Focusing on hibakusha poets as public intellectuals, it is the straightforward and often emotive language, as well as the structure of their poetry, that has attracted a large public. However, for the same reason, hibakusha poetry has also been criticised for its simplicity and repetition (Tan N.pag.). After the dropping of the atomic bomb, poets who responded often wrote in the form of haiku or tanka. These are the earliest forms of Japanese verse and are, therefore, steeped in Japanese history. While haiku has become a popular form of poetry internationally, tanka is less known. Tanka poems are composed of five lines and follow a pattern of syllables: 5-7-5-7-7; groups of tanka poems use this individual, syllabic unit to form a suite. Richard Minear, Japanese scholar and translator of Kurihara’s poetry and prose, argues that the ‘repetition of phrases [is used] for cumulative effect’ (26) and is not a flaw in the composition. Eventually, some hibakusha poets, like Kurihara, came to believe that tanka and haiku were too small and constrained to convey the horrors of atomic warfare and chose to write in free verse. This allowed them free reign to experiment with new techniques which also represented the rupture and annihilation they had experienced.

Kurihara as hibakusha poet and public intellectual

Kurihara Sadako was thirty-two when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. She was at home, four kilometres from ground zero. Her poem ‘The Day of the Atomic Bomb’ illustrates her experiences and is analysed, below. Kurihara wrote poetry in the 1930s, before the atomic bomb, unlike many other hibakusha poets who only started writing after the beginning of the nuclear age compelled them to warn people of its dangers. In addition to this, Kurihara was already involved in anarchist politics after becoming involved in her husband’s political activities. Perhaps because of this, Kurihara did not feel the same compulsion as many other hibakusha to remain silent, and wrote about her experiences despite the crippling censorship restrictions. After 1952, at the end of the Allied Occupation, Kurihara was free to publish. She wrote 125 essays and hundreds of poems. Her recollections include a reflection of her walking around ground zero, days after the blast:

A few days after the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I walked around the ruins of the Second Unit of the West Region in Kamiya-cho, half a kilometre from the center of the explosion. Numerous burned-red iron helmets were lying on the ground with debris all around them. Human bodies, like broiled fish with white bones, were on simple iron-frame beds in the army hospital.’ (White Flash Black Rain 65)

This kind of eyewitness testimony was originally suppressed under Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) and now provides a lasting legacy of the devastation of nuclear warfare. Kurihara is a public intellectual because ‘she writes from strong political convictions’ (Black Eggs, 1) and writes with a large international public in mind. She is a dissident public intellectual in the way she has been identified as having ‘little honour in her own country’ (Black Eggs 15). This is based on her abiding statements that Japan’s war crimes contributed to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In 1990, she was awarded the third Tanimoto Kiyoshi Prize and she ended her acceptance speech with the following words:

Hiroshima itself was a victim, of course, but the true Hiroshima demands an acknowledgement of Japan’s war guilt and a sensitivity to the aggression and murder Japan committed…The true Hiroshima demands that there be a ‘dual awareness, of Japan as victim and Japan as victimizer’. (Black Eggs 11)

In addition to her criticisms of Japan’s militarism, Kurihara also defended the tens of thousands of forgotten Korean victims of the atomic bomb and forged a link between atomic bomb literature and holocaust literature. At a time when hibakusha prioritised silence, Kurihara urged them to speak out about their experiences and face discrimination in order to provide commentary on atomic warfare:

People who have witnessed such tragedy must tell of it. That is the responsibility, the duty that survivors owe to those who died… the atomic landscape … does not allow me to rest. (Black Eggs 17-18)

The 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb provided an important opportunity for those who had remained silent for so long, to educate people about their experiences. Many had refused to identify themselves as hibakusha for fear their children would be bullied and discriminated against as ‘second-generation hibakusha’. However, time had also afforded many hibakusha the opportunity to see how ‘speaking out about experiences [of the atomic bomb] was a powerful and cathartic way to educate people about the ugly realities of nuclear warfare’ (Nakabushi, N.pag).

As hibakusha dwindle in numbers due to their advancing age, testimonies are now translated into English for projects like Voice of the Hibakusha and Hibakusha Stories and also into Chinese and Korean on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan’s Testimony of Hibakusha videos. They are freely accessible online as archives of ‘living witness’ (Hibakusha Stories, N.pag). This demonstrates an understanding of how witness testimony and atomic bomb literature need to be available to an international public for it to affect, on any level, a nuclear free existence.

Kurihara’s political engagement included reaching out to the international peace community in prose and poetry. She was a staunch defender of atomic bomb literature against rancorous critics who criticised its quality. As Daniela Tan argues,

all atomic bomb literature has been heavily criticized: that these accounts lack literary qualities and serve as a cheap means for the authors to distinguish themselves, that they are descriptions mainly of political events. (N. pag)

In particular, Kurihara defended the language and techniques of hibakusha poetry by focusing on the importance of imagination and accessibility in poetry:

Words exist to seek human recovery. I firmly believe that when we call out in human words, it is possible to meet in feelings that transcend national boundaries…For me poetry is not the expression of ideas sealed off hermetically from other people, nor the solving of magic wordlike riddles, nor wordplay; it is to seek to confirm, as fellow human beings living in the nuclear age and beginning to speak to the roots of all the people of the world, the pulse of the human heart. May that process give birth to something new… (Black Eggs 22-3)