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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the emergence and developmental trajectory of Japanese victimhood discourse using the texts of 74 years of Hiroshima's Peace Declarations and 20,000 atomic-bomb survivors' questionnaire responses.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the emergence and developmental trajectory of Japanese victimhood discourse using the texts of 74 years of Hiroshima's Peace Declarations and 20,000 atomic-bomb survivors' questionnaire responses.

On 6 August 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb explosion left the city of Hiroshima barren. An estimated 140,000 civilians were dead by the end of the year. With this, World War II came to an end, but a war of discourse on identifying the victim and the culprit began. The war of words emerged in the process of making sense of the unprecedented scale of human tragedy: Some offered justification for the nuclear attack as a necessary evil to save many lives from Imperial Japan’s aggression, while others condemned the inhumanity of mass civilian genocide which left those who barely survived with lifelong physical, psychological, and socioeconomic damages.

Meanwhile, the survivors themselves have taken a long journey of self-identity change. From ostracized victimhood to established citizenship as witnesses of an ultimate event that touches upon every human being across national, cultural, and political borders. Their journey is entwined with the 74 years of the Hiroshima city’s annual peace declarations, the role of which is to reflect the citizens’ sentiments and to communicate with domestic and international audiences.

This empirical study scrutinized all declaration texts in the original Japanese versions and the English translations, with a special focus on how the actors associated with the concepts of ‘victimhood’, ‘aggressor’ and ‘peace’ may be expressed. The results of quantitative and qualitative discourse analyses reveal that the survivors’ collective and individual perceptions of victimhood changed over time, but the contents and the developmental trajectories of discourse change are different in the original Japanese declarations and in their English translations. Two distinct narratives were established for the victimhood of A-bomb survivors, giving rise to a debate on Japanese victimhood culture.