Kubo Yoshitoshi and the psychology of war and peace

In 1945, researchers on a mission to Hiroshima with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey canvassed survivors of the nuclear attack. This marked the beginning of global efforts – by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other social scientists – to tackle the complex ways in which human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. 

A trans-Pacific research network emerged that produced massive amounts of data about the dropping of the bomb and subsequent nuclear tests in and around the Pacific rim.

In his new book, Ran Zwigenberg traces these efforts and the ways they were interpreted differently across communities of researchers and victims. One of the Japanese psychologists he discusses is Kubo Yoshitoshi, a Hiroshima native and a former military doctor. 

Like many scientists from the United States, he believed research on the hibakusha, or survivors of the atomic bombs, should promote peace and reconciliation, though this focus eventually shifted to antinuclear activism, separating his work from that of his American counterparts. This excerpt describes his research.

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Kubo Yoshitoshi was in his Naval base when the A-bomb was dropped, but Kubo's family was in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and his mother, wife, and eldest daughter were exposed to the A-bomb. Kubo could not get in touch with his them almost until October, when he went to visit. He recalled, 'I was so shocked by the destruction, I could not even shed a tear'.

Kubo connected his turn to psychological research on the bombing survivors directly to his personal and family experience. As he would recall in 1977, he was convinced of the importance of the survivor experience to the goal of peace: 'My research led me to believe that the feelings and attitudes of A-bomb survivors toward the atomic bombing and the war should be pursued by all fields of science, not to mention psychology and sociology, and that there was much potential for change [in general attitudes] as the period of the bombing and defeat in the war passed.' This statement was no doubt coloured by his later experiences, but one could see similar rationales in Kubo's writing as early as 1950.

Kubo first published his research on survivors in April 1950, in a handwritten circular within Hiroshima University. The research garnered some media attention. In an interview in June 1950, Kubo noted the disproportionate attention given to the American opinions about the A-bomb, which, he emphasised, were researched with funds from Carnegie, Rockefeller, and other institutions at Gallup and other surveys. 

But Kubo protested, 'What about the issue of [our] people's attitudes and opinions toward the atomic bomb and nuclear power? Although a few articles by [Japanese] experts have been published in newspapers and magazines, there has been no comprehensive study of the attitudes and opinions of the general public, especially those who experienced the atomic bombing.' 

Kubo was tasked by the city of Hiroshima to collect testimonies of survivors together with those of other social scientists and activists, and he was moved by them. He was convinced of the importance of bringing hibakusha voices to the public, telling a reporter, 'Only those who have been exposed to the atomic bomb once [can] know whether it is right or wrong to use it on ordinary people.'

Kubo was not interested in victims' personal stories per se, but, following the usual trajectory of psychological experts at the time, he wanted to research how the experience connected to the bigger agenda of peace and reconciliation, namely the survivors' commitment to peace. Presenting the connection as self-evident, he wrote, 'The unprecedented experience of the atomic bombing naturally had an enormous impact on the attitudes and opinions of the hibakusha, so researching nuclear [science] from the perspective of the social sciences must naturally include a comprehensive survey of the attitudes and opinions of the hibakusha in this regard' (my emphasis).

Furthermore, Kubo was not going to present the testimonies unmediated and unfiltered, as the research would 'not be served by listing individual stories or by skillful reportage and rhetorical alterations.' He did not trust survivors' subjective testimony. He explained: 'Since the atomic bombing was an unprecedented experience, many stories have been told by hibakusha to each other and to people who were not exposed to the bomb, and I imagine that there are many cases in which people unwittingly confuse their own experiences with those of others, or consciously or unconsciously exaggerate their own experiences.' Thus, while elevating hibakusha voices, he was at the same time suspicious of the hibakusha's testimony and argued for the need to mediate their voices through his own scientific expertise.

Kubo's distrust of hibakusha voices was very much connected to the 'unprecedented experience' of being A-bombed. Later thinkers in trauma studies, such as the psychologist Dori Laub and the literary scholar Cathy Caruth, accorded the witness to mass violence a special 'truth' value, which not only complemented but even at times was considered superior to historical or juridical knowledge. 

Such debates are particularly passionate in regard to the Holocaust, as most 'factual' and documentary evidence in that case was produced by the Nazis. Kubo's episteme could not have been more different. Measuring himself against the American ideas of science, he aspired to the objective. 

Thus, given what he saw as the rhetorical embellishments in testimonies, he defined the 'target of the survey' as 'find[ing] out whether the reported experiences were true or not.' This impacted both the kind of testimonies he examined and his methodology. Almost all 54 of his interviewees were academics, as 'it was necessary to select survey targets who have a high degree of accuracy in the reported course of action.' 

In the revised version of his article published in 1952, Kubo was even more pointed, writing that he had limited the survey to Hiroshima academics in order to 'select people who could reliably report their behavioral experiences,' and who were 'well educated and aware of the value of social research.' The need for accuracy was magnified by the nature of the experience. 

The major reaction Kubo identified, following the trajectory of American civil defense researchers, was panic. However, 'in general, behavior in paniclike situations is fragmentary . . . and is expressed in fragmentary language and speech. Therefore, in analyzing panic behavior, we must take the position opposite to reportage; that is, instead of compiling fragments, we must further fragment the fragmented nature expressed in the spoken language.' 

Kubo was after general patterns. So he deconstructed the various testimonies, and on the basis of social 'scientific method,' he searched for commonalities to ensure that the 'analysis is as objective as possible'. For Kubo, it was the very fragmentary nature of what we now call traumatic memory that made it problematic, and victims' testimony unreliable and unscientific. The victims' own words were almost nowhere to be found.

In direct contrast with earlier research by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, however, Kubo sought to find the exact mechanism that led from violent psychological shock to the change of political attitudes. His main theoretical references were SSRC reports into American opinions, and, significantly, Hadley Cantril's 1940 Invasion from Mars and the idea of 'frames of references'. 

Cantril defined the term as the psychological makeup that structured an individual response to panic-induced events. But Kubo seemed to imply that this could also mean the survivors' larger psychological makeup and political attitudes and outlook (he did not follow on this in the 1950 research). It is quite telling that Cantril's work on a fictional alien invasion would serve as a primary reference for Kubo's tackling of the very real experience of A-bomb victims. 

Cantril's American credentials, the importance of his work on panic, and the weight panic carried in American psychology enabled Kubo's use of Invasion from Mars. It also demonstrated the extent to which myth and fantasy intermixed with scientific work on the impact of the A-bomb.

The main use of Cantril's work by Kubo was in showing how the A-bomb destroyed older ways of thinking and frames of reference and led to new ones. Kubo divided survivors' reactions into four stages: 'instinctive action', 'panic', 'quasi-panic', and a 'blank' (stupefied) stage. None of these stages, however, lasted beyond a week or two after the bomb. Kubo, like Janis, divided the various shocks into groups, noting that the shock of the bomb event was compounded by the sight of dead and wounded, which was particularly gruesome in Hiroshima. 

Survivors constantly looked for familiar patterns to understand the situation, as 'the "frame of reference" [English in original] that had been the standard of behavior was now completely destroyed. . . . When we are in such a "critical situation" [English in original] – that is, when we are looking for a standard or frame to interpret again – we receive stimuli such as injured people, voices calling for help, and smell of fire.' 

This led to panic and chaos; but as Japan was still at war, many reverted to a wartime mode of behavior. Kubo noted that, 'while some people escaped and others were apathetic, many were angered by the bomb and sought to fight the United States "as a suicide squad."'

Kubo added the surrender as the final group of stimuli. The defeat led to a final change, as 'frustration disappeared completely, leaving only emptiness and escape'. But how does this emptiness lead to current attitudes toward war? Kubo left this question unanswered. 'We can hardly estimate the next stage,' he concluded, 'but perhaps some time afterward, every respondent succeeded in slowly adjusting to their circumstances.' 

Kubo acknowledged the limitations of his survey: 'Since this survey was based on behavior immediately after the bombing, the effect on attitudes or frame of reference is not known, but about half of the 54 respondents reported this aspect of their behavior.' Hibakusha noted that they felt different, 'that it was very unpleasant for others to see the keloids caused by the bombing, that they should wear badges to identify them as hibakusha (like the wounded soldier insignia) . . . [and] that it was inconceivable that those who died in the bombing would be in heaven.' 

Yet Kubo did not follow up in his research beyond the immediate experience, and just assumed that the shock of the bomb led to a change that lasted until the 1950s. The experience of discrimination, he conceded, showed that 'the influence [of the experience] is very strong, and [the difference in] the frame of reference between the experienced and the inexperienced is nonexistent.' But Kubo stopped short of examining conditions and long-term damage, and did not detail the long-term mechanism that connected the initial shock with issues like anxiety, numbness and the like, which were already known at the time.

Kubo's insistence on scientific patterns and distrust of victims' stories should be understood in the context of both the nature of the testimonies he heard, and the political and scholarly world in which he was operating. Transcripts of Kubo's interviews were circulating among Hiroshima activists, and a number of them made it into private correspondence between Ogura Kaoru, a Seattle-born city official and translator, and the author Robert Jungk, a German-Jewish emigre who wrote extensively on the A-bomb.

Ogura passed to Jungk, in instalments, the 'compiled report of 42 reports of University professors of their experience both in action and in mind on the particular August 6 and the following 7th,' the content of which was quite graphic. A typical testimony Ogura translated, written by a 'Professor of Eastern History,' spoke of how "corpses are seen only along the roads. . . . [many are] facing towards heaven, some are sitting dead with intestines exposed. And some are dead in the air-raid shelter. . . . Hiroshima City is an entirely scorched and a devastated plain. This is terrible. [I] thought we are annihilated. [I] felt completely defeated.' 

Similar descriptions abound in Kubo's testimonies. This was not an easy material to generalise or write a scientific treatise about. With a few exceptions, such accounts were heavily censored in Japan. Not until 1952, with the publication of accounts such as the Asahi gurafu exposé, were they more openly discussed.

Furthermore, such descriptions of horror did not fit with the optimistic outlook and spirit of reconciliation that Kubo was actively promoting at the time, both within Hiroshima and through the institutions of Japanese psychology. On 3 April 1950, the same month his first draft of the Hiroshima research was circulating, Japanese psychologists met at the 14th annual conference of the Japanese Psychological Association (JPA). 

Kubo was one of 'seven leading psychologists [who] issued a "peace appeal to American psychologists."' This was the start of an organisational drive under the banner 'Japanese Psychologists for Peace' (JPP). The peace appeal made a point of the Japanese psychologists' unique situation as citizens of 'the country [which] experienced the terrors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.' 

American responsibility for this 'experience' was not mentioned. Emphasising their cooperation with the US reformist agenda, the psychologists stated that 'after the war, we, Japanese psychologists, have made every effort to democratize our country and to establish the [sic] academic freedom. We can never forget the great contribution of peace-loving scientists in the United States to the establishment of academic freedom in Japan.' 

The declaration vaguely referred to Japan's recent imperialist past, and demonstrated its ignorance of or disagreement with Freud, when it stated: 'We know that "aggression" is not human instinct and that development of this kind of behavior mostly depends upon some historical and social circumstances.' But the statement did not develop the point any further. The declaration ended on a very optimistic note, with a call for world peace. 

Notably, the statement was building on the above-mentioned 1944 appeal, initiated by Gordon Allport in 'Human Nature and Peace', and the 1948 'Statement by Scientists in Japan on the Problem of Peace', both which appeared in a volume edited by Cantril. The latter statement was part of a campaign to promote 'peace thought' by both Japanese and American social scientists, through groups such as JPP and 'the Peace Study Group' in Japan, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SSPI) at the US. 

Cantril was connected with SPSSI and other groups in which USSBS veterans like David Krech operated. Allport, who had worked with Cantril in the 1930s, and others were active in the movement. Cantril's peace activism further explains Kubo's choice of his work. This was another important link between the work done by American psychologists and Japanese psychologists, who shared a similar agenda. Besides the shared belief in the duty of behavioural scientists to help promote peace in both countries, the concern of psychologists was not with the impact of the A-bomb on individual mental health, but with greater social issues, first and foremost the problems of aggression and war.

After the 1950 meeting, JPP established a number of 'study objects'. These included 'experience of the atomic bombs', 'Nazi concentration camps', 'war psychology', and 'peace consciousness of the adolescents'. This early juxtaposition with Holocaust work was important. 

But, again, this was not done out of concern for damage to individuals. Rather, work on the A-bomb was subsumed under a general framework connected to totalitarianism, war, and the general experience of the Japanese under fascism. It indicated the impact of American thinking, where the experience of the camps was also mostly thought of in the context of totalitarianism and the relative ease with which Japanese social scientists identified with the experience of victimisation. 

Two essays on the work of Bruno Bettelheim by the psychologists Shimizu Ikutaro and Kido Kotaro clearly illustrated these points. Shimizu connected his reading of Bettelheim to the outbreak of the Korean War, as 'once the war broke out, the situation Bettelheim had described was far more difficult to deal with'. 

Shimizu was referring to the fear among intellectuals regarding the return of totalitarianism with the outbreak of war. He summarised Bettelheim's 1943 work 'Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations', focusing on the 'initial shock and collapse of self' that occurred as prisoners arrived in the camp, and the 'prisoners' regression into infantile phase where man became what the Nazis wanted him to be.' 

Shimizu's main interest was in the collapse of mental defences, which led to loss of individuality and humanity. Such understanding of the camp experience was parallel to the contemporary understanding of those experiencing traumatic neurosis, which were seen in various locales, as 'regression to the infantile'. 

But Shimizu was not interested in trauma. He was after an explanation of why prisoners obeyed, why they 'mimicked the Gestapo', and how group solidarity was broken. 

Shimizu was not misreading Bettelheim. These things were very much what Bettelheim himself was interested in, comparing the prisoners' obedience to the camp guards to Germans' obedience to Hitler. Bettelheim, who had spent time in Dachau and Buchenwald after Kristallnacht but had managed to flee Germany, did not see the camps as primarily an anti-Jewish institution. 

As he wrote in his review of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, the camps were 'merely one part of the master plan to create the thousand-year totalitarian Reich'. And, for him, Arendt, and many others, the Holocaust 'was not the last chapter in anti-Semitism but rather one of the first chapters in modern totalitarianism.'

Most Japanese intellectuals saw the experience of the camps through the lens of totalitarianism. Kido Kotaro made this connection explicit in his 1955 essay Tamashi no setusujin ichi ichi kyoseishuyosho to ningen (The Killing of Every Soul: Humans and the Concentration Camps). Kido, unlike Shimizu, did mention Bethlehem's Jewishness, if only in passing, but he was much more interested in his status as an academic who 'used himself as a guinea pig . . . [and] analyzed the psychological mechanism of "soul murder", but saved his own soul.' Kido argued that Bettelheim had done so by 'splitting his ego into "observing ego" and "real ego".' 

Kido's summary of Bettelheim did not differ much from Shimizu's. Kido likewise focused on the loss of humanity and 'the process of disintegration of the personality in the camps . . . where human dignity is shredded like a piece of paper, and torture labor turns people into slaves more obedient than bass [fish].' The connection between suffering, dehumanisation, and the power of objective observation was important for later researchers like Ishida Tadashi. Ishida, who was also influenced by Holocaust psychology, would use these insights to formulate a psychological theory of A-bomb suffering and healing through observation and struggle.

Herein lies the importance of the Japanese psychologists' mid-Fifties engagement with Bettelheim. Unlike Ishida and Lifton, Kido and his contemporaries connected the Holocaust not to A-bomb psychology but to the question of authoritarianism. Kido, for instance, emphasised regression, as prisoners 'regressed to the childish belief that the Gestapo is righteous and kind, which they have received as an image of the Almighty Father.' 

He emphasised the coercive power of the group on the individual prisoner and the ingenuity of the Gestapo, in that by 'throwing the individual into . . . the group, they have, by both external and internal pressure, regressed the individual into a childlike mode of behavior and blind obedience to the will of the leader.' Kido made this coded reference to Japanese fascism explicit when he wrote that Bettelheim's work 'reminds us of the Japanese military'. 

Wartime Japan was a 'concentration camp [organized] by the ruling class to deprive the people of their critical spirit and instill a spirit of obedience.' Referring to the concept of a 'vacuum zone' of nonthought, developed by the writer Noma Hiroshi, Kido argued that 'the vicious cycle of adaptation and regression was extended to the entire nation, turning the whole of Japan into a "vacuum zone" and a concentration camp.'

The psychologist Shimoyama Tokuji was an exception to this general trend. Shimoyama translated Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning into Japanese with the peculiar title Yoru to kiri, 'Night and Fog'. In their comments on Frankl, Shimoyama and his unnamed publisher compared the experience of Auschwitz not to the oppression of the Japanese by the militarists, but to the 'Nanking Incident of 1937, in which Japanese troops, after occupying Nanking, shot, burned, tortured, raped, and murdered an estimated two hundred thousand innocent civilians.' Auschwitz and Nanking, they wrote, 'make us ashamed to be human. These events occurred in relation to the war, not in the war itself, but rather in [connection to] the internal politics of the nation and its people.' 

This was a departure from the conflation of war and fascism by Kido and Shimizu, which blurred the boundaries between victims and victimisers. Shimomura here invited his readers to reflect on their role in the tragedy; but at the same time, his call for reflection was only implicit: he was ashamed to be human, not to be Japanese. He was much more concerned with the issues of modernity and mechanised mass killing, writing, 'This was not the result of primitive impulses or temporary excitement, but rather the organization, efficiency, and circumscription based on calm and careful planning . . . where "modern mass-production industries were mobilized to reduce man from a vertical walking animal to a kilogram of ash."' 

This move was capped by a reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which served as a grim warning for 'the unfolding possibility of a new tragedy' and an example of the "correlation between technology and politics in the new machine age.' 
Thus, here as well, Hiroshima was eventually seen as the more appropriate equivalent to Auschwitz and the horrors of the new age, while Nanking was conjured to be the more 'primitive' impulse – and, by implication, a thing of the past that the new Japan left behind. 

This does not mean that Shimomura gave himself and his countrymen a free pass. Reflecting the general trends in mid-century psychology, he saw the real enemy as being within. Referring to these same 'raw' impulses and the danger of the 'cross-section of modern history and the pathology of politics and war,' he asked, 'Who is to say this story will not end in a different form? If we do not fight the snake?'

Such debates, as fascinating as they are, were not about the victims but about the larger political and historical questions. The snake within was a metaphor, not a psychological category, and one concerned with perpetrators as such. Trauma, again, was just not a category that interested psychologists at the time. Whether it was in the context the examination of Holocaust psychology or Kubo's research into the impact of the A-bomb on Hiroshima survivors', the researchers' gaze was fixed on social and political issues, and how psychological damage related to these and not on the long-term impact on individuals. 

- Adapted and excerpted from Nuclear Minds by Ran Zwigenberg, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2023 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

See also our review.