ABSTRACT
A history of the southern California Japanese published that year reported that the number of Nisei returnees had reached three thousand. America was their homeland, but to those who had spent their formative years in Japan, it was nevertheless a foreign country. Psychic wounds remained in the hearts of those who had endured officially sanctioned ostracism and a concentration camp experience in their own country. Japanese Americans internalized the psychic wounds they had suffered in the relocation camps, and even used this as an inner engine to drive them to success in postwar America. The phenomenal, emotional response to Hiroshima, John Hersey's book based on the testimony of six survivors in Hiroshima, was indicative of the American openness of that period. The anxiety of the American people was only intensified by the civil defense plan issued by the federal government as a national policy.
