Demilitarization and language

The attempts by Japanese political leaders to employ metaphors in order to facilitate the acceptance of their policies and to define normal or abnormal nuclear attitudes have posed a challenge to the anti-nuclear discourse in Japan. By ‘anti-nuclear discourse’ we mean the corpus of texts, mostly on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, produced from the perspectives of the victims of the ‘first limited nuclear war’. These perspectives, constituted by language and embedded in the information environment, have been of critical importance in configuring the ‘macro discourse’ which evolved out of the oft-times competing interpretations of the meaning of being atom-bombed. ¹ For there is nothing intrinsic to the atom-bomb experience per se that gives it significance in creating an anti-nuclear identity, rather than for supporting coexistence with nuclear weapons. What has been crucial to the evolution of the anti-nuclear discourse in Japan has been the centrality of the atom-bomb experience as the starting point to oppose nuclear weapons as the core of this identity. The fact that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not, in general, been taken as a lesson that Japan, too, should possess nuclear weapons, is evidence of how an anti-nuclear rather than a pro-nuclear discourse has taken root. ² This chapter discusses the evolution of this anti-nuclear discourse.