Bowing has been essential in Japanese culture—or at very least, the culture westerners think of as being essentially Japanese.11To the American journalist and adventurer Boye De Mente, for example, the bow is one of “the most conspicuous symbols” of “Japanese etiquette” whose importance transcends that of good manners and courtesy. Boyé Lafayette De Mente. Behind the Japanese Bow. Passport Books. 1993, p. 32; See also Damon A. Young, “Bowing to Your Enemies: Courtesy, Budō, and Japan,” Philosophy East and West vol. 59, no. 2 (2009): pp. 188–215.  A gesture of respect, the art of bowing reflects the power of body language, which is often more powerful than verbal communication. By bending the body and accompanying this with a slight nod or a deep bow, the Japanese salute each other by expressing respect, acceptance of social hierarchy, or even deep apology. I was certainly not aware of the multi-layered symbolism of bowing when recently I found myself in Hiroshima—the consummate trip of a lifetime considering that almost all of my research work focuses on the history of radioactivity and recently on the history of radiation protection and safety.

My own perception of Japan was probably informed by the many pictures of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the images of the American occupation that followed. Recently, Karen Fraser reminded us that the most iconic perception of Japan’s place in the postwar world was the image of the Emperor Hirohito standing next to the U.S. General MacArthur, at their first meeting at the US Embassy in Tokyo on September 27, 1945.22Karen M. Fraser, Photography and Japan. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. For a view of the picture see here https://www.gettyimages.de/detail/nachrichtenfoto/general-douglas-macarthur-stands-next-to-japanese-nachrichtenfoto/514679016?adppopup=true “One devastating image” write art historians Melissa Miles and Robin Gerster, “had reduced Japan’s living god to a nervous, slightly absurd visitor in his own country—a country now ruled by the U.S.”33Melissa Miles and Robin Gerster, “Japan for the Taking: Images of the Occupation,” in Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia–Japan Relationship. Canberra: ANU Press, 2018, pp. 113–52; image on p. 113. I see this picture as representative of what historian Sarah Alisabeth Fox has described as a “full-stop on modernity” in her ethnographic study of Americans whose environment was contaminated by the atomic tests of the 1950s to early 1960s.44Sarah Alisabeth Fox, Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, imprint of University of Nebraska Press, 2018. In my understanding, the dropping of the atomic bombs signified the end of the worldview that ignored the devastating effects of radiation and radioactive substances on both humans and the environment. During the 1920s and 1930s, the use of radiation by the military (remember the case of “radium girls” who painted compasses and other instrument dials with radium during the First World War), in cancer therapy, and the cosmetic industry was conceived as the triumph of human civilization.55Maria Rentetzi, Seduced by Radium: How Industry Transformed Science in the American Marketplace. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, forthcoming. The atomic bombs forced the world to grapple with this distorting thinking and to reconsider the very term “civilization.”

To historians of nuclear science, then, probably the most widely-shared perception of postwar Japan can be epitomized in the image of mothers and children in the reception of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). 66For a view of the picture see https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgb8d3/70-years-on-researchers-archive-the-longest-running-study-of-a-bomb-survivors Constructed on Hijiyama, the top of a small hill that oversees Hiroshima, the ABCC was established by the US government in 1947 to study the effects of radiation on the atomic bomb survivors. The ABCC laboratories were housed in modified Quonset huts, where they remain to this today. In 1975, the ABCC was renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), reflecting political and diplomatic changes that defined the relation between US and Japan over nuclear issues.77John Beatty, “Scientific Collaboration, Internationalism, and Diplomacy: The Case of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission,” Journal of the History of Biology vol. 26, no. 2 (1993): pp. 205–31; Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. But throughout all these years and into the present, the RERF uses these premises to conduct epidemiological and genetic studies of the atomic bomb survivors and their children. The research data they collect have provided the primary basis for radiation health standards, and also fomented controversies over the politics and ethics of the US radiation research program in Japan. As historian of science Susan Lindee has documented in her excellent study in 1994, the epidemiological research of the RERF, which tracks the biomedical effects of radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has a controversial premise:88Susan Lindee, “Survivors and Scientists: Hiroshima, Fukushima, and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 1975-2014,” Social Studies of Science vol. 46, no. 2 (2016): pp. 184–209. The center is co-financed by the US and Japan, and is still housed in the same military buildings that hosted the ABCC. Thus the RERF was an unmissable destination of my trip to a country that I had strongly associated with my professional interests in the history of radiation.

Back to Hiroshima, with a small group of colleagues, I am standing at the entrance of the RERF waiting to be welcomed by the institute’s representative. As we wait, I notice a black taxi next to us and the white hair of an old lady who just got in. The taxi driver, clad in a black suit and white gloves, closes her door and opens his own in a slow, almost ritualistic manner and starts the engine. Next to me stands a young Japanese woman in an extremely deep bow with her arms crossed in front of her. She remains in this position until the taxi disappears behind the hill.

The prolonged duration of the bow makes no sense to my untrained western eyes. Interestingly enough, I do not feel foreign in the country, but the country and its culture feel “xenos” to me.99The Greek word “xenos” covers both stranger and foreigner. For an analysis of the term “xenos” see Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Startled, I seek an explanation from our guide who has just arrived. “It is a sign of respect but much more one of sincere apology to the lady who just left, one of the survivors of the atomic bomb,” he explains. “We would not exist as an institution without these people who still trust us, nor would we know what we know today about the effects of radiation. We owe them total respect.”

Beyond our respect, we also owe to the atomic bomb survivors the understanding that the Anthropocene is about more than the material effects and the ecological impact of a nuclear blast, or even the multilateral nuclear diplomacy that the regulation of radiation risks requires.1010Kenji Ito and Maria Rentetzi, “The co-production of nuclear science and diplomacy: towards a transnational understanding of nuclear things,” History and Technology vol. 37, no. 1 (2021): pp. 4–20. In “Facing Fukushima 2011-2021,” the photojournalist Peter Blakley documents the reality of the Fukushima nuclear accident and reminds us through the power of his photographs and that of personal stories that “Man is now the biggest threat to human survival.”1111Peter Blakley, Facing Fukushima 2011-2021. (https://www.peterblakely.com/index) The more-than 150,000 nuclear refuges displaced by the Fukushima accident will never return to their pre-disaster lives, even though many of them have been allowed to re-occupy their “decontaminated homes.” The Anthropocene is equally about single human stories of loss and devastation, of pain and grief, of death and destruction, stories that obviously do not end with atomic bombing.

Maria Rentetzi is Professor and chair of Science, Technology and Gender studies at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She is the author of Seduced by Radium: How Industry Transformed Science in the American Marketplace, of Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early Twentieth Century Vienna, and coeditor of Boxes: A Field Guide.

This publication is part of the “Living with Radiation: The Role of the International Atomic Energy Agency in the History of Radiation Protection” project (HRP-IAEA) that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 770548), https://hrp-iaea.org

Please cite as: Rentetzi, M (2022) The Japanese Art of Bowing and the Nuclear Anthropocene. In: Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds) Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/3S6W-CQ53