The experience of the excluded: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Minamata 1945--1975

After Japan's defeat in the Pacific War in 1945, the country became not only ground zero for the first use of atomic weapons, but also experienced year zero of the postwar, democratic era---the top-down reorganization of the country politically and socially---ushered in by the American Occupation. While the method of government changed, the state rallied around two pillars: the familiar fixture of big business and economics, and the notion of "peace" supplied by the new constitution. At this formative time, two uniquely postwar groups of people came to be excluded: the hibakusha, the atomic bombing survivors who epitomize ground zero, and the people of Minamata affected by industrial mercury pollution who symbolize the price of unbridled economic expansion which Japan embarked upon in year zero.;As victims of technologically-based poisoning, both the hibakusha and the victims in Minamata became excluded in their own communities, due to the secrecy and reticence at a governmental level surrounding their poisoning, but also because of Shinto notions of purity, which further marked hibakusha and Minamata victims as "diseased." The stigmatization and rejection both of these groups suffered came at the same moment their nation pursued a democratic, representative path to recovery and prosperity for the citizens of Japan. These post-war "poisoned people" are symbols of the cost of technology to humanity and are important not only to Japan's history, but to that of the world.