Memory pertains to the past but is conditioned by the present. When presented in representational forms, memories of past events are inevitably affected and mediated by the existing symbolic order and cultural imagery, and therefore, are inseparable from cultural memories. Traumatic memory is no exception. Even for those who were at the site of the traumatic event, their memories are imbued with historical knowledge and cultural imagery of the event that they themselves have not accessed on the site. Social and cultural memories influence what the survivor remembers and forgets; in a sense, memories of survivors, including of a traumatic nature, are prosthetic memories.
The overemphasis on the unrepresentability of traumatic experience continues to be dominant in cultural trauma theory, despite the limited focus on actual survivor testimonies. Given the temporal structure of traumatic experience-its belatedness-it is only after the event that, just like its memory, the experience of trauma is registered or constructed. As Joan Scott contends, so far as experience is mediated by the established symbolic order, the experience of trauma is inevitably conditioned by the symbolic parameters that are at the survivors' disposal and the socio-cultural space that enables or inhibits their speech.
In the case of Hiroshima, the first nuclear attack in history, those exposed to the event had no prior parameters to take in what they were experiencing. The survivors also did not have adequate language after the event to put their experience into words. When traumatic memory (nonnarrative or "literal" according to Cathy Carth) is transformed into a narrative, the trauma's force that resists comprehension becomes lost. While this gap between the traumatic memory and its narrative partially explains the silence of many hibakusha, the atomic bombing survivors, we must also the tens of thousands of written testimonies and several thousand drawings that some of them have left. The silence of hibakusha should not be attributed solely to the nature of traumatic memory, which defies comprehension, but to the socio-political conditions that discouraged or inhibited their speech, such as the fear of discrimination and censorship imposed by the Occupational Force for the first several years after Japan's defeat. In other words, what enables survivors to put their experience in sharable forms are the developments following the event, which provide them symbolic parameters and a socio-political space for articulating their experience and memory, which occur due to the cultural and political activism of survivors and non-survivors.
As an empirically grounded inquiry of productions of and changes in Hiroshima memories, I attempt to delineate how memories of survivors of historical trauma are entangled with cultural imagery and collective narratives of the past. Moreover, I will argue that their subjectivity as hibakusha is constituted not by the event itself, but rather through cultural memories and socio-political conditions that developed after the event. I thus attempt to contribute to the ongoing expansion of cultural trauma studies towards a more historically specific and politically enabling undertaking for both victim-survivors and non-survivors.
