Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-9klzr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-16T16:16:08.565Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

What Lay Beneath the Mushroom Cloud

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This article examines photographs taken by U.S. Marine Joe O'Donnell, who was tasked with documenting bombed urban centers immediately after the Asia-Pacific War. O'Donnell's photos document not just the physical damage wrought by U.S. bombing raids, but the human suffering as well. While most published images at the time projected the U.S. military's destructive potential through mushroom clouds or razed cities, O'Donnell shifted the visual focus to the struggles of Japanese citizens in the ruins. In doing so, O'Donnell disrupted notions of American superiority by giving voice to those rebuilding their lives in the war's aftermath.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2024

References

Ahara, Hideji. 1978. Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction. Tokyo: Hiroshima-Nagasaki Publishing Committee.Google Scholar
Air Objective Folder Fukuoka Region, records of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Pacific). Japanese Air Target Analyses, 1942–45 (NARA M1653).Google Scholar
Braw, Monica. 1991. The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Google Scholar
Brodie, Janet Farrell. 2015. “Radiation Secrecy and Censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Journal of Social History 48 (4): 842–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conner, Ken, Heimerdinger, Debra, and Bristol, Horace. 1996. Horace Bristol: An American View. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.Google Scholar
“Controversy over the Enola Gay Exhibition.” 2016. Atomic Heritage Foundation, 17 October. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/controversy-over-enola-gay-exhibition/.Google Scholar
Cosgrove, Ben. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Photos from the Ruins, 1945.” Life. https://www.life.com/history/hiroshima-and-nagasa-ki-photos-from-the-ruins/.Google Scholar
Craven, Wesley Frank and Cate, James Lea. 1953. The Army Air Forces in World War II. Volume Five. The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, June 1944 to August 1945. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Crockett, Lucy Herndon. 1949. Popcorn on the Ginza: An Informal Portrait of Postwar Japan. London: Victor Gollancz.Google Scholar
Dower, John. 1986. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Fainsod, Merle. 1946. “Military Government and the Occupation of Japan.” In Haring, D. G. (ed.) Japan's Prospect (pp. 287304). Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Andrew. 2013. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, third edition. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Graulich, Heather. 2007. “A Photographer's Legacy Tarnished,” National Press Photographer's Association, 15 September. https://nppa.org/news/1618.Google Scholar
Harvey, Justin., Daniels, Charlie, Emigh, Matthew, and Crane, Kevin. 2007. “Joe O'Donnell ‘Snapshot.’” Nashville WWII Stories. Nashville Public Television. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Gc1-vSQMHM.Google Scholar
Hatsuda, Kōsei. 2002. “Tokyo's Black Markets as an Alternative Urban Space: Occupation, Violence, and Disaster Reconstruction.” Journal of Urban History 48 (5): 10461065.Google Scholar
Hein, Laura. 2018. Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Robert. 2010. “Reconstructing the Perpetrator's Soul by Reconstructing the Victim's Body: The Portrayal of the ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ by the Mainstream Media in the United States.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 24. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/jacobs.htm.Google Scholar
Jung, Ji Hee. 2018. “Seductive Alienation: The American Way of Life Rearticulated in Occupied Japan.” Asian Studies Review 42 (3): 498516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerr, Bartlett E. 1991. Flames over Tokyo: The U.S. Army Air Forces' Incendiary Campaign Against Japan, 1944–1945. New York: D.I. Fine.Google Scholar
Kitamura, Hiroshi. 2012. “America's Racial Limits: U.S. Cinema and the Occupation of Japan.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 23: 139162.Google Scholar
Koikari, Mire. 2009. Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan. Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Low, Morris. 2015. “American Photography during the Allied Occupation of Japan: The Work of John W. Bennett.” History of Photography 39 (3): 263278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Douglas. 2007. “Joe O'Donnell, 85, Dies; Long a Leading Photographer,” The New York Times, 14 August. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/washington/14odonnell.html.Google Scholar
Medical Report of the Atomic Bombing in Hiroshima,” Army Medical College, First Tokyo Army Hospital via joint medical commission for investigation of effects of atomic bombs. Report No. 3c(25), USSBS Index Section 2.Google Scholar
Miles, Melissa and Gerster, Robin. 2018. Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia-Japan Relationship. Australian National University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Greg. 2005. “Hiroshima Film Cover-up Exposed. Censored 1945 Footage to Air.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 3 (8): https://apjjf.org/-Greg-Mitchell/1554/article.html.Google Scholar
Mydans, Shelly. 1945. “The Japanese Mind in Defeat,” Life, 3 September.Google Scholar
“Myths and Realities About Incendiary Weapons.” 2018. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/11/14/myths-and-realities-about-incendiary-weapons.Google Scholar
Nayar, Pramod K. 2023. Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nolan, James L. 2020. Atomic Doctors: An Unflinching Examination of the Moral and Professional Dilemmas Faced by Physicians who took Part in the Manhattan Project. Harvard: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Nuclear.” Nuclear Threat Initiative. https://www.nti.org/area/nuclear/#:~:text=We%20have%20entered%20a%20new,device%20being%20used%20is%20rising.Google Scholar
Ochi, Hiromi. 2006. “What Did She Read?: The Cultural Occupation of Post-War Japan and Translated Girls' Literature.” F-GENS Jānaru: Frontiers of Gender Studies 5: 359363.Google Scholar
O'Donnell, Joe. 2005. “A Straight Path Through Hell.” American Heritage 56 (3). https://www.americanheritage.com/straight-path-through-hell.Google Scholar
O'Donnell, Joe. 2005. Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine's Photographs from Ground Zero, first edition. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.Google Scholar
O'Donnell, Joe and Alldredge, Jennifer. 1995. トランクの中の日本:米従軍カメラマンの非公式記録 [Images from the Trunk]. Tokyo: Shōgakukan.Google ScholarPubMed
O'Donnell, Tyge. 2011. “Interview with David Weir about Photographer Joe O'Donnell.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tu_uxqwYoo.Google Scholar
Richardson, Jack. 2006. “Seeing, Thinking, Mapping, Moving: Considerations of Space in Visual Culture.” Visual Arts Research 32 (2): 6268.Google Scholar
‘Sasebo History: Assorted Data on a Historical City in Southern Japan.’ Center for Research: Allied POWS Under the Japanese. http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/fukuoka/fuku_18_sasebo/sasebo_history/sasebo_history.html.Google Scholar
Sasebo Report No. 3-a(37). USSBS Index Section 7. Records of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey; Entry 59, Security-Classified Damage Assessment Reports, 1945. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3984539.Google Scholar
Schultz, Joan M. 2011. “Felix Man's ‘Canada’: Imagined Geographies and Pre-Texts of Looking.” In Payne, Carol and Kunard, Andrea. (Eds.). The Culture Work of Photography in Canada. London: McGill-Queen's University Press.Google Scholar
Selden, Mark. 2007. “A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities & the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 5 (5): https://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html.Google Scholar
Selden, Mark. 2005. “Foreword. After the Bomb: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Photographic Record.” In Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine's Photographs from Ground Zero, first edition. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.Google Scholar
Senate Resolution 257: “Relating to the ‘Enola Gay’ Exhibit.” Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 131. Monday, 19 September, 1994. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-1994-09-19/html/CREC-1994-09-19-pt1-PgS48.htm.Google Scholar
Shibusawa, Naoko. 2006. America's Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
「占領軍ルックからスラックスへ」 [“From the Occupier's Looks to Slacks”]. 1977. In 占領したの日本 [Japan Under Occupation]. Volume 9 of 昭和日本史 [Showa Japanese History] (pp. 4748). Tokyo: Akatsuki Kyōiku Tosho.Google Scholar
Smylitopoulos, Christina. (ed.). 2016. Agents of Space: Eighteenth-Century Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. 2002. “Looking at War.” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Spector, Ronald. 1985. Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Takemae, Eiji. 2003. The Allied Occupation of Japan, translated by Ricketts, Robert and Swann, Sebastian. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Taylor, N.A.J., and Jacobs, Robert. (eds.). 2018. Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Thwaites, Lily. 2019. “The morality of war photography.” The Boer. https://theboar.org/2019/11/war-photography/.Google Scholar
“The Meaning of Victory.” 1945. Life. 27 August.Google Scholar
“The Tokyo Express. A Life Photographer Takes a Ride to Hiroshima on Japan's Best Train.” 1945. Life. 8 October.Google Scholar
Tsuchiya, Yuka. 2002. “Imagined America in Occupied Japan: (Re-)Educational Films Shown by the U.S. Occupation Forces to the Japanese, 1948–1952.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 13: 193213.Google Scholar
“U.S. Occupies Japan.” 1945. Life. 10 September. Photos by Bernard Hoffman, Carl Mydans, and George Silk.Google Scholar
“War's Ending.” 1945. Life. 20 August.Google Scholar
Wellerstein, Alex. “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:75 Years and Counting. https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/.Google Scholar
“5th Peace Memorial Exhibition ‘Fukuoka Air Raid.’” Fukuoka Now. http://www.fukuokanow.com/en/event/5th-peace-memorial-exhibition-fukuoka-air-raid/.Google Scholar