The Repatriation of Atomic Bomb Victim Body Parts to Japan: Natural Objects and Diplomacy

IN MAY 1973 A GROUP OF SCIENTISTS, physicians, and dignitaries gathered in the lobby of a Hiroshima research institute to open seven large wooden boxes. Shipped a few days earlier from the United States, these boxes contained twentythree thousand items, including photographs, autopsy records, clothing, and four thousand pieces of human remains. The institute director later appeared in a newspaper photograph holding up several plastic bags filled with "wet tissue"-hearts, lungs, livers, eyes, and brains, immersed in formalin and doubly sealed, whole organs marked by the radiation produced by the atomic bombs in August 1945.1 These body parts spent twenty-eight years as state secrets in an atomic bomb-proofed building in Washington, D.C. The first atomic bomb victim autopsy materials to leave Japan, they were the last to return. In this essay, I explore the repatriation of these and other atomic bomb victim remains from the United States to Japan between 1967 and 1973. I consider their status as natural objects that could reveal scientific truth and as diplomatic objects that both Japan and the United States could use in negotiating their postwar relationship. By considering the management of these humble and unappealing bodily things (fragmented livers, pieces of brains in paraffin, and hearts in jars), I address the more general process through which human bodies become natural. A large scholarly literature xplores how science makes the body in relation to