Cambridge University Press spring 2021 sampler

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T WOHRE O L BOFB D DYL AN

ED SE ITED BRI AN LA BY AN H THA OSM M A ER ND

Contents The World of Bob Dylan....................................................... 4 There Is No Planet B.............................................................. 14 American Survivors................................................................ 24 A Tattoo on My Brain............................................................ 72 Runaway Technology............................................................ 83 Seven Deadly Economic Sins................................................. 99 The First Wave....................................................................... 113 Customer Services.................................................................. 136 Publicity................................................................................. 136 Cambridge University Press Around the World................... 137

The World of Bob Dylan THE WORLD OF BOB DYLAN EDITED BY SEAN LATHAM AND BRIAN HOSMER

March 2021 9781108499514 Hardback $25.95 / £19.99

Edited by Sean Latham Bob Dylan has helped transform music, literature, pop culture, and even politics. The World of Bob Dylan chronicles a lifetime of creative invention that has made a global impact. Leading rock and pop critics and music scholars address themes and topics central to Dylan’s life and work: the Blues, his religious faith, Civil Rights, Gender, Race, and American and World literature. Incorporating a rich array of new archival material from never before accessed archives, The World of Bob Dylan offers a comprehensive, uniquely informed and wholly fresh account of the songwriter, artist, filmmaker, and Nobel Laureate whose unique voice has permanently reshaped our cultural landscape.

Sean Latham is the Pauline McFarlin Walter Professor of English at the University of Tulsa where he serves as director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies.

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Introduction: Time to Say Goodbye Again Sean Latham

Is there any writer or performer more haunting – and more haunted – than Bob Dylan? We recognize his songs, his vision, his inventiveness, his poetry, and especially his distinctive voice nearly everywhere: in music and film, popular culture and politics, global protest movements and intimate moments of self-reflection. As he now turns eighty, it’s a shock to realize that, for most us, Dylan has always been there, singing, touring, laughing, snarling, and sometimes even hawking whiskey and underwear.

Like the members of the Nobel committee that awarded him the world’s most important cultural prize, we know he is a vastly influential artist. But which Dylan is it? The folk-singing activist who shared the stage with Dr. King at the March on Washington? The rocker in Ray Bans and a leather jacket who faced down hostile crowds by ordering his band to “play it fucking loud?” Is it the country boy who went to Nashville and befriended Johnny Cash? Or the Beat-inspired hipster who took to the road with a ramshackle medicine show? The Christian convert? The brilliant curator of folk and blues? The Sinatra-inspired crooner? Or the weary old man who’s “standin’ in the doorway cryin’?”

Just as we grapple with these many Dylans, so too we can see him as an artist who built a career around wrestling with strong spirits from the past.

When he reached New York City in 1961, he was already a young man possessed: walking, talking, and singing like Woody Guthrie – a revenant from another world. He had even half-invented a fake history for himself by lifting bits and pieces from the pages of Bound for Glory, Guthrie’s semifictional account of his life in the Dust Bowl. Not long after Dylan’s arrival, however, it became clear that this was not some youthful journey to freedom, but an Odyssean trip into the underworld. When he passed through the iron gates of Greystone Psychiatric Hospital to seek out his idol, Dylan instead discovered a frail man suffering Huntington’s chorea who was too palsied to talk or sing. The young man later claimed there had been some spark of recognition, but if so, it would have been hard to 1

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discern and Dylan was haunted enough by what he had seen to try to exorcise this ghost. His first original composition, “Song to Woody” (1962), after all, concludes with desperate hope that he might escape such a world and such a fate – that he would be spared this kind of “hard travelin’.”

That song helped lay Woody to rest in Dylan’s imagination – and thus free him from the often icy grip of the folk music world that clutched at him throughout the early 1960s. He instead set out to explore and then invent the larger, richer, and stranger world this volume seeks to describe.

The twenty-seven essays gathered here each offer a different way of understanding the depth, complexity, and legacy of Dylan’s music, while at the same set setting out an entirely new agenda for writing, research, and invention. Although written by experts and scholars, they are designed to be accessible both to long-time fans and those who are curious about how and why this musician has become such a singular figure. The chapters are simply titled and concisely written so that readers can make their way through the book with only their own curiosity as a guide, jumping perhaps from rock music, to the counterculture, to the Nobel Prize. But the book can also be read in order as it moves outward from Dylan’s life then into his music, influence, fame, and legacy. The first section is largely biographical and aims to provide a general introduction to a remarkable story that leads from a small town in Minnesota through New York and out into the world. This is followed by series of chapters that each look closely at the many different genres of music from which Dylan drew inspiration and which his own work helped to reshape. As the Nobel Prize committee realized, however, Dylan is far more than a musician and his lyrics are now part of a vast historical and cultural web that stretches into the deep past and around the world. The authors in Part III thus offer some sense of how Dylan’s work intersects with literature, theatre, religion, and the visual arts, while those in Part IV look at the extraordinary way his art has shaped our politics and even our idea of justice. The book then ends with a series of chapters that step back to consider Dylan’s legacy, including a closing piece by the director of the Bob Dylan Archive®.

This book is occasioned, in part, by the extraordinary riches of those archives. Purchased by the George Kaiser Family Foundation and resting now in Tulsa, Oklahoma alongside the lifetime works of Woody Guthrie, the Dylan collection contains some 100,000 objects, including notebooks, session tapes, photographs, letters, and page after page after page of lyrics.

They spill out everywhere: some neatly typed and others hastily scrawled on advertisements or worked out in tiny handwriting on pocket

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notebooks. On these pages, we see evidence of a restlessly creative mind, one deeply engaged with all the complexity and confusion of being human in a messy, ever-changing world.

One of the things that makes Dylan’s work so extraordinary, in fact, is precisely our inability to slot it neatly into categories, genres, or cultural histories. In his songs, the civil rights movement can somehow cross with the work of obscure Confederate poets, while the electric energy of rock melds with the plaintive honesty of folk and the smooth sophistication of the American Songbook. The world of Bob Dylan is defined by such fault lines. It is an art of thresholds and doorways, of arrivals and departures, full of restless farewells and the fear that he might stay just a day too long.

There always seems to be another world that calls to him, tugging him Gatsby-like into the past or propelling him into a future the rest of us didn’t quite see coming.

In “Song to Woody,” Dylan learned to live with the past so that it might possess but never overpower him. He then built an astonishing career around a relentless series of similar farewells: first to Guthrie, then to his folk audience on a steamy Newport evening, to rock fans in a Nashville studio, to his devout Christian believers with an album called Infidels (1983), and – more recently – to the very idea of himself as a singer-songwriter in five long LPs packed with crooning covers.

Again and again, Dylan uses his albums to imagine and even enact the end of one musical world in order to clear the way for another. Some of his most astonishing albums – Highway 61 Revisited (1965), John Wesley Harding (1967), Blood on the Tracks (1975), Love and Theft (2001) – might even been seen as murder ballads: an attempt to kill off a public persona that had become burdensome, even dangerous.

Such deaths, however, create entire musical and imaginative worlds that we critics, musicians, scholars, and fans continue to explore.

Meanwhile, Dylan himself slips away, refusing once again to be entombed in vinyl.

In order to introduce this volume, I want to compare two of his most powerful farewells as a way of demonstrating his ability to both make and shatter imaginative worlds. The first is his infamous envoi to the folk world, which we can date not to that distant Newport evening when he plugged in his sunburst Stratocaster, but instead to “Restless Farewell” – the song and poem that he hurriedly added to Times They Are A-Changin’ in 1963. The second is one of his more recent gestures of farewell: the 14minute epic recounting of the Titanic disaster that that appeared in 2012 on Tempest. Although he has disavowed any allusion to Shakespeare in the

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album’s title, it’s impossible not to hear the voice of the old wizard now exhausted by decades of “rough magic.”1 The first of these farewells is now an integral part of Dylan’s myth. In November 1963, just on the eve of his Carnegie Hall concert, Newsweek published a short two-column note buried in its arts and culture section titled “I Am My Words.” Dylan, his manager, and his PR team all expected this to be a major profile, on par with the recent Time profile of Joan Baez that had occupied the cover, a photo spread, and a dozen pages in the magazine. Instead, it was a short exposé that deftly revealed the truth about Dylan’s past: that he was a middle-class kid from Hibbing and not a latterday hobo poet. More troublingly, it wrongly suggested that his landmark hit, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” had been cribbed from a kid in New Jersey.

Dylan was furious and the article became a kind of wound – one that still ached, as we’ll see, some fifty years later. At the time, an angry Dylan first refused to talk to the press before beginning what became a lifelong attack on every erstwhile journalist or interviewer who tried to get a quote from him or gain some insight into this music.

Shortly after the Carnegie Hall concert, he returned to Columbia’s New York studios and added an additional track titled “Restless Farewell” to an album that otherwise contained his most politically activist songs – the kind of music that led Pete Seeger to champion his work and that still makes critics and historians alike insist (despite Dylan’s many protestations) that he is the voice of the 1960s. Derived from a Scottish folk tune, this last-minute addition aims directly at the folk world from which these songs grew as well as at the many writers, critics, and editors who had sought to shape and therefore constrain him. His lyrics are soaked in the imagery of martyrdom, and by the song’s end, he envisions himself facing what seems to be defeat, an effect heightened by the tune’s derivation of a ballad tradition that romanticizes doomed rebellions: “I’ll make my stand,” he proclaims, “And remain as I am / And bid farewell and not give a damn.”

This heroic declaration of independence, however, is complicated by the lines just before it. Plainly invoking the Newsweek article, he describes the dirt and dust of gossip that cover him, before imagining an arrow in flight: “if the arrow is straight / And the point is slick / It can pierce through dust no matter how thick.” Crucially, we cannot tell if Dylan himself has loosed this missile. If so, then it becomes a metaphor for this art and the underlying truths that cannot be obscured by gossip or the press. Alternatively, or maybe simultaneously, Dylan imagines himself as the martyred Saint Sebastian, in 1

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William Shakespeare, The Tempest, V, i.

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which case that arrow is the truth about his own past, punching through the false stories he has told in order to land fatally in his own breast. The restless farewell thus does not come from a troubadour heading once more for the road (as is in the case in the original Scottish tune), but instead marks the death of the Guthrie-esque persona that Dylan had fashioned. This Dylan had to be killed to make way for a new world, created by an artist who has learned to not give a damn.

In addition to penning “Restless Farewell,” Dylan also added the ominously titled poem “11 Outlined Epitaphs” to the album – heightening the sense that the song may be laying to rest some older version of himself. One of the sections directly invokes the Newsweek interview and the larger mechanisms of fame it represented to him: I don’t like t’ be stuck in print starin’ out at cavity minds who gobble chocolate candy bars quite content an’ satisfied.2

He then adopts a clever rhetorical trick that he will return to consistently throughout his career, suggesting that what he says and sings only makes sense within the moment and context of performance itself. Reporters and fans, he writes, have no way of knowin’ that I ‘expose’ myself every time I step out on the stage.

There is no deeper meaning behind the lyrics, these lines suggest, no other way of understanding the man or the music than in the moment of the performance itself. In performance, at least, the world of Bob Dylan shrinks for a moment to encompass only the singer and his audience.

Such is his hope anyway, but this is a strategy doomed to failure since such ghosts cannot be so easily banished. The boos and slow claps – first at Newport in 1964 and then on the 1966 tour – demanded the revenant return. This refusal to accept Dylan’s various farewells and the accompanying demand that he thus freeze one of his many worlds in amber has plagued him throughout this career. And so he has to keep saying goodbye, keep trying to exorcise the spirits that might otherwise overwhelm him.

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Bob Dylan, “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” reprinted in Bob Dylan, Writings and Drawings (New York: Knopf, 1973), p. 107.

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His attempts to escape, however, are never fully successful and one of his most recent farewells offers a glimpse of a man still struggling with the past, but now determined to live the cascade of imaginative worlds he has left in his long and winding wake.

A Sinking Feeling In 2012, Dylan released Tempest, his thirty-fifth studio album and the last to contain original tracks. Shortly afterward, Dylan sat down for an interview with Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore, who starts the conversation by trying to goad the singer into admitting that his fame essentially rests on those early albums from the 1960s. Not surprisingly, Dylan reacts pugnaciously. He resorts first to his old claim that his words and songs having meaning only in the moment of utterance.

When Gilmore presses him to at least explain what he meant when he told an audience that “It looks likes things are gonna change now” just after Obama’s election, Dylan insists that “whatever was said, it was said for people in that hall for that night.”3 He seems, in other words, to be managing the ghosts the same way he did in 1963 – by insisting that the old songs, indeed entire performances, die the moment the house lights come up.

Near the end of the interview, however, things take a turn as one of Dylan’s oldest ghosts suddenly materializes. Gilmore asks about the humorous moment when a young New Jersey cop arrested the musical superstar while he was out looking for Bruce Springsteen’s house. Dylan playfully relates the story and the whole things feels a bit Guthrie-esque; after all, here’s an international celebrity, who started his career pretending to be a drifter, now planted in the back of a squad car on suspicion of vagrancy. But things take an abrupt turn. The problem, Dylan tells Gilmore, is that he cannot ever be mistaken for someone else, that someone always sees through his act and gives him away. “That’s the side of people I see,” he snarls. “People like to betray people . . . . They want to be the one to do it . . . . I’ve experience that. A lot.”4 Gilmore hits a nerve here and when he next asks about Dylan’s unacknowledged borrowing from Civil War poet Henry Timrod on Love and Theft (2001), the songwriter returns unexpectedly to that now ancient Newsweek article: “People have tried to stop me every inch of the way,” he bitterly complains.

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Mikal Gilmore, “Bob Dylan Unleashed,” Rolling Stone, September 27, 2012.

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Ibid.

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They’ve always had bad stuff to say about me. Newsweek magazine lit the fuse way back when. Newsweek printed that some kid from New Jersey wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” and it wasn’t me at all. And when that didn’t fly, people accused me of stealing the melody from a 16th-century Protestant hymn. And when that didn’t work, they said they made a mistake and it was really an old Negro spiritual.5

Can those two narrow, yellowing columns in Newsweek still be haunting him all these years later? His outlined epitaphs, the lines of “Restless Farewell,” the insistence that the songs live only in the moment, and his various attempts to bid us farewell appear not to have worked after all.

Dylan’s many revenants still roam through his imagination and he admits that they cannot be forgotten, ignored, or exorcised. Fifty years on, it turns out, he still does give a damn.

And this brings us to the title track for Tempest, itself another kind of farewell, fashioned by a man in the crowded company of ghosts. This haunted song rambles through fourteen minutes of sounds, images, and characters from the past, all presided over by an enigmatic watchman who nightly dreams their doom. Like his other sprawling epics – such as the eleven-minute “Sad Eyed Lady from the Lowlands” from Blonde on Blonde (1966)or its reprise, the sixteen-minute “Highlands” from Modern Times (2006) – this one too is built around a looping musical structure that could seemingly go on forever. It differs in one key way from those earlier songs, however: it tells the story of the Titanic and thus a tragic, predestined ending awaits from the moment it begins. In those earlier songs, lengths fills time as the singer waits for something to happen. In “Tempest,” however, it delays the inevitable moment of death’s victory.

The song’s forty-five four-line stanzas unfurl without a chorus over an up-tempo waltz that belies the descriptions of terror, death, and violence woven through the lyrics. Dylan wrote the song amid the frenzy of Titanic mania that marked the centenary of the maritime disaster and it jumbles together a disparate collection of fictional and historical source material. As is so often the case in Dylan’s late songs, “Tempest” is also laden with literary and musical references that reflect the writer’s deep yet wildly disparate reading. It first quotes the Carter’s family’s 1956 song about the disaster – itself one of the very last singles released by country music’s most influential group.6 Dylan also invokes Shakespeare’s final play – even though he limply tried to deny it, saying the Bard’s work was called The Tempest, while his was merely “Tempest.” This is the play in which 5

Ibid.

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The Carter Family, “The Titanic,” Acme, 1956.

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Shakespeare uses the character Prospero to bid farewell to his audience on the shores of the last fantastical world he fashioned.

Most of the songs recorded for Tempest made it quickly into Dylan’s concert sets and many of them, such as “Pay in Blood” and “Early Roman Kings,” have become immediate favorites performed at nearly every live show.7 The title track, however, like “Restless Farewell,” joins a handful of recorded songs that Dylan has almost never played live. The 1963 song has only been performed twice – once just after he recorded it and then again at Frank Sinatra’s eightieth birthday party. And it has been covered only rarely – itself another oddity for a Dylan song.8 If we can indeed read it as Dylan’s attempt to bid the folk world an angry goodbye, then this makes sense. The jabs it lands, after all, only sting when he can deliver them directly, then turn and walk away. “Tempest,” however, has never been covered – indeed, has never been performed in public at all. There are, of course, sound technical reasons for this, since just remembering all those verses would be daunting. Still, if it is something like a final farewell, then it makes sense that he has no interest in performing it live – no interest in saying goodbye more than once. Like the sinking of the Titanic, this particular ending is both fated and final: death will come to silence his voice and give the lie to the idea of a “never ending tour.”9 But is this really the end? Like “Restless Farewell” some five decades earlier, “Tempest” too is beset by a crucial ambiguity. In the original Cater family tune, the disaster unfolds after a careless watchman falls asleep. In Dylan’s version, however, the watchman becomes a double for the songwriter, who invents this catastrophe. “The watchman, he lay dreaming,” Dylan sings, “He dreamed the Titanic was sinking / And he tried to tell someone.” The song becomes that telling, each new verse an act of both creation and destruction as Dylan engages in a fury of invention. Just as it’s unclear in “Restless Farewell” if Dylan is firing the arrow of truth or is instead felled by it, so too in “Tempest” we cannot tell if Dylan the watchman sinks with the ship or instead presides over its destruction. At one point, the watchman sits at forty-five degrees, seemingly poised to slip beneath the waves, but in the final verse he’s safe and simply dreaming 7

According to bobdylan.com, “Early Roman Kings” has been performed 498 times since November 7, 2012 and “Pay in Blood” 477 times.

Curiously, those covers have only been performed by people who have been relatively close to Dylan at various points in his career, including Joan Baez (on Baez Sings Dylan – Vanguard, 2006), Mark Knopfler (on the 2012 tribute album, Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International), and Liam Clancy (Clancy, O’Connell & Clancy – Helvic, 1997).

9 This is the popular name fans and critics have given to Dylan’s rigorous touring and performance schedule since 1988.

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again “of all the things that can be.” So maybe this isn’t the final farewell it appears to be.

After complaining to Gilmore in that Rolling Stone interview about constantly being betrayed, Dylan summons his old familiar snarl. “Fuck ‘em,” he concludes, “I’ll see them all in their graves.”10 That’s not the voice of resignation or of a latter-day Prospero content to drown his book and break his staff. Instead, it’s the credo of an artist who has learned to live with his ghosts. Where “Restless Farewell” mixes martyrdom with a desire to destroy a restrictive public persona, “Tempest” seemingly accepts, even welcomes, the many worlds Dylan has made for himself and for generations of listeners. Unlike Shakespeare’s Tempest, which concludes with Prospero’s gentle plea that the audience “let your indulgence set me free,” Dylan’s song ends on a braver, if more bitter note.11 Its cascade of verses might be an attempt to literally clear the decks of his mind, but through it all, the figure of the watchman endures, a double for Dylan himself who also returns to the dream-like space of the stage night after night. Up there, he is surrounded by the ghosts of his many other selves – both those that stalk him and the ones that each new audience brings with them. As that sudden explosion of anger about a 50-year-old Newsweek article suggests, he has decided not to make peace with the past, but neither does he hope to escape it. Instead, he faces down the ghosts that might crowd him out, content to wrestle with them – and with us – through one more performance. Like the watchman, he may well see them into their graves, but the songs will summon them again in a potentially endless loop. “Fuck ‘em” he says as he takes the stage – it’s time to say goodbye again: an act of farewell that clears the way yet again for another of Dylan’s many worlds.

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Gilmore, “Bob Dylan Unleashed.”

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William Shakespeare, The Tempest, V, i.

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There Is No Planet B A Handbook for the Make or Break Years – Updated Edition Mike Berners-Lee

January 2021 9781108821575 Paperback $12.95 / £9.99

Feeding the world, climate change, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics, pandemics - the list of concerns seems endless. But what is most pressing, and what should we do first? Do we all need to become vegetarian? How can we fly in a low-carbon world?

How can we take control of technology? And, given the global nature of the challenges we now face, what on Earth can any of us do, as individuals? Mike Berners-Lee has crunched the numbers and plotted a course of action that is full of hope, practical, and enjoyable. This is the big-picture perspective on the environmental and economic challenges of our day, laid out in one place, and traced through to the underlying roots - questions of how we live and think. This updated edition has new material on protests, pandemics, wildfires, investments, carbon targets and of course, on the key question: given all this, what can I do?

Mike Berners-Lee thinks, writes, researches and consults on sustainability and responses to the challenges of the twenty-first century. He is the founder of Small World Consulting (SWC), an associate company of Lancaster University, which works with organisations from small businesses to the biggest tech giants. SWC is a leader in the field of carbon metrics, targets and actions. About his first book – How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint Of Everything – Bill Bryson wrote ‘I can’t remember the last time I read a book that was more fascinating, useful and enjoy – able all at the same time’. His second book (co-written with Duncan Clark) – The Burning Question: We Can’t Burn Half the World’s Oil, Coal, and Gas. So How Do We Quit?

– explores the big picture of climate change and the underlying global dynamics, asking what mix of politics, economics, psychology and technology are really required to deal with the problem.

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WHAT’S NEW IN THIS UPDATED EDITION? I’m writing this in lockdown, as coronavirus disease (COVID19) holds humanity in its grip. Everyone is trying to work out what it will mean for the world after the immediate crisis has passed. Many people are asking whether this could be the moment we unlock ourselves from an economic and social set-up that is now so clearly unfit for the modern era and embark, at last, on the transition to a more environmentally friendly world that our (and other) species so urgently needs. Of course, at present no one knows. But clearly, change of every kind, for better and worse, looks so much more possible now that we have already been forced to turn our lives upside down.

Even without the pandemic, the two years since publication of the first edition of There Is No Planet B have seen a lot of change. In 2019–20, the wildfires of Australia single-handedly added more than 1% to global greenhouse gas emissions and turned the skies orange in New Zealand, 2,000 miles away.

Methane has been exploding (literally) out of the melting Russian permafrost, leaving craters 50 metres across, and we have news that the Amazon may be drying out so fast that it could soon turn from an important carbon sink into a brand new source of emissions.

And yet at the same time we have also seen hugely encouraging signs that the world – or at least some parts of it – is at long last waking up to our environmental crisis. There is such a long way to go, but it is enough to give me more hope than I’ve had in years.

When the first copies of There Is No Planet B reached the bookshops, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had only just released its long-awaited report, making

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WHAT’S NEW IN THIS UPDATED EDITION?

crystal clear the need to keep global temperature change to within 1.5 ℃.1 Greta Thunberg was only just emerging as a household name, and the school kids had not yet taken to the streets en masse. Extinction Rebellion was still planning the landmark London protests of April 2019. In the UK, politicians still thought they could look like they were leading the world with a hopelessly inadequate target to cut emissions by just 80% by 2050. It had not yet become fashionable for both local and national governments to declare a climate emergency. The BBC was only just starting to talk plainly about the need to eat less meat and dairy. It had not yet released its landmark documentaries Climate Change – The Facts (which drew a line under its hitherto abysmal coverage of the climate emergency) and Extinction: The Facts, which brought our biodiversity crisis into shockingly sharp focus. (Please try to watch these documentaries if you haven’t already.)

Plans to expand Heathrow Airport have been judged illegal by the Court of Appeal on climate grounds. That sets an incredibly helpful precedent, opening the floodgates for climate-scrutiny of all the UK’s infrastructure plans, including crazy new coal mines and road expansion schemes. It is getting harder for politicians to talk about the climate in one moment and then forget about it the next. These straws in the wind are enough to give me real hope.

How did these first steps of change become possible? What caused what? The answer has to be that, just like all system change, it all came together at once. The conditions became right for the first inch of shift to take place on the big transition; the journey that we so urgently need. And the first inch might have been the hardest one.

It is a race between tipping points; will the environmental crisis tip out of control first, or will humanity wake up in time?

While the science is getting even more scary, for the first time, it feels like society as a whole has actually managed to stir a little in its slumber. Our collective head has just started to try

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wiggling out of the sand. If we all pull hard, the big system change that we so urgently need feels more likely than it did two years ago. And we might even be in time.

COVID-19 struck at a moment when the world was tottering on the brink of enormous change. By delivering an immediate threat to every human life, the pandemic has surely forced us to reflect on what truly matters in life. Lockdown gave humanity a chance to stand back, take stock and rethink. This book tries to help with that by looking at how the old system was working, what needed to change, why and how.

So, what’s specifically new in this edition? I haven’t found any need to update the basic premise or through-line of the book, or even any of the numerical analysis, but the launch of this new version gives me a chance to fill in some gaps and cover some critical updates.

To start with, of course, the whole book has been picked through, nuances and updates squeezed in all over the place and some of the diagrams improved. In quite a few places I have replaced the phrase ‘climate change’, with a phrase that better describes what we now face: ‘climate emergency’. In the light of COVID-19 I have written more about disease. I have considered around 700 feedback emails, making useful tweaks and insertions throughout. So this version of There Is No Planet B is even more of a collaborative work than the first version.

In terms of brand new material, I have written more about some of the important levers of change that have been emerging. There is now a short chapter on protest, including Extinction Rebellion and the striking school kids. I’ve also added more for the business community in response to the surge of new questions that I am getting in my work: Does offsetting work? What does ‘net zero’ mean? How should we invest? How should we manage our financial asset portfolios to get the trillions of dollars pushing for a better world? Finally, in recognition of an even stronger calling for all of us to be part of the change right now, I have elaborated on the ‘What can I do?’ section.

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We are all on a journey of change now and I hope that this new edition reflects that more than ever.

Happy reading!

Mike Berners-Lee

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Do we need protest?

After decades of asking politely and getting nowhere, we have a full-scale emergency on our hands. We have to have change. And it must be now. If the right kind of protest is what it takes, then that’s what we must have.

I do not write this as someone who feels instinctive joy at the thought of taking to the streets, but these are serious times. There is compelling evidence that the right kind of protest clearly works. When, in 2019, the UK tightened its carbon targets to ‘net zero by 2050’, it wasn’t far enough, but it was a big step in the right direction. And it looks pretty clear that the political space to make that possible was opened up in no small part by protesters; by Greta Thunberg, by armies of school kids, and by Extinction Rebellion (XR). My work with tech giants, investment bankers, energy companies, an airline and many other corporations tells me that these straight-talking, non-violent direct actions made possible conversations in boardrooms that seemed unthinkable just 18 months before.

What we need is a very special kind of protest. Around the world, but especially in the UK, I think XR has been an incredibly impressive movement. At their best I think they have been brilliant; perhaps one of the greatest causes for optimism in the world today.

They haven’t been perfect – but we shouldn’t expect that of anyone. They have made mistakes, paid for them and usually learned fast. Anyone who criticises XR needs to first explain

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what is the more effective game plan that they are already implementing to bring about the system change that we need.

XR knows it doesn’t have all the answers, but, to quote the partisans in Primo Levi’s novel If Not Now, When?, it is a case of ‘If not this way how, and if not now when?’ We owe them a debt of gratitude.

What has been Extinction Rebellion’s magic?

It boils down to values, processes, role modelling, positivity and fast learning.

Most importantly for me, XR has been a loud advocate of the three core values I call for in this book. In the London protests of April 2019, you could hear the tannoys reminding supporters to respect everyone: the authorities; the government; the public; each other; the oil companies; EVERYONE. In surreal scenes on Waterloo Bridge, the police were caught visibly off balance by the tide chanting: ‘To the police, we love you. We’re doing this for your children’, as the police carried people away to their vans. Of course, as XR’s name suggests, they stand overtly for the preservation of all species. And they made a very strong call for truth.

At its best, XR gave us a taste of a better world. They carried trees onto Waterloo Bridge. They offered free food, interesting talks, a book library and even a skateboard park. There was music and fun. They made the air cleaner. They were nice to everyone – even the few who were less polite in return. They picked up not just their own litter but every piece of litter they could find nearby. No alcohol nor drugs were allowed near the protests. They operate a transparent, inclusive, democratic process, holding debates and votes about every decision, and modelling the evolution in the democratic process that they call for. They were nice to everyone, so that the air wasn’t just cleaner from the reduced traffic, it felt kinder too. When they caused disruption they did so respectfully and apologetically.

‘I’m really sorry to inconvenience anyone but I’m afraid we do

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What is the next evolution of protest?

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have an environmental emergency and we simply have to have big change right now.’ And they were prepared to get arrested.

When they made mistakes, they usually learned from them fast. What were those mistakes? Well to my mind they included: • Singling out specific politicians (turning up at Jeremy Corbyn’s house); • Graffitiing a Shell Oil building (to me this is at odds with the spirit of non-violence, even though not directed against people); • Jumping on a couple of tube trains (disrupting the green infrastructure was picking the wrong battle); • There were very occasional instances of spokespeople straying beyond the scientific evidence, and this undermined the principle of respecting scientific truth; • Calling for zero carbon by 2025 without any idea of how that might be achieved reduced their credibility – but this is a matter of detail.

For perspective, this is a pretty short list of errors for a large and inclusive organisation.

What is the next evolution of protest?

It is with some humility that I chip in my thoughts as to how XR’s activities might be more effective. But for what it’s worth here is what I think: (1) Widen the call for truth beyond just scientific truth about the environmental emergency, to a call for a raising of the bar on truthfulness in public life.

(2) Make sure that the balance of activities is more positive than disruptive. Offer a taste of a better world that does not need to be imagined. Examples might include providing delicious, free, sustainable street food in deprived communities, and cleaning up districts. By doing this XR makes the point that it cares about everyone and stands for a better world. And when it does cause disruption,

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people will understand that they are a positive movement, not a destructive force.

(3) Broaden their activities – engaging respectfully with all walks of society, including businesses of every kind. Do this with respect for the people who run such businesses, however unhelpful their activities might be, and even if they are behaving dishonestly. Like Mandela and Gandhi, the trick is to find genuine respect for everyone.

(4) Find ways of lowering the barriers of entry, so that it is easier and less embarrassing for anyone to start to support XR. This might include advice on how to support XR as you shop, or even as you drive.

(5) Continue pushing the deliberative democratic processes and experiments, such as the People’s Assembly on Climate Change.

(6) Be very honest and public about mistakes made and the learning process that follows. In this way model what to do when you make mistakes. This especially matters because nearly all our politicians and business leaders have made huge mistakes with respect to the environment and need to be allowed to learn and change.

Should children protest?

The younger generation have been better than their parents at seeing and saying it like it is. If we want psychologically healthy kids we need to let them respond to the challenges of the world as they see them. Striking school kids are playing a huge role.

The kids are right that it shouldn’t have been left to them to call out the climate emergency. But my generation hasn’t been up to the mark and we should be humbled and grateful for their insistence that we shape up. Why do they so often see and say it more clearly than their parents and teachers? I think it is only partly because it is their future even more than ours.

I think the other part of the story is that they have not lived

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through so many decades of confusing psychological dissonance. All my life the science has been telling us to look after the planet better and society has been pushing me in the other direction. Our whole society has been living in a way that is fundamentally unfit for the Anthropocene, and there has been a collective barrage of fog protecting us from seeing the disconnect between how we are living and how we need to be living.

In the words of J. R. R. Tolkien in his classic trilogy Lord of the Rings, like Gollum, ‘We forgot the taste of bread . . . the sound of the trees . . . the softness of the wind’. But often our kids can still see the disconnect. They see the situation with fresh eyes, and if the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes they often find it easier to say so. Greta Thunberg has many amazing qualities, and her youth is just one that makes her arguably the world’s clearest voice on the climate emergency.

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American Survivors Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Naoko Wake

May 2021 9781108835275 Hardback c.$39.99 / c.£ 29.99

American Survivors is a fresh and moving historical account of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, breaking new ground not only in the study of World War II but also in the public understanding of nuclear weaponry.

A truly trans-Pacific history, American Survivors challenges the dualistic distinction between Americans-as-victors and Japanese-as-victims often assumed by scholars of the nuclear war. Using more than 130 oral histories of Japanese American and Korean American survivors, their family members, community activists, and physicians – most of which appear here for the first time – Naoko Wake reveals a cross-national history of war, illness, immigration, gender, family, and community from intimately personal perspectives. American Survivors brings to light the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that connects, as much as separates, people across time and national boundaries.

Naoko Wake is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. A historian of gender, sexuality, and illness in the Pacific region, she has authored Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism and co-authored with Shinpei Takeda Hiroshima/ Nagasaki Beyond the Ocean. She was born and raised in Japan.

Advance praise ‘... deeply researched, sensitively analyzed, and beautifully written ...’

Laura Hein, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson, Professor of History, Northwestern University

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2 REMEMBERING THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST US survivors have uttered countless words about the nuclear holocaust. In their oral histories, many recounted the incident eagerly, resolving to tell it as accurately and completely as they could. To forget to say something – names of their family members who had perished – was to do injustice to them. To tell all intimate details of unprecedented injuries with utmost clarity, too, was hibakusha’s compulsion.1 They seemed to say: You may not believe it, but this happened to me. For some US survivors, remembering was a kind of obligation that they had taken upon themselves by giving lectures or public testimonials. For the rest, their oral history interviews were one of the first occasions to speak about their experiences with someone outside their circles. Despite their determination to recount events, nuclear death and destruction are not easy subjects. Often, survivors were at a loss for words at the cruelty of the words they had just uttered. A handful of American hibakusha refused to recall certain images or moments by flatly saying: I do not want to remember this. Please excuse me for not telling. Their speech and silence about what happened on the ground at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are revealing of their identities as survivors. To those of us who are not survivors, ways in which hibakusha recount the nuclear destruction become part of what little we can know about them.

Memories wane and wax, but they do not go away. The identity of a survivor shifts and glows by breathing in this movement. At the same time, survivors’ recollections (or refusals to recollect) remind us of a vast distance between the teller and the listener, by shedding fleeting light on

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73 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust the impossibility of fully knowing or remembering what hibakusha experienced in 1945.

Keeping an eye on both speech and silence, I recapture some of American survivors’ experiences in an attempt to continue to trace the counter-memory of the bomb.2 Building on their cross-national experiences as immigrants discussed in Chapter 1, I explore how Nikkei’s layered sense of belonging to Japan and America (and in the case of Korean Americans, to Korea and Japan as of 1945) continued to shape their remembering of the explosion, destruction, and death.

Simultaneously, I illuminate some of the most common, yet underexplored, aspects of the hibakusha’s experiences on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by considering memories of bodies, clothes, medicines, care, water, and food. It is a cultural history of the nuclear holocaust that stays close to survivors’ remembering. It is a history that exposes the mass, indiscriminate nature of the bomb by showing memories marked by both uniqueness and universality. Japanese American and Korean American survivors experienced the bomb’s effects along with other survivors. At the same time, the cross-national meanings they found in these universal experiences reveal a striking uniqueness. Their burns were no different from Japanese or Korean survivors’. In most cases, they treated injuries in the same way as did everyone else. And yet, some American survivors felt as if they had more (or, in some cases, fewer) resources than Japanese hibakusha because of their crossnationality. US survivors escaped, rescued, and survived just as others did after the bomb’s explosion. There were fires to run away from, rivers to be crossed, and loved ones to be found. The meanings Americans attached to each step, though, often differed from those typically found

by Japanese or Korean survivors. Sometimes, universality and uniqueness stood in sharp contrast; other times they merged together, as if to mirror the sweeping power of nuclear destruction that turned everyone alive on the ground universally into survivors regardless of their individual uniqueness.

The convergence of and contrast between uniqueness and universality in US survivors’ remembering reveal a history that ran counter to national memories and commemorations that proliferated in Japan, the United States, and South Korea after the war. In fact, the crossnational history of US survivors suggests that memories bound by national interests offer only a limited path toward understanding the nuclear destruction and its indiscriminate ways. Many studies that

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74 / American Survivors highlight these nation-bound memories either assume or imply that all or most survivors were part of Japan’s national polity, culture, and body.3 These studies have rarely discussed non-Japanese victims whose number in the best estimate reached more than one in ten.

A few studies that have analyzed non-Japanese hibakusha tend to separate them into different groups based on their nationality. None has fully focused on the coexistence and convergence of multiple national belongings and cultural affinities in survivors’ remembering of the nuclear destruction.4 To show that they included not only Japanese but also Koreans, Chinese, and Americans is one important way of illuminating the uncontainable force of nuclear weapons. Still, placing survivors in groups based on nationality, ethnicity, or race tends to highlight the distinctiveness of different groups of hibakusha while downplaying commonality among them and multiplicity within a given group. As a group whose history has been fundamentally shaped by Hiroshima and Nagasaki as cities of immigrants, US survivors’ remembering brings to light the limits of categories based on citizenship, national loyalty, and cultural belonging in our understanding of nuclear destruction and its human costs. If we follow the path of US hibakusha’s remembering and see these categories through the lens of the history of immigration, they appear to be as fictional as they were real at ground zero.

I follow a loosely chronological order in my exploration, although an occasional back and forth in time is inevitable to show ways in which American survivors made sense of certain times, locations, and incidents. Beginning with the days before the bomb’s explosion, I first examine how US survivors recalled the destruction of the two cities, often with a distinctively cross-national accent. I look at how this accent shaped US survivors’ remembering of their escaping and rescuing. Next, I examine their bodies and clothes as they were fused together with foreign objects such as glass, soil, and heat in the bomb’s aftermath. The third section is devoted to an analysis of medicine and care that survivors devised in the hours and days after the explosion. The last section examines water and food in US hibakusha’s remembering of ground zero. In my analysis of survivors’ stories, three major trajectories of the nuclear holocaust’s meanings emerge. First, the bomb was remembered as causing devastation common to all, regardless of their nationality, age, class, or gender. All the differences that normally separate individuals from one another appeared to be erased

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75 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust momentarily. And yet, shortly after survivors found each other, these categories came back powerfully. In some cases, survivors sought to express these differences as if to remind themselves of who they had been before the bomb. In other instances, survivors were reminded of these categories of difference by others who were shaken by survivors’ seeming otherworldliness. Because American hibakusha’s national and cultural belonging prior to the bomb had been layered, what they regained after the explosion, too, was compound.

Secondly, survivors’ remembering points to a particular significance of gender as a source of cross-nationality that came back after the bomb. Regardless of their nationality at the time of the bombing, many American hibakusha experienced the nuclear attack as an eraser of their gender. They felt that their identity as men or women was shattered by the bomb, and they made whatever effort they could to regain it. This was particularly true of older survivors, while younger ones remembered how adults struggled to act in distinctively gendered ways. Men felt as if it was their duty to rescue others at any cost, while women were expected to mobilize womanly resources to save their families. In this light, it is important to note that it was indeed mostly women who crafted medicine and offered care to the dying, ill, and injured. Using what little resources were left behind – tea, oil, vegetables, herbs, bones, and ashes – women became improvisational practitioners of folk medicine. To remember the care and treatment that women imparted was one of the most empowering actions that US survivors took many years later. Men’s gender identity, too, took a particular shape. Despite their desire to protect families and communities in the bomb’s aftermath, their resources were severely limited. How men might come to terms with their inability to protect without losing their sense of self-worth, then, became a central concern in 1945, as it did decades later.

The nuclear destruction may be seen as the beginning of a new gender awareness for both women and men, which in turn may explain the relative lack of gender in US survivors’ remembering of times before the bomb. To be sure, as seen in Chapter 1, many of them were children in the 1920s and 1930s, making it unlikely that a clearly defined gender would play a central role in their remembering. Nonetheless, those who were still children in 1945, as well as those who were reaching their early twenties, noted things related to gender more frequently in their recollections of the bomb’s immediate aftermath. Before the bomb, their gendered memories were about food cooked by mothers, clothes worn

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76 / American Survivors by boys or girls. Their remembering about times after the bomb, however, became more filled with acts and aspirations framed by distinct ideals of femininity and masculinity. It appears as if the bomb marked the end of childhood, as well as the beginning of their identity as survivors. Part of this identity was markedly gendered, signaling the coming of adulthood albeit at a young age for many. It is also likely that gendering the bomb added a universal tone to their remembering, making their experiences listenable to non-survivors. Consciously or not, hibakusha might have sought a way to be heard by recalling themselves as men and women who were, it was assumed, like everyone else.

Thirdly, I illuminate how the shifting ground of identity that emerged after the bomb’s explosion created a realm of the unspeakable in American hibakusha’s remembering. Although survivors of any nationality might face the unspeakability of the nuclear holocaust, American survivors are distinct in that their layered sense of belonging unequivocally marked their experiences on the ground. The destruction’s universality and its utter obliviousness to the uniqueness of the destroyed powerfully shaped things that cannot be recounted in US survivors’ remembering. Often, conspicuous silence took shape in the midst of their remembering, although I found no silence that was merely empty. When and how it descended pointed to what was remembered but could not be spoken. Sometimes, the tension between speech and silence followed a trajectory similar to that of the visibility and invisibility discussed in Chapter 1. Cross-national experiences were difficult to speak, as much as they were to show. In a larger sense, though, unspeakable things that emerged after the bomb were unprecedented and unique. Arising out of a survival that shifted the meaning of life and death, things that US survivors did not speak became inseparably entwined with things that they did speak in their remembering. The coexistence of speech and silence, I argue, offered a structure to the counter-memory of the bomb. As later chapters reveal, the counter-memory of the bomb stayed largely private in the 1950s and much of the 1960s, while the following decades witnessed a conscious revelation of the memory in public. In this light, the immediacy of ground zero, recounted both in silence and speech by US hibakusha, signified the beginnings of their memory and identity, which in turn shaped the bomb’s meanings in the margins of mainstream history.

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77 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust

Survive, Escape, and Rescue US survivors’ remembering of the bomb often started with the airplane that had dropped it, so it seems appropriate for us, too, to begin with the B-29 as we reach out to meanings of the nuclear destruction. In America’s public memory of the war, the airplane has symbolized the technological advancement that led to a victory, an embodiment of national pride. In Japanese memory, in contrast, the aircraft seems to stay in the sky, a remote, dutiful yet emotionless carrier of the weapon that caused a national tragedy.5 If we consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki as cities of immigrants as shown in Chapter 1, though, it is hardly surprising that the airplane provoked an entirely different set of meanings for many on the ground. Nikkei, for one, saw the planes not only from below but also at the same height as the aircraft. Given their attachment to American things, it was unsurprising that these airplanes embodied what they meant for the United States, as well as what they meant for people in Japanese cities. Often told unthinkingly yet with striking immediacy, US survivors’ oral histories trace the beginning of the mass destruction in cross-national contexts.

By the summer of 1945, the B-29 was a familiar figure for many in Japan. Major cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe had been heavily pummeled by incendiary bombs rolled out of the aircrafts’ distinctively silver bodies. Because the bomber excelled in low-altitude aviation, many in these cities remembered how they could see the pilots’ faces when running away from bullets raining down on them. For those in Hiroshima, however, the aircraft was a relatively benign figure, having flown high over the sky many times but hardly engaging in attacks from low altitudes. Not only Americans, but also the Japanese and Koreans familiar with the presence of Americans in the city, considered the aircraft’s apparent lack of interest in bombing Hiroshima a proof of US awareness about its citizens there. Some Americans in wartime Japan knew that their families and relatives in the United States had been incarcerated. And yet, this fact did not necessarily lead them to believe that their country was ready to bomb its own citizens and their family members. For fifteen-year-old Haakai Nagano, the airplane was a constant presence but held no further meaning. He recalled how “during the last part of the war . . . getting closer [to the end], and we could see the B-29s flying, . . . you see the B-29[s]. I don’t know, hundreds, but there were a lot of them. But they never dropped the bomb. So

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78 / American Survivors you feel like there was just a bunch of planes flying out there.”6 The planes did not threaten to kill, although it was of course clear that they were from America. So it was that the airplane provoked a childhood memory for eight-year-old Katie Yanagawa from Washington state. She recalled: “Since our location was [near] Seattle, and there is a Boeing [factory] right in Seattle, we used to drive back and forth from Eatonville or Tacoma to Seattle, and were able to see all of these impressive aircrafts – B-29s and whatever. So Father knew that the war was coming.” In fact, Yanagawa’s father continued to insist throughout the war that “there was no way that Japan was able to win.” This was “because he saw all of those resources in the United States before he left.”7 For Yanagawa, then, the B-29 was a reminder of both her belonging to her home country of America and the inability of her adopted country of Japan to measure up.

Fourteen-year-old Hayami Fukino described the B-29 in even more intimate terms. Like Nagano, Fukino did not feel afraid of the airplane. In fact, she used to think: “‘Oh, yeah, they’re from America!’ . . . [They are] part of me, you know. My friend.”8 Kazue Suyeishi, born in 1927 in Pasadena, California, and coming to Japan immediately thereafter, felt equally attached to the airplane, secretly nicknaming it an “angel.” The way it flew was “so beautiful. It was silver-colored, and it looked like an angel in a beautiful costume dancing in the blue sky. I did not have any adverse feeling to it. I actually longed for it.”9 Such fondness for the US bombers was likely rare in wartime Japan. But the feeling that drew Nikkei close to America in fact coexisted with a sense or acts of belonging to Japan. Fukino had been participating in teishintai, Japanese girls’ army corps. By 1945, she was working at a paint factory in Hiroshima, which made dryers for the Japanese Imperial Army’s airplanes. Suyeishi, too, had been in the girls’ army corps, although she happened to be off duty and at home on August 6, 1945, because of a fever. The B-29 on that day did not seem much different than usual, gliding high and quiet in Hiroshima’s blue summer sky. Many went outside to watch the airplane, some even with a telescope in hand.10 Suyeishi, too, stepped outside. A few moments after she greeted the “angel” with a silent “Good Morning!” Suyeishi felt her body flying. She landed across the street, in front of her neighbor’s house and under the roof that came down on her.11 Some remembered a flash of bright white light. Others recalled seeing many colors such as blue, red, pink, yellow at the moment of the

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79 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust explosion.12 What they recollected almost uniformly, though, was the monotonous, black-and-grey scenery that emerged in the bomb’s aftermath.13 Most thought that the explosion was an incendiary bomb or some sort of accident, but none of course understood that it was a special bomb. Everything was burnt and black, be it a building, tree, horse, or person. Things that escaped heat and fire still turned black, covered by ash or the “black rain.”14 In addition, everything was on the ground, transforming the city to a vastly flat space. People remembered being able to see all the way to the sea because there was nothing to block the view. For a moment, it was very quiet, with no one making any sound or uttering any word. In this strangely transformed world, a few things caught American hibakusha’s attention. Julie Kumi Fukuda heard “something funny,” which turned out to be the mushroom cloud. It was the only thing yielding any color or sound: “. . . the best way I could describe it as I recall it was like it was a red smoke, and it was whirling around like a whirlwind. It was making such a NOISE. This is why I noticed it. And I thought: Wow, that was a great ball of firelight. And so I thought: If that falls on me, I’ll really be burned.”

Although the whirlwind did not fall on Fukuda, she still was struck by “the heat [that] was so intense.” She wondered if she was “burned to a crisp” or about to be. Reaching high temperatures, the air did not feel like the natural surrounding it used to be.15 Twelve-year-old George Kazuto Saiki remembered one thing that remained standing: a sewing machine that his family had brought back from Hawai‘i in 1939, an old-fashioned, sturdy model made in America

by Singer. About three-feet high like a little desk, it was “still standing, mysteriously.” The only difference was that it was about twenty feet away from where it had been.16 In the post-nuclear explosion’s ground, implausible sights emerged anew, while familiar things were suddenly placed in unfamiliar surroundings. Changes were everywhere – in the sky, air, on the ground.

Katie Yanagawa’s Singer sewing machine was not to be found where it had been, either. Ordered by mail in 1939 and coming to Japan for the first time in 1941 together with her family, on that day in 1945, the machine was found by the main entryway of her collapsed house in Hiroshima. Her father “spotted this Singer,” Yanagawa recalled, “wooden, portable sewing machine sitting there.” Not knowing where to put it, he “left it right by the hedge” outside the house, greenery that soon “burned down to the ground” when the house caught on fire.

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80 / American Survivors Similar to how Saiki’s remembering connected times before and after the bomb through a home appliance, Yanagawa’s recollection of the bomb followed a small yet sturdy machine’s whereabouts. It was her way of making sense of things familiar and unfamiliar, abruptly thrown together. The “machine caught on fire, but only charred the outside, and the inside is perfect,” recalled Yanagawa. Then, her remembering freely stretched into the present: “I am still using that.” Returning to the United States in 1953, she took the surviving machine with her. Now, she was considering if she could donate the machine to the Singer Sewing Machine Company. She felt sure that “this means a lot to them,” evidently because the history of the machine meant a lot to her.17 Such elasticity of time in survivors’ remembering was not unusual. Hayami Fukino, too, connected times in America and Japan early on, then linked them together with the present moment of remembering in the United States. Similar to Kazue Suyeishi, Fukino was blown off her feet, though in her case it was into a closet. She had to hurry out because the house was on fire. Then, something remarkable happened. As she left, she took only one thing with her, a blanket. “And that blanket . . . was the one that . . . [her family] took from America.” In fact, it carried a very special meaning for her family, because her father had once used it to show hospitality when he was hosting an important visitor from Japan, a Buddhist monk, in 1929. Her father had put it on the backseat of his brand-new American car, so as to make sure that the guest felt comfortable. It turned out, then, that the blanket fulfilled another significant mission, this time at Hiroshima’s ground zero. On their escape, Fukino’s family had to cross a river at high tide. It was a struggle to climb onto the other shore, because it was hedged by a tall stone wall. The family managed to get over it, but there were many others still struggling in the river. So her father took out the blanket, and according to Fukino, “we used the blanket, so we saved lots of people.

So that they could get up. That’s the only thing I can remember.”18 Although this was the only episode that Fukino could remember about her escape, the story did not come without hesitation. She talked easily about how she took the blanket, but then she wondered “if I should tell you this” before she went on to reveal the history that stretched back to her childhood in the United States. The reason for her hesitation might have been her modesty; she might have felt that the episode was too personal to share. She also might have been reluctant because she was struck by the unusual cross-nationality of this story. It

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81 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust did not fit into an oft-told national memory, whether in Japan or America. She did not know if her interviewer was invested in either or, if so, which. Your American blanket saved Japanese people? The question could lead to suspicion about Fukino’s belonging, perhaps even her loyalty, in her interviewer’s mind. Questions similar to this one frequently had this effect in wartime Japan and America. In this light, Fukino had reason to be cautious if she was to share the episode.

Although a long time has passed since 1945, it would not hurt if she used caution when remembering things that could invite unwanted inquiries. The universal story of escaping was easier to tell, while a more unique history of the cross-national blanket might remain untold because of past tensions finding ways into the present remembering.

Fukino’s hesitance revealed only one of many relationships that formed between silence and speech in US survivors’ recollections. In some cases, cross-national experiences were such ordinary elements of US survivors’ remembering that it appeared as if they did not even think to tell about them until repeatedly prompted. So it was with Masako B. Hamada, who came to Japan as a twelve-year-old in 1933. At one point during my interview with her, she explained how she had passed out after the bomb’s explosion, and how she had remained unconscious until after her friend brought her to an air-raid shelter. But she needed some prodding before she acknowledged that her friend was also an American: hamada: . . . when I woke up . . . they put me – my girlfriend put me in, in the cave, you know, uh, bōkūgō [air-raid shelter]? wake: Right, right. . .. Was it, was it your Nisei friend? When you say “girlfriend”? hamada: Yeah, my group of friends. . .. Sewing . . . sewing friend. wake: Right, okay. . .. And then she was also a Nisei? hamada: Y-yeah. wake: Okay. hamada: She’s from Hawai‘i.19 It was more important for Hamada to say that the friend was from the sewing school that she had attended in Japan than to acknowledge that the friend was also a second generation American. Earlier in the interview, Hamada had already told me that there had been many Nisei girls at her school in Hiroshima, so that was the reason why I asked. Unlike Fukino, Hamada did not show any hesitation in revealing her cross-national

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82 / American Survivors memory from the beginning of her oral history. By the time she was telling the story of rescue, it seemed as if she expected me to assume that the friend in question was an American. “My group of friends,” including a girl who rescued Hamada, of course were Nisei. Unlike Fukino, who clearly hesitated to tell a cross-national history, then, Hamada expected me to know better. Clearly, it was her memory of the bomb before it was a crossnational memory as I saw it. It was I, not her, who was stunned by the image of Americans rescuing each other in Japan’s post-nuclear holocaust landscape. Of course, we were there. She seemed to say. Why do you even ask?

Silence, then, could carry a range of meanings, including both hesitance and forthrightness. This also rang true in Korean American survivors’ remembering. James Jeong offers a vivid example of how speech and silence might even converge to disclose a cross-nationality in an American hibakusha’s remembering. As discussed in Chapter 1, he was a Japanese-born Korean, twenty years old in 1945 and working for his older brother’s company in Hiroshima. During my interview with him, Jeong abruptly began a story about how he helped a daughter of his high school principal in Hiroshima. “Ah, she was heavy!” exclaimed Jeong, with no context. Not understanding who this woman was and why he was talking about her, I followed up with questions. Gradually, it became clear that he was remembering a woman whom he had rescued immediately after the bomb’s explosion. And yet, when I asked him to further explain what happened, he was reluctant to tell anything specific.

“Where were you on the morning of August 6?” I asked, only to receive in response, “Yes, there really were so many terrible things.” Clearly, he was hesitant, although he also wanted to tell the story of the woman. After some back and forth, reasons for his urge to speak the unspeakable began to emerge. To remember the woman was to bring back both pain and pride that Jeong felt as a Korean man. Moments after the bomb’s explosion, Jeong found himself under a heavy wooden fence that had fallen on him. His back might have been broken. Soon after he crawled out, someone approached him to ask for help. Jeong described the incident: She said, “Excuse me, could you please help me? I am the daughter of the high school principal.” Of course, a rich girl like her could not have known me, a Korea-boy, so I figured that she had mistaken me for somebody else. . .. Regardless, I took her to a shrine.20

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83 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust He went on to explain how he had helped not only her but also her father. She was severely burnt and could not sit down on a trailer that Jeong had found to carry her. So, her father held her to lift up her body, and Jeong carried them both, together, to a shrine nearby where many refugees congregated. Thanks to Jeong’s assistance, the father and the daughter survived. Only after ensuring their safety, Jeong headed home where he was reunited with his worried father.

The heroic story carried darker meanings, which were crossnational as much as gendered. As shown by his use of the derogatory term “Korea-boy,” Jeong was keenly aware of his precarious status as a Korean man in Japan at the time. The term suggested that not only his nationality, but also his manliness, had not measured up. It still came as a shock, though, when his father told him not to speak to the woman afterward. According to Jeong’s father, “It is not an honor for a Japanese girl [to be rescued by a Korean man], so do not say a word about what happened unless they come to thank you. . .. Especially for an unmarried woman, there is nothing good to be said about getting to be known as a survivor.” If Jeong went to check on them, the woman’s reputation could be compromised not only because of her survivorhood but also her tie to a Korean man. Still dubious, Jeong waited for the father and the daughter to come to thank him. Such a visit would have been completely expected between Japanese families. But it never happened, prompting Jeong’s father to say: “Here we go, just as I told you.

Be kind and keep the secret of those people” by not revealing their survivorhood. Spurring his sarcasm was Jeong’s father’s pride as a Korean generous enough to shield his thankless rulers from disgrace.

The “secret” of the Japanese, however, came to haunt Jeong long after the war, after he migrated to the United States, because of his marriage to a Nisei woman. His injury did not completely heal, which brought the woman back to his memory: “My back still hurts because she was plump. Even her father was kind of chubby!” he said. He also mentioned how his friend, a Nikkei man, had been urging him to get a certificate of survivorhood issued by the Japanese government. The certificate could offer him access to free medical care and monetary allowances that the Japanese government began to offer Japanese survivors in the 1950s and 1960s. But to obtain the certificate, he would need two witnesses to prove his presence in the city as of August 1945.

Jeong thought of finding the woman and asking her to serve as a witness; still, he was reluctant. “I don’t talk about the bomb, especially about

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84 / American Survivors women survivors,” said Jeong. “She would be disgraced if it became known that she was a survivor.” Now, Jeong was talking as if he were his father more than sixty years ago. Jeong of course understood that the woman, if alive, would be nearly eighty years old. Her survivorhood would not affect her chances for reproduction or marriage. His reluctance to have her be a witness, then, was not driven by a practical concern about her. Instead, he was driven by his self-respect, hurt by being unacknowledged by the Japanese and hardly repaired by remaining silent. As of 2010, the hurt was still palpable, the need to keep the repair urgent. As both a Korean and a man, he would continue to protect a reputation of a Japanese woman. In this way, he could stay on a morally higher ground. This act of self-respect, though, brought back to his mind Japan’s gendered racism against Korean men, which continued to disadvantage him by barring him from the possibility of applying for a certificate.21 To pursue the possibility, he would have to give up his role as a Korean man guarding a Japanese woman. The pain and pride that arose out of Jeong’s cross-national experience were entangled with his gender identity.

Jeong’s silence was burdened by his urge to speak, even as his speech was frequently fused with his desire to not attempt the unspeakable. This dynamism might not have revealed itself if he were not being interviewed by a Japanese national in the United States. I am also a woman, someone he could have easily placed in a similar category as his school principal’s daughter. Remembering knows little boundary between then and now, connecting seemingly unrelated dots like a flash of light. His inclination to speak about the most universally known effect of the bomb – that it caused terrible things – only might convey his cautiousness about his listener, brought to the fore by the linkage across time made by the act of remembering. Similar to the way that Hayami Fukino was reluctant to tell the cross-national history of her blanket, Jeong might have hesitated because he was afraid of offending his listener’s national loyalty, race, and gender identity. As the interviewer, I wanted to believe that my questions gradually made it clear to him that I could hear stories of Japanese racism against Koreans; I wanted to tell myself that this revelation explained why he eventually told me the difficult story of the rescue. Clearly, both the interviewer and the interviewee were Asian residents of America, aware that racism has been our common enemy regardless of great differences between the histories of Korean and Japanese peoples. But the fact may be that,

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85 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust simply, my family name did most of the persuading. My name is unusual for Japanese, as it sounds a bit Korean. Toward the end of the interview, Jeong asked me about my family name. When I answered that it most likely came from a man who had migrated from the Korean peninsula to Japan many centuries ago, his response was enthusiastic: “I thought so!” Then, he went on to talk in great length, animatedly, about how Korean and Japanese peoples had been one and the same in ancient times. If only this were still true, there would be no need for a “Koreaboy.” Or, there would at least be no need for Jeong to feel shy about revealing the name-calling. Gradually, I began to wonder if my national belonging throughout our time together appeared to him more uncertain, layered, than I had ever imagined. It might be that, as Jeong carefully assessed my identity during the interview, the balance between silence and speech shifted. When he finally spoke, his manhood, nationality, and race, diminished by the Japanese empire and further damaged by the American bomb, came back with lucidity. As someone who might have a family connection to Korea, his interviewer might be able to lend understanding ears to such a story.

US survivors remembered cross-national artifacts and experiences dear to their histories as immigrants. These histories, often provoked by American objects in the Japanese landscape, ranging from an airplane to a blanket, shaped their narratives of survival, escaping, and rescuing. Cross-nationality shaped remembering about ground zero by Koreans in Japan, too, showing the striking entanglement among gender, race, and nationality. These narratives in turn reminded US hibakusha of who they had been before the bomb, creating a countermemory that resists a singular, nation-based definition of the meaning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Body, Clothes, and Foreign Objects The nuclear bombs developed by the United States after 1945 were many times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I often think about this well-known fact. One of its implications might be that any future nuclear war would destroy more than one country, in effect making all of us survivors of a nuclear holocaust regardless of our nationality.22 But what about the meaning of such a comparison between weapons now and then for survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Does the comparison make them think that

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86 / American Survivors the older weapons they confronted were less capable of mass, indiscriminate killing? In this regard, it is notable that some US hibakusha expressed a concern about more recent, powerful bombs and their capacity to ruin the world. Equally notable, though, is that such sentiment was revealed almost invariably toward the end of the oral history.

When US survivors discussed their bomb and its effect on them in the midst of their interviews, virtually no one said anything that compared 1945 and thereafter. Instead, they told of strange things that had happened to their bodies and clothes. Stripped of normal clothes, unfamiliar-looking burns and cuts were harshly exposed. Humans did not seem like human beings anymore. Such was the common experience on the ground, prompting them to use whatever means were available to restore a semblance of normalcy. Similar to their memories of escaping and rescuing, US survivors’ remembering of their transformed bodies was also accentuated by cross-nationality. In some cases, bodies marked by items of clothing brought from the United States became one of the most distinctively remembered aspects of US hibakusha’s experiences.

Their bodies, literally fused with foreign objects by the bomb’s force, become for us a pathway toward understanding the meaning of the coexistence of universality and uniqueness on the ground. In this light, the contradictory essence of the 1945 bombings comes to the forefront of our view of ground zero. Individual uniqueness was there, expressed in their memories marked by a range of cross-national experiences as immigrants. And yet, the bomb’s force had universal effect, destroying Americans, Koreans, and Japanese alike. The convergence, as well as the contrast, between uniqueness and universality was intrinsic to the use of nuclear weapons in the modern world; their blanket power of destruction relies on nation-states’ disregard for people who move, live, and connect. The magnitude of the bomb recalled by US survivors suggests that a nuclear holocaust did not require a bomb a thousand times more destructive than “Fat Man” or “Little Boy.” These weapons were powerful enough to nullify a comparison between the past and present, and to define all of us in the post-1945 world as survivors regardless of our nationalities.

John Hong, a Korean American survivor who, as discussed in Chapter 1, was a student at Japan’s Imperial Army Weapons School in 1945, decided to run after he saw the flash. He dashed out of his classroom and darted down the hallway. To his right were classrooms, to his left were windows facing the city of Hiroshima. After a while, he

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87 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust noticed that his view was blocked by “water” dripping over his eyes.

The water turned out to be his blood, which he did not realize because he felt absolutely no pain. In fact, though, his face and chest were covered by pieces of glass.23 Such an unexpected, nearly inconceivable merging of a human body and foreign objects struck many as worth telling, attesting to the extraordinary time. Izumi Hirano, born in Hawai‘i in 1929 and coming to Japan in 1933, was stunned to see a piece of glass deeply embedded in his father’s chest. And yet, his father had walked from his house to a nearby air-raid shelter to see if his wife and children were there. Finding no one, he turned around and came back home. There, he was reunited with the family. Seconds later, he collapsed, his breaths visibly leaking from his lung. The injury was so implausible that he put it aside until he regained human contact.24 For Joyce Ikuko Moriwaki, born in Japan and coming to Hawai‘i after the war because of her marriage to a Nisei survivor, the foreign object was dirt. As she recalled, her grandfather was living in an old-fashioned, Japanese style house with walls made of mud. Although he was fortunate enough to survive the blast, his body was covered by pieces of dirt released by the wall’s violent collapse. These pieces stayed so firmly affixed to his skin that Moriwaki could still spot them when she, who had been three years old in 1945, became old enough to remember them.

For years, no one succeeded in removing the dirt from his skin.25 Fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters were stunned by burns, blood, and swellings that distorted their faces. Many had to call each other’s names to confirm who they were, and some could not help saying that a loved one looked like a ghost.26 Some refrained from commenting on their transformed looks, only to have others cry out. An eight-yearold in 1945, Masako Kawasaki recalled the severe burns that completely altered her younger brother’s face. Nobody said anything about it for a long time, but a neighbor who had seen her family right after the bomb remembered it later: “His face looked like a baked potato. It was so blackened that it looked like it had been cooked on an open fire.”

Recalling this, Kawasaki seemed to feel both upset and impressed by the comment. “It was such a shrewd expression!” she exclaimed.27 Born in 1931 in Japan, Kazuko Aoki was struck by the incredible patterns she found in burns. These patterns were made by kasuri, a fabric motif commonly used for monpe, Japanese wartime clothes worn by civilians.

The kasuri motif consisted of various black and white segments. Black parts were burned into the wearer’s skin, while white parts remained

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88 / American Survivors unfused. The remaining pieces of fabric hung from the body as if they were some sort of rags on display.28 It was not clear if those wearing kasuri were better off than people wearing black only, although perhaps they were, according to Hawaiian-born Minoru Sumida. He remembered how people in wartime Japan refrained from wearing white clothes. White stood out too much for US bombers looking for a target. Many white or light-colored clothes were dyed black, gray, or dark navy. Although such precaution might have saved some from incendiary bombs or bullets, black clothes became something of a curse in the bomb’s aftermath. The difference between old weapons and this new one was not missed by people on the ground, although they were yet to learn that the latter was nuclear. Sumida recalled how everyone, including “women, was naked after being burned by that flash.” Some “were burned so severe that their arms seemed twice as long,” because their arms’ skin sagged down from their fingertips. These arms belonged to those who had chosen a dark shirt for the day. The more cautious they were, the more damage they suffered.29 It is notable that, in Sumida’s recollection, it was skin, the surface, that transformed people’s bodies and, by extension, the city’s landscape. In the chaotic, immediate aftermath of the bomb, people were struck by visible signs of annihilation rather than invisible measures of contamination. What was visible then could lead to invisibility now, however. Like Sumida, Toshiaki Yamashita remembered seeing a type of burn that caused a person’s facial skin to hang down from the chin. After explaining this, Yamashita recoiled from the image: “Well, I don’t want to talk about this kind of thing.” His hesitance seemed to bear both his and his listener’s dread, suggesting earlier times when dread had stifled his recounting. Certainly, this was not the only time when “this kind of thing” that we find difficult to hear silenced survivors. As images of catastrophe took shape and became visible in remembering, the tellers fell speechless. The listeners, too, had no choice but to fall silent.30 I wonder if this dynamism is one of the reasons why survivors’ bodies have found a surprisingly limited space in the historical inquiry into the bomb. After briefly describing injuries, most scholars have steered readers to survivors’ testimony in John Hersey’s Hiroshima or Robert J. Lifton’s Death in Life published a long time ago.

Whether from respect, fear, or both, we have collectively recoiled from finding historical meanings in people’s profoundly damaged bodies.

Seeing their images or reading disturbing words about them, we have

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89 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust told ourselves that we already understood. But there are rich histories to be found in the immediacy of bodies.

Survivors’ bodies were so drastically altered that they prompted sheer astonishment as well as an urge to bring back any sense of normalcy.

When Kazue Kawasaki’s younger sister crawled out of her house, she thought everyone had turned into “Americans.” This was because everybody’s hair was covered by dust and appeared “brown.”31 Izumi Hirano was astonished by how he could not tell men from women even though everyone was naked. Their hair was gone, and their bodies were unrecognizably disfigured by heat. Public nakedness was unusual in Japan, especially in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, making suddenly naked survivors everywhere a strikingly otherworldly vision. Hirano thought that those who survived with underwear were fortunate.32 Even more fortunate were people who managed to escape from the city with their clothes on.

Born in Japan in 1937, Magohei Nagaishi, recalled how he felt too embarrassed to run outside without wearing any piece of outer clothing after the bomb fell on Nagasaki. It was a hot summer’s day, and he was only wearing underwear. So, as he left his house, he grabbed a pair of slacks hanging on a clothesline outside. Thus, he was one of the fortunate few who did not have to feel ashamed of their appearance.33 Both Hirano’s and Nagaishi’s remembering complicates the better-known story about how nakedness became the norm at ground zero.34 Certainly, some US hibakusha, as well as their Japanese counterparts, recalled how they were stunned by naked people everywhere, seemingly unconcerned about how they looked. Thus, it was not surprising that some felt embarrassed or sorry about the fact they were still wearing decent clothes when they escaped.35 Nagaishi’s recollection of embarrassment about not being fully clothed, as well as Hirano’s feeling that those clothed with anything were lucky, however, shows us that concluding too quickly that nakedness was the accepted norm only blinds us to how survivors remained capable of feeling the most ordinary feelings.

Assaulted by heat, glass, fabric, dirt, and deprived of clothes to hide their foreign-looking injuries, survivors grasped at normalcy and a command over their bodies that they had enjoyed only a few moments earlier. Such grasping, often strongly gendered, was urgent enough to mark a defining moment in US survivors’ remembering. Atsuko La Mica’s older sister, severely injured, insisted that her younger siblings not come to see her at the hospital. Although the hospital was equipped with sheets and blankets, they were too warm for hot summer days. The patients lay with their scars exposed, a state that La Mica’s sister did not

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90 / American Survivors think to be tolerable as a young woman. Thus, it struck the twelve-yearold La Mica as good news when her sister asked for a freshly washed and ironed yukata. It sounded as if her sister was anticipating a muchawaited homecoming, which she wanted to celebrate with the ordinary clothes that made her a presentable woman again. Shortly thereafter, though, La Mica’s hope was crushed. Her sister suddenly passed away, just before she was scheduled to come home wearing the prepared clothes. Her desire to make her body once again feminine, respectable, and presentable was so urgent that it kept the sisters apart at the moment of her death.36 For Yasuko Ogawa, her desire to return to a state of normalcy by way of clothing created an equally intense memory. Because the bomb in Hiroshima exploded right after the “allclear” siren had sounded, Ogawa was not taking cover but undressing her young daughter out of “her favorite satin dress.” This was because she wanted her daughter to be in the most beloved outfit if and when “the worst happened.” Now that the air-raid siren was replaced by the sound of safety, there was no need to keep her daughter in the dress any more. “I had just taken her dress and monpe off when we were bombed,” recalled Ogawa. Everything was blown away, including the dress. “Afterward, she [her daughter] cried that she could not find [it]”. She was further upset by the fact that she had to run naked, with no time to wear or take any clothes. For a little girl, this was a shocking embarrassment. It came as great news then, when Ogawa went back to the house about a week later, that she miraculously found the “dress . . . on the second floor roof. It had gone around from the kitchen and had been blown up to the roof.”37 The surprising power of the explosion was met by the daughter and the mother’s determination to regain what had been lost to it. In fortunate cases like Ogawa’s, survivors succeeded in finding not only clothes, but also the feminine intimacy they used to share in them.

As the stories of Hirano, Nagaishi, La Mica, and Ogawa show, virtually any clothes were desirable, sparking many recollections. But reasons for this desirability varied, illuminating both the universality and uniqueness of American survivors’ remembering of the nuclear attack. In some cases, what appears to be a universal story contained surprisingly unique meanings. In Haakai Nagano’s remembering, a padded cap he called bōka zukin, which he wore when escaping from the city of Hiroshima, protected him from both fire and radiation.

It worked as if it were a “miracle coverage seal,” a term that conveys his appreciation of his mother’s cross-cultural resourcefulness:

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91 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust My mother made that for me. It was so hot. . .. I had to do something, because otherwise I could never pass through all this heat. So I got this bōka zukin, and put it in a tub [of water]. . ..

I put it on my body, and I just opened up a little hole so I could see. . .. Those days, bōka zukin was made out of cotton. . . . I think when you wet it, it gets dense. So it’s really a good shield. . .. So that’s how I traveled through Hiroshima with this miracle coverage seal. And I don’t tell the story too much, because it may sound ridiculous, but I didn’t even have my hair fall off.38 Embedded in this memory of the life-saving cap was his mother’s education that taught Nagano how to use bōka zukin appropriately.

Following the steps of many mothers in wartime Japan, she made the cap with thick cotton so that it functioned as a water absorbent shield against fire. She also taught her son that there were tubs of water called bōka suisō that could be easily found anywhere, because they were strategically located to put out fires caused by incendiary bombs.

These instructions, commonly given by parents to children in wartime Japan, carried cross-national meanings for this particular mother and son. For Nagano’s mother who had migrated from Japan to America as a young girl at the turn of the century and come back to Japan as a mother of three in 1941, bōka zukin and bōka suisō were new realities of her old country at war. She had to learn, then teach, these facts of life to her American son, who spoke fluently only in English. Indeed, Nagano “had a lot of problem” with Japanese after he had come to Japan for the first time in 1940. He went to a Buddhist temple to learn the language, but still, things were “very difficult in Japan” for him. In this light, it could have been truly a “miracle” for him to be able to escape from a factory only three quarters of a mile away from the hypocenter. His relative unfamiliarity with Japanese could have easily endangered him at ground zero. However, his mother’s cross-national skills ensured his safety, as she had taught him Japanese customs in English, the chief language of communication between mother and son.

For other US hibakusha, too, clothes worked a kind of miracle, though in strikingly different ways. Both Tae Alison Okuno and May Yamaoka felt that they had benefitted from “American” clothes worn by family members. Unlike Okuno, who was born in 1921 in Merrillville near Sacramento, her young cousin, a girl, was born in Japan. But the cousin’s connection to the United States remained palpable. On August 6, 1945, the

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92 / American Survivors cousin was “wearing a piece of American underwear with a distinctive stripe pattern on it.” Indeed, the underwear had been “sent by her parents from the United States for her brother, but he was not in Hiroshima at that time so she was wearing it instead.” Because of this underwear, Okuno’s family was able to identify the cousin after the bomb took her life. Her American item of clothing made her body distinguishable from others lying on the ground. The underwear became the cousin’s katami, a memento, which remained dear to the Okunos, another family of immigrants who understood its meanings.39 May Yamaoka’s remembering, too, was infused with a lived cross-nationality that quietly found its way into people’s clothes. Raised in Lodi, California, Yamaoka was in Hiroshima in 1945 as a sixteen-year-old. Although she lost her sister Mana to the bomb, she thought that her family was “lucky.” After searching for days, the family found Mana’s body on the top of a pile of corpses. The family identified her by her “American slip,” silky underwear unknown to most Japanese at the time. This made Mana, also American-born like May, stand out, making it possible for the family to bury her appropriately.40 Both of these stories are similar to those of other survivors who looked for their loved ones relying on any sign of distinction, be it clothes, a name tag, or teeth (gold ones were frequently mentioned as identity markers).41 These items did not have to be American; they simply needed to be recognizable by searchers. But both Okuno and Yamaoka show how their linkage to the United States distinctly made their memory of the bomb. In their remembering, their uniqueness as Americans becomes seamlessly integrated into a universal element of the nuclear destruction – mass, indiscriminate death.

Their uniqueness as immigrants connected them to universal desires to recover and remember perished family members.

If clothes distinguished otherwise indistinguishable bodies in the nuclear holocaust, national origin, class, and gender worked to determine what clothes were worn by whom or if clothes were worn at all, suggesting yet another way in which universality and uniqueness related to each other. Indeed, in Pak Namjoo’s remembering, the social standing of Koreans in wartime Japan, as well as the gender norms shared in their community, shaped her particular account of the mass death. As discussed in Chapter 1, Pak is a Japan-born Korean residing in Japan; thus, she is not a US survivor. And yet, her story offers a rare look into the experiences of Korean American survivors whose number is small. Although their migration histories diverged after the war, Korean and Korean American survivors had shared experiences as Korean subjects in the Japanese empire

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93 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust until 1945. As such, Korean survivors offer the best proxy for us as we reach out to Korean American hibakusha’s experiences on the ground.

Pak’s account of the bomb began in the Fukushima district in Hiroshima, a poor neighborhood of mostly Koreans. There, the nuclear holocaust occurred in the Fukushima River, where many children played: Children went to swim in the river. They were all naked – there were no clothes to wear anyway because of the wartime shortage. Girls refrained from going there because boys were naked.

I mean, they were completely naked, not even covering their genitals. So those who were in water got their upper bodies burned, while those playing on the sandy bank got completely burned and died instantly. So I remember their mothers crying, shouting: “Aigo! Aigo!” [Korean word expressing shock and remorse]. These shouts never leave my ears.42 In Pak’s account, these mothers’ devastation was amplified by the fact that it was boys, not girls, whom they lost to the blast. Girls were neither in the river nor on the bank because they were avoiding the naked boys. In a Korean tradition of Confucianism, Pak continued to explain, boys were considered to be more important than girls for the continuation of family lineage. This gender differentiation, combined with the “wartime shortage” of clothes that had hit the Korean community particularly hard, shaped the tragedy. As Pak recalled, public nakedness was not unusual in the poorer neighborhood of Korean minorities; neither was it embarrassing for boys to be wholly naked, giving her a memory specific to her community. Pak indicated a unique way in which a common experience of being bombed was woven together with a cross-nationality of immigrants. Despite the bomb’s universality, its effect could be discriminatory because of one’s national background, class, and gender. The uniqueness and universality of the nuclear holocaust could be placed against each other, each elucidating the other’s sharpness.

As survivors emerged from the bomb’s indiscriminate destruction, they encountered people who were not directly affected and were troubled or offended by their presense. Indeed, non-survivors were often shaken by survivors because they seemed to annul human distinctions. To be sure, many survivors themselves were shaken by the lack of appropriate clothing because they retained their dignity as unique individuals; for non-survivors, however, survivors often seemed indistinguishable, ghost-like figures in a universal mass. Their apparent failure to act in gendered ways seemed to

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94 / American Survivors particularly disturb non-survivors. Takashi Thomas Tanemori’s father could not find his wife in the bomb’s aftermath. Feeling desperate after a long, fruitless search, he took his children to his mother-in-law’s, located more than thirty miles away from the city of Hiroshima. “How dare you come back without my daughter” was how he was greeted by his mother-inlaw, whom he met in a park, where others could overhear the tense conversation. She berated him, Tanemori recalled: “What sort of man are you? Do you even have testicles?” In response, Tanemori’s father went back to the ruined city in search of his wife. He became sickened by what we now know to be radiation, and he passed away shortly thereafter.43 The pressure to fulfill his duty as a man and a husband destroyed him. Chisa Frank lost her baby son to the bomb, which created a feeling of distrust between her and her husband. In 1946, he requested a divorce from her, because he “blamed” her as an irresponsible mother. “I survived. Why, then, not rescue that helpless baby?” speculated Frank about her husband’s reasoning.44 Clearly, her apparently compromised motherhood, femininity, or both, was a good enough reason for him to abandon the marriage. No matter how severely wounded she was, she as a mother could have saved her child.

Mothers who survived with their children, however, did not necessarily feel fortunate. They suffered from their children’s transformed bodies and unknown futures. Yi Jougkeun, a Korean survivor who stayed in Japan after the war, remembered how his mother cried every day when she picked maggots from his wounds. His face was severely burned, his body covered by scars that attracted flies. Her tears fell on his cheek, which made him cry, too. “I hope you die soon to be peaceful,” she told him. “A person with this face and this body, infested by maggots, must not live.

Please die soon, I beg you to die soon.” For Yi, to recall these times was to see motherhood and childhood on a shifting ground. “I don’t think that my mother really meant it,” said Yi at one point in the interview. A few moments later, he thought of it again: “I don’t think she really wanted me to die soon, but maybe she did, up to a point.”45 Powerful, too, in Yi’s remembering was how the nuclear destruction appeared to override gender. As in Pak’s earlier story, a boy’s death was deemed more devastating than a girl’s in the Korean community. That Yi’s mother wished her son a death nonetheless meant that, in some cases, such a view failed to persist.

While many called back gender eagerly, it could seem worthless for some in the face of nuclear holocaust.

Parenthood, childhood, femininity, and masculinity, once seemingly natural ground for meanings and purposes, became uprooted in

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95 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oftentimes, young children were left on their own to survive, while adults struggled to regain normalcy. One way or another, survivors pushed back against the loss of distinct identities that made them look not worthy or capable of living. Pak Namjoo remembered how, in the air-raid shelter in which she took refuge, it was only she, a child, who attended other child-survivors. Someone had told her that crushed cucumbers and potatoes could help heal burns, so she took it upon herself to make and apply these “medicines” for children. It was also she who removed maggots from child-survivors’ bodies: I was a child, so I went to help children of my age. . .. I don’t remember helping adults, but I did help children. Especially because people used to have a lot of children, they tended to be left alone. It was as if people thought that it’s okay if [a few] children were to die.46 In contrast to the Korean mothers grieving over the loss of their boys, adult-survivors here turned into a mass marked only by their disregard for child-survivors. Following Pak’s remembering, then, one sees different meanings of nationality, gender, or age given by changing moments on the ground. In a matter of seconds, old distinctions could come or go; in no time, a new distinction might emerge. Kazue Suyeishi’s younger brother seemed taller when he came back home soon after the bomb’s explosion. It appeared as if he was wearing a brown Indian-style turban on his head. The turban turned out to be a fabric drenched with blood streaming out of his wound. Under the strong August sun, “he smelled awfully awful.” Then, Suyeishi’s remembering took a surprising turn, which pieced together her brother’s coming-of-age and her cross-nationality as an immigrant in a single breath: My brother could not stand the smell, either. I used to be referred to as “Mary-chan,” a nickname given to me by a white customer [of my father’s business in Pasadena] who thought I was so cute but could not pronounce my name “Kazue.” This was the origin of “Mary-chan,” everyone calling me “Mary-chan, Mary-chan!”

So my brother asked me: “Excuse me, Mary-chan, could you please bring me my mother’s perfume?” He was a young man, and it was the first time he said anything like that.47

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Figure 2.1 Kazue Suyeishi in a photo taken in Hawai‘i, on her way to return to California. On the back of the photo Suyeishi wrote to her family in Japan: “Here is Mary in Aloha shirt.” Kazue Suyeishi papers, 1949.

Suyeishi could not find her mother’s perfume, so she sprinkled her brother with some wine that her family’s acquaintance had left.

Whether with wine or perfume, he was determined not to smell bad.

The coming of adulthood for him – becoming aware of the way he smelled – came with the nuclear holocaust that he had narrowly survived. For his sister, it was a moment that brought together the person she had been before and the person she became after the destruction.

I was Mary-chan; and I still am. No matter how her father felt about his American customer who could not pronounce his daughter’s name “Kazue,” at least he liked “Mary” enough to make it into a nickname by adding “chan,” a Japanese diminutive commonly used for girls. That sweet baby girl in Pasadena was still Suyeishi indeed (see Figure 2.1).

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Medicine and Care There was no ready-made medicine for survivors. Most doctors and nurses perished with the bomb. In the city of Hiroshima, 224 out of 298 registered physicians died, and 46 more were injured or ill.48 The total destruction of the cities’ infrastructure blocked or slowed down rescuers from other cities and prefectures. It took even longer for hospitals and clinics to be rebuilt. These facts of destruction have created a blank spot in our understanding of people’s immediate response to the bomb before the infrastructural recovery began months later. We know a few famous figures such as Sasaki Terufumi and Nagai Takashi, physicians who at ruined hospitals in Hiroshima or Nagasaki assisted in the care and treatment of survivors immediately after the bomb exploded.49 We are also familiar with hospitals and research facilities that attended the injured or irradiated years later. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), which studied genetic and epidemiological effects of radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, which performed surgeries on Japanese women whose faces were disfigured by the bomb (as part of the famous “Hiroshima Maidens” project), are notable examples.50 Here, I turn my eye toward the hours and days after the moment of explosion, which have been seen as a time of little to no medicine or care. A few patterns emerge in my inquiry: faced with the lack of readymade medicines, hibakusha concocted medicines from virtually any materials available. The medicine makers and caretakers were overwhelmingly women, bringing to light a practice of folk medicine that has been overshadowed by the understanding of medicine that revolved around male doctors, Western science, and their institutions. Moreover, the medicine offered by women became one of the tenets of US survivors’ remembering because it was one of the first reassurances they found in the bomb’s immediate aftermath. If the bomb erased or diminished gender in certain ways, it came back powerfully in the folk medicine that women devised. This, in turn, made it possible for American survivors to reconnect times before and after the bomb by affirming a universal experience of surviving a nuclear holocaust.

Compared to this kind of medicine sustained by universality, then, the medicine driven by national and institutional interests, which conspicuously marked the years after 1945, seemed desperately lacking. As I argue, then, it is not surprising that some US hibakusha became strong

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98 / American Survivors critics of the ABCC; most of them showed no interest in the “Hiroshima Maidens” project.

The experience of Junji Sarashina, a sixteen-year-old from Hawai‘i, encapsulated some of these patterns. Soon after the bomb’s explosion, he found himself “somehow, on the ground,” miraculously unscarred. But when he went to the first-aid station at his factory, he found a nurse “standing there, and she was covered with blood. And she opened the mouth, and I saw a piece of glass . . . in her tongue. So she was yelling at me, and I went over there, pull the piece of glass from her . . . I was scared, too, I didn’t know what I was doing, and she was scared, too.” The shared moments of terror scrambled the roles expected of a nurse and a patient. Things did not seem any more orderly at the Red Cross Hospital, one of the few facilities that offered emergency care in Hiroshima on August 6. Sarashina recalled: “I went to the Red Cross building and I could not get in there. It was full of doctors and nurses, all hurt. All the nurses were hurt, all the doctors were hurt, they can’t do a damn thing.” However heroic, the care offered by a handful of soon-to-be famous physicians was not substantial enough to be remembered by any US survivors. Sarashina’s experience was also similar to others in that it was his mother who cared for his injury. “Of course, when I walked in, my mother just cried, oh Junji-san. . .. She tried to feed me but for some reason I couldn’t eat. . .. I had a diarrhea . . . and she fed me all kinds of things, home remedy, she heard what’s good, what’s bad.”51 Clearly, the benefit of a mother’s care was not only physical but also psychological. It was a huge emotional relief for Sarashina that his mother’s knowledge about all sorts of “home remedy” survived the blast that transformed or erased so much else.

We do not know specifically what Sarashina’s mother fed him, but we do know from others that various oils were used to treat burns.

Yi Jougkeun (before he came back to his crying mother who wished him to die) applied engine oil to his facial burns. An employee of the Japanese Railway Bureau, he found the oil the only material that seemed therapeutic. Unfortunately, his pain greatly intensified. Yi also tried castor oil for his diarrhea. Not knowing that his condition was caused by irradiation, his mother, the caretaker, thought that the oil customarily used as a cathartic might be beneficial to him. It seems that it worked at least better than engine oil.52 Toshiro Kubota, a Sacramento-born fourteen-year-old, seemed to have even better luck with the rapeseed oil

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99 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust that his family used to use for cooking. Because his parents were farmers in Hiroshima’s countryside, at least food was ample. Not surprisingly, the food materials of yesterday were made to serve as the medicines of today, rapeseed oil being a good example. Meanwhile, his neighbor, an acupuncturist, was swamped by “patients” who flooded his office, although they could not receive anything better than what Kubota was getting next door. Here again, the distinction between homes and hospitals was erased.53 Alfred Kaneo Dote, another Sacramentan, recalled how he, his sister, and his mother cared for his younger brother after they fled to Hiroshima’s countryside. They burned rice straw and mixed the ash with vegetable oil. They applied the mixture to the boy’s face until they realized that it was attracting flies. They removed maggots with a pair of tweezers, along with parts of skin that had dried and were causing the patient great pain. The caretakers then decided to apply vegetable oil only to see if it attracted less flies and reduced pain.

Thanks to this improvisation, Dote believed, his brother was not heavily scarred, though one can still tell that his face had been burned.54 What emerges out of the remembering by Yi, Kubota, and Dote is not only that people relied on their existing knowledge about the healing capacity of oil; they also revised or experimented with it when confronted by extreme injuries.

Solid vegetables and leaves that contain water were considered therapeutically valuable, too, serving as another link between traditional practices of folk medicine and what people invented anew to treat nuclear burns. Indeed, caretakers showed remarkable resourcefulness. As seen earlier, Pak used crushed potatoes and cucumbers to treat child-survivors. Some remembered using grated pumpkins, too. Various kinds of leaves were deemed effective, including those of tea, the chameleon plant, and poppy. Oftentimes, people used these leaves first to make tea, then to cover burns and injuries. Similar to crushed vegetables, these leaves gave burns a sensory relief, sometimes by working as a disinfectant. They also offered protection from direct contact with air.

Nobuko Fujioka remembered a method of treatment that involved an application of used green tea leaves. They were particularly effective when placed on a maggot-infested wound. Fujioka was impressed by how they appeared to work as both a disinfectant and an antiinflammatory medicine. Maggots disappeared and pus subsided.

Although the healing power of green tea was known, this particular application of leaves was new to Fujioka’s mother, the caretaker. In fact,

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100 / American Survivors a neighbor who had traveled on a hospital ship told her that they were good for reducing pus. Thus, the treatment consisted of a combination of old and new methods.55 Jeremy Oshima’s grandmother used potatoes for her daughter’s wounds, although there was no known therapeutic value to the vegetable. “Of course we had no bandages and such,” recalled Oshima, “so my grandmother baked potatoes, white potatoes – mashed them, and put them on the wound to absorb the juice that came out.”56 Here again, a new means of treatment (mashed potatoes) was adapted to an old technique (bandage). Mitsuko Okimoto’s mother used to cut both ends off cucumbers and keep them in a jar to ferment.

She believed that they made a good painkiller. To heal her nuclear burns, then, she dipped a piece of old kimono fabric into the fermented cucumbers and covered her wounds with it. Sure enough, the pain began to subside. The next step, to dry the burns, was entirely new: to apply ground human bones that she collected from a crematory. Okimoto’s mother needed something solid and flexible, and human bones were one thing that was abundant in the nuclear holocaust’s aftermath. Looking back on the episode, Okimoto seemed to feel somewhat ambivalent: “Bones have calcium in them, so they are good for you . . . [but] she was not at all concerned about radiation’s effect. Now that I am thinking about it, she must have been doubly irradiated.”57 Though clearly concerned about her mother’s possible exposure to the irradiated bones, Okimoto chose to say something reassuring about them: that they were a source of calcium. In Okimoto’s remembering, then, her mother remained a remarkable caretaker, who fearlessly mobilized old and new ways at her disposal.

A similar method of treatment played a key role in Tokiko Nambu’s account, suggesting yet another way in which the folk medicine invented by female caretakers shaped American survivors’ understanding of the bomb’s aftermath. Nambu’s older sister needed urgent care; her eyes and face were so severely burned that at first her mother did not recognize her. Only her skirt and her feeble response to her mother’s call allowed her to be identified. With no medicine at hand, her mother decided to go to a cremation site hurriedly set up and collect human bones left unclaimed. She ground them finely to apply to her daughter’s face. According to Nambu, her mother “knew that it was wrong to take these bones, but her daughter was a girl with a burnt face.

If left untreated, the skin would harden, and she would look pitiful. My mother also did not want the burn to fester.” This emergency procedure,

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101 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust Nambu believed, prevented the girl’s face from becoming hardened except in the area around her eyebrows. Nambu’s sister did not become a “keloid girl,” a girl with highly visible, discolored scars, because she “got [her] mother’s good treatment.” As with Junji Sarashina’s and Okimoto’s, Nambu’s account suggests that women’s care imparted not only physical aid but also emotional relief. What Nambu’s mother first thought to be “wrong” became “mother’s good treatment” in her daughter’s remembering. As recalled by her daughter in America many decades later, the account can also be read as a story of resistance.

Thanks to her mother’s inventiveness, Nambu’s sister did not draw attention from American medical scientists after the war. Although Nambu did not explicitly mention this, her sister could have been asked to come to the ABCC or be chosen to be one of the “Hiroshima Maidens” to receive cosmetic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital years later. Indeed, Nambu’s other sister, whose legs were severely injured, was asked to participate in the study conducted by the ABCC, “even though she really didn’t want to show her scars” to anyone. Her mother did not hide her outrage: “This is not to treat her. They [the ABCC] came to get her to help American research. It would be nice if they treated her burns, but they don’t.” In this light, the sister with healed facial scars was fortunate, as her mother’s care helped protect her privacy, autonomy, and integrity. Here, it is notable that Nambu was only three years old in 1945. It is likely, then, that her family’s accounts of the treatment shaped Nambu’s remembering as much as her personal recollections. In both the mother’s account and the daughter’s remembering, the home treatment differed sharply from the institutional research, in no small part because of the gendered identity that the treatment protected.58 Because new ways of treating injuries caused uncertainty, unease, or even guilt, it was all the more necessary for survivors to find reassurance somewhere outside of the medical professions and institutions as they had known them. Often, reassurance came through caretakers who were their grandmothers, mothers, or sisters, suggesting the importance of intergenerational connections that imparted care.

Their method of treatment might be unfamiliar, but at least those who used it were familiar. Women had been the chief caretakers of households, creating at least some sense of continuity between times before and after the bomb for those who received emergency care from them.

These caretakers sometimes offered a folk medicine long forgotten but

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102 / American Survivors now revived out of necessity. Sue Carpenter did not appreciate the aid first offered by her mother: alcohol. Because her father was a physician, her house was equipped with a small assortment of modern medicines.

This potentially enviable situation quickly turned into a nightmare when the nine-year-old Carpenter realized how painful alcohol felt as it penetrated the burns on her legs. She pleaded with her mother to discontinue it, to which her mother responded by trying a much older method: leeches. Although her mother clearly considered them to be inferior to alcohol, the blood-sucking creatures produced surprisingly soothing effects. Thanks to her mother’s flexibility to use a folk method instead of a modern one, Carpenter believed, she endured the healing process and regained her ability to walk.59 Michiko Benevedes, a Japanborn thirteen-year-old in Nagasaki, went with her family to Gotō Rettō, a small island off the city’s shore right after the bomb. Severely injured and ill, her family sought the help of her grandmother who lived on the island. But the island was far away, exhausting the family who traveled in a rowboat for more than ten hours. Her cousins and mother died shortly after their arrival, and it appeared as if Benevedes was to follow.

In particular, a wound on her feet, inflicted by a large nail, was angry, causing a high fever. No wonder, then, that she was greatly impressed by the effect of a medicine her grandmother made out of crab shells.

Because she had not been particularly close to her grandmother, the medicine she concocted was unfamiliar to Benevedes. And yet, the grandmother’s dedication as a family caretaker helped Benevedes to trust the medicine. This, in turn, offered Benevedes her first encounter with a previously unknown traditional medicine. She was delighted when a version of the medicine became patented many years later both as a disinfectant and an anti-inflammatory.60 For Benevedes, the patent proved that her caretaker knew what was right all along. Care and trust conveyed across generations of women, in addition to the specific medicines employed, were an essential part of the medicine devised immediately after the nuclear holocaust.

In some extraordinary cases, survivors found a surprising reassurance in both medicine and its makers. Minoru Sumida, a Hawaiian-born eleven-year-old in 1945, received a mixture of oil and ground human bones. The caretaker was his older sister, and the bones were their mother’s. His mother had passed away in 1943, so his older sister had been taking care of her younger siblings. The family also kept their mother’s bones at home, in a compact Buddhist shrine, as

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103 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust many Japanese families customarily did (and still do) with the remains of their loved ones. As Sumida recalled, his sister decided to use this method of treatment because “people told her that if she used oil only, it would drip off” from the scar. She needed something to keep the oil in place, and she was told that ground human bones worked well for this purpose. Thus, this was a new method for Sumida’s sister, which she decided to try with the help of their deceased mother. Because their house was only a little more than a mile away from the hypocenter, it is likely that the sister could have gone to a crematory as did Mitsuko Okimoto’s and Tokiko Nambu’s mothers. But she chose the bones that belonged to her dearest person, her mother, most likely because it was a way to make unfamiliar medicine familiar.61 When his burns were nearly healed, Sumida received another course of treatment from a family member. This time, the caretaker was his father, although his method was far fiercer than what the term “caretaker” usually implies.

Sumida’s burns made his legs and arms unnaturally bent and bound together. Fearing that these disfigurements could disadvantage the son’s future, the father tore the son’s legs and arms apart by sheer force, so that they could be separated and moved freely. Sumida recalled how he screamed out of pain, stating: “In the end, my father became oni [a Japanese monster known for his ferocity]” at that moment. But then, Sumida continued: “Unless he became oni there was nobody else who would do that for me.” The son regained an ability to walk, and his arms began to function more normally.62 Faced with the lack of modern medicines, doctors, and hospitals, Sumida’s family formed a chain of innovations sustained by communal advice, familial ties, and gendered divisions of labor. Women imparted care and continuity, while men seemed to be assigned to drastic, even violent, tasks of treatment.

The care and medicine offered to survivors in the bomb’s immediate aftermath, then, were based on folk medicine practiced by predominantly female (and occasionally, male) caretakers. This was a medicine embedded in the community, and they felt personally compelled to use it because of the destruction of modern medicine and its institutions as they knew them before August 1945. Seen through our contemporary lens of medical science, the effect of the medicine-on-theground might seem dubious and rudimentary. And yet, its efficacy was striking in the context, distinctively shaping US survivors’ view of the nuclear holocaust. Certainly, destruction was on an unprecedented scale, provoking terror, fear, and deep uncertainty among the injured

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104 / American Survivors and ill. But it is wrong for us to assume that the bomb created a medical vacuum; instead, the altered landscape of Hiroshima or Nagasaki was peopled by survivors making the best use of old and new resources to care for each other. The nuclear landscape refused human life, but there were humans left to live. For many, one urgent purpose of their life was to give care. One import of this experience of survivors as caretakers is that it shaped their views of institutional medicine in the years following the war. As will be shown in Chapters 3 and 4, US survivors’ responses to medical authorities in both Japan and America, including the ABCC and the “Hiroshima Maidens” project, were complex and often critical.

These responses need to be understood as not simply directed at the institution or US sponsorship of the project, but as more deeply rooted in the care and medicine hibakusha had created in the hours and days after the bomb.

So it was, that shortly after Japan’s surrender, some US survivors already began to see the uneasy relationship between the medical care devised by their family and community members and its postwar counterpart delivered by medical and scientific establishments. The former was delivered by familiar faces, with a watchful eye toward patients’ reactions. The latter, in contrast, was established by governments and served primarily national interests. Kazuko Aoki, for one, felt “fortunate” enough to be cared for by her neighbor, a female doctor whom she had known from her high school, even though the physician did not have the means to treat the rash that appeared on Aoki’s skin.

When the war ended and the occupation forces came to Japan, Aoki’s father was called upon to assist the US Army military police. Because he had lived in America for decades and was fluent in English, he was tasked with the responsibility of a translator, visiting Japanese households with American MP officers to confiscate daggers and swords. He was dismayed by young US officers’ lack of knowledge about Japanese culture. They did not remove their shoes when entering Japanese houses, and once, one of them broke a Japanese flute over his knee, mistaking it as a weapon. Aoki’s father scolded the officer, and interestingly, the officer did not talk back. He apparently was willing to take some lessons from this cross-cultural man. In any event, her father’s work made it possible for Aoki to receive medicine not readily available to Japanese civilians. Aoki recalled: “My father told the MPs that his daughter was injured by the bomb . . . and had a rash. They started to come to my house to deliver a big tube of cream and apply it thickly on

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105 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust my rash . . . they also brought a brown bottle of medicine to take orally, which I think was Vitamin C now that I am looking back on it, but there was no label on it because it was a military supply.” Thus, her father’s cross-cultural skills and experiences made it possible for him to treat his daughter. But this does not necessarily mean that he gave institutional medicine a blanket approval. It is possible that he considered the MP supplies as much-deserved compensation for his service. Moreover, it seems clear that he felt he could decide what was acceptable care. For instance, he did not believe that participating in the study of survivors conducted by the ABCC would benefit survivors. Though a survivor himself, Aoki’s father also refused to receive the certificate of survivorhood, the medical care, and the monetary allowances offered by the Japanese government years later. He was willing to negotiate for military supplies insofar as he was treated as an equal player in the negotiation. Beyond that, however, he did not want to be dependent on institutionalized support as he felt it would interfere with his autonomy.

Pak Namjoo’s remembering also revealed a complex relationship between the folk medicine invented immediately after the bomb and the modern medicine brought by the end of the war. She had a relative in Osaka, one of the centers of opium poppy production in Japan before 1945. Japanese people found the plant effective for treating diarrhea. So, Pak’s relative sent poppy extract to her family, who suffered from the condition shortly after surviving the bomb. But soon, the supply stopped, because of the occupation forces’ intervention: Many people used to plant poppy plants [to treat diarrhea].

Then, the occupation forces came and pulled them out. . .. They said that these plants were dangerous, and they took them all away, down to the last one. . .. The plants had beautiful pink flowers, but they said that you could make opium out of these plants. They could see the color of the flowers from the sky, so they took pictures to spot them.63 Here, the distinction between the familial and commercial uses of poppy plants was ignored, resulting in the loss of a community medicine known to work. What came after, DDT, also provoked highly mixed feelings. Seeing that everything was infested by lice and flies, Pak was both appalled by the lack of cleanliness and impressed by the human ability to survive in such extreme conditions. Then came a new medicine in October 1945:

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106 / American Survivors It was white, called DDT, and US airplanes sprinkled it over us.

We all went outside. If this were done today, it would be a big scandal. But everyone said: “This will kill the lice!” So we all went outside and moved our bodies like this to get the medicine [Pak gestured to show how people made dancing moves].

Indeed, all the lice and flies disappeared. It was in October. . ..

I was so impressed. I remember thinking: this is awesome, this is awesome!64 Obviously, Pak’s youthful self in 1945 had been awed by DDT’s ability to terminate harmful insects. And yet, she was also aware by the time of the interview that the substance was harmful not only for insects but also for humans. Neither did she fail to mention that people appeared to be fully capable of living with the insects. Her remembering, then, did not point to any conclusive judgment about the insecticide. Rather, it illuminated a shifting ground of medicine on which survivors must navigate their health, illness, and injury. Nation-states dictated changes, sometimes literally from above, while people were left alone to figure out what these changing policies might mean for their families and communities. New caretakers were powerful yet remote, leaving survivors to wonder about their efficacy with no opportunity to negotiate the terms of care and treatment.

In the face of such complexity, the medicine offered predominantly by women across generations became a strong element of US survivors’ remembering of the bomb. As they took familiar and unfamiliar medicines, American survivors’ connection to caretakers who made and gave these medicines carried considerable weight in determining their efficacy in retrospect. Survivors’ cross-nationality, too, shaped efficacy as they perceived it, leading some to define it sharply apart from any state-sanctioned medical authority. In the eyes of many, the latter was too narrowly unique to serve as a meaningful response to the universality of the catastrophe.

Water and Food The landscape after the nuclear attack was a ground for new moral questions. Nothing raised more compelling ones than water.

Water was not unavailable, perhaps surprisingly so given the intense heat and fire generated by the explosion. Hiroshima had seven rivers,

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107 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust and the water supply from some of them continued for a while after the bombing because of the water flowing from broken hydrants, spigots, and water pipes everywhere.65 Nagasaki, too, experienced the same destruction of infrastructure, which ended up supplying not a few survivors with a much-needed drink of water briefly. A familiar story of survivors, however, tells of cries for water heard everywhere. In the outskirts of the cities where many sought shelter, there actually was a shortage of water, caused by the sudden flux of a large number of people.66 Within the city limits, these cries likely arose as well from survivors’ inability to walk to water and the absence of any container to carry it. With nearly everything shattered into pieces, it suddenly became a difficult assignment for those who were capable of walking to bring water to those who were not.67 Moreover, a rumor quickly spread that it was dangerous to give water to those who were severely burned. Rooted in an accurate observation that many survivors passed away after drinking water, the rumor inaccurately supposed that death was caused by the water itself instead of burns or gastrointestinal injuries. Regardless of its erroneousness, the word about lethal water posed a moral question that was deceptively simple and difficult to answer: Should I give this person water?

Survivors recalled different ways in which they answered, sometimes more than once by revisiting it repeatedly over years. In a way, the question about water was similar to questions that survivors asked about other elements of the natural environment such as air and soil contaminated by radiation. Things that humans needed for life turned poisonous, one universally felt consequence of the nuclear holocaust.68 And yet, the question that survivors asked about water was also unique in that doubt about water existed from day one, before most survivors became aware of radioactivity. As such, how survivors grappled with the question about water offers us a pathway toward understanding the convergence of uniqueness and universality in the nuclear holocaust, which brought all survivors to an uncertainty about their surroundings regardless of their nationality, race, or gender. George Kazuto Saiki first heard of the rumor about water at an elementary school in Hiroshima, which was set up as a rudimentary refuge station. He was told that someone from the Red Cross was taking care of survivors with merbromin solution, so he thought that his missing father and brother might be there.69 He was pierced by numerous calls for water as he walked through the dead and dying on the school’s ground. Though filled

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108 / American Survivors with pity, he was dissuaded from responding to the calls. As Saiki explained, “Doctors shouted at me: ‘Please don’t give them water!

Please don’t give them water!’ Because they would die immediately if they were given water.” Thus, it was medical professionals who directed him and relieved him of guilt.70 Pak Namjoo, on the other hand, was not so free of guilt, although it was primarily her rescuers who decided not to give water to the dying. Unaware of the rumor about fatal water, she was fortunate enough to drink water she received from rescuers who came from Hiroshima’s countryside. She recalled how the rescuers made snap decisions about who was likely to live and who was not. Those in the former group were first given water and hardtack, then they were transported to a relief center outside the city. The latter group, in contrast, was simply left to die. Pak recalled: I didn’t give even a single drop of water to those who were lying and dying but still calling: “Water! Water!” I think that any survivor would feel pain when they remember such a time. I, too, wonder why I was able to ignore their calls. I don’t know if I can say that I regret, but I think about it over and over.71 Pak was still searching for an answer to the question in 2013 when she was interviewed. This uncertainty suggests a lasting effect of moral ambiguity posed by the nuclear holocaust. Because of the nuclear weapon’s ability to drastically transform the environment, what used to be the most natural act – to give water to the thirsty – became problematic.

This, in turn, has opened a path for survivors to become double participants in the mass death. In their remembering, they might be both sufferers and perpetrators.72 Other survivors grappled with the question of water more solitarily, without intervention by others such as physicians or rescuers.

Junji Sarashina found himself in one such struggle, showing another way in which survivors tried to make sense of the new moral universe presented by the nuclear holocaust. As discussed earlier, Sarashina stopped by the Red Cross Hospital near his school on his way back home on the day after the bombing. This was when he was confronted by the water question: When I walked in there, I saw one of the students [of my school] over there . . . you could identify it [the school uniform], so I talked to him for a while. And, you know . . . I talked to him

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109 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust for a while, and he said I want some water. . .. You were told not to give water . . . but I looked at him and [thought] he is not going to live. Because he was burnt. It’s almost like twenty-four hours after the bomb and he was down to nothing . . . he looked at me, and that was it. So yes, at least I gave him water.73 Unlike Saiki or Pak, then, Sarashina decided to give water. Although all their experiences contained deaths (in Sarashina’s case, his classmate passed away right after drinking water), Sarashina chose to participate in the process of dying by giving water. This decision offered him at least some solace years later, separating him from Saiki, who felt he had no choice, or Pak, who wondered if she could have acted differently. As death overwhelmed life and the dead outnumbered the living, the question of how one engaged with the process of dying carried an enduring significance. When there was little chance for life, there was no option but to engage with death. This blurring of life and death coexisted and converged with the practice of folk medicine on the ground. As Yi Jougkeun’s experience with his mournful mother has already shown, caretakers could feel similarly to Sarashina: that life might not necessarily be more desirable than death. For all parties involved – sufferers, caretakers, and perpetrators – the distinction between healing and dying was boundlessly unclear.

The blurring of life and death embodied by the choice to give or not give water permeated everything with which survivors came in contact. With striking frequency, survivors of all nationalities have talked about “poison gas” they breathed in unknowingly, by which they meant air filled with radioactive dust. Food, another essential for life, could contain elements of death if contaminated by radiation. In this light, it is notable that many food materials were nevertheless used as medicines. As might be imagined by the many calls for water, vegetables that contained water were highly desirable not only for healing but also for eating. Mitsuko Okimoto remembered a cucumber that she ate the day after: “I woke up early in the morning, and for the first time, I ate a cucumber that came from a cucumber field owned by the family [with whom she stayed on the previous night]. Ah, it was so cool and tasty!”74 Akiyuki Sumioka, a Japan-born fifteen-year-old in 1945, remembered the tomatoes he ate after walking all day to get home. The owner of a factory in his neighborhood owned a lot that he used as a vegetable garden, so the tomatoes came from there: “You are so young but you look so miserable,” said the neighbor.75 This incident likely offered one

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110 / American Survivors of the first reminders for Sumioka of who he had been before the nuclear destruction. He was a teenager, and he could still be treated to tomatoes by neighbors if he looked hungry. Akiko Watanabe, on her way from the city to the countryside, also was given a “refreshingly tasty” tomato by a farmer. After all, it was the height of summer and the seasonal vegetables were plentiful in the areas that had escaped the blast and the fire.76 But as survivors learned later, these seemingly benign vegetables were highly contaminated. Aiko Tokito, then a sixteen-year-old, captured a mixed feeling provoked by a delayed revelation: tokito: So I went back to where my house had been, and you know, we used to home-grow vegetables. Pumpkins were in season at that time, and they were baked – perfectly baked. wake: By the bomb? tokito: I didn’t know [about radiation] at that time. I remember thinking, “Wow!” And I ate the pumpkin. I remember that it was tasty (laughter). wake: Was it right after the bomb? tokito: Right after the bomb. . .. It must have been highly radioactive, and looking back on it, I think it is funny. But it was tasty.77 In a similar way that Okimoto worried about the irradiated bones ground up and applied to her mother’s burns, Tokito here appeared somewhat concerned about the radioactive pumpkin that she had eaten unsuspectingly. At the same time, her laughter and her description of the episode’s humor reveal a kind of resilience to which we have not given enough attention. In a horribly transformed environment, survivors were compelled to redefine meanings of life, dying, and death. This redefinition was mediated by some of the most fundamental elements of the environment such as water, food, and medicines. As survivors took these elements into their bodies as they must, they became part of the nuclear holocaust even as they survived it. One might reason that Tokito’s dark humor arose out of this process of internalization. As the nuclear holocaust in a sense became part of her, the tension it provoked called for a relief and resilience. Too, the new morality that the destruction opened up demanded that hibakusha shed light on the uniqueness – the absurdity – of their experiences by way of universality. Survivors’ laughter signals their desire to capture how uniquely the world was transformed by speaking the universal language of laughter; it turns

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111 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust their extraordinary survival into an act of all-too-common human blindness.

US survivors’ remembering often epitomized a similar combination of humor, relief, and resilience, accentuated by their cross-nationality. Katie Yanagawa, who had a family memory of the B-29s from Seattle, recalled how her family had lost nearly everything in Hiroshima in 1945. The devastation struck her mother particularly hard. As Yanagawa recalled: they [her parents] had this beautiful bed purchased in the United States, brought home, you know, this art deco type, and brass, and all of those things. . .. And my mother said that she didn’t even have the energy to cry. . .. All of these things that my father had worked for all his life, brought back to Japan . . . everything was just burned down to ground.78 But Yanagawa’s story had a brighter side. Thanks to “the Japanese-style homes” made of mud walls, some pots and pans that had fallen under them survived the blast, and the family could dig them up, still in good shape.

Then, miraculously, they found a chicken running around on the street. As Yanagawa recalled, “Japanese people [kept] a chicken for the eggs.” But the Yanagawas saw the chicken as the meal; they were Americans, familiar with the American diet.79 So they caught the chicken, “dug up all of the potatoes and carrots and onions” from the family’s garden, and took sugar and soy sauce from an empty air-raid shelter that belonged to a rich family in their neighborhood. The Yanagawas then cooked the chicken and vegetables using a pot dug out of mud walls, and this made the family’s first meal at ground zero. When she talked about this incident, Yanagawa could not help but laugh. She felt sorry for “this poor chicken” because it “survived the bomb and (laughing) then [was] killed by” these Americans, eager to put it in sukiyaki. Of course, she was aware by the time of interview that everything had been highly contaminated. And yet, it was this “means of survival” that made this episode “an amazing story.”80 In Yanagawa’s remembering, the speechlessly dismayed mother and the humorously depicted “poor chicken” were placed in sharp contrast. In both episodes, cross-national meanings are salient, allowing her to define her story of the nuclear holocaust by both universality and uniqueness. Her mother’s disappointment over loss, a common experience to all, was given texture by the family’s hard work in America. Her disappointment was about not only a loss of belongings in Japan, but also a loss of the material embodiment of the family history that bridged

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112 / American Survivors nations. Her distress notwithstanding, it was also the family’s crossnational ties that offered them the first meal after the bomb. It was their familiarity with both cultures that served as the meal’s ingredients.

Thinking of how the pots and pans had been protected by the collapsed mud walls, Yanagawa exclaimed: “God is very fair.”81 Although their wealth accumulated in America was lost in Japan, their Japanese house made of mud protected utensils that allowed them to prepare a family meal, American-style chicken sukiyaki. Similar to Tokito’s baked pumpkins, the Yanagawas’ meal was contaminated, pointing to the common experience of forced ingestion of harm and, in some cases, of resiliently making laughter out of the experience.

Writing this, I do not suggest that the nuclear holocaust could be overcome by any individual’s attitude or “approach to life.”82 Rather, humor was a pathway toward speaking the unspeakable. As US survivors found each other and sought water, food, and shelter, their cross-nationality came back powerfully. Their layered belonging, which had invited questioning of their national loyalty, offered them a way to account for the otherwise unaccountable aftermath of the nuclear holocaust. If cross-nationality were largely invisible in the bomb’s history, humor offered a rare opportunity for it to become visible. In this light, it is important that Yanagawa’s interviewers were in fact US hibakusha.

Surrounded by fellow immigrant-survivors, she likely found it easy to laugh about the episode. US survivors’ resilience might have been indistinguishable from other survivors’, but the route US survivors took to regain it was uniquely shaped by the collective history of immigrants.

Here again, both universality and uniqueness were part of the nuclear holocaust that did not discriminate based on distinctions such as citizenship, cultural belonging, and national loyalty. Seen from where US hibakusha stood, the 1945 weapons were grossly at odds with the idea that, in a nuclear war, one nation wins and another loses. By bringing together the uniqueness and universality of their experiences, US survivors’ remembering indicates how this dualistic view holds only if we are fundamentally uncurious about the nuclear war’s reality.

Korean American survivors’ cross-nationality, too, came back forcefully in their remembering of food, but in much different ways than Nikkei’s. Their layered sense of belonging did not necessarily bring back a uniform experience in their remembering, either. James Jeong recalled how he was denied a rice ball because he was Korean. After the bomb’s explosion, those in the ruined cities relied on emergency food supplied

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113 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust by nearby prefectures. One day, there was a team of soldiers from Okayama prefecture, which came to Hiroshima “with a truck full of rice balls.” While Jeong waited “with his hands open, just like everybody else” in line, a middle-aged man yelled at him: “You are a Korean!

These rice balls are not for you.” Because Jeong had been born and “living almost as a Japanese,” he was stunned. Nobody should be able to identify him as Chōsenjin, or a Korean. As it turned out, though, the accusatory man knew about Jeong’s national origin because he had worked at a wartime rationed food distribution center in Jeong’s neighborhood. Because the food rationing was a national program, the roster of recipients included information about their national origins. But Koreans were considered Japanese, so the man could not discriminate against Jeong at the distribution center. The rice balls delivered right after the bomb were not rationed, however; it was emergency food. The man thus felt free to discriminate. Ironically, when Jeong went to receive rationed food days after the rice ball incident, the same man was attending the food distribution center. “He looked really uncomfortable,” now that he had to give rice to Jeong.83 If food after the bomb was capable of calling up an arbitrary mixture of discrimination and nondiscrimination, it was also capable of revealing the persistence of ties between Japanese and Korean peoples.

John Hong did not recall any discrimination surrounding food supplies after the Hiroshima bombing. Shortly after receiving treatment for his injuries at a military hospital “since I belonged to the army,” Hong recalled, “we had surrendered” on the 15th, “and on the 25th we got the order” to be released from the military. When he found out that there was no ship to take him back to Korea immediately, Hong consulted with the second lieutenant of his unit, who took him in. Hong was allowed to stay with this second lieutenant until early September, when the passage to Korea was finally reinstated. As discussed in Chapter 1, Hong’s superiors were aware of his Korean background.

Especially after the bomb, “they had an opportunity to look through all the personal records and documents concerning the students,” so it was easy for them to identify him as Korean. Still, there was no discrimination as Hong remembered it. Clearly, he was treated, housed, and fed well enough to survive around the same time that Jeong experienced the inconsistent attitudes toward Koreans after Japan’s defeat. Many years later, Hong looked forward to seeing his classmates in Japan at reunions. Jeong, in contrast, realized “how much he hated Japan”

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114 / American Survivors after being denied a rice ball. He knew he could not live in Japan anymore.

The universality of the bomb’s effects could rise over the uniqueness of an irradiated pumpkin or an ingested chicken, as seen in the cases of humor finding a way to speak about the unspeakable; in Hong’s remembering, too, his unique situation as an immigrant did not limit his access to food, something universally needed by survivors. But uniqueness could also stand out conspicuously in the sea of universal experiences, as seen in Jeong’s experience of being denied food. Unlike Japanese American survivors, their Korean American counterparts conveyed no humor in their remembering. The latter’s resilience, at least when recalled in interviews by persons of Japanese ancestry, was not accompanied by laughter.84 This suggests that US survivors might have been unwilling to speak the unspeakable unless they felt assured that their listeners understood an essential contradiction of the nuclear holocaust – that it fused together uniqueness and universality inconceivably and inhumanly. This unwillingness, in turn, likely shaped the structure of the counter-memory of the bomb consisting of both speech and silence.

US survivors’ experience of regaining cross-nationality after the bomb became a source of empowerment for some. For others, it offered moments of doubt about what it meant to be an immigrant in a defeated country. Either way, food marked a turning point where the transformed morality of life, dying, and death in the post-nuclear world might begin to return to what it had been. Unlike water that could turn sufferers into perpetrators instantaneously, food could be consumed no matter how irradiated it was without showing any immediate impact. In a way similar to medicine, food’s effect on humans was felt over a longer stretch of time than that of water. This likely made food more open to different kinds of remembering about how survivors reconnected to life, including stories told with humor or without.

When given or denied, food frequently brought to the fore US survivors’ cross-nationality, suggesting its centrality to immigrant life. Equally important, gendered meanings embedded in food became central to some US survivors’ remembering. As discussed earlier, the bomb in many ways was an eraser of gender, because it destroyed gendered roles and infrastructures. US survivors did everything they could to regain these, as seen in their reactions to bodies and clothes, as well as

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115 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust their use of medicine. Neither did food escape people’s desire for meanings framed by gender.

For Yi Jougkeun, the importance of a meal cooked by his mother a day after the bomb went far beyond the simple fact that he finally had something to eat. After walking many miles after the bomb’s explosion, Yi found that his parents were not back home.

His younger brothers said that his parents had gone to Hiroshima to look for Yi. When they came back, it was already early in the morning. Yi recalled: My mother said “Oh! You are alive!” and held me [daite kuremashite ne]. She had thought that I was dead. Then we ate . . . because we hadn’t eaten. My brothers hadn’t been eating because mother had been gone. So mother cooked something [nan ka tukutte kurete] and we ate it – I remember it.85 In addition to the last words that accentuated the memory’s vividness, Yi’s use of “kuremashite” and “kurete” also conveyed his sense of gratitude toward his mother. It was not assumed anymore that mothers would hold their children or cook for them. It seemed as if these had become acts of kindness, something that needed to be reaffirmed in the bomb’s aftermath. This memory about a meal prepared by a mother became particularly significant for Yi because it recalled a time before his injury became worse and his mother began to doubt if he should live.

For Yi, then, his mother’s meal might have offered something to hold onto as he struggled for his life days later. In this meal, he could find a glimmer of hope that he still was a beloved son of a Korean family.

If the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to an erasure of gender, its return by way of food was greeted by a nearuniversal sense of relief. This relief, in turn, opened up an unexpected opportunity for US survivors to redefine their cross-nationality and find resilience in it. The family of Brazilian-born American survivor Fumiko Imai, a fifteen-year-old in 1945, was fortunate enough to have access to beans, meat, oil, sugar, and blankets (which they gave to farmers in the countryside in exchange for food) after the bombing.

Her older brother had worked at the Japanese Imperial Army’s Ministry of Clothes, where all of these supplies were relatively abundant. But it was not her brother of whom Imai was proud. She was proud of her mother who, equipped with these food materials, taught her neighbors how to cook a small amount of available food to satisfy

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She used a Brazilian coffee grinder that had survived the bomb to make flour. Her neighbors, who had been eating pan-fried dried beans, were delighted with the many possibilities that flour opened up.86 In particular, deep-fried, sweet cornbread was popular, and Imai recalled helping her mother prepare quite a few meals for neighbors in a big pot of oil. In Imai’s remembering, her mother was a chef-in-chief at these cookouts, a role that likely fit into her being a wife and a mother. And yet, it was also her cross-nationality that made the story worth telling; her son obtained food from the Japanese military, and it was her Brazilian skills and utensils that pushed her to assert herself in the Japanese community struck by a food shortage. Clearly, she had something special to offer. Decades later, this story of assertion and assistance became something for her daughter in America to share. This story is in striking contrast to Imai’s pre-bomb memory of her mother showing up at a school gathering wearing a pair of high heels. Nobody else wore such shoes, and Imai appeared to feel embarrassed. In the bomb’s aftermath, however, the mother’s cross-cultural skills were affirmed and approved of by the daughter. Being an immigrant woman meant being useful. As gendered remembering pieced together places and peoples across the ocean, cross-nationality became an extraordinary, yet ordinarily practiced, terrain of the bomb’s history.

The cross-cultural history of the nuclear holocaust brings affected individuals into sharp focus. In the flattened, discolored landscape of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, women found themselves playing traditionally expected roles as cooks and caretakers; men responded to the emergency by trying to rescue others, sometimes by risking their own lives. At the same time that they embraced familiar gendered roles, so as to capture the uniqueness of the nuclear holocaust by way of universality, US survivors were also pushed by the unprecedented destruction to experiment and expand them. That they went through this process of gender destruction, affirmation, and transformation together became a basis of their identity as survivors, which would emerge years later.

Some moments of transformation on the ground, too, brought them

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117 / Remembering the Nuclear Holocaust close to Japanese, American, and Korean cultural belonging, reminding them of the compound nature of their cross-nationality. Indeed, many memories told by US survivors were about cultural convergence marked by the shifting relationship between the bomb’s uniqueness and universality, showing the striking diversity of experiences that the bomb attempted to destroy. Stripped of old meanings, survivors asked new questions about life and death. As they came back to life as immigrants and their children, American hibakusha recaptured or reinvented a sense of resilience and self-worth as people with cross-national ties.

Their remembering indicates how it extends into the present, as much as it is about the past. Nothing exemplified this ongoing nature of remembering more than the story of Yamaoka’s sister Mana’s “American slip” discussed earlier in this chapter. When she wrote a personal recollection of the bomb in 2008, Yamaoka simply mentioned how she “felt extremely thankful to have found” her sister because “she was on the top of a pile of corpses.”87 There was no reference to Mana’s underwear. In her oral histories taken in 2009 and 2011, in contrast, Yamaoka revealed that her family had been able to identify Mana thanks to the “American slip.”88 As she talked to interviewers, it seemed, a more personal, closely held memory was revealed. But this was not the end of the story. When Yamaoka talked to her family, she included an even more intimate detail, embroidery stitched on the slip. This became clear when Yamaoka shared with me a copy of a 2006 essay by her granddaughter, then a college student. Her granddaughter wrote: “I know my grandma and her father found little Mana’s body after searching through wreckage for three days and her father recognized her only by the embroidery on her undergarments; her face had been burned and bruised beyond recognition.”89 Here, the story is about the detail of family intimacy, which allowed a father’s gaze to grasp his daughter’s tiny identifier, the embroidery. That Yamaoka remembered the detail but chose not to tell me suggests her continuous interactions with the past that contain varying degrees of silence and speech. In speaking to me, too, Yamaoka did not indicate that Mana’s face was so unrecognizable that the family had to rely on something other than that to identify her. But with her granddaughter, it was an indispensable memory to be shared. That Yamaoka gave me a copy of her granddaughter’s essay suggests the shimmering boundary between speakable and unspeakable things.

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118 / American Survivors US hibakusha’s cross-nationality that lives on today found little standing in Japan, Korea, or America in the following decades, when Cold War ideology spurred an increasingly narrow definition of national belonging, loyalty, and patriotism. And yet, as Yamaoka and others in this chapter show, their remembering never stopped. How they found a place to recollect in the difficult Cold War years was another story.

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DANIEL GIBBS TERESA H. BARKER

A Tattoo on my Brain

A Tattoo on My Brain

A Neurologist’s Personal Battle against Alzheimer’s Disease

A Neurologist’s Personal Battle against Alzheimer’s Disease

final cover coming soon

Dr. Daniel Gibbs and Teresa H. Barker

May 2021 9781108838931 Hardback c.$24.99 / c.£18.99

Dr Daniel Gibbs is one of 50 million people worldwide with an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis.

Unlike most patients with Alzheimer’s, however, Dr Gibbs worked as a neurologist for twenty-five years, caring for patients with the very disease now affecting him. Also unusual is that Dr Gibbs had begun to suspect he had Alzheimer’s several years before any official diagnosis could be made.

Forewarned by genetic testing showing he carried alleles that increased the risk of developing the disease, he noticed symptoms of mild cognitive impairment long before any tests would have alerted him. In this highly personal account, Dr Gibbs documents the effect his diagnosis has had on his life and explains his advocacy for improving early recognition of Alzheimer’s. Weaving clinical knowledge from decades caring for dementia patients with his personal experience of the disease, this is an optimistic tale of one man’s journey with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

Daniel Gibbs is a retired neurologist in Portland, Oregon with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Having spent twenty-five years caring for patients, many with dementia themselves, he is now an active advocate for the early recognition and management of Alzheimer’s.

Teresa H. Barker is journalist and nonfiction book cowriter whose collaborations include strong narrative treatments of subjects including medical science, creative aging, child and adult development, parenting and life in the digital age.

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PROLOGUE

When Auguste D. was about 52, her husband noticed she was acting oddly, misplacing things around the house and suspecting him of having an affair with the next-door neighbor. Her memory rapidly declined over the next year and her paranoia and delusions worsened. The year was 1901, and she was admitted to the Asylum for the Insane and Epileptic in Frankfurt, where she came under the care of Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a young German psychiatrist with an interest in trying to link neuropathological changes in the brain with psychiatric and neurological illnesses. At the time Auguste D. died in 1906, Dr. Alzheimer had moved to another position in Munich, but he was able to obtain her brain for pathological examination. Under the microscope, he saw dark particles between the nerve cells in the outer layers of the brain. He also saw a different type of smaller dark particles within the nerve cells, which were twisted in appearance. These were the plaques and tangles in the brain that we recognize today as the signature of Alzheimer’s disease, the neurodegenerative disease named for the doctor who first correlated this specific pathology in the brain with a form of dementia.

Auguste D. died just five years after first seeing Dr. Alzheimer, and probably about eight or nine

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years after her husband first noticed her unusual behavior. More than a hundred years have passed since Auguste’s diagnosis and death, and yet the typical time from diagnosis to death for those with Alzheimer’s disease has remained the same, about eight years.

That was the prognosis that I saw play out for most Alzheimer’s patients in my twenty-four years as a clinical neurologist. By the time their symptoms brought them to me, the disease had typically progressed beyond anything medicine could do. Today, neuroscience has advanced to the point that we know now that Alzheimer’s disease starts in the brain at least ten, possibly twenty, years before any cognitive symptoms are noticed. The question is, with earlier detection of the changes that set the stage for neurodegenerative disease, could we stop those processes before the damage is done, act to change the course of this disease? Can we use that lead time to buy time against Alzheimer’s? I believe the answer is yes. I know because I’m living it.

Chapter-reference 1 Prince M, Bryce R, Albanese E, et al. The global prevalence of dementia: a systemic review and meta-analysis. Alzheimer’s & Dementia 2013; 9:63–75; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jalz .2012.11.007.

2 Gibbs, DM. Early Awareness of Alzheimer Disease: a neurologist’s personal perspective.

JAMA Neurology 2019; 76:249; https://doi .org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2018.4910.

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1

BEACON ROCK

A towering stump of basalt second only to the Rock of Gibraltar, Beacon Rock rises 848 feet from the Washington shore of the Columbia River, about 40 miles east of my home on the Oregon side, up a dead-end street in a woodsy hilltop neighborhood in Portland. The river feels like my second home, carrying years of memories and the promise of more good times spent on the water, first with my kids when they were kids, and now with my grandchildren. This is where they learned some lessons in resourcefulness and practical skills for life and where I learned some of the ropes myself.

Those days are numbered now, though the timeline is imprecise. Ordinarily, this would be maddening for me as a former research scientist and neurologist for whom precision is second nature.

But I’m officially retired now, leaving me free to pursue any research I wish, and the whole point of my current project is to exploit this imprecise timeline confronting me and discover how to tweak it in my favor – turn the uncertainty of it to my advantage.

I have early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, the beginnings of neurodegenerative processes that will progress over time and someday kill me if something

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else doesn’t get me first. My interest now lies in navigating the progression of this disease in its early stages to find ways to slow it down. I want to buy myself more time on this end of the Alzheimer’s continuum. Time with my family and friends.

Time to study, read and write, for professional purposes as well as pleasure. Time to enjoy walks in the woods and time on the river. The good news is, I’ve discovered that all of these pursuits intersect.

Each informs the others, advancing some aspect of the larger inquiry around science or life satisfaction, or setting up for the step of insight that will.

How that all fits together neurologically – how a brisk walk affects the way your brain functions, for instance – is really pretty amazing in the landscape of the brain. For now, Beacon Rock is a good place to start.

On a clear day, the Portland skyline is dwarfed by nearby Mount Hood, a sleepy volcano, and some sister peaks that thrill hiking enthusiasts.

I’ve never been one of them. But, about five years ago, when I suspected that I had some very early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, my thoughts turned to the bucket list of things I wanted to do in my lifetime. Years of volunteer work as a neurologist assisting at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) in Tanzania had put Mt. Kilimanjaro in my sights.

About that time, on one of my continuing annual volunteer trips to the region, my wife Lois came too, and we took a day hike to Mandara Hut, considered the first full stop for camping and allowing time to acclimatize to the altitude and to the physical exertion required to complete the climb to Kilimanjaro’s summit.

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One of the unique aspects of working with staff at the hospital in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro is the exposure to patients with high-altitude sickness and other climbing misadventures. Mt. Kilimanjaro is just short of 20,000 feet tall, the tallest mountain in Africa, but climbing it does not require technical climbing skills. It can be done by almost anyone. But it is physically demanding and can be deadly. Each year, about 40,000 climbers attempt to summit, and on average about 6 to 10 of them die trying.

About 60 percent of deaths on the mountain are due to high-altitude sickness; 30 percent to medical illnesses such as heart attack, pneumonia or appendicitis; and about 10 percent to trauma from falls or being struck by rocks. A few years ago, an Irish football star was killed by lightning while climbing the mountain. Highaltitude headache occurs in about 80 percent of unacclimatized climbers who have recently reached about 10,000 feet. It can usually be relieved by good hydration, simple analgesics and allowing time for acclimatization. The next step in severity is acute mountain sickness which combines headache with loss of appetite, nausea with vomiting or diarrhea, and sleepiness.

The most severe stage is high- altitude cerebral edema. In addition to the severe headache and gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms of acute mountain sickness, the climber suffers confusion, loss of coordination, trouble speaking, and lassitude progressing to coma and death if not treated immediately. It is often associated with high-altitude pulmonary edema – the accumulation of fluid in the lungs that causes difficulty

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breathing. This occurs in about 1 percent of climbers above 15,000 feet. Most people recover fully if immediately transported to a lower elevation, but residual changes in the eye (retinal hemorrhages) and brain (microhemorrhages) may be seen months later [1].

It took us about four hours to climb from the Marangu trailhead to a spot at about 9,000 feet.

Even at this relatively low elevation – only about halfway to the top – both of us had mild symptoms of headache and queasiness. The symptoms rapidly improved as we descended the mountain, and once we returned home I was stoked to try again next year – for the summit. Lois thought this was a seriously bad idea, considering my high risk now for potentially lethal neurological complications, such as those from altitude sickness.

Mt. Kilimanjaro as seen from the KCMC campus where I worked in Tanzania.

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Lois wouldn’t agree to go with me, so I asked my friend Henry, a seasoned trekker, if he’d join me.

Henry suggested I train for it and offered to help me start to get in shape with some local hiking and climbing – perhaps eventually to summit Mount Hood, which he’d done many times. We started with modest day hikes in the Columbia River Gorge, and by the time I sensibly realized that Lois was right – Mt. Kilimanjaro was out of the question – Henry had introduced me to Beacon Rock.

At a glance, Beacon Rock looks daunting. The south face is. A 400-foot vertical climb reserved for experienced rock climbers only, it requires technical skill and equipment. But the west face, adapted more than a century ago for use by more casual weekend walkers, features wooded trails and an elaborate scaffolding of fifty-four switchbacks, some of them wide footpaths carved into the rock, others spanning wooden bridges (seventeen of them) and walkways, all lined with safety rails. If heights bother you, then it’s easy enough to look straight ahead along the broad footpaths and pause to enjoy the scenic distant vistas. It’s only scary if you look down the steep rock face.

The views from the riverbank and forest trailhead below and the summit are breathtakingly beautiful. Every step along the way is a walk through woods and rocky terrain that exist in geological time, millions of years in the making and absent any sense of urgency. There’s something calming about that for me. A day on the river and the rock quickens the senses, and for me carries years of memories and current good times spent on the water with my family and friends. Once a year now, Henry and I do the mile-plus hike up.

At the summit, the bald rock narrows as it juts

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upward still, and the last 50 feet or so of the engineered path follows concrete steps, a 45-degree Stairmaster climb to the top.

On my most recent hike up Beacon Rock, as I reach the top I feel a little winded, definitely sweaty, but also exhilarated with the pure joy of this incredible workout in my most favorite place. I am participating in a clinical trial of a new smartphone-based cognitive test that can be taken several times a day without significant learning bias – meaning it doesn’t get easier with repetition. The goal of the trial is to see whether fluctuations in cognition can be linked to activity level. The cognitive data from the smartphone app is correlated with measures of exercise obtained through a fitness tracker. Lately, although I’ve started to notice some decline in cognition, more forgetfulness and befuddlement, I still think more clearly during and after exercise. This has been borne out in this study so far. On average, my cognitive assessment score increases 8 percent after aerobic exercise. Today, my fitness tracker says my heart rate is 131, up from a baseline of 64 at the start of the hike. After the 1.75-mile, 57-minute hike from the boat dock to the top of Beacon Rock, elevation gain 850 feet, the cognitive assessment score has increased by 15 percent.

I mention this later to a friend, who laughs at my endless interest in data even on a day when I’m out in this gorgeous natural setting. But for me, this sophisticated tracking program, the real-time feedback and the fact that it’s part of a clinical trial only add to my enjoyment of the hike. Like the rock climbers who prefer the hard way up the rock face, I take pleasure in the gritty detail of the data.

It’s an inward-facing vista for me I can appreciate –

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Taking a cognitive test on the summit of Beacon Rock. Photo by my friend John Harland.

an encouraging one for now – without taking a thing away from the trail views.

Hikers like us don’t run into the rock climbers, whose treacherous ascent up the south face rewards them with a different viewpoint. But any way you look out at the gorge, it’s spectacular. I’m just grateful that the easier trail option exists. It’s the switchbacks that make the climb possible at all for me, however challenging it is on any given day.

Sometimes the thought of the years ahead with Alzheimer’s feels especially daunting, a towering monolith, a sheer rock face. At those times, I think of Beacon Rock, the gift of switchbacks and the power of one step at a time.

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Switchbacks on the face of Beacon Rock.

Chapter-reference 1 Dekker MCJ, Wilson MH, Howlett WP. Mountain neurology. Practical Neurology 2019; 19:404–411; https://doi.org/10.1136/ practneurol-2017-001783.

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Runaway Technology Can Law Keep Up? Joshua A. T. Fairfield

February 2021 9781108444576 Paperback $19.95 / £15.99

In an era of corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation, and more, law often seems to take a back seat to rampant technological change. To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. In this riveting work, Joshua A. T. Fairfield calls their bluff. He provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans thrive in the face of technological change. He shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology – a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money. However, to secure the benefits of changing technology for all of us, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate.

Joshua A. T. Fairfield is William D. Bain Family Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law. He is the author of Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom (2017). A Fulbright and Fernand Braudel Scholar, Professor Fairfield was a privacy and civil liberties counsel on intelligence community studies of virtual worlds, and was part of the founding team of Rosetta Stone.

Advance praise ‘Can democracy keep pace with technology? Yes, says Joshua Fairfield, but only if we swiftly adapt the language of law itself.’

Edward Castronova, Indiana University www.cambridge.org

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1 Can Law Keep Up?

We need to talk. The future is coming fast, and we need to work together to decide how to meet the challenges of rampant technological progress. Talking is how humans cooperate. Cooperation, through language, is humans’ superpower. Language is why humans, and not wolves, run this particular show. But there are two problems. First, we don’t yet have the kind of language we need to talk about the problems of the future. Second, you and I don’t yet have the kind of language we need to talk about how we will build the kind of language we need. In this book, I will try to build, between us, a language that will let us talk about the problems of the future.

“Wait,” one might say. “What’s all this about language? I thought this was a book about law!” It is. Law is language, a special kind. It is language that states how we have decided to live together. Law is the language that we need to build, to help us cooperate, in order to deal with the rapid changes introduced by technology. We need to develop language to permit us to talk about certain hard problems, and we need to do it quickly. That language is humanity’s scratching at the surface of reality, building better social tools to handle what it finds.

The news is full of new challenges: dragnet surveillance,1 artificial intelligence,2 autonomous vehicles,3 biohacking,4 and 3D printing.5 If 1

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See, e.g., Raymond Zhong, China Snares Tourists’ Phones in Surveillance Dragnet by Adding Secret App, N.Y. Times (July 2, 2019), www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/technology/china-xinjiangapp.html; Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police, N.Y. Times (April 13, 2019), www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-location-trackingpolice.html; Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001); United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983).

See, e.g., Janosch Delcker, Europe Divided over Robot “Personhood”, Politico (Apr. 11, 2018), www.politico.eu/article/europe-divided-over-robot-ai-artificial-intelligence-person hood/; Zara Stone, Everything You Need to Know about Sophia, the World’s First Robot Citizen, Forbes (Nov. 7, 2017), www.forbes.com/sites/zarastone/2017/11/07/everything-you-need-to-know -about-sophia-the-worlds-first-robot-citizen/#24f7c10846fa.

See, e.g., Peter Holley, After Crash, Injured Motorcyclist Accuses Robot-Driven Vehicle of “Negligent Driving”, WA. Post(Jan. 25, 2018), www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/ wp/2018/01/25/after-crash-injured-motorcyclist-accuses-robot-driven-vehicle-of-negligent-driving/; Cleve Wootson Jr., Feds Investigating after a Tesla on Autopilot Barreled into a Parked Firetruck,

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law becomes obsolete, lagging behind the ever-increasing rate of technological advances, what happens to individual rights and freedoms? If law evolves to grant increased flexibility to government, will those broader, more far-reaching powers upset the balance between citizen and state? Is there a way that law can keep pace with innovation while protecting and preserving the freedoms that create the necessary context for innovation?

If law is to do this, it must not only change, but embrace the concept of ongoing change, interweaving flexibility and resilience with the more established concepts of order upon which society is built.

With the widespread adoption of any new technology, there is an assumption that the technology has created a space that law is unable to reach.

Money, for instance, has morphed from dollars to checks to credit cards to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, all faster than regulators can react.6 With Apple’s introduction of end-to-end encryption on cellular devices7 came then FBI Director James Comey’s claim that the “Going Dark” phenomenon would leave the public at risk and law enforcement unable to thwart crime.8 Is technology doomed to always be regulated by out-of-date rules? Or, worse, is the world doomed to become lawless, as technology leaves dusty law codes behind?

The currently accepted narrative is that technology outpaces antiquated legal institutions in the blinding rush of progress. Lawyers and judges are deemed to be at technology’s mercy. But there is another

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WA. Post (Jan. 24, 2018), www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/01/23/a-tesla-owners -excuse-for-his-dui-crash-the-car-was-driving/.

See, e.g., Emily Baumgaertner, As D.I.Y. Gene Editing Gains Popularity, “Someone Is Going to Get Hurt”, N.Y. Times (May 14, 2018), www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/science/biohackers-gene -editing-virus.html; Antonio Regalado, In Blow to New Tech, European Court Decides CRISPR Plants Are GMOs, MIT Technology Review (July 25, 2018), www.technologyreview.com /the-download/611716/in-blow-to-new-tech-europe-court-decides-crispr-plants-are-gmos/.

See, e.g., Steve Henn, As 3-D Printing Becomes More Accessible, Copyright Questions Arise, NPR (Feb. 19, 2013), www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/02/19/171912826/as-3-d-print ing-become-more-accessible-copyright-questions-arise; Michael D. Shear et al., Judge Blocks Attempt to Post Blueprints for 3-D Guns, N.Y. Times (July 31, 2018), www.nytimes.com/2018/ 07/31/us/politics/3d-guns-trump.html.

See, e.g., Peter J. Henning, Policing Cryptocurrencies Has Become a Game of Whack-a-Mole for Regulators, N.Y. Times (May 31, 2018).

Matt Apuzzo et al., Apple and Other Tech Companies Tangle With U.S. over Data Access, N.Y. Times (Dec. 7, 2015), www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/us/politics/apple-and-other-techcompanies-tangle-with-us-over-access-to-data.html.

Hon. James B. Comey, Statement before the House Committee on Homeland Security (Washington, D.C., Oct. 21, 2015) (available at www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/worldwidethreatsand-homeland-security-challenges).

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story. Law can keep up. Law itself is the social technology of regulating human behavioral change under conditions of technological development. Law is often far ahead of technology. Lawyers and judges must wait to regulate—often for years—until a technology matures. The sense here is that creating law too early will be a mistake. This story tells us that law is capable of being overhauled, that we might create systems that can keep up. However, unless we begin now, we will experience an ever-increasing disconnect between society and its tools, between democracy and technology.

This book examines what happens at the nexus of law and technology.

It analyzes the interaction between the two, seeking a framework on which to build a set of principles to guide legal evolution in the coming years. It counters the technological fatalist narrative that law is simply too slow to incorporate technological change. It challenges received wisdom that law must trail technological change, and argues that law plays a critical role in anticipating and guiding, in naming and shaping, technological change.

Upon closer examination, the narrative that law can’t keep up turns out to be not true, and is a particular problem tied to the United States—we could regulate these new technologies appropriately and responsibly if we decided to, and many countries do. Rather, the argument that law can’t keep up is propaganda advanced by technology companies eager to avoid legal responsibility for the stunning damage their business models cause the surrounding society. Consider the role social media companies play in systematically profiting from compromising democratic elections, for example. The fact that such propaganda succeeds means there is a hole in our collective heads, a problem with how we talk about the problems of the future.

failing narratives Bad narratives, like the one that law can’t keep up, only live because of the absence of better ones. Our dominant narratives, the stories we use to organize meaning in our lives, are failing across the board. Consider the fact that right now, both science and religion are failing. Science fails to convince flat-earthers,9 9

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Moya Sarner, The Rise of the Flat Earthers, Science Focus (Aug. 31, 2019), www .sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-rise-of-the-flat-earthers/ (last accessed Nov. 11, 2019); Matt J. Weber, How the Internet Made Us Believe in a Flat Earth, Medium (Dec. 12, 2018), https://medium.com/s/world-wide-wtf/how-the-internet-made-us-believe-in-a-flat-earth -2e42c3206223.

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anti-vaxxers,10 and racists.11 Religion fails to convince an increasing share of the young12 and highly educated.13 The question is why our dominant narratives are dying, leaving us at the mercy of the self-serving ad slogans of corporations and clickbait articles as our source of truth.

Religion is failing because religious language often lacks a valid epistemology: a way of knowing what is factual and what is not. As religious communities empty themselves of the young, the tolerant, and the educated at truly startling rates,14 those communities have come increasingly to understand their myths as representing some kind of pseudoscientific reality. Religion was never intended to tell us how the world worked, only how to orient ourselves within it. By making obviously false scientific claims in religious language, speakers of religious language have revealed that they have no way of determining facts about the world. Consulting one’s feelings is not a measure of how the world is.

But if religion fails to convince for lack of valid epistemology, science is failing for a lack of guiding narrative. Science tells us how to do things, not why or whether to do them. As we will explore, scientists won’t even admit that they lack a meta-narrative, a guiding story of why they should conduct some experiments over others, a reason to pursue some lines of research over others.

The sad truth is that the current meta-narrative of science is that the experiments which scientists pursue are most often in the name of corporate profit, not human thriving—and the two are not at all the same thing. Science’s false claims of neutrality: “we’re just doing science!” is the same as technology’s obviously false claims of neutrality: “we’re just building technology!”

Facebook is not neutral technology, and atom bombs are not neutral science.

They are decisions in a direction. And if we do not straighten out why we do science, provide some account for where we need to go with scientific progress, we will end up continuing to blindly create technologies that harm our

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Jan Hoffman, How Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Took Hold in the United States, N.Y. Times (Sept.

23, 2019), www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/health/anti-vaccination-movement-us.html.

Angela Saini, Why Race Science Is on the Rise Again, The Guardian (May 18, 2019), www .theguardian.com/books/2019/may/18/race-science-on-the-rise-angela-saini.

The Age Gap in Religion around the World: 2. Young Adults around the World Are Less Religious by Several Measures, Pew Research Center (June 13, 2018), www.pewforum.org/201 8/06/13/young-adults-around-the-world-are-less-religious-by-several-measures/.

In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion?, Pew Research Center (Apr. 26, 2017), www.pewforum.org/2017/04/26/in-america-does-more-education-equal-less-religion/.

See, e.g., Robert P. Jones, Daniel Cox, Betsy Cooper, & Rachel Lienesch, Exodus: Why Americans Are Leaving the Church and Why They’re Unlikely to Come Back (2016).

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democratic institutions and our long-term chances for survival on a dying planet. In the absence of a well-thought-out reason for our science, a guiding meta-narrative that keeps us alive, the current meta-narrative of our high priests of technology is this: we do whatever we want to, just because we can, hidden behind the propaganda that technology is neutral.

what’s at stake?

Why would I write this book, and why should you read it? Why try to preserve the rule of law in the face of technological change? The answer is that law plays a fundamental role in helping humans adapt to new circumstances.

Humans upgrade their ability to cooperate in new circumstances by upgrading their social software, their language of cooperation, their law. The biggest change in our circumstances right now is technology. Law is the discipline that adapts human systems to technological shifts. If we give up on law, especially now, we’re going to have a very hard time. Put simply, no state that fails to adapt the rule of law to new technology will survive as a liberal democracy.

Law helps us sort the difference between what governments can do and what they actually do. Natural sciences technology, or “hard” technology, has always upset that balance by increasing the range of things we can do. Law must adapt, to protect important social values. Consider the development of the sword or spear: with basic technology, we can deprive each other of life and limb. Thus law adapted rules to determine when this use of technology was considered by society to be just (too often, in a war) or unjust (a private murder). The development of a new technology is not enough. We must develop social technology: norms and rules surrounding its use that will help us survive and thrive. Unfortunately, we have moved into something dangerously close to a post-legal era, in which what we can do is very nearly equated with what we should do. Take, for example, the surveillance apparatus used by most modern surveillance states. Law does not seriously constrain states’ snooping on their citizens, even when the citizenry is in broad agreement that it should.15 The ability to snoop is equated with its legality. This is a fundamental failure of law.

We also need a theory by which law can respond to technology because technology is increasingly putting law directly under attack. Technologies 15

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See Jonathan Turley, It’s Too Easy for the Government to Invade Privacy in Name of Security, The Hill (Nov. 30, 2017), https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/362500-its-too-easy-for-thegovernment-to-invade-privacy-in-name-of-security.

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have always caused new forms of politics. The development of agriculture shifted our form of life from herding and hunting to settled life and politics in the same way that the railroad changed the nature of cities and urbanization.

Politics is often not pretty, but from its manure springs some greenery of democracy. The difficulty is that if technology poisons the ground, we’ll get twisted fruit. If technology is permitted to dominate politics, and if politicians wish to do away with the rule of law, we will see the emergence of very bad societies. If we do not wish authoritarian nationalism to be the dominant political form of the twenty-first century, we are going to have to understand how to help the rule of law survive technological change.

law and language We can no longer afford to see law as a series of dry and dusty legal codes that, in the face of evolving technology, are already obsolete by the time the laws are printed. That vision of law is just going to have to go. We must learn to see the discipline of law as a method for adapting to technological change, not a series of presently existing rules. We must attend to change in law, rather than its present state. It’s like driving a car: many people look at the speedometer to see how fast they are going. That’s looking at the law as it is now. But we need to be looking at how fast we are accelerating. That’s a different way to look at law, and one that is necessary if law is to keep pace with technology.

In order to accelerate law, we need to understand how law works—what fuel it runs on. Law runs on language. That language is used to create cooperative fictions like statutes, kingdoms, money, days of the week, contracts, and torts, but those are only snapshots of what law is.16 Law is a series of made-up systems, rules, norms—made up by people trying to cooperate. It is a cooperative fiction created by groups of humans to help them coordinate their actions at scale. Law bubbles up between us; when we interact with each other, we build rules and norms about relationships and resources. These rules and norms expand outward and interact with others, colliding and collaborating. Over time and across geography, rules and norms spread from relationships to communities to jurisdictions and become law.

Language is humans’ superpower. Humans took over the planet because they stopped dealing with threats on an evolutionary scale and started solving problems collectively, through language, by upgrading their cultural and linguistic software instead of waiting for a genetic evolutionary upgrade.

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Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015).

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Language is why humans can cooperate in numbers far greater than bees or ants.

Changing our language to develop cooperative symbols like the State of California or the Rule of Law, and cooperative fictions like “all [people] are created equal” or “next Tuesday” help us follow the laws of the State of California, to treat people decently under the law, and to make it to a meeting next Tuesday. We have adapted our language to stay ahead of our shifting technological circumstances since well before nomads became farmers, farmers became town dwellers, town dwellers organized into nations, and so on, and so on. Law is the cooperative fiction that lets us live together productively under conditions of constantly changing technological context.

If anything can help stabilize our life together in the face of rampant technological change, it is our superpower.

Developing law requires developing language. So we need a clear idea of what language is, what it does, how it changes, and where it comes from.

Language comes from use by a linguistic community located in a context.

This apparently simple statement underlies a revolution in how we think about language, rules, and law. This revolution is badly needed. For the moment, law as a discipline has surrendered its essential function—the crafting of beautiful cooperative fictions like “all [people] are created equal”17—to become a not particularly useful subbranch of economics and empirical survey studies, as I will elaborate in Chapter 6. There is nothing wrong with the tools of math or microscope, but the legal profession and legal theorists have badly lost their way. They cannot create new and generous cooperative fictions that will help us coordinate in the face of technological change, because they think that their job is to be second-rate economists or laboratory scientists. Understanding the origins and role of language and law in human cooperation and survival may help law as a discipline reclaim its soul.

a conversational method Law should be understood as a system for adapting human social technology to human physical technology. Law runs on language, and it upgrades according to the rules of language. So as we discuss those rules and the role they play in the development of law, I would like to do so at the same time.

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Beautiful despite the multiple obvious problems in the original expression. I use “all people” to show that our foundational norms must continue to be updated, that the original expression of a foundational norm cannot be allowed to become a trap.

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My aim is for this book to be an example of this method. This book tries to develop language we can use to talk about how to develop the kind of language (law) that will help us survive the future. I will try to state my understanding of how things are and how things ought to be straightforwardly. It is important to me to be clear enough to be understood where I am right, and identifiably wrong where I am wrong. But even if stated forcefully, everything I say here is to be taken provisionally, as an introduction to a conversation. That is because a book is only half a conversation. A book is only paper until read, and the reader brings more than half the meaning to the table. If I mean to say—as I do mean to say—that life-giving language arises from community and context, then I must admit that I am missing your half of the conversation. I wish that this book were closer in form to a conversation, such that you could respond to what I say here, and I could accept your criticism, and we could develop more precise and better language for talking about the issue. That is how we would make progress.

As for my part of the conversation: I’m a lawyer and the William D. Bain Family Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law, trained at the University of Chicago, with experience in both the law-andeconomics and behavioral economics traditions. I have worked in the technology sector while helping to found the language-teaching startup Rosetta Stone. I also have extensive research experience as a legal academic writing about technology subjects, including online communities, the future of property, online currencies, and cryptocurrencies, virtual worlds, mixed and augmented reality, and a host of other technology issues. My prior book showed how norms of private property have been subverted by software developers: you don’t really own or control Alexa. For several years I worked with the intelligence community on a range of cutting-edge technology issues and served as privacy and civil liberties counsel for intelligence community studies in online communities. My recent work has focused heavily on privacy and new applications of cryptocurrencies and decentralized ledger technology.

I conducted the research for this book in the United States; Munich, Germany; and Florence, Italy, under generous invitations from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich and the European University Institute in Florence.

My method in this book is to start a conversation about the nature of law, technology, and language that will help us better understand the problems we face as we try to develop social rules that keep a grip on a fast-changing technological environment. That environment is changing us, and how we interact, and we have the opportunity to shape it in turn. The problem is a hard one, and goes to the root of what law and language are. So in this book you will

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hear from futurists, computer scientists, legal theorists, economists, historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers of language, philosophers of science, and even the occasional theologian: the set of people who have been occupied with the question of how we should live together.

And although this book is only one half of the conversation, you will have the benefit of having both my voice and yours in your head as you read. So when you disagree with something written here—and you will—it might be useful for you to think to yourself, “the author would probably agree with me. How can my idea build on or improve what was written here?” In short, the inevitable questions and challenges that will arise in your mind as you read these pages are not necessarily a rejection of this book, its contents, or its method, but rather are examples and critically important products of that method.

introducing social technology So, I believe that law can keep up. But the kind of law that can keep up will be something that is barely recognizable to us now as law. Once we shift our frame of reference for thinking about law, we can see something fairly simple.

Law can keep up with technology because law is technology: social technology, but technology nonetheless.

Let me explain. For much of our culture (this definition is not universal, and I will offer better definitions later), technology is the practical implementation of observation-based science,18 a certain method of cognition given its current form in the early part of the twentieth century (with Karl Popper’s development of falsifiability),19 yet one dating back to the ancient Greeks. For some kinds of science, primarily related to what we traditionally understand as hard technology20—physics, electronics, computation, and the like—we use formal modeling and experiments to isolate certain elements of human behavior the way we isolate certain elements of physical interaction, and that is both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that in an experimental mode, we strip the world down to just one thing that we are trying to test. We then jiggle the input and see if it creates any identifiable corresponding jiggle in the outputs of our system. For example, if I want to know whether eating 18

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Technology, Oxford English Dictionary (2018) (defining technology as the “application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes”).

See Karl Popper, Chapter 4: Falsifiability, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery 57–73 (Karl Popper et al. trans., 1983).

See generally Zhouying Jin, Global Technological Change: From Hard Technology to Soft Technology 19–76 (Kelvin Willoughby & Ying Bai trans., 2nd ed., 2011).

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more rich food increases my weight, I might eat more of it for a couple of months and see if I gain weight, then eat less of it and see if I lose weight. If jiggling the input causes a detectable corresponding jiggle in the output, I might call my experiment a success.

That’s the kind of science we’re used to. But we need to acknowledge that there is a different kind of observation-based science which is equally as valid and in fact dominant in the social sciences (as a result of a fork in the scientific road occasioned by Ludwig Wittgenstein around the middle of the twentieth century—more on this later).21 The difficulty is that some problems are very difficult to observe because their scale is greater than our measuring tools.

Human history is one of the more important of these large observational problems, because by definition we didn’t develop certain analytic tools until later in our history. There are two components to this. First, every experiment is a stripped-down model of the world, a friction-free universe whose essential theoretical characteristic is that it is absolutely nothing like the real thing. That is, of course, an enormous advantage to helping determine whether one jiggle creates another. But simplifying the world that way means that experimental results are extremely limited in terms of what they can tell us about practical implementation. Or as the old canard puts it, “in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”22 What this means is that the simpler the experimental universe is, the clearer the results. Conversely, however, the simpler the universe of the experiment is, the less likely it is to give us immediately practical and useful outputs. For practicality, we need something beyond experiments. We need trial and error, we need actual practical implementation that succeeds or fails in the real world over long periods of time.

More than that: consider looking at a book, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and trying to explain to a Martian what it is. There is an answer: it’s a novel about magical children in danger that fits with the bildungsroman tradition transposed into the English public school setting— a fairly common genre. But to say those—true—things, you can’t use a laboratory, as chemists do, or a logical system, as mathematicians do. You have to interpret culture using tools built by culture. You have to explicate words using other words.

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See Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973).

This statement is often erroneously attributed to Yogi Berra. See, e.g., Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder 213 (2012). In reality, it is an anonymous remark overheard at a conference on computer science, first recorded in Walter J. Savitch, Pascal: An Introduction to the Art and Science of Programming 507 (1984).

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That is closer to what history and law are. There, we use observation-based science, but we are observing one massive and messy field experiment and attempting to extract information from it, rather than stripping the world down to the one thing we are trying to study. And more: we are trying to make sense of the narrative of history, culture, law, and language. We are analyzing the cooperative fictive tools we use to work together using other tools also made of language.

Of course, the approach of history and law has its drawbacks. We can never be sure whether the lessons we are learning from law and history are true. We do not have a chance to go back and run a given battle, or a given parliamentary session, or a given fad or famine again, to see if doing things differently would have a different result. But the advantage of the approach taken by history and law is that the findings are pretty robust. We adopt a certain way of running our society until another way comes along that better addresses the challenges we face. (Like evolution, our science and law does not necessarily get “better” or “worse,” it simply addresses or fails in the face of adversely selecting circumstances.23) We have a lot of bad laws, and we can do much better, but each law and each legal system has the distinct advantage of having existed within the real world. It is the product of a long process of trial, error, and social competition.

What I want to dispel at the outset is the idea that there is a “real” technology or science, and that disciplines like history and law are somehow either not technology or not science. In particular, if technology as we traditionally understand it is the practical implementation of scientific truth, then law is also the business end, the practical implementation, of social, economic, and psychological truths.

This then leads to a fundamental vocabulary word for this book. Social technology is the practical implementation of rules and norms through human social systems. Families are social technology. Marriage is a social technology. Summer vacations are social technology. Political parties are social technology. Nation-states are social technology. Money is social technology. What binds these together is that they are practical implementations of core insights about groups, individual human psychology, resource allocation, hierarchy of human needs, and so on. They are no less technology for being practical implementations of observations on human wetware and through human social networks than would be hard implementations through silicon chips, forged steel, or smokestacksporting factories.

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Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 205 (1996).

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As Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem writes, “Technology is the domain of problems posed and the methods of solving them.”24 How we ought to live together is clearly one such problem, and the rule of law is a method for solving it. Law is clearly a technology—a social technology, made up of cooperative fictions and symbols in language, but no less a technology for all that. What is common here is the practical attempt to better human life through implementation of our best guesses about how to respond to what we observe.

Here’s an example of what I mean. In his book Industries of the Future, former State Department tech advisor Alec Ross compares Ripple, one of the more prominent examples of a cryptocurrency-facilitated money exchange network, to hawala, a family-based social exchange system ranging from the Middle East to northern Africa and some parts of India.25 In Ripple’s system, businesses transfer value through one another to avoid the fees and costs of the banking system.26 Where needed, Ripple uses a cryptocurrency, XRP, to bridge gaps and connect systems.27 Similarly, hawala effects money transfer by paying one member of the network, a hawaladar, who then contacts another member in another country and instructs him to pay out the money.28 Notably, the system works entirely by trust: the honor of the hawaladar who receives money is the only bond that secures the right to payment by the hawaladar who pays the money out.29 So which network of trust is the technological one, the one built on a consensus ledger and cryptography, or the one built on honor (itself a social technology), family (same), and social connection?

Nor can we say that we can distinguish between these systems because a system made out of humans is always more primitive and less efficient than a system made out of processors. Consider the example of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. In the Mechanical Turk’s system, a large network of humans performs tasks that computers cannot.30 Mechanical Turk is used 24 25 26

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Stanislaw Lem, Imaginary Magnitude 135 (Houghton Mifflin 2012).

Alec Ross, The Industries of the Future 118–19 (Simon and Schuster 2016).

See Real-Time Cross Border Payments for Banks, Ripple, https://ripple.com/use-cases/banks/ (using infographics to illustrate the reduced transaction costs for banks that use the Ripple Net for cross-border transactions).

Alec Ross, The Industries of the Future 119 (Simon and Schuster 2016); see also XRP, Ripple, https://ripple.com/xrp/ (2018).

See Mohammed El-Qorchi, The Hawala System, 39:4 Finance and Development n.p.

(2002) (explaining the process of hawala in detail).

Id. (Hawaladars maintain ledgers to track transactions and debts, which can be settled in cash, goods, or services).

See Amazon Mechanical Turk, MTurk, www.mturk.com/.

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for surveys, businesses seeking a list of all sushi restaurants in Canton, Ohio, people seeking to identify a specific object in a photograph, and so on.31 Crowdsourcing is a faster way to solve many tasks than computation. That crowdsourcing has become possible through technology does not change the fact that crowdsourcing itself is largely social technology.

The upshot of all of this: I suspect that the idea of social technology (which is itself, of course, a small piece of social technology) will help us understand that we can evolve and update social tech to handle the social problems that traditional hard technology poses. Or to put it bluntly, the question of whether law can keep up with technology is resolved when we understand that law is technology.

can we succeed?

We can succeed, but we have to move quickly and understand clearly what we are doing. We are not out of time to make changes to help the rule of law adapt to new technologies, but we are out of time to begin.

Already, elections are being tipped by mass robotic social engineering,32 Twitter drives international policy,33 and surveillance states track their citizens’ locations and internet traffic in massive cross-referencing databases.34 There is no sign that the pace of technological change will slow. In fact, if progress in miniaturization,35 sensor profusion,36 31 32

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Id. See, e.g., Scott Shane, The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election, NY Times (Sep. 7, 2017), www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitterelection.html.

See, e.g., Krishnadev Calamur, The International Incidents Sparked by Trump’s Twitter Feed in 2017, The Atlantic (Dec. 19, 2017), www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/12/tru mp-tweets-foreign-policy/547892/.

See, e.g., Paul Mozur, Looking through the Eyes of China’s Surveillance State, N.Y. Times (July 16, 2018), www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/technology/china-surveillance-state.html.

See, e.g., John Markoff, IBM Scientists Find New Way to Shrink Transistors, N.Y. Times (Oct. 1, 2015), www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/science/ibm-scientists-find-new-way-to-shrinktransistors.html; Jennifer Chu, Miniaturizing the Brain of a Drone, MIT News (July 11, 2017), http://news.mit.edu/2017/miniaturizing-brain-smart-drones-0712?utm_campaign=Wee kly%20Newsletters&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz9yIyIZQfpouXbyCXm3lrFk2QOdVN22Fkvx55efgHsiwXfUYBedb7t8m5vmM046k_uOlCld. See, e.g., Sensor Market Growth Is Driven by Proliferation of Smart Homes, MarketWatch (July 19, 2019), www.marketwatch.com/press-release/sensor-market-growth-is-driven-byproliferation-of-smart-homes-2019–07-19; Richard Nabors, Integrated Sensors: The Critical Element in Future Complex Environment Warfare, Army: Mad Scientist Laboratory, https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/46-integrated-sensors-the-critical-element-in-future -complex-environment-warfare/; Sensor Market Is Projected to Reach USD 266.27 Billion by 2023, MarketWatch (Aug. 13, 2018), www.marketwatch.com/press-release/sensor-market-is-

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genomics,37 artificial intelligence,38 DIY biology,39 and automation40 continues apace, we will see increasing inability to govern according to the rule of law—unless we do something about it.

Now is the time to use the human superpower—language—that we have always used to update our social software to face new challenges. We have done this before, as nomads adapting to agriculture, as family-based feudal holdings adapting to modern nation-states, as we adapted to the shifts from agrarian to industrial, and from industrial to information economies. (Indeed, we had to invent each of those words’ current meanings so the previous sentence would make sense!) We will adapt to the future the way we always have: by coming up with new ways to talk about things so we can have the conversations we need to have. And the most important conversation we can have is a conversation about conversations, about how to talk about what we need to talk about. Law is the language of human coordination. Language is how humans update their

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projected-to-reach-usd-26627-billion-by-2023-by-product-type-technology-end-users-demandand-trends-by-forecasts-2018–08-13.

See, e.g., A Brief Guide to Genomics, Nat’l Human Genome Research Inst., www.genome.gov /about-genomics/fact-sheets/A-Brief-Guide-to-Genomics (last updated Aug. 27, 2015); Jackie Drees, AdventHealth to Provide Free DNA Tests to 10,000 Florida Residents for Genomics Study, Becker’s Hospital Review, www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcareinformation-technology/adventhealth-to-provide-free-dna-tests-to-10–000-florida-residents-for -genomics-study.html (July 25, 2019); Major Investment in Genomics Research Will Improve the Lives of Canadians, Genome Canada, www.genomecanada.ca/en/news/major-investmentin-genomics-research-will-improve-the-lives-of-canadians (Feb. 4, 2019).

Rob Matheson, New AI Programming Language Goes Beyond Deep Learning, MIT News (June 26, 2019), http://news.mit.edu/2019/ai-programming-gen-0626; K. K. Rebecca Lai, et al., How A.I. Helped Improve Crowd Counting in Hong Kong Protests, N.Y. Times (July 3, 2019), www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/03/world/asia/hong-kong-protest-crowd-ai.html; Gabe Cohn, AI Art at Christie’s Sells for $432,500, N.Y. Times (Oct. 25, 2018), www .nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold-christies.html.

Alexandra Ossola, These Biohackers Are Creating Open-Source Insulin, Popular Science (Nov. 18, 2015), www.popsci.com/these-biohackers-are-making-open-source-insulin; Catrin Nye, Biohacker: Meet the People “Hacking” Their Bodies, BBC News (Dec. 5, 2018), www.bbc.com/news/tech nology-46442519; Moa Petersen, New Way to Pay: Why Thousands of Swedes Are Deliberately Inserting Themselves with Microchips, Independent (June 27, 2018), www.independent.co.uk /life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/sweden-microchips-contactless-cards-biohackers-dystopianfuture-a8408486.html.

See, e.g., Tom Simonite, Robots Will Take Jobs from Men, the Young, and Minorities, Wired (Jan. 24, 2019), www.wired.com/story/robots-will-take-jobs-from-men-young-minorities/?ver so=true; Adam Rogers, Welcome to Checkout-Free Retail. Don’t Mind All the Cameras, Wired (Aug. 28, 2018), www.wired.com/story/zippin-cashier-free-retail-store/?verso=true; Mattie Milner & Stephen Rice, Robotic Health Care Is Coming to a Hospital Near You, The Conversation (May 7, 2019), https://theconversation.com/robotic-health-care-iscoming-to-a-hospital-near-you-116236.

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social software through symbol and cooperative fiction. Learning how we create and innovate language, and especially creating a vocabulary and way of talking about doing that, is going to be our best bet for activating our human superpower, and surviving the challenges of the future together. That is what this book is about. So let’s talk.

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Seven Deadly Economic Sins Obstacles to Prosperity and Happiness Every Citizen Should Know James R. Otteson April 2021 9781108843379 Hardback $27.95 / £18.99

You have heard of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Each is a natural human weakness that impedes happiness.

In addition to these vices, however, there are economic sins as well. And they, too, wreak havoc on our lives and in society. They can seem intuitively compelling, yet they lead to waste, loss, and forgone prosperity. In this thoughtful and compelling book, James Otteson tells the story of seven central economic fallacies, explaining why they are fallacies, why believing in them leads to mistakes and loss, and how exorcizing them from our thinking can help us avoid costly errors and enable us to live in peace and prosperity.

James R. Otteson is the John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (2002), Actual Ethics (2006), The End of Socialism (2014), and Honorable Business (2019).

Advance praise ‘James Otteson is not just a scholar of markets, he is their Mozart. In this compelling tour, Otteson lays out economic principles the way Mozart laid out a sonata. Otteson orders and presents key principles in a fashion any American can understand and appreciate.’

Amity Shlaes, author of Great Society

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Introduction Why Care About Economics?

Even if you could not name them all, you have probably heard of the Seven Deadly Sins. Here is the standard list: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Those seven are not the only sins there are, but because we are so susceptible to them – seemingly almost psychologically primed to be seduced by them – and yet they lead to so much harm in both individual lives and in society, they are wisely considered among the most important things we all need to beware. One need not be a Christian, or a subscriber to any particular faith at all, to see how easily we can succumb to them, how much mischief they can and do create in our lives, how beneficial it would be to us if we could resist them, and yet how much effort it takes to resist them. Just when we might think we have mastered one, we discover we are indulging others, with exactly the negative consequences we would predict. There is, unfortunately, no such thing as conquering them once and for all. They continue to recur, often when we least expect it, and when they do, they can seem so alluring, so self-promoting and even emotionally satisfying, that it is only after the fact that we might look back on our behavior and feel regret, embarrassment, even shame. In the heat of the moment, however, it can be a different story.

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seven deadly economic sins There are, however, central deadly economic sins as well. That is what this book is about. Committing these economic sins might not prevent you from getting into heaven, but what they can do is, like their sinful counterparts, wreak havoc – in our private lives as individuals and in our communities when they find their way into public policies.

They are “deadly” mistakes in economic reasoning to which we seem psychologically susceptible and that can seem intuitively compelling, but, when viewed in the cool, objective light of dispassionate analysis, reveal themselves to lead to negative outcomes like waste, loss, and forgone prosperity. Because these can have real, if unintended and perhaps surprising, effects in people’s lives, however, understanding both that and why they are fallacies is crucial.

In the chapters that follow, I lay out what I contend are seven central economic fallacies. I explain why they are fallacies, why believing in them leads to mistakes and loss, and how exorcizing them from our economic thinking can help us avoid costly errors and enable positive benefit. The book is designed not so much for economists or others who are already trained in or expert at economics – though they may be interested to see what a philosopher makes of their discipline – but, rather, for the educated reader who is concerned about economic matters and who wants to understand how economics can help us make better decisions in our private lives and in our public policies. It is aimed, in other words, at the educated citizen. Of course, there are many considerations that should go into deciding how, for example, to vote – everything from our moral values to prudential concerns to strategic reasoning. Economics cannot decide all of that. Even 2

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introduction a firm understanding of the basics of economics will not tell you which party or candidate to support. But economics can help us understand how to evaluate the likely consequences of proposed policies; it can help us understand how prosperity is generated, and what endangers it; and it can help us see when a policy proposal that sounds good might not in fact be all that it is cracked up to be – as happens, alas, all too often. It can help us become not just better-informed voters but better reasoners about voting, and hence better citizens.

The book is based on the assumption that we all want a just and humane society – that, wherever we are on the political or economic spectrum, we all want a society whose public institutions protect justice and in which people are able to construct for themselves lives of meaning, purpose, and happiness. My argument will be that increasing prosperity – not just wealth, but widespread and increasing opportunity for flourishing lives – is a necessary prerequisite of a life worth leading and of public institutions worth supporting.

Economics can help us achieve prosperity, even if it cannot tell us exactly what we should do with our prosperity. And economics can highlight several mistakes in reasoning that we are prone to make. Exposing those mistakes can enable greater prosperity and thus increase the chances of ever more of us leading genuinely flourishing lives. Or so I will argue.

Why Trust Economics?

I don’t know you, of course, but I would be willing to bet that you have lots of opinions about economics. Some of your 3

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seven deadly economic sins opinions you may hold strongly, and some of them you may believe are all but self-evident. That is true for most of us, including me. When you hear the word “socialism,” for example, you may think of Scandinavian countries like Sweden or Norway, and thus attach positive associations to the term; or you may think of the former Soviet Union or contemporary Venezuela, and thus conjure negative thoughts. And whichever way your thoughts incline, you probably think the other side is making some clear mistake.

Curiously, however, many of us who have strong beliefs about economics have not had any training in economics. And consider our leading national politicians, or the people who pass laws or enact regulations on economic, banking, financial, or business institutions. The disheartening news is that most of them have not studied economics either.

If most of us do not know much about the discipline of economics, and do not pay much (or any) attention to economists, why do we nevertheless have such strong economic opinions?

Part of the explanation is probably the general propensity we have to overestimate our knowledge. People who know little about Israel and Palestine may nevertheless have strong opinions about what to do regarding their conflicts; people who know little about medicine have strong opinions about vaccines or about who has and how to treat ADHD or depression; and so on. And many of us assume that because we know something well – our particular vocation or area of expertise, for example – then our opinions in other areas can be trusted as well. It is probably safe to say, however, that many (most?) of the people who have strong opinions about, 4

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introduction say, whether we should raise the legal minimum wage have not reviewed the economic studies about it. Similarly with our opinions about sweatshops, “fair” vs. free trade, nationalization of healthcare, whether immigration is a net positive or not, and so on. Many of us have opinions about these and other economic matters, and we may vote in part on the basis of these opinions, but without knowing what economics has to say about them we are not in the best position to know whether our opinions are reliable or trustworthy.

We should not necessarily judge ourselves negatively, however, for not knowing about these matters. After all, we are all busy with other things that are much more consequential in our actual, everyday lives. Most of us simply do not have the time, for example, to read the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (has anyone actually read all 11,000-plus pages of it?).

This implicates one of the ideas we will discuss in the chapters that follow, namely, opportunity cost: before deciding to spend any of our resources (including our time) on anything, we should think about what we are giving up to do so. Consider: the average person can read approximately half a page per minute; at that rate, it would take some 367 hours to read the ACA. If you were to read for eight straight hours a day, it would take you 46 days, or about nine work weeks, to read it. Is it worth it? Ask yourself what else you might do with those 46 days. And then ask yourself what it would gain you to have read it. You would know what’s in it, but, to be honest, so what? As a single individual person, you could have had approximately zero effect on whether it passed – so why bother? And that is just one law; what about the thousands of others in effect and under consideration by just the federal 5

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seven deadly economic sins government, not to mention those in effect or under consideration by state and local governments, and not to mention the tens of thousands of pages of federal, state, and local regulations and proposed regulations. Given the value to you of whatever else you could do, devoting your scarce time to reading those actual and proposed statutes, bills, and regulations would almost certainly not be worth it. Similarly with the literature on, say, the minimum wage. There are numerous empirical studies of various aspects and cases related to mandatory minimum wages: who, other than a trained economist who works in the field, should spend the time required to master them?

There is also, however, as paradoxical as it might sound, such a thing as rational ignorance – the idea that it is actually rational to remain ignorant of indefinitely many things. I do not know how satellite TV works, for example, or how to do a Tommy John surgery or how to file an amicus brief. Thankfully, however, I don’t need to: there are others who do know those things, which relieves me of the burden of learning and frees me to learn about other things that relate more closely to what I actually do. If I were a satellite engineer or an orthopedic surgeon or an attorney, then I would know about the things concerned with what I did – but then I still would not know about the other things, or about the seventeenth-century Leveller movement or eighteenth-century British political economy (which I do know something about). Not having to know those other things enables me to focus my attention on a narrower range of things that connects more closely with my own interests and my own comparative advantage.

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introduction Comparative advantage is another concept we will discuss. The idea is that, although I might be able to be a satellite engineer if I spent a lot of time and energy training myself in the field, even if by some miracle I could be a better satellite engineer than at least some of the current satellite engineers, I probably could not be better by a sufficiently large margin to justify giving up what I already do and am already good at. So, the satellite engineer and I are probably both doing what we should be doing, that is, what enables each of us to contribute the value to society that we respectively can.

Just as business benefits from division of labor, then, so does knowledge. It is rational for each of us to specialize because it enables us to increase the output of whatever we work on.

I could not write this book if I also had to make the word processing software I am using or if I also had to generate the electricity I am using; and if software engineers or electricity plant workers had to develop the disciplines of philosophy and economics on their own, they would not be able to make our computers work. This is true for knowledge as well. The geneticist relies on the chemist, the chemist relies on the physicist, the medical researcher relies on the biologist, the engineer relies on the mathematician, and so on. If any of them had to be experts in all those fields, they would not have any time or opportunity to make the contributions to their own fields that they are actually capable of. But they can make those contributions if others are taking care of the other things for them. Thus, everyone benefits from division of labor – yet another claim of economics we will explore.

There is a lot that economists do not know, but there are some things that economists have been able to 7

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seven deadly economic sins figure out. Because so much of our lives depends on economic policy and because so many of the decisions we make, both individually and in the public realm, have economic implications, we should pay attention to what economics can teach us. It is a discipline, a field of inquiry, with its own specialties and subspecialties, and no one could – or should: remember rational ignorance! – become a master of all of it. But some of the principles of economics would, if more widely understood and appreciated, help us make not only better decisions in our own individual lives but also make better social and public decisions about laws, regulations, and policies. If only those of us who are not trained economists could find a ready way to learn some core economic fundamentals without having to go back to school and major in economics.

Plan of the Work That is where this book aims to help. It presents several principles of economics, focusing on areas where their insights can be expressed without technical jargon and where exposure of the fallacies can enable significant improvement in both individual and public life. So, it largely avoids esoteric topics, specialized discussions, and – you may be relieved to learn – where math is required. I will argue that there is a series of economic fallacies that hinder our thought and, unfortunately, inform our policy. Getting rid of them will enable far better decision-making in our individual lives, as well as far better public policy. It may also help us to focus our energies on areas where we can contribute the most value to 8

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introduction ourselves and to society – and to have public institutions that reward us for doing so.

The book has seven main chapters, each addressing a commonly held economic belief or set of beliefs that I will argue are in fact fallacies. Here is the list.

Chapter 1 addresses the “Wealth Is Zero-Sum Fallacy,” or the idea that the only way a person or group can get wealthy is by impoverishing some other person or group.

In fact, in a market-based commercial society, wealth is positive-sum, meaning that both (or all) parties to mutually voluntary transactions benefit. By contrast, gaining wealth through what we will call extraction is indeed zero-sum, or even negative-sum; gaining wealth through what we will call cooperation, however, is positive-sum and win–win. This chapter also addresses the worry that the rich in a commercial society might hoard, thereby preventing others from benefiting as much as they otherwise might. At the end of the book, I provide a list of references and suggestions for further reading for Chapter 1 and all the other chapters.

Chapter 2 addresses the “Good Is Good Enough Fallacy,” or the idea that if some proposed course of action (or allocation of resources) would, or at least could, lead to a good outcome, then we should therefore do it. In fact, examining the potential good that would ensue from a proposal is only part of the question; the other part is what we would have to give up to do it. Because all actions and allocations involve tradeoffs, we need to estimate the opportunity cost and compare it to the prospective benefit, and then consider moving forward only if the likely proposed benefit outweighs all likely costs, including opportunity cost. That is 9

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seven deadly economic sins easier said than done, however, and the implications of considering opportunity cost are surprisingly far-reaching.

Chapter 3 addresses what we will call the “Great Mind Fallacy,” or the idea that there is some person or group that possesses the relevant knowledge to know how others should allocate their scarce time or treasure – and is incentivized and motivated to get it right. In fact, third parties, even expert third parties, are typically not in possession of the detailed personal knowledge required to know how other individuals should allocate their resources. They may know averages or trends based on aggregated data, but because they do not know you or your situation, they typically cannot know what is right for you to do. They are also often incentivized in ways that do not motivate them to get things right.

Chapter 4 addresses the “Progress Is Inevitable Fallacy,” or the idea that innovation, increasing wealth, and economic progress are natural or inevitable. In fact, economic progress has occurred only very recently in human history, and it is dependent on fairly specific – and historically rare – cultural norms and institutional arrangements. It is thus fragile and delicate, and could easily be slowed, stopped, or even reversed.

Chapter 5 addresses the “Economics Is Amoral Fallacy,” or the idea that economic calculation is cold and inhumane, proceeding without regard for human beings or the real welfare and interests of those whose lives it affects. In fact, the principles of economic reasoning not only incorporate real human interests and values, including moral values, but they might even be capable of illuminating the best ways to address and realize them.

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introduction Chapter 6 addresses the “We Should Be Equal Fallacy,” or the idea that inequalities in income or wealth are necessarily bad or worrisome and thus should necessarily be reduced. In fact, people’s differing abilities, skills, interests, and values should be expected to lead to differential levels of material wealth. Moreover, because they can enable people to complement one another, they can play an important role in enabling and encouraging cooperative mutual benefit. There is one conception of equality, however – what I will call equal moral agency – that we should support and that our public institutions should recognize and protect.

Chapter 7 addresses the “Markets Are Perfect Fallacy,” or the idea that commerce and markets can solve all problems. In fact, markets face several challenges, including collective action problems and negative externalities, and there are some areas of human life – in families, for example – where market features like private property rights, competition, and negotiation are inappropriate. So, markets cannot solve all problems, and they introduce their own peculiar kinds of problems. Markets are good at addressing some kinds of problems, however, so the proper way to evaluate them is by examining them objectively, warts and all, and seeing how they stack up against actually available alternatives.

The last chapter is the Conclusion, which offers an argument for the importance of privacy – and respect for privacy – for treating others as persons of dignity and for recognizing them as moral agents equal in this respect to us.

It addresses what I call the “I Am the World Fallacy” (a bonus eighth fallacy!), or the idea that my values, 11

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seven deadly economic sins preferences, and tolerances are correct not only for me but also for others as well. In fact, each person is not only precious and valuable but unique, and the proper signature of choices one person should make might well apply to no others. Each of us therefore needs a private realm in which to develop his or her unique identity, and we should respect others’ expression of their identities in the same way that we want others to respect ours. Such respect reflects a moral imperative arising from individuals’ dignity as equal moral agents but can also lead to economic growth, vitality, and prosperity.

Finally, in a brief postscript, I indicate one important limitation of my discussion of economic fallacies, connected with my reliance on the perhaps controversial moral principle of equal moral agency. I close with a few summarizing words about why I think getting the fundamentals of economics right is so important.

As I shall try to show, the economic fallacies discussed in the following chapters have proven not only harmful but persistent. I have framed them around fallacies that “every citizen should know,” but the purpose in exposing them is not only to enable better voting. As I shall also try to show, belief in the fallacies can also lead to bad decisions in our private lives – according to our own considered values.

Economics offers a powerful set of analytical and decisionmaking tools. We must use our values, including especially our moral values, to point them in the right direction, as it were, but if we ignore or fail to use them, we open ourselves up to all manner of needless, even if well-intentioned, mistakes. We will never be able to make all decisions perfectly, of 12

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introduction course, and no set of public institutions will ever be perfect.

What we can do, however, is avoid at least some central mistakes, and thus what we can hope for is improvement, if not perfection. In this, economics can help. But we have to get it right.

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The First Wave Why the Coronavirus Was Fought So Differently Across the Globe Peter Baldwin

March 2021 9781316518335 Hardback c. $24.99 / c. £20.00

COVID-19 is the biggest public health and economic disaster of our time. It has posed the same threat across the globe, yet countries have responded very differently and some have clearly fared much better than others. Peter Baldwin uncovers the reasons why in this definitive account of the global politics of pandemic. He shows that how nations responded depended above all on the political tools available – how firmly could the authorities order citizens’ lives and how willingly would they be obeyed? In Asia, nations quarantined the infected and their contacts.

In the Americas and Europe they shut down their economies, hoping to squelch the virus’s spread. Others, above all Sweden, responded with a light touch, putting their faith in social consensus over coercion.

Whether citizens would follow their leaders’ requests and how soon they would tire of their demands were crucial to hopes of taming the pandemic.

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.

His previous publications include Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 and The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of TransAtlantic Battle. His latest book, Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History is forthcoming in the fall of 2021.

Advance praise ‘... provides a rich, thoughtful, and accessible account of the various attempts to come to grips with COVID-19 around the world. This book will be at the center of the discussion for years to come.’

Timothy Snyder, author of Our Malady

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CHAPTER 1

Science, Politics, and History Do They Explain the Variety of Approaches to Covid-19?

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ith the coronavirus, the world faced a common problem. Yet it responded in many different ways. Why? That is the fundamental question the response to the epidemic has posed thus far. The scientific understanding of the disease might have varied, thus prompting various approaches to combating it. With some exceptions, addressed in Chapter 6, that has not been true. Despite a common etiological understanding of the virus and its spread, nations marshaled different preventive strategies. What about politics, then? Likely, democracies and autocracies would have approached it differently, on account of their being more or less able to enforce the painful measures to beat back a pandemic in the absence to date of any medical solution. Pandemics certainly posed a fundamentally political issue, requiring zero-sum trade-offs between potentially infected citizens whose convenience and economic well-being had to be sacrificed to spare others. Here too, obvious answers fail us.

Nations’ political complexions and the preventive strategies they applied did not line up in any evident correlations.

Carl von Clausewitz, the early-nineteenth-century Prussian general and philosopher, is best known for his aphorism that war is the continuation of politics by other means. War, in other words, is but another implement in the politician’s toolbox – extreme, but sometimes necessary. A similar continuum connects politics and disease prevention. How we seek to spare ourselves the ravages of 9

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pandemics reflects the assumptions baked into our political culture and the systems that govern us. Pandemics are first-order political events. They differ from other threats, natural or human, in posing an immediate faceoff between the community’s obligation to safeguard itself and individual citizens’ claims not to be sacrificed in the process. In pandemics, citizen and community confront each other head-on. As members, each of us gains from measures to protect our community; as individuals, we may well end up being sacrificed for the common good.

This primordially political situation is itself likely to be colored by the structure of governance in question. How do different political systems handle pandemics? Do some cope better? Autocracies can command their subjects, exacting more obedience and sacrifices than liberal democracies. But, conversely, consensus and buy-in enhance a system’s ability to act. Citizens of democratically legitimated regimes may agree to modify their daily routines, accepting sacrifices for the public good. They may be willing to submit to acts that would otherwise be hard to require or compel.

Montesquieu, the eighteenth-century political philosopher, thought that only despotic governments required severe punishments. In republics (he included monarchies too), citizens were impelled to behave as much by honor, virtue, and fear of disapproval as by force.1 Subjects had to be coerced, but citizens motivated themselves to obey. The nature of law in representative systems also encouraged citizens to obey voluntarily. In republics, laws emerged from decisions that, ultimately, citizens themselves took. By following them, they conformed to what they had mandated their representatives to pass. Breaking the law therefore approximated the self-inflicted harm that Kant and Hegel discussed: thieves whose own right to property was undermined by their refusal to respect that of others, for example.2 Legitimate law was self-imposed and obeying it was self-will.3 Yet, ultimately, even the most despotic regime relies on some consensus. Without a policeman standing behind each subject, people cannot be forced to do what they categorically reject.

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SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND HISTORY

Even Hitler and Stalin had to consider dissenting opinions. The Nazi euthanasia campaign against the disabled and mentally handicapped was called off after resistance, especially from the Catholic Church.4 Protests in today’s China may not portend the regime’s downfall, nor even push it in more democratic directions, but they still require it to abide by informal rules acceptable to its citizens, not merely thrust demands on them.5 Authorities can punish people for disobeying – fining, jailing, or even executing them. Fines and prison are indirect techniques of compulsion. Someone willing to put up with them may decide to pay the price of disobedience. Fines can accumulate to the point where they cause bankruptcy, but that is their outer limit – as is a life sentence in jail. Indeed, the spectacle of multiple and concurrent life sentences highlights the inability of mere prison sometimes to render justice.

It is much more difficult to compel specific behaviors.

Threatened with execution for his belief about planetary movements, Galileo saved himself by mouthing assent to heliocentrism, but it seems unlikely he changed his mind.6 Where vaccination is mandatory, as in most developed nations, citizens have been subjected to the needle by force. Today, such direct methods have fallen out of use. Schools can refuse to enroll antivaccinators’ children, and governments may perhaps fine or even jail the parents. Beyond that, they rarely go.

Even states willing to use force have only limited means of compelling behavior. They can directly deduct back taxes or unpaid child support and alimony from bank accounts or paychecks. Property can be encumbered with liens or repossessed to meet obligations. Police can confiscate drivers’ licenses on the spot, putting those who continue on their way even more directly at odds with the law. Schools can be desegregated by semi-military force, clubs forced to admit women on pain of forfeiting their liquor licenses. The draft is obligatory, but a young man who refused it would be jailed or fined, not forcibly enlisted.7 In theory, a conscientious objector could be compelled to serve in the

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military, but – other than setting an example for others – what would be the point? Deserters are often shot, which undermines the goal of mustering forces to defend the homeland in the first place, except by discouraging emulation. Compulsory labor is notoriously inefficient. No one makes an effort on chain gangs.

Slacking and shirking are how subjects resist and undermine compulsion. Working-to-rule is the trade unionist version.

Emergencies and other states of exception raise the degree of intervention citizens will tolerate.8 Cynics have argued that capitalism waltzes from one disaster to the next, deliberately exploiting crises to firm up its grip.9 But even then, the state has not been issued a political blank check. The most autocratic regimes also rely on at least tacit cooperation from their subjects.

Democracies suffer from efficiency envy. They may have broad backing and stable support. But having to keep majorities onboard requires compromise, log-rolling, and trade-offs. That leads to short-term thinking and appeals to the lowest common denominator that undermine decisive action. Mussolini’s on-time trains spurred admiration and envy in the 1920s.10 China’s ability to make massive infrastructural investments without the pork-barrel negotiations required in democracies and to pursue distant strategic goals without continually jollying public opinion along is today a source of wonderment to Western observers. Wanting to build a huge dam, the Chinese have the resources and the political clout to remove the peasants whose homes stand in the way.11 Such considerations are amplified in emergencies. The nuts and bolts of democracy are little conducive to swift or incisive decision-making: consensus, checks and balances, due process, and voting. In emergencies, democratic procedures must paradoxically be temporarily sidestepped in order to preserve democracy.12 What are the implications as different political regimes face pandemics? Which systems have best been able to get their subjects to toe the preventive line? The Chinese government – seeking to paper over initial stumbles – trumpeted its successes with a global publicity campaign.13 The nation’s leader had decisively indicated

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the way. Its medical personnel had made countless sacrifices, building a Great Wall against the virus. And 1.4 billion Chinese themselves, with faith in the party, had – resilient and united – plunged into battle against the epidemic.14 The Saudis, too, congratulated themselves on decisive, early interventions that contrasted their allegedly flexible, humanitarian approach both with the bumbling of next-door Iran and with the hesitations of European leadership.15 Or does consensual buy-in expand the state’s repertoire of tactics and the leverage needed to guide its citizens’ conduct?

Does a free flow of information give more transparent nations a leg up? Standardizing for wealth, one study suggested that democracies have suffered lower mortality rates than non-democracies in pandemics over the past half-century. They also managed to reduce overall mobility, thus cutting transmission, during the coronavirus epidemic.16 Among democracies, the ones led by women seem to have done exceptionally well.17 For the first half of 2020, the West admired the Asian nations that appeared better prepared and able to deal with the coronavirus.

The West was simply not ready to tackle the epidemic with the speed and purpose seen in China, the WHO reported back in March.18 But these effective nations ran a political gamut from autocratic China through technocratic Singapore to democratic South Korea and Taiwan. So factors beyond politics must also have been in play.

These countries had also recently suffered epidemics – SARS and avian flu – and therefore sported an infrastructure of prevention poised to be remobilized. And possibly – despite their political differences – they shared cultural commonalities lacking in the West that enhanced their citizens’ willingness to subordinate their interests to the social good.

A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOMING

How do we explain the gamut of reactions to a comprehensively global problem? Given a common dilemma, one might have

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expected a cohesive array of responses. In fact, how the world’s nations dealt with Covid-19 spanned the spectrum: from precise testing, tracing, and isolating the ill and their contacts, through broad-gauge lockdowns of most citizens and economic sectors, to a moderate encouraging of social distancing and closing some institutions, and – finally – sometimes nothing much at all.

A politically polymorphous array of nations followed each of these various preventive strategies. Little unites them. The targeted quarantiners included China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, as well as New Zealand and Australia. Broad shutdowns were the tactic in Italy, France, Spain, eventually the UK, and most US states, and also in India. A hands-off approach was followed in the “ostrich alliance,” nations led by strong leaders with their heads in the sand, Nicaragua, Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Brazil.19 Yet irreproachably democratic countries were among them too – Iceland, the Netherlands, Uruguay, arguably Japan, and – most unexpectedly – Sweden.20 Within the US, some states resisted lockdown strategies: both Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Arkansas.21 What strategy a nation took could not have been predicted by the nature of its political system. Nor did the world’s surprisingly diverse preventive tactics seem to be determined in any straightforward sense by epidemiology. The science of the coronavirus was uniform the globe over. Indeed, as one of the epidemic’s few silver linings, science’s dissection of the virus underscored the noblest aspects of globalization. Scientific cooperation was immediate, prolific, and worldwide. An astounding amount of scientific information on the coronavirus poured forth almost instantly.

Pandemics had sparked an eruption of discovery before. When the cholera first struck Western Europe in 1832, thousands of books and articles appeared within the year. One contemporary diagnosed a “bibliocholera,” a disease he considered as acutely contagious as its subject.22 Today, economists gently mock the ferocious citation densities of the first generation of research, spreading as it traveled with the internet’s speed and a transmissibility far surpassing that of the disease itself.23 But

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the results spoke for themselves. Two decades ago, the SARS virus took several months to decode; the coronavirus required just weeks.

In earlier pandemics, information had been hamstered away for eventual publication in prestigious scientific journals, locked behind paywalls from all but well-heeled university and other institutional subscribers. The standard process of peer review delayed publication to ensure quality. For research on Ebola and Zika, even publications that had also been preprinted appeared in their official versions on average only three months later – a painful delay in epidemic times.24 In the interim, however, preprint dissemination had become common. Like physics, mathematics, and computer science, some academic fields had long been issuing their most significant publications as preprints.25 Peer review then arrived afterward, as early versions were commented on and revised or withdrawn. Biology and medicine now used the epidemic to take a step towards normalizing preprint publication for their fields. About half of the early work on Covid19 appeared in this way.26 Epidemiological knowledge was now posted on the web, permitting efficient and timely use.27 Preprint sites hosted data and research results almost immediately.28 The downside – as for any not-yet-peer-reviewed information – was that wheat mingled with chaff. Several notable studies had to be retracted.29 Preprint sites therefore began to extend screening beyond rudimentary issues like plagiarism to guard against other problems. Did articles advance misleading and possibly conspiratorial theories (similarities between HIV and SARS-CoV-2) or information that might harm the public health, such as unwarranted claims for cures?30 And scientists proposed a rapid review system for preprints – in effect a turbocharging of the old system.31 Disputes over Covid-19’s etiology were not an issue. In previous epidemics, plain ignorance and then differences of understanding had hampered preventive action. For cholera’s first half-century, there was no agreed-upon etiology. Many considered it contagious,

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much like the plague. Others thought it a filth disease, caused by insalubrious surroundings. Depending on what seemed accurate, to prevent it meant either breaking chains of transmission or cleaning up urban decay. Only when Robert Koch identified the cholera vibrio in 1884 was the precise cause known. Even then, different approaches continued, all equally justified by appeals to the new knowledge – either cleaning up urban filth to hamper the spread of the vibrio or breaking chains of contact for the same purpose.

Decades after Koch’s discovery, German law courts were still hearing evidence whether diseases like typhoid were spread purely by microorganisms or whether contaminated soil too was a necessary precondition.32 Even as late as the 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic, disagreements framed in scientific terms had undermined unified responses to the disease. Science overwhelmingly agreed that the HIV was its cause. Yet disconcertingly many observers remained convinced that AIDS was generated not exclusively by a microorganism, but also by lifestyle or environmental factors.

That spoke to the moralization that invariably accompanies diseases that are both sexually transmitted and associated with habits unlike most citizens’. How was it possible – so ran this logic – that an illness that especially afflicted homosexuals, drug users, and the promiscuous did not somehow stem from their conduct? Even prominent scientists signed on to such reasoning, discounting the HIV as the sole cause, as did some political leaders, most notably Thabo Mbeki, then president of South Africa.33 Even gays succumbed to such reasoning in the years before the HIV emerged as the cause. The accouterments of anal fisting – Crisco, to lubricate, and amyl nitrate, to relax the sphincter – were considered possible causes, as was semen itself.34 Covid-19 suffered less epistemological static. Misinformation abounded, of course. Much was patent nonsense – the idea that the virus spread thanks to 5 G networks.35 Folk medicine offered useless treatments, which threatened to be harmful mainly if believers trusted them alone, ignoring the medical authorities.

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“Immunity boosting” became a selling point even as experts cautioned that – if even possible – it would lead to inflammations and autoimmune diseases.36 For the worried-well-off, Central Europe’s weird and wonderful spa culture served up high-priced nostrums.

Eating slowly, chewing properly and salivating, avoiding raw food in the evenings – all served to strengthen the immune system and prevent Covid-19, the quack Professor Doktors at Vivamayr in the Austrian Alps assured their clients.37 Some political leaders, too, decided to throw their weight behind pet cures of little use. Iran’s supreme leader touted herbal remedies, as did Andry Rajoelina, president of Madagascar. Alpha Condé, president of Guinea, recommended hot water and inhalation of menthol, Mike Sonko, Nairobi’s governor, Hennessy cognac.38 Notoriously, President Trump extolled the alleged virtues of two anti-malarial drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. He had been tipped off to them via a post by Teslamanufacturer and Mars-enthusiast Elon Musk.39 Brazil’s president, Bolsonaro, jumped on the bandwagon too. French president Macron dignified Didier Raoult, an off-piste French clinician whose research had pointed to the supposed benefits of hydroxychloroquine, with a presidential visit to Marseilles.40 The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was not to be outdone with a campaign for avigan, an anti-viral with potentially severe side effects and an effectiveness for Covid-19 that has yet to be demonstrated.41 From under every upended rock, cranks swarmed forth, as apparently they must whenever illness is the topic.42 Most knotty, as we will see later, were the antivaxxers, who broached the threat that, even with a vaccine, they would shirk herd immunity.

But most other advice on the coronavirus at least posed no immediate dangers. The worried were counseled to drink water frequently, for example, thus washing the virus from the throat into the stomach where supposedly it did no harm.43 Indonesians, who usually prize pale skin, began sunbathing en masse, hoping that sunlight killed the virus.44 Later, when the virus really started

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to gnaw, sadder stories emerged – Bolivians consuming bleach in the absence of much else to turn to, Peruvians harming themselves with a cornucopia of homemade nostrums.45 More discouraging were the religious leaders whose claims that faith alone was sufficient protection deluded their followers into letting down their guard while crowding together. Tanzania’s president kept his nation open, claiming that prayer was adequate protection.46 So did Burundi’s as well as Indonesia’s health minister.47 Mass religious ceremonies and pilgrimages turned into transmission hotspots in South Korea, Pakistan, and Iran.48 Several American megachurches continued to hold services, and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University remained open for business.49 California pastors insisted that churches be exempted from lockdown as essential businesses and vowed to hold in-person services for Pentecost Sunday in May.50 Eventually allowed to reopen, when cases flared up again in July, churches were forbidden their most dangerous practice – singing.51 FROM KNOWLEDGE TO ACTION: DOES SCIENCE GUIDE POLITICS?

Except for some quackery, and what we deal with in Chapter 6, the etiological understanding of Covid-19 was largely uniform across the globe. A unified etiology did not, however, produce a consistent approach to prevention. But that did not prevent politicians from claiming a grounding in science. Regardless of their tactics, leaders insisted that they rested on the best available knowledge and that, as politicians, they were but the experts’ handmaidens. That was nonsense. Whether invoking expertise or hiding behind it, and even – as Trump did occasionally – dismissing it altogether, politicians picked and chose among the possibilities science held out. Nor were they above pressuring the scientists to arrive at more palatable conclusions. US public health authorities partially authorized hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma after pressure from the White House.52 We return to this issue when considering vaccines.

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“Experts ought to be on tap, and not on top,” said the Irish writer George William Russell. In Britain, rival groups of experts vied for the politicians’ attention. The felicitously acronymed SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) were the official advisors.53 The Independent SAGE was formed to advocate instead for a firmer shutdown and a test-and-trace strategy.54 About the etiology of Covid-19, there was little dispute. About preventive conclusions to draw, plenty. Experts disagreed among themselves, giving politicians cover for various approaches.55 All nations setting out in their contradictory directions were fully armed with what they considered a scientific imprimatur.

The Swedes claimed that their unusually relaxed approach was the outcome of allowing public health experts to make the decisions, untainted by political expediency.56 Other nations, including their neighbors Denmark and Norway, were, they claimed, in thrall to populist ideology. But in Sweden, professionalism reigned supreme.57 The choice in Norway and Denmark to lock down had been a political, not epidemiological, determination, the chief Swedish epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, declared.58 If only things had been that simple. In fact, Swedish experts disagreed among themselves, as elsewhere.59 But one faction, the laissez-fairists, was in the saddle. Despite their credentials, once the epidemiologists began acting as the face of government policy, they ceased being experts to become hired guns. An epidemiologist in power is a politician, just as much as someone who may once have been an actor or a soldier.

Government by technocracy, rule by expertise, is nothing new or unusual. Some parts of modern states are meant to be officially neutral, not politicized in their day-to-day running. The judiciary and central banks are the usual examples.60 Sometimes this has been generalized, with entire cabinets becoming technocracies.

Epistocracy is a mode of governing that shifts politically unpalatable decisions to leaders who – pretending to act apolitically – make decisions that the public can accept as motivated by neutral expertise. But nations following this path usually did so only in

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emergencies and – had it even been possible – rarely sought to make a permanent transition to rule-by-expertise.

During the interwar years, governments of individuals, not representing a majority coalition, had been established to take hard decisions, like cutting unemployment benefits. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s unparliamentary cabinets during the Weimar Republic’s dying days had been necessary in the absence of viable majorities.61 More recently, Italy and Greece had resorted to technocratic cabinets faced with their debt crises in 2011.62 Such emergency, stop-gap ministries were not the usual company kept by a nation like Sweden as it claimed to be guided only by expertise.

Normally, politicians and experts play different roles. Experts offer advice, politicians take or leave it, making decisions informed not just by technical knowledge, but by its broader consequences.

Just as librarians are happiest when all the books are unlent and securely in place on the shelves, so epidemiologists, if they stay in character, favor the safest approach – total lockdowns or other means of preventing all transmission. The minute they begin considering other issues – the collateral harm of postponing other medical treatments during a shutdown, the economic impact of mass quarantine – or more generally start weighing the consequences of different actions against each other, they are no longer acting strictly as epidemiologists.

Experts, who are often civil servants, are not punished at the ballot box for their choices. The ultimate responsibility for overall decision-making must rest with politicians. To leave decisionmaking to the experts is for politicians to abdicate their role.

And to blame the experts for supplying misleading information, as some politicians tried, effectively suggested that the political leaders were slavishly following their advisors and not doing their job.63 Those politicians who disparaged the experts could, of course, not then hope to hide behind their skirts when things went sour. They stood naked and exposed. But those who had claimed to be following the scientific advice, like British prime

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minister Boris Johnson, might later – some worried – try to set up the experts as fall guys.64 Public Health England, the agency that had flubbed the national testing strategy, was forced to walk the plank in August.65 Chickens were expected to roost eventually.

France and Sweden announced government commissions of inquiry to investigate their coronavirus response.66 One was called for in Spain, and it is likely there will be one in the UK too.67 British civil servants expected to be hung out to dry.68 Most embarrassingly, the Wayback Machine caught Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s Rasputin-lite special advisor, with his pants down, having retrofitted a tweet from 2019 with would-be prescient cautions about the pandemic soon to hit.69 The counterpart to Sweden’s practice of letting experts lead the way came in neighboring Denmark. Outsiders often consider Scandinavia much of a muchness. But in this case, the Nordics headed in diametrically opposing directions. In early March, the Danish health authority, run by Søren Brostrøm, much like Tegnell in Sweden, advised the politicians against overly drastic measures, such as forbidding large assemblies or shutting stores and schools. The economic consequences, he argued, would be counterproductive.70 In the middle of March, when the politicians closed the borders, Brostrøm was again opposed.71 The Social Democratic prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, however, feared the consequences of inaction. According to the existing contagious disease law, the politicians could act only on the health authorities’ recommendations. To deal with the unexpected situation, where the experts were less cautious than the politicians, the prime minister introduced and passed emergency legislation on March 14 to alter the law. The government could now directly decree measures, no longer awaiting the health authorities’ initiative. It used the opportunity to impose a drastic lockdown in the middle of March.72 “It is better that we act today,” she said at a press conference on March 11, “than regret ourselves tomorrow.”73 The new law gave the authorities temporary powers to compel inspection, isolation, vaccination, and treatment of

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victims, forbid public assemblies, blockade neighborhoods, shut down transportation, prohibit visits to hospitals and care homes, and close institutions.74 The British experience, in turn, demonstrated the perils of switching experts in midstream. Throughout January and February 2020, the newly elected Tory government, preoccupied

by Brexit, did little. Only with the outbreak in the middle of February of cases and deaths in Iran and then especially Italy, where many Britons were vacationing during half-term holidays, did the gravity of the situation make an impression on the cabinet.

On March 11, Italy announced a national lockdown, with Spain and France set to follow. Nonetheless, Boris Johnson resisted following suit. The nation was doing what it could to combat the epidemic, “based on the very latest scientific and medical advice,” he announced on March 9.75 On March 12, the government sought to justify its mitigation strategy of taking some measures but not locking down. Even as the rest of Europe was shutting down, the British authorities planned to allow the epidemic to sweep through the population to bring herd immunity.

Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, said that the government’s aim was not to avoid everyone falling ill. “It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it and it is also not desirable because you want some immunity in the population to protect ourselves in the future,” he noted.76 On the radio the following day, he elaborated: “Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not to suppress it completely. Also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some degree of herd immunity as well, so that more people are immune to this disease.”77 Though the government later denied that it had been pursuing herd immunity, the 500 scientists who now wrote to denounce this strategy certainly understood it as such.78 The prime minister himself spelled out the consequences of pursuing herd immunity, warning that “many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” Nonetheless, schools would not be closed, large gatherings would not be banned, and nor would contacts of the ill

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be traced and tested. Over-seventy-year-olds with grave medical conditions were merely cautioned against taking cruises, and those with coronavirus symptoms were advised to isolate themselves at home for a week.79 On March 13, SAGE told the authorities there was evidence to support implementing household isolation as soon as practically possible, in other words, to impose a suppression strategy. But it also noted that it was a “near certainty” that completely squelching a first wave would cause a second peak, once the initial efforts were relaxed.80 The politicians were thus given a range of choices. Isolation should be done soonest. But suppression also meant deferring, not eliminating, much infection. Implicit in this warning was that the second peak would happen later, at a time when the government might have marshaled resources to tackle it.

A mitigation strategy meant isolating suspected cases at home, as well as the elderly and other vulnerable groups, but no further attempts to close down the economy, impose social distancing in public, or limit mobility. As it followed this approach, the British government claimed to be making decisions dictated by science.

But that was a fig leaf. Politicians selected among the often conflicting recommendations issued by the experts. Three days later, the scientific advice firmed up, and so did the government’s mind.

Neil Ferguson’s epidemiological team at Imperial College now forecast how many deaths mitigation would likely cause in the UK – a quarter of a million, more than half as many as had died in the Second World War. The health system would be overwhelmed at least eight-fold, especially intensive care units.81 These figures were no different from those of the government’s own pandemic modeling committee two weeks earlier. But by this time, other nations had started shutting down, raising the stakes for those that refused such prudence. Analogous figures for France – 300,000 to half a million deaths – had been presented by the Imperial team to President Macron on March 12, four days before he imposed lockdown.82 Having imposed shutdown on the

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French as of March 16, Macron now threatened Johnson on the 20 with shutting the border if the British did not follow suit.83 As they belatedly realized just how politically – not to mention morally – unacceptable deaths on this scale were, the Tories voltefaced. They pivoted in favor of a suppression strategy, now denying that herd immunity had ever been their aim.84 On March 23, a new suppression strategy now imposed self-isolation on the entire population, except crucial occupations like health care, police, transport, and food and drug retail.85 Schools and universities closed, along with theaters, restaurants, and sports arenas; gatherings were forbidden. Citizens were to stay at home except to shop for necessities and a daily hour of exercise. Suppression, the experts made clear, would need to continue until a vaccine was discovered and distributed.

The comparable calculations of likely Covid-19 deaths had similar political effects in the US.86 Were merely a mitigation strategy to be imposed there, the Imperial College modeling predicted more than a million deaths, twice the casualties in the Second World War, and thirty times those of the Vietnam War. Simultaneously, the Trump administration responded through the CDC with a suppression plan, much like the new British strategy. Unlike the UK, which still imposed no travel restrictions, the Americans also closed the borders to foreigners from China and threatened to quarantine US nationals returning from Hubei province.87 In both instances, the politicians turned on a dime when new information revealed they were courting political disaster. Data did not determine politics, but updated input did encourage politicians to recalibrate their course. Elsewhere, too, politicians picked and chose among the advice they wanted to follow. In Sweden, public health authorities recommended against shutting secondary schools, but the government closed them for pupils over sixteen. In March, the Danish government asked its experts to develop a dire prognosis with high mortality projections even as the politicians were officially likening the Covid-19 epidemic to a severe flu.88 Denmark locked down nonetheless.

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In April, Denmark began unlocking only its kindergartens and primary schools against the experts’ advice for a broader opening.89 The Italian government ignored its experts’ counsel that it target the north and instead shut down the entire nation.90 When Iran loosened restrictions in April, requiring only what it called “smart distancing,” it went against expert opinion.91 Florida’s medical examiner pleaded with politicians to shut beaches but was ignored.92 The British government began relaxing lockdown in early June, earlier than its experts recommended.93 As the authorities imposed quarantine on incoming travelers, they specifically did not ask the experts for advice, knowing they would disagree.94 Plenty of German epidemiologists were willing to testify that their government’s shutdown had been excessive.95 Further examples could be multiplied at will.

WAITING FOR DR. FAUCI: EXPERTISE AND POLITICS

How politicians and experts interacted was ultimately the politicians’ decision. Those nations that allowed experts the initiative did not uniformly do better than those where politicians kept the reins in hand. Even so, those who officially spurned expertise hardly benefited. The nations led by authoritarian populists suffered among the fastest-growing infection rates and the highest absolute and per capita mortalities.96 Yet, there was no self-evident correlation between allowing expertise its due and mastering the epidemic. In early summer 2020, the US, UK, and Brazil suffered the highest absolute mortalities. In per capita terms, they were in the top fifteen. But so were Sweden, France, and the Netherlands, whose leaders had not disparaged experts.97 Conversely, Belarus, whose leader had mocked the illness, continued to enjoy the low mortalities prevalent in Eastern Europe, below Norway and Finland.

Trump and Bolsonaro hogged the stage, showering their experts with disdain, and undermining their message with misleading remedies and nostrums. Bolsonaro lost two health ministers; one quit,

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the other he fired.98 Boris Johnson typically appeared flanked by a rotating phalanx of top experts – Stephen Powis, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance, and Jenny Harries – but he did most of the talking.

Spanish and Canadian leaders followed suit. In Austria, Japan, and New Zealand, the politicians also stayed front and center, with good to excellent results. President Macron of France listened to two scientific advisory committees, but followed Clemenceau’s advice.

Just as war was too important to leave to the military, so a pandemic could not be entrusted to the epidemiologists.99 In Greece and Ireland, in contrast, the experts were the public face of authority.100 Sweden was in this respect, too, off the charts.

The epidemiologists held court, becoming media darlings.101 The prime minister, who fronted a weak and divided coalition government, preferred to hide behind the technocratic façade. Tegnell became a pop icon, with T-shirts and rival Facebook fan pages.102 A cult of personality developed, with his daily press conferences assuming a ritual aura.103 Victims tattooed his image.104 In May, seven out of ten Swedes trusted him.105 Journalists hailed him as incorporating the Swedish soul, which apparently meant forceful, blunt, unglamorous, and laconically humorous.106 It mattered less, however, whether experts or politicians stood at the front and more what they decided. The public often trusted the experts more than their leaders. Disparaging experts could come back to bite politicians who strayed off-piste. In May, Trump wanted to reopen schools. The teachers’ unions pushed back, saying that only one official could reassure them that it was safe to go back.

“I’m waiting for Dr. Fauci,” Lily Eskelsen García, the National Education Association president, insisted. “I’m waiting not for a politician; I’m waiting for a medical, infectious-disease professional to say, ‘Now we can do it, under these circumstances.’”107 HAND OF THE PAST

Neither political system nor science explained why nations differed so dramatically in fending off the pandemic. Nor did the

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heavy hand of the past matter much. Each country had accustomed ways it had dealt with previous epidemics. With the demise of the worst infectious diseases – plague, cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, polio – the legal infrastructure used against them had fallen into disuse. Public health regulations remained on the books just in case, giving the authorities tremendous powers of quarantine, notification, compulsory inspection and treatment, and contact tracing. These had long not been used, except during brief flareups of new epidemics, and then only rarely in the developed world.

During the SARS epidemic of the early 2000s, China had quarantined tens of thousands and threatened to execute anyone who deliberately spread disease. Singapore had passed travelers through thermal scanners to detect fevers. Vietnam imposed restrictions on travelers. The US authorities could hold suspected victims against their will. In New York, when they detained an arrival from Asia in 2009, he became one of the few nontubercular persons in a quarter-century quarantined against his will.108 Acute contagious illnesses have declined. The disease landscape in the developed world is today dominated by chronic ailments and transmissible ones, where a purposive act – often sexual – is required to pass it on. As we will see, disease prevention has therefore now become a matter primarily of individual behavior, no longer state diktat. Potential victims are expected to make lifestyle adjustments to hold off chronic diseases and take their own precautions to prevent transmissible ones from spreading.

But easily and involuntarily communicable diseases, like Covid19, limited the scope for voluntary action. Victims were not in control of, and often not even aware of, their contagiousness. In contrast, sexually transmitted diseases, where purposive acts were the transmissive offenses, allowed voluntary restraint more scope.

The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s had been perhaps the last instance when first-world nations fought a toe-to-toe clash between preventive strategies relying either on the state’s impositions or on voluntary behaviors adopted by citizens. Each country faced the

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epidemic with standard-issue contagious disease laws on the books. These typically allowed it to require notification of suspected cases, test those who appeared ill, oblige them to follow whatever medical regimen was available, trace their contacts, and detain those who refused to comply with directives intended to prevent transmissive behavior. The latter usually meant that they had to warn their sexual partners and not have sex except using barrier protection, mainly condoms.

Only a few nations put this inherited preventive armamentarium into effect. Cuba locked seropositives into sanatoria or camps, where the conditions were often so good that some people voluntarily sought infection to enter.109 Mongolia followed a similar route, with compulsory screening and treatment and forcible abortions for seropositive pregnant women.110 Some nations, like China, the Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, screened resident aliens and returning nationals, and imposed travel restrictions on others.111 In the developed world, however, such tactics were uncommon. Only a small and motley crew tried them, including some US states and Bavaria and Sweden.112 Most other countries pursued a more voluntarist strategy. The infected and those at risk of HIV infection were counseled on whatever medical treatments were available, advised to warn their contacts, and not have unprotected sex, but otherwise, they were left alone. AIDS was a disease fraught with stigma. Many of its victims were already persecuted before the epidemic and even more so afterward. The best way of persuading them not to hide and covertly transmit was to treat them gently, encouraging rather than commanding them. For perhaps the first time, a transmissible disease epidemic was dealt with by relying on individual behavior, voluntarily adopted and pursued, rather than on the state’s ability to compel.

Similar disputes, as we will see, flared up with Covid-19 too. This time, however, the nature of the disease tilted things differently.

Covid-19 was a contagious disease, spread involuntarily by sneezing, coughing, or even just breathing. Many, possibly half, of its

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victims had no symptoms, and hence were unable – with the best of intentions – even to know that they should take precautions to hinder transmission. Prevention therefore rested most securely on the authorities’ judgment of how to act. Unlike sexually transmissible diseases, this was not an illness whose prevention could be left to the victims alone.

Moreover, the tactics used in the past against other epidemics did not seem to weigh heavily on any nation’s public health authorities. Countries had changed direction radically in the past, as the government experimented with new tactics against novel diseases. Outside of Bavaria, Germany had defied its tradition of strict disease management when it grappled with AIDS, instead using voluntary methods, as had, to a lesser extent, the French.

With the coronavirus, a few nations did follow a course much like what they had previously pursued. The Netherlands had long been consistently voluntarist and remained so now. The Bavarians had been notoriously old-fashioned in their approach to AIDS and took a similarly interventionist approach this time. But others offered a surprise, perhaps even to themselves. The UK, traditionally laissez-faire, set off in the expected direction. The Tory government plowed a predictable furrow when the prime minister claimed that the freedom-loving British would not tolerate an across-the-board shutdown. On the same day – March 3 – his scientific team advised the nation not to shake hands, the prime minister boasted of doing so in hospitals with coronavirus patients.113 But in late March, fearing the consequences of such insouciance, the government swung around to enforce a strict lockdown. Italy, homeland of the quarantine, defied what may well have been just lazy national stereotyping to impose one of Europe’s strictest shutdowns.

Sweden, in turn, astonished everyone, but for the opposite reason. Having been strictly quarantinist against cholera in the nineteenth century, vaccinationist for smallpox, and ferociously regulationist on syphilis and then AIDS, the nation decided to

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change its spots amid the worst epidemic of the century. No broadgauged shutdown was required, its epidemiologists advised the government. That was a tactic for nations where citizens did not trust each other or the authorities. A few common-sense precautions were eventually imposed, such as shutting down counter service at restaurants, closing universities, and forbidding large gatherings. But other than advising people to maintain their distance in public, little was demanded, and cafes, restaurants, and many stores remained open.

We have, then, a perplexing situation where, faced with a common threat, nations across the globe laid on a smorgasbord of different preventive tactics. This variation was not caused by politics in any straightforward sense, nor by differential knowledge of the disease. Not even past policies poured the mold for current tactics. Before we can ponder why such multiplicity emerged, we must look at what nations undertook.

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