Radiation, knowledge, and power: colonial ambivalence in the ABCC and Hibakusha experience

By Kimiko Ichikaw

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sociology

Published: Jun 24, 2026 | pg. no: 1-17

Abstract: This article adopts a deliberately circumscribed analytical orientation centered on the institutional—frequently characterized as perpetrator—perspective, in order to interrogate the conditions under which the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and its successor, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation came to be canonized as engines of post-atomic scientific advancement. From this vantage point, Hiroshima and Nagasaki emerge as historically singular laboratories for large-scale human radiation research, facilitating unprecedented advances in cancer epidemiology, quantitative risk assessment, and therapeutic radiology. Such a framing elucidates the extent to which these research programs contributed to a paradigmatic reconfiguration of twentieth-century biomedical science. In this sense, the article advances an explicitly unorthodox methodological stance by foregrounding the standpoint of institutional actors who, through the aggregation and analysis of hibaksuha-derived data, enabled significant developments in nuclear medicine, radiation science, and related technological domains. At the same time, this institutional optic is neither epistemologically neutral nor universally authoritative. Hibaksuha accounts, particularly as articulated in testimonies and postwar Japanese publications, frequently express a profound ambivalence structured by both dependency and distrust. The ABCC was subject to sustained criticism for its “no-treatment” policy, which was widely perceived as privileging data extraction over patient care. Even following its reconstitution as RERF, a binational (US–Japan) entity with formal Japanese governmental participation, many survivors continued to experience difficulty in extending full trust toward the institution, despite their ongoing reliance on its research infrastructure and findings. This condition of ambivalence reflects a deeper entanglement, wherein survivors remained epistemically and materially bound to a research apparatus associated with the very structures of US aggression that produced their suffering. Accordingly, the historical and ethical valence of these institutions resists reduction to a univocal narrative of either scientific progress or moral failure. This article therefore contends that the legacy of ABCC/RERF is most productively theorized through the dual lenses of perspectival divergence and epistemic ambivalence. Drawing on the postcolonial insights of Frantz Fanon, it reconceptualizes the disjuncture between institutional and survivor epistemologies not as contingent disagreement, but as a structural condition of knowledge production under regimes of unequal power. In doing so, it demonstrates that the same corpus of scientific knowledge may simultaneously function as a cornerstone of global medical advancement and as a locus of ethical contestation, thereby revealing the co-implication of empirical authority and epistemic violence in the production of postwar radiation science

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