Chapter 6 explores US survivors’ activism in the last three decades of the twentieth century through the lens of health, illness, and medicine. Radiation illness – physical and psychosocial – continued to concern US survivors. Women were frequently primary caretakers in Asia and Asian America, spurring female survivors to consider radiation illness from both patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives. This dual challenge became a driving force for US survivors to form trans-Pacific coalitions with Japanese and Korean survivors. US survivors’ understanding of illness that placed psychosocial factors at its center drew attention from the broader Asian American community, also plagued by the lack of resources for culturally aware medical and social services. Unlike the earlier medical exams conducted on US survivors by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, US survivors’ grassroots activism proved capable of producing a solution fitting their needs. One distinct accomplishment of their activism was the creation of biannual health checkups conducted in America by Japanese physicians familiar with radiation illness, funded by the Japanese government and supported by the Asian American community.

Chapter 2 examines US survivors’ layered belonging as it played out on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s ground zero in 1945. In partucular, the chapter argues that their cross-nationality remained persistent as their culture – clothes, medicines, and food – became the essential means of surviving, rescuing, and caring in the bomb’s immediate aftermath. Despite the enormous destruction that appeared to erase any human distinctions, cultural diversity and gender differences came back powerfully in the hours and days after the bomb’s explosion. Women emerged as chief caretakers of the ill and injured in the utter absence of hospitals, doctors, and nurses, crafting what might be called improvisational practices of folk medicine. Men, in contrast, felt as if it was their duty to rescue others at any cost, sometimes at the sacrifice of their own safety. Not only universality of nuclear destruction, but also uniqueness of individuals and cultures affected by it, came to light. Altogether, US survivors’ experiences are explored as a cross-cultural history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which became the basis of US survivors’ memory, identity, and activism after the war.