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The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon, and I, by Oishi Matashichi. Translated by Richard M Minear. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011. isbn cloth, 978-0-8248-3511-8; paper, 978-0-8248-3557-6; xii + 157 pages, index. Cloth, us$45.00; paper us$18.00.
This riveting account of Oishi Matashichi's exposure to radioactive fallout is accessible to both academic and general audiences. As a twentyyear- old fisherman, Matashichi was one of twenty-three crewmembers aboard the Lucky Dragon, which strayed within eighty-seven miles of the Bravo thermonuclear bomb test that was conducted on 1 March 1954. The Japanese vessel's twentytwo- year-old captain had known that Enewetak was off-limits but not that the US government had expanded the danger zone to include Bikini Atoll, which was ground zero for the Bravo test. Bravo remains the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States, 1,000 times more powerful than either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The devastation of those two cities had provided ample evidence of the horrors of nuclear weapons during wartime, but the Lucky Dragon's voyage exposed the dangers of these weapons in all contexts when its crew returned displaying evidence of radiation sickness and with "death ash" from the detonation still coating the vessel. Matashichi's account vividly details how the "Bikini Incident" catalyzed a Japanese movement to abolish nuclear weapons. (The monstrosity of damages unleashed by nuclear weapons would mythically come to life in Japanese films in the form of Godzilla, who rose from the ocean's depths as a consequence of a detonation on Bikini Atoll.) Reawakened to the horrors of nuclear weapons, thirty-two million Japanese people signed a petition to abolish nuclear weapons the year after the Lucky Dragon's voyage.
One of the most disturbing story lines to emerge from Matashichi's account is the political horse trading between the United States and Japan in the aftermath of the Bikini Incident. In an effort to discredit the fishermen and to...