Atomic Bomb Survivor Testimonies as Sociolinguistic Data:

An Approach from Discourse Analysis

Ikuko OKUGAWA
International Center
Keio University (Japan)

Abstract
This study takes testimonies from hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) as data, to
perform a discourse analysis of 1) the structure of testimonies and 2) how speakers’
identities and viewpoints are presented therein. The testimonies examined proved to
be compatible with Labov’s framework of Abstract, Orientation, Complication,
Internal Evaluation, and External Evaluation. Abstract and Orientation mainly
appeared at the beginning, whereas External Evaluation was seen at the end, in
closing. Moreover, narrators reinterpret the meaning of their experiences in their own
ways, including their own value judgments from their own social and personal points
of view. We expand Labov’s framework by relating this aspect of value judgment to
anthropological, psychological, and sociological frameworks of identity.

Keywords: hibakusha, testimony, narrative, narrative structure, identity

要旨
本研究は被爆者証言という歴史的な体験を語ったナラティブをデータとし
て使用し、以下の点について考察を行った。１）被爆者証言談話の構造は
どのようなものか、２）その中で話者のアイデンティティーがどのように
示されているか。その結果１）に関しては、①要旨、②設定、③出来事、
④状況、⑤内的評価、⑥外的評価が見られ、要旨、設定は証言の最初に、
外的評価は証言のまとめとして最後に語られる傾向があることが分かった。
さらに２）に関して語り手は、過去の悲惨な経験を「今、ここ」に結び付
けて評価を行い、自分なりに再解釈して語っていることが明らかになった。
これは、証言を語るという活動を通しての、語り手の社会的かつ個人的な
アイデンティティーの表出と言える。

キーワード：被爆者、証言談話、ナラティブ、談話構造、アイデンティティー

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1. Introduction

‘Telling’ is an act found in all cultures, in which people talk about events that they
experience, witness, or hear indirectly. Functions of narratives include not only
the communication of information or entertainment, but also social functions like
the inheritance of culture or tradition and the inculcation of morals, or
psychological effects like empathy and the formation and maintenance of identity
(Bruner 1991; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012; etc.). Narrative is a broad
category encompassing a variety of genres in both written and spoken language,
like written autobiographies or novels, as well as films or plays. Accordingly,
narrative must be studied from unique and interdisciplinary perspectives,
incorporating tools from the traditions of anthropology, sociology, linguistics,
literature, philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy.

Discourse is not only a unit of linguistic analysis but a creative expression of the
speaker him or herself. Discourse analysis allows us to deepen our understanding of
human beings by integrating linguistics with related fields such as anthropology,
cognitive science, psychology, and sociology. This has been rare in traditional formal
linguistics, which has focused on sentences and the smaller units that make them up,
such as clauses, phrases, words, and even smaller units such as phonemes, morphemes.

In this study, we take a sociolinguistic approach to oral testimonies given by

hibakusha 1 (survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), a
body of narrative which has never been studied in this way before. We use
discourse analysis to reveal the structures of the narratives, then incorporate
findings from anthropology, psychology, and sociology, to expand our theoretical
framework by illuminating the latent identities of the speakers.

2. Interview narrative: Previous studies and theoretical frameworks

For exploring how speakers expressed themselves in narrative, the sociolinguistic

tool known as discourse analysis is particularly useful.

Labov and Warentzky (1967) and Labov (1972) show that there is a structure and
systematicity of narrative in stories told by so-called ordinary people by analyzing
oral narratives of their personal past experiences in interview situations. Labov calls

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narratives “one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal

sequence of clauses to a sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred”
(Labov 1972: 360). We modify their definition of narrative here as follows:

Narrative is the process of evaluating and reconstructing the world of

narration through the influence of the ‘here-and-now’ (sociocultural
influences and the influence of listeners).

This is because narrators are not merely recounting the events of the past but also
redefining what happened to them and expressing their own identity through the
act of storytelling. In the case of personal stories, narrators will inevitably express
their own values, attitudes, and identity, as pointed out by the linguistic
anthropologists Ochs and Capps (2001: 45).

First, Labov’s narrative analysis framework identifies the components of a

narrative from its overall composition, thereby elucidating the implicitly shared
cultural knowledge that makes such structuring possible.

As an example, see the following narrative taken from Labov’s interview with an
African-American youth (Labov 2010):

a. Well, this man had a little too much to drink

b. and he attacked me
c. and a friend came in
d. and she stopped it.

This narrative satisfies the minimal requirements of the above definition: it is a

sequence of narrative clauses, from which we can infer that the events described
really occurred in the order a. through d. Each narrative clause is an answer to the
implicit question “What happened next?” and is called Complicating Action or
Complication. More detailed narratives include Orientation, which answers the
questions “Who did what, when, and where?” as well as the Coda, which brings
us out of the world of the narrative and back to the present interaction between
speaker and listener.

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Finally, Labov posits Evaluation, which works to derive the speaker’s point of
view in narrative by using direct quotes, descriptions of irrealis such as things in
the future or fictious events, and by using emotional adjectives. Evaluation is the
part where the narrator explains why they think the story needs to be told in this
moment. There are two kinds of evaluations: 1) External evaluation is inserted
independently and not related to the plot of the story. For example, while telling
the story of a dangerous airplane ride, the speaker stops narrating and says, “It
was a terrible experience after all.”; 2) Internal evaluation shows how the speaker
interprets the event while controlling the flow of the story, adding their own
feelings at the time. For Labov (1972: 369), evaluation can emerge at any point in
the narrative and generate waves that penetrate the narrative as in Fig. 1.

(Labov 1972: 369)

Fig. 1: The distribution of evaluative devices throughout the narrative

A complete narrative begins with orientation, proceeds to the

complicating action, is suspended at the focus of evaluation before the
resolution, concludes with the resolution, and returns the listener to the
present time with the coda (Labov 1972: 369).

However, evaluation “may be found in various forms throughout the narrative”

(Labov 1972). It is perhaps the most important element besides the basic narrative
clauses because it is used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, why
it was told, and what the narrator is getting at.

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Based on this theoretical framework, we will analyze data from actual hibakusha
narratives below.

This study will not only analyze the structure of narratives but also consider the
identities of the speakers as expressed therein. What is expressed in narrative is
ultimately shaped by the ‘here and now’, including the circumstances under which
the story is told and the narrators’ current thoughts about the past. Narrative is not
just a text but a practice, and narratives are habitual but also emergent and
situational (Georgakopoulou 2007). Narratives are narrators’ representations of
past events but also of their own selves in light of past events as well. Therefore,
we will add to Labov’s framework by analyzing the dynamic function of narrative
in addition to its structure, borrowing methods used in anthropology, psychology,
and sociology to analyze identity.

Sociolinguists Marra and Holmes (2004: 64) describe the various function of
narratives as follows:

It is generally recognized that stories serve a wide variety of functions:

they may entertain, educate, socialize, and inform; they may express
individual preoccupations, perspectives and feelings, and contribute to
building a particular identity for an individual; they may be used to
establish social connections, express social solidarity, pay attention to
the face needs of others, and mark social boundaries. Often one
narrative will realize several of these functions simultaneously.

This study will clarify these functions by analyzing oral testimonies given by
hibakusha to answer questions such as “What do people accomplish by
narrating?” and expand our understanding of oral communication.

As mentioned above, for Labov (1972) the core of a narrative is the point of the
story, and we can see how important evaluation is to a narrative by the fact that it
is evaluation that is used to convey a point. Evaluation shows the narrator’s
attitude toward an event, and the significance of the narrative cannot be conveyed
to the listener without it. Linde (1993) further specifies that the events related in
life stories contain extraordinary elements and should be worth repeating for the

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narrator. We would add that the evaluation of events is not intended to be a

general evaluation of the world but rather to show the narrator’s own identity. As
the narrator’s experience is turned into a story, their social and personal identity is
constructed therein (Buchanan and Middleton 1995; Schifflin 1996). Narratives
also create a continuity of self and society and thus a continuous identity through
the past, present, and future (Ochs 1997).

Hill (1995) draws on Labov’s sociolinguistic analysis of narrative, as well as

Bakhtin’s (1929) idea of the selection of voice to express ideas, to analyze the
narratives of Don Gabriel, the last living speaker of the Mexicano language. Hill
showed that multiple different ‘selves’ are represented in the narrative by different
‘voices’ expressed by means of word choice, quotations, tone of voice, or tense.
For Hill, this ‘voice system’ in narrative is an indicator of narrator Don Gabriel’s
ideology: hostility towards colonialism or camaraderie with villagers or society.
Hill focuses more on ‘self’ and ‘other’ as expressed in the narrative and tries to
read ideology from the narrator’s way of speaking in the ‘here and now’ of
storytelling. Identity does not exist in the narrator from the beginning but is
created in an act of storytelling bounded in time and space. It is a fluid and
provisional thing epiphenomenal to mutual negotiations between narrator and
listener. It is also related to the values and moral system of the society in which
the narrator lives.

Moreover, Davis and Harre (1990) analyze the concept of positioning, a discursive
practice “whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and
intersubjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines” (1990: 48).
Bamberg (1997) expands this concept of positioning to fit a reciprocal action
approach to narrative:

In conversations — due to the intrinsic social force of conversing —

people position themselves in relation to one another in ways that
traditionally have been defined as roles. More importantly, in doing
so, people ‘produce’ one another (and themselves) situationally as
‘social beings’.
(Bamberg 1997: 336)

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Bamberg (1997) proposes measuring the narrator’s positioning on different levels

by answering three questions:

1. How are characters in the narrative positioned in relation to one another?

2. How do narrators position themselves with respect to the audience?
3. How do narrators position themselves with respect to themselves?

The first level is how the characters, especially the narrator, are positioned and
talked about, and this tells us how the narrator wants to position themselves as a
character in the narrative world. The second level is how the speaker and the
listener situate themselves in the mutual action of narration in the here and now.
The third level is the sociocultural self, or an identity that can be maintained even
after leaving the place where the story is being told.

These previous studies form the foundation of this research.

3. Data and Method

The narratives used in this study come from a corpus of hibakusha testimony
published on a website called The National Peace Memorial Halls for the
Atomic Bomb Victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As far as we know, there is no
research that analyzes the historical experience of the atomic bombings from a
sociolinguistic or discourse analysis perspective, but these testimonies meet
Ochs and Capps’ (2001: 20) five conditions for a narrative that is easy to
identify and analyze.

First, we have unique narrators telling their own stories. Second, we have an
experience of high historic value, that of being among the first human beings to be
subject to atomic bombing. Moreover, the narrative is highly linear, and events are
told chronologically in the order in which the narrator perceived them. Further,
survivors’ modes of expression are embedded in the values of the Japanese and
local societies in which they lived. Finally, data for this study were obtained from
interviews intended to be shown to a general audience, so the presence of the
researcher did not affect the behavior of the narrators or listeners. For the above
reasons, these testimonies were selected as our data.

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First, we will analyze the testimony as sociolinguistic discourse, using Labov’s

structural analysis. Then, since the evaluation of events in narrative is not
directed at the world in general but rather expresses the narrator’s own identity
(Linde 1993; Ochs 1997), we expand on Labov’s element of evaluation to show
how speakers’ identities are constructed and expressed in the narratives.

This study examines the testimonies of the following four people (Table 1):

Table 1. Subjects’ personal data

Isano Akira Shūichi Fumiko

Name
Tanabe Itō Idani Amano
Gender Female Male Male Female
Age at time of bombing 26 18 16 14
Status at time of bombing Homemaker Soldier HS Student HS Student
Recorded on 2003.10.27 2005.11.14 2009.11.5 2011.10.18
Age at time of recording 84 79 80 80

The research questions for this study are as follows:

1. What is the basic structure shared by these survivor testimonies?

2. How are the speakers’ identities presented in the narratives?

In the next section, we will answer these questions by analyzing the testimonies.

4. Data Analysis

4.1 The structure of an atomic bomb survivor testimony

Now let us consider the testimony given by a woman named Isano Tanabe, who
was eighty-four years old when the interview was recorded in 2003. At the time of
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Isano was twenty-six years old and was in
Hirose-Kita-machi, about 1.2 kilometers from the epicenter. She escaped through
the burning landscape and was hit with black rain, and she has suffered from

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atomic bomb disease ever since. The video of the interview begins with a
narration of these basic facts, followed by Isano’s testimony, which may be
divided into the following twelve topics:

1. Job at the time of exposure

2. Reason for being in Hiroshima
3. The explosion and immediate aftermath
4. Her escape
5. The fate of her family members
6. Her immediate health problems
7. Her daughter’s funeral
8. A new baby daughter
9. Illness in the family
10. Social welfare support
11. Health worries resulting from the bomb
12. Anger at the bombing

We will use Labov’s narrative structure (Labov 1972), which is based on analysis
of narratives by American English speakers of various social backgrounds to
determine the structural order in which sequential actions occurred in speakers’
experiences and how they were arranged into a coherent narrative. As explained in
section 2, for Labov narratives have the following six components:

1. Abstract
2. Orientation
3. Complication
4. Evaluation
5. Resolution
6. Coda

This step-by-step structure is only one model, and Labov says that not all these
aspects were neatly manifested in his data, but it is useful for understanding the
communicative acts that underlie casual, daily acts of narration.

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These overall structures are the macrostructure of narrative, but there is also the
clause structure, which is their microstructure. For example, the clause structure
of the Complication part consists of complicating action clauses, which are
surrounded by embedded orientation clauses explaining the existing state or
situation in order to promote the listener’s understanding of the event, as well as
evaluation clauses commenting on or interpreting the event from the narrator’s
perspective for the listener.

The following is an analysis of Isano’s testimony 2 using this model. It has been
broken up into clauses or sentences, as well as bits of silence. Translations are
based on that provided in the corpus, revised by the author for both dynamic and
literal accuracy, and checked by a native speaker of English.

4.1.1 Isano’s testimony - A

Labov’s first section of a story, the Abstract, is given here in the form of a
narration by the interviewer, and Isano then picks up her story at Labov’s section
two, Orientation, and she talks about her employment situation — she was
unemployed — and what she was doing in Hiroshima at the time: she was there
to help her mother-in-law, who was ill. She quotes her mother-in-law directly
asking her to come to Hiroshima, then tells how she got better, both of which
Labov would class as Complication. Then we have an element of Evaluation
because Isano expresses an intention: “we decided to take her back to the
countryside” after her recovery. Then the narrator adds an explanation, the
reason why they had to go.

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Table 2: Isano’s testimony – A

Japanese testimonies and English translation Narrative

（ ）indicate annotation structure
田辺イサノ（ﾀﾅﾍﾞ ｲｻﾉ）さんは、当時２６歳。爆心地
から１.２キロの広瀬北町で被爆しました。田辺さん
は火の中を逃げまわり、黒い雨にも打たれ、今も原
爆症に悩んでいます。 (Narration)
[Mrs TANABE Isano was exposed to the A-bomb 1.2 km Abstract
from the epicenter. She was 26 years old. She ran through
fire and was hit by black rain. She still suffers from A-
bomb disease.]
Topic ① 被爆当時の仕事は [Job at the time of exposure]
当時はですね、あの::、なにもしていませんでした。
1 Orientation
[At the time, you see, well, I wasn’t doing anything.]
その時は、その前はですね、被爆一ヶ月前は、軍事
工場がありましてね、お隣に、そこで旋盤工をして
2 おりました、はい。 Orientation
[At the time, well, one month before the bombing, there
was a military factory, and next door to that, I was working
as a lathe operator, yeah.]
Topic ② 広島にいたのは [Reason for being in Hiroshima]
（ 義 理 の ） 母 が 病 気 で ｢困 っ て お る か ら帰 っ て 来
て:: ｣って言うもんですから、（私は）８月１日にね、 Direct
1 広島に出て来たんです。 quotation
[My mother-in-law was ill, and she said, “Come home! I’m Complication
in trouble!” so we came to Hiroshima on August 1st, right?]
ほいでも（母は）２、３日したら良くなったけ::、
2 Complication
[Yes, but in two or three days she got better—]
一日、三日、四日してね、良くなったのでね、（私は
彼女を）田舎に連れて帰ろうと思って。
3 [From August 1st, it was the 3rd or the 4th, and she was Evaluation
better, so we thought we would take her back with us to the
countryside.]
ほんだら、朝、…主人のお父さんが警防団員で、そ
の頃はみんな、あの、婦人会の人がね、疎開作業に
Embedded
4 行かないけんのです。 orientation
[And then, the morning of the 6th, we were ready to go, (Explanation)
but my father-in-law was in the civil defense unit, and the
women's groups had to go work on the evacuations.]

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The macrostructure of the discourse in this first part of the testimony flows from
Abstract, to Orientation, Complication, and Evaluation, but looking at the clause
structures we see that an evaluation clause and an embedded orientation clause are
added to complicating action clauses in the Complication section.

4.1.2 Isano’s testimony - B

Next, let us consider the part where she talks about her family’s suffering. The
story begins with a group of many injured people, and as we move to her
daughter’s death, she uses direct quotations (2, 5, 6, 11) of their last conversation
such as “water, water, water,” “Atchan, Atchan,” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and, “I’ll
be back for you soon.” These quotations make it easy for the listener to imagine
the scene as the daughter opens her big eyes but then goes still, and even as her
mother screams her name (Atsuko, diminutive Atchan), she is already dead.

Table 3: Isano’s testimony – B

Narrative
Topic ⑤ 家族の被災 [The fate of her family members]
structure
もう、そこもいっぱいのけが人ですよ。 Embedded
1
[And then, the raft was also just full of the wounded.] orientation
｢水、水、水｣ね（求めている/言っている）。 Direct
2
[“Water! Water! Water!” (they said)] quotation
ほいで、しばらくね、こう見たら、（アツコが）きれ
いに水につかっとる、きれいなんですよ、子供が、
Embedded
3 アツコがね。
[And then after a while, she was so beautifully floating in orientation
the water. (Holding onto the side of the boat?) She was so
beautiful, my daughter, my Atsuko.]
ひょっと見ると、もう、大きな目を開けたんですね。
4 Complication
[I looked and, well, she opened her eyes wide.]
｢アッちゃん、アッちゃん｣と言うてやったら、もう
目を開けて、しばらくこうしよったから、笑いもせ
Direct
5 ずそのままね、もう亡くなったんです。 quotation
[I called out to her, “Atchan, Atchan,” and she opened her Complication
eyes, and for a while she was just like this, like (maybe she
was going to) smile but before she could she just, died.]
｢もう、ごめん、ごめ::んってね、アツコちゃん、ごめ::ん｣。 Direct
6
[Oh, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Atsuko-chan! I’m sorry!”] quotation

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もう、あ::、もうどうしてやる事も出来ず、抱きしめ
7 てやるだけです。 Complication
[And, aah, there was nothing I could do but hold her tight.]
自分もですね、もう、すぐ死ぬんじゃと思いまし
8 た、もう泣く力もなかったです。 Evaluation
[I thought, well I thought I would be dead soon, too, and I
didn’t even have the strength to cry.]
ほいでそうしよったら、その、くろ、黒い雨です
9 ね、大きい粒の雨が、降り、降り出したんです。 Complication
[And then as I was doing like those black, the black rain
(fallout), big black raindrops started to, to fall.]
あ::、｢田辺、あ、あ、アツコ｣言うて書いて、名札に
10 見えるようにして、そのままね。 Complication
[Ahh! So I wrote a name tag so they could see it, “A-A-
Atsuko Tanabe,” just like that.]
｢ごめんね、行ったらすぐ迎えに来るよ:: ｣言うてね、
Direct
11 それから…のあれで、そこ逃げたんですけどね。 quotation
[“I’m sorry, honey. I’ll be right back for you,” I said, and Complication
then— kind of, well I ran away out of there, though, yeah?]
まあ、もう、…になって見ると、ず::っと見渡す限り
12 の焼野原ですよね。 Complication
[Ahh, well and when I got there, everything was burnt to
the ground for as far as you could see.]
それに死体がいっぱい転がっていて、ほいで、馬な
んか、大きな馬から、…てね、それはそれはもう、
13 何とも言えんですよ。 Evaluation
[And then there were all the dead bodies lying everywhere,
and then, like, a horse, from inside a big horse there was…
and it, well it was just beyond words.]
その、しかばねをこえて。
14 Complication
[I stepped over those corpses, and—]

In other parts of the narrative, the narrator describes events that advance the
narrative (4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14), such as “she opened her eyes,” “I wrote (her
name)”, “I stepped over the corpses”, etc. In addition, in 8 and 13, internal
Evaluation is used to show the speaker’s indescribable feelings at the scene
through which she must pass, with corpses everywhere and apparently some
substance coming out of a big horse.

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4.1.3 Akira’s testimony - A

Akira Isobe was eighteen years old and served as a naval communications officer
at the time of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He was exposed to the bomb on
the streetcar on his way home from Ujina-machi. The interviewer begins with
basic information on Akira, which we categorize as Abstract. Then Akira explain s
that there was a military command center in Ujina-machi, with troops there during
the day but no one there at night (lines 1–6). This part sets the scene for the story,
so it can be called Orientation in the narrative structure.

Table 4: Akira’s testimony – A

Japanese testimonies and English translation Narrative

（ ）indicate annotation structure
伊藤晶（イトウ アキラ）さん、当時 18 歳。船舶通
信兵として広島へ配属。宇品から千田町へ戻る電車の
中で、激しい光と爆音に襲われました。避難する途中
で見た光景は、この世のものとは思えませんでした。
焼けただれた人たちの、水を求める姿が、今でも強烈
に心に残っています。
[Mr. ITŌ Akira. 18 years old at the time of the bombing. (Narration)
Stationed in Hiroshima City as a naval communications Abstract
officer. While riding back in a train from Ujina-machi to
Senda-machi, he was struck by a bright light and a
deafening explosion. What he saw as he fled for safety was
like something from another world. To this day, the sight of
hideously burned people begging for water remains burned
into his mind.]
宇品から千田町へ
Topic ①
[On the way from Ujina-machi to Senda-machi]
あの::、船舶::司令部というのが、あの:、宇品にあ
1 るありまして、 Orientation
[So, a thing called the Naval Command Center was, was in
Ujina-machi and—]
昼は、あ::、要員が出勤してくるわけですね。
2 [During the day the relevant personnel would come there to Orientation
work, right?]
ところが夜になるとね::、そういう人たちは全部帰っ
3 ちまうわけ。 Orientation
[But then at night, right, those people would all go home.]

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したがって、その::、ほとんどもう空に近い状態。
4 Orientation
[Accordingly, there was— almost, well, nobody around.]
警備する人が空襲になってもどうにもならん。
5 [The people guarding it wouldn’t have been able to do Orientation
anything if there was an air raid.]
ほんなら特幹隊にひとつ、う:、警備してもらおうじゃ
6 ないかなとそういうような話になったんでしょうね。 Orientation
[And so, that’s probably why they ended up saying, like,
shouldn’t we have your Special Officers’ Corps guard the place?]
この 8 月の、5 日はですね、あの::、夕方 あぁ、宇
Embedded
7 品へ泊って、 orientation
[And that August, it was the fifth, and well, I had spent the Complication
night at Ujina, and—]
そして、え::、6 日の朝は、あの::、電車乗って帰ると
いうことですが警戒警報も何も入らなかった、うん。 Embedded
8 [And then, uh, on the morning of the sixth, well, I was orientation
going to get on the train and go home, but there was no air Complication
raid siren or anything. Nope.]
そいで停留所あっても止まりせん。 Embedded
9
[And even when a stop came, the train didn’t stop.] orientation
あの、タカシキにでしてね、 Embedded
10
[Well, it was at Takashiki, right?] orientation
ほいで御幸橋に今度は、あの、まっすぐ行くと広島駅
に行くんですが、それを途中左へ折れると御幸橋、
11 [And then at Miyuki Bridge, well, if you go straight ahead Complication
there’s Hiroshima Station there, but if you go left its
Miyuki Bridge,]
あ、これはもう、あの、ぼつぼつ降りなきゃならんなと。
12 Complication
[And oh, I thought, here we go, time to get going.]
電車の方もある程度徐行しますしねえぇ。 Embedded
13
[And the train had slowed down a certain amount, right?] orientation
ま、あの、マイコウ(毎回)あのちょこちょこ行ってま
14 すんでだいたい感じが分かる。 Evaluation
[And well, I had ridden this line every day for so long, I
had a good feel for it.]
ところが、惰力のような形で走っておった瞬間、
15 Complication
[However, just as we were coasting in on the momentum,]
もう、目の前すぐそこに、こう、あの、千田町の停留
16 所が見えてきたん、もう、 Complication
[Oh, right there, before my eyes, like, well, Sendamachi
station came into view, oh!]

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すぐそこに近づいてきたなと瞬間です。
17 Complication
[Just when it had really come right up close,]
もう、なんですか、バ:::ッとこう、あの、目の前が
18 こう何も見えなくなっ、見えんようなって、うん。 Complication
[Oh, how should I say, just in a flash, well, my whole visual
field went blank, I couldn’t see, nope.]
ほんとになんにも見えなかった、うん。
19 Complication
[I really just couldn’t see anything, nope.]

Next is the Complication, in which Akira talks about staying in Ujina-machi on

August 5, returning home by train on the morning of August 6, and the events
during the train ride, in chronological order (lines 7–19). The complication action
clauses are surrounded by embedded orientation clauses that describe the situation
of the train (lines 9, 10, 13), and an evaluation clause (line 14) that describes the
narrator’s feelings. Here again, as in Hisano’s story, Akira begins with Abstract,
followed by an Orientation setting the scene, then a Complication describing
events in chronological order, with embedded orientation clauses to explain the
situation, as well as evaluation clauses to express his feelings.

4.1.4 Shūichi’s testimony - A

Next, we have Shūichi’s testimony. Shūichi’s interviewer again gives an Abstract,

summarizing how he went to Hiroshima to take an entrance examination for the
army accounting school and was hit with the bomb. He was a sixteen-year-old
junior high school student in Tottori prefecture at that time.

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Table 5: Shūichi’s testimony – A

Japanese testimonies and English translation Narrative

（ ）indicate annotation structure
伊谷周一（イダニ シュウイチ）さん。当時１６歳。
鳥取県立鳥取第一中学校の４年生でした。陸軍経理学
校を受験するため広島へ行き、爆心地から１キロ離れ
た堀川町の旅館で被爆。外傷はなかったものの、吐き
気や下痢に苦しみました。友達を助けられなかったこ
とで自分を責める気になると語る伊谷さん。現在は、
地域の子供たちや、外国の人々に放射能の恐ろしさを
伝える活動をしており、世界から核兵器がなくなるこ
とを切に願うと言います。
[Mr. IDANI Shūichi. 16 years old at the time. A fourth-year (Narration)
student at First Tottori Junior High School. He had gone to Abstract
Hiroshima to take the entrance examination for the Army
Accounting School. He was in an inn in Horikawa-chō,
about one kilometer from the hypocenter, when the atomic
bomb exploded. While he had no external injuries, he
suffered nausea and diarrhea. Mr. IDANI talks of feeling
guilt over his inability to rescue his friends. Mr. IDANI is
currently taking part in activities to spread knowledge on
the dangers of radioactivity to local children and people
outside of Japan. He says he strongly wishes for a world
without nuclear weapons.]
受験のため 広島へ
Topic ①
[Going to Hiroshima for his entrance examination]
中学校に入りましたら、あの::、声が大きいという事
1 で級長にさせられるわけですね。 Orientation
[When I entered middle school, well, they said I had a loud
voice, so they made me be class leader.]
それで、当時は、あの::、中学校はもう兵隊組織に
なってましたから、から、私は中隊長という事でね、
2 朝から晩まで号令をかける役になるわけですね。 Orientation
[And at the time, well, middle schools had become military
regiments, so, so, I was the captain, you know, so it was my
job to shout out the orders from dawn to dusk.]
で、それで、あの::、とうとう、軍国少年の最たるもの
3 に、ま::、染め上げられて行く過程があるわけですね。 Orientation
[And so, well, by and by, I became, well, a dyed in the wool
militarist youth, by a certain process, you see.]

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で、それで、一番その頃憧れていた海軍兵学校に受け
るんですけれども、その::、海軍兵学校が不合格にな
ると、そして、え::、どうしても天皇のために役に立
4 ちたいというところで、 Orientation
[And so, the thing that I dreamed of most was to get into
the naval academy, but I— failed the examination for the
naval academy, but even so, uh, I felt I just had to find
some way to serve the Emperor, and—]
残っていた軍隊の学校は陸軍経理学校であったと。
5 [the only military school left was the Army Accounting Orientation
School.]
で、その、陸軍経理学校の受験日が、あぁ、昭和 20
年 8 月 6 日、場所は広島だったと。
6 [so, the, the date of the entrance exam for the Army Orientation
Accounting School was August 6, 1945, and the test site
was in Hiroshima.]
鳥取県中から 8 人か 9 人かのね、あの::、同い年の学
生が、あの::、同じ汽車に乗って、あのぉ、試験を受
7 けるんですよ、引率官が１人ついてね。 Orientation
[8 or 9 students of the same age, right, from Tottori
Prefecture, well, we got on the same steam engine to take
the test, with one chaperone with us.]
え::、前の日、8 月 5 日のですね、もう暗くなってま
したから、おそらく、夏の暗いということになると、
8 8 時かそこらじゃないかと思いますね。 Orientation
[And, the day before, August 5, right, it was already dark,
so perhaps, if it was dark in summer so I think it must have
been eight o’clock or thereabouts.]

As Shūichi continues the story, he suffers from nausea and diarrhea after the
bombing but is tormented by guilt over not being able to save his friends. As he
grows older he starts to testify about the horrors of radiation to local children and
people from abroad. Then he returns to the scene of the bombing for one final
Orientation section, explaining how he went to Hiroshima that day (from Tottori,
August 5–6) in order to take an examination for the Army Accounting School.

4.1.5 Shūichi’s testimony - B

Next, Shūichi narrates the morning of the atomic bombing in chronological order,
telling how an air raid alarm went off, and between complicating action clauses
sharing how in that moment he felt that he wanted at least to see the enemy plane.

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Table 6: Shūichi’s testimony – B

Narrative
Topic ② 原爆当日の様子 [ The day of the bombing]
structure
朝、あの::、え::、御飯を食べましてね、それで引率官
1 が、さ::行くぞ::というように声かけるもんですから。 Complication
[We ate, well uh, breakfast, you know, and the chaperone
was like, all right, off we go! as he was wont to say.]
ところが、そのときに、途端に、空襲警報が鳴りま
Embedded
2 してね。
[However, just then, that very moment, the air raid siren orientation
sounded, right?]
それで、ま::、あの憎いアメリカの飛行機をせめて一
目見るだけでも見てやろうと思って。
3 Evaluation
[And then, well, I felt I wanted at least to catch a glimpse of
that hateful American plane.]
で、廊下の、あの::、柱にこう手を回してですね、あ
の、ぴかっという閃光、から、あの、爆発音ですね、
ふと、こう、お、庭の端から上を見上げた瞬間に、そ
して、爆風で飛ばされるわけですね。
4 [And I put my, well, my arm around a pillar of the Complication
colonnade and, well, the blinding flash, and then, at the
sound of that explosion, you see, before I knew it, like, the
moment I looked up from the edge of the garden, I was
blown over by the shockwave.]

Again, we see that narratives proceed in the order of Abstract, Orientation,

Complication (complicating action clauses with embedded orientation and
evaluation clauses).

4.1.6 Fumiko’s testimony - A

Here is a part of Fumiko’s story. As the interviewer again summarizes in an

opening Abstract, Fumiko was a fourteen-year-old high school student when
she experienced the bombing of Hiroshima. She goes to Hiroshima City to
look for her family and is reunited with them, but her brother is seriously
injured and dies half a month later. She later decides to testify about the
bombing in Japan and abroad.

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Table 7: Fumiko’s testimony – A

Japanese testimonies and English translation Narrative

（ ） indicate annotation structure
天野文子（アマノ フミコ）さん、当時１４歳。８月
７日未明、家族を探しに市内へ。死の街となった広島
を見て、初めて気がつきます。戦争なんて人殺しじゃ
ないかと。ようやく家族と再会しますが、重傷の兄は
苦しみながら、半月後に亡くなりました。生き残った
者に忘却や沈黙は許されない、自分が和解の第一歩を
踏み出そうと、国内外で証言活動を続けています。
[Mrs. AMANO Fumiko, 14 years old at the time. On the
7th of August before dawn, she went to Hiroshima to look (Narration)
Abstract
for her family. Seeing that Hiroshima had become a city of
the dead, she realized for the first time that war was
equivalent to murder. She finally found her family but her
older brother was in critical condition and passed away
within half a month after enduring agonizing suffering from
his severe injuries. AMANO Fumiko believes it is
unforgivable for survivors to forget the Atomic Bombing,
or to keep silent about what happened. She is determined to
keep stepping forward to testify about the Atomic Bomb.]
Topic ① 原爆投下の前日 [The day before the atomic bomb]
兄はですね、体がとっても弱くて丙種合格だったんで
1 す、そんな兄に、まぁ、徴用みたいの来たんですね。 Orientation
[My elder brother was the most weakly of us all, you see,
so he was conscripted Grade C.]
そいで、飛渡瀬村っていうたぶん島だと思うんです
2 が、行って、 Orientation
[So then he went to Hitonose Village, which I think is an
island, and…]
結局、あのぉ、も う１カ月も たたないう ちに、あ
のぉ、体が悪い、手術が必要、っていうので 8 月 1 日
3 に広島へ帰ってきたんです。 Orientation
[In the end, well, not a month had gone by when they said
he’s in bad shape, he needs an operation, so he came home
to Hiroshima on August 1st.]
兄が、あの、6 日の日に、8 月 6 日の朝、７時半に、
あの、リヤカーにお布団積んで島病院に行きますって
4 いう、約束だったんですね。 Orientation
[Well, on the 6th, August 6th, at 7:30 that morning, well, we
were supposed to put my brother’s futon on a handcart and
take him to Shima Hospital.]

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普通だったらそれでいいのに、母はね、｢空襲警報が
Direct
5 治まったからちょっと行こう｣言ってね。
[Normally that would have been fine, but my mother says, quotation
“The air raid sirens have stopped, so come on, let’s go,”]
何故だかね、島病院まで私をね、連れてったんです、
6 5 日の晩に、 Complication
[I’m not sure why, but she brought me to Shima Hospital,
on the evening of the 5th.]
もう暗くて、でも流れ星がとってもたくさん落ちてね::。
Embedded
7 [It was very dark, but there were many, many shooting
orientation
stars, you see.]
｢なんだか、お母さん今晩は静かすぎて変だねぁ｣って
Direct
8 言いながらね::。
[And I’m not sure why, but I was saying, “Mother, it’s so quotation
quiet tonight, it feels strange.”]
その、流れ星を見ながらね::、そして、右側に、そ
のぉ、あと 11 時間後に原爆ドームになる、奨励館を
見ながらねぇ、産業奨励館を見ながら島病院に行っ
たんです。
9 [And as we were those shooting stars, just then, on the Complication
right, well, there was the Promotion Hall, which eleven
hours later would become the Atomic Bomb Memorial
Dome, and on our way to Shima Hospital we were looking
at the Promotion Hall you know, the Hiroshima Prefectural
Industrial Promotion Hall.]
そして、あの、明日の朝来ますけどいいですかって
Direct
10 言ったらば、
[And then, well, we asked, “We’ll come in tomorrow quotation
morning, all right?”]
若い看護婦さんが｢はい、いいですよ、ちゃんと約束
Direct
11 になってるから」って言われて、
[and the young nurse says, “You’re all set, his spot is quotation
all reserved.”]
｢はい、ありがとうございます｣って母は安心して帰り
かけて、もうほとんどドア閉めるときに奥から婦長さ
んが出てきて Direct
12 [So my mother says, “Okay, thank you,” and her mind quotation
was set at ease so we were about to go home again, and Complication
just as the door was closing behind us when the head
nurse come out, and…]

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｢は::、院長先生がね、島薫先生が一年に一回郡部の
友達の病院に手術に行かれるので、7 日でもいいです
Direct
13 よ｣って言われたんです。
[She says, “Actually, our director, Dr. Shima Kaoru, has his quotation
annual visit to do surgeries at his friend’s hospital in the
countryside, so we may as well make it the 7th.”]
婦長さんのその一言で私は助かったんですよね::、はい。 Embedded
14
[And that one word from the head nurse saved my life. Yessir.] orientation

The narrative begins with her own Abstract of her testimony. Then Fumiko talks
about her brother, how he was drafted into the army even though he was weak and
barely passed the physical, then came home from basic training needing surgery,
and he was supposed to enter the hospital the morning of August 6. These
explanations set the stage for her narrative, so Labov would call them Orientation
(lines 1–4). Next, Fumiko tells events in chronological order (lines 5–14), how her
mother took her to the hospital the evening of the fifth because the air raid alarm
had been silenced. They went to the hospital, past the building that would become
the Atomic Bomb Dome a mere eleven hours later. She describes her mother’s
interaction with the nurses there in direct quotation (lines 8, 10–13). While
describing the events in chronological order (lines 5–14), Fumiko adds
background information to help the listener understand the story better by
explaining how many shooting stars fell (line 7) and how she was saved by a
chance comment from the head nurse (line 14), as well as adding the conversation
at that time in direct quotation (lines 5, 8, 10–13).

It is important to note that here Fumiko is not only advancing the narrative
through action verbs that progress events but also using direct quotations (lines 5,
8, 10–13). Fumiko is showing us the ‘voice’ (Bakhtin 1929; Tannen 1989) of ‘then
and there’, reproduced ‘here and now’. Sunakawa (1989) describes this
phenomenon as “duality of place”. Here, Fumiko creates two places, ‘the place
where the quotation itself is uttered (now)’ and ‘the place of the statement
reproduced by the quotation (past)’ and shifts her viewpoint between them. In
other words, there are two different ‘me’s: the ‘me’ who tells the story in the here
and now and the ‘me’ who is a character in the story (then and there): the story is
told from two perspectives. The more decades ago the experience is, the greater
the psychological distance that separates the two realms.

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The voice that the speaker quotes may be different from that was actually said
(Tannen 1989). However, quite apart from whether what is said is true or not, the
quotation strategy in the narrative is important. A quotation for which the speaker
changes the tone and volume of the voice is important, this represents a choice to
reproduce the ‘voice’ directly in order to narrate direct experience more
effectively. Looking at this narrative from the perspective of constructing
coherence, it is highly informative, that is, reportability or tellability is high and
can be described as a continuous construction of causality through the effective
use of direct quotation in parallel with the complicating action clauses. A narrative
structure that is rich in direct quotation makes it difficult for the listener to
question the faithfulness of the narrative world to what occurred in the past, and it
is likely to produce a highly convincing narrative (Hill 2005).

The following structure of testimonial discourse emerges when the narratives of

Isano, Akira, Shūichi and Fumiko are analyzed along Labov’s lines.

Fig. 2: Structure of the atomic bomb survivor testimony

The hibakusha stories published by the Atomic Bomb Museum each start with an
Abstract that tells the listener what the story is about, followed by an Orientation
of who, when, where, and what they were doing when the bomb hit, and then a
Complication telling what happened next. This Complication moves the narrative
forward. In each section the speaker may use direct quotation of speech, thoughts,
or feelings, to express his or her own internal evaluation or to explain the situation,
and sometimes we have Orientation that does not move forward in time but just

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explains the situation. However, these are not mandatory. What is characteristic of
these testimonies is the last part of the discourse, where they leave the then and
there of the bombing and return to the here and now of the narration to make an
objective evaluation. This evaluation has a subjective element which we identify
as identity, and we will now go beyond Labov’s framework to analyze how this
identity is constructed and reconstructed through the act of narration using an
anthropological, psychological, and sociological approach.

4.2 Speakers’ identities in the survivor testimonies

Next, we will show how narrators present their identities in their testimonies. A
story is told from a particular point of view; it is not an objective or exhaustive
record of the event as it was. In other words, even if narrators think they are
faithfully retelling events, narratives will always be in part a creative
reconstruction from a bounded viewpoint. In addition, the narrator may not only
want the listener to listen to his or her own experiences, but to accept his or her
own opinions or impressions, as well as their ideas about their own identity, who
they are in all this. In the fields of literature, anthropology, or cultural studies there
are some analyses of hibakusha testimonies which cover some of these
perspectives (Treat 1995; Yoneyama 1999; Kawaguchi 2017), but as far as we
know, there are no linguistic analyses of the same material.

4.2.1 Isano’s testimony - C

In Table 8, we have Isano expressing her anger at the atomic bombing. Here the
speaker does not use Complication to move the story forward, but rather we have
Evaluation: “I think it was an inhuman act” or, “I thought it was an incendiary
bomb at first.”

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Table 8: Isano’s testimony – C

Narrative
Topic ⑫ 原爆投下への怒り [Anger at the bombing]
structure
やっぱり非人道的な行為と思いますよ。
1 Evaluation
[Sure enough, I think it was an inhuman thing to do.]
今も昔も一緒。あの時（被爆当時）は、まあ、原子爆
弾とは知りませんからね。 Embedded
2
[I thought so then and I think so now. At the time, well, we orientation
didn’t know that it was an atomic bomb, mind you.]
もう知ったのは１０年後ですから。 Embedded
3
[When we found out it was 10 years later, mind you.] orientation
（昭和）31 年（1956 年）ごろ、ビキニ、ビキニのあれ
Embedded
4 があってからですからね。
orientation
[About 1956, after Bikini, that thing with Bikini, mind you.]
そのとき（被爆した時は）焼夷爆弾、焼夷弾だと思と
5 るから。 Evaluation
[At the time we thought it was an incendiary bomb,
mind you.]
後遺症があるとか、何があるとか、ぜんぜん知らない
Embedded
6 時代ですからね。
[And we didn’t know anything about any after effects or orientation
anything like that, mind you.]
自分が弱いのは、自分の健康が悪いのは、自分が悪い
7 んだと思うぐらいですから。 Evaluation
[They let us think that we were just weak, we had poor
health, it was our own fault.]
もう、なんべんもダメかなと思うことがありましたよ。
8 Evaluation
[Oh, so many times I thought I just couldn’t go on.]
今は本当に、あんなもん、絶対に、使っちゃいけません。
9 [Now, today, that damned thing must never ever be used Evaluation
again, I mean it.]
もう世界のどの国にも、もうこれは絶対、みんな忘れ
10 てもらったら困ると思うんです。 Evaluation
[Not on any country in the whole world. I want you all to
remember this for me.]
もう、ほんとね::、声を大きくして言いたいです。
11 Evaluation
[Oh, I mean it, I want to shout it.]
原爆はもう絶対使ったらいけない、ね、思います。
12 [The atomic bomb must never be used again, ever, you Evaluation
hear? That’s what I think.]

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The speaker’s strong feeling that the atomic bomb should never be used is shown
again and again in the concluding part of her testimony (9–12). Here, Isano does
not use direct quotation or emotional adjectives to show her internal evaluation of
the then and there, as she has done in the past, but rather changes her narrative
frame to the here and now and strongly expresses her own identity and viewpoint
on the atomic bomb.

Next, let us consider Table 9, another example of the speaker’s identity showing
up in testimony. This is the last part of Itō Akira’s testimony. Akira was eighteen
years old at the time of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where he was stationed
as a naval communications officer.

4.2.2 Akira’s testimony- B

Table 9: Akira’s testimony – B

Narrative
Topic ⑥ 平和への思い [Hope for peace]
structure
絶対にこれからそんな戦争なんてことは考えるべきで
はないと思うんですがね、
1 Evaluation
[I think that we must absolutely never even think of war
again, ever, you know?]
まぁ、あの、そこらへんのね、あの、資力、資金それ
2 から技術、科学、そういうものをね、 Evaluation
[Well, uh, all that, you know, that economic power, capital,
and then science and technology, all that sort of thing, right?]
戦備に向けずに人間の生活面に全部向けたら、この地
球は桃源郷じゃないですか。
3 [Rather than using them to prepare for war, if we put them Evaluation
all toward the life of humanity, wouldn’t this earth become
the Peach Garden of the Immortals?]
私はそう思いますが。
4 Evaluation
[That’s what I think, anyway.]

At the end of his story, in Table 9 Akira evaluates what he has narrated so far: “I
think we should use economic power, funds, technology and science not for military
use but for human life”, changing his narrative time from the then and there to the
here and now and showing a strong anti-war social and personal identity.

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4.2.3 Shūichi’s testimony - C

Table 10 is the last part of Shūichi’s narrative. In the first and second lines he
expresses his survivor’s guilt at not being able to help his friends, for being the
only one who survived. He tells how his passion for the campaign to ban nuclear
weapons became a way to escape this feeling (lines 3, 9). He gives specific
examples of talks he had with children about the atomic bombing: they know
about the light and sound of the bomb and the maggots growing in the necrotic
flesh of the survivors (lines 4, 5), but they do not know much about radiation. In
the case of the university students (lines 6, 7, 8), Shūichi uses direct quotes such
as “I’ve already heard about it”, (line 6) and “Ehh!” (line 7), which show that he is
developing a sense of realism in the story. As a result of Shūichi’s testimony, he
concludes that he is “happy” (line 12) that the people who hear his stories now
understand the fearfulness of radiation and think carefully about war.

Table 10: Shūichi’s testimony – C

放射能の怖さ 核兵器廃絶への思い
Narrative
Topic ⑥ [The dangers of radioactivity and hope for a world without structure
nuclear weapons]
中には、あの::、自分の親だとかね、え::、兄弟だと
かをま::、そういう見捨てて逃げた人がたくさんある
Embedded
1 わけですけども、
orientation
[Among them were, well, many who left behind their parents
or, well, brothers and sisters and you see, run away, but uh—]
私の場合は、ま::、たった一晩の友達だったですけど
も、うぅん、やっぱり、自分だけがまぁ、逃げて助
かったっちゅうのが、どうしても、あの、自分を責め
2 る気になるんですね::、え::。 Evaluation
[In my case, now, they were friends I had only known for
one night, but umm, sure enough I just can’t help but want
to blame myself for having gotten away while others did
not, you know?]
そういう気持ちが 強い人が、え ぇ、今度は逆 にあ
のぉ、まぁ、私の場合もそうなんですけど、原水爆禁
止の運動の方にあのぉ、情熱を燃やすようになるわけ Embedded
3 なんですね、え::。
orientation
[People with this sort of strong feeling, well, now, I am one
of them, but we became passionate for the movement to
abolish nuclear weapons.]

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こう、公民館だとかね、それから、う:ん、子供たち
に話をしてもね、何にも知ってないわけですよね、原
Embedded
4 爆のことをね。
[I give, give talks to children in community halls and other— orientation
and you know, children know nothing about it, the atomic
bomb.]
で、ピカッと光って、ドンと鳴って、で、ウジ虫がわ
Embedded
5 いたぐらいのところはよく知っていて。
[And, they know that there was a flash and a boom, and orientation
maggots on people’s bodies.]
で、大学生なんかでもね、｢もう、その話はもう聞き
Direct
6 ました｣っちゅうわけですわね。
[And, even university students are all like, “I’ve already quotation
heard that story.”]
で::、ところが、その::、放射線の話だとかですね、
え::、ゆうことになってくると、｢え::っ｣つうようん
Direct
7 なって、
quotation
[And, however, when I talk about radiation, you know, well
then they begin to listen intently, like, “Ehh!”]
初めて聞きましたということで、ま::、身を乗り出し
Embedded
8 て聞いたりするようになるもんですから、
[They say they, “That’s the first I ever heard that!” and lean orientation
forward listening, so—]
ま::、これはもう、やっぱり、あの::、ピカドンだけ
でなしに詳しい話をしなきゃいけないんじゃないかと
Embedded
9 いうことに、ま::、目覚めましてですね、
[Well, it a matter of, sure enough, uh, it’s not just the orientation
flash and the boom, and we have to talk about it in
detail, I came to realize.]
感想文を必ず書いてもらうんですよ。
Embedded
10 [I always make the students write a report afterwards,
orientation
you see.]
そうすると、あの::、戦争反対だということは、小学
Embedded
11 生でもみんな考えてくれますし、
[And then, uh, even elementary schoolers come out saying orientation
they’re against war.]
それから、あの、原爆で一番怖いのは、あの::、放射
線だというようなことがね、きちっと伝わってきてい
12 るというのがね、ま::、うれしいですわね、え::。 Evaluation
[And then, uh, the scariest thing about the atomic bomb is
well, radiation, and they’re starting to get that, which, you
know, well, makes me so happy.]

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This ‘happy’ self has overcome the hardships of the original experience of the
atomic bombing and grows through the act of narration: we might call it a ‘thriving
self’. In the field of counseling and therapy, a thriver is someone who has reached
the ideal final stage on the journey of recovery (victim to survivor and survivor to
grower) for those that have experienced violence, abuse, or trauma (see Sato 2020).
In this way, we can see in the narratives the process of positive growth through
testimony, even though they carry the sad past of the bombing and the loss of
friends and family. In terms of Bamberg’s positioning as introduced in section 2
above, on Level 1, in the world of the story, Shūichi was a victim of the atomic
bomb. However, on Level 2, the world of storytelling, he overcomes his victimhood.
Finally, on Level 3, the sociocultural self, Shūichi inhabits his identity as an activist
calling for a ban on atomic bombs. Here again, the experience of the then and there
is reinterpreted in the here and now, and an external evaluation is made at the end of
the narrative. Telling stories has the power to recapture the past, change the self in
the present, and evoke hope for the future.

4.2.4 Fumiko’s testimony - B

In Table 11, Fumiko’s feelings shift over time. She is asked by Dr. Tanaka of the
Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations to go to the
United Nations, but she says she does not want to (lines 1–2). Here, the narrator
uses direct quotations such as “Please go to the UN”, and “I do not want to go to
the U.S.” However, he argues that she should go because she is a Christian, but
she does not respond (lines 3–5). Here again, direct quotations are used: “You are
Christian, aren’t you?”, “If you visit the U.S., you will see church women who are
taking a lead in the peace movement”, “You are a mother and the principal of a
kindergarten, aren’t you?” Then Fumiko read the report Dr. Tanaka gave to her
that night and realizes that survivors should not be allowed to ‘forget’ and that
silence is not an option. (lines 6–10).

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Table 11: Fumiko’s testimony – B

Narrative
Topic ⑦ 伝えたいこと [What I Want to Tell You]
structure
あの、今、被団協の事務局長してらっしゃる田中煕巳
先生がね、報告書を持ってらして、あの::、｢今度、国
連特別総会へ行ってください｣って言われたんですよ。 Complication
1 [So now, Tanaka Terumi, the Secretary General of the Japan Direct
Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Survivors, brought me a quotation
report and said, “Please go to the Special Session on
Disarmament of the General Assembly of the United Nations.”]
で、私が、｢アメリカには行きたくない｣って言ったん
Direct
2 ですね。
quotation
[And I said, “I don’t want to go to America,” you know?]
そしたら、その田中先生がね、｢あなたはクリスチャ
Direct
3 ンでしょう｣って。
quotation
[So then Dr. Tanaka said, “You’re Christian, aren’t you?”]
｢アメリカに行ってごらんなさい、教会に集まってみ
んながね、あの::、歩いていますよ｣って、｢教会の婦
人たちも先頭に立って歩いてますよ、あなたお母さん
でしょう｣って、｢幼稚園の園長でしょう｣って言われ
Direct
4 たんですね。
[“Just look at America: everybody gets together in their quotation
churches and they’re, well, marching,” he says, and, “The
church ladies march at the head of the marches! And you’re
a mother, aren’t you?” and, “You’re the principal of a
kindergarten, aren’t you?” he says to me.]
でも私はそのときに返事しなかったんですよ。
5 Complication
[But at that time I didn’t give him an answer.]
そして、その晩にず::っとその報告書を読んだんですね。
6 Complication
[but that night I read that report all night long, you see.]
その報告書の中にね、一番後ろに、この生か、忘却
Embedded
7 かっていうのがあったんですよ。
[In that report, at the very end, there was this saying: “To orientation
live, or to forget.”]
この生か、忘却かというのは、あの::、あなたは生き
て、もし沈黙をするならば、それは忘却したことと同
Embedded
8 じっていう意味なのね。
[“To live, or to forget.” This means, well, that you may go orientation
on living, but if you keep silent, that’s just the same as if
you’d forgotten.]

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だから、生き残った者に忘却は許されない。
9 [And that’s why those of us who have survived must Evaluation
never forget.]
もちろん、沈黙も許されないって思ったのね。
10 Evaluation
[And of course, never keep silent.]
これを読んだから、次の朝、私が夫に何か言おうか
11 な::と思ったときに、夫の方が先にこう言ったの。 Complication
[I had read this, so the next morning I was just thinking,
“Should I tell my husband?” and he said to me—]
自分が、その、聖地イスラエルに行くお金が貯めてあ
るだろうって、だから、それを使って行ったらって
Direct
12 言ってくれたの。
quotation
[“I’ve been saving that money to visit the Holy Land,
Israel, haven’t I? So why don’t you use that to go?”]
まぁ、そういうことで、私は、あのぉ、アメリカで初
13 めて、あの::、証言をし出したんですけど、 Complication
[And oh my, so that’s how I, well, I went to America for the
first time and uh, gave my testimony, and—]
考えてみたらね、アメリカでたくさん癒された気がするの。
14 [Now that I think about it, right, I feel like I was greatly Evaluation
healed in America.]
本当にわかる人はわかるのね。
15 Evaluation
[Those who really understand will understand, you know?]

Finally, her husband recommends she use the money he had saved to go to
Jerusalem to go to the U.S. instead: “I have been saving money in order to visit
the Holy City of Jerusalem, you know? Why don’t you use that money and go to
the U.S.?” This is why she started to testify in the U.S. (lines 11–13). Her
experience in the U.S. brought her feelings of healing, which she describes in
lines 14 and 15 by reconsidering past events from the present point of view: with
external evaluation.

These examples of speakers’ identities in testimony are consistent with

Matsumoto’s (1998) ‘voice’ or Bamberg’s (1997) ‘positioning’. Matsumoto
(1998) analyzed narratives of war survivors using Bakhtin’s (1929) theory of
‘voice’, pointing out that there are inevitably at least two perspectives of the ‘I’ in
war narratives: that in the ‘here and now’ of the narration and that of the ‘there
and then’ of the experience. Matsumoto also shows how survivor narratives are

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delimited by quotations that represent ‘my voice in the past’, ‘the voices of others’,
and ‘my voice in the present’, indicating the narrator’s evaluation of war and his
or her own positionality or identity.

In these testimonies, too, the narrators used two perspectives, internal and external
evaluation, and this shows that they are not only recounting their past experiences
but also expressing their own identities.

Mishler (2006) cites Ricoeur’s (1980) metaphorical description of time as a ‘two-

way arrow’ to argue that narrative time is not just a chain of events on a one-way
track from past to present; rather, the concluding section is the most important part
of the storyline because it forces us to go back and reinterpret the earlier parts of
the timeline. The past is not fixed, and the meaning of past events and experiences
is constantly being reconstructed, depending on how they are registering in the
present moment. We have seen above how past reflections are expressed in
narrative form and how they are related to one’s current identity, and here we see
that the Evaluation portion of a narration often contains, or better, develops, the
narrator’s own identity. Not only do the narrators’ telling of stories that happened
in the past construct their social and personal identities but, according to Ochs
(1997), narratives create a continuity of self and society, allowing us to see a
continuing identity from the past to the present and to a future yet to be seen.

5. Conclusion

Taking atomic bomb survivors’ testimonies as data, we have taken up the research
questions:

1. What is the basic structure shared by these survivor testimonies?

2. How are the speakers’ identities presented in the narratives?

We found 1. that the structures of these narratives could satisfyingly be analyzed

using Labov’s framework of Abstract, Orientation, Complication, Internal
Evaluation, and External Evaluation. In keeping with Labov’s framework,
Abstract and Orientation are mainly used at the beginning of the testimony, while
External Evaluation is used at the very end as a moral judgment is passed. This is
just where 2. the narrators’ identities come into play most strongly, as they

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(re)interpret the meaning of their experiences in their own ways, both socially and
as an individual.

From this point of view, it can be said that the act of testifying is an act of
positioning and giving meaning to experience from one’s own present viewpoint,
because testimonial discourse not only conveys objective facts that happened in
the past but connects that experience with the here and now and offers moral and
other evaluations. Naturally a more extensive study of many more survivor
testimonies is in order, and a larger data set would allow us to expand our
methodology across more disciplines in response to the specificity of the data.
Recent work has pointed out that narratives also constitute an interaction with the
listener (Bamberg 2004; Buchanan and Middleton 1995; Goodwin 1990; Ochs
1997), so it will be necessary to examine the way in which the speaker’s identity
is co-constituted in negotiation with various listeners, with attention to pauses,
intonation, and nonverbal behaviors such as posture, gaze and gesture, as well as
moments of spontaneous conversation before, between, and during events of pure
storytelling. Accordingly, future data collection should include media such as
video to capture the behavior of all participants from a multimodal perspective.
This methodology will also be of use in recording testimony of current disasters
like the nuclear accident in 2011, the coronavirus pandemic (see Najima 2021)
and future events related to climate change, the results of which may be used to
develop new methods of clinical care. For now, this paper has shown the viability
of a sociolinguistic discourse analysis of hibakusha testimonies, combined with an
anthropological, psychological, and sociological approach to the construction and
reconstruction of identity through the act of narration.

* This research is the product of a project on Memory Transfer and Language, funded by the Basic Research
Support Program at the University of Tsukuba, as well as the International Research Institute for Studies in
Language and Peace at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. Earlier versions were presented in seminar at the
University of Tsukuba, as well as at the 11th International Association of Chinese-Japanese Contrastive Linguistics,
Suzhou University. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

1 Japanese names and words are written in the modified Hepburn style. Long vowels are indicated by
macrons..
2 Various gross aspects of speech delivery are captured in these transcripts as follows:

。 falling tone
、 continuing tone
… inaudible parts
: stretching of a sound, the number of colons corresponding to relative length

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