The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 have unfailingly provoked historical fascination. In particular, recent scholarship has highlighted, often with little connection to local contexts, how the bomb resulted in nation-specific, gendered understandings of Americans as masculine victors and the Japanese as feminine victims in medical and cultural discourses in the nuclear age. In these discourses, the bomb’s survivors are often helpless “guinea pigs” at U.S. scientists’ disposal or “keloid girls” whose scarred beauty could be retrieved only by America’s advanced medical technologies.¹ Much scholarly attention, too, has focused on institutional medicine, such as the genetic research