Last week I interviewed a Japanese journalist for an industry publication about Japanese content sales overseas, in particular Japanese TV dramas. I brought up the current NHK morning drama series, or “asadora,” which is aired every weekday for 15 minutes and always centers on a female protagonist. The one NHK is presenting now, and which started in the spring, is called Tora ni Tsubasa (English title: The Tiger and Her Wings). It’s a fictionalized biography of Yoshiko Mibuchi, who was one of the first female lawyers in Japan and the first female judge. The journalist said she has watched every episode and admired the way the series frankly covered the sexual politics of Japan during the Showa Era, when it takes place, especially its sympathetic treatment of one LGBTQ+ character. 

I had only seen a handful of episodes, but the significance of the series for me was something different. Mibuchi was the judge in charge of the first lawsuit brought against the Japanese government by victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a subject that, as far as I am aware, has never been touched by Japanese television in dramatic form. And while NHK often covers the atomic bombings in documentaries, especially during August when the anniversaries come around, it tends to approach the issue in historical terms in a neutral manner. The journalist acknowledged this point, but since the case didn’t come up until the 98th episode, which was broadcast on August 14, she didn’t think it was the primary theme of the series. She saw it as simply a fictionalized bio-drama of a prominent historical figure with whom many Japanese were probably unfamiliar.

In that regard, I thought the show would be more valuable for opening viewers’ eyes to aspects of the bombings that aren’t discussed in Japan openly. In the series, Mibuchi has been renamed Tomoko Inotsume (Tora-chan is her nickname), and she will presumably preside over a case that greatly affected the legal standing of hibakusha (victims of the atomic bombings). According to a Tokyo Shimbun article about the trial, the genesis of the court case came about around 1955, when two separate suits brought by hibakusha against the government, one filed in Tokyo, the other in Osaka, were combined into one. In addition, the irradiation of a Japanese fishing boat and its crew by the U.S. atomic testing at the Bikini atoll in 1954 was allowed as material evidence. The plaintiffs insisted that the atomic bombings violated international law, but since the Japanese government had abandoned any war-related demands from the U.S. in the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the victims could not sue the U.S. and so aimed their wrath at the Japanese government, demanding compensation based on property rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The Japanese government insisted that the suit had no standing because matters between separate sovereign nations do not hinge on the domestic laws of either country, which Tokyo Shimbun agreed was a flimsy argument. In any case, individual victims do not have the right to demand compensation in terms of international law. To add even more irony to the case, in its defense, the government took the American justification for the bombing at face value, saying that it sped up the end of the war and thus prevented many more deaths on both sides of the conflict, a theory that is still being debated. 

Mibuchi presided over all 9 trial sessions except the last one, when she was replaced by another judge and transferred to family court. She was not present when the verdict was read on Dec. 7, 1963, though Tokyo Shimbun agrees that her sensibility was all over the court’s statement. Though the court rejected the suit owing to procedural matters, in its 131-page ruling it stated that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indeed illegal acts of war in terms of international law, since they caused the indiscriminate killing of civilian non-combatants in a location with no strategic value. It mentioned that the use of poison gas after World War I was deemed a war crime, and the court saw no difference in terms of pain and suffering inflicted by the atomic bombs. It was the first time a legal entity had addressed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the statement would reverberate in the subsequent international movement to abolish nuclear weapons and figure more locally in the treatment of hibakusha over the years by the Japanese government. 

Tokyo Shimbun points out that it took a certain measure of courage to write an opinion that overtly criticized the U.S. at the time, since Japan was very careful not to offend the country that defeated it. Tora ni Tsubasa could clarify this important historical moment for a wider audience.