Well, I take it we're not supposed to just write things here, but this today is the 70th anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing (shameless plug), so this particular example feels appropriate, and I doubt anyone is going to ask about it: Why aren't there many photos of corpses at Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

The photos one is used to seeing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are as cities of rubble. There are often no corpses visible. This has, in my experience, led to people over the years thinking that atomic bombs sort of just vaporized you.

But this is a very false impression. Eyewitness accounts describe mountains of corpses, and rivers choked with them. They describe the scenes as hellish, not sanitized. This instant vaporization appearance was, I think, created by two factors. One is that these photographs are usually from no earlier than September 1945, over a month after the bombing. Some of them are from October 1945, or even as late as 1946. So the cities are actually quite cleaned up by this point. This is an artifact of the fact that most of the photos we see of these cities were taken by Americans in charge of making surveys of the damage of the bombs, and Americans didn't start showing up in Japan until September.

The other aspect, which is more to the point of this theme, is that the Japanese culture at the time believed that corpses needed to be buried or burned almost immediately. This was more than a hygienic measure — it was apparently religious in intent. So literally within a day or so of the Hiroshima bombing there were organized crews of soldiers collecting and burning the corpses. To my knowledge we have no photographs of this, but we do have drawings made by witnesses (which I warn you are rather powerful and horrific). Those particular drawings refer to the events of August 6th and 7th at Hiroshima, so even on the day of the bombing (which took place early in the morning) they had started corpse disposal.

There are, of course, a few photographs of individual corpses. But because of censorship conditions in Occupied Japan, and because of squeamishness on behalf of the American public and news media, they were not broadly distributed until decades later.

I find this to be a rather interesting way in which the cultural practices of dealing with the dead affected the sorts of historical documentation produced, and as a result had a major impact on collective historical understanding and memory.

Separately, in the late 1950s, the US government produced a pamphlet on the subject of disposing of the millions of corpses a full nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union would produce. It features the craziest flowchart I have ever seen, showing the progress from casualty to corpse to burial. What is interesting about this pamphlet as a whole, aside from its inherently disturbing subject matter (when a government pamphlet states up front that it is about to dive into a "grim business," you know you are in for a treat), is that it is, in typical late-20th-century US bureaucratic fashion, obsessed with the question of documentation. It is less about the orderly burial of corpses as it is the orderly registration of the dead, because without good records, how can you move on? (This from the same government that also nuked filing cabinets to see if the bureaucracy would survive said nuclear exchange.) Which is an interesting contrast to the Japanese case mentioned above.

Oh hey! It's something I specialize in!

Now is the best time to ask about the shaft tomb culture.

Ooh neat. Well I guess I'm here to shamelessly plug my own area of expertise.

How did Feudal Japan perceive life after death for humans?