After Hiroshima: Portraits of Survivors

What motivated the Japanese to assimilate to the very culture that destroyed over 75,000 of their people?
Excerpt:

Like other men who have watched postwar Hiroshima, Lieut. Colonel Thomas Cloward, chief of American Military Government stationed there, could only say, “We don’t know what is the truly motivating force. All we know is that something’s happened to these people. They want peace, and they want to play a part in that peace.”