Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War 9781315505558, 131550555X

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Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This edited volume reconsiders the importance of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a post-­Cold War perspective. It has been argued that during the Cold War era scholarship was limited by the anxiety that authors felt about the possibility of a global thermonuclear war, and the role their scholarship could play in obstructing such an event. The new scholarship of Nuclear Humanities approaches this history and its fallout with both more nuanced and integrative inquiries, paving the way towards a deeper integration of these seminal events beyond issues of policy and ethics. This volume, therefore, offers a distinctly post-­Cold War perspective on the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The chapters collected here address the memorialization and commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by officials and states, but also ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, or forgiveness. The volume presents a variety of approaches with contributions from academics and contributions from authors who are strongly connected to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its people. In addition, the work branches out beyond the traditional subjects of social sciences and humanities to include contributions on art, photography, and design. This variety of approaches and perspectives provides moral and political insights on the full range of vulnerabilities – such as emotional, bodily, cognitive, and ecological – that pertains to nuclear harm. This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, nuclear weapons, World War II history, Asian History and International Relations in general. N.A.J. Taylor is a lecturer in Australian Environmental Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Robert Jacobs is a professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and Hiroshima City University, Japan.

Series: War, Politics and Experience Series Editor: Christine Sylvester

Experiencing War Edited by Christine Sylvester The Political Psychology of War Rape Studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina Inger Skjelsbæk Gender, Agency and War The Maternalized Body in US Foreign Policy Tina Managhan War as Experience Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis Christine Sylvester War and the Body Militarisation, Practice and Experience Edited by Kevin McSorley The Politics of Protest and US Foreign Policy Performative Construction of the War on Terror Cami Rowe Joy and International Relations A New Methodology Elina Penttinen Women and Militant Wars The Politics of Injury Swati Parashar

Fictional International Relations Gender, Pain and Truth Sungju Park-­Kang Bodies, Power, and Resistance in the Middle East Experiences of Subjectification in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Caitlin Ryan Masquerades of War Edited by Christine Sylvester Gender Politics and Security Discourse Personal-­Political Imaginations and Feminism in ‘Post-­Conflict’ Serbia Laura McLeod Gendering Counterinsurgency Performativity, Embodiment and Experience in the Afghan ‘Theatre of War’ Synne L. Dyvik Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki Nuclear Humanities in the Post-­Cold War Edited by N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs

Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Nuclear Humanities in the Post-­Cold War

Edited by N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Taylor, N. A. J., editor. | Jacobs, Robert A., 1960- editor. Title: Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki : nuclear humanities in the post-Cold War / edited by N. A. J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Series: War, politics and experience | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017021419 | ISBN 9781138201842 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315505572 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hiroshima-shi (Japan)–History–Bombardment, 1945. | Nagasaki-shi (Japan)–History–Bombardment, 1945. | Atomic bomb– History–20th century. Classification: LCC D767.25.H6 R45 2017 | DDC 940.54/2521954–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021419 ISBN: 978-1-138-20184-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-50557-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgments



Introduction: on Hiroshima becoming history

vii viii xi 1

N . A . J .   T aylor and R obert  J acobs

  1 Contested spaces of ethnicity: zainichi Korean accounts of the atomic bombings

12

E ri k R opers

  2 Memory and survival in everyday textures—Ishiuchi Miyako’s Hiroshima

30

M a k eda  B est

  3 The most modern city in the world: Isamu Noguchi’s cenotaph controversy and Hiroshima’s city of peace

37

R an Z wigenberg

  4 Hiroshima remediated: nuclear cosmopolitan memory in The War Game (1965) and “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials” (2012)

53

J essica R apson

  5 Nuclear memory

71

S tefanie F ishel

  6 Nagasaki re-­imagined: the last shall be first Kathleen S ulli v an

87

vi   Contents   7 The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh in post-­war Japan

91

A dam B roinows k i

  8 Australian POW and Occupation force experiences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: a digital hyper-­visualisation

108

S tuart  B ender and M ic k   B roderic k

  9 In the light of Hiroshima: banalizing violence and normalizing experiences of the atomic bombing

123

Y u k i M iyamoto

10 Hiroshima and the paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity

139

T homas E . D oyle ,   I I

11 For granting (a) voice

156

M arcela Q uiroz

12 Witnessing Nagasaki for the second time

160

RYUTA IMAFUKU

13 Antimonument: a short reflection on writings by Marcela Quiroz and Ryuta Imafuku

169

S hinpei T a k eda



Index

175

Illustrations

Figures   8.1   8.2   8.3   8.4   8.5   8.6 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4

Section of 360-degree panorama taken in Hiroshima by Shigeo Hayashi, 1945  Section of 360-degree panorama taken in April 2015 Extract from the exhibition’s two-­panel diptych showing the contemporary orientation map of Nijimura, the former BCOF housing district in situ today A small memorial dedicated to ‘all foreign war victims in Nagasaki. May it be a token of Man’s prayer for the abolition of nuclear weapons and a pledge never to take arms again’ Frame enlargement of Kana outside the Genbaku Dome The authors standing in front of the 180-degree panorama display Beta Decay #5 in the exhibition “Shinpei Takeda ANTIMONUMENT” at Nagasaki Art Museum, 2015 Close view of Beta Decay #5 in the exhibition “Shinpei Takeda ANTIMONUMENT” at Nagasaki Art Museum, 2015 Close view of Beta Decay #5 in the exhibition “Shinpei Takeda ANTIMONUMENT” at Nagasaki Art Museum, 2015 Alpha Decay installation by Shinpei Takeda at Centro Cultural de Tijuana, 2011 

109 109 110 111 114 116 170 171 172 173

Table 8.1 Audience engagement (duration)

119

Contributors

Stuart Bender is Early Career Research Fellow at Curtin University, focusing on the aesthetics of digital violence. His recent film and exhibition work has explored mass violence, including both the school-­shooter film Excursion (2013), and Fading Lights (2015), which draws attention to the legacy of Australian POW and British Commonwealth Occupation Force troops in Japan. Makeda Best is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard University Art Museum. She previously co-­edited the volume Conflict, Identity and Protest in Amer­ican Art (2015). Mick Broderick is Associate Professor of Media Analysis at Murdoch University, where he is a fellow of the Asian Research Centre and co-­chief investigator of the Global Hibakusha Project. His extensive creative work and scholarly writing spans over 30 years and includes video production, installation, curated film festivals and international touring exhibitions. His most recent monograph is Reconstructing Strangelove: Inside Stanley Kubrick’s “Nightmare Comedy” (2017). Adam Broinowski is at the Australian National University where he is completing his Australian Research Council DECRA project, “Contaminated Life: ‘Hibakusha’ in Japan in the Nuclear Age.” His monograph is Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body during the Cold War and after (2016). Thomas E. Doyle, II is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas State University. His first book is titled The Ethics of Nuclear Weapons Dissemination: Moral Dilemmas of Aspiration, Avoidance, and Prevention (2015). His recent articles have appeared in Global Governance, Critical Military Studies, and Journal of International Political Theory. Stefanie Fishel is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (2017). She is a founding member of the Archive of Nuclear Harm’s Advisory Board when it was constituted in 2013.

Contributors   ix Ryuta Imafuku is a Professor of Anthropology and Communication at the Graduate School of Global Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan. His books include The Heterology of Culture (1991), Technology of the Wild (1994), Mínima Gracia: History and Craving (2008), The Archipelago-­World (2008), and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Night, and Music (2011) among others. Robert Jacobs is a Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and Hiroshima City University. He is a historian of nuclear technologies and radiation techno­politics, the author of The Dragon’s Tail: Amer­icans Face the Atomic Age (2010) and the editor of Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb (2010), and the co-­editor of Images of Rupture in Civilization Between East and West (2016). Yuki Miyamoto earned her PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is an Associate Professor, teaching ethics in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University. Her publications on nuclear discourse include a monograph, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud (2011), and articles such as “Inconceivable Anxieties” and “Gendered Bodies in Tokusatsu.” Marcela Quiroz is an art historian, with a PhD in critical theory. Her first book, “La ilusión de ser fotógrafo” (2007)—a phenomenological approach on pinhole photography—is sold out. Her latest book, La escritura, el cuerpo y su desaparición, was published in 2016. Her art theory essays have been translated to English, Portuguese, German, French, and Japanese. Jessica Rapson is a Lecturer in Culture, Media, and Creative Industries at King’s College London. She is the author of Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice (2015) and co-­editor of The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders (with Lucy Bond, 2014). Erik Ropers is Assistant Professor of History at Towson University. His work broadly focuses on historical discourse (both written and visual) and memories of the Korean minority in wartime Japan, with particular attention to forced labourers, survivors of the atomic bombings, and questions of gendered violence. Kathleen Sullivan, PhD, has been engaged in the nuclear issue for nearly 30 years, and has worked internationally as an educator for disarmament focusing on two distinct audiences: young people and atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha). Currently, she is the Program Director for Hibakusha Stories, an arts-­based initiative that has brought atomic bomb survivors into the lives of some 30,000 New York City High Schools students. As an education consultant to the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, she developed the disarmament education web portal for the UN’s Cyberschoolbus website and co-­wrote with Peter Lucas Action for Disarmament: 10 Things You Can Do! (2014), recently translated into Japanese and Korean.

x   Contributors Shinpei Takeda is an artist whose projects include Alpha Decay and Beta Decay, in which he has interviewed over 60 survivors of the atomic bombings living in North and South America, and made a series of art installations, directed a documentary movie, Hiroshima Nagasaki Download (73 minutes, 2010), and wrote Alpha Decay: How can a contemporary art express the memory of the atomic bomb (2014) and Hiroshima Nagasaki Beyond the Ocean (co-­written with Naoko Wake, 2014). N.A.J. Taylor is among those inaugurating a new, nuclear, humanities. Recent works include the edited volume, Re-imagining Hiroshima (Critical Military Studies, 2015), with Robert Jacobs. Forthcoming works under contract include the book, Antipodean Nuclear Feminisms (Palgrave Macmillan, c.2018), and the special issue Montebello, Emu, Maralinga: Australia’s Nuclear Culture (Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts, c.2017) Ran Zwigenberg is Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on modern Japanese and European history. Zwigenberg published on issues of war memory, atomic energy, psychiatry, and survivor politics. Zwigenberg’s first book, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (2014), was the winner of the 2016 Association for Asian Studies’ John W. Hall book award.

Acknowledgments

We—a nuclear philosopher and nuclear historian, respectively—began collaborating on this project when, in 2014, we were asked to edit a special issue of Critical Military Studies for the 70-year anniversary of the United States’ nuclear attacks on the cities and peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Versions of Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9 and 10 appeared in Critical Military Studies, Issue 2, Vol. I (2015), and are reproduced here by permission of Taylor & Francis. Despite affording ourselves and the contributors less than 12 months to deliver the project, we had sufficient provocative material left that we agreed to publish this expanded edited volume as a stand-­alone book with Routledge. There are, to be sure, many more chapters—including two authored by the editors—that we omitted from the final publication to make space for others. Both volumes are testament to the (re)newed interest in the emerging subfield of the Nuclear Humanities, but also to the efforts of countless others who have variously enabled, enhanced, or otherwise equalised us throughout the project. For this, we would principally like to thank Paul Brown, the convenor and creative producer of the Nuclear Futures partnership initiative, a three-­year arts and culture program sponsored by the Australia Council for the Arts, whose own project led to us being introduced to each other—albeit virtually—in 2013. The list of people who in some way enhanced this edited volume are considerable, and include Victoria Basham, Jess Gifkins, and Sarah Bulmer of Critical Military Studies, as well as the reviewers that we called upon for that 2015 special issue. For encouraging us to consider a wider audience, we thank both Andrew Humphrys and Hannah Ferguson at Routledge, as well as Christine Sylvester, the book series editor. For a project such as this, equalisation is no less important. For this, we extend the warmest love to our partners, Jahnne Pasco-­White and Carol Agrimson, family, and closest friends for reminding us that while all about us in the Nuclear Humanities are preoccupied with the spatial and temporal enormity of nuclear harms, not everyone is—or should be. N.A.J. Taylor Melbourne, Australia Robert Jacobs Hiroshima, Japan

Introduction On Hiroshima becoming history N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs

A great deal has been written about Hiroshima.1 One only needs to mention the city’s name—Hiroshima—and people of all generations tend to recall the two nuclear attacks that America inflicted on Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945. Over time, however, there is also the growing tendency for the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the awareness of nuclear weapons and war in general, to fade from contemporary consciousness. Simply put, Hiroshima is becoming history. Nevertheless, for those who have retained a sense of the nuclear imaginary, Hiroshima has come to stand-­in for a world historical event—and a crime against humanity—that called into question the very meaning of harm, as well as of life, death, and politics.2 For the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just that: attacks. Attacks not only on the human body, but also on the biosphere on which all life depends. In this way, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki introduced a form of harm that was fundamentally different-­in-kind from all others that had gone before it. In 1999, prominent journalists in the United States were asked to vote on the top 25 news stories of the twentieth century.3 When the results came in, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Japan topped the poll. For many it was an important story because it was said to have “ended World War Two.” For others, it was because of the threat of the Cold War. Either way, the significance of the weapon was linked to its role in either an actual or potential nuclear war.4 Throughout the last half of the twentieth century many people fixated on the threat of a global thermonuclear war during the Cold War, and when that threat was largely averted with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the place of nuclear weapons in our imagined future became murky at best. Amid fears of proliferation, use by non-­state actors, dirty bombs, and regional nuclear war, the notion that nuclear weapons were altogether different-­in-kind has been lost amid a deeply troublesome climate of fear that seemingly pervades our time. From this perspective, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki increasingly became footnotes to twentieth-­century history. However, just as radiation persists long after initial contamination, Hiroshima has not receded into the near past: a remnant of a historical trauma and a narrowly averted threat of Cold War aggression. Much as the uranium-­235 that has settled deep into the soil of Hiroshima and the Seto Inland Sea (where much of the contaminated topsoil

2   N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs of  Hiroshima was dumped), and the plutonium that has settled into the soil of Nagasaki, the half-­life of this history is arguably only just beginning. Our shared nuclear past is the Earth’s nuclear future. Nuclear technologies are produced in short periods of time. The Manhattan Project delivered nuclear weapons to the United States military in less than five years. The United States and the U.S.S.R. both transitioned from fission weapons to fusion weapons in less than 10 years. However, the materials produced out of this technology began a life that is lived on an almost inconceivable timescale. It is likely true that long past the time when there is still a city named Hiroshima, the residue of the nuclear attack will still be present at the site. We place our understanding of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the container of twentieth-­century warfare and history: it was the most important news story of the twentieth century. Our relationship to radionuclides, produced by both civilian and military nuclear technologies, may be the story of the millennium, or millennia. This long-­term relationship to radiation, separate from our anxieties about the use of nuclear weapons, will continually demand that we engage in a process of experiencing and re-­imagining Hiroshima again-­and-again. The entry of radionuclides into our ecosystem did not begin in Hiroshima, just as the detonation of nuclear weapons and perhaps even the dawn of the Anthropocene epoch did not begin in Hiroshima.5 Hiroshima, however, remains our touchstone, our talisman: the name given to our changed relationship to both nature and human technological culture. For those living 5,000 years in the future, the name Hiroshima may still resonate, but it will not be for the same reasons that it resonated with the journalists who participated in the 1999 survey. Thus, as we find ourselves in the early years of being liberated from seeing Hiroshima strictly in terms of World War Two, or in terms of our own vulnerability during the Cold War, we are in a unique position to begin a work that will be ongoing for scholars: re-­imagining Hiroshima as it relates to current times, and not just the twentieth century. We have therefore compiled this volume at a critical juncture. The project began in June 2014 with our original call for papers asking potential contributors to “re-­imagine the nuclear harm that was inflicted [at Hiroshima and Nagasaki], and its aftermath.” Through the process of collating and editing the papers over the last few years, first for the scholarly journal, Critical Military Studies (Taylor and Jacobs, 2015), in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then for this expanded volume, while our resolve has only firmed, our focus has narrowed on this notion that Hiroshima can indeed be experienced, even by non-­Japanese or others implicated in the nuclear, and even today. The chapters we have assembled for this collection therefore address the recollection, memorialization, and commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by officials and states, but also ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, or forgiveness. We attempted to include contributions from authors outside the city walls, but were especially eager to publish papers from those who are themselves closely connected to the cities of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and its people. As you shall see, contributions specializing in art,

On Hiroshima becoming history   3 photography, and design have been considered just as crucial as knowledge derived from the humanities and social sciences. As we argued in our original call, “[w]e look to a variety of perspectives to gain moral and political insights on the full range of vulnerabilities—such as emotional, bodily, cognitive, and ecological—that pertains to nuclear harm.” In this way, this edited collection therefore constitutes one of the first works in the emerging field of Nuclear Humanities. To situate this collection inside this idea of Hiroshima becoming history, we have ordered the remainder of this present chapter according to the three historical tenses: past, present, and future. It begins—in the first section—with a brief account of the earlier responses to the nuclear attacks, which we argue tended to be carried out by Anglo-­Amer­ican male scholars with little to no engagement or experience of the harm that was inflicted. Engaging these marginalized voices is interesting and important since it enables us to contextualize our re-­imaginings, and to canvass some of the key reasons that warrant (and perhaps even necessitate) approaching the nuclear attacks on Japan in new ways. In the second part, Robert Jacobs offers a personal account of being an Amer­ican in Hiroshima on August 6, 2015—the date that marked the 70-year anniversary of the nuclear attacks on that city—as well as the subsequent first visit to either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki memorials by the head of a nuclear weapon state, at the time, United States President Barack Obama to Hiroshima in 2016. In so doing, Jacobs’ narrative averts our gaze from the historical literature to the ordinary every day, which reaffirms how authors writing today, many of whom who are neither Japanese nor Amer­ican, or living at the time of the attacks, may too experience Hiroshima. Finally—and third—we introduce the various contributions included in this volume, as well as put forward some questions that create space for future re-­imaginings of this notion that Hiroshima is becoming history.

August 6, 1945: early responses to the nuclear attacks Our stated aims are bold. We are calling for the manifold experiences of a world historical event that occurred over 70 years ago to be re-­imagined; interpreted anew or approached from an altogether different perspective. We have no doubt some, particularly the nuclear arms control wonks in the United States, will regard such a task unnecessary and/or inadvisable. Indeed, a further question remains as to why—that is, why now, and why at all—must we begin to ­re-­imagine Hiroshima, if at all? What is it about encountering experiences? We come to disclose our reasons by way of a critical engagement with the existing literature that is punctuated by Anglo-­Amer­ican inquiries performed at some remove from the harm that was inflicted. The nuclear scholarship of the Cold War era was often framed with introductions and conclusions in which the author explicitly states that they hope their work can help awaken readers to the real risks and dangers of nuclear war. Calls to activism, and entreaties for scholarship to play a role in steering governmental policy, or facilitating antinuclear organization in civil society, stand unique in

4   N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs modern scholarship. One cannot imagine such inclusions in works on the Civil War, on Ancient Rome or histories of commodities like cotton or steel. This reflects the depths of personal anxiety and distress among many who worked on nuclear issues during the Cold War. Their fears that the world stood on the brink of annihilation appear to have motivated, if not their choice in scholarship than certainly their orientation toward their chosen subject of inquiry. For instance, all paled in the shadow of the threat of global thermonuclear warfare. They were advocating not simply scholarship, but survival. Historian Paul Boyer in By the Bomb’s Early Light, his foundational study of nuclear thought and culture in the early Cold War and an influential tome in the wave of nuclear scholarship in the 1980s (stimulated in part by the nuclear brinksmanship of the early years of the Reagan Presidency) reflects in his introduction,  As is appropriate, this book will be read and judged by my professional peers as a piece of scholarship like any other. I hope it will not seem presumptuous to say that it is also intended as a contribution, however flawed, to the process by which we are again, at long last, trying to confront, emotionally as well as intellectually, the supreme menace of our age. Boyer concludes his introduction even more explicitly, “This book is a product of experiences outside the library as well as inside, and it not the work of a person who can view the prospect of human extinction with scholarly detachment.”6 Such was the depth and reach of nuclear anxiety during the Cold War era. The omnicidal stakes of the Cold War made scholarship as traditionally practiced perhaps mundane, and more certainly futile. This held true for those working with nuclear iconography as well as nuclear history. When one looks at the “nuclear art” of the 1980s, most focuses on nuclear weapons, and specifically the threat of nuclear war. Mark Vallen’s 1980 silkscreen street poster, “Nuclear War?! … There goes my career!” went from the cover of the LA Weekly to exhibitions in the Los Angeles Transport Gallery to the Parco Museum in Tokyo and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Today a great deal of art being made around nuclear issues has focused on the dilemma that surrounds the legacy of nuclear waste from both civilian and military applications of nuclear technology.7 Indeed, as the large-­scale production of plutonium was first initiated to obtain material for use in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima, and more specifically on Nagasaki, for those living in future generations, the most important significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be that these were the historical justifications to begin mass production of plutonium, a very real and deadly legacy of nuclear technologies that they will have to grapple with no matter how the winds of history and warfare blow for those of us living during the Cold War and immediately after. The end of the Cold War brought a global sigh of relief to those who had fixated on the threats and consequences of the feared global nuclear exchange. While nuclear weapons remained a dire threat to human civilization, the risk of an exchange of thousands of weapons in the megaton range during an afternoon

On Hiroshima becoming history   5 appeared to have been escaped. In contrast to the heavy output of the 1980s, the immediate post-­Cold War era saw a marked decrease in scholarship about the Cold War and the threat of nuclear harm. However, as time passed, and the century turned, we have seen the emergence of a new style of nuclear scholarship that seems to have been impossible, if not unthinkable, during the years of the Cold War threat of nuclear war. This new wave of nuclear scholarship embodies instincts that are both a return to traditional analytical work, and a visionary move toward a much more inclusive and diverse scholarly approach. This scholarship has seen important work done in diverse fields including architectural history, geography, theatre history, childhood studies, gender studies, the history of music, studies of racial dimensions of nuclear fear and activism, and many other fields. These are not works of advocacy, but deep and nuanced work that considers the Cold War experience in the continuum of human social construction and organization. Their aim is not to save the world but to detail it. We are in a period where nuclear scholarship has been liberated from its mission to redeem the human species and that liberation has been fertile and provocative. In this context, Hiroshima is no longer limited to being a warning and a harbinger. It can be a town, a place where people live and where an astonishing historical trauma was inflicted. It is time to re-­imagine Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) not as markers of our destiny, but as Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—real places. Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always carry symbolic content, just as does Auschwitz, and for that matter Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, and Moscow. These are actual places as well as historically significant sites full of implications and projections. In Western scholarship Hiroshima and Nagasaki were constricted to being sites warning us of a horrifying destiny. Now they are so much more. It’s time to begin to reconsider them in our scholarship.

Reflections of an Amer­ican in Hiroshima, today The 70th anniversary commemoration of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima was far more crowded than it had been during the 12 years Robert Jacobs, co-­editor of this volume, has spent living and working in Hiroshima. Attendance, especially foreign attendance, had dropped off dramatically after the 3/11 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Since then the numbers had slowly begun to grow, but in 2015 the crowds, and especially the presence of foreigners and international media, was larger than it had been in over 10 years. Some estimates suggest the crowd had swelled that year into the tens of thousands, with formal representation from over 100 governments. As an Amer­ican historian of nuclear technologies living in Hiroshima, he has frequently been interviewed by international media covering the anniversary of the attack. Jacobs reasons that being the sole native English-­speaking nuclear historian is the reason for his press appearances, as the few English-­speaking hibakusha (or, atomic survivor) are also the ones repeatedly interviewed by these same media outlets. By contrast, the Japanese press is full of the many Japanese scholars in Hiroshima who can speak on this topic. For the most part those interviews had been alike in their content: interviewers

6   N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs asked about the scale of the devastation after the attack, the rebuilding of Hiroshima, and the plight of the hibakusha. The focus was on the experiences in Hiroshima. In the 70th year the media requests started earlier and were many. Jacobs was interviewed by numerous international television and radio news services, and almost a dozen international newspapers.8 The focus of the interviews was noticeably different than in previous years. While he did receive questions about the rebuilding of Hiroshima, Jacobs received almost none about the scale of the devastation from the bombing or the plight of the hibakusha. However, from almost every news organization he was asked questions about the ethics of the nuclear attacks on the two cities.9 Invariably these questions took the form of asserting the idea that the attacks had saved lives compared to the alternative of a United States invasion of mainland Japan, and then asking for his opinion on this claim. It is worth noting that here in Hiroshima the 70th anniversary year had added weight as many in the community are aware that this would be one of the last “big” anniversaries in which people could hear direct testimony about the attack from living hibakusha. The average age of hibakusha is now over 80, and 5 to 10 years from now, there will be fewer surviving hibakusha to provide public testimony.10 Even now when you listen to hibakusha testimony in Hiroshima, or in Nagasaki, you are hearing the stories of people who were children when they endured nuclear attack. It is hard not to come away without feeling that these nuclear weapons were used against tens of thousands of children, and since most military-­aged males were away at war, the victims were disproportionately women, children. and the elderly.11 As the hibakusha are aging, so too are the combatants of World War Two. Just as there was profound opposition to including information about the victims of the nuclear attacks in the proposed exhibition of the Enola Gay (the plane that delivered the nuclear weapon to Hiroshima) at the Smithsonian Institution by veteran groups in the United States in 1995, there was a push around this anniversary to engage the notion that the use of nuclear weapons against a primarily civilian population was a war crime, and hence, unethical.12 Further deepening the gap between historic and historical Hiroshima, the visit by former United States President Barack Obama to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016 altered the traditional narrative told in Hiroshima has about the city’s destiny. The narrative that was central in Hiroshima about the role that the city would play in changing the world was fundamentally altered on that day. This was a narrative that was repeated at almost all August 6 commemorations, as well as at countless conferences and symposia held in the city. The narrative asserted that once leaders of nuclear-­armed nations visited to Hiroshima, and met with hibakusha, they would be irrevocably affected and the world would move toward nuclear abolition. The city was imagined as destined to play this essential role, not just of commemorating the nuclear attack of 1945, but to compel the abolition of nuclear weapons. Witnessing Hiroshima, absorbing the lived history of hibakusha, and feeling the depth of the culture of peace that has grown since the

On Hiroshima becoming history   7 city rebuilt, would act upon the conscience of the leaders of nuclear-­armed states and disarmament would naturally follow. On May 27, 2016 Barack Obama visited Hiroshima, he met with hibakusha (although there is no evidence he listened to their stories), returned to his nuclear-­armed nation, and did not make any moves toward disarmament or nuclear abolition. In fact, over a year before his visit to Hiroshima he had committed the United States to an additional investment of $1 trillion dollars over 30 years to nuclear weaponry, delivery systems, and weapon development, quite the opposite of disarmament.13 This visit by the head of a nuclear-­armed state to Hiroshima, so deeply longed for in community for so long, finally occurred with no discernable effect on the commitment of his nation to nuclear weaponry. What will Hiroshima’s (and Nagasaki’s) path toward affecting nuclear disarmament be in the wake of such a narrative disruption? Hiroshima must become something new; can no longer see itself as the city that would compel world peace. In many ways, we are seeing a similar, temporal tension play out in recent developments in the scholarship surrounding the history of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold War, there was a need both to formulate arguments about the morality of the nuclear attacks on Japan that maintained a continued policy of nuclear deterrence, and to frame the attacks against the threats of nuclear war between the United States and the former Soviet Union. That is, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were to be either justifications of why America must maintain nuclear weapons to counter the Soviet Union, or they were warnings of how such a reliance would lead to an ecological, or even global, cataclysm. In 1975 Martin Sherwin wrote,  To comprehend the relationship between atomic energy and diplomatic policies that developed during the war, the bomb must be seen as both scientists and policymakers saw it before Hiroshima: as a possible means of controlling the postwar course of world affairs.14 In recent years, especially since the end of the Cold War, this scholarship has been uncoupled from its imbrication with Cold War anxieties and is beginning to be examined from a variety of perspectives no longer wed to the tensions of the times in which they are written.

Future experiences of Hiroshima And so, despite more than 70 years having passed, numerous people continue to claim to have contributed something new to our understanding of Hiroshima, and its aftermath. In 1965 historian Gar Alperovitz wrote about how the attacks on Japan were, in part, aimed at the Soviet Union, spawning the revisionist interpretation of the attacks. In 1986 journalist and historian Richard Rhodes won a Pulitzer Prize for propounding the traditional Amer­ican narrative that the real story behind the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is primarily one about Amer­ican scientists. In 1995 Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell brought

8   N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs the image of Hiroshima home to the United States, arguing that Hiroshima has never really shown up in the consciousness of the country that attacked it with nuclear weapons.15 These previous efforts are Amer­ican, reflecting the imbricated relationship of Amer­ican thinkers with the legacy of the nuclear attacks. However, major volumes dedicated to thinking freely and imaginatively about the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are rare. Certainly, there have been very few, if any, concerted attempts to interpret Hiroshima anew and from a range of different perspectives as we earlier asked contributors to a special issue of Critical Military Studies. There, our original call for papers yielded submissions from a diverse range of authors who each explored insights, approaches, and methods from art history, anthropology, comparative religious studies, history, international relations, media and cultural studies, philosophy, politics, and war studies, among others. As we read the material, we came to realize that their re-­imaginings not only contributed to a better scholarly understanding of nuclear culture in particular, and military studies in general, but taken together, that they might pave the way for scholars of tomorrow to explore novel ways of thinking about the nuclear events of August 6 and 9, 1945. Despite this, the contributors to this volume variously claim that people—and not just the Japanese and Amer­icans—do indeed continue to experience Hiroshima (and Nagasaki). How can this be? Prior to embarking on this project, we editors identified five key pathways for this seemingly paradoxical situation that can be discerned in one or more of the contributions to this volume. First, even after more than 70 years since the nuclear attacks, there remain a select few atomic survivors as well as those implicated on the side of America and her allies who can recollect, first-­hand, the events that unfolded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is, testimony from lived experience is still being produced. In this volume, Erik Roper traces the emergence of Korean hibakusha testimonies who were resident in Japan at the time of the nuclear attacks, to examine attempts to remedy their marginalization in Japanese society by way of counter-­ histories and activism. Second, there are ongoing processes of memorialization and commemoration that have arguably reached their zenith when former President Barack Obama became the first President to visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial in 2016, after having earlier inaugurated the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in 2015. In this way, officials and states are continuing to (re)write the history with which many more people than at any other time are learning about what transpired for the first time. For instance, Makeda Best, writing in this volume, speculates as to the meaning of memorialization and national memory role of ひろし ま/HIROSHIMA (2008) by photographer Ishiuchi Miyako, who “uses clothing and personal items as sites through which to establish and expand the viewer’s connection to the lives and experiences of bombing victims.” Elsewhere, Ran Zwigenberg examines Hiroshima’s relation to nuclear modernity by way of a detailed investigation into how and why Isamu Noguchi’s design for the Hiroshima cenotaph came to be rejected. Jessica Rapson turns her attention to wider appeals to cosmopolitan or global community, via a thoroughgoing examination

On Hiroshima becoming history   9 of Peter Watkins’ fictional documentary The War Game (1965), in both its original context and as reclaimed media in “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials” exhibition at the Taipei Biennial in 2012. While in her chapter, Stefanie Fishel choses instead to compare the memorialization of the nuclear attacks in Japan and the United States, before examining how remembering the event from multiple viewpoints could lead us toward different policies or debates about the weapons themselves. Third, there is heightened interest in ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, and forgiveness toward the nuclear attacks. This includes the anguish that surrounds the nuclear attacks on the Japanese themselves, as well as the more than 2,000 tests that subsequently took place in Earth’s atmosphere, underground, and on the seabed. Appropriately then, Kathleen Sullivan’s intervention in this collection serves as a reminder that the two nuclear attacks—on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—are in fact two bombs of different kinds, against different people, and with different effects. Elsewhere, Adam Broinowski argues that the Japanese dance movement, ankoku butoh, is a response to the “structural complex of drivers that underpinned the use and effects of the atomic bomb.” Whereas Stuart Bender and Mick Broderick’s contribution to this volume, although perhaps an act of commemoration, documents their attempts to catalogue and communicate the little-­known Australian involvement at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fourth, there is the increasingly important realization that every living human has internalized radionuclides from the use of nuclear weapons, either in warfare or peacetime. Of the chapters in this collection, Yuki Miyamoto’s contribution addresses this theme most explicitly by tracing the media appearances (or lack thereof ) of the Hiroshima maidens in Japan and the United States, whose wounded bodies, she believes, were used to normalize the horror of the atomic bombings. Although less directly, Thomas E. Doyle II too takes up this idea in the form of a metaphor by arguing that there are at least two paradoxes of the nuclear age in which the Japanese people are simultaneously “allergic” to nuclear weapons but do not wish to be “treated,” while the Japanese government endures the nuclear allergy without ridding itself of the “allergens.” Fifth—and lastly—since the field of the Nuclear Humanities, in which there is truly transdisciplinary studies and exchange, is still very much in its infancy, there remain relatively few forums that have yet appeared. Here we profile the work of artist Shinpei Takeda, who has been working through the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. In this volume, Marcela Quiroz and Ryuta Imafuku respond to Takeda’s artistic practice in dialogue, and Takeda then responds. What results is a meditation between artist and critics who are grappling with what nuclear culture and arts can do. To be sure there are many ways of experiencing Hiroshima that are not included in this volume. For instance, we had in our original call for papers probed what it means for the hibakusha concept to have been recently globalized to others affected by ionizing radiation outside of Japan. We had also asked in what ways, if at all, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have begun to provide a template for the commemoration of genocides and war crimes internationally. These are,

10   N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs however, other streams of work for future scholars working in this exciting new field of Nuclear Humanities.

Notes   1 Throughout this editorial introduction, “Hiroshima” is variously used to refer to the Japanese city of that name, as well as to stand in for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. For a critique of this move, see Kathleen Sullivan’s essay included in this volume.   2 For instance, N.A.J. Taylor has published extensively on this idea (see 2012, “Andrew Linklater: The Problem of Harm in World Politics.” Australian Book Review, June; 2014a, “Shared Vulnerability in the Anthropocene: Nuclear Weapons, Harm, the Biosphere”; 2014b, “Rethinking Cosmopolitan Solidarity: Nuclear Harm from a Cosmic Point of View.” In Welcome (?) To the Anthropocene. Allenspark, Colorado: International Society for Environmental Ethics, International Association for Environmental Philosophy, Center for Environmental Philosophy; 2016, “Anthropocosmic Thinking on the Problem of Nuclear Harm: A Reply to Seth D. Clippard and a Plea to Mary Evelyn Tucker and Tu Weiming.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10 (1): 58–65).   3 “Top News of the 20th Century,” CBSNews.com (February 24, 1999): www.cbsnews. com/news/top-­news-of-­20th-century/ (accessed February 8, 2017).   4 Here it is important to make note of Jacques Derrida’s (1984, No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives). Translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14 (2): 20–31) claim that “a nuclear war has not taken place,” since what occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was instead a nuclear attack inflicted on the Japanese and the biosphere.   5 As at the time of writing, the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which delivered its recommendation in October 2016 that the world’s first nuclear weapons detonation at Trinity, in New Mexico, United States, may indeed be the marker of this new geological epoch.   6 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: Amer­ican Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) xx.   7 See, for example, Ele Carpenter, ed., The Nuclear Culture Sourcebook (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016).   8 For example, on Al Jazeera International television (August 6, 2015): https://youtu. be/c2u_e7-ZulA (accessed January 23, 2017); Felix Lill, “Vielleicht der schlimmste Tag der Menschheit,” Hannoversche Allgemeine (August 6, 2015): www.haz.de/ Nachrichten/Politik/Deutschland-­Welt/Vor-­70-Jahren-­explodierte-ueber-­Hiroshimadie-­erste-Atombombe (accessed January 23, 2017).   9 Taylor earlier co-­convened a series of panels on such a theme in 2015 and 2016 with Thomas E. Doyle II. A co-­edited compendium tentatively titled Nuclear Ethics for the 21st Century, has subsequently been placed on hold. Nevertheless, each of the papers presented in London and Atlanta are being published by the various authors, which included Steven P. Lee, Nicola Horsburgh, Alex Leveringhaus, Behnam Taebi, Maria Rost-­Rublee, Shampa Biswas, Anne Harrington, Nicholas Wheeler, Anthony Burke, and Scott Wiser. See: N.A.J. Taylor and Thomas E. Doyle II, Nuclear Ethics after Nye: Perspectives from Politics and Philosophy, 57th International Studies Association Annual Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, United States, March 18, 2016; N.A.J. Taylor and Thomas E. Doyle II, Nuclear Ethics after Nye: Perspectives from Politics and Philosophy, British International Studies Association (BISA) Annual Conference, London: England, June 16–19, 2015. 10 As of 2016 there were 174,080 surviving people of over 640,000 legally recognized as hibakusha by the Japanese government. The Global Hibakusha Project of Robert

On Hiroshima becoming history   11 Jacobs and Mick Broderick seeks to expand our definition of hibakusha to include those exposed to ionizing radiation from nuclear weapons and nuclear power around the world. 11 See, Robert Jacobs, “Seeing Children Hidden Behind the Clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” in, Mischa Honeck and James Marten, eds., War and Childhood in the Age of the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) forthcoming. 12 Influential texts of this genre include, a themed special issue titled “Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence” of the scholarly journal Ethics (1985), Joseph Nye’s monograph Nuclear Ethics (New York: Shue Press, 1986), and Henry Shue’s edited volume Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 13 William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms,” New York Times (September 21, 2014): www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/us-­ ramping-up-­major-renewal-­in-nuclear-­arms.html (accessed February 9, 2017). 14 Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975): 3. 15 This assertion is challenged in, Robert Jacobs, “Domesticating Hiroshima in America in the Early Cold War,” in, Urs Heftrich, Robert Jacobs, Bettina Kaibach and Karoline Thaidigsmann, eds., Images of Rupture between East and West: The Perception of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Literature (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016): 83–97.

1 Contested spaces of ethnicity Zainichi Korean accounts of the atomic bombings Erik Ropers1

Borders define the world we live in. For some writing about the atomic bombings in Japan, survivor experiences transcend the power or ability of nation-­ states to craft narrow, nationalistic narratives. Others, particularly minority groups in Japan, have been critical of these seemingly universalistic histories and understandings of the atomic bombings (and more broadly wartime history as a whole). While maps during the colonial period (1910–1945) included Korean territory as a part of the Japanese empire, as well as counting its population as Japanese, a rearranging of borders by Occupation forces resulted in the overnight exclusion of Korea from Japan. Such a rapid shift, in light of culturally assimilationist policy proclaiming “Japan and Korea as One” (naisen ittai) is astounding.2 Koreans who remained in Japan were placed into a precarious position and pushed to the very margins of Japanese society.3 This marginalization of Koreans is reflected in Japanese historical narratives concerning the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the immediate postwar period. Arguably such marginalization was by necessity on the part of Japan, for to include the voices of minority survivors like Koreans would raise uncomfortable and impossible to avoid questions about Japan’s colonial history. These questions include Japanese policies of wartime forced recruitment and forced labor, ongoing and widespread discrimination against members of the Korean community resident in the country, and perhaps even suggest a continuing moral responsibility to survivors whose Japanese nationality was revoked in 1952. Historian John Dower wrote,  more than battlefield causalities or the civilian deaths caused by conventional strategic bombing, these two cataclysmic moments of nuclear destruction solidified the Japanese sense of uniquely terrible victimization. The atomic bombs became the symbol for a special sort of suffering—much like the Holocaust for the Jews.4 In the immediate months and years that followed, survivors would document, tell, and retell their experiences to a variety of audiences. Literature rapidly became one of the largest corpuses of work, allowing survivors to work through the trauma and make sense of their experiences on “that day.”5 Others, like

Contested spaces of ethnicity   13 Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, would express the inhumanity of the bombings in art. In most cases, Japanese public discourse rapidly coalesced around Japanese victimhood, which became widely embraced domestically in Japan and abroad. Consequently, this so-­called “nationalist mythologization” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reinforced a victim consciousness narrative centered on ethnically Japanese victims and survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.6 Thus, while many authors have rightly drawn attention to the appalling lack of empathy many Japanese showed to Japanese hibakusha in postwar Japan, the near invisibility of Japan’s largest minority community in Japanese historiography is equally shocking. This chapter traces efforts by the Korean community resident in Japan (the zainichi Korean community) in constructing a public narrative of Korean hibakusha, examining the roles of survivor testimonies in furtherance of this goal. An examination of this vibrant yet often overlooked discourse can help us better understand the context and experiences of colonial citizens at Ground Zero, and how efforts by the zainichi Korean community to gather and make known hibakusha testimonies fit within the wider social and political movements of the community in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As I show, many in the zainichi Korean community saw their colonial and wartime history effaced in Japanese historical discourse after the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan in 1952. Survivors are critical of their marginalization in Japanese historical narratives about the war, evidenced in histories and testimonial collections, as well as how the effects of Japanese colonialism are widely absent in Japanese memory. The attempts by the zainichi community to create a space within Japanese historical discourse for Korean hibakusha is therefore connected with broader attempts by the community to temper the so-­ called “victim consciousness” narrative (higaisha ishiki) evident in some Japanese quarters, and ultimately to recover and document the wartime history of Japan’s largest minority community. In doing so, we can appreciate how testimonies of Korean hibakusha are part of a much wider discussion making known the experiences of Koreans in colonial, wartime, and postwar Japan, and how they serve to modulate widespread understandings of Japan and the Japanese as the victims of the atomic bombings. After a brief overview of colonial history and Korean migration to Japan, I proceed to outline some of the key arguments and texts concerning the forced labor and forced recruitment of Koreans between 1939 and 1945. In doing so, I show how early efforts by some in the Korean community to grapple with related wartime history led to and influenced a growing number of grassroots community efforts concerning the collection of survivor experiences and writing of Korean narratives about the atomic bombings.

The Korean community in Japan, 1910–1945 Although there is a rich and expansive history of migration, the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 marked the start of a rapid and sustained increase of Korean emigration to Japan.7 Initially numbering in the thousands during the

14   E. Ropers decade of the 1910s, the number of Korean residents in Japan grew to over two million by the time Japan surrendered in August 1945. Policies of assimilation in colonial Korea encouraged the construction of a multiethnic society, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s.8 The dramatic increase in the number of migrants was a direct result of Japanese government policies mandating the conscription and enforced labor of Koreans beginning in 1939. Outside of mainland Japan, many more Koreans migrated or were forcibly relocated to other Japanese territories like Sakhalin, or to the Japanese controlled puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China (Manchuria). This period of enforced migration between 1939 and 1945 saw Koreans put to work in Japan’s vital resource and war industries, and as a consequence Koreans would come to form a sizeable fraction of the population in Japan’s important industrial cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where companies such as Mitsubishi worked to produce the planes, ships, and armaments necessary for the war effort. Although precise numbers are impossible to come by, it is estimated that roughly 70,000 Koreans were exposed to the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of the estimated 30,000 Korean hibakusha who did not perish in the immediate weeks and months that followed, about 7,000 are believed to have remained in Japan with the remainder repatriating to Korea in the immediate months and years after Japan’s surrender.9 The surrender of Japan in August 1945 began a period of uncertainty for Koreans resident in Japan. Most of the approximately two million who were residing in Japan at the time elected to return to Korea, and by 1948 roughly 600,000 remained. Stripped of Japanese nationality, the process of constitutional revision during the Occupation Period (1945–1952) ensured the marginalization of non-­Japanese with equal protection under the law for resident aliens being eliminated.10 The “blatantly racist nature” of revisions would impact long-­running efforts by zainichi Koreans and Koreans who repatriated to seek welfare and medical allowances, with court cases continuing today.11 Those choosing to remain became foreign nationals in 1952 at the end of the Allied Occupation, and the legal definition of “Japaneseness” was coupled to Japanese ethnicity.12 My use of the phrase “Korean community” in this chapter oversimplifies the complicated postwar situation on two counts. First is that the division of the Korean peninsula and emergence of two regimes complicated matters for zainichi Koreans, who were split further with loyalty to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or the Republic of Korea (ROK). The division between Chōsen (referencing “Korea” as a whole, not a particular state) and Kankoku (denoting the ROK) became the center of expatriate politics by the Korean community in Japan. Given that Japan had no formal diplomatic relations with either North or South Korea before 1965 these nuances made little difference in actual fact: both terms embodied “the same degree of statelessness, disenfranchisement, and unstable residential status.”13 The second reason is that a further division exists inside the community of Korean hibakusha, which as noted earlier was constituted of those choosing to remain in Japan, and those returning to their ancestral homes in Korea. For those repatriating to Korea,

Contested spaces of ethnicity   15 returnees were scattered throughout the peninsula as a whole, though most hailed from cities and counties in the southern half of the peninsula. In Japan, a tangible example of divisions in the zainichi Korean community can be seen with the dispute over the memorial to Korean victims in Hiroshima, erected outside the Hiroshima Peace Park on the opposite bank of the Ota River. Before the memorial was moved inside the Peace Park in 1999, Weiner and Yoneyama rightly observed that the separate memorial for Koreans was an abject, physical reminder of the alienation zainichi Koreans faced in their daily lives.14 The city gave approval to relocate the memorial in 1990 on the condition that North and South Koreans could agree on the details.15 Certainly members of the community recognized and agreed that the separate memorial space was discriminatory, but were broadly split on the linguistic nuances conveyed in the memorial’s inscriptions. The debate became centered on the monument’s changed inscription written by committee, which drew protest from zainichi Koreans, Japanese nations, and others.16 Though eventually settled, we will see this alienation and separation of Korean hibakusha from Japanese hibakusha in the Hiroshima Peace Park, revealed by the memorial cenotaph, is also seen much earlier in the discursive realm.

Inscribing the erased in Japanese historiography The alienation of zainichi Korean hibakusha was initially marked by absence. In the years immediately following the Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), Japan saw the emergence of what is commonly referred to as a “victim consciousness” narrative. James Orr notes that victim consciousness narratives are most clearly seen in narratives about the atomic bombings, and such narratives tended to exclude minority communities due to assertions of the Japanese “people” (minzoku) as victims of the wartime Japanese state and military.17 The exclusion of minority communities in Japan from these narratives, as well as an utter lack of recognition about the ways these communities were themselves victimized by the Japanese during the wartime period meant that zainichi Koreans and community groups began to routinely question the inadequacy of standard histories about the bombings, asking for instance “how did such a wide gap come to be between the ‘victim consciousness’ of Japanese [and a recognition of wartime forced labor, forced recruitment, and Korean hibakusha]?”18 As a result, members of the zainichi Korean community looked to reassert their particular memories and perspectives of Japan’s wartime history, a process that began in the 1960s. Oral histories formed an important part of zainichi Korean hibakusha writings, with a few reasons behind this reliance on testimonies to reveal and recover aspects of its wartime and colonial history. First is that a discursive shift by the Korean community to include testimony in historical writings helped to increase the accessibility of historical works by reading publics and spoke to readers and communities in a more personally engaging and engrossing fashion. Moreover, it seems that the reliance on oral histories is indicative of certain problems concerning more “traditional” documentary

16   E. Ropers sources about the zainichi Korean community during the colonial period and Allied Occupation of Japan. This is what Ken Kawashima has termed the “ethnic-­epistemological trap,” defined in part as a “positivist, empiricist, and sociologizing trap that stems from [Japanese] government and state documents upon which studies rely for historical data.”19 In short, it is indicative of the problematic tendency for Japanese sources to confirm what they believed to be the causal factor behind problems in the Korean community: that they were Korean. Further challenges confront researchers when considering the amount of documentation destroyed intentionally or otherwise in the days before Allied troops landed to occupy the country; documents continuing to be classified by the Japanese government; or with long-­running legal challenges to access corporate archives.20 Therefore, the importance of oral histories in underpinning zainichi Korean narratives goes beyond efforts to overcome these epistemological challenges and drives to the heart of histories concerning Japanese colonialism. As we will see, many testimonies of Korean hibakusha do not simply describe or discuss their thoughts and experiences about the atomic bombings, the Cold War, or the nuclear age: rather, they speak to a broader set of experiences that the Korean community faced during the colonial period and in postwar Japan, points which are rarely, if ever, considered in the broader Japanese corpus of writing about the atomic bombings. It would not be until the early 1960s when the zainichi Korean population gradually became more politically active, directly challenging discriminatory government policies by direct action.21 Until the passage of the 1965 Normalization Treaty, the Japanese government essentially practiced the “politics of exclusion” as Lie puts it.22 Zainichi Korean alienation from the body politic and civil society meant a “separate and unequal” treatment as foreigners resident in Japan with many suffering through “invisibility and silence.”23 Nevertheless, as the community became active in civil rights struggles, such as the employment discrimination case against Hitachi, some community members also began to publish histories of colonial and wartime Korea from a zainichi perspective. These authors, mainly first-­generation zainichi Koreans, sought to counter dominant Japanese discourses of wartime history and ethnic relations, written from the perspective of the former colonizer.24 The leading zainichi Korean historian involved in this effort was Pak Kyŏngsik, author of Records of Korean Forced Recruitment.25 At the time of publication, Pak’s Records was the first major monograph detailing the excesses and extent of Japanese wartime forced recruitment (kyōsei renkō) and conscription policies and their effect on Koreans. It presented a damning account of Japan’s wartime government and military policies, focusing on the problem of enforced labor recruitment and conscription. His groundbreaking study helped launch subsequent research by other zainichi Korean historians and research groups over the following decades, who detailed and chronicled the extent and effect of Japanese wartime policies on the Korean minority in Japan and its colonies. Reflecting on the state of research in the zainichi Korean community at this time, Pak observed how several factors came together to jump start this monumental

Contested spaces of ethnicity   17 research effort. Many, including Pak himself, were concerned that zainichi Korean historians and researchers were being left behind by their zainichi Chinese counterparts who had been publishing accounts of Japanese wartime history and atrocities inflicted upon their community since the early 1950s.26 More acutely for the Korean community was that 1963 marked the 40th anniversary of the Great Kantō Earthquake which leveled the capital of Tokyo and saw the massacre of roughly 6,000 Koreans in its aftermath. Two years later in 1965 saw the signing of the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, which formally reestablished diplomatic relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea. Both anniversaries would be significant in driving a reassessment of the history of Koreans in Japan.27 Importantly the Treaty would be cited by successive Japanese governments to argue both inside and outside the courtroom that compensation and reparation claims had been legally settled.28 Pak’s work was critical for providing the groundwork for subsequent zainichi Korean researchers writing about colonial and wartime Japan during this era. A brief snapshot of Pak’s argument, political views, and writing style is useful to illustrate commonalities between Pak’s writings about forced recruitment and forced labor, and narratives about Korean victims and survivors of the atomic bomb examined in the following section. In his own words, Pak’s sought to “protect democratic rights, eliminate ideological remnants left behind by imperialist aggressors, and to establish goodwill, genuine equality, and international solidarity.”29 This politicization is important: while a natural outgrowth of Marxist sympathies, it subsequently affected research by scholars and activists who held Pak’s Records as one of they most influential and referenced works concerning zainichi Korean history during the colonial period by the following generation of scholars.30 Put a different way, Sonia Ryang suggests that these formative writings are not merely about shedding light on an under-­researched part of recent Japanese history (the colonial and wartime experiences of the Korean minority), but more importantly are seen to contain a moral imperatives by these authors.31

Critiquing narratives of Japan’s “ethnic history” Understanding early histories of enforced recruitment written by Pak and others provides some much needed context in understanding how subsequent works concerning Korean hibakusha developed, as many survivors were in fact victims of Japanese government policies that had brought them to work in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to begin with. A year after as Pak’s groundbreaking work, journalist and future mayor of Hiroshima Hiraoka Takashi confirmed what many in the Korean community, including Pak, had intuitively understood about Japan’s wartime history but which many Japanese were unconscious of—that most works about the atomic bombings were largely framed as “ethnic histories” (minzoku no rekishi).32 More to the point, Hiraoka argued that while the Japanese had never forgotten the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had forgotten the tens of thousands of Korean victims.33 Into this gap stepped zainichi

18   E. Ropers Korean researchers and community groups, who repeatedly and explicitly linked the history of forced labor and forced recruitment to research and narratives about the atomic bombings. We may be rightly critical that the response of the zainichi Korean community to Japanese ethnic histories was with narratives in the same restrictive framework. However as Morris-­Suzuki’s work on border politics and migration makes us aware, “insularity and myths of ethnic homogeneity have helped to shape public and official attitudes” in Japan concerning immigration, and, I would argue, the writing of history as well.34 By the first half of the 1970s, some Japanese writers and commentators had “discovered” the existence of Korean hibakusha, unsurprisingly coinciding with the growing number of histories written by zainichi Koreans at the same time.35 Zainichi authors and research groups would gradually expand their focus from that of Korean forced recruitment and forced labor to that of hibakusha. Increasingly, these works would be authored by collectives rather than individual authors due to the amount of time necessary in amassing documentary evidence and interviewing survivors.36 These authors took a lead from the rhetoric and arguments posited Pak Kyŏng-sik in his Records of Korean Forced Recruitment. One, Nishimura Toyoyuki, suggested that the atomic bombings were “impossible for Koreans to have avoided.”37 Moreover, the commonly heard refrain that there were no differences between Japanese and Koreans victims of the atomic bombings was nonsense—an “impossible argument” for Nishimura.38 After all, referencing Pak Kyŏng-sik, “most Koreans were forced to help with Japan’s aggressive war (shinryaku sensō).”39 While many in Japan appeared content to forget the implications of colonial rule, a growing number of Koreans and Japanese were persistently pointing out uncomfortable wartime realities. Certainly most Korean hibakusha were not content to have their experiences effaced and equated equally with Japanese survivors. For instance, one of the first points zainichi hibakusha Chong Su-­nam noted was not the atomic bomb, but that “I was forcibly conscripted and brought to Japan, [herded] like a pig—and on top of that there’s the atomic bomb, and my now impossible dream of returning to my mother county given the partition [of Korea].”40 Certainly some Japanese authors like Hiraoka were not only critical of Japanese colonial rule, but also publicly advocated on behalf of Korean hibakusha. Yet this so-­called discovery, as Kawaguchi writes, did not necessarily translate into a surge of interest among Japanese researchers or the reading public to re-­ insert a Korean element that had been purged from the public’s consciousness. In examining early works about Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the 1950s and 1960s we find that voices of Korean hibakusha are few and far between, with only a handful of testimonies appearing in collections and only a few tangential references to Koreans at Ground Zero in literary and poetic works.41 And, while many oral histories have been frequently published and republished, in whole or in part since the end of the Allied Occupation, Korean survivors do not necessarily figure in them. For instance in 1967, the nationally circulating Asahi newspaper published a collection entitled Genbaku 500-nin no shōgen (500 Testimonies of the Atomic Bombings), with survivors spread across 30

Contested spaces of ethnicity   19 prefectures contributing to the work. While another oft-­forgotten minority group, that of Okinawan survivors, received their own three-­page section under the title “There are hibakusha from Okinawa too,” which sought to raise a small measure of public awareness, the numerically larger number of affected Koreans were conspicuously absent.42 While I do not suggest this example completely captures the entirety of Japanese narratives concerning the bombings at this point in time, it does raise broader questions about the visibility of the Korean minority in Japanese narratives of the bombings, specifically in those garnering significant publicity and which were targeted for popular audiences. With this example in mind, we can return to Hiraoka’s analysis and commentary concerning Korean survivors as he writes the nearly the exact same time in 1966 about the so-­called “problems of Korean hibakusha”: In South Korea, it’s thought that survivor experiences (hibaku taiken) are a problem for Japanese [to deal with]; from the perspective of Koreans [in Korea] it’s often thought to be something that doesn’t concern them. On the other hand, even though Korean survivors live in Hiroshima, the number of people who recognize the problem there are few and far between. […] [Ultimately] I think the meanings of Japanese and Korean hibakusha experiences are different [for each community in question]. The Japanese approach it as Japanese, and for them survivor experiences are a part of their ethnic history; Koreans view it as Koreans, and see it from the perspective of Japanese colonialism. From that the atomic bombing, as a historical experience, tore through the Korean people and carved itself into their minds.43 Whereas Japanese historians and researchers continued to largely view the history of the atomic bombings “as Japanese” according to Hiraoka, a growing number of researchers and activists were engaged in providing a methodological and historical framework to narrate the history of Koreans in Japan. Coupled with the growing visibility of the Korean community, in terms of discursive outputs, civil disobedience, and public protest, the existence of zainichi Koreans and Korean hibakusha became increasingly difficult to ignore in Japan. Community history groups like Mukuge and Mukuge no kai sprung up in Osaka and Kobe to address a variety of issues, including discrimination, wartime history, and the atomic bombings.44 Those that emerged in Hiroshima and Nagasaki often devoted attention to the history and effects of the atomic bombings on the local zainichi community. Some, like the Association to Protect the Human Rights of Resident Koreans in Nagasaki (discussed later in this chapter) authored a large number of publications spanning decades. Others, like the Research Group Investigating the Actual Conditions of Koreans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hiroshima Nagasaki Chōsenjin Hibakusha Jittai Chōsadan) were short-­ lived, though boasted enough active members (54 in Hiroshima and 25 in Nagasaki) to receive coverage for their work in national newspapers.45 Notably the membership of many groups was not limited to zainichi Koreans; Japanese

20   E. Ropers members also participated in many of these community history groups.46 Given that most groups utilized oral histories as a key source of evidence in their works, I turn to an analysis of Korean hibakusha testimonies to illustrate some of the markers that, as Hiraoka suggested, left lasting impressions on the zainichi Korean community.

Divergent experiences and the politics of memory in survivor testimony In analyzing survivor testimonies, most texts compiled or authored by zainichi Koreans focus wholly or in part on those who repatriated to South Korea during the Occupation Period. This near-­obsession with repatriates is explained in large part by a tendency for first and many second-­generation zainichi Koreans to look toward the Korean homeland. In fact, many zainichi Koreans like Pak Kyŏng-sik continued to see themselves as temporary residents of Japan who had been displaced from their homeland in Korea due to Japanese colonialism and the subsequent partition between the ROK and DPRK.47 In Japan, for example, the North Korean affiliated organization Chōsen Sōren represented and expressed the concerns for many zainichi Koreans since its formation in 1955, arguing that all zainichi were overseas citizens of North Korea.48 The nominally apolitical Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan) made similar claims as to representing the interests of zainichi Koreans.49 Thus, while many texts make explicit reference to examining and critiquing the situation for survivors in South Korea, the audience these groups and authors was one almost entirely based in Japan.50 Testimonials by Korean survivors underscored certain experiences not shared by Japanese hibakusha. Beginning an analysis with the short titles of each testimony or interview can be instructive in how clearly Korean survivor experiences may be demarcated from their Japanese counterparts and illustrate the ways in which they link to this newly constituted and parallel discourse concerning forced recruitment and forced labor. Consider for instance the following titles of individual testimonies: “Brought to Nagasaki by labor conscription”51 “Koreans …, Amer­icans, and Chinese are victims too”52 “A labor brokerage brought me to a coal mine”53 “The diary of a blast-­affected conscripted Korean worker”54 A certain amount of familiarity with a range of hibakusha testimonies is helpful at this point, since broadly surveying published collections it becomes evident that the experiences encapsulated in these titles more likely than not refer to colonial citizens and not to Japanese survivors. While Japanese citizens were subject to military and labor conscription as well, the burden of military or labor conscription was not something considered unusual, out of the ordinary, or defining in many cases. Conscription or labor service was, after all, seen to be a responsibility that all undertook for the state in what were increasingly dire

Contested spaces of ethnicity   21 c­ ircumstances for Japan by 1944–1945, and when Japanese experiences of conscription appear, they are rarely referenced in titles themselves.55 This distinction differentiating Japanese and Korean testimonies based on title is important: as Smith and Watson urge us to consider, titles of books, or in this case individual testimonies, are the strongest suggestion of authorial truth claims; that key “moments of the past” are “impelled” by the titles assigned to entire works or chapters.56 Titles are, after all, the first thing that audiences typically read and they provide a snapshot of the work as a whole, making particular representations about the story or experience in whole. These kinds of titles by Korean survivors suggest the impact that Japan’s colonial history had upon them as individuals, and the importance which survivors attach to it even as survivors of the atomic bombings. In doing so, they knowingly and unknowingly make reference back to the rapidly growing and concomitant discourse concerning forced labor and forced recruitment by Pak Kyŏng-sik and others who argued that military or labor conscription was in fact the common point around which all Korean lives had revolved around during the colonial period. Reading testimonies of Korean hibakusha, this much seems clear: if not conscripted or forcibly recruited, oftentimes survivors’ family members or friends were. Although titles of individual testimonies can be the most overt indication to readers of the ways in which Korean life experiences diverge from those of Japanese survivors, close examinations of the testimonies themselves are understandably necessary as well. As we have seen, military or labor conscription, along with the migration of families during the colonial period, are frequently recurring components of Korean testimonial narratives whereby zainichi Korean hibakusha discuss how they and/or family members came to arrive and reside in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Indeed, further attention should be given to the typical length and detail these accounts provide given that, broadly speaking, this is another significant divergence from many Japanese accounts in that the details zainichi Korean survivors sketch of their lives before the bombings are often as vivid, lengthy, and important (in terms of the testimony’s narrative structure) as the day and immediate aftermath of the bombing itself. Much of the reasoning behind this, I suggest, is in seeking to counter Japanese “ethnic histories” of the bombings, although the politics of memory plays a significant role too. Listen, for example, to the voice of Pak Min-­gyu, chairman of the Nagasaki Prefecture Council for Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors (Nagasaki-­ken Chōsenjin hibakusha kyōgikai). His prefatory remarks at a local community gathering attended by students indicates an understanding of the implicit political elements that testimonies like his, and those gathered by community organizations, carry. Not just young children have listened to me speak this year, but also high school students, members of the labor movement, and those in the religious community too. Whether I take an hour, two hours, three hours, or even longer, the one point I wish to share with each of you more than anything else is [my answer to the question of] why so many Koreans came to Japan,

22   E. Ropers and why they must have been killed by the atomic bomb blasts. There are many answers to this question, and of course there are many personal experiences [that speak to this question]. Some answers support political agendas, and in these places I will make adjustments my story.57 With this example, we see how Pak, as chairman of a community history group, recognizes the political implications that zainichi narratives may have. At the same time, given his student audience, politicizing his experience would be inappropriate. Instead, he sticks closely to points that differentiate Korean experiences from Japanese hibakusha: noting for instance the policy of “Japan and Korea as One” (naisen ittai) or that many Koreans in Japan lost their jobs (for which they had been conscripted or forcibly recruited to fill) after surrender.58 We can see here how hibakusha testimonies may be deployed to achieve a more factual or holistic narrative in contrast to ethnicized histories that excluded Koreans. And, recalling Pak Kyŏng-sik’s arguments, it is possible to see how in different contexts such stories could be mobilized for outright political ends or advocacy. To better illustrate this I turn to one such community organization to illustrate a more politicized narrative concerning Korean hibakusha.

The Association to Protect the Human Rights of Resident Koreans in Nagasaki The 1970s and 1980s saw a quickening of research by zainichi Koreans concerning colonial and wartime history, branching out to investigate micro-­histories of factories, mines, and other forced labor sites, hibakusha in local communities, and the fate of hibakusha who repatriated to Korea.59 A useful window for examining the growth and development of a more politicized zainichi Korean narrative concerning the atomic bombings in the 1980s lies with works by the Association to Protect the Human Rights of Resident Koreans in Nagasaki (Nagasaki zainichi Chōsenjin no jinken o mamoru kai). The Association has been active since 1979, holding yearly rallies and memorial activities.60 Publications of their research findings as part of a series entitled Koreans and the Atomic Bomb began in 1982, and under the direction of Oka Masaharu, the Association’s research gradually branched out to investigate the forced recruitment and forced labor of Koreans. Concerning Korean hibakusha, members of the Association argued that the Japanese state had ignored the suffering of Korean survivors and that historical research by Japanese scholars and policies promoted and enacted by Japanese politicians continued to define issues pertaining to the atomic bomb and survivors in terms of nationality.61 Writing in 1982, the message was clear and resembled calls by community members in the preceding decades: “the real tragedy of ethnic [minority] victims such as Koreans is that their very existence has been completely forgotten.”62 The methods that the Association argued for in terms of publicizing and eventually seeking some kind of government recognition,

Contested spaces of ethnicity   23 compensation, and/or support came back first and foremost to what they termed as the “absolute necessity” of researching “the actual conditions and supporting measures for Korean hibakusha” in Japan.63 However, even before tackling the inequalities of support for Korean survivors versus Japanese survivors, members asserted that any serious examination or discussion of hibakusha necessarily needed to go back to the year 1910 and grapple with the colonial underpinnings that contributed to the lives, experiences, and memories of Korean survivors. Such a statement is telling in that basic questions continued to be unresolved by authors in the preceding decade. In their first publication from 1982, the Association articulated eight key goals: two directly referenced this perceived need to engage with colonial history and again follow the observations of Pak, Hiraoka, and other trail­ blazers from the 1960s and 1970s. First, members noted their desire and intent to publish and share a more holistic history of Korean hibakusha with the wider community in Japan (both Korean and Japanese), ultimately making clear the connections to wartime labor policies and practices.64 Second, they sought to chronicle survivors’ lives before the bombs were dropped, not to simply begin or chronicle survivors’ live starting from the day the bombs were dropped.65 It is suggestive that in making such aims plain, both points were (still) in sharp contrast to the testimonial practices and work by many Japanese survivors and groups. If anything, the Association’s goals drew attention to the incomplete nature of zainichi historical projects over the past 15 years, and the different direction that zainichi projects about the atomic bombings were beginning to take (compared to Japanese projects). Considering the second point in closer detail, the Association’s intent was to make clear to reading audiences that they and others members of the Korean community were hibakusha in large part because of Japanese colonial policies. In the words of survivors themselves, they were “brought” to Nagasaki or “forcibly transported” to Hiroshima, often against their will. By working with expository personal histories, it was possible for members to show readers that even those who migrated to Japan as children, or willingly with their families for purposes of employment were critical. In members’ eyes the lack of testimonies was traceable in part to the difficulties of survivors wishing to recall such a difficult and violent past.66 However, they argued that such testimonies could be used to agitate for fairer and more equitable access to medical benefits and social welfare, especially for survivors in Korea. By 1984 with the release of their third volume of findings, the Association was becoming more forthright in its criticism, placing blame thusly: The Japanese and South Korean governments failed to carry out their social and legal responsibilities to Korean hibakusha, which they saw as an unnecessary bother (needless to say, the responsibility was 100% Japan’s to do so). Meanwhile, while America [in the postwar period] proclaimed in a loud voice ideas of humanity and human rights, it avoided responsibility for dropping the atomic bombs.67

24   E. Ropers Across the multi-­volume series, it is clear that the analysis and argument of these authors was built in large part on the research conducted by the Nagasaki Group and others who had identified and collected the testimonies of survivors that we have seen earlier in this chapter. A point of contrast between these earlier works and the Association’s is the extent to which the latter begins to lay bare the inattention given to Korean survivors by the Japanese government and international organizations up to the early 1980s. Despite illustrating the depths of this inattention in past decades, it would be something sadly continuing over the coming decades.68

Conclusion In the years following the war’s end, the neglect of the Korean living and dead who had fought and died for the Emperor under 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, including those who were present in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was evident to many in the Korean community. In this chapter I have traced the development of writing about the atomic bombings by resident Koreans in Japan. By selecting a number of case studies and thematic commonalities present in writings since the mid-­1960s, we have seen some of the unique aspects of Korean survivor narratives. In contrast to Japanese writings on the subject, the hallmark of zainichi Korean writings and testimonies concerning the atomic bombings delve deeply as a whole into the history of colonial and wartime Japan. Like Japanese accounts and narratives, zainichi Korean testimonies make clear the horror and inhumanity of the atomic bombings. More than this however, many challenge the ethnicized version of history presented by most Japanese narratives and testimonies. One of the most important acts by members of the zainichi Korean community was to challenge pervasive ethnically framed narratives of wartime Japan. In a 1975 article, one Japanese author admitted that before the publication the same year of a book entitled Hibaku Kankokujin (Koreans Affected by the Atomic Bomb), he “didn’t know there had been any Korean victims.”69 This kind of frank admittance is reflective of the overwhelming dominance of ethnicized Japanese histories of the atomic bombings, and speaks to the reasons noted throughout this chapter about why zainichi Koreans were writing, collecting, and publishing histories and testimonies about Korean hibakusha—indeed, almost anything to do with the wartime period in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Though numbering in the hundreds of thousands, zainichi Koreans were essentially an invisible and ignored part of Japan’s population. Though these works made a growing number of Japanese aware of the existence of Korean hibakusha, equality in accessing government medical and welfare benefits continued to be stymied. Given that discrimination, as Ishikawa Itsuko noted “lies in the dark shadows of history [concerning Korean hibakusha],” it would be up to the Japanese courts in many cases to slowly tear down barriers that prevented zainichi Korean and Korean hibakusha from accessing many of the same medical and social welfare benefits afforded to Japanese survivors despite nationality not

Contested spaces of ethnicity   25 being a prerequisite in the laws establishing these programs.70 While these legal victories were welcome relief for many, they did not dramatically alter popular perceptions or understandings of Korean victims. Rather, public memories and understandings of the atomic bombings continued to be framed in an ethnicized and exclusionary framework despite challenges to the contrary. In theorizing why this was the case, John Bodnar’s framework concerning historical memory in the United States is useful, where he broadly notes that public memory “emerges from the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions.”71 Those in positions of prominence, in government or educational ministries or bureaucracies for example, are invested in the continuity of certain narratives and the suppression of competing interests or discourses as Ienaga Saburō has elaborated on.72 On the other hand, vernacular expressions, which works concerning zainichi Korean hibakusha largely fall into, are comparatively diverse and better reflect the “firsthand experience[s] in small-­scale communities rather than the ‘imagined’ communities of a large nation.”73 As we have seen, zainichi Korean testimonies and works directly challenge dominant discourses and understandings of the atomic bombings by foregrounding a longer period of colonial history and thereby question Japanese victimization narratives about the atomic bombings. Yet, despite the growing number of works published about Korean survivors since the mid-­1960s, it has been incredibly difficult to overcome the wide-­ranging institutional support in terms of pedagogy, historical research, and commemorative and memorial practices, which by and large promote imagined and communal understandings of the atomic bombings along ethnic lines.74 Consequently efforts to re-­insert or create a space for zainichi Korean wartime narratives remains an incomplete project, and as recent interviews and speeches by members of the community suggest, many feel as if this neglect continues even today.75 As the 70th anniversary of the war’s end approaches, members of the Korean community in Japan continue to be active in organizing second-­generation hibakusha in an effort to preserve and draw attention to the memories and experiences of a fast-­fading generation of survivors.76 Ultimately, Korean hibakusha testimonies are not primarily about leaving a record for future generations that illustrated the potential horrors of nuclear warfare, nor squarely focused on broad hopes for “peace in our time”; first and foremost they were about reversing the near-­complete amnesia that many in Japan had contracted concerning the worst aspects of the wartime period and the important ways in which colonial citizens (coercively) contributed to the wartime Japanese state.

Notes   1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2014 Asian Studies Association of Australia conference, the costs of which were supported in part by a grant from the USAsia Centre at the University of Western Australia. Additional research funding was provided with a grant by the Towson Academy of Scholars. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions for clarification and improvement.

26   E. Ropers   2 Chikako Kashiwazaki, “The Foreigner Category for Koreans in Japan: Opportunities and Constraints,” in Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, ed. Sonia Ryang and John Lie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 129.   3 Michael Weiner, “The Representation of Absence and the Absence of Representation,” in Japan’s Minorities: the Illusion of Homogeneity, ed. Michael Weiner (London: Routledge, 1997), 81.   4 John Dower, Embracing Defeat (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 66.   5 Karen Thornber, “Responsibility and Japanese Literature of the Atomic Bomb,” in Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film, ed. David Stahl and Mark Williams (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 270–271.   6 James Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 64–66.   7 Although the largest increases came between 1939 and 1945 due to Japanese government policies mandating the conscription and enforced labor of Koreans, other factors included widespread poverty throughout the Korean peninsula, poor agricultural harvests and subsequent famines, and natural disasters such as flooding. This said, Koreans have resided in and emigrated (voluntarily or by force) to Japan for centuries, although by the nineteenth century only a few thousand Koreans who had not assimilated were scattered around Japan, including some in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 4.   8 Tessa Morris-­Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 2010), 10.   9 Ichiba Junko, Hiroshima o mochikaetta hitobito: “Kankoku no Hiroshima” wa naze umareta no ka [Those Who Brought Back Hiroshima: How Did the “Korean Hiroshima” Come to Exist?] (Gaifūsha, 2000), 27. 10 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 392–394. 11 Ibid., 394. Japanese residents became eligible for medical assistance in 1957 and social welfare in 1968. Those who repatriated to Korea were excluded from these provisions that resulted in litigation. The Japanese Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that the Medical Assistance Law should be applied regardless of nationality or residency. Recent litigation has focused on wage compensation for Mitsubishi forced laborers and benefits for hibakusha in Korea. See David Palmer, “Korean Hibakusha, Japan’s Supreme Court and the International Community,” The Asia-­Pacific Journal, www. japanfocus.org/-David-­Palmer/2670/ (accessed March 9, 2015), and “Aging Overseas Hibakusha Still Seek Equal Treatment,” Japan Times, October 30, 2013. 12 Kashiwazaki, “Foreigner Category,” 128. The history of Japanese nationality law and the peculiarities unique to Korea is complex. Refer to Chikako Kashiwazaki, “The Politics of Legal Status: the Equation of Nationality With Ethnonational Identity,” in Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices From the Margin, ed. Sonia Ryang (London: Routledge, 2000), 13–31, and Morris-­Suzuki, Borderline Japan, 42–45. 13 Sonia Ryang, “Introduction: Between the Nations—Diaspora and Koreans in Japan,” in Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, ed. Sonia Ryang and John Lie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 9. 14 Weiner, “Representation of Absence,” 103–104; Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 151–186. 15 Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 164. 16 Ibid., 166–167. 17 Orr, Victim as Hero, 7. 18 NZJK, ed., Genbaku to Chōsenjin: Nagasaki Chōsenjin hibakusha jittai chōsa hōkokusho, dai-­ichishu [Koreans and the Atomic Bomb: A Report on Research Into the Situation of Korean Hibakusha in Nagasaki, Volume One] (Nagasaki: Nagasaki zainichi Chōsenjin no jinken o mamoru kai, 1982), 3.

Contested spaces of ethnicity   27 19 Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 19. 20 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 631; Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War  II, trans. Suzanne O’Brien (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 12; Toyonaga Keisaburō, “Colonialism and Atom Bombs: About Survivors of Hiroshima Living in Korea,” trans. Eric Cazdyn and Lisa Yoneyama, in Perilous Memories: the Asia-­Pacific War(s), ed. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 385–393. 21 See David Chapman, Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 2008), 31–33, and Tonomura Masaru, Zainichi Chōsenjin shakai no rekishigakuteki kenkyū [A Historical Studies Approach to the Study of Zainichi Korean Society] (Ryokuin shobō, 2004), chapter 7. 22 Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 36. 23 Ibid., 37–38. 24 Erik Ropers, “Testimonies as Evidence in the History of kyōsei renkō,” Japanese Studies 30 (2010): 267–268. 25 Pak Kyŏng-sik, Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiroku [A Record of Korean Forced Recruitment] (Miraisha, [1965] 2005). 26 A comprehensive list of sources concerning zainichi Chinese histories of forced recruitment and forced labor can be found in Nozoe Kenji’s excellent multi-­volume set Shiriizu: Hanaoka jiken no hitotachi—Chūgokujin kyōsei renkō no kiroku [Series: The People of the Hanaoka Incident—A Record of Chinese Forced Recruitment] (Shakai hyōronsha, 2008), 4: 219–307. 27 Pak Kyŏng-sik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō minzoku mondai: koki o kinenshite [Resident Koreans, Forced Labor, Ethnic Issues: Commemorating Seventy Years] (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1992), 15. 28 Palmer, “Korean Hibakusha,” unpaginated. 29 Pak Kyŏng-sik, Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiroku, 3–4. 30 Ropers, “Testimonies as Evidence,” 268. 31 Sonia Ryang, “Inscribed (Men’s) Bodies, Silent (Women’s) Words: Rethinking Colonial Displacement of Koreans in Japan,” Critical Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (1998): 5. 32 Hiraoka Takashi, Henken to sabetsu [Prejudice and Discrimination] (Miraisha, 1972), 116. Hiraoka served as mayor from 1991 to 1999. Note that the Japanese word minzoku is rooted in the concept of “the people” as a particular ethnic group. In the context of broader discussions concerning forms of Japanese “nationalism” and the ways ethnicity factors into the discussion, see Kevin Doak, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 25–29, and Ueno Chizuko, “Kioku no seijigaku: kokumin, kojin, watashi [The Politics of Memory: the Nation, the Individual, and the Self],” Inpakushon 103 (1997): 170. 33 Hiraoka Takashi, “Kankoku no genbaku hisaisha o tazunete [Investigating Korean Victims of the Atomic Bombing],” in Nihon no genbaku kiroku [Accounts of the Atomic Bombings of Japan], ed. Ienaga Saburō, Odagiri Hideo, Kuroko Kazuo et al. (Nihon tosho sentā, 1991), 10: 209. 34 Morris-­Suzuki, Borderline Japan, 10–11. 35 Kawaguchi Takayuki, Genbaku bungaku to iu puroburematīku [The Problematics of “Atomic Bomb Literature”] (Fukuoka-­shi: Sōgensha, 2008), 69. 36 Pak Kyŏng-sik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō minzoku mondai, 16. 37 Nishimura, Nagasaki no hibakusha, 85. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 HCHK, ed., Shiroi chogori no hibakusha, 40. Emphasis added. 41 Kawaguchi, Genbaku bungaku, 70–72. 42 Asahi shinbunsha, ed., Genbaku 500-nin no Shōgen [500 Testimonies of the Atomic Bombings] (Asahi shinbunsha, 1967), 65–68.

28   E. Ropers 43 Hiraoka, Henken to sabetsu, 116. 44 Mukuge (K: mugunghwa) or Rose of Sharon is the national flower of South Korea. The journal Mukuge tsūshin, affiliated with the organization Mukuge no kai, is one of the longest continuously published journals by a zainichi Korean community group (1971–today). 45 “Chōsenjin hibakusha chōsa o [Investigating Korean Hibakusha], Asahi shinbun, November 20, 1979. 46 See Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō shinsō chōsadan (CKRC), ed., Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō kyōsei rōdō no kiroku: Hokkaidō, Chishima, Karafuto hen [A Record of Forced Korean Labor and Recruitment: Hokkaidō, Chishima, Karafuto] (Gendaishi shuppankai, 1974), 683. 47 Pak Kyŏng-sik, Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiroku, 10. 48 Chapman, Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity, 30. 49 Ropers, “Testimonies as Evidence,” 273. 50 Comparatively fewer survivors would be have repatriated to North Korea, and given the closed nature of the DPRK, it was impossible for zainichi Korean groups to travel there and interview survivors. For representative accounts, see Pak Su-­bok, Hibaku Kankokujin [Blast-­Affected Koreans] (Asahi shinbunsha, 1975); Nagasaki no Shōgen Kankō Iinkai (NSK), ed., Nagasaki no shōgen, vol. 7. Reprinted in Nihon no genbaku kiroku, vol.  11 (Nihon tosho sentā, 1991); Pak Su-­nam, Mō hitotsu no Hiroshima: Chōsenjin Kankokujin hibakusha no shōgen [One More Hiroshima: Testimonies of Korean Hibakusha] (Chigasaki: Sharōbō shuppanbu, 1982). 51 Son Ri-­nop, “Chōyō de Nagasaki e [Brought to Nagasaki by Conscription,” Shōgen Hiroshima Nagasaki no koe 1 (1987): 122. 52 Pak Su-­bok ., Hibaku Kankokujin, 184. 53 Pak Su-­nam, Mō hitotsu no Hiroshima, 102. 54 Kim Sun-­gil, “Kankokujin hibaku chōyōkō no nikki [The Diary of a Blast-­Affected Conscripted Korean Worker],” Shōgen Hiroshima Nagasaki no koe 6 (1992): 100. 55 To be sure, many Koreans express the same devotion to wartime Japan, although such views are rarely expressed publicly. See Ropers, “Testimonies as Evidence,” 278–279. 56 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: a Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 33, 144. 57 Pak Min-­gyu, “Chōsenjin hibakusha toshite [Concerning Korean Hibakusha],” Shōgen Hiroshima Nagasaki no koe 3 (1989): 50. A more formalized testimonial variation of Pak’s story can be found in NSK, ed., Nagasaki no shōgen, 645–653. 58 Pak Min-­gyu, “Chōsenjin hibakusha,” 50–51. 59 Yamada Shōji, Koshō Tadashi, and Higuchi Yu’ichi, Chōsenjin senji rōdō dōin [Korean Wartime Labor Mobilization] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005), 26. 60 “Kagai sekinin hatasuyō uttae: Chōsenjin giseisha tsuitō shūkai [Realizing a Complaint For Assaulters’ Responsibility: A Gathering to Mourn the Korean Departed],” Nagasaki Shinbun, August 10, 2011. 61 NZJK, ed., Genbaku to Chōsenjin, dai-­ichishu, 2. 62 Ibid., 3. 63 Ibid. 64 Oka Masaharu would go on to establish the Oka Masaharu Museum in Nagasaki in 1995. Later volumes which Oka contributed to would begin to focus more on coal mining and forced labor concentrated on the island of Hashima, which lies about 15 kilometers off Nagasaki. Thanks to Mark Pendleton for drawing my attention to this point. 65 Ibid., 4. 66 Ibid., 8. 67 NZJK, ed., Genbaku to Chōsenjin: Nagasaki Chōsenjin hibakusha jittai chōsa hōkokusho, dai-­sanshu [Koreans and the Atomic Bomb: A Report on Research Into

Contested spaces of ethnicity   29 the Situation of Korean Hibakusha in Nagasaki, Volume Three] (Nagasaki: Nagasaki zainichi Chōsenjin no jinken o mamoru kai, 1984), 136. 68 See Toyonaga, “Colonialism and Atom Bombs” and Palmer, “Korean Hibakusha” for further details concerning the following decades. 69 Kishibe Kumi, “ ‘Hibaku Kankokujin’ ni tsuite [About “Blast Affected Koreans],” Koria hyōron 167 (1975): 39. 70 Ishikawa Itsuko, “Kaisetsu: ‘Sabetsu’ to iu kurai yami no naka de [Commentary: Discrimination Hidden in the Darkness],” in Nihon no genbaku kiroku, ed. Ienaga Saburō et al. (Nihon tosho sentā, 1991), 12: 490; Weiner, “Representation of Absence,” 95. 71 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13–14. 72 Saburō Ienaga, “The Glorification of War in Japanese Education,” International Security 18, no. 3 (1993–1994): 113–133. 73 Bodnar, Remaking America, 14. 74 Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Untying the Text: a Post-­Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge, 1981), 55. 75 See “Hyakumannin no Shinse Taryon” Henshū Iinkai, ed., Hyakumannin no shines taryon: Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō, kyōsei rōdō no “han” [One Million Persons’ Cries of Grief: the Sorrow of Forced Korean Labor] (Ōsaka-shi: Tōhō shuppan, 1999); Oka Masaharu Kinen Nagasaki Heiwa Shiryōkan Kinkyō An’nai, “2011-nen Nagasaki genbaku Chōsenjin giseisha tsuitō sōchō shūkai messējo [Early Morning Assembly Address Mourning Korean Victims of the Atomic Bomb in Nagasaki, 2011],” available online: http://okamuseum.seesaa.net/article/387995235.html (accessed April 1, 2015). 76 “Chōsenjin hibaku nissei soshiki 21-nichi fukkatsu [The Revival of an Organization for Second-­Generation Korean Hibakusha],” Chūgoku shinbun, March 10, 2015; “Hiroshima-­ken Chōsenjin hibakusha nissei no kai hossoku [Launch of an Organization for Second-­Generation Korean Hibakusha in Hiroshima Prefecture],” Chūgoku shinbun, March 22, 2015.

2 Memory and survival in everyday textures—Ishiuchi Miyako’s Hiroshima Makeda Best

The postwar era prompted a generation of avant-­garde Japanese artists to eschew traditional mediums and art institutions all together.1 For postwar generations of Japanese photographers, the trauma of World War II, the atomic bomb, and Occupation (1945–1952) are recurring subjects, as well as driving artistic and conceptual influences. Such issues as the aesthetic and role of photographic expression in the post-­atomic bomb era were explored in numerous exhibitions and photographic books, and in magazines like Camera Mainichi, Camera, and Photo Art. Some, like Tsuchida Hiromi, who has spent nearly the past 40 years exploring the topic, sought a more direct engagement with the subject matter. Meanwhile, to the collective known as Provoke, the era called for a new photographic language based in blur and graininess. Domon Ken articulated his ideas on the photographer as a social agent and photographic realism as a progressive aesthetic in an influential series of texts published in Camera and Photo Art. In his words, “photographic realism looks directly at reality, and points reality in a better direction.”2 He compiled his documentation of the post-­bomb structural damage and the lives of survivors (known as hibakusha) in the seminal Hiroshima (1958), a project that became emblematic of his belief in the power of photography to change society. In the series on military bases and towns titled Occupation that he began in 1959, Shōmei Tōmatsu’s depictions of the presence and influence of America on postwar Japan register ambivalence toward the directly humanist appeals of the post-­bomb photography of his peers. John Dower has broadly described the projects of Domon and Tomatsu as work “to shift attention from anodyne images of mushroom clouds or shattered buildings and look directly at the bombs’ victims” and to restore “individualized humanity to popular memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”3 Recent publications and exhibitions have explored the role of photography in constructing and influencing the public understanding of atomic energy and the history of the atomic bomb. These studies have sought to produce a counter narrative to such images as those of the so-­called “mushroom cloud,” which have dominated popular culture in the West for the past 50 years. This chapter is inspired by the position of the artist/photographer, and how the events of 1945 precipitated an ongoing investigation among Japanese practitioners of photography in the postwar era, the relationship between photography and national

Memory and survival in everyday textures   31 trauma, and how to approach the aftermath of the atomic bomb as a subject. In Ishiuchi’s series ひろしま/HIROSHIMA (2008), the meaning of witness and the negotiation of the relationship of the present-­day viewer to the bombing, its victim and survivors, are central themes. Ishiuchi’s oeuvre, with its recurring interest in exploring change and the relationship between the past and the present through such subjects as the surfaces of the body, reflects how she absorbed and responded to the debates in postwar Japanese photographic circles. Similar to the photographers associated with the group known as Provoke for example, enlisting and enhancing the tactile qualities of the photographic print in her work has been a consistent interest. Her aesthetic often references documentary, but a personal interpretation and perspective of the real world are also significant aspects of her practice. As she has explained, the title ひろしま/HIROSHIMA:  The title ひろしま of this series means Hiroshima written in Japanese Hiragana characters.… The Hiragana characters were extensively used by women in former times.… Using this way of Japanese writings for the title means to the artist that this series is made by the point of view and feelings of a woman.4 Following a long tradition of the production of photographic books and photographic books on the atomic bomb specifically, the publisher Shueisha originally commissioned the project in 2007 as a photographic book. In addition to producing a book, Ishiuchi has also presented the project in exhibition form. This chapter explores how Ishiuchi’s Hiroshima project differs from other postwar projects because of her expansive interpretation of the temporal reality of this traumatic event, which allows her to foreground the lives and experiences of atomic bomb victims and survivors. While other projects have compellingly identified and interpreted symbols associated with the war and the atomic bomb, Ishiuchi’s work evokes the experience of those who lived it. The project references the instrumental use of photography in the origins, development, and study of the effects of the atomic bomb at the same time as it reclaims the function of photography as a site through which to witness and to connect the past and the present experience.

Photography, science, forensics, and the atomic bomb Clothing and personal accessories are the subjects of Ishiuchi’s Hiroshima. The series features personal artifacts collected by volunteers and family members of bombing victims, and donated to the archive of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. The Museum permanent installation features a small number of the items in the archive. Alongside the objects, visitors can examine, via computer, the survivors’ testimony, alongside other contextualizing items such as photographs and maps.

32   M. Best Ishiuchi’s subject matter and approach reminds viewers that photography had already established a distinct relationship to the atomic bomb prior to 1945. Hiroshima portrays single items against a plain background under even lighting, referencing the aesthetic of scientific data and forensic photography. Authors including Robert Jay Lifton and Kyo Maclear have argued the events of August 1945 pose a distinct challenge to creative responses in any medium (visual and literary); however, photography’s connection to this trajectory of events is especially complex. Photography contributed to the scientific and technological development of the bomb as a research tool. Acknowledging the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of and experiments on properties of radiation in the late 1800s, Akira Mizuta Lippit describes the history photography shares with radiation as “uncanny.”5 When Robert Oppenheimer and his team worked to create the atomic bomb, they used visual data collected by cameras and other equipment in order to document and measure such aspects as degrees of radioactivity and temperature. Items from the archive have appeared in the work of other photographers. For example, Tsuchida Hiromi published Hiroshima Collection (Tokyo: Tosei-­sha, 1995) in 1995, also in coordination with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. His black and white photographs depict single items such as a briefcase or the burned jacket of a school child. Each item is positioned centrally in the frame. The lighting is flat and neutral. The captions describe the owners of these items, and provide a short anecdote about the item. Tsuchida’s straightforward depictions of these items elevate the mundane. Yet, by adopting an approach that enhances the evidentiary power of these artifacts, Tsuchida also emphasizes their meaning to a past moment that the viewer observes rather than also experiences or imagines. Clothing was also the focus of forensic study following the bombing. When the United States Strategic Bombing Survey arrived in October 1945 to record and assess the impact of the bomb, survey workers studied and photographically documented how different fabrics responded to exposure to the blast and whether thick fabric offered any protection to the skin. Some fabric “ ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame.”6 Darker colors responded differently from lighter colors: “white silk seldom was affected, although black, and some other colored silk, charred and disintegrated.” Resisting the tone of distant reverence and the objective perspective of the scientist or investigator, Ishiuchi’s choice of medium and her technique activates these objects as human and material presences. In one of Ishiuchi’s untitled photographs, a pale pink empire waist dress against a white background fills the close-­cropped frame of a large vertical color photograph. Stains, wrinkles, and tears disfigure the sweet pattern of tiny flowers and leaves. The tattered remains of the dress’s upper portion trail off to the right of the frame, as if caught by wind. The photograph conveys movement through the placement of the object and close cropping of the composition. The garment dominates the pictorial space. The dress is not a static object of the distant past, but seems to be alive. Ishiuchi’s project is distinguished by her vivid use of color and manipulation of

Memory and survival in everyday textures   33 points of view in order to actively evoke the lives of the owners of these artifacts, thus fostering a unique engagement with viewers. Describing working with these artifacts, Ishiushi recalled how she removed a blouse from a box and brought over to a window, and “for an instant, the polka dots and floral patterns shimmer and the woman who once wore it rises.”7 There are no extensive texts describing the object—individual images are untitled. This is deliberate, as Ishiuchi insists her intention is not to “document,” but to resurrect them into beauty.”8 The vivid color announces a subjective investigation. The lighting conditions and the use of a background are unifying elements to the series, but Ishiuchi eschews a systematic placement of objects in the composition. The background is not always visible as some garments fill the entire frame. Some photographs portray items in their entirety. Other photographs focus on a fragment, such as a corner or the front lapels of a jacket, and the viewer must imagine the rest. The objects migrate around the frame, forcing the viewer to shift their gaze. Her use of different images sizes and orientations means each work portrays a different relationship between object and the parameters of the picture frame, or between viewer and photograph. In installations, Ishiuchi arranges the works in various locations around the walls, with irregular spacing between the works. Ishiuchi’s analytical proximity of the garments allows the viewer to explore the fine texture of mottled crepe or other details such as someone’s handwriting on the inside. Lifton wrote: “Hiroshima not only exceeded all previous limits of destruction, but had, in effect, declared that there were no limits to destruction.”9 Here, the intimacy of scale is the opposite of the enormity of the event itself. Ishiushi focuses our gaze on individuals, and on specific memories and histories embodied in individual garments worn by that individual. The scale encourages us to explore, with our eyes and fingers, these as personal landscapes. Each of these items belonged to and meant something to someone. They also meant something to those who experienced this garment through its wearer. Clothing gives the viewer a sense of the living person, and how that person lived within a community and in a particular historical moment. The intimacy of these landscapes is a contrast to photographs that recorded and addressed the event as a national trauma. She wrote of her selection process: “… I chose things that at one time had touched skin and bodies, and photographed them …”10 The project uniquely conjoins other aspects of Ishiushi’s oeuvre, namely her interest in photographing skin and her appreciation for the tactile qualities of photography. Ishiuchi’s link of fabric to skin also recalls the photograph’s particular relationship to its referent. As Susan Sontag described it, the photograph is “something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”11 In postwar Japanese photography, photographers turned to documenting aspects of the physical landscape as symbolic for the war’s national, social, and psychic traumas. Working in a controlled studio setting, and Ishiuchi’s intensely close presentation transforms the fabric into landscapes of a different sort. There are areas of smoothness, and areas puckered with damage. These “scars” on the fabric serve as metaphors for the bodies of bomb victims and of a nation.

34   M. Best

Finding Hiroshima in everyday textures Ishiuchi’s project proposes that it is misleading to understand these objects as marked by only a singular moment in time. These objects are themselves material witnesses to the social, economic, and political history and reality of their unseen wearers, and the ways they chose to respond to that reality. Prohibitions issued on July 7, 1940 outlawed the manufacture and sale of goods that were considered “unneeded and nonurgent” or “luxurious” —including fabrics. For example, the cotton shortage was such that it gained the designation of “precious good”; in the last year of the war, Japan produced very little textiles at all. The government sought to use clothing guidelines as a tool to boost civilian loyalty and to portray a unified country.12 Some of the items reflect government wartime mandates and the scarcity of fabric, but others do not. Ishiuchi has written:  I catch my breath at their vivid hues and textures, surfacing from the long shadows cast by their extreme circumstance … I found Hiroshima in the gentle, everyday textures surviving in the silhouette of a one-­piece dress, worn, perhaps clandestinely, by an unknown woman, and in the deep folds of a gathered skirt, in a fabric woven of silken threads.13 Choices in clothing and accessories convey personal perspectives and lived experiences. As an integral aspect of self-­identity and self-­representation, personal adornment serves a communicative function—conveying personal desires, feelings, and intentions of the wearer.14 These personal items remind viewers of life during wartime, expanding the temporal qualities of the image. August was only the culmination of a war strategy that targeted civilians as well as combatants. Thus, the civilian owners of the items in the photographs endured these years too, and the objects also embody those periods. Ishiuchi’s photographs document the changing role of textiles in everyday life in Japan, and they suggest something of the lives and identities of the people who owned them, how these people represented themselves publically and privately, and how their community saw them during a particular historical moment. In this way, the photographs portray portraits of their owners that extend beyond and to before the atomic bomb. Each of these garments has a history that is broader than the “scars” they carry. Instead of providing specific contextual information, Ishiushi forces viewers to imagine the lives of their owners, while also insisting that they had lives prior to the events of August 1945. Further, personal display and the contemplation of one’s own display and that of others foster feelings of pleasure.15 Trauma is not the only feeling registered in the objects. Ishiuchi’s photographic interpretations of the objects further expand these dimensions of display and self-­representation.

Memory and survival in everyday textures   35

Living memorials Ultimately, Ishiuchi’s project performs a function denied to photography in the immediate years following the war. Decisions by Amer­ican and Japanese officials after the United States deployed the atomic bomb in August 1945 led to photography’s diminished role as an immediate source of information about and site of memorialization of the atrocities. The suppression of images through official censorship, and confiscation and destruction of photographs, contributed to the fact that it was not until after the Amer­ican occupation of Japan in 1952 that photographic records of the human, structural, and environmental toll of the use of the bombs began to circulate widely in Japanese media outlets.16 It was not until the late 1960s that Amer­ican officials gradually returned more images they had either produced or confiscated.17 These conditions unusually altered photography’s capacity to serve as a collective means through which to, in Barbie Zelizer’s term, “bear witness.” Zelizer defines “bearing witness” as “an act of witnessing that enables people to take responsibility for what they see.”18 She writes: the photograph “facilitates the work by which individuals establish moral accountability, move on from the trauma, and in so doing help return the collective to its pre-­traumatic state.”19 Hiro Saito argues the near absence of photographic records in national life informed Japan’s memory of the bombings. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s theories, Saito argues the delayed dissemination of images “produced among the viewers the consciousness that the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki belonged to the distant past (having-­been-there-­andthen), not the present (being-­here-and-­now).”20 Further Saito writes, the documentary photographs of the devastation positioned viewers “as spectators of the past, not actors of the present who shared the victim’s wound.” In response to the discussions about the capacity of witnessing, testimony, fiction, and metaphor to communicate and memorialize the trauma of the events of 1945, Kyo Maclear asks: “What would it take to see the fictional and the factual, the metaphoric and the referential, as mutually imbricated, rather than mutually exclusive?”21 Ishiuchi’s Hiroshima exists in what Maclear describes as the space of “approximation,” or “a dialectical space between art as frank recollection and art as unfettered imagination.”22 In her creative work to engage the objects as communicative material presences rather than mute or self-­evident artifacts, the project represents the facts of wartime Japan, while at the same time allowing for the personal lives of the objects’ former owners. Thus through fact and fiction, the visual and the tactile, Hiroshima perpetuates the meanings of these objects. The role of the viewer is transformed from distant observer to immediate witness and participant in this encounter, which elicits an imaginative dialog with the unknown and the reckoning of known facts. The viewer encounters the objects in the present; existing in “being-­here-and-­now,” the viewer extends and supplements the imaginary conversation with the original owner, their desires and experiences. In this way, an art of “approximation” might also be understood as works that make space for the past and the present to coexist— as living memorials.

36   M. Best

Notes   1 Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Mika Yoshitake, Miryam Sas, Yuri Mitsuda, Masatoshi Nakajima, and Nancy Lim, Tokyo, 1955–1970: a New Avant-­Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 27.   2 Ken Domon, “Photographic Realism and the Salon Picture,” in Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers, Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka and Yutaka Kanbayashi, eds. (New York: Aperture, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2006), 25.   3 John Dower, “Contested Ground: Shōmei Tōmatsu and the Search for Identity in Postwar Japan,” Shōmei Tōmatsu: Skin of the Nation, Leo Rubinfien, Shōmei Tōmatsu, Sandra S. Phillips, and John W. Dower, eds. (San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Musuem of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 2012), 67, 69.   4 “ひろしま Hiroshima” Artswire, October 16, 2011. Accessed March 20, 2015. http:// wire.arts.ubc.ca/events/ひろしま-hiroshima/.   5 Akira Mizua Lippit, “Photographing Nagasaki – From Fact to Artifact,” in Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945, Robert Jenkins, ed. (Portland: Pomegranate, 1995), 26–34.   6 The United States Strategic Bombing Survey – The Effects of the Atomic Bombings in Hiroshima, Japan, Volume I, Physical Damage Division, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, May 1947), 24.   7 Linda Hoaglund, “Behind ‘Things Left Behind’: Ishiuchi Miyako,” Impressions 1:34 (January 2013): 85.   8 Ibid., 94.   9 Robert Jay Lifton, Future of Immortality and Other Essays on the Nuclear Age (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 261. 10 “ひろしま Hiroshima” Artswire, October 16, 2011. Accessed March 20, 2015. http:// wire.arts.ubc.ca/events/ひろしま-hiroshima/. 11 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador USA; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, 1977), 154. 12 Jacqueline M. Atkins, “Extravagance is the Enemy – Fashion and Textiles in Wartime Japan,” in Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931–1945, Jacqueline M. Atkins, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 157–168. 13 “Miyako Ishiuchi,” Timemachine, Issue 6, 2014. Accessed January 2, 2014. http:// timemachinemag.com/past-­issues/issue-­six-atomic/miyako-­ishiuchi/#24. 14 Mary Ellen Roach, and Joanne Bubloz Eichner, “The Language of Personal Adornment,” in The Fabrics of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment, Justine M. Cordwell, and Ronald A. Schwartz, eds. (The Hague: Mouton, 2007), 7–12. 15 Ibid., 7. 16 Barbara Marcoń, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Eye of the Camera: Images and Memory,” Third Text 25:6 (November 2011): 789. 17 Ibid., 787. 18 Barbie Zelizer. “Finding Aids to the Past: Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic Public Events,” Media Culture and Society 24:5 (2002): 698. 19 Ibid. 20 Hiro Saito, “Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma,” Sociological Theory 24:4 (2006): 365. 21 Kyo Maclear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-­Nagasaki and the Art of Witness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 71. 22 Ibid.

3 The most modern city in the world Isamu Noguchi’s cenotaph controversy and Hiroshima’s city of peace Ran Zwigenberg In 1955 the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum, the first major project of Japanese architect Tange Kenzō, opened in Hiroshima. Tange, who became one of Japan’s most internationally acclaimed architects, was one of the most influential figures in Hiroshima’s commemoration history. Tange’s design, and the city plan of Hiroshima as a whole—which he supervised, aimed at offering a vision of Japanese modernity committed to peace and technological development. Indeed, Tange made his intentions for Hiroshima clear when, drawing on Le Corbusier’s famous quip, he called the Hiroshima Peace Park “a factory for peace.”1 However, Tange’s plan was not implemented smoothly. Many elements in the Peace Park plan proved to be contentious. Building a modernist building in the midst of the destruction and misery that still dominated Hiroshima was not without its critics. Amer­ican censorship and the popularity of the “peace” narrative in the first 10 years after the bombing did much to muffle such conflicts.2 But the ambivalent and conflicting meanings of the bombing continued to plague the commemoration of the tragedy and rebuilding of the stricken city. This chapter examines Hiroshima’s reconstruction through looking at a major controversy that uncovered much of these conflicts and contradictions surrounding the Peace Park: the rejection of artist Isamu Noguchi’s design for the Hiroshima cenotaph. Although Tange supported it, Isamu Noguchi’s design for the cenotaph was rejected, at least partially because of Noguchi’s Amer­ican ancestry. During the debates about the rejection competing visions of Hiroshima’s identity and relation to the bomb were displayed and argued about as postwar Hiroshima tried to make peace with its modern past and itself. Although discussions of Hiroshima’s commemoration usually focus on its place as a center of a burgeoning peace movement, an understudied side of commemoration and the city’s rebuilding was an emphasis on the remaking of the city as a model modern city.3 Hiroshima’s reconstruction was seen as a symbol of Japan’s transformation and re-­embrace of Western modernity. Indeed, ironically, it was precisely because Hiroshima was the site of modernity’s worst nightmare that it could be rebuilt as an expression of utopian modernism, as if to pose to the world the choice between “utopia or Hiroshima.”4 The cenotaph episode illustrates the many contradictions and ambivalences within Hiroshima’s, and indeed, Japan’s postwar embrace of the modern project. As historian

38   R. Zwigenberg Oguma Eiji noted, the first postwar decade saw the re-­embrace of enlightenment values and Westernization by Japanese elites.5 Turning their backs to Asia, many in Japan now looked, yet again, to America and the West for inspiration. Hiroshima’s transformation from a military city into a city of peace, with all its attended progressive interpretations and emphasis on reconciliation with those who destroyed it, was very much in line with that development. Significantly, the vision of the future Hiroshima offered was a transnational one wherein the significance of the city’s Japanese character, or any issues of “racial” identity, was supposedly overcome. The disaster of war and atomic warfare were actually refashioned as an opportunity to remake Hiroshima (and Japan) as a shiny new city of peace and capitalist prosperity; a phoenix rising from the ashes of war. Thus, leaving its destroyed old landscapes, the old militarist values and racial hierarchies behind. Noguchi’s intervention briefly uncovered this façade and demonstrated the complexities and continuities within the “peace city’s” modern history.

The city of peace During a 1951 press conference held upon his arrival in Hiroshima, the Japanese­Amer­ican artist Isamu Noguchi startled Japanese reporters with the comment, “Hiroshima is probably the most modern city in the world.”6 Noguchi’s statement expressed the ambivalence many in Japan and beyond felt toward Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bomb. Hiroshima was an expression of a modern nightmare, a failure of the enlightenment narrative of science and progress, but Hiroshima was also a tabula rasa, an urban space open for a complete reconstruction of the city, and “[for] clearing the blinders of convention to enable a bold modernity.”7 With only a few exceptions, Hiroshima, and Japan as a whole, embraced the second interpretation of Noguchi’s declaration in its reconstruction of a new postwar identity. The destruction of the war was perceived as a new beginning and the defeat as an opportunity for transformation. Hiroshima’s destruction was seen as a chance to move away from the (errant) militarist modernity of the war era into a bright (Amer­icanized) modern future. By the late forties the equation of Hiroshima’s and of Japan’s postwar “mission” with a quest for peace, and, furthermore, the equation of the pursuit of peace with a pursuit of capitalist modernity, was fast becoming a dominant official interpretation of the bombing.8 This narrative created in Hiroshima credited the bomb, as Amer­icans often did, with bringing peace and ending World War II. In Hiroshima’s account, however, it was Hiroshima’s sacrifice rather than the bomb itself that brought peace. With this “baptism of fire” (another often repeated phrase), Hiroshima was transformed into a transnational city of peace with a special mission to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear war. Japan’s celebrated peace constitution and the discourse of peace made Japanese adherents of what Carol Gluck called “a cult of new beginnings,” which helped them forget what had preceded the end of the war.9 Curiously, this discourse was both distinctively Japanese, continuing

The most modern city in the world   39 the prewar trope of Japanese uniqueness, and universal at the same time: erasing any particular ethnic identity of other non-­Japanese victims.10 As John Dower has argued, the bomb was Janus-­faced; it was both a reminder of the folly of war and, also, a symbol of the new omnipotence of science.11 This certainly fit into the optimistic message of renewal and the emphasis on peace promoted by the Amer­icans. The phrase “Building a nation of science and culture” (kagaku to bunka no kokka o kensetsu) was ubiquitous all over the Japanese media. The word heiwa and the prefix shin (new) suddenly appeared everywhere.12 The discourse on transformation and modernization was nothing new for the Japanese. From Meiji onward, the Japanese were taught by their modernizing elites to accept change and transformation and discard much of their old way of life. Building on this history, from the end of the war onward, Amer­ican and Japanese elites actively tried to direct Japan’s gaze toward the future. In Hiroshima itself, just devastated from the latest advance of science, the very first mention of plans for commemoration in September 1945 was a call by Hiroshima’s governor for “building a new Hiroshima and a scientific Japan.” Significantly, the governor also went on to say, a day later, that he wanted to push Hiroshima as, “a major inner sea tourist point and for getting funds and resources from the world to create a peace memorial city.”13 After the Amer­icans’ arrival, as Hiroshima was preparing for reconstruction, it asked and got help from the occupation authorities. In mid-­May 1946, at Hiroshima city’s request, Lt. John D. Montgomery from the United States Army and Major Harvey Stein from the Australian forces, were stationed as official reconstruction advisers in Hiroshima. They were quick to show Hiroshima the “proper” way forward. In a June 1946 interview, Montgomery called on residents to “make Hiroshima a symbol of international peace.” Montgomery went on to say: “the memorial tower [Hiroshima erected a tower at ground zero] is for me, not for commemoration … but should stand for the baptism of the first dropping of the A-­bomb, ending of World War  II and creation of eternal peace.”14 Montgomery was also the first one to propose building a museum on ground zero (bakushinchi) and the infrastructure for visitors to the site.15 Miles W. Vaughn, an influential Japan-­based Amer­ican journalist, made similar calls a few months later. In 1946 and again in 1947, Vaughn called on Hiroshima residents, in a letter that was published in the press, to build a “peace memorial city,” and a “memorial museum where artifacts and pictures will be shown for the visitors.” Both Vaughn and Montgomery promised they would appeal for reconstruction funds in the United States16 Montgomery in particular mentioned the Rotary Club and religious organizations and promised, “Hiroshima can count on the world’s sympathy.”17 In 1947, Hiroshima did look to the world for help. Hiroshima lost almost 80 percent of its tax base due to the bomb and the disbanding of the military, on which many of its industries were based.18 Frustrated by its failure to receive reconstruction funds from the government, Hiroshima city turned to fundraising as a possible source of revenue. In these efforts, Hiroshima’s city fathers crafted a Universalist message of peace that bordered on the Orwellian in its zeal to

40   R. Zwigenberg erase the perpetrator, the United States, from the picture, while accepting the Amer­ican interpretation of the bomb as the cause for peace. In a letter to donors, Itō Yutaka, the chairman of Hiroshima’s newly created reconstruction committee, wrote, Hiroshima has been accorded a historical significance and is known throughout the world as the center of the dropping of the atomic bomb, one of the main causes contributing to the termination of the Second World War, we consider it a duty given to us by Providence to reconstruct Hiroshima … as a city of peace and culture.19 Reflecting its adherence to the Amer­ican imposed narrative, Itō further thanked the United States for its gift of democracy. “We want,” Itō wrote to the Amer­ ican people, “to express our profound respect for your efforts for the peace and liberty of mankind and would like to offer our sincerest gratitude … [to those] who helped Hiroshima.” Going even further along these lines, Mayor Hamai Shinzō, in a more targeted letter to the president of Carroll College in Wisconsin, pronounced, “On August 6th 1945 our city of Hiroshima was born anew” [emphasis added].20 The intended audience, of course, explains much of this rhetoric, but in Japanese publications as well one can find similar sentiment. One newspaper account, for instance, called the bomb in 1946 “the bright flash of peace.”21 Another factor one must remember is Amer­ican censorship, which prevented any kind of open discussion about the bomb in Hiroshima. As fundraising efforts continued, the city solicited help from architects, city planners, the occupation army (Lt. Montgomery was a guest of honor) and local residents to help its reconstruction committee envision the new city. The committee, which first met in February 1946, included representatives from the city, prefecture, leading business interests as well as journalists and academics. It reviewed mostly proposals and plans by professional city planners and experts but also accepted suggestions from ordinary citizens. Hiroshima’s reconstruction plans were more about reinventing Hiroshima as a modern city than about commemoration and loss. Ishikawa Hideaki, one of Japan’s leading architects, took this sentiment to extremes. When he was invited by Hiroshima to the reconstruction committee, Ishikawa told its members, “Hiroshima has a resource which cannot be easily obtained even in hundreds of years and which must be utilized for the future, and it is vast open land.”22 Mayor Hamai and others shared this vision: “the disappearance of the old city gave us a chance of creating a fine new one if we do not let it slip through our fingers.”23 To be fair to Hamai, at times he also had reservations about the extreme measures that reconstruction required, such as the forced removal of residents on Nakajima. But, Hamai argued, “Hiroshima’s pre-­war visage had to be transformed. Rather than vainly clinging to the old downtown structure … we should plan for redevelopment.”24 The redevelopment plan was based on a number of suggestions made by architects and others. The majority of these adhered to zoning and other ideas about separation of industry and residence, grid road network, etc. that were

The most modern city in the world   41 espoused then by modernist town planning. Many of the plans, significantly, bring Amer­ican cities as a model for Hiroshima.25 Planners often conflated “peace” and “prosperity.” Watanbe Shigeru’s influential plan was typical. Watanabe spoke of creating a modern city of tourism and commerce, and in it’s center, “monuments for world peace.” We must, he concluded, “build Hiroshima on basis of friendship with America.”26 Parallel to the planning efforts, Hiroshima again tried (and now succeeded) to achieve funds for reconstruction through its campaign to get the Diet to enact a Hiroshima Peace Memorial Law. This successful effort became the legal basis for its reconstruction plan. The 1949 Peace City Memorial Law marks the high water mark of the campaign to transform Hiroshima from a place of apocalyptic destruction into a place of hope and “bright peace.” Hiroshima, which could not  initially muster enough support from the Diet and faced stiff resistance form  Nagasaki representatives and others finally managed to get it passed after the Amer­ican authorities made it clear they favored the law. The success of this law could be attributed to the peculiar alignment of interests between Amer­ican and Japanese elites. Both sides had a need to put the past behind them and to cooperate as allies in the new Cold War. As the law was drafted, the Chinese Civil War was drawing to a close and Japan’s old foe was now taking the role of America’s new “Yellow peril.” The Hiroshima law was a way to give both sides what they wanted and to turn Hiroshima’s gaze to the future.  Teramitsu Tadashi, the Hiroshima Diet member who drafted the law, struggled with the wording in order to get Amer­ican approval. Two competing meanings of Hiroshima’s bombing emerged from the various drafts of the law: one that represented Hiroshima as a Japanese city and another that saw it as an international peace city. The final version did not mention Japan but aimed, to construct the city of Hiroshima as the Eternal Peace Commemorating City, the symbol of human ideal for eternal peace, as well as the symbol for renunciation of war, is to answer the world hope for the reconstruction of HIROSHIMA.… (upper case in original)27 The law passed the Diet May 11, 1949 and went into effect, after an approval by Hiroshima residents in a special referendum, on August 6, 1949. With the passing of the law Hiroshima finally got the funds it needed to rebuild itself as a modern city. The law and its wording served as a guideline for future official commemoration. Even after the occupation was over, Hiroshima stuck with the wording and spirit of the law. The law was an expression of and a further impetus to the hegemonic role of the peace narrative. It was very much responsible for what Carol Gluck later called the telling of “history in the passive voice” in Hiroshima, with Japan playing the role of the victim and the context of both its own war crimes on the continent and the horrors inflicted on it by the Amer­ icans conveniently ignored.28 Indeed, as funds were made available and larger commemoration projects were becoming possible, this whole narrative was

42   R. Zwigenberg becoming part of a shape of the city itself, as architects and city planners sought to remake Hiroshima as a city of peace.

The cenotaph controversy The 1949 law gave Hiroshima the funds to carry out what was already a very ambitious city plan. Consistent with the way Hiroshima represented itself elsewhere; the city design equated the creation of a “peace city” with achieving modern, rational city planning and capitalist prosperity. In the heart of the city, Tange Kenzō designed a forward-­looking memorial that recounted to visitors a story of resurrection and promise: leading one from the destroyed Atomic Bomb Dome into the modern building of the museum. The Peace Park was to be the “moral core of Hiroshima’s city plan.”29 Tange’s plan had defined the physical space of the Peace Park and the city and had huge implications for future commemoration. It literally set in stone Hiroshima’s message, which intended to overcome both the destruction of the bomb and the prewar (modern) past. Tange, who formerly designed commemorative project for Japan’s wartime militarist regime (and openly supported it), now aimed at building a memorial representative of “Hiroshima’s noble quest for peace.” This was, for Tange, more than just a memorial. “Peace,” he wrote, “is not just politics but a pure spiritual movement of striving for peace … [which is] the new intellectual trend of the atomic era.”30 Hiroshima’s spiritual mission, however, was to be pursued in a peculiarly modern way. Following the war, Tange, like many of his modernist architecture colleagues, quickly embraced modernization and democracy. In his essay accompanying the design, Tange wrote he was engaged in “making Hiroshima into a factory for peace.”31 The choice of the imagery of a “factory” was significant as the factory was the ideal metaphor for internationalism. Le Corbusier, who Tange admired, used the language of a “machine for living” for his designs and now Tange presented his design as a machine for peace.32 Still, the memorial was not to be just a factory for peace but also, Tange argued, it should not ignore people’s day to day needs. Tange designed the park to accommodate these, serving as a community center, a library, as well as an archive and a commemoration center. Tange’s rhetoric is reflected in his design. The Western and modernist design signifies a bold new beginning. Tange arranged the memorial on an axis perpendicular to the 100-meter roads he designed for the city. The axis connects in one line the Atomic Bomb Dome, an arch (later to be the cenotaph, which was supposed to be designed by Noguchi), and a square able to hold 20,000 people (later to grow to a larger one for 50,000) that led to the memorial hall. Tange designed three modernist buildings in bare concrete. These stood on pillars that enclosed the square. One could see a straight running line from the dome to the memorial hall; a long pool with roads and trees on both sides leading from the bridges (across the two rivers that enclosed the Park) to the island, and on to the arch facilitated by the axis. The Atomic Bomb Dome preserved across the river represented the suffering of the war, while the gardens represented a healing of

The most modern city in the world   43 the land. While the three main buildings (the museum, library, and assembly halls) were built in a bold monumental style, the pillars evoke Japanese rice granaries. Another reference to Japanese forms is the haniwa-­shaped arch. The haniwa arch, however, was a later addition. Initially, Tange sought the help of Isamu Noguchi in designing the cenotaph. Noguchi’s design inserted elements of doubt, mourning, and ambiguity into Tange’s modernist design. Elements Tange actually welcomed. The design, however, ran contrary to Hiroshima’s story of rebirth and (supposedly clean) break with its past and was eventually rejected. Noguchi had enormous enthusiasm for Japanese art and culture. For Noguchi, Japan had very little material wealth but, through its culture, had an appreciation of the limitations and nothingness (mu) in the heart of modern material culture; an appreciation “we in America are just starting to learn.” Furthermore, Noguchi was received in Japan with much enthusiasm. “Nowhere have I experienced,” wrote Noguchi, “more goodwill and openness than in Japan in 1950 … war has leveled the barriers and hope was everyone’s property.”33 Noguchi had tremendous hopes for Japan. He wanted to be part of the new experiments and new beginnings he saw around him. He told a reporter he wanted to “prime the pump of their renaissance.”34 He truly felt that he was witnessing the rebirth of Japan. Hiroshima, however, had a very sobering effect on Noguchi. Isamu Noguchi first met Tange in 1950. Even before the 1950 visit, the atomic bomb enormously troubled Noguchi, already an established avant-­garde artist at the time. Before coming to Japan he wrote he was terribly “depressed by the ever present menace of Atomic annihilation.”35 Unlike in Japan, where United States censorship kept information on the bomb under tight control, many Amer­icans, Noguchi included, were very well informed as to the suffering and the terrible destruction wrought by the bomb. The Soviet Union’s development of nuclear weapons and the onset of the Cold War made the slogan “no more Hiroshima’s” terribly relevant and troubling for many Amer­icans. Noguchi wrote at the time that he was “drawn to Hiroshima by sense of guilt.”36 Tange first met Noguchi in Tokyo. He showed Noguchi a model of the Peace Park, then under construction in Hiroshima, and, he told Fujimoto Chimata—a Hiroshima city official with whom he had a long correspondence— “We immediately hit it off.”37 The Peace Memorial plan was then encountering many financial and other difficulties. While some in the Finance Ministry and in Hiroshima wanted to scale back the plan, Tange was adamant that the design be implemented “as such.” In a letter to Mayor Hamai he blamed the “mixed message” and “lack of unity in Hiroshima” for impeding the implementation of the “noble idea of the peace city.”38 Adding Noguchi on board would have given the plan a much-­needed boost as Noguchi and his star wife, Yamaguchi Yoshiko (a fascinating figure in her own right), were celebrities in Japan. They were also magnets for controversy and gossip. In one instance, a Tokyo Shinbun correspondent accused him of being arrogant toward Japanese artists. Tange was incensed, assuring Fujimoto, that “whatever was published about Noguchi in the [newspaper] Tokyo Shinbun … was a complete lie.”39 Noguchi proposed to

44   R. Zwigenberg design a Peace Tower, but at that early moment Tange worried that it might not “be suitable for Japan at the present time.” Tange, furthermore, wondered if perhaps Noguchi’s fame and attendant “troubles” (turaberu) might prove problematic to the Hiroshima project, but thought it is a “good idea over all.”40 Tange tried to arrange a meeting with Hamai and Noguchi to finalize the details of the design but Noguchi returned to the United States before it could be arranged. The start of the Korean War brought much urgency to the project. Tange, as well as many in Hiroshima, now saw the peace city project as directly threatened by the war next door. The exact nature of the threat, however, was a matter for debate. Many in the peace movement frantically tried to organize to prevent the spread of the war. Students and workers marched under slogans such as “Resist Nuclear Weapons! Do not let the 300,000 die in vain (genbaku Hantai! 300 man nin no shi o muda in suru na).”41 Even the City joined in the fray and raised its voice against the danger of Amer­ican use of atomic weapons. In a rare departure from the usual peace narrative, Mayor Hamai warned during a visit to Switzerland of the imminent threat of the use of Amer­ican nuclear bombs.42 The new anti-­bomb discourse had, especially on the far left, aspects of anti-­Amer­icanism and Asian solidarity reminiscent of wartime ideas of Asian racial solidarity against Euro-­Amer­ican colonialism. As Mathew Jones noted, the war brought back race as a factor in Asian attitudes toward the United States43 The massive Amer­ican bombing of civilians in Korea raised anew a perception that the United States bombing of Hiroshima had a “racial dimension.” As Oguma Eiji demonstrated, these years saw a shift, among intellectuals, from a Western-­centered view of modernity to an anti-­Amer­ican and Pro-­Asian stance. The Chinese revolution was idealized and many felt a new solidarity with Asians. After the war broke, Shimizu Ikutaro, one of Japan’s most popular intellectuals, commented that, “now, once again, the Japanese are Asians.”44 Some, however, saw Asian issues differently. In August 1950, Hiroshima’s newly founded Public Safety Committee banned the August 6 ceremony on Occupation authorities’ orders. “This day [6 August],” went the committee’s declaration, “should be a day for silent prayer and not, as the peace movement tries to make it, as a cover for anti-­occupation activities.” The committee further called on residents “not to participate in these anti-­Japanese criminal activities,” referring to the “Korean League” as one of the “anti-­Japanese” groups.45 That kind of thinking was reminiscent of prewar targeting of Korean-­Japanese and leftists, such as in the infamous massacres following the Kanto Earthquake. All that tension caused much unease in Hiroshima. Tange wrote to Hamai at the time, showing “great concern and anxiety” over what was still called the Korean incident’s (Chōsen jihen) impact on the cause (of peace) and congratulating Hamai for showing great perseverance and responsibility in these hard times.46 The war, however, was turning out to be not so bad for Hiroshima. As the war dragged on many in Hiroshima saw a whole new side to the Korean War as it brought prosperity to the city. The city’s former munitions and heavy industry revived and was now supplying the Amer­icans with Howitzers, Jeeps, uniforms, and many other services. This turn of events was aptly symbolized by the theft

The most modern city in the world   45 in March 1951 of the Peace Bell from the Peace Tower, ostensibly, claimed the police, because of the metal shortage due to demand by military contractors.47 This wartime boom also eased the financial pressure on the memorial project. The money to build the third building of Tange’s design, which the government had withheld, was given by private donations.48 In September 1951, following a visit the preceding June by Noguchi and Tange to city hall, funding was also pledged by the city for two memorial bridges and a cenotaph to be designed by Noguchi.49 On the occasion of the formal commission, Noguchi sent an open letter to Hiroshima residents conveying his wishes that the bridges would symbolize Hiroshima’s rebirth.50 He later told the press that designing he cenotaph was the “greatest honor for me as an artist.”51 Also that June, residents who lived on the future location of the Peace Park petitioned the city against their eviction.52 This contradiction between the lofty sentiment of the building design and the situation on the ground became readily apparent to the artists when they visited the building site in November 1951 (the occasion of the “modern city comment”). Six years after the bombing much of central Hiroshima still stood in ruins. Visiting the site of the memorial greatly shook Noguchi. He likened Hiroshima, echoing contemporary discourse, to a “modern Pompeii.”53 But it was not only the physical destruction but also the despair he saw in Nakajima that shocked Noguchi, the scattered graves there were still on the site, and, even more so the shantytown that sprang up on the island. Upon seeing this reality, his first words to Tange were “in here?” He reproached Tange for the city’s intention to evict the residents of Nakajima for the purpose of constructing the memorial. “[Your] modern city plan is impressive … [And] idealism should be respected but what about the [people’s] sacrifice?” Unfortunately, the reporter did not record Tange’s response.54 Noguchi was so shaken that he refused to join Tange and other scholars for a seminar about Tange’s city plan in Hiroshima, asking for it to be held outside of the city. In Hiroshima itself “I can not hold any discussion about a utopian plan for Hiroshima.”55 Still, Noguchi agreed to go ahead with his design. Noguchi then returned to Tokyo where he continued to work on a design for the cenotaph. The design reflected Noguchi’s ambivalent position in regards to Tange’s project and the modernist promise it embodied. Noguchi’s design for the cenotaph, not unlike Tange’s own plan, mixed Western and Japanese motifs in its design. Noguchi’s design, however, implied a much more tortured modernity than Tange’s vision. The design featured a combination of an underground vault-­like chamber to commemorate the dead, which Noguchi likened to “the womb of the earth from which we come and into which we return,” and a parabolic arch with thick legs sunk deep into the earth.56 The arch design suggests that it grows outwards from the vault. One would climb down through a thin, fragile looking staircase into the vault, which was to be used as the repository for the names of those who perished in the blast. The vault had in it a sculpture done in an abstract form but which evoked the pre-­modern haniwa figures (ancient Japanese burial figures) titled “Mother goddesses,” representing what Noguchi saw as “an allegory of both hope and mourning.”57 The whole design

46   R. Zwigenberg had a somber air to it, yet, like the city of Hiroshima itself, it aimed at the possibility of rebirth. The alignment of the axis with the Dome enhanced the emphasis on atomic destruction, yet when one was to emerge from the underground chamber into the light through the massive legs of the arch it was as if she was emerging from a womb. While hope for a new Hiroshima and a new modernity was shared by both designs, Noguchi was much more ambivalent toward Hiroshima’s newfound modernity. Tange was very enthusiastic about Noguchi’s design. “It was a small model but it overflowed with a generosity of spirit,” he wrote, “it had the placidity of an ancient jewel. I could sense it was something wonderful.”58 Tange was drawn to Noguchi’s use of ancient Japanese motifs that he, as well, tried to incorporate into his work. Suddenly, however, in April 1952, Noguchi unexpectedly received a letter informing him of his rejection. Both Tange and Noguchi speculated that the reason for the rejection was because he was Amer­ican.59 Mayor Hamai claimed later the design was too abstract for Hiroshima’s purposes.60 The matter might have been resolved discreetly (Noguchi’s commission of the bridges remained in force) if not for the stardom of Yamaguchi Yoshiko. Yamaguchi’s public support of her husband, Noguchi, especially after a greatly publicized visit to Hiroshima just two days after the rejection announcement, quickly turned the affair into a scandal.61 The reasons for the rejection are not clear. One explanation is that Noguchi and Tange went behind the back of the committee chairman, Tange’s former teacher Kishida Hideto, straight to Hamai, thus, angering Kishida and leading to the rejection. Tange was Kishida’s junior and studied under him in Tokyo. According to Jacqueline Kestenbaum, the relationship with Kishida played at least some role in Tange winning the Hiroshima and earlier projects. It is more than reasonable to suggest that Kishida was simply unhappy with Tange bypassing him and going straight to the mayor. Fujimoto Chimata, Tange’s contact in Hiroshima, recalled that the prevailing opinion among city hall staff was that “the biggest reason behind the problem with Nogichi’s design was that he did not go through Kishida, the big boss.”62 There was more to the rejection than just insider politics. Noguchi’s rejection was widely debated in the papers and on the floor of Hiroshima city’s assembly. One assembly member asked the mayor whether the rejection was because Noguchi was a foreigner. Hamai replied that the committee felt that Tange should “take responsibility for the whole design” and that the decision was based solely on architectural considerations. The committee, Hamai emphasized, “Did not take into consideration anything like the fact that the designer was a foreigner.”63 Most contemporaries, however, were not convinced. Tange wrote that the decision reflected public opinion and a “growing consensus that the memorial should be designed by a Japanese.”64 Committee members were quoted as saying, “someone from the country that dropped the bomb [could not] possibly design the cenotaph.”65 Race and Noguchi’s mixed parenthood was a major theme in the debate.66 An anonymous piece in one national newspaper claimed, 

The most modern city in the world   47 In Isamu Noguchi’s blood there is mixed half which is from overseas.… Coming to occupied Japan where Nisei [second generation Japanese-­ Amer­icans] have clout, he spread the idea in the press that he, of all people, was the most suitable person to make the monument for the slogan “No More Hiroshima” – thus showing the mixed character of his temperament.67 Other authors defended Noguchi’s right to design the cenotaph. A Hiroshima author wrote, “to shun a work of art because the artist is a foreigner is to fail to see the international character of art.”68 Okamoto Tarō, who would become one of Japan’s leading artists, wrote, “Hiroshima is already an international place … the fact that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima is a product of the lack of Japanese awareness of the world.”69 The controversy unmasked the contradictions and ambiguities in the Hiroshima project. Continuities in wartime thinking, resurgent feelings of Japanese uniqueness, racial thinking, and resentment of the Amer­icans persisted. Following the controversy, Kawazoe Noboru wrote a fierce critique of Tange in a devastating critique of Hiroshima’s narrative, pointing out that, “the people of Hiroshima all speak in unison about that cruel day … but we know that this act ended a war of atrocities (committed by our army).”70 Indeed, the bomb, for Kawazoe, in stark contrast to Tange and other Hiroshima figures, was a cause for reflection over the whole edifice of Japanese modernization and enlightenment. The bomb, he wrote, “has caused many to reflect deeply of the meaning of civilization (bunmei). The [bomb] points to a lingering doubt, did we achieve happiness through the attainment of civilization [or just the destruction of the A-­bomb].”71 As Winter-­Tamaki pointed out however, the Japanese played a special role in what was a global moment of doubt. Echoing a widely held sentiment in Japan, Kawazoe wrote, “We Japanese who experienced this destruction on our bodies, have a particularly strong feeling [of doubt].”72 Kawazoe then proceeded, however, to blame the West and Westernization for Japan’s woes. Western civilization produced the technology of nuclear war, Kawazoe argued, in a similar way to the imperialism that colonized Asia and forced Japan to adopt a similar imperialist stance, which led in turn to the Japanese atrocities in Asia. Ironically though, with the nuclear bomb, Western science’s “highest achievement … Japan was knocked out of the line of Western powers and it was only then that Japanese people were pressed back to a self-­realization of their real Asian identity.”73 Thus, Kawazoe, like many in the peace movement, recaptured Japanese uniqueness but he did so via a return to Asia. Asian solidarity was, as mentioned earlier, quite popular in Japan’s progressive circles at the time. This was the time of decolonization and many Japanese were excited about the ideas about Asian solidarity and independence that were coming out of what would soon become the non-­aligned movement. When India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru visited Hiroshima in 1957 he received a hero’s welcome as a “peace maker.” Over 30,000 people lined the streets and Nehru was showered with gifts and honors by the city and the peace movement.74 These pan-­Asian ideas were,

48   R. Zwigenberg again, dangerously close to wartime talk of anti-­colonialism and Asian co-­ prosperity used by Japan’s militarists against the West, and it is no small irony that Kawazoe, one of a small number of critics that raised these points, attributed these to Western influence.75 The Noguchi controversy was an occasion for debating such sentiments and interpretations of the bombing in a way that had not been possible earlier. These debates, also, suggest the importance of racial thinking in the rejection of the design. Race, which was supposedly subsumed under the transnational modernity of the Peace Park—obscuring the racial hatreds that played a role in both Japanese aggression and United States nuclear warfare resurfaced as a central factor in the Hiroshima debate. The rejection of Noguchi’s design had the effect of making Tange’s plan much more unitary by erasing the ambiguities and depth Noguchi’s cenotaph could have give it. The city’s narrative of rebirth and smooth postwar progress away from its past was reaffirmed. Indeed, without Noguchi’s cenotaph, Hiroshima was a very different place.

Conclusion In her work on Hiroshima, Lisa Yoneyama observed that there are three different kinds of “modernities” hiding underneath the seemingly unitary façade of the Peace Park. First, there is the Meiji era building of the Atomic Bomb Dome. Designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel, the 1915 continental-­secession style “Industrial Promotion Hall” was a material representation of Japan’s hopeful and confident imperial modernity and the promise of science and industry. The Peace Park itself, a reworking of Tange Kenzō’s monumental design for a “Greater East Asia War” memorial, represented a second (unrecognized) modernity. This was the modernity of Japanese fascism, which aimed at overcoming Meiji’s modernity’s ills and recovering a putative Japanese past.76 The third expression of modernity was, of course, that of the bomb. Destroyed by the bomb, the Atomic Bomb Dome could be seen as a symbol of the failure of both modernities and stands as a testimony to the coming of a third, much gloomier, yet not at the least a less modern age.77 One might add fourth type of modernity to Yoneyama’s list. The Peace Park itself was an embodiment of the forties and fifties “return” of a belief in science, democracy, and progress, embodied in Tange’s hopes for creating a “moral core” for Hiroshima and the modernist design of the Peace Museum. His plan, however, sought to promote an internationalist vision that aimed at erasing racial tensions and, with it, the painful history and present reoccurrence of these. What all these interpretations of Hiroshima and Japan’s larger modern experience shared was a very selective use of the past. What the Noguchi controversy did was to bring to bear the multiple modern pasts of Hiroshima and interfere and complicate the unitary façade of the latest incarnation Hiroshima city has adopted. This history of modernities was not a linear progress; it developed with many twists and turns as well as with complex and ambivalent characters and events. Tange, for instance, could be a proponent of all modern visions and, at

The most modern city in the world   49 the same time, champion Isamu Noguchi’s darker “intervention” in his otherwise forward-­looking design. Noguchi himself was enthusiastic about Japan’s “rebirth” yet painfully aware of the continuities in racial thinking shared by both his homelands, Japan and the United States Indeed, the continuities and contradictions of Japan’s modern project are rife in Hiroshima. The “most modern city in the world,” is an apt term for Hiroshima. The city itself, as a physical site and as a symbol, embedded many of the paradoxes and ambiguities of Japan’s continuing interaction and struggles with its past and the different modernities that intersected with and reflected in its built environment.

Notes   1 Tange Kenzō, “Hiroshima heiwa kinen tōshi koen oyobi kinen kan kyõgi sekkei nado senzuan,” in Kenchiku zashi, (October, 1949), p. 42. Le Corbusier famously used the phrase a “machine for living.”   2 Japan’s embrace of pacifism was not a simple imposition of the conquering Amer­ican forces, but was popular with most of the political spectrum. Even the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party (JCP) saw the Amer­icans as liberators in the first couple of years of the occupation. Thus, open debate about the nature of Japan’s new polity or, in Hiroshima’s case, the nature of reconstruction was constricted by the imposition of both external censorship and the newly popular paradigms of peaceful (Amer­ icanized) development.   3 A major exception is Lisa Yoneyama’s Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Yoneyama however, is not a historian and did not examine the historical development of the city. There is a substantial body of work in Japanese, mostly by local historians, on the development of Hiroshima as a peace city. See for instance Satoru Ubuki, Heiwa kinen shikitan no ayumi (Hiroshima-­shi: Hiroshima Heiwa Bunka Senta, 1992). Ishimaru Norieki also wrote many articles on the topic. See, for instance, Ishimaru Norieki, “Hiroshima heiwa kinen toshi kensetsu hō no settei kattei to sono tokushitsu,” Kiyō (Hiroshima shi kōbunshokan no zasshi), No. 11 (1988). For English see my Hiroshima and the Rise of Global Memory Culture, (London: Cambridge University Press, 2014).   4 The original phrase, coined by Hans Kundani in regards to the German student movement in the sixties was Utopia or Auschwitz. My own research led me to see Hiroshima as a site as pertinent for Germany, Japan, and beyond. See Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2009).   5 Oguma Eiji, “Postwar Japanese Intellectuals’ Changing Perspectives on “Asia” and Modernity,” translated by Roger Brown. Japan Focus www.japanfocus.org/-Oguma-­ Eiji/2350/article.html. Last accessed October 18, 2016.   6 Funatō Kōkichi, “Musshu Noguchi (Monsignor Noguchi),” Geijutsu Shincho, Vol. 10 (October 1951), p. 123.   7 Bert Winther, “The Rejection of Isamu Noguchi’s Hiroshima Cenotaph: A Japanese Amer­ican Artist in Occupied Japan”, Art Journal, Vol. 53, (1994), p. 23.   8 Because of space limitations Nagasaki’s own (in many respects unique) development is not examined here.   9 Quoted in Hiro Saito, “Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma,” Sociological Theory, No. 24, Vol. 4, (2006), p. 363. The phrase is from a lecture by Gluck given at Rutgers University, which was cited by John R. Gillis in his introduction to his edited volume, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

50   R. Zwigenberg 10 While in the prewar Japanese saw themselves as the liberators of Asia, now they were accorded a special place in world history as the first nation that suffered a nuclear attack. For an extended discussion of prewar ideas of Japanese uniqueness and their continuation into the post war see James Orr, The Victim as Hero : Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). 11 John W. Dower, “The Bombed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese Memory,” in Michael J. Hogan, ed. Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 123. 12 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War  II, 1st ed. (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999). p. 173. 13 Chūgoku Shinbun, September 21, 1945. 14 Ishimaru Norioki, “Hiroshima no sensai fukkō keikaku toki ni okeru fukkō mondai no keikaku, John d. Montgomery no keikaku shisō to sono hatashita yakuwari ni kan suru kenkyū,” Toshi keikaku ronbun shū, No. 44, Vol. 3 (October 2009), p. 833. See also Chūgoku Shinbun, June 6, 1946. 15 Ibid., p. 831. 16 For Vaughn, see Chūgoku Shinbun, August 2, 1946 and July 7, 1947; for Montgomery, see Chūgoku Shinbun, May 22, 1946. 17 Chūgoku Shinbun, May 22, 1946. 18 For details, see Hiroshima Shi, Hiroshima shinshi. Rekishi hen (Hiroshima: Hiroshima-­shi, 1981), pp. 29–41. 19 Itō Yukata, “Letter to donors,” December 1, 1948. Letter attached to Hiroshima Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Committee, Hiroshima (Hiroshima City Japan: The Committee c/o Hiroshima Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 1948). Carroll University Library, Waukesha, Wisconsin. 20 Hamai Shinzō . to President of Carroll College, June 30, 1950, letter attached to ibid. 21 Quoted in Zwigenberg, Hiroshima, p. 28. 22 Quoted in Hiroshima-­shi, Hiroshima Shinshi. Shiryohen (Hiroshima: Hiroshima-­shi, 1981), p. 318. 23 Hamai Shinzō, A-­Bomb Mayor: Warnings and Hope from Hiroshima, translated by Elizabeth W. Baldwin (Hiroshima: Publication Committee for the English version of A-­bomb mayor: Shift project, 2010), p. 318. 24 Ibid., p. 65. 25 Ishimaru Norioki. “Hiroshima no fukko katei,” in Hiroshima shi, Hiroshima shinsh: toshi bungaku hen (Hiroshima: Hiroshima-­shi, 1984), p. 15. 26 Hiroshima, Hiroshima Shinshi: Shiryo hen, p. 56. 27 Quoted in Jacqueline Kestenbaum, “Modernism and tradition in Japanese architectural ideology, 1931–1955,” (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 1996), p. 283. 28 Carol Gluck, “The Idea of Showa,” Daedalus Vol.  119, No.  3 (July 1, 1990), pp. 12–13. 29 Tange Kenzō, “Hiroshima Keikaku,” in Genjitsu to Sozō: 1946–1958, (Tokyo, Bijitsu Shuppansha, 1966), p. 45. First published in Shinkenchiku in January 1954. As Inoue Shōichi pointed out, the Peace Park design displays many parallels to Tange’s early design, which was once hailed as “the vision best representing the sublime objective of establishing the Greater East Asian Co-­Prosperity sphere.” Quoted in Yoneyama, Hiroshima, p.  3. In an essay accompanying his design Tange condemned Western Monumental architecture and “Anglo-­Amer­ican craving for world domination.” This style of architecture, according to Tange, “oppress [es] men and have no connection to us … the very fact that we do not have this ‘monumentality’ is the triumph of the holy country of Japan.” Quoted in Kestenbaum, p. 108. 30 Tange, “Hiroshima Keikaku,” p. 44. 31 Ibid., p. 42.

The most modern city in the world   51 32 Le Corbusier original quote was “a house is a machine for living.” Tange had a long relationship with Le Corbusier and his group. He presented his Hiroshima plan to CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne), and his postwar plans show a considerable influence from the group. Le Corbusier, and Frederick Etchells, Towards a New Architecture (London: Architectural Press, [1924] 1946), p. 95. 33 “Isamu Noguchi,” Arts and Architecture, No. 19 (1950), p. 24. 34 Ibid. 35 Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor World (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 31. 36 Ibid., p. 85. 37 Tange Kenzō to Fujimoto Chimata, May 27, 1950, in Tange Shukan, Fujimoto Collection, Hiroshima City Archive (HCA), Hiroshima, Japan. 38 Tange Kenzō to Hamami Shinzō, March 30, 1950, Tange Shukan, (HCA). 39 Tange Kenzō to Fujimoto Chimata, August 3, 1950, Tange Shukan, (HCA). 40 Ibid. 41 The phrase is from a Hiroshima student union demonstration on June 27, 1950. Quoted in Quoted in Hiroshima-­ken, Genbaku Sanjūnen, p. 197. 42 Ibid., p. 199. 43 Matthew Jones, After Hiroshima the United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 99. 44 Oguma, “Postwar Japanese Intellectuals.” 45 Hiroshima Shi, 1950. 46 Tange to Hamai, September 14, 1950. 47 Chūgoku Shinbun, March 27, 1951. 48 Kestenbaum, p. 309. Incidentally Tange’s firm did not build it. Apparently, according to Tange’s assistant, to allow for kickbacks for the local construction companies involved to receive kickbacks. 49 Chūgoku Shinbun, June 11, 1951. 50 Chūgoku Shinbun, September 28, 1951. 51 Asahi Shinbun, April 8, 1952. 52 Chūgoku Shinbun, June 24, 1951. 53 Funatō, p. 124. 54 Ibid., p. 125. 55 Ibid., p. 126 Chūgoku Shinbun, November 5, 1951. 56 Winther, p. 26. 57 Ibid. 58 Tange, “Go man nin no hiroba—Hiroshima Pisu Senta kansei made” in Tange Kenzō, and Noboru Kawazoe, ed., Genjitsu to sōzō; 1946–1958 (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1966), p. 126. 59 Masayo Duus, The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders, translated by Peter Duus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 254. 60 Chūgoku Shinbun, June 10, 1965. 61 Chūgoku Shinbun, April 18, 1952. 62 Duus, p. 256. Noguchi himself suspected as much. In a 1956 interview he remarked (without mentioning Kishida by name), “in Japan there is an especially deep-­rooted problem of boss favoritism … some influential person controls the group and [his] rather than the opinions of the whole committee controls decisions on public issues.” See Isamu Noguchi, “Modan to iu koto – Hiroshima mondai ni furete,” Atorie Vol. 30 (August 1952), p. 39. 63 Quoted in Duus, p. 254. 64 Tange, “go man nin no hiroba,” p. 130. 65 Chūgoku Shinbun, “Hiroshima 50-nen in Shuzaihan and Chūgoku Shinbunsha,” in Kenshō Hiroshima: 1945-1995 (Hiroshima-­shi: Chūgoku Shinbunsha, 1995), p. 38.  66 Art historian Bert Winther-­Tamaki explored a whole range of responses to the rejection. Much of my information on this debate comes from his excellent article on the topic.

52   R. Zwigenberg 67 Quoted in Winther, p. 27. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Kawazoe Noboru, “Genbakudō,” in Noboru Kawazoe, Kawazoe Noboru Hyoronshu, Vol. 1 Kenchiku 1, (Tokyo: Sangyō Nōritsu Tanki Daigaku shupansha, 1976), p. 315. 71 Ibid. p. 316. 72 Winther, p. 27. 73 Quoted in Winther, p. 26; Kawazoe, p. 221. 74 See Chūgoku Shinbun, October 9, 1957. 75 A Chūgoku Shinbun editorial welcoming Nehru noted, “Japan and India share a long Asian history. And that cooperation would lead to bright development” (October 9, 1957). These words could have easily been taken from a Japanese wartime propaganda pamphlet. On Japanese anti-­colonial propaganda, see John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon Books, 1993). 76 Inoue Shōichi, Atto kitchu japanesuku: Dai Tōa no posutomodān (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1987), p. 262. 77 Yoneyama, pp. 2–5.

4 Hiroshima remediated Nuclear cosmopolitan memory in The War Game (1965) and “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials” (2012) Jessica Rapson Introduction In May 2016, when Barack Obama became the first sitting United States president to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park since the United States nuclear assault on Japan in 1945, he called for a mass moral re-­evaluation of technological progress, framed in accordance with familiar commemorative logic: that we need to learn from the past in order to prevent repetition of atrocity: “we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.” In addition to this embrace of collective solidarity and the “usability” of memory, Obama relied upon another key trope of commemorative culture: that the creation of such collective solidarity, and that which makes a particular past “usable” in the service of achieving it, relies upon our ability to see others of the past as being as much like “us” as possible. This was made explicit in the closing passages: the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family— that is the story that we all must tell. That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here, 71 years ago. Those who died, they are like us. (Obama, 2016) In other words, collective moral re-­evaluation relies on individuals’ capacities for making imaginative links across cultural and temporal divides. While lacking the apology the Japanese (as victims) might have reasonably expected from the United States (as perpetrators) during this unprecedented diplomatic exercise, Obama’s speech usefully pinpoints what I identify in this chapter as a fundamental and complex knot that makes remembering Hiroshima as an event difficult, messy and contradictory, particularly “among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations” most directly implicated, to whom this speech

54   J. Rapson was predominantly addressed. This knot lies between a set of what frequently appear to be irreconcilable positions: progress and destruction, the past and the future, the self and the other, the universal and the specific, the local and the global. The texts I examine in this chapter—Peter Watkins fictional documentary The War Game (1965), in and the exhibit into which it was introduced (“The Museum of Ante-­Memorials,” Taipei Biennial, 2012)—constitute, I argue, an attempt to reconcile these positions. In doing so, I suggest, they urge us reflect on ways in which we might reignite the sense of nuclear danger that abated at the end of the Cold War in accordance with the demands of the contemporary political climate in which the speech was made—one which, as I posit here, is one characterized by global risk (see Beck 2009, 2014). For the most recent example of the place of nuclear threat in the twenty-­first century, one need look no further than the recent debate in UK parliament over the renewal of the nuclear deterrent programme Trident. In confirming renewal, Prime Minister Theresa May (2016) suggested not only that nuclear arms were a crucial part of the UK’s protective arsenal against terrorist groups such as D’aesh and Al Qaeda, but that “our nuclear deterrent remains as necessary and essential today as it was when we first established it. The nuclear threat has not gone away. If anything, it has increased.” May (2016) moved on to list Russia and North Korea as the most dangerous of the “nuclear states,” and as for the future, the possibility of new “extreme threats” emerging to “to threaten our security and way of life” was made explicit. This particular national context is worth remembering in the forthcoming discussion of Watkins’ film, created as it was for a UK audience. In the remainder of this introduction, I outline the ways in which Obama’s words spoke to the evolving history of memories of Hiroshima, before moving on to consider the following questions: how do The War Game and “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials” encourage a re-­imagination of self-­ other, universal-­specific and local-­global binaries that have shaped memories of Hiroshima? And how does the integration of the film into the museum urge us to revise our understanding of progress and destruction in the past and future? A 75-year period of censorship, commemoration and remediation has fueled the gradual but persistent evolution of cultural and collective memories of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In common with many other atrocious pasts, the United States nuclear assault on Japan has been by turns suppressed and mobilized according to the shifting agendas of state and non-­state actors. In other words, who remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years after the attacks, and what is known about them, may bear scant relation to the experience of those who were directly affected. Thus if we seek to examine the place of the Japanese nuclear attacks in contemporary memory and imagination, we may discover much about the way this past has been made “usable” (or otherwise) (see Olick 2007) between 1945 and 2015, but comparatively little about the events themselves or their impact on individual victims and witnesses—that is, about the specificity of experiences of others. Perhaps most apparent in existing

Hiroshima remediated   55 scholarship on memories of Hiroshima is the extent to which the attacks have been drawn on, in commemorative contexts and beyond, to assert an urgent need for global, stable, universal peace (Perlman 1988; Yoneyama 1999); to achieve the re-­imagination of “our connection to one another as members of one human race.” (Obama 2016). Indeed the “lingering and uncontainable effects” of nuclear radiation, its capacity to trespasses “over geographical borders and temporal limits” renders it particularly suited to a universal narrative (Yoneyama 1999, 15). The associated “never again” discourse of resistance to nuclear warfare has frequently despecified or decontextualized original, “authentic” memory. Lisa Yoneyama (1999, 15) refers to this narrative as “nuclear universalism”; conflating “countless particulars,” “[t]he subject of remembering the bombing of Hiroshima [is] the omnipresent and universal subject that transcends all particular locations and differences in the name of world peace.” This is troubling, and not simply because we need such memories as documents of the empirical “truth” about the attacks. Testimonies of such barbarism, in their very instability and fragility, deserve retrieval and recognition for their own sake. The lack of individual narratives also has consequences for contemporary formations of cultural memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As recent scholarship has shown, in an age of increasing digitization and globalization—in which, in Obama’s (2016) words, “Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds”—cultural memories frequently transcend the borders of nation states and geographical boundaries (see Bond and Rapson 2014). Such transcultural formations have much potential; not least the creation of new forms of solidarity, empathy and recognition of otherwise marginalized groups. This happens, in part, because the more we know about the victims of particular conflicts, atrocities and inequalities, the greater potential for an ethically desirable sense of “differentiated solidarity”; for us to “distinguish different histories of violence while still understanding them as implicated in each other” (Rothberg 2014, 33). Such sensibilities are recognized in Michael Rothberg’s (2009, 6) model of “multidirectional memory,” a term which describes the “interaction of different historical memories,” particularly the Holocaust, through a “productive, intercultural dynamic” in the age of decolonization. Similarly, in their work on remembering the Holocaust in the global age, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006, 12) describe “cosmopolitanized” memories, “characterised by a high degree of reflexivity and the ongoing encounter with different cultures.” Essentially, they suggest, such memories have provided a platform for a universal human rights culture. However, such optimistic and compelling visions of memory rely on reflexivity, specificity, and a clear recognition of cultural and experiential difference as well as similarity. While memories of Hiroshima may be transcultural in the sense that they transcend “all particular locations and differences” and “invoke commonly shared human thoughts, sentiments, and moral attitudes not limited by cultural boundaries,” the over-­riding tendency to conflate “countless particulars into a single totality in the name of world peace” (Yoneyama 1999, 15) apparently negates any possibility for cosmopolitan, differentiated memories of the Japanese nuclear attacks to

56   J. Rapson emerge in the global arena. Indeed, to the contrary, Yoneyama (1999, 13) notes that mention of the names Hiroshima and Nagasaki provoke “discrepant” and “retaliatory memories of atrocities committed by and against specific nations,” such as the Rape of Nanjing and Pearl Harbor. As such, the universal narrative did not encourage “shared sentiments and understandings of a universal collectivity.” Instead, Yoneyama (1999, 23–24) demonstrates universal memory in the service of the specific, arguing that “remembering Hiroshima from the transcendent and anonymous position of humanity has embraced and supplemented particular nationalist concerns.” This is a “mnemonic topography” (Yoneyama 1999, 16) from which any kind of cosmopolitan sensibility is notably absent. United States authorities in Japan after the bombing ensured that limited photographic images were disseminated, and only aerial views reached Amer­ ican media publication in the following weeks (Roeder 1997, 77). Images of “burned, crushed, and irradiated bodies” were tightly controlled, and George Roeder (1997, 77) suggests that even 50 years after the bombing, “public presentations … as well as the illustrations in the majority of Amer­ican history textbooks” still continued to show aerial views of material damage rather than depicting victims. This representational bias, partly the result of direct censorship but also indirect marginalization of the victim images that were available, was a significant factor in despecifying the event on an international scale. As such there was a dominant absence of human figures and individual suffering, of images of soon-­be-victims at the breakfast table or their subsequent trauma and loss. Hiroshima was framed in scientific and architectural terms, and the “sublime” spectacle of the mushroom cloud stood between the witnessing world and the event’s human casualties. This was true not only of the photographs that made it into the mass media, but also of visual images created by artists in the 1950s and 60s. This was how Hiroshima was imagined, and, as Michael Perlman has argued, “memory and imagination most often occur simultaneously” (1998, ix). Obama’s words as he urges us to imagine loving families enjoying their morning routines called for a reintroduction of individual humanity, to curtail the kind of dangerous othering that enables war. However, his call to recognize similarity does little to recuperate the memories of those whose experiences are completely different from our own. An experience of a family breakfast might provide a uniting co-­ordinate across cultural boundaries (although historians of eating cultures in the West and East respectively might reject such a notion); indeed we might understand this in line with Levy and Sznaider’s (2006, 3) definition of a “rooted cosmopolitanism,” in which the values at play are universal, but represented in a local context that “descend[s] from the level of pure abstract philosophy and into the emotions of people’s everyday lives.” However, such a narrative has the undeniable limitation of a normality that was completely disrupted by the attacks themselves. It is worth noting that Levy and Sznaider (2006, 39) use Hiroshima as an example of a catastrophe which completely failed to provoke the kind of cosmopolitan global conscience they associate with Holocaust memory, despite the fact that Yoneyama’s (1999, 15) description of Hiroshima as an “unprecedented

Hiroshima remediated   57 experience in human history brought about by scientific progress” could equally be applied to the Holocaust. The reasons for this deserve brief exploration. For Levy and Sznaider (2006, 5–6), cultural memories of the Holocaust are valuable because they are shared across national boundaries and so readily inscribed “into other acts of injustice”: “the universal nature of evil associated with the Holocaust … fuels its metaphorical power at allows it to be appropriated in referring to human rights abuses that bear little resemblance to the original event.” This form of universalism is entirely different to that discussed in relation to Hiroshima. This is because Japanese remembrance: began with universalism. That is, it began with the idea that modern warfare made everyone victims … lessons of Japanese victimhood were designed to prevent … another world war that would draw everyone into its orbit. By contrast, memories of Jewish victimhood were supposed to prevent another Holocaust. The big difference, of course, is that in the “nuclear Holocaust” scenario there ultimately is no difference between victims and vanquished. World War III will make victims of us all. (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 40, my emphasis) This is the logic that leads Levy and Sznaider (2006, 10) to suggest that “the process through which the global becomes internalized does not lead to a convergence and homogenization of Holocaust memories,” while “Hiroshima as a symbol of nuclear disaster has not become a medium for cosmopolitan remembrance” (2006, 39); or to put it another way, globalization has, in the case of Hiroshima, led to a convergence and homogenization of memory. This chapter isolates and explores a particular trajectory of commemorative remediation that certainly fits the above noted rubric of resistance to nuclear war. However, as will be argued, the examples discussed here also reveal traces of the original individual memories and experiences of the Japanese nuclear attacks that were missing from the mass media for much of the Cold War. As such, in this case, remediations of Hiroshima have not necessarily over-­written first-­hand, original memory as it has been re-­purposed and transformed to work for new times and to new ends. Accordingly a trajectory of traveling memory (see Erll 2011) is traced here through the creation, suppression, and later revitalization of Peter Watkins’ documentary fiction The War Game (1965). To create a convincing depiction of an imaginary Soviet nuclear attack on Kent, UK, Watkins combined substantial imagery based on testimony from the Japanese nuclear attacks with that of other histories, from the Holocaust and mass migration in World War II to race riots in the United States. This chapter will focus on The War Game itself alongside curator Eric Baudelaire’s conceptual repurposing the film as a memorial text in “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials,” an exhibit at the 2012 Taipei Art Biennial. Notably, “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials” was an investigation of the extent to which memorials function, as Baudelaire (2012a) describes it, “prophylactically”—in order to prevent an event from happening. This intriguing proposition will be considered at a later stage. Fundamentally, both the film

58   J. Rapson and the exhibit, in oscillating between the factual and the speculative, prompt us to question deeply ingrained epistemological assumptions about the past and its relationship to our present and future. This chapter will also suggest that, in doing so, these remediations hold the potential for formerly universalized memories to be re-­specified, and effectively, cosmopolitanized. Central, then, to this discussion will be the question of whether Watkins’ and Baudelaire’s creative practices might facilitate forms of ethically differentiated cosmopolitan memory and empathy (or, the globalization of emotion; see Beck 2014). In other words, can Watkins and Baudelaire be seen to create within and around their works an empathically grounded cosmopolitan dialogue that integrates global experiences into local contexts? As suggested above, Levy and Sznaider’s optimistic mapping of memories of atrocity posits shared affinities across national and cultural boundaries, but not in a way that erases, negates or despecifies local, ethnic experiences. Furthermore, for Beck (2014), cosmopolitan empathy is essential within the global risk society of the twenty-­first century into which Baudelaire re-­introduced Watkins’ film. As such, if these practitioners succeed in facilitating cosmopolitan memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and cosmopolitan empathy for the victims, they usefully disrupt the narrative of “nuclear universalism” that has dominated international remembrance of these events; for rather than “transcend[ing] all particular locations and differences,” cosmopolitanism recognizes difference as well as the interdependence of international subjects in the face of global risks.

The War Game: a cosmopolitan vision? Against the grain of national and international mass media censorship and despecification described above, Watkins created The War Game. With all his film work, Watkins (2007) aimed to disrupt static authoritarian narratives with “alternative exploration and presentation of history,” and reveal “objectivity, reality and truth” to be media cultivated myths. He did so through the subversion of the documentary form, explicitly fostering viewer familiarity before ultimately evacuating its authority. Indeed, at 80 years of age, he continues to comment critically on issues of media representation and cultural agency, arguing that we live in a climate of dependency and inertia which prioritizes the trivial and represses alternatives to dominant consumer and capitalist discourses (see Watkins 2007). The 70th anniversary of the nuclear attacks presented a timely moment to revisit this unusual warning document. Originally commissioned by the BBC as part of a series of drama anthologies, The War Game was to be shown on the 20th anniversary of bombings in 1965. However, it was hastily labeled by then BBC director Hugh Carlton Greene as “too horrific for the medium of broadcast” (Fowler 2003).1 Accordingly it was not publicly released until 1985, for the 40th anniversary. Commentators now agree that the BBC’s claim that the documentary was too horrific was a smoke screen for the real reason they did not want to release it: it exposed how weak the UK government’s nuclear defense provisions were and clearly supported the objectives of

Hiroshima remediated   59 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (see Chapman 2009, 90; Shaw 2006, 139). In banning the film, the BBC claimed to be protecting the public from Watkins’ transgression. However, they were also complicit in maintaining a silence about the nuclear arms race in the media that it had been Watkins’ primary aim to break when he embarked on its creation. Furthermore, the film critiqued the inadequacy of the government’s rudimentary “protect and survive” methods for dealing with nuclear war thus destabilizing civil authority (see Spence and Navarro 2011, 27). This is evident in journalistic responses: “This monstrous misrepresentation … accurately mirrors the claims of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament … it could more accurately be called ‘The C.N.D. Game’ ” (Daily Express cited in Watkins 2007). However, laudable as Watkins critique was, it is less his anti-­nuclear message than the particular way in which it was produced and delivered that makes his work notable for this inquiry. In order to create a simulation of a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom, Watkins researched reports from the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden. He noted (in Corner and Rosenthal 2005, 113) that there was “plenty of technical material” but “the emotional affect of an atom bomb on people [had] been much less thoroughly investigated.” The reports, like the mass media imagery, were largely depersonalized. While technical accuracy was important to Watkins, the individual, emotional, human consequences were equally so. The personal perspective arguably might enable viewers to overcome the challenge nuclear warfare presents to the human imagination (see Marsh 1986, 130). Furthermore, wary about the potential impact of over-­exposing people to imagery of actual nuclear detonations, Watkins determined that The War Game would focus primarily on the lives of his varied cast of “everyday” protagonists in the wake of the attack. In later years, during the making of The Journey (his film critique of media representations of the arms race, released 1983), Watkins (in MacDonald 2001, 322) commented that images of nuclear detonation had become “so pervasive” “as to be endangering the planet by naturalizing the sight of bombs going off.” His concern is resonant of Yoneyama’s (1999, 4) contention that “[a]s recovered memories become incorporated and settled into our common sense knowledge about our past, present and future, the mystifying and naturalizing effects of remembering itself seem ceaselessly at work.” Using traditional persuasive techniques including statistics, “expert” testimony and determinative rhetoric (for example, “this will have taken place by 1980”) Watkins created a sense of authenticity which, combined with the knowledge that the piece is fiction, results in an uncanny disruption of binaries of what is real and what is imagined. This blurring of fiction and reality will be discussed further in relation to the film’s inclusion in “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials.” To achieve an alternative to naturalizing and despecifying the imagined attack, Watkins made people the main focus of his film. Many scenes resonate clearly with the images like those of Hiroshima that the United States had either censored or ignored, and the detailed depiction of the impact of radiation of the everyday lives of individuals is completely central to the narrative. Indeed, throughout the 45 minutes, there is rarely more than a few seconds of film not

60   J. Rapson centered on a human subject. Its primary focus is on the daily lives of survivors affected by lack of resources and deportation, and the physical and psychological impacts of the attack. While the voice-­over narrator only makes comparative references to Hiroshima four times in the film, and Nagasaki is only mentioned once, these attacks are implicitly recalled in the images of burnt skin, eyes melting in their sockets, and the bodies of the dead. The specificities of experiences of Hiroshima are transformed, in the sense that they are re-­territorialized within the English county of Kent, the “garden of England.” Authority appears in the recognizable British police uniform. Rural landscapes and city streets are archetypal English backdrops for crying children, anxious mothers and dying fathers. This is a “rooted cosmopolitanism” that accommodates the specificities of disruption rather than normality. This re-­territorialized form of “glocalization” (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 10) is not the only way in which The War Game arguably works toward the creation of cosmopolitan nuclear memory with a distinctly multidirectional quality, as this chapter goes on to suggest. As noted above, Levy and Sznaider argue that contemporary Holocaust memory is at once specific and universal, whereas the nuclear attacks were almost immediately completely universalized and have remained so since. The inscription of Holocaust memory into “other acts of injustice and other traumatic national memories” (including African-­Amer­ican slavery, colonialism, the Nanking massacre, genocide in Rwanda and human rights abuses in Argentina) is seen to be the result of the Holocaust memory’s unique specific-­universal make-­up. Watkins, in drawing an imaginary nuclear attack into dialogue with a plethora of acts of injustice and national “traumas,” offers an opportunity for a different perspective, and one which resonates with arguments in the most recent major discussion of memories of the nuclear attacks, Ran Zwigenberg’s Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (2014). Zwigenberg (2014, 7) presents Hiroshima as deeply entangled with other histories and memories, a story of “contradictions and ambiguities.” In fact, commemorations of Hiroshima are introduced as “messy,” and, particularly notably, “multi-­directional and open to many interpretations.” As much of Zwigenberg’s text deals with the relationship between the history and memories of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, it is somewhat surprising that he does not relate his notion of multi-­directionality to Rothberg’s. Rather, his point of departure is Jurgen Kocka’s model of “entangled histories,” an approach interested in “the processes of mutual influencing, in reciprocal or asymmetric perception, in entangled processes of constituting one another” (Kocka in Zwigenberg 2014, 4). Nonetheless, the similarities between Zwigenberg and Rothberg’s approaches are clear. Both see memory as subject to transnational influences and flows (Rothberg 2009, 20; Zwigenberg 2014, 5), and, perhaps most significantly, they individually reject the idea that bringing particular histories and subsequent memories together is necessarily a zero-­sum game with distinct winners and losers (Rothberg 2009, 11; Zwigenberg 2014, 9). The crucial difference is that Rothberg recounts the development of an existing (and continuing) multidirectional discourse surrounding the Holocaust, while Zwigenberg’s mission is, in part, to instigate one in relation to Hiroshima as a history that has been comparatively marginalized.

Hiroshima remediated   61 The War Game arguably made an early intervention into this marginalization, as Watkins’ vision of an imaginary nuclear attack is firmly situated at the interstices of diverse histories of violence and injustice, including Hiroshima and the Holocaust. While direct comparisons between the imaginary attack and Hiroshima by the narrator are, as noted above, limited in number, they are indicative of Watkins’ attempt to draw attention to the specificities of victim experience. The first is indicative of his desire to represent the little that was known about the “emotional affect of an atom bomb on people”: “At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the population three months later was found to be apathetic and profoundly lethargic, people living often in their own filth, in total dejection and inertia” (Narrator, The War Game). The next direct mention of the Japanese nuclear attacks chronicles the specific physiological consequences of the bomb for an individual child: “Due to radiation, this little boy has only half the requisite number of red blood corpuscles. He will be bedridden for seven years, then he will die. This happened at Hiroshima.” A third mention is indicative of Watkins’ handling of disparate histories, in that he invokes a range of examples to unpack specific consequences of nuclear attacks. Describing a firestorm, the narrator announces: This is the phenomenon which could perhaps happen in Britain following a nuclear strike against certain of our cities. This happened after the bombing of Hamburg, at Dresden, at Tokyo and at Hiroshima. This is what is technically known as a firestorm. Within its centre, the rising heat from multiple fires, caused by both the heat flash and the blast wave upsetting stoves and open furnaces, is sucking in ground-­level winds at speeds exceeding 100 miles an hour. This is the wind of a firestorm. Much of the imagery is resonant with other aspects of World War II—refugee camps, long queues for scant resources, dispossessed families—which were, at that time, part of living memory for many of Watkins’ intended viewers. At its most extreme, the film shows the problems caused by the need to dispose of 50,000 corpses (with scenes reminiscent of the photographs of Nazi concentration camps at the point of liberation by photojournalists such as the Associated Press photographer Margaret Bourke-­White), hunger riots and subsequent firing squad executions. Images of the nuclear attacks and the Holocaust are invoked alongside one another, but not necessarily at the expense of other disparate histories and memories. Indeed much imagery in the film is a testament to how the representation of one historical instance can invoke and speak to memories of another. For example, in one scene, survivors collect victims’ belongings. The narrator announces: Everything that you are now seeing happened in Germany after the heavy bombing in the last war. It would almost certainly have to happen in Britain after a nuclear war. Another thing the Germans did after the bombing on

62   J. Rapson Dresden was they … took the wedding rings from the bodies. They were trying to identify them from the inscription inside the ring. While the narrative draws on memories of the bombing of Germany, the vast collection of wedding rings could equally well provoke thoughts of the many piles of concentration camp victims’ belongings in the concentration and death camps, including piles of wedding rings which were, alongside forcibly extracted gold teeth, valued for their material worth by perpetrators. These parts of Watkins’ film can be read as an intermingling of diverse histories resistant to the creation of any particular hegemony of memory or victimhood. The BBC’s suppression of The War Game evacuated its potential to have any notable influence on cultural memories of any of the events it drew on until the Cold War was almost over. However, under public pressure, they allowed a series of private screenings at the British Film Institute’s National Film Theatre in 1966, and the critical responses are indicative of the impact it could have had on audiences. Criticism was divided; some reviewers supported a ban on television release and others were vehemently against it. Several tabloid papers supported the ban. For example The Daily Mirror’s reporter drew attention to the “real horror” of “the stark documentary quality of the film, the “sickening realism” of “charred limbs, crushed faces and eyes melting in their sockets. This, as the BBC rightly decided, could not have been borne by the millions of viewers sitting at home” (Daily Mirror cited in Watkins 2007). The Sun also criticized the film for its absence of even “a glimmer of human resilience. And humans are incredibly, wonderfully resilient.… All The War Game has to offer is a screen of protest and blame” (cited in Watkins 2007). Such reviews suggested both a refusal to face the reality of a nuclear future and, furthermore, an unwillingness to countenance the possibility of humans as complicit in atrocity rather than figures of hope and resilience. However, the Observer’s film critic Kenneth Tynan (cited in Watkins 2007) dubbed The War Game a “warning masterpiece,” and perhaps  the most important film ever made. We are always being told that works of art cannot change the course of history. Given wide enough dissemination, I believe this one can … The War Game stirred me at a level deeper than panic or grief. However, despite this potential, and while the film arguably overcomes something of what Yoneyama (1999, 21) calls the friction between nuclear universalism and demands to acknowledge historical and structural specificities, the limited dissemination prevented this particular work of art from changing “the course of history.” Before taking a closer look the repurposing of The War Game as an Ante-­ Memorial, and the implications of this for cultural memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaski, it is worth briefly highlighting the anthropological inspiration for the 2012 Taipei biennale that inspired Baudelaire’s curatorial goals. The theme was

Hiroshima remediated   63 Modern Monsters: Death and Life of Fiction, its rubric to depart “from the crisis of the imagination within the global capitalist culture,” and address  the need for collective shared horizons that withstand the clichés of modernist development, and the logic of division haunting the nationalist and identity politics in the long shadow of colonialism and imperialism.  (Taipei Fine Arts Museum 2012) The original inspiration for the theme was David Der-­wei Wang’s consideration of modernity and history via the metaphor of the mystical Chinese monster taowu, a creature able to see both past and future: taowu … is meant to recount the past in such a way as to caution subsequent generations against immorality and aberration … [fiction written under the name of taowu] bespeaks the complicity of civilization in its own discontent … we find ourselves still coping with the inhumanity of the past in the hope its eradication in the future. And yet, at any point in time, the inhuman may prove to be that which is all too human. (Wang 2004, 189) The taowu, looking both backwards and forwards, demands that in looking to the past we simultaneously consider its implications for the future; a sentiment at the heart of Western commemorative culture since the Holocaust and certainly visible in Obama’s words at Hiroshima in 2016. Furthermore, Wang’s discussion of the taowu draws attention to the ethical fallacy of categorizing destruction as monstrous and therefore inhuman. He echoes Gillian Rose’s (1996, 43) warning in the context of Holocaust representation, that when we cast a history or an experience as ineffable we “mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are: human, all too human.” The works in “The Museum of Ante-­ Memorials,” positioned by Baudelaire under the name of the taowu, work, in theory, to demystify, make representable, apparently ineffable pasts and futures. Nonetheless their capacity, in practice, to disrupt the complicity of civilization in its own discontent (represented in Obama’s speech as “humanity’s core contradiction”) is one that demands further interrogation.

“The Museum of Ante-­Memorials”: commemorative prophylactics Theorist of postmodern memory cultures Andreas Huyssen (1995, 2–3) has rightly pointed out that “all representation—whether in language, narrative, image or recorded sound—is based on memory. Re-­presentation always comes after.” The exhibits in “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials” do not negate this statement; as discussed, The War Game, for example, draws explicitly on imagery and footage from post-­nuclear attack Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the

64   J. Rapson London Blitz, and broadcasting of the Vietnam War and various race riots. A reliance on existing representational forms is also evident in the other texts Baudelaire brought together. One of six spaces at the Biennial “conceived as models of possible histories and narratives hidden in the interstices of official accounts” (Biennial Foundation, 2012), Baudelaire’s museum also featured Deimantas Narkevičius’ The Dud Effect (2008), which showed a “fictional recreation” of the launching of a nuclear missile from a military base in Lithuania. Like Watkins, Narkevičius took recognizable imagery to create an uncertain space between reality and fiction. Also included was a collage series entitled Commemor (Commission Mixte d’Échange de Monuments aux Morts/Joint Commission for the Exchange of War Memorials) (Filliou 1970) in which pictures of existing war memorials in Holland, Germany and Belgium, had been cut out and swapped; “for these countries which nowadays are thinking of going to war, they could consider exchanging their war memorials before instead of making it” (Filliou 2012). Alongside these works were two historical documents from Hiroshima: an Amer­ican memorandum recommending that the bomb should be dropped onto an unpopulated island as a warning to the Japanese—advice which was never taken—and a film showing aerial footage of Kokura, Japan, the planned target of the second atomic bombardment on August 9, 1945. Cloud coverage made the target unfeasible and eventually Nagasaki became the second target (Baudelaire 2012b, 5). Thus all works shown in “The Museum of Ante-­ Memorials,” including The War Game, reverse the temporal logic of commemoration by bringing together evidence of past nuclear attacks with speculative fictions of apocalyptic futures. Nonetheless, while grounded in memory, these Ante-­Memorials suggest the need to extend Huyssen’s statement that representation always comes after; the Ante-­Memorial endeavor calls on representational forms to explicitly “come before,” highlighting that their relationship to the future may potentially be as intimately wrought as their relationship to the past, in particular the actuality of the attacks on Hisrohima and Nagasaki. The Ante-­Memorial project constitutes a timely intervention in a long-­ standing debate about the function, possibilities and limitations of memorials that has received careful consideration by memory scholars. For example, Alan Rice (2010, 51) remarks, reading Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of justice, the future and the imperative of duty to memory, that “memorials at their most effective speak to their future contexts as much as to the past they commemorate, to a future-­orientated responsibility, rather than a guilt recharged retrieval of a static past.” Despite considerable attention to the possibilities of memory and imagery, the increasingly visibility of global injustice and environmental precarity endemic to the global risk society (a society in which catastrophe is always anticipated and constant danger “shapes our expectations,” see Beck 2014) implies a certain futility of the commemorative endeavor to date, raising doubts about the ethical, pedagogical and social value of memorials. Clearly, investigating the extent to which memorials function, as Baudelaire describes it, “prophylactically,” is an endeavor fraught with difficulty: this would require a knowledge not only of history, reality and data concerning human response which would be

Hiroshima remediated   65 challenging to collect, but of alternative realities, things which could have come to pass, which still may come to pass, but which are not part of the “real” past. Nonetheless, Baudelaire’s conceptual space presents a welcome opportunity to interrogate the efficacy of future-­orientated collective memory in theoretical terms. For Baudelaire, this form of collective memory requires the manipulation of existing images. Writing specifically on “imaginal memories” of Hiroshima, Perlman (1988, 3) similarly argues that remembering evokes future possibilities. Conversely, imagining the future inevitably involves a look into the past; future possibilities are linked and laden with memory … the challenge of peace, of the future, is simultaneously a challenge to our capabilities of memory. (My emphasis) The works in Baudelaire’s museum rely on the power of the human imagination to transcend and disrupt clear-­cut distinctions between past, present and future nuclear realities, forcing the idea that “time puts the notion of truth into crisis” through the presentation of “documentaries of a possibility” (Baudelaire 2012a). These documentaries of possibility are so crucial to Baudelaire (2012b) because they may potentially plug “gaping holes in the visual record … of the 20th century” such as the images of victim experiences of the Japanese nuclear attacks that were repressed throughout much of the Cold War. In his notes for the exhibit Baudelaire draws a reasoned comparison between nuclear imagery and representation after Auschwitz via issues of the unimaginable and unrepresentable. He ultimately aligns himself with George Didi-­Huberman’s argument, in relation to Holocaust representation, that we must have “images in spite of all” obstacles (Baudelaire 2012b, 10 cites Didi-­Huberman 2008). Such reliance on imagery is echoed in Perlman’s work on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that “only become fully real with closest possible engagement with nuclear images [that] deepen and amplify the entwined powers of memory and prudence” (1988, 10). To this end, for Baudelaire, if the images do not exist, then they must be created. As such, in providing images that allow us to imagine the victim experience of the Japanese nuclear attacks, Watkins’ film makes an important contribution to Baudelaire’s curatorial aims.

Conclusion: nuclear cosmopolitanism and global risk This chapter has suggested that Watkins’ film called for nuclear cosmopolitanized memories of the Japanese nuclear attacks. Baudelaire’s inclusion of The War Game in “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials” begs a question about the place of nuclear threat in the contemporary imagination. The end of the Cold War signaled the beginning of the end of the perception that nuclear war was the ultimate threat to the human world. What could the film’s depiction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear victimhood offer, in its new context in 2012 in Taipei, and

66   J. Rapson beyond? That it draws attention to a neglected narrative in twentieth-­century history and memory is notable in and of itself, but the question of what we do with this recuperation, and its broader relationship to contemporary memories of nuclear experience remains uncertain. The relevance of such memories in the twenty-­first century might be explained by arguments such as that made by literary critic Molly Wallace (2011, 15), that “though the cultural obsession with the nuclear may have waned, we continue to live under the shadow of the atomic bomb,” as was indicated clearly in Theresa May’s aforementioned speech defending the renewal of Trident. Like memory itself, nuclear radiation has a half-­life that transcends nation state border and cultural boundaries and, while invisible, shapes the present and future. In “the second nuclear age,” Wallace (2011, 16) suggests that the word “nuclear” appears to operate as a synechdoche for global environmental risk in general, as other forms of risk—in particular that of climate change—have graduated to the scale of the nuclear. Accordingly, Wallace (2011, 16) argues for returning to the somewhat marginal field of nuclear criticism that emerged in the Cold War years and bringing this into dialogue with literary ecocriticism to create “something like risk criticism,” in order “to theorize the megahazards of the present.” Indeed, she goes on to bring together a range of critics who see a potential for a new nuclear criticism, because rather than moving on from the nuclear we need to see it in new ways and new places: from issues around nuclear power and waste, to environs such as North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. Furthermore, for Beck, notably, global risk society must be characterized by a cosmopolitan spirit, as if—as Wallace (2011, 22) notes sceptically—“a common risk makes for a common bond.” Wallace’s scepticism is understandable. Nonetheless, the global risk context provides an intriguing new backdrop for Watkins’ film. Discussing The War Game in 2010, Gary Giddins (2010, 383–384) commented: Decades later, the effectiveness of The War Game depends on the degree of fear in the land. During the years in which the nuclear war receded into a memory-­lane jaunt … the film may have played as a period piece, quaint in its use of amateur actors.… It’s different now. Furthermore, Giddins, like Wallace, points to nuclear warheads in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran and color-­coded terror in the United States. Such threats explain why fear and risk are mutually constituent parts of our social world. Watkins’ work may look parochial and outdated now, but his documentary format, aimed at deconstructing the narratives spun to us by the mass media and government bodies, has never been more urgently required. The War Game, as Baudelaire’s curation implies, is a thing of its own time, a museum exhibit. Nonetheless, watching it now reminds us that we need to keep finding radical new ways of representing the “real.” Beck (2009, 5) argues that risks are not realities, but stories. The War Game’s potential lies in its success in re-­enacting a story that never happened—a kind of pre-­enaction that leads back to Huyssen’s notion of the “afterwardness” of re-­presentation. The film existed, in 1968, at the

Hiroshima remediated   67 nexus of re-­presentation and pre-­presentation, re-­enaction and pre-­enaction. From this perspective, the maintenance of hierarchical power (explicitly in the form of the BBC as an institution and implicitly in the British government) functioned to maintain the complicity of “civilization” in its own discontent. However, Baudelaire’s vision and Watkins’ film, like all attempts to “caution subsequent generations against immorality and aberration” (a category in which we might include Obama’s speech) is haunted by “the complicity of civilization in its own discontent” (see Wang 2004, 189). Wang (2004, 184) notes that [T]he image of the taowu is a liminal zone where the inhuman and the human confessedly mingle, a region that is legally and morally anomalous … a view that blurs the cultural and natural boundaries that humanity would draw around itself. The War Game was one such liminal anomaly, a text which underlined the inhumanity of human monstrosity of events such as the atomic bombing of Japan in a way which was too horrifying; as such it transgressed carefully perpetuated cultural and moral norms. Documents such as The War Game, which speak to an unfulfilled potential to change the course of history, were brought together in “The Museum of Ante-­Memorials.” In dedicating these exhibits as Ante-­ Memorials, Baudelaire at once acknowledges their failure to prevent particular events from happening, while drawing attention back to the potential of their functional structures. It is the pre-­representational, pre-­enactive nature of these exhibits that, according to Baudelaire’s logic, theoretically might allow them to function pre-­emptively; “Ante-­Memorials” succeed where the memorial risks failing, precisely because they are temporally antithetical to the logic of commemoration; they re-­orientate commemorative temporality. Baudelaire’s inclusion of The War Game in “The Museum of Ante-­ Memorials” provides it with a new platform for dissemination, in a different and compelling context and in thought-­provoking dialogue with other texts that are outside the central purpose of this chapter. Nonetheless, while its assignation as an “Ante-­Memorial” seems to reinvigorate The War Games’ prophylactic possibilities for a new generation, there is something elegiac about simultaneous casting of the film as a museum object; indeed, this is the case with all the objects and texts included in the project. Perhaps this is because, despite the “new museum’s” focus on audience engagement, the pedagogical uses of artefacts and new media forms (see Simon 2010), the idea of the museum itself in the popular imagination has not completely shed its past life as a dusty repository of objects that illustrate the past rather than speak directly to the future. It is only possible for Baudelaire to create a “museum” of Ante-­Memorial artefacts because they have inevitably become part of history. Within this, Watkins’ film is a document not only of an imagined nuclear future that never happened, but of its own suppression and marginalization, of both the potential and the failure of the Ante-­Memorial as productive reorientation of the commemorative endeavor. Nonetheless, in re-­introducing The War Game three-­quarters of a century after

68   J. Rapson the threat of nuclear warfare became reality, Baudelaire reminds us of a representational form that, at least in theory, refuses the ineffability of the future and calls for a cosmopolitan vision that re-­specifies memories of the Japanese nuclear attacks for the global risk society of the twenty-­first century; a society for which, as Beck contends, cosmopolitan empathy may allow common risks to inspire the creation of the kinds of common bonds that might extend beyond the normality of breakfast table. Watkins’ film, 50 years after it was made, and Baudelaire’s curation, 75 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, do not perhaps succeed in reconciling the binaries of progress and destruction, the past and the future, the self and the other, the universal and the specific, the local and the global; however they serve to remind us that we neglect opportunities to re-­ imagine them at our own peril.

Note 1 Faced with public demand for it to be screened, the BBC issued a letter explaining that the project had been an experimental failure; “such failures as may occur are the price we must expect to pay if new forms and subjects are to be brought within the compass of television” (cited in Watkins 2007). The BBC’s designation of The War Game as a failure did not prevent them from accepting its Academy Award for Best Documentary a few months later.

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5 Nuclear memory1 Stefanie Fishel

Introduction Remembering is often a struggle. Memories rise unbidden when we least expect them. A precious memory becomes hard to recall. The voice of a loved one fades into the past, while trauma lingers with an awful clarity years after the event. We have memories we share as lovers, parents, families, nations, and cultures. Each year we pause to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries—our memories of years spent on Earth together with others with reflection on how we will grow together in the coming years. As nations, we gather to remember what we have suffered or overcome: wars ending and our collective dead. Our very bodies hold memories in our brain cells and neural pathways; scars are reminders of old wounds. Alongside our personal and collective memories the Earth’s body remembers, too. Islands echo long forgotten volcanoes as they rise above the waves. Canyons show the river’s long memory as it flows toward the sea. Oxbow lakes tell the story of an old river too tired to wander any longer, its curves finally meeting and resting in still waters. The Earth keeps a memory of war, too. Craters in the ground, verdant growth in demilitarized zones with those deadly flowers planted by men to explode upon touch, holes dug for mass graves, atolls lost in a blinding minute. War even has its own weather. As a global community, we have experienced many of these events together— crying out in pain or joy with one voice as we witness love and tragedy: these events are never left in the past, but rather told and re-­told to become paths that lead us into our futures, potential and actual. This chapter is concerned with one such memory: the bombing of Hiroshima with an atomic weapon. Seventy years ago this year, we remember—a global memory—the end of World War  II in nuclear fire. How do we remember such a terrible and unique event? The memory suffuses at many levels: those who experienced it, those who caused it, those who desire to take lessons from it, those who want it silenced, those who want to forget. The Uranium-­235, painstakingly purified from U-­238, can be imagined with a memory, too. The radioactive material used to build the bomb dropped on Hiroshima remembers: we call it half-­life, or the time it takes for one half of a radioactive substance to decay. U-­235 decays, or to gently anthropomorphize for

72   S. Fishel metaphorical clarity, remembers for over 700 million years. This time span is absurdly beyond the lives of nations and the people in them. This chapter will explore the human memory and memorialization of Hiroshima in the United States and Japan. The first and second section will discuss nuclear weapons and collective memorialization, respectively, to frame the two case studies. The next two sections will describe the two case studies—the Smithsonian Enola Gay Exhibit and the Hiroshima Peace Park and Memorial— in light of these concepts. The final two sections explore how collective remembrance might, in light of the shared experiences of nuclear destruction and the radioactive haunting of our bodies and land, draw a rough map of the future that pauses for ethical reflection upon accountability and use of nuclear weapons, or how we might connect the apparent incongruity of global nuclear realities and collective remembrance with the creation and recreation of ethical visions of the future.

Forgetting nukes The weapons made from radioactive materials have irrevocably changed the world. Of this fact, few argue. The speed and intensity of modern war with thermonuclear weapons has altered military strategy, compressed time and, importantly, limited democratic accountability for any decisions made regarding nuclear weapons use (Virilio 2007). Yet few contest this deadly transformation. This is in part due to the nature of nuclear weapons and their relation to the state as a protector of civil society. The omnicidal nature of these weapons brings to light the fact that the state fails in protecting its citizens from death—a requisite for modern social contract theory. In most nuclear states, this equals the public not wanting to dwell on nuclear weapons and the state is happy to let nuclear policy be “born secret” and stay that way. Often referred to as “nuclear reclusion” (Deudney 1995), this view argues that we are both unwilling and unable to see the implications of nuclearism on the whole due to the sublime nature of nuclear weapons. The material form of nuclear weapons (their compact and distinctive features) and the “dread and unease” that they engender in the public allow reclusion to be an effective state strategy used to counteract the legitimacy crisis posed by nuclear weapons (Deudney 1995, 103). These weapons—whether in offence or defense—negate the very conditions of life on Earth and fundamentally question the democratic state’s power to regulate this potentiality. Put differently, nuclear weapons, and specifically, a reliance on deterrence as strategy, hold the state’s citizens hostage to nuclear annihilation at the same time that it offers a similar fate to the other state’s citizens. Reclusion can also work in concert with the psychological effect Robert Jay Lifton terms “numbing.” Our fear of nukes is pervasive and repressed (Chaloupka 1992, 172). Of course, as William Chaloupka writes, that day-­to-day life still continues and it is easy to forget the radical changes that nuclear technology produced. “Politics finally went orbital; encircling us in the most general way possible, but at a sufficient

Nuclear memory   73 distance that it seldom interferes very directly in our picnics and softball games” (Chaloupka 1992, 129). This distance is both of our making, and also that of the state working to keep nuclear weapons out of sight and secret. To place this in the context of remembering and memorializing the use of nuclear weapons it follows that the collective remembering of nuclear weapons, from the state perspective, will be obliged to forget as much as it remembers. At best, memory of this event would have to strongly remind citizens of their obligation to defend and die for the nation-­state and place it alongside other conventional war remembrance. In a larger sense, this “forgetting” or “selective remembering” is part of a historical and ideational debate about human relations and modern warfare deriving from the Enlightenment. Campbell Craig splits this debate into two camps—roughly, the optimists and the pessimists. The “optimistic” argument focuses on our ability to use reason, science, and technology to our benefit. Nuclear weapons are only weapons and rational leaders will use them (or not) in rational ways. The “pessimists” argue that, given the “sorry history of modern politics and warfare,” thermonuclear war only exacerbates a climate rife with fear and panic (Craig 2003, 162). Importantly, as Craig points out, the debate between thermonuclear war and wars that have come before is that these debates remain hypothetical, an event that never comes (Craig 2003, 162). If the pessimists turn out to be right and the optimists lose the bet “a thermonuclear war will have destroyed the human race, and along with it things like discourse and memory. The debate would remain forever unresolved, because those pessimists proven right, along with those optimists proven wrong, would all be dead” (Craig 2003, 162). The ontological horror of nuclear weapons makes reflection unpleasant and rife with moral and ethical uneasiness. The concept of potentiality, or the ability to develop, also becomes an important for understanding nuclear memory; it plays a vital role in securing deterrence as a “rational” nuclear weapons strategy. Nuclear destruction only presents itself as a potentiality and “as long as deterrence does not fail, the gap that exists between security promise and performance is potential rather than actual” (Deudney 1995, 99). This bares a noteworthy relationship to temporality—it is a moment that never comes, never becomes actuality. It is here that Morgenthau, writing in 1961, lays out an appeal to clear thinking about nuclear weapons and their potential and actual destructive power: It would indeed be the height of thoughtless optimism to assume that something so absurd as a nuclear war cannot happen because it is so absurd. An age whose objective conditions of existence have been radically transformed by the possibility of nuclear death evades the need for a radical transformation of its thought and action by thinking and acting as though nothing of radical import had happened. This refusal to adapt thought and action to radically new conditions has spelled the doom of men and civilizations before. It is likely to do so again. (Morgenthau, 1961)

74   S. Fishel While there is a danger losing oneself in the absurdity of nuclear war, or in the constant deferral of an event that never comes (Derrida 1984), there is also space in potentiality. Potentiality, and the longue durée of nuclear time (Taylor 2017; Burke, 2016), can be imagined as a space of meditation rather than absurdity. This is where memory and remembrance become particularly salient and useful. Along with cultivating a reflective view of history and our relationship to the future, memory allows for conversations in these spaces of potentiality about diverse experiences and response to nuclear use—a need that is inarguably necessary for the creation of strong democratic, reflective pluralities whether in the state form or in some new configuration as yet to be known.2 The “radical import” of nuclear weapons demands changes in both how we remember and how we move into the future.

Remembering together The Western Liberal tradition privileges a certain conception of time and history. It is linear, progressive, and based on the teleological assumption that “man” moves steadily forward through time improving his lot as he goes. In the Western Realist tradition, history is cyclical and based on a view of human nature that dooms us to repeated wars and conflicts. In either conception, nuclear weapons—as an effect or a symptom of modernity—throw these commitments into doubt. To expand, the end of World War I begins what many would argue to be the modern age. The end of World War  II continues on this trajectory of cultural hopelessness and malaise. Broadly, the inability to see our nuclear vulnerability is wrapped up in a particularly modern malaise. Nuclear weapons signal for some a final end to the idea of human potential as progressive and limitless and brought our faith in human nature radically under question. It signifies a loss of belief in human progress and decency. Chaloupka writes In short, the presumptions that most of us have lives to live out, that our lives would be followed by other people’s lives, that our rationality and humanity would gradually make things clearer, or even improve them—all were undermined forever by the bomb. A narrative was disrupted, replaced by a fracture. Have your expectations, your hopes, and commitments, the bomb said, but always remember that one wildman, one moment of weirdness, could cancel them out. (Chaloupka 1992) Jay Winter and Avishai Margalit provide two cogent examples of how collective memory functions in relation to larger conceptions of time and history. Winter uses “collective remembrance” because he believes this best links history and memory. He sees this as a “strategy to avoid trivialization of the term memory … to privilege remembrance is to insist on specifying agency, on answering the question who remembers, when, where, and how?” (Winter 2006, 3). This also

Nuclear memory   75 means “remembrance is an act of symbolic exchange between those who remain and those who suffered and died” (Winter 2006, 279). Collective remembrance reveals that there are many actors who bring different memories and voices into that which is remembered. Importantly for Winter, it brings affect and multi­ vocality into historical study. For Margalit, it is “shared memory” with the “we” as collective or communal, not a simple aggregate of individual memories, but built instead on a division of mnemonic labor. This shared memory travels from person to person through institutions, or archives, and communal mnemonic devices, or monuments (Margalit 2002, 56). Shared memory produces an obligation on a community; each has a responsibility to keep memories alive, but all shoulder this burden. This, in turn, makes shared memory’s relationship to morality and action different from that which stems from individual memory. This is memory that is based on keeping promises to generations that preceded and those that will follow. This point is crucial for my argument and succinctly said by Margalit: “the memory that we need to keep our promises and follow through on our plans is this kind of prospective memory … to remember is to know and to know is to believe” (Margalit 2002, 14). This gives shared memory a special relationship to the future as well as to the past. Our memories become a promise to the future; an ethics based on shared memory is connected to an ethics of belief about the future. Using this insight, the impoverishment of remembrance and willful forgetting in nuclear politics affects our ability to conduct ethical relations. Join this with a relationship to the future defined by deterrence and with the “unspeakability” of nukes and it doubly affects our ability to critique nuclear weapons policy and their use. To use the cliché that it could lead to a disaster is a serious understatement. To “not speak” of nuclear weapons and their potential destructive capacity is to neglect human responsibilities to the future, future generations, and future biospheres. Winter writes that remembrance and mass mourning became something very different after World War  II as compared to World War  I. While still overwhelmingly apocalyptic, there are fewer instances of mass mourning.  Other voices emerged, and other cultural forms appeared. Many of them were abstract, and thereby both more liberated from specific cultural and political reference and less accessible to mass audience. Their austere simplicity is powerful and compelling and points to 1945 as the real caesura in European cultural life. (Winter 1995, 228) It is unclear whom it is appropriate to mourn. “In effect, the search for meaning after Somme and Verdun was hard enough; but after Auschwitz and Hiroshima that search became infinitely more difficult” (Winter 1995, 228). In reality, our relationship to the past is just as tenuous, just as prone to uncertainties as is our future. Shared memory reminds us that there may not be an event, but an event-­story (Margalit 2002). It is important to see the ethical

76   S. Fishel obligations that follow from this event-­story rather than to solely create an attachment to a particular identity created by the telling of this event-­story. The “truth” or “realness” is less important in this argument than what the current stories bare about the relation between power and memory. As a telling example, Stanley Goldberg, a historian on the Smithsonian board during the Enola Gay exhibit proposal writes that the greatest irony of all was the fact that the exhibit was finally canceled as a result of a dispute between Martin Harwit and the representatives of the Amer­ican Legion concerning how many casualties there would have been had there been an invasion of Japan. ‘That is, a dispute about events that never happened!’ (Goldberg 1999, 177) Let the cries of revision fall on deaf ears and take seriously the idea that “revisionist history is not necessarily deluded history. For all we know we might have been deluded in the past” (Margalit 2002, 111). Or as another historian concisely writes: “All history is revisionist history” (Goldberg 1999, 177). Therefore, this effort is not about recovering knowledge that we once knew, but is, in part, to examine what we refuse to remember and is therefore un-­ recollectable through examination of the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum. In both of the case studies, pieces of the event are treated as not worth remembering and stand as excellent examples of how the same event embodies many purposes and motives when they are publicly remembered. Memorials and museums represent public statements about what the past has been, and how the present should acknowledge it; who should be remembered, who should be forgotten; which acts or events are foundational, which marginal; what gets respected, what neglected. (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003, 12–13) At this point, it is important to connect nuclear reclusion and shared memory to two stories of memorializing the same event, and then return to these topics in further depth in the last sections of the chapter.

Enola Gay and the Smithsonian The Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) opened June 28, 1995 and closed May 18, 1998. After five years of controversy and debate, the exhibit entitled “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibit” became an homage to the “Superfortress” B-­29 nicknamed Enola Gay. This plane carried and dropped the bomb dubbed “Little Boy,” the first atomic bomb used in war, to the city of Hiroshima. The exhibit plans around the B-­29 became so controversial that the Smithsonian canceled

Nuclear memory   77 the original plan in order to assuage various factions involved in exhibit’s planning. In 1987, discussions began on what should happen to the Enola Gay—the plane was, at this time, rotting in a hanger in Silver Hill, MD. Many groups voiced concerns that the aircraft, as a symbol meaning different things to each interested party, needed to be restored and on exhibit for all to see. The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute and the soon-­to-be director of the NASM, Martin Harwit, agreed that the Enola Gay symbolized a pivotal change in twentieth-­century warfare and doubtlessly in world history. “Her Hiroshima mission had introduced a nuclear weapon with which the human race could demonstrably annihilate itself ” (Harwit 1996, 27). The Enola Gay stands out in this, of that Harwit was well aware, but the question became how the NASM would treat that difference given his, and the Smithsonian’s views, on the role of the museum. Harwit believed that museums tell stories and history is a particular kind of story that museums tell. These are stories about events that actually happened, and museums are responsible for portraying these events accurately and truthfully (Harwit 1996, 53). This was the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb and this bomb had killed 100,000 people. To leave this out would be “distorting history” (Harwit 1996, 54). Harwit felt the best way to achieve both of these goals was to place the Enola Gay in an exhibit about strategic bombing. Harwit also felt strongly that an exhibit using the Enola Gay could not focus solely on the Hiroshima bombing mission. It had to be placed in context with the actions of the Allied and Axis Powers during World War II. But museums must also take into account as many voices as possible. Early in the planning process, the NASM called in critics, academics, experts, focus groups, and advisors to plan the exhibit. Harwit realized that each group represented saw the Enola Gay in a different way; therefore there was a need for balance and discussion beforehand. The museum also had to be concerned with what the visitor takes way from the exhibit (Harwit 1996, 53). There was much unease reflected in the early discussions on what was appropriate commemoration for the Enola Gay. These also showed a movement away from the belief that we should memorialize technology’s neutrality. The Enola Gay, in these early debates, served as a symbol for the honest telling of the “dark side of aviation” as well as the larger history of escalating total war through technology and the power of nuclear weapons. Especially important in the early debates was that a mission using nuclear weapons against human beings should not be glorified. There should be no pride in this act and that drawing attention to nuclear weapons in this manner might help to control the use of them in the future (Harwit 1996, 33). They all hoped, and communicated to the public in a series of concept papers, that the primary goal of the exhibition should be to provide a public service by re-­examining the atomic bombings in light of new scholarship and long-­term implications at the 50th anniversary of the event. It was after the release of the first concept papers that serious debates over the role and tone of the memorial began for Martin Harwit and the NASM. By late summer 1993, a group of World War  II veterans created a petition with 5,000

78   S. Fishel signatures pressing the Smithsonian to exhibit the Enola Gay “proudly” and that the current exhibit plans were an injustice to the soldiers who fought in the war. General Monroe W. Hatch, Jr., Executive Director of the Air Force Association (AFA), backed the veterans and wrote a letter to Harwit condemning the exhibit as biased and partisan—not history and fact. After much back and forth between the Smithsonian and the AFA about the images and content of the exhibit, the NASM changed and renamed the exhibit: “The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Onset of the Cold War.” This rewrite resulted in another bout of protest. After the Amer­ican Legion condemned the “Crossroads” exhibit, the script was revised yet again and titled “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II.” The NASM received detailed responses about the exhibit from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Retired Officers Association, the Military Order of the World Wars, and the Disabled Amer­ican Veterans. The areas that these organizations, and the AFA and the Amer­ican Legion, demanded to have deleted were mainly concerned with the portrayal of the Japanese as victims, not aggressors; too many pictures of Asian casualties, including “emotional” and “graphic” photos of Ground Zero; imbalanced analysis of the decision to use the bomb; the postwar nuclear arms race and proliferation; and ultimately, the most important complaint was that the exhibit did a disservice to those that served in World War II (Correll 2004). General Tibbets, the pilot of the infamous B-­29, says that the “ ‘proposed display of the Enola Gay is a package of insults’ ” and that the Enola Gay should be glorified as the first plane to “drop the bomb. You don’t need any other explanation. And I think it should be displayed alone“ (Correll 2004, 12). Senate Resolution 257 was passed September 3, 1994 denouncing the exhibit. The Senate drove this message home with a threat to cut funding to the Smithsonian—85 percent of the annual budget originated from the federal government. By January 30, 1995, the Smithsonian bowed under the pressure from the various groups and canceled the exhibit. Martin Harwit resigned in May 1995 and the final exhibit with the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay opened June 28, 1995. The AFA praised it as a “straightforward historical exhibition” and stated, “Within a year, it draws more than a million visitors—making it, by far, the most popular special exhibition in the history of the Air & Space Museum” (Correll 2004, 26).

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum The main criticism repeated against memorializing the victims of the atomic bomb by the public and scholars in Japan is unwillingness to accept responsibility for wartime aggression by an imperialist Japanese army against Korea and China. Many dwell on the fact that memorialization of the nuclear attacks do not view the atomic bombings as part of a policy of escalating total war, imperialism, and colonialism. Severed from this historical trajectory, and breaking with the history of Pacific War, many argue that the only responsibility most Japanese

Nuclear memory   79 will accept is their place as the first victims of the atomic bomb. Benedict Giamo wondered if this focus calls into question whether or not the Japanese can still have “an ethical and moral claim for world peace and antinuclearism” if they excise the history of Japanese imperialism and colonization and the atrocities it created (Giamo 2003, 714). Others call it a form of empty pacifism that only serves when needed. On the other hand, Roger Jeans wrote, “perhaps it is unreasonable to expect a museum to dwell solely on its own people’s ‘sins’ ” (Giamo 1997, 173). These debates are reflected in public discussions around the experience of the bombs dropped on Japan. In 2007, Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma said that he thought the atomic bombing of Japan “could not be helped.” While this may have been taken out of context, the backlash against the minister is telling. “ ‘The U.S. justifies the bombings saying they saved many Amer­ican lives,’ said Nobuo Miyake, 78, director general of a group of victims living in Tokyo. ‘It’s outrageous for a Japanese politician to voice such thinking. Japan is a victim’ ” (Hippen 2007). Kyuma resigned shortly thereafter. The government has wavered in its conviction in taking responsibility for its wartime aggression. At the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki the government changed its stance on history and admitted to a larger role in the war. But in 2005, the Japanese government changed the words of this resolution to (re)minimize Japanese aggression. “Invasion” and “colonial rule” were removed (Editor 2005). The government continues to whitewash the history of “comfort stations” for the military and the forced mass suicides in Okinawa (Hanai 2007). At the 60th Anniversary of Hiroshima, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi did not speak to A-­Bomb survivors after the August 6 ceremony as prime ministers have done in the past. Osamu Fujiwara, associate professor of peace studies at Tokyo Keizai University said “there is no political debate over this cancellation” and that “the ceremony itself has become history, and the A-­bomb itself has become a thing of the past” (Onishi 2005). Dr. Hiroshi Maruya, a hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bomb, described the government as “very cold.” He added: “It’s as if the government is saying, ‘It is no use listening to you.’ … Power politics is the theory of the new world” (Onishi 2005). But even with the government’s attempts to control the narrative, there have been shifts in public opinion about the official story of the end of World War II. This is in part due to the efforts of the hibakusha and their commitment to calling out the danger of nuclear weapons to global peace and stability. The complexity of the debate and eventual focus on the larger issue of global nuclear vulnerability can be seen in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum. Completed in 1954, the Park was built on the ruins of the Nakajima district in Hiroshima. The Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) was the only remaining structure after the explosion. Ran Zwigenberg recounts that like the rebuilding of the city of Hiroshima, the debates about the memorial included the desire for a “forward-­looking recounting to visitors a story of resurrection and promise that emphasized Hiroshima’s unique status as the first city destroyed by a nuclear bomb” (2014, 52–53). Some believed that the entire city should be preserved as

80   S. Fishel a memorial and that it was not appropriate to build on ground where so many were killed (Zwigenberg 2014, 53). Zwigenberg continues on to tell the history of Tange Kenzō, a young Tokyo architect, who was chosen to plan and build the memorial in 1949. As discussed above, the modern and forward-­looking design of the memorial was thought by many to try to hide Japanese fascism and aggression as aberration within a story of progress, transformation, and new beginnings (58). Many thought the money would be better spent on the hibakusha. When the Peace Museum finally opened in 1955, Hiroshima was also transformed from a place of destruction to a modern city. The museum itself holds a collection of materials related to the atomic bombing, and in 1994 a new wing was built in the museum that serves as a place to tell the stories of the hibakusha and highlights the dangers of the current global nuclear culture. A section for Sasaki Sadako and her folded cranes was added and this memorial was meant to stand as a hope for peace, especially for children. After the 1994 renovation, Yuki Miyamoto, in Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, writes that the new wing of the museum, with its video testimony of the survivors, depiction of wartime culture, and a level dedicated solely to the problem of global nuclear memory counters the nationalist narrative of innocent suffering and makes this nationalist agenda impossible (2012, 72–73). The personal memories of the bomb, and the continuing testimony of the hibakusha, are a large part of the public’s ability to understand a contextual and nuanced history of World War  II rather than one that hides a history of aggression with progress and victimization. Through the 1990s, polls showed public opinion did not support the “nationalists and conservatives, in and out of government, who prefer to downplay Japan’s war record” (Jeans 2005). Indeed, many of the changes to the museum came at the behest of the survivors and additions and changes were viewed critically. In 2002, the National Memorial Hall was proposed and the hibakusha refused to support the addition the government agreed to that acknowledges the “the atomic bomb was the result of the nation’s ‘wrong decisions’ (ayamatta kokusaku)” (Miyamoto 2012, 75).

Remembering nukes What lessons can be drawn from these narratives of the same event? One clear message is that memorialization controlled by the interests of the nation-­state fails to bring to the fore our nuclear vulnerability. In part, this is due to the ability of omnicidal weapons to cast doubt on both the state and broader Western conceptions of social order. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, nuclear weapons broadly question a liberal’s progressive theory of human potential—this is also clear in Japan’s official story of progress and peace—as well as the realist’s belief in a cyclical nature of time. Specifically, thermonuclear war makes recreating the state (the Leviathan) after war impossible in Hobbesian theory and Lockean theory. As Craig writes “if war occurs no one may be left to point out

Nuclear memory   81 how bad the war was, and then call for the construction of a state that could have prevented it” (Craig 2003, xvii). Beyond the challenge to the state, for Morgenthau, nuclear weapons made even death and time irrelevant categories. Nuclear death is a difference in kind rather than degree: The scale of nuclear destruction takes away the individuality of death rendering it meaningless. It destroys immortality and “meaning of life by throwing life back upon itself ” (Morgenthau 1961). There is, then, a radical difference in meaning between a man risking death by an act of will and fifty million people simultaneously reduced—by somebody switching a key thousands of miles away—to radioactive ashes, indistinguishable from the ashes of their houses, books, and animals. (Morgenthau 1961) Morgenthau stresses that thinking and acting as if nuclear death were no different than other deaths and as if “it has no bearing upon the meaning of life and death” reduces our “noble” words to “absurd clichés.” Humans must come to understand that one cannot defend “freedom and civilization” with nuclear weapons as these weapons negate the very possibility of society’s survival (Morgenthau 1961). Schell echoes these sentiments in 1998 writing that stopping nuclear proliferation is a pressing moral issue only made more important by the end of the Cold War. Danger lies in additional countries beyond the United States and the former U.S.S.R. “thinking the unthinkable” by creating or expanding nuclear weapons programs (Schell 2001). In both cases, the state counters the legitimacy crisis, or unthinkability, posed by nuclear weapons by leading the debate away from nuclear weapons to hide this fundamental questioning of the basis of order itself. The state relies on an unrelenting formation of what it means to be a citizen of a nation-­state, not as a human vulnerable to nuclear destruction. Unfortunately for this vision of the future, the nation-­state is ethically deficient. The nation-­state, based on sharp boundaries between “us and them” creates violence in its very existence (Fishel 2013). It is naturally divisive, focuses on a destructive account of hypostasized forms of ethnic identity that keep different political communities from forming. It divides the world into mutually exclusive opposing forces armed with thermonuclear weapons that are many times more destructive than Fat Man and Little Boy. The nation in these two cases, due to its interest in hiding its impotence in the face of nuclear weapons and covering up past aggressions, fails in creating stable and ethical communities. The question then becomes whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be claimed as a global memory? It is the contention of this chapter that contextual, collective remembrance can imagine a future where we are not hapless victims, but rather a global collective aware of its vulnerabilities. Especially in the case of Hiroshima’s memorialization and the ongoing activism of the hibakusha, some forms of collective remembrance be used to aid in shaping a community of memory based on thick relations of caring—using the nuclear

82   S. Fishel attacks “as warning signposts in moral history” (Margalit 2002, 71) This collectivity needs to be less concerned about consolidating identity—personal or national—and focus on the “eruptive force of remembering otherwise” (Simon 2005) and what this can mean for ethical relations and the future. “Remembering otherwise” would be less concerned with a focus on simple, dualistic debates that serve nationalist agendas. In the above, atomic victimization and wartime aggression both forget “the causes and conditions of total war” unless coupled with robust public debate (Giamo 2003, 705). In the United States, this led to a patriotic backlash that only allowed the commemoration of the airmen and those who served and died in a “good” war. The exhibit plans provoked evasion and resistance in the United States and the eventual exhibit evades the bombings completely—Enola Gay is just an airplane. Martin Harwit concludes in his book on his history of the exhibition that the driving force behind the protest was a group of individuals “who feared that the exhibition could cast into doubt a hallowed, patriotic story that they believed was essential to our national self-­image” (Harwit 1996, 426–427). He also adds that the Amer­ican Legion and the AFA suppressed the newly declassified information questioning the necessity to use the bomb to force Japanese to surrender. They wanted the traditional story told: millions of lives were saved by the decision to use the bomb. It is important to stress that the new information about the decision to use the bomb was evidence, not revisionism as the critics cried.  The Air Force Association’s simplistic account, in which dropping the bomb was motivated by nothing more than a desire to bring a quick end to the war so as to result in a net savings of lives, can’t begin to cope with the complexity of the evidence. (Goldberg 1999, 179) This simplistic dualism of remembering victimhood/forgetting aggression does its own violence to what can be gained through remembering Hiroshima/ Nagasaki in multiple ways. There is no denying that civilians in Hiroshima were and are victims of a powerful weapon dropped in the middle of a bustling city center. It was a singular, horrific event that far surpassed, and is still unrivalled, in its toll on civilians. This United States action went against customary and binding international law concerning civilians during war3 and furthermore the “aggressiveness” of a state’s military is never a legal or moral reason to the harm the civilians of that state. This privileging the Enola Gay and its role as “just an airplane” downplays United States aggressiveness and the war crimes committed in aerial bombing campaigns. It aids in glorifying a military history unconnected to the realities of nuclear weapons. This was, and has become, even more dangerous after 9/11 and years of rhetoric about the so-­called “War on Terror” (Noon 2004; Boehm 2006). While we know that our own personal memories can fail us, collective memory failure can have potentially fearsome consequences. Recent estimates of the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan are at least 1.3 million, and this does not take in to account casualties in Yemen and Somalia, the

Nuclear memory   83 wounded, the grieving, or internally displaced (Carasik 2015). In other words, some forms of collective memory can support future warfare in a way that adds more categories of “acceptable” collateral damage. In Japan, the official narrative often centered on one of transformation, and supporting the national narrative meant believing that the bomb saved Japanese lives and ended the war: the loss of Hiroshima was to be remembered as a sacrifice for peace (Zwigenberg 2014, 34). In the nationalist story in both the United States and Japan, the hibakusha’s testimony tended to be seen as “biased” and attempts to insert their lived experiences of the bomb into commemoration are seen as unbalanced. The United States’s view of the bomb as necessary to save the lives of Amer­ican soldiers—and future Japanese civilians—and Japan’s view of transformation after the explosion suppress the experiences of the hibakusha in order to see the bomb as a “savior” (Miyamoto 2012, 178). A focus on the moral horror of war—with all its atrocities—has been the strength in the work of the hibakusha.4 The hibakusha’s memories are vital to remembering both the atomic attack and our connection as humans through mutual suffering and strength. Their efforts have attached victimhood (and aggression) to humanity and the humanity of the victims while being able to shoulder the blame for other wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army. Their voices cannot be ignored, and as Miyamoto urges, they also do not need to be offered a “place of privilege over the sufferings of victims of other atrocities” (Miyamoto 2012, 179). The hibakusha bring a true realism to the memorialization debates and “their message emerges from a genuinely self-­ critical process: I too have done wrong, and I am not justified in condemning others” (Miyamoto 2012, 4).

Conclusion To conclude, I will focus on how nuclear commemoration can lead to positive consequences and outcomes. If remembrances are contextual, material, and focused on the suffering of the victims of nuclear attack without forgetting, or discounting, the many crimes against humanity committed by both the United States and Japan then memorialization can have a ethical role in public discourse and debate (Miyamoto 2012, 2). If nuclear reclusion makes this an uphill battle how do we find the solution set, cure, or countermeasure to official state amnesia and aphasia? One answer is that ethical and nuanced role memories can help us, as global citizens, imagine different and more robust regimes to control the spread of nuclear materials and technology. As shown in both of the cases, the temptation of falling into comfortable dichotomies instead of facing existential questions of species survival is a danger. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Park fares better in finding the “we” who will “anticipate and preclude any future use of nuclear weapons” (Giamo 2003, 705) than the public who visited the Enola Gay fuselage at the NASM. To gaze backward, in Japan, “the immediately dead, forever maimed, and slowly dying of that moment have occupied an important commemorative place in the

84   S. Fishel postwar imagination” (Biswas 2014, 6). In Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki led the Japanese to ratify the Non-­Proliferation Treaty in 1976 and support universal disarmament while the generation surviving World War II in the United States created a deadly nuclear arsenal (Biswas 2014, 6). In 2016, after the first visit by a sitting United States president,5 the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki read a peace declaration calling for action toward abolishing all nuclear weapons during the 71st anniversary of the event (Jiji, 2016). The continuing role of survivors who press for solidarity with all victims of nuclear radiation, not just as citizens of a particular country, can aid in creating stronger control regimes and a possible nuclear zero world. A lack of reflection on the bombings, and the refusal to listen to the hibakusha, has led to a disconnection from “the lingering effects of nuclear waste generated from the production of the commodity that wrought devastation” on Amer­ican soil (Biswas 2014, 14). To add to this, the long-­term effects of nuclear weapons and nuclear policy are only beginning to come to light 70 years after the bombing of Hiroshima. These include both tangible and intangible effects: the monetary cost of creating and maintaining nuclear weapons, the political cost of secrecy, the ecological cost, and the health risks posed by increased radiation due to the detonation of thousands of nuclear weapons during testing, too name but a few. This is especially crucial in a world that is turning to nuclear power to decrease reliance on fossil fuels. Post 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima and other victimizations by nuclear power, another pressing question, as Shampa Biswas asks, is how to think about the future of nuclear power in “ways that honor the effects of nuclear pursuits on all its victims, past, present, and future?” (Biswas 2014, 7). These questions gain even more importance as deterrence and MAD no longer control the international peace (if it ever really did). Interpreting the atomic age and shedding light on the secrecy surrounding it is of paramount importance if we mean to meet the challenge that nuclear weapons pose in a multipolar world with no reliable controls on their use and proliferation. The importance in memorializing Hiroshima lies not in assuring ourselves that we have certain versions of the past correctly represented, but in what these representations allow us to remember, and conversely, what they allow us to forget. Every nation-­state in its formation will retell its stories, and in particular, its war stories; however, how we retell those stories is neither politically nor institutionally neutral. Remembering can arrest a nation in the perdition of nostalgia or demand of its citizens robust and thoughtful democratic engagement focused on the future. If the experience of Hiroshima and other nuclear catastrophes are remembered with all of their context intact, apologies are offered for wrongs done in the past, the path to the future can become a different one: perhaps even one that leads toward global nuclear disarmament.

Notes 1 Portions of this chapter was originally published in Critical Military Studies, Vol. I, Issue 2 (2015) as “Remembering nukes: collective memories and countering state history.”

Nuclear memory   85 2 This way of framing the potential in absurdity and of the space gained in stretching out time, can be used to productively speaking of another crisis folding out on a geologic time scale: the Anthropocene and the coming changes in Earth’s environment due to fossil fuel use. 3 Additionally, the United State’s use of the atomic bomb on civilians should be remembered as part of a larger trend that sees an increase in civilian casualties during conflict. War has largely lost its legal meaning (war has not been declared in the United States since the end of World War II, but the United States has been involved in violent conflict since the Korean “police action” began in 1950) and during this time, in all of the cold and hot wars of the twentieth and twenty-­first century civilian casualties and increased “collateral damage” have become the norm in modern conflicts. 4 Of course it is important to remember that the hibakusha are not a homogenous group. Some declare the criminality of the use of the bomb, others call for remilitarization of Japan and the creation of a nuclear arsenal, and still others who press for an ethical remembrance of Hiroshima and give testimony of the experiences—the kataribe (Miyamoto 2012, 179). 5 On May 27, 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting United States president to visit either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. While he did not offer a formal apology, President Obama called for a moral revolution in how we deal with nuclear weapons. “We must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them” (Harris 2016). Unfortunately, the gap between reality and disarmament is a wide one. The Obama administration has reduced the nuclear arsenal less than any post-­Cold war presidency (Broad 2016). For full remarks see: www.whitehouse.gov/the-­press-office/2016/05/27/ remarks-­president-obama-­and-prime-­minister-abe-­japan-hiroshima-­peace.

Bibliography Biswas, Shampa. 2014. Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boehm, Scott. 2006. Privatizing Public Memory: The Price of Patriotic Philanthropy and the Post-­9/11 Politics of Display. Amer­ican Quarterly 58 (4): 1147–1166. Broad, William J. 2016. Reduction of Nuclear Weapons Has Slowed under Obama, Report Finds, New York Times, May 26. Burke, Anthony. 2016. Nuclear Time: Temporal Metaphors of the Nuclear Present. Critical Studies on Security 4 (1): 73–90. Carasik, Lauren. 2015. Amer­icans Have Yet to Grasp the Horrific Magnitude of the War on Terror, Al Jazeera, April 10. Chaloupka, William. 1992. Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Craig, Campbell. 2003. Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz. New York: Columbia University Press. Correll, John T. 2004. The Smithsonian and the Enola Gay. Arlington: Aerospace Education Foundation.  Derrida, Jacques. 1984. No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives). Diacritics 14 (2) (Summer 1984): 20–31. Deudney, Daniel. 1995. Political Fission. In On Security, edited by Ronnie D. Lipschutz. New York: Columbia University Press. Editor. 2005. The End of Silence: Korea’s Hiroshima–Korean a-­Bomb Victims Seek Redress. Japan Times, August 2. Fishel, Stefanie. 2013. Theorizing Violence in the Responsibility to Protect. Critical Studies on Security 1 (2): 204–218.

86   S. Fishel Giamo, Benedict. 1997. The Smithsonian Enola Gay Exhibit and the Display of National Identity. Nanzan Review of Amer­ican Studies 19 (2): 133–146. Giamo, Benedict. 2003. Myth of the Vanquished: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Amer­ican Quarterly 55 (4): 703–28. Goldberg, Stanley. 1999. The Enola Gay Affair: What Evidence Counts When We Commemorate Historical Events? Osiris 19 (1): 176–186. Hanai, Kiruku. 2007. Restoring the Military’s Honor. Japan Times, April 23. Harris, Gardiner. 2016. At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require a Moral Revolution, New York Times, May 27. Harwit, Martin. 1996. An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying and the History of Enola Gay. New York: Copernicus. Hippen, Andreas. 2007. A-­Bombings “Couldn’t Be Helped”: Kyuma–Defense Chief Says USSR Had to Be Kept from Attacking. Japan Times, July 1. Hodgkin, Katharine and Susannah Radstone, ed. 2003. Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. London: Routledge. Jeans, Roger. 2005. Victims or Victimizers? Museums, Textbooks, and the War Debate in Contemporary Japan. The Journal of Military History 69 (1): 149–195. Jiji, Hiroshima. 2016. Nagasaki to Cite Obama’s Speech for Peace Declaration. Japan Times, August 1. Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Miyamoto, Yuki. 2012. Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima. New York City: Fordham University Press. Morgenthau, Hans. 1961. Death in the Nuclear Age. Accessed August 27, 2014. www. commentarymagazine.com/article/death-­in-the-­nuclear-age/. Noon, David Hoogland. 2004. Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror, and the Uses of Historical Memory. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7 (3): 339–364. Onishi, Norimitsu. 2005. Where First a-­Bomb Fell, Prayers Ask “Never Again.” New York Times, August 7. Schell, Jonathan. 2001. The Gift of Time. Accessed August 27, 2014. www.thenation. com/article/gift-­time-introduction?page=0,1#. Simon, Roger I. 2005. The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning, and Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, N.A.J. 2017. The Problem of Nuclear Harm: An Ethical Ecology. Doctoral thesis to be submitted in the School of Political Science and International Studies at The University of Queensland. Virilio, Paul. 2007. Speed and Politics. New York: Semiotexte, 1997. Reprint, 2007. Wilson, Ward. 2007. The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima. International Security 31 (4): 162–179. Winter, Jay. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winter, Jay. 2006. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Yoneyama, Lisa.1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press. Zwigenberg, Ran. 2014. Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6 Nagasaki re-­imagined The last shall be first Kathleen Sullivan

The word Hiroshima has stood-­in for both Hiroshima and Nagasaki for more than 70 years. The two appear synonymous in the minds of many historians and many people but these two “bombs” (if one could dare to be so colloquial) were very different and have specific different effects regarding nuclear weapons in the world today. The last atomic bomb used in war was the first plutonium bomb. The uranium type, Hiroshima bomb was not even tested during the Manhattan Project. The “Gadget,” codename for the bomb that was tested in the New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945, was a plutonium type explosive. In extensive trials leading up to the production of the plutonium at Hanford in Washington State the bulbous bomb-­shaped prototype was dropped from planes many times over a test range in California and on practice runs over Japanese cities. What would be known as “Fat Man,” was first simply called the pumpkin (Bird and Sherwin: 2009). And that plutonium component that was thus tested and developed would become the prototype for the plutonium trigger. Rocky Flats, part of the government-­run nuclear weapons assembly line, 11 miles Northwest of Denver, Colorado, manufactured some 70,000 plutonium triggers or pits for use in all United States nuclear weapons (Iversen: 2013). One could say at the center of every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal is a Nagasaki bomb—the atomic trigger for a larger hydrogen explosive, that exists today as standard. Nagasaki still resides, in the present moment, in the United States nuclear stockpile. In every silo, on every submarine, in the bomb bays of airplanes poised for deployment, every second of every day, a Nagasaki bomb lies in wait as a trigger mechanism for devices that would level entire cities, creating firestorms of a 50-mile radius leaving radioactive death and decay for millennia (Eden: 2006). It may be various cultures’ obsession with the first of all things being the most important. It may be the chronicling of Hiroshima by John Hersey that took precedence in the postwar mind. It may be that the world was so shaken on the morning of August 7, 1945, that August 9 became a decades-­old after thought. Or, maybe it was how these two reality-­shattering tragedies were memorialized that held one to the forefront of collective memory causing erasure or second-­ thought status to the other. Still, if we are to truly “re-­imagine Hiroshima,” Nagasaki must stand alongside it in memory and discourse.

88   K. Sullivan

Urakami Cathedral On August 9 a plutonium bomb reduced Nagasaki to a radioactive wasteland. In November 1945, in the bombed-­out ruin of the Urakami Cathedral, a mass was held for the repose of the victims of the atomic bomb. The cathedral ruins stood for some 13 years after the bombing. Many people in Nagasaki City saw the relevance of the cathedral ruins to speak to the world of the significance and urgency for nuclear disarmament and world peace. “The broken remains of factories, the scorched out stumps of trees, the crumbling carcass of the Cathedral – all of these are important subjects for research. It is our responsibility to humanity to carefully record the details of this destruction”—Nagasaki Nichi Nichi Shimbun on October 8, 1945. (Takahara et al.: 2010, 83) In 1955, Nagasaki Mayor Tagawa Tsutomu travelled to the United States. Following his visit there was a sudden change of opinion and purpose. The Mayor had originally fought to keep the atomic relic. Yet, upon his return from the United States he had a considerable change of heart, and argued that the decision rested with the Church population. Some hibakusha believe there was pressure from abroad to bring down the ruin, its meaning too momentous. However many parishioners regarded the ground upon which the cathedral was built to be sacred, the ground upon so much suffering of their ancestors had occurred, the secret preservation of their faith, these tragic occurrences were significant enough to make the argument for a new cathedral to be built in its place. It is hard to know what precipitated his abrupt departure from a previously held strong position to keep the ruins as a memorial, because a fire in 1958 at Nagasaki City Hall destroyed the town records (Takahara et al: 2010, 89). If there was evidence pointing towards United States pressure to demolish the cathedral remains, it was lost.

Nagasaki 11:02 At the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum the upstairs is light and bright with windows and water features and installations of paper cranes. Downstairs are the relics and records of the atomic blast. At 11:02 a.m. daily, there is a sad electronic song piped throughout the building to signal the time, more than 70 years ago on a hot August day, when hell was visited upon the most historic port city in Japan. My friend, Sakue Shimohira, was 10 years old hiding in a shelter when the plutonium bomb exploded making a radioactive ruin of Nagasaki and taking the lives of her mother, sister, and brother and many tens of thousands of other mostly, noncombatants—other children and other mothers. Ten years after the bombing, Shimohira san’s surviving sister met her death on the tracks of an oncoming train. Ten years of depression and disease had been

Nagasaki re-imagined   89 too much and so, as Shimohira san put it, her sister found the courage to die. One in four atomic bomb survivors experienced a similar fate, unable to carry on in the charnel ground, the atomic wasteland. Some atomic bomb survivors found the courage to die. Some found the courage to live, like Shimohira san, who tells her story to thousands of young people visiting Nagasaki on their school sponsored pilgrimages. I’ve been with her on such occasions, when the students file into a meeting room, looking slightly bored or tired. Then they listen, and most are transformed by the force of nature that is Sakue Shimohira. On one occasion I heard her say: “There were so many bones that lay on the ground, their whiteness shone in the night sky. Be aware then, that when you are walking here you are walking on the bones of loved ones.…” When we hear first hand the testimony of atomic bomb survivors the nuclear issue can become personal to us. Although these accounts can be terrifying and dreadfully sad, our emotional responses to hearing such stories are signs of our shared humanity and ability to love. And our love extends to an ability to remember, and in remembering we work to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Once the living voices of hibakusha are gone, how will we be helped in our remembrance? In Nagasaki we lost the greatest atomic relic ever known. The one that said, we are no different than you. Christ on the cross, a radioactive crucifixion for all the world to see, might have problematized nuclear weapons use in the way a municipal building in Hiroshima cannot. Any bombed-­out temple or place of worship would hold the same import to people of compassion everywhere, but a bombed-­out Catholic cathedral would have held special relevance for the victor nation that sought to demonize the “exotic” Japanese while at the same time uphold “Christian” principles fighting The Good War. They even called the first nuclear test Trinity.

The Peace (?) Statue Unfortunately, we will never truly know why Nagasaki chose to memorialize its nuclear attack with a Romanesque figure pointing with one hand towards the sky from where the atomic bomb dropped and the other horizontally suggesting some vague idea of “peace.” The bronze statue made by Japanese artist Kitamura Seibo has been the subject of considerable controversy. Nagasaki resident and Japanese language scholar, Brian Burke-­Gaffney puts it this way: The figure is touted as an East-­West hybrid, but you don’t need a degree in art history to recognize it for what it is: a clumsy approximation of a Greco-­ Roman deity. At the time of construction, only three years had passed since the Treaty of San Francisco and Japan’s escape from the doghouse after World War  II, and the people of this country were busy rebuilding their lives, looking to the United States for both material assistance and socio-­ cultural models. Going along with the rhetoric that the atomic bombings had

90   K. Sullivan been necessary to end the war was probably Japan’s natural choice under these circumstances. But the Peace Statue seems glaringly incongruent, paying tribute to the civilization that deliberately dropped atomic bombs on two cities populated mostly by noncombatants. (Burke-­Gaffney, web reference) Sadly this same incongruence plays politically today. The very nation that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now “protects” Japan from the threat of more black rain under its nuclear umbrella, thereby distorting Japanese policy in nuclear non-­proliferation and disarmament matters at the United Nations and elsewhere. What if the bombed-­out cathedral still stood as a place for visitors to reflect upon the evil that humanity is capable of meting out on one another, and with nuclear weapons, on to every living being, including the future itself? With radical and instantaneous mass destruction—omnicide—and the slow death of genetic integrity through radioactive contamination: we have created the technology to destroy our world so thoroughly, so completely, that we not only threaten all life, but the promise of continuity. We threaten the future itself. The editor’s provocation to “Re-­imagine Hiroshima” may well be noble and timely, though it must engage us in re-­imagining Nagasaki too. Nagasaki, different but akin to Hiroshima, has its own memories, suffering, stories, and hibakusha. Our task should be to take these chards of meaning and memory and use them to ignite action to more than imagine a world without nuclear weapons, but to make that world a reality.

References  Bird, Kai, and Martin J Sherwin. Amer­ican Prometheus. 1st edn. London: Atlantic, 2009. Burke-­Gaffney, Brian. “Thoughts On The Peace Statue.” Railwayrider-­nagasakiperspectives. blogspot.com (accessed April 8, 2015). Eden, Lynn. Whole World On Fire. 1st edn. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. Hersey, John. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, (1946) 1985. Iversen, Kristen. Full Body Burden. 1st edn. New York: Broadway Books, 2013. Takahara, Itaru, Kazuhiko Yokote, and Brian Burke-­Gaffney. Nagasaki Kyū Urakami Tenshudō 1945–58. 1st edn. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 2010.

7 The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh in post-­war Japan Adam Broinowski

Introduction Ankoku butoh is an original Japanese dance form that emerged in the mid to late 1950s in Tokyo. Co-­founded by Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986) and Ohno Kazuo (1906–2010), it was an artistic response to social conditions as the nation of Japan underwent radical shifts in Imperial Japan’s engagement in the Asia-­ Pacific war (1931–1945), defeat and United States-­led Occupation of Japan (1945–1952) and the Cold War United States-­Japan alliance. In this chapter I explore how the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 and the hibakusha (people exposed to the blast 被爆者 and radiological 被曝者 effects of an atomic explosion) it produced can be seen reflected, in both a conscious and subconscious manner, in the artistic works of ankoku butoh. Of the many and multifaceted, realist and abstracted artistic renderings of this powerfully impacting historical event, whether from the grounded perspectives of hibakusha, their relatives and witnesses or through surrogate perspectives of artists in post-­war Japan, in this chapter I show how in their early ankoku butoh, Hijikata and Ohno responded to a structural complex of drivers that underpinned the use and effects of the atomic bombs. In their concentrated and devastating force, not only did the atomic bombs permanently alter the lives of living organisms directly exposed to this force, the industrial and epistemological systems required to devise, construct and use them also had broad and far-­reaching impacts upon the social and political conditions across the societies that were affected. Rather, the atomic bombs and their results that included human hibakusha, were symptoms of an apparatus through which broader changes were being carried out. One way of conceiving of or capturing this apparatus is as a modality or way of seeing, which for purposes of brevity and utility I call the ‘atomic gaze’. As I construct in the following, in the poetic phrases and movements of ankoku butoh can be identified not only the components of the atomic gaze and their creative response to conditions in which the artists lived, but also the creative and embodied tools of resistance from below to this apparatus. I develop this argument in four sections.

92   A. Broinowski First, I seek to introduce the formation of the atomic gaze and its production of hibakusha as linked to and comparable with the techné of the contemporaneous Nazi concentration camps and its victims. Both shifted the understanding of ‘human’ within changing forms of domination and sovereign power until that point, and can be situated within a legacy of colonial domination based on an epistemic hierarchy of evolution, power and ultimately, value. Second, with the hibakusha situated at the nexus of the physical, social, economic and geopolitical components that comprise the atomic gaze, I analyse the impacts of the atomic bombs through some literary reflections of hibakusha alongside relevant popular film interpretations in Japan. While highlighting the broad impact of atomic weapons across all forms of cultural production, these reflections also serve to contextualise the social and political pressures of Japan’s reorientation within the overarching United States-­Japan alliance and post-­war division system in Northeast Asia in the world-­historical inception of the nuclear age. Third, in examining early ankoku butoh, I identify and develop how Ohno and Hijikata, relative to their social conditions, were concerned with subaltern history and memory; valorising the non-­virtuosic, marginalised and collective materiality; engaging the non-­human and non-­living; and dissolving the sharp epistemic divide between mind and body. Discussed in terms of the binary of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’, I suggest that Hijikata’s butoh resisted the ‘bleaching’ effect of the atomic gaze by recovering cultural memories of a suppressed subaltern population. I conclude that ankoku butoh contributed to the counter-­ hegemonic transnational potential of ‘blackness’ through its creative modes to bridge divisions and build alliances to resist the core antagonism between modern capitalist societies and the natural earth that is so clearly manifest in the atomic bombs, hibakusha and the overarching atomic gaze which produced them, and which is at the core of dominant and hegemonic power relations.

The atomic gaze and the production of hibakusha In the post-­war conditions in cities in Western Europe after the Second World War, many artists and intellectuals attempted to understand the causative factors of the major wars between European nations in the first half of the twentieth century and their deep and far-­reaching impacts. Almost every cultural artefact generated roughly between 1940–1960 could be regarded as imbued with and as indirect testimony to the violence of these conflicts.1 Given that Japan had engaged in total war in which almost the entire population had been harnessed to the national war effort in some way, amid the austerity and ruins of defeated Japanese society many also reflected on their bitter experiences of the wartime period. As recognised by intellectuals and artists in both Europe and Japan, in the intense violence of the battlefields, ghettos, camps and bombed cities and of the psychological warfare that propelled it, the concept of human itself had become a target. In early post-­war Japanese society, while some strived to recover a redemptive and triumphant ideal of ‘humanity’, others maintained that

The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh   93 it was precisely this concept that was pivotal in creating the Holocaustal conditions that had transpired. This was no less evident in the use of the atomic bombs than in the Nazi concentration camps. In what culminated in a hitherto unprecedented scale of destruction, the Trinity atomic bomb test in the Alamogordo on 16 July 1945 was considered as the successful demonstration of human capacity to unlock a primary source of universal energy. The subsequent use of the atomic bombs and their industrial-­scale ‘clearing’ of the target areas in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with bright flashes (pika) and intense heat, force and toxicity of the atomic bombs (don), exposed and transformed every living and non-­living thing in range in a telos of light and matter. This was heralded as the crowning achievement of modernity and proof of the superiority of Western rational thought and civilisation.2 But while the responsibility for the barbarity of these weapons cannot be laid wholly upon the industrial, financial, political and epistemological system that had produced them, the architecture of the atomic bombs and their targeting and delivery systems was certainly developed via a Western genealogy of experimental anatomy, visual prostheses (microscopy to photography), molecular biology and atomic physics and in a direct line of aerial bombing technology used on human cities and settlements beginning in the late nineteenth century. Like a ‘mega-­camera’, the apparatus of the atomic bomb exposed the ‘photographed’ to the interactions of light and chemicals as they were embedded in a flattened-­out landscape of ‘photographic paper’. Through this ‘mega-­studio’ process their life-­worlds were forever altered.3 Instead of reducing the analysis to technological development, however, just as Giorgio Agamben read the pseudo-­scientific apartheid machinery (that included the camp) of the Nazi state as the ‘biopolitical nomos of the twentieth century’,4 we can also observe that the Asia-­Pacific war was similarly saturated in bitterly racialised enmity. This ‘anthropological machine’ which was based on the distinction between human (bios) and animal (zōē) life in eighteenth-­century zoology and biology5 also operated in constructing a racialised image of the Japanese enemy in the popular Allied imagination, and of a British–Amer­ican enemy as well as Asian variants in the Japanese public consciousness. Using the public fear generated through such narratives and images, between 1941 and 1945 the targeted enemy ‘who we fight’ transitioned from the Japanese Emperor, to Japanese military leaders and then to the Japanese population as a whole. Within the United States, United States law makers determined that it was necessary to strip ordinary Japanese-­Amer­ican civilians residing in the United States of their humanitarian law rights and quarantine them within United States internment camps. Although a combination of legal contingency and biopolitical dehumanisation of the enemy was useful in mobilising public support for, among others, the United States, Nazi and Imperial Japanese state wartime operations, unlike the Nazi state the United States did not implement a final solution of mass-­extermination of former citizens (i.e. Japanese, German and Italian Amer­icans) extracted from its

94   A. Broinowski own society and denied rights under newly defined national security laws, preferring to leave that to their operations in other societies where indiscriminate killing operations seemed to be justified as ‘collateral damage’ in warfare.6 The large-­scale area bombing campaigns conducted by both Allied and Axis forces did inflict disproportionate suffering on civilians who were indiscriminately exposed and consumed by the destruction wrought upon cities in Britain, Germany, Italy and China as well as Japan. In the case of the United States, targeted aerial incendiary bombing sorties (that included the use of napalm) over Japanese cities were planned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as early as 1942 and carried out over all Japanese cities by the United States Air Force (USAF ) between late 1944 and mid 1945 under the command of General Curtis LeMay. And alongside popular fiction and documentary films and publications, relevant United States industry periodicals, particularly in the later years, attest to a mindset in which the Japanese enemy had been sufficiently dehumanised as to be depicted and narrated as resembling human-­insect hybrids for whom ‘pest-­ control’ was the ‘solution’.7 While the USAF aerial bombing campaign was apparently intended to psychologically ‘soften up’ the Japanese population in preparation for the coming Allied Occupation, the additional use of atomic bombs can also be distinguished from conventional aerial bombing. In penetrating and shattering the core components of the material world, the unprecedented depth and rate of disruption produced from the first use of atomic bombs on civilians marked the induction of a new human taxonomy that was inextricable from their mode of production. Humans instantly vapourised at the bomb’s epicentre, and people barely upright in ‘semi-­human’ form further away destabilised the meaning of ‘human’,8 which Ōe Kenzaburō later described as introducing the terrible possibility that ‘man might become no longer human’.9 Yet it was more terrifying that the planned use of the atomic bombs on the occupants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with prior knowledge of its industrial-­scale and insidious impacts as justified both by the perpetrators and in the general doxa as killing to save lives (primarily Amer­ican) and to precipitate Japan’s surrender and the end of the Pacific war. In the ‘criminogenic’ spaces of wartime and Occupation in which civilians were exposed to pre-­meditated, organised, mass violence under the selective suspension of humanitarian laws (as Agamben theorised in the case of the death camps based on the Schmittian legal concept of the ‘state of exception’),10 the use and ‘effects’ of weapons designed to flatten entire cities and extinguish their resident populations seemed to offer raw proof of the withering heliocentric power of the ‘photographers’ world-­view. This capacity to literally inscribe the legitimate authority of the dominant power through the bodies of its new subjects was consistent with a colonial techné in a lineage that included the museum, the plantation and the concentration camp in which colonial subjects were transformed in the coloniser’s hierarchical image of the human species as grounded in seemingly natural terms.11 At the time, many United States scientists and military officials in commanding roles in Manhattan Project (Manchester–Rochester Coalition) understood

The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh   95 these bombs to be chemical, environmental and psychological weapons.12 Only those with privileged access to information about the releases of energy through a fission nuclear chain reaction knew how exposures to external radiation and internal radio-­emitters biochemically disrupted the normal cellular functioning of an organism and weakened their constitutions. As they did not disclose this knowledge to the public, the official United States and Japanese narratives were permitted to obscure the causes of damage to the bodies of hibakusha (including those who entered contaminated areas after the blast). It was under these uncertain and inhumane conditions that hibakusha who continued to live for various durations were then subjected to testing and data collection for radiation effects (and later to further scientific studies and lifetime monitoring) carried out by Amer­ican and Japanese medical scientists and assistants in the ‘optimal’ conditions of a ‘shielded’ laboratory (i.e., the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission hospital in quarantined areas in Hiroshima) under a policy of ‘research without treatment’.13 To treat hibakusha as victims of both the blasts and radiological exposures, both external and internal, would have been a tacit admission that disproportionate and indiscriminate harm from the use of chemical weapons on both civilians and ‘the enemy’ in breach of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. This would have had extenuating legal implications for the United States high command14 as it would have undermined United States strategic plans to use nuclear weapons whether in threat or actual use against its enemies and provided further ammunition for its Soviet rivals to use to delegitimise United States claims to moral authority. It would have also drawn further scrutiny to United States-­led data collection during the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) programme which lacked a dedicated purpose of medical treatment, the safety of the planned United States nuclear testing programme as well as the overall radiation health standards that would be derived from the A-­bomb studies and subsequently used by the nuclear industry. Due to this subjection of humans, and ecological systems more broadly, to systematic devaluation as relative to their use value and defined along a pseudo-­ scientific evolutionary spectrum, responsibility for the destruction caused by these weapons has been rationalised and occluded. So while legal responsibility is crucial, the techné of the atomic gaze enables us to broaden our grasp of causation beyond the narrow foci of atomic physics, blast effects, weapons/visual systems, realpolitik and even human and ecological impacts. If we are to not only seek restitution for this past event but also to intervene in the repetition of such gross injustices, however, it is also necessary to seek ways to unsettle the functioning of the atomic gaze. To do so, it is useful to examine how artists responded to the atomic gaze, both directly and indirectly.

Grounded responses to the atomic gaze during Cold War transformation Alongside the world pre-­eminence of the United States in terms of GDP and military power by the end of World War II, in the first post-­war years the United

96   A. Broinowski States together with its allies had largely determined the institutional foundations of the international order through the United Nations. This was underwritten by its new atomic weaponry and the capacity to produce, possess and deliver it in what amounted to a geopolitical watershed in international relations that reconfigured the coordinates of global military strategy in the Cold War era. The introduction of the atomic bombs served to deter the Soviet advance from occupying Hokkaido, to reinforce United States authority in its planned reorientation and reconstitution of the state structure of Japan and South Korea during Occupation, and to influence its strategic alliances and re-­territorialisation in an arc of United States military bases and installations on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Guam for the projection of geostrategic power in the coming proxy wars against the Soviet Union (USSR) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). From 1946 until the partial nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, as a form of psychological warfare, the United States also conducted regular displays of its nuclear potency via its widely televised 20 series nuclear test programme in the Nevada desert and on the Marshall Islands. Although the USSR had deprived the United States hegemon of its sole nuclear power status by successfully testing a nuclear weapon on 29 August 1949 (RDS-­1 implosion bomb), and the People’s Liberation Army succeeded in defeating the Kuomintang to claim control of mainland China by 1 October 1949, the series was a public advertisement to assure the world that the United States retained the upper hand. As a linchpin of United States geostrategy as signified by its 1948 ‘reverse course’ doctrine and its indirect participation in the Korean War, Japan’s first post-­war decade of reconstruction and reorientation was dominated by official discourse of national recovery and national security. In this period many of the most politically astute artists embraced the official proscriptions of the censors (in the Civil Censorship Detachment and Civil Information and Education units) by denouncing the former regime and promoting a bright new model of Amer­ ican capitalist democracy for other nations to emulate. Just as the remainder had witnessed the loss of basic human value in the Nazi camps,15 hibakusha viscerally recognised the deeper psychic power of the atomic gaze to redefine a core understanding of ‘human’ through its impact. They could not forget that the atomic bombs had made them into biopolitical subjects who were ‘made to live (faire vivre) or allowed to die (laissez mourir)’16 as part of the effort to transfer and bestow authority to the United States as the hegemonic power. Some like the hibakusha poet Ōta Yōko, for example, regarded herself as emblematic of the erosion of the modern concept of human: ‘… perhaps those who survived were like some kind of insect, [and] were not human’.17 Tinged with survivor guilt and bitter irony, expressions of alienation such as these indicated how being hibakusha often necessitated living in isolation from the rest of society. Due to lack of information about radiation in society, the discrimination they experienced often meant they had to conceal their status, particularly for young women and men who sought to improve their marriage prospects.

The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh   97 For those exposed to its transformative force, the atomic gaze also seemed to operate in an entirely new, almost magical dimension.18 Hayashi Kyōko for example, a chronicler of hibakusha experience, through the eyes of Takako, a co-­worker in an arms factory in Urakami, depicted how her fellow hibakusha with no visible wounds began to rapidly die off from acute radiation poisoning. To explain the inexplicable attrition rate, several of these hibakusha adopted self-­help remedies to fight the A-­bomb, which they construed as a malicious demon who would return relentlessly in the form of diseases over months and years to eventually claim them.19 Due to the lack of sufficient information on morbidity and mortality from this radiological occupation at the molecular level, this meant that hibakusha came to exist in a liminal condition in which their familiar boundaries between life and death grew unstable as their health and life-­ world eroded and contracted in varying degrees of illness, disability, sterility, genetic mutation and death. Although it was common to perceive hibakusha as victims, Hayashi portrayed Takako as a more independent spirit. Instead of aborting her pregnancy, as was common practice for hibakusha women, for example, she embraced the epithets (‘guinea-­pig’, ‘flawed merchandise’) and chose to give birth to her child, although he was severely impaired and was later euthanised. Hayashi emphasises Takako’s life as being one of living testimony and dogged resistance to the social pressures of ignorance and prejudice against hibakusha within the vertical hierarchy of hegemonic power, and at the height of her illness Takako urges others to ‘Crawl like me and set a red eye on the ground’.20 Whether symbolic of the collective punishment rendered by the atomic bombs for Japan’s impudent and inter-­imperialist challenge to Western powers during the war, or, as a localised expression of the desire for solidarity with a community of others, this motif of human ‘animality’ could be considered as signifying a political ontology of the weak. Instead of continuing to expend one’s dwindling energy and health by raging against an unjust world filled with contingency, Takako’s approach seemed to be to grind away her final term without compromising her resistant position while cognisant that she was fully entangled in the violating logic of the Occupier’s atomic gaze. With the Korean War (1950–1953) still fresh in people’s memories and only a year after President Eisenhower launched the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme to promote the apparently neutral, ‘good atom’ of nuclear power generation as a form of economic development (December 1953), Honda Ishirō’s Gojira (November 1954) a hugely popular film in the monster movie genre (kaijū eiga) was released. Gojira depicted a deep-­sea monster with a calloused hide, angry scream and a body pinging with polluting radiation awoken from the depths of the Pacific Ocean by hydrogen bomb tests and causing havoc and destruction in Japanese cities. In part, it was a response to Castle Bravo, the first-­ever test of a deliverable thermonuclear bomb conducted by the United States six months earlier on 1 March 1954 on Bikini Atoll. Bravo’s fallout, which contaminated hundreds of fishing boats including Japanese fishermen and their catches, and the subsequent

98   A. Broinowski attempt to cover it up triggered the first nation-­wide anti-­nuclear protests in August 1955 (Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs). Even so, given the systematic public relations campaign by which Japanese government and media officials and United States handlers had prepared the way for atomic energy as a peaceful way to recover from ignominious defeat, overcome the nation’s weakness in resource dependency and become a techno-­ scientific industrial and economic giant, the Japanese government was able to overcome the strong anti-­nuclear movement and commit the nation to becoming one of the earliest and largest investors in nuclear energy in 1955. The notable shift in narrative focus in the Godzilla series that followed was perhaps informed by the fact that by this point the United States had threatened Viet Nam, North Korea and the PRC with nuclear weapons, and had forward-­ deployed nuclear weapons on United States naval forces to and in Japan, to Taiwan during the first Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958, and in South Korea in 1958.21 By the late 1950s, the USSR also had tested a fusion bomb and by 1960 was deploying its own nuclear missiles, although not on foreign soil and only on ships in the Indian and Pacific oceans. As various Godzillas battled titans over Tokyo and other cities, instead of a punitive visitation of nature’s wrath in response to human use of nuclear weapons, Godzilla had transformed into a science-­fiction guardian deity to be adopted and managed by techno-­ scientific humans to ensure the prosperity and security of Japan against future nuclear wars.22 Together with the superior range of USAF intercontinental bombers and its forward deployment of nuclear missiles, however, the United States then prepared the Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP-­62, 1960), a ‘massive retaliatory strike’ capacity to be used against any Soviet aggression which integrated its conventional and nuclear forces in joint operations across a spectrum of bases, warheads, delivery systems, communications, and command and control. As the Plan entailed instant annihilation of urban populations targeted in the USSR and mainland China, it seems that the genocidal proportions of its atomic gaze were intended not just to maintain a balance of power or deter aggression through the threat of overwhelming force but to be used to wrest as much control as possible over foreign territories, resources and finance, and ultimately to win a nuclear war. Despite this shift in meaning of Gojira, a subterranean stream of artists of the yakeato-­ha (burnt ruins) generation who had experienced various forms of oppression during the war, the Occupation and after, as well as the shinjinrui (new human) generation who followed (including nikutai-­ha writers, some neo-­ realist film makers, performance and film makers of the Avant-­Garde Theatre Guild (ATG), and neo-­dada, Surrealist, action and experimental visual artists),23 remained critically aware that atomic power signified much more than either peaceful energy or destructive weaponry once used in wartime by an enemy-­ turned-friend. For many of these artists, the materiality of the body, including the bodies of hibakusha, served as an anchor, an archive and a device through which to examine their memories as well as to grasp and express and even

The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh   99 contest their conditions as the official narrative of history and memory hardened around them. Ankoku butoh, an original dance form that was nurtured by the conditions of the war and the early post-­war decades, is just such an artistic example. Both Ohno Kazuo and Hijikata Tatsumi were trained in modern dance, yet both sought a form that could express their experiential perspectives and local particularities. Ohno and Hijikata were disillusioned both with grand imperialist nationalism and liberal capitalism. They had known wartime austerity and martial law and had witnessed the rehabilitation of wartime ultra-­nationalist officials as leading champions of liberal democracy in defeat and Occupation. They understood the less than democratic priorities of the new vitalist regime to beat back social forces that sought to remind and educate people of past pain, shame and injustice to establish better conditions in the future and to create a landscape of individuated and brutal competition to stimulate high economic growth (kōdō seichō ki) in the late 1950s. In an efflourescent landscape of oblivion and consumerism, both artists developed their butoh as a localised form of resistance. Under the prismatic sign of ankoku (lit. ‘darkness’), for example, Ohno Kazuo likened the butoh condition to an ‘animal’ scuttling across the barren, poisoned desert of Tokyo’s (firebombed) aftermath.24 For Hijikata darkness was a sense of crisis that ‘runs away from the light’ – an ambiguous state of acquiescence and coercion, disobedience and rebellion – a criminalised condition.25 Darkened spaces of gradated contrasts in butoh studios offered optimal conditions for subterraneous collective existence of those who were or who empathised with the stigmatised, pauperised and internally colonised, whether under the old or new regime. Much of the artists’ poetic preoccupations were concerned with valuing decay, death and regeneration amid life on the ground in post-­war society, and took inspiration from the local black volcanic soil and its scorched aftermath; the weathered agrarian farmer and the grimy urban worker; the collective rural agrarian (non-­institutionalised) rituals and those of mass urban political demonstrations. In Hijikata’s three major early works – Kinjiki (Forbidden colours, 1959), Anma (Blind masseurs, 1963), Bara iro dansu (Rosy coloured dance, 1965) – a pronounced binary of white and black was evident. These performances included figures from Hijikata’s social milieu: rural tenant farmer migrants living in monolithic apartment blocks in urban ghettos as they worked on highly polluted construction sites, prostitutes and pimps, rickshaw pullers, barbers, repatriated soldiers, rural brides, shamisen players, blind masseurs, shamans, children and animals. Hijikata perceived the high-­density ‘my home’ existence of the everyday worker as ‘corpse-­like’, and proposed to resuscitate their numbed existence through recovering memory and localised connection with people and place in his butoh practice. The subaltern figures in his performances reflected a desire to express and a strategy to reclaim a degree of agency for those who had been occluded in the social norms of the new biopolitical capitalist dispensation.

100   A. Broinowski Butoh’s signature of the ‘naked white body mask’ seemed to reflect this post-­ war condition in which one visible and socially acceptable layer concealed other less visible ones. In contrast to the aesetheticised refinement of post-­war Kabuki, Nihon Buyō (Japanese traditional dance) and geisha performances, the lumpy cracked and crumbling full body masks of ankoku butoh suggested a non-­ professionalised, transient and subaltern condition.26 These bandaged déformé bodies seemed to evoke the social pain of being host to an occupier, and the tensions in suppressing and voiding taboo or forbidden identities while the process of their transplantion with another was underway. This dynamic is evident in several other works from the period, including Abe Kōbō’s novel Tanin no Kao (‘The Face of Another’, 1964), for example, itself inspired by Georges Franju’s 1959 classic horror film Eyes without a Face and adapted by Teshigahara Hiroshi for a feature film of the same title (1966), in which the protagonist, who has keloid scars from a nuclear accident, has his face surgically removed and transplanted with the face of a dead criminal.27 As a kind of political ontology or praxis from below, Hijikata’s butoh practice methodically engaged his dancers in a process of re-­possessing the human body in social conditions in which they were like living corpses that were increasingly oblivious to their own memories. In the interests of space, this can be distilled to two steps: a b

empty the body of ‘self ’; and become receptive to otherwise neglected, abandoned or silenced selves.28

Decolonial frames in Ankoku Butoh The axiomatic relations of white-­black and light-­dark, underpinned by the epistemology of the anthropological machine outlined above, spans an entire history of colonial ideology and enterprise, including the pan-­Asian project of the Japanese empire. Although the tenor of institutionalised discrimination differed during the Occupation in Japan, the United States tutor discouraged its hermetic protégé reconstituted under the economic and social model of Amer­ican liberal capitalism from engaging in unilateral foreign policy initiatives in the region, and with its Communist neighbours in particular. In a tendency towards victimhood as a subordinate to the dominant United States overlord, the nation’s pre-­ existing ideas of insularity and racial and cultural uniqueness remained under-­examined in post-­war society, while a lower strata in Japan’s internal urban and rural peripheries continued to be marginalised and exploited. Hijikata described a ‘schismogenesis’ or ‘duality schism’ which was inflected in the contorting butoh body as an ill-­fitting, lightening and whitening social mould set over inhumed darkened and blackened layers. He wrote: This cast-­off skin is totally different from that other skin that our body has lost. They are divided in two. One skin is that of the body approved by society. The other skin is that which has lost its identity.29

The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh   101 This was similar to experiences of occupation in internal and external colonies elsewhere. A ‘doubled’ paradox as described by W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), for example, for whom the negative configuration of ‘blackness’ in the compounded indignities of poverty, sickness and discrimination as determined by biopolitical parameters that enforced social enclosure, had condemned the black body to permanent development by an internalised (gestural, semiotic) mirror of ‘whiteness’.30 Reactive or acquiescent, the black body as locked within ‘natural’ givens (authenticity, particularity) lived a semi-­existence of estrangement through evacuation and return to itself as past.31 In the decolonising era of the 1950s until the 1970s, the importance of ‘blackness’ was central to the mobilisation of waves of protests around the world mainly led by the political left. It was taken up by Franz Fanon (1925–1961), a leading anti-­colonial thinker and champion of all oppressed peoples in opposition to French colonial rule in French-­Algeria. As a trained psychologist, Fanon identified how ‘whiteness’ operated to suppress indigenous forms of agency.32 Every colonized people – every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation … the colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.33 In France, Jean Genet’s The Blacks: A Clown Show (1958), for example, exposed French audiences in their complicity in the production of ‘terrorist’ reaction in France’s colonies.34 And in the United States during the mass civil rights and anti-­Vietnam war protests over these decades, popular leaders such as Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X and Mohammad Ali recognised and utilised ‘blackness’ as a platform of resistance to the United States-­led capitalist military enterprise.35 In Japan, just as Fanon had described ‘the black man’s soul’ to be the ‘white man’s artefact’, where white had once been the colour of funeral rites it had become the colour of domestic appliances.36 In this context, a small buzoku (group) community of butoh and other artists plied their trade in the mizu shōbai (‘water’ trade) in which night replaced day in an informal ‘black’ nightclub economy. Taking inspiration from Genet’s novels (such as Divine)37 and the tours of Josephine Baker (1954) and Katherine Dunham (1957) to nightclubs skirting United States bases (Yokohama),38 their butoh-­esque club performances inverted the normative and militarised masculinity of Ohno’s youth as an Imperial Japanese Army soldier and that of their United States army clientele. By celebrating subversive figures such as the cabaret diva, they elevated society’s ‘rubbish’ to statuesque icons in opposition to the elitist societal ideals of perfection and efficiency norms – an approach which also underpinned their butoh art performances. In parallel, the rise of civil society and the New Left and the flowering of  revolt led by a younger generation of student activists in the 1960s, social

102   A. Broinowski movements comprising of activists, unionists, intellectuals, artists and students demanded recognition of civil rights and demonstrated against the opportunistic, corrupt and oppressive policies of the Japanese government and the renewal of the United States-­Japan Security Treaty (ANPO) in 1959–1960. Bodily materiality remained a consistent focus as many groups and factions organised actions and clashed with authorities and sometimes themselves as they demanded greater self-­determination and political independence from United States foreign policy and its Amer­ican War in Viet Nam throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. In 1968, when prominent artists in Japan were identifying as ‘yellow negroes’ who threw rocks on the streets to the rhythms of black jazz (Terayama Shūji and Nakagami Kenji),39 while sharing the view that the public had been duped with the ‘bad cheque’ of democracy and recognising the theft and forfeiture of their cultural traditions,40 Hijikata preferred to contend that real change could only occur through the revolution of the human body itself. In his solo, Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: Rebellion of the Flesh (Nikutai no hanran: Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin), performed in the centenary year of the founding of the modern nation-­state of Japan under Emperor Meiji, Hijikata used sartorial and dynamic changes to evoke the experience of radical modernisation from the perspective of a subaltern agrarian population.41 If a narrative can be put to this dance, we might see a mysterious shamaness surrounded by animals conveyed on a palanquin from a Tōhoku village. As the shamaness disrobes to become a demon strapped with a golden phallus who frantically hurls himself into brass sheets hung with dead roosters, we can see a pre-­Shintō tengu visitation in a fertility ritual. Waltzing in a ballroom gown and black rubber gloves, then stripped to a doubtful teacher in a loincloth, and then skipping like a school girl in pigtails and long white socks, Hijikata transforms from chthonic mysticism to buffoonery to elegance, authority and innocence. He arrives tethered with ropes and suspended in the air, after which, presumably having crossed over to the other world, Hijikata took the curtain-­call with a fish in his mouth. This cyclical transformation from premodern to modern to contemporary to sacrificial ritual suggests repetition rather than rupture. While emptied of ‘primitive evil’ and disenchanted, the sensuous butoh body continues to be re-­inscribed by newly dominant ideology and material conditions. If butoh is read as a choreo-­historiography, then we can perceive a mobilised poor, rural population and their life-­world (communal memories and inherited practices embedded in land) exchanged as a ‘gift’ to a power elite as the nation-­state is subsumed within a United States-­led transnational political and economic regime. In short, the anthropological machine that undergirded the process of social engineering to reorient Japanese society towards accommodating United States military bases on Japanese soil was also enmeshed with free-­market principles. These bases provided the platforms for United States-­led military operations (in a continuum of the atomic gaze) that were launched in East and Southeast Asia in the Cold War decades were mainly to encircle and contain China and to insure and secure the profitability of subsequent United States and Japanese corporate

The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh   103 investment in these regions. The military aspect of these operations saw the slaughter of populations, the overwhelming majority of whom were poor rural agrarian peasants, much like Hijikata’s family, on the Korean peninsula, and in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos.42 In short, the atomic gaze entailed and drove both the violence of the United States war machine and the economic profits that it facilitated.

Sensuous bodies as resistance to ‘whiteness’ After the student-­led protest movement had been ‘kettled’ and subdued by state police by the end of the 1960s, protests moved into rural areas where the Tanaka administration was encouraging state-­corporate industrialisation as well as outsourcing to offshore factories in East and Southeast Asia. Many immiserated rural communities could not refuse offers of investment and public works by developers, which included the construction of nuclear power plants.43 In stark contrast to the massive industrial development being carried out by Japanese corporations in East Asia from the mid 1970s through the 1980s, as if to compensate for the dissolution of the welfare state ideal during high economic growth a resurgent nationalist discourse re-­emerged among Japanese intellectuals based on an ‘obsessive return’ to essentialised origins and a unique spiritual connection to nature.44 New Left leaders such as Yoshimoto Takaaki, aware of this collective fantasy (kyōdō gensō), embraced rural agrarianism as a chance for urbanised intellectuals to dehegemonise their status to learn of subaltern ‘emotionality’ in the village collective.45 Between 1965 and his death in 1986, Hijikata also seemed to be increasingly preoccupied with childhood memories of vanishing rural life in north east Japan (Tōhoku). He spoke of the experiential histories of a collective rural poor, whose communities had been subjugated and subjected to the demands of central government for produce (rice), horses, soldiers and women since national unification.46 And he took particular interest in the aesthetics of Tokugawa-­era kabuki, visual arts and taishū engeki (popular theatre).47 With mud as his declared origins of butoh, as distinct from any ethno-­ nationalist (minzoku) pure land, Hijikata’s choreographic notations (Butoh-­fu) which he compiled with Ashikawa Yōko and other butoh dancers in this period were designed to stimulate the imaginations of his dancers through images of babies in utero and infants, memories of the dead, and the non-­human realm – ducks, flowers, insects, wind, rocks. Instead of setting a specific form or image to imitate and perfect, however, the phrases were distilled into qualitative sensations which were to enhance sensitivity in the dancers and evoke empathy for the non-­human ecological world and collective localised experience. Hijikata wrote: Butoh plays with time, it also plays with perspective if we humans learn to see things from an animal, an insect, or even inanimate objects. The road trodden everyday is alive … we should value everything.48

104   A. Broinowski If subaltern collectivity could sustain some kind of resilience in the harsh urbanised world of competitive capitalism, this sort of dedicated somatic intimacy with the earth also offered a path through which neglected or forgotten identities could return. Hijikata’s crepuscular and transgressive aesthetics – wild, grotesque, erotic, ambiguous – and the butoh praxis of imagining, feeling, remembering and configuring the body as a liminal site between life and death dilated and deformed the normative ontology as defined by the capitalist family-­state structure within the Cold War division system of the atomic gaze. The darkness of butoh seemed to create necessary space for experiencing a multiplicity of others beyond the narrow confines and short-­term consumer memory of ‘whiteness’. In short, in cultivating emotions, senses and memories suppressed by the biopolitical order of rationalised capitalism, butoh-­ka could selectively loosen the bonds of individual subjectivity within hegemonic normativity in order to succour the dead for the living. To make gestures of the dead, to die again, to make the dead re-­enact once more their deaths in their entirety – these are what I want to experience within me. A person who has died once can die over and over again within me.49

Conclusion Ankoku butoh can be read as embodying lived histories of poverty, exploitation and collective materiality as its artists were exposed to the atomising ‘whiteness’ of liberal capitalism underpinned by the force of the atomic gaze as deployed by the United States hegemon in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although, unlike the work of the hibakusha poets or other artistic forms that responded more directly to the atomic bombs, the slow, grounded, contorted intensity unfolding without catharsis in butoh contrasted with the surrounding conditions of individuated and desiring affluence in a society reoriented by United States and Japanese capitalist growth and expansion into Asia. Its non-­ virtuosic yet focused mediation of the marginalised, the non-­human and non-­ living, can be recognised as an attempt to dissolve the divide between mind and body and human and nature inscribed in the modern human subject. In literally covering the butoh body with mud, it re-­sensitised a body that had been numbed to the sacrifice and erasure of a ‘blackened’ surplus population to sustain the vertical and stratified power structure. In so doing, butoh suggested the mnemonic potential in reconnecting the body with history and memory. This was, I contend, to cultivate a local modality of resistance to continuing impacts of the atomic gaze as propagated by the United States-­Japan alliance. Given that nuclear fission (technically since the discovery of uranium and its mining and milling), the human use of atomic bombs, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have been dispersed and secreted anthropogenic radioisotopes, some of which have half-­lives that reach practically forever into the future, into every living organism on the planet, re-­thinking human-­non-human relations –

The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh   105 organic, mineral, ecological – may be the only option to regenerate an ontological life-­world contra the atomic gaze that reduces and subjects the earth’s biodiversity at its basic atomic components to human domination, utility and value. As Hijikata wrote: The dancer through the Butoh spirit confronts the origin of his fears through a dance which crawls towards the bowels of the earth.50 In their performances, butoh artists seem to state: if a gaze represents a mode, system or disposition of one’s being in the world, then perhaps a more open and sentient awareness of being with others who have been neglected and framed out by a narrowly rationalised biopolitical construct of ‘human’ as instrumentalised by sovereign power for its own interests may be a step towards a reconstitution of the human as no longer fearful of and at war with the earth.

Notes   1 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Homo Sacer III, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen, (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998), 38.   2 Although the numbers continue to change as more hibakusha pass away, in August 2014 Hiroshima city recorded more than 450,000 hibakusha with the average age of 75. The total number of hibakusha from the Second World War certified by the Japanese government peaked in 1980 at 372,264, which dropped to 183,519 by 1 July 2015. • Deaths from bombings – • 292,325 in Hiroshima • 165,409 in Nagasaki.   3 For a development of this theme see Akira Mizuta-­Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).   4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Homo Sacer I, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (California: Stanford UP, 1998 (1995)), 176.   5 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6. Others who actively developed ‘scientific racism’, also known as ‘social Darwinism’, included Georges Cuvier, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, Charles Pickering, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton.   6 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 40; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 170.   7 Edmund P. Russell, ‘ “Speaking of Annihilation”: Mobilizing for War Against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914–1945’, The Journal of Amer­ican History, 82 (March, 1996): 1505.   8 See, for example, John Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 30.   9 Ōe Kenzaburō, Hiroshima Notes (New York: Grove Press), 182. 10 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 71–86, 91–111, particularly 104–105. 11 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 37; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 157. 12 See, for example, James Conant et al. ‘Groves Memo’, Manhattan District, Oak ridge, Tennessee, 30 October (1943), declassified 5 June 1974, accessed October 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Groves_memo_30oct43_p1.GIF. 13 See Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: Amer­ican Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 117–118.

106   A. Broinowski 14 Article 19 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty released the United States from any responsibility for the care and treatment of hibakusha, leaving compensation to the Japanese state. The Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP) censorship programme silenced many hibakusha claims, and its techniques were continued by the Japanese state. 15 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 62, 133. 16 Michel Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), 241. 17 Richard H. Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 252. Ōta Yōko was one of a number of well-­known hibakusha poets including Hara Tamiki, Kurihara Sadako, Toge Sankichi, Yoneda Eisaku, as well as the visual artist duo Ira and Toshi Maruki who reflected on hibakusha experiences. 18 Giorgio Agamben, The Open, 26–27. 19 Minear, 1990, 176–177. 20 Kyōko Hayashi, ‘ “Masks of Whatchamacallit”: A Nagasaki Tale (Nanjamonja no men)’, The Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 3:12, 12 December 2005, accessed January 2015, www.japanfocus.org/-Hayashi-­Kyoko/1668. 21 See for example, Peter Hayes and Roger Cavazos, ‘Complexity and Weapons of Mass Destruction in Northeast Asia’, Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia: Foreign Policies and the Korean Peninsula, ed. Peter Hayes and Kiho Yi, Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia: Foreign Policies and the Korean Peninsula (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 270. 22 See William Tsuitsui, Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of the Monsters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 13; Igarashi Yoshikuni, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture 1945–1970 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 121. 23 For example, Ōshima Nagisa, Imamura Shōhei, Yoshida Yoshihide, Hani Susumu, Okamoto Kihachi, Wakamatsu Kōji, Adachi Masao in film; Hosoe Eikoh and Moriyama Daidō in photography; Terayama Shūji, Suzuki Tadashi, Satoh Makoto, Kara Jūrō, Kishida Rio, Saitō Ren, Yamamoto Kiyokazu, Fukuda Yoshiyuki in theatre, as well as many visual artists including members of Gutai, Hi-­Red Centre, Jikken Kōbō, Shiraga Kazuo, Shinohara Ushio and Murakami Saburō. 24 Ohno Kazuo in Micki McGee, ‘An Avant-­Garde becomes an Institution’, High Performance, 9:1 (1986): 49. 25 Tatsumi Hijikata, Asbestos-­kan (ed.), The Body on the Edge of Crisis (Tokyo: PARCO, 1987), 84. 26 In a more Buddhist-­inspired direction, subsequent versions of the whitened body by some butoh-­ka (butoh dancers) included shaven heads, a detached serenity and semi-­ closed eyelids. 27 In Franju’s Eyes without a Face, the vivisectionist Dr Genessier kidnaps young women to steal their faces and graft them onto the ruined face of his daughter. The display of slaughter sequences in which the killing tools are shown and discussed in cool precision also can be associated with other contemporaneous works which include George Bataille’s images in Documents of the La Villette slaughterhouse (where Franju later shot his film), Francis Bacon’s abattoir carcasses and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 451. 28 Adam Broinowski, Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body during and after the Cold War (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 83. 29 Hijikata Tatsumi interview in Mark Holborn, Black Sun: The Eyes of Four – Roots and Innovation in Japanese Photography (New York: Aperture, 1986), 121. 30 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: The New Amer­ican Library, 1982), 44.

The atomic gaze and Ankoku Butoh   107 31 Charles Johnson, ‘The Phenomenology of the Black Body’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 32: 4 (1993): 595–614. 32 For how this operated in colonial and decolonised India see also Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1982, vol.  1), 1; Partha Chaterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed books, 1986), 100. 33 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1993), 18. 34 Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1993), 834–842; Claire Finburgh, ‘Micro Treatise’, in Jean Genet: Politics and Performance, ed. Claire Finburgh et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3. See also the development of a negritude politics in Jean Paul Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, The Massachusetts Review, 6: 1 (1964–1965): 13–52. 35 Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal: An African Amer­ican Anthology (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 443. 36 Emiko Ohnuki-­Tierney, ‘The Ambivalence of Self ’, Cultural Anthropology 5: 2 (1990): 203–205. 37 See, for example, Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers (New York: Grove Press 1991), 168. 38 Harry J. Elam and David Krasner, African-­Amer­ican Performance and Theater History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 193. 39 Nakagami Kenji, ‘Jazu kyōsaha [Jazz appreciation group]’, Fûkei no mukō e [‘Towards the Landscape’] (Tokyo: Fuyukisha, 1990). At this time, study groups were organising to raise consciousness of discrimination, whether towards burakumin or non-­white people. See Ira Reid and Naramoto Tatsuya, ‘Taidan: Kokujin sabetsu to buraku mondai’ [Discrimination against black people and the ‘buraku’ issue], Buraku, 164 (1963): 44–48. 40 Hijikata Tatsumi, ‘To Prison’, TDR, 44: 1 (1961) 2000: 43. Historian Ienaga Saburō similarly described ‘the slogan of democracy as nothing but hollow cant, and the flip-­ side of wartime militarism’. Ienaga Saburō, Japan’s Past, Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 127. 41 See Hijikata Tatsumi, ‘Nikutai no Hanran’, Hijikata Tatsumi no butai [The Stage of Hijikata Tatsumi], CD-­ROM (Tokyo: Art and Arts Administration research centre, Keio University, 2004). 42 See, for example, Honda Katsuichi, Senjō no mura (Vietnam: A Voice from the Villages) (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 1967). 43 Tanaka Kakuei, Nihon Rettō kaizō [Building a New Japan: A Plan for Remodeling the Japanese Archipelago] (Tokyo: Simul Press, 1983 [1972]). 44 Harry Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988), 66. 45 See Yoshimoto Takaaki, Kaitei Shinpan: Kyōdō Gensō ron [Revised judgement: Communal Illusion theory] (Tokyo: Kadokawa bunkō), 1982. 46 See Hijikata Tatsumi, ‘Nikutai no Hyōgensha tachi [Body performers]’, Zen’ei Hōsō Inroku, (Tokyo: NHK, 1985). ‘Pre-­modern’ internal colonies in rural Japan were entangled during Imperial expansion and included a state-­corporate managed and financed port-­trading system. 47 For example, Eikoh Hosoe’s ‘Sickle Weasel/Kamaitachi’ a 1969 folk-­tale inspired photographic journal set in Japan’s rural north referenced in Mark Holborn, Eikoh Hosoe (New York: Aperture, 1999), 26–29. See also, Moriyama Daidō, Suda Issei, Kitai Kazuo, Tōhoku e, 1974–1977. 48 Hijikata Tatsumi in Nourit Masson-­Sekine and Jean Viala, Butoh: Shades of Darkness (Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1988): 65. 49 Hijikata, Butoh: Shades of Darkness, 127. 50 Hijikata, Butoh: Shades of Darkness, 188.

8 Australian POW and Occupation force experiences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki A digital hyper-­visualisation Stuart Bender and Mick Broderick Introduction For contemporary visitors to Hiroshima and Nagasaki the legacy of the Bomb is mostly abstract: these places are pre-­inscribed with historical and social significance. While these two cities were subject to catastrophic erasure in August 1945, after reconstruction there remained surprisingly few physical artefacts to remind visitors of the atomic bombings. So how do residents and visitors make sense of these unique ‘places’? While the respective Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bomb Museums and Peace Parks display multiple forms of memory work (from dioramas, audio-­visual productions and bomb simulations, to survivor testimony and artwork) a pedestrian wandering the central avenues and boulevards may find it difficult to discover the Atom bombs’ visible imprint upon the twenty-­first century cities. The nuclear conflagration that instantaneously consumed the wartime infrastructure was quickly replaced by the rebuilding of Japan, overseen by Occupation troops. The annihilation of place was subsumed by the rapid return to industrial and technological prowess under a new peacetime Constitution. The topographic erasure was itself erased and literally re-­placed. Comparison panoramic photographs taken 70 years apart from near identical camera positions at street level reveal the radical transformation that has occurred in these locations (Figures 8.1–8.2). However, there is also a unique, mostly forgotten, Australian legacy both physically and psychically etched upon the ‘traumascapes’ (Tumarkin 2005) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Tumarkin, traumascapes are: much more than physical settings of tragedies: they emerge as spaces, where events are experienced and re-­experienced across time. Full of visual and sensory triggers, capable of eliciting whole palettes of emotions, traumascapes catalyse and shape remembering and reliving of traumatic events. It is through these places that the past, whether buried or laid bare for all to see, continues to inhabit and refashion the present [… They] are a distinctive category of place, transformed physically and psychically by suffering [and are] precisely the places that remind us that the past cannot simply be erased, or for that matter, simply reconstructed. (12; 18)

Australian POW and BCOF experiences   109

Figure 8.1 Section of 360-degree panorama taken in Hiroshima by Shigeo Hayashi, 1945. Source: courtesy of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Figure 8.2 Section of 360-degree panorama taken in April 2015 by the authors. Note the iconically preserved Genbaku Dome in both images at frame right – partly obscured by trees in both images.

For the Australian troops of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF ), arriving in Hiroshima in February 1946 was a raw and mixed experience. From 1946 to 1952, more than 16,000 Australian service personnel (and in some cases their partners and families) were stationed in Kure, a naval port town 25 km southeast of Hiroshima city, where the first atomic bomb had been detonated on 6 August 1945. Australian troops comprised the largest contingent of Occupation forces in and around Hiroshima, often working alongside Japanese labourers rebuilding sanitation, communications and other essential infrastructure (Gerster 2008). Approximately 450 km to the southwest, the city of Nagasaki was a parallel site of mass trauma. At the time of the second atomic attack on 9 August, 24 Australian Prisoners of War (POW) were imprisoned labourers working only 1.7 km from the hypocentre (Broderick and Palmer 2015). Miraculously, all the Australians survived the attack. According to Hugh Clarke, an Australian POW in Nagasaki from 1944–1945, even the most hardened of his fellow POWs were emotionally overwhelmed upon seeing the atomic aftermath of the A-­bomb (Clarke 1985). This history of the POWs in Nagasaki and BCOF experiences of Hiroshima is little known to Australian and Japanese citizens alike (Gerster 2008). Given the intergenerational experiences of tens of thousands of Australian BCOF personnel and their families – and by extension, their interaction with millions of Japanese

110   S. Bender and M. Broderick citizens during the seven-­year Occupation – there remains a forgotten lacuna of place that demands ongoing recollection and representation. To coincide with the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan (6 and 9 August 2015) the authors mounted a research-­led, immersive exhibition at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth: Fading Lights: Australian POWs and BCOF Troops in Japan 1945–52.1 The exhibit was intended to draw attention to the experience of Australian POWs in Nagasaki at the time of the atom bombing, and the Occupation forces stationed in the Hiroshima prefecture soon after the Pacific war ended. The timing was doubly significant in that 2015 was part of the centenary commemorations of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac). Our project embraced the Anzac centenary committee’s objectives to include Anzac traditions such as the Australians who served as peacekeepers, a role often marginalised in mainstream myths of Anzac (Brown 2014; Seal 2009, 2010). Hence, our project was designed to critically engage with this little understood aspect of Australian military history while experimenting with new digital modes of transmission, especially in crafting immersive experiences for new audiences. During the on-­site production visit to these locations in April 2015 we soon discovered that the Japanese had equally (if not further) erased the POW and BCOF experience from their local and national history. Prior to our arrival, even our liaison from the Kure tourism commission knew nothing of the BCOF history in his home town. Similarly, during an interview with the vice principal of the Koyagi Junior High School, he explained that, although he was born in Nagasaki, he was not aware Koyagi (10 km south of the city) had been the site of a POW camp during World War II until he had worked with students on a school project that revealed the historical significance of the place. For Australians, as latter day pilgrims, it remains a difficult task to locate the sites of BCOF or Australian POW camps in order to retrace their family history. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify traces of Australian presence in these places. Around Kure, for example, some street signs and the odd map point to the Nijimura industrial complex (Figure 8.3), but there is no indication that this site once housed thousands of BCOF troops during the Occupation.

Figure 8.3 Extract from the exhibition’s two-panel diptych showing the contemporary orientation map of Nijimura, the former BCOF housing district in situ today. Representative image from Fading Lights exhibition. Source: image by the authors.

Australian POW and BCOF experiences   111 Slightly more visible is the former ‘Anzac Park’, now a public sports field, where BCOF troops ‘incessantly’ marched and paraded. Only here it is possible to find a small sign, in Japanese, indicating the site once bore the name of the Anzacs. In Nagasaki, where hundreds of Allied POWs were held captive in two camps at the time of the A-­bombing, a small memorial dedicated to the soldiers who died in captivity (either from the atomic bomb, or from illness and mistreatment) can be found in a little visited corner of the Peace Park, adjacent to public toilets (Figure 8.4) with the majority of the textual narrative (on the ‘rear’ of the monument) facing away from the public pathway and virtually inaccessible due to shrubs on either side. Only recently has the Koyagi Junior High School recognised its POW antecedents by erecting a small metal sign in the car park next to the entrance. Nagasaki City Councillor, and first-­generation hibakusha, Mr Toyoichi Ihara, has successfully campaigned to mount a larger memorial next to the school playgrounds that was installed in September 2015. As yet there is no public monument to those POWs who perished at the forced labour camp closest to the Nagasaki hypocentre (1.7 km) – a site still operated by Mitsubishi industries, despite a 2015 public apology to Amer­ican POWs (and not other foreign nationals).

Representing place The Fading Lights exhibition consisted of five different digital displays, all of which re-­presented and re-­interpreted the in situ places of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Figure 8.4 A small memorial dedicated to ‘all foreign war victims in Nagasaki. May it be a token of Man’s prayer for the abolition of nuclear weapons and a pledge never to take arms again’. Source: photograph by the authors.

112   S. Bender and M. Broderick relevant to these neglected aspects of Australian military service history. We purposely designed the immersive, digital installation to enable the creative re-­ visioning of these places using archival photography, film and interview transcripts as a means of rendering visible the invisible and latent Australian cultural/historical significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The exhibition was held in a visualisation laboratory, named the Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch), located within the John Curtin Gallery. The entire project self-­ consciously relates to our praxis as artist-­researchers visiting a foreign location in an attempt to use digital arts practice to render visible the legacy of previous Australians’ involvement and experiences in these culturally and historically significant localities. There were five displays in the exhibition: 1 2

3 4

5

A two-­panel diptych installation on the unique ‘Wedge’ screen (Bender and Broderick 2015b). A 3D-HDTV screen which featured a seven-­minute stereoscopic documentary filmed inside the Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima, showing views that no tourist would be able to experience (for 2D video see: Bender and Broderick 2015c). An 8K-resolution multi-­panel tiled Matrix display measuring 10 m2 with a 12-minute loop of archival and contemporary material from Nagasaki (see: Bender and Broderick 2015a). A large 180-degree Cylinder screen (3 m high, 8 m in diameter) featuring overlapping panoramic photographs taken in April 2015 from identical camera positions as four classic panoramic photographs taken three months after the atomic bomb detonation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945 (Figures 8.1 and 8.2 are examples). A 4 m diameter immersive dome with 360-degree panoramic photographs taken inside the historic Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima. A selection of these immersive panoramas was made available for public download as 360degree augmented reality experiences on various mobile devices, at our website www.fadinglights.com.au.

Of the five works on simultaneous display, the material for the Wedge was the most ‘traditional’ installation in the exhibition. Nevertheless, our design enabled both screens of the Wedge diptych to speak to, and against, each other, varying the timing of transitions as well as incorporating a digitally layered approach to compositing some of the archival material. Each of the two screens measured 3.8 m diagonally, with a 10.5-minute loop of archival material, juxtaposed with contemporary imagery of the same locations, interviews with BCOF historian Professor Robin Gerster, and repurposed voice-­over narration from veteran Australian POW and BCOF soldier, Allan Chick. The conceptual tension explored in this work is the cognitive paradox that although these locations clearly exist – i.e., the sites of Fukuoka Camp #14 in Nagasaki, Camp #2 on Koyagi, and Anzac Park in Kure – the historical places do not. Camp #14, a mere 1.7 km from the

Australian POW and BCOF experiences   113 explosion on 9 August 1945, was rebuilt under Occupation as a new Mitsubishi factory. Anzac Park is now used for community sporting events and recreation. And as the panoramic photographs in Figure 8.1–8.2 indicate, the specific places of Hiroshima and Nagasaki captured in the archival photos are radically different from what they were 70 years ago and near impossible to identify today. The 3D stereoscopic documentary Inside the Dome was recorded in April 2015 when the authors were granted rare access to enter inside the iconic and World Heritage protected Genbaku Dome in the Hiroshima Peace Park, with public entry restricted from the late 1960s. The video is comprised of a deliberately simple visual structure: a series of carefully composed and static shots begin on the periphery of the structure and progressively the view changes to positions from the inside. The montage gradually reveals a range of perspectives in 3D never before seen by contemporary audiences. This series of static tableaus enables viewers to be immersed in a space from inside the Dome that is physically inaccessible even to tourists who visit the physical site. There is no other existent stereoscopic imagery available from inside the site, although there are images taken by visitors in the immediate years after the bombing. For instance, some BCOF veterans have shown the authors their personal photographs taken from inside the site during their tour, as well as some professional photographs that were available to buy on the street. In the Dome’s current state, there are limited 2D still images available from inside, as well as some very brief shots within a video produced by NHK to promote the UNESCO World Heritage designation (UNESCO n.d.). Aside from the importance of this visual content, the other significant component is that the film features a third-­ generation hibakusha, Kana Miyoshi, who accompanied the authors inside the Dome and was able to physically explore the site, which has familial and psychic significance for her as a resident and native of Hiroshima. Speaking in English Kana’s is the sole voice heard during the film, with excerpts taken from an interview prior to entering the site and immediately afterwards. Before entering the Dome, she notes that her grandmother, a first-­generation hibakusha, rarely discussed her experience, memories, feelings or thoughts about 6 August 1945. Importantly, through the interview it emerges that Kana’s immersion inside the space left her with more questions than answers concerning the historical significance of the Dome. For example, towards the conclusion she is equivocal and unsure how about she feels, wanting to ‘clear up’ her mind by talking with her grandmother about the experience (Figure 8.5). The meditative narration is bookended by a Japanese rendition of ‘Lullaby of Oleanda’, a song that has become associated with Hiroshima and based on a poem by a hibakusha, Michiko Ishii, who ironically notes it: is not a song to put babies to sleep peacefully. The girl described in this song is myself, and also implies children who died because of the A-­bombing. […] Those children and I are both victims of the A-­bombing. By singing in tears with a prayer of lament, I want to console the souls of the children whose short-­lived lives ended like night dew. In this way I can

114   S. Bender and M. Broderick give comfort to their souls […] I wrote the poem ‘Lullaby of Oleander’ because I wanted to stir up children’s minds, not to put them to sleep. (Ishii) Importantly, from the perspective of installation and framing, a 3D-HDTV was positioned alongside the Gallery’s existing two-­storey high reprint of an iconic Anzac photograph of the 11th Battalion in front of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. The Gallery staff were careful to ensure enough space existed between the 11th Battalion image and our 3D screen so as to make it clear to audiences that they were two separate exhibits. The resultant juxtaposition of 1914 photograph with 1945/2015 imagery of the Genbaku Dome throws into sharp relief the alternate ways by which Australia and Japan remember military history. More information on the 11th Battalion image is available at the following link: http://news. curtin.edu.au/events/together-­100-years-­apart-exhibition/. Inside the exhibition space itself, the Matrix 8K resolution multi-­panel, tiled display featured a 12-minute loop of contemporary location filming and interviews, composited and edited together with archival photographs, military records and eyewitness testimony of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki from Koyagi Island POWs. Among the overlay of images are archival photos depicting Australian soldiers languishing on Koyagi and views of the camp taken from reconnaissance aircraft at the time. The multiscreen panel material included an interview with the vice principal of Koyagi Junior High School, Mr Tetsuya Hirano, who commented on the peace studies programme which the students undertake each year and occasionally addresses the POW history of the school as well as the central topic of nuclear weapons. The piece also contains an interview with hibakusha and

Figure 8.5 Frame enlargement of Kana outside the Genbaku Dome. Source: image by the authors.

Australian POW and BCOF experiences   115 ­ agasaki City Councillor, Mr Toyoichi Ihara, who explained his strong interest in N elucidating and preserving the memory of POWs at Camp #2. Artistically, the challenge for us was to use this very large, ultra high-­ resolution screen in ways that would not overwhelm the viewer but rather would encourage an engagement across the screen layout. This meant not simply filling the screen continually, but using its Matrix capacity to explore graphic options for placement of text, images and occasional full-­screen layouts. In addition, this video work involved more of the geo-­located matching compositions, such as the rare photograph taken from Koyagi Island of the Fat Man mushroom cloud forming over Nagasaki harbour, approximately 10 km away. We also identified the exact site of a photograph taken by former Australian POW and author, Hugh Clarke, who visited the site again in 1983 and met with former prison guards, recreating this image as a digital overlay. In one key moment, the entire screen is completely blank except for clean white text, citing testimony from Clarke as he recalls the aftermath of the bomb on Nagasaki. Similar testimony from another Australian, Bob Watkins, who witnessed the bomb explode from his position on Koyagi Island is included: ‘A great flash lit up the surroundings […] then there was a feeling of heat, huge noise of explosion, followed soon by a great rush of air [and the] shock of concussion transmitted through the ground.’ As we discuss later, these inclusions of contrasting veteran testimony is often ambiguous. Our exhibition deliberately avoided didacticism in its representation of the Bomb and its use, preferring the immersive, audio-­visual experience of place to engender the associative affect. Perhaps physically dominating the exhibition space, the large 180-degree curved Cylinder screen in the HIVE displayed a series of five famous panoramic images taken months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which gradually dissolved into panoramic views from the same geo-­located camera positions precisely recorded in April 2015. While the original photographs, taken in late 1945 by Shigeo Hayashi (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) have been incorporated into other museum displays during the past 70 years, none use immersive digital techniques to convey the spatial phenomenology of then and now. For instance, a gigantic mural print of one of Hayashi panoramas can be found in the Hiroshima Peace Center, and the image from Nagasaki is printed on a large knee-­high sign near the Nagasaki Peace Center overlooking the same vantage. Nevertheless, this type of ‘before and after’ photographic comparison is quite commonly available in a variety of other historical and geographic contexts, often showing the passage of time. They generally create impact by way of the visual contrast inherent in the then/now configuration. However, there are a number of aspects to our visualisation strategy that are quite unique. First, the rarity of the 1945 composite panoramas themselves is significant. The stark erasure of the human presence at the sites in Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes them undeniably powerful images in their own right. Complemented with our matching contemporary digital panoramas, they gain greater significance, as testament to the both effects of the Bomb and of the capacity of reconstitution in post-­war Japan, as each image slowly dissolves to the contrasting present-­day

116   S. Bender and M. Broderick view. A minimalist, but spatially significant, soundtrack accompanied these visuals. During the historical images of bomb devastation there is total silence. This is gradually replaced by a recording of ‘wild’ location sound at each site as the image is replaced by the contemporary scene. The fourth immersive display in the exhibition, shrouded from initial view of the other installations, was the 180-degree upright diaphragm display featuring a slowly rotating projection of our 360-degree panoramic photographs taken inside the Genbaku Dome. These images were captured during the same site-­visit as the 3D material, using a fisheye lens DSLR camera with stitching performed with software during post-­production. As with the 3D video described earlier these are perspectives impossible for the contemporary tourist to experience due to the mandated World Heritage protection of the site. Hence, this installation not only offers unique views from inside of the Dome, but the presentation of the experience itself is significant as a form of hyper-­visualisation (Figure 8.6). The display was programmed to perform a very subtle drifting pan, horizontally across the image, and timed to change every 30 seconds to the next perspective. Although the screen is large enough for more than one person to see what is on the display, the ideal viewing position is directly in the centre in order to achieve an orthographically correct perspective. To maximise optimum viewing conditions, this 4 m-­wide diaphragm shaped screen was partially shrouded with black curtains to shield it from the exterior ambient light. Also within this area, six iPads with augmented reality apps preloaded with additional 360-degree

Figure 8.6 The authors standing in front of the 180-degree panorama display. Source: photo courtesy of Sam Proctor – Curtin University.

Australian POW and BCOF experiences   117 high-­resolution images were available for visitors to view. The iPads enabled individual orientation to view on-­screen content according to an internal gyroscope, allowing the viewer to rotate, tilt and pan their perspective within the Genbaku Dome. Viewing in this context meant as the devices were moved about within the exhibition space users could individually access several 360-degree views from within and outside the Dome’s restricted World Heritage space. Thus visitors to this part of the exhibition were granted the ability to experience either a ‘passive’ immersion before the large formatted imagery and/or utilise the adjacent iPads haptically as augmented reality. Readers can download and view these same panoramas to smart phones or tablets by visiting the exhibition website: www.fadinglights.com.au. Overall, viewing these images enabled a solitary contemplation of the material. Again, the sound design was important but understated here. A low, ambient loop of audio captured inside the Dome can be heard accompanying the pictures. Additionally, the gong of the Peace Bell (approximately 120 m across the river from the Genbaku Dome) could be heard periodically throughout the entire exhibition, though in a muted way because of the curtains shrouding the display. Thus physically, visually and acoustically, the shrouded arrangement of the display encouraged an individual encounter with the material (though a pragmatic contingency to minimise light contamination). Given the fixed layout of the exhibition/visual laboratory space, it became part of the overall design that none of the screen presentations had a definite beginning or end point. Rather, the design permitted audiences to move at random from one screen to the next, perhaps returning to see more of the material on the earlier display(s). However, audience members did not generally behave this way. During the four days of the exhibition’s official opening times audiences tended to choose a particular screen as their first encounter with the space and then moved to another screen after watching several minutes of content. A handful of audience members returned briefly to particular displays (in particular the Wedge), but for the most part audiences did not come back to a display once they had moved on. Although this was quite surprising audience behaviour, it is indicative of the value of designing each piece as a non-­narrative loop that some exhibition participants were able to move from one to the next at their leisure. Also significant is the quite large number of people who stood in front of particular displays for the entire duration of the content and only moved on once they realised the material had looped back to the point at which they started viewing. We discuss some of these audience movements and interactions with the material in the conclusion below.

Virtually revisiting Japan In order to locate these sites as contemporary places, we relied upon our own geographic knowledge from earlier visits as both authors had travelled to Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki previously. Drawing from these experiences, it was possible to employ Google Maps, Google Earth and Streetview to remotely identify likely locations prior to site visits in situ.

118   S. Bender and M. Broderick We also relied upon local Japanese liaisons from the Hiroshima Film Commission, the Kure Tourist Commission, and the Nagasaki Tourist Commission. Some of these Japanese staff had friends who also were able to help identify obscure locales (for instance, a friend of our translator in Nagasaki lived on Koyagi Island and was able to find the likely camera position of a rare photograph taken of the explosion from ground-­level on 9 August 1945). Throughout our on-­location scouting, digital recording and the post-­ production editing process, one of the key methods to match the camera positions was via the position, location and scale of mountains in the background. Note, for instance in many re-­photographed locations in the Wedge diptych, the presence of the same mountains in the background are indexical of the place’s witness to the destruction in 1945 and subsequent reconstruction. Ironically, the new Mitsubishi building at frame-­right echoes the continuity and legacy of place, as both a former POW slave labour camp and site of atomic bomb devastation. There is limited public material in circulation concerning the history of BCOF and Australian POWs in Nagasaki. However, the Australian War Memorial holds a great number of historical photographs, film footage, and archival records related to the Australian experience in Japan. As Gerster notes, ‘The camera, moreover, was the most important means by which the Occupation was officially communicated to the public back home’ (2015, 281). Significantly, one sequence from our diptych involved juxtaposing the contemporary views from the same camera positions as a string of archival motion clips commonly used in many historical documentary productions on the bomb. Thus it is important to note that traces of the BCOF legacy do also appear – albeit uncredited – in the cultural visual memory of the atomic bombings. Given the difficulty of mimetically approaching the trans-­historical authenticity of place, we deliberately adopted an impressionistic presentation of the spaces, people and experiences while focussing on two (deceased) real-­life characters, former Australian POWs Allan Chick and Hugh Clarke. The diptych features their testimony (in Chick’s case, re-­recorded with the voice of a contemporary actor). Later in his life Chick, who survived the Nagasaki explosion and returned to Japan as a BCOF soldier, reflected on the Bomb: Well I’m all in favour of it myself. As far as I’m concerned, it saved several million lives. I think that’s a very good argument in favour of it. I think since the advent of the bomb, we’ve had no more world wars. […] before the bomb, they had two world wars in twenty-­five years. I consider it to have been a good thing, actually. In our multiscreen exhibition design, this eyewitness testimony remains controversial for post-­war generations. It contrasts and competes with other perspectives featured on the large panel screen in which POWs at Koyagi Island describe the flash, surface concussion and mushroom cloud. Using on-­screen text, fellow Nagasaki POW Clarke is more equivocal in describing the atomised place:

Australian POW and BCOF experiences   119 Twisted girders protruding like obscene tombstones […] I felt that no matter how much we had suffered no people on Earth could have deserved such a fate. At the same time […] I was convinced that no prisoner of war in Japan would have remained alive much longer without it. Unlike the conventional portrayals of the atomic bomb, which typically privilege either the Amer­ican military/political view or the Japanese civilian (hibakusha) perspective, our exhibition was created as an immersive, digital space favouring the subjective view of the Australians who witnessed and were affected by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As visitors moved about the exhibition viewing material across the five HIVE screens, they could repeatedly hear POW Chick’s words (and other commentators) reflecting on the bomb in an audio-­ visual loop. This lingering, disembodied testimony was employed to defamiliarise and reorient audience’s prevailing perspectives of the atomic bombings.

Conclusion and audience reaction As part of the project design, we were interested in the engagement audiences had with both the historical material about place, as well as with the immersive nature of the exhibition space itself. Simple survey forms were available with a range of questions about the nature of the material and types of screen experiences. We also adopted a minimalist observational methodology involving a small camera, time-­lapsed to record one frame per 30 seconds during the limited opening hours of the exhibition. This footage was analysed to measure how long participants engaged with each screen. Participants could be tracked, but not personally identified. Audience members who did not remain in front of a screen for longer than one minute – or who were not actively engaging with the content – were not counted. A summary of the available data is in Table 8.1 (below). This data is merely a metric of how long viewers appeared to be engaged by a particular screen; it does not offer direct insight into what the audience thought of the content or what opinions they may have formed afterwards (hand-­written comments sheets tracked these qualitative results). Nonetheless, some of these results were pleasantly surprising to us. In an installation-­exhibition with five competing displays, nearly half of the people who stopped to view the ‘Wedge’ Table 8.1  Audience engagement (duration) Screen

Content duration

Mean viewing time

Mode viewing time

Viewed two-thirds of the content or more (%)

Wedge

10.5 mins

11 mins

57

Cylinder

4 mins

2 mins

52

Matrix

16 mins

8 mins (Range: 1–20 mins) 3.2 mins (Range: 1–8 mins) 7 mins (Range: 1–19 mins)

2 mins

31

120   S. Bender and M. Broderick exhibit watched approximately 80 per cent of the 10.5-minute video content, with a quarter watching the entire piece and moving on after they realised the content was repeated in a loop. Exhibition ‘fatigue’ (Bitgood 2009; Davey 2005) and ‘transient’ installation engagement (Petersen 2015) is a common phenomenon affecting static and audio-­visual displays. In the context of contemporary museum installation works, the statistics of audience engagement with the Matrix were much better than average with a mean viewing time of just under 50 per cent and nearly a third staying to watch more than 70 per cent of the looped content. In contrast with the other competing displays in our exhibition, the Matrix may appear less successful. However, we speculate that one of the reasons for lower engagement with this content may well be its immediate proximity to the entry passageway. This meant that audiences initially experienced the Matrix sequence upon entry, which contained a range of rich and complex overlapping audio-­visual content, interspersed with video interviews. The remaining immersive displays could be heard and seen alongside the Matrix, possibly drawing viewers away. It should be noted that curtains shrouded both the display of the large diaphragm screen and viewers using the augmented reality iPads. Therefore it was impossible for the static camera to record participation for this part of the exhibit. With regard to the Wedge display, the following data is of note. Unlike most audience engagement with digital and audio-­visual installations, our visitors spent a higher proportion of time in front of the Wedge encountering both POW and BCOF stories than would be normally be expected. As a large, 90-degree digital diptych both screens comprising the Wedge ran simultaneous audio-­visual material occupying either fragments of each of the two panels or the entire space. The video ran in a continuous loop of 10.5 minutes. Of the weekend viewers recorded by our camera, nearly half stayed to view 80 per cent of the content on the Wedge, and a fifth of the audience watched more than 100 per cent of the entire content (i.e., they waited until after they had completed the loop). This result is surprising for an installation-­exhibition with five, large, competing immersive displays. Just as Holocaust and other such museums worldwide are charged with the task of ‘sustaining memory’ in relation to events of which present generations have no direct experience (Messham-­Muir 2004, 97–98), our exhibition strives to evoke the traumascapes of Japan (atomic, post-­atomic and slave labour camps) by exploring the artistic friction between digital media, Anzac mythology and dark tourism (Broderick 2008, 2010; Lennon and Foley 2000). The latter is a burgeoning interest for a younger cohort of Australian pilgrims visiting Anzac heritage sites such as Gallipoli and the Kokoda Track (Capper 2014; Lynn 2014). These locations are, in part, promoted by government policy (for example, see Anzac Centenary Advisory Board 2013), and are bi-­partisan political activities not without criticism (McKay 2013). Irrespective of the national ideology informing such commemorative acts, as the Fading Lights project has demonstrated, the immersive, digital re-­interpretation of historically significant places via hyper-­visualisation is an effective means of engaging new audiences with largely forgotten archival images and sounds.

Australian POW and BCOF experiences   121

Note 1 The authors would like to thank Curtin’s Faculty of Humanities and the Australia-­Asia Pacific Institute for their funding of the research field-­trip and exhibition, as well as the Australian War Memorial for its in-­kind support by way of the rights usage and sourcing of some archival materials from BCOF. We would also like to thank the staff at the Curtin HIVE for their technical advisement during the production of the exhibition materials as well as their valuable on-­site efforts during the exhibition dates to ensure clean playback of the content for each display. In addition, we thank our official representatives of the Hiroshima, Kure, and Nagasaki Tourism Commissions for their invaluable and essential time and assistance while we were in country during April 2015.

References Anzac Centenary Advisory Board. 2013. Anzac Centenary Advisory Board: Report to Government. Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Accessed 7 March, www.anzaccente nary.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/acab_report.doc. Bender, Stuart Marshall, and Mick Broderick. 2015a. Fading Lights: High Resolution Flat Panel Presentation of Nagasaki Pows at Koyagi Island. Accessed 1 March, https:// youtu.be/e_iEiRGMGjA. Bender, Stuart Marshall, and Mick Broderick. 2015b. Fading Lights: Wedge Diptych Screen Presentation of Bcof Occupation of Kure and Australian Pows in Nagasaki. Accessed 1 March, https://youtu.be/AdTX2-eEV58. Bender, Stuart Marshall, and Mick Broderick. 2015c. Inside the Dome (2d Version). Accessed 1 March, https://youtu.be/OsGdn0s5mYg. Bitgood, Stephen. 2009. ‘Museum Fatigue: A Critical Review’. Visitor Studies 12 (2): 93–111. Broderick, Mick. 2008. ‘Waiting to Exhale: Somatic Responses to Place and the Genocidal Sublime’. IM: Interactive Media (4). http://imjournal.murdoch.edu.au/im-­issue-4-2008. Broderick, Mick. 2010. ‘Topographies of Trauma, Dark Tourism and World Heritage: Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome’. Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (24). http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/broderick.htm. Broderick, Mick, and David Palmer. 2015. ‘Australian, British, Dutch and U.S. Pows: Living under the Shadow of the Nagasaki Bomb’. The Asia-­Pacific Journal 13 (32). http://apjjf.org/2015/13/32/Mick-­Broderick/4358.html. Brown, James. 2014. Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession. Collingwood: Redback. Capper, Stephanie. 2014. Anzac Day: Young Australians Take Pilgrimage to Gallipoli. ABC News. Accessed 7 March, www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-25/young-­australianstake-­anzac-pilgrimage-­to-gallipoli/5410732. Clarke, Hugh V. 1985. Twilight Liberation: Australian Prisoners of War between Hiroshima and Home. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Davey, Gareth. 2005. ‘What Is Museum Fatigue?’ Visitor Studies Today 8 (3): 17–21. Gerster, Robin. 2008. Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan. Melbourne: Scribe. Gerster, Robin. 2015. ‘Capturing Japan: Australian Photography of the Postwar Military Occupation’. History of Photography 39 (3): 279–299. Ishii, Michiko. n.d. Quoted in Floating Lantern: Hiroshima Speaks Out. Accessed May, http://h-­s-o.net/ryuto/en/soundphoto/index.html.

122   S. Bender and M. Broderick Lennon, John, and Malcolm Foley. 2000. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Continuum. Lynn, Charlie. 2014. Kokoda Day: Deeds Not Words. Accessed 7 March, http://blog. kokodatreks.com/2014/11/03/kokoda-­day-deeds-­not-words. McKay, Jim. 2013. ‘A Critique of the Militarisation of Australian History and Culture Thesis: The Case of Anzac Battlefield Tourism’. PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 10 (1). Messham-­Muir, Kit. 2004. ‘Dark Visitations: The Possibilities and Problems of Experience and Memory in Holocaust Museums’. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art: Art and Ethics 4 (2): 97–111. Petersen, Anne Ring. 2015. Installation Art: Between Image and Stage. Copenhagen: Museum Tuscalanum Press. Seal, Graham. 2009. ‘Anzac: The Sacred in the Secular’. In Sacred Australia – Post Secular Considerations, ed. Makarand Paranjape, 210–224. Melbourne, Australia: Clouds of Magellan. Seal, Graham. 2010. ‘Folklore, History and Myth at an Anzac Memorial’. Australian Folklore (25): 171–181. Tumarkin, Maria. 2005. Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. UNESCO. n.d. Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome). UNESCO. Accessed 18 July, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/775/.

9 In the light of Hiroshima Banalizing violence and normalizing experiences of the atomic bombing Yuki Miyamoto

Introduction: representation of lightness of the light On his largely successful foreign campaign tour in Europe in 2008, a Democratic nominee for Amer­ican president, Senator Barack Obama, faced about 100,000 audience in Berlin, and made a momentous speech calling for a world free from nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom. It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era.1 Then, he emphasized, “This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.” The audience all over the world, including Hiroshima citizens, saw a new light—however dim it was—to end the nuclear age, and enthusiastically embraced his speech. In the beginning of his presidency, the appeal to disarm nuclear weapons was repeated in Prague, the Czech Republic in 2009 and once again toward the end of his tenure, in Hiroshima in 2016. Nevertheless, the actual United States nuclear policy betrays otherwise.2 On October 21, 2008, three months after Obama’s speech in Berlin, people in Hiroshima witnessed another kind of light. A group of ambitious artists based in Japan, Chim↑Pom,3 whom documentarian Linda Hoaglund describes as “the young Japanese art provocateurs’ collective,”4 chartered a small airplane to draw the word “pika” with its exhaust five times between 7:30 a.m. and noon over Hiroshima. They simultaneously filmed and photographed their performance from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park so as to frame the word “pika” appearing over the Atomic Bomb Dome. Although “pika” is a common Japanese onomatopoeia for a flashlight, or cleanness and brightness, in this context, the word “pika” in the sky drawn by Chim↑Pom undoubtedly alluded to the flash from the atomic bombing. In Hiroshima, the bomb was long referred to as “pika-­don” or simply “pika,” derived from its blinding light (“pika”) followed by the roar (“don”) emanating from the explosion. After the Chim↑Pom’s performance, entitled “Making the sky of Hiroshima PIKA!” Hiroshima citizens, including hibakusha (who experienced the atomic

124   Y. Miyamoto bombing and radiation exposure),5 found the word “pika” in the sky ominous and unpleasant, and sent in complaints to the local newspaper Chugoku Shimbun. Responding to the citizens’ reactions, the director of Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (HCMCA), Machida Yasuo, and curator Yukie Kamiya made a public apology the following day that the HCMCA staff had acknowledged Chim↑Pom’s performance plan and was present during the performance, yet had not informed citizens about it.6 The city of Hiroshima added its own apology, admitting to its responsibility for overseeing the HCMCA. As a result, Chim↑Pom’s exhibition at the HCMCA, scheduled to open only a week away, was canceled.7 Following the apology and announcement of the exhibit cancellation, the city called for a meeting for Chim↑Pom to meet the representatives of seven hibakusha groups. Ryūta Ushiro, representing the artist group, made an apology to the five hibakusha groups attending the meeting for their insensitivity to hibakusha’s feelings. A series of incidents—from Chim↑Pom’s performance to the apologies by involved parties, the cancellation of their exhibition, subsequent controversy revolved around freedom of expression, and reconciliation with some hibakusha—was later complied in a volume entitled Naze Hiroshima no sora o pikatto sasetewa ikenainoka (Why it is wrong to ‘pika’ in the sky of Hiroshima, hereafter Why not pika).8 The book contains essays by 22 contributors, ranging from artists and art critics to hibakusha, introducing various thoughts and opinions about freedom of expression in art form, representation of a tragic event, and Chim↑Pom’s performance in Hiroshima. Among them, art critics Noi Sawaragi and Ren Fukuzumi respond respectively to the question of why their performance was wrong, by scrutinizing the ethicality of art and representation of tragedy. On the one hand, both condemn the lightness and shallowness of Chim↑Pom’s performance as an art, and on the other, condone it precisely because of its lightness and shallowness as a representation.9 Drawing upon Theodor Adorno’s prominent line: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today,”10 Sawaragi reminds us of the impossibility of representing such a tragic event as the atomic bombing. Due to the magnitude of the event, no efforts represent properly the atomic bomb experiences. Given the implausibility of the project, Chim↑Pom’s performance, Sawaragi argues, in fact, offered a way to avoid Adorno’s accusation of “violence of representation” in art by eschewing “sophisticated aesthetics.”11 As Sawaragi claims, avoiding sophisticated aesthetics as bourgeois entertainment may necessitate “light” and “shallow” representation, yet, it also can easily slip into benign and banal expressions. When Hannah Arendt calls the Nazi genocide the “banality of evil” over 50 years ago, she indicates, by no means, that the genocide itself was banal.12 Rather, she reveals a horror in a process where the act of mass murders requires no “thinking” and consequently the action itself was normalized. Judith Butler explains further the banality of violence in Arendt’s argument: “In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity

In the light of Hiroshima   125 ‘banal,’ [Arendt] was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.”13 Summing up the thoughts by Arendt, Butler, and Adorno, I claim that banalization of violence has two components: first, banalization of violence occurs when an act of violence itself is normalized; and second, such normalization takes place through representations—their failure to reveal the horror of violence—whether intentional or not. Thus, such representation allows violence to appear banal and normal. Consequently, it indulges artists as well as audience in being complicit in violence, as Adorno warns. Chim↑Pom once claimed that their performance aimed to somber up people in Japan who were, heiwaboke, or taking “peace” for granted. On the contrary to their assertion of disrupting the existing discourse, I argue in this chapter, Chim↑Pom merely furthered banalization of violence and normalization of the atomic bomb experiences, as was done so for decades. As historian Ran Zwigenberg, for example, observes, banalizing the violence and normalizing the horror of the atomic bombing did not begin in the twenty-­ first century: “Hiroshima’s tragedy was rendered harmless to the status quo by the particular way in which it was remembered. Commemorative work in Hiroshima was largely used to normalize and domesticate the memory of the bombing.”14 Such efforts were already made immediately after the bombing by censorship placed by both governments of the United States and Japan.15 In tracing such history, this chapter focuses on the 1950s—a crucial time for the nuclear industry, while shedding the lights on political use of injured female bodies, such as the Hiroshima maidens. They were 25 female hibakusha, scarred and disfigured by the atomic bombing, who were invited to the United States to receive reconstruction surgeries in 1955. The philanthropic gesture on the Amer­ ican end functioned not only to alleviate Amer­ican collective guilt, but more importantly to recreate post-­war Amer­ican identity and thus to reinforce white, middle-­class, heterosexual, Christian family values. At the same time, on the other side of the Ocean, the scarred women, called genbaku otome (hereafter otome),16 or the atomic bombed maidens, were not immune to political exploitation in their own country, either. It is understandable, I hasten to add, that hibakusha, especially those who suffered disfigurement and discrimination, desired to lead normal lives again, yet, what I found was that normalization of violence in the atomic bomb discourse utilized the women’s injured bodies to reconstruct post-­war national identities, either to divert attention from the damage inflicted on the human body, or to reconcile its war crimes for further militalization, which I will investigate in the following pages.

Norms, gendered discourse, and the Hiroshima maidens In representing the vulnerable bodies of hibakusha, it is not a coincidence that the overwhelming number of the atomic bomb literature in Japan—both fictive

126   Y. Miyamoto and non-­fictive—revolves around the experiences of women and children: de-­ masculinized figures.17 Political theorist, Iris Marion Young, once notes that the physical disadvantages of women and children, indeed, provides an opportunity to promote a national security agenda, treating the vulnerable bodies as the loci of “masculininst protection,” at a time of national crisis. Women’s images are constructed in relation to the ideal male role of protector, write Young: An exposition of the gendered logic of the masculine role of protector in relation to women and children illuminates the meaning and effective appeal of a security state that wages war abroad and expects obedience and loyalty at home. In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience.18 This gendered discourse, according to Young, allowed a number of Amer­icans (and allies with the United States) to justify the United States military deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11. The rhetoric, pointed out by Young, justifies aggression of a nation and normalizes familiar gender tropes for that purpose. The ideal image of men gives a shape to the social norm, assigning women a corresponding role, by which both men and women abide and thereby reinforce the norm. In this regard, Japan was not an exception. During the war, the gendered discourse constructed the image of ideal women, being assigned a task of “assisting” the male mission, which facilitated mobilization of the entire population. Even the loss of the war did not change the fundamental structure of gendered discourse. Lisa Yoneyama argues that, in post-­war Japan, the male protector figure only shifted from the Japanese male to Amer­ican counterparts, in which the Hiroshima maidens played a crucial role: “[the Hiroshima maidens] constituted a specular image of the oedipal relation between Japan and the United States,” writes Yoneyama. “Through hinting at a possibility of miscegenation, the dominant images of these women—pure, virgin daughter—loyally figured the nation in its relation to the paternalized America, at least in popular discourse.”19 The Hiroshima maidens project is owed primarily to two men: Methodist minister Kiyoshi Tanimoto and Saturday Review editor-­in-chief Norman Cousins. Tanimoto was born in 1909 in Sakaide city, Kagawa Prefecture. After graduating from Kwansei Gakuin University, Tanimoto went to the United States and earned a degree from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in 1939.20 Returning to Japan, he was appointed to minister the Nagarekawa church in Hiroshima in 1943. On August 6, 1945, he experienced the atomic bombing 3 km (1.86 miles) from the hypocenter. After taking part in relief acts, he suffered from acute radiation sickness but miraculously recovered. Once the initial chaos subsided, young women, who were scarred from the bomb, began to come to his church to seek comfort. Witnessing those women’s physical pains, emotional plights, and withdrawal from society, Tanimoto was compelled to work to alleviate their suffering for their reintegration into society.21

In the light of Hiroshima   127 Thanks to his appearance in John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Tanimoto’s public recognition in the United States led to the Methodist Church Mission Board’s invitation to give talks in the States in 1948, a time when the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) still strictly regulated Japanese citizens’ travels abroad. In his speech, Tanimoto addressed Amer­ican audiences: “Hiroshima citizens regret the Pearl Harbor attack, and they do not hold a grudge against Amer­icans for dropping the atomic bombs. They are now pleased with generous policies carried out by General MacArthur and the SCAP.”22 It was during his speaking engagement, which lasted for a year and a half, that Tanimoto met Norman Cousins, another crucial figure for the Hiroshima maidens project. Immediately after the Hiroshima bombing, Cousins wrote a long editorial piece in Saturday Review, entitled “The Modern Man is Obsolete,” expressing his guilt over the Amer­ican use of nuclear weaponry. He eventually found his way to Hiroshima in 1949, 1950, and 1953, prior to his Hiroshima maidens project. After his second visit, he launched a “moral adoption” program, in which Amer­ican “parents” supported war orphans in Hiroshima by sending letters and small gifts. On Cousins’ third visit in 1953, Tanimoto arranged a meeting at his church with a group of disfigured women. Cousins’ encounter with the young, injured women urged him to embark on a project to bring those women to the United States to receive reconstruction surgeries. Upon his return to the United States, Cousins successfully raised funds for the project, which enabled 25 women—later labeled as the “Hiroshima maidens”—to come to the States. On May 5, 1955, the maidens left Iwakuni, the nearest United States base to Hiroshima, via the Army Transport, for the United States. The stories of Hiroshima maidens were widely publicized both in the United States and in Japan. The popular TV show, This is Your Life invited two maidens, Toyoko Minowa and Tadako Emori, together with Tanimoto, his family, and the Enola Gay co-­pilot, Captain Robert A. Lewis. Minowa and Emori stood behind the screen, while the show’s host Ralph Edwards introduces them as “to avoid causing any embarrassment, we will not show you their faces.”23 In addition to the TV show appearance, newspapers and radio programs took up maidens’ journey. Historian Michael J. Yavenditti interprets the maidens’ visit as the manifestation of Amer­ican goodwill, signifying forgiveness and reconciliation between the United States and Japan. “The project’s over theme of reconciliation and its unspoken message of mutual forgiveness,” writes Yavenditti, “were compatible with Amer­ican benevolence also accorded with Amer­ican desires for good United States–Japanese relations.”24 Yavenditti’s remarks reveal that the maidens’ visit was neither about the horror of nuclear attack nor about their continuous physical and emotional suffering. Rather, it highlights the Amer­ican altruism that enabled poor women to receive free reconstruction surgeries. In fact, what was reconstructed was not only the women’s scarred body, but the Amer­ican identity—being benevolent, generous, and forgiving. Yavenditti further unfolds his optimistic view that utterly minimizes consequences of the

128   Y. Miyamoto nuclear destruction: “As a philanthropic, almost joyful, episode in reconciliation, the ‘curing’ of the Maidens symbolized the healing of wartime hatreds and projected an image of Amer­ican compassion, benevolence, and generosity toward a former foe.”25 His statement attests that the horror of the aftermath of nuclear destruction was rendered as “curable,” thanks to advanced Amer­ican medical technology and Amer­ican civil virtues. Historian Robert Jacobs criticizes such negligence of human toll and suffering found in such rhetoric as a “triumphant narrative of science and compassion,” and provides an illuminating analysis:  the Japanese are allowed to be present but only in a childlike, dependent and ultimately grateful position. The heroes are the United States doctors and philanthropists, who make the decisions, bear the costs and perform the miraculous surgeries, thus restoring life, happiness, and beauty to the Japanese women.26 Once again, the story about Amer­ican benevolence serves to remind Amer­ican citizens of their moral foundation, which is underwritten by a patriarchal family structure. In this rhetorical framework, the Hiroshima maidens are indebted their overcoming the tragedy to the parental care they received in Amer­ican homes during their stay. Scholar of Amer­ican studies and literature Christina Klein, referring to Cousins’ frequent use of family metaphors—his projects of “moral adoption” and “maidens,” notes that “Cousins offered a vision of America bound to Asia through ties of familial love.”27 While Cousins’ family metaphor stems from his humanitarian philosophy of treating everyone as a family member,28 Cousins’ unquestioned reliance on a patriarchal family model perturbed some contemporary critics. Amer­ican writer and poet David Mura, for example, suggests that the Amer­ icans’ paternal attitude toward Japan was also complemented by the gender stereotype corresponding to the East/West division; “The [Hiroshima maidens] project’s promotability stemmed from how the Maidens’ gender accommodated the mythology of Western subjugation of the East in ways that Japanese males would not.”29 America’s protective/paternal image, reinforced by hosting the Hiroshima maidens, claims Mura, reinstituting the Orientalist stereotype—the subjugated image of the feminized “East.” The East/West division becomes more complicated, taking into account Caroline Chung Simpson’s report that the most notable absence in the Hiroshima maidens’ publicity was the Japanese-­Amer­icans.30 The two Japanese-­Amer­ican women—Helen Yokoyama and Mary Kochiyama—accompanied the maidens in the United States as interpreters. In particular, Kochiyama, who was born and grew up in San Pedro, California and was later relocated to the internment camp in Arkansas, earned no media recognition during the Hiroshima maidens’ visit. Behind the reconciliatory gesture read into the Hiroshima maidens’ visit, another opportunity for reconciliation with Japanese-­Amer­icans remained neglected, as

In the light of Hiroshima   129 they do not fit the promotion of “Amer­icanness of unconditional love and domestic tranquility.”31 Domestication of the Hiroshima maidens was further reinforced by Amer­ican women, which simultaneously underpinned the roles assigned to Amer­ican women themselves. Caroline Chung Simpson points out that, through publicizing the Hiroshima maidens, Amer­ican media “celebrated white, middle-­class Amer­ican mothers.”32 The United States media portrayed Hiroshima maidens’ adoption of Amer­ican housekeeping and lifestyles as the process of recuperation from their physical and psychological wounds, while exalting Amer­ican housekeeping as their goal. The publicity thus visualized the lifestyle of suburban middle-­class mothers as an ideal. Supporting Simpson’s point, Mura argues that the publicity of the Hiroshima maidens in fact “reflects postwar fears of threats to US heteronormative values,”33 which was a white, middle-­class, Judeo-­ Christian, and heterosexual family.

Values and religious traditions Given the socioeconomic structure of the United States in 1950s, the families who could afford Japanese guests tended to be rather affluent, (upper-)middle class, which traditionally belong to Judeo-­Christian tradition (Norman Cousins is Jewish). The religious tradition was an important component to promote an ideal of family values, drawing upon a traditional patriarchal family structure, against “God-­less” Communism,34 but also at a time for change—widespread feminism, increasing divorce rate, coming-­out of homosexuality, and emergence of single-­parent households that were threatening the heteronormative values. The Quakers’ hospitability to the maidens in the States as well as in Japan is noteworthy. The project was indeed indebted to many Quaker families who sponsored and welcomed the Hiroshima maidens to their homes, detailed by Serlin and Ida Day, a member of the New York Friend Center, an organization of the Quakers. Day assured that the families “want the girls to feel perfectly free to do as they wish … and not be influenced by what the host families do.”35 Even though the Quakers are often excluded from the main stream Christian tradition in the United States due in large part to their refusal to engage in war, their “Christian” identity was, nonetheless, exploited. The Hiroshima maidens’ visit gave an opportunity to extol further Amer­ican “Christian” values, even well into the 80s. In comparison with Japanese religious traditions, Rodney Barker inaccurately describes Japanese philanthropic tradition, and explains the maidens’ bewilderment of facing the generosity of Amer­ ican host families. Historically, philanthropy was an alien cultural and philosophical concept in Japan. A traditional reluctance to get involved in the troubles of others, plus the absence of the “Good Samaritan” ethic in Japanese religion, generally explained why there were so few philanthropic foundations or programs in Japan. While the Japanese had a strong sense of obligation in certain

130   Y. Miyamoto s­ ituations, such as to Emperor and family, they were largely lacking in feelings of altruism.36 The Hiroshima maidens’ visit repeatedly reinstitutes the moral high ground of Amer­icans, drawing upon religious resources, despite the atomic bombing that scarred the very women. Religious rhetoric was integral to the post-­war Amer­ican narrative. Ethicist Amy Laura Hall analyzes the ways in which religion is used to reinforce the patriarchal family image and its norms by promoting patriotism through consumerism against the threat of Communism: “the birth of the Atomic Age helped solidify the norm of a relatively isolated, nuclear family, anchored by its use of consumer goods,” which was by reinterpretation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the symbol of destruction to that of scientific achievement and a better life style.37 Domestication of the atom, as Hall puts it, was in tandem with the domestication of the Hiroshima maidens, which also confined Amer­ican women to hetero­ normative family values.38 Introducing the Hiroshima maidens to an Amer­ican audience, the focus is not on the actual damage inflicted on the human body. On the contrary, the publicity diverts attention from the actual damage. Indeed, the rhetoric characterizes the weapons as ethically neutral, as if the problem lies in an agency—who owns them, but not what the weapons are capable of doing. As a result, the Hiroshima maidens’ stories were incorporated into the United States post-­war discourse, irrespective of the experiences of the bombing. Such normalization of the horror done to the maidens in the United States also took place in their home country, Japan.

The Hiroshima maidens in Japanese discourse Prior to the Hiroshima maidens project in 1955, similar projects were launched domestically in Japan. Several women were invited from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cities like Osaka and Tokyo to receive, supposedly, more advanced reconstruction surgeries. The very first trip was initiated by a Tokyo-­based author, Shizue Masugi. Masugi first encountered the disfigured female hibakusha, coordinated by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, upon her visit to Hiroshima at a lecture meeting in May 1952.39 The personal encounter with the otome urged Masugi to fundraise so as to provide them better surgical opportunities, which she immediately undertook after returning to Tokyo. Masugi successfully secured money to invite nine otome, together with Kiyoshi Tanimoto and a male hibakusha, Kiyoshi Kikkawa, who was referred to as genbaku ichigō, or “the atomic bomb victim no. 1.”40 Unexpectedly, upon their arrival in Tokyo, the maidens’ first destination was not the hospital but several commercial landmarks, such as Teikoku theater, Kabuki theater, and the Daiei movie studio. They were also interviewed for a radio program and women’s magazines.41 Being the only male hibakusha in the group, Kikkawa felt excluded from the narrative that Tanimoto provided for the

In the light of Hiroshima   131 media, in which Tanimoto only discussed the hardships of women, but not that of men. Learning that the otome were scheduled to visit the Sugamo Prison where Japanese war criminals were incarcerated was the last straw for Kikkawa and their friendship became irreparable. For Kikkawa, it was preposterous, and even insulting to the dead in Hiroshima, that hibakusha, who went through indescribable hardships because of the war, pay a visit to the prison. Moreover, the visit was not to reprimand the war criminals, but to express sympathy for those who had been complicit in the reckless war that resulted in the nuclear attacks. He opposed the idea, but the visit had been already scheduled without his consent. At the end, however, Kikkawa went along with the group out of curiosity. When the group arrived at Sugamo, Kikkawa saw the inmates chatting, smoking, and snacking, far from what he had expected—a sad and regretful group of men. Their encounter began with the greetings to the otome by two inmates: one was a Hiroshima-­born politician, Okinori Kaya, who served as Minister of Finance during the war, and the other was the former Army General, Shunroku Hata, who was stationed at Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. During their initial talks, Kikkawa remembers, neither of them uttered a word of repentance or remorse for having caused such tragedy to the hibakusha. Then, the two otome, the delegates of the group, replied that they had once held a grudge against the military leaders for their disfigurement, but now that seven years had passed, they began to realize that their plight was the same as theirs. The otome’s response deeply disturbed Kikkawa. Later that night, he contacted Yoko Ōta, herself hibakusha and the author of Shikabane no machi (City of Corpses) to discuss this visit. During their conversation, Ōta first disclosed her discontent over journalism that was preying upon the otome. Her complaint confirmed Kikkawa’s suspicion that otome were used as poster girls to show Japan’s resilience and hope for the future. The otome’s prison visit, thus, symbolized reconciliation not only between the war criminals and the hibakusha, but also suggested abandoning imputing Japan’s war responsibility.42 It was not Kikkawa alone who found this meeting troublesome, also the inmates as well. Ryōji Kawabe learned about the otome’s visit at breakfast table on the very day. At first, it made no sense to him that the victims would be paying a visit to the victimizer at a prison, unless the otome would reproach the war criminals for their misconduct. Similar to Kikkawa, Kawabe thought that the otome were among those who suffered the most from the war, while the Sugamo inmates, mostly war criminals, were either directly accountable for the war, or were accomplices.43 Kawabe thought that he would have to meet the  otome to apologize to them with his knees on the ground. However, Kawabe’s friend unexpectedly came to see him on that morning, which kept him from meeting the otome. Later, Kawabe heard from his fellow inmates how the meeting had gone, and his anger surged: “I hate even more the military leaders who are responsible for the disfigurement of those women, yet show no regret.” Kawabe writes, “I also

132   Y. Miyamoto hate myself: I was not acting of my own volition during the war. Instead, I took up a gun, being carried away by the military government’s propaganda … taking part in the aggressive war.”44 During the conversation with other inmates, one of them questioned whether Tanimoto or Masugi had realized the significance of the otome’s visit at Sugamo. The inmates in this conversation were quite concerned that their visit would lower people’s psychological barriers against Japan’s remilitarization:  The actual war criminals who evaded the consequences of the war are now calling for remilitarization and resumption of arms production incorrigibly … if people read the newspaper article on the otome’s visit, they may take it as a beautiful reconciliation story between the otome and war criminals. That would only please the real war mongers.45 The timing was also crucial. Although the Japanese Constitution, enacted in 1947, announces the renouncement of war and military force in article 9, when the Korean War broke out in 1950, the SCAP established a paramilitary unit, Keisatsu yobitai (National Police Reserve, or NPR), which later became the Self-­Defense Force. Given the virtual remilitalization, and a prospect of Sugamo’s governance being transferred from the SCAP to Japan upon its independence, the prison became a popular tourist destination in Tokyo. Sociologist Aiko Utsumi informs that the “sympathetic visits to Sugamo” (senpan imon) in 1950s were initiated by celebrities, such as dancers from the famous Ishii Baku Dance Company, followed by rakugoka (traditional Japanese story tellers), Japanese traditional dancers, stand-­up comedians, singers, theater actors, and even baseball players.46 Prefectural associations (kenjinkai) would begin to make pilgrimages to Sugamo. The enthusiasm for the Sugamo visit culminated in 1952’s petition to release war criminals from the prison, noted Utsumi.47 Feminist scholar in Hiroshima, Kikue Takao, describes this series of events as “a process of chipping away war  responsibility.”48 The popular Sugamo visit and war criminals’ release movements altered the average Japanese people’s perception of the war criminals. They transformed from the persona non grata to war victims or even heroes. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to see the otome’s visit as apolitical. Rather, both Tanimoto and Masugi may well have been aware of the impact of the otome’s visit to Sugamo on the public discourse. After the Sugamo visit, the otome group finally went to Tokyo University’s Koishikawa clinic for examination of their wounds. It turned out that the surgical treatment would require a certain period of hospitalization, and the otome would have to return home to be ready for a long stay. The surgeries were, after all, successful, which encouraged Norman Cousins to promote his own Hiroshima maiden project in the United States. However, Kikkawa also disputed their visit to Tokyo clinic for reconstruction surgeries. “The reason of my opposition is that simple,” explains Kikkawa, “Hiroshima doctors are more experienced when it comes to surgical treatment of keloids. Taking injured girls to Tokyo seemed to

In the light of Hiroshima   133 me an insult to Hiroshima doctors and their medical experiences.”49 It is beyond the scope of the present research to compare their medical adequacies between the hospitals in Tokyo and Hiroshima, but it is certain that their Tokyo visit planned more than clinic visits. It garnered far more media attention, which was unheard of in Hiroshima. While Cousins and Tanimoto were working on the Hiroshima maiden project, a hydrogen bomb test conducted by the United States at the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954, affected the crew of Daigo Fukuryūmaru, or Lucky Dragon No.  5, (hereafter Lucky Dragon) albeit outside the danger zone. This incident fueled anti-­war and nuclear weaponry movements, and brought about women’s active involvement in Japan. Discovering that the crew was affected by radiation—a chief radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama died of acute radiation sickness six months after the exposure—and that the tuna caught in the Pacific was irradiated, women in Suginami ward in Toyo stood up. They organized a grass-­root anti-­nuclear weapons movement and collect petitions against the nuclear bomb tests. Suginami women’s movement against the nuclear tests reverberated throughout Japan, which brought forth the two conferences: Nihon hahaoya taikai, or Japan Mother’s Assembly, and Sekai hahaoya taikai, or World Mothers’ Assembly, in 1955. The emergence of “mothers” in public discourse in anti-­war and anti-­nuclear movements, Yoneyama observes, makes a sharp contrast between “mothers” and “daughters,” represented by the otome and the Hiroshima maidens: “Hiroshima mothers dominant in peace and anti-­nuclear discourse, came to signify that which was antithetical to Amer­ican militarism and imperialism”50 whereas daughters—whether genbaku otome or the Hiroshima maidens—were rather viewed as pro-­Amer­icans and even pro-­ militarism, in part because they did not aggressively blame the United States for dropping the atomic bombs. Nor did they seem to impute the responsibilities of Japanese war criminals, as we have seen. The division between the mothers and daughters perplexes Takao:  I doubt that they [hibakusha mothers] were disinterested in the otome, especially the Hiroshima maidens, as their visit was largely publicized. Yet, I have not come across any record, informing that Hiroshima mothers having supported the genbaku otome or the Hiroshima maidens. Nor did I find any criticism for them, either.51 Then, Takao speculates that the mother’s silence over the “daughters” may indicate dissonance among hibakusha. Takao unfolds complicated relations among hibakusha: one case is a married woman who was divorced by her husband because of her keloid scars from the atomic bombing; another case is scarred and disfigured women, who were not chosen to go to the United States as a part of the Hiroshima maiden project, being resentful for the chosen. Male hibakusha are not an exception. Some withdrew from society because they became self-­conscious of their disfigured appearance.52

134   Y. Miyamoto In contrast to the active anti-­nuclear movement by mothers in and out of Hiroshima, the otome and the Hiroshima maidens eventually disappeared from the public discourse. In fact, as Takao notes, the Hiroshima maidens were not welcomed back in Hiroshima, perhaps as a result of people’s jealousy over both their free reconstruction surgeries and their transformations from pitiful scarred maidens to independent and sophisticated women immersed in the advanced Amer­ican lifestyle. On the maidens’ end, though having guilt over their chosen status, they had not expected an unwelcomed ambiance back in Hiroshima. Consequently most of them withdrew from the public eye and kept silent after their return to Japan in order to assimilate in the society, instead of being actively involved with “mothers’ ” anti-­nuclear movement.53 Likewise, the otome, who had surgeries only in Japan, distanced themselves from the public discourse. Ironically, while their reconciliation with the war criminals was highly publicized, they had difficulties in reconciling with other fellow hibakusha who remained wounded physically and emotionally. The stories of maidens and otome were adopted by Amer­ican and Japanese national narratives to reinstitute their own identity respectively. As a result, the horrors of the flashing light that burned their body were translated into a different story—a story of resilience, recovery, and reconciliation, instead of those of loss, horror, and irrevocability.

Conclusion The year 2016 marked Barack Obama’s Hiroshima visit made by the first sitting President of the United States. In the meantime, in the annual Peace Declaration on August 6 delivered by Hiroshima mayor, Kazumi Matsui shared his concern that “the average age of the hibakusha has exceeded eighty,” while “over 15,000 nuclear weapons remain.”54 As the number of hibakusha dwindles, it becomes more urgent how they could pass down their first-­hand accounts to future generations. Under such circumstances, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been making efforts to archive hibakusha’s stories through videos, memoirs, and drawings, and also encourages non-­hibakusha to help in documenting and disseminating the atomic bomb experiences through the venues of literary works, movies, graphic novels, and TV shows. Chim↑Pom’s performance in 2008 was one of those attempts, as the leader Ryūta Ushiro explains: their performance in Hiroshima tried to “inspire the people in the world to think about the reality of peace, and mirror the state of today’s society with its vague and blurred memories of peace and things past.”55 Ushiro further claims that he was familiar with this historical event, influenced by Keiji Nakazawa’s Hadashi no Gen, (Barefoot Gen). Perhaps drawing the word “pika” on the sky—somewhat cartoonishly—might have been taken directly from the expression employed by this graphic novel. With the word, “pika” in the sky, their performance was to call for the viewers’ self-­reflection on the reality, in which the atomic bombing had been fading from people’s mind. The group attributed their motivation to people’s heiwaboke. However, by banalizing a horror of violence, by

In the light of Hiroshima   135 placing themselves in the shoes of Amer­ican pilots, and by forcing hibakusha to revisit the trauma without warning, Chim↑Pom betrayed their own heiwaboke. Artist Yukinori Yanagi comments; “Art can definitely express something harmful. But Chim↑Pom did not know to whom they want to reveal the harm, and resulted in harming hibakusha.”56 As Butler suggests, observing an act of mass murder is horrific, but witnessing executing it without “intention” is even more horrendous. In order to overcome such banality, one has to “think reflectively about one’s own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others.”57 With this analysis of Butler, Chim↑Pom’s message of “Do not forget!” sounds hollow, and this emptiness was certainly not intended to address Adorno’s concern for art. In considering the weight of the “pika” and the meaning of light in Hiroshima, the following anecdote may be suggestive: photographer from Hiroshima, Sachiko Miyamae, once remarked that her friends living in Osaka mistook Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburō Oe for a Hiroshima native. Such a misunderstanding may not be uncommon, construed from his writings about Hiroshima as well as his active involvement in anti-­nuclear movements. But, Miyamae observes, “If Oe were from Hiroshima, he would not have named his son ‘Hikari’ (Light) [back in the 60s].”58 Besides her birth and upbringing in late 1960s and 1970s Hiroshima, Miyamae has no familial relations to the atomic bombing, yet feels ambivalent toward Oe’s choice for his son’s name. While her statement did not insinuate Oe’s insensibility, it poignantly discloses the graveness of the atomic bombing—its light, roar, and aftermath—in the mind of some in Hiroshima. Conventionally, the term “hikari” in Japanese, as its English translation of “light,” commonly connotes a hope—a positive connotation: the first bullet train introduced in Japan in 1970 was named “hikari,” alluding its speed to the light, and indicating technological advancement and its promise of a bright future. In general, the onomatopea “pika” derived from “hikari” evokes brightness, cleanness, hope, and even cuteness as in Pikachū, a fictional creature in the popular video game, Pokémon, and rarely conveys the ominous association once widely perceived in Hiroshima.59 As Chim↑Pom’s performance of drawing “pika” in the sky of Hiroshima unfortunately resulted in being complicit in another banalization of violence. Far from being radical, the performance proves itself a mere continuation of a long tradition of normalization of the horror, observed in the United States and Japan where violence of the atomic bombing—the flash, roar, blast, radiation, discrimination, disfigurement, keloids, pains, anxieties for their health and the health of their children and grandchildren—has been downplayed. As a screen on This is Your Life blocked the exposure of the Hiroshima maidens, showing the mere silhouettes of Minowa and Emori, we are yet unable to face the violence over 70 years ago. Representations shield us from the light, shading any embarrassment and disturbance, and yet we are all trapped in the shadow of the bombs.

136   Y. Miyamoto

Notes   1 The transcript of the speech is available at ‘Obama’s Speech in Berlin,’ New York Times, July 24, 2008. Accessed June 24, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/us/ politics/24text-obama.html.   2 John Feffer, “Obama’s Nuclear Paradox” Foreign Policy in Focus, June 1, 2016. Accessed June 24, 2017. http://fpif.org/obamas-­nuclear-paradox/.   3 The group consists of Ushiro Ryūta, Ellie, Hayashi Yasutaka, Okada Masataka, Mizuno Toshinori, and Inaoka Motomu, but the group’s only female member, Ellie, was not a part of this performance.   4 Linda Hoaglund, “The Suddenly Relevant Activist Antics of Artist Collective Chim↑Pom: Challenging Japan’s Nuclear Power Agenda” Asia Pacific Journal, vol. 10 (3), 2012.   5 Official definition of hibakusha are those who were in a designated area at the time of bombing; who were within a radius of two kilometers from the hypocenter within two weeks of the bombing; who helped more than 10 patients per day at the triage center or shelter; and who were prenatally exposed and were born within nine months of the bombing.   6 Morris Low, “Art, photography and remembering Hiroshima” East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2013), 159–160. While I agree with Kamiya’s statement, in Low’s article, on art in general, Chim↑Pom’s performance differed from a gallery exhibition. For the same reason, I take Cai Guo-­Qiang’s performance as an imposition. Unlike their guerrilla performance, Chim↑Pom’s exhibition at a museum should not be cancelled, presuming that the audience acknowledges what they will be exposed.   7 The exhibition was scheduled to open on November 1, 2008.   8 Chim↑Pom, and Ken’ichi Abe, eds. Naze Hiroshima no sora o pika tto sasetewa ikenainoka [Why is it Wrong to Draw “Pika” in the Sky of Hiroshima?] (Tokyo: Kawaide Shobō Shinsha, 2009).   9 Noi Sawaragi, “Katsute Enora Gei kara mieta ‘sora’: Chim↑Pom no ‘pika’ to Kaikisuru genbaku tōkasha tachi no mado” [The sky once seen from the Enola Gay: Chim↑Pom’s ‘pika’ and the Atomic Bombers’ window], 42–59, and Ren Fukuzumi, 2009. “Karoyaka ni mujaki ni, soshite ikkini.” [Lightly, innocently, and all at once], 146–155. Both are found in Naze Hiroshima no sora o pika tto sasetewa ikenainoka. 10 Theodor W. Adrno, Prisms. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), 34. 11 Sawaragi, 47–48. 12 Hannah Arendt, Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006 [1961]). 13 Judith Butler, “Hannah Arendt’s Challenge to Adolf Eichmann.” Guardian, August 29, 2011. Accessed June 24, 2017. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/ aug/29/hannah-­arendt-adolf-­eichmann-banality-­of-evil. 14 Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2. 15 Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: Amer­ican Censorship in Occupied Japan (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1991). 16 It is important to note that the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum removed the title, genbaku otome, from their exhibition in 2004, to respond the complaint from one of the Hiroshima maidens that the label genbaku otome is distressing. The museum instead describes them as hibaku shita wakai josei tachi, or “young women who suffered from the atomic bombing” (Kikue Takao, “ ‘Genbaku otome’ to jendā: Naniga kanojotachi ni tobei chiryō o ketsui Sasetanoka” [‘The Hiroshima Maidens’ and Gender: What Contributed to Their Decision to go to the States for Surgeries]. Joseishi Sōgō Kenkyūkai [The Annals of Women’s History] vol. 20 (4) 2010, 1).

In the light of Hiroshima   137 17 For the representation of the male body of hibakusha, see Yuki Miyamoto, “Gendered Bodies in Tokusatsu: Monsters and Aliens as the Atomic Bomb Victims.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 49 (5), 2016, 1086–1106. 18 Iris Marion Young, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 29 (1), 2003, 2. 19 Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 202. 20 Rodney Barker, The Hiroshima Maidens: A Story of Courage, Compassion, and Survival (New York: Viking, 1985), 56. 21 Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Hiroshima genbaku to Amerika-­jin: Aru bokushi no heiwa angya [The Hiroshima Bomb and Amer­icans: One Minister’s Pilgrimage for Peace] (Tokyo: Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, 1976). 22 Takao, 4. 23 David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 74–75. 24 Michael J. Yavenditti, “The Hiroshima Maidens and Amer­ican Benevolence in the 1950s.” Mid-­America: A Historical Review, vol. 64 (2): 34. 25 Ibid., 21. 26 Robert Jacobs, “Reconstructing the Perpetrators’ Soul by Reconstructing the Victi’s Body: The Portrayal of the ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ by the Mainstream Media in the United States.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 2010, 24. Accessed June 24, 2017. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/jacobs.htm. 27 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 149. In fact, Cousins “adopted” one of the Hiroshima maidens, Shigeko Sasamori, having her and her son, Norman (named after Cousins) live in their house in Connecticut for seven years. 28 Ibid., 149. 29 David Mura, “Asia and Japanese Amer­icans in the Postwar Era: The White Gaze and The Silenced Sexual Subject.” Amer­ican Literary History vol. 17 (3), 2005, 610. 30 Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Amer­icans in Postwar Amer­ican Culture, 1945–1960 (Durham; NC: Duke University, 2008), 128. 31 Ibid., 128. Also see Sarah Alisabeth Fox, Downwinde: A People’s History of the nuclear West (Lincoln; NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 127; Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Patrick B. Sharp, Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in Amer­ican Culture (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 32 Simpson, 124. 33 Mura, 610. 34 Historian Kevin M. Kruse argues the insertion of “one nation under God” in the pledge of allegiance is not only against Communist ideology, but also to downplay the New Deal mindset to promote economic freedom. Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 35 The memorandum dated on June 19, 1955. I owe the Quakers’ view on the Hiroshima maidens to a research made by Annie Devon Kramer, “The Hiroshima Maidens Project at the Margins of History: Quaker Facilitation of Spiritual Rebirth and Rejuvenation” The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal, 2010. Accessed June 24, 2017. https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-­bin/wordpress/wp-­content/uploads/ 2012/09/Kramer_Hum_2010.pdf. 36 Barker, 130. 37 Amy Laura Hall, Conceiving Parenthood: Amer­ican Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (Grand Rapids; MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008), 294. Also see Chapter 4 “For Domestic Security: The Atomic Age and the Genomic Revolution.”

138   Y. Miyamoto 38 David Serlin, “The Clean Room/Domesticating the Hiroshima Maidens” Cabinet 11, 2003. 39 Tanimoto, 172. 40 Takao, 4. 41 Kiyoshi Kikkawa, “Genbaku ichigō” to iwarete [Named as the “Atomic Bombed No. 1”] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1981), 84–85. 42 Ibid., 88. 43 Ryōji Kawabe, “Genbaku otome no imon.” [The Atomic Bomb Maidens’ Sympathetic Visits]. Kabe atsuki heya: Sugamo BC kyū senpan no jinseiki [A Room with Thick Walls: Life Stories of BC Class War Criminals in Sugamo]. Edited by Riron Henshūbu (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1992), 229. 44 Ibid., 230. 45 Ibid., 232. 46 Aiko Utsumi, Sugamo Purizun: Senpantachi no heiwa undo [The Sugamo Prison: Peace Movement by War Criminals] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2004), 146. 47 Ibid., 143–149. 48 Takao, 6. 49 Kikkawa, 89. 50 Yoneyama, 202. 51 Takao, 15–16. 52 Ibid., 15–16, and Jacobs. 53 Only 4 out of 25 maidens are publicly active in disseminating their experiences and anti-­nuclear messages, notwithstanding Tanimoto’s wishes. Takao, 11. 54 Kazumi Matsui, “Hiroshima Peace Declaration” Hiroshima city official site. Accessed June 24, 2017. www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1343890585401/. Perhaps, not just Chim↑Pom but we all are contently living in the shadow of the bombs. 55 Tetsuya Ozeki, “Chim↑Pom’s Cancelled Exhibition.” Realtokyo. 198. November 18, 2008. 56 Ichiro Hairu, Yukinori Yanagi, Makoto Aida, and Ryūta Ushiro. 2009. “ ‘Pika’ wa dare ni mukatta hyōgen Dattanoka.” [To whom the ‘pika’ was drawn?] In Naze Hiroshima no sora o pika tto sasetewa ikenainoka, 242. 57 Butler, 2011. 58 Personal communication, December 15, 2014. 59 Chim↑Pom presented taxidermied rats that they had caught in Shibuya, painted yellow to resemble Pikachū, named “Super Rat,” 2 years prior to the controversy.

10 Hiroshima and the paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity Thomas E. Doyle, II

Introduction1 The August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were singular moments of holocaust for the Japanese people that have become so powerful in collective memory that repeated attempts by Japanese policymakers to introduce or even discuss an acquisition of a nuclear deterrent have been severely contested and sanctioned. The cultivation of a ‘memory culture’ around the stories of the atomic ‘bomb-­affected people’ – i.e. the hibakusha – and the sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as icons of atomic victimhood have contributed to the emergence of a formidable antinuclearism. This antinuclearism has in turn put significant pressures on Tokyo and several other national capitals since the 1950s to abjure the possession of nuclear weapons (see, for example, Orr 2001; Wittner 2009; Zwigenberg 2014). Moreover, this memory culture of atomic victimhood has contributed to the sustained imagining of Hiroshima as a ‘peace city’ whose aim is to abolish nuclear weapons and even warfare itself.2 Notwithstanding this profound antinuclearism, Tokyo’s enduring rivalries with a nuclear-­armed China and North Korea have also produced a formidable conviction among some key policymakers that Japanese security requires nuclear deterrence at some level (see, for example, Gavin 2012, 89–91; Solingen 2007, 66–79). In 1951, Tokyo entered into a security arrangement with the United States and its extended nuclear deterrence regime. Thereafter, Tokyo was pulled in opposite policy directions: i.e. to respect and represent to the world their people’s antinuclear convictions while simultaneously maintaining the security arrangement with the United States, who sought to station nuclear weapons on Japanese soil or nuclear-­armed ships in Japanese ports (Hook 1984, 263–264). By the mid-­1960s, the Japanese people’s hypersensitivity to the introduction of United States nuclear weapons was constructed by their government as a ‘nuclear allergy’ in need of ‘treatment’, and by the late 1960s the domestic political contestation over the government’s commitment to United States nuclear deterrence became permanently entrenched. Two pronounced and interrelated paradoxes eventually emerged in Japanese political culture as this contestation over nuclear weapons progressed. One is that the Japanese people began to regard their ‘nuclear allergy’ as necessary for

140   T.E. Doyle, II realizing nuclear abolition and hence not a condition to ‘treat’ or eliminate. The second is that Tokyo could not be rid of United States nuclear weapons qua ‘allergens’ for reasons of national security even though the people remained ‘allergic’ to them. These two paradoxes characterize a sustained and truncated dialectical relationship between the Japanese people and their government that reflects a collective moral perplexity, and it represents to a great extent the same moral perplexity of the international community towards nuclear weapons (see, for example, Doyle II 2015a; Walker 2012). This chapter relates a detailed theoretical account of the metaphor ‘nuclear allergy’ and a corresponding but implicit recognition of a cluster of ‘nuclear allergens’ responsible for that ‘allergy’ in Japanese political discourse. The first step is to briefly recall elements of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s account of ‘grammar’ on the general discursive category of political metaphor. Thereafter, the chapter investigates the genealogy of ‘nuclear allergy’ and applies Wittgensteinian insights to the pro- and antinuclear discourse in Japan in light of the larger effort by the other contributors to this edited volume. The chapter will conclude with the claim that the ‘game’ of Japanese nuclear contestation, although currently ensnared in a seemingly intractable stalemate, must be played to win by those who never want their ‘allergy’ to go away.

Wittgenstein, ‘grammar’ and political metaphor In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asserts that discourse or ‘grammar’ is ‘the shadow of possibility cast by language on phenomena’ (Wittgenstein 1958, para 329; Pin-­Fat 2011, chapter 1). One way to read this assertion is that discourse functions to expand, contract or eliminate the possibilities of understanding and acting on social phenomena within a system of social practices. A ‘language game’ is constituted by the diverse moves of actors in accordance (or sometimes in conflict) with a set of governing norms. Accordingly, the shadow which ‘language’ casts – literally or metaphorically – serves to constitute definitions, descriptions or assessments in which conceptions putatively linked to the phenomena of concern are included or excluded from ‘sight’. For instance, the moral ‘grammar’ of nuclear abolition casts shadows of moral condemnation on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An instance of a literal use of ‘grammar’ is found in the Nippon Times’ condemnation of the two atomic bombings on 10 August 1945: How can a human being with any claim to a sense of moral responsibility deliberately let loose an instrument of destruction which can at one stroke annihilate an appalling segment of mankind? This is not war; this is not even murder; this is pure nihilism. This is a crime against God and humanity which strikes at the very heart of moral existence. (Quoted in Bailey and Kennedy 1994, 397–398) To say that atomic or nuclear warfare is nihilistic and ‘strikes at the heart of moral existence’ is to discursively construct the possibility of the annihilation of

Paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity   141 moral value (along with that of humanity) and then to proscribe that annihilation. By so doing, the antinuclear grammar casts a shadow of impossibility directly on the notion that nuclear weapons can ever constitute or produce a lasting moral benefit. In contrast to the Nippon Times’ literalist ‘grammar’, the shadows cast by metaphor on phenomena depend on implicit comparisons between a source-­ concept and a target-­concept for the purpose of structuring reality and constituting a corresponding range of possibilities or impossibilities for action (Hook 1984, 260–262). A metaphor taken as a near-­literal comparison should generate near-­literal entailments, while one taken non-­literally should do the opposite. Even so, the resort to metaphor already belies an inexact explication of the relevant social phenomena. Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that metaphors are not substitutes for literal claims; rather, they construct the very similarities which are (disingenuously) asserted as antecedently existing (Hook 1984, 261). Consequently, diverse shadows cast by competing metaphors on the same social phenomena can generate different constructions of social realities and entailments for action. In this light, the meaning and entailments of the metaphor ‘nuclear allergy’ depend on its source-­concept that is located in medical discourse. ‘Allergy’ refers to a physical condition where an individual’s hypersensitivity to an allergen (e.g. pollen, animal fur) produces minor bodily irritations or perhaps major failures of bodily systems. Although one might endure minor allergic reactions without much difficulty, serious reactions require immediate medical treatment and then a possible relocation to an allergen-­free environment. Unfortunately, allergy medicines can also produce allergic reactions. If one produces an anaphylactic reaction, for instance, first-­aid procedures are immediately rendered to prevent death or severe incapacity.3 The existential import of such ‘allergies’ implies an urgency in the elimination of life-­threatening allergens from one’s environment. It follows that the implicit comparison in the metaphor ‘nuclear allergy’ strongly suggests existential risk and, accordingly, that the practical stakes of its usage are high. In particular, it strongly suggests that the Japanese people’s hypersensitivity to nuclear weapons or pro-­nuclear discourse is unhealthy and that it must be treated (Hook 1984, 265). To say that the ‘nuclear allergy’ is unhealthy is also to say that nuclear weapons are normal instruments of national power and that there is nothing especially worrisome about them. Furthermore, it is to say that the antinuclearism arising from a collective memory of atomic victimhood and from a perception of Hiroshima as a recovering city of peace might rest on a mistaken appreciation of international political realities in which nuclear abolition is imprudent. A deeper and more critical theorization of ‘nuclear allergy’ must therefore seek to problematize these entailments. A first step in this deeper and more critical theorization is to trace the genealogy of ‘nuclear allergy’ and take note of the shadows actually cast by it in Japanese political culture.

142   T.E. Doyle, II The genealogy of ‘nuclear allergy’ The term ‘nuclear allergy’ entered Japanese public discourse in 1964, before which the terms used were ‘atomic bomb disease’ or ‘bomb-­affected people’ (i.e. hibakusha). Since the Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors suffered diverse internal and external physical maladies from their exposure to the atomic bombs’ effects, including significantly higher rates of cancer, the term hibakusha cast a near-­literal shadow on their varied experience (Ham 2011, 433–439). In particular, those suffering from external disfigurements – i.e. from keloids, which are slight to major skin disfigurements treated by plastic surgery – experienced greater shame than those suffering from internal disorders (Ham 2011, 329 and 433). From the late 1940s through the mid-­1950s, Japanese society generally regarded keloid-­affected hibakusha – and to a lesser extent all other bomb-­affected people – as ‘untouchables’. They were ostracized from family, jobs, marriage, association, and even prevented from receiving government compensation for their injuries (Ham 2011, 439). The hibakusha’s ostracism helps explain in part why, in the first few years after Hiroshima, the notion of atomic victimhood remained latent and undeveloped. The memories of Allied conventional firebombing were more pronounced, and it was only after the United States occupation’s censorship ended that Hiroshima slowly emerged as a contested icon of the national war experience (Orr 2001, 40–41). The moderate and conservative governments in Japan did not treat Hiroshima’s status as exceptional, regarding it more along the lines of a natural disaster.4 Tokyo’s disregard for the hibakusha during this period did not, however, discourage antinuclear activists from invoking their suffering and the image of Hiroshima to the ends of nuclear abolition and a general peace. In 1951, Kuno Osamu wrote an essay in the periodical Sekai that began to cultivate more fully the notion of atomic victimhood. He wrote: The only role given to us can be nothing other than bearing witness in front of the world to our first experience as [the atomic bomb’s] victim. It is the governments and peoples of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that have atomic bombs, not us. It is necessary to solidify our resolve to produce no more victims, but there is no danger that we ourselves will become victimizers. The calls for ‘No More Hiroshimas’ carry sorrowful echoes because of this reality of powerlessness behind them. (Quoted in Orr 2001, 44) For Kuno, the notion of atomic victimhood and the call for ‘No More Hiroshimas’ were the necessary grounds on which activists could anchor the mission of preventing any future nuclear holocaust. Yet, his voice and the voices of others were unable to resonate with the wider Japanese public at the time. Japanese attitudes towards the hibakusha and atomic victimhood began to change after the United States nuclear test at Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954. The 15-megaton explosion was equivalent to roughly 700 Hiroshima bombs. Its radioactive fallout dispersed over a much larger area of the South Pacific than expected,

Paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity   143 and 23 crewman from the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon suffered significant radiation poisoning and one fatality (Ham 2011, 447–448). Japanese society regarded the Bikini Atoll test as the third use of atomic weapons on them and, with the corresponding fear of radiation poisoning spreading rapidly, a petition drive in the Suginami prefecture to ban the H-­Bomb was overwhelmingly successful and motivated similar petition drives across the country. Indeed, by October 1955, the various petition drives had collected around 30 million signatures (Orr 2001, 48). On the other hand, the Lucky Dragon incident reinforced a different set of understandings that Tokyo had employed to put an honourable face on their 1945 surrender to the United States. Rather than admitting that Imperial ambitions had failed dishonourably, Tokyo framed their wartime defeat as a martyrdom of innocents slain in the atomic fire. Specifically, Tokyo ‘was able to surrender without conceding defeat on the battlefield, … [and] the Imperial forces were able to capitulate with military honour intact’ (Ham 2011, 486). By this discursive move, the Japanese government embraced the atomic bomb as the object that could excuse an otherwise inexcusable surrender. Tokyo’s embrace of the atomic bomb played an important background role in the emergence and evolution of the ‘nuclear allergy’ metaphor a few years later. One more element of the pre-­1960s historical context is important to mention. In August 1955, the tenth anniversary of the atomic bombings were celebrated in Hiroshima by the first world conference on banning atomic weapons. A prof­ essor of international law at Tokyo Imperial University, Yasui Kaoru, became the conference chairperson and he began to mobilize an antinuclear movement that earned the respect and participation of all political factions in Japan. One of Yasui’s tasks was to promote the narrative that Hiroshima was ‘an icon of Japan’s past as innocent war victim and a beacon for its future as a pacifist nation’ (Orr 2001, 52). This effort succeeded, and hereafter conservative and liberal Japanese administrations were persuaded to pursue peaceful nuclear energy and prevent the United States from stationing nuclear weapons on Japanese soil (Mizumoto 2004; Orr 2001, 50–62). In the context of Yasui’s efforts to build an antinuclear movement, disarmament activists evidently did not regard their nuclear aversions as unhealthy or irrational (albeit fearful) responses to the possibilities of future nuclear warfare (see, for example, Orr 2001; Wittner 2009). Indeed, 71 per cent of Japanese citizens favoured nuclear disarmament at the time while only 1 per cent opposed it, leading to all four major Japanese political parties adopting a non-­nuclear stance in their electoral campaigns without indicating any belief that antinuclearism was in any sense a disease (Wittner 2009, 70–71). It was in this context that, in August 1964, a Japanese reporter working for the leading newspaper Asahi Shimbun introduced the term ‘nuclear weapons allergy’. The reporter noted that As the U.S. government is fully aware of the extreme sensitivity of the Japanese people to the expression ‘nuclear weapons’, it adopted a prudent attitude towards the problem throughout, taking great pains not to give the

144   T.E. Doyle, II impression of having, in a word, ‘put pressure’ on the Japanese government [to allow nuclear-­powered and nuclear-­armed submarines to dock in Japanese harbors]. (Quoted in Hook 1984, 263) As this account suggests, the operational requirements of extended nuclear deterrence within the United States-­Japanese security alliance helped produce an ‘extreme sensitivity’ in the Japanese people to the very words ‘nuclear weapons’, to the weapons themselves, and to the naval vessels which bore them. Yet, the United States Navy did not want to be forced to off-­load nuclear weapons from their vessels before docking into Japanese ports, as this would add unwanted costs in time and money. The United States Navy expressed concern to Tokyo about Japanese attitudes, as the reporter later indicated: ‘In the background seems to be the United States government’s desire for the Japanese to put greater trust in the United States, expecting that, if enough time goes by, Japan’s “nuclear-­weapons allergy” will be eliminated’ (quoted in Hook 1984, 264). The reporter’s use of scare quotes signalled that this metaphor, or one very close to it, already enjoyed official currency. As it happened, the term ‘nuclear allergy’ had been coined by John Foster Dulles in 1954, and it is plausible to assume that the reporter’s knowledge of Dulles’s neologism informed his choice of terms5 (Solingen 2007, 67). A Wittgensteinian analysis of this reporter’s account suggests that a ‘shadow of possibility’ cast by this metaphor on the phenomena of nuclear aversion was one of ‘allergic reaction’ to pro-­nuclear discourse as well as the very weapons themselves. Any exposure to any of these ‘allergens’ would elicit expressions of ‘extreme sensitivity’ by the Japanese people against any entry of United States nuclear weapons into Japan. The United States opposed any constraints produced by antinuclear pressures, and it sought for the elimination of this ‘allergy’. Japanese antinuclearism had thus been constructed as a ‘disease’ which needed to be treated. The other shadow cast by the reporter’s metaphor excludes from ‘sight’ the possibility that nuclear aversion is a healthy or normal attitude which ought to be cultivated and upon which constraints on United States nuclear force projection are justified. In October 1964, the Communist Chinese government tested a nuclear device that immediately triggered existential anxieties of the United States and Japan (Gavin 2012, 75). In December 1967, the Japanese Diet reconsidered its nuclear non-­proliferation posture, and a Member of Parliament (MP) Akira Kuroyanagi asked a question of Prime Minister Sato Eisaku: it is said that the nation, the whole of Japan, is suffering from a nuclear allergy. I have heard that also within the Liberal Democratic Party discussions are being held on how to eliminate the people’s nuclear allergy. In short, the nuclear threat and nuclear [weapons] are fearful; I think this is certainly so. At the same time, there are some scholars who say we have arrived at a time when we should go one step further and should correctly

Paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity   145 understand nuclear [weapons] and should provide a precise understanding of nuclear [weapons]. What is the view of the Prime Minister regarding this situation? (Quoted in Hook 1984, 267) Akira’s remarks began by recalling the 1964 ‘nuclear-­weapons allergy’ metaphor, although the term now was the more concise ‘nuclear allergy’. Besides the change from ‘nuclear-­weapons allergy’ to the more concise ‘nuclear allergy’, Akira’s remarks raise for the first time the prospect that the Diet ought to work to ‘eliminate’ the people’s nuclear aversions by providing a treatment of a ‘precise understanding’ of them. Prime Minister Sato’s response reinforced and elaborated on this construction: the question of the nuclear allergy has been raised. I think it is necessary to eliminate this, the nuclear allergy. I think it can be said to be the result of not having a correct understanding of nuclear [weapons]. If there were correct understanding, then there would not be the so-­called nuclear allergy. Again, in regard to peaceful use and so on, I think there ought to be a higher appreciation of nuclear power. So, as was just pointed out, I think it is necessary to strive even harder for correct understanding. Yet, this is not simply in respect of weapons, so in this sense it is necessary to have correct understanding. (Quoted in Hook 1984, 267–268) Sato reinforced Akira’s depiction of ‘nuclear allergy’ as a negative condition deserving ‘treatment’ of ‘correct understanding’ to nullify its constraining effects on government policy. Indeed, in 1969 Sato claimed that I do not regard it as a complete system of defense if we cannot possess nuclear weapons in the era of nuclear weapons. I will, nevertheless, adhere faithfully to the pledge I have made to the people. We will not possess, manufacture, or permit the introduction of nuclear weapons. (Quoted in Solingen 2007, 73) Sato’s 1969 remark shows that Tokyo’s desire to be rid of the political constraints produced by the ‘nuclear allergy’ had endured for the previous five years. Nonetheless, Sato felt compelled to reaffirm the Three Non-­Nuclear Principles. The ‘nuclear allergy’ had not been effectively treated, and it still constrained Japanese nuclear weapons policy. On Wittgensteinian terms, the shadows of possibility and impossibility cast by Akira and Sato’s securitizing discourse solidified and expanded the understandings of ‘nuclear allergy’.6 Of particular note are their efforts to portray the core nuclear allergen as the Japanese people’s incorrect understanding of nuclear weapons and on that basis recommend a treatment of de-­sensitization via increasing the number of port calls by United States nuclear submarines and

146   T.E. Doyle, II a­ ircraft carriers, initiating public criticism of antinuclear emotions from a ‘common sense’ standpoint, and starting a propaganda campaign to introduce the ‘correct understanding’ of nuclear weapons and their role in Japan’s security (Hook 1984, 268–269). The increased number of port calls by United States ships presumably would produce a numbing of the Japanese people’s emotions which would then facilitate the government’s need to not disturb the nuclear element of their security alliance with the United States. The second and third planks of de-­sensitization would follow – i.e. the international ‘common sense’ would ameliorate any popular fears of the utility of nuclear deterrence and of nuclear energy’s economic promise. It bears repeating that Japanese antinuclear activists from the late 1940s through the mid-­1960s did not depict their opposition to nuclear weapons as a disease requiring treatment (Wittner 2009, 70–71). If they had, it would have signalled that antinuclearism was somehow illegitimate since, in the shadow cast by a near-­ literal use of the metaphor, (1) it is generally assumed that an allergen is harmless to ordinarily healthy people and therefore that (2) antinuclear activists aren’t healthy or normal and (3) they should undergo treatment to rid themselves of this unwarranted hypersensitivity (Hook 1984, 264). However, Japanese antinuclearists surprisingly ‘could and did use the self-­same metaphor’ at various moments in the months and years after its introduction (Hook 1984, 264). Even so, its adoption by the antinuclear movement excluded any of the metaphor’s near-­literal entailments. Rather, a paradoxically contrary shadow was cast – i.e. that the activists’ belief is correct, healthy and rational that nuclear weapons are existential threats to Japan and the wider world. It would then have to follow that the existence of nuclear weapons, the prospect of radiological poisoning in the wake of a nuclear detonation, and the pro-­nuclear discourse of the Japanese government must count as the set of true ‘nuclear allergens’ that required treatment. This last point seems warranted in light of the history of the Japanese disarmament movement. Recalling Wittner’s account of Tokyo’s intimidation over the Japanese super-­majoritarian commitment to nuclear disarmament and the corresponding civil society antinuclear pressures, never does he report the use of the term ‘nuclear allergy’ nor employ it to describe the Japanese people’s attitudes. However, he claims that the ‘nuclear allergy’ began to spread among South Pacific Islander states opposed to continued nuclear weapons testing and which had in 1985 signed and ratified the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established a nuclear-­ weapons-free-­zone in the South Pacific (Wittner 2009, 185). This is an unusual application of the metaphor to non-­Japanese peoples for whom, as for their Japanese allies, this ‘allergy’ is not a disease in need of treatment; indeed, this is an ‘allergy’ that paradoxically all the world’s peoples should contract. Paradox one of two: nuclear allergens as that which must never be expelled Having traced the genealogy of ‘nuclear allergy’ in the preceding section, it is now important to explore the corresponding paradoxes and the moral perplexity

Paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity   147 that attends them. Paradoxes are conundrums that constitute disruptions or subversions of conventionally accepted and dualistic ontological categories for lived experience. Goods are transformed into evils, burdens are transformed into benefits, and one effect of such transformations is a profound disorientation or perplexity. Individuals and communities are no longer certain about the status of politically salient objects or dynamics, nor are they certain about how to act in relation to them. Nevertheless, these subverted ontologies can remain entrenched and as ideologies they can and often do resist change. For this reason, they can often continue to regulate perception and social practices. Hence, the paradoxes produced by the subverted ideological categories are often sustained and eventually produce a range of social, political or moral dilemmas, or what Prividera and Howard call ‘double binds’ (2012, 56–58). A dilemma or double bind is a decision-­making situation where, on the basis of a conventional ontology or ideology, all available courses of action are foreclosed in terms of intrinsic value or positive outcome. For instance, in Prividera and Howard’s discussion of the social discourse on women in the United States military, the focal double bind produced by the conventional ideology of military heroism and gender is that a woman cannot be a soldier and a soldier cannot be a woman. Accordingly, a woman who joins the military not only denies her femininity but also denies the cult of the noble and manly hero affirmed by conventional gender stereotypes. Additionally, any valiant military service by a woman is not fully recognized as such even if a man with the same valiant service would be recognized. The enduring fact that women serve (valiantly) in the military is and remains paradoxical as long as the conventional gender ideologies regulate thinking and practice, and this can produce perplexity among many women who might otherwise have unqualified commitments about joining the military. Accordingly, our genealogy of the Japanese ‘nuclear allergy’ suggests two central paradoxes which in turn points to two corresponding dilemmas: one is that the nuclear allergens which actually trigger the Japanese people’s hypersensitivities must never be expelled, and the other is that the ‘nuclear allergy’ is not something to be treated. Each paradox has been preceded by others (i.e. what I will call ‘antecedent paradoxes’) that have then set the stage for an enduring moral perplexity over how to understand and act with respect to nuclear weapons. The remainder of this section will examine the first paradox and the following section will examine the latter one. It was suggested earlier that experience or historical knowledge of paradox can inspire an anticipation of future paradox, which in turn helps to construct a corresponding dilemma. This remark is particularly relevant for national or human security paradoxes.7 In the case of Akira and Sato’s deliberations on the evolving United States-­Japan security alliance, they apparently recalled that Tokyo’s pursuit of empire before World War II aimed to address perceived national security deficits linked to geography and access to natural resources in a rapidly changing and industrialized world. Moreover, they would have recalled that this militarism harmonized with the perceived Japanese values of national honour and pride. However, they knew intimately that militarism led to a humiliating surrender to

148   T.E. Doyle, II the United States, and they knew that many Japanese held the government responsible for their suffering and international misfortune (Orr 2001). From this recollection an initial antecedent paradox emerges: To the extent the former Imperial government avoided (some of ) the humiliation of surrender by using the atomic bomb as the excuse for doing the inexcusable, to that same extent it must have struck the Japanese people and officials that an absolute evil had been (partially) transformed into a political good (Doyle II 2015a, 64–65; Mizumoto 2004, 261–263). For, we recall that the Nippon Times editors’ charge of moral nihilism against the United States affirmed the conventional moral ontological categories of good/evil and value/disvalue in absolute terms. And yet, in the absence of the atomic bomb, the Imperial government would have lacked a face-­saving explanation of their surrender to the Allies. Thus, a first antecedent paradox is that the Imperial government discursively constructed the atomic bomb as that which provided a measure of honour for Japan in the midst of humiliating defeat. Since it was claimed that the Emperor had to surrender in the face of a looming atomic war, an absolute evil had thus been transformed into a political good, thereby subverting a conventional ontological dualism. A second and related antecedent paradox arose soon afterwards: namely, that Japan’s return to ‘full’ sovereignty did not include the sovereign right for Japan to field a full-­scope military for national defence. Instead, Japan remained largely dependent on the United States for its defence, and in due time that meant United States extended nuclear deterrence. The paradox of a sovereign state without the sovereign right to full-­scope military capability is generated again by a subverted yet entrenched perception about international political ontologies. On the one hand, it is partially generated by the regulative norm of self-­help in an international order of anarchy and, on the other hand, by the international political fact of Japan’s Peace Constitution, especially Article 9, which forbids it from fielding a full-­scope military. These two antecedent paradoxes establish the conditions of the possibility for one of the central paradoxes: i.e. the ‘nuclear allergens’ that can or must never be expelled. For one former Japanese non-­proliferation official, Tokyo must paradoxically embrace United States nuclear weapons as guarantors of their security while at the same time regarding them as absolutely evil.8 In order to make the government’s position appear coherent, it must reconstruct the identity of the ‘nuclear allergen’ away from nuclear weapons and instead towards, as Sato aimed to do, the ‘incorrect understanding’ of the Japanese people. It is in this sense that the metaphor does not identify antecedently existing similarities between the target- and source-­concepts (i.e. the political discourse and medical discourse); rather, it creates a similarity which had not previously existed and then pretends that an ‘incorrect understanding’ is akin to a nuclear pollen. The corresponding double binds forced on Tokyo’s security posture cannot be unwound unless the dominant security ideology is replaced. For, the Japanese people’s ‘nuclear allergy’ compels the renunciation of the use, manufacture and possession of nuclear weapons even as Tokyo refuses to expel the United States nuclear umbrella believed essential for Japanese security.

Paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity   149 The Japanese government has attempted to artfully render this paradox and its accompanying dilemmas as a matter of balancing disparate political and moral values. In 2002, the former Foreign Minister, Yukiya Amano, responded to challenges that Japan’s dependence on the United States nuclear umbrella contradicted its nuclear disarmament commitments.9 He argued that: When Japan makes decisions on a disarmament measure, it considers the humanitarian value and the security implications of such a measure for Japan, the Asia Pacific region, and the world. These two interests are not always in conflict, but sometimes they do clash. In such cases, the government of Japan must strike a balance between them.… In most cases, … both dimensions – humanitarian and security – have equal importance for Japan. (Amano 2002, 133) Amano’s distinction between equally weighted values of humanitarianism and security betrays the conventional security ideology that produces the dilemma into which ‘balance’ is the only viable mitigation strategy. If Amano had rather assumed a human security framework, then the values of humanitarianism and security could be synthesized rather than uncoupled and then balanced. The paradox of nuclear allergens that cannot be expelled could dissolve, and the double bind of affirming contradictory political values would unwind in favour of the affirmation of the complex but singular value of human security. One implication of this analysis is that the Japanese ruling class has a ‘nuclear allergy’ and not the Japanese people. University professor, Ito Takeshi, suggested as much in 1975 in discussing certain pressing problems for hibakusha aid activists. He said: The Japanese government has cooperated closely with this Amer­ican postwar strategy [of posing nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union].… It is precisely because of this that the Japanese government is extremely sensitive to the ‘nuclear issue.’ And might we not say that it is the subject on which it has been most vague with the people? It has not been the Japanese people who have had a ‘nuclear allergy’ but postwar Japan’s ruling class itself. And this ‘high-­level political’ treatment of the nuclear issue by the United States and the Japanese government has inevitably led them to ignore atomic bomb victims’ various demands and build a political environment that discriminates in favor of the military and related persons. (Quoted in Orr 2001, 170) Orr correctly notes Takeshi’s insight into the relationship of the Japanese government’s early reluctance to embrace a robust hibakusha aid policy and their hypersensitivity to criticism of its reliance on the United States nuclear umbrella (2001, 170). Extrapolating from Takeshi’s remarks, it is the Japanese government’s ‘nuclear allergy’ – then and now – which has not been properly emphasized in the academic literatures. In particular, it is (1) the government’s

150   T.E. Doyle, II long-­standing aversion towards accepting completely the moral imperative of the humanitarian imperative to abolish nuclear weapons grounded in a proper identification of humanity with the suffering of the Japanese who died at Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the hibakusha who continue to carry atomic wounds, and (2) Tokyo’s tightened embrace of the nuclear umbrella as they move towards a full-­scope military and away from any remaining commitment to pacifism in the Peace Constitution (see, for example, Le 2016; Soble 2016). Paradox two of two: a nuclear allergy that must or can never be treated The second and related central paradox to emerge can be expressed thusly: to the extent the Japanese antinuclear movement accepted ‘nuclear allergy’ as descriptive of their nuclear aversions, to that same extent it must never be ‘treated’ if nuclear abolition aspirations are to be realized. Japanese nuclear hypersensitivity becomes an evil transformed into a good or a burden transformed into a benefit given conventional security ideology. Indeed, it is an insecurity that must not be mitigated until a revolution in security theorizing diffuses across Japanese political society, their ruling elites, and perhaps the world generally. Until then, the ‘nuclear allergy’ qua weakness is paradoxically the only strong and durable defence for the Japanese people who must never again experience Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Two points seem to follow. One is that the project of (re)imagining Hiroshima must always have it reduced to atomic ash and rubble with a hot, radio­ active afterglow. Paradoxically, Hiroshima must always stand as a perpetual atomic ground zero at the same time it stands as a recovered and peculiarly modern peace city (see, for example, Zwingenberg 2015). Otherwise, the constitutive basis of the ‘nuclear allergy’ is subverted and the urgency of nuclear abolition evaporates. Unsurprisingly, this first point carries its own paradoxical features. To say that Hiroshima/Nagasaki must be always reduced to radioactive ash and rubble is to say it must always stand as a Nothingness, as a perpetual moment of Moral Nihilism, which simultaneously is a marker of Modernity and Being in all its positivity and of ultimate Moral Value. The embrace of atomic Death is transformed into an embrace of Life in the face of the perpetual atomic fire. A second point is that the term hibakusha must no longer refer exclusively to the surviving victims of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Instead, it must refer to all actual and potential victims of nuclear holocaust.10 The scope of potential atomic victimhood begins with the identification of all Japanese citizens as hibakusha. As Orr correctly notes: Radioactive fallout from the Bikini tests helped all Japanese to experience the Hiroshima A-­bomb victimhood as their own, and Yasui Kaoru’s ban-­ the-bomb petition movement involved them in making atomic victimhood a peculiarly transcendent national experience.… (2001, 65)

Paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity   151 If all Japanese become (virtual) atomic victims, then they possess the ‘nuclear allergy’ as a matter of social fact. Accordingly, their weakness that is their strongest defence can sustain the domestic pressure against Tokyo’s nuclear aspirations. This second point also carries its own paradoxical features. To say that all Japanese are now hibakusha is to say, recalling Jacques Ranciere,11 that those who have not counted in the Cold War (i.e. the actual hibakusha) are the ones which must be counted above all, and that those which did not count as such yesterday and today must now be counted as such – otherwise the ‘nuclear allergy’ fades ever more with the death of every person exposed to the atomic holocausts in 1945 or 1954. It is to say that those with a lack of injury have been transformed into those with the gravest of vicarious injuries, such that the radiation sickness, the cancers or the keloids have an ontological positivity that exceeds the ordinary health and well-­being of people which lack these maladies. It is to say that the ‘nuclear allergy’ has an ontological positivity that exceeds the hypersensitivity of the ruling elite to the criticism of their closeted nuclearism. But perhaps a final and tragic paradox should be noted, which might help illuminate what appears to be an enduring Japanese nuclear perplexity: i.e. that the Japanese antinuclear movement’s urgent advocacy of ‘no more Hiroshimas’ and hibakusha aid put Tokyo continually on the defensive and, more importantly, exceeded the national consensus on the question of national security. According to Orr, although ‘the majority of Japanese opposed nuclear weapons, most generally favored or at least felt it was best to assent to the government’s close relationship to the United States’ (2001, 170). We have already noted how Professor Ito Takeshi, in the process of urgently advocating for hibakusha aid, charged that the Japanese ruling elites were the ones with the ‘nuclear allergy’. Sadly, the stridency of this antinuclearist advocacy helped to hinder sufficient assistance for the hibakusha and which prevented an adequate and united resolution over the regional security threats facing Japan (Orr 2001, 68 and 170). Moreover, the constant refrain of atomic victimhood seemed to deprive the antinuclear movement of the necessary agency to offer responsible security alternatives to nuclear weapons (Mizumoto 2004, 267; Orr 2001, 68). Thus, a majority of Japanese have been consistently antinuclear in orientation but also supportive of the Japan-­United States security alliance, which has always included extended nuclear deterrence.

Conclusion: the paradox of Japanese nuclear perplexity as a Wittgensteinian language game According to Kazumi Mizumoto, ‘Japan has four different faces regarding nuclear issues’: those of (1) an atomic victim, (2) a United States ally under a nuclear umbrella, (3) an active promoter of peaceful nuclear energy, and (4) a peaceful nation promoting nuclear abolition (Mizumoto 2004, 259). In this light, the Japanese are indeed perplexed by nuclear weapons. The Japanese can neither effectively securitize nor de-­securitize nuclear weapons, nor can they be effectively

152   T.E. Doyle, II introduced or excluded. For the Japanese people, nuclear weapons subsist in a perpetual tension between positivity and negativity. Their political use presupposes their non-­use, while their non-­use presupposes the possibilities of their use. Moreover, Japanese political culture is perplexed by Hiroshima/Nagasaki and how they must be (re)imagined. Perpetually, Hiroshima/Nagasaki must remain unchanged and yet constantly rebuilt. It is the locality that is universal, the modern which is timeless, and the virtual residence of every citizen of the nuclear age. It must always be produced, but it must never be produced again. I suggest that these perplexities (and others which might be identified) reveal a long-­standing dialectical relation we might characterize as a Wittgensteinian ‘language game’ or ‘form of life’ in which the Japanese people and the ruling elites are attempting to navigate complex domestic and regional environments (Hollis and Smith 1990, chapter 8). Indeed, it represents a global dialectic between the nuclear-­weapon and non-­nuclear-weapon states inherent in the logic of nuclear restraint (Walker 2012). Framing this relationship in Wittgensteinian terms helps us to understand it as an evolution of agencies and structures in which the ‘rules’, ‘grammar’ and ‘play’ of nuclear weapons politics are ‘made up as they go along’ with no fixed end in sight (Doyle II 2015b). We saw originally the official disdain and disregard that accompanied the hibakusha’s atomic holocaust, and yet the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident made it impossible to sustain that official response. Afterwards, Japanese antinuclearism began to gain traction without any reference to nuclear allergies. However, we also saw that, after Japan returned to full (and yet only partial) sovereignty, Japanese antinuclearism was constructed as a ‘nuclear allergy’ that required treatment. Surprisingly, the antinuclear movement co-­opted the metaphor and ignored its conceptual entailments. Nuclear weapons, the military platforms that bore them, and the doctrines that justified them, were constructed as security instruments for the Japanese government, and the nuclear allergy was constructed as a condition that must never be treated. This fundamental stalemate in Japanese nuclear politics has remained largely unchanged since the days of Prime Minister Sato. And yet, each side must play the nuclear ‘game’ to ‘win’, or perhaps as if to win. Periodically, a Japanese official will state in public that Tokyo must seriously consider acquiring its own nuclear deterrent. Presumably such discursive moves aim to budge the entrenched antinuclearism of the Japanese people and to introduce some ‘correct understanding’. And, in response, antinuclear spokespersons will chastise and pressure such officials to resign (see French 2002). This, too, is a discursive move to resist ‘treatment’. Other discursive moves add complexity to the game. For instance, every August the sitting prime minister must offer memorial remarks at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembrance Celebrations. Most notably, on 27 May 2016 United States President Barack Obama took the unprecedented step of visiting the Hiroshima Peace Park and laying a wreath at the cenotaph that commemorates all those which died in the atomic attacks (Nakamura 2016). Obama spoke about the need for a ‘moral revolution’ and the common interests of the United States and Japan for a nuclear-­weapon-free world (Harris 2016). In this instance, Obama echoed the

Paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity   153 repeated calls of Abe and former Japanese Prime Ministers, but without any corresponding action by Tokyo or Washington on changing the nuclear terms of the United States-­Japan security alliance or the nature of United States extended nuclear deterrence in the world (Le 2016). The description of this Wittgensteinian ‘language game’ of Japanese nuclear politics is not meant to valourize it. Indeed, in this game’s international version, I would argue that many scholars that advocate for nuclear abolition are deliberately trying to play this ‘game’ ‘to win’. I conclude with an anecdote on why the nuclear abolitionist game must be played to win and why it is important to subvert the conventional security ideology that underwrites the language game of nuclear armament in Japanese political culture and international society generally. On 2 May 2012, the co-­chairperson of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-­Bomb Sufferers Organizations, Mikiso Iwasa, spoke to the First Preparatory Committee for the 2015 NPT Review Conference in Vienna, Austria. Now 83 years old, Mr Iwasa recalled how as a 16-year-­old boy he witnessed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He recounted for the First Committee his experiences of finding his mother’s charred body underneath some rubble, of losing sight of his siblings and not ever finding them again, and of trying to help assist the injured survivors while the Japanese and United States governments worked assiduously to cover up ‘the realities of the atomic bombings’ while ‘abandoning the survivors to their fate without providing any help’ (Iwasa 2012, 2). He recalled how the shock of the Lucky Dragon incident triggered in Japan a movement organized under the slogan ‘no more hibakusha’. He reported to the First Committee that he was fighting cancer linked to his exposure to the Hiroshima bomb, and he called on the assembled governments to accept their responsibility to prevent any future nuclear catastrophe by constructing a peaceful future. For, unless we can effectively (re)imagine nuclear weapons as having no capacity for bringing security – human or otherwise – we will suffer as nuclear hostages for the indefinite future. The first necessary step to nuclear abolition is to effectively stigmatize nuclear weapons. We can only hope that Mr Iwasa in turn hoped that his ‘nuclear allergy’ was intractably contagious.

Notes   1 This chapter is a revised and updated treatment of a previously published article: (Doyle II, 2015c). One significant motivation for this revision is the need to incorporate an analysis of United States President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Hiroshima, Japan, on 27 May 2016. I wish to thank Nico Taylor and Bo Jacobs for inviting me to write that previous article for the journal Critical Military Studies and for their invitation to write this revised and updated version for this edited volume. I thank them for their valuable input on both projects, along with the input of the anonymous reviewers and the series editor Christine Sylvester. I also want to thank Tom Le for his useful discussions of the topic. Any remaining error in the chapter is my responsibility alone.   2 For an extended discussion of the controversies over Hiroshima’s identity, see (Zwingenberg 2015), which is also published in this volume. Moreover, see, e.g. www.pcf. city.hiroshima.jp/top_e.html. Accessed 25 April 2015.

154   T.E. Doyle, II   3 This remark is based on a personal experience. My wife once suffered an anaphylactic reaction to over-­the-counter cold medication. She almost died, and since then she has carried an ‘Epi-­Pen’ which is injected to counteract such reactions if she reacts to a new medication. We also removed from our home all medications of the kind that produced that reaction.   4 It is also important to note the deaths of 40,000–50,000 Koreans in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks, along with a number of survivors who also suffered ostracism and a denial of medical coverage from the government at Seoul. See Sang-­Hun 2016.   5 Note: Hook’s 1984 analysis was unable to find any use of ‘nuclear allergy’ from an Amer­ican source, even though the reporter quoted alluded to its possibility. Solingen’s remarks correct the historical record.   6 For those unfamiliar with the term ‘securitizing’, political actors that want to highlight through speech or writing the security threat posed by some dangerous set of conditions commit an act of ‘securitization’ by their speech acts. See, e.g. Balzacq 2011 as one excellent source on the theories and application of securitization.   7 For the most recent treatment of these concepts and their interrelations, see Booth and Wheeler 2008.   8 Interview with Yasuyuki Ebata, Embassy of Japan, Washington D.C. 27 August 2008.   9 Note: Yukiya Amano currently serves as the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). 10 At least two classes of non-­Japanese atomic bomb or atomic radiation victims might thus count as members of a global hibakusha: the Korean victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Sang-­Hun 2016) and the Hispanic and Native Amer­ican victims of nuclear testing in the Southwest United States (The Associated Press 2016). 11 For an extended discussion on persons who do and do not ‘count’, see Ranciere 1999.

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Paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity   155 Harris, Gardiner. 2016. ‘At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require “Moral Revolution” ’ New York Times, 27 May. Hollis, Martin, and Steve Smith. 1990. Explaining and Understanding International Relations. London: Oxford University Press. Honneth, Alex. 1997. ‘A Society without Humiliation’. European Journal of Philosophy 5 (3): 306–324. Hook, Glenn D. 1984. ‘The Nuclearization of Language: Nuclear Allergy as Political Metaphor’. Journal of Peace Research 21 (3): 259–275. Iwasa, Mikiso. 2012. ‘No More Hibakusha: Message of the Hibakusha to Governments of the World’. Civil Society Presentation to the First Preparatory Committee to the 2015 NPT Review Conference, Vienna. Accessed 26 March 2015. www.ne.jp/asahi/hidankyo/nihon. Le, Tom. 2016. ‘In Hiroshima, Obama and Abe are Pledging to Stop Nuclear Proliferation. Their Actions Don’t Match Their Words’. Washington Post. 27 May. Mizumoto, Kazumi. 2004. ‘Non-­nuclear and Nuclear Disarmament Policies of Japan’. In Nuclear Disarmament in the Twenty-­First Century, edited by Wade L. Huntley, Kazumi Mizumoto and Mitsuru Kurosawa, 259–274. Hiroshima: Hiroshima Peace Institute. Nakamura, David. 2016. ‘In Hiroshima 71 Years after First Atomic Strike, Obama Calls for End of Nuclear Weapons’. Washington Post, 27 May. Orr, James T. 2001. The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Pin-­Fat, Veronique. 2011. Universality, Ethics and International Relations: A Grammatical Reading. New York: Routledge. Prividera, Laura C., and John W. Howard III. 2012. ‘Paradoxical Injunctions and Double Binds: A Critical Examination of Discourse on Female Soldiers’. Women and Language 35 (2): 53–73. Ranciere, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Sang-­Hun, Choe. 2016. ‘Korean Survivors of Atomic Bombs Renew Fight for Recognition, and Apology’. New York Times, 25 May. Soble, Jonathan. 2016. ‘Fear Sharpens in Japan That Hiroshima’s Lessons Are Fading’. New York Times, 26 May. Solingen, Etel. 2007. Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Tannenwald, Nina. 2007. The Nuclear Taboo: the United States and the Non-­Use of Nuclear Weapons since 1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. The Associated Press. 2016. ‘Trinity Test Residents Praise Obama’s Plan to Visit Hiroshima’. The Japan Times, 12 May. Walker, William. 2012. A Perpetual Menace: Nuclear Weapons and International Order. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil-­Blackwell. Wittner, Lawrence S. 2009. Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zwigenberg, Ran. 2014. Hiroshima: the Origins of Global Memory Culture. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Zwingenberg, Ran. 2015. ‘The Most Modern City in the World: Ismau Noguchi’s Cenotaph Controversy and Hiroshima’s City of Peace’. Critical Military Studies 1 (2): 102–115.

11 For granting (a) voice Marcela Quiroz

In one of his lesser-­known stories, Franz Kafka describes a torture machine that transfigures the writing process in a suffering-­stricken road to death. In “The Penal Colony” (1914) the Czech writer describes a complex punishment instrument devised to inscribe the verdict of a non-­existent legal process on the back of the convicts. Sentenced through imposition, the convicts’ bodies, tied up and laying face-­down (with a felt ball inside their mouth to still their moans), had to withstand for 10 to 12 hours the puncturing inscription of their verdict on their backs; as the piercing letters went deeper, the body, defeated by words, finally lost sense and breath. The machine, a crystal coffin filled with acid-­tinged needles traced an unjust inscription turned into unquestionable dogma over the condemned bodies; the needles carved, through words, an endless ornamental patchwork that bled them to death. After the first couple of hours, the felt ball was retrieved. The executioner explains that the body didn’t have either the strength or the will to grant voice to the intensity of their pain. Only then was the prisoner, defeated through the cruel and relentless conscience of pain as absolute defenselessness, considered as fully redeemed. Guilt penetrated, as an unspeakable already-­forever of pain, the back of a body that assumed silence as its last stance. As the voice was lost, the body exchanged what was left of its words for the words of others. Yesterday’s night marked the last activity of Japanese artist Shinpei Takeda’s Alpha Decay project, in collaboration with Mexican architect Gabriel Martinez. A pavilion built with cardboard boxes was traced over with graphite depicting the vibrations of the testimonial voices of some of the exiled survivors of the detonation and radioactive sequels of the atomic bombs. The wounded cardboard pavilion was, for a handful of hours, a refuge for two women who were exposed (then and now) to the sequels of the extreme timescape of a particular vibration that was grafted inside of them and marked the pitch of their emotional and corporeal memory. Mishiko and Sue—a couple of former 11-year-­olds who bear in the depth of their skins the tragic imprint of that August of 1945 in their hometown, Nagasaki—talked about their memories. The sound of running water, an unrestrainable saturated flow, was audible between their words and transferred the testimony of both women to the memory of deadly and deadful Nagasaki river, where so many thirsty bodies ended up dying, darkened and destroyed, as black rain residues.

For granting (a) voice   157 Inside the walls of the inscribed pavilion of the body and its obsessive replication of words, trimmed and overprinted until they relentlessly gutted that destructive gesture into a recreating corporal memory, Shinpei Takeda offered to both survivors the butchered painful recordings of his own emotional, mental and physical process. The unprocessable silence of both already-­forever nightless mornings of August 1945 was summoned; Mishiko and Sue’s seemingly fragile bodies gave voice to the resilient spirit that preserved their life as death’s witness. Both women spoke last night, in English and Japanese, convening a flood of two imploded languages. The persistence of memory hovered over the hurtful tone of their voices, as if their skin was being flayed again, as if the only way to bear the cruel demeanor of all those unanswered questions—death’s exhalations—was to tread again that wounded terrain. Mishiko received the bomb some miles away from downtown Nagasaki; she wasn’t heavily wounded. Sue was a mile away from the epicenter. Mishiko never saw her father again, who was working as a teacher in a downtown school. Mishiko talked about walking hand in hand with her mother through the remains of the city, trying to find, among the charred bodies, the remains of her father. They never found any. In his place, Mishiko’s mother picked ashes from a communal pyre and took them back with her in a box, as if wishing destiny would allow some of her husband’s remains to dwell in those ashes. Sue survived because her left hand remained visible among the pile under which she was buried after the plutonium explosion. A stranger, looking desperately for his own son, freed her from the rubble and took her to a refuge where she spent four days without water or food, with a fractured skull, half of her face severely damaged and her left leg destroyed. When her family found her, her mother thought it would be better to let her pass away. But Sue survived. Both women, now 77, traveled from San Diego, CA to Tijuana, BC on the night of March 11, 2011 and turned the cardboard skin of the pavilion into a Kafkian crystal coffin. They allowed us to witness the secluded depths each word bears over a hurtful, lacerated memory, fused in the body. They allowed us to remember that history writes itself mercilessly over their testimonies. They allowed us to face the gaze of children who survived the unseeable, the unsayable. The project was driven by a series of questions. What does it mean to talk at ground level—with nothing but words mediating between the ground and the body—about the dual condition of this surface, where all foundations begin and to where all remains return? What can still be done with the testimonies of a tragedy, regardless of its dimensions and visibility? Is it possible to turn being-­ witness into being-­survivor? What are the possibilities and limitations of art, architecture and writing to receive and respond to these historical urgencies of intimate survival? We have tried to understand the distances—corporeal, philosophical, emotional, contextual, residual—that bind the road between being-­witness an being-­ survivor; to understand the meaning between our responsibility over the living

158   M. Quiroz body of a project like this one and its attempt to recover the other’s pain from our own body. We want to believe that it was not only possible, but vitally urgent to give voice and permeable existence to a time relentlessly written over the body of two children—always already, inevitably—aged by the torture of infinite pain. … Months ago, when we began imagining the pavilion as an ephemeral container that might give closure to the intensive investigation process Shinpei Takeda has embarked on since he left Japan to live in Tijuana six years ago, we wanted to believe that we would be granted, one way or another during the process, a sensation not unlike that which in physics decants dispersed particles into murky watery terrain. The conceptual process that gave body to this architectural-­ artistic intervention kept revealing some of the edges and textures of what was to come. Nevertheless, I’m sure none of us foresaw the blind power to which our skins were exposed as we raised that strange cardboard shelter. Last night, breathing in the words of the two women whose voices’ submerged us in the desperation of the hours spent looking for a father or the numb cries of a wounded leg, we understood our work during the previous months, we realized the urgency laid out between their voices and our bodies. We understood the (im)property (that is, a condition as unseizable as it is immersive, imposed over property) of aching memory; we understood the eagerness to latch unto the remains of our existence. We realized that only through speaking from an exposed language over the indelible edges of their wounds it might seem possible to salvage the voices that serve as witness to the density of the (un)bearable quality of that/this time’s—always already—pain. … As if destiny had brought another coincidence, I received another legacy yesterday’s night, an article from Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik, in which she remembered an experience from her Parisian exile. Years after, that same young exile remembered that, during one of her singing classes, her teacher asked her to choose a song on which to exercise her voice. Rolnik chose an old Brazilian melody without much thought. She writes—still touched by the memory—about how, as soon as she began singing, a silenced voice, almost forgotten, in which the vital substance of her past was nested, reappeared in her song. It was the voice of the body of her language. That afternoon, the harsh and unfertile armor that had taken over her skin since she had been forced to (un)see herself in another continent through a language which her body didn’t know, was shattered from the inside. Even after all those years away from her homeland, she knew her adopted language, French, had never been able to summon in her the vibration she felt facing the seed of her destiny. … That night of the testimonies of that morning in Nagasaki, an insoluble silence dwelled on the pavilion. The wounds and scars our guests-­witnesses bore both visibly and veiled followed each other through their voices. In the tangible weight between each silent breath shared by the survivors and the audience, it

For granting (a) voice   159 became clear that both women had found their voice and were granting it to us in that specific time and place. Jacques Derrida asked over and over again what is that which granting promises; what can effectively be gifted through that gesture-­in-action that tries to give to the other, not the remains of one, but that which will be substracted from him/her, that which might possibly be granted out of what is no longer available, of the wound, the memory, the past. To grant that which one does not have, wrote the philosopher, would be the condition for truly giving. It isn’t granting out the excess, but that (im)possibility which might give existence to other. To receive other’s wounds through the time of a body willing to grant itself to exchange would be a way to try it. But, in exchange of what? Last night, Mishiko and Sue granted their memories the timbre of a voice born from the fathomless depth of a life-­in-resistance; from the invincible soul of a body always already vibrating with the emotions that in both of them extracted their will to survive from existence. The cardboard pavilion—a material that seemed incapable of surviving the rain and weather that marked its life outdoors (considering cardboard has a great degree of absorption and/or penetrability)—stood still. The pavilion that housed Alpha Decay seemed to have understood that it is necessary to un/re-­do itself to be granted back again the remains, the testimonies that covered its outward skin as recorded audible vibrations, 100 tireless traces that had, until then, been completely illegible. The cardboard boxes that held the walls that gave body to Shinpei Takeda’s Alpha Decay pavilion host in themselves the breath of the stories they housed. Held within their edges waits the true structural support of their stacking, drenched in the recovered voices of two Japanese women who managed, yesterday, to go back to Nagasaki’s horror and grant us the hope of their return.

References (selection) Derrida, Jacques. La difunta ceniza. Buenos Aires: La Cebra, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. Decir el acontecimiento, ¿es posible? Madrid: Arena Libros, 2007. Mishima, Yukio. La corrupción de un ángel. Madrid: Alianza, 2006. Nancy, Jean-­Luc. L’intrus. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2007. Tanizaki, Junichiro. El elogio de la sombra. Madrid: Siruela, 1994.

12 Witnessing Nagasaki for the second time Ryuta Imafuku

At the scene of banishment “The Disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”1 With this seemingly contradictory statement, the philosopher and theorist Maurice Blanchot makes a cold pronouncement on how we, the living, are fundamentally “left aside” by disaster. When it strikes, whether a war or a large-­scale natural disaster—which it seems could leave nothing intact—what could possibly remain out of reach, whole and unharmed? First, it is important to recognize that Blanchot’s declaration does not simply refer to the destruction and death that occur at the disaster site. Rather, it is ultimately a heartlessly keen observation of the truth that all disasters, whatever their sort, are by nature absolutely exterior to us, the living members of the human race. The true, primal disaster is that which silently shows us the imminence of apocalypse, the climactic point where the human mind is rent asunder, in a place beyond emotional engagements like mourning and compassion, a place incomprehensible and beyond human reach. No doubt Blanchot intended to make a philosophical observation of this kind. No matter how the earth is disgorged or disintegrated, no matter how many human lives are lost, beneath the rubble and ruins there lies something out of reach, a deep oblivion. As long as this oblivion remains intact, humans cannot truly be hurt by disaster, nor can we really learn from it. Thus, there is no such thing as an “unprecedented” disaster. All manner of catastrophes have recurred again and again throughout our prehistory and history, each time pointing us toward the whereabouts of this deep well of oblivion. To call one of these unprecedented—unbelievable, unheard-­of—is to lose sight of what the ongoing narrative of disaster throughout human history has to teach us. When there are no witnesses but the dead, a cataclysm becomes invisible and ephemeral to the living, and memory that ought to reside some place deep within us is ruthlessly erased from existence. This endless series of recurring catastrophes has always struck from the outside, bringing us face to face with the abyss of oblivion, as if to test the strength of our will to survive. Once the disaster has wrought its destruction, it once again withdraws beyond the bounds of the human experience. Never are we truly able to accept, to process, the disaster as an internal phenomenon.

Witnessing Nagasaki for the second time   161 It is in this way that we are, by nature, excluded from disaster, alienated from that entire realm of experience. The devastated natural environment and dead victims become manifestations of the very disaster that stole away their very life force. And, from the oblivion of the lost, it draws a power that strikes us, the living, once again with renewed force. Survivors stand before the aftermath of the calamity, dazedly recognizing the extent of their helplessness in the face of such limitless power, and how they are, by definition, banished from its realm. Even when able to see into this realm, they are at a loss as to what it is they should witness, and are only left bewildered, unable to assimilate what they have seen. In this way the world marches on, as if nothing had ever happened. “Restoration”: this fraudulent and hypocritical word is used to deny and conceal, out of force of daily habit, the human experience of existential banishment.

Scar tissue The work of Takeda Shinpei conveys a sense of hope born at the scene of this primal banishment, imbued with anguish and yet also with a resolute grace. Certainly, Takeda apprehends with a direct, contemporary sensibility the truth of his own, and all humanity’s, exclusion from major existential awakenings relating to disaster. However, his self-­awareness of the dilemma of his own non-­ experience of the atomic bombing, as a historical incident, is merely a starting point for the work. To be sure, his perception of the impossibility of testifying to the historical fact itself is a primary, and indispensable, procedure in the process of gravely accepting the conditions of exclusion. It is from a standpoint beyond the naïve-empiricist differentiation between the participant and the non-­ participant, the insider and the outsider—in other words from a position of facing the reality of banishment from disaster head-­on—that Takeda begins his working process. The more violent the expulsion from disaster, the stronger his drive to inhabit (or possess from outside) its primal and unknowable power. In drawing over and over the trembling lines of voiceprints from interviews with atomic bombing survivors, tracing and retracing them, he found that what ought to be the experiences of others, of the dead, became his own wounds and his own pain, incurred through the very process of exclusion from them. To be wracked by the pain of this violent expulsion, which assaults him precisely because of its unapproachability––a pain that is neither a naïve sympathy, nor a circumscribed vicarious experience, nor an imagined self-­identification—to endure it, to survive the wounds, to scream at his own wounds. To tirelessly pursue the origin of the scars etched as if on his own body by the recorded voices (voiceprints). To reject easy, simplistic cures for the pain. Through all of Takeda’s work runs the clear note sounded by these austere and provocative ethics. Scars etched on the body. I find myself mouthing the vividly evocative phrase “scar tissue.”2 I pronounce it again, more clearly this time. I feel the rough movements of the palate, the sharp collision of tongue and teeth. The progression of syllables expelled from the mouth vibrates the air, and the vibration is conveyed to my ears. I have a renewed awareness of the fact that all words are originally

162   R. Imafuku just sonic vibrations produced by the tongue and palate. Scar tissue: the dictionary defines it as “a dense, fibrous aggregate of cells that forms over a healed wound.” With this definition we can understand what “scar tissue” means, but our grasp of the phrase contains virtually no reverberations of the real, raw sound of ripped flesh. The moment the tongue is tamed, subjugated by language, we experience a silent, forlorn understanding, estranged from the physical realities of the body. And our understanding of history has always been this kind of non-­ physical, conceptual understanding, at one remove from the body. Let us turn back to the sound of the words “scar tissue,” so sharp and sibilant coming out of the mouth, while attempting to transfer the pain of the scarred, wounded body to our own. The sound, disengaged from meaning, is itself frightening, painful. At the same time, we somehow instinctively recognize the life-­ and-death character of the phrase, the threat to our vulnerable human bodies. In the course of life we undergo countless injuries, which are etched into our skin and organs until we are all, in fact, dragging around husks of nothing but scar tissue.… The horror, the pain, evoked when we voice these words unquestionably originates from the very conditions of human physical and mental existence. By pronouncing them, our tongues vividly deliver an understanding that is not conceptual, but intuitive and physical. Takeda makes the scars etched by this anguished sound, and his own physical tissues that undergo these scars, the starting point of his art. In doing so he finds a moment when his own body does, impossibly, transmigrate and inhabit the scarred bodies of atomic bomb survivors. And Takeda goes on to engage unflinchingly with the scars he has miraculously transferred to himself. Rather than leaving them alone and waiting for them to heal, he rips off the scabs that have finally formed and sets the blood flowing again. New scars are formed atop old. Perhaps it is this practice that embodies his “austere and provocative ethics” with regard to the conveyance of memory. In Alpha Decay (2014), his forthright written account of the trajectory of his art production, Takeda writes: When you tear off a scab, the wound is once again exposed to the air, dramatically shortening the length of time it takes to heal. Of course, when it does heal, the scar tissue is really noticeable. And when scars remain, it makes it easy to remember the pain and the trauma of the injury.3 Here the inclination toward compassion for victims of disaster approaches a kind of artistic asceticism, which aspires to a desperate communication of the physical pain itself. The artist believes that through his intentional exposure of the scars he has received through transference, the memories of history’s lacerations will somehow be kept vital and present. After World War  II, Japanese photographers rendered the keloid scars on the faces and arms of atom bomb victims visible to the public, marking the first time art explored the ongoing consequences of the atomic bombing. Since then, over half a century has passed.

Witnessing Nagasaki for the second time   163 Today Takeda passes on these survivors’ scars as if they were impossibly his own, which through his redemptive actions, might have the faintest potential to be imprinted in turn on any of our bodies.

Sympathetic to the world’s vibrations At the root of Takeda’s sensibilities as an artist seems to lie a resonating and sympathetic body, with an extremely deep amplitude. On extensive travels throughout South and North America he interviewed atomic bombing survivors, and while overwhelmed and even alienated by the intensity of their testimony, he grappled with their voices and memories. Takeda hit upon the physical manifestation of the voice’s auditory patterns in the form of the voiceprint, and within this format he sensed the manifestation of his own unprecedented “scar tissue.” By endlessly copying these voiceprints, he synchronized the real vibrations of these recorded voices with his own physical and mental vibrations. In this endeavor, he ran himself ragged overlaying various forms of shaking and trembling, and creating sympathetic and symphonic vibrations among them. He wrote: The shaking of the voices of atomic bombing survivors, which I drew over and over for Alpha Decay … these vibrations of the atmosphere, if voiced in solitude, are nothing but mumbling to oneself, and the trembling of the body that accompanies them is nothing but self-­reassuring behavior. However, when one creates a series of voiceprints like I have done here, they have an empirical, external reality as vocal vibrations, directed at me … which unmistakably made their way through the air, and into my own ears and the microphone attached to my camera. They are without a doubt their voices, and even more than that, they are without a doubt memories of the cartilage of my ears vibrating in response to their voices.4 Here Takeda recounts his discovery of the physical phenomenon of atmospheric vibration, by which the voices of survivors testifying to their ordeals, which he had thought unapproachable, unmistakably demonstrated their existence by activating the tympanum and cartilage of his own ears. Taking his own physical memory-­imprint as a starting point, he endlessly drew voiceprint waveforms on walls, floors, and boxes, and created sculptures and installations where the waveforms were manifested in threads or weaving. As if he were possessed by the replication and transference of vibration, through the medium of the voiceprint, Takeda’s actions took on a repetitive character that could be called obsessive. In these works, it is as if the repetitiveness itself manifests the essence of voices as waveforms that continuously vibrate the air around us. Vibration—trembling, shaking—is the physical phenomenon that fundamentally underlies Takeda’s art, and also its key concept. The Martinican poet, writer and critic Édouard Glissant has employed the term tremblement (trembling) in discussions of both humanitarian disasters and the

164   R. Imafuku r­ ichness of sympathetic vibration and resonance that arises among human hearts. The Caribbean islands, where Glissant grew up, have fallen victim to one disaster after another—earthquakes, tsunami, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes—and based on the long history and collective memory of these, Glissant strategically employs the concept of “trembling,” proposing in La cohée du Lamentin: Poétique V5 that above all humanity has something important to learn from the trembling of the natural world, in other words the vibrations caused by earthquakes. What he advocates is an across-­the-board acceptance of the world’s trembling, and a sincere dialogue with a world that has ceaselessly been wracked by trembling in the past and will continue to do so in the future. To Glissant this tremblement is not only physical, but also, as regards human ethical standards, a disturbance in the crust of our internal mental and emotional landscapes. It is a creative, generative trembling or vibration of the spirit that occurs during the process of recognizing and understanding the countless differences between ourselves and the other. It is meaningfully responding to the urgings of the alien and the foreign which we perceive as we undergo this trembling of the emotions, and responding to the calls of the other. This is the most effective means of avoiding humanity’s innate self-­centeredness, whether intentional or unconscious. Trembling is a phenomenon that pervades both our internal and our external worlds, and there is constant resonance and sympathetic vibration between the two. Recognition and acceptance of this trembling, as it is, unquestionably act as forces that lead our intellects in new directions and toward new connections. When Takeda speaks of “trembling,” it refers to the determined act of binding together, and creating sympathetic vibrations between, the literal, physical shaking of the ear canal by sound waves from outside, and the shaking of the crust of the internal mental landscape when it nears a critical ethical juncture. The “noises” caused by places and historical periods devastated by natural upheaval or political violence seep their way inside the artist’s body and set off deep reverberations. The body of the artist dissolves into a series of vibrations, and reacts by trembling with waveforms of greater amplitude, becoming the shining, symbolic nexus of events. Takeda introspectively describes the moment when he is possessed by the internal trembling that occurs while he is endlessly tracing voiceprints with a pencil: With a 2B pencil I draw the waveforms of voices, shaped by the emotions that fill them, on the irregular surface of a wall, sharpening the pencil from time to time. Once again I feel throughout my body the remembered sensation, the sonic vibration that shook the cartilage of my ears. What I am trying to say is something greater than myself. It doesn’t matter what people around me think, I am not important. I recall something crucial I had forgotten: that these narratives are something larger than me, and larger than my work.6 At this point, the artist has truly become a modern-­day medium. When he channels a force vastly greater than any one individual, opens himself up to possession by

Witnessing Nagasaki for the second time   165 the source of that energy, he has taken on for all of society the collective role that belongs to the shaman in traditional cultures. This is surely a daunting, overwhelming ordeal, but by expanding beyond the size of the individual, and merging with the trembling land and sea of the realm that he reaches, he transcends the personal asceticism of the ordeal. It is this vibration universally present in the earth that naturally generates the very foundation of our world, in eternal, cyclical flux, which can neither be accepted nor rejected. In this sense, even the atomic bomb cannot be denied, flatly rejected on humanitarian grounds. In this realm, even the phenomenon of a nuclear explosion must be gravely acknowledged as one of the many vibrational waveforms in the great cycle of the earth’s and humankind’s destiny.

Weaving the atomic unconscious Takeda’s work entails the endlessly repeated processes of weaving, unraveling, and re-­weaving. He weaves and then unravels dialogues, the waveforms of voiceprints, and the fabric of narratives, returning them once again to formlessness. In this reiterated process, stories that have been collectively imbued with fixed meaning, in the manner of tragic monuments, are slowly unraveled and then rewoven as new and unknown tapestries. A primal experience beyond language is brought into the realm of expression through words, and through the power of vocal vibration and of image, emerges as an as-­yet-unseen vision. Takeda has created sculptures in which the patterns of atomic bomb survivors’ voiceprints are elaborately woven with cotton thread spun in a small village of the Zapotec people of southern Mexico. Among the Zapotec, everyone is a weaver, and in this village they wove textiles with patterns based on Takeda’s images of voiceprints. This and other innovative and elaborate projects by Takeda are intended to free the testifying voices from the imprisoning role of the symbolic and monumental, and to return them to the land of the living through the rich physicality and craftsman-­like everyday wisdom of Latin Amer­ican indigenous peoples’ traditional craft. Among the indigenous people of Mexico the act of weaving, with thread spun delicately by hand, is a primordial process central to human creative activity. In the language of the Maya-­Kiche people the verb tz’ib, meaning to weave, is used not only about actual weaving of textiles, but depending on the context can also mean to write, cut, draw, paint, carve, perform, embroider, knit, to landscape (as in fashioning a garden), and a host of other actions that involve using the body to create a “text.” As in Western European languages the word “text” comes from the same root as “textile,” among the indigenous Latin Amer­ican peoples the word tz’ib describes all manner of intersecting sensory expressions branching out from the central act of weaving. In the course of day-­to-day human activity, weaving is an act both broad and deep, meaning creating the very “text” of the world using the warp and weft of wisdom, and working with delicate creativity and improvisation.

166   R. Imafuku Takeda was profoundly affected when he learned from an indigenous Mexican weaver that the indigenous people regard the intersection of warp (urdimbre) and weft (trama) as a metaphor for the act of generating a narrative. Indeed, in the weaving process the warp (the vertical thread on a loom) is laid down first in preparation, with the weaver determining the number of warp threads, their length, their tension, and so forth, just like setting the scene for a story. When the weft (horizontal) threads are woven in, the story begins to take shape, and when the pattern is eventually rendered visible by these weft threads (in this case the pattern being the waveforms of voiceprints), it is analogous to the depth, the vitality, the action of the narrative. In Takeda’s work the ruins at atomic ground zero are the foundation laid by the warp threads. On this foundation the voiceprints of survivors, and the actions of the artist-­shaman channeling them, become the weft interwoven among them to create a text/textile. In a sense, there is a need for us in the contemporary world to weave a new narrative for the age of atomic imagination. To extend the metaphor, we must rend asunder the net of the “atomic unconscious” that encircles and binds our everyday political and economic sphere, and begin the work of unraveling those vain tapestries and toppling those monuments. No one combated postwar nuclear proliferation more determinedly than Gunter Anders, the twentieth-­century German philosopher who reflected deeply on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two final catastrophic events of World War II, after he himself had just barely survived the Holocaust. Anders stated that to combat the dark, wily ambitions sparked by the corrupting power of the atom, it was necessary to understand the secret voices, or secret intentions, of that technology that humankind had developed. If the crafty tapestry of nuclear weapons has been solemnly unfurled in the magnificent inner chambers of the state, then we the people must unmask the mechanisms by which it is woven, undo the superficial warp and weft, unravel and unwind its threads, laying bare the most basic structure of the cunning tapestry. Anders has written in the following suggestive passage: You have to examine the secret voices, motives, and maxims of your instruments (…) for it is in an herostratic way that atomic weapons are treating mankind. Only when this new moral commandment “look into your ‘instrument hearts’ ” has become our accepted and daily followed principle shall we be entitled to hope that our question “to be or not to be” will be answered by: “to be”. (…) The apocalyptic danger is not abolished by one act, once and for all, but only by daily repeated acts.7 Ceaseless critical thinking from day to day, as Anders describes, is the way to escape from apocalyptic destruction, from the nuclear shroud that is winding itself around humanity. It also relates to the weaving of new mechanisms of memory. Takeda’s tireless obsession, his endlessly repeated action of tracing the voiceprints of atomic bombing survivors, points toward a vision of constant

Witnessing Nagasaki for the second time   167 “evolution” of human collective memory. His Alpha Decay contains the following passage: One remembers suffering. Then, one remembers remembering suffering. And so on, laying layer upon layer of film over the same event, writing, rewriting, and re-­rewriting one’s original memory. Rethinking and reinterpreting the memory as it changes.… As time goes by, it inexorably alters and replaces our memories. Individual memories become intermingled, changing into new colors and forms. We must interpret this process not as the contamination of memory, but as the evolution of memory. Unless one dies right there on the spot, this evolution must continue, an inevitable part of the process of living.8 In the phrase “the evolution of memory,” I glimpse the light of hope in Takeda. By endlessly overlaying the image of the vortex of flame at atomic ground zero, he unravels and reweaves the memory of it, moving toward a small but brilliant point of light that shines from the future.

The future of kaku Listening, editing, writing, drawing, assembling, tracing, carving away, weaving in: an endless cycle of activity. It is all a never-­ending process aimed at unmasking the unconscious that lurks within the nuclear tapestry, unraveling the fatal text/textile and re-­weaving it. The unforeseen warp and weft of this new tapestry form a new structure, a new tissue, not scar tissue but the tissue of hope. The fabric of hope, however faint, that lies on the other side of agony. In Japanese the verb kaku can be written with various different kanji characters, and can mean variously to draw, to write, to scratch (as when something itches), or to lack. The hard, sharp repeated K sound hints at the similarities between these actions, the scratching or rubbing away (creating “lack”) of a surface, and the word kaku has a physical, corporeal ring to it. Everyone who writes, or draws, is possessed by this repetition, this continuation of crisp K sounds that convey the relentless motion of the body. New narratives are written and drawn through these sustained, repetitive actions. In a room at one of his installations, Takeda wore a white radiation suit while using a pencil to trace over, once again, the voiceprints of survivors. This act was a physical exploration of the hidden link between kaku (to write) and kaku (to scratch). As if driven by some force, I used a pencil to retrace the existing lines of the voiceprints. The squeaking sound of the pencil acted like a metronome, lending rhythm to the performance. And the sound of writing in real time on the wall, the sounds recorded in advance, and the words of the atomic bombing survivors were layered and intermingled, echoing throughout the small room. The entire space became an instrument, and seemed to be disconnected, floating like a box somewhere deep in intergalactic space.9

168   R. Imafuku Here the scratching sound of the pencil has turned to a more urgent squeaking. Propelled by the artist’s obsession, it has been transformed, through the process of “the evolution of memory,” into something more forceful. The repetition becomes a trembling ostinato, a cycle of short, repeated melodic phrases, a soundtrack for an unknown new horizon beyond atomic ground zero. We, the viewers, become witnesses to the atomic bombing for a second time, conduits for passage of the catastrophic memory on to future generations.

Notes 1 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1. 2 Here one is reminded of the bilingual poetry collection Scar Tissue (2005) by Gustavo Perez Firmat, the Cuban-­Amer­ican poet who, like Takeda, moved around repeatedly in childhood, leading him to navigate through words and cracks that spread through linguistic and cultural self-­identification. His writing in English, a second language, takes on a variety of aspects, conveying the pain of the Spanish-­cultivated self as it plays the role of an alienated outsider, as well as the agony of the scars resulting from an operation for prostate cancer. See Gustavo Perez Firmat, Scar Tissue (Temp, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2005). 3 Takeda Shinpei, Alpha Decay (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 2014), 80. 4 Ibid., 55. 5 Glissant first fully outlined la pensée du tremblement in his captivating book La cohée du Lamentin: Poétique V. See the following: Édouard Glissant, La cohée du Lamentin: Poétique V (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 6 Takeda Shinpei, op. cit., 60. 7 Gunter Anders and Claude Eatherly, Burning Conscience (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962), 18–20. 8 Takeda Shinpei, op. cit., 184. 9 Ibid., 76–77.

13 Antimonument A short reflection on writings by Marcela Quiroz and Ryuta Imafuku Shinpei Takeda

Manifest The two pieces by Marcela Quiroz and Ryuta Imafuku formed part of the catalogue for the exhibition “SHINPEI TAKEDA: ANTIMONUMENT” that took place in Nagasaki Art Museum in the summer of 2015. The catalogue begins with my opening statement entitled “Antimonument Manifest.”

Our world is filled with monuments. They continue to stand for a long time, without wavering, against the inevitable oblivion of humanity. However, as time goes by, these monuments become frozen and consequently stagnate our memory to evolve. By hoping and praying to monuments, are we not avoiding having to really look at ourselves and our actions? As we worship these pillars of the past, are we passively allowing the repetition of history to take place before our eyes? Something fundamental must be changed. We must break away from this pattern to create a new path for the future. By listening to the stories of individuals, and by allowing ourselves to reverberate with their voices, we can breathe life back into the once frozen memory. The memory once again alive will provide us with a guiding thread to once again weave our unknown future. In this monumental 70th year anniversary of the atomic bombing, at a place where the atomic bomb, another monument of humanity, was dropped over  human society for the last time, I would like to propose this ANTIMONUMENT MANIFEST.

The Manifest was a call to the public as well as a call to myself, the creator of the exhibition. It was the first ever exhibition in which the then 10-year-­old Nagasaki Art Museum tackled the theme of atomic bombings and their surrounding legacies directly. It was also to be the conclusion of my decade-­long investigation which included two publications, one feature documentary movie, one website, numerous exhibitions, and numerous research trips.

170   S. Takeda The opening was on August 1 coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the same city eight days later on August 9. The exhibition had all the expected accolades—official logos from the cultural ministry of Japan to various acronyms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki city and prefectural as well as governmental institutions. One would normally expect an official version of the story from the appearance of such an exhibition. Therefore, the Manifest was an important departure point to set a different expectation to the exhibition. It was a public statement; a warning against the repetition of other monuments like the massive sculpture “Peace Statue” by Seibou Kitamura sitting in the Peace Park only a few miles away from the museum. Meanwhile, the Manifest was also a warning against myself. I have become aware of my own rather profound desire to create a monument and put an end to this complex web of memories that I somehow got myself into. I wanted to liberate myself from this memory by creating a monument that would last forever, hoping that would somehow satisfy my sense of responsibility. Nevertheless, I was very aware of the contradiction arising from the very act of putting my work in a public institution on such an occasion. It was already against my antimonument stance, not to mention that I was to install a rather monumental sculpture (4 meters × 5 meters × 12 meters) even by today’s contemporary arts standards. This only further enhanced my sense of dilemma heading into the biggest exhibition I was to ever undertake. I had to find peace within myself over this boiling sense of contradictions as an artist. The only possible way forward was to frame this exhibition as a point

Figure 13.1 Beta Decay #5 in the exhibition “Shinpei Takeda: ANTIMONUMENT” at Nagasaki Art Museum, 2015. Source: photo by Shinpei Takeda.

Antimonument   171 of departure for a new dialogue. With the sensitivity required when executing an art exhibition in a highly sensitive city—in its most sensitive time—with its most sensitive theme in its modern history, it became urgently vital to open doors for completely new outlooks on the memory of this tragic horror. Therefore, it only made sense that following this Manifest texts were written by Marcela Quiroz and Ryuta Imafuku. Their texts not only shed a light on various dimensions of my work, but also highlighted the antimonument nature of this exhibition.

Body-­material Perhaps what makes Quiroz’s and Imafuku’s texts so antimonument (in a sense written in the “Antimonument Manifest”) is their almost anatomical sense of connection between body and memory. In the context of my art production, the body is the material that constitutes my artwork. Imafuku refers to the scar tissue of the body as a point of departure for his chapter. He further analyzes his tongue’s senses upon pronouncing this very word, while inviting readers to literally pronounce the word themselves, almost as if the readers were to return to the fundamentally physical sense of body. This physical act, although very insignificant in comparison to the scale of events unleashed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing, coincides with

Figure 13.2 Close view of Beta Decay #5 in the exhibition “Shinpei Takeda: ­ANTIMONUMENT” at Nagasaki Art Museum, 2015. Source: photo by Shinpei Takeda.

172   S. Takeda what I intend to do with my art productions. The use of my body to understand its scar tissues and its compositions at its cellular level, is in essence, the only way my work stays true to the very carrier of the memory. For an example, Beta Decay #5, the center piece of the exhibition, required a series of repetitive body movements going back and forth weaving thread that is as long as 35 km. The resulting work became a body to carry the memory thus relieving me of my scar tissues. This body, consisting of threads that are used as base thread for weaving in Oaxaca, Mexico, provided this sensitivity. Just as it requires a keen sensitivity to understand the feeling of your tongue pronouncing the word “scar tissues,” the thread literally became embracing material for our “scar tissues.” The work provided the museum visitors a temporary body into which his or her own memory of pain can be liberated.

Body-­vibration While both Imafuku and Quiroz refer to my work Alpha Decay and discuss our voices’ potential to vibrate beyond our bodies as materials, Quiroz’s chapter on the visits of two Nagasaki survivors to Tijuana’s museum provides an insight into the possibility of understanding their voices with our bodies. Ironically on the night before March 11, 2011, not knowing what was to come with the Fukushima nuclear reactors accidents, I had brought two atomic bomb

Figure 13.3 Close view of Beta Decay #5 in the exhibition “Shinpei Takeda: ANTIMONUMENT” at Nagasaki Art Museum, 2015. Source: photo provided by Nagasaki Art Museum.

Antimonument   173

Figure 13.4 Alpha Decay installation by Shinpei Takeda at Centro Cultural de Tijuana, 2011. Source: photo by Shinpei Takeda.

survivors from San Diego across the border to Tijuana, Mexico to share their testimonies in Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT) where my Alpha Decay installation was being exhibited. What happened is aptly described in the chapter by Quiroz. The two women spoke inside the Alpha Decay installation/pavilion, which was surrounded by a wall full of voice vibration patterns written by my own hand. Their words became vibrations, echoed our bodies’ vibrations, and sank deep inside of us. The art work had transcended its physicality as materials and its limitations of time and space. The audience was able to go beyond the physical limitations of their bodies, allowing their bodies to be granted the voices of the survivors.

From monument to antimonument, antimonument to monument There is no end goal to the pursuit of the antimonument, because the moment that there is a static answer, it then becomes a monument. Rather it is a process toward the antimonument that is essential. This path is a movement toward a new outlook on the legacies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is perhaps best illustrated in the project I led, together with Ryuta Imafuku with the support of the

174   S. Takeda Nagasaki Art Museum, as a parallel event of the exhibition. The “Monument to Antimonument” walking tour took place four days after the 70th year anniversary of the bombing. We literally created a physical movement of people from the monument to the antimonument. With 30 plus participants that voluntarily gathered for this event, Imafuku and I started the walking tour from the “monument,” Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. From there, the group walked by the official monuments: the hypocenter, Urakami Church, Nagasaki University, some of the places most devastated by the atomic bombings. The walking tour was loosely led by Imafuku and me without too much guidance or speeches to make a space for each individual to reflect on their own sensitivities. Eventually we headed toward the museum where we sat by my artwork and reflected on how we each felt throughout the journey. It is this physical movement from the monument to the antimonument that symbolizes the shift from figurative to abstraction. It wasn’t the monuments at the hypocenter, neither was it my Beta Decay #5 that was important: it was the movement from the hypocenter to the safe area that was crucial. It was this process of moving away from realism and getting closer to abstraction that was important. It was liberation from the frozen time of 1945 in order to come back to present time that was important. On the other hand, the Alpha Decay exhibition in Tijuana, Mexico, described in Quiroz’s chapter, was the other way around. The journey was from the antimonument to the monument. First came the abstraction in the form of exhibition in the museum, which was followed by the testimonies of actual survivors of the Nagasaki atomic bombing. Even though they were not the monuments themselves, their physical presence was as close as one can get to the monument in Tijuana. There, the abstract became real, Tijuana was transformed into Nagasaki, 2011 became 1945. It was as if the journey took us from the fringe to the hypocenter of the memory. From the monument to the antimonument, and from the antimonument to the monument, the repetition of these movements between the two opposing perspectives forms an infinite loop. In this constant challenging of what is monument and what is the antimonument, what is the hypocenter and what is the fringe of the memory, and what is public history and what is personal stories, we are able to keep the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alive, and furthermore to evolve.

Index

Page numbers in bold denote figures. 3-Mile Island 84 Adorno, Theodor 124, 125 aerial bombing 94 Agamben, Giorgio 93, 106n18 Air Force Association (AFA) 78, 82 Al Qaeda 54 allergy: defined 141; nuclear see nuclear allergy Allied Occupation of Japan see Occupation Period (1945–1952) Alperovitz, Gar 7 Alpha Decay installation 173 Amano, Yukiya 149, 154n9 American Legion 82 anaphylactic reactions 141 Anders, Gunter 166 ankoku butoh (original Japanese dance form) 9, 91–107; atomic gaze 92–100; Cold War transformation 95–100; decolonial frames in 100–3; sensuous bodies as resistance to ‘whiteness’ 103–4 Anma (Blind masseurs) 99 ANPO (United States-Japan Security Treaty) 102 Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy 10n5 antinuclearism 3, 139, 143, 144, 146, 150–2 anxiety, nuclear 4 Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) 110, 120 approximation, space of 35 archival photographs 112, 113, 114, 118, 121n1 Arendt, Hannah 124, 125, 136n12

arms control, nuclear 3 artifacts 31, 32, 33, 92 artists 30, 56, 92, 98, 99 Asahi newspaper 18–19 Ashikawa, Yōko 103 Asia-Pacific war (1931–1945) 91, 93 Asian solidarity 47–8 Asian Studies Association 2014 25 assimilation 12, 14 Association to Protect the Human Rights of Resident Koreans in Nagasaki 19, 22–4 Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) 94, 95 Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima Peace Park see Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima Peace Park atomic gaze: Cold War division system 104; grounded responses to during Cold War 95–100; and production of hibakusha 92–5; teché 95 atomic unconscious 165–7 atomic victimhood 65–6, 139, 141, 142, 150, 151 ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme 97 attacks, nuclear see nuclear attacks audience reaction, commemorative projects 119–20 Auschwitz 65 Australian POWs 108–22 Australian War Memorial 121n1 Avant-Garde Theatre Guild (ATG) 98 Bailey, Thomas A. 140 Baker, Josephine 101 Baldwin, James 101 “banality of evil” (Arendt) 124

176   Index Bara iro dansu (Rosy coloured dance) 99 barbarism 55, 93 Barker, Rodney 129–30 Barthes, Roland 35 Bataille, George 106n27 Baudelaire, Eric 57, 58, 62–5, 67, 68 Beck, Ulrich 58 Bender, Stuart 9 Best, Makeda 8 Beta Decay #5 170, 172, 174 Bikini Atoll, US nuclear test (1954) 142, 143, 150 ‘blackness’ 92, 104 Blacks, The: A Clown Show (Genet) 101 Blanchot, Maurice 160 bodies: butoh 102; damage to 95; déformé 100; male 137n17; materiality of 98, 102; otome (disfigured female hibakusha) 130, 131, 132, 134; sensuous 103–4; vulnerable 125 Bodnar, John 25 body-material 171–2 body-vibration 172–3 Bourke-White, Margaret 61 Boyer, Paul 4, 10n6 British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) 109, 110, 111, 113, 118 British Film Institute, National Film Theatre 62 Broad, William J. 11n13 Broderick, Mick 9, 10n10 Broinowski, Adam 9, 106n28 Burke-Gaggney, Brian 89–90 Butler, Judith 124–5, 135, 136n13 By the Bomb’s Early Light (Boyer) 4 Camera (magazine) 30 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 59 capitalism 99 Carmichael, Stokely 101 cenotaph controversy 37, 42–8 censorship 35 Chaloupka, William 72–3, 74 Chapman, David 27n21 Chernobyl 84 Chick, Allan 112, 118, 119 Chikako Kashiwazaki 26n2 Chim↑Pom (Japanese art provocateurs collective) 123, 124, 125, 134, 135, 136n3, 138n59 China 139, 144 Chong Su-nam 18 Chōsen Sōren (North Korean affiliated organization) 20

Civil Censorship Detachment units 96 Civil Information and Education units 96 civil rights 101 civil society 101 civilians, use of atomic bomb on 85n3 Clarke, Hugh 109, 115, 118 clothing 31, 32–4; choices 33, 34; colors 32, 33; lived experience 33, 34 Cold War 7, 41, 43, 57, 66, 102, 104; emotional effects on those working on nuclear issues 4; end of 4–5, 54, 62, 65; global military strategy 96; grounded responses to the atomic gaze 95–100; nuclear scholarship of era 3–4; threat of 1; United States-Japanese alliance 91, 92 collective memory 54, 74–6; Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a global memory 81 colonial period (1910–1945) 12, 13, 16 commemoration projects 41 Conant, James 105n12 concentration camps 92, 93; photography 61 conscription 20 cosmopolitanism, nuclear see nuclear cosmopolitanism Cousins, Norman 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 137n27 Craig, Campbell 73, 80–1 crimes against humanity 1, 124–5 Critical Military Studies 2, 8 cultural memory 54, 55 Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch) 121n1; Fading Lights exhibition 110, 111–12; Matrix 8K resolution technology 114, 115, 120; Wedge display screen 112, 117–20 D’aesh 54 darkness 99 Davis, Angela 101 Day, Serlin and Ida 129 decolonialism 47, 100–3 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) 14, 20, 28n50 Derrida, Jacques 10n4 detonation of nuclear weapons 2 Didi-Huberman, George 65 Diet, Japanese 41, 144 Disabled American Veterans 78 disfigurements 142 Domon Ken 30, 36n2 Dower, John 12, 26n4, 27n20, 30, 36n3, 39, 50n11, 50n12

Index   177 Doyle, Thomas E. 9, 10n9 Dresden bombing 59 Du Bois, W.E.B. 101 Dud Effect, The project 64 Dulles, John Foster 144 Dunham, Katherine 101 Edwards, Ralph 127 Eichner, Joanne Bubloz 36n14 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 97 elitism 38, 39 Emori, Tadako 127 enlightenment values 38, 47 Enola Gay “Superfortress” B-29 plane: decisions on final destination 77; exhibit at Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum 6, 72, 76–8; petition for memorial 77–8 ‘Epi-Pen’ 154n3 ethnic history of Japan 17–20 ethnic-epistemological trap 16 exclusionary policies 16 Eyes without a Face (horror film) 100, 106n27 fabrics 32, 33, 34 facism, Japanese 80 Fading Lights exhibition, John Curtin Gallery, Perth 110, 111–12 Fanon, Franz 101, 106n33 Fat Man mushroom cloud 87, 115 Firmat, Perez 168n2 First World War, memories of 75 fission weapons 2, 104 forensics 32 forgetting 73 Foucault, Michel 29n74 Franju, Georges 100, 106n27 French-Algeria 101 Fujimoto, Chimata 43, 46 Fujiwara, Osamu 79 Fukuoda Camp 112 Fukushima nuclear disaster (3/11) 5, 84 Fukuzumi, Ren 124 Funatō, Kōkichi 49n6 fusion weapons 2, 98 “Gadget,” The 87 Gallipoli heritage site 120 geisha dance 100 Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima Peace Park 42, 46, 48; Australian POW and Occupation force experiences 109, 113, 114, 116, 117; restricted World Heritage space

117; see also Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum genealogy, nuclear allergy 142–6 Genet, Jean 101 geostrategy 96 Gerster, Robin 112 Giddins, Gary 66 Glissant, Édouard 163–4 Global Hibakusha Project 10n10 global risk 65–8 “glocalization” 60 Gluck, Carol 38, 41 Godzilla series 98 Gojira (film) 97–8 Goldberg, Stanley 76, 82 Google Maps/Google Earth 117 grammar 140, 141 Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere 50n29 Great Kantō Earthquake, Japan (1923) 17, 44 Greene, Hugh Carlton 58 Ground Zero 13, 18, 78 H-Bomb 143 Hall, Amy Laura 130, 137n37 haniwa arch 43 harm: Anglo-American male scholars with little experience of 3; nuclear attacks introducing a new form of 1 Harootunian, Harry 106n44 Harwit, Martin 76, 77, 82 Hata, Shonroku 131 Hatch, General Monroe W. 78 Hayashi, Kyōko 97 Hayashi, Shigeo 109, 115 heritage sites, Anzac 120 Hersey, John 87, 127 hibakusha (atomic survivors) 5, 8, 88, 123–4; activism 81; aging 6; atomic gaze and production of hibakusha 92–5; damage to bodies 95; diseases suffered by 142, 151; divergent experiences and politics of memory in survivor testimony 20–2; heterogeneous nature of 85n4; Korean 14, 16, 17, 20, 24; official definition 136n5; oral histories 15–16, 18, 20; otome (disfigured female hibakusha) 130, 131, 132, 134; secondgeneration 25; testimonies see testimonies of survivors; Tokyo’s disregard for 142; see also Korean community (zainichi), Japan high command, US 95

178   Index Hijikata, Tasumi 91, 99, 100, 103–4, 105, 106n29, 106n40 Hirano, Tetsuya 114 Hiroshima: 70th anniversary of atomic bombing 2, 5, 6, 110; assembly 46; becoming history 1, 2, 3; contaminated topsoil 1–2; as a crime against humanity 1; current situation 5–7; early responses to nuclear attacks 3–5; future experiences 7–10; governor 39; modern nature of 38, 49; nationalist mythologization of 13; new form of harm, from nuclear attacks 1; nuclear attack compared to Nagasaki 9; rebuilding as model modern city 37; reconstruction 38–41; role in warning of dangers of war 38; transformation into a city of peace 37, 38–42, 49n3; Uranium-235 settled into soil of 1, 71–2; whether a template for commemoration of genocide/war crimes internationally 9–10; as a world historical event 1, 3; see also Nagasaki Hiroshima (Hersey) 87 Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (HCMCA) 124 Hiroshima Collection (1945) 32 Hiroshima Film Commission 118 Hiroshima maidens 125, 127, 128, 129, 135; in Japanese discourse 130–4 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims 31 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Law 41 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum 15, 31, 32, 37, 42, 76, 78–80, 83, 123, 136n16; cenotaph controversy 37, 42–8; factory image 42; location 45, 79; modernity of Peace Park 48; Obama’s visit to (2016) 3, 6, 7, 8, 53, 134, 152–3, 153n1; opening of Museum (1955) 80; Peace Memorial plan 43; Peace Tower, designing of 44, 45; see also Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima Peace Park Hiroshima project (Ishiuchi, 1958) 30, 31, 32, 34 historical memory 25 historiography, Japanese 15–17 Hoaglund, Linda 123, 136n4 Hobbesian theory 80 Hodgkin, Katharine 76 Holborn, Mark 106n29 Holocaust 55, 57, 60, 61, 120 Honda, Ishirō 97

Hook, Glenn D. 143–5, 154n5 Hosoe, Eikoh 106n47 Howard, John W. 147 Huyssen, Andreas 63, 66 hydrogen bomb test (Marshall Islands, 1954) 133 hyper-visualisation 116 iconography, nuclear 4 Ihara, Toyoichi 111, 115 Imperial Army (Japanese), wartime atrocities committed by 83 imperialism 99 incendiary bombing sorties 94 Inside the Dome (stereoscopic 3D documentary) 113 intercontinental bombers, USAF 98 internment camps, US 93 Ishii Baku Dance Company 132 Ishii, Michiko 113–14 Ishikawa, Hideaki 40 Ishikawa, Itsuko 24, 29n70 Ishimaru, Norioki 50n14, 50n25 Ishiuchi, Miyako 8, 30–6; color, use of 32, 33; Hiroshima project (1958) 30, 31, 32, 34; subject matter and approach 32 Itō, Yutaka 40, 50n19 Iwasa, Mikiso 153 Jacobs, Robert 3, 5, 6, 10n10, 11n11, 11n15, 128, 137n26 Japan: ethnic history, critiquing narratives of 17–20; as first nation suffering nuclear attack 50n10; historiography 15–17; Korean community in see Korean community (zainichi), Japan; Peace Constitution 148; virtually revisiting 117–19 Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations 153 Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs 98 Japanese Communist Party (JCP) 49n2 Japanese Constitution 132 Japanese Imperial Army 83 Jeans, Roger 79 John Curtin Gallery, Perth: Faculty of Humanities 121n1; see also Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch) Johnson, Charles 107n31 Joint Commission for the Exchange of War Memorials (collage series) 64 Jones, Mathew 44

Index   179 Judeo-Christian tradition 129 Kafka, Franz 156 kaku, future 167–8 Kashiwazaki, Chikako 26n12 Kawabe, Ryōji 131–2, 138n43 Kawaguchi, Takayuki 18 Kawashima, Ken 16, 27n19 Kawazoe, Noboru 47, 51n70 Kaya, Okinori 131 Kazumi, Matsui 134 keloids 142 Ken, Domon 30 kenjinkai (prefectural associations) 132 Kennedy, David M. 140 Kestenbaum, Jacqueline 46, 50n27, 51n48 Kikkawa, Koyoshi 130, 131, 132, 138n41 King, Martin Luther 101 Kinjiki (Forbidden colours) 99 Kishida, Hideto 46 Kitamura, Seibo 89 Kitamura, Seibou 170 Klein, Christina 128 Kōbō, Abe 100 Kochiyama, Mary 128 Kocka, Jurgen 60 Koizumi, Juichiro 79 Kokoda Track heritage site 120 Korea, Japanese annexation (1910) 13 Korean community (zainichi), Japan: from 1910 to 1945 13–15; accounts of the atomic bombings 12–29; Association to Protect the Human Rights of Resident Koreans in Nagasaki 19, 22–4; direct action by 16; divergent experiences and politics of memory in survivor testimony 20–2; divisions in 15; enforced recruitment/labor of Koreans 13, 14, 16–18, 20, 26n7, 27n26; exposure to atomic bomb blasts 14; hibakusha 14, 16, 17, 20, 24; historical sources 27n26; historiography 15–17; marginalization of Koreans 12, 13, 14; migration, enforced 14 Korean Residents Union, Japan 20 Korean War (1950–1953) 44–5, 96, 97, 132 Koyagi Island POWs 114, 118 Koyagi Junior High School, Nagasaki 110, 111 Kruse, Kevin M. 137n34 Kuboyama, Aikichi 133 Kundani, Hans 49n4 Kuno, Osamu 142

Kure (naval port town) 109, 112, 121n1; Tourist Commission 110, 118 Kuroyanagi, Akira 144–5, 147 Kyŏngsik, Pak see Pak Kyŏngsik Kyuma, Fumio 79 language game, Wittgensteinian 140, 151–3 Le Corbusier 37, 42, 51n32 legitimacy crisis 81 LeMay, General Curtis 94 Letzel, Jan 48 Levy, Daniel 55–8, 60 Lewis, Robert 127 Lie, John 16 Lifton, Robert Jay 7–8, 32, 33, 36n9, 72 light 46, 93, 99, 100, 116, 117, 151, 167; of Hiroshima 123, 134, 135 Lippit, Akira Mizuta 32, 36n5 Lockean theory 80 London Blitz 64 Lucky Dragon (Japanese fishing boat) 143, 152, 153 ‘Lullaby of Oleanda’ (Hiroshimaassociated song) 113–14 MacArthur, General 127 Maclear, Kyo 32, 35, 36n21 Mahammad Ali 101 Malcolm X 101 Manhattan Project, US 2, 87; Manchester– Rochester Coalition 94 Margalit, Avishai 74, 75 Maruki, Iri 13 Maruki, Toshi 13 Maruya, Hiroshi 79 mass media 56, 57 mass mourning 75 Masugi, Shizue 130, 132 Matrix 8K resolution technology 114, 115, 120 May, Theresa 54, 66 Maya-Kiche people, Mexico 165 media 5, 6 memorials 3, 35 memory/memories 30–6; clothing 31, 32–4; collective 54, 74–6; cosmopolitan 58; cultural 54, 55; historical 25; Holocaust 60; living memorials 35; memory culture 139; multidirectional 55; nuclear see nuclear memory; photography 30–3; politics of, in survivor testimony 20–2; public 25; remembering 71, 73; universal 56

180   Index metaphor 141 Methodist Church Mission Board 127 militarism 147–8 Military Order of the World Wars 78 military studies 8 Minear, Richard H. 106n17 minority groups, Japan 12, 13; see also Korean community (zainichi), Japan Minowa, Toyoko 127 Mitchell, Greg 7–8 Mitsubishi 1 Miyake, Nobuo 79 Miyako, Ishiuchi see Ishiuchi Miyako Miyamae, Sachiko 135 Miyamoto, Yuki 9, 80 Miyoshi, Kana 113 Mizumoto, Kazumi 151 mnemonic topography 56 modernity 37, 41, 43, 48 modernization 39, 47 Montogomery, Lt. John D. 39, 40 moral re-evaluation, collective 53, 85n5 Morgenthau, Hans 73, 81 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 17, 26n8 multidirectional memory 55 Mura, David 128 museum installation works, contemporary 120 “Museum of Ante-Memorials” 54, 57, 59, 67; commemorative prophylactics 63–5 “mushroom cloud” imagery 30, 56, 87, 115, 118 Nagasaki 87–90, 160–8; 70th anniversary of atomic bombing 2; atomic unconscious 165–7; becoming history 2; kaku, future 167–8; Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum electronic song (11:02) 88–9; nationalist mythologization of 13; nuclear attacks introducing a new form of harm 1; peace statue 89–90, 170; scar tissue 162; Urakami Cathedral 88; whether a template for commemoration of genocide/war crimes internationally 9–10; world’s vibrations, sympathetic to 163–5; see also Association to Protect the Human Rights of Resident Koreans in Nagasaki; Hiroshima Nagasaki Art Museum, “Shinpei Takeda: ANTIMONUMENT” exhibition (2015) 169–74 Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, electronic song (11:02) 88–9

Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims 174 Nagasaki Prefecture Council for Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors 21 Nakagami, Kenji 102 Nakazawa, Keiji 134 Narkevičius, Deimantas 64 NASM (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum), Enola Gay exhibit at see Enola Gay “Superfortress” B-29 plane National Air and Space Museum (NASM), Smithsonian 76–8 National Police Reserve (NPR) 132 nationalism 99 Nazi concentration camps 61, 92, 93 Nehru, Jawaharlal 47, 51n75 nihilism 140, 148 Nihon Buyō (Japanese traditional dance) 100 Nijimura industrial complex 110 Nishimura, Toyoyuki 18 Noguchi, Isamu 8, 37, 38, 43–8, 49, 51n62 Non-Proliferation Treaty (1976) 84 Normalization Treaty (1965) 16 North Korea, threat of 54, 139 nuclear allergy: genealogy 141, 142–6; metaphor of 141 nuclear arms control 3 nuclear attacks: early responses to 3–5; introducing a new form of harm 1; threat of 1, 4, 54; see also Hiroshima; Nagasaki nuclear cosmopolitanism 53–70; and global risk 65–8; “Museum of AnteMemorials” 57, 59, 63–5, 67; War Game (fictional democracy by Peter Watkins) 9, 54, 57, 58–63, 68n1 nuclear culture 8 nuclear destruction 73 nuclear deterrence 7, 84 nuclear disarmament 7, 146 Nuclear Humanities, field of 9 nuclear iconography 4 nuclear memory 71–86; Enola Gay exhibit 6, 72, 76–8; Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum 78–80; remembering together 74–6 nuclear perplexity, paradoxes (Japanese) see paradoxes, nuclear perplexity nuclear reclusion 72 nuclear scholarship 7; lack of major volumes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks 8

Index   181 nuclear submarines 145 nuclear time 74 nuclear weapons: detonation of 2; as different-in-kind from other weapons 1; material form 72; meaning for Japanese people 152; in megaton range 4–5; nature 72; ontological horror 73; physical effects of exposure 142, 151; significance of weapons used linked to role in actual/potential nuclear war 1 nukes 72, 80–3 Obama, Barack 54, 55, 63; visit to Hiroshima (May 27, 2016) 3, 6, 7, 8, 53, 85n5, 134, 152–3, 153n1 observational methodology 119 occupation force 108–22 Occupation Period (1945–1952) 12, 13, 14, 16, 30, 91, 98 Oe, Kenzaburō 94, 135 Oguma, Eiji 38, 44, 49n5 Ohno, Kazuo 91, 99, 101 Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko 106n36 Oka, Masaharu 22, 28n64 Oka Masaharu Museum, Nagasaki 28n64 Okamoto, Tarō 47 Okinori, Kaya 131 omnicide 90 Oppenheimer, Robert 32 optimists 73 oral histories 15–16, 18, 20 Orr, James 15, 26n6, 50n10, 142, 149, 150 Ōta, Yoko 96, 131 otome (disfigured female hibakusha) 130, 131, 132, 134 pacifism 49n2, 79, 150 Pak, Kyŏngsik 16–17, 18, 20, 21, 23 Pak, Min-gyu 21 paradoxes, nuclear perplexity 8, 139–55; allergens that must ever be expelled 146–50; defining paradoxes 147; that must or can never be treated 150–1; as a Wittgensteinian language game 151–3 partial nuclear test ban treaty (1963) 96 Peace City Memorial Law (1949) 41, 42 Peace Declaration, annual 134 peace movement 44, 47 Peace Park see Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum Pearl Harbor attack 56, 127 People’s Liberation Army 96 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 96 Perlman, Michael 56, 65

perplexity, nuclear see paradoxes, nuclear perplexity pessimists 73 Photo Art (magazine) 30 photography: archival photographs 112, 113, 114, 118, 121n1; censorship 35, 56; confiscation and destruction of photographs 35, 56; diminished role as information source 35; fisheye lens DSLR camera 116; Hiroshima project (1958) 30–3, 34; instrumental use, in study of atom bomb 31; Nazi concentration camps 61; observational methodology 119; photographic magazines and books 30; postwar Japanese 33; see also Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch) place, representing 111–17 plutonium 87 political metaphor 141 Prisoners of War (POWs), Australian 108–22 Prividera, Laura C. 147 Provoke (collective) 30, 31 public memory 25 Public Safety Committee, Hiroshima 44 Quakers 129, 137n34 Quiroz, Marcela 9, 169–74 race/racism 44, 48 radiation 2, 96, 133; poisoning 143 radionuclides 2, 9 Radstone, Susannah 76 rakugoka (traditional Japanese story tellers) 132 Ranciere, Jacques 151 Rape of Nanjing 56 Rapson, Jessica 8–9 Realism, Western 74 reconstruction of Hiroshima 38–41 reconstruction surgery 127 Records of Korean Forced Recruitment (Pak Kyŏngsik) 16–17, 18 religious traditions 129–30 remembering 71, 73; collective 74–6 Remembrance Celebrations 152 Republic of Korea (ROK) 14, 20 Research Group Investigating the Actual Conditions of Koreans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 19 Retired Officers Association 78 revisionist history 76 Rhodes, Richard 7

182   Index Rice, Alan 64 Ricoeur, Paul 64 Roach, Mary Ellen 36n14 Rocky Flats (nuclear weapons assembly line) 87 Roeder, George 56 Rolnik, Suely 158 Röntgen, Wilhelm 32 rooted cosmopolitanism 56 Roper, Erik 8 Rose, Gillian 63 Rose of Sharon, South Korea 28n44 Rothberg, Michael 55, 60 Russia, threat of 54; see also Soviet Union, former (USSR) Ryang, Sonia 17, 26n13, 27n31 Ryuta, Imafuku 9, 169–74 Saburō, Ienaga 25 Saito, Hiro 35, 36n20, 49n9 San Francisco Peace Treaty 106n14 Sanger, David E. 11n13 Sartre, Jean-Paul 106n34 Sasamori, Shigeko 137n27 Sato, Eisaku 144–5, 147, 152 Sawaragi, Noi 124 scar tissue 161–2, 172 Schell, Jonathan 81 schismogenesis 100 science, omnipotence of 39 securitization 154n6 self-help remedies 97 Senate Resolution 257 78 sensuality 103–4 Serlin, David 138n38 Seto Inland Sea 1–2 shallowness 124 shared memory see collective memory Sherwin, Martin 7, 11n14 Shimizu, Ikutaro 44 Shimohira, Sakue 88–9 shinjinrui 98 “Shinpei Takeda: ANTIMONUMENT” exhibition (2015) 169–74; ‘Antimonument Manifest’ opening statement 169, 170; body-material 171–2; body-vibration 172–3 Shinzō, Hamai (mayor) 40, 43, 44, 46, 50n23 Shueisha (publisher) 31 Simpson, Caroline Chung 128, 129 Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP-62, 1960) 98 Smith, Sidonie 21

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM), Enola Gay exhibit at see Enola Gay “Superfortress” B-29 plane social contract theory 72 Solingen, Etel 145 Sontag, Susan 33 Soviet Union, former (USSR) 1, 2, 43, 96 space 35 ‘state of exception’ 94 Stein, Harvey 39 steroscopic imagery 113 Streetview 117 structural damage, post-bomb 30 student activism 101, 103 subaltern figures 99, 100, 104 Sugamo Prison 131, 132 Suginami women’s movement against nuclear tests 133 Sullivan, Kathleen 9 Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP) 106n14, 127, 132 Supreme Court, Japanese 26n11 surrender of Japan (1945) 14 survivor testimony see testimonies of survivors Sznaider, Natan 55–8, 60 Tagawa, Tsutomu 88 Taipei Biennial (2012), “The Museum of Ante-Memorials” at 9, 54, 57, 59, 62–5, 67 Takahara, Itaru 88 Takao, Kikue 132, 133, 134 Takashi, Hiraoka 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 27n32 Takeda, Shinpei 9, 156, 157, 161, 165; Alpha Decay 162 Takeshi, Ito 149, 151 Tange, Kenzō 37, 42–6, 48–9, 49n1, 50n29 Tanimoto, Kiyoshi 126, 127, 130, 132, 133 Tanin no Kao (Abe Kōbō) 100 Taylor, N.A.J. 10n2, 10n9 Teramitsu, Tadashi 41 Terayama, Shūji 102 terrorism threats 54 Teshigahara, Hiroshi 100 testimonies of survivors 8, 13, 82; divergent experiences and politics of memory in 20–2; Japanese and Korean, distinguished 21; lived experience 8; see also hibakusha (atomic survivor); oral histories textiles 34

Index   183 textures, clothing 33, 34 “The Museum of Ante-Memorials,” Taipei Biennial (2012) 9, 54, 57, 59, 62–5, 67 thermonuclear war (global), threat of 1, 4, 54, 73, 80 Thornber, Karen 26n5 Three Non-Nuclear Principles 145 Tibbets, General 78 Tokyo University 132 Tōmatsu, Shōmei 30 trauma 12, 30, 31, 34, 35, 56, 71, 135, 162; historical 1, 5; mass trauma 109; national 33 ‘traumascapes’ 108 Treaty of Ratotonga (1985) 146 Treaty on Basic Relations (1965) 17 trembling 163–4 Trident nuclear deterrent programme, UK 54, 66 Trinity atomic bomb test (Alamogordo, 16 July 1945) 93 Tsuchida, Hiromi 30, 32 Tynan, Kenneth 62 U-235 decays 71–2 United States Air Force (USAF) 94, 98 United States-Japan Security Treaty (ANPO) 102 United States-Japanese alliance 91, 92, 147, 151, 153 United States Navy 144 United States Strategic Bombing Survey 32 universal memory 56 Urakami Cathedral 88 Uranium-235 1, 71–2 USSR see Soviet Union, former (USSR) Utsumi, Aiko 132, 138n46 Vallen, Mark 4 values 129–30 Vaughn, Miles W. 39 vernacular language 25 Veterans of Foreign Wars 78 vibration 163–5 “victim consciousness” 13 victimhood 62, 82, 83; atomic 65–6, 139, 141, 142, 150, 151; Japanese 13, 57; Jewish 57 victimization 12, 25, 80, 82, 84 Vietnam War 64

violence, banalizing 123–5 voice, granting 3, 156–9 Wallace, Molly 66 Wang, David Der-wei 63, 67 war criminals, Japanese 131, 133 War Game, The (fictional democracy by Peter Watkins) 9, 54, 57, 58–63, 66, 68n1 War on Terror 82 wartime aggression 78, 79, 82 Watanbe, Shigeru 41 Watkins, Bob 115 Watkins, Peter 9, 54, 57, 58, 58–63, 66, 67, 68n1 Watson, Julia 21 weapons, nuclear see nuclear weapons weaving 165–6 Weiner, Michael 15, 26n3 White, Edmund 106n33 ‘whiteness’ 92, 100, 101, 106n26; sensuous bodies as resistance to 103–4 Winter, Jay 74, 75 Winther-Tamaki, Bert 47, 49n7, 51n66 witnessing 31; bearing witness 35 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 140, 144, 145; language game, Wittgensteinian 151–3; Philosophical Investigations 140 Wittner, Laurence S. 146 world historical event, Hiroshima attacks as 1, 3 World War Two, aging of combatants 6 Wright, Richard 101 yakeato-ha (burnt ruins) generation 98 Yamaguchi, Yoshiko 43, 46 Yanagi, Yukinori 135 Yasui, Kaoru 143 Yasuo, Machida 124 Yavenditti, Michael J. 127–8 Yokoyama, Helen 128 Yoneyama, Lisa 15, 48, 49n3, 55–7, 59, 62, 126 Yoshimoto, Takaaki 103 Young, Iris Marion 126 Yuki, Kamiya 124 Zapotec people, Mexico 165 Zelizer, Barbie 35, 36n18 Zwigenberg, Ran 8, 60, 79–80, 125, 136n14