Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age

by Hein,Laura E.

• ISBN13: 9781563249679
• ISBN10: 1563249677
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1996-12-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The development and use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki number among the formative national experiences for both Japanese and Americans, as well as for U.S.-Japan relations throughout the last half of the twentieth century. It is now clear, however, that memories and lessons learned from the bombings are still being reworked and contested, perhaps even more heatedly than they were in 1945. Tracking the development of that fifty-year trajectory, this volume explores the ways in which the bomb has shaped the self-image of both peoples: for Americans, the dominant story is that the bombs provided an appropriate and necessary conclusion to a just war; for Japanese, it is a symbol of their victimization. The distinguished contributors analyze the ways in which memories of the bombs, constantly reworked in the media, in the arts, and in the political arena, continue to define important, albeit often unacknowledged, undercurrents in the U.S.-Japan relationship.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Commemoration and Silencing: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan

Commemoration and Censorship

Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia

Between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki: Nationalism and Memory in Japan and the United States

Making Things Visible: Learning from the Censors

Commemoration Controversies: The War, the Peace and Democracy in Japan

Mass Death in Miniature: How Americans Became Victims of the Bomb

Patriotic Orthodoxy and American Decline

Contending Constituencies

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Voluntary Silence

The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the A-Bomb Decision, 1945-1995

Memory Matters: Hiroshima's Korean Atom Bomb Memorial and the Politics of Ethnicity

Were We the Enemy? Hiroshima Survivors in America

Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory

Afterword

Learning About Patriotism, Decency and the Bomb

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