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: 9781563249662
• ISBN10: 1563249669
• Format: Hardcover
• 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

Acknowledgments	ix
Part I: Introduction	3	(34)
1. Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan	3	(34)
Laura Hein
Mark Selden
Part II: Commemoration and Censorship	37	(118)
2. Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia	37	(15)
John W. Dower
3. Between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima Nagasaki: Nationalism and Memory in Japan and the United States	52	(21)
YUI Daizaburo
4. Making Things Visible: Learning from the Censors	73	(27)
George H. Roeder, Jr.
5. Commemoration Controversies: The War, the Peace, and Democracy in Japan	100	(22)
Ellen H. Hammond
6. Mass Death in Miniature: How Americans Became Victims of the Bomb	122	(12)
Lane Fenrich
7. Patriotic Orthodoxy and American Decline	134	(21)
Michael S. Sherry
Part III: Contending Constituencies	155	(124)
8. Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Voluntary Silence	155	(18)
Monica Braw
9. The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the Atomic Bomb Decision, 1945-1995	173	(29)
Sadao ASADA
10. Memory Matters: Hiroshima's Korean Atom Bomb Memorial and the Politics of Ethnicity	202	(30)
Lisa Yoneyama
11. Were We the Enemy? American Hibakusha	232	(28)
SODEI Rinjiro
12. Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory	260	(19)
Hugh Gusterson
Part IV: Afterword	279	(8)
13. Learning about Patriotism, Decency, and the Bomb	279	(8)
Laura Hein
About the Authors	287	(4)
Index	291