Shadows of Nagasaki

Shadows of Nagasaki




SHADOWS OF NAGASAKI
TRAUMA, RELIGION, AND MEMORY AFTER THE ATOMIC BOMBING


Edited by Chad R. Diehl

Contributor(s): Brian Burke-Gaffney, Chad R. Diehl, Anna Gasha, Anthony Richard Haynes, Michele M. Mason, Gwyn McClelland, Tokusaburō Nagai, Maika Nakao, Haeseong Park, Franklin Rausch, Nanase Shirokawa, Shinji Takahashi and Anri Yasuda
World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension


Pub Date: January 2, 2024

ISBN: 9781531504953

Page Count: 368

Illustrations: 12 b/w illustrations
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A critical introduction to how the Nagasaki atomic bombing has been remembered, especially in contrast to that of Hiroshima.

In the decades following the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the city’s residents processed their trauma and formed narratives of the destruction and reconstruction in ways that reflected their regional history and social makeup. In doing so, they created a multi-layered urban identity as an atomic-bombed city that differed markedly from Hiroshima’s image. Shadows of Nagasaki traces how Nagasaki’s trauma, history, and memory of the bombing manifested through some of the city’s many post-atomic memoryscapes, such as literature, religious discourse, art, historical landmarks, commemorative spaces, and architecture. In addition, the book pays particular attention to how the city’s history of international culture, exemplified best perhaps by the region’s Christian (especially Catholic) past, informed its response to the atomic trauma and shaped its postwar urban identity. Key historical actors in the volume’s chapters include writers, Japanese- Catholic leaders, atomic-bombing survivors (known as hibakusha), municipal officials, American occupation personnel, peace activists, artists, and architects. The story of how these diverse groups of people processed and participated in the discourse surrounding the legacies of Nagasaki’s bomb­ing shows how regional history, culture, and politics—rather than national ones—become the most influential factors shaping narratives of destruction and reconstruction after mass trauma. In turn, and especially in the case of urban destruction, new identities emerge and old ones are rekindled, not to serve national politics or social interests but to bolster narratives that reflect local circumstances.

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REVIEWS

Thanks to multidisciplinary approaches, Shadows of Nagasaki situates the historiography of the atomic bombing in a broader context of Nagasaki history and beyond, which demonstrates a new approach to memory-making practice.---Yuki Miyamoto, Professor at Depaul University, and author of Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Note on Japanese Names | xi

Introduction: Imagining Nagasaki: Religion and History in Postatomic Memoryscapes

Chad R. Diehl | 1

Part I: Catholic Responses

The "Saint" of Urakami: Nagai Takashi and Early Representations of the Atomic Experience

Chad R. Diehl | 33

Loving Your Neighbor across the Sea:

The Reception of the Work of Nagai Takashi in the Republic of Korea

Haeseong Park and Franklin Rausch | 70

Faith, Family, Earth, and the Atomic Bomb in the Art of Nagai Takashi

Anthony Richard Haynes | 93

"Love Saves from Isolation": Ozaki ToÅmei and His Journey from Nagasaki to Auschwitz and Back

Gwyn McClelland | 112

Part II: Literature and Testimony

"Nagasaki" in Akutagawa Ryu±nosuke's Taisho-Era Literary Imagination

Anri Yasuda | 131

Lambs of God, Ravens of Death, Rafts of Corpses:

Three Visions of Trauma in Nagasaki Survivor Poetry

Chad R. Diehl | 151

Listening to the Dead and Filling the Void: The Prayer and Activism of Akizuki Tatsuichiro

Maika Nakao | 179

Breaking New Ground in Nagasaki: Seirai Yuichi's Ground Zero Literature

Michele M. Mason | 191

Part III: Sites of Memory

Fragmented Memory:

The Scattering of the Urakami Cathedral Ruins among Nagasaki's Memorial Landscape

Anna Gasha | 215

One Fine Day: The Allied Occupation of Nagasaki and "Madame Butterfly House"

Brian Burke-Gaffney | 243

The Titan and the Arch:Regulating Public Memory through the Peace Statue

Nanase Shirokawa | 264

Part IV: Reflections

How I Came to Criticize Nagai Takashi's Urakami Holocaust Theory

Shinji Takahashi | 295

On Rereleasing The Bells of Nagasaki to the World

Tokusaburo Nagai | 312

Acknowledgments | 319

List of Contributors | 323

CONTRIBUTORS

Contributions: Brian Burke-Gaffney

Brian Burke-Gaffney was born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1950 and came to Japan in 1972, going on to train for nine years as an ordained monk of the Rinzai Zen Sect. He moved to Nagasaki in 1982. He is currently professor of cultural history at the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science and honorary director of Glover Garden. He received the Nagasaki Prefecture Citizens Award in 1992 and the Nagasaki Shinbun Culture Award in 2016. He has published several books in Japanese and English, including Starcrossed: A Biography of Madame Butterfly (EastBridge, 2004) and Nagasaki: The British Experience 1854–1945 (Global Oriental UK, 2009).

Contributions: Chad R. Diehl

Chad R. Diehl received his PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2011, specializing in modern Japanese history. He has researched the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and its aftermath since 2003 and published his first monograph, Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives, with Cornell University Press in 2018.

Contributions: Anna Gasha

Anna Gasha is a doctoral candidate in historic preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Her research interests include the relationships between disasters and preservation and the history and politics of science and technology within preservation practice. She graduated with a BA in history of art and architecture and an ScB in materials engineering from Brown University, and she holds an MS in structural engineering, mechanics, and materials from University of California, Berkeley. She is of Japanese and Okinawan descent.

Contributions: Anthony Richard Haynes

Anthony Richard Haynes received his PhD in Christian ethics and practical theology from the University of Edinburgh in 2018. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the connection between art and mysticism in the life and thought of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. He has since worked as an adjunct professor and visiting lecturer in philosophy and religious studies for several universities, including Lakeland University (Japan Campus) and, most recently, the University of Santo Tomas (Philippines). His academic research centers on the practical expression of religious belief and experience, particularly in fiction, visual art, and ascetic ways of life.

Contributions: Michele M. Mason

Michele M. Mason is associate professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, gender and feminist theory, masculinity studies, environmental humanities, and contents tourism. Mason is also dedicated to the study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in literature and history, nuclear abolition, global hibakusha movements, and nuclear power. She is the author of Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and Nation-State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and coproduced, with Kathy Sloane, the award-winning documentary film Witness to Hiroshima (witnesstohiroshima.com).

Contributions: Gwyn McClelland

Gwyn McClelland is an oral historian who studies the impact of trauma in religious narratives. He is currently lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of New England, Anaiwan Country, Australia, and is the author of Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives (Routledge, 2020). His work has also recently been published in History Workshop Journal and Journal of Cultural Economy, and he is a recent Japan Foundation Fellow researching the experiences of Hidden Christians and Catholics in the Goto Archipelago.

Contributions: Tokusaburō Nagai

Tokusaburō Nagai is the grandson of Takashi Nagai and the director of the Nagasaki City Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum.

Contributions: Maika Nakao

Maika Nakao is an associate professor at Hiroshima University. She received her PhD in the history of science from the University of Tokyo and is an expert in the nuclear history of Japan. She also worked at Nagasaki University from 2018 to 2021. She coedited the book The Seventy-Five Years after the Atomic Bombing: Tracing the Memories and Records of Nagasaki (Shoshi tsukumo, 2021) and has published two monographs: Scientists and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The Border between Science and Non-Science (Seidosha, 2019) and Allure of Nuclear: Science Culture in Prewar Japan and the Emergence of “Atomic Utopia” (Keisō shobō, 2015).

Contributions: Haeseong Park

Haeseong Park is currently an instructor in the Community Faculty at Metropolitan State University. She has published several journal articles, including many on Christianity in Korea, such as “Christian Feminist Helen Kim and Her Compromise for the Service to Syngman Rhee” in Korea Journal (2020).

Contributions: Franklin Rausch

Franklin Rausch received his PhD from the University of British Columbia and is an associate professor in the History and Philosophy Department at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina. His research focuses on Korean religious history, particularly Catholicism. He has published several articles, including “The Late Chosŏn Korean Catholic Archives: Documenting this World and the Next” in Journal of Korean Studies (October 2019). He has also contributed two articles on Korean Catholicism to The Palgrave Handbook of the Catholic Church in East Asia. His recent translation with Jieun Han, An Chunggŭn: His Life and Thought in His Own Words, was published by Brill in 2020.

Contributions: Nanase Shirokawa

Nanase Shirokawa is a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying art and architectural history. Her research focuses on memory and visual culture in postwar Japan.

Contributions: Shinji Takahashi

Shinji Takahashi is one of the foremost scholars of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and was formerly a professor at Nagasaki University. He has written and coedited numerous books on Nagasaki and has been active in the antinuclear peace movement since the 1970s.

Contributions: Anri Yasuda

Anri Yasuda is an assistant professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Virginia. Her monograph Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930 is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.