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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Japanese war memory has diversified since 1945, but the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have retained their importance.
Scholars and critics have written in detail about how Japanese neo-nationalists have attempted to whitewash or deny war crimes committed by Japanese troops across Asia. Less widely discussed, however, is the fact that their revisionist school textbooks have also given short shrift to Japanese wartime suffering, or the understanding of Japanese as victims. Notably, while the Atarashii rekishi kyokasho (New History Textbook) failed to give even tentative numbers of the victims of Japanese wartime violence, the editors of the controversial first edition also left out the number killed by the atomic bombs. Since the early 1990s, neo-nationalists have argued that the Japanese population suffers from heiwa boke—a sort of “senility” brought on by peace. Since most Japanese oppose an expanded military role for the country or the development of nuclear weapons, neonationalists accuse their countrymen of unrealistic idealism. Downplaying the atomic bombings and focusing instead on “heroic sacrifice” and “service to the nation,” as Kobayashi Yoshinori does in Sensōron, is a way of undermining what scholar Thomas Berger has described as postwar Japan's “culture of anti-militarism.”
1 Tessa Morris-Suzkui, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso, 2005), 177.
2 The two stories were originally published separately in the youth-oriented weekly serial Weekly Manga Action in 2003 and 2004, and debuted as a single volume in 2004. The response to Konō's work has been impressive. A radio drama version was produced in 2006, and both Sasabe Kiyoshi's live-action film and Kunii Kei's novel adaptation came out in 2007. The Japan Media Arts Festival awarded Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms the Grand Prize for manga in 2004, and it received the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Creative Award in 2005. Both the film and actor who played Hirano Minami, Aso Kumiko, garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards. It has been released on DVD and a soundtrack is available. Last Gasp published the comic in English, and it has been translated into Korean, Chinese and French as well. Kōno Fumiyo, Yūnagi no machi sakura no kuni (Tokyo: Futabasha, 2004). Quotes herein are from the English translation by Naoko Amemiya and Andy Nakatani. Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2006).
3 Nishioka Yuka, Natsu no zanzō (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2008). Gaifūsha produces books that address a wide range of political, economic, and social justice issues. All translations of this work are my own.
4 The contested and complicated use of the word hibakusha is rightly receiving more attention recently. In this paper, however, I use the term interchangeably with the English translation “survivor.” For more information on this subject, see Takemine Seiichirō's “‘Hibakusha ’ toiu kotoba ga motsu seigisei” [The Political Aspects of the Word Hibakusha], Ritsumeikan heiwakenkyū, No. 9, (March 2008): 21-30.
5 John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 27.
6 There is plenty of evidence, unfortunately, to confirm this fear in the case of images. Tessa Morris-Suzuki offers one example in The Past Within Us. After Nakazawa Kenji's Barefoot Gen began serialization in Shōnen Jump in 1972, serious criticism was aimed at his visuals for being too graphic and disturbing. “In response, Nakazawa admits, he was forced to exclude from his testimony some of the darkest images engraved on his memory.” Later he commented, “When I reread my own work, my flesh crawled with loathing. I fell into a state of thinking ‘how could I have done it so badly?’ And this was so painful that I could not bear it. I immediately hid the magazines in which my work was serialized in a drawer. The plot of Gen kept running through my head, but I had spent half a year trying to alter my mood by writing entertainment comics (Nakazawa 1994, 215).” Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us, 162-63.
7 Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 26.
8 Ibid., 27.
9 Ibid., 26.
10 Anna Richardson, “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” eSharp No. 5 (2005): 1-19.
11 Richardson, “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” 7.
12 I am thinking here of, for example, the 2008 discovery that the best-selling work Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years was completely fictionalized and written by a Belgium woman who was not Jewish, the scandal of Herman Rosenblat's authorial liberties in Angel at the Fence, and the scholarship over the last decade on fake slavery narratives (written by white abolitionists) and “autobiographies” about if not by people of the first nations (e.g. Asa Carter's The Education of Little Tree). One excellent example of this scholarship is Laura Browder's Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000). Richardson's article treats Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1995), which was marketed as a “memoir” and “personal testimony.” A controversy over its categorization erupted when it was revealed that the author, whose real name is Bruno Dösseker, was a non-Jewish Swiss national. It has not been reprinted since 1999.
13 Richardson, “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” 9.
14 Ibid., 5-6.
15 Ibid., 7.
16 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 46.
17 Sara Horowitz, “Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz: Probing the Boundaries of Second-Generation Aesthetics,” in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, Ed. Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 278.
18 Horowitz, “Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz: Probing the Boundaries of Second- Generation Aesthetics,” 277.
19 For excellent translations and commentary on the work of the first three writers see Richard H. Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). John Bestor's wonderful translation of Ibuse's Black Rain (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1988) stands the test of time. Another important resource for short stories by both survivors and non-survivors is the anthology edited by Ōe Kenzaburō The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (New York: Grove Press, 1994).
20 Stephen C. Feinstein, “Mediums of Memory: Artistic Responses of the Second Generation,” in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, Ed. Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 201.
21 I use the term “manga memoir,” cautiously, realizing the contentious issues surrounding the definition of such a reference. It brings to mind an interview (conducted by Stanley Crouch) on the Charlie Rose Show (July 30, 1996), wherein Art Spiegelman asserts, “I kind of like living in the space between categories” when he explains that he wrote the New York Times to complain that his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, had been listed as “fiction” on the bestseller list. He adds that he would “have done so no matter which side of the list it had appeared on.” (link)
22 Subsequent anime and live-action film adaptations and the completion of the full English translation attest to Barefoot Gen's wide reach and long lasting popularity. Yamada Tengo directed three live-action adaptations, which came out between 1976 and 1980. Barefoot Gen (1983) and Barefoot Gen 2 (1987) were both created by Mori Masaki. The English translation of Volume 10 of the manga Barefoot Gen was released November 2009.
23 For more details see the interview of Nakazawa Keiji in Japan Focus. Nakazawa Keiji, “Barefoot Gen/The Atomic Bomb and I: The Hiroshima Legacy.” (link)
24 Kōno, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 103.
25 Ibid.,103.
26 Ibid.,104.
27 Ibid.,102.
28 Nishioka, Natsu no zanzō, 133.
29 Ibid., 133.
30 Nishioka writes, “Thinking I would engrave this day on my heart, I gave my protagonist the name ‘Kana’” (133). Michael Rothberg's excellent new work, entitled Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, speaks to how collective memory emerges out of a dynamic process that is frequently inspired and shaped by seemingly unrelated events in time and place. One of the most important interventions of this book lies in Rothberg's notion of “multidirectional memory,” which he characterizes as “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (3). Thus, in the same way that the Algerian War constituted a cite of “transfer,” which stimulated articulations of memories of the Holocaust, the production of A Summer's Afterimage can be attributed in part to Nishioka's association of the bombing of Qanaa with that of Nagasaki. See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
31 Ibid., 137.
32 In 1960, approximately 900 households were located along a strip of land running along the Hon River. In 1968, a development plan was proposed, everyone evicted, and over a span of ten years the land redeveloped. Today, in addition to an apartment complex, there exists a municipal art museum, youth center, swimming pool, and several libraries where the “atomic slum” used to be.
33 For instance, Fujimi Hirano expresses disappointed when her son Asahi, who was in Mito at the time of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, decides to marry a hibakusha. In the contemporary story, Nagio tells the woman he has been dating, Toko, that her parents have instructed him to never see her again because he is a second-generation survivor with a history of health problems.
34 The many writings of Hayashi Kyoko, a survivor of Nagasaki, stand out as particularly important contributions to the genre of Atomic Bomb Literature. Numerous works by Hayashi have been awarded prestigious literary prizes, such as “Procession on a Cloudy Day” (Kumoribi no Kōshin, 1967, trans. Kashiwagi Hirosuke, 1993) and Ritual of Death (Matsuri no ba, 1975, trans. Kyoko Selden, 1984). Readers can also find English translations of her short stories “Empty Can” (Akikan, 1978, trans. Margaret Mitsutani, 1985) and “Masks of Whatchamacallit: A Nagasaki Tale” (Nanjamonoja no men, 1968, trans. Kyoko Selden, 2005). (For the latter work see this link.) Another widely available work in English is Dr. Nagai Takashi's The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no kane, 1949, trans. William Johnston, 1984), which can help fill in this overlooked history.
35 This strategy of casting both characters and readers as the audience of oral testimonies recalls Spiegelman's ever-present tape recorder in Maus.
36 Kōno, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 93-95.
37 See Hayashi Kyōko's poignant novella “From Trinity to Trinity” (Toriniti kara toriniti e, 2000), which describes her 1999 visit to Los Alamos, New Mexico and, specifically, the Trinity site where the U.S. tested the first atomic bomb. (link)
38 Other historical novels make explicit links between the past and present, especially those that seek to “revise” the historical record in order to place it within the “proper” light of the times. Manga: Hating the Korean Wave and Japanese and the Emperor, although from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, can be considered in this light. Both employ “straw man” devices to present their arguments, building their storylines around contemporary college students discovering the “truth” about the past. In the former, this is facilitated through a debate with Zainichi and Korean exchange students who lose to the “superior” neo-nationalist narrative. In the latter, conservative, authoritarian school officials who attempt to punish a student for not singing the national anthem are shot down and shamed by an older supervisor who uses his personal experience during the war to bolster his authority to speak and teach everyone a lesson. For more on the former work see Rumi Sakamoto and Matthew Allen's “’Hating “The Korean Wave’” Comic Books: A Sign of New Nationalism in Japan?” (link).
39 Kōno, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 34.
40 Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 55.
41 Ibid., 55.
42 Richardson, “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” 7.
43 Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 135-6.
44 Nishioka, Natsu no zanzō, 134.
45 Ibid., 135.
46 These lines come from the poem entitled “One Note for the Creators of Atomic Bombs” whose original first lines read “Creators of atomic bombs! For a short while, lay your hands down and close your eyes!”
47 Kōno, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 33.
48 Jason Thompson, “Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms” in Otaku USA (October 30, 2007).
49 Jason Thompson, Manga: The Complete Guide (New York: Del Rey, 2007), 371.
50 Feinstein, “Mediums of Memory: Artistic Responses of the Second Generation,” 204.
51 Feinstein, “Mediums of Memory: Artistic Responses of the Second Generation,” 202.
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