Enola Gay Research Articles

Historical Controversies and Collective Memory: Reassessing the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This article explores the complex historical and public memory controversies surrounding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, focusing on the National Air and Space Museum’s Enola Gay exhibition. It examines how different historians interpret the use of atomic bombs and the varying narratives presented to the public. Through the lens of Michel Foucault’s theory on popular memory, the study highlights the tensions between official narratives and revisionist perspectives. The analysis reveals how national patriotism and historical revisionism shape collective memory, questioning the ownership of historical truth. The Enola Gay controversy exemplifies the ongoing debate over historical representation, public history, and the ethical implications of wartime actions. By revisiting this controversy, the paper aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how history is constructed and contested, emphasizing the importance of inclusive and critical engagement with historical events.

August 6 — International Physicians for Peace Day

73 years ago, on the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The American bomber had the sonorous name "Enola Gay" - it was named after the mother of the crew commander, and the deadly bomb with the affectionate name "Little Boy" contained 20 thousand tons of TNT equivalent. In a few seconds, the "Little Boy" claimed about 130 thousand human lives, most of which turned into radioactive dust, and tens of thousands of people were dishoused. Three days later, on August 9, the city of Nagasaki was subjected to a similar strike using a bomb with no less peaceful name "Fat Man", with equally terrible consequences [3]. According to some reports, the Americans, in order to achieve complete surrender of Japan, planned to carry out a total of three nuclear strikes, but as of early August 1945, the US military had only two deadly bombs at their disposal. At that time, few could have imagined how terrible and irreversible the consequences of a nuclear strike could be. The incidence of leukemia increased 18 times. The victims of this terrible bombardment continue to die from radiation sickness to this day, annually replenishing the list of victims by 5,000 names [1]. To date, the number of victims of the tragedy has approached 450 thousand. The US Air Force colonel, who gave the order to drop the bomb from an escort aircraft, soon went mad, and spent the rest of his days in a psychiatric hospital.

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Review: Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, by James L. Nolan, Jr.

Review: <i>Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age</i>, by James L. Nolan, Jr.

Invisible Atomic Bombs: Spectrality and the Testimonial Potency of the Atomic Bomb in Hibakusha and Post-Hibakusha Narrative

Invisible Atomic Bombs:Spectrality and the Testimonial Potency of the Atomic Bomb in Hibakusha and Post-Hibakusha Narrative Jason C. Toncic (bio) Tamiki Hara, born 15 November 1905, lived the majority of his life in dreamlike comfort. Then, on 6 August 1945, at 8:15 a.m., an eighteen-kiloton nuclear bomb, code name "Little Boy," exploded over the city of Hiroshima where he lived, immediately killing 80,000 people and later taking the lives of an additional 60,000 civilians. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began a new era. Yet where does the story truly begin? Does it start with J. Robert Oppenheimer's work on the atomic bomb, Albert Einstein's support of nuclear weaponry, President Truman's decision to use the bomb on Japan, the pilots of the Enola Gay who delivered the first payload—or does it rather begin with the aforementioned Hara, who wrote, "I owe my life to the fact that I was on the privy" (1990, 45)? Atomic bomb literature is essentially backward-facing. The hibakusha's narrative structure begins with the end (i.e., the bomb) and, instead, presupposes a beginning. The hibakusha—atomic bomb survivor—testimony predicates the survival of the hibakusha writer; atomic bomb literature, therefore, is literature of survival. However, many of the survivors embody a ghostly existence after the atomic bomb: they share in their writings that they no longer feel alive. In "Summer Flowers," Hara writes, "Right from the start, when I received the blow to my head and things went black, I knew I wasn't dead. … My cry sounded in my ear like someone else's voice" (1990, 46). The hibakusha story indelibly begins with the end—the end of lives but also of the narrative—and what emerges is an abnormal syuzhet (narrative chronology) in which the figurative end is predicated by the literal continuation of the narrator's life. Those killed in the atomic blast could dictate no stories, and those who survived were heavily laden with the task to represent the unsignifiable, although words ceased to capture reality. In "Summer Flowers" there are two levels of storytelling. When Hara writes that "it was like something in the most horrible dream," it stands [End Page 183] in contrast to his ruminations on his past: "That large maple had stood forever in the corner of the garden; when I was young, it had figured in my daydreams" (1990, 46–47). The "dream" forced into existence by the atomic bomb stands contrapuntally to the "dream" before the atomic bomb. Witnessed in this way, too, are hibakusha Katsuzō Oda's dreams in "Human Ashes." Oda first notes, "My one dream at that time was to shoulder a gun and go off to battle," but this dream is incompatible with the post-bomb world in which a lieutenant's "frenzied shouts resembled the outcries of a frightened animal" (1984, 64, 71). The restructured dream is a trope of the hibakusha work—it is not dreaming that is changed but rather reality, inverted by the atomic bomb, which perhaps necessitated the construction of the real world as a dream world. The challenge for the hibakusha work is that it must reference an imaginary signifier. It must summon up images of the bomb that are unknown to the reader. For example, in Takehiko Fukunaga's Island of Death, a hibakusha notes that "others are utterly incapable of understanding it" (Fukunaga 1971, 289). The atomic bombing conjures a contradiction—the story of the A-bomb is not transmittable through language, yet a large number of hibakusha works exist. The expression of the bombing through symbolic representation cannot be complete, for metaphor fails in the hibakusha work. Rather, the hibakusha narrative relies on metonymy. The I in the hibakusha testimony becomes the scopic "eye," relating events as a binocular to the reader. Through this metonymic inclusion, the reader becomes the writer's I and witnesses the story through that perspective. Hibakusha Megumi Sera notes that "at the time each of us believed that our house had received a direct hit" (quoted in Treat 1995, 49). The atomic bomb created a singularity that was relayed by a metonymic narrative. The dream...

Resistance Today

Following decades of neglect, the work of the German Jewish philosopher, literary author, cultural critic, and poet Günther Anders (1902–1992) is gaining increasing recognition in the English-speaking world. This translation of “Résistance heute” (Resistance Today) makes one of Anders’s most programmatic and polemical short texts available. Published at the height of his anti-nuclear activism, “Resistance Today” is the written version of a speech Anders delivered in November 1962 upon acceptance of the northwest Italian city of Omegna’s Resistance Prize (other notable recipients included Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon). It first appeared in print in the West German left-wing journal Das Argument in November 1963. Clearly written for the occasion, the text condenses (and often further radicalizes) key premises about the end of history, the amoral character of work, and the continuity between Nazi totalitarianism, the nuclear age and the world of consumerism that are developed in great nuance across a range of books that Anders had recently published. Key co-ordinates include: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1 (The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1, 1956), his groundbreaking critique of technology; Der Mann auf der Brücke (The Man on the Bridge, 1959), a philosophical travel diary occasioned by Anders’s 1958 visit to Japan and his participation at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Tokyo; Burning Conscience (1961), a correspondence with the American reconnaissance pilot Claude Eatherly, who scouted the target area before the Enola Gay went on to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. It seems likely that Burning Conscience, which turned into an international bestseller, occasioned the award of the prize.

Memory Politics: US

Conflicts about the Past are no less characteristic of the United States than of European countries, although there they are more often referred to as a variant of culture wars. They are especially pronounced during periods of internal political crises, since the role of foreign policy in American discourse is almost negligible. Thus, memory of the World War II in the United States was used to unite the nation and did not, unlike in many European countries, become a basis for conflict with its neighbors. The article demonstrates how the two harshest conflicts over the Past in the last quarter century were connected with the crises, first of the Republican Party (the case of the Enola Gay exhibition in 1995), and then the Democratic Party (the case of the removal of Confederate monuments in 2017). The attack on the symbols of the Past after they ascribed to them negative meanings allows activists to mobilize supporters and overcome the ideological vacuum characteristic of a critical period. In other cases, both regarding the foreign policy “apologies for the USA” or the protests of the Italo-Americans after the authorities’ rejection to commemorate Christopher Columbus, conflicts did not acquire national character.

The Airplane Boneyard Studio: Considering Stillness and Creative Practice from an Airplane Wing

In 1975, Australian artist Ian Howard taped sheets of paper to the nose of the Enola Gay, and through rubbing the surface with a thin layer of wax crayon, he created a ghost-like impression of the airplane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Forty years later, in an aircraft boneyard in Arizona, I placed redundant maps of the Great Sandy Desert on the wing of a passenger jet to take an imprint of a similarly disused yet functionally different aircraft. Despite the conceptual and temporal differences that separated these two acts, the process of rubbing—or frottage—resulted in two artworks that revealed traces of the physical encounter with the aircraft surfaces, the dynamic handling of the materials of making, and the practical and aesthetic impact of working in the field. By its very nature of proximity and touch, the process of frottage records a bodily engagement with both object and environment. Recounting the experiences of working on the wing of a civilian plane in the desert heat of Arizona forty years after Howard worked on the Enola Gay, I reflect on the low-tech process of frottage and its capacity to suggest our respective embodied experiences of making. Furthermore, I suggest that traces of environmental factors such as high humidity, desert winds, or extreme heat, or time-based factors such as limited access to stationary airplanes can be captured and archived through creative practice as a way to contribute to contemporary understandings of mobility and its counterpart stillness.

Psychoanalysis in My Life: An Intellectual Memoir

Psychoanalysis in My Life: An Intellectual Memoir Murray M. Schwartz (bio) But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever-changing forms. —James Joyce, Ulysses Two distincts, division none. —Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident. —Hamlet, III.ii.194 My “intellectual autobiography” can be imagined as two sets of three overlapping circles. The first set of circles consists of activities: teaching, academic administration, and writing. The second set consists of three intellectual preoccupations: psychoanalysis, literature, especially Shakespeare, and the Holocaust. Each set is implicated in the other, and all six circles are in motion, their interplay and interaction varying from time to time and place to place, more like Ptolemy than Copernicus. This abstract scheme is my guide to memory. I hope that the meanings of the circles will become clearer as I tell my story. I. Beginnings In 1942, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I was born into a working-class Sephardic Jewish family. I have a visceral memory of the resounding percussions of the 16" battleship guns practicing in New York harbor during the Second World War. Less than two years later, my father, a skilled carpenter and welder during the Depression, enlisted in the Navy. He was trained as a pharmacist’s mate, spending 1944–1945 on [End Page 125] the island of Tinian, where he ran an infirmary for prisoners, women, and children. On the opposite side of the island, the Enola Gay took off to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. My earliest images of him envision a caretaker and protector against a background of massive violence. My father was an only child, raised in poverty by a mother on welfare who sold napkins and embroidery for a meager living. His father and a stepfather both died before he was five, thrusting him prematurely into a caretaking role at home, and instilling a desire for a protective family of his own. After the war he became a clothes presser in New York’s garment district, where he represented his coworkers in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). My brothers and I thought of him as “in the service,” condensing the Navy medical man and the worker. My mother’s family became his haven, though he prized his sense of independence and self-sufficiency, having spent much of his youth on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side “taking care of himself,” as he said. My mother was the twelfth of thirteen children, nine of whom survived infancy. She became an expert seamstress and devoted housewife, and spoke Ladino as she shared news and mediated disputes among the siblings of her large extended family. Although she had received only elementary formal education, she was a very intelligent woman, who had no trouble speaking truth to power. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table with her buttered white bread and coffee reading Les Misérables as I left for school, and when I came home she would be watching Joe McCarthy’s interrogations of suspected communists on television, smoking her Pall Mall cigarettes and directing expletives his way. In each of these memories I now see a deeply felt element of my intellectual life: my concern with forms of violence and their relation to personal and familial continuity, my preoccupation with the potential for victimhood, my interest in the uses and misuses of democratic institutions, my desire to mediate conflict. “Murray, you like happy families,” an analyst friend once observed, and my psychoanalytic mind asks what was unhappy about mine, what drives me to seek reconciliations and accommodations. A good part of the answer has to do with the [End Page 126] conflicts and tensions in a large and loving family that was striving to improve its social and economic status while maintaining its Jewish identity in the jostle of mid-century New York. During my analysis, I dreamed of lying as an infant blissfully alone beside a translucent pool, but in reality my identical twin brother, Albert, was born to (re)join me after nine minutes. Although we were raised as a unit (“The Twins”) and dressed identically until...

Colloquy: Queering America and the World

Mark Bradley: Queer isn’t a word you see much in the pages of Diplomatic History or the program for SHAFR’s annual conference. Indeed, a quick lexical check of article titles since the journal began publication in 1977 for “gay,” “homosexual,” “lesbian,” “transgender,” and “queer” brings up absolutely nothing (bracketing the single title reference to the Enola Gay ). You may not be surprised. You should be. Queer history and queer studies occupy an increasingly central place in many historical subfields and in the work of other disciplines. Even for the redoubtable guardians of realism among political scientists in international relations, one can detect a queer turn. 1 The time has more than come to better understand how queering the history of American foreign relations might transform our own scholarly practice, and the field itself. As this lively and far-ranging conversation suggests, the project of queering America and the world operates in multiple registers. For some participants here it is about making visible what has gone unseen about gender and sexuality, recovering LGBTQ lives and experiences in ways that deepen what it means to write American history on a transnational canvas. For others the project is just as much about disrupting conventional notions of what constitutes power and how it is exercised in the world. Queering, as many of the participants in this conversation argue, not only disturbs hetero-normative assumptions about sexuality but ultimately pushes back on how we conceive of power relations in spaces as intimate as the bedroom or as geopolitically capacious as the United Nations. And for still others, it is both. The conversation as it unfolds moves along three tracks: a conceptual discussion of the theoretical terms of engagement, more granular talk rooted in the ongoing research of the participants and personal observations on how a queer lens came to inform their scholarship. In them readers can follow the back-and-forth between the participants as they literally think out loud about how the “queer” as history, theory, and method can disrupt our research and teaching.

Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima by Yuki Miyamoto (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima by Yuki Miyamoto Levi McLaughlin (bio) Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima. By Yuki Miyamoto. Fordham University Press, Bronx, 2012. xvi, 233 pages. $85.00, cloth; $30.00, paper. Yuki Miyamoto’s thought-provoking book analyzes a wide array of philosophical, religious, popular media, museum, and governmental efforts that give voice to the lives of hibakusha: survivors of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Beyond the Mushroom Cloud compellingly mixes [End Page 153] the analytical and the prescriptive as it proceeds from ethical interpretations of the atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki toward a demand for universal responsibility to join what Miyamoto refers to as an “inclusive community of memory.” This community enjoins everyone, not only hibakusha, to promote Hiroshima’s challenging postwar moral imperative of “not retaliation, but reconciliation.” Scholars have already addressed some of the issues Miyamoto engages, such as the nature of atomic bomb site remembrance,1 controversy that surrounds commemoration of the war dead,2 and dilemmas occasioned by relying on Japan’s religious traditions as resources for peace.3 Beyond the Mushroom Cloud casts a wider net than almost all of these studies: it draws inventively on a broad range of Japanese texts and ideas from ethicists inside and outside Japan to suggest possibilities inherent within hibakusha narratives to erase distinctions between victim and victimizer, and even between the living and the dead. Miyamoto splits her book into three sections. “Commemoration,” the first and strongest section, opens with chapter 1, “Toward a Community of Memory,” which Miyamoto begins with a discussion of outrage triggered by the 1995 Smithsonian exhibition that displayed both the Enola Gay (the aircraft that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima) and Japanese testimonials of the atomic bombing. She turns to Avishai Margalit’s work on memory and community, acknowledging the difficult task of moving beyond “thick” relations of natural communities (one’s own family, nation, and/or ethnicity) to apply the Good Samaritan’s principle of selfless love of fellow human beings in order to foster universal ethical relations. Miyamoto asserts that the dangers of nuclear weapons pose such an overwhelming existential threat to humankind that the community-specific experiences of Japanese hibakusha translate across divides, and that the nation-state—which Margalit proposes as a natural forum—is demonstrably not the most desirable location for a community of memory. She suggests that municipally generated efforts to establish Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park and Museum serve as an inspiring example of how a community of memory may transcend nation-centered [End Page 154] politics. Self-reflection evident in the museum presentations and in advocacy by Hiroshima’s municipal politicians acknowledges ambiguous identities of hibakusha as victims and perpetrators, and their identity as survivors who are not necessarily Japanese. These efforts have enabled Hiroshima to present itself outside national frameworks as a model for transcending ideological, class, and religious differences. “Commemoration” continues with chapter 2 in which Miyamoto lays out a persuasive critique of Sueki Fumihiko’s comparative analysis of Yasukuni Shrine to the war dead and Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with her own comparison of the two sites. She deftly dismantles Sueki’s positive assessment of Yasukuni as she extends some of his ideas, notably the principle of “transethics” and the importance of fostering a dialogue with the dead in order to cultivate ethics in the living. Sueki, in his 2006 book Bukkyō vs. rinri (Buddhism versus ethics), castigates what he perceives as Buddhism’s failure to take death seriously in its progressively modernizing, rationalizing forms. By positing stark differentiation between the living and spirits of the dead, modern Buddhism limits ethical discourse to the human relations of the living, thereby blocking a Buberian I / Thou relationship with the dead that appreciates forces beyond man-made comprehension—a transcendence Sueki calls “transethics” (chōrinri). Sueki praises Yasukuni for what he sees as the transethical manner in which the shrine communes with spirits, and he criticizes the Hiroshima memorial’s nonreligious cenotaph as arrogant mistreatment of the dead that leaves them sitting in silence rather than engaging them through religious ritual. Miyamoto strongly resists Sueki’s claims...

Who owns America's past?: the Smithsonian and the problem of history

In 1994, when the National Air and Space Museum announced plans to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 sent to destroy Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the ensuing political uproar left the museum's parent Smithsonian Institution entirely unprepared. As the largest such complex in the world, the Smithsonian cares for millions of objects and has displayed everything from George Washington's sword to moon rocks to Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Why did this particular object arouse such controversy? From an insider's perspective, Robert C. Post's Who Owns America's Past? offers insight into the politics of display and the interpretation of history. Never before has a book about the Smithsonian detailed the recent and dramatic shift from collection-driven shows, with artifacts meant to speak for themselves, to concept-driven exhibitions, in which objects aim to tell a story, displayed like illustrations in a book. Even more recently, the trend is to show artifacts along with props, sound effects, and interactive elements in order to create an immersive environment. Rather than looking at history, visitors are invited to experience it. Who Owns America's Past? examines the different ways that the Smithsonian's exhibitions have been conceived and designed-whether to educate visitors, celebrate an important historical moment, or satisfy donor demands or partisan agendas. Post gives the reader a behind-the-scenes view of internal tempests as they brewed and how different personalities and experts passionately argued about the best way to present the story of America.

Harold Agnew, physicist, atomic bomb Everyman

Harold Agnew (1921–2013) was etched into history at 8:16 AM on August 6, 1945, by the actinic flash of the Hiroshima explosion. He was a scientific observer in The Great Artiste, a B-29 flying immediately behind the Enola Gay. Smuggling aboard a contraband movie camera, Agnew recorded the only known motion picture of the event. One might argue that his destiny, or at any rate the course of his professional life, was also fixed by the flash.

The End of the Beginning

The End of the Beginning

Disaster Poetics: Keats and Contemporary American Poetry

Following the spate of devastating tornadoes that struck the United States in spring, 2011, the American poet, Mark Levine--also the author of F5 (2008), book of journalistic non-fiction about the massive tornado outbreak of 1974--wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com that begins by quoting Keats. If the destruction visited by the tornadoes seems a freakish demonstration of nature's power, Levine comments, might be more extraordinary [...] is capacity to pretend that disaster--and the sudden upending of ordinary life that it brings forth--is not part of very fabric, what might have called 'A partner in your sorrow's mysteries.' (The quotation redirects the import of Keats's line from the Ode on Melancholy, since in the context of the poem the line insists, by contrast, on the value of not taking any artificial partner in sorrow's mysteries: Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be / Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl / A partner in your sorrow's mysteries, writes, before turning in the next stanza to compare melancholy fit to sudden weather [1. 6-8; 11]). What caught my attention here was not so much the general point Levine makes--though its capaciousness is least want to recognize about lives, vulnerability to disaster might be the most basic thing share--as the recruitment of poet as disaster's lyric signature. Keats functions in this instance as shorthand both for collective vulnerability to disaster and for consolatory form of melancholic feeling won from the proximity of disaster. When I came across Levine's piece, I had already been thinking about the way and disaster are linked in his difficult, compelling poem John placed close to the heart of his collection Enola Gay (2000). Like the collection as whole, the poem depicts (as Ashbery puts it in the jacket blurb) a post-cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic world, where life hangs on haphazardly in the wake of some unspecified catastrophe but without--yet--either total annihilation or the surprise of something totally unexpected. This in-between time recalls Keats's description of his own posthumous existence, or the temporality of the Titans' grief in Hyperion (think of Thea's listening fear [...] as if calamity had but begun [I. 37-8]), or the knight at arm's sojourning on his cold hill's side in La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1. 44). The poem opens with logically challenging (or logically challenged) dexis, like the start of story (so there were) and like puzzling return (weren't already here?), that sets the tone for the disorienting narration that follows: Here were. Here here were. Graphite and plaster and cardboard and canvas. A dozen human fingers of yellow rays. Mere fully exposed here fully protected. [...] The newly-dead were not lazier than we. (48) In the possibly post-nuclear, apparently war-ravaged scenario of agonized indolence the poem describes (despite the insistence of here, the poem never really explains where we were), our ideal vase / was still with us, still friend to man, to whom it is reciting, sadly or hilariously, treatment methods / were eager to share (48-9). (1) In poem that is part homage, part elegy, part ironic riff, Levine uses the figure of as the pivot between lyric and its present conditions of existence, its history, and what seems the compromised possibility of its future. The figure of plays special, even peculiar, role in the imaginary of contemporary American poetry in ways whose effects insist symptomatically across the range of poetry, sometimes in emphatic fashion, as in Levine's uses of Keats, and sometimes obliquely. The discussions in several excellent studies, including Jeffrey Robinson's Reception and Poetics in (1998), Michael O'Neill's The Alt-Sustaining Air (2007), and James Najarian's Victorian (2002), indicate the richness of the field. …

Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima by Yuki Miyamoto (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima by Yuki Miyamoto Joseph S. O’Leary Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima. By Yuki Miyamoto. Fordham University Press, 2012. 252 pages. Hardcover $75.00; softcover $26.00. Coming to terms with a traumatic past has become a major preoccupation of thinkers and artists over the past century, and of public figures, too, as seen in the papal call for a “purification of memory” in 2000 or Queen Elizabeth’s poignant litotes in Dublin in 2011: “With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.” The First World War, the Holocaust, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the most prominent sites of this collective travail of mourning, repentance, and healing. In Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, Yuki Miyamoto undertakes a close critical study of how the Hiroshima bombing is recalled in Japan, whether as a uniquely Japanese fate or in the more universal terms expressed in the refrain of the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), “I do not want anyone to go through this again” (p. 4), and in the motto, “not retaliation, but reconciliation” (p. 112). For many, the author reminds us, Hiroshima is more than a memory, because of “the long-term effects on hibakushas’ health as well as the genetic influence on their children and grandchildren” (p. 14). Her book is more than a contribution to Asian cultural studies: in five essays on the themes of public commemoration, religious interpretations, and fictional representations, it keeps coming back to the moral imperative of remembering and learning from the traumatic past. An afterword added as the book went to press refers to the catastrophes of March 2011, giving a sharp edge to Miyamoto’s call for the abolition of nuclear weapons and power plants, “these causes of shame and affliction” (p. 184). Public commemoration often fails to create “an inclusive community of memory” (p. 25). The victims’ perspective was excluded from the 1995 exhibition commemorating the half-centenary of the bombing of Hiroshima at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The organizer, Martin Harwit, came to realize that “the balance he sought, and the message that he believed this balance conveyed, would not be tolerated by the American public” (p. 17). The Enola Gay had become sacrosanct as an icon of victory and technological prowess, and Harwit was accused by veterans of ignoring “the record of Japan’s aggression, the brutality of its war policy, and the fanaticism of its soldiers,” while newspapers denounced intellectuals who sought “to redefine American history in a way that assaulted traditional values” (p. 18). Harwit resigned, and the exhibition enshrined the view that “the atomic bombing was part of a sacred mission to save American soldiers and American values, even though it resulted in an unfortunate loss of non-American lives” (p. 21). Both in segments of U.S. society and in Japan the commemorative work is fraught with tensions between what Avishai Margalit calls the “thick” relations of particular [End Page 147] communities and their values and the “thin” relations constructed, in the spirit of the parable of the Good Samaritan, “upon the mere fact that we are all humans—the community of humankind” (p. 23). The hibakusha and the mayors of Hiroshima have championed a universal morality that “urges one to extend thick relations to all humankind” (p. 24). Unfortunately, “by the mid-1980s, the Japanese national narrative had begun to appropriate the accounts emerging from Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of a narrative of victimhood” (p. 47). Addressing the controversial visits to Yasukuni Shrine by Yasuhiro Nakasone and Jun’ichirō Koizumi during their respective tenures as prime minister, the author refers to scholar of Buddhism Sueki Fumihiko, who sees certain events as “too grave and too far beyond comprehension to be dealt with adequately by the human-made regulations of ethics” (p. 62) and who advocates a religious “dialogue with the dead” (p. 59) that goes beyond ethics. She rejects Sueki’s claim that Yasukuni Shrine facilitates this dialogue and deplores the shrine museum’s glorification of the “Great East Asian...

Representing and interpreting traumatic history: a study of visitor comment books at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Representing and interpreting traumatic history plays a central role in promoting world peace. While significant research has examined the 1990s controversy over the proposed Enola Gay exhibition in the United States, no research has yet explored visitor reactions to the traumatic history interpreted by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (HPMM). Questions regarding the messages communicated by the museum, emotive conflicts experienced by visitors, and the meanings that visitors glean from museum exhibits are worth further exploration in order to enhance the value of the HPMM to world peace promotion and to healing the wounds of war and prejudice. The exhibition narrative starts with the pre-1945 history of Hiroshima before exploring the bombing and its aftermath. Photographs and objects belonging to the victims graphically illustrate the effects of the atomic bomb (A-bomb) blast. The exhibition's core message is anti-nuclear and supportive of world peace. Entries in HPMM visitor comment books reflect upon war's cruelty and express wishes for its permanent end. For survivors, a visit to the museum evokes sad memories of an unforgettable day and its aftermath. Children's comments show that some featured photographs are excessively vivid and terrifying for younger visitors. Overseas visitors provided a wide range of responses, including guilt, reflections upon the war, and criticisms of their own or other governments. This study provides insights into the interpretive complex by discussing the content of visitor comment books and then reflects upon museum progress toward its stated aim – promotion of international harmony.

Meanwhile: Poems by Kathleen O'Toole (review)

Reviewed by: Meanwhile: Poems by Kathleen O'Toole Madeleine Mysko (bio) Kathleen O'Toole . Meanwhile: Poems by Kathleen O'Toole. David Robert Books. In Kathleen O'Toole's Meanwhile, the title poem appears late. The reader who has attended straight through to that point will find a revelation in store: "Meanwhile" doesn't seem to illuminate the entire collection. Rather it is the other way around. Upon arrival at the title poem—wherein the speaker opens her copy of Yeats' Collected and finds the photograph she has saved of her own mother's diseased heart, marked as it is by the cardiologist's pen—the reader has been prepared by the dedicated practice of the poems that preceded it. The "meanwhile" in O'Toole's work is ordinary time, a poetic space in which she presents herself, open to what comes. Her "meanwhile" is reminiscent of W. H. Auden's "the time being," which he reminds us is "the most trying time of all," wherein "the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing," no matter the flatness of the everyday, its sense of loss, its unmistakable brokenness (For the Time Being). O'Toole practices her scales of rejoicing continually. Given her long careers in community organizing, writing, and teaching—and given her spiritual profession as a Benedictine oblate—her practice yields work not easily categorized. It resists separation into groups of poems one might characterize as nature poems, or political or "religious" poems. In Meanwhile, a poem is just as likely to emerge from a conversation about politics with a cab driver from Sierra Leone ("April is National Poetry Month"), as it is to emerge from a visit to the museum ("Opening: O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe"). Likewise, the same habit of contemplation that is exerted on the discovery of the mother's heart in "Meanwhile" is also exerted on a news piece about the death of a man who flew on the Enola Gay ("Reading Obituaries"). Again and again these ordinary moments within the meanwhile give occasion to accomplished poems in a range of styles, some worked out in traditional forms and others decidedly more free. But one [End Page 160] after the other they seem cut from the same cloth, one poet still at work on the same project-a determined openness to the holy. In an earlier chapbook, Practice, O'Toole refers to the spiritual discipline of the Benedictines. Benedictine oblates live and work outside the monastery, where they are free to marry and tend to their own families, and where they are continually at work translating the Rule of Benedict to the everyday world. Over the years, O'Toole has applied that discipline to her work as poet. Thus it is that the poems from the chapbook seem at home in the larger collection, their accomplishments a matter of course. In "The Luminous World," while attending Mass during Advent—that time of year when the light is going—the poet listens as a blind cantor sings "of brightness in the coming / of the Lord" and contemplates her own habit: I find that year to year I hoardmore illumination to store for sunless days,recording gradations of luster and shadowcalibrating brilliance. The middle stanza of this poem becomes painterly, images of remembered light thickly laid, and it concludes with a flight out of Brussels during winter: "slow / motion sunset before us, the dark diagonal of night / behind." Even as the plane enters the airspace of frozen Manhattan, the present moment seems suspended in a rich, crimson going-down of the sun. But the final stanza returns to the meanwhile, wherein the blind cantor sings, and wherein Milton is recalled, "painting his bright stones of desire." Where, O'Toole wonders, would she find grace "without the luminous world"? The allusion to Milton here is more than humble nod, more than thanks for the gift of sight with which to paint imagery praising natural beauty. Rather it is O'Toole's exhalation of gratitude for the gift of the luminous world itself. In the tradition of Christian poets like Milton-but without the direct address of conventional Christian prayer—O'Toole places herself in the presence of...

Bombsights and Adding Machines: Translating Wartime Technology Into Peacetime Sales

On 10 February 1947, A.C. Buehler, the president of the Victor Adding Machine Company presented Norden Bombsight #4120 to the Smithsonian Institute. This sight was in service on board the Enola Gay when it dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Through this public presentation, Buehler forever linked his company to the Norden Bombsight, the Enola Gay, and to history. Buehler’s ultimate goal, however, was the sale of adding machines, and while significant, the presentation to the Smithsonian was essentially the final step in a long running advertising campaign designed to sell adding machines. During the War, Victor was the Army’s main contractor for the production of Norden Bombsights. This work is an investigation into the dysfunctional relationship that existed between Victor Adding Machine Company, the Army, the Navy Bureau of Ordinance (BuOrd). Wartime shortages demanded that pre-war arrangements between the Army and BuOrd be reconsidered and it was agreed that the Army be allowed to build its own units. Within a year of production Victor sights were scrutinized for their inaccuracies, and ultimately Victor’s contract was cancelled ending the Army’s short sojourn into bombsight production.

Atomic Historiography

Atomic Historiography Michael Kimmage (bio) Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, eds. The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Illustrations, bibliography, index, and notes. xxxi + 447 pp. $42.00. The large-scale periodization of American history rests on a few phrases, usually referring to a military conflict of one kind or another. There is the age of conquest, the revolutionary age, the antebellum era, the interwar years, the postwar period and, finally, the atomic or nuclear age. This is the age that began definitively with the creation of the atomic bomb, and it encompasses both the Cold War, which would not have been cold without atomic weapons, and the rise of the nuclear family. One could go a step further and describe the individualism of the postwar period as atomistic individualism, as if the mobile atom—and its power—were metaphors for modern culture and modern geopolitics alike. The Atomic Bomb and American Society, a collection of essays edited by Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, takes as its working premise the link between atomic weaponry and the drift of postwar American history. Based on a 2005 conference held in Oak Ridge, Tennessee—itself a significant site in atomic and American history—The Atomic Bomb and American Society is devoted to charting “the social swath of this atomic sword [nuclear weapons] in the context of the Cold War” and to examining the atomic bomb and “its lead role in the culture surrounding the Cold War” (pp. xix, xxiii). The included essays range from military to cultural history, from women’s history to the history of public memory. They demonstrate how wide the bomb’s “social swath” was, wider perhaps than Americans may have known during the Cold War. In the volume’s concluding essay, “The Challenges of Preserving America’s Nuclear Weapons Complex,” Jason Krupar remarks on the vastness and the relative invisibility of America’s nuclear weapons complex. “The Cold War created a national web of black spaces,” Krupar writes, “zones hidden from public sight even while located in the midst of it” (p. 399). The Atomic Bomb and American Society helps to illuminate these black spaces, without fully proving the bomb’s lead role in the culture surrounding the Cold War. In an essay that frames this volume as a whole, “Sixty Years and Counting: Nuclear Themes in American Culture, 1945 to the Present,” Paul Boyer [End Page 145] addresses the complexity of the bomb’s role in postwar American culture. A distinguished historian of American culture and the bomb, Boyer breaks this role into three phases: an early phase of anxiety, running from 1945 to the mid-1950s; a relaxation of fear in the 1960s and 1970s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had passed without incident; and a widening fear of atomic catastrophe in the late 1970s and 1980s.1 Boyer emphasizes that nuclear fear or questions prompted by the existence of nuclear weapons were unsteady variables in American culture, waxing and waning for the duration of the Cold War. Nor did nuclear questions disappear together with the Cold War: the 1995 dispute over the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition demonstrated precisely how unmasterable America’s nuclear past had remained, some six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 What did disappear after 1989, according to Boyer, was the coherence or urgency that had previously been attached to nuclear questions. “In contrast to earlier eras, a fundamental disconnect arose between politics and the popular culture” after the Cold War, Boyer writes (p. 14). Nuclear proliferation was sharply relevant as a strategic issue in the 1990s, while American popular culture was celebrating the harmless incompetence of Homer Simpson, the cartoon employee of an atomic energy plant (p. 14). And yet, the old fears were still there under the surface, made worse, in fact, by the fading of the Cold War. “During the Cold War, the adversary was at least the nation-state headed by rational leaders with whom one could negotiate,” Boyer states. “In the volatile destabilized post–Cold War world, lethal menace could lurk anywhere, and the popular culture reflected the resulting anxieties” (p. 12). One...