Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power)

Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power #10

by Lisa Yoneyama

Remembering Hiroshima, the city obliterated by the world's first nuclear attack, has been a complicated and intensely politicized process, as we learn from Lisa Yoneyama's sensitive investigation of the "dialectics of memory." She explores unconventional texts and dimensions of culture involved in constituting Hiroshima memories―including history textbook controversies, discourses on the city's tourism and urban renewal projects, campaigns to preserve atomic ruins, survivors' testimonial practices, ethnic Koreans' narratives on Japanese colonialism, and the feminized discourse on peace―in order to illuminate the politics of knowledge about the past and present. In the way battles over memories have been expressed as material struggles over the cityscape itself, we see that not all share the dominant remembering of Hiroshima's disaster, with its particular sense of pastness, nostalgia, and modernity. The politics of remembering, in Yoneyama's analysis, is constituted by multiple and contradictory senses of time, space, and positionality, elements that have been profoundly conditioned by late capitalism and intensifying awareness of post-Cold War and postcolonial realities.

Hiroshima Traces , besides clarifying the discourse surrounding this unforgotten catastrophe, reflects on questions that accompany any attempts to recover marginalized or silenced experiences. At a time when historical memories around the globe appear simultaneously threatening and in danger of obliteration, Yoneyama asks how acts of remembrance can serve the cause of knowledge without being co-opted and deprived of their unsettling, self-critical qualities.

Genres: Japan, History, Nonfiction

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an account of personal memories and state-instituted memories of Hiroshima after the dropping of the catastrophic atomic bomb. Yoneyama draws a lot of historiographical interpretation from Foucault, Derrida, and Walter Benjamin. She reveals many firsthand accounts of survivors who lived through the experience and analyzes how they remember and talk about their experiences, compared to how the formal apparatus of the state informs the public about these memories. She also analyzes how cultural norms restrain how people think about and remember this past event.

A new, modern secular world order changes the city dramatically in the decades after the bomb. Yet, a multiplicity of stories are passed down over time as the aging survivors try to come to terms with their trauma and the complexities of the past. There is no singular, clear narrative. One particular tension is between reconciling personal roles as both victim and victimizer, that is, as both survivor of war and perpetrator of war. It is fascinating to read the oral accounts that Yoneyama records from the survivors. They tell their stories, trying to remember and to recuperate the past. The reader learns that the public narratives of war and peace in Japan is far from a comprehensive truth about what happened. That is about all I can say about it here.

The final two chapters discuss the diasporic Korean-living-in-Hiroshima experience of the public memorialization of the bomb, and how women are figured into the public recuperative narrative of postwar Hiroshima.

[Benemint · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction is a little jargon heavy, but overall the book is thoughtful, thought-provoking, and deals with the important issue of postwar history.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting exploration of memory and memorializing in Hiroshima.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only read two chapters. but I'll come back to this book.

[Gwyn McClelland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating discussion of Hiroshima and commemoration of the bombing.