Organizer and Chair: Laura Hein, Northwestern University
Discussants: Laura Hein, Northwestern University; Lane Fenrich, Northwestern
University; Mark Selden, State University of New York, Binghampton; Rinjiro
Sodei, Hosei University, Japan; Lisa Yoneyama, Stanford University; Michael
Sherry, Northwestern University
This roundtable focuses on the atomic bomb's power as a "locus of memory" and thus a lightning rod for cultural and political battles that have erupted in both Japan and the United States since 1945. (This reflects our forthcoming book, which includes seven other contributors, including John Dower and Daizaburo Yui). We seek to explain why the atomic bomb is so powerful and enduring a symbol in both countries. We draw on current interdisciplinary scholarship on memory and commemoration to analyze the debates and disputes about the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see this effort as a contribution to new ways of approaching international history, political history, and cultural history (including analyses of visual images), drawing on insights from several different disciplines. We see this roundtable as an opportunity to discuss this interpretive strategy with other AAS participants at a time when it is gaining wider currency.
We explore domestic struggles over the different ways that the bomb has been remembered in both Japan and the United States, including several different hibakusha perspectives. We trace the specific ways that debates about the atomic bomb inform and reveal deep tensions and conflicts within postwar Japanese and American societies. We also situate the debates within the context of great power conflict (both WWII and subsequent conflict), in order to explore the larger meaning of the bomb as a defining event of the international postwar era.