Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (review)

Lisa Yoneyama's Hiroshima Traces is a beautifully written study that carefully uncovers complexity behind monuments and commemorations that evoke the name "Hiroshima," the city that is remembered by Japanese and others as a mark of the first human nuclear disaster and now a promise for peace. In this book Yoneyama maps trajectories of space/time that Hiroshima contains. These include the city's contemporary urban planning aiming at the image of "brightness" and the controversies and conflict of opinions over the physical reminders of the A-bomb memory. She brings back the unspeakable memories through words of the survivors. With determination and insight she explores the peripheries of Hiroshima memory of the disaster, the world of Korean victims and (de)ethnicization of the memory, on the one hand, and the world of female victims and participation by women in peace movements, which Yoneyama names "feminization" of the memory, on the other..

Yoneyama takes the reader from a simple image of Hiroshima the victimized nation to a complex world of Hiroshima, the terrain of national ambiguities and transnational ambivalence. A seemingly small matter such as the location of the bomb-related monument can cause multiple splitting interests, views, policies, and sentiments among a group of people who are otherwise bracketed together as "victims," "minorities," or "survivors."

An example is the debate over the interpretation and preservation of the Korean A-bomb victims' memorial monument. According to Yoneyama, this monument stands not only outside Hiroshima's Peace Park where the rest of the major memorial edifices are housed, but more symbolically, beyond a river. Built in the 1970s, the monument went through changes in inscription and interpretation. These changes reflect shifting relationships between Japan and Korea, marked by the new Emperor's nominal expression of remorse over the past and the president of the Republic of Korea's visit in the early 1990s. Koreans in Hiroshima of different political allegiances, generations, class and educational backgrounds, and degree of identification with their homeland have expressed their views to Yoneyama. Some take the placement of the monument outside the main area of the Peace Park as continuing the colonial and postcolonial marginalization of Koreans in Japan. Some see it as a positive sign of creating a space for Korean victims independent of Japanese state intervention. Some are unhappy about the emphasis on commemorating Prince Yi U, the colonial Korean royal personage who served in the Japanese imperial army and became a bomb-victim in Hiroshima. Some are wary of making the monument vulnerable to the intra-ethnic political battle reflecting the north-south partition of the Korean peninsula. All in all, we are reminded that the Japan-Korea relation as observed through the A-bomb issue is not a clear-cut dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized, but full of ambiguous alliances and divisions, both political and personal.

Yoneyama shows us how remembering occurs by way of forgetting. The Japanese government has resisted acknowledging its colonial and semicolonial domination, aggression, brutality, and atrocity. Yoneyama emphasizes the unproblematized notion of victim (be it of the west or the war) attached to Hiroshima is indispensable to the erasure of the traces of empire, conquest, and destruction that Japan inflicted on other peoples in various parts of Asia.

Yoneyama uncovers yet another layer of critical mnemosis that challenges a national imaginary of victimhood. She finds it in the testimonials of the survivors themselves, who are often heterogeneous in position. In Yoneyama's words, "the identification generated by the hibakusha's [victims'] testimonies does not necessarily work to maintain collective unity and consistency in the fashion of, say, 'all the oppressed,' or 'all victims' " (p. 147).

Yoneyama sums up her project as follows:

Residues of Hiroshima's catastrophe are constantly in danger of being recuperated for the establishment of coherent national narratives and identities. Nevertheless, these shards of memory, as traces, also carry the power to obstruct that same process

(p. 217).

Through her analysis...