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Reviewed by:
  • Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture by Ran Zwigenberg
  • Yuki Miyamoto (bio)
Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture. By Ran Zwigenberg. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014. xiv, 332 pages. $99.00.

Ran Zwigenberg’s monograph Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture pursues an ambitious theme, closely tracing the development of memorialization—national and international—of Hiroshima’s atomic bombing, in comparison with memorialization of Auschwitz. In doing so, Zwigenberg illustrates various influences upon the construction of Hiroshima memories. This is an exciting topic, treated here with an impressive, unprecedented range and depth of research, as its purview extends from Hiroshima to Israel. The author’s archival excavations include local newspapers carrying articles on the atomic bombing and personal interviews. He takes up topics from architecture to psychiatry in examining the socio-cultural transformation in the construction of memory from 1945 to 1995. As all this should suggest, the book’s main value is in its descriptive richness, the abundance and diversity of the information it presents.

The first three chapters of Hiroshima detail the ways in which Hiroshima citizens—mainly what Zwigenberg calls “elites,” meaning primarily intellectuals and politicians—restored the city and its identity after the bombing. For example, the local “elites,” who themselves were often hibakusha (the atomic bomb victims), attempted to situate the destruction in what they took to be its proper context: “commemorating the bomb primarily not in terms of grief and loss but, instead, emphasizing transformation, [End Page 205] rebirth and, ultimately, progress” (p. 24). Although the politicization of Hiroshima experiences and memories, especially after the Lucky Dragon incident of 1954, repelled some hibakusha who wanted to pursue the abolition of nuclear weaponry regardless of party ideologies, hibakusha involvement in the antinuclear movement, Zwigenberg claims, afforded them a pride that allowed them to overcome the sense of shame associated with the social stigma of being bomb victims.

Yet the antinuclear movement continued to embrace nuclear technology, a matter Zwigenberg attributes to Hiroshima citizens’ ambivalence toward modernity. On the one hand, the citizens profoundly distrusted modernity because it was associated with the invention of nuclear weaponry and the destruction it wrought. This suspicion of modernity instigated a sense of nostalgia, as evidenced by the reconstruction of Hiroshima castle, an emblem of Japan’s premodern period. On the other hand, coinciding with “transformation, rebirth,” and “progress” toward their new identity, citizens of Hiroshima also celebrated the “atoms for peace” campaign to spread nuclear energy technology, endeavoring to turn their suffering and sorrow into something positive.

While the first three chapters detail the production of memory at Hiroshima, with brief accounts of memorializations of Auschwitz, the remaining four chapters follow a different direction. Chapter 4 conveys the story of American psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton’s contribution to the development of the concept of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in response to his encounter with Hiroshima bomb survivors. Thanks to the recognition of PTSD in the medical community (it was incorporated into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980) and the dissemination of knowledge about the disorder among the public, suffering from traumatic experiences was turned “into a badge of political honor” (p. 174). The legitimization of PTSD allowed victims of Hiroshima and Auschwitz to be discussed and compared in similar terms.

Chapter 5 reveals the influence of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1962 on the discourse of Auschwitz as well as that of Hiroshima and war memory in Japan at large. Zwigenberg claims that the Eichmann trial elevated a Japanese sentiment of moral superiority over “the Jews insofar as they themselves [the Japanese] ‘overcame’ their hatred” of the enemy (p. 186). Although this morally superior feeling might be another example of the “elite” construction, the 1960s saw the emergence of collaborations between Hiroshima and Auschwitz, such as the Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March (HAP) and the Hiroshima-Auschwitz Committee (HAC).

Chapter 6 describes in detail the consecration of Hiroshima memories, examining relics, architectural constructions, the Peace Memorial Park as a memorial site, and the testimonies of hibakusha. The efforts behind this consecration, which frequently employed the rhetoric of the “sacred” and [End Page 206] “martyrdom...

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