Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives by Chad R. Diehl (review)

By chance, I first spent time in Nagasaki during the 1989–90 New Year's holiday. A year earlier, Emperor Hirohito lay dying, and the Imperial Household had ordered Japanese society to "restrain" itself and desist from the bubble-era's outlandish shopping sprees and end-of-year blowouts (1980s footage is online of Mitsukoshi Department Store ads for gold-plated refrigerators and Tokyo's Maharaja nightclub if memory fails). At the time, many Japanese complied with being treated more like subjects than citizens (at least in public), meaning that when the year was up, Nagasaki-ites, like the rest of the country, were eager to bring back the fun. Nagasaki's famous music scene thrived, and Heisei 2 opened quietly with families in lavish new kimono walking to local shrines through the city's astonishingly limpid light. It would have been easy to fall off the academic train and into an orientalist, hypercapitalist wonderland.

Yet days before I'd visited the now revamped Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and remained overwhelmed by the reality of where I was (the city's immediate beauty notwithstanding). Upstairs in the then still original 1955 display was a letter that caught me by surprise: on August 9, 1945, several Manhattan Project physicists appealed to fellow physicist and former colleague Sagane Ryokichi of Tokyo Imperial University. Three copies of this letter were dropped in metal canisters on areas surrounding Nagasaki from another B-29 accompanying Bockscar's flight just minutes before Charles Sweeney released its plutonium carnage. The message included a nationalist plea for an internationalist understanding of the moment to come:

Within the space of three weeks, we have proof-fired one bomb in the American desert, exploded one in Hiroshima, and fired the third this morning. We implore you to confirm these facts to your leaders, and to do your utmost to stop the destruction and waste of life which can only result in the total annihilation of all your cities, if continued. As scientists, we deplore the use to which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that unless Japan surrenders at once, this rain of atomic bombs will increase manyfold [sic] in fury."¹

Four years later, Sagane would locate the man he suspected as being the letter's lead author: Luis Alvarez, his close colleague and friend from a 1938 sabbatical at Berkeley (and future Nobel laureate). At their December 1949 reunion, Alvarez added his name to the document with friendship, humility, and full awareness that the radiation released in Nagasaki was exponentially—and intentionally—greater than that in Hiroshima. By then, moreover, the United States had already committed to the complete nationalization of its nuclear weapons program, defeating even the slimmest hope for any international control of science's "beautiful discovery."

In Nagasaki in early January 1990, all of this seemed surreally absent despite all of it still being right there.

Chad Diehl's recent book, Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Foundation of Atomic Narratives, likewise originates with the author's initial bewilderment at Nagasaki's jarring present-day juxtapositions, which he first encountered during a trip there in 2001. He also did not fall off the academic train, and his book builds on dissertation research that stemmed from that moment in addition to translation efforts that appear in his thoughtful, self-published And the River Flowed as a Raft of Corpses: The Poetry of Yamaguchi Tsutomu, Survivor of Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Excogitating over Coffee Pub, 2010). Ongoing conversations with bomb survivors, their descendants, community leaders, and their respective writings importantly inform the arc of Diehl's empathetic interrogation. Equally, the author's scholarly commitment to stepping beyond his personal experience—as well as those of his interlocutors in Nagasaki—gives shape to the book's examination of ways in which the postbombing narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became so differently fashioned and what that continues to mean to...