Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima by Yuki Miyamoto (review)

Coming to terms with a traumatic past has become a major preoccupation of thinkers and artists over the past century, and of public figures, too, as seen in the papal call for a “purification of memory” in 2000 or Queen Elizabeth’s poignant litotes in Dublin in 2011: “With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.” The First World War, the Holocaust, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the most prominent sites of this collective travail of mourning, repentance, and healing. In Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, Yuki Miyamoto undertakes a close critical study of how the Hiroshima bombing is recalled in Japan, whether as a uniquely Japanese fate or in the more universal terms expressed in the refrain of the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), “I do not want anyone to go through this again” (p. 4), and in the motto, “not retaliation, but reconciliation” (p. 112). For many, the author reminds us, Hiroshima is more than a memory, because of “the long-term effects on hibakushas’ health as well as the genetic influence on their children and grandchildren” (p. 14). Her book is more than a contribution to Asian cultural studies: in five essays on the themes of public commemoration, religious interpretations, and fictional representations, it keeps coming back to the moral imperative of remembering and learning from the traumatic past. An afterword added as the book went to press refers to the catastrophes of March 2011, giving a sharp edge to Miyamoto’s call for the abolition of nuclear weapons and power plants, “these causes of shame and affliction” (p. 184).

Public commemoration often fails to create “an inclusive community of memory” (p. 25). The victims’ perspective was excluded from the 1995 exhibition commemorating the half-centenary of the bombing of Hiroshima at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The organizer, Martin Harwit, came to realize that “the balance he sought, and the message that he believed this balance conveyed, would not be tolerated by the American public” (p. 17). The Enola Gay had become sacrosanct as an icon of victory and technological prowess, and Harwit was accused by veterans of ignoring “the record of Japan’s aggression, the brutality of its war policy, and the fanaticism of its soldiers,” while newspapers denounced intellectuals who sought “to redefine American history in a way that assaulted traditional values” (p. 18). Harwit resigned, and the exhibition enshrined the view that “the atomic bombing was part of a sacred mission to save American soldiers and American values, even though it resulted in an unfortunate loss of non-American lives” (p. 21).

Both in segments of U.S. society and in Japan the commemorative work is fraught with tensions between what Avishai Margalit calls the “thick” relations of particular communities and their values and the “thin” relations constructed, in the spirit of the parable of the Good Samaritan, “upon the mere fact that we are all humans—the community of humankind” (p. 23). The hibakusha and the mayors of Hiroshima have championed a universal morality that “urges one to extend thick relations to all humankind” (p. 24). Unfortunately, “by the mid-1980s, the Japanese national narrative had begun to appropriate the accounts emerging from Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of a narrative of victimhood” (p. 47).

Addressing the controversial visits to Yasukuni Shrine by Yasuhiro Nakasone and Jun’ichirō Koizumi during their respective tenures as prime minister, the author refers to scholar of Buddhism Sueki Fumihiko, who sees certain events as “too grave and too far beyond comprehension to be dealt with adequately by the human-made regulations of ethics” (p. 62) and who advocates a religious “dialogue with the dead” (p. 59) that goes beyond ethics. She rejects Sueki’s claim that Yasukuni Shrine facilitates this dialogue and deplores the shrine museum’s glorification of the “Great East Asian...