The trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrates the limits of dominant visual models, such as photography, for providing adequate historical memory. The author argues that collective traumas suggest the need for a prolonged gaze, such as can be provided by expressive art.

August 1995 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. This new volume in the Eyewitness Series reconstructs how pre-war scientists laid the bomb's theoretical foundations, provides the details of the Manhattan Project, and bears witness to the Japanese experience of the bombings and their legacy. Media attention.

"I'll search you out, put my lips to your tender ear, and tell you. . . . I'll tell you the real story--I swear I will."--from Little One by Toge Sankichi Three Japanese authors of note--Hara Tamiki, Ota Yoko, and Toge Sankichi--survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only to shoulder an appalling burden: bearing witness to ultimate horror. Between 1945 and 1952, in prose and in poetry, they published the premier first-person accounts of the atomic holocaust. Forty-five years have passed since August 6, 1945, yet this volume contains the first complete English translation of Hara's Summer Flowers, the first English translation of Ota's City of Corpses, and a new translation of Toge's Poems of the Atomic Bomb. No reader will emerge unchanged from reading these works. Different from each other in their politics, their writing, and their styles of life and death, Hara, Ota, and Toge were alike in feeling compelled to set down in writing what they experienced. Within forty-eight hours of August 6, before fleeing the city for shelter in the hills west of Hiroshima, Hara jotted down this note: "Miraculously unhurt; must be Heaven's will that I survive and report what happened." Ota recorded her own remarks to her half-sister as they walked down a street littered with corpses: "I'm looking with two sets of eyesthe eyes of a human being and the eyes of a writer." And the memorable words of Toge quoted above come from a poem addressed to a child whose father was killed in the South Pacific and whose mother died on August 6th--who would tell of that day? The works of these three authors convey as much of the "real story" as can be put into words.

"I'll search you out, put my lips to your tender ear, and tell you. . . . I'll tell you the real story--I swear I will."--from Little One by Toge Sankichi Three Japanese authors of note--Hara Tamiki, Ota Yoko, and Toge Sankichi--survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only to shoulder an appalling burden: bearing witness to ultimate horror. Between 1945 and 1952, in prose and in poetry, they published the premier first-person accounts of the atomic holocaust. Forty-five years have passed since August 6, 1945, yet this volume contains the first complete English translation of Hara's Summer Flowers, the first English translation of Ota's City of Corpses, and a new translation of Toge's Poems of the Atomic Bomb. No reader will emerge unchanged from reading these works. Different from each other in their politics, their writing, and their styles of life and death, Hara, Ota, and Toge were alike in feeling compelled to set down in writing what they experienced. Within forty-eight hours of August 6, before fleeing the city for shelter in the hills west of Hiroshima, Hara jotted down this note: "Miraculously unhurt; must be Heaven's will that I survive and report what happened." Ota recorded her own remarks to her half-sister as they walked down a street littered with corpses: "I'm looking with two sets of eyesthe eyes of a human being and the eyes of a writer." And the memorable words of Toge quoted above come from a poem addressed to a child whose father was killed in the South Pacific and whose mother died on August 6th--who would tell of that day? The works of these three authors convey as much of the "real story" as can be put into words.

On two separate days in August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the seventy-fifth anniversary of these cataclysmic bombings draws near, American and Japanese citizens are seeking new ways to memorialize these events for future generations. In Discordant Memories, Alison Fields explores—through the lenses of multiple disciplines—ongoing memories of the two bombings. Enhanced by striking color and black-and-white images, this book is an innovative contribution to the evolving fields of memory studies and nuclear humanities. To reveal the layered complexities of nuclear remembrance, Fields analyzes photography, film, and artworks; offers close readings of media and testimonial accounts; traces site visits to atomic museums in New Mexico and Japan; and features artists who give visual form to evolving memories. According to Fields, such expressions of memory both inspire group healing and expose struggles with past trauma. Visual forms of remembrance—such as science museums, peace memorials, photographs, and even scars on human bodies—serve to contain or manage painful memories. And yet, the author claims, distinct cultures lay claim to vastly different remembrances of nuclear history. Fields analyzes a range of case studies to uncover these discordant memories and to trace the legacies of nuclear weapons production and testing. Her subjects include the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, New Mexico; the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan; the atomic photography of Carole Gallagher and Patrick Nagatani; and artworks and experimental films by Will Wilson and Nanobah Becker. In the end, Fields argues, the trauma caused by nuclear weapons can never be fully contained. For this reason, commemorations of their effects are often incomplete and insufficient. Differences between individual memories and public accounts are also important to recognize. Discordant Memories illuminates such disparate memories in all their rich complexity.