InResurrecting Nagasaki, Chad R. Diehl examines the reconstruction of Nagasaki City after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945. Diehl illuminates the genesis of narratives surrounding the bombing by ...following the people and groups who contributed to the city's rise from the ashes and shaped its postwar image in Japan and the world. Municipal officials, survivor-activist groups, the Catholic community, and American occupation officials interpreted the destruction and envisioned the reconstruction of the city from different and sometimes disparate perspectives. Each group's narrative situated the significance of the bombing within the city's postwar urban identity in unique ways, informing the discourse of reconstruction as well as its physical manifestations in the city's revival. Diehl's analysis reveals how these atomic narratives shaped both the way Nagasaki rebuilt and the ways in which popular discourse on the atomic bombings framed the city's experience for decades.
Following the opening of Japan's ports in 1859, Nagasaki rapidly became one of Japan's leading industrial centres, which included shipbuilding. It has been largely overshadowed by interest in the ...Meiji settlements of Kobe and Yokohama. Fully illustrated, the value of the work is reinforced by additional key data to be found in the appendices.
This book explores the American use of atomic bombs and the role these weapons played in the defeat of the Japanese Empire in World War II. It focuses on President Harry S. Truman's decision-making ...regarding this most controversial of all his decisions. The book relies on notable archival research and the best and most recent scholarship on the subject to fashion an incisive overview that is fair and forceful in its judgments. This study addresses a subject that has been much debated among historians and it confronts head-on the highly disputed claim that the Truman administration practised 'atomic diplomacy'. The book goes beyond its central historical analysis to ask whether it was morally right for the United States to use these terrible weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also provides a balanced evaluation of the relationship between atomic weapons and the origins of the Cold War.
Five Days in August Gordin, Michael D
2015, 2007., 20150901, 2007, 2007-01-01, 2015-08-18, 20070101
eBook
Most Americans believe that the Second World War ended because the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan forced it to surrender. Five Days in August boldly presents a different interpretation: that the ...military did not clearly understand the atomic bomb's revolutionary strategic potential, that the Allies were almost as stunned by the surrender as the Japanese were by the attack, and that not only had experts planned and fully anticipated the need for a third bomb, they were skeptical about whether the atomic bomb would work at all. With these ideas, Michael Gordin reorients the historical and contemporary conversation about the A-bomb and World War II. Five Days in August explores these and countless other legacies of the atomic bomb in a glaring new light. Daring and iconoclastic, it will result in far-reaching discussions about the significance of the A-bomb, about World War II, and about the moral issues they have spawned.
In World Trade Systems of the East and West, Geoffrey C. Gunn profiles Nagasaki's historical role in mediating the Japanese bullion trade, especially silver exchanged against Chinese and Vietnamese ...silk.
This book aims to discredit the myth that has the `unique cultural traits' of the Japanese as the key to the country's success, arguing that the more realisable foundation of long-term investment in ...training and research is responsible.The book looks at the development of Japan in the pre-War period. Yukiko Fukusaku sees the achievements of this period as central to the present competitiveness of the country's industrial technology. She uses the Mitsubishi Nagasaki shipyard as a case study, looking at technological innovation and training as the keys to long-term stability and economic success.The book has implications for industrial development worldwide. Japan's starting point over a century ago was similar to the present conditions of many developing countries and the book's emphasis on the acquisition of better skills as a key to development is as relevant to Europe and America as it is to the Third World.
An unflinching examination of the moral and professional
dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the Manhattan
Project. After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took
possession of a box of ...private family materials. To his surprise,
the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information
about his grandfather's role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project.
Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented
ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project,
organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at
Alamogordo, escorted the "Little Boy" bomb from Los Alamos to the
Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the
irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Participation on the
project challenged Dr. Nolan's instincts as a healer. He and his
medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty
and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life.
Atomic Doctors follows these physicians as they sought to
maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear
radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize
delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the
harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors
struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using
the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human
drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity. A vital and vivid
account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic
Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that
ordinary people face in extraordinary times.
The before, the after, and the event that divides. In Irradiated Cities, Mariko Nagai seeks the dividing events of nuclear catastrophe in Japan, exploring the aftermath of the bombings at Hiroshima ...and Nagasaki and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Nagai’s lyric textual fragments and stark black and white photographs act as a guide through these spaces of loss, silence, echo, devastation, and memory. And haunting each shard and each page an enduring irradiation, the deadly residue of catastrophe that leaks into our DNA. Winner of the 2015 NOS Book Contest, as selected by guest judge lê thi diem thúy.
National, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries all play a role in academic study and nowhere is this more apparent than in traditional humanities scholarship surrounding the atomic bombing of ...Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How would our understanding of this seminal event change if we read Japanese and Euro-American texts together and across disciplines? In Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yuko Shibata juxtaposes literary and cinematic texts usually considered separately to highlight the "connected divides" in the production of knowledge on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shedding new light on both texts and contexts in the process.
Shibata takes up two canonical works-American journalist John Hersey's account, Hiroshima, and French director Alain Resnais' avant-garde film, Hiroshima Mon Amour-that are traditionally excluded from study in Japanese literature and cinema. By examining Hersey's Hiroshima in conjunction with The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagai Takashi) and Children of the A-Bomb (Osada Arata), both Japanese bestsellers, Shibata demonstrates how influential Hersey's Hiroshima has been in forging the normative narrative of the hibakusha experience in Japan. She also compares Hiroshima Mon Amour with Kamei Fumio's documentary, Still It's Good to Live, whose footage Resnais borrowed to depict atomic bomb victimhood. Resnais' avant-garde masterpiece, she contends, is the palimpsest of Kamei's surrealist documentary; both blur the binaries between realist and avant-garde representations. Reading Hiroshima Mon Amour in its historical context enables Shibata to offer an entirely new analysis of Renais' work. She also delineates how Japanese films came to produce the martyrdom narrative of the hibakusha in the early postwar period.
Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki allows us to trace the complex and entangled political threads that link representations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reminding us that narratives and images deploy different effects in different places and times. This highly original approach establishes a new kind of transnational and transpacific studies on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and raises the possibility of a comparative area studies to match the age of world literature.
In novels such as Silence , Endō Shūsaku examined the
persecution of Japanese Christians in different historical eras.
Sachiko , set in Nagasaki in the painful years between 1930
and 1945, is the ...story of two young people trying to find love
during yet another period in which Japanese Christians were accused
of disloyalty to their country. In the 1930s, two young Japanese
Christians, Sachiko and Shūhei, are free to play with American
children in their neighborhood. But life becomes increasingly
difficult for them and other Christians after Japan launches wars
of aggression. Meanwhile, a Polish Franciscan priest and former
missionary in Nagasaki, Father Maximillian Kolbe, is arrested after
returning to his homeland. Endō alternates scenes between
Nagasaki-where the growing love between Sachiko and Shūhei is
imperiled by mounting persecution-and Auschwitz, where the priest
has been sent. Shūhei's dilemma deepens when he faces conscription
into the Japanese military, conflicting with the Christian belief
that killing is a sin. With the A-bomb attack on Nagasaki looming
in the distance, Endō depicts ordinary people trying to live lives
of faith in a wartime situation that renders daily life
increasingly unbearable. Endō's compassion for his characters,
reflecting their struggles to find and share love for others, makes
Sachiko one of his most moving novels.