Ground Zero Nagasaki

Set in contemporary Nagasaki, the six short stories in this collection draw a chilling portrait of the ongoing trauma of the detonation of the atomic bomb. Whether they experienced the destruction of the city directly or heard about it from survivors, the characters in these tales filter their pain and alienation through their Catholic faith, illuminating a side of Japanese culture little known in the West. Many of them are descended from the "hidden Christians" who continued to practice their religion in secret during the centuries when it was outlawed in Japan. Urakami Cathedral, the center of Japanese Christian life, stood at ground zero when the bomb fell. In "Birds," a man in his sixties reflects on his life as a husband and father. Just a baby when he was found crying in the rubble near ground zero, he does not know who his parents were. His birthday is set as the day the bomb was dropped. In other stories, a woman is haunted by her brief affair with a married man, and the parents of a schizophrenic man struggle to come to terms with the murder their son committed. These characters battle with guilt, shame, loss, love, and the limits of human understanding. Ground Zero, Nagasaki vividly depicts a city and people still scarred by the memory of August 9, 1945.

Treat summarizes the Japanese contribution to such ongoing international debates as the crisis of modern ethics, the relationship of experience to memory, and the possibility of writing history. This Japanese perspective, he shows, both confirms and amends many of the assertions made in the West on the shift that the death camps and nuclear weapons have jointly signaled for the modern world and for the future.

On August 9th, 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. It killed a third of the population instantly, and the survivors, or hibakusha, would be affected by the life-altering medical conditions caused by the radiation for the rest of their lives. They were also marked with the stigma of their exposure to radiation, and fears of the consequences for their children. Nagasaki follows the previously unknown stories of five survivors and their families, from 1945 to the present day. It captures the full range of pain, fear, bravery and compassion unleashed by the destruction of a city.Susan Southard has interviewed the hibakusha over many years and her intimate portraits of their lives show the consequences of nuclear war. Nagasaki tells the neglected story of life after nuclear war and will help shape public debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history. Published for the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, this is the first study to be based on eye-witness accounts of Nagasaki in the style of John Hersey's Hiroshima. On August 9th, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a 5-tonne plutonium bomb was dropped on the small, coastal city of Nagasaki. The explosion destroyed factories, shops and homes and killed 74,000 people while injuring another 75,000. The two atomic bombs marked the end of a global war but for the tens of thousands of survivors it was the beginning of a new life marked with the stigma of being hibakusha (atomic bomb-affected people). Susan Southard has spent a decade interviewing and researching the lives of the hibakusha, raw, emotive eye-witness accounts, which reconstruct the days, months and years after the bombing, the isolation of their hospitalisation and recovery, the difficulty of re-entering daily life and the enduring impact of life as the only people in history who have lived through a nuclear attack and its aftermath. Following five teenage survivors from 1945 to the present day Southard unveils the lives they have led, their injuries in the annihilation of the bomb, the dozens of radiation-related cancers and illnesses they have suffered, the humiliating and frightening choices about marriage they were forced into as a result of their fears of the genetic diseases that may be passed through their families for generations to come. The power of Nagasaki lies in the detail of the survivors' stories, as deaths continued for decades because of the radiation contamination, which caused various forms of cancer. Intimate and compassionate, while being grounded in historical research Nagasaki reveals the censorship that kept the suffering endured by the hibakusha hidden around the world. For years after the bombings news reports and scientific research were censored by U.S. occupation forces and the U.S. government led an efficient campaign to justify the necessity and morality of dropping the bombs. As we pass the seventieth anniversary of the only atomic bomb attacks in history Susan Southard captures the full range of pain, fear, bravery and compassion unleashed by the destruction of a city. The personal stories of those who survived beneath the mushroom clouds will transform the abstract perception of nuclear war into a visceral human experience. Nagasaki tells the neglected story of life after nuclear war and will help shape public discussion and debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history.

After the United States detonated an atomic bomb at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the U.S. government restricted the circulation of images of the bomb's deadly effect. President Truman dispatched some 1,150 military personnel and civilians, including photographers, to record the destruction as part of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The goal of the Survey's Physical Damage Division was to photograph and analyze methodically the impact of the atomic bomb on various building materials surrounding the blast site, the first "Ground Zero." The haunting, once-classified images of absence and annihilation formed the basis for civil defense architecture in the United States. This exhibition includes approximately 60 contact prints drawn from a unique archive of more than 700 photographs in the collection of the International Center of Photography. The exhibition is organized by Erin Barnett, Assistant Curator of Collections.

"In addition to the official photographs he turned over to his superiors, O'Donnell recorded some three hundred images for himself, but following his discharge from the Marines he could not bear to look at them. He put the negatives in a trunk that remained unopened until 1989, when he finally felt compelled to confront once more what he had seen through his lens during his seven months in post-war Japan." "Exhibited in Europe and Japan during the 1990s, O'Donnell's photographs were first published in book form in a 1995 Japanese edition. This edition, the first to appear in the United States, includes an additional twenty photographs and will bring O'Donnell's eloquent testament to the horrors of war to an even wider audience."--BOOK JACKET.

Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Nonfiction: The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian returns with a groundbreaking comparative study of the dynamics and pathologies of war in modern times. Over recent decades, John W. Dower, one of America’s preeminent historians, has addressed the roots and consequences of war from multiple perspectives. In War Without Mercy (1986), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he described and analyzed the brutality that attended World War II in the Pacific, as seen from both the Japanese and the American sides. Embracing Defeat (1999), winner of numerous honors including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, dealt with Japan’s struggle to start over in a shattered land in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, when the defeated country was occupied by the U.S.-led Allied powers. Turning to an even larger canvas, Dower now examines the cultures of war revealed by four powerful events—Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, and the invasion of Iraq in the name of a war on terror. The list of issues examined and themes explored is wide-ranging: failures of intelligence and imagination, wars of choice and “strategic imbecilities,” faith-based secular thinking as well as more overtly holy wars, the targeting of noncombatants, and the almost irresistible logic—and allure—of mass destruction. Dower’s new work also sets the U.S. occupations of Japan and Iraq side by side in strikingly original ways. One of the most important books of this decade, Cultures of War offers comparative insights into individual and institutional behavior and pathologies that transcend “cultures” in the more traditional sense, and that ultimately go beyond war-making alone.

This is a collection of articles and essays, some written thirty years ago, others written or revised over the years and a few written most recently. Some are co-written or written by people who have impacted me personally. All focus in some way on the postmodern Nuclear Age rising out of the atomic ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All signify journeys to come to terms in some way with nuclear psychic dread, with humanity's inhumanity, and with both fear and hope in the present for the future. I first moved to Japan as a child and at age fourteen moved to Hiroshima City, over fifty years ago. I then returned years later to be the principal teacher for eight years at Hiroshima International School. Those experiences have touched and even colored the rest of my life.