From Geisha girls to the Atomic Bomb Dome: Dark tourism and the formation of Hiroshima memory

Current research on Hiroshima

While tourism studies have referred to Hiroshima usually only in passing, the bombing has been discussed primarily as an issue of collective memory and of Japanese postwar identity politics. ¹ In general, scholars argue that the so-called a-bomb nationalism reflects the belief of many Japanese that they themselves have been victims of the war, thereby obfuscating memories of wartime militarism and colonialism. In this context, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and—albeit to a lesser degree—Nagasaki epitomizes what has often been criticized as “victim’s consciousness” (Yoneyama, 1999). In James Orr’s (2001) words,

The vision of the Japanese as innocent war victims reached its purest expression in the public dialogue over nuclear weapons. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings privileged the Japanese nation with an exclusive claim to leadership in the global ban-the-bomb movement and provided the country with its first powerfully unifying national myth after defeat. (p. 7)

From the perspective of national identity, the formation of public Hiroshima memory originated in 1954 when after the end of the occupation (and of censorship politics), the exposure of a Japanese fishing boat to the nuclear fall-out of a US atomic bomb test on the Bikini Atoll triggered a wide public protest movement against nuclear weapons. This dominant framework reflects area study’s preoccupation with the nation—be it actors, discourses, identity, and so forth. Local historians such as Ubuki Satoru have shown, however, that larger parts of the institutional setting that defines and produces Hiroshima memory until today had been established already in the early postwar years, between 1945 and 1949—a long time before the nation took an interest in Hiroshima (Ishimaru, 1988; Ubuki, 1992). This includes the annual Peace Ceremony, the Peace Message by the incumbent Hiroshima mayor, designated atomic bomb ruins, school trips, the Cenotaph, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum. The fact that Hiroshima memory played a pivotal role in postwar Japanese identity politics and that this deeply shaped the way Hiroshima is commemorated notwithstanding, the national project clearly does not suffice to explain how and why public atomic bomb memory came into existence. If the formative period took place under the Occupation regime which inhibited a wider national memory culture, it is crucial to reexamine the local factor, discourses, and actors that shaped these early times.

With regard to the local level as well as the early years of atomic bomb memory, historical research has identified two main motives molding the formation of this memoryscape. On the one hand, the people of Hiroshima expressed the urgent desire to mourn the lost lives of their kin. Although private commemorative services fulfilled this purpose to some extent, a public memory culture was called for because death was not an individual but a collective experience. Furthermore, in total war that suspended the distinction between home and front line, the victims of the bomb were victims of the war and as such deserved official commemoration, just like soldiers who died in battle. On the other hand, the experience of the atomic bomb as well as defeat in war led to a widespread desire for peace. Commemorating the bomb was considered to publicly express and advocate this peace sentiment. These motivations for the establishment of a larger public commemorative apparatus can be traced through various sources such as public speeches, legislation, newspaper articles, autobiographical accounts as well as public policy recommendations. However, when looking into the minutes of council meetings and municipal subcommittees, it becomes obvious that the formation of Hiroshima memory was also strongly influenced by the city’s general reconstruction efforts as well as the municipal tourism strategy. This article will show that tourism played a pivotal role in the formation of Hiroshima memoryscape. This adds a hitherto unacknowledged perspective to the debate on atomic bomb memory. But more importantly, tourism offers an explanation that reconciles different interpretations on the rationale of Hiroshima memory by showing how social space is arranged and defined.

The ramifications of Hiroshima’s union of tourism—or more broadly consumerism—and atomic bomb memory have already been analyzed by Lisa Yoneyama (1999). However, she discusses this issue as a phenomenon of the 1980s, when deindustrialization urged the city into strengthening its service sector. The subsequent urban renewal aimed at replacing darker memories of the bomb through a more marketable tourist-friendly atmosphere of “bright and cheerful peace” (p. 44). Yoneyama does not discuss the role of tourism in earlier decades but assumes that tourism happened belatedly usurping or pushing aside more painful memories of the survivors’ generation. Historical sources on Hiroshima, however, challenge this conceptualization and present tourism as a driving factor which shaped memory culture from the start. Since this is a rather large claim, it is important to carefully present the historical evidence that supports it.

The development of Hiroshima’s “touristic potential”

Before discussing the emergence of atomic bomb tourism, it is necessary to recall the extent to which the atomic bomb had destroyed the city. The explosion of the bomb was followed by a tremendous blast and heat wave, which caused buildings to collapse, paper and wood—common materials in Japanese housing constructions—to burst into flames. The coinciding of these effects led to massive conflagrations all over the city, which lasted for about 24 hours. When the flames subsided, all buildings within a 3-km radius of the epicenter had been destroyed; within a 4-km radius, only 8 percent of the buildings were in a functioning condition. Electricity poles had burned down, and sewers, pipes, and roads were blocked or had collapsed (The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1981). This left city officials with a population homeless and close to starvation, no noteworthy tax revenues, and the challenge to rebuild the whole city from nothing. Despite these circumstances, the city took on the significant financial and logistical burden to establish a larger institutional arrangement commemorating the atomic bomb. The city—and historians who appropriated this position—stated that the memoryscape was due to the overwhelming feeling of loss, a strong longing for peace among Hiroshima citizens, and the conviction that the bombing presented a historical lesson to be taken seriously. But can this explanation be taken at face value for people who barely survived on the ferns that they found growing along the railroad tracks?

When looking into the records of municipal council and subcommittee meetings, it becomes obvious that the creation of a commemorative apparatus was mostly discussed as an issue of reconstruction and tourism development efforts. From the perspective of tourism development, the atomic bombing offered a surprising but also attractive source of income. City officials were aware that Hiroshima from now on was “a site that people from all countries would visit” (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 81). The chairman of the municipal reconstruction committee expressed his hopes “that when visitors from abroad come to Japan they will drop by in Hiroshima” (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 50; also Mayor Hamai Shinzō’s reconstruction plan in Hiroshimashi, 1982: 100). While detrimental to any other economic endeavor, the nuclear wasteland promised a potential goldmine for a tourism industry. In addition, the touristic usage of the atomic bomb experience did not require any major investments. Hiroshima had been a tourist destination even prior to the atomic bombing but had lost its attractions in the nuclear blast. Now, the 1948 city chronicle proclaimed, “the ruins provide[d] the new touristic resource, namely the atomic bomb memorial artifacts” (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1948: 101). For the municipality, tourism did not only provide a short-term source of revenue but was regarded as crucial to the future economic basis of the city. Since the late nineteenth century until the end of the Pacific War, Hiroshima had been an important military center, which was home to the Fifth Army as well as the main harbor for troops leaving for mainland Asia. With defeat in war, the city thus had to find a replacement for this important source of income and employment. As soon as February 1946, the reconstruction committee recommended diversifying the municipal economic basis including industry, trade, administration, education, and tourism (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 7f; see also Ishimaru, 1988: 5). However, tourism figured not just as one of many aspects. In fact, some council members argued even in favor of tourism as the main economic pillar as the then mayor Hamai Shinzō recalls in his autobiography (see also Ishimaru, 1988: 5; Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1947: 3).

The earliest example of this match between tourism and atomic bomb memory was the first Peace Ceremony that was held in 1947. Already in the year before, the city had organized a public commemorative service close to the epicenter of the bombing. There was a widespread consensus that in honor of the dead the atomic bombing should be remembered publicly every year. However, grief was only one driving force fostering a commemorative service. Mayor Hamai (2010) remembers that “[…] the Chamber of Commerce and the Tourism Association wanted the festival to inject energy into our moribund retail sector; they wanted to develop it into an event to highlight regional products” (p. 95). In this vein, the Tourism Association Hiroshima, which had been established only in January 1947, took over the planning of the festival thereby following its founding mission to organize events that advertise regional products (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1947: 79f). The first Peace Ceremony was to become the Association’s first project. The event itself contained many of the elements that are until today part and parcel of the annual commemorative service, such as the peace message by the mayor, the peace bell, and the releasing of doves.

To make the most of Hiroshima’s “touristic potential” as the catchphrase went, atomic bomb commemoration could, however, not be reduced to a single annual event. Tourists needed places to visit all year long. At first, the city itself presented such a space, but as reconstruction efforts gained momentum, one faced the well-known problem of weighing modernization (here as “reconstruction”) against preservation. Again, it was tourism-related initiatives that paved the way for early site demarcation. In summer 1948, not survivor groups or peace activists but the Tourism Association conducted a survey asking whether the a-bomb dome—today Hiroshima’s most iconic building—should be maintained (Chūgoku Shinbun, 18 August 1948). According to the Chūgoku Shinbun, two-thirds were in favor of its preservation, and one-third preferred its removal. The preservation of the Atomic Bomb Dome remained a contested issue well into the 1960s dividing Hiroshima’s citizens into two camps: those who wanted the site gone because it either brought up painful memories or the location right in the city-center seemed too valuable to be wasted on a ruin, and those who regarded the dome as a persuasive warning against nuclear warfare and as a crowd-puller for visitors to Hiroshima. While the touristic demarcation of the city-center was thus kept in suspense, the preservation of other sites in the cityscape was less problematic. In 1947, US Major S. A. Jarvie, who was advising the city on issues of reconstruction, had recommended to mark and to preserve atomic ruins for future touristic interest. Jarvie told the reconstruction committee, “Nuclear Hiroshima will be of particular importance for tourism. It is necessary to preserve the atomic bomb artifacts. This will be a source of revenue for the city. Even one more day of delay will make preservation difficult” (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 108). Subsequently, Jarvie together with the Tourism Association chose 11—one source mentions 13—locations in the city as atomic bomb ruins and thereby laid the groundwork for Hiroshima’s memoryscape (Chūgoku Shinbun, 1 August 1948; Chūgoku Shinbun, 6 August 1948; Hiroshimashi, 1982: 86).

It is important to understand that the relation between progress and preservation although often experienced as a conflict (e.g. the preservation of the dome) did not necessarily present a dichotomy. The founding of the atomic bomb museum is a case in point. In the early days after the nuclear blast, Kuwabara Ichio, a local business leader, suggested in the municipal reconstruction committee to abandon the reconstruction of Hiroshima. One square kilometer of “sacred ground” around the epicenter should be kept as a memorial that testified to the nuclear destruction. Only survivors would be allowed to sell souvenirs there while the new Hiroshima would be rebuilt around this ground zero (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 81). While there was a wide consensus that the city needed a memorial and that preservation was an important issue, only a few favored Kuwabara’s all-encompassing memoryscape. The wish for a future beyond the atomic bomb was stronger. In fact, many—including many survivors—did not want to remember but to forget wartime hardship and wished to participate in the postwar promise of peace, prosperity, and democracy (Lifton, 1969). On the level of city-planning, this meant literally clearing the grounds for new streets, new houses, new businesses, and a whole new life. Demarcation initiatives such as Jarvie’s and the Tourism’s Associations could only go so far. The majority of atomic bomb remnants therefore had to be gathered in a single spot which at the same time preserved them for and from the world and cleared the city for reconstruction (and later for urban renewal). In August 1948, the city council thus decided to build a museum commemorating the atomic bombing (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 108). This resonates with Dean MacCannell’s assessment that “the best indication of the final victory of modernity over other sociocultural arrangements is not the disappearance of the non-modern world, but its artificial preservation and reconstruction in modern society” (MacCannell, 1976: 8). Although coined with a different case in mind, this statement also holds true in case of Hiroshima. The possibility to store the atomic bomb artifacts in the museum and to demarcate sites for preservation laid the ground for opening the rest of the city to modernization.

Visitors of the atomic bomb

The Peace Ceremony in 1947, first site demarcations in 1948, the opening of a provisional museum in 1949, and so forth… The establishment of Hiroshima memoryscape was deeply entrenched in municipal tourism development efforts. The city harbored high expectations toward the financial impact of tourism, especially of visitors from abroad. The city chronicle of 1948 asserted, “From now on, visiting the atomic bomb ruins in Hiroshima will become an important part of the itinerary for all international tourists coming to Japan” (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1948: 101). In the following year, the city chronicle already presented Hiroshima as a regular stop for foreign tourists to Japan (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1949: 112). However, sources do not provide sufficient ground to quantify whether the city’s hopes became true. The city chronicle of 1952 mentions a total of 1.16 million visitors, who spent approximately 1.24 million Yen (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1952: 256). These figures, however, do not clearly reflect atomic bomb tourism since they also include business trips, family visits, and so forth. At the same time, these chronicles show an increase in visitors during April (the month for school field trips) and August (the anniversary of the bombing) which might indicate that many atomic bomb tourists did visit (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1952: 256). The city at least—eager to present itself as a place of international attention—readily interpreted the numbers as proof of the “touristic significance of the city” and its appeal as “the Mecca of world peace” (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1952: 255). What is obvious from the city chronicles, photos, and newspaper articles is that people—tourists—came to see nuclear Hiroshima. Sasaki Yūichirō, a local photographer, who became the visual chronologist of the bomb and its aftermath, documented the tourist busses and passengers, school children taking a rest at the Atomic Bomb Dome during their field trips, and US soldiers taking each other’s pictures in front of the dome (Sasaki, 1977). In March 1949, the local newspaper announced that spring saw many visiting students—“daily at least 1000” (Chūgoku Shinbun, 20 March 1949)—showing pedagogically motivated atomic bomb tourism already existed in the late 1940s.

Historical research on tourism usually—and Hiroshima is no exception—reaches its limits when discussing the tourists themselves, their motivations, their perception, and behavior simply because of a lack of historical sources. Nevertheless, even using only sources on the tourism developers, this already offers a new perspective on the visitor’s experience than current scholarship that focuses on peace-activism, the anti-nuclear movement, and commemoration. Leaving participants of the ban-the-bomb-movement’s annual conferences aside, visiting Hiroshima was (and is) embedded in a number of activities that—as the city chronicle of 1952 puts it—“provide real pleasure” (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1952: 256). Visitors could join in guided tours that connected atomic bomb sites such as the museum and the dome with the Hiroshima castle, the scenic mount Hiji, or more distant locations such as the famous island of Matsue (Chūgoku Shinbun, 9 March 1949; Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1949: 111, 1952: 256). Much emphasis was laid upon providing good accommodation and food; local products (e.g. oysters and sewing needles) were marketed as souvenirs for family and friends at home (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1952: 256). As Major Jarvie said, “Tourists […] are willing to spend a lot of money. It is essential to hold their attention and extend their stay” (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 108). And the city managed to put together a comprehensive tourism package, which catered to the tourist’s many needs. Apparently with success. The 1952 city chronicle gives detailed information on the average expenditure of tourists. Visitors from the prefecture Hiroshima spent 1000 Yen per person, visitors from outside the prefecture 1280 Yen, foreign tour groups 4000 Yen, and individual foreign travelers even 5000 Yen per person. That made a total of 1.2 billion Yen in turnover (Hiroshima shisei yōran, 1952: 256ff). ²

Although atomic bomb memory was deeply entrenched in the city’s efforts to develop local tourism, this was of course not the only factor contributing to the emergence of public Hiroshima remembrance. The collection of the museum, for example, goes back to the initiative of Nagaoka Shōgo, a local geologist and later first director of the museum, who at first single-handedly and out of his own pocket started collecting remnants that documented the bombing. His work was inspired by his professional scientific curiosity as well as the overwhelming feeling of having witnessed an event of global and historical importance (Asahi Gurafu, 1961). Many others who later joined him in the so-called Preservation Society were motivated by similar concerns and spent significant time and resources on building a Hiroshima commemorative culture (International Graphic, 1965). Their work was not preoccupied with tourism development and the city’s overall economic situation.

Furthermore, commemorative initiatives were often directed at locals, who themselves had experienced the bomb and lost relatives and friends (Sasaki, 1977). At times when Allied censorship politics made information scarce, the exhibitions, booklets, and so on presented an important source of information for those most immediately affected.

In short, the atomic bombing constituted the core of the municipal tourism concept and tourism deeply influenced how the bomb would be commemorated. It was local city officials and entrepreneurs who put money and work into realizing a public atomic bomb commemoration as part of their local tourism strategy. Area studies that continue to be deeply entrenched in the national project tend to focus on national aspects such as the importance of Hiroshima for postwar national identity. Questioning this national perspective brings new insights into the inner workings of memory culture as the Hiroshima case shows. However, area studies’ preoccupation with the nation is just one reason for the silence on atomic bomb tourism. In fact, tourism itself offers an additional explanation for why Hiroshima tourism has been absent from discussion so far.

Tourism in Denial

Despite the evidence of the importance of tourism, the topic is strikingly absent from other historiographical accounts although to some extent they rely on similar sources as this article, including the Chūgoku Shinbun. This absence echoes the absence of “tourism” from many documents of prominent atomic bomb institutions. The official name of the annual anniversary festivities is a case in point: the official name for the event is Peace Prayer Ceremony ³ emphasizing the longing for peace as well as grief about the lost lives of relatives and friends. The Tourism Association that initiated the ceremony, on the other hand, stays tellingly in the background in this context. In fact, the Peace Memorial Museum, the annual Mayoral Peace Message, the Peace City Law, and so forth never once mention the tourist (kankōkyaku). This holds particularly true for public statements, which often serve as self-portrayals. If there is something akin to the “tourist” in these sources, it is the “visitor.” The museum calls them kanransha, literally “people who see [an exhibition],” in other cases, it is sankansha or hōmonsha all meaning in one way or the other “people who go and see,” that is, the visitor. This jargon is starkly contrasted by internal municipal records, such as the minutes of the meetings of the city council, its subcommittees and the reconstructions committee, and the accounts of the economic development of the city, for example, the city chronicles and statements by business leaders. Here, it is the plain old “tourist” that is being discussed with regard to the atomic bomb. Interestingly, it is often the same people such as the mayor or city officials but also newspaper journalists, who in a different setting avoid this term. This is to say that there are two different discursive fields with a different language, different rationale, to some extent even different institutions. However, the absence of the “tourist” from most atomic bomb accounts does not speak to the irrelevance of tourism to the phenomenon of atomic bomb memory. What it indicates is that “tourism” presents an absence that is key to understanding how atomic memory discourse functions. As long as historiography sets aside tourism, it risks reproducing the very discourse it seeks to analyze.

In order to understand this silence—a more accurate term than absence in this case—it is helpful to look at those rare moments in which the two spheres collided. For example, in 1962, an article in Time Magazine criticized Hiroshima for the touristification of the bomb. According to the magazine, Hiroshima is “the only city in the world that advertises its past misery”: “Hiroshima is visited by 2,000,000 tourists a year; its chilling museum of atomic horrors has been massively and masochistically documented in endless magazine and newspaper articles, TV features and movies. […] Hiroshima has made an industry of its fate” (Time Magazine, 1962; emphases mine). By calling it “touristic,” the article turned Hiroshima’s peace message with its altruistic universalistic claims into a self-deluding, manipulative, and profit-driven ploy to lure tourists to town and to make money. Calling Hiroshima “touristic” with one stroke delegitimized Hiroshima and all it meant. For peace activists and their like, it was therefore crucial to distance themselves from the commercial benefits of Hiroshima memory in order to convey their message as credibly as possible. This devaluating effect of the “tourism” label is the main reason why atomic bomb memory actors avoided the term and developed their own language to talk about visitors and what they do—it also, in my opinion, accounts for the uneasiness with which scholars approach or rather stay away from the question of Hiroshima tourism.

In the case of Time Magazine, the tourism allegation was embedded in a justification of the bombing and the many lives it might have saved. Of course, one might have easily turned the tables on Time Magazine and expose the apologetic agenda in an article that questions Hiroshima in order to justify the bombing. However, pointing this out would not have annulled the charge of “tourism,” which apparently was first priority. The reaction was therefore to deny and to bring public attention back to the issues of the anti-nuclear movement. Following this logic, Hiroshima Mayor Hamai—aided by Nagasaki’s mayor—decided to give a lengthy interview to the Japanese journal Sekai, insisting that Hiroshima did “not turn the bomb into a commodity” (Bungei Shunjū, 1962: 92). His only wish, Mayor Hamai argued, had been the reconstruction of the city and peace for future generations. “Reconstruction” and “peace” are the key words to frame Hiroshima’s memory which also feature prominently in other documents of atomic bomb memory. “Reconstruction” was the permissible Hiroshima version of postwar prosperity and growth that kept more tricky issues such as consumer culture—of which tourism was an important part—at arm’s length. This highlights the delicate line that Hiroshima maneuvered between participating in Japan’s postwar rise and commemorating the atomic bomb. It was crucial to develop coherent and appropriate yet distinct languages for these spheres. The trial-and-error period in developing this language can be seen with regard to an earlier incident of “tourism” critique. In 1947, the first Peace Ceremony was publicly censured with the suggestion that the accompanying costume parade and performances resembled, in the words of Life Magazine, a “South-American carnival” (cited in Ubuki, 1992: 13). Subsequently, the organizers dropped these activities from the program with the intention of presenting a more solemn event that had the necessary gravité (Hamai, 2010: 99 and 101).

The uneasy relationship of commemoration to its commercial aspects is neither unique to Hiroshima nor restricted to sites of dark tourism. In fact, it is quite easily explained from the perspective of commemoration as tourism. As Dean MacCannell argued, tourist settings can be conceptualized as a form of social backstage to borrow from Erving Goffman’s terminology. Here, tourists partake in what is said to be hidden from them and experience the authentic social reality of the site (MacCannell, 1973, 1976). This holds true even for the most cynical naysayers among the tourists. In the case of Hiroshima, tourists come in search of the original place of the first atomic bombing wanting to see or experience what it really had been like. These experiences are made available through social and spatial arrangements such as the museum and bus tours. Although framed as a backstage, the touristic realm is, according to MacCannell, rather an in-between space that he calls “staged authenticity.” By making the man-made dimensions of this space visible—which is what happens when someone labels a phenomenon “touristic”—it ceases to fulfill its social function as a space of authenticity. Subsequently, not only the peace movement has to distance itself from tourism but atomic bomb tourism itself—just like any other tourism—has to deny its touristic nature; its self-effacement is integral to the functioning of tourism. Although a forceful analytical tool, “staged authenticity” as a concept has little space in actual tourism practice, particularly not in atomic bomb tourism. Not only in the Time Magazine article but also in scholarly critique of dark tourism including Hiroshima, tourism is conceptualized as the true self of Hiroshima that cowers behind a façade of peace rhetoric ultimately hiding only the mercenary schemes of city officials. This binary thinking of consumerism versus altruism that haunts too many social and political theories offers a reproduction of the discourse of modernity rather than an analysis. MacCannell’s approach here offers a much more nuanced understanding of the phenomena, which explains how atomic bomb tourism and atomic bomb commemoration co-developed as two distinct social spheres that were mutually dependent and in mutual denial right from the beginning.

On rare occasions, the matchmakers of this liaison acknowledged the union of tourism and atomic bomb memory. The 1950 edition of Shintoshi, a Japanese city planning magazine, was dedicated exclusively to Hiroshima and discussed local tourism in detail. The magazine featured an article by the then head of the municipal planning and information agency, Morihiro Sukeharu, who later served as director of the atomic bomb museum in the 1960s. “Tourism,” Morihiro argued, “is one of the greatest pleasures in life for people around the world and also means precious learning.” Hiroshima offered both: “to cherish the cheerful atmosphere of the peace city” and “to learn important lessons from Hiroshima” (Morihiro, 1950: 46). Just like Morihiro himself, who effortlessly moved from municipal planning to the post of museum director, atomic bomb commemoration and tourism did not present a conflict to the city official. In the same magazine, the head of the Hiroshima Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Akita Kanzaburō (1950), explained,

The call for peace doesn’t stop at a simple hope or ideal. The effervescent wish for peace does not stop at a single word or in the head. Through practice, i.e. all actions, through the quality of products, through prices, through commerce in which the ideal is embodied, the ideal of peace flows as actualized practice friendly to the heart of the people around the world. (p. 42)

In line with Japan’s postwar focus on economic development and peace, Akita argued that economic activity itself was a manifestation of peace. Atomic bomb tourism in this sense was doubly peaceful: learning about the atomic bombing and contributing to or participating in economic recovery.

The “Peace” brand

Despite this belief that tourism and atomic bomb memory did not conflict, from the tourism perspective, the death and suffering of Hiroshima did present a dilemma. On one hand, the first-hand experience of the first atomic bombing in history was exactly why visitors came to Hiroshima, what made it unique, in other words what made it a “destination” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). People came to see the ruins and to experience the “hell on earth” as it was often called. On the other hand, Hiroshima’s uniqueness presented a negative image with which city officials and residents felt uncomfortable both because of their own self-conception and of the city’s touristic appeal. Therefore, when it came to marketing or branding Hiroshima, the city decided to establish a jargon around the concept of “peace” rather than the horrors of the bomb. An important example is the museum that until today is officially called “Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.” However, in everyday language, the museum is referred to as the “atomic bomb museum.”

In general, “peace” resonated with dominant interpretations of the bombing by United States as well as Japanese officials. US government and media argued that the atomic bomb had ended World War II and brought peace to the world. Igarashi Yoshikuni points out that in the last days of the war, Japanese officials, too, embraced this interpretation in an attempt to save their own (political) lives and that of the emperor. In their view, the bombs had triggered a national crisis, which was only resolved by the intervention of the emperor, who pushed for unconditional surrender. This legitimated the continuation of the emperor system and its adjacent institutions in the postwar era. In public discourse, the dead of Hiroshima thus became the necessary condition for peace—in many ways, even a synonym for peace (Igarashi, 2000). When marketing atomic bomb tourism as peace tourism, Hiroshima city officials therefore successfully tapped into Japan’s powerful postwar “foundational narrative” that was fostered by both Allied Occupation forces and central government agencies. This also explains why the regional headquarter of the occupation forces supported the expansion of atomic bomb tourism. Individuals such as Major Jarvie and Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery actively worked on site preservation and the establishment of an atomic bomb museum (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 50f). In 1949, even the central occupation headquarters backed the city with the Peace City Law—a law that aimed at getting national funds for rebuilding Hiroshima as a city commemorating the bomb and thus ultimately peace (Hamai, 2010: 127). If the atomic bombing could not be banned from public discourse, Occupation Forces used the opportunity to shift the peace narrative into focus. This served to downplay the atrocity of the bombing and simultaneously legitimize the decision to use the bomb. Atomic bomb tourism, which was framed as peace tourism, played into this legitimizing strategy.

Beyond these political aims, peace tourism resonated with the general Zeitgeist. In the 1940s and 1950s, tourists themselves still had vivid memories of the war and the atomic bombing epitomized their own hardships. By framing the bombing as peace, these hardships were turned from present into past which had been overcome and had made possible a future of peace and prosperity. Atomic bomb tourism as peace tourism reasserted a future-oriented optimistic temporality of modernity that helped distancing oneself from past which was embodied in the object of sightseeing. This distancing confirmed modernity’s teleology and its credo of eternal progress that had been challenged by the atomic bombing. It was this longing for something “bright” (akarui) that characterized much of everyday and popular culture up until the 1960s. Hiroshima’s memory and tourism were located at the fault-line of these postwar desires and wartime legacies. The harsh criticism that met Mayor Hamai’s suggestion to replace the atomic bomb museum with an art museum documents (Chūgoku Shinbun, 19 August 1960) echoes the wish both for a brighter image and for Hiroshima’s fate to forever remain the atomic bomb city.

Hiroshima’s memory as peace culture was just one way in which tourism fostered a whitewashing of atomic bomb memory. For example, until the early 1990s, the museum mentioned neither Korean and Chinese forced laborers who died in the blast nor touched upon questions of Japan’s military aggression in Asia and US responsibility for dropping the bomb. At the beginning of the exhibition, the bomb literally fell out of the clear blue sky (Schäfer, 2008). Proponents of this exhibition argued that a depoliticized and ahistorical interpretation of the bombing provided a universal point of identification with the victims and thus strengthened the ban-the-bomb movement. Critics countered that, on one hand, this strategy failed in a Cold War environment which made it impossible to separate the bomb from politics and that, on the other hand, this kind of commemoration played into the hands of those who were in denial of Japan’s war responsibility. “Peace” as it appears in Shintoshi is exemplary of this mainstream approach. Akita’s argument inflated “peace” so that it could mean everything and nothing. “Peace” could even be used as an argument against peace activists. For example, when activists passionately discussed their specific political claims, this was disdainfully depicted as “chaos” and “uproar” endangering “peace” (Chūgoku Shinbun, 6 August 1963: 2 and 14). From the perspective of atomic bomb tourism, what was at stake was alienating the tourist rather than the political public. What was needed was a version of the past which was marketable to a broad touristic audience in Japan. It is a case in point that the question of forced laborers among the victims and Japan’s wartime aggression were only included in the museum’s exhibition at a time when Hiroshima was scheduled to host the Asian Games and planned to attract large numbers of visitors from Asia (Yomiuri Shinbun, 28 July 1991). The union of tourism and atomic bomb memory in the formation of Hiroshima commemoration thus promoted the avoidance of politically sensitive issues and tapped into the immediate postwar’s belief in progress and economic development, meaning, for example, that potential doubts on progress through technology that arose in regard to the atomic bomb were obliterated.

The initial draft announcing the establishment of an atomic bomb museum declared the purpose of this institution as follows: “Scientific progress will annihilate mankind in the next war and will destroy civilization. […] We [the people of Hiroshima] have the responsibility to take the misery and tragedy of this fateful day as a lesson and warn mankind worldwide” (Hiroshimashi, 1982: 108). This was a clear disavowal of modernity’s most fundamental credo, that is, the belief in civilatory progress through technological innovation. However, this is one of the few cases in which such far-reaching concern was articulated. Instead, for reasons unknown, this draft was discarded and the reframing of the atomic bomb as a warning for peace introduced a more powerful narrative that reasserted the belief in progress, technology, and modernity’s eschatology. This might explain why, as tentative evidence suggests, it was not only city officials who subscribed to this narrative as well as to compatibility of tourism and atomic bomb memory. In a letter to the editor of the Chūgoku Shinbun from November 1958, a Hiroshima resident argues that tourists do not simply “go to the hot springs, drink sake, and enjoy the scenery.” There is a different kind of tourism which is of great interest to people. Tourists come to Hiroshima to think about “the horror of the atomic bomb” and the “fate of mankind” (Chūgoku Shinbun, 6 November 1958). There were doubts as to whether tourism served the peace movement and contestations of particular ways in which the touristic need was accommodated (Schäfer, 2008) but no substantial opposition against atomic bomb tourism. This was partially due to the fact that those who suffered from this particular kind of atomic bomb memory were already marginalized in postwar Japan. For example, many poor families had built their homes along the river on the grounds of the Peace Park. In order to present a pretty Hiroshima, which left no doubt that hardship was a thing of the past, the city forcefully relocated all residents of this area to the newly built social housings in the periphery of the town (e.g. Chūgoku Shinbun, 24 June 1952 and 3 April 1958). In the light of global attention and a steadily increasing number of tourists, they lost to a sanitized atomic bomb tourism free of unwelcomed reminders of the past and the present.

Conclusion

This article has presented historical evidence that tourism development played an important role in formation of Hiroshima commemoration right from the start. These findings challenge area studies’ focus on the nation which regards public atomic bomb memory primarily in the context of Japan’s search for a postwar identity and memory politics. Of course, the nationalization of the atomic bomb facilitated the expansion of this commemorative culture, but local actors have been key to the foundation of this memoryscape. These actors turned to tourism as a solution for economic as well as cultural challenges of postwar society.

This article further analyzed atomic bomb tourism as “staged authenticity” to show that commemoration and tourism do not present a dichotomy but function as co-existing, co-dependent discourses or social spheres. In order to function, tourism and commemoration (as grief and as peace advocacy) have to deny their touristic nature or their implication in consumer culture.

Despite the uneasiness about Hiroshima as tourism, tourism scholars have paid increasing attention to the general phenomenon that has been labeled “dark tourism” (Lennon and Foley, 2000), “thanatourism” (Seaton, 1999), or “black spots” (Rojek, 1993). Definitions vary, but mostly the terms refer to tourism sites that are linked to usually violent large-scale death such as war, genocide, and torture. While some scholars maintain that death sites have always been part of the touristic repertoire (Rojek, 1993; Seaton, 1999), others attribute their development to the expansion of the service sector in late-capitalist deindustrializing societies as did Lisa Yoneyama (1999) with regard to Hiroshima. However, the role of tourism for the formation of Hiroshima memory proves that “dark tourism” cannot be limited to “a growing phenomenon in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 3). ⁴ The three main features that according John Lennon and Malcolm Foley (2000) define dark tourism can also be traced in early atomic bomb tourism: embeddedness in modern global communication technology, responding to anxieties toward modernity, and combining an educative agenda with commoditization (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 11).

In many ways, Hiroshima figures as an early example of dark tourism which challenges current temporal as well as geographical assumptions about the origins of dark tourism. In the words of a contemporary newspaper commentary, “If Mount Fuji and Geisha Girls had been the stars of Japanese tourism in the past century, times have changed and in the nuclear age atomic bomb Hiroshima rather than Mount Fuji will attract touristic interest” (Chūgoku Shinbun, 1 August 1948).

In fact, it remains to be seen whether “dark tourism” will hold as an analytical category. As, for example, Tony Bennett showed with regard to nineteenth-century exhibition, tourism always combined elements of leisure and self-improvement partially in response to the anxieties that arose in the rapid change of modern life which was perceived as a succession of crises (Bennett, 1995). It is true that the expansion of financial capitalism and the service sector in the context of late-capitalist deindustrialization led to a growth of dark tourism, just as tourism itself expanded. Yet, much of what Lennon and Foley describe, such as anxiety toward modernity and the union of an educative agenda and commodification, have been part and parcel of the modern experience and thereby of tourism from its start.

Rather than defining “dark tourism” through its relation to modernity or the interplay between education and consumerism, I would suggest regarding it as a form of tourism which is particularly sensitive about its claim to authenticity. Places like Auschwitz, the Killing Fields, or Hiroshima cannot acknowledge its staged-ness without being threatened in its very existence. Contrary to this, one might travel to Paris and purchase a miniature of the Eiffel Tower ironically acknowledging one’s self-awareness of the inauthenticity of touristic experience (regaining parts of this authenticity in return). However, this kind of transgressions or subversion is not an option at a Hiroshima souvenir booth. This is what makes dark tourism sites at the same time fundamentally like and unlike other touristic places.