High Fidelity: Pedagogy and Postatomic Japanese Chronicle

Hibakusha Pedagogy

Lisa Yoneyama (1999) is an anthropologist, critical theorist, and interpreter of gender in postwar Japan who has noted that just as “Auschwitz” is often understood to signify not only the physical location of Auschwitz but all concentration camps and a wide range of Nazi violence, “Hiroshima” has become part of a “nuclear universalism” that is “apparently all-absorbing as it conflates countless particulars into a single totality in the name of world peace” (p. 15). Thus, the “Hiroshima” in “No More Hiroshimas!” (a common activist call for the abolition of nuclear arms and use of nuclear weapons) is metonymic ⁴ in varying connections to the actual site or context of the city of Hiroshima (Hiroshima-shi) in Hiroshima prefecture (Hiroshima-ken) in the Chūgoku region of the Japanese Island of Honshū (and so on) that was flattened by the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945. ⁵

As it is usually written in Japanese, Yoneyama and many other scholars note, the word hibakusha uses two different characters for baku depending on the context—one means “bomb” and one means “exposure” or “radiation”—so in the context of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hibakusha (simultaneously singular and plural) is actually a catch-all term for people affected by the short- or long-term effects of the bombings. ⁶ Simply being a hibakusha does not necessarily mean that one gives testimony. ⁷ Beyond “surviving,” hibakusha also could assume the identity of “witnesses” (shōgensha) or “storytellers” (kataribe), not only by telling memories to public audiences but by accompanying such self-definition with another pedagogical practice, “an attempt to critically intervene in given cultural and social contexts” (Yoneyama, 1999, pp. 35, 86).

Hibakusha pedagogy, I therefore suggest, combines the focus on critical intervention with the goal of transmission. Yoneyama describes one storytelling organization, Hiroshima o Kataru Kai (Hiroshima Narrating/Relating Society), which focused in name and mission not simply on being a survivors’ association but on the act of testifying itself, of joining people together to teach and relate. Kataru Kai focused on creative transmission across generations and on the inheritance of hibakusha experience: As a group, they explicitly invested in “‘the succession of storytelling’ (katari tsugu koto)” (p. 110) that inspired my focus on testimony as teaching—connecting to the more literal sense of pedagogy that focuses on leading children.

Hibakusha framed as teachers here teach for transformation, as I noted earlier—“transmission for transformation”—but the lesson itself is indirect and its access is entirely contingent upon someone finding it. For a teaching space so concerned with possibilities of praxis, the lessons are neither coercive nor overdetermined. Daisuke Yuasa (2007) argues that hibakusha typically fit their testimonies into a preconstructed narrative and it is true that the hibakusha testimony that is published, translated, sought, and reproduced predominantly carries an anti-war, anti-nuke, pro-peace message. In that sense, we might consider students’ possible conclusions and actions quite circumscribed. However, I describe below that even within overarching anti-war or pro-peace thematics, there is far more variation and uncertainty, as well as incisive critique.

Historian Seiitsu Tachibana (1996) notes that hibakusha “began to resist war and the A-bomb . . . linking ‘the dead’ (the past) with ‘themselves’ (the present) and their ‘successors’ (the future)” (p. 180). In the testimonial account “What Does it Mean to Live in Hiroshima?” hibakusha Akihiro TAKAHASHI notes, “I have never forgotten for a moment the horror of that day. No matter how painful the memory, I have told myself, I must never forget” (Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation [HPCF], 2003, p. 89). He then moves from his personally felt injunction to his teaching mission: He notes that the work of memory is ongoing and must be continually revisited: “Thinking of [my dead friends],” he declares, “fills me with a recognition of the precariousness of life. Hiroshima, I believe, is the place where we should . . . ceaselessly ask what it is to be alive, and learn to live life accordingly.” Recognizing that Hiroshima itself is a continually created memorial and pedagogical space for questioning and action, he declares that Hiroshima “is not merely an historical fact; it is a continuous warning and lesson for the future” (HPCF, 2003, p. 95). This closing is especially interesting because in lieu of a conclusion evoking “progress,” a sense of overcoming suffering, or a brighter future, Takahashi instead foregrounds an uncertainty that binds the student to the lesson: The lesson is a warning, and the future depends on her heeding it. The student ignores it at her peril.

As a last illustration of this kind of uncertain, critical pedagogy, consider the final volume of the famous postbomb manga serial Barefoot Gen, titled Never Give Up. Years after the bombings, our young protagonist Gen refuses to sing the Kimigayo, the national anthem praising the emperor. Instead, he declares the emperor—still alive in the manga and still alive when it was authored and read—a war criminal, citing in word and image not only his own family’s deaths in the war but wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese:

They chopped off people’s heads like it was a game. They used them for bayonet practice. They cut open pregnant mothers’ bellies and tore out their babies. They rammed saké bottles into women, crushing their pelvises and killing them . . . Our fellow Asians were subjected to unspeakable atrocities. I’ll never forgive the emperor for allowing tens of millions of people to be killed like that in his name. (Nakazawa, 2004, p. 20)

Gen’s (and hibakusha author Keiji NAKAZAWA’s) stories offer critical interventions into postwar Japanese narratives about the emperor, surrender, victimhood, relationships with other East Asian neighbors, and hibakusha themselves. Against narrative that excuses or lauds wartime Japan, or even narrative that uses “peace” as a mode of national neutrality, ⁸ Gen relates 10 volumes of unspeakable horror, of those who have been obscured and overtrodden, of Japanese and American wrongdoing. Gen is not about to let the government overlook the hibakusha or, for that matter, subsume their experiences into a national narrative that paints the hibakusha as postwar angelic innocents who exist only to reinforce Japan’s wartime victimhood. As literary critic Takayuki KAWAGUCHI suggests, the “constant criticism of the imperial system” in the series manifests “the attempt to forcefully deconstruct the dominant interpretative codes” guiding representation of the atomic experience in postwar Japan. This attempt rests “on the tenacity to somehow re-recollect the countless personal experiences which cannot be acknowledged by the grand narrative” (Kawaguchi, 2010, p. 242). Nakazawa vividly portrays a multiplicity of hibakusha experiences and identities, each of which is complicated, messy, and eludes simple classifications.

Students of Nakazawa are provided the “argument” but have to work their own way to personal conclusions: When students read Gen and his neighbors’ painful experiences as consequences not only of U.S. but of Japanese wartime and postwar decisions, they can ask, “Wait, who is the perpetrator here?” When they see, in the context of vast postwar scarcity and hibakusha displacement, a hibakusha addict perpetrate violence against a hibakusha thief, they can ask, “Wait, who is the victim here?” Gen stages messy, complicated contradictions that are not easily or comfortably read and prompts students to think for themselves. These experiences are not easily subsumed into tidy solutions.

When the student enters into relation with Nakazawa via Gen, for example, she is forced to ask—of herself, of her government—questions of ethics and justice. One can almost hear Gen ask, “and what are you gonna do about it?” I should be clear that the volume and indeed the full series teach several paths that are “bad” ones—the ones that led to the horrifying situations depicted throughout Gen—but they offer few solutions. In short, the power in hibakusha pedagogy is the way that it places the learner in this critical position. To understand further how it is constructed as a lesson that places the learner in this position, I will build on this discussion of Gen to frame the shareable and retrievable lesson as one of “chronicle.”

The Lesson: Chronicle

Hibakusha teaching like Takahashi and Nakazawa’s is memorial storytelling or history-telling. Walter Benjamin’s notion of “chronicle” ⁹ offers new resources for understanding some of the pedagogical moves made in hibakusha testimonial literature that have not yet been exhausted by notable scholars of that literature like John Whittier Treat, John Dower, and Richard H. Minear. ¹⁰ Connecting chronicle to “transmission for transformation,” this teaching mode is structured around uncertainty, cultural disruption, and critical intervention. It is what scholars of teaching and learning call inquiry-guided pedagogy. Chronicles foreground their own contingency, a need for interpretation, and ongoing dialogue. They have a germinative power, prompting students’ repeated return and a vigilance against the wrongs of history. They introduce uncertainty and disruption is through an intentionally disjointed narrative style that is well suited for traditional Japanese aesthetic practices that privilege the imperfect and nonlinear. Finally, chronicles utilize techniques of juxtaposition and evocation to convey the unrepresentable.

In his theses “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin (1972/2004a) famously critiques what he calls historicism or positivist history because it gives the appearance of there being only one truth to history, only one way of “reporting” what happened. These would be the “dominant interpretive codes” noted by Kawaguchi. Chronicle is Benjamin’s answer to the uncritical consumption of such narratives and then a way of recognizing plural truths and competing commitments—that is, chronicling, rather than “reporting,” the atomic aftermath. ¹¹ In learning from chronicle, the student essentially asks, “What is the storyteller relating, and how do I maintain the relationship long enough or carefully enough to properly attend to the tale?” How do narratives of postwar Japan, precisely by not fitting together well, by not positing clear conclusions, by bringing together different perspectives, by offering different versions of events, by painting incomplete or fractured visions, call for my closer and ongoing attention?

I noted earlier that hibakusha lessons display what Edith Wyschogrod (1998, p. 10) calls a “passion for rectitude” that seeks to capture the truth of the other’s experience, not the truths dictated by dominant narratives while recognizing that all such subtle truths are elusive and mutable. Laura Levitt (2007, p. 4) in turn calls this passion for subtle truths “fidelity,” by which she does not mean “holding on” to the “correct” presentation of events but rather “being confronted” by the events “again and again” and bearing with them. The passion for rectitude or fidelity in this testimony requires ongoing and renegotiated attention to individual cases of history, to particular others, to the stories behind the facts. Andrew Benjamin (1997), too, demands a memory that is “linked to the impossibility of mastering what took place. Not a memory admitting of failure, but a memory that, in responding to the threat of forgetting, comes to be repositioned in terms of vigilance” (p. 23). This is how chronicle offers a “continuous warning and lesson for the future” to use Takahashi’s words.

John Whittier Treat (1995), in an exhaustive study of this literature, discusses the work of Kyōko HAYASHI, a Nagasaki hibakusha author. She is “noted and specifically faulted for novels that fail to ‘console’ precisely because of their inscrutable resort to ‘paradox.’” Treat offers an example in which Hayashi “tersely described the bombing” as a “‘contradiction perpetrated by human beings upon human beings’” (Treat, 1995, p. 38). According to Treat, Hayashi does not resolve the paradoxes or contradictions for her reader; she invites the reader into a relationship with that contradiction, into a dialogue of frustration and uncertainty that, she believes, will better help the reader contend with the unfathomable. The pedagogical practice is meant to draw people to the problems repeatedly, allowing them to see many facets of the problems they lay bare; the narratives teach by illustrating their own holes, not trying to fill them. These components are what lead me to argue that the pedagogical power of chronicle is its “germinative” power: It can be told and retold, read and reread, worked and reworked, and each new student can be confronted with new truths and revelations. It is retold or reprinted in different languages, for different audiences, and to different generations for the sake of the future.

In addition to these elements of nonlinear, nontotalizing pedagogy that inspires repeated return to the lesson and vigilance against future violence, chronicle draws heavily on classic Benjaminian montage-as-method. An excellent example of this spatial juxtaposition that conveys more than the sum of its parts comes from the volume Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors (The Japanese Broadcasting Corporation [Nippon Hoso Kyokai: NHK], 1977). In the 1970s, the Japanese national television broadcasting company Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) initiated a project in which people were invited to submit their atomic experiences through drawings and paintings. A sample of these works was gathered and published as Unforgettable Fire, forming a chronicle or lesson in itself and also a mini-archive of survivor art to which a wider public later gained access (including via translation into English).

The first thing a student might notice on engaging the volume is the fact that the people compiling the volume are less comfortable with uncertainty than the witness artists. NHK bureau chief Soji Matsumoto attempts to circumscribe the volume’s contents, to control or resolve a composite narrative into something more “understandable,” into something with a singular message. In the preface to the volume, he writes, “Thirty years have passed since the A-Bomb was dropped. The memory of how things were in Hiroshima at that time is being forgotten.” Taking the reader’s concern at this proclamation as a given, he continues,

It is therefore necessary to appeal to the people of Japan and of the world that there be “No More Hiroshima” . . . The pictures are a vivid documentary of the miserable scenes of that day, although thirty years have passed. The memories, etched in the minds of the survivors, are unforgettable! (p. 5)

Is the power of the volume in its “documentary” evidence? We might accept at the outset, instead, that already there are gaps in the “information”: The “report” exclusively issues from drawn and painted pictures and stories sometimes told alongside them. Matsumoto and NHK are not offering photos or newsreel footage, and drawn documents might be suspect as “reports.” Survivors thirty years removed from an event might not be seen as reliable “reporters.” All told, the book simply would not do for an authoritative history, so Matsumoto offers an apologetic.

To his credit, Matsumoto asserts, on the contrary, that photographs cannot express what “these pictures” portray. The pictures portray what his company’s stock-in-trade “information” reporting cannot: There is a limit to what “information” provides, and the drawn offerings in Unforgettable Fire exceed that limit. The book, we are told, offers a compilation of “memories,” images etched in the minds of survivors and reproduced for this volume while the event to which they refer notoriously defies direct representation. ¹² While one image might tell the reader very little, the compilation, the assemblage or juxtaposition of a variety of images in this chronicle bring the reader to the multifaceted problem of the bombing over and over, from different perspectives, to ask questions about what the pictures convey, to try out a variety of interpretations, to enter into dialogue with the artist-storytellers. And each image offers its fidelity to the experience, communicated obliquely.

For example, a work by Kazuo KATSUMURO with the heading “In Search of a Place to Cremate Her Dead Child” shows a picture of a mother, breasts bared, hair singed, tattered monpe trousers hanging off her legs. She carries a soldier’s helmet in her left hand, and a dead, burned child hangs strapped to her back. The text reads,

The burned face of the child on her back was infested with maggots. I guess she was thinking of putting her child’s bones in a battle helmet she picked up. I feared she would have to go far to find burnable material to cremate her child. (The Japanese Broadcasting Corporation [Nippon Hoso Kyokai: NHK], 1977, p. 70)

The “communicative performance,” to use Yoneyama’s (1999, p. 91) words, in the joined image and words takes higher priority than “the authenticity of the original meanings” or the documentary information-reporting.

Instead of asking, say, whether the drawing is modeled on a specific historical sighting of such a woman and child, perhaps a visceral response comes first—the audience may be arrested, intrigued, outraged, aghast. The student might first simply be shocked by the image of the woman, the dead child, the maggots; they might be curious about the battle helmet (American? Japanese?) and why the woman might have to go far for burnable material. Why is cremating the child the urgent concern? While students with more cultural knowledge or background information can bring certain understandings to bear (the helmet matches specific soldiers’ uniforms, the cremation is essential to Buddhist practices for the dead), the “information” recipients might know about the atomic aftermath does little to help them contend with what the image conveys. The image, by being present, holds its audience at a distance from this “other” woman: Most non-hibakusha receivers of this art probably cannot imagine what this woman was going through, never mind the experience of the artist reporting her sighting, and almost all audiences certainly can never know. But the point is that the image, many of the volume’s images, arrest and “hold” the audience. Sparked (perhaps trapped) by that disruption, they are drawn closer to the text, to the woman, the dead child, the artist/author, even as they are discomfited. The placement of the image in a volume of many such images then prompts students to start making connections across the montage, puzzling through their responses.

Again, written and oral testimonies foreground the difficulty of communicating the experience of the bombing while demonstrating implicitly or explicitly the desire that testimony—that teaching—will contribute to future engagement with catastrophic events, their causes, and prevention. Hibakusha Fumie ENSEKI writes, in a volume of collected testimony, “What am I to say of these wretched figures? My pen is sadly inadequate to the task of describing them.” Yet hers is one of the longest memoirs in the volume (HPCF, 2003, p. 31). The student recognizes that Enseki’s “pen” is not up to the task of documentary reporting, but it is up to the task of chronicling a lesson.

In another volume of recorded interviews with rural Hiroshima prefecture women widowed by the bomb, Chiyoko SUGITA reflects that she does not know how to tell her story to the groups who come and want to talk for a few minutes. So, she says, she decided not to tell them anything:

I can never forget the agony I went through when my husband was killed by the atom bomb; so all I say to them, over and over again, is: “Make sure none of you ever gets caught up in any wars.” (Kanda, 1989, p. 172)

Such a pedagogical proclamation—an expressed hope intended to lead and transform its audience—offers fidelity to the experience while acknowledging the gap between listeners’ and her own experiences. She wishes to teach because her audience cannot already know, but she is unsure the seeds of her teaching will take hold in her students.

So Sugita quickly shifts to discuss a different part of her life history, adding to her narrative montage, attempting to communicate obliquely the lesson she hopes will hold her students. She tells a story of taking her children around, after the bombing, to collect nightsoil from outhouses to spread on their farm fields. Her sons could not stand scooping the human waste, so she did it by herself while they loaded the tubs (Kanda, 1989, pp. 172–174). She hopes to “lead the children,” but the youth, she fears, are not up to the task of “shoveling the shit” of atomic atrocity, just as Benjamin (1976/2004) noted that the “excavation” involved in chronicle was a difficult and unpalatable task. Finally, Sugita abruptly shifts gears and adds another piece to her memorial montage: “Since my husband died, I haven’t been sick once. My husband must have been watching over me” (Kanda, 1989, pp. 172–174). By allowing the narrative to highlight, in a temporally diachronic fashion, the elements that are important to her at that moment—each thematically highlighting her values and commitments, countering hardship and discrimination—Sugita stresses the performance of storytelling rather than focusing on fact-telling or presenting a linear narrative. In her “back door” pedagogy, the gaps, more than her own declaration of being lost for words, draw the audience in and indicate that there is always more to be said, and done, in attending to the dead and creating a more just future.

There is another way that these authors and artists tried to communicate the incommunicable, to overcome the limits of representation in their chronicle—by adapting more familiar Buddhist tropes for the nonlinear, montage-based chronicle. Whereas montage helped “present” what could not be presented by a single image, placing more and more pieces together until they collectively conveyed across the gaps in information important truths about the experience, this other adaptive technique used an existing artistic practice in a different context with new subject matter. Much of the meaning-making from this technique, I argue, happens between the recognition or associations that accompany a felt familiarity with the source technique or trope and its application to the utterly unfamiliar experience of the bombing. Chronicle essentially suspends the student in that “between,” subverting the familiar by applying it to something inconceivable. Richard H. Minear (1990), a translator of many hibakusha chronicles, explains that “textually and visually, the closest existing approximation” to the August events “was to be found in medieval writings and pictorial scrolls depicting the horrors of the Buddhist hell.” Indeed, he notes, “the only real Japanese precedents for the naked, mutilated figures” in “depictions of atomic bomb victims were the tormented sinners” in these scrolls (p. 132).

The similarities between the depictions of survivors in the immediate atomic aftermath and Hell Scroll images of ghosts and the damned in the Buddhist hot hells are difficult to overlook. The 1983 animated film version of Barefoot Gen (Masaki, 1983/2006) also often uses a greenish-reddish palette evoking hell imagery as well. Literary hibakusha author Tamiki HARA, in his famous autobiographical novel Summer Flowers (part of a triptych chronicle designed to be read out of order, forming a montage of scenes) made the connection explicit: “I think we must have been enveloped in the dreadfully gloomy faint green light of the medieval paintings of Buddhist hell” (Minear, 1990, p. 51). Drawing on established Buddhist imagery allows authors and artists simultaneously to present and show the limitations of presenting the bombing experiences, denying the adequacy of any visual representation while offering connections that the reader can explore.

Perhaps the most famous example from post-Bomb visual culture studies of the adaptation of hell imagery to convey post-atomic experiences is in the Hiroshima Murals or Panels project undertaken by the wife-and-husband painting team of Toshi and Iri Maruki. The Marukis went to Hiroshima from Tokyo three days after the bombing to look for family and help with relief efforts. ¹³ When the couple started to produce their famous series of murals based on this experience, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, their art stood out during a near-total-lack, at the time, of human images of the bombing (Maclear, 1999, p. 164). They grappled with existing visual tropes, particularly Buddhist ones—further combining Iri’s training in a form of inkwash painting often performed in Buddhist settings with Toshi’s training in Western painting traditions, often in literal layering over one another’s work—to explore the adequacy and inadequacy of visual representation. ¹⁴

Visual culture theorist and artist Kyo Maclear (1999) notes that the Maruki

murals speak to the ambiguity of the visible. They strive to prevent what has disappeared from falling into the negation of the unseen and, thus, the unthought of. They retain, at the same time, an awareness of what the eye cannot and will never see. (p. 162)

Thus, it becomes ever more important to foreground the inadequacies of representation within chronicle’s practices of representation, as in the examples above, to show the fissures and breaks that undermine understanding, to make students know these gaps are there. By promoting an engagement with the unknown and unknowable, such lessons offer disjointed chronicles as a pedagogical practice of an ongoing vigilance, questioning, and concern.

The Activity: Appeal, Ritual Relation, and Dialogue With the Dead

Now we turn to the “activity” of the lesson. What is the place of the student or the student–teacher relationship? As we have seen, chronicle positions the audience, the student, between unknown worlds by conjuring two key groups of “others.” First, hibakusha lessons are concerned with the dead—to whom both the witness and the audience offer promises of “never forget” and “never again,” hoping to soothe the souls in those hells with their actions—and second with unknown, future generations to whom the teachers direct their exhortations. As we have seen in the examples throughout this essay, living hibakusha always are intertwined with the hibakusha who did not survive, and by attending to chronicle from a hibakusha witness, a student is connected simultaneously to the living hibakusha witness-teacher (likely dead by the time the student retrieves the archived chronicle) and the dead others that create the condition of the testimony in the first place.

And the student, while very often part of a newer generation in a different time and place, is performatively placed into the tenuous “present” of the lesson as its audience. They are left holding together the unrecoverable past and unforeseeable future. Students themselves, then, are the “holders” of something very slippery: The dead threaten to slip away, and the future generations may never come with ears to hear, but the chronicle is issuing its appeal directly to them. ¹⁵ Already challenged by the difficulty in the disjointed storytelling, montage, and indirect communication of chronicle, now the student is expected to “participate” in the lesson by taking on a duty to the dead and trying to bring about a more just, but ultimately unforeseeable, future.

Hibakusha poet Sankichi Tōge helps illustrate these points via the mode of “appeal.” In the poem “August 6” (Minear, 1990, p. 307), named for the date of the bombing of Hiroshima, he writes,

In that hush

the white eyes of dead women and children

sent us

a soul-rending appeal:

who can forget it?

Couched in a question without an answer—who can forget it?—is the injunction to students not to forget, the injunction to participate, to act.

While Tōge was known for a certain prewar apoliticism, in the postwar era, he grew increasingly committed to teaching, “using poetry to mobilize opposition to injustice.” ¹⁶ These poems are excellent examples of chronicle for that very reason. Tōge’s poem “Appeal,” written after the 1950 Stockholm Appeal against atomic weapons, in the midst of grave concerns about the use of nuclear weapons by the United States in the Korean conflict, condemns the political inactivity of people who comfortably claim to “hate war” without doing anything about it. He enjoins the hibakusha to lead them to action, overlapping and blurring the addressees, the “others” of his testimony:

It is not too late, even now . . .

to block, with your back that bears the brand of death,

the tears of all those gentle people

who hate war but simply stand around;

to take those hands that now hang limp

and grasp them firmly

between your own palms, raw and red:

no,

it is not too late, even now. (Minear, 1990, p. 357)

“Appeal” is written as an exhortation (its intended audience remaining vague and therefore open); it has the pull of an injunction, the weight of a lament that is simultaneously a cry for action. It is pedagogical, in the sense of hibakusha chronicle: It clearly intends to lead us, perhaps through guilt (do we, too, hate war but do nothing to oppose it?) or inspiration (it is not too late!), to a response and further to a praxis.

Tōge frames his “appeal” by establishing a relationship between the dead hibakusha and living apolitical others, with Tōge speaking simultaneously to the dead, the apolitical living, and unknown future audiences (in the “now,” the Benjaminian jetztzeit, of the “not too late, even now”). The “appeal” leaves the student in a position of duty to the dead.

The “duty” of student participation is something I frame as a ritual relationship. The NHK editors write in Unforgettable Fire’s Afterword, “We wondered why so many pictures were drawn in spite of their crude techniques. Then we realized that many explanations on the pictures ended with the words ‘gashoo’ or ‘gashoonembutsu,’” implying an offering of prayer for the dead. They quote the words of a contributor:

I am not good at painting. I am very sorry that I couldn’t make a picture scroll which would really tell you of the experience that I had at that time. However, today I drew a picture and wrote an explanation while in front of a Buddhist altar. (The Japanese Broadcasting Corporation [Nippon Hoso Kyokai: NHK], 1977, p. 108)

Not only are Buddhist tropes adapted for these chronicles, then: Buddhist ritual response is involved as well. The teacher is performing ritual redress simply by offering testimony, but the audience then becomes a participant in that ritual. The Afterword continues,

The pictures convey what the survivors would like,[sic] known that in drawing the picture it led them to make amends individually for the people who died that day and to relieve the anguish of their souls. This was related to the positive wish that others should understand the truth of that day. (p. 108)

This notion of “making amends” is an ethos that intentionally joins “past” and “future,” dead and living, teacher and student.

To connect “making amends” to Miyamoto’s “dialogue with the dead,” I draw on the work of Akira Nishimura (2019), who focuses on commemoration “within the context of a Japanese-centered history of religion.” He begins with existing memorial scholarship on the twin notions of irei, “to console the spirit of the dead,” and tsuitō, or “to mourn retrospectively” (p. 141), both of which have traditional connections to violent deaths. He notes that one consoles both by comforting and by appeasing the dead. “Appeasing” can involve revenge, but it also can involve “devoting one’s life to the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements in order to abolish nuclear weapons.” In any case, he argues, ritual attention to the dead provides inspiration (furui) for the living. For example, “the living are urged to be involved in programs to address” issues that caused the death—programs that offer education and paths to action. Nishimura’s “inspiration” is a “way of continuing an association or connection with the dead through which the living take up the unresolved issues of the dead” and “attempt to face the dead with sympathy and compassion” (pp. 145–147). This appeasement and inspiration, this ritual response, helps form the expectation that students can respond to the appeal they encounter via the chronicle. Their first avenue of response to the appeal, before other actions, is “dialogue with the dead.”

Yuki Miyamoto’s (2012) approach helps address two concerns with Nishimura’s investigation. First, Nishimura notes the danger that inspiration can take nationalist forms, but Miyamoto discusses how dialogue establishes an ongoing ethical relationship with the dead, respecting them as dead and as fully “other” while promoting attention to what their absence demands of the living. Essentially, the student’s participation in the lesson is their communing with the dead. So Miyamoto points out that “if communion with the dead is to be genuinely dialogical, and not merely an enforced monologue in the interest of advancing an ideology, nationalist or otherwise, we must admit that it is open and ongoing, ever changing.” She notes that we may never achieve a “perfect” dialogue in which interests of commemorated and commemorators are equally answered (Miyamoto, 2012, p. 71), but the goal is to try for such high fidelity.

Second, Nishimura’s investigation is connected to concrete ritual practices of Japanese religions—Buddhist, Shinto, and folk practices with specific steps and assumptions and ritual practitioners. If part of my goal is to frame “transmission as transformation” as something accessible to a more general, amorphous future body of students, Miyamoto helps move the teaching context into more open terrain. The “dialogue” has to overcome limits of language, culture, and understanding in a pedagogical context. But it is, I suggest, the path for students to hear the appeal that transcends language, dwell carefully with the lesson, ask questions of its messages, and puzzle out responses.

As an example of the open-ended complexity of this dialogue, consider another example from Tōge. In his poem “When Will That Day Come?” Tōge’s fragmented hope for the future and feelings of futility about the promise to the dead are narrated to a corpse. In literal dialogue with this dead girl—bent over at an unnatural angle, the seat of her pants burned out, with her bottom exposed so that passersby could see the small piece of dried excrement still attached there—he writes,

And could you have thought

that the street leading to this square in our beloved Hiroshima would be widened out,

renamed MacArthur boulevard? . . .

There is no one

to identify and take charge of your murdered body.

There is no one to cover the shame of your burned pants.

And of course no one to wipe away the mark of your agony clinging there. (Minear, 1990, pp. 362–363)

His chronicle collapses the time of the bombing with his present, marking the unknowable dead girl as the witness to the injustice of naming a street in Hiroshima after an American military commander, a mute but responsive participant in the dialogue. Tōge does not simply describe the shameful state of the girl’s corpse; he models an (unresolvable) dialogue with her, responding, asking her questions, recognizing her humanity alongside her dehumanization. Tōge in turn acts as a kind of spirit medium, guiding the relationship between the student-audience and the dead by involving the reader as addressee of an appeal. Like many who work with spirit mediums to determine the feelings and needs of the dead, the student receives the burden of “identifying” (something impossible for them) and “taking charge of” (is this more possible?) the girl’s murdered body through the feelings of outrage and shame Tōge evokes. All audiences positioned this way are positioned as culpable: How can they offer response and redress?

Testimony, according to Kyo Maclear, establishes relationship based on shared vulnerability:

The survivors of atrocity afflict the witness with the openness of their claims, their pain, their vulnerability. They tell us that trauma is not simply absorbed into the flow of history; it recurs, it troubles the very notion of chronology. (Maclear, 1999, p. 26)

By “paying attention in class,” by attending closely to the address of the dead, by accepting the ethical demands made by this literature, and by responding with fidelity to the storytellers’ appeal, the student participates in expiation for the dead. She helps make amends by taking on the story.

Like Tōge, those who speak for and to the dead often foreground their distance from the dead. This relational distance of chronicle demonstrates that neither the hibakusha nor the dead can communicate their experiences perfectly or directly; neither has control over their narratives’ receptions and understandings. Hibakusha chronicles are, again, teaching texts, prioritizing curiosity and concern over mastery. And the pedagogical project is an ethical project: The ethical onus is on the reader, across generations, to sustain ongoing relation to the events and what they teach, to develop a praxis that honors the dead. There is, of course, no guarantee that the appeal will be heard or that it will resonate with a reader to the point of ethical action, but understanding “transmission for transformation” as a didactic enterprise opens testimonies to students across the world, increasing the power of possibility.

Conclusion

Kenzaburō Ōe, one of Japan’s most lauded authors and a commentator on postwar literary politics, notes that hibakusha chronicle—stories, art, and poems like Tōge’s—are

not merely [expressions,] composed by looking back at the past, of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. They also are highly significant vehicles for thinking about the contemporary world over which hangs the awesome threat [of further nuclear catastrophe] . . . [and are] relevant to the present and to our movement toward all tomorrows. (Ōe, 1985, p. 15)

In short, these chronicles teach. These narratives are composed with the desire to be read and heard, not only because of care for the dead but specifically because that care also tries to right the wrongs done to the dead by preventing their reoccurrence—by trying to teach future generations not to do what was done to those who experienced catastrophic suffering.

In the first volume of Barefoot Gen, Gen’s mother Kimie goes into labor immediately after the bombing and Gen delivers his baby sister in the ruins of Hiroshima. Holding her daughter for the first time, Kimie says, “Remember this, my little one. This is war. This is what took your father, sister, and brother from us. When you grow up, you must never, ever let this happen again.” The final cell of this book shows the baby held up against a backdrop of flames, crying (Nakazawa, 2004, pp. 278, 282, 284). The “this” is metonymic (like “No More Hiroshimas!”), standing in for an unimaginable scene of total destruction in Hiroshima, another soon to come in Nagasaki, and a wealth of possible nuclear futures. Kimie’s teaching moment, her appeal, and her exhortation—to the figure of her child and, we know, the children to come—are clear.

We students are not meant to “master” the narrative or the understanding of postatomic Japan; we are meant to question, to be curious, to be outraged, and, hopefully, to act in relationship to the dead. This relationship—across generations—maintains ethical and political concern about the social conditions that produced losses as well as desire to prevent suffering in the future. Chronicle in postwar Japan therefore provides a crucial historical-pedagogical intervention in engaging wartime losses. Resisting teleological narratives of “progress,” wartime justifications, and ideals of documentary information-reporting, chronicle teaches by disruption and defiance, by means of a disjointed history-telling that prompts attention to what does not “fit” in dominant histories, presenting counter-narratives that keep the work of learning ongoing and vigilant. Hibakusha chronicles teach to transform:

Because civilization is headed either toward extinction or toward salvation from that fate, we inescapably face an “unknowable future.” The fundamental condition of life, then, is that we are assailed by overwhelming fear yet, at the same time, beckoned by the necessity to rebuild hope, however difficult, in defiance of that fear. ¹⁷