¹ Arthur Binard and Okakura Tadashi, Sagashite imasu [I am Searching], Tokyo, Dōshinsha, 2012. This book won two prestigious awards in 2013: the 44th Kodansha Publication Culture Award for Children's Picture Books, and the 60th Sankei Award for Children's Books and Publications. See: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/アーサー・ビナード. Retrieved 16 October 2014.

² For more on the genre of “nuclear art” see Asato Ikeda, “Ikeda Manabu, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and Disaster/Nuclear Art in Japan”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 11, iss. 13, no. 2. Retrieved on 29 March 2014. One internationally-renowned example in picture book form is Maruki Toshi, Hiroshima no Pika [The Flash of Hiroshima], Tokyo, Komine Shoten, 1980. Two translations have also been published: Hiroshima no Pika (trans. unknown), New York, Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1982; and The Hiroshima Story, trans. Judith Elkin, London, Black, 1983. Maruki Toshi (1912-2000) is famous for making the Hiroshima Panels in the 1950s with her husband, Maruki Iri (1901-1995). On Japanese nuclear literature, see: John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

³ Tōkyō Shimbun “Kochira Tokuhō” “Kochira Tokuhō(ed.), Higenpatsu ”Fukushima“ kara ”Zero“ e, Tokyo, Ichiyōsha, 2013, p. 1220. Binard's first Japanese award was the 2001 Nakahara Chūya Award for his collection of poetry, ”Tsuriagete wa“ [Catch and Release]. See Tōkyō Shinbun ”Kochira Tokuhō“ (ed.), Higenpatsu ”Fukushima“ kara ”Zero“ e, Tokyo, Ichiyōsha, 2013, p. 1220; and http://japan_literature.enacademic.com/70/null. Retrieved on 19 October 2014.

⁴ Yasufumi Kado, “U.S. Poet Publishes Photo Book of Personal Belongings of Atomic Bomb Victims”, The Asahi Shimbun, 2 August 2012. Retrieved 20 October 2014. Also see Binardo Āsā. “Atogaki”. Binardo Āsā and Okakura Tadashi, Sagashite imasu, Tokyo, Dōshinsha, 2012, n.p..

⁵ Yasufumi Kado, “U.S. Poet Publishes Photo Book of Personal Belongings of Atomic Bomb Victims”, The Asahi Shimbun, 2 August 2012. Retrieved on 20 October 2014.

⁶ “Taidan: Warera Mina ‘Kazashimokko’ [We are all ‘Downwinders‘]: Āsā Binādo, Nakazawa Shōko”, compiled by Nishiyama Rika, Nihon Jidō Bungaku ^{Japan Children's Literature], vol. 9-10, 2012, p. 35. (All translations are my own.)}

⁷ The two forms of “hibaku” are: 被爆 irradiation from an atomic blast; and 被曝 exposure to radiation through more general, “peaceful” or accidental means. For more on this connection, see: Murakami Haruki, “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 9, iss. 29, no. 7, 18 July 18 2011. Retrieved on 22 March 2014. Here Murakami states: “[In the case of Fukushima] no one dropped a bomb on us … We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives”.

⁸ Asato Ikeda, “On Uranium Art: Artist Ken + Julia Yonetani in Conversation with Asato Ikeda”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 11, iss. 11, no. 1. 18 March 2013. Retrieved on 29 March 2014 from.

⁹ “Taidan: Warera Mina ‘Kazashimokko‘”, p. 35. This kind of amnesia is exemplified in the proliferation of nuclear power plants in Japan, despite the fact that Japan had experienced the trauma of nuclear irradation with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (All plants are decommissioned at time of writing.) Repression and self-censorshop are also evident through complaints like those which caused organisers to cancel Binard's lecture, entitled “Saita Saita, Seshiumu ga Saita” (It's Blossomed, it's Blossomed, the Cesium has Blossomed), to be held in Saitama on 10th March 2012. See Tōkyō Shinbun “Kochira Tokuhō” (ed.), Higenpatsu “Fukushima” kara “Zero” e, Tokyo, Ichiyōsha, 2013, p. 1220-1222; and here. Retrieved 19 October 2014.

¹⁰ Mark Pendleton, “Subway to Street: Spaces of Traumatic Memory, Counter-memory and Recovery in post-Aum Tokyo”, Japanese Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2011, p. 360.

¹¹ Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 11.

¹² Stef Craps and Gert Buelens, “Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels”, Studies in the Novel, vol. 40, nos. 1 and 2, 2008, p. 1; Karen Scherzinger, “Other People's Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics”(review), Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, p. 119.

¹³ Lisette Gebhardt, “Post 3/11 Literature: The Localisation of Pain - Internal Negotiations and Global Consciousness”, in Lisette Gebhardt and Yuki Masami (eds.), Literature and Art after “Fukushima”: Four Approaches. Berlin, EB-Verlag, 2014, pp. 11-35.

¹⁴ Ikeda, “Ikeda Manabu, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and Disaster/Nuclear Art in Japan”.

¹⁵ Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space”, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford, CSLI Publications, 2003, pp. 214-42; p. 215, her emphasis.

¹⁶ Roberta Seelinger Trites, “Growth in Adolescent Literature: Metaphors, Scripts and Cognitive Narratology”, International Research in Children's Literature, vol. 5, no. 1, 2012, p. 65. See also Lisa Zunshine, “Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in A. L. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children (1781)”, Poetics Today, vol. 23, no. 1, 2002, p. 130.

¹⁷ Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think. p. 390. The back jacket reiterates that “a child's entire development consists of learning and navigating … blends”.

¹⁸ Mark Turner, “The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature”, Poetics Today, vol. 23, no. 1, 2002, p. 10. Conceptual blending combines “two schematic frames of knowledge or two scenarios … to create a third mentalpacket of meaning that has new, emergent meaning”. Also see, Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, p. 48.

¹⁹ As developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, this theory of conceptual blending consolidates cognitive studies research and offers a framework for how the human mind creates new meaning by blending different (imagined or actual) scenarios. The authors also explain how such a scenario can be inhabited mentally. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, New York, Basic Books, 2002.

²⁰ Rita Felski, Uses of Literature, Malden, Blackwell, 2008, p. 30.

²¹ Felski also cautions that a moment of cognition or self-apprehension can also trigger emotional reactions that are not necessarily cognitive. Felski, Uses of Literature, p. 29.

²² Felski, Uses of Literature, pp. 29-30.

²³ Felski, Uses of Literature, pp. 29-30.

²⁴ Felski, Uses of Literature, p. 30.

²⁵ This latter point involves Felski's concept of validity in political recognition.

²⁶ Schemas, as explained by John Stephens, are aspects of memory which shape our knowledge of all concepts. They “are knowledge structures, or patterns, which provide the framework for understanding. … Whereas a schema is a static element within our experiential repertoire, a script is a dynamic element, which expresses how a sequence of events or actions is expected to unfold.” Stephens, John. “Schemas and Scripts: CognitiveInstruments and the Representationof Cultural Diversity inChildren's Literature”, in Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford (eds), Contemporary Children's Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 13-14. As we read (words and/or pictures), the represented material matches part of a static schema in the memory and activates the core elements to unfold into a more dynamically evolving script. As Stephens indicates in a footnote, the terms schema and script originally come from cognitive linguistics, but have been taken up in more recent narrative theory which draws on theories of mind. See p. 35.

²⁷ This unique type of granite, often known as Diet Stone, was specially selected as the platform for these objects. Binard and the book's editor had the stone dug up by a stonemason from Kurahashijima, a town outside of Hiroshima. See Binard's “Afterword” to Sagashite imasu, p. 33.

²⁸ Felski, Uses of Literature, p. 39.

²⁹ Sagashite imasu, pp. 2, 18, and 24. The book uses the more colloquial (and childish) “asobo” for “Let's play”, rather than the more grammatically correct “asobō”.

³⁰ Felski, Uses of Literature, p. 30.

³¹ See pages 12 and 16 (Figures 5, Tamotsu's spectacles, and 6, the soldier's keys).

³² My thanks go to one of the anonymous reviewers for this latter point.

³³ Sagashite imasu, p. 3. The Japanese is: “Anata ni totte, ‘ima’ wa nan ji?” “Watashi ni totte, ‘ima’ wa itsudemo asa no hachiji jūgofun.”

³⁴ Sagashite imasu, p. 6.

³⁵ Sagashite imasu, pp. 20-21.

³⁶ Appreciation for this point must go to one of the anonymous reviewers.

³⁷ Stephens, “Schemas and Scripts”, p. 15.

³⁸ Sagashite imasu, p. 8.

³⁹ Sagashite imasu, p. 12.

⁴⁰ Sagashite imasu, p. 16.

⁴¹ Sagashite imasu, p. 16.

⁴² Felski, Uses of Literature, p.47. Felski is discussing subordinated gender or minorities as worthy here, but the owners of the objects in Sagashite imasu who have been long forgotten also form part of the masses who are subsumed through either time or the active - or political - suppression of their memory.

⁴³ Other literature is drawing similar comparisons. The pre-3/11 poetry of Fukushima author Wakamatsu Jōtarō, who has been writing against nuclear energy since the 1970s, is now seen as prescient, especially in his 1994 poem “Disappearances” [Kamigakushi sareta Machi], written in response to Chernobyl, and his 2008 poem “South Winds 2” [Minamikaze Fuku Hi 2], which lists major incidents which were covered up at the Fukushima plant. See: Mark Rainey, “Playing Around With Plutonium”, Nyx: noctournal, 8 August 2012. Retrieved on 18 March 2014. Also see the poetry collection: Wakamatsu Jōtarō, Āsā Binādo and Sadamu Saito, Hito Akashi ^{What Makes Us]. Tokyo, Seiryū Shuppai1, 2012.} Nakazawa Shōko's 1988 young adult novel, Ashita wa Hareta Sora no Shita de: Bokutachi no Cherunobiri ^{Tomorrow Under Fair Skies: Our Chernobyl] has also been re-released since the triple disaster (Tokyo Chōbunsha, 2011). See “Taidan: Warera Mina ‘Kazashimokko’: Āsā Binādo, Nakazawa Shōko”. p. 37 p and p.35.}