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Envisioning Nagasaki: from ‘atomic wasteland’ to ‘international cultural city’, 1945–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2013

CHAD R. DIEHL
CHAD R. DIEHL*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Emmanuel College, 400 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115, USA
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Abstract

This article looks at the first five years of reconstruction in Nagasaki City after the atomic bombing of 9 August 1945, elucidating how the municipal vision of reconstruction shaped the city's post-war urban identity, especially in comparison to Hiroshima. From early on, city officials envisioned the future of Nagasaki as a restored ‘international cultural city’, not solely as a centre of atomic memory, while Hiroshima made the atomic experience the centre of its urban identity. This article seeks to revive Nagasaki as a subject of historical inquiry in order to balance scholarly, as well as popular, literature on the bombings, which has favoured Hiroshima for nearly seven decades. In short, the story of Nagasaki sheds a different light on bombing and aftermath, not only in comparison with Hiroshima but with other cities that have suffered mass destruction and the course of their subsequent reconstruction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 497 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

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3 Ishikawa and Swain (trans.), Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 479. The official number of dead is generally given from the end of 1945 because of the great number of deaths that resulted from radiation exposure in the months following the bombing.

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9 Most city residents, including the municipal officials, had experienced the bombing and were thus hibakusha, but the term is used here to refer to the group of survivors who rose up in the first decade as memory activists and members of the peace movement and fought for inclusion of the memory of the bombing in the post-war construction of an urban identity.

10 ‘Kyoto of Kyushu’, ‘Naples of Japan’: Tetsurô, Saitô, ‘Dai Tôa no kyôyô moji toshite no Nihonji’, Nagasaki dansô, 30 (1942), 84Google Scholar. Kyushu is the westernmost of the four main islands of Japan. Nagasaki sits on the west coast of Kyushu.

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14 A prefecture in Japan is a regional administrative district. Since the latter part of the 1800s, governmental power in Japan has been separated into national, regional (prefecture) and local (municipality) governments. There are 47 prefectures.

15 Nagasaki shinbun, 1 Sep. 1945.

16 Itô Hisa'aki, ‘Nagasaki saiken no kôsô’, Nagasaki shinbun, 14 Sep. 1945.

17 Ibid.

18 Nagasaki shinbun, 16 Sep. 1945. The term used to mean ‘recovery’, fukkyû, implies ‘a return to the old state of things’, and city planners used the same kyû character in the term, ‘old Nagasaki’. Kyû here represents the Nagasaki of past, and so fukkyû as used by the mayor implied a return to the Nagasaki of days past.

19 Ibid., 7 Oct. 1945. For a study on the role of public parks in post-war Japan, see Havens, T.R.H., Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan (Honolulu, 2011), esp. 122–53Google Scholar.

20 Nagasaki shinbun, 13 Aug. 1946.

21 Ibid., 18 Sep. 1945.

22 Dower, J.W., Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999), 176–7Google Scholar. All Romanization is sic.

23 Nagasaki shinbun, 4 Aug. 1946.

24 Ibid., 8 Oct. 1945. Kunitomo declared that the ‘atomic bomb of Nagasaki City put an end to the Greater East Asian War’ (dai tôa sensô ni shûshifu o utta Nagasaki-shi no genshi bakudan).

25 Ibid., 8 Oct. 1945.

26 This was the Sensai fukkô keikaku kihon hôshin: see shiyakusho, Nagasaki (ed.), Nagasaki genbaku sensai shi (Nagasaki, 1977)Google Scholar (hereafter Nagasaki genbaku sensai shi), vol. I, 665. For more on the national reconstruction plan, see Sorensen, A., The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century (London, 2002), 158–9Google Scholar.

27 Nagasaki shinbun, 4 Aug. 1946.

28 Ibid., 24 Aug. 1946.

29 Ibid., 4 Aug. 1946.

30 Ibid., 24 Aug. 1946.

31 Bôeki can be literally translated as ‘trade’, but in the case of Nagasaki it implies ‘foreign trade’. I have translated fukkô here as ‘revival’, whereas elsewhere I translate it as ‘reconstruction’.

32 Nagasaki minyû, 9 Aug. 1947. The ‘Foreign Trade Revival Festival’ was sponsored by: Nagasaki Nichinichi shinbunsha (newspaper company), Nagasaki City, Nagasaki Assembly of Commerce and Industry (Nagasaki shôkô kaigisho), Nagasaki Prefectural Trade Association (Nagasaki-ken bôeki kai) and the Association for the Promotion of Foreign Trade at Nagasaki Harbour (Nagasaki-kô bôeki shinkô kai).

33 Nagasaki minyû, 9 Aug. 1947.

34 Nagasaki nichinichi, 8 Aug. 1947.

35 Nagasaki monogatari, Nihon nyûsu, Kyûshû ban, dai 1 shû, 12 Aug. 1947.

36 Nagasaki nichinichi, 10 Aug. 1948 (‘Culture Festival’) and 9 Aug. 1948 (‘Reconstruction Festival’).

37 Nagasaki nichinichi, 10 Aug. 1948.

38 John Treat, like many others, has noted that Nagasaki was considered a ‘redundant act within the logic of the Second World War’, done out of curiosity ‘for power's sake’: Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 302. In other words, Nagasaki was in the eyes of some people simply a second ‘Hiroshima’.

39 For more on the Hiroshima reconstruction law, see Ishimaru Norioki, ‘Reconstructing Hiroshima and preserving the reconstructed city’, in Hein, Diefendorf, and Ishida (eds.), Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945, 95; and Yoneyama, Lisa, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley, 1999), 18–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Nagasaki nichinichi, 10 May 1949.

41 Kadoya Seiichi's preface to Tadashi, Teramitsu, Chûkai: Nagasaki kokusai bunka toshi kensetsu hô (Sasebo, 1949), 9–10Google Scholar.

42 Nagasaki nichinichi, 10 May 1949.

43 Nagasaki minyû, 17 May 1949.

44 Ibid.

45 On the reconstruction laws of Kyoto and Nara, see Shintoshi, 4 (1950), 5–6. Yokohama and Kobe were each designated as an ‘International Port City’ (kokusai kôto): 6–7. On the reconstruction laws of Beppu, Itô and Tokyo (shuto), see Shintoshi, 4 (1950), 7–11.

46 Nagasaki minyû, 17 May 1949. I have translated aran (verb aru) as ‘sustain’.

47 See, for example, Nagasaki nichinichi, 11 May 1949; and ibid., 12 May 1949.

48 Teramitsu, Nagasaki kokusai bunka toshi kensetsu hô, 5. Wakamatsu translates the motto, Heiwa wa Nagasaki yori, as ‘Peace from Nagasaki’.

49 Nagasaki nichinichi, 25 May 1949. The imperial tours to cities around Japan were an attempt by the Japanese government to ‘humanize’ the emperor in the eyes of the people: see Dower, Embracing Defeat, 330–9. Through his visits to and association with Nagasaki (and Hiroshima), the emperor was also tapping into the traumatic memories of the atomic bombings, which has allowed him, and Japan more generally, to appear as victims of the war. For more on this topic, see, for example, Tetsuya, Takahashi, ‘The Emperor Showa standing at Ground Zero: on the (re-)configuration of a national “memory” of the Japanese people’, Japan Forum, 15 (2003), 3–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a good study of how the atomic memories of Nagasaki and Hiroshima came to represent a national memory of the war, see Orr, J.J., The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu, 2001)Google Scholar.

50 Nagasaki genbaku sensai shi, vol. I, 667. By comparison, residents of Tokyo voted on the ‘Capitol Construction Law’ (shuto kensetsu hô) as follows: out of 1,840,312 ballots cast, 1,025,790 (55.7%) voted in favour and 676,550 (36.8%) voted against, with 137,972 (7.5%) invalid votes (mukô tôhyô): ibid., 11.

51 Nagasaki nichinichi, 9 Aug. 1949.

52 That is, heiwa yokkyû he no jissen undô.

53 Nagasaki genbaku sensai shi, vol. I, 666.

54 For more on the early history of Christianity in Japan, see Boxer, C.R., The Christian Century 1549–1650 (Berkeley, 1951)Google Scholar. For a good history of Catholicism in modern Japan, see Van Hecken, J.L., The Catholic Church in Japan since 1859 (Tokyo, 1963)Google Scholar. For a study of the Catholics of Urakami, see Wasaburô, Urakawa, Urakami Kirishitan shi (Tokyo, 1973)Google Scholar.

55 Nishi Nippon, 8 Aug. 1948.

56 Nagasaki nichinichi, 26 Jun. 1949.

57 Ibid., 30 May 1949.

58 Shigeki, Irie, ‘Toshi keikaku’, Shintoshi: Nagasaki kokusai bunka toshi tokushû gô, 5 (1951), 9Google Scholar.

59 Tsutomu, Tagawa, ‘Nagasaki-shi tokushû gô no hakkan ni yosete’, Shintoshi: Nagasaki kokusai bunka toshi tokushû gô, 5 (1951), 1Google Scholar.

60 The word nioi usually carries a negative connotation and is generally translated as ‘smell’, but in the context of the article by Shimauchi Hachirô, the word suggests a positive nuance, so I have translated it here as ‘aroma’.

61 Hachirô, Shimauchi, ‘Nagasaki-shi kôgai’, Shintoshi: Nagasaki kokusai bunka toshi tokushû gô, 5 (1951), 44–6Google Scholar. See, also, Hachirô, Shimauchi, ‘Risô no naihatsu’, Nagasaki bunka, 3 (1950), 5Google Scholar.

62 Nagasaki minyû, 12 May 1949.

63 no kai hen, Nagasaki hibaku kyôshi, Chinmoku no kabe o yabutte (Tokyo, 1970), 17Google Scholar.

64 Ishikawa and Swain (trans.), Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 604–5.

65 Mainichi shinbun, 1 Aug. 1969.