https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9418-969X
Abstract
The use of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been extensively studied in war and peace literature. Research abounds on the ethical debates surrounding the bombing, the legal and political ramifications of the use of nuclear weapons, the socio-cultural underpinnings of the peace movements, and the somatic and psychological consequences of the bombing. However, Hiroshima’s reconstruction has rarely been studied from the scholarly lens of peacebuilding approaches that cover various aspects of post-war reconstruction. The city and prefectural governments of Hiroshima published several reports on Hiroshima’s history of reconstruction over the years, and as of 2014, with an aim to support peacebuilding efforts elsewhere and contribute to achieving a peaceful world. Using policy analysis, new empirical data, updated historical accounts, and interdisciplinary lenses, the contributions in this Special Issue respond to this objective by bridging the past war experience and the present peace aspirations from Hiroshima to bring new insights into post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding research and practice.
It has now been more than seventy-five years since the United States dropped the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings can be considered a closing chapter to the devastations of the two world wars, an introduction to a new international peace and security landscape, or both. The aftermath of the bombings created a sense of urgency in revising the international system to prevent another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Peace movements emerged soon after calling for nuclear disarmament. Meanwhile, the nuclear arms race between the US and the former Soviet Union, among other factors, escalated into the Cold War. Debates regarding the strategic justification and humanitarian consequences of the bombings shaped the field of international politics and strategic studies, as well as the public discourse on war and peace.
‘Nothing will grow for the next seventy-five years’ was the rumour that circulated after the Hiroshima bombing, which could not be further from the truth. Except for the memorial sites, most notably the preserved A-bomb dome, it is hard to recognise that Hiroshima was the epicentre of the first nuclear attack. Trees flourished, physical infrastructure rolled out, and people’s lives resumed. Indeed, Hiroshima has ‘risen from the ashes’ and is now widely known as the ‘city of peace’. The social, legal, political, physical, psychological, and cultural impact of the bombing, including the post-war reconstruction, however, ripples to this day. As an example, in May 2023, a class action lawsuit was filed with the Hiroshima District Court by twenty-three victims of the ‘black rain’ challenging the existing recognition standards of hibakusha (atomic bomb victims).
Hiroshima has been extensively studied in war and peace literature. The ethical considerations and justifications for the bombing, for instance, have been heavily debated throughout the years.Footnote1 This led to legal and political examinations of the use of nuclear weapons and sociological and cultural analyses of the peace movements and anti-nuclear activism.Footnote2 Relatedly, research abounds about the somatic and psychological consequences of the bombing. Hiroshima’s reconstruction has, however, rarely been studied from the scholarly lens of peacebuilding approaches that cover various aspects of post-war reconstruction.
The prefectural and city government of Hiroshima jointly organised the ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee to undertake a two-year project on ‘Hiroshima Reconstruction and Peacebuilding Research Project’ from 2012 to 2013. The project published a detailed report on the destruction and post-war reconstruction of Hiroshima, including the challenges and lessons learned throughout the process.Footnote3 Three more volumes have been published since then, focusing on educational institutions and medical treatment facilities, the administrative system for dealing with atomic bomb damage, the stories of the atomic bomb orphans, the importance of inheriting and conveying the Hiroshima experience, and international support received following the bombing. It is the objective of the city and prefectural governments for these reports to ‘support reconstruction efforts and peacebuilding in post-conflict countries and contribute to the realisation of a peaceful and stable international community’.Footnote4 This special issue engages with the said objective by analysing policy documents, new empirical data, updated historical accounts, and interdisciplinary concepts to bridge the past war experience and the present peace aspirations from Hiroshima and bring new insights into post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding research and practice.
This special issue aims to contribute to scholarly and public dialogues on post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding using the case of the atomic bombing of Japan and its local, regional, and international implications for peacebuilding. The articles are diverse in analytical approaches, providing a comprehensive and balanced scholarly discourse on the political and social aspects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s post-war reconstruction. These aspects include but are not limited to policymaking, identity-formation, memorialisation, and peace promotion and are interrogated through historical, anthropological, socio-psychological, and socio-political lenses, among other disciplinary lenses. The first and second articles challenge the dominant scholarly discourse on peacebuilding by presenting Hiroshima as a case of peacebuilding and highlighting its value in providing new insights into the processes of peace formation. The third and fourth articles also challenge common assumptions about trauma and religion, respectively, vis-à-vis conditions of war and peace. The fifth and sixth articles in this special issue advance these conversations by situating them within the Anthropocene debate, signifying the broader agential, temporal, and spatial implications of war experiences and peace formation that emanated from Hiroshima. In doing so, these articles underscore the relevance of Hiroshima’s (and to some extent, Nagasaki’s) bombing and reconstruction in drawing lessons for contemporary and emerging post-war or post-conflict peacebuilding efforts.
While the array of topics discussed in this special issue is not exhaustive, this collection advances these conversations and critically engages with long-held assumptions about post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding. The first article opens with the history of Hiroshima’s post-war initiatives by delving into the debates that occurred between local citizens and the city government. In their article, ‘Reconstructing Hiroshima as a peace memorial city: local agency and identity-making in peacebuilding’, Mari Katayanagi and Noriyuki Kawano trace the physical and symbolical transformations of Hiroshima after the bombing. They argue that the 1949 Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law accelerated the city’s identity formation after the war. Anchoring on the concept of local peacebuilding, Katayanagi and Kawano identified local contestations, compromises, and compliances that influenced the identity-making process that turned Hiroshima from a military city to a city of peace. As such, the article advances our understanding of the dynamics behind identity-making and its role in peacebuilding. The second contribution to this special issue also contests mainstream peacebuilding scholarship, which mainly focuses on international interventions in intrastate conflicts since the 1990s, by presenting Hiroshima as a case of post-war peacebuilding. In his article, ‘Hiroshima’s ongoing peacebuilding and beyond: how does this local initiative seek to extend to world peace?’, Tatsuo Yamane characterises Hiroshima’s peacebuilding as a project that is yet to be completed. His combined analysis of local–global and local–state relations shows that the Japanese national government is yet to affirm immediate and complete nuclear disarmament at the global level despite the global resonance of local aspirations for achieving world peace free of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima’s ongoing peacebuilding.
This critical discourse on dominant post-war framings follows through the subsequent articles. The third article, titled ‘Anomalies in collective victimhood in post-war Japan: “Hiroshima” as a victimisation symbol for the collective national memory of war’, provokes questions regarding collective victimhood, which draws heavily on the relationship between victims and perpetrators. Yuji Uesugi argues that such a relationship is not explicit in the case of Japan, where acts of identifying the perpetrator, seeking revenge, and pursuing safety from the perpetrator are absent. The personal victimhood of the hibakusha became the ‘chosen national trauma’ for Japan. Contrasting with socio-psychological theories of collective victimhood, Uesugi situates the unique formation of collective war memory in post-war Japan.
In the fourth article, Hirokazu Miyazaki also challenges a common assumption, specifically on how religion could cause or promote violence. ‘The bishop’s “fine tact”: the ambiguity, ambivalence, and relationality of Catholic peacebuilding from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Flores, Indonesia during the Asia-Pacific war’, follows the experience of Japanese Catholic priests from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their mission to Flores, Indonesia. Miyazaki elucidates a unique type of relationality based on tact in which the Japanese priests cooperated with missionaries and civilians from enemy nations against the Japanese military. In doing so, the article provides a rich narrative of the constructive role of religion, embodied by the Japanese Catholic Church leaders, in promoting peace amid Japan’s aggressive nationalism and imperialism.
Relationality can also be found beyond actors. The fifth article in this special issue, ‘Agencies, Temporalities, and Spatialities in Hiroshima’s Post-War Reconstruction: A Case of Reflexive Peacebuilding in the Anthropocene?’, incorporates considerations of time and space in peacebuilding. By engaging with the expanded notions of agency, temporality, and spatiality in the critical discourse on the Anthropocene, Dahlia Simangan argues that reflexivity or the iterative process of recognition, reflection, and response could help illuminate the multiple, interwoven, evolving, and sometimes contesting peace narratives coming from a singular post-war experience. By situating the case of Hiroshima in the broader Anthropocene debate, the article links post-war peace formation to more recent peacebuilding challenges posed by global environmental change.
Luli van der Does builds on the value of the concept of the Anthropocene in analysing the temporal, spatial and interpersonal shifts in the hibakusha’s anthropogenic discourse. In the sixth and final article, ‘Turning a Disaster into a Regenerative Strength: Hiroshima’s Strategy for Societal Peace in the Anthropocene’, she reviewed the history of the recovery discourse of atomic bombed cities. She then analysed more than 20,000 survivor testimonies and the entire set of Hiroshima Peace Declarations to unpack the meanings associated with the bombing, life in the aftermath, recovery and reconstruction, and the formation of Hiroshima’s postwar identity over time. The article demonstrates that the anthropogenic discourse surrounding the bombing evolved from immediate, local post-disaster relief and recovery to nuclear disarmament and global peace.
While it has been more than seventy-five years since the bombs were dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this historical moment continues to have a lasting psychological, social, and political impact for generations to come. When the G7 leaders visited Hiroshima in May 2023 and reaffirmed their commitment to achieving a world without nuclear weapons, none of the G7 countries ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) to date. Japan’s reluctance to sign the treaty, in particular, continues to disappoint the survivors whose demands for a nuclear-free world are left unmet. Furthermore, the threat of nuclear weapons remains, especially in the ongoing war in Ukraine and geopolitical tensions in the Korean peninsula. Yet the G7 Leaders’ Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament affirmed nuclear deterrence without even mentioning the TPNW. These issues signify the need for continued conversations about the impact of nuclear weapons on war and peace.
For these reasons, the authors in this special issue prompt several questions for future research and policy considerations regarding peacebuilding. In their analysis of local agency in Hiroshima’s peacebuilding discourse, Katayanagi and Kawano encourage further exploration of the role of city branding in post-war reconstruction. Yamane also encourages further studies into the other types of local agencies in Hiroshima’s peacebuilding. Uesugi and Miyazaki call for an expansion of existing theories on collective victimhood and the relationship between religion and violence, respectively, by examining unique cases, such as those found in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Similarly, Simangan demonstrates the value of extended temporalities and expanded spatialities when analysing post-war reconstruction. Finally, van der Does’s discourse analysis highlights the importance of continuously examining the evolving narratives about Hiroshima’s post-war experience across local and global contexts. With ongoing war and violence in many parts of the world, these historical and future-oriented lessons from Hiroshima, as well as Nagasaki, could inform practitioners and policymakers in implementing inclusive, transformative, and peaceful post-war reconstruction efforts.
Acknowledgements
The editorial team wishes to thank Mr Michael Lemmer, Academy Library, UNSW Canberra for his expert assistance with the footnotes in this special issue.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dahlia Simangan
Dahlia Simangan is Associate Professor at the IDEC Institute of Hiroshima University and one of the core members of the university’s Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS). She holds a PhD in International, Political, and Strategic Studies from the Australian National University (2017). She is the author of International Peacebuilding and Local Involvement: A Liberal Renaissance (Routledge, 2019) and several research articles on post-conflict peacebuilding, the relationship between peace and sustainability, and international relations in the Anthropocene. She is an Assistant Editor of Peacebuilding and a member of the Planet Politics Institute.
Mari Katayanagi
Mari Katayanagi is Professor and Vice-Director of International Peace and Coexistence Program at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences of Hiroshima University. She holds a PhD in Law from Warwick University, UK. Previously she served at the UN peacekeeping operation in Croatia and then the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a political adviser. Her research and teaching focus on peacebuilding and human rights. Her publications include Human Rights Functions of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (Kluwer Law International, 2002), and contributions to Preventing Violent Conflict in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Confronting Land and Property Problems for Peace (Routledge, 2014).
Luli van der Does
Luli van der Does is Associate Professor of Memory Studies at the Centre for Peace, Hiroshima University. She is a member of the ICOM-ICMEOHRI and Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Steering Committee. Her research explores the nexus of mind and society by looking closely at linguistic, visual, and sensory representations of traumatic memory. Her publications include Media and Environmental Sustainability: An Empirical Study of National Media Reporting of Environmental Issues in China and Japan (Routledge 2017) and articles on war, media, heritage, and social change.
Notes
1 Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, 2nd ed. (CO: Pluto Press, 1994); James F. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958); Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Robert James Maddox, ed., Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007); John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb (SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Henry L. Stimson and Harry S. Truman, ‘The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 3, no. 2 (1947), 37–67.
2 For legal discussion: Katherine E. McKinney, Scott D. Sagan, and Allen S. Weiner, ‘Why the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima Would be Illegal Today’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 76, no. 4 (2020), 157–165; Gro Nystuen, Stuart Casey-Maslen and Annie Golden Bersagel, eds, Nuclear Weapons under International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). From a political perspective: Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2012). The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has engaged in research on various issues surrounding nuclear weapons, and its thematic issue of International Review of the Red Cross, Humanitarian Debate: Law Policy, Action in 2015, ‘The Human Cost of Nuclear Weapons’, includes legal, political, and humanitarian perspectives, and the voices of hibakusha and civil society. A recent publication containing multiple perspectives on the atomic bomb is Michael D. Gordin and G. J. Ikenberry, eds, The Age of Hiroshima (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020).
3 ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee (HGPPJPEC), Hiroshima Prefecture and City of Hiroshima. Learning from Hiroshima’s Reconstruction Experience: Reborn from the Ashes (Hiroshima: Hiroshima Prefecture, 2014).
4 HGPPJPEC, ‘About this Publication’.