The photo above is of two guards at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum located in Peace Memorial Park. It is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the city of Hiroshima and is an example of the city’s new ideals after its reconstruction. After the city’s destruction many sought to interpret it as a “born-again city of peace.” (Zwingenberg). The essay which discusses this, “The Atom City” written by Ran Zwingenberg, argues that tourism greatly helped reshape what the destruction of Hiroshima meant and its reconstruction. Another essay, “Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens” by D. Serlin, also discusses the reconstruction of Hiroshima, but focuses on the postwar conflict between traditional and western values. While these articles focus on different issues they both deal with the destruction and reconstruction of the first city to be destroyed with an atomic weapon.
The articles take two fairly different approaches to the reconstruction of Hiroshima. Zwingenberg focuses on the city’s identity while Serlin focuses more on the people who were affected by its destruction. Tourism makes up a large part of Zwingenberg’s argument. Places like Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, became symbolically important after their destruction which is why there was so much effort put into reshaping the city’s identity to one that would support a peaceful new beginning, rather than its previous identity of militarism. Serlin largely focuses on the people of Japan and their struggle between upholding their traditional culture and becoming more western during reconstruction. One instance Serlin discusses was the proposed construction of a Hiroshima memorial by a Japanese American sculptor named Isamu Noguchi. His plan was rejected by the Japanese people who found it inappropriate for an American to design the memorial. This focus on the evolving identity of the Japanese people is what separates Serlin’s essay from Zwingenberg’s.
In the years after WWII Japan found itself reforging their own national identity, one that was largely different from before the war. Hiroshima went from a symbol of destruction to one of new beginnings and peace. During this time the Japanese people worked to balance their traditional ideals with new western ones while the U.S was overseeing the reconstruction of the state. It would be these practices that reshaped Japan and introduced the nation to a new state of modernity in the Cold War era.
Sources:
D Serlin, Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens, in Replaceable You- Engineering the Body in Postwar America (2004).pdf
Zwigenberg, Ran. 2016. The atomic city: Military tourism and urban identity in postwar hiroshima. American Quarterly 68 (3): 617-42.
Is Obama’s pronunciation of the word ‘Hiroshima’ right?
I like how you brought up the idea of tourism that the bombing brought in its destruction. In my mind, this was more for the idea that these were the first places nuclear bombs were dropped and less for the Japanese people affected by the blast, but it gave the Japanese people a platform to build off of to show how terrible the weapons were and the possible destruction it could mean for the world.
I really liked this article. I like how you tied in tourism. In this context , I would have never evaluated the the effect of tourism and how that shaped the culture as well. I also like you talk about how its a place of “new beginning” and that it used to be very militaristic. The way you tied these articles together was great!