- Authors: Gregory Vanderbilt
- From: Center for Religion and Cross Cultural Studies Graduate School Universitas Gadjah Mada
Abstract:
Observations of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki come in the midst of controversy over U.S. intervention into Iran’s nuclear capabilities and over a shift to the right in Japanese politics towards abandoning its postwar pacifist positioning (and active opposition in the streets of Japanese cities) as well as the passing on of those who directly experienced the bombs (the hibakusha). To what extent do their voices still gather concentrated as well as ritualized attention? What roles do religious leaders, movements, and institutions now play in this process, in a society that tends to define itself as areligious? Hiroshima has often been framed as a universal tragedy while memories of Nagasaki have often highlighted connections to Catholicism, including the “hidden Christians” the 150th anniversary of whose reemergence was celebrated earlier this year, but religious ideas, including the comforting of lost souls in Buddhist terms, are part of both sites. With Benjamin’s thesis about grabbing hold of a memory in a moment of danger in mind, this paper asks what place history, alongside religion and politics, play as one generation does not remember what another repressed. This paper draws on fieldwork during the observations in August 2015 in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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