Re-narrativizing
the Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Satoko Oka Norimatsu
August 11, 2026
From Webinar Re-narrativizing
the Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Resisting Japan’s Remilitarization organized
by Tricontinental Asia, August 11, 2026
*This text includes the parts
that I skipped in the webinar in order to save time.
*Reproduction, forwarding, or posting on social media of this text without
permission is prohibited. For questions, contact Satoko Oka Norimatsu peacephilosophycentre@gmail.com.
Introduction: The Coexistence of Peace and War?
I believe that the prevailing
narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan have done little to prevent
Japan's remilitarization. In other words, they have failed to generate a
meaningful opposition to the country's trajectory toward remilitarization. Political
scientist Kang Sang-jung raised this question in his essay "Yasukuni and
Hiroshima: Two Sacred Sites" (in Facing Yasukuni, Mekong,
2006, p. 62). He noted that, for example, a Japanese prime minister can take
part in memorial ceremonies for the war dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the
one hand and visit Yasukuni Shrine on the other. He asked why these two acts
are accepted by the same public without any sense of contradiction, when,
however one looks at it, they are inconsistent.
This contradiction is
symbolized in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park itself. Next to the cenotaph for
the atomic bomb victims stands an enormous Japanese national flag donated by a
right-wing organization. A symbol of peace commemorating the victims of the
atomic bombing thus coexists with a symbol of the Japanese nationalism that
destroyed peace during the imperial era. Could it be that Japanese people
commemorate the victims of the atomic bomb and the "heroic spirits"
enshrined at Yasukuni in much the same way?
With this question in mind, I would like to reconsider the narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
My Journey
My entry point into peace
activism was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1970s, when I was in the upper
grades of elementary school, I went to an atomic-bomb exhibition in my
neighborhood in Tokyo and was deeply shocked. I felt that I had to do something
about this history, and I began talking about it with people around me.
In my second and third years
of high school, I studied at a school on Canada's west coast. A friend from
Singapore told me that when the Japanese military invaded, they committed
brutal acts, including killing infants with bayonets and throwing them into the
air. Friends from the Philippines, Indonesia, and China also told me about
memories of Japanese military atrocities that had been passed down from their
parents' and grandparents' generations.
However immature my
understanding was at the time, I realized that there was an enormous history I
needed to learn before speaking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Fast-forward more than twenty
years: in 1997, I returned to Canada to study and eventually settled there.
In 2006, as a member of my
local Article 9 Association, I participated in the World Peace Forum held in
Vancouver. Many people came from Japan, and there I interpreted for a hibakusha
(a-bomb survivor) for the first time. Over the following fifteen years, I
traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August with university students from
Japan and the United States, serving as an interpreter and lecturer on study
trips where we listened to hibakusha testimonies.
Re-narrativizing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the
Culmination of My Work
Through my repeated visits to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I came to think more deeply about the atomic bombings
by locating them within the history of Japan's wars of aggression. In 2024,
together with colleagues in the International Network of Museums for Peace
(INMP), of which I am a member, I published an English-language book titled Museums
for Peace: In Search of History, Memory, and Change.
In the chapter I contributed,
"Japanese War Memory: Ongoing Challenges of Remembering and
Forgetting," I questioned the victim-centered narrative of war memory in
Japan. Today I would like to speak mainly about the issues I discussed in that
book, while also incorporating more recent developments.
Recently I watched a new film
titled Atomic Bomb Museum.
Directed by a producer at a Hiroshima television station, it traces the history
of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum through interviews with its successive
directors and follows people working to pass on what is called the
"reality of the atomic bombing." In this film I recognized a
persistent Japanese way of narrating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Erasing Historical Context
First, the atomic bombing is
completely isolated from the historical fact that it occurred at the end of
some seventy years of aggressive war and colonial rule by the Japanese Empire.
The story becomes one in which, one day, a terrifying bomb suddenly fell on
innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This story continues to be
reproduced through the museums, through literature and journalism, and through
a great deal of hibakusha testimony.
Among the hibakusha
testimonies I have translated and interpreted are statements such as these:
"My father returned from Malaya and was transferred to military
headquarters in Hiroshima. Unlike Tokyo, Hiroshima was a peaceful place."
"Until the atomic bomb fell on August 9, it was summer vacation and the
children spent happy days playing by the sea and in the mountains."
"I was born in Kure. Since Kure was a naval port, more than two thousand
people were killed in air raids."
Hiroshima was an important
base of the Imperial Japanese Army. The 11th Infantry Regiment of the
Hiroshima-based Fifth Division carried out massacres of ethnic Chinese on the
Malay Peninsula. When Hiroshima is described as having been "peaceful,"
there seems to be no awareness of the people of Korea, Manchuria, and occupied countries
in Southeast Asia, who had long been denied peace by Japanese aggression and
colonial rule. Kure was a major base of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Today it is
a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force base that is also used by the U.S.
military.
Incidentally, in the case of
Kure, Fumiyo
Kouno's manga In This Corner of the World, which was also adapted
into a film, cleansed the city into an image of a pitiable place that suffered
air raids despite having done nothing wrong. Both this work and Town of
Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, which depicts the Hiroshima
bombing, center on the victimization of innocent young women. I believe that
through these two works Kouno effectively "kawaii-washes" both the
Japanese army and the navy.
Restoring the Historical Context
Of course, people who were
bombed as children and knew nothing about what was happening may understandably
speak from a child's perspective. Hibakusha who have lived with lasting
physical and psychological consequences throughout their lives may have all
they can do simply to tell what they are able to tell. That is precisely why
those of us who are not hibakusha need to learn the broader history and provide
the missing context. For example, when I assist with hibakusha testimony
overseas, I first explain the overall history of the Japanese Empire's wars of
aggression and then invite the hibakusha to testify. In that way, their
testimony is placed within its historical context.
Suppose a survivor of the
Allied bombing of Dresden in Germany were to give testimony abroad while saying
nothing whatsoever about Nazism and speaking only about German victimization.
Would that be readily accepted? Probably not. People in Japan need to recognize
that, like Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire was a fascist empire that
committed atrocities across a vast geographical area.
The Nazi regime lasted twelve
years. Its genocidal and persecutory policies killed more than ten million
people, including approximately six million Jews. By contrast, the Japanese
Empire pursued colonial rule and wars of aggression for roughly seventy years,
and at its height controlled and occupied a territory around twenty times the
size of present-day Japan. Japan’s colonial rule and wars of aggression killed
an estimated twenty million or more people across the Asia-Pacific. In both
duration and the scale of killing, the Japanese Empire exceeded Nazi Germany.
Japanese politicians
repeatedly say that people should "come to the atomic-bombed cities and
learn the
reality of the bombing." At this year's August 6 and 9 ceremonies,
Prime Minister Takaichi
and other politicians said this as well. I travel to China, Korea, Okinawa, and
Southeast Asian countries to learn the "reality" of the atrocities
committed by the Japanese Empire, but that reality is so vast that I feel I
could spend a lifetime studying it and still never learn it all.
When we talk about Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, even within Japan, I think it is important to place them within
the broader history of Japan’s war. This may in fact be a role that those of us
who are not hibakusha can play better than the hibakusha themselves. In Japan,
we often hear concerns that as fewer people remain who actually experienced the
war, those experiences will gradually fade from memory. Passing on their
experiences is important. But if we accept the idea that peace can be
maintained only as long as people with direct experience of war are still
alive, then their eventual absence could end up being used to justify war.
Japan has a constitution that renounces war precisely as a system for
preventing war even when no one with direct experience of it remains.
Nationalism Beneath the Surface of the
Narrative
Yet programs are in fact
being developed that train people to perform the role of hibakusha witnesses.
Hiroshima City runs a program to train "successors
to atomic-bomb experience testimony," while Nagasaki City trains
"family
and exchange witnesses" to give testimony in place of hibakusha. At
the Hiroshima museum, I actually listened to a trained speaker who was not a
hibakusha deliver such "testimony." As I expected, the narrative was
victim-centered. At one point, however, the speaker described a scene in which
a young soldier, himself a victim of the bombing, was helping people cross a
river as they waited patiently in line. “It made me think how wonderful
Japanese people are,” he said.
Perhaps he was simply
repeating what the original hibakusha had said, but I was astonished by the
leap to "Japanese people are wonderful." The soldier in question
could have been a conscripted Korean or Taiwanese. It struck me that precisely
in such eruptions of nationalism we may catch a glimpse of the underlying
nature of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki narrative.
At the same time, while Japan
is so concerned about the declining number of its own "people with wartime
experience" that public funds are used to reproduce "witnesses"
and preserve their stories, there seems to be little comparable sense of
urgency about the dwindling number of survivors of the Nanjing Massacre or
victims of forced mobilization and Japanese military sexual slavery. In this
sense, it points in the same direction as political movements that proclaim
"Japanese First."
Even overseas, I encounter
people who seem to hold a sense of privilege expressed in claims such as,
"Because we are Japanese, we are uniquely able to speak about the horror
of nuclear weapons." This tendency can be even stronger among people from
Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I have repeatedly seen people who are not themselves
hibakusha use the atomic bombing almost as a badge of Japanese moral authority,
while reacting fiercely against efforts to remember the victims of Nanjing
Massacre or the Japanese military sex slavery.
The "Only Atomic-Bombed Nation" and
Korean Hibakusha
Once again, this year,
phrases such as "the only atomic-bombed nation" and "the only
country to have suffered atomic bombing in war" are everywhere in Japan.
Ichiba Junko, who has long supported Korean hibakusha, wrote in The
People Who Brought Hiroshima Home (Gaifusha, 2000, p. 28) that roughly
one in ten hibakusha was Korean, and that this fact exposes a hidden face of
Japan's claim before the world to be "the only atomic-bombed nation."
The phrase is an expression of Japanese atomic-bomb nationalism and of the
exclusion of Korean hibakusha. Here too, this narrative points in the same
direction as the current government's xenophobic politics.
In Pacifism without Peace
(Hosei University Press, 2016), a book examining contradictions within Japanese
pacifism, Kwon Heok-tae observes that references to Japan as "the only
atomic-bombed nation" tend to increase in the media and anti-nuclear
movements as the existence of Korean hibakusha becomes more visible and as the
nuclear threat from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is emphasized.
Estimates suggest that in
Hiroshima, 50,000 Koreans were exposed to the atomic bomb and 30,000 died; in
Nagasaki, 20,000 were exposed and 10,000 died. Koreans were in Japan because of
colonial rule, were then subjected to the atomic bombings, and after the
bombings faced discrimination in medical care and relief measures - a triple
victimization. This is one reason their mortality rate was higher than that of
Japanese hibakusha. The United States bears responsibility for dropping the
atomic bombs, but Japan bears responsibility for the fact that Koreans were
exposed to the atomic bombings and for what happened to them afterward.
Japan rarely talks about
Korean hibakusha, and in doing so avoids confronting its own responsibility.
The film Atomic Bomb Museum does not discuss them either. Among
Hiroshima's successive mayors, only Hiraoka Takashi, who served from 1991 to
1999, apologized in his Peace Declaration for Japan's war of aggression and
colonial rule. He deliberately avoided the phrase "the only atomic-bombed
nation," but his successor, Mayor Akiba Tadatoshi, brought the phrase back
into use.
The
National Memorial Museum of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Occupation
in Busan places the experience of Korean atomic bomb victims within the broader
history of forced mobilization. Its exhibition states:
“Japan has widely publicized
the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and appealed to the world for peace
and opposition to war. Peace and opposition to war are universal values
essential to the shared well-being of humanity. But those words can carry very
different meanings depending on who speaks them. Before Japan calls for peace
and opposition to war, it must show profound remorse for the harm it inflicted
through war and demonstrate its willingness to take responsibility for it.”
This is a powerful criticism
of how Japan invokes the universal ideals of nuclear abolition and peace while
avoiding the question of its own war responsibility.
Idealizing Hibakusha
The movement also has a
tendency to idealize hibakusha unnecessarily. Hibakusha are ordinary human
beings. They become angry and jealous like anyone else. Some are right-wing,
and some discriminate against others. When I say this, some people become angry
and tell me that it is disrespectful to hibakusha. But isn't refusing to treat
hibakusha as ordinary human beings itself a form of discrimination?
Former Hiroshima mayor Akiba
Tadatoshi often emphasized the concept of a "hibakusha philosophy"
while in office. Put simply, he meant a universal ethic expressed in the wish
that no one in future generations should have to experience the suffering one
has endured oneself: a hibakusha who chooses "reconciliation over
retaliation" and devotes themselves to the abolition of nuclear weapons.
As an example of someone who
embodied this "hibakusha philosophy," Akiba cited Takahashi Akihiro,
a hibakusha and former director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum who died
in 2011. Takahashi is also treated as a central figure in the film Atomic
Bomb Museum. He was also well known for the fact that glass had pierced the
base of his fingers in the atomic bombing, causing a deformed nail to continue
growing; the nail itself was eventually put on display at the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Museum. I interpreted for him while he was alive.
After Takahashi spoke about
meeting Paul Tibbets, the captain of the B-29 Enola Gay that dropped the atomic
bomb, an American student asked him, "What would you have done if you had
been in Captain Tibbets's position?" Without any apparent hesitation,
Takahashi answered that he would have fulfilled his duty as a soldier. Born in
1931, he belonged to a generation that, as boys, had been thoroughly immersed
in militarist education. At that moment, his expression seemed almost to take
on the role of a soldier.
What I want to show with this
example is that even a highly respected hibakusha could be a product of the
militarist era. Hibakusha were not saints. In Nagasaki, Dr. Nagai Takashi, a
Catholic physician and writer, has been elevated to almost saintly status.
Tomoe Otsuki, a scholar in Canada who studies atomic-bomb memory in Nagasaki, notes that Nagai
served in Nanjing as a doctor in the Imperial Japanese Army, yet never spoke
about the Nanjing Massacre or other atrocities committed by the Japanese
military in China.
Not Demanding Accountability,
Not Accepting Accountability
The idealization of hibakusha
leads to another problem in the Hiroshima narrative. The exemplary hibakusha
who practices what Akiba calls the "hibakusha philosophy" does not
speak of retaliation, demand that the United States take responsibility for the
atomic bombing, or express anger toward it. During my many years interpreting
for hibakusha, I repeatedly heard statements to the effect that they did not
dislike Americans and that war itself was to blame.
I once spoke with a filmmaker
who was making a documentary about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The filmmaker said,
“Hibakusha seek peace without holding grudges, but look those Chinese and
Koreans! They just keep resenting Japan forever!”, openly displaying
discriminatory attitudes. I was shocked at the time. After twenty years of
activism, however, I came to realize that such attitudes are not rare among
Japanese.
Historian Yuki Tanaka argues
in Examining "Postwar
Democracy" (San-ichi Shobo, 2019, pp. 31-33) that a Japan-U.S.
"collusion" around the justification of the atomic bombings became
one of the foundations of the Japan-U.S. military alliance. The United States
established the "atomic bomb myth" that the bombs were necessary to
end the war, while Japan's enormous number of war crimes across the
Asia-Pacific and Emperor Hirohito's responsibility were left unresolved. In
this account, the two sides sustained a mutually convenient relationship.
I think the “peace narrative”
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reinforces this “collusion.” In addition to favoring
“model” hibakusha who do not express anger toward the United States, the Peace
Declarations issued by successive mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not
held the United States accountable for the atomic bombings. This year’s
ceremonies were no exception. In its 2024
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Nihon Hidankyo did not say who had
dropped the atomic bombs.
When President Obama visited
Hiroshima in 2016, he said that "death fell from the sky." The
hibakusha who were permitted to speak with or embrace Obama belonged to this
reconciliation-oriented group. Hibakusha who had taken a critical stance toward
U.S. nuclear policy were not given the same access. Candidates had been
screened in advance after the Foreign Ministry asked what they would want to
say if they had the opportunity to speak with President Obama.
Hibakusha Who Confronted Accountability
There were also hibakusha
whose accounts went beyond narratives of victimization. Nakazawa Keiji, the
creator of Barefoot
Gen, stands out. His work not only refuses to idealize hibakusha and
portrays the complexity of their humanity; it also sharply criticizes President
Truman's responsibility for the atomic bombing, Hirohito's responsibility for
the war, Japanese atrocities in China, and discrimination against Koreans. That
is why the work became a target of the right, including campaigns to restrict
access to it in libraries. In 2011, the year before Nakazawa died, I had
the opportunity to interpret
for him. He recalled learning a song at school praising Imperial Japanese
Army General Tojo Hideki and singing it at home, only to be sharply rebuked by
his father. As depicted in Barefoot Gen, his father was arrested for his
anti-war beliefs and imprisoned for a year and a half, where he was subjected
to torture.
Another was Numata
Suzuko, who died in 2011. Sadly, I never had the opportunity to know her
personally, but I once saw her giving testimony beside the "A-bombed Aogiri
tree" in Peace Memorial Park. In 1988, Numata listened to testimonies from
survivors of massacres of ethnic Chinese in Malaya. When she learned that the
perpetrators belonged to the 11th Infantry Regiment of the Hiroshima-based
Fifth Division, she felt a sense of responsibility and joined a trip to
Malaysia to learn about the history of Japanese aggression there.
At Ilonglong, near the town
of Titi in Negeri Sembilan, Japanese troops killed 1,474 villagers on March 18,
1942, destroyed their homes, and erased the village from the map. Visiting the
site and speaking before more than one hundred local residents, Numata
apologized. The following is the substance of her remarks as remembered by Takashima
Nobuyoshi, then a high-school teacher who was leading the group.
“Everyone, I come from
Hiroshima, the base of the Japanese military that killed your innocent family
members one after another as if they were insects. I did not know that troops
from Hiroshima had committed atrocities in Malaysia. I learned about this last
year, and from that moment I felt that I absolutely had to come to Malaysia. I
wanted to come because I wanted to apologize to you directly. I am truly,
deeply sorry. Please forgive us.”
After Numata spoke, the local
residents rushed toward her. According to Takashima, they called out to her:
“You came all this way despite having lost a leg in the atomic bombing.” “I’m
so glad to finally hear the words I had always wanted to hear from a Japanese
person.” “You are a victim yourself, and yet you came here and said this to us.
I am deeply moved.”
Numata also traveled to
Chongqing, China, where she apologized for the Japanese military's bombing of
the city. In countries victimized by Japan, the historical view that "the
atomic bomb was a form of divine deliverance" has remained deeply rooted.
The feeling is understandable, but difficult for hibakusha to accept. Takashima
suggested that behind Numata's visits to countries victimized by Japan was
precisely a desire to engage with societies in which such feelings existed.
Problems with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Museums
I have mentioned the
Hiroshima-based Fifth Division. The division repeatedly participated in the
Japanese Empire's major wars of aggression, colonial rule, and suppression of
popular uprisings, including the First Sino-Japanese War, the suppression of the
Boxer Uprising, the Russo-Japanese War, the suppression of the March First
Independence Movement in Korea, the military dispatch to Qingdao, the Siberian
Intervention, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the massacres of ethnic Chinese
in Malaya and Singapore. During the First Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial
General Headquarters itself was located in Hiroshima, and Emperor Meiji
directly commanded the army and navy from there.
Does the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum tell this
history? It notes that Hiroshima was a "military capital," but the
description is matter-of-fact and carries no sense that the city was involved
in wrongdoing. This stands in sharp contrast to the emotionally immersive
presentation of atomic-bomb victimization. The Nanjing Massacre appears only in
a media-table section, where visitors have to navigate through several
touch-screen steps before reaching it. Even there, the Japanese text calls it
the "Nanjing Incident" while the English says "Nanjing
Massacre," presenting different language to Japanese and English-speaking
audiences. The historical fact that Japan waged a war of aggression is absent
throughout the museum's extensive exhibition space.
The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb
Museum currently has a section that presents the broader history of the
Asia-Pacific War. When it was renovated in 1995, it introduced a section
presenting an overall chronology and visual history of the Asia-Pacific War,
provoking such a fierce response that right-wing sound trucks surrounded the
museum. In recent years, however, the right has objected in particular to the
chronology's reference to the Nanjing Massacre, and Nagasaki City is now planning
to completely transform
this section as part of a comprehensive renovation of the museum.
The issue has already drawn
criticism from China
and DPRK and is
developing into an international
controversy. Nagasaki also has a privately run Nagasaki Museum for Human Rights
and Peace, which specializes in Japan's atrocities, including Korean
hibakusha and forced mobilization. Yet the museum is not included on Nagasaki
City's tourist map, and it is not permitted to place its brochures in the
Atomic Bomb Museum.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were once centers of military power and war industries that supported Japan's
wars of aggression. After Japan's defeat, U.S. forces arrived. Step outside the
"sacred sites of atomic victimhood" and the surrounding region is
filled with Japanese and U.S. military facilities. Then as now, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki have been made into bases connected to wars of aggression. In
Nagasaki, someone with inside knowledge of the museum told me that the
influence of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries makes it virtually impossible for the
Atomic Bomb Museum to address present-day militarization.
Conclusion
I have tried to consider why
the Japanese narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can coexist without
contradiction with Japan's remilitarization and why it has failed to become a
force capable of preventing it. Several factors are intertwined: isolating the
atomic bombings from the larger history of the Japanese Empire; failing to
demand accountability either for Japan's war responsibility or for the U.S.
atomic bombings; atomic-bomb nationalism symbolized by the phrase "the
only atomic-bombed nation"; and the accompanying erasure of Korean
hibakusha.
To re-narrativize Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, I believe, means telling the whole history: not just a
"reality of the atomic bombing" that suddenly begins in August 1945,
but a history in which the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred
in the final phase of the Japanese Empire's colonial rule and wars of
aggression. Only by taking responsibility for that history, while also
demanding the U.S. accountability for the atomic bombings and advocating
anti-war and anti-nuclear principles, can a path open toward cooperation with
Japan's Asian neighbors, and peace in East Asia.
Satoko Oka Norimatsu is an author based in Vancouver, Canada, and Tokyo, Japan. Her primary areas of interest are war memory, war responsibility, and decolonization, with a focus on East Asia and the Asia-Pacific. For her biography and publications, see here.
