Abstract
Even now, in Japan, there are “rules of decorum” associated with representing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.1 Even now it is understood that the “art about the bombing should contain an explicit anti-war or pro-peace ‘message,’ or else respond to the tragedy with a sufficient air of gravity.”2 Even now, Hiroshima art that is too cheeky, too stylized, or too playful is subject to reproach. In Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, Lisa Yoneyama acknowledges that “the nationalized remembering of Hiroshima has … never been monolithic or without contradictions” in Japan.3 Nonetheless, she argues,
Whether within the mainstream national historiography, which remembers Hiroshima’s atomic bombing as victimization experienced by the Japanese collectivity, or in the equally pervasive, more universalistic narrative on the bombing that records it as having been an unprecedented event in the history of humanity, Hiroshima memories have been predicated on the grave obfuscation of the prewar Japanese Empire, its colonial practices, and their consequences.4
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Notes
Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 ), 15.
See Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, The Spirit of Hiroshima: An Introduction to the Atomic Bomb Tragedy ( Hiroshima: City of Hiroshima, 1999 ), 46.
Cited in Carol Mavor, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jet é e, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima Mon Amour ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012 ), 149.
Rob Wilson, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991 ).
Paul Boyer, “Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory,” in Hiroshima in History and Memory, ed. Michael J. Hogan ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ), 143–167.
Toyofumo Ogura, The Atomic Bomb and Hiroshima, trans. Glyndon Townhill (Tokyo: Liber Press, 1994), 33–35, 12.
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989 ), 85.
Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 144. See also Norman Cousins, “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” Saturday Review August 18, 1945.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003 ), 119–120.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981 ), 64–65.
Leo Rubinfien, Sh imei T ō matsu: The Skin of the Nation ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004 ), 27.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969 ), 261.
Yoko Hayashi-Hibino, “Representing the Loss of Loved Ones,” in Infinity: The Destiny of the Body, ed. Miyaku Ishiuchi (Tokyo: Kyuryudo, 2009 ), 148.
Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 ), 2.
Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007 ), 125.
See also Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity?: Writings of Tekeuchi Yoshimi, ed. and trans. Richard Calichman ( New York: Columbia University Press, 2013 ).
See Andrew Gordon, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 150, 121–122.
Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982 ), 83.
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© 2015 Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman
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Scandura, J. (2015). The Horror of Details: Obsolescence and Annihilation in Miyako Ishiuchi’s Photography of Atomic Bomb Artifacts. In: Tischleder, B.B., Wasserman, S. (eds) Cultures of Obsolescence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463647_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463647_9
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