Reviews for Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory

The average rating for Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-03-10 00:00:00 Robert Jordan This is an account of personal memories and state-instituted memories of Hiroshima after the dropping of the catastrophic atomic bomb. Yoneyama draws a lot of historiographical interpretation from Foucault, Derrida, and Walter Benjamin. She reveals many firsthand accounts of survivors who lived through the experience and analyzes how they remember and talk about their experiences, compared to how the formal apparatus of the state informs the public about these memories. She also analyzes how cultural norms restrain how people think about and remember this past event. A new, modern secular world order changes the city dramatically in the decades after the bomb. Yet, a multiplicity of stories are passed down over time as the aging survivors try to come to terms with their trauma and the complexities of the past. There is no singular, clear narrative. One particular tension is between reconciling personal roles as both victim and victimizer, that is, as both survivor of war and perpetrator of war. It is fascinating to read the oral accounts that Yoneyama records from the survivors. They tell their stories, trying to remember and to recuperate the past. The reader learns that the public narratives of war and peace in Japan is far from a comprehensive truth about what happened. That is about all I can say about it here. The final two chapters discuss the diasporic Korean-living-in-Hiroshima experience of the public memorialization of the bomb, and how women are figured into the public recuperative narrative of postwar Hiroshima.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-03-03 00:00:00 Anton Demin The introduction is a little jargon heavy, but overall the book is thoughtful, thought-provoking, and deals with the important issue of postwar history.