Press Conference by Hiroshima’s Historiographers
Overview: Confining Hiroshima’s history to the object of an atomic bomb obscures the subject, the soul of the place, and puts all the focus on the verb, the bombing, rendering a definition of Peace as the absence of a verb – a bombing – or, at best, the absence of a whole class of nouns: No more bombs. Absent the absence of bombs, though: Can there be peace? That is, can we still have bombs and not use them, or use them less often? This formulation begs the questions of what are we bombing, and, why are we bombing it? To answer the first question, we need to know what Hiroshima was. Hiroshima’s Historiographers proposes that the answer will be found not at the A-bomb Exhibit at the Peace Memorial Museum, but eight blocks away, in the shadow of the old Bank of Japan, at the 頼 山陽 San’yō Rai (1780 – 1832) Historical Site Museum in Fukuromachi. Once upon a time, at the critical decades when Japan was encountering modernity, Japan turned to San’yō’s 漢文 kanbun classic, the Nihon Gaishi (日本外史, A Collection of Folklore from Outside the Official Government Records) to answer the question of what is Japan’s soul? What is Japan’s essence? Who are we as a Japanese people, and what exactly is the Japanese nation?
At Hiroshima’s Historiographers, while we can’t provide answers to those questions, we can point in the direction of where and how those questions once were answered in an historical Japan. At the 2023 G-7 Summit, we hope to give visitors to Hiroshima a different sense than the omnipresent victim narrative, we hope to provide a glimpse at Japan’s soul. Our insights include:
- the true nature of Korea-Japan relations;
- the high degree of elective affinity between Russian and Japanese culture;
- what the 言文一致 genbun ‘ichi movement missed in terms of oral cultural
- literacy, and how Occupation Era reforms compounded that absence;
- how maritime commerce and criminality (AKA 海賊 kaizoku) presaged
- Miyajima and Hiroshima’s Imperial Era 海賊 gunto status;
- and many more.
Contact: John Mensing ([email protected], 090-2861-0828)
