More Than a Mushroom Cloud

    Although an instructor of Japanese literature may not have an opportunity to teach a course entirely focused on Hiroshima/Nagasaki, this paper shows that it is always possible to include related texts as part of the reading assignment.
    When I taught “Japanese Literature in Translation” that featured the Japanese family, women and marriage as the theme of the course, I adopted a socio-historical approach and assisted students to examine the issue of A-bombing of Hiroshima from multiple perspectives. Students, first, read an article that referred to the potential danger of using nuclear weapons in the present days to approach the issue of Hiroshima as the current issue in our society. Students were also required to learn the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Asia during WWII to position the issue in the appropriate historical context, examine different discourses on the validity of the use of A-bombs, and compare and contrast Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse with the film version of the text to understand the prolonged suffering of the victims in Japanese society. As a summative activity, students read peace poetry and they themselves composed haiku verses on peace.
    In the process of learning, students from multi-cultural backgrounds actively engaged in discussion in small groups and later with the entire class. According to the students’ survey, students appreciated this interactive activity that helped them promote their critical thinking.
    I hope that this report will give a pedagogical hint to instructors of Japanese language and literature.

War has become a media event for spectators who expect 'shock and awe' – and speedy victory. For the modern soldier, war is a kind of video game where the enemy has no face and death is without meaning. War has a 'new face' that is turned away from its human consequences.
The thesis of this paper is that our view of war must also undergo a transformation that recognizes the human consequences of military technology. In the research reported below[in the paper], role-playing based on a constructivist learning model is employed to alter the perceptions of war held by students in undergraduate liberal arts colleges. Studies conducted in two colleges over a three-year period provide evidence that war experience as mediated by comics and role-playing is a promising methodology for peace educators.

Hiroshima uniquely challenges our capacities to balance scholarly objectivity with compassionate subjectivity. “Hiroshima: Eros or Thanatos?” is an interdisciplinary senior seminar that requires students to grapple with this challenge as they apply the methodologies of their academic majors to questions raised by Hiroshima. In examining the (non)decision to use the bomb, for example, international relations, management, and political science majors help their peers understand and critique diplomatic, organizational, and political analyses of the war’s endgame. Other majors provide their own insights as we look at the history of the Cold War in America and Japan, and at the various cultural and political artifacts from that era.
Moral and political ideologies typically cloud discussions of Hiroshima. Spurred by the controversies surrounding the 1995 Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit, I had originally intended merely to cultivate in students the capacity for comprehending how American veterans could see Hiroshima as deliverance while anti-nuclear peace advocates understood it as a symbol of apocalypse. The course was to conclude with the Lifton-esque appreciation for how impending nuclear holocaust could lead to our potential salvation through species consciousness. But as students learned from and challenged each other, with the instructor serving as ad-hoc devil's advocate, we were ineluctably led to recognize: the power and limits of the authority of expert and witness (be he/she veteran or victim); the epistemological and ontological constraints of the human condition that holocaust culture reveals; and more generally the ambivalent relationship of citizen and scientist, soldier, poet, and artist to nation, state, and humanity.

    In our team-taught and interdisciplinary course at Tufts, "Cultural Legacies of the Atomic Bomb," students gain much knowledge about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as about current nuclear issues in general. But the course aspires to go beyond the facile assumption of "more knowledge = superior ethical positioning." In fact, the course challenges the students' very quest for knowledge and their desire to be ethical in relation to such immense manifestations of evil.
    Students must first consider the nature of interdisciplinarity: we learn that our knowledge of an event is organized by different disciplines (or discourses). Thus, we bring to our class different discourses about Hiroshima, such as science, history, journalism, literature, cinema, etc. We learn that each discipline has its own way of producting knowledge, often vying with others. Even within a discipline, there seems to be no final truth established about an event. Moreover, students need to think about how knowledge is represented. Is it at all possible to represent Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Finally, we confront the sanctity of victimhood: can we pretend to be one of them even though we were not there?
    In our course, students move from ignorance to knowledge and then to confusion. Our final assignment asks whether they still want to talk about Hiroshima/Nagasaki. If not, they have to explain in an esay why not; if yes, why, what, and how they want to talk. Out of our fallible embrace of trutgh, our students keep talking with much confusion, imagination, and passion.