On July 14 this year, the Hiroshima High Court delivered a stunning  victory to aging sufferers of “black rain” fallout from the atomic bomb:  it recognized them as “A-bomb affected people,” or hibakusha. Why  should this be a matter of interest to residents of the Twin Cities?  Minneapolis and Nagasaki have been sister cities since 1955. Minnesota’s  two nuclear power plants, Monticello and Prairie Island, including a  nuclear waste storage facility, are near the Twin Cities. The High Court  decision provides a key to connecting the dots of the nuclear age, from  Trinity to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Marshall Islands, test sites and  nuclear facilities the world over, as well as Three Mile Island,  Chernobyl, and Fukushima. In other words, the Hiroshima decision  challenges the firewall erected to keep apart atomic weapons and “atoms  for peace.”  

With this court case as a starting point, Norma Field and Yuki Miyamoto  will explore the political, economic, environmental, and gendered  aspects of the nuclear age, including its colonial legacy.  

Norma Field is Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Professor Emerita of  the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the  University of Chicago. For a number of years, she taught a course titled  “From Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Beyond.” Her most recent book, with  Heather Bowen-Stryk, is For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An  Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature. She has pursued the  Fukushima nuclear disaster since its inception and, together with Yuki  Miyamoto, maintains the Atomic Age blog. Her most recent  Fukushima-related publication is This Will Still Be True Tomorrow:  “Fukushima Ain’t Got the Time for Olympic Games”: Two Texts on Nuclear  Disaster and Pandemic. She is currently working on a book on Fukushima.  

Yuki Miyamoto is a Professor of ethics in the Department of Religious  Studies at DePaul University where she teaches nuclear ethics,  environmental ethics, nuclear discourses in the US and Japan. She has  published monographs, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud (2011), Naze genbaku ga  aku dewa nainoka (The narrative divergence in nuclear discourse) (2020),  and A World Otherwise: Environmental Praxis in Minamata (2021), and  several articles, focusing on gender (ex. “In the Light of Hiroshima”  and “Gendered Bodies in Tokusatsu”). Her current work is to examine the  construction of postwar nuclear discourse in Japan and discrimination against the atomic bomb sufferers in Japan. She has taken DePaul students to Hiroshima and Nagasaki since 2005 on the biannual study abroad program.

For more information and to see the video: https://youtu.be/hP09jlpnqeI