Terrible Knowledge and Tertiary Trauma,Part I: Japanese Nuclear Trauma and Resistance to the Atomic Bomb in the Classroom

This article discusses twelve reasons that we must teach about the 1945 American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As with Holocaust studies, we must teach this material even though it is both emotionally and intellectually difficult—in spite of our feelings of repugnance and/or grief, and our concerns regarding students' potential distress (“tertiary trauma”). To handle such material effectively, we should keep in mind ten objectives: (1) to expand students' knowledge about the subject along with the victims' experience of it; (2) to develop teachers' awareness of and comfort with it; (3) to help students cope with this knowledge so they are not traumatized themselves; (4) to make sure students don't take refuge in callousness, inappropriate humor, blaming the victim, or despair; (5) to enable students to teach others about the event(s); (6) to enable students to use their increased knowledge and self-reflection individually and as part of the national dialogue; (7) to deepen and “complexify” the conversation on the bombings; (8) to develop supports for teachers and students throughout this process;” (9) to reintegrate the objective with the subjective, recognizing that emotion may be appropriate to some learning; (10) to instigate a dialogue allowing teachers and students to continue to investigate this and related topics.     

日本高等教育自我评估——以广岛大学为例

目前我国的高等教育评估进行得如火如荼, 尤其是外部评估, 即政府对高校进行的评估,取得了不小的成绩。与此相反,我国高校的内部评估,即大学的自我评估却相当不成熟,而且容易被大学自身忽视。文章以日本广岛大学进行案例研究,就其自我评估的理念、内容、组织机构以及结果公布进行介绍和分析,总结其成功经验,为我国高等教育自我评估提供参考和借鉴。     

浅析《广岛之恋》的现代主义特色

从《广岛之恋》题材的现代性、主题的多义性、表现手法的反传统性等方面,分析了影片所蕴涵的现代主义特点,从而阐释了它作为一部现代主义电影的经典之作在反映人“在世”的进退两难、人的情感的细腻丰富以及意识流叙事结构等方面的独特风格和重要意义。     

Narrative,Adaptation, and Change

This paper explores how individuals and communities orient themselves to the future by the way they story the past. There is a persistent tendency to think of such narratives as factual and therefore stable. The mutability of such narratives is actually a key adaptive characteristic, ranging from complete repression of individual traumas to public revisionism and debates about such events as the bombing of Hiroshima. Arguably, only those with a predictable future can afford a fixed version of the past, while those who are swept by unpredicted social change toward new learning and improvisation must also construct new narratives. This paper considers the social and individual value of multiple fluid narratives in the context of multiple belief systems of other kinds.     

‘Migrations of Chineseness’: in conversation with Ien Ang

This paper explores John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) and Nagai Takashi's The Bells of Nagasaki (1949). These two best-selling books published in the US and Japan in the late 1940s portray the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although they appeared in a similar period—a postwar transition and a herald of the Cold War—their reception was strikingly different. Hersey's piece acquired international currency when the representations of the atomic bombings in Japan were censored under the US Occupation. Since then Hiroshima has virtually remained the ‘first and only’ text about the atomic bomb victims widely read in the US. Nagai's memoir, a rare exception allowed to be circulated nationwide under the censorship, and elevated to a canonical voice of Nagasaki's experience, however, has been the subject of controversies in Japan from the 1970s. The paper argues that despite these differences, both works share parallels in narratological strategies, such as historical emplotment, the personalization of the event, compassionate identification, the valorization of the power of the atomic bomb, and the promotion of compartmentalized knowledge. These effects create a psychological deterrent for readers not to confront larger political and ethical problematics of Japanese colonialism and postwar US hegemony in Asia. Their discursive entanglement and ostensible dissociation symbolize the ways in which trans-Pacific knowledge on the atomic bombings has been shaped postwar for many decades.     

Re-visiting Hiroshima: The Role of us and japanese history textbooks in the construction of national memory

This paper originates from the perspective that school textbooks are crucial organs in the process of constructing legitimated ideologies and beliefs and are a reflection of the values considered important by powerful groups in society. This claim is explored through investigating the manner in which a selection of history textbooks in use in US and Japanese schools invites students to understand the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Linking narrative with historical analysis, the paper presents evidence which suggests that US and Japanese children are provided with a narrow view of the past which in promoting asense of unity and patriotism limits the development of a critical historical consciousness.