High Fidelity: Pedagogy and Postatomic Japanese Chronicle

Abstract

With the 75th anniversary of 1945 barely in our cultural rearview mirror, the generations who experienced World War II firsthand have ceded their stories to the generations that follow. This article focuses on the 1945 bombings of Japan, particularly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who experienced the bombings, known generally and collectively as hibakusha, worked to preserve accounts of their experiences in acts of transmission across generations that were intended to prompt particular kinds of praxis. Now the accounts—at least those for public consumption—are collected in a variety of memorial archives and exhibitions, available in translation and via a range of media. This article asks, How can we think about the ‘afterlives’ of these accounts, or how might we understand the body of archived testimony in a way that is available for engagement by subsequent generations at temporal, geographic, and linguistic remove? To address this question, I frame witnesses’ acts of memorial transmission as teaching acts. I argue that their lingering power is a pedagogical power, meant to lead the audience, the students, toward care, attention, and action. I argue that the “lesson” takes the form of Benjaminian chronicle and its activity is one of appeal and response prefigured by Japanese ritual actions of irei, or making amends with the dead. The form and activity of these lessons frame a memorial relationship with testimonial literature that moves beyond moment of production and transmission into an enduring and accessible space of critical pedagogy.