Register here to join this event on Zoom. This event will also be live streamed to ESFL’s Facebook page and available for later viewing on our YouTube channel.

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.

Free and open to all

Invite your friends on Facebook!