Overview

In Resurrecting Nagasaki, Chad R. Diehl explores the genesis of narratives surrounding the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945, by following the individuals and groups who contributed to the shaping of Nagasaki City's postwar identity. Municipal officials, survivor-activist groups, the Catholic community, and American occupation officials all interpreted the destruction and reconstruction of the city from different, sometimes disparate perspectives. Diehl's analysis reveals how these atomic narratives shaped both the way Nagasaki rebuilt and the ways in which popular discourse on the atomic bombings framed the city's experience for decades.

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9781501714962

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Reviews

Diehl immerses the reader deeply in the look, sound, and feel of the city via his `social cartography' of reconstruction in the first twenty-five years after the bombing. He makes the city and its inhabitants come to life by showing the interactions of real people, the dovetailing of unlikely interests and interpretations, indeed the collusions that produced Nagasaki's relationship with its atomic past in ways that are significantly different from Hiroshima's. -- Franziska Seraphim, Associate Professor of History, Boston College Diehl poses a deceptively simple question and, in answering it, succeeds in telling a stimulating and complex history of responses to the bomb in Nagasaki in the broader context of postwar Japan. -- Lori Watt, Director of East Asian Studies and Associate Professor of History and of International Studies, Washington University in St. Louis

The book makes a significant contribution to the understudied history of Nagasaki. Resurrecting Nagasaki is an important book for anyone who is interested in nuclear history, US Japan relations, US public diplomacy, and urban studies. * Japanese Studies * Resurrecting Nagasaki deserves to be read as foundational work on the post-atomic history of Nagasaki. * Pacific Historical Review * A nicely written monograph-also the first in English, as it turns out-on Nagasaki the bombed, Nagasaki the resurrected, and Nagasaki the mirror image of its ghastly twinned counterpart, Hiroshima. * Kirk Center *

Diehl poses a deceptively simple question: when considering the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, why does Hiroshima, and not Nagasaki, come to mind? This deeply researched and beautifully written study of how different constituencies in Nagasaki responded to the bomb substantially enriches our understanding of the only other atomically bombed city in history. -- Lori Watt, Director of East Asian Studies and Associate Professor of History and of International Studies, Washington University in St. Louis Diehl immerses the reader deeply in the look, sound, and feel of the city via his `social cartography' of reconstruction in the first twenty-five years after the bombing. He makes the city and its inhabitants come to life by showing the interactions of real people, the dovetailing of unlikely interests and interpretations, indeed the collusions that produced Nagasaki's relationship with its atomic past in ways that are significantly different from Hiroshima's. -- Franziska Seraphim, Associate Professor of History, Boston College

Diehl immerses the reader deeply in the look, sound, and feel of the city via his `social cartography' of reconstruction in the first twenty-five years after the bombing. He makes the city and its inhabitants come to life by showing the interactions of real people, the dovetailing of unlikely interests and interpretations, indeed the collusions that produced Nagasaki's relationship with its atomic past in ways that are significantly different from Hiroshima's. -- Franziska Seraphim, Associate Professor of History, Boston College Diehl poses a deceptively simple question: when considering the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, why does Hiroshima, and not Nagasaki, come to mind? This deeply researched and beautifully written study of how different constituencies in Nagasaki responded to the bomb substantially enriches our understanding of the only other atomically bombed city in history. -- Lori Watt, Director of East Asian Studies and Associate Professor of History and of International Studies, Washington University in St. Louis

Author Information

Chad R. Diehl is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Follow him on X @ProfDiehlLoyola.

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