The "Inheritance" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Rethinking the Bombings towards a Post-Survivor World

With 2025 marking the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this timely study focuses on the challenge of keisho or 'inheritance' and the way a new generation of scholars and activists is re-examining the meaning of the A-bomb and the 80-year history of commemoration and activism in the stricken cities. Using a team of scholars based in the USA and Japan, many of who are academics from this new generation, The 'Inheritance' of Hiroshima and Nagasaki takes a critical look at the problem of inheritance and the current transitory moment in A-bomb commemoration and nuclear scholarship by looking at a range of historical topics from the 80-year history of post-atomic Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and beyond. The book does this by: examining historical memory in a way that disengages the two cities from a Japanese-national memory perspective by looking at global connections, on one hand, and the local history of the two cities; re-thinking the history of survivors, their experience, and their movement; and, finally, exploring material culture and the problem of inheritance and legacy.

Maika Nakao is Associate Professor at Hiroshima University, Japan. She received her Ph.D. in history of science from the University of Tokyo and is an expert on the nuclear history of Japan. She worked at Nagasaki University from 2018 to 2021 and co-edited the book, Seventy-five Years after the Atomic Bombing: Tracing Records and Memories of Nagasaki (Shoshi Tsukumo, 2021).

Christopher Gerteis is an historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan at SOAS University of London, UK and The University of Tokyo, Japan. His first book, Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (2009), is an interdisciplinary study of the forgotten history of wage-earning Japanese women who during the 1950s militantly contested the socialist labor movement's revival of many prewar notions of normative gender roles. His second book, Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (forthcoming), examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who engaged in political violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It unpacks how notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women of the 'Sixties Generation'. Dr Gerteis is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble (2012) and is Founding Series Editor of the Bloomsbury series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary. He also served as Chief Editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Japan Forum from 2014 through 2019.

Masaya Nemoto is Assistant Professor of Historical Sociology and Qualitative Research Methods at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan. His work focuses on the memory of the Asia–Pacific War and nuclear catastrophes in Japan, including the life stories of hibakusha. He has received awards for his book Hiroshima paradokusu: sengo Nihon no hankaku to jindo ishiki [Hiroshima paradox: anti-nuclearism and humanitarianism in postwar Japan] (2018).

Ran Zwigenberg is Professor of Asian Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He has published multiple works on Hiroshima, beginning with his prize-winning monograph, Hiroshima: The Rise of Global Memory Culture (2014), which addresses survivor politics, trauma, and heritage issues.