TY - JOUR
T1 - The most modern city in the world
T2 - Isamu Noguchi’s cenotaph controversy and Hiroshima’s city of peace
AU - Zwigenberg, Ran
N1 - Funding Information:
This paper was supported by funding by the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Society for the Promotion of of Science. I wish to thank Nathan Hopson and Oleg Benesch as well as the anonymous readers of this article for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Taylor & Francis.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - During a 1951 press conference upon his arrival in Hiroshima, the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi startled reporters with the comment “Hiroshima is probably the most modern city in the world”. Noguchi’s statement expressed the ambivalence many in Japan and beyond felt towards Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bomb. Hiroshima was an expression of a modern nightmare, a failure of the enlightenment narrative of science and progress, but Hiroshima was also a tabula rasa, an urban space open for a complete reconstruction of the city, and “[for] clearing the blinders of convention to enable a bold modernity”. Indeed, the ambivalent and conflicting meanings of the bombing continued to plague the commemoration of the bombing and rebuilding of the stricken city. This paper examines Hiroshima's relation to nuclear modernity through a look at the controversy surrounding the rejection of Isamu Noguchi's design for the Hiroshima cenotaph. During the debates sparked by the design and its rejection, competing visions of Hiroshima's identity and relation to the bomb were displayed and argued about as postwar Hiroshima tried to make peace with its modern past.
AB - During a 1951 press conference upon his arrival in Hiroshima, the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi startled reporters with the comment “Hiroshima is probably the most modern city in the world”. Noguchi’s statement expressed the ambivalence many in Japan and beyond felt towards Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bomb. Hiroshima was an expression of a modern nightmare, a failure of the enlightenment narrative of science and progress, but Hiroshima was also a tabula rasa, an urban space open for a complete reconstruction of the city, and “[for] clearing the blinders of convention to enable a bold modernity”. Indeed, the ambivalent and conflicting meanings of the bombing continued to plague the commemoration of the bombing and rebuilding of the stricken city. This paper examines Hiroshima's relation to nuclear modernity through a look at the controversy surrounding the rejection of Isamu Noguchi's design for the Hiroshima cenotaph. During the debates sparked by the design and its rejection, competing visions of Hiroshima's identity and relation to the bomb were displayed and argued about as postwar Hiroshima tried to make peace with its modern past.
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U2 - 10.1080/23337486.2015.1051832
DO - 10.1080/23337486.2015.1051832
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85035004877
SN - 2333-7486
VL - 1
SP - 102
EP - 115
JO - Critical Military Studies
JF - Critical Military Studies
IS - 2
ER -