A city brings together in the same space different ages, offering to our gaze a sedimented history of tastes and cultural forms. The city gives itself as both to be seen and to be read.Footnote 1
Introduction: reviving Nagasaki
After the atomic bombing of 9 August 1945, Nagasaki residents faced a long road to recovery. Of the 51,000 buildings in the city, 36.1 per cent were completely destroyed. Because the bomb exploded in the narrow Urakami Valley in the northern part of the city, mountains buffered much of the power of the bomb, but radioactive fallout blanketed the entire city.Footnote 2 By the end of 1945, approximately 74,000 people, or 27.4 per cent of the population of 270,000, had died due to the blast, the fires or the radiation, and another 75,000 were injured.Footnote 3 American Marines who occupied the city during the first year after the bombing called Urakami the ‘Valley of Death’, because it had been reduced to an irradiated landscape of rubble and corpses.Footnote 4 As one Marine recalled years later, the ‘stench of the dead was so overwhelming that you could never become accustomed to it. It even lingered in our clothes.’Footnote 5 For months, surviving residents lived in the bombed out area in dugout air-raid trenches or makeshift huts assembled from debris, and the entire city struggled to maintain a daily existence amid the destruction. As in cities throughout the world that had suffered the ravages of World War II, daily survival was the primary concern in Nagasaki, and dreams of a full recovery carried the city forward and out of the ashes.
The reconstruction of a city after mass destruction is a creative process involving a variety of memories and visions. In his study on the rebuilding of Soviet Sevastopol after World War II, Karl D. Qualls describes reconstruction as an ‘urban identification project’, one that grows out of a conversation among ‘competing visions for restoration’.Footnote 6 Many visions for restoration and reconstruction emerged in post-atomic Nagasaki, but there was little competition, as municipal officials controlled the conversation and had the greatest impact in shaping the landscape of the city and its urban identity. Recent scholarship on the urban history of post-war Japan has pointed out the continuities of the infrastructure of urban planning throughout the country from the pre-war through the post-war periods, especially in regards to the top-down approach – from the national government to the municipalities – to implementing urban reconstruction policies.Footnote 7 This article complements the literature but takes a different approach, exploring instead the ways in which the relationship between the historical past, the immediate (atomic) present and the municipal vision for the future shaped Nagasaki's local and national identity in the first five years of reconstruction, especially in comparison to Hiroshima.
Many groups worked for the reconstruction of the city, but few shared exactly the same vision. Differing views of politics, religion, history and memory informed the kinetic enterprise of reconstruction, and the groups who held these views constituted what must be called a social cartography of reconstruction. The municipal vision of reconstruction emerged first. In the first four years after the war, the mayor, city councilmen, urban planners and economists sought to link the city's historical past to its present instead of defining its public image solely in terms of the atomic bombing. They recalled the Nagasaki of days of old, when the city had boasted economic ties to China and the Netherlands for more than 300 years. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, when Japan was closed off from relations with Europe, Nagasaki remained the sole window to the west, both in trade and intellectual exchange. From 1859, after Japan signed a series of treaties with other western countries, Nagasaki City was opened as a port of trade to England, the United States, Russia and France, which altered the cityscape as representatives from these countries erected western-style buildings.Footnote 8 The atomic bomb did not erase this historical legacy, which prompted officials to call for the reconstruction of Nagasaki as an ‘international cultural city’, an approach that became official in 1949 when the Nagasaki International Cultural City Construction Law passed unanimously in the National Diet in Tokyo. The municipal government created memorials and museums to commemorate the bombing, but unlike in Hiroshima, addressing the city's atomic memory was never a top priority for officials in Nagasaki.
The hibakusha, or atomic-bombing survivors, promoted a vision of reconstruction that directly challenged the municipal vision, which they saw as ignoring the memory of the destruction and the plight of the most affected survivors. The hibakusha wanted the city to emphasize the atomic experience in the reconstruction process, just as Hiroshima City was doing, but in the first decade after the bombing, the hibakusha had almost no political voice as a group, which meant no influence in the plans for reconstruction. Only in the mid-1950s did they successfully assert their demands for municipal and national assistance in paying medical treatment costs.Footnote 9
For Nagasaki Catholics, whose community resided in the Urakami Valley and lost approximately 85 per cent of its 10,000 members in the bombing, reconstruction became a vision of the complete renewal of the valley. The Catholics supported the municipal vision, especially discussions of restoring the ‘international’ nature of the city, because it suited their identity as part of a global community of Catholics. They advocated removal of all atomic-bombing relics in Urakami that reminded them of the tragedy and threatened their total recovery as a community, even the ruins of their cathedral. The Catholics promoted remembrance of the bombing, but also encouraged moving past it, an approach shared by city officials intent on promoting a history of international culture.
The municipal vision dominated in the first years of reconstruction and set the city apart from its atomic counterpart, Hiroshima. This article thus focuses on the rise and development of that vision. Though sharing the similar experience of atomic destruction with Hiroshima, local identity dictated reconstruction in Nagasaki. For a city that was once known as the ‘Kyoto of Kyushu’, and even the ‘Naples of Japan’, it was natural to wish to rebuild the city in those terms rather than associate it with an atomic wasteland.Footnote 10 The rhetoric of ‘international’ and ‘historic’ Nagasaki that defined post-war discussions of reconstruction drew its vocabulary from a tradition of regional identity and pride in an historical image of the city, which politicians, newspapers and journals had promoted since decades before the bombing. City planners and politicians in post-atomic Nagasaki simply carried the tradition of boasting of their international history into the present. In contrast, a desire to distance the city from its historical past as a military centre drove the reconstruction process in Hiroshima. Officials there grounded their dream of reconstruction on the idea that, as the first atomic-bombed city, Hiroshima should become the centre of ‘peace’ in Japan. In their drive to carve out an identity as the ‘peace city’ in Japan, Hiroshima officials sought to exclude Nagasaki from their city's atomic memory.
The story of the reconstruction of Nagasaki begins to balance the scholarship on the atomic bombings, which has favoured Hiroshima's experience for nearly seven decades. ‘Hiroshima’ is looked to as the key to understanding the bombings, or atomic destruction more generally, which even a cursory glance at the literature of any field reveals. Literary scholar John Treat acknowledges this fact, calling Hiroshima the ‘metonymy’ of nuclear destruction, past and future, yet he includes only one chapter on Nagasaki out of 11 in his seminal work on atomic-bomb literature.Footnote 11 A recent edited volume on urban reconstruction in Japan after World War II includes a chapter on Hiroshima, but not one on Nagasaki, implying that Hiroshima represents the experience of both cities, or at least perpetuating the assumption that Hiroshima is somehow a more representative atomic-bombed city than Nagasaki.Footnote 12 The subtitle of an excellent book on the early history of scientific research on the survivors of both cities subsumes Nagasaki within ‘Hiroshima’, which has been the most common approach to writing about the ‘atomic bombings’.Footnote 13 To be sure, scholars do not set out to erase Nagasaki from the historical narrative. But an enduring focus on Hiroshima threatens to do just that. Furthermore, writing exclusively on Hiroshima leaves half of the story unwritten, which limits our understanding of how each city responded to their atomic destruction in ways that reflect their regional and historical identities. In that sense, Hiroshima's experience cannot speak for, nor represent, Nagasaki. It is surely time to revive Nagasaki and write its experience back into the history and memory of the atomic bombings and their aftermath.
Reviving ‘old Nagasaki’ with ‘culture’ and ‘peace’: the rise of the municipal vision
The municipal vision of reconstruction emerged within weeks after the bombing, even before the arrival of American occupation troops to Nagasaki in September. On 28 August, only 19 days after the bombing, members of the Nagasaki Prefectural Association of Commerce, Industry and Economy met with the mayor of Nagasaki, Okada Jukichi, to discuss plans to ‘revive the Great Nagasaki City of yesteryear bathed in its brilliant light’.Footnote 14 Two days later, the group submitted its official recommendation, the ‘Great Nagasaki Revival Plan’ (Dai Nagasaki-shi fukkô keikaku), which outlined the path the city should take in its reconstruction. Nagasaki, the economists declared, should draw on its history and become an international centre of trade and tourism. It should ‘be the gateway of western Japan’ and serve as the base of trade with China and Taiwan, in the end becoming a ‘free trade port’. In addition, historic areas of Nagasaki should be ‘beautified’ to develop the city as a sightseeing centre.Footnote 15
The ideas in the petition gained immediate traction. Economist Itô Hisa'aki pointed out in mid-September that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, especially its shipbuilding factories, for which the city had been famous since the latter part of the nineteenth century, had ‘suffered a fatal blow’ with defeat. Therefore, he argued, the city ‘has no choice but to continue its economic existence as a traditional port of trade’. Nagasaki, he added, should also take the opportunity to rebuild in such a way as to attract tourists. Once the rubble had been cleared, and the ‘scattered dung of horses and cows’ removed from the streets in the manner of a ‘civilized country’ (bunmeikoku), then the city could erect ‘modern hotels and recreational facilities’, as well as ‘wide streets, greenbelts, and flower gardens’. Then, the ‘sightseeing city of Nagasaki’ would surely attract ‘high-class people of culture’ to its various historical sites and museums that celebrated the city's rich past as an international port city.Footnote 16
‘Nagasaki culture’, it was thought, provided fertile ground for reconstruction, because, despite the atomic destruction of the city, it had not been destroyed in the bombing. Itô admitted that the ruins of ‘the exotic Cathedral’ on a hill in Urakami aroused sentimental thoughts in everyone who looked upon it, and it would indeed become a ‘historical memento of Japanese Christians’, but he declared that the tragic scene should not dishearten the city. The destruction of Nagasaki's Christian community and its cathedral by the atomic bomb dropped by ‘Christian America’, Itô claimed, was a ‘regrettable event for cultural Nagasaki’, but ‘historical traditions cannot be destroyed by mere violence’. Itô concluded, ‘In this aerial bombing, the cultural Nagasaki of history sustained no fatal wound’, and ‘the modern cultural city of Nagasaki’ should continue to have deep contact with the ‘new China’.Footnote 17 Itô's message was clear: Nagasaki could overcome its tragic fate and rise from the ashes by embracing and reviving its past as an international trading port.
Mayor Okada agreed. The reconstruction of Nagasaki would require exorbitant amounts of money – over the next 10 years, the mayor predicted that recovery costs might exceed 100,000,000 yen – and the national government could not be counted on to supply the money. Nagasaki was not the only city in Japan that lay in ruins, and the national government needed to spread its resources over the entire country. In Nagasaki, the mayor pointed out, reconstruction funds could also not count on the industrial profits of Mitsubishi and other destroyed companies. The ‘decrease’ (gen) in numbers of residents in Nagasaki due to the atomic bombing made taxes an unreliable source of funds. Nagasaki's only recourse, the mayor thought, resided in the city's future as a hub of trade, which he hoped would soon resume with China, and as a city of tourism.Footnote 18
The foundation for the official plan of reconstruction was now set. In early October 1945, less than two months after the bombing, the City Planning Division of the Prefectural Public Works Department released the official plan: Nagasaki was to become a city of trade, tourism and culture. Considering the wishes of the ‘people of old Nagasaki’ as well as the ‘people of new Nagasaki’, the planners proposed the construction of ‘Great Nagasaki’ as a ‘city of free trade’ and a ‘city of tourism’. An elaborate system of trains and trolleys would cover the city, so that residents would not have to walk more than 200 or 300 metres to ride public transportation. Streets would be wider than before and public parks would abound.Footnote 19
Reconstruction projects also sought to create an atmosphere of ‘modern culture’ in the city. In 1946, the Nagasaki Cultural Association (Nagasaki bunka konwa kai) emerged to propose a name for the reconstruction of the city, and the intellectual elite who made up the group organized an informal meeting in August to discuss with planning officials the merits of their suggestion to envision Nagasaki as a ‘Cultural City’. Several city planners attended the ‘Cultural City Construction Colloquium’ (Bunka toshi kensetsu kondankai), including the head of the Prefectural City Planning Division as well as the chief of the City Facilities Department, Naruse Kaoru, who later became head of the City Construction Office. The group discussed concrete ways to construct modernized streets, shopping areas, improved harbours, an airport, parks, sports grounds and other facilities to enliven the city, or, as one member called them, ‘good policies for prosperity’. They discussed creating a ‘Nagasaki City of tourism’ by building hotels and such, and also the possibility of setting aside two or three areas for the construction of pleasure quarters (or red-light districts: kanrakugai).Footnote 20
The rhetoric of ‘cultural city’ – and indeed ‘cultural’ everything – was standard post-war language, but in Nagasaki the word held a specific significance that drew on the city's history. Making Nagasaki a city of ‘culture’ relied on its past, but, as city planners quickly realized, reconstruction in the wake of war and the atomic bombs also required the promotion of another ubiquitous post-war term: peace. Public discourse focused on the peace that many Americans and Japanese argued the bombing had brought about. Thus, those who survived the devastation of Nagasaki endured the first years of defeat and occupation by viewing the atomic tragedy through a discourse of peace.
The discourse of peace was ubiquitous in Japan. Prime Minister Higashikuni Naruhiko declared in September 1945 the general hope of Japan to ‘construct a nation of peace not inferior to the United States’ (Beikoku ni otoranai heiwa kokka kensetsu). ‘We will build a completely new, peaceful Japan’, he said, ‘and it will become a cultural nation (bunkakoku) of high morality’.Footnote 21 John Dower writes that the
two most familiar slogans of the early postwar period – ‘Construct a Nation of Peace’ (Heiwa Kokka Kensetsu) and ‘Construct a Nation of Culture’ (Bunka Kokka Kensetsu) – resurrected two key themes of wartime propaganda, construction and culture, and turned them into rallying cries for the creation of a nation resting on democratic, antimilitaristic principles.
In the immediate post-war, ‘Catchphrases were like valises’, Dower notes, ‘waiting to be emptied of their old contents and filled with something new’.Footnote 22 The word ‘peace’ found its way into every corner of society and culture, from festivals to reconstruction laws to the ‘Peace Constitution’ of 1946, written by the Americans. The constitution's Article 9 forever renounced war, underlining Japan's resolve to maintain peace. The ideas of peace and culture became intertwined as the country sought to rebuild as a demilitarized and democratic nation.
While Higashikuni did not last long as prime minister, the concept of building a nation of ‘peace’ quickly took root and persisted. The first year of reconstruction in Nagasaki, as local newspapers put it, represented the city's ‘first step toward the historic construction of peace’. ‘Among the ruins of atomic-town Nagasaki (genshi no machi Nagasaki)’, the Nagasaki shinbun reported on 4 August 1946, ‘a town of modest houses has emerged’, and the ‘city-plan of Nagasaki City, which was established in the “atomic town” of ruins and dust, embodies a beautiful dream aimed at the reconstruction of a port city of bright and virtuous peace’. Nagasaki, the paper declared, was ‘making a comeback’ as it slowly rebuilt its prestige as an international port, ‘conveying its spirit of new life’ as far as ‘the mountains that surround the port’.Footnote 23
Some officials and townspeople understood the importance of preserving the atomic ruins as reminders of the horrors of war. Indeed, they considered it to be key to fulfilling the mission of building a nation of peace. At a city council meeting on 6 October 1945, councilman Kunitomo, who had lost his wife in the atomic bombing, declared that rallying cries for the revival of the city were not enough. As an atomic-bombed city, Nagasaki had a responsibility to do more. He argued that the city should retain the ruins of the atomic bomb that ‘snatched away the existence of tens of thousands of our countrymen’. By preserving the physical traces of the bombing, he claimed, ‘we must provide to the world research material on the menacing atomic bomb of science that laid the foundation for world peace’. ‘We have a human obligation’, Kunitomo continued, ‘to fully record the aftermath of the destruction, and preserve all important research material, such as factory ruins, scorched trees, and the crumbled Urakami Cathedral.’ These ruins, he believed, would long interest historians, much like the ruins of Pompeii. Kunitomo asserted that it was ‘the duty of a cultured nation’ to conduct the necessary preservation work.Footnote 24 Even though he failed to see the irony in boasting of the connection between the atomic bomb and ‘world peace’, an idea that echoed American interpretations of the bombs, Kunitomo sought to promote peace and memory activism, such as the preservation of atomic relics, as part of the city's post-war mission.
The preservation of ruins presented an additional advantage in Kunitomo's mind. He pointed out that a western scholar claimed that even though Japan was a ‘civilized nation’, it was not a ‘cultured nation’. For Kunitomo, post-atomic reconstruction was Nagasaki's chance to help the country rise in the eyes of the world through the ‘sacrifice’ of his wife and tens of thousands of others. Preservation of the ruins would demonstrate to the world that Nagasaki and the Japanese people truly regretted their part in the war, and that the ‘noble sacrifice of tens of thousands of Nagasaki City residents has rid the world of war forever’.Footnote 25 Preservation connected the ideas inherent in the municipal vision, and thus became a part of the early reconstruction plans. Ruins, such as the demolished Urakami Cathedral, stood as reminders of Nagasaki's international past, the dangers of modernity, the folly of war and the importance of peace, which was a major component of post-war international culture. The composite symbolism of the ruins in Nagasaki also made the city an attractive place for historical and atomic tourism. As the city began the long reconstruction process, its path looked bright as it overcame its atomic devastation as a modern city in control of its future.
Refining the municipal vision
National reconstruction plans did not prioritize Nagasaki and Hiroshima at first. The national government had developed a plan in November 1945 to aid in the reconstruction of 115 war-torn cities, including the two atomic-bombed cities.Footnote 26 In August 1946, months after Japan had begun laying out national city-reconstruction plans, delegates from Nagasaki and Hiroshima travelled to Tokyo to discuss their individual municipal plans with officials from the Ministry of Home Affairs. The national government, as Mayor Okada had pointed out, could not be counted on for reconstruction funds in 1945, but by autumn 1946 there was promise. The August 1946 meeting in Tokyo, as Deputy Mayor Kan'no reported upon his return to Nagasaki, had gone ‘smoothly’. The delegates from the atomic-bombed cities and ministry officials had agreed that Japan should promote the reconstruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima over the other war-damaged cities.Footnote 27 Here was official recognition that the two cities were indeed different from the other bombed-out cities of Japan.
City governments all over Japan were struggling to fund their projects, but city officials from Nagasaki and Hiroshima thought that the ‘special’ nature of their destruction entitled them to national funds. Throughout 1946, officials from both cities, inspired and supported by local public opinion, worked together to request ‘special funds’ from the national treasury for their cities, which they argued required more aid than the ‘general war-damaged city’.Footnote 28 The August meeting in Tokyo took into consideration the fact that the two cities were destroyed by atomic bombs, which national officials agreed made them different and declared that the reconstruction of the two cities was also ‘special’ (tokubetsu).Footnote 29 At a plenary meeting of parliament on 23 August 1946, Nagasaki representative Honda Eisaku and Hiroshima representative Kuroda Yoshi submitted an official petition. Parliament adopted the proposal without delay, and upon negotiating a ‘concrete figure’ from the Treasury Office, Nagasaki prepared to ‘launch full-blown city reconstruction’.Footnote 30
But the special funding Nagasaki received also appeared to leave the city at the mercy of the national government. A year later in August 1947, Nagasaki and Hiroshima no longer seemed to be working together but rather taking different paths to building their respective post-war identities. Hiroshima held a massive commemoration ceremony for the second anniversary of the atomic bombing on 6 August, for which it received a special message from General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander for the Allied Powers during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–52). This was the first ‘peace festival’ held in Hiroshima and it attracted more than 10,000 people. Nagasaki officials, for their part, organized a city-sponsored week-long ‘Foreign Trade Revival Festival’ (bôeki fukkô sai) to promote the city's recovering commercial trade and shipbuilding industry, rather than a commemoration of their atomic bombing on 9 August.Footnote 31 The Nagasaki minyû newspaper company, after receiving letters from Nagasaki residents expressing ‘jealousy’ over the situation in Hiroshima, decided to investigate. City officials seemed to have been so consumed by their goal to make Nagasaki a city of trade and tourism that they neglected the memory of the bombing, despite discussions to preserve atomic relics. A reporter named Sakamoto made this point in an interview with the newly elected mayor, Ôhashi Hiroshi, on 8 August.Footnote 32 The mayor, failing to see it as a major problem or setback, placed the blame on the national government. Ôhashi claimed that ‘We received a notice from the government’ that the municipal government was not allowed to sponsor a commemoration of the bombing. ‘I forget if it was from the Ministry of Home Affairs of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’, he continued, ‘but it came from one of the ministries in charge.’Footnote 33
Perhaps there existed no ‘notice’ from the government at all in regard to such a commemoration. It hardly seems likely that Hiroshima could hold a massive peace event and Nagasaki could not. But now that the city was receiving extra funds from the national government, to divert from the course of reconstruction would make little political sense, and further, it would not distinguish the city from Hiroshima. Organizers of the Foreign Trade Revival Festival in August 1947 intended it to ‘celebrate the shining rebirth (kadode) of the promotion of foreign trade and the reconstruction of the economy’ of the city.Footnote 34 But many in Nagasaki (and Hiroshima) could not understand the official decision not to commemorate the bombing. Nagasaki residents made their voices heard, insisting that the city not allow the atomic bombing to be forgotten as they moved forward with reconstruction. But city officials stood firm in their determination to realize the vision of a restored ‘international’ Nagasaki, leaving atomic memory to play only a secondary role in the identity of the city.
The atomic experience did not have a large presence in the national profile of Nagasaki in 1947 as it did in Hiroshima's. Instead, the shipbuilding and maritime-based economy and the presence of the Catholic community were featured in discussions of the city in national media. An August 1947 news film by Nihon nyûsu celebrated the revival of these two features as central to the revival of the city and the preservation of its historical identity. The report, Nagasaki monogatari (Nagasaki Story), was short (less than one minute) and to the point, suggesting that the recovery of both symbols after the atomic bombing demonstrated the recovery of the city as a whole. This reflected the image of the city as promoted in the municipal vision, and, like municipal officials, the news film deemphasized the memory of the atomic bombing as a major factor in the reconstruction process.Footnote 35
One year later in August 1948, the mood surrounding atomic memory in Nagasaki had a very different tone. By the time of the third-year anniversary of the bombing, politicians recognized the significance of the atomic experience to the post-war identity of the city, and the municipal vision of reconstruction began to include the promotion of atomic memory for the purposes of tourism and peace activism. On 9 August 1948, the city sponsored what would become the standard commemoration. During the ‘Culture Festival’, or ‘Reconstruction Festival’ as it was also known, citywide public ceremonies and pledges to ‘never repeat the tragedy of Atomic Nagasaki (atomu-Nagasaki)’ blended with the official insistence on building a ‘city of trade and tourism’.Footnote 36 Mayor Ôhashi delivered a speech in ‘Atomic Park’ (later ‘Peace Park’), challenging residents to convert the atomic tragedy into something meaningful: ‘The sacrifice we paid was enormous, but the result has been even grander. Nagasaki is not just a city of Japan.’ In order to ‘repay the noble sacrifice, [we] commit ourselves to the realization of the cultural Nagasaki that the world expects, to conquer all obstacles and to exert great effort and diligence’.Footnote 37 Nagasaki, in other words, must not dwell on its atomic tragedy, but rather should exert efforts to reconstruct with the goal of becoming a world city, not simply a Japanese city. The city's international past provided a template for that vision. Moreover, Ôhashi thought, to make the atomic experience the central part of the city's identity would impede the development of Nagasaki as a city of significance beyond the borders of Japan. Nagasaki's official mission, in other words, was to rebuild as both a city of international culture and an international city.
Throughout the ceremony, in addition to the usual rhetoric of ‘Cultural Nagasaki’, ‘peace’ was the catchword. The Nagasaki City Council vice-chairman read the first ever ‘Peace Declaration’, which would become a staple of the anniversary ceremony of Nagasaki (as in Hiroshima), elucidating the city's approach to commemoration. The declaration emphasized two key phrases that made atomic memory significant to Nagasaki's developing image as a city of peace activism: ‘Peace Starts from Nagasaki’ and ‘No More Nagasakis’. The declaration made no mention of Hiroshima. Nagasaki officials were seeking to link their city to an international world that existed beyond Japan's borders – to make Nagasaki ‘not just a city of Japan’ – and so to associate it with Hiroshima, which had made the atomic experience central to its urban identity, might limit Nagasaki's own vision. The omission of ‘Hiroshima’ can also be attributed to an emerging competitiveness between the two atomic-bombed cities.
The battle for ‘peace’ and the special-city reconstruction laws
By 1948, Nagasaki and Hiroshima had settled into their approaches to reconstruction, each professing the greater significance of their city's atomic destruction and peace work. Officials in each city considered their own tragedy as the ‘cornerstone’ of world peace, but the term held different meaning for each. Hiroshima officials viewed their city as different from and, in terms of the emergence of the nuclear age, more significant than Nagasaki, because it was the first city in history to experience the destruction of an atomic bomb.Footnote 38 Nagasaki officials, however, considered their atomic bombing as more significant precisely because it was the second and last atomic bombing, which to them meant that their atomic tragedy had ended the war. Hence the phrase, ‘Peace Starts from Nagasaki.’ But the approach of Nagasaki officials and city planners to rebuild the city as a centre of international trade, tourism and culture made them appear less eager than Hiroshima to stress the horror of an atomic bomb and the necessity to work for world peace. The political struggle between the two cities over their rightful places in the popular symbolism of the atomic bombings came to a head in 1949 when each city's approach to reconstruction became immortalized in ‘special-city reconstruction laws’.
In late April 1949, Hiroshima officials decided to take action to secure the city's post-war identity as the primary atomic-bombed city. Delegates from Hiroshima, including the mayor, travelled to Tokyo for a National Diet Meeting taking place on 10 May to propose the ratification of the ‘Hiroshima Peace Commemoration City Construction Law’ (Hiroshima heiwa kinen toshi kensetsu hô). The law reflected the direction Hiroshima had been taking since its atomic bombing, as well as the image that officials wanted to project into the future – as the first atomic-bombed city, Hiroshima must stand as the pre-eminent symbol of the horror of war and the importance of peace.Footnote 39 Officials in Nagasaki received no notification from Hiroshima of its plan to propose the legislation to the Diet, catching them off guard and unprepared. Nagasaki officials felt betrayed because they claimed there had existed a promise between the cities to work in harmony to protect the special character of the two atomic-bombed cities among the rest of the bombed-out cities of Japan. That it had come to Hiroshima's need for individual recognition ahead of Nagasaki as a special atomic-bombed city, Nagasaki officials thought, was ‘regrettable’.Footnote 40
Nagasaki officials tried to catch up. Mayor Ôhashi and a few others from Nagasaki rushed to Tokyo in time for the National Diet meeting, working through the night to cobble together a proposal for their own reconstruction legislation. The Nagasaki representative in the Diet, Kadoya Seiichi, attributed his city's ‘slow start’ to the self-serving attitude of Hiroshima, considering that Nagasaki officials had to ‘stop an already departed train, jump on with a lot of luggage, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder to ride together’ with Hiroshima.Footnote 41 City council members who stayed behind in Nagasaki organized an ad hoc meeting on the night of 9 May, the day before the Diet meeting. Some members thought that Nagasaki, too, should be a ‘peace city’. Indeed, Hiroshima did not hold a monopoly on the word, but the designation of Nagasaki as a ‘cultural city’ had already gained traction.Footnote 42
Either way, Hiroshima was not willing to share the spotlight. At an earlier meeting of the Liberal People's Party (Minjitô), Hiroshima supporters objected to the inclusion of ‘peace’ in Nagasaki's official title. The word ‘peace’ defined the reconstruction of Hiroshima because the city could not draw on its past and revive its history as a major military headquarters for the Imperial Army. One Hiroshima representative at the Minjitô meeting pleaded that only Hiroshima's law be passed because its purpose, he explained, was to rid the city of its military traces, that is of former ‘land for military use’. Nagasaki had none to speak of, he pointed out, saying, ‘I ask that you approve only Hiroshima's law.’ Nagasaki's representatives did not attend that meeting, but later they joined Hiroshima representatives for another meeting with the Minjitô, where it became clear after intense debate characterized by ‘heroic hometown love’ (hisô naru kyôdoai) that Hiroshima's law could not pass the Diet without a similar law for Nagasaki. Only the content of the law needed to be decided, including a designation for the city to define its path of reconstruction.Footnote 43
Hiroshima officials sought a monopoly on the word ‘peace’. On 3 May, representatives from Nagasaki and Hiroshima held a joint meeting to discuss the Nagasaki law, attended by Mayor Ôhashi. The meeting ‘saw the confrontation of fiery opinions’ from both sides, but in the end it only ‘strengthened the attitude of Hiroshima’, which claimed that there could be only one peace city. The Hiroshima side argued, as Nagasaki representative Tsubouchi explained in the Nagasaki minyû on 11 May, that the existence of two peace cities in Japan would ‘undoubtedly blur the focal point’ and dilute the essence of a ‘peace city’ altogether. Whether the concern over a blurred ‘focal point’ refers to ‘peace’ or ‘Hiroshima’ was not clear. But Hiroshima's unwillingness to share the designation of a ‘peace city’ determined the fate of the two cities. It was decided at a following board meeting of the Minjitô that Nagasaki would instead become a ‘city of culture’.Footnote 44
Indeed, as Tsubouchi titled his op-ed piece in the Nagasaki minyû, Nagasaki had lost to Hiroshima. On 10 May, the National Diet unanimously passed the ‘Hiroshima Peace Commemoration City Construction Law’ and the ‘Nagasaki International Cultural City Construction Law’ (Nagasaki kokusai bunka toshi kensetsu hô). Hiroshima, as planned, became the ‘peace city’ of Japan, while Nagasaki joined a clique of ‘international cultural cities’ that included Kyoto, Nara, Beppu, Itô and others. Despite the ubiquity of ‘culture’ and ‘peace’ in post-war Japan, the former dominated in the titles of city reconstruction laws. Nagasaki hoped to emphasize its history of ‘international culture’ that had defined it for centuries, but also the contemporary international culture that included peace activism. Beppu put emphasis on its ‘international tourism and hot spring culture’, using the term ‘international’ quite loosely, but Kyoto came close to resembling Nagasaki with its ‘Kyoto International Cultural Tourism City Construction Law’ (Kyôto kokusai bunka kankô toshi kensetsu hô). Nara's law was nearly identical to Kyoto's. Like Nagasaki's law, each city aimed at the ‘achievement of the ideal of everlasting world peace’, a phrase that appeared, identically, in the opening clause of the laws.Footnote 45 Among the bombed-out cities in Japan, Hiroshima managed to preserve its image as the sole ‘peace city’. As an atomic-bombed city, Nagasaki's image was less defined, taking a back seat to Hiroshima, at least on the official level.
The inability of Nagasaki officials to secure a reconstruction law with the word ‘peace’ in the title demonstrated the effect of the municipal vision of reconstruction on the image of the city, as well as Nagasaki's political weakness in comparison to Hiroshima. Many in Nagasaki could not understand why ‘peace’ did not appear in the title. Tsubouchi argued that there were many issues upon which Nagasaki needed to ‘greatly reflect’ in the future, but the main reason that Nagasaki had lost to Hiroshima was that it had not kept up with Hiroshima's peace activism, which had been strong for more than three and a half years. The ‘loss’ of the word ‘peace’ should serve as Nagasaki's wake-up call, he argued, but the ‘International Cultural City Law’ was by no means a loss. Rather, Tsubouchi declared, ‘I truly pray from the heart that with this law Nagasaki emerges internationally as a cultural bridge across the world and sustains lasting development.’Footnote 46 Overall, city officials and residents were hopeful about their newly defined mission. For Nagasaki in 1949, international culture meant celebrating a vibrant past while embracing a responsibility to work for everlasting peace, even without an official designation as a ‘peace city’. The 1949 law promoted the themes that had defined the municipal vision of reconstruction since 1945 – trade, tourism and international culture – but it also made room for the atomic memory of the city through engaging in the post-war discourse of ‘peace’. Despite the loss to Hiroshima of the word ‘peace’ in legislation, local newspapers referred to the city as ‘Peace and Culture City Nagasaki’ (bunka heiwa toshi Nagasaki), or simply as ‘Peace City Nagasaki’ (heiwa toshi Nagasaki), both of which were interchangeable with ‘International Cultural City’.Footnote 47
The law also complemented the mission of Nagasaki officials to link the city to a post-war culture beyond Japan's borders. In his address to the National Diet, Nagasaki representative Wakamatsu Torao declared that the law would make Nagasaki the ‘central city of international peace’ in Japan, because the idea was inherent in the title, Kokusai bunka toshi, which could be interpreted as both ‘city of international culture’ and ‘international city of culture’. The motto of the city, ‘Peace Starts from Nagasaki’, rallied for the mission.Footnote 48 Because ‘peace’ was implied in the title of the law, then, it did not need to be stated outright as in the Hiroshima law. The idea of ‘Peace Starts from Nagasaki’ had gained traction on a national scale, as demonstrated in May 1949 when the emperor visited Nagasaki and encouraged the residents to ‘turn the sacrifice of the atomic bombing into the foundation of peace’.Footnote 49 The official designation as an ‘international cultural city’ instead of a ‘peace city’ allowed Nagasaki to move forward from its tragedy by embracing both its historic past and its present role as a ‘foundation of peace’.
Embracing the municipal vision
The people of Nagasaki seemed to welcome the International Cultural City Construction Law. A public vote was held on 7 July 1949, and an historic 73.5 per cent of eligible voters showed up to the polls, voting unanimously in favour of the law. Of the 81,637 people to cast votes, 79,220 (98.6 per cent) chose to adopt the law, while only 1,136 (1.4 per cent) voted against it.Footnote 50 The high percentage in favour of the law could perhaps be due to the fact that residents understood the benefit of becoming a ‘special city’ in that the city would receive extra funds from Tokyo for reconstruction; it did not necessarily mean that they whole-heartedly embraced the municipal vision. Moreover, there was no alternative reconstruction plan put forth by the city government. The law took effect on 9 August 1949, on the fourth anniversary of the bombing, and commemorations were accompanied by celebrations that lasted for three days in honour of the city's progress toward revival. ‘Today is the birthday of New Nagasaki’, declared a headline in the Nagasaki nichinichi. General MacArthur and Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru sent messages to Mayor Ôhashi and the citizens of Nagasaki to congratulate them on the official new path of reconstruction as a centre of ‘international culture’.Footnote 51
Residents boasted of the city's new title by naming events and buildings ‘International Culture-’ or ‘Peace-’, and they embraced the task given to them by the law to revive the past and cultivate peace activism. As an editorial in the Nishi Nippon newspaper declared in late August 1949, the basic principle of the law was to make ‘Nagasaki City a model city of everlasting world peace replete with happiness and peace’, and its construction would be realized through real activities that promoted peace.Footnote 52 According to commentators, Nagasaki had to look beyond its local, Japanese culture and promote a so-called ‘world culture’ that blended ‘culture’ and ‘peace’. In 1951, city officials added provisions to the reconstruction legislation to construct appropriate facilities in accordance with the law, which began to shape the architectural landscape of the city. The International Cultural Hall – which later became the Atomic Bombing Museum – Peace Park, Peace Hall and other facilities (all located in Urakami Valley) breathed new life into the former atomic wasteland.Footnote 53
The history of Christianity in the city was a major characteristic of Nagasaki's international culture which benefited reconstruction and complemented the municipal vision. The Urakami Valley had been the home of Nagasaki Catholics for more than four centuries. After Christianity was outlawed in the early 1600s, the religion went underground and survived in communities of ‘hidden Christians’ (kakure Kirishitan) centred in the areas surrounding Nagasaki until legal freedom of religion was achieved in the latter part of the nineteenth century.Footnote 54 From the 1870s, the Catholics of Nagasaki grew in number and established their community in the valley, the centre of which became the Urakami Cathedral, completed in 1925 after 30 years of construction. After the bombing, city officials and reconstruction planners promoted this history by preserving historical Christian sites, such as the Ôura Cathedral, the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral and the hill of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of 1597, as these were considered ideal tourist spots to boost the city's appeal as a sightseeing destination and thus help its economy.Footnote 55
For the Urakami Catholics, the Nagasaki International Cultural City Law represented more than a ‘Peace Commemoration City Law’ ever could. The law revived, through its approach to historical remembrance, Nagasaki's long history with the Christian west, which included the Urakami Catholics’ history of oppression and martyrdom, but it also seemed to empower their community. The defeat of Japan in the war brought unrestricted religious freedom, and aid from the United States boosted the revival of Christianity in Nagasaki (and Hiroshima). As the Nagasaki nichinichi reported, the United States contributed $50,000,000 in ‘private capital’ to support the special-city reconstruction laws of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including a fund of $12,000,000 for the construction of Christian universities.Footnote 56 The Catholics saw the International Cultural City Law as a call to resurrect and promote Catholicism in Nagasaki, which their leaders enthusiastically strived to do.
The Catholics used an international religious celebration to demonstrate that their community enjoyed strong ties to the west and was thus essential to Nagasaki's post-war recovery. The festival of the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of St Francis Xavier to Japan, which took place on 29 and 30 May 1949, just weeks after the International Cultural City Construction Law was announced, involved more than 300,000 people, including numerous missionaries and representatives from the Vatican, who brought with them the holy relic of Xavier's arm.Footnote 57 The timing of the event was key to displaying the Urakami Catholics’ support of the city's plan to emphasize its international character in its post-war image. Taking place on the heels of the emperor's visit, the events of May exhibited Nagasaki's determination to become ‘international’ and to boast of the support voiced by prominent political figures. In 1949, it seemed as though everyone – residents, politicians, the emperor, the Americans, the Vatican – was on board with the municipal vision for the reconstruction of Nagasaki.
In conclusion
By the start of the 1950s, Nagasaki had already made tremendous strides in recovery. The city population rose to 241,818 by 1950, surpassing its 1935 number by more than 15,000 and approaching the 1945 pre-bombing number of about 270,000.Footnote 58 As newly elected mayor, Tagawa Tsutomu, proudly put it in a national journal in 1951, the city was rebuilding according to its relationship with western culture, enhancing its history through maintenance of historical sites. A series of photos of these sites displayed the proud scenery of the city, including the ‘Glover mansion of Madame Butterfly’, the Ôura Cathedral where French missionary Petitjean had ‘discovered’ the hidden Christians, and the shipbuilding facilities in the bay.Footnote 59 The municipal vision of reconstruction – validated by and realized through the 1949 International Cultural City Construction Law – seemed to be successfully breathing life into the cityscape.
The international culture of Nagasaki, or its ‘aroma’ (nioi), as city planner Shimauchi Hachirô called it, was easily identifiable by its landmarks.Footnote 60 Shimauchi boasted of the historic sites that defined Nagasaki in a 1951 article for Shintoshi (New Cities), a Tokyo-based journal dedicated to issues of city reconstruction in post-war Japan. Shimauchi included Nagasaki's ‘national treasures’, such as the Ôura Cathedral and two Buddhist temples. The Dutch compound Dejima topped the list of historical landmarks, followed by the Chinese compound, the hill of the Twenty-Six Christian Martyrs of 1597, and the former residence of British merchant Thomas Glover. Glover's mansion held special significance, Shimauchi wrote, because its beautiful garden inspired the opera Madame Butterfly, which made Nagasaki a place of world-renowned international culture.Footnote 61
Initially, it seemed that the passage of the International Cultural City Construction Law benefited Nagasaki more than the Peace Commemoration City Construction Law did for Hiroshima. Prior to these special-city reconstruction laws, among 41 cities slated to receive national reconstruction funds in 1949, Hiroshima was placed sixth on the list, but Nagasaki trailed far behind at 31st. The laws launched both cities to the top of the list for funds.Footnote 62 Despite its focus on ‘international culture’, or perhaps because of it, by 1950 Nagasaki had become a hotspot for atomic-bombing tourism. What appealed to visitors was the combination – or juxtaposition – of natural beauty (of the bay and surrounding mountains), historical sites (such as Glover Park, Dejima and Chinatown, all of which survived the bombing), and traces of the atomic bombing (such as the Urakami Cathedral ruins).Footnote 63 The reconstruction laws allowed each city to build a museum according to their appellations. The Nagasaki International Cultural Hall and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, both completed in 1955, became popular tourist destinations as they displayed atomic-bombing relics. In the first year of operation, Nagasaki's museum drew in 220,671 visitors to Hiroshima's 115,369. The activities of the two museums were similar, but Nagasaki's greater attraction could perhaps be attributed to – in addition to the city's juxtaposition of histories – its museum's goal to ‘promote international culture and contribute to the establishment of lasting peace’. Hiroshima's museum, by contrast, focused exclusively on the ‘victim's sufferings as well as their struggle for peace’.Footnote 64 By 1969, the average number of annual tourists to Nagasaki reached 2,500,000.Footnote 65
Nagasaki's secondary status in the history and memory of the bombings can be attributed in part to the municipal visions of reconstruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima's dominant position was never predetermined. If Nagasaki's goal was to restore its past, Hiroshima's was to reinvent itself. From the beginning, Hiroshima officials drew on the city's atomic experience to move away from its past and build an identity as the oracle of nuclear destruction and centre of world peace, meanwhile downplaying Nagasaki as a counterpart voice of atomic memory, as exemplified by the fight over the word ‘peace’ in the 1949 reconstruction laws. Nagasaki officials did little to aid in their city's memory activism. From the mid-1950s, Hiroshima became the centre of the anti-nuclear weapons and peace movements in Japan, while Nagasaki officials continued to view the atomic experience as a minor part of the city's identity. In 1958, against the wishes of residents and the hibakusha, the city council allowed the Catholics to remove the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral and build a new one, despite the fact that the ruins had served as the city's central site of atomic memory for more than a decade. Within Nagasaki, the municipal drive to create an ‘international city’ often appeared as a direct attack on the memory of the survivors; to the rest of Japan, it appeared as though the entire city was apathetic to atomic memory, especially when compared to Hiroshima. The mission of Nagasaki officials to build an urban landscape and identity on the basis of ‘international culture’ first, and on atomic memory second, helped clear the path for Hiroshima's rise in the early post-war years to become the representative voice of the atomic bombings and their aftermath.
The early period of reconstruction in Nagasaki presents us with a look at how the past never dies, but rather lives on, evolving to fit the needs of the present. The city's past as an international port city shone bright in the aftermath of the atomic bombing, which inspired city officials to commission nostalgia to work for them to revive the cityscape and establish a post-war identity. The 1949 special-city reconstruction law validated their vision, which saw Nagasaki transformed from an ‘atomic wasteland’ to an ‘international cultural city’, completing the journey from envisioning Nagasaki to realizing its reconstruction. But until Nagasaki is afforded equal footing with Hiroshima on the landscape of history and memory, the rest of us will forever be merely envisioning Nagasaki.
