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In this essay, I hope to provide some insight into the topic of Hiroshima in history as I have been exploring it in a course that I have taught a number of times. It became a city rebuilt by its citizens, one that lives on today as a bustling, thoroughly contemporary, global city, albeit one whose self-professed identity is now inextricably tied to the atom bomb and a postwar mission to promote disarmament around the world.
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And finally, the history of Hiroshima also continued forward from the mid-summer date of its destruction in 1945. The city also occupied an important place in the modern rise of the Japanese nation as an imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The formative era of the city was a time when samurai represented the ruling class of Japan, a time when the clash of modern empires that eventually resulted in Hiroshima’s obliteration could not have been imagined. The history of Hiroshima extends far back into centuries prior to the bomb. Resituating Hiroshima into its longer early modern and modern history also helps reveal the ways that Japan can serve as a national case study of common experiences of modern change around the world. It is one that certainly now includes the war-time bombing, but that should not be reduced to the horrifically important event of the bombing alone.Įxpanding the story of the city of Hiroshima beyond a tale of the atomic bombing can provide a fascinating lens onto the broader themes of Japanese historical experience. And yet, as important in world history as Hiroshima as cataclysmic event was, Hiroshima as a place, as a city, has a rich history, too.
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The name Hiroshima has come to stand for the catastrophic tragedy of war in general and for the horrifying potential for nuclear annihilation that has loomed in human affairs since the day in August 1945 when an atomic weapon was first used over that southwestern Japanese city.