Guest Lecture Series RELIGION AND MEMORY IN A TIME OF DANGER: THE ATOMIC BOMBS IN THE AGE OF FUKUSHIMA
Pembicara: Gregory A. Vanderbilt
(Center for Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies, Graduate SchooL UGM)
Selasa, 10 November 2015 | 16.30 – 18.00 Wib | Ruang Seminar ICAIOS
Abstract
Observations of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki come in the midst of a shift to the right in Japanese politics towards abandoning its postwar pacifist positioning (and active opposition in the streets of Japanese cities) as well as the passing on of those who directly experienced the bombs (the hibakusha). To what extent do their voices still gather concentrated as well as ritualized attention? What roles do religious leaders, movements, institutions, and forms now play in this process, in a society that tends to define itself as areligious? Hiroshima has often been framed as a universal tragedy while memorialization of Nagasaki has tended to highlight connections to Catholicism, including the “hidden Christians” the 150th anniversary of whose reemergence close to what became the hypocenter was celebrated earlier this year, but religious ideas, including the comforting of souls in Buddhist terms, are present in both sites. Now, the triple disaster of March 11th, 2011, which shows the vast cost of nuclear power as an energy of Japan’s modern life, raises new questions about how to remember the two atomic bombs. These comments draw on fieldwork during the observations in August 2015 in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the literature that has developed over the last seventy years.
About the Speaker:
• Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles. History, June 2005.
dissertation: “‘The Kingdom of God is Like a Mustard Seed’: Evangelizing Modernity between the United States and Japan, 1905-1948” co-chaired by Joyce Appleby and Fred Notehelfer, outside field in Japanese literature with Michael Bourdaghs
• Visiting Researcher, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. 2000-2001.
• Advanced study in Japanese language, Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, Yokohama, Japan, 1999-2000
• M.A., University of California, Los Angeles. History, September 1995.
• B.A., Pomona College, Claremont, California. History, May 1993.
