“After Hiroshima” Symposium

Professor Kinya Nishi, Konan University, Japan

“A Postmodern Hiroshima? Trauma, History, and Poetic Language in Modern Japan”

10th November, 1.30-3.00 pm Manchester Metropolitan University, GM302 .

Organised by Dr David Miller, Department of English Studies, MMU, with the generous assistance of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.

Admission is free. Refreshments will be provided.

The relationship of Japanese cultural and literary memory to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki allied atomic-bombing and the Tokyo fire-bombing campaign is a site of contested memory, traumatic elisions and historical dispute. This symposium approaches these various questions and examines the Japanese responses as well as questioning the current shape of the various Japanese literary, artistic and cultural encounters with those epochal events. These issues have gained renewed emphasis and significance in the light of the recent Fukushima nuclear disaster and shadow of that event is also a factor in this symposium.

The symposium will also be showcasing the forthcoming bilingual Japanese-English issue of Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies dealing with the literary and cultural aftermath of the A-bomb and fire-bombing campaigns against the Japanese mainland and subsequent US occupation. This bi-lingual issue includes papers from Professor Michiko Shimokobe, Professor and psychiatrist Shigeyuki Mori, Professor Gen Nogami and Professor Akihiro Yamamoto.

Kinya Nishi is Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at Konan University, Japan. After completing his PhD on Adorno’s aesthetics at Kyoto University he attended the University of Essex, where he developed an interest in the discursive formation of cultural traditions in the context of modern Japan. He has held visiting positions at the Centre for Social and Political Thought, University of Sussex (2008-2009) and at the Department of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London (2013-2014). He has authored several books and essays in Japanese, his publications in English include ‘A Multicultural Approach to the Idea of Tragedy’ (2011) and ‘Basho as a Post-Pastoral Poet’ (2017).