Walking out of ground zero: art and the aftereffects of the atomic bombs in postwar Japan

This dissertation examines the ways in which artists of postwar Japan visualized the aftereffects of the atomic bombs and conditions arising from the catastrophes—despite their unrepresentability. It asks how artists and individuals engaging in cultural productions took the nuclear issues and politics as their own, rendered the catastrophes vis-à-vis the crises of vision, ontology, and the environment, or, if not, denoted the detachment from ground zero in the decades after the atomic detonations. The project thus speaks for the productive force of the atomic bombs and their legacies, the possibility of creative and intellectual challenges that question, expand, or override the predominant narrative of the nuclear catastrophes and its relationship to visual representations as trauma, a tabula rasa, or a fundamental rupture. ❧ The study approaches the subject by clustering it around five themes—documentary, explosion, metamorphosis, site-specificity, and pilgrimage—and corresponding case studies. It begins by problematizing the ideas of documentation and documentary art by exploring the large but nearly forgotten art exhibition Nihonjin no kiroku/Records of the Japanese (1959) in Hiroshima. While dissecting the facile association of art about the atomic bombs with clear-cut documentation, the chapter serves as a critical introduction to various artistic representations of the man-made catastrophes. Chapter Two looks at how the atomic bomb calamities are being reconsidered as a means to question their iconic images, such as explosions and mushroom clouds, and the historical narratives they represent. This is done by centering on Okamoto Tarō’s monumental mural in Mexico City, Asu no shinwa/Myth of Tomorrow (1968–1969). Chapter Three investigates the visualization of invisible radioactivity and other industrial toxins but as productive energy rather than a destructive kind, through Kudō Tetsumi’s deployment of a visual theory of metamorphosis from the 1950s to the 1970s. Chapter Four revisits the artist collective Chim↑Pom’s hotly debated guerrilla art project in Hiroshima (2008) so as to illuminate negotiations between site-specific artwork and site-specific memory, which eventually led them to depict Hiroshima as something fluid and transient, liberated from the actual time and space of the 1945 disaster. The study concludes with an epilogue that contemplates the notion of pilgrimage out from and to ground zero to emphasize a process of healing and understanding the aftereffects of the bombs rather than focusing on a singular conclusion or tangible artwork. In this manner, the dissertation embraces the complexities, confusions, contradictions, and flexibility that arise when we face such unimaginable and unrepresentable events.