Speaker:

• M.G. SHEFTALL (Shizuoka University)

Moderator:

• Kyle Cleveland, ICAS Co-Director

Overview

Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses is the first volume in a two-book series about each of the atomic bomb drops that ended the Pacific War. It is the result of nine years of personal interviews with Hiroshima survivors, onsite fieldwork, and archival research of both Japanese and American wartime records by M.G. Sheftall, a cultural historian at Shizuoka University, a campus of the Japanese national university system. In this book, M. G. Sheftall layers the stories of hibakusha—the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors—in harrowing detail, to give a minute-by-minute report of August 6, 1945, in the leadup and aftermath of the world-changing bombing mission of Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay, and Little Boy. These survivors and witnesses, who now have an average age over ninety years old, are quite literally the last people who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in their cities before the bombings, tell us what they experienced on the day those cities were obliterated, and give us some appreciation of what it has entailed to live with those memories and scars during the subsequent seventy-plus years. Sheftall has spent years personally interviewing Hiroshima survivors, allowing him to construct portraits of what life in their city was like before the bomb, and how catastrophically its citizens’ lives changed in the seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, and years afterward. He stands out among other Western scholars and writers approaching the subject due to his fluency in spoken and written Japanese, and his longtime immersion in Japanese society that has allowed him, a white American, intimate access to these atomic bomb survivors in the waning years of their lives. Their trust in him is evident in the personal and traumatic depths they open up for him as he records their stories. With the post-World War II global order in increasing disarray, toxic nationalism once again on the march, and liberal democracy in seemingly full retreat around the, Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses should be required reading for the modern age. The personal accounts it contains will serve as cautionary tales about the horror and insanity of nuclear warfare, reminding them—it is hoped—that the world still lives with this danger at our doorstep.

Speakers:

M.G. SHEFTALL

Shizuoka University

M.G. Sheftall is is a professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication at Shizuoka University. His research focuses on the modern evolution of Japanese national identity, with particular emphasis on WWII and the lingering effects of that conflict at both collective and individual levels of Japanese consciousness. In addition to his teaching duties, he has been a research fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto (2012-2013), a visiting curator at WWII-related museums in Japan and the United States, and a technical consultant and commentator for numerous historical documentaries in both Western and Japanese media. His best-known works to date include: Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (2005), based on interviews with survivors of Japan’s 1944-1945 kamikaze program; Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses (2024); and its companion volume, the upcoming Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses (2025), based on interviews with survivors of the atomic bombings of those two cities in 1945. He has lived and worked in Japan continuously since 1987.

Moderator:

Kyle Cleveland

ICAS Co-director

Kyle Cleveland is the co-director of ICAS and associate professor of Sociology at Temple University, Japan Campus. His expertise ranges from political and theoretical sociology to race and ethnicity, popular culture and ideology.

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