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* I am grateful to the Terasaki Center at UCLA, the Whiting Foundation, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for providing support for this research. With much gratitude to Carol Gluck for her guidance, Anri Yasuda for reading drafts and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.
A city brings together in the same space different ages, offering to our gaze a sedimented history of tastes and cultural forms. The city gives itself as both to be seen and to be read.1
Introduction: reviving Nagasaki
After the atomic bombing of 9 August 1945, Nagasaki residents faced a long road to recovery. Of the 51,000 buildings in the city, 36.1 per cent were completely destroyed. Because the bomb exploded in the narrow Urakami Valley in the northern part of the city, mountains buffered much of the power of the bomb, but radioactive fallout blanketed the entire city.2By the end of 1945, approximately 74,000 people, or 27.4 per cent of the population of 270,000, had died due to the blast, the fires or the radiation, and another 75,000 were injured.3American Marines who occupied the city during the first year after the bombing called Urakami the 'Valley of Death', because it had been reduced to an irradiated landscape of rubble and corpses.4As one Marine recalled years later, the 'stench of the dead was so overwhelming that you could never become accustomed to it. It even lingered in our clothes.'5For months, surviving residents lived in the bombed out area in dugout air-raid trenches or makeshift huts assembled from debris, and the entire city struggled to maintain a daily existence amid the destruction. As in cities throughout the world that had suffered the ravages of World War II, daily survival was the primary concern in Nagasaki, and dreams of a full recovery carried the city forward and out of the ashes.
The reconstruction of a city after mass destruction is a creative process involving a variety of memories and visions. In his study on the rebuilding of Soviet Sevastopol after World War II, Karl D. Qualls describes reconstruction as an 'urban identification project', one that grows out of a conversation among 'competing...