ABSTRACT
The survivors’ recollections of remains in the landscape are intrinsic to the distressing and challenging narrative of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The survivors remember the bodies as ‘dangerous’ memory in a space doubly fissured by the atomic bombing on the one hand and by past instances of desecration and death on the other. The survivors’ recollections of bodies in Urakami haunt their own remembering, are troubling to the listener and question the generalisation of the bombing as a Nagasaki city event. In 1945 some danced while others mourned, reflecting fissured Nagasaki. Those in Urakami continued to participate in the clean-up, grieved and sought refuge in outer regions, while in the city there were signs of resumption of normal life. An oral historian, Dominick LaCapra, explains how ‘land has memory’, due to the perceived presence of the sacred in places of trauma.
