ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Japanese American initiatives in 1995 to remember the atomic bomb, who its victims were, whose lives are worth grieving, and how its violence can be understood in relation to issues of colonization and imperialism. In doing so, it elucidates a number of possibilities and limitations of “Race as Resistance” in a transpacific context. The chapter focuses on the multi-directional ways that Japanese American remembering and critiques of the atomic bomb in 1995 were constructed across borders in ways that not only countered dominant narratives in the US and Japan but also contemplated war memory and nuclear history in a “minor transnational” way that emphasized horizontal relationships to other minority populations. Emphatically, the issue of Japanese American war responsibility presents a problematic for understanding the Japanese American critique of the atomic bomb as part of an ethic of cohabitation. It presents as its ethical problem the question of how to be Japanese American.
