Silence and Resilience: Commemorating Nagasaki Alongside the “Extraordinary Noise” of the Olympics and Under the Covid-19 “Mushroom Cloud”

Covid-19 in 2020 produced a "mushroom cloud" which threatened to obscure and suppress the seventy-fifth commemorations of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Official narratives simultaneously attempted to proclaim an end to past difficulties and hibakusha (sufferers of the atomic bombings) and their supporters stood up to all of these challenges. We discuss how the government used the Olympics to promote and showcase recovery or transcendence above nuclear disaster, focused especially on Fukushima, but also on the past atomic bombings. In 1964, after all, an Olympic torch runner born in Hiroshima Prefecture lit the Olympic torch, while in 2020, the closing ceremony was slated for Nagasaki Day.

How would a Nagasaki perspective understand, make sense of and respond to the Covid-19 "mushroom cloud" as well as the above intentions for the Olympic event? Drawing on surveys of a number of citizens during the year, including a Nagasaki-based novelist, educationalists, nuclear activists and researchers, we detail in this chapter the resilience of memory, undercutting the official narrative that Japan is no longer troubled by its past. There is an evident connection between the production and consumption of both nuclear energy and war, and the normalisation of collateral violence. On the other hand, the resilient memory that people hold of the aftermath of both nuclear accidents and the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima rejects this normalisation, and recalls the impacts especially on sufferers represented by the hibakusha.