Japan

Hiroshima's Shadows

One of the main battles of the cultural wars is the controversy that engulfed the proposed exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museums in 1995 commemorating the fuselages that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay. The script for the exhibit turned out to be a tangled bitter display that attempted to celebrate the deaths of millions of Japanese civilians. The impressive volume of Hiroshima’s Shadow by Kai Bird and Lawerence Lifschultz is an anthology and it originated in the most terrifying as well as the central event of the twentieth century, the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.