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Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges, basically kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed, and the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Nathan Moore and today we're traveling to one of the most consequential moments of the 20th century, not through strategy or geopolitics, but through memory. We're Talking with Professor M.G. sheftalk, author of the Last Witnesses. It's a book about voices, fragile, fading, yet the survivors of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki who carry history not in archives, but in their own lived experience. In other words, this isn't just a history book. It's a book about what happens when history breathes. Professor M.G. sheftal. Welcome to the New Books Network.
A
Thank you for having me.
C
What does the phrase last witnesses mean in the context of Nagasaki? And can you tell us, by also giving us more about your background?
A
Okay, well, let me. Excuse me. Let me answer that first part first. All right. As of today, there are still, believe it or not, nearly 100,000 hibakusha, as atomic bomb survivors are called in Japan, still alive. But the great majority of those people were young children, toddlers, babies, and even in utero fetuses at the time of those, of course, consequential explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So what I mean in the context of my book by last Witnesses, is that the survivors that I focused on, I deliberately chose people who had been 12 years old or older, so in adolescence or early adulthood when the bombings had happened, because what I was going for was narrative memories on their part. Now, in terms of cognitive development, people younger than 12 years old have great difficulty with narrative memories. Now, what I mean by that is saying not only that there was a big explosion and everyone was running around in a panic and the sky turned black. And not those kind of what we call flashbulb memories, but rather, on the morning of the explosion, I Woke up at 6 o'. Clock. My mother made me rice gruel. I met Hanako at the streetcar stop, and we went on our way to the munitions plant to do our work. And that's when the explosion happened. That kind of so memory at that level of granularity. And that's partly why my. Both my Hiroshima and Nagasaki books are over 500 pages. And there was a second part to your question, wasn't there?
C
And the audience would love to know more about your background and how you came to this topic.
A
Oh, gosh, I could talk for 30 minutes just about that. I'm 63 years old. I was born in Boston, 1962. I moved to New York City in early 1970, grew up there. I came to Japan after college to teach English, and in 1987. I've been here ever since. I've always been interested in foreign languages. The Japanese language has been particularly challenging to me. I've also had a lifelong interest in military history and history in general, probably influenced by my father. Should I keep going, or do you have other questions related to that?
C
Your previous book is on Hiroshima. Are these two connected?
A
Yes, absolutely. I researched them in parallel and wrote one right after the other. So I've been doing this research. I've been researching, formally researching Japanese war memory for about a quarter century now. I started right after 91 1, and I've been doing this particular project, the Hibakusha Atomic Bomb Survivor project, since May 2016. So going on 10 years now, the actual writing of the books took about, let's see, three or four years. But the research was the real. That was the hard part.
C
Before we get into the nitty gritty of Nagasaki, are you familiar with the atomic bowl, which was a memory in the form of a football game?
A
Yes. Yeah. So that was pretty much right around ground zero or via the hypocenter of the Nagasaki explosion, an area called Matsuyamacho, right along the Uragami river in the northern suburb of Nagasaki. And when the American occupation forces arrived, they bulldozed that area flat to make a small airfield capable of handling, like, Piper Cubs and liaison planes and things like that. And they ended up just steamrolling the rubble and the bones that had been lying bare to the elements, so that when they played that football game there, I believe, was it New Year's Day of 1946. They were playing on top of bone meal, essentially. But I don't think people knew that, although the survivors in the area knew what it was. And apparently they tried to say something to the Americans about it, but had been ignored. Quite a grisly situation, but the Americans were blissfully ignorant of it.
C
What kind of stories did survivors share with you and how did you approach recording them?
A
So there've been a lot of books, a lot of books in English and exponentially more in Japanese about what people experienced on the day of the bombings and maybe immediately after that. So I wanted to write, of course, I was interested in that information also, but as well, I was interested in the context, the cultural and the social context of why those people were where they were and why they were doing what they were doing. And I thought that that would be of interest to non Japanese readers. Now, when Japanese people write these books about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or for that matter, any kind of war memory, they can do so with the reasonable assumption that their fellow Japanese reader already has all of the, what we call the cultural schema, the contextual information about why a person in this situation does this instead of that, why someone says this instead of that. And basic, like early 20th century oral memories that had been passed down from parents and grandparents, et cetera, so they can go straight to the incident itself, explain it very effectively, efficiently, without having to explain, again, all of the social and the cultural context. Now, a lot of the material that non Japanese read is translations from those kind of books, translations of that sort of material, direct translations. And so these Non Japanese speakers, non Japanese readers are reading this stuff, and a lot of it literally goes right over their heads because they don't have the cultural, contextual knowledge to make sense of what they're reading. So they lose a lot. And I've always felt, over the decades that I've been reading Japanese history, history about Japan's war in the 20th century. I felt that that's unfortunate that there's not more material out there in English that gives readers a better idea of what was going on at the time. So I guess you could say that I set out to write the Hiroshima and Nagasaki books that I'd always wanted to read. And again, because I had to go into all of that detail, that's why they turned out to both be about 500 pages or longer. So as to the latter part of your question, so I interviewed, let me see, 51 hibakusha, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for at least two or three hours each. And the people who went on to be sort of the core central cast of characters in the books, I did multiple interviews with them, email exchanges, telephone calls, things like that. So again, when I interviewed these survivors, of course I was interested in what they were doing on that day, the day of the bombing, where they were when the actual exploit the explosion happened, and how they sort of recovered from that. But in addition to this, I was also interested in, again, going back to what I was saying earlier. I said, why was your family living in that city? Tell me what a typical daily day in your life was like before the bombing. The family structure, what did your house look like? What kind of food were you eating? And how did the. For example, how did the quality of the food begin changing as Japan began losing the war? When did you and your family members, if you did at all, begin talking about the possibility that maybe the war wasn't going so well for Japan? How did you explain when American planes started flying overhead every night? What was the media telling you about the progress of the war? Did you believe what you were hearing? Et cetera, et cetera. And I was also very interested in what happened after the bombing, how my interview subjects were able to, essentially, for lack of a better way to say it, I'd get their lives back together after experiencing probably the most extreme trauma that a human community has ever had to experience. Some of them got on their feet quicker than others, some more successfully than others. Looking at the long run, all dealt with lifelong health issues, various types of cancer, especially gastrointestinal tract and blood cancers, and how and if they Shared their experience of the bombing with other people and their lives after the war, for example, with family members after they got married, after they had children. Some of the people that I spoke to didn't tell their family members, even their spouse, that they had been survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until decades, decades after the fact. Did they share it with colleagues at work? Did they hide it from colleagues at work? Were they worried about having children because of the, you know, the potential for genetic damage? When did they find out what radiation was and what it had done to their bodies, et cetera, et cetera. So again, extreme granularity in terms of detail for these survivor stories.
C
In what ways can these survivors stories mirror maybe the stories that Americans might have? For example, the last pilots of this event.
A
Do you mean the pilots who dropped the bombs? Yes. Okay, well, I do. I go into a lot of detail about them too, although that's all mostly from secondary sources because they were. All of those crew members were dead by the time I began this project. So I wasn't able to interview any of them, although I was able to interview a B29 bomber pilot who had flown conventional bombing missions, although unfortunately, I wasn't able to work his material into the books anyway. So do you mean how would I compare what happened to the Japanese people with the Americans? Is that what you're asking here? Yes. Well, I don't think there's really any comparison at all for being on the business end, so to speak, of an atomic bomb or to being the person that's 10km away who just dropped it. Entirely different experience after the war. Right. The atomic bombers were treated as heroes in the United States. And for many people, they still are. Very few of them have been candid in any way about having any guilt feelings about what they did. And until recent, until recently, they had been facilitated in that aspect by a broad based acceptance of the narrative that the bombs had been necessary to avoid what would have been a costly land invasion of the Japanese archipelago. But I've noted with interest that since about 10 or 20 years ago, American opinions about whether the bombs had been necessary or not have begun turning towards the idea that they were not necessary, that they'd been an unnecessary evil rather than a necessary evil. And if I remember correctly, the Reese most recent Gallup poll on that question, which was, I think, 20, 20, thereabouts, American popular opinion has for the first time crossed over 50% of people who said that the bombs should not have been dropped. I'm not entirely sure what's the cause of all That I suppose it's a generational thing rather than an educational thing. As for Japan, the Hibakusha, again, the atomic bomb survivors, almost all of them, hid their experience, their personal experience for at least the first 10 years or so after the war out of shame and out of fear of the repercussions in their personal life and perhaps for their family members and if it got out among the local community or at their workplace or at their school, et cetera, the university, that they were in fact bomb survivors. So from the beginning of the evolution of the community of atomic bomb memory, the origins were shrouded in shame, largely, and that really colored and influenced the trajectory that atomic bond memory took here in the first few decades. There was always this lingering feeling that it was something that shouldn't be talked about and that the survivors didn't want to talk about and that people who were not survivors should not be asking of the survivors. Sort of a, how would you say, an atmosphere of taboo about it. But that really began to open up in the 1960s or so or late 1950s when the survivors here began organizing and demanding special compensation and care from the government, which they did. It was incredibly successful campaign of memory, activist campaign, which has, to my knowledge, not been duplicated anywhere else in Japanese history.
C
What kind of shifts exist between survivor testimony and inherited memory?
A
Shift? What kind of shift did you say?
C
Well, we have survivor testimonies of people who experienced the event and then those who are inheriting stories or narratives that have been passed down to them.
A
Well, I think you would be dealing with issues of what we might call signal fidelity. When you were a kid, did you ever play that game telephone? You know, when the kids sit in a circle and one person whispers. Right. Well, that happens with oral history, unfortunately. So when you're going into a historical research project about something recent in which there's still survivors alive to give the testimony, obviously it's best to get it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and to give credence to direct testimony, always taking care to verify through official records and cross reference against other testimonies, firsthand testimonies, primary sources, to check on the reliability of that testimony. Once the survivors are gone and you're talking about a more an oral tradition in a sort of, I guess, an anthropological sense, then you start moving into the realm of legend, legend and myth rather than testimony. And if you're thinking of using that as a historical source, it's something that has to be taken from with a grain of salt. Was it's going to be just, by its nature, less reliable than the direct testimony from firsthand survivors.
C
What were the ethics? And did you have an ethical dilemma in asking for interviews or getting information on this issue? And was it a healing process or a burdensome process for those interviewees?
A
Knowing, knowing what I did about, about the, the taboo and the shame aspect of the Hibaksha memory community, which. I already had some idea of this when I went into the project. I. These 51 people that I've interviewed, all of them are people who have been active in sharing their testimony previously with the public, either through writings or giving interviews, or participating in what's known in Japan as peace education, where they go to local schools in their areas and talk about their experiences. So I didn't, I didn't. I had the opportunity to, but I passed on interviewing and, and publishing the results of interviews with people who had never gone public before. Right. Because I didn't want to intrude on anyone's privacy. And I wanted to make sure that, for example, their, their family members were okay with this and all. So in a sense, I, I spoke to experienced, seasoned Hibaka testimony givers. I wanted them to have no hesitation or regrets about going public because they had already gone public in the past with other interviewers and researchers. As far as the interviews themselves went, I was very careful about not appearing to badger them into going to places where they didn't want to go. Although, again, as they were, so to speak, experienced testimony givers, they had already gone through this a lot. They were used to talking about what they were talking about. So as far as, like, the actual, the horrifying stuff, the traumatic stuff, they had already talked about that with other people. So I didn't really have anyone like, for example, break down on me in those times when I did feel that maybe they were getting distressed by what they were remembering or what I was asking, I would just change the subject. But a lot of them, almost all of them, were surprised and by the questions I was asking about their lives previous to the bombings, because the other interviewers who had been with them previously had not been interested in that. Mostly, again, going back to what I said earlier, because Japanese people already have the cultural context about what life was like in Japan in early 20th century, and we kind of enjoyed those conversations and it was sort of like a walk down memory lane for them to talk about their school days and their friends and what their neighborhood was like and the kind of movies they would go to see on the weekends and things like that. They had almost never spoken about those things to anybody because everyone's always going just for the nitty gritty of the bomb stuff. So yeah, all in all I had really, really positive experiences with, with the people I interviewed and, and I think they did with me as well.
C
You mentioned previously the changing perceptions about guilt and the bomb. For your interviewees and for the general Japanese population. How do they see nuclear deterrence today, including nuclear testing of the 20th century?
A
All right, well, yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot to unpack there. In the Japanese psyche since the end of World War II and up until recent years, there was something that could be called a nuclear trauma or a nuclear allergy. Even though Japan has embraced nuclear generated nuclear power generation for, for, for over half a century now, the idea of Japan being involved in any way with nuclear weapons has been an extreme taboo and something which again until recently, no politician would touch or would dare talk about in public. Talk about that is the desirability of Japan someday having nuclear weapons. But in recent years, and I've been here for almost 40 years now, and I'm following this stuff, I've been quite shocked by voices in recent years and especially during the past few months, the past eight months since a certain presidential administration began, US Presidential administration that is that Japanese people in, in growing numbers, not only politicians, but media figures, public intellectuals and even my own students, which would have previously been absolutely unthinkable, are now beginning to express talking points about why Japan maybe cannot rely on its strategy for its strategic protection on the so called American nuclear umbrella anymore. Because fewer and fewer Japanese believe that this United States in 2025 would be willing to go toe to toe with another nuclear armed power and possibly have to endure a nuke city or two or an all out nuclear exchange just to protect Japan or maybe Taiwan or South Korea or something like that. And increasing numbers of Japanese people are saying, well, maybe it's time for us to ditch the nuclear taboo, to get over our nuclear allergy and protect ourselves with our own native nuclear deterrent. And that's. If someone had said to me 10 years ago that Japan was going to be here in 2025, I would have thought they were high on something or drunk. Just unthinkable. But now people are talking about it openly. It's kind of scary really.
C
How is Nagasaki viewed differently than Hiroshima? Are they one in the same?
A
I approach them as being one story, part of the same story. I don't really like to look at them as distinct events. Hiroshima was bombed first obviously on August 6, Nagasaki was August 9, three days later and almost twice as many people were killed in Hiroshima as in Nagasaki. And that was through a fluke of geography and topography and weather conditions on the day of August 9th. So for the second bombing, for the second bombing mission, which ended up targeting Nagasaki, originally the primary target for that day was a city in northern Kyushu known as Kokura, which is an army Imperial Japanese army arsenal and logistical marshaling area. But when the bombers arrived over Kokura earlier that morning, on the morning of August 9th, the city below them was, was hazy and clouded over, and the bombardier on the bomb plane could not visually identify his designated aiming point. And they had been under strict orders to not drop the bomb unless they could distinctly distinguish the aiming point on the ground visually confirm. They weren't able to do that. They made a few circuits over the city waiting for the weather conditions to change. They didn't. The visibility conditions to change. They didn't. And they ended up flying on to the secondary target in their orders, which was Hiroshima, sorry, Nagasaki, about 150 kilometers to the south. Now, in their orders there was also a designated aiming point for the secondary target for Nagasaki. And in that case it was a bridge, as with Hiroshima, because it was easier for the bombardier to spot from high altitude, the contrast of a bridge against water more easily distinguished from the air. And in the case of Nagazae, it was a bridge that passed over a river, pretty much dead center mass of the most densely populated part of district of Nagasaki, the central business district. And when the planes arrived over in Nagasaki, again, weather conditions had changed since they they'd gotten the all clear from the weather reconnaissance planes a few hours earlier, weather conditions had changed and once again the bombardier on the bomb plane could not distinguish, visually distinguish the aiming point, the designated aiming point on the ground. Instead, the bomb ended up getting dropped on a northern suburb some 3km away, which still killed 75,000 people eventually by the end of the year, as compared to 140,000 for Hiroshima. But if the bomb had been dropped on the designated aiming point for Nagasaki, which is again in the most densely populated part of the city, the death toll there would have probably exceeded that of Hiroshima. And the memory of Nagasaki and of the bombings as a whole would have been quite different. I think Nagasaki might have ended up being the one that falls from everyone's lips as soon as the subject of an atom bomb city comes up instead of Hiroshima. So in the case of Nagasaki, from the perspective of the central part of the city, where all the government and the business and the social elite were living the people who would have been wiped out if the sky over their part of the city had been clear on that day. From their perspective, the bombing in Nagasaki was something that happened to people on the wrong side of the tracks, if you will. And as such, the movers and shakers of Nagasaki never felt quite as compelled as their counterparts in Hiroshima to make their atomic bombing experience a central part of the city's identity. In other words, they were happy to let Hiroshima take that, let Hiroshima be the city that defines itself from now on and for eternity as the atomic bomb city. And Nagasaki, that would of course, be an indelible part of their history, but it wouldn't be the central pillar of their municipal identity, if you will. And their ability to do that has shaped the symbolism, the iconography, if you will, of the atom bombing experience not only in Japan, but in world memory as well.
C
Is there a ground zero in the history and memorial of this event? For example, Holocaust survivors, Vietnam veterans, the 911 ground zero, Tuskegee Airmen, historical museums, does that kind of exist in Japan?
A
Oh, absolutely, yeah. In fact, the term ground zero came from those two cities. That was the origin of that term. Ground zero refers to the hypocenter, which was the location on the ground, at the ground level, directly vertically underneath the air burst of the two nuclear devices. So both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have markers at the actual point of ground zero. And ironically, the marker in Nagasaki is more impressive than, than the one in Hiroshima because the one in Hiroshima, Hiroshima's actual historical ground zero is right in the middle of a rebuilt business district and shopping district in downtown Hiroshima. In fact, it's located right on top of a hospital that was right in front of a hospital that. That whose predecessor had also been there on August 6, 1945. But in the case of Nagasaki, that ground zero is located within a park facility, so they had more space to work with. And there's a very rather striking black obelisk sort of thing with an altar sort of structure in front of it. And both cities also have quite extensive and well appointed museum facilities that deal with the bombing and the historical background and also the medical effects on the survivors. So in a way, those sites almost kind of wrote the playbook for traumatic memory commemoration sites that others have followed since. So I think maybe, for example, there might be some parallels between the 911 memorial and those are some, how would you say, some museum curating DNA shared between those facilities or the Oklahoma City bombing site, for example. So, yeah, in a way Hiroshima and Nagasaki sort of have written the book on how a site of former traumatic experience can be tastefully and effectively commemorated.
C
Your book is with Penguin Press. Was that always the case? Did you approach academic publishers?
A
No. A guy I went to high school set this up for me, and he had also been the one who helped set up my book with about the comic about kamikaze memories, which I published 20 years ago. And I want this, you know, these stories to, especially with these. These atomic bombings, survivor stories, to reach the largest possible audience. So a commercial publisher was the way to go, I thought.
C
How much religion is existing for you in. In this work? Whether it be Christianity or Buddhism, Was that a prevalent factor?
A
No, I'm not. I'm not really religious myself, but I was interested in religion as one of the contexts, the contexts of the. The survivors experiences because some of my survivors, especially for Nagasaki, were Christians. And I'm interested in how their Christian faith was able to cope with the trauma that they had experienced and how the survivors were able to use their religious faith to restore meaning to lives which initially were stripped of that meaning. Because of the velocity and the intensity of the trauma they'd experienced. It caused them to temporarily experience, I guess, what you could call an existential crisis, having gone through that. What's the meaning of living if a world can be destroyed? So from their perspective, arbitrarily and suddenly, some people did this more successfully than others. Everyone ended up, I guess, finding their own solution to this problem in one way or another. And if they hadn't, they wouldn't have been talking to me.
C
Are there any gaps in the literature when it comes to this topic? If someone wanted to do more research.
A
I would like to see someone go into an English treatment, English language treatment of military and civilian cooperation and governance during the war. I often, when I was doing this, my. My own research, I had often found myself wishing that such a material existed. There was Japanese material on that, and I did consult that to a certain extent, but it would be a real rabbit hole for me to go into it. The depth I wanted to go into it would have taken too much time. Other gaps. Yes, there's still room for people working in English language to write more about non Japanese survivors. There were thousands, tens of thousands of, for example, Koreans in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. Not only the laborers who'd gone there to do war work during the war years, but also people who'd been living there, in some cases, for 10 or 20 years as Imperial subjects and had their own communities there in Hiroshima, I would like to see. Yeah, someone pick up the baton on that and run with that. Also Chinese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people from Southeast Asia, for example, were there as students. And also the allied POWs who were there. There were some in there. 12 of them were killed in Hiroshima, American POWs by the first atomic bomb. And there are many more allied POWs, especially Australian and Dutch, in Nagasaki, working in Mitsubishi factories there. I wish. I would like to see their stories more widely known, receive some more attention. So, yeah, there's still stuff out there and plenty for any young researcher who wants to make their reputation. And if they're willing to put in the years the stories are out there.
C
In all of this, is there still also room for humor, irony or unexpected did resilience humor?
A
Well, a lot of, A lot of my, I might even say most of my. My survivor informants related humorous anecdotes to me. Not about the bombing itself, but about, you know, from their, from their childhood, from their, their pre bombing life life world, if you will. Irony. Every survivor has a, has an irony story, right? Because if they'd been somewhere else on that morning, if they'd gone to work instead of stayed at home with a stomachache, if they'd stepped out from behind the concrete wall that ended up shielding them from the direct effects of the bomb, all of them have a story like that, a what if scenario that if they, if they had taken the what if scenario, they would not have been there talking to me because they would be dead. So that hangs over that, that hung over the rest of their lives. This, this idea of the. The fragility of their. Of their existence and how close it had come to. To not existing anymore just through sheer luck or fate or destiny. Resilience. God, every one of them has just resilience that, that pushes the, the imagined limits of human endurance. Many survivors or initial survivors did not have the resilience. Maybe they didn't have the support community or their religious faith wavered or their survivor's guilt got the better of them and they ended up committing suicide or drinking themselves to death or something like that. So in a way, the people that I spoke to were sort of the winners of the hibaksha game. They had survived, they'd come this far, and they had enough psychological strength, I guess you could say, to sit across from a table from someone who looks like me, a Caucasian from the. The country that caused them all of their sorrow for three hours, looking me in the eye and share their stories with me and trust me to Transmit those stories and record them accurately. Yeah. So all of those, humor, irony, resilience, they're all there in spades with these people. Some of the most impressive people I've ever met. And collectively speaking, absolutely the most impressive people I've ever met.
C
In closing, what do you want people to take away from your writings here in Nagasaki and also your previous publication?
A
I want people to take away the idea that these. These weapons can never be used again under any circumstances, except maybe for like, planet killing, asteroid deflection or something. Right? Like this. Have you ever seen those asteroid movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon? Right, which we should have. We should probably have a small and internationally managed stockpile of those kept against that contingency that they might have to be used for that someday. But national militaries should not have the access to those. And states, politicians, decision makers should never have the nuclear option on the table as a possible solution to what might seem to them in this situation. An intractable and impossible situation. While we're losing a war, the war, the enemy's closing on the Capitol. Well, we might as well use a nuke to try to make the pullback. No, that can't be done, ever. Because the other side will just fire back something bigger, and then the escalation will snowball and within a couple of hours, boom. Human civilization is toast. It's gone. So these weapons can never be looked at as potential solutions to problems outside of that very narrow range of, as I was saying, the asteroid deflection scenario. Something like that.
C
Well, it was great following up on your newest publication, Nagasaki, the Last Witnesses.
A
Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thanks for your great questions.
C
Where are you teaching at now? And are you going to be giving any seminars or meetups?
A
I'm teaching at Shizuoku University, which is about halfway between Tokyo and Osaka on the Pacific coast. And I've been here since 1992. I'll be here for two and a half more years until my mandatory retirement at age 65. Yeah, I'm always open to, you know, giving Zoom seminars or lectures or things like that. And I have been doing that pretty steadily for the past year or so. And I plan to keep doing that as long as I can, as long as there's interest in my. In my research. Okay.
C
That was Professor M.G. sheftal, author of Nagasaki the Last Witnesses, published by Penguin. It reminds us that memory is both an inheritance and a responsibility. And that sometimes the last word on history doesn't belong to the statesmen or generals, but to ordinary people who happen to survive the unimaginable. As always, thanks for listening to the New Books Network. And thank you to Professor M.G. sheftalk.
A
Again, thank you for having me.
Host: Nathan Moore
Guest: Professor M. G. Sheftall
Date: October 1, 2025
In this episode, host Nathan Moore sits down with Professor M. G. Sheftall to discuss his forthcoming book Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses. The conversation explores not just the historical facts of the atomic bombing, but the lived memories of Nagasaki’s survivors—voices that are dwindling with time. Sheftall reveals how personal testimony, social context, memory politics, and cultural nuance all shape the legacy and understanding of one of the 20th century’s most consequential moments. The episode delves into the methodology of oral history, survivor experience, ethics of testimony, cultural context, shifts in nuclear thought, and the enduring lessons of resilience and memory.
Sheftall defines “last witnesses” as survivors of Nagasaki who were at least 12 years old at the time of the bombing—old enough to provide narrative memories, not just fragmented recollections ([02:56 – 04:49]).
He conducted multiple in-depth interviews with survivors, focusing both on the day of the bombing and their lives before and after ([08:18 – 15:07]):
Granularity of Memory
"On the morning of the explosion, I woke up at 6 o’clock. My mother made me rice gruel. I met Hanako at the streetcar stop, and we went on our way to the munitions plant to do our work. And that’s when the explosion happened." – M.G. Sheftall [03:35]
Context Matters "I set out to write the Hiroshima and Nagasaki books that I’d always wanted to read." – M.G. Sheftall [09:44]
Survivor Stigma "From the beginning... the origins were shrouded in shame, largely, and that really colored and influenced the trajectory that atomic bomb memory took here." – M.G. Sheftall [18:23]
Rising Nuclear Anxiety in Japan "If someone had said to me 10 years ago that Japan was going to be here in 2025, I would have thought they were high on something or drunk. Just unthinkable. But now people are talking about it openly. It’s kind of scary really." – M.G. Sheftall [28:29]
Irony and Survivor Guilt "Every survivor has a, has an irony story, right? Because if they’d been somewhere else on that morning, if they’d gone to work instead of stayed at home with a stomachache..." – M.G. Sheftall [45:54]
On the Purpose of Memory "These weapons can never be used again under any circumstances, except maybe for, like, planet-killing asteroid deflection or something." – M.G. Sheftall [48:12]
Sheftall’s core message is clear:
These stories are vital not only as historical record but as living memory, offering irrefutable personal testimony against nuclear war’s return. Their voices, captured as “the last witnesses,” demand that such weapons never be used again under any human circumstance, cementing the importance of memory as both inheritance and responsibility.