Digitalising Trauma's fractures: Nagasaki Museums, Objects, Witnesses, and Virtuality

Abstract

<p>The Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki is located less than 1km from Ground Zero where the United States Army Air Force detonated a second atomic bomb just a few days before the end of World War II on 9 August 1945 (Figure 1). It commemorates immense tangible and intangible losses for this place. The United States Army exploded a plutonium fuelled atomic bomb nicknamed 'Fatman' above the northern suburb of Urakami at 11:02am on 9 August 1945. Due to considerable cloud-cover and a lack of fuel, the pilots released the bomb not above the proposed city target, but earlier. Exploding roughly 500 metres above the Urakami valley, a northerly suburb of Nagasaki, the bombing exerted a force equivalent to 22,000 tons of TNT (Kort 2007, p. 4). This was the second of two atomic bombings of cities in Japan: events which definitively altered the course of world history. Whether or not the bombing were decisive for the final stages of WWII, there is little doubt the atomic explosions defined the nature, and the fears central to the following Cold War. Culturally, socially and politically, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum narrates a unique trajectory - that is often compared to the museum in Hiroshima, the city bombed three days before - yet, Nagasaki has been much less discussed in existing academic literature. What sets the narrative of the bombing of Nagasaki apart from that of Hiroshima is how the centre point of the bombing demolished a much more marginal, less developed part of the city, fracturing social, cultural, and economic life and resulting in deep trauma in a city that was already divided (McClelland 2019a, p.3-14).</p>