In the Crossfire of Nationalism: Historical Memory, National Identity, and the East Asian Controversy over Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Abstract

For all Chinese, Japanese and Korean personal names, I follow the Asian custom of placing surnames before given names; for the sake of consistency, this rule is followed even for Asian authors who have published their works in English (hence "Wang Zheng" instead of "Zheng Wang"). The only exception is for those who have Asian surnames but English given names. For the transliteration of Chinese sources and terms, I use the pinyin romanization system and strictly follow the updated Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography; for Japanese terms I use the Modified Hepburn system; for Korean terms I use the Revised Romanization of Korean system. However, for certain already well-known proper names, the common English spelling is used. All diacritics are omitted in text but kept in the footnotes and bibliography. When Asian characters are used to identify sources and terms mentioned, simplified characters are used for all Chinese sources and terms; shinjitai is used for all Japanese kanji terms; hangeul, immediately followed by the corresponding hanja if possible, is used for all Korean terms. In 2015, the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, delegations from around the world gathered at the United Nations Headquarters in New York for the Ninth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), a quinquennial meeting of the NPT's 190 state parties to review the Treaty's implementation in the previous five years. On 27 April, the opening day of the meeting, the Japanese delegation, led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Kishida Fumio and Ambassador Sano Toshio, called for new actions in disarmament and transparency, and commented on issues such as fissile material cut-off and the Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. At the end of its speech, the delegation stressed the importance of raising awareness of ""the tragedy that had been brought about by the use of nuclear weapons,and asked to have the Conference's Final Document invite the world's leaders to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki "to witness the reality [of atomic bombings] first hand".