Popular Protest in Post War Japan: The Antiwar Art of Shikoku GorōMain MenuOverviewThis exhibit explores the vibrant grassroots artistic culture of Hiroshima, known as the atomic bombed city. From 1949 through the 1990s, local artist Shikoku Gorō advanced a bold and democratic vision for cultural life by bringing poetry to the streets & mobilizing visual arts to represent the vitality, beauty, and complexity of Hiroshima. The exhibit explores a set of influential books, along with other examples of socially committed art. Shikoku and his circles of collaborators illuminated pathways to civic engagement for the citizens of Hiroshima—hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), vets, & younger generations.Atom Bomb Poetry CollectionThe Angry JizoHiroshima SketchesGlossaryResourcesAcknowledgmentsAnn Sherif99c9850c7ffbc663daa16feec7b9f1dd71ca3e2e
Personal Meaning Note
12020-05-26T15:13:40+00:00Max Mitchell5fec7a6574d32fe574c01ba927cd57c749ceca6991plain2020-05-26T15:13:40+00:00Max Mitchell5fec7a6574d32fe574c01ba927cd57c749ceca69The extensive literature on memory, history, and place includes Pierre Nora’s influential notion of lieux de memoire (memory space, sites of memory); Lisa Yoneyama’s use of memoryscape; Paul Gilroy’s concept of knotted intersections of history and memory. James Young, John Dower, and others emphasize people’s “active agency” necessary for places to inscribe memory.
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12020-05-26T15:13:31+00:00Text, Image, and the War Dead2plain2020-06-14T16:09:35+00:00Shikoku carefully paired text and image in this book. Some of the text concerns the beauty of his beloved Hiroshima, but most passages narrate the entanglement of the built and natural environments with broader imperial and national histories and memories, as well as local and personal meanings. Shikoku revisited certain sites over a period of decades to sketch; other times he drew from memory. He explained drawing cityscapes as a process of grappling with the larger evolving meanings of Hiroshima as it oscillates between hometown, community, military center, city of peace, and contested global site in the nuclear age. At the same time, the book celebrate the richness of daily life there.
The book evokes Hiroshima as a beautiful city built on top of the bones of the war dead; a place once destroyed by a nuclear bomb but now alive with lush green trees, mountains, and a thriving built environment; a delta with a hundred bridges spanning the rivers so one might go home. The book also asserts an ethical stance against nuclear weapons, social injustice, and war, one consonant with the spirit of Hiroshima (Hiroshima no kokoro).
