Introduction

Chad R. Diehl has written the volume’s introduction as an essay that outlines the most salient points emerging from discussions and representations of the atomic experience of Nagasaki. Specifically, the introduction illustrates how the city’s history of Christianity shaped Nagasaki’s image as an atomic-bombed city in popular memory and scholarly discourse on the bombings, especially in comparison to Hiroshima. Diehl singles out what he calls the Christian image of ground zero—which took hold from immediately after the bombing—as the most enduring legacy of Nagasaki’s postatomic memoryscapes. Diehl leverages an in-depth analysis of murals depicting Nagasaki’s atomic experience by the two artists Toshi and Iri Maruki (best known for their work The Hiroshima Panels) to set up an argument about how we must confront the origins and legacies of the Christian image of ground zero as a prerequisite for understanding “Nagasaki” and to engage with that city’s experience as a subject worthy of study on its own terms, i.e. without being subsumed under “Hiroshima.”