The Arts of Unmaking Empire : Nationalized (im)Mobilities and the Management of Post-Hiroshima Bodies

• In Event: Global Perspectives on Popular Culture

Abstract

This chapter examines how Hiroshima—commonly remembered as the city where the U.S. atomic bomb ended World War II—became central to the symbolic and spatial reordering of the postwar Asia-Pacific. It focuses on the postwar settlement of the Japanese empire, particularly through the repatriation of colonial subjects from Hiroshima to their assigned ‘homelands.’ Under U.S. Occupation, this process redefined national affiliations and redrew borders in the language of decolonization. Yet rather than dismantling imperial legacies, it erased the fluid, multiethnic geographies of the Japanese empire by fixing populations into discrete national categories, masking imperial continuity as postcolonial transition. Comparing the U.S.-led repatriation of Koreans from Hiroshima with other forms of managed mobility—such as the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission’s extraction of irradiated tissue samples and the selective humanitarian rehabilitation of the Hiroshima Maidens—this chapter argues that nationalized (im)mobility was not merely a consequence of war, but a deliberate technique of imperial spatial management. These divergent trajectories stabilized a post-imperial order by partitioning a once-fluid imperial space into a constellation of adjacent, governable nation-states. In doing so, the arts of unmaking empire were co-produced through U.S.-Japanese collaboration, transforming imperial debris into the foundations of a discretized Asia-Pacific.

Author

• Minah Kang, Johns Hopkins University