Chapter IV: Radiating from the Past

Chapter three attends to the articulations of liberation in the histories that narrated the end of the Japanese Empire. Science and technology figured predominantly in Korean-language accounts of the Asia-Pacific War, in particular the atomic bombings that coincided with its resolution. In so far as the end of the war had led to the end of the empire, these were liberatory accounts. However, atomic weapons and the broader campaign of urban bombings that they were a part of introduced new temporalities that undermine the progressive aspirations for techno-liberation. This chapter examines the tension that the bombings introduced. It points to the plurality of positions that Korean writers and atomic bomb survivors occupied in relation to a postcolonial and atomic era. This is done by first examining the theme of liberation sketched out in accounts of the Asia-Pacific War as a “science war.” Here inter-imperial conflict was read as a technoscientific contest that pivoted on the relative capacity to conduct research.

In these accounts, whiggish narratives of scientific development melded with notions of inter-state competition. That the former empire had been defeated in this contest was a significant rupture from the hierarchical relations the defined Japanese rule; but in doing so, the colonial metropole was simply displaced, not dispatched. The question of liberation is focused on in a second section through a review of several key works and translations that shaped the Cold War discourse about the atomic attacks both in Korea and transnationally. Through readings of a series of post-liberation texts, including the 1949 Korean translations of John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Takashi Nagai’s The Bells of Nagasaki, this section examines how several modes of utilitarian thought were applied to redeem the bombings as liberatory.

From here the chapter shifts to examine how science as a progressive force interfaced with the cultures of foreboding that emerged through wartime mobilization. While the specter of atomic weapons was new to the post-1945 world, the threat of indiscriminate aerial bombing was not. Colonial era mobilization had pressed urban destruction into the popular the imagination and along with these projections came an explicit agnosticism over the possibilities of science in a progressive history. This theme is further highlighted in a final section on Korean survivors of the atomic attacks. For the tens of thousands of Koreans who endured the mental and physiological trauma of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings the future was hardly a liberatory horizon, but instead represented a disconcerting return to the present dangers of radioactive exposure.