Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses
Donnerstag, 23.10.2025, 18:00 UhrVortrag, Museum Fünf Kontinente, München
Lecture with Prof. M. G. Sheftall, Ph.D. (Shizuoka University) on Thursday, 23 October 2025 at 6pm
Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses and its Embers series companion volume—Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses—are the result of nine years of personal interviews with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, onsite fieldwork, and both Japanese and American archival research by M.G. Sheftall, a cultural historian at Shizuoka University, a campus of the Japanese national university system.
In his research, M. G. Sheftall layers the stories of hibakusha—the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors—in harrowing detail, to give a minute-by-minute report of August 6, 1945, in the leadup and aftermath of the world-changing bombing mission of Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay, and Little Boy. These survivors and witnesses, who now have an average age over ninety years old, are quite literally the last people who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in their cities before the bombings, tell us what they experienced on the day those cities were obliterated, and give us some appreciation of what it has entailed to live with those memories and scars during the subsequent seventy-plus years.
With the post-World War II global order now in disarray, toxic nationalism once again on the march, and liberal democracy in seemingly full retreat around the world, these hibakusha accounts should be required reading for the modern age, as they can serve as cautionary tales about the horror and insanity of nuclear warfare, reminding us—it is hoped—that the world still lives with this danger at our doorstep. But the stories these hibakusha have shared with Sheftall also stand as testaments to the incredible resilience of the human spirit in the face unfathomable horror, suffering, and destruction.
M.G. Sheftall is a professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication at Shizuoka University. His research focuses on the modern evolution of Japanese national identity, with particular emphasis on WWII and the lingering effects of that conflict at both collective and individual levels of Japanese consciousness. In addition to his teaching duties, he has been a research fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto (2012–2013), a visiting curator at WWII-related museums in Japan and the United States, and a technical consultant and commentator for numerous historical documentaries in both Western and Japanese media. His best-known works to date include: Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (2005), based on interviews with survivors of Japan’s 1944–1945 kamikaze program; Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses (2024); and its companion volume, the upcoming Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses (2025), based on interviews with survivors of the atomic bombings of those two cities in 1945. He has lived and worked in Japan continuously since 1987.
The lecture will be held in English.
Vortragsprogramm zur Sonderausstellung Vom Inferno zum Friedenssymbol. 80 Jahre Hiroshima und Nagasaki in Kooperation mit dem Japan-Zentrum der LMU München
