Japanese fiction studied in American classrooms is more likely to emphasize Japan's suffering under the atomic bomb than to grapple with that nation's war crimes. Students should be informed of the horrific human costs of atomic weapons (and conventional aerial bombing of civilians from plane and drone); nevertheless, treating Japan only as a victim risks portraying the bombings as an abstraction, a disaster without cause or context, thus playing into master narratives of responsibility developed by Japan and the United States in the immediate postwar era. Narratives of victimization that ignore questions of ethical accountability will not readily foster introspective discussions of guilt, responsibility, and complicity. Accounts of Japanese atrocity are a necessary counterweight because they consider responsibility in ways that are often elided in discussions of the atomic bombings. In his study of Japanese war crimes Yuki Tanaka writes that exploring these crimes stimulates us to project our thoughts toward a more humane future through the creative examination of our past. The texts discussed below do more than recount atrocities; they illustrate how confronting depravity in the past and present can help us move toward a more humane future.

Bates, Alex. Teaching Japanese War Crimes through Literature. In Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction, edited by Alex Bates, 157-168. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2023.

Alex Bates is a professor of Japanese Language and Literature at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit MLA's (Modern Language Association) Website. https://www.mla.org/Publications/Bookstore/Options-for-Teaching/Teaching-Postwar-Japanese-Fiction

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