News Abroad

The Man Who Continues to Speak about Experiencing the H-Bomb -- Exposed Clearly: the Deception that is Deterrence

by Oe Kenzaburo

Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō published this article in The Asahi Shinbun on March 15, 2011.

Richard H. Minear is Professor of History emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst. His books include translations of Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, Kurihara Sadako’s Black Eggs, and The Autobiography of ‘Barefoot Gen.’ His best-selling Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel contains an introduction by Art Spiegelman. His translation of Oishi Matashichi, The Day the Sun Rose in the West, is in press. He is a Japan Focus associate.

Notes

1 Ōe’s own father died in 1944, when Ōe was nine years old.

2 This passage occurs near the end of Kimyō na shigoto (Strange job), Ōe’s first published story. The job, in which the narrator works with two other students, one male and one female, involves slaughtering dogs; in the end, the job is a con, and they are all laid off after killing only some of the dogs. Ōe Kenzaburō zensakuhin 1:17 (Shinchōsha, 1966). This translation is by Ruth Adler (Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 12.3:73 [July-September 1980].

3 Hatoyama cited “deterrence” to justify abandoning his previous insistence that no new U.S. base be built in Okinawa in favor of supporting construction at Henoko.