Name: Haunting Hands: Artistic Remembrance of Hiroshima in 21st Century Japan
Start: 2026-04-07T12:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-04-07T13:30:00-04:00
Location: Weatherhead East Asian Institute (located at the School of International and Public Affairs)

Haunting Hands: Artistic Remembrance of Hiroshima in 21st Century Japan

With 80+ yrs having passed since end of WWII, only a handful of hibakusha are left to share their personal tales of nuclear survival.
About this Event

For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 4:00pm on Mar. 25 for campus access.

Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event. NOTE: You cannot access campus using the QR code from Eventbrite.

Speaker: Yoshikuni Igarashi, Distinguished Professor of History Vanderbilt University

Moderator: Sarah Kovner, Senior Research Scholar in the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace; Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs, SIPA

With more than eighty years having passed since the end of WWII only a handful of hibakusha are left to share their personal tales of nuclear survival, and the task of passing down nuclear memories has fallen into the hands of the postwar generations, the generations who have no direct experience of the event. In this presentation, Professor Igarashi will discuss two female Japanese artists’ creative efforts to position themselves as the legitimate inheritors and propagators of Hiroshima’s memories.

Speaker's Bio: Yoshikuni Igarashi’s research focuses on Japanese cultural history during the interwar and post-WWII periods. His most recent monograph, Japan, 1972: Masculinity in the Age of Mass Consumption and Metavisuality (Columbia UP, 2021) focuses on the radical economic, social, and cultural transformation of Japanese society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, stemming from the development of mass consumer society, and analyses Japanese society’s anxiety-ridden and often violent responses to that transformation.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.