Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the ‘legacy successor’ (densōhsha) initiative used in some Japanese museums in place of hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to convey eyewitness testimony on behalf of those unable to do so themselves, asking what ethical issues might arise with such a programme.

Paper long abstract:

‘Can successors pass on the words that come out of our souls, something so painful, our experiences and thoughts and feelings?’ – Emiko Okada (in Rosner, 2017), eight years old at the time of the Hiroshima bombing. Before her death in April 2021, Okada entrusted the retelling of her experience to Yasukazu Narahara from Tokyo, a ‘legacy successor’. This paper analyses Hiroshima ‘legacy successor’ initiative from an ethical standpoint.

For years after the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, acting as kataribe (storytellers), hibakusha recounted their experiences to museum visitors. Hearing a talk from a hibakusha was a fixed feature of a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, or the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, both of which opened in 1955. However, as of 2022, the average age of a hibakusha is 84. This has led to an inevitable decline in living hibakusha who can still visit the museum to give lectures, challenging ‘museum management to maintain an interpretation form where the hibakusha tell their tragic experiences to both visitors and students’ (Yoshida et al. 2016: 36).

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some memorial museums offer visitors the experience of listening to denshōsha, (legacy successors), who did not directly experience the event. Denshōsha are trained for three years to ‘inherit’ a hibakusha’s experience so that they can still convey their testimony at the museum. However, the idea that someone can give testimony on behalf of a direct eyewitness could be considered ethically problematic. Indeed, some ‘aging kataribe have a dilemma that their stories of agonizing memories are very personal and should not be told by other people’ (Hashimoto and Telfer, 2019).

Based on scholarly literature, publicly available interviews with denshōsha, and fieldwork conducted in Japan between June-August 2022, this paper raises significant questions about the ethics of storytelling, a relatively under-researched area of Japanese museology. This paper is important for those in Japanese Studies, as it offers a different perspective to the extensive scholarship on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum which usually concerns the display of artefacts.