HIST 216
Remembering Nagasaki Spring 2025
Division II
Cross-listed SOC 213 / ASIA 223

On the morning of August 9, 1945, the B-29 military plane Bokscar dropped an atom bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing an estimated 74,000 people. The Fat Man plutonium bomb would be the second and last nuclear bomb used in a military conflict. The course will consider this monumental historical event against the backdrop of Nagasaki’s fascinating history. For centuries, Nagasaki had been a place uniquely open to Western ideas, customs, and practices. During sakoku–Japan’s more than two century long isolation from the international community–Nagasaki was the only Japanese port city to allow any form of Western trade. The course will look at this era, as well as the years when Nagasaki was a stronghold of Japanese Catholicism and a hub of Japan’s persecuted “hidden Christians.” The class will also give attention to the early Meiji period when Nagasaki, along with the rest of Japan, reopened its doors to international trade, introduced more liberal religious freedom policies, and initiated features of Western-styled modern industrialization–a time and place that inspired Puccini’s famous opera, Madam Butterfly. A survey of this remarkable history–and the intersecting role of the United States in it–will shed light on both the manner in which the people of Nagasaki responded to the atom bomb and the narratives they constructed to interpret and remember it in the years that followed.