The rejection of Isamu Noguchi's Hiroshima cenotaph: a Japanese American artist in occupied Japan

On the other hand, a sympathetic essay appeared in Bijutsu Hihyo (Art Criticism), then the most advanced journal of contemporary art criticism and theory in Japan. The author, who was from Hiroshima, defended Noguchi with the observation that "to shun a work of art because the artist is a foreigner is to fail to see the internationality of art. Should we not regard the memorial of the victims of the nuclear bomb as a task best left to 'citizens of the world' who fervently desire a pure peace?"(16) Okamoto Taro, an artist and writer who forcefully advocated a dynamic model of tradition and asserted the universality of modern art, also defended Noguchi's cenotaph design. Okamoto wrote that Noguchi "was the most appropriate artist for this kind of monument," maintaining that "Hiroshima is already an international place. . . . The fact that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima is a product of the Japanese lack of awareness of the world."(17) Thus, support of Noguchi's proposal was premised, at least in part, on the international significance of Hiroshima while opposition was focused on the undesirability of Noguchi's non-Japanese nationality. Neither side regarded Noguchi's design as capable of representing the will of the Japanese people.

In 1954 the architect Shirai Sei'ichi took it upon himself to design an imaginary atomic memorial without any particular site in mind or plan for actual construction. His design, which was never to be realized, bears the traces of Noguchi's precedent in its pure geometry and its monumental vertical cylinder pushing through horizontal levels. Shirai's design is also analogous to that of Noguchi in its relationship to Japanese tradition; according to an interpretation of 1955 by the architectural critic Kawazoe Noboru, the atomic memorial harbors significant allusions to the seventh-century temple of Horyuji in Nara. Shirai's identity posed no non-Japanese affiliation to inhibit a nativist polemic; Kawazoe dwelled on the significance of the Hiroshima holocaust to the Japanese people. "Western civilization"' is the weighted term in his view of the historical causes of the disaster. Western civilization produced the technology of nuclear war, Kawazoe maintained, just as it fomented the imperialism that colonized Asia and forced Japan to adopt a similar imperialist stance to maintain its independence, which led in turn to the Japanese atrocities in Asia:

However, in the midst of violent resistance from the peoples of Asia and upon receiving the highest product of nuclear civilization, the nuclear bomb, Japan was knocked out of the line of Western powers and it was only then that Japanese people were pressed buck to a self-realization of their real Asian identity.(18)

Kawazoe noted that this was a particularly bitter irony if, as some suggested, the American bombing of Japan was determined more by racism than by other factors. Thus the conclusion of the war is occasion for a "self-critique of the civilization which Japanese have received." In this destiny the Japanese are unique: "Only the Japanese have directly felt the cruelty possessed by the nuclear bomb and thus we have the strongest knowledge of the dangers of civilization."(19) It was this will to Japanese cultural exceptionalism, woven into the epic of Japan's defeat, that was threatened by the notion of a cenotaph designed by the bicultural Noguchi.