03 June 2016

Next meeting: Wednesday 29 June at the Craft Beer Co - Guest speaker Elizabeth Ingrams

7 for 7.30 Craft Beer Co http://thecraftbeerco.com/pubs/brighton/

Elizabeth Ingrams has worked extensively in Japan including for the Japan Times, Eland Books, the Japan Literature Promotion Project. Her anthology of travel in Japan, Japan Through Writers’ Eyes, has recently been republished. In Hiroshima, Japan, the average age of the survivors of the world’s first nuclear attack, known as hibakusha, is 80 years old. In a few years’ time it is likely that none of the first-hand witnesses will be around to remember the event.

During the post-war period in Japan, when the word ‘atomic bomb’ was censored under US occupation (1945-1952), the narratives of the hibakusha were marginalized and the history of the end of World War Two was played down as part of post-war reconstruction through a kind of collective amnesia or forgetting.

The hibakusha are coming forward to tell their experiences due to an urgent desire to continue to pass on to the next generation the horror and tragedy of nuclear war and its results for humanity.

This talk by Elizabeth Ingrams will cover ways of investigating survivors' stories; approaching sensitive subjects. She will also talk about her work within the NUJ to promote and re-frame its antinuclear policy. Her work is motivated by the goal of helping change attitudes toward the end of World War Two. Her website is at https://elizabethingrams.wordpress.com