摘要：As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels. As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōe lamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublime as a trauma of geopolitical domination and racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (raptured by these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installing Patriot missiles as signs of their global supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinated by self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a ‘post-nuclear’ era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility: at once urging the globe towards annihilation and yet also towards transactional and dialogical unity at the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, with its “sublime Patriot” missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.
关键词：Hiroshima;nuclear sublime;Kenzaburo ﾅ憩;Akira Kurosawa;Cold War;J. G. Ballard
