8　「トランスナショナルな」平和のシンボルとしての広島―――戦後初期の国際世界平和デー運動に着目して

抄録

This paper focuses on the International World Peace Day Movement (IWPDM) in order to clarify how people and social circumstances outside Japan influenced the discourses about Hiroshima bombing in the Japanese society during the early postwar years.

IWPDM was a peace movement based in the U.S., brought about by the interaction of two individuals in Oakland, California, and Hiroshima. The origin of this movement can be traced back to the “Symbol of Peace” discourse. During the period of the U.S. occupation, when the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) strictly prohibited the criticism about the use of atomic bombs, Hiroshima city authorities claimed that Hiroshima was the “Symbol of Peace” because Hiroshima bombing had put an end to the war and brought the world peace.

Among the participants of IWPDM were Christian organizations in the U.S. and peace groups in the Western countries. There were almost no participants from the Communist countries. These characteristics helped making IWPDM acceptable to SCAP, and enabled Hiroshima city authorities to express their interest in it.

The main idea of IWPDM was similar to that of Hiroshima city authorities in that Hiroshima was a transnational symbol of peace. However, in the case of IWPDM, Hiroshima symbolized peace because for them it was the symbol of the grave threat to the world. The participants were less interested in the actual state of casualties and loss that took place there. Behind this was the perception widely shared in the U.S. and other countries that the presence of the atomic weapons was an imminent danger to their own lives when the Cold War was heightening. At the same time, this absence of the perspective to the human destruction in Hiroshima was another aspect of IWPDM that made it tolerable to SCAP.