Oral histories of North and South American survivors of the atomic bombs

Consisting of fifty-six oral histories of survivors collected by Mexico-based artist Shinpei Takeda from 2005 to 2010, as well as seventy-three oral histories of U.S. survivors and their supporters collected by US historian Naoko Wake from 2010 to 2015, this collection is the world’s largest oral history repository of non-Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Takeda collection, chiefly conducted in Japanese, is freely available online, so user can listen to the interviews at www.lib.msu.edu. Wake collection, which contains a number of interviews conducted in English, will become available online in 2018-19. As rare materials that convey experiences of the bomb by people of the Americas, including US-born citizens, the collection offers openings for considering issues not frequently related to nuclear destruction—colonialism, race, gender, citizenship, collective identity, migration, and diaspora.

Robert Vincent Voice Library, Michigan State University, East Lansing.

Wake, Naoko

English/Japanese

Oral History