Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses and it Embers series companion volume -- Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses – are the result of nine years of personal interviews with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, onsite fieldwork, and both Japanese and American archival research by M.G. Sheftall, a cultural historian at Shizuoka University, a campus of the Japanese national university system.
In these books, M. G. Sheftall layers the stories of hibakusha—the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors—in harrowing detail, to give a minute-by-minute report of August 6, 1945, in the leadup and aftermath of the world-changing bombing mission of Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay, and Little Boy. These survivors and witnesses, who are now on average ninety years old, are quite literally the last people who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in their cities before the bombings, tell us what they experienced on the day those cities were obliterated, and give us some appreciation of what it has entailed to live with those memories and scars since.
With the post-World War II global order now in disarray, toxic nationalism once again on the march, and liberal democracy in seemingly full retreat around the world, the Embers volumes should be required reading for the modern age. The personal accounts they contain are cautionary tales about the horror and insanity of nuclear warfare, reminding us—it is hoped—that the world still lives with this danger at our doorstep. But the stories these hibakusha have shared with Sheftall – and through him, with all of us – also stand as testaments to the incredible resilience of the human spirit in the face of unfathomable horror, suffering, and destruction.
M.G. Sheftall is a professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication at Shizuoka University. In addition to his teaching duties, he has been a research fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto (2012-2013), a visiting curator at WWII-related museums in Japan and the United States, and a technical consultant and commentator for numerous historical documentaries in both Western and Japanese media. His best-known works to date include: Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (2005); Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses (2024); and its companion volume, the upcoming Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses (2025). He has lived and worked in Japan continuously since 1987.
Doors open at 5:45 pm with a casual “meet the author/cocktail time” from 6:00 pm. Dinner will be served from 6:30 pm and the talk begins at 7:15 pm.
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