How many books on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been published in the world and how many languages have been used to publish them? Our survey started from these simple questions. We are ready to release a database containing approximately 4,174 books published in 75 languages. Your first search might be for information on the topic you are studying. Then you can search within the results to filter the information by language, category (Literature, Juvenile Literature, Memories, Graphic and Photographic Records, History and Social Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Physical Sciences and Engineering), and publication year. In this way you will discover the connections among the books in a way that reveals the scope related to the research question. In other words, you will learn how the world has shared information related to the atomic bombings since 1945.
Note:We handled the books originally written in Japanese differently than the ones originating in other languages. The database does not contain books originally written in Japanese that have no translated versions in other languages. We do, however, list books written in languages other than Japanese that have never been translated into any other language. The offerings of this database currently reflect the numbers of languages and books collected as of April 1st 2023. The number may increase, based on our future research.
Try to identify some keywords to narrow down a search. For example, if you input “Sadako paper cranes,” you will obtain the information from books on Sadako Sasaki’s paper crane story quickly. Conversely, if you only input “Sadako”, the results show many irrelevant books by several authors. You can obtain the same results using your own language, as shown in this example as follows: “さだこ おりづる”.
As a result of conducting a keyword search, a list of book titles appears with an indication of the original and/or the number of translations. Next, click on the book title to obtain basic information about each book, such as the author, editor, translator, book title, place of publication, publisher, the year of publication, as well as descriptions originally written by LinguaHiroshima members. We provide detailed descriptions for primary sources, but not for secondary sources.
You can obtain a book list by language, category (Literature, Juvenile Literature, Memories, Graphic and Photographic Records, History and Social Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Physical Sciences and Engineering) and year of publication.
Revising and updating the data will constitute our primary tasks from now on. We made every effort to find books concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were published since 1945; however, there may still be many books left unlisted. If users know of any such books, we would be delighted to receive any information in this regard.
In our database we use the Hepburn method for romanization of Japanese words as recommended by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, with one exception. We use syllabic n instead of m before the consonants b, m, and p. For example: Genbaku for 原爆 or atomic bomb, Kenmoku for 見目 (a family name), and nenpo for 年報 or an annual report.