Yuki Miyamoto is an ethicist whose work centers on nuclear
discourse and environmental ethics, through the framework of comparative
ethics. Her monograph Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima (Fordham University Press, 2011)
examines the ways in which survivors of the atomic bombings of 1945 came to
terms with the nuclear attacks within their religious understandings—Hiroshima
with True Pure Land Buddhism; Nagasaki with Roman Catholicism—while critiquing
the framework imposed by nation-states. She continues to work on nuclear
discourse, marshaling the key concepts of commemoration, representation, and
dark tourism in articles such as “In the Light of Hiroshima” in the edited volume, Reimagining
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Routledge,
2017), and “Gendered Bodies in Tokusatsu”
in The Journal of Popular Culture (2016).
She is also studying a case of environmental disaster in the form of methyl
mercury poisoning in Japan, for example in the article “Before Good and Evil” in Spirituality in the 21st Century 3: Theory, Praxis and
Pedagogyi (2014),
against the backdrop of the still unfolding disaster at the Fukushima daiichi
nuclear power plant. This study forms the basis of her current book project,
tentatively entitled Otherwise than This
World: Ethics and Praxis out of Environmental Disaster in Minamata.
Research Interests
- Comparative Ethics
- Nuclear Ethics
- Japan
- Environmental Ethics
Courses Frequently Taught
REL 202 Atom Bomb Discourse
HON 104 Religious Worldviews and Ethical Perspectives
HON 350 Honors Senior Seminar: The Atomic Age
LSP 112 Focal Point Seminar: Re/Presentation of Japan