Norma Field

Norma Field grew up in Tokyo, Japan, with an American father and Japanese mother. Listening to her parents’ conflicting views on Pacific nuclear weapons testing turned out to be her introduction to the atomic age. She first came to the US at college age. Her BA is from Pitzer Collge, MA from Indiana University, and PhD from Princeton University. Now professor emerita, she began her career at the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations of the University of Chicago as a scholar of classical Japanese literature. Her most recent publications are Ima, “Heiwa” o honki de kataru ni wa: Inochi, jiyu, rekishi [To seriously talk peace today: Life, freedom, history]; The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and the Tokyo Olympics (introduction and translation of Koide Hiroaki). With Yuki Miyamoto, she maintains the Atomic Age website.

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster occurred just as she was preparing to retire from thirty years’ of teaching at the University of Chicago. That disaster brought together questions that have always been important to her : what are people able and willing to understand, given economic, social, and political constraints, in such a crisis? How do taboos get set in place, silencing people and alienating them from profound anxieties about themselves and their children because of radiation, the invisible intruder? How do these reverberate with the still unresolved history of atomic bombing?

Until the pandemic, Field traveled on average twice a year to Fukushima. She has organized symposia, translated and written on Fukushima. Recent publications include  Fukushima Radiation: Will You Still Say No Crime Has Been Committed? (editor and co-translator, 2015) and “This will still be true tomorrow: ‘Fukushima ain’t got the time for Olympic Games’” (2020).