Publisher's Synopsis
In postwar Japan, "peace" has become the memorial scaffolding that structures the collective national orientation towards the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War, in large part owing to the devastating bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet the atomic catastrophes endured by the two cities have become subsumed into what Anne McClintock terms the "administration of forgetting." The traumas associated with the bombs have been construed in Japan as an experience of national victimhood and a moral lesson for humanity, in the process obfuscating histories of imperial terror that I argue are carried forward in significant formal continuities, transvalued in a discourse of peace. Peace, in this regard, becomes a mode for asserting a clean rupture and justifying political amnesia.
