The development and use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki number among the formative national experiences for both Japanese and Americans, as well as for U.S.-Japan relations throughout the last half of the twentieth century. It is now clear, however, that memories and lessons learned from the bombings are still being reworked and contested, perhaps even more heatedly than they were in 1945. Tracking the development of that fifty-year trajectory, this volume explores the ways in which the bomb has shaped the self-image of both peoples: for Americans, the dominant story is that the bombs provided an appropriate and necessary conclusion to a just war; for Japanese, it is a symbol of their victimization. The distinguished contributors analyze the ways in which memories of the bombs, constantly reworked in the media, in the arts, and in the political arena, continue to define important, albeit often unacknowledged, undercurrents in the U.S.-Japan relationship.

I: Introduction; 1: Commemoration and Silence; II: Commemoration and Censorship; 2: Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia; 3: Between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki; 4: Making Things Visible; 5: Commemoration Controversies; 6: Mass Death in Miniature; 7: Patriotic Orthodoxy and American Decline; III: Contending Constituencies; 8: Hiroshima and Nagasaki; 9: The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches; 10: Memory Matters; 11: Were We the Enemy?; 12: Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory; IV: Afterword; 13: Learning about Patriotism, Decency, and the Bomb