New and Clear

To be sure, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still plays a part in the imagery of popular culture. But more meaningful references to Japan's nuclear past, like those in the story of Godzilla or the cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa's best-selling series about a Hiroshima survivor, have morphed into the cultural equivalent of elevator music.

Indeed, Japanese culture is unusual (although by no means unique) in its ability to take shocks or disturbances and gradually transform and neuter them. In that respect, today's atomic imagery in pop culture is not so different from the mohawked punks who apologize profusely if they bump into you in downtown Tokyo: the T-shirts they wear with antisocial slogans (in English) are an aesthetic statement, not a moral one.

For my generation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the war in general now represent the equivalent of a cultural "game over" or "reset" button. Through a combination of conscious policy and unconscious culture, the painful memories and images of the war have lost their context, surfacing only as twisted echoes in our subculture. The result, for better and worse, is that, 60 years after Hiroshima, we dwell more on the future than the past.

[by Joi Ito]