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Crime and Responsibility: War, the state, and Japanese society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Yuki Tanaka
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‘Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the formation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.’ Ernest Renan

In 2002, the Japanese government built the “Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims” within the Hiroshima Peace Park. It is located less than two hundred meters from the A-Bomb Peace Museum operated by the Hiroshima City Council. This new Memorial Hall, funded and run by the Japanese government, includes the following message on one of the wall panels:

‘At one point in the 20th century, Japan walked the path of war. Then, on December 8, 1941, Japan initiated hostilities against the U.S., Great Britain and others, plunging into what came to be known as the Pacific War. This war was largely fought elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region, but when the tide turned against Japan, American warplanes began bombing the homeland, and Okinawa became a bloody battlefield. Within this context of war, on August 6, 1945, the world's first atomic weapon, a bomb of unprecedented destructive power, was dropped on the city of Hiroshima.’

Type
Part 2: Topics of Historical Memory in Japan
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Special Issue S7: Course Reader No. 7. The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia , January 2013 , pp. 88 - 98
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2013

References

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