The Chukiren Peace Memorial Museum nestles among swathes of identikit houses in a suburb of Saitama Prefecture, watched over by a pensioner – a foot soldier in what Milan Kundera called the struggle of memory against forgetting. Voluntarily funded and still smelling of new paint, the museum is a work in progress; an antidote, hopes Curator Niki Fumiko, to the narcissistic chauvinism of the Abe administration, which she and her supporters believe is poisoning the bloodstream of Japanese politics.