The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were Japan's single greatest catastrophe of World War II. They loom so large in the popular imagination that the events of the previous decade and a half have paled – or faded from view altogether. (Conveniently so, as Asians affected by those events have noted.)

In millions of words and images, eulogizing and otherwise, the bombings have been ritualized and abstracted in that same imagination, their horror endlessly referred to, but less and less clearly felt. Meanwhile, the victims have come to be seen more as park statuary, less as flawed human beings.