World War II produced many great villains, but as for the supreme Monster, many would award that dishonor to Adolph Eichmann, the man who administered the deaths of six million Jews, and who made “I was only doing my job” into an expression laden with bitter irony in the post war world. Hannah Arendt, after attending his trial in Israel, shocked the world by announcing that she found him to be not a Monster at all, but rather a Nobody – or worse still, an Anybody. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banality of Evil was attacked on the reasonable grounds that where there are monstrous acts, there must be a Monster. But as terrifying as Monsters are, Arendt was pointing to a truth more frightening still: that monstrous acts can be carried out by ordinary (banal) bureaucrats.

This conversation between two artists draws on, presents, and discusses visual representations including video, drawings and maps pertaining to the Nanjing Massacre and the US history of bombing. Discussion offers reflection on war, memory, history, biography, the relationship between language and visual representation, protest, the possibility of reconciliation, and the role of the artist in response to war.

The year 2010 marks the 65th year since the 1945 Battle of Okinawa between American and Japanese armed forces, the 50th year since the signing of the Japan-US Security Treaty in 1960, and the 38th year since Okinawa was officially returned from American to Japanese control in 1972. In May of 2010, after juggling ill-conceived and unpopular alternative proposals for the relocation of the American military's Futenma Airbase in Okinawa, the short-lived Democratic Party's Hatoyama Government capitulated to American demands for the continuation of the original relocation plans, agreed upon in 1996 with the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which call for the construction of a heliport at Camp Schwab, in Henoko, also in Okinawa. Despite this latest Japan-US agreement, or rather because of it, the controversial and much contested issue of Futenma Airbase's return-as-relocation (see Inoue 2007) remains unresolved, especially for Okinawans.