Relatively few creators of Japanese popular culture works about the Asia-Pacific War are military veterans. More Japanese experienced the bombings of Japanese cities and accompanying hardship than fought overseas and survived to return to Japan. Japanese who experienced traumatic events such as the atomic bombings or the destruction of Tokyo and Osaka through firebombing used popular media such as anime, manga, and film to come to terms with their experiences. Typically they have not dwelt only on that experience.

In 2009 China became Japan's biggest trading partner, taking over the top spot from the United States. Japan is a popular destination for big-spending Chinese tourists, cited by some Japanese retailers as “salvation” in a time of economic downturn. On the flipside, the continent has only increased its allure for Japanese travellers, with tourists now more likely to hit Hong Kong than Hawaii. The number of Japanese and Chinese studying at universities and language schools in the other country continues to rise unabated.

From the Japanese point of view, the 1990s and 2000s are characterised by two broad historical shifts. The first is globalization. The word has many nuances but is most often taken to mean the expansion of economic interconnectivity between countries. In 1970 just under a million Japanese went overseas; by 2000 that number had risen to nearly 18 million. Likewise, in the 1970s, China was relatively isolated, its foreign trade a mere 20 billion USD in 1978. Now it is the axis of production on which the world economy turns, with about 3 trillion dollars in total imports and exports. Globalization also signifies the more rapid movement of people, information, ideas, and cultural forms across borders. In 1986 Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro made the shocking comment that “So high is the level of education in our country that Japan's is an intelligent society. Our average score is much higher than those of countries like the U.S. There are many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in America. In consequence the average score over there is exceedingly low.” Why did he say what he was thinking? Perhaps he lacked awareness that something said in Japanese at a press conference in Japan would be picked up by the world outside Japan's borders. Japanese politicians are still gaffe-prone, but now all know their comments may be tweeted around the globe in seconds. Importantly, Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans, and others now have quick access to information about historical narratives prevalent in other societies.

“Historiography” refers both to the study of history and to the body of research, writing, and debates about a specific historical theme or topic. In historical debates, historians have tended to place priority on written documents, even when dealing with recent events. More recently, however, oral history—interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors and attempts to come to terms with how ordinary people see their own historical experience—has become mainstream among academic historians.

Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Nakazawa Keiji's (1939-) manga Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen, 1973-85) is one of the most powerful graphic novels ever produced. Running over 2000 pages, the manga is loosely based on the experiences of the author, who lost his father, sister, and younger bother to the bomb. Barefoot Gen has been enduringly popular and sold millions of copies. It has been adapted into other media numerous times including two harrowing animated films, which opened in Japan in 1983 and 1986 and are available in English translation from Geneon, a live action film trilogy in the 1970s, and a 2007 TV drama.

Japanese war memory has diversified since 1945, but the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have retained their importance.

Scholars and critics have written in detail about how Japanese neo-nationalists have attempted to whitewash or deny war crimes committed by Japanese troops across Asia. Less widely discussed, however, is the fact that their revisionist school textbooks have also given short shrift to Japanese wartime suffering, or the understanding of Japanese as victims. Notably, while the Atarashii rekishi kyokasho (New History Textbook) failed to give even tentative numbers of the victims of Japanese wartime violence, the editors of the controversial first edition also left out the number killed by the atomic bombs. Since the early 1990s, neo-nationalists have argued that the Japanese population suffers from heiwa boke—a sort of “senility” brought on by peace. Since most Japanese oppose an expanded military role for the country or the development of nuclear weapons, neonationalists accuse their countrymen of unrealistic idealism. Downplaying the atomic bombings and focusing instead on “heroic sacrifice” and “service to the nation,” as Kobayashi Yoshinori does in Sensōron, is a way of undermining what scholar Thomas Berger has described as postwar Japan's “culture of anti-militarism.”

In many ways, Hollywood sets the tone for global cinema, at least of the blockbuster variety that big-budget war movies must almost inevitably become to justify their huge budgets. After 1998, many countries tried to produce their own Saving Private Ryan. Canada has the 2008 World War I melodrama Passchendaele. Russia, grappling with issues of national identity in the decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, has the “Great Patriotic War” epic The Star (2002). South Korea's Brotherhood (2004) was an attempt to understand the fraternal violence of the Korean War. While each of these national epics presents an account of war coherent with that country's memory culture, visual and narrative nods to Saving Private Ryan are evident in each.

As the essays in this collection suggest, representations of war are varied and memories of war are expressed in many different ways. Apart from works that seek to represent the Asia-Pacific War directly, there are also examples of popular culture that refer to the conflict obliquely or even use fantasy or science fiction scenarios as a metaphor or allegory to address the historical conflict and its postwar ramifications.