August in Japan is a time of remembrance—of family dead (honoured in the festival of Obon) and of war dead (those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in particular). Seventy-five years after the end of the war, the ranks of those who remember it have grown thin, but in August 2020 one story caught my eye. It was the story of Yi (or Lee) Hak-nae, born in the then Japanese colony of Chosen (Korea) in 1925 and known during the war and during his trials by his Japanese name, Hiromura Kakurai. Now aged in his nineties, Yi is the last survivor of 148 Koreans convicted of war crimes in the Allied trials that followed the East Asian and Pacific wars and continued to 1947. His story, published by Reuters in 2020, was headed ‘The Survivor: Last Korean War Criminal in Japan Wants Recognition’.

This article examines the often-noted “cuteness” in early post-war Japanese animation, and explains how this style has led in more recent years to grittier works depicting war's devastation through fantasy and cinematic technology. Anime provides insight into the social attitudes of each post-war era; and, into how collective memory has processed “unimaginable” horror. The author argues that what is concealed within “unrealistic” animation often reveals more than what is shown about people grappling with an apocalyptic legacy in search of a national identity.