In postwar Japan peace has become the memorial scaffolding that structures the collective
national orientation towards the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War in large part owing to the
devastating bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet the atomic catastrophes endured by the two
cities have become subsumed into what Anne McClintock terms the administration of forgetting.
The traumas associated with the bombs have been construed in Japan as an experience of national
victimhood and a moral lesson for humanity in the process obfuscating histories of imperial
terror that I argue are carried forward in significant formal continuities transvalued in a
discourse of peace. Peace in this regard becomes a mode for asserting a clean rupture and
justifying political amnesia.
