ABSTRACT
Japan’s strongly felt national identity as the first and only country to have undergone atomic bombings gives a unique twist to its perspective on the bomb. It is hardly surprising that Japanese views on the American decision to use the bomb have been markedly different from those of Americans. What deserves to be noted, however, is that, in some respects, the gaps in collective memory have, if anything, widened over the half-century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In both Japan and the United States, the A-bomb question is dominated by emotion and, more often than not, surrounded by historical myths and moralism. 1 In the United States until recently, the exigencies of the cold war and imperatives of the “national security state” have defined perceptions of the A-bomb decision in narrowly strategic terms, often clouding the broader significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in human history. The psychological and cognitive dissonance over the question has been such that it has constituted a serious irritant in relations between the two peoples as well as in their official dealings. 2
