As for a nation yet to achieve meaningful reconciliation over the past with Asian neighbors, the political divide opens room for utilitarian considerations in its pacifist discourse.
This research situates the ambivalent amnesia and political compromises demonstrated during the renovation project of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum from 1985 until 1994. Given Japan's ideational multiplicity as the victim and the victimizer, its pacifist ideology needs further examinations in conceptual and empirical manifestations. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima was a decisive moment inaugurating Japan as the torch-bearer of pacifism. This paper explores the complicated workings of Japan's mnemonic praxis in its establishment of moral authority.
