An Anniversary to Forget

It was Joi Ito who introduced me to my first techno party, shortly after I had introduced him to Tim Leary, back in 1989. For a while we were the Japanese editors of MONDO 2000 magazine. These days, His weblog is one of the most-read in the Blogosphere. Here are excerpts from an op-ed piece he's just written for the NY Times:







August 7, 2005
An Anniversary to Forget
By JOICHI ITO


WHEN people ask my thoughts on the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I always feel uncomfortable. As a Japanese, I know how I'm supposed to respond: with sadness, regret and perhaps anger. But invariably I try to dodge the issue, or to reply as neutrally as possible.

That's because, at bottom, the bombings don't really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are simply the flashpoint marking the discontinuity that characterized the cultural world we grew up in...

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...To be sure, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still plays a part in the imagery of popular culture. But more meaningful references to Japan's nuclear past, like those in the story of Godzilla (awakened from his slumber by American atomic tests) or the cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa's best-selling series about a Hiroshima survivor, have morphed into the cultural equivalent of elevator music.

Indeed, Japanese culture is unusual (although by no means unique) in its ability to take shocks or disturbances and gradually transform and neuter them. In that respect, today's atomic imagery in pop culture is not so different from the mohawked punks who apologize profusely if they bump into you in downtown Tokyo: the T-shirts they wear with violent, antisocial slogans (in English) are an aesthetic statement, not a moral one.

For my generation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the war in general now represent the equivalent of a cultural "game over" or "reset" button. Through a combination of conscious policy and unconscious culture, the painful memories and images of the war have lost their context, surfacing only as twisted echoes in our subculture. The result, for better and worse, is that, 60 years after Hiroshima, we dwell more on the future than the past.

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