“The Japanese people have stopped thinking about war … Even though our troops have been sent to Iraq, we don’t see ourselves as having any connection to war … the concept of building a nation through military power has disappeared and we just spend our days having fun,” is how Takashi Murakami, one of Japan’s pre-eminent pop artists, characterizes the lingering effects of the atomic bomb, 60 years after the days of infamy, on the Japanese mindset.  

What, then, is this Japanese mindset? According to Murakami, who was born in 1962, it is an attitude towards life, framed by the annihilation of the atomic bomb and the seven-year-long American occupation that followed, characterized by defeat, a desire for pleasure and entertainment, and a childlike inability to form a clear identity. Such a mindset may well be true, and given the counterproductive and curiously nasty trends that surface in Japanese culture — the tendency of many Japanese in their 20s and 30s who have forsaken or believe they have been forsaken by corporate culture to wander from temporary job to temporary job; the overwhelming lack of faith in the national pension scheme that is woefully under-funded and may become unable to sustain today’s youth; the bizarre phenomenon of “oyajigari,” whereby Lolita-esque schoolgirls meet older, typically married men, and then extort them for money while threatening to reveal their liaisons to their wives and children — but what is the solution to this event that occurred over half a century ago?

Murakami theorizes that this culture of diversion and defeat is “because we lost the war and because of the way we lost the war. We didn’t lose with courage, we just gave up and showed the white flag.”  What, then, should the Japanese have done or do now? According to Murakami’s characterization, a reversal would be a return to imperialist militarism. Regardless of whether the timbre of Japan’s current social identity was informed by an initial culture of military defeat, it has now become an identity, nonetheless, in the 60 intervening years; let military defeat be absorbed into the culture and be transformed so that the legacy of militarism, as well as the resultant defeat, can be left behind.  

Mimi Hanaoka