Remembering/Forgetting "Hiroshima"

Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In the past few days there were newspaper articles and TV news about how memories of Hiroshima have been fading as survivors--living testimonials--get older and younger generations are less informed about the event.

But, as far as I can tell, they didn’t discuss why Hiroshima is getting “forgotten” among Japanese. (Put the other way round: what is necessary for Japanese collective memory of Hiroshima to be sustained?) It seems to me that one of the reasons that less and less Japanese remember Hiroshima is that the hegemonic commemorative frame fails to connect to the contemporary issues, both national and international. I believe that collective memory of “Hiroshima” will be well and alive if it is articulated with legacies of WWII (including current anti-Japanese sentiments in China and South Korea), potential proliferation of nuclear weapons among terrorist groups, problems of the US military domination of the world (including the Japan-US Security Treaty), and so on.