Helena Meyer-Knapp

Students in Japan are so likely to have visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki that a special section of this study has been devoted to the ways that experience is described in the US and in Japan. On this page the focus is on other aspects of the suffering imposed by World War II and museums and memorials as representatives of current attitudes to that suffering in both countries.

Post war justice has become a key element of current discussions of that suffering. An international tribunal in Tokyo convicted and executed 14 members of Japan’s governing elite for War Crimes. Contemporary Japanese political leaders have caused genuine international outrage by visiting Yasukuni Shrine, where every since person who died  in the name of Japan’s Emperors since the 1860s is enshrined.

Much quieter  distress among the Japanese is evident in the museums and memorials which describe the hundreds of thousands who died under US bombing all across Japan between February and June 1945.

The Edo Tokyo Museum teaches Japanese students about these events. No Americans were ever prosecuted for these deaths.

In the 1980s the US government accepted that it had done an injustice to the Japanese Americans interned in the US during WWII. The memorial to these men and women, constructed under the auspices of the victims, sits just to one side of the Mall in Washington DC.

However, at the Smithsonian, the Air and Space Museums are virtually silent about civilians who died in the strategic bombing campaign.

A large display labeled “Tokyo Raid” discusses the 11 bomber retaliation for Pearl Harbor in April 1942, not the mass bombings of 1945.

The American History Museum is more explicit.