Coming Full Circle?

By Thomas Berger

Thomas Berger is a Professor of International Relations at the Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies. He is the author of War, Guilt and World Politics: The Legacy of WWII in Europe and Asia (Cambridge, 2012), and Cultures of Anti-militarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (Hopkins 1998). He is currently a research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC.

Seventy-one years ago, on August 6, 1945, a U.S. B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 140 thousand people. The bombing came at the end of a long and bloody war in which 20 million people or more died in Asia. Soon thereafter, for the first time in its recorded history, Japan found itself occupied by foreign forces, led by the United States.

These momentous events had a transformational impact on Japan and its position in the world. In the pre-1945 era, Japan was a highly militarized society that had come to dominate most of East Asia. After 1945, Japan came to define itself as a “Peace Nation,” one that renounced war and the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy and sought to cultivate peaceful relations with its neighbors.  Trade and diplomacy, rather than battleships and bayonets, came to characterize Japan’s relations with the outside world. Hiroshima played a critical symbolic role in this new narrative, showing the world the unacceptable horrors that modern military technology could inflict.

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