Fifty Years after the Bomb Commemoration, Censorship and Conflict When either Americans or Japanese talk about the bombings, they not only engage thinking about the meaning of the second world war, but also of subsequent wars, the relationship of citizens to the state, the meaning of democratic participation and the state's prerogatives to make war. While the two official stories reveal much about the national myths of each nation, in the end, the official stories are wholly inadequate to capture the lived experience of all the people of either country or to grasp the ongoing significance of the nuclear era.
