A presentation asking what is memory and why is it important, using the Hiroshima Peace Memorial as a case study.
Image 1 (right): The Genbaku (Atomic Bomb) Dome in Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.
When we think of memory, our first assumptions often center on the personal, like childhood experiences and granular details of objects, people, or stories. These experiences are often deeply felt and emotive, impacting us throughout time and space. So-called "core" memories are referred to that way because they are formational: representing experiences central to our very identities.
However memories which influence identity are created in ways far more complex than just through lived experience. In order to understand memory and its importance we must recognize it as many different things, not just something experienced individually but that which can also be collectively constructed by many actors in a group, culture, or civilization, and through various means, some with more influence than others.
Image 2 (left): A memorial in Greenport, New York. November 2025.
Eric Ketelaar describes the main kinds of memory as follows:
Memory constructed directly by individuals from personal experience. Not mediated by other processes but subject to distortions, such as misremembering and/or changing details. Fades over time if not reinforced by other people or memory texts.
Shared memories of a close group such as a family. The stories which make up group memory are the initial basis of culture. Important to note is that even if members of a group experience the same thing, they neither remember the exact same things, nor do they remember things in the same way.
Group memory which endures and draws strength through engagement of a collective base. Collective memory is a metaphor, for even in instances of it the act of remembering is done by individuals. It is made possible through transmission and diffusion, which are carried out by memory texts, oral traditions like ceremonies, rituals, and performance, or structures like monuments, buildings, or the landscape itself. It's important to note that like individual memory, collective memory is susceptible to being invented, distorted, and falsified as it is constructed over time.
Memory not directly experienced but constructed through engagement with memory texts. Closely related to collective memory in that prosthetic memory is essential to constructing and finding collective memory, especially across generations.
So, memory is a formative force which exists at many levels, and it often endures beyond an individual because of purposeful actions. If an individual does not share or experience their memories with another, group memory can't exist. If a group does not codify and document their memories and family traditions, they can't spread beyond that group and in turn become part of a larger collective.
For memory to exist at the collective level, its construction is no longer passive and unconscious in the way it may be for an individual. All propagation of memory at this level involves decisions about what version of a memory to tell and how to present that information, as well as for whom and to what end. Once memory successfully enters this collective, canonical stage, it is often invoked to give power to ideas, movements, individuals, or organizations.
One purposeful method of preservation and propagation of memory is a process called memorialization.
Milica Božić Marojević defines public memorialization generally as:
“Public memorials are physical representations or commemorative activities that concern events in the past and are located in public spaces. They are designed to evoke a specific reaction or set of reactions, including public acknowledgment of the event or people represented; personal reflection or mourning, pride, anger, or sadness about something that has happened, or learning or curiosity about periods in the past. The sole process of creating of public memorials is memorialisation.“
Memorialization is a sort of performance of memory, a way of embodying an event and its effects so that they can be remembered and interacted with throughout time. It is an often powerful process, as evidenced by holidays, monuments, and historic sites being synonymous with cultural identity.
Image 3 (left): Victory Tower in Berlin, Germany. September 2024.In order to better understand the function, form, and effects of memorialization, I will use my experience at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Complex in Japan from a trip in September 2025 as a vehicle for examining the processes of memory at play in public memorials and elsewhere.
Through delving into my personal experience, I hope to highlight concrete instances of key concepts in memory studies, including both the power and contradictions of memory, as well as the ways its construction is used to serve specific means. I hope to provide a model for considering and interacting with memorials for all who read this to use in future visitations.
I want to make clear that these experiences are filtered through the lens of my own memory, and while they are unique to me they may be constructed in some form themselves. All photos come from my phone's camera roll, taken by me or my partner who joined me on the trip, just one way we access our own version of group memory.
Image 4 (right): A clueless tourist (me) on the trip which inspired this presentation. Kyoto, Japan. September 2025.
Located in Hiroshima, Japan, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Complex is a collection of memorials to the victims of the August 6th, 1945 atomic bombing of the city by the United States at the end of World War II.
Post-war monuments are common throughout the world, and Hiroshima’s is unique for its reliance on various forms of memorialization as well as its broader influence on both Japanese and world memory. It is one of the most visited public memorials in the world, attracting over two million annual visitors in recent years.
Since its founding, the park complex and the memorials it contains have been the subjects of controversy and disagreement amongst survivors, government officals, and other countries effected during the war. Despite this, it remains a powerful authority on popular conceptions of the event and its victims.
Image 4 (behind): The Atomic Bomb Dome, Motoyasu River, and outer edge of the Hiroshima Peace Park Memorial. Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.
The park itself is host to many forms of memorials, including museums, monuments, lecture halls, and various annual ceremonies. It combines both modern and classical memorial paradigms, making use of the advantages of each.
Solid, “monumental” structures like the cenotaph pictured here, or the previously pictured Genbaku Dome are classical examples of memorials which convey their authority and importance through their physical characteristics.
Exhibits, lectures, and remembrance ceremonies are examples of modern memorial initiatives, ones which emphasize education and active debate to ensure that they don’t lose meaning and importance over time, a common fate of public monuments.
Image 5 (left): The Hiroshima Victims Memorial Cenotaph, a common kind of monument whose empty tomb memorializes the dead, especially those whose bodies can't be recovered.
Regardless of their implementation method, memorials which are accessible in socially and politically significant locations are vastly more effective. The Hiroshima Peace Park is not only where the A-bomb was dropped, but it is also right in the center of the city of Hiroshima. These characteristics are circumstantial but also intentional.
The Japanese government could have just as easily rebuilt the area as an industrial hub like it was before the bombing, but chose to dedicate the large site as a place of remembrance. As a general public gathering space, the park encourages repeated visitation and reflection of the events which took place there, and in turn stands to influence and become a greater part of collective memory in modern day Hiroshima.
Image 6 (behind): Another view of the Genbaku Dome next to Motoyasu River, roughly the exact point where the atomic bomb was dropped. Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.We know that memory draws power from the emotional connotations it carries. As previously mentioned, the most obvious role of memorialization is to provoke emotional reactions in visitors. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum attempts this goal, serving as a more in-depth account of the event and its victims. This group and its members are called hibakusha.
Memories of the bombing, as well as depictions of the lives hibakusha lived before and in the aftermath of the incident are communicated to museum visitors by repurposed memory texts like personal letters and photographs, as well as clothing and everyday objects which survived the bombing.
This invocation of prosthetic memory resonates powerfully. Taking in the artifacts and the identities they represented, I and other attendees reconstructed the lives of victims and their families – memories and trauma we ourselves did not experience, but which were felt deeply through our own imaginations.
Walking through packed, dark rooms, I was taken aback by the respectful silence, an atmosphere sometimes lacking from memorials that become tourist destinations.
Image 7 (left): The Genbaku Dome up close, left as it was after surviving the blast. Controversy surrounded the decision whether to rebuild or leave the structure standing, but pressure from citizens led to its preservation as a ghostly symbol of resilience in 1966 and eventual recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996. Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.
The end goal of the Hiroshima Peace Park and the memorials contained has changed over the years to better reflect changing opinions in Japanese society, international criticisms, and overall progress in the recent field of memory studies. As argued by Marojević, public memorials in a transitional justice practice should both serve to acknowledge victims of human rights violations who are unable to forget, like the hibakusha, as well as hold perpetrators accountable by preventing denial of their crimes.
Initially, the memorial only fulfilled the first function of Marojević’s definition, commemorating the victims of a horrific event and promoting a message of world peace. Holding perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable is still a complicated issue for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. To this day, the Japanese government has never formally apologized for the war crimes it committed during World War II. Addressing this appropriately at the memorial has proved a difficult task, as the complicated legacy of Japan’s own imperialist practices during the war can easily dilute the more black-and-white, digestible narrative of Japanese victimhood.
Renovations made in 1995 acknowledge Japan’s own role as an aggressor during World War II, ultimately contributing to the conditions which led to a nuclear bomb’s creation and use. After a renovation in 2019, the memorial now heavily promotes denuclearization, fulfilling the second function and seeking accountability not from a specific actor, like the United States, but from all nations who possess nuclear weapons.
Image 8 (right): An anti-war and anti-nuclear weapon sticker in a shop window, reflecting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial's message of peace and the shared memory of people across Japan. Kyoto, Japan. September 2025.
It’s important to remember that in practice memorials apply selective memory, in most cases using information that best contributes to a desired narrative. The prevalence of artifacts revolving around child victims, like the Children’s Peace Monument pictured here, rely on the universal innocence of childhood as a vehicle for conveying the devastation of the bombing to visitors.
This application of selective memory becomes more complicated when discussing Japan’s imperial past as previously discussed, but more presently involves the historical presentation of hibakusha at the memorial. Initially presented as a uniquely Japanese identity, hibakusha are in truth composed of many nationalities present in Hiroshima at the time, including tens of thousands of Koreans, Chinese, and Taiwanese forcibly conscripted during Japanese WWII colonization.
Image 9 (left): The Children's Peace Monument, honoring the children who died from the bombing, including Sadako Sasaki who famously attempted to make 1,000 paper cranes as she battled leukemia at age 12 following exposure to A-bomb radiation as a young child. The symbol of the origami crane as one of peace is now known around the world, perhaps one of the gratest instances of collective memory propagated by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.
Selective memory reflects the political, cultural, historical, and social realities of a country, largely revealing the opinions of its ruling elite or government. Hibakusha not located in Japan were previously not considered for any form of medical benefits, which the Japanese government provideed to other domestic survivors. This only changed after a court ruling in 2002, and since then the museum now includes a section specifically for foreign hibakusha following its 2019 renovation, directly mirroring this change in policy. The new section includes not only those under imperial conscription in Hiroshima but also foreign students and prisoners of war.
Many critics have stated that this grouping is problematic. An all-encompassing section on foreign hibakusha ultimately homogenizes the experience of many different identities who were affected by forced conscription, the bombing, and subsequent lack of health benefits, Korean laborers being the foremost example. As the museum broadens its focus to condemn all acts of nuclear war, some feel this decision still ultimately views the victims of nuclear weapons in a distinctly nationalist way, namely Japanese versus non-Japanese, and actively favors the traumas of the former.
Image 10 (behind): Garlands made from paper cranes at the Childrens Peace Memorial. Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.However effective or flawed the narrative of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Complex may be, it is but one manifestation of Japan’s collective memory surrounding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Echoes of these events ring throughout Japanese popular culture, both playing on existing fears of nuclear holocaust as well as further instilling an anti-war stance amongst the Japanese people.
Media plays a large role in the formation of collective memory, being able to convey stories to large amounts of individuals, effectively creating collective memory at an incredibly fast rate and large scale. Many governments have capitalized on this fact to create effective propaganda, which often invokes symbols already present in collective memory to give narratives a substantial, truthful, or authoritative quality. Media which displays bomb or nuclear imagery relies on this same connective capacity of memory to support linkages throughout time and space and in turn influence the present.
The 1954 film Godzilla’s story of a giant monster created by nuclear testing which destroys Japanese cities without discretion is given emotional heft by the fact that it relies on evoking existing collective memories of the atomic bomb. The film also creates new memory by recontextualizing the memory of the atomic bomb for audiences who haven't interacted with it before. Of note is that the film's production studio and distributor, Toho Co., was a military propaganda arm for the Japanese government only a couple years prior during World War II. The film and character have become staples of Japanese film and pop cultural identity, becoming well known around the world for it's clear anti-nuclear, anti-war message.
Image 11 (right): A poster for the 1954 film Godzilla, displayed in the National Film Archive of Japan. Tokyo, Japan. September 2025.
The official explanation of Hiroshima City officials of why it took so long to incorporate mention of foreign hibakusha was a lack of available artifacts and documents specific to them, highlighting the specific ways in which memory institutions like archives stand to impact collective memory, and by extension collective identity and behavior.
We may see archives as being fundamentally different from the processes of the Hiroshima Peace Park’s museum and memorials, which are places curated and designed to convey specific things, but they are also places of collective memory construction. Not only that, but they are subject to similar decision-making processes. A popular conception of archives is that of a naturally emerging body of documentation and evidence surrounding a specific person, organization, event, or identity, but in truth their creation and maintenance is very much the product of stewardship. What gets archived and how it is made accesible to archive users is ultimately a decision which reflects archivists’ biases, as well as institutional constraints like scope, budget, and donor requirements.
Image 12 (behind): A dove constructed from paper cranes at the Hiroshima Childrens Memorial. Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.
In his work Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida writes that when an archive is used, users discover what is already there, but also invent memories based on the materials they interact with to constitute the people or things documented within them, similar to my experience of reading personal correspondences of hibakusha.
It’s vital that archivists and other memory workers understand how memories are produced through this process of mediation, and how like archival documents themselves, memories can be managed, contested, transmitted, and recontextualized. All of these processes are evident at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Complex. Through the process of engagement with memories, both individual and collective identities form as well. As we begin to understand the role archives play in discussions of identity, archivists must adapt to meet the needs of their users.
To make this process even clearer, I’ll now introduce two more forms of memory discussed by Eric Ketelaar.
Image 13 (right): The Red Bird Monument dedicated to the novelist Miekichi Suzuki next to the Genbaku Dome. Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.
Closely related to collective memory and otherwise known as the canon, cultural memory is perpetuated through consciously maintaining and selecting what is deemed vital for shared remembering. This can include literary and visual materials, school curricula, museums, holidays, shared customs, remembrance days, and memorials. Cultural memory has a capacity to adapt to ongoing changes, innovations, transformations, and reconfigurations, but can also fade from memory if its active use stops.
If cultural memory is active, archival memory is latent. It is potential memory which exists within archives, but it is not a memory until it is actively used. When it is, it can cross the boundary into the canon. It is accessible only to specialists, not all of a culture, and therefore can’t be transformed into broader cultural memory without both the mediation of the archivist and then validation by a cultural institution or public media.
We can now understand archives as societal memory resources, and archivists as mediators whose decisions impact identities and memories entering cultural memory. We can also see how both archival memory and the canon can interact in both directions. For example, when a ritual is forgotten or no longer performed, it leaves the canon and enters the archive.
Conversely, if a community wants to reconnect with or bring to light lost history, the archive offers the possibility of rediscovering memories to meet their present needs. By creating a section for foreign hibakusha, the Hiroshima Peace Museum is bringing their identities out of archival memory and into the canon in a similar way, albeit their role as a mediator is clear in that at present this cultural memory is incomplete, and at odds with the memories of the various communities it homogenizes.
Image 14 (behind): A diagram depicting the international peace efforts of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Hiroshima, Japan. September 2025.
While they constitute a small part of the various forms of memory and ways they are constructed, archives and other memory institutions have an important role in the construction of memory at both individual and collective levels.
While there is still work to be done, the various renovations and alterations of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Complex exemplify Marojevic’s notion that memorials which encompass trauma must adapt across generations and serve to exemplify what she describes as “the dual nature” of monuments and other memory institutions like archives and museums, “as ideologically driven tools of memory…and / or as constant sources of creative construction and opening up of memory”.
As digital, randomly-accessed memory changes how collective memory is stored, accessed, and constructed, memory workers must be receptive to the ways that this may allow for increased opportunities to better represent multiple narratives and identities. They must also stay vigilant for the ways it may change the act of remembrance, as what is archivable, how readily it is accessed, and how it can impact collective memory changes with new technology.
Image 15 (left): A view of Hiroshima and the inland sea. Miyajima Island, Japan. September 2025.
Ketelaar, Eric. “Archives, Memories and Identities.” In Research in the Archival Multiverse, edited by Anne J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish, and Andrew J. Lau, 131–70. Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2016.
Marojević, Milica Božić. “Sites of Conscience as Guardians of the Collective Memory.” Culture – International Journal for Cultural Researches 4, no. 5 (2013): 105–14.
Nakamura, Keita. “Foreign Hibakusha Speaking Out as Museum Dedicates Section to Them.” Japan Wire (KYODO News). July 19, 2019. https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/11221.
Foote, Kenneth E. “To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture.” American Archivist 53 (2009): 378–92.
The Contested Histories Initiative. “Hiroshima Peace Memorial Complex in Hiroshima, Japan.” Contested Histories Case Study no. 364 (December 2024). https://contestedhistories.org/resources/case-studies/peace-memorial-complex-in-hiroshima/. CC BY 4.0.
Gilliland, Anne J. “Memory and Memory-keeping.” PowerPoint presentation, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, October 27, 2025.