Joi Ito wrote an editorial for The New York Times, Sunday, on his perspective on the impact that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has had on his generation of Japanese:

To be sure, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still plays a part in the imagery of popular culture. But more meaningful references to Japan's nuclear past, like those in the story of Godzilla (awakened from his slumber by American atomic tests) or the cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa's best selling series about a Hiroshima survivor, have morphed into the cultural equivalent of elevator music.

[...]

For my generation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the war in general now represent the equivalent of a cultural "game over" or "reset" button. Through a combination of conscious policy and unconscious culture, the painful memories and images of the war have lost their context, surfacing only as twisted echoes in our subculture. The result, for better or worse, is that, 60 years after Hiroshima, we dwell more on the future than the past.

The future is, at least, still unknown and the events that circumscribe it are still within our control, so I'm more than willing to dwell on the future, and not just because we want to turn away from the horrors of past wars. But simply because I think the future will be a better place than the present, and not just a refuge from a war-torn past.