In 1945, the United States Army Air Force conducted a highly destructive aerial bombing campaign that reduced dozens of densely built Japanese cities and their inhabitants to charred ash, even before the infamous atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This measure was deemed necessary to end the atrocities carried out by the Japanese Empire.  The architect of this air campaign, Curtis LeMay, asserted that if the United States lost the war, his command would have been tried as war criminals. Today, the mass produced Boeing B-29 Superfortress aircraft used to carry out these raids are enshrined in well-funded public and private museums across the United States.

In Japan, a vastly different narrative is presented. Tragic accounts of the bombing campaign are presented on public television, in city museums, and in peace memorials, advocating for an uncritical pacifism. Today, aided by the simplified stories of history taught throughout Japan that leave out or simply deny the horrors committed by the Empire of Japan, calls for militarism threaten to drown out the waning voices of the survivors who saw war firsthand and renounced it forever.

I visually investigate the museum as the site of narrative construction and selective memory production, focusing on the morality and necessity of aerial bombardment, as seen through the presentation of the modern reliquaries of the age of industrial warfare. This is an ongoing project.