This article shows that tourism development was a driving factor in the formation of Hiroshima memory culture from the start. By focusing on tourism, this article discusses a hitherto neglected aspect of public atomic bomb memory and raises criticism of area studies’ ongoing preoccupation with the nation which risks overlooking local as well as structural factors. Many aspects, such as postwar pacifism, can be explained from the perspective of tourism. Dean MacCannell’s concept of “staged authenticity” is used to explain how atomic bomb tourism ties into previous research on Hiroshima memory and how tourism discourse is structured. Furthermore, it offers an alternative approach to understanding sites of dark tourism defining them the particular way in which their “staged-ness” plays out.
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