setsuko drops and auschwitz

boing-boing's daily "ain't japan crazy" entry is about these. Sakuma drops are "retro" a Japanese candy that's been around since before the war. (However the manufacturer underwent a fissure at some point so that there are now two "sakuma" companies, producing "sakuma drops" proper and these "sakumashi drops". )
What's "crazy" about them is that they feature an illustration of "Setsuko" from "grave of the fireflies". Without going into much depth, (spoilers ahead, yo) she starves to death in the aftermath of the war, and these sakuma drops (a non-fictional product) are a potent symbol for her.
Boing-boing and the site they link call them macabre, but I don't really like that reading. They're symbolic of her death to some extent, sure, but they're much more symbolic of her life, and the fleetingness of all life... and most especially of innocence. These candies, in their nostalgically over-constructed can, are perfectly on the mark for the nascent showa retro-ism that I see more and more every day.
Showa nostalgia is a considerably more dialetical nostaglia than "wally and the beav" American nostalgia. Like America, the sense is that Japan has, in the interim years, drifted from a more original (more japanese) morality and lost it's innocence, just as the children who grew up in the era did. (That is to say, a critique of modern capitalism, and consumerism hides behind the rather cynically capitalistic and consumerist repackaging of our memories... but that's another show.) However, unlike the American counterpart, it remembers that Japan was a nation of steel and labor. That they didn't enjoy the freedoms they do today, whether it be the power to travel the world, or the gradually developed canon of women's rights.
And unlike America, nostalgia means remembering a war as painful and not "glorious". Which brings me to the tangential point that I wound up at somehow:

What keeps Japan "off the march" is not the same as Germany, where the nation's attrocities themselves are the best evidence against any future war. In Japan, it's the death of Setsuko. And the death of the equally "macabre" folder of paper cranes, and a million more symbols of the pain that came to Japan as a result of the war.
This may not an internationally sensible way to look at the war, but it's a more potent, and, having lived in both countries I think, tangibly more effective approach. There's no turning away from orphaned children and razed cities and calling it "nothing to do with me".

That young germans can and (way too often) do say "my grandfather was never in the Nazi party/ never killed a Jew/ was only 12 when the war started" gives them every reason to forget and ignore the war. And why wouldn't they want to? It's only been taught to them as an enormous guilt trip, with the occaisional mention of the dangers of fascism. All the death that they're treated to in war media is "outsider" death, to the extent Germany is united as one nation.

holy crap, I can't write anything longer than a single sentence without losing focus, can I?