Japanese pop culture and World War 3

The professor mentioned one class that during the Cold War a popular theme in movies in Western pop culture were World War 3 or post-apocalyptic society movies like Doctor Strange Love or Mad Max. This may or may not be true in the West (do the recent zombie movies count?), but worldwide wars and post-apocalypse are still common themes in Japanese entertainment. In the anime Hellsing OVA, the Nazis literally come back from the dead as vampires and destroy London. Many shows, mangas, or video games like the Ghost in the Shell, Final Fantasy, Vampire Hunter D, and Evangelion are set after a vaguely explained massive war or global catastrophe, often nuclear or alien in nature. Gundam Wing is a science fiction series about a war between the Earth and space colonies, but its plot is an allegory of World War 2, a war to end all wars.

Japan is not traditionally considered a Western culture but it is most certainly a western style developed economy with strong ties to the West and lots of (mutual) cultural borrowing. I think that at least at the pop cultural level, the memories of World War 2 and particularly the resulting nuclear holocausts are stronger in Japan. The media is certainly going into a feeding frenzy portraying the powerful fear of nuclear radiation many Japanese citizens are experiencing after the Richter 9 earthquake wrecked a Japanese nuclear power plant. On the other hand the Japanese government has frequently been criticized in the past for not explicitly teaching Japanese war atrocities in schools. Media forms like anime in Japan are strongly driven by the youth market. This is purely speculation, but perhaps the focus on disastrous wars and the destruction of society in these media are a reflection of Japanese youth discontent with older generations or the status quo.