Fuzzy Necromancer wrote:
"Toughen up, buttercup" is a message I am extremely aware of, mainly because the person in my childhood who most warned me that "They won't let you make excuses in high school" and "you can't blame everything on your ADD" was also the person who was the quickest to abdicate personal responsibility for ANYTHING he did and blame somebody else or, failing that, blame the victim.
I don't parse the show's message as being, precisely, "toughen up." Rather, I'd suggest something closer to 'confront your problems, rather than pretending they don't exist.'
The nuclear imagery is, I think, very important context. And the nuclear imagery is prominent - Chuck is probably right that Maromi is meant to look like a mushroom cloud and represent the memory of the atomic bomb; the heavy use of mushroom clouds in the opening of *every* episode makes the connection pretty clear.
Unlike the modern German state, Japan has never really confronted the reality of what Imperial Japan did. Japanese schools often do not teach, for instance, the Nanking Massacre, Unit 731 (a biowarfare experiment unit that used chinese civilians as test subjects), mass killings or forced suicides of civilians, so-called 'comfort women,' etc etc. The Japanese Ministry of Education regularly releases censored textbooks that omit these events; famously, historian Saburo Ienaga sued the minstry to try to get his own textbook un-censored. Instead, much of the popular memory of the war in Japan has focused on Japan's victimization at the hands of the USA, especially in the context of the use of atomic weapons. The mushroom cloud became, in Satoshi Kon's thinking, the thing - like Maromi - that let the Japanese people avoid talking about, confronting or working through their problems.
I would suggest, as a side note, that you can see some of the impacts of that 'selective' cultural memory in anime. For instance,
Space Battleship Yamato is pretty explicitly a science-fantasy revision of the war and, in particular, the Yamato's own final mission, Operation Ten-Go. Both feature what is essentially a suicide mission by the most powerful warship available against an otherwise overwhelming enemy, in order to turn the tide of a war in which the enemy uses radioactive weapons. The only difference is that the Space Battleship suceeds whereas the historical battleship failed. Heck, in the 2010 film remake, the Yamato's mission is a literal suicide mission - it is destroyed at the end of the film in order to space the world (the plan in Operation Ten-Go was that the Yamato would be beached to serve as a massive coastal artillery battery after the mission). The metaphor is so shockingly on-the-nose that initial English translations of the work opted to rename the ship to try to blunt the implications. Try imagining Space Battleship Bismark and I find the sudden and deep problems with the presentation come out. And this isn't a fringe series, if you're not familiar with it - it was massively popular and has gotten multiple additional series and film adaptations.
The message of the show then is less "toughen up" - the message is instead, "we should admit to our mistakes" and perhaps more directly (given the nuclear imagery), "The Japanese did something profoundly horrible which they have never truly confronted, choosing instead to hide behind the mushroom cloud and revisionist history; it is necessary in order for the society to move forward that the history and the mistakes be confronted out in the open."
Edit: I suspect Satoshi Kon saw suicide as a related problem in part because the glorification of suicide and death was a core part of the militarism of Imperial Japan. I do not know if he ever said this before he passed away, but I would guess this is the connection. Before the Imperial period (that is, pre-meiji) the Samurai warrior ethos which valorized the acceptance of death was a very class-limited thing: you either were born into the Samurai class or you were not. After the Meiji restoration, as Imperial Japan built a modern army, those values were - quite intentionally and carefully - broadcast into the broader society. State propaganda of the Imperial era suggested that every soldier, from every background - and eventually, every Japanese person - could and should aspire to that warrior ethos. A warrior ethos that glorified suicide as something beautiful and profound.
Failing to confront Japan's imperial ideology, I suspect, was thus seen as tied to a failure to confront the culturally embedded notion that suicide - especially to relief others of a burden - was somehow noble. Whereas if the entire Japanese imperial experiment were to be examined, it might all of it be thrown out - the imperialism, the brutality and the warrior-cult of suicide - all together. I suspect - again, I can't be sure - but I suspect this was the reading Satoshi Kon intended.
Wrong on both counts. Bismarck wasn't even laid down until 1936 and she was launched in 1940.