Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-hxdxx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-16T16:18:13.406Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction: Re-examining Asia-Pacific War Memories: Grief, Narratives, and Memorials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Justin Aukema ,
Daniel Milne ,
Ryōta Nishino  and
Mahon Murphy
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Articles in this special issue re-examine Asia-Pacific War memories by taking a longer and broader view, geographically, temporally, and spatially. A diverse, global team of thirteen authors highlights subjects across a wide geographical area spanning the Asia-Pacific region especially. In the process, articles question common assumptions and narratives surrounding Asia-Pacific War memories by highlighting crucial, in-between spaces and remembrances. These range from Japanese military cemeteries in Malaysia, to the experiences of Filipino residents living near a Japanese POW camp, and to Japanese veterans' personal narratives of guilt, trauma, and heroism. Articles also draw attention to the ongoing significance of Asia-Pacific war memories, partly as personal struggles to confront and to find meaning in the past, and partly through memory's political instrumentalization in Cold War and post-Cold War power struggles.

Keywords

Asia-Pacific Warmemorysites of memorynarrativegrieftraumaveteranscemeteriesmemorials
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 10 , May 2022 , e2
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2022

References

Acton, Carol. 2007. Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Ashplant, T. G., Dawson, Graham, and Roper, Michael (eds.). 2000. The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Transformations between History and Memory.” Social Research 75 (1): 49–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Assmann, Jan, and Czaplicka, John. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65:125–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Augustine of Hippo (Saint). 1961. Confessions. Translated by Pine-Coffin, R.S.. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Aukema, Justin. 2016. “The Need to Narrate the Tokyo Air Raids: The Literature of Saotome Katsumoto.” In Hutchinson, Rachael and Morton, Leith Douglas (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature. Abingdon: Routledge, 198–210.Google Scholar
Bodnar, John. 2010. The “Good War” in American Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Choi, Chungmoo. 2001. “The Politics of War Memories Toward Healing.” In Fujitani, Takashi, White, Geoffrey M., and Yoneyama, Lisa (eds.). Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Durham NC: Duke University Press, 395–411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cook, Haruko Taya, and Cook, Theodore Failor. 2000. Japan at War: An Oral History. London. Phoenix Press.Google Scholar
Figal, Gerald. 2018. “The Treachery of Memorials: Beyond War Remembrance in Contemporary Okinawa.” In Remembering the Second World War. Finney, Patrick (ed.). London: Routledge, 143–157.Google Scholar
Frost, Mark R., Vickers, Edward, and Schumacher, Daniel. 2019. “Introduction: Locating Asia's War Memory Boom: A New Temporal and Geopolitical Perspective.” In Frost, Mark R., Schumacher, Daniel, and Vickers, Edward (eds.). Remembering Asia's World War Two. London: Routledge, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fryer, Tiffany C., Vaughn, Belle La, Galanin, Nicholas, Upton, Dell, and Wolde–Michael, Tsione. 2021. “As the Statues Fall.” Current Anthropology 62 (3): 373–384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fujitani, Takashi, White, , Geoffrey, M., and Yoneyama, Lisa (eds.). 2001. Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gillis, John R. 1996. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Ithaca: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Translated by Coser, Lewis A.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hashimoto, Akiko. 2015. The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsch, Marianne. 1992. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15 (2): 3–29.Google Scholar
Hunt, Nigel. 2010. Memory, War and Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Misztal, Barbara. 2003. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead, England; Philadelphia: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Aaron William. 2013. Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Low, Morris, Petrov, Leonid, and Tsu, Timothy Y. 2013. East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mosse, George. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Munslow, Alun. 2006. Deconstructing History. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2017. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26:7–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perks, Robert, and Thomson, Alistair (eds.). 1998. The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Saaler, Sven, and Schwentker, Wolfgang (eds.). 2008. The Power of Memory in Modern Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shirakawa, Tetsuo. 2015. “Senbotsusha irei” to kindai Nihon: jun'nan-sha to gokoku jinja no seiritsu-shi. Tokyo: Bensei shuppan.Google Scholar
Takahashi, Saburō. 1988. “Senki mono” wo yomu: sensō taiken to sengo Nihon shakai. Kyoto: Akademia shuppankai.Google Scholar
Twomey, Christina, and Koh, Ernest (eds.). 2014. The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, Jay. 2014. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, Jay, and Sivan, Emmanuel (eds.). 2000. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Woods, Colleen. 2020. Freedom Incorporated: Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization. Ithica: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Yoshida, Yutaka. 2011. Heishi tachi no sengoshi. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.Google Scholar
Yoshida, Yutaka. 2005. Nihonjin no sensōkan: sengo-shi no naka no henyō. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.Google Scholar
Young, James E. 1992. “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.” Critical Inquiry 18 (2): 267–296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar