This special issue introduces thirteen original essays, each offering unique perspectives and re-examinations of Asia-Pacific War memories. The special issue's broad geographical scope stretches the Asia-Pacific region. Essays' diverse topics and themes highlight previously unexplored avenues and voices, from war cemeteries in Malaysia, to Japanese veterans' complicated war narratives, and to war brides in New Zealand. Each explores a different facet of how war memories shaped and navigated a shifting postwar terrain and complex geopolitics. Toward this end, the special issue is woven around three broad themes in particular: sites of mourning, personal narratives, and commemoration and memorialization.

For about a decade from the late 1990s until the early 2000s, the Chinese state commanded loss-making and other small- and medium-sized enterprises to dismiss tens of millions of older (over age 35), unskilled workers, as it prepared to join the World Trade Organization and the global market. These uncompetitive laborers were left with little or no income or benefits, and many protested. In response, the regime instituted a so-called “social assistance” program, which, this paper shows, did little to address the predicament of these people; the legacy of their layoffs remains to this day.

This paper examines the little-known and long forgotten overseas deployment of Japanese minesweepers to North Korea in 1950 and the events that led to postwar Japan's only known deployment to a combat zone that led to the loss of Japanese life.

This article provides a close examination of a recent CCTV program on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and China-Russian relations in the wake of the war.

In 2016 and 2017, members of Ontario Provincial Parliament and the Parliament of Canada submitted bills to declare commemorative days for the Nanjing Massacre. In response, the National Association of Japanese Canadians mounted a campaign against the commemorative days, arguing that memorialization of the Nanjing Massacre would make Japanese Canadians vulnerable to racial persecution akin to the animus that led to mass incarceration during the Second World War. This paper investigates the transnational political forces that have shaped the controversy around the commemorative days, illuminating the conflicted racial, ethnic, and national affiliations that structure Japanese Canadian community, and Canadian politics more broadly.

This article examines the Japanese government's 2010 decision to exclude Chōsen schools (Chōsen gakkō) from its Tuition Waiver and Tuition Support Fund Program for high school education (Tuition Waiver Program). It introduces the perspectives of groups supporting the Chōsen schools as well as those seeking to exclude Chōsen schools from the Tuition Waiver Program. By tracing the historical background and trajectory of discrimination against ethnic Koreans in Japan, it shows that the exclusion of Chōsen schools reflects the continuation of Japan's intolerance toward the ethnic education of Korean residents, particularly Korean residents affiliated with North Korea, since the colonial period, which hinders the nation from becoming an ethnically inclusive society.

In August 2021, Yukiyo Kawano, a third generation Hiroshima hibakusha, was refused permission to install her sculptural evocation of the Nagasaki bombing, at the first commemoration of the atomic bombings within the National Park Service's Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford, Washington, where plutonium for the “Fat Man” device was produced. The artist nonetheless raised the piece near the restricted Hanford zone. We consider the work's complex ritual symbolism and the Park's resistance to interpreting the impact of nuclear weapons and the legacies of environmental toxicity associated with plutonium production at Hanford during WWII and the Cold War.

This paper analyzes the animating potential of narrative in Medoruma Shun's Me no oku no mori (In the Woods of Memory, 2009). The novel's narrative structure embodies both the constant circulation of traumatic memories, particularly surrounding sexual violence, and the inevitable gaps in such memories. The text draws the reader in turn into its spiral of telling and re-telling, shifting the burden of narrating history onto countless new witnesses. Moreover, the act of narrating this violent past necessarily entails the acknowledgment of one's own complicity in its violent reverberations in the present.

This article draws on material from Geoffrey Gunn's Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong: Anti-Colonial Networks, Extradition and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Onodera Makoto (1897–1987) served as the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm 1941–45. His accomplishments during WWII made him instantly famous when they became known to the public in 1985 with a documentary about him on NHK based on a memoir by his wife, Yuriko. One of his famous deeds took place in mid-February 1945 when he allegedly sent a telegram to the Japanese General Staff shortly after the Yalta Conference in February 1945 warning that Stalin during the conference had promised that the USSR would attack Japan three months after the German surrender. After the German capitulation on 7 May, the Soviet Union joined the war against Japan on 9 August, precisely as Onodera had predicted. The problem is that no one has been able to trace this telegram. However, wartime documents, most of them traced in Swedish archives, show that the famous story of ‘the lost Yalta telegram’ is invented.

The legacies of the Fukushima nuclear accident remain hotly contested in the media, academia, the courts and public debate because various actors have much at stake in contemporary battles over the future of nuclear energy, the national economy, decommissioning of the stricken reactors and public memory. Here I examine some aspects of this vibrant discourse and how the trauma of Fukushima is evolving.

In September 2020 a Statue of Peace was installed in the German capital Berlin. The Japanese government attempted to prevent the installation of the statue, but in the end, it was allowed to remain. Based on participant observation and interviews, this article introduces the background and motives of the coalition of civic groups that installed the statue, how they frame the statue's meaning, and how the statue has acquired new meanings through unplanned interactions with the local population in Berlin. Summarizing the events related to the installation of the statue, this article examines how the conflict between a national and a transnational understanding of the “comfort women” experience played out in Berlin.

This review plumbs the deep narrative structure of Hong Yunshin's “Comfort Stations” as Remembered by Okinawans during World War II (Brill, 2020). It begins by situating her work in the historical tensions between Okinawa and mainland Japan as viewed through their disparate responses to the “comfort women” issue. Hong's discussion of military “comfort stations” during the Battle of Okinawa focuses not on the sexually enslaved, but on the collateral trauma of Okinawans who witnessed that violence in their daily lives. Tomiyama hightlights the author's emphasis on the postwar ressurection and reworking of battlefield memories, which today have become productive sites of remembrance and resistance. He joins Hong in noting that the memory work of war survivors is part of an ensemble of collective postcolonial practices that are shaping a self-reflective and distinctively Okinawan consciousness. This process of discovery, Tomiyama writes, challenges the territorial and ethno-nationalist assumptions of the contemporary Japanese state.

In this essay, I point out that the age-limit norm is misrepresented and misperceived in current analyses of leadership changes in the Chinese Communist Party for two reasons. First, the method employed in these analyses fails to capture the complexity of the rules that constitute the norm. Second, the method is ill-equipped to reflect the stratification of power at the top of the Party. To rectify these issues, I provide a structured framework to examine the age distribution patterns of membership changes at national Party congresses. I conclude that the age-limit norm functions as a nondemocratic mechanism for the Party and its top leaders to facilitate the exit of current powerholders and redistribute power en masse in a peaceful manner with reduced cost, enhanced transparency, and reasonable credibility. The framework I offer can help reveal the hidden significance and resilience of the age-limit norm, which has thus far been overlooked, obscured, or underestimated in current analyses.

This article explores the construction of identity by the Japanese war brides (sensō hanayome 戦争花嫁) in postwar New Zealand. War brides came to New Zealand in the 1950s in search of a new life with their New Zealand partners. However, Japanese atrocities towards New Zealand prisoners of war were not forgotten there, nor were Japanese actions in Pearl Harbor and in the Pacific. In addition to being reminders of Japan as the enemy, the war brides were non-white in a country that unofficially followed a “white” immigration policy. These initial difficulties did not affect the war brides' determination to make New Zealand their new home. Through the stories of the war brides and their family members, this article contributes to understanding nascent, informal transnational relations between Japan and New Zealand as they emerged into the early postwar era. It also tells the story of how the transmission of memory of Japan and the Asia-Pacific War has passed from the brides to the “post-memory” generation of their children.

My book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha has just been released by Yale University Press. The book is based on more than 10 years of research on the Global Hibakusha Project with my research collaborator Mick Broderick. This article provides a short overview of the book; you can learn more and watch some lectures at the book's website: Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha.

The success of the Meiji regime elite in placing Japan on the road to unprecedented rapid economic development is for all to see in the public history displayed within the port districts of Yokohama, Kobe and Nagasaki. Silence marks the history of how important these port-rail-communications developments were to the restoration of Japan's own sovereignty and the simultaneous stripping away of others. This work explores the state and left-unstated reasoning behind Meiji Japan's elevation to become the first non-western power utilising the authors photography of the public history of Japanese ports and their indispensable rail and communications connections.

The summer of 2018 saw an unprecedented series of LGBT-led political demonstrations in Japan involving thousands of people. They emerged in reaction to an article written by conservative Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Sugita Mio which stated that LGBT couples “did not have productivity” because they could not have children. The article engendered an unprecedented backlash, as LGBT activists argued that Sugita's notion of productivity attacked not only LGBT people but other so-called “unproductive” groups. This paper analyzes the political context and significance of the 2018 protests and shows how LGBT activist strategies have evolved and responded to changing social and political conditions in Japan.

Japan has nominated the Sado Gold Mine for UNESECO World Heritage inscription despite South Korean opposition due to Japan's refusal to recognize the role of wartime Korean forced labor at this location. Japan's previous industrial World Heritage inscription is criticized for similar denials of forced labor history. In this way, the Japanese government has embarked on a “history war” against Korea and the memories of the wartime victims of forced labor. In addition to providing victim testimony, historical sources and local and Korean research reveals that Mitsubishi forced Korean laborers to work in deadly conditions in the Sado mines. Korean forced laborers were taken to Sado Island where they faced racial discrimination and abuse. This article explains why Japan chose to worsen relations with Korea by nominating the Sado mines for World Heritage inscription while concealing the use of forced Korean labor and examines evidence of forced labor at the site.

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.