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.

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.

This paper examines Japan's complex infrastructure of cemeteries that preserve the memories of Japanese soldiers who died during military conflicts, while simultaneously maintaining a literal and figurative distance from more controversial sites of memory, such as the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Yasukuni has been at the center of “memory debates” in East Asia, making it difficult for unobtrusive forms of commemoration such as war cemeteries to gain a significant profile. Japanese war cemeteries are scattered around the country and the East Asian region and contain ossuaries hosting the actual remains of the dead, cenotaphs, as well as individual and collective tombs. Their physical configuration provides an educational tool of transnational scope, involving, among others, displays of commemoration and mourning dedicated to non-Japanese ‘enemy’ soldiers. In addition, the presence of Japanese cemeteries and monuments for the war dead built and maintained throughout Southeast Asia, in Japan's former colonial and wartime territories, amplifies the relational and transnational composition of the notion of a ‘national space’ of mourning. By looking at two Japanese sites, Sanadayama Cemetery in Osaka and the Japanese Cemetery in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, I highlight the importance of the cemetery as a locus of transnational memory and a reverent educational resource which moves beyond the picture of Japanese war memory as simply “reactionary” or “revisionist.” I argue that these two sites allow for an interpretation of commemorative spaces at the heart of contested war memories that neither conform to, nor are constrained by the debates surrounding Yasukuni.

This essay focuses on the war cemetery as a place of reconciliation, by exploring the commemoration of war dead. It describes the journey taken at the Cowra Australian and Japanese war cemeteries from postwar enmity, when the memory of conflict and loss was still raw, to a landscape of shared cultural memories (Ashplant et al. 2001). Looking at a site in which former enemies are interred in collocated spaces, it demonstrates how war cemeteries can function as performative spaces, host acts of reconciliation and sustain practices of memorial diplomacy (Graves 2014). Through the rituals of war commemoration regularly performed at the cemetery, and negotiated within a transcultural setting, it shows how these war cemeteries offered a comparatively neutral space for mourning when the tension of conflict between former wartime combatants remained. As the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) moves beyond survivor testimony, this essay provides a useful interrogation of the role of war cemeteries as sites of memory and how the materiality of human remains figures in the continuing evolution of war memory to post-memory (Hirsch 2008).

In 1969, a group of Japanese veterans returned to New Guinea to find the remains of their comrades and conduct funeral rites, one of many such postwar missions to former battlefields. The group documented its search in photographs and published a book of these photographs in 1970. This article shows how the visual cues of the photographs functioned to blur the temporal distance from war and encouraged an emotional response in the viewers by contrasting the recognizable, shattered remains of the dead with the peaceful and ostensibly timeless environment in which they were now found. The photographs also reveal unequal power relations between Japanese veteran visitors and their New Guinean hosts, and the enduring nature of the veterans' colonial viewpoints. This article argues that the aim of the veterans in presenting these photographs to the greater public was to contribute an emotionally engaging argument against forgetting the sacrifice of veterans in the war, underlining the powerful mechanisms that allowed conservative alliances of veterans, bereaved families and politicians to bypass debates about war guilt by appealing instead to emotions connected to grief and mourning.

After the Asia-Pacific War, many former Japanese soldiers wrote of their wartime experiences in an attempt to assign meaning to defeat. So many of these accounts were published that they eventually came to form a literary genre in their own right: the “war tale (senkimono).” Previous scholarship has looked at such war tales as examples of soldier trauma or examined them from the perspective of war responsibility. This essay takes a different approach. It highlights two works by veteran authors Furukawa Shigemi and Kamiko Kiyoshi which probed the causes of Japan's defeat. The works blamed Japan's defeat entirely on material and technological differences between the Japanese and American armies, and specifically on what they perceived as the Imperial Japanese Army's (IJA) “backward” traditions and inability to properly “modernize.” This argument enabled such veterans to find meaning in defeat by aligning their narratives and memories with a dominant postwar discourse of modernization – a paradigm which did not disavow the underlying justifications of the war and militarism, and which simultaneously validated Japan's postwar model of development.

Upon its publication in 1969, a war memoir by a Japanese veteran, Ogawa Masatsugu (1917–2009), “The Island of Death,” New Guinea: Humans in Extremis (Shi-no-shima Nyūginia: Kyokugen no naka no ningen), rose to prominence for its portrayal of the raw realities of the author's combat experience in New Guinea. Although it secured its place in Japan's war memory of the Asia-Pacific War, what remains overlooked, and merits further exploration is Ogawa's efforts in grappling with his war trauma and psychological damage. This article argues that Ogawa's memoir marks the initial step in his long healing process through employing two narrative threads. First, he identified the initial traumatic episode as an incident in China, where he had fought before New Guinea. Second, Ogawa created a binary between the compassionate New Guineans and the callous Japanese officers. The two threads led him to frame himself as a victim and bystander but let him leave questions of violence, humanity, savagery, and civilization unaddressed. His capture as a prisoner of war and his repatriation to Japan dealt further blows to his already fragile self. It was this awareness of psychological damage that led Ogawa to write his memoir and to start his long road to recovery. Thus, Ogawa's memoir is not a mere personal story, but rather it reflects the inner struggle of many war veterans in Japan and elsewhere attempting to come to terms with and give meaning to their traumatic war experiences.

This article uses the example of a children's manga from the early 1960s to investigate how the reconstructed heroism of kamikaze can be seen in the context of postmemory. In postwar Japan the tragic character of the kamikaze has been invoked in many movies, in television dramas, and in novels, manga, and biographies. The tragedy of kamikaze has also appeared in numerous privately run sites of war memory such as the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots and Yūshūkan, the museum of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Many such representations of kamikaze have portrayed the young pilots as pathetic but patriotic figures who generate strong empathy in readers/viewers that conform with the tropes associated with Marianne Hirsch's idea of postmemory. This essay suggests that postmemory with respect to kamikaze is illusionary, and that the comic in question, Robotto Tokkōtai, is a powerful example of ironic discourse that is in fact a counter postmemory reading of the role of kamikaze. Drawing on contemporary sources' readings of memory and postmemory, the article suggests that partial memorialization and partial amnesia go hand in hand within early twenty-first century Japan's nostalgia for the kamikaze.

24 February is a date destined to be long remembered, the day on which Russia launched war on its neighbor Ukraine in the name of a “Special Military Operation.” Just over a week later the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted by overwhelming majority a special, emergency resolution (ES-11/1) deploring the Russian act as aggression and demanding it desist and withdraw. The invasion and the response by Ukrainian forces under President Zelenskyy, backed by US and NATO support in the form of advanced weaponry, economic, financial and diplomatic backing, has brought the world itself to the brink of World War Three.

The year 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Okinawa's reversion to Japan. This article examines the Japan Civil Liberties Union's 1955 solidarity activism on occupied Okinawa, which generated Japanese civil society's first awakening to the “Okinawa problem.” The Asahi Shinbun's front-page article on the organization's publication “Human Rights Problems in Okinawa” and its follow-up coverage triggered public debate influencing Japan/U.S. official policies on Okinawa. Drawing on archival evidence, the article illuminates the contested nature of Japanese activism caught between Cold War Asia and decolonizing Asia. It argues that the 1955 activist movement shaped the subsequent trajectory of Japanese engagement with the “Okinawa problem.”