On May 20, South Korea's defense ministry made public a short statement on the “international” investigation into the sinking of the South Korean warship, the Cheonan, on March 26, which left 46 sailors dead. U.S. South Korean officials, along with major western news organizations, have been describing this statement as a “report,” but since a) the authors of the document describe it as a “statement,” b) the document's contents consist of several pages of description of physical evidence (visual aid supplements relating to the evidence are not included in the document but have been made available separately by South Korea's defense ministry) along with unverifiable assertions and conclusions, and c) only the 5-page document rather than a rumored 400-page version has been made public, “statement” seems a more accurate description than “report” and will be used in this article.

Much recent discussion on anti-base opposition in the Asia-Pacific has focused on island-wide protests against the relocation of Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma. By uniting in mass demonstrations against the construction of a new U.S. base, and by staging a multi-year round the clock demonstration at the proposed site of the new base, Okinawans put pressure squarely on Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to keep his campaign pledge to move Futenma air base off the island. However, shortly after the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which South Korea and the U.S. charge was the work of a torpedo launched by a North Korean submarine, Hatoyama reversed his pledge. The Japanese government bowed to U.S. pressure, agreeing to move forward with earlier plans to relocate Futenma within Okinawa to smooth over U.S.-Japan relations.

With “history's bloodiest century” growing distant, twenty-first century scholars have become preoccupied with the fraught moral and political dimensions of memory. ‘Memory wars’ have become commonplace in discussions over postwar compensation or in anxious debates over national identity in an era of shifting geopolitical realities. In East Asia, one only needs to look at the sore points of Korean- Japanese relations—contested sovereignty over the Dokdo islands, textbook treatments, questions of official visits to the Yasukuni shrine—to realize the centrality of memory in articulating deeply divergent national narratives.