The award-winning picture book Sagashite imasu (2012) was published in response to 3/11. It combines dynamic poetics with poignant photographs of relics from the Hiroshima Peace Museum to evoke emotions about extended suffering from radioactive fallout. I argue that the work plays an activist role in prompting an empathetic response which raises an ethical consciousness, and that this kind of response in turn generates a broader “recognition” of the dangers of using nuclear power in (and beyond) Japan after the Fukushima disaster.

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.

On October 26, 1967, John McCain (1936-2018), the naval aviator who later became a US Senator from Arizona was shot down while flying over Hanoi, Vietnam. McCain then became a war prisoner for five and a half years until his release in March 1973. Where McCain was captured became the site of a memorial, depicting a soldier kneeling with two arms raised in surrender. Originally intended to celebrate the Vietnamese victory, the memorial later turned into a symbol of McCain's relationship with Vietnam and the US's relationship to the country. McCain himself visited, as well as recent US leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Upon McCain's passing, both Vietnamese people and American expats brought flowers to the memorial to pay their respects. This commentary discusses how the memorial became an instrument of diplomacy, serving the present rhetoric of friendship the US has fostered with Vietnam and demonstrating both peoples' desires for an amiable future. By honouring the memorial, the Americans and the Vietnamese have engaged in what we argue is strategic remembering, reconfiguring the meaning of a war artifact and making it not only a testament to the past but also a marker of renewed reality in the present.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) occupies an integral position in the memory politics of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In recent years, dominant representations of the war create a memory discourse which portrays the heroic triumph of the Chinese people led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over Japan. This article shows how the war has been remembered from the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 to the present in the PRC. It contributes to the debate on the effectiveness and limitations of the monopoly of war memory by the CCP.

Borrowing from Judith Butler's notion of the ethics of plural and heterogeneous cohabitation, this essay reads two of Tsushima Yūko's novels in light of how they negotiate proximity and distance in forging ethical connections that constitutes such cohabitation; the first is her autobiographical work of mourning, On Grieving (2017). The second is the historical time-travel novel, Laughing Wolf (2000), crowded with humans and animals both spectral and real. The essay argues that reading these two modes of writing together can enhance the felt connection between the personal and the historical by turning thin relations into thick ones through the act of remembering.

For almost 150 years, the Yūshūkan military museum on the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine has been one of the most prominent tourist sites in Tokyo. Opened in 1882 as Japan's first Western-style museum, the Yūshūkan is often seen as the emblem of the so-called “Yasukuni view of history, ” which downplays Japanese militarism and imperialism and is at the heart of tensions with other nations. This study is the first dedicated treatment of the long history of the Yūshūkan from its conceptualization in the 1870s to its place in Japan and the world in the 2020s. It argues that the origins of the Yūshūkan should be seen in the context of the global spread of the military museum as an institution in the late nineteenth century. Over the past 140 years, the Yūshūkan has gone from appealing to an emerging global standard to claiming a Japanese uniqueness as justification for its existence and has always been closely intertwined with global discourses on war, commemoration, and Japan's place in the world.

This edited transcript of conversations among a group of scholars and practitioners is the culmination of a multi-year, multi-platform dialogue intended to capture the work and motivations of memory activists towards addressing both historical justice and current social and political needs of Asian American communities.

In this transcription of a webinar from October 2023, speakers Kevin Blackburn (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Katharine McGregor (University of Melbourne, Australia), and Sachiyo Tsukamoto (University of Newcastle, Australia) talk about their new books on the “comfort women.”

Takeda Shinpei was invited to create an art installation at Centro Nacional de las Artes, located in Mexico City. This chapter is a vivid telling of Takeda's process working on this piece, part of his Alpha Decay series which foregrounds voice vibrations of survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings. Takeda details the ways in which he drew from his own memories of adolescence, reckoned with voices of the “hibakusha,” and channeled these complex and haunting intersections through his body into his art. Takeda thus weaves a powerful yet honest and vulnerable narrative that shares reflections on method and ethical praxis.

This article provides a critical analysis of the representations of collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II. The discussion of the “subject debate” over the inscription of the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims, politics over the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the preservation of the A-bomb Dome transpired the memory mechanisms at work with regard to the US responsibility for the A-bomb, the Japanese aggressive war leading up to the A-bomb, Japan's colonial rule of Korea, and denationalization and universalization of the A-bomb experience in Japan as a result. The article analyzes the chronology of the “only A-bombed nation” notion in the post-WWII Japanese “peace” discourses and concludes that it was a process to reconstruct Japanese national victimhood as a reaction to the “discovery” of the Korean A-bomb victims and the DPRK nuclear program. The article overall challenges the notion of “peace” and “pacifism” in post-WWII Japan that revolve around the experience of the atomic bombing.

Numerous complex issues concerning the history of Japanese war crimes cloud the trials that adjudicated justice in postwar East Asia. Discrepancies between fact and fiction, or facts that can be proven in a court of law, result in a situation that even today renders what actually happened during the creation of empire and the ensuing war in Asia open to interpretation. More than seven decades after the war, disagreements about the justice or injustice of these processes continue to feed political friction in the region.

This essay summarizes my argument in The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia. The history problem is essentially a relational phenomenon that arises when nations promote self-serving versions of the past by focusing on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. East Asia, however, has recently also witnessed the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather than nationality, as its primary frame of reference. When cosmopolitan commemoration is practiced as a collective endeavor by both perpetrators and victims, a resolution of the history problem will finally become possible.

This article considers the intersecting of remembering and imagining vis à vis individual and cultural amnesia. It focuses on two artists’ films, Shona Illingworth’s video installation Time Present (2016) and Trinh-T Minh-Ha’s film, Forgetting Vietnam (2015). Time Present portrays the experience of an individual living with amnesia and further relates it to the immobility that denotes the cultural representation of the island of St Kilda (Outer Hebrides). Forgetting Vietnam questions the problematic legacy of the Vietnam War and its recollection by bridging personal and shared experiences through a portrait of Vietnam itself. Both Illingworth and Trinh use the film’s features of frames and movement to convey the emotional and affective resonances of the experiences and places presented to generate the possibility of presence. This article closely examines Time Present and Forgetting Vietnam with a focus on the films’ respective structures and thematic developments and reads them by suggesting the intersecting of remembering and imagining culturally and its potentiality for engaging with absence and silenced histories through decentralized approaches.

This piece troubleshoots an array of epistemological, political, and practical difficulties involved in public studies of colonial atrocities. It explores the deficiencies of the Commission on Colonialism backed by the Belgian parliament between 2020–22, and suggests pathways for facilitating a fuller accounting of colonial wrongs. The argument leverages the author’s experiences in investigating and publicizing the colonial massacre of Mozambican civilians in Wiriyamu in 1972, which culminated in a public apology from Portugal’s prime minister in 2022.