Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s)

Abstract

The study of how stakeholders battle over memory has become in the last decade or so a booming historical field. The Asia-Pacific War has been a particularly contentious topic; witness, for example, the recent Korean and Chinese diplomatic protests against Japanese history textbooks that whitewash atrocities committed by the Imperial Army. Perilous Memories both joins the fray and furthers our scholarly understanding of this particular, highly complex, “memory war.” The book grew out of a conference held in 1995 to commemorate the end of World War II. The international lineup of contributors includes historians, cultural theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, specialists in communication studies, political scientists, and activists. As is typical for this kind of collection, the essays vary greatly in style and are of uneven quality. All, however, have intellectual worth, and indeed a number of them are outstanding. The editors, T. Fujitani (historian), Geoffrey M. White (anthropologist), and Lisa Yoneyama (Japanese studies), offer a fine introduction. They outline, without too much trendy jargon, the ways in which memory is often messy and influenced by political and nationalist concerns. The inherent complexity of memory is compounded when examining the Asia-Pacific War because dozens of societies, none of them monolithic, were involved in the conflict. Throw in other complicating factors such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationalism, and decolonization—in short, the usual list of suspects—and the problem of memory becomes even more daunting.