War Memory and East Asian Conflicts, 1930–1945

This book explores how narratives, exhibitions, media representations, and cultural heritage sites that communicate memories of conflicts in East Asia between 1930 and 1945 spread, interact, and are re-packaged for post-war audiences across national divisions. The contributors examine individual case studies of grassroots engagement with war memory, and collectively demonstrate the necessity of remaining aware of the researcher as participating in another kind of engagement with war memory. 

Contributions showcase a number of ways of doing research on war memory, alongside case studies from diverse regions of the world. Taken together, they bring a fresh perspective to scholarship on war memory, which has tended to focus on space, text, exhibition, or personal narrative, rather than bringing these elements into dialogue with one another.

1 Engaging with War Memory: Legacies of East Asian Conflicts, 1930-1945 – Eveline Buchheim and Jennifer Coates.- 2 Encountering Stories: Victimhood, Aggression, and Multidirectional Memory in Japan in the Early 1990s – Aomi Mochida.- 3 Displaying the past in and for the present: The exhibition ‘The Indies under Japanese occupation’ (1946/1947) and Dutch collective memories of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia – Caroline Drieënhuizen.- 4 Towards a Borderless Memory of Hiroshima: From Victimhood to Witness Culture in the 75 years of Peace Declarations – Luli van der Does.- 5 Camouflaged War Heritage: Differing Narratives and Accessibility at Brecciated War Heritage Sites in Kyoto, Japan – Oliver Moxham.- 6 National narratives and individual agency in the Kamioka POW Camp: negotiating the power relations above and below ground – Ernestine Hoegen.- 7 Beyond the “Hell-ship” Experiences: Former Okinawan POWs Visit Hawai’i after 72 Years – Kaori Akiyama.- 8Tintin, Hergé and Japan. Framing war in East Asia in West-European comics – Kees Ribbens.- 9 A Sense of a Memory: Prosthetic War Memories Among the Japanese Cinema Audience – Jennifer Coates.- 10 Contextualizing Cow: War Atrocities in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Movies of the Second Sino-Japanese War – Timothy Y. Tsu.- 11 Approaching War Memory and Representation – Eveline Buchheim.

Eveline Buchheim is Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 

Jennifer Coates is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK.