Ruptured Histories

War, Memory, and the Post–Cold War in Asia

Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Rana Mitter, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Rana Mitter

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9780674024717
  9780674024700
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674274037
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

What has the end of the Cold War meant for East Asia, and for how its people understand their recent history? These thought-provoking essays explore a vigorously contested area in public culture, the wars of the modern era.

All the major East Asian states have undergone a profound reassessment of their experiences from World War II to Vietnam. New and at times aggressive forms of nationalism in Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan have affected American security policy in the Pacific and posed a challenge to the post-communist world order. Japan has met fervent opposition to its premiers' visits to the Yasukuni shrine honoring the wartime dead. China has reclaimed a forgotten war history, such as the positive contributions of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. South Korea has embraced an interpretation of the Korean War that is hostile to the United States and sympathetic to its North Korean adversaries.

This volume not only illuminates regional and global changes in East Asia today, but also underscores the need for rethinking the Cold War language that continues to inform U.S.–East Asian relations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Re-envisioning Asia, Past and Present
• Chapter 1. Relocating War Memory at Century’s End: Japan’s Postwar Responsibility and Global Public Culture
• Chapter 2. Operations of Memory: “Comfort Women” and the World
• Chapter 3. Living Soldiers, Re-lived Memories? Japanese Veterans and Postwar Testimony of War Atrocities
• Chapter 4. Kamikaze Today: The Search for National Heroes in Contemporary Japan
• Chapter 5. Lost Men and War Criminals: Public Intellectuals at Yasukuni Shrine
• Chapter 6. The Execution of Tosaka Jun and Other Tales: Historical Amnesia, Memory, and the Question of Japan’s “Postwar”
• Chapter 7. China’s “Good War”: Voices, Locations, and Generations in the Interpretation of the War of Resistance to Japan
• Chapter 8. Remembering the Century of Humiliation: The Yuanming Gardens and Dagu Forts Museums
• Chapter 9. Frontiers of Memory: Conflict, Imperialism, and Official Histories in the Formation of Post–Cold War Taiwan Identity
• Chapter 10. The Korean War after the Cold War: Commemorating the Armistice Agreement in South Korea
• Chapter 11. The Korean War: What Is It that We Are Remembering to Forget?
• Chapter 12. Doubly Forgotten: Korea’s Vietnam War and the Revival of Memory
• Chapter 13. Revolution, War, and Memory in Contemporary Viet Nam: An Assessment and Agenda
• Epilogue: New Global Conflict? War, Memory, and Post-9/11 Asia
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index