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Forever Alongside: War Cemeteries as Sites of Enemy Reconciliation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Alison Starr
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Abstract

This essay focuses on the war cemetery as a place of reconciliation, by exploring the commemoration of war dead. It describes the journey taken at the Cowra Australian and Japanese war cemeteries from postwar enmity, when the memory of conflict and loss was still raw, to a landscape of shared cultural memories (Ashplant et al. 2001). Looking at a site in which former enemies are interred in collocated spaces, it demonstrates how war cemeteries can function as performative spaces, host acts of reconciliation and sustain practices of memorial diplomacy (Graves 2014). Through the rituals of war commemoration regularly performed at the cemetery, and negotiated within a transcultural setting, it shows how these war cemeteries offered a comparatively neutral space for mourning when the tension of conflict between former wartime combatants remained. As the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) moves beyond survivor testimony, this essay provides a useful interrogation of the role of war cemeteries as sites of memory and how the materiality of human remains figures in the continuing evolution of war memory to post-memory (Hirsch 2008).

Keywords

Cowra Breakoutprisoners of warwar deadwar cemeterytranscultural memoryAsia-Pacific War
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 10 , May 2022 , e4
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2022

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