This article examines human experimentation under Japanese colonial rule, highlighting the practices by Japanese medical doctors at medical educational institutions in Manchuria in the years 1911-45. Although it proclaimed a civilizing mission in the colonies, colonial medicine exploited the bodies of the colonized for medical research and education. This article details unethical civilian practices which began well before the well-known, systematic atrocities of the Kwantung Army's Unit 731 in Manchuria. Bodies in the service of empire were long a part of the violent everyday life under colonial rule. The medical practices, experiments, and dissections carried out on the Chinese were more ethically problematic than those conducted in the home country. Over the period of colonial subjugation, such practices became steadily more radical. Colonial medicine, associated with physical experimentation, expropriated and endangered Chinese bodies. More importantly, the practices in medical colleges became the basis for Unit 731's human experimentation on Chinese using bacteriological and chemical weapons. The use of the human body is deeply intertwined with the interests of the power relations that governed the colony. This research shows how colonized bodies became material for the Japanese Empire.

This paper traces the history of Ryōzen Kannon, a little-known religious site in Kyoto, Japan, to consider war memorials as sites of transwar continuity and change, and as ideological tools to present certain visions of past and present wars. While Ryōzen Kannon is promoted today as little more than a typical Japanese temple, it has a remarkable history beginning in the 1950s with its establishment by the business entrepreneur Ishikawa Hirosuke. Opened in 1955, it was pitched as a Buddhist alternative to commemorating the patriotic sacrifices of the war dead. Shortly thereafter, a separate monument to Allied prisoners of war that professed world peace and reconciliation was added to the site. While accompanied by historically valuable records of these former prisoners, however, this monument was largely a homage to the Cold War-era Japan-US alliance, and it obfuscated memories of violence in East Asia from the site. Since the 1960s, Ryōzen Kannon has struggled to keep up with the times. Particularly after the death of its founder and the end of the Cold War, the site has become increasingly anachronistic. Now, it occupies an ambiguous space between remembering and forgetting.

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.

The total number of Japanese casualties in the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945) is estimated to be around 3.1 million, with military fatalities accounting for 2.3 million. In contrast to the popular image in Japan of these war dead as “noble heroes” (eirei) who fought valiantly in service of the nation, however, the realities of war were quite different. Rather than being killed in combat, some sixty percent of soldiers (1.4 million) died away from the battlefield, succumbing to disease and starvation. Others suffered from the military's failure to secure dependable supply lines to provide food and equipment replenishments, resulting in a large number of otherwise preventable deaths. In this article, Professor Yoshida Yutaka focuses on the grim realities of war death as experienced by ordinary soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, a topic rarely touched upon by scholars. Combining a social historical approach with rigorous statistical analysis, Yoshida sheds light on the institutional issues and peculiarities of what was once proudly known as the “Emperor's military.”

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).

This paper, as a conclusion to this special issue, discusses approaches taken to memory studies of the First World War and what they can tell us about commemoration of the Asia-Pacific War. A lot of work remains to be done in connecting the historiographies of the two world wars of the twentieth century, but this is important if we are to fully understand the development of war and memory throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The First World War was an important reference point for those who fought in the second and founded practices of commemoration such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Based on my experience as a First World War historian, I address some of the important themes that this special issue on the Asia-Pacific War has raised, namely the image of the soldier, commemoration, the temporal memory of war and how an expanded geographic lens has altered our understanding of the Second World War in general.

The issue of forced labor during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) remains a stone of contention in Japanese-Korean relations. While the governments of the two countries seem to put the issue aside in order to improve economic and military ties, civil society in both countries remains suspicious. The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus here introduces the positions of representatives of two civil society organizations from South Korea and Japan, respectively, explaining why the government approach to address historical injustices remains unsatisfactory.

This article examines photographs taken by U.S. Marine Joe O'Donnell, who was tasked with documenting bombed urban centers immediately after the Asia-Pacific War. O'Donnell's photos document not just the physical damage wrought by U.S. bombing raids, but the human suffering as well. While most published images at the time projected the U.S. military's destructive potential through mushroom clouds or razed cities, O'Donnell shifted the visual focus to the struggles of Japanese citizens in the ruins. In doing so, O'Donnell disrupted notions of American superiority by giving voice to those rebuilding their lives in the war's aftermath.

This article explores the construction of identity by the Japanese war brides (sensō hanayome 戦争花嫁) in postwar New Zealand. War brides came to New Zealand in the 1950s in search of a new life with their New Zealand partners. However, Japanese atrocities towards New Zealand prisoners of war were not forgotten there, nor were Japanese actions in Pearl Harbor and in the Pacific. In addition to being reminders of Japan as the enemy, the war brides were non-white in a country that unofficially followed a “white” immigration policy. These initial difficulties did not affect the war brides' determination to make New Zealand their new home. Through the stories of the war brides and their family members, this article contributes to understanding nascent, informal transnational relations between Japan and New Zealand as they emerged into the early postwar era. It also tells the story of how the transmission of memory of Japan and the Asia-Pacific War has passed from the brides to the “post-memory” generation of their children.

This paper examines how the Asia-Pacific War is presented in the new textbooks for the recently upgraded “special subject” of moral education in Japanese elementary schools. Three stories are analyzed to show the discursive strategies utilized by the authors and the moral values presented. As the analysis reveals, the image of the war created by the stories is highly selective and profoundly revisionist.

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 paper explores the politics of Asia-Pacific War memory and memorialization in Southeast Asia, evident in the production context and visual semiotic resources of Thailand's Victory Monument, a generic memorial to Thai war heroes, and the Philippines' Shrine of Valor, a historical shrine complex dedicated to Filipino and US soldiers of the Asia-Pacific War. These heritage structures represent two divergent memorialization practices that demonstrate how the commemoration or suppression of war memory is influenced by politics, agendas, and the benefits it brings to the state. In Thailand, the inward justification and outward restraint stem from the difficult choices the state had to make during the war. In the Philippines, while war memorialization was pronounced and served state aims, it was initially undermined by President Ferdinand Marcos, who wanted to bolster his fraudulent war heroism claims. The cases illustrate how diverging national memorial practices surrounding the war's contested past achieved similar aims and how memorial sites become repositories of meaning potentials through which we could make sense of the nation and its international entanglements.

This paper examines Japan's complex infrastructure of cemeteries that preserve the memories of Japanese soldiers who died during military conflicts, while simultaneously maintaining a literal and figurative distance from more controversial sites of memory, such as the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Yasukuni has been at the center of “memory debates” in East Asia, making it difficult for unobtrusive forms of commemoration such as war cemeteries to gain a significant profile. Japanese war cemeteries are scattered around the country and the East Asian region and contain ossuaries hosting the actual remains of the dead, cenotaphs, as well as individual and collective tombs. Their physical configuration provides an educational tool of transnational scope, involving, among others, displays of commemoration and mourning dedicated to non-Japanese ‘enemy’ soldiers. In addition, the presence of Japanese cemeteries and monuments for the war dead built and maintained throughout Southeast Asia, in Japan's former colonial and wartime territories, amplifies the relational and transnational composition of the notion of a ‘national space’ of mourning. By looking at two Japanese sites, Sanadayama Cemetery in Osaka and the Japanese Cemetery in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, I highlight the importance of the cemetery as a locus of transnational memory and a reverent educational resource which moves beyond the picture of Japanese war memory as simply “reactionary” or “revisionist.” I argue that these two sites allow for an interpretation of commemorative spaces at the heart of contested war memories that neither conform to, nor are constrained by the debates surrounding Yasukuni.