Cold War Ruins

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the 1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a "transborder redress culture." A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique—of "comfort women" redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.

"Yoneyama critically analyses the normative discourses surrounding Japanese wartime criminality and exposes how the Cold War power relations between Japan and the US continue to influence the terms in which international redress culture is enacted. The book offers a highly critical dissection of the political sensitivities of the post-Cold War era in the Japanese context. . . ."  , "Readers interested in geopolitical spheres beyond Asia Pacific should find Yoneyama’s approach to transnational cultural critique useful in exposing institutionalized forgetting in a wide variety of situations.... Given the metastasizing violence throughout the post-9/11 world, we can only hope that the methodologies and commitment to unflinching critical analysis evident in Cold War Ruins will find a wide audience.", "At a time when no single narrative can now monopolize the 'truth,' a global memory culture is coalescing around a human rights discourse that also monopolizes its own 'truth' originating in the West. Yoneyama's work is a valuable reminder that a multilayered perspective is crucial to discerning the political exploitation of such a paradigm as well.", “Tracking ruins across the longue durée of the twentieth century, this impressive study explores the historical forces that have delimited the possibilities for justice for survivors of colonial and military violence in Asia and the Pacific. . . . The methodological and analytical depth of Cold War Ruins provides an exemplary transnational approach to the study of historical justice, which should appeal broadly to researchers and graduate students.”, “Cold War Ruins is an innovative and provocative work. It contextualizes and builds connections between a host of thorny issues often receiving separate treatment. . . . A book filled with new questions and fresh answers about facing the past.”

Lisa Yoneyama is Professor of East Asian Studies and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, the coeditor of Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), also published by Duke University Press, and the author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory.