Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. xi, 320 pp. (B&W photos.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6169-5.
Lisa Yoneyama’s Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes never quite delivers on its stated aims but provides readers more than promised in other areas. The book is divided into two parts. Part I: “Spaces of Occupation” explores the contorted roots of modern American exceptionalism through case studies of United States military presence in Okinawa (chapter 1) and the enfranchisement of Japanese women by Occupation authorities following World War II (chapter 2). Cold War leaders sold both cases as evidence of the benevolence—and benefits—of US hegemony. Part II: “Transnational Memory Borders” includes chapters on racial and gendered dimensions of historical revisionism in Japan (chapter 3), Asian-American and Pacific Islander advocacy for legislative and judicial redress in the United States (chapter 4), and disruptive Cold War memories in the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay controversy of the 1990s (chapter 5). Through each of these three chapters, Yoneyama traces “transborder redress culture” among state and non-state actors as an entangled legacy of both World War II and the Cold War. Cold War Ruins takes readers beyond polities, geographies, histories, spaces, and times: a book of rare interdisciplinarity and range. Yoneyama has completed a work of fierce advocacy, abstract reasoning, and historical merit.
While Yoneyama is capable of beautiful prose—her epilogue and acknowledgements bear this out—I have never had an appetite for jargon-laden, over-theorized academic writing. Unfortunately, overwriting obscures some of Cold War Ruins’ insights. Further, Yoneyama and I see accountability for Japanese war crimes very differently. Yoneyama analyzes postwar courts from a geopolitical rear-view (hence Cold War Ruins) processed through a wide-angled theoretical lens informed by Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and others. My writings on the subject present ground-level assessments of war crimes operations in action based on multi-archival research. My work reframes the limits of post-war justice as predictable outcomes of a difficult, maybe impossible, set of circumstances negotiated by historical actors. In other words, I am not programmed to like Cold War Ruins. Yet, I do. Its quality and import are undeniable.
Yoneyama’s most important contribution is connecting post-war Occupation policies to the myth of US exceptionalism which continues to shape—and haunt—world politics. According to Yoneyama, early Cold Warriors lionized the liberating conquest, corrective reconstruction, and cultural remodelling of Japan as a triumphant conclusion of a good war fought to uplift wayward civilizations. This “Cold War knowledge construction” transformed Occupation successes into cultural weapons against Soviet internationalism. “The past’s productive power over the present historical moment” (85), in turn, produced an incongruous rise of anti-violence rhetoric (redress culture) in an age of renewed violence and American empire (the 1990s).
Though trenchant, Yoneyama’s views on the “management of knowledge” about the war reflects a deeper tension in Cold War Ruins. Despite trans-border and trans-war aspirations, Yoneyama’s reading of post-war Japan remains singularly American. Cold War Ruins downplays Japanese influence and agency (still most effectively demonstrated by John Dower’s magnificent Embracing Defeat). The American Occupation narrative also ignores other Allied contributions particularly the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) which sent thousands of personnel to Japan from Australia, Britain, Canada, India, and New Zealand. The myopic American justice view of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) likewise misses the mark. The tribunal had judges from eleven countries, a defence section with American and Japanese attorneys working together, a prosecution section with lawyers and investigators from over a dozen countries. Moreover, blaming redress shortcomings solely on the IMTFE ignores the hundreds of other war crimes and collaboration courts convened throughout the region. Finally, Yoneyama overvalues the universality of Cold War power. Other personal and political contingencies birthed redress culture in the 1990s. For instance, emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989 dramatically altered Japanese recognition of wartime transgressions. Likewise, so-called comfort women began speaking out for myriad reasons that had little or nothing to do with the Cold War’s end, a fact apparent in Yoneyama’s other writings on the subject, but overlooked in Cold War Ruins.
On balance, Cold War Ruins’ contributions outweigh any oversights. Yoneyama’s nuanced exploration of Okinawa’s political, cultural, social, and strategic liminality as liberated yet occupied captures the long afterlife of violence in the trans-war period (i.e., from pre-World War II to post-Cold War). Sections on comfort women reveal the limits of state redress for personal pain. Looking at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery held in Tokyo in December 2000, Yoneyama argues, “precisely by virtue of its imaginary status, it offered a connection between justice and social transformation in ways the actually existing legal system or other state apparatuses could not dare to propose” (127). The reader is left painfully aware of justice’s ephemerality, yet inspired by human resilience. Importantly, Cold War Ruins also provides rare perspective on the Chūkiren, Japanese prisoners of war held by the Chinese Communist Party into the 1970s. As Yoneyama demonstrates, beyond allegations of brainwashing, the guilt reckoning forced onto these soldiers had a lasting effect. “They have tirelessly spoken and written on the Japanese military atrocities which they themselves had committed in China. They have also repented, apologized, and assigned themselves the impossible mission of seeking forgiveness for what they had already learned is unforgivable” (133). Not a conventional path to accountability, but a fulsome form of redress.
Despite some flaws, the windows Cold War Ruins opens on redress culture and American justice represent exciting avenues for further scholarship. Its findings and arguments will interest researchers in many fields ranging from literary, area, media, gender, and cultural studies to philosophy, law, sociology, political theory, anthropology, and history.
James Burnham Sedgwick
Acadia University, Wolfville, Canada