Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia, no. 101. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge [an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business], 2017. xx, 300 pp. (Table, map, B&W photo.) US$49.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-138-09207-5.
Studies on the impacts and memories of World War II usually focus on the European theatre of war and the second Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945. The South, Southeast Asian, and Pacific dimensions of the war often receive little public attention, although they arouse considerable academic attention and interest, as this collection of essays reveals. The Pacific War has been, because of the subsequent emergence of post-colonial states as the result of the war, remembered along national lines that have sometimes been used as national founding myths that omit dimensions of human experience. This collection of essays challenges the nationalistic approach of remembering the Pacific War by showing the diverse ways in which the war is being understood by different communities, and by elucidating previously omitted dimensions of the war that played a role in the emergence of modern Asia. The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture starts with a succinct introduction by Christina Twomey and Ernest Koh which discusses the role of nationalism in post-colonial societies (and in one or two cases, ex-colonial powers) in the aftermath and remembrance of the war.
The chapters after the introduction, sixteen in total, are organized into four themes: remembrance; aftermaths; race, sex, and culture; and veterans in the post-war world. It should be noted that the contributors utilized a wide range of public and private primary sources in various languages, making this work a truly international effort. Ernest Koh discusses the differences between how the diasporic overseas Chinese community and the post-colonial Singaporean state remember the Pacific War. The realization of the existence of multiple wartimes experiences, he concludes, helps bridge differences between communities. Janet Watson’s work on British commemorations of the Pacific War in 1985 and 1995 suggests that the post-war commemorations reflect less about the reality of the war and more about the very state of the society. The British commemorations, as Watson suggests, focused on the suffering of the prisoners of war and the civilian internees because they drew away “uncomfortable attention” to the changes in the status and social composition of post-war Britain (46). Paula Hamilton’s chapter on the Australian memories of the war highlights the fact that although there is a state-sponsored narrative of the war, many agents of memories exist, and these agents mobilize memories or complicate the understanding of events for different purposes as well as their own benefits (62). Joan Beaumont’s chapter on the memories of the Thai-Burma Railway, on the other hand, illustrates the difficulties of bridging different or even conflicting memories of the same event because of post-war internal and international politics.
The chapters under the theme of aftermaths deal with the legal and political consequences of the war and how post-war circumstances further complicated such matters. Robert Cribb focuses on minor war criminals in Asia and the Pacific and concludes that their trials had some impact on the development of international criminal law. Joost Coté and Natsuko Akagawa’s chapter on the Dutch Eurasian civilians in Java discusses the “multi processes identity labeling” of this group during and after the war, and the resulting difficulties faced by this group not only in the Netherlands, but also different parts of the world because of their ambiguous identity. John Solomon’s chapter on the Indians in Japanese-occupied Malaya during the war touches upon a similar issue, and argues that the Japanese occupation helped shape the identity of the Indians there by suppressing their cultural and ethnic diversity within the limits imposed by the occupiers and Indian collaborators. Jason Lim discusses the absence of revenge killings of Japanese at the end of the war in Singapore in some of the post-war narratives, citing ethnic politics. Together, these chapters show how the Japanese occupation complicated the ethnic and culture fissures of the European colonial empires and their post-war successors.
The third theme of the collection deals with the issues of race, sex, and culture. During the war, millions of Japanese and Allied servicemen were deployed in different corners of Asia, which led to unprecedented interaction among peoples. The chapters of this section deal with how the war affected the ways in which people understood the world, especially in regards to race, body, and gender. Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon’s chapter discusses how anthropology helped the Americans construct a romanticist image of the South Sea communities that helped sustain the American strategic position in the region even after the war. On the other hand, Arnel Joven illustrates, using the example of the Philippines under Japanese occupation, how locals resurrected local medical and cultural traditions in response to the absence of more modern Western medical infrastructure and resources. The other three chapters under this theme discuss the role of sex and gender in the encounters between Allied soldiers and locals in Borneo, the South Pacific Islands, and New Guinea. Together, the chapters suggest the depth of these intertwined issues and uncover the often-overlooked inequality between male Allied servicemen, whom are usually seen as the liberators of Asia, and the local women who in many cases have had difficulties leaving a voice in history.
The last three chapters of the collection deal with the experience of veterans and their family members in the post-war world. Using the volume of war memoirs published by the Japanese group Hagoromo Kai, M.G. Sheftall uncovers the existence of diverse understandings of the war among veterans and bereaved families during a brief period in Japan in the early 1950s when the mainstream postwar memory of Japan, sponsored by the new Japanese state, had yet to emerge. Beatrice Trefalt discusses the complexity of the mentality of the Japanese soldiers, using the works of Funsaka Hiroshi as example. Her work warns of the pitfalls of seeing all Japanese soldiers as stereotypical fanatics who had little agency or no independent thinking. Christina Twomey, in her chapter on Australian prisoners of war, shows that shifting political contexts have affected the reception of the POW narrative in Australian society, and highlights the need to pay attention to context when using and discussing individual memories in historical studies. The chapters illustrate the complexity of the politics of veteran memories in post-war societies, although collectively the veterans have often been celebrated or sympathized with as heroes or victims, and often both.
In all, this collection of essays illustrates the diversity and complexity of the human experience in the Pacific War and how nationalisms in the post-war and post-colonial world have prevented a more nuanced understanding of the conflict. The Pacific War is an essential read for anyone who is interested in not only World War II in Asia-Pacific, but also the history of modern Asia itself.
Chi Man Kwong
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China