This paper examines the construction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as signifiers of “peace” in postwar Japan. It offers alternate ways of understanding the impact and significance of “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in historical context and argues that national readings of the history of the cities obscure nuances in the local narratives of the atomic bombs in each place.

My maternal grandparents were from Warsaw. On one side, only my grandmother survived the Holocaust; on the other, my grandfather and his two brothers escaped together. My sense of family always included those who were lost to genocide. The absence has always been at least as visible as the presence. Ghosts. Shadows. Still images in stories. I knew they were there. Somehow. Somewhere. As of October 2024, these ghosts have a home, a place in the city, in their city of Warsaw, Poland. This was the last place they resided of their own free will. Their names are etched in brass, planted in concrete – stumbling stones or Stolpersteine, to be exact – to remind passersby of the last place they lived by choice in Warsaw. This public humanities/public art project reveals a lot about memory, monument, and meaning in a much-contested arena – the history of Jews in Poland.

In this essay I provide an account of a series of commemorative events held in Eastern Australia since the compound disaster of March 2011 occurred in Fukushima in Northeastern Japan. Individuals expressed transnational solidarity through the embodied experience of attending and participating in local events. Reflecting on these events reminds us of the entangled and mutually imbricated histories of Japan and Australia, and the ways in which various individuals and groups are positioned in the global networks of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry.

The Miike Coal Mine, extending across Omuta and Arao in Kyushu, was an engine for economic growth in Japan until the nation's defeat in World War II. In 1873, the Meiji government introduced convict labor in the mine. This arrangement continued after the government handed the mine over to a private company, the Mitsui Coal Mine. It was not until 1931, in the wake of the International Labor Organization's 1930 Forced Labor Convention, that convict labor was terminated. The history of convicts in the mine was not widely known for decades until a local group started restoring memories of it in the 1960s. This paper examines the social and discursive environment in which the recovered history of convict labor evolved.

In 1969, a group of Japanese veterans returned to New Guinea to find the remains of their comrades and conduct funeral rites, one of many such postwar missions to former battlefields. The group documented its search in photographs and published a book of these photographs in 1970. This article shows how the visual cues of the photographs functioned to blur the temporal distance from war and encouraged an emotional response in the viewers by contrasting the recognizable, shattered remains of the dead with the peaceful and ostensibly timeless environment in which they were now found. The photographs also reveal unequal power relations between Japanese veteran visitors and their New Guinean hosts, and the enduring nature of the veterans' colonial viewpoints. This article argues that the aim of the veterans in presenting these photographs to the greater public was to contribute an emotionally engaging argument against forgetting the sacrifice of veterans in the war, underlining the powerful mechanisms that allowed conservative alliances of veterans, bereaved families and politicians to bypass debates about war guilt by appealing instead to emotions connected to grief and mourning.

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.

Disaster commemoration serves as a moment to remember victims and honor survivors. In the case of 3.11, commemoration works differently. As a slow disaster, with radiation exposure and evacuation at the center of the story, 3.11 is not yet over. This places special importance on commemoration as a moment for memory, but also for ongoing commitments to research, justice, and health interventions for survivors.

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.

In 1853, a Taiping army infiltrated North China, threatening Beijing and the Qing dynasty itself. Though this army never reached Beijing, its northern siege had acute and lasting impacts on communities in the capital region (jifu 畿輔). Attention to the capital region invites reflection on the temporality and strategic nature of commemoration. Focusing on Cangzhou 滄州, I examine how capital region communities memorialized the northern chapter of the Taiping Civil War, even as for the rest of the empire, the war remained unfinished until 1864. In gazetteers, private histories, and commemorative records, local authors reframed ambiguous realities to write their localities into a story of northern victory, regardless of the fate of the south. The timeline for commemoration in Cangzhou was interrupted, not seamless, and took place over decades. Initially addressed to Beijing and elites along the Grand Canal, Cangzhou's commemorative project was later brought into the orbit of ascendant Tianjin.

Since the sinking of SS Arandora Star 84 years ago, the memory of this tragic wartime incident has been strongly held and developed within the British Italian community, moving through several phases, from oblivion to recognition and commemoration to a more recent growing awareness in a wider mnemonic community of interest. The aim of this special issue is threefold: to raise further the profile of the Arandora Star; to consolidate and secure the uncertain historical foundations of the event; and to advance the historiography by introducing new facts and perspectives and uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects both of the past and the continuing afterlife. The six articles presented move logically through the history and stages of memory evolution and its manifestation – internment and deportation, the sinking itself, material, cultural and political aspects of the deathscape, oral histories, the multimedia ‘archive’, with finally, an embarkation listing to plug a serious knowledge gap.

The misremembering by Americans of the Spanish-Cuban-American War was not an accident of either time or place. Rather, it was a collaboration between the citizenry, political and business elites, and the military-industrial complex centered on the cult of the fallen soldier. As businessmen carved up the Cuban landscape and the military occupied Guantanamo Bay, the war dead played one last service of memory. American commemoration of fallen soldiers acted as a shroud to obscure the practices of American imperialism. The recovery of the war dead thus provides an interesting example of how officials wanted Americans to remember the conflict. Most of the fallen died from disease rather than combat. Recovering the war dead thus entailed an elaborate process of sanitizing the “sick” dead and disinfecting the remains of warriors buried in foreign and tropical soil to repatriate them back to the United States. The metaphorical intersected with the medical in presenting dead soldiers from an imperialistic war with “clean and sterile bones” that would neither threaten the health of the general public nor their collective memory. Such a re-presentation would help shape how Americans remember a clean and sterile “Splendid Little War” without acknowledging the mucky details of empire-building.

The Maya used dress to help them structure social interaction. Taking a behavioral chain and practice approach, I define dress elements of male courtiers and how they were combined into outfits during the daily practices of dressing and attending court. I identify two groups of headgear, Standard and Special, among courtiers on vases showing historical interaction among humans. Each vase is considered commemorative and must communicate to an audience. I identified six Standard hat types that were widespread in the Maya Lowlands. The distribution implies a basic set of recognizable roles that provided the political-religious structure of the typical Maya court, perhaps as early as the Late Preclassic period. Four of the hat types are connected to glyphic titles. Each titleholder's position in the vase's visual space implies a hierarchy of roles. The results support my hypothesis that dress does identify social roles in the Maya court.

As in many areas of pre-Reformation devotion, the dead were a conspicuous presence in English religious guilds of all sizes. Members joined in the expectation that the guild would say prayers and perform masses for their souls after death, and previous members and benefactors would be commemorated with regularity. This article, however, investigates a new avenue of the fraternal relationship with the dead: the practice of enrolling people after their death. Doing so shifts the paradigm of our understanding of the multidimensional functions of pre-Reformation society, commemoration, and guilds, privileging the experiences of both the dead and living equally, while highlighting the interplay of the spiritual and socioeconomic. Taking the extensive membership records of England's “great” guilds as its basis, this article reveals that postmortem enrollment was a practice both common and widespread, and it addresses questions of practicalities and motivations. As such, the richness of commemoration in late medieval society is demonstrated, and the importance of postmortem membership brought to the fore.

The Japanese empire’s occupation of China during the Second World War left a complex and bitter legacy in postwar Chinese society. This article examines the occupation and its legacies at the grassroots, taking university students in Nanjing as a case study in occupation history and ‘bottom-up’ wartime commemoration. These young people, who studied at National Central University (NCU) under the Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei, organized three protest movements between 1940 and 1945, defying puppet authorities, Japanese forces, and, after the war, the returning Chongqing Nationalist government, as they campaigned against corruption, opium sales, and discriminatory treatment over their status as ‘bogus students’ who supposedly received Japanese ‘enslavement education’ from a collaborationist regime. In the 1980s, after decades of marginalization under the People’s Republic of China, these former protestors began holding reunions, documenting their experiences, and campaigning for recognition from Nanjing University, which eventually recognized them as alumni. Drawing primarily on privately printed alumni memoirs and commemorative volumes, this article positions the protests in the history of youth activism in Nanjing. That NCU students were able to rehabilitate themselves was due to their own organizational prowess and a sympathetic reception from the leadership of a cash-strapped Nanjing University, though the interests of fellow alumnus Jiang Zemin and the Communist Party-state still set the parameters of historical memory. In this, the example of the Nanjing students complicates the top-down role of the state, as described in much previous scholarship on Chinese wartime commemoration, in producing politically motivated nationalist narratives of wartime history.