Lisa Yoneyama. Cold War Ruins

Anyone with doubts about the innate conservatism of history as a discipline will find them put to rest upon reading books such as Lisa Yoneyama’s Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Injustice and Japanese War Crimes, a study focused on justice denied for victims of war crimes, particularly of Japanese war crimes during the Asia-Pacific War. Most historians are sympathetic to this cause, but Yoneyama’s critique of denied justice goes well beyond condemning the past. Her book demonstrates that yawning gaps exist between academic disciplines. It is a hard read for historians, not just in its laden language, but also in its very premises of analysis. Yoneyama argues that conventional mechanisms for addressing issues of justice, punishment, and redress consider only the interests of states. These mechanisms are either biased toward or in thrall to the elites of those states, who actively use them to enforce historical narratives that in turn reinforce those mechanisms. She cites examples such as the Japanese and subsequent American colonization of Okinawa, the American myth of the U.S. Occupation of Japan as a democratizing and liberating event, the plight of Korean “comfort women,” the stirrings of attempts at legal redress for those women and others through American state legislatures and courts in the 1990s, and the furious debates over the Enola Gay exhibit that was planned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War. Using those examples, Yoneyama builds a case for a glaring failure of justice for individual victims of state actions and calls for a fundamental overhaul, or overthrow, of extant methods of redress, which she depicts as depoliticized and overly judicialized and as depriving the people of a direct voice for their grievances. She blames the Cold War for much of this evil, for compelling states and populations alike to put aside issues of justice and rights. For a brief moment in the 1990s this shadow was lifted, and various movements for those issues arose on both sides of the Pacific, only to be eclipsed again in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror.

Comfort women · Criminology · Economic Justice · Injustice · Political science · Redress · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies