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In her 1999 monograph, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, Lisa Yoneyama challenges the “Japanization” of memory about the atomic bomb. Analyzing peace memorials and interviewing survivors, Yoneyama explores the extent to which Japan narrates the nation as victim and forgets Japanese imperial history and military aggression in the Asia Pacific wars and World War II. Building on this, in Cold War Ruins Yoneyama uses transpacific critique to explore the “Americanization” of justice in the immediate post–World War II era. Although this “Americanization” does not forget Japanese aggressions, it forecloses justice by demarcating them as redressed. This process of state-to-state forgiveness, she suggests, covers over the continuities linking the former Japanese empire with a growing American empire during the course of the Cold War and through the present.
Yoneyama introduces her methodology in the preface and introduction, describing transpacific critique as an alternative to a binary Cold War geography. The transpacific deliberately triangulates the Cold War through Asia, allowing Yoneyama to consider how Japan was the United States’ “junior partner” and best ally. She also outlines other terms that are central to her analysis, including “Cold War,” “cold war,” the prefix “post-,” and “transnational.” Yoneyama uses “Cold War” to refer to the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1989 and “cold war” to “signal the diverse regional manifestations” of the ideological conflicts, which “were fought as hot wars and in other violent forms,” but whose histories “have been eclipsed by the reification of the globality of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War” (xi). The “post-” used in post–Cold War, post-violence, and post–World War II “signifies the condition it refers to has not concluded but continues through modification, amendments, and/or intensification” (xi). Cold War Ruins is necessarily transnational in scope, but Yoneyama is less interested in...