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225 the installation of an “eternal flame” is a common feature of memorial sites around the world. The symbol captures the ephemerality of the past in the immateriality of fire and highlights the enduring significance of the past for the present and the way that the past can illuminate the present. The eternal flame also captures the incendiary contentiousness of the past and the responsibility of the present to remember and sustain the past. All of these aspects of the symbol resonate in relation to historical memories of World War II. Few question that World War II was a cataclysmic event that dramatically transformed the societies of the Pacific Rim and continues to have a deep impact, even among those generations with no experience of the war. The war redrew the political and economic landscape of East Asia and catapulted the United States to its role as global hegemon. It fundamentally restructured not only state-to-state relations but also relations between states and their national subjects. Since 1999 we have been studying the impact of memories of World War II in the United States and Japan. We have been building an archive that includes not just accounts of World War II in the Pacific but also the ways in which people interacted with World War II in the recent past. Examining historical memories of the war articulated in the 1990s is not used to engage in historical research on the 1940s but on the 1990s. Just as we need to understand historical events in their proper contexts, our study of historical memories, or historical consciousness, is properly an examination of the context of the memory act. What the war means to someone in the 1990s is really a statement about the 1990s and not the 1940s. Many scholars have analyzed how historical memories affect perceptions of the present. In 1998 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen noted that alice yang and alan s. christy Eternal Flames The Translingual Imperative in the Study of World War II Memories 226 alice yang and alan s. christy although many Americans shun “academic” history, they “pursue the past actively and make it part of everyday life” by keeping diaries, talking with relatives, visiting museums, and collecting memorabilia.1 Our comparison of interpretations of the Pacific War in the United States and in other nations is designed to create new mechanisms for stimulating transnational conversations about historical memories. In other words, we hope our collaborative scholarship can be extended to the larger public to examine the interaction, construction, and translation of memories across national lines.2 Our research shows that memories of events such as the Rape of Nanjing and the Battle for Iwo Jima powerfully affect people in the present and will continue to do so even after the generation that experienced the war passes on. Comparing American and Japanese views of these two particular war events reveals a multitude of methodological issues scholars need to confront when examining historical memories. Like other researchers studying the recent past, we need to historicize and contextualize the creation and reception of the sources we use. We need to recognize the impact of larger political, cultural, and economic factors on interpretations of the war. There is a wealth of scholarship on the war, but research on historical memory cannot assume that war survivors and other members of the public know about or accept this research. Instead, we need to critically analyze the interaction between different constituencies in promoting, dismissing , and revising historical memories. As a result of this collaboration, we have begun developing an innovative website—named Eternal Flames: Living Memories of the Asia Pacific War—that can function as a repository of memory artifacts in multiple media and as a site to develop a collaborative translingual community among scholars, students, institutions, activists , and the general public around the world. Even if one limited research to a single country, this is a daunting goal given the proliferation of possible sources on war memories in our digital age. For example, a Google web search on the “Nanking Massacre” on January 29, 2011, yields 484,000 results, which include photos, memorial exhibits, memoirs, personal testimony, news accounts, documentary footage taken during the war, and clips from recent popular films. If we search for the “Nanjing Massacre,” a term used now by most scholars because of a preference for pinyin romanization, we get 406,000 results.3 If we were traditional historians interested only in the war itself, we might...

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