Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice: Americanization of Japanese War Crimes at the End of the Post-Cold War

This article examines the multi-faceted implications of legislative and other developments in the United States concerning efforts to redress Japan's wartime military sex slavery and other war crimes. Yoneyama explores the not-so-uniform ways in which Asian/Americans become mobilized into such redress efforts within the Unite States public sphere. On the one hand, Asian/American involvement in redress may secure their nationalized status, by allowing them to serve as an alibi to underwrite what Yoneyama calls the American myth of "liberation and rehabilitation." On the other hand, the same process may illuminate the long history of United States imperialism and violence, thereby producing new subjects and publicity that rally around the transnational, anti-racist, anti-colonial notions of history and justice.