Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War by Gi-Wook Shin, Daniel Sneider (review)

Particularly since the mid-1990s, there has been rapid growth in the English-language literature on memories of the Asia-Pacific War. Divergent Memories is an ambitious volume that compares memories across four countries—the United States, Japan, South Korea, and China—through a study of “opinion leaders.” It is part of a large project called Divided Memories and Reconciliation, based at Stanford University. The project produced three books (on textbooks, screen memories, and a comparison of memories in Western Europe and East Asia) prior to the present volume (p. 7).¹ These three edited volumes taking a transnational approach have close counterparts in books such as Laura Hein and Mark Selden’s Censoring History ² or East Asia Beyond the History Wars by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu.³ Furthermore, the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus has published dozens of articles on similar topics. However, the work of the Divided Memories and Reconciliation group is notable for bringing together various topics in a coherent project. Memories of the Asia-Pacific War have long cried out for collaborative, comparative research on this scale. Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider deserve great credit for rising to the task and managing such a major undertaking.

In the authors’ words: “This book draws on [the] earlier phases of the project but goes beyond them to delve into the views of the elites that guide each nation and the roles that opinion leaders play in shaping memories of colonialism and war in Northeast Asia and the United States” (p. 7). Opinion leaders who are deemed to have shaped memories were interviewed. Their opinions, in turn, shape the entire book. The appendix lists 14 interviewees from China, 12 from South Korea, 15 from Japan, and eight from the United States. Five people from each country were selected and their (inter)views were presented in five-to-seven-page sections. These form the heart of chapters 2 to 5 about divergent memories in China, South Korea, Japan, and the United States, respectively. The opinions of all the inter viewees are incorporated into chapters 6 to 10, which are thematically based: colonial rule, forced labor and the comfort women (chapter 6), Japanese atrocities in China (chapter 7), war in the Pacific (chapter 8), the A-bombs (chapter 9), and postwar settlements (chapter 10).

While Divergent Memories is the project’s first book that is not an edited collection of essays, and despite having only the project leaders as its two authors, I hesitate to call it a monograph. Rana Mitter’s endorsement on the back cover says it well: “a stimulating and comprehensive account of key issues . . . a valuable new resource for scholars and general readers.” A large proportion of the citations are from the interviews with opinion leaders, making the book more akin to a reader than a monograph. If it was an article rather than a book, it would be in the review articles section of a journal. This does not detract from the book’s value. Quite the contrary: it will be very useful on both undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists, and researchers working in similar areas will find the book easy to dip into for insights and information on specific topics or people. But readers will not go to this volume for its synthesis of war memory issues, a point I return to later.

There are two major advantages of the book’s approach focusing on interviews with opinion leaders. First, the text is engaging. The views are not abstract arguments but the opinions of visible experts (there is a photo of each of the 20 principal interviewees). Their arguments are “brought to life” for the reader through supplementary biographical information, such as the wartime experiences that influenced some of the interviewees’ stances. Some interviewees, therefore, are not only opinion leaders...