Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes by Lisa Yoneyama (review)

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 movement and exchange across borders, but rather attends to the “insurgent memories, counterknowledges, and inauthentic identities” that transnationalism makes possible (7). Yoneyama makes what she calls a conjunctive cultural critique, connecting histories, events, nations, and people that have usually be treated as separate and/or discretely knowable, although in reality they have co-occurred and have been continuously and intimately entwined.

Cold War Ruins is organized into two parts. Part I, “Spaces of Occupation,” compares the American occupation and militarization of Okinawa to that of the Japanese mainland. The American occupation of the Japanese mainland concluded in 1952, but Okinawa remained under U.S. control for another twenty years, which Yoneyama discusses in chapter 1. As of her writing, the United States controls 20 percent of Okinawa’s land and 40 percent of its airspace, and the island hosts 70 percent of the U.S. military personnel stationed in Japan. Yoneyama views this as not only a continuance of the American occupation, but also a vestige of the former Japanese empire. Through this “transwar connectivity,” Okinawa remains Japan’s Other and is exploited by the Japanese to garner the benefits of an American alliance while projecting the image of a sovereign, equal, and powerful Japanese nation. For Yoneyama, “transwar connectivity” is “the ability to make connections, to perceive affinities and convergences of geohistorical elements that have worked together to constitute mid-twentieth century violence” (49). Chapter 2 emphasizes that these connections can also be traced through the post–Cold War period into the present-day global “war on terror.” Yoneyama observes that leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. media strategically and nostalgically recalled the “success” of the post–World War II occupation of Japan, which granted women voting rights and encouraged other public roles for them. She closely reads occupation-era propaganda against these media stories, and demonstrates how a script of freedom was used in postwar Japan to rally public support in the United States, obscuring how these...