ABSTRACT
Other chapters in this book discuss ways in which the Cold War modi fied the international framework, and thereby the domestic balance, of postwar Japan. But before the postwar and the Cold War was “The War,” and when that term is used, no one is in any doubt as to which war is meant. Although its shadow is indubitably lengthening over late-twentieth-century Japan, it shows no sign of fading into the light of a new day. New horrors continue to be exposed, from mass graves or “people-reducing kilns” (renjinro) of atrocity victims in Thailand and China to mysterious heaps of human remains in Japan itself. War time stockpiles of Japanese chemical weapons continue to kill and injure people in China. The children of the grandiose multicultural visions of a new Asian order, abandoned in China amid the ruins of the collapsing Japanese empire in 1945, now in middle age troop forlornly around Japan seeking their lost families and an understanding of their own identity. Countless victims of torture or ill-treatment throughout the region continue to suffer the effects of the cruelty of a half century ago. In many comers of the Japanese empire that collapsed fifty years ago, victims stir, lodge complaints, demand apologies and compensa tion. The question of how the war should be remembered, even what it should be called, continues to trouble a generation that is increasingly removed from the events themselves.1
