ABSTRACT
This chapter applies cultural analysis to look at the proposal for an East Asian Community in the light of the ‘memory problems’ associated with relations between Japan and South Korea – why the Japanese and Koreans remember their overlapping pasts in different ways – and illustrates their different ways of handling the past with reference to two cases, the handling of the memorials to the dead of Hiroshima, and the victims of the civil uprising in Kwangju in South Korea in 1980.
