ABSTRACT
This chapter adds a further dimension to the subject of trans-generational memory work, which constitutes a long-neglected phenomenon in Asia, bringing to it a new transnational lens. Smyth describes and analyses the pilgrimages to Southeast and East Asian war memory sites made by children of British prisoners of war and addresses the question of why some of these descendants incur the material and emotional costs of travelling to locations that risk reactivating painful childhood memories. Utilizing a “psychosocial” approach, and basing his research on numerous oral-history interviews, Smyth seeks to provide an understanding of the of the act and meaning of such pilgrimages from the participant's point of view, to which he adds his own reflexive ethnographic observations based on pilgrimages he himself undertook to Japan, as the child of a Far East Prisoner of War.
This chapter examines how pilgrimages can challenge the individual spatially, temporally, physically, and psychically. It suggests that this form of postmnemonic “return” unsettles past assumptions and subjectivities, yet also offers the pilgrim the chance to re-engage with their own child selves, and to reconstruct their relationships with their fathers. The relational experiences available in many pilgrimages may facilitate re-contextualization and re-narrativization of postmemory, the emotional consequences of which, for some, are powerful enough to plant the seeds of reconciliation.
