Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on ‘difficult heritage’, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage’ in a number of societies in contemporary East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The authors analyse how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on the political agendas that inform the heritage-making process. They also examine the ways in which these processes respond to colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of ‘difficult heritage’ can involve the construction of new borders in the mind between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten. Taken together, the studies presented here suggest new directions for comparative research into difficult heritage across Asia and beyond, applying an interdisciplinary and critical perspective that spans history, heritage studies, memory studies, urban studies, architecture, and international relations. ‘Bringing together an excellent range of cases from diverse locations across the Asia Pacific, this book is an important contribution not only to this part of the world but to understandings of heritage struggles, especially in relation to colonial histories, more widely.’ —Sharon Macdonald, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin ‘This collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the place of Asia within global memory culture. Going beyond the “tunnel vision” of national memories, it provides us with a sophisticated examination of the ways the “difficult heritage” of colonialism, revolution, and war intersects with contemporary politics to produce an Asia-Pacific memory sphere.’ —Ran Zwigenberg, Pennsylvania State University

Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on 'difficult heritage', this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as 'heritage' in a number of societies in contemporary East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The authors analyse how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on the political agendas that inform the heritage-making process. They also examine the ways in which these processes respond to colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of 'difficult heritage' can involve the construction of new borders in the mind between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten. Taken together, the studies presented here suggest new directions for comparative research into difficult heritage across Asia and beyond, applying an interdisciplinary and critical perspective that spans history, heritage studies, memory studies, urban studies, architecture, and international relations.

Why is it that we so readily accept the boundary lines drawn around nations or around regions like ‘Asia’ as though they were natural and self-evident, when in fact they are so mutable and often so very arbitrary? What happens to people not only when the borders they seek to cross become heavily guarded, but also when new borders are drawn straight through the middle of their lives? The essays in this book address these questions by starting from small places on the borderlands of East Asia and looking outwards from the small towards the large, asking what these ‘minor pasts’ tell us about the grand narratives of history. In the process, it takes the reader on a journey from Renaissance European visions of ‘Tartary’, through nineteenth-century racial theorising, imperial cartography and indigenous experiences of modernity, to contemporary debates about Big History in an age of environmental crisis.

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This compelling and engaging book takes readers on a unique journey through China and North and South Korea. Tessa Morris-Suzuki travels from Harbin in the north to Busan in the south, and on to the mysterious Diamond Mountains, which lie at the heart of the Korean Peninsula's crisis. As she follows in the footsteps of a remarkable writer, artist, and feminist who traced the route a century ago—in the year when Korea became a Japanese colony—her saga reveals an unseen face of China and the two Koreas: a world of monks, missionaries, and smugglers; of royal tombs and socialist mausoleums; a world where today's ideological confrontations are infused with myth and memory. Northeast Asia is poised at a moment of profound change as the rise of China is transforming the global order and tensions run high on the Korean Peninsula, the last Cold War divide. Probing the deep past of this region, To the Diamond Mountains offers a new and unexpected perspective on its present and future.

Ongoing arguments over how histories are honoured – as evidenced by the conflict between South Korea and Japan over the opening of Tokyo's Heritage Information Centre in June 2020 – reveal the extent to which heritage processes enable states to assert legitimacy and power on a global stage. Here, Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan's Empire shines a timely spotlight on the complicated histories and disputed legacies of various sites associated with Japan's empire in Asia and the Pacific. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this transnational study sees contested memorial spaces as windows for us to explore how borders are created, moved and altered in everyday life. From the Asan Bay Overlook Memorial Wall in Guam and the Puppet Emperor Palace in China to Japan's Ainu Museum and the Cowra War Cemetery in Australia, the diverse range of case studies examined here foreground the complex relationship Japan and its neighbours have with their imperial past and reveal how these relations stand at the intersection of individual actions, societal choices and memory collectives. In doing so, this innovative collection of essays bridges history, geography and heritage studies to provide an invaluable new approach to the study of imperial conflict and memory politics in modern Japan.

From grassroots conflicts to great power relations, this book explores some of the key concepts, methodologies, and dilemmas of researching Asia-Pacific affairs. The book deals with key questions about the Asia Pacific: Why should we study policy from the ‘ground up’? What are the human considerations for societies in conflict? Why is regionalism important and how do global powers play a role? Should Asia-Pacific researchers embrace the design-based revolution in the social sciences? Muddy Boots and Smart Suits is for students, scholars, and policymakers in the region looking for a new way to understand local, regional, and global security challenges.