Cold War Ruins

"Yoneyama critically analyses the normative discourses surrounding Japanese wartime criminality and exposes how the Cold War power relations between Japan and the US continue to influence the terms in which international redress culture is enacted. The book offers a highly critical dissection of the political sensitivities of the post-Cold War era in the Japanese context. . . ."
  -- Teemu Laulainen * LSE Review of Books *
"Readers interested in geopolitical spheres beyond Asia Pacific should find Yoneyama’s approach to transnational cultural critique useful in exposing institutionalized forgetting in a wide variety of situations.... Given the metastasizing violence throughout the post-9/11 world, we can only hope that the methodologies and commitment to unflinching critical analysis evident in Cold War Ruins will find a wide audience." -- Geoffrey White * American Ethnologist *
"At a time when no single narrative can now monopolize the 'truth,' a global memory culture is coalescing around a human rights discourse that also monopolizes its own 'truth' originating in the West. Yoneyama's work is a valuable reminder that a multilayered perspective is crucial to discerning the political exploitation of such a paradigm as well." -- Akiko Hashimoto * Monumenta Nipponica *
“Tracking ruins across the longue durée of the twentieth century, this impressive study explores the historical forces that have delimited the possibilities for justice for survivors of colonial and military violence in Asia and the Pacific. . . . The methodological and analytical depth of Cold War Ruins provides an exemplary transnational approach to the study of historical justice, which should appeal broadly to researchers and graduate students.” -- Wendy Kozol * Journal of American History *
“Cold War Ruins is an innovative and provocative work. It contextualizes and builds connections between a host of thorny issues often receiving separate treatment. . . . A book filled with new questions and fresh answers about facing the past.” -- Dayna Barnes * Journal of American-East Asian Relations *
"Cold War Ruins takes readers beyond polities, geographies, histories, spaces, and times: a book of rare interdisciplinarity and range. Yoneyama has completed a work of fierce advocacy, abstract reasoning, and historical merit. . . . Yoneyama’s most important contribution is connecting post-war Occupation policies to the myth of US exceptionalism . . . The reader is left painfully aware of justice’s ephemerality, yet inspired by human resilience." -- James Burnham Sedgwick * Pacific Affairs *