The editors of Remembering Asia's World War Two, Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, have their fingers on the pulse: their well-crafted volume is indeed timely as it explores and directly speaks of and to a boom, intensification, and diversification of war remembrance in East and Southeast Asia. The volume offers a decentered perspective that pays close attention to regional events and developments. It highlights and unearths transnational connections of war memory discourse and practice in Asia that can also work beyond state authority, and that ultimately would establish a decidedly non-Eurocentric approach.

Ten richly researched and well-written chapters account for memory politics and private reconciliation efforts as well as official and unofficial commemoration with all its successes, failures, and tensions. They cover anti-imperial public and private memory in mainland China; postimperial memory politics in Japan; postcolonial musealization and capitalization of war memory in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore; and transcolonial and transimperial reconciliation activism and its consumption, at times beyond state control and initiatives. Contemporary war remembrance in Asia, as war itself, the editors rightly contend, crosses multiple borders and boundaries—social, cultural, and political—as well as time and space.

Remembering Asia's World War Two is a welcome contribution to the field, and it is a great addition to Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s)—or better yet, a prolific complementary read, as it takes off where the 2001 volume ended and narrates the contemporary history of memory politics, reconciliation, and its discontent over the past two decades.Footnote ¹ The 2019 volume takes into account recent developments in Asia that have had an enormous impact on remembrance of World War II in Asia. Instead of gathering accounts on every single place in this vast and diverse world region, the volume “focuses on selected cases with a view to interrogating the cross-border dimension of commemorating East and Southeast Asia's World War Two, analyzing how ostensibly transnational discourses have been refracted or transformed by local political and social agendas” (p. 3). In doing so, the editors and authors underscore the significance of China's involvement in shaping East and Southeast Asian remembering in multiple ways.

Remembrance of World War II in China has changed dramatically, from silencing the war until the 1980s because many battles against the Imperial Japanese Army were fought by nationalist Kuomintang troops, toward a recent push by state authorities to build mnemonic sites commemorating the anti-imperial Resistance War. Simultaneously, Chinese state and party authorities increasingly tolerate and co-opt individual and family war remembrance and private initiatives such as the Jianchuan Museum.

Another key shift in the past two decades of war remembrance in East and Southeast Asia is not related to changes in China and Chinese politics alone, but has roots in political, cultural, and economic developments in the whole region. Increasing mobility—manifested most significantly in migration, travel, and consumption—increasingly connects Asian peoples and countries and, as the volume's editors and authors argue, increasingly transnationalizes commemorations of World War II. These developments pair with new forms of cultural productions. Such productions include immensely popular Chinese and Korean historic films and dramas. They also include museums and exhibitions, which do not just produce patriotic education through nationalist war memory for a national audience but are progressively addressing a diverse local as well as regional and international audience. Commemoration narratives derived from these productions very often still align with national political positioning. Yet they nevertheless have to face the circumstances that traveling memory tourists draw their own connections and comparisons between East and Southeast Asia's mnemonic sites or that local peoples and communities claim their own, mostly private and family-related, war commemoration. In places like Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which are explored in depth in the volume's chapters, local remembrance is particularly complex. In these cases, the fight against imperial Japan's aggression does not simply dissolve in a clear-cut narrative of China's anti-Japanese and hence anti-imperial resistance. Because of local integration into European empires that entailed loyalties to or discontent with colonial authorities next to Sinosphere nationalism and local communities, World War II was also a defense of one empire against another as well as protecting one's home—then and now.

Remembering Asia's World War Two makes a strong case for taking inter-Asian dynamics and developments more seriously. In particular, the volume heavily criticizes the established notion that European and especially German memory politics would set a global normative standard for a supposedly successful reconciliation path. One can hardly agree more, as it is shameful and painful to watch Western (European) leaders’, journalists’, but also academics’ mantra-like self-righteous paternalism in their judgment of Asia's alleged incomplete reconciliation. The volume's strategy is to counter Eurocentric commentary by highlighting historic specificities and Asian transnational connections, beyond a post–Cold War global public culture narrative, and to demand a stronger provincialization of European commemoration and reconciliation. However, such an approach misses the chance to engage more critically with the fact that the European model is far from being a model. This is not because “the Western European experience of reconciliation in the decades following 1945 appears exceptional rather than normative” (p. 10), but because Europe's reconciliation path itself was never smooth—and is far from over.

Germany's reconciliation process is incisive here: although the German case is often certified as the most successful memory politics—and the editors agree that this is the case in comparison with many Asian states—Germany still has not fully come to terms with its past, as any attempt at fully accepting war responsibility continuously erodes social cohesion. Although political leaders tirelessly ask for forgiveness for Nazi atrocities, most emblematically embodied in the Shoa, anti-Semitism remains widespread (even deadly), and most German families do not accept the fact that their family members took part in the largest and unprecedented mass industrial killing of people in world history. Regardless, the alleged successful reconciliation politics have even become an export good, which perpetuates a new postwar German nationalism and is actually a foundation for Germany's (and, for that matter, Western Europe's) arrogance and paternalism toward Asian countries. Simultaneously, German memory politics completely ignores the increasing diversity of the German (and European) society and has not much to offer to migration/diaspora communities about how they can cooperatively design World War II responsibility, memory, and reconciliation.

That said, an even more critical approach would have allowed the authors to go beyond a simple critique of Eurocentrism and/or a valorization of regional specificities over global integration. Both the volume as a whole and its respective chapters’ running trope of transnational connections and border-crossing exchange in World War II remembrance coming from and with ongoing tension between public and private (read: state controlled/state-sanctioned and nonstate/antistate) initiatives and collaborations could be turned into an explicit lesson for Western (European) World War II remembrance. Particularly the focus on the very successful individual, family, and other private network remembering—especially when it comes to acknowledging personal wartime responsibility, complicity, and perpetration—would be a long-awaited impulse for, say, a German audience. Such awareness of private remembering, I think, is one of the volume's biggest strengths, because it sheds new light on local everyday practices and experiences beyond state power.

In sum, Remembering Asia's World War Two marvelously illustrates agency, capacity, and creativity in memory and reconciliation beyond nation and beyond state—yet unfortunately not beyond region. Nevertheless, the volume is a fantastic collection of essays that themselves also work well as stand-alone pieces for students of East and Southeast Asian history, politics, and society, as well as for a nonspecialist audience interested in remembering World War II.