Routledge Handbook of Trauma in East Asia

This handbook explores trauma in East Asia from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, assessing how victims, perpetrators and societies have responded to such experiences and to what extent the legacies still resonate today. Mapping the trauma-scape of East Asia from an interdisciplinary perspective, including anthropologists, historians, film and literary critics, scholars of law, media and education, political scientists and sociologists, this book significantly enhances understandings of the region’s traumatic pasts and how those memories have since been suppressed, exhumed, represented and disputed. In Asia’s contested memory-scape there is much at stake for perpetrators, their victims and heirs to their respective traumas. The scholarly research in this volume examines the silencing and distortion of traumatic pasts and sustained efforts to interrogate denial and impunity in the search for accountability. Addressing collective traumas from across East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam), this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Trauma and Memory Studies, Asian Studies and Contemporary Asian History more broadly.

Table of Contents:
1. Contesting and Commemorating Trauma in East Asia: An Introduction Part 1: Japan 2. Surviving A World Destroyed: Existential Trauma in Hibakusha Experience 3. Japanese Progressives, Asia and Posttraumatic Growth 4. Trauma, Reconciliation, Social Justice and Artistic Commentary: Tomiyama Taeko’s Strategies for Repair Through Her Visual Art 5. Unwriting the Wrongs: History, Trauma and Memories of Violence in Germany and Japan 6. The West and the Dissemination of Japanese Historical Revisionism 7. Overcoming Trauma at Chidorigafuchi: Japan’s ‘National Cemetery’ and the Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War 8. Telling Stories of War Trauma: Japan’s Popular Manga 9. Back to the Future: Contested Wartime Trauma in Japanese Popular Culture 10. Shared Complicity in War Crimes in Japanese Detention Camps 1941-1945 11. Trauma in Japan’s Hope 12. Okinawa: The Trauma of Betrayal 13. Ignoring the history of foreign forced labour at Japan’s ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’ 14. Memories and Displays of Japan’s Early Industrialisation through the Production of Silk: Tomioka Silk Mill, Nomugi Pass and WWII Propaganda 15. Fukushima’s Traumatic Legacies Part 2: China/Hong Kong 16. Hong Kong as Pillar of Shame: Trauma Foretold, Suppressed and Compounded 17. The Nazi Holocaust in a Chinese Mirror: Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum 18. Memory and Mythmaking: World War II in Chinese Cinema 19. Martyrs, Military Heroes and Massacre Victims: The Complex Memorial Terrain of Lushun, 1894-present 20. Narrating Trauma: Memories of the Atrocities Under the Japanese Occupation of Sanzao Island 21. Trauma, Artificial Intelligence and Capitalism in Hao Jingfang Part 3: Taiwan 22. Contested Memory in Taiwan’s Jing-Mei White Terror Park 23. Transitional Justice in Taiwan: Truth and Reconciliation in a Contested State 24. Representing Taiwan’s White Terror in Pop Culture Part 4: South Korea 25. Contesting Trauma in Court: Korean Historical Claims and their Radiating Effects 26. Commemorative Witness: ‘Gwangju in 1980’ and Unresolved Transitional Justice in 21st Century South Korea Nan Kim 27. The politics of forgetting: Unmaking memories and reacting to memory-place-making 28. Cultural Trauma and the Cheju Massacre in Transnational Perspective 29. Commemorating and Contesting Gender-Based Violence in Korea Part 5: Wider East Asia 30. Putin, Politics and Propagandizing Memories of WW2 in Russia’s Far East 31. Trauma – Prolonged and Accumulative: The impact of Singapore detention without trial from the 1948 Malayan Emergency 32. East Asia’s Vietnam: Postwar Trauma and the Sub-empire of Memory 33. Wounds to the Soul: A View from Vietnam

About the Author :
Tina Burrett is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Japan. She is the co-editor of Japan in the Heisei Era 1989–2019 (Routledge, 2022) and Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia (Routledge, 2019) and the author of Television and Presidential Power in Putin’s Russia (Routledge, 2011). Jeff Kingston is Professor of History at Temple University, Japan. He is the author and editor of a dozen books on contemporary Japan and Asia, including Japan’s Quiet Transformation (2004), Contemporary Japan (2011), Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (2014) and Japan in the Heisei Era 1989–2019 (Routledge, 2022).