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East Asia is now the world's economic powerhouse, but ghosts of history continue to trouble relations between the key countries of the region, particularly between Japan, China and the two Koreas. Unhappy legacies of Japan's military expansion in pre-war Asia prompt on-going calls for apologies, while conflicts over ownership of cultural heritage cause friction between China and Korea, and no peace treaty has ever been signed to conclude the Korean War. For over a decade, the region's governments and non-government groups have sought to confront the ghosts of the past by developing paths to reconciliation. Focusing particularly on popular culture and grassroots action, East Asia beyond the History Wars explores these East Asian approaches to historical reconciliation. This book examines how Korean historians from North and South exchange ideas about national history, how Chinese film-makers reframe their views of the war with Japan, and how Japanese social activists develop grassroots reconciliation projects with counterparts from Korea and elsewhere. As the volume's studies of museums, monuments and memorials show, East Asian public images of modern history are changing, but change is fragile and uncertain. This unfinished story of East Asia's search for historical reconciliation has important implications for the study of popular memory worldwide. Presenting a fresh perspective on reconciliation which draws on both history and cultural studies, this book will be welcomed by students and scholars working in the fields of Asian history, Asian culture and society as well as those interested in war and memory studies more generally.

This paper attempts to do two things: first, it describes the secondary burial as it is performed in south Taiwan; and second, it analyzes the symbolism of the rite. Although often mentioned by anthropologists in their writing on Chinese funerary and burial practices, secondary burial itself has seldom formed the focus of scholarly investigation. The narrative part of this paper thus fills a gap in the English ethnographic literature. The analytical part shows that the traditional understanding of secondary burial as a rite of purification is inadequate. It emphasizes that the rite has three related goals, namely, purification of the remains, revival of the purified bones, and definition of the geomantic property of the grave. This paper concludes that while primary burial merely expunges the polluting corpse from the community, secondary burial directly manipulates the corpse to completely eliminate it as a source of danger to the living.

This paper analyzes the ritual of launching model junks to send away the spirits of the dead practiced by the Chinese in Nagasaki during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). It shows that the ritual is an improvisation by the overseas Chinese with the aim of reconciling the conflicting demands of their culture on the one hand, and the reality of Nagasaki under \"national seclusion\" on the other. The ritual is an improvised practice in that it has no exact precedent in China, but integrates symbols and techniques drawn from a number of sources. It has the function of addressing the Chinese concerns for helping the dead as well as neutralizing their harmful influences under the restrictive circumstances of Nagasaki. The ritual launch is thus a useful case study that sheds light not only on Chinese funerary practices but also on the dynamics of cultural adaptation of overseas Chinese communities.

An opinion survey in 2009 by China Daily, the leading English newspaper in China, and Genron NPO, 1 a Japanese polling organization, found 65.2 per cent of Chinese respondents held a negative image of Japan. 2 Of these, 73.2 per cent cited the last war between the countries and 56.8 per cent referred to the 'unresolved historical issue'- the common Chinese belief that Japan has not shown proper contrition over its past aggression- as the source of their unfavorable perception. 3 The same survey found that more Chinese respondents associated Japan with the Nanjing massacre (1937) than with Mount Fuji or cherry blossoms, which the Japanese themselves prefer as national icons. 4 Will the Chinese ever change their attitude toward Japan over the war? After all, fighting ended more than 60 years ago. A Japanese professor I once met was confident that time would dissipate this deep-seated Chinese animosity toward Japan. He pointed out that China has never apologized for invading Japan in the thirteenth century (the Mongol invasions), but the Japanese nowadays do not feel aggrieved in the least because of it. Give the Chinese another century, or maybe two, and things will somehow work out, this argument seems to imply. 5

On 14 December 2011, a bronze statue of a seated woman was unveiled by the side of a busy street in central Seoul. The statue depicts a young woman, barely past childhood, wearing traditional Korean dress. She sits on a plain hard chair - straight-backed, her hands curled on her lap, her soft youthful face displaying a quiet and almost pensive expression, but her gaze fixed firmly ahead. A small bronze bird perches on her shoulder and a second empty chair has been placed next to the statue, so that passing visitors can sit side-by-side with the statue-woman and, if they wish, have their photo taken with her. Her human scale invites interaction. Local residents sometimes present her with bouquets of flowers, or lend her a mackintosh as protection from the rain (see Figure 0.1).