History, Conflict, and Contexts: Remembering World War II in Asia

As in Emily Brontë's dreams, war has flowed through Asia in the past century like wine through water. Be they interstate conflicts, intercommunal violence, social revolutions, or struggles for sovereignty, wars have transformed political structures, changed territorial boundaries, and reshaped the regional order. In particular, World War II, which strides the twentieth century like some malignant colossus, had a profound impact on the region. Estimates of its human cost vary, but it probably caused at least twenty-three million deaths in the Asia-Pacific (Wikipedia 2015a).2 Politically, it shattered the hold of the European powers on their colonial subjects, triggered the wave of post-war decolonization, and established the bipolar balance which dominated international and regional relations for almost fifty years.