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 ... Read morejustice's ephemerality, yet inspired by human resilience.
James Burnham Sedgwick
Pacific Affairs
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
Tracking ruins across the longue duree 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
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
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
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
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