Heroes, collaborators and survivors: Korean kamikaze pilots and the ghosts of war in Japan and Korea

The unseen memorial The reframing of memories challenges the very vocabulary with which we speak about the past. Terms like ‘hero’, ‘traitor’, ‘partisan’, ‘collaborator’, and even ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’ are opened to new scrutiny. The complex processes of reconciliation that we have explored in this volume have shaken simplistic nationalist certainties, opened new topics of debate and made silenced voices audible. But the process is ongoing and diffi cult. This chapter takes one long-silenced voice – the voice of an individual participant in the Asia-Pacifi c War – as a basis for considering the unending retelling of history across the frontiers of the East Asian region from a micro perspective. How are individual lives affected by East Asia’s history wars and by the search for reconciliation? How far can one person’s private history open windows onto new perspectives for public memory?