Beyond Trauma: War and Violence in the Transpacific

In the catastrophic wake of the Holocaust and atomic bombings, liberal rights were reinvented as universal human rights. Chapter 2 moves from postwar Europe to Cold War Asia, the International Military Tribunals in Nuremberg to the International Military Tribunals of the Far East in Tokyo, and the Transatlantic to the Transpacific. It brings together legal proceedings, reportage, and literature on war and violence in the Transpacific to explore the postwar ascension of reparations and human rights in the context of three interlocking events: the atomic bombings of Japan, which ended World War II; the internment of Japanese Americans by the US government during that war; and legal claims by “comfort women,” young women and girls conscripted into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. It considers how psychoanalytic approaches to the history of the traumatized subject supplement the subject of Cold War history still in search of a historical consensus.