This study investigates journalistic representations and discursive constructions of memories of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45) in three newspapers from three East Asian countries: Japan, China, and South Korea. These three countries have been having decades-long debates over how to interpret and recount what happened in East Asia during the war. Numerous people perished during the wars Japan waged in pursuit of its ambition to be a great Asian empire. The debates over war memories intensified during the past decade due to “memory politics” in the region. Among the many atrocities that have been the subject of international disputes, this study explores media discourses of three of the most heated controversies associated with the Asia-Pacific War: the Yasukuni Shrine controversy, the “Comfort Women” controversy, and the Japanese textbooks revisionism controversy. There are two theoretical groundings that support this study: “memory and politics,” and “journalistic discourses of memory.” Regarding memory and politics, this study approaches the topic from a collective/cultural memory perspective. In this regard, the three controversies over war memories were theoretically identified as sites of memory by which war memories were articulated and reinvented. As for the journalistic aspect, this study focuses on the cultural meanings of journalism and news. The cultural approach in journalistic study views texts as cultural artifacts that represent key values and meanings. Journalism plays a major role in creating, transmitting, and articulating memories. A critical discourse analysis was the primary method that was employed to investigate the discursive constructions of memory through news texts. An interpretive policy analysis was also conducted to examine official stances of the three countries with respect to war memories. The analysis has found that the three newspapers were agents of collective memory. They articulated the meanings of national memory based upon what they believed to be the most appropriate interpretations of their nations’ past. Political circumstances and ideological stances greatly influenced their coverage of war memories. Their coverage has shown that East Asia still lives under the shadow of the Asia-Pacific War that ended more than a half century ago. Memory has not been forgotten because it has been reinterpreted and reconstructed mirroring the national, social, political, and international climate. Situated at the center of such reproduction of memory, the three newspapers were also sites of memory. The three newspapers’ active involvement in the historical controversies exceeded what scholars described as common features of commemorative journalism. The controversies surrounding war memories and the newspapers’ construction of memory have shown that journalism is a cultural practice and that a cultural approach is necessary in journalism studies to gain a more holistic understanding of the representation of social events in the news.

This thesis proposes a new perspective on Malaysian Chinese studies by exploring issues of identity formation refracted through the lens of contestations of war memory, communal history and state-sponsored national history. In multiethnic Malaysia, despite persistent nation-building programs towards inculcating a shared Malaysian national identity, the question as to whether the Chinese are foremost Chinese or Malaysian remains at the heart of Malaysian socio-political debates. Existing scholarship on the Malaysian Chinese is often framed within post-independent development discourses, inevitably juxtaposing the Chinese minority condition against Malay political and cultural supremacy. Similarly, explorations of war memory and history echo familiar Malay-Chinese, dominant-marginalised or national-communal binary tropes. This thesis reveals that prevailing contestations of memory and history are, at their core, struggles for cultural inclusion and belonging. It further maps the overlapping intersections between individual (personal/familial), communal and official histories in the shaping of Malaysian Chinese identities. In tracing the historical trajectory of this community from migrants to its current status as ‘not-quite-citizens,’ the thesis references a longue durée perspective to expose the motif of Otherness embedded within Chinese experience. The distinctiveness of the Japanese occupation of British Malaya between 1941-1945 is prioritised as a historical watershed which compounded the Chinese as a distinct and separate Other. This historical period has also perpetuated simplifying myths of Malay collaboration and Chinese victimhood; these continue to cast their shadows over interethnic relations and influence Chinese representations of self within Malaysian society. In the interstices between Malay-centric national history and marginalised Chinese war memory lie war memory silences. These silences reveal that obfuscation of Malaysia’s wartime past is not only the purview of the state; Chinese complicity is evident in memory-work which selectively (mis)remembers, rejects and rehabilitates war memory. In excavating these silences, the hitherto unexplored issue of intergenerational memory transmission is addressed to discern how reverberations of the wartime past may colour Chinese self-image in the present. The thesis further demonstrates that the marginalisation of Chinese war memory from official historiography complicates the ongoing project of reconciling the Malaysian Chinese to a Malay-dominated nationalist dogma.