Participants

• Aileen Concepcion ANI Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Huong Bui Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University

  The nexus of war memories and contemporary touristic exploitation of the place has been neglected in research area. The complexities and dynamics of place transformation, from intangible memory to tangible touristic places, are being explored in the current research. Underpinning by the interpretivist paradigm, the hermeneutic phenomenology approach employed for this study uncovers the interactions between various social groups, including locals, tour guides, and government officers in the reconstruction of memories of the Japanese Pacific War in the Philippines, featuring Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, a war survivor in the jungle for three decades. Drawing on evidence from the process of development of the site of memory into a trail of adventure, the current research offers an insightful explanation of the conversion of social memories to a touristic site. Authors argue that tourism establishes its own ways of remembering historical events and figures. Tourism with its functions of moving people to come and direct experience of historical places, therefore continues to preserve the memory of the past for future generations. Tourism as a dynamic social phenomenon also offers a place for interconnecting of different versions of memory. Thus, the mechanism to transform a site of memory to touristic place entails temporal, social dimensions along with industrial operations structure.

• Ken MacLean Clark University

  Throughout the twentieth century, many countries in East and Southeast Asia experienced intense warfare. As destructive war technologies and weapons were developed and deployed in the region, they left behind long-lasting negative impacts on local ecologies, human health, communities’ livelihoods, and altered relations between humans and more-than-humans. In conjunction with the launch of a new special issue, “Warfare’s Ecologies: Toxic Legacies, Scientific Seductions, the Violence of Aftermaths”, in the journal War & Society scheduled to be published in August 2026, this roundtable provides a comparative examination of the ecological consequences of warfare in East and Southeast Asia, particularly how states, non-governmental organisations, and local communities have addressed, experienced, and lived with war pollution. The editorial team of the special issue will first introduce the contributions of the special issue to the emerging interdisciplinary research on war ecologies, highlighting how the history of warfare and violence in East and Southeast Asia played an important role in shaping and giving rise to international awareness on ecocide and the transnational ecological impacts of modern warfare. Four contributors to the special issue will then briefly discuss their case studies, including the transgenerational health impact of Agent Orange on local Vietnamese population, the bilateral US-Vietnam efforts to remediate Agent Orange contaminated sites, the mobilisation of mice in landmine detection in Cambodia, and the transformation of a secret weapon production site into a tourism site in Japan featuring cute bunnies.

• Tam Ngo NIOD

  Throughout the twentieth century, many countries in East and Southeast Asia experienced intense warfare. As destructive war technologies and weapons were developed and deployed in the region, they left behind long-lasting negative impacts on local ecologies, human health, communities’ livelihoods, and altered relations between humans and more-than-humans.
  In conjunction with the launch of a new special issue, “Warfare’s Ecologies: Toxic Legacies, Scientific Seductions, the Violence of Aftermaths”, in the journal War & Society scheduled to be published in August 2026, this roundtable provides a comparative examination of the ecological consequences of warfare in East and Southeast Asia, particularly how states, non-governmental organisations, and local communities have addressed, experienced, and lived with war pollution. The editorial team of the special issue will first introduce the contributions of the special issue to the emerging interdisciplinary research on war ecologies, highlighting how the history of warfare and violence in East and Southeast Asia played an important role in shaping and giving rise to international awareness on ecocide and the transnational ecological impacts of modern warfare. Four contributors to the special issue will then briefly discuss their case studies, including the transgenerational health impact of Agent Orange on local Vietnamese population, the bilateral US-Vietnam efforts to remediate Agent Orange contaminated sites, the mobilisation of mice in landmine detection in Cambodia, and the transformation of a secret weapon production site into a tourism site in Japan featuring cute bunnies.

Abstract

Keywords

• battlefield tourism
• collective memory
• commemorative rituals
• history
• memory
• tourism
• war heritage