This is not a book for the fainthearted. The chapters within deal with collective historical trauma in East Asia: with memories of war, repression, exploitation, disaster, torture, massacres and gender-based violence. Memories of collective trauma evolve over time and are refracted through the prism of shifting contemporary concerns and political contexts that also influence the rites and sites of commemoration. Trauma studies gained momentum after WWII and the Holocaust in an extensive and sustained effort to make sense of the genocidal horrors perpetrated and experienced. There has been a Eurocentric bias, but the field has expanded to examine other collective traumas around the world. This volume builds on those efforts in East Asia where the mapping of the trauma-scape remains incomplete.