Memorializing the Enemy Three Ways: Australia, Japan, the USA

In this chapter, I reconsider three sites of war memorialization featuring in my recent research from perspectives related to encounters or not with enemies: the Australian War Memorial, the American Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Hiroshima Peace Park and Museum. It compares how each site establishes what war experience warrants memorialization and whose experience is insignificant or in opposition to it. The piece works from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s notion that industries of memory present limited angles on war and render invisible the many counternarratives that would round out war as a complex social institution with many enemies that can be named, ignored, silenced, accommodated, or conquered. Thus, the Australian experience of loss at Gallipoli becomes one of a nation coming together through international war; the American Vietnam Veterans Memorial by-passes the massive losses of that war by remembering only its own military deaths; and the Hiroshima Peace Park foregrounds civilian war experiences as encounters with a bomb-as-enemy. These comparisons culminate in ruminations about the many-sided notions of enemy emerging at a time of natural and international conflict and challenge.