Sixty years after the end of World War II, are memories of the war fading away or are the issues it generated still real? To find an answer to this question, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies organized an international conference in 2005. It brought together a diverse group of scholars who examined different aspects of the war's legacy. Their general conclusion was that the political and social fallout from the war is alive and divisive.

Two examples present themselves readily. One example is how former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine prevented China, Japan and South Korea from sitting down together to talk about Northeast Asian integration, and wider Asian integration. Only the presence of ASEAN in the driver's seat of the East Asian Summit process made any kind of dialogue on the issue possible. The other example is the question of comfort women. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's statement — that there is no evidence that Japan's government or army forced women to work in military brothels during the war — appeared to go back on a 1993 apology for the comfort women. His stance has upset many Asian countries and the United States.

The above and other unresolved issues such as the improvement of relations among and between the states in Northeast Asia, with implications for the rest of the international community, will be areas for study in the decade ahead.