On behalf of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies let me welcome all of you to this very interesting conference, for us to reflect on sixty years of change since the end of World War II.

ISEAS is one of my favourite institutes because it is one of those institutes that has a memory and we historians like that. I recalled that about ten years ago ISEAS had a conference on “War and Memory” to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in Southeast Asia. I was at that conference and I remember how memorable and interesting it was — it stimulated us to think about the past but also to relate it to the present. This conference is an even more conscious effort to relate it to the present, about the impact on us today.

Let me say that there are two very important different aspects of this conference compared to the previous one. This one talks about World War II, while the previous one was really more about war and memory in Malaysia and Singapore. Second, this is about World War II in a much larger region. Both are very large concepts. World War II was a global war, and East and Southeast Asia put together is a much larger area than our previous conference topic. By broadening it, this larger perspective can help us think through some of our more local concerns as well.

World War II, of course, is understood quite differently in a number of places. I was struck by that long time ago. But for most people, World War II represented the war that was fought largely in Europe to begin with, and then enlarged to cover the rest of the world. For our region, it is a little bit less clear. There had been a war that had started earlier between China and Japan.