"We always seem to be at the tail end of history, dragged along roads already ruined by others."
— "Memoirs of a Declining Ryukyuan Women," Kushi Fusako
On a recent trip to the Pacific island of Guam, I came across a peculiar omission in the memorialization of war. During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army used forced labor to dig shelters into cliffs whose entrances, with rusting grill doors bolted into rock, resemble cages.