|
The end of apology
By Alexis Dudden
February 16, 2005
In recent months, the survivors of Japan's so-called comfort women system have
been dealt a series of newly cruel blows. In late January, the beleaguered
Asian Women's Fund announced that it would disband in 2007. During its ten year
history, the Fund has been attacked from all sides, yet, as an editorial in the
Asahi Shinbun emphasized, for all its shortcomings the Fund "managed to move
the history issue ahead, if only just a little." The Asahi quoted Fund staff
members who recalled how some of the women found a measure of closure to their
horrific personal histories through contact with the Fund.
The decision to dissolve the Asian Women's Fund fell as quietly as snow,
however, landing on top of the media-blitzing scandal that pitted the LDP
leadership and NHK against the Asahi concerning the NHK's well-known censorship
of a 2001 documentary on the military sex slaves. The head of NHK resigned, but
Japan's Public Television authorities refuse to admit wrongdoing, let alone
that it was bullied into removing segments of the original show by powerful LDP
Diet members.
In all of the excitement, of course, the women themselves -- and above all
their history -- were the first casualties, largely ignored in the uproar. By
now, the basic facts are available to reading audiences in Japan and around the
world. In the wake of the 1937 atrocities committed by Japanese troops in
Nanjing, the Japanese government established a system to make available sex for
its troops and civilian workers throughout Japan's battlegrounds in Asia and
the Pacific, eventually enslaving some 100-200,000 women as forced sexual labor
for the system, of which Koreans and Chinese comprised the greatest numbers.
These details, once elusive due to government efforts to destroy all records,
can now be substantiated readily with the kind of official archival
documentation that government historians and courts so dearly prize. So why
give up on the few surviving women now?
The big tragedy for the dwindling number of living victims of this crime came
well before the New Year, and received much less attention, yet brought the
continuing dimensions of the problem into sharp relief. In late November, the
Supreme Court turned down a 13-year lawsuit brought by a group of former sex
slaves from South Korea against the Japanese government. For years, the courts
have shown indifference to the women's humanity by dismissing such cases on the
grounds that the San Francisco Treaty and subsequent normalization agreements
settled apology and compensation issues once and for all. Last November's
judgment went farther than this customary apologist reasoning. The court
claimed that the women's case had no basis in the Japanese legal system because
the events they described -- their enslavement -- happened before the 1947
constitution came into being. Japan was a different country then, they
explained, meaning that the women and their history could not be the
responsibility of "new" Japan. Several days after the decision, Education
Minister Nakayama Nariaki greeted the court's judgment as well as the
decreasing references to the issue of sexual slavery in school textbooks with
characteristic empathy: "It is good. We shouldn't focus so much on the
negative." Taking all of these moments together, it's safe to say that we're
watching the end of the apology decade.
In 1989, in what seems like generations ago, Hirohito's death coincided with
the end of the Cold War and, particularly, the growth of widespread
democratization movements throughout the Asian-Pacific nations of Japan's
former empire, encouraging thousands of long-ignored and denied voices to come
forward to relate their experiences. In addition to the victims of sexual
slavery, Korean victims of the atomic bombs, enslaved mine and factory
laborers, and forcibly conscripted soldiers took advantage of this new
atmosphere to challenge nationally narrated truths of Japan's twentieth
century. Sometimes purposefully, and sometimes unintentionally, their claims
for redress from Japan coincided with a larger, global trend of apology and
reconciliation, giving rise to what even the movement's detractors acknowledge
as a decade of apology politics.
As is well known, in Japan, highlights of this era included historian Yoshimi
Yoshiaki brandishing a wartime Army document on television in 1992 to disprove
denial about Japanese governmental involvement in sexual slavery. The height of
the movement came, arguably, in December 2000 when hundreds of surviving women
from throughout Asia gathered in Tokyo to hold a peoples' tribunal that judged
Hirohito personally accountable for crimes against humanity. Moments such as
these meshed internationally, for example, with Germany's increasing statements
of atonement and reparations to holocaust survivors, and Australia's attempts
to come to terms with aboriginal issues, leading there to the establishment of
a National Sorry Day.
In Japan, the 1990s witnessed the demise of the era of so-called miracle
economics, following the burst of the bubble. Leaders anxiously debated Japan's
national interests in light of their aspirations to have Japan be considered a
"normal state" in the international system, mainly defining "normal" as a
nation with a permanent UN Security Council seat and an internationally active
military. Both are, however, expensive to maintain. Though often ignored yet
hotly contested among political parties, Japan's official statements of apology
became deeply entwined for the country's leaders with Japan's national
interests. In the wake of far-reaching statements of apology by Prime Ministers
Hosokawa and Murayama in the mid-90s for Japan's past, the ruling LDP veered
towards what many came to call the pragmatic approach. This held that it was in
Japan's national interest to apologize for the past in order to strengthen
Japan's ties with its Asian neighbors. Put differently, doing so also fostered
unencumbered economic exchange in the region.
The limits of the national interest approach to apology were easy to see. The
government's craven refusal to apologize directly to the survivors of sexual
slavery, for example, led to the establishment of the quasi-private, always
suspect Asian Women's Fund. Although, as mentioned above, its organizers make
the claim that some women found closure through its efforts, only 285 women
from throughout Asia took advantage of the Fund. What of the rest of the women,
and, more important, what of the deep-level problem that plagues Japan's
relations in the region concerning the telling of modern Japanese history?
Japan's relations with China have spiraled to the lowest point in years, and
Japan has also clearly entered a period of mounting conflict with North and
South Korea, heralding quite a start to the so-called Year of Friendship
between Japan and South Korea commemorating the 40th anniversary of normalized
relations. Recent statements and actions make clear, however, that apology --
and the reparations that come with it -- may no longer be so important to
Japan's leaders. For all its obvious shortfalls, the apology era allowed the
women formerly enslaved by Japan to find a voice against the deafening,
collective silence, shattering Japan's long-standing claim that the government
bore no responsibility because it had nothing to do with these women's
suffering. It was, of course, possible to sense throughout that official Japan
was just playing a waiting game until the women's inevitable death to make
things easier for itself, yet it was also possible still to hope for change
largely due to the emotional and intellectual strength generated by these women
as they wrote themselves into Japanese history. Some of them, it seems, were
able to believe before they died that their existence had mattered.
Unfortunately for the oldest remaining survivors, however, it appears that
Japan will throw them away after all.
Alexis Dudden contributed this article to Japan Focus. Alexis Dudden is
associate professor of history at Connecticut College and author of Japan's
Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power.
Comment on this story,
click here.
Copyright 1999-2004, AsianSexGazette.com. All rights reserved. No
content may be reproduced in whole or part without written permission.
Please contact us via the link below for re-print and syndication policies.
|
|
Comfort
womens' fund to be dissolved in 2007
1-25-2005
Military
record of 'comfort woman' unearthed
1-13-2005
World
War II sex slaves still suffer from disorder
4-21-2004
|
