Abstract
As Japan marks the 75th anniversary of World War II in 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not offer a fresh apology and maintained that future generations should not have to keep apologizing for past mistakes. This paper uses the unresolved war issue of the military comfort women system as a context to discuss what it means for political apologies to be more than mere political gestures founded on political interests and discusses what it takes to facilitate forgiveness. It will examine the features of a repentant wrongdoer who deserves forgiveness based on how one relates to one’s past wrongdoing in order to distinguish political apologies that are genuine from those that are mere gestures aimed at hasty reconciliation. This will be discussed through the works of Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Next, through Jankélévitch’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of forgiveness, it will be discussed how matters of justice and forgiveness should be understood as well as how the history of past wrongs and injustice is necessary for a genuine apology and makes forgiveness possible. It is also a moral responsibility for both perpetrators and victims to remember history in order to achieve personal forgiveness as well as begin social and political reconciliation.
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Notes
See, for example, these works for a clear presentation of the history of Japan’s Comfort Women system and experiences: Tanaka (2002) and Hick (1995). A good summary is given by Suzanne O’Brien’s introduction to Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s book Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II (2000).
Neither the Nuremberg trials or Tokyo trials recognized the crime of sexual violence. Rape, was included as a crime against humanity (alongside crimes such as torture and extermination directed against civilian population in armed conflict) in the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia 1993 because of the widespread rapes of women. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994) also declared rape as a war crime and crime against humanity, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which came into force in July 2002, now includes rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or “any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity” as crime against humanity when it is committed in a widespread and systematic way.
This chapter will continue to use this post-war term “jugun-ianfu”. See also footnote 6 on the controversy of this term. References in this essay to Senda Kako’s book Jugun-ianfu is based on Yoshiko Nozaki’s English journal article “The ‘Comfort Women’ Controversy: History and Testimony” in the Asia–Pacific Journal (2005).
This was only possible after the successful democratization of South Korea in the late 1980s and the rise of feminist movements. Historians estimated as many as 50,000 to 200,000 Korean women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. See “The ‘Comfort Women’ Controversy: History and Testimony” Nozaki (2005: 3).
The work that most literature on comfort women from the 1990s onwards are based on is Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s book Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II (Columbia University Press 2000) which was written based on 3 groups of materials: 1. Foreign and domestic documents uncovered; records from interviews with former comfort women from Korea, Philippines, and Netherlands, and 3. Survey sponsored by the Centre for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility of military unit histories and memoirs of war experiences in the National Diet Library’s collection. See p. 38.
Descriptions of “comfort women” appeared in all 7 textbooks approved by the Education and Science Ministry for use in junior high schools by 1997. However, these references were gradually erased and by 2006, the phrased “comfort women” was completely gone and weakened descriptions (without the use of the phrase) remained only in 2 textbooks. This means only 17.3% of junior high students has the opportunity to learn anything about the fact of the “comfort women” system now. For more details, see “An NGO Shadow Report to CEDAW, Japan: The ‘Comfort Women Issue’” (2009: 4).
The AWF was problematic on several counts. First, it was not state compensation, but a charity operated by volunteers. Receiving charity served as a humiliation to the survivors who demanded official compensation from the Japanese Government. Second, this fund was not directed to all survivors. It did not cover DPRK, China, Malaysia, East Timor, Burma, Papua New Guinea and Japan where the survivors had come out. Other countries where the existence of “comfort stations” have been identified include Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, India, Guam, Solomon Islands, Palau, and other Southern Islands. For more details, see “An NGO Shadow Report to CEDAW, Japan: The “Comfort Women Issue” 2009: 2.
Neonationalists raised 2 points of contention. The first is a minor technical detail of the facts presented by women’s testimonies of the use of the term “jugun-ianfu” (comfort women serving in the war) that were used in some textbooks since the term was not used officially and unofficially during the war. “Jugun-ianfu” was thus not a historical term but a postwar invention. The second is the use of the term “kyosei-renko” (taking by force) in the textbook to suggest an act of slave-hunting by the military or government authorities when no documentary evidence has been found to suggest that “kyosei-renko” took place in recruiting comfort women. As many wartime official records were destroyed by the military at Japan’s surrender, progressive historians such as Yasumaru Yoshio and recent works by Hayashi Hirofumi produced other evidence of the direct involvement of government and military in the procurement, shipping, and management of comfort women, and was aware and condoned traffickers use of violence and deception tactics.
Announcement was made by the Foreign Ministers of Japan and Republic of South Korea at the Joint Press Occasion, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 28 Dec 2015. There were subsequent interviews that elaborated the stances of both Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Park Geun-Hye.
Statement by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan and his Cabinet, 14 August 2015. https://japan.kantei.go.jp/97_abe/statement/201508/0814statement.html. Also see reports by McCurry (2015a) and Soble (2015).
Yonhap News (2018). At the end of October 2015, a total of 4.4 billion won have been handed out to 34 surviving victims and 58 families of late victims. 5.78 billion won remained with the foundation when it was shut down. Of the government-registered 240 victims, only 27 are alive.
Derrida’s idea of pure extraordinary forgiveness is similar to the theological concept of divine grace although he does not explicitly state so. See Janover (2006: 226).
A counter-example of state organized apologies that took a superficial form and hastened process to achieve the goal of reconciliation is the South Africa Truth Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The national call for unconditional forgiveness for the purpose of political reconciliation has been met with resistance by the victims. This is because while the individual letters of apology were written by perpetrators, genuine remorse is absent given that these apology letters took a “standardized” form and did not include a reckoning with crimes of the past showing an acknowledgement and admission of past wrongs, experiences of regret, a willingness to accept punishment, and repentance by committing to avoid wrongdoing in the future.
A proper in-depth discussion on collective guilt, and whether representatives or later generations should continue to bear the guilt is a natural extension of this point, but is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this essay and better treated as a separate discussion on guilt and collective shame.
See, for example, reports by McCurry (2015c); Jeff Kingston, “Coded rebuke as Japan’s crown prince says: remember war ‘correctly’” (27 Feb 2015, CNN).
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Ang, J.M.S. Remembering as Necessary for Forgiving. Hum Stud 44, 655–673 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09608-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09608-0