Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations| Session 10A, Panel
Chair: Arthur Stockwin (University of Oxford)
This paper aims to explore the ways in which sexuality, gender and colonialism are conceptualised in memory politics on "comfort women" in historical revisionism in Japan. The issue of comfort women has been a site of contestation for historical revisionists in Japan. Distortion of historical facts on comfort women system with the "masochistic" view of history has been asserted, for example by Fujioka Nobukatsu, Nakamura Akira, Hôsaka Masayasu, Nishioka Tsutomu, and Kusaka Kimihito have been involved in this discussion.
They claim
I shall investigate their assertions in terms of
The questions posed and addressed in this paper are
How is the comfort women system legitimised in revisionist historiography in Japan?
Yoshida Takashi (Western Michigan University)
In the more than six decades since its occurrence, the Nanjing Massacre has undergone continuous redefinition and reinterpretation in Japan, China, and the United States. Today it is easy to assume that the Massacre was always viewed in the three nations as an emblem of Japan's wartime aggression in China and that it has always inspired revulsion like that associated with the Holocaust or Hiroshima. In truth, however, the image of Nanjing as the site of particularly brutal atrocities is a more recent construction. I argue that the Massacre as it is discussed today did not exist in either national or international awareness until decades after the event. Certainly, as readers will realize in later chapters, Japanese atrocities in Nanjing were reported widely in China and the United States immediately after the fall of Nanjing, and such information, albeit on a limited basis, was available even in wartime Japan. Nevertheless, the wartime understandings and meanings of the atrocities in Nanjing were not necessarily the same as those of today, and contemporary reports as to the scale and duration of the atrocities were far less controversial than discussions of these matters in the present day. In the decades following the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45), the politics of the Cold War dominated historical discourse in East Asia, and the memory of Nanjing was pushed into the background. Indeed, through the 1950s and 1960s, disputes over the facts and significance of Nanjing were virtually non-existent. It was only after the early 1980s that Nanjing attained a prominent position in the history and memory of the Asia-Pacific War, and only after that time did it attract the attention of a wide range of commentators.
My presentation demonstrates the shifting understandings of the Nanjing Massacre. It examines how the history of Nanjing has been constructed in Japan, China (including Taiwan), and the United States since 1937 to the present. Both as a historical topic and as an emblem of countless conflicting emotions and ideas, the Nanjing Massacre has touched these three countries in a startling variety of ways. Nanjing has figured in the attempts of all three nations to preserve and redefine national and ethnic pride and identity. It has assumed different kinds of significance, depending upon the changing identity of each country's internal and external enemies. It has influenced and in turn been influenced by foreign policy and diplomatic relations among the four governments considered in this study. Perceptions of it have been used as a barometer of patriotic loyalty, and its memory has been manipulated in order to galvanize such loyalties. It has left its mark on journalism, in film, in painting, in fiction, and in museum displays. It has triggered acute controversies among individuals and groups of various political values. It has haunted and influenced the conscience of the world.
The core of the dispute over Nanjing can be largely attributed to the individual standpoints of the participants in the debate. Unless one understands their different motives and politics, it is hardly able to understand why the dispute over Nanjing has lasted since the 1970s and is not likely to end in the immediate future.
Dirk Hasler ( University of Munich)
Japan acquired an "obligation to internationalism" through its constitution, which was developed immediately after World War II. At the heart of the constitutional norms containing this obligation is the essential element, Art. 9, whose interpretation dominates the political and scientific disputes over Japanese foreign and security policy to this day. This is all the more remarkable, because when using a consequent juridical interpretation methodology, the popular yet contradictory interpretations cannot be fully traced back to the actual text of the norm. Prevalent among constitutional scholars, the strictly pacifistic interpretation renounces any form of self-defense of the Japanese state, as well as the legality of a national military organisation, but proves to be highly selective under historical perspective and neglects systematic connections to public international law.
The contrary position, which can be called "legality-interpretation", differentiates between a legal individual self-defense and a forbidden collective self-defense—a separation that is in no way derived from the original text of the norm. Art. 9 effectively represents a national adaptation of Art. 51 CUN, but the theoretical confusion between "self-preservation" and "self-defense" immediately after the war allowed enough room for political interpretation that, though often lacking juridical methodology, proved useful for the day-to-day struggle in foreign policy debates. This initiated a process still going on today, in which the peace terminology can be called "values without norm" in contrary to the assertion, that Art. 9 is in "realistic" view a "norm without value". Behind this complex situation of Japanese constitutional law stands the tremendousneed to develop political methods to handle one of the most antagonistic relationships between two friendly countries in modern history. The relationship to the USA is to this day the foundation of Japanese foreign policy and is marked by two extremes: the "fear of being abandoned" and the "fear of getting involved". Meanwhile, to regulate this bilateralism, the foreign policy administration developed various kinds of institutionalized steering mechanisms under use of specific portions of Art. 9, which can be summarized by the term "instrumental pacifism". The permanently articulated focus on world peace has been an argument untouchable by US-administrations. Moreover, as it seemed to have its rationale in the "oshitsuke kenpô" (forced constitution) itself.
In internal dialogues as well, the "Heiwa kokka" (peace state) had the potential for reducing conflicts because of its positively associated contents contrary to the imperialistic past. So the articulation of constitutional pacifism could quickly develop into a functionalist myth to cover the time before 1945 and to give a kind of idealistic compensation to a decades-long and substantial increasing military capability.
Despite innumerable proposals to adjust Art. 9 to "reality", though often under use of a narrow and ideologically odoured definition of realism in international relations theory, current discussions offer the possibility for the Koizumi government to show its real commitment to pacifism. Still unchanged, his formulation bears the chance for a simple re-interpretation. Comparable to the term of supranationality in the European context, Art. 9 could be "reinvented" as a partial reduction of the traditional definition of sovereignty, in the sense of reducing the classical claim of purely autonomous state behavior. When looking in detail at the wording of Art. 9, paragraph 1, this would be a convincing position even from the strictly normative point of view, but political needs can also be fully considered: only through regional institutionalisation—with its peace-sustaining logic—can the risk of global instrumentalisation be minimized by the then powerful argument of legitimated constitutional norms.