The Politics of Memory: Nation, Individual and Self

Japan's "Historical Revisionists"

The Japanese political world has splintered to pieces in the aftermath of the cold war. The same splintering has occurred among intellectuals as well, as one distorted claim invites another, until one hasn't a clue who is conservative and who is progressive. The present focus of the confusion is the so-called comfort women problem. Holocaust revisionism has created scandals in the past in Japan as elsewhere, but this time the fire has ignited on our own doorstep. With the emergence of a Japanese version of historical revisionism, the comfort women issue has become a litmus test of attitudes about war responsibility and the construction of public memory.

Fujioka Nobukatsu, of the so-called Liberalist History Research Group, stands at the eye of the typhoon. This "liberalism" has nothing to do with any traditional liberalism. The liberation they claim to advocate is from the "biased historical perspectives of both left and right"; what they call the "Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal perspective" of the left and the "affirmation of the Greater East Asian War" on the right. Actually, this sort of critique belongs entirely to common sense—one hardly needs to hear it from Professor Fujioka. Everyone knows that the Tokyo Trials were victor's justice. As for "affirmation of the Greater East Asian War," that issue was declared bankrupt years ago. To come along now and pose these two as extremes, and then make it appear that you possess "the truth" merely by standing somewhere in between, is the stock formula of the so-called "debate method" in which Fujioka purports to specialize. [...]

Along with "Tokyo Trials History," Fujioka's group makes a scapegoat of what he calls "Comintern History," asserting that in the East-West division of the cold war years, Japan was forced by both camps to accept a "masochistic history." Blatant nationalism and superpower consciousness underlie this thinking. The logic has three stages: (1) The Western powers are guilty of the same evils but they are not apologizing; (2) Japan was an empire standing shoulder to shoulder with the Western powers; (3) therefore, what's wrong with Japan's behaving in the same manner as the Western powers?

Since Fujioka and the revisionists have directed their attacks at former comfort women and their defenders, let us begin by filling in some of the historical context surrounding this system of exploitation. "Comfort stations" were established after the Nanking massacre in 1937 and soon became widespread, first throughout China and then over the whole battlefront in Asia. What first excited the concern of the Japanese military was the frequent rapes committed by soldiers, which enraged the Chinese and accordingly made the occupation more difficult. Rape was illegal even under military code, and in theory rapists were punishable. The combination of the patriarchal assumption that male sexuality is uncontrollable and concern about military hygiene prompted officials to establish comfort stations under military control and forbid soldiers to visit local brothels. Apart from the reduction in overt cases of rape, and greater control over the spread of venereal disease, the comfort stations also reduced fraternization with enemy nationals, which might compromise military security.

Korean women were the favorite recruits for this sexual service, as they best met the military's requirements: they were "imperial subjects," since Korea had been made part of the Japanese empire in 1910, and they were young women without experience in brothels, therefore "hygienic"—military slang even dubbed them "sanitary public toilets." Estimates of the number of women taken vary from 80,000 to 200,000. Japanese women were also recruited, but these women came mostly from brothels, so that for "hygienic" reasons, Korean women were preferred. Still, a racial hierarchy remained between them; Japanese comfort women served officers, Korean women were assigned to lower-ranked soldiers. The fees charged varied on...