Historians and Public Memory in Japan: The "Comfort Women" Controversy: Introduction

An intellectual battle divides public life in Japan today. Since 1995, writers calling themselves advocates of a "liberalist view of history" (jiyūshu gi shikan) have attacked academic historiography and the contents of public-school textbooks. Coming from the political right, these critics question the dark narrative of Japanese imperialism and wartime fascism. Historians have responded with a variety of arguments and recently unearthed documents. As a result, the major journals in the late 1990s have featured more discussion of World War II than at almost any time since the end of the war. Debate has focused particularly on one symbolic issue: the forced sexual labor and brutal abuse of thousands of women who were made to serve the Imperial Army. Since 1991, when a few of the victims brought the first lawsuits against the Japanese government, the story of the so-called "military comfort women" (jūgun ianfu) has received international attention. Successive Tokyo administrations since then have trodden a fine line, expressing measured contrition while avoiding outright acknowledgement of Japan's responsibility. "Liberalist history" advocates claim that the women were simply ordinary prostitutes and deny that the military coerced them. ¹

There is nothing new per se in right-wing denials of Japanese atrocities committed during World War II or, more broadly, of guilt for Japanese imperialism. In fact, apologists for the prewar Japanese empire are numerous, and the belief that Japan entered World War II in selfdefense is widely held in private among members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Several times in the 1980s and 1990s, individual politicians have allowed themselves to make these sentiments public, incurring sharp protests from Korea and China. Minister of Justice Nagano Shigeto² was forced to resign after asserting in 1994 that Japan had fought a war of liberation for the countries of Asia and that the infamous Nanking massacre was a fabrication. Later the same year, then Minister of International Trade and Industry Hashimoto Ryutaro, using somewhat vaguer language, stated that he believed Japan had had no intention to fight its Asian neighbors and questioned whether Japan should be viewed as an aggressor. ³ With the exception of such lapses, however, Japan's political establishment has maintained silence on questions of war responsibility whenever possible.

There is also a long tradition of left-wing scholarship and activism critical of Japan's imperial past, including the emperor's own responsibility for pursuing a reckless and cruel invasion. A famous textbook battle was waged for decades by historian Ienaga Saburo, who sued the national Ministry of Education after his high-school social studies texts were denied approval because of their damning portrait of the Imperial Army. A board within the ministry carefully vets all textbooks before permitting their use in the public school system. The board has been known to make hundreds of demands for corrections of wording in a single text. Ienaga persisted through repeated screenings and Supreme Court appearances, in which he challenged the constitutionality of the procedure itself. ⁴

Yet several factors reveal that the present controversy is fundamentally-different in character. For one thing, this time rightists rather than leftists are the ones posing as outsiders challenging the educational establishment. In addition, unlike the traditional right, Liberalists avoid the subject of the emperor. ⁵ The question of Hirohito's role had been a magnet for arguments on both sides in past debates over war responsibility. Conservatives defended the person of the emperor (often as a "peace-loving" sovereign) and called for greater reverence toward the institution. Now the focus is on the Japanese citizenry. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the new right includes popular writers and television personalities, young and old, who have exploited the whole spectrum of mass media, including television talk-show appearances, shrewdly packaged and highly readable books, a popular comic series and sites on the World Wide Web. ⁶

Unlike Germany, the Japanese government has...