How Empires Deal with History： Australia Finds It Difficult to Turn Back Time on the “Lost Children”

The Australian Senate passed its own, somewhat belated motion (motion 920; scroll down to page 24459) on the comfort women issue on 2007 September 20. It must have been a disappointment to supporters of the ongoing campaign to force the Japanese government go beyond the Kōno Statement, though. For, I quote:
[T]he Senate
(a) notes that:
(i)...
...
(iv) the 1993 statement by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on the comfort women issue (the Kono statement) fully and officially acknowledged the complicity of the Japanese Government and military in the 1930s and 1940s in a coercive system of sexual slavery in occupied territories, and
(v) the Kono statement has been reaffirmed by subsequent Japanese governments and prime ministers, including by Prime Minister Abe;
(b) commends the Japanese people and Government for the steps they have taken so far to acknowledge and atone for Japan’s actions in the 1930s and 1940s; and
(c) encourages the Japanese people and Government to take further steps to recognise the full history of their nation, to foster awareness in Japan of its actions in the 1930s and 1940s, including in relation to comfort women, and to continue dialogue with those affected by Japan’s past actions in a spirit of reconciliation.

The Labor Party and other members of the opposition introduced an amendment that would make the motion read:

(iii) the 1993 statement by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono officially acknowledged the Japanese Government’s findings, including its involvement in the comfort women system;
(b) encourages the new Prime Minister of Japan to acknowledge and officially apologise to comfort women by introducing such a resolution in the Diet; and
(c) encourages the Japanese Government to take further steps to recognise the full history of its nation, by taking historical responsibility and accurately teaching the history of comfort women in its schools.

However, the amendment was rejected by a vote of 34 to 32, and the motion passed as introduced. But Senators newly elected in the will take their seats on July 1, which will give the Labor Party, with an absolute majority of its own (39 seats out of 76 in all), to take another crack.

Now I have no quarrel in principle with members of civil society pressing claims, their own or otherwise, against the Japanese government*. But what are we to make of governments, particularly those of former empires, that try to dictate how the Japanese government deals with its history even while falling far short when it comes to dealing with their own. So let’s sit back and watch the Australian government deal with its own apology to the Australian aborigines. For this BBC report says nothing about any resolution, and the new Labor administration has apparently ruled out any compensation. Moreover, the proposed apology refers only to the “Stolen Generations”. It says nothing about the aborigines who were living on land expropriated by settlers over the years**, nor does it mention the aborigines in Tasmania, who were hunted as game and slaughtered as vermin.

Perhaps the Australian Senate should take the easy way out and demand that the British Parliament pass a resolution of apology. After all, there are no personal costs to making demands that only others need fulfill.

Incidentally, I would be very much obliged if someone could enlighten me as to any other action, administrative or legislative, that the Australian government has taken on this issue.

* Anyone who is curious to know what I personally make of the comfort women issue is requested to look here. I have not done any thinking beyond it.

** Yes, I am aware that Japan has been less than exemplary in its treatment of the ainu. Yes, I am aware that the United States… In fact, it is a fact of history, the sadness of which is correlative to the degree of empathy in the beholder, that expanding nations are rarely kind to indigenous populations.

How Empires Deal with History: Rewrite It, Said Prime Minister Fukuda

In this English language version of his New Year's greetings (the long version), Prime Minister Fukuda says, “One hundred years ago, in nineteen-oh-eight, the Russo-Japan War ended, ushering in a period of respite for Japan…” Yet we have no plans to celebrate that great victory. And Mr. Fukuda calls it the Russo-Japan, not Japan-Russia, War. And is the Nippon Kaigi doing anything about this? The sissies!

---

A more accurate re-rendition of the Japanese original would be, “A hundred years ago, Japan had seen the end of the Russo-Japan War and was enjoying a period of respite...”

How Empires Deal with History: The European Parliament Gives Me the Opportunity to Revisit the Comfort Women Issue

Once upon a time, I suggested that I would revisit the comfort women issue more fully than I had up till then. I’ve taken this occasion to put my tentative conclusions and the conclusions only in the form of a conjecture. A fuller treatment at this point would require my reasoning behind each assertion as well as many qualifiers and modifiers.

In an event that even wire services overlooked but the Japanese media dutifully recorded, the European Parliament in its plenary meeting on 13 December passed a resolution closely mirroring the U.S., Canadian and Dutch resolutions. The European Parliament apparently does not need a quorum, since out of the 785 EU MPs, only 54 voted in support while 3 abstained. Regardless, the Yomiuri is alarmed at the possibility of a chain reaction, and has decided to strike back with an editorial calling on the government to “review the Kōno Statement”, which according to the editorial, “suggested that Japanese officials systematically and coercively recruited women to be comfort women.” The editorial further states that “there is not one single document or a shred of evidence that substantiates this”. Knowing Japan hands will likely chide the Yomiuri for rising to the bait and advise it to let yet another non-binding resolution lie.

I for one would fully agree with any public efforts to revisit the entire issue. If such a thing is done, though, I believe that the picture of what most likely occurred over those years will disappoint many people, including the denialists as well as the people pushing the resolutions. It will also displease the Korean public. In fact, I am surprised to find nothing out there from my admittedly intermittent and usually accidental visitations to the issue that resembles what I have come to see as the probable. Since I do not feel the urge to expend my own resources to do the substantial spadework required to provide proper documentation, I offer it here as Okumura’s Conjecture. If anybody is interested in putting up real money to explore it more fully, I’ll be happy to spend some of my time on it. As things stand, the only thing that the denialists obtain is overseas opprobrium, while those who claim to be seeking reconciliation merely achieve revenge as proxy.

The comfort women from Korea and Taiwan were recruited in more or less the same way as the Japanese comfort women, with due adjustments for the greater poverty of those two colonies* as well as the lower status of Koreans and Taiwanese in the Japanese empire. Their treatment once in situ also reflected such status. The business was mostly a private sector affair dominated by Japanese operators but with substantial local involvement. Some of the women did receive financial rewards － if not emotional satisfaction or job security － far exceeding that of a general in the imperial army, but many, if not most, saw conditions quite different from those advertised, never for the better. Some, at times with the complicity of immediate family members, were totally ignorant of what would be in store for them. And speaking of advertisement, most comfort women did not of themselves find placement through newspaper ads.

As the Japanese military moved out beyond Manchuria**, it foraged for supplies***, including women. Beyond whatever contingent that it managed to bring along and locally available local supply, it gang-pressed unwilling women into sexual service****. The overall scope and relative proportion of the latter will never be known. The level and nature of this coercion, even its existence, varied widely from place to place, and also as result of the outlook of local commanding officers. It did this in mainland China, the Dutch Indies, the Philippines and Singapore. It is possible that it did this in other locations as well. The Dutch women were released because the Germans interceded. In any case, the military － local commanders and officers as well as Central Command －was a branch of government just as much as, say, the Emperor’s Privy Council.

The human condition of the comfort women as well as their ultimate fate also varied with time and place. The outlook of local commanding officers had a major effect. As the situation worsened for the Japanese military, the women also suffered. Under extreme conditions, they were treated at best no better than other civilians.

As I’ve said before, I see no reason to retract the Kōno Statement. If － it is an enormous if － the Cabinet decides to issue an apology over and beyond the Prime Ministers’ letters, or the Diet decides to adopt a resolution (passes a motion?) of its own, I think that one or the other will come up with something that I can support. But leaving the political practicalities aside (the resolutions have made a meaningful domestic dialogue impossible for the time being), any such action will have to follow the fullest possible search for the truth. And the truth should lie more or less in the above conjecture.

I believe that the reason that such a scenario fails to be adequately explored is because the public debate is dominated by the two extremes, one dominant in Japan and the other in the West and South Korea. The two ends focus on material that supports their conjectures to the neglect of other evidence direct and circumstantial, historical analogues both Japanese and non-, and other known facts and circumstances as well as common sense that speaks otherwise. Though I have no reason to doubt their sincerity, the truth may be too complicated and unpleasant for these people to handle. But my views, needless to repeat, are mere conjecture. I stand ready to be proven wrong.

Finally, to those legislatures that purport to pass moral judgment on the Japanese government, I will heed your words if and when you destroy your own glass houses. Otherwise I have no regard for your actions, which you believe, falsely, to be costless.


* I use the term “colonies” rather loosely here. In legal terms, imperial Japan in Korea and Taiwan went beyond what the old European empires did. Think Hitler and Sudetenland, only if there had been no ethnic Germans there.

** The origins and the fate of the comfort women from Manchuria should have been similar to those of the Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese comfort women, but I cannot pull any material on them from my memory, so I refrain from including them in the main body of my conjecture.

*** Logistics was never a strong point of the Japanese military.

**** There must have been a large number of women who were raped but were never subsequently conscripted as comfort women. That is a related but different issue.

If Miss Tibet Has Problems with the Chinese Authorities, Imagine What the DPJ Has to Go Through

CNN says in this news report that Miss Tibet took herself out of a beauty contest in Malaysia because the Chinese authorities put pressure on its organizers to use the name Tibet-China (like the good people of the Republic of China). Good thing for the guys who run Miss World that this year’s contest, held in China, was over and done with. But imagine the embarrassment for China next year, when the U.S. Congress puts pressure on the corporations that run Miss World and Miss Universe. The Bush administration will be of no help to China, because it will have to lean on a Democratic Congress in an election year. That is, if Miss Tibet shows up again.

According to this Sankei article, Ichirō Ozawa should be able to feel Miss Tibet’s pain, because the DPJ had to cancel a 28 November study group meeting on the plight of the Uighur in China to facilitate Mr. Ozawa’s upcoming trip to Beijing. Sankei itself was thrown out of China during the Cultural Revolutions in the 1960s when it refused to lick Mao Zedong’s… well, I hope for the sake of correspondents from a couple of other newspapers at the time that rumors about Mr. Mao’s aversion to showers were only a myth. So, although it hasn’t found the smoking gun, it has good reason to suspect China of leaning on the DPJ to deep-six the Uighur meeting.

China is one of the last empires left standing; democracy is a luxury it can ill afford in dealing with minorities.

How Empires Deal with History: President Sarkozy Goes to Algeria

No, this is not an apology. But I suppose that it beats passing funny laws.

How Empires Deal with History: The Dutch Case

Early last month, the Dutch Lower House passed a unanimous resolution to seek from the Japanese government an official apology to and restitution for the comfort women*. The U.S. Congress had set the bar for both non-binding resolutions and the Japanese non-response thereto, so it was not only imperative but also easy for the Dutch Lower House (and the Canadian legislature for that matter) to pass a motion of little practical consequence.

Now the Dutch women probably have the most clear-cut case against the Japanese government on the comfort women issue (even Yoshiko Sakurai has acknowledged their allegations, if not their demands), so, if you do not think that the Kōno Statement, the subsequent letters from Japanese Prime Ministers, and the “fund” are sufficient**, then you are more than within your rights in airing your views and demanding rectification. But it’s one thing for individuals like you and me to focus on a single issue with total disregard of consistency, and for the government to do so. To quote:

"We should not go into semantics. What is important is that we delivered a message that has been very clearly received in this country and comes straight from the heart."
- from Jakarta, Ben Bot, Foreign Minister, Netherlands, 2005.

Well, that was then. Actually, Ben makes a lot of sense. Remember, it was semantics that got Prime Minister Abe in trouble.

And in case you’re wondering, the Indonesian authorities did not insist.

*You probably missed it, because it seems to have been ignored by the mainstream British and American media.

**Just for the record, I support the Japanese government’s position. More specifically, I believe that it is within the range of justifiable positions, given what I’ve viewed and read that have dealt with this subject as well as other sources that have no direct bearing on the facts but illuminate the issue, and that, on balance, I see no reason to change it. More significant than my personal views, I believe that the resolutions have at best merely served to freeze debate in Japan, and that they have made any change in official policy towards the direction that their proponents desire even less plausible. I’ll elaborate all this in a post of its own if I can create some background while minimizing speculation.

How Empires Deal with History

Do you know what this reminded me of? To quote:

The stated aim of Sunday's rally was to call on the British government to pay compensation to the descendants of ethnic Indians taken to Malaysia as indentured labourers in the 19th Century.

The same BBC reported the following day that another Commonwealth state voted unanimously to condemn Japan over the comfort women issue.