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Post by Admin on Oct 17, 2019 19:39:26 GMT
A sharp increase in the popularity of Japan-related books in recent months is a good example. Among the top books is one titled Anti-Japan Tribalism. The book, which consists of three main chapters, criticizes the conventional perception and knowledge of South Korean society regarding the Japanese colonial era. It was a best seller at several major bookstores in the country in July and August. At Bandi & Lunis, one of the largest booksellers in South Korea, the book topped the list of best-selling books for seven weeks at 13 branches across the country in the past two months. What’s in the book? In the first part, it rebuts claims that Japan exploited South Korea’s rice, land, and workforce during the colonial era. In the second portion, the book explains why anti-Japanese sentiment spread in South Korea while analyzing in the third sections the comfort women issue which has been a center of the dispute between two countries for a long time. Anti-Japan Tribalism is not alone. Books about Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japanese history, economy, politics and culture all saw increasing demand in recent months. A series of videos by South Korean historian Hwang Hyun-pil, which analyze and rebut Anti-Japan Tribalism, attracted more than 500,000 views in about 10 days. This new trend hints at the desire of South Koreans to understand the current tensions with Japan within in a wider context. Tensions between the two are not novel, but have become more severe over the past few months as the two countries engage in a blame game.
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Post by Admin on Oct 18, 2019 8:12:48 GMT
Less well-known is how South Korean nationalism has co-opted the comfort women issue. What Korean American scholar Sarah Soh has described as a post-Cold War, transnational “feminist humanitarian perspective” on comfort women has been shoehorned into a government-supported discourse of Korean national victimhood under Japanese rule. The violation and suffering of Korean comfort women is one of its most potent symbols. This nationalist orthodoxy is enforced more severely through criminal defamation laws than any revisionist nationalism in Japan. Historian Park Yu-ha was recently prosecuted and fined and another professor jailed for dissenting from it. Now that disputes over South Korea’s colonial history are once again driving a legal and diplomatic rift between Japan and South Korea, the underlying motivations for the Korean nationalist appropriation of the comfort women story merit closer scrutiny. Recent research by political scientists Joseph Yi, Joe Phillips and Wondong Lee has explained the domestic context for this nationalism. It emerged from a decadeslong culture war between South Korea’s right- and left-wing factions, waged over the contentious legacies of Japanese colonial rule, civil war and autocratic postwar industrialization. Under South Korea’s postwar autocracies, right-wing nationalism focused more on North Korea than on Japan as South Korea’s main enemy. Progressive South Korean activists and political leaders were denounced as North Korean allies and persecuted. Since the democratization of South Korea, progressives have successfully pushed back against rightists’ more propagandist representations of North Korea, and against their anti-communist slurs. Yet according to Yi and his co-researchers, South Korean progressive activists, intellectuals and political parties evolved their own populist, anti-right wing nationalism. Central to it is a “Manichaean” representation of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea as equal in its oppressions and cruelty to Nazis wartime rule over Europe. The populist aspect to this nationalism is its denunciation of key historical figures in the Korean right as elite, pro-Japanese collaborators during the colonial era, enriching themselves and their families through craven clientelism, enthusiastically joining the Imperial Japanese Army, and trafficking working-class Koreans into slavery under the Japanese. There is some truth in this populism. South Korea’s postwar dictator and modernizer Park Chung-hee had served as an officer in Japan’s wartime army. Many colonial era Koreans who became administrators, entrepreneurs, military officers and scholars under Japanese patronage went on to comprise South Korea’s commercial, academic and political elites during its postwar industrialization. Korean labor brokers, pimps, businessmen, teachers, officials and police helped recruit poorer Koreans into sexual and industrial servitude for the Japanese empire.
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Post by Admin on Oct 18, 2019 18:18:03 GMT
This anti-Japanese nationalism, now spread through school history textbooks as well as the mass media, is currently upheld by President Moon Jae-in’s Democratic Party government. But it has proven electorally attractive enough for conservative political parties and governments to exploit as well, though with far less enthusiasm for denouncing the collaboration of former colonial elites. Its narrative of national victimhood under Japanese colonial domination papers over Japan’s role in Korean modernization, and nowadays it increasingly elides the colonial class system that allowed some Koreans to prosper more than others under Japanese rule.
Sarah Soh argues that the nationalist and even human rights perspectives have also flattened out the comfort women’s experiences into a uniform sexual slavery narrative, overlooking the complexity of an evolving empire-wide system incorporating both “licensed prostitution and indentured sexual labor … and battlefield abduction into sexual slavery.”
Japanese historian Akane Onozawa has pinpointed the origins of the comfort women system in prewar, state-licensed debt-bondage prostitution in Japan, which expanded in the 1920s to colonial Korea before being adapted to service the sexual demands of Japan’s armed forces in China, amid concerns about soldiers raping local women.
This system employed mostly poor, working class Japanese and Korean women sold to brokers by their parents, or often deceitfully recruited with promises of jobs in factories or in hospitals. These women were all vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, but in keeping with the empire’s ethnic hierarchy, Japanese comfort women generally received better pay and treatment.
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Post by Admin on Oct 19, 2019 3:57:29 GMT
Surviving Japanese military records analyzed by Chinese scholar Su Zhiliang demonstrate that expanded wartime operations and rising military demand for comfort women in China in 1938 generated a recruitment crisis in the licensed comfort women system. Increasing resort was made to using Chinese women for growing comfort women facilities, now managed under closer state and military supervision, or set up informally beyond official supervision. This pattern of using local women was replicated in other wartime occupied territories, including the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor Leste. Though some were forcibly recruited with the assistance of local collaborators, others were kidnapped or captured in counter-insurgency operations, and — unlike Japanese or Korean comfort women — were far more likely to be repeatedly raped, tortured or murdered. However, as Japan’s military capabilities and economy collapsed in 1944-1945, Japanese and Korean comfort women trapped in war zones with other civilians also faced increased risks of starvation, disease and violent death. The international research summarized above, based on careful analysis of incomplete documentary evidence and the testimony of aged survivors and witnesses, undermines the dogmatic certitudes of Japanese and Korean nationalists — and of some comfort women supporters. There are many lessons to draw from it. Feminists should be wary of a Korean nationalism that draws from a deep well of masculine humiliation over Japanese abuses of Korean women’s innocence, and reassert more transnational perspectives on the comfort women issue. Yet South Koreans also should ask themselves whether an intolerant, divisive, anti-Japanese nationalism is compatible with their own hard-won liberal democracy. Though its prospects seem unlikely, a liberal nationalism emphasizing South Korea’s rich cultural history, successful modernization and democratic values would be the better alternative; and if anti-Japanese animus can be defused and defamation law reformed, there would be greater freedom for scholars and activists to discuss the comfort women problem. Such a nationalism would also be more conducive to building better relations with Japan, and to working out more collaborative approaches to investigating historical injustices.
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Post by Admin on Feb 22, 2020 21:37:09 GMT
How do you view the so-called “history wars” between Japan and South Korea? Professor Tsutomu Nishioka argues that the Japanese and South Koreans do not need to share the same view on history. Rather, the important thing is for the two countries to agree to disagree — that it is okay to have differing views on history. I agree with this. Professor Lee Young-hoon’s new book, Anti-Japan Tribalism (Bungeishunju, 2019, in Japanese) sheds light on the facts regarding war crimes during the Japanese colonial period. We need to re-examine and discern facts from myths. It is important to note that the leftists in both Japan and South Korea have conspired together to distort facts and create the anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea that seriously harms the relationship between the two countries. A history grounded in solid facts provides a good basis for building ties. In 1950, one of the fundamental U.S. Cold War policy documents stated that their enemy held a “new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own” and was determined to impose its “absolute authority over the rest of the world.” The stakes in the struggle were existential: “The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” The proponents of totalitarianism say that there is no such thing as human dignity, individual sovereignty, freedom to choose, freedom to take responsibility. They say that we are no different from machines. Let us prove otherwise. This fight is not one that South Korea alone, Japan alone, or America alone can fight and win. Let us restore sovereignty to where it belongs — to the person. Does President Moon benefit from or use anti-Japanism for political advantage? Moon Jae In has been using Japan as South Korea’s external enemy in order to bury his policy failures and unite the people. And South Korean leftists have been using the concept of victimhood against Japan for their own political gains. More importantly, North Korea and China’s totalitarian forces are behind the incitement of anti-Japanese sentiment. Totalitarian forces of China, North Korea, and South Korea are conspiring to separate South Korea from free nations of the world and to include it among totalitarian nations. And they find anti-Japanese sentiment the most effective means to accomplish this.
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