Memo #394
By: Ji Young Kim – jiyoungkim333 [at] gmail.com and Jeyong Sohn – sohn [at] rikkyo.ac.jp
On December 28, 2015, the “comfort women” problem, one of the major stumbling blocks in Japan-South Korea relations, seemed to have been resolved through a governmental agreement between the two countries. Despite its characterization as a “final and irreversible resolution,” however, the agreement set the stage for yet another dispute between Japan and South Korea.
Just a year later, in December 2016, a new comfort women statue was erected in front of the Japanese consulate in Busan, Korea. The Japanese government and mass media strongly protested, arguing that it was in violation of the spirit of the agreement. The ensuing conflict caused the South Korean civil society to suspect the genuineness of the Japanese apology, and pushed the 2015 agreement to the brink of collapse.
What are the implications? For one, the reemergence of the discord over the issue demonstrates that intergovernmental agreements without domestic consensus are no more than a house of cards. Indeed, Japanese domestic discourse over the comfort women problem has been trending toward conservatism since the early 1990s, rather than towards the consolidation of an apologetic discourse that would ideally have served as the basis for any meaningful “resolution.”
What explains this trajectory? During the last quarter century, “comfort women” victims and NGO activists have sought a more permanent solution that went beyond the 1993 Kono Statement and Asian Women’s Fund (1994-2007), by utilizing international pressure at diverse levels. Ironically, their all-out effort sparked a revisionist backlash in Japan. The backlash began to consolidate in 2010, when civic groups launched an international campaign to erect statues commemorating the “comfort women” victims around the world. The conservative elites in Japan depicted such activity to be an attack on the honor and credibility of Japan.
In other words, the two countries reached the 2015 resolution while Japan was still locked in the phase of “tactical concession,” where governments accused of violating human rights norms try to adjust to international and domestic pressures by implementing some conciliatory policies. In this phase, normative claims are still highly contested and not yet institutionalized in domestic laws. The failure of the 2015 resolution highlights the need for long-term institutionalization of an apologetic domestic discourse as a critical ingredient for stable and lasting diplomatic agreements on this fraught issue.
About the Authors:
Ji Young Kim is an associate professor in the Department of Area Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo.
Jeyong Sohn is an associate professor in the College of Law and Politics, Rikkyo University.
Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, left, shakes hands with his South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-Se after a joint press briefing at the Foreign Ministry in Seoul on December 28, 2015. (Credit: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP via Getty Images via Bloomberg)
South Korean activists staging a sit-in protest around a statue in Busan of a teenage girl symbolizing former ‘comfort women’. (Credit: AFP-JIJI via The Japan Times)
Links
- Ji Young Kim and Jeyong Sohn, “Settlement without Consensus: International Pressure, Domestic Backlash, and the Comfort Women Issue in Japan,” Pacific Affairs 90, no. 1 (March 2017), forthcoming issue.
- C. Sarah Soh, “Japan’s National/Asian Women’s Fund for ‘Comfort Women,’” Pacific Affairs 76, no. 2 (2003): 210.
- Ji Young Kim, “Rethinking the Role of Identity Factors: the History Problem and the Japan-South Korea Security Relationship in the Post-Cold War Period,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 15, no. 3 (2015): 447-503.
- Ji Young Kim, “Escaping the Vicious Cycle: Symbolic Politics and History Dispute Between South Korea and Japan,” Asian Perspective 38, no. 1 (2014): 31-60.
- United Nations Commission on Human Rights, E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its Causes and Consequences: Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan on the Issue of Military Sexual Slavery in Wartime,” 4 January 1996.
- “Survey: 72% of Japanese support retaliation over Busan comfort woman statue”, Hankyŏreh, 31 January 2017.
- H.Res. 121, 110th Congress, 30 July 2007.
Related Memos:
See our other memos on South Korea and Japan.
This has its root in the aftermath of the war. While China and other countries had big roles in the defeat of Japan, upon capitulation, it was clearly the USA that held all the cards in dictating the terms of the new order. The US had the opportunity to effect any reasonable changes, make any reasonable demands. But in that new post-war sutuation, the new, cold war was breaking out. Concerned to avert any drift towards Soviet influence, the MacArthur viceroyalty was prepared to concede apparently unimportant things relating to the past in order to secure the immediate future and entrenchment in the western alliance. So, along with the emperor and a lot of powerful wartime figures and structures, a substantially unmodified view of the war and its causes was allowed to remain in place. Curiously, when Japan behaves in the way that it now is in realation to these victims, it is reminiscent of the CCP. I was in China at the time of commemorations of the “peaceful liberation of Tibet,” and saw spineless western business people and polititicians obediently describing the event in officially approved terms. Similarly, I recall the head of a western toy company with some Chinese manufacturing operations making a grovelling mea culpa about how his company had been entirely at fault. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I recall it involved some kind of chemical contamination, and it was obvious to everyone that the culpability there was at the level of local operations. I believe that CEO didn’t really think he was harming his company’s reputation, as absolutely everyone except the Chinese authorities would realize it was a bullshit apology to appease those authorities. Again, looking at Chinese government statements about Falun Dafa or at China, an officially aetheist state, insisting on its right to be involved in choosing religious successors and appointees, such as Tibetan Budhist leaders or Christian bishops, it seems the authorities don’t comprehend how how bizarre that is. When Japanese or Chinese governments behave in this manner, posturing and flouncing, they possible imagine they are making a kind of bella figura on the international stage. To us non-Confucians, they only create an impression of Spike Milligan performing Beijing opera.
correction: “possible imagine” > possibly imagine.
“Apologetic discourse” over time creates a populist backlash. I think we need to look deeper than this for solutions.