OPINION: The Politics of Memory-Bending
Anti-China protest in Tokyo. (Source: Flickr)
Imagine the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe, but with an exciting—or perhaps horrifying—twist: not only can benders control a natural element, but they can also manipulate memory. Several decades after the defeat of the imperialist Fire Nation, entire nations are propagating different versions of the war.
Take away the bending of natural elements, and replace Fire Nation with the Empire of Japan. Imagination is no longer necessary. Just look at the conflicting narratives circulating about World War II; governments are attempting to memory-bend as they oscillate between rallying nationalism and improving diplomatic relations.
Last month, Harvard Professor John Mark Ramseyer’s paper claiming that Korean comfort women were contracted sex workers in Japan’s prostitution system faced international backlash. Korea-based scholars like Yuji Hosaka accused Ramseyer’s paper of supporting the Japanese government’s goal to “change the notion of comfort women” as interpreted by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. On the other hand, Japan-based scholars framed the Korean backlash as Korean nationalism. For instance, in an op-ed for the Japan Times, Shaun O’Dwyer of Kyushu University called the suffering of Korean comfort women a “nationalist orthodoxy” that has been “shoehorned into a government-supported discourse of Korean national victimhood under Japanese rule.
To be clear, the sexual exploitation of Korean women actually happened. A report by the United Nations puts the number of Korean comfort women at approximately 200,000. The rapporteur consulted Dr. Cho Hung Ok, who confirmed that these women still suffer from weak physical and psychological conditions. The South Korean government under President Moon Jae-in has stood solidly behind these women. Moon even expressed his discontent toward a 2015 agreement with Japan on war reparations, which some Japanese would argue is evidence of how Korea’s dominant narrative on comfort women takes an anti-Japanese focus.
Scholars C. Sarah Soh and Pyong Gap Min claim that Korea’s dominant narrative obscures how the intersection of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy and class created the conditions for the suffering of comfort women. Neither denies the Imperial Japanese Army’s brutality or the comfort women’s horrifying experiences. Instead, their work demonstrates how the Korean government’s focus only on Japanese colonialism misses the multicausal nature of the comfort women system.
Meanwhile, in February 2021, just after Ramseyer’s scandal, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs revised the comfort women section of its History Issues Q&A page. It now explicitly states that the “forceful taking away” of comfort women could not be confirmed and that the term “sex slaves” is counterfactual. But Japan’s denialism is unreliable when the only evidence that scholars like Ramseyer have offered to prove that comfort women were voluntary prostitutes turns out to be gross misinterpretations of historical documents. Clearly, Japan’s memory-bending efforts are ineffective when applied to an international audience.
To be sure, Korea’s latching onto one of several historical truths is distinct from purposely distorting memory. What Ramseyer and conservative Japanese nationalists have done is erase the lived experiences of comfort women and change the facts of Imperial Japan’s crimes. Some kinds of memory-bending are worse than others.
But Japan and South Korea aren’t the only Asian states with World War II stories to rehash. China also has problems with Japan. Yet an examination of the Chinese Communist Party’s World War II historiography demonstrates that as the international environment changes, governments may sometimes strategically downplay long-held narratives for foreign policy gains.
In “China's ‘New Remembering’ of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, 1937-1945,” Parks M. Coble writes that the Maoist era de-emphasized Chinese losses during the war, declaring a death toll of 9.32 million Chinese. In 1972, China’s Premier of the State Council and Minister for Foreign Affairs met with Japan’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs to establish a Joint Communique. Japan only mentioned their atrocities briefly, prioritizing the normalization of relations. The Chinese agreed and even renounced their demand for war reparations.
But in 1995, Jiang Zemin increased the casualty estimate of World War II to 35 million, employing what Coble calls a “numbers game” that maximizes the number of Chinese victims. Jiang also began to use Japan’s World War II atrocities as leverage in Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations. In his 1998 visit to Tokyo, he suggested that Japan show a “necessary response and reaction” to people who “constantly distort history” and urged Japan to “squarely face [the real] history and learn a lesson from it.”
In 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army massacred about 17,00 captives in Nanking. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Xi Jinping expresses less desire to use World War II victimization as leverage in Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations. On the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in China in 2015, Xi was blunt about Japanese war atrocities: “[China’s] great triumph crushed the plot of the Japanese militarists to colonize and enslave China and put an end to China’s national humiliation of suffering successive defeats at the hands of foreign aggressors in modern times.” Unsurprisingly, Japan found Xi’s speech to be “extremely regrettable” for its anti-Japanese sentiments.
Moreover, as China emerged as a world power, Xi began to use China’s wartime sufferings as justification for the country’s rising role in the international order. In his first address to the United Nations in September 2015, he declared that China made a “national sacrifice” of more than 35 million deaths and that China contributed greatly to the Anti-Fascist victory in the European and Pacific theaters. He then called for an international order based on mutual understanding and cooperation, which he promised China would uphold. On the 75th anniversary of Japan’s surrender to China in September 2020, Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai echoed similar sentiments, this time including Russia’s role in the war victory as a symbol of the Sino-Russian alliance.
Despite Xi’s strong condemnation of Japan’s wartime atrocities, China toned it down when the Chinese public commended Japan’s coronavirus relief donations in February 2020. State-controlled media organization China Central Television suspended the broadcast of twenty episodes of Red Sorghum, a popular drama about a family of resistance fighters during the Second Sino-Japanese War that portrays Japan unfavorably. Though apparently small, this action demonstrates that political interests control how narratives are or are not used by governments, even trumping over concerns of national identity.
At the end of the day, Korean and Japanese scholars and journalists are not offering any new insights when they accuse the other side’s government of using historical narratives for political purposes. All governments do this, and most history is created in this way. Repeat after me: there is no war in Ba Sing Se.