APP'S BOOKS OF THE WEEK of June 28, 2026

 📚Books of the Week📖

Red Arrow Across the Pacific: 

The Thirty-Second Infantry Division during World War II

By Mark D. Van Ells, Professor of History, Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York

PURCHASE BOOK 11/12/2024

The story of the renowned Thirty-Second "Red Arrow" Infantry Division: qNational Guard unit—which originated in Wisconsin and Michigan but soon evolved to include soldiers from California to New England—became one of the first US military units deployed overseas in World War II, eventually logging more combat hours than any other US Army division. Offers a cultural history of the Red Arrow's wartime experience, from its mobilization in 1940, to its deployment across New Guinea, Australia, and the Philippines, to its postwar occupation of Japan. Drawing from letters, memoirs, and interviews, Van Ells lets the soldiers speak for themselves, describing in their own words the terror of combat, their impressions of foreign lands, the struggle to maintain their own humanity, and the many ways the war profoundly changed them.

1942: Crux of War

By Jonathan Parshall, Lecturer, 

US Naval War College

PURCHASE BOOK 6/18/2026

By the end of 1942 there had been a sea-change in the conduct of WWII. Within just one 40-day timespan, the British had triumphed over Rommel at Alamein; British and American forces landed in North Africa to confront the Axis position there; the Americans won two naval battles at Guadalcanal, sealing the fate of that campaign and with it Japanese expansionism; the Red Army launched a massive counter-offensive at Stalingrad that would condemn six Axis armies-and hundreds of thousands of German, Italian, Romanian and Hungarian soldiers-to eventual destruction. The Allies had somehow gained the upper hand, forcing the Axis powers into a defensive crouch from which they would not rebound. The war, in short, had turned.

Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail

By Mark Leonard, Co-founder and Director,

European Council on Foreign Relations

PURCHASE BOOK 6/23/2026

Trump is blowing up political order. Xi Jinping is scrambling the economy. And Putin is redrawing the map of Europe. At a time when every crisis bleeds into the next – from pandemics and wars to climate shocks and AI revolutions – the old rules of global order are collapsing. Leonard reveals how geopolitics is being rewritten in an age of 'Un-Order', where no one agrees on the rules, and even the concept of order itself is up for debate. Drawing on years of conversations with leaders and thinkers from Beijing to Washington, Leonard argues that we are witnessing a new divide in international politics.

*Books purchased through the links here support Asia Policy Point*

Books selected on the APP website are not a sign of endorsement. 

They are simply new and interesting.

Japan's Continued War

Behind Japan's political battles, a war over history By Daniel Sneider, lecturer in East Asian Studies in Stanford University, the former co-director of the Divided Memories and Reconciliation project at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, and an APP member. First appeared on Observing Japan, August 5, 2025 Constitutional Democratic Party leader Noda Yoshihiko questions Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru in a 4 August meeting of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives. During their exchange, Noda asked about Ishiba’s plans to mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II; Ishiba said he intended to issue a personal statement, though not a formal cabinet statement. Source: CDP The political battles now raging in Japan in the aftermath of the July Upper House election are being waged across many fronts – tax policy, trade, corruption, and at base, a struggle for power. Largely hidden from sight is another, deeper and more long-standing conflict – the war over Japan’s wartime history and its national identity. This dimension of the political battles emerged into the open this past week when the embattled Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru seemed to back away from his plan to issue a potentially landmark statement to mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war on August 15. The Japanese media reported last week that Ishiba had changed his mind when faced with fierce resistance from the rightwing of the Liberal Democratic Party, mostly but not entirely followers of the late Prime Minister Abe Shinzō. For these conservatives, the last words on the meaning of the war were uttered by Abe in his seventieth anniversary statement. Fearing what Ishiba might say, they mounted a growing campaign to demand he back off from his plans. “I believe it is unnecessary and will cause unnecessary confusion,” argued Nishimura Yasutoshi, a former Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry and a former senior member of the Abe faction in the party. They are leading the charge to force Ishiba to step down after the election results led to the loss of the majority in the Upper House for the ruling LDP-Kōmeitō coalition. As the Asahi Shimbun put it: Having been dealt a devastating blow in the Upper House election July 20 and facing calls from within his Liberal Democratic Party to resign, Ishiba has chosen not to rankle conservative elements in the party that would take umbrage at a fresh interpretation of Japan’s role in the war. But in answer to a question from an opposition leader in the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives on Monday, August 4, Ishiba left open the possibility he may still issue some kind of eightieth anniversary statement as a personal message rather than a formal cabinet approved document which carries more weight. "We must not let history fade away,” Ishiba replied. “We need to make active and proactive efforts to prevent this from fading away. Regardless of the formality, it is necessary to issue a statement to ensure that war never happens again." The anniversary statement over time The wars over anniversary statements are not new – they are in fact one of the most significant battlegrounds in the fight over Japan’s past. The baseline for Japan’s official view of the war remains the statement issued in 1995 by Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, a Socialist who had joined an unusual coalition government with the LDP. For the first time, a Japanese leader not only marked the end of the war but apologized directly for Japan’s aggression and colonization in Asia. He expressed “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology” for “tremendous damage and suffering to the peoples of many countries, particularly those of Asian nations” that Japan caused “through its colonial rule and aggression.” From the start this was a target of attack from those in the LDP who embraced revisionist views of the war, regarding it as a justified act of self-defense, of liberation of Asia from Western colonial rule, who focused on Japan’s victimization and condemned apologies as acts of “masochism.” Despite this opposition, which among other things blocked a Diet resolution echoing Murayama’s statement, his clear view remained as the official view. In 2005, when then Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō issued his sixtieth anniversary statement, he very notably echoed Murayama’s language. When it was Abe’s turn in 2015, he issued a statement that carefully stepped around this challenge to rewrite the Murayama precedent. Under clear pressure from the Obama administration and from within Japan, Abe’s own statement does echo key words – “aggression” and “colonial rule” – while also trying to rewrite the narrative about the war. As I wrote at the time, based on my own expertise on the formation of historical memory about the war, in Nippon.com: Abe’s version of events can be read as a justification for Japan’s own imperialism (which he neglects to mention began in the late 1800s with the seizure of Taiwan) and a denial of historical responsibility. But he goes on to acknowledge Japan’s own decisions that led to war (my italics): ‘With the Manchurian Incident, followed by the withdrawal from the League of Nations, Japan gradually transformed itself into a challenger to the new international order that the international community sought to establish after tremendous sacrifices. Japan took the wrong course and advanced along the road to war.’ This version of history will not satisfy many people, including many historians, but it is a step away from the view held by Japanese revisionists, including Abe himself, that Japan waged a war of self-defense and not of aggression, or even more provocatively, that it was engaged in the noble cause of liberating Asia from colonial rule. Since that time, the backers of the revisionist right in Japanese politics have been eager to both protect the Abe legacy but also to correct even the concessions he made at the time. The most ardent advocates of this view of the past include the leader and members of the newly emergent darlings of the right in Japan – Sanseitō, a new party that made a significant showing in the recent election, now holding fifteen seats in the Upper House. Sanseitō* is now well known as a Japanese echo of Trumpian rhetoric – from its slogan of “Japanese People First” to its anti-immigrant rhetoric. But what is less well understood is its passionate advocacy for an ultra-nationalist view of Japanese history, articulated by its leader Kamiya Sōhei and distributed for many years now on his YouTube Channel, CGS or Channel Grand Strategy. The channel features so-called “history lessons” taught by prominent rightwing historians. “A fundamental reason for Sanseitō's rise, I believe, is rooted in the historical perspective shared by its candidates,” wrote historian Fujioka Nobukatsu in the rightwing daily Sankei Shimbun. “Building on the momentum of these study sessions, Sanseitō, established in 2020, has uniquely emphasized the importance of taking pride in Japanese history. It's an approach no other political party has adopted.” Fujioka is a historian and the vice president of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Tsukurukai), the driving force for decades behind revision of Japanese middle and high school textbooks and opposition to what it views as a distorted view of Japan’s past. Sanseitō members have been active in promoting use of their alternative textbooks in Japanese schools. What would Ishiba say? If Ishiba were to deliver his own judgement on Japan’s wartime history in an anniversary statement, what would he say? There are some clear clues to this, clear enough to have fueled the fears of the revisionist rightwing in Japan. Ishiba has made numerous remarks that indicate he shares Murayama’s view of Japan’s aggressive and colonial past and saw the eightieth anniversary as a key moment to declare Japan’s intention not to repeat that past, despite his reputation as a defense hawk. Ishiba was among the most forthright of Japanese politicians in advocating close ties to South Korea based on a recognition of the illegality of Japan’s 1910 annexation of Korea. “There’s no need to flatter Korea or to lay out the logic of the past, but we should admit that what was a mistake was a mistake,” he said in a December 2023 interview touting his bid for leadership. “We must redouble our emphasis on the fact that it is vital for this region that Japan and South Korea understand one another and cooperate.” In unscripted remarks to the Global Dialogue organized by the Japan Institute for International Affairs, where this author was present, Ishiba spoke frankly about his desire to mark the eightieth anniversary as a moment for self-reflection about the disaster of the decision to go to war. “It is time for us to revisit and review the war experience,” he said. He called for Japan to understand “how to position itself in the world to create a world with more peace.” The idea that the mistakes that led to Japan’s war and its total defeat should not be repeated is a persistent obsession of Ishiba. As he told the Diet this week: What should we do to ensure that war never breaks out again? It is not simply a matter of expressing our thoughts, but rather of what went wrong. I have strong feelings about what our country will convey to the world this year. Tanzan Ishibashi Perhaps the most intriguing, and least known, clue as to what an unfettered Ishiba would say is his membership, since its beginning in 2023, in a study group dedicated to the life and work of former Prime Minister Ishibashi Tanzan. Ishibashi, also a former editor of the august Japanese weekly Tōyō Keizai, was a long time opponent going back to the prewar era of Japanese militarism and aggressive nationalism. In his brief tenure as PM in the 1950s, he sought to defy the United States and establish diplomatic relations with Communist China. According to Richard Dyck, a longtime resident of Japan and a businessman with a passion for Ishibashi and his work, Ishiba has been a regular attendent at these study sessions. Among the members are also two prominent members of his cabinet and close friends – Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi and Defense Minister Nakatani Gen. At the most recent meeting of the group, according to Dyck, Foreign Minister Iwaya gave introductory remarks along the lines of “the message we get from Ishibashi is that relations in Asia need to transcend nationalism, ideology and history.” From all this we can gain a glimpse into the largely hidden – at least to Western eyes – war over history that still is being fought in Japan and that lies behind, in part, the fate of Ishiba and his government. ### *According to Sanseito Senator Gen Yamanaka's [山中泉] X feed, he and Sanseito founder and leader Sohei Kamiya [神谷 宗幣] will be in Washington, DC in mid-August. Their visit will be arranged by their Washington lobbyist Matthew Martin Braynard who is an all-in MAGA loyalist and J6er. Love to hear from anyone who they visit or who knows how to get ahold of Mr. Braynard. [APC Editor]

Asia History Events February 2023

KENNAN: A LIFE BETWEEN WORLDS. 2/6, 4:00-5:30pm (EST), ZOOM. Sponsor: Washington History Seminar, Wilson Center. Speaker: author, Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut; Beverly Gage, Yale University; Barbara Keys, Durham University. 

 PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3x0u18J 

PERFORMATIVE RECOLLECTION AND PARALLAX MEMORY: PERPETRATOR AND VICTIM WAR MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE VIDEO ART DESCRIPTION. 2/8, 5:00-7:00pm (GMT), HYBRID. Sponsor: SOAS Japan Research Centre. Speaker: Ayelet Zohar, Tel Aviv University. 

PRISONERS OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC WAR: HISTORY, MEMORY, AND FORGETTING. 2/7, JAPAN 4:00-7:30pm (JST), 2/8, 9:00am-5:00pm (JST); US EAST COAST 2/7, 2:00-5:30am (EST), 2/7 7:00-10:30pm (EST).  ZOOM. Sponsor: Kyoto University and JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). This symposium brings together scholars researching the histories, memorialization and forgetting of prisoners and prison camps of the Asia Pacific War. Speakers include: Robert Cribb, Australian National University; Sarah Kovner, Columbia University; Anoma Pieris, Melbourne University; Taeko Sasamoto, POW Research Network, Japan. Organizer: Daniel Milne, Kyoto University.  [THIS CONFERENCE WILL NOT BE RECORDED]

THE 30 ANNIVERSARY OF WASHINGTON COALITION FOR COMFORT WOMEN ISSUES: CELEBRATING THE LEGACY OF COMFORT WOMEN. 2/7, 11:00am–1:00pm (EST). IN PERSON ONLY, 2168 Rayburn House Office Building (The Gold the Room). Speakers: Margaret Stetz, Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware; Yangmo Ku, Associate Director of the

Peace and War Center at Norwich University; Bonnie Oh, Georgetown University Emeritus; Dennis Halpin, former staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Screening of a clip from the documentary: Cry Out: The 30 Years of Comfort Women Redress Movement, Written and Directed by Professor Jungsil Lee, George Washington University. 

THE GHOST AT THE FEAST: AMERICA AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD ORDER, 1900-1941. 2/8, Noon (EST), ONLINE. Sponsor: Alexander Hamilton Society. Speaker: Author Robert Kagan, Stephen & Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings Institution. 
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3WN9jUB

DISCUSSION WITH FAMILIES OF FORMER US POWS HELD BY IMPERIAL JAPAN. 

2/14, 5:00-6:00pm (JST), 3:00-4:00am (EST), 12:00-1:00am (PST). IN PERSON ONLY. Sponsor: Temple University Japan. SPEAKERS AND POW PROFILES. [THIS CONFERENCE MIGHT NOT BE RECORDED]

MILITARY HISTORY FOR THE MODERN STRATEGIST: AMERICA’S MAJOR WARS SINCE 1861. 2/15, 6:30-7:30pm (EST), IN-PERSON AND ONLINE. Sponsor: New-York Historical Society. Speakers: Author Michael E. O’Hanlon, Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at Brookings; Moderator: General David H. Petraeus (U.S. Army, Ret.), Commander of coalition forces during the Surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan and Former Director of the CIA. 
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3XyOjRX

THE GENERAL VS. THE PRESIDENT: MACARTHUR AND TRUMAN AT THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR. 2/16, Noon (EST), LIVE WEBCAST. Sponsor: Korea Society. Speaker: author, Dr. Henry W. Brands, Professor and Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. 
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3HGDSXr

IMPERIAL GATEWAY: COLONIAL TAIWAN AND JAPAN’S EXPANSION IN SOUTH CHINA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA, 1895-1945. 2/24, 4:30PM (EST), IN PERSON ONLY. Sponsor: Sigur Center, GW. Speaker: author, Seiji Shirane, Assistant Professor of Japanese History, City College of New York. 
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/400aHFW

Monday Asia Event March 28, 2022

2022 GLOBAL ENERGY FORUM. 3/28-29 (EDT), WEBCAST. Sponsors: United Arab Emirates Ministry of Energy & Infrastructure; Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week; Atlantic Council. 

CHINA-RUSSIA RELATIONS: PEERS, ALLIES, COMPETITORS? 3/28, 9:00-10:30am (EDT), WEBINAR. Sponsor; Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues, GU. Speakers: Joseph Torigian, Assistant Professor, School of International Service, American University; Elizabeth Wishnick, Senior Research Scientist, China and Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Division, CNA; Yu Bin, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Wittenberg University; Moderator: Evan Medeiros, Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies, School of Foreign Service, GU.

CHINA’S ROLE IN THE SMUGGLING OF SYNTHETIC DRUGS AND PRECURSORS. 3/28, 10:00-11:30am (EDT), ONLINE-ONLY. Sponsor: Brookings. Speakers: Vanda Felbab-Brown, Director, Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors, Co-Director, Africa Security Initiative, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology; Ryan Hass, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for East Asia Policy Studies, John L. Thornton China Center, Michael H. Armacost Chair, Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair, Taiwan Studies, Nonresident Fellow, Paul Tsai China Center, Yale Law School; Rupert Stone, Independent Journalist, Analyst; Moderator: Claire Galofaro, National Writer, Associated Press. 

U.S. NAVCENT COMMANDER VICE ADMIRAL BRAD COOPER. 3/28, 10:00-11:00am (EDT), ZOOM WEBINAR. Sponsor: Middle East Institute (MEI). Speakers: Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces in U.S. Central Command (NAVCENT), U.S. Fifth Fleet, Combined Maritime Forces; Moderator: Bilal Y. Saab, Senior Fellow, Director, Defense and Security Program, MEI. 

WAHHABISM AND THE WORLD. 3/28, 12:30-1:30pm (EDT), WEBINAR. Sponsor: Berkley Center, GU. Speakers: Peter Mandaville, Editor, Senior Research Fellow, Berkley Center, GU; Alexander Thurston, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Cincinnati; Moderator: Annelle Sheline, Research Fellow, Middle East Program, Quincy Institute. 

REEXAMINING GLOBAL HEALTH: GLOBAL COMMONS, FINANCING PRIORITIES, AND THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH. 3/28, 11:00am-Noon (EDT), ONLINE. Sponsor: Center for Global Development. Speakers: Olusoji Adeyi, Former Director, Global Practice, Health, Nutrition & Population, World Bank; Dean Jamison, Emeritus Professor, University of California, San Francisco; Agnès Soucat, Head of Health and Social Protection, Agence Française de Développement; Prashant Yadav, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development; Moderator: Amanda Glassman, Executive Vice President and Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development. 

FREEDOM OVER TYRANNY: A CONVERSATION WITH SENATOR JONI ERNST. 3/28, Noon-12:30pm (EDT), ONLINE. Sponsor: Hudson. Speakers: Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA); Bryan Clark, Senior Fellow, Director, Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, Hudson. 

THE EU, U.S. AND NATO: PARTNERS FOR GLOBAL SECURITY. 3/28, 1:00-2:00pm (EDT), LIVESTREAM. Sponsors: Global Europe Program, Kennan Institute, Wilson Center. Speakers: Stefano Sannino, Secretary General, European External Action Service; Duncan Wood, Vice President for Strategy & New Initiatives, Senior Advisor, Mexico Institute, Interim Director, Global Europe Program; Moderator: Robin S. Quinville, Former State Department Fellow, Sol M. Linowitz Visiting Professor of International Affairs, Hamilton College, New York, Senior Diplomat, formerly Chargé d’Affaires, U.S. Embassy in Berlin. 

ON THE UPCOMING NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY FROM MICHAEL R. POMPEO AND NADIA SCHADLOW. 3/28, 2:00-2:20pm (EDT), ONLINE. Sponsor: Hudson. Speakers: Michael R. Pompeo, Former U.S. Secretary of State, Distinguished Fellow, Hudson Institute, ; Nadia Schadlow, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy. 

ORGANIZATIONS AND NATION-STATE CYBER THREATS IN THE CROSSHAIRS. 3/28, 3:00-4:00pm (EDT), LIVESTREAM. Sponsor: CSIS. Speakers: Bryan Palma, Chief Executive Officer, Trellix; Brandon Wales, Executive Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; John Fokker, Head of Cyber Investigations, Trellix; Matthew Noyes, Director, Cyber Policy and Strategy, U.S. Secret Service; Moderators: James A. Lewis, Senior Vice President and Director, Strategic Technologies Program, CSIS; Eugenia Lostri, Associate Fellow, Strategic Technologies Program, CSIS. 

IN A GLOBAL ERA: WHY MEMORY DEBATES HAVE EXPLODED NOW. 3/28, 3:45-5:45pm (EDT), ZOOM. Sponsor: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Speakers: author, Sebastian Conrad, Global History University Professor, Freie Universität Berlin, Memory in a Global Era: Why Memory Debates Have Exploded Now; Nate George, Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program, Harvard University, Kabl Wilkerson, PhD Candidate, Harvard University. 

IN CONVERSATION WITH SENATOR THE HON PENNY WONG. 3/28, 4:00-5:00pm (EDT), LIVESTREAM. Sponsor: CSIS. Speaker: Senator the Hon Penny Wong, Leader of the Opposition, Senate and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australia; Moderator: Charles Edel, Australia Chair, Senior Adviser, CSIS. 

MICRO-INSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF CAPITALISM: SECTORAL PATHWAYS TO GLOBALIZATION IN CHINA, INDIA, AND RUSSIA. 3/28, 4:30-6:00pm (EDT), WEBINAR. Sponsor: Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program. Speaker: Roselyn Hsueh, Associate Professor of Political Science, Temple University. 

Memorialising and Remembering

Truth-Telling, Victimhood, And Historical Amnesia

Australian Outlook, Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), January 30 2020

By Caitlin O'Brien, Bachelor of Asian Studies/ Bachelor of Laws student at the Australian National University.

Why do some nations seem to be concerned with conflicts which have since ended? What is historical amnesia? Why is victimhood dangerous to national healing? A brief comparison of China, Finland and the Baltic States illustrates the necessary components for the reconciliation of historical injustice.

With extensive research completed on a nation’s conflict, the area of memory and remembering the conflict in contemporary society is a fascinating and intensely complex field. Broadly, nations would rather emphasise memories which evoke pride rather than those which admit guilt and express shame. Engrained within the difficulty of societies memorialising and remembering their history are the concepts of victimhood, reconciliation and truth. These three ideas are essential to the formula a nation must apply in order to successfully heal and progress from the trauma of historical injustice. This healing is vital if a nation’s identity is to be defined without the formative influence of historical injustice. “There cannot be reconciliation without truth” and essential to truth is accurate identification of perpetrators and victims. So often a victor’s history is told and remembered as fact, but, for societal fissures arising from warring parties to be amended, both sides’ history must be told and remembered.

Perpetuating individuals’ identification with victimhood obstructs reconciliation by delegating responsibility for the conflict and dismissing criticism from other groups. The major impediment to truth-telling and the following reconciliation, victimhood, pertains to the “white-washing” of the recollection of historical injustice which prevents an accurate collective memory being formed. Meaningful and long-term reconciliation requires “a changed understanding of the self and other that transcends the narrow roles of victim and perpetrator.”

“Victimhood” refers specifically to collective victimhood, which is “people’s sense of group-based victimisation by virtue of their identification with (that group), even without having been personally harmed.” “Reminding people of historical… victimisation (reduces) their… collective guilt for their group’s harmful actions.” An example of this is China where the perceived victimisation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution felt by all Chinese absolves the perpetrators from taking responsibility for the injustice they committed at the time. By delegating the perpetrating of the injustice to that of the “regime,” individuals are removed from blame and guilt. China’s acknowledgement of wrongdoing has not surpassed the blame of Mao and his Gang of Four. Until the issue of “victimhood,” where everyone suffered but no-one executed the violence of the Cultural Revolution, reconciliation remains elusive.

The complexity of this case stems from the fact that those who experienced the Revolution all see themselves as victims, not as the perpetrators. Arising from the unpredictable political climate at the time, where one day a person could be a victimiser and the next a victim, and vice versa, reconciliation has been unable to progress due to the ambiguity of who is at fault. Qui criticises this saying that “one can be a victim of the propaganda at the time as well as having the courage to admit that they participated in the cultural revolution as well.” An accurate collective history is not achieved as truth has not been discovered. Thus, the trauma of the Cultural Revolution remains an aspect of national identity as the injustice has not been relegated to the realm of memory.

Finland offers a contrary example where the Civil War of 1918 was unable to be reconciled until the official version of history admitted the crimes and violence of the victors, the White army which resulted in the losers, the Reds, being unable to identify with the public recollection of the war. Only in the nineties, following rapid modernisation in Finland which addressed class inequality, which was a precursor to the civil war, when the public began to discuss the war did individual memories contribute to the collective one, facilitating the progression of reconciliation. This changed the public narrative from the one-sided victorious White’s recollection, to one more representative of the experience of the Whites and Reds.

Public commemoration and memorialisation of both the Red and White experience of the war is central to reconciliation. In the decades following the War, only the Whites could memorialise and grieve their dead in a public setting. The repression felt by the Reds and their descendants prevented a peaceful, harmonious society from developing as deep-seated dissatisfaction felt by the Reds inhibited reconciliation. Through the collection of individual testimonies, encouraged by the new generation’s interest in the war, a revised collective memory emerged that incorporated the victorious narrative, and the darker, violent experience of the Reds and Whites. In 2008, 90 years after the civil war, the conflict was mediated through various forms of memory work and finally relegated the associated emotions surrounding to their original historical context.

Unlike Finland, the Baltic States are yet to reconcile with their historical injustice. The devastating annexation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union in 1939-40 has residual effects on contemporary society. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are unable to come to terms with the tens of thousands of deaths of their citizens at the hands of the Soviets primarily because of the historical amnesia surrounding it. Russia refuses to acknowledge that its occupation and annexation on the Baltic States was unlawful and classified as ‘foreign occupation’; Russia insists that it was a peaceful cooperation. Russian history books still educate people of this, which remains a perpetual thorn in the side of the Baltic States. Moscow’s historical amnesia of the Baltic States’ and its own role in occupation and annexation prevents the formation of a collective memory, obstructing the required unified collective memory. External historical amnesia coupled with particularly Estonia’s own national identity of victimhood surrounding the conflict known in Russia as the “Myth of 1939-40” impedes reconciliation.

“Civil wars in particular give rise to complex memory politics, as they often carve deep wounds into a society’s social memory”. The aforementioned cases were civil wars in the 20th century whose effects are being felt even now.

Weekend of Comfort Women Herstory

by Christian Poirot 

This weekend is one for the history of the Comfort Women. There are a number of opportunities, especially in Washington, DC. to discuss and consider the history of the Comfort Women and its unique form of sexual violence in conflict. Most of the events below employ the arts to communicate the universal emotions of the trauma and tragedy.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9

[DC] GEORGETOWN GENDER+JUSTICE INITIATIVE’S THIRD ANNUAL FACULTY RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM. 11/9, 1:00-6:30pm, Washington, DC. Sponsor: Georgetown Gender+Justice Initiative. Speakers include: Deborah Epstein, Professor of Law, GTU Law; Lisa Singh, Professor, Department of Computer Science, GTU; Jamillah Williams, Associate Professor of Law, GTU Law; Naomy Mezey, Professor of Law, GTU Law; Lane Windham, Fellow, Kalmanovitz Initiative; Kris Tiscione, Professor of Law, GTU Law.

[DC] US DEBUT SCREENING OF NEW DOCUMENTARY ON COMFORT WOMEN CONTROVERSY: SHUSENJO. 11/9, 4:00-6:30pm, Washington, DC. Sponsor: History Department, Georgetown University. Speaker: Miki Dezani, filmmaker who says he interviewed some of the most prominent figures in the debate in Japan and Korea.

[DC] SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WARFARE: THE FILMS OF UNHEALED WOUNDS FILM FESTIVAL. 11/9-11, Washington, DC. Sponsor: Washington Coalition for Comfort Women (WCCW) and American University. Films: Nine international films highlight the history and trauma of the “Comfort Women” (CW). Four of the films are from Korea, two from Australia, and one each from China, Canada, and the Netherlands. The lives of Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Indonesian former Comfort Women are portrayed. At Noon on Sunday, November 11th there will be a roundtable discussion with the directors and experts on “The Art of the Witness” examining the importance of the arts in conveying the history of the CW and in preserving CW voices.
NOVEMBER 9
6:00 - 8:00PM I Can Speak (119 min)
8:00 - 8:30 Director's Talk
8:30 - 10:00 Reception

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10

[DC] SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WARFARE: THE FILMS OF UNHEALED WOUNDS FILM FESTIVAL [SEE ABOVE]
10:00 - 11:00 50 Years of Silence (57 min)
11:00 - 11:15 Daily Bread (15 min)
11:15 - 11:45 Director's Talk
11:45 - 12:15 Break & Snack
12:15 - 1:15 Because We Were Beautiful (60 min)
1:15 - 1:40 Discussion
1:40 - 2:00 Break & Snack
2:00 - 3:40 Twenty Two (99 min)
3:40 - 4:00 Discussion
4:00 - 5:00 Break & Snack
5:00 - 7:10 Spirits' Homecoming (127 min)
7:10 - 7:50 Cocktail / Refreshment
7:50 - 8:30 Ae-Eum-Gil (100 min)
8:30 - 10:00 Director's Talk

[TOKYO] INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM: VOICES OF THE ‘COMFORT WOMEN’: REMEMBERING & RECONSTRUCTING. 11/10, 10:00am-6:00pm, Tokyo, Japan. Sponsor: International Joint Nomination Committee (ICJN). Speakers: Heisoon Shin, Director, ICJN Secretariat; Ustinia Dolgopol, Associated Professor, Flinders University; Lilian Sing, Co-chair, “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition; Yasushi Higashizawa (Lawyer); Hye-In Han, Team Leader, ICJN Secretariat; Eriko Ikeda, Commissioner, Japanese Committee; Hyun-Gyung Kim, Post-doc researcher, Berlin Free University; Phyllis Kim, Executive Director, Korean American Forum of California; Shu-Mei Huang, Assistant Professor, National Taiwan University; Edward Vickers, Professor, Kyushu University; Hyun-Kyung Lee, Post-doc researcher, University of Cambridge, Seoul National University; Akihisa Matsuno, Professor, Osaka University; Hye-In Han, Team Leader, ICJN Secretariat; Marie Louise Stig Sorensen, Professor, University of Cambridge; Mary McCarthy, Associated Professor, Drake University; Linda Hasunuma, Visiting Professor, University of Bridgeport; Yujie Zhu, Lecturer, Australian National University; Mina Watanabe, Japanese Committee, Director, Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM); Phyllis Kim, Korean American Forum of California.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11

[DC] SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WARFARE: THE FILMS OF UNHEALED WOUNDS FILM FESTIVAL [SEE ABOVE]

10:00 - 10:15 For Her (14 min)
10:20 - 12:04 The Apology (104 min)
12:04 - 12:30 Director's Talk

12:30-2:00pm - Roundtable Discussion on The Art of the Witness: Film in Persevering the History of the Comfort Women. Directors will discuss their work with history and media scholars. Free. Lite Lunch. Media Innovation Lab, McKinley Bldg., Rm 100.
WITH Ms. Mindy Kotler, Director, Asia Policy Point (Ms. Kotler is a public historian who works on the intersection of history and politics in Northeast Asia. She writes on the progress toward historical justice for the Comfort Women and the American POWs of Japan. In 2007, she assisted Congressman Mike Honda in 2007 in writing and defending his House Resolution 121 that asked Japan for an unequivocal, official apology to the Comfort Women.) and Dr. Greg Metcalf, Lecturer Twentieth-Century Art, Film, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland, College Park (Dr. Metcalf teaches Film and Twentieth Century Art for the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has a B.A. in Art/East Asian Studies/Political Science (St. Olaf), an M.F.A. in Painting and Graphics (Bowling Green) and a Ph.D. in Art and Culture (UMCP).)

WEEK OF NOVEMBER 11TH AND BEYOND
SCREENING AND DISCUSSION OF THE APOLOGY DIRECTED BY TIFFANY HSIUNG.

[PORTLAND, OR] 11/13, 6:00pm. Sponsor: People Organizing for Philippine Solidarity (POPS)and FeND. Location: US Bank Room, Multnomah Central Library, 801 SW 10th Ave, Portland, Oregon. https://www.facebook.com/events/285638112158553/

LOS ANGELES, CA: 11/15, Co-sponsored by Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, Progressive Asian Network for Action, Korean American Forum of California, Japanese American Women Speak (JAWS), Survivor Love Letter, Tomorrow Girls Troop, and FeND and will include an all-Japanese/Japanese American panel of activists/artists/scholars following the film, https://www.facebook.com/events/887947484928010/

SEATTLE, WA: 12/8, Co-sponsored by API Chaya, Densho, Pacific Rim Solidarity Network (Parisol), Gabriela Seattle, Seattle Evergreen Coalition, International League of Peoples’ Struggles (ILPS) Seattle, Northwest Film Forum, and the Women’s Commission of the City of Seattle as well as FeND. Https://www.facebook.com/events/1957810347850205/

Remembering American POWs killed at Hiroshima

May 28th, 2018. MEMORIAL DAY POW PLAQUE UNVEILING IN LOWELL, MA HONORING AMERICAN POWS OF JAPAN. Centralville Veterans dedicate a new plaque honoring the 12 Americans killed in and from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. The new memorial joins the nine others in the park, which collectively display the names of over 3,000 service members. Special guests will be Mr. and Mrs. Shigeaki Mori from Japan, the subject of the documentary film, Paper Lanterns, that recounts Mr. Mori’s 35-year quest to identify the American POW aviators who perished and to notify their families. Mr. Mori was the Hiroshima survivor that President Barack Obama hugged at his speech in Hiroshima. The families and friends of two of the POWs he identified--Normand Brissette, U.S. Navy and Ralph Neal, USAAC--will be at the ceremony. The event will begin at 9:00AM. Location: Centralville Memorial Park, 700 Aiken Street, Lowell, MA 01850, at the intersection of Aiken and Ennell Streets, at the foot of Aiken Bridge, MAP  
PRESS RELEASE

PAPER LANTERNS: FILM SCREENING. 5/24, 7:00–9:00pm, San Francisco, CA. Sponsor: Asian Art Museum. Speakers: The film’s subject, Mr. Shigeaki Mori, a Japanese historian and atomic bomb survivor, who spent 35 years finding the families of 12 American POWs who perished during the Hiroshima bombing. Location: Asian Art Museum, Samsung Hall, 200 Larkin Street.

PAPER LANTERNS: FILM SCREENING. 5/25, 6:00–7:30pm, Mountain View, CA. Sponsor: Community School of Music and Arts. Speakers: The film’s subject, Mr. Shigeaki Mori, a Japanese historian and atomic bomb survivor, who spent 35 years finding the families of 12 American POWs who perished during the Hiroshima bombing. Location: Community School of Music and Arts, 230 San Antonio Circle.

PAPER LANTERNS: FILM SCREENING. 5/30, 7:30–9:15pm, Boston, MA. Sponsor: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Speakers: The film’s subject, Mr. Shigeaki Mori, a Japanese historian and atomic bomb survivor, who spent 35 years finding the families of 12 American POWs who perished during the Hiroshima bombing. Location: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Harry and Mildred Remis Auditorium (Auditorium 161), Avenue of the Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue.

War and Memory in Japan

Something Dreadful Happened in the Past: 

Generational Memory of War and Peace in Japan

Akiko Hashimoto (Visiting Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Portland State University, and Faculty Fellow of Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology) speaks to Temple University's Japan Campus,
Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS) on November 9, 2017.

click to order

She is author and editor of volumes on cultural sociology and comparative sociology, focused on social constructions of reality in varied cultural settings. Her special interests are cultural trauma, war memory, national identity, culture and power, popular culture and media, family and aging.

Japanese children are raised in an environment encoded with generational memory that encourages them to develop negative moral sentiments about the Asia-Pacific War. The “encouragement” comes in subtle and unsubtle ways, as young children develop gut instincts that “something dreadful happened in the past,” even if they don’t fully understand what or why. A growing number of cultural institutions and communities play a pivotal role in producing this generational memory as the wartime generation passes on. Drawing on the emotions of cultural trauma to forge a pacifist moral consciousness is a common technique of transmitting memory at such sites. Hashimoto’s talk will explore the broader cultural premise of the pacifist nation underlying the plural narratives of dark history that continue to cast a shadow on postwar Japan. The talk is based on Hashimoto’s The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan which has recently been published in a Japanese translation.

Japanese state history dissemination

Autobiography of Massachusetts
native who survived
the Bataan Death March

On November 30, the Abe Administration through its Foreign Ministry's think tank, the Japan International Institute for International Studies (JIIA), will sponsor a conference in Washington, DC at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), entitled, POST-WAR U.S.-JAPAN RECONCILIATION: STRATEGIC BENEFITS OF HEALING.

Its purpose, as the Sankei Shimbun article below explains, is to present the current Japanese government's views of history.

This means it is an effort to sanitize the Japanese Administration's denier history narrative and to discredit Korea and China's historical views of WWII.  The United States will be presented as the "good" reconcilier. However, people who actually fought for historical justice for the American POWs, civilian internees, and comfort women are not included in the conference. These scholars and activists are likely to observe that the U.S. was a reconciler through neglect and its absence in reconciliation programs.

Speakers complicit in this effort are: Representative Niki Tsongas (D-MA); Michael H. Armacost, Shorenstein APARC fellow, Stanford University; Gerald L. Curtis, Burgess professor emeritus of political science at Columbia University; Thomas Berger, professor of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University; Rohan Mukherjee, assistant professor of political science at Yale-NUS College in Singapore; Keiko Iizuka, editorialist and senior political writer for the Yomiuri Shimbun; Koichi Ai, acting director general at the Japan Institute of International Affairs; Michael R. Auslin, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution; Jennifer Lind, Associate Professor, Department of Government, Dartmouth College; Toshihiro Nakayama, Professor, Faculty of Policy Management, Keio University; Douglas H. Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; James L. Schoff, senior fellow in the Carnegie Asia Program.

Japan International Institute for International Studies Begins to Spread Japan's Viewpoints on History by Initiating its First International Symposium on History and Reconciliation

Sankei Shimbun, November 19, 2017 [Provisional Translation by APP Interns]

The Japan International Institute for International Studies (President and Director General Yoshiji Nogami, Former Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs) will hold a number of symposia overseas on the theme of "history and reconciliation.” It is the first time for JIIA, established in 1959, to hold a symposium overseas on this theme. This is an effort to disseminate overseas the arguments of the Japan side based on objective historical research on such issues as territory and comfort women that Japan has [differences] with neighboring countries.

The symposia will be held in Washington DC on November 30th; in Paris next January; and in New Delhi in February. Researchers from Japan and overseas will participate and it is expected that the latest research in Japan and the opinions of researchers from third-party countries will be presented.

In addition to underscoring the differences between regions that experienced the last world war [大戰] and other events where reconciliation has progressed and those regions where it has not, the symposia are expected also to focus discussion on nationalism in each country.

[Note: The Sankei’s text is ambiguous and written badly. The Sankei writer is hinting above that one should “look at Taiwan and the Philippines, etc., who are very cooperative with Japan despite their war experience, and compare them with the Koreans and Chinese who continue to condemn Japan.”]

The Institute held a symposium in Tokyo this October [the 12th, (Japanese only)] that invited history researchers and others from South Korea, India and the U.S. entitled “History and Reconciliation - Thinking from International Comparison.” One participant, Professor Park Yu-ha of Sejong University [not a historian], the author of the book The Empire's Comfort Women, who was charged [and convicted] of defamation against the several former Comfort Women, said, “The background of the comfort women issue as a major problem between Japan and South Korea can be traced to the fact that the ideological conflict between the left and right in South Korea is closely linked to their views of Korean history as related to Japan.” [i.e., Park is saying that the Korean Left is anti-Japanese and the Right is pro-Japanese]

With an unfair “history war” developing abroad, a JIIA official noted, “We hope that these symposia can spread the data [correct historical evidence] that Japan has accumulated so far in order to appeal to the hearts of people in the West and elsewhere.

###

Background

>Japan Institute of International Affairs caves to right-wing pressure. 2006/2007

The Struggle for the Japanese Soul: Komori Yoshihisa, Sankei Shimbun, and the JIIA controversy By David McNeill, Japan Focus, September 4, 2006.

Softly, Softly: Did the Japan Institute of International Affairs buckle under right-wing pressure? No, says Ambassador Satoh Yukio. Yes, say his critics by David McNeill; Fred Varcoe interviews Amb. Satoh Yukio, Japan Focus, July 3, 2007.

>SYMPOSIUM "HISTORY AND RECONCILIATION－AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE STUDY"－October 12, 2017 JIIA Symposium in Tokyo

Part I: "Case Studies on Reconciliation" [Video]

Mr. Brahma Chellaney, Professor, Strategic Studies, Center for Policy Research in New Delhi

Ms. Lily Gardner Feldman, Senior Fellow, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies(AICGS), Johns Hopkins

Mr. Fumiaki Kubo, Senior Fellow, American Government and History, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, University of Tokyo

Mr. Nobukatsu Kanehara, Deputy Secretary General of National Security Secretariat and Assistant Chief Cabinet Secretary, Prime Minister’s Office of Japan

Part II: "What Promotes and Prevents Reconciliation?"

Ms. Yinan He, Associate professor, Department of International Relations, Lehigh University

Ms. Ji Young Kim, Associate Professor, Department of Area Studies, University of Tokyo

Mr. Kazuya Sakamoto, Professor, Department of Law and Political Science, Graduate School of Law and Politics, Osaka University

Mr. Thongchai Winichakul, Emeritus Professor of Southeast Asian History, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Part III: "Reconciliation and Nationalism"

Mr. Yūichi Hosoya, Senior Fellow, Tokyo Foundation, Professor, Faculty of Law, Keio University.

Mr. Lung-chih Chang, Associate Research Fellow and Deputy Director, Institute of Taiwan History

Mr. Daqing Yang, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, GWU

Ms. Yu-ha Park, Professor, College of Liberal Arts, Sejong University

Mr. Shin Kawashima, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo

Japan’s Pyrrhic Victory Over ‘Comfort Women’ Commemoration

Blocking comfort women documents from UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register could do Japan more harm than good.

By Edward Vickers, Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, Japan. He is a member of the War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership (WARMAP), funded by the Leverhulme Trust and coordinated by Mark Frost of Essex University. His latest book, Education and Society in Post-Mao China, was published by Routledge in 2017.

The Diplomat, November 25, 2017

October was a good month for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Following his crushing electoral victory came a further triumph highly prized by Japanese rightists: the stymieing of attempts to inscribe documents relating to “comfort women” — wartime sex slaves of the Japanese military — on UNESCO’s “Memory of the World Register.”

An international alliance had submitted an application, “Voices of the Comfort Women,” in May 2016. But on October 27, inscription was declared “postponed” pending “dialogue” between the applicants and the Japanese government.

This decision is portrayed by Abe’s supporters as endorsing his efforts to close the book on the wartime past, and restore Japan to a “normal” role in world affairs. But does Japan’s UNESCO diplomacy really serve this end? Or does it rather ensure that controversy over wartime atrocities continues to fester, imperiling Japan’s security by lending ammunition to anti-Japan nationalists?

Over many decades, Japan has invested heavily in UNESCO, which it joined in 1951, five years before becoming a full member of the UN itself. From 2011, following withdrawal of U.S. funding, it became the biggest contributor to the organisation’s budget. UNESCO has served as a rare arena for Japanese diplomatic leadership; it was largely at Japanese instigation, for example, that UNESCO declared 2004-2014 the “Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.” Through such initiatives, Japan built up a reputation for responsible global citizenship.

But the Abe administration claims that in recent years other states — specifically China and South Korea — have sought to “politicize” the organisation, in particular its heritage listing process. In 2015, China secured “Memory of the World” inscription for documents relating to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Shortly thereafter, Japan suspended its financial contribution to UNESCO in protest.

Japan also sought to buy South Korea’s silence over the “comfort women” issue. A bilateral agreement in December 2015 offered compensation to surviving victims, in return for the South Korean government’s defunding campaigns for further recognition — specifically the application to UNESCO. But far from resolving tensions, the agreement exacerbated them. This was due not least to the blatantly disingenuous nature of the Japanese stance: half-hearted contrition for foreign consumption, alongside intensifying revisionism within Japan itself. Under Abe, discussion of “comfort women” has all but disappeared from school textbooks.

This does not mean that the history of wartime sex slavery simply pits Japanese villainy against Korean or Chinese victimhood. As the South Korean scholar Park Yu-ha has controversially pointed out, Chinese and Korean gangs trafficked women for the Japanese military; some girls were sold into prostitution by their impoverished families; and while most were tricked or coerced, there were exceptions. Trafficking in women for sex is nothing new, and continues across Asia and beyond. For example, China’s skewed sex ratio — a by-product of the One Child Policy — is today fueling an upsurge in trafficking along its southern borders.

Nor were Japan’s imperial forces unique in deploying sexual violence. The Soviet advance into Germany at the end of World War II witnessed an orgy of rape and assault on women, as troops took revenge for suffering inflicted by the Germans on their compatriots. And as Japanese revisionists like to point out, American military bases in South Korea and Japan today are liberally serviced by local sex workers.

However, the “comfort women” system was a particularly coordinated, institutionalized, and brutal form of sexual exploitation. Moreover, for many campaigners, the continuing abuse of women today is precisely the point. The activists at the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo, for example, see a failure to acknowledge the iniquity of the “comfort women” system as symptomatic of the entrenched chauvinism of Japanese society. For many, securing recognition for wartime sex slaves is partly about drawing attention to the widespread persistence of the kinds of attitudes toward women that underpinned that system. This aim would seem eminently consistent with UNESCO’s humanitarian mission.

But UNESCO is an organization in crisis. In parts of its decrepit Paris headquarters, rusty reinforcing rods can be seen poking through the crumbling concrete. A lack of UNESCO funding left the German government to cover my group’s travel costs when recently visiting to launch a UNESCO-commissioned report on education in Asia. One official whispered fears that Japan might follow the United States in withdrawing completely. Meanwhile, Chinese influence is rapidly filling the void, leaving many UNESCO insiders desperate somehow to restore political balance.

This is the context for the recent “Memory of the World” decision. In 2015, a related Chinese application was turned down, despite the fact that the International Advisory Committee adjudged the submitted documents to have “met the criteria” for registration. In light of the transnational nature of the issue, the committee recommended that groups in various affected countries (not just China) jointly submit a more comprehensive collection of documents. Hence the subsequent South Korean-led 14-country application, the documents submitted by which were described earlier this year by UNESCO’s Register Sub-Committee as “irreplaceable and unique.”

Japan was meanwhile fiercely pressing for revision of the criteria for inscription. It finally secured a commitment to pursue “dialogue” in cases where an application is contested — the principle cited in the recent “postponement” decision. However, as the alliance supporting registration noted in an October 31 press release, this potentially amounts to a perpetrator’s veto: “It means that documents related to colonial regimes should be negotiated with the colonizers, and the damage suffered by victims of war should be discussed with the perpetrators.”

UNESCO’s eagerness to placate Japan is apparent elsewhere, too. This July, the island of Okinoshima off the coast of Kyushu was declared a “World Heritage Site,” along with related shrines on the mainland. The island is a repository of thousands of ancient artifacts from South Korea, China and beyond, mysteriously deposited over the centuries. Intensive Japanese lobbying persuaded the UNESCO committee to override an expert recommendation to register only the island itself, and agree instead to inscribe the mainland sites as well. Moreover, the official description of the site notes neither a “traditional” ban on women landing on Okinoshima, nor the island’s association with nationalistic annual commemorations of a nearby 1905 naval battle.

Not all recent decisions have gone Japan’s way. An application to inscribe as “Memory of the World” documents relating to Sugihara Chiune, the wartime Japanese consul in Latvia who helped save several thousand Jews, was rejected. The reasons were not divulged, but celebrating an instance of wartime Japanese humanitarianism while denying inscription to “comfort women” documents was probably seen as politically unwise.

Given threats from a nuclearizing North Korea and an increasingly assertive China, the project of pursuing a more “normal” constitutional position for Japan’s armed forces has much to recommend it. However, to seek constitutional reform alongside historical revisionism is both ethically indefensible and strategically insane. It needlessly sullies Japan’s international reputation and awards easy propaganda points to nationalists elsewhere intent on portraying Japanese as unrepentant militarists.

And Japan’s actions threaten UNESCO’s reputation, too. In squandering much of the goodwill acquired over decades of involvement in UNESCO, it has exacerbated the very process of “politicization” it claims to lament. Denying inscription to records of wartime atrocities brings discredit both to Japan, for its bullying and mendacity, and to UNESCO, for buckling under pressure and subverting its own processes.

The international alliance has pledged to continue its campaign to inscribe “comfort women” documents, declaring its readiness to enter whatever form of dialogue UNESCO mandates. It remains to be seen whether Japan will approach such an exercise as more than a means of blocking and obfuscation. But for truly meaningful dialogue with its neighbors over this and other aspects of the wartime past, what Japan needs first of all is a long-overdue dialogue with itself.

Memorializing Sexual Violence in War

Sexual Violence in War

Professor Elisabeth Wood 

Yale University, October 7, 2009

It is not normative

An Important Statue for “Comfort Women” in San Francisco

By Sally McGrane, The New Yorker, October 12, 2017

At the back of St. Mary’s Square in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the retired judge Lillian Sing—who, long a trailblazer, was Northern California’s first Asian-American female judge—unlocked a temporary plywood gate. Behind the gate, in the corner of a terrace, stood a week-old memorial. Against the backdrop of city skyscrapers, three teen-age girls, cast in bronze, stand in a circle, holding hands. Next to them, looking on, stands the figure of an elderly woman in Korean dress—Kim Hak-sun, the first so-called comfort woman to speak out, in 1991, about her horrific sexual enslavement, during the Second World War, by the Imperial Japanese Army.

Sing had come to the park that day with Julie Tang, another retired judge and her co-chair in the project to create the memorial. “What they did was so brave,” Tang said, as she gazed up at the three girls. Chinese, Korean, and Filipino, they represent the estimated two hundred thousand women from countries across East and Southeast Asia occupied by Japan who were held in brutal state-run rape camps—a crime that went largely unacknowledged until the nineties. That was when Kim’s declaration inspired surviving comfort women in Korea, China, and elsewhere to come forward with their stories. Tang shook her head. “They were silent for fifty years, holding this shame inside them,” she said. “Victims think they are to blame. They think they did it to themselves.” With this statue—the first to be erected in a major U.S. city, though smaller memorials to comfort women exist in places like Glendale, California, and Palisades Park, New Jersey—Tang, Sing, and the local coalition they assembled want to change that kind of thinking. By bringing attention to the comfort women’s history, they hope to draw attention to ongoing problems of human trafficking and sex crimes.

This may not be as self-evident as it sounds. Discussing the statue, Dara Kay Cohen, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, said, “As a scholar of wartime rape, I think it is extraordinary.” Cohen has interviewed women captured as sex slaves in Sierra Leone; she found their stories of being raped dozens of times a day by fighters, even when the women were sick, “eerily similar” to those of the comfort women. “Publicly memorializing the rape of women is rare,” she said. “Women are half of humanity,” Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American and Asian-diaspora studies at U.C. Berkeley, and a supporter of the statue (whose unveiling brings the total number of public statues in San Francisco of real women to three), said. “And women are not represented in history. Nothing will be done about crimes like these if they remain in the shadows.”

The Japanese Army’s “comfort stations,” initiated in the early nineteen-thirties, were expanded extensively following the Nanjing massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, in 1937. According to a paper by the Yale political-science professor Elisabeth Jean Wood, the stated goal of the comfort stations was to reduce random civilian rapes. Girls were seized from the local populations. Conditions were brutal, and death rates were high. “In one day, we had to serve forty to fifty soldiers,” Lee Ok-seon, a Korean survivor, who was kidnapped at the age of fifteen, recalled in video testimony. Girls who refused were lined up against the wall and slashed open with knives. “I don’t call it a ‘comfort station.’ I call it a slaughterhouse,” Lee said. Jan Ruff-O’Herne, a Dutch girl, was taken from the Indonesian prisoner-of-war camp where she was living with her family. In a television interview, she recalled arriving at the comfort station: “We started protesting right away. We said we were forced into this, they had no right to do this, it was against the Geneva Convention. And they just laughed at us. They said they could do with us what they liked.”

After the war, survivors risked rejection by their families. Ill and impoverished, many never married or had families of their own. Ruff-O’Herne had two daughters, but did not tell them what happened to her. “You know, how can you tell your daughters?” she said in the same interview. “All these years, I was too ashamed. You think, What will they think of me?” But, after seeing Kim Hak-sun and others come forward and struggle to have their stories heard, Ruff-O’Herne decided that she had to help by speaking up. (Her daughters hugged her.)

The former congressman Mike Honda told me that, in addition to the stigma faced by victims of sexual crimes, the Japanese government’s stance on the issue has been a problem. He said that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe “flip-flops”: “He says, ‘We’re really sorry,’ then, ‘It never happened.’ He’s all over the field.” Honda, who spent his own early years in a Japanese-American internment camp, said that he first heard of the comfort women in the nineties, after an aide returned from an exhibition visibly upset. Honda became determined to learn more. “We know a lot about what happened in the war in Europe, but not a lot about what happened in Asia,” he said.

After he researched the comfort women, he decided to act. “For me, as a Japanese-American, there was a parallel,” he said. “We fought to have the U.S. government apologize to us. Now we have to get the Japanese government to recognize the historical facts.” In 2007, Honda brought survivors—including Ruff-O’Herne—to testify before Congress, and successfully pushed through legislation demanding that the Japanese government apologize. “Telling the story of the comfort women to the public is powerful,” Honda said. “The statue is a physical representation of something that happened in the past that needs to be learned about, in order to prevent violence against women and end human trafficking—which is a one-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar industry.”

Steven Whyte, the Carmel-based artist who created San Francisco’s memorial, had a similar learning curve. “I was familiar with the term ‘comfort women,’ but I didn’t realize the extent of the torture,” he said. Once he saw the call for applications, he researched the topic, and wanted the job so much that he reduced his regular prices. “You think of every girl you’ve ever known—your nieces, your daughters, your girlfriends, everything. It’s desperately upsetting.”

While most of the comfort-women statues around the world have been put up by South Koreans or members of the Korean diaspora, the push for this statue was led by San Francisco’s Chinese-American community, with support from several other groups, including members of the Japanese-, Filipino-, Korean-, and Jewish-American communities, Eric Mar, who served as the city supervisor during the planning-and-design process and championed the project, said. “I thought, to be successful, we had to build a pan-Asian coalition,” he explained. Mentioning his own teen-age daughter, Mar began to weep. “It’s very emotional, for a lot of people.”

At the cavernous Cathay House restaurant, just up the street from St. Mary’s Square, Sing and Tang were joined by Judith Mirkinson, the president of the board of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition. Over hot toddies and Chinese chicken salad, the women talked about the challenges they faced in bringing the statue into being—including local Japanese-Americans who say they worry that the statue could give rise to a new wave of discrimination, and a vigorous campaign of condemnation from the Japanese government. Whyte received some twelve hundred negative social-media messages and e-mails, including form letters copied and pasted from a Japanese Web site threatening economic boycotts of his work. Activists attended hearings about the statue and called an elderly survivor a prostitute when she testified before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. More recently, the mayor of Osaka threatened to end his city’s long-standing sister-city relationship with San Francisco if the statue is not removed—and the Japanese consul-general in San Francisco, Jun Yamada, wrote a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle calling the statue a “half-told” story, and warning that if the city wants to “give equal treatment to all cases, there will be no free space left anywhere.”

Those spearheading the memorial fear that pressures like these may delay the bureaucratic procedures that still need to take place before the plywood gate comes down and the statue is visible to the public. At lunch, Sing said that she felt that racism in the United States had played a silencing role when it comes to recognizing what happened to the comfort women. “Why did this take so long?” she said. Kim Hak-sun “spoke out in 1991. There is the race issue: Asian women’s lives didn’t matter, like black men’s lives don’t matter.” Still, the three women agreed that it is no accident that this statue is here. “Even if San Francisco is changing, progressivism is still woven into the fabric of this city,” Mirkinson said. “And we are on the Pacific Rim,” Tang said. “We are closer to Asia, and thirty-three per cent of the city is Asian. People bring with them family memory that goes back to World War Two.”

For Lee Yong-soo, an eighty-nine-year-old survivor who flew from Korea for the unveiling, San Francisco seemed dauntingly far away. But when she arrived she was glad she had made the journey. “When I saw the girls holding hands, it brought tears in my eyes because she looked just like the girl I once was,” Lee wrote in an e-mail. “We need more memorials to remember the truth. I am the living proof of the history. But when I’m gone, who will tell the story to the next generation?”