(5) Facebook
[토론자료] 여성을 위한 아시아평화국민기금 1
국민기금 위로금이 사죄라고?
일본, 위안부 피해 여성 국가배상 호도… 받은 사람도 못 받은 사람도 상처
- 김부자(도쿄외국어대대학원 교수)
위안부 문제에 대한 일본 정부의 공식 주장은 법적으로는 1965년 ‘청구권·경제협력에 관한 협정(대한민국과 일본국 간의 재산 및 청구권에 관한 문제의 해결과 경제협력에 관한 협정)’으로 해결했으며, 인도적으로는 1995년 ‘여성을 위한 아시아평화국민기금’(이하 국민기금)으로 해결했다는 것이다. 이 가운데 국민기금에 대해서는 한국에 그 실체가 잘 알려지지 않았다.
최근 노다 요시히코 일본 총리는 미국 신문과의 인터뷰에서 “일본 정부는 국민기금으로 위안부 문제에 성의를 표했다”고 강조했다(홋카이도 신문 9월 28일자). 앞서 아사히신문은 8월 29일자에서 “일본은 (위안부 문제가) 법적으로 해결됐음에도 국민기금으로 보상하려고 노력했다. 평화헌법을 가진 일본의 전후 노력을 알아줬으면”이라고 보도했다.
그렇다면 국민기금이란 무엇이며, 피해자에 대한 사죄 혹은 보상으로 볼 수 있는지 살펴보자. 1993년 8월 일본 정부는 위안부제도에 대한 일본군의 관여와 강제성을 인정하면서 ‘사과와 반성’을 표명한 ‘고노 담화’를 발표했다. 그리고 사과의 마음을 표현하는 방식을 검토하겠다고 밝혔다. 문제는 사죄를 표명하는 방식이 ‘보상’이 아니라 ‘보상에 대신하는 조치’였다는 점이다. ‘이미 법적으로는 문제를 해결했다’고 주장해온 일본 정부가 1995년 7월 19일 도의적 책임을 지는 ‘츠구나이(償い·위로) 사업’으로 설립한 것이 바로 ‘보상에 대신하는 조치’인 국민기금이다.
그 내용은 위안부제도 피해자를 대상으로 △민간모금에 의한 츠구나이금(200만 엔) △총리의 사과편지 △국고로 의료복지 지원 사업(한국에서는 300만 엔 규모)을 실시한다는 것이었다. 국민기금에 따르면 일본 국민에게서 실제로 모금한 총액은 약 5억6500만 엔(목표 10억 엔), 국고에서 지출하기로 한 의료복지 지원금은 7억5000만 엔이다.
이를 기반으로 한국, 필리핀, 대만 피해자 285명에게 위 3가지 조치를 모두 취하고, 네덜란드 피해자 79명에게는 총리의 사과편지와 의료복지 지원만 실시했다(2002년 종료). 인도네시아에서는 고령자사회복지추진사업을 시행했으며(2007년 3월 해산), 중국과 북한, 동남아시아 국가 피해자들은 제외됐다. 구체적인 국가별 내역은 공개하지 않았으나 9월 28일자 홋카이도 신문은 한국 정부가 인정한 위안부 피해자 234명 중 61명이 ‘츠구나이금’을 받았다고 보도했다.
한국 위안부 61명 ‘츠구나이금’ 수령
여기서 짚고 넘어가야 할 점이 있다. 바로 ‘츠구나이금’이라는 일본말의 애매함이다. 한국의 주요 언론보도와 출판물에서 이를 ‘보상금(補償金)’ 혹은 ‘보상(補償)’이라고 번역한 경우가 적지 않은데, 엄연한 오역이다. 최근 한국의 한 일간지는 “일본 정부는 아시아 여성기금을 통해 군위안부 피해 여성에게 보상하려 했지만 당사자들과 한국정신대문제대책협의회 (정대협)가 일본 정부의 관여와 사죄와 보상을 법으로 정해달라고 요청했다”고 보도했다. 이렇게 되면 일본 정부가 국민기금을 통해 ‘보상’하려고 했음에도 피해자와 운동단체가 반대한 것으로 오해할 수 있다.
국민기금에 의한 ‘츠구나이금’은 민간에서 모금한 것으로 ‘보상에 대신하는 조치’라고는 하지만, 일본 정부에 의한 개인 보상(국가배상)과는 분명한 차이가 있다. 그러니 일본어 ‘츠구나이금’을 한국어로 번역할 때는 ‘위로금’ 혹은 일본어 발음 그대로 ‘츠구나이금’이라고 해야 한다.
짚고 가야 할 점이 또 있다. 위에서 결정한 3가지 조치, 즉 위로금과 총리의 사과편지, 의료복지 지원을 세트로 실시했다는 점이다. 그래서 총리의 사과편지는 피해자 모두에게 오지 않고 위로금을 받은 피해자에게만 전달됐다. 위로금을 받지 않은 피해자는 사죄 대상에서도 제외된 것이다.
한국이나 대만에서는 국민기금의 모호한 성격 때문에 대다수 피해자가 위로금을 거부했다. 홋카이도 신문이 보도한 대로 한국인 피해자 234명 중 61명이 위로금을 받았다면, 4명 중 3명이 이를 거부한 셈이다. 1991년 한국에서 위안부 문제를 최초로 고발한 김학순 씨는 1997년 세상을 뜰 때까지 국민기금에 단호히 반대했다. 또 다른 피해자 강일출 씨는 “일본 정부가 져야 할 책임을 국민에게 미루고 있다. 국민에게서 돈을 모아 나눠준다는데 그건 이상한 이야기다. 어떤 사람은 받고 어떤 사람은 안 받고 사람들 사이에 균열이 생겼다. 일본 정부는 왜 이런 짓을 하는가”라고 말했다(2009년 11월 28일).
위로금 전달 방식에도 문제가 있었다. 1997년 국민기금 측이 피해자들의 거부에도 위로금 전달을 강행하면서 위로금 사취 사건이 벌어지기도 했다. 피해자들이 글을 읽을 줄 모른다는 점을 악용한 피해자 주변인이 정부로부터 받은 피해자인정증을 복사하는 등의 방법으로 국민기금 측으로부터 위로금을 받아 빼돌린 것이다. 위로금을 받은 적 없는 위안부 피해자 심달련 씨는 제삼자가 위로금을 챙겼을 수도 있다는 생각에 국민기금 측에 사실 확인을 요청했으나 계속 거부당했다. 그러다 국민기금이 해산된 2007년 3월 말에야 일본 변호사로부터 심씨의 위로금이 김모 씨 계좌로 입금됐다는 사실을 확인했다. 심씨는 계좌주인 김씨가 누구인지 전혀 알지 못했다. 국민기금이 피해자 본인 확인을 게을리한 결과인 만큼 비슷한 사례가 더 있을 개연성이 높다.
한국 정부는 법적 책임 요구
국민기금의 위로금은 피해자가 요구한 국가보상이 아니며, 총리의 사과편지가 위로금을 받은 피해자에게만 한정됐다는 점, 위로금을 둘러싸고 피해자 혹은 피해자와 지원 단체 사이에 균열을 초래했다는 점, 결정적으로 위로금을 받지 않은 피해자가 대다수며, 위로금을 받은 피해자조차 그 사실을 공표할 수 없어 궁극적인 ‘존엄의 회복’을 가져오지 못했다는 점에서 일본 정부의 사죄라고 보기 어렵다. 위로금을 받은 사람이나 받지 않은 사람 모두에게 슬픔과 혼란, 노여움과 불신을 초래했기 때문이다.
더욱이 국민기금은 일본 정부가 법적 해결을 촉구하는 피해국의 요구나 유엔 등의 권고를 등한시하는 ‘알리바이’로 작용했다. 위로금 지급 실적 올리기에는 분주하면서 정치인이나 역사수정주의자들의 언동에는 침묵했다. 일본 내 여성·시민단체들이 입법 해결을 요구하는 운동을 전개했으나 이를 막은 것도 국민기금이다.
유엔 인권소위원회 특별조사관 맥두걸은 보고서(1998)에서 “피해 여성에게 법적 배상을 한다는 일본 정부 책임이 국민기금으로는 달성되지 않았다”며 “국민기금의 위로금 지급은 일본이 제2차 세계대전에서 일으킨 범죄에 대한 법적 책임을 인정한 것이 아니다”라고 평가했다. 2007년 7월 미국 하원이 채택한 일본 정부에 대한 위안부 사죄 결의안도 국민기금에 대해 “공인 및 민간인의 노력과 정열은 인정하나 근본적인 해결이라고는 볼 수 없다”면서 “명쾌하고도 애매함이 없는 형태로 공적 사죄와 역사적 책임을 다할 것”을 촉구했다. 같은 해 12월 유럽연합(EU)은 일본 정부 측에 역사적, 법적 책임을 다할 것을 요청하면서 피해자 및 그 유족에게 배상할 것, 개인이 정부에게 배상을 요구하는 권리를 인정할 것을 요구했다.
한국 정부는 1997년 1월 국민기금이 관계자를 서울에 파견해 기금사업을 강행하자 “너무나 유감스럽다”며 불쾌감을 표명했다. 이듬해 4월에는 위로금을 거부한 피해자에게 지원금을 지급할 것을 결정하면서 국민기금에 사업 중지를 요구했다. 한국 정부는 피해자들의 의사를 반영해 국민기금에 반대해왔고, 지금은 명확하게 일본의 법적 책임을 요구하고 있다.
한국 정부도, 국제사회도 국민기금이 사죄로서 불충분하다는 점에 인식을 같이하며, 일본 정부 측에 피해자 개개인에게 사죄와 법적 배상을 할 것을 요구하고 있다. 피해자가 바라는 사죄란 일본 정부의 국가배상을 동반하는 사죄임을 잊지 말아야 할 것이다.
(주간동아 2012.11.05)
---
[토론자료] 여성을 위한 아시아평화기금 3
* 기부자로부터의 메시지
- The Asian Women's Fund 아시아여성기금
아시아여성기금의 호소에 부응해 기부해 주신 여러분들이 메시지를 곁들여 보내 주었습니다. 이 메시지에는 (일본)국민의 심정이 표현되어 있습니다.
(1997년 기금의 팸플릿에서)
<인간으로서의 사죄>
-논의가 있어도 행동하는 것이 중요하다고 생각해, 조금이나마 협력합니다.
-위안부였기 때문에 불행한 삶을 보내신 분들에게 부디 정중한 사과와 함께, 앞으로의 행복을 빌어 드리고 싶습니다. 충분한 도움은 못 드리지만 하루 2시간 정도 집에서 할 수 있는 자원봉사가 필요하시면 말씀해 주십시오. 조속한 보상을 마음으로부터 기원합니다.
-이러한 아시아여성기금이 생기는 것을 고대하고 있었습니다. 일본인으로서 답답했던 마음이 조금은 가벼워진 것 같습니다. 기쁜 일입니다.
<조금씩이라도. 할 수 있는 일부터>
-전쟁 당시, 저는 어린아이였습니다만, 나중에 '종군위안부'의 존재를 알고, 희생이 되신 여성들의 억울함을 헤아리면서, 이러한 무모한 시책을 실행한 일본군대에 대한 분노로 몸이 떨려왔습니다. 이 죄의 보상은, 일본인 한 사람, 한 사람이 해 나가야 한다고 생각합니다. 그 구체적 행동의 일환으로 이 기금의 의의를 인정합니다.
-상대국의 입장, 일본정부의 이유도 있겠지만, ODA(정부개발원조)보다도 우선적으로 보상해야 한다고 생각합니다.
-위안부였던 분들의 명예회복에 도움이 되는 형태로 활용해 주었으면 합니다. 동시에, 이것으로 일본정부 책임이 끝나는 것이 아니라, 사실 규명 등, 각종 노력을 계속해 나가도록 요청해 주십시오.
<전쟁을 모르는 젊은이로부터>
-이 나라의 국민인 이상, 이 나라의 과거의 잘못, 역사로부터 벗어날 수 없습니다. 종군위안부로서 희생되신 여러분께 일본인으로서, 인간으로서 마음으로부터 사죄 드립니다. 아시아여성기금의 성공을 기원합니다. --그 전쟁을 모르는 27세의 젊은이로부터.
- '민중의 전쟁책임'을 자각하며 참여합니다.
<제대로 된 과거 청산을>
-'종군위안부'로서 강요 당했던 여러분들에게, 저는 깊이 머리 숙여 사죄 드립니다. 이 분들에 대한 보상은 '국가'가 '국가'로서 해야 한다고 강력하게 생각합니다. 그러나, 50년이 지난 지금, 노령이 되신 분들에게 남겨진 시간은 적다는 것을 생각할 때, 저는 원칙론을 거두어 들이겠습니다. 일본국민의 한 사람으로서 보상을 위해 사용해 주시길 바라며 송금합니다. 이 분들에 대한 고통이 조금이라도 덜어질 수 있기를 바랍니다. 그리고 두 번 다시 이러한 역사를 만들어서는 안 된다고 절실하게 생각합니다.
<군인연금 일부를 기부>
-과거 병사였던 사람으로, 군인 연금의 일부를 기부합니다. 그러나 한마디 말씀 드리자면, 전쟁터의 심리는 현장에 있던 사람밖에 이해할 수 없는 것. 가볍게 보지 말아 주십시오.
<전후50년, 새로운 출발점에>
-국가의 사죄와 보상이 좋다고 생각합니다만, 그를 향한 과정으로의 민간기금에 찬성합니다. 얼마 안되지만 가족 4명의 모금입니다. 활용해 주십시오. 제 아버지는 지금 77세로, 만주(満州), 오키나와(沖縄)에서 전쟁에 참전했습니다. 기금의 성공을 기원합니다.
-아시아 각국과의 좋은 관계를 구축하기 위해 아주 조금이지만 협력할 수 있었으면 합니다.
-참혹한 일을 당한 여성은 오늘날도 많이 있습니다. 힘내십시오.
-전쟁책임의 처리뿐만 아니라, 지금도 어떤 무책임한 일본인 남성 때문에 피해를 입고 있는, 아버지가 없는 아시아 국가의 아이들을 위해서도, 구원의 손길을 부탁 드립니다.
(2007년 기금 홈페이지로부터)
아시아여성기금의 뉴스를 보고, 처음에는 먼 일처럼 생각했지만, 열심히 활동하는 것을 알게 되면서, 여러 문제를 안고 있는 여성을 위해 열심히 해 주셨으면 하는 생각을 하게 되었습니다. 여성에게 있어 대단히 마음 든든한 활동이므로 계속해 주셨으면 합니다. 다양한 프로젝트가 좋은 방향으로 발전되기를 바랍니다. (가나가와현 가와사키시(神奈川県川崎市)∙여성)
위안부였던 분들의 심정을 생각하면 가슴 아픔을 금할 수가 없습니다. 아주 적은 금액이지만, 일본인의 한 사람으로서 사죄와 보상의 마음을 보내드립니다. (도쿄도 스기나미구(東京都杉並区)∙여성)
전쟁에 의해 얼마나 많은 여성이 상처 입고, 남자들의 폭력으로 심신 모두 엉망진창이 되었는가를 생각하면, 더더욱 '평화'의 중요성, 소중함, 두 번 다시 전쟁을 일으켜서는 안 된다고 생각, 남성의 폭력을 허용해서는 안 된다는 마음이 강해졌습니다. (도쿄도 스기나미구(東京都杉並区) ∙여성)
저도 소년시대 전쟁을 경험했습니다만, 당시를 되돌아보면서, 적지만 기부를 합니다. 부디, '위안부'였던 분들이 즐거운 여생을 보내실 수 있기를 바라 마지 않습니다.(지바현 나라시노시(千葉県習志野市)∙남성)
'위안부'였던 분들에 대한 보상을 위해 사용해 주십시오.(사이타마현 우라와시(埼玉県浦和市)∙여성)
두 번 째입니다. 일본국민으로부터 기금을 모금하고 있다는 것에 의의가 있으며, 이런 점이 이해를 받을 수 있도록 노력해 주십시오. (쿄토부 나가오카쿄시(京都府長岡京市)∙남성)
많이 늦어서 죄송합니다. 드디어 취직이 돼서 협력할 수 있게 되었습니다. (도쿄도 시부야구(東京都渋谷区)∙남성)
침략전쟁이, 무엇과도 바꿀 수 없는 개인의 인생에 돌이킬 수 없는 비참한 죽음과 고통, 슬픔을 가져온 것을, 우리 일본인은 직시하고 후세에 전해야만 한다고 생각합니다. (도쿄도 나카노구(東京都中野区)∙남성)
적지만 희망하시는 '위안부'였던 여성분들에게 하루라도 빨리 전달되기를 기원합니다. (2001년 2월19일 도쿄도 스기나미구(東京都杉並区)∙여성)
힘든 시대를 헤쳐 오신 분들의 마음을 생각하면, 아무 말도 할 수 없습니다. 약소하지만, 제 마음을 받아주시면 기쁘습니다. (지바현 마쓰도시(千葉県松戸市)∙남성)
'기금뉴스'를 받았습니다. 반성과 보상의 사업은 힘든 일이라 사료됩니다. 저도 중국에 2년간 종군했습니다만, 다행히 귀국을 할 수 있어서 지금 80살입니다. '위안부' 문제에 대해서는 여러 가지로 생각하게 되었습니다. 약소하지만 도움이 되었으면 합니다. (사이타마현 오가와쵸(埼玉県小川町)∙남성)
일본인이 '위안부'였던 분들에게 저지른 일은 어떤 죄보다도 심한 것이라고 생각합니다. 아무것도 모르는 순수한 소녀들에게 평생 가도 지울 수 없는 정신적인 고통과 육체적 고통을 주었으며, 전쟁의 피해자가 되어 비참한 일을 당한 여성들. 그 사실을 지금 살아 있는 우리들은 더욱 더 알아야 된다고 생각합니다. 그리고 두 번 다시 되풀이하지 않도록, 제대로 전하고 바른 교육을 하는 것이 중요합니다. 그리고 그 분들의 마음의 무거운 짐이 조금이라도 가벼워질 수 있도록, 살아 있는 동안에 적으나마 보상, 사죄와 사죄금을 전해 주십시오. 신속하며 오랫동안 지속적인 활동을 해 주시기를 바랍니다. 또, 홍보를 더욱 확대해 모금액∙기한도 늘려 주십시오.(도쿠시마현 고마쓰시마시(徳島県小松島市)∙여성)
아시아여성기금의 활동에 경의를 표합니다. 번영 속에서 과거를 직시하지 않는 사상이 확산되고 있지만, 인간의 존엄, 평화, 행복과 삶에 대해 서로가 깊이 생각하고, 과거에 대한 도의적 책임을 지는 것도 21세기가 진정으로 사람들의 세기로서 아시아 전체가 공생하며, 협력해야 되는 사명이라고 생각합니다. 얼마 안되지만 세라초(世羅町)관청 직원들의 모금을 보내드리오니, 보탬이 되면 기쁘겠습니다. (히로시마현 세라쵸(広島県世羅町)∙관청)
정말 적은 금액이지만 송금합니다. 저는 4급 장애인으로 병역의 경험은 없습니다만, 전쟁 당시의 일은 잘 기억하고 있으며, 마음 아파하고 있는 한 사람입니다. (오사카부 가도마시(大阪府門真市)∙남성)
수고 많으십니다. 지방에서 조금씩 확대하기 위해 노력하겠습니다. (시즈오카현 가케가와시(静岡県掛川市)∙남성)
입원 때문에 송금이 늦어졌습니다. (오사카부 히라카타시(大阪府枚方市)∙남성)
기본적으로는 일본정부가 보상해야 하는 문제라고 생각합니다만, 독일에서는 유태인의 홀로코스트 보상을 정부와 관련 회사∙기업이 했다고 들었습니다. 또 미국에서는 전시중 일본인 강제수용에 대해서 뒤늦게나마 보상을 했습니다. 일본은 일본국적의 병사들에게만 은급을 지급하고 오키나와를 비롯해 피해를 입은 민간인에게는 일체 보상하지 않았습니다. 조금이지만 기부합니다. (오사카부 오사카시(大阪府大阪市)∙남성)
'위안부'였던 분들께 바칩니다. 부디 우리 일본인을, 그리고 저희 선조가 저지른 죄를 용서해 주십시오. 여러분들의 마음의 상처가 하루라도 빨리 치유되고, 하느님께서 평안을 주시길 진심으로 기원합니다. (사이타마현 우라와시(埼玉県浦和市)∙여성)
앞으로는 아름다운 그림을 보고 아름다운 음악을 듣고, 조금이라도 마음이 평안한 여생을 보낼 수 있기를 마음으로부터 기원합니다. (오카야마현 와게쵸(岡山県和気町)∙여성)
지난 3일, 아내가 70살로 생을 마쳤습니다. 공양이라 생각하고 기부합니다. 전세계 여성에게 평안과 안식이 있기를 기원합니다. (후쿠오카현 후쿠오카시(福岡県福岡市)∙남성)
소액이지만 모금합니다. '사과금'의 1인당 금액은, 그 사람의 인생을 짓밟은 데 비하면 얼마 되지 않겠지만, 일본인의 양심을 증명하기 위해 마지막까지 열심히 해 주십시오. (미야기현 센다이시(宮城県仙台市)∙남성)
공민관 창구에 모금함을 설치해서 모금했습니다. 소액이지만 도움이 됐으면 하는 생각에 보내드립니다. (후쿠오카현 나라하마치∙공민관(福島県楢葉町•公民館))
돈으로 보상이 되리라고는 생각하지 않습니다만, 조금이라도 보탬이 되었으면 합니다. (가나가와현 가와사키시(神奈川県川崎市)∙여성)
서울에 있는 아들이 부탁해서 송금했습니다. (오카야마현 오카야마시(岡山県岡山市)∙여성)
지난 달은 사정이 별로 좋지 않아서 송금하지 못했습니다. 계획한 2개월 분이니 받아주십시오. (에히메현 단바라쵸(愛媛県丹原町)∙남성)
보상사업에 참여합니다. (2001년4월24일 이바라기현 도리데시(茨城県取手市)∙남성)
이번에 '남자와 여자의 인권'이라는 테마로 DV, 아동학대에 대해 4회 연속 세미나를 처음으로 개최했습니다. 이 때 입구에 모금함을 설치했습니다. (이바라키현 기타이바라키시(茨城県北茨城市)∙여성연맹)
일본인의 책임으로서 보상을 해야 한다고 생각합니다. 가난한 사람의 작은 정성입니다. 활용해 주십시오. (지바현 사와라시(千葉県佐原市)∙남성)
조금이라도 마음이 평안해지기를 기원합니다. (아이치현 도요하시시(愛知県豊橋市)∙여성)
힘들 것으로 생각되던 사업이 여러분들의 성의 있는 활동으로 인정 받게 된 것을 기쁘 게 생각합니다. (도치기현 우쓰노미야시(栃木県宇都宮市)∙여성)
소액이지만, 조금이라도 일본이 저지른 죄의 보상이 되길 바라며… (니가타현 아라이시(新潟県新井市)∙남성)
역시나 공평한 조사와 국가에 의한 정식적인 사죄배상을 희망합니다. 그리고 깨끗하게 된 다음 재출발 하고 싶습니다. (구마모토현 구마모토시(熊本県熊本市)∙남성)
얼마 안됩니다만, 문화제에서 모금을 해서 보내드립니다. (이바라키현(茨城県)∙고교자원봉사부)
*출처: The Asian Women's Fund 아시아여성기금
---
Spirituality, Mind-Body, Gender, Ecology, Ageing, Peace, Scrapbook (in English and Korean)
2020/07/24
David Suzuki, Wade Davis, Ronald Wright: We Must Change the Way We Look at the Natural World - EcoWatch
David Suzuki, Wade Davis, Ronald Wright: We Must Change the Way We Look at the Natural World - EcoWatch
David Suzuki, Wade Davis, Ronald Wright: We Must Change the Way We Look at the Natural World
EcoWatchJun. 28, 2016 02:54PM ESTPOPULAR
By James Hoggan
In my last blog I reported some dire warnings from several of the world's top scientists, experts who are able to present facts about species extinction and climate change in ways we can all absorb. I have never been a pessimist, but we cannot ignore these alarm bells or allow ourselves to get bogged down in denial and acrid debate. These problems are serious and they won't go away on their own.
As I explain in my new book, I'm Right and You're an Idiot, the driving mechanism behind significant social change is an urgent sense of the moral challenge combined with a credible path forward. Social justice advocate Marshall Ganz stresses that both dissonance and hope must be present if we are to spark change. MIT Sloan School of Management's Otto Scharmer adds the success of any intervention depends less upon the specific actions taken, and more upon the inner condition of the intervener.
So clearly, if we want to solve these global environmental problems we need to change the way we see the world and the way we interact with nature. And we also need to shift not only our attention but also our intention.
In this blog I highlight the insights of three experts who urge us to do this by tapping into mankind's extraordinary gift of foresight, the lessons of history and the wisdom of indigenous cultures.
Ronald Wright, Canadian author of the bestseller, A Short History of Progress, who studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, sees a pattern in our refusal to take our collective foot off the accelerator and slow the greedy advance of civilization. He said we North Americans are heavily invested in selling hydrocarbons but are in denial about it because of, "controversies stirred up by massive funding from big oil companies that create bogus scientific institutes."
Civilizations rise and fall, prosper then collapse when the very technologies that created prosperity and success in the first place become liabilities, said the scholar who described this in his Massey Lectures. He calls this downfall of societies the progress trap and refers to examples in Easter Island, ancient Rome, Sumer and more, where innovations created new problems of their own, conditions that were worse than those that existed before the innovation.
It can start with something as seemingly simple as irrigation. People run canals into the desert to grow more food, but that leads to more people, more houses and other concerns. After many centuries, the ancient Sumerians found their fields were turning white because salts were building up when water evaporated. They didn't deal with the problem because they had expanded to a point where it was beyond their ability to change. They were locked into the system and ignored the warnings. "In a matter of 1,000 years, start to finish, they ended up producing only a quarter of the food that the fields had produced in the beginning and of course large parts of southern Iraq had to be abandoned. The land hasn't recovered even after thousands of years," he said.
Discoveries and technologies that start out being beneficial can end up being detrimental. For instance, when you move from a spear to a rifle you've made real progress in your ability to kill animals and other people, but when you move from a rifle to the hydrogen bomb you've made too much progress. You've built a weapon you cannot use without destroying most of the higher life on Earth.
He explains how the Mayans fell into a similar progress trap when their rulers followed a similarly self-serving and shortsighted path. The Maya built bigger and bigger temples at the end, just as our civilization is creating taller and taller skyscrapers. Evidence from Maya skeletons shows that while members of the ruling class became fatter and taller, peasants became shorter and thinner. There was a transfer of resources upwards over time, as we see in our society today, along with a "great reluctance to face up to the fact that the party was over." He sees similar cynical manipulations of tax structures today by those who are absurdly wealthy and reluctant to share any of that wealth.
The historian said we only have to look back 30 years to see staggering changes in the ratio of income between the CEO of a major American corporation and a shop floor worker in the same corporation. Three decades ago it was about 40 to 1; today it's more than 1,000 to 1. "We see fabulous amounts of wealth in a few hands and almost a third of the human race living in dire poverty," he explained. This pattern of the super rich avoiding taxes was seen towards the end of the Roman Empire too, when great landowners received huge tax exemptions. The tax burden was moved down the social pyramid and the state had to debase the coinage to meet its financial obligations. Meanwhile, there was increasing social unrest and Rome was rapidly turning into a city of slums.
Civilizations that have prospered and achieved brilliance in the past got into trouble because they were unable to change their ways of thinking and operating, and the very things that created their initial prosperity and success became liabilities. Wright sees the same happening now and his dystopian vision of the future leads to his warning that this will threaten not only our civilization but also the natural world on which it depends.
"There's an absolute inability to face up to the fact that there are limits … It goes against the cultural grain of North Americans who are used to having endless plenty, used to the idea that the future will always be bigger and better," Wright said. This is the thinking of a plunderer, not a wise steward. He explained, "One of the absolutely clear essences of history and archeology is that a healthy economy depends on a healthy environment and once you start eating into the environment to grow your so-called economy you are on a path to ruin."
He said our rapid technological advances have made it possible to suck more and more out of the environment and have made it seem as though human prosperity is detached from natural systems. "Of course the reverse is true. What we've been doing by these very sophisticated means of extracting things is actually taking out stuff that can never be replaced," he said.
Canadian geneticist, science broadcaster and environmental activist David Suzuki couldn't agree more and said the problems we face regarding energy and environmental issues are not technological, political or economic. They are psychological, and the path forward lies in learning to see the world differently.
"The environmental movement has failed," he said, because although we now have laws that protect clean air, clean water, endangered species and millions of hectares of land—we have not changed the way people think. "The failure was, in winning these battles, we didn't change the way we see the world ... We didn't get across the idea that the reason we wanted to stop logging here, or this dam, or this offshore drilling is we're a part of the biosphere and we've got to begin to behave in a way that protects the most fundamental things in our lives—air, water, soil and other species. That's the lesson of environmentalism and we failed to inculcate that in society," he said.
Suzuki explains that for most of human existence we knew we were part of nature and understood we had to be careful not to jeopardize our place in the natural world. Back in 1900 there were only 1.5 billion human beings on the planet and just 14 cities with populations of more than a million. Most lived in rural communities and were involved in farming.
Today, just more than a century later, we have more than seven billion people on Earth and hundreds of gigantic cities, dozen with populations of more than 20 million. "In cities we create our own habitat and as long as we have a park somewhere to go to camp and play in, who needs nature? The important thing in the city is your job and making money," Suzuki said. We have seen a fundamental shift from an understanding that we are part of and dependent on nature, to becoming urban dwellers whose priorities are economic.
"Humanity has grown so powerfully that we've become a geological force," he said. "There have never been so many people with the ability to affect the chemistry, the physics and the biology of the planet. A crunch is coming, because the biosphere has been so altered that there are going to be collapses and an inability to sustain the number of people on the planet."
Human beings are now co-opting 40 percent of what's called the net primary productivity of the planet. All of the energy captured by plants through photosynthesis is what powers life on Earth, he explains. We are in a species extinction crisis, because we're co-opting all the land for ourselves. "Environmentalists used to demonstrate for things like clean rivers and pristine forests, but now we're fighting for the future of the biosphere—all of the globe's ecosystems," he explained.
"We keep hearing about the bottom line and the economy, but the bottom line is actually the air that keeps us alive, that gives us our climate and weather. And it's the same with water. If we see the world through economic eyes, the things that matter most to us are worthless."
Suzuki moved into television in 1962—his program The Nature of Things has aired in nearly 50 countries—because he believed people needed more information. "I thought, the more information, the better information they have, the better decisions people will make," he said. However, he no longer believes that.
"People today have unprecedented access to information," he said, but we're going backwards and science itself is being discredited. There has been a huge investment in neo-conservative, right wing think tanks that claim a lot of environmental concerns are part of the left-wing movement toward socialism. "Scientific integrity and credibility have been undermined, and that is the greatest disappointment to me," said the former professor who has received 25 honorary degrees for his efforts to save the environment.
When 15,000 people died in Chicago one summer because of a heat wave; when 33,000 people died in Europe as a result of a heat wave; when New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina—each time he thought, "This has got to be it. I mean, people can't deny the fact that billions of dollars worth of pine trees have been destroyed in British Columbia because of the mountain pine beetle. The best sequester of carbon is our forests and we have the largest, last, intact forest on the planet in the boreal forest of Canada. What does it take for us to accept that something is going on?"
Suzuki notes that 150,000 years ago when we emerged as a species, our one brilliant advantage was a brain that invented the concept of a future. Based on our knowledge and experience, we could look ahead and anticipate threats. "It is this ability to avoid danger and exploit opportunity that has been at the heart of our success, that led us to take over every continent of the planet and become the dominant species," he said.
We have a huge population of scientists, and super-computers to aid them, who have spent the last four decades acting in the best tradition of our species, looking ahead, seeing where the dangers are and telling us we've got to change. "And now, we are being deliberately stalled … that's the tragedy," he said. "The success of our species is based on foresight, and now, we are turning our backs on that survival strategy."
Modern cultures are famously myopic when it comes to their world view, concurs Canadian anthropologist and ethno botanist Wade Davis, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence whose work has taken him from Peru to Polynesia, from the Amazon rainforest to the Mali desert. "That kind of cultural myopia has been the curse of humanity, and today it is evident in the way we think about the natural world," Davis said.
Most traditional cultures and indigenous people have a reciprocal relationship with the world. "They don't see it as just a stage upon which the human drama unfolds," he said. "They see it literally as a series of reciprocal exchanges in which the Earth has absolute obligations to humanity, and humanity has obligations to the Earth."
We in the western world were raised to believe the mountains are there to be mined, "which is completely different from a child of the Andes raised to believe that that mountain above his community was an Apu spirit, a deity, that would direct his destiny for the rest of his life." Here on the west coast of British Columbia, Davis said, we grow up believing forests exist to be cut. That makes us very different from a First Nations elder raised to believe those forests are the domain of spirits.
The interesting thing isn't who's right or wrong, he stresses, it's how the belief system mediates human interaction with the environment. "It reveals two profoundly different belief systems: One with a relatively benign ecological footprint for thousands of years, another which has razed the forests in three generations," Davis explained.
When the British first arrived in Australia, they saw people who looked strange, and had a very primitive technology. "But what really offended the British was that the aboriginal people had no interest in self-improvement, in progress, in changing their life," he said. "That was the fundamental ethos of 18th and 19th century Europe. As recently as 1902, it was debated in parliament in Australia as to whether aboriginal people were human or not. As recently as the 1960s, a school book called A Treasury of Fauna of Australia, included the aboriginal people amongst the interesting wildlife of the country." The entire purpose of life in Australia, for the civilization of the aboriginal people, was the antithesis of progress, said Davis. The whole purpose in life was to not change anything.
"What I find so moving when I go around the world is seeing the way indigenous people are dealing with the demonstrable evidence of climate change, whether in the Amazon or in the Andes, the Himalayas or the Arctic," he said. In Southern Peru there is a legendary pilgrimage called the Qoyllur Rit'I that involves tens of thousands of Indians from all over the Southern Andes converging on a sacred valley dominated by a glacier called the Colquepunku. The ritual involves, among other things, crawling up to the ice and chipping off small blocks, which are then carried back to elders who are incapable of making the pilgrimage.
"Watching the degree of recession of those glaciers, the people have unilaterally decided it's their fault, and this is a key thing," Davis said. "We think of climate change as a technical problem, a scientific problem, perhaps a controversial, political issue. They see it as their fault. So, these people, in this poignant act, have ceased chipping trivial blocks of ice from the glacier, breaking the sacred cycle of the ritual that goes back at least 2,000 years."
This is not their problem. This is a problem created by a narrow subset of humanity with a specific ideology and a specific attitude toward the world, Davis said. He does not suggest we return to a pre-industrial past, but that we recognize the existence of different ways of being alive on the planet and change the fundamental way we interact with it.
"In our lifetimes, we've seen Black people go from the woodshed to the White House; women go from the kitchen to the board room; gay people from the closet to the altar. Through space exploration we've reconfigured our entire notion of what the world is, and now we are being asked to re-think our integration into the natural world," Davis explained.
The scholars I interviewed here have elegantly revealed the story of our counter-evolutionary behavior, and they have offered a more enlightened and ethical way of looking at our natural world and interacting with it. As Otto Scharmer explained at the beginning of this blog, we have to change the inner condition of the intervener if we are to affect change and deal with the problems we face.
James Hoggan is president of the Vancouver PR firm Hoggan & Associates, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and founder of the influential website DeSmogBlog. He is also the author Climate Cover-Up, Do the Right Thing and the recently released I'm Right and You're an Idiot.
David Suzuki, Wade Davis, Ronald Wright: We Must Change the Way We Look at the Natural World
EcoWatchJun. 28, 2016 02:54PM ESTPOPULAR
By James Hoggan
In my last blog I reported some dire warnings from several of the world's top scientists, experts who are able to present facts about species extinction and climate change in ways we can all absorb. I have never been a pessimist, but we cannot ignore these alarm bells or allow ourselves to get bogged down in denial and acrid debate. These problems are serious and they won't go away on their own.
As I explain in my new book, I'm Right and You're an Idiot, the driving mechanism behind significant social change is an urgent sense of the moral challenge combined with a credible path forward. Social justice advocate Marshall Ganz stresses that both dissonance and hope must be present if we are to spark change. MIT Sloan School of Management's Otto Scharmer adds the success of any intervention depends less upon the specific actions taken, and more upon the inner condition of the intervener.
So clearly, if we want to solve these global environmental problems we need to change the way we see the world and the way we interact with nature. And we also need to shift not only our attention but also our intention.
In this blog I highlight the insights of three experts who urge us to do this by tapping into mankind's extraordinary gift of foresight, the lessons of history and the wisdom of indigenous cultures.
Ronald Wright, Canadian author of the bestseller, A Short History of Progress, who studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, sees a pattern in our refusal to take our collective foot off the accelerator and slow the greedy advance of civilization. He said we North Americans are heavily invested in selling hydrocarbons but are in denial about it because of, "controversies stirred up by massive funding from big oil companies that create bogus scientific institutes."
Civilizations rise and fall, prosper then collapse when the very technologies that created prosperity and success in the first place become liabilities, said the scholar who described this in his Massey Lectures. He calls this downfall of societies the progress trap and refers to examples in Easter Island, ancient Rome, Sumer and more, where innovations created new problems of their own, conditions that were worse than those that existed before the innovation.
It can start with something as seemingly simple as irrigation. People run canals into the desert to grow more food, but that leads to more people, more houses and other concerns. After many centuries, the ancient Sumerians found their fields were turning white because salts were building up when water evaporated. They didn't deal with the problem because they had expanded to a point where it was beyond their ability to change. They were locked into the system and ignored the warnings. "In a matter of 1,000 years, start to finish, they ended up producing only a quarter of the food that the fields had produced in the beginning and of course large parts of southern Iraq had to be abandoned. The land hasn't recovered even after thousands of years," he said.
Discoveries and technologies that start out being beneficial can end up being detrimental. For instance, when you move from a spear to a rifle you've made real progress in your ability to kill animals and other people, but when you move from a rifle to the hydrogen bomb you've made too much progress. You've built a weapon you cannot use without destroying most of the higher life on Earth.
He explains how the Mayans fell into a similar progress trap when their rulers followed a similarly self-serving and shortsighted path. The Maya built bigger and bigger temples at the end, just as our civilization is creating taller and taller skyscrapers. Evidence from Maya skeletons shows that while members of the ruling class became fatter and taller, peasants became shorter and thinner. There was a transfer of resources upwards over time, as we see in our society today, along with a "great reluctance to face up to the fact that the party was over." He sees similar cynical manipulations of tax structures today by those who are absurdly wealthy and reluctant to share any of that wealth.
The historian said we only have to look back 30 years to see staggering changes in the ratio of income between the CEO of a major American corporation and a shop floor worker in the same corporation. Three decades ago it was about 40 to 1; today it's more than 1,000 to 1. "We see fabulous amounts of wealth in a few hands and almost a third of the human race living in dire poverty," he explained. This pattern of the super rich avoiding taxes was seen towards the end of the Roman Empire too, when great landowners received huge tax exemptions. The tax burden was moved down the social pyramid and the state had to debase the coinage to meet its financial obligations. Meanwhile, there was increasing social unrest and Rome was rapidly turning into a city of slums.
Civilizations that have prospered and achieved brilliance in the past got into trouble because they were unable to change their ways of thinking and operating, and the very things that created their initial prosperity and success became liabilities. Wright sees the same happening now and his dystopian vision of the future leads to his warning that this will threaten not only our civilization but also the natural world on which it depends.
"There's an absolute inability to face up to the fact that there are limits … It goes against the cultural grain of North Americans who are used to having endless plenty, used to the idea that the future will always be bigger and better," Wright said. This is the thinking of a plunderer, not a wise steward. He explained, "One of the absolutely clear essences of history and archeology is that a healthy economy depends on a healthy environment and once you start eating into the environment to grow your so-called economy you are on a path to ruin."
He said our rapid technological advances have made it possible to suck more and more out of the environment and have made it seem as though human prosperity is detached from natural systems. "Of course the reverse is true. What we've been doing by these very sophisticated means of extracting things is actually taking out stuff that can never be replaced," he said.
Canadian geneticist, science broadcaster and environmental activist David Suzuki couldn't agree more and said the problems we face regarding energy and environmental issues are not technological, political or economic. They are psychological, and the path forward lies in learning to see the world differently.
"The environmental movement has failed," he said, because although we now have laws that protect clean air, clean water, endangered species and millions of hectares of land—we have not changed the way people think. "The failure was, in winning these battles, we didn't change the way we see the world ... We didn't get across the idea that the reason we wanted to stop logging here, or this dam, or this offshore drilling is we're a part of the biosphere and we've got to begin to behave in a way that protects the most fundamental things in our lives—air, water, soil and other species. That's the lesson of environmentalism and we failed to inculcate that in society," he said.
Suzuki explains that for most of human existence we knew we were part of nature and understood we had to be careful not to jeopardize our place in the natural world. Back in 1900 there were only 1.5 billion human beings on the planet and just 14 cities with populations of more than a million. Most lived in rural communities and were involved in farming.
Today, just more than a century later, we have more than seven billion people on Earth and hundreds of gigantic cities, dozen with populations of more than 20 million. "In cities we create our own habitat and as long as we have a park somewhere to go to camp and play in, who needs nature? The important thing in the city is your job and making money," Suzuki said. We have seen a fundamental shift from an understanding that we are part of and dependent on nature, to becoming urban dwellers whose priorities are economic.
"Humanity has grown so powerfully that we've become a geological force," he said. "There have never been so many people with the ability to affect the chemistry, the physics and the biology of the planet. A crunch is coming, because the biosphere has been so altered that there are going to be collapses and an inability to sustain the number of people on the planet."
Human beings are now co-opting 40 percent of what's called the net primary productivity of the planet. All of the energy captured by plants through photosynthesis is what powers life on Earth, he explains. We are in a species extinction crisis, because we're co-opting all the land for ourselves. "Environmentalists used to demonstrate for things like clean rivers and pristine forests, but now we're fighting for the future of the biosphere—all of the globe's ecosystems," he explained.
"We keep hearing about the bottom line and the economy, but the bottom line is actually the air that keeps us alive, that gives us our climate and weather. And it's the same with water. If we see the world through economic eyes, the things that matter most to us are worthless."
Suzuki moved into television in 1962—his program The Nature of Things has aired in nearly 50 countries—because he believed people needed more information. "I thought, the more information, the better information they have, the better decisions people will make," he said. However, he no longer believes that.
"People today have unprecedented access to information," he said, but we're going backwards and science itself is being discredited. There has been a huge investment in neo-conservative, right wing think tanks that claim a lot of environmental concerns are part of the left-wing movement toward socialism. "Scientific integrity and credibility have been undermined, and that is the greatest disappointment to me," said the former professor who has received 25 honorary degrees for his efforts to save the environment.
When 15,000 people died in Chicago one summer because of a heat wave; when 33,000 people died in Europe as a result of a heat wave; when New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina—each time he thought, "This has got to be it. I mean, people can't deny the fact that billions of dollars worth of pine trees have been destroyed in British Columbia because of the mountain pine beetle. The best sequester of carbon is our forests and we have the largest, last, intact forest on the planet in the boreal forest of Canada. What does it take for us to accept that something is going on?"
Suzuki notes that 150,000 years ago when we emerged as a species, our one brilliant advantage was a brain that invented the concept of a future. Based on our knowledge and experience, we could look ahead and anticipate threats. "It is this ability to avoid danger and exploit opportunity that has been at the heart of our success, that led us to take over every continent of the planet and become the dominant species," he said.
We have a huge population of scientists, and super-computers to aid them, who have spent the last four decades acting in the best tradition of our species, looking ahead, seeing where the dangers are and telling us we've got to change. "And now, we are being deliberately stalled … that's the tragedy," he said. "The success of our species is based on foresight, and now, we are turning our backs on that survival strategy."
Modern cultures are famously myopic when it comes to their world view, concurs Canadian anthropologist and ethno botanist Wade Davis, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence whose work has taken him from Peru to Polynesia, from the Amazon rainforest to the Mali desert. "That kind of cultural myopia has been the curse of humanity, and today it is evident in the way we think about the natural world," Davis said.
Most traditional cultures and indigenous people have a reciprocal relationship with the world. "They don't see it as just a stage upon which the human drama unfolds," he said. "They see it literally as a series of reciprocal exchanges in which the Earth has absolute obligations to humanity, and humanity has obligations to the Earth."
We in the western world were raised to believe the mountains are there to be mined, "which is completely different from a child of the Andes raised to believe that that mountain above his community was an Apu spirit, a deity, that would direct his destiny for the rest of his life." Here on the west coast of British Columbia, Davis said, we grow up believing forests exist to be cut. That makes us very different from a First Nations elder raised to believe those forests are the domain of spirits.
The interesting thing isn't who's right or wrong, he stresses, it's how the belief system mediates human interaction with the environment. "It reveals two profoundly different belief systems: One with a relatively benign ecological footprint for thousands of years, another which has razed the forests in three generations," Davis explained.
When the British first arrived in Australia, they saw people who looked strange, and had a very primitive technology. "But what really offended the British was that the aboriginal people had no interest in self-improvement, in progress, in changing their life," he said. "That was the fundamental ethos of 18th and 19th century Europe. As recently as 1902, it was debated in parliament in Australia as to whether aboriginal people were human or not. As recently as the 1960s, a school book called A Treasury of Fauna of Australia, included the aboriginal people amongst the interesting wildlife of the country." The entire purpose of life in Australia, for the civilization of the aboriginal people, was the antithesis of progress, said Davis. The whole purpose in life was to not change anything.
"What I find so moving when I go around the world is seeing the way indigenous people are dealing with the demonstrable evidence of climate change, whether in the Amazon or in the Andes, the Himalayas or the Arctic," he said. In Southern Peru there is a legendary pilgrimage called the Qoyllur Rit'I that involves tens of thousands of Indians from all over the Southern Andes converging on a sacred valley dominated by a glacier called the Colquepunku. The ritual involves, among other things, crawling up to the ice and chipping off small blocks, which are then carried back to elders who are incapable of making the pilgrimage.
"Watching the degree of recession of those glaciers, the people have unilaterally decided it's their fault, and this is a key thing," Davis said. "We think of climate change as a technical problem, a scientific problem, perhaps a controversial, political issue. They see it as their fault. So, these people, in this poignant act, have ceased chipping trivial blocks of ice from the glacier, breaking the sacred cycle of the ritual that goes back at least 2,000 years."
This is not their problem. This is a problem created by a narrow subset of humanity with a specific ideology and a specific attitude toward the world, Davis said. He does not suggest we return to a pre-industrial past, but that we recognize the existence of different ways of being alive on the planet and change the fundamental way we interact with it.
"In our lifetimes, we've seen Black people go from the woodshed to the White House; women go from the kitchen to the board room; gay people from the closet to the altar. Through space exploration we've reconfigured our entire notion of what the world is, and now we are being asked to re-think our integration into the natural world," Davis explained.
The scholars I interviewed here have elegantly revealed the story of our counter-evolutionary behavior, and they have offered a more enlightened and ethical way of looking at our natural world and interacting with it. As Otto Scharmer explained at the beginning of this blog, we have to change the inner condition of the intervener if we are to affect change and deal with the problems we face.
James Hoggan is president of the Vancouver PR firm Hoggan & Associates, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and founder of the influential website DeSmogBlog. He is also the author Climate Cover-Up, Do the Right Thing and the recently released I'm Right and You're an Idiot.
2020/07/21
장유유서 - 위키낱말사전 長幼有序 일어
장유유서 - 위키낱말사전
장유유서
어원: 長幼有序(장유유서).
장유유서
1. 어른과 아이 사이에는 차례와 질서가 있어야 한다.
長幼有序 ちょうよう－ゆうじょ
-
意味 年上と年下の間にある、守るべき社会的、道徳的な秩序のこと。
「長幼」は年齢が上の人と下の人。
「序」は順序、席次のこと。
儒教の五つの道徳法則、五倫のうちの一つ。
장유유서
어원: 長幼有序(장유유서).
장유유서
1. 어른과 아이 사이에는 차례와 질서가 있어야 한다.
長幼有序 ちょうよう－ゆうじょ
-
意味 年上と年下の間にある、守るべき社会的、道徳的な秩序のこと。
「長幼」は年齢が上の人と下の人。
「序」は順序、席次のこと。
儒教の五つの道徳法則、五倫のうちの一つ。
[역사와 현실]장유유서(長幼有序)의 오해 - 경향신문
[역사와 현실]장유유서(長幼有序)의 오해 - 경향신문
[역사와 현실]장유유서(長幼有序)의 오해장유승 단국대 동양학연구원 책임연구원
입력 : 2018.11.07
우리나라 사람들, 나이를 많이 따진다. 학교는 한 살 차이로 학년이 달라지니 그렇다 쳐도, 직장은 엄연히 직급이 있는데도 나이를 따진다. 처음 만나는 사람들은 서로 나이부터 확인하고, 모르는 사람과 싸움이 붙어도 반드시 나오는 말이 “너 몇 살이야?”다. 나이차가 많으면 모를까, 몇 살 차이 나지 않는 사람들도 나이를 따진다. 이로 인해 세대 간 갈등은 물론 세대 내 갈등까지 빚어진다. 노인끼리 나이를 따지며 노약자석을 다투는 사태가 벌어지는 것이다. 청년들도 나이에 민감하다. 취업시장에서는 한 살이라도 어려야 유리하다는 것이 정설이다. 나이 많은 신입사원을 꺼리기 때문이다. 중장년층의 재취업이 어려운 것도 나이 따지는 문화 때문이다.
나이 따지는 문화의 원흉으로 지목되는 것이 ‘장유유서’다. 나이순으로 서열을 정하는 유교적 잔재가 이 모든 문제의 근원이라는 것이다. 하여간 나쁜 건 전부 유교적 잔재란다. 한국 사회의 모든 문제를 유교적 잔재 탓으로 돌리는 건 게으른 사회학자의 핑계에 불과하다. 문제를 해결하려면 원인을 정확히 파악해야 한다. 결론부터 말하면 장유유서는 나이와 무관하다.
장유유서는 <맹자>에 나오는 말이다. 먼 옛날 순임금이 다섯 가지 유형의 인간관계에서 지켜야 할 윤리를 제시했다. 부자유친은 부자관계, 군신유의는 상하관계, 부부유별은 부부관계, 붕우유신은 수평관계, 그리고 장유유서다. 장유유서는 어떤 관계에 적용되는 윤리일까? 형제관계, 조금 더 확대하면 친족관계의 윤리다. 사회윤리가 아니라 가족윤리라는 말이다. 그러니 장유유서를 찾고 싶으면 집에 가서 찾든가 명절에 친척들 모인 자리에서 찾는 것이 좋겠다.
과거 지역사회는 대부분 집성촌이었다. 혈연으로 맺어진 친족들이 한 마을에 살았다. 여러 사람이 모이면 순서가 있어야 하는 법, 어른과 아이를 구분하여 순서를 정하는 것도 한 방법이다. 그렇다면 어른과 아이를 구분하는 기준은 뭘까? 나이라고 생각하기 쉽지만 천만의 말씀이다. 종법(宗法) 질서가 지배하는 유교사회에서는 숫자에 불과한 나이 따위를 기준으로 위아래를 정하지 않는다. 장유유서는 소목(昭穆)의 순서, 쉽게 말해 항렬의 순서다. 나이 어린 삼촌을 어른 대접해야 하는 이유가 이것이다.
사촌 이내의 가까운 친척이라면 대체로 나이와 항렬이 일치하므로 별 문제가 없다. 하지만 사돈의 팔촌까지 함께 사는 마을에서 나이순으로 위아래를 정하면 순서가 꼬인다. 속된 말로 ‘개족보’가 되는 것이다. 유교적 관념으로는 결코 용납할 수 없는 사태다. 유교사회에서는 나이를 따지지 않는다. 따지는 건 항렬의 상하와 적서(嫡庶) 여부다. 백발이 성성한 노인이 어린이를 존대하는 일이 드물지 않았던 것도 이 때문이다.
취학연령도 취업연령도 없었던 과거에는 나이에 큰 의미를 두지 않았다. 함께 공부하는 학생끼리도 나이가 제각각이었다. 과거에 합격한 나이도, 처음 관직에 오른 나이도 천차만별이었다. 자연히 나이에 상관없이 친구로 지냈다. 역사에 길이 남은 ‘절친’들도 나이차가 제법 많았다. 함께 공놀이하던 김유신과 김춘추는 일곱 살 차이, 동문수학한 정몽주와 정도전은 다섯 살 차이, 오성과 한음으로 알려진 단짝 이항복과 이덕형도 다섯 살 차이다. 지금이라면 친구로 지내기 애매하겠지만 그들은 전혀 상관하지 않았다. 열 살 가까이 차이 나는 친구도 드물지 않았다. 옛날책을 아무리 뒤져봐도 한두 살 차이까지 따지는 엄격한 장유유서 문화는 보이지 않는다. 더구나 같은 유교문화권인 중국과 일본은 우리처럼 나이를 따지지 않는다. 그렇다면 나이 따지는 문화의 원흉은 유교 아닌 다른 데서 찾아야 하지 않겠는가.
나이 따지는 문화는 전근대적 유산처럼 보이지만 아이러니하게도 근대의 산물이다. 근대적 학제의 도입은 취학연령과 교육과정을 법제화했다. 모든 학생이 같은 나이에 입학해서 정해진 기간 동안 공부하고 같은 나이에 졸업했다. 자연히 취업과 결혼, 승진과 정년에 적합한 나이도 대충 정해졌다. 제 나이에 정해진 경로를 따라가면 성공한 인생이고, 따라가지 못하면 실패한 인생이다. 나이에 민감해지지 않을 수 없다.
정해진 경로를 따라가는 인생에서 나이는 사회적 서열을 가늠하는 기준이다. 결국 나이 따지는 문화는 서열에 민감한 우리 사회의 단면이다. 서열이 자주 바뀌면 덜 민감하겠지만, 한 번 정해진 서열은 좀처럼 바뀌지 않는다. 월반과 유급이 사라진 학교, 능력과 성과보다 근속연수가 중요한 직장, 개성과 다양성을 무시하고 획일화를 지향하는 사회, 이것이 나이 따지는 문화가 사라지지 않는 이유다.
원숭이 무리조차 서열이 자주 바뀌는데 그보다 높은 잠재력을 가진 인간의 서열이 바뀌지 않는다면 문제다. 서열이 고착화된 사회는 병든 사회다. 서열을 없앨 수 없다면 최소한 바뀌기 쉽게 만들어야 한다. 하지만 반발이 만만치 않을 것이다. 갑작스러운 서열 변화를 반기기보다는 두려워하는 사람이 많을지도 모르겠다. 나이 따지는 문화가 불만이라면, 엄한 유교를 탓하기 앞서 우리 사회가 교육과 노동의 전면적인 변화를 감수할 준비가 되어 있는지 묻는 것이 순서다.
원문보기:
http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?art_id=201811072048005#csidx9b979b75a7bf269978e1fc334dbf5ef
[역사와 현실]장유유서(長幼有序)의 오해장유승 단국대 동양학연구원 책임연구원
입력 : 2018.11.07
우리나라 사람들, 나이를 많이 따진다. 학교는 한 살 차이로 학년이 달라지니 그렇다 쳐도, 직장은 엄연히 직급이 있는데도 나이를 따진다. 처음 만나는 사람들은 서로 나이부터 확인하고, 모르는 사람과 싸움이 붙어도 반드시 나오는 말이 “너 몇 살이야?”다. 나이차가 많으면 모를까, 몇 살 차이 나지 않는 사람들도 나이를 따진다. 이로 인해 세대 간 갈등은 물론 세대 내 갈등까지 빚어진다. 노인끼리 나이를 따지며 노약자석을 다투는 사태가 벌어지는 것이다. 청년들도 나이에 민감하다. 취업시장에서는 한 살이라도 어려야 유리하다는 것이 정설이다. 나이 많은 신입사원을 꺼리기 때문이다. 중장년층의 재취업이 어려운 것도 나이 따지는 문화 때문이다.
나이 따지는 문화의 원흉으로 지목되는 것이 ‘장유유서’다. 나이순으로 서열을 정하는 유교적 잔재가 이 모든 문제의 근원이라는 것이다. 하여간 나쁜 건 전부 유교적 잔재란다. 한국 사회의 모든 문제를 유교적 잔재 탓으로 돌리는 건 게으른 사회학자의 핑계에 불과하다. 문제를 해결하려면 원인을 정확히 파악해야 한다. 결론부터 말하면 장유유서는 나이와 무관하다.
장유유서는 <맹자>에 나오는 말이다. 먼 옛날 순임금이 다섯 가지 유형의 인간관계에서 지켜야 할 윤리를 제시했다. 부자유친은 부자관계, 군신유의는 상하관계, 부부유별은 부부관계, 붕우유신은 수평관계, 그리고 장유유서다. 장유유서는 어떤 관계에 적용되는 윤리일까? 형제관계, 조금 더 확대하면 친족관계의 윤리다. 사회윤리가 아니라 가족윤리라는 말이다. 그러니 장유유서를 찾고 싶으면 집에 가서 찾든가 명절에 친척들 모인 자리에서 찾는 것이 좋겠다.
과거 지역사회는 대부분 집성촌이었다. 혈연으로 맺어진 친족들이 한 마을에 살았다. 여러 사람이 모이면 순서가 있어야 하는 법, 어른과 아이를 구분하여 순서를 정하는 것도 한 방법이다. 그렇다면 어른과 아이를 구분하는 기준은 뭘까? 나이라고 생각하기 쉽지만 천만의 말씀이다. 종법(宗法) 질서가 지배하는 유교사회에서는 숫자에 불과한 나이 따위를 기준으로 위아래를 정하지 않는다. 장유유서는 소목(昭穆)의 순서, 쉽게 말해 항렬의 순서다. 나이 어린 삼촌을 어른 대접해야 하는 이유가 이것이다.
사촌 이내의 가까운 친척이라면 대체로 나이와 항렬이 일치하므로 별 문제가 없다. 하지만 사돈의 팔촌까지 함께 사는 마을에서 나이순으로 위아래를 정하면 순서가 꼬인다. 속된 말로 ‘개족보’가 되는 것이다. 유교적 관념으로는 결코 용납할 수 없는 사태다. 유교사회에서는 나이를 따지지 않는다. 따지는 건 항렬의 상하와 적서(嫡庶) 여부다. 백발이 성성한 노인이 어린이를 존대하는 일이 드물지 않았던 것도 이 때문이다.
취학연령도 취업연령도 없었던 과거에는 나이에 큰 의미를 두지 않았다. 함께 공부하는 학생끼리도 나이가 제각각이었다. 과거에 합격한 나이도, 처음 관직에 오른 나이도 천차만별이었다. 자연히 나이에 상관없이 친구로 지냈다. 역사에 길이 남은 ‘절친’들도 나이차가 제법 많았다. 함께 공놀이하던 김유신과 김춘추는 일곱 살 차이, 동문수학한 정몽주와 정도전은 다섯 살 차이, 오성과 한음으로 알려진 단짝 이항복과 이덕형도 다섯 살 차이다. 지금이라면 친구로 지내기 애매하겠지만 그들은 전혀 상관하지 않았다. 열 살 가까이 차이 나는 친구도 드물지 않았다. 옛날책을 아무리 뒤져봐도 한두 살 차이까지 따지는 엄격한 장유유서 문화는 보이지 않는다. 더구나 같은 유교문화권인 중국과 일본은 우리처럼 나이를 따지지 않는다. 그렇다면 나이 따지는 문화의 원흉은 유교 아닌 다른 데서 찾아야 하지 않겠는가.
나이 따지는 문화는 전근대적 유산처럼 보이지만 아이러니하게도 근대의 산물이다. 근대적 학제의 도입은 취학연령과 교육과정을 법제화했다. 모든 학생이 같은 나이에 입학해서 정해진 기간 동안 공부하고 같은 나이에 졸업했다. 자연히 취업과 결혼, 승진과 정년에 적합한 나이도 대충 정해졌다. 제 나이에 정해진 경로를 따라가면 성공한 인생이고, 따라가지 못하면 실패한 인생이다. 나이에 민감해지지 않을 수 없다.
정해진 경로를 따라가는 인생에서 나이는 사회적 서열을 가늠하는 기준이다. 결국 나이 따지는 문화는 서열에 민감한 우리 사회의 단면이다. 서열이 자주 바뀌면 덜 민감하겠지만, 한 번 정해진 서열은 좀처럼 바뀌지 않는다. 월반과 유급이 사라진 학교, 능력과 성과보다 근속연수가 중요한 직장, 개성과 다양성을 무시하고 획일화를 지향하는 사회, 이것이 나이 따지는 문화가 사라지지 않는 이유다.
원숭이 무리조차 서열이 자주 바뀌는데 그보다 높은 잠재력을 가진 인간의 서열이 바뀌지 않는다면 문제다. 서열이 고착화된 사회는 병든 사회다. 서열을 없앨 수 없다면 최소한 바뀌기 쉽게 만들어야 한다. 하지만 반발이 만만치 않을 것이다. 갑작스러운 서열 변화를 반기기보다는 두려워하는 사람이 많을지도 모르겠다. 나이 따지는 문화가 불만이라면, 엄한 유교를 탓하기 앞서 우리 사회가 교육과 노동의 전면적인 변화를 감수할 준비가 되어 있는지 묻는 것이 순서다.
원문보기:
http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?art_id=201811072048005#csidx9b979b75a7bf269978e1fc334dbf5ef
Amazon.com: Buddhism beyond Gender: Liberation from Attachment to Identity eBook: Gross, Rita M., Simmer-Brown, Judith: Kindle Store
Amazon.com: Buddhism beyond Gender: Liberation from Attachment to Identity
eBook: Gross, Rita M., Simmer-Brown, Judith: Kindle Store
![Buddhism beyond Gender: Liberation from Attachment to Identity by [Rita M. Gross, Judith Simmer-Brown]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51mdZuiaqGL.jpg)
Buddhism beyond Gender: Liberation from Attachment to Identity
Kindle Edition
by Rita M. Gross (Author), Judith Simmer-Brown (Introduction)
----
Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
See all formats and editions
Kindle
from $18.99
Read with Our Free App
Paperback
$17.58
33 Used from $2.93
20 New from $4.99
Read less
Length: 189 pages Word Wise: Enabled Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
---
A bold and provocative work from the late preeminent feminist scholar, which challenges men and women alike to free themselves from attachment to gender.
At the heart of Buddhism is the notion of egolessness—“forgetting the self”—as the path to awakening. In fact, attachment to views of any kind only leads to more suffering for ourselves and others. And what has a greater hold on people’s imaginations or limits them more, asks Rita Gross, than ideas about biological sex and what she calls “the prison of gender roles”? Yet if clinging to gender identity does, indeed, create obstacles for us, why does the prison of gender roles remain so inescapable? Gross uses the lenses of Buddhist philosophy to deconstruct the powerful concept of gender and its impact on our lives. In revealing the inadequacies involved in clinging to gender identity, she illuminates the suffering that results from clinging to any kind of identity at all.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Rita Gross offers readers an amazing example of a lifelong, ongoing commitment to feminist thinking and practice. Her visionary insistence that the path to ending patriarchal domination must lead us beyond gender is a revolutionary paradigm shift, one that can lead to greater freedom for everyone.”—bell hooks
“In terma (treasure) traditions, texts appear in the world, mysteriously, at the precise moment when they will have the greatest benefit. Rita Gross’s posthumously published book, Buddhism beyond Gender—set to be released by Shambhala Publications at a time when clarity around gender is needed more than ever—may be just such a treasure.”—Lion’s Roar
"In Buddhism Beyond Gender, Rita Gross provides her final and most candid assessment of the state of gender dynamics within Buddhism... This book feels as much as a scholarly culmination as it does a call to arms."—Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies
“The Buddhist scriptures tell us that we are neither male nor female—that gender is an illusion, and that clinging to it just brings suffering. In this, her last book, Rita Gross, one of the founding figures in the feminist study of religion, explains why this is so. One of the few academics to speak from an insider’s perspective, Professor Gross devoted most of her life to challenging the structures of patriarchy and oppression in the Buddhist tradition—to ‘repairing’ the tradition and making it more just. Buddhism beyond Gender is Rita Gross at her very best: clear, direct, insightful, and uncompromising. The book is not just an important contribution to Buddhism and gender studies, it is a practical guidebook on how to see through the fictions of gender identity and free oneself from the prison of gender roles so as to lead a more liberated life.”—José Ignacio Cabezón, Dalai Lama Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
---
About the Author
RITA M. GROSS (1943–2015) was Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies in Religion at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. An important figure in the study of women in religion in general, she was also a Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner and teacher, appointed a lopon by Mindrolling Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche.
She is the author, coauthor, or editor of eleven books, including her classic Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Product details
---
File Size: 1358 KB
Print Length: 189 pages
Publisher: Shambhala (March 27, 2018)
Publication Date: March 27, 2018
Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B076NPZW4F
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
---
Customer reviews
4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
3 customer ratings
----
Top Reviews
Top Reviews
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinarily insightful
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2018
Verified Purchase
I found this book to be extraordinarily insightful. As a Buddhist practitioner--one who cares deeply about the issues of gender but feels they are underrepresented or glossed over--this book was a revelation. The main theme is that attachment to gender roles—of any gender—creates suffering. The author refers to this as the “prison of gender roles.” But ultimately, the view in Buddhism is that attachment to any fixed views or fixed identity leads to suffering. She shows both how we as individuals can find freedom (through emptiness, or egolessness) and how Buddhist traditions can address this. I love the author’s occasional personal anecdotes of how she’s confronted issues related to gender roles in her own life.
As for the one-star review that exists for this book, my impression is that the reviewer missed the forest for the trees, though I wish them the best.
15 people found this helpful
-----
Lisa Rayner
1.0 out of 5 stars people like my transgender wife
Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2018
Shambala Publications has disgraced itself by publishing this book by an openly transphobic author. Transphobia hurts real human beings every day, people like my transgender wife, and me, a non-binary person. Rita Gross gave talks about the book while she was writing it. Even though she died before she could write about transgender people, leaving a placeholder in the book, it is clear that what she would have written would likely have been transphobic. Before her death, she expressed much ignorance about transgender people. She also appeared to conflate gender roles with gender identity, like many 2nd wave feminists still do (trans exclusionary feminists who believe, wrongly, that transgender women are not women). There is plenty of scientific data on the effects of hormone timing in the womb on the sex and gender of developing embryos. The Endocrine Society recently published a position statement that transgender identity is not a mental illness and that biology underlies gender identity. The commenters on this page who are writing transphobic opinions are just making the situation worse. When did science-denialism become “Buddhist” Transphobic Buddhist feminists. What a horrific perspective on Buddhism and 2nd wave feminism. Where’s the empathy and compassion for the real human beings who are discriminated against and treated poorly every day because they were born transgender? Shambala Publications has harmed the public perception of Buddhism. I will never look at this company or Buddhism the same benign way again.
Read less
9 people found this helpful
----
eBook: Gross, Rita M., Simmer-Brown, Judith: Kindle Store
Buddhism beyond Gender: Liberation from Attachment to Identity
Kindle Edition
by Rita M. Gross (Author), Judith Simmer-Brown (Introduction)
----
Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
See all formats and editions
Kindle
from $18.99
Read with Our Free App
Paperback
$17.58
33 Used from $2.93
20 New from $4.99
Read less
Length: 189 pages Word Wise: Enabled Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
---
A bold and provocative work from the late preeminent feminist scholar, which challenges men and women alike to free themselves from attachment to gender.
At the heart of Buddhism is the notion of egolessness—“forgetting the self”—as the path to awakening. In fact, attachment to views of any kind only leads to more suffering for ourselves and others. And what has a greater hold on people’s imaginations or limits them more, asks Rita Gross, than ideas about biological sex and what she calls “the prison of gender roles”? Yet if clinging to gender identity does, indeed, create obstacles for us, why does the prison of gender roles remain so inescapable? Gross uses the lenses of Buddhist philosophy to deconstruct the powerful concept of gender and its impact on our lives. In revealing the inadequacies involved in clinging to gender identity, she illuminates the suffering that results from clinging to any kind of identity at all.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Rita Gross offers readers an amazing example of a lifelong, ongoing commitment to feminist thinking and practice. Her visionary insistence that the path to ending patriarchal domination must lead us beyond gender is a revolutionary paradigm shift, one that can lead to greater freedom for everyone.”—bell hooks
“In terma (treasure) traditions, texts appear in the world, mysteriously, at the precise moment when they will have the greatest benefit. Rita Gross’s posthumously published book, Buddhism beyond Gender—set to be released by Shambhala Publications at a time when clarity around gender is needed more than ever—may be just such a treasure.”—Lion’s Roar
"In Buddhism Beyond Gender, Rita Gross provides her final and most candid assessment of the state of gender dynamics within Buddhism... This book feels as much as a scholarly culmination as it does a call to arms."—Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies
“The Buddhist scriptures tell us that we are neither male nor female—that gender is an illusion, and that clinging to it just brings suffering. In this, her last book, Rita Gross, one of the founding figures in the feminist study of religion, explains why this is so. One of the few academics to speak from an insider’s perspective, Professor Gross devoted most of her life to challenging the structures of patriarchy and oppression in the Buddhist tradition—to ‘repairing’ the tradition and making it more just. Buddhism beyond Gender is Rita Gross at her very best: clear, direct, insightful, and uncompromising. The book is not just an important contribution to Buddhism and gender studies, it is a practical guidebook on how to see through the fictions of gender identity and free oneself from the prison of gender roles so as to lead a more liberated life.”—José Ignacio Cabezón, Dalai Lama Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
---
About the Author
RITA M. GROSS (1943–2015) was Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies in Religion at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. An important figure in the study of women in religion in general, she was also a Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner and teacher, appointed a lopon by Mindrolling Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche.
She is the author, coauthor, or editor of eleven books, including her classic Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Product details
---
File Size: 1358 KB
Print Length: 189 pages
Publisher: Shambhala (March 27, 2018)
Publication Date: March 27, 2018
Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B076NPZW4F
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
---
Customer reviews
4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
3 customer ratings
----
Top Reviews
Top Reviews
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinarily insightful
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2018
Verified Purchase
I found this book to be extraordinarily insightful. As a Buddhist practitioner--one who cares deeply about the issues of gender but feels they are underrepresented or glossed over--this book was a revelation. The main theme is that attachment to gender roles—of any gender—creates suffering. The author refers to this as the “prison of gender roles.” But ultimately, the view in Buddhism is that attachment to any fixed views or fixed identity leads to suffering. She shows both how we as individuals can find freedom (through emptiness, or egolessness) and how Buddhist traditions can address this. I love the author’s occasional personal anecdotes of how she’s confronted issues related to gender roles in her own life.
As for the one-star review that exists for this book, my impression is that the reviewer missed the forest for the trees, though I wish them the best.
15 people found this helpful
-----
Lisa Rayner
1.0 out of 5 stars people like my transgender wife
Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2018
Shambala Publications has disgraced itself by publishing this book by an openly transphobic author. Transphobia hurts real human beings every day, people like my transgender wife, and me, a non-binary person. Rita Gross gave talks about the book while she was writing it. Even though she died before she could write about transgender people, leaving a placeholder in the book, it is clear that what she would have written would likely have been transphobic. Before her death, she expressed much ignorance about transgender people. She also appeared to conflate gender roles with gender identity, like many 2nd wave feminists still do (trans exclusionary feminists who believe, wrongly, that transgender women are not women). There is plenty of scientific data on the effects of hormone timing in the womb on the sex and gender of developing embryos. The Endocrine Society recently published a position statement that transgender identity is not a mental illness and that biology underlies gender identity. The commenters on this page who are writing transphobic opinions are just making the situation worse. When did science-denialism become “Buddhist” Transphobic Buddhist feminists. What a horrific perspective on Buddhism and 2nd wave feminism. Where’s the empathy and compassion for the real human beings who are discriminated against and treated poorly every day because they were born transgender? Shambala Publications has harmed the public perception of Buddhism. I will never look at this company or Buddhism the same benign way again.
Read less
9 people found this helpful
----
2020/07/20
Japanese Memories of the Asia-Pacific War: Analyzing the Revisionist Turn Post-1995 | The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
Japanese Memories of the Asia-Pacific War: Analyzing the Revisionist Turn Post-1995 | The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
Japanese Memories of the Asia-Pacific War: Analyzing the Revisionist Turn Post-1995
Akiko Takenaka
October 15, 2016
Volume 14 | Issue 20 | Number 8
Article ID 4967
This essay begins with three notable incidents of recent years, which are indicative of contemporary trends in the politics of war memory in Japan. The first is associated with the Abe administration’s 2015 passage of the Collective Self Defense Bill: an interpretation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which allows the Japanese Self Defense Forces to engage in military affairs when an ally of Japan is deemed to be under threat. The second is a part of the controversies on the “comfort women,” the systematic sexual slavery conducted at military brothels, which was implemented and managed by the Japanese military and government during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). The third concerns a municipal museum dedicated to the local experience of the Asia-Pacific War.
Incident 1: In October 2015, a Tokyo branch of national bookstore chain Junkudō was pressured into cancelling its “Fifty Must-Reads for Freedom and Democracy” book fair. This, in response to complaints that the selection was biased. The bookstore resumed the fair a month later with a new title “Forty-Nine Titles to Think About Democracy Today.” As many as forty of the original fifty books had been replaced with new titles. Among the books that were pulled were those by liberal intellectuals who had voiced concerns and criticisms of the ways that the Abe administration forced passage of the Collective Self-defense Bill.1
“Fifty Must-Reads for Freedom
and Democracy” book fair “Forty-Nine Titles to Think
About Democracy Today”
book fair
Incident 2: In August 2014, former Asahi newspaper reporter Uemura Takashi became embroiled in an intense controversy over several articles on the “comfort women” issue, which he had authored in 1991. The articles are considered to provide key evidences of the Japanese government’s involvement in the “comfort women” system. Conservative critics accused Uemura of fabrication. The controversy is still ongoing, and has cost Uemura an academic position. He and his family continue to receive death threats.2
Former Asahi newspaper reporter Uemura Takashi showing the “comfort woman” article from 1991
Incident 3: In April 2014, Peace Osaka, a municipal museum dedicated to the Japanese experience of the Asia-Pacific War, closed its doors in order to overhaul the entire exhibit. The museum had displayed, in addition to local experience of the Allied air raids, aggressive acts committed by the Japanese military in China. The transformation was a result of continuous attacks by the revisionist right, which argued that the museum must present a history that Japanese youths can be proud of. The museum reopened a year later featuring a narrative of the Asia-Pacific War completely devoid of Japan’s aggressions in Asia.3 Several other municipal museums dedicated to local experiences of the war have also removed displays of Japanese atrocities under similar pressure.
Activists protesting the “renewal” of Peace Osaka, April 30, 2015
The three episodes illustrate ways that memories of the Asia-Pacific War are politicized in line with resurgent nationalism in Japan today. In many of these cases, war memory has become a political position that one must take, polarized between two options: the Asia-Pacific War was a war of imperialism and aggression, or it was a war of self-defense from Western imperialism. How to remember this war has always been a politicized issue in Japan, but the trend has certainly intensified in the last two decades, especially since 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end. In the cases of the bookstore and the museums, we see instances where the extreme right succeeded in pressuring municipal and private groups to alter their narrative portrayal of the past. The instance involving the former Asahi reporter demonstrates how issues associated with the wartime past have been reduced to a political position. There are many other situations where even personal memories of the war have been simplified into a black-and-white stance on whether Japan’s war was one of aggression.
This essay will analyze this recent trend in Japanese war memory through three avenues: 1) the 1995 paradigm: the conservative turn in the mid-1990s as a reaction to the series of official apologies that were issued by the Japanese government for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war; 2) “postmemory”: the shift in war memory in recent decades influenced by the rapid decrease in the number of war survivors; and 3) memory activists: an examination of whose memories—and what kind of memories—are actively being remembered today. Through these three themes, the essay explicates the unresolved nature of Japan’s relationship with its wartime past. In particular, the victimhood consciousness held by a large majority of Japanese, as well as the failure by relatively liberal administrations to systematically resolve the issues through research, outreach, and education, have hampered Japan’s efforts for reconciling with its history.
Displays that were eliminated with the “renewal”
Politics of Apology and the 1995 Paradigm
Japan has had to deal with the issue of official apologies since the end of the war. In the early postwar decades, apologies at the state level were only issued to specific nations such as Burma (1957) and Australia (1957), or on particular occasions such as the normalization of international relations (South Korea, 1965; People’s Republic of China, 1972). International scrutiny on Japan’s attitude towards its wartime past intensified in the 1980s alongside the increased focus on the Japanese government’s relationship with Yasukuni Shrine, the highly politicized institution where spirits of all military dead from modern Japan including fourteen Class A war criminals are memorialized.4 Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s official visit to the shrine on August 15, 1985 especially raised concerns in Japan’s neighboring countries and brought attention to the issue of Japan’s war responsibility. Also in the 1980s, ways that the Asia-Pacific War—and especially the China campaign—was depicted in Japanese textbooks caused tensions between Japan and its East Asian neighbors.5 In the early 1990s, the issue of the “comfort women” reemerged, when Asahi newspaper reported on its front page that historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered “comfort women”-related documents in the Ministry of Defense archives. The authors of the article urged the Japanese government to apologize and pay reparations to the women.6 Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi and Foreign Minister Kōno Yōhei issued several statements that included apologies to the women.
The shift in Japan’s political climate in the mid-1990s—the years leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in August 1995—also affected the government’s official stance towards war responsibility. The Liberal Democratic Party, which had consistently been the majority party since 1955, yielded its status first to the newly formed Japan New Party (Nihon Shintō) headed by Hosokawa Morihiro in August 1993, then to the short-lived Japan Renewal party (Shinseitō) of Ozawa Ichirō in April 1994, and finally, to a coalition government headed by the socialist Murayama Tomiichi in June 1994. Hosokawa and Murayama in particular issued several notable apologies, which included acknowledgement of the pain and suffering that the actions of the Japanese military inflicted on people of Asia, as well as admission of the Japanese government’s involvement in the “comfort women” system. Murayama established the Asian Women’s Fund, a private foundation whose goal was to pay reparations to the women and raise awareness of the issue.7 Opinion polls from the time reveal that the majority of Japanese approved these official statements.
Yet, these apologies were quickly overshadowed by the Japanese government’s sharp turn to the political right in succeeding years. As early as 1996, LDP lawmakers tied to conservative lobbyist groups assumed the premiership and other key government positions.8 These government officials resumed the practice of paying official tribute at Yasukuni Shrine. In 1997, they established the multi-party coalition “Association of Diet Members Who Jointly Pay Tribute at Yasukuni Shrine.” These were possible because there was public support for these lawmakers.
Association of Diet Members Who Jointly Pay Tribute at Yasukuni Shrine (photograph from 2013)
These neo-conservatives maintain that the history of modern and contemporary Japan should present the kind of narrative that Japanese youths can be proud of—that is, a narrative devoid of any wrongdoing by the Japanese state or the military. According to this narrative, the Asia-Pacific War for Japan was either a war of self-defense, or a war to liberate Asia from Western imperialism. There are several examples of institutional efforts to advocate this kind of history. In 1996, several scholars founded the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform that sought to promote a nationalistic view through history education. Their version of Japanese history was cleansed of Japan’s war crimes and situated wartime Japan as the liberator of Asia from Western imperialism. 1997 saw the establishment of Nippon Kaigi, a “private organization for policy promotion and popular movement aimed at the reconstruction of a beautiful Japan that we can be proud of.”9 In 2002, Yūshūkan, the military museum owned and operated by Yasukuni Shrine, reopened its renovated and expanded facility with a brand new exhibit that featured a revisionist narrative of Imperial Japan.10 The popularity of publications by ultranationalist cultural producers such as the graphic novelist Kobayashi Yoshinori, commentator Sakurai Yoshiko, and writer Hyakuta Naoki illustrate the kind of narratives appreciated by many Japanese today.11 Attacks on museums such as Peace Osaka started in the mid-1990s. Mainstream popular culture, films in particular, typically do not go so far as to justify the war itself, but they often aestheticize sacrifice and honor without specifically addressing the political implications of the war or crimes and atrocities committed. The subtext here is Japan as a nation that all Japanese can be proud of—a narrative that presumably appeals to many who have grown tired of criticisms from the rest of Asia.
History and Civics textbooks published by
the Japan Society for History Textbook Reform
Following this shift to the right in the representations of Japanese history was the simplification of the issues associated with war memory. There have always existed debates about Japan’s role in the Asia-Pacific War. But by the 21st century, the points of contention in these controversies had shifted dramatically from the specific to the symbolic. For example, in the case of the “comfort women” issue, the original debate focused on the number of women involved, what kind of treatment they received, and, most importantly, whether or not the Japanese wartime government was involved in the setting up of the “comfort” stations and recruiting the women. The most heated debate that ensued in the recent years revolves not around issues, but rather, individuals—Japanese nationals who argue that there existed a Japanese state-controlled systematic sexual slavery in East and Southeast Asia during the war: Uemura Takashi, the former Asahi newspaper reporter who broke the news containing critical information about this systematic slavery, and Yoshimi Yoshiaki, the historian who uncovered archival evidence of state support of this system. The current debate is on the character and integrity of the two men, rather than on the issue itself. The debate has also extended outside Japan and Korea, to erecting memorials dedicated to the “comfort women” in expat communities in the United States and Canada, and to depiction of the subject matter in American textbooks.12 In the case of Yasukuni Shrine, focus of the associated controversies has shifted from specific issues such as the attempts of the Liberal Democratic Party to reinstate state support of the shrine, to more ambiguous ones including the alleged pain and suffering that a prime minister’s visit to the shrine has caused to specific individuals.13 While these debates are rooted in the historical past, it is also clear that the focus has shifted to matters that have little to do with specific occurrences in the past. Similar shifts can be observed in other controversial matters including Japanese military’s aggressive acts in Asia such as the Nanjing Massacre.
I suggest that this recent shift can be understood as a reaction to the period of apologies of the mid 1990’s—apologies that were, in the words of historian Yoshida Yutaka, “not backed by a solid understanding of the wartime history,” but rather, presented to support a necessary shift in Japan’s international policy.14 Yoshida argues that such apologies in particular, and popular opinion on Japan’s war crimes more generally, were not so much a result of changing historical consciousness as they were a reaction to international criticism.15 Just as the apologies were a political move in response to international pressure, the revisionist trend of recent years can be considered a reactionary move on the domestic level.
There certainly were geopolitical pressures that culminated in the 1995 apologies, the most influential of which was the collapse of the Cold War structure in Asia and the rise of China. During the Cold War, disagreements over war memory remained, for the most part, a domestic issue in Japan. But the demise of the global Cold War structure had profound implications for Japan, for it brought renewed attention to unresolved tensions with the Asian lands it had invaded prior to 1945. The 1989 death of Showa emperor, the supreme commander of the Asia-Pacific War who was nevertheless never tried in the Tokyo War Trials or deprived of his throne, also shifted the landscape of war memory in Japan.
By the 1990s, individuals (rather than states for whom issues of responsibility and compensation seemed to have been settled through war crimes tribunals and normalization of international relations) had begun to make claims in court for apologies and compensation.16 Former “comfort women” from South Korea began to speak about their experiences in the early 1990s leading to lawsuits against the Japanese government. Korean men also filed suits against Japanese corporations for their harsh forced labor during the war as colonial subjects. The 1997 publication of Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking also highlighted Japanese atrocities in East Asia.17 International pressure, especially from China and South Korea, compelled Japan to contend with war memory from a global perspective. This provoked Japan to nationalize its war memory and to seek to impose a unified voice.
In this context, the mid-90s apologies can be understood as a strategy for improving Japan’s foreign relations with China and South Korea, rather than a full acknowledgement of wrongdoings in the wartime past. Another point worth considering is the ways that war memory was shaped immediately after 1945. The US-led Allied Occupation reframed Japanese war memory as one that can be described as “victim’s history”: by identifying individuals that were responsible for the war through the Tokyo Trials, and especially by allowing the emperor to evade prosecution, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) created in Japanese society an environment that was easier for them to occupy and manage. In the process, however, a feeling of “being deceived (damasareta)” by the wartime government permeated the immediate postwar period, and allowed the general public to not only welcome democracy, but also leave issues of their own war responsibility unquestioned.18 Victim’s history has played a role of a powerful unifier in Japanese society, presenting a situation that demonstrates the timelessness of Ernest Renan’s apt observation on nationalism: that “shared suffering unites more than does joy.”19
The Japanese public, then, embraced the official apologies of the mid-1990s not because they felt responsible, but because the official apologies reinforced their understanding that it was the government’s responsibility to apologize, to compensate, and to work on reconciliation with its wartime foes. It is also worth mentioning that the Japanese government did not endorse their apologies domestically by educating, or having a dialogue with, the general public on issues of war responsibility. In this scenario, where the apologies occurred as more or less superficial measures, it is possible that the persistence of international criticism resulted in yet another reactionary response—a denial of war crimes more generally.
This all suggests a kind of reactionary nationalism: the reinterpretation of the past as a political position. If the apologies of the mid-1990s came as a result of international pressure, the succeeding turn to the right can be considered a response by frustrated domestic voices. War memory thus became politicized. In the process, the complex relationships that the Japanese had with the fifteen-year war—ranging from those who were indeed perpetrators, those who committed crimes under pressure, those who took advantage of the war for financial gain or promotion of their cause, those who truly believed that the war was a holy war including children who were thoroughly educated to celebrate Japan’s militaristic nationalism, and others who were simultaneously perpetrator and victim—have been reduced to political positions. One notable consequence of such political positioning is that those who supported one side or the other soon found themselves unwilling or unable to express critical views of methodologies or tactics utilized by those within their groups.
The Postmemory Generation and the Issue of War Responsibility
Over seventy years has passed since the end of the war, and the large majority of Japanese today have no firsthand experience of the war. This section focuses on the generations born after 1945—those with no experience of the war—in order to engage further with this problem of war memory. The ongoing, persistent international criticisms—especially those from China and South Korea—have had a particularly strong impact on the generations born after 1945, who feel that they should not have to be responsible for what happened before they were born. For example, in 1995, then member of the Lower House Takaichi Sanae, who was born in 1961, publicly asserted that she was under no obligation to contemplate (hansei suru) Japan’s war responsibility since she was not even alive at the time.20 Takaichi’s statement drew a variety of responses. Liberal media outlets, including the Asahi newspaper, condemned her point of view.21 At the same time, many Japanese from her generation—including those who acknowledge Japan’s wartime crimes—admitted to holding similar sentiments.22 This latter response suggests a trend more complex than that of a generation refusing to bear responsibility for something that had happened before they were born. Many who do acknowledge Japan’s war crimes believe that the Japanese state has an obligation to pay for its wartime injustices, but feel no need to take responsibility for the actions themselves as individuals.23 Such sentiments continue to fuel victim’s history.
Takaichi Sanae, as well as the majority of scholars, activists, and cultural figures who have been promoting revisionist views of Japan’s wartime past, belong to the generations that have come to know the war through what Marianne Hirsch has coined “postmemory”—a memory without experience that is inherited through the environment in which one grows up. Unlike their parents and grandparents, those who belong to the postmemory generation never directly experienced war. Rather, they have grown up “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation [and] shaped by the traumatic events that can be neither understood or recreated.”24 Hirsch, who has examined literature and other forms of culture produced by the children of Holocaust survivors, argues that the descendants of those who have “witnessed massive traumatic events connect so deeply to the previous generation’s remembrances of the past that they identify that connection as a form of memory, and that, in certain extreme circumstances, memory can be transferred to those who were not actually there to live an event.”25 But of course, received memory is different from that of actual witnesses and participants. And received memory continues to be reshaped by the society in which the recipients live. Or perhaps it is not memory that is received. Eva Hoffman, who has also examined children of Holocaust survivors, suggests that what the children inherit is not memory, but rather, what she calls “the emotional traces of the parents’ experiences.”26 Whether memory or emotional traces, what is received by the succeeding generation continues to be reshaped by the society in which the recipients live.
Hirsch and Hoffman are talking about the familial transmission of the Holocaust experience. But the transmission can also be social, as was the case in Japan. For example, those who experienced childhood in 1970s and 80s Japan typically grew up surrounded by narratives that situate Japan and the Japanese as victims of war. Required readings for summer vacations often presented narratives from Japan’s home front: war orphans, destroyed cities, Hiroshima survivors who feared the physical aftereffects of massive radiation, and animals that had to be sacrificed for the war effort. Television dramas featured young protagonists that had lost everything. Even the kinds of works problematized by conservatives such as Hadashi no Gen [Barefoot Gen] depict people as victims of the wartime government.27
These popular cultural representations, in turn, tied the young readers’ parents and grandparents’ narratives to a larger past that was the history of Japan. Narratives of those who experienced hardships and loss of the wartime home front, whose personal experiences were to serve as a lesson for peace, dominated the childhood of many Japanese. The primary voice was that of the former victim (those of the parents and/or grandparents’ generation) preaching that war is bad and therefore we must promote peace. The perpetrator was never identified in the original narrative—the war was something that came and went, like a natural disaster.
Through the experience of growing up surrounded by these narratives, the postmemory generation has come to inherit their parents’ generation’s trauma—the trauma of an all-out war, of hardship and loss. For the postmemory generation, however, this is an elusive trauma without a specific hardship or loss. Through this process of inheritance as postmemory, the war trauma has become the trauma of their people, which they too have come to embody through the environment that they have grown up in, a part of their identity. But the postmemory generation has also inherited another kind of legacy from the war—that of war responsibility. In the post 1995 society, they have encountered constant chatter about Japan’s war responsibility, of their war guilt. The inherited trauma of wartime hardship, then, is deeply intertwined with a pressure of guilt. In attempts to rectify the guilt and the resulting trauma, many have come to embrace the victim’s history in which at least ordinary Japanese are not to be held responsible. Others have turned to revisionist history that echoes the wartime state propaganda that asserted Japan fought the Asia-Pacific War out of self-defense, a narrative that absolves all Japanese, including political leaders, from war responsibility.
Of course the “postmemory generation” is not singular. And even among the supporters of revisionist history, the understanding of the fifteen-year war as well as of the current East Asian memory wars differ typically based on how far removed one is from the war. Unlike the generation that experienced the war, or that were personally acquainted with people who experienced the war, most who are in their thirties or younger today have not experienced specific, personal losses that can be acknowledged or compensated. For this generation, the issue is based on abstract concepts such as responsibility and guilt. As a result, they tend to welcome symbolic gestures that allow them to feel that they are not responsible.
Memory Activists and Victim’s History
One key reason for the persistence of the memory wars in East Asia is the presence of what I have been referring to as victim’s history. According to this history, ordinary Japanese not only do not bear any responsibility for any aspect of the fifteen-year war, but they were in fact victims of both their own government and the Allied air raids (or the atomic bombs or the land battle in Okinawa). The Tokyo Trials that identified war criminals reinforced this belief. But with the Trials long over and those who were found guilty no longer alive, there is no one left to take responsibility for the war. Of course this victim’s history is not really a productive way of thinking about the past. For, as historian Carol Gluck has argued, it takes more than the top political and military leaders (in the case of Japan, the emperor and the convicted war criminals) for a nation to wage a total war. In other words, all Japanese bear some degree of responsibility.28
But here, I would like to turn to the question of where and how this victim’s history emerged. Put another way, when the Japanese think of their wartime experiences as that of victims, whose voices were being heard, whose memories are now being remembered? Whose memories are we relying on now?
The primary way that the Japanese “remember” the war is as victims on the home front, especially of the Allied air raids, which destroyed nearly two hundred cities and killed approximately 330,000 people.29 A concerted effort to collect and preserve memories of local air raids began in the 1960s. In many cities, groups for collecting and recording survivor memories organized in the 1970s. The Tokyo Association to Record Air Raid Experiences (Tokyo Kūshū o Kirokusuru-kai), founded by four survivors of the March 10, 1945 Tokyo air raid—writers Saotome Katsumoto and Arima Yorichika, cultural critic Matsuura Sōzō, and historian Ienaga Saburō—began its activities on August 5, 1970.30 Similar groups quickly followed in several other cities. Most of these groups characterize themselves as the victims of the wartime government, believing that collecting and relaying their wartime suffering to succeeding generations translates to peace promotion.
One impetus for the collection of air raid memories was America’s war in Vietnam. News reports that American bombing on North Vietnam was creating numerous civilian casualties prompted the April 1965 establishment of Beheiren, or the Citizen’s Alliance to Bring Peace to Vietnam. In the midst of the war, in January 1970, Prime Minister Satō Eisaku allowed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the US [Anpo Treaty, originally concluded in 1960] to be automatically renewed, further fueling Japan’s anti-war movement. Since the treaty enabled the United States to use Japanese land and facilities for military purposes, many Japanese felt a sense of responsibility towards the war in Vietnam. Planes that bombed Northern Vietnam typically took off from American bases in Okinawa, and Japanese factories were produced weapons, ammunitions, and herbicides for the war, while forty percent of planes using Haneda International Airport in Tokyo at the time were chartered by the US military and three-quarters of wounded American soldiers received treatment in Japan.31 According to an Asahi newspaper poll of August 24, 1965, 75 percent of the respondents were opposed to the war in Vietnam, with only 4 percent in support, and 54 percent thought Japan to be in danger of entanglement in the conflict.32
For the men and women that had lived through the Asia-Pacific War, personal experiences of air raids were a powerful impetus to collect memories as a way to oppose the war in Vietnam and promote peace. Many who lived with vivid memories of running through incendiary bomb showers and witnessing mass death felt a particular obligation as well as authority to protest against the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.33 Their sense of victimhood was key to their thought process. In order to promote real peace, they argued, it was necessary to fully understand the victim experience. In their view, those born after 1945 (the postmemory generation), who had grown up in an environment with no trace of the devastation caused by the war, especially needed to learn from their collection of victim memories before they could oppose the war in Vietnam. Air raid survivors were also apprehensive that memories of the Japanese war experience were fading (sensō taiken no fūka) alongside the dramatic societal changes during Japan’s high economic growth period of the 1960s. Many concurrently worried that war memories were starting to become aestheticized, as narratives lionizing Imperial Japan’s military death began to appear.34
At the time, however, there were multiple, competing interpretations of the war. For example, in 1966, Oda Makoto, novelist, chairman of Beheiren, and a child victim of the Osaka bombing of 1945, wrote a scathing critique of war experience narratives that were constructed from the viewpoint of the victim. He argued against victimhood consciousness and called for a “personal sense of involvement [in the war] and responsibility [for the involvement].”35 There also were generational rifts during this period, with some youths accusing the generation that lived through the war of collaborating with Japanese militarism. The notorious 1969 vandalism at Ritsumeikan University of the Wadatsumi statue, which commemorates fallen student soldiers, is one manifestation of this rift.36
At least during this time period, it was possible for generational differences in the remembrance of the war to coexist, and there were efforts to discuss, communicate, and reconcile these differences at least within Japan. There was no need for a unified collective Japanese narrative of the war in the Cold War geopolitical order. But what I want to point out here is that efforts were made to record and preserve numerous voices from the home front, of the air raids, and of Japanese suffering in the final months of the Asia-Pacific War.
In addition to the collection and preservation of memories, these memory activists took on the task of collecting artifacts associated with air raids. Many such collections developed into municipal peace museums, of which Peace Osaka mentioned earlier was one. Some wrote memoirs, children’s books, and novels based on their experience. War-themed commercial films and television dramas with a focus on the home front experience also began to receive attention in the 1970s and 80s. Other kinds of war stories, especially from the battlefields, existed, but for the most part, these were not personal narratives, but rather, popular military histories involving battle strategies, fighter planes and aircraft carriers. Primary voices came from the home front.37 Most depicted the air raids without identifying the perpetrator.
These home front narratives of air raid experience that situated the Japanese as victims ironically resonated with the way that the US framed Japanese war memory during the occupation period—the Japanese were the victims, of their own government, of aerial bombing of their cities. More specifically, the Japanese were the victims of “the war”—not the “Greater East Asia War,” as Japan’s wartime leaders called it, not the “Pacific War,” as SCAP renamed it, not the “Asia-Pacific War,” generally accepted today in intellectual communities, but a generic war. A generic evil.
The proponents of the victim’s history are also proud supporters of Article 9, as the non-war clause of the Japanese Constitution completes their redemptive myth. The generation growing up in the 70s and 80s was told that the peace and prosperity that Japan enjoyed came as a result of the suffering and loss experienced by the wartime generation. For Japan to rise up from the ashes like a phoenix, the war was necessary, they were told. The redemptive myth held strong, until Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 1990s.
The generation that came of age during and after the mid-1990s—the time of official apologies, the time when criticisms from East Asia crescendoed—never experienced the economic progress or the prosperity that Japan enjoyed for decades after the war. For many in this generation, Article 9 does not symbolize the redemptive myth, but rather, stands in the way of Japan’s path to becoming a “normal country” with its own military. This is not to say that all Japanese that belong to this generation support the revisionist narrative. Many from this generation consider Article 9 a source of pride, a quality that allows their country to be exceptional. But here, too, it is about political positions: Article 9 for the supporters symbolizes peace. Peace as a generic good; peace as an antithesis of war as a generic evil.
Postwar responsibility
The concept of “postwar responsibility” offers some possibilities for escaping this reactionary trend.38 This concept is concerned not so much with accepting responsibility for the war and its associated crimes, but rather, for the postwar responses. The “responsibility” in this approach is therefore not for the acts committed during the war, but for ending the present international tension resulting from the unresolved issues from the war, which can only be successfully executed through reconciliation. Of course the issue of who is responsible still remains unresolved and scholars differ on this point. Renowned historian and activist Ienaga Saburō, for example, has argued for a collective responsibility that transcends experience or age groups: that since the postwar generations have benefited from the peace and prosperity built on the Japanese war experience, it is necessary for all Japanese to bear responsibility.39 Others argue that responsibility is not based on nationality, but should be founded upon a critical assessment and understanding of Japan’s imperial past: that postwar generations should not be forced to inherit war responsibility without rational reasoning or acceptable explanation.40 While many scholars have actively, and often transnationally, contributed to the discourse on Japan’s war responsibility in recent years, it seems that the concept of people’s responsibility has yet to take hold among the general public in Japan.41 Further, there is no safe public space for education on war responsibility since the topic is always heavily politicized. War responsibility has become a political position rather than a problem that needs to be understood, acknowledged, and resolved.
Another way to think about war responsibility is through the concept of citizenship. Citizenship entails both rights and responsibilities. It is thus possible, on the one hand, to argue that as citizens, all Japanese—including those who were born after the war—need to bear responsibility for Japan’s wartime past. But on the other hand, it is also possible to argue that in wartime Japan, most people (and women in particular) were not full citizens of Japan, when we take into account the extremely limited nature of democracy prior to 1945. Or, perhaps we can think about the concept some political theorists call “individual national responsibility,” which is responsibility for acts performed by others (dead or alive) who belongs (or belonged) to the same nation.
In the summer of 2015, the seventieth anniversary of Japan’s defeat, tens of thousands of Japanese protested in front of the National Diet Building to oppose Abe’s reinterpretation of the Collective Self Defense Bill. The protest was led by the SEALDs, a student group that spearheaded a number of anti-defense bill activities. They were standing up against the conservative turn that had been the norm for two decades since 1995. The protest has now expanded into an anti-government and anti-war rally more generally.42 But this ongoing activism in its current form, in which protestors single out top lawmakers as the culprit, remains within the framework of victim’s history. The protestors merely criticize government policies and strategies and accuse lawmakers of deception without offering possible solutions or, perhaps more importantly, publicly engaging in a self-reflective analysis by asking the important question: “why and how did we arrive at where we are today?”
Nevertheless, this kind of activism has much potential to transform into a demonstration of postwar responsibility. What is needed here is a more inclusive approach to these anti-war protests—an approach that includes consideration for the pain of others, of people who might become enemies if Japan were to take up arms; an approach that includes a reflection on Japan’s past deeds. If Japanese people are not to take up arms because they do not want to go to war, or because they do not want their loved ones to go to war, the intent can and should also be expanded to potential opponents: an intent not to go to war because the act may inflict injury on citizens of other nations. And by extension, it is also possible to argue that Japanese people should not go to war so that they would not have to injure citizens of other nations, as they had done during the fifteen years between 1931 and 1945. An anti-war protest by Japanese youth that includes such demands is a much more powerful statement of acknowledgment and responsibility than any words a sitting prime minister can utter.
SEALDs (Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy)
Notes
1
Tokyo Asahi shinbun, November 5, 2015; November 13, 2015.
2
Uemura Takashi with Tomomi Yamaguchi, "Labeled the reporter who "fabricated" the comfort woman issue: A Rebuttal", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 2, No. 1, January 12, 2015.
3
Akiko Takenaka, “Reactionary Nationalism and Museum Controversies: The Case of ‘Peace Osaka’,” The Public Historian 36.2 (Spring 2014), 75-98; Philip Seaton, "The Nationalist Assault on Japan’s Local Peace Museums: The Conversion of Peace Osaka", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 30, No. 2, July 27, 2015.
4
Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015).
5
Laura Hein and Mark Selden eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).
6
Asahi shinbun, January 11, 1992.
7
The foundation closed on March 31, 2007 but still exists today in the form of a digital museum.
8
Hashimoto Ryūtarō, who succeeded the socialist Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi on January 11, 1996, had—until shortly before he assumed premiership—been the president of the Japan Bereaved Families Association (Nippon Izokukai), the powerful lobbyist group with strong ties to Yasukuni Shrine.
9
From official website.
10
Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine.
11
Kobayashi Yoshinori has authored a number of popular graphic novels that explain key postwar issues such as war responsibility, Yasukuni Shrine and the imperial family. Journalist and commentator Sakurai Yoshiko is a prolific author of texts that promote neo-conservative views of Japan. Hyakuta Naoki is the author of the best-selling novel Eien no zero, which depicts a young man’s journey to learn about the military life of his late grandfather who was a tokkō pilot. He is also known for his friendly dialogues with Prime Minister Abe Shinzō.
12
For more recent developments, see, Norma Field and Tomomi Yamaguchi, Introduction, '“Comfort Woman” Revisionism Comes to the U.S.: Symposium on The Revisionist Film Screening Event at Central Washington University', The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 21, No. 1, June 1, 2015; Tomomi Yamaguchi and Normal Field, "The Impact of “Comfort Woman” Revisionism on the Academy, the Press, and the Individual: Symposium on the U.S. Tour of Uemura Takashi", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 33, No. 1, August 17, 2015.
13
The shrine was owned and operated by the Japanese state until February 1946, when it became a private institution to satisfy the SCAP issued Shinto Directive, which separated Shinto from the Japanese government. For details on the lawsuits that resulted from the “pain and suffering,” see Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine.
14
Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan: sengoshi no naka no hen’yō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 7.
15
Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan, 7.
16
Carol Gluck, “Sekinin/Responsibility in Modern Japan,” in Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing eds., Words in Motion: Toward A Global Lexicon (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 97.
17
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
18
Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensōkan, 55.
19
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” lecture delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882.
20
Nihon keizai shinbun, March 17, 1995.
21
Tokyo Asahi shinbun, March 18, 1995.
22
“Editorial,” Kikan sensō sekinin kenkyū no. 11 (Spring, 1996), 2-9. Takaichi currently is Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications in the Abe administration. Her comment may have been a result of her conservative leanings, but the youths’ identification with her statement is worth noting.
23
According to a 2005 poll by the conservative Yomiuri newspaper, only 5 percent responded that the general public bore some responsibility for the war. A 2006 poll by the liberal Asahi newspaper yielded somewhat different results: 39 percent believed that the general public had some responsibility, while 43 percent responded that they were not responsible at all. But respondents to both polls placed the primary blame on the military and political leaders. Yomiuri Shinbun Sensō Sekinin Kenshō Iinkai ed., Kenshō sensō sekinin vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 2006), 208-9; Asahi Shinbun Shuzaihan, Sensō sekinin to tsuitō vol. 1 (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 2006), 230-31.
24
Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today (17.4): 659-86; here, 662.
25
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3.
26
Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
27
In 2012, Matsue City Board of Education made a recommendation to local elementary and junior high schools to remove the graphic novel series from school libraries in response to complaints from members of citizens group Zaitokukai, a group that seeks to eliminate what they consider as privileges extended to Korean residents of Japan. Similar requests also occurred in Tottori City and Izumisano City around the same time. Most schools initially complied to the requests, but subsequently returned the books to their open stacks.
28
Carol Gluck, “The Idea of Showa,” in Gluck and Stephen R. Graubard eds., Showa: The Japan of Hirohito (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 1-26.
29
Detailed information on the air raids is available at the online archive.
30
For the early history of the group, see here [last accessed August 1, 2014].
31
Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “aikoku”: sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2002), 588-589.
32
Oguma, “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 589.
33
Koyama Hitoshi, Nihon kūshū no zen’yō: Mariana kichi B29 butai (Tokyo: Tōhō shuppan, 1995), 252.
34
Oguma, “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 589.
35
Oda Makoto, Betonamu no Amerikajin (Tokyo: Gōdō shuppan, 1966).
36
On May 20, 1969, members of Ritsumeikan University Zenkyōtō (United Front of All Students) vandalized the Wadatsumi statue that commemorates the student soldier war dead arguing that the generation that lived through the war had collaborated with Japanese fascism. “If you were against war, why didn’t you throw away your guns? Why didn’t you run away from the battlefield?” they protested. Oguma “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 595.
37
For an analysis of personal war narratives from the battlefields, see Narita Ryūichi, “Sensō keiken” no sengoshi: katarareta taiken, shōgen, kioku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010).
38
The word postwar responsibility has existed since the 1970s, but it has been mobilized in the last two decades to result in a flurry of publications that use the term in order to interrogate ways to conceive of innovative ideas for breaking through the stagnant postwar. For recent discussions on postwar responsibility, see, for example, Ōnuma Yasuaki, Tokyo saiban, sensō sekinin, sengo sekinin (Tokyo: Tōshindō, 2007); Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekinin ron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005); and Kōketsu Atsushi, Watashi tachi no sensō sekinin: “Showa” shoki 20 nen to “Heisei” ki 20 nen no rekishi teki kōsatsu (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2009).
39
Ienaga Saburō, Sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002).
40
See, for example, Kōketsu Atsuhi, Watashi tachi no sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2009), and Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekinin ron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005).
41
Examples of transnational scholarship include Daqing Yang et al. eds., Towards a History Beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012); Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi and Togo, Kazuhiko. East Asia’s Haunted Present: Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2008); Kawakami Tamio et al. eds. Kaikyō no ryōgawa kara Yasukuni o kangaeru: hisen, chinkon, Ajia (Tokyo: Oruta Shppanshitsu, 2006).
42
SEALDs has announced its official dissolution on August 15, 2017, but members assert that they will continue their political activism in different forms.
Japanese Memories of the Asia-Pacific War: Analyzing the Revisionist Turn Post-1995
Akiko Takenaka
October 15, 2016
Volume 14 | Issue 20 | Number 8
Article ID 4967
This essay begins with three notable incidents of recent years, which are indicative of contemporary trends in the politics of war memory in Japan. The first is associated with the Abe administration’s 2015 passage of the Collective Self Defense Bill: an interpretation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which allows the Japanese Self Defense Forces to engage in military affairs when an ally of Japan is deemed to be under threat. The second is a part of the controversies on the “comfort women,” the systematic sexual slavery conducted at military brothels, which was implemented and managed by the Japanese military and government during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). The third concerns a municipal museum dedicated to the local experience of the Asia-Pacific War.
Incident 1: In October 2015, a Tokyo branch of national bookstore chain Junkudō was pressured into cancelling its “Fifty Must-Reads for Freedom and Democracy” book fair. This, in response to complaints that the selection was biased. The bookstore resumed the fair a month later with a new title “Forty-Nine Titles to Think About Democracy Today.” As many as forty of the original fifty books had been replaced with new titles. Among the books that were pulled were those by liberal intellectuals who had voiced concerns and criticisms of the ways that the Abe administration forced passage of the Collective Self-defense Bill.1
“Fifty Must-Reads for Freedom
and Democracy” book fair “Forty-Nine Titles to Think
About Democracy Today”
book fair
Incident 2: In August 2014, former Asahi newspaper reporter Uemura Takashi became embroiled in an intense controversy over several articles on the “comfort women” issue, which he had authored in 1991. The articles are considered to provide key evidences of the Japanese government’s involvement in the “comfort women” system. Conservative critics accused Uemura of fabrication. The controversy is still ongoing, and has cost Uemura an academic position. He and his family continue to receive death threats.2
Former Asahi newspaper reporter Uemura Takashi showing the “comfort woman” article from 1991
Incident 3: In April 2014, Peace Osaka, a municipal museum dedicated to the Japanese experience of the Asia-Pacific War, closed its doors in order to overhaul the entire exhibit. The museum had displayed, in addition to local experience of the Allied air raids, aggressive acts committed by the Japanese military in China. The transformation was a result of continuous attacks by the revisionist right, which argued that the museum must present a history that Japanese youths can be proud of. The museum reopened a year later featuring a narrative of the Asia-Pacific War completely devoid of Japan’s aggressions in Asia.3 Several other municipal museums dedicated to local experiences of the war have also removed displays of Japanese atrocities under similar pressure.
Activists protesting the “renewal” of Peace Osaka, April 30, 2015
The three episodes illustrate ways that memories of the Asia-Pacific War are politicized in line with resurgent nationalism in Japan today. In many of these cases, war memory has become a political position that one must take, polarized between two options: the Asia-Pacific War was a war of imperialism and aggression, or it was a war of self-defense from Western imperialism. How to remember this war has always been a politicized issue in Japan, but the trend has certainly intensified in the last two decades, especially since 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end. In the cases of the bookstore and the museums, we see instances where the extreme right succeeded in pressuring municipal and private groups to alter their narrative portrayal of the past. The instance involving the former Asahi reporter demonstrates how issues associated with the wartime past have been reduced to a political position. There are many other situations where even personal memories of the war have been simplified into a black-and-white stance on whether Japan’s war was one of aggression.
This essay will analyze this recent trend in Japanese war memory through three avenues: 1) the 1995 paradigm: the conservative turn in the mid-1990s as a reaction to the series of official apologies that were issued by the Japanese government for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war; 2) “postmemory”: the shift in war memory in recent decades influenced by the rapid decrease in the number of war survivors; and 3) memory activists: an examination of whose memories—and what kind of memories—are actively being remembered today. Through these three themes, the essay explicates the unresolved nature of Japan’s relationship with its wartime past. In particular, the victimhood consciousness held by a large majority of Japanese, as well as the failure by relatively liberal administrations to systematically resolve the issues through research, outreach, and education, have hampered Japan’s efforts for reconciling with its history.
Displays that were eliminated with the “renewal”
Politics of Apology and the 1995 Paradigm
Japan has had to deal with the issue of official apologies since the end of the war. In the early postwar decades, apologies at the state level were only issued to specific nations such as Burma (1957) and Australia (1957), or on particular occasions such as the normalization of international relations (South Korea, 1965; People’s Republic of China, 1972). International scrutiny on Japan’s attitude towards its wartime past intensified in the 1980s alongside the increased focus on the Japanese government’s relationship with Yasukuni Shrine, the highly politicized institution where spirits of all military dead from modern Japan including fourteen Class A war criminals are memorialized.4 Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s official visit to the shrine on August 15, 1985 especially raised concerns in Japan’s neighboring countries and brought attention to the issue of Japan’s war responsibility. Also in the 1980s, ways that the Asia-Pacific War—and especially the China campaign—was depicted in Japanese textbooks caused tensions between Japan and its East Asian neighbors.5 In the early 1990s, the issue of the “comfort women” reemerged, when Asahi newspaper reported on its front page that historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered “comfort women”-related documents in the Ministry of Defense archives. The authors of the article urged the Japanese government to apologize and pay reparations to the women.6 Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi and Foreign Minister Kōno Yōhei issued several statements that included apologies to the women.
The shift in Japan’s political climate in the mid-1990s—the years leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in August 1995—also affected the government’s official stance towards war responsibility. The Liberal Democratic Party, which had consistently been the majority party since 1955, yielded its status first to the newly formed Japan New Party (Nihon Shintō) headed by Hosokawa Morihiro in August 1993, then to the short-lived Japan Renewal party (Shinseitō) of Ozawa Ichirō in April 1994, and finally, to a coalition government headed by the socialist Murayama Tomiichi in June 1994. Hosokawa and Murayama in particular issued several notable apologies, which included acknowledgement of the pain and suffering that the actions of the Japanese military inflicted on people of Asia, as well as admission of the Japanese government’s involvement in the “comfort women” system. Murayama established the Asian Women’s Fund, a private foundation whose goal was to pay reparations to the women and raise awareness of the issue.7 Opinion polls from the time reveal that the majority of Japanese approved these official statements.
Yet, these apologies were quickly overshadowed by the Japanese government’s sharp turn to the political right in succeeding years. As early as 1996, LDP lawmakers tied to conservative lobbyist groups assumed the premiership and other key government positions.8 These government officials resumed the practice of paying official tribute at Yasukuni Shrine. In 1997, they established the multi-party coalition “Association of Diet Members Who Jointly Pay Tribute at Yasukuni Shrine.” These were possible because there was public support for these lawmakers.
Association of Diet Members Who Jointly Pay Tribute at Yasukuni Shrine (photograph from 2013)
These neo-conservatives maintain that the history of modern and contemporary Japan should present the kind of narrative that Japanese youths can be proud of—that is, a narrative devoid of any wrongdoing by the Japanese state or the military. According to this narrative, the Asia-Pacific War for Japan was either a war of self-defense, or a war to liberate Asia from Western imperialism. There are several examples of institutional efforts to advocate this kind of history. In 1996, several scholars founded the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform that sought to promote a nationalistic view through history education. Their version of Japanese history was cleansed of Japan’s war crimes and situated wartime Japan as the liberator of Asia from Western imperialism. 1997 saw the establishment of Nippon Kaigi, a “private organization for policy promotion and popular movement aimed at the reconstruction of a beautiful Japan that we can be proud of.”9 In 2002, Yūshūkan, the military museum owned and operated by Yasukuni Shrine, reopened its renovated and expanded facility with a brand new exhibit that featured a revisionist narrative of Imperial Japan.10 The popularity of publications by ultranationalist cultural producers such as the graphic novelist Kobayashi Yoshinori, commentator Sakurai Yoshiko, and writer Hyakuta Naoki illustrate the kind of narratives appreciated by many Japanese today.11 Attacks on museums such as Peace Osaka started in the mid-1990s. Mainstream popular culture, films in particular, typically do not go so far as to justify the war itself, but they often aestheticize sacrifice and honor without specifically addressing the political implications of the war or crimes and atrocities committed. The subtext here is Japan as a nation that all Japanese can be proud of—a narrative that presumably appeals to many who have grown tired of criticisms from the rest of Asia.
History and Civics textbooks published by
the Japan Society for History Textbook Reform
Following this shift to the right in the representations of Japanese history was the simplification of the issues associated with war memory. There have always existed debates about Japan’s role in the Asia-Pacific War. But by the 21st century, the points of contention in these controversies had shifted dramatically from the specific to the symbolic. For example, in the case of the “comfort women” issue, the original debate focused on the number of women involved, what kind of treatment they received, and, most importantly, whether or not the Japanese wartime government was involved in the setting up of the “comfort” stations and recruiting the women. The most heated debate that ensued in the recent years revolves not around issues, but rather, individuals—Japanese nationals who argue that there existed a Japanese state-controlled systematic sexual slavery in East and Southeast Asia during the war: Uemura Takashi, the former Asahi newspaper reporter who broke the news containing critical information about this systematic slavery, and Yoshimi Yoshiaki, the historian who uncovered archival evidence of state support of this system. The current debate is on the character and integrity of the two men, rather than on the issue itself. The debate has also extended outside Japan and Korea, to erecting memorials dedicated to the “comfort women” in expat communities in the United States and Canada, and to depiction of the subject matter in American textbooks.12 In the case of Yasukuni Shrine, focus of the associated controversies has shifted from specific issues such as the attempts of the Liberal Democratic Party to reinstate state support of the shrine, to more ambiguous ones including the alleged pain and suffering that a prime minister’s visit to the shrine has caused to specific individuals.13 While these debates are rooted in the historical past, it is also clear that the focus has shifted to matters that have little to do with specific occurrences in the past. Similar shifts can be observed in other controversial matters including Japanese military’s aggressive acts in Asia such as the Nanjing Massacre.
I suggest that this recent shift can be understood as a reaction to the period of apologies of the mid 1990’s—apologies that were, in the words of historian Yoshida Yutaka, “not backed by a solid understanding of the wartime history,” but rather, presented to support a necessary shift in Japan’s international policy.14 Yoshida argues that such apologies in particular, and popular opinion on Japan’s war crimes more generally, were not so much a result of changing historical consciousness as they were a reaction to international criticism.15 Just as the apologies were a political move in response to international pressure, the revisionist trend of recent years can be considered a reactionary move on the domestic level.
There certainly were geopolitical pressures that culminated in the 1995 apologies, the most influential of which was the collapse of the Cold War structure in Asia and the rise of China. During the Cold War, disagreements over war memory remained, for the most part, a domestic issue in Japan. But the demise of the global Cold War structure had profound implications for Japan, for it brought renewed attention to unresolved tensions with the Asian lands it had invaded prior to 1945. The 1989 death of Showa emperor, the supreme commander of the Asia-Pacific War who was nevertheless never tried in the Tokyo War Trials or deprived of his throne, also shifted the landscape of war memory in Japan.
By the 1990s, individuals (rather than states for whom issues of responsibility and compensation seemed to have been settled through war crimes tribunals and normalization of international relations) had begun to make claims in court for apologies and compensation.16 Former “comfort women” from South Korea began to speak about their experiences in the early 1990s leading to lawsuits against the Japanese government. Korean men also filed suits against Japanese corporations for their harsh forced labor during the war as colonial subjects. The 1997 publication of Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking also highlighted Japanese atrocities in East Asia.17 International pressure, especially from China and South Korea, compelled Japan to contend with war memory from a global perspective. This provoked Japan to nationalize its war memory and to seek to impose a unified voice.
In this context, the mid-90s apologies can be understood as a strategy for improving Japan’s foreign relations with China and South Korea, rather than a full acknowledgement of wrongdoings in the wartime past. Another point worth considering is the ways that war memory was shaped immediately after 1945. The US-led Allied Occupation reframed Japanese war memory as one that can be described as “victim’s history”: by identifying individuals that were responsible for the war through the Tokyo Trials, and especially by allowing the emperor to evade prosecution, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) created in Japanese society an environment that was easier for them to occupy and manage. In the process, however, a feeling of “being deceived (damasareta)” by the wartime government permeated the immediate postwar period, and allowed the general public to not only welcome democracy, but also leave issues of their own war responsibility unquestioned.18 Victim’s history has played a role of a powerful unifier in Japanese society, presenting a situation that demonstrates the timelessness of Ernest Renan’s apt observation on nationalism: that “shared suffering unites more than does joy.”19
The Japanese public, then, embraced the official apologies of the mid-1990s not because they felt responsible, but because the official apologies reinforced their understanding that it was the government’s responsibility to apologize, to compensate, and to work on reconciliation with its wartime foes. It is also worth mentioning that the Japanese government did not endorse their apologies domestically by educating, or having a dialogue with, the general public on issues of war responsibility. In this scenario, where the apologies occurred as more or less superficial measures, it is possible that the persistence of international criticism resulted in yet another reactionary response—a denial of war crimes more generally.
This all suggests a kind of reactionary nationalism: the reinterpretation of the past as a political position. If the apologies of the mid-1990s came as a result of international pressure, the succeeding turn to the right can be considered a response by frustrated domestic voices. War memory thus became politicized. In the process, the complex relationships that the Japanese had with the fifteen-year war—ranging from those who were indeed perpetrators, those who committed crimes under pressure, those who took advantage of the war for financial gain or promotion of their cause, those who truly believed that the war was a holy war including children who were thoroughly educated to celebrate Japan’s militaristic nationalism, and others who were simultaneously perpetrator and victim—have been reduced to political positions. One notable consequence of such political positioning is that those who supported one side or the other soon found themselves unwilling or unable to express critical views of methodologies or tactics utilized by those within their groups.
The Postmemory Generation and the Issue of War Responsibility
Over seventy years has passed since the end of the war, and the large majority of Japanese today have no firsthand experience of the war. This section focuses on the generations born after 1945—those with no experience of the war—in order to engage further with this problem of war memory. The ongoing, persistent international criticisms—especially those from China and South Korea—have had a particularly strong impact on the generations born after 1945, who feel that they should not have to be responsible for what happened before they were born. For example, in 1995, then member of the Lower House Takaichi Sanae, who was born in 1961, publicly asserted that she was under no obligation to contemplate (hansei suru) Japan’s war responsibility since she was not even alive at the time.20 Takaichi’s statement drew a variety of responses. Liberal media outlets, including the Asahi newspaper, condemned her point of view.21 At the same time, many Japanese from her generation—including those who acknowledge Japan’s wartime crimes—admitted to holding similar sentiments.22 This latter response suggests a trend more complex than that of a generation refusing to bear responsibility for something that had happened before they were born. Many who do acknowledge Japan’s war crimes believe that the Japanese state has an obligation to pay for its wartime injustices, but feel no need to take responsibility for the actions themselves as individuals.23 Such sentiments continue to fuel victim’s history.
Takaichi Sanae, as well as the majority of scholars, activists, and cultural figures who have been promoting revisionist views of Japan’s wartime past, belong to the generations that have come to know the war through what Marianne Hirsch has coined “postmemory”—a memory without experience that is inherited through the environment in which one grows up. Unlike their parents and grandparents, those who belong to the postmemory generation never directly experienced war. Rather, they have grown up “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation [and] shaped by the traumatic events that can be neither understood or recreated.”24 Hirsch, who has examined literature and other forms of culture produced by the children of Holocaust survivors, argues that the descendants of those who have “witnessed massive traumatic events connect so deeply to the previous generation’s remembrances of the past that they identify that connection as a form of memory, and that, in certain extreme circumstances, memory can be transferred to those who were not actually there to live an event.”25 But of course, received memory is different from that of actual witnesses and participants. And received memory continues to be reshaped by the society in which the recipients live. Or perhaps it is not memory that is received. Eva Hoffman, who has also examined children of Holocaust survivors, suggests that what the children inherit is not memory, but rather, what she calls “the emotional traces of the parents’ experiences.”26 Whether memory or emotional traces, what is received by the succeeding generation continues to be reshaped by the society in which the recipients live.
Hirsch and Hoffman are talking about the familial transmission of the Holocaust experience. But the transmission can also be social, as was the case in Japan. For example, those who experienced childhood in 1970s and 80s Japan typically grew up surrounded by narratives that situate Japan and the Japanese as victims of war. Required readings for summer vacations often presented narratives from Japan’s home front: war orphans, destroyed cities, Hiroshima survivors who feared the physical aftereffects of massive radiation, and animals that had to be sacrificed for the war effort. Television dramas featured young protagonists that had lost everything. Even the kinds of works problematized by conservatives such as Hadashi no Gen [Barefoot Gen] depict people as victims of the wartime government.27
These popular cultural representations, in turn, tied the young readers’ parents and grandparents’ narratives to a larger past that was the history of Japan. Narratives of those who experienced hardships and loss of the wartime home front, whose personal experiences were to serve as a lesson for peace, dominated the childhood of many Japanese. The primary voice was that of the former victim (those of the parents and/or grandparents’ generation) preaching that war is bad and therefore we must promote peace. The perpetrator was never identified in the original narrative—the war was something that came and went, like a natural disaster.
Through the experience of growing up surrounded by these narratives, the postmemory generation has come to inherit their parents’ generation’s trauma—the trauma of an all-out war, of hardship and loss. For the postmemory generation, however, this is an elusive trauma without a specific hardship or loss. Through this process of inheritance as postmemory, the war trauma has become the trauma of their people, which they too have come to embody through the environment that they have grown up in, a part of their identity. But the postmemory generation has also inherited another kind of legacy from the war—that of war responsibility. In the post 1995 society, they have encountered constant chatter about Japan’s war responsibility, of their war guilt. The inherited trauma of wartime hardship, then, is deeply intertwined with a pressure of guilt. In attempts to rectify the guilt and the resulting trauma, many have come to embrace the victim’s history in which at least ordinary Japanese are not to be held responsible. Others have turned to revisionist history that echoes the wartime state propaganda that asserted Japan fought the Asia-Pacific War out of self-defense, a narrative that absolves all Japanese, including political leaders, from war responsibility.
Of course the “postmemory generation” is not singular. And even among the supporters of revisionist history, the understanding of the fifteen-year war as well as of the current East Asian memory wars differ typically based on how far removed one is from the war. Unlike the generation that experienced the war, or that were personally acquainted with people who experienced the war, most who are in their thirties or younger today have not experienced specific, personal losses that can be acknowledged or compensated. For this generation, the issue is based on abstract concepts such as responsibility and guilt. As a result, they tend to welcome symbolic gestures that allow them to feel that they are not responsible.
Memory Activists and Victim’s History
One key reason for the persistence of the memory wars in East Asia is the presence of what I have been referring to as victim’s history. According to this history, ordinary Japanese not only do not bear any responsibility for any aspect of the fifteen-year war, but they were in fact victims of both their own government and the Allied air raids (or the atomic bombs or the land battle in Okinawa). The Tokyo Trials that identified war criminals reinforced this belief. But with the Trials long over and those who were found guilty no longer alive, there is no one left to take responsibility for the war. Of course this victim’s history is not really a productive way of thinking about the past. For, as historian Carol Gluck has argued, it takes more than the top political and military leaders (in the case of Japan, the emperor and the convicted war criminals) for a nation to wage a total war. In other words, all Japanese bear some degree of responsibility.28
But here, I would like to turn to the question of where and how this victim’s history emerged. Put another way, when the Japanese think of their wartime experiences as that of victims, whose voices were being heard, whose memories are now being remembered? Whose memories are we relying on now?
The primary way that the Japanese “remember” the war is as victims on the home front, especially of the Allied air raids, which destroyed nearly two hundred cities and killed approximately 330,000 people.29 A concerted effort to collect and preserve memories of local air raids began in the 1960s. In many cities, groups for collecting and recording survivor memories organized in the 1970s. The Tokyo Association to Record Air Raid Experiences (Tokyo Kūshū o Kirokusuru-kai), founded by four survivors of the March 10, 1945 Tokyo air raid—writers Saotome Katsumoto and Arima Yorichika, cultural critic Matsuura Sōzō, and historian Ienaga Saburō—began its activities on August 5, 1970.30 Similar groups quickly followed in several other cities. Most of these groups characterize themselves as the victims of the wartime government, believing that collecting and relaying their wartime suffering to succeeding generations translates to peace promotion.
One impetus for the collection of air raid memories was America’s war in Vietnam. News reports that American bombing on North Vietnam was creating numerous civilian casualties prompted the April 1965 establishment of Beheiren, or the Citizen’s Alliance to Bring Peace to Vietnam. In the midst of the war, in January 1970, Prime Minister Satō Eisaku allowed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the US [Anpo Treaty, originally concluded in 1960] to be automatically renewed, further fueling Japan’s anti-war movement. Since the treaty enabled the United States to use Japanese land and facilities for military purposes, many Japanese felt a sense of responsibility towards the war in Vietnam. Planes that bombed Northern Vietnam typically took off from American bases in Okinawa, and Japanese factories were produced weapons, ammunitions, and herbicides for the war, while forty percent of planes using Haneda International Airport in Tokyo at the time were chartered by the US military and three-quarters of wounded American soldiers received treatment in Japan.31 According to an Asahi newspaper poll of August 24, 1965, 75 percent of the respondents were opposed to the war in Vietnam, with only 4 percent in support, and 54 percent thought Japan to be in danger of entanglement in the conflict.32
For the men and women that had lived through the Asia-Pacific War, personal experiences of air raids were a powerful impetus to collect memories as a way to oppose the war in Vietnam and promote peace. Many who lived with vivid memories of running through incendiary bomb showers and witnessing mass death felt a particular obligation as well as authority to protest against the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.33 Their sense of victimhood was key to their thought process. In order to promote real peace, they argued, it was necessary to fully understand the victim experience. In their view, those born after 1945 (the postmemory generation), who had grown up in an environment with no trace of the devastation caused by the war, especially needed to learn from their collection of victim memories before they could oppose the war in Vietnam. Air raid survivors were also apprehensive that memories of the Japanese war experience were fading (sensō taiken no fūka) alongside the dramatic societal changes during Japan’s high economic growth period of the 1960s. Many concurrently worried that war memories were starting to become aestheticized, as narratives lionizing Imperial Japan’s military death began to appear.34
At the time, however, there were multiple, competing interpretations of the war. For example, in 1966, Oda Makoto, novelist, chairman of Beheiren, and a child victim of the Osaka bombing of 1945, wrote a scathing critique of war experience narratives that were constructed from the viewpoint of the victim. He argued against victimhood consciousness and called for a “personal sense of involvement [in the war] and responsibility [for the involvement].”35 There also were generational rifts during this period, with some youths accusing the generation that lived through the war of collaborating with Japanese militarism. The notorious 1969 vandalism at Ritsumeikan University of the Wadatsumi statue, which commemorates fallen student soldiers, is one manifestation of this rift.36
At least during this time period, it was possible for generational differences in the remembrance of the war to coexist, and there were efforts to discuss, communicate, and reconcile these differences at least within Japan. There was no need for a unified collective Japanese narrative of the war in the Cold War geopolitical order. But what I want to point out here is that efforts were made to record and preserve numerous voices from the home front, of the air raids, and of Japanese suffering in the final months of the Asia-Pacific War.
In addition to the collection and preservation of memories, these memory activists took on the task of collecting artifacts associated with air raids. Many such collections developed into municipal peace museums, of which Peace Osaka mentioned earlier was one. Some wrote memoirs, children’s books, and novels based on their experience. War-themed commercial films and television dramas with a focus on the home front experience also began to receive attention in the 1970s and 80s. Other kinds of war stories, especially from the battlefields, existed, but for the most part, these were not personal narratives, but rather, popular military histories involving battle strategies, fighter planes and aircraft carriers. Primary voices came from the home front.37 Most depicted the air raids without identifying the perpetrator.
These home front narratives of air raid experience that situated the Japanese as victims ironically resonated with the way that the US framed Japanese war memory during the occupation period—the Japanese were the victims, of their own government, of aerial bombing of their cities. More specifically, the Japanese were the victims of “the war”—not the “Greater East Asia War,” as Japan’s wartime leaders called it, not the “Pacific War,” as SCAP renamed it, not the “Asia-Pacific War,” generally accepted today in intellectual communities, but a generic war. A generic evil.
The proponents of the victim’s history are also proud supporters of Article 9, as the non-war clause of the Japanese Constitution completes their redemptive myth. The generation growing up in the 70s and 80s was told that the peace and prosperity that Japan enjoyed came as a result of the suffering and loss experienced by the wartime generation. For Japan to rise up from the ashes like a phoenix, the war was necessary, they were told. The redemptive myth held strong, until Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 1990s.
The generation that came of age during and after the mid-1990s—the time of official apologies, the time when criticisms from East Asia crescendoed—never experienced the economic progress or the prosperity that Japan enjoyed for decades after the war. For many in this generation, Article 9 does not symbolize the redemptive myth, but rather, stands in the way of Japan’s path to becoming a “normal country” with its own military. This is not to say that all Japanese that belong to this generation support the revisionist narrative. Many from this generation consider Article 9 a source of pride, a quality that allows their country to be exceptional. But here, too, it is about political positions: Article 9 for the supporters symbolizes peace. Peace as a generic good; peace as an antithesis of war as a generic evil.
Postwar responsibility
The concept of “postwar responsibility” offers some possibilities for escaping this reactionary trend.38 This concept is concerned not so much with accepting responsibility for the war and its associated crimes, but rather, for the postwar responses. The “responsibility” in this approach is therefore not for the acts committed during the war, but for ending the present international tension resulting from the unresolved issues from the war, which can only be successfully executed through reconciliation. Of course the issue of who is responsible still remains unresolved and scholars differ on this point. Renowned historian and activist Ienaga Saburō, for example, has argued for a collective responsibility that transcends experience or age groups: that since the postwar generations have benefited from the peace and prosperity built on the Japanese war experience, it is necessary for all Japanese to bear responsibility.39 Others argue that responsibility is not based on nationality, but should be founded upon a critical assessment and understanding of Japan’s imperial past: that postwar generations should not be forced to inherit war responsibility without rational reasoning or acceptable explanation.40 While many scholars have actively, and often transnationally, contributed to the discourse on Japan’s war responsibility in recent years, it seems that the concept of people’s responsibility has yet to take hold among the general public in Japan.41 Further, there is no safe public space for education on war responsibility since the topic is always heavily politicized. War responsibility has become a political position rather than a problem that needs to be understood, acknowledged, and resolved.
Another way to think about war responsibility is through the concept of citizenship. Citizenship entails both rights and responsibilities. It is thus possible, on the one hand, to argue that as citizens, all Japanese—including those who were born after the war—need to bear responsibility for Japan’s wartime past. But on the other hand, it is also possible to argue that in wartime Japan, most people (and women in particular) were not full citizens of Japan, when we take into account the extremely limited nature of democracy prior to 1945. Or, perhaps we can think about the concept some political theorists call “individual national responsibility,” which is responsibility for acts performed by others (dead or alive) who belongs (or belonged) to the same nation.
In the summer of 2015, the seventieth anniversary of Japan’s defeat, tens of thousands of Japanese protested in front of the National Diet Building to oppose Abe’s reinterpretation of the Collective Self Defense Bill. The protest was led by the SEALDs, a student group that spearheaded a number of anti-defense bill activities. They were standing up against the conservative turn that had been the norm for two decades since 1995. The protest has now expanded into an anti-government and anti-war rally more generally.42 But this ongoing activism in its current form, in which protestors single out top lawmakers as the culprit, remains within the framework of victim’s history. The protestors merely criticize government policies and strategies and accuse lawmakers of deception without offering possible solutions or, perhaps more importantly, publicly engaging in a self-reflective analysis by asking the important question: “why and how did we arrive at where we are today?”
Nevertheless, this kind of activism has much potential to transform into a demonstration of postwar responsibility. What is needed here is a more inclusive approach to these anti-war protests—an approach that includes consideration for the pain of others, of people who might become enemies if Japan were to take up arms; an approach that includes a reflection on Japan’s past deeds. If Japanese people are not to take up arms because they do not want to go to war, or because they do not want their loved ones to go to war, the intent can and should also be expanded to potential opponents: an intent not to go to war because the act may inflict injury on citizens of other nations. And by extension, it is also possible to argue that Japanese people should not go to war so that they would not have to injure citizens of other nations, as they had done during the fifteen years between 1931 and 1945. An anti-war protest by Japanese youth that includes such demands is a much more powerful statement of acknowledgment and responsibility than any words a sitting prime minister can utter.
SEALDs (Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy)
Notes
1
Tokyo Asahi shinbun, November 5, 2015; November 13, 2015.
2
Uemura Takashi with Tomomi Yamaguchi, "Labeled the reporter who "fabricated" the comfort woman issue: A Rebuttal", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 2, No. 1, January 12, 2015.
3
Akiko Takenaka, “Reactionary Nationalism and Museum Controversies: The Case of ‘Peace Osaka’,” The Public Historian 36.2 (Spring 2014), 75-98; Philip Seaton, "The Nationalist Assault on Japan’s Local Peace Museums: The Conversion of Peace Osaka", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 30, No. 2, July 27, 2015.
4
Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015).
5
Laura Hein and Mark Selden eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).
6
Asahi shinbun, January 11, 1992.
7
The foundation closed on March 31, 2007 but still exists today in the form of a digital museum.
8
Hashimoto Ryūtarō, who succeeded the socialist Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi on January 11, 1996, had—until shortly before he assumed premiership—been the president of the Japan Bereaved Families Association (Nippon Izokukai), the powerful lobbyist group with strong ties to Yasukuni Shrine.
9
From official website.
10
Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine.
11
Kobayashi Yoshinori has authored a number of popular graphic novels that explain key postwar issues such as war responsibility, Yasukuni Shrine and the imperial family. Journalist and commentator Sakurai Yoshiko is a prolific author of texts that promote neo-conservative views of Japan. Hyakuta Naoki is the author of the best-selling novel Eien no zero, which depicts a young man’s journey to learn about the military life of his late grandfather who was a tokkō pilot. He is also known for his friendly dialogues with Prime Minister Abe Shinzō.
12
For more recent developments, see, Norma Field and Tomomi Yamaguchi, Introduction, '“Comfort Woman” Revisionism Comes to the U.S.: Symposium on The Revisionist Film Screening Event at Central Washington University', The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 21, No. 1, June 1, 2015; Tomomi Yamaguchi and Normal Field, "The Impact of “Comfort Woman” Revisionism on the Academy, the Press, and the Individual: Symposium on the U.S. Tour of Uemura Takashi", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 33, No. 1, August 17, 2015.
13
The shrine was owned and operated by the Japanese state until February 1946, when it became a private institution to satisfy the SCAP issued Shinto Directive, which separated Shinto from the Japanese government. For details on the lawsuits that resulted from the “pain and suffering,” see Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine.
14
Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan: sengoshi no naka no hen’yō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 7.
15
Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan, 7.
16
Carol Gluck, “Sekinin/Responsibility in Modern Japan,” in Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing eds., Words in Motion: Toward A Global Lexicon (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 97.
17
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
18
Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensōkan, 55.
19
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” lecture delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882.
20
Nihon keizai shinbun, March 17, 1995.
21
Tokyo Asahi shinbun, March 18, 1995.
22
“Editorial,” Kikan sensō sekinin kenkyū no. 11 (Spring, 1996), 2-9. Takaichi currently is Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications in the Abe administration. Her comment may have been a result of her conservative leanings, but the youths’ identification with her statement is worth noting.
23
According to a 2005 poll by the conservative Yomiuri newspaper, only 5 percent responded that the general public bore some responsibility for the war. A 2006 poll by the liberal Asahi newspaper yielded somewhat different results: 39 percent believed that the general public had some responsibility, while 43 percent responded that they were not responsible at all. But respondents to both polls placed the primary blame on the military and political leaders. Yomiuri Shinbun Sensō Sekinin Kenshō Iinkai ed., Kenshō sensō sekinin vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 2006), 208-9; Asahi Shinbun Shuzaihan, Sensō sekinin to tsuitō vol. 1 (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 2006), 230-31.
24
Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today (17.4): 659-86; here, 662.
25
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3.
26
Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
27
In 2012, Matsue City Board of Education made a recommendation to local elementary and junior high schools to remove the graphic novel series from school libraries in response to complaints from members of citizens group Zaitokukai, a group that seeks to eliminate what they consider as privileges extended to Korean residents of Japan. Similar requests also occurred in Tottori City and Izumisano City around the same time. Most schools initially complied to the requests, but subsequently returned the books to their open stacks.
28
Carol Gluck, “The Idea of Showa,” in Gluck and Stephen R. Graubard eds., Showa: The Japan of Hirohito (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 1-26.
29
Detailed information on the air raids is available at the online archive.
30
For the early history of the group, see here [last accessed August 1, 2014].
31
Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “aikoku”: sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2002), 588-589.
32
Oguma, “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 589.
33
Koyama Hitoshi, Nihon kūshū no zen’yō: Mariana kichi B29 butai (Tokyo: Tōhō shuppan, 1995), 252.
34
Oguma, “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 589.
35
Oda Makoto, Betonamu no Amerikajin (Tokyo: Gōdō shuppan, 1966).
36
On May 20, 1969, members of Ritsumeikan University Zenkyōtō (United Front of All Students) vandalized the Wadatsumi statue that commemorates the student soldier war dead arguing that the generation that lived through the war had collaborated with Japanese fascism. “If you were against war, why didn’t you throw away your guns? Why didn’t you run away from the battlefield?” they protested. Oguma “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 595.
37
For an analysis of personal war narratives from the battlefields, see Narita Ryūichi, “Sensō keiken” no sengoshi: katarareta taiken, shōgen, kioku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010).
38
The word postwar responsibility has existed since the 1970s, but it has been mobilized in the last two decades to result in a flurry of publications that use the term in order to interrogate ways to conceive of innovative ideas for breaking through the stagnant postwar. For recent discussions on postwar responsibility, see, for example, Ōnuma Yasuaki, Tokyo saiban, sensō sekinin, sengo sekinin (Tokyo: Tōshindō, 2007); Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekinin ron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005); and Kōketsu Atsushi, Watashi tachi no sensō sekinin: “Showa” shoki 20 nen to “Heisei” ki 20 nen no rekishi teki kōsatsu (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2009).
39
Ienaga Saburō, Sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002).
40
See, for example, Kōketsu Atsuhi, Watashi tachi no sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2009), and Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekinin ron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005).
41
Examples of transnational scholarship include Daqing Yang et al. eds., Towards a History Beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012); Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi and Togo, Kazuhiko. East Asia’s Haunted Present: Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2008); Kawakami Tamio et al. eds. Kaikyō no ryōgawa kara Yasukuni o kangaeru: hisen, chinkon, Ajia (Tokyo: Oruta Shppanshitsu, 2006).
42
SEALDs has announced its official dissolution on August 15, 2017, but members assert that they will continue their political activism in different forms.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)