TY - JOUR
T1 - Introduction
T2 - The “comfort women” as public history-scholarship, advocacy and the commemorative impulse
AU - Frost, Mark R.
AU - Vickers, Edward
N1 - Funding Information:
At its best, the commemorative impulse ought to be an aid to historical understanding, not an affecting yet reductionist substitute for it. There are real dangers, as we move into an era without living witnesses to the reality of the comfort women system, that its history becomes simplified and commodified as activists compete for attention in a global heritage marketplace that evaluates atrocities against a Holocaust gold standard. But this would be to distort the historical experience We would like to express our gratitude to Jeff Kingston, Mark Selden and Tessa Morris-Suzuki for their very helpful comments on the papers in this special issue. We also acknowledge the generous support of the Resona Asia-Oceania Foundation, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, and of Kyushu University ᤀs Progress 100 scheme, which together funded the September 2019 symposium at which most of the papers in this special issue were initially presented. Finally,
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Japan Focus. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - In this introductory essay to the special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Comfort Women as Public History,” we analyze the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. After reviewing the political, cultural and historiographical background to ongoing disputes over “comfort women,” we examine how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration, and associated tropes. Prominent among such tropes is the claim that commemoration fosters “peace”. However, following recent critical scholarship on this issue, and drawing on the papers that comprise this special issue, we question any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation. When done badly, the drive to commemorate a contentious issue as public history can exacerbate rather than resolve division and hatred. We therefore emphasise the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity, for example regarding the depiction of victims versus perpetrators; the transnational dimension of the system; and its relationship with the broader history of gender politics and the sexual subjugation of women.
AB - In this introductory essay to the special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Comfort Women as Public History,” we analyze the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. After reviewing the political, cultural and historiographical background to ongoing disputes over “comfort women,” we examine how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration, and associated tropes. Prominent among such tropes is the claim that commemoration fosters “peace”. However, following recent critical scholarship on this issue, and drawing on the papers that comprise this special issue, we question any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation. When done badly, the drive to commemorate a contentious issue as public history can exacerbate rather than resolve division and hatred. We therefore emphasise the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity, for example regarding the depiction of victims versus perpetrators; the transnational dimension of the system; and its relationship with the broader history of gender politics and the sexual subjugation of women.
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M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85103255812
VL - 19
SP - 1
EP - 21
JO - Asia-Pasific Journal: Japan Focus
JF - Asia-Pasific Journal: Japan Focus
SN - 1557-4660
IS - 5
M1 - 5555
ER -