The politics of national atonement and narrations of war

Abstract

In March 2007, Japan’s ‘national atonement project’ for survivors of military sexual slavery was officially concluded. The atonement project that was implemented by a Japanese government‐established non‐governmental organization – the Asian Women’s Fund – has distributed its fund to a number of survivors in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands since its inception in 1995. Over the years, intense politicization around the project has made it extremely difficult for most observers to assess whether the project was successful or not. Several prominent scholars in Japan and South Korea have called for a more compassionate and positive assessment of the project’s good intentions, while feminist activists continue to critique the project’s negative interventions in the process of redress and reconciliation in Asia. This essay is an attempt to open up a space to rethink the felicitousness of the atonement project by focusing on the ways in which the project told its own story of war, violence, and gender. By juxtaposing stories told by Filipina survivors of the ‘comfort women’ system with one that has been told by the atonement project implemented by the Asian Women’s Fund, it seeks to find a way to reassess whether the project acknowledged the survivors’ claims for justice and compensation.     

Generations of 68Ers

ABSTRACT

The protests of ‘1968’ are a powerful symbol of generational belonging and central to Germany's collective memory. The so-called ‘68ers’ have been transformed into a mythical yardstick of what constitutes a generation. Yet few people thought of themselves in this way in the late 1960s: the idea of the ‘68er’ only emerged from complex and often retrospective processes of generational building, which this article investigates. It is shown that such age-related affinities were not confined to members of the West German Left. Two alternative generational narratives that emerged out of the late 1960s are examined in this piece: those of the West German moderate right-wing ‘counter-generation’ and of the ‘East German 68ers’. The antagonistic character of the West German events and the subsequent public projection of left-wing activists as a ‘generation’ mobilized their political contemporaries and led to a growing desire to collectivize their experiences in their turn. East Germany's ‘1968’, on the other hand, may have been far less iconic than the West German revolt, but former East German activists have also given their memories generational form, particularly since the 1990s. This article addresses these manifold processes of generation building to show that they have much to reveal about how activists—and those who observed them—made sense of the events of 1968 and about how different groups mobilized the idea of a generational experience politically to powerful effect in the years that followed. We are not dealing with a single and monolithic generation of 1968, but with more diverse communities of German ‘68ers’.     

Kuala Lumpur,July 2005

Abstract

This paper is a study of the impact of the Thai ‘Sixties’ on present day Thai politics, especially that of the ‘Peoples Movement’. In doing so, the study concentrates on looking at the influence of both political ideas and movements and the role of some important political actors from this period. Internationally, the Sixties Movement was characterised by a general rise in the struggle of oppressed groups on a global scale. Central to this struggle was the role of students and a new generation of activists in labour and peasant organisations. This took the form of movements against racism, sexual oppression and especially imperialism. Activists from this period are now to be found playing important roles in political systems throughout the world. However, their present day role is often in contradiction to their original beliefs during the Sixties. In Thailand, the ‘Sixties’ movement has helped to shape both the policies of the present Thai Rak Thai government and the nature of the Peoples Movement. Any understanding of the present Thai political scene has to include an examination of the mass‐movements that continue to struggle for democracy and social justice, together with the nature of various ruling class factions. Thai Rak Thai grew out of a need to deal with the effects of the 1997 Economic Crisis. Its Populist policies reflect a need to balance conflicting class interests in order to buy social peace. Many of the activists within Thai Rak Thai and those within the social movements are people of the October Generation who cut their teeth during the Thai Sixties. Their political beliefs and strategies reflect the events of the last 30 years in different ways. The Thai Sixties will continue to influence Thai politics and society in the years ahead.     

Culture = politics: the emergence of new cultural forms of protest in the age of freeter

This paper examines new cultural and political movements that have developed outside of traditional leftist politics since the early 1990s in Japan. The new movements, including Dame‐ren, the Cardboard House Art movements in Shinjuku and recent anti‐war protests on the Iraqi war, were mainly led by young people, in particular, the freeter generation, who did not experience the leftist politics of the 1960s. These movements are different from traditional Marxist political ones and even from the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that they incorporate more cultural practices such as art, music, dance and performance into their political activities. The paper also explores the historical background against which the new movements were born and have developed since the end of the Bubble economy. It sees freeters, young part‐time workers, as emerging, new political actors that have appeared through the transition of a mode of production from Fordism to post‐Fordism. The transformation of society, economy and politics, known as ‘post‐modernization’ or recently as ‘globalization’, has asked us to re‐consider and re‐define the basic concepts such as class, proletariat, power, labour and work which we once shared. The paper tries to locate, through a critical examination, the new movements within a broader context of anti‐neo‐liberalism and anti‐globalization and find political potentiality within it.     

Discourse on guomin (‘the citizen’) in late Qing China, 1895∼1911 1

Abstract

The term guomin is found in Chinese texts from an early period. However, as commonly used today – as a modern political concept of special value and significance – guomin belongs to a political vocabulary adopted by Chinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Japan’s new usages. The goal of this essay is to explain how this important concept was formed and what it signified. The term guomin has basically conveyed two levels of meaning since the late Qing. In essence, the term is similar to the English word ‘citizenship’, and it reveals a kind of awakening of a new political consciousness on the part of Chinese intellectuals since the late Qing. Through the discourse of guomin, they began to emphasize the subjectivity of each individual in the national political process, along with all of their rights and duties. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the criticisms and reflections of Chinese intellectuals about traditional politics, society and culture, and thought have basically developed along the lines of the logic of ‘turning subjects into citizens’. However, the pursuit of a strong nation‐state under a civil crisis sparked by foreign pressure marked the historical conditions that generated the modern Chinese guomin discourse. Limited by this kind of ‘national identity,’ the discourse and construction of guomin since the late Qing have never been able to escape the shadow of the state. Under these ideological conditions, guomin could only become a means of the nationalist project for survival; it could never become an autonomous and universal category. Guomin, as it turns out, has been, and still remains, ‘the people of the state’.     

Takamine Go: a possible Okinawan cinema 1

Abstract

Despite little improvement in the socio‐political predicament of Okinawa since its reversion to Japan, culturally there has recently been something of an ‘Okinawa boom’ in mainland Japan. This has involved a huge interest in Okinawa and Okinawan cultures in mainland Japan and an increasing ‘consumption’ of Okinawan goods and cultural artefacts. One of the symptoms of this trend has been the growth in the last five years or so, in the number of films set in Okinawa. Many of these films present conventional stereotypical images of Okinawa and, whether wittingly or not, have contributed to the ‘cosmetic operation’ of Japan’s multiculturalism by providing a utopian vision of Okinawanness and erasing Okinawa’s problems from the screen. However, an Okinawan filmmaker, Takamine Go, critically challenges such stereotypes and Japan’s cosmetic multiculturalism. This paper focuses on Takamine’s Untamagirū (1989 Takamine, Go. 1989. Untamagirū  [Google Scholar]) and Tsuru‐Henry (1999). It examines the cinematic strategies mobilised by these films – the use of different languages, allegorical implications, complex montages of image and sound, and the departure from conventional narrative realism. These strategies, it will be suggested, not only enable the films to explore complex forms of public memory and history but also to challenge the notion of a homogeneous Japan and its ‘quasi‐orientalist’ gaze towards Okinawa. The paper then proceeds to argue that Takamine’s films should not simply be regarded as a ‘regional’ variant of Japanese cinema but as a ‘specifically Okinawan cinema’ that both overlaps with and opposes a ‘national’ Japanese cinema.     

Military base culture and Okinawan rock ‘n’ roll

The presence of US military bases has had a strong influence on US popular music in postwar Japan and Okinawa. In 1951, mainland Japan gained independence from the US occupation while Okinawa was occupied until the early 1970s and therefore was outside of the Constitution of Japan. Okinawa has been forced to coexist with many US bases, soldiers and civilian personnel. Postwar western popular music entered Japan via the bases and became a part of Okinawan culture. In this essay, tracing the history of Okinawan rock ‘n’ roll since the 1960s, I will discuss how to get into Okinawan society, the cultural function played by the US military bases in Okinawa, and the significance of the role played by the US bases for the globalization of ‘American Culture’. The golden age of the entertainment sector geared toward US soldiers was the 1960s and early 1970s, before the reversion of Okinawa to Japan. After this, a reduction in the number of troops and the increasing exchange rate of the yen dealt a serious blow to the economy of the entertainment sector. As a result, Okinawan rock ‘n’ roll increasingly entered another social cultural context; first commercialization by the record industry in Tokyo, and then as a tourist resource for local community development.     

Gendered nationalism and otherization: transnational prostitutes in South Korea

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to understand how masculine ideologies become (re)produced in the trope around transnational prostitution, by examining a lawsuit case concerning Filipina prostitutes in Korea. While several actors, including nation‐states, journalists, and activists engaged in constructing the images of Filipina prostitutes as ‘sex slaves,’ as ‘deceived or exploited victims’, or as ‘abused poor women,’ the actual economic, political and cultural processes that contribute to the complex process of women crossing borders are elided. Such homogeneous images of transnational prostitutes function to symbolically demarcate and maintain the boundaries of the nation, gender, and sexuality, and to neglect actual women’s agency and experiences as workers. This paper demonstrates how, complicit in the representations of the transnational prostitutes as victims, are ideologies of traditional gender norms, nationalism, and colonialism. Ultimately, I argue that this case will enable us to re‐examine contemporary discourses on trafficking and transnational prostitution in a more critical and subversive feminist perspective.     

Is the postwar state melting down?: an East Asian perspective on post-Fukushima Japan

Prime Minister Abe’s return to power in Japan dealt a blow to the anti-nuclear movement and returned the country to broadly pro-nuclear policies. Meanwhile, eight years on, although the effects of the Fukushima disaster are still being felt, Japan’s anti-nuclear movement has struggled to move forward or effect changes in policy. This article argues that prospects for change will not emerge until Japan’s anti-nuclear movement is able to look beyond its national borders and articulate a perspective on nuclear power that takes into account other countries within East Asia. The 3.11 Great East Japan Earthquake revealed heretofore hidden aspects of the Japanese state and society. The truth is that Japan’s postwar state (Sengo-kokka) is actually a nuclear power state (Genpatsu-kokka), a byproduct of the US-Japan alliance under the East Asian Cold War system, which insulated nuclear policy from the standard operation of democratic politics. As a product of the Cold War, the issue of nuclear power and development extends beyond Japan’s national borders and relates to the questions of US superpower sponsorship and the armistice system in East Asia that pertain broadly to the politics of East Asia. It is important to understand that Japan’s nuclear energy is a product of the Cold War in East Asia, and the armistice system that constitutes the international system in East Asia must be discarded if Japan is to become a post-nuclear energy state.     

Finding a voice,fighting for rights: the emergence of the transgender movement in Hong Kong 1

Abstract

This paper is intended to provide a space for reflection on Hong Kong’s transgender movement at its current stage, with particular reference to the objectives and activities of the Hong Kong Transgender Equality and Acceptance Movement (‘TEAM’). Established in 2002, TEAM was the first organized group of transgender people and supporters in Hong Kong. First, the paper examines the emergence of the transgender movement in Hong Kong, situating the stated objectives of TEAM in the broader social, legal and political context in Hong Kong. It then considers the successes and limitations of TEAM’s activities to date, measured against its objectives. Finally, it examines why Hong Kong’s transgender community has not yet fought for the right to legal recognition of their gender identity, as have transgender individuals and transgender movements in many other countries around the world. In the Asia‐Pacific region these include Australia, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand. Through interviews with members of TEAM, the paper questions whether legal recognition is indeed a concern and/or priority for Hong Kong’s transgender community, and, if so, what prevents Hong Kong transgender people from claiming their right to legal recognition in the courts or through the political process.     

China’s popular nationalism on the internet. Report on the 2005 anti‐Japan network struggles 1

Abstract

In April 2005, waves of anti‐Japan protest swept China and South Korea. In China, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in more than 40 cities to protest against Japan over its irresponsible attitude toward the history of colonial rule and war crimes of 60 years ago. Despite the protest having a strong ground and its action being generally non‐violent and peaceful, it was then severely condemned by many Western critics and media as chauvinistic and irrational, and as being manipulated by the Chinese government to legitimize its rule. Against such a notion, this essay attempts to work with China’s ‘popular nationalism’ (renmin minzu zhuyi), and considers its space as an autonomous political domain that is independent of the state nationalism. The ‘cyber‐nationalism’ (wanglu minzu zhuyi), this paper argues, not only challenges the state monopoly over domestic nationalist discursive production, but also opens up new possibilities for performing common people’s ‘public discursive right’ (gonggong huayu quanli). Far from being a homogeneous unity, the online campaign is characterized by free exchange of information and lively debate over the boycott strategy.     

‘Migrations of Chineseness’: in conversation with Ien Ang

This paper explores John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) and Nagai Takashi's The Bells of Nagasaki (1949). These two best-selling books published in the US and Japan in the late 1940s portray the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although they appeared in a similar period—a postwar transition and a herald of the Cold War—their reception was strikingly different. Hersey's piece acquired international currency when the representations of the atomic bombings in Japan were censored under the US Occupation. Since then Hiroshima has virtually remained the ‘first and only’ text about the atomic bomb victims widely read in the US. Nagai's memoir, a rare exception allowed to be circulated nationwide under the censorship, and elevated to a canonical voice of Nagasaki's experience, however, has been the subject of controversies in Japan from the 1970s. The paper argues that despite these differences, both works share parallels in narratological strategies, such as historical emplotment, the personalization of the event, compassionate identification, the valorization of the power of the atomic bomb, and the promotion of compartmentalized knowledge. These effects create a psychological deterrent for readers not to confront larger political and ethical problematics of Japanese colonialism and postwar US hegemony in Asia. Their discursive entanglement and ostensible dissociation symbolize the ways in which trans-Pacific knowledge on the atomic bombings has been shaped postwar for many decades.     

Populist cosmopolitanism: the predicament of subjectivity and the Japanese fascination with overseas

Abstract

This article examines the way in which seemingly contradictory positions of populism and cosmopolitanism are articulated in the development of the Japanese post‐Second World War fascination with overseas. Specifically, I analyze the writings of Ohashi Kyosen, a popular television entertainer, and investigate how a particular mode of subjectivity is expressed through his ideas of overseas leisure and retirement in his best‐selling book Kyosen: Choose Your Own Life (Kyosen: Jinsei no Sentaku) and related essays published around 2000. While the issue of subjectivity has been the central concern throughout modern Japanese history, earlier analyses have been focused on the critical writings of intellectuals. I argue that in order to understand the larger social impacts of the translation of subjectivity, we also need to examine how the issue is articulated in popular discourses. Ohashi’s popular writings suggest that the issue of subjectivity still haunts the contemporary everyday lives of many Japanese, and continues to be the key predicament for articulating a culturally meaningful model of ‘citizen’ in Japan. Ohashi’s writings raise questions about what it means to be an active agent of one’s life, and how to situate the self in the larger society. Through an analysis of Ohashi’s narratives, I first illustrate how subjectivity is negotiated through people’s demands for leisure and their concerns about retirement, both of which are entangled with their fascination with overseas. Second, I examine Ohashi’s narratives as an expression of the paradoxical position of the Japanese citizenry conditioned by the US–Japan political, economic, and military coalition. I discuss how the predicament of articulating Japanese subjectivity reflects this paradoxical position under the legacy of Cold War geopolitics in Asia.     

The watershed of Modernity: translation and the epistemological revolution

Abstract

From Modernity on, there has been continuity for the ‘West’ and interruption for non‐European cultures, histories and languages, for which indeed there is supposed to be only discontinuity with their own antiquity. Their own past counts as ‘premodern’ or ‘traditional’, and thus as belated compared with universalised Modernity. This is so because Modernity itself is normative, and it is normative because it was universalised. The norm of Modernity and the dignity of the modern ‘political’ has been spread through western idioms: through the western normativity of the political, such concepts as democracy, revolution, state, republic and the like will have their patterns in ‘Europe’ and in the ‘West’, while all other political concepts and terms, when contributed to a world dictionary of political terms, will denote merely exceptions. Modernity has been one of the great splits or disjunctions that froze some norms in history, making them become patterns: from that time on, western modernity (first western, then ‘western’ and finally ‘universal’…) has constructed an unbroken genealogical origin for its own concepts and episteme as ‘universal’, and has proposed/imposed them to the planet. The patterns of selection, exception and exclusion of Modernity, which posit the subject as an ‘autonomous’ figure mirrored and complementary of (state) sovereignty – while referring it to the hegemonically dominant model – have not altogether disappeared today. They are merging and mutating into, and coextensive with, configurations of multiple power vectors within non‐transparent networks of blurred and crossed hierarchies with novel, and maybe more volatile, forms of production, of integration and of institution, where again, although in a completely new way, collective action, the sharing and federation of knowledge transcend individual subjectivity while reaching out to both old and new forms of association.     

Political aesthetics: activism,everyday life,and art’s object in 1960s’ Japan

Abstract

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and a means to assuage and co‐opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, a diverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice. Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life. Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene, mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates the state’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics of culture in the early 1960s.     

The politics of imagining Asia: a genealogical analysis

Abstract

Following the recent trends of globalization and regionalization, the idea of Asia has been revived in political, economic, and cultural fields. This essay examines some of the various uses of this idea in modern East Asian and especially Chinese history. The essay consists of four parts. Part One discusses the derivativeness of the idea of Asia, that is, how this idea developed from modern European history, especially the nineteenth‐century European narrative of ‘World History,’ and it points out how the early modern Japanese ‘theory of shedding Asia’ derived from this narrative. Part Two studies the relationship between the idea of Asia and two forms of populism against the background of the Chinese and Russian revolutions – one, exemplified by Russian Narodism, attempted to use Asian particularity to challenge modern capitalism; the other, represented by Sun Yat‐sen, attempted to construct a nation‐state according to a socialist revolutionary program, and to develop agricultural capitalism under the particular social conditions of Asia. Part Three considers the differences and tensions between the ‘Great Asia‐ism’ of Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun and the Japanese idea of East Asia (Tōyō),and it discusses the need to overcome the categories of nation‐state and international relations in order to understand the question of Asia. Part Four discusses the need to go beyond early modern maritime‐centered accounts, nationalist frameworks, and Eurocentrism in re‐examining the question of Asia through historical research by focusing on the particular legacies of Asia and Toyo (such as the tributary system) and the problems of ‘early modernity.’     

Beyond the ‘feminization of masculinity’: transforming patriarchy with the ‘feminine’ in contemporary Japanese youth culture

Contemporary Japanese society has seen the emergence of aesthetically conscious young men who employ ‘feminine’ aesthetics and strategies as ways of exploring and practising new masculine identities. In this paper, I explore the significance of this emerging trend of male beauty by observing and analysing the expressions, strategies and intentions of those young men who have taken to aesthetically representing themselves in these ways. This cultural trend is often described as the ‘feminization of masculinity,’ echoing the gendered articulation of rising mass culture in terms of the ‘feminization of culture,’ which acknowledges aspects of the commercialization of masculine bodies in Japan of the 1990s onward. While this view successfully links important issues, such as femininity, beauty, and the gendered representation of the self in a broader context of capitalist culture, it does not sufficiently convey a sense of agency in the young men's lively practices of exploring and expressing new masculine values and ideals. Rather than viewing ‘feminization’ simply as a sign of commodification, I argue that these young men strategically distance themselves from conventional masculinity by artificially standing in the position of the ‘feminine’, where they can more freely engage in the creation of alternative gender identities. From this point of view, the use of the phrase ‘feminization of masculinity’ often implies a fear and anxiety on the part of patriarchy over the boundary‐crossing practice that seriously challenges the stability of gendered cultural hegemony. Moreover, such anxiety driven reactions easily merge with nationalist inclination, as those threatened tend to seek the consolidation of patriarchal/hegemonic order by eliminating ambiguities and indeterminacy in cultural/national discourse. I conclude that the cultural hegemony of contemporary Japan could better sustain itself by incorporating non‐hegemonic gender identities, which would allow it maintain an open space for critical imagination and effectively diffuse an obsessive and ultimately self‐destructive desire for transparency/identity.     

Wartime collaboration in question: an examination of the postwar trials of the Chinese collaborators

This paper examines the political aspects of the postwar trials of the Chinese collaborators and their arguments, at the trials, against the charges of treason. Against the dominant scholarship on their collaboration with Japan, it argues that the Chinese collaborators had a different version of nationalism, which emphasized the different roles and functions of the state during the anti‐Japanese war, and that wartime collaboration was, in part, a product of their reflections on the Guomindang’s history and its political culture since 1927. The fates of the major collaborators, as the trial cases of Zhou Fohai and Chen Gongbo show, were determined, this paper argues, not by legal crimes they committed but rather mainly by their former political affiliations in the intraparty politics, which revealed the political character of the trials. The political aspects seemed to serve to disclose further the innate problems and inability of the party and its Nationalist Government, which were the main reasons for its ‘failure’ in 1949.     

‘He is the Vagabond that Hath No Habitation in the Lord’: The Representation of Quakerism as Vagrancy in Interregnum England,c. 1650–1660

This article examines the printed representation, and prosecutorial characterisation, of the movements, actions and motivations of early Quakers as vagrant. It argues that the prevalence and power of representing (and subsequently treating) early Quakers as vagrants is an understudied aspect of the social and cultural history of the Society of Friends, particularly in Interregnum England. As evidence, it interrogates a furious pamphlet debate between mid-century religious writers and preachers, who devoted much time and ink to painting Quakers as mendacious vagabonds, and Quaker ‘First Publishers’, who responded at length and in a striking way to these accusations. The article concludes that these images of Quakerism as a form of ‘spiritual vagrancy’ created historically significant echoes in English and Atlantic culture.     

September 11 and its aftermath

Abstract

This article deals with a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Asian–African Conference 1955. Held in a modest way, in Yogyakarta, Bandung and Bangkok, the commemoration leaves, a durable contribution: the conference book – an anthology of reflections related to this world historical event. Written by 16 socially engaged intellectuals, academics and activists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and USA, the book is entitled ‘BANDUNG 2005: Rethinking Solidarity in Global Society. The Challenge of Globalisation for Social and Solidarity Movements.’ The objective of the work is to look for alternatives to the present undesirable World Order and Globalisation. Put in the perspective of social history (of social struggle, social movement, or social change), the Yogyakarta Commemoration of the Bandung Asian–African Conference deserves close attention. The actors involved in the publication and in the meeting, the messages they delivered and the projects they proposed, are too important to be ignored. This article presents an analytical review on the commemoration, especially on the content of the book, completed by a concluding remark on the prospect of the movement.