By Jason Lim
Kamikaze, Yasukuni and comfort women ― these are words that bring out possibly the three worst images of Japan: blind fanaticism, stubborn reluctance to apologize and past war crimes.
But they can also beat a path towards reconciliation and peace in East Asia, as posed by Annabel Park, one of the four panelists at the recently concluded panel discussion titled, ``War, Memory and Representation in Art: Burma, Korea, Laos, & Vietnam," hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus.
Annabel Park is a 1.5-generation ― people who immigrate to a new country before or during their early teens ― Korean-American filmmaker and activist who spearheaded the passage of H. Res. 121 in the summer of 2007, otherwise known as the comfort women resolution.
In addition to Park, artists and social activists Kyi May Kaung, Channapha Khamvongsa, and Peace Mural artist Huong spoke about ``how, through art, traumatic individual memories can be woven into a larger context of community grief, reconciliation, and healing."
As part of her presentation, Park showed a brief video of a documentary she's making, containing footage of surviving comfort women attending various protests, particularly one in Tokyo that sparked extreme reactions from Japanese rightists who hurled insults and threats at the peaceful protesters, showing how the comfort women issue is still powerfully raw in both the psyche and politics of East Asia, especially in the larger context of Japan's past aggression.
She followed up on her video with a photograph of a Kamikaze plane hanging in the Yushukan, or museum of the Yasukuni Shrine, where the spirits of the Japanese war dead, including 14 Class-A war criminals, are honored. Pointing to the photo of the Kamikaze fighter, more of a human-guided missile than a plane, she posed the question of whether these young Kamikaze pilots ― driven by a sense of misguided patriotism, fanaticism, and glory ― weren't just as much victims of the war as the other victims who died brutally at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, including the hundreds of thousands of comfort women.
Coming from Park, this is an extraordinary statement, since she had been continually immersed in the painful subject, engaged in making a documentary of the surviving comfort women's struggle to make their stories heard and networking with progressive civil society groups and politicians in Japan and Korea on their behalf. As such, Park knows more than anyone else, except for the comfort women themselves, the unspeakable cruelty that the young girls suffered under a system of rape camps organized by the Japanese Imperial Army.
Of course, she wasn't equating the nature of the victimization between the 6,000 Kamikaze pilots and 200,000 comfort women _ quantitatively, qualitatively, or morally. But her statement was nevertheless a game-changer, if you will, in how we can examine the whole possibility of dealing with reconciliation and peace because she was asking the crucial question, ``How do we get beyond the oppressor vs. victim paradigm?"
Truly. How do we?
Is it possible to achieve true reconciliation while stuck in the ``Oppressor vs. Victim" paradigm, or does it inevitably lead to an attempt by the victims to want to see the oppressors humiliated, stripped of dignity, and hurting, much as they were?
I am not saying that the victims have no right to do so, or that the oppressors don't deserve such treatment, but if we are to truly engage in the process of ``community grief, reconciliation, and healing," is it reasonable to expect that we can get there by demanding the offending side to demonize their past, completely repudiate their ancestors, and discard the memory of the very real suffering that the people of Japan, including the soldiers, experienced during the war? Can we really expect the people of Japan to admit that their parents and grandparents engaged in immoral behavior if it also means having to admit that they were immoral human beings?
Could Koreans do so if the situation were reversed? Could Chinese, or people of other Asian nations victimized by the Japanese during WWII? I truly don't know. I do know that it won't be easy.
Furthermore, doesn't the ``community" necessarily include the oppressors as well as the victims when it comes to war? If so, what if we approach the issue not from the ``Us vs. Them" framework but from an ``Us vs. War" paradigm, making the war the common enemy that dehumanized both the oppressors and victims? Wouldn't that be more constructive, especially going forward as a regional community of neighboring nations?
I still believe the government of Japan should, once and for all, unequivocally apologize for the war crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army in the first half of the 20th century. I also believe that the Dokdo islets are Korean territory and that Korea has a better soccer team.
But I also believe that any good-faith attempt at dealing with Japan's wartime abuses must be inclusive and founded on the ``Us vs. War" paradigm that brings the Japanese into the process by acknowledging and sympathizing with their human suffering due to the war, rather than one of exclusion based on the ``Us vs. Them" framework that seek to dismiss the reality of their pain by painting a black and white caricature of their collective experience.
Jason Lim was the 2007-2008 fellow at Harvard Korea Institute. He can be reached at jasonlim2000@gmail.com