Comfort for whom?

By Stephen Costello

The Korea-Japan Dec. 28 agreement to settle the comfort woman/sexual slavery issues between them could be a step forward for both countries. It should be some compensation for surviving women to receive compensation from Japan. Little of the rest of the agreement can survive the leaders or the related considerations that resulted in the deal.

Many individuals and groups are deeply affected by history, and are sensitive to the way contemporary ­― and temporary ― governments in Japan, Korea, or anywhere talk about it or try to make it feel less painful. It was inevitable that this agreement would be controversial, and would not satisfy everyone.

How could it? Groups and individuals come to the issues with contradictory views and expectations, among them different views of history. Critically, current leaders bring their own histories to such an agreement, for better and for worse.

The issues have been kept alive by succeeding leaders in both countries, even though there were actions available to bring some justice and comfort to surviving victims. Korean President Kim Dae-jung and Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi tried to settle the issue with an historic but general apology by Obuchi and a private compensation fund in 1998.

Many Korean victims did not accept it, and the next Korean president violated it. The current Japanese prime minister has spoken against it. Despite great effort, the comfort women issue cannot be separated from other, parallel issues, both historical and political, which will now provide reasons for different groups to protest against the deal.

Several points should be kept in mind. The air of crisis that has surrounded the comfort women issue for more than a year, and has increasingly distracted and diverted the Japanese and Korean governments from more worthwhile and immediate work, was largely created by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Park Geun-hye.

Their realization that it was now having such a negative impact on their international standing, regional relations, and domestic political support forced the strained agreement of Dec. 28. Prodding from the U.S. government would have driven home these high and growing costs, and perhaps assisted in bringing about the agreement.

The treatment of history, and more specifically the attempt by governments to control a national narrative that is comfortable and supportive for conservative nationalists, has been a driving theme in China, Japan and South Korea during 2015.

They are not alone. The Netanyahu government in Israel has revealed its fears of “assimilation” by banning for high school students a novel about love and identity between a Palestinian and an Israeli. The Republican-controlled Texas school board has injected ideological standards into its textbooks since 2010. Why are democratic governments doing what is more expected from an authoritarian system?

The comfort women issue is bound up with the national history issue, the need to rewrite history textbooks, and of course the conservative/progressive division. It is also bound up intimately with profound failures of diplomacy, tension reduction, and leadership vision in the Northeast Asian region.

There is an arms race and a crippling pause in creative and tension-reducing diplomacy, to name just two. These are related. It is difficult to read any U.S. account of the new Japan-Korea agreement without being assured that a major casualty of strained relations for the past three years has been necessary cooperation in opposing threats from North Korea and China, and that maybe such cooperation can now proceed.

Because of this failure to see linkages, governments and reporters now attempt to deal with the comfort women agreement as a discrete problem. For instance, none has to date pointed out that President Park’s conviction that much of Korea’s political opposition is “pro-North,” that demonstrators critical of the government may be “terrorists,” and that Korea’s long but successful struggle for democracy should be ignored or denigrated, stripped her of negotiating leverage, not to mention of democratic and moral standing to challenge Prime Minister Abe’s denial of history.

As scholar Jeff Kingston noted in the Japan Times, “… Following Japan down this Orwellian road relinquishes any advantage South Korea might have enjoyed from Abe’s promotion of patriotic education.”

In Korea and Japan, the process and the text of this agreement are bound to prolong, if not increase, the sense that governments misunderstand their roles and responsibilities in a modern democracy. Both administrations have seen mass public demonstrations against them of unprecedented size in the past year. Historians and scholars in both countries have issued unusual letters, speaking out against trying to impose one view of history on an open society.

Many Japanese will understand the value to history-deniers of avoiding legal responsibility while escaping future Korean government criticism. Many Koreans will see crass political calculations in accepting this deal, and notice how the President went about it. In the short term, social conflict and disharmony will result.

And in both cases, they will fail. Both publics are far beyond the 1980s, 1970s or earlier frameworks being used by the Prime Minister and the President to enforce national narratives that are broadly known to be wrong. In this sense the democracy/history crises in the two countries are not primarily left vs. right. They are more importantly new vs. old.

Modernization, to the extent that society can digest important lessons from the past, share a vision, and invent new ways to move forward, is what has been missing. Increasingly, that may be what is demanded.

Stephen Costello is a producer of AsiaEast, a Web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C. He can be contacted at cosetllos@asiaeast.org.