Uncomfortable ‘Followership’

By Jason Lim

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. _ Recently, Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, denied that the Imperial Japanese Army had anything to do with the establishment of the Asia_wide system involving the systemic rape of women perpetrated by Japanese soldiers during WWII, euphemistically referred to as the ``comfort women.’’ Abe has also given implicit support to an effort led by his close advisers to overturn the 1993 Kono admission of official Japanese involvement with comfort women.

Many have been trying to paint this debate as a conflict between Japan and Korea, or Japan vs. the rest of Asia. Others have portrayed this as a failure of leadership, mainly on the part of Japanese politicians to show courage in facing the unpleasant past. Still others framed the issue as part of a larger international issue of Northeast Asia’s security system for the future, warning that the comfort women issue could inflame nationalistic passions and destabilize the region.

Such characterizations do not represent the whole picture. The comfort women issue is not only about regional conflict, international order, or even bad leadership. It is essentially about a failure in ‘``followership’’. What is followership? It’s not a concept familiar to many of us. We have been drilled to no end about the paramount importance of leadership, but followership?

Professor Barbara Kellerman, who pioneered the concept and teaches a course at the Kennedy School of the same name, has following to say about followership: ``I am arguing that in order to understand the leadership dynamic, we must take into account not only those who exercise power, authority, and influence, but also those on whom power, authority, and influence are exercised. But I am making another claim as well: that instructing on becoming a good follower is as important to the common good as instructing on becoming a good leader. In fact, this course on followership makes the argument that to teach the one without the other is illogical.’’

A logical explanation of the above definition is that good followership is as essential to maintaining the common good as good leadership. In fact, good leadership is not possible without good followership. Then, let’s examine the issue comfort women from the perspective of followership. Have we practiced good followership in this case? Have we, as citizens of the world, done enough to really force our leaders to become good leaders and engage in a process of truth, reconciliation, and healing? Have we fulfilled our role as followers in with a sense of global civic duty, instead of only engaging in name-calling and emotional orgies of hatred venting? How effective have we been in following so that the leaders of China, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, and other nations could come together with the Japanese leadership to co?create a future based on truth of the past and hope for the future?

The central issue of the comfort women goes deeper into the very issue of systemic sexual violence against women in regions of conflict, the use of rape as a weapon of war. We have seen egregious cases of rape as a weapon of war in the breakup of former Yugoslavia. We see similar abuses in Darfur, Sudan, today.

Just imagine if we had been more effective in following so that the truth of the comfort women became an acknowledged truth decades ago. Open and widespread recognition and education of the comfort women phenomenon would have contributed to the public debate and formation of a collective consciousness that would have allowed us to characterize sexual violence as a weapon of war wielded by a government or the authority structure. Existence of a collective consciousness on the issue would have allowed us to more quickly recognize a similar phenomenon when it occurs anywhere else,?instead of wasting time debating about defining the phenomenon anew.

Connecting the dots among these seemingly disparate crimes is a matter of presenting the dots as a pattern of sexual violence against women.?It's always easier to see a whole, connected picture than individual dots. Comfort women happen to be the first and one of the biggest dots in the pattern, from which we?can begin realizing the issue. For example, open public discussion of the Holocaust has allowed the crime of ``genocide’’ to enter into the global public consciousness and offer a moral reference point to all similar crimes that have drawn universal condemnation.

Luckily, late is better than never. Recently, U.S. Congressman Mike Honda submitted the non?binding House Resolution 121 calling on U.S. citizens and members of the Congress to urge the government of Japan to ``…formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force's coercion of young women into sexual slavery, known to the world as `comfort women’, during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of World War II.’’

Consider this a golden opportunity for us followers to practice good followership. Go to www.support121.org and show your support for the passage of the resolution that will add to the effort to protect girls and women in regions of conflict from sexual violence used as a weapon of war.

Jason Lim is a graduate student at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Administration.