15th May
A very odd combination of experiences and stimuli in Cambridge, Britain, and Japan these days.
Armed police have been patrolling Luton streets. Scenes from Brazilian flavella transported to Bedfordshire, and a regular town of little note other than an airport near London and once a centre of car and hat production. The reason is that gangs have been ‘tooling up’ with firearms and several have died. For US citizens this might sound familiar, but not in Britain, although very oddly this hasn’t made the national news.
Further afield, Hashimoto Toru, Osaka Mayor, joint head of Japanese political maverick party Isshin no Kai with Tokyo Governor Ishihara, has had some of Ishi’s charm and diplomacy rub off on him. He has come out with remarks about ‘comfort women’ having been of great service to Japan’s war effort, and urging the US forces in Japan to make far greater use of the services of prostitutes (seemingly so that they might rape less Japanese women). It is less astonishing that he said such idiotic things, but utterly astonishing that he seems astonished at the backlash in the media and among activists and politicians. More evidence it seems that even allegedly educated and responsible social leaders are able of the most depressing expressions of ignorance and ill-judgement regarding Japan’s history, particularly the war legacy that has blighted Japan’s Asian relations since 1945.
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000225447
Now, in all such issues, there is a danger that an emotional reaction engendered by the issue might mask some of the nuances of the original statement, so it is best to look at Hashimoto’s comments regarding the opprobrium that has been liberally heaped upon him.
“I did not say that the comfort women system was necessary today. If the Second World War were to occur now, (a similar system) probably wouldn’t be enacted, and nobody would approve of the kind of comfort women system Japan had back then,” he said.
Hashimoto added that because other countries have also provided prostitutes to soldiers during wartime, he can’t understand why the world is singling out Japan, while also maintaining that he isn’t saying the comfort woman system was a good thing.
So, he was talking historically, and therefore we should adopt a different perspective. Possibly reasonable, depending upon what alteration we are asked to undertake. However, the second remark is the really telling one. Japan, he believes, simply ‘provided prostitutes’, as did many other countries, so that is fine. Prostitutes are not a problem, not as though they were a commodity which people might feel squeamish about trading. In the logical extension of his point many armies invaded and occupied cities, so the mass rapes that occurred in Berlin and Nanking are basically the same as the occupations that occurred when the British took Brussels, or the Americans occupied Yokohama, so those rapes and abuses in Berlin and Nanking are not worthy of note: that just happened, and was part of occupation processes. Perhaps equating the bombing of Coventry with that of Hiroshima would be considered in the same equivalent light, but that is doubtful, and the reason why it is doubtful is the key here.
Equivalence is not a damp blanket by which the flames of comparative analysis are extinguished at the level of ‘the same, the end’.
Hashi has made a hash of history by his profound ignorance. He misunderstands the comfort women as being willingly recruited, when there is clear evidence that many were press ganged, impelled to provide sex, and were therefore victims of mass rape, and many more were recruited as volunteers to help troops, much in the way that volunteers now try to disaster victims, but were then forced into providing sex, often by third-parties for profit, and were therefore victims of human-trafficking and sexual abuse. The willing volunteers, of whom there were a few, were driven by the desire for money and a way out of even worse situations in their homelands, and can therefore be equated to normal prostitutes, each of whom may have a terrible story of abuse, hardship, poor education, addiction, or other tragedies. For very few people throughout history has prostitution proven a rational career choice made due to a balancing of factors as the optimum option. For the vast majority of the ianfu or comfort women, there simply was no choice, and therefore they were victims, and their ranks, although mainly Chinese and Koreans, also include European, South-East Asian, and, the most overlooked group of all, Japanese victims. In a twisted logic, the comfort women therefore do bear similarities with the women abused in Okinawa by US personnel.
Oddly, although Hashi believes that Japan ‘provided prostitutes’, the defence of the Japanese government (largely debunked by scholars) is that the Japanese state did not make such a provision, but that it was actually made by private businesses. That they acted as agents for the state (for the military) is seen as removing responsibility from the successor state, present day (non-Imperial) Japan (that coincidentally has the same Imperial Family and basic institutions), and therefore compensation was provided through an arms-length third party trust fund mechanism. No soiling of present day palms was to be allowed.
This whole process really began after groundbreaking work by young Japanese scholars in the late 1980s into one of the many aspects of their own nation’s history tucked away, not spoken of, and glossed over by successive generations in an officially sanctioned approach of dwelling on the positives while expressing very general, vague, yet seemingly heartfelt expressions of regret for the darker events of Japan’s past. In this sense the bombing of Hiroshima and other Japanese cities could be regretted in much the same way as the massacres in China without recourse to specifics, and thereby Japan could be genuinely regarded as a fellow victim of war.
As soon as there was a deeper investigation of Japanese war crimes by a later generation that approach began to seem increasingly like a shabby conceit, even while held by millions as a genuine expression of rejection of war and militarism. For this reason, the expression of regret for Japan’s wartime actions by socialist PM Murayama in 1995 enraged the right-wing, mainly in the Liberal Democratic Party, and still continues to do so, to the degree that present PM Abe has flirted with rejecting the Murayama statement. On 22nd April 2013, he said that he wouldn’t necessarily accept the statement in its entirety. However, such has been the uproar over the idiotic Hashimoto statement, and the naturally amplified and well-practiced outrage of the Chinese and Korean governments (without a hint of hypocrisy on their part regarding human rights abuses and ‘managed national history’), that Abe has felt constrained to state he completely accepts the 1995 statement. The irony of the Hashi hash has been to reinforce Abe and LDP loyalty to a statement that most detest and wish to ditch as soon as possible.
The effects of such outrageous blunders, delivered by various Japanese high profile politicians with tedious regularity, is to further estrange Japan from its important East Asian neighbours. That this should occur at this moment, when all of them face the challenges being posed by North Korean missile and nuclear posturings, and just as Abe has dispatched his special advisor, Iijima Isao, to Pyongyang, and called for talks with the DPRK’s leader Kim Jong-Un, it seems that any common front with Seoul has been made very unlikely in the short term. Abe may be overly optimistic in his hopes of achieving anything with the DPRK, and he may well be delusional, seeming during his first administration to believe he could solve the continuing abduction issue, but his chances of anything resembling success would appear to have become even more slender without the support and engagement of Korea and China.
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000229401
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000229345
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000229351
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/05/16/national/seoul-envoy-mayor-is-odd-man-out/#.UZQelkon3Vo
Perhaps Hashimoto should come to Britain and seek allies here. It seems that a fairly large minority of the country has taken a (hopefully very temporary) shine to an odd man, a political outsider, who is full of negative energy and wishes to kick the political establishment about a bit, and has decided that being nasty to foreigners and shouting loudly about how lovely Britain is, despite also saying that he hates so much about it, might prove his ticket to some sort of political power: Nigel Farage. Like a mini-Tea Party, Farage’s UKIP (UK Independence Party) aims to control the Tory Party from arms length, grabbing the tail of the membership and thereby dragging the Tory leadership in the desired direction, much as the Tea Party has done with Republican Party candidates. It has worked for a few weeks, with Dave ‘the Wave’ Cameron feeling so weak that he has caved in to each demand of his party members who are running to embrace a UKIP agenda in the hope that it will make the Tories more electable, despite the fear that it will make them unelectable, like the Republicans, or even irrelevant: there is a UKIP, and we don’t need one, let alone two of them.
In the past the British have rather sneered at France and Italy for their mad right-wing fronts and forces, but in the recent county council elections (yes, with an average voter who is rather more right-wing than the national average, and with a turnout out of less than 30%) UKIP got 23% of the votes cast, and mainly at the expense of the Tories. Their policies are bizarre. They demand more cuts in public spending, except for defence, where they would like a 40% increase (for what reason it isn’t clear. Perhaps to re-fight the defence of Singapore but this time win? Or re-enact Waterloo? Or maybe they really fancy staying in Afghanistan for a very long time indeed), withdrawal from the EU, and ‘a better Britain’. Quite how they equate that with no public services, a bloody big military, and an economy ruined by withdrawal from the massive common market on our doorstep isn’t exactly clear. But it is clear what issues the public most respect UKIP for: being nasty to Brussels, being nasty to immigrants (yes, those that pay to come and study here and subsidize British students, and those that choose to come here to work and pay taxes and do the jobs most British can’t or won’t do), and allowing people to smoke in pubs. Yes, that is the intellectual level the party is working at, and which millions of British people are responding to: foreigners and fags with a pint. It’s enough to make you hold your remaining hair and cry.
However, in Cambridge at least there is plenty to distract you from this madness. There are guided tours of Cambridge sundials, on which I have developed a great interest. There was a lecture series and a symposium featuring former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, who it must be said is one of the most impressive public speakers and one of the most approachable that could possibly ever be encountered. There was also a session on Wed 15th May: “The Future of the Past at the BBC: the production, impact & legacy of Simon Schama’s ‘A History of Britain’”. This featured Martin Davidson, the BBC’s History Commissioning Editor, and Professor Helen Weinstein, Founding Director of the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (University of York) and Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, discussing the production, impact and legacy of the BBC’s landmark series, ‘A History of Britain’ (a 15-part documentary series, presented by Simon Schama and broadcast 2000 and 2002). It was very interesting, and featured a clip of a new series to be broadcast on the BBC in September 2013. It was an example of how the ‘talking head’ on camera could work well. It featured Simon Schama talking about Jews, in a series on the same subject, in front of the huge steel security wall that surrounds much of the West Bank areas. Schama was dumped in front of the camera, allegedly without script or preparation by the director, and told to speak to camera. He did so with a degree of eloquence that few could match. He spoke of how the wall was one of many walls that have come to symbolise Jewish struggles, how it had cut the deaths from hundreds to almost zero, and how it protected and made people feel protected. He then said that this series was about a culture of Judaism and Jews that was about communication, exchange, learning, and coexisting with others, and that the form of Judaism left to live within these encasing walls was one cut off from that tradition, and thereby actually cut off from its own life.
If only Japan and Britain could exchange Hashimoto and Schama, just for a little while. Maybe the insight and humanity of one could provide a little light, and the blundering ignorance of the other could make people reconsider their own short-sightedness about the world and that which seems foreign. Sadly, most things would probably be lost in translation, and many people would probably be more concerned about whether or not they could smoke at the bar.
As for me, I’m waiting for the new dawn, and to check a sundial.
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