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FOREIGN POLICY: Why is Japan’s use of “comfort women” or “sex slaves” popping up as a topic, more than 60 years after the end of World War II?
Gerald Curtis: It’s popping up because the current leadership thinks they’ve apologized enough for wartime misdeeds, and they don’t want to be pushed around on this issue anymore.
FP: In 2005, China erupted in what looked like orchestrated anger over a controversial Japanese textbook that glossed the “Rape of Nanking.” It’s the same general topic, World War II historical wrongs, but China’s reaction has been muted this time. What’s changed?
GC: First of all, that’s a different issue. But what’s changed is that the Chinese strategy has changed. They’re trying to avoid this history issue getting in the way of the relationship. Plus, it’s difficult to have big problems with Japan and not, in some way or another, get caught up in problems with the United States. They want to focus on their internal development, not be distracted by problems in their external relations. They appreciate that [Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe went to Beijing first thing as soon as he became prime minister. And as long as he doesn’t visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which was their big issue with [Abe’s predecessor Junichiro] Koizumi, they’re going to try to downplay these history issues. So they’re playing it very differently now than they did when Koizumi was in office. In any case, the comfort women issue is not such a big issue for China; it’s a bigger issue for the Koreans.
FP: Picking up on your last comment, it seems like there’s been more reaction to the comfort women issue in the United States than in Asia. Why would the U.S. Congress want to get involved in a controversy that’s between Japan, China, and South Korea, but has nothing to do with the United States?
GC: It’s true that the congressional resolution that Congressman [Mike] Honda [of California] put forward deals with an issue that Americans are not directly a party to, which was the use of women in Asia for forced sex with the Japanese military. But when the Japanese prime minister sounded as though he was defending the actions of the Japanese military during the war, by saying that in some narrow sense, these women were not forced into prostitution—I mean, it’s really outrageous—that not only angered Korean-Americans and Chinese-Americans and others who have a direct interest in this issue, but it angered anybody who’s concerned about human rights and women’s rights. And the prime minister and the leadership in Japan handled it almost as badly as could be imagined. More recently, he’s been trying to undo the damage by saying that, as prime minister of Japan, he feels these women’s pain, he apologizes, and that he reaffirms the statement that was made in the 1990s by the then chief cabinet secretary, Mr. Kono, which was an official government apology for the treatment of these women.
FP: Is that enough?
GC: I don’t know what’s enough at this point because the situation has really gotten so nasty. These very conservative Japanese draw a line between what they say were women being forced by the Japanese government to provide sexual services, and women who were recruited some other way, possibly by middlemen. It’s a distinction without a difference. Some of these women were 14 and 15 years old. They were forced to become sex slaves for the Japanese military. So were middlemen used to recruit them? Yeah, probably. Did the military rape some of these women directly and recruit them themselves? Yes, definitely. The Japanese government says there’s no written evidence to confirm that the Japanese military forcibly recruited these women, but there’s the testimony of these 16 comfort women. It’s the worst possible issue for Japan. They can’t say anything that seems as though it’s defending the awful actions of the Japanese government during its militarist period, and expect that anybody anywhere is going to be sympathetic. Too many of the conservatives in Japan have convinced themselves that it’s just what they call the “left-wing American media” that is playing up this issue for its own purposes, without saying what those purposes are. So there’s a lot of self-delusion going on here about how bad this is for Japan’s image.
FP: According to the latest poll numbers, Abe is down to about a 35 percent approval rating just six months into his time in office. Why is he so unpopular?
GC: Because the public hasn’t been convinced that he knows what he wants to do about Japan’s domestic issues and how to do it. The public is concerned about things like healthcare, pensions, taxes, education of their children. What are his policies? It’s not clear. Plus, there’s the sense that after Koizumi’s radical approach, Abe is going back to politics as normal, the bad old ways. He doesn’t really have much leadership ability, to manage his own cabinet, etc. All of those things are contributing to this continuing decline in his support ratings. It doesn’t seem to have leveled off yet.
FP: How does the comfort women issue play into that?
GC: I’m sure this issue with the comfort women is hurting him a lot, because there isn’t much sympathy among the Japanese public for his position. I think there’s some concern that it’s leading to a deterioration in relations with the United States, the most important relationship Japan has. As for Abe’s statements, I think he said what he believed without thinking very hard about either playing to his conservative base or what the consequences would be abroad. Before he became prime minister, he was one of the leaders of the group that wanted to revise the so-called Kono statement about Japan’s culpability for forcing those women into sex slavery. So he said what he believed. Yeah, it plays to his narrow base of hard-core right-wing support, but I think it cost him more broadly, both domestically and internationally. The Japanese conservative leadership has not come to grips with World War II, so there’s a politics of denial here. This is not majority sentiment in Japan, but it happens to be a very strong sentiment among the group that’s in power in Japan.
FP: Japan has a history of baffling foreign observers. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for instance, once described the country as having “intangibles of culture that America is ill-prepared to understand fully.” What do you think most outsiders still don’t get about Japan?
GC: It’s hard to find Japanese who can explain what Japan is thinking in a way that foreigners can understand. It’s very different when you interact with Chinese elites. They’re very articulate. They have a global vision. They have a worldview. They know what they think and they tell you. But the Japanese cultural tradition is quite different, so you have to be able to read between the lines. You have to be able to hear it in the Japanese language, and there aren’t very many people who can do that. So they’re not very good at articulating their views, and that leads to all kinds of guesswork about what they’re up to. The fact is, even with all the changes going on, and this right-wing leadership in power now, the Japanese defense budget is not increasing. They’re reaching out for a bigger role abroad, but in a pretty tentative and limited manner. They’ll probably continue to muddle through—take some tough positions like they have on the abductee issue with North Korea—but the idea that they’re on the march to become a great military power with power projection capabilities and challenge the Chinese and so on? I don’t buy it.
Gerald L. Curtis is professor of political science at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books on politics in Japan and U.S.-East Asian relations.
