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| AsiaViews, Edition: 47/V/Dec/2008 |
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| Historical Dialogue & Reconciliation in East Asia |
Understandings of history have profound implications for international relations in East Asia. “Memories” of historical events are used by governments as instruments of diplomacy as well as foci of national identity. In September of this year, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA in cooperation with the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, presented the Historical Dialogue and Reconciliation in East Asia Series.
This seminar grew out of a five year project undertaken by Japanese and overseas Chinese historians supported by the Tokyo-based Sasakawa Peace Foundation that produced a book of essays with the tentative English title, Contentious Issues in Modern Sino-Japanese Relations: Toward a History Beyond Borders. This book has been published in Chinese (PRC) and Japanese in 2006. An English translation is now underway.
Speakers at this seminar were Kawashima Shin and Lim Jie-hyun. Kawashima Shin is an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, where he teaches the history of East Asian international relations. He was previously a special researcher at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and an Assistant Professor at Hokkaido University. He graduated from Tokyo Foreign Language University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. He is the author of several books in Japanese on East Asian international relations. His first book, The Formation of Modern Chinese Diplomacy (in Japanese), was awarded the Suntory prize in 2004.
Lim Jie-hyun is a Professor at Hanyang University in South Korea, where he specializes in Polish history and comparative studies of nationalisms. He is a leading figure in South Korea in the development of transnational history. He is also the director of the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture. He received his Ph.D. in Western Intellectual History from Sogang University and is the author of several books in Korean on nationalism and dictatorship.
The following is the continuation of papers presented by Kawashima Shin and Lim Jie-hyun in September. The papers presented here discuss the backgrounds of current disputes over history as well as ongoing efforts at dialogue and transnational historical cooperation.
Lim Jie-hyun
My topic is not about political policies, historical commissions, history textbooks, education systems, etc. Rather, it’s about historical culture in a very broad sense, upon which these historical textbooks and education systems and policies and even political power have been invented.
If the former group of “the facts” belongs to the domain of hard power, perhaps historical culture may belong to soft power, especially with its hegemony backed by the civil society level. It is very often heard that the change of political regime is very important for historical reconciliation in East Asia. Yes, partly this is true, but any political regime in East Asia should take into consideration the strong existence of nationalism on the civil society level. So even though these political regimes want to escape the nationalistic, antagonistic stalemates between regimes, they have to pay attention to the very strong, hegemonic existence of nationalism on the civil society level. So even very strong political power cannot be free from this sort of nationalism as soft power.
Prevalence of Victimhood Nationalism
I would like to say something about nationalism as soft power, especially regarding the term “victimhood.” Actually, victimhood is not confined to some small and weak countries, countries colonized and victimized during the war. Fortunately or unfortunately, in 2003 I was staying here and witnessed how American society responded to Bush’s call for the second Iraq war. I could see that visibly, quite predictably, and sometimes quite emotionally and energetically, the American audience responded to the call from the political power towards the second Iraq war. I think that behind the response of the American audience toward the second Iraq War lies a sort of victim. The American nation—we are the victims of a terrorist attack; perhaps the worst victims of a terrorist attack. So in the wake of September 11, I think that American society could respond to Bush’s call for a second Iraq War quite positively, and almost unanimously in the Congress.
So I think victimhood is quite a prevalent phenomenon, confined not only to weak, colonized, or victimized nations, but also some victimizing nations and also colonizing nations. So that is why victimhood is quite widely found not only in Korea and China in the East Asian case, but also in Japan. And in the European case, victimhood also can be found now in Germany, especially the post-1999 regimes.
The Jedwabne Massacre
I will turn back to this phenomenon in a more specific way. Actually, my interest in victimhood came from my encounters with Polish history and especially the hot debate on the massacre in Jedwabne. The Jedwabne massacre is a tragedy or genocide done by Poles in July 1941 under the German occupation. But until 1999, many Poles believed that that tragedy, the massacre of Jews in the small town of Jedwabne, was perpetrated by Germans. But a Jewish historian who came from Poland, Jan Gross, excavated the truth about the massacre in Jedwabne, and he revealed that it was done not by Germans but by Poles.
It brought the whole of Polish society into a state of shock— ‘we were taught that the Poles never harmed their neighbors. We are a very peaceful nation. We have always been invaded by Germans, Russians, and even Habsburg Austrians.’ As historical victims who are hereditary victims, Poles could enjoy a privileged position and a morally very comfortable position since they always regarded themselves as victims. But suddenly, they found out their compatriots were perpetrators, especially in this terrible massacre of Jews in Jedwabne. Polish neighbors killed or massacred their Jewish neighbors on a certain day. So it was really quite a shock in regard to historical culture among the Polish masses.
And then there followed lots of hot debates about the massacre in Jedwabne: in Polish historiography, Jewish historiography, controversies between Poles and Jews, controversies between some leftist Polish historians, rightist Polish historians, ultra- rightist historians, the Kaczyński brothers, and so on.
So these messy controversies followed this—the revelation of this massacre in Poland. But what is most interesting to me regarding these controversies was that the Laudański brothers were perpetrators in Jedwabne in 1941, and they survived the war. Immediately after the war, they were convicted for the murder of Jews in Jedwabne, but they were released from prison.
So after the revelation of the massacre in Jedwabne, a Polish journalist and a German journalist tried to have an interview with these living, convicted Laudański brothers. And in this interview, the most interesting thing is that the Laudański brothers regarded themselves as victims. “Like the whole Polish nation, we suffered…we suffered under the Germans, we suffered under the Soviet occupation, we suffered under the People’s Republic of Poland…”
So in this interview, we find a very magical metamorphosis of individual victimizers into the collective victim. So they could hide behind the memory wall of collective victimhood in terms of the nation. So that is why I found that collective victimhood or some hereditary victimhood, victim nationalism, is quite dangerous. And actually, it hinders historical reconciliation, for example, in this case, between Jews and Poles and between Israel and the Polish state now.
Collective Guilt and Innocence
Based on this assumption, let me point out several points that are quite crucial to understanding victimhood nationalism and historical reconciliation. First, the dichotomy of collective guilt and collective innocence. Hannah Arendt in the early 1960s made a brilliant analysis of collective victimhood in her book, the very controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem. I think that book has already survived the test of time. I think it is still one of the most crucial books in understanding collective guilt and collective innocence and how this feeling of collective guilt contributes to the making of a certain sort of historical consciousness, sentiments, and so on.
In speaking of the Japanese to my students—usually, we tend to believe that you should be sorry since you belong to the Japanese nation that victimized, colonized, perpetrated atrocities against your Asian neighbors during the World War II. But usually, their friends are Japanese who were born after the 1980s. So I used to ask my students, “Do you think that you are responsible for the atrocities that the Korean army perpetrated in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s before you were born?” And they used to say, “It is impossible that we can be responsible for acts that were done even before we were born.” But why do you say to your Japanese friends, “You should take responsibility for what the Japanese nation did during the World War II and during colonial rule”? So it is a bit strange. But on the other hand, every young Korean cannot escape from a sort of feeling that we feel sorry for the Vietnamese. Those atrocities and brutalities were not done by myself, but they were done by the generation of my fathers, my uncles, so we feel sorry anyway.
We should divide historical responsibility into two levels. One level is that people can be responsible only for what they have done. We cannot be responsible for what we did not do. But on the other hand, today’s young people, for example, the young generation who were born after the 1980s, are responsible for the memory of the past, how the society remembers the past and what our ancestors did to our neighbors. So they are not responsible for what has been done, but all of us are responsible for the contemporary memory of the past, and we are responsible for how our contemporary societies are remembering the past, both negative and positive and so on. So we should approach the younger generation in this way by stressing that their responsibility, our common responsibility, is for society’s memories of the past, which is quite unpleasant. But, anyway, we should remember that.
That is one point. We should avoid the politics of, “you should be sorry.” You should be responsible just because you belong to this nation, or we are innocent just because we belong to the Korean nation regardless of what I have actually done. That actually reinforces the feeling of national belonging. And so in that way collective guilt and collective innocence are very crucial emotional tools or conceptual tools to lead people into a very strong feeling of national belonging and thus intensifies and reinforces nationalism.
Sacralization and Uniqueness
The second point is the sacralization of memories. For example, very often we hear this common response from ordinary people, “You foreigners can never ever understand our own tragic history. Only we who suffered from this tragic history can understand it, so we have the exclusive right to understand and to explain this. You foreigners, you will never experience such a tragic history. You can never ever understand our own history, so you have no right to tackle our understanding of history.” Perhaps between individuals, it might be partly true. Everyone has his own secrets, and they cannot be shared even by—we have some experiences that cannot be shared even by wives or husbands. So every individual has some secrecy, but if this sacralization of memory develops into a group level or a national level, it has a different connotation. It actually precludes any possibility to share understandings of the past with the others.
Sacralization of politics also sometimes exists, and usually it works out as a bulwark against others’ understanding of our past and as such, eventually blocks a mutual understanding of the past.
So I’m afraid that the discourse of uniqueness is dominant, especially in the discourse on the Holocaust. Of course we should recognize that every historical event is a singularity. Every historical event or every historical accident or every history has its own singular characteristics that cannot be denominated into general history or common history with neighbors. But even though we recognize this singularity, it should not be made equal to uniqueness. It is a different story.
Transnationality
The third point I would like to emphasize is transnationality. Victims cannot be imaginable without imagining victimizers. So if one would like to approach victimhood in Korea, he or she should also approach Japan as the victimizers. For example, if one approaches victimhood consciousness in Poland, he should know the Polish-Jewish relationships before the Second World War and the Polish-German relationships under the German occupation and even Polish-Russian relationships. Only with an understanding of the transnational circumstances evolving around victimhood, can one really understand what this victimhood nationalism is. So in a sense, a transnational historical approach is inevitable and indispensable, and the national historic paradigm would not work out. So it is quite an irony that victimhood nationalism can be understood not in the national historic paradigm but only in the paradigm of transnational history.
Victimizers as Victims
The fourth point is that victimhood nationalism also can be found among victimizers in Japan and Germany. Japan, as Professor Bu Ping already pointed out, was the first nation bombed by an atomic bomb, and that contributed much to the making of Japanese victimhood. Also, the trauma of the Pacific War led to an emphasis on the confrontation between America and Japan instead of emphasizing the confrontations between Chinese and Japanese and between Japanese and Koreans. It worked out to a belief that we Japanese are the victimized nation and were the victims.
There was also the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers’ perception of the Japanese people. They defined nearly all of the Japanese people as simply victims of their military leaders. But this perception of ordinary people as just passive victims actually deprives the Japanese people of agency. Where has their historical agency gone? Certainly, this sort of perception of ordinary people as passive victims is an obstacle to understanding how deeply ordinary people appropriated certain circumstances on their own and how they actively responded to the political power and the given circumstances and so on.
Contextualization
Finally, I would like address the question of overcontextualization and decontextualization. Usually, victims tend to overcontextualize historical circumstances. For example, there was a controversy about So Far From the Bamboo Grove, a novella written by a Japanese expellee who had to flee from North Korea to Japan after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Many Koreans were upset by the novella’s depiction of the ordeal of Japanese civilians who had to flee from the occupied land. It depicts how the Koreans threatened them on their way back to Japan, and Koreans were shocked, saying, “Oh, we are the victims. We never ever victimized the Japanese—we were victims of Japanese colonialism,” and so forth. So in that case, the Koreans tended to overcontextualize their historical situation.
On the other hand, the author, Yoko Kawashima Watkins, tends to decontextualize. She just emphasized how she and her mom and her sister suffered from the Koreans’ hostile attitudes towards Japanese on their way back to Japan. She is totally ignorant of the historical circumstances, why her family came to leave North Korea and why Koreans had such hostile attitudes towards Japanese. Those sort of facts are totally forgotten. So we can find a stark contrast of overcontextualization and decontextualization between the Korean audience’s perception of the novella and Yoko Kawashima Watkins’ own description of her past.
It is a very stark contrast with Günter Grass’ Im Krebsgang, which depicts very vividly how 8,000 Germans were killed by a Soviet submarine torpedo attack, but he never forgot to describe the fact that the Wilhelm Gustloff was a ship that was used by the Nazis’ propaganda project of Strength Through Joy, and Gustloff himself was a Nazi collaborator in Switzerland, and Grass also alluded to the fact that there were not only civilians onboard but also Germans in uniform. So Günter Grass, on the one hand, emphasized the innocent deaths of more than 8,000 Germans, but on the other hand, never forgot to allude to several historical circumstances in which these German civilians actually were located. So overcontextualization and decontextualization can also be found in the various discourses regarding victimhood nationalism.
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