Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga left office in September without having met South Korean President Moon Jae-in for a bilateral summit.
Different views on the historical coming to terms with the Japanese colonial rule over Korea are again preventing a long-term rapprochement between their two states.
One point that strains relationships is the question of how to deal with the so-called "comfort women".
Anna Schiller
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The euphemism describes those women who were forced into prostitution in brothels of the Japanese army during World War II. Most of the women came from the Japanese colonies of Korea and Taiwan, from China and from Japan itself. Historians estimate that the Japanese military conscripted between 50,000 and 200,000 women. In the early 1990s, women outside of Japan first spoke publicly about their experiences. From the point of view of the Japanese government, the war victims have already been compensated through the basic agreement between Japan and Korea from 1965 and a bilateral agreement from 2015. So far, South Korea has not shown a uniform line on the question of compensation: the government's attitude changes depending on the general domestic political situation.
In "Truth Effects and Controversy: The 'Comfort Women' and Their Monuments", Reinhard Zöllner, Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Bonn, deals with the history of the discourse about forced prostitutes and comments on the narratives that determine the debate in South Korea and Japan. One of the book's strengths is the abundance of primary sources that customs officials use to show how the authors perceived the forced prostitutes in their day. Zöllner mainly quotes Japanese and South Korean authors. In his analysis of the narrative he therefore refers to the conflict between the two states.
Zöllner identifies four “master stories”: The “Chongdähyŏp narrative” is named after a South Korean women's rights organization of the same name, which, from Zöllner's point of view, is the main representative of a post-colonial story. She understands the “punishment of the 'comfort women' system” as “part of the collective liberation and identity formation”. The “South Korean mainstream media” in particular preferred this interpretation. However, the narrative is rejected by the victims themselves because it instrumentalizes their individual fate, writes Zöllner. The “feminist narrative” comes from Japan, which understands the prostitution system of the Japanese army within patriarchal and collectivist structures. According to Zöllner, it will "soon" become the dominant narrative in South Korea.The “socio-economic narrative” is a “classic left narrative”, he writes: The exploitative structures of capitalism drove women into poverty and ultimately into prostitution. Under the “narrative of deniers”, customs officers subsume all those who deny that there were ever forced prostitutes in the Japanese army.
Zöllner analyzes what he sees as the four-part discourse based on the theory of the postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. In “Der Widerstreit”, Lyotard defines such a “conflict case” between at least two parties, “which cannot be adequately resolved because there is no rule of judgment applicable to both arguments”. Lyotard's idea of postmodern discourse is the counter-draft to Jürgen Habermas' communicative reason. Modern philosophers like him thought it possible to end a discourse with a consensus based on rational arguments, writes Zöllner. "After three quarters of a century of discourse about the 'comfort women', however, this assumption has been refuted," he invalidates Habermas' discourse theory in just one paragraph.Based on the narrative, there will no longer be a consensus on the history of the forced prostitutes. According to Zöllner, Lyotard, who “considers an amicable end to the discourse to be impossible”, is right.