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Politics of Memory in Korea and China: Remembering

the Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre
a
Jungmin Seo
a
University of Hawaii at Manoa , USA
Published online: 28 Aug 2008.
To cite this article: Jungmin Seo (2008) Politics of Memory in Korea and China: Remembering the Comfort Women and the
Nanjing Massacre, New Political Science, 30:3, 369-392, DOI: 10.1080/07393140802269021
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393140802269021
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New Political Science,
Volume 30, Number 3, September 2008
Politics of Memory in Korea and China: Remembering

the Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 08:48 22 December 2014
Jungmin Seo
University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA
Abstract This study raises the question of “who” instead of “what” regarding the problem
of collective memories in East Asia. To do so, I review the vicissitudes of the memories of two
events, the Nanjing Massacre and the Comfort Women, which are now firmly entrenched in
popular memories as the core Japanese atrocities against her neighbors during the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Pacific War (1941–1945). By prioritizing political
subjects who can remember or forget—both as performative practices—I argue that history is
the very central field of political struggles, not merely a tool for mobilization, in East Asia
and the (re)emergence of the memories of the Nanjing Massacre and the Comfort Women in
the international scene is more a function of the new subject formation in China and Korea
than an un-mediated outcome of unearthed historical facts.
Introduction
On September 19, 2006, the Independence Hall of Korea invited two dozen of
foreign brides who had recently married Korean men. A news article, titled as
“Now I feel like I am a Korean,” describes crying foreign brides in front of
exhibitions pertaining to the suffering of the Comfort Women during the
Second World War.1 On December 13, 2004, the Chinese communities across the
United States observed “Nanjing Memorial Day” commemorating the 67th
anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre and, particularly that year, mourned the
unfortunate death of Iris Chang, the author of Rape of Nanking.2 A banner at the
center of the altar built in San Francisco reads, “Five Continents share affection of
the nation, Four Oceans worship heroic souls of homeland.” For both domestic
and overseas Chinese, the newly remodeled Nanjing Massacre Museum that
opened with the observation of the 70th Anniversary of the Massacre in 2007 is
now placing itself on a par with the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington
DC. Above examples vividly show that the memories of the Comfort Women and
the Nanjing Massacre, that emerged in national and international historiography
less than three decades ago, now play a key role in producing political identity
that transcends ethnic boundaries or in ascertaining ethnic identity that crosses
national borders. At the same time, recent Japanese Prime Ministers, Koizumi
(2001 – 2006) and Shinzo (2006 – 2007) , who are well known for their right-wing
This work was supported by a grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2008-
R-36). All translations from Chinese and Korean texts are by the author.
1
Han’guk Ilbo, September 20, 2006, p. 8.
2
Xinhuanet, December 14, 2004 available online at , http://news.xinhuanet.com/
overseas/2004-12/14/content_2331628.htm. (retrieved March 22, 2007).
ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/08/030369-24 q 2008 Caucus for a New Political Science
DOI: 10.1080/07393140802269021
370 Jungmin Seo
nationalist position, have been continuing, if not accelerating, the nationalization

of Japanese public discourses through tacit endorsement of revisionist history
textbooks that deny the centrality of the Comfort Women and the Nanjing
Massacre in East Asian historiography.3
Prasenjit Duara contends in his thought-provoking article that history is
antitheoretical because it is comprised of nation-centered narrations of flowing
events and facts without a “satisfactory model for theorizing over time, over flux
and change” and with uncritical acceptance of “the subject –object distinction that
makes it so difficult for us to recognize that what we think of as our object also
constitute us as subjects.”4 In other words, history as a modern academic discipline
has been an indispensable tool for a nation state to construct a linearity of collective
memory while suppressing localized or heretical methods of narrating time.
Historians, as the conscious or unconscious accomplices of these nationalizing
projects, have concealed the subjectivity of historical writing by not questioning the
volatile relationship between authors and historical facts.5 By doing so, the
historical inquiries have been “determined to pose the question of ‘what?’ before
the question of ‘who?’ despite philosophical traditions that tend to favor the
egological side of the mnemonic experience.”6
This study raises the question of “who” in its volatile and mutually constitutive
relations with “what” regarding the problem of collective memories in East Asia. Here,
official or popular narratives of collective memories are not just collages of individual
recollections and testimonies but collective reworking of the past7 through which
subjects of memories are constantly re-defined. To explicate the delicate relations
between subject and object of historical memories, I review the vicissitudes of the
memories of two events, the Nanjing Massacre and the Comfort Women, which
are now firmly entrenched in popular memories as the core Japanese atrocities
against her neighbors during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 – 1945) and the
Pacific War (1941 –1945). By highlighting political subjects who can remember or
forget—both as performative practices—I argue that history is the very central
3
On March 1, 2007, Abe Shinzo made a move to revise or cancel the Kono Statement of
1993, which clearly admitted Japan’s official responsibility for the forceful mobilization of
the Sex Slaves during the Second World War, by saying “there is no evidence to prove there
was coercion.” Many speculate that the controversial statement is one of Abe Shinzo’s
efforts to boost his hawkish image among his right-wing constituency amid his losing
streak in domestic and international affairs. See Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Japan’s ‘Comfort
Women’: It’s Time for the Truth (in the Ordinary, Everyday Sense of the Word),” Japan Focus,
March 8, 2007; Alexis Dudden and Kozo Mizoguchi, “Abe’s Violent Denial: Japan’s Prime
Minister and the ‘Comfort Women,’” Japan Focus, March 2, 2007.
4
Prasenjit Duara, “Why is History Antitheoretical?,” Modern China 24:2 (1998),
pp. 106– 107.
5
More fundamentally, as Harootunian suggests, the problem surrounding the
interpretation of the past events comes from the false belief “that relies on the fixity of the
past and its capacity to yield a historical knowledge that can reveal how the present
developed from it, even though the perspective of the present must be detached from the
quest for knowledge.” Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice,
and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 15.
6
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 3.
7
Jun Wang, The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Villate
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); see also Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective
Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Politics of Memory in Korea and China 371
field of political struggles, not merely a tool for mobilization, in East Asia and
the (re)emergence of the memories of the Nanjing Massacre and the Comfort
Women in the international scene is more a function of the new subject formation
in China and Korea than an un-mediated outcome of unearthed historical facts.
The realities of the past, which are “an infinite multiplicity of successively and
coexistently emerging and disappearing events, both ‘within’ and ‘outside’
ourselves”8 cannot speak for themselves. An atrocity, the vocabulary of which is
already morally charged, cannot be narrated without shared, collective agreement

upon a fixed set of memories concerning the events of killing and raping. Hence,
the question of political subjectivity and historical memory suggests both Chinese
and Korean sides to contemplate whose memories the atrocities are. Memories of
atrocities primarily start from pains and sufferings of individuals. Nevertheless,
for or against those sufferers’ interests, collective memories are actively formed in
the field of politics. Even forgetting or inability to remember atrocities should not
be treated as negligent and dysfunctional behavior but “as shadowy underside of
the bright region of memory, which binds us to what has passed before we
remember it.”9 If the memories of collective experiences such as the Nanjing
Massacre and the Comfort Women were suppressed or forgotten by the victims’
own societies, that is not just a direct result of malfunctioning societies such as lack
of democracy. Rather, the temporal absence of the collective memory is the very
outcome of the way of political subject formation in post-colonial societies.
In that sense, the accusation of the Western media, Japanese high officials and
right-wing politicians against the Chinese and Korean governments for
politicizing history is tautological since any national history is essentially
political. Equally futile is the Chinese and Korean popular belief that collective
efforts “to set facts straight” can solve the issue in a fundamental way.10 As much
as the emergence of the Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre into the
Korean and Chinese national historiographies is intertwined with the formation of
new historical subjectivities, the inclusion of the atrocities in Japanese history
textbooks primarily depends on the fluctuating Japanese collective identity
regardless of the factuality or truthfulness of those events.
The emphasis on political subjectivity in historical writing and reading in this
study, however, neither implies nihilistic or cynical perspectives of history nor
endorses the deniers’ claims. Especially, my discussion of political subjectivity in
history should be clearly distinguished from the Japanese right-wing nationalists’
appropriation of post-modern vocabularies. Japanese right-wing scholars such as
Sakamoto Takao argue that, following Ernst Renan’s thesis of formation of a nation
through forgetting, Japan as a nation should, and has a right to, produce a history
as an acceptable, desirable and viable fiction.11 Since a national history’s major
function is to produce a national subject, it is natural that nation states in shared
historical spaces, i.e., China, Japan and Korea, produce distinctive and mutually-
contradictory stories. Nevertheless, it is extremely distorted usage of postmodernist
8
Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of
the Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York:
The Free Press, 1949), p. 72.
9
Ricoeur, op. cit., p. 21.
10
China Daily, June 10, 2005.
11
Yoshiko Nozaki, “The Comfort Women Controversy: History and Testimony,” Japan
Focus, 336 (2005) , http://japanfocus.org/products/topdf/2063 . (accessed March 18, 2007).
372 Jungmin Seo
terms to justify revisionist textbooks by saying that history exists to serve the
nation state since the purpose of postmodern criticism is to deconstruct
nation-centered narration of history, not to endorse the purposeful creation of
politically-serving historical narratives. As Yoshiko Nozaki rightly criticized,
Japanese right-wing nationalist historians are using postmodernist terms to serve
very much modernist purpose—invoking patriotism toward the state.12
As I mentioned above, history is not an accumulation of facts and evidences but
narratives centered on subject formation. Because of that, public memorization of

atrocities by both victims and perpetrators define the high points of politics, “the
moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”13
The irony is that when the perpetrator’s story disappears from Japanese history
textbooks the narratives of victimization in Korea and China cannot locate their
perpetrators in the past—due to the impossibility of temporal separation between
1930s Fascist Japan and 2000s Peaceful Japan—but only in the present through the
very act of intentional forgetting by the Japanese right-wingers. Historical memory
should be taken as a deep political issue precisely because it is inseparably
connected with imagination and ambition of a nation’s subjectivity.14 Hence,
criticisms against deniers’ distortion of historical memory is one thing, questioning
the nature of a new political subjectivity that deniers try to create through
re-designing of national memories is another. Though challenging historical
distortions by state or national elites is invaluable, the more fundamental aspect is
our political assessment over the nature of newly emerging historical subjectivities
through memorization, re-memorization and de-memorization of the Comfort
Women, the Nanjing Massacre, and the Revisionist Japanese history textbooks.
Korean women became a historical/political collectivity through the memorization
of the Comfort Women. The post-Maoist Chinese nation emerged through the
symbolic power of the Nanjing Massacre. What would be the political nature of
the Japanese subjectivity that affirmatively forgets atrocities in the dark age of the
East Asian history? This last question, unfortunately, is not part of this research.
Democratization, Feminist Movement and the Memories of Comfort Women in

South Korea
The Comfort Women issue was first raised in Korea in 1988, 43 years after the
liberation, in an international symposium on “Women and Sex Tourism” by a then
lone researcher, Yoon Chong-ok, who had barely escaped the forced draft of
Chongsindae [Volunteer Corps] during the Second World War period.15 A sense
12
Ibid.
13
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translated with an introduction and notes by
George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 67.
14
J. J. Suh’s recent work shows how this aspect of identity politics can be successfully
applied to the field of International Relations. He argues that debates over history in East
Asia are fundamentally each state’s diplomatic questioning and investigation on the others’
political intentions. J. J. Suh, “War-like history or diplomatic history? Contentions over the
past and regional orders in Northeast Asia,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 61:3
(2007), pp. 382– 402.
15
Chin-song Chong, Ilbon’gun Song Noyeje: Ilbon’gun Wianbu munje ui silsang kwa ku
haegyol ul wihan undong [The Japanese Military Sexual Slavery: The Realities of the Comfort
Women Problem and Movements toward a solution] (Seoul: Seoul National University
Press, 2004), p. 110.
of awakening ( jagak) widely spread among women’s movement organizations

that were growing rapidly as a result of democratization in 1987. The Korean
Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan was established in
1990; its creation was followed by the public demand—first articulated by the
Korean Church Women United—for a Japanese apology along with appropriate
compensation for the victims.16
The most disturbing aspect of the revelation of the operation of the Comfort
Women during the war periods is not necessarily the newly available knowledge
of the dire conditions and sufferings of the victims, but also the silence on this
issue that lasted more than four decades. A few, though not many, studies and
narrations on the Comfort Women existed both in Korea and Japan in the forms of
newspaper reports, academic research, and novels.17 As Yoshiko Nozaki suggests,
the stories of suffering of the sex slaves and/or the pleasure of Japanese soldiers
during the Second World War were ubiquitous in Japanese society from the very
moment of the Sino-Japanese War in spite of omnipotent Japanese censorship.18
Although Japanese official documents or public discourses misguided public
perceptions through the euphemistic word, Chongsindae [Volunteer Corps], a
recent bibliography compiled by a Korean research group indicates that at least 21
monographs in Japanese and one in Korean were published both by academic and
commercial presses, many of them using the term military Comfort Women
( jugun ianfu), before the issue was first raised by Yoon Chong-ok.19 Even with the
initial efforts by a number of scholars and civil organizations, the Comfort Women
issue was not fully publicized in Korean society until a brave testimony by a
Conmfort Women survivor, Kim Hak-Soon followed by the revelation by a former
Japanese teacher, Ikeda Masae, who confessed that she helped draft Korean girls
to Chongsindae,20 the corps of Korean women mobilized for the Japanese war
efforts in the early 1940s. Kim’s testimony and Masae’s confession in August 1991
and January 1992, respectively, galvanized the Korean society. The day after the
confession, Korean newspapers reported 99 cases of Chongsindae in the Seoul area
alone, followed by several week-long revelations of the atrocities recorded
16
Hui-jin Chong, Songpongnyok ul tasi ssunda: Kaekwangsong, Yosong Undong, Inkwon
[Rewriting Sexual Violence: Objectivity, Women’s Movement, Human Rights] (Seoul:
Han’ul Akademi, 2003), pp. 158– 160.
17
Chin-song Chong, op. cit., p. 102. Especially, the tragedy of Chongsindae was well
known among nationalist dissidents in 1970s and 1980s. Im’s work represents well how
dissidents subtly contextualized the problem of Chongsindae with the Park Chung-hee
regime’s “original sin” as a pro-Japanese collaborator. See Chongguk Im, Chongsindae
(Seoul: Irwolsogak, 1981).
18
Nozaki, 2005, op. cit.
19
Han-il minjok munje hakhoe, Kangje yonhaeng munje yon’gu punkwa [Association
for National Problems between Korea and Japan, A research committee for forceful
apprehending], Kangje Yonhaeng, Kangje Nodong Yon’gu Kilajabi [A guidebook for forceful
apprehending and forceful labor research] (Seoul: Son’in, 2005), pp. 483– 492.
20
Though the term, Military Comfort Women (chonggun wianbu in Korean and jugun
ianfu in Japanese), was not well known even during the Sino-Japanese War and the Second
World War, Yoja [female] Chongsindae ( joshi teishintai in Japanese; literally means a volunteer
corps) has been widely used to refer to conscripted young female workers under the
Japanese empire-wide massive labor mobilization system.
374 Jungmin Seo
in school records, personal testimonies, and other official and unofficial

documents.21 The fact that Korean news agencies were able to gather and report
vast amounts of information regarding Chongsindae and the Comfort Women proves
that the Japanese sex slavery as a history was not “discovered” in 1988 or 1992.
Considering long-lasting anti-Japanese sentiments in the Korean society during
the post-liberation era, it is hard to imagine why such clear evidences of brutality
at the hands of Japanese militarists had not been revealed or mobilized by
South Korean political and social leaders who were themselves often in the
business of utilizing anti-Japanese sentiments. Hence, it is important to notice that
the establishment of the Comfort Women as the core symbol of the atrocities
committed as a result of Japanese imperialism was possible not only due to the
brutal nature of the event itself, but also as a result of the new dynamics of the
post-democratization Korean society.
First of all, let us ponder why the Comfort Women issue could not be a
significant theme of Korean political and societal discourses before the 1990s.
Chong Chin-song, the most renowned scholar on the issue of the Comfort Women,
suggests three factors: (i) the efforts of concealment by the Japanese government;
(ii) American reluctance to reveal Japanese war crimes in the Cold War
environment; and, (iii) the patriarchic social environment in Korea that regards
losing chastity as a personal shame.22 The first two factors, however, cannot fully
explain why atrocities and massacres other than the Comfort Women, such as the
Cheamni massacre,23 Chingyong (forced labor conscript for factories and mining
fields in Sakhalin and Pacific islands), and naeson ilche (naisen ittai in Japanese)
policy,24 were indoctrinated in Korean education. The memories of victimhood
and humiliation during the colonial period have been incessantly reproduced and
recalled even when Cold War era East Asian security realities required strong
Korean– Japanese relations under the American nuclear umbrella. Hence, two
outside factors, Japanese and American concealment of Japan’s war atrocities, are
critically important to understanding the social and political invisibility of the
Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre but somewhat incomplete to explicate
the four-decade-long silence on those issues, especially considering the existence
of scattered but sizable amounts of documents, publications, and survivors.
The third factor, the patriarchic social environment in Korea, is noteworthy.
It is not surprising that female victims of sexual violence are seen as spoiled
and degraded beings under this patriarchic social order. Until the early 1990s,
the popular discourses of Korean society regarded victims of rape as women
21
Hyunah, Yang, “Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women: Nationalism,
Sexuality, and Silencing,” in Elain H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (eds.) Dangerous Women:
Gender & Korean Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 125.
22
Chin-song Chong, op. cit., pp. 99 –101.
23
During the March 1st Movement in 1919, Japanese police forces raided a church in
Suwon where a group of Christian protesters had gathered all 28 inside the church were
killed. This massacre was well publicized in America because of the efforts of western
missionaries.
24
This policy from the later phase of the Second World War is remembered as a
Japanese effort of ethnic cleansing (minjok malsal) in the Korean peninsula, since it targeted
elimination of Korean language, traditional practices and name. According to Michael
Mann’s categorization of ethnic cleansing, naeson ilche policy can be qualified as total ethnic
cleansing through policed repression. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining
Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 12.
with either loose morals or an unfortunate fate.25 The testimonies of the

Comfort Women survivors unanimously express this sense of deep self-
contempt, humiliation and isolation from their families and society as a whole
for more than four decades. Even some survivors had identified themselves as
prostitutes and sinners until very recently.26 Nevertheless, the concept of
patriarchism is too vague and broad to explain the question we are facing. One
counter-example is the revelation, followed by successful politicization, of a
sexual torture incident committed by the Korean police during the final phase
of the Korean military authoritarianism. In 1986, a female hakchul [student-
turned-worker]27 made a complaint against six police officers for sexual
harassment during a police interrogation session. When the court stayed a
prosecution, this incident quickly became a symbol of the military regime’s
brutality. More than 150 lawyers volunteered for this case and achieved a
five-year jail term for the principal offender after three years of legal struggles.
What is noticeable in the progress of this incident, which is seemingly a great
victory for Korean feminism, is that the sexual harassment against a female
halchul was interpreted, understood, and narrated as the state’s brutality against
the labor movement and progressive political forces, but not against women, at
least during the early phase.28 Recent studies also show that the culture of the
dissident activist groups in the 1980s was surprisingly patriarchic and
indifferent to the issue of sexual violence until the mid-1990s.29 Hence, the
resulting indictment in the police sexual harassment case in 1986 shows,
ironically, that patriarchic Korean society was able to reveal, problematize,
criminalize, and then publicize sexual violence against women when the
specific incident can be contextualized as part of a larger political agenda. In a
similar vein, if necessary, the patriarchic Korean society would have mobilized
the issue of Comfort Women to condemn Japanese colonialism. The patriarchism
of the Korean society alone, therefore, cannot fully explain the long silence on
the issue of Comfort Women.
Ueno Chizuko, a renowned Japanese feminist scholar provides the most
convincing answer to the question of the 50 years of silence.
25
Hui-jin Chong, op. cit.
26
For compilations of the survivals’ testimonies, see Sangmie Choi Schellstede (ed.),
Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (New York: Holmes &
Meier, 2000); Keith Howard (ed.) True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women: Testimonies
Compiled by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and the
Research Association on the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, translated
by Young Joo Lee (London: Cassell, 1995).
27
Hakchul means a group of college students who sneaked into factories while hiding
their education level and real identity. The aim of this unique organized activity was to
vitalize labor movement in Korea and to produce worker– student alliance to resist against
the military regime in 1980s. For an in-detail description of Hakchul, see Hagen Koo, Korean
Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2001), pp. 104– 125.
28
Chin-song Chong, op. cit., p. 278.
29
Hyesook Kim and Sun’gyong Cho, “Minjok minju undong kwa kabujangje
[National/democratic movement and patriarchy],” Sahoe Pyongnon Kil (August 1995),
pp. 142–150; Undongsahoe songpongnyok ppurippopki 100-in wiwonhoe. Undongsahoe
songpongnyok ppurippopki 100-in wiwonhoe hwaldong paekso [White Book of the 100 persons
committee on the elimination of sexual violence among activists], 2003.
376 Jungmin Seo
What kept them silent for fifty years? The answer plainly is that the crime
continued, in the present tense, for that half-century period. There are probably still
numerous women who have not come forward. It goes without saying that
patriarchy in Japan and Korea has played the greatest role of all in perpetuating the
crime. It is mistaken to say it took them as long as fifty years. The women’s
movement in Korea in the 1980s and the global development of feminism formed
the necessary background. Yoshimi Yoshiaki30 himself acknowledges that the
documents he uncovered took on significance for him after he heard the statements
of victims. Had he discovered them in the 1980s, they might have remained buried
even while at his own fingertips.31
For Ueno Chizuko, the brutality against the Comfort Women was not concealed or
distorted. The novelty of her interpretation of the 50 years of silence is the
emphasis on the absence of a collective subjectivity that can narrate and
problematize the Comfort Women as victims of violence by the nation and state.
In other words, without women as a collectivity, there is no women’s history and,
accordingly, no narration of the Comfort Women as a collective tragedy. Hence,
the stories of the Comfort Women were not recovered or discovered. The rise of
feminist consciousness and the emergence of women as the subject of history
enabled the Comfort Women survivors to narrate their stories in terms of women’s
suffering, as opposed to the plight of unfortunate individuals’.
In spite of the glorious emergence of this feminist movement that liberated the
Comfort Women victims from their five-decade-long atomized isolation, Ueno
Chizuko foresees an obstacle for the historical solution of the Comfort Women
issue. She recalls a deeply uncomfortable situation during a joint workshop on the
Comfort Women issue at the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995:
When I started at this workshop my concern that this was in danger of becoming a
tool in negotiation over national interests between Japan and South Korea and urged
Japanese and Korean feminism to overcome national boundaries, I was confronted
by vociferous protest. Kim [Puja] summarizes one of the responses, from a Korean–
American who was in the audience: “Our country was invaded by soldiers from
your country. You can’t simply ask that we overcome national borders. Claiming
that feminism has nothing to do with nationalism is no different from the
ethnocentric thinking of Western feminism. Nationalism is an important issue for
feminists in Asia.” This criticism points to the danger that Japanese feminists
seeking support for a transnational feminism from women in countries invaded by
Japan may nullify Japan’s role as aggressor. Since Beijing, I have taken this criticism
as a weighty homework assignment and continued thinking about the subject.32
What frustrates her as a feminist is this deep sense of “us” and “them” based on
national boundaries. She frequently argues that Japanese women who survived a
defeated country should realize that women can live without a state and that
30
A Japanese Historian at Chuo University who discovered and compiled the most
comprehensive sets of documents that prove the existence of massive mobilization of
Comfort Women during the Second World War. See Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women:
Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, translated by Suzanne O’Brien
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
31
Ueno Chizuko, “The politics of memory: nation, individual and self,” History &
Memory 11:2 (1999), p. 137.
32
Chizuko, op. cit., p. 145.
nation-bound and culture-bound feminism is self-fettered.33 Hence, the new

subject she assumed in the construction of the Comfort Women as a collective
victim was the state-less feminism based on cross-border sisterhood. Through this
paradigm, she expects the comprehensive historical solution of Korean Comfort
Women, Japanese Comfort Women, and post-war Japanese prostitutes to be
achieved.34
The discourses of nationalism, indeed, deeply penetrated in the post-1992
South Korean discourses regarding the Comfort Women issue. The suffering of
the Comfort Women was translated into the suffering of the nation as a whole,
and the victims were mobilized, not represented, to explain the hardship of the
nation during the colonial period. From the perspective of a masculine nation
state, women are regarded as domesticated for the purpose of national
production, therefore the loss of the women’s chastity was treated as the loss of
the nation’s essential property.35 Therefore, the outburst of anger in Korean
society apparently took the form of Korean men’s anger against Japanese men
because of the nationalist doctrine that “Korean women’s sexuality belongs to
Korean men.”36 Even worse, as Ueno Chizuko argues, the focus of debates
frequently shifts to the discrimination of Korean Comfort Women vis-à-vis
Japanese Comfort Women, rather than the problem of the Comfort Women
itself.37 The discourses of the Comfort Women in Korea have been, therefore,
“neither about nor for the [Military Comfort Women],”38 but rather about the
humiliation of Korean men.
Although it is undeniable that nationalism in Korean society diverted the
discussion of the Comfort Women by nationalizing the issue, the binary image of
nationalism and feminism in Korean society oversimplifies the issue of the
construction of collectivity through the memories of Comfort Women. As widely
agreed, the rise of Korean feminism is deeply associated with the 1980s’
democratization process, which cannot be understood outside of the context of the
nationalistic agenda centered on the collaborator issue. One Comfort Women
survivor states that “Of course Japan is to blame, but I resent the Koreans who were
their instruments even more than the Japanese they worked for. I have so much to
say to the Korean government. The Korean government should grant us
compensation as well.”39 This testimony clarifies why the post-liberation Korean
33
Ueno Chizuko and Hye-jong Han Cho, Kyonggye eso malhanda [Speaking on
boundaries], translated from Japanese into Korean by Sasaki Noriko and Chanho Kim
(Seoul: Saenggak ui Namu, 2004), pp. 137, 141.
34
Ibid., p. 97.
35
En-shil Kim, “The Discourse of Nationalism and Women: Critical Readings on
Culture, Power and Subject,” Han’guk Yosonghak [Korean Women’s Studies] 10 (1994),
pp. 18 –52; Seungsook Moon, “Begetting the Nation: the Androcentric Discourse of
National History and Tradition in South Korea,” in Kim and Choi, op. cit., pp. 33 – 66; for an
extensive discussion on the nationalistic paradigm on women’s body, see George L. Mosse,
Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
36
Yang, op. cit., p. 131.
37
Ueno Chizuko, Naeshonalijum kwa jendo [Nationalism and Gender], translated into
Korean by Suni Yi (Seoul: Pak Chong-chol chulpansa, 1999), pp. 99 – 100.
38
Yang, op. cit., p. 130. Original emphasis.
39
Cited from Yang, op. cit., p. 133.
378 Jungmin Seo
government, whose rhetorical legitimacy wholly depends on the anti-Japanese

struggle,40 should compensate the Comfort Women for their suffering under
Japanese colonial rule. The problem of Korean collaborators during Japanese
colonial rule, the “instruments” mentioned in the victim’s statement, have not been
resolved; which is why Korean nationalism continues to exist as inherently
anti-state discourses.
Unlike China or Taiwan, the purge of collaborators in Korea has been virtually
non-existent due to cold-war environments.41 When the Research Institute for

National Problems (Minjok munje yonguso), an influential NGO focused on the
issue of collaborators, published 3,090 names of collaborators on August 29,
2005,42 the majority of mass media outlets expressed astonishment, given some of
the unexpected names listed as collaborators.43 The list includes two former heads
of the Korean state (Yoon Po-son [1960 – 61] and Park Chung-hee [1961 – 1979]); the
founders of the two most influential Korean newspapers (Chosun Daily and Dong-a
Daily); the founders and/or former presidents of many prominent Korean
universities (including, but not limited to, Seoul National University, Yonsei
University, Korea University, Ewha Women’s University, Chung-ang University);
the founding fathers of Korean modern art, literature, music, and history; and
hundreds of former lawmakers, intellectuals, high-ranking bureaucrats and
religious leaders. Ordinary Koreans suddenly realized that the legacies of the
collaborators are not simply omni-present, but are dominating the country.
The journalistic sensation on the collaborator issue in August 2005 is ironic
because, for many 386ers,44 few names were fresh and unexpected. For example,
Haebang Chonhusa ui Insik [Understanding of the History around the Liberation],
which was published in 1980 and quickly became one of the most influen-
tial books for the student activists in 1980s, listed several hundred names
of collaborators, including the ones who collaborated with the mobilization
40
The South Korean constitution defines the origin of the modern Korean state as the
government-in-exile in Shanghai during the colonial era.
41
In this sense, any interpretation of the contemporary anti-Americanism in Korea
without understanding the collaborator issue is misleading. Many academic and popular
history books in Korea in detail introduces how the United States Army Military
Government in Korea (1945 – 1948) re-instated the former collaborators into the newly
formed Korean administrations and discouraged political persecution of them.
42
,http://www.banmin.or.kr/. . The name of the website, “banmin,” symbolizes
“banminjok haengwi tukpyol chosa wiwonhoe” [Special Committee for the Investigation of
Anti-National Activities], that was established in 1948 for the purpose of prosecuting
collaborators under the Japanese colonial government. In 1949, the committee was
illegally and violently dissolved by Syngman Rhee, the first president of Korea, whose
power base was landed class and capitalists. Ikhwan Oh, “Panmin tukwi ui hwaltong
kwa wahae [The establishment and dissolution of the special committee for the
investigation of anti-national activities],” in Kon-ho Song et al., Haebang chonhusa ui insik,
vol. 1 [Understanding of the history around the liberation] (Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1980),
pp. 101– 171.
43
Conservative newspapers, especially Chosun Daily and Dong-a Daily, whose founders
were listed as collaborators, seldom reported about the lists, while trying to depict it as the
left-wing political scheme against the right-wing politicians.
44
“386” is the nickname of the student movement generation in the 1980s. The term
was coined in the 1990s when they began to enter the political scene. They were 30s—in the
1990s—attended college in the 1980s and had been born in the 1960s.
of Chongsindae.45 One contributor of the book, Im Chong-guk, published four widely

read monographs that were solely devoted to the revelation of the collaborators.46
Because Im Chong-guk’s studies substantially rely on the compilation of Banmin
Tukwi [Special Committee for the Investigation of Anti-National Activities] between
1948 and 1949, the lists of collaborators were not necessarily found or revealed but
reiterated. The significance of the August 2005 sensation is, therefore, not about the
revelation of “facts,” but the novel mode of treating the collaborator issue. Until
recently, the discussion of the collaborator issue could not become “public” in a strict
sense. For example, the National Assembly refused to fund the publication of the lists
of collaborators for fear of politicization of the issue.47 The political parties seldom
used the collaborator issue as a political tool since the majority of the ruling elite
families were connected to the collaborator history. Further, the Korean state-
sponsored nationalism has consciously evaded this issue since no political elites,
except the ones who were assassinated during the white terrors between 1945 and
1949, in South Korea surpass Kim Il-Sung in terms of anti-Japanese, national struggle
credentials. Raising the collaborator issue in South Korean politics, therefore, might
pave a path to denying the legitimacy of the South Korean state itself to represent the
Korean nation. Hence, for decades, discussions of the collaborator issue were
confined to left-wing academia and activist groups. Before the democratization in
1987, the discussion of this issue was virtually censored—and banned on many
occasions—and scholars such as Im Chong-guk were forced to remain as
non-establishment intellectuals without access to the formal academic world.
Whereas the Comfort Women issue could not be formed as a public discourse
owing to the incapability to translate individual memories to collective memories,
the memories of collaborators—including those responsible for the mobilization of
Comfort Women—established by a thick stream of Korean nationalism were
suppressed for political reasons. The emergence of the collective memories of the
Comfort Women in the early 1990s, therefore, cannot be properly understood
without analyzing the intensive interaction between feminism and left-wing
nationalism. The incorporation of two perspectives allows Korean feminists to
contextualize the atrocity against the Comfort Women in the Japanese efforts of
national cleansing (minjok malsal), such as forced name change (changssi kaemyong)
and forced worship at Shinto shrines during the late colonial period.48
45
Song et al. op. cit., 1980, especially Vol. I, pp. 172–247 and Vol. II, pp. 143– 210.
46
Im Chongguk, Chin’il munhangnon [A study of pro-Japanese literature] (Seoul:
Pyonghua, 1966); 1981, op. cit.; Ilche chimnyak kwa chinilpa [Japanese invasion and pro-
Japanese collaborators] (Seoul: Chongsa, 1982); Chin’il nonsol sonjip [Selected pro-Japanese
news editorials (during the colonial period)] (Seoul: Silchon munhaksa, 1987).
47
Kyonghyang Daily, December 31, 2004.
48
Chin-song Chong, op. cit., p. 113; the Comfort Women issue made the incorporation
of anti-racism and feminism possible in Asian – American feminism. It is not strange that an
Asian American made a harsh criticism on Ueno Chizuko’s feminist solution of the
Comfort Women issue (see n. 21). The communities of Asian American women in the
United States were especially interested in the negligence of the International Military
Tribunals for the Far East on the crimes against the Comfort Women and the legacies of
colonialism in the community history. The Comfort Women issue allowed them to criticize
the prevalent racism among the mainstream feminist movement and sexism inside of the
ethnic communities in a non-confrontational way. Laura Hein, “Savage Irony: the
Imaginative Power of the ‘Military Comfort Women’ in the 1990s,” Gender & History 11:2
(1999), pp. 336– 372.
380 Jungmin Seo
The societal discourses of the Comfort Women were translated into the languages
of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism while also being merged into the
broad spectrum of progressive political/social movements. For instance, the
public anger toward the recently revealed secret documents concerning Korean –
Japanese diplomatic normalization in 1965 was quickly directed toward the
denunciation of conservative political forces, since the treaty in 1965 gave the most
important rationale for the “no official compensation for Comfort Women” policy
of the Japanese government and the Korean protagonist of the treaty was
Park Chung-hee, the president of the third and fourth republics (1961 –1979)
and the farther of the current conservative party leader, Park Keun-hye. Hence,
the Comfort Women issue inherently has the symbolic power to unite all
progressive forces.
In sum, the formation of the female subjectivity through the development of
Korean feminism enabled the writing of the history of the Comfort Women as a
collective memory. Then, the Comfort Women issue was greatly empowered by
contextualizing itself with progressive nationalistic discourses. Nevertheless, the
amalgamation of nationalism and feminism regarding the Comfort Women issue
is not yet stabilized. As Chunghee Sarah Soh suggests, Korean feminist
perspectives on the Comfort Women intend to overcome “the framework of
ethnic nationalism in order to confront and improve the insidiously persistent
everyday realities of social injustice” for many Korean women including still
existing “slave prostitution” in Korean cities.49 The Comfort Women issue is
subject to the strategic concerns of Korean feminism, which is trying to expand its
social and political bases. It is deploying the vocabularies of nationalism in its
alliances with domestic NGOs, North Korean Comfort Women support groups,
and domestic labor unions, while using the language of feminism to cooperate
with Japanese, Asian, and other foreign feminist organizations. The careful usage
of human rights and peace movements is observed in Korean feminists’
approaches to international NGOs and the UN.50 In spite of many alternative
possibilities, the alliance between nationalism and feminism in Korea will likely
continue for a while. Korean feminists cannot ignore the hegemonic status of
nationalism in Korean public life to consolidate their political status. Further,
feminism and nationalism share one core objective: the unification of the Korean
peninsula. While nationalism pursues unification of the peninsula as the ultimate
goal to solve the half-century long national contradiction, the Korean feminist sees
unification as the only way to de-militarize the Korean peninsula.51 This alliance
between feminism and nationalism in Korean society means that the Comfort
Women issue will continue to be narrated in terms of national sufferings for the
foreseeable future.
49
Chunghee Sarah Soh, “Sexual Enslavement and Reproductive Health: Narratives of
Han among Korean Comfort Women Survivors,” in Niels Teunis (ed.), Sexual Inequalities and
Social Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 101; see also C. Sarah Soh,
“Aspiring to Craft Modern Gendered Selves: ‘Comfort Women’ and Chongsindae in Late
Colonial Korea,” Critical Asian Studies 36:2 (2004), pp. 175–198.
50
Chin-song Chong, op. cit., pp. 129– 131.
51
Hyok-paek Chong, Minjok kwa Peminijum [Nation and Feminism] (Seoul: Tangdae,
2003), p. 47.
Remembering Nanjing
Until recently, the Nanjing Massacre was not included in Western scholarship
regarding China. In classical references and textbooks such as Cambridge History of
China, China: A New History (Fairbank), and The Search for Modern China (Spence) the
coverage of the Nanjing Massacre is minimal to non-existent in contrast to the often
disproportionately heavy treatment of the Tiananmen Democratic Movement in
1989. In the Western scholarship the Nanjing Massacre is, similar to the Comfort
Women issue, still a fresh and new event that is trying to establish its own factuality.
The paths of the memories of the Nanjing Massacre and the Comfort Women are,
however, fundamentally different from each other. Whereas the Comfort Women
issue as a problem of a Japanese former colony was neglected during the International
Military Tribunals for the Far East, the Nanjing Massacre was relatively well recorded
and documented during the Tribunals largely as a result of China’s status due to its
alliance with the victorious powers. The official count of the number of victims,
200,000 killed and 20,000 raped, was also first established during the Tribunals. Then,
the question is, let alone the silence in the Western China scholarship, why the
Chinese and Taiwanese governments had not activated the memories of the Nanjing
Massacre until the first Japanese textbook controversy in 1982.
Before further discussions, let me emphasize another key difference between
the memories of the Comfort Women issue and the Nanjing Massacre in terms of
the activation process. If the memories of the Comfort Women were constituted as a
collective memory thanks to the rise of Korean feminism and the democratization
that produced a strong civil society, the initial activation of the memories of the
Nanjing Massacre in the 1980s is not much related to civil society or feminism.
The hegemonic status of the party/state had not been challenged until the late
1980s and, consequently, few social actors could have advanced alternative
versions of Chinese history. Therefore, the memory of the Nanjing Massacre
fluctuated because “either it was artificially forgotten via an unnatural repression
during the socialist period and then naturally re-remembered afterward, or it was
naturally forgotten during the socialist period and artificially revived as an object
of memory after the Cultural Revolution.”52 Further, “given the domination of
the state in both theory and practice here, this renewed emphasis on an apolitical,
disinterested free space of scholarly historical research [on the Nanjing Massacre
in the contemporary China] is in fact a product of the state.”53
The domination of the Chinese party/state and the lack of civil society in China
during the early reform era are also related to the incapability of Chinese
intellectuals, the only group capable of writing alternative histories, to reconstitute
a new version of the Chinese identity centered on the Nanjing Massacre. Without
the capacity to form social alliances,54 the post-reform Chinese intellectuals in the
52
Robert Yee-sin Chi, “Picture Perfect: Narrating Public Memory in Twentieth-century
China,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (2001), p. 50.
53
Ibid., pp. 50 – 51.
54
Chinese intellectuals’ incapacity to form a social alliance with other classes against
the Chinese party/state is well explained through the fiasco of the Tiananmen Democratic
Movement. See Lei Guang, “Elusive democracy: Conceptual Change and Democracy
Movement in China from 1977/8– 1989,” Modern China 22:4 (1996), pp. 417– 447; Andrew
G. Walder and Gong Xiaoxia, “Workers in the Tiananmen Protest: the Politics of the Beijing
Workers’ Autonomous Federation,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 29 (1993),
pp. 1 – 29.
382 Jungmin Seo
1980s took two strategies; the denial of themselves as “an organic component of its
[Chinese] working class”55 while constructing their inward-oriented identities
though collective trauma caused by the Cultural Revolution56 or the “tacit
agreement with Deng’s social programs or, rather, with the idea of universal
evolution that the modernists believe is the raison d’etat of the New Era.”57
The absence of Chinese intellectuals in the early problematization of the Nanjing
Massacre in the 1980s leaves only one actor responsible for the silence and
outburst of the memories of the Nanjing Massacre: the Chinese party/state, which
has constituted and re-constituted Chineseness by identifying different others
since liberation. The party/state monopoly over the memories of the Nanjing
Massacre is, however, partially compromised by the emergence of the cultural
market and the internationalization of the issue, as I discuss further below.
From the establishment of People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and the first
Japanese textbook controversy in 1982, the Nanjing Massacre was not the key agenda
or theme for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to narrate its own history.58 None of
Mao’s writings and speeches between 1926 and 1971 that appeared in nine volumes
of Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung mention the Nanjing Massacre with historical
significance. Until the 1980s, the Chinese authorities did not perform any compre-
hensive empirical survey or interviews with the Nanjing Massacre victims and
survivors.59 The absence of the Nanjing Massacre in Mao’s writings and government
documents may easily prove the argument that the memories of the Nanjing
Massacre were suppressed by the new socialist Chinese state and re-vitalized by the
advent of nationalism in post-reform China. The majority of Chinese nationalism
specialists argue that the ideological vacuum created by the market transition forced
Chinese leaders to mobilize nationalism as a cohesive ruling ideology.60
55
Zhang Xudong, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde
Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 11.
56
Wang Ban, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). The Chinese intellectuals’ perception of the
Cultural Revolution as the primary trauma explains why the tragedy of the Great Leap
Forward, which is arguably the worst disaster in the PRC history but its victims were
predominantly rural peasants, could not be narrated in the same fashion as the Cultural
Revolution was. If the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was “narrated” by Chinese
intellectuals, the disaster of the Great Leap Forward produced new peasant rationality that
eventually made the initial rural market reform possible in the early 1980s. See Dali L.Yang,
Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap
Famine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
57
Zhang, op. cit., p. 12.
58
The most comprehensive review of the history of the memories of Nanjing Massacre
is a dissertation written by Takashi Yoshida, “The Nanjing Massacre in History and
Memory: Japan, China, and the United States, 1937– 1999,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia
University (1997).
59
The Nanjing Massacre survivors’ testimonies were first published in 1985, followed
by an extended version in 1995. Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre:
Reflections on Historical Inquiry,” in Joshua A. Fogel (ed.) The Nanjing Massacre in History
and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 140.
60
Thomas A. Metzger and Ramon H. Myers, “Chinese Nationalism and American
Policy,” Orbis 41:2 (1998), pp. 21 –36; Thomas Christensen, “Chinese Realpolitik,” Foreign
Affairs 75:5 (1996), pp. 37 – 52; Suisheng Zhao, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Quest for National
Greatness and the Nationalistic Writings in the 1990s,” China Quarterly 152 (1997),
pp. 725– 745; Yongnian Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization,
Identity, and International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Nevertheless, it should be noted that the massive patriotic education based on official
nationalism started in China only after the Tiananmen Democratic Movement in
1989.61 Hence, the early emergence of the memories of Nanjing Massacre in the 1980s
had little relation to the nationalistic campaign in China. Further, it is an equally
misleading assumption that the socialist Chinese state before reform was indifferent
to nationalism. If the national history anchored on the linear history is the gist of the
nationalistic subject formation,62 the construction of Chinese national history in the
late 1950s shows that nationalism was not a part but the basis of the CCP official
historiography.63 On a deeper level, as Wang Hui suggests, the ideological structure
of the Chinese revolution itself should be interpreted as “communism in nationalist
revolution,” not “nationalism in communist revolution.”64 Hence, the silence on the
Nanjing Massacre in pre-reform China cannot be attributed to the socialist Chinese
state, but to certain ways of identifying the others in constructing post-revolution
Chineseness.
During the early period of the PRC, the CCP faced two archenemies, the
Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan (an internal enemy) and the United States (an
external enemy). While the continuation of “Western Imperialism” was
re-affirmed during the Korean War, in which the PRC sustained nearly a million
casualties, the superiority of the Republic of China in Taiwan in terms of its UN
status as a security council member and its strong ties with the United States
forced the CCP to be hyper-hysterical toward the possibilities of “capitalist/
imperialist elements” in the society. The incessant political campaigns and
massive purges such as “Three-Anti,” “Five-Anti,”65 “Anti-Rightist movement,”
and “the Cultural Revolution” endlessly targeted anyone who had had official or
personal relations with the KMT, or, more broadly, those who enjoyed successful
careers in formerly KMT-controlled territories. As the late Tang Tsou precisely
describes, the Chinese Revolution was an event of primarily revolutionized and
nationalized rural peasants successfully surrounding and seizing the cities.66
Reversely, the KMT, which embraced urban modernity as its identity, resided in
the forests of tall buildings and commercial centers in big cities. Hence,
Chineseness was incessantly re-affirmed through the deployment of the symbolic
capital of “the Yen’an way” of revolution against easily corruptible urbanites.67
61
Suisheng Zhao, “A State-Led Nationalism: The Patriotic Education Campaign in
Post-Tiananmen China,” Communist and Pot-Communist Studies 31:3 (1998), pp. 287– 302
62
Duara, op. cit.
63
Jungmin Seo, “Nationalism and the Problem of Political Legitimacy in China,”
in Lynn White (ed.), Legitimacy: Ambiguities of Political Success or Failure in East and Southeast
Asia (Singapore: World Scientific Press, 2005), pp. 141–182.
64
Hui Wang, Xiandai Zhongguo Sixiang de Xingqi, vol.2 (Beijing: Sanlian Chubanshe,
2004), p. 297.
65
“Three-Anti” and “Five-Anti” launched in 1951 to eliminate “reactionary elements”
in the state and economic sectors. The former targeted the former Kuomintang (KMT)
bureaucrats in the government and the later the industrialists that had remained after 1949.
66
Tang Tsou, “Interpreting the Revolution in China: Macrohistory and Micro-
mechanisms,” Modern China 26:2 (2000), pp. 205– 238. The novelty of the Chinese revolution
cannot be simply attributed to the Chinese history and tradition of peasant rebellions. For
instance, the Taiping Rebellion started from rural Guangdong but quickly shifted its center
into big cities such as Nanjing.
67
David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994).
384 Jungmin Seo
The CCP’s peasant-centered/anti-KMT identity during the pre-reform era

puts the Nanjing Massacre in a gray area. For the pre-reform CCP perspective, the
fall of Nanjing by the advancing Japanese Imperial Army in December 1937 was
associated with a series of images that proves the corrupt and incapable nature of
the KMT, such as: Chiang Kai-shek’s silent escape from Nanjing six days before
the fall; the last-minute abandonment of the city by Tang Shen-chi, a general who
was supposed to execute Chiang’s order to defend the city until death; and the
chaos of leaderless and hopeless KMT soldiers on the day of the fall. In the
pre-reform Chinese history textbook, the events of December 13, 1937 were
narrated not as the beginning of the Nanjing Massacre but as the day of failure and
collapse of the KMT’s Nanjing era (1928 – 1937). Even the KMT’s impressive battle
of Shanghai (August 13 –November 9, 1937), which deterred the advance of the
Japanese Imperial Army for almost three months and has been regarded as one
important cause of the Nanjing Massacre,68 was attributed to the revolutionary
tradition of the Shanghai proletariat class, not to the KMT army, which, according
to the CCP account, failed both militarily (simplistic defense strategy) and
politically (failure to achieve popular support from the people).69 Subsequently,
the narration of the Nanjing Massacre was not about the tragedy of China, but
about the failed morality and irresponsibility of the KMT. The CCP revolutionary
history describes the magnitude of the massacre in Nanjing, including killing
competition, massive rapes, and merciless mass killings. Nevertheless, the
description of the event is more focused on the barbarism and brutality of “the
Japanese fascists.”70 The citizens of Nanjing were the objects of the Japanese
brutality not necessarily the subjects of the suffering. From this context, we can see
that there is little room in the CCP’s historiography to accentuate the tragedy of
Nanjing in a strict sense, because, as is mentioned above, the Nanjing urbanites
were not the subjects of the revolution.
If the Chinese revolutionary history during the pre-reform era was focused on
the brutality and formidable strength of Japanese Imperialism and the weakness
and injustice of the KMT in order to emphasize the achievement of the CCP, the
post-Korean war party propaganda was centered on the barbarism of American
Imperialism. The CCP falsely accused American missionaries who remained in
Nanjing during the Massacre of “being more interested in preserving American
property, such as churches and schools, than in saving Chinese lives.”71
68
Many historians agree that the unexpected extension of the Battle of Shanghai
provoked both the rank-and-file soldiers and top leadership of the Japanese Imperial Army
and motivated them to execute massive retaliation in Nanjing a month later. Mark Eykholt,
“Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre,” in
Fogel, op. cit., pp. 17 – 18.
69
Xin Li and Ming Peng (eds), Zhongguo Xin Minzhuzhuyi geming shiqi tongshi [A
History of the New Democracy Revolution], vol. 3 (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1961
[1981]) pp. 13 – 15.
70
Zhongguo Xin Minzhuzuyi geming shiqi tongshi (pp. 29 – 30) uses four short
paragraphs—excepting one sentence concluding remark—to describe the Nanjing
Massacre. All four paragraphs start with sentences using Japan as subjects—“Japanese
Imperialism,” “Japanese invaders,” “Japanese fascists (or fascism),” and “Japanese
fascists.” The description of the tragedy is primarily to ascertain the brutality of the
Japanese aggressors.
71
Yoshida, op. cit., p. 113.
Further, instead of the Nanjing Massacre, the CCP began to emphasize the scale
and brutality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to describe the inner nature of the
American Imperialist,72 reflecting the shifting archenemy of the CCP. It is also
noticeable that the image of Wang Jingwei, the leader of the Japanese puppet
regime in occupied China, as the most unforgivable hanjian [national traitor] did
not emerge in Zhongguo Xin Minzhuzuyi geming shiqi tongshi (1961), though Mao
mentioned him several times as the most viscous traitor of China in his war-time
writings. During the Civil War (1946 –1949), the CCP did not use harsher
measures to purge Chinese collaborators with Japan than it did against the KMT
collaborators. In sum, the pre-reform CCP had no reason and/or no capacity to
interpret the magnitude of the Nanjing Massacre and incorporate it into the
history of the “victorious” Chinese revolution.
The start of the reform in 1978 and the series of changes in international
security settings around China have led the CCP to change the way it imagines
others. “The reactionaries in Taiwan” could not be an archenemy anymore after
the replacement of the Republic of China (Taiwan) for the UN Security Council
post and the diplomatic normalization with the United States and Japan.
The newly secured superiority over Taiwan in international relations, that
provided the CCP an upper-hand position over the issue of reunification, quickly
affected the history writings about the KMT. For example, in-detail and fairly
balanced descriptions of the Shanghai battle began to appear in the Chinese
history textbooks in the early 1980s. The determination of the KMT’s defense of
Shanghai is newly introduced and the three-month-long battle is defined in terms
of the “brave struggles of Chinese military and people,”73 and “the resistance of
the whole country (quanguo) lead by the KMT and the CCP.”74 The new history
books in the 1980s state that the KMT, once described as an incapable and corrupt
entity, “performed brave resistance (yingyong kangzhan) with enthusiastic support
and encouragement from Shanghai citizens,” and that many KMT officers and
soldiers “sacrificed themselves without hesitation to defend our country and
nation (zuguo / zhonghua minzu).”75
The new history books in the 1980s also show significant changes in the
description of the Nanjing Massacre; especially in the ways victims are
described. Zhongguo xin minzhuzhuyi gemingshiqi tongshi, published in 1961,
identifies the victims as “Nanjing ijumin [residents in Nanjing]” or “Nanjing
renmin [people in Nanjing].”76 By using “Nanjing” in front of jumin and renmin,
the book draws a clear boundary of the actual victims, who did not resist and
were not the subjects of the revolution. After two relatively long paragraphs
72
Ibid., p. 114.
73
Beijing shifan daxue lishixi zhongguo xiandaishi jiaoyanshi (ed.), Zhongguo Xiandaishi
(1919 – 1949) [Modern Chinese History], vol. 2 (Beijing: Beijing shifandaxue chubanshe,
1983), pp. 10 – 11.
74
Huaxuan Jiang (ed.), Zhongguo gemingshi jianbian [Selected writings of the Chinese
Revolutionary History] (Beijing: Guangmingribao chubanshe, 1986), p. 200.
75
Shieryuanxiao Zhongguo gemingshi bianxiezu (ed.), Zhongguo gemingshi: zhuanyeke
jiaocai [Chinese Revolutionary History: College textbook] (Lanzhou: Gansu renmin
chubanshe, 1986), p. 361.
76
Li et al. 1961 [1981], op. cit., p. 30.
386 Jungmin Seo
on the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army, a short paragraph of comments

appears as follows:
The Japanese fascist invaders had a delusion that using such a barbarous massacre
policy would deter the Chinese people’s (zhongguo renmin) will to resist. However,
the Chinese people with revolutionary traditions could not be threatened.
The violence of the Japanese invaders only encouraged several hundred
thousand Chinese people to fearlessly resist with anger and determination.77
As shown here, “nanjing jumin” and “the revolutionary Chinese people” are
not identical, while putting the former as an objective in-between the revolutionary
Chinese people and the fascist Japanese invaders. The Massacre was the suffering
of the Nanjing residents but not of the Chinese people who would not fear.
The way to describe the Nanjing Massacre changed significantly in the 1980s,
especially after the first heated Japanese history textbook controversy erupted in
1982. The victims are now “Chinese men who were killed,” “Chinese women who
were massacred,” “Chinese compatriots (tongbao) who were massacred,”78 and a
part of “hundreds of millions Chinese people who had been suffering from the
barbarous crimes [of the Japanese fascists].”79 Unlike before, the revolutionary
history textbooks published in the 1980s unanimously illuminate the victims as
Chinese people in Nanjing, rather than Nanjing residents, and articulate the
shared sense of pain and suffering, while contrasting the Nanjing Massacre
victims with the victims of the “three-all” attacks and Unit 731. The changed tone
of the historical description of the Nanjing Massacre is paralleled with the
increased emphasis on the evils of the Chinese collaborators with the Japanese
imperialists, especially Wang Jing-wei. Most textbooks of modern Chinese history
or revolutionary history began to include a section on Wang’s surrender-turned-
to-traitor (toudi panguo) history. The shifted focus toward Wang’s betrayal is
consistent with Chinese historiography’s overall changing tone regarding the
images of friends and foes; the rehabilitation of Zeng Guofan from a feudalistic
traitor to a national hero, the dubious attitude toward the revolution-ness of the
Taiping Rebellion,80 and the reinterpretation of ancient figures such as Yue Fei.81
The end of class politics made the CCP halt finding internal others to define
Chineseness and forced it to re-define the “us and them” dichotomy. As the KMT
is no longer an archenemy or an internal “foreign” enemy collaborating with
American imperialists, the foreignness had to be assigned to other figures in the
history books, such as Wang Jingwei. With this change in the historical formula,
77
Ibid.
78
Beijing shifan daxue lishixi zhongguo xiandaishi jiaoyanshi, op. cit., pp. 23 –24.
79
Caoran Xiao and Jiansun Sha, Zhongguo gemingshi gao [Chinese Revolutionary
History] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1984), p. 261.
80
For shifting images of Zeng Guofan and the Taiping Rebellion, see Baogang He and
Yingjie Guo, “Reimagining the Chinese Nation: The Zeng Guofan Phenomenon,” Modern
China 25:2 (1999), pp. 142– 170.
81
Yue Fei was a loyal general of the Southern Song dynasty. He was purged and
executed due to his, allegedly unrealistically, hawkish attitude and policies against Jin
(a Jurchen state occupied in northern China). Since the contemporary Chinese
historiography regards Jin dynasty as a part of Chinese history—Jurchen is regarded as
the ancestor of Manchu tribes which are now a minority ethnic group of China; Yue Fei’s
hawkish attitude toward Jin has become controversial since mid-1990s.
the victims of the Nanjing Massacre could be understood as the pain and suffering
of the nation, which was newly defined. The new historiography was quickly
resonated with the creation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorials in 1985.
The change of the Chinese official historiography in the 1980s cannot be under-
emphasized for two reasons. First of all, it disproves the Western China
scholarship’s obsession that the liberal 1980s was crushed by the June Fourth
Massacre in 1989 and the nationalistic 1990s was meticulously invented by the CCP
after the June Fourth Massacre. The official historical narration of the Sino-Japanese
War and the Nanjing Massacre was established in the early 1980s and has not
significantly changed until now. Hence, the official discourse on the Sino-Japanese
War, which is frequently blamed for the rise of anti-Japanese sentiments in today’s
China, did not emerge as the consequence of the Tiananmen Democratic
Movement in 1989, but appeared at the very beginning of the reforms. Secondly,
the vocabularies of the official narration of the Nanjing Massacre and the general
atrocities during the Japanese aggression since 1937 are carefully chosen not to
confuse “Japan” and “Japanese fascism/imperialism.”82 Of a dozen recent history
textbooks I reviewed, none of them failed to make this distinction. If the Chinese
official history textbooks—and more broadly the patriotic education campaign
since 1991—are the source of anti-Japanese and anti-American nationalism, why
did anti-Japanese and anti-American protests not take place in the 1980s?
It is, however, undeniable that the discourses of the Nanjing Massacre, associated
with anti-Japanese sentiments, were amplified throughout the 1990s. I argue that
two factors, the commercialization of the Chinese cultural industry and the
re-invigorated sense of humiliation in the 1990s, magnified the discourses of the
Nanjing Massacre. The rise of the cultural market in China is significant in the sense
that non-official/market-driven political discourses can be distributed as a
commodity format. The partial liberalization of the publishing industry and the
under-defined video compact disc and compact disc markets in the mid-1990s
allowed private entrepreneurs to enter the business of discourse production, which
had long been monopolized by the CCP. The government distribution networks were
quickly surpassed by the second channel,83 and the state-owned publishers and
studios were penetrated by book dealers and contract agents. The Chinese society
witnessed a surge of nationalistic books, including those with graphic descriptions of
the Nanjing Massacre, since the commercial success of China Can Say No84 in 1996.
82
Yinan He, “Remembering and Forgetting the War: Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction,
and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1950– 2006,” History & Memory 19:2 (2007), pp. 43 – 74.
83
“Second Channel” means the production and distribution of books by private
entrepreneurs who do not have book publishing permissions. For a detailed description of
the second channel, see Shuyu Kong, Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the
Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005).
84
Qiang Song Zangzang Zhang, Bian Qiao, Zhengyu Tang and Qingsheng Gu,
Zhongguo keyi shuobu [China Can Say No] (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi,
1996); a few examples of books with commercialized nationalism are Yongjun Xi and
Zaihuai Ma, Chaoyue Meiguo: Meiguo shenhua de zhongjie [Surpassing the USA: The End of
the American Myth] (Huhehaotu shi: Neimenggu daxue chubanshe, 1996); Shan Zhang and
Weizhong Xiao, Ezai Taidu: Bucheng Nuofangqiwuli [Stop Taiwan from Independence: No
Promise on Not Using Force] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui chubanshe, 1996); Qiang Song,
Zangzang Zhang, and Bian Qiao, Erling Sanling Zhongguo di yi [2030: China as the Number
One] (Hong Kong: Mingbao chubanshe, 1997).
388 Jungmin Seo
Following the model of the success of China Can Say No, radicalized, racialized and
sensationalized publications were “manufactured” by bold book dealers and poured
into the market. The official distinctions between “evil Japanese fascist” versus
“innocent Japanese people,” and “historical lessons” versus “realpolitik” were
frequently violated in the process of marketization. For example, the authors of China
Still Can Say No assert that “the wickedness of the Japanese people cannot be
corrected because of their [bad] blood,”85 and called for more aggressive foreign
policy toward Japan. A few of them were banned by the authorities due to this
excessiveness. Documentaries released—and frequently banned thereafter—in the
1990s also used the tactic of sensationalism. With dramatization through frequent
re-enactments of grotesque pictures of beheading, mass killing and raping, the
documentaries of the Nanjing Massacre directly aimed to provoke public anger
toward Japan.86 In sum, the discourses and images produced in the cultural market
in during the 1990s were in general detached from the Chinese government’s realistic
considerations and were less hesitant to release and/or provoke anger toward Japan
as a nation.
Another factor for the amplification of the Nanjing Massacre discourses is the
re-invigoration of the sense of humiliation. As some scholars observe, throughout
the 1990s, the CCP invested efforts to include the history of humiliation to counter the
chaos of Tiananmen Square in 1989.87 As much as the hunger strikers wanted to
humiliate the Chinese leaders in front of the visiting Soviet leader, Gorbachev, the
CCP used the images of the national humiliation since the beginning of the Opium
War in the patriotic education campaign starting in 1991. The newly emerged sense of
humiliation in the Chinese society, however, has a root in the 1980s reform period.
As Jing Wang observes, the Chinese students and intellectuals in the 1980s faced a
suddenly open space filled with “progress syndrome of modernization” in the era of
reform and, at the same time, experienced a schizophrenic separation between harsh
realities and the futuristic dreams of modernism and post-modernism.88 If the
optimism of the 1980s produced “the pseudo-proposition of postmodernism in
China” as “part of the syndrome of the Great Leap Forward myth,”89 the newly
perceived harsh realities of the backward China vis-à-vis the former Western colonial
powers provoked a deep sense of humiliation as shown in the 1988 popular TV
documentary, He Shang [River Elegy]. When the students in Tiananmen Square in
1989 claimed to be the subjects of modernization, rendering the CCP a failed
modernizer, they articulated the 70 years of “degeneration and the humiliation of the
Chinese nation.”90 Nevertheless, the difference between official and non-official
discourses of national humiliation should be noted. The official discourses of the
85
Song, et al., op. cit.
86
Michael Sanford Berry, “A History of Pain: Literary and Cinematic Mappings of
Violence in Modern China,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2004.
87
Paul A. Cohen, “Remembering and Forgetting National Humiliation in Twentieth-
Century China,” Twentieth-Century China 27:2 (2002), pp. 1 – 39; William A. Callahan,
“National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism,” Alternatives 29:2
(2004), pp. 199– 218.
88
Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 14.
89
Ibid., p. 235.
90
Mouren Wu, Jiaqi Yan and Wuèrkaixi, (eds.) Bajiu Zhongguo Minyun Jishi [A Record
of the 1989 Chinese Democratic Movement] (New York: n.p., 1989), p. 131.
century of humiliation have clearly targeted the construction of the history of

redemption; the suffering Chinese nation that was saved by the CCP and national
heroes. By reading a table of contents in any revolutionary book published in China
since 1980, a reader can see how the events of humiliation are contextualized in the
victorious history of the CCP. Nevertheless, the humiliation discourses produced by
intellectuals and the market suppose the continuation of the humiliation with the
deeper and seemingly improbable redemption in the near future, the solution of
which requires complete reversal of the power relation between China and the
West/Japan.
If the discourses of humiliation were embedded into the Chinese public
consciousness through the harsh realities of the economic backwardness of China
during the early period of reform, the style of the narration of the Nanjing Massacre
fueled the popular feeling of national humiliation in an ironic way. When any
historical argument about the Nanjing Massacre was blamed for being a CCP
propaganda tactic by right-wing Japanese deniers and American China-bashers,
most of the writings and documentaries produced in China use the records of foreign
witnesses in 1937 Nanjing, especially those from the West, as par-excellence
sources to prove their points.91 The problem is that once the massive rapes were
“witnessed,” there is no way to revoke the anger since the witnessed rape might be
the most profound form of humiliation in the discourses of (patriachic) nationalism.
In sum, the Nanjing Massacre has been narrated in several different ways
from the “dry facts” of mass killings and rapes that were initially reported after
the event. The CCP recognized the Nanjing Massacre as a symbol of national
suffering only after the end of class politics and the changing international
environment in which the KMT cannot pose a security threat anymore. What is
largely unnoticed in the existing studies is the bifurcation of the Nanjing
discourses; the official discourses based on the history of victory and the newly
emerged societal discourses of the unending victimization of the Chinese nation.
If the former has changed through time based on the CCP’s need to define and
re-define the others in the changing domestic and international environments,
the later reflects the deep sense of humiliation developed during the reform
period and the emergence of non-state agencies as history writers. It might be too
early to analyze the societal discourses of the Nanjing Massacre in terms of the
newly forming national identity. My cautious guess is that these new discourses
are deeply subversive in the sense that the historical consciousness based on
unending national humiliation inherently revokes the CCP’s narration of victory,
and then, makes the CCP’s right to represent the Chinese nation disputable.
The emergence of alternative narratives of the Nanjing Massacre is, therefore,
a signal of the new historical subjects in the Chinese society.
Conclusion
If the Comfort Women issue were to be narrated as a collective memory
through the formation of new historical subjects, it could also produce another
form of the national subjects. On the contrary to the developmental nationalism
symbolized by Park Chung-hee era (1961 – 1979), a new historical consciousness
91
Berry, op. cit., p. 44; In Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking, a German Nazi leader in Nanjing
International Security Zone is one of the most credible witnesses in her story.
390 Jungmin Seo
articulated by the Comfort Women issue makes a history of victimization as the core
of the identity formation by adding women as co-subject of suffering. The new
national identity reinforces its own narration of victimization by excluding those
outside of the story; collaborators. The ever-changing discourses of the Nanjing
Massacre also reflect the shifting position of the CCP and the new subjectivity
emerging in Chinese society. Taiwanese moves toward independence by distancing
themselves from the Chinese nation by constructing a hybrid identity of a
Chinese/Japanese/Indigenous nation92 also forces Chinese popular nationalism to

admit the unending national humiliation. Occasional voices of “denial” from Japan
are actively vitiating the CCP’s identification with the “victorious” Chinese nation.
The memories of the Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre have never been
stabilized and will not in the near future.
A number of scholars problematized a recent trend of the debates about the
Nanjing Massacre; the game of numbers. When the CCP and the Chinese popular
discourses use an indisputable number of victims, “three-hundred thousand” which
is vividly presented in gigantic signs in 11 languages at the entrance of the Nanjing
Massacre Museum,93 to prove the magnitude of the suffering of the Chinese nation,
any attempt to verify or re-calculate the number—either by Japanese right-wing
deniers or by sincere academic inquiries—is perceived by the CCP and the Chinese
public as another attempt to humiliate China.94 The Chinese refusal of “audit”
reinforces the Japanese and American perception of the unreliable CCP and irrational
Chinese nationalists, and, eventually, strengthens the Japanese right-winger’s notion
of the Nanjing Massacre as fiction.95 Further, the number game is petrifying and will
kill the richness of the memory by reducing the events to abstract numbers.96 The real
pitfall of the number game, however, is that it leaves no room to ponder the question
of “who,” while forcing the debates to be confined with the question of “what.”
When some Japanese right-wing politicians argue for a sharply reduced
number of victims and the Japanese government officially protests the Chinese
authority’s use of “three hundred thousand victims” as an historical fact,97 their
argument is unconsciously but firmly based on the identification of Japan with the
Japanese Imperial Army in Nanjing. Otherwise, why should they concern
themselves with the number issue more than Germans’ are interested in verifying
the number of Holocaust victims? As such, the positivist inquiries of the Comfort
Women and the Nanjing Massacre often hide the politics of identity, which
produces the very source of the conflicts over history. In other words, at the core
92
Melissa J. Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration of
Changing Identities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
93
Mark Magnier, “Showcasing the Pain of Nanjing,” Los Angeles Times, December 23,
2007, p. 15.
94
Peter Hays Gries, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), pp. 80 – 81.
95
Yuji Inoguchi, “Changchao Ri-Zhong jian zhishide gongtong kongjian” [Creating the
Sino-Japanese common space for knowledge], Dushu, May 2001.
96
Xiaodong Cheng, “Jiyi de yanshazi” [Assassin of Memory], Dushu, July 2001.
97
For example, a Japanese diplomat officially visited the Nanjing Massacre Memorial
to convey concerns regarding the anti-Japanese tone of the museum and requested Chinese
authorities “should listen to various opinions” about the number of victims. Takanori Kato,
The Daily Yomiuri (English edition), January 18, 2008, p. 2.
of the debates over the number of Nanjing Massacre victims is the unfortunate
political path of Japan that failed to separate pre-war and post-war Japanese
identities.98
The memories of the Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre are
fundamentally identical in the sense that both have played the central role in
formation of political subjectivities, Korean women and Chinese nation, through
transformation of individual traumatic experiences into collective memories.
Nevertheless, the radically different socio-political conditions of memorizing

processes between those two should not be ignored. Although further research
may be able to identify numerous points of contrast and comparison, I briefly
suggest three conspicuous dimensions here. First of all, the collective memory of
the Comfort Women emerged from a bottom-up process in which newly emerging
feminist consciousness in civil society challenged both the former colonial power
and the patriarchic Korean state, whereas the narratives of the Nanjing Massacre
have been largely produced and controlled by the Chinese one-party state.
Secondly, two atrocities are characteristically different, one being a short-term
massive massacre in a city and the other being a prolonged intensive sexual
violence across war fronts. Due to the different natures, the Nanjing Massacre has
always been a visualized tragedy by gory pictures of piles of dead bodies, whereas
the Comfort Women have been represented by individuals’ excruciating
narratives. Finally, the memories of the Comfort Women are more internationa-
lized than those of the Nanjing Massacre that primarily symbolizes a “national
suffering.” In addition to the sheer facts that the Comfort Women victims are not
ethnically homogeneous and the crime scenes are scattered across East and
Southeast Asia, I conjecture that the bottom-up nature of the memorization of the
Comfort Women greatly contributed to internationally empowering those
memories through global networks of NGOs.
The recent publication of history sub-textbooks by the committee on “Modern
History of East Asia” and the committee for Korean/Japanese textbooks for
Women is a significant step toward the solution of the problems of memories.
The Modern History of East Asia,99 co-written by a group of left-wing/liberal
scholars from China, Japan and Korea, tries to re-interpret the history from the
perspective of renmin / minjung [people], not of the nation state (guojia / kukka) or
national citizens (guomin / kungmin). It impressively inserts a significant portion
of the suffering and resistance of the Japanese people against the Japanese fascist
98
Naoko Shimazu, “Popular Representations of the Past: The Case of Postwar Japan,”
Journal of Contemporary History 38:1 (2003), pp. 101– 116. Historical narration of the pre-war
Japan in contemporary Japanese society is a deeply contested field. Hence, a monolithic
depiction of “Japanese understanding of its imperial pasts” should be cautiously avoided.
For recent studies on diverse perspectives on Japanese war crimes in Japan, see Philip
Seaton, “Reporting the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue, 1991–1992: Japan’s Contested War
Memories in the National Press,” Japanese Studies 26:1 (2006), pp. 99 – 112; Franziska
Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945– 2005 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Asia Center Press, 2006); Yoshikuni Igarashi, “Kamikaze Today: The Search for
National Heroes in Contemporary Japan,” in Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (eds.),
Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007), pp. 99 – 121.
99
Dongya sanguo de jinxiandaishi gongtong bianxie weiyuanhui (ed.), Dongya Sanguo
de jinxiandaishi [Modern History of East Asia] (Beijing: Shihui kexue wenxian chubanshe,
2005).
392 Jungmin Seo
regime during the war. By doing so, it tries to interpret the history of the war as the
Japanese fascist versus the people of East Asia. Similarly, The Modern History
of Korea and Japan through the Women’s Eye,100 published by Japanese left-wing and
Korean feminist scholars, tries to use the perspective of gender politics to
re-interpret the modern histories of Japan and Korea. Both works show an attempt
of a radical solution; construction of new identity across the national border. As a
number of scholars have suggested recently, emerging international civil society
began to play significant roles in determining national identity questions in East

Asia.101 Two examples introduced above are good examples of how transnational
civil society tries to positively influence the quagmire of nation-centered history
narration in East Asia. It is too early to evaluate those books’ actual impacts on the
current debates on Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre. Especially, it is
questionable whether the artificially created regional identities can overcome the
historiography nationalization in all three East Asian societies. Whether
successful or not, the editors and authors of these books seem to understand
the fundamental nature of the problems of memories. Because history is not a tool
of but the very field of identity politics, any viable approach should presume a
political solution first—in a deep sense—before seeking a solution to the problems
of memories.
100
Chin-song Chong and Yuko Suzuki (eds.) Yosong ui nun ero pon Han-Il kunhyondaesa
[Modern History of Korea and Japan through the Women’s Eye] (Seoul: Han’ul, 2005).
101
Baogang He, “Transnational Civil Society and the National Identity Question in East
Asia,” Global Governance 10:2 (2004), pp. 227– 246; Suh, op. cit.; Carol Gluck, “Operations of
Memory: ‘ Comfort Women’ and the World,” in Jager and Mitter, op. cit., pp. 47 – 77.

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On: 22 December 2014, At: 08:48

New Political Science

Politics of Memory in Korea and China: Remembering

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393140802269021

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Politics of Memory in Korea and China: Remembering

nationalist position, have been continuing, if not accelerating, the nationalization

already morally charged, cannot be narrated without shared, collective agreement

narratives centered on subject formation. Because of that, public memorization of

Democratization, Feminist Movement and the Memories of Comfort Women in

of awakening ( jagak) widely spread among women’s movement organizations

in school records, personal testimonies, and other official and unofficial

with either loose morals or an unfortunate fate.25 The testimonies of the

nation-bound and culture-bound feminism is self-fettered.33 Hence, the new

government, whose rhetorical legitimacy wholly depends on the anti-Japanese

non-existent due to cold-war environments.41 When the Research Institute for

of Chongsindae.45 One contributor of the book, Im Chong-guk, published four widely

The CCP’s peasant-centered/anti-KMT identity during the pre-reform era

on the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army, a short paragraph of comments

thousand Chinese people to fearlessly resist with anger and determination.77

century of humiliation have clearly targeted the construction of the history of

Chinese/Japanese/Indigenous nation92 also forces Chinese popular nationalism to

Nevertheless, the radically different socio-political conditions of memorizing

began to play significant roles in determining national identity questions in East

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