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Gendered Politics of Memory and Power: Making Sense of Japan’s Peace Constitution and the Comfort Women in East Asian International Relations

  • Analyses & Alternatives
  • Abbr : A&A
  • 2020, 4(2), pp.163~202
  • DOI : 10.22931/aanda.2020.4.2.006
  • Publisher : Korea Consensus Institute
  • Research Area : Social Science > Social Science in general
  • Received : August 16, 2020
  • Accepted : September 17, 2020
  • Published : September 29, 2020

Taeju Kim 1,  Lee Hongchun 2

1The University of Chicago
2東京都市大学

Candidate

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Japanese society produced and reproduced a distinctively gendered history and memories of the experience of WWII and colonialism in the postwar era. We argue that these gendered narratives, which were embedded in postwar debates about the Peace Constitution and comfort women, have engendered contradictions and made the historical conflicts with neighboring countries challenging to resolve. On the one hand, this deepens conflict, but on the other, it also generates stability in East Asia. After Japan’s defeat in WWII, the American Occupation government created the Peace Constitution, which permanently “renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” The removal of the state’s monopoly on violence—the symbol of masculinity—resulted in Japan’s feminization. This feminization led to collective forgetting of prewar imperialism and militarism in postwar Japan. While collectively forgetting the wartime history of comfort women within these feminized narratives, the conservative movement to revise the Peace Constitution attempted to recover Japan’s masculinity for a new, autonomous role in international politics, as uncertainty in East Asia increased. Ironically, however, this effort strengthened Japan’s femininity because it involved forgetting Japan’s masculine role in the past. This forgetting has undermined efforts to achieve masculine independence, thus reinforcing dependence on the United States. Recurrent debates about the Peace Constitution and comfort women have influenced how Japanese political elites and intellectual society have constructed distinctive social institutions, imagined foreign relations, and framed contemporary problems, as indicated in their gendered restructuring of history.

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