COMMENTARY / JAPAN
Korean nationalism and the 'comfort women' issue
Shaun ODwyer
shared a link.
24 S1S1epupfftsegmberm t2017a9ored ·
My latest Japan Times op-ed, on the Comfort women issue. Japanese nationalist revisionism has fostered distorted understandings of the comfort women's experience and the system that they were trafficked into. However, less attention has been paid to the distorting effects of today's Korean nationalism.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/.../korean-nationalism.../...
Korean nationalism and the 'comfort women' issue | The Japan Times
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP
Korean nationalism and the 'comfort women' issue | The Japan Times
South Korean nationalism has co-opted the comfort women issue.5 comments
-----
Haruki Teshirogi
Whoa this is very well-researched
· Reply · Share · 2 y
Haruki Teshirogi
You offer some points of advice on what feminists and S. Koreans "should" do. How should Japanese people be approaching the matter?
· Reply · Share · 2 y
Shaun ODwyer
Author
I would say "まず、冷静に行動して下さい。" Especially, tell the right wingers to shut up and stop the reactive Korea-hating, if that is at all possible.
People shouldn't take it so personally - there are Korean right and left wingers who detest each other as much as some Koreans detest Japan these days. And remember those 500 Yemeni asylum seekers who arrived on Jeju Island to be greeted with ethnonationalist rage and anti-Islamic hysteria in South Korea last year? I think I feel more sorry for them than I do for Japanese in this latest colonial history/memory row.
South Koreans have got a lot of post-colonial, post-civil war legacy issues to work out with each other, and in some ways the history wars thing with Japan is a side-effect of their domestic culture wars.
Of course, I know in Japan there are long-standing culture war issues over war memory and the constitution that divide the Japanese left and right, and these sometimes connect to controversies over Japanese colonial rule over Korea (just ask the Asahi News about that!).
But somehow it just doesn't get as vehement and enraged in Japan as much as it does in South Korea.
Some S Korean scholars I know - and who advised me when I was writing my article - have been telling me about some really crazy incidents lately.
No comments:
Post a Comment