A critical discourse analysis of the Asian Women’s Fund website

Abstract

The so-called ‘comfort women’ were women (including teenagers) taken by force and treated as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during the Second World War. The Asian Women’s Fund, as an extension of the Japanese government, is an institutional device for political apology regarding the ‘comfort women’ issue. As an initial step to consider postwar history cognition in Japan, this article examines some of the web pages on the Asian Women’s Fund website, analyzing the lexical items, the rhetoric, and the defining/summarizing/quoting strategies with corpora evidence. By examining related details, the article uncovers how ‘facts’ and ‘history’ were presented in the discourse, and thus uncovers the infelicity of the apology.

Keywords

comfort women corpus assisted analysis critical discourse analysis discourse in historical context political apology

Introduction

Whether Japan’s apologies for its crimes during the Second World War are sufficient or not is a question still under debate even though the war has been over for over 60 years, and the ‘comfort women’ issue is among the most hotly disputed historical issues.

The so-called ‘comfort women’ were women (including teenagers) taken by force and treated as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during the Second World War. Compensation by the Japanese government to the individual victims, though for years demanded by many activist groups and victims, has never come about until now. The way the history of the ‘comfort women’ has been narrated in currently-in-use Japanese textbooks, is also highly concerning (see generally, Nozaki, 2001, 2005).

It is said that some Japanese politicians, on the basis that the Japanese Government compensating individuals was not realistic in a short time frame (土野, 2010), decided to establish ‘The Asian Women’s Fund’ (in short, the AWF) in 1995. Unfortunately, the AWF has brought disputes rather than reconciliation.

In this article, I take a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to the AWF website, in the sense that I analyze the linguistic facts in a historical context, using interdisciplinary tools and thoughts.

The main purposes of the article are to uncover the infelicity of certain apologies, to find clues to understand certain views of history, and to ‘show that problems in political science can … be studied … sometimes more adequately when it is realized that the issues have an important discursive dimension’ (Van Dijk, 1995: 12).

Historical context

The crimes of the Imperial Japanese Army were revealed in 1991 when a former ‘comfort woman’ from South Korea broke her silence. In 1992, a historian, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, presented a study that revealed the Imperial Japanese Army’s involvement in the ‘comfort women’ system (see also Hayashi, 2008).

Under great external pressure from South Korea and other Asian countries, the Japanese government carried out an investigation and released a report accompanied by a statement in 1993. The report was entitled ‘On the Issue of Wartime “Comfort Women”’ (いわゆる従軍慰安婦問題について, in short, the 1993 report),¹ with great reluctance, it admitted that ‘these women were forced to move with the military under constant military control and that they were deprived of their freedom and had to endure misery’. The talks held by the then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono (known as ‘the Kono Talks’)² confirmed the conditions of the women at the ‘comfort stations’ as ‘they lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere (強制的な状況)’. The Japanese right wing wanted (and still want) to erase the 1993 report and the Kono Talks, to delete confirmation of the coercive conditions in particular.

Although the military’s involvement and the coercive conditions were confirmed by the report and the talks, the then government of Japan insisted that it would only bear ‘moral responsibility (道義的な責任)’ for the ‘comfort women’ issue,³ and refused to pay compensation to individuals. Such a stance has been inherited by successive governments, and the expression ‘moral responsibilities’ as a cohesive item (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 274–288) has been set down in related statements since.

In 1995, the AWF, which was supervised rather than supported by the Japanese government, was invented. Several announcements and documents were presented by government officials, including the then Chief Cabinet Secretary Igarashi Kozo, and the then Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi. After the disbandment of the AWF in 2007, a summary of its activities was released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan on its website. The summary said that the Japanese government bore ‘the total operational costs of the AWF’ to ‘support’ it in gathering donations from the people of Japan (the donations were used as reparations for some former ‘comfort women’).

The nature of the AWF was basically twisted – it claimed to be independent while it participated in reproducing the attitudes of the Japanese government; donations from the people of Japan were appealed by the fully government-funded organization, which was shaped on the premise that the Japanese government was not going to give compensation to individuals.

Indeed, we need to consider the AWF as an institutional device for a certain political apology, and as an extension of the Japanese government.

Data and method

The AWF’s website was established as early as 1998 to promote its activities. According to records preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (archive.org/index.php) and Japan’s National Diet Library (warp.ndl.go.jp),⁴ the website had four versions in total. The fourth version (www.awf.or.jp)⁵ contained six sections, namely (1) ‘Japanese Military and Comfort Women’, (2) ‘Establishment of the AWF’, (3) ‘Atonement Project of the AWF’, (4) ‘Various Efforts regarding Comfort Women Issue’, (5) ‘The AWF’s Women’s Dignity Project’ and (6) ‘Archives’. In this article, I focus on the pages regarding the ‘facts’ and ‘oral history’ of the ‘comfort women’ in the fourth version of the site, which belong to sections (1) and (3)⁶ respectively, since on these pages a questionable view of history was mainly represented. The overall nature of the site will be discussed at the end of the article. Being aware of the importance of keeping a permanent record (Mautner, 2005, 2007), I used a freeware (Webzip) to package the whole site and saved it to my hard disk.

My approach is based on a few questions rather than on conclusions or solutions. First, is history all about interpretations than facts? A group of right-wing revisionists in Japan would probably nod in response to this question. On the other hand, some historians hold that there exists a distinction between fact and fiction (霍布斯鲍姆, 2002: 前言p. 2; but see Nozaki, 2005: 229). The question varies in the field of literature, depending on whether an interpretation of a text is limited or not (伊格尔顿, 2009: 92). Linguistics may contribute to the discussion through discovering how the range of interpretations is being restricted (Wodak, 2011, introduced related research). And, first of all, ‘an author’s freedom is always constrained by how other speakers use the language’ (Stubbs, 1996).

Second, can corpus-assisted analysis help us understand attitudes of discourse more objectively? Words have semantic prosody (or, discourse prosody) and semantic preference (Partington, 2004; Stubbs, 2001). When we use corpora to conclude the semantic prosodies of some keywords in certain contexts, wouldn’t the interpretation of the discourse be restricted? When native speakers use dictionaries in their own language and/or rely on native-speaker introspections (Sinclair, 1991), is the corpora-evidence-oriented diverse opinion held by non-native speakers worth considering?

In this article, as a non-native speaker of Japanese, I search for support from corpora to complete the analysis of the data.

The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (chunagon.ninjal.ac.jp; in short, BCCWJ) is a corpus expanding to over 100 million words, covering 11 resources including books, newspapers, textbooks and web usage. The NINJAL-LWP for BCCWJ (nlb.ninjal.ac.jp; in short, NLB) is a web tool developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, covering major data of BCCWJ with results analysis function. The Japanese Law Translation Database (www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp; in short, JLTD), owned by the Japan Ministry of Justice, provides Keyword in Context Search, which helped me to confirm the use of specific words in the genre of law. All the corpora above were accessed in August, 2013.

In this article, I sometimes manually analyze the results returned by the corpora to confirm the use of certain words in certain contexts (Baker et al., 2008, discussed a similar method). The main task was to put the words back into the context under discussion, since ‘CDA starts from a complex social problem or phenomenon’ and ‘corpus linguistics from the largely decontextualized text’ (Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 15).

Finally, in the light of the speech act theory (initiated in Austin, 1962) and the studies of political apologies (among others: Anderson, 2012; Augoustinos et al., 2011; Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984; Harris et al., 2006; Lakoff, 2001; Mok and Tokunaga, 2007; Yamamoto, 2002; 大谷, 2008; 陶, 2008; 遠藤, 2000), this article takes the AWF site as an example and tries to answer the question ‘What makes a political apology on a historical issue infelicitous?’

Analysis

In this part of the present article, I examine the lexical items, the rhetoric, and the defining/summarizing/quoting strategies of the related pages. By examining the details of the ‘facts’ and ‘oral history’ pages, I uncover how the ‘facts’ and ‘history’ were presented in the discourse.

Euphemistic expressions

The definition of ‘comfort women’, and the details of what happened in the so-called ‘comfort stations’, are neither mentioned in the 1993 report or the Kono Talks, nor in other documents or statements regarding the ‘comfort women’ issue by the Japanese government. However, the fourth version of the AWF website provided a definition in ‘facts-00.html’ as below:

Excerpt 1

いわゆる「従軍慰安婦」とは、かっての戦争の時代に、一定期間日本軍の慰安所等に集められ、将兵に性的な奉仕を強いられた女性たちのことです。[The so-called ‘wartime comfort women’ were those who were taken to former Japanese military installations, such as comfort stations, for a certain period during wartime in the past and forced to provide sexual services to officers and soldiers.]

The underlined expression caught my attention due to its unusual use of the word ‘奉仕 (services)’. ‘奉仕’, which can be translated into ‘service’ or ‘ministration’, has 450 concordances covered by the NLB. The verbal noun most frequently co-occurs with nouns such as ‘活動 (activities)’, ‘社会 (society)’ and ‘勤労 (labor)’, forms such as ‘奉仕活動(voluntary activities)’, ‘社会奉仕 (social services)’ and ‘勤労奉仕 (volunteer labor)’, and has an overwhelming positive prosody.

The exact collocation of ‘性的な奉仕 (sexual services)’ has only two hits, appearing in two social science books. To understand this rare use, I dug deeper into the concordances and found that the word ‘奉仕’ has a ‘split personality’, that it is primed for formal, written usage in a public-benefit-related context, and at the same time it has a ‘hidden face’ – it is sometimes used alone as a euphemism for ‘sexual intercourse’ in a sex-related context in popular novels – pornographic novels in particular. And its use as a euphemism has not been included by most major dictionaries. Back to excerpt 1, it turns out that ‘性的な奉仕を強いられた (forced to provide sexual services)’ is actually a euphemism for ‘raped’.

In serious discussions of history, euphemisms are not supposed to appear in definitions. For instance, readers generally expect ‘death’ rather than ‘passing’ when reading a monograph on history. Since the AWF invited some scholars to interpret the historical data, and the scholars’ opinions participated in shaping the discourse of the site, it is curious to find that, in the crucial definition, the expression ‘raped’ has been replaced with a rarely used euphemism. The autonomous producer of the euphemism must either be unusually familiar with the exact euphemistic expression, or have made an effort in searching for it. The latter possibility suggests that the reconstruction of history on the site may not be as ‘academic’ as it claimed to be.

A euphemistic description of the ‘comfort stations’ can further be found in ‘fact-09.html’:

Excerpt 2

慰安所は通常業者が経営管理していましたが、軍はさまざまな面で慰安所の存立、稼動に関与しました。それは現地部隊が定めた各種の管理規定にうかがえます。

まず慰安所の建物は軍が提供したり、建設したりしました。警備は軍が行い、さらに営業時間、休業、単価も、部隊別の利用日の割り振りも軍が決めていました。慰安婦の性病検査も軍がおこなっていました。軍は管理委員を指名し、慰安所にいく者のためには、軍が利用券を発行する場合が多くみられました。[Comfort stations were regularly managed by civilian proprietors, but the military always closely and directly controlled various aspects of comfort stations’ activities. This can be known by regulations for the use of comfort stations minutely formulated by local army units.

First, edifices for comfort stations were provided or constructed by the military. Security control was taken by the military. Working time, holidays and prices, assignment of clients to each unit were decided by the military. Examination of sexual diseases was carried out by military doctors. The military appointed a managing committee and in many cases issued tickets for soldier-visitors of the comfort stations.]

All the underlined expressions form a string (a group of expressions shaping the image of a discourse):

経営管理 (managed) – 警備 (security control) – 営業時間、休業、単価、部隊別の利用日の割り振り(working time, holidays and prices, assignment of clients to each unit) – 性病検査 (examination of sexual diseases) – 利用券 (tickets)

The semantic preferences and prosodies of the words in the string help shape the image (the overall impression that a discourse makes on an addressee) of the paragraphs. There is further an interaction between the image of the paragraphs and its context. The image of the paragraphs generally leads the addressee to infer the context of the paragraphs when the addressee’s knowledge of the context is incomplete. In this case readers who had never heard of ‘comfort stations’ may deduce that the facility described here was a military-run, secured welfare installation, probably providing medical care and uninvolved in any criminal activities, since expressions such as ‘経営管理 (managed)’ and ‘営業時間 (working time)’ evoke an image of common business; ‘利用券 (tickets, common translation: voucher)’ is frequently used in public-service newsletters of local governments in Japan;⁷ and none of the expressions in the string points at crime.

On 22 June 1998, a report entitled ‘Contemporary Forms of Slavery: Systematic rape, sexual slavery and slavery-like practices during armed conflict’ was submitted to the United Nations Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities⁸ by Gay J. McDougall, the special rapporteur. The McDougall report has an appendix entitled ‘An analysis of the legal liability of the Government of Japan for “comfort women stations” established during the Second World War’. As a comparison, the underlined expressions in the appendix formed a very different string. For instance, the report pointed out that ‘the Japanese military employed physical violence, kidnapping, coercion and deception’, that ‘(the women) were held there against their will inside these “comfort stations”’ and ‘were forcibly raped multiple times on a daily basis’, ‘the regulation of the health of the women as if they were chattel’, ‘the “comfort women’s” lack of personal and sexual autonomy’, and that the so-called ‘comfort stations’ were actually ‘rape centres’.

To those who are familiar with the context of the AWF site and the McDougall report, the striking difference between the two implicitly reveals a totally different reconstruction of history.

Told and untold

The site omitted important facts on some pages in its summarizing. On the page named ‘oralhistory-00.html’, three victims’ testimonies were quoted. Each testimony was led by an introduction added by the site. The introduction for the first testimony follows:

Excerpt 3

16歳のとき、向かいの日本人の家で働いていた娘の話で、よい働き口があるということで、ソウルへ行き、日本人に引率されて、汽車に乗せられました。中国天津から北站をへて、棗強の部隊に送られ、慰安婦にされたのです。そこで金田君子という名前を与えられました。やがて、棗強から石家荘へ移りました。現実から逃避するために吸い始めたアヘンの中毒になった金田さんは1945年、帰国を許されました。戦後過酷な慰安所生活で傷ついた子宮を摘出しなくてはなりませんでした。[When she was 16 years old, she went to Seoul for better employment on the recommendation of her friend who worked as housemaid for a Japanese family. Led by a Japanese, she was put on a train to go from Seoul to Tianjin, China, then from Tianjin via Peitan to Zaoqiang. There she was forced to be a comfort woman for the Japanese military. She was named Kimiko Kaneda. Later she moved to Shijiazhuang. Her life during childhood was difficult and solitary. Out of wish to forget her real pains, she became an opium addict and in 1945 was allowed to return to Korea. After the war she had to go through an operation in which she lost her womb. ]

The passage basically can be divided into two parts: the first part describes how the woman was deceived; the second part describes the aftermath of being a ‘comfort woman’. Between the two parts, how the victim suffered in the ‘comfort station’ is expected to be mentioned, but is totally omitted in the passage.

In fact, the victim talked a lot about her suffering in the ‘comfort station’ in her testimony. She said,

Soldiers came to my room, but I resisted with all my might … [The soldier] waved a knife at me and threatened to kill me if I didn’t do what he said. But I didn’t care if I died, and in the end he stabbed me … My clothes were soaked with blood.

In another paragraph, she said,

When the soldiers came back from the battlefields, as many as 20 men would come to my room from early morning … They rounded up little girls still in school. Their genitals were still underdeveloped, so they became torn and infected. There was no medicine except something to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and Mercurochrome.

Quantitative facts, as given in Table 1, may help illustrate the focus of the testimonies.

Table 1.

The quantitative facts of the testimonies on ‘oralhistory-00.html’.

Source of the testimonies	Length	On how the victim was taken	On the suffering in the ‘comfort stations’
The South Korea victim	Approx. 2500 words	<370 words	Approx. 1200 words
The Philippine victim	Approx. 950 words	15 words	>620 words
The victim of Taiwan district	Approx. 980 words	<280 words	>310 words

The table shows that the amount of text regarding victims’ suffering ranges from 31% to over 65%, that is, nearly 1/3 to nearly 2/3 of the testimonies constitute the main body of them. However, these accusations were under-represented in the introductions, especially in excerpt 3. This unusual absence leaves the crucial parts of the testimonies unconfirmed by the site. Considering the vicious attacks from the right wing on the reliability of the testimonies given by the victims, the role the site played becomes suspicious.

The third testimony, given by a victim of Taiwan district, consisted of four paragraphs, which not only appeared in ‘oralhistory-00.html’, but was also quoted on ‘taiwan.html’ to illustrate how women in Taiwan were forced to be ‘comfort women’. The full quoted passage, being the first full paragraph of the third testimony, is as given below:

Excerpt 4

そのとき、わたしの婚約者は日本の兵隊にとられて、南方へ行っていました。わたしは家でお父さんの仕事を手伝っていました。そうしたら日本人の警察が呼びに来て、仕事があるから来なさいって言いました。兵隊にご飯をつくったり、破れた着物を縫ったりする仕事だと。行きたくないと思ったけれど、警察の人が、いまは戦争で男も女も国家総動員法だから来なくてはいけないと言うので、働きに行くことにしました。日本兵がたくさんいました。わたしのほかに女の人も何名かいました。わたしたちは朝起きたら顔を洗って、ご飯をつくって兵隊に食べさせ、それから洗濯して、破れた着物を縫いました。そうしたら、夜になって呼ばれて、部屋に入れられて… 悪い仕事でした。[At that time, my fiancée had been drafted by the Japanese military and sent to the south. I was helping my father’s business at home. One day, the Japanese police called and told me to come because they had a job for me. They said that I would be preparing meals and mending torn clothes for the soldiers. I did not want to go, but the police said that all men and women must come because the country was at war then and that everybody must follow the General National Mobilization Law. So I went to work. I saw many Japanese soldiers. There were some other women like me, too. We got up in the morning, washed our faces and cooked breakfast to feed the soldiers. We washed their clothes and mended torn clothes. Then, at night, we were called and confined to a room – it was a terrible job.]

The whole passage is mainly about how she was deceived and the underlined sentence is the mere lead to her suffering in the ‘comfort station’. The quotation curiously stops at the underlined sentence, as if the victim talked no more, as if the ‘terrible job’ was all about the cooking, feeding, washing and mending mentioned above.

In fact, the nature of the ‘terrible job’ is exposed in the second paragraph in the third testimony on ‘oralhistory-00.html’:

Excerpt 5

泣いてばかり。昼間は着物を縫って、洗濯して、この仕事は楽でした。でも夜は死んだ。死んでるんです、死んでいる気なんです。逃げたいけれど道がわからない。それに門のところに兵隊が立っているから、逃げたら鉄砲で撃たれるでしょう。子どもだったですよ、なにもわからなかった。妊娠したこともわからない。食べ物を食べても吐くから、一緒にいた女の人に妊娠しているよと言われました。二ヶ月で流産しました。今でも涙が出ますよ。あぁ…あんたにこんな悪い話を聞かせて、すみませんね。[I was only weeping. In the daytime I sewed clothes and did the soldiers’ laundry. It was easy. But at night I died. I was dying. I felt as if I was dead. I wished to flee away, but I did not know the way. Soldiers were standing at the gates. If you fled, you would be shot. I was too young. I did not know anything. I could not realize that I was pregnant. I began to throw up what I had eaten. Then a woman, who was with me, said that I was pregnant. In two months I had a miscarriage. Even now when I think about it, tears come to my eyes. Oh … I am sorry to make you hear such a terrible story.]

Excerpt 5 is significant as the underlined sentences clearly showed the victim was enslaved. Quoting excerpt 4 instead of excerpt 5 in ‘taiwan.html’ is questionable, since through quoting excerpt 4, one can actually talk less about what really happened to the victim.

The whole site contains over 80 web pages in Japanese; however, it confirmed very little – if anything – about the victims’ suffering in the ‘comfort stations’. In fact, ‘oralhistory-00.html’ (at most 2 % of the text on the whole site) is the only page on which the crimes inside the ‘comfort stations’, inside the rape centers, were directly indicted, and the crimes were indicted by the victims, rather than confirmed by the site or by any officials.

It seems that the 1993 report to a great extent shaped and limited the expressions on the site. The facts of wartime ‘comfort women’ mentioned in the report were divided into eight parts: the background of the establishment; the timing of the establishment; areas of operation; number of ‘comfort women’; ‘comfort women’s’ place of origin; operation and management; recruitment; and transportation. The AWF site adopted exactly the same strategy to omit what really happened in the ‘comfort stations’.

Specific word choice

‘acts’ or ‘crimes’

In this part of the present article, I highlight the absence of the word ‘crime(s)’ on the AWF site.

On the website for the Embassy of Germany in the United States, I found a page regarding ‘Historic Responsibility’,⁹ in which there is a sentence identifying ‘the crimes of the Nazi regime’ and the responsibility for this that Germany bears. On the contrary, I failed to find any word as clear as ‘crime(s) (犯罪)’ in the related documents and statements released by the Japanese government. Instead, I found ‘不法な (unlawful)’ ‘行為 (acts)’ in documents, for instance in the 1993 report:

Excerpt 6

旧日本軍占領地域内において日本軍人が住民に対し強姦等の不法な行為を行い、[rapes and other unlawful acts by Japanese military personnel against local residents in the areas occupied by the then Japanese military]

The BCCWJ returns over 500 hits of ‘行為’ co-occurring with ‘不法な’, which shows that the expression ‘不法な行為/不法行為’ is actually a legal term only used in civil law (different from criminal law) in Japanese. According to the JLTD, the standard translation for ‘不法な行為/不法行為’ (50 hits in the ‘Keyword in Context Search’ of the database) should be ‘tort’ or ‘tortious act’, and the Japanese term never appears in the Code of Criminal Procedure or in any other crime-related context. The unusual translation ‘unlawful acts’ has only seven hits in the database, is used in the Plant Protection Act and in the Act on Domestic Animal Infectious Diseases Control. On the other hand, the word ‘crime(s)’ has 354 hits in the database – no wonder that it is used in a crime-related context.

That is to say, by confirming ‘不法な行為/不法行為 (unlawful acts)’ or torts, one can deny crimes. The presence of ‘不法な行為 (unlawful acts)’ in the 1993 report can be seen as a frame, which determined the absence of ‘犯罪 (crime/crimes)’ on the AWF site. Due to its nature (owned and supervised by the Japanese government), the site inherited the attitude of the government.

The site used the expression when citing ‘General Okamura Yasuji’s memoir of the war’ in ‘facts-01.html’. The criminal Okamura himself did use ‘強姦罪 (crimes of rape)’ three times in the two paragraphs quoted by the site. However, the English translation goes like this:

Excerpt 7-1

As in 1932 during the Shanghai Incident some acts of rape were committed by Japanese military personnel…

Excerpt 7-2

As a result, rape crimes totally disappeared, …

Excerpt 7-3

But rape acts did not disappear in the Sixth Division, …

Only in excerpt 7-2 has the word ‘crimes’ been kept in a sentence, and that where it ‘totally disappeared’.

The word ‘acts’ has over 3000 hits in JLTD, including ‘criminal acts’ (seven times), ‘tortious acts’ and ‘unlawful acts’. As an expression in a legal context, ‘acts’ is a hypernym of ‘crimes’, and the latter only refers to criminal acts. When someone uses ‘acts’ to replace ‘crimes’ in a context where ‘crimes’ would be much more accurate, either he is cognizing ‘crimes’ as normal ‘acts’ or he is violating the maxim of quantity (Grice, 1975, as summarized in Levinson, 1983), and intends to use an imprecise, inappropriate expression to cover up the crimes.

As a comparison, in the McDougall report the word ‘crime(s)’ has over 70 hits as a definition of the violence committed by the Imperial Japanese Army, and the word ‘act(s)’ is used either in a quotation of a statement issued by the Japanese government, or as a co-occurrence of the word ‘crime(s)’, and is always defined appropriately, for instance in the sentence ‘The women and children who were held there against their will inside these “comfort stations” were then subjected to acts of rape and sexual violence on such a massive scale that the nature of the crime may only properly be described as a crime against humanity’.

Representations of specific views of history

Some specific words are so deeply entangled in a specific historical context that the historical context has become a part of these words. The use of the words therefore has specific ‘“framing” effects on the activation of political attitudes and ideologies’ (Van Dijk, 2002).

In 1982, the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) required editors to use ‘中国進出 (Japan advanced into China)’ to replace ‘中国侵略 (invaded China)’ in Japanese history textbooks when narrating China’s War of Resistance Against Japan (the second Sino–Japanese War). The government of China lodged solemn representations and criticized the use of the neutral-prosodic verb ‘進出 (advanced)’. In August, as Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary at the time, Miyazawa Kiichi made a statement and promised to ‘make corrections of the Government’s responsibility’.¹⁰ However, despite the protests expressed by China and the Republic of Korea, the use of neutral terms and the under-representation of the historical facts in some Japanese history textbooks have been repeated thereafter to date, and have even developed into the ‘history textbook controversies’.

To those who are familiar with the controversies, it is astonishing to find that the AWF site used the exact verb ‘進出’ on ‘korea.html’:

Excerpt 8

日中戦争の過程で中国に進出した日本軍が設けた慰安所に、日本人の女性に続いて朝鮮人の女性が慰安婦として送り込まれました。[During the Sino–Japanese war Korean women with Japanese women were sent to comfort stations which the Japanese military set up in various places of occupied China.]

The underlined verb phrase (omitted in the translation) functions as the modifier of the noun phrase ‘the Japanese military’, and means, as mentioned above, ‘(the Japanese military) advanced into China’. Such an expression insulted the victims of all countries, for it has already been linked to an unrepentant attitude to the war.

Another questionable expression appears in ‘facts-12.html’:

Excerpt 9

日本軍が東南アジアで敗走しはじめると、慰安所の女性たちは現地に置き去りにされるか、敗走する軍と運命をともにすることになりました。玉砕した人もいれば、かろうじて脱出して、連合軍に保護された人もいます。[When the Japanese military began retreating from one place to another in Southeast Asia, the women were either abandoned or destined to share their fate with defeated military. Some perished and others narrowly escaped to be protected by the United forces.]

The underlined expression ‘玉砕した’, which functions as the modifier of ‘人 (some, some of the women)’, is not ordinary at all. The borrowed-word ‘玉砕’ is originally an expression mainly used in the traditional Chinese ethic system. The character ‘玉 (jade)’ can metaphorically refer to ‘君子 (noble, honorable, respectable man)’ and the character ‘砕’ means ‘(v.) break’ or ‘(adj.) broken’. Therefore, the expression literally means ‘a jade breaks/a broken jade’, and can metaphorically refer to ‘die in glory/die for glory/death for honor’. The expression is not commonplace, not only because of its semantic aspects, but also because of its appearance in a specific historical context. Following the decisive battle of Midway in June 1942, Imperial Japan was hurling towards defeat. Between 1943 and 1945, the word ‘玉砕’ was frequently used by the Imperial General Headquarters (大本営, Daihon’ei) and by Japan’s mass media (such as Asahi Shimbun, one of the most important daily newspapers in Japan both then and now) to address the public, and it was mainly (in fact, only) used in three situations at the time. First, the word was used to describe the defeat of the Japanese troops and the death of Japanese soldiers in the battle of Attu and other islands. Under thoughts of Bushido on loyalty to the emperor, the Japanese soldiers made a Banzai charge (suicidal human wave attack) to avoid being captured – to protect their ‘honor’ as soldiers of Imperial Japan. Later, the so-called Divine Wind (神風Kamikaze, or特別攻撃隊Tokubetsu Kougeki Tai, i.e. Special Attack Unit) of the Japanese Army began to carry out suicide attacks by crashing explosive and fuel-laden fighter aircraft into Allied battleships, and the word ‘玉砕’ was used to prettify those suicide attacks. After the US forces secured Saipan in July 1944, the slogan ‘一億玉砕Ichioku Gyokusai’, which means ‘all people of the empire should fight to death for their honor’, came into public use. In sum, the word ‘玉砕’ was a representation of the exact ideology, especially of the essence of the wartime ideology – the ‘皇国史観 Koukoku Shikan (the emperor-centered view of history)’ that had driven Japan towards war, rationalized and prettified the ferocity, and further shaped those textbooks advocating historical revisionism. The usage of placing ‘comfort women’ as the subject and selecting ‘玉砕 die for glory’ as the verb in excerpt 9 is provocative, since ‘玉砕 die for glory’ not only implies that an action was done voluntarily by the subject, but also that, in this case, ‘comfort women’ were contributors to the imperial war.

In short, technically, the AWF site used expressions involved in a view of history that praised war to ‘apologize’ to the victims of war crimes.

Infelicitous apology

According to the evidence discussed here, it is clear that some pages on the AWF site carry highly questionable understandings of history and the felicity of the apology has thus been severely – if not totally – undermined, since, in this case, the public demands the apology rather ‘for a reconsideration and discursive reframing of history’ (Luke, 1997, as cited in Harris et al., 2006).

Despite the advocacy for the dignity of women in other sections on the site, the feminists’ voice after all failed to contribute to the felicity of the apology. Partly because at the time it wanted to reply to feminist groups, the site developed its discourse in some sections within the framework of feminism, in which the ‘comfort women’ issue was considered in the category of sex crime, along with its neighbor domestic violence. However, the feminist segments faced contradictory expressions on the same site. For instance, the site inherited the stance of the Japanese government, seeing the ‘comfort women’ issue as one regarding ‘the honor and dignity of women’. The expression ‘the honor and dignity of women’ was repeated many times, not only within the AWF site, but also in the ‘Recent Policy of the Government of Japan on the Issue Known as “Comfort Women”’ in the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA). The question is, in what sense were the victims dishonored? Is this not a reinforcement of a universal conservative moral discipline, which sees raped women as dishonored? Moreover, for another reason, feminist segments such as those following can hardly be seen as valid elements in the apology:

Excerpt 10

人が生きる権利や社会に参加する権利には、性による違いがあってはなりません。それにもかかわらず、女性の人権に対する社会の認識は依然として低く、武力紛争下での女性の人権侵害、性犯罪、人身取引、セクシャル・ハラスメント（性的いやがらせ）、ドメスティック・バイオレンスなど、「女性に対する暴力」は、地域・国を問わず、絶えず発生しています。「女性尊厳事業」は、女性の人権や尊厳に対する社会の認知を高め、女性の人権を著しく侵害する暴力や虐待などの被害を未然に防止し、女性も男性も平和で自由に生きることのできる社会をめざす事業です。[Human rights, such as the right to live safely and the right to freely take part in social activities, must apply equally to men and women. The reality, however, is that social awareness of women’s human rights is still low, and women face various forms of gender-specific problems, such as sexual harassment, domestic violence, child prostitution and underage sexual exploitation (in Japanese, sex crime), regardless of the region or country in which they live. The Women’s Dignity Project aims to enhance social recognition of women’s human rights and dignity and prevent women from becoming victims of abuse in order to build a society where women can live in peace and freedom.]

Since the paragraph (and similar paragraphs) contains no specific subject of responsibility, or confirmation of any kinds of facts, its validity fully relies on the reconstruction of history in the pages regarding ‘facts’ and ‘oral history’. However, in the first three versions of the site (from 1998 to August 2007), there were no ‘facts’ or ‘oral history’ pages. That is to say, the appropriate reframing of history was absent at the beginning; later, in its fourth version of the site, as I discussed earlier, the AWF, as an extension of the Japanese government, used the exact strategies employed by those right-wing historical revisionists to reframe history. Unfortunately, the feminist segments in such a context look more like a shelter being used to cover up the subject of responsibility.

Furthermore, it was under a strange coalition government formed by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP, conservative) and the Japan Socialist Party (JSP, had a complicated background) that the AWF was established. The JSP was ‘widely seen to have abandoned principles’ to enter the coalition (Gordon, 2003: 322; see also Nozaki, 2001: 176), and its voice was rather weak, although the then PM and JSP president Murayama managed to make forthright apologies on historical issues. It is said that some JSP members pushed for legal compensation for the victims during negotiations with the LDP (岡野, 2010). Nevertheless, a sub-section on the AWF site, ‘Projects by Country or Region’, has all its pages beginning with a claim that the Japanese government need not bear legal compensation to the relevant countries/regions or individuals. The Japanese government and its mouthpiece, the AWF site, were so eager to reject legal liability that the sincerity of the apology was widely questioned, since ‘acceptance of responsibility’ is considered a compulsory element in political apologies (Harris et al., 2006).

Finally, the ‘comfort women’ issue is about women’s human rights. However, at the same time, the issue should be considered in the category of war crime – along with its neighbors: massacre and the use of biological/chemical weapons – since there is a necessity to trace the subject of responsibility not only in a ‘male–female’ relationship, but also in a ‘war criminals–victims of war crime’ framework. Since the site failed to establish discussions on the latter framework, the narrowness of its interpretation of the issue largely limited the felicity of the apology as well.

Conclusion and outlook

Most of the criticisms of the AWF raised by leftists focused on the government evading responsibility, while few discussed the suspicious attitude to the issue expressed on the AWF site or in other documents/oral data.

After exploring all the evidence presented, how should we view the AWF site?

On a page on the site entitled ‘Number of Comfort Stations and Comfort Women’, the discussion is basically about how researchers made inferences regarding the number of ‘comfort women’ without solid evidence, with the page accusing the McDougall report for relying on an ‘untrustworthy source’ on the number of ‘comfort women’.

Indeed, it is a familiar strategy employed by the right wing, who focused on ‘pointing out [minor] errors and the impossibility of verification [of some facts]’ (Nozaki, 2005). I am also not surprised that a right-wing cartoonist – who asserted ‘[“comfort women”] were not taken by force’ – said he is proud of Japanese women who kept the ‘matter’ of rape only to themselves (Nozaki, 2001: 178).

Typically, the right wing firmly denies the existence of the ‘comfort women’ and the conditions of coercion. The AWF site contains no direct denial and employs left-wing expressions in such feminist segments. However, it displays visible right-wing characteristics in some crucial parts, therefore it is non-typically right. The question is, how did right-wing thoughts manage to permeate this fully government-funded organization?

As strongly suggested by the evidence given in this article, there probably exists a hidden systematic view of the history of the war in postwar Japan. Although the view somewhat differs from ultra right-wing thoughts, it shares some deep-rooted aspects with the right wing, and is powerful enough to affect postwar politics and the reconstruction of history in Japan. Recognizing the systematic view will require a back-tracing process, as was practiced in this article. That is, first gather the related text, second trace the discourse, and finally ascertain the interaction between the discourse and its context. The context may be blurred at the beginning, but should be clear when the work is complete. It is indeed a process that we sometimes experience in our daily lives. For instance, in regards to the recent tragic loss of the Malaysian airliner during flight MH370, many people have tried to locate the last words ‘Goodnight, Malaysian three seven zero’ in a context in which the words make sense, though they failed because the words were too isolated.

I believe CDA may further help unlock the hidden systematic view of history through uncovering linguistic evidence hidden from the naked eye and clarifying the historical/political context. Related research will be my focus in the future.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Xin-yuan Gu currently works as a librarian at Shanghai Library. She attained a BA degree from Fudan University and a MA degree from Waseda University, majored in Japanese language and literature, and is currently interested in using critical discourse analysis to explore language data in Japanese regarding postwar history cognition in Japan.

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