Awakening the sufferers: Reflections on public relations,activism,and subalternity in postcolonial controversies between Taiwan and Japan

Introduction

This article delineates a problematic often ignored or bypassed in public relations studies of activist public communication and public relations initiatives, namely that of the structure and management of subaltern client representation in politically sensitive and heavily mediatized issues. Often, the public relations character of activist publicity manoeuvres and media interaction on behalf of disadvantaged and victimized groups escape critical attention and analytical decipherment, including crucial issues like organizational vis-à-vis client agency, the character of public relations efforts to attain interpretive authority, and capability to initially discern primary stakeholder interests. Addressing such concerns, this article also contributes to a lack of critical public relations research in English on cases and conditions in East Asian publics and mass media systems based on sources and coverage in the original languages, a lack that still leaves such publics largely unnoticed or only superficially known to most western public relations scholars and theorists. Taking as my empirical material news coverage in Japanese and Taiwanese national media of two cases involving present-day handling and understanding of historical organized maltreatment and activist demands for compensation and apologies to victims, my aim is to highlight how activists fighting for justice for their subaltern clients make use of public relations angles that contain an inherent risk of misrepresenting and unreasonably simplifying subaltern realities and of reifying their already established role as absolute sufferers in the mass media. Engaging analytical points from critical public relations research and subaltern studies as well as suggesting generalization to other contexts, this article calls for critical reflection, not on the practice of altruism, humanitarian work, or activism as social phenomena, but on the way activist groups make use of public relations in their organizational representation of the subaltern clients they are struggling to protect and deliver from suffering. The main implication of this article is therefore to foster far more critical reflection on the central, albeit perhaps counterintuitive, question of who is really helping or using whom to achieve specific strategic goals in such cases of formal representation and public relations initiatives for justice and social change.

Power, voice, and representation

Despite the scarcity of published work in public relations on such questions and cases, a number of studies with somewhat related analytical concerns have appeared, all of them part of the new so-called critical or postmodern paradigm in public relations studies. Arguing polemically against the dominant modernist or ‘excellence theory’ paradigm, critical PR scholars openly value pluralism, sensitivity to language and representation, as well as scepticism towards ideas of absolute truth in research methods and styles of argument. In an important essay on postmodernism and public relations, Derina Holtzhausen (2002) describes a gradual paradigmatic transition since the 1980s away from modernist concerns of rationality and strategic management towards a postmodernist preoccupation with practitioners, power relations and activism. She points out that a one-sided modernist overemphasis on control and strategy has led to ‘a lack of reflexivity in public relations theory and practice’ and – programmatically championing ‘the public relations practitioner as organisational activist’ (2002: 33) – calls for deeper understandings of the power structures that underpin and sustain organizational communication. Although Holtzhausen is conscious of what she calls a ‘crisis of representation’ in the practice of public relations, she conceives of such a phenomenon in abstract terms, not as concrete acts of stylizing and staging of otherwise publicly silent others as part of specific PR initiatives. Indeed, it seems her approach to the question of voices and representation is rather optimistically to assume a ready but as yet unfulfilled potential for autonomous articulation and ‘inclusiveness of all voices … affected by the organisation’ (2002: 33).

W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry Holladay have argued eloquently that ‘critical public relations’ and its concern with ‘fringe’ issues ‘once ignored or shunned, such as activists, persuasion/advocacy, and power, are emerging as legitimate concerns for mainstream public relations research’ (2012: 880). They note that the term ‘persuasion’ as ‘the ability to influence people’s attitudes and/or behaviors’ (2012: 881) is gaining recognition in the still-dominant ‘Excellence Theory’ paradigm in public relations, but ‘not the real practice of advocacy behind the term’. Coombs and Holladay aptly define ‘advocacy’ as ‘a more direct way of saying that those who practice public relations are pursuing self-interests’ (2012: 884) and contend that ‘critical public relations has been on the fringe of the field because it asks the tough questions about power, persuasion, and activism that the orthodoxy of public relations chooses to ignore’ (2012: 882). Coombs and Holladay make a strong and polemical point, but, unlike mine, their work is concerned with rethinking more conventional public relations issues such as stakeholder activism vs. corporate or commercial organization interests. Nevertheless, I would argue that their clear analytical understanding of persuasion and advocacy is substantially relevant also to this discussion of representation and publicity initiatives by activists fighting for justice and compensation for subaltern victims.

Analysing successful public relations campaigns by grassroots groups in Australia, Kristin Demetrious has investigated organized environmentalist responses to construction plans by energy or logging corporations that would impact the living environments of a ‘politically, technically and media savvy local community’ (2008: 108). Demetrious’s sympathy clearly lies with the activist groups who ‘produced and distributed communication for subjects to promote understandings that assisted them to think and act independently on the debates and to form considered and informed judgements’ (2008: 114), an activity that ‘could give rise to new discursive practices that facilitate further empowerment’ (2008: 115). Somewhat confusingly, she considers ‘public relations’ as distinct from and opposed to an apparently far more authentic and ethically legitimate ‘collaborative-deliberative communication’ (2008: 116) employed by activists and largely disregards the public relations character of activist campaigns themselves. Consequently, problems of authenticity are in Demetrious left entirely on the side of corporate ‘PR people’ and their ‘fusion of system rationality and unauthentic communicative action’ (2008: 114).

The most important attempt to date to link critical public relations research with subaltern studies is to be found in the work of Mahuya Pal and Mohan Dutta. Critically examining ‘public relations in the realm of broader social relationships and the distribution of power within social systems’, Pal and Dutta introduce issues of subalternity and communicative exclusion in intriguing attempts to disentangle ‘the ways in which [public relations] participates in marginalizing the underserved segments of the population, while simultaneously managing the interests of the dominant social actors’ (2008: 173). In an important critique of the interconnectedness of neoliberal globalization, bourgeois mainstream public spheres and ‘the hegemony of the universal’ (2010: 378), they call for wider realization of the resistive potential in subaltern sectors of society through the establishment of:

dialogic forms of resistance that seek to disrupt transnational hegemonic spaces by engaging with the possibilities of sincerely listening to subaltern voices, transforming dominant epistemic structures, and shifting the realms of praxis that are established on the bases of these structures. (2010: 364)

In Pal and Dutta’s perception, subalterns exist in ‘communities’ (2010: 364), they have ‘communicative needs’ (2010: 375), and represent ‘alternative knowledge claims that disrupt neoliberal hegemony’ (2010: 364), but unfortunately they lack access to ‘acceptable platforms, languages, norms, rituals, and processes needed to engage in dialog’ (2010: 371) with ‘bourgeois’ civil society. Central to Pal and Dutta’s project is, consequently, to conceive of public relations ‘realms of praxis’ whereby the voices of speaking subalterns would be ‘sincerely’ listened to by activists ‘presenting subaltern narratives in global spaces and sites, through projects, methods, theories, and meta-theories initiated in the subaltern sectors’ (2010: 368). It remains unclear in Pal and Dutta, however, if, on the way to thus dialogically disrupting ‘the globalization politics of neoliberalism’ (2010: 367), such subaltern voices are ideally to achieve direct access to the relevant communicative platforms, or merely to be ‘listened to’ and ‘presented’ to civil society by non-bourgeois and non-subaltern activist scholars ‘in solidarity with the subaltern communities’ (2010: 364) and in pursuit of larger designs. In other words, is the main purpose to assist in a process of de-subalternizing such voices by attempting to expand the restrictive norms of public and mass media discourse (i.e. communicative empowerment of the oppressed and powerless), or is it rather to use carefully elicited subaltern ‘voices’ and ‘narratives’ as tools in a larger and far more abstract struggle against the workings of apparently pervasive malevolent forces, here the spread of neoliberal globalization (i.e. communicative empowerment of someone else through the oppressed and powerless)? Making that often-ignored but crucial distinction is central to my work here, and it forms the overall analytical basis of this article and of the arguments I will present here.

To get a firmer grip on these main concerns, this article operates with a slightly different approach to subaltern studies, a field of research that originated in a group of scholars of Indian history and literature including Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, David Arnold, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and, by loose connection, Gayatri Spivak. Influenced by Gramsci’s ideas and primarily active in the 1980s and 1990s, the group was particularly concerned with issues of subaltern resistance and defiance of British colonial authorities in the form of rebellions and uprisings and, more especially, the misrecognition of subaltern consciousness and agency in colonial historiography and in literary scholarship. Chatterjee (1993) describes the idea as one of studying ‘the unity’ of subaltern ‘consciousness as grounded in a relationship of power, namely, of domination and subordination’ (1993: 167). In Guha’s major work Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), he rejects the ‘elitist’ idea that insurgency is ‘spontaneous’, announcing that:

they err who fail to recognize the trace of consciousness in the apparently unstructured movements of the masses. … What is conscious is presumed … to be identical with what is organized in the sense that it has, first, a ‘conscious leadership’, secondly, some well-defined aim, and thirdly, a programme specifying the components of the latter as particular objectives and the means of achieving them. (1983: 5)

It is in Guha’s clear distinction between organized movements under non-subaltern ‘charismatic leaders’ and ‘advanced political organizations’ (1983: 4) and the subaltern ‘peasant-rebel’s awareness of his own world and his will to change it’ (1983:11) that Spivak’s intervention in subaltern studies with her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) finds its point of emergence. In the essay, Spivak focuses on representation and subaltern silence, taking issue with European poststructuralism (Foucault, Deleuze), internationalist Marxism, and postcolonial nativism for adhering to ‘the assumption that there is a pure form of consciousness’ (1988: 286) and for tending to simplistically assume that subalterns can recognize their own interests, organize, and represent themselves directly. On the contrary, due to systems of social and economic domination, Spivak argues, subaltern agency cannot express itself in the language of non-subaltern power; its subjectivity remains therefore ‘irretrievably heterogeneous’ (1983: 284), misunderstood, and subject to strategic or ideological manipulation from various influential non-subaltern quarters.

Relying on such an understanding of subaltern voices and agency, this article analyses two cases involving the public representation today in Taiwanese and Japanese national media of specific groups of now elderly Taiwanese people who suffered systematic abuse by colonial authorities during Taiwan’s half-century under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945. As such, it is a study of the way public relations practitioners stage and represent subaltern stakeholder clients. It is not another study of survivors’ accounts of the abuse itself or an attempt to solve historical problems surrounding that abuse and its various modern interpretations. My concern is with public relations approaches to the complex issue of colonial victimhood and with how these victims and their stories are presented in the public spheres of these two societies. The cases are:

The mass media are important because they present a vital means for the representatives to harness public support for their clients’ cause, while the media on their side seek out these victim stories for the sheer pity and pathos values they offer. For this study, I draw on the coverage in four major national newspapers: in Taiwan, the China Times and United Daily News; in Japan, Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun, although I studied also the coverage in Mainichi Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun. While the two cases involve similar types and structures of representation and public relations practice, they are also very different from each other and indisputably contain more aspects than this study can claim to cover adequately. Reading these sources, I will adopt a qualitative analytical method and derive my insights from close and careful textual interpretation of direct statements and propositions, questioning the logic and coherence of the main aspects of public relations and stakeholder interests as expressed and contained in national newspaper coverage. All sources have been studied in the original languages, although quotes and passages originally in Chinese or Japanese will be given here in my English translation only.

A cartoon controversy: Public relations and Taiwanese war-time comfort women

In early 2001, Taiwan experienced a major publicity controversy that would rage for months in the island’s mass media, public sphere and political system. Dubbed the On Taiwan controversy, the issue arose due to various public relations manoeuvres initiated by the humanitarian anti-trafficking and women’s rights organization Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF) on behalf of former Taiwanese war-time comfort women in response to remarks by business tycoon and Japan-friendly Taiwan nationalist Hsu Wen-lung quoted in a best-selling Japanese comic book. The issue soon became thoroughly politicized and led to public demonstrations, protest actions, parliamentary clashes, and the right-wing nationalist Japanese cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori being briefly shortlisted and banned from entering Taiwan.

A good four and a half decades after the war had ended, the comfort women or war-time sexual slavery issue that forms the larger historical background of the On Taiwan controversy broke internationally in 1991 and, according to Alexis Dudden (2008), led to ‘countless newspaper articles, feature stories, doctoral dissertations, history books, novels, testimonials, songs, and films in numerous languages’, involving ‘up to two hundred thousand women and girls who were part of Japan’s state-organized system of sexual servitude’ (2008: 88). These were women in many different Asian countries and territories under Japanese rule or occupation during its 1937–45 period of all-out aggressive warfare. Founded in 1987 and having since then ‘dedicated itself to preventing the sale of teenage girls in the country, rescuing teenagers in the city, representing victims in court, providing total care including rehabilitation at halfway houses, advocating new legislation, and studying and publicising the issues’ (Bulbeck, 1994: 99), the TWRF also acts as representative organization for today’s surviving Taiwanese comfort women. On its website, the organization notes:

The foundation has been a standard bearer for the plight of aging women who served as sex slaves (so-called ‘comfort women’) to Japanese soldiers during World War II. Since 1992, TWRF has provided legal counsel and psychological support for these victims. We have championed their cause by petitioning governments and courts both in Taiwan and in Japan. (TWRF, 2013)

Being the most prominent advocacy organization in this as well as in more contemporary issues of violent or sexual exploitation of women and children in Taiwan, the TWRF has done important work for its victimized clients, the merits and value of which I do not mean to question or trivialize in any way. I do not take issue with humanitarian work or the practice of social activism: What concerns this study is solely the TWRF’s manner of conducting public and press relations as the representative communicating unit for its subaltern clients.

The TWRF initiated the On Taiwan controversy in Taiwanese public debate by calling a press conference where its founder and former chairwoman Wang Ching-feng retorted Hsu’s remarks in Kobayashi’s cartoon book that Japanese colonial and military authorities did not forcefully recruit the comfort women but only employed Taiwanese women who had freely chosen to perform that role, the TWRF demanding that Hsu publicly clarify and explain those statements (China Times, 2001a). Born and raised during the colonial period that ended when Japan was forced to cede Taiwan to the Republic of China (ROC) after the Second World War, Hsu and many like-minded pro-independence advocates base parts of their central argument that Taiwan is entirely different from China on the island’s colonial past, a past that to many Taiwanese represents a successful modernization under Japanese suzerainty of the island’s formerly languishing technological, economic and intellectual standing (see Sejrup, 2012). A main theme in Kobayashi’s (2000) best-selling On Taiwan was the idea that a national ‘Japanese spirit’ lost in today’s allegedly westernized consumerist Japan has survived intact in Taiwan since colonial times, an idea he underpinned by referring to Hsu and other high-profile Taiwanese informants.

A prominent proponent of the so-called historical revisionist movement in contemporary Japan (Ahn, 2008), Kobayashi caters especially to Japanese youth with ‘a nebulous sense of history’ (Shimazu, 2003: 114). Koichi Iwabuchi describes him as ‘notoriously xenophobic’ (2006: 30), and Barak Kushner calls him aptly ‘a one-man, self-generating publicity machine’ (2007: 805). The unsavoury remarks on comfort women (a minor theme in the book itself) that Kobayashi quotes Hsu for making in On Taiwan were to the effect that girls forced into prostitution by extreme poverty found much more attractive working environments at comfort stations than in ‘ordinary brothels’ and ‘all really wanted to’ become comfort women. Allegedly supported by what former comfort women had told him personally, Hsu claimed that the Japanese army ‘paid attention to human rights’ and that sanitary conditions at the comfort stations were the product of a benevolent wish on the part of the Japanese military to protect and care for these women (Kobayashi, 2000: 231–232). As TWRF had directed mass media attention to these statements, indignation over On Taiwan accelerated rapidly, and just two days later, the newly founded pro-unification and conservative People First Party (PFP) followed the TWRF’s example and convened a press conference of its own. Conducted under the slogan ‘How Can We Tolerate a Japanophile Presidential Adviser Obliterating Taiwan’s Tears of Blood?’ (China Times, 2001b), the press conference took the form of a direct attack on Hsu, the PFP effectively politicizing the issue by demanding that Hsu not only clarify his remarks but also be dismissed from his post as senior adviser to then-ROC President Chen Shui-bian of the independence-oriented Democratic Progressive Party.

Not only TWRF officials, but also former comfort women themselves speak publicly as part of TWRF publicity activities, and the events of 2001 were no different. Doing this, the women play a specific role, namely that of authenticators of the representative structure and of the demands and statements put forward by the TWRF or relevant political actors in defending ostensibly common needs and concerns in the entire group of represented women. They therefore usually appear in public together with members of the representative organization and express themselves in accordance with the public relations strategies of the organization’s communicating unit, with whom they always agree and in relation to whom they function as suffering first-hand witnesses to the violations that the public relations practitioners struggle to redeem. In other words, they infuse the press events with the authenticating effects of concrete experience essential to the high journalistic value of their struggle. During the On Taiwan controversy, the most prominent witnesses were a pair of then 80-year-old twin sisters known simply as Ah-T’ao (‘Peach’) and Ah-Chu (‘Pearl’). They were both present at the PFP’s press conference, and already the day after, they were back in the news, this time giving vent to their resentment over Hsu’s statements during a personal meeting with ROC Premier Chang Chun-hsiung:

‘Why would he say something so stupid? He must come forward and state things clearly! I certainly didn’t do it willingly!’ Yesterday, the two eighty-year-old former Taiwanese comfort women Ah-T’ao and Ah-Chu poured out their hearts to Premier Chang Chun-hsiung, tearfully denouncing as a grave insult remarks by senior presidential adviser Hsu Wen-lung that comfort women ‘acted out of their own free will’. (China Times, 2001c)

While the two sisters seem active and capable enough of expressing their resentment, it is significant that their demands are identical to (that is, obviously coordinated with) those already put forward by the TWRF and the PFP. The report relates the women’s actions in highly sentimental terms – they ‘pour out their hearts’, they ‘tearfully denounce’, they suffer ‘a grave insult’ – that is, it presents the sisters as operating exclusively in a register of emotional agitation, feminine frailty and frustrated helplessness. Here as well as at the PFP’s press meeting, the sisters’ performance seems to allow the remarkable contrast between their irrational agitation on the one hand and their very rational demand for Hsu to ‘state things clearly’ on the other to escape reporters’ notice. The organized setup is neither questioned nor relativized, as the media inform their readers of the sisters’ repetition of their established role as despondent sufferers.

Representing the few Taiwanese former comfort women still alive by 2001, the TWRF made a point of signalling to the public the necessity of its difficult work of organizing the women and protecting their interests. Different views within the group had to be aligned and responses to various turns in the development of the On Taiwan controversy planned and coordinated so that the TWRF could maintain an offensive advantage and communicate consistently in the mass media. Without the TWRF to keep the group unified, it seemed the women would simply drift off in various directions. That situation became even clearer after Hsu a few days later gave in to the enormous public pressure and issued a statement saying that he had been misquoted in On Taiwan, that the comfort women system ‘is a tragedy of history’, that he was sorry for the comfort women about this whole affair, and that he ‘feels deep sympathy for them and will commit himself to improving women’s rights’ (China Times, 2001d). Significantly, the victims were then portrayed as in immediate need of the TWRF to rally them around a common response:

this morning, reactions from elderly former comfort women differ widely, some of them think that Hsu Wen-lung is not at all sincere and continue to insist that he should resign as senior presidential adviser; but others feel that, as they are now so old, they do not want to fight anymore. The Women’s Rescue Foundation wants to consult with them at noon today to seek a consensus (United Daily News, 2001a).

The task is to organize confidential discussions to make the women decide what steps the organization is to take next or what their immediate objectives are, now that organizational PR efforts have attained the stated objective of compelling Hsu to engage the public by issuing an apology. But the key point to observe here is that the TWRF calls the meetings, sets the agenda, and communicates decisions to the media, as the women’s personal involvement is, once again, pictured only in emotional terms and, literally, does not even express itself in the same language:

Yesterday, the Women’s Rescue Foundation met confidentially with thirteen former comfort women, and via translation into Taiwanese, Hakka and aboriginal languages informed the old ladies, few of whom are literate, of Hsu Wen-lung’s statement of apology published in newspapers yesterday so as to let the women decide themselves how to respond to it. In answer to media requests, the ladies decided to announce their feelings in the form of a press conference, and, surprisingly, ten of the women, who previously have all been protected from public exposure, decided that they will make a group appearance there and express how they feel. (United Daily News, 2001b)

Meeting with the women ‘confidentially’ in order to ‘protect’ them from media exposure, the TWRF sees to it that its clients even grasp that Hsu has made a statement and what it says. As ‘few of them are literate’ or understand Mandarin Chinese, a significant someone must have originally ‘informed’ the women of Hsu’s hurtful statements in the Mandarin edition of On Taiwan. As it will be remembered, those statements were what caused the TWRF to take public relations initiatives against the book in the first place, but its clients cannot have been able to read or understand them directly if they could not understand Hsu’s subsequent statement. There is thus a remarkable dynamic at play as the activist organization plays a much more actively structuring and, indeed, instructive role in relation to these clients than what is suggested by its publicity campaign, which is merely that Hsu’s statements insulted the women directly and that the demands for Hsu to clarify and apologize sprang immediately from the victimized women suffering over his lack of respect for their suffering. Logically, however, resentment must have, if not originated, then certainly been given shape in the TWRF and not in the comfort women, whose ‘feelings’ were kept in a state of continuous activity only due to an ongoing process of translation, structuring and appropriation.

We are thus not dealing here with Demetrious’s ‘new discursive practices that facilitate further empowerment’ (2008: 115) in ‘a politically, technically and media savvy local community’ (2008: 108), but with the type of ‘advanced political organizations’ with a ‘well-defined aim, … particular objectives and the means of achieving them’ that Guha kept rightly and entirely distinct from subaltern ‘consciousness’ (1983: 4–5). This is a case of non-subaltern public relations practitioners operating much like Holtzhausen’s ‘organisational activist[s]’ (2002: 33), taking initiatives and framing responses, controlling information flows and managing campaign directions on behalf of fragile, old and linguistically disparate clients in need of organizational ‘protection’. The representatives strategically manage their intermediary position between the public and their subaltern stakeholder clients by ‘protecting’ them from direct contact with the media at one moment only to present them with the media’s invitations to ‘express their feelings’ the next, feelings that the women have been made to ‘decide for themselves’ already beforehand under the instructions and careful arrangements of the very same representative body. Note the subtlety of the public relations practitioners relating the content of Hsu’s apology to the women in order to let them decide ‘how to respond to it’, indicating that a public response is necessary even after their demands have been met. Thus, the clients ‘decide’ to play their established public role and repeat its basic elements of emotion, fragility, decrepitude, and verbal incapacity, their brandishing of personal experience effectively rendering their representatives’ strategic manoeuvres transparent and publicly reinstating the victims as suffering self-sufficient subjects. This operation invites reflection on Pal and Dutta’s contention that:

[t]he subaltern is ‘subaltern’ precisely because she/he has been erased from the discursive spaces of the mainstream, marked out by the tools that construct the dialogic space. Her absence/presence is dialectically connected with dialog, existing outside the dominant spaces of bourgeoisie public spheres that constitute dialog, and subalternized by the intellectual processes of appropriation that erase the diverse. (2010: 374)

Here, it would seem, activism does precisely the opposite with those ‘tools’, bringing the subaltern into the mainstream or, to stay in the poststructuralist parlance so characteristic of the field, erasing the erasure of the subaltern ‘by the intellectual processes’ of appropriating ‘the diverse’ into the seemingly similar, communicative, and macro-socially dialogic with access to mass-mediated ‘discursive spaces’. Indeed, the phenomenon of non-subaltern activism on behalf of victimized subalterns seems to turn upside-down Pal and Dutta’s identification of ‘dialogic spaces constituting the “other” through acts of erasure that are framed as civilizing missions of promoting democracy, justice, and participation’ (2010: 369), because, precisely, the ‘civilizing missions of promoting … justice’ in the ‘dialogic spaces’ of civil society pose here, in fact, as acts of un-erasure seemingly conjuring ‘the other’ as the same, from silent obscurity to fragile but autonomous participating subject. Thus, the present empirical cases question the notion that[t]he subaltern is “subaltern” precisely because she/he has been erased from the discursive spaces of the mainstream’ (2010: 374) if by such a statement Pal and Dutta would suggest, as one must assume logically, that un-erasing them from such spaces would effectively also de-subalternize them. On the contrary, I argue, handing these clients a microphone to express ‘their feelings’ to eager media professionals and the wider public does not diminish but only confirms their subaltern role and, by extension, further legitimizes and empowers their non-subaltern organizational representatives. Ironically, in this type of communication, the weaker the represented stakeholders appear, the more it strengthens the public relations practitioners in the ongoing publicity battle, because, as it filters through the mass media, such weakness generates the formidable power of unreserved public pity.

In ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Spivak (1988) challenges the idea of a sovereign stable subject and draws attention to an often overlooked duality in the very concept of ‘representation’ as employed by Karl Marx, namely the difference between the two terms Vertretung and Darstellung in Marx’s original German. While Vertreten designates the act of someone representing others, speaking for them, and, ideally, embodying their will ‘within the state and political economy’, Darstellen is the act of representing others by shaping an image of who or how they are, producing them discursively in ‘rhetoric as tropology’ (1988: 275–276). Relying on Spivak’s emphasis on the double function of representation, I argue here that in the Vertretung of the subaltern, their representatives also enact strategic and media-friendly public Darstellung of their clients, so that they are represented and produced as one group in the same movement by a speaking other who is not one of them. Subalterns, Spivak insists, do not know their interests, have ‘no history and cannot speak’ (1988: 287). In order to grasp the ideological framework that controls subalterns locally as well as in the international economic system, one:

must note how the staging of the world in representation – its scene of writing, its Darstellung – dissimulates the choice of and need for ‘heroes’, paternal proxies, agents of power – Vertretung. (1988: 279)

Here, I want to emphasize the Darstellung of subaltern sufferers, not only by those who are against them and trivialize the abuse that victimized them, but also by those who are for them and commit themselves publicly to awakening the sufferers and setting them free through vicarious resistance. These primary stakeholders – some illiterate, some other-lingual – are subject to precisely this duality of representation, as the TWRF and its political allies stage them as so many identical sufferers in need of organizational protection, ‘paternal proxies, agents of power’, to constitute them as a group, fight their struggle, care for them, and in representing them repeatedly produce and reproduce them for the media in their already established public role, thereby garnering strength for their own abstract public and political agenda.

A tale of two trials: Activist legal representation of colonial leprosy patients

‘Suffering is not defined solely by physical pain, nor even by mental pain, but by the reduction, even the destruction, of the capacity for acting’, writes Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another (1994: 190). And, indeed, representation of victims of Japanese colonial oppression tends to come across in the media as a difficult organizational endeavour as public relations practitioners have to engage in a continuous process of making it clear to their suffering clients how best to defend interests that the clients do not always immediately recognize as their own or as worth the trouble. Sometimes the prospective representatives may have to overcome initial reluctance on the part of potential clients to let themselves be represented at all and to allow proxies to manoeuvre them strategically through publicity and legal battles, as was the situation in the case surrounding the Taiwanese and South Korean leprosy compensation lawsuits of 2004–05.

The case was essentially a conflict over the interpretation of a Japanese law hastily enacted in 2001 granting compensation to leprosy patients (or, as it was phrased, patients of ‘Hansen’s disease’) who became subjected to the authorities’ past policy of isolation and forced hospitalization ‘long after successful treatments had become available’ (Burns, 2012: 298). The law was promulgated after a ruling in the Kumamoto District Court found the isolation policy wrongful, but the law failed to specify whether it applied only to victims in Japan proper or whether compensation was due also to victims in the former colonies where the same policy had been pursued before and during the Second World War. The Japanese colonial authorities had operated two leprosaria where patients were forcibly committed: one on the tiny island of Sorokdo off the southern coast of Korea and one, the Losheng Sanatorium, just outside Taipei. While both institutions survive to this day as sanatoria, patients are no longer confined and forcibly committed there. By 2004, there were well over 100 patients still alive at Sorokdo and 25 at Losheng (plus an additional three, who had, however, grown senile in the meantime, the group’s average age standing by that time at 79) who had all been installed there before 1945 (Asahi Shimbun, 17 Dec. 2004), and the Japanese team of lawyers who had successfully won lawsuits for victims in Japan under the 2001 law now took it upon themselves to secure compensation for these two patient groups as well (United Daily News, 2006). When the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare turned down both groups’ applications for compensation, the Korean and Taiwanese patients represented by their Japanese legal team filed two separate civil lawsuits at the Tokyo District Court in December 2004. Before things got that far, however, the Japanese lawyers had experienced some difficulty getting to represent the victims of Japan’s colonial isolation policy, as certainly the Taiwanese patients were reluctant to come out:

In the lawyers’ view, the ‘Hansen’s disease compensation law’ ² enacted by the Japanese government due to the Kumamoto ruling should apply to all pre-war Taiwanese and Korean patients. As both the Losheng and Sorokdo facilities were established under the Japanese isolation policy, and, additionally, the compensation law identifies as eligible those who ‘were harmed under the Japanese isolation policy’, there can be no doubt that the law applies. However, having resolved firmly to confront the government officials in court, the thorniest problem the lawyers and support groups have encountered during the trials has been how to convince patients to appear in court and testify. (China Times, 2005a)

Having ventured outside Japan in search of leprosy patients to represent against ‘government officials’ so as to continue their stream of legal victories, the lawyers and support groups find the potential clients hesitant to participate. Significantly, the process begins with the lawyers’ ‘resolve’ to confront the authorities in court: the victims do not seek legal counsel out of a desire to speak up in court or voice their grievances; rather, legal counsel seeks victims in further pursuit of its already successful campaign. The patients have to be ‘convinced’ that they want what lawyers and activists tell them they want. I discussed above how the TWRF played a formative and controlling role in constituting former Taiwanese comfort women as one coherent unit with publically communicable and defendable common interests, and here it is even more clearly demonstrated how the need for representation and public engagement originates not in the sufferers as such, but others who have an interest – however sympathetic, however morally commendable – in fighting for them against someone else (cf. Coombs and Holladay’s precise understanding of advocacy as ‘a more direct way of saying that those who practice public relations are pursuing self-interests’ (2012: 884). This fact somewhat complicates the question of victims’ motivation to sue, which Dudden, for example, in the case of Korean comfort women stipulates to be ‘for the simple reason that they want to know before they die that their existence mattered’ (2008: 92). While that is certainly what their representatives claim to be the clients’ ‘simple reason’, it is, as I have demonstrated, actually not that ‘simple’. To paraphrase Dudden, I would say that the Losheng patients sue because they have been convinced by others that they want to know before they die that their existence mattered – and, indeed, that engaging the public and pressing legal charges are steps on the way to attaining such wanting knowledge. But why were the patients at first unwilling and had to be persuaded to go to Japan to testify? Su Hui-ching, a Taiwanese scholar associated with the Japanese legal team, gave China Times’ reporter an explanation:

In fact, most Hansen’s disease patients were full of apprehension and uncertainty. … the hospital residents are afraid of confronting unfamiliar surroundings, they feel insecure about leaving Losheng, and furthermore, it is an embarrassing thing for them to show their faces in public. (China Times, 2005b)

Su’s reasoning touches upon something central to the nature of subaltern suffering as presented in activist public relations: that the plight is ‘double’ and incorporates both the physical maltreatment directly suffered under historical brutality as well as subsequent acute embarrassment. The logic is that the victims must first overcome the shame that, literally, keeps them confined before they can overcome their external opponents in a public struggle for personal rehabilitation, in other words, enable an awakening of themselves by virtue of outside intervention. In these sources, representation strategically ties suffering to passivity; suffering victims are presented as solitarily and exclusively turned towards the activity of ‘enduring’, and they have to actively deposit their agency in organizationally and communicatively more capable others. The fundamental problem is then that freedom from the malign power of the wrongdoer follows subjection to the benignly ‘convincing’ power of the activist representative – very possibly a happy and significant improvement of the situation and certainly an instance of ‘autonomy and agency’ on the part of the practitioners, but only in the most illogical and indirect sense an instance that Pal and Dutta might consider ‘built upon a commitment to listening to subaltern voices’ (Pal and Dutta, 2008: 176).

The trials ended in total legal confusion with two different judges passing diametrically opposed rulings in the two cases: one dismissing the Korean plaintiffs’ claim because the 2001 law did not specifically identify patients confined outside present-day Japan as eligible for state compensation, the other affirming the Taiwanese claim because, conversely, the law did not specifically identify them as ineligible, either. The Diet, the Japanese parliament, then hastily short-circuited the entire legal problem by passing a bill unambiguously granting compensation to all former Japanese colonial subjects forcibly confined before 1945. However, before the issue had been thus radically resolved and while the trials were still undecided, the cases remained in the public eye due to various publicity activities by the lawyers and associated groups of activists making news by demonstrating and conducting public protest actions, as well as providing the mass media with access to plaintiffs acting as authenticating witnesses, much as I described that role in the previous case study. Thus, a number of Taiwanese and Japanese newspapers featured the story and lifetime experiences of 85-year-old inmate since 1940 Lin Ch’üeh, here in Asahi Shimbun’s version:

When she was hospitalized, it meant separation from her two children – a four-year-old daughter and a son who was just four months old. The moment the topic is mentioned her eyes well up and her voice starts to tremble: ‘I was so heartbroken I wanted to die.’ With both hands, no fingers left on either, she wipes away her tears. (Asahi Shimbun, 2005)

The figure of a fragile and deformed old woman reliving still acutely painful memories of 65 years ago testifies to the emotional stress that the Japanese isolation policy inflicted upon its victims by severing basic parent–child relations. Her account is very chilling and seems both authentic and intimate; in fact, it might easily convince the newspaper reader that he is ‘sincerely listening to subaltern voices’ (Pal and Dutta, 2010: 364) directly through the medium of Japan’s second-largest national daily. However, Lin appears repeatedly in the sources telling her story the last few days before the Tokyo court was to pass rulings in the two cases (for example, in Asahi Shimbun, 2005; China Times, 2005b; Yomiuri Shimbun, 2005) so it seems she was selected for media exposure, a situation that sheds a different light on the confidential tone in the passage above. If she was deliberately put forward by her representatives, it seems reasonable to assume that she would also have been prepared that reporters would ask her about the circumstances of her hospitalization. Nevertheless, her suffering is so intense after 65 years that it takes mere mention of her children – who are alive and visit her regularly (Asahi Shimbun, 2005) – to stir up anew Lin’s suffering, cause her more tears, and force her to lose her composure yet again in front of a journalist. There are 25 resident patients suing the Japanese state, but Lin and a very few others get all the attention in these sources. One suspects that it might have something to do with her willingness and ability to embody the role of the sufferer, bodily deformed and engaged in a struggle to contain her sorrow. I have no reason at all to doubt the truth of her story or that her suffering is quite real and excruciating, but I must insist that upon close analysis it becomes clear that that suffering is also repeatedly being paraded before pathos-hungry reporters just a few days before a judge is to rule in her controversial court case. It seems either Lin Ch’üeh simply does not share her fellow inmates’ ‘embarrassment to show herself in public’ and keeps trying bravely, but ultimately in vain, to control her suffering every time she happens to be giving an interview to a visiting reporter, or someone has ‘convinced’ her that it is in her best interests not to worry too much about it and just let herself go on occasions like that. ³

In both these case studies, ‘the banality of … self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed’, as Spivak has noted in an altogether different connection (1988: 277). This study shows that in public and media relations initiatives, the subaltern victimhood status is run together with a role as absolute sufferer in need of organizational representation by others. The representation (Darstellung) of victims as helpless sufferers legitimizes – to clients, to the media, to the public – representation (Vertretung) of victims by non-suffering others who have on their own initiative launched themselves on a quest for their clients’ rehabilitation by ‘presenting subaltern narratives’ (Pal and Dutta, 2010: 368) in carefully arranged and strategically appropriated circumstances. As long as the victims suffer, they cannot act, such narratives claim: only by dwelling entirely on their victimhood will the victims cease to suffer.

Conclusion

The structure of representation and its significance for public relations practices of advocacy and activist organizations on behalf of subaltern groups is still an understudied topic in critical public relations research, especially with regard to cases and conditions in non-western publics and mass media systems. This article has analysed mass-media projections and news coverage in the original languages of two controversial cases involving postcolonial problems of historical oppression, accountability, and compensation in today’s Japan–Taiwan relations. While acknowledging a certain awareness of problems of subalternity and organizational communication in previous studies, my purpose has been to highlight the element of organizational agency and communicative initiative exercised by representative public relations practitioners for rehabilitation and social justice and to emphasize the strong element of structuring, coordination and appropriation of represented subalterns in specific roles as witnesses, authenticators and absolute sufferers for larger strategic purposes.

The analysed cases differ somewhat from each other: the On Taiwan controversy was essentially a reactive event aimed at pressuring powerful domestic political actors into uniformly acknowledging the challenged suffering and historical abuse of represented clients on TWRF’s longer strategic path to securing compensation and rehabilitation for their subaltern clients from Japanese authorities. The leprosy compensation case was, in public relations terms, a supplementary effort to galvanize public opinion in support of legal claims being pressed against the Japanese government and being decided concurrently with the activist initiatives and mass media campaign. However, despite their differences, the two cases display crucial similarities in that they both feature the same characteristic division of roles between strategy-conscious organizing representatives and initially reluctant and disorganized subaltern clients.

In both cases, it is the representative public relations practitioners, not the victimized primary stakeholders, who first discern the public and strategic interests of their clients, take steps to organize and represent them, pursue public relations goals and objectives, control and interpret information flows between clients and the public sphere, and, importantly, arrange and handle events for the mass media in the form of dramatic stakeholder manifestations and press conferences, demonstrations and protest actions, as well as journalists’ access to a few select clients. Both cases feature a notable division of communicative roles between non-suffering representatives as rational, strong and indignant social actors appealing to public involvement in registers of morality, propriety and decency, and subaltern clients as irrational weak victims engulfed in suffering and with personal accounts and experiences inviting public commiseration, solidarity and pity. I highlight especially how the staging of represented clients as powerless and despondent absolute sufferers under the continued malevolent influence of Japanese and japanophile past wrongdoing and present misrecognition also serves rhetorically as a strategic instrument to maximize the impact and influence factors of representative public relations practitioners fighting on their behalf.

To untangle these complexities and nuances of client-representative relationships in the studied cases, this article has relied on analytical investments from primarily Spivak and Guha. One of the great values of their respective work lies in its acute sensitivity to organization and appropriation of subalternity on a level of non-subaltern intervention by social actors seeking influence and interpretative authority for their specific rational agendas and, on another level, the reality of subaltern agency expressing itself by other means than, as a fundamental difference from, institutionally sanctioned forms of language and logic. My aim has been to analytically highlight the existence of these two distinct layers and the not necessarily converging nature of their respective interests and concerns. I hope hereby to have contributed constructively to a heightened critical awareness of the nature of representation, agency, and initiative in postcolonial activist public relations and subaltern client organization in East Asia, perhaps even to have raised concerns relevant also to future public relations research on similar issues in other publics and societies.