‘Comfort women must fall’? Japanese governmental responses to ‘comfort women’ statues around the world

This article examines Japanese governmental responses to memorial statues dedicated to ‘comfort women’ – women across the Asia-Pacific whom the Japanese military forced into conditions now recognised as sexual slavery before and during World War Two. This article discusses four cases around the world in which Japanese government officials have demanded the removal of comfort women statues: 1) Glendale, California; 2) San Francisco; 3) Manila; and 4) Berlin. The global expansion of comfort women memorialisation is significant to contemporary statue politics and crises of memory in three ways. Firstly, East Asian diasporas have become important actors in the remembrance of Japanese colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War outside East Asia. Secondly, these statues constitute attempts by diasporas to recover and reclaim a traumatic past through material culture. Thirdly, despite the global geographical reach of comfort women memory activism, neither nationalism nor the power of the nation-state have declined in today’s transnational world.

Between Colonialism and Despotism

The Mengjiang 蒙疆 puppet regime was established in Inner Mongolia by Japanese colonizers, in collaboration with the Mongolian Prince Demchugdongrub, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Mengjiang regime tried to revive Mongolian culture in the name of resisting Chinese despotism. However, the Japanese supported the Mongols' desire for “self-determination” merely to use it as a vehicle for their colonial designs. Through a close reading of several texts that appeared in Sinophone magazines published in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia during the war, this article explicates the distinctions between Han writers' and Mongol intellectuals' nationalist writings, in order to theorize the dual oppression of the Mongol minority culture under Japanese colonialism and Chinese despotism. Despite the mission of this so-called Mongolian nation-state to write in a Mongolian style, the Han writers in Mengjiang expressed their ethnic identity through Sinophone literature; at the same time, Sinicized Mongol intellectuals failed to revive Mongolian culture through the same vehicle. In the end, both the former Han despots and the new Japanese colonizers tried to instrumentalize Mongol minority culture to establish their own cultural hegemony. Under this dual oppression of foreign colonialism and native despotism, the Sinophone nationalist writings of the Han majority and the Mongol minority problematize any simple binarism of colonizer and colonized.

Potensi Dark Tourism Di Bandung

Bandung has been famous as a tourist destination or for leisure for a long time since the Dutch colonialism. Most of activities are mass tourism, such as culinary, shopping and nature tourism. Aside from those tourist activities, there is other kind of tourism that actually has been done by tourists and still need to be developed. It’s dark tourism. This research aimed to identify the potential of dark tourism and its activity. In this tourism, the object is a place with past dark horrible history for violence experienced by people in the past colonialism. The spectrum of darkest and lightest was demonstrated to show similarity and difference from previous researches as well as the level of eeriness in dark tourism.This research was conducted in Bandung using qualitative method. Data was obtained by directly visiting the tourist object, interviewed people related to the tourism activity and literature study. The instruments used in collecting data were a camera and a recorder. After processing data, it was then triangulated to make sure that all the result of the data was correct.From the research it was found that there were one tourist object and one tour included in dark tourism. They were Goa Pakar, consist of Goa Belanda and Goa Jepang, and a ghost tour which was known as Wisata Mistis. Goa Belanda and Goa Jepang are located in Taman Hutan Raya Ir. H. Djuanda or known as Goa Pakar or Dago Pakar. These caves have dark history about the cruelty from struggling against Dutch and Japanese colonialism. While ghost tour is a trip related to visiting spooky places at night. It is expected in the future that the dark tourism object will obtain serious attention and improvement from the local government so that educate tourists about sacrifice of the people who fought for nation independence

The Classical Developmental State in Korea

This chapter explores the characteristics of the classical developmental state in Korea in the Park Chung Hee era of the 1960s and 1970s, how it was established, and how it evolved. Neoliberals emphasize the free market of the 1960s in the Park Chung Hee era. By contrast, most developmental state (DS) scholars focus on the HCI drive of the 1970s to identify the typical developmental state in Korea. However, unlike the arguments of neoliberals and DS theorists, this chapter reveals that the basic characteristics of the Korean classical developmental state, including state-guided capitalism and export-led industrialization, were already established in the 1960s, although the 1970s saw a shift to an extreme variant of developmental state. In addition, unlike historical institutionalists’ emphasis on historical legacy of Japanese colonialism, this chapter emphatically examines the political process of elite competition for the origin of Korean DS.

Impact of the Japanese Educational System on the Rise of Proclamation August 17, 1945

This research aims to describe what had been done by youth especially the students to achieve the independence of Indonesia during the Japanese occupation. During the Japanese occupation, the Japanese military government had full power to organize in almost every sector such as social, government, military, economy, and education. Moreover, since Japan came to Indonesia to run the education system, schools have been provided regardless of national group, race, ancestry, which is why a sense of the same fate has arisen that has led to a strong sense of unity, and then a spirit of nationalism has arisen between them, and a desire to escape Japanese colonialism has also arisen.

Mel-han-cholia as Political Practice in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Turning to extant theories of melancholy, this article uses Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée to reevaluate the linear trajectory of Asian American identity formation in the United States. In particular, the author develops the term mel-han-choly—a hybrid form of melancholy and Korean han (a culturally specific grief)—to show how Cha uses it as a subversive political tool to defer historical closure and to refuse her quiet assimilation. Cha’s remembrance of the histories of Japanese colonialism in the Korean peninsula and the Korean War defies the expectation that minority populations somehow transcend their grievous pasts in becoming model American citizens. The author claims that Cha’s mel-han-cholic gestures disrupt the United States’ discursive power in narrating Korean history, especially as one contingent on accepting America’s “liberating” charge. This article also proposes that mel-han-choly serves a healing function within the diasporic Korean community, offering transnational connectivity through the shared experience of grief.

The Intimacies of Complicity

This chapter elaborates a transnational literary critical methodology for approaching South Korean depictions of the Korean War that now circulate in the United States in translated form through an analysis of Hwang Sok-yong’s novel The Guest. This magical realist work recounts a massacre that occurred in late 1950 in which roughly thirty-five thousand residents of Sinch’on, located in what is now North Korea, were slaughtered by their friends and neighbors. This chapter situates The Guest in its domestic context, elaborating its critique of both North and South Korean nationalist narratives that tend to avoid holding Koreans themselves accountable for such atrocities, and its complex engagement with the history of Korean Christianity. Even as it does so, however, the novel also implicates Japanese colonialism and Western Christianity in the violence that erupted in Sinch’on. However, this chapter also argues that this novel in its translated form must also be read within the context of its circulation in the United States, which highlights certain aspects of it: the affinities it suggests between working-class Koreans drawn to Marxism and enslaved Africans and its critique of the bystander role adopted by the US military in relation to atrocities committed by its Korean allies.