The Issue of State Apology and ‘Comfort Women’ in ASEAN as Discourse between Aggressor and Victim

• In Event: The Other Side of Integration: Questions in the Wake of ASEAN Community 2015

Abstract

This paper will investigate the former comfort women’s continuing struggle for a state apology. Specifically, I intend to shed light on how the international state apology discourse has configured an aggressor-victim relation between the “Japanese” and “comfort women.” The problems surrounding “state apology” and “comfort women” have been studied as distinct and concurrent topics. Scholars have discussed arguments for and against state apology and its function as a standard for endorsing international human rights. However, there is still a need to critically address how the current international discourse of state apology has excluded Japanese peoples’ wartime suffering and victimhood in configuring aggressor-victim relations between the Government of Japan and the comfort women from other ASEAN countries. This paper will investigate how the aggressor-victim relation has established discourses that render Japan as historical aggressor incommensurate with the wartime suffering of individual Japanese. Using key insights from Naoki Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity and Chantal Mouffe’s works on discourse theory, this paper will argue that the aggressor-victim relation only makes sense through (1) representing unity in historical narratives and (2) excluding competing discourses. Without investigating these issues, we will be unable to effectively negotiate and articulate a state apology that better represents the complexity of both the individual and collective histories of Japan and the comfort women.

Author

• Niko Atrio G. Hapitan, Ateneo de Manila University