This inaugural issue of paideia is structured around questions of experience, memory, and the historian’s burden to evaluate evidence and take social responsibility as elicited by Miki Dezaki’s 2018 documentary film Shusenjo.
This inaugural issue of paideia is structured around questions of experience, memory, and the historian’s burden to evaluate evidence and take social responsibility as elicited by Miki Dezaki’s 2018 documentary film Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue. The issue includes an extended interview with Dezaki and reviews by undergraduate students, put together by Tani Barlow, Katsuya Hirano, Suzy Kim, and Lan Li–all of us professional historians of the 19th and 20th century East Asia. When Harvard Law School professor of Japanese Legal Studies J. Mark Ramseyer’s ill-advised publication hit the scholarly world of Asianists, we were in the process of organizing this issue as an important learning resource. The scandal threw into stark relief why history is always a contest that matters. Tani Barlow taught Dezaki’s film at the undergraduate level twice in Spring 2021. Several of her students–all history majors with one headed to a history doctoral program–have contributed their evaluations, and these reviews are published with our interview. …
Pedagogically, “Shusenjo” puts students and instructors alike face to face with their contemporary moment. We, too, are struggling over social justice issues in our time. We recognize how institutionalized sexual slavery speaks globally to women’s social value and disposability. We understand that its historical roots in the Asia Pacific lie in the Fifteen Year War, Japan’s economic rise, the First Cold War in Asia, Asian migrations to the US, and now the disaster of a New Cold War in Asia. While the film is “about” the issue of sexual slavery and justice, a red thread running through the film is how historians and responsible people keep memories of injustice and redress alive. Since Dezaki foregrounds his own learning experience in the making of the documentary, he invites us to learn with him to reconsider how we think about atrocities and what historical truths must be taught and not forgotten. The film opens a full panoply of real problems of history in a striking way: what is evidence, what is interpretation, how do we write history after weighing evidence or searching beyond existing sources, are there only ever “two sides to the story,” and, most critically as demonstrated by Ramseyer’s flawed approach, what is an unacceptable position in a debate over historical truth. The transcript and reviews have been edited for length and clarity.
— Tani Barlow, Katsuya Hirano, Suzy Kim, Lan Li, editors
Tani Barlow, Katsuya Hirano, Suzy Kim, Lan Li
Rijuta Vallishayee
Skyler Ewing, Pauline Huff, Ari Forsyth, Allen Sellers, Tessa Schreiber
Historical Responsibility
Tani Barlow
Your film focuses on the denialists, many of whom were not involved in the “comfort women” problem directly. What kind of responsibility do we bear when we talk about this history? What do we make of how denialists react to these characterizations of “comfort women” by historians? How should we teach war responsibility to students and the public?
Miki Dezaki
When we talk about history that involves victims who are still alive and still waiting to receive justice, there’s a huge responsibility to talk about history. The denialists are very good at getting their views out there through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, but it’s incredibly irresponsible for them to talk about it in the way that they do without having done the proper research. A great example is [John Mark] Ramseyer. Here is a Harvard professor who really didn’t do the research, and look at the damage that he has caused. Denialists read what historians have written about the “comfort women” and how they were treated by the Japanese military, and they react with disbelief because denialists want to believe that Japanese people were always good. And it’s from that belief that they cherry pick information and build their narrative. I understand why people would want to believe that they’re good, and that their ancestors are good; to create this narrative to honor them is just a gut feeling that they have. Yoshiko Sakurai and others in the film say there’s absolutely no way that their ancestors could do such horrible things. But they will say, they can imagine Chinese people doing them. The interesting thing about this kind of thinking is that they recognize that the stories of the abuse these women faced sound bad, but they ignore these stories or call them lies, and at the same time they highlight stories that make it sound like the women had a good time or fell in love with a soldier, and from that they conclude that the women were not sex slaves and the conditions weren’t that bad. This is the selective remembering and the mental gymnastics they go through.
Suzy Kim
These reactions are not specific to the Japanese response. It’s a nationalist, defensive reaction that you see in all parts of the world, wherever you see historical denialism, including those that deny the Holocaust ever happened.
Miki Dezaki
There are a lot of Armenian Americans in Glendale, California, and I remember the mayor and the city council members would say in response to the denialists that all you have to do is replace Armenians with Koreans and the Turks with the Japanese and it’s the same thing. Interestingly denialists all use the same kind of tactics. The question about how we teach war responsibility to undergraduate students is a tough one for me. I’ve had to think about it, but we should really start by learning about war victims. We should look into what the victims are demanding for justice. I don’t think we go into that enough, or at all, in high school history. I took AP American history in high school, and I just remember learning facts and figures and years and I don’t remember learning about victims of war. In college, I studied physiology because I was pre-med, and for science majors, you just do not get any of this information. So it’s really important to cover this in a mandatory curriculum in high school or junior high school. From there, we can look into what kind of responsibility has been taken, if any. Many countries, especially the most powerful, have not taken responsibility for what they’ve done. I also think it’s really important, not just to look at what other countries have done, but to look at what your own country has done. It’s easy, I believe, for Americans to look at Japan and say, they did horrible things, but as you read more and more about what America has done, it’s terrible. Finally, it’s important to understand international laws and conventions, and what they say about war atrocities and crimes against humanity, and how countries have basically been able to figure out a way to avoid responsibility. There is a 1993 film called “The Fog of War” by Errol Morris who interviewed Robert McNamara. I remember one scene that really stayed with me, where he says, we were acting like war criminals. The fire bombings in Japan was a war crime, but they can get away with it because they were the victors.
Lan Li
How did you recruit the rightists and get them to agree to be on camera? How did you get access? It sounded like there were women interviewers – was there a team you worked with in making the film and how did you go about creating such a team?
Miki Dezaki
After the film was released, those rightists launched a lawsuit, claiming that I totally deceived them by saying that this was only going to be a graduate school project. I did approach them as a graduate student, but I also told them that this had the possibility if it was good enough to be in film festivals and possibly in theaters. I always made that very clear, and the release forms they signed state that it could be publicly released in various ways. I went about approaching and recruiting them by showing up at their symposiums. And that’s what you saw in the film when they’re all gathered together. They had a few of these within a short period of time, so I would go and I met them there. And once they saw that I was a familiar face to some extent, then I think they were more open to talking to me. Interestingly, they saw that I was a Sophia University student, considered a prestigious university in Japan, and I think that helped me get my foot in the door, and maybe it was flattering to them that a grad student would even want to listen to what they had to say. In a certain sense, they respected that I was a grad student, but in another sense, they were probably not taking me that seriously and maybe felt like they had to teach me or something like that, which is possibly why they were so open and frank about their ideas and opinions. So it worked in my favor, both ways that I was a grad student.
Suzy Kim
I imagine that it may have also worked in your favor that you are of Japanese heritage?
Miki Dezaki
Actually, I remember Koichi Mera came up to me after the first symposium of theirs that I attended, and after I explained what I wanted to interview him about, he said, “we really need you guys on our side,” by which he meant second generation Japanese Americans. So I do believe that they possibly thought that they could use me in some way for their own purposes. Because they had this big agenda in the US, and here I am an American willing to give them a platform. And I do believe that me being male had something to do with it. These guys are misogynists, and so, when we talk about women’s issues, I think that they don’t believe that women can think about this rationally. So they’re thinking, his real true roots and his male hormones will allow him to think about this more rationally than a woman would. And about the interviewers and the team I worked with, I had two women who helped me with the interviews.
Katsuya Hirano
Did you learn about the history of “comfort women” as you interviewed the denialists and historians or did you study it before you started the project?
Miki Dezaki
I had done a research paper on the “comfort women” issue before starting the interviews. So I was familiar, to some extent, with what the right wingers and the “comfort women” supporters had to say about the issue. But I didn’t know that much. Details like the documents and historical data that right wingers use, I wouldn’t have anything to refute that. And that’s exactly how they get a lot of people, because most people just have a general idea of the “comfort women” issue, and the right wingers are quick to pull out their toolkit with certain data to make it sound like they know what they’re talking about. Like the US war report, Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49 (1944), which looks so official, and it is a real report. I didn’t know what to say to that, because I’m not a historian. They’re very good at convincing you, and as I was making the film, I was encountering what they had to say and also what the people who support “comfort women” and the historians would say in response. And oftentimes, it was the responses from the historians that really shocked me, because the historians were able to put all these documents that the right wingers would use into context, and every document they used was misinterpreted or misunderstood. After talking to them, I really appreciate what historians do because they aren’t like the revisionists in the sense of just cherry picking information; historians give you the full story. I wish I could put more of what they said in the film, but historians talk a lot and you can’t put everything in a film. Still it’s all great information.
Work of Historians
Tani Barlow
The film clearly demonstrates historians explicitly naming who is responsible for the system of military sexual slavery. What is the scholarly culture of historians who work on this subject? We know that many Japanese scholars feel a sense of moral obligation regarding Japanese imperialism. Can you talk about these communities of scholars, how they do their research, what kind of teachers they are and what motivates their commitment, to the extent that you were able to observe in making the film?
Miki Dezaki
I didn’t put this in the film, but there was a symposium I went to that was really enlightening about the attitude of historians. It was organized in Tokyo to show the evidence that some researchers from Seoul had found from digging in the US National Archives. One example I remember seeing was a textbook that Japanese American soldiers studied with Japanese vocabulary words, and ianfu, which is the Japanese word for “comfort women,” was defined in that textbook as “prostitute.” That’s probably why the soldier who wrote the US war report, wrote that they’re “nothing more than prostitutes.” It wasn’t like he was trying to make a judgment call on whether these women were slaves or not; it was just something that he learned and so he wrote it down that way. But what I found really enlightening is that the historians weren’t jumping on it and saying, “look, this is it, we finally found information we can use.” And that is exactly what the right wingers do. They take whatever little information that they can get, and they’ll say this obviously proves that Japanese people were good people and Japanese didn’t do anything bad. But the historian says, “this is very interesting information, but we have to cross reference it and make sure this is actually legitimate evidence.” The historian I heard was basically saying, “it’s interesting but I have to look into it more before I get too excited about it.” And that led me to respect the historian’s thought process. I think that is the process that historians like Yoshimi Yoshiaki or any respectable historian goes through; it’s a painstaking and critical analysis of evidence. It’s the amateur historians that jump on any little information that supports their view.
When historians talk about an issue, they’re not talking about it impulsively or about something they heard recently. It’s something that they’ve been studying for a very long time, and they wouldn’t talk about it unless they had verified it. I have an interview I did with a German historian (it didn’t make the final cut in the film) talking about how documents are usually left by people privileged enough to leave behind documents. We see that with the Japanese military. They burned all the documents that they didn’t want people to see and they left the ones that made them look okay. To me that means that oral testimony and oral history is also a very important part of creating a historical narrative, because oftentimes it’s the oral history that is coming from the lower classes or the victims since they don’t leave documents, they don’t have official documents saying, “I got raped today,” and then a stamp to make it official.
Right wingers will always say, “where are the documents, we have documents, how come you don’t have documents?” We can be obsessed with that kind of paper evidence, and we don’t recognize that that kind of evidence is often left by powerful or privileged people who can selectively leave evidence that won’t be as damaging to their reputation. And this is exactly what happened with the Japanese military’s purposeful burning of documents before they could be confiscated. One other thing that was interesting to me was a conversation I had with another historian in Tokyo. He was talking about a kind of “history laundering service,” where you write down somebody’s testimony on paper and then you put it on an archive shelf, and it is now a historical document that feels and sounds like hard evidence. And let’s compare that to a testimony given by a woman who’s alive and who is talking about her experiences. It’s interesting how we put so much importance on written documents, as opposed to testimony of a victim, who’s still alive today and who’s talking about her experiences. Even the US war report that the right wingers love to show off is basically just some soldiers’ opinion, what he put together after interviewing some of these women. They were spoken words at one point, and he put pen to paper and put a transcript on the shelf, and now it’s a historical document that is seen as more valid than anything else to some people.
Suzy Kim
That’s a great point about what gets documented and what gets left out. You ended your film so powerfully with the statement from Kim Hak-sun who was the first “comfort woman” to come forward in 1991, who said you can’t keep remembering and be able to live on, that they can’t survive by preserving that memory intact. In fact, the film doesn’t seem to dwell on the graphic and brutalizing experiences of the “comfort women,” sensitive to the traumatizing experiences of rape and sexual violence. What are some of the benefits and pitfalls of this? Were these issues something you considered and anticipated in terms of the effect on the viewer?
Miki Dezaki
I didn’t put many of the testimonies in the film, and that was a strategic decision because I had constantly been hearing from the right wingers that these women were inconsistent in their testimonies and they are lying. This is the mainstream narrative in Japan. I think most of my Japanese friends and random people I talked to about the issue would parrot this point, and even my own mother, who isn’t really right or left in her politics, would make this point to me. People would also say that the “comfort women” supporters try to pull at your heartstrings with these testimonies, and they don’t have any rational or logical arguments, only emotional testimonies to support their claims. I listened to and read a lot of the testimonies, and they’re horrible and very powerful. As a filmmaker, I thought if I put more of these in the film, it’ll be a stronger film in a way. People may feel more of what these women experienced and how horrible it must have been to live in those conditions. But I chose not to focus on testimonies because I didn’t want to be accused by right wingers and Japanese people that I deflected their arguments and was trying to pull at their heartstrings. I wanted them to hear the very logical arguments made by historians and supporters.
Nowadays the testimonies are a little more rehearsed because they’ve been repeating them so many times, but some of the videos from the 1990s that you see of the testimonies, you can tell they don’t want to talk about it. It’s really hard to watch them talk about their experiences. Putting that in the film would have been very powerful, but I felt like people, especially Japanese people, need to be prepped before they see a testimony. There’s a whole section in my film that is about testimony, why these women might not have talked about this right after the war, or why testimonies might be inconsistent. I felt people needed to understand more about testimony before they heard a testimony. Because then they can see it in context. When you just see a testimony on TV or on a film without any kind of information, you see a sad woman and feel bad for her, but when you really understand how hard it was for the women, especially the first person to speak out about it, it’s a very courageous act because she’s going against all this patriarchy. She knows that she’s going to be criticized, and who really wants to say that they’ve been raped many, many times.
Also, I’m very fortunate that while I was making the film, the #MeToo movement happened, and that really informed me on sexual assault testimony. For instance, that Alabama man who ran for Senate [Roy Stewart Moore, 2017] had sexually assaulted some women when he was younger, and I remember hearing that it took one of the victims 40 years to talk about how he had touched her inappropriately in his car. She had held this in for so long, and you could see it affected her life. It was difficult for her to speak out about this for so many years in a relatively egalitarian country, so can you imagine how difficult it was for the former “comfort women” to speak out, living in a very patriarchal society after the war until the 1990s under a military dictatorship. If you know about the context, you can see how courageous and how difficult it was for these women to talk about it. I really wanted people to understand that before they listened to a testimony.
Katsuya Hirano
To underscore what you said, it seems to me the strength of the documentary is really a focus on the problem of knowledge production. You successfully show the problem by comparing how nationalists and historians produce their respective discourses. As you pointed out, the former have the set agenda, and they cherry pick facts, to create their own discourse according to the agenda, without carefully verifying them. They are motivated to win the debate on the “comfort women” issues, reacting to oppositional views. On the contrary, historians are not interested in reacting to anything, but they’re focused on pursuing some kind of truth if I can use the term “truth” here. Their interest lies not only in uncovering what really happened and why it happened but also in probing ethical and political implications of it. By putting these two groups of people side by side in the film, I think you really succeeded in showing how the process of producing knowledge matters in terms of truthfulness. You also avoid inserting testimonies casually in the film in order to minimize strong and sensational effects.
Miki Dezaki
I was very aware of the fact that when I was making and releasing the film, I was also a participant in this whole battle that’s going on right now, and I felt it was very important for me to put out information that held up to scrutiny. And having seen how right wingers cherry pick things, I could see how the politics and your own sort of beliefs in certain things can lead you towards a certain narrative. I was highly aware of that and that’s actually what was emotionally very difficult because your mind really wants to go towards your biases. But I was constantly fighting against that. Finally, at the end, I landed on a conclusion that I felt was something I could support after considering both sides and giving the benefit of doubt to both sides.
Suzy Kim
Some viewers, especially younger students, may hold a naive understanding of history as something that can be “proven”–that we can establish historical “objectivity.” What was your approach to this question of objectivity for the film, especially in light of the fact that numbers and testimonies are always the sites of manipulation as you so effectively show in the film?
Miki Dezaki
It was never a goal to be objective, because I believe that’s almost impossible. But I did try to give the benefit of doubt to both sides and really deeply consider what the arguments were on both sides. There were a lot of times that I would have debates or discussions with my team members, including a couple of Korean friends. We would go back and forth on certain topics. That process really helped me understand and formulate my own conclusions. I go back to this thing that I learned when I was a Buddhist monk in Thailand. It’s not necessarily Buddhist, but a teaching that I learned was “being unsure is the attitude of the noble ones” and it’s basically a scientific kind of mentality: if you think you’re right, you should ask yourself if you’re sure. Thinking that you’re right is a dangerous attitude to have, because when you think you’re right, that’s when you can justify a lot of horrible things that you do. I was somewhat fresh out of the monastery and still had that kind of teaching in my head. There were a lot of times when making the film that I felt like I had it right, but then I would ask myself, “are you sure,” because there was always new information. It got to the point where I was doubting whether I could make this film, because there was just so much information. Some people suggested I do a ten-part podcast. But I like films. At first, I thought a 2 hour film would be like writing a book, but it’s more like a poem. You really have to bring things down to their essence, and maybe podcasts are closer to a short story or something like that. But to get all this information about the “comfort women” issue into our film was quite a challenge. I just kept challenging myself and being challenged by people on the issue. I’m very fortunate that I had people who helped me. The Koreans debating with me weren’t debating the side of the Koreans. They were explaining how Korea had a patriarchal system. Despite what so many Japanese right wingers want to believe, that Koreans influenced me to support the Korean side, it was actually sometimes the opposite.
Tani Barlow
The point that I will take back to my students is the distinction that you draw between objectivity and truthfulness. The goal historians pursue is the truth, whereas ideologues want to be right and they introduce the impossible idea of “objectivity.” The process that you just described is fabulous because it mirrors what we historians do.
Miki Dezaki
I think doing history is a “science”; it’s experimenting, having a hypothesis, and cross-checking. When I first thought of historians, I was thinking like these right wingers that anybody can do history. But when I understood the actual rigor and how tough this process can be, to challenge yourself, and challenge your own ideas of what possibly the history was, through the evidence that you find, I respected historians so much more.
Suzy Kim
This is also why for ideologues the point of history is very different. Textbook controversies are everywhere, not just in Japan. In South Korea in previous conservative governments, there was also an attempt to revise history textbooks because the point of history for them was to instill national pride, so anything critical of the nation’s history just has no place. It’s a very different conception of what history is meant to do.
Miki Dezaki
The Japanese fundamental law of education revised by Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in 2006 now says that it’s there to foster national pride. If that’s the goal, then there’s no hope for an actual true history, especially of things that might make Japan look bad in the past.
Politics of Nationalisms
Katsuya Hirano
In what ways do you think national interests and nationalism continue to impede our ability to understand and resolve the “comfort women” issue, not just referring to the Japanese here but all parties involved?
Miki Dezaki
In regards to the “comfort women” issue, some students in Korea told me that they had thought that this issue was a battle between Japan and Korea. After one of them saw my film, she understood that it’s a human rights issue, a women’s rights issue. And I think what helped her get into that space in her mind was seeing Japanese scholars and activists supporting the “comfort women,” something that she had never seen before. In the media, she had never seen Japanese people supporting “comfort women”; maybe Korean media hasn’t done a good job of presenting it as a human rights issue. Flaming nationalism–Japan versus Korea–prevents us from progressing in a positive direction, because it’s not really the heart of the “comfort women” issue at all. Let’s just look at what happened. These women faced horrible crimes, and they’re looking for justice, and these are the laws that show that this was a crime. It’s very clear when you see it that way; that these are victims and there were perpetrators.
The 2015 agreement came out while I was making the film and I noticed NHK, for example, would report that Korea agreed to take the “comfort women” statue down in Seoul, but that the Koreans are going back on their agreement by not taking it down and actually erecting more statues around the world. Presenting the information that way, Japanese people fill in the blanks and conclude that Koreans are irrational and sneaky people. That kind of distrust and racism fostered through the media makes it almost impossible for people to listen to each other. It’s impossible for Japanese people to hear Korean women’s testimonies after that, because the Japanese think they’re trying to lie and cheat to get more money. But if the Japanese media had shown that the Japanese politicians have been trying to erase the mention of “comfort women” from textbooks, and that these statues are being built as a response to that, so that the memory of these women isn’t completely erased, then there would be a different reaction to the news report in Japan. And with the 2015 agreement, if the media had recognized that none of these “comfort women” were consulted on this agreement, and it was just an agreement between two nations represented by two men, then it’d be a different reaction. In my film, I tried to strip away the nationalism and get down to the nitty gritty of the arguments, bringing context to the issue so that hopefully we could talk about it in clear ways without tying things up with racist emotion.
Suzy Kim
As you refer to the 2015 agreement, I’m visualizing the image from your film of President Barack Obama standing between Japanese and South Korean officials, brokering that agreement. An important point in your film is the geopolitics of the region, where you show the US maneuvers to make sure that the US-Japan-ROK tripartite alliance holds. This extends all the way to the beginning of the Cold War and the US occupation of Japan and South Korea, and the film effectively demonstrates how the US is implicated in the unresolved status of the “comfort women” issue. The film brings this point home toward the end when you ask the Japanese audience if they want to be involved in a war started by the US. As a Japanese American, how do you see the US role in the “comfort women” issue?
Miki Dezaki
I took it as my responsibility to learn more about the influences and the pressure that the US has put on both countries to push the issue under the rug, to set it aside for a later time constantly since the war. It’s marginalized groups that get pushed aside, like the problems of Korean women or women in Southeast Asia. At what point do we finally look at this? I feel like the US is playing a game in a way. We had the US House Resolution 121 that put pressure on Japan to apologize for the “comfort women” issue because that’s the right thing to do. But at the same time, the US is pressuring the two countries to just put a band-aid on this and move on to preserve the US-Japan-South Korea alliance. The US accepts a half apology in the form of “upholding” the Kono Statement. But if you uphold the Kono Statement, you’re supposed to teach history because that’s what the Kono Statement says–“We hereby reiterate our firm determination never to repeat the same mistake by forever engraving such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history.” So you can’t uphold the Kono Statement, and then behind the scenes actively try to erase it from textbooks and also actively tell other countries to take down the “comfort women” statues. It’s just not consistent at all. People ask me, what would a sincere apology look like, how many times does Japan have to apologize? Well, a sincere apology could first start with maybe building a statue of the “comfort women” in Tokyo instead of trying to take them down from all these other countries. It’s not about just throwing money at them, as the 2015 agreement did. There’s a lot more to an apology that would make it sincere. As I started to learn more about how America influences these two countries, I felt a responsibility as an American citizen to show this to other Americans and say we have our hand in this as well.
I didn’t put it in the film, but America’s attitude towards women during that time had something to do with it too. If America had really seen these women as they were, as sex slaves, then it would have been brought up in the Tokyo Tribunals. In fact, the US for a period of time while they occupied Japan, were using a “comfort women” system as well. It was after they started the occupation that MacArthur realized this doesn’t look good, so they closed all the comfort stations, but their attitude towards it also influenced why the “comfort women” have not gotten justice, even after 70, 80 years.
Katsuya Hirano
During the occupation, as Yuki Tanaka has shown, there were a number of rape cases by American soldiers in Japan. Occupied Japan also set up “comfort women” stations to offer “service” to American soldiers and “minimize” rape cases among Japanese civilians. There was a really transnational regime of sexism and sexual exploitation against women across the Pacific. That was why the US had no interest in exploring the “comfort women” issue at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals. Your film shows how the transnational regime between Japan and the US shaped the history and memory of the Asia-Pacific War in postwar times.
Miki Dezaki
Going back to the last message in the film, if Japanese young people are going to go to war to basically fight in America’s wars, they should really think about it. I really tried to de-sensationalize the film, but that last clip at the very end is explicit and could be seen as sensational, but that is what war is. It is innocent people getting shot by an American Apache helicopter sometimes. It is innocent people getting bombed as collateral damage. I wanted to show that because we don’t see those images that much in Japan or in the US of the reality of war. It’s shooting down people, gunning them down, or blowing them up. They’re not going to get that image when they recruit for the military, for the national Self Defense Forces in Japan. The older people remember the horrors of the war, but the younger generation definitely do not. So, as an American, I felt a sort of responsibility to show young Japanese people the brutal reality of fighting in a war with America. It’s about killing real people and being killed for things that may not be as pure and simple as freedom and democracy, as we are often told.
Suzy Kim
The film is very effective at showing the connections forged through Abe-Nihonkaigi (Japan Conference), something that is not well known outside Japan. Why was it important for you to uncover and introduce the ways in which Japanese nationalists had formed a united front to push forward their agenda, including historical revisionism? And as you clearly show in the film, the Japanese rightists argue that the battleground has now shifted to the US, and they are actively working with partners in the US. Why is there so much effort to make these transnational connections into influencing US public opinion about the “comfort women” issue, and how are you reading our current moment, especially with the Ramseyer controversy? How are Japanese rightists responding to it?
Miki Dezaki
I focused on the Nippon Kaigi connection because it’s actually a huge part of the issue and you can’t ignore it once you know about what they’ve been doing. It’s very plain to see, and it’s not a secret but out in the open in their efforts to change the history in Japan. People need to know that this is a huge network with a lot of money and power, and its purpose is to influence and change the minds of Japanese people for generations to come toward their ideal view of Japan to appreciate and have pride and honor in Imperial Japan. It’s creating the myth that Japan is always peaceful, called the Yasukuni view of history. If they can show that they were so honorable in the past, then young Japanese can believe that in the future they will also be honorable and join the Self Defence Force and join the military in Japan and they can have faith that they are fighting on the right side. The US does this too–we don’t fight for oil, we fight for freedom, we fight to liberate people.
The film shows how Hisae Kennedy was willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a no-name writer write an article just because he was a white American, former military guy. You’ve got to wonder how much money, what kind of promises were involved in the Ramseyer controversy. I also understand the accusations can go both ways. I was accused of getting money from the Korean government for making my film, which is very flattering to me because they were implying that there’s no way that I could have made this film on such a small budget. But that’s exactly what happened; I was sleeping in my friend’s living room at the time while I was finishing the film. So I don’t want to make accusations because it’s so easy to speculate, but knowing what they did with that writer and knowing how Ramseyer is much bigger fish, it’s hard not to speculate about that one.
Ramseyer published articles about Okinawans and buraku and now “comfort women” which are all points that the right wingers always talk about. The buraku are historically social outcasts and are still discriminated against in many ways. Parents don’t want their kids to marry buraku, and companies don’t want to hire them. You can’t usually tell by appearance, but you can somewhat tell by their last names, or where they live. Based on that kind of information, an address book came out a few years ago that “outed” a lot of people as buraku, and became a bestseller, which angered many in the buraku community. Apparently, right wingers in Japan used Ramseyer’s article for a lawsuit on the address book as evidence that the book had been used by an academic and therefore had academic value. They took his academic article and weaponized it. He has so much credibility as a Harvard professor, but he’s an economics law professor and what does he know about these topics? Why does he have any credibility? Because he’s a white male professor at Harvard.
Suzy Kim
Did you mention the hired writer’s name in the film?
Miki Dezaki
I didn’t because Hisae Kennedy had been so traumatized by the situation, we agreed that I wouldn’t name him in the film, but she’s totally fine with me talking about it now. His name is Michael Yon, white male, used to be in special forces in the US military. He was a war correspondent at one point. He was able to deceive them by saying he had a bigger readership than the New York Times. He was really puffing himself up to them, and they bought into it and thought that he would be the guy to write this very significant piece on the “comfort women” issue that would really change the minds of all Americans.
Katsuya Hirano
There has been a close link, a sort of collaborative relation between Japanese and American nationalists since 1945 as an “anti-communist” alliance against the backdrop of the Cold War. This kind of collaboration has created ground for people like Koichi Mera, a leader of the Japanese nationalist group in LA, to start a movement in the US. Mera received $1 million from a right wing Japanese organization and used it to file a lawsuit against the Glendale “comfort women” statue. Mera also organized a group in LA with some Japanese Americans to study modern Japanese history and to fight against “Japan bashing.” This is the group of people who acted on behalf of Japanese nationalists and Abe Shinzo’s Japan Conference in the US. That’s why Mera also tried to recruit you when you were making the film.
Miki Dezaki
I didn’t put it in the film, but Hideaki Kase was sort of boasting about that $1 million. He gathered a million dollars for his lawsuit through his connections. But one of the former mayors from Glendale spoke with the Consul General of Japan, who said his number one priority is getting that statue out of Glendale. The fact that the Japanese Government wrote an amicus brief for that lawsuit shows how much they support these groups in the US. The right wing activists seem to be fringe, but they have a lot of support from the Japanese government. The Japanese consulates have been contacting universities to tell them not to show my film, and they use that lawsuit against me by the people in the film to argue they shouldn’t trust this film. Even though there’s been no verdict or any outcome from the lawsuit, they can use the lawsuit to say, this is a film that shouldn’t be trusted because people are suing.
Documentary Methods
Lan Li
Something that you mentioned that was really interesting was that you intentionally didn’t sensationalize this history, which would be very easy to do. Your style of storytelling was restrained in that it’s presented in these brief chapters. The soundtrack for the film was very restrained in that it didn’t invoke emotions like grief or pity. For instance, you used drums to punctuate the title cards in a way that offered us a point of reference. It invited us to unpack ideas such as APOLOGIES and the politics of reparation. These issues remain open-ended. The chapter on CONFESSION was a partial confession when formal rightists who admitted to their acts of conspiracy failed to validate historical and first-hand evidence of “comfort women.” So the question is, who influenced you as a filmmaker? Can you walk us through the editing process for this film, your choices in scoring the film, the soundtrack, and the contrast between the sound choices and the visuals? What role did you see the soundtrack in telling this story without over-dramatizing or over-simplifying its affect?
Miki Dezaki
Some of the films I love and respect have no narration, just people telling their stories in interviews. One film I really like is a documentary called “Let the Fire Burn.” It tells the story of a police killing of a radical Black political group called MOVE. What ended up happening was the police basically lit a fire on the building, and let the fire burn. Eleven people, including kids, burned to death inside the building. It’s all just archival footage of what led up to it and the aftermath. I really loved how he was able to tell the story, not through narration, but letting us watch it happen. I wanted to do something like that, and that’s why I have this back and forth between the interviewees. I didn’t want to have sections, but in the end I had to because without them the events just blended together. So if I’m going to have sections, then I wanted you to really know. Boom – there are sections to this film; boom: here’s the apology section; here’s the testimony section, and so on. I basically made chapters. I recently saw parts of the new Adam Curtis documentary–he used to work at the BBC–and his films are trying to explain why things are the way they are in the world. Not that I was trying to do that with my film, but he does use large texts sometimes to make a point. Maybe subconsciously, I had that in my head as well. One thing about his films that is very different from mine is that he uses music as a way to evoke certain emotions. I didn’t want to do that. As you mentioned, I avoided it. I was working with a composer on the music, a Japanese guy about my age who lived in the US while going to music school in New York. He saw the film and we talked about it, and I felt like we were on the same page. I was doing a million other things, so I was totally cool with just giving it to him to make the music. I was looking forward to not having to meticulously direct the music like I had everything else. He makes the first cut of the music, and I thought, this is wrong.
The music he had composed was so sad. That is what he saw. The film is about a sad issue, but putting sad music in the film was too manipulative. I didn’t like it and I hadn’t realized how almost inherently manipulative music is. I didn’t want that kind of music in my film. Part of the reason I decided to use sections and the type of sound I used was to keep people fresh. I knew it was two hours of talking, and how do you keep people engaged for two hours. I was only used to making 10 minute videos on YouTube. You can hold people’s attention for 10 minutes, even if it’s not that great, but two hours is really hard. I thought sections along with music might help people feel refreshed. So the music and absence of it is there to signal what to pay attention to, what the point is. I wrestled with my composer because I just wanted violins to go bump, bump, bump, a repetitive serious sound but not something that pulls your heartstrings. He ended up doing a fantastic job of interpreting what I wanted. And the Japanese drumming is a mostly female drum group called Gocco in Tokyo which is rare. Most of the time, men do this professional taiko drumming. They told me that they know that drumming is a very militaristic sound, but for them, it’s a joyous thing, a celebratory thing, and they want to express that. For me, I didn’t take it as militaristic or necessarily joyous either. I wanted people to feel that this is serious stuff, but at the same time, a sort of energy. Having been a teacher, when you talk about serious stuff, people start feeling down and don’t have much energy for it. But drumming has the combination of recognizing something is serious, and it has a lot of energy. It wakes you up, and shakes you up.
In terms of influences, maybe Adam Curtis was one subconsciously, and Errol Morris was definitely an influence, especially “Fog of War” and “Thin Blue Line.” I really liked his approach of hearing people out. And also Mori Tatsuya, who did a documentary called “A” (1998) about the sarin gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995. One thing that I remember him saying in an interview when asked how he got access to their headquarters after the whole thing happened is that he just asked. That was his approach or philosophy as he was making the film; you don’t know till you ask. Maybe the right wingers will say no, but you won’t know until you ask. I remember some of my teammates being hesitant to talk to them and making excuses, saying maybe this is not the right time. I said, no, there’s no other time; this is it, we have to ask. And that was my approach. You just got to ask, and you never know what kind of access you can get. And also Joshua Oppenheimer, who did “The Look of Silence” (2014) and “The Act of Killing” (2012). If there’s a theme to all those, it’s interviewing people who are perpetrators. Oppenheimer interviews people who perpetrated mass killings in Indonesia. Mori interviews a member of Aum Shinrikyo. Errol Morris interviews McNamara. It’s talking and listening to these people who have done bad, questionable things. And maybe that was a subconscious theme for my film; talking about the taboo, or going to places and talking to people that people don’t really want to talk to or hear about.
Suzy Kim
In academia too, there’s growing interest in understanding the recent rise of the alt-right. There’s a tendency sometimes to dismiss them as fringe without really understanding what’s going on. Especially with everything that’s happened in the US with the rise of Donald Trump and his supporters, there’s urgency to understand these communities.
Miki Dezaki
Dismissing definitely doesn’t work. You just talk past each other all the time, but when you meet them head on, that’s when you can speak to them and their followers as well. After you understand how they think of things, you’re able to speak to them in their language. I would often hear from Japanese audience members that they really appreciated that I didn’t meet their arguments by just telling them to listen to the “comfort women” testimonies, because that’s what many “comfort women” supporters say. But I was meeting them head on, on their level, as far as their arguments go, and saying I hear your arguments, but here are other ways to look at this possibly.
Katsuya Hirano
I think your interview of Hisae Kennedy is an excellent example. It is one of the powerful moments in the film. She describes her earlier commitment to nationalism as a soul-searching process. It shows a nationalist logic and sentiment shared by many nationalists. For her, nationalism is something very personal. She felt like defending Japan at the expense of everything as if she desperately needed to defend herself. Her story added much more complexity to the film in a way that did not demonize or caricature nationalists.
Miki Dezaki
I think people on the left side, or Koreans can relate somewhat to what she’s saying. I’m not trying to make excuses for the Japanese nationalists, but it’s understanding why they think that way. And to some extent, I felt really bad because they feel like the victims, and it’s unfortunate because their feeling of victimization is hurting the actual victims, the former “comfort women”.
Katsuya Hirano
I think that’s the complexity of nationalism among racialized minorities, especially immigrants in the US. When I interviewed some Japanese nationalists who belonged to Koichi Mera’s study group in California, they didn’t want people to bring up wartime memories about Japan’s atrocious conducts because they were very concerned that it would lead to racism against them. They said that they always suffered discrimination by white Americans and other minoritized groups in the US after immigrating to the country. They tried so hard, they said, to assimilate into American society by learning English and new ways of life. But they were so worried that these negative wartime legacies would recall racism that they worked hard to overcome. There is a very complicated dimension to this whole issue of nationalism among the immigrants. And Japanese nationalists like the members of Japan Conference take advantage of this complex dynamic of racism and discrimination in the US to recruit their sympathizers and collaborators.
Lan Li
Given that the film offers a dynamic, transnational history of history-making and history-re-making, how did you choose the title of the film Shusenjo (Main Battlefield)? Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would do differently with the film? If you could edit it again, or do the film differently, what would you do, if anything?
Miki Dezaki
“Shusenjo” means the main battleground in Japanese, and it’s actually a word that I heard the right wingers use frequently in their symposiums. It’s not a word that is used too much in everyday spoken Japanese, and a lot of Japanese people would ask if it was Japanese. But the right wingers would use it a lot in reference to the US as the new main battleground for the “comfort women” issue, maybe as a way to get financial support from their supporters. Perhaps they believe that the battle in Japan had already been won, so it’s time to move to the next main battleground, which is the US and the rest of the world. When I was conducting interviews, I felt that my own mind was like a battleground with these right wingers and the “comfort women” supporters and historians battling it out in my head. I think this happens a lot to people who are interested in the “comfort women” issue or any historical issue and trying to figure out what they think is the truth. Our minds become this battleground for these opinions and arguments, and I thought that was a nice metaphor for the whole thing.
That being said, when the right wingers were talking about the US being the main battleground, I had interpreted that to mean that if they could flip the minds of Americans or flip history in America, this would change history around the world and completely change the history of the “comfort women.” But now I don’t think that they feel that this is a realistic goal. Actually Hideaki Kase told me that the main battleground is not the US, but Japan. This is interesting because that’s not what they say in their symposiums. What I took this to mean was that even though they’re doing all this stuff in America and they’re putting out websites in English with their narrative, I think the point is for Japanese people who speak English or go abroad to have their narrative that they learned from Japan be validated or verified in English. So they put out all this information in English, so that if anyone were to look it up, they would see English information that supports their view learned in Japan. So the whole point is to get Japanese people to have no doubts about the narrative presented to them, because if Japanese people go abroad and they start hearing the history taught by professors, then they might feel like they were told something that isn’t true. But it’s really hard to get to that point because, there’s trust in the education system, there is trust in the media, there’s trust in the government.
For instance, there was a student that I met in Notre Dame, who was a Japanese exchange student. After watching the film, she was totally shocked because she had blindly believed the government. If you believe that the Japanese government and media are doing the right thing, then anything that goes against that is a lie. So the Koreans are liars; Americans just don’t get it; Europeans don’t get it. When Japanese right wingers put out all this information in English and do symposiums in the US, and try to get white American males to speak for them, it’s all to create enough data, enough media online, so that if Japanese people who speak English were to research it, they would have references in English that they could send to Americans who are arguing with them, or have for themselves to feel like this is the truth.
It got taken down, but there was a website called the Princeton Institute of Asian Studies. Koichi Mera’s group created this website, but there’s no such thing as the Princeton Institute of Asian Studies. The name looked legitimate, but it was basically all the right wing talking points on the Nanjing Massacre and the “comfort women.” Their goal was to make something that looked very legitimate so that the Japanese or American students who look up the “comfort women” issue would think that what they were saying must be true. Fortunately the site got taken down eventually after a lot of complaints.
The last question was knowing what I know now, would I do anything differently. When I first showed the film to a couple of director friends who live in Japan who happened to be American and British, they said it was okay, a bit long, to cut it down at least 30 minutes. I wanted to make it 90 minutes or at most, an hour and 45 minutes, because that’s the sweet spot. I really wanted to cut it down and they suggested cutting it down 30 minutes, but wanted me to add this, that, and the other. So in the end, I never changed it from that first cut that I sent them. Interestingly, they watched it again almost a year later, and they asked if I had changed the film because it was a lot better and they really liked it. Maybe it was because it had music then and I had added animation, but no, I hadn’t changed it and it was the same exact information. I do think there is something to watching the film in a theater with other people and being forced to focus on it, as opposed to when they first watched it on a computer, looking at their phone, stopping it here and there. The feedback I’ve gotten from Western audiences is that they wish that there was more testimonies in it, which I totally understand. But like I said, I have reasons for why I didn’t do it that way.
Suzy Kim
The first documentaries on the “comfort women” such as Byun Young-joo’s “The Murmuring” (1995) and Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s “Silence Broken” (1998) focused very much on testimony.
Miki Dezaki
My film came out at the right time in that sense. It isn’t a film that could have been made in the 1990s. We needed to hear and see those documentaries with testimonies first. In South Korea, many Koreans were telling me that this was a refreshing take on the “comfort women” issue for them. Not that they’re tired of hearing about it, but there’s exhaustion from hearing these heavy stories over and over. So for them to see a film that approached the whole thing from a different angle was really refreshing. So I don’t know if I would do it any differently. I’m usually not happy with what I make and I need other people to tell me that it’s good to appreciate it myself. But with this one, I felt like I could defend why I did the things that I did. There was one clip that I really wanted to use, but didn’t get permission to put in the film. It was from a film called “Senso Daughters” (1989) about Papua New Guinea. The director goes there and meets the people, and some of them are singing Japanese military songs and it’s really bizarre and some of them speak fondly of Japan, but then the film goes to the women who are used as “comfort women.” The male take on the military in the occupation of Papua New Guinea was so different from the female take, because Japanese soldiers took the guy in the film under their wing and he has fond memories of them. But the women were basically used as sexual objects. But the part that I wanted for my film was an interview of a doctor in the film, a Japanese gynecologist, not political at all, who was recruited into the military. He didn’t understand why a gynecologist would be needed there, but then he realized that they wanted him to examine the women. When he checked the 100 women, he said 20 of them were Japanese professional prostitutes, and 80 of them were Korean virgins. He was just saying matter-of-factly that that’s the way it was, and I thought it would be a great clip to include because the right wingers were saying that most of the “comfort women” were Japanese professionals. Ramseyer says this too. He’s taking examples from the Japanese prostitutes at that time, and extrapolating to the general experience for the “comfort women” when that’s not the case.
Because of the lawsuit against me, we had to look at some of the old raw footage of some of the interviews, and I realized that there were a lot of things that I could have put in the film that would have made the rightwingers look worse. But I didn’t put those in the film because the point wasn’t to make them look bad, and doing so goes against the integrity of the film. I show that they were racist and sexist, but it was very minimal. I had to put it in because I couldn’t ignore it. For instance, Hideaki Kase at the very end of the film says, “You can’t rape a woman that you paid.” The mentality is that so long as you throw money at them, it’s fine. There are other things I could have put in the film, but I’m glad I didn’t because the point wasn’t to demonize them. The point was to lay out their arguments and the possible motivations for why they think that way. So despite my usual hatred of my own work, this one, I’m okay with it.
Many thanks to Miki Dezaki!
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