From Responsibility to Compassion – Lessons from the Controversy over “Comfort Women” in Japan –

Abstract

This article intends to find some clues to a solution for an important question about the concept of responsibility, namely whether and (if so) how people who were not directly involved are able to take responsibility.
For that purpose, we begin by following and analyzing a controversy that has been present in Japan since the turn of the century over the question of how we should memorialize the wartime past, especially the so-called “comfort women” during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Participants in this controversy could and should be classified along two opposing axes, “affirmative vs. critical” toward the Japanese past, and “history vs. story” about the images of the past.
We then make some considerations on responsibility in history, focusing on the concept of “post-war responsibility” presented and argued in that controversy. This thesis is based on the original meaning of the word “responsibility,” i.e., the “ability to respond.” Its advocates claim that even those not directly involved have a responsibility when called by the involved, for they have the ability to respond.
Finally, we try to make this thesis more acceptable to more Japanese people by ridding it of its prescriptive overtones. The resulting annoyance is brought about by the fact that the post-war responsibility thesis is based on a one-sided, collective, and memoryoriented concept of responsibility. To make the discussion about the past and responsibility (especially for those who were not involved) productive, it will be necessary to shift the discussion framework from a “responsibility-based collective memory” to a “compassion-based individual history.”