The Ama Museum in Taipei, which is dedicated to raising awareness about “comfort women,” last week hosted an 11-day international film festival to draw attention to the issue of violence against women, which has been politicized to serve certain agendas.
The festival began on Thursday last week, ahead of the International Memorial Day for Comfort Women on Monday.
It featured movies and documentaries that depict the physical plight and emotional distress of Taiwanese, Korean and Chinese women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.
The line-up also included a 2013 drama depicting wartime atrocities, especially those against women, committed during the ethnic cleansing of Visegrad in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992.
The festival’s organizer said they decided to feature a film that did not seem to fit the overall theme to underline what the comfort women issue is really about: crimes against humanity.
For a long time, the comfort women issue has been used as a political tool to stir up nationalist feelings or anti-Japan sentiment, especially in South Korea and China.
It is no different in Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has long accused the Tokyo-friendly Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of remaining indifferent to the issue due to political concerns.
The perpetrators should indeed be called out and denounced. Japan should answer for its crimes, just as the KMT regime should be held to account for its brutalities during the 228 Massacre and the 38-year-long Martial Law era.
Human rights violations need to be stopped via collective attention and pressure, but such actions should spring from the belief that every individual’s right to life, liberty and security must be protected and guaranteed — they should not be motivated by the goal of reigniting past ethnic conflicts or winning the favor of certain voters.
A considerable percentage of Taiwanese seem apathetic to the comfort women issue or the 228 Massacre, except for those who are politically active or are invested in public affairs, because the issues have become political weapons, detached from human compassion.
That is why Wu Hsiu-ching (吳秀菁), director of the second Taiwanese documentary on comfort women, The Song of the Reed (蘆葦之歌), took an approach different from the first one, 1998’s A Secret Buried For 50 Years — A Story of Taiwanese Comfort Women (阿媽的秘密─台籍「慰安婦」的故事), which adopted an accusatory tone against the Japanese government.
The Song of the Reed focuses on the emotional healing process of Taiwan’s surviving comfort women, their interactions with each other, the support of their families and a major problem faced by most of the nation’s older generation — loneliness.
The approach does not seek to downplay Japan’s role in the issue or whitewash the former imperial power’s atrocities.
It aims to bring the focus back on the victims and try to examine the issue from the perspective of human rights, instead of politics.
Crimes against humanity should be taken seriously and at face value.
They should never be twisted, neglected or misinterpreted for political expediency.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry