History as a political weapon
The latest chapter in the entertaining saga of the post-election-defeated Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) circus was President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-bashing news conference in which tired tropes of DPP-led desinicization and the Tsai administration’s weakness in asserting sovereignty over Itu Aba Island (Taiping Island, 太平島) were yet again espoused.
Legislators at the roasting also renewed the issue of comfort women, the euphemism used to describe the women used as sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War.
While justice and dignity are assuredly things that the women who suffered this horrific fate at the hands of the Japanese deserve, one must also question the KMT’s motives in latching on so fiercely to the cause of Taiwanese comfort women.
Political parties in virtually every country have used history or its distortion as a political tool. The current pursuit of transitional justice by the Tsai administration is no exception and it certainly should be held up by any observer or participant to great scrutiny.
As such, many in the pan-blue camp question current efforts that do not include an examination of the Japanese colonial period or the involvement of Hoklo and Hakka in the Japanese army during this time.
These are valid arguments, but they do not negate the brutality of the more recent period of KMT authoritarianism, the longest imposition of martial law by any regime in history, or the importance of uncovering the truth of those men and women who were jailed, tortured, disappeared, or executed during the White Terror Era.
Those who are making these arguments also fail to realize (or deliberately choose to ignore) the fact that when the KMT arrived in Taiwan in 1945, they made no attempt at transitional justice for the preceding 50 years of Japanese colonial rule, which for many Hoklo and Aborigines had been oppressive and brutal.
In fact, the KMT had every opportunity to press Japan for a full and honest accounting of and apology for the human rights abuses that took place during that time, but instead Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) decided to bury the hatchet with Japan politically in 1952 in order to gain an important economic ally.
Likewise, the issue of comfort women, one which should have been addressed immediately after the KMT took power, was only given public visibility in 1992 and has been touched upon only intermittently since, usually to appeal to anti-Japan sentiment or to discredit the DPP as apologists for what they see as an unrepentant Japanese government.
One can only conclude then that the cause of comfort women, while one that still holds great importance and should be supported by all, is no less a political tool than the transitional justice endeavors of the current DPP administration.
By using it in this manner, it does just as much of a disservice to survivors and the memory of those who have passed, as does ignoring the issue completely.
Jeremy Olivier
Taipei
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