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エイゴ メディア ノ イアンフ ホウドウ ト ソノ ケイコウ 90ネンダイ ショトウ ノ ホウドウ オ チュウシン ニ

Formulation of the Comfort Women Discourse in International Society

Japanese (日本語)

国際協力論集

23(1)

1-19

神戸大学大学院国際協力研究科

2015-07

2015-09-01

Since the 1980s, the historical disputes between Japan and South Korea have been local disputes in Northeast Asia, and international society has not paid much attention. However, the comfort women dispute drew the attention of international society as soon as it began to be discussed at the beginning of the 1990s. This situation has not changed since then, and the topic of comfort women has remained the central and most important subject among the many historical issues in Japan’s past regarding World War II and colonial rule prior to 1945. In spite of the importance, scholars have not studied why this issue has drawn the attention of international society or how their understanding of the issue was formulated. As long as there are any diplomatic concerns, which are admittedly important, it is important to analyze how those concerns were found and how people formed their understanding of the issue, in order to understand the development of the issue. As such, this paper analyzes the discourse regarding the comfort women issue in the English media in the early 1990s, when it was first formulated in international society. The paper focuses on English media because they paid close attention to these issues, after the Japanese and Korean media, and because they have a greater influence on discourse in international society than media in other languages. The process of formulating the discussion regarding comfort women has two detailed steps. The first step was in December 1991, when the comfort women victims sued the Japanese government in Tokyo. Because December 7, 1991, was the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, English media reported this news as one of the most important negative Japanese legacies of Japan during World War II. However, the attention of the English media to the issue was just temporary at this stage. The second stage came in January 1992, after the Japanese newspaper Asahi sensationally reported the discovery of historical documents that showed the involvement of the Japanese government in the control of the comfort station system. The number of reports jumped after that, and the English media conveyed an understanding of the issue and of the petition filed by the victims in Japanese court. The basic understanding of the English media was formulated during this stage, and it has not changed much since then. The first reason the English media accepted the viewpoint of the victims, and not that of the Japanese government, is that the English media at that time already had a negative opinion of the stance of the Japanese government regarding historical disputes, before the comfort women issue was brought up. At the same time, some members of the media had also mounted a campaign that criticized violations of human rights in Japanese sex industries. Those negative opinions of the Japanese government and society helped formulate the discourse.

紀要論文