The Competition to Attain Justice for Past Wrongs: the “Comfort Women” Issue in Taiwan

This article joins the debate on transnational campaigns for Japanese historical wrongs in the Asia-Pacific by highlighting the collective “forgetting” on the part of the victims’ society. Focusing on the case of the Taiwanese “comfort women” issue, I argue that the “comfort women” campaign has been overshadowed by identity politics in Taiwan, and has subsequently lost ground to civil society debates about the KMT repressive past. In the context of democratization and a growing political movement to emphasize a Taiwanese identity, I argue that a Chinese Other has been constructed to emphasize the island’s distinctiveness from China. This, however, has entailed drawing attention to historical wrongs committed by the Nationalist Party (Zhongguo guomindang, or KMT) during Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian rule, as well as the emergence of a new historical narrative that emphasizes (relatively) benign Japanese colonial rule. This has had the unintended effect of drawing greater societal attention towards party political disputes over Taiwan’s national identity and how history should be interpreted, rather than the redress for the former “comfort women”.

就歷史錯誤討得公正的競賽：臺灣的”慰安婦”問題

通過凸顯受害社會一方的集體性”遺忘”，本文加入到關於日本在亞太地區的歷史錯誤的跨國運動的辯論之中。聚焦於臺灣的”慰安婦”問題，本文認為”慰安婦”運動先是被臺灣的身份政治問題所遮蔽，其後又被公民社會關於國民黨壓迫下的過去的辯論所取代。在民主化和強調”臺灣人”身份的政治運動不斷增強的形勢下，本文認為一個”中國他者”被塑造出來以強調臺灣島與中國的區別。這一話語導致公眾注意力轉向蔣介石獨裁統治下國民黨所犯下的歷史錯誤，以及強調日本殖民統治的（相對）”和善”的新曆史敘事的湧現。這無意中將大量的社會關注導向各政黨在臺灣的國家身份及應該如何詮釋歷史等問題上的政治分歧， 而非關注如何補償前”慰安婦”。