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Debating Shusenjo - the Main Battlefield of the Comfort Women Issue: Director Miki Dezaki in conversation with Mark R. Frost and Edward Vickers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Miki Dezaki
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Abstract

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This Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus special issue on “The Comfort Women as Public History” concludes with documentary filmmaker Miki Dezaki in conversation with Edward Vickers and Mark R. Frost. Dezaki's film Shusenjo, released in 2018, examines the controversy over “comfort women” within Japan, as well as its implications for Korea-Japan relations. Dezaki, himself Japanese-American, also devotes considerable attention to the growing ramifications of this controversy within the United States, as an instance of the increasing international significance of the comfort women issue. In this discussion, he, Frost and Vickers reflect on the messages of the film, the experience of making and distributing it, and what this reveals about the difficulty - and importance - of doing public history in a manner that respects the complexity of the past.

Keywords

Comfort womenfilmfilmmakingpublic historyUSAKoreanationalismcensorshiplitigation
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 19 , Issue 5 , March 2021 , e11
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2021

References

Notes

1 This conference was made possible by funding kindly provided by the Resona Asia-Oceania Foundation, Kyushu University's ‘Progress 100‘ scheme, and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.

2 Okano Yayo. ‘Prime Minister Abe's Constitutional Campaign and the Assault on Individual Rights,‘ Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (2018), Vol. 16, Issue 5, No. 3, Article ID: 5119.

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5 The Cove is a 2009 American-made documentary film directed by Louis Psihoyos about dolphin hunting in Taiji, in Japan's Wakayama Prefecture.

6 Edward Vickers (2012). “西遊記の如意棒”手に強固な決意と勇気を ('Having the firmness of purpose and courage to grasp the Monkey King's Magical Wish-granting Staff), in 外交 (Diplomacy), Vol. 15, September 2012: special feature commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, pp. 82-88.