“Japan should recognise the truth of history … Japanese people suffered terribly in the war too, but they were not the only victims.”

“I don’t think the far right is going to shut up anytime soon,” says Bang Chungja, a second-generation zainichi Korean who belongs to an Osaka-based network demanding compensation and an official apology for victims of wartime sexual slavery. While legal crackdowns on hate speech have weakened far-right groups such as Zaitokukai, which calls for the removal of supposed “privileges” for ethnic Koreans, there are no penalties for violators, and much of the abuse has migrated online.įew believe the films – along with a recent freedom of speech exhibition in Tokyo that included a statue symbolising the comfort women – will be enough to rein in rightwing narratives about the zainichi and Japan’s wartime conduct. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images South Korean protesters hold up banners beside a statue of a teenage girl symbolising ‘comfort women’ near the Japanese embassy in Seoul in March 2021. Under government pressure, school textbooks that will be introduced next year omit the word “forced” to describe wartime labourers and make no mention of the military’s role in recruiting comfort women. Japan has pushed bids for Unesco world heritage status for sites that used Korean workers. The balance has tipped in favour of conservative, revisionist interpretations of history. “Unless Japanese news media, especially TV news media, cover my film or Pachinko, there will be no balance,” he said. “Japanese people do not think racism exists in Japan, and they do not like to face up to the fact that they are active perpetrators of racism against the zainichi.”ĭezaki noted how little coverage his legal victory had attracted, even in Japan’s liberal media.

“This accelerated the overall intolerant atmosphere in Japanese society,” says Satoko Oka Norimatsu, a co-coordinator of the International Network of Museums for Peace. Under its longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Japan set about dismantling its “masochism” over the war, casting doubt on accepted narratives about the Japanese military’s role in recruiting comfort women and the use of zainichi as forced labour. “The right-wing nationalist view of the comfort women issue is now the mainstream narrative in Japan,” he says. Shusenjo, a documentary by director Miki Dezaki, examines the controversy over the “ comfort women” – an estimated tens of thousands of women and girls, mainly from the Korean peninsula, who were coerced into working in Japanese military brothels before and during the second world war.ĭezaki, who recently took his documentary around Japan and to the US, had to fight off a legal challenge from right-wing commentators who claimed they had not given their consent to appear in the film. Anna Sawai and Jimmi Simpson in Pachinko.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee