동아시아에서의 제2차 세계대전의 기념과 집단기억

초록

As 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Ⅱ, numerous commemorative events were held in countries of East Asia. ‘Commemoration’ refers to the symbolic act of creating a homogeneous time-space for a community and a communal contemporaneity through the representation of a ‘collective memory.’ The V-day celebrations of China and Taiwan, the memorial services for the war dead in Japan, the Liberation Day ceremonies of Korea are all geared toward the representation and reproduction of collective memories. The differences among these events chiefly lie in the attitudes toward war. In August of 2015, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave a statement on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. Although his statement included words such as ‘remorse’ and ‘apology’ for the past war, they were of the past tense, simply reiterating the position of the previous cabinets. While the damage and suffering incurred by the people of Japan as well as the countries that fought against Japan were described, not a word was said about the Korean men who had been conscripted into the war, or of the Korean women who had been used as comfort women for the Japanese soldiers. The statement by Abe has drawn various responses. The responses by the media and intellectuals within Japan as well as those of other countries in East Asia have demonstrated clearly the differences in the understanding of the past colonial rule and aggressive war by Japan. And these differences in understanding are intricately linked with differences in the memory of war, particularly collective memory of war. The differences in the collective memory of war are easily recognizable in the discordances in the understanding of the nature of the Asia-Pacific War, war and post-war responsibility, and the truth of Nanking Massacre. Each East Asian country has its conservatives, progressives and moderates, each with a different stance toward the above issues. And they are fiercely competing against each other to create a memory that is favorable to their own stance, and furthermore to turn it into the collective memory of their society, that is, history. The ongoing conflicts among various groups in East Asia surrounding history, particularly war memory, are unlikely to subside in the near future. However, with the progression of globalization, discourses and collective memories that are not founded on universal values are increasingly being discredited.

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