한･일 중･고교 역사 교과서의 ‘위안부’ 서술 비교

Abstract

The difference between Korea and Japan in perceiving the Japanese military "comfort women" issue is emerging not only among political leaders and government offices, but more extensively among opinion leaders including journalists as well as the general public. When an aggressor nation's perception of a past wrongdoing starkly differs from that of a victimized nation and even functions as a current source of political and diplomatic conflict, how should the issue be covered in history textbooks? Middle and high school history textbooks in Korea and Japan are both published through a screening system, but there is an obvious difference in the criteria each country applies toward descriptions regarding the Japanese military comfort women. In Korea, the criteria for textbook authoring (2011) and teaching the curriculum (2015) shows indications of reinforcing comfort women descriptions by stipulating the inclusion of such descriptions and suggesting certain (descriptive) guidelines regarding the age and the number of comfort women. In Japan, on the other hand, political pressure and social pressure has been diluting descriptions about comfort women in textbooks. This has even led to requests for the inclusion of government opinions on the issue, and such requests have been criticized by scholars and related organizations. Reconciliation is not to gradually forget about a painful past. It needs to be accompanied by a process that determines the entity responsible for the pain. And through such a process the perpetrator must atone in order to bring closure and facilitate social unification. In that sense, the travails and struggles that authors go through to offer a balanced description of the historical reality behind the Japanese military comfort women and recent developments associated with the issue should be highly regarded, including the efforts of the authors of Manabisha's middle-school history textbook and Jikkyo's high-school Japanese history textbook. Yet, creating descriptions aimed at achieving a broader and general degree of conflict resolution and reconciliation requires a change in Japan's socio-political atmosphere that would result in a change in Japan's textbook screening criteria. Because the comfort women issue somewhat recently emerged as a topic of discussion in Korean society and is still undergoing investigation, the issue continues to be surrounded by a considerable amount of misconceptions and misunderstandings. Descriptions about the issue must therefore break away from such misconceptions, for example, regarding the difference between comfort women and the Korean Women's Labor Corps. They should instead be featured through a more general perspective that goes beyond Korea-Japan relations as a historical case of systematic, organized violence against women, which is still being committed all over the world. In addition, textbook authors in Korea and Japan should together review how the comfort women issue is being described in textbooks from both countries, discuss how the issue should be described, and come up with a jointly devised guideline for descriptions about the issue. At a time when the Korean and Japanese government are drifting further apart from one another on how they each regard the comfort women agreement made on December 28, 2015, civilian exchanges like discussions between Korean and Japanese textbook authors should be able to serve as priming water for the lengthy process headed toward conflict resolution and reconciliation.