20.12.2014

 

Poklosie

 

Recently, I had a chance to watch a Polish film called Poklosie (Aftermath in English, dir. Władysław Pasikowski, 2012）. The film is a fiction based on a massacre of Jews in Jedwabne in 1941, a town in northeastern Poland. More than three million Jews lived in Poland before the Second World War. Most of them perished in the Holocaust. Non-Jewish Poles also suffered heavy losses under Hitler’s occupation. The Polish deaths amounted to two to three million (1).

 

In Jedwabne, it was the Poles who slaughtered the Jews. The massacre had long been attributed to the Nazis. Many Poles were shocked, even outraged when Polish-American historian Jan Gross published its account (Neighbours, Penguin Books, 2002 ). An official investigation led the Polish President to offer an apology. The Jews were slaughtered with clubs and machetes. Those who escaped were burned to death inside a barn which was torched from the outside.

 

Set in a fictional location, the film focuses on the tension between the protagonists, two brothers who are determined to find the truth of the matter, and the villagers who would rather assign the whole incident to oblivion. In the process, the protagonists learn that the farmland they work on today were expropriated from the murdered Jews, and that their own father was one of the ringleaders of the massacre.

 

It does not seem right to compare Poland, victimized by the Nazi Germany, with Japan, which victimized the rest of Asia. But the subject of the film, the selective erasure of the past in the construction of a nationalist narrative, has particular resonance in Japan today. Intentional forgetting of Orwellian type may be commonplace world over. It must not be tolerated, however, precisely because there are so many instances of it.

 

Benign efforts to remember the past, too, sometimes produce adverse effects. In August this year, Japan’s largest daily, the Asahi Shimbun, admitted that the paper knowingly published articles about the Japanese military sex slaves euphemistically called “comfort women”, based on a false testimony. The report that the army rounded up girls on Cheju Island in Korea turned out to be a lie told by a megalomaniac.

 

There is no way that the Asahi Shimbun can evade moral responsibilities. But the accusations aimed at the paper seem somehow gotten out of hand. The worrying trend is that people here want to believe that the Japanese army committed no wrongdoings, that there were no women who were forced into sex slavery. It begins to sound like that the Japanese army was righteous, that there were no massacres anywhere, not even in Nanjing, and there were no medical experimentations carried out on the living bodies of the Chinese POWs. This is to deny Japan’s criminality in toto.

 

Another worrisome trend is the glorification of the suicide mission. It is easy to sympathize with young innocent men who sacrificed their lives to defend the nation. Such glorification, however, does not call into question the process in which innocence had been forged by the state ideological apparatus. Forgotten are tens of millions of “others” whose lives were deprived of.

 

Many of the so-called “peace museums” founded and run by local prefectures and municipalities in Japan foreground victimization of civilians, such as those who died in indiscriminate carpet bombing of the Americans. Showa-kan museum, built by the state government in the capital, Tokyo, purports to display only the “hardships” endured by the Japanese nationals, such as food shortage and conscripted labour in arms factories. Such displays are misleading in the construction of an ethnocentric history. Obliterated are the suffering and the loss of the others, as if to tell that their suffering is irrelevant to public museums.

 

The Japanese living today, are not, like the protagonists of the film Poklosie, were not, perpetrators. They did not commit criminal acts at first hand. It must, however, be noted and remembered, that the erasure of criminal acts from social memory, also constitutes a criminal act.

 

(Note) Auschwitz Peace Museum in Fukushima, Japan, not too far from the nuclear power plant severely damaged by the tsunami in 2011, displays watercolours painted by Polish children right after the Second World War (wojina w oczach dziecka). They convey to the visitors a sense of deep psychological wounds that Nazi atrocities inflicted on them. Despite the enormity of their suffering, under Hitler’s and Stalin’s regime, Poles are sometimes portrayed as cynical bystanders, as in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shore (1985).

 

 

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収容

あなたは他の市民と同じように仕事をしている。悪事に手を染めたこともなく、納税者としての義務もきちんと果たしている。ところがある日、あなたは街で警官に呼び止められ、捕まってしまう。あなたは言葉も習慣も異なる10人ほどと、狭い部屋で共同生活を送ることになる。食事は配給されるが、外に出ることは許されない。こんな不条理な話が現実に起きている。それが「収容」である。収容はいつ終わるのかも分からない。「あなた」とは日本の有効な在留資格（ヴィザ）を持たないか、あるいは、その有効期限が切れてしまった外国籍市民である。

「収容」という言葉から何が連想されるだろうか。ユダヤ人や、ロマ、同性愛者などを絶滅収容所に移送したナチスの「最終解決」か。あるいは同じ頃、合衆国西海岸で「敵性外国人」のラベルを貼られた日系人の収容だろうか。全ての人間性を否定され、多くが生還することのなかった前者と後者の間には明らかな違いがある。しかし、「その人が何をしたか」ではなく、「その人が誰であるか」が争点となっていることが、この二例と、現在、世界各地でイシューになっている移民や非正規滞在者の取扱いを繋いでいる。移動、居住、労働の自由を国内で、あるいはEUのような域内では保障するが、国境の向こうから来た外国人には保障しないという政策は、全ての人間が同じ権利を有するという「人権」の理念に反しないか。

　さらに日本では、ヴィザを持たない難民申請者が、仮滞在などの救済制度が適用されないまま、収容されてしまうことがある。そもそも日本では、難民の認定率が極めて低い。国や年度、また比較の方法によっても幅がでるが、他の先進国では20％から50％ぐらいの認定率が、日本では1％にも満たない。日本も加盟している国連の難民条約では、難民を「迫害を受けるかあるいは迫害を受ける恐れがあるために他国に逃れた」人と定義している。迫害を恐れて難民申請する人が、日本のヴィザを持っていないことは十分に考え得る。

　私は、面会支援をおこなっている人権団体の活動に参加して、ゼミの学生と共に、法務省入国管理局の収容施設を訪れる機会を得た。そこで出会ったのは、日本人の配偶者がいても偽装結婚を疑われてヴィザをもらえないフィリピン人から、民族の弾圧が出国の主要動機となったクルド人までさまざまであったが、日本で暮らすこと＝犯罪として、その人たちに社会生活を認めず、家族からも切り離して「収容」することには強い疑問を持った。入国制限を緩めれば移民が急増して社会が混乱に陥る、という主張も理解できる。しかし、自由を奪って閉じ込めることが、人の精神をどれほど傷つけるかを想像して欲しい。入国管理の対象である前に、その人たちは人間であるのだから。

 

Incarceration

Incarceration

 

Your daily routine is nothing extraordinary. You go to work, come home, and spend the weekend with your family. You pay your taxes. You are a law-abiding citizen. The way you speak Japanese, however, betrays that you are “foreign”. One day, you are hailed by a police officer at a street corner. You are arrested and confined in a small room with about ten other inmates who speak languages different from yours. You are fed so that you will not starve. But you are not allowed to go out. Kafkaesque? No. It is real. You are in Japan without a proper visa, or your visa has expired.

 

Incarceration, an ominous word. It evokes images. An image of Nazi “final solution” by which millions perished: Jews, Romanies, homosexuals, among others. An image of “Enemy Aliens” who spent the war-time years in desert concentration camps in the American West, may also be conjured up. An image of Guantánamo, perhaps. The circumstances under which people were confined differ. Nazi final solution, some argue, was beyond comparison. Today, the images of incarceration are linked with the issue of border control. Illegal aliens are sought out, detained and deported all over the world. People are incarcerated, not because of what they did, but because of who they are. Freedom of movement and freedom of work are guaranteed within the borders of one state, or within the borders of a group of countries, as in the EU. The same freedom is not accorded to others who have come across the borders.

 

What makes the situation in Japan more annoying is that asylum seekers without a visa are also subject to incarceration when their requests for provisional stay are denied. To begin with, Japan has an extremely poor track record when it comes to refugees. Whereas some 20 to 50 percent are granted refugee status in other “advanced democracies”, the rate here remains less than one percent. A refugee, the UN convention defines, is a person who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted, is unable to return to the country of his/her nationality”. It is possible that those who fled persecutions arrive in Japan without a proper visa.

　

Last year, I had a chance to visit a detention centre run by the Ministry of Justice with my students. We went with people from a human rights NGO as part of their programme to support detainees. Among the detainees we met was a Philippino who had married a Japanese. His request for a spouse visa had been denied as the authorities suspected that his marriage was not genuine. Another detainee was a Kurd who fled persecutions in Turkey. I wonder if the state is not exercising excessive power by depriving these people of a life of an ordinary citizen and by putting them through a traumatizing experience of incarceration.

 

あなたは他の市民と同じように仕事をしている。悪事に手を染めたこともなく、納税者としての義務もきちんと果たしている。ところがある日、あなたは街で警官に呼び止められ、捕まってしまう。あなたは言葉も習慣も異なる10人ほどと、狭い部屋で共同生活を送ることになる。食事は配給されるが、外に出ることは許されない。こんな不条理な話が現実に起きている。それが「収容」である。収容はいつ終わるのかも分からない。「あなた」とは日本の有効な在留資格（ヴィザ）を持たないか、あるいは、その有効期限が切れてしまった外国籍市民である。

「収容」という言葉から何が連想されるだろうか。ユダヤ人や、ロマ、同性愛者などを絶滅収容所に移送したナチスの「最終解決」か。あるいは同じ頃、合衆国西海岸で「敵性外国人」のラベルを貼られた日系人の収容だろうか。全ての人間性を否定され、多くが生還することのなかった前者と後者の間には明らかな違いがある。しかし、「その人が何をしたか」ではなく、「その人が誰であるか」が争点となっていることが、この二例と、現在、世界各地でイシューになっている移民や非正規滞在者の取扱いを繋いでいる。移動、居住、労働の自由を国内で、あるいはEUのような域内では保障するが、国境の向こうから来た外国人には保障しないという政策は、全ての人間が同じ権利を有するという「人権」の理念に反しないか。

　さらに日本では、ヴィザを持たない難民申請者が、仮滞在などの救済制度が適用されないまま、収容されてしまうことがある。そもそも日本では、難民の認定率が極めて低い。国や年度、また比較の方法によっても幅がでるが、他の先進国では20％から50％ぐらいの認定率が、日本では1％にも満たない。日本も加盟している国連の難民条約では、難民を「迫害を受けるかあるいは迫害を受ける恐れがあるために他国に逃れた」人と定義している。迫害を恐れて難民申請する人が、日本のヴィザを持っていないことは十分に考え得る。

　私は、面会支援をおこなっている人権団体の活動に参加して、ゼミの学生と共に、法務省入国管理局の収容施設を訪れる機会を得た。そこで出会ったのは、日本人の配偶者がいても偽装結婚を疑われてヴィザをもらえないフィリピン人から、民族の弾圧が出国の主要動機となったクルド人までさまざまであったが、日本で暮らすこと＝犯罪として、その人たちに社会生活を認めず、家族からも切り離して「収容」することには強い疑問を持った。入国制限を緩めれば移民が急増して社会が混乱に陥る、という主張も理解できる。しかし、自由を奪って閉じ込めることが、人の精神をどれほど傷つけるかを想像して欲しい。入国管理の対象である前に、その人たちは人間であるのだから。