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Most importantly it finds answers to some of the biggest questions for Japanese and Upcoming Koreans: Were comfort women prostitutes or sex slaves?

Were they coercively recruited? And, does Japan have a legal responsibility to apologize to the former comfort women? Because he spoke out it became national news — it was on NHK. Then on the last day of the festival they were able to show my film. That was a win for us, in a way. EV: Oh really? MD: Yep. And then UC Berkeley got contacted. I would say a lot of the more prestigious schools in the US are concerned. Even Berkeley was concerned about showing this film at one point. EV: A lot of people have written about the intimate connection between Japanese studies in many top universities and the Japan Foundation, the Japanese Government, and their funding networks.

It is certainly about funding. And very nice funding is available for overseas scholars who want to come to Japan. If you are a Japan Studies scholar and value your networks in Japan, you would perhaps be wary of biting the hand that feeds you. Lots of people signed up to it, if I remember correctly, including a number of Japan specialists. MD: If there is some kind of trend, it seems to be that Japanese consulates reach out to universities that they have relationships with, where they help each other or do joint events together.

MF: Related to this, I have a further question, Miki. Colleagues of his get emails from alleged Chinese postgraduate students supposedly exposing his flawed research methods.

Have you faced anything like that? Or even, at a one-on-one level, anyone publicly denouncing your film? MD: I have had a couple of encounters. There was that guy. But when I was in Minnesota and at Notre Dame, I ran into some Japanese students there, some were on exchange and others were regular students. One of the students at Notre Dame said to me that she was just totally shocked after the film.

She had just believed that Japan was doing the right thing. This is one of those things where she just had faith in Japan, because she probably thinks of herself as always trying to do the right thing. So, if suddenly the Japanese government is saying that there was no wartime coercive recruitment and no sexual slavery then she would tend to side with that.

Another Japanese student I met was a football player who basically came to the US to play football — his professor was telling me about him before the screening, and that before the film he had been quite resistant to some materials on the comfort women issue that his professor had presented him.

So, the professor thought it would be interesting to therefore see what the student said after seeing the film. After it, this student and I had a great conversation and he was basically shocked just like that girl was. A similar thing happened at Waseda University. But the problem is getting them through the doors of the cinema in the first place, of course.

MD: Exactly. This was something that went down very strongly at our conference in Kyushu, and in fact had some of us wondering what we were doing and why so little of our research had tackled the power behind the production of these rightist, revisionist, narratives. You conclude that such denials are rooted in ultra-nationalist anxieties about human rights, global feminism, and the threat they pose to Japanese national identity as Japanese rightists imagine it. How far were you out on your own doing this work?

I realize there was a lot that began to be published in Japan from about Nippon Kaigi. But was this knowledge starting to spread amongst certain groups when you were making this film, or was this something you were really picking up and circulating for the first time? Books were coming out about it; television shows were discussing it. It really blew up over there. But the film came out in South Korea on July 25th [], and when I toured there most of the questions from the media were about the Nippon Kaigi, because they were so fascinated with it.

At that time, Japan and South Korea had this trade restriction thing going on, so people there were really upset with Japan and trying to understand why Japan was doing what it was. My film gave them some answers. In Japan, as you said, the whole Nippon Kaigi thing broke from I was really happy that such a highly regarded political scientist shared the same hypothesis.

EV: My impression is that most ordinary people in Japan are not very conscious of the Nippon Kaigi and what it gets up to. But the people who are interested in this kind of thing — many of them are already aware of what it is and what it does.

The problem is reaching out beyond that coterie of scholars and activists to the broader public and getting them to take some interest and to care. MD: I will say that a lot of professors in Japan now assign this movie as extra credit to their students, so there have been a lot of college students in the theatres, and a lot of screenings in Japanese universities.

Most of these were not public, but universities were getting this out to their students who previously probably had no idea about this stuff.

So that, to me, is really great. MF: I think the fact Japanese professors are setting this film in class is quite something, quite a sign — MD: The Japanese professors who have done it seem to be very, very progressive.

EV: Exactly. But you know, young students when they see that none of their Japanese professors are talking about this, this gives them a lot of internal conflict. The student I mentioned actually challenged me, because she wished I had done the narration in Japanese, because she usually only hears this stuff in English.

MF: This is something many of us were struck by at the screening in Kyushu: the work your film is doing in this respect. In that respect, it really is revealing in your film having the Nippon Kaigi rightists speak for themselves. Nonetheless, they do openly put their beliefs out there. Ed and I are interested in what happens to historical understanding in these battles over history involving the state, activists and activist-intellectuals. So, what do you think happens to historical research when it becomes part of a wider political battle which relates as much to present-day politics as it does to the past?

Because of this, I feel privileged to have been able to make this film and feel a great sense of responsibility to present what I learned through my research and interviews with integrity.

Shusenjo: The Main Battlefield of the Comfort Women Issue comes at a time of increasing nationalism all over the world and polarization of news media. While struggling to edit the film, it became clear to me why depth and balance are rarely found in films or reports on the issue, and that is because it is much less entertaining.

There is a satisfaction or enjoyment in being reassured that our viewpoint is right, which is why news and documentaries are so one-sided these days. Shusenjo may be an uncomfortable film to watch for both liberals and conservatives, and it may feel overly detailed to viewers from the West, but it was important to de-sensationalize the issue and thoroughly address each of the.

That being said, I tried to make the information as easily digestible as possible, and I hope that Shusenjo provides the depth of information and context that can lead to more productive discussions on the issue in the future. Finally, Shusenjo focuses on the comfort women issue between Koreans and Japanese, as they are the most politically active groups; however, I feel it is important to mention that the comfort women system affected the lives of women from all over East Asia, including China, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, East Timor and Micronesia.

Thank you for your interest in Shusenjo. If you would like to offer your support, we do accept donations. We accept donations through PayPal. Please see the link below. Chung sees this as a basic human rights issue, specifically the treatment of women in wartime. Miki Dezaki, the director of the documentary film, would agree. He recently completed a graduate program in global studies at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Dezaki also worked for the Japan Exchange Teaching Program for five years and then became a Buddhist monk in Thailand for one year. Dezaki credits being a Japanese-American male with allowing him to access people on both sides of the issue and hopes this will allow him to promote a more productive conversation moving forward.