Restless Reconciliation: Unsettling Victimhood and Perpetration

Abstract What does it mean to reckon with imperial violence through legal means decades after the formal end of violence? What do out-of-court settlements settle, and what does reconciliation look like on the ground? This essay ethnographically explores Chinese slave labor settlements that came out of a series of lawsuits filed within Japan since the mid-1990s by survivors against the Japanese government and the corporations that enslaved them in the 1940s. News headlines announcing the successful signing of settlements after decades of legal battle cannot capture the emotional labor of reconciliation as it took shape among Chinese victims and their bereaved families, Japanese lawyers who represent them pro bono, and civic activists in Japan. By illustrating how the transnational legal redress movement itself has become the site of reconciliation, the author shows how the work of reconciliation on the ground defies the assumed model of redress, in which the story ends with the perpetrator acknowledging historical wrongs and making amends. On the contrary, such work comes to unsettle assumptions about where and how reconciliation takes place, who counts as victims, and whose needs are served. This includes facing uncomfortable questions about the lack of accountability within the redress movement itself, reckoning with the unsettled figure of victims who collaborated with the Japanese in victimizing fellow compatriots, and asking what it means to be faithful to historical truths within the context of a movement that operates on the assumption of a clear-cut binary between perpetrator and victim. Instead of settling accounts, the work of reconciliation opens up even more to account for.