The Emperor and Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ : At the Crossroads of Taboo and De–Historization–A Focus on Wartime Generation Filmmaker Okamoto Kihachi

The representations of the ‘Emperor’ and ‘Comfort Women’ in Okamoto Kihachi's post– war Japanese films vividly demonstrate two contrasting approaches employed by post–war Japanese society in handling historical ‘taboos’ and the mechanism of ‘de–historization.’ On the one hand, the representation of the ‘Emperor’ cautiously broke a powerful ‘taboo’ that was once a pre–war sacrosanct domain. By having an actor portray the Emperor with human characteristics on screen, this directly intervened in historical memory, contrary to de–historization, contributing to the reconstruction of a new collective/national memory for post–war Japanese society. By depicting the Emperor as bearing the burden of wartime anguish, it aimed to recontextualize him within historical narratives, dismantling past taboos and incorporating them into a new memory. On the other hand, the representation of ‘Comfort Women’ functioned as a core mechanism to thoroughly ‘de–historize’ them, concealing their tragedy and coercion, even as they appeared as central elements in the film's comedic war depictions. They were portrayed as natural fixtures of the battlefield, sometimes used for comic effect or depicted as subsidiary figures to male characters. This served to invisibilize their real historical suffering and the traces of wartime sexual violence, inducing oblivion. Furthermore, even after the ‘Comfort Women’ issue became a public discourse in the 1990s, the tendency of some researchers to deliberately downplay or avoid mentioning their existence indicates the formation of a new ‘taboo’ that reinforces de–historization through the suppression of uncomfortable truths. Thus, the contrasting ways in which these two ‘taboos’ — the ‘Emperor’ and ‘Comfort Women’ — were handled in Okamoto's films clearly reveal a dual and problematic aspect of post–war Japanese society: its evasion of historical responsibility and its formation of a distorted collective memory by invisibilizing uncomfortable truths.