SHUSENJO: THE MAIN BATTLEGROUND OF THE COMFORT WOMEN ISSUE

A Victory Lap for a Must-See Documentary

Venue(s): Theater Image Forum
Screenings from April 16 to May 13, 2022.
Language: Japanese, Korean, English with English and Japanese subtitles
Official website: www.shusenjo.com
Theater website: www.imageforum.co.jp/theatre/movies/2411/
Tariff: Check at the official sites.
Talk event: Check details on the official site.

Title: 主戦場 (Shusenjo)
Director: Miki Dezaki Duration: 122min

Miki Dezaki’s landmark documentary Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue has returned to Image Forum with English subs, shortly after the filmmaker won a high-profile lawsuit against him in Tokyo District Court. The suit was filed in 2019 by five of the film’s interviewees, who objected to being termed “nationalists” and “revisionists,” charged him with defamation and demanded a huge sum in damages, as well as an end to screenings of the film. Fortunately, freedom of expression was protected, and you now have another chance to experience Dezaki’s milestone work.

Shusenjo performs the near-miracle of exploring, explaining and de-sensationalizing this most contentious of disputes in Asia, this “gross human rights violation” that has also impacted the lives of women in China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, East Timor and Micronesia.

An incendiary flashpoint in Japan’s postwar relations with Korea and China since the early 1990s, the comfort women have been both helped and hurt by the internet, which contributed to making the issue so complex, it became nearly impossible to parse.

The online proliferation of counterproductive arguments about the treatment of these women allowed doubt to be cast on “the truth” and created an increasingly bifurcated divide. One side supports the victims, who have given moving accounts of the outrages perpetrated against them, for which Japan apologized in 1993; the other side insists the women were well-paid prostitutes and the Japanese government was not complicit in “creating a massive, organized rape system,” as has been charged.

Until Miki Dezaki’s Shusenjo, there had not been public-facing work that thoroughly investigated the facts, figures, opinions and distortions of both sides.

The Japanese-American director decided to tackle the issue after he came under relentless attack from neo-nationalists for posting a YouTube video about racism in Japan. He then spent several years conducting the type of balanced, in-depth reporting that was once the purview of the news media. On his own dime, he criss-crossed the globe, meeting with a wide-ranging group of experts and eyewitnesses, amassing footage from milestone events dating back to before WWII, even conducting man-on-the-street-style interviews. Then he edited it all into a comprehensive, comprehensible whole.

Shusenjo probes a range of critical questions: Were all comfort women “sexual slaves?” What does “coercive recruiting” really mean? Does the often-inconsistent testimony of the elderly victims even matter? Does Japan have a legal responsibility to apologize? Are the Chinese paying for those comfort women statues in California? Where the hell is the smoking gun? Why are venerable newspapers like the Japan Times “redefining” their vocabulary around the issue? And what does it all have to do with Shinzo Abe’s march to remilitarize Japan?

Despite the future-defining seriousness of the subject, it must be noted that Dezaki is a brilliant editor, and watching the film is both an educational and entertaining experience, and should not be missed.

Theater Image Forum