Unsettling nostalgia through irony: cinematic war memory and gender

War memory haunts us always in the present. It haunts more disturbingly when issues of war responsibility and reconciliation remain unresolved. As the seventieth anniversary of the end of the War in the Pacific approached, many nervously awaited the statement scheduled for release by right-wing Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Although Japan's close allies including the United States were quick to commend Abe's August 2015 statement, others including feminist scholars like ourselves were disappointed. We were particularly despondent at the fact that, apart from a blanket statement to the effect that 'there were women behind the battlefields whose honour and dignity were severely injured' (Abe 2015), there was no response to on-going demands to recognise the voices and experiences of Imperial Army sex-slaves, the so-called 'comfort women'. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that many 'comfort women' came from the Korean Peninsula, unlike China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, South Korea was not specifically mentioned by Abe. Korea was only abstractly implied with the use of the term 'elsewhere'.