ABSTRACT
This motion reflected an ongoing campaign by many, including groups such as ALPHA (Association for Learning and Preserving the History of World War II in Asia) as well as partners in the Korean and Filipino communities, to help obtain justice for the many women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese imperial forces. The campaign was also endorsed by the National Association of Japanese Canadians. For many people, the elderly survivors among the “comfort women” are a living emblem of unresolved issues from the war. And in Canada, where today Asian Canadians constitute a large proportion of the population in major cities, political parties could ill afford to ignore the movement; and thus the resolution gained all-party support in the Canadian parliament. Such actions, however, have not been without controversy. In 2009 Harper Collins published a book, Nest of Spies, written by journalist Fabrice de Pierrebourg and Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) official. The two authors accused ALPHA (although not named specifically, the group was clearly identified by the description) of being “agents of the Chinese government.” Such characterizations harken back to an earlier era, when people of Asian heritage were racialized as alien others and potential fifth columnists. ALPHA launched a libel suit against the authors, the publisher, and newspapers that repeated the claim. Harper Collins quickly folded their tent, as did the newspapers. The book was withdrawn and the newspaper
printed retractions. This anecdote highlights the fact that, for some in Asian Canadian communities, the legacies of World War II in Asia remain a concern and that racism, ostensibly overcome with Canada’s official adoption of multiculturalism in the 1980s, remains a potent force. In a similar vein, John Dower’s recent work, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/ Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq, frequently alludes to racist attitudes on the part of US officials involved in waging war on Iraq.1 That Dower should mark these instances is not surprising, given his previous work on racism in the Pacific War.2 What is surprising is the persistence, decades after the civil rights movement, of “the imagined dichotomy between rational Westerners and irrational hordes of people of color that, for most Caucasians, never ceases to be gospel.”3 These accounts underscore two themes that I apply to this discussion of the San Francisco System. First, many people in Asian Canadian communities had an abiding concern about the peace treaty and post-war arrangements in East Asia – an interest that continues to this day. Second, the rise of the post-war San Francisco System was closely linked not only to the geostrategic politics of empire but also to racism. How we associate or dissociate racism from other factors in a system of unequal relations is a continuous challenge, but no more so than in other questions, including the interrelationship between class and gender, for example. In this chapter I use the term race to talk about the social construction of categories of people based on physical appearance, ethnicity, or culture that reflect power relations. Racialization refers to the process of constructing “race.” Racism is defined as racialization organized into exclusions that have significant negative consequences for the excluded.4 I argue that our understanding of the 1951 peace treaty and the post-war system that evolved out of it must take into account racism, not as the sole or necessarily the determining factor in every instance, but rather as an ideological and systemic formation that those in power both reflected and influenced, and that shaped political and strategic outcomes in the post-war era. White supremacy was not land-locked, but arose in tandem with the modern age of imperialism; it found clear expression in the cataclysm of World War II. By looking at the treaty from the position of those whom the treaty marginalized or who were rendered invisible in the process, including Asian Canadians or other diasporas, we gain a fuller understanding of the politics of power and domination. What is quite remarkable in the case of the peace treaty is how the majority, both of people and countries of Asia, were excluded by the politics of empire and race at San Francisco. Thus, this account provides a different yet complementary lens to the more traditional geostrategic perspective and renders visible the multiple and intersecting layers of race and empire that were at work in the making of the postwar order in East Asia. Including the diasporas in our account of the post-war system also provides new ideas regarding redress and reconciliation, a matter in which a number of Asian Canadian communities now have considerable experience.
