Traumatizing and Healing: How Media Memorialize the Comfort Women
by Chengcheng Xu
B.A., Nankai University, 2016
Extended Essays Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
in the School of Communication (Dual Degree Program in Global Communication) Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology
© Chengcheng Xu 2018 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Summer 2018
Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or re-use is done in accordance with the relevant national copyright legislation. Approval
Name: Cheng Cheng Xu Degree: Master of Arts Title: Traumatizing and Healing: How Media Memorialize the Comfort Women Program Co-Directors: Yuezhi Zhao, Adel Iskandar
Yuezhi Zhao Senior Supervisor Professor
Adel Iskandar Program Director Assistant Professor
Date Approved: August 14, 2018
ii Abstract
Until recently, the story of “comfort women” was more or less suppressed as a kind of national humiliation in China; however, it has received more diverse media attention in recent years. Through the framing analysis of articles on the issue of comfort women in three different newspapers in China, this research examines similarities and differences in media treatment of the topic. While differences in media frames reflect variations in the national, provincial and metro orientations of different newspapers, overall media memorialization of the topic by the three newspapers reveals that the cultural wound is still not healed both on a national and individual level. The paper argues that Chinese media should take the responsibility of crafting new identities for comfort women, in order to help them finally gain respect.
Keywords: comfort women; media frame; collective memory; cultural trauma; gender representation
iii Acknowledgements
I would like to extend thanks to the many people, who so generously contributed to the work presented in this thesis throughout the past year of the Double Degree program in Global Communication at SFU.
Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Yuezhi Zhao for the continuous support of my study and related research, for her patience, motivation, and immense knowledge. Her guidelines helped me in all the time of writing of this thesis. Thanks to that, I have a strong feeling that my thesis improved a lot. Besides the academic support, she also found me a wonderful opportunity for field placement, helping me to get a better understanding of my future career.
Besides my supervisor, I would like to thank the rest of the Double Degree Program: Dr. Adel Iskandar and Dr. Kirsten McAllister. It is their insightful comments and encouragement that empower me to be confidence and brave. I will definitely bring their wishes to find my way. Never give up and never stop.
Similar, profound gratitude goes to our TA Xiaoxing Zhang for he always provided us with valuable suggestions and resources whenever we needed him. I would also like to acknowledge and deeply thank Dora Lau who has dedicated herself to this program.
I am also hugely appreciative to my friendly cohort. We have spent a whole year to know each other and finally we have become best friends. Now I have very fond memories of my time in Vancouver. I would treasure the precious relationship forever.
Finally, but by no means least, thanks go to mum, dad and all of people who love me for almost unbelievable support.
iv Table of Contents
Approval ...... ii Abstract ...... iii Acknowledgements ...... iv Table of Contents ...... v List of Figures...... vi
Section 1. Introduction ...... 1
Section 2 Collective Memory, Media Memory, and Gender and Nationalism ...... 5 2.1. Collective memory and cultural trauma theory ...... 5 2.2. Media and Memory ...... 8 2.3. Gender and Nationalism: On the Issue of Comfort Women ...... 10
Section 3. Methodology ...... 14 3.1. Previous Literature ...... 14 3.2. Research Method ...... 15
Section 4. Media Memory Difference between National and Local Newspaper ..... 19 4.1. General Description of Newspaper Coverage ...... 19 4.2. Framing Analysis of People’s Daily as a National Newspaper ...... 25 4.3. Framing Aanalysis of Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News as Local Newspapers ...... 28
Section 5. Media Memory Difference between Party Organ and Metropolis Newspaper ...... 32 5.1. Dialogue with the Government: The Discourses of Comfort Women Constructed by Hainan Daily ...... 32 5.2. Alternative Oral History: The Discourses of Comfort Women Constructed by Nanguo Metro News...... 34
Section 6. Conclusion ...... 39
Appendix. Framing Items ...... 42
References ...... 43
v List of Figures
Figure 1...... 21 Figure 2...... 22 Figure 3...... 24 Figure 4...... 30 Figure 5...... 36
vi Section 1.
Introduction
On August 14, 2017, the fifth International Memorial Day for "Comfort Women", Twenty-Two, a documentary featuring interviews with several “comfort women”, who were forced into sexual slavery during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, sparked a nationwide discussion in China, since it was the first time for a film that touches this specific topic to be released to the public under the permission of the Chinese government. For decades, people have not been able to get access to sufficient records or coverage of “comfort women”. Therefore, a question is raised: why is the issue of “comfort women” so sensitive and controversial?
The answer lies in the history of this very issue. The “comfort women” were the sexual slaves raped by the Japanese army during the World War II, most of whom came from China, the Korean Peninsula, Japan, Philippine, and Malaysia. In the beginning, the comfort women system was implemented in an effort to reduce sexually transmitted diseases mostly caused by sexual intercourses among soldiers. Moreover, the Japanese government had to allow the atrocity in order to invigorate the soldiers and improve their battling capacity. The Japanese military even established “comfort stations” to ensure that there were enough sexual slaves to “comfort” the soldiers (Su, 1999). However, the soldiers did not regard those women as companions but as sexual tools to relentlessly vent their spleen and bestiality upon.
China’s Shanxi Province and Hainan Province were the most invaded areas where thousands of local women were constantly transported to “comfort stations”. According to the historical records, Hainan province was one of the regions that had the largest number of “comfort stations” and the largest number of survivors (Liu, 2007, July 6). In recent years, more than 20 “comfort women” in Hainan province have consented to be summoned as the witnesses to Japanese war-time crimes.
The issue of “comfort women” intertwines with many complex historical factors. China’s recovery from World War II, reform and opening-up, the establishment of diplomatic relations with neighbors and even the complicated situation of the world all had
1 an influence on how communities memorialized “comfort women”. Therefore, in order to comply with the specific historical environment and cater to collective demands, the story may have been written in different versions and from different perspectives.
Although the collective memory is controlled and constructed by the government, it is not static but dynamic. As the carrier of national ideology, the media participate in the construction of collective memory (Alexander, et al., 2004). However, influenced by the external and internal factors, different media outlets produce different media memories and lead to different media effects (Shoemaker, 2013). In general, by analyzing the frame difference, we can have a better understanding of how media construct the discourses of “comfort women” and what mainstream ideologies prevail.
For many years, the “comfort women” were regarded as a kind of national humiliation. Also, under pressure from the traditional culture, the survivors refused to speak out in public in fear of misunderstanding from the whole society. In such condition, the media were likely to highlight their agony and describe them as victims. The common narrative storylines included oral accounts of painful experience, accusations against the Japanese government claiming for apology and restitution, and the death of the “comfort women”.
In recent decades, however, the discourses of “comfort women” have received much attention, in sharp contrast to its relative obscurity before 2005, reflecting how collective memory, public history, and politics are interacting with each other. This research is set in the period of 2005 - 2018. It is because the year 2005 is not only the 60th anniversary of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression but also the turning point when China-Japan ODA project (Government Assistance Program) was drawing to an end. Past ODA projects in China included large-scale economic infrastructure projects, such as the construction of roads, airports and power stations, as well as infrastructure projects in medical and environmental areas1. These projects have played a significant role in boosting China's economic growth. The cease of the program suggested that Sino-Japanese relations have stepped into a new stage, when the official interpretation of the memory regarding the World War II would also be changed.
1 Retrieved form the website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/oda/region/e_asia/china/index.html
2 I choose People’s Daily and two newspapers based in Hainan Province (Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News) as my research objects. These three media outlets have different editorial orientations. As a national media and party organ, People’s Daily consciously reflects the mainstream ideology, represents the official position, and presents its stories in an official language. Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News, meanwhile, have devoted themselves to strengthening the local citizens’ memory of “comfort women” by actively adopting the scheme of agenda-setting to place the survivors under the spotlight. One explanation for the attribute is that Hainan Province suffered tremendously from the Japanese atrocities and had the largest number of “comfort women” who still survived.
These three media outlets hold different positions partly because of their different editorial positions within the media system. The People’s Daily as a party organ is more government-oriented, Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News are more market-oriented. Since the media’s positions in the media system make a difference in news frame building, these three media outlets are supposed to produce different media memory resulting in different media effects.
As Lerner (1994) stated, historical memory has a value of healing, and only when it is accurately treated and interpreted can it effectively heal the historical trauma in the nation. With the help of the media, the controversy could be resolved, as the media have the ability to disseminate historical facts and educate the people about war crimes, and the responsibility to reconcile diversified ideologies. In other words, media products provide us with the opportunities to learn more about history and shape our attitudes towards history. This is especially true in the current situation. As China has stepped into a new historical period, the media can do much in writing and dispersing historical knowledge and cultural information to educate future generations in China.
The questions about how to heal the wound of the victims and how to preserve the memory of the history are particularly crucial for both the nation and individuals, especially in terms of those women who experienced the inhumanity and have been suffering from physical and mental trauma for their whole lives. These women are confronted with the dilemma of experiencing isolation from the society and receiving discrimination, for people spontaneously prefer to get rid of the humiliation and misery rather than relive the past (Stein, 2016). Under these circumstances, I will take the perspective of feminist studies to re-examine the history of these “conform women”, to analyze whether the wounds of the
3 “comfort women” were healed, and to discover a new frame of memorialization that helps reflect different dimensions of the history and give voices to those survivors.
The thesis is divided into five sections. Following this introduction with the background and the purpose of my research presented, Section 2 will review the literature on collective memory, media memory and the relationship between gender and nationalism. In Section 3, I will introduce the methodology of frame analysis and clarify the research questions. In Section 4 and Section 5, the frame differences between national and local media, and those between party and metropolis newspaper will be revealed. The fifth section concludes with a discussion of the relationship between media memory and the healing of cultural trauma.
4 Section 2
Collective Memory, Media Memory, and Gender and Nationalism
Collective memory is manipulated and ultimately constructed by the nation. As the main source of information for society, media plays a vital role in constructing and disseminating collective memory. This section aims to clarify the core concepts mentioned in the thesis and investigate previous literature to highlight both the accomplishments and limitations of collective memorialization through media. I will explore the literature surrounding collective memory and cultural trauma and examine how they intertwine with communication, exploring media’s function in the process of reproducing memory. There is further an angle of social gender brought in to the section, focusing on the interplay between feminism and nationalism within the Chinese context.
2.1. Collective memory and cultural trauma theory
The origin of collective memory research dates back to 1898 when Durkheim (1898) first demonstrated that collective memory is different from individual memory. He believes that collective memories can provide a sense of cohesion for collectives and be used as an approach to establish community identity. Moreover, the process of sharing memories in social interactions influences how memories are internalized. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992) first coined collective memory as a term and clarifies the definition in his book “On Collective Memory”:
It is in this sense that there exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to this degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection (p.38).
As Halbwachs (1992) suggested, memory is not static or an eternal truth, but changes across time and space. Most importantly, it needs to be reconstructed according to the specific context. Another feature is that the solidarity of the community has a positive influence on recalling collective memory. That is, the socialization of the collective memory relies heavily on communication within the community.
5 After Halbwachs, research on collective memory developed in a more concrete and practical way as scholars began to pay more attention to how collective memory is socialized. Connerton (1989) focuses on how collective memory is communicated and preserved. He discovers that the impression of the past and historical knowledge are both more or less disseminated and maintained during ritual performances.
Bartlett (1998) adopts an empirical research strategy to study the effect of daily life on the construction of psychological consensus. He profoundly reveals that collective memory can be used to reflect context and ideology in the contemporary period. Individuals are not only the receivers but also the vehicles of delivery for the ideology through interpersonal communication through the action of sharing memories with one another. His research inspired later scholars by concentrating on the individual and highlighting the importance of every day experiences.
The concept of cultural memory is an important supplement to the field of collective memory. German cultural anthropologist Jan Assmann (2011) extended the research in the context of nation and culture, proposing the concept of cultural memory. As he states, the theory of cultural memory relates three elements: memory (the contemporized past), culture and the group (society) to each other. There are six characteristics of cultural memory including “the concretion of identity”, “its capacity to reconstruct”, formation, organization, obligation and reflexivity. Law (2011) focuses on the connection between contemporary memory and previous memory, discussing how to maintain a balance between inherited memory and constructed memory, and between historical records and collective memories. He also argues how memory facilitates national identity.
Some scholars were aware of the particularity of traumatic memory; therefore, they combined the theory of cultural trauma with memory and focused on how trauma is constructed and how it functions within societies and within individuals. Alexander (2004) believes that the generation of cultural trauma is based on consensus when members of a community experience a shocking event leading to unforgettable memory. More importantly, this type of incident has the capability to irreversibly change the future identity of the collective, and therefore the social cohesion is strengthened. Similar findings also exist in other territories. Hu (2010) examines a historical event named "The Funerals of Ch’iu Chin" to analyze the connection between historical commemoration and the production of public memory. The author notes that through various commemorative
6 activities, emotional awareness related to community solidarity is produced and inherited across generations.
Since traumatic memory has developed into a new branch of memory study, more researchers concentrate on clarifying definitions and methodologies used to examine trauma. Wang (2017) defines three important concepts of traumatic memory: traumatic discourses, traumatic performance and trauma construction. In general, traumatic discourse is a collection of cultural traumatic narratives which grant historical traumatic events a sense of integration and promotion at the cultural level. As for "traumatic performance", it plays an important role in trauma construction. During the process of witnessing trauma, the community carries out a performance of the cultural values and religious tenets (Duggan & Wallis, 2011).
Traumatic discourse is a kind of power discourse, for the construction of the traumatic discourse is often constrained by the social context and manipulated by mainstream ideology (Doná, 2010). Due to the complicated domestic and international environments the comfort women issue exists within, especially in terms of China being labeled a defeated nation, the memories from the traumatic events were cautiously controlled by the country. Reilly (2011) identifies the time variation as the main variable of the research and concludes the official language of the anti-Japanese war can be clearly divided into four stages. Before 1982, China deliberately forgot the Japanese atrocities; in the mid-1980s, patriotic educational movements towards war prevailed; in the late 1990s, the historical activism was on stage in order to claim reparations from Japan; around 2005, the government made efforts to reconcile the controversy.
Both scholars in and outside of China are concerned about the interactions between politics, culture and memory. As Gao (2015) states, the explanation for the lack of memory regarding anti-Japanese war in the early stage of China was due to inconsistency with the dominant cultural ideology, “class trauma”, which emphasized that the principle controversy is the conflict between different classes. The finding shows it cannot be summarized as memory amnesia, and instead, should be defined as cultural deconstruction where the symbolic space was emasculated. The cultural trauma brought on by the war was not allowed to be expressed at that time. Liu (2004) believes that the current focus on national humiliation performs the function of activating previous traumatic memory and enhancing the provocation of traumatic discourses. “Traumatic Memory” and
7 “Revival Imagination” construct the characteristic of contemporary Chinese nationalism as "Rejuvenation Nationalism”. It embodies the national aspiration to revive the ancient glory of the nation in order to wash away the humiliation of recent history.
2.2. Media and Memory
As mentioned previously, the concept of collective memory realizes the importance of communication. When people no longer lived in isolated communes where they communicated by talking and listening in person, and gradually stepped into the era of the global village characterized by increased communication between various groups, media products were the most popular and convenient option for people to acquire collective memory. Media memory is a concept put forward in the cross-domain of media studies and memory studies where we can explore how media interacts with history and politics by playing the role of a memory agent in the community (Kitch, 2006).
In the process of reproducing and disseminating memory, media fulfills the mission of spreading mainstream ideology to a wider scale of audiences through a variety of institutionalized communication practices (Alexander, 2004). As Assmann (1995) states, media products are reusable texts, images, and rituals, exclusively possessed by each society. These materials are constantly accumulated and construct media memory. Moreover, media transfers into collective knowledge where the consolidation and hallmark of the community are cultivated.
Similarly, as Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg (2011) explicitly state, rather than being regarded as a "channel" or "process", media should be examined as a self- contained phenomenon. They believe that research around media memory should include the following aspects: the collective history reported by the media, the collective history reproduced by the media (out of specific purposes), and the collective history regarding the media.
There are two prevailing storylines that explain how media produces collective memory. On one hand, by reporting breaking news, media provides people with an opportunity to witness events that they are unable to experience at a personal level. Through this experiential aspect of media, audiences are able to achieve a sense of social recognition. On the other hand, media represents and reproduces history by using the
8 scheme of agenda setting: they decided what we should know and how salient the event or the problem is. Above all, media play the role of “public historian” (Kitch, 1999) by selecting what audiences are exposed to and carefully crafting the presentation of stories.
Edy (1999) systematically explains how media functions as a conceptual tool to interpret history. Firstly, in commemorative and periodical reports, media takes on the responsibility of determining what should be regarded as historical events and defining the social significance of select events. Secondly, cognizant of social contexts, the media conveys a moral standard informing society how to respond to the world around them. Thirdly, the coverage of historical events will use analogies to establish bonding associations between previous personal experiences, collective memories, and current responses and feelings.
The process of coding the coverage is influenced by social context and organizational norms. Therefore, Li (2015) advocates using the term of “memory practice” to understand and deconstruct media memory. He reminds us to pay attention to the cooperation, negotiation and conflicts appearing on the media stage between political power and communities. It is further related to how memory is recognized by the collective in the specific context of politics, society and culture. Shao (2012) proposes that there are three dimensions of media memory including shallow layers, deep layers, and core layers:
It is not only the carrier of national values and cultural genes, but also affected by the media’s position in the overarching media system. Different media outlets have different characteristics and functions, and consequently leads to different internal mechanisms and external representations (p.38).
One of the most common research approaches is to select cases and cross examine media production from various agencies to determine whether or not a media organization’s positionality how collective memory is constructed. Zhang and Gan (2014) investigate the coverages of the Sun Zhigang Incident reported by party organ and metropolis newspapers, arguing that the differences in purposes, motivations, and narrative strategies among media organizations are major contributing factors to differentiated collective memory production amongst media.
Traumatic memory has always been a key focus in the field of media memory and in a Chinese context, it is often associated with another issue: national identity. Research
9 on the relation between media memory and China's national identity foregrounds two events: the creation and dissemination of national myths (triumph and rejuvenation), and traumatic narratives related to nationalism (Li & Huang, 2015).
In an analysis of People’s Daily’s commemorative coverages on the Nanjing Massacre, Li (2014) expresses that the Nanjing Massacre was nested in the framework of the Anti-Japanese War, leading to the lack of independent frameworks and symbolic resources to reproduce the history. The memory is determined by the social mechanism and ultimately controlled by the nation.
In addition to the events that are remembered, those that are forgotten also reflect the principles of the memory mechanism. Therefore, some scholars choose to focus on memories that are excluded from the historical records. Wang (2010) examines the features published on the China’s 60th anniversary by the mainstream media, pointing out that the reports place particular emphasis on the display of achievements and deliberately utilized historical resources to construct morality models and heroes. By contrast, the media ignored the problems and conflicts that were the repercussion of rapid development. Media is part of the social system, and because of that, media memory is partial and political.
2.3. Gender and Nationalism: On the Issue of Comfort Women
Memory is gendered. Studies of women's issues cannot be isolated from a macro framework surrounding the relationship between women and nation. Therefore, I will firstly arrange the research on women's history related to collective memory. The American historian Lerner (1994) was a pioneer of historic memory research as well as a feminist who devoted herself to transform female memory from "supplementary history" to "universal history". Lerner attached great importance to the healing function of historic memory and believed that only when history was rationally understood, accepted and disseminated can historic memory effectively heal cultural trauma. At the same time, the significance of memory lies in the fact that it enables the actors who experience the trauma and their descendants to make peace with history. It would help resolve the contradiction domestically and internationally.
10 On the other side, Chinese scholars focused on the women’s status in the context of national memory. They especially conducted the research in the special period such as the Cultural Revolution. Ai (2010) interviewed several women who were educated urban youth and pointed out that the construction and maintenance of collective memory comes from two origins: one is the social consciousness to record the history, and the other is the psychological needs of confirming self-identity for they needed the memory to memorialize their lost youth.
Guo (2003) focused on the differences between individual experiences and national interpretations. He visited the Ji Village located in Shanxi Province, adopting ethnographic methods to interview local women about their memory around Agricultural Cooperation. The finding is that apart from the pain of the revolution, the community provided women with public sphere where social gender was relatively equal compared to past years. In other words, collective life became an alternative “religious ritual” in which the collective memory as well as community identity were created.
Responded to what I mentioned previously, another genre of research is feminist oral history. It aims to construct history that emphasized women’s experiences and feelings, challenging male dominated history. Traditional historiography research is mainly based on limited historical materials which make it is a relatively passive research model. By contrast, oral history can initially “excavate” history, presenting multiple layers of history. As Bao (2000) mentioned in her book "Feminism and Listening to Women's Voices: Significance, Methods, and Reflections", feminist oral history is an achievement due to the development of women history and feminist studies. This approach advocates bottom-up research methodology and perspective, recognizing the value of individual memory and emphasizing the importance of female subjectivity.
When it comes to the issue of comfort women, since it just receives more attentions in recent decades while relatively obscure in the past, the research regarding to that are insufficient. The scholars mainly focus on discovering historical records such as publishing archives and interviewing survivors. The principle goal is to reveal historic truth. Liu (1999) interviewed comfort women who lived in Meng Village in Shanxi Province. The interviews were regarded as testimony to accuse Japanese brutalities. Su (1998) is a pioneer who elaborates his work on Chinese comfort women. He discovered the distribution of comfort women stations in China and confirmed the number of comfort women raped by Japanese
11 soldiers. Apart from providing the historic evidence, he also criticized the purposes and negative consequences of the comfort women system.
In addition, there are some scholars who pay attention to the influences caused by the issue of comfort women in postwar period, especially in terms of international relationships. Shi and Chen (2016) suggested that South Korea successfully transformed this issue to representative of post-war culture that was accepted by American society, and continually facilitated the U.S. policy toward South Korea.
Some feminists believe that women’s status is subordinated to the national context. Knezevic (1997) pointed out in her article named Affective Nationalism that rape is a tactic of humiliating and polluting the country. She used a metaphor to clarify the relationship between nation and women: nation is a woman's body, or we can say nation is a woman to some extent. Chen & Dai (2004, p.17) also wrote an article explaining the significance of comfort women from a gendered perspective:
Female body is actually a part of the battlefield in international war. In terms of the rape of the female body and the violation of national sovereignty, the occupation of women’s uterus and the invasion of the territory, there is no remarkable difference. In other words, the invaders’ penetration to other nation’s territory should be regarded as “genitalia hegemony”. The Japanese army’s sexual oppression and exploitation towards comfort women should be analyzed at national and ethnical level.
However, there are few articles concentrating on analyzing the discourses of comfort women in the mass media. A majority of scholars place the issue of comfort women in the framework of the Nanjing Massacre and they prefer to analyze coverages reported by mainstream media. Li and Huang (2104) investigated the commemorative articles by People’s Daily from the founding of the People's Republic of China to 2014, pointing out that the prevailed theme of media memory around the Nanjing Massacre was the humiliation frame in which the significance of the victims was weakened. Shi (2017) analyzed the discourses of comfort women constructed by People’s Daily. She revealed the dynamic interaction between public history, socioeconomic context and collective memory according to time variations.
In recent years, as the issue of comfort women gains more attention by more audiences, more scholars begin to discard the national framework to focus on individual
12 experiences. As Song (2016) elucidated, the current discourses of comfort woman fell into the mandatory mechanism of remembering and forgetting, which fully blamed women’s misery on the atrocities of the invading country and neglected the oppression and discrimination within the country. She urged to add a perspective of gender oppression mechanisms to analyze the issue and reconstruct the history of comfort women. Similarly, Korean scholar Choi (2001) believed that the focus of the issue should shift from war compensation to shared responsibility and the encouragement of the development of a new frame that allowed the comfort women to speak out for themselves, so that the post- war trauma can be effectively healed.
13 Section 3.
Methodology
3.1. Previous Literature
According to Pan & Kosicki (1993), framework theory was originated from two fields, one is psychological theory where Minsky (1995) interpreted the frame as the knowledge which is systematically stored in human’s memory. The other one is sociology theory where Goffman (1974) suggested that people use frames to discover and interpret events, giving specific meanings to daily behaviors in the real life. Given the difference between these two definitions, the latter pays more attention to the function of producing and constructing the meaning of social activities. In general, the framework is the apparatus for people to perceive and identify the messages. The specific concepts and ideology are highlighted by framing through that the reality is reorganized (Goffman, 1974).
Based on Goffman’s theory, some scholars began to conduct empirical research. Gitlin (1980) creatively applied the concept of the frame to the field of mass media and political communication, coining the term of “media frame”. He believed that “Framing is persistent selection, emphasis, and exclusion of content to make a certain aspect or aspects of an issue more or less salient (Gitlin, 1980, p. 7)”. Also, news frames are conceptual tools which media and individuals rely on to convey, interpret and evaluate information (Neuman et al., 1992, p. 60).
The issue of how media construct reality is always on debate, resulting in several prominent theories such as agenda-setting theory, encoding and decoding theory, and priming-effect theory. Compared to those theories, framing analysis emphasizes the role of the media as a “symbol processor”, that is, to help audiences locate, perceive, identify, and label the flow of information around them and to narrow the available political alternatives (Tuchman, 1978, p. 156).)
What is media frame? Simply, media frame is a mode of attitudes, expressions, and standards used by the media when it comes to news reporting. It is these particular
14 modes that media rely on to portray the world that we live in. In another word, media participate in the construction and reconstruction of social reality.
The significance of the frame is that it provides people with an institutionalized and operational manual to encode media content. Referring to the definition given by O'sullivan (1994), we can get a better understanding of how media frame is produced: frame should be regarded as the principle of selection – a series of signified that can be emphasized, interpreted, and presented. The modes are originated from the organizational norms (such as news routines, norms, routes, etc.), and affected by various external factors (such as political power, social groups and enterprises), and also determined by ideology and culture (McLeod, D. M., & Hertog, J. K., 1992).
Wolfsfeld (1991) summarized five main factors that influence the formation of news frames by studying the interactions between movements and media:
1. The autonomy of the media organization (to what extent be controlled by the government);
2. The information provider of the social event (the source of the message);
3. The process or routine of news production (especially in terms of editorial political position);
4. The value and preference of journalists;
5. The extent to which social events are affected by the original organization.
To conclude, these five points suggest influences from multiple layers of social structure. That is why when analyzing the interaction between media and society, scholars regard them as the unity rather than independent actors. The fact is that, media is a part of the social system and media frame is the reflection of mainstream ideology and culture.
3.2. Research Method
Media frame theory focuses on three areas: media frame analysis, media frame construction, and media effect. This article will elaborate the works on the first two areas, examining the media contents and explaining how they are constructed. In detail, I will
15 conduct research according to the following steps. Firstly, I will analyze the media frames used by three newspapers: People’s Daily, Nanguo Metro News and Hainan Daily, and summarize the characteristics and differences. Therefore, my first research question is:
RQ1: From 2005 to the present, what principles and frames were used by national and local newspaper to construct the discourses of comfort women, and consequently lead to what kind of media representation of them?
There is a kind of hierarchy in media content. Zhong (1992) summarized the three layers of media frame: the upper layer, the middle layer and the ground layer. The upper layer refers to the definition of the theme of an event; the middle layer refers to the selection of the salient event and the evaluation of the significance of the event; the ground layer refers to the writing style including the key words, sentence structure and rhetorical strategy. Since this article has a large scale of materials to investigate, it will lay emphasis on the upper layer and the middle layer.
In order to increase the precision and reliability of the research result, I will adopt the methodology of “Frame List” and “Discourse Analysis”, a combination of quantitative frame analysis and qualitative discourse analysis. The former was proposed by Tankard (2001) who established a frame catalog to analyze context. The indicators are news headlines, news photos, captions, news leads, sources, citation selection, citation highlights, layouts, data and chart and conclusion. According to the context, the researcher should label the news as a specific media frame and finally receive an overview of frame distribution. The latter based on the theory of Van Dijk (1983) who devoted himself on critical discourse studies.
In addition, media frame is also influenced by the editorial position as well as organizational norms. Therefore, my theoretical interest is to evaluate the difference of media frame produced by different media outlets, that is the reason why I choose People’s Daily (national party organ), Hainan Daily (provincial party organ) and Nanguo Metro News (provincial metropolis newspaper). Therefore, my second research question is:
RQ2: Dose the use of frames and media content vary significantly by media’s editorial position?
16 I will use the general frames summarized by previous scholars to examine the coverages. According to Semetko (2000, p.95-96), there are six frames can be applied to research regardless of cross-cultural communication boundaries. This general framework includes: (a) Conflicts Frames: emphasizing conflict between individuals, groups, or institutions as a means of capturing audience interest. (b) Cooperation Frame: emphasizing the desires, prospects and outcomes of cooperation between countries; c) Economic Consequences Frame: reporting and event, problem or issue in terms of the economic influence on the actors; (d) Responsibility Frame: Attributing responsibility for its cause or solution to either the government or to an individual or group. (e) Human Interest Frame: presenting a human face or an emotional angle to the presentation of an event, issue, or problem. (f) Morality Frame: displaying the event, problem, or issue in the context of religious tenets or moral prescriptions.
After reading the coverages, I decided to refine the frames in conformity with the research question. Firstly, cooperation frame and economic consequences frame are eliminated, for they have less connection with the research topic and might overlap with other frames. Secondly, in terms of human interest frame, I will add the perspective of social gender to investigate whether the reports concern about female individuals rather than are completely constrained with national framework. Thirdly, I will change the morality frame to nation/morality frame, adding new variables to examine whether or not the story contains nationalism message. The disaster memory provided by the media plays an important role in the society structure by affecting citizens' moral judgments and political attitudes. For example, the reflection of the Holocaust increased the sense of morality of citizens and made a positive influence on the political movement in the 1960s (Xu, 2016). As for the memory around comfort women, it is more connected with national frames including national shame and national revival.
Another approach is to analyze how media present the event. According to Iyengar & Kinder (1991, p.62), the coverages are divided into two categories: Thematic Frame and Episodic Frame.
Episodic frame: it depicts issues in terms of specific instances. Episodic reports are essentially illustrations of issues.
Thematic frame: by contrast, depicts political issues more broadly and abstractly by placing them in some appropriate context-historical,
17 geographical, or otherwise. In appearance, the thematic frame takes the form of a backgrounder report featuring a series of people talking (p.62).
The result illustrated that episodic frames predominated in most cases. In terms of media effect, episodic frames breed individuals to attribute controversies to private actions rather than deep-seated socioeconomic or political conditions, which is beneficial to maintaining social stability (Iyengar & Kinder, 1991). From this perspective, how media construct the discourses of comfort women determines people’s attitudes and reactions towards this national issue.
Why different media organizations rely on different news frames? As Shoemaker and Reese (1991) elucidated, media frames are affected by economic, political, and social factors. Therefore, my third research question is:
RQ3: How social structure influences news reporting, and moreover, through that what mainstream cultural concepts and ideology are disseminated?
Shoemaker and Reese (1991) invented a hierarchy of influences mode: (1) Individual Level, covering journalistic factors such as reporters’ attitudes, professional competence and personalities; (2) Media Routines Level, referring to the dominated norms, such as writing style, the source network, the interview route, etc.; (3) Media Organization Level, such as the characteristics of the organization; (4) External Level, including audiences, markets, advertising investment, governments and groups, media competitors, etc.; (5) Social System Level, including social context, culture, ideology, etc.
Hence, I will mainly focus on the media organization level and social system level, analyzing how media’s editorial position affects the production of media memory. Additionally, due to the issue of comfort women is related to international dynamics, I will also adopt a perspective of geopolitics to analyze the context.
18 Section 4.
Media Memory Difference between National and Local Newspaper
The significance of cultural trauma lies not only in the trauma itself, but also in the symbolic meaning constructed by the nation. As I discussed above, traumatic memory is produced and maintained by the memorial agents in the community. If the agents fail to take advantage of the appropriate resources, power, and the interpretive ability to effectively disseminate the story, it will result in unconvincing narratives which have a negative influence on the collective memory. That is, the community would either forget the history or devalue the significance of the trauma (Alexander, 2004, p. 27).
By representing and reproducing the history, the memory could be inherited across generations (Wang, 2017). Therefore, an effective way to enable the members of the community to recall the memory is to demonstrate the trauma through the mass media. In the practice of memorializing history, the media has developed systematic reporting schemes including unique narrative methods and writing strategies. It means that through content analysis and frame analysis, we can demonstrate how the media constructs the discourses of comfort women.
In addition, due to the organizational and media routines influences, even when covering the same issue different media outlets would produce media memory. According to Carpenter (2007), frame differences exist along various axis. For instance, they have been found not only according to conventional left–right political distinctions but also between elite national newspapers and local newspapers. The framing of news and how different news agencies utilize media framing then becomes a notably complex phenomenon. In this section, I will focus on the differences of media frames and media content between People’s Daily as a national newspaper and Hainan Daily and Nanguo as provincial newspapers.
4.1. General Description of Newspaper Coverage
By using the key words “comfort women” to search articles in the Huike News database, I collected a total of 680 coverages (including 321 articles of People’s Daily;
19 225 articles of Hainan Daily; 134 articles of Nanguo Metro News). However, after repeated sifting, there were only 340 articles which specifically focused on the issue of comfort women (including 148 articles of People’s Daily, 128 articles of Hainan Daily and 64 articles of Nanguo Metro News).
Surprisingly, the final number of coverages reduced by nearly another half. In most cases, "comfort women" were used as evidence to reproach the Japanese atrocities, especially when Japanese government delivered insulting speeches toward the comfort women or denied the historical fact. For instance, a coverage said that “Abe Shinzo (Japanese Prime Minster) is trying to deny the crime committed by Japanese soldiers during the World War II. They still refused to apologize to the comfort women.” (Zhang & Chen, 2015, April 30) On the other hand, they were described as a national humiliation to incite Chinese citizens’ patriotism, rather than the centric subject of the reporting. For example, in the commemorative report of the People’s Daily, the representative of comfort women who charged the Japanese military with rape were regarded as a coop to memorialize the July 7th Incident (Zhang, 2007, July 8). To conclude, the discourses of comfort women were nested in the national framework of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
In terms of time variation, as the table demonstrates, between 2005 - 2012, the number of coverages was significantly lower compared with post-2012 reporting. It is most notably true for People’s Daily that did not report any issues of comfort women in 2008 and 2009. The media content should be regarded as a reflection of the mainstream ideology at that time. On the one hand, comfort women were considered to be a symbol of the national shame. On the other hand, in the context of traditional culture, the sexual violation posed a threat to women’s chastity and reputation, not to mention that the women were raped by soldiers who came from another country. Under these circumstances, the discussion of comfort women has been excluded from the historical stage for a long time. The government pushed to shut down public discussion of sexual slavery and to impose silence and forgetting.
20 35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
People Daily Hainan Daily Nanguo Metro News
Figure 1. The number of the coverages in three media outlets After 2012, the number of coverages reported by People’s Daily and Hainan Daily witnessed a significant increase, reflecting political motivations. On September 11, 2012, the Japanese government used force to purchase the Diaoyu Islands and triggered an intense controversy in Japan and China (Wu, 2012, June 14). Since then, Sino-Japanese relations entered into a period characterized by political strain, and thus, the issue of comfort women had been unconcealed and widely discussed not only in China but also in the world. The issue of comfort women was considered as a valuable chip in the political game. In certain circumstances, China hoped to use them as evidence to deface the Japanese government and to gain sympathy from the Western world.
In addition, since the issue of comfort women is a common problem faced by many countries in the Asian-Pacific region, it is influenced by international dynamics. The statues of comfort women have repeatedly led to diplomatic strains between South Korea and Japan as well as other countries where such statues have been erected. The Japanese government even urged the diplomats to leave their embassy in Korea to boycott the statue (Evans, 2015, April 28). These factors all intensified China's concerns of the comfort women—the issue of comfort women became a political event.
21 The peak number of comfort women reporting appeared in 2015. On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, a large number of coverages appeared in the media, suggesting that the government had started to pay more attention to the construction of discourses surrounding comfort women at both a domestic communication level and a global one.
It is worth mentioning that the number of coverages of Nanguo Metro News remained constant, meaning the newspaper was less affected by domestic and global situations. Instead, as a local metropolis newspaper, Nanguo Metro News insisted on its own editorial orientation, prioritizing reports on the living conditions of comfort women in Hainan. One explanation of why the number of coverages is comparatively low is that in these years, more and more victims passed away, silencing their stories and experiences. Furthermore, the comfort women who were interviewed prior were those who dared to accuse Japan and face the repercussion of public exposure in the media; however, when comfort women who had come forward passed away, the remaining seniors had more misgivings and were more likely to refuse interviews. As a result, the number of coverages gradually decreased.
44% 43% 41%
35%
28%
22% 23% 20%
15% 13% 10% 6%
Attribution of responsibility Human interest Conflict Morality& Nation
People Daily Hainan Daily Nanguo Metro News
Figure 2. Proportions of four news frame in three media outlets
22 The most frequently used frames differed according to a newspaper’s media positionality. As a national newspaper, People’s Daily had the largest proportion of responsibility frame and conflict frame orientated articles, and conversely, the national/morality frame stories account for only 6% (8 coverages). On the contrary, local media adopted more human interest frame and national/morality frame focused articles, highlighted most notably in Nanguo Metro News which has the highest proportion of these two frames (44% and 20% respectively).
Another difference between national media and local media was the media content. The most common storylines in People’s Daily included: Japanese politicians addressing comfort women in an insulting and derogatory manner, historical disputes between Korea and Japan, condemnation from the Western world, demonstrations organized by groups and individuals in suffered countries, and public events to memorialize the comfort women.
Global news coverage was significantly higher than the figure for domestic news. A strategy used by People’s Daily was to quote critics from other countries to euphemistically reproach Japan’s inappropriate behaviors while avoiding provocation of Sino-Japanese conflicts respective of China’s need for a peaceful international environment to allow for the reinforcement of national comprehensive power. It was because of this approach that People’s Daily was the country’s most government- influenced party newspaper, representing China’s mainstream ideology and official attitudes. By contrast, the coverages of Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News showed a different pattern: local newspapers paid more attention to the domestic news rather than the global news. It is because the division of labor in media system, that is, local media have their duty to focus on local events and communicate with local citizens.
In general, the coverages were divided into two categories: original reporting carried out by the news agency itself or reprinting news from other sources. For example, only 53 coverages of comfort women were internally sourced by Hainan Daily, and the leftover 75 coverages were reprinted from Xinhua News Agency. Nevertheless, Nanguo Metro News produced 47 coverages in-house (total number was 64), including a large proportion of interviews and features. It is worth noting that post-2013, the number of international news articles in Hainan Daily experienced a marked increase, corresponding with People’s Daily’s international news output. The correlation was strong evidence that
23 as a local party newspaper, Hainan Daily was receiving ideological signals sent from the government and making connections with international dynamics. The purpose of increasing the prevalence of international news articles is to educate local citizens through information related to comfort women in a global context.
Compared with Hainan Daily, Nanguo Metro News was less sensitive to the political ideology being passed down by the government. Instead, the newspaper continually made efforts to record the living conditions and needs of local comfort women.
In terms of reporting schemes, both People’s Daily and Hainan Daily, government- oriented newspapers, preferred to adopt the episodic frame. This is especially notable within People’s Daily which had the largest number of coverages written using this frame (82%). On the contrary, Nanguo Metro News, a market-oriented newspaper, most frequently used the thematic frame and was the only media in which the thematic frame outnumbered the use of the episodic frame.
82%
66%
52% 48%
34%
18%
People Daily Hainan Daily Nanguo Metro News
Episodic Thematic
Figure 3. Proportions of the episodic/thematic frame in three media outlets
24 4.2. Framing Analysis of People’s Daily as a National Newspaper
As discussed previously, the conflict frame and the responsibility frame were the predominant frames in the coverages produced by People’s Daily. This was a result of the majority of coverages being international reports. In other words, the global situation was the driving force behind the frame building. When international relationships between countries in the Asia-Pacific region were relatively stable (there were no severe disputes between the suffered countries and Japan), the most common frame was the responsibility frame; when Japan officially insulted comfort women through public speeches 2 , the international relations turned into a hostile situation—resulting in a hostile period—and the usage of conflict frame articles increased.
Throughout history, the Japanese government often refused to recognize the crimes committed by Japanese soldiers during wartime periods. The history of comfort women is subordinated to the post-war historical framework, a stigma Japanese right-wing politicians and groups want to be rid of for they believe it will pose a threat to Japan's economic and cultural development as well as their international reputation.
In Japan, right-wing politicians occasionally deliver speeches aimed to rewrite the history and suppress trepidations rooted in past atrocities and crimes. For instance, in 2012, Jin Matsubara (Chairman of the National Public Safety Commission) proposed a modification to the Kono Statement 3 that is a political milestone when Japan officially admitted wartime atrocities. In May 2013, when visiting the bases of the United States Forces in Japan, Hashimoto Tōru who was the Osaka Mayor said that "the comfort women system is indispensable" (Sun, 2013, May 29). As a result, these deliberate provocations intrigued strong oppositions domestically and internationally.
A Japanese popular newspaper named The Asahi Shimbun published editorial to challenge Shimonoseki. The article pointed out that the history of "comfort women" and
2 In August 2012, Japanese government first proposed to revise the Kono Statement. After that, the government frequently attempt to deny the wartime atrocities and refuse the previous achievement of reconciliation. 3 The Kono Statement refers to a statement released by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yōhei Kōno on August 4, 1993, after the conclusion of the government study that found that the Japanese Imperial Army had forced women, known as comfort women, to work in military-run brothels during World War II.
25 "aggression" were undeniable. To that extend politicians like Shimonoseki who delivered inappropriate speeches helped Japan become isolated and aggressive. Thus, the conflict framework replaced the responsibility framework, becoming the most frequently used reporting frame. However, it is undeniable that the sexual violence is the truth. Due to public pressure from both countries still recoiling from the trauma experienced by comfort women and the western world, the Japanese government was unable to completely deny a history that was recognized by many.
Under these circumstances, representation of the comfort women through mainstream media bears witness to the atrocities committed by the Japanese military. The survivors play vital roles as both prosecutors and agents of justice and change. The comfort women as a collective are interpreted as a political symbol and an indicator of political struggle between Asia-Pacific countries. Japanese official’s attitudes toward comfort women is evidence in the evaluation of whether or not the Japanese right-wingers began to gain the upper hand within the struggle for historical recognition of Japanese military crimes. For instance, an article written by Hong Tian expressed that:
Japan still refuses to admit historical crimes. In recent years, it frequently destroys the friendship between Asian countries by eliminating the history of comfort women in textbooks, delivering insulting speeches, and visiting Yasukuni Shrine. These actions undermine the peaceful and fraternal atmosphere of global situation, resulting in the condemnation from the world. (Tian, 2013, August 16)
In addition to publishing domestic statements urging the Japanese government to admit the crimes of the past, People’s Daily also reported performances made by groups or individuals in other countries such as South Korea and Philippine. For example, in the coverage which is aimed to reproach Hashimoto Toru’s inappropriate behaviors 4 , editorials from a Japanese newspaper (The Asahi Shimbun), protests performed by the Korean comfort women, and condemnation from a German history scholar named Eckart Dietzfelbinger were all quoted.
The result also demonstrates another important point— People’s Daily began to pay more attention to discovering the historical and cultural value of comfort women, using the thematic frame more frequently. After the 70th anniversary of the victory of the War of
4 As I discussed above, Hashimoto Tōru who was the Osaka Mayor said that "the comfort women system is indispensable" when he visited the bases of the United States Forces in Japan.
26 Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the number of articles practicing thematic frames increased remarkably. In essence, the government began to explore the historical and cultural values of comfort women and mass media was regarded as an important platform to disseminate moral values through media framing.
In order to facilitate public knowledge and emphasize the significance of the comfort women, People’s Daily published a series of reports on the history of the women who had come to be known an ‘the comfort women’. For example, the newspaper invited researcher Su Zhiliang who was a professional in the field of comfort women studies to write an article introducing the history of the comfort women to readers (Su, 2015, August 15). On August 16 of the same year, People’s Daily interviewed the head of the National Archives Bureau to present an official statement on the comfort women:
The planning and implementation of the "comfort women system” completely reveals the brutality, cruelty and injustice of Japanese militarism which violates the humanitarianism and gendered ethics. It is an uncommon atrocity in the civilized human history. It seriously violates the human rights of the women victims, becoming the most painful part in the women history. (Comfort women archives, 2015)
In the same year, CCTV also launched a documentary named "The Comfort Women - Japanese Sexual Slaves Records”. According to the propaganda campaign of spreading the knowledge of comfort women, People’s Daily published seven articles to promote the documentary that fulfilled the function of official advertisement. Traced back to the social context at that time, we can understand why a large scale of media products referring to comfort women appeared. In June 2014, China sent a file documenting the history of the comfort women to the Memory of the World5 to initiate the recognition of the historic crime and the trauma that remained from its brutality. However, in the spring of 2015, a Japanese religious group sent a message to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 6 challenging the qualification of the historical materials presented by China and implying that the Nanking Massacre and the
5 The program was established by the United Nations cultural body in 1992 to 'facilitate preservation, by the most appropriate techniques, of the world's documentary heritage.' Inclusion on the program's list leads to improved conservation of the items, as its experts help procure resources to preserve and digitize the material. 6 It aims to seeks to encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world. This is embodied in an international treaty called the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, adopted by UNESCO in 1972.
27 comfort women system were postwar fabrication. In order to eliminate negative influences on the final result (supposed to be declared in October by International Advisory Committee (IAC)), China was forced to take measures to enhance the dissemination of the history of comfort women to receive recognition domestically and internationally.
The transformation reflected two shifts in building the discourses of comfort women. First, the government began to explore the historical and cultural values of comfort women by re-encoding their perceived signification in order to transform cultural trauma into a spiritual source of national rejuvenation. Second, in the context of global communication, China saw a political need to construct a discourse system which emphasized the significance of the main battlefield in the East. The government expected media to facilitate the spread of improved historical research to the readers, prompting the comfort women to be recognized by more people in both domestic and foreign fields.
4.3. Framing Aanalysis of Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News as Local Newspapers
As local newspapers, Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News shared similarities in frame building, both papers largely focusing on human interest and national/morality frame, a sharp contrast to People’s Daily.
The published reports on the lawsuit filed by comfort women in which accusations against the Japanese government were made was a good case to illustrate the difference between the local newspaper and the national newspaper. There were no exceptions in the coverages reported by People’s Daily utilizing the conflict frame to request an apology from the Japanese government; however, Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News adopted human interest frames which placed an emphasis on individual feelings and experiences in the process of seeking justice. When interviewing Huang Youliang, a comfort woman participating in the prosecution of the Japanese government, in addition to providing the result of the lawsuit Nanguo Metro News also presented several monologues:
"I am 80 years old now, my waist is bent and I walk difficultly. Not to mention going to Japan, even flying to Haikou makes me tired. Nevertheless, as long as I’m alive, I will go to Japan to the court. I can't close my eyes when I die if I lost the case on appeal!" (Yue & Deng, 2008, January 13)
28 In terms of the narrative strategy, local newspapers used the thematic frame more frequently by providing readers with sufficient background information and interpretation. Many reports included sections of "extended reading" and "related links" to help readers get a better understanding of the historical and cultural context. In an article by Hainan Daily, the use of subheadings clearly divided the story into three parts: “the process and the results of the lawsuit”, "Japanese army had set up 62 comfort women bases in Hainan province ", and "Hainan comfort women went to Japan to give evidence in the court" (Sun, 2006, August 31). Similarly, Nanguo Metro News combined different perspectives in reporting. An example of this can be noted in the presentation of previous lawsuits against Japan in the Hainan province. The coverage combined with different storylines including the current living conditions of comfort women and the assistance from the society. It also provided readers with a supplemental article named “How many comfort women alive in Hainan now?” in which the historic materials were presented (Zeng & Lin, 2005, July 13).
In the process of reproducing the cultural trauma, media spread mainstream ideologies through various institutionalized activities to make sure they were successful in reaching a wide scale of audiences in the community (Alexander, 2004). Media determines what is worth remembering and the significance of the monuments in social culture through a process of agenda setting. The representation of comfort women within local newspapers may diverge from representation presented within media counterparts such as People’s Daily.
Firstly, local newspapers focus on constructing the social and cultural significance of the comfort women, especially at the level of documenting Hainan history. This is also validated by the result I presented previously that local newspapers were more likely to use the thematic frame. By providing interpretative news, they successfully shaped the image of the comfort women in a positive way. The label of " warriors to seek justice" and "live history" empowered those victims and helped them to gain respect from the community. For instance, when reporting a survivor who passed away, the reporter appealed for attentions and assistance of society, describing comfort women as “alive history”. They attempted to make connections between helping those seniors and preserving local history. In addition, local media consciously works to make people understand how misunderstandings resulting in prejudice and discrimination are detrimental to the wellbeing of comfort women. For instance, in Hainan Daily, a commemorative report of the July 7th Incident was titled as “people who make
29 contributions to correct the misunderstandings towards the comfort women” (Shao, 2014, July 7). The coverage applied the phrase of “correct the misunderstandings” to praise the assistance of volunteers.
Figure 4. The memorial feature of comfort women by Nanguo Metro News Secondly, the importance of the local news in shedding light on local issues embodied the connection with local culture. It emphasized the specialties of the Hainan comfort women including their value to Hainan history and their current needs. The coverages were more likely to strike a responsive chord in the hearts of local readers, and articles of this nature helped to positively accommodate the story of the comfort women in collective memory. For example, in the World Comfort Women Day, Nanguo Metro News quoted Zhiliang Su’s statement to inform the readers about the characteristics of the history of Hainan comfort women: “Hainan comfort women were from a variety of ethnicities such as Han Zu, Li Zu, Miao Zu and Hui Zu.” (Tan & Sun, 2017, August 14) Also, in the memorial feature of the 70th anniversary of the war, the newspaper conducted
30 a series of interviews recording comfort women to prevent the public from forgetting their stories and experiences. As the newspaper shows below, the title was "70 years have passed, these pains are around us", the term of "around us" not only intrigues a sense of sympathy, but also builds a bridge between the subjects of the article and the article audience.
In addition, for provinces such as Hainan that suffered tremendously from the war, the issue of comfort women is not only nested in the war framework but also a livelihood problem faced by local residents. The victims of the brutalities of the war are not only the witnesses of the atrocities, but also the seniors in the community. Therefore, when reporting the local comfort women, the journalist sometimes named them as “Li Zu Grandma”, rather than the general description like “comfort women” or “victims”. In terms of the layout, this form of news reporting was usually placed in the edition of livelihood news and social news.
31 Section 5.
Media Memory Difference between Party Organ and Metropolis Newspaper
Affected by the different natures of sources at the levels of journalistic, organizational and external, the same issue covered by different media outlets could be interpreted through different news frames according to the outlet’s pursuits and ambitions (Schudson, 2003). In terms of editorial political position, a significant difference in both the human interest frame and morality frame is evident (Pak, 2016). In China, the Party’s control of the media inhibits the media from showing different political tendencies. Instead, the media is divided into the party organ and the metropolis newspaper. The former stick to the “Party principle” emphasizing the Party’s domination over the media and serve as the mouthpiece of the Party and the people. The latter refers to market-oriented newspapers that focus on the lives and needs of the urban middle class readership and provide specialized information and entertainment (Zhao, 1998). The difference of editorial orientation predetermines the different types of frame building. In the last section, I demonstrated the difference between the national newspaper and the local newspaper in memorializing the comfort women. In this section, I will compare the frames and discourses of Hainan Daily as a party organ with those of Nanguo Metro News as a market-oriented newspaper.
5.1. Dialogue with the Government: The Discourses of Comfort Women Constructed by Hainan Daily
Since the party organ represents the official line, it is at an advantage regarding resource availability and exposure from the government. At the same time, Hainan Daily is also more sensitive to shifts in national ideology and is greatly influenced by national policies. In terms of news framing, an obvious difference between Hainan Daily and Nanguo Metro News is that the former has a larger proportion of conflict frame and the responsibility frame-based articles. This is because post-2013, Hainan Daily published several stories based on international dynamics surrounding comfort women, and most of these coverages reported stories such as disputes between countries and protests seeking justice, occurrences that are categorized within conflict and responsibility frames.
32 It is evidence that as instructed by the government, Hainan Daily consciously takes the perspective of global communication to reproduce the memory around comfort women by focusing on international interactions between the suffered countries, Japan and the western world in the new era.
Obedient to political principles, the party newspaper is required to be instructive and authoritarian. Therefore, even when making use of human interest frame, the party organ implements more deep-seated socioeconomic meanings in reporting and adopts a neutral tone to describe trauma. To fulfill their role as a bridge between the Party and the people, journalists must convey the truth without exaggeration, sensationalism, or prejudice (Zhao, 1998, p.25). Thus, in terms of media effect, readers are able to understand the problem while remaining passive and unlikely to take reformative action. In general, Hainan Daily depicted the story by summarizing and explaining logistics rather than directly using the footage of interviews with victims. For example, in an article aimed to express the pain experienced by comfort women, the multiple layers of oppression the survivors faced was presented:
In their old ages, many survivors experience low-quality living conditions. The inhuman violations have chronically negative influence on them, physically and mentally. Many comfort women even lost their ability of reproduction, resulting in being confronted with misunderstandings and discrimination from their neighborhoods. Even if they successfully find a husband, low income was still a severe problem. (Huang, 2010, August 9)
On the other hand, in morality frame, a majority of news coverage highlights the importance of volunteer efforts for the purpose of appealing for social donations. In order to strengthen the media effect, Hainan Daily commonly adopts the thematic frame to encourage people to take action. By making reference to the official moral tenets such as core values of socialism and social positive energy, the media establishes links between those benevolences and moral norms. For instance, in the coverage that reported a volunteer who had helped seniors apply for the identity card to receive health treatment, the title expressed this notion: “A collaboration to help the seniors apply for a new ID card. It is the society positive energy that brings warms and love to the elderly.” (Huang, 2013, October, 11)
Empowering vulnerable groups is one of the principle responsibilities of the party organ. In general, Hainan Daily produced interpretative news that presented the social
33 problem rather than only focusing on the specific instances. The goal was to attract the attention of governmental departments and encourage them to take measures to effectively safeguard the rights and interests of minorities (Wu, 2011). In addition, since Party propaganda departments directly exercise control over party organs, coverages related to the government can be regarded as apparatus to implement ideology.
The dialogue between Hainan Daily and the local government is embodied in two parts: first, the media reports governmental support, including the provision of financial assistance and appealing for formulating polices to increase the living standards of comfort women; second, it also plays a regulatory role to euphemistically put forward the accountability of the government, making contributions to implement beneficiary laws and regulations at the level of social structure. For example, one coverage listed performances aimed at seeking rights for comfort women in South Korea, followed by an expectation for the Chinese government to take similar action:
At present, in China, the survivors who suffered from the war still need the support at the level of national policy. The nation has not yet completely taken the responsibility to address the issue. (Shao, 2014, July 7)
5.2. Alternative Oral History: The Discourses of Comfort Women Constructed by Nanguo Metro News
According to Figure 2, nearly half of the coverages in Nanguo Metro News adopted human interest frame. The prevailing genres were not overviews or commentary like articles found within Hainan Daily, but instead the coverages were interpersonal interviews and profile features. In addition, the reporter periodically returned to visit the seniors on multiple occasions, establishing a long-term and systematic series of reports that created an extended and all-encompassing narrative. After reading the coverages, I had a strong feeling that I was already familiar with the life experience of each woman. From my perspective, these coverages can be regarded as an alternative oral history, not only because of their social and cultural significance, but further for their historical research value. The reports witnessed the life story of the comfort women, most notably the struggle that follows the pursuit of justice from Japan and the difficulties in removing stigma caused by misunderstanding from within the community.
34 The significance of oral history compared with mainstream history lies in the excavation of the historical actors. The stories memorialized by Nanguo Metro News were interesting and abundant, and more importantly they revealed different dimensions of the history and illustrated the complexities of the narrative as a whole. In the process of designing the indicators of the media frame, I added the question of “whether or not the reporting presents the individual’s needs and feelings” in human interest frame in order to examine whether the purpose of reporting is to give voice to the comfort women or if the purpose is nested in the national trauma framework. The results showed that in People’s Daily and Hainan Daily, even the coverages written in the human interest frame more or less failed to reflect the current needs and feelings of the survivors.
By contrast, in Nanguo Metro News, there were many articles expressing the complex postwar difficulties faced by the comfort women including economic difficulties, fertility difficulties and mental trauma. These obstacles went unrecognized by society for a long time, and thus the hardships continually faced by comfort women went unrecognized in tandem. In an article the marital experience of seniors was recorded. “Being introduced by a friend, she married a man whose fiancée had died. Her husband was 4 years junior to her. Her husband was 4 years younger than her. As for the past when she was raped by the Japanese army, Wang Zhifeng decided to keep silence and never mentioned it (2015, August 16).” Referring to that, readers are able to identify with comfort women, understanding the difficulties and struggle they were confronted with.
Nanguo Metro News also made contributions to perfect the history of Hainan comfort women by making use of a wide range of news sources. It made efforts to demonstrate the livelihood of the comfort women with a variety of perspectives. Since those survivors were of old age, they often had limited ability to clearly express themselves and explain their experiences. Further, humiliation is another obstacle for interviewing, for the history was rooted in shame. To alleviate the problem, the reporter attempted to invite people with close relationships with those elders to participate in the interview. Therefore, the content was enriched and precision was improved. For example, in a profile feature, the reporter impressively reflected the multiple layers of the pressure received by the comfort women through recording the lives and contributions made by the volunteers (Lin, 2012, November 5). Besides, the comfort women who participated had support from close relations which made the process of reliving trauma through sharing their stories less painful.
35
Figure 5. The only news photos in which comfort woman smiles Also, there was another article that completely avoided the stereotypical frame which emphasizes suffering and misery. Instead, the article depicts the transnational friendship between a Japanese volunteer and a “comfort grandma”. As the coverage reports, the Japanese girl had been to Hainan province several times to spend the Spring Festival with the comfort women. Gradually, they developed strong relationship and the survivors even treat the girl as a family member. As the newspaper shows above, the image used within the article was the only news photo where the comfort woman was smiling, contesting the stigma of comfort women being solely victimized, suffering individuals.
In terms of frame building, Nanguo Metro News generally develops a self- contained model. It is good at telling the entire story including emotional reflections and experiences, rather than only describing the event or problem in a systematic fashion. The coverages include more conflict episodes and moving details—a writing formula incorporating the expression of colloquialism and dialects that local people are familiar with. A characteristic is that a majority of the headlines are the oral language expressed by the interviewees. For example, "If I died, I want my children and grandchildren to take my case to the court" (Yue, 2008, December 29), "If I couldn’t walk one day, I will craw to
36 Japan to seek justice" (Liu, 2009, March 25), "Dear grandma, we support you" (Wang, 2015, April 27), "I couldn’t live to hear the result, please persevere for me" (Tan & Sun, 2017, August 14). These titles enabled readers to directly listen to what survivors wanted to express. In other words, these titles built a bridge between local readers and the comfort women that allowed for the facilitation of empathy, compassion, and understanding.
In addition to human interest frame, another dominant frame is nation/morality frame. In the coverages written in nation/morality frame, a common storyline is the benevolence of local individuals, groups and organizations. The newspaper quoted the volunteers’ statements to express the media’s values. It aimed to reverse the traditional misunderstanding and discrimination of the comfort women, empowering the women economically and mentally. Volunteers such as Zhang Yingyong, Chen Houzhi and Huang Yiming were shaped as local morality models, especially for Chen Houzhi who won The “Touching Hain” award7 several times. Below is an excerpt from the award ceremony speech:
The voice might be sealed and the nightmares might be ignored, and the suffering might be forgot in one day. However, even if the atrocities are concealed, he is more convinced of his behaviors and realizes it is urgent to record survivors. The fact is that, the ordinary people and the vulnerable people all have their immortal power. Hand in hand with comfort women, he encourages us with courage and confidence. Justice needs the light to illuminate the darkness, so we must seek the truth of the history. (Lin, 2012, November 5)
Through the analysis of coverages reported by the party organ and market- oriented newspaper, it is clear that by emphasizing the historical and cultural significance of the comfort women, as a provincial newspaper, Hainan Daily devotes itself to lead public opinion towards comfort women to make positive change. In comparison, Nanguo Metro News makes contributions to reveal different layers of the life conditions of those survivors and plays an important role in reproducing an alternative oral history.
It is worthy to mention that some scholars point out that when market-oriented media report on vulnerable groups, problems such as low quality and sensational news and homogeneous competition between different media outlets due to operational
7 The annual "Touching Hainan" program honors those who have touched the province with their tenacity, bravery and wisdom over the previous year. The award winners are carefully selected to represent a true moral epic in Hainan province.
37 pressure will follow (Zhu, 2006). However, Nanguo Metro News did not show this tendency. When reporting highly controversial or sensitive issues, media are stimulated with a stronger sense of media responsibility. They are more likely to increase the intensity of self-censorship to review the reports and obedient to party propaganda and ideology. It also reflects the complexity of media ecology in China, although the structures and orientations are pluralistic, both the party organ and market-oriented press are dominated by the Party.
38 Section 6.
Conclusion
The difference between the frames suggests a different inclination for national and local newspapers, as well as a difference between the party organ and metropolis daily. The overarching media system determines the variations in media memory since they have different positions and responsibilities. As the representative of national discourse, People’s Daily takes responsibility for seeking truth about human history in the world and remedying the cultural trauma of domestic events. This is different from the local media, which is more concerned with events and problems of a particular region. People’s Daily will provide a national perspective on an issue in order to call for historical rejuvenation. In the special commemorative edition of the World Comfort Women’s Day, it sincerely explained the significance and dilemma of comfort women:
For comfort women, it takes more courage and perseverance to express their feelings and experiences. It is painful to recall past nightmares, but the reflection on history has a positive influence on breaking the silence and returning the survivors to normal life. At the same time, the publication of records of the atrocities unveils the truth about Japan's implementation of sexual slavery in China. This encourages victims to pursue reparations, and to strive for international justice. This part of Chinese history is a valuable memory legacy.(Su, 2017, August 16)
Whilst a national newspaper is a means of ideological instruction, the local media fulfills the function of reconciling the contradictions between politics and populace. As a result, local media pays more attention to the living conditions and needs of local comfort women. With regards to the local communities, this issue was not only a historical controversy but also a problem relating to livelihood. The first report on the comfort women in Nanguo Metro News was an article from 2000 entitled “Comfort women who suffered from the atrocities.” This was the first article to educate people about the Hainan victim. Since they were placed in the spotlight, society began to pay attention to this special group. This helped to slowly wash away the stigma attached to comfort women.
There were unlimited positive consequences as a result of the report. With the assistance of the media, an increasing number of volunteers and sponsors contacted the survivors to help them, and in turn, the volunteers were reported as morality models by
39 the newspaper, in order to encourage people to take action. In addition, Nanguo Metro News cooperated with local educational organizations to raise awareness of the history of comfort women; they invited scholars and volunteers to deliver speeches in class. It was a significant step and shows that the media was realizing the importance of preserving memory across generations.
The issue of comfort women is always regarded as controversial and sensitive topic, which means that the media must be sensitive in what they discuss. Seventy years ago, Japan’s sexual violations assaulted the masculine desire of the Chinese nation and this had a constant influence on the Chinese nation, resulting in an unforgettable cultural trauma (Choi, 2001). Also, the term ‘comfort women’ not only refers to the girls who suffered from the atrocities, but also represents the traumatic memory within the community from that historical era. The government is taking measures to put emphasis on the construction and dissemination of the discourses of comfort women.
However, the results reveal a severe problem in media memorialization: the cultural wound is still not healed, both on a national and individual level. One would expect People’s Daily to have concentrated more on the national/morality frame, when compared to other newspapers. Nevertheless, from 2005 to 2018, there were only eight articles written in this frame, indicating that the value of comfort women was not fully discovered as significant historical and cultural issue. Although the number of articles has gradually increased since 2013, the prevalent frames were still focused on the issues of conflict and responsibility. Simultaneously, the former comfort women did not achieve social dignity and respec. They were excluded from the collective memory.
In terms of media memory, there are two prevailed themes: resistance and trauma. However, the resistance frame is always on the margin compared to the trauma frame; people prefer to strengthen the victim frame to memorialize the history, rather than rationally reflect the relationship between history and reality. This results in the emergence of nationalist sentiments.
Without exceptions, the chosen media outlets for this paper have relied heavily on the victim frame, which has highlighted the misery experienced by women. In terms of media representation, the media described domestic comfort women as lonely aged people who suffered from economic difficulties and health problems. By contrast, foreign comfort
40 women freed from the label of ‘victim’, and instead the coverage crafted them as advocates devoted to seeking justice and participating in protests against the Japanese government. The latter storyline is more beneficial for expressing the personality of comfort women. Therefore, I suggest that the victim frame should be replaced by other frames that can help to balance resistance and trauma and will deeply explore the historical significance and spiritual values of comfort women. Thus, this will help to heal the cultural trauma.
Finally, the biggest concern is how to heal the wounds of comfort women. The pain suffered by the women existed both during wartime and during the postwar period. The lack of definition of the pain in the traditional context that leads to exclusion and discrimination from inside the community. From this point of view, as long as the trauma is redefined in a positive way within the social structure, the comfort women may overcome this bitter historical legacy. Communities of remembrance may be disparate in their identification, politics, and strategies. However, they are connected by the actions of remembrance in the pursuit of justice (Elizabeth, 2018).
The positive position in the collective memory, combined with recognition given by the community, will help to treat mental trauma. In terms of frame building, positive media representations like ‘Alive History’ and ‘Justice Advocates’ should be regarded as good examples of remedying actions and should be widely disseminated. In conclusion, media should take responsibility of crafting new identities for comfort women, in order to help them finally gain respect.
41 Appendix.
Framing Items
Attribution of responsibility frame
1. Does the story suggest that some level of government has the ability to alleviated the problem/issue?
2. Does the story suggest that some level of government is responsible for the problem/issue?
3.Does the story suggest solutions to the problem/ issue?
4.Does the story suggest the problem/issue requires urgent action?
Human interest frame
5.Does the story provide a human example or “human face” on the issue?
6.Does the story employ adjectives or personal vignette that generate feelings of outrage, empathy/caring, sympathy, or compassion?
7.Does the story emphasize how individuals and groups are affected by the issue/problem?
8.Does the story go into the private or personal lives of the actors?
9.Does the story reflect actor’s current needs or problems?
Conflict frame
10.Does the story reflect disagreement between parties/individuals/groups/countries?
11.Does one party/individual/group/country reproach another?
12.Does the story refer to two or more sides of the problem or issue?
Morality frame
13.Does the story contain any moral message?
14.Does the story contain any nationalism message?
14.Does the story make reference to morality, God, or other religious tenets?
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