The New York Times - 19.09.2019

A8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

HONG KONG — A night of
horse racing at Hong Kong’s
iconic Happy Valley Racecourse
was canceled just hours before
post time on Wednesday over the
potential “imminent threat” to the
safety of jockeys, horses and bet-
tors, racing authorities said.
The extremely popular
Wednesday night races — which
draw a mix of Cantonese bettors
and beer-swilling expats — had
until now been largely unhurt by
the unrest roiling the former
British colony. But officials de-
cided to cancel the night of racing
when protesters began seizing on
reports that a horse part-owned
by one of Hong Kong’s most polar-
izing figures, the pro-Beijing law-
maker Junius Ho, was set to race
on Wednesday evening.
“Our concerns are tied to poten-
tial social unrest in the vicinity to-
night,” a Hong Kong Jockey Club
spokesperson said in a statement,
citing “the very real threat of a dis-
turbance or possible violence” at
the racecourse and potential dis-
ruptions to public transportation
in the area.
Also on Wednesday, the Hong

Kong government canceled the

annual fireworks for the celebra-

tion of China’s National Day,

marking the founding of People’s

Republic of China. The Oct. 1 holi-

day is expected to draw big pro-

tests in the city.

Horse racing was introduced to

Hong Kong by the British in the

1840s, and the Wednesday night

races at Happy Valley — founded

in 1846 as the first racecourse in

the territory — have become a fix-

ture in society.

The colonial-era sport is so em-

blematic of the city that China’s

late paramount leader, Deng Xiao-

ping, promised that after Britain’s

handover of Hong Kong to Chi-

nese rule in 1997, “horses will still

run, stocks will still sizzle, dancers

will still dance.”

But the three months of pro-de-

mocracy protests have brought

increasing disruptions to the tran-

sit system, spilled over into sleepy

residential neighborhoods and

even descended into street brawls

and fistfights between civilians.

Mr. Ho, the target of the pro-

testers’ ire, has long been known

for his unforgiving view of pro-de-

mocracy figures and protesters.

In July, a video showed him shak-

ing hands with a group of men be-

lieved to have beaten protesters

with sticks and metal bars in an at-

tack the same day that injured at

least 45 people. He had denied any

connection to the attackers.

Mr. Ho’s district office was later

destroyed and his mother’s grave

was defaced. Last Saturday, a fire

broke out at the same office.

In recent days, he urged his

supporters to turn out Saturday to

take down the so-called Lennon

Walls across the city — vibrant

mosaics of pro-democracy mes-

sages and artwork. In response,

protesters have rallied for city-

wide demonstrations against Mr.

Ho that same day.

The cancellation of the night of

racing is another blow to an en-

gine of Hong Kong’s economy —

the races and heavy betting on

them help generate money for the

Hong Kong Jockey Club, which fi-

nances charities and projects

around the city. The city’s overall

economy has been slammed since

protests began in June, weighing

on the retail and tourism sector in

particular.

Hong Kong Cancels Popular Horse Races

By ELAINE YU vived.”

A presidential spokesman, Sal-

vador Panelo, said Wednesday

that Mr. Duterte had meant to say

“You were ambushed,” not “I am-

bushed you.” Mr. Duterte, he

noted, is not a native speaker of

the Filipino language but of Visa-

yan, which is spoken mainly in the

southern and central Philippines.

“It is silly and absurd to con-

clude that he is behind the am-

bush just because he misspeaks

the Filipino language, which is not

his native tongue or first lan-

guage,” Mr. Panelo said.

Mr. Duterte ran for president

promising a bloody campaign to

kill drug dealers, and thousands of

people — many but not all of them

suspected dealers or addicts —

have been gunned down by police

officers or vigilantes since he took

MANILA — President Rodrigo

Duterte of the Philippines ap-

peared to admit in a speech this

week that he had ordered an as-

sassination attempt on a politician

last year, a startling statement

even for a president known for

bloody, provocative rhetoric.

His spokesman said on

Wednesday that Mr. Duterte had

misspoken.

In a speech on Tuesday night at

the presidential palace in Manila,

Mr. Duterte railed against drug-

related corruption in Philippine

politics. He mentioned two may-

ors who were killed by the police

after he accused them of drug

crimes: Rolando Espinosa, who

was gunned down in his jail cell in

2016, and Reynaldo Parojinog,

who died in a raid on his home in

2017.

Then he mentioned Vicente

Loot, a mayor and former general

who survived an attack by gun-

men in the central Philippines in

May 2018.

“General Loot, you son of a

bitch,” he said. “I ambushed you,

you animal, and you still sur-

office in 2016.

Mr. Loot, Mr. Espinosa and Mr.

Parojinog were on a list of more

than 100 politicians that Mr.

Duterte read on live television

soon after taking office, accusing

them of being involved in drug

trafficking.

In December, Mr. Duterte de-

nied being involved in the attack

on Mr. Loot, which left three of his

aides and a dock worker wounded.

In July, the United Nations’ Hu-

man Rights Council voted to begin

a process that could lead to an in-

vestigation of the killings carried

out during Mr. Duterte’s tenure.

Filipinos have filed two com-

plaints at the International Crimi-

nal Court in The Hague accusing

Mr. Duterte of murder; one was

filed by two men who say they

were part of a “hit squad” he com-

manded as mayor of Davao, a city

in the south.

A lawyer for those men, Jude

Sabio, said on Wednesday that Mr.

Duterte’s statement about Mr.

Loot could be used against him in

court. “As a lawyer and a former

prosecutor, he knows that admis-

sion is the queen of evidence,” Mr.

Sabio said.

Duterte Says He Ordered Mayor’s Death

By JASON GUTIERREZ

The Philippine

president misspoke,

his office said later.

TOKYO — When Miki Dezaki
decided to make a documentary
for his graduate thesis, he exam-
ined a question that reverberates
through Japanese politics: Why,
75 years later, does a small but vo-
cal group of politically influential
conservatives still fervently dis-
pute internationally accepted ac-
counts of Japan’s wartime atroci-
ties?
Specifically, Mr. Dezaki focused
on what historians call the Imperi-
al Army’s sexual enslavement of
tens of thousands of Korean wom-
en and others in military brothels
during World War II. He explored
in detail the conservatives’ case
that the so-called comfort women
were in fact paid prostitutes.
Ultimately, Mr. Dezaki was un-
persuaded — he concluded that
the conservatives were “revision-
ists,” and used terms like “racism”
and “sexism” to characterize
some of their claims. Now, five of
them are suing him for defama-
tion.
The conservatives whom he in-
terviewed in the movie are part of
a group that has influence at the
highest levels of the Japanese
government. They have helped
shape what Japanese children are
taught, what works of art can be
shown, and, perhaps most signifi-
cantly, how Japan conducts im-
portant aspects of its foreign pol-
icy, most notably with South Ko-
rea.
Any reference to the women can
raise the conservatives’ ire. Last
month, organizers of an interna-
tional art fair in Nagoya closed an
exhibition after receiving terror-
ist threats over a statue symboliz-
ing one of the Korean comfort
women.
Mr. Dezaki, his supporters and
outside historians say the lawsuit
over his film shows how national-
ists seek to silence those who chal-
lenge them, while at the same
time using any outlet they can to
spread views that run counter
even to an official 1993 Japanese
government apology to the com-
fort women.
“The overarching theme of the
film is, why do they want to erase
this history?” the 36-year-old Mr.
Dezaki said.
The 1993 apology has been a
festering wound for those on the
political right, including Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe, who have in-
sisted that the Korean women
were not sex slaves because there
is no proof that they were physi-
cally forced into the brothels.
Diplomatic, economic and secu-
rity ties between Japan and South
Korea have reached their lowest
point in years, a rupture that can
be traced to the long-raging dis-
pute over what Japan still owes
for abuses committed during its
colonial occupation of the Korean
Peninsula, including its treatment
of the comfort women.
The conservatives have gener-
ally avoided the kind of reckoning
that Germany has undergone in
atoning for the Holocaust, as they
argue that the actions of Japan
during the war were no worse
than those of other nations, and
should not damage national pride.
Many of the most vocal right-
wing critics of the mainstream
view of comfort women are older
Japanese, but a younger cadre of
social-media-savvy activists reg-
ularly pounce on those who de-
scribe the women as sex slaves.
“It is an issue that people get
wild-eyed over,” said Jennifer
Lind, an associate professor of
government at Dartmouth Col-
lege in New Hampshire and a spe-

cialist in Japanese war memory.

She said passions also run

strong in South Korea, where ac-

tivists accept no deviations from

the narrative that the women

were brutally enslaved. In 2015, a

court ordered a South Korean

scholar to redact numerous pas-

sages from a book that suggested

that the relationship between sol-

diers and the comfort women was

more complex.

Mr. Dezaki’s two-hour docu-

mentary, “Shusenjo: The Main

Battleground of the Comfort

Women Issue,” has been shown

commercially in Japan and South

Korea and will be shown on col-

lege campuses in the United

States this fall.

When he began his research,

Mr. Dezaki, a second-generation

Japanese-American who grew up

in Florida and learned little about

the comfort women from his Japa-

nese immigrant parents, said he

wondered whether historical ac-

counts in the Western news media

“had gotten it wrong somehow.”

To understand the mainstream

view, he interviewed historians,

advocates and lawyers who de-

scribed their evidence. Docu-

ments have proved the Japanese

military’s direct role in managing

the brothels, and hundreds of

women have described harrowing

conditions in so-called comfort

stations.

But the mainstream experts Mr.

Dezaki interviewed were also

open about the lack of direct proof

that the Japanese military physi-

cally abducted the women — a

fact that the conservatives seize

on — and forthright about the

wide-ranging estimates of the

numbers of women involved.

In the film, Mr. Dezaki high-

lights a 1944 American Army doc-

ument, cited by the conservatives,

in which 20 Korean comfort wom-

en interviewed in Burma are de-

scribed as “nothing more than”

prostitutes who were “attached to

the Japanese Army for the benefit

of the soldiers.” That same docu-

ment says the women were re-

cruited under “false pretenses.”

Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a retired his-

tory professor who uncovered key

documents describing the mili-

tary’s management of the broth-

els, said that by “denying one

point,” the conservatives “seek to

deny the big picture.”

Much of the film dwells on the

nature of coercion. In the end, Mr.

Dezaki said, he was persuaded by

the scholars who say the women

were forced or deceived into pro-

viding sex to soldiers against their

will. In the movie, he concludes

that to remember the comfort

women is to fight “against racism,

sexism and fascism.”

“I did not defame them,” Mr.

Dezaki said of the conservatives.

“I made a film that documents the

issue and the people involved.”

He added: “Information is re-

vealed in the film, and how the au-

dience interprets this information

is up to them.”

But those suing Mr. Dezaki say

he is biased. “ ‘Revisionist’ is a

word with the greatest malice,”

said Nobukatsu Fujioka, vice

president of the Japanese Society

for History Textbook Reform,

whose business card reads “Let’s

create Japanese who are proud!”

Another plaintiff, Shunichi Fu-

jiki, wrote in an email, “I believe

this is a fight to clarify who is the

one fabricating history.” He added

that in the United States, liberals

“label conservatives as ‘segrega-

tionists,’ ‘KKK!’ ‘the Nazis!’

‘Hitlers!’ etc., but in actuality, the

segregationists they’re referring

to are themselves.”

Kent Gilbert, an American law-

yer and celebrity television com-

mentator who has lived in Japan

for more than 30 years, said that

the film did not misrepresent his

views, but that it was “a propagan-

da hit piece.” The comfort women,

he said, were just prostitutes.

“Everybody knows that,” he

said. “If you want to see prosti-

tutes, look for the Koreans. My

land, they’ve got prostitutes all

over the world.”

In addition to defamation, the

lawsuit accuses Mr. Dezaki and

Tofoo Films, the distributor, of

breach of contract, saying the

plaintiffs agreed to be interviewed

only for his graduate thesis, not a

commercial film. The plaintiffs

are demanding compensation and

a suspension of all public screen-

ings.

All of the interviewees signed

release forms giving Mr. Dezaki

full editorial control and copy-

right, said Makoto Iwai, a lawyer

who is representing Mr. Dezaki

and the film’s distributor. The New

York Times reviewed two ver-

sions of the release.

Koichi Nakano, a political scien-

tist at Sophia University in Tokyo

who was one of Mr. Dezaki’s pro-

fessors and appears in the movie,

said he believed that the plaintiffs

were looking for a reason to bring

a suit because the film’s “interpre-

tation doesn’t fit entirely what

they like.”

Audiences in Japan and South

Korea have said the film helped

them understand the comfort

women controversy in a new way.

At a showing in Seoul at Sogang

University late last month, Chae

Min-jin, 26, said she “realized that

we Koreans didn’t really know the

context and the logic in which the

right-wingers in Japan asserted

themselves after all.”

In Japan, some audience mem-

bers said the movie revealed in-

formation unavailable in their his-

tory textbooks. Tsubasa Hirose, a

freelance copywriter, wrote on her

movie-reviewing blog that she

had always thought comfort wom-

en “treated people at the hospital,

like nurses.”

“I didn’t know anything,” she

wrote, “and I wasn’t given any op-

portunity to.”

Mr. Dezaki said he did not con-

sider the debate closed.

“My conclusion is not final,” he

said. “I don’t know everything. I

feel like I can defend my conclu-

sion based off what I know.” But,

he added, “I’m always aware that

there’s a possibility that one of the

factors in my argument might not

hold.”

American Sued Over Film on Sexual Enslavement by Japan

‘Comfort Women’

In World War II

Miki Dezaki directed the documentary “Shusenjo” about military brothels maintained by the Im-

perial Army 75 years ago. At left, a statue symbolizes the “comfort women” sexually enslaved.

NORIKO HAYASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By MOTOKO RICH

Makiko Inoue and Eimi Ya-
mamitsu contributed reporting
from Tokyo, and Su-hyun Lee from
Seoul, South Korea. Kent Gilbert, a television commentator who appeared in the film, called it “a propaganda hit piece.”

NORIKO HAYASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

KYODO/REUTERS