A Sentimentalist Approach to the Comfort Women Issue: Reading a Documentary The Big Picture through the Notion of Sympathy

A Sentimentalist Approach to the Comfort Women Issue: Reading a Documentary The Big Picture through the Notion of Sympathy

This paper analyzes a recently released documentary on the comfort women issue, The Big Picture, through two notions of sympathy: diachronic sympathy and synchronic sympathy. Diachronic sympathy is to infer the counterpart"s passion in relation to his or her diachronic being. It is collective but personal and reflective but contingent. In contrast, synchronic sympathy is to imagine the circumstance of the counterpart. It is a partially reactive sentiment to an imagined circumstantial vulnerability. With this distinction, I contend that both Koreans and the Japanese in the documentary might reconsider their habituated nationalistic orientations towards the comfort women issue and perceive circumstantial vulnerability comfort women faced as a shared threat through the Lacanian real at the register of diachronic sympathy and the Derridean différance at the register of synchronic sympathy.

This paper analyzes a recently released documentary on the comfort women issue, The Big Picture, through two notions of sympathy: diachronic sympathy and synchronic sympathy. Diachronic sympathy is to infer the counterpart"s passion in relation to his or her diachronic being. It is collective but personal and reflective but contingent. In contrast, synchronic sympathy is to imagine the circumstance of the counterpart. It is a partially reactive sentiment to an imagined circumstantial vulnerability. With this distinction, I contend that both Koreans and the Japanese in the documentary might reconsider their habituated nationalistic orientations towards the comfort women issue and perceive circumstantial vulnerability comfort women faced as a shared threat through the Lacanian real at the register of diachronic sympathy and the Derridean différance at the register of synchronic sympathy.