Where there is no vision, the people perish. The scholars are the priests of that
thought which establishes the foundation of the earth. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
True theory does not totalize, it multiplies. (Gilles Deleuze)
In the beginning
Calvin O. Schrag once remarked that while practice without theory is blind, theory without practice is empty. This essay attempts to define, by way of transversality, the role of public philosophy in the globalizing world of multiculturalism in terms of practice. I was introduced to the Kyoto Forum’s seminal project of public philosophy by its president Tae-Chang Kim when we met for the first time in Seoul, South Korea in June Japan, China, and Korea whose irresolution hinders its intra-regional relationships. It is the question of reparation and/or issuing a public apology by the Japanese government acknowledging, for example, the massacre of hundred thousands of civilians in Nanking and the “slavery” of Korean and Chinese “comfort women” during the Second World War. Recently the new Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi from California even introduced a non-binding resolution that would call for the Japanese government to acknowledge and issue a public apology for the wrong-doings concerning “comfort women” against which it reportedly lobbied. A New York Times editorial urged the Japanese government not to deny the established fact of “Japanese Army sex slaves” but to issue “a frank apology and provide generous official compensation to the surviving victims” and concluded that “the first step toward overcoming a shameful past is acknowledging it”. The New York Times reported that Prime Minister Abe said that Japan would not apologize even if the House passed the resolution. The obduracy of the Japanese government to issue a public apology not only creates tensions in intra-regional relationships but also cannot not be interpreted as an act of irresponsibility.
During Japan’s occupation of Korea (and Taiwan) including its assimilation policy fully being implemented during my elementary school days, there had been the incarceration, torture, and death of many Koreans. The Jung clan was forced to adopt at an emergency meeting the Japanese surname Umiyama in two kanji by giving up the traditional Korean way of spelling Jung with one kanji.