| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In those bygone eras and societies where "peace" was thought of in terms of a "peace of God", peace agreements could be expected to effect a complete amnesty for all evil deeds committed during an armed conflict (see Philip Towle, Democracy and Peacemaking, Routledge, 2000).
"To forgive" had the same connotation as "to forget". No matter how tragic a war might have been or what unspeakable sufferings people might have known, in times where peace agreements could be reached without paying attention to the desires or feelings of those who had directly borne the brunt of wars' destruction and brutalities, once the peace was established, questions of how to "heal" the sufferings of individuals or the sufferings of communities - composed, of course, of individuals - were not matters of particular concern for governments or other privileged social classes. Today, by contrast, as a result of societies' democratization, concern with elevating the life or status of individuals who have directly
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suffered from wartime calamities, the development of the mass media, and especially the diffusion of a way of thinking based on "human rights", people have come to believe that to remember past wars and the pain they brought can help avoid future wars. In the process of social democratization, the old equivalence between "peace agreements" and "forgetting the past" has broken down and the brutal acts of wartime are no longer forgotten. Postwar reconciliations must now take place within this modem matrix of history-related phenomena. The search for facts and the attainment of justice are now thought to be absolute preconditions for any true peace. Most difficult is the fact that, in spite of our tendency to talk about things at the level of collectivities and in the context of nationalisms, we must, at the root of these kinds of discussions, deal with "pain" as a feeling experienced by individuals. In a society where the equivalency between "peace" and "forgetting the past" is no longer valid, there have not yet matured, at least through the end of the 20th century, new factors that would make easier the act - very difficult for us human beings - of reconciling "I forgive" with "and still I cannot forget". Less
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