1. Conceptual Framework: Defining Narrative Appropriation
Definition
Narrative Appropriation refers to a deliberate discursive strategy in which a powerful template drawn from an entirely different historical context——such as the transatlantic slave trade or European colonial plunder——is intentionally superimposed upon a specific historical event, effectively overwriting its actual factual structure.
The essence of this technique lies in stripping away the particularity of the target event (its legal context, economic framework, and regional specificity) and forcibly connecting it to an image that international society recognizes as absolute evil. The result is that evidence-based, archival discussion is neutralized before it can gain traction, and the side that commands the emotionally and morally superior narrative comes to dominate the discursive space.
Structure
The mechanism operates in three stages:
- Template Selection: A historical atrocity for which strong international guilt exists——slavery, colonial looting, etc.——is selected as the template.
- Forced Connection: The historical context of the target event is deliberately stripped away, and the template is applied. The binary of victim vs. perpetrator is emphasized to erase the complexity of the issue.
- Neutralization of Counterarguments: Once the template is established, fact-based rebuttals are dismissed as “the perpetrator making excuses.” The discourse is designed so that moral authority, not evidence or logic, determines the outcome.
2. Case Study I: The Tsushima Kannon-ji Buddha Statue Theft
Factual Background
In 2012, a Korean theft ring stole cultural artifacts from Kannon-ji Temple in Tsushima, Nagasaki Prefecture, including a gilt bronze Buddha statue believed to have been crafted during the Goryeo period. Legally, this constitutes criminal theft under modern penal law, without qualification. The perpetrators were arrested, prosecuted, and convicted by South Korean authorities.
The Appropriated Narrative
Certain factions in South Korea, and initially the Daejeon District Court, refused to return the statue as stolen property, citing the argument that it “may have originally been on the Korean Peninsula before being brought to Japan through pillage”——a ruling that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court of Korea in 2023.
This reasoning draws on a template that deliberately evokes the Elgin Marbles controversy and the broader return-of-colonial-plunder debate. By borrowing the morally high-ground narrative of “reclaiming cultural property from former colonial powers”——a discourse with strong resonance in Western progressive circles——and overlaying it onto what is in fact a modern criminal act, the theft is reframed as a cultural repatriation movement.
The Substitution of Issues
The provenance of the statue is historically complex:
- Multiple Japanese historical records document the transmission of Buddhist artifacts from the Korean Peninsula to Japanese temples through medieval trade and diplomatic channels, as well as deliberate safekeeping during periods of anti-Buddhist persecution under the Neo-Confucian Joseon dynasty.
- The claim that the statue was “looted by wakō (Japanese pirates)” remains unsubstantiated and lacks documentary foundation.
- The claimant institution, Buseoksa Temple, cannot demonstrate institutional or legal continuity from the era in which the statue is said to have been created.
Yet, once the “colonial looting” template takes hold, these historical and archival debates are swept aside in international discourse, and Japan’s legitimate legal arguments are reframed as moral failures——as insufficient remorse for colonial rule.
3. Case Study II: Wartime Labor (Forced Labor Claims)
Factual Background
Under the National Mobilization Order (Imperial Ordinance No. 451, promulgated in 1939), the Japanese wartime state mobilized labor, including residents of the Korean Peninsula, into its wartime production system. Historical records indicate that mobilization occurred through multiple mechanisms: recruitment, government-mediated placement, and conscription. Wages were structurally provided for under the system, though records also document cases of delayed or withheld payment due to wartime supply obligations and compulsory savings programs. The 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, along with its accompanying Agreement on the Settlement of Problems concerning Property and Claims, declared this issue “settled completely and finally.”
The Appropriated Narrative
Beginning in the 1990s, segments of South Korean media, academia, and politics began framing the wartime labor issue within the same categorical register as the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of chattel slavery in the Americas. In English-language discourse, terminology escalated from “forced labor” to “slave labor” and “slavery,” and the issue has increasingly been cited within UN human rights bodies in the context of “contemporary forms of slavery.”
The Substitution of Issues
The moral and emotional weight of the word “slavery” is overwhelming: once that framing takes hold, legally and economically precise arguments become functionally impossible, automatically classified as “apologia by the enslaver.” The specific substitutions are as follows:
- The National Mobilization Order was a domestic legal mobilization framework and is structurally distinct from what international legal norms of the era——and contemporary international law——define as forced labor in the sense of racially motivated deprivation of property and intergenerational servitude.
- The defining structural features of the transatlantic slave trade——racial differentiation, intergenerational bondage, and systematic family separation——are absent from the wartime labor context.
- The bilateral treaty framework of the 1965 Claims Settlement Agreement is disregarded and subsumed into a narrative of “continuing injustice.”
4. Strategic Intent and Mechanisms
Narrative Appropriation is effective not merely as information manipulation, but as a strategically sophisticated act that exploits the emotional infrastructure of international public opinion.
(1) Leveraging Western Guilt
Former colonial powers in the West have deeply internalized guilt over their own histories of aggression. By inserting Japan into the category of “colonial power,” these campaigns capture the moral sympathy of Western progressive opinion and structurally fix Japan on the “wrong side of history.” Once this framework is established, Japan’s fact-based rebuttals are interpreted through the lens of “the perpetrator refusing to acknowledge the victim’s suffering.”
(2) Neutralization of Evidence
When an emotionally and morally superior narrative is constructed, all evidence that contradicts it——archival documents, legal texts, statistical data——is automatically dismissed as “the perpetrator’s excuse.” This constitutes the formation of an epistemic barrier: a structure that renders normal scholarly and diplomatic discourse dysfunctional. The debate is no longer about what the evidence shows, but about whose moral standing permits them to speak.
(3) Perpetuating Victim Status as Moral Currency
By permanently occupying the position of victim, current violations of international law——such as unilateral reinterpretation of treaties or the obstruction of ICJ jurisdiction——and failures to honor bilateral commitments are legitimized as “resistance within the context of historical victimhood.” Victim status functions as a form of moral currency: past injustice becomes a credit that can be used to offset present injustice.
5. Conclusion and Countermeasures: Strategies for Narrative Resistance
(1) Weaponizing Concepts: Naming “Narrative Appropriation”
Japan’s counterarguments have historically been reactive——perpetually on the defensive against accusations of historical revisionism. However, an effective counter-strategy is not defensive but offensive conceptualization: making the opponent’s logical structure itself the object of critique.
By explicitly deploying the concept of Narrative Appropriation in international forums, Japan can shift from defending facts to analyzing the rhetorical mechanism: “What you are doing is not historical verification; it is applying a template borrowed from an entirely different context.” This critique must be delivered not as an emotional protest, but as rigorous analysis.
(2) Restoring Historical Particularity
The structural divergence between the borrowed templates (slavery, colonial plunder) and the actual events (wartime labor mobilization, the provenance of the Tsushima statue) must be continuously and visibly documented through academic papers, legal briefs, and policy papers.
Specifically, this requires:
- Comparative legal and social analysis of the transatlantic slave trade and the National Mobilization Order (presence or absence of racial criteria, intergenerational transmission, degree of restriction on freedom of movement, etc.)
- Empirical analysis of the legal definition of “colonial looting” against the documented provenance possibilities of the Tsushima statue
- Demonstration of the legal validity and finality of the Claims Settlement Agreement under international treaty law
(3) Strategic Multilingual Communication
There is urgent need to strategically build and disseminate, in multiple languages, a “genuine narrative” grounded in international legal principles and objective fact, entirely free of emotional rhetoric.
Of particular importance is the construction of consistent counter-discourse in English, Japanese, Chinese, and French against entrenched terms such as “slave labor” and “Comfort Women”——deployed continuously through academic journals, UN submissions, lobbying at Western legislatures, and fact sheets targeted at journalists.
The war of narratives is, before it is a war of facts, a war for the commanding heights of language and emotion. Only by recognizing this can effective resistance become possible.
This paper represents a policy analysis produced within the analytical framework of konrad.jp.