Also in 1940, a year before Japan escalated its conflict against China into a Pacific War that eventually embroiled the US, came the order for all Koreans to be organized into ten-family units of Neighborhood Patriotic Associations. This reflected the colonial state’s quest to achieve complete control over human and material resources through penetrating surveillance and security. These neighborhood associations facilitated rationing and a comprehensive system of extracting “common good donations,” of both food and materials, that forced people, especially in the last few years of the war, into desperate measures to feed themselves. Everything eventually became appropriated for war; indeed, the state even arrogated the choice of shoes and clothing that people wore. The term “total mobilization” (“soryoku,” Kor. “ch’ongnyk”) became pervasive, attached to a torrent of new regulations as well as to all kinds of groups organized according to occupations, regions, and even religions.
For Koreans, it would be difficult to recall anything worse than the severe economic deprivations of the wartime mobilization period, especially in the countryside. However, two other phenomena would eventually rival rural immiseration both in terms of severity and in their impact on Koreans’ memories of this period. The first was the descent of workforce mobilization into forced labor. Eventually thousands of Koreans, whether they were drawn by deceptive promises of employment or simply abducted, filled the labor shortages in Manchuria, Japan, and newly conquered Japanese territories such as Sakhalin Island. In munitions factories, shipyards, sweatshops, and mines, these Koreans led lives of unremitting toil amidst often dangerous conditions, with little food, no pay, few chances to escape, and diminishing chances of survival. Many of the descendants of those who did survive still live in Japan and Sakhalin Island, now part of Russia. The other, and by now the most publicized wartime atrocity, was the roundup of thousands of young women into the “Comfort Corps” forced prostitution rings servicing imperial soldiers on the battle fronts throughout the expanding Japanese empire. As with those Koreans who eventually found themselves in coerced labor conditions, these females were either kidnapped or lured out of their villages with promises of economic opportunity. The extraordinary horrors that they experienced in these brothels can hardly be imagined. But beginning in the 1990s, as they neared the close of their lives, survivors gradually came forward with wrenching stories recounting their ordeals, following a lifetime of hiding what they deemed an unspeakable shame. These accounts incriminate the collusion of colonial authoritarianism with the long-held nexus of sexual vulnerability and social status, a practice that readily fell prey to the depredations of wartime mobilization.
RESIGNATION, COLLABORATION, AND MODERN IDENTITY
Given such harm inflicted on the Korean culture and people, how, one may ask, could there have been so many Koreans who collaborated with Japanese colonialism during wartime, and indeed actively promoted the efforts at extreme mobilization? At one level, it is not that difficult to answer: many Koreans earned their livelihoods or otherwise benefited from the colonial system. And many of them, as well as others, sincerely believed that the best outcome for the Korean people—not necessarily for Korea’s status as a politically autonomous nation-state, which might have been less important—was incorporation into and support for the Japanese empire’s pursuit of war. This would explain the thousands of civil servants, businessmen, intellectuals, artists, educators, and other professionals who publicly encouraged fellow Koreans to contribute to the war effort and renounce their Korean loyalties. Even more confounding is that central figures in the formation of modern Korean identity later came to advocate its obliteration. This is why the case of Yi Kwangsu and Ch’oe Namsn is so compelling.
It would be no exaggeration to call Yi Kwangsu and Ch’oe Namsn the two most influential intellectuals of the early twentieth century, and indeed perhaps the two seminal figures in the formative period of modern Korean culture itself. Yi, author of what is considered the first modern novel (and possibly still the most famous one), Heartless (1917), became the standard-bearer for Korean fiction writing in the colonial period. And Ch’oe, a pioneering poet and publisher whose innovations, beginning with his poems “Song of the Seoul-Pusan Railroad” and “From the Sea to the Boys,” along with his literary journal, Boys—all unveiled in 1908—established the stylistic foundation for modern Korean poetry. But these two figures’ influence extended beyond literature, as both played active roles in educational campaigns, scholarship, and, most intriguingly, causes for Korean independence. Ch’oe Namsn, in fact, authored the stirring March First Declaration of Independence of 1919. His turn into a vocal supporter of the Japanese war effort, then, would be akin to Thomas Jefferson’s joining the British forces in the War of 1812. Granted, Ch’oe shunned political activism and even demurred from actually signing the Declaration of Independence, but he also produced foundational works of scholarship on Korean history, religion, and language. Yi Kwangsu, for his part, published essays that adamantly called for reforming Korean customs and character to prepare for eventual autonomy. He also idolized his mentor, the celebrated independence activist An Ch’angho, who died in 1937 while recovering from a prolonged bout in a Seoul prison.
In their roundtable discussion following their November 1943 speeches to a throng of Korean students studying in Japan (see Image 19), Ch’oe and Yi rehashed the by-then familiar arguments calling for Koreans’ support for the war effort: that Korea had a great deal to gain from Japanese tutelage; that the real enemy was the Anglo-Saxon civilization that threatened to destroy the East Asian one; that it would be an honor for the individual, family, and nation to sacrifice one’s life for this great cause. Interestingly, Ch’oe Namsn also alluded to the findings of his historical research, noting that in ancient times—before Korean civilization had become “soft” through a preoccupation with literary pursuits due to Chinese influence—Korea was much like Japan: militarily oriented. Indeed, Ch’oe notes, these ancient Koreans who migrated to Japan were likely the ancestors of the samurai themselves! For his part, Yi, who appears in the transcript through his Japanized name, betrays an anxiety that his message should have been better received by the Korean students, who still seemed overly attached to their Korean identity. As if to accentuate such a naive innocence of youth, Ch’oe and Yi spend the rest of the discussion recounting their own formative years, starting four decades earlier, as students in Japan. This experience, they note while praising each other, had provided the springboard for their major accomplishments in developing Korea’s modern literary culture.
Image 19 Ch’oe Namsn, Yi Kwangsu, and children’s author Ma Haesong at the roundtable discussion in Tokyo, November 1943. (Courtesy of Sjng sihak.)
It is somehow fitting that these two giants took an intellectual stroll through the entire colonial experience. Much more had emerged than modern Korean literature and culture; the colonial period in many ways had stood as the intensive cauldron of modern Korea as a whole. Within a relatively short span of three decades, Korea had experienced nearly the full spectrum of changes that took one-and-a-half centuries to take hold in, say, colonial India: urbanization, industrialization, state-led development, nationalism, communism, social restructuring, and so on. By the early 1940s much of Korea, especially the urban areas, looked fundamentally different than in 1910, and throughout the country a pervasive feeling of permanence arose regarding Japanese colonial rule. Even the dislocations of wartime mobilization reinforced the sense that Koreans were simply cogs in the wheels of the Japanese empire. For many Koreans, then, resignation, not “collaboration,” was almost unavoidable and equated simply to accommodation with the inexorable changes of modernity.
What complicates matters is that the wartime mobilization included the excesses of forced labor and sexual slavery, as well as the horrors of wartime combat itself for many caught outside the peninsula. In other words, the ultimate judgment on the so-called collaborators cannot escape consideration of the colonial period as a whole, which i
n turn cannot disregard the crimes of the wartime years. Given what happened in the subsequent Korean War, it is not difficult to believe that, had Korea remained independent, the wrenching trials of modern change would have resulted in horrors of one kind or another, either among Koreans or committed by Koreans on other people. The terrible events, however, cannot be
detached from the reality that Korea was ruled by a foreign power, and this makes fingering and condemning Korean collaborators almost inevitable, however simplistic. The suffering of Koreans was one thing, but for Koreans to assist the Japanese colonial system in committing abuses invites outrage. As in France’s periodic soul-searching regarding its Vichy past, the complicity to horrific crimes (in the French case, the Holocaust) is almost overshadowed by the more facile condemnation of national betrayal—collaboration with a longtime foreign rival turned hated ruler. In this sense, to most Koreans today, the wartime mobilization period represented a fittingly ignoble end to the despicable enterprise of colonial rule as a whole. To forgive the Korean collaborators from the wartime mobilization would be as unfathomable as acknowledging any positive results from the colonial experience.
THE GRAND NARRATIVE: INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS
The most ready alternative to a more forthright engagement with the issue of collaboration in the wartime era, and indeed of much of the colonial period itself, has been to focus on the celebrated efforts by Koreans to fight for their independence. These are well known, hailed as evidence of a resilient national spirit. Among the renowned leaders was Syngman Rhee, who spent most of his lifetime in the US trying to use his patchy connections to the Washington elite in order to influence American foreign policy. There were also Kim Ku and Kim Il Sung, who fought alongside the Chinese nationalists and Chinese communists, respectively, in the common struggle against Japanese imperialism. By the 1940s, in fact, Kim Ku acted as the de facto leader of the Korean government in exile that had originated in the spring of 1919. He even formed a Korean Restoration Army from his base in China, with hundreds of soldiers ready to charge into the peninsula. There are several problems with the traditional focus on these movements, however: first, these organizations were all operating outside the peninsula; second, they were splintered and commanded little cooperation from each other; finally, and not unrelated to the first two issues, these movements had little to no effect on actually bringing about liberation from Japanese colonial rule.
The heroizing of these freedom fighters is understandable, given that they at least made great sacrifices for the cause of independence, and given the demands of constructing the modern narratives of nationhood; indeed, the North Korean political system has always been utterly dependent on this story. But their historical significance lies more in understanding the history that followed than the history for which they are honored. That their role in achieving Korean liberation was far greater in legend than in actuality bespeaks the complexities of the colonial experience as a whole.
20
. . . . . . . .
The Liberation Period, 1945–50
CHRONOLOGY
1945 August Liberation from Japanese colonial rule
1945 September Formation of the Korean People’s Republic
1945 September Start of the Soviet occupation in the north and American occupation in the south
1945 October Return of Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung to Korea
1945 December First Soviet–American Joint Commission, announcement of trusteeship
1946 October Mass general strike in southern provinces
1947 April Dissolution of the Joint Commission
1947 July Assassination of Y Unhyng
1948 April The Cheju Island Uprisings
1948 May Elections for members of the National Assembly in southern Korea
1948 June Syngman Rhee elected president of southern government by National Assembly
1948 August Proclamation of the Republic of Korea (South Korea)
1948 September Proclamation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)
1948 October Ysu-Sunch’n Rebellion
1948 December Passage of the National Security Law
1949 June Promulgation of the South Korean land reform
1949 September Dissolution of the Committee for Investigating Anti-National Behavior
THE MAY ELECTIONS IN SOUTHERN KOREA, 1948
On May 10, 1948, in southern Korea, people formed long lines waiting to do something they had previously only heard about: choosing government officials in a national election. These first-time voters were
electing legislators for the provisional National Assembly that would be charged with devising a constitution for the Republic of Korea. These citizens were responsible, then, for helping to establish a new Korean government. That this government would come into being three years after the end of Japanese colonial rule, and that its jurisdiction would cover only the southern half of the peninsula, encapsulated the uneasy circumstances leading to this momentous event. The jubilation that had greeted liberation from thirty five years of Japanese colonial rule in the summer of 1945 had quickly shifted to a more somber realization that freedom from Japan did not mean freedom from foreign rule. Indeed the division of the peninsula into separate northern and southern occupation zones headed by the Soviet Union and the US, respectively, turned the peninsula into the first Asian theater of the emerging rivalry between these Second World War allies: the Cold War.
For Koreans in the southern zone, the American occupation would bring forth greater political and economic freedoms than the Japanese colonial period had, but an almost equally repressive stifling of their aspirations for autonomy. The unremitting clashes between American priorities and Korean goals, American disregard for Korea’s internal dynamics versus Korean ignorance of geopolitics, and often bitter divisions among Koreans came to dominate the “liberation space” in the southern occupation zone. This tense five-year period between liberation in 1945 and the Korean War in 1950 brims over with historical significance, primarily because it must be viewed in relative terms: unable to escape the foreshadowing of the Korean War, but also bound inescapably to the colonial legacy. One can consider the liberation space a transitional period from colonial subjugation to national division, a short-lived interregnum between two devastating wars, or a wasted opportunity to reset Korea’s modern historical trajectory. In any case, what took place at this time would cast long, dark shadows over the rest of Korea’s twentieth century, and indeed frame the perspective on Korea’s modern experience as a whole.
THE PRIMACY OF POLITICS: A MULTI-LATERAL DYNAMIC
Korea’s modern history appears to be dominated by politics, so intense and rapid have been the political changes and their repercussions. The intrusion of politics into every other sphere of existence was never more acute than in the post-liberation period. Political interests and conflicts, from village disputes over property and ideology to the geopolitical rivalry between the Allied victors-turned-occupiers, seem to have overwhelmed everything else. Complicating the situation even further were the constant shifts in the political forces arrayed against and alongside each other: the two occupation armies and governments, the various Korean organizations of all ideological stripes, the emigrant workers and independence activists returning to their homeland, those who benefited from as well as those victimized by the colonial wartime mobilization, and so on. There simply was little room in the liberation space for much else beyond politics.
This reality seemed far-fetched during the enormous celebrations that spilled into the streets beginning on August 16, 1945, the day following the Japanese emperor’s proclamation of unconditional surrender that had been heard by some on the radio. The joyous news spread like wildfire, and for several days Koreans marched up and down urban boulevards shouting and waving placards and makeshift symbols like the Korean flag. For some, however, this was not a surprise. A few days before liberation, the Japanese colonial leaders had asked the man they consid
ered the de facto Korean leader still in the country, Y Unhyng, to form a provisional governing organization. Y, a moderate leftist, consented to this request and quickly formed the Committee for the Preparation for Korean Independence (CPKI). Scarcely could he have known that, upon the signal for Koreans to exercise their new freedoms, a host of other political groups would emerge to push a variety of interests and ideologies. This was a portent of things to come.
A History of Korea Page 22