Ten days later an official letter summoned Sŏl Chin-yŏng to the office of the provincial governor. After careful investigation, ranking officials had decided that his case was delicate and that the governor should see him personally. And my chief must have thought that this Korean with his strong sense of propriety would bow to the governor.
At the office I was told that someone had come to see me. In the hallway I found Sŏl Chin-yŏng in traditional Korean dress, his gentle face pale and taut after the long walk in the bitter wind. I took him to the janitor’s room downstairs and again pleaded with him.
“Mr. Sŏl, I am going to ask you one more time. The conversion of names has almost legal force now. If you will take a two-character Japanese name, everything will go smoothly. You can still maintain your clan records, can’t you?” I was desperate to persuade him. Tragedy was already casting its dark shadow over him. I couldn’t bear to see this pure-spirited man fall into disaster. The harder he fought, the more tragic would be the consequences.
“So it’s about that,” he muttered. “Just as I thought.” But I saw the same determination in his eyes.
That morning the chief clerk had secretly told me their scheme. If Sŏl Chin-yŏng did not change his name that day, his daughter’s fiancé, Kaneda Hokuman, intern at the Severance Medical School, was to be arrested as a political criminal.
Sŏl Chin-yŏng couldn’t know this and I could not tell him, but I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him as hard as I could. I wanted to call him “Fool!” I wanted to force him to change his name.
He was politely led to the governor’s office. There he had lunch with the governor, who tried his best to change his mind. It was no use. I knew the attempt was futile, but when I heard the result I shuddered. Now I could only look on. But hadn’t I brought him to this? Wasn’t my naïveté the cause of it all—my ignorance of the ways of the world?
I was in despair, but about four o’clock in the afternoon the chief returned from the governor’s office gleeful and smelling of liquor. Smiling and talkative, he rattled on to the chief clerk. “It was the governor’s decision to go rather slowly with Sŏl Chin-yŏng, since he has been so pro-Japanese and we didn’t want to irritate military headquarters. We have various options. You know, it is thanks to Sŏl Chin-yŏng that I, only a section chief, could talk with the governor on intimate terms. He seems to like me. He invited me to go with him to Shimachi tonight.” Shimachi was the entertainment district.
I was disgusted—disgusted that he was happy to promote himself through the misfortunes of others, disgusted by the chief clerk’s fawning on him. I looked at my watch. It was about time for the military police to arrest Ok-sun’s fiancé and take him away to be tortured in a cold prison cell. I went to the window to suppress my anger. Mount Pukhan soared in the late afternoon light. The governor-general’s slogan, “Japan and Korea Unified,” was carved on the side of the mountain, but I could see only splotches of white snow on its rocky surface.
I wanted to scream. Every nerve throbbed. I had fallen into a bottomless swamp. I could do nothing. I could not save Sŏl Chin-yŏng.
Two days later, the seventh of February, Ok-sun came into town; she had learned of her fiancé’s arrest. She went to the military police but was coldly refused permission to see him. Not knowing what to do, she came to see me at the office. She was pale with anger and tension. Her eyes were accusing. I could not escape consciousness of guilt.
She told me that her father had been ill since his return from Seoul. “I don’t want to trouble him, so I came myself.” She was tearful. She must have been treated badly by the military police. I could find no words to console her. I got permission to leave and went out with her.
“I will go to the military police myself,” I said abruptly. I knew it would do no good, but I wanted to show Ok-sun that I had nothing to do with the arrest. She must have already realized that it was linked to her father’s refusal to change his name.
Amenities were growing scarce in Seoul, but there were still a few taxis. I hailed one, dropped her off at her uncle’s, and went on to the military police headquarters. It was my third visit to the red brick building in front of Yongsan Station.
I stated that I had come concerning the prisoner Kaneda Hokuman. The man in charge of the case glanced at my name card. Seeing that I was from a government office, he relaxed and grinned. “He’s under arrest for subversive ideas.”
When I explained that I was there because his fiancée was very worried about him, he was delighted. “That’s exactly what we want. When she comes tomorrow, we’ll kick him in front of her. Koreans hate the sight of blood. When she sees his nose bleeding, she’ll moan and faint. Then she’ll appeal to her father to help him, and in no time at all he’ll cave in.”
Suddenly I was dizzy. Things went black and I almost fell. I broke out in a cold sweat. Lightning flashed in my head; rainbow circles throbbed at my temples; my stomach contracted; and bile rose in my throat. I managed to say “I will return tomorrow” and headed for the door.
The military policeman escorted me outside to a stream of sadistic boasting. His skin was dark, and he had that repugnant odor peculiar to soldiers. “Tomorrow Sŏl Chin-yŏng is coming, too. We told Kaneda’s father that his son would be released if he had good surety. He was delighted to learn that Sŏl Chin-yŏng could stand surety. He’s gone to get him.”
“Is that so?” I thought I replied, though in fact I said nothing at all. I turned up the collar of my coat and walked headlong through the windy streets. My dizziness left in the cold air. The streets of Seoul were bleak under a gray sky. The passersby looked tired. “They have no dreams,” I mumbled to myself. “They’re dried up, exhausted.” I shunned the trams, kept walking.
As expected, Sŏl Chin-yŏng, despite a high fever, appeared at the military police headquarters the following morning. His daughter was supposed to be married in a week. He presented the necessary paper with his signature. The military police officer looked at it and handed it back. “You must sign with your Japanese name on an official document.” He refused to listen to Sŏl Chin-yŏng’s reasons, pushed another paper at him. “If you love your daughter, file this application to change your name at once. Otherwise we cannot process your document to release her fiancé.” At last Sŏl Chin-yŏng realized what they were doing. He sighed deeply but, still obstinate, said, “Let me think about it for a day.”
I stayed home from work that day because I was afraid that Sŏl Chin-yŏng and his daughter might come to the office to see me. But I could not avoid them. That afternoon one of my sister’s children called to me, “Uncle, you have guests.”
I went to the vestibule and found them both there, looking miserable. I almost choked. “We went to your office but learned that you were absent because of a cold. We are sorry to bother you when you are ill, but . . .” Sŏl Chin-yŏng spoke timidly; he had lost his usual composure.
I invited them to the parlor and lit the gas heater. I felt like a criminal dragged to court for a hearing, but I couldn’t help being pleased that after all, they had come to see me.
Sŏl Chin-yŏng gravely explained what had happened at the military police headquarters and asked if he really had to change his name to obtain Kaneda’s release. He was almost pleading.
“Do you know anyone,” I asked, “who has already changed his name and who can qualify as surety?”
Sŏl Chin-yŏng answered that Kaneda’s father had already done his best to find another guarantor for his son but in vain. “Of course,” I thought, “all this has been prearranged solely to make Sŏl Chin-yŏng change his name.”
“Mr. Tani, you have been very kind to us in this matter, and I am sorry to trouble you further. But we have no one else to turn to. Please . . .”
I was grateful to him for thinking well of me, but the situation was out of my control. Now that the military police were involved, bribery was out; if only I had suggested a bribe earlier! I blamed myself, and feeling guilty, I repeatedly left
them to go to the kitchen, though I had no business in the kitchen.
There was only one way out: to obtain special dispensation from the governor-general exempting Sŏl from changing his name. Sŏl Chin-yŏng had thought of that, of course, and his reply was quick. “That won’t do. Governor-General Minami has gone to Tokyo, hasn’t he? He won’t be back before the date for the wedding.” He added that the Keijō Imperial University professor of history who had pressed him to preserve his records had petitioned the governor-general to allow him to keep his Korean name but had not received an answer.
His hair had grown whiter since our first meeting the previous November. Because of his high fever, he seemed to have some difficulty breathing; sometimes his shoulders shuddered. His cheeks had become hollow. Yet even in torment, he retained the dignity that bespoke the seven-hundred-year history of his clan.
“I no longer know what to do,” he murmured, almost to himself. “So I will let my daughter decide. I will do whatever Ok-sun says.”
Ok-sun had been trying to suppress her tears. Now her body was racked with sobs so loud that my surprised sister came into the room.
Sŏl Chin-yŏng’s voice trembled. “Ok-sun, Hokuman is your future husband. Choose either him or me. I will abide by your decision.”
I was shocked. What was going through his mind? Was he not moved by his pride in Korean nationalism, now even more precious to him than his concern for his ancestors and the clan records? Was his anger not directed at the cunning and cowardice of the Japanese government? As he watched his sobbing daughter, his eyes became vacant but his lips were pressed tight. Ok-sun’s sobs pierced my heart.
The daily torture of Kaneda Hokuman increased. In their judo hall the military police kicked and whipped him until he lost consciousness. His family cursed Sŏl Chin-yŏng. Hokuman was their only son. His mother screamed at Sŏl Chin-yŏng: “Are you going to kill our only son?” But for Kaneda Hokuman there was no deliverance. Ok-sun chose her father instead of her fiancé.
Kaneda Hokuman was a slight, spoiled young man. He had nothing at all to confess. He had not the slightest idea why he was being tortured, why the military police shouted, “You must be a nationalist! You want to make Korea independent!”
He wanted only to sleep, but he was kicked, hit, and choked. When he passed out, they brought him to with buckets of cold water, and the torture went on. At last, to escape his suffering, he pressed his thumbprint as his signature on a confession. Only then did one military policeman show some pity and tell him he had been used to make Sŏl Chin-yŏng change his name. At that moment was born his fury against Sŏl Chin-yŏng, Ok-sun, the hated military police, and Japan. Wrapped in a thin blanket, shaking in his cold cell, he cursed all Japanese. A passionate nationalist was born.
On the same afternoon he was released by the military police, he was forced to enlist and was put in a training camp in the suburbs. A red mark was placed by his name in the roll book, and the instructors kicked him as often as they wished. He was constantly injured, and he was not allowed to see his family or even to write to them. But he was no longer the weakling he had been. There were many young Koreans in camp who had been abused as he had been and who shared his bitterness. They plotted together and tried to escape. He was caught and eventually died in prison.
The second scheme to coerce Sŏl Chin-yŏng was quickly put in motion: to draft his beloved daughter for labor in the arsenal at Inchŏn. Since they could not call up only Ok-sun, they would conscript all the young unmarried women in the area. I learned of this quite accidentally. During the chief clerk’s absence I took some papers to his desk and among them saw “A Plan to Draft Seventy Persons for Labor Service, Including Sŏl Ok-sun.” I didn’t need to read it to know what was intended.
That evening I sent a special delivery letter to Ok-sun telling her to find a job right away. She wrote back that she had no idea where to find work. We had no time to waste. What came to mind was the military warehouse where Sŏl Chin-yŏng had donated rice. Fortunately, some of my high school classmates were working there. With an introduction from them, I met the officer in charge. “Sŏl Chin-yŏng’s daughter would like to serve by working here,” I told him.
“Is that the Sŏl Chin-yŏng who donated a hundred thousand bushels of rice?” The officer remembered him, and since the warehouse needed many people, Ok-sun went to work the following Monday. I was pleased that one thing had gone well. I heard that the young women who were sent to the Inchŏn arsenal were making the Model 38 rifles. I knew little about the place, but since Ok-sun had been slated to go there, it was clear that the work would be anything but easy. Even I could not endure labor service for more than ten days. I couldn’t bear to have Ok-sun suffer and come to hate the Japanese government as a result.
Ok-sun commuted to work from her uncle’s home on Hamaguri Street in Seoul. One day she came to thank me for arranging the job. She felt fortunate because she had been assigned to secretarial work at the warehouse, while the girls who had been drafted slaved in miserable conditions at the arsenal. “They can’t go home even when they get sick,” she said. She knew that those young women were victims because of her father. “Why are they treating him like an enemy?” she asked sharply. “Has he done anything wrong?”
I felt good because I had been able to block their second maneuver. Imagining the crestfallen faces of my chief and the chief clerk when Ok-sun’s name was not among those drafted made me feel at last revenged.
By that time, the conversion of names was being enforced in all of Korea as though it were mandatory under law. When the police found Korean names on doors or gates, they walked right into the houses and told the residents they’d be jailed if they didn’t change their names. Influential local figures, earlier reluctant, had given up when they were threatened with being labeled anti-Japanese and assessed higher taxes and rice quotas. What had happened to Oksun’s fiancé was widely known.
However, Sŏl Chin-yŏng knew that name conversion was not yet law. The Japanese could not promulgate a law solely to cover cases like his without admitting failure in their campaign for voluntary compliance and facing loss of prestige as a result. They were desperately trying to sway the holdouts. Sŏl Chin-yŏng was not the only one. Song Yŏng-mok, the governor of Chŏnbuk, and Kim Tae-u, the governor of Kyŏngbuk, had not changed their names, but they held high government rank, while Sŏl Chin-yŏng was an ordinary civilian.
Meanwhile, I was confused and without hope, plagued by self-doubt. My days were meaningless. As I worked on complicated documents, I sometimes raised my head and looked at my fellow workers, next to me and across from me. We were like machines, following without question the chief’s orders as relayed by the chief clerk. “I cannot be a machine,” I muttered to myself, but I knew I was only a cog. Sometimes I seemed to be in a black whirlpool that spun me slowly and heavily, then swiftly and violently.
“One could go mad if he tried to think logically in a situation like this,” I said to myself and tried to accept things as they were. At times I wished to be merely a faithful government official.
Despite the holdouts, the conversion of names was considered complete at the end of May, and we were given a new assignment: “Use Japanese.” The objective was to make the use of Japanese universal by abolishing publications in Korean: newspapers, magazines, and, of course, elementary school textbooks. All people under the Japanese emperor had to use the Japanese language. To speak Korean would mark one as anti-Japanese and a shirker in the war effort.
Ridiculous slogans in Japanese were to be recited like incantations: “Pledges to the Imperial Nation.” Elementary school children were required to chant “We are subjects of Great Imperial Japan. We will cooperate loyally to serve our emperor. We will become good Japanese for the sake of our country.” The pledge for adults began “We are subjects of the Imperial Nation, and we serve our country loyally.”
We were ordered to promote the recitation of these pledges by any gathering of five or more people and at
all ceremonial occasions. The authorities hoped that repetition of these vows would inculcate loyalty among the Koreans. I found this job distasteful, too.
Around the middle of June I received a letter in beautiful calligraphy from Sŏl Chin-yŏng: “I am truly grateful for the kind consideration you have shown my daughter. Your favor is unmatched in our lives and will never be forgotten.”
Reading his letter, I wondered how he had been doing. I wanted to help him if I could, but since I was no longer involved in name conversion, I had no idea what was being done about him.
When I was a child I saw some children cruelly skinning a live snake. The skinned snake writhed in agony in the grass by the roadside. It finally crawled onto the dirt road and died struggling in the mud. I was reminded of that snake as I thought of Sŏl Chin-yŏng. He was suffering, and I was merely watching with clenched fists and bated breath just as in my childhood I had stared at that poor snake.
If only Sŏl Chin-yŏng would change his name—but he wouldn’t unless a law was enacted. All that remained to him was his pride in the seven-hundred-year history of his clan. Five thousand years of his nation’s history and the language and letters used by three hundred thousand Korean people were being systematically nullified. Now he faced final defeat: loss of his clan name and legacy.
Sŏl Chin-yŏng’s obstinacy, his insistence that he would not change his name voluntarily, inflamed the Japanese authorities. Short of a miracle, the outcome was obvious. I sensed that the gray shadow of death was approaching Sŏl Chin-yŏng, its color darkening to mourning black. He was like a terminally ill patient. I had prolonged his life with injections, but shouldn’t I have insisted on a radical operation?
Yet all through the summer I received fine melons and pears, with no hint that things were not going well. And so my foreboding came to pass with unexpected suddenness.
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series) Page 105