A New Year: A New Japanese Apology

Japan: We are sorry. Bad things were done to you. We should remember the vicitms.

Korea: Oh. Wow. Are you just now admitting that you forced women to be your sex slaves?

Japan: You shouldn’t try to revision history. It seems that those women were not coerced. They were all willing prostitutes.

Korea: Is that right? But you will admit that you used slaves for industrial labor?

Japan: I don’t know what you mean. Why don’t you try to prove it.

China (butting in): Why don’t you folks admit that you went out of your way to massacre Chinese people, slaughtering us in mass extermination campaigns cutting south across Asia from Manchuria down to Singapore and Indonesia?

Japan: You folks are just blowing things out of proportion. It was never that bad. Please, we’re addressing the Korean people.

Korea: Do you acknowledge that you intentionally starved people to death?

Japan: It was war. Nobody had much to eat.

Korea: But you did things that can’t be justified, even by war, like how you practiced medical experimentation on human subjects?

Japan: What are you talking about? We would never do such thing.

Korea: You used chemical weapons on the battlefield, tortured and killed and cannibalized POWs.

Japan: All’s fair in war.

Korea: Fine. Why don’t you at least admit that your wars of conquest damaged our society?

Japan: Actually, we did all of you a benevolent service. If it wasn’t for us, you’d still be living in the middle ages.

Korea: Excuse me?

Japan: Bad things happened. And we regret they happened. But you should try to face the truth and understand how we developed your nation and raised you up out of the gutter. You have come along as far as you did only because we gave you the infrastracture and culture.

Korea: But all that wealth you looted from us, are you saying all that is your fee? Or will you give them back to us.

Japan: Finders keepers.

Korea: But at least give up your ridiculous claims over Dokdo.

Japan: Takeshima is Japan. You should hand them over.

Korea: We heard you say that you apologize. But we don’t exactly get what you’re apologizing for.

Japan: Because bad things were done, which in actuality was a great benefit to you. And we should remember the victims, even though we do not acknowledge any wrong doing or that there are any victims. Certainly, we are not liable because contractually you relieved us of any legal responsibility. But we should remember the victims of that horrible war anyway. Especially those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Korea: But you know that many who died there were Korean slaves and unpaid laborers.

Japan: That was our misery and not yours. But we will deign to incorporate your little memorial into our holy site of Rememberance since you keep bitching about it…

You Korean nationalists are too prone to amnesia when it comes to our apologies.

red sparrow: I feel your pain, Japan. But having a better memory would deprive them of constantly being able to play the victim card.

bureaucracies have lost the power to gain political influence–such as in rural areas through the granting of enormous subsidies–have left them disarmed in a life-or-death political fight.

FIXED

@seouldout

“where were the uprisings? Whoops, let me amend that: where was the uprising? Hundreds of thousands of Koreans with loaded weapons… and no revolt. Think about that for a moment. No revolt. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. Heck, the Indians revolted in 1857. The Warsaw ghetto Jews revolted in ‘43 and held off the Nazis for approx. a month. And they were barely armed.”

This is wrong on so many levels. Most of the large-scale uprisings were put down between the late 1890s and 1910. The Japanese sometimes completely burned down and massacred entire villages and also assassinated the relevant royal leadership involved in resistance, including the Queen, as well as prominant scholars. F.A. Mckenzie, author of “Korea’s Fight for Freedom,” documenting at the time, recounts:

“In June, 1908, a high Japanese official said that about 20,000 troops were then engaged in putting down the disturbances, and that about one-half of the country was in a condition of armed resistance.”

Matt, the blogger of “Gusts of Popular Feeling,” says that by 1910, 17,000 insurgents of the Righteous Army had been killed. This figure does not take into account the non-combatants killed.

After 1910, with its formal annexation, the Japanese were able to completely consolidate its new holdings on the peninsula. As a result, the various insurgent movements were forced out of the peninsula and they ended up basing themselves in Manchuria, from where they waged guerilla war. There were protests, too, though only one was massive or well organized–3.1, which resulted in 7000 killed in reprisals throughout the peninsula. Throughout their occupation, whether Koreans engaged in peaceful protests or armed insurgency, the Japanese tended to respond with massacres or pogroms. Many protesters and insurgents were also forced into slavery or were imprisoned where they were tortured.

One of the key weaknesses of the resistance movement was that it was profoundly fractured. It was not just that the royals themselves were fractured in how to deal with Japan, it was that other groups rejected the royals entirely along with the Japanese. And then there were the Communists. This meant that the Koreans would not be able to mount a united effort. Another major weakness was that the Korean emperor” was a damnably silly joke figure of historical proportion–the worst guy to have on the throne at the worst time. And yet, no matter how Koreans felt about him, his abdication must have been a demoralizing shock to the people. This all probably made Korea easier to annex than it might have been. Still, by this time, Japan was armed with one of the greatest armies and navies in world history and the successful domination of the weaker Korea was inevitable.

“Secondly, the approx. 650,000 Koreans who chose to remain in Japan after WWII indicate to me that they found life in “inhumane Japan” preferable to that of the freedom of Korea. This is amazing….Few jobs to be found in a post-War Japan, especially for those who aren’t Japanese. Food shortages, of course. Who sticks around in such a sh*t hole when they have a ticket out? The insane. And the content.”

We should also not forget that Korean Japanese were also subject to violence and murder simply because of the fact that they were Koreans. But to say that the fact that they have remained in Japan proves that their experience was not that bad is pretty lame. This conclusion could only be made by ignoring the social factors and realities involved in most kinds of migration, voluntary or otherwise. If we take extreme examples, we could ask why the Jews and the Romani of Asia have remained in Europe after experiencing centuries of large scale pogroms at the hands of the Christians and right-wing groups. We could also ask why African-Americans have remained in America after centuries of slavery and pogroms. Certainly, the Sakhalin Koreans and the Koryo-sarams of central Asia experienced murderous hardships. Something like half the Koreans forcibly relocated by Stalin died or were killed pretty early. And yet, we continually see that migration is “sticky” by nature. There are many complex reasons why this is so, some of which you can figure out on your own without picking up a scholarly book. The point is that the mere fact that a large number of Koreans have remained in Japan only lets us imagine the scale of the sum of forced relocation and voluntary migration the Koreans experienced under Japanese colonial rule. It does not say anything about the “comfort” of their stay.

Also, although it is correct to say that Japan was bombed flat by the Allies, to say that, therefore, the situation in Korea was necessarily better is questionable. Despite having to default on their sovereign debt, the Japanese were still much wealthier than the Koreans, largely because of the scale of the looting and enslaving they perpetrated across Asia. Furthermore, the Korean peninsula was widely seen as a likely theater of war in the near future, after Japan’s surrender. Indeed, war broke out merely 5 years later. This war completely devastated and impoverished the peninsula. In a recent article, Professor Andrei Lankov wrote that South Korea became the poorest nation in Asia–having an even lower income per capita than Papa New Guinea. Whatever Korean infrastructure remained with Japan’s surrender in Korea was largely lost as a result of the war–Korea, too, ended up being bombed flat.

For Japan, however, the Korean War was a boon. America began to invest heavily in Japan to build up Japan’s infrastructure to accomodate the UN war effort and to build up Japan to serve as bulwarks against Communist expansion. A decade later, South Korea experienced a similar boon when America began to invest heavily in the ROK for their joint war efforts in Vietnam and also as an incentive for Korea’s participation.

“Your best – and only – argument of merit is the sex slaves. Yes, a terrible crime. Yet, for some reason our Korean commenters don’t stay on point. Why is that? Could it be the post-war sex trade suggests that Koreans were active participants in procuring women? Were ethnic Korean soldiers customers?”

It seems you are the one who is not staying on point. Nobody is saying that there are no Korean prositutes or pimps. Prostitution exists everywhere. Only a fool denies this. Certainly, prostitution has always followed large armies stationed in foreign lands. It should be no different with the Koreans. But your attempt to take this obvious reality and try to diminish the severity and scale of forced sex slavery by the Japanese war machine is morally indefensible.

Also, to say that the Koreans have only one grievance against the Japanese reveals much more about yourself than it does about history.

“Now, a few points about your gambits. I find it offensive that you jump on the Holocaust bandwagon. Sure, the me-too argument can be compelling…when you too endured genocide. You didn’t….You don’t deserve to use it. You’re not Armenian, not Cambodian, and not Rwadan.”

I have no idea who you are addressing, but I don’t see where anyone made such a claim of genocide in the above posts. You seem to be confused on the issue and angry for no reason.

“Earlier discussions of this topic on this site have debunked the claims of forced name changes and destruction of the Korean language and culture. No need to regurgitate it.”

“Firstly…the Koreans…served in the Japanese military (some as officers no less), A Korean was is charge of all the POW camps in the Philippines. Death March of Bataan, anyone? Koreans popped their cherries by bayoneting Americans. Koreans were kamikaze pilots. Koreans held command positions. Koreans battled the Americans to the death on Tarawa. You can argue Korean soldiers may have not been true believers, but they were true behavers.”

Although I am a new and outside observer of Korean society and new member of the MHole, I find it highly questionable that anything was actually debunked by the denizens here. First of all, posters on this site do not offer good, let alone conclusive, analysis on anything. I certainly do not. And neither do you.

Now, to say that a systematic colonial assimilation of Koreans into Japanese culture was not taking place is absurd. The fact that the attempt has largely failed should be attributed to the fact that Japan’s formal direct control over Korea lasted only 35 years, which is hardly enough time to finish such a complex social engineering task.

The constant complaint among Japanese right-wingers is that everything was voluntary. Koreans moved to Japan and Manchuria voluntarily. They changed their names voluntarily. They joined the imperial army voluntarily. The slave-laborers worked voluntarily. The sex-slaves worked voluntarily. Plus, it is a true fact that there was a minority of Koreans who wanted Japan to “fix” and modernize Korea. All this makes some people find Japanese right-wing revisionist propaganda compelling.

But, there are complex reasons to find their complaints suspect.

We must begin with the constraints on the type of economic activity allowed Koreans. The result of these constraints was that, even though Japan spent an enormous amount to modernize Korea, nearly all the wealth and benefits went to Japanese citizens and most of the local resources went to Japan. In fact, the very purpose of modernizing Korea’s infrastructure was (1) to facilitate continental warfare, (2) to facilitate the exploitation of resources and food on the continent for transport back to Japan, and (3) to create an incentive for Japanese to migrate to Korea. Even where Koreans were allowed to participate in a market, Koreans often faced discriminatory regulation, which made it very difficult, if not impossible, to compete with Japanese business. The following is described in the scholarly work, “Korea Under Japanese Rule:”

“Virtually all industries were owned either by Japan-based corporations or by Japanese corporations in Korea. As of 1942, Korean capital constituted only 1.5 percent of the total capital invested in Korean industries. Korean entrepreneurs were charged interest rates 25 percent higher than their Japanese counterparts, so it was difficult for Korean enterprises to emerge. More and more farmland was taken over by the Japanese, and an increasing proportion of Korean farmers either became sharecroppers or migrated to Japan or Manchuria. As greater quantities of Korean rice were exported to Japan, per capita consumption of rice among the Koreans declined; between 1932 and 1936, per capita consumption of rice declined to half the level consumed between 1912 and 1916. Although the government imported coarse grains from Manchuria to augment the Korean food supply, per capita consumption of food grains in 1944 was 35 percent below that of 1912 to 1916.”

With further restrictions on how Koreans were allowed to be educated and gain job skills, the Koreans were often forced to choose between, on the one hand, “voluntarily” moving to Manchuria and Japan, changing their names, joining the army, or otherwise voluntarily collaborating one way or another and, on the other hand, impoverishing one’s entire family. That’s a tough choice for any parent to have to make, especially at a time when, as a natural consequence of being largely an agricultural society, families tended to be large.

Japan was then pretty sensitive to world opinion. They wanted to be recognized as a world power, but, as China is today, they didn’t like that the Americans and Europeans kept complaining about their frequently brutal treatments of the peoples they conquered. There was much more than pride at stake. Japan largely depended on staying on the good side of America and Europe to import energy resources–particularly oil, which they lacked and which they imported from America. And so, they often invited select American journalists and dignitaries to “witness” their benevolent rule of Korea and Manchuria. I suspect that this sensitivity was one of the major reasons which caused the Japanese to develop strategies to make the world think that the Koreans were largely accepting of their Japanese rulers. And I guess that there are still people out there who actually can fall for such obvious lies. I suppose people really do believe that the Korean Emperor felt honored to hand over his throne to Japan and marry off his children to Japanese. I suppose people out there do actually believe there never was any brutality or discrimination, for which Koreans never felt the need to rise up against or protest. I suppose that there are people out there who actually believe that the Koreans saw the Japanese as the enlightened liberators, who modernized Korea for the sake of the Koreans. I suppose no Korean ever pleaded with the outside world to condemn the Japanese and help restore sovereignty. I suppose that no Korean ever took up arms against these benefactors. I suppose that there never was any compelling reason, other than enlightenment, to cause Koreans to change their names, speak Japanese, move to a foreign land (where they never experienced brutality or discrimnation), and fight on behalf of the great emperor. I am sure all of this somehow just makes sense. Only Koreans, of all the peoples of the world, could have seouldout. Of course. Certainly, nobody else would have. Right?

As an outside observer, I have the opportunity to be impartial. So, I can see why the collaboration issue is sensitive for Koreans. But honestly, I think the way the Koreans collaborated with Japan, including in its brutality in committing war crimes, is, ultimately, understandable because it is common. For one thing, the sense of the word, “collaboration,” as used in this context, was coined centuries ago. In fact, I can’t think of any case in history where such a thing didn’t happen in similar circumstances, in which a foreign power annexed a nation through military conquest. One of the immediate losses in the conquered nation is the traditional bonds and hierarchies, which ruled society previously. And any good imperial nation could use some local thugs for hire to keep the local dissidents quiet. I’m sure you can find a couple thousand such dregs in any society of millions. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see some of them end up as some of the worst criminals of WWII. But just as with the Germans and Japanese, some of the Korean POW prison camp guards were just young kids who were put into positions of great power and learned to use it to brutalize people. In a Hankyoreh article attempting to humanize one of these guards, Lee Hak-rae, who had his death sentence commuted to 20 years, the reporter writes:

“Lee said that there were few who welcomed him upon his release. His homeland viewed him with suspicion as a pro-Japanese collaborator, and the Japanese ostracized him for his Korean ethnicity. Thus, his struggle continues to this day. ‘If only for the sake of my fallen comrades,” he said, “I hope that our honor will be one day restored.’”

As a poorly paid teenager, this guy, who was not smart enough to get out of grade school, learned to slap wounded POWS for not obeying him, even though Allied doctors at the prison pleaded with him not to order wounded POWs to work in deadly conditions. I have no idea what kind of honor he hopes to reclaim for himself and his comrades.

But he lived 60 years of the rest of his life being rejected by Koreans and made to feel like a man of compromised honor. I don’t see how the Koreans ostracizing Japanese collaboraters being proof that Koreans are hypocritical.

Or maybe it is the fact that Manchukuo veterans ended up taking over and ruling the ROK has got you feeling bitter. But of course they would have. After all, they were really the ones with the most skills in governance. This is an important point. As Professor Han Suk Jung writes in his article, “On the Question of Collaboration in South Korea:”

“Koreans gained valuable technical and managerial experience in government, army, the Kyowakai (the fascist party aspiring to link government and people), and police, as well as in the hospitals and factories of Manchukuo. This differs greatly from the experience of most of the Koreans who migrated to (or studied in) Japan during the colonial period, the majority of whom were confined to jobs as manual workers there. Manchukuo was a land of opportunity not only for Japanese but also for Koreans. These “Manchurians” possessed comparative advantages in the quest for power and position in postliberation Korea, where a power vacuum emerged following the departure of Japanese rulers.

The necessary condition for the employment of their talent was U.S. hegemony, which was established in South Korea after liberation. [2] South Korea was very different from North Korea, where landlords and pro-Japanese collaborators were eradicated or fled to the South. Nationalists, particularly those who emerged from the anti-Japanese resistance, were not welcomed into the South Korean administration, Army, or police force built by the occupying U.S. forces. A special committee set up under the new Korean congress in 1948 to investigate the activities of those who had worked for the Japanese empire was suppressed by the U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee government, particularly by the Korean police whose higher echelons were largely staffed with ex-colonial police. It was disbanded within half a year.”

Of course, the only reason the Manchukuo veterans had those skills in the first place, whereas, non-collaborators largely lacked these technical and managerial skills desired by the Americans was because non-collaborators were necessarily denied the necessary opportunities during the colonial era. And after Park Chung Hee successfully turned Korea into an economic phenomenon, the Manchukuo vets could finally defend themselves once the truth became understood by the general public. Contrast this, with the American’s de-Baathification campaign, which was reaffirmed later by the Constitution of Iraq. The result is that no Baathist will ever be granted any opportunity to contribute to the political process and prove his competency. The purge made the ensuing insurgency more deadly for everyone in Iraq. However, the Americans made it easy for the Iraqis to punish Ba’athists, even though many joined the Ba’athists because that was the easiest way to get real work and learn professional skills. However, left to their own wishes, peoples tend to punish known collaborators, not set them up to rule. You can see by the actions of the DPRK, which systematically purged Japanese collaborators. The Communist Koreans relished punishing known and suspected collaborators. Had the South Koreans been given the same opportunity, of course, they would have done the exact same thing. They hated the Japanese! However, MacArthur’s prerogative was clearly to shorten the time for the reconstruction and set up South Korea as a credible defense against the spread of Communism. And so, just as he made the controversial decision to protect Hirohito from prosecution for understandably practical reasons, the Americans made it inevitable out of practical concerns that the Manchukuo veterans and the colonial police thugs would end up in places of power in the new ROK. The result is that, unlike the North Koreans, the South Koreans ended up having to deal with, on the one hand, the psychological dissonance of admiring Park Chung Hee and, on the other hand, the people who sympathize with right-wing Japanese, who have had to deal with this ill-treatment for more than 50 years.

@Seouldout

“In contrast, 1945’s Koreans in Japan had a homeland which to return. A land where they still were the majority….So, why stick around with lousy Japs in radioactive rubble?”

Korean War. Political purges. Extreme poverty. Lack of services or jobs. Unstable government. Stigma of being suspected Japanese collaborators. Vigilante reprisals. High violent crime rate associated with Korea being a dysfunctioning society and failed state, with no legitimate heir to the Choseon authority. Having already set up roots in Japan. The cost of relocating back to Korea. Lack of housing. Brutal winters. You got me. I have no idea why people would find it difficult to move back to Korea.

I encourage you to read my above statement again.

“Hundreds of thousands of Koreans in the Japanese military, and no revolts. No assistance rendered to Allies. Allies brutalized. Koreans convicted of war crimes.”

“….Do you ever get sick of being wrong?”

I think the problem here is that you simply have not read enough.

@seouldout

“What a write up. Lots of supposin’. Quite a digression; you really didn’t address my two main points.”

You made more than two points, actually, and I responded to them all. The fact that you are now throwing away those other points says much about those points. I will now answer your “second” point. For a third time. The Sakhalin Koreans and the Koryo-Sarams are not being barred from returning to Korea today. The Japanese have even offered free fare for the Sakhalins. And everytime one of them returns, Korean TV news document the scene of the returner’s arrival. That’s what happened recently, when an old married couple tearily left their adult children and friends behind to return to the ROK. Yet, they have largely not done so.

And so you admit that Israel was important to the Jews. And yet they did stick around in Europe for thousands of years. You say that it was dangerous to return because the local Arabs would not like it. And yet you completely ignore the fact that historically many many more Jews have been killed by Europeans than by Arabs.

Their return to Israel is actually a fascinating instance of large-scale migration. But I don’t know why you think that they needed America’s “protection” to return. America acknowledged Israel, but in the ensuing wars with the Arabs, the Israelis defended themselves pretty much by themselves, armed largely with non-American weapons.

“No revolts. Allies brutalized. Koreans convicted of war crimes.”

I have sufficiently responded to these points.

“1) Hundreds of thousands of Koreans in the Japanese military, and No assistance rendered to Allies”

What do you mean by “Allies?” And what do you mean by no assistance? If, by “Allies,” you are referring to America and allied Europe, the fact is, they were not much of a factor in Manchuria and Korea. And without much outside support, anti-Japanese, anti-Communist Koreans were not as big a factor as the Communist Koreans were.

After the annihilation of the Righteous Army finally forced Korean resistance fighters and terrorists out of the peninsula, the remnants became profoundly fractured and scattered and they became involved in all kinds of wars in the region, but always with the aim to fight Japan. During the Russian civil war, a large contingent of Communist Koreans fought for the Soviets against an interesting alliance, which included czarist Russians, czarist Koreans, Japanese, and Koreans fighting for Japan. After the war, Lenin practically betrayed these Communist fighters and their numbers got hammered in Manchuria.

Other Communists joined with the CCP. The CCP was a serious threat to Japan since their formation. Moreover, Kim Il Sung apparently was an effective guerilla fighter and skilled manager, who was singled out by the Japanese as a priority target.

There is no doubt that many thousands of Koreans died fighting the Japanese all over northeast Asia.

By the way, how do the actions of hundreds of thousands of Koreans speak for 10s of millions?