[KS] Re: Japanese Colonization Period

[k u s h i b o]

REPLY sends your message to the whole list
__________________________________________

Reply to: kushibo at mac.com
Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

Henny Savenije wrote:
> Often when I get into a discussion like this with Koreans, I ask them if
> they knew that in the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and Holland (Former
> colonist interned in Indonesia) do hate the Koreans more than the Japanese?
> Then there is a silence, and the question: "Why?" I tell them that the
> Koreans serving for the Japanese were crueler than the Japanese themselves.

As an American of partial Korean ancestry, I never learned of this until I
was a college student in Korea and I encountered some British people who
talked of how it was widely known that the British and Australian POWs in
the Pacific War had experienced unnecessary brutality from Korean POW camp
guards. This is addressed in the fiction "King Rat" by James Clavell, and
Max Hastings, in his book "the Korean War," briefly mentions the brutality
of Korean POW camp guards and how it affected those British POWs in the
Korean War who had also been POWs during the Pacific War.

> Then the issue about Comfort girls comes up, well did you know that
> (Taiwanese, Philippino and) Dutch women served as comfort girls as well, no
> they don't. Then the question comes up if they were compensated, no they
> weren't either.

To be fair to the Korean conventional wisdom on this, the overwhelming
majority of these people were from Korea. And I think for all the women, the
compensation issue is simple: figure out the average compensation a rape
victim received in Japan in those days, multiply it by the number of days of
"work" a comfort woman endured while there, multiply that by the average
number of "customers" she had to endure, and then calculate 55 years of
interest at Japanese rates. The number, I'm sure will be in the millions of
dollars for each woman, so, as to not bankrupt Japan, we may have to cap it
at a million bucks a piece. But they deserve at least that. And a huge
apology.

That said, what eats away at the Korean conventional wisdom is several
things. First, if you read Hicks's book, "the Comfort Women", and you hear
the testimonies of the women themselves, you see that a number of knowing
Koreans (including step-fathers, village elders, etc.) helped *dupe* these
women into thinking they were going to Japan for factory work. Second, the
official Korean version likes to downplay the fact that there were Japanese
women there too, by brushing them all off categorically as professional
prostitutes. Third, it was Japanese citizens themselves who dug up the
information necessary to prove that the Japanese government and military had
been culpable for this.

> The problem was that the women could be divided into three
> categories: the ones who wanted it, the ones who didn't want it, but did it
> in order to survive, and finally the ones who didn't want it. Since it was
> almost impossible to decide who belonged to which group, the whole things
> was never settled.

The idea that the women wanted to be there, that they were volunteers seems
a misogynistic alibi designed to evade responsibility. I don't buy it.

> Although I understood there have been negotiations
> between the Dutch government and Japan.
> 
> And indeed when I was much younger I have heard many stories about both the
> German holocaust and people who were interned in concentration camps in
> Germany, as well as stories about the Japanese and Koreans who tortured the
> Dutch. From those stories I don't know who was crueler, the Germans or the
> Japanese/Koreans, the methods just differed.

Sometimes I wonder about this. The Koreans have painted themselves as being
like Japan's Poland or something. But it seems, sometimes, that Japan's
Austria or at least Japan's Vichy France would be more suitable in shedding
light on what really went on.

> I think Koreans are right.
> Comparatively speaking this is one of the darkest periods in Korean
> history, beside the Imjin wars and Manchu invasions. On the other hand,
> Taiwan which has a far more violent history, doesn't complain that much
> about the Japanese.

I don't think Taiwan was as brutally suppressed, largely because the
Japanese didn't have to suppress an already existing nation with its own
army, customs, laws, etc., as they did in the early years of the Korean
occupation. Taiwan was an island province, not a country. I could be wrong
on that, though. Also, the nature of administrative responsibility was
different in Korea, compared to Japan. Korea was ruled by one naval admiral
(the relatively benign one of the group) and a string of army generals,
whereas (and I could be wrong on this) Taiwan had civilian leaders.

> I think this has also to do with the fact that Koreans
> needed something to make themselves a unity and give themselves an
> identity.

I agree that the post-colonial paradigm of Korea and of Taiwan has a lot to
do with this.

> It was convenient to use the Japanese on one side and the
> communists on the other side to get that identity, but also with the fact
> that Korea has little violence in their (written) history.

As my cousin likes to put it, "The Koreans are a very peaceful people. They
only invade themselves."

> On (yet) another hand (I only have two ;-) as John Caruso pointed out, the
> Koreans in Japan are still humiliated, though I understood that recently
> they could change their nationality,

They've been able to change their nationality for decades. And many have.
The Japanese are trying to paint themselves as ethnically pure, so they
downplay the fact that perhaps millions of "Japanese" are ethnically Korean
who are colonial migrants or their descendants. A number of years ago I read
that the number may be as high as five million, versus the 700,000 who have
Korean citizenship. Koreans who become Japanese citizens, though, have a
notation on their family registry for three generations, though. That might
hurt in marriage prospects, but it prevents them from getting caught in the
net of legal bars against "foreigners" holding certain jobs. (And this
happens in Korea as well: a former student of mine was born in Hokkaido to a
Korean father and a Japanese mother; she had no problems growing up in Korea
until she applied to work at Hyundai and she was barred because she wasn't
100% Korean. She had not told them so, but when they did the usual
background investigations of regular Korean recruits, they discovered this
on her family registry and kicked her out).

> but the majority doesn't want. On the
> other hand, most of them don't want to go back to Korea. On my trip to
> Namwon, I met a group of old people, I was a bit confused since some of
> them spoke only Japanese, others a mix of Japanese and Korean, but they all
> looked Korean. They appeared to come from Japan and none of them really
> wanted to live in Korea. I forgot to ask about their nationality status.

Why should someone be forced to leave their home of 50, 60, 70 years?

> I think that, when you get into discussions like this, the main issue is to
> make comparisons with other nations. At least the discussion is less
> emotional and more rational. But I think indeed that you will have a hard
> time finding objective history books, though I think that the tide is
> changing.

I agree. When I first point out similar shortcomings of "my" country of
birth (the US) then I find most Koreans are more open to discussing problems
in South Korea. Sometimes it works too well, and you open the floodgates.

K U S H I B O