A History of Korea (69 page)

By the end of the Pacific war, some 4 million Koreans, almost 16 percent of the total population, were scattered throughout the Japanese empire. As victims of the Japanese warmongers, Koreans had been robbed of their rice, exploited as low-wage earners in factories and mines, and requisitioned as laborers or soldiers or humiliated as sex slaves.

From the late 1930s, as Japan consolidated its wartime mobilization, the Japanese organized nearly every aspect of Korean life to serve their war needs. The National General Mobilization Law, promulgated in April 1938, imposed upon Koreans mandatory Japanese war conditions. The desires of Koreans were completely ignored, and the Korean people became slaves of the Japanese warlords. Japan established a policy of
naisen ittai,
meaning “Japan and Korea as one body,” to obtain the Koreans’ total loyalty. The Japanese attempted to create a climate wherein the Koreans and the Japanese would be of one body, one mind, and one spirit in serving the needs of Japan. The policy of “Japan and Korea as one body” originated in the Japanese contention of the 1880s that the Japanese and Koreans had the same ancestors. Koreans were prohibited from speaking their own language and writing in their own script, and were forced to assume Japanese names and participate in Shinto worship. Japan organized numerous “patriotic” and “anticommunist” groups to penetrate Korean society at every level for the war effort. The Japanese also pressured prominent Koreans to collaborate with them, holding up the slogan “Japan and Korea as one body,” Simply put, Japan wanted Korea to cease being a colonial outpost and become an integral part of the Japanese empire.

The appointment of Minami Jiro (1936–1942) as governor-general in August 1936 marked an intensification of the mobilization and assimilation policies. After his inauguration, Minami recklessly pushed ahead with the assimilation plan, contrary to the Koreans’ wishes. In 1938, as part of the plan, he ordered Koreans to recite from memory, in Japanese, the “Oath of Imperial Subjects,” pledging loyalty to the Japanese emperor while bowing toward the imperial palace in Tokyo. He also forced the Koreans to worship the Japanese Shinto
spirits of dead Japanese, a practice repellent to them, and closed schools and newspapers that opposed his policy. For instance, he shut down the
Chos
ŏ
n chungang ilbo,
or Korean Central Daily, in November 1937, and then the two largest Korean newspapers, the
Tonga ilbo
and the
Chos
ŏ
n ilbo,
in August 1940, leaving only the minor pro-Japanese
Maeil sinbo,
or Daily News.

In April 1938 Minami issued an order to extinguish Korean culture altogether by strictly prohibiting the use of the Korean language in all Korean schools, offices, and businesses. All teaching materials written in Korean were forcibly destroyed, and teachers and students who spoke Korean in schools were expelled or severely punished. All government offices or business corporations had to write documents only in Japanese. Novelists, poets, and other creative writers were forced to produce their works only in Japanese. Even mild expressions of cultural and literary nationalism were not tolerated and subject to surveillance and punishment.

In accordance with the Name Order enacted in 1939, Koreans were required to use Japanese names. Family names, for Koreans, represented an essential means through which families and clans forged a spiritual bond. Those who refused to assume Japanese names were discriminated against in every corner of society dominated by the Japanese. They were prohibited from attending schools, from obtaining official documents, and from mail delivery, and were not even allowed to draw provision rations. The law took effect in February 1940, and, to the end, only 14 percent of Koreans refused to adopt Japanese names. In short, the Japanese sought to obliterate Korean national identity which had been maintained for several millennia. Because Japanese efforts to erase Korean identity were so ruthless and tenacious, Koreans might not have preserved their indigenous language, culture, and customs if Japanese colonial rule had not ended in August 1945.

While Japan stubbornly pursued its assimilation policy in the 1930s and the 1940s, some Korean nationalist scholars made every effort to preserve Korean culture. The Chos
ŏ
n
ŏ
y
ŏ
n’guhoe, or Korean Language Study Society (currently the Han’g
ŭ
l hakhoe, or Han’g
ŭ
l Study Society), was founded in 1921 by Yi Chung-hwa, Chang Chi-y
ŏ
ng, and Ch’oe Hy
ŏ
n-bae—disciples of Chu Si-gy
ŏ
ng, a great scholar in the late Chos
ŏ
n period who, in 1910, wrote
Taehan kuk
ŏ
munp
ŏ
p,
or Korean Language Grammar, and
Kuk
ŏ
munp
ŏ
p,
or Korean Grammar.
¹⁸
This organization of Korean linguists made its greatest contribution
in the standardization of both han’g
ŭ
l orthography and the transcription system of foreign words. Its monthly journal,
Han’g
ŭ
l,
which first appeared in February 1927, broadened and popularized the use of the native Korean alphabet in a country where the educated elite still preferred to write in literary Chinese. At the same time, the linguistic society embarked on the clandestine compilation of a dictionary of the Korean language and commemorated as “Han’g
ŭ
l Day” the date in 1446 when the newly created Korean alphabet was first promulgated. Meanwhile, Korean vernacular newspapers launched a campaign to enlighten the masses. In April 1933 these daily newspapers adopted the newly proclaimed spelling system and sponsored a literary campaign enlisting the participation of middle school students. In October 1942, when the clandestine Korean-language dictionary was detected by the Japanese police, leading figures of the society were arrested, charged with conducting anti-Japanese activity. In what became known as the “Incident of the Korean Language Study Society,” they were subjected to severe torture, and Yi Yun-jae and Han Ching died in prison.

The Japanese rewrote Korean history from a strongly Japanese viewpoint to denigrate Korean history and culture. To stress the Koreans’ cultural inferiority, for instance, the Japanese denied, falsely, that the Paleolithic Age had never existed on the Korean peninsula, but Korean historians, in their quest for independence, refuted and discredited the Japanese historiography. Nationalistic histories of Korea, in the tradition of those published at the end of the Chos
ŏ
n dynasty, appeared in the 1910s and the 1920s. In his works
Han’guk t’ongsa,
or The Tragic History of Korea (1915), and
Han’guk tongnip undong chi hy
ŏ
lsa,
or The Bloody History of the Korean Independence Movement (1920), Pak
Ŭ
n-sik not only attacked Japan’s aggression in Korea but also sought to spiritually support the Korean independence movement, and his works made a lasting impact on the minds of Koreans. Sin Ch’ae-ho devoted himself to the study of early Korean history and wrote his representative work,
Chos
ŏ
nsa y
ŏ
n’gu ch’o,
or Exploratory Studies of Korean History, in 1929. By gleaning information from the inscription on the stone monument of the Kogury
ŏ
king Kwanggaet’o, Ch
ŏ
ng In-bo was able to correct errors Japanese historians had made concerning early Korean history. Mun Il-p’y
ŏ
ng understood Korean history as an expression of the country’s distinct cultural identity, and he wrote a well-known work titled
Taemi kwangye osimny
ŏ
nsa,
or The Fifty-Year History of Korean-American Relations, which appeared in 1939. Because most of these nationalistic studies were closely related to the struggle for Korean independence,
the Japanese suppressed them. Sin Ch’ae-ho died in prison in Lushun (Port Arthur), China, because of his independence activities.

In the 1930s some Korean historians sought to explain Korean history from the perspective of Marxist historical materialism. They tried to awaken class consciousness among peasant farmers and laborers, and, in so doing, conflicted with the nationalist historians who gave priority to the nation over class struggles. Paek Nam-un represented the Marxist historian in his works
Chos
ŏ
n sahoeg y
ŏ
ngjesa,
or The Socioeconomic History of Korea, written in 1933, and
Chos
ŏ
n pongg
ŏ
n sahoe ky
ŏ
ngjesa,
or The Economic History of Feudal Society of Korea, published in 1937. In 1934 historians who rejected both the nationalistic and materialistic interpretations of history founded the
Chindan hakhoe,
or Eastern Land (Korea) Study Society, which advocated a purely objective study of history, with no rigid theoretical frameworks. The Japanese saw the study of the Korean language and Korean history as dangerous, so they aborted even the activities of Korean historians who belonged to the relatively moderate Chindan hakhoe.

In the 1940s Korean literature faced its darkest hour, its very survival in peril. Most Korean writers yielded to Japanese pressure, publishing their works in Japanese or even allowing their art to serve the Japanese war effort. But the poets Yi Yuk-sa and Yun Tong-ju were exceptions. Speaking out for independence, Yi Yuk-sa composed
Ch’
ŏ
ngp’odo,
or Seedless Grape, in 1940; after being arrested many times, he died in prison in Beijing in January 1944. Another poet Yun Tong-ju, famous for his posthumous poem,
Han
ŭ
l gwa param gwa py
ŏ
l gwa si,
or Sky, Wind, Stars, and Poetry, also died in prison in Fukuoka, Japan, in February 1945, just before Korea’s liberation. Thus, in the darkest hours of Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s and 1940s, some Koreans did strive and sacrifice themselves to preserve Korean culture by studying the Korean language and history, as well as writing the nation’s literary works.

During the 1930s all Korean nationalists fought bravely against the immense power of the Japanese empire. Within Korea, both active and passive resistance virtually ceased as the police and the military kept close watch on anyone suspected of subversive inclinations and imposed severe punishments. Most Koreans chose to pay lip service to the colonial rulers; others actively collaborated with the Japanese. As a result, the treatment of collaborators became a sensitive and sometimes violent issue during the years following liberation. Even in the
twenty-first century, the controversy over these Japanese collaborators still remains a contentious, divisive issue.

As the nationalist movement was completely thwarted at home, Manchuria and later China were the main theaters of émigré nationalist activity, and mainly the communists led the independence struggle. In Manchuria Korean guerrilla forces grew rapidly, and by 1933 they established several liberated districts in mountainous areas near the Korean-Manchurian border. The strength of the guerrilla forces grew to such an extent that they carried the battles into Korea proper. Japanese forces based in the villages of Poch’
ŏ
nbo and Musan were attacked and destroyed in July 1937 and May 1939, respectively, and the guerrilla struggle continued into the early 1940s.

North Korean sources have credited this struggle to Kim Il-sung, the founder of the North Korean regime. It appears, however, that most of Kim’s military exploits were either imaginary or greatly inflated and carefully tailored to suit the image of a cult figure. Japanese authorities described Kim as a bandit chieftain in command of about 40 to 50 marauders. The “division” he allegedly commanded in Manchuria consisted of only some 300 men.

Kim was born Kim S
ŏ
ng-ju to a peasant family in Man’gy
ŏ
ngdae near Pyongyang on 15 April 1912, which happens to be the day the
Titanic
sank. His family moved back and forth between Korea and Manchuria while he was growing up, and as a child he was exposed to his parents’ deep Christian beliefs; his mother was the devout, churchgoing daughter of a Presbyterian elder, and his father had attended a missionary school, and both reportedly were very active in the religious community. Kim had only eight years of formal education. When he was 17 years old he was expelled from school for revolutionary activities and never returned to the classroom. In the early 1930s, after a brief stint in jail for subversive activities, he joined guerrilla bands fighting the Japanese. Kim was a member of a Korean guerrilla army, organized by and attached to an army led by the Chinese Communist Party (
CCP
). In 1935 he assumed the name Kim Il-sung, meaning “become the sun,” a legendary hero of the Korean independence movement, and under the name became a well-known anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in the 1930s. He also used his assumed name effectively to gain support when he entered northern Korea in 1945. By 1941 Kim’s units and other parts of the Chinese guerrilla army were forced to retreat across the Manchurian border to the Soviet army training camps. The existence of Korean guerrilla forces irritated the nerves of the Japanese in Manchuria, and so, in August 1939,
the Japanese mobilized six battalions of the Guandong (Kwantung) Army and 20,000 men of the Manzhou State Army and police in a six-month antiguerrilla campaign, mainly targeting Kim Il-sung’s guerrilla fighters. In September 1940 the Japanese mounted an even larger counterinsurgency campaign that lasted more than two years and killed thousands of Korean and Chinese guerrillas, but Kim survived.

With Kim hiding in the Soviet Maritime Province for the next four years, the Russians created an international army of 10,000 Koreans and Chinese troops. At Khabarovsk some guerrilla officers were assigned Soviet army officer ranks. At the Voroshilov Camp and Okeanskaya Field School, Kim Il-sung is believed to have been appointed a major and the commander of a Korean detachment in the 88th Special Independent Brigade, an international unit of the Soviet Army’s Far East Command. When Kim returned to Pyongyang in September 1945 after Korea’s liberation, he wore a Soviet army uniform and had the rank of major. While in the Soviet Union Kim married a fellow partisan, Kim Ch
ŏ
ng-suk, and fathered two sons; the elder, Kim Jong-il, eventually became his political heir and successor. The younger Kim, often called “Yura,” was born near Khabarovsk on 16 February 1942.
¹⁹