A History of Korea (70 page)

In northern China some 500 Korean guerrilla forces continued military operations until 1938, when they retreated deeper into China and fought against the Japanese alongside
CCP
troops. In postwar Korea these pro-
CCP
forces, including Kim Tu-bong, Kim Mu-j
ŏ
ng (Mu Ch
ŏ
ng), Pak Hy
ŏ
n-sam, Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik, and Han Pin, were known as the Yan’an group and played an important role in the formation of the North Korean state.

While guerrilla forces engaged in armed struggle against the Japanese in Manchuria and northern China, other Korean exiles in China proper adopted terrorist tactics in their fight against Japan. The best known of these organizations were Kim W
ŏ
n-bong’s
Ŭ
iy
ŏ
ltan, or Righteous Brotherhood, and Kim Ku’s Aeguktan, or Patriots Corps. Both groups carried out many bombing and assassination plots; the best known included the bomb attack on the Oriental Development Company in Seoul in 1926 by Na S
ŏ
k-chu of the
Ŭ
iy
ŏ
ltan; the attempt to assassinate the Japanese emperor with a hand grenade in 1932 by Yi Pong-ch’ang of the Aeguktan; and the bombing of Japanese military leaders in China in 1932 by Yun Pong-gil of the Aeguktan. On 29 April 1932 Kim Ku ordered Yun Pong-gil to throw a small-scale bomb at high-ranking Japanese military officials in China who were gathered at Hungkou Park in Shanghai
to celebrate Japan’s occupation of the city on 28 January. The bomb killed and wounded more than ten military leaders, and Sirakawa Yoshinori, commander of the Japanese armed forces in China, was among the dead.

Three years after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in September 1940, the Korean Provisional Government, under Nationalist Chinese sponsorship, formed the Kwangbokkun, or Restoration Army, in Chongqing. On the day after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, on 9 December 1941, it declared war against Japan. While conducting a diplomatic campaign to gather support from the Allies, its forces launched military operations against Japan in concert with the Allied armies, particularly the Chinese forces. In June 1943 the Restoration Army concluded a mutual assistance agreement with British forces in India by which its units were sent to the Burma-India war area. Others cooperated with the U.S. Office of Strategic Service, preparing for an advance into Korea proper.

Meanwhile, Japanese pressure was steadily forcing the retreat of the radical Korean National Revolutionary Party, organized under Kim W
ŏ
n-bong in northern China in 1937, and its army, the Korean Volunteer Corps. The Koreans eventually fell back to Chongqing, where they were integrated into the Korean Provisional Government and its Restoration Army.

Altogether, after 1943, more than 5,000 Korean troops joined the Allied forces in military operations against the Japanese throughout the Chinese theater of war. Korean college students and youths drafted into the Japanese army deserted to join the ranks of China’s anti-Japanese fight. In the United States a number of Korean immigrants volunteered for the U.S. Army to fight against the Japanese in the Pacific.

Koreans, during this period, were able to have military careers for the first time, based on previous service with either the Japanese or Chinese armies. Some attained officer status, such as Park Chung-hee, who was commissioned a lieutenant in the Japanese Guandong Army in Manchuria and later became president of the Republic of Korea. A few even reached the rank of general, including Kim Hong-il, who became a major general in the Republic of China Army. The officer corps of the later South Korean Army during the Syngman Rhee period (1948–1960) was dominated by Koreans who had gained experience in the Japanese army.

In the 1930s and 1940s disparate elements of Korean nationalists abroad continued their struggle against the Japanese imperial yoke. But these elements of the nationalist movement were so divided and parochial that they never
achieved a united front. When Koreans finally freed themselves from harsh Japanese bondage and regained their independence in August 1945, a fundamental question remained: Which ideologies would lead independent Korea?

Since the early 1950s Japan has claimed sovereignty over the Korea-controlled island of Tok-to and has plotted to make the island a disputed area in the eyes of the international community. So far, Japan has been successful in this currently invisible contest for international recognition, as it has attempted to establish Japanese names for the East Sea (“Sea of Japan”) and Tok-to (“Takeshima”). The Japanese laid claim to Tok-to by the unilateral act of a local government in early 1905. On 22 February 1905, in the course of Japan’s imperial aggression, the Shimane prefecture, a Japanese local authority, adopted a municipal ordinance to incorporate Tok-to into its jurisdiction without legal foundation or notifying any concerned state.

After Japan’s defeat in World War II in August 1945, liberated Korea recovered its territories, including Tok-to. The victorious Allied powers recognized Korea’s sovereignty over the island, and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers Instruction No. 677, in 1946, excluded Tok-to (referred to as Liancourt Rocks) from Japan’s territory with the following edict: “For the purpose of this directive, Japan is defined to include the four main islands of Japan . . . excluding Utsuryo (Ull
ŭ
ng) Island, the Liancourt Rocks, and Quelpart (Cheju) Island.” As a result of Japan’s fierce lobbying activity to exclude Tok-to from Korea’s sovereignty, however, the 1952 San Francisco Treaty of Peace with Japan stipulated, in Article 2 (a), that “Japan, recognizing the independence of Korea, renounces all right, title and claim to Korea, including the islands of Quelpart, Port Hamilton (K
ŏ
mun-do), and Dagelet.”
²⁰
At the time the government of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) under President Syngman Rhee negotiated ineffectively over the ownership of the islands in talks with U.S. authorities but focused, instead, on an unrealistic demand for Korean sovereignty over Japan’s Tsushima. Much of Rhee’s attention was also on suppressing his domestic political rivals rather than on maintaining his country’s territory. Despite Japan’s endless attempts to claim sovereignty over Tok-to, since 1954 South Korea has effectively exercised jurisdiction over the islands and has stationed its coast guard on Tok-to as a symbol of Korea’s ownership.

Since 1996 South Korea and Japan have had several rounds of talks about the boundary between their exclusive economic zones (EEZs) in the East Sea but with little progress. South Korea proposed a median line between Tok-to and the Japanese archipelago, whereas Japan maintained its position that the line should be drawn between Ull
ŭ
ng-do and Tok-to. In a tentative step, the parties signed a fisheries agreement in 1998, sharing a joint fishing area in the waters separating the two countries in the East Sea.

Claiming sovereignty over Tok-to, Japanese right-wing nationalists have revised the history of its relations with Korea, raising tensions between the two countries. In the spring of 2001, the Japanese government, which authorizes the use of textbooks every four years, approved, for use in secondary school, a right-wing history textbook titled
New History Textbook,
or Fusosha textbook, named after Fuso Publishing, its publisher, and authored by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, a group comprised of right-wing nationalist scholars and politicians. The textbook first described Japan as aiding in the modernization of Korea: “Since [Chos
ŏ
n] opened its doors to the outside world, Japan has supported military reforms of the Korean dynasty as part of its efforts toward the modernization of [Chos
ŏ
n]. It was vital to the security of Japan that [Chos
ŏ
n] developed into a modern state capable of self-defense without yielding to foreign domination.” To justify Japanese colonial rule in Korea, the textbook unreasonably argued that Japan had freed Chos
ŏ
n from China’s domination and supported the kingdom’s modernization, totally ignoring Japan’s ruthless aggression to control Korea as a colony.

With regard to the Russo-Japanese War, the textbook explained that “the Korean peninsula protrudes from the continent to Japan like an arm. . . . If the Korean peninsula came under control of Russia, it could be used as a base for an invasion of Japan. . . . With its national budget and armed forces ten times greater than those of Japan, Russia reinforced its military presence in Manchuria and established a military base in the northern part of [Chos
ŏ
n]. It was evident that Russia’s military in the Far East would grow so powerful that Japan could hardly match it. The victory by Japan, a burgeoning modern state and a country of non-white people, over the Caucasian empire of Russia instilled hopes of independence into colonized people.” In short, the textbook glorified the war as a defensive measure against threats from a Korean peninsula controlled by Russia and as a purely heroic and patriotic action.

In discussing the annexation of Korea, the textbook stated that “there were some voices within [Chos
ŏ
n] accommodating Japan’s annexation. The Japanese Government-General in Korea endeavored to modernize Korea.” The Japanese annexation of Korea, in other words, was a non-coercive response to the Koreans’ wishes and, after annexation, Japan contributed to Korea’s modernization.

Concerning the forcible change of Korean names into Japanese names, the textbook pointed out that “on the Chos
ŏ
n [Korean] peninsula, the change of Korean surnames into Japanese names was approved [by the Japanese government], and policies were carried out to Japanize the Korean people.” This implied that Koreans themselves had wanted the name changes and earned approval for the changes from the Japanese government.The textbook ignored one of the most notorious abuses of human rights perpetrated by the Japanese, the enslavement of tens of thousands of “comfort women” as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers. It did not reveal that many of the comfort women were conscripted from Korea against their will by the Japanese Imperial Army.
²¹
By doing so, the textbook denied the forcible mobilization of Korean women for prostitution for the Japanese soldiers. Since the 1990s the Japanese government has given only a token apology and has refused to make proper compensation to the victims.

The history textbook prompted criticism from South Koreans for its glorification of Japan’s imperialist past. But when the Japanese government approved the controversial history textbook again in 2005, the percentage of secondary schools using the book as their text increased tenfold. In April 2009 the Japanese government approved a history textbook, written by the very same Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform but this time published by Juyu Publishing, and it was used in classrooms in 2010. This second textbook was even worse than the first. As a whole, the textbooks glossed over Japan’s invasion of Korea and glorified the invasion by arguing that the Japanese had sped Korea’s emancipation.

In the late nineteenth century, Korea was a center of great conflict for its neighboring powers, China, Russia, and Japan. It once again emerged as a focus of international rivalry in the 1940s, almost 30 years after Japan annexed that country in 1910, demonstrating that it was still critical to the peace of Northeast Asia. This time the two archrivals for the strategic peninsula were the United
States and the Soviet Union, and the Korean problem began with the proposition that Korea be placed under the trusteeship of a group of other nations. The trusteeship issue caused a maelstrom in Korea, when it was publicly announced in late 1945. It also influenced to an extent how the United States used the trusteeship arrangement to prevent the sovietization of postwar Korea.

The trusteeship matter surfaced for the first time in 1943, when, on 27 March, in Washington, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden met with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suggested returning Manchuria and Taiwan to China and establishing trusteeship arrangements for Indochina and Korea. He also recommended that China, the United States, and one or two other countries act as trustees in Korea.
²²
Despite opposition from the British, who rejected the trusteeship idea because of their huge colonial holdings, the United States proceeded with Roosevelt’s proposals for postwar trusteeships.
²³

Allied military victories in the Pacific during 1943 led the United States to consider more seriously the impact of the Soviets entering the war against Japan. U.S. officials realized that Russia had been deeply involved in Korean affairs ever since the late nineteenth century, and that because the Soviet Union was now in a superior military position on the Asian mainland, it was capable of occupying Korea unilaterally at the end of the Pacific war. The multinational trusteeship was considered a sure way to prevent the Soviet Union from making a unilateral move in Korea, and thus the Soviet agreement to trusteeship assumed greater importance. Although the Roosevelt administration favored trusteeship for certain regions, strategic considerations dominated U.S. thinking with respect to Korea. During the autumn of 1943, the United States concentrated its energies on achieving an accord with the other three major powers—Britain, Russia, and China—for a Korean trusteeship.

An ambiguous commitment to Korean independence was made in a joint communiqué, issued on 1 December 1943, by the three participants in the Cairo Conference held on 22 November 1943, which included President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). The part regarding Korea read that “Japan will . . . be expelled from all . . . territories which she has taken by violence and greed. . . . The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.”
²⁴
Although the three powers had officially pledged their support for Korean independence
after the war, the phrase “in due course” left some questions as to the nature of the Allied commitment to Korean independence. Thus, although they welcomed the Cairo Declaration, many Koreans worried about the implications of the proviso “in due course,” which obviously meant Korean trusteeship. At the time the participants failed to grasp the mood of the Koreans who were impatient for their country’s independence. Roosevelt, in particular, linked Korean trusteeship with the Philippine experience. In the Tehran Conference between Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, held from 28 November to 1 December 1943, Roosevelt stated that “the Koreans are not yet capable of exercising and maintaining independent government and they should be placed under a 40-year tutelage.”
²⁵
When, on 30 November, Stalin said that he approved of the Cairo Declaration, the Allies appeared united behind trusteeship.