A century after mass protests against Japanese colonial rule on the Koream Peninsula, the issue of those who collaborated with Tokyo — many of whom later become part of the South Korean elite — remains hidden.
When the Seoul government signed a 1910 treaty handing sovereignty over the peninsula to Japan, their new overlords awarded 76 key politicians and officials Japanese noble titles and pensions.
Over the next 35 years, hundreds of thousands of Koreans worked for colonial authorities as civil servants, soldiers, teachers or police.
Photo: AFP
According to historians, hundreds of thousands more were forcibly recruited as frontline troops, slave workers and wartime sex slaves.
A few thousand others went into exile in China to fight Japanese forces.
The independence struggle is at the heart of Korean national identity in North and South Korea, but eight in 10 South Koreans believe their country has never properly come to terms with the issue of collaboration, according to a government study released for last week’s 100th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement.
Mass protests against Japanese rule began that day in 1919, only to be forcibly put down, with 7,500 people killed within two months and 46,000 arrested, according to Seoul’s national archives.
In a commemorative speech, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said: “Wiping out the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators” was a “long-overdue undertaking.”
However, it is an intensely political issue, with collaborators generally seen as right-wing and Moon under pressure from conservatives looking to paint him as a Northern sympathizer.
The US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, forced Tokyo’s World War II surrender and ended colonial rule only for the victors to divide the peninsula.
Then-North Korean leader Kim Il-sung’s Moscow-backed regime executed Japanese collaborators en masse.
In the South, the US-oriented administration of then-South Korean president Syngman Rhee recruited many colonial-era officers and officials into its ranks to exploit their expertise and experience.
“Even in the liberated homeland, those who used to serve as police officers during Japanese colonial rule painted independence activists as Reds [communists] and tortured them,” Moon said.
Historical resentment sours relations with Tokyo to this day and prevents South Korea making a proper reckoning with its past, says Lee Young-hun, a former professor of economics at Seoul National University.
“Those who are labeled as Japanese collaborators are Koreans who actively embraced modernism,” Lee said.
Among those who went into exile was Shin Young-shin’s great-grandfather, a Korean general imprisoned and tortured by Japanese-backed troops. Both of her parents took part in the campaign, but struggled to feed their family when they returned to the South in the late 1940s.
“My parents got nothing — not even a penny from the government — for their activism while they were alive,” Shin, 71, told reporters in her small basement flat in Ansan, south of Seoul.
According to local government data almost three-quarters of independence activists’ descendants in Seoul make less than 2 million won (US$1,800) a month.
However, many descendants of collaborators — defined by South Korean law as those who received titles under Japanese rule, or arrested or killed independence fighters — have prospered.
One of those ennobled in 1910, and included on a list of 1,005 collaborators Seoul issued 10 years ago, was Song Byung-jun.
His son led the forces that jailed Shin’s great-grandfather, and his grandson became the first director of Seoul’s central bank.
Some of the South’s biggest conglomerates were founded during the colonial period. High-profile executives, including Hyundai Group’s chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, have sued to remove ancestors’ names from the list of collaborators.
Former South Korean president Park Chung-hee was an officer in the Japanese forces before ruling the South as a military-backed dictator for 18 years until his 1979 assassination. His daughter was elected president in 2012.
Park was not officially classed as a collaborator, but is on a longer list of 4,389 names collated by the Center for Historical Truth and Justice campaign group, which includes prominent cultural figures such as Ahn Eak-tai, composer of the South Korean national anthem.
“There is a popular Korean saying that translates to: ‘Those who fought for independence have made three generations of their descendants suffer. Those who collaborated with the Japanese have made three generations of their descendents prosper,’” center researcher Lee Yong-chang said.
Shin — whose mother was posthumously awarded the South Korean Order of Merit for National Foundation — will never come to terms with the contrast.
“I have prayed so that I could love my enemies, but I cannot possibly love the Japanese collaborators,” she said.
As the sun sets on another scorching Yangon day, the hot and bothered descend on the Myanmar city’s parks, the coolest place to spend an evening during yet another power blackout. A wave of exceptionally hot weather has blasted Southeast Asia this week, sending the mercury to 45°C and prompting thousands of schools to suspend in-person classes. Even before the chaos and conflict unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup, Myanmar’s creaky and outdated electricity grid struggled to keep fans whirling and air conditioners humming during the hot season. Now, infrastructure attacks and dwindling offshore gas reserves mean those who cannot afford expensive diesel
Does Argentine President Javier Milei communicate with a ghost dog whose death he refuses to accept? Forced to respond to questions about his mental health, the president’s office has lashed out at “disrespectful” speculation. Twice this week, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni was asked about Milei’s English Mastiff, Conan, said to have died seven years ago. Milei, 53, had Conan cloned, and today is believed to own four copies he refers to as “four-legged children.” Or is it five? In an interview with CNN this month, Milei referred to his five dogs, whose faces and names he had engraved on the presidential baton. Conan,
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other