Fri, Mar 08, 2019 page5

• Collaboration with Japanese hangs over South Korea

  • AFP, ANSAN, South Korea
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  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.

  

  Shin Young-shin, whose family members were key figures in the Korean independence movement against Japanese colonial rule, holds a photograph of her family at her home in Ansan, South Korea, on Feb. 22.

  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.
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