Japan frets about Korean collaborators
probe By Kosuke Takahashi
TOKYO - As South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun
plans to open a full-scale investigation into the
country's collaborators who worked for Japan or
unethically benefited from the 1910-45 occupation of the
Korean Peninsula, Japanese lawmakers and experts have
expressed concerns this could throw cold water on the
recent warming of the two countries' ties. They fear it
might seriously undermine the recently improved
state-to-state relationship between Japan, the former
colonial power, and South Korea, the once-colonized and
exploited.
Many Japanese experts argue that
Roh's center-left administration is using the probe
largely in a preemptive attack, an effort to weaken the
antagonistic conservative camp that has traditionally
held political, economic and social power. The probe
into collaboration, the experts argue, would then
strengthen the currently shaky political ground for
Roh's progressives in advance of the 2007 presidential
election.
"That's a revolution taking place in
South Korea," Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at
Waseda University in Tokyo and an expert on Korean
Peninsula affairs, said in an interview with Asia Times
Online. "President Roh is trying to replace the
country's ruling elite of the conservatives from ancient
regimes with the progressives."
Masao Okonogi, a
professor of political science at Keio University in
Tokyo and an expert on Korean politics, holds similar
views. He told Asia Times Online that Roh is mainly
trying to get buoyancy for his administration and the
ruling Uri Party by doing what the previous presidents
could never do. "President Roh's political foundation is
so unstable that he always has to go to extremes, if not
a revolution," Okonogi said.
The
anti-collaborationist mood is already taking its
political toll in South Korea. The chairman of the Uri
Party, Shin Ki-nam, stepped down on August 19, taking
responsibility for the swirling and expanding
controversy about Koreans' collaboration with Japanese
occupiers, his own father's role in the Japanese
military police, and his personal efforts to cover it
up. His father was said to have had a role in
supervising the torture of Korean dissidents. The probe
is expected to have major ramifications for Korean
society if influential families are named.
The
South Korean National Assembly is expected to launch a
wide investigation officially in the next couple of
months, but its nature and scope have yet to be
determined. Meanwhile, the idea of the probe is causing
jitters in both Korea and Japan.
Roh appeared
very eager to investigate the wrongs of the nation's
colonial history. To show his strong determination to
make the case, he devoted about half of his speech on
August 15, marking the 59th anniversary of independence
from Japan, to the probe. He proposed forming a special
committee to look into modern history, particularly
during Japan's colonial rule as well as the
authoritarian South Korean governments in the decades
that followed. The founders of South Korea's major
newspapers, Chosun Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo, which were
established during Japan's occupation, could also figure
in an investigation.
Bitter wartime memories
for both countries Japan colonized the Korean
Peninsula from 1910 to 1945 and, because of the
brutality of the occupation, resentments against Japan
linger in both South and North Korea.
Perhaps
the worst time for Korea came after the beginning of
Japan's war with China in 1937. The colonial government
formalized a program to assimilate Korean culture and
thought into Japanese forms in the pursuit of "total
war". This shift, encapsulated in the well-known slogan
Naisen Ittai, meaning Japan and Korea as a single
body, brought together a number of state initiatives in
the cultural, economic and social arenas in an intensive
indoctrination program of education and participation in
the rites and symbolism of Japanese Shintoism and
imperial rule.
Indeed, it has been taught in
South Korean schools that Japan plundered Korea of
"seven significant things" during its occupation - a
sovereign (emperor), sovereignty, lands, natural
resources (such as salt), language, the names of
Koreans, and their lives.
The real tragedy for
Koreans is that some 40-50% of the police in
Japanese-occupied Korea, which implemented Japan's
missions and directives on the peninsula, were said to
have been Korean. It is also said that many Korean
comfort women (women rounded up and forced into
prostitution to "comfort" Japanese troops), totaling
100,000-200,000, were arrested and forced into military
brothels by more than a few Korean men. Japan was clever
and, indeed, brutal enough to pit Korean against Korean,
with consequences that have continued down through the
years and persist to this day.
Probe seen as
politically motivated Still, one simple question
arises. Why now is the left-leaning government of
President Roh so serious about his nation's past wrongs,
especially when the majority of collaborators are
already deceased?
Many Japanese experts who are
familiar with Korean politics and care about the two
countries' relations view the probe as a politically
motivated move to weaken the opposition, or evidence of
a domestic power struggle within Korea.
Shigemura, the professor at Waseda University,
has pointed out that one of Roh's major motives is to
prevent any strong opposition candidates from running
for the 2007 presidential election, particularly
targeting the main opposition Grand National Party's
(GNP's) leader Park Guen-hye, whose father was the
assassinated president Park Chung-hee (1917-79),
considered the father of modernization. Her father was
no doubt pro-Japanese. He not only had served as an
officer of the Japanese army during the militarism of
the late 1930s and 1940s, but also conducted the Yushin
Reforms of 1972, modeled on Japan's Meiji Restoration or
Meiji Ishin, the Japanese pronunciation of the
Korean yushin, to commit the whole nation to
continual rapid economic growth under the harsh
authoritarian system.
In the late president
Park's first book after the 1961 coup, Our Nation's
Path, he lauded the Meiji Restoration as a great
nation-building effort, and introduced the Korean
version of it in the 1970s. Moreover, he even concluded
the normalization treaty with Japan in 1965, despite
strong opposition from citizens, especially university
students.
Faced with political onslaughts
against her father, Park Guen-hye has never been silent.
In a bid to counteract the progressives' probe into
Japanese collaborators' descendants, such as herself,
her GNP countered with a proposal for a much broader
investigation to include pro-communist activities.
Japanese observers see this counterattack as targeting
at pro-North Koreans and pro-communists, including the
father of President Roh's wife, Kwon Yang-sook. Her
father is said to have been a communist.
Behind
this power struggle lie two factors:
Roh's recently waning popularity. His standing has
been buffeted mainly by the country's sputtering economy
and the standoff over talks on defusing North Korea's
nuclear crisis - as well as stagnation on the
reunification issue that Roh has emphasized. His
approval ratings have slipped to about 25%, far below
some 70% in his prime just after his inauguration in
February 2003, according to the opinion poll conducted
in late June by the Korea Society Opinion Institute.
Okonogi, the political-science professor at Tokyo's Keio
University, said Roh's approval rating has slipped into
the danger zone and his political tenure is insecure.
Roh's shaky political foundation. Roh and his ruling
Uri Party have always been supported largely by one side
of the divided public. They are labor unions, not the
mainstream business community. They are the younger
generation, not the older generation. They are people in
Cholla province, where former president Kim Dae-jung
comes from, not people in Kyongsang province, which has
long been a conservative stronghold. They are
civil-rights activists, not mainstream political
circles.
Okonogi especially has pointed out that
Roh lacks the political authority enjoyed by the three
Kims before him, referring to former presidents Kim
Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung and former conservative prime
minister Kim Chong-pil, who contested the 1987
presidential election. Okonogi also said the fact that
Roh comes from the nation's southernmost city of Pusan
gives him a political handicap in the country where
political regionalism still prevails, although Pusan is
the country's second-largest city, with a population of
about 4 million.
President Roh's political
weakness was exemplified by his raucous impeachment in
the National Assembly and his later trial by the Supreme
Court this past spring. He was restored to office by the
court, which heard charges over alleged election
irregularities and incompetence. Although he managed to
survive as a president, returning to his duty in May,
since then he has been seeking any magic - some say the
collaboration probe could be that magical diversion -
that could resuscitate him and his party in preparation
for the 2007 presidential election. Roh himself,
however, cannot run again for election because the
constitution prohibits a second presidential term.
On August 11, the administration completed a
controversial plan to move the seat of government from
Seoul to a rural area 160 kilometers south, Yeongi and
Gongju counties in central South Chungcheong province,
which was a crucial battlefield for both ruling and
opposition parties in the 2002 presidential election and
is expected to be so toward the next presidential
election. The government appeared to have been in a
hurry to decide to move the seat of government from
Seoul, brushing aside opposition from politicians and
Seoul citizens to the US$45 billion move - in the
absence of any national consensus on the issue.
Roh: Japan-South Korea ties can withstand
probe Japan-South Korea relations have flourished
in recent years, especially culturally. Under former
president Kim Dae-jung, the 2002 soccer World Cup
co-hosted by Japan and South Korea helped improve ties
between the two countries and helped to change their
relationship, strained by the past, into one that looks
to the future. Since that time, many Korean musicians
and actors frequently have been showing up on Japanese
television screens and Japanese entertainers are seen on
Korean TV. Very recently, the South Korean TV soap opera
Winter Sonata and its war movie
Brotherhood have become mega-hits in Japan. They
are so popular that major Japanese travel agencies are
even promoting package tours to take travelers,
especially female tourists, to sites of location
shooting in South Korea. Meanwhile, Japan's comic books,
animation films and game players have been very big in
Seoul.
Notably, some Korean soccer fans even
cheered for the Japanese team during the final Asia Cup
match of Japan against China held in Beijing on August
7. That outpouring of support was triggered by South
Korea's row with China over the ancient kingdom of
Koguryo, which Seoul says Beijing claims as its own,
Japanese media have reported. Many Japanese were
surprised to hear that news about their Korean fans.
President Roh and members of his ruling Uri
Party may well believe they can press the probe into the
Japanese colonial period, believing in and counting on
the two countries' consolidated relationship. They
appear to have concluded that the two countries'
relations are strong enough at this time to endure the
investigation into unpleasant, even unpalatable history.
Still, some Japanese lawmakers and experts say
this examination of pro-Japanese collaborators would be
potentially damaging for the two countries' ties. Yukio
Hatoyama, former president of Japan's opposition
Democratic Party, expressed concern over the possible
negative impact of the campaign to re-evaluate its
modern history when he met with South Korean Prime
Minister Lee Hai-chan in Seoul on August 18. Hatoyama
told Lee: "I am worried that the issue will be misused
for political bickering, and it will have a negative
effect on the relationship between South Korea and
Japan." Lee responded that there is no intention to hurt
the two countries' ties and said Japan does not have to
worry about it at all, according to Hatayama's recent
e-mail magazine to his supporters.
Still, many
Japanese experts are worried by the probe.
"The
probe would bring no positive effect on the two
countries at all," said Lee Young-hwa, an associate
professor of economics at Kansai University and a
third-generation Korean resident in Japan. "President
Roh is just thinking about a maneuver for party
interests in the short term, forgetting about
diplomacy," he told Asia Times Online. "He has other
things to tackle such as measures for economic
recovery." Lee said South Korean politics today are
reminiscent of the polarized politics of Japan in the
1960s and '70s, when Japanese political society was
sharply divided into antagonistic conservative and
progressive camps.
Shigemura echoed Lee's
concerns. "Ordinary Japanese perhaps will have the
feelings that the South Korean government is again
arousing latent anti-Japanese sentiment, acting on
political interests," Shigemura said.
Okonigi
also worries that the probe might create
misunderstandings among Japanese people who view the
probe as yet another anti-Japanese movement, even if the
true intention for the South Korean government is to
trace the history of its dark side.
Whether such
Japanese concerns and worries will prove unfounded
remains to be seen. It could surely be one measure of
how far the two countries' relations have been advanced
and consolidated so far and it could tell a lot about
how South Korea's weighs its pragmatic politics compared
with its foreign policy.
Kosuke
Takahashi is a former staff writer at the Asahi
Shimbun and is currently a freelance correspondent based
in Tokyo. He can be contacted atkosuke_everonward@ybb.ne.jp.
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