Korea's tortured reckoning with collaborators
By David Scofield

It has only just begun and already South Korea's program of historical reckoning of the often brutal Japanese occupation and colonization has produced its first victim. With no small amount of irony, it was the chairman of the governing Our Open Party (OOP, also known in Korean as the Uri Party), Shin Ki-nam, whose family was the first to be "exposed" in this latest political exercise. He stepped down on Thursday after it was disclosed that his father served as a military police officer with the Japanese occupiers. Media reports said he had supervised torture; Shin tried to cover up his father's record.

Many believed, and it may well come to pass, that members of the conservative Grand National Party (GNP) will bear the brunt of the inquest into Japanese collaboration because conservative ideology is often associated with pro-Japanese beliefs in South Korea. Shin's public acknowledgment that his father served as a military police officer under the Japanese army has cost him the chairmanship of the ruling OOP, and other high-profile resignations may well be in the offing.

On July 14, 171 lawmakers, most from the ruling Uri Party, submitted revised guidelines for the probe into those who collaborated with the Japanese during the time of the occupation, from 1910-45. Previous directives had reduced the scope of the inquiry to those who held the rank of lieutenant-colonel or higher within the Japanese military, or had organized groups in support of Japan. But these lawmakers, a majority of Korea's 299 elected members of the country's National Assembly, have submitted new guidelines calling for the scope to be widened to include all officers in the Japanese military and for all members of a new "truth" commission to be appointed by President Roh Moo-hyun.

The Japanese formally annexed South Korea in 1910, though Japan's presence and influence was in felt in Korea 15 years before that. Korea was a vital component of Japan's newly acquired "empire", and debates over the role of Japan in South Korea's post-Korean War development still continue today.

During World War II and regional wars that preceded it, Japan displayed a barbaric disregard for the lives of non-Japanese, the most gruesome examples of this found north of the Korean Peninsula in Harbin, home to Japan's notorious Unit 731, a human laboratory controlled by Shiro Ishii from 1931-45. That tens of thousands of Chinese, Russians, Mongolians and Koreans were killed in the most evil ways imaginable has been widely documented. Japanese experiments on live human subjects, ranging from germ- and biological-warfare experiments, shrapnel tests and vivisections performed on still-breathing victims to the aerial spraying of biological agents over villages, no depravity was too great in Japan's quest for strategic data. (The data were so coveted by the United States that Shiro Ishii was spared retribution for his actions and he was allowed to live, dying of natural causes in 1959.)

The Korean people suffered great humiliation during the first half of the 20th century, but Korea was not a concentration camp. That the Japanese were indifferent to the suffering of the people goes without saying, but the country was developed as a production unit, a factory to feed Japan's increasing appetite for both food and the resources necessary to fuel the war machine. Japan's takeover of Korea was complete, there was little in the way of organized, effective resistance, and people tended to do what people tend to do - focus on surviving and building a better future for their families. For many, this meant working for the Japanese administration, and there is no question that many did.

Ironically, Japan ended slavery in Korea
Japan annexed a weakened country in 1910. From the beginning of the 19th century, Korea's royal leadership became increasingly ineffectual, with corruption and incompetence rife by the end of the Chosun era. The country's infrastructure was underdeveloped; the rigid heredity-based class-system structure arrested the nation's development. Scholars note that, ironically, it was the Japanese who ended slavery in Korea.

Today, South Korea's progressives, their families it would seem free of any documented links with the Japanese administration, are calling for a redress of history, a fact-finding initiative that would expose those who worked with the Japanese.

The details of the probe are to be worked out in the National Assembly in the next couple of months.

Initially, the probe was to include only those who held the rank of lieutenant-colonel or higher in Japan's Imperial Army, but many younger members of South Korea's National Assembly pressed for a more comprehensive review, and succeeded in widening the probe. Now, those who were "officers" are to be scrutinized and exposed, their families, as in Shin's case, held responsible for the misdeeds of their fathers, or grandfathers - strangely analogous to North Korea, where perceived crimes against class include punishment of three succeeding generations.

If the investigation becomes a political weapon, its expanded mandate could prove ruinous to many families, Shin's resignation being only the first of what will certainly become a long list of families with fathers and grandfathers who served under the Japanese flag. The most prominent of course, and initially the raison d'etre, many believe, behind the whole initiative, is the father of current leader of the conservative GNP, Park Guen-hye.

Park's father, Park Chung-hee, was South Korea's third president, having risen to power through a military coup. Widely heralded by many old enough to remember, Park was the architect of modern South Korea. It was during his period in office from 1963 until his assassination in 1979 that the groundwork was laid through the developmental state system of centralized resource allocation, for the nation's rapid industrial development, moving South Korea from one of the poorest nations in the world to one of the world's richest. For these accomplishments he is held in high esteem by many, but he is reviled by many younger progressives - while his policies propelled the nation forward, his authoritarianism, especially in the second half of his reign, was characterized by the imprisonment, torture and sometimes death of those who advocated an end to Park's rule.

Park's unpopularity with many of Korea's newly elected lawmakers, coupled with his education at the Manchurian Imperial Academy in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, and his subsequent rise to the rank of lieutenant, makes him an obvious target, as well as his daughter, the head of the GNP, Park Guen-hye.

Some argue that pro-communists should be exposed
Of course, in fairness, there was a substantial corps of pro-North Korea communist sympathizers residing in the South who were bent on disrupting the country for ideological reasons. Communists have been subsequently labeled pro-democracy fighters by the president's Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths, including three North Koreans who died imprisoned for spying in South Korea, preferring to die rather than recant their ideology. But regardless of how one views their dedication to the North's Juche/Marxist ideology, it's difficult to see the pro-democracy connection. Indeed, South Korea's brand of historical reconciliation tends to be rather bipolar - nuanced shades of ideological belief reduced to either pro- or anti-democracy.

This latest historical mission to expose collaborators could be a move forward for the nation. It could help to expose the reality of the era, and ultimately help Japan and South Korea move closer together. Indeed, widening the probe to the next logical level, by including those who fought to extinguish South Korea and impose communism throughout the peninsula, should, as Park Guen-hye has asserted, also be included in any project of historical reckoning.

That Koreans aided the Japanese in maintaining strict control over the nation and held positions within the Japanese army is without question. A better understanding of the era is vital for South Korea given the myths and emotions that still envelop Japan's annexation of Korea. But if the exercise is nothing more than a political maneuver, effective only in removing rivals and creating a new political elite untainted by public evidence of collaboration (note that documents and family histories were very fluid at the time of Japan's defeat in World War II and its withdrawal from Korea), this will not move the country ahead, but further fracture and stratify an already divided nation.

David Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently conducting post-graduate research at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.

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