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Collaborators serve Seoul's
cause
By Sheila Miyoshi Jager
(Republished with permission from Japan Focus)
The
year 2005 has particular significance for Koreans
concerning Japan: it is the 100th anniversary of
the 1905 protectorate treaty (or Ulsa Treaty)
which led to Korea's formal colonization by Japan
in 1910. It is also the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Korea from colonial rule and it is
the 40th anniversary of the normalization treaty
of 1965. The year has also seen a distinct rise in
anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea.
In
March, angry crowds of South Koreans protested at
the Japanese Embassy, burning the flag of the
Rising Sun, and expressing emotions so deep that
some demonstrators cut off parts of their fingers.
Riot police blocked a group of anti-Japanese
demonstrators from blowing up a propane gas tank
at the embassy gates. Citizens' groups called for
a boycott of Japanese goods, and at several golf
courses Japanese players were no longer welcome.
The Korean wrath centered on a territorial
dispute over an uninhabited island chain known as
Takeshima in Japanese and Dokdo in Korean. But
tensions between the two countries have been
building ever since January, with the release of
documents from the South Korean Foreign Ministry
archives pertaining to Korea's 1965 normalization
treaty with Japan. The issue of compensation for
colonial victims was raised by South Korean
lawmakers. President Roh Moo-hyun also called on
the Japanese government to again atone for its
historical misdeeds. Addressing an anniversary
ceremony for the March 1 Independence Movement
this year, Roh said of Korea's relationship with
Japan, "We need to bring to light the historical
truth. It is necessary to apologize and reflect,
pay compensation should there be things that need
to be compensated, and reconcile."
Talk of
the past has become a hot-button issue in
contemporary South Korea. In the wake of the
historic shift in power that has occurred in the
aftermath of the Cold War when South Korea's power
holders were forced to yield to a new generation
of leaders with a very different take on history,
there has been an explosion of interest in
re-examining South Korea's colonial past. This
movement, broadly termed kwagoch ongsan or
"cleansing the past", has been compared with the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South
Africa. Among the issues that have been recently
raised is the re-examination of Korean
collaboration under the Japanese colonial regime
(1910-1945).
Scrutiny of
collaborators
Roh used the occasion of the
59th anniversary of the end of Japanese rule,
August 15, 2004, to announce a new campaign to
look into Korean collaborationist activities. "We
are still unable to rid ourselves of the
historical aberration that the families of those
who fought for the independence of the nation were
destined to face impoverishment for three
generations," Roh said, "while the families of
those who sided with Imperial Japan have enjoyed
success for three generations." That same year,
two laws were passed by the National Assembly to
establish working committees to look into Korean
activities during the colonial period, including
the investigation of Korean collaborators who
profited from the colonial regime as well as those
who collaborated with the policy of forced labor
under the Japanese.
There have also been
high profile private endeavors to expose Korean
collaborators. For example, the private
organization Minjok Munje Yonguso (Korea Issues
Research Center) is compiling a master list of
Korean collaborators, which they hope to publish
by the end of 2006. This group also sponsored, in
2004, a popular exhibition of Korean artists who
collaborated with the colonial regime. Featuring a
variety of pro-Japanese posters, letters, artistic
works and photographs, the aim of the exhibit,
according to the exhibition catalogue, was to
"expose all those who helped make possible Korea's
subordination to the Japanese colonial regime".
In a similar effort to expose
collaboration, some citizens' groups have led
protests demanding the disinterment of bodies of
alleged collaborators from the National Cemetery
and other patriotic burial sites. Not
surprisingly, former president Park Chung-hee has
been a central figure in this struggle. A former
Japanese military officer, his link to both the
colonial regime and military dictatorships has
made him an especially potent target of criticism.
For example, the government has recently decided
to replace the Kwanghwamun name panel at Kyongbok
palace that was inscribed by Park because it was
written by a "questionable" leader. A 2005 movie
on Park entitled Kuttae ku saramdul (The
President's Last Bang) plays up Park's association
with the colonial past - he is frequently shown
speaking Japanese, and in his last moments is
shown enjoying Japanese songs.
So what are
we to make of all this hoopla over Korean
collaborators, most of whom are now long dead or
dying? Why the recent struggle to come to terms
with Korea's colonial past? Why the attempt to
revisit this past on the living, few of whom lived
though the colonial period?
Part of the
answer lies in the profound geopolitical shift
that took place in East Asia at the end of the
Cold War. During the Cold War, South Korea's
relationship with some Asian countries, notably
China, Vietnam and North Korea, remained
contentious because of Korea's role in the
US-South Korean security alliance. Moreover,
throughout the Cold War, South Korea was heavily
dependent on Japanese capital and investments for
economic development. The need to appease Japanese
sensibilities (and US interests) combined to
suppress discussion of the horrors of the war and
the colonial period.
In the wake of the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the
transition to democratic rule in South Korea in
the early 1990s, however, South Koreans, no longer
constrained by the geopolitical demands and
economic imperatives of the Cold War, began to
look at their past very differently. And this
included not only a new assessment of Japan and
the US, but North Korea as well. The stark
contrast between a rich and powerful South Korea
and a poor and isolated North Korea could no
longer support the kind of anti-North Korean
rhetoric that had sustained the South Korean state
throughout the Cold War.
Roh's policy of
peace and prosperity toward North Korea, which
extended the earlier Kim Dae-jung administration's
approach, interprets Pyongyang's pursuit of
nuclear weapons primarily as a defensive strategy
and advocates a policy of engagement with the
North to solve the nuclear question as part of a
broad understanding to reduce tensions between the
two countries and between North Korea and its
international adversaries, particularly the US.
But these post-Cold War political
reevaluations of North Korea as a blighted but
basically benign enemy in need of prodding and
support is cautiously opposed by South Korea's
conservative politicians, many of whom have links
to the colonial past. The Grand National Party,
whose leader, Park Kun-hye, is Park Chung-hee's
daughter, takes a harder approach to the North,
and is openly critical of Roh's engagement policy
towards North Korea.
In short, the
struggle over Korea's colonial past is really a
struggle over the two Koreas' future. Critics of
the truth committees say the effort is politically
motivated and in a society where offspring are
judged guilty by family association, they maintain
that the truth committees are simply attempts to
damage certain politicians. (Ironically, however,
it was the chairman of the Uri Party, Shin Ki-nam,
who was forced to resign from his post after it
was disclosed that his father was a military
policeman during the Japanese colonial period.)
They believe the collaboration issue is simply a
means to single out members of the Grand National
Party, especially Park Kun-hye. As one lawmaker of
the Grand National Party put it, "It is a
political game. They are afraid that Park Kun-hye,
who is very popular, may become president in the
next term."
The view of whether the truth
committees are designed simply to censure certain
politicians or are sincere efforts to come to
grips with Korea's past largely depends on one's
own political orientation. What is particularly
elusive is how the unearthing of Korea's colonial
past is linked to the question of nationalism. By
presenting an interpretation of history as parable
rather than as politics, South Korea's new truth
committees largely deny the particular conditions
that allowed Korea to be colonized in the first
place.
In South Korea, this meant
portraying colonialism not as a condition of the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, or the corrupt and
inept Korean government that had invited foreign
powers into Korea during the turn of the century
in the first place, but rather as one more
instance in the familiar story of "national
victimization" that had taken place throughout
Korea's history since ancient times. "We must
right the wrongs of the past to make sure that
history is not repeated," said Moon Byong-ho, a
lawmaker for the governing Uri Party. "It is the
responsibility of a democracy to look into the
wrongs of the past."
The irony, of course,
is that the very achievement of South Korea's
new-found democracy and economic prosperity is
also the product of that past. While critics of
Park Chung-hee rightly condemn him for the abuses
of his regime, they cannot deny that Park also
created the foundation for South Korea's stunning
economic success. Indeed, despite Park's mixed
legacy, he continues to be viewed by the vast
majority of South Koreans as the nation's most
important and respected modern leader. For
example, a November 2004 nation-wide poll
conducted by the major national daily newspaper
Munhwa ilbo (The Cultural Daily), found that
nearly 80% of respondents named Park as the person
who had contributed most to modern Korea. In this
way, Korea's colonial and post-war history is not
presented as the outcome of actual causal, social,
political, military and cultural relations that
are connected to the prosperity of the present,
but merely as a dark backdrop against which to
contrast South Korea's new-found democracy and
future pan-Korean unity.
South Korea's
truth committees thus distill Korea's colonial
past into a manageable, lucid story of timeless
struggle and redemption in which the collaborator
is reviled. Moreover, the revival of the memory of
Korea's experience of colonialism offers a
familiar story of national victimization and
imperialist aggression that can serve to bind the
two Koreas together in a shared history of
collective suffering. The collaborator plays an
important role in this narrative, since he/she is
viewed as existing outside of Korea's history of
victimization, and hence outside of the nation
itself. The main purpose of the truth committees
is to affirm the national myth of victimization
and struggle by selecting those who belong and
those who must be excluded from that myth.
Of course, in seeking to remember the
abuses of the colonial regime and the
collaborators who profited from it and later rose
to power under the military dictatorships of Park
Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan and Noh Tae-woo, the Roh
Moo-hyon administration overlooks the real-life
human-rights abuses that are currently going on in
North Korea today. This irony has been brought to
the fore by a new coalition of "386ers" who had
initially supported Roh's 2001 presidential bid.
(The phrase "386" was coined in the 1990s and
refers to those who were in their 30s - they are
now in their 40s - who came of age during the
turbulent decades of the 1980s, and who were born
in the 1960s.) Known as the "New Right", this new
coalition of 40-something political activists and
intellectuals has accused the Roh administration
of deliberately ignoring North Korea's appalling
human-rights record to promote a conciliatory
North Korean policy that indirectly supports Kim
Jong-il's continuing human-rights abuses.
Meanwhile, in the North
...
While the Roh government focuses on the
collaboration issue and Korea's past victimization
by the Japanese colonial and postwar military
regimes, these critics point out that it has
deliberately ignored the present victimization of
the North Korean people by the Kim regime. The
death camps, the documented human-rights abuses,
the plight of North Korean refugees in China, the
crackdown on private and religious groups aiding
North Korean refugees, not to mention the very
difficult conditions of North Korean defectors
living in South Korea today, are all set aside in
favor of a nationalist hue of memory focused on
the country's past victimization under colonial
and military rule.
The almost complete
erasure of the present appalling conditions in
North Korea in official discourse is ironically
sidelined in favor of a new and urgent focus on
Korea's victimization under past Japanese colonial
rule. This is due not only to the fact that the
policy architects in the South believe that a
North-South reconciliation would be hindered by an
honest probe into Pyongyang's death camps; the
focus on past abuses by the colonial regime also
furthers their pan-nationalist agenda by creating
a common memory of suffering that can help bridge
the gap between the two countries.
Thus,
the current obsession with the colonial past has
little do with the actual or lived past. The truth
committees serve as an agent of nationalism by
appealing to cogent metaphor and themes that
affirm the "new" pan-Korean nation and the search
for a view of history that can serve to bind North
and South Korea in a shared memory of common
victimization, struggle and redemption. The
question of collaboration thus becomes one of
selecting who belongs and who is excluded from
this nationalist narrative. What the truth
committees overlook is the fact that everyone
living under the Japanese had to collaborate to
some degree in order to survive. No one, except
the staunchest resistors or those living outside
of the colony, could claim a clean conscience.
By appealing to a national myth of
victimization and struggle, the preservation of
the memory of collaboration is made possible only
by the erasure of memory on all other spheres,
including the very historical conditions that led
to Korea's colonization in the first place. This
includes the actual lives of Koreans under the
colonial regime as well as the obfuscation of the
real-life contributions that collaborators like
Park Chung-hee made in creating the foundations
for South Korea's "miracle of the Han". In short,
the truth committees invoke the past less as a
record of lived events, than as a constituent
element of pan-Korean nationalism and identity.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager is Luce
assistant professor of East Asian Studies at
Oberlin College and author of Narrative of
Nation Building in Korea: A Genealogy of
Patriotism. Her edited volume (with Rana
Mitter) entitled Ruptured Histories: War,
Memory and the Post-Cold War in Asia is
forthcoming.
(Republished with
permission from Japan Focus) |
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