Fighting for the enemy: Koreans in Japan's war, 1937-1945

Korean Studies, 2015

Many agree that Japanese colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945 was intense and pervasive due to the empire's interest in the peninsula's strategic value and assimilation policies targeting the Korean people. Although many are interested in the subject of Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the majority of the researchers come from Japan, Korea, and the United States, that is, the nations that played the roles of ruler, ruled, and liberator. Scholars in these countries naturally view history from different perspectives. In his The Pacific War and its Political Legacies (2009), Denny Roy, a scholar of Chinese political history, discusses divergent accounts and perspectives of the Pacific War (1941-45) presented by China, Japan, and America and calls this discrepancy a Rashomon effect, the term made famous by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film, in which the same incident is recounted contradictorily by several characters involved. Similarly, Japanese rule of Korea in the first half of the last century is viewed and interpreted from conflicting viewpoints, reflecting the researchers' backgrounds. An increasing number of scholars today, however, seek a middle ground through examining the rich historical records available. George Akita and Brandon Palmer's book Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea 1910-1945: A New Perspective captures this new trend. Post-liberation Korean scholars perceived the colonial period from the dichotomous viewpoint of Japanese oppression versus Korean resistance, depicting Japanese rule as ruthless, exploitive, and without merit. This standpoint is represented by C. I. Eugene Kim and Han-kyo Kim's seminal monograph Korea and the Politics of Imperialism 1876-1919 (1967) as well as many works that followed. Akita and Palmer refer to this black-and-white interpretation by Korean scholars as a ''nationalist (or patriotic) historical paradigm.'' Seventy years after the end of the colonial period, this paradigm has not lost momentum in South Korea. Many in the United States have also been critical of Japanese colonialism. As Akita and Palmer point out, in 1945, the victorious Allied powers were convinced that ''Japan, in every aspect of its society, economy, culture, religion, and governance, was completely flawed,'' and ''these views of Japan spilled over into perceptions of the Japanese as brutal colonial overlords'' (p. 197). Although postwar American scholars of Japanese history often challenged this bias in search of more balanced views, some

Religious Experience in Trauma, 2020

The primary goal of this chapter is to provide a new historical perspective, which has been hidden for a long time, on what might unconsciously motivate S. Koreans to convert to Protestantism in large numbers in the past century, bringing into focus a correlation between their traumatic experiences and their massive conversion to Protestantism. Its main argument is that a series of the traumatic events such as the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and the massive industrialization and urbanization, led by Korean military governments, might cause a certain psychological state of South Koreans-a cultural complex of inferiority-that helped them to choose Protestantism as their new religion. 1 To support this, first, the author will examine the traumatic experiences of Koreans during the Japanese colonial era that disrupted Korea's traditional identity considerably by its industrial revolution of the Korean Peninsula. Second, the tragic reality of the Korean War, like a series of mass killings of Koreans, will be discussed, stressing that memories of those tragedies became an involuntary fear and anxiety about North Korea and communism. Third and last, the chapter will examine how the S. Korean military governments controlled their people for about thirty years, manipulating the terror of their people about the Korean War and its consequences.

Asian Perspectives, 2007

The Republic of Korea and Japan share a tumultuous history, but arguably no period has caused greater trauma in bilateral relations than the twentieth century. After Japan's four-decade long colonial occupation of Korea, the two countries took two decades just to establish diplomatic relations. Subsequent interactions have remained seriously compromised by the memory of colonialism. This article reviews the tensions behind the tempestuous bilateral relationship, focusing on the depiction of Japan's wartime past in school textbooks. We advance three suggestions for reconciliation: viewing reconciliation not as the restoration of a harmonious pre-conflict order, but as an ongoing, incomplete process; expanding promising bilateral dialogues; and accepting that there will always be differences between Korea and Japan, most notably with regard to representations of the past. Rather than being an inevitable source of conflict, these differences should contribute to an ongoing process of negotiation between the two neighbors.

International Journal of Korean History, 2022

As the guest editor of the present issue of the International Journal of Korean History, I ask that you oblige me in a slightly unconventional introductory essay. Given the contrast between the typical purview of this journal and the contents of the articles contained in this special issue, I decided that a direct and open address in an autobiographical, epistolary mode would be appropriate. The genesis of this special issue reaches back to a panel that I organized for the Association of Asian Studies 2019 AAS-in-Asia conference held in Bangkok, Thailand. The panel was entitled, "Displaced Subjects of Japanese Modernity," and featured excellent contributions by the historian Tomoko Seto (Yonsei University) concerning the communal reckoning with the massacre of Koreans in Tokyo after the historic 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, and Japanese literature expert Kathryn M. Tanaka (Hyogo University) on patient literature in Japanese Hansen's disease sanitoriums throughout the empire, as well as insightful commentary from the historian Araragi Shinzō (Sophia University). My own paper was on the Manshū/Manchurian Japanese-language literary community. When the IJKH associate editor Leighanne Yuh approached me the following

The Middle Ground Journal

Rule and Social Change in Korea, 1910Korea, -1945 demonstrates that the debate over the legacy of that era will last far longer. This thought-provoking collection of essays analyzes the blurred boundaries between colonization, modernization, nationalism, and native agency that emerged during Korea's time under Japanese rule. At its core, this work is a response to a long-running historiographical debate about the legacy of Japanese imperialism in Korea. On one side of the debate is a nationalist approach,

Itinerario, 2005

Journal of Korean Studies, 2009