A History of Korea (77 page)
Read A History of Korea Online
Authors: Professor Kyung Moon Hwang
Tags: #Education & Reference, #History, #Ancient, #Early Civilization, #Asia, #Korea, #World, #Civilization & Culture
INDUSTRIALIZATION AND STATE DOMINATION
Every society immersed in modern wars has faced the ferocity of mass mobilization, and in the ruthless spectrum that ranged from food rationing to Stalinism or the Holocaust, Koreans’ experience during the Second World War likely sits closer to the latter. But while the litany of abuses can readily be dramatized to fit a narrative of unrelenting horror, the experience was uneven in its severity, depending on one’s socioeconomic standing, geographical location, and, terribly for many women, gender. And while the hardships seem to have come in many forms and touched every facet of Koreans’ lives, they mostly resulted from the intensification of two phenomena that had been growing for a couple of decades.
First was industrialization, which began sporadically in the early years of the twentieth century and received a major kick-start during the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s following Korea’s transformation into a base for Japanese expansion into the Asian mainland. The economic growth that accompanied this shift had turned Korea’s urban areas, especially Seoul, into centers of advanced consumer and popular culture. The colonial government’s demand for industrial expansion and infrastructural improvements stimulated the cycle of occupational diversification, increasing expectations for economic opportunity, and urbanization. During the 1930s, and particularly in the wartime years, the mass movement of people extended to beyond the peninsula as well, as peasants escaped rural poverty and followed work opportunities to Japan and Manchuria, where Korean capitalists even established factories. These mass migrations would present a major challenge to social stability following liberation in 1945.
Manchuria as a cauldron of modern Korea
The formative experiences of the two dominant Korean historical figures of the second half of the twentieth century, Kim Il Sung and Park Chung Hee, took place in Manchuria during the last decade of the colonial period. Kim Il Sung (b. 1912), who went on to rule North Korea for fifty years, grew up in Manchuria and eventually led the most successful of several anti-Japanese communist guerilla groups operating in tandem with their Chinese counterparts. In contrast, Park Chung Hee (b. 1917), long-time president and the person most closely associated with South Korea’s accelerated economic development in the 1960s and 1970s, came of age as one of the few Koreans selected for training in the Japanese Military Academy in Manchuria. Though they both exploited nationalist sentiment to bolster their rules later, this strong contrast in their experiences as young men in Manchuria decisively shaped their respective destinies, and in turn those of their states, following liberation in 1945. In fact, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Manchuria, both before and following the establishment of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in the early 1930s, served as Korea’s great frontier, the place to which Koreans could escape to forge a new life. In turn the forms of communal existence established there appear to have influenced significantly the social and political patterns back home.
Manchuria’s pivotal role in Korean history was not a modern novelty, however. Since the ancient beginnings of state formation in northeast Asia, the peoples of Manchuria supplied an impression of the (uncivilized) Other against whom Koreans conceived their own ethnic or national identity. As late as the seventeenth century, after the Manchus subdued Chos
n on their way to conquering China itself, Manchuria continued to compel Koreans to sharpen their sense of self. The name for certain Manchurian tribesmen,
Orangk’ae
, in fact became synonymous with a common derogatory reference to the northern peoples—whether
Malgal, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongol, or Manchu—and turned into the default Korean term for “barbarian.” This tendency also reflected the nostalgia for a mythical era when Koreans were said to have ruled this territory, and in turn the likelihood that Koreans, deep in their collective sub-consciousness, understood that they and these “barbarians” might have common origins. Japanese colonial rulers also promoted this idea by integrating their two conquered territories of Korea and Manchuria into a single extension of the Japanese homeland, claiming that this process reconstructed an ancient civilizational bond. Whether in spurring resistance to (Kim) or embrace of (Park) this process during the late colonial period, Manchuria’s function as the cultivator of Korean leaders, and as the experimental cauldron of Korea’s modern existence more generally, continued its long historical role of shaping Korean identity.
The intensification of economic activity occurred throughout the 1930s. The most dramatic leaps in industrial output and the accompanying socioeconomic development, however, came with the shift to a wartime footing. Following the eruption of hostilities between Japan and China in 1937 and the formal proclamations
of wartime mobilization measures in 1938, Koreans experienced a precipitous surge in the range and intensity of economic activity. The established sectors of early industrialization, such as textiles and food processing, were joined by the rapid growth of heavy industries catering to war: armaments, chemicals, machinery, and oil and gas. Factories churning out these products began to concentrate in special corridors along the west-central and north-eastern coasts, and the numbers of Korean factory workers and managers increased exponentially in line with equally enormous increases in industrial production. By the closing months of the war in 1945, industry accounted for nearly 40 percent of the total economic output in Korea, which a decade earlier was still overwhelmingly agrarian.
For the most part, this remarkable expansion was not designed to improve the lot of the Korean people themselves. In Korea, the deprivation from mobilization for twentieth-century war was made worse by the colonial state’s overbearing efforts to intensify both the economic
and
“spiritual” fortitude of its subject people. The colonial state, in short, instituted a relentless drive toward total war. This in turn reflected the state’s development into an entity that actually surpassed industrial growth as an institutional force in the wartime years. In channeling the economy toward war, the colonial state forcefully blunted organized worker actions throughout the peninsula, even in the rural areas, where strikes by peasant unions had become increasingly vociferous. The searing trials of both urban and rural laborers undergoing these battles with factory owners and the state would contribute greatly to the creation of a proletariat in the concluding years of colonial rule.
The state’s impact on the people’s lives reached its comprehensive peak in the radical assimilation policies of the wartime years. Colonial authorities had always mouthed assimilation as a central goal, and indeed had explicitly stated this as a motive for annexation in the first place. But the irreconcilable reality of ongoing legal discrimination in the colonial system—from bureaucratic recruitment and compensation to segregation in educational and business opportunities—had marginalized this objective. Beginning in the latter 1930s, however, as war loomed in the air, the colonial
state began to institute measures to coerce a psychological identification with the Japanese empire—to turn Koreans into “imperial subjects”—that veered toward totalitarianism. In 1935 came a government order for Korean schoolchildren and public employees to begin their day with a ritual bowing toward the east in honor of the Japanese emperor, soon followed by orders for Koreans to make visits to Japanese religious shrines. These steps intensified the battle with Korean Christian groups that would end with the expulsion of all Western missionaries from the peninsula in 1942. The authorities also began to prohibit children from speaking Korean in school. The two major Korean language newspapers were shut down in 1940. And as if to put a final stamp on the drive to suppress a separate Korean identity, in 1940 came the promulgation of what has often been considered the most egregious order, that to adopt Japanese names. The authorities instituted this measure more to streamline surveillance and mobilization of the subject people than to humiliate them, and disregarding this directive did not result in legal repercussions for everyone. But soon it became clear that, for anyone whose livelihoods depended on the colonial system—for example, professionals—taking a Japanese name was unavoidable. The harrowing tales of honorable Koreans forced to dishonor their ancestry by registering their new names tend to inflate the ultimate impact of this measure. Undoubtedly, however, the name-change law carried great weight as a symbol of the forced assimilation campaign, which continued to spread through slogans such as “Japan and Korea as One Body.”
Also in 1940, a year before Japan escalated its conflict against China into a Pacific War that eventually embroiled the US, came the order for all Koreans to be organized into ten-family units of Neighborhood Patriotic Associations. This reflected the colonial state’s quest to achieve complete control over human and material resources through penetrating surveillance and security. These neighborhood associations facilitated rationing and a comprehensive system of extracting “common good donations,” of both food and materials, that forced people, especially in the last few years of the war, into desperate measures to feed themselves. Everything
eventually became appropriated for war; indeed, the state even arrogated the choice of shoes and clothing that people wore. The term “total mobilization” (“soryoku,” Kor. “ch’ongnyk”) became pervasive, attached to a torrent of new regulations as well as to all kinds of groups organized according to occupations, regions, and even religions.
For Koreans, it would be difficult to recall anything worse than the severe economic deprivations of the wartime mobilization period, especially in the countryside. However, two other phenomena would eventually rival rural immiseration both in terms of severity and in their impact on Koreans’ memories of this period. The first was the descent of workforce mobilization into forced labor. Eventually thousands of Koreans, whether they were drawn by deceptive promises of employment or simply abducted, filled the labor shortages in Manchuria, Japan, and newly conquered Japanese territories such as Sakhalin Island. In munitions factories, shipyards, sweatshops, and mines, these Koreans led lives of unremitting toil amidst often dangerous conditions, with little food, no pay, few chances to escape, and diminishing chances of survival. Many of the descendants of those who did survive still live in Japan and Sakhalin Island, now part of Russia. The other, and by now the most publicized wartime atrocity, was the roundup of thousands of young women into the “Comfort Corps” forced prostitution rings servicing imperial soldiers on the battle fronts throughout the expanding Japanese empire. As with those Koreans who eventually found themselves in coerced labor conditions, these females were either kidnapped or lured out of their villages with promises of economic opportunity. The extraordinary horrors that they experienced in these brothels can hardly be imagined. But beginning in the 1990s, as they neared the close of their lives, survivors gradually came forward with wrenching stories recounting their ordeals, following a lifetime of hiding what they deemed an unspeakable shame. These accounts incriminate the collusion of colonial authoritarianism with the long-held nexus of sexual vulnerability and social status, a practice that readily fell prey to the depredations of wartime mobilization.
RESIGNATION, COLLABORATION, AND MODERN IDENTITY
Given such harm inflicted on the Korean culture and people, how, one may ask, could there have been so many Koreans who collaborated with Japanese colonialism during wartime, and indeed actively promoted the efforts at extreme mobilization? At one level, it is not that difficult to answer: many Koreans earned their livelihoods or otherwise benefited from the colonial system. And many of them, as well as others, sincerely believed that the best outcome for the Korean people—not necessarily for Korea’s status as a politically autonomous nation-state, which might have been less important—was incorporation into and support for the Japanese empire’s pursuit of war. This would explain the thousands of civil servants, businessmen, intellectuals, artists, educators, and other professionals who publicly encouraged fellow Koreans to contribute to the war effort and renounce their Korean loyalties. Even more confounding is that central figures in the formation of modern Korean identity later came to advocate its obliteration. This is why the case of Yi Kwangsu and Ch’oe Namsn is so compelling.
