The Korean War: A History (8 page)

It is difficult to think of a more sordid transgression by a modern army than this one, trampling the lives and decency of such a multitude
of racially despised women. Korea’s venerable tradition of female chastity is still reflected in common names given to babies, in the chadorlike head-to-toe garments worn by elite women when they ventured out of their home in the old days, and the female inner sanctum of the home: the character for peace and tranquillity depicts a woman under a roof. But in the past century millions of foreign soldiers have had their way with Korean women. Sarah Soh has shown that the actual number of sex slaves was perhaps 50,000 (still a terrible figure), that the first documented comfort station was established in Manchukuo in 1932–33, and as early as 1938 about 30,000 to 40,000 women, “primarily Korean,” were already in this system in China. Her book also illustrates in detail that many procurers—more than half—of candidates for Japanese military brothels were in fact Koreans.
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Korean men also joined the Japanese military in great numbers—but as soldiers, a minority as volunteers and a majority as draftees. About 187,000 Korean soldiers and an additional 22,000 sailors served during the war—and also availed themselves of comfort stations. The South Korean army then set up a similar comfort system during the Korean War, sometimes using women kidnapped from the North.
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Many sex slaves were utterly ruined individuals, dared not return to their families, and thus had no alternative but to continue working in the fetid brothels alongside U.S. military bases in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, and the Philippines.

Mr. Abe’s “forcible in the narrow sense of the word” turned out to mean that military officers did not kick down the doors of homes and drag teenage women off by the hair—but it was “forcible in the broad sense of the word,” Abe later acknowledged, in that civilian brokers, colonial stooges, lying pimps, or businessmen claiming to have good factory jobs inveigled young women into this degradation most foul (initiation usually meant rape, especially if the victim was a virgin). If for once Mr. Abe could put himself in the shoes of a young woman fooled into a “job” taking on forty or fifty soldiers a day, held as a prisoner for months and years, given only a bare subsistence living, he would drop to his knees and beg forgiveness.
Scholarship on this subject, almost always done by women, illustrates the awful life chances, family catastrophes, and casual degradations that lead women into prostitution in East Asia (or anywhere else).
⁷
Of course, only a minority of
ianfu
were prostitutes in the first place. And many
were
forced into it “in the narrow sense of the word”: a dominant clan in a Korean village would tell a Japanese official and a Korean policeman where to find a pretty young girl among the residents of the subordinate clan households, and she was either inveigled with promises of education or a job, or just thrown bodily into the back of a truck.

Prime Minister Abe’s fumbling and craven performance took place on a national holiday in Korea, marking the countrywide uprising against Japanese colonial rule that began on March 1, 1919. March 1 is also the day in 1932 that Japan chose to inaugurate Manchukuo (after seizing northeastern China). Imagine that this debate were in Germany, Tessa Morris-Suzuki wrote, and the leader in question were named Krupp.
⁸

Americans shouldn’t comfort themselves and feel unconnected to all this, or point out how awful the Japanese are compared to the Germans (who have sincerely tried to come to terms with their history, and so on). We are the ones who organized a unilateral occupation of Japan, provided it with a remarkably soft peace, refused war reparations to its near neighbors, and put people such as Kishi back into power (as Herbert Bix illustrated in his prizewinning book,
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan)
. Americans also sometimes appear oblivious to wounds of empire that are still raw in Korea, and that haunt present-day relations with Japan.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously questioned the origin of human events—the search for origins pushes ever backward in time, and is subject to endless revision—but he does not say that
beginnings
never occur. The beginning for his
On the Genealogy of Morals
is the Bible and two millennia of (mis)interpretations of its teaching. The beginning for the Korean War was in 1931–32, after Japanese forces invaded the northeast provinces of China and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. They quickly faced a huge if motley army of guerrilla, secret society, and bandit resistance in which Koreans were by far the majority, constituting upward of 90 percent of entities such as the Chinese Communist Party (partly because the eventual top leaders and thus the main historical lineage of this party resided in southeast China in the early 1930s). They quickly found a tiny minority of Koreans who would collaborate with them in killing these resisters. By the mid-1930s the man who took the nom de guerre Kim Il Sung was a well-known and formidable leader of guerrillas. At that time the head of the Central Control Committee of Police Affairs for Manchukuo and concurrent provost marshall of the Kwantung Army (the name of Japan’s armed forces in Manchuria) was Gen. Tojo Hideki, in command when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and subsequently sentenced to death for his war crimes by the U.S. occupation under Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Tojo played a crucial role in unifying ordinary police with the feared military police
(kempeitai)
. Among the Koreans tracking down and killing Korean and Chinese guerrillas was Tomagami’s hero Kim Sok-won, who commanded the 38th parallel in the summer of 1949 (from the Southern side, of course).
⁹
This Manchurian crucible produced the two most important leaders of postwar Korea, Kim Il Sung and Park Chung Hee, and several key leaders of postwar Japan (for example, Kishi Nobosuke not only was responsible for munitions in Manchukuo, but later worked together with Shiina Etsusaburo and several others in the mid-1950s to form the mainstay of the Liberal Democratic Party, long the core of Japan’s peculiar one-party democracy).
¹⁰

To the North Koreans it is less the Japanese than the Korean quislings that matter: blood enemies. They essentially saw the war in 1950 as a way to settle the hash of the top command of the South
Korean army, nearly all of whom had served the Japanese. During the Korean War this was barely known to Americans, and when known was deemed to be of dubious import because by then Japan was our ally. This is not a matter of what we think, however, but what
they
think. The Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 is akin to the Nazi occupation of France, in the way it dug in deeply and has gnawed at the Korean national consciousness ever since. Manchuria is also “greater Korea” to patriots who remember the wide sway that the Koguryo kingdom (37
B.C.–A.D.
668) had in the region—and Koguryo begins Pyongyang’s lineage of critical Korean antecedents for its own republic.

Kim Il Sung began fighting the Japanese in Manchuria in the spring of 1932, and his heirs trace everything back to this distant beginning. After every other characteristic attached to this regime—Communist, nationalist, rogue state, evil enemy—it was first of all, and above all else, an anti-Japanese entity. A state narrative runs from the early days of anti-Japanese insurgency down to the present, and it is drummed into the brains of everyone in the country by an elderly elite that believes anyone younger than they cannot possibly know what it meant to fight Japan in the 1930s or the United States in the 1950s (allied with Japan and utilizing bases all over Japan)—and, more or less, ever since. When you combine deeply ingrained Confucian patriarchy and filial piety with people who have been sentient adults more or less since the Korean War began in 1950, you have some sense of why North Korea has changed so little at top levels in recent decades, and why it is highly unlikely to change radically before this elite—and its relentlessly nationalist ideology—leaves the scene. The average age of the top twenty leaders in North Korea in 2009 was seventy-five. Of the top forty leaders in 2000, only one was under sixty: Kim Jong Il. This gerontocracy draws a straight line from 1932 onward, brooking no deviation from this most important of all North Korean legitimations. Diane Sawyer may not be the best example, but when she took an ABC crew to North Korea in late 2006, she interviewed
Gen. Yi Chan-bok, who commands the DMZ on the northern side. How long have you been there, she asked sweetly. “Forty years,” he replied, to her amazement. He has been getting up every morning to riffle through the enemy’s order of battle since the year before the Tet offensive effectively ended the American effort in Vietnam.

For decades the South Korean intelligence agencies put out the line that Kim Il Sung was an impostor, a Soviet stooge who stole the name of a famous Korean patriot. The real reason for this smoke screen was the pathetic truth that so many of its own leaders served the Japanese (but think of the contradiction: there
was
someone named Kim Il Sung heroically fighting the Japanese, even if it was somebody else—and what were you doing, sir?). This canard quickly took on the glow of truth; thus, when the leading scholar of Korean communism, Dae-sook Suh, was finally allowed to explain the real story to a large audience of young people in Seoul in 1989, upon hearing that Kim Il Sung was in fact a hero of the resistance they all burst into applause. Meanwhile the North Koreans took Kim’s admirable record and piled on enough exaggeration and myth to insult the intelligence of a ten-year-old. But somewhere along the yawning chasm between the desperate lies of former South Korean governments and the ceaseless hyperbole of the North Koreans, there is a truth.

Two Koreas began to emerge in the early 1930s, one born of an unremittingly violent struggle in which neither side gave quarter; truths experienced in Manchukuo burned the souls of the North Korean leadership. The other truth is the palpable beginning of an urban middle class, as people marched not to the bugle of anti-Japanese resistance but into the friendly confines of the Hwashin department store, movie theaters, and ubiquitous bars and tearooms. The complexities of this moment in Korea, when 75 percent of the population were still peasants and a burgeoning working class bustled alongside a tiny middle class in the streets of Seoul, were brilliantly captured in Kang Kyong-ae’s 1934 novel,
From Wonso Pond.
¹¹
A writer and quintessential “new woman”
(shin yosong)
, at one point
Kang wanted to join the guerrillas in Manchuria, and she later worked with hundreds of other young women in a new textile factory in Inchon (the port of Seoul). With an acute critical sensibility Kang charted the arrival of urban modernity, the travails of “modern boys” and “modern girls,” while saving her fury for the fraught lives of Korean women and her satire for the alienated suffering of the “blasted intellectuals, all words and no action.” Even when they spoke out and went to prison, she wrote, they “converted” under Japanese suasion and got off scot free. No earlier generation of Korean women could possibly have had her experiences—her Brechtian experiences.

Brecht began his 1931 play with this: “The revolution marches forward even in that country. The ranks of fighters are well organized even there. We agree with the measures taken.” He wrote about Communist agitators dispatched from Moscow to Manchuria to fight the oppressors. But the agitators also killed a comrade (“we shot him and cast him into a lime-pit”). Why? “He endangered the movement.” Thus the play begins; it ends with the lines above.
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Like Antigone, the fallen comrade was cast into a pit. Like Sophocles, Brecht thrusts the reader into a widening gyre of power and
justice: Were “the measures taken” right or wrong? But he doesn’t render a definitive judgment, unlike Sophocles. Instead he left the dilemmas for the cast and the audience to sort out, every evening
The Measures Taken
was staged.

Brecht could not have known how fitting his play would seem a few months later, when Korean agitators took up arms against the new puppet state of Manchukuo. They found themselves ensnared by pitiless overlords, a complex mix of Korean immigrants, and a local Chinese population filled with ethnic hatred, yielding a daily bread of life-and-death risks, dubious if not foolhardy odds, bad moral choices and worse moral choices. Brecht’s play appears to be the opposite of
Antigone:
instead of justifying individual resistance against the state, all measures must be taken to assure the revolution’s victory, even if it means sacrificing the individual. That isn’t quite what he meant—he wanted the audience to grapple with the terrible dilemmas of revolutionary action versus the daily violence of the status quo in extremis: Hitler’s rising power, the demise of any liberal option, and the alternative of Communist revolution.