Tag: Imperial Japan

A ceremony to mark the 99th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean government-in-exile in Shanghai during the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910-45) takes place at the memorial hall of late independence fighter Kim Koo in Seoul on April 13, 2018, in this photo provided by the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs. (Yonhap)

A video uncovered from the US National archives shows that Japanese forces massacred a number of Korean women believed to have been sex slaves following a battle in China:

Seoul Metropolitan Government and the Seoul National University Human Rights Center unveiled video footage, Tuesday, showing scores of bodies of Korean sex slaves being dumped after being killed by Japanese soldiers during World War II.

The Japanese government has denied any responsibility for forcing tens of thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery. But the latest footage contradicts that claim, according to researchers studying the issue.

The 19-second footage depicts a Chinese soldier looking at scores of naked bodies he carried to a hill. In another scene, he takes a sock off one of the bodies before walking away. Another scene shows smoke billowing from what appears to be a mound of human bodies at a different location.

The research team said the footage was recorded Sept. 15, 1944, in Tengchong, a western Chinese village bordering Myanmar, by an Allied Command soldier, surnamed Baldwin. The team recovered the footage from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

In June that year, the Allied Command began attacking Tengchong and a nearby city which were under control of almost 3,000 Japanese soldiers. As defeat became more certain, the Japanese soldiers took their own lives and killed people stationed with them, including the sex slaves. At least 70 sex slaves were believed to have been there with the troops, among whom only 23 survived.

Together with the footage, the team also revealed a document filed by the Allied Command reporting the killing of Korean sex slaves. “Night of the 13th (Sept. 13, 1944), the Japs shot 30 Korean girls in the city,” the document said.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link and below is the actual video.

This guy should have known better than to make these type of comments in South Korea:

Sunchon National University has dismissed one of its professors for making derogatory comments about Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II.

Six out of seven members of the university’s disciplinary committee in the city of Sunchon, South Jeolla Province, chose the severest level of punishment for the professor, whose name is withheld, on Wednesday. He was charged with failing to fulfill his duty faithfully and failing to preserve his vocational dignity.

University President Park Jin-sung apologized for “those hurt by the blasphemous comments made by our school professor, especially the women who had gone through the ordeal in Japan.”

He said the school suspended the professor after the incident was reported in April and formed a task force to investigate the matter.

The professor, 56, from the university’s teachers’ college, made the comments during a lecture. He said many of the women, also known as “comfort women,” “probably knew that they were going to sexually serve the Japanese soldiers and thus voluntarily left for Japan. ” He also said all the women were “crazy about Japan and would not have gone there if it weren’t for their (sexual) passion.”   [Korea Times]

You can read the rest at the link, but he is not the first academic fired for making comments against the comfort women dogma. Professor Park Yu-ha at Sejong University was arrested for defamation for writing a book that takes a balanced look at the comfort women issue.  She was fortunately found innocent.

The Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes.  Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.

What Professor Park wrote about is the same historical narrative that American Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan“.  In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers.  The actual kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available.  This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet.  To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution.  I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute.  Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty.  This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.

It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but has more nuance to it then each side is willing to admit.  Ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls.  The Imperial Japanese had to have known how young the girls were and the unethical and deceptive actions the Korean brokers were taking to make them available to the Japanese military.  There is no need to rewrite the history of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.

I saw this interesting Yongsan Garrison history lesson posted on the USFK Facebook site:

Regimental Bachelor Officers’ Quarters; later Imperial Japanese Army Hospital; now JUSMAG-K Headquarters.

Garrison Front Gate on Itaewon-ro (now the finance office).
The Japanese began their construction of the U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan, which served as their occupation headquarters until the end of World War II in September 1945. These were early milestones in the establishment of the U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan by the Japanese:

For those that have visited the Yushukan Museum located adjacent to the highly controversial Yasukuni-jinja Shrine, there is definitely an alternative history of World War II taught in Japan. The majority of people in Japan do believe that the Imperial Japanese militarism was a great folly, but there are people who believe the history taught at the Yushukan Museum that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was to preempt an American attack on Japan and liberate Asian people from western colonialism:

The Pearl Harbor attack that led the United States into WWII is normally a historical footnote in Japan, rarely discussed on anniversaries or in depth at schools.

That changed when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced he would visit Pearl Harbor with President Barack Obama on Dec. 27 to offer “comfort to the souls of the victims.”

Most Japanese today view the war as a great folly. The clause in Japan’s constitution that renounces the nation’s right to wage war has taken root so deeply that even new, restrictive laws allowing Japan to defend its allies were viewed with suspicion last year.

However, some divergent perspectives over history remain among two of the world’s closest allies.

Americans are taught that the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked sneak attack.

The view among some Japanese, and particularly among some otherwise pro-U.S. alliance conservatives, is that a Western economic embargo forced Japan’s hand.

By 1941, Japan controlled large parts of China and other parts of Asia. In July, its military occupied parts of Southeast Asia, including a key port in what is now Vietnam.

The U.S., Britain and The Netherlands responded by freezing Japanese assets in their countries, which included access to most of Japan’s oil supply.

“Indeed, the oil embargo cornered Japan,” Emperor Hirohito said in an audio memoir recorded shortly after the 1945 surrender. The memoir was found in 1990 by the Bungei Shunju magazine and then translated by The New York Times.

“Once the situation had come to this point, it was natural that advocacy for going to war became predominant,” Hirohito said. “If, at that time, I suppressed opinions in favor of war, public opinion would have certainly surged, with people asking questions about why Japan should surrender so easily when it had a highly efficient army and navy, well trained over the years.”  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but the best book I have read about the period before the attack on Pearl Harbor is Eri Hotta’s: Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy.  I highly recommend ROK Heads read this book to really understand why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.  The Japanese had opportunities to keep parts of their Chinese and Korean colonies if they would withdraw from other areas of China and Southeast Asia as demanded by the US and its allies. How different would things be today if Japan had been allowed to continue the colonization of Korea and parts of China?

There was actually a lot of dissenting opinions in Japan, but the militarists eventually were able to convince enough people they could replicate the success of the Russo-Japanese War with a decisive naval victory against the US at Pearl Harbor.  As history has shown the bombing of Pearl Harbor became one of the great misjudgments in military history.

Regardless of the history involved it is good to see Prime Minister Abe finally make the visit to Pearl Harbor and hopefully put an end to any remaining hard feelings about World War II.

Over at Korea Expose there is a great article about a nondescript set of stairs near the US military’s Yongsan Garrison in Seoul that is actually a reminder of some interesting Japanese colonial history:

There’s a stairway on the outskirts of the hip Haebangchon area in Seoul — one that doesn’t really merit a second look. No impressive characteristics beyond its steepness, nothing spectacular in its surroundings. No chic bars, no hipster coffee shops. There’s no reason to remember, much less visit, it unless you’re a resident walking up and down the hilly area.

But the 108 Stairway, as the steps are called, is one of Haebangchon’s oldest residents. In existence since the colonial era, it saw the evolution of Yongsan, the district Haebangchon is in: Streams, woods and tigers in the early twentieth century, the tents and slums before the Korean War, the bombing and destruction, and eventually the clusters of red-bricked houses (and increasingly coffee shops) today.

Situated near the U.S military base, today’s Haebangchon boasts one of the most culturally diverse pool of residents in South Korea. But very few of them have actually used the 108 Stairs for its original purpose.

“My friends and I would rush up, panting, and skip two or three steps at a time,” says 82-year-old Seo Jang-hun. “At the top, there was this huge area, covered with gravel. And there was this temple, where adults threw coins into a box, clapped their hands three times, and prayed.”  [Korea Expose via Gusts of Popular Feeling]

You can read the rest at the link, but the staircase once led to the Gyeongseong Hoguk Shrine that was built in 1943.  Residents that lived in the neighborhood were forced by Japanese authorities to pray at the shrine for Japan’s war dead.  After liberation in 1945 residents tore down the shrine and today the steps are all that remain.  Soon even the steps may be removed to be replaced by an escalator.

This all poses the question of what Japanese colonial relics should be allowed to remain and what should be tore down?

A bit on an interesting document even though according to the report the document was first revealed in the 1990’s:

A local research team said Monday it found a record of the Japanese military killing Korean women forced to serve as sex slaves when the country was under colonial rule (1910-45).

The operation diary for Sept. 15, 1944, recorded by allied forces of the United States and China, says “Night of the (Sept.) 13th, (1944), the Japs shot 30 Korean girls in the city (of Tengchong, China),” according to the Seoul National University (SNU) Human Rights Center.

The record was discovered at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, during the research team’s monthlong field study from mid-July to August.

Words such as “whores,” “comfort women” and “prostitutes” were used throughout other relevant records, indicating the 30 women mentioned in the page were former sex slaves, said professor Kang Sung-hyun, a member of the research team.

The existence of this record was already revealed to the public in the 1990s, but the latest finding was the first time the exact institution holding the document has been identified, said the professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies under Sungkonghoe University in Seoul.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but Tengchong, China is right across the border from today’s Myanmar:

Of interest is that the document also says that they found two Englishmen were their hands tied behind their backs with their throats cut.  It appears the Japanese may have also executed their wounded.  In the document it states that 1,000 Japanese soldiers were found dead in one quadrant of the city and that half of them were wounded before being killed.  The Japanese may have killed every non-fighting soldier in the city before its fall to limit the intelligence provided to the allied forces if those people were captured.

Over at Mashable they have the story about Lieutenant Hiroo Onada posted who was the Japanese soldier who after Japan surrendered during World War II decided to fight on with his companions.  The below article features some great photos that are worth checking out:

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on Aug. 15, 1945, Japan announced its surrender, bringing an end to World War II.

But for some, the war was not over.

Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was 22 years old when he was deployed to Lubang Island in the Philippines in December 1944. As an intelligence officer, he was given orders to disrupt and sabotage enemy efforts — and to never surrender or take his own life.

Allied forces landed on the island in February 1945, and before long Onoda and three others were the only Japanese soldiers who had not surrendered or died. They retreated into the hills, with plans to continue the fight as guerrillas.

The group survived on bananas, coconut milk and stolen cattle while engaging in sporadic shootouts with local police.

In late 1945, the group began encountering air-dropped leaflets announcing that the war was over, and ordering all holdouts to surrender. After careful consideration, they dismissed the leaflets as a trick, and fought on.  [Mashable]

You can read the rest at the link, but Lt. Onoda and his companions over the decades would either surrender or be killed leaving him ultimately along until his surrender in 1974.  I always thought that Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda should have been hunted down and held accountable for his crimes.  His group had to have known that the war was over and yet they continued to kill civilians.  I believe the real reason his group did not surrender was not because of honor, but because they did not want to be held accountable for the war crimes they committed.

A group of grandchildren of Koreans who were forcibly taken to work on Russia’s far east island of Sakhalin during the Japanese colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula (1910-45), arrives at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, on Aug. 2, 2016. A civic organization in Busan invited the group to a five-day history tour program. Some 43,000 Koreans were sent to the icy island that was a part of the Japanese empire at the time. (Yonhap)

I understand that having a nuclear weapon used against you is a horrible experience, but the two atomic bombs were a key factor in ending World War II which ultimately brought independence to the entire Korean peninsula:

A group of South Korean victims of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Thursday demanded an apology and compensation from both the United States and Japan.

“Nuclear bombs were dropped and Koreans in Japan at the time were victims,” a shelter for bombing victims in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province, said in a press release.

The demand comes as U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima later this month, making him the first sitting American president to do so.

The victims pointed out that “Japan has thoroughly hid its own war crimes while only emphasizing the fact that it was victimized by the bombing.”  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link, but I recommend readers check out this link to see why I think the US has nothing to apologize for in regards to using nuclear weapons to end World War II.