Frog in a Well welcomes a guest posting from Sayaka Chatani on the issue of Korean War Criminals and the difficulty Korean historians have found in addressing them in modern Korean historiography. Sayaka is a PhD student in the History Department of Columbia University. Her research interests are in the transnational history of early to mid-twentieth century East Asia, mainly focusing on the colonization and decolonization of Korea and Taiwan.

Introduction

Colonial legacies are one of the most hotly debated political issues in South Korea. The phrase “legacies of Japanese imperialism (ilche chanjae)” is ubiquitous in newspapers and in bookstores, and the topic not only triggers controversies among academics, but inspires social movements, and leads the government to adopt policies to resolve the remnant problems.

Among the many controversies surrounding the history of Japan’s colonial rule in Korea, much attention has centered on the question of collaborators. Many Korean historians argue that former pro-Japanese collaborators subsequently prevented Korea’s unification and brought about significant harm to South Korean society. They see punishing them as a prerequisite to restoring a healthy society.¹ In the context of ‘setting history straight,’ The South Korean government has confiscated the property of descendants of nine collaborators.² A presidential fact-finding panel has finished its second investigation to identify the names of pro-Japanese collaborators, and continues working on a third investigation.³

In contrast to their excitement over the issue of collaborators, historians have only given very limited attention and analysis to the issue of Korean war criminals despite the significant number of Koreans put on trial and executed as Japanese prison guards. When a few Japanese and Korean historians do face the issue, they tend to simplify the complex experiences of Korean war criminals to fit the dominant minjung discourse that blames a distinct group of collaborators for betraying the majority of Korean people. The fact that Korean war criminals were both victims and victimizers makes it difficult for nationalist historians to openly discuss the issue.

Class B/C Korean War Criminals

The term “Class B/C war crime” is unfamiliar to many. Unlike those who were tried in the Tokyo Trial (International Military Tribunals for the Far East) as Class A criminals, all of the accused Koreans were put on trial as Class B/C war criminals. The classification of war crimes did not reflect the gravity of the crime or court sentences, but was based on the kind of crime they committed; Class A was “crimes against peace,” Class B was “conventional war crimes,” and Class C was “crimes against humanity,” although the latter two were usually not distinguished in the tribunals. In the aftermath of the World War II, seven countries, nine governments (the US, the UK, Netherlands, France, Australia, the PRC, the ROC, the Soviet Russia and the Philippines) amongst the Allies conducted tribunals individually in a variety of locations throughout Southeast Asia, China and in Yokohama.⁴ In the B/C war tribunals, the majority of the cases were made up of Kempeitai (Imperial Japan’s Military Police) and prison guards being tried for torturing and mistreating POWs or for massacring local populations.⁵ In contrast to the 28 put on trial in the Tokyo Trial, approximately 5,700 military and civilian personnel were tried in Class B/C war crime tribunals, and 984 of these were sentenced to death. Among those convicted, 148 were “Japanese” of Korean origin and 173 from Taiwan. Among these, 23 Koreans and 26 Taiwanese were executed.⁶ Among the Koreans who were executed, three were military officers, 16 were interpreters, with the remaining number made up of prison guards who had served in Thailand, Malaya and Java.⁷ Most of the Koreans went through British or Dutch B/C war tribunals.

Source: Utsumi Aiko, Chōsenjin BC Kyū Senpan no Kiroku (A Record of Korean Class BC War Criminals), Keisō Shobō, 1982, p.152

Accounts of the Korean prison guards are not absent in the Western literature on the history of Western Prisoners of War in Asia. Memoirs of American POWs who survived the hardship of forced labor (especially of the building of the notorious Burma-Thailand railway) have left us with numerous anecdotes of their interactions with Korean prison guards. In their memoirs, Korean guards are most typically depicted as cruel and brutal. Some give a psychological analysis of the Korean brutality, arguing that “[the Korean guards]’d been under the thumb [of the Japanese] so long, when you’d give them a little bit of authority, they took advantage of it. They thought authority meant to beat people… They had some treacherous ways of punishing people.”⁸ Others show raw prejudice against Koreans, calling them “purely amoral coolie vermin… brutal by nature as well as by orders.” ⁹

Despite the large number of the Korean war criminals and the Western accounts on them, the attention to the issue in Korean academics has been scarce. Both the source of the difficulty that Korean scholars have in facing the issue is generated from and the ultimate narrative that they employ are determined by the characteristics of the movement to “set history straight,” which has directed society’s attention to the legacies of the Japanese colonial rule.

Korean Collaborators and War Criminals in the Movement to “Set History Straight”

In South Korea, various civic organizations have used the slogans of “setting history straight” and “settling the past” since the end of the dictatorial regimes and democratization in the early 1990s. Chung Youn-tae describes the goal of this campaign as being “to remove the remaining negative legacies” still found in a “distorted modern Korean history,” and “to build a society based on human rights, peace and justice through democratization and reunification.”¹⁰ Among the various problematic legacies, Korea’s colonial experience under Japanese rule is the main target since it is argued that it had a grave impact on the whole Korean society and retarded its development. The issue of collaborators in particular is regarded as “the root of all evil,” and thus treated as a critical issue in the movement.¹¹ The scholar Koen De Ceuster has argued that many Korean scholars are driven by their political convictions as they publish works leveling accusations at collaborators. The works by the Korean nationalist historians reflect the wider social movement against authoritarian rule in the early 1980s, De Ceuster argues, and is “tightly interwoven with the minjung discourse on history.”¹²

‘Minjung’ is a Korean word for the masses or people. The emphasis on the minjung experience and perspective has become a trend in works of literature and national history since the 1980s. Roughly defined, the minjung movement is a series of activities that share a class-based narrative combined with a Korean culturalist nationalism. Kenneth Wells identifies some common aspects of the minjung movement; for example, that it challenges histories that only focus on institutions of power, and develops histories of ordinary people; the minjung are the bearers of suffering in these histories. Many minjung scholars emphasize the divide between the ruling elites and the ordinary Korean masses, and question the political legitimacy of the ruling elites. These works and narratives led to the formation of a dominant minjung discourse within South Korea’s nationalist historiography.

The minjung discourse in the movement to “set history straight” has also influenced the literature on the Korean war criminals. Utsumi Aiko, a leading scholar on the issue in Japan, as well as a couple of other Japanese authors, compiled interviews and memoirs of the survivors, but did not provide an academic synthesis which combined consideration of it with other issues, such as international law and the issue of ‘comfort women.’¹³ A few Korean scholars who write on the issue depend heavily on these Japanese sources.¹⁴ They commonly emphasize the suffering and injustice that those Korean war criminals had to bear by pointing out the coercive nature of their recruitment, their difficult living conditions, the inappropriate procedures of the tribunals, and the lack of appropriate compensation from the Japanese government. Like other minjing scholars, their works attempt to adopt the dichotomy of the victimized ordinary masses and the victimizing ruling elites. However, their simplistic narratives reveal problems in narrating experiences of the Korean prison guards; for example, since many Koreans were openly recruited and employed by the Japanese authorities to work as prison guards in Southeast Asia, it is hard to categorize them within the dichotomy of ‘voluntary’ collaboration and ‘forced’ conscription.¹⁵ The issue of war crimes highlights the gap between the self-image of ‘victimized’ Koreans and the label of ‘victimizers’ that they acquired in international society. Many Korean prison guards were from the lower social classes, and thus are situated among the ordinary Korean minjung who suffered. However, historians cannot deny the fact that many of the Korean prison guards committed the crimes of torturing and abusing POWs with or without the direct orders of their Japanese superiors. For these scholars, it is of critical importance whether the convicted personnel were from a colonized nation, but from the perspective of international law, neither the nationality nor the nature of their recruitment was an essential element in judging the gravity of their war crimes. On this point, what the Korean nationalist historians (and the Japanese scholars cited above) have to face is not Japanese colonialism or Japan’s own nationalistic historiography, but an internationally recognized standard of justice.

The decision of the “Truth Commission” also reveals the dominant minjung discourse in the movement to “set history straight.” In November 2006, the Korean “Truth Commission”¹⁶ studied the records of Class BC war tribunals, and pronounced the convicts of the Korean B/C war criminals innocent.¹⁷ The Commission declared that all 86 convicts who had requested reinvestigation were cleared of the guilty verdicts delivered in the Allied war crimes tribunals because the courts had not examined enough evidence. It explained that those convicts who were high-ranking officials or Kempeitai most likely volunteered to cooperate with the Japanese military, and were thus outside the scope of its reinvestigation. It also ruled that those Korean B/C criminals suffered the “double pain” of being conscripted by the Japanese government and being imprisoned as war criminals.¹⁸ This, at root, is a preservation of the dichotomy of ruling elites and innocent masses. Its decision not to include high-ranking officials and Kempeitai in its reinvestigation program confirms the worldview that is heavily influenced by the minjung discourse.

Despite its relevance to questions of social justice, it is unlikely that scholars will take an interest in the issue of war criminals if they remain within the confines of the nationalist paradigm. As De Ceuster argues, “the collaboration issue is much more related to the postliberation development of an independent South Korean state than it is to the colonial period.”¹⁹ Many writings on the collaboration issue focus on the impact on postwar society—what harms former collaborators caused to Korea’s development in unification and democratization.²⁰ War criminals did not play a significant role in post-liberation Korean politics, and it helps explain why the issue was left out of their research agenda.

Conclusion

The issue of Korean war criminals highlights the complexity of integrating Korean society and people into Japan’s empire, and can trigger controversies over how we should conceptualize the position of those Koreans who worked within the Japanese imperial system. This question is probably particularly hard to face for nationalist historians who immerse themselves in a minjung discourse which dichotomizes the suffering (poor ordinary Koreans who hated and resisted collaborators) and the evildoers (ruling elites who benefited through collaboration). The Korean war criminals indeed suffered from the political circumstances and received unfair treatment after their release. Their compensation issue, however, should not prevent us from drawing from their experiences implications for larger issues, especially on the issue of individuals facing state power across colonies and the metropole, the appropriate procedures of ‘transitional justice,’ the individual criminal responsibility and the relationship between international law and imperialism.

1. For example, Ahn Byung-ook, “The Significance of Settling the Past in Modern Korean History,” Korea Journal, Autumn 2002, pp.7-17, and Chung Youn-tae, “Refracted Modernity and the Issue of Pro-Japanese Collaborators in Korea,” Korea Journal, Autumn 2002, pp.18-59
2. New York Times, “World Briefing, Asia: South Korea: Crackdown On Collaborators” May 3rd 2007.
3. The Korea Times, “202 Pro-Japanese Collaborators Disclosed.” September 17, 2007
4. Hayashi Hiroshi, BC kyū Senpan Saiban (Class BC War Crime Tribunals), Iwanami Shinsho, 2005, p.203
5. Many convicts in China were Japanese-Chinese interpreters.
6. Yutaka Shuichi, “‘Japanese’ War Criminals Seek Redress,” Japan Focus, May 22, 2005. Gil Hyeong-yun, “The complicated history of Korean war criminals,” The Hankyoreh, March 14, 2007. See also Hayashi p.153
7. Hayashi, p.153
8. Lester Rasbury in Robert La Forte & Ronald Marcello eds. The Ordeal of American POWs in Burma, 1942-1945: Building the Death Railway, Scholarly Resources, 1993. p.60
9. ibid., p.117.
10. Chung p.47-48. Also see Ahn p.7-9
11. Chung p.48
12. Koen De Ceuster, “The Nation Exorcised: The Historiography of Collaboration in South Korea,” Korean Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2002, pp.18-59
13. Utsumi Aiko, Chōsenjin BC Kyū Senpan no Kiroku (A Record of Korean Class BC War Criminals), Keisō Shobō, 1982. Kankou, Chōsenjin BC KyūSenpan wo Sasaeru kai, Sojō (A Complaint to the Court), 1991. The Organization of United Korean Youth in Japan, Chōsenjin BC Kyū Senpan Mondai (The Problem of Korean Class B/C Criminals), 1991.
14. See Chae Yŏng-guk, Haebang hu BCgŭp Jŏnbŏmi doen Han’gugin P’orogamsiwŏn (Korean Prison Guards Who Became Class BC War Criminals in the Aftermath of Liberation), Han’guk Kunhyeondaesa Yŏngu (Korean Modern and Contemporary Historical Research), vol. 29, 2004 June, pp.7-36. Also see Kim Yong-hee, BC gŭp Jŏnbŏm Chae’pan gwa Chosŏnin (A Study of the B and C Class War Crime Trials and Korean War Criminals), Pŏphak Yŏn’gu (Legal Studies) vol.27, August 25, 2007. pp. 513-535
15. See stories in Utsumi Aiko, Chōsenjin BC Kyū Senpan no Kiroku, and Gil Hyeong-yun, “Convicted of war crimes during WWII, 80-year-old Korean tells his story” The Hankyoreh, March 14, 2007.
16. The Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under the Japanese Imperialism Republic of Korea
17. This Commission, comprised scholars and government officials, was established in November 2004 in response to “the Disclosure Act of Forced Mobilization under the Japanese Imperialism.” They set its purpose as “revealing the truth of Japanese war crime [sic] through investigating forced mobilization (forced labor, conscription, and so-called ‘Comfort Women’).” From their website. Seen on September 23, 2007.
18. “강제동원 ‘조선인 전범’ 오명 벗었다, (Forcefully Mobilized ‘Korean War Criminals’ Cleared)” Seoul Sinmun, November 13, 2006.
19. De Ceuster p.219
20. For example, Chung p.46 argues that “the root of all the negative legacies of a hundred years of modernity in Korea—colonialism, national division, war, dictatorship, dependence on foreign powers, and social injustice stem from the problem of collaborations.”

I returned last week from the second of what will be four trips to the National Archives before I leave for Korea in June. On my first trip I had only two days and decided to stick to easily accessible microfilms of early postwar South Korea related State Department documents that were not available in published reproductions in the Harvard-Yenching library. My second trip however, and in other trips to come, I have been focusing entirely on North Korean documents captured by the United States during the Korean War found in Record Group (RG) 242.

A lot of the best research related to the early postcolonial history of northern Korea and the first years of the North Korean regime to come out in recent years has made use of RG242 material. The captured North Korean documents only make up a tiny fragment of RG242, a record group which is primarily made up of the vast ocean of captured documents from World War II Germany, but is still said to consist of more than 1.6 million pages of wonderful material.

There are some articles floating around in English about the archive¹ and I understand that there are several papers and a full length index of the collection available in Korean. In his book on the North Korean Revolution, Charles Armstrong has a great appendix dedicated to these sources, and also reports that many of the documents have been reproduced in a Korean source collection that I hope to get a look at when I no longer have easy access to the originals in Washington D.C.

So what is to be found in this collection? Well, just about every sort of document you might imagine, though the majority of what I have seen dates from 1946-1950. For a short time during the Korean War the United States was in control of large proportion of North Korean territory and the fleeing North Korean forces certainly weren’t able to burn or evacuate documents fast enough to prevent many materials from falling into the hands of US/UN forces. A lot of this material, however, clearly seemed to be of a normal published nature. Many of the documents, photos, books, newspapers, and magazines found by troops in North Korea were put together, organized by date and location of capture and sent back to the US divided up into a collection of boxes grouped by Shipping Advices (SA). A few items appear to have been removed from the collection during and after the Korean war for “local exploitation” and not all of these items were returned to the archive. Most of this material was declassified in the late 1970s and I only saw a handful of items in the index blanked out and accompanied with a sheet designating an item as restricted.²

You can find a hundred page handbook on swine-raising for farmers³ listed in the same original shipping box with three thousand pages or so run of a journal on Korean linguistics.⁴ You can find a book of military songs⁵ in the same original shipping box with the minutes of a Peasant League Committee on village defence.⁶ You can find applications to join the North Korean Democratic Boy Scouts⁷ or a bunch of handwritten reports on education in Christian sunday schools⁸. There are long lists of Chinese and Japanese residents in various counties throughout North Korea⁹ or a handwritten “table of truant school children.”¹⁰ There are trial records, police records, financial records, salary receipts, student lecture notes and idle doodles, propaganda books, election posters, literature, folders full of photos, political cartoons, thousands of pages of newspapers and journals, lots of speech compilations and meeting minutes. It is, in a word, overwhelming.

I spent an entire day at the National Archives just going through the large English-language index to the collection available on a single reel of microfilm which allowed me to locate potential items that are of interest to me in my own research. This index divides the RG242 captured North Korean materials up by SA (2005-2013, and 10181), Box number, and Item number. It shows the date and location of capture for each box. Each item has a one or two line description in English of what it contains. However, I have learnt to treat this information with caution, because occasionally what you actually get when you request the material is more or less, and sometimes somewhat different from what this index shows. I sympathize with the monumental task the indexers faced, however, because many “items” consist of a vanilla folder which contains a pile of sometimes completely unrelated handwritten documents.

It is truly wonderful that any of us can walk into the National Archives, which is a short metro subway and bus ride from Washington D.C. at the College Park complex (Archives II), sit down in their wonderful second floor reading room, and look through these documents at our leisure. But how do you request this material? Below I offer a few tips for anyone who would like to look at this collection:

I have posted some general information about getting to and into the National Archives on my own personal blog here.

Once you are there:

1. Much of what I have read about RG242 suggests the documents are at Suiteland, not College Park, but I was able to request everything I wanted to see at the College Park facility.

2. Remember that to Korea studies scholars RG242 means captured North Korean documents, but to most archivists at the National Archives, when you say “RG242″ they immediately think you are looking for German wartime captured materials since only a fragment of this record is dedicated to North Korean materials. I spoke to one German specialty archivist who was surprised to learn that her RG242 had North Korean materials in it and she did not know which of the several location numbers were correct for the materials I was looking for.

3. I would definitely recommend looking at the microfilm index of the captured North Korean documents, unless you have access to the (published?) Korean language index which I have heard of but have not seen. The English language index is located in a single reel in a blue reel box, in the bottom right hand corner of an open box located on top of a pile of boxes on the far left side of the long table you face as you walk in the microfilm room on the 4th floor. Those I asked in the microfilm room had only a vague recollection that such an index existed but an Asia specialist on the 2nd floor remembered the exact location of this reel, which is not numbered or properly filed. I am not sure what I would have done were it not for the memory of this archivist (Rich[ard?], I believe was his name).

4. Once you have made yourself a list of things you want to look at (mark down the SA number, the box number and the item number in this format: SA XXXX X/XX) bring this to the second floor. There are “pull times” when your request for materials are processed at 10am, 11am, etc.

5. The “box number” in the original index has no relation whatsoever to the box number of the collection’s current state. The original SA and box numbers do not correspond to anything physical in the archival collection, only to the state in which they arrived. However, these SA and box numbers are faithfully recorded on the side of the boxes the archival collection is currently found in so when you request the materials you can refer to them in your request. If you request a “box” directly by number however, you will get a box that has no connection to the original index.

6. On your request slip, in the large open space put:

Captured North Korean Documents
SA XXXX
ITEMS X/XX, X/XX, X/XX
BOX ________

NOTE: Only put contiguous box/item entries, you need separate request slips if the items you are requesting are not contiguous. You can submit up to 20 slips at a time but there is a limit to the number of boxes you can get from this. The last line with “BOX ____” is left blank intentionally so the archivist can fill this in when they find the items you are looking for in the collection and give you the boxes.

7. On the request slip above the large open space, I was told to put (and this worked in almost every case):

RG: 242 Stack Area: 190 Row: 16 Compartment: 7- Shelf: 3-

NOTE: I don’t know if this location will stay this way or if it contains all SAs, but the archivist named Rich says this is where the North Korean documents are mostly located. There is a red location folder for RG242 in the reference room (right side of the clock-stamp, 2nd or 3rd row from top) which locates the North Korean documents in several different areas and has location codes different from the ones above but the above location worked well for me for the SAs that I requested. The hyphen next to the compartment and shelf number tells them that they should start looking from the number that precedes it.

8. You are allowed to bring computers, scanners (without paper feeds), tripods, and digital cameras into the reading room, as long as you register your equipment at the front desk. There are also a range of copy services. I was allowed to copy everything I wanted from RG242 materials, ranging from relatively fragile handwritten pages on the regular copiers to photos (on the more expensive machine that uses glossy paper) and larger books (on the special book copier, which is also more expensive).

Information Last Confirmed: March, 2007

1. Including Thomas Hosuck Kang “North Korean Captured Records at the Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland,” in The Association for Asian Studies, Committee Asia Libraries Bulletin (Feb 1979). 30-37.
2. Classified materials appear to include SA 2009 1/31 “Handwritten sheet, titled “Roster of Informants” containing the personal history of ******* born on 5 Aug 31 and dwelling at MANSU-dong, INCHON city, dated 14 Sep 50, belonging to NAM-dong Police Substation, 1 p.” – withdrawn 3/10/77 because it contained “Otherwise restricted information” and an item in SA 2011 box number 8: “Handwritten and typewritten file of personal history of civilians living in Pusan, ROK August 1950 written by ***** pp. 45″ Also withheld for “Otherwise restricted information” 3/10/77. I did not try to request these materials so I don’t know if they are still restricted.
3. SA 2012 1/131
4. SA 2012 1/24
5. SA 2012 5/12
6. SA 2012 5/145
7. SA 2005 4/30
8. SA 2005 4/41
9. SA 2005 all over box 9, those interested in Japanese repatriation, Chinese minorities in Korea or in Korean-Japanese intermarriage could potentially find some great material here and I have no idea if this has been exploited yet
10. SA 2005 10/17

In the weeks leading up to May 10th, 1948, the United States run interim Military Government in southern Korea was busy preparing the national assembly elections that create the first legislature of a soon-to-be independent Republic of Korea. Things were not going well, however, for America’s trusteeship in Korea. A general strike broke out in February, a rebellion erupted in Cheju-do in early April, and the only two major alternatives to the aging future president Rhee, Kim Ku and Kim Kyu-sik, frequently voiced their opposition to the elections and went north to Pyongyang to participate, or at least, hang around the entrance of, a political conference in North Korea designed to condemn the separate elections in the south and argue for the creation of a united “democratic” Korea. While much greater violence was to come, several hundred Koreans died in political violence in the first few months of 1948.

Meanwhile, in civil war China, the country’s ruling GMD nationalists were in steep decline, suffering major defeats in the summer of 1947 and as a Communist offensive in September of that year got underway Lin Biao and other commanders of the CCP began to make serious progress in destroying nationalist opposition all over the northeast of China. The partition of India in August of 1947 sparked massive ethnic and religious violence in the migrations that followed. In January 1948, however, both of these countries would have delegates in the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) set up to monitor the May election in Korea (They may have been a Y. K. or a Y. W. Liu for nationalist China and K. P. S. Menon on the India side).

The US Military Government had its hands full with everything from designing ballot boxes (I found nice diagrams of them in State department archival documents), fixed the rules for post-election review procedures, releasing thousands of political prisoners (some half of the political prisoners that UNTCOK expressed concerns about) in an amnesty, and launched a massive public relations campaign to encourage voter registration (including the dropping of at least a million leaflets from the air). The election date was even moved from May 9th to May 10th on UNTCOK Liu’s recommendation because the solar eclipse on that day was seen as a bad omen by some. However, there were several very serious concerns that seem to dominate US discussion about the election in documents from April and early May: 1) A fear of low voter turnout 2) Concerns about Communist and leftist anti-election protests and violence in the lead up to the election 3) Violence and intimidation tactics by the many right-wing “youth groups” around the country (A “Youth” conference which representatives of many of these groups attended was held in late March and US representatives did their best to encourage responsible behavior. They also urged “youths” over 25 years in age to join organizations for grown-ups) and 4) Concerns that Korea’s police officers, whose propensity for random violence and brutal torture somehow reflected, to quote one US report, “oriental ideas about policing” would be a major obstacle to a free and fair election come May.

One despatch to the State department noted approvingly that on March 2nd, 1948, National Police director Cho Pyông-Ok gave a speech arguing that South Korea was not a “police state,” that Korea’s “young” police force was coming along nicely in its development and they would all work to play a helpful and constructive role in the election to come. The very next despatch in the microfilm I was reading through in the National Archives yesterday offered something a little less optimistic in its tone. It was a summary of one side of a conversation between the then Seoul Metropolitan police chief (and often a political rival to Cho), Chang T’aek-sang and America’s military commander in Korea, Lt. General John R. Hodge on March 22nd. Chang opened up and gave his appraisal of the situation:

I speak to you unofficially. I am expressing my private opinion but it is an honest one. Perhaps I am a pessimist but I have become convinced that Korea is doomed. Financially, spiritually, and morally Korea is bankrupt. People speak of emancipation. Emancipation from what? Korea is divided and caught between the Russian-American struggle. She can only be united by one of two ways – turning the country over to the communists or through a Russo-American war. The UN can never unite Korea. The Commission they sent to Korea does not care what happens to Korea. They are here only to hold an election but they can’t even do that without causing confusion. They insist upon “free atmosphere” and blame the police because it doesn’t exist. What is “free atmosphere”? The right to allow communists to burn, plunder, and kill whenever the urge strikes Stalin? Today, three police boxes were burned by the communists. Does the Comission know how many Koreans have been killed by communists since UNTCOK’s arrival? If the police try to prevent such action the UN bellows about infringement upon political freedom. Two-thirds of China is overrun by communists yet that ‘son of a bitch Liu’ is trying to solve Korea’s problems. And as for that Indian Delegate, why, more people are killed in India in one day than in many years in Korea! El Salvador has a population smaller than the City of Seoul. These are the representatives they send to solve our problems.

In my honest opinion no more than 25 to 30 per cent of the eligible voters will vote in the coming election. Americans fail to realise that 80% of the Koreans are illiterate. Will they walk many miles with a lunch box under their arms to vote for someone they don’t know or care about or for his political program which they will never understand? How does General Hodge think we manage to fill the stadium every time a demonstration is held? Those people didn’t go there willingly nor will they vote willingly. If the police don’t force the people to turn out for election day the government elected will never be recognized by the General Assembly. A government elected by 25% of the people will make nice propaganda for the Soviets and poor propaganda for the Americans when it is declared void by the General Assembly. It is necessary that the police ‘interfere’ in the election or the majority of the Korean people, who are little more than animals due to their educational deficiencies will sit in their ‘bloody, stinking rooms’ and not budge one foot to vote. The police should not attempt to tell the people how to vote but if they are not forced to the polls the Americans are due to be greatly embarrassed. (National Archives RG59 Department of State 895.00/3-29 49, p2)

It is hard for me to judge how much of this is a version of Chang’s views or Chang’s ideas mixed up with Hodge’s own similar hard-nosed pragmatic anti-communist views. Just as interesting in my view is the fact that the record of this meeting said nothing whatsoever about Hodge’s own replies to Chang. How did the US respond to this Seoul police chief’s plea to allow his men to engage in a massive herding of people to the polls—though without, of course, making any suggestions about who the people should vote for?

On May 10th, about 90% of the registered voters cast their ballots. Despite non-trivial election violence, an election boycott by many on the left and some other parties, localized irregularities and plenty of accusations, both the United States and at least some of the delegates UNTCOK were pleased with the results. Other delegates in UNTCOK voiced serious concerns about the election, including the high turnout, but did not launch any significant challenge to the election’s legitimacy in the aftermath. Since Kim Ku and Kim Kyu-sik did not participate in the election and had suffered a considerable blow to their popularity upon their return from the pre-election anti-election and pro-unification conference in North Korea, two of “the big three” found themselves quickly marginalized and Rhee continued his bumpy political rise towards authoritarian rule. The 1948 election is now remembered mostly as one big step on the road towards a permanent division of the Korean peninsula. In my next posting here, I’ll post some more contemporary views about the degree of “free atmosphere” in pre-invasion South Korea.

For some reason the Korea Times seems to be quite a decent source of history news these days, so in the absence of a more heavyweight post, here’s a round up of articles I’ve come across in the last week or so:

A couple of weeks ago the Korean Supreme Court released a bundle of court rulings from the early colonial period for the first time. The rulings date from 1912-1914 and the article notes how at that time custom still had an important influence on how the law was executed:

The court acknowledged concubines and gave supreme rights to the eldest sons of families. A person’s legal capacity was decided not by his or her age but by whether he or she had the intelligence to determine gains and losses.

Last week it was announced that a number of Chosŏn royal seals are missing, having been lost by various Korean museums. This is really not good for Korean museum PR:

The Board of Audit and Inspection also said that the surface of a royal seal made for the concubine of King Sonjo rusted away and a turtle-shaped seal, made of jade for the wife of King Sonjo, had been destroyed.

They said that every one of the of 316 seals owned by the National Palace Museum of Korea had been damaged in some way.

Two wooden ships found off the coast of China last year have turned out to be extremely rare examples of Koryŏ flat-bottomed wooden ships.

“It provides evidence that flat-bottom ships could sail as far as Shandong Province. Flat-bottom is a unique feature of ancient Korean ships unlike Chinese ships that had relatively pointy-shaped bottoms,” Choi Hang-soon, professor at the Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering at Seoul National University, told The Korea Times.

“It seems the Koryo ships arrived in the Chinese port, and had some big repairs there,” said Choi, who participated in the international academic conference on the ancient ships last week in Penglai.

And finally… A KT student guest columnist lauds the philanthropic attitude of Chosŏn dynasty sŏnbi (Confucian scholar-officials). This is something that interests me a lot as I’m planning to do some research on the ‘gift economy’ in Chosŏn Korea. However, I must admit that I can’t help being a bit put off an article when I see empty catchphrases like ‘sŏnbi spirit’ being thrown around and I’m not entirely convinced about the idea of seeing members of the exclusive and exploitative yangban class as moral models for our age, however philanthropic they may have been. Actually I could criticise numerous aspects of that column, but that would seem rather misanthropic of me…

I’ve been dipping into an excellent book on the history of Korean popular music now and then (이혜숙 & 손우석 – 한국대중음악사) and came across a fascinating passage on Park Chung-hee’s use of drugs scares to suppress the emerging youth culture that he found threatening. Here’s an excerpt (my rough translation):

After the defeat in Vietnam Park Chung-hee set about strengthening his dictatorship by stressing an external policy of self-reliant defence and an internal policy of ‘defending the system’. To that end, the possession of nuclear weapons, national harmony and traditional culture were all emphasised. However, the imitation of the Western youth culture of jeans, long hair, [folk] guitar and pop songs was widespread. At a time when it was necessary to defend the system and achieve national unity and a self-reliant defence it was impossible to remain indifferent to this degenerate Western youth culture. It was necessary to tighten social discipline. In the view of Park Chung-hee the base and degenerate culture of the West appeared in two forms: one was the folk guitar singers and the other was the entertainers who had originated in the [clubs frequented by] US Eighth Army soldiers. A crackdown on these people was urgent. He began by banninglarge numbers of pop songs and kayo and then moved on to a crackdown on marijuana. On December 2nd, 1975 a huge number of entertainers were banned completely from working in the so-called ‘marijuana crisis’ (대마초 파동). [한국대중음악사, p86]

The book goes on to quote Park Chung-hee himself on the marijuana problem:

“At this grave juncture that will settle the matter of life and death in our one-on-one [struggle] with the Communist Party, the smoking of marijuana by the youth is something that will bring ruin to our country… You must pull up by the roots the problem of marijuana smoking and similar activities by applying the maximum penalties currently available under the law.” [Chosun Ilbo, 3 February 1976, quoted in above book, p88]

There was a little bit more to this story, because the president’s own son, Park Ji-man, had smoked marijuana and been influenced by hippy culture. As the authors of the book point out, this was possibly further motivation for Park’s crackdown.

Of course there exist semi-conspiracy theories as to why marijuana is prohibited throughout the world and how it came to be prohibited in the first place. We can also ask the broader questions about why states would want to outlaw commodities for which there is a clear market and which could be so lucrative to both capitalist entrepreneurs and government tax revenues (David Harvey has some good passages on the limits of commoditisation in his recent book on neoliberalism).

This is probably not the place to get into all the historical reasons why this particular commodity happens to be prohibited. But the history of controlled drugs all over the world shows that social control is often one aspect in the calculations of governments enforcing prohibition laws. Korea was and continues to be a good example of this. The fact that illegal drug use is very low in Korea by world standards did not and does not stop the authorities from stamping down on the merest hint of usage, particularly when it comes to people in the public eye. As I’ve mentioned in a post before at my blog, there continue to be periodic scandals with prominent Korean entertainers being busted and sometimes having their careers ruined. And this is not confined to the world of pop singers or TV hosts – one of Korea’s most talented traditional musicians, percussionist and dancer Yi Kwangsu, has been in and out of jail a number of times as a result of his fondness for the odd reefer.

Of course, as a fibre crop hemp was crucial to the economies of both Korea and Japan for hundreds of years. But that’s another story…