Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Back in his home district in Korea after his two-week journey, Kim stayed with his maternal grandparents, the Kangs. One of their sons, Kang Jin-sok, was in prison for anti-Japanese activities. (He eventually died there after thirteen years’ imprisonment.38 ) Police surveillance of the family was strict and burdensome, Kim recalled. The boy attended Changdok School, where his grandfather was schoolmaster. A memory of those days is that Grandfather Kang taught him a poem by a Korean warrior who had so distinguished himself against invaders as to be named minister of the army at age twenty:

  Grinding my sword wears down Mount Paektu’s rock;

  My horse gulps and dries the Tumen River.

  Should a man at twenty fail to subdue the land,

  Who will in later years call him a man of caliber?39

  Kim’s teacher was another relative, Kang Ryang-uk, a Methodist minister. In later years Kang Ryang-uk was to head North Korea’s token “opposition” Korean Democratic Party and serve as figurehead vice-president of the country under Kim. The teacher was a strong nationalist who taught his pupils patriotic songs. Kim said he remembered the songs and sang them later while fighting the Japanese.40

  Like other Korean schools of the time, Changdok School taught the Japanese language but not Korean. The authorities were trying to integrate the Korean colony into Greater Japan. To that end they sought to relegate Korean to the status of a regional dialect and replace it with Japanese, which they referred to as the “national language” or “mother tongue.” Later, they would even demand that Koreans adopt Japanese names. As Kim was to tell it later, he was shocked when his grandfather gave him his fifth-grade textbooks. “I asked my grandfather why the Japanese language book was titled Mother-tongue Reader. He merely heaved a sigh.” Kim claimed he then took a pocketknife, resolutely scratched the word “Mother-tongue” from the book’s title and wrote “Japanese” to replace it, making the title Japanese Reader.41 The anecdote may sound a bit too good to be true, but—as with many of Kim’s claims—no witness is alive to refute his account.

  The Kangs had little to share with the grandson who had come to live with them. They were so poor that one of his uncles had to hire out as a carter to make ends meet. But like many Korean families the Kangs combined pride with endless respect for formal education. The family “did not reveal any signs of poverty in my presence and supported me wholeheartedly while I attended school,” Kim recalled. “They provided me with a separate room furnished with a kerosene lamp and fine floor mats.”42 Their poverty was only typical of-what most Koreans experienced during that period. Even among the one hundred thousand residents of Pyongyang, Kim said, “only a small number of Japanese and Americans were living well.” Koreans had to settle for “slum dwellings with straw-mat doors and board roofing.”43

  Hearing the news of the Tokyo area’s great earthquake of 1923, Kim was outraged by reports that Japanese had killed hundreds of Korean émigré residents. Inflammatory rumors had spread in Japan, accusing Korean residents of plotting to rise up and take advantage of their masters’ misfortune, even of poisoning the wells. Kim realized that Japanese “despised Korean people, treating them worse than beasts.” He said he responded by planting a board with a nail sticking from it in the road, hoping it would puncture the bicycle tires of any passing policeman.

  His growing awareness of his people’s “miseries” made him aspire to a new sort of society. It would blend productive pride and joy with the characteristic Korean feeling called han —a prickly combination of pessimism, vengefulness and xenophobia that had evolved over centuries, in response to the frustration aroused by the country’s status as a small nation bullied by bigger and more powerful neighbors. In the new society, Kim dreamed,“the toiling masses could live happily and harbor a bitter hatred for the Japanese imperialist aggressors, landlords and capitalists.”44

  ***

  After two years in Korea, Kim returned to Manchuria. The family moved to the town of Fusong. There Kim’s father, long in poor health, died at age thirty-two. Now fourteen years old, the boy-was sent off to Huadian, another Manchurian town, where he enrolled in a military school founded by nationalists in the Korean independence movement.

  Arriving in Huadian he went for supper at the home of one of his father’s friends, who offered him his first drink of liquor. “There was a bottle of alcohol made from cereal at one edge of the round table. I thought that Kim Si-u had put it there to drink with his meal. But he poured some into a glass and offered it to me, much to my surprise. I felt so awkward that I flapped my hands.” Kim found this first drink potent with symbolism of his coming of age: “Although the glass was so small that it could be hidden in the palm of one’s hand, it was loaded with inestimable weight. At that table where Kim Si-u treated me as an adult, I solemnly felt that I should behave like a grownup,” he recalled.45

  Relations between Korean communists and conservative nationalists, including those in Manchuria, alternated between bitter enmity and a wary alliance against the common foe. As in the case of the Chinese communists and nationalists, the two groupings agreed on little more than the goal of independence from Japan.

  Kim had been developing socialist leanings, according to his account. He had read some pamphlets, and he had heard rumors about developments in the Soviet Union since the October Revolution less than a decade before.46 But he had not yet become a fully committed communist, so he found no contradiction at first in attending the nationalist Huadian School. Becoming more radical as he learned more about communism, Kim criticized the school’s prohibition against reading Marxist-Leninist books. His argument, as he recalled it later: “If a man does not read the books he wants to because he has been prohibited from doing so, how can he undertake a great cause?47

  Eventually, Kim said, he became thoroughly dissatisfied with the nationalist military school and the bourgeois movement for which it was training soldiers. The movement’s volunteer soldiers wore cumbersome traditional robes and broad-brimmed hats, he related. They were armed with little more than swords, spears and flintlock guns. Their minds filled with old-fashioned notions that they had taken from “the nobility’s ethics and Buddhist precepts,” they were no match for the well-trained Japanese troops armed with modern cannon and machine guns. Besides, Kim noted disapprovingly “some young students at the school still believed in dynastic rule.”48 In his view, Korea’s former royalty had “bled the people white and beheaded or banished loyal subjects who spoke the truth.49

  In a student debate, Kim asked what type of society Korea should build after winning its independence. Another student replied, “Our nation lost its country to the Japanese because our feudal rulers idled their time away reciting poems while other countries advanced along the road to capitalism. We should build a capitalist society and thus avoid a repeat of the past.”“50 Kim recalled delivering a ringing rejection of capitalist and feudal societies, where “people with money lead a luxurious life by exploiting the working people.”51

  The young Kim and his idealistic friends were indignant when nationalist leaders and even fellow cadets at the school behaved just like those earlier feudal rulers, squeezing “contributions” from the local Koreans and then putting the money to personal use. One commander used such contributions to finance his own wedding. He “spent the money like water in order to treat all his neighbors to food and drink over several days,” Kim said. “In the bright society we have now, the army and the people would have gathered public support and taken him to court or tried the case among themselves to force him to break this bad habit.” At the time, though, adults failed to stop the abuses. Kim said he and some school friends formed an organization called Down-with-Imperialism Union, and the group circulated a letter protesting the newlywed commander’s actions.52

  After only six months at the nationalist school, Kim said, he quit and moved to Jilin, capital of the Manchurian province of the same name. Close to Jiandao with its Korean-majority population, “Jilin was the haunt of many
Korean independence fighters and communists who were fleeing from the Japanese army and police,” he wrote in his memoirs. This made the city “a theater and a center of political activities for Koreans.”53 But although the Japanese did not have complete control over the city, they had a very strong presence. Japanese agents, claiming authority over citizens of their Korean colony, were able to influence the Chinese warlords and the warlords’ police. A friend of his father’s took the newly arrived young Kim to meet anti-Japanese activists who gathered in the Sanfeng Hotel, situated within one hundred yards of the Japanese consulate. Since the consulate was the virtual headquarters of the Japanese police agents in Jilin, it seemed risky to use the hotel as the gathering place for independence fighters. “But they came there all the same, saying, ‘The darkest place is below the candlestick.’” Indeed, reported Kim, there were no arrests there.54

  One thing about Jilin that delighted him was the vigorous clash of opinions expressed in the city’s Beishan Park, Kim said. In that local equivalent of London’s Hyde Park,“enlightenment champions from different professions coming from various places, brandishing their fists, delivered fervent speeches on patriotism, morals, the defense of law, aesthetics, unemployment, physical culture, hygiene and other subjects. This was a splendid spectacle, the like of which could not be seen elsewhere.”55

  Kim enrolled in Yuwen Middle School, a Chinese private school described as the most “progressive” in the city. I visited the school in 1982 and found a large statue of Kim in the courtyard. A slogan on the school building proclaimed: “Long Live Sino-Korean Friendship.” Strangely the marble tablets on Kim’s statue were blank. I wonder whether the Chinese had erased them— perhaps during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when the Red Guards criticized Kim harshly, or during the subsequent movement led by Deng Xiaoping and other reformers to stamp out signs of the discredited personality cult built around China’s own Mao Zedong. Or could it have been the North Koreans who chose to leave the tablets blank—because it was not then considered politic, from the standpoint of Korean nationalism, to advertise that Kim had been educated in a foreign language? When he chose a Chinese school after leaving the Korean Huadian School, he did have a choice, as there were Korean schools in Jilin.56

  Simply to continue his studies was an economic struggle for Kim. His mother had remained in Manchuria with her other two sons following her husband’s death. While Kim attended Yuwen Middle School, she sent money from her meager earnings as a laundress and seamstress,57 he recalled later. His poverty is one of the points on which witnesses offer basic corroboration of his account. A younger friend from that period, in a letter that he wrote to me when he was in his eighties and living in the United States, recalled Kim: “Although he was in a neat and tidy school uniform, I could see his family was not well-to-do, for he was boarding at the dormitory belonging to the Methodist Church. That dormitory charged less than others.”58 Kim wrote that he went barefoot much of the time to conserve his single pair of canvas shoes for wearing to school. Jilin “gave off the stink of a class society,” he complained in his memoirs. He and his friends “asked ourselves how it was that there were people who rode in a rickshaw while there were others who had to pull it, and why it was that certain people were living in luxury in palatial mansions while others had to wander the streets begging.”

  Money was so tight that he could not afford to buy books other than his textbooks. He persuaded friends from rich families to buy the books he wanted to read, or so he claimed later. (I have not seen much independent evidence that Kim really was a book-worm, and his later life does not by any means suggest he was an intellectual. But to political activists of that time and place books were weapons, so perhaps there is something to this.) According to his recollections, Kim got involved with some friends in organizing a reading circle and a private one-room library in a rented room. Their library offered love stories as a come-on to attract new members but concentrated on revolutionary works, which he says the group kept on a “secret bookshelf.” A bookish older friend who was reading Das Kapital in Japanese explained Marx’s thinking to him, and Kim said later that this was the period when “I began to realize my class position.”59

  Kim threw himself into organizational work among students and other young people in Jilin, helping to start a Korean Children’s Association and to radicalize an already existing group of Korean students.60 Such activities, especially when he worked with younger children, allowed him to show and to develop his considerable leadership qualities.

  The younger friend of Kim’s whom I quoted above, a former member of the Jilin Korean Children’s Association, recalled that the group occupied its time with patriotic songfests, debates, discussions and speeches on how to regain Korean independence. Their more active pastimes included sports, searches for quartz crystals in Beishan Park, games of hide-and-seek and patriotic play to prepare them for overthrowing the Japanese imperialists. “Very often we played “war games,” that friend remembered. “One team played outside of the fence and the other team remained inside the fence. The outside-fence team was to invade and the inside team was to defend their citadel.”

  A communist teacher at Yuwen Middle School became mentor to the future North Korean leader. Shang Yue, a twenty-six-year-old Beijing University graduate, Chinese Communist Party member and aspiring novelist, arrived to teach literature and the Chinese language shortly before Kim’s sixteenth birthday in 1928. Hearing from the lad of his zeal to oppose the Japanese imperialists, Shang opened his considerable library to him. Kim in his memoirs ecstatically recalled frequent discussions with Shang, in and out of class, centering on books ranging from the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber to such Russian authors as Gorky to the teachings of Lenin and the memoirs of a founder of the Chinese Communist Party61 Removed from his teaching post after only six months on account of his views, Shang went on to become one of China’s leading historians before his death in 1982. The teacher’s daughter told an interviewer from the Reuters news agency in 1994 that her late father had remembered Kim as a star pupil in Jilin, “diligent, putting good questions both inside and outside the class.”62

  Great as his interest in communism had become, patriotism still took first place in Kim’s heart, as he illustrated in an anecdote. The English teacher at Yuwen Middle School “worshipped the West” and spoke contemptuously of East Asian customs, including the habit of slurping noodles loudly. Students one day prepared noodles for all the teachers. “The hall was loud with sucking sounds. The English teacher, too, was sucking his noodles down. The students roared with laughter at him.”63

  Kim recalled that he and his communist-leaning friends argued a great deal over a question of priorities. Marxist-Leninist classics, as he understood them, taught that the working class’s emancipation would come before the national liberation of colonial peoples. But would it not be better for the Koreans to throw off the yoke of Japanese imperialism before reaching the stage of class struggle? Kim said he chafed at the “scientific” answer that Korea’s revolution must await revolution in Japan, the colonial power.64 Actually, Lenin had long since revised that doctrine, placing first priority on national liberation for Koreans as early as 1920, when Kim was eight years old.65 As this example suggests, there were definite limits to the extent of Kim’s serious study of Marxism-Leninism during his school days, when, by his own account, he was still leading younger pupils in soldier games on a riverbank.66

  Stoking Kim’s hatred of the Japanese were stories such as one he said an elderly independence fighter told him, a story that could fit right into the list of complaints by Japan-bashing American trade hawks of the 1980s. A Korean-owned factory produced matches, under the “Monkey” brand, which were so popular that a Japanese factory was unable to compete. So Japanese competitors bought up tens of thousands of boxes of Monkey matches, soaked them in water, dried them and sold them at the market. When they failed to light, customers switched to the Japanese competition;
the Korean-owned match factory went bankrupt. Kim said the old man’s story could not be confirmed decades later when he was writing his memoirs, but “it was very valuable in understanding Japanese imperialism.”67

  Kim joined his predominantly Chinese and leftist fellow students in 1928 for demonstrations against Japanese military aggression in China. “Reactionary teachers labeled our activities as communist propaganda and thus created a pretext for repression,” he said. The teachers went through the library seizing “progressive” books. That censorship inspired a student strike, which succeeded in getting the offending teachers dismissed.68

  Besides right-wing Chinese teachers and their warlord backers, Kim recalled finding fault with moderate Korean reformists who argued that Korea needed time to develop its economic muscle and to “perfect its national character.” Only then would the colony be ready for independence. An article by an influential reformist infuriated Kim, he said, because “the author regarded the Korean nation as inferior.” Korea had become back-ward, Kim acknowledged—but its overall history was so glorious as to give the lie to any notion of inferiority. “Koreans form a civilized and resourceful nation that was the first to build armored ships and produce metallic type,” he noted.

  An Chang-ho, a prominent reformist, gave a lecture in Jilin when Kim was not quite fifteen. The youngster spoke out, sharply questioning the famous man’s view that Koreans were at a low level of “spiritual cultivation” and would be able to restore independence and sovereignty only after refining themselves to the level of the British or Americans. As An Chang-ho wound up his lecture and started to leave the hall, police burst in and arrested him along with hundreds of those who had come to hear him speak. The arrest had nothing to do with the questions Kim had asked, but he felt guilty nonetheless.69