White Chrysanthemum
Page 29
Notable Dates
1905 Korea becomes protectorate of Japan, ending the Korean Empire.
1910 Japan annexes Korea; Korean traditions and culture are repressed.
1931 Japan invades and occupies Manchuria.
1932 The puppet state Manchukuo is created by Japan.
1937 Second Sino-Japanese War begins; China receives help from Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States, setting the stage for the conflict to merge into the Second World War.
1938 Japan begins active assimilation programme for colonised Koreans; practice of Korean customs – including language, worship, art and music – becomes illegal.
1939 Japan enforces mobilisation of Korean men and women for the war effort.
1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. The Second Sino-Japanese War becomes part of the Pacific War and the Second World War.
1945 August: US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Soviets declare war on Japan, invade Manchuria, and enter North Korea.
Japan surrenders unconditionally to the Allied forces.
Second World War ends.
As part of the Japanese surrender, Korea is split into the Soviet-controlled North and the US-controlled South along the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. US occupation forces arrive in South Korea.
December: The US, UK, Soviet Union and Republic of China establish a four-way trusteeship of Korea until it can put a single government in place. After this, plans for a unified national government falter as Cold War divisions between the Soviet Union and US increase.
1948 April: Jeju Uprising and Massacre (also known as the Jeju 4-3 or 4.3 Uprising).
August: After unsupervised, democratic election on 10 May, Republic of Korea formally established in the South with Syngman Rhee as its first president.
September: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea established in the North, Kim II-sung becomes premier.
October: Soviet Union declares Kim II-sung’s government sovereign over both North and South Korea.
December: UN declares Rhee’s government the only lawful government; US refuses to offer military aid to the South but the Soviet Union heavily reinforces the North.
Soviet Union withdraws troops from Korea.
1949 January: Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek resigns as president.
US withdraws troops from Korea, ending Allied occupation of Korea.
October: Mao Zedong establishes the People’s Republic of China.
1950 June: Korean War (also known as the 6-2-5 Upheaval, or 6.25 War) begins when North Korea breaches the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, invading South Korea. North Korea is supported by the Soviet Union and China, South Korea is supported by the US and the rest of the UN. More than 1.2 million people will be killed in the conflict.
1953 Korean War ends, leaving the division between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North and the Republic of Korea in the South intact. Since the peace treaty was never signed by South Korea, the two countries are still officially at war.
1991 Kim Hak-sun tells her story of being a victim of Japanese military sexual slavery at a press conference and files a lawsuit against the Japanese government.
1992 January: First Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul.
December: Election of South Korea’s first civilian president, Kim Young-sam.
1993 August: Kono Statement issued by Japanese government confirming coercion used to entrap ‘comfort women’ against their will.
2007 Japanese government retracts the statement.
2011 December: 1,000th Wednesday Demonstration takes place in Seoul; unveiling of the Statue of Peace.
2015 Japanese and South Korean governments announce a ‘landmark agreement’ on the ‘comfort women’ issue – to remove the Statue of Peace and never speak of the ‘comfort women’ issue again.
Further Reading
If you’re interested in learning more about Korea’s history, Mongolia, the wars in Asia, or other subjects touched on in this novel, like the haenyeo divers, this reading list contains many of the books that helped me during my research, as well as a few* that inspired me to write it.
1. A History of East Asia: From the Origins of Civilization to the Twenty-First Century by Charles Holcombe
2. A History of Korean Literature by Peter H. Lee
3. Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves by James Nestor
4. Dictionary of Wars: Revised Edition by George Childs Kohn
5. Echoes from the Steppe: An Anthology of Contemporary Mongolian Women’s Poetry, edited by Ruth O’Callaghan
6. Everlasting Flower: A History of Korea by Keith Pratt
7. *Half the Sky: How to Change the World by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
8. Hirohito’s War: The Pacific War, 1941–1945 by Francis Pike
9. Hunting with Eagles: In the Realm of the Mongolian Kazakhs by Palani Mohan
10. Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 by Max Hastings
11. In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China by Michael Meyer
12. Japan 1941 by Eri Hotta
13. Journey to a War by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood
14. Korea by Simon Winchester
15. Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary by Keith Pratt and Richard Rutt
16. Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, edited by Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B. C. Oh
17. Lost Names by Richard Kim
18. Mongolia: Nomad Empire of Eternal Blue Sky by Carl Robinson
19. Moon Tides: Jeju Island Grannies of the Sea by Brenda Paik Sunoo
20. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History by Miriam Kingsberg
21. Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux
22. The Cloud Dream of the Nine by Kim ManChoong
23. The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War by George Hicks
24. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan by C. Sarah Soh
25. The Hidden History of the Korean War: America’s First Vietnam by I. F. Stone
26. The Hundred Years’ War: Modern War Poems, edited by Neil Astley
27. The Mongol Empire by John Man
28. The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials by Arnold C. Brackman
29. *The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang
30. The Second World War: A Complete History by Martin Gilbert
31. The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 by S. C. M. Paine
32. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
33. Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A Feminist Poet from Japan Encounters Prewar China by Yosano Akiko, translated by Joshua A. Fogel
34. *True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women, edited by Keith Howard
35. When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Soon Park
36. When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversies over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, edited by Roy L. Brooks
37. World War II in Photographs by Robin Cross
38. 1914: Goodbye to All That, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw
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Remembrance of My Beloved Sister
fn1 Song by Buddhist monk Master Wolmyeong in the eighth century, translated by Jeong Sook Lee, Korean translator and teacher at the Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Author’s Note: This lyric poem is a hyangaa folk song composed after the death of Master Wolmyeong’s sister. I read it often to remind myself of the universality of Emi’s plight.