by Ian Buruma
This was close to what some influential American New Dealers, sent out to help General MacArthur remake Japan into a peaceful democracy, thought as well. Some of the early drafts of their plans could have been written by Leninists. Owen Lattimore, a leftist British scholar of China at Johns Hopkins, was influential for a time. He believed that Asians were more interested in “actual democratic practices, such as the ones they can see in action across the Russian border,” than they were in Western democratic theories, which come “coupled with ruthless imperialism.” The only true democracy in China, he claimed to know, was to be found “in Communist areas.”31 Other “China hands” in the State Department looked carefully at the ideas for postwar Japan of Nozaka Sanzo, the leader of the Japanese Communist Party who had spent the war in China indoctrinating Japanese POWs. Factory committees and workers’ groups were supposed to take over from “fascist” bureaucrats to run food distribution and other vital services. Even though this particular idea fell by the wayside, New Deal administrators were serious about land reforms and independent trade unions, and were convinced that the U.S. occupation authorities should “favor a wider distribution of ownership, management and control of the economic system.”32
The New Deal for Japan was rather like Attlee’s plans for Britain. Of course, neither Attlee nor the New Dealers were communists. On the contrary, they were, like most social democrats, very much opposed to communism. A serious concern among the U.S. administrators, including the New Dealers, was that Japanese, driven to extremes by economic destitution, would become susceptible to communist temptations. The solution was to make sure Japan could feed itself as quickly as possible by rebuilding its industrial capacity, undistracted by military interests or big business greed. And the best way to do this was to hand economic policy over to the Japanese with the most experience, to civil servants who knew how to plan for the future, who would put the public good over private interests, whose ideals were patriotic and egalitarian; that is to say, to the largely unpurged bureaucrats in the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
In 1948, Kishi Nobusuke was released from Sugamo Prison without his case ever coming to trial. During his time in jail he had kept up with old friends from the worlds of right-wing politics and organized crime, some of whom shared his cell. In 1949, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry ceased to exist. In its place came the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI, the most powerful government force behind the Japanese economic miracle of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1957, Kishi was elected prime minister.
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WHEN KOREANS HEARD on the radio that Japan had surrendered on August 15, 1945, the first thing many of them did was throw away their Japanese wartime uniforms—the unsightly peasant trousers for women and the woolen khaki breeches for men. Dressed in traditional white Korean clothes, thousands of people swarmed into the streets waving Korean flags, singing patriotic songs and shouting “Korean independence for ever!” The streets of Seoul were gutted, the electricity had been cut off, there wasn’t enough food, but people were crying with happiness. For the first time in many years, they could openly behave like Koreans again, without being punished for not bowing to images of the Japanese emperor or refusing to go by a Japanese name.
There were some misunderstandings at first. People thought the Soviets were coming, so welcoming parties were sent off to Seoul’s railway station to greet the Russian liberators who never arrived. Similar parties waited in vain at railway stations in other cities across southern Korea, in Taegu, Kwangju, and Pusan, waving Soviet and Korean flags and banners expressing thanks for Soviet help in restoring Korean independence.
Others made for the nearest Japanese Shinto shrines, the main symbols of colonial oppression, and tried to bring them down with hammers, clubs, and even their bare hands, before setting them on fire. First in the northern city of Pyongyang, and then all over Korea, the hated shrines burned brightly through the night to the horror of Japanese who held them sacred.
And yet the Japanese themselves, by and large, escaped from molestation, except in the north where women and girls of all ages were treated by Soviet soldiers as war booty. On the morning of August 16, in Seoul, a Korean resistance hero named Yo Un-hyong, a devout Christian with leftist views and a taste for smart English tweed suits, formed the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence with other patriots, including communists just released from Japanese jails. His speech, to thousands of people gathered in a high school playground, was remarkable for two reasons. One was its spirit of generosity: “Now that the Japanese people are about to part from the Korean people, we should let bygones be bygones and part on good terms.” And then there was a strong note of utopianism: “Let us forget what we suffered in the past. We must build on this land of ours an ideal society, a rational paradise. Let us set aside individual heroism and progress together in an unbreakable union.”33
The crowd sang the patriotic Korean anthem, expressing undying love to the nation, set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” which apparently gave some Japanese the illusion that Koreans were bidding a fond farewell to their Japanese masters.
North of Seoul, above what would become known as the “38th parallel,” about a week before the Soviet troops arrived in Pyongyang, an equally venerable left-leaning Christian patriot named Cho Man-sik, known because of his gentle ways and his native Korean garb as the “Korean Gandhi,” also prepared for national independence. Like Yo in the south, Cho had many former political prisoners from the Communist Party in his entourage, but was not yet dominated by them. In both north and south, Korean People’s Committees quickly took over from Japanese administrators. Most members were either communists or moderately left-wing, often Christian, nationalists.
As was true in Europe, east and west, leftists, including communists, had the best patriotic credentials. While the conservative elites in government, business, and higher education had usually collaborated with the Japanese, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes keenly, in the name of modernization or progress, or out of self-interest, resistance since annexation to the Japanese empire in 1910 had a strong left-wing slant. Korean rebellions against their own elites, as well as the Japanese, often had a messianic streak, a mixture of Korean shamanism and Christian influences. Marxist-based resistance against Japanese rule was in many ways a modern incarnation of old peasant revolts against the Korean landowning gentry.
Unity, however, Yo Un-hyong’s fine words notwithstanding, was brittle. It was indeed a rarity in Korean history. The country was torn by regional differences, especially between north and south, as well as by explosive political rivalries. The year 1945 was no different. Even though Cho Man-sik and Yo Un-hyong had a common ideal of Korean unity, the left was riven by factions, and communists were ready to grab power where and when they could. When Yo established the Korean People’s Republic in Seoul, he faced a challenge from the right as well, in the shape of the Korean Democratic Party, led by landowners and other members of the old elite, many of whom had collaborated with the Japanese. There were also various Korean politicians in exile, in China and the United States, who were far from united.
But almost all Koreans, whatever their political views, agreed about one thing. Never Again, to them, meant never to be dominated by foreign powers. These were the fighting words of the declaration of the Korean People’s Republic on September 14:
We are determined to demolish Japanese imperialism, its residuary influences, antidemocratic factions, reactionary elements, and any undesirable foreign influence in our state, and to establish our complete autonomy and independence, thereby anticipating the realization of an authentically democratic state.34
There is a word in Korean, sadae, literally “serving the great,” a term used to describe the traditional tribute paid to the Chinese imperial throne by peripheral kingdoms, such as Korea. In modern times, sadae came to mean groveling to any foreign power, usually to ga
in advantage over Korean rivals. Collaborators with the Japanese were guilty of sadae. In the “rational paradise,” envisaged by Yo, the shame of sadae would be wiped out forever.
The Koreans never had a chance.
When the U.S. troops finally landed in the southern port city of Inchon several weeks after the Japanese surrender, they had no clue about the country or the aspirations of its people. Lieutenant General John R. Hodge had been chosen to be the man in charge just because he happened to be in the neighborhood—on the Japanese island of Okinawa. His political advisers hardly knew any more about Korea than he did. None spoke a word of Korean. But there was immense goodwill, certainly on the Korean side. Yank magazine reported that “native Koreans” greeted U.S. jeeps, trucks, and reconnaissance cars with “shouts, grins, lifted arms, bows and cries of ‘Hubbah, hubbah!’”35
Despite strict nonfraternization orders, a Japanese-American military intelligence officer named Warren Tsuneishi fell into a conversation with a Mr. Kim, a hotel manager in Seoul. Mr. Kim said: “And we have you to thank for our liberation. Deeply, deeply, I thank you. You have suffered so much to liberate us and make us independent.” Tears welled up in Mr. Kim’s eyes, which made Tsuneishi suddenly feel “ill at ease.”36
By then, the first U.S. blunder had already been made. Before he had even disembarked from his ship, General Hodge received a request to see Yo Un-hyong’s brother, Yo Un-hong, a moderate figure representing the provisional Korean government. The general, suspecting Japanese or perhaps communist skullduggery, refused to talk to him. The next day in Seoul, Hodge announced that the Japanese governor and his entire administration would stay in place until further orders. Koreans were furious and flooded the streets to protest against this slap in the face. Embarrassed by the reaction, the U.S. State Department quickly announced that the Japanese would no longer be in control after all. The Americans would take charge. But since the Americans still lacked sufficient troops, Japanese were ordered to stick to their posts anyway.
This is how Yank described the Japanese surrender ceremony: “Outside the Japanese Governor’s palace in Seoul, a brief retreat ceremony was held around the flag pole. The 184th formed a hollow square of fatigue-clad men, and the 7th division played Americans We. The Jap flag was hauled down, displayed briefly for the inevitable photographers and replaced by the U.S. flag as the band played the U.S. national anthem.” Then, the American troops “marched out the gates of the palace. The Bringers of Justice whom Koreans had welcomed to their ancient Land of the Three Kingdoms had begun their occupation duty.”37
Although the Soviet Red Army occupied Korea above the 38th parallel, Soviet authority was not quite so crudely imposed. A Soviet official remarked to an American reporter that Russians liked the English and Americans, because “they look like us.” But, he continued, “we don’t like the Koreans. We will stay until a suitable stable government has been set up, then we’ll go.”38 General Hodge, incidentally, didn’t like Koreans any better. He regarded most of them as “poorly-educated Orientals strongly affected by forty years of Jap control . . . with whom it is almost impossible to reason.”39
The Soviets stuck to their word, but their idea of a suitable stable government was not what patriots, such as Yo Un-hyong or Cho Man-sik, would have wished. Northern Korea was first run by Korean People’s Committees. People’s Courts were set up to purge collaborators and “reactionary elements.” Officials of the colonial government were ousted, sometimes with considerable violence. Korean landlords, and others who had nothing to gain from revolutionary politics backed by Soviet officials, began to move to the south very swiftly. Cho Man-sik was still in charge of the People’s Political Committee, but this central organ had only limited control over the regional committees. Nor could it stop the Soviets from dismantling and looting Japanese-built factories.
In the south, the American military authorities, who, unlike the Soviets, did assert direct government control, embarked on a policy which would be repeated on many occasions when the U.S. decided it knew best how to bless the natives with good government. Partly out of ignorance, partly out of a not always unreasonable distrust of communist intentions, the U.S. military government relied on conservative members of the Korean elite who spoke English, or, better still, were educated at American institutions. To lead the future Korean government, they brought in a man from the United States who was indisputably a nationalist, but also a figure with staunch anticommunist views: Syngman Rhee, a Christian, educated at Harvard and Princeton. Rhee was not a total unknown in Korea, but he had no popular base there, either. Although he had been regarded by U.S. officials as a nuisance while in exile, a lady from the passport division of the State Department thought Rhee was “a nice patriotic old gentleman.” Her opinion, combined with Rhee’s anticommunist credentials, was thought to be good enough. On October 11, Rhee was welcomed back to his native country by General Hodge, who called him “a great man who has given his entire life to the freedom of Korea.”40
A similar scene took place in Pyongyang three days later, when a relatively obscure Korean guerrilla fighter, a pudgy man in his thirties with a pudding-bowl haircut, who had spent most of the war in a Soviet army training camp near Khabarovsk, was welcomed by the top Soviet commanders as “a national hero” and “an outstanding guerilla leader.” Seventy thousand people had been mobilized to pay tribute to “General Kim Il-sung,” who, in his capacity “as a representative of the grateful Korean people,” delivered a speech written by his Soviet handlers honoring the Soviet army.41
Precisely one week after that the first glimmer of a Kim Il-sung cult appeared in a Pyongyang newspaper, describing heroic exploits that would soon become part of a quasi-religious liturgy celebrating all manner of divine interventions on the Korean peninsula, echoing the messianism of so many political movements in the Korean past. In December Kim took over the leadership of the North Korean Communist Party. But the center of Korean politics was still in the south. There was no question, quite yet, of two independent Korean nations.
Koreans, always conscious of their nation’s history of sadae, had ample reasons to worry at this point. In November 1945, Donald Keene, still based in the Chinese city of Tsingtao, had dinner one night with some resident Koreans. For once, he reported in a letter, there was no contentious argument over Korean independence. “The only subject discussed which led to any controversy was that of Russo-American relations.” Keene found it “very difficult” to persuade his Korean friends that “America and Russia have no quarrel and can get along in a world of peace.” These Koreans, he explained, had “braved severe punishment [from the Japanese] by listening to American shortwave broadcasts during the war,” and so they thought the U.S. should help their country against the Russians. Keene observed, with a hint of impatience: “A solution based on cooperation is viewed as out of the question. All they can see are two different factions in Korea, each striving to win all; cooperation in such a case they would consider betrayal.”42
They were right: the fate of the Koreans would indeed be decided by foreign powers. But there were many more than two factions. At first, at a December conference of foreign ministers in Moscow, it looked as though Keene’s optimism was justified and the United States and the Soviet Union could come to an agreement. A “trusteeship” would be established in Korea under a joint commission drawn from U.S. and Soviet military commands. United States and Soviet authorities would help the Koreans form a provisional government and guide the country towards full independence with the help of Britain and China. This undertaking could take up to five years.
The Soviets had little trouble persuading their Korean allies in the north to back this arrangement. Dissenters were quickly dealt with. When Cho Man-sik, to whom a trusteeship smacked of yet more colonialist meddling in Korean affairs, protested, he was put under house arrest. House arrest later turned into imprisonment, and around the time of the Korean War, he disappeared entirely, never
to be seen again.
The situation in the south was more fraught. Almost all south Koreans opposed a trusteeship, either for nationalistic reasons or political ones; conservatives wanted nothing to do with Soviet interference. They could not see how a national government could possibly include the Korean Communist Party. The conservatives, however, lacked popular support. The leftist Korean People’s Republic, despite American efforts to crush it, still had more patriotic credibility. But the issue of trusteeship proved to be its undoing.
When an attempt by leftists and conservatives to form a coalition collapsed, the left became more sympathetic to the idea of a trusteeship. This was followed by chaos: a coup attempt, led by another former exiled nationalist known as “the assassin,” was thwarted; workers went on strike in protest against the U.S. military government. And Syngman Rhee’s conservatives rose as the true patriots, accusing the Korean left of being Soviet stooges—sadae, in other words. The Americans backed Rhee, naturally, and now claimed that trusteeship had been a Soviet plot from the beginning, and that South Korea should set up its own conservative government under the benevolent stewardship of the U.S.—something that might be described, and would be described by what remained of the left in future years, as another form of sadae.
