As a married couple, Kaoru and Yukiko received the standard allotments of food, delivered three times a week, even in the 1990s, when many North Koreans experienced hardship and famine. Food rationing is the regime’s primary means of social control, and with the exception of small farmers’ markets and home-grown produce, all staples (rice, vegetables, meat, poultry, and fish) are allocated through the public distribution system. In normal times, a working adult, depending on his occupation, receives 700–800 grams of grain a day. The elderly receive 300–600 grams, and children get 100–500 grams, depending on their age. White rice is the most prized staple, and any shortfall is filled with less desirable grains like wheat, corn, and barley. In addition, as “employees” of the state, Kaoru and Yukiko were each paid ten won per day, with which they could purchase additional food in private markets, usually at exorbitant prices. Chinese cabbage, cucumber, and eggplant were cheap, but apples, pears, and meat were expensive. If Kaoru was lucky enough to find a store selling pork, the meat was usually half fat. It wasn’t anything like the abundance he had experienced in Japan, but he was grateful for what he got. One day an encounter with someone living outside the zone made him appreciate how well off he and Yukiko were, relative to ordinary people. “If the people could all eat as you do in the Invitation-Only Zone, then I guess we could say that the true Communist society had been realized,” a man told him. “I sensed he was jealous, and in the future I was careful not to talk about how much food we had.”
Kaoru did what he could to make the house feel more like a home. “In the same way that, as a child, I made up games without toys or playmates, I found ways to play by myself in the Invitation-Only Zone.”4 He carved a mahjong set out of wood and taught his wife to play. Although he hadn’t played golf in Japan, he spent several weeks clearing a nearby area to create a five-hole golf course. He drew on his memories of watching the game on television to come up with something approximating the rules, and played obsessively, using balls made from glued-together cotton swabs. “As idiotic as it may seem, I was so starved for play that my golf course was a lot of fun.” On occasion he’d dream he was back home. He’d stare out the living room window at a hill that resembled one in Kashiwazaki that he used to climb to look out over the ocean. “I’m going to climb to the top of that hill so I can see the water on the other side,” he told himself, well aware that Pyongyang is a landlocked city and the quest for the ocean view was folly. Still, one day he sneaked out and scrambled up to the top of the steep hill just to see what was there. On the other side was a flat, dusty landscape. “The crazy thing is that even after I saw it with my own eyes, I still felt there should be an ocean behind that hill.”5
The newlyweds fell into a routine. Every morning, after being woken up by the announcement coming from the loudspeaker that is installed in every North Korean house and workplace, Yukiko would prepare a traditional Korean breakfast of miso soup, rice, eggs, and kimchi. After breakfast Kaoru would go for a run, taking a route past identical small white cottages, down the paths that cut through the hills and trees. It wasn’t a terribly long run, however, because after a few thousand yards, he would see the barbed-wire fence peeking above the trees.
Once a week, the theater on the second floor of the neighborhood center screened movies, usually educational films filled with revolutionary propaganda. Kaoru quickly realized that the first few movies screened were expressly directed at him: Team 4/25 told the story of a North Korean soccer team touring Japan, the underdog beating the slick, arrogant Japanese—an unsubtle message about precisely who was in charge. Movies are one of the primary media through which the regime communicates with the people, and virtually every town in North Korea, no matter how small, has at least one theater. “There are no other tools in art and literature as powerful as cinema in educating people in a revolutionary manner,” writes Kim Jong-il in his book On the Art of the Cinema (1973). “As an ideological weapon, it is crucial to produce a highly ideological artistic film for the education of the masses.” Kim’s first job had been running the Central Committee’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, an organization responsible for stoking the people’s revolutionary spirit via movies and other media. One of the most popular movie series at the time was Unsung Heroes, a multipart Cold War saga in which North Korean spies match wits with an evil American CIA agent, played by Charles Robert Jenkins, an American soldier who had defected to the North in the 1960s and later married a Japanese abductee. Another favorite was Pulgasari, the 1985 Godzilla remake directed by Shin Sang-ok, the South Korean film director whom Kim Jong-il abducted in 1978 along with Choi Eun-hee, Shin’s glamorous actress ex-wife (known as the Elizabeth Taylor of South Korea). Kim kidnapped them in the hope they would revitalize the North Korean film industry. He treated them like (captive) royalty, hosting parties and dinners in their honor, in return for which they made seven films. Most nights, Kaoru and Yukiko stayed at home and watched the news on one of the two official television stations, Pyongyang Central Broadcasting and Kaesong Broadcasting, which were on air only from five until eleven each night. At eight o’clock, the news would end and a movie would begin. If they were lucky, the electricity would hold out long enough for them to see the whole thing. If not, they’d go to bed early.
During their captivity, the Hasuikes were moved ten times between and within various Invitation-Only Zones, occupying a house anywhere from one week to one decade. Sometimes it was simply a question of supply and demand; other times, the moves were designed to reduce the abductees’ visibility by relocating them to ever-more-remote locations. Whenever news about the abductions surfaced in Japan, Kaoru and Yukiko had to pack up their belongings and move. The question of their needs or desires never arose. The power of the North Korean regime over its citizens is absolute. Much as Koreans were dictated to by Japan during the thirty-five years they lived under colonial rule as “children of the emperor,” Kaoru and Yukiko, as citizens of North Korea, sublimated their own desires in order to serve the all-powerful Great Leader, Kim Il-sung.
4
JAPAN AND KOREA’S “COMMON ORIGINS”
In their study of Western imperialism, Meiji intellectuals noted that the most successful world powers possessed colonies.1 Having a colony was a status symbol, marking a nation as international and modern, and between 1876 and 1915, one-quarter of the globe’s land surface was controlled by a half dozen Western states.2 Nineteenth-century colonialism was condoned by international law, and Japan was careful to employ recognized legal procedures as it extended its borders.3 It was also careful to distinguish itself from Western colonizers, whom it characterized as interlopers, driven solely by their desire for power and money. Japan, however, characterized itself as a unifier, not a conqueror, with a duty to protect Asia from the West. There had been few instances in world history of a nation subjugating an ethnically similar nation—England’s amalgamation of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland was noted—so Japan’s brand of colonialism was idiosyncratic from the start. The foundation of its pan-Asianist political rhetoric was the “common origins” (Nissen dosoron) theory that Japan and Korea shared an ancient ancestral lineage, a theory Japan augmented with the new sciences of archaeology and anthropology to argue that its expansion was rationally justified. How could any nation defend itself against an army that flew the flag of modernity itself? In particular, Ryuza Torii’s historical analysis of the Japanese as simultaneously inviolable and protean—the core “Japanese proper” synthesizing the best of other Asian ethnic groups—gave the project a veneer of intellectual respectability, implying that Japan was superior precisely because it had been forged through natural selection. Japan’s first conquest was China, which it defeated in 1895. The terms of the peace treaty gave Japan possession of Taiwan and forced China to release its grip on Korea. Japan further bolstered its reputation as a modern power in 1905 by defeating Russia, which possessed the largest army in Europe. It was the first triumph of a nonwhite nation over a white one, and was celebrated in
Japan and throughout Asia as evidence of Darwin’s theory of the “survival of the fittest.”
Another lesson Japan learned from the West was that modern states “catalogue” their pasts, funding surveys and archaeological excavations and exhibiting historical artifacts in museums.4 Beginning in 1895, the Meiji government dispatched dozens of anthropological and archaeological teams throughout Asia to record the history of the empire it was assembling. “It is most important for Japan to have, in place of general ethnology and ethnography, the ethnological and ethnographic studies specialized on Asia,” Torii wrote. “Japan is no longer what it used to be, but has obtained those people of the colonies who are the most interesting from an academic point of view.”5 Japan literally wrote the first draft of Korean history in a thirty-eight-volume encyclopedia, which folded Korea’s past into Japan’s new narrative of Asian history. The Korean Peninsula received the most extensive attention from anthropologists, whose studies served a dual role: first, to preserve the historical record. The second role was more practical: to document the culture and customs with which colonial administrators would have to contend. One of the main points of dispute between the two countries was that Korea had refused to acknowledge the recently “restored” emperor Meiji as the Chinese emperor’s equal. Having taken its cues from China for hundreds of years, the Korean royal court couldn’t conceive of a world with two emperors, so it snubbed a series of Japanese emissaries. The affront provided diplomatic cover for the Japanese takeover of Korea.
On September 20, 1875, the Unyo, a small Japanese gunboat, landed at Ganghwa Island, thirty miles west of Seoul. The Koreans shelled the intruder, an action that, according to international law, justified return fire. With its modern armaments, Japan won easily, and the resulting Japan-Korea Treaty of Amity imposed on Korea the same terms the United States had imposed on Japan nearly twenty years earlier. It opened the country to trade, reduced Chinese influence over it, and made it accept various internal reforms. Japanese troops were stationed in Korea, ostensibly to protect the Japanese merchants now permitted to work there, but in reality the troops were used to begin Japan’s conquest of Asia, with Korea as the staging ground.
Japan’s takeover was an act of slow-motion colonization. Korea was forced to sign the Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty in 1905, after which Japan installed a “resident-general” to oversee Korea’s international affairs. In 1906, Japan convinced the United States to place the country under the rubric of Japan on official maps, deleting all references to Korea. In 1907 it demobilized the Korean army and forced King Kojong to abdicate. Finally, on August 29, 1910, Japan officially annexed Korea. The major world powers accepted Japan’s narrative of a dissipated Korea that had, through corruption and misgovernance, lost the capacity for self-rule and would benefit from Japanese oversight. The Japanese were careful to distinguish between Korean leaders (inept, corrupt) and the Korean people (proto-Japanese, full of potential), and predicted that Korea would thrive as part of the Japanese Empire. Japan classified Korea as a “new territory” and referred to the annexation as an “extension of the map,” euphemisms designed to obscure the true nature of the relationship.6
The Japanese media portrayed Korea’s capitulation as inevitable. “The Annexation of Korea Is a Natural Course of Events,” read the headline to an Osaka Asahi Shimbun editorial. “Judging from history, anthropology, and linguistics, there are no doubts that a close relationship existed between Japan and Korea,” it explained.7 And that relationship was embodied in even the highest level of Japanese society. A November 1910 editorial in Taiyo drew a biological link between ancient Korea and the Japanese royal family: “Korean blood runs in the veins of many Japanese noble families, even those of the Imperial family.”8 An article compared Koreans who resisted Japan to “Japanese who were hostile to Westerners when Japan’s doors were opened” twenty years before. The notion that Japan was recapitulating its experience of modernization in order to save Korea was expressed succinctly by the historian Kunitake Kume. “This is not an Annexation, but a Restoration,” he wrote.9
Annexation was embraced by Japan’s Koreaphiles, who saw the peninsula as a prelapsarian paradise, an idealized version of what Japan had been like in a purer, simpler time.10 Korea seemed like an antidote to the overly Western nation Japan had become. Tourists on nostalgic package tours visited ancient temples and archaeological sites discovered by explorers such as Ryuzo Torii. “I feel as though I were living three thousand years back,” wrote the diplomat Inazo Nitobe of his 1906 visit. Korea was promoted as an ideal destination for summer retreats, its climate praised as “the most pleasant and agreeable in the empire.”11 By 1910, there was a proliferation of guidebooks and travel journalism about Korea, which became an essential stop for Japanese citizens trying to understand their growing multicultural empire. “Now anyone can travel in Korea and experience the same beauty and level of efficient and convenient service as we do in Japan proper (naichi), since there is now no difference between Korea and Japan,” advised one guidebook.12
Japan’s domination over Korea was cruel, exploitative, and ruthlessly efficient. But the gravest damage, both to Japanese-Korean relations and to Korean national identity, was inflicted by Japan’s often-successful campaign to appropriate Korean culture. Many Koreans had watched enviously as Japan modernized itself during the Meiji era, and the synthesis of modern and colonial rhetoric made it difficult for even the most nationalist Koreans to reject all aspects of Japanese rule. “Aggression and exploitation also coincided with fairly remarkable development and a learning-by-doing experience of how education, military, polity, and economy can be modernized,” writes historian Bruce Cumings. “Thus the Japanese set up a love-hate conflict that has gnawed at the Korean national identity ever since.”13
For the first ten years, Japan ruled primarily through its military might—until March 1, 1919, when two million Koreans took part in a well-coordinated protest for national independence. The Japanese army put down the protest violently, but the passion behind the Koreans’ actions made the government realize its policies were ineffective.
Between 1920 and the late 1930s, Japanese rule relaxed somewhat, granting Koreans limited freedom of expression in a strictly regulated environment, treating them more like an ethnic subculture—Korean was called a “dialect” of Japanese—than a subjugated people. Rather than depend solely on the threat of violence (although that was always an option), the Japanese co-opted Korean pride instead of trying to eliminate it.14 They exploited the ambiguity between ethnic and national identity to create an intellectual space where Koreans could experience simultaneously Korean ethnic pride and Japanese nationalism.15
The most brutal, and best remembered, period of colonialism was from the late 1930s through 1945, when Japan accelerated the pace of assimilation, forcing Koreans to speak Japanese, take Japanese names, and worship at Shinto shrines. Korean men labored in Japanese factories and mines, and Korean women were dragooned into sexual slavery as “comfort women” for the Japanese military.
No manipulation or coercion was required, however, for Koreans to see that, under the Japanese, their economy had leapfrogged from late feudalism to twentieth-century capitalism. Railroads, mines, and factories were built as Korea became more urbanized and less rural. Modern agricultural techniques and new chemical fertilizers increased rice output. Mortality rates declined and literacy rates increased.16 Colonial subjects were awarded citizenship, with the same (limited) privileges of native-born Japanese.17 Starting in 1920, Koreans who lived in the Japanese isles had the right to vote.18 Intermarriage between Japanese and Koreans was encouraged, the most famous example being the royal marriage of Korean crown prince Uimin and Japanese princess Masako.
The reforms gave birth to a new class of assimilated Koreans, a small group of educated urbanites who provided evidence that it was possible (though not easy) to better oneself under Japanese rule. Those opportunities only increased as Japan mobilized for war and more Koreans
than ever joined the Japanese establishment at every level.19 The police force and military were particularly popular routes for upward mobility, and by 1943 one-third of Korea’s colonial police force was composed of Korean officers.20 Two hundred twenty thousand Koreans fought in the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy, where they developed reputations as some of the fiercest combatants. Unlike the segregated U.S. Army, the Japanese armed forces integrated Koreans, promoting seven to the rank of general and others to positions where they commanded Japanese soldiers.21 Kim Il-sung’s brother was an interpreter for Japanese troops in China,22 and Park Chung-hee, South Korea’s future president, served in the Imperial Army, swearing he was “both physically and spiritually ready to be a Japanese subject and … willing to give my life for the emperor.”23 The Japanese colonizers set the terms for acceptable civic, political, and cultural activities, and Koreans throughout the peninsula “collaborated” through the simple act of living their lives. As in other authoritarian systems, such as North Korea today, one had few other choices.
* * *
By the end of the Second World War, four million Koreans were living outside their homeland, and one million Japanese civilians and troops were living inside Korea.24 Imperial Japan had become a hybrid Asian nation at precisely the moment when the entire project collapsed. With the loss of the Japanese Empire came a need for a new theory of Japanese identity. If one role of the “common origins” theory had been to tie Japan to its colonies, it became irrelevant to a postwar Japan that had been stripped of them. Although the outlines of the theory were still supported by the historical and archaeological record, the politics of the era called for a new story for Japan, in which it played a less aggressive, less ambitious role. It didn’t take long for Japanese intellectuals to fill the space left by Torii’s now-unpopular ideas.
The Invitation-Only Zone Page 4
