[Column] Japanese collaboration has always been present

The Association of Family Members of Victims of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery and other family members of comfort women victims hold a press conference Tuesday with Gyeonggi Provincial Council member Jeong Dae-woon in front of the council’s statue of a young girl commemorating the comfort women.

J. Mark Ramseyer, a professor at Harvard Law School, kicked a hornet’s nest with his claim that the comfort women were prostitutes under contract.

Some scholars in other countries have labored to refute the overt historical distortions in the academic paper by the professor who occupied a chair funded by Mitsubishi, a Japanese company that was complicit in war crimes during World War II. Those scholars have been joined by South Korean professors in their 70s and 80s who have been a shining light to the world with their advocacy of human rights and democratization in South Korea from the military dictatorships of the past until the candlelit revolution a few years ago.

But there are also pro-Japanese scholars in South Korea who have warned foreign scholars that, as outsiders, they have no right to discuss these matters. But who exactly are the outsiders here?

The Japanese army’s “comfort women” system of wartime sexual slavery and the forced labor camps operated by the Nazis are crimes against humanity. There are no statutes of limitation and no national borders for such crimes since they touch upon all of humanity. The only separation is between those who stand with the victims and those who stand with the offenders.

Ignoring the victims’ testimony and parroting the arguments of the offending government is not scholarship but politics. It’s an insult to academic freedom, which has been established through so many sacrifices.

I miss the ferocious fulminations of the late scholar Yi Yong-hui. He would have denounced such people for not even trying to resist political power.

Who exactly are these people who say that one’s nationality disqualifies them from participating in a debate? The national traitors who received aristocratic titles and land from the Japanese empire in exchange for their support of the treaty by which Japan annexed Korea in 1910 have been described, somewhat euphemistically, as “the pro-Japanese faction,” or Japanese collaborators.

The Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea in 1965 was concluded by the South Korean government. President Park Chung-hee, the dictator who had served in the Japanese army, used martial law to suppress public opposition to the treaty and then spent the settlement paid by Japan on projects unrelated to the victims of Japanese colonialization.

In 2015, Park’s daughter, President Park Geun-hye, concluded a comfort women agreement with Japan. In so doing, Seoul agreed to trade a paltry 10 billion won (US$8.87 million) for the agony of the more than 100,000 comfort women and not to bring the issue up anymore. And thus, the pedigree of the collaborators has been passed down to the present in an unbroken line.

Are we obliged to respect the thoroughly fraudulent treaties signed by imperial powers and their local agents as international agreements?

Japanese collaboration is not merely a matter of history; it has always been part of the present. The people defaming comfort women statues during protests in the middle of Seoul betray a disgusting sadism reminiscent of the jeering people who scarfed down pizza in front of the bereaved families of Sewol ferry victims during their hunger strike.

When I see people roving around the US and Japan claiming that the comfort women are fake and that no forced labor occurred, I can’t help but wonder why they’re so determined to inflict pain on the victims and their allies.

Recently, I had a chance to review a slice of history of the Japanese collaborators, the people who chose to become the perpetrators following Korea’s liberation. Toward the end of the War in the Pacific, the Japanese empire hurriedly conscripted young Korean men to move weapons and dig trenches in preparation for the US assault on Okinawa. Typically, the poorest and weakest people in the villages of North Gyeongsang Province were conscripted for this work.

But it was not the Japanese themselves, but rather Korean police officers, officials at the town and county level, and pillars of the community who rounded up these men, gave them instructions and exhortations and sent them off to the battlefield.

We read that a few resisted or ran away, but most felt compelled by thoughts of their family members to travel to the front. The Koreans taken to Okinawa were worked like cattle and then dragged to the battlefield to die; some were even executed.

After the War in the Pacific had ended, the Japanese tracked down the name of every last Japanese soldier who had died in the Battle of Okinawa. But the Japanese never revealed how many thousands, or tens of thousands, of Koreans lost their lives there.

During the war, the Japanese drew up lists of who would be conscripted in each village. But today, they hide the records of the Koreans they conscripted and deny the testimony of the survivors.

The Koreans who did survive didn’t return home until a year after liberation. These men were devastated, both physically and emotionally, having watched their comrades die in the horrors of battle. They despised the Japanese collaborators among the police and the petty officials who had sent them into the jaws of death, and some of them acted on their desire for revenge.

But when the labor conscripts demanded a full investigation, the new authorities, who had allied themselves with the US military government, suppressed the returned Koreans, framing them as communists.

We need to ponder our country’s history of muzzling these victims of crimes against humanity. After Korea’s liberation, the very people who had collaborated with the Japanese to enrich themselves and fuel their careers were the first to bash communists and justify acts of violence, hoping to cover up their own past.

During the conflict and division of the Cold War, officers who had served in the Japanese military became the leaders of the military junta that ruled South Korea. These people represented Korea in negotiations with Japan for compensation for harm done during the colonial period and then took that compensation for themselves while harming the victims once again by demanding their silence.

The collaborators’ denial of compulsory mobilization under the Japanese empire is an issue of justice deferred because it was concealed under the shadow of the Cold War ideology.

While those who benefit from historical violence committed decades ago are not directly responsible for that violence, they can be seen as “accessories after the fact” for their indirect complicity in those past crimes. We must uncover the origin of the privileges and status built on the abject suffering of countless victims.

The Japanese collaborators who are even now repeatedly and sadistically covering up past injuries are perpetrators in the present. They should be condemned and held accountable for their wrongdoing.

Chung Byung-ho

By Chung Byung-ho, Professor Emeritus of anthropology at Hanyang University

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