This article reproduces a chapter originally published on October 7, 2015.
Drawing primarily on Nangyū Abe’s essay published in the monthly magazine Seiron, it discusses how the myth of “forced deportation” was formed and how it became entrenched in Japanese society through GHQ’s preferential policies toward Koreans, the realities of illegal entry, Chongryon’s campaigns, and the discourse of progressive intellectuals surrounding the Kim Huirō incident.
It is an important essay for considering postwar Japan’s historical consciousness, issues concerning Koreans residing in Japan, and distortions in public discourse.
2019-04-21
World Heritage Sites Tarnished by Chinese and South Korean Anti-Japanese Hostility.
The Past of Koreans in Japan Concealed by the False Theory of “Forced Deportation.”
Why Did the Myth of Forced Deportation Arise?
Those Who Crossed the Genkai Sea After the War.
The Fiction of “Forced Deportation,” Acknowledged Even by the Man Who Named It.
The following is a chapter published on 2015-10-07 under the title “Since There Is Even Less Space to Publish Substantial Essays, There Is No Way They Can Be Conveying the Truth.”
This month’s issue of Seiron, too, is packed with truths that remain entirely unknown to people who live their lives subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun or the Mainichi Shimbun and watching only the news programs of TV Asahi or TBS.
And yet it costs just 780 yen.
Meanwhile, the Asahi fills roughly half of its limited newspaper space with advertisements like those found in sports tabloids, yet charges approximately 5,000 yen a month.
The following is from a painstaking work by Korea specialist Nangyū Abe, spanning pages 178–187.
Mr. Nangyū Abe.
Born in Fukuoka Prefecture in Shōwa 14 (1939).
Graduated from Kogakuin University.
Served at the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry’s Agency of Industrial Science and Technology and as a senior research scientist at the National Chemical Laboratory for Industry.
After retiring in 2000, served until 2003 as director of the Tsukuba administrative office of the Japan Chemical Innovation Institute.
His specialty is technology for treating mining and industrial pollution.
His books include The Substantial Completion of Tsukuba Science City, and his coauthored works include North Korea’s Military Industrialization and Studies in Postwar Japan–North Korea Relations.
He is currently preparing to establish an “Archive of Trade with the Communist Bloc.”
＊Readers will surely realize that his painstaking work also proves my arguments to be 100 percent correct.
Bold emphasis other than in the titles is mine.＊
World Heritage Sites Tarnished by Chinese and South Korean Anti-Japanese Hostility.
The Past of Koreans in Japan Concealed by the False Theory of “Forced Deportation.”
Why Did the Myth of Forced Deportation Arise?
Those Who Crossed the Genkai Sea After the War.
Following the issue of comfort women for the Japanese military, “wartime conscription” has emerged as a historical dispute between Japan and South Korea.
This is the issue once called “forced deportation” and remembered as an “atrocity of Imperial Japan.”
As its actual circumstances were clarified and the image of an “atrocity” was refuted, fewer people now call it “forced deportation,” and it is increasingly referred to as “forced labor” and other such terms.
In any case, wartime conscription becomes a source of friction between Japan and South Korea because the memory of this “forced deportation equals atrocity” narrative remains deeply rooted.
In Shōwa 43 (1968), Kim Huirō, a second-generation South Korean resident of Japan, shot dead two men, including a gang member collecting a debt, at a snack bar in Shizuoka Prefecture and barricaded himself inside an inn at Sumatakyō Onsen in the same prefecture.
When Kim demanded, as a condition for releasing his hostages, an apology from a serving police officer who had made discriminatory remarks about South and North Korean residents of Japan, the mass media began giving the incident extensive coverage as an issue of “discrimination against Koreans” while the siege was still underway.
Within Japan, activist organizations and people calling themselves intellectuals began supporting Kim Huirō.
And although Kim Huirō had killed two people with a rifle, he escaped the death penalty at trial.
The incident had a major impact on subsequent activism among Koreans residing in Japan.
The greatest of these effects was the creation of the myth that “Koreans in Japan have always been discriminated against.
And at the root of that discrimination lay their ‘forced deportation’ by prewar Japan.”
This was propaganda promoting the image that they had been brought to Japan in the same way that Black people had been taken from Africa to America as slaves.
Was “discrimination” really the background to the Kim Huirō incident?
It has generally been said that Japanese people looked down on Koreans, but in postwar Japan, after the dissolution of the Empire of Japan (hereafter, “the Empire”), the American occupation forces—the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers, or GHQ—adopted policies favoring Koreans.
By treating Koreans more favorably than Japanese people, they sought to inflame ethnic antagonism, use it as a buffer against Japanese resistance to occupation policies, and facilitate military occupation and rule.
This is their customary method, frequently seen in Western colonial administration: promoting ethnic antagonism to facilitate governance.
I believe that this deliberately inflamed “ethnic friction” encouraged Kim Huirō’s claims.
At the time of the Empire’s dissolution, nearly 1.6 million of the approximately two million Koreans who had been living in Japan returned to Korea.
By the end of Shōwa 21 (1946), only approximately 400,000 Koreans remained in Japan.
By Shōwa 34 (1959), when the “repatriation movement,” or repatriation program, to North Korea began, the number had increased to 600,000.
Of course, these are the publicly recorded figures.
GHQ’s preferential policies toward Koreans, which promoted ethnic antagonism, did more than discourage Koreans who intended to return to the Korean Peninsula from leaving; they actually created an impetus for migration in the opposite direction.
A population cannot possibly increase by 50 percent in such a short period.
During this period, approximately 60,000 people were apprehended for illegal entry.
It has been pointed out that three times that number of illegal entrants were not arrested.
That amounts to approximately 200,000, which corresponds numerically to the difference between 600,000 and 400,000.
Yet the significance of these “200,000 illegal entrants among the 600,000 Koreans residing in Japan” has rarely been questioned.
The Fiction of “Forced Deportation,” Acknowledged Even by the Man Who Named It.
This, too, is because the image of Koreans in Japan as people who were “forcibly deported” has become firmly established.
A catalyst for this was the publication of On the Forced Deportation of Korean Workers During the Pacific War (1962), by Pak Kyong-sik, a Korean historian residing in Japan.
Regarding the term “forced deportation” used here, Pak Kyong-sik stated that he had been prompted by “materials concerning an investigation into the forced deportation of Chinese people,” published in the May 1960 issue of Iwanami Shoten’s magazine Sekai.
In response, Shōji Yamada, a researcher on the massacre of Koreans during the Great Kantō Earthquake, pointed out that “forced deportation” was not a term coined by Pak Kyong-sik, but was probably borrowed because the earlier expression “forced deportation of Chinese people” was already known; [passage omitted].
Pak Kyong-sik’s On the Forced Deportation of Korean Workers During the Pacific War was published by Korea University in Japan.
Regarding the term “forced deportation” used at that time, the Korean writer residing in Japan, Kim Tal-su, [passage omitted] asserted that it was Pak Kyong-sik’s coinage.
Meanwhile, in his final years, Pak Kyong-sik is said to have insisted to Yamada that “forced deportation is not limited to taking people away under physical restraint” (Remembering Pak Kyong-sik).
These words by Pak Kyong-sik bring into relief the fact that the very man who coined the expression “forced deportation” of Koreans acknowledged that no Koreans had come to Japan through physical violence.
If traveling to Japan of one’s own volition under the influence of the “ideology of imperial subjecthood” constitutes “forced deportation,” then the 100,000 people who went to North Korea under the influence of the repatriation movement, which Chongryon promoted by proclaiming that “North Korea is a paradise on earth,” would also be victims of “forced deportation.”
Although Pak Kyong-sik had stated that he himself was “not a Korean who had been forcibly deported,” in 1965 he published A Record of the Forced Deportation of Koreans (Miraisha).
Today, this work by Pak Kyong-sik is regarded as having entrenched the concept of “forced deportation” in Japanese society.
Incidentally, where did the 200,000 illegal entrants mentioned earlier disappear to?
At least until the mid-1970s, the existence of illegal entrants was widely known.
Even as 100,000 people crossed the sea through the repatriation movement to North Korea, the number of illegal entrants was increasing, and they were also regarded as a source of labor expected to support industry in the Osaka–Kobe region at its lowest levels.
Many Japanese people have now forgotten that many Koreans residing in Japan were illegal entrants.
The Kim Huirō incident played a part in that process.
One could also say that this was because Chongryon mounted a campaign in response to arguments about Kim Huirō and the incident such as, “Since Koreans in Japan have suffered discrimination, his punishment should be reduced by one degree.”
That campaign involved Chongryon’s establishment of the “Investigative Commission on the Truth of the Forced Deportation of Koreans,” which sought to promote “the clarification of the realities of forced deportation, a ‘dark chapter’ in Japan’s modern history.”
This campaign began in Hokkaido and Kyushu in Shōwa 48 (1973), and numerous investigative reports were produced with the additional cooperation of Japanese scholars and civic activists trapped in an atonement-centered view of history.
Then, in Chongryon (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, published in 2005), issued to commemorate the organization’s fiftieth anniversary, Chongryon came to emphasize “forced deportation” in explaining “why Koreans live in Japan” (Chongryon), even though it is common knowledge that illegal entrants were also among Chongryon’s senior officials.
Is It Acceptable to Kill “Bad Japanese People”?
In the Kim Huirō incident, progressive intellectuals who said they were “shocked by Kim Huirō’s appeal” began to act.
The recently deceased philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi, who said he wanted to “be on the losing side,” was one of them.
However, it was highly questionable whether a man who could kill people with a rifle belonged to “the losing side.”
The “Association to Consider Kim Huirō” included Masahito Ara, Shōzō Inoue, Minpei Sugiura, Kanji Seki, Kenzō Nakajima, Takashi Hatada, and Ichirō Haryū, who were regarded at the time as progressive cultural figures.
According to the account in the afterword to Kim Huirō’s Court Statement (Hyakuni Shobō, 1970), by French literature scholar Michihiko Suzuki, professor emeritus at Dokkyo University, eight people served as organizers of the Committee for the Kim Huirō Trial: Shin’ichirō Ōsawa, Hideki Kajimura, Hiroshi Kubo, Katsumi Satō, Minoru Satomi, Michihiko Suzuki, Osamu Mitsuhashi, and Setsuko Miyata.
I met three of them—Hideki Kajimura, Katsumi Satō, and Setsuko Miyata—at the Japan–Korea Research Institute in Mejiro.
Tsuneari Fukuda, Yūji Aida, Renzaburō Shibata, and others took a stern view of the murders committed by Kim Huirō and criticized them.
At the time, Japanese people who made critical comments about Kim Huirō were in the minority.
Fukuda and the other two were accused of failing to take the Kim Huirō incident seriously, of making light of it, and of distorting it.
The fundamental thinking behind the defense of Kim Huirō’s murders is symbolized by the following words.
“Certainly, Kim Huirō killed two people.
And you say that murder is an absolute evil.
Then what of the actions of the Japanese who took the lives of countless Koreans?”
(From the afterword to Kim Huirō’s Court Statement.)
The “you” in this quotation probably refers to Tsuneari Fukuda, Yūji Aida, Renzaburō Shibata, and others.
Suzuki anticipates that “you” will respond, “That happened before the war and was committed by the previous generation.
There is no reason whatsoever for me to bear responsibility for it,” and then counters as follows.
“However, I believe that you, too, have no right to take that position.
That is because we ourselves are the very people who have inherited this grim history and are reproducing it.”
Michihiko Suzuki was born in 1929, so he must have retained memories of the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat, including memories of Koreans running riot.
What Kim Huirō denounced at Sumatakyō was a police officer’s discriminatory remark: “You damned Koreans come to Japan and do nothing but cause trouble!”
Yet those words emerged from the police officer’s own life experience.
They also overlapped with the life of Kim Huirō, who was angered by them.
Before Kim Huirō killed two Japanese people and barricaded himself at Sumatakyō, he had been sent to a juvenile reformatory for theft before the war and, after the war, repeatedly committed theft, fraud, and robbery, moving back and forth between prison and Japanese society.
That must have been why the police officer’s words struck such a nerve.
Meanwhile, a police officer who spoke in that way had lived a life of enforcing the law, from the standpoint of maintaining public order, against Koreans who had behaved outrageously since immediately after Japan’s defeat.
Did the progressive intellectuals who supported Kim Huirō have no feelings of concern for the police officers who had confronted such behavior and protected public order in Japan, or for the two Japanese people who were suddenly shot dead?
Were they saying that, because a man was a gang member who lent money and demanded repayment, he could not complain if he was killed?
It is said that one of the two people killed was not a gang member.