Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States

Alexis Dudden

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231512046
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Whether it's the Vatican addressing its role in the Second World War or the United States atoning for its treatment of native Hawai'ian islanders, apologizing for history has become a standard feature of the international political scene. As Alexis Dudden makes clear, interrogating this process is crucial to understanding the value of the political apology to the state. When governments apologize for past crimes, they take away the substance of apology that victims originally wanted for themselves. They rob victims of the dignity they seek while affording the state a new means with which to legitimize itself.

Examining the interplay between political apology and apologetic history, Dudden focuses on the problematic relationship binding Japanese imperialism, South Korean state building, and American power in Asia. She examines this history through diplomatic, cultural, and social considerations in the postwar era and argues that the process of apology has created a knot from which none of these countries can escape without undoing decades of mythmaking.

CHAPTER ONE

An Island by Any Other Name

The book begins with a tiny group of islands in the sea between Japan and Korea. Migratory birds spend time there, and several rare species of trees, squirrels, and rabbits scratch out an existence on their wind-worn lava cliffs.

History, politics, and law also swirl around these islands now in guises of national security and pride. Japan and Korea both claim them as their own, with Japanese calling them “Takeshima” and Koreans “Dokdo,” making them difficult to write about because the book is not trying to pick a winner. Instead, it is trying to describe how these islands—among other things—stand as markers today in the contest to win narrating Northeast Asia’s twentieth century. With the important exception of the Korean fishermen killed there in 1948 during U.S. military target practice, these are some of the least bloody lands in the region.¹ That, however, is precisely what makes the arguments around them even more noticeable. Japanese and Koreans are deeply at odds over something that, save for the birds and trees, has grown increasingly empty at the center.

Since the end of Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1945, Japan and Korea have contested ownership of these islands in closed-door meetings and in widespread public demonstrations, with both sides going to extremes. In 1995, for example, a camera crew from one of South Korea’s major television networks camped out on the islands for the entire year, filming each flower as it bloomed and each bird as it arrived to make a detailed point to Korean audiences that the islands were theirs.

FIGURE 1.1 Islands in dispute (From a South Korean government tourist brochure)

The dispute changed key in May 2004, however, when members of an obscure right-wing group in Japan’s southwestern Shimane area set sail for the islands in a small motorboat covered with Rising Sun flags to claim them for Japan once and for all. The South Korean government promised full military retaliation should the Japanese men’s boat get too close to the rocks. Tokyo loudly proclaimed Japan’s sovereign claims while the Japanese Coast Guard guided the men and their patriotically decorated boat home.

The issue of control over these islands has a long and fraught history, and feelings on both sides did not simply melt away once the flag-laden boat returned to Japan. Regional politicians began advocating for national recognition of February 22 as “Takeshima Day,” a movement that drew to a head during the first several months of 2005 when the Shimane Assembly organized to vote on the holiday and make it local, if not national, policy. Sponsors of the measure picked the date to commemorate the day in 1905 when Japan incorporated the islands into the nation’s now vanished pre-1945 empire, and the Shimane lawmakers wanted to take advantage of the centennial as best they could.²

Unlike the previous summer when Tokyo reigned in the extremists and their small boat, the central government made no attempt to stop the regional politicians’ movement to declare the islands Japanese. Many wondered whether the ruling party was quietly encouraging the action. To the anger of the South and North Korean governments, as well as millions of Korean citizens, Tokyo described the whole affair as simply a local matter. Japan’s ambassador to Seoul, Takano Toshiyuki, made things worse when he told reporters that he did not understand what Koreans were so upset about: the islands were Japanese.

When Shimane assemblymen declared February 22 henceforth “Takeshima Day,” anti-Japanese sentiment exploded across South Korea, and Seoul announced that the holiday was “an effective withdrawal of the apologies that Japanese leaders and politicians have made for Japan’s past aggressions and imperialist record.”³ Korea’s major newspapers and television stations ran weeks of nonstop coverage of the protests and the islands with pundits, politicians, fishermen, and just about anyone else who wanted to talk, explaining over and over that Dokdo was Korean territory and always had been.

In one of the more gruesome acts of protest at the daily gatherings in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, a mother and son pair sliced off their little fingers decrying what they called Japan’s resurgent imperialism, and a fifty-three-year-old man claiming to represent families of the victims of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War set himself on fire. Seoul city assemblyman Choe Jae-ik traveled to southwestern Japan where Japanese police thwarted his attempt to write a protest in blood on the steps of the Matsue government building. Back in Seoul, Korean police wrestled a pig away from protestors who had named the animal after the then Japanese prime minister Koizumi Junichiro and were preparing to kill it. Korean officials candidly voiced their anger, and South Korea’s president at the time, Roh Moo-hyun, even posted a letter on his official Web site demanding that Japan “learn the truth.”⁴

Surprisingly enough, all this happened during the first few months of a long and elaborately planned “Year of Friendship” between Japan and South Korea.

What fuels such passion over these rocks? Or, put differently, what is perceived of as so important about them that makes people go to such extremes? The fishing areas and natural gas resources around the islands matter to some, of course, but the deeper problem stems largely from the way history troubles the region. The urge to claim them so aggressively now has grown steadily since 1945 with the ways that Japan, Korea, as well as the United States address Japan’s colonial era in Korea (1905–1945).

Including the United States in this dynamic may surprise some. Yet, during the second half of the twentieth century, the ways in which each of these countries has dealt with the legacies of the first half of the century in terms of political and legal apologies and apologetic histories has compounded on top of and blended into the earlier era’s lived, remembered, and forgotten events. As of today, the process has wound them all into a knot from which none can escape without unraveling the decade of mythmaking that masquerades as national history and has shaped the respective national identities involved.

The obsessive focus on these islands in Japan and Korea ranges from the outrageous to the tragic, a condition mirrored in reverse in the United States by overwhelming ignorance or avoidance. A quick way to grasp the complexity of the problem in American terms comes by knowing that, in the unlikely and highly undesirable event that Japan and South Korea should go to war with each other over these islands, the United States might find itself having to defend the islands for both countries because of the separate security and defense treaties it has with each. Although U.S. treaties have attempted to place these islands out of bounds, should actual war break out, the United States might have to align with one of its allies at the cost of the other over dots of land that most Americans never heard of. The incomprehensibility of this state of affairs suggests that determining an owner for the islands is not as easy as it might seem and, more important, might not really solve the problem.

The island dispute is one of many flashpoints between Japan and the Asian nations of its former empire, the most glaring of which is the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to modern-era war dead that houses the souls of regular soldiers as well as convicted war criminals. Today, to the outrage of others in the country as well as countless people throughout Asia and the rest of the world, Japanese politicians visit this shrine to please particular domestic constituencies. Critics wonder how supposedly free, open, and democratic Japan can reconcile state-sponsored worship of men who perpetrated the decimation of tens of millions of lives and entire regions.

With the furor Yasukuni visits cause, as with the island dispute, many scholars and policy makers argue about whether history is really the problem or whether we should allow that Japan and the other governments are simply behaving “rationally” “despite antagonisms” from their shared past, trying to maximize their current interests through manipulation of public sentiment over these issues.⁵ If we leave history at the level of how politicians and others deploy reference to things that happened a long time ago for their specific present purposes, then, no, history is not the problem per se. Yet this line of reasoning grasps history in terms of what the German thinker Walter Benjamin observed as occurrences in “homogenous empty time,” which is an inert space endemic to the modern era in which past events are measured equally to present ones, and whose moments, heroes, and villains are selectively chosen for the present.⁶ In other words, in this view, 1905 is just the same as 2005 and can be played with accordingly.

Explaining history in this manner, however, treats it as if it were yet another factor of the present like a trade imbalance or background music. Doing so will not get us any further in understanding why it weighs so heavily on Japanese-Korean relations—among others in the region—let alone grasp what history is. Moreover, it traps those involved in what Harry Harootunian calls “the ruse of history”—a charade that tells a necessary story instead of examining inconvenient truths—which is the “empty time” way that the governments participating in the island standoff use what they call history to justify their respective possession of the islands.⁷ The book begins with these islands, therefore, and occasionally returns to them because just a few details of this story shed light on the many histories that have been ignored or rewritten or purely made up to make this currently irreconcilable state of international affairs common sense within national storytelling.

During the spring 2005 standoff, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro responded to Korean hostility over Japan’s claims to the islands with the customary, half-hearted pleasantries of “sorrow and remorse for the past” and a need to “face the future together” with Korea. Those unfamiliar with Northeast Asian history and politics may not know what such polite, if formulaic, phrases avoid and what they might have to do with these islands. This is understandable, because the purpose of these terms is to render history an opaque object rather than to open up the messy, contentious, never-ending process that it is. This now-standard apologetic vocabulary has, moreover, been smoothing diplomatic and business relations since 1965, when Tokyo and Seoul signed their Treaty on Basic Relations and began official exchange for the first time since the colonial era ended in 1945. In recent years, these apologetic pleasantries have even fostered an atmosphere conducive to joint military exercises.

Over the years, however, such official niceties have made it all the more difficult for Japanese and Koreans to address the actual content of the so-called past between them, let alone fully appreciate how the past lives and transforms in the present. This includes matters such as the island dispute as well as more internationally known histories like the comfort women system, which involved the commandeering of up to two hundred thousand young women throughout Asia—primarily Korea—to provide sex for Japanese soldiers during the war. The chapters that follow elaborate on some of the problems involved, but for now it is important to understand that various forms of official apologizing for the region’s shared history have themselves helped generate and spark the unstable present. Although Japanese officials can claim that Japan has apologized for the country’s past actions numerous times, victims of that past as well as their supporters have found no dignity in these apologies as far as their particular histories are concerned. Routinely dismissing Korean uproar over the Yasukuni Shrine or the comfort women or possession of the islands, for example, only intensifies the problem.

At first glance in Japan it is difficult—if not impossible—to understand the country’s deep modern relationship with Korea. Although many would like to portray Japan’s 130 million people as uniform throughout time, since 1945, when the nation’s empire disintegrated, Japanese census takers have routinely counted about six hundred thousand people of registered Korean ethnicity among other groups of differing backgrounds in Japan. This may seem a tiny percentage of the population by American standards, but in Japanese terms this means that people of Korean heritage make up more than half of Japan’s “other” population. Roughly three-quarters of them descend from the approximately 2 million Koreans who came to Japan forcibly or voluntarily during the colonial era, and, notably, as a group in Japan they now extend into their fifth generation.

The Japanese word zainichi translates as “resident foreigner,” but it continues to mean “Korean” in practice, marking these people as forever not Japanese and denying them citizenship. Unlike the popular Chinatowns in Yokohama, Kobe, or Nagasaki, most Japanese city maps do not specify their Koreatowns, although Osaka residents know, for example, that Ikaino is where the Koreans live. Slums in Japan generally house such a mix of the offspring of the country’s former empire, current immigrants, and internal outcastes that no particular name for them would work. Throughout Japan, everyone knows that barbecue restaurants are largely Korean, but with names like “Spring Moon” or “Midnight” they do not disturb the landscape.

Increasingly, in recent years, some zainichi have been choosing to live openly with Korean names and embracing their Korean ethnicity, yet—and revealingly—although entertainment stars from Seoul can successfully flood Japanese markets by jetting in from abroad, zainichi remains such a nervous category within Japan that its stars such as singer-songwriter Pak Poe are classified under “World Music” regardless that their songs or films or novels are written or performed almost entirely in Japanese and the people involved are born and raised in Japan. Moreover, it remains just as commonplace that the “Tanaka” family next door may appear Japanese until a daughter or son tries to marry into the “Abe” family; then, the investigator hired by the “Abes” discovers that the “Tanakas” are really Korean and are also called the “Chons,” or something similar, because voluntary and obligatory concealment is still elemental to zainichi existence.

There is nothing in Tokyo like London’s Trafalgar Square even to hint at the glory of Japan’s once massive empire, which included Korea, unless you count the Yasukuni Shrine, and some do. The largest public display still celebrating Japan’s takeover of Korea visible anywhere is a giant mural at New York City’s Museum of Natural History that depicts Theodore Roosevelt as host of the 1905 Portsmouth Peace Treaty Conference ending the war between Japan and Russia, which resulted in Korea becoming a victory spoil for Japan. For all practical purposes, unless you know how the early twentieth century operated, you might just think that Tokyo’s National Museum naturally has a very good collection of Korean pottery and bronzes.

It is not just in Tokyo, however, where Japanese pretend that Korea and Koreans are, as the cliché so gratingly reminds, “so near and yet so far.” Only in 1999 did Hiroshima city officials allow a granite slab dedicated to the approximately fifty thousand Koreans incinerated there on August 6, 1945 inside the memorial park. Even still, the poetic phrases adorning the stone do not really explain why the Koreans were there in the first place or how they lived. Instead of big, public monuments, the layered relationship between Japan and Korea more commonly unearths itself on small markers at unannounced sites around the country that quietly record the hundreds of thousands of Koreans who were enslaved in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s in mines, lumber camps, munitions factories, and other industries for the nation’s wartime effort.⁸ But you should be aware that you might come upon such graves, and, if you do, you have to read Japanese fairly well to decipher the engraving.

By contrast, in Korea, those who have spent even a little time in Seoul know that remembering and forgetting Japan’s colonial period is a much more obvious part of the daily terrain. Amid five-star hotels, youth hostels, banks, barbecue restaurants, and night clubs whose staff fluently cater to Japanese tourists and residents of all ages and backgrounds, there are countless structural demonstrations of how the South Korean government has simultaneously re-configured and effaced its Japanese era self.

A popular landmark in central Seoul, for example, is the old Seodaemun jail, which the city’s Parks and Landscape Office suggests should be considered a “holy place” dedicated to the “unyielding spirit of independence” of all Koreans, at home “and abroad.”⁹ In case the point might be lost, within minutes visitors find themselves in the building’s basement where mannequins dressed in Japanese colonial uniforms whip bound and shrieking young Korean girls—also plastic—and appear to commit all sorts of other tortures. A detail you cannot figure out from the costumes or the fearsome Japanese language commands piped in through loudspeakers, however, ...