I wrote this paper for a class called "Modern Japan" at Rice. It primarily deals with the present-day attitudes of Koreans towards Japanese.
The first major contacts and conflicts between the Japanese and Koreans occurred during the Japanese invasions from 1592-1598. Led by General Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the man responsible for unifying Japan in 1591, these invasions were primarily naval battles fought in two different waves beginning in 1592 and 1597. Originally the Japanese requested free passage through Korea to invade China. King Sonjo sent envoys to unearth Hideyoshi’s true plans. When the envoys returned, there were conflicting reports, and the Korean king chose to believe the report that Japan really wanted passage and would not attack Korea. The purpose of the Japanese attacks was to conquer Korea in order to gain a better position to eventually attack China since the Koreans refused to allow passage. There were no military preparations due to this report by the envoy sent by King Sonjo. After suffering heavy defeats, the Korean forces chose Admiral Yi-Soon-Shin and his fleet of kobukson, or “turtle boats,” to lead and eventually defeated the Japanese in one of the largest naval battles in history. The kobukson were the first iron-clad boats to exist, preceding the Monitor and the Merimac of the American Civil War over two and a half centuries later. Korea would begin an isolation policy of her own due to these attacks, earning the nickname the “Hermit Kingdom,” and would not come into much contact with the Japanese until the nineteenth century.
In 1876, twenty-two years after the Japanese signed a treaty with the United States, Japan utilized the same western style gun-boat diplomacy on Korea to open her doors for trade with the signing of the Kanghwa Treaty. Due to rising Japanese resentment, King Kojong declared himself the emperor of the Taehan Empire, an independent Korea, in 1907 after the murder of this wife Queen Min in 1895. She was stripped naked, raped, and then burned alive by the Japanese. This declaration by King Kojong would later prove pointless as Japan encroached on Korea during the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The two nations signed the Japan-Korea Protection Treaty enacted on November 17, 1905, which would eventually lead to the annexation of Korea to the Japanese Empire in 1910.
After being annexed by Japan in 1910, the Japanese implemented several laws, including the ban of the Korean language. Korean was banned in public places, schools, and places of business. Japanese became the official language of Korea in 1910, forcing housewives to attend classes to learn Japanese. Koreans were also forced to adopt Japanese names. The attempt to change Korean culture and identity is not the only factor for the resentment.
Violence against Koreans was commonplace during the Japanese Occupation. It did not take long for movements and political groups to call for Korean Independence. A movement on March 1, 1919 involved between half a million and two million Koreans demanding freedom from Japan. In response to this huge rally, the Japanese fired into crowds of Korean Christians singing hymns and crucified Christian leaders, saying that they “can go to heaven” by being nailed to wooden crosses. In addition to these killings, churches were burned and young children were beheaded by mounted policemen. The differences in the Japanese and Korean reports of the violence were extremely skewed. Japanese and Korean accounts were 533:7,500 killed, 1,409:15,000 injured, and 12,522:45,000 arrested, respectively. Later in September of 1920 in Manchuria, a Korean Independence Army occupied Hunchun and killed all the Japanese in the town. In response to this, the Japanese Army sent two divisions to crush the KIA. About 2,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, with 3,000 Korean survivors fleeing to Siberia. The Japanese retaliated by killing over 6,000 Korean civilians; women and babies bayoneted, village elders burned alive, captured soldiers either quartered or skinned alive, and Christian pastors crucified. Another incident involving discrimination and killing of Koreans at the hands of the Japanese is the Kanto Earthquake on September 1, 1923. The earthquake occurred around noon time in Tokyo, and hundreds of fires broke out and swept through the city just after lunch. With the mass chaos and confusion that soon ensued, Koreans were blamed for the tragedy. People suspected of being Korean were told to speak to find any hints of an accent. Anyone with Korean accents in their Japanese were beaten and antagonized. After a paper reported that Koreans were planning “treasonous and rebellious plots,” between 3,000 and 6,000 Koreans were executed. These events in Korean history are just minor contributors to the resentment towards Japanese. The jugun ianfu (comfort women) employed by the Japanese are one of the most heated topics as far as the history between Japan and Korea are concerned.
Beginning in 1932, the Japanese Army opened up comfort stations in an attempt to placate the numerous reported rapes by the Japanese troops. Jugun ianfu was a euphemism for the real word, teishintai, which translates to “voluntary corps.” The soldiers would pay a fee, receive a ticket with a condom, and then admitted into a room which was often partitioned with sheets in order to save space. They would recruit women by using the strategy of offering the young girls jobs in factories or other deceptive means. If the family found out the truth, anyone caught trying to rescue their teenage relatives would be either beaten or murdered. These women serviced between twenty and thirty men a day. The girls who resisted the forced sex were either beaten or killed. Several women became sterile from the repeated rapes, and anyone who became pregnant or caught a disease would be given shots of an antibiotic called terramycin, which would usually cause an abortion. The Japanese government recruited between 80,000 and 200,000 women from throughout the Japanese Empire, but a majority of them came from Korea. The social stigma in Korea attached with this event in history forced women to keep quiet about their experiences until recently in the past couple decades. To this day the Japanese government has yet to issue a formal apology and an acknowledgement of the atrocities committed against Korean women by Japanese troops.
Albeit it has been half a century since these actions were committed by the Japanese, many Koreans today hold a grudge with the Japanese. By polling several college students in Korea with five questions each, I received some expected and unexpected responses. The first question was, “How do you feel about Japanese people?” As mentioned earlier, the answers were varied, but many students’ answers were similar with each others’. Out of the eleven students polled, the first question asking for their personal opinion of the Japanese drew six responses of “I hate Japan,” two that said they liked Japan, two that replied they did not care, and one who misunderstood the question completely. One of the hate responses stated they hate the Japanese for no reason and that they believe that Japanese are “two faced.” Another student simply rejects Japan and the Japanese all together, while another student uses a racial term jok ba li, which does not translate to anything specific in English. An additional response to the first question was that the Japanese and Koreans are physically close in geography, but mentally they are far apart. The student further stated that Koreans are interested in Japanese culture, but not the people themselves. A fifth student replied that she never had good feelings toward Japan. It seemed that the majority of the students dislike Japan in a social context.
For the second question, I asked, “How do your parents and grandparents feel about Japanese?” After the first question was asked, two students said that “I don’t even want to think about that” and “I don’t want to talk about that,” clearly displaying irritation at the subject of the question. One student replied that their parents do not particularly like Japanese, but his grandmother absolutely hates them. Another responded that his parents have stronger negative attitudes toward Japanese, and that his parents do not even want to learn about the Japanese culture. The most interesting response for this question came from a student that wrote that the older generations think the Japanese are “insane” since some of the Japanese, even politicians, still go to the World War II shrines and worship the ashes of the dead. This clearly shows that some Japanese have little or no remorse for the actions committed during World War II. A forth student replied that many parents do not have a particular personal reason for disliking Japan, they just simply “hate them.” The majority of the students believe that the older the person is, the more hatred they have for Japan.
The third question asked, “In your opinion, how do you think Korea feels about Japan?” Many of the students misunderstood this question, thinking that I meant a relationship in the sense of economics and politics, rather than Korea as a whole. For the political answer, a few believed that Korea should take more action about a territorial dispute that is currently a hot topic. Japan asserts the Dok Doh Islands as her own, while the Korean citizens want their government to claim the island back. One student did not understand why the Korean government allows Japan to keep the territory without a dispute. As far as the answers I was looking for, one student said Korea will not accept Japanese culture or anything else they have to offer, contrary to what one student stated earlier. A different response maintained that the relationship between the two countries is better than it used to be. He continued that Koreans still dislike Japan since they never issued a formal apology and repented for the comfort women and other horrors committed during the occupation. He pointed out that Germany had apologized for their actions toward the Jews during World War II and monetarily paid for what they did. An amusing answer came from the same student who used the racial term in question one, which he said he wants to “destroy Japan.”
I asked the students in the fourth question, “What do you think is the main reason for the difference in opinions between young and old generations?” This question had an obvious answer. Several students previously addressed that history is the reason for the differing opinions between their parents/grandparents and the youth of today. Experiencing the occupation and reading about it in books are two completely different methods of education answered one student. Another stated that their parents always heard stories from their grandparents about how horrible the Japanese were, and the evil things they did. In short, the experiences are the determining factor in why a large gap exists in opinions between young and old.
Finally, for the last question I asked, “Will Japan and Korea ever truly be friendly neighbors?” Again, many students believe that until Japan issues a formal apology to the Koreans for the acts committed, Koreans will have a stronger negative attitude toward their neighbors. Some of the students gave a time frame for when they felt Japan and Korea will put the past behind them, ranging from fifty to two-hundred years. The student who answered two-hundred years did not say that it would be definite, but that it “MIGHT” happen after two centuries. Others suppose that this is purely a hypothetical question, answering that it will “never happen” or it is “impossible.” One interesting view expressed by a student was that the younger generations do not truly dislike the Japanese, only because that is how they are raised. He pointed out that in America blacks and whites, for the most part, get along with each other, but there are still blacks that are bitter about slavery.
In summation, the friendship between Korea and Japan has been strained due to the history between the two countries, especially the Japanese Occupation between 1910 and 1945. It is only natural for a group of people to dislike, distrust, and to prejudge another group if “bad blood” exists throughout the history between the two. Many believe this social strain between Japan and Korea will last for at least the next century, while others think the tension will last forever.
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