Japanese Narratives on Life in Late-Colonial Korea: From Wartime to Repatriation

Review Essay Japanese Narratives on Life in Late-Colonial Korea: From Wartime to Repatriation Kiseki no 38-dosen toppa: Heijö kara Nippon e [A miraculous break through the 38th parallel: From P'yöngyang to Japan] by Fujikawa Masuo. Tokyo: Bijinesusha, 2006. 197 pp. Bibliography, Photos, Maps. ¥1400 (paper) Shônen no hi no haisen nikki: Chosen hantô kara no kikan [A journal of my youth on Japan's defeat: Repatriation from the Korean peninsula] by Iwashita Takeki. Tokyo: Hösei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2000. 429 pp. Photos. ¥3800 (cloth) Kita Chosen kara seikan: Arujussai no shônen no hikiage kiroku [A safe return from northern Korea: An account of the repatriation ofa ten-year-old boy] by Kukimura Hisashi. Tokyo: Köjinsha, 2006. 163 pp. Photos, Maps. ¥1600 (cloth) Watakushiga Chosenhantôdeshitakoto [WhatI didon theKorean peninsula] by Matsuo Shigeru. 1928-1946. Tokyo: Söshisha, 2002. 198 pp. Photos, Map. ¥1600 (cloth) Nihon töchi shita no Chosen: Hokuchin no rekishi [Korea under Japanese rule: History of Hokuchin] by Sakai Toshio. Tokyo: Söshisha, 2003. 334 pp. Bibliography. Photos. Maps. ¥2200 (cloth) Aru Chösen sötokufu keisatsu kanryö no kaisö [Memoirs of a police bureaucrat in the Government-General ofKorea] by Tsuboi Sachio. Tokyo: Söshisha, 2004. 220 pp. Photos. ¥1800 (cloth) The Journal ofKorean Studies 14, no. I (Fall 2009): 117-132 117 118Mark E. Caprio Over the past few years many Japanese who lived in Korea during Japan's subjugation of the peninsula (1905-1945) have been busy publishing memoirs of their colonial experiences.1 This review essay examines six such autobiographical narratives, which collectively present diverse episodes across a variety of settings, and, at the same time, evince common perspectives and limitations. More than sixty years have passed since Japan's defeat in World War II and the dissolution of its colonial empire, so these recently published memoirs understandably do not reach back to the initial decades ofKorea's colonial era; they cover the last fifteen years of Japanese rule and the first year ofKorean liberation (1930-1946). Interestingly, all the authors of the six selected works spent time in Korea's northern provinces, and all but one at war's end resided in areas that today fall within the borders ofNorth Korea. This shared experience leads to a common motivation for writing: to commemorate the great struggles that Japanese colonial settlers experienced in the closing stages of war and during the chaotic process ofrepatriation, particularly after the Soviet military arrived in northern Korea on August 9, 1945. In addition to this objective—which dovetails with the Japanese public's current concerns about North Korean missiles and the plight ofJapanese citizens abducted by the North Korean regime during the late 1970s to early 1980s—is another collective goal. These authors seek to correct what they perceive as mistaken interpretations of Japan's colonial role in Korea. They argue by way oftheir personal recollections that colonial rule actually benefited the Korean people, and depict Japanese-Korean interactions as basically friendly and cooperative; at least until Japanese stewardship was supplanted by Soviet and American intervention. Indeed, in these accounts some Koreans even offer to the departing Japanese words ofgratitude and empathy. Despite such biases and limitations that render the memoirs somewhat problematic as historical documents, they nonetheless provide us tantalizing glimpses oflong-suppressed and variegated memories from late colonial Korea. The authors crossed over to Korea at different stages of their lives due to differing circumstances. Four experienced Korea as children and two as young adults. Their recollections transport readers across a variety ofsettings, including schools (elementary, middle school, and university), offices of the colonial police bureau, a construction company, and so forth. Their interactions with the Korean people, shaped primarily by these institutional milieus but also by their places of residence, are equally diverse. The memoirs contain, in other words, much that may be of interest not only to Japanese nationalists but also to scholars of all nationalities specializing in colonial Korea. Therefore, with a caveat about the less than perfect convergence between "memory" and "history," the present review essay explores a sampling of Japanese colonial memoirs with the following issues foremost in mind: (1) their historical-literary...