Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II

6. National Mobilization

c h a p t e r s i x · National Mobilization In fact the discourses of race and nation are never far apart, if only in the form of disavowal. etienne balibar, “Racism and Nationalism” (1988) U.S.psychologicalwarfareduringtheSecondWorldWarhadasoneof itskeystrategies the exploitation of class, racial, and regional divisions within the Japanese nation and larger colonial empire. While most Americans in the postwar United States have tended to believe that the Japanese are a homogeneous people, and wartime propaganda represented the Japanese as just like so many “photographic prints off the same negative,”1 to use the filmmaker Frank Capra’s famous phrase, U.S. intelligenceagenciesunderstoodthattheenemy ’sfaçadeof unityveiledanationandcolonial empire fractured by deep cleavages. Even as U.S. propaganda tried to demonstrate to the world that America treated its minorities with fairness and equality, its intelligence agencies simultaneously studied and monitored the condition of racial discrimination in the enemy camp—not in hopes of improving the situation of Japan’s colonial subjects and minorities, but with the unabashed aim of finding ways to worsen their circumstances. In its April 1942 propaganda plan for Japan, the Foreign Intelligence Service advised that minorities such as the “Christian minority and the eta” should be targeted for the purpose of furthering “national disunity.” Even more explicitly, the May 1942 draft for general propaganda toward Japan (discussed more fully in chapter 2) specifically listed among its nine primary “propagandaobjectives “toexploitthefearof minoritiesentertainedbytheleadersof Japan, inciting the leaders to persecute minorities in every case where the result will be impaired morale, reduced efficiency, or both.” It further recommended persuading the “common Japanese people” that “Korea is still a potential menace to Japan.”2 239 The concern to manage race and colonial divisions in the interests of promoting the enemy’s disunity prompted U.S. and other Allied forces to interrogate captured Korean soldiers about their attitudes toward Japan and the war. Not surprisingly— given the harsh and discriminatory conditions prevailing in Korea as well as the obvious advantage for prisoners of war held by the Allies to distance themselves from the Japanese empire—most of these POWs expressed dislike of Japan. Some complained of discrimination, and those who had volunteered sometimes asserted that they had been in one way or another coerced or enticed to enlist for reasons other than loyalty. Taketheinstanceof PrivateFirstClassYamamotoTakenaga(K.CheNamChar). According to his interrogator’s report, Yamamoto was relatively highly educated, as he had received fourteen years of education, including three years in a commercial college before enlistment. He volunteered for the Japanese army in late 1943 and was inducted into the Seventy-third Infantry Regiment in Nanam, Korea, in January of the following year. He was obviously one of the Korean “student soldiers ” whose enlistment had been enabled by the Army Special Volunteers Extraordinary Induction Regulations of October 1943. Yamamoto completed basic training in a very short period of time and then underwent “special gas training.” After serving in the region around Nanam, he shipped out to the Philippines in December 1944, where he “participated in operations against Filipino guerrillas.” But in early February 1945 he deserted his unit and surrendered to a Filipino civilian, who escorted him to the headquarters of guerrilla forces just west of Acops. According to the report, Private Yamamoto resented Japan and the Japanese. Affirming the finding of the historian Kang Duk-sang (TQk-sang) that the authorities applied tremendous pressure on Korean students to volunteer, Yamamoto claimed that he had tried to evade recruitment into the military and complied only when the authorities retaliated by imprisoning his parents. He and the report thus explainedhisdesertionasthelogicalconsequenceof hishavingbeen“forcedtovolunteer .” In addition, Yamamoto testified that “Koreans in the Army were not accepted as equals. They were often forced to do the hardest work.” He also held the Japanese officers responsible for “non-promotion of Koreans and the ill-treatment they received.”3 Similarly,anotherstudentsoldierwhohadsurrenderedon26March1945inBurma informed his interrogator that many Koreans were then serving in his division, the Forty-ninth, and that “all Koreans shared his feelings toward the Japanese, and that they would attempt to escape and surrender.” In fact, he reported that Koreans had held at least three meetings at which they discussed the “prospects of escape.” The 240 · koreans as japanese report noted that while the “more intelligent” Koreans were aware of the Geneva Convention and believed that they would be treated fairly upon surrendering, the “less intelligent” were more skeptical...