Imperial Nostalgia

In the winter of 1943, when my father was weeks away from completing elementary school, he lay awake through many nights in utter dread of the future. A great and terrible war was raging across the Pacific, but the source of his anxiety was much closer to home as he found out that he was to attend an elite middle school in the new year. His concern was not over how he would perform academically, but from the frightening stories he heard of the treatment he was bound to receive there. Most of his classmates would be done with formal education upon graduation and go work in the city or at the farms. But kids from better-off families took a test that determined whether they would get vocational training or go on to middle school. My grandfather was a high school teacher with a university degree so he had ambitions for his oldest son who was one of the smartest kids in his class. He once told me that it was one of the great misfortunes of his life that his high test scores not only qualified him for continued education but also put him in a small group of students who were selected to go to a Japanese school. This was in his hometown of Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea but back then the third largest city in the peninsular which was a colonial territory of the Empire of Japan.

Two decades before his birth, the Korean kingdom of Joseon lost its sovereignty to the foreign power. By the time the Pacific War began in 1941, over 700,000 Japanese lived in the colony, government bureaucrats and soldiers as well as entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, journalists, laborers, shopkeepers, adventurers, gangsters, and prostitutes. They ruled over the native population of twenty-five million people. During my father's childhood, there were some 30,000 Japanese in Pyongyang, about a quarter of the city's population, the third highest concentration of them after Keijo (Japanese for Gyeongseong, the old capital of Joseon dynasty and today's Seoul) and the southern port city of Busan.

The middle school that my father was to attend was an institution for privileged Japanese boys whose fathers were colonial administrators, military officers, and successful businessmen. Every year a small number of the highest-scoring Koreans were placed there to be groomed as the next generation of loyal collaborators. On the first day of school, my father put on a new military-style uniform and entered the place with its intimidating modern buildings of vast concrete walls and a wide, well-maintained exercise field. He knew, of course, that he was not a citizen of a sovereign nation but a subject of a foreign power, but the reality of that condition was not something that he had to face on a daily basis when he spent most of his time with his Korean family, classmates, and teachers. But he was made painfully aware of his subordinate status from the moment he set foot in that school, as he became a member of a despised minority among foreigners living in his hometown. In the following decades, my father would experience the Korean War as a refugee as well as a soldier and live through the impoverished years of the post-war era, but he remembered the two years he attended that middle school as the worst time of his life.

The prevalent slogan of that era was naisen ittai, the notion that the Japanese and Koreans were one. It was based on a historical myth that was constructed in the colonial era, that the people of the two countries were essentially of the same ethnicity who became separated through migrations in ancient times. Koreans were, however, the less developed and more primitive cousins of the Japanese, their cultural and intellectual growth having been stunted by the corrupt and oppressive feudal rulers of the previous dynasties who were only interested in enriching themselves at the expense of the common people and kowtowing to the Chinese. The Japanese were there to help their poor relatives catch up to the level...