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

Introduction Ethnic and Colonial Soldiers and the Politics of Disavowal

i n t r o d u c t i o n · Ethnic and Colonial Soldiers and the Politics of Disavowal I think there was considerable feeling [among Koreans] that it would be better [than seeking independence] to join up with Japan, to become Japanese and blend in— that becoming truly Japanese might be better for the happiness of the Korean people. . . . This is certainly not an unreasonable thought. Even thinking about secondgeneration Japanese in Hawaii, you know that with respect to Japan, although it was their mother country, they swore their allegiance to America. This was a tremendous thing. The Hawaii Nisei. tanaka takeo (former vice governor-general of Korea), roundtable discussion, “Koiso sOtoku jidai no gaikan—Tanaka Takeo seimu sOkan ni kiku” (1959) RACISM AND ITS DISAVOWAL IN TOTAL WAR REGIMES Reflecting on her childhood years in early postwar Japan, the pioneering historian and activist Utsumi Aiko wrote in her 1991 contribution to the popular Iwanami Booklet series that she could recall no public memory from that time of the Korean andTaiwanesemenwhohadfoughtforJapanassoldiersandsailorsduringtheAsiaPaci fic War. While she remembered those around her struggling to piece together their lives in the immediate aftermath of the war, or simply getting by from day to day, she had no childhood memories of these ethnic and colonial soldiers. “Thus, although the ‘War’ remained in our daily lives,” she wrote, “I had no way of knowing that the Japanese military had drafted soldiers from colonized countries such as Korea and Taiwan. I never imagined that North and South Koreans such as Kim Chae-ch’ang, who had been unilaterally stripped of their Japanese citizenship by the postwar Japanese government and [thereby] had no relief benefits at all, were among those wounded soldiers that [I noticed] in the streets.” While she imagined retrospectively that there must have been Korean soldiers among the wounded or 1 map 1. The Far East and the Pacific: The Imperial Powers, 1 September 1939. Redrawn in grayscale from the original color map (ca. 1941), courtesy of the Department of History, United States Military Academy. Although they might be legitimately contested by various parties today, all notations, dates, spelling, and place-names reproduce the original to reflect the U.S. Military Academy’s understanding of the AsiaPaci fic War as a struggle among empires that had established “control of their possessions” throughout the region. The exception is the legend, which has been changed to accommodate grayscale reproduction. disabled that she had seen in the streets of her war-torn city, to her they were, as sheputit,“invisible.”1 Similarly,thewell-knownfilmmakerNshimaNagisahaswritten that when he began preliminary research for a television documentary on Korean veterans in the Japanese military that aired in August 1963, he was shocked to discover that in fact, “all of the white-robed disabled veterans begging in the streets of Japan [were] Korean.”2 Even as late as the mid-1990s, when many Asia-Pacific Warmemoriesthathadbeenmarginalizedbegantoreemergeinthemainstreammedia and public debates with the thawing of the Cold War, the historian Kang Duksang (TQk-sang)lamented that in the flood of publicationsand TVspecialsin Japan commemoratingthefiftiethanniversaryof therecruitmentof studentsintotheJapanese military, he had not seen even one reference to Koreans who had been mobilized for this purpose, even though by his calculations about one in every twenty student soldiers had been Korean.3 Moreover, ethnic and colonial soldiers remain remarkably absent from the postwar public discourse around Yasukuni Shrine, the national site that is dedicated to the souls of all those who have lost their lives in military service for Japan. Each visitof apostwarprimeministerorotherhigh-rankingJapaneseofficialtoYasukuni hassparkedstrongandfairlypredictableoutcriesfromleftistswithinJapanandfrom the international community. These critics understand that Yasukuni is a symbol of Japanese militarism and imperialism and that visits to that site represent both a lack of remorseaboutthepastandarenunciationof responsibilitiesinthepresent.Rarely dothesecriticsfailtomentionthatsuchconvictedwarcriminalsasTOjOHidekihave been deified in this war memorial. And yet regardless of the fact that by official (under )count, 21,181 Korean and 28,863 Taiwanese war dead have also been enshrined at Yasukuni—an uncomfortable reminder that Japan not only waged a war of invasion against its neighbors but was also a multiethnic colonial empire and nation— a conspicuous silence about these ethnic and colonial soldiers remains.4 Even on Okinawa’s Cornerstone of Peace, a sprawling monument on which its builders have attempted to list every participant killed in the Battle of Okinawa—man or woman, enemy or ally, civilian or serviceman—there is a noticeable...