Description

Japan’s colonial presence in Korea ended sixty-five years ago, but the legacy of this period lingers to this day. Questions debated at the time of annexation continue to be debated at present. One such question concerns the status of the Korean peninsula and the Korean people during this period. Japanese predicted that its colonial-era assimilation policy would eventually foster equal relations between Koreans and Japanese. Neoconservative Japanese today exploit this rhetoric to argue that Japan annexed Korea as an integral part of Japan, rather than appending it simply as a colony, and that Japanese viewed Koreans as fellow national subjects (kokumin) from the time of annexation. They join others in contending that Koreans retained this status until the war’s end, when the United States-led postwar occupation administration returned their status to that of Korean. This paper will consider two problems presented by these arguments. First, their misrepresentation of Japan’s colonial-era intentions and results, as well as Korean reactions to Japan’s policies, offers Japanese today a skewed view of this history. Second, it neglects the post-liberation issues that developed from this policy’s residue, as seen in the violence over lingering “Japanese-ness” that separated political factions. Failure to properly confront these issues brings a tension to the Korea-Japan relationship that impedes reconciliation at a time when more productive voices call for regional unity.

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Mark E. Caprio is professor of history at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan. He earned his doctorate at the University of Washington in 2001. The author of Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, Caprio has published several articles and book chapters on Japanese colonial policy, post-liberation Korean repatriation, and the North Korean nuclear issue.

Description

Elaine H. Kim is Professor and head of Asian American Studies and former Chair of the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley, where she also served as Associate Dean of the Graduate Division, Faculty Assistant for the Status of Women, and Assistant Dean in the College of Letters and Science. She wrote Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982) and is co-author of Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on DICTEE by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1994) and Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (2003). She co-edited East To America: Korean American Life Stories (1996), Making More Waves: New Writing By Asian American Women (1997), Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, (1998), and Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writing (2003). She is associate producer of Slaying the Dragon: Asian Women in U.S. Television and Film (1988), co-producer of Sa-i-gu: From Korean Women’s Perspectives (1993), and executive producer of Labor Women: Asian American Women Labor Organizers (2003). She served as President of the Association and is co-founder of Asian Women United of California, the Korean Community Center of the East Bay, and Asian Immigrant Women Advocates in Oakland, California. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws at the University of Notre Dame.