Category Archives: Korea

The river crossing didn’t take long, two minutes, perhaps, of running across the ice with as little noise as possible. I still remember clearly the mix of emotions I felt just then. There was certainly fear–of getting caught and of what awaited me on the other side–but I also felt sadness. I was abandoning something indefinable that was reproaching me for leaving. … Those two or three minutes on the ice were like an eternity.

Though the area was supposed to be under surveillance, we didn’t see a single guard. Running across the border today is even easier: many more people are at the starting line, and the guards are more lax than ever. Just give them some money or a good pack of cigarettes and they’ll let you pass. Back in 1992, if they saw a fugitive, they would cry “Halt,” then start firing.

We arrived at our guide’s house tired and out of breath. We found him dressed in South Korean-made jacket and pants, which must have cost the equivalent of a North Korean worker’s monthly wages. He was a man bubbling over with plans, the first of which was to move to South Korea as soon as he had enough money saved up. “Going from the North directly to the South is impossible,” he said with effect, trying to bait us. But we weren’t going for it. We had taken the precaution of not telling him we were wanted by the authorities. While he was happy to help people make little “business” trips into China, he had no interest in running seriously afoul of the law. To help ensure he kept quiet about our crossing, I gave him a handsome wad of cash [sent by relatives in Japan], for which he was also supposed to find us a truck to Yonji–or Yongil, as we say in Korea–the capital of China’s autonomous Korean region. As we sat chatting that first night, we heard some astonishing things from our guide. We learned, for example, that he was actually a member of the Chinese Communist Party. It was totally baffling. Korean Communists were hard, austere ideologues–or at least tried to act that way–and here was this Chinese Communist proudly flaunting his wealth!

The next evening’s meal was as ample as the first. The guide’s wife claimed it was just the usual fare, but what was ordinary to them was gargantuan to me: there were many different dishes, and several had meat! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt as if I’d been invited to a feast for Party cadres. In the North, alcohol is very expensive; an average bottle sells for 10 won, one-tenth of a worker’s monthly wages. The most popular spirit, pai jou (white alcohol), comes from China. It costs 60 won a bottle and is usually reserved for special occasions. Here it was being poured into our glasses as an ordinary accompaniment to an improvised meal! … China was like paradise, and I began to sense the huge gulf separating the universe as I knew it and the world as it might actually be.

There were more surprises to come. After dinner, our host suggested we walk to a nightclub in the neighboring village. We accepted the invitation–though I couldn’t help thinking, Don’t these people go to work? It was nearing midnight, and we were only now stepping out! Finally, I worked up the courage to ask, “Don’t you have to wake up early tomorrow?” His answer left me stunned: it was “up in the air!” His next observation, though, is the one that really did me in. “In any case,” he said, “the important thing isn’t work; it’s to enjoy life.” I was speechless.

SOURCE: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, translated by Yair Reiner (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 197-198

South Korean scholars are finally beginning to re-evaluate the sharp dichotomy between “collaborators” and “nationalists” in their narratives of the Japanese colonial period, according to an article entitled “War and the Colonial Legacy in Recent South Korean Scholarship” by Kyu Hyun Kim in IIAS Newsletter no. 38.

In the mainstream Korean narrative of the wartime period (1941-1945, or more accurately 1937-1945, dated from the outbreak of the continental war against China), Koreans are relegated to the position of victims. It was during this period that Japanese exploitation of Korean socio-economic resources, both material and human, reached its height. It was also during this period, according to most Korean scholars, that the Japanese colonizers tried to eradicate Korean culture by forcing Koreans to worship at Shinto shrines, by banning the Korean language from official use and designating Japanese as the ‘national language’ (kokugo), and by adapting Korean family lineages into the Japanese household system, compelling the latter to choose Japanese-style names. Koreans have come to refer to this set of policies, promoted under the ideological campaign of naisen ittai 内鮮一体 (Japan and Korea as One) as ‘ethnocidal policies’ (minjok malsal chôngch’aek 民族抹殺政策) through which the Japanese colonizers sought to eradicate Korean identity altogether, absorbing it into the ontological category of the Japanese imperial subject (kôkoku shinmin).

The wartime period was characterized as a pitch-black vacuum (amhûggi 暗黒期, the ‘era of darkness’) in which only certain elite members, the ‘pro-Japanese’ traitors (ch’inilp’a 親日派), were allowed to profit and flourish at the expense of the majority of Koreans. However, this characterization of the wartime period has also suppressed frank, open-minded investigation of the actual circumstances involving Japanese colonialism’s infiltration into Korean culture and society. Studying the colonial-period ‘collaboration’ between Japanese and Koreans was anathema for many years, especially under the dictatorial regimes of Syngman Rhee (1946-1960) and Park Chung-hee (1961-1979). Indeed, President Park, who seized presidential power through a military coup d’etat, was a direct progeny of Japanese wartime militarism, a graduate of the Manchurian Military Academy.

Democratization and rehabilitation of the South Korean public sphere in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following monumental protest and resistance against Park’s junta successors, finally opened the space to examine the collaborationist activities of the Korean colonial elite. ‘Progressive’ scholars and critics, riding the surf of democratization and liberalization and embracing hitherto-forbidden Marxist and radical-populist perspectives, challenged the whitewashing and exposed the lacunae found in historiography, literary collections and the biographical data of ‘collaborators’. Scholars excavated shrill pronouncements written by prominent writers, intellectuals, educators and government leaders of post-liberation South Korea, inculcating Korean youth to throw away their lives for the glory of the Japanese empire, or fictional works enveloped in a sheen of patriotic fervor and serene acceptance of the Holy War, looking to a future when Japan would emerge triumphant in the titanic struggle against the venal white races.

By the mid-1990s, this newfound freedom in exposing the past sins of the fathers and the scholarship it engendered moved into a new phase. While the democratically elected regimes of Kim Dae-jung (1997-2002) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-present) have continued to struggle with ‘the dark legacy’ of the colonial period, South Korean scholars, now relatively unencumbered by the desire to subordinate such reflections to the political objective of overthrowing military dictatorship, have begun a long and arduous process of parsing through the legacy of the colonial period, engaging in long-overdue reflection on the possibility of post-colonial identity for Koreans.

via Hunjangûi karûch’im

On November 29, 1987 … a powerful bomb exploded on a Korean Air Lines (KAL) jetliner over the Andaman Sea on its way from Abu Dhabi to Seoul. All 115 passengers and crewmembers were killed….

Moving swiftly after news of the plane’s disappearance, the Bahrain Intelligence Service had determined that the passport of Mayumi Hachiya, a 25-Year-old Japanese woman traveling with her father and registered on the first leg of KAL 858 from Baghdad to Abu Dhabi, was a fake. On November 31 at the airport in Bahrain, where the two had flown in an attempt to get home from Abu Dhabi, the suspicious pair was apprehended by Bahraini police as they were about to board a flight for Rome. The elderly man, who turned out to be a veteran North Korean secret agent, bit into a cyanide-laced cigarette and died instantly. Bahrain Police Chief Ian Henderson, however, grabbed for a similarly poisoned cigarette on the lips of the young woman. She hesitated for a moment, and Henderson flicked the cigarette out of her mouth. The young woman survived. To this day, Henderson, an Englishman by birth, shows curious visitors the scar on his finger where the young woman bit him when he reached for the “cigarette.”

At first, with her interrogators the young woman stuck steadfastly to her cover story that she was a Chinese orphan who had grown up in Japan and who had had nothing to do with the bombing. But her actions belied her story. In one violent outburst in Bahrain, enraged by a line of questioning about her sexual past, she felled a female interpreter with a palm-heel strike to the nose, delivered a hammer-fist punch to the groin of Henderson, and then grabbed for his pistol. She was about to shoot herself with the pistol when she was jolted by an electric stun gun. Her rage prompted Henderson to send her to Seoul. “Get her out of here. She belongs to the South Koreans now,” Henderson said.

The man who took Kim Hyun Hee–her real name–back to Seoul was Vice Foreign Minister Park Soo Kil. Park flew to Bahrain shortly after the KAL 858 explosion with three agents from the Agency for National Security Planning, also known as the KCIA, to demonstrate to the Bahrain authorities that Kim was indeed a North Korean agent. Chief among the evidence was an analysis of the cyanide-laced cigarettes, which showed them to be the same type used by North Korean agents apprehended in South Korea. Bahrain was getting pressure from unfriendly countries such as Syria to send her to China. Park told Bahrain government officials that the longer the suspected terrorist stayed in their country, the more at risk Bahrain would be to a rescue attempt by North Korea that could leave more people dead, likely Bahrainis. Finally, after Kim’s attack, the Bahrain government let her return with him.

In Seoul, under twenty-four-hour observation and subject to in-depth questioning to which she replied in either Japanese or Chinese, Kim broke and confessed. On the eighth day of her interrogation, she collapsed upon the breast of a woman interrogator and said in Korean, “Forgive me. I am sorry. I will tell you everything.” The interrogation had been conducted masterfully by the South Koreans. They had observed the way she expertly made her bed every morning as if she had had prolonged military training, uncovered discrepancies in her story, like her incorrect use of southern Chinese words to describe life in northern China, and cajoled her by taking her on a tour of Seoul.

She admitted to helping place a radio time bomb with liquid explosive in the overhead luggage rack of KAL 858 while on the Baghdad to Abu Dhabi leg and then deplaning with her fellow agent. Kim revealed that the two North Koreans had been traveling overseas, disguised as father and daughter, for more than three years in preparation for the operation. Interestingly, the South Koreans used the fact that Kim had said she was originally from China to get back at the North Koreans. They communicated to Peking through the New China News Agency in Hong Kong that “your North Korean friends have put this monkey on your back.” The Chinese were upset–and probably embarrassed….

For the bombing of KAL 858, the U.S. put North Korea on its list of countries engaged in terrorism and started to assist South Korea in security arrangements for the upcoming [1988] Olympics. In a meeting with Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze in March 1988, President Reagan received assurances that there would be no North Korean terrorist attacks at the Olympics.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 283-284, 286-287

When my brothers [Frank and Jack Lilley] arrived in Pyongyang [in 1934 and 1935], they found it larger than Tsingtao, with several six- and eight-story buildings and many taxis and streetcars, but it was a gritty, gray city under the heel of Japanese occupation. In Tsingtao we were still somewhat unaware of Japan’s intentions in China, but Frank kept us clued in from his vantage point in Korea, which Japan had annexed in 1910 and which was closer to the center of Japanese military activity in northeast Asia. Frank sensed impending war from his reading of the local papers and his observations of the Japanese military in Korea, and he conveyed his thoughts to us in Tsingtao every week in his letters.

Indeed, at school he and the other students were often very close to demonstrations of Japanese military might. Across the river from PYFS [Pyeng Yang Foreign School], the Japanese had their major military airfield in Korea. Several times a week during classes, Japanese dive-bombers executed dry runs over the school, aiming for the school’s athletic fields as the target for their imaginary payloads. Then, at night, searchlights would light up the sky over Pyongyang for night runs, and students would run to black out their windows.

In downtown Pyongyang, Japan’s oppressive colonial policy was even more evident. When Frank and his friends would wander into town on a free day, they would see harassment of Koreans by the Japanese in the city’s markets. Since Japan’s annexation of Korea, many Korean farmers had chosen to protest the loss of their country by wearing white clothes, the traditional color of mourning in Korea. This practice of silent protest infuriated the Japanese authorities. Periodically, Japanese policemen on horses carrying buckets of red paint would make runs through the produce markets in Pyongyang. Armed with long paintbrushes that they wielded like lances, the Japanese policemen would smear paint on any Koreans wearing white clothes. [Does this paragraph ring true?–J.]

By the time Frank got to Pyongyang, the Japanese were turning their tactics of intimidation on the local community of Western missionaries. In January 1935, Japanese authorities called down two American missionaries, Samuel Moffet, the pioneer Western missionary in Korea, and Dr. Douglas McCune, head of Union Christian College. The Japanese demanded that the missionaries follow Japanese custom and force the Korean students at their schools to pay homage to the Japanese emperor at the city’s Shinto shrine. The missionaries refused. The Japanese threatened to close the Christian schools in retaliation.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 17-18

UPDATE: The bit about white clothes being a protest doesn’t sound right to Kotaji, either (see comments). He concludes, “Anyway, the point is that I’ve never heard of wearing white clothes as a form of protest, but it might just be that the Japanese found Koreans wearing their traditional clothing offensive.” I suspect this might illustrate a weakness of Lilley’s book: garbled memories not carefully cross-checked against external sources. Perhaps it even illustrates the frequently criticized CIA habit of trusting secret informants while mistrusting open sources, publicly available information.