Category Archives: Korea

by Joel | 14 February 2005 · 5:53 pm

North Korean Recipe for a Personality Cult

The Kim cult combined images of Confucian familism with Stalinism, elements of Japanese emperor worship, and overtones of Christianity. Confucian familism, and particularly the virtue of filial piety (hyo), was perhaps the most distinctly Korean element of this “cult.” Kim’s revolutionary family background was frequently stressed in the propaganda literature, focusing especially on his father, who was a member of an anti-Japanese nationalist organization when Kim was a child. Thus, Kim Il Sung was a filial son (hyoja), perhaps the most revered virtue in Confucian Korea, carrying on his father’s legacy. Of course, the precedent of Stalinism played a role in this cult formation, and the term suryông itself seems to have been used as a translation of Stalin’s title vozhd’ (“chief”). But suryông had a deep resonance in Korean history, going back to the tribal chieftains of Koguryo, and was a term of great respect for political leaders in postliberation Korea, including Yô Unhyông and Pak Hônyông in the South (before Pak became a subordinate of Kim’s). The use of suryông for Kim Il Sung began shortly before the DPRK was founded, and it became his main title after the mid-1960s.

As for the Japanese cult of the emperor, the frequent use of the image of the sun as a metaphor for Kim Il Sung, especially as the “sun of the nation” (minjogûi t’aeyang), seems a deliberate reversal of the sun-image of the Japanese emperor, in whose direction Koreans had been forced to bow as colonial subjects. The benevolent, fatherly, but awesomely powerful image of the sun-god was North Korea’s answer to the foreign god of the Japanese–our sun (uriûi t’aeyang), as the novelist Han Sôrya described Kim in the first recorded use of this appellation, in 1946. Finally, Christian imagery appears in the early hagiography of writers like Han Chaedôk, who wrote in 1948 that Kim’s emergence as a leader was marked by a brilliant star, his return to Korea was equated with the coming of the sun, and he shed his “precious blood” for the sake of national salvation. To what degree Kim’s own Christian background contributed to his personality cult can only be speculated.

Korean Christianity is both a contributing element and useful comparison to the cult of Kim Il Sung. Like Christianity, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism in Korea was indigenized, blended with folk belief, and thereby made more comprehensible to the popular masses. Also as in Christianity, ideological purists condemned this popularization. Kim also embodied and symbolized political power in a highly personalized, quasi-supernatural manner reminiscent of the bundle of Korean folk beliefs often referred to as “shamanism.” For example, … Kim was attributed with an almost magical power over nature in North Korean publications, which credited him with personal responsibility for the bumper harvest of 1946 and control of the winter floods of 1946-47. Furthermore, it was not by accident that this popularization was propagated by and centered on Kim Il Sung, a man who understood Christianity at least as well as he understood Marxism-Leninism. What he understood most of all, however, was of the psychology of Koreans, especially northern peasants. Both evangelical Protestant Christianity and “Kim Il Sung-ism” took root in the same area of northern Korea. Both derived their unique strength and peculiar nature from the way in which they appropriated and subverted the language of popular belief.

In the symbol and “cult” of Kim Il Sung, a popular nationalism of multiple practices became a single, elite narrative of the minjok [‘nation, tribe’], and national subjectivities were reduced to one class, one party, and finally one man. If the nationalist project in modern Korea has been an attempt to re-create a center of national identity and politics, a center that is “connected with the way the world is built,” in North Korea, Kim Il Sung became that symbolic center. He became father, village chieftain, and priest, embodying and monopolizing previous symbols of authority in North Korea’s peculiar variant of the “cult of personality.”

SOURCE: The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950, by Charles K. Armstrong (Cornell U. Press, 2003), pp. 223-225

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by Joel | 10 February 2005 · 8:49 am

Nick Kristof on North Korea

In the 10 February edition of the New York Review of Books, Nick Kristof reviews two recent books about North Korea: Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s) and Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies by Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang (Columbia University Press).

Kristof captures at least two interesting ironies:

Americans routinely try to increase the country’s isolation by trying to cut off its few links to the outside world, even though this only increases the longevity of the regime. [This, of course, is exactly why the Kim dynasty tries to keep its subjects isolated.]

For example, Western journalists and commentators have periodically written exposés about North Korean labor camps on Russian territory in Siberia. These are typically logging camps or occasionally mines where North Korean laborers, under North Korean supervision, work for negligible wages, without any freedom to engage in political activity, under constant guard so that they cannot escape. Westerners have assumed that the workers are slave laborers forced to toil in the grim conditions of Siberia, and they have demanded that Russia crack down on such abuses.

The articles seemed persuasive to me. But in fact, Martin writes, the laborers were not forced to go to Russia but went willingly:

Indeed, they had competed fiercely, using bribes and any other means available, to exert enough influence on North Korean officials to get themselves on the list. They saw going to Russia as their tickets to wealth otherwise almost unimaginable by North Korean standards. The work was approximately as arduous as what they would have experienced back at home. The big difference besides huge salary increases was that it was possible to leave the camps occasionally and interact with Russians and ethnic Koreans and Chinese in nearby communities. Many loggers were transformed by experiencing Russia’s relatively liberalized atmosphere.

Martin cites interviews with defectors like Chang Ki Hong, who said that the average income in North Korea was about sixty won a month, but that in Russia he got nine hundred won a month. The thousands of North Korean workers in the camps were all under North Korean supervision and were not permitted to leave the restricted area without a pass but they did get to see something of the country. But those allowed to work in the camps were transformed by the experience. “Until I got to the Soviet Union, I believed in the regime,” Chang Ki Hong said.

But when I got to the Soviet Union and started meeting people there, I realized there must be something wrong back home. It was after I had been there about six months that my mentality started to change. We are taught that the whole world worships Kim Il Sung. I met Russians who made fun of this Kim worship, and then I realized that he was not in fact worshipped by the whole world.

Ultimately, Chang defected from the work camp, as did others among these laborers in Russia. But partly because of pressure from Western human rights activists, and partly because of Russia’s 1998 economic crisis, almost all of those North Korean laborers have since been sent home—a loss, it would seem, for human rights.

Shades of blackbirding (PDF) in the South Pacific! Now compare the role of missionaries in the South Pacific, or the relative success of Christian missionaries in Japan and Korea.

The evidence suggests that Kim Il Sung was a genuine nationalist hero and guerrilla leader, albeit not nearly so heroic as the later hagiographers would suggest, since his group’s attacks on the Japanese were not decisive in the war.

More remarkable, it turns out, Kim’s father was a Christian. Korea was fertile ground for Christianity in the early twentieth century, partly because Christianity was a way to quietly express defiance of the Japanese colonial rulers who had formally annexed the country in 1910. Kim’s father attended a school founded by missionaries, and later attended church regularly; he was also a church organist. He taught Kim Il Sung to be an organist as well, and the boy attended church throughout his teens. “I, too, was interested in church,” he once wrote, but later “I became tired of the tedious religious ceremony and the monotonous preaching of the minister, so I seldom went,” although he acknowledged receiving “a great deal of humanitarian assistance from Christians.” Still, after taking power, Kim completely wiped out Christianity from his country, keeping a couple of churches for show but staffing them with actors and actresses to impress foreign visitors with his tolerance.

Ironically, in view of his ideological extremism in later life, Kim was initially accused by other guerrillas of being a “rightist deviationist,” and he complained that some guerrillas were too ideological and not pragmatic enough. Yet Kim genuinely did fight hard against the Japanese at a time when many Koreans (including many future South Korean officials) were quislings of the hated occupiers. Those nationalistic credentials gave Kim Il Sung an authenticity and moral authority among Koreans that leaders in the South lacked, and that is one reason why many ethnic Koreans in Japan (even those from the southern half of Korea) have sided with North Korea rather than with South Korea. They weren’t Communists; they were nationalists. Some moved to North Korea in the 1960s, thus ruining their own lives and those of their families.

via The Marmot

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by Joel | 10 February 2005 · 8:27 am

North Korea Tries to Censor Czechs

For those of you who are still a bit befuddled how everything on this disparate bunch of blogposts ties together, I give you this headline from the CBC: North Korea calls for ban on ‘Team America’ in Czech Republic. Go Czechs! And congrats Japan! And go Canada!

via NKZone

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by Joel | 10 February 2005 · 7:41 am

Pol Pot’s Slave State

In the 1 February edition of the Christian Science Monitor, Clayton Jones reviews journalist Philip Short’s (psycho)biography of Pol Pot.

Reading the biography of a 20th-century tyrant takes courage. The tales of atrocities can be numbing, the motives unclear, and the lessons uncertain. Evil seems like a lurking character in such books, either in one man, the body politic, or foreign players, and is eventually exposed as, well, a rather stupid mistake….

Short’s contribution is in describing Pol Pot’s Cambodia as a modern slave state, as North Korea still is. Even today, Cambodia is ruled autocratically by former minor Khmer Rouge leaders, despite the efforts of the United Nations to bring democracy there. (Pol Pot’s top men may face trial next year.)

Much like slavery’s demise, the Khmer Rouge’s downfall was due largely to its internal contradiction in denying each person’s basic humanity. Its leaders eventually turned on themselves in a paranoid purge that provided an opening for Vietnam to invade Cambodia.

Just before he died in 1998 in a jungle hideout – unrepentant and unpunished – Pol Pot claimed in an interview that his conscience was clear and that he had done it all for his country. Like other tyrants of his century, we may never know enough about him to draw the right conclusions. Short’s book, however, takes us more than half way there.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by Joel | 1 February 2005 · 10:42 pm

North Korea Down for Another 8-Count?

On 30 January, NKZone blogged the Times of London‘s recent depiction of Chairman Kim’s Dissolving Kingdom. After hearing such reports for over a decade, I’m not holding my breath. Be sure to read the comments, both supporting and skeptical, to the NKZone post.

But, what the heck! I’ll just hazard a wild prediction: the technical knockout will come in Round 301, let’s say around 2007, shortly after the Dear Leader mysteriously disappears, leaving his video collection and fantasyland either to a half-brother, to be hailed as Demi Liter, or one of his sons, to be known as Double Shot or Weak Tea, depending on how long he lasts. Don’t even think about female succession. That’ll happen in Japan first.

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by Joel | 18 January 2005 · 8:39 pm

Foreign Policy in Omaha

If St. Louis typifies urban America statistically, Omaha is typical in a more elusive and anecdotal sense. Its history reveals the crass commercialism, the blunt meat-and-potatoes aggressiveness and masculinity, as well as the military power that helped define twentieth-century America. Swanson Foods invented the TV dinner in downtown Omaha. A few blocks away, in the kitchen of the World War I-era Blackstone Hotel, the Reuben sandwich was invented. In Omaha a Russian-Jewish immigrant family founded Omaha Steaks. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) with its underground nuclear nerve center is based here. SAC’s vast telephone linkage fans out throughout the country, providing the infrastructure for the nation’s telemarketing and credit card authorization industries, both born in Omaha in the 1980s. Many of the unsolicited and obnoxious calls that Americans get at dinnertime come from Omaha, and almost every time a credit card is swiped through a machine for authorization, that machine is communicating with a computer in Omaha. (There are other reasons why Omaha is the nation’s telemarketing center: midwestern accents are considered neutral and therefore not offensive to anyone– unlike a New York or southern accent, for example. And because of its Central Time Zone location, Omaha-based telemarketers can start calling the East Coast in the morning, work their way across the country, and dial the West Coast in the late afternoon.) Johnny Carson got his start in Omaha on WOW-TV in 1949. Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando began their careers here. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in west Omaha. Warren Buffett, the second richest man in America after Bill Gates, still lives and works in Omaha. The college baseball world series is held every year in Omaha. Omaha could hardly be more American.

But the Omaha I visited in 1996 had a distinctly international flavor. At breakfast I read in the Omaha World-Herald that area farmers had imported llamas from South America to protect their calves from coyotes. The lead editorial was about how high death rates in eastern Europe had influenced the downward trend in the rate of world population growth. The first person I met in Omaha was Susan Leonovicz, who worked in a nondescript suburban office and handed me a business card with English on one side and Chinese on the other.

Leonovicz is a vice president of Mangelsen’s, an Omaha firm that imports thread, feathers, porcelain eggs, dolls, and other items from China and other Pacific Rim countries, in addition to wedding ornaments from South Korea, for resale throughout America and Canada. I had wanted to see several other Omaha businesspeople involved in international trade, but they were out of town: in St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and other foreign cities negotiating deals. “Can’t some of these items be made in America?” I asked. “Sure,” Leonovicz answered, “but Americans won’t pay more than, say, $1.99 for a feather, so we import feathers and many other things from places where wages are much lower.”

She told me that the Japanese and South Koreans were opening maquilladora factories in China, much like ours in Mexico, using cheap labor to make products for re-export back home, which is partly why Mangelsen’s and other businesses with factories in Asia were lobbying for permanent “most favored nation” trade status for China. A foreign policy dominated by human rights would mean job cuts in Omaha, she told me emphatically. What struck me about this discussion was its ordinariness. Foreign trade is a normal subject for the business elite not only in Omaha and St. Louis but, as I would later learn, in Wichita, Tulsa, Des Moines, and other heartland cities, too, all of which had formed their own “foreign policy committees.” Intermediaries in New York and Washington were no longer necessary. The foreign policies pursued by these heartland cities were, ironically, more like those of European countries than of the East and West Coast elites, dominated by the concerns of trade and realpolitik rather than by human rights and spreading democracy.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 59-60

The Sheila Variations has more excerpts from this book (and is an ardent fan of Kaplan’s work).

UPDATE: Geitner Simmons at Regions of Mind posts reactions from Omaha.

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by Joel | 17 December 2004 · 9:57 pm

North Korea’s "Analectical Materialism"

The environment of the Soviet occupation of northern Korea, unlike that in Eastern Europe, was an East Asian agrarian society recently emerged from [Japanese] colonial rule. Certain policies, such as land reform, were immensely popular regardless of whether Russians or Koreans drafted the laws. Moreover, the Korean input into these policies, whether that of the regime in Pyongyang or in the process of ground-level implementation, was greater than a reading of Soviet sources alone would suggest.

In the area of ideology, for example, one of the most distinctively Korean elements of communism in North Korea was its emphasis on ideas over material conditions. Koreans shared this Marxist heresy with their counterparts in China and Vietnam, but this humanistic and voluntaristic emphasis was even more pronounced in Korea than in the other two East Asian communist revolutions, which may reflect the fact that Korea had long been more orthodox in its Confucianism than Vietnam or China. Korean communists tended to turn Marx on his head, as it were, valorizing human will over socioeconomic structures in a manner more reminiscent of traditional Confucianism than classic Marxism-Leninism. In short, the social and cultural context of the communist revolution in North Korea resulted in a society that looked less like Poland, a country occupied by the Red Army, than Vietnam, a country that was not. North Korea simply cannot be seen as a typical post-World War II Soviet satellite along the lines of East Germany or Poland, where leaders with longstanding ties to the USSR and long periods of residence in the Soviet Union were implanted by the Soviet occupation forces, where the Soviet Army remained the authority of last resort for decades afterward, and where the withdrawal of Soviet support quickly led to these regimes’ demise. The North Korean revolution may not have been entirely autonomous, but its indigenous elements allowed it to endure.

Among the most important elements of this indigenization was Korean nationalism, which at the beginning was partially hidden under a veneer of fulsome praise for the USSR and for Stalin. But nationalism and pro-Soviet orientation were not mutually exclusive in East Asia at the time. For Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean radical nationalists, state socialism was a compelling route to national liberation and modernity, especially when the USSR had been the only major country to give material assistance to their struggles against colonialism.

SOURCE: The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950, by Charles K. Armstrong (Cornell U. Press, 2003), pp. 4-5

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by Joel | 17 December 2004 · 8:39 pm

North Korea’s Hard "Soft Landing"

NKZone‘s Andrei Lankov posts a link to an analysis he presented in New Zealand last year raising doubts “about the now so fashionable ideas of North Korea’s ‘soft landing'”–the idea that it can reform its way into less-than-catastrophic unification with South Korea.

Lankov’s talk, entitled Soft Landing: Opportunity or Illusion (viewable in IE, but not Firefox!), emphasizes the uniqueness of the Korean situation relative to that of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China.

Assumptions based on the Chinese, East European or post-Soviet experiences are not applicable to the North. The “market” or capitalist reforms in those countries were indeed beneficial to the former Communist elite or at least for more flexible and better-educated parts. Even a cursory look at the biographies of post-Soviet tycoons and top politicians confirms that the so-called “anti-communist revolutions” of the early 1990s often boosted the standing of those who were prominent apparatchiks in the 1980s. The first two presidents of the supposedly anti-Communist Russia were Yeltsin, the former Politburo member and Putin, the former KGB colonel. The same is true of other post-Soviet states and China.

However, North Korea is dramatically different from other former members of the Communist bloc. Its major problems are created by the existence of a democratic and prosperous “alternate Korea” just across the border, a mere few hundred kilometres away from even the remotest North Korean village.

The economic gap between the two Koreas and the corresponding difference in living standards is huge, far exceeding the difference which once existed between East and West Germany. The per capita GDP of the South is approximately 10,000 USD, while in the North it is estimated to be between 500 and 1,000 USD. Obesity is a serious health problem in the South while in the North the ability to eat rice every day is a sign of unusual affluence. South Korea, the world’s fifth largest automobile manufacturer, has one car for every four persons, while in the North a private car [is] less accessible to the average citizen than a private jet would be to the average American. South Korea is the world’s leader in broadband Internet access while in the North only major cities have automatic telephone exchanges and a private residential phone is still a privilege reserved solely for cadres.

The survival strategy of the North Korean political system has been based on the combination of three important strategies: intense police surveillance, harsh suppression of even the slightest dissent and maintaining a strict information blockade.

The last factor is especially important…. Economic reforms are unthinkable without large-scale foreign investment and other types of exchange with overseas countries (what is known in China as “openness”). However such “openness” would mean a decisive break with this system of self-imposed isolation. Under the present circumstances both investment capital and expertise are likely to come largely from South Korea.

The influx of foreigners, especially South Koreans, will however undermine one of the pillars of the regime’s political stability, namely the system of information isolation. Even if these visitors carefully avoid everything which could upset their minders, the sheer presence of strangers will be disruptive. This was not such an issue in China or Vietnam where the visitors came from alien countries whose prosperity was seen as generally irrelevant to the local situation. It is likely to be a problem in the North, however, where a large proportion of foreign investors and experts will come from another half of the same country and will speak the same language.

Thus, any wide-scale cooperation with the outside world remains a dangerous option. Its obvious economic benefits do not count for much, since the associated political risks are prohibitively huge and the Pyongyang elite will not take chances….

If the populace learned how dreadful their position was compared to that of the South Koreans, and if the still-functioning system of police surveillance and repression ceased to work with its usual efficiency, then the chance of violent revolution or at very least, mass unrest would be highly likely. The proponents of a “soft landing” believe that the collapse of the regime (be it violent or otherwise) would not mean an end to a separate North Korean state. However, it is difficult to see how the North Koreans could possibly be persuaded to remain quiet if they knew the truth and were not afraid of immediate and swift retribution for their dissent…. In other words, the attempts to promote reform and liberalization are likely to lead to the exact opposite–to political instability, regime collapse and a subsequent “hard landing.” …

In Eastern Europe and the former USSR it was the second and third tiers of apparatchiks who reaped the greatest benefits from the dismantling of state socialism. Their skills, training and expertise, as well as their connections allowed them to appropriate sizeable chunks of the former state assets. They then used this property to secure dominant positions in the new system and quickly re-modelled themselves as prominent businessmen or even “democratic politicians.” The North Korean mid-level elite does not have access to such an attractive option. Once again such a scenario is rendered unlikely by the existence of South Korea with its highly developed economy, large pools of capital and managerial skills. If the collapse of Kim’s regime spells an end to the independent North Korean state which is a very likely option, the local elite would stand no chance of competing with the South Korean companies and their representatives. Capitalism in post-Kim North Korea would be constructed not by former apparatchiks who some day declare themselves the born-again enemies of the evil Communism, but by resident managers of Samsung and LG. At best, the current elite might hope to gain some subaltern positions, but even this outcome is far from certain. Something analogous to the “lustration policy,” the formal prohibitions of former Party cadres and security officials from occupying important positions in the bureaucracy of post-Communist regimes, is at least equally likely. Some ex-apparatchiks might even face persecution for their deeds under the Kims’ rule. Facing such dangers, the lower strata of the ruling elite is showing no signs of dissent and prefers to loyally follow Kim Jong Il’s entourage….

This does not mean that the regime will last forever. However, its transformation is unlikely to occur according to the “soft landing” scenario. If the elite resists change for too long an implosion will be unavoidable and if it initiates reform now, the result is likely to be the same or perhaps only marginally less dramatic.

I suspect relations between the two Koreas after unification will soon evolve into a fierce antagonism between a North Korean colony offering little more than unskilled labor and raw materials, and a South Korean colonial occupation force that quickly loses patience with its helplessly dependent cousins. Fierce South Korean classism (and impatience) will soon overwhelm the abstract sympathies so many South Korean citizens now feel for their North Korean compatriots. North Korea will be like Yankee-occupied Mississippi during Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War. Tough times for all, for at least a generation or two.

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by Joel | 19 November 2004 · 11:01 am

What’s Happening in North Korea?

NKZone has assembled a long compilation of fodder for speculation about a variety of unusual happenings in North Korea. Kim Jong-il seems to be in seclusion, and there are reports of both clampdowns and protests. Hard to know what it all means.

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by Joel | 16 November 2004 · 7:46 am

The Early 1940s Japanosphere

On 12 December 1941 Japan’s media announced that the four-day-old hostilities in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, together with the four-year-old China Incident, were henceforth to be referred to as the Greater East Asia War (Dai Toa senso). During the next three and a half years, the word “Greater East Asia” reverberated through radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, academic monographs, Diet speeches, classrooms, and barracks. No other term so frequently surfaced in discussions of Japan’s war aims. Imperial forces were waging a “holy war” to cleanse Greater East Asia of Chiang Kai-shek, communism, and Anglo-Saxons in order to build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Asians could live and prosper under Imperial Japan’s benevolent tutelage.

So closely was Greater East Asia identified with wartime propaganda that the term abruptly dropped out of sight in 1945 and has since been shunned. Japanese writers are loathe to employ something so tainted with emotional associations. Consequently, they have adopted the American nomenclatures: “World War II,” and “Pacific War.” Neither is very satisfactory. The former is too broad, because Japanese forces did not participate in the Soviet-German conflict, nor did they operate in Europe. The latter is too narrow, because it suggests that the war was basically oceanic and in doing so fails to reflect the major fighting that took place on the Asiatic continent. Despite its awkward connotations, “Greater East Asia War” remains the most accurate designation for a struggle that in Japan’s perspective encompassed the Indian and Pacific oceans, East and Southeast Asia.

How far did the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere extend? From the moment the term made its public debut at an August 1940 press conference called by Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, its magnitude remained vaguely defined. Conceptions of the Sphere varied in accordance with individual inclinations and external circumstances. Available evidence clearly suggests, however, that the entire Hawaiian archipelago consistently fell within its envisioned boundaries, both before and after 7 December 1941.

Before 7 December public discussions about Greater East Asia usually referred to Hawaii indirectly through the term Nan’yo (South Seas). Nan’yo, which was said to lie within Japan’s “lifeline” (seimeisen) and “life sphere” (seimeiken) had its nucleus in the Micronesian mandated islands, but at times was said to include Melanesia and Polynesia. Before 7 December mention of Hawaii as part of Nan’yo was usually done indirectly. For example, early in 1941 a book on Hawaii translated into Japanese by former University of Hawaii instructor George Tadao Kunitomo appeared in the “New Japan Sphere Series” [Shin Nipponken sosho] of a Tokyo publisher. There were also, to be sure, more direct intimations of Hawaii’s position. In a booklet published in September 1941 the retired army officer and ultranationalist Kingoro Hashimoto explicitly included Hawaii in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Hashimoto’s public identification of Hawaii with Greater East Asia was consistent with a classified study prepared several months earlier in the Research Section of Navy General Staff. Dated 29 November 1940 and entitled “Draft Outline for Construction of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” this secret (it was stamped gokuhi) report cast Hawaii’s future disposition in sharper focus than did any public document that appeared before the Pearl Harbor attack.

Authors of the “Draft Outline” stated that the objective for establishing a Sphere was: “… to create a new culture by the sharing of respect, by mutual good neighborliness, friendship, joint defense, and economic cooperation in an area with Japan [literally “kokoku” or “imperial country”] as the nucleus and including [a list of nations] … Hawaii.”

The Sphere was to be divided geographically into three concentric subspheres: inner, middle, and outer. The inner subsphere would consist of the Japanese archipelago, Korea, and Manchuria. The middle subsphere would be formed by most of China and all of Nan’yo, “including Hawaii.” The third, outer subsphere, would include “such outer areas as are necessary for the complete economic self-sufficiency of Greater East Asia.”

Defining political relationships within the Sphere, the document enumerated four categories: lands to be annexed outright by Japan; autonomous protectorates; independent states with “unbreakable” defense and economic ties with Japan; and independent states with close economic ties with Japan. Australia, New Zealand, and India fell into the final category. Hong Kong, Thailand, and the Philippines (with the exception of Mindanao, which had a J apanese population of twenty-six thousand) were put in the third category. Indochina and the Dutch East Indies were in the second category. The first category included Guam, Mindanao, and Hawaii. In other words, a Navy General Staff research report recommended, over a year before the outbreak of hostilities with the United States, that the Hawaiian Islands be incorporated into the Japanese Empire.