Home GRASP GRASP/Korea Re-examining the Korean armistice: Give peace a chance

Re-examining the Korean armistice: Give peace a chance

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Ahead of the 65th anniversary of the truce that ended hostilities during the Korean War, we examine the conflict’s mixed legacy in Japan.
Sixty-five years after the Korean War ended in an uneasy truce, there is still no formal peace treaty between the two Koreas. Nor does one exist between North Korea and either the United States or Japan.
In 2017, it seemed that war with North Korea was a possibility after Pyongyang tested nuclear devices and launched a series of missiles. This year, however, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shocked and confounded North Korean experts in the West and Japan with unprecedented diplomatic overtures, topped by a meeting on South Korean soil in April with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and then, last month, a historic summit with U. S. President Donald Trump in Singapore.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in raise their hands during their April summit.| AP
Skeptics and pessimists, including Japanese and U. S. politicians, policymakers, military specialists and mainstream media, doubt the younger Kim, whose grandfather Kim Il Sung sparked the Korean War when his communist-backed forces in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula invaded the U. S.-backed southern part, is sincere about getting rid of its nuclear arsenal. Denuclearization is a precondition for turning the July 27,1953, armistice agreement into a permanent peace treaty.
Optimists, however, hope the extremely difficult problems that block a peace treaty (not only North Korea’s sincerity in denuclearizing, they say, but also the willingness and the political ability of both Washington, D. C., and Tokyo to make their own strategic compromises in order to reach that goal) will not prevent all sides from trying to end the Korean War. The legacy of conflict continues to profoundly shape the military and strategic positions of the two Koreas, China, Russia, the United States and especially Japan, for which the Korean War is remembered as a time when certain industries flourished and when Tokyo became a firm ally of the United States, even as it left questions about Japan’s military role that remain controversial to this day.
U. S. soldiers in action near South Korea’s Ch’ongch’on River in November 1950.| PUBLIC DOMAIN
On June 25,1950, North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea, crossing the 38th parallel and catching the world by surprise. Since the end of World War II in 1945, the U. S.-led Occupation of Japan meant U. S. troops had been based in hundreds of locations in Japan and South Korea. However, it was not North Korea but rather the intentions of the Soviet Union, and China, where the communists had seized power in 1949, that most concerned Washington and Tokyo when they looked at maps of Northeast Asia.
When the invasion occurred, the Japanese government, still under the Occupation, rushed to assure the public that World War III had yet to begin, just as the U. S. rushed to cobble together support in the United Nations for resisting the invasion militarily. In the opening weeks of the war, North Korea overran South Korean military units, capturing Seoul and pushing south. Japan would serve as a launching pad for U. S. troops and ships defending South Korea.
Thanks to a special procurement order by the Japanese government for firms to supply the U. S. military with all manner of supplies, the war created an economic boom later credited for getting Japan back on its feet, economically, and for helping lay the foundation of the economic “miracle” that Western media and scholars would write about in the 1960s and ’70s.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of the U. N. Command (seated), observes the shelling of Incheon in September 1950.| PUBLIC DOMAIN
At the beginning of the war, however, the immediate concern on the part of the Occupation forces was on protecting Japan and stopping the North Korean attack. On July 8,1950, the supreme commander for the Allied powers, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, ordered the Japanese government to establish a 75,000-strong National Police Reserve and to increase the Maritime Safety Force by 8,000 personnel. There was some expectation they could be dispatched to the Korean Peninsula. But with memories in South Korea of World War II and Japan’s brutal colonization of the peninsula in the early part of the 20th century still fresh, the South Korean government expressed opposition to that idea.
On Aug. 19,1950, nearly two months after the invasion and at a time when U. N. forces were being pushed back to Pusan, the Japanese government announced its position on the Korean War, which was to support South Korea. Ten days later, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida sent a message to MacArthur.
“Let me assure you that the Japanese government and people are ever ready and anxious to furnish whatever facilities and services that you may require,” Yoshida wrote. “I only regret that we cannot do more by way of cooperating with the U. N. in its crusade against communist aggression.”
U. S. troops move through Chinese lines during their breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in South Korea.| PUBLIC DOMAIN
However, Japan’s role in the Korean War, especially its military role, was a politically sensitive problem for the Americans.
“U. S. authorities had a very ambivalent approach to the use of Japanese support in the war,” says Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a professor of Japanese history at the Australian National University who has written about Japan’s participation in the Korean War.
“On the one hand, they needed manpower and wanted to recruit Japanese for this purpose.

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