A century after mass protests against Japanese colonial rule in Korea the issue of those who collaborated with Tokyo — many of whom later become part of the South Korean elite — remains hidden in the shadows. When the Seoul government signed a 1910 treaty handing sovereignty over the peninsula…
A century after mass protests against Japanese colonial rule in Korea the issue of those who collaborated with Tokyo — many of whom later become part of the South Korean elite — remains hidden in the shadows.
When the Seoul government signed a 1910 treaty handing sovereignty over the peninsula to Japan, their new overlords awarded 76 key politicians and officials Japanese noble titles and pensions worth millions.
Over the next 35 years, hundreds of thousands of Koreans worked for colonial authorities as civil servants, soldiers, teachers or police.
And according to historians hundreds of thousands more were forcibly recruited as frontline troops, slave workers and wartime sex slaves. A few thousand others went into exile in China to fight Japanese forces.
The independence struggle is at the heart of Korean national identity in both North and South, but eight in 10 South Koreans believe their country has never properly come to terms with the issue of collaboration, according to a government study released for last week’s 100th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement.
Mass protests against Japanese rule began that day in 1919, only to be forcibly put down, with 7,500 killed within two months and 46,000 arrested according to Seoul’s national archives.
In a commemorative speech, President Moon Jae-in said “wiping out the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators” was a “long-overdue undertaking”.
But it is an intensely political issue, with collaborators generally seen as right-wing and Moon under pressure from conservatives looking to paint him as a Northern sympathiser.
