Real History in Korean Textbooks

I've said my bit in the past about how utterly false the claims Koreans make about the era of Japanese rule tend to be, only to be met with lots of angry but empty-headed nonsense to the effect that I must be wrong, facts be damned, because Imperial Japan could never have done anything positive for its colonial acquisitions: after all, the Koreans say so loudly and angrily all the time, right?

Funny thing is, though, that it now appears that at least some educators in Korea are now ready to acknowledge what I'd been insisting all along - that whatever the effects of Japanese rule on the self esteem of Koreans, there can be no doubting that becoming a part of the Japanese empire had a very strong and lasting positive effect on the Korean economy.

A history textbook that speaks positively of the economic impact of Japan's occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910-45 has recently been published in South Korea.

The new textbook covers modern and contemporary South Korean history, and was written by a group of authors known as the New Right, which includes a university professor.

Recent South Korean history textbooks have tended to focus on the campaign of Koreans opposed to rule when explaining the period during which the Korean Peninsula was forcibly placed under Japanese control.

However, the new textbook gives some credit to the Japanese occupiers, stating: "Japanese rule was not only a history of oppression and control. It was an era in which society's capacity to build a modern state was developed by learning [from Japan] and implementing this."

In particular, the textbook highlights infrastructure such as railways and roads that were developed during Japanese rule. "[Japanese rule] activated the free market economy," the book says.

It's good to see that at least some Korean students will now have a chance to learn something about the real history of their country, rather than being simply stuffed with propaganda designed to stoke anti-Japanese hatred. Still, I don't see this positive move within Korea having much of an effect on the efforts of Korean chauvinists to rewrite history as presented outside Korea's borders, nor on the Westerners who would like nothing better than to believe that Imperial Japan was an Asian Third Reich, when it was no worse - and in quite a few respects much better - than all of the other Western empires of the period.

PS: To buttress the claim I make in the final sentence above, I suggest that readers look at this link and this one to start learning about just a portion of the very many ugly aspects of that supposedly most benign institution, the British Empire. It's no mystery why Hitler thought so highly of the British Empire or liked to recommend "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" to his troops: Hitler's mistake was to assume he could get away with doing to the Poles and the Russians what British (and French, and Belgian, and Dutch, and Spanish, and Portuguese) administrators and settlers had done all over Africa, Asia and the Americas. To know all of this and yet claim that Imperial Japan was worse than the European empires is to engage in a blatant falsification of history - at least Japan left a positive legacy of development in Korea and Taiwan, which is more than can be said for Britain in any non-white colony ...

Comments

[IvanGroznyIV]

"...nor on the Westerners who would like nothing better than to believe that Imperial Japan was an Asian Third Reich, when it was no worse - and in quite a few respects much better - than all of the other Western empires of the period."

That would depend a bit heavily on the period of Imperial Japan under discussion, I would think. I have no doubt for most of it's history that Korea under Japanese control was nowhere near the unending series of horrors your typical Korean nationalist might present it as, but to suggest that the Imperial Japan of 1937-1945...in the midst of Nanking, Manila, Singapore, Unit 731, the food-hording induced famines in Vietnam and Indonesia, the Burma-Siam railway, 燼滅作戦, rampant prisoner starvation and abuse, and so on and so forth...is 'no worse - and in quite a few respects much better' than other Empires of the period....

[Andrew]

But let's not forget some of the outrages perpetrated by Western empires of the period... the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; Leopold's Congo; etc etc. Though I still think it's basically pointless to engage in these "who's the worst empire" comparisons as if another's guilt were to somehow lessen one's own guilt.

[Abiola]

Andrew, I agree, and my point isn't to lessen the severity of the Imperial Japanese Army's brutality in China, but to put it in context when it comes to thinking about Western efforts to paint Imperial Japan as somehow uniquely evil.

What particularly irritates me is the insistence on pretending that opposition to Japan's imperial expansion in Europe and America stemmed from other than the motives of protecting their own conquests, leaving room to make even more conquests down the road (hence America's "open door" policy in China), and preserving the seeming worldwide inviolability of white rule. There was nothing the least noble about any of it, nor were Asia's resident European overlords any less brutal than the IJA when they were first embarked on conquering their Asian fiefdoms. What is more humane about machine-gunning Zulus in Southern Africa, packing Kikuyus into disease-ridden concentration camps, or instituting mercantilist administrative policies which led to tens of million Indians starving to death?

Imperialism is an abominable evil, yes, but no one has been more guilty of it in the last 500 years than Europeans, and yet they love to sanctimoniously sermonize to the Japanese about their late entry into the "great game" which was anything but a "game" for the hundreds of millions who came to living under European domination. What gets to me is that I can follow the Japanese media, and from everything I see there is far more genuine remorse and reflection about colonialism on the Japanese side than there is in Britain, France or even the USA: just look at the bewilderment and hostility towards Jeremiah Wright's statements to see an example of the self-delusion I'm talking about.

[IvanGroznyIV]

Those links are very interesting, if true; I wasn't aware of just how devastating the British Empire's influence could be in the 19th century.

I stand by the statement in regards to the period 1937-1945, however. Without hesitation, I would take living in British Hong Kong, British Singapore, American Manila...even Dutch Jakarta over the Japanese ruled versions of any of the above any day of the week, even removing the privations which resulted when Japan started losing the war badly. An average Chinese 'subject' in Hong Kong under British rule faced inequality, a complete lack of democracy, poverty, and racism; that same Chinese under Japanese ruled faced all of the above alongside random rapes, beatings, looting, killing, forced labor, forced acculturation, etc.

There's a reason why so many people across Asia during that period went so quickly from enthusiasm at the possibility the Japanese genuinely were liberating them from colonial rule to active and violent opposition to the Japanese occupation. And there's a reason why even many countries and cities which experienced long periods of European colonial rule still remember the Japanese occupation as a particularly ugly period in their history.

Does that make Japan 'uniquely evil'? Probably not. As of the end of it's history, though, I would say without question that the Japanese Empire was the worst of a bad lot.

[Abiola]

Is it really a mystery why all the colonies you mention were so much easier to live in just prior to Japanese rule? The answer is obvious: by then most of the worst brutalities of the previous conquerors were in the past, with the stubbornest natives opposed to white rule already killed.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the same process would have eventually occurred under Japanese rule - just compare Japan's "pacification" of Taiwan with America's conquest of the Phillipines, or Britain's handling of the 19th century Sepoy Mutiny and (as late as the 1950s) the Malaysian "Emergency": even better, look at the French in Vietnam and tell me that was any better than what the Japanese did elsewhere in South-East Asia.

In short, I don't buy your thesis about Japanese rule being "worst of a bad lot", as it is a very selective reading of history, as meaningful as suggesting American slavery and the mass murder of the Native Americans couldn't be that bad given how relatively good the descendants of the survivors of both horrors have it today.

[IvanGroznyIV]

"Is it really a mystery why all the colonies you mention were so much easier to live in just prior to Japanese rule? The answer is obvious: by then most of the worst brutalities of the previous conquerors were in the past, with the stubbornest natives opposed to white rule already killed."

I hesitate to agree with that. It almost sounds like 'mass murder as colonial growing pains', something which invariably happens during the opening stages of colonial takeover and which makes atrocities...if not really excusable...at least a bit more understandable. That would suggest, however, that all colonial acquisitions were almost invariably followed by massacre, rape, live dissection of prisoners of war, use of locals and POWs as expendable slave labor, etc., which is not true. From what I know of the British takeover of Malaya, for example, there was no equivalent to 華僑粛清, nor do residents of Singapore think of ANY period of the British colonial rule in the same dark way they think of the little over three years of Japanese occupation.

As for the British and the Sepoys or the American 'pacification' of the Phillipines or the French in Vietnam, for all the horror of those, if you add the casualties of all of them combined you still fail to reach the number killed in China alone from 1937 on. If we accept R.J. Rummel's statistics, the total reaches nearly 6 million dead across Asia.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB8.1.GIF

The methods were similiar, but the scale was not the same.

To be fair, however, I would agree that this has NOTHING to do with how uniquely 'cruel' Japan is. You need only look to the Boxer Rebellion and the comparative behavior of Western soldiers a few decades prior to see that there was nothing pre-determined about the widespread atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese during the Pacific War. Nevertheless, that Japan DID behave in extremely...and unusually.... ruthless behavior during World War II is not something which can be fairly dismissed as simply a figment of battered Korean pride.