hankyoreh

By Han Sungdong, Senior Reporter

Ryujo Sejima was part of Japan's supreme war council, the Imperial General Headquarters (Daihonei), and later a general on the staff of the Kwantung Army. After Japan was defeated, he spent 11 years in Siberia as a war criminal. Later, back in Japan, he used his experience as a strategist to rise to the position of chairman of the Itochu Corporation. Rumor has it that the main character in Toyoko Yamasaki's The Barren Zone was modeled after him.

His memoirs, published in 1996 by the ultra-right newspaper Sankei Shimbun, tells an interesting story. In March 1980, just after Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo's "New Military" took power of Korea in a coup on December 12, 1979, Sejima was contacted by Samsung chairman Lee Byung-chul, who told him he would like Sejima to "quietly visit Korea to encourage generals Chun and Roh as a fellow man of the military and give them some advice. There will be economic issues to talk about, too, so please come with Mr. Kojima, Chairman of Tokyu Corporation, he added. Sejima met Chun and Roh in June. Chun asked him how to rule the country and how to approach Japan. Chun and Roh had spilled the blood of hundreds of innocent civilians in Gwangju (Kwangju) a month earlier to secure their grip on power, but Sejima's impression of them was that they were "both gentle, magnanimous, and men with a broad outlook." Given the circumstances, it is likely the New Military probably asked Japanese big business leaders to connect them to Japan's ruling elite. They needed the support of money, Japan, and the United States.

Sejima would continue to frequent Korea and act as the secret emissary of business and government collusion between parties in Korea and Japan . It was he who arranged for Chun's regime to get a US$4 billion loan from the government of Yasuhiro Nakasone and was behind Nakasone's visit to Korea as the first postwar Japanese prime minister to do so. At the time, Japan's foreign minister was Shintaro Abe, the father of the current Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe. There was a reason the newly installed Nakasone threw everything aside and hurried to visit Korea at such great expense. It was part of such close adhesion between the U.S. and Japan that it developed into the so-called "Ron-Yasu" (Ronald Reagan + Yasuhiro Nakasone) relationship and the first step in a strategy for Japanese stability and prosperity at a time during the eighties when it was no longer strange to hear Japan considered the country to follow after the U.S. in international supremacy, a "Japan-as-a number-one-nation." Nakasone went right to the U.S. and acted to have the U.S. support Korea's coup plotters, who had just stood atop the tears and blood of the Buma Struggle in 1979 and the Gwangju Massacre in 1980. The stability of Korea's security environment - the preservation of a pro-Japanese and pro-American military regime - became one of the links in the close adhesion and prosperity among the neoconservative governments in the U.S. and Japan at the time.

One of the characteristics of Sejima's memoirs is that there is no self-reflection about wrongdoing. It is not entirely lacking in self-reflection, but the regrets are mostly about decisions made by Japan's war council and its limitations and failure to run the war more effectively. Any regrets are about having not done better at what he did. It is full of regret at not being able to make Korea and Manchuria, or at least Korea , Japanese territory. It is only a matter of course that such a person would have felt a sense of superiority towards Chun's military government - which puckered up to Sejima as it did - and toward the Korean people. Suddenly a perpetrator was a benefactor.

An "escape from Korea" kind of story titled So Far From the Bamboo Grove, told from the eyes of a 12-year-old Japanese girl who lived in Korea when Japan lost the war, has been the subject of controversy lately. In that book, too, there is no self-reflection about wrongdoing on the part of the perpetrator. One of the main criminal acts of Japan's continental aggression was its invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet government of Manchuguo, and the girl's father worked for the Manchuguo state. Put simply, whether her family intended to be perpetrators or not, that is what they were while living in Nanam, Korea, and they escaped to their country when it lost the war. Her story makes no mention whatsoever of the arrogance possessed and atrocities committed by those who ruled the colony. She never asks why the atrocities happened or why she found herself living in someone else's country. It is as if it was all something to take for granted. As for the communists she says attacked her, she criticizes them in a tone that treats Korea's liberation fighters like a bunch of immoral bandits, a view that is no different from calling the famous independence activist Yun Bong-gil a wicked terrorist. The fact that So Far From the Bamboo Grove was chosen as a middle school reading text in the U.S. might be because it fit so shockingly well with justifying imperialist behavior as "anti-communism" and America's position as a country that allied itself with perpetrators of colonialism. Perpetrators tend to understand fellow perpetrators.

Think for a moment. Hundreds of thousands died in the Vietnam War and Vietnam was covered in Agent Orange, which still causes birth defects and continues the suffering felt by the people. Where did that tragedy begin? As you see in the 1978 film "The Deer Hunter," in a war that would never have happened in the first place if it had not been for colonial rule and aggression, the invaders portray the Vietnamese - who are laying down their lives for their families and their fatherland - as harsh commies, and portray themselves as victims and suffer ever so elegantly. The tragedy is a tragedy, but also something of a sick comedy. In So Far From the Bamboo Grove, what the 12-year-old daughter of a colonial ruler saw was a nation that had grown impoverished because of acts committed by her own people, and she saw a few nationalists who put their lives on the line to oust the foreign masters: the Korean nationalists they encountered thus surely must have seemed like a threat to them. Most nationalist fighters were, because of circumstances, invariably leftists at the time, but this girl calls them communists, "reds," and confuses the essence of the situation. She adds a few episodes from her extremely narrow scope of life and turns the victims into perpetrators.

This is just as North Korea, one of the countries that suffered most from colonial rule, has been turned into the most villainous of perpetrators in Japan's eyes over the sole issue of its abduction of Japanese citizens. Would there have been abductions of Japanese citizens if there had been no colonial rule, if the U.S. military had not come in as the new ruler under the guise of disarming the colonial military and one-sidedly divided the country into north and south, and if therefore the Korean War had never happened and the division never settled in?

There are some who say those who take issue with So Far From the Bamboo Grove are so blinded by nationalism that they cannot recognize simple acts of wrongdoing and are fools for not being able to engage in some healthy self-reflection. After all, harming others cannot be justified no matter who is behind it, so perpetrators of wrongdoing must be criticized and condemned. But excessive vigilance against nationalism that causes one to misread the facts or act like a half-baked globalist is far more dangerous than nationalism itself.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]