hankyoreh

Independent lawmaker Yoon Mee-hyang is seen here (front, center) attending a memorial ceremony in Tokyo’s Yokoamicho Park on Sept. 1, the centenary of the massacre of Koreans in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake. (Kim So-youn/The Hankyoreh)

“The problem here isn’t that Yoon Mee-hyang attended a memorial service organized by Chongryon, but that the South Korean president did not demand anything from Japan on the 100th anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake.”

Hiroshi Tanaka, a professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University who has long worked to improve the rights of Zainichi Koreans, could not help but let out a long sigh as he thought about how South Korea’s conservative news outlets labeled independent lawmaker Yoon Mee-hyang a “communist” for attending a memorial gathering in Tokyo for the 100th anniversary of the Kanto massacre organized by the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, known also as Chongryon, and how President Yoon Suk-yeol slammed the act as “anti-state.”

Tanaka professed that he could not understand why the lawmaker’s attendance was problematic, saying that the memorial gathering for the Korean victims of the massacre has been held annually in Yokoami, Tokyo, since 1974.

South Korean and Japanese civil society figures agree that criticism surrounding Yoon Mee-hyang’s attendance of the memorial ceremony shows a collective ignorance of the decades-long, complex history of solidarity between Zainichi Koreans and Japanese civil society, in which Chongryon has played a central role.

The group in charge of organizing this year’s memorial was a Tokyo-based team investigating the drafting of Koreans into forced labor, which is composed of members of Chongryon and Japanese citizens.

Organizations that sponsored the event include the Forum for Peace, Human Rights and Environment, Japan’s largest pacifist organization with strong ties to Korean civil society, which has led the movement to uphold Japan’s pacifist constitution.

In May 1972, a group of Japanese lawyers, scholars, and artists banded together with Chongryon to establish a group to “investigate the lived reality of Koreans who were forcibly transported from Korea to Japan between 1939 and 1945 under the State General Mobilization Law.”

This team went on to investigate the issue of Japanese military sex slaves (known widely as “comfort women”), the massacre of Koreans after the Great Kanto Earthquake, and the remains of Korean forced laborers, publishing 20 sourcebooks between 1992 and 2007.

It was a couple working at the Okinawa branch of Chongryon, Kim Su-seop and Kim Hyeon-ok, who found the first comfort woman in Okinawa, Bae Bong-gi (1914-1991), in 1975. This was 16 years before Kim Hak-sun’s first testimony.

The Tokyo branch of the investigation team was formed in November 2004 to address the issue of the remains of those from the Korean Peninsula held at Tokyo’s Yutenji Temple.

The group has made significant progress on issues such as the forced internment of Koreans on Hachijo Island, an island south of Tokyo, and Korean victims of the March 10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo.

The late Lee Il-man, who headed the Tokyo branch, estimated the number of Koreans killed in the bombing of Tokyo to be at 10,000, about one-tenth of the total death toll, and since 2007 the group has held a memorial event for these Koreans each year in February or March.

Although the event has been led by Chongryon, the South Korean government committee charged with investigating forced labor during the Japanese colonial period sent letters of condolence.

There are concerns that labeling all interactions with Chongryon as “anti-state” could stifle grassroots exchanges between South Korea and Japan, such as South Korean civil society’s support for Chosen gakko (Korean schools), which has been ongoing for more than two decades since the 2000s.

Unlike the Korean Peninsula, where North and South Korea are separated by a line, there is no such distinction in Japan, meaning that when South Koreans support the human rights campaigns of their compatriots in Japan, they often find themselves working with people from Chongryon.

“If you want to contact Chongryon, you have to file a prior contact report under the Inter-Korean Exchange and Cooperation Act, but under the current administration, the Ministry of Unification refuses to even process these reports,” said an activist from a South Korean civic organization. “It’s as if they are trying to completely uproot a grassroots movement where Koreans, Japanese, and Zainichi work hand in hand.”

At the same time, there are those who wish that Yoon Mee-hyang had attended the memorial ceremony after first stopping at a separate event organized by the Korean Residents Union in Japan, or Mindan, which was held at 11 am on the same day.

“Unlike Chongryon, Mindan does not actively organize memorial services for the victims of the Great Kanto Earthquake,” said one Japanese civic leader, “but they organized a special for the centenary, and if Yoon [Mee-hyang] had been aware of the event, it would have been good for her to have attended.”

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

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