Russia, successfully eliminating it as a rival in East Asia. With a free hand in Korea, the Japanese continued their program of converting Korea into a Japanese appendage. Responding to this threat, Korean patriots formed underground resistance groups and guerrilla bands to combat the Japanese. Finally in 1910 Japan gave up all pretense of “protecting” Korea, annexed the country, and began an all-out political, military, and cultural campaign to condition Koreans to accept their fate.
Japanese administrators in Korea repressed all political activity and cultural life. Spies were dispatched into every corner of the country to report on the activities of intellectuals, religious leaders, and former politicians, beginning an era that Koreans were later to call Amhuk Ki (Ahm-huuk Kee), or “The Dark Period.”
Japan dispatched a large number of its notorious kempeitai (kem-pay-e-tie), or “thought police,” to Korea, charging them with ferreting out and punishing anyone who spoke ill of the Japanese or Japan. They also created a large corps of koto keisatsu (koh-toh kay-e-saht-sue), literally “high police”—approximately half of whom were Koreans who had agreed to work for the Japanese. These police were charged with the responsibility of overseeing political activity, education, health, morality, tax collection, public welfare—in fact every facet of life in Korea—and they had virtually unlimited powers to search, arrest, pass sentences, imprison, or execute anyone accused of breaking their laws.
One of the extremes to which the Japanese went to enforce their laws and impress on Koreans their power and the importance of obeying them without question was a provision that required government officials and teachers to wear swords as a means of intimidating people. Koreans who refused to act as spies and informers themselves became subject to arrest and punishment as enemies of the Japanese regime. The slightest suspicions were grounds for arrest, torture, and imprisonment or death. Punishment was typically collective, with hundreds punished for the crime or rebellious conduct of a single person or a small group.
The psychic damage caused by this kind of control by force and fear was magnified beyond all reason because so many Koreans themselves were intimidated into participating in the brutalities inflicted on the population, making it impossible for people to trust anyone except their own families.
Despite these draconian measures, the Japanese annexation and continued occupation of Korea did not go smoothly. More and more Korean patriots took to the hills as guerrillas and began a campaign of attacking Japanese troops and their facilities. Urban residents staged street demonstrations, resulting in thousands of them being killed. In retaliation Japan began a campaign to totally eradicate Korean culture. Schools were required to teach only in Japanese. All Koreans were ordered to take Japanese names, speak only Japanese when dealing with the Japanese, and behave in the Japanese manner. Leading artists and craftsmen were killed or imprisoned to prevent them from passing Korean culture on to the next generation. Hundreds of ancient palaces and temples were destroyed.
Dozens of thousands of Korean men were inducted into the Japanese army. Thousands of Korean women were forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese military. Other thousands of men and women were shipped to Japan as slave laborers to work in factories and mines. Rather than submit to Japanese rule and enslavement, thousands of Koreans fled their homeland, some making their way to Manchuria and China and others to the United States. Many of the refugees who fled to nearby China and Manchuria formed clandestine guerrilla groups that carried out commando raids against Japanese facilities.
Other exiles formed assassination teams that targeted Japanese government officials and military officers. One member of a group in China that organized an Aeguk Tan (Aye-guuk Tahn), or “Patriotic Society,” succeeded in killing several high-ranking Japanese military officers with a bomb, greatly encouraging all Koreans as well as the beleaguered Chinese.
The great Amhuk Ki ended on August 15, 1945, when Japan was defeated by the United States and its allies and Korea quickly reclaimed its sovereignty. But one kind of dark period ended only to have another one start just five years later. The United States agreed that Russian troops could occupy the northern half of Korea and disarm the Japanese troops there, while the U.S. forces would do the same thing in the southern half of the country. Both sides were to withdraw their forces from Korea as soon as the Japanese troops had been disarmed and shipped home. The United States fulfilled its commitment, but the Russians refused to withdraw from the northern half of Korea and quickly set up a Communist government under the leadership of Il Sung Kim, a dedicated Korean Communist. The Soviets then shipped most of the Japanese troops in North Korea to Siberia to be used as slave laborers rather than sending them home. (By the time these ex-Japanese soldiers who survived enslavement in Siberia were finally allowed to return to Japan in the 1950s, they had been so thoroughly brainwashed in communism that they immediately began staging strikes and sit-ins against the Japanese government and the American military forces in Japan, becoming an international embarrassment to Japan.)
Il Sung Kim, with massive Soviet aid, immediately began building up a large army of North Koreans and fortifying the line along the thirty-eighth parallel that had been selected as the boundary between the Soviet and American zones. But all was not calm in South Korea either. As soon as the U.S. withdrew its forces from the southern half of the peninsula, political factions began fighting over which group was going to run the government.
Finally, in September 1947, the United Nations called for elections in both the northern and southern portions of the country. The Soviet Union refused to allow North Korea to participate in the process, so elections were held only in the South. On August 15, 1948, three years to the day after the end of World War II, the UN presided over the establishment of the Republic of Korea, with veteran politician-patriot Syngman Rhee as its first president. Three weeks later the Soviet-backed Il Sung Kim proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Korea, with himself as president.
On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched a full-scale invasion of South Korea, capturing Seoul within a matter of hours and pushing the ill-prepared South Korean forces into a tiny pocket at the end of the peninsula. The United States, with UN approval and help from fifteen other UN member nations, quickly rallied a counterattack under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, who had commanded American forces in the successful war against Japan and was then commander of the Allied forces occupying Japan.
The Allied counterattack succeeded in pushing the North Koreans out of South Korea, but when the Allied forces continued to pursue the North Koreans beyond the thirty-eighth parallel, China entered the war on the side of North Korea. Allied forces suffered enormous losses, and once again Seoul fell to combined Chinese and North Korean forces. General MacArthur proposed to attack China’s staging areas north of the Yalu River in Chinese territory and was fired by U.S. president Harry Truman because Truman and his advisers were afraid that would result in all-out war with China.
With Allied forces bowing to political pressure to stop at the thirty-eighth parallel, the fighting finally ended in a stalemate on July 27, 1953. Peace talks were begun in a special complex built hastily in a three-mile-wide demilitarized zone straddling the boundary between North and South Korea.
The war devastated both North and South Korea. In addition to some 1.5 million people killed on both sides, hundreds of thousands of families were torn apart by the division of the peninsula into two parts separated by a barrier that was one of the most heavily guarded strips of land in the world.
The second Amhuk Ki of the twentieth century was over for South Korea, but by that time communism had an even firmer grip on the northern portion of the peninsula and was imposing a different kind of darkness on the hapless people there.
Anae 안애 Ah-negh
Wives: The Inside People
Few societies have limited, or twisted, the lives of women as much as Korea’s Choson dynasty, which began in 1392 and formally ended in 1910. Under the influence of a Confucian ideology that
