The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [6]
Little of this propaganda reached the illiterate majority of the population, who often had to be brutally coerced into complying with Japanese demands for soldiers, laborers and prostitutes.15 The educated classes, however, being more highly propagandized (as the educated always are), and enjoying the benefits of the new order, generally behaved as the authorities wanted them to. Granted, a repressive system was in place.16 But one must either assume that the average educated Korean harbored a fierce opposition to the status quo, and collaborated in painful awareness of his fear and hypocrisy, or that he chose to believe he was serving his people as part of a winning racial team. No one familiar with human nature can doubt that the latter assumption is more likely to be true.17 It is borne out by evidence of widespread over-compliance with the naisen ittai campaign. By the end of the 1920s the upper and middle classes in Seoul were speaking Japanese in their own homes.18 Marriages between Koreans and their colonizers were, as a famous short story later put it, “thought quite natural by many, perhaps even a mark of distinction.”19 (In South Korea, marriage with Japanese citizens remains the form of international marriage with the least social stigma attached.) Newsreels of the imperial army’s victories in the Pacific War elicited vigorous applause from moviegoers.20
They had less to clap about as the war progressed. By early 1945 propaganda had taken on a note of desperation. “If our destiny is thwarted in this war … it would be a tragedy for all mankind,” the Korean-language daily warned in March. “We must win.”21 But on August 6 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, emboldening the USSR to enter the war with Japan. The Red Army was advancing swiftly down the Korean peninsula on August 15 when Hirohito read out his famous surrender notice. By that time the US and the Soviet Union had already decided, without consulting the Koreans themselves, to share the administration of the former Japanese colony for an indefinite period. The Red Army occupied the north, setting up headquarters for a so-called Soviet Civil Administration in the ancient city of Pyongyang. American soldiers arrived in September to take over Seoul and the rest of the southern half of the peninsula.22
THE SOVIET OCCUPATION, 1945-1948
Though most Koreans in 1945 had no memory of life before Japanese rule, neither the Soviets nor the Americans saw a need to de-colonize hearts and minds. That the Koreans now hated Japan was taken as proof that they had always done so. Nor did either power punish former propagandists. In Seoul, the cultural scene’s spontaneous efforts to come to terms with its past were soon undermined by the settling of personal scores and a general refusal to acknowledge a collective guilt.1 Obscure ex-collaborators condemned the famous ones, those who had propagandized in Korean asserted moral superiority over those who had done so in Japanese, and erstwhile “proletarians” acted as if their brief prison stays in the 1930s made up for everything they had written afterward.
Meanwhile, to the north, the Soviet authorities set about orchestrating a “people’s revolution” of the kind already underway in much of Eastern Europe. The first stage was to be a coalition between communists and other forces, followed by a pseudo-coalition in which the communists called the shots, and finally a monolithic regime.2 This plan was complicated by the lack of left-wingers in the north of the country, which had hitherto been a bastion of conservatives and Christians. The occupying power had to build up a local party from scratch while courting right-wing partners for a coalition.3 For all their feigned impartiality, the Soviets lost no time transferring ownership of printing presses, publishing houses and radio stations to the fledgling Workers’ Party. The first issue of the party daily (known today as the Rodong sinmun) appeared in September 1945.4 The radio network began operations on October