Together with my friends Jens and Youngsoo I spent a chunk of this past Saturday afternoon at ICU for an event which ended up being broadly related to modern Korea. There were two main speakers, 池明観 who anonymously wrote the “Report from South Korea” for 『世界』 magazine from 1973 until 1988 under the alias “T. K.” and a second talk by 坂本義和, an apparently well-known professor at Tokyo University. The main event was presumably to hear 池明観 reflect on his writing about Korea during the period of military dictatorship but I found it to be a rambling discussion which was something of a combination of a review of modern Korean history and his own random reflections. I slept rather soundly through the middle half of his talk so it is possible it got better then.
Professor Sakamoto’s talk was much better…
Professor Sakamoto also focused rather broadly on modern Korea and covered a number of unrelated issues, but his points were compact and organized. He compared the US occupations of Japan and Korea in the postwar period and suggested how differences between the two may explain some of the differing results in the two countries’ postwar experiences. I seem to remember Bruce Cumings making very similar points. Sakamoto’s own emphasis was on the fact the US was not prepared to occupy Korea and had to depend on old power centers rather than “build” democracy from scratch. Although a scholar like John Dower have more to say about the kind of democracy that emerged from Japan’s experience (he wrote about this in a recent essay comparing the Japanese occupation to that of Iraq), there was no need to drag that issue out at a talk on Korea.
There were some other themes he touched on. He suggested that the militarization of Korean politics (軍事化) can help explain the unusually long period of separation between North and South Korea. He also compared what he believes to be very different views of the Cold War for Korea and Taiwan than the rest of the world, reminding us that what was “cold” for us was “hot” for much of Asia.
Another topic he spent some time on was his own argument for pacifism (this was a presentation given at ICU’s “Center of Excellent” for peace research). He backs an argument for pacifism with a very simple point: “If people are really all equal, all equally protected by some universal human rights, then this is clearly at contradiction with any state of war.” He then suggests that war introduces an “other” into the equation (in the form of an “enemy” or “animal/sub-human” etc.) that disturbs the vision of equality we have for our fellow human. I’m more than willing to grant him the observation of this key contradiction but he didn’t go on to address some of the more difficult questions that might follow. That said, the nods in the audience showed that he was among friends.
What I found most refreshing about his talk, however, was a short segment he devoted to the “kidnapping issue” (拉致問題) which fills the newspapers every day here in Japan (North Korea kidnapped a bunch of Japanese and just recently returned some of the survivors). The issue has created a huge response on the mass level and made Japan’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea much more complicated. After assuring the audience that he thinks the kidnappings are unforgivable (許せない) he asked an important question: Are the Japanese angry because the kidnapping issue was a clear violation of human rights? Or is there is huge mass movement emerging from this issue because Japanese had been kidnapped (South Koreans have been kidnapped in huge numbers as well, but obviously this never generated a mass movement in Japan). If the former case is true, he saw great potential for applying the movement to a number of worthy international causes. If the latter is true (I think we can say this bordered on a rhetorical question), then it is no more than an expression of nationalism.