A Little History Outside the Library

I have had some of the most interesting conversations talking to random old people and as someone who is interested in the history of East Asia, I especially enjoy those who I have met while on this side of the Pacific pond.

There is the retired farmer in Tateyama city who told me about his wartime experiences as a sailor delivering supplies to Japanese troops in China and the almost decade long romance he had with a Chinese woman there. Although he married a Japanese woman after the war, he got very emotional when he told me, a complete stranger, about that relationship that ended with Japan’s defeat.

There is the very old man I befriended in a park near the zoo in Yokohama who told me all about growing up in the city. He claimed to have been “saved” by American generosity twice, once as a mere baby, when some food packages sent from the US after the huge earthquake of 1923 reached his family, and once when he attached himself to a US occupation soldier after showing off some elementary English. The soldier apparently gave him some kind of ration cards that he claimed saved his family from starvation. He told me about watching Japan’s gradual wartime collapse from the accounting office of a Mitsubishi airplane factory during the war and later became my personal guide through Kamakura (even showing me some of the back entrances to my favorite temples). He boasted that he had over 20 pen pals in various English speaking countries. My favorite conversation with him was in a graveyard in Kamakura just after he had told me about all the places he had visited in Japan. I asked him why he had never travelled outside of Japan, despite working several decades after the war as a photographer for SAS and other foreign airlines. I remember his reply, in English, as, “Why do I need to go outside of Japan when there is so much left around me that I have yet to see.”

There was the old man who caught me taking notes at Yushukan (the nationalist museum attached to Yasukuni shrine) in front of their (as usual) very twisted portrayal of the 1939 Nomonhan incident. He nonchalantly leant over my shoulder, consulted my notes, and then said in Japanese, “I was there.” We sat down and he told me about his experiences stationed on the Manchurian borders working in some kind of artillery unit. I don’t remember much from his brief description of the actual confrontation except the fear that he and his fellow soldiers felt when faced by the formidable Russian forces.

Today I had another one of these experiences, this time, sitting just across from the entrance of Korea’s National Library.

It actually started yesterday when I went to meet a friend who works at the National Library for dinner. While I was waiting I was approached by an elderly man wanting to try out his English on me. It didn’t work very well, as his listening skills were minimal. My Korean sucks too. He managed to tell me he was born in 1932 and after a few more frustrated attempts at making some sentences, I asked him if he spoke Japanese. Of course, he did, he was taught Japanese in elementary school and was only 13 when the colonial period ended.

Once we shifted into Japanese, our conversation moved much more smoothly. However, we both had six o’clock meetings to go to so we agreed to meet again at the library tonight at six to continue our conversation.

For the sake of his privacy I won’t mention his name or where he is from, but suffice to say that what Korean he tried on me was in a dialect far less intelligible to me than that which is spoken in Seoul, and well, pretty much any Korean is already unintelligible to me. For the next hour and a half or so I asked him all sorts of questions and I was delighted, as always, to find that he seemed perfectly comfortable answering all sorts of questions posed by complete stranger.

After talking a bit about growing up in Japanese schools, he had all sorts of stories about life after 1945. I even asked him about his family. He is now in Seoul just for a few days, much like my own father, is spending most of time in retirement working on his family genealogy. His bag was stuffed with photocopies of various family genealogy records he showed me that he had recently harvested from the national library. His father was apparently a farmer in the colonial period, but when the Korean war started, he left for the city and joined the many unemployed there.

His father apparently found work transporting food stuffs on some kind of horse-driven vehicle that is also powered by burning wood (as far as I could understand)?! Or perhaps the foods were simply being cooked on the horse-driven vehicle like the yaki-imo trucks in Japan or something. I’m not sure. I asked him if he or his father were active in any labor or political movements during the time and he said, somewhat unbelievably that, “No no, there were no such movements until the Park regime.” He claimed that the country was politically united and peaceful until after the civil war.

Anyways, my friend was 19 when the civil war hit Korea with invasion from the North and he was soon sent off to fight as a soldier for South Korea. He became some kind of communications officer, relaying orders to various units. While he was away from most of the action, apparently his office was often under artillery fire and he was injured on four occasions, on one occasion getting some nasty shrapnel (he said bullet, but I think he meant shrapnel) in his lower back that still bothers him.

During his four years as a soldier he studied law in idle moments and continued his studies after the war while he scraped about for jobs. He ended up passing the exam to become enter some kind of police academy at the age of 25 (1957?) He served as a police officer from this time until 1990, when he retired. As confirmation, he listed every dictator regime he had served under, right through to Korea’s democratization in the 1980s. He apparently spent most of this time in the 수사조사 (搜査調査) division of his city investigating “all kinds of crimes” including, he said when I asked, crimes of a political nature. When I asked him what it was like to serve during that time, he said they were always under pressure from superiors and in a somewhat vague manner, he said they did this to “people” all the time. When he said the word “this” he made downward punching motions which I guess could mean anything from “fought against criminals” to “oppressed the masses” to “beating the living crap out of people.” Given what I have heard about police practices in Korea under its US supported dictatorships, I am inclined to take him literally, rather than metaphorically. Switching to broken English he said the times were “very very bad” but now they were “good, very good.”

One thing I learnt in a recent class on historical documents where we briefly discussed oral history techniques was that it can help to steer the person you are talking to away from topics where influences other than their own direct experience tend to dominate. I was especially sensitive to this today when I watched how the conversation drifted to his views about democracy and about Japan where all sorts of ideas he has picked up over the years came into play. Before I got him back to talking about his own personal and family experiences, he lectured me on Korea’s superiority to Japan and the fact that democracy could not have come earlier to Korea.

“During Yi Sŭng-man’s (Rhee Syngman) regime Korea was united in its resistance to the Communists. Under Pak, the entire nation had to work work work in order to get the food and clothes for our families. Only when we have time to sleep and food to eat can any country afford to have democracy.”

Japan, I was told, had a great capacity for unity 단결(團結) because it was an island country so they were inherently more aggressive, barbaric, and warlike (Interestingly, this is not in contradiction with many attempts by the more nationalistic Japanese to describe themselves). In contrast, he said, Korea was a country with very “deep thoughts” that had spent hundreds of years dedicated to cultivating the ways of peace. I then immediately asked him what was the most “difficult” part of his life, he answered, without any sense of irony, that it was the Korean war, when the peaceful Koreans massacred each-other in the millions.

He said that 500 years ago [sic], in the Koryo period, Korea was in all ways superior to Japan and had taken its imported Chinese philosophy (of Confucianism) and developed into a highly advanced, diverse, and unique Korean ideology. In Japan, there was nothing at all to compare and they had no philosophy 사상(思想) to speak of. Only when America helped it (in the Meiji period?) did Japan become strong enough to overcome Korea and colonize it.

He said that Korea has deep democratic traditions going at least back to King Sejong who ruled, apparently, as a “democratic king.” Alas, Korea is a shrimp caught between the whales and Korea’s strength was destroyed by colonization and the war brought about by Mao and Stalin.

This kind of stuff is all great material from nationalistic historiography but nothing you can’t find in your standard Korean nationalistic textbook. The anti-democratic material may come from his indoctrination as a police officer. However, I realized today that in my future conversations with these interesting figures, it would be best to keep them focused on their own experiences and reflections on those experiences (which of course will be influenced by these broader issues). It is hard for me, however, since I always love it when a classic historiographical narrative rears its head.

It was a wonderful chat, and I’m sure he had many more stories to tell but it was getting cooler and dark, so we exchanged contact info and parted ways. It was then, towards the end of our conversation that I noticed something about his Japanese. He spoke surprisingly well, albeit with a lot of common mistakes that I often hear less skilled Korean speakers of Japanese make, and had a vocabulary roughly equal to his half dozen years in the Japanese education system of the colonial period. He would throw in more difficult Korean nouns, which we either looked up or were similar enough to Japanese that I could often guess them from context. However, what took me longer to notice was something I found fascinatingly similar to how Sayaka and I communicate (a mish mash of English, Japanese, and Chinese): He had basically been using Korean particles and grammatical words (e.g. (으)니까) at least half of the time. One reason, I realized, why this took me so long to notice is that it simply fits so well. It rarely, if ever, altered the order or structure of his sentences.

Also, since I have been here over a week now, these words don’t seem out of place so I didn’t even recognize them as not being Japanese until the end of our conversation. Also, he was essentially doing the reverse of what I have been doing here when I speak to Japanese classmates or Japanese speaking Korean friends. I feel so much more comfortable talking to them in Korean because I can randomly throw in Japanese words or grammar into the various gaping holes of my Korean and not skip a beat in sentence construction. Of course, I know, I am supposed to be filling those holes with real Korean, but you know…I got stuff to say, debates to win, long-winded stories to tell!