Though the Korean War looms larger in people’s minds here, nothing engenders more rancour than Japan’s subjugation of the peninsula. In modern history, this began with the imposition of the 1876 Treaty of Ganghwa and culminated in Korea’s formal annexation between 1910–45.
While the Taiwanese display a more nuanced attitude towards their former colonial masters, Koreans repudiate them unequivocally. Anyone who resisted or fell victim to Japanese aggression has subsequently been martyrised. The first to enter this pantheon was Admiral Yi Sun-sin, whose statue proudly occupies Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Plaza. His successive victories against Japanese naval forces during the Imjin War in the late sixteenth century arrested their incursions into Korea for nearly 300 years. Another oft-exalted figure is the nationalist An Jung-geun. He assassinated a former Japanese prime minister in 1909, for which he was executed. A school class attended his memorial museum at the same time as me. The pupils were encouraged to write expressions of thanks on heart-shaped post-it notes to their revolutionary martyr. The enmity that permeates Korean discourse of Japanese rule is well-founded. My visit to the Seodaemun Prison History Hall highlighted their abhorrent treatment of political malcontents.
Yet nothing rankles deeper than the issue of “comfort women”. This refers to the Japanese military’s sexual enslavement of between 50,000–300,000 women, overwhelmingly Korean, in occupied Asia before and during the Second World War. I visited the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul and the House of Sharing – a nursing home and museum in Gwangju, south of the capital – which together threw their harrowing experiences into relief. The documents and blueprints on display evinced heavily bureaucratised processes eerily redolent of Nazi extermination programmes. Unlike reconciliation efforts in Germany, however, Japan’s acknowledgment of its culpability has been inadequate and equivocal. The Wednesday demonstrations that have taken place outside the Japanese embassy unremittingly since 1991 have largely fallen on deaf ears. Just nine South Korean survivors remain with little prospect that they will see justice in their lifetimes. Despite this deeply unsatisfactory situation, I was encouraged by the amazing work I saw at the House of Sharing. This nursing home has helped to ensure a level of dignity and comfort for these victims in their final years and will continue to raise the flag for this issue when they are no longer around to. It was a privilege to visit and a very worthy charitable cause to anyone so inclined.