Abstract
August 15 remains an important day in Korean and Japanese cultures for the two peoples, the former commemorating their liberation from colonial rule and the latter lamenting the end of the tragedy that had befallen their nation. On this day in 1945, the emperor declared his country’s intention to accept the Allied forces’ surrender terms. This date, however, is a myth of sorts as the Koreans were soon after forced into division and further subjugation at the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, who divided postwar occupation responsibilities. For the Japanese, the emperor’s unprecedented broadcast may have ended the bombing of Japanese cities, but it did not bring about a general return of Japanese soldiers from Pacific War battlefields. These days, however, the day is marked for concluding two tragic periods of their histories, but with very different sentiments. In this article the author traces his observations on how the Japanese and Koreans observe August 15 in contemporary times.
Introduction
Each year, August 15 is commemorated in three states across Northeast Asia: the two Koreas—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea)—and Japan, but with totally different sentiments.1 For the Koreas, the day carries the dual significance of liberation from colonial Japan, but also the beginning of their divided history. In the ROK this day is known as Kwangbokchŭl, or the “day that the light returned.” They also remember their state’s founding day in 1948. The DPRK, which was officially inaugurated the following month on September 9, observes the day as Chogukhaebangŭl, or the day of the colonial “liberation of the Fatherland.” In Japan, on the other hand, August 15 commemorates the end of the Pacific War (Shūsen kinenbi), the day that the emperor delivered his “Jewel Voice broadcast” (Gyokuon hōsō) throughout the nation and the empire to end the war. Here he announced that Japan was prepared to accept the Allied forces’ terms of surrender as stated in the Potsdam Declaration, which was issued on July 26, 1945.
Both the Koreans and the Japanese misrepresent the significance of this day. While the Koreans technically were liberated from colonial occupation by Japan’s decision to end the war, their subjugator’s influence continued in southern Korea up to the United States’ arrival in Korea in September 1945, and beyond.2 For the Japanese, even though the emperor announced his decision to end the war (sensō wo owaraseru), his broadcast did not completely end the fighting as battles continued to rage afterwards. The solemn day bookmarks a series of Pacific War commemorative ceremonies that lead up to the day, starting in Okinawa on June 23, the day the battles there finally ended, and continue into early August in Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) to remember the days that atomic bombs were dropped on those cities. It also did not bring all overseas Japanese home. Many of the overseas Japanese subjects joined armies across the region which experienced fighting for years after.3 Also, the Soviet Union continued to battle Japanese troops beyond this date. They also transported an estimated 550,000 to 750,000 Japanese men as prisoners to labor camps in Siberia, tens of thousands of whom died in captivity. The remains of as many as 30,000 Japanese who died while trying to repatriate remain entombed in scattered graves throughout the DPRK.4 One soldier, Onoda Hirō, remained active in the jungles of the Philippine Islands until 1974 when he was finally convinced to surrender.
For the Allied forces, August 15 is remembered as VJ Day, but the war would not officially end until September 2, when the Japanese formally signed surrender papers aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Similar surrender ceremonies continued in China into October with one taking place on October 10 in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Today there is no official national day of remembrance in the United States to commemorate the end of the bloody years that sent Americans to fight on European and Asian war fronts.
Two sabbatical years, and close residential proximity, situated me within an hour’s journey of the two capitals on separate occasions to observe how the Korean and Japanese peoples observe this day. Assuming that the more interesting events would take place in their respective capitals, Seoul and Tokyo, I limited my travels to these two cities; I did not go elsewhere. Here I found the two peoples observing this day to commemorate a single event, but in very different ways, and for very different reasons.
Preserving (and Destroying) Historic Memory
Nations go to great lengths to preserve their histories by designating important sites, buildings, and dates to remind the living of the significance. Guy Podoler explains that nations consume “commemorative landscapes …as historical texts [with] the understanding of which sheds light on the way nations perceive, establish, and convey their identity.”5 The keyword here is “identity,” a concept necessary to preserve and disseminate a united national narrative among the nation’s constituents. Doing so restricts competing narratives which are given a limited space (if any), lest they interfere with the hegemonic story that the nation wishes its people to accept as its one “true” history. This involves the nation assigning importance to specific events to its national narratives. It allows the state to draw differences from other states that share the same date for similar events, such as August 15 does for the Japanese and Koreans. Often the state finds it necessary to silence or engage the people in forgetting certain aspects that conflict with this story, even going so far as to destroy historical sites for this purpose.
While elements of the narrative become more permanently engraved in this national narrative (through, for example, school textbooks and museums), other occasions engrave the dates and stories of the events on calendars and monuments to remind the nation of their importance, as well as the reasons why they are deemed important. These dates, depending on the degree of importance that the state affords them, become national holidays or simply special days set aside to commemorate the particular event. The United States, for example, commemorates November 11 as a special holiday (Veterans Day) that was originally formed to remember the date when the belligerent participants laid down their arms to return the world from the horrors of the First World War (it has since been expanded to include people who participated in all wars). However, as mentioned above, no similar official holiday has been proclaimed to remember when the Second World War ended. The days, however, are given importance to different degrees in the collective memories of other nations for different reasons.
Both Japan and the Koreas include a number of sites that are designed to preserve their respective national narrative which, like many other countries, is heavily formed around war. Japan maintains various museums across the archipelago that are dedicated to tell the story of its war history, particularly the Asia Pacific wars (1931–1945) and their aftermaths. These range from the Yūshūkan (which explains why Japan had to go to war), to the Shōwa-kan (which details how the Japanese survived the war and managed to rebound into an economic powerhouse), to the Chiran Peace Museum in Kyushu (which honors the memory of the suicidal Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai [Kamikaze] pilots).
These narratives are reinforced in school textbooks, comic books, films, and the like. Around Japan’s capital city of Tokyo, there are markers situated to designate other events, many from previous wars, to inform people of their significance. For example, three temples in Tokyo house gates with bullet and cannon holes that were penetrated by Meiji forces in 1868 to enter Kan’ei temple complex (presently Ueno Park) to flush out Tokugawa loyalists who had assembled there. Signs inform viewers of the gates’ significance.6 Destruction caused by the aerial bombings that the United States inflicted upon the Japanese capital in the last year of the Pacific War is limited mainly in the form of signs telling how a certain temple or gate was destroyed by the attacks before being rebuilt over the postwar years.7
Such Korean remnants in Seoul are few and primarily limited to the Korean War due to the war’s destruction and to more recent urban development. There are a number of colonial-era buildings that remain.8 Most signs can be found in or around museums. They include exhibits from primarily the Korean War, and to a lesser extent the Imjin wars of the sixteenth century, when Hideyoshi Toyotomi tried to subdue Korea before his planned attack on China. The War Memorial of Korea (Chŏnjaeng Kinyŏmgwan) located in the Yongsam area, for example, greets visitors with the “Clock Tower of Peace,” a bronze statue made up of female figures holding two clocks over a pile of rubble: one with the present time; another frozen at June 25, 4:00 a.m. to remind visitors of the exact time when the ROK remembers being invaded by DPRK armies from the north to initiate the Korean War. Space for a third clock, designed to include a yet another clock that will be situated to indicate the time when the north and south are reunified, is set aside for this purpose. In P’yŏngyang in the DPRK there is a war museum, the Fatherland Liberation War Victory Memorial Hall (Choguk Haebang Chŏnchaeng Sŭnri Kinyŏmgwan) that displays U.S. weapons captured in battles during the Korean War.
Left: The two clocks that make up the Clock Tower of Peace. Right: Items captured by the DPRK armies that are on display at the country’s war museum in P’yŏngyang.
These places serve to add to the national narrative by reminding the nation of the more trying times that they faced in previous years and the sacrifices that its people made to ensure the state’s continuity.
August 15, 1945
August 15 is special for both Japan and the Koreas, but for very different reasons. Uniting them is the Japanese emperor’s August 15, 1945 announcement to Japan, its empire, and to the world, that his country was prepared to accept the demands of the Allied forces. Prior to this speech, people throughout the empire were informed that his majesty would broadcast an important message to his subjects at noon on that day. People were to gather around radios at this time, which many did. The emperor’s words were stilted, projected in a form of the Japanese language with which many were not familiar. That unusually formal Japanese oratory style and the poor radio reception further complicated the nation’s understanding of the emperor’s unprecedented broadcast—most Japanese had never heard his voice before that day.9 It was followed by a short summary offered by an NHK announcer that provided people with the gist of the emperor’s message: the war was over; Japan had agreed to surrender to the Allied forces. Pictures from this time show a large number of Japanese who had gathered outside the palace walls bowing in the emperor’s direction, many to reportedly offer their apologies for their wartime efforts being insufficient to deliver victory to Japan. Others, unable to bear the shame of defeat, chose to commit suicide. Still others recall acknowledging a feeling of relief that fifteen years of continuous warfare and sacrifice were finally behind them.10
In contrast, Koreans in Japan and around the empire took to the streets in celebration as they translated Japan’s defeat into their country’s liberation from colonial rule. The Shinto shrines were the first to go as Korean people burned many of the shrines that the Japanese had erected across the Peninsula. The sight of Koreans marching in celebration frightened some Japanese, who in most cases were outnumbered. Smoke filled the skies as the colonizers took to burning important and potentially incriminating documents.11 At this point, perhaps, few Koreans (particularly those residing in Korea) would know that their country’s liberation would be followed by an undetermined period of Allied occupation, or that the Japanese would be instructed to remain in power in southern Korea until the U.S. arrived to formally accept their surrender, at least until the U.S. agreed to drop fliers informing the Koreans of this decision.12
Various State Department postwar plans for Korea (and Japan) had the U.S. forming a four-state coalition to include China, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to occupy these territories.13 For the Korean peninsula to be divided at the 38th parallel, however, was a plan proposed by the U.S. only after the Soviet armies had entered the war against Japan and had commenced their invasion of Manchuria and northern Korea, and after the Japanese had signaled their willingness to end the war around August 11. The Soviet Union accepted the U.S. proposal within days and, to the surprise of many U.S. officials, honored their commitment even though their armies could easily have occupied the entire peninsula. Indeed, for the first week following the emperor’s broadcast, the Japanese administration in Seoul had prepared to surrender to the Soviets. After learning that they would surrender to the U.S., they reported to U.S. military officials, still in Okinawa, of their recent encounters with Soviet military personnel below the line of division.14 Thus, while the Korean people continue to commemorate the significance of the events of August 15, 1945, the day would be followed by continued Japanese influence over their affairs, a post-liberation divided occupation by the United States and the Soviet Union, a brutal three-year war, decades of dictatorial administrations, and continued division of the peninsula.
Seoul 2013
Two sabbatical years put me in Seoul on August 15 in 2013 and 2020. In 2013, I, along with a few students, travelled throughout the city to discover what events attracted South Korean attention on this day. Various television shows the previous night set the tone of the day by carrying documentaries related to Korea’s colonial history. One television program, carried on the evening of August 14, argued that the bombing of Hiroshima could have been avoided if Japan had surrendered earlier, thus liberating Korea a week earlier, preventing the Soviets from entering the war, and keeping Korea united. Thus, our first inclination was to visit the spots where anti-Japanese activity might occur. Also, a prerecorded interview I conducted with the Arirang television station that was scheduled to air this day was suddenly cancelled and replaced due to a comment I made which the station interpreted to be overly sympathetic to the Japanese.
This was not to be the case. The first indication was that it was access to the United States embassy, rather than the Japanese embassy, that the police had blocked off. In contrast to this, there was nothing to obstruct us from making our way to the Japanese embassy. A space across the street from the Japanese embassy has traditionally been the site that Koreans have used to deliver anti-Japanese messages. Since January 1992, weekly Wednesday-demonstrations organized by The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery (Hanguk chŏngsin taemunje taech’aek hyŏqŭihoi) had gathered to show their support for the country’s unresolved military “comfort women” grievances. In 2001, the Statue of Peace (Pyŏnghwa ŭi sonŏsang), depicting a young girl sitting on a bench that symbolically represents a woman that the Japanese abused during the wartime period in the form of “sexual slavery,” was created. The elimination of this statue, which stares up at the Japanese embassy across the street, had been at the center of talks between Korean and Japanese leaders who have met in an effort to resolve lingering colonial-era issues.15
Left: The Statue of Peace on a cold December morning, thus dressed to keep warm. Right: A Korean in traditional costume lecturing the Japanese from across the street of the Japanese embassy in Seoul on August 15, 2013.
On this particular day, however, save for a single man dressed in traditional Korean costume yelling anti-Japanese messages in the direction of the embassy, accompanied by a few curious bystanders, there was little action. The other colonial era-related ceremony that I witnessed on that day took place in Seoul City Hall Plaza, a grassy space in front of the city hall building often used for public gatherings. (When Japan played the ROK in the World Baseball Classic in 2009, for example, South Koreans gathered here to support the home team. Video screens were set up and t-shirts were being sold). On this day an event was being staged to honor Korean heroes in the anti-Japanese liberation movement. Here, too, a sparse crowd was in attendance, with many of the chairs that had been prepared to accommodate a larger crowd remaining unoccupied.
Ceremony at Seoul City Hall Plaza to honor anti-Japanese patriots who fought for their country’s liberation.
The scene in front of Seoul Station contrasted with these sparsely attended sites quite dramatically. Here a large number of people had gathered for a reason at best indirectly related to Japan’s colonial history, but closely related to its aftermath, as the date also signifies the start of the Peninsula’s divided history. It was the United States that first proposed division at the 38th parallel to demarcate the Soviet (north) and U.S. (south) zones of occupation in the late hours of August 10–11, 1945; Soviet acceptance of this proposal, and both sides failing to work toward erasing this dividing line, ushered in the long period of division. Some Koreans contest that it is the superpower that remains a critical obstacle to the two Koreas advancing toward more congenial ties.16 People gathered here to demand a peaceful end to this history of Korean division. Signs calling for “unification” (t’ongil ŭl!) and for “peace” (p’yŏnghwa rŭl) signified demands of future aspirations rather than retribution of past colonial grievances. Blue Korean Peninsula maps, minus the DMZ line, graced many of the large posters that decorated the main stage. This particular rally was by far the best attended event that I saw in the city, both in terms of participants and the police force. The events of this day, however, were peaceful, thus rendering the strong show of authority as perhaps needless.17
Left: Demonstrators for peaceful unification gathering in front of Seoul Station. Right: Korean police near the site of one gathering.
Seoul 2020
Compared to 2013, in 2020 the magnitude of those in attendance at the events on this day had dropped dramatically, partially due to the Covid-19 virus and the inclement weather. The circumstances of the time had also changed from seven years previous, perhaps due to the inability of the Moon Jae-in (Mun Chae-in) administration to realize success with his controversial north-friendly efforts and his shaky economic policies. The Seoul Station area was nearly empty. Instead, many people had gathered along the streets and sidewalks in Seoul’s downtown area, between the City Hall and the Kwanghwamun Palace squares. Those who braved the at times heavy rainfall, as well as the threat of virus infection, appeared to be drawn together in opposition to, rather than in support of, unification, at least as Moon saw it unfolding.
A recent trend in ROK politics is that comparatively DPRK-friendly administrations tend to get voted out of office when their north-friendly efforts fail to produce concrete results, only to be voted back into office when conservative get-tough-policies with DPRK administrations threaten peninsula security. Neither party seems to have come up with the formula needed to improve these relations, due in no small part to the fact that the United States insists that the southern triangle (U.S. Japan, and the ROK) be on the same page when they try to deal with the DPRK. That the U.S. conditions advancement on the DPRK fulfilling overly stringent prerequisites, such as a sincere movement toward total denuclearization and its verification on having done so, inhibits any progress toward peaceful resolution of these issues, particularly when the DPRK insists on negotiations progressing in a reciprocal tit-for-tat way.18 The DPRK’s missile and nuclear tests play a major role in orchestrating these shifts in ROK politics.
The majority of the crowd gathered on this occasion appeared to be in opposition to the current administration, particularly its economic policies and its positive, but unsuccessful, overtures to the DPRK which included Moon’s meeting with DPRK leader Kim Jong-un (Kim Chŏng-un) on at least three occasions. Signs sprinkled throughout the crowd called for his dismissal (Mun Che-in ŭl p’amyŏn handae). One other sign, written in English, declared the recent April 15, 2019 midterm elections, which strengthened Moon Jae-in’s party majority, an “illegal fraud.” The only hints of success of his efforts to come to terms with Kim Jong-un had been in Moon’s convincing U.S. President Donald Trump to meet with the DPRK leader. Unfortunately, their three meetings—in Singapore (2018), at the DMZ (2019), and in Hanoi (2019)—had ended in failure. Some in the crowd demanded the release of Moon’s impeached and imprisoned predecessor, Pak Kŭn-hye. The crowd, which did not directly voice a stance on unification, was clearly rallying for stronger ROK-United States ties, a sign of their support for a tougher stance toward the DPRK. One person donned a Donald Trump mask to express his apparently pro-U.S. sentiment, a curious choice considering the amicable relations that Trump reported to have developed with the DPRK leader. The Korea Times reported the following day that among the estimated 10,000 demonstrators, thirty had been arrested for assaulting police and ignoring Covid-19 virus protocol as directed by the government.19
Thus, we see here a conflict of historical memory, and an attempt by the opposition to return ROK policy away from “carrot” policies to engage the communist state into developing a working relationship. What policy the opposition advocated for is further from a state of peaceful unification as was popular in 2013, and instead closer to the hardline policies that united the ROK and U.S. forces against the DPRK (as well as China and Russia), in many ways resembling the divisions that existed during the Cold War.
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