[Lee Kyong-hee] Yoon’s dangerous spin on history

Saburo Ienaga, arguably the most famous historian in 20th-century Japan, waged a more than 30-year fight against his government’s efforts to omit wartime atrocities from school textbooks. “Even if you hide from the Japanese,” he declared, “the people in other countries know about them. The side that inflicted sufferings forgets, but the side that suffered doesn’t forget.”

Not necessarily so, one may say, when it comes to the current Korean administration.

Addressing the National Liberation Day ceremony on Aug. 15, President Yoon Suk Yeol again defied its purpose. In remembering the end of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea, he followed Japanese textbooks in omitting the brutal wrongdoings committed. Instead, he vilified the “pseudo-intellectuals and demagogues who distribute fake news,” seemingly referring to his critics at home and defining them as “anti-freedom, anti-unification forces.”

After 25 months of observing Yoon, a former prosecutor, everyone has seen how he will ignore facts and display gross tone deafness in the court of public opinion. But public outrage is not diminished, and the administration’s “What’s the use?” attitude only deepens the fury. The next day, Kim Tae-hyo, a senior presidential advisor on national security, contended that Japan has issued repeated apologies and feels “fatigue” over dealing with its wartime history. “What matters is Japan’s intent,” Kim said. “If you force an apology from someone who doesn’t feel like to, can the apology be considered genuine?”

Pouring more salt on emotional and physical wounds, Yoon avoided explaining his controversial seating of a revisionist history professor, Kim Hyoung-suk, at the helm of the Independence Hall of Korea, a major state facility upholding the spirit of anti-Japanese independence struggle.

The ruckus apparently boils down to two historical issues: the nationality of Koreans under the Japanese rule and the founding date of the Republic of Korea. Professor Kim, widely seen as a proponent of New Right views on Korea-Japan relations, reportedly stated during the selection interview that Koreans were Japanese nationals during the colonial period because their country no longer existed.

The Korea-Japan Treaty, signed on Aug. 22, 1910 under Japan’s coercion, stipulates that “His Majesty the Emperor of Korea makes the complete and permanent cession to His Majesty the Emperor of Japan of all rights of sovereignty over the whole of Korea.” Japan’s Imperial Edict 318, promulgated along with the treaty a week later, says, “We hereby authorize the change of name of Korea to Chosen [Joseon] and make it official.” Japan never enforced its nationality law in Korea. It separately administered the Korean population with a family registry system. Koreans were considered “Japanese subjects,” distinguished from “Japanese citizens” endowed with rights and freedoms, and targets of the “kominka” policy of transformation into imperial subjects.

In 1919, in the wake of the March First Movement, the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea was set up in Shanghai as a government-in-exile. The question of the founding date of the Republic of Korea raises issues about the legal identity of Koreans up to the formal establishment of the ROK government in 1948.

Most independence-related organizations boycotted the National Liberation Day ceremony hosted by the government, and so did opposition parties. They marked the day in a separate ceremony, an unprecedented split.

“Degenerate historical ideas tainted with distortion and pro-Japanese views are rampaging, throwing our society into confusion,” said Lee Jong-chan, president of the Heritage of Korean Independence, the largest organization of independence fighters and their descendants, addressing their separate ceremony. “No matter what, a history written with blood cannot be covered with a history written with tongue.”

Yoon should have listened to the views of different groups and individuals on related documents and historical circumstances, rather than ramming through his regressive perspective and sticking to his disputed appointment plan. But, unfortunately, Yoon’s inaction followed a pattern. His appointment of Kim comes on the heels of a string of similar controversial appointments of New Right scholars, who justify Japan’s colonization of Korea, as heads of key state institutions handling the nation’s history.

Most recently, Korea supported Japan’s nomination for the UNESCO World Heritage inscription of Sado Island Gold Mines while Japan allegedly rejected its request for presentation of information on Korean forced laborers who toiled in the mines’ harsh environment during World War II.

Instead of igniting conflict and division, Yoon should try to help achieve consensus and harmony by healing the old scars and filling chasms, given the painful journeys that different groups of the nation have taken in coping with the rough tides of history, including the methods of independence movement.

The Yoon administration’s one-sided concessions in sensitive historical issues have aroused suspicions and naturally, plenty of questions. After more than two years of bending the knee, what has Yoon achieved with Japan? And what does he ultimately intend to achieve through his diplomacy of subservience?

Forging better ties with a neighbor and going forward together is advisable.

No doubt, strengthening three-way cooperation with Tokyo and Washington in the emerging, high-risk global order is important.

For a genuine and sustainable peace in the region, however, Yoon and his policymakers should deal with their Japanese counterparts from a moral high ground, not appeasing and assisting them in whitewashing a dark history.

Lee Kyong-hee

Lee Kyong-hee is a former editor-in-chief of The Korea Herald. The views expressed here are the writer's own. -- Ed.