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FTR #1141 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: The late Park Won-soon was a leading political reformer and critic in South Korean politics, as well as being a probable candidate in the 2022 presidential campaign. Of particular significance in assessing the suspicious circumstances of his death are the overlapping areas in which his criticism placed him afoul of political, economic and historical dynamics stemming from the Japanese Golden Lily program and the placement of that consummate wealth at the foundation of the post-World War II American and global system.
In addition, the “Black Gold” accumulated through the Golden Lily program and Nazi loot provided an economic foundation for post-World War II covert operations. (FTR #‘s 427, 428, 446, 451, 501, 688, 689, 1106, 1107 & 1108 deal with the subject of the Golden Lily program successfully implemented by the Japanese to loot Asia.)
An advocate of reconciliation between North and South Korea, Park Won-soon’s stance on the two nations placed him at odds with prevailing American, South Korean and Japanese national security policy.
A lawsuit was filed by a conservative South Korean lawyer against the Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un. This is noteworthy in the context of the death of Park Won-soon, who was an advocate of reconciliation between North and South Korea. Korean right-wingers have called him a “commie” for his advocacy of improved relations between the countries.
Relations between the Koreas are very much on the front burner.
Much of the program details the centuries-long Japanese looting of Korea, culminating in Japan’s 1905 colonization of that country. In 1910, Korea was declared to be Japanese national territory, thereby denominating all material and cultural wealth of Korea as Japanese.
The bulk of the program consists of a history of Japan’s colonization of Korea. That colonial occupation was a major target of the late Park Won-soon’s criticism.
Again, when it incorporated the Golden Lily wealth into the postwar “Black Gold” cache and John Foster Dulles engineered the 1951 Peace Treaty, the U.S. “signed off” on Japan’s actions in Korea and elsewhere in Asia.
Japan’s looting of Korea took place over centuries. In Gold Warriors, the Seagraves present the history of Japan’s rape of Korea, beginning with their account of the grisly murder of Korean Queen Min in 1894. ” . . . . the defenseless queen was stabbed and slashed repeatedly, and carried wailing out to the palace garden where she was thrown onto a pile of firewood, drenched with kerosene, and set aflame. An american military advisor, General William Dye, was one of several foreigners who heard and saw the killers milling around in the palace compound with dawn swords while the queen was burned alive. . . .”
A snapshot of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, a focal point of criticism of Park Won-soon:” . . . . [General] Terauchi was extraordinarily brutal, setting a precedent for Japanese behavior in all the countries, it would occupy over coming decades. Determined to crush all resistance, he told Koreans, ‘I will whip you with scorpions!’ He set up a sadistic police force of Korean yakuza, ordering it to use torture as a matter of course, for ‘no Oriental can be expected to tell the truth except under torture’. These police were closely supervised by Japan’s gestapo, the kempeitai. . . . ‘Japan’s aim,’ said Korean historian Yi Kibeck, ‘was to eradicate consciousness of Korean national identity, roots and all, and thus to obliterate the very existence of the Korean people from the face of the earth.’ . . . the peninsula was stripped of everything from artworks to root vegetables. As Korea now belonged to Japan, the transfer of cultural property—looting—was not theft. How can you steal something that already belongs to you? . . .”
Key elements of analysis of the Japanese political, economic and cultural decimation of Korea: The looting of Korea took place over centuries; the Black Ocean and Black Dragon societies (forerunners of the Unification Church and, possibly, the Shincheonji cult) played a key role in instigating the incremental Japanese conquest of Korea; the economic and cultural looting of Korea had already rendered that country one of the weakest in Asia by the nineteenth century; (Korea had been one of the most advanced civilizations on earth, prior to Japanese conquest); for centuries, China had functioned as a military protector of Korea; as noted above, there was wholesale economic and cultural plunder; millions of Koreans were enslaved to work in Japan and, during World War II, in Golden Lily facilities, where they were worked to death or buried alive; many more Koreans were conscripted as soldiers into Japan’s army; torture was routine in Japan’s occupation of Korea, as was summary execution and imprisonment on trumped-up charges; Koreans were forbidden from speaking their own language; even Japanese school teachers wore uniforms and carried swords; as highlighted in the previous program, many Korean women were forced to become slave prostitutes for the Japanese army–“Comfort Women.”
After a preview of discussion of John Foster Dulles and his negotiation of the 1951 Peace Treaty institutionalizing the looting and brutalization of Asia by the Japanese–a treaty that received diplomatic momentum from the advent of the Korean War–we conclude with an obituary of a South Korean general whose career is an embodiment of the deep politics surrounding the life and death of Park Won-soon.
General Paik Sun-yup was a Korean four-star general, whose service in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II has been a focal point of controversy in South Korea. General Sun-yup embodied the ongoing controversy in Korea over Japan’s occupation and the subsequent unfolding of events leading up to, and including the Korean War. “. . . . In 1941, he joined the army of Manchukuo, a puppet state that imperial Japan had established in Manchuria, and served in a unit known for hunting down Korean guerrillas fighting for independence . . .”
1. A lawsuit was filed by a conservative South Korean lawyer against the Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un. This is noteworthy in the context of the death of Park Won-soon, who was an advocate of reconciliation between North and South Korea. Korean right-wingers have called him a “commie” for his advocacy of improved relations between the countries.
Relations between the Koreas are very much on the front burner.
After North Korea blew up an inter-Korean liaison office on its own soil last month, plunging relations with South Korea to a diplomatic nadir, a conservative activist lawyer in the South decided that one person was responsible; Kim Yo-jong, the only sister of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. So he filed a lawsuit against Ms. Kim. . . .
2. The bulk of the program consists of a history of Japan’s colonization of Korea. That colonial occupation was another target of the late Park Won-soon’s criticism.
Japan’s looting of Korea took place over centuries. In Gold Warriors, the Seagraves present the history of Japan’s rape of Korea, beginning with their account of the grisly murder of Korean Queen Min in 1894. ” . . . . the defenseless queen was stabbed and slashed repeatedly, and carried wailing out to the palace garden where she was thrown onto a pile of firewood, drenched with kerosene, and set aflame. An american military advisor, General William Dye, was one of several foreigners who heard and saw the killers milling around in the palace compound with dawn swords while the queen was burned alive. . . .”
A snapshot of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, a focal point of criticism of Park Won-soon:” . . . . [General] Terauchi was extraordinarily brutal, setting a precedent for Japanese behavior in all the countries, it would occupy over coming decades. Determined to crush all resistance, he told Koreans, ‘I will whip you with scorpions!’ He set up a sadistic police force of Korean yakuza, ordering it to use torture as a matter of course, for ‘no Oriental can be expected to tell the truth except under torture’. These police were closely supervised by Japan’s gestapo, the kempeitai. . . . ‘Japan’s aim,’ said Korean historian Yi Kibeck, ‘was to eradicate consciousness of Korean national identity, roots and all, and thus to obliterate the very existence of the Korean people from the face of the earth.’ . . . the peninsula was stripped of everything from artworks to root vegetables. As Korea now belonged to Japan, the transfer of cultural property—looting—was not theft. How can you steal something that already belongs to you? . . .”
Key elements of analysis of the Japanese political, economic and cultural decimation of Korea: The looting of Korea took place over centuries; the Black Ocean and Black Dragon societies (forerunners of the Unification Church and, possibly, the Shincheonji cult) played a key role in instigating the incremental Japanese conquest of Korea; the economic and cultural looting of Korea had already rendered that country one of the weakest in Asia by the nineteenth century; (Korea had been one of the most advanced civilizations on earth, prior to Japanese conquest); for centuries, China had functioned as a military protector of Korea; as noted above, there was wholesale economic and cultural plunder; millions of Koreans were enslaved to work in Japan and, during World War II, in Golden Lily facilities, where they were worked to death or buried alive; many more Koreans were conscripted as soldiers into Japan’s army; torture was routine in Japan’s occupation of Korea, as was summary execution and imprisonment on trumped-up charges; Koreans were forbidden from speaking their own language; even Japanese school teachers wore uniforms and carried swords; as highlighted in the previous program, many Korean women were forced to become slave prostitutes for the Japanese army–“Comfort Women.”
. . . . During the night of Octoer 7. 1895, thirty Japanese assassins forced their way into Korea’s royal palace in Seoul. Bursting into the queen’s private quarters, they cut down two ladies-in-waiting and cornered Queen Min. When the Minister of the Royal Household tried to shield her, a swordsman slashed off both his hands. the defenseless queen was stabbed and slashed repeatedly, and carried wailing out to the palace garden where she was thrown onto a pile of firewood, drenched with kerosene, and set aflame. An american military advisor, General William Dye, was one of several foreigners who heard and saw the killers milling around in the palace compound with dawn swords while the queen was burned alive. Japan declared that the murders were committed by “Koreans dressed as Japanese in European clothes”–a gloss greeted with ridicule by the diplomatic community. According to the British minister in Tokyo, Sir Ernest Satow, First Secretary Sugimura of the Japanese legation in Korea led the assassins.
The grisly murder of Queen Min was a turning point in Japan’s effort to gain control of Korea. Her husband King Kojong was a weakling, controlled by the queen’s faction, who were allied with China against Japan. Once the queen was dead, the Japanese could easily control the king, and put n end to Chinese interference.
The coup was planned by Miura Goro, agent of Japan’s aggressive Yamagata clique. At first, the killing was to be done by Japanese-trained Korean soldiers, so it could be passed off as an internal matter. But to make sure nothing went wrong, Miura called for help from the Japanese terrorist organization Black Ocean. Many of its members were in Korea posing as business agents of Japanese companies, including the oldest zaibatsu, Mitsui. Black Ocean and another secret society called Black Dragon functioned as Japan’s paramilitaries on the Asian mainland, carrying out dirty work that could be denied by Tokyo. They were in position throughout Korea and China, running brothels, pharmacies, pawnshops, and building networks of influence by supplying local men with money, sexual favors, alcohol, drugs, pornography, and Spanish Fly. While Black Ocean was obsessed with Korea, Black Dragon (named for the Amur or Black Dragon River separating Manchuria from Siberia) was dedicated to blocking Russian encroachment, and seizing China for Japan. Black Ocean provided Miura with the professional assassins he needed, and the rest of the killers were security men from Japan’s consulate. Whether they intended to kill the queen in full view of foreign observers is another matter. Japanese conspiracies often began quietly, then went out of control.
Many Japanese leaders like statesman Ito Hirobumi were enlightened and reasonable men who would have vetoed the murder, had they known. But there was a deep contradiction inside Japan following the Meiji Restoration in the nineteenth century. Two cliques competed ruthlessly for power behind the throne, and for influence over the Meiji Emperor. Those associated with Ito were more cosmopolitan, emulating the role of Bismarck in guiding Kaiser Wilhelm, or Disraeli in guiding Queen Victoria. Those allied with General Yamagata were throw backs to medieval Japan, where power worked in the shadows with assassins, surprise attacks, and treachery. While Yamagata built a modern conscript army to replace Japan’s traditional samurai forces, he also built a network of spies, secret police, yakuza gangsters and superpatriots. These were key elements of the police state Yamagata was creating in Japan. Underworld godfathers were vital component of Japan’s ruling structure. Members of the imperial family, and the financial elite that controls Japan, had intimate ties to top gangsters. When Yamagata’s armies invaded Korea and Manchuria, gangsters were the cutting edge. Thereafter, Japan’s underworld played a major role in looting Asia over fifty years, 1895–1945.
Queen Min’s murder marks the beginning of this half-century of extreme Japanese brutality and industrial scale plunder. Her killing shows how easily the mask of Japan’s good intentions could slip, to reveal hideous reality.
Other Japanese strategies also began quietly, then got out of hand. For example, it is unlikely that Japan intended all along to have its army stage the Rape of Nanking in 1937, butchering some 300,000 defenseless people in full view of foreign observers with cameras. Had the Rape happened only once, it might have been a grotesque accident. But variations of Nanking occurred many times during Japan’s lightning conquest of East and Southeast Asia. By the time they overran Singapore in 1942, the atrocities committed against Overseas Chinese civilians there—the Sook Ching massacres—were happening all over Southeast Asia, and not only to Chinese. That this occurred so often suggests there was more to Japan’s aggression than a purely military operation. Why, after successfully conquering a neighboring country, did Japan torment the Chinese and others who had money or property? The explanation lies in the shadows behind the army. Few history books take into account the role of the underworld, because scholars rarely study outlaws. With Japan, we must always consider the underworld because it permeates the power structure, as darkly satirized by the films of Itami Juzo.
The conquest of Korea was Japan’s first experiment in foreign plunder on an industrial scale, so there was plenty for the underworld to do. Westerners know so little about Korea that it is surprising how much there was to steal. Today, North and South Korea are only vestiges of a distinguished past. Historian Bruce Cumings points out that “Korea’s influence on Japan was far greater than Japan’s influence on Korea”. In ancient times Japan was raided by marauders from the Korean peninsula, and raided Korea in return, but these were bands of swordsmen and archers, not armored regiments. Such raids caused mutual loathing of Koreans and Japanese that has its parallel in the Catholic and Protestant troubles of Northern Ireland. A quick thumbnail history explains this hatred, and show how Japan’s aggression began.
When they first started feuding two thousand years ago, there was no Korea or Japan, as we know them today. In different parts of the Korean peninsula were city-states with highly developed economies supporting magnificent religious, literary and artistic cultures. Their porcelain is among the most prized in the world today, along with elegant paintings, sculpture, and gold filigree. The elite lived in palaces on great estates, with thousands of sales. Taking no interest in commerce or warfare, they developed astronomy, mathematics, wood block printing, and invented movable type long before anyone else. Until the sixteenth century, Korea had one of the world’s most advanced civilizations.
Meanwhile, in the secluded islands of Japan, immigrants from China and Korea were linked in a loose confederation ruled by Shinto priests and priestesses. For a thousand years, these rival domains feuded among themselves, before finally submitting to the central military dictatorship of the shoguns. Chronic conspiracy produced what one historian calls Japan’s ‘paranoid style’ in foreign relations. If Japanese treated each other ruthlessly, why treat foreigners otherwise?
Koreans regarded Japanese as ‘uncouth dwarves. Chinese were more cultivated, so Korea willingly accepted tributary role with China. In return, China protected Korea from Japan.
In the sixteenth century, after Japan was unified by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, he launched an invasion of Korea with 158,000 men. His plan was to crush Korea and erase its culture from the face of the earth. He nearly succeeded. After several years of cruel occupation, Korea was rescued by Admiral Yi Sun-shin’s famous Turtle Ship, the world’s first ironclad—65-feet long, firing cannon balls filled with nails. Admiral Yi cut Japan’s supply routes and destroyed its ships. Humiliated, Hideyoshi died soon afterward.
Despite this failure, the invaders profited richly by looting Korea. Their army included monks and scholars assigned to steal Korea’s finest manuscripts. Samurai kidnapped masters of ceramics such as the great Ri Sam-pyong, and made them slaves in Japan. A Korean scholar said the Japanese were “wild animals that only crave material goods and are totally ignorant of human morality”. Centuries later, when Japan invaded Korea again, its armies once more included teams of monks and scholars to find and loot the finest artworks.
Korea never recovered. In the nineteenth century, it was the weakest, least commercial country in East Asia, ripe for picking. China’s Manchu government, on the verge of collapse, was in no shape to defend Korea.
Following the Meiji Restoration, Japan made a convulsive effort to modernize, becoming the first Asian nation able to compete militarily with the West. As her army and navy developed, she was in a position to launch a campaign of mechanized conquest on the mainland, to acquire a colonial empire of her own. Her fist target was Korea. Politicians and army officers argued that if Japan did not grab Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan, they would be grabbed by Russia, France or England. General Yamagata and Black Ocean boss Toyama Mitsuru needed an incident that would give them an excuse to invade, while putting the blame on Korea. Yamagata told Toyama to “start a conflagration”—then it would be the army’s duty to go “extinguish the fire”.
Starting a fire in Korea was easy. Black Ocean terrorists attacked a rural religious sect called Tonghak. The Tonghaks struck back, causing some Japanese casualties. With this excuse, Tokyo rushed in troops to ‘protect’ its citizens in Korea. When news came that China was sending 1,500 soldiers aboard a chartered British ship, the S.S. Kowshing, a Japanese squadron intercepted the vessel and sank her with all aboard. This surprise attack set a precedent, followed many times by Japan in later decades.
China’s tottering Manchu government foolishly declared war on Japan. In September 1894, in the mouth of Korea’s Yalu River, the Japanese destroyed half of China’s navy in a single afternoon. Japan then captured Manchuria’s ‘impregnable’ Port Arthur, and the fortified harbor at Weihaiwei in Shantung province sinking all Chinese ships in the harbor. China sued for peace. By the end of February 1895, Japan controlled the whole of Korea and also Manchuria’s strategic Liaotung peninsula. China also gave Japan control of Taiwan, which became Tokyo’s first colony. When South Manchuria and Port Arthur also were turned over to Japan, France, Germany and Russia pressured Tokyo to return them.
It was at this point that Queen Min refused to cave in to Japanese bullying, and was murdered. The stage was now set for the unprecedented cruelties of the twentieth century. . . .
. . . . Now feeling invincible, Japan formally declared Korea a colony. Nobody asked Koreans what they thought. Western governments did not protest. Great numbers of Japanese arrived in the peninsula to make their fortunes. With them came legions of agents for the great zaibatsu conglomerates, seizing every commercial opportunity, every natural resource. Japan took control of law and order, creating new police and secret police networks. No longer making any pretense of chivalry, Japanese abused Korean sovereignty at every turn, crushing all resistance. A newspaper editor was arrested when he wrote: “Ah, how wretched it is. Our twenty million countrymen have become the slaves of another country!”
Not all Japanese were predators. Some earnestly believed that they were in Korea to help, not to plunder. Ito Hirobumi told Korean officials, “Your country does not have the power to defend itself. . . I am not insisting that your country commit suicide. . . I expect that if you thrust forward boldly, the day will come when you will advance to a position of equality with us and we will cooperate with one another.”
The appointment of Ito as the first Japanese viceroy of Korea gave the country some hope of rational government. But General Yamagata saw to it that Ito’s staff included Black Dragon boss Uchida Ryohei. Secretly financed from army funds, Uchida’s thugs went on a rampage, murdering 18,000 Koreans during Ito’s time s viceroy. Disgusted by the bloody meddling, Ito resigned in 1909 only to be shot dead by paid assassins. His murder was used as a pretext to demand full annexation of Korea. On August 22, 1910, Korea ceased to be a mere colony and was fully incorporated into Japanese territory. Japan’s army now had its own domain on the Asian mainland, free of interference from Tokyo politicians. One of Yamagata’s most rabid followers, General Terauchi Masatake, was appointed first governor-general of Korea. Terauchi, who had lost his right hand during a great samurai rebellion in the 1870s, had been army minister during the Russo-Japanese War. He now supervised the looting and plunder of Korea.
Although some Japanese Army officers were chivalrous, showed mercy, or refused to indulge in wanton killing, Terauchi was extraordinarily brutal, setting a precedent for Japanese behavior in all the countries, it would occupy over coming decades. Determined to crush all resistance, he told Koreans, “I will whip you with scorpions!” He set up a sadistic police force of Korean yakuza, ordering it to use torture as a matter of course, for “no Oriental can be expected to tell the truth except under torture”. These police were closely supervised by Japan’s gestapo, the kempeitai.
Many kempeitai agents wore civilian clothes, identified only by a chrysanthemum crest on the underside of a lapel. Eventually Japan spawned a network of these spies, informants, and terrorists throughout Asia. At the height of World War II, 35,000 official kempeitai were deployed throughout the Japanese Empire. The unofficial number was far greater, because of close integration with Black Dragon, Black Ocean, and other fanatical sects, working together ‘like teeth and lips’. Black Ocean boss Uchida reviewed all appointments of kempeitai officers sent to Korea.
Korean resistance was intense, but futile. In 1912, some 50,000 Koreans were arrested; by 1918 the number arrested annually rose to 140,000. During Korea’s first ten years of Japanese rule even Japanese schoolteachers wore uniforms and carried swords. Japan’s army stood guard while kempeitai and Black Ocean thugs pillaged the peninsula. Japanese police controlled rice production from paddy field to storehouse, so the majority could be shipped to Japan Yakuza were expert at extortion. In Japan, they used intimidation, extortion, kidnapping and murder, restrained only by prudence in selecting the victims. On the mainland there was no need for such restraint. Because Terauchi’s style was so brutal, Japanese bankers and businessmen made a public display of showing contempt for mercy. Eventually, the Terauchi style spread across Asia, remaining in place till 1945.
To be sure, Japan did modernize Korean industry, to some extent, but at terrible cost. Korean workers were paid one-fourth the wages of Japanese counterparts in the same factories. Terauchi forced Koreans to eat millet, while their rice was sent to Japan.
In this merciless way, the peninsula was stripped of everything from artworks to root vegetables. As Korea now belonged to Japan, the transfer of cultural property—looting—was not theft. How can you steal something that already belongs to you?
First on the wish-list was Korea’s famous celadon porcelain, which many thought surpassed China’s Tang porcelain. Korean stoneware was distinctive for its translucent blue-green glaze, with floral designs incised in the clay and filled with color before glazing. A Western expert called it “the most gracious and unaffected pottery ever made”. Although Japan had kidnapped Korea’s celadon masters in the sixteenth century, and these experts had discovered sources of fine clay in Kyushu, the porcelain they made in Japan was not the same spiritually. Japanese valued Korean celadon above all others for rituals and tea ceremony. Coveted also were examples of Korea’s punch’ong stoneware, and Choson white porcelain.
Some of this plunder was put on display at Tokyo’s Ueno Museum. Most ended up in private Japanese collections where it was never on public view, and rarely was seen even in private. Japanese collectors keep their treasures in vaults, taking single pieces out for personal viewing. So, most of Korea’s stolen antiquities remain lost from sight to this day.
When all Korea’s private collections were confiscated, experts studying court records and ancient manuscripts determined that the finest celadons still slept in the tombs of kings. To disguise the looting of these tombs, Terauchi introduced laws for the ‘preservation of historic sites. By preservation, he meant that the tombs would be looted and the valuable contents preserved in Japan. He then opened some two thousand tombs, including a royal tomb in Kaesong, which were emptied of their ancient celadons, Buddhist images, crowns, necklaces, earrings, bronze mirrors, and other ornamental treasures. Along the Taedong River near Pyongyang, some 1,400 tombs were opened and looted.
This wholesale theft was overseen by General Terauchi, personally. One of his first acts was to destroy the 4,000-room Kyungbok-goong Palace to make way for the construction of a residence for himself. To decorate his personal quarters, he chose 600 artworks from thousands being prepared for shipment to Japan.
Japanese private collectors and antique dealers carried off not only artworks, but classic literary texts and important national archives—all in the name of academic research art Japanese museums and universities. Tens of thousands of the finest books listed as Korean national treasures, including all 1,800 volumes of the Ri dynasty archives, were shipped to Japan. Scholars say some 200,000 volumes of ancient books of lesser distinction were then burned, as part of a deliberate program to erase Korea’s distinctive culture. They list more 42,000 cultural relics including ancient manuscripts, taken to Japan for ‘study’, and never returned. For good measure, the Japanese used dynamite to blow up a monument to King Taejo (1396–1398) and a monument to Sam-yong, the militant Buddhist priest who led the resistance to Japan’s samurai invasion in 1592.
“Japan’s aim,” said Korean historian Yi Kibeck, “was to eradicate consciousness of Korean national identity, roots and all, and thus to obliterate the very existence of the Korean people from the face of the earth.”
Once stripped of their heritage and identity, Koreans were to be made-over into second-class Japanese. Divested of their inherited land, they had their names changed into Japanese names, and were forced to adopt Shinto in place of their own Buddhist, Confucian or Christian beliefs. Japan’s emperor would be their only god, and any Korean who refused to acknowledge his divinity was arrested. Temples were looted of bronze bells and Buddhist statuary. Even ordinary religious metalwork was removed and melted down for weapons as ‘spiritual cooperation behind the guns.’ Koreans were to speak only Japanese; Korean writers could only publish in Japanese, and all schools taught only in Japanese. At home, Koreans were expected to speak Japanese to each other.
In 1907, Tokyo forced King Kojong to abdicate in favor of his retarded ten-year old son. They styled the boy ‘Crown Prince Imperial Yi Un’ and sent him off to Tokyo, claiming he would be educated side-by-side with Meiji’s grandsons—Princes Hirohito, Chichibu and Takamatsu. In truth, the boy was a hostage, whose survival depended on continued cooperation by Korea’s royal family. For some reason, Emperor Meiji found the oy sympathetic, and lavished attention and gifts on him, the sort of affection he never demonstrated toward his own grandsons. The boy was easily persuaded to sign away his claim to the Korean throne.
In subsequent decades, thousands of other Korean cultural artifacts were forcibly removed by Japan and never returned, despite promises. When people are so thoroughly terrorized, it is impossible to come forward later with a precise list of what was stolen, or a stack of receipts. In 1965, the South Korean government demanded the return of 4,479 items that it was able to identify individually. Of hose, Japan grudgingly returned only 1,432, taking another thirty years to do so. The great mass of Korean cultural treasure remains in Japan to this day, in private collections, museums, and the vaults of the Imperial Family. Much of this patrimony is beyond price. Here alone is evidence that Japan was far from bankrupt at the end of World War II.
There always are collaborators. Over forty years, a Japanese antique dealer named Nakada amassed a fortune looting and exporting ancient Koryo celadons. His partner was a former high official of the Ri dynasty, who also became a millionaire.
Most Korean landowners were stripped of their estates and agricultural properties, which were snapped up by Japanese developers. One developer acquired over 300,000 acres in Korea, where he intended to settle Japanese immigrants. As tenant farmers lost their land, they and the urban poor were rounded up and shipped off as slave labor to work in mines and construction brigades in Japan, or in the desolate Kurile Islands. Sixty thousand Koreans were forced to toil as slave labor in coal mines and military factories in the Sakhalin peninsula of Siberia. Of these 43,000 were still in Sakhalin at the end of World War II, when they came under Soviet control, and had great difficulty getting home.
Before 1945, it is believed that over six million Korean men were forced into slave labor battalions. Of these, nearly one million were sent to Japan. Others were sent to the Philippines or to the Dutch East Indies, to do construction work for the Japanese Army and navy, and to dig tunnels and bunkers for war loot, where they were worked to death or buried alive to hide the locations. On August 24, 1945, a group of 5,000 Korean slave laborers who had spent the war digging a major underground complex for war loot in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, were put aboard the warship Ukishima Maru to be ‘taken home to Korea.’ The ship sailed first to Maizuru Naval base on the west coast of Japan. There the Koreans were sealed in the cargo holds, and the ship was taken offshore and scuttled, by blowing a hole in the hull with dynamite. Out of 5,000 Koreans aboard, only 80 survived. Tokyo claimed that the Koreans locked in the hold had scuttled the ship themselves. Fifty-seven years later, 15 of these survivors, and relatives of others, at last won a lawsuit against the Japanese government, for compensation. A court in Kyoto ruled in August 2001 that the Japanese government must pay 3‑million yen (less than $30,000) to each of the plaintiffs. But the court also ruled that there was no need for the government of Japan to apologize for the ‘incident’.
Aside from the six million Korean men dragooned as slave labor, tens of thousands of young Koreans were conscripted into the Japanese Army, to serve as cannon-fodder n campaigns far to the south, many ending up in Burma or New Guinea.
Saddest of all were thousands of Korean girls duped into going to Japan for employment, instead ending up in brothels. It was in Korea that the kempeitai set up its first official army brothels in 1904. These were filled with kidnapped women and girls, forerunners of hundreds of thousands of Korean women later forced to serve as Comfort Women in army brothels all over Asia. Koreans were targeted because it was believed that if Japanese women and girls were forced into prostitution for the army, soldiers might mutiny. The Japanese Army to pains to characterize Korean women and girls as mere livestock. Mercy was in short supply. [Again, the late Park Won-soon was outspoken on behalf of the Comfort Women and against Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea—D.E.]
Bruce Cumings sums up their predicament: “Millions of people used and abused by the Japanese cannot get records on what they know to have happened to them, and thousands of Koreans who worked with the Japanese have simply erased that history as if it had never happened.” . . . .
3. In our next program and in previous posts, we highlight the 1951 “Peace” Treaty between the Allies and Japan, an agreement which falsely maintained that Japan had not stolen any wealth from the nations it occupied during World War II and that the (already) booming nation was bankrupt and would not be able to pay reparations to the slave laborers and “comfort women” it had pressed into service during the conflict.
Note that the wealth generated by the centuries-long rape of Korea was incorporated into the Golden Lily/Black Gold cache and the 1951 Peace Treaty institutionalized that theft.
In effect, the U.S. signed off on what was done to Korea (and China and other Asian nations) with that treaty and the incorporation of the Golden Lily treasure into the post-World War II global economy.
In the context of the fantastic sums looted by Japan under the auspices of Golden Lily and the incorporation of that wealth with Nazi Gold to form the Black Eagle Trust, that 1951 treaty and the advent of the Korean War raise some interesting, unresolved questions.
One of the principal figures in the looting of occupied Asia during World War II was the remarkable Kodama Yoshio. Networked with the powerful Yakuza Japanese organized crime milieu, the Black Dragon society (the most powerful of the patriotic and ultra-nationalist societies), the Imperial Japanese military and the Royal family of Emperor Hirohito, Kodama looted the Chinese underworld and trafficked in narcotics with Chiang Kai-shek’s fascist narco-dictatorship.
We can but wonder about Kodama Yoshio’s presence along with 1951 “Peace” Treaty author John Foster Dulles at negotiations in Seoul on the eve of the outbreak of the Korean War.
As discussed in numerous programs in an interview with Daniel Junas, the Korean War was a huge economic boom for Japan, and generated considerable profit for German firms as well. Thyssen, for example, won lucrative contracts for making steel for the war effort. Is there some connection between the Kodama/Dulles presence in Seoul on the eve of the outbreak of war linked to the Golden Lily/Black Eagle/1951 “Peace” Treaty nexus?
Just what WERE Kodama Yoshio and John Foster Dulles up to? It is highly unlikely that we will ever know.
. . . . In October of 1949, the People’s Republic of China came into being. Eight months later, in June of 1950, the Korean War broke out. Just before the war began, Kodama [Yoshio] accompanied John Foster Dulles to negotiations in Seoul. The Dulles party also included Kodama’s protege Machii Hisayuki, boss of the Korean yakuza in Japan. Efforts to discover under Freedom of Information what Kodama and Machii did during the trip with Dulles have run into a stone wall. In the MacArthur Memorial archive we discovered a personal letter from Kodama to General MacArthur offering to provide thousands of yakuza and former Japanese Army soldiers to fight alongside American soldiers in Korea. According to sources in Korea and Japan, the offer was accepted and these men joined the Allied force on the Peninsula, posing as Korean soldiers. . . .
4. The program concludes with the obituary of general Paik Sun-yup of Korea, whose service in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II has been a focal point of controversy in South Korea. General Sun-yup embodied the ongoing controversy in Korea over Japan’s occupation and the subsequent unfolding of events leading up to, and including the Korean War. “. . . . In 1941, he joined the army of Manchukuo, a puppet state that imperial Japan had established in Manchuria, and served in a unit known for hunting down Korean guerrillas fighting for independence . . .”
Paik Sun-yup, South Korea’s first four-star general, who was lionized as a Korean War hero by the South Korean and United States militaries but dismissed by many in his country as a traitor, died here on Friday. He was 99. . . .
. . . . Though widely credited for leading his troops in a pivotal battle of the Korean War, Mr. Paik was a divisive figure in his home country. In 2009, a South Korean presidential committee put him on a list of “pro-Japanese and anti-nation” figures who had collaborated with Japanese colonizers during their rule of the Korean Peninsula. . . .
. . . . In 1941, he joined the army of Manchukuo, a puppet state that imperial Japan had established in Manchuria, and served in a unit known for hunting down Korean guerrillas fighting for independence, though Mr. Paik said he had never engaged in battles with them.
He was a first lieutenant when Japan was defeated in World War II and Korea was liberated. After the country was divided into the pro-American South and the Communist North, Mr. Paik was among the Koreans in Japan’s colonial military who were recruited when the United States was helping to build a military for the South. . . .
. . . . IF Paik Sun-yup is called a ‘hero,’ what does that make Korean independence fighters who lost their lives at the hand of his old Manchuria unit?” asked Kim Won-woong, the head of Heritage of Korean Independence, a group recognized by the government for its members’ struggle for independence.
“If he really wanted to be treated like ‘a Korean War hero,’ he should at least have expressed repentance and remorse for his pro-Japanese deed,” Mr. Kim added, in an interview published last year. “But he never has.”
Discussion
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