North Korea in a Nutshell by Kongdan Oh

Author:Kongdan Oh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

North Korea and Japan: Age-Old Enmity

For two countries separated by only a few hundred miles of water, North Korea and Japan have an exceptionally distant relationship. North Korea’s major eastern port, Wonsan, is only 418 miles from the important Japanese port of Fukuoka. Opposing political systems have separated the two countries during the last seven decades, and today there is strong animosity on both sides.

Several thousand years of history have witnessed many hostilities between Korea and Japan, as has been the case between so many neighboring nations. The Mongol rulers of China enlisted the Koreans to join them in two unsuccessful invasions of Japan in the thirteenth century. The Japanese, on their way to attack China, invaded Korea twice in the sixteenth century, killing tens of thousands. As a trophy and proof of their victory, the ears and noses of at least thirty-eight thousand Koreans were brought back to Japan and buried in the Mimizuka (Ear Mound) in Kyoto. In these campaigns the Japanese also took many Korean national treasures and carried back with them Korean artisans who taught the Japanese cultural skills such as pottery making, mostly originating in China.

Memories of the bitter Japanese colonial period still shape Korean views of the Japanese. The Japanese did not even have to defeat Koreans in order to incorporate them into the Japanese Empire. Japan expelled the Chinese from Korea in the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War and eliminated Russian influence in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, after which the Japanese began to take administrative control of the Korean government. In 1910, Korea was forced to become part of the Japanese Empire and remained so until the Japanese were defeated by Western forces in World War II.

During the colonial period the Japanese tried to make Koreans loyal second-class Japanese citizens by obliterating Korean culture. In resistance, Koreans staged a few anti-Japanese revolts that were easily quelled. Some Koreans, like Kim Il-sung, left the country to fight the Japanese in China. During the occupation, the Japanese built modern industrial infrastructure in Korea, bringing the country into the twentieth-century economy. Yet the Koreans have not forgotten the decades during which the Japanese tried to make them into Japanese. In 1965 Japan and South Korea signed a Treaty of Basic Relations. Japan wanted to move in this direction with North Korea as well, but the North demanded that it be compensated not only for purported economic damage inflicted during the colonial period but also for the years since the occupation, and this demand met with firm opposition from Japan. The two governments have never signed a “peace treaty,” and the people of North Korea and Japan remain mutually hostile to this day. The Kim regime’s media frequently warn that the Japanese are preparing another invasion of the Korean Peninsula, an illusion shared by no one else.

North Korean contact with Japan is extremely limited. During the colonial period thousands of Koreans went to Japan for education and employment. In the run-up to the Pacific War, two million Koreans were

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.