Koreans Remembering the Colonial Period

Koreans who lived through the Japanese colonization of Korea remembered different aspects of life during that time. Some of these accounts were contained in Hildi Kang's Under the Black Umbrella Voices from Colonial Korea 1910 - 1945.

Kang Byung Ju from North Pyong'an province remembered that the Japanese ordered men to go round villages in order to round up children and force them to attend Japanese-run schools.

Kang recalled: "So you can imagine, while we studied Chinese characters in the schoolroom of our house, we kept one eye looking out for the child-catchers. Our room opened up to a clear view of Sodang Hill where the officials were likely to appear. Whenever a person with black clothes came down the hill, we all scattered and fled."

When Kang grew older, he remembered how the Koreans were made to do menial jobs so as to free the Japanese to become soldiers. Ching yong (labor draft) was non-combative work, and Korean men were drafted into this service to do assembly-line work making parts for airplanes, tanks, and military supplies, and also to work in the mines.

But towards the end of the war, ching byong (military draft) turned compulsory, as the Japanese were running out of their own men, and had to make soldiers out of Koreans.

Yang Songdok from South Chungchong province remembered the lights flickering at night across the Yalu River in Manchuria. "Rumor said that those lights came from bands of roving Korean guerrilla fighters."

Yang also recalled that when he was in the fourth or fifth grade (1929 - 30) the Japanese forbade Koreans to wear their traditional white clothing. But since the Japanese could not enforce the ban, they "set up huge tubs of water - dirty, dark water - at street corners everywhere. Whenever they saw people in white clothes passing by, they sprayed them with this dirty water."

Recalling a visit to China shortly after the 1937 Nanking massacre, Yang noted: "With my own eyes I saw corpses pile high on the streets, corpses blocking sewers, and absolutely brutal bayonet practices."