North Korea's Hamgyong Province

During the Chosun dynasty, Korean officials who incurred the wrath of the emperor were exiled to Hamgyong, the country’s northern-most province.

“Perhaps as a result of all these malcontents in the gene pool, what is now North Hamgyong province is thought to breed the toughest, hardest-to-subdue Koreans anywhere.” (Barbara Demick, Nothing To Envy, Spiegel & Grau, 2010)

Until the 20th century, this province, which extends all the way to the Tumen River, its border with China and Russia, was sparsely populated and of little economic significance. Its human population was probably outnumbered by tigers, “the beasts that still terrify small children in Korean folktales.”

But all that changed when the Japanese began their empire-building, and Hamgyong was seen as laying right in the pathway of Japan’s eventual push toward Manchuria. Apart from coveting the then largely unexploited coal and iron-ore deposits around Musan, the Japanese also turned Chongjin (pictured), then a small fishing village, into a port that could handle three million tons of freight each year.

The Japanese built massive steelworks at Chongin’s port and developed Namsan into a city with a rectangular street grid and large modern buildings. The Imperial Japanese Army’s 19th infantry division, which assisted in the invasion of eastern China, was headquartered there. Further south in the city of Hamhung, the Japanese built virtually from scratch a headquarters of massive chemical factories producing everything from gunpowder to fertilizers.

But when the Communists came to power in the 1950s, factories that had been bombed in the successive wars were rebuilt and reclaimed as their own. Chongjin’s Nippon Steel became Kim Chaek Iron and Steel, the largest factory in North Korea. And the industrial might of the northeast served as a shining example of Kim Il-sung’s economic achievements.

“To this day, Chongjin residents know little of their city’s history – indeed, it seems to be a place without any past at all – because the North Korean regime does not credit the Japanese for anything.”

Chongjin, also known as the city of irons produced watches, television, synthetic fibers, pharmaceuticals, machine tools, tractors, plows, steel plates, and munitions. Crabs, squids and other marine products were fished for export.

Much like the South, it is understandable for the North not to “credit the Japanese for anything” even though the colonial masters had developed the Peninsula by putting in place a relatively good set of hardware and infrastructure, though admittedly not for altruistic reasons. Because of nationalistic reasons and the painful memories of Japanese colonialism, it is still hard for Koreans to objectively assess the positive aspects of the colonial period, as the negatives simply far outweigh the positives. But then a question to ask would be, how different would Korea’s trajectory be if the Japanese had not come barging in?