Life in Korea

Life under the Japanese, 1905-45

Korea lies in the centre of three powerful states – China, Russia and Japan.  Each saw it as a strategically vital 'buffer' in case of attack by the other two. 

After losing a war with Japan in 1895, China renounced all influence over Korea.  After losing a war with Japan in 1905, Russia ceded its interests in northern Korea, and the Japanese incorporated Korea into their empire.

The Japanese empire in Korea was one of the cruellest in history:

  •   The Korean language was replaced by Japanese, Korean archives and libraries were burned;

  •   From 1939 the policy of Sōshi-kaimei pressurised Koreans to take Japanese names, as a symbolic annihilation of Korean identity. 

  •   All government, industry and business was handed over to Japanese colonists;

  •   Schooling was neglected (in 1945 80% of Koreans – and 90% of women – could not read or write);

  •   Apart from a few collaborators who became guards, police etc, Koreans were used only as labourers – ⅔ million Korean men were forced to work unpaid in brutal conditions in Japanese mines, factories, and construction sites;

  •   Punishments were brutal, including torture on the rack and public executions;

  •   At least 50,000 Korean women were shipped abroad as 'comfort women' (= sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers;

  •   When a guerrilla resistance (the 'Righteous Army') set up, the Japanese mounted indiscriminate 'kill-all, burn-all, loot-all' campaigns – 50,000 Koreans died in the uprising of 1919, 25,000 in the anti-guerrilla campaign of 1932;

  •   Captured guerrillas were sent as 'logs' on which to do live experiments in Japan's germ warfare laboratory. 

The result was to build a nation determined for independence, resentful, resourceful and inured to repression.

Life in North Korea, 1945-50

1.  Historians debate Soviet influence in North Korea.  The USSR installed Kim Il Sung as head of a Provisional People’s Committee (1946), wrote its constitution, and ran an election without Korean input. 
Yet the new state was not a puppet Stalinist Soviet clone: 

  •   At local level, Koreans had already formed active People’s Committees; these were integrated into the new 'dual party' structure and became local party units.  Soviet advisers were influential at the top, but their presence was limited elsewhere. 

  •   The 90-or-so leftist parties, led by the Workers’ Party, were peacefully unified into the Democratic National United Front. 

  •   Opponents and former collaborators were executed, imprisoned or re-educated; 400,000 fled to South Korea.  Christianity – particularly strong in Pyongyang – was suppressed: churches closed, believers persecuted, pastors arrested. 

  •   Yet the new regime also enjoyed genuine enthusiasm.  Workers’ Party membership reached nearly ¾ million by 1948.  Voter turnout in the 1948 election was near-total, though all candidates were pre-selected by the ruling Democratic National United Front. 

  •   Many people became members of mass organisations such as the Peasants League (2.5 million members by 1948, which engaged in political activity and agricultural improvement). 

  •   Kim Il Sung was hailed in schools and media as an heroic guerrilla fighter and national hero. 

2.  There was a flurry of social reform:

  •   The Land Reform Law (1946) confiscated Japanese and collaborators’ estates and redistributed half of all arable land to ¾ million poor families.  Next, the state began setting up state farms; this continued throughout the war, but farming was not collectivised until 1953. 

  •   The Law of Equal Rights for Men and Women (1946) gave women the vote and formal legal equality. 

  •   The Labour Law (1946) enforced equal pay and banned child labour in hazardous industries. 

  •   The Law to Eradicate Feudal Practices (1947) abolished child marriage, polygamy, forced marriage and prostitution. 

  •   School enrolments more than tripled: 12,000 literacy schools were founded, and by 1948 literacy rates stood at 92%. 

3.  Collective life was structured through mass bodies like the Korea-Soviet Cultural Association (which sought to modernise Korean culture by copying Soviet Russia). 

  •   The journal Choson yosong (Korean Women) recorded and encouraged the transformation of women’s lives.  Although many women were reluctant to take on greater public roles, more than a million women had joined the Democratic Women’s League by 1947. 

  •   The Children’s Union (founded 1946) taught "collective learning" through activities like drawing May Day posters or putting on plays during labour campaigns.  It also targeted Christian families, urging children to stop attending church. 

4.  The North inherited some Japanese industry and a number of hydro-electric power stations – though much had been looted by the departing Japanese or taken as reparations by Soviets.  All industry was nationalised, and the new state concentrated on building the economy.  Nevertheless, 70% of the population still worked in agriculture, and the country was desperately poor. 

5.  It built a strong army – the immun gun – of maybe 150,000 thousand soldiers (including 2,000 former Soviet Army soldiers and 30,000 guerrillas with years of experience fighting the Japanese), equipped with Soviet weaponry (including tanks and planes).

By 1950, North Korea had become a unified, mobilised, militarised state with revolutionary energy – confident in its system and eager to act. 

Source C

The cover of the 1949 film Nae Kohyang, which tells the story of liberation in 1945 through the eyes of a poor farmer's son. 
Fighting as a guerrilla, he joins the Workers Party and even meets Kim Il Sung. 
Victorious, he returns home to his sweetheart, who proclaims: "Oh! General Kim Il Sung has given the land to our peasants". 
The film's subtitle was: 'Patrtiotic General Kim Il Sung liberates the Fatherland'. 

Life in South Korea, 1945-50

On 15 August 1948, the Republic of Korea was formally established, with Syngman Rhee as the first president.  South Korea, with its background of Confucianism and foreign oppression, was declared a capitalist democracy with a Christian President put in place by the United States.  It was never going to end happily. 

1.  A Sham Democracy

  •   The Constitution of July 1948 guaranteed freedom, rights and equal opportunities, and recognized the need for a welfare state.  It was ignored.  South Korean politicians failed to set up stable parties, which descended into factionalism.  Rhee ran South Korea as an autocracy.

  •   ‘Elections’ were held in May 1948.  Voting was restricted to landowners and taxpayers in the towns; in the villages the elders voted for everyone.  United Press special correspondent James Roper reported that American reconnaissance planes flew overhead, and the polling stations were strictly guarded by the Hyangbodan carrying baseball bats, and the South Korean police with US guns.

  •   Rhee immediately passed laws forbidding political dissent, and allowed the internal security force (led by his right-hand man, Kim Chang-ryong) to detain and torture suspected communists.  By early 1950, Rhee had about 30,000 alleged communists in his jails, and some 300,000 suspects in a ‘re-education’ movement called the Bodo League.

  •   The Rhee government repressed with horrific cruelty uprisings in Jeju and Yeosu-Suncheon in 1948-49.  In 1949, at Mungyeong, the South Korean Army massacred 88 civilians, mostly women and children.  There were continual guerrilla operations in the hills.  In the end more than 100,000 South Koreans were killed in political violence before 1950 in what New York Times correspondent Walter Sullivan described as "a cloud of terror that is probably unparalleled in the world."

  •   Future President Park Chung Hee was arrested for communist conspiracy in 1948; and leader of the Korean Independence Party Kim Ku was assassinated by a follower of Rhee in 1949.

  •   When the Americans forced Rhee to hold elections in 1950, voters booted out all but 27 of the 1948 Assembly, and elected instead 128 independents (and only 45 of Rhee supporters).  By May 1950 Rhee’s government was in chaos. 

2.  Few Reforms

  •   The first Education Law (1949) introduced universal compulsory education at primary level; 1946-50 the number of elementary schools rose from 2,800 to 4,600, though there were shortages of teachers and materials.

  •   Given his right-wing rich supporters, Rhee was opposed to Land reform.  He was eventually persuaded to pass some limited measures in 1949, but no land had changed hands when the War intervened. 

  •   Trade Unions were allowed, but strikes were harshly repressed. 

  •   Despite nominal 'equal rights', few women became visible in politics, and marriage remained male-dominated. 

3.  Propaganda and censorship

  •   After 1948, the US-funded Korean Motion Picture Section of the Dept of Public Information put out one film a week, to show "people who live democracy in their daily action" alongside the nationalist films being shown in cinemas. 

  •   School textbooks, government-sponsored films, and posters emphasised anti-communism, Korean nationalism, and loyalty to the state. 

  •   Christianity was promoted alongside nationalism, especially by Rhee, who saw the Church as a key anti-communist ally. 

  •   Anything appearing to support unionism or communism was shut down. 

4.    A weak economy

  •   The exit of the Japanese (who had made up 80% of the management and technicians in industry – 90% in the metal industries), along with the division of the country (92% of the country’s power came from the North), left the economy in a shambles.  Textile production fell by 60%, metal products by 90%.

  •   Most of Korea’s industry was in the North; the South was overwhelmingly agricultural.

  •   There were severe food shortages, made worse by the inflow of refugees from the North; a famine was only averted because the US imported 670,000 tons of food 1946-48.

  •    Massive housing shortages, slum growth, and unemployment created deep urban unrest – fertile ground for the growth of communism.

  •   The USA poured massive amounts of aid into South Korea.  By 1950, Korea had the largest American embassy in the world and the biggest aid mission.  American aid to the ROK in 1949 amounted to more than $200 million – twice the total ROK government budget – so much money that it caused an inflation crisis.

  •   In 1949-50 Rhee began trade negotiations with Japan, a very unpopular move. 

5.  A militaristic agenda

  •   Rhee spent the first two years of his presidency trying to persuade the Americans to support an invasion of North Korea.

  •   In May 1949, the six infantry battalions of the ROK Army launched a four-day invasion of the Kaesong area of North Vietnam, killing 400 NKPA soldiers and 100 civilians.  General Kim Sok-won told the UN Commission: "We should have a program to recover our lost land, North Korea, by breaking through the 38th border which has existed since 1945".  In August, however, the NKPA counter-attacked, routed the ROK army, and retook all the captured land.  Rhee refused advice to sack his Army Chief, General ‘Fatty’ Chae (with disastrous consequences).

  •   As to military force, most of the ROK army, which by 1949 numbered 114,000 men, were armed with modern American rifles and trained by US advisers.  As he sailed back to the USA in June 1950 at the end of his term of duty, KMAG Head General William Roberts told Time magazine that the ROK army was the best in the world outside the United States, although he admitted the officers needed further training. 

6.    A dependent regime

  •   The American regime penetrated every area of South Korean government and economy, and many government decisions required prior agreement by a US aid representative.  It was, as the historian Bruce Cumings commented, a "neocolonial" relationship. 

   By 1950, South Korea was politically repressive, economically fragile, and ruled by an autocratic president whose regime was cracking – and who hoped a reunification forced by war would solve his problems. 

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