In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in New York City. The youngster listened as his older relatives rehashed time and again in New York their homeland’s tragic past: division upon liberation from Japan in 1945 at the end of the Second World War; military occupation until the establishment in 1948 of two competing authoritarian regimes, the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north; a civil war that erupted in 1950, a conflict made far more deadly by the intervention of foreign military powers; and the continuing existence today, more than 70 years after the 1953 armistice (not a peace treaty), of a peninsula comprising two Korean states whose military forces face one other in mutual hostility.
Chang, now associate professor of history and American studies at Rutgers University-Newark, wonders if such a tragic course of events had been inevitable. In the book under review here, he reviews the history of southern Korea under US military occupation to pose a basic question: “Were there no other options?”
Korea, made a protectorate of the Japanese Empire in 1905 and formally annexed in 1910, emerged after the Allied victory over Japan in 1945 as a nation divided between the United States and the Soviet Union even before the formal Japanese surrender of September 2. Moscow had accepted Washington’s proposal the previous month to cede the Korean Peninsula south of the 38th parallel to the United States as its zone of occupation, even though Soviet military forces by that time had already advanced into Korea and could have occupied the entire peninsula well before distant American forces could have arrived. Several days later, Washington rejected Moscow’s request to station troops on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands, limiting Soviet occupation of Japan to what they had already invaded: the Chishima (Kuril) chain of small islands extending north from Hokkaido to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
On hearing the Japanese emperor’s broadcast of 15 August that Japan would surrender to the Allies, Koreans formed people’s committees to take back control of their country from the departing Japanese. Their dreams of independence soon ended with the imposition of military rule in both the American and Soviet zones of occupation. In Seoul, Lieutenant General John Hodge, who had commanded the US Army’s XXIV Corps in military campaigns against the Japanese in the Philippines and Okinawa, administered the southern zone. On September 9, he and Admiral Thomas Kinkaid signed the local instruments of surrender for the United States. General Abe Nobuyuki, the final Governor-General of Chosen (Japan’s name for Korea within the empire), signed as Japan’s representative. American soldiers then hauled down the Japanese flag in front of the Office of the Governor-General and hoisted the American stars and stripes. No Korean signed the surrender. No Korean flag flew at the former headquarters of Japanese rule.
The US military government rejected the nascent People’s Republic of Korea (PRK), based on a nationwide network of people’s committees, in favor of military rule through favored Korean officials. In October, the expatriate independence activist Yi Sung-man (Syngman Rhee) flew from the United States into Seoul via a US military aircraft from Tokyo, a few weeks after Moscow had brought a Korean officer of the Soviet military, Kim Il Sung, into Pyongyang.
In both Korean occupation areas, as well as in occupied Japan, the victors exercised “government by interpreter”. In the American zone, many of those who found favor with occupation officials were wealthy, spoke English, and were Christian. Others had cooperated with the Japanese and prospered under Japanese rule. Meanwhile, wealthy landlords, industrialists, Christians, and collaborators left the inhospitable Soviet zone for refuge in the south. Uprooted northern youths provided muscle to paramilitary forces for southern rightists to suppress communist and social democratic movements in the American zone. Political assassinations, popular uprisings, and harsh suppression campaigns plagued the south in those years.
In 1948, Washington defied Moscow and overcame the misgivings of allied nations in sponsoring government elections only in its own zone, where rightist terror was rampant. On 15 August, the third anniversary of the Japanese emperor’s surrender broadcast, Yi became the first president of the ROK. A month later, Moscow oversaw the establishment of the DPRK in Pyongyang. A division of the peninsula into temporary zones of postwar occupation had hardened into two distinct, and hostile, regimes.
In 1950, forces of the DPRK’s Korean People’s Army nearly re-unified Korea, routing the ROK Army before Washington intervened with massive military force under the banner of the United Nations. General Douglas MacArthur then overran nearly all of the DPRK and advanced UN forces to the Chinese border before Beijing sent in a large army that advanced south beyond Seoul before withdrawing north under pressure to a line near the 38th parallel. After tremendous death and suffering, the war ended in stalemate.
Eastern Europe later emerged from Soviet rule at the end of the Cold War. Vietnam and Germany, divided for decades, today are reunited countries. Only Korea continues to suffer division.
Kornel Chang, reviewing these events, suggests the possibility of an alternative history. He considers an “Asian Spring” of grassroots Korean democracy after decades under imperial rule:
With the sudden collapse of the Japanese empire, hopes, visions and fractures that had been bottled up for nearly forty years erupted into Korea’s Asian Spring. If Koreans deserved anything after nearly four decades of colonial rule, it was the chance to determine their own futures.
What if the Korean people’s committees had succeeded in expropriating factories, farms, and other property from Japanese and their Korean collaborators, then broadly distributed those assets to benefit industrial workers and tenant farmers? What if the PRK had survived under US military occupation to administer southern Korea? What if the assassinated Yo Un-hyong (Lyuh Woon-hyung), who had proclaimed the PRK in September 1945, had emerged to lead the south, rather than the authoritarian and erratic Yi Sung-man?The author points to what he sees as the intriguing example of the southern island of Cheju, run in relative peace for a time by a people’s committee under the US military government. He also sees potential in the presence of New Dealers and other liberal reformists within General Hodge’s administration, as well as in reformist Korean activists and the Korean people in general. The author also suggests that events could have taken a better course had Hodge acted on his frustrations with recalcitrant Korean rightists under his command, including National Police Director Cho Pyong-ok and Seoul Metropolitan Police Chief Chang Taek Sang, by removing them from office.
Could General Hodge have set the course of events on a markedly less tragic course by acting differently? After all, leaders in Washington and Moscow had committed the original sin before his arrival on the scene by dividing Korea into two zones of military occupation rather than granting the nation immediate independence at the time of Japan’s surrender. In the spirit of considering alternative outcomes, one can argue that Washington sinned a second time by its military intervention, which prevented Pyongyang from re-uniting the nation at relatively little cost in death and destruction in 1950. Instead, Washington’s decision left a nation divided and millions—men, women, and children; civilian and military; Americans, Chinese and, above all, Koreans—killed or injured. And who knows? Perhaps Washington taking a different path in those years would have resulted in an authoritarian and united Korea occupying the same favored position as Hanoi in Washington’s present policy of competition with Beijing.
Such musings of mine aside, I much enjoyed reading this book. The author has written an engaging history in an approachable style for a wide audience. At the same time, he has adhered for the most part to academic convention by using conventional systems of transliteration for Asian names (McCune-Reischauer for Korean, Hepburn for Japanese, and Pinyin for Chinese) and documenting his prodigious research in standard endnotes. The book’s many photographs of the Koreans and Americans who played a part in this history are a plus. The author’s repeated references to his own family’s place in Korea’s story may also interest readers. Finally, I particularly enjoyed his references to Korean film, literature, and music to put across Korean views on issues of their nation’s liberation.
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