Fighting the Korean War in pacifist Japan: Korean and Japanese leftist solidarity and American Cold War containment

Where does “pacifist” Japan fit within the history of the Korean War? Was Japan simply the beneficiary of the wartime boom – a case best exemplified by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s characterization of the Korean War as “a gift of the gods”? When North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and launched a full-scale attack against South Korea, the U.S. occupation in Japan quickly transformed the pacifist nation into the indispensable rear base of United Nations military intervention in the Korean War. The Japanese Communist Party and leftist groups organized by zainichi Koreans (Korean residents in Japan) launched an antiwar movement to stop Japan from producing and sending arms to UN forces in Korea. The U.S. occupation responded with determined efforts to contain every antiwar voice emerging from the streets of the pacifist country. By examining the political dynamics of zainichi Korean and Japanese leftist solidarity and U.S. countermeasures, this article shows how the Korean War was fought in pacifist Japan. It also illuminates how the practice of Cold War containment was mutually linked on the ground between occupied Japan and South Korea.     

A Geo-Economic Object or an Object of Geo-Political Absorption? Competing Visions of North Korea in South Korean Politics

Abstract

The so-called Sunshine Policy launched by the liberal regime of South Korea brought about a significant transformation in its visions of North Korea. Through it, North Korea became an “object of development.” This was something different from the previous idea of North Korea as a politico-military target. However, to conservatives, North Korea remains within the politico-military realm as an object of territorial and ideological absorption. As a result, political conflicts in South Korea in the conception of North Korea – between a geo-economic object and an object of geo-political absorption – entail competitive appropriation of the discourse of “China’s colonisation of North Korea” and affect the way North Korean territory is produced.     

US Foreign Policy and the Korean War

Abstract

Sometimes called the “Forgotten War” because Americans pay so little attention to it, the Korean War was nevertheless a pivotal event in US foreign policy. Three themes will be integrated into this article as it analyzes Korean War policy. First, the Korean War heightened the debates and divisions among US foreign policymakers. If Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor helped to silence these divisions, then President Truman’s handling of North Korea’s 1950 invasion of South Korea helped resurrect them. Second, while foreign policy goals are generally assumed to drive the objectives of war in the classic Clausewitzian sense, the opposite frequently occurred in Korea as changes on the battlefield drove policy objectives of officials in Washington. Third, although the Americans, Chinese and Soviets all worked assiduously to keep the Korean War limited to the Korean Peninsula, the war had repercussions far beyond the Korean battlefield. Its ramifications were felt in Taiwan, Vietnam, Europe and in US defense expenditures as well.     

Imperialism and Asia: A brief introduction to the literature

Abstract

From 1910 (formally, de facto earlier) until 1945 Korea was under extremely harsh occupation by Japan. During this period, when every component of Korean culture was cruelly suppressed, Korean women suffered specific oppression. Very large numbers of Korean women were forcibly driven into prostitution, both in Korea itself and throughout the Japanese empire. Many were forced into prostitution for Japanese troops in appalling conditions, often in the front lines, and many were killed in the trenches. Within general Japanese sexism, there was a specificity to the attempt to degrade and exploit Korean women. Certain aspects of contemporary Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) official culture must be understood as attempts to combat the legacy of this colonial past. The emphasis on “purity”—for women—which is articulated by both men and women in the DPRK is justified officially by reference to both the Japanese colonial past and the contemporary degradation of women in South Korea, which is usually attributed mainly to US and Japanese influences, such as sex tourism.     

Civil society in South Korea: From grand democracy movements to petty interest

“Civil society” has been at the center of recent discussions on South Korean democratization. This article examines the current configuration and the historical evolution of civil society in South Korea. Beginning with a synoptic overview of South Korean civil society today, the article selects and analyzes three “cuts” in the past—1960–1961, 1973–1979, and 1985–1987. What emerges from this historical analysis is an image of a highly resistant civil society, gradually expanding and ultimately culminating in the grand democracy movement in 1987. For South Korean democracy to consolidate, civil society should be moving from an amorphous assemblage of antigovernment forces to a tightly organized and well-defined interest group society.     

“Seoul will become a sea of fire…”

Abstract

Seoul, 19 March 1994: People watching the evening news are terrified. The network stations repeatedly show Park Yong Soo, the North Korean representative at the eighth working-level meeting between North and South Korea at Panmunjom, retorting angrily to Song Yong Dae, his South Korean counterpart. “Seoul is not far from here,” he declares, “If there is a war, it will become a sea of fire.” The next day disturbing headlines splash across the morning and evening newspapers: “Seoul will become a sea of fire.”     

The Cheonan Incident and East Asian Community Debate: North Korea’s Place in the Region

The East Asian community debates project the region as one integral unit. Rapidly shifting landscapes explain the tension between the old order and emerging hierarchy where North Korea plays a crucial role. This paper analyzes North Korea’s place in the East Asian community debates by examining the regional governments’ reactions to the Cheonan incident. The responses and circumstances of South Korea, Japan and North Korea to the sunken ship incident demonstrate three dynamics. First, domestic political needs of the regional government supersede normative Community rhetoric. Second, manageability of the North Korean regime will determine the next regional hegemon. And third, the community debates need to include North Korea for viability.     

Social Darwinism as History and Reality: “Competition” and “The Weak” in Early Twentieth-Century Korea

ABSTRACT

By the time of Korea’s forced integration into the Japanese Empire in 1910, Social Darwinism was established as the main reference frame for the modernizing intellectual elite. The weak had only themselves to blame for their misfortune, and Korea, if it wished to succeed in collective survival in the modern world’s Darwinist jungles, had to strengthen itself. This mode of thinking was inherited by the right-wing nationalists in the 1920s–1930s; their programs of “national reconstruction” (minjok kaejo) aimed at remaking weak Korea into a “fitter” nation, thus preparing for the eventual independence from the Japanese. At the same time, in the 1920s and 1930s some nationalists appropriated the slogan of solidarity and protection of the weak, nationally and internationally, in the course of their competition against the Left. After liberation from Japanese colonialism in 1945, “competition” mostly referred to inter-state competition in South Korean right-wing discourse. However, the neo-liberal age after the 1997 Asian financial crisis witnessed a new discursive shift, competition-driven society being now the core of the mainstream agenda.     

Security,Nationalism and Popular Culture: Screening South Korea’s Uneasy Identity in the Early 2000s

By examining the cultural representations of the South Korean notion of the Self/Other in relation to its major traditional enemy — North Korea — this article aims to capture a picture of South Korea’s discursive economy of the North, and to problematise the South Korean identities implicated in that economy in the early 2000s. To achieve these aims, this article focuses on representations of a successful popular South Korean film which was released in 2000, just a few months after the first inter-Korean summit: Joint Security Area JSA. By analytically reading JSA, it is revealed that, in South Korea, the traditional discursive practices based on the Cold War thinking have been eroded. For the South, the North is part of the Self (Korean-ness; love for the North as the same nation) and, at the same time, is an Other (South Korean-ness; contempt for the North as an inferior state). Related to this, South Korea appears to be the uneasy Self without a firm Other in between Korean-ness and South Korean-ness.     

Preparing for the best: involving North Korea in the new pacific community

The United States, Japan, and South Korea should be considering ways and means to involve North Korea in regional cooperation. In the economic sector, the United States and South Korea might support the Northeast Asia Economic Forum and the Tumen River Area Development Project. The United States might also encourage Japan or South Korea to lead discussions on the possibilities of an Association of Northeast Asian Provinces, a Northeast Asian Development Bank, a regional labor market, and forums on regional transportation and communication, shipping and navigation, and air traffic management. All should support North Korea’s joining the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The need to monitor or retrieve the dumped Russian nuclear submarine reactors in North Korean waters is a serendipitous opportunity for broaching multilateral environmental cooperation.     

North Korea's juche ideology: indigenous communism or traditional thought?

ABSTRACT

This article examines the content of North Korea's juche ideology by analyzing official texts in comparison with Confucian classics and new religious movements in South Korea. The comparison revealed a series of similarities that vividly demonstrate that juche ideas have absorbed core elements of Korean and East Asian philosophical traditions.     

Making Sense of North Korea: Pyongyang and Comparative Communism

Abstract

Highly repressive, heavily militarized, strongly resistant to reform, and ruled by a dynastic dictatorship that adheres to a hybrid ideology, North Korea might be “the strangest political system in existence.” While distinctive, North Korea is an orthodox communist party-state best classified as an eroding totalitarian regime. Although weakening, Pyongyang remains durable and could survive for many more years. Absent “regime change,” North Korea is unlikely to demilitarize—including relinquishing its nuclear program—and will continue to reject thoroughgoing economic reform, cling to ideology for legitimacy, and make every effort to engineer a successful dynastic succession.     

论独岛领有权问题

本文借鉴了韩国学界与日本学界关于独岛领有权问题的主流观点,参考了与独岛相关的文献资料,结合国际法中领土主权的取得方式论述了该岛的领有权问题。笔者通过研究发现,虽然“韩国从新罗王朝时期就开始拥有独岛主权”的韩国学界主流观点存在疑问,但根据近代以来的相关史料及领土取得方式来看,独岛主权属于韩国的主张更具有说服力。站在第三者的立场上,我们应该尊重韩国政府实际控制着独岛的客观事实。     

Dealing with North Korea: The case of the agreed framework

The “Agreed Framework,” a deal that the United States and the DPRK cut in Geneva in October 1994 on the North Korean nuclear issue, now approaches the first of its check points to pass a test as to whether it really has a chance to survive. The United States is required to secure by April 21, 1995, a “supply contract” for the provision to North Korea of a light water reactor project as a quid pro quo for North Korea’s eventual dismantlement of its suspected nuclear weapons program over a period of ten or more years. With the reactor issue looming as but the tip of the iceberg that results from the many “ambiguities” and “omissions” of the Agreed Framework, the United States now enters a stage where it will have to brace for another wave of North Korea’s “diplomatic brinkmanship” featured again by threats of reneging on the Agreed Framework and involving the United States in a renewed military conflict on the Korean peninsula.     

Letter from the Philippines

In this “critique and rejoinder” Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett argue that Constance Lever-Tracy and Noel Tracy (authors of “Mismatch at the Interface,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 31, no. 3 [1999)) have fallen into the trap of searching for an “optimal” form of capitalism rather than moving beyond contemporary capitalism's “end-of-history” ideology and envisioning and struggling for a more sustainable and human-developmental system. Lever-Tracy and Tracy reply that however much one might hope for a revival in the fortunes of workers in China and Southeast Asia the reality is that “in the kind of short-term perspective relevant to a temporary, frictional crisis, there really is no realistic prospect for solving [the current crisis] by constructing an alternative society.”     

Future dynamics in Sino-Korea relations

This article argues that the basic interests of the major actors involved in the Korean problem converge on the cross-recognition and “two Koreas” formula. Seoul’s diplomatic normalization with Moscow, and North Korea’s ongoing negotiations with Tokyo, testify to this trend. Because of its sensitivity to North Korea’s dilemma and carefully measured policy, China has succeeded in sustaining North Korea’s trust while improving its ties with South Korea. Shaken by the changes in the international system and threatened by the rapidly growing economic capability of the South, North Korea’s overall foreign policy objective is shifting from unifocation to accepting the existing status quo, a movement toward a direction that China has been advising. A mostly likely breakthrough to the stalemate in Korea will come from the Pyongyang-Tokyo bilateral relations. Ironically, when the South feels more confident than ever before about the possibility of unification under its terms, the rest of world is moving toward the cross recognition it has advocated. Whether the two Koreas with over-lapping diplomatic relations with all four major powers surrounding the peninsula will be able to achieve the unification that all Korean people desire will largely depend on how the regimes manage inter-Korean relations in coming years.     

Globalization's impact on the Malaysian workforce

This article provides a partial analysis of the socio-political impact of the so-called IMF reforms that were implemented by the South Korean government in response to the financial crisis of 1997–98. We find that at least in one key area — namely policies related to foreign investment — the IMF reforms fundamentally altered and reshaped Korea's development path. In fact, the policy changes affecting foreign investment produced what amounts to a paradigm shift in Korea's well-known model of developmental state. Alternatively put, these reforms led to the demise of the “Korea, Inc.,” the symbiotic relationship between government and businesses that was at the core of Korea's developmental state. As such, our analysis suggesting a paradigm shift in Korea's developmental state stands in contrast with previous (pre-crisis) arguments that proclaimed the demise of the developmental state.     

LIMITED WAR,UNLIMITED TARGETS

In the early days of the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) had a policy of precision bombing military targets only. Policy-makers in Washington, D.C., formulated this policy to ensure the protection of Korean civilians and to increase the effectiveness of their air operations. Senior USAF officers in Korea, however, were unhappy about the limitations placed on them by Washington. In their strategic air operations against targets in North Korea USAF officers followed Washington's precision bombing policy, but they insisted that USAF bombers be permitted to use incendiary bombs against population centers in North Korea. China's entry into the war in November 1950 led to a drastic change in the precision bombing policy. On 5 November 1950, when the UN forces began suffering defeat after defeat in battles with the new enemy, General Douglas MacArthur designated cities and villages in North Korea as “main bombing targets” and permitted the use of incendiary bombs, which had been used in attacks against Japanese cities during World War II. From that point until the end of the war, the USAF regarded North Korean cities and villages as their crucial targets as political and military occasion demanded.     

Governance and Conflict

Within a global gendered economy based on an international division of labor, Filipina migrants have become nannies, maids, and caregivers in affluent homes in numerous Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Filipina migrants who seek employment as domestic workers abroad have been described as “classical” transmigrants who keep in touch with family members back home and commute between their countries of origin and their destinations. In this article — based on ethnographic research in Israel, Palestine, and the Philippines between 2003 and 2008—the author argues that Filipina migrants are transnational in a much broader sense than commonly discussed in studies on migration: engaged in border-cross-ing journeys through a number of nation states, many Filipina migrants move on and on rather than back and forth. They do so within a global hierarchy of desirable destination countries, ranked according to the differences between nation-states with regard to salaries and the legal entitlements migrants can claim, the costs and risks migrants have to take in order to enter, and these countries’ overall subjective and imaginative attractiveness. By migrating on, Filipina domestic workers acquire an intimate picture of the Middle East “backstage.” Some even become self-pro-claimed Middle Eastern experts or politically active Christian Zionists or sentimental Orientalists, who, in spite of their Christianity, miss fasting on Yom Kippur or during Ramadan as they continue their journeys toward Western Europe and North America, where they have hopes of living and perhaps gaining citizenship.     

The China model of Korean reunification

Like Germany's reunification, essentially the annexation of East Germany by West Germany, Korean reunification looms as most likely, ultimately and largely entailing South Korea's annexation of North Korea. The awesome cost borne by West Germany for reunification has been instructive to South Korea, particularly in recognition that the material and ideological gaps between North and South Korea are far greater than those which existed between East and West Germany. A possible solution to the negative implications of cataclysmic reunificationmay rest in gradual reunification of the Koreas, with an interim industrialization of North Korea by South Korea, based on the model of the economic development zones in southeastern China; hence, the “China Model”. In such a scenario the investors in North Korea's gradual industrialization would be (primarily) the huge conglomerate South Korean corporations chaebol which seek cheaper labor pools abroad. Investment by such corporations, in cooperation with the South Korean government, and possibly supplemented by western and Japanese capital investment, would presumably raise levels of productivity and the standard of living in the economically and agriculturally ravished North. The North-South gaps would thus be gradually reduced as would the financial and other burdens South Korea would otherwise have to bear for cataclysmic reunification.