War crimes investigations invariably confront the important question of responsibility: to what extent should soldiers be held responsible for crimes that they committed under orders delivered by their superiors? Adding the colonial factor—colonized peoples being ordered by their colonial subjugators to commit criminal actions—further complicates this issue. These are the very problems that Utsumi Aiko confronts in her study of the 148 Koreans convicted by Allied forces as Class B and C war criminals—whom she collectively symbolizes by the popular Korean name Kimu (Kim)—in the aftermath of World War II. Of these, twenty-three were sentenced to death. Here, Utsumi follows the plight of a handful of these Koreans, from the time of their induction into the Japanese military through postwar efforts to exonerate their names.
Class B and C war criminals, as opposed to the higher-profile Class A war criminals such as General Tōjō Hideki, were enemy combatants accused of crimes committed during the war's implementation, rather than its planning. The Allied forces convicted 4,682 members of the Japanese military (including 173 Taiwanese) under these categories (p. 7). The extraordinarily high death rates in Japanese POW camps in part motivated Allied courts to seek justice. This rendered those soldiers assigned to prisoner management duties, a disproportionate number of whom were Japan's colonized subjects, vulnerable. Kim Wan'gŭn, for example, was given a ten-year sentence for subjecting a prisoner to cruel and unjust treatment—he punched a British officer (and then apologized) in a fit of anger. Yi Hangnae was initially sentenced to death for forcing sick prisoners to work on the Thai-Burma Railroad, as well as for not doing more to curtail the high death rate at his camp. The victors reduced his sentence to twenty years after learning, upon reviewing his case, that they had mistaken him for another Korean soldier.
These Koreans were victims, argues Utsumi, for the following reasons. First, many of the Koreans had been forced to join the Japanese military against their will. Second, the Allied courts convicted the Koreans for crimes established by international law (the Geneva Conventions), in which they had been given little or no instruction (p. 195). Third, their low position (and ethnicity) left them little choice but to obey the orders from their superiors; refusal would have subjected them to severe punishment. And fourth, the Allied court hearings, often limited to prisoner testimony, were sometimes conducted unfairly. Occasionally, it was the efforts of their Japanese superiors and former POWs that gained these Koreans reductions in their sentences.
Their victimization did not end with their trial and sentencing; it continued even after their “repatriation” to Japan. Arrested, convicted, and sentenced by the Allied forces as enemy “Japanese,” from induction into the military, the Japanese consistently recognized and treated them as colonized “Koreans.” They regarded them as their inferior during the war, and released them as “foreigners” in its aftermath. Thus, paroled Korean war criminals had to register as foreigners under Japan's alien registration laws; their status disqualified them from the government benefits that their Japanese counterparts enjoyed. Nor could they legally return to Korea. While on parole, they were required to report monthly to a parole officer, remain within 80 kilometers of their official domicile, and could not be absent from this address for more than three days (p. 264). A different kind of prejudice awaited them should they return to Korea. As war criminals, they faced the scorn of the villagers, who equated them with the “worst of the collaborators” (pp. 30–31), a reputation that invited harassment of their family, and caused some former soldiers to choose suicide.
Among the survivors were those who exerted much effort to exonerate the names of Koreans charged with war crimes, particularly those already executed. Full exoneration required that both the Japanese and South Korean governments take action. From the Japanese side, these Koreans demanded acknowledgment of responsibility for their plight and compensation equal to that provided to Japanese war criminals. Japan's Minshūtō finally answered their demands in May 2008 by proposing a bill that seeks this end. From the South Korean side, they required official recognition of their status as “victims of forced mobilization” to end the discrimination that they endured. This they gained in 2006 (p. 344).
Kimu wa naze sabakareta is the most recent of a series of Japanese-language monographs authored by Utsumi Aiko on Korean participation in the Japanese military (see also “Korean Imperial Soldiers: Remembering Colonialism and Crimes against Allied POWS,” in Perilous Memories, ed. T. Fujitani et al. [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001], 199–217). Her stories of these Korean soldiers reveal patterns in the way in which colonial Japan recruited and administered its colonized peoples, and how Japanese washed their hands of responsibility for their actions after surrender. Her research provides a stark example of how many global powers continue to shirk responsibility for actions committed during their colonial subjugation of peoples over the past century.
