Controversy Over S. Korea’s C-List

The list of shame reads like a who’s who of South Korean society.

The former dean of a prestigious women’s university helped recruit Korean women who ended up as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The wartime publisher of Korea’s largest newspaper ran editorials urging youths to join the Japanese army. Church leaders rallied congregations to donate gold jewelry for the war effort.

Late last month, members of the South Korean National Assembly released a list of 708 prominent people who are said to have collaborated with the ironfisted Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula between 1910 and 1945. Notwithstanding the passage of more than half a century and the fact that all but one of the people named are dead, the list’s publication is stirring up emotions so raw that the events seem like they happened yesterday.

The timing of the publication is particularly awkward because in less than three months Japan and South Korea will co-host the World Cup soccer games, their largest joint effort since World War II. And with the presidential election scheduled here in December, accusations that various candidates are related to Japanese collaborators have become the newest form of political mudslinging.

One reason the subject is so sensitive in South Korea is that many collaborators, their children and grandchildren became the core of the nation’s elite.

Unlike France, where more than 10,000 people were executed after the collapse of the Nazi-backed Vichy regime, efforts in this nation to punish collaborators were nipped in the bud. Soon after the peninsula’s liberation at the end of the war, tensions flared between the U.S.- and Soviet-administered sectors, leading to the creation of two nations in 1948 and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. The struggle against communism took precedence over settling old scores, and the U.S.-backed South Korean government retained most of the bureaucrats from the wartime period.

“The money of the collaborators was not confiscated, and with this money they and their descendants became the ruling class of the new, liberated Korea,” said Han Sang Bum, a law professor at Seoul’s Dongguk University who pushed for the release of the list. “People who would have been shot or imprisoned in France became national heroes here.”

The list includes most of the famous poets, writers, composers and artists of the early 20th century, people who are still revered by South Korean schoolchildren. Beloved poet Mo Yun Suk wrote paeans to the Japanese emperor. Painter Kim Eun Ho, considered the father of modern Korean art, produced propaganda to support the war effort. And late educator Helen Kim, head of Ewha Women’s University, called on students to join the Women’s Patriot Service Corps, a ruse that led to thousands being forced to become “comfort women,” or prostitutes, for Japanese soldiers.

The release of the list came on the eve of the March 1 celebration of Independence Movement Day, a major South Korean holiday marking the anniversary of an anti-Japanese uprising in 1919.

The World Cup games are to begin May 30. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is to visit March 21. However, resentment still festers here over a Japanese history textbook approved last year that South Koreans believe glosses over the brutality of the occupation. Former “comfort women” still demonstrate outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, the capital, seeking recompense for suffering.

Those who prepared the list of collaborators insist that it has nothing to do with Japan but rather is designed to help South Koreans deal with their past.

“I don’t think it will negatively influence the relationship with Japan. This is a domestic issue,” said Kim Hee Sun, an assemblywoman from the ruling Millennium Democratic Party who spearheaded the release of the list. “This is not to create divisions but for the sake of reconciliation.”

Cho Moon Ki, 77, a former resistance fighter who has spent most of his life on this issue, said he has given up on efforts to punish the collaborators, almost all of whom are dead anyway.

“We are not trying to dig up the tombs of the deceased,” Cho said. “This is something we have to do for the next generation so that we can restore our national pride and start out again right and clean.”

The publication of the list has not been popular in all quarters. Some conservatives grumble that it might be better to leave skeletons in the proverbial closet.

“There is a danger that this will be used purely for political purposes and turn into a witch hunt,” said Lee Kang Doo, a leader of the conservative opposition Grand National Party.

He and others are upset with the procedure used to compile the list. A semi-governmental agency known as the Rehabilitation Assn. prepared a roster of 692 collaborators, but legislators who released the list added 16 names of prominent people who had been omitted because of their contribution to Korean society. Others complain that the association listed only the most prominent collaborators, leaving off civil service workers and soldiers who served the Japanese.

Just as U.S. politicians accuse their rivals of sexual peccadilloes, accusations are flying fast and furious that the fathers of various politicians were collaborators. The Confucian sense of family loyalty makes such allegations far more shameful and politically damaging here than in the West.

Although neither are on the list of 708, the late fathers of two prospective candidates for the Dec. 19 presidential election face such allegations. Former President Park Chung Hee, whose daughter Geun Hye is likely to run, was a soldier in the Japanese army fighting the Korean resistance. Front-runner Lee Hoi Chang’s father was a prosecutor under the Japanese.

The issue of collaborators is shrouded in partisan politics, with leftists historically pressing for their prosecution and rightists resisting. After World War II, North Korea vigorously prosecuted collaborators with the Japanese and many fled south to escape.