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The Koreans in Second World War Philippines: Rumour and history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2012

Lydia N. Yu Jose
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Abstract

‘Mas malupit ang mga Koreano kaysa mga Hapon’ is a rumour about Koreans in Second World War Philippines that has persisted to this day. A comparative, quantitative statement, it is roughly translated as ‘The Koreans committed more atrocities than the Japanese in Second World War Philippines’. This is a half-true memory: true, there were Koreans in the Philippines; false, they could not have committed more atrocities than the Japanese because there were very few of them, as archival evidence discussed in this article proves. If only the Koreans and their role in the war were properly discussed in Philippine textbooks, this rumour would not have persisted to this day.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 324 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2012

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References

1 National artist Frankie Sionil Jose, who was a teenager during the war, confidently declared in an informal conversation that the rumour is not true because there were no Koreans in the Philippines — ‘they were all Japanese!’

2 See Jose, Lydia N. Yu, ‘The Japanese Occupation, nationalism, textbooks, and teachers’, Loyola Schools Review, 3 (2004): 159–78Google Scholar.

3 The story was narrated to me by this adviser, and it was serendipitously confirmed at a conference in Singapore in 2010, when I heard the same story from another faculty member from the same university, to whom the South Korean student also told her ‘shocking’ experience, to use her own words.

4 Atsumi, Aiko, Chosenjin ‘seigun’ heishitachi no senso [Koreans in the emperor's army] (Tokyo: Iwanami Booklet No. 226, 1992)Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., pp. 54–5.

6 Yamamoto, Shihei, Shiyoku Kou chujo no shokei [The execution of Lieutenant General Shiyoku Kou] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1987)Google Scholar.

7 Connaughton, Richard, Pimlott, John and Anderson, Duncan, The battle for Manila (London: Bloomsbury, 1997)Google Scholar.

8 Legarda, Benito Jr., ‘Sixty-five years later’, Philippines Free Press, 6 Feb. 2010, pp. 25; 34Google Scholar.

9 The Taiwanese labourers are mentioned in connection with the rumour, along with the Koreans. Connaughton et al., The battle for Manila, p. 143. Contrary to this, I have yet to come across a similar rumour about the Taiwanese being cruel during the Second World War in the Philippines.

10 Ibid.

11 Legarda also mentions the presence of Taiwanese workers, but (unlike Connaughton et al.) does not mention a rumour about them regarding cruelty. See Legarda, Jr., ‘Sixty-five years later’, p. 25.

12 Ibid.

13 He is Professor of History at the University of the Philippines, Diliman (Quezon City).

14 Personal communication, Washington, DC, summer of 2010; series of emails, early 2011. Kerkvliet, Benedict is the author of Huk rebellion: A study of peasant revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

15 This Filipino woman was interviewed by a friend of mine in Honolulu who knew about my research and emailed the interview transcript to me. My friend had herself heard such rumours. Intrigued, she took it upon herself to also ask around, informally and carefully.

16 Japanese residents in the Philippines immediately after the end of the Second World War were either pre-war immigrants who were unable to return to Japan at the outbreak of the war, or — and most of them were — children of Japanese–Filipino parents. They tried to hide their Japanese identity by adopting Filipino surnames. Some of them moved residence where they believed no one would recognise them. Still others did both. They began to surface and reclaim their identity by the 1980s, after Japan became an economic power.

17 Although the Philippine Daily Inquirer is Manila-based, the Veterans Bank has branches all over the Philippines; hence the contest was advertised through posters in high schools wherever there are branches of the bank.

18 Care was taken not to do an extensive survey, such as a national one, because it might inadvertently spread the rumour. A simple question such as ‘Have you heard stories that the Koreans were more cruel than the Japanese during the Japanese Occupation?’ or its variant, could easily turn into a declarative sentence as it gets transmitted from mouth to mouth. Thus, convenience sampling was done. The sampling was also purposive, in that it was limited to students and educators, thus eliminating lack of education as a variable.

19 US Armed Forces in the Philippines, Northern Luzon (hereafter USAFIP-NL), ‘Reports of operations and other papers, vol. 1, Oct. 1945’, in Historical Bulletin, 12, 1–4 (1968)Google Scholar. The figures correspond to the total number of Japanese and may not include non-Japanese captured or killed; the sources do not indicate this.

20 National Archives Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter NARA), RG 331, entry 1362, box 2012, location 290/13/4/01; Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (hereafter SCAP): Legal Section, Investigation Division, Manila Branch, miscellaneous files.

21 NARA, RG 331, entry 1362, box 2023 (16), location 290/13/4/01; SCAP: Legal Section, Investigation Division, Manila Branch, miscellaneous files.

22 USAFIP-NL, ‘Reports of operations’.

23 Connaughton et al., The battle for Manila, p. 143; Legarda, Jr., ‘Sixty-five years later’, p. 25.

24 Atsumi, ‘Koreans in the emperor's army’, pp. 54–5. The number was supplied by Atsumi's interviewee, Kenyo Ohara.

25 Letter to Commanding Officer, Sugamo Prison, through Major Swanson, the Operation Officer, 21 Apr. 1947 found in NARA, RG 554, [no entry number], box 99(14), location 290/66/23/01; Record of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and United Nations Command, Central Command, 8132nd Army Unit/Sugamo Prison Detachment, Paroled Prisoner 201 Files.

26 This was the same camp that was later taken over by the victorious Allies to house Japanese and other POWs and internees, and whose prison populations were detailed earlier.

27 See NARA, RG 331, entry 1338, box 1868, location 290/12/23/07; SCAP: Legal Section, Investigation Division, Manila Branch, Records of Trials, Kou vs the United States (hereafter Trial, followed by page number). There were other POW camps in the country. Some of the other main camps were in Cebu, Iloilo City, and in several colleges and hospitals in Manila. See Stich, H.F. and Stich, W., Prisoners of war and internees in the Pacific theater of World War II: Postal history (Vancouver: H.F. Stich and W. Stich, 1991)Google Scholar.

28 Trial, pp. 88, 309, 638, 644, 1016, 1090, 1094.

29 Ibid., pp. 1090; 1094.

30 Ibid., p. 1397 (p. 189 of the exhibit document); Yamamoto, ‘The execution of Shiyoku Kou’, p. 177. ‘Chosen’ was a derogatory Japanese way of referring to Korea, and it is intriguing that Kou used the word. Even if he did not use it pejoratively, it was an indication of his deep integration into the Japanese army and Japanese society. On the other hand, Kou's defence lawyer referred to him as Korean (Trial, p. 470). In Japanese, it translates as Kankokujin, a neutral, non-derogatory word.

31 Trial, p. 18.

32 Ibid., pp. 35–41.

33 Trial, pp. 41–2. The Oryoku Maru was sunk by American bombs on its way to Japan. Despite the fact that more than half of its passengers were sick POWs, the ship did not have a Red Cross sign. See Pearson, Judith L., Belly of the beast (New York: New American Library, 2001)Google Scholar.

34 NARA, RG 457, entry A1 9036, box 3, location 290/86/46/5; Select documents released under the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Acts relating to Japanese war crimes, 1937–1980.

35 Trial, pp. 182 and following.

36 Trial, p. 1397.

37 Trial, p. 566.

38 Trial, p. 1414.

39 Trial, p. 1418.

40 Atsumi, ‘Koreans in the emperor's army’, p. 15.

41 NARA, RG 554, [no entry number], box 99 (14), location 290/66/23/01; 201 files.

42 Before 1944, Koreans could volunteer to join the Japanese Imperial Army. In 1944, they were conscripted. Between 1944–45, the total number of conscripts was 110,000. The total number of Koreans in the Japanese army was around 240,000, more than 3,000 of whom were prison guards. See Atsumi, ‘Koreans in the emperor's army’.

43 NARA, RG 554, [no entry number], box 99 (14), location 290/66/23/01; 201 files.

44 Interviewed as a free man by Atsumi, Ohara expressed the belief that these Filipinos were guerillas. See Atsumi, ‘Koreans in the emperor's army’.

45 NARA, RG 331, entry 1221, box 1193; location 290/11/24/01; SCAP: Legal Section, Administrative Division, POW 201 file, 1945–52.

46 Ibid.

47 NARA, RG 554.

48 NARA, RG 331, entry 1221, box 1072.

49 Ibid.

50 See Sharon Williams Chamberlain, ‘Justice and reconciliation: Post-war Philippine trials of Japanese war criminals in history and memory’ (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, Washington, DC, 2010), pp. 55–8.

51 NARA, RG 331, entry 1182-897, box 897, location 290/11/8/03; SCAP: Legal Section, Administrative Division, Investigation Reports of War Crimes, 1945–48.

52 Ibid.; memo of Captain Nicanor Maronilla-Seva to Chief of the National War Crimes Office, 14 Jan. 1948.

53 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The social contract ([1762], trans. Cole, G.D.H., Dutton, E.P. & Co., 1947)Google Scholar, excerpted in Ebenstein, William, Great political thinkers: Plato to the present, third ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 443Google Scholar.

54 Sharon Chamberlain's extensive research on the war crimes trials conducted by the Philippine government does not mention Ihara Mangaku. In a conversation with her, she said she did not come across any Korean who was tried by the Philippine government. The documents at NARA contained only three pages about Ihara Mangaku, but those pages definitely point to the fact that he was a POW and was supposed to be tried by the Philippine tribunal. Most probably, he was not tried.

55 These atrocities are attributed in history books to Japanese, but in conversations and interviews, they are also blamed on Koreans.