'The Sorrow and the Pity'

By John Burton

In 1969, the French documentary maker, Marcel Ophuls, produced a film on the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, called the “The Sorrow and the Pity.” It examined collaboration and resistance to Nazi rule by focusing on one city, Clermont-Ferrand in central France.

The film wanted to explore why some of the French were willing to collaborate with the Germans. But it also revealed a complicated picture of life under the occupation, with the French response ranging from the heroic to the opportunistic.

When it was released, the film created immediate controversy and was banned from French television for a decade afterwards. The reason for the outrage was that it exploded the myth that nearly all of the French had resisted Nazi rule.

But it also opened an important debate about France’s history between 1940 and 1945 and led to an examination and acknowledgement of some of the war crimes that the French had committed, including the roundup of French Jews and their deportation to German concentrations camps for extermination.

Given the rather murky history of the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, I have thought that Korea needed its own version of “The Sorrow and the Pity.” This point was brought home to me recently when I read a series of letters written by U.S. intelligence officers immediately after the end of World War II and published as a book, “From a Ruined Empire.”

Donald Keene, who would later become a respected professor of Japanese studies at Columbia University, describes visiting captured Korean soldiers who had been fighting for the Imperial Japanese Army during the Battle of Okinawa and who were being held in Hawaii.

“I used to go almost every evening to the Korean prisoner of war stockade on Oahu, ostensibly for a Korean lesson, but actually for the pleasure of talking to the Koreans,” he wrote. Some of the Koreans POWs were being trained as part of a military unit, called the Korean Eagle Party, which was set to accompany the U.S. Army in an expected invasion of Korea if World War II had continued.

After hearing their bitter tales of Japanese rule, one of the soldiers said, “At last I have realized the great ambition of my life. Ever since I read a certain book in high school I have wanted to join an organization like the Korean Eagle Party.” Keene asked him what the book was and the soldier gave the Japanese title of “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler.

“I stuttered something about this book having been the very symbol of all we hated and fought against,” wrote Keene.

But another soldier replied, “But we all read it. We all believed it. Japanese propaganda was very strong.” The first soldier added, “Everyone had to believe their propaganda. I was once thrown into a detention cell for questioning it just a little.”

The episode left a deep impact on Keene. On one hand, he understood that the “Koreans couldn’t help it: they had collaborated, had made every possible positive step of collaboration in order to make a bare living.” But it also left him with a sense that the Koreans also presented “a hopelessly complicated pattern of hypocrisy” in dealing with the aftermath of Japanese colonial rule.

As Korea celebrates the 70th anniversary of its liberation from Japan, the issue of complicity among Koreans during the colonial period has not been fully explored or examined. Instead, it has largely been obscured by a national sense of victimhood, humiliation and guilt.

Korea was not alone in refusing to face stark reality. Many European nations occupied by Nazi Germany also had trouble in confronting their behavior.

“Nations are not only physically damaged by war, occupation or dictatorship but are morally corrupted too,” wrote Ian Buruma in his book “Year Zero: A History of 1945.” “Political legitimacy is lost. Civic sense is corroded by cynicism. Those who do well in tyrannies are often the least savory and most easily corrupted people. Those who carry most legitimacy, when the transition comes, are very often the most marginal while dictatorship lasts.”

In avoiding the past, countries in both Europe and Asia initially found refuge in the national myth that nearly everyone resisted the Germans or Japanese invaders. But gradually over the years, most European countries went through a period of catharsis in more objectively analyzing their role during World War II as shown by “The Sorrow and the Pity.” This helped form the foundation for the growth of the European Union.

It can be argued that Korea’s continued adherence to the national resistance myth has substantially harmed it. After all, it forms the basis for the rule of the Kim family in North Korea.

Although Japan has also not come to terms with its wartime past, Korea would be on firmer moral ground in criticizing Tokyo if it first dispassionately assessed its own response to Japanese colonial rule.

John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at john.burton@insightcomms.com.