Doomed fate of 'undesirable Korean' in Japan

Between 1945 and 1952, Lee Sang-ho, also known by his Japanese name Sugiura Shogo, had been forced to embark on a tragic transnational migration. In June 1945 he was drafted as a civilian employee of the Japanese military and sent to Manchuria a month later. After Japan's surrender in August 1945, he became a prisoner of war (POW) captured by Soviet Union troops and from there he was sent to a prison camp in Mongolia until he was released to North Korea in 1948. He infiltrated Japan the next year as a North Korean spy and was arrested by the Japanese police. He was tried in Tokyo and deported to South Korea in 1952. / Korea Times graphic by Bae So-young

Korean Japanese historian brings World War II POW's tragic transnational migration to light

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Lee Sang-ho, also known by his Japanese name Sugiura Shogo, embodied the tragic life of "zainichi" Koreans in Japan shortly after World War II.

Although a Japanese national, he lived as a second-class citizen in the country he truly believed his home and ultimately faced deportation to South Korea in 1952 after which his whereabouts have remained unknown.

Born in 1924 in Gyeongsang Province in South Korea, Lee accompanied his parents who moved to Japan the same year when he was three months old.

Spending almost all his life in Japan until he was enlisted as a civilian employee of the Imperial Japanese Army in June 1945, he identified himself as a Japanese citizen.

Lee's life became intertwined with the turbulent modern history of East Asia.

Between 1945 and 1952, he had been forced to embark on a tragic transnational migration. In June 1945 he was drafted as a civilian employee of the Japanese military and sent to Manchuria a month later. After Japan's surrender in August, 1945, he became a prisoner of war (POW) captured by Soviet Union troops and from there he was sent to a prison camp in Mongolia until he was released to North Korea in 1948. He infiltrated Japan the next year as a North Korean spy and was arrested by the Japanese police. He was tried in Tokyo and deported to South Korea in 1952.

His post-World War II journey was different from other Korean POWs who were interned in Siberia or Mongolia. Some of them managed to travel all the way down to South Korea across the 38th parallel and were reunited with their families. Back in the late 1940s before the Korean War, the inter-Korean border was blurred and porous.

But for Lee, going to South Korea was not what he wanted.

He was Japanese and wanted to go back home to Japan. His parents died not long after the family migrated there. Still a child, Lee was adopted by a Japanese family and raised in Japan until he was enlisted in the Japanese Army.

"I had never set foot on the land of my birthplace, Korea, since my family moved to Japan when I was three months old… I always lived with Japanese people and in their customs. I did not have any chance to use Korean language and did not even need it," Lee was quoted as saying during interrogation by the U.S. military investigators who probed the North Korean espionage ring in Japan. His remarks were included in the U.S. intelligence report that compiled the espionage case in Japan in 1952 which was declassified decades later.

Lee Sang-ho (1924-?), also known by his Japanese name Sugiura Shogo / Photo from Deok-hyo Choi

The North Korean authorities had ordered him to work for a spy ring in Japan to collect information and share it with other North Korean agents operating there, a condition he accepted in order to return home.

In the late 1940s after World War II, North Korea-Japan relations were not hostile.

Japan had been under U.S. occupation from 1945 till 1952. This unique political circumstance appears to have motivated North Korea to feel the need to infiltrate Japan to gather information about their enemy ― the United States.

Lee was smuggled on a boat from the North Korean port city of Wonsan and secretly landed in Japan in March 1949. He stayed in Japan until he and over forty other suspects were arrested by the Japanese police in September 1950 as the U.S. authorities instigated a crackdown on North Korean spies. The suspects were tried in a U.S. provost court in May 1951. Lee was sentenced to four years of confinement and deported to South Korea in 1952 before his jail term was completed.

The deportation of Korean leftists in Japan during the U.S. occupation era was a highly sensitive political decision, according to Korean Japanese historian Deok-hyo Choi.

Choi, 44, a lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England, brought the Korean POWs' tragic transnational migration to light while tracing Korean Japanese communists' involvement in the socialist movement in Japan for his research paper. He found the declassified U.S. military intelligence reports and discovered the existence of Lee Sang-ho.

Korean Japanese historian Deok-hyo Choi, a lecturer in Korean Studies at University of Sheffield in England, brought the Korean POWs' tragic transnational migration to light while tracing Korean Japanese communists' involvement in the socialist movement in Japan for his research paper. / Courtesy of Deok-hyo Choi

In an email interview with The Korea Times, Choi said the United States was wary of communist influence in Japan, particularly during the Korean War, because it was at war with North Korea.

Meanwhile, Korean leftists were a headache to the Japanese government as the former teamed up with the Communist Party of Japan (CPJ) to bring down the government and instigated the public to join their anti-war campaign.

They staged protests, distributed anti-war leaflets and rallied support from laborers assigned to ship munitions, which were to head to South Korea during the war, on sabotage missions.

The socialists recognized North Korea as the sole legitimate government on the Korean Peninsula, and put serious effort into mobilizing like-minded Japanese to fight against the U.S. government that led the allied forces in the Korean War.

It is no surprise that Korean and Japanese socialists were targeted as a common enemy for both the U.S. and the Japanese governments.

The United States and Japan shared a mutual interest in deporting Korean socialists to South Korea. By sending the socialists to prison camps in war-time South Korea, the United States was able to remove the potential threat to its East Asia strategy, and Japan was able to remove "subversive" Korean communists.

Lee Sang-ho's deportation to South Korea in 1952 during the Korean War came against such a geopolitical backdrop.

Citing Japanese government sources, Choi said Korean deportees totaled 10 in 1946, rose to 365 the next year, and dozens more in the following years.

It remains unknown how Lee's life turned out after he was deported to South Korea. There are no documents available to trace his whereabouts.

Professor Choi cautiously predicted that the Korean Japanese POW would have been sentenced to death.

"I could not trace his whereabouts after his deportation," he said. "But based on my research on other similar cases, it is highly likely that he was imprisoned and possibly sentenced to death in South Korea."

Although six decades have passed since he was last seen in a prison camp in Incheon, Choi said the untold history surrounding Lee still has implications for South Korea.

Wartime victims, including those who fell victim to sexual enslavement and slave labor, became vocal in the 1990s and some took legal action against the South Korean and Japanese governments. The Korean courts sided with these wartime victims.

POWs and Koreans who were interned in the Siberian region or Mongolia, however, faced a different fate.

The post-Korean War purge of communists in South Korea made them vulnerable to punishment and a witch hunt as they were painted as communists having alleged links with the Soviet Union or North Korea.

Some voluntarily chose military service to prove their patriotism.

Choi found the declassified U.S. military intelligence reports and discovered the existence of Lee Sang-ho. / Photo from Deok-hyo Choi

Professor Choi said the suffering these wartime victims endured raises a human rights issue. Lee, for example, was a Korean-born Japanese and thus was not subject to deportation. The United States and Japan would have been fully aware of his impending fate once he arrived in a prison camp in South Korea. The massive "Red purge" was underway during the Syngman Rhee government and a man like Lee who was labelled as a North Korean spy would have likely faced a tragic end once he arrived at his birthplace.

Choi calls Lee a victim of cruel Cold War politics.

"Lee Sang-ho's story compels us to think about how the violence of Cold War politics can ruin the life of an ordinary person," he said.

Lee's case raises a key question for Koreans today: What if becoming a North Korean spy was the only way for him to go back to the home he had missed so much?

Choi was sympathetic to Lee regarding his motives to become a North Korean spy in Japan.

"He just wanted to come back to Japan where he grew up and spent almost his entire life. (When he was sent to North Korea after being captured by the Soviet troops), he chose neither South nor North Korea," Choi said. "He probably had no choice but to accept the intelligence mission the North Korean authorities assigned to him in exchange for his return home to Japan. There he was convicted by the U.S. provost court as a 'North Korean spy' and was deported to South Korea. This is how he returned to his birthplace."