On September 1, 1945, just over two weeks after the Japanese emperor made his famous surrender speech over NHK radio, Lieutenant General Kozuki Yoshio, Commanding Officer of the Seventeenth Japanese Army in Korea, established contact with U.S. Lieutenant General John Hodge, Commanding Officer of the XXIV Corps, remained in Okinawa but soon traveled to Seoul to direct the United States occupation of southern Korea. He had just learned that he would surrender to the U.S., rather than to the Soviet, armies. As Soviet troops were quickly advancing south from the Manchurian border, Kozuki informed Hodge that "there are Communist agitators among the Koreans who are plotting to take advantage of the situation to disturb the peace and order here." Fearing a possibility that this ideology may come to dominate southern Korean politics, Hodge directed the Japanese to maintain control over the peninsula until U.S. forces arrived. This was one of a number of clues that Japan would be positioned by the United States to again maintain a position of influence in the Northeast Asian region. This paper argues that U.S. attitudes toward the enemy Japanese began to soften as its relations with its ally turned enemy, the Soviet Union, hardened, even as the battles waged in the Pacific War. Japan's importance as a future belligerent in a possible future confrontation with the Soviet Union and the territory it would soon occupy in northern Korea?

August 15 remains an important day in Korean and Japanese cultures for the two peoples, the former commemorating their liberation from colonial rule and the latter lamenting the end of the tragedy that had befallen their nation. On this day in 1945, the emperor declared his countrys' intention to accept the Allied forces'surrender terms. This date, however, is a myth of sorts as the Koreans were soon after forced into division and further subjugation at the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, who divided postwar occupation responsibilities. For the Japanese, the emperors' unprecedented broadcast may have ended the bombing of Japanese cities, but it did not bring about a general return of Japanese soldiers from Pacific War battlefields. These days, however, the day is marked for concluding two tragic periods of their histories, but with very different sentiments. In this article the author traces his observations on how the Japanese and Koreans observe August 15 in contemporary times.

The battles of the Pacific War formally ended between mid-August and early September, 1945. However, the declarations of peace and surrender ceremonies that occurred during this time did not end informal battles across the Asian continent. Renegade Japanese military personnel refused to lay down their arms and repatriate quietly to their country. Some combed the waters between Japan and Korea in search of returnees attempting to repatriate with financial and material means in excess of that which the United States military governments allowed. Others sought to disrupt the occupation process by patrolling the streets of Korean cities and engaging in illegal and often violent activities. Koreans also caused problems by joining the Japanese in their postwar adventures or by harassing Japanese preparing to return to Japan and the Korean sympathizers who attempted to help them. Reportage of such actions appeared in the G-2 Periodic Report, which kept a daily record of such actions. These documents today open windows into the chaotic situation that the postwar era brought to Japanese and Koreans. Primarily through these reports, this paper sees the postwar belligerence that continued beyond official declarations of cease fire and peace in 1945 as kindling that sparked the broader conflicts of the late 1940s, and evolved to all-out war from the summer of 1950.

The United States and Soviet Union delegations to the Joint Commission talks ended the initial round of their efforts in May 1946 after but two months of talks designed to guide the creation of a unified Korean government through a process of trusteeship that would last at most five years beyond their helping Koreans form a unified provisional government. At the center of their differences were those over the concept of democracy. Without a shared understanding of this concept, selection of which Korean "democratic political parties and social organizations" to consult proved to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. The two delegations would return to the conference table in July 1947, over a year later. But in the interval between meetings, the two Koreas had distanced themselves to such an extent that, even if the Joint Commission had realized success, the odds of their being able to agree on a framework to build a unified Korean government were greater than when they had first met. Examining the rhetoric from the northern Korean media, but also to a lesser extent that from southern Korean media, this paper attempts to flesh out some of the differences. While trusteeship proved to divide extreme left and right forces, two issues emphasized on the left were the superiority of its bottom-up democracy that focused on granting basic rights to a society (emphasized in the south) over building a level society from the bottom up (as emphasized in the north). The north also emphasized a second issue, that of the actions of "reactionaries" in the south to disrupt the development of this democratic society in Korea. In the end, both sides failed to form democratic societies that matched their rhetoric.

In December of 1943, three leaders of the Allied forces gathered in Cairo, Egypt to discuss wartime and postwar issues. The Communiqué that they completed in the last of the four-days of meetings, however, reflected issues related to the postwar fate of the Japanese empire, rather than the wartime issues that had dominated their discussions. The rather obtuse phrase, “in due course,” inserted to qualify the leaders’ promise to deliver Korea its independence would gather significant importance only after the conference. It served as a cornerstone for Allied occupation policy planning and execution for future gatherings, while Koreans used it as a rallying point around which they protested Allied trusteeship policy both during and after the Pacific War. This disagreement contributed to the failure that the U.S. and Soviet experienced in their efforts to reunite the peninsula during their three-year occupations of southern and northern Korea. The legacy of this phrase continues in the divided peninsula to this day.

태평양전쟁 말기 몇 년간, 연합군 지도자들은 일본이 항복하는 경우 식민지에서 철수한다고 하는 선언을 냈다. 최초의 것은 루스벨트 미국 대통령, 처칠 영국 수상, 장개석 중국 국민정부 주석이 1943년 11월 카이로에서 공동으로 작성한 선언이었으며, 거기에서 “일본은 이제껏 무력과 강욕(强欲)에 의해 빼앗아 온 영토에서 퇴거한다”고 적시했다. 해당 영토에는 중국 영토였던 타이완, 만주 그리고 한반도가 포함되어 있었다. 이 지령은 얄타와 포츠담에서 행해졌던 회의에서도 반복되었다. 이렇게 반복된 약속에도 불구하고 이미 전쟁 중에 일본은 동북아시아에서 중요한 지위를 점하고자 하는 징후를 보였다. 연합국 지도자들이 일본의 항복은 전면적이고 일본제국은 완전히 무장해제 돼야 한다고 하고 있었지만. 연합국이 일본에 승리하여 전쟁을 공식적으로 종결하는 문서에 서명한 후에도 일본의 영향력은 우선 한국에 있어서 느껴지고 있었다. 분명 외교문서라든가 영토의 반환만으로는 30여 년의 식민지지배가 신속히 종식되는 것이 아닐지도 모른다. 그러나 일본인(특히 군대)에 의한 행동 그리고 보다 더 중요했던 것은 이 영토를 통치하게 되었던 미국 정부가 일본의 영향력을 강화하는 행동을 취했었다는 것이다. 일본 헌병대는 항복을 거부해 서울 시가지와 한일간의 해역(海域)을 계속 점거했다. 미국 고관들은 한국인들이 훈련될 때까지 식민지 법률을 개정하려 들지 않고, 일본식으로 훈련된 한국인과 일본인을 찾아내 그 역할을 메워 한반도를 통치하기 위한 조언을 했다. 본고는 일본이 항복 이후, 한반도 남북분단 후 한국전쟁에 이르기까지도 한국에서 일본이 지속적으로 보유했던 영향력에 대해 논한다. 브루스 커밍스가 ‘최고의 아이러니’라고 했던 것처럼, 원래라면 일본이 마땅히 당했어야 했을 가혹한 점령을 외려 한국이 감당하지 않으면 안되었던 일본의 영향력 지속의 한 이유를 밝힌다.

This chapter deepens our knowledge of a decolonizing and divided Korean peninsula in the violent interregnum between the fall of the Japanese empire and the outbreak of the Korean War. What did it mean to collaborate in a empire? How are collaborators to be judged? When should justice rule? When political expediency? This chapter deepens our understanding of the contradictions and ambiguities at the heart of the early post-1945 Korean state’s attempts to address colonial-era collaboration through legislation and law. In so doing it reveals much about the postimperial afterlives of Koreans who served the Japanese empire, their relationship to the post-1945 politics, how many evaded punishment, and the grey areas of nationalism in a colonial empire. In so doing it shows how the politics of collaboration unfolded in a postcolonial and transnational key, delving through the records of the United States military government and into the heart of the high politics and judicial arguments of Korean post-1945 leaders.