Korea

"There was a period when our nation brought to bear great sufferings upon the people of the Korean Peninsula. The deep sorrow that I feel over this will never be forgotten."

"The present Japanese régime in Korea is doing everything in its power to suppress Korean nationality. The Government not only forbade the study of Korean language and history in schools, but went so far as to make a systematic collection of all works of Korean history and literature in public archives and private homes and burned them."

"Another official report, entitled 'Outline of Economic Policies for the Southern Areas', made it clear that Japanese financial institutions would 'assume the financial hegemony hitherto held by the enemy institutions'. The development of manufacturing industries in Japanese-occupied territory was to be 'discouraged'. Other Asians must learn Japanese. They must adopt the Japanese calendar. They must kowtow to the Japanese. In short, Co-Prosperity simply meant a new imperialism, with the Japanese taking the place of the Europeans as the masters. All that remained to be seen was whether they would be more cruel or less - though the example of Japanese rule in Korea, where nationalist stirrings had been crushed with unrestrained violence in the 1920s and where linguistic and cultural Japanization was intensified in the 1930s, was not encouraging. The Korean language was banned from schools. Koreans were to attend Shinto services and, after 1939, to adopt Japanese names. Nor was this process of cultural subjugation mitigated by economic progress. Living standards were miserably low in Korea. Per capita income was roughly a quarter of what it was in Japan, while the mortality rate from contagious diseases was more than twice as high."

"No less enslaved and little more likely to survive were the tens of thousands of Korean girls who were abducted to serve as 'comfort women' - ianfu, colloquially known as 'Ps', from the Chinese p'i (cunt) - to Japanese troops all over 'Greater East Asia', often to front-line areas. Victims of what amounted to institutionalized gang rape, their recollections make harrowing reading."

"One of the most neglected aspects of the history of Korea under Japanese colonial rule is the significant role of the drug trade during the colonial period. Korea emerged as a major producer of opium and narcotics in the 1920s, and in the 1930s became an important supplier to the opium monopoly created by the Japanese-sponsored Manchukou regime. The latter development sparked an international controversy due to Manchukou's unsavory reputation in connection with the illicit drug trade, and would later lead the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to identify Korea as the 'principal source of opium and narcotics at the time of the Mukden Incident and for some time thereafter.' Moreover, emigrant Koreans played an extensive role in drug trafficking in China, and especially Manchuria. This disreputable element of the Korean Diaspora was usually employed at the lowest rung of the drug trafficking ladder as poppy farmers, drug peddlers, or the proprietors of opium dens. As Japanese nationals, Korean drug traffickers were immune from prosecution by Chinese authorities due to extraterritoriality."

"My opinion of Japanese administration in Korea has been derived from the consideration of what I saw in the country, what I have read about it in official and in unofficial publications, and from discussions with persons, Japanese, Korean and foreign, who were living in the Peninsula at the time of my visit. It is true that at the time Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the actual conditions of life in the peninsula were extremely bad. This was not due to any lack of inherent intelligence and ability in the Korean race, but to the stupidity and corruption which had characterized the government of the Korean dynasty, and to the existence of a royal court which maintained a system of licensed cruelty and corruption throughout Korea. Such was the misrule under which the Koreans had suffered for generation after generation that all incentive to industry and social progress had been destroyed because none of the common people had been allowed to enjoy the fruits of their own efforts. From 1910 to 1919 Japanese rule in Korea, though it accomplished much good for the people, bore the stamp of a military stiffness which aroused a great deal of resentment. The New Korea of which I write is the Korea which has developed under the wise and sympathetic guidance of Governor-General Saito. At the time of my own visit to Korea in 1922, the Governor-General had nearly completed three years of his tenure in the office."

"We hereby pledge the following:"

"# Today’s undertaking reflects the demands of our people for justice, morality, survival, and prosperity. Therefore, we will act solely in the spirit of liberty, never in the spirit of enmity."

"# To the last person and to the last moment, we will forthrightly express the will of the Korean people."

"# We will respect order in all our actions and ensure that our demeanor and claims are always honorable and upright."

"Americans think of WW2 in Asia as having begun with Pearl Harbor, the British with the fall of Singapore, and so forth. The Chinese would correct this by identifying the Marco Polo Bridge incident as the start, or the earlier Japanese seizure of Manchuria. It really began in 1895 with Japan’s assassination of Korea’s Queen Min, and invasion of Korea, resulting in its absorption into Japan, followed quickly by Japan’s seizure of southern Manchuria, etc. – establishing that Japan was at war from 1895–1945."

"The origins of the Korean War linked the late nineteenth century collapse of Chinese power in east Asia with the rise of Cold War ideological conflict. The fall of the Qing Empire, with which Korea had long been associated, opened the way for Japanese imperialist expansion across the region. The first country to be taken over was Korea, after China lost the 1894–95 war against Japan. By 1910 Korea was fully annexed to Japan, as an integral part of its empire. The Japanese administration did its best to stamp out Korean identity. The royal palace in Seoul was demolished and Japanese became the medium of instruction for all higher education. Tokyo even tried to force Koreans to wear Japanese dress and assimilate in social codes and family life. But at the same time, just like in the European empires that the Japanese admired and feared in equal amounts, there was widespread segregation of colonizers and colonized. Most Koreans understood that they could never become full members of the Japanese Empire, even if they had wanted to. From the beginning, the occupation of Korea gave rise to nationalist resistance. For many young Koreans, the real insult of the Japanese takeover was that it came just as they were formulating their own views of their country’s future. Some of them went into exile, and the nationalisms they conceived there were intense and uncompromising, as ideal views of one’s own country formed abroad often are. Korean nationalists wedded themselves not only to defeating Japan and liberating their country but also to building a future, unified Korea that was modern, centralized, powerful, and virtuous. Korea, they believed, could not only produce its own liberation but would stand as an example for other downtrodden peoples."

"They made a new government, which was a lot more Western. They made a new constitution, that was, pretty Western. And a military, that was... pretty Western. And you know what else is Western? That's right: It's conquering stuff. So what can we conquer? Korea! They conquer Korea, taking it from its previous owner, China, and then go a little bit further."

"North Korea, also known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK, a country of nearly 25 million people, whose capital city is Pyongyang."

"South Korea, also known as the Republic of Korea, or ROK, a country of over 50 million people, whose capital city is Seoul."

"The people are well built and strong, as a rule. They are a loyal, contented race, not grasping, and rather too easy in disposition. They are intelligent and learn with great ease. Possessed of many characteristics in common with their neighbors, the Chinese and Japanese, they yet seem to have a personality indicative of a different parentage, which continually calls forth inquiry as to their origin. In some slight degree they resemble the aborigines of America, and it is believed that their ancestors came from the north:—the question opens up a fertile field for study. Their written records are said to date back three thousand years."

"The tragedy of Korea is further heightened by the fact that its military action is confined to its territorial limits. It condemns that nation, which it is our purpose to save, to suffer the devastating impact of full naval and air bombardment while the enemy's sanctuaries are fully protected from such attack and devastation. Of the nations of the world, Korea alone, up to now, is the sole one which has risked its all against communism. The magnificence of the courage and fortitude of the Korean people defies description. They have chosen to risk death rather than slavery. Their last words to me were: 'Don't scuttle the Pacific!'"

"In Germany, it's, let's say it's 5:59 and you're heading for the bakery or whatever and it's due to close at 6. The German will walk right up to that door and close it right in your face, they will lock it on the other side of that glass door with a shrug, like "sorry". A Korean would never do that, ever. And, and this is what I like about them."

"If we are weak, our country will be in jeopardy. It is the living lesson of human history of the rise and fall of nations. In order for a country not to fall, it must cultivate its own strength."

"“How can the Korean people, who have lived in one territory and one region for five millennia, now have nothing to do with each other just because [the Korean Communist Régime] banned unification songs?”"

"Our state’s slave law is ancient, and the scholar-officials depend on [slaves] to survive ... Slaves are the hands and feet of the literati."

"In fact, it is in the oriental state of Korea that we find one of the most extraordinary cases of economic dependence on slaves among all peoples and all periods. Large-scale slavery flourished there for over a thousand years up to the nineteenth century. For several centuries the service population was proportionately higher than the one in the U.S. South at its peak of dependence on slavery in the nineteenth century."

"Korea’s science and technology are worth knowing and thinking about in connection with technology transfer for special reasons. Unlike China, Korea’s styles in thinking systematically and objectively about nature and in developing instruments and techniques of material culture were always defined in the shadow of a large sophisticated nearby civilization. The Korean experience differs from Japan’s in that its influences from China flowed in more freely and directly, across a shared land border or a short stretch of sea. It was from Korea in fact that new sciences and arts were carried into Japan during the early centuries until regular contact between Japan and China became possible. As recent Korean and Japanese scholarship begins to cohere, it is becoming plain that we have not yet adequately recognized what a great part immigrant Koreans played in the formative phases of Japanese civilization as men of learning, craftsmen, and indeed nobles. Korea thus presents for our reflection the case of a country seeking to maintain its identity against pressures too imminent to be shut out."

"(Jeon Sang-woon) is a Korean, and his pride in certain inventions and techniques is perceptibly greater than if he were a foreigner writing about Korean science. He knows that he is addressing a world-wide readership most of whom did not dream before they picked up his book that Korea is entitled to exert any claim upon the universal history of science. He knows that many educated people in Europe and the United States are just recovering from the shock of learning Joseph Needham’s lesson, that the Chinese tradition is as indispensable as that of the early West in determining the potentialities of science. This book opens up still another range of awareness by demonstrating that peripheral societies must be examined with equal seriousness if we are not to overlook real originality. The author also knows that this implication will be equally surprising to most of his fellow Koreans. In Korea today the power to exploit nature is seen as an importation, as foreign in its essence. Few people are aware that, say, Korea in 1400 may very well have had the most advanced astronomicalobservatories in the world. Is it possible that science is not fundamentally Caucasian and Judeo-Christian (and all sorts-of other things Koreans are not) after all?"