Blowback - S3 Episode 2 - “The Uninvited”

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

A pocket-sized history of the Korean peninsula, the upstart US and Japanese empires, and World War II.Soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/album/4e9hkmGdDhycmgcGKe3bF0?si=d97_H1fvS5CV84ZvcEhZqQAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

United Nations Radio presents the first of two specially recorded broadcasts telling the Korea Story and starring Dick Powell. This evening, everyone has the right to know how this war began, how it was waged and how it was stopped. Chapter 1 of the Korea story. Speak about this luxem. Speak about this loss, son. Welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Colwyn.

And this is episode two, the uninvited. The last time, as we do each season, we took an overview in episode one, took a general look at the place of the Korean War in the United States' memory and culture. Now, in this episode, we'll start to tell the story, trace this history of the Korean War. But as listeners may be used to by now, we will not start in June 1950, when the breakout of the war is usually dated. We won't even start in 1950 at all, or the year before that. We won't even begin at the close of the Second World War. In fact, that's where this episode will end.

Yes, we'll start by going way back with a quick history of how Korea, Korea emerged as a kingdom, grew into a single state, and eventually became dominated by foreign powers. We'll see the competition between Westerners and the Japanese to break into Korea, a contest won by Japan, which turns the Korean Peninsula into a colony by the 20th century. Of course, China was also a major influence here, and we'll see how all three of these Asian nations, Korea, China, and Japan, coped with the long hand of European and, and eventually American policy. In particular, we'll see Imperial Japan's development

with a focus on the economics of empire and how Korea paid the price. We'll also look at how the United States in this same period began to expand its own empire beyond North America, acquiring territories in Asia, and placing itself on track for competition with upstart powers like Germany and, of course, Japan. And these narratives merge in the climax of the Second World War, during which the future leaders

of Korea struggle to resist Japan, and the Americans and the Soviets emerge as the two superpowers. The aftermath of World War II sets the stage for the division of Korea and the rest of this story. Now, as usual, you can find sources and further reading on our website. In general for this episode, we've drawn heavily from Han Wu Kuhn's History of Korea and Bruce Cummings' is Korea's place in the sun. So, without further ado, let's get on with episode two, the uninvited. For those of you who have not recently traveled to Korea or returned, it lies between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. Its shores are washed by these waters of the Pacific Ocean. It happens that its name Chosun means land of the morning calm.

Three years ago, the troubled morning calm erupted into war. The modern name for Korea comes from the Koryo dynasty, which came to power in the 10th century. The north of this East Asian peninsula, which would find itself bordered by the Chinese and Russian empires, was largely mountainous. The South, by contrast, was coated by planes and opened up to the sea, across the water from Japan. And to greatly simplify a long and deep history here, it was the Koryo dynasty that sealed the deal of unifying the peninsula after many years of competition between warring kingdoms. And by this point in the 10th century, Korea had developed a special relationship with the Chinese Empire. It was distinct from its vast neighbor, but not unlike the way neighbors of, say, Rome inevitably grew and

found their place in relation to that empire. China greatly influenced Korea, yes, but Korea both retained its own character and in turn influenced others, such as Japan. And quite contrary to the descriptions you'll hear later of foreigners describing a pitiable, impoverished land, we find records of travelers at the time showing great admiration for Korea's beauty. There's an account from an Arab historian that seems appropriate to quote here as it brushes together Korean and Iraqi history, quote, seldom has a stranger who has come there to Korea from Iraq or another country left it afterwards. So healthy is the air there, so pure the water, so fertile the soil, and so plentiful all good things. By the 15th century, the Corio dynasty had given way to the Chosan

dynasty, whose capital was Seoul. The name Chosan is in fact how North Koreans still refer to country today. And this time, the 1400s, was maybe the peak of pre-modern Korea. Long before Gutenberg, in Europe, the Koreans had developed a movable type, which you can still recognize today. Authors Cho Seng Han, Martha Mendoza, and Charles Hanley write, quote, Koreans devised their own simple alphabet free in Korea from the shackles of Chinese character writing. They taught techniques of ceramic making to the Japanese. They instituted civil service exams and organized the nation into political subdivisions centuries before Western societies did. Bruce Cummings writes of the, quote, unpretentiously naturalistic folk paintings, popular novels,

and theater, which attacked the inequities of the class system, some of which is still performed today in both the North and the South. There was a central state in a powerful aristocracy, the Young Ban, which owned Korea's property alongside both a Confucian and Buddhist scholar class, Below this lay everybody else. Cummings writes, quote, Below hereditary aristocracy were common people like peasants, clerks, and merchants. Below these were outcast groups of butchers, tanners, and entertainers who were called Chunmin and who led a caste-like existence.

Likewise, slavery was hereditary, and slaves may have constituted as much as 30% of Corio society. The landed class was pretty good at keeping the central government out of its affairs, and it wasn't until the communist revolution centuries later that a Korean state would finally dethrone it. You can also see the seeds of a deeply anti-commercial ideology. Historian James Gale writes, quote, Korean Confucian hierarchy not only killed manufacture of all kinds, but has put the merchant in a class little better than a pariah.

Then came the slow decline. Quote, a combination of literary purges in the early 16th century, Japanese invasions at the end of it, and Manchu invasions in the middle of the next century, severely debilitated the Chosan state, and it never again reached the heights of the 15th century, end quote. And these were some dark times. Epidemics killed hundreds of thousands.

Along the way, Korea lost something special about the special relationship with China as the Manchus overthrew the friendly Ming dynasty. Quote, a series of bad harvests in the early 1880s pushed many peasants into vagabondage or slash and burn farming in the mountains and others into open rebellion. Greedy tax collectors were often the stimulus for revolt.

They stretched their hands even into the mountains seeking to collect from the farmers. And this kind of oppression could not go totally unopposed forever. Quote, the Pacific is the Ocean Bride of America. China and Japan and Korea, their innumerable islands hanging like necklaces about them, are the bridesmaids. California is the nuptial couch, the bridal chamber, where all the wealth of the Orient will be brought to celebrate the wedding. Let us as Americans see to it that the bridegroom cometh.

Rear Admiral Robert Wilson Shufelt, a 19th century. officer in the U.S. Navy who negotiated the First American Treaty with Korea. In the mid-19th century, beginning with the Opium Wars, Western imperialism crowbarred open the doors of East Asia, which had until then had the gall to resist becoming, among other things, a giant drug outpost for the British Empire. After China's opening, came Japan's, and then Korea's. Korea till this point had been famously blunt with foreigners. The mighty British East India Company had been turned away twice. Isolationist, xenophobic, whatever you want to call it,

this was Korea's general sensibility after the succession of Manchu and Japanese invasions of the 16th and 17th centuries. Quote, Korea was relatively content in its relations with one country, China, and anxious to keep everyone else at bay. The knocking was loud, insistent, and soon at the point of a gun. The first breakthroughs were made by Catholic missionaries, and Korea's leaders recognized the threat that they could pose. Through the 19th century, Korean Catholic converts began to sprout, and the missionaries were ruthlessly cut down. In 1866, French troops, claiming outrage over this treatment of the Catholics, showed up at Gangwa Island, north of where General MacArthur would land about 100 years later.

The Koreans expelled the French. and then came the first major exchange with the Americans. It was not a pleasant one. The SS General Sherman attacked in 1866, the same year as the French. This was a heavily armed schooner, sailing up on the Tarang River. The Koreans told the crew to turn back that foreign commerce was not permitted. But the Sherman went ahead anyway, Han Wukun writes, and when angry crowds gathered on the shore, its sailors shot at them.

The Korean provincial governor ordered the ship destroyed, and it was, and its crew was executed. More American ships followed to avenge the Sherman, but were also repulse, for now. As Wukhune puts it, Korea, quote, was living on borrowed time. Now, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, outraged as the French had been, suggested teaming up with France to launch a punitive expedition to Korea, which did eventually happen in 1871. This war, which the New York Herald called, quote, the Little War with the Heathen, pitted American warships and Marines against Korean cannons. This American expedition eventually withdrew, like its forebears did, but this time, as many as 650 Koreans died. Beyond state

expeditions, you also had entrepreneurial private citizens trying to crack open Korea. Cummings provides a particularly Cohen Brothers-esque example with Ernst Opert, a German trader and adventurer. Quote, after being rebuffed in his first attempt to truck and barter in 1866, he got the bright idea to raid the tomb of the Korean king's father, grab his bones, and hold them for ransom. Surely this would get the Koreans to see the virtues of free trade. Meanwhile, Han Wukhune writes, a process was beginning in Japan that was to have the gravest consequences for all of East Asia, and ultimately for the whole world. Ever since opening to the West in the mid-19th century, Japan's leaders had dawned Western

suits and were feeling their imperial oats. Many elites had traveled and been schooled in the West as well. This was all part of the drive to achieve a modern industrial society under Emperor Meiji. People usually refer to this as the Meiji era. and so Japan was growing more and more impatient with the stubborn Korean kingdom across the strait. Cummings describes the outlook of Korea's leader at this time, known as the Taiwan Gun. The Taiwan Gun, quote, had a simple foreign policy. No treaties, no trade, no Catholics, no West, and no Japan. He viewed Japan's progressive reforms as yet more evidence of how far it had fallen from the way.

However, a few years later, after the Tewun's reign, his son, King Go Chong, thought that he could snatch a favorable deal from Japan. This backfired. It turns out Korea ended up facing Japanese warships, and the first of a series of unequal treaties favoring Japan was signed in 1876. After this treaty by gunpoint with Japan, there was a treaty with the United States in 1882, along with Germany and the United Kingdom. The Western nation secured, among other things, tariffs, diplomatic outposts, port concessions, you name it. What remained of Korea's sovereignty was slipping fast. Inside Korea, things were not going much better. First of all, the government in 19th century Korea taxed everything you could possibly tax,

and it was a deeply regressive system that fleeced the vast majority of the subjects, who were peasants. Not to mention, as Wukyun does, that by the end of the century, Western imports were upending Korea's homegrown economy, outmatched only by the rapid-fire economic takeover launched by the Japanese. Yeah, and let's make it plain here what made up Korea's economy. This is again from Wukyun. Quote, exports were mainly rice, soybeans, Jinsan, and hides. Gold, unhindered by any laws or regulations, flowed out of the country in vast quantities, exceeding all exports in value. Imports were chiefly British cotton textiles, metals, and

manufactured goods, end quote. Meanwhile, against the terms of their treaties, quote, Japanese businessmen began buying mines, ginson fields, and farmland outside the least territory. Japanese economic penetration spread through every trade and industry in Korea. For 40 years, Korea has been under Japanese domination. It's a flourishing, modern country rich natural resources, and its capital, Seoul, almost more western than Oriental. So as the century wound forward, peasant rebellions began to punctuate crises like poor harvests, political chaos, and economic stagnation.

This growing peasant discontent matured into the Tong Haq movement, founded and initially led by a mystical millinarian demagogue. Uprising broke out all over the south, prompting overwhelming waves. of government soldiers sent to stop them. What did the peasants want? They basically demanded, and this is Cummings, quote, fair taxation and a halt to rice exports to Japan. They wanted, quote, removal of Yangban oppression, the aristocracy,

burning of slave registers, an end to the strict social hierarchy, and remember this one, general redistribution of the land. And none of this, from the anti-Japanese sentiment to the Revolutionary People's Program, was sitting that well with Tokyo. And so Japanese troops entered Korea. This culminated in the first Sino-Japanese War. It did not go well for Korea, nor for China. Japan, in addition to negating Korea's sovereignty,

slaughtered enough peasants to completely stamp out the Tongok uprisings in general. The rice quota went up, not down. Furthermore, quote, Japan now occupied. Taiwan and made the island its first colony, and China ceded rights to Port Arthur, cementing Japan's naval position. As the 19th century came to a close, Korea passed a storm of reforms under now Japanese supervision, the end of slavery, the end of class-based dress code, the end of the Confucian-style exam systems, ministries on the quote-unquote Japanese model came into being. New tax laws, more rational ones too, a primary education system that was open to all.

And here's Cummings on all this. Quote, for most Westerners, Japan in this period was a shining beacon of enlightenment. For other Asians, it was a mecca of progress. And for Koreans who had groaned under the yoke of an aristocracy that, as it neared total collapse, seemed to only do exact more privilege for itself. The reforms were a welcome antidote. Japan was so feeling its oats, in fact, that its minister in Korea organized a kill squad to get rid of a bothersome Korean queen, stabbing her to death and burning her body in a garden shortly after.

At this point, the king of Korea essentially snuck back into his palace and formally took control back from the Japanese cabinet. But once again, the king was hoping to basically pay all these empires off, Cummings, writes. Quote, he doled out Korea's resources. Column A, gold mines, railroads, a new electric system for Seoul, went to Americans. Column B, banks, and timber rights, he divided between Britain and Russia. Meanwhile, Japan was still by far the most active commercial nation in Korea. Yeah, as all this went along, Korea was growing the first little seedlings of a modern middle class with incentives to collaborate and boost not Korean industry so much as Japanese industry.

By now, Cummings writes, quote, Korean society was showing unaccustomed vigor, but the state was still incapable of mobilizing this latent energy. The only question now was which imperial power would colonize Korea. Now, Japan obviously had the upper hand. Its troops had already gotten deep inside Korea, but let's take a brief rundown of the competition. The United States. Through Horace Allen, the first American doctor missionary

in Korea, America secured Korea's best gold mine for a U.S. company. American interests in Korea also included oil and electricity. The sole electric light company, the sole electric car company, sole fresh spring water company were all American firms. And there was the British. Quote, in 1902, England established an alliance with Japan and along with the United States gave Japan a free hand in Korea, coming a bit of a business partner. And to the north, Zaris Russia, was developing a railroad in Manchuria and, quote, exploiting forests and gold mines in the northern part of Korea. Russia also had coaling stations, timber concessions along the Yalu River, and with the American J.P. Morgan interests also got a gold mine at Unsan. In fact, the Russian

empire, which had long played Korea against its local Japanese rival, decided to make a play for Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula. This did not work, and in fact led to the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, in which Japan stunned the world as a modern non-white nation that whipped a massive European power. Theodore Roosevelt, in fact, brokered the peace treaty at Japanese invitation and won a Nobel Peace Prize in the process, and officiated Japan's new ownership of Korea. This was part of a handshake, in which the Japanese accepted American rights in the United States. the Philippines. Quote, if Japan had a free hand in Korea, it also had a helping hand. Almost every Westerner supported Japan's, quote, modernizing role in Korea, according to Bruce Cummings.

Japan's soft takeover in Korea, it was not yet technically a colony. This was yet another feather in the empire's cap. Everyone from Christian missionaries to progressives, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Sydney and Beatrice Webb, expressed awe and respect for the Japanese over, as Beatrice Webb put it, the quote horrid race in Korea. Japan was at this point an ally of Britain, whose empire was actually in slow decline and aware of its diminishing returns. The anxiety of the Japanese decades earlier had now been flipped on its head. Now it was Britain, looking at Meiji Japan as a dynamic example, especially with a rising Germany that was making Britain's very nervous. And so, in the

end, after several years waiting for Korea's power elite to collapse, Japan officially seized Korea. In August 1910, the country became a Japanese colony. Quote, Koreans never saw Japanese rule as anything but illegitimate and humiliating, writes Cummings. Furthermore, the very closeness of the two nations in geography and common Chinese cultural influences, indeed in levels of development in the 19th century made Japanese dominance all the more galling to Koreans. Japan had in a very short time flipped the script and became the pre-eminent power in Asia. China, once the most glorious civilization on the planet to many, had failed to meet challenges both at home and abroad and had fallen behind until it was carved up like a Thanksgiving ham

by hungry, hungry Europeans. Japan was going to get a piece of that too. But, much to Japan's distaste, there was another newish empire in the game. Perhaps not only a competitor, but a would-be conqueror. As all this was happening in the Pacific, the American Empire was coming into its own. Let's start with Hawaii. In 1893, the American business elite in Honolulu put Queen Lulio Colani under house arrest before eventually deposing her. The coup plotters, however, didn't succeed in getting Hawaii formally annexed to the United

States like they had hoped. Throughout the 1890s, the question of what to do about Hawaii remained, you know, an open political issue, with lots of powerful interests muscling to get their way. Enter John Watson Foster, highly devout Christian, brigadier general in the Union Army, career diplomat and lawyer from Indiana. The highlight of his career was his stint as Secretary of State at the end of the 1880s. Within a decade, Foster had become a key business and political partner of the Hawaiian colonial elite. According to the historian Michael Devine, Foster visited the islands and plotted chiefly with the Dole family,

you know, of Dole Fruit, to get the territory annexed, in time becoming the lawyer and lobbyist for the Hawaiian annexationists in D.C. He was their inside man in Washington. At that time, Foster said Hawaii was already, quote, virtually an American colony. In the winter of late 1897 and early 1898, just before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, imperial sentiment was in vogue inside the United States, infamously whipped up by the yellow journalism of the Hearst Chain, Pulitzer newspapers, and other media empires. The war with Spain provided the opening,

that Foster, the Dole family, and friends of the Hawaiian elite needed. Hawaii's annexation was approved in short order before the war was even over. American ascendance through the First World War was virtually guaranteed. New frontiers, after all, meant new markets. In America, quote, the three major depression periods coincided with outbreaks of industrial violence, writes the historian Gareth Studman Jones. Quote, James Madison's prediction that class war would follow the closing of the frontier seemed to becoming true. John W. Foster had been one of the men who

had shaped this era, this transition from the Gilded Age to something new. He worked to keep the global frontier alive, especially in the Pacific, with its potential for new natural resources and indigenous labor so cheap it might as well have been free. Foster has long been credited as the role model to his grandson, one John Foster Dulles, future partner. Future partner of white shoe law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and like his grandfather, a soldier for Christ and an eventual secretary of state. Not every American came off as gung-ho as the fosters of the world. President William McKinley, on the other hand, was getting called weak by the Hearst Papers for his pre-Spanish-American

War pledges not to annex the Philippines. He came to see the light, however, adopted a policy of what he called, quote-unquote, benevolent assimilation of the islands and their people. Here's an account of McKinley speaking before a Methodist congregation in 1890. Now, McKinley begins by telling his audience that he, quote, didn't know what to do with the islands. And he prayed to God for guidance. McKinley concluded, quote, that there was nothing left for us the Americans to do, but to take them all, to take all the Philippines, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them,

and by God's grace do the very best we could by them as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the war department. McKinley was assassinated in September 1901 by the anarchist Leon Shogush. But from the moment McKinley spoke those words, a new Filipino-American war, the Filipino fight for national liberation is started.

It would continue until the summer of 1902, well after McKinley's death. Filipinos with whom the Americans had once fought against Spain, again, not totally unlike the Cubans, were now being slaughtered by United States troops. The historian Ken de Beauvoir wrote a book, Agents of Apocalypse, about how the Philippines developed the highest mortality rate on the planet. at the time of this war. Here's a key excerpt. He writes, quote, it appears that the American war contributed directly and indirectly to the loss of more than a million persons from a base population of about 7 million.

Now, who were the Americans who administered this apocalypse? Well, there were some marquee names. In Manila, the Philippines capital, their military governor was one Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas, the future general and supreme commander for the allied powers in the Pacific. Papa MacArthur had led the charge against the Spaniards on land, allied with Filipino rebels fighting the Spanish, and upon becoming military governor, claimed that Manila, quote, the city, its inhabitants, its churches and religious worship, and its private property of all descriptions, are placed under the special safeguard of the faith and honor of the American army. The American military occupation of the Philippines had officially begun, and the man administering it, according to one Colonel Enoch Crowder, remember him, a one-time U.S. puppet master in Cuba?

According to Crowder, Arthur McArthur's own aid, he was, quote, the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen until I met his son. Arthur McArthur struggled to put down the Philippine insurgency and wrote purple letters to McKinley. Here's a taste, quote, the adhesive principle comes from ethnological homogeneity, asking for more resources to dominate Manila and the Philippines, where the rebellion was growing violent. McKinley's response, as happened in supposedly autonomous Cuba, was to install a political pro-consul to effectively oversee McArthur's administration. During congressional hearings, writes Cho Sang-Hun and Martha Mendoza, McArthur, quote, assured the congressman that America was carrying out the civilizing mission

of its Aryan ancestors in the Philippine campaign. McInley, meanwhile, chose a relative nobody at the time, an Ohio judge named William Howard Taft to become the new political overseer of the American presence in the Philippines. Taft and MacArthur did not get along, writes Douglass. McArthur's biographer, William Manchester. Eventually, as his own political star rose higher, Taft got rid of this, quote, pseudo-profound military martinet. Meanwhile, at West Point,

a few dozen miles up the Hudson River from New York City, MacArthur's son, the fresh-faced cadet, Douglas, faced his own ordeals. MacArthur, the younger, testified before Congress about the hazing of quote-unquote plebs at the Military Academy and formed a rivalry with fellow big man on campus Ulysses S. Grant III. In fact, both Grant and MacArthur's mothers took up residence at a yellow-brick hotel just down the road from campus. But it was Douglas, who reportedly dined with his mother, Pinky MacArthur, every night. and it was Douglas who graduated far ahead in their class.

The Spanish-American and Filipino-American wars, pushing American control further across the globe, they naturally required that the United States produce a naval power capable of handling all of those miles of open sea. In the roughly two decades from those wars at the turn of the century, until America's entrance into World War I, the American Navy usurped Britons as the world's most powerful fleet. And by coming into the First World War so late, the U.S. was further empowered to invoke and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to keep European powers out of its hemisphere.

These were the years of Teddy Roosevelt's so-called Big Stick policy, the rise of the, quote, Great White Fleet, and the realization of the Panama Canal, whose infamously lethal construction and American control proved immensely lucrative for decades to come. Meanwhile in the Pacific, the Japanese, who like the United States, were allied powers during World War I, the Japanese Navy similarly increased its own imperial holdings in East Asia. In May 1917, a month after the U.S. joined the First World War,

Vladimir Lenin delivered a lecture on, quote, the question of the class character of the war, what caused that war, what classes are waging it, and what historical economic conditions gave rise to it. On the subject of America's recent entry into the war in its relationship with supposed allied power, Japan. Here's what Lenin said, quote. On the question of America entering the war, I shall say this.

People argue that America is a democracy. America has the White House. I say slavery was abolished there half a century ago. The anti-slave war ended in 1865. Since then, multi-millionaires have mushroomed. They have the whole of America in their financial grip. They are making ready to subdue Mexico. Mexico and will inevitably come to war with Japan over a carve-up of the Pacific.

This war has been brewing for several decades. All literature speaks about it. America's real aim in entering the war is to prepare for this future war with Japan. The American people do enjoy considerable freedom, and it is difficult to conceive them standing for compulsory military service, for the setting up of an army pursuing any aims of conquest, a struggle with Japan, for instance. The Americans have the example of Europe to show them what this leads to. The American capitalists have stepped into this war in order to have an excuse behind a smokescreen

of lofty ideals, championing the rights of small nations for building up a strong standing army. Back to the East Asian countries here. lofty ideas of national power and prestige, why might Meiji Japan have wanted to colonize Korea? We asked, scholar of Korea, Bruce Cummings. When Japan embarked on empire, it was in an alliance with the British, a formal alliance by 2002, but basically they didn't want to do anything to offend the British or the Americans with the Philippines. So they colonized their near reaches. So first of all, Korea was just there.

I mean, it wasn't like Japan could go to Africa and compete with other imperial powers for colonies. They didn't want to do that. So that's the first reason for colonizing Taiwan and Korea. Second reason, initially, was to grow rice. By the 1920s, Korea was providing about 20% of Japanese rice. We also spoke to scholar Susie Kim, who adds to this, and describes the differences between European and Japanese imperial expansion. If you think about the reasons for the colonial enterprises, for Europe it was largely extracted

where they were seeking raw materials to bring in, and then that would be used within the metropole, within the urban centers within Europe, where the industrialization was happening. Whereas with Japan, because the impetus for colonization, happened in order to expand its territorial ambitions beyond its island nation-state, it really needed a foothold within the mainland to be able to expand. And so it wasn't enough to be extractive. I mean, there was definitely extractive reasons. In other words, Japan was really struggling with insufficient rice, for example, but it would

have taken too much effort to try to mobilize a... across the seas, all of its industrial resources to then continue to expand into the rest of mainland Asia. So what this meant was that Korea had to become rapidly industrialized. Factories had to be set up very quickly. Railways had to be put down, largely to basically connect the peninsula as a launching path to the rest of Asia for Japan to expand its ambitions. It tried to justify it as a form of kind of defensive measure against the encroachment of the West into Asia. So in other words, it saw itself very much as a way to save the rest of Asia. And so, after the formal acquisition in 1910, when Korea became a Japanese colony, the empire got to work.

The occupation began as equal parts, military, and bureaucracy. Japan considered the pen and the sword equally mighty. Quote, in the first decade of their rule, Cummings writes, Japanese colonizers pushed a heavy-handed military policy, mainly because of the sharp resistance at their accession to power. Even classroom teachers wore uniforms and carried swords. But perhaps even more important was, quote, the horde of bureaucrats.

246,000 Japanese civil servants and professionals ruled about 21 million Koreans. The Colonial Bank of Korea was set up as the central bank. Central judicial bodies, quote, wrote new laws establishing an extensive, legalized system of racial discrimination against Koreans, making them second-class citizens in their own country, and a centrally administered police force, the national police, enforced the colonizer's daily occupation. And scholar Patty Sarumi describes the policeification

the Japanese imposed onto their colonies. Quote, The police became the backbone of regional administration. In addition to regular policing duties, the police supervised the collection of taxes, the enforcement of sanitary measures. They oversaw road and irrigation work, public works, agriculture, local industry, etc. Native Koreans were employed en masse to police, spy on and torture their countrymen, as much as half of the national police were Korean.

The empire also made good use of Korea's existing class cleavages. One thing the Japanese did not destroy from the Chosun dynasty was the same aristocracy. Korean landlords were allowed to retain their holdings and encouraged to continue disciplining peasants and extracting rice or export. Meanwhile, Japan's conglomerates, the Zibatsu, laid railways, built ports, and installed modern factories. With all of this going on, the economic transformation was drastic. First World War had led to more exports, higher rice prices, and more money to invest in the Korean colony. Quote, agricultural output rose substantially in the 1920s, and a hot-house industrialization took root in the 1930s.

In the decades after Japan's takeover at Cummings, writes, Korea grew faster than Japan itself. But as we'll see, that growth was designed to achieve the empire's interests rather than the interests of the people of Korea. Here's a passage from the journalist Stephen Kinser. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson drafted a speech to Congress declaring, It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another people what their government shall be. And he sent this note to his Secretary of State for review. It came back with this notation,

in the margin. Haiti, Santa Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama. Confronted with this inconvenient reminder, Wilson decided not to deliver the speech. Koreans immediately opposed the Japanese takeover. As the years ground on, organized resistance grew. March 1st, 1919 saw millions of Koreans marching for independence, and it was met with with a violent response by the Japanese. They ended up killing thousands. Condemned by a world community that had started to talk the post-World War I talk about self-determination and nice ideas like that, Japan started opting for a lighter touch.

Bonka Sejee, or cultural policy, promised a far-away eventual independence for Korea, under Japanese supervision, of course. But the empire eased restrictions on speech, assembly, and political organization. Literary and political work in Korean flourished at the time. And with this breathing room, we can see two main camps developed, the communists and the nationalists. The latter camp, the nationalists, tended to be moderate in their domestic agenda and looked to the west, to the words of, say, Woodrow Wilson,

and his 14 points after the First World War promising, again, self-determination and national sovereignty. Many of the nationalists went to study in the West. Because of this, perhaps it's not surprising that these Western-oriented liberal nationalists didn't end up enjoying the broader social base that the more hard-scrabble communists did. Of the communists, historian Soudaisouk writes, they succeeded in rest in control of the Korean Revolution from the nationalists. They planted a deep core of communist influence among the Korean people, particularly the students, youth groups, laborers, and peasants.

For Koreans in general, the sacrifices of the people, of the communists, if not the idea of communism, made strong appeal, far stronger than any occasional bomb-throwing exercise of the nationalists. The haggard appearance of the communists suffering from torture, their stern and disciplined attitude toward the common enemy of all Koreans, Pan. This had a far-reaching effect on people, end quote. A Korean memoir from the colonial era describes the other side, quote, the American group made up of people like Singman Rie, who pounded the pavement in Washington, buttonholing foggy bottom diplomats, they were all gentlemen. Most spoke good English. They actually expected

to get Korean independence by being able to speak persuasive English. The Korean Communist Party, meanwhile, was founded in Korea in 1925 by a future leader of South Korean leftists. And the nationalists, they had their group. The Korean provisional government in Shanghai, which included future South Korean president to Singmanri. But the Chinese nationalists led by Chiang Kai Shik were far less hospitable to the Koreans than the Chinese Communist Party would be to the Korean communists. Chenkishik soldiers refused to train the Koreans undercutting their independence. At this stage, though, Japan didn't much care whether you were communist or nationalist, if you were making a stand against the colonial authority, you went to jail either way.

Funnily enough, it was the Japanese appetite to gobble up Korea's mammoth neighbor's China, the ultimate Liebenzhram of the Meiji Empire that introduced them to Kim Il-sung. In 1931, Japan invaded and annexed Manchuria, renaming it Menchikuo. This was a huge swath of territory in northeast China, and this sparked wider war with the Republic of China and its neighbors. Now, at this point, China had undergone a somewhat confused Republican revolution, if you want to call it that, that had given way to a civil war between the nationalists led by Generalissimo Chengkaishek and the communist guerrilla army, soon to be led by Mao Zikung. This civil war would stop and start and intertwine with the war against Japan in these coming

years. The invasion of Manchuria by Japan, many would argue, marks the true origin of the Second World War. And it's certainly true that by the war's end, Japan would be the final axis power to fall. In Manchuria, a strong guerrilla resistance, quote, embracing Chinese and Koreans emerged. All told, at least 200,000 guerrillas took up arms against the Japanese Empire in the early 30s. And one of them was a certain Kim Il-sung. Born in a village near Pyongyang, Kim took the path of his father, a longtime agitator for Korean independence, who could be found in the March 1919 movement we mentioned a moment ago. As a young man, Kim Il-sung Having joined a communist group which earned him arrest by the Japanese authorities. Flash forward

by the middle of the 1930s, Kim had become a well-known guerrilla fighter and leader in Manchuria, commanding the third division of the Sino-Korean army. Quote, the Japanese considered Kim one of the most effective and dangerous, writes Bruce Cummings, and formed a special counterinsurgency unit to track him down. But Kim was one of thousands, juking through forests, staging surprise attacks, you know, mobile guerrilla warfare. Men such as Cho-Hung-Yung, who became his Minister of Defense later on,

these were his core comrades. Bruce Cummings talks more about the scene in Manchuria where Kim and his comrades fought in the 30s. Within a year or two, there were probably 200,000 resistors of all kinds, guerrillas, bandits, secret societies. But that's when Kim started fighting in April. of 1932, there was a kind of pogrom by the Japanese on Koreans in Manchuria who had left Korea

to escape the Japanese. And the North Koreans claim that about 25,000 Koreans were killed. And this became the basis for one of their most well-known revolutionary operas called The Sea of Blood. Kim fought for about a decade in just the worst kind of circumstances. Manchuria, you know, has winter temperatures like minus 30 degrees. But Kim, Kim, This group was coherent and loyal and managed to get the best of the other factions. No one could deny Kim's heroism in the 1930s, and that was just a huge part of his position in the north. Most of the communist guerrillas were in fact Korean.

Susie Kim writes that, quote, Koreans made up over 90% of CCP membership in Manchuria in the early 1930s. But even among these fighters, with such shared struggle and cooperation, things could turn sour. Susie Kim writes how, quote, the Japanese authorities were able to manipulate class and ethnic antagonisms to pit the Chinese against Koreans, as well as the communists against nationalists. Bruce adds that the ruthlessness of the Japanese invaders itself contributed to the suspicions within the Korean resistance. But the Japanese were unbelievably brutal.

They would just wipe out entire villages if there was resistance. And they had fiendish torture methods so that from the guerrilla standpoint, if somebody was captured by the Japanese, they just assumed, they had to assume that they gave up all the names, all the information the Japanese wanted. Kim was never captured, which was a real source, obviously, of his prowess and his survival. Quote, upwards of 2,000 Korean communists were purged from the Chinese Communist Party as pro-Japanese spies between late 1932 and early 1935. Kim Il-sung himself came under accusation only narrowly escaping death. Kim's memoir and those of his partisans point to the dramatic moment when Kim burned all the files of the suspects compiled by the Purge Committee as key in solidifying Kim's leadership, not only for the bold move, but also for his compassion. Once this atmosphere of suspicion had passed, Kim became the commander of the 3rd Division's Second Army and recognized as a fixture in the resistance, a role he used to rehabilitate many

others who had been accused of collaborating. As the only communist leader in history to have been imprisoned by both Chinese and Soviet communists, Susie Kim writes, Kim Il-sung was keenly aware of how expendable revolutions in small countries such as Korea could become when weighed against the national interests of larger powers, such as China and the Soviet Union, despite communist principles of internationalism." He would remember this come 1950. Right as Japan was cracking down on these guerrillas in Manchuria, it was also slamming the doors on its economy.

After a period of relative free trade of the 1920s, it was back to state-led, and the state-led militaristic development. Meanwhile, in Korea, you could now see seaports and railway centers where you couldn't before. Scholars disagree as to whether Korea was developing a national bourgeoisie, as the lingo goes. Certainly, quote, a small urban middle class began going to the movies, listening to the radio, buying cosmetics, and dressing in the latest fashions. Most importantly, it was a key time for the Kaibol, or the Korean conglomerate. Some of these Kaibal would be recognizable to you today, firms like Samsung and LG. Imitating the Japanese Zibatsu, these were built from southern landowners who rode Japan's

occupation of Korea into a career in modern business. For instance, the Guangzhou Agricultural and Industrial Bank, a powerful landholding group, was, quote, the basis for much of the political leadership in post-war South Korea. As we mentioned, Japan used its colonies as the engine of its rapid industrialization, which fueled its imperial growth. Quote, Manchuria and Northern Korea got steel mills, auto plants, petrochemical complexes, and enormous hydroelectric facilities, writes Cummings, giving these places less of a development and more of an overdevelopment. All of this had a destructive effect on Korea's social makeup, Cummings writes.

Quote, the Korean upper and managerial classes did not blossom. Instead, their development was retarded or it ballooned up suddenly at Japanese. In the 1930s, the combined effect of the depression and the industry of the peninsula shifted large populations off the farms and into new cities and industries. From 1935 to 1945, Korea began its industrial revolution, with many of the usual characteristics, the uprooting of peasants from the land, the emergence of a working class, urbanization, and population mobility. While the new capitalist class, groomed by Japan, was such a

suddenly making big money, the small but fresh working class in Korea was noticeably cut out. In 1937, for instance, Japanese workers in Korea made about three times more than their fellow workers who were Korean. This, of course, put the Korean workers on a distinct path toward the communist side of the resistance. Meanwhile, any mild, perceived expression of communism was treated as a national security threat. quote, the Korean Anti-Communist Association had branches in every province, local offices and police stations, and associated groups in villages, factories, and other workplaces.

Participation in anti-communist, quote, spiritual discussions became compulsory in the workplaces and schools, a measure of the degree to which communists were resisting the Japanese. Recalcitrant Koreans had, quote, impure ideas winnowed out of their heads by totalitarian methods or interrogation until they were ready to confess their political sins in writing and join groups for those who had, quote, reformed their thoughts. Japanese historian Saburro Yanaga argues that this is what led the empire to recalibrate and that they did in 1941 with an attack on Pearl Harbor. The path to war predicted by Lenin between the U.S. and Japan was plain as day by 1937.

That July, Japan invaded China, using skirmishes with Chinese nationalist troops to create a new front in what was becoming an increasingly global confrontation between the anti-communist-packed countries of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and the emergent axis. unfortunate neighbors and colonies. In their Washington Mary Go-Round newspaper column, published a few days after the Sino-Japanese War broke out in the summer of 1937, the journalist Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen wrote, The two chief factors which cause worry are, one, fear that war between Japan and China will spread to the rest of the world. Should Russia come into the fray against her traditional enemy

Japan, then Japan's ally Germany would immediately follow, and the fat would be in the fire. Two, more immediate is the necessity of the United States declaring an arms embargo against both Japan and China under the Neutrality Act. This would mean a tremendous handicap to China and none at all to Japan, for Japan has ample armament and war supplies, while China has almost none. Among President Roosevelt's advisors, it is felt that this advantage should not be thrown to Japan, if there is any way to get around it. Here was the final confrontation foreshadowed decades earlier, when Japan successfully trounced Russia in 1905 to Western applause.

The Japanese Empire, fully formed, no longer a possible victim of the Western imperialists, no longer even a competitor to the Western imperialists, but an outright enemy. By January 1938, syndicated newspaper columnist Connie Brown in a piece titled This Change changing world, showed how in six months anti-Japanese sentiment had calcified into policy. How seriously the American and the British governments consider the Japanese menace in the future can be gathered from the fact that the two key points of the Pacific, Hawaii and Singapore, are now being prepared to become the strongest air fleet stations in the world. Singapore, which already is a first-class naval base,

is now becoming the strongest air base of the British Empire. The Imperial Defense Council believes that air supremacy will be the vital factor in dealing with the Japanese menace of the future. The U.S. is spending no less than $40 million in converting the Hickman Airfield, next to Pearl Harbor, into the largest airfield station in the world. It's a long one down to around the three-yard line. An historical echo for our times written here by Patrick Kobach. Quote, in 1941, the United States froze Japanese economic assets and squeezed its oil supplies in an effort to prevent it

from undertaking further territorial expansion. Nice block there by Lehman. I'm still going. He's up to the 25, and now he's hit and hit hard. In the event, these acts of deterrence were spectacularly counterproductive and led to Japan launching its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. About the 27-yard line. Bruno Canareg made the attack. We interrupt this broadcast and bring to this important bulletin from the United Press.

Flash, Washington, the White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This is CBS in America calling Honolulu. Go ahead, Honolulu. When word reached the Philippines that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, it was about three in the morning in Manila. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had months before tapped General Douglas MacArthur, son of Pinky, who had been serving as field marshal of the Philippine Army to be the head of the U.S. Army forces in the Far East. Back in the 1920s, MacArthur had done a stint in the Philippines as Major General, going on to serve as the superintendent of West Point.

After that, despite some tawdry tabloid entanglements, MacArthur was dubbed in 1930 the chief of staff of the army, putting him in charge of the whole military branch. But at that time, running the army was not a particularly appealing job. The onset of the Great Depression meant budget cuts, which MacArthur fought tooth and nail. But most infamously, in 1932, MacArthur earned himself the reputation of right-wing icon by personally leading U.S. military soldiers against the Bonus Army marchers in Washington, D.C. These were tens of thousands of protesters organized around impoverished World War I veterans and their families. President Hoover had told MacArthur not to proceed against the protesters' encampment,

and Dwight Eisenhower, an aide to MacArthur at the time, said he told MacArthur to also hold off against the bonus army marchers. MacArthur would have none of it. Several veterans who marched against MacArthur were killed, as was an 11-week-old baby, believed to have died from the effects of tear gas. Dozens, if not hundreds more, were maimed and wounded. Though there was staggering public backlash and nationwide condemnation, the official, unofficial word from the White House in the United Press story

was that actually Hoover approved of the, quote, promptness of MacArthur's response. Many troops resent the communiques which treat the Pacific campaign as MacArthur's, personal war and the renowned publicity staff which guards camera angles projecting a calculated image of an infallible leader but even his critics admit the campaign is brilliant fDR overlooked mcArthur's right-wing politics and tabloid-level public profile and set the general to work as part of structuring the civilian conservation corps among other efforts in the mid-1930s he returned to the philippines to become the military attach to an American vassal president, who, in the hours after Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941,

was in some truly deep shit. Concurrent with their strike on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese began advancing from Formosa, the island now called Taiwan, southward, toward the Philippines. It was not until March 1942 that MacArthur left the area of the Philippines for the safety of Australia, where he was presented publicly as the face of the new tide of the war, having successfully snuck past the Japanese blockade on St. Patty's Day.

The general is grim and depressed, but his arrival reassures Australians of the United States support. Their frontline troops in North Africa, the Australians have been dismayed by Japan's southward rush. To the cheering crowds, MacArthur reports came through. Then makes his famous problem. promise, I shall return. Because air and naval power were the key elements to battle in the Pacific, what was

MacArthur, a general in the army? What was his role to be? Quote unquote, island hopping was the name given to his strategy of bounding around the Pacific and acquiring territory that the Japanese couldn't, making it increasingly difficult for Japan to mobilize and resupply. In January, 1943, 10 months after he left Corrigador, MacArthur begins a series of leapfrog landings along the northern New Guinea coast.

Following a strategy of, hit him where they ain't, he bypasses Japanese stronghold. By avoiding major battles and gradually shifting the battle westward, MacArthur would reclaim the mantle of the Philippines in 1945. But it would not be his troops in Tokyo, that would decide the end of the war. I am once again in this land that I have known so long and amongst this people that I have loved so well.

My dear friends, I have returned. As World War II approached Endgame, the Japanese, much like their collapsing German ally, threw any remaining restraint to the wind. Quote, Korean culture was simply squashed. The colonizers even forced Koreans to worship a traditional Japanese religious shrines. Conscription of Korean labor had skyrocketed to the point where, quote, by the end of the war, Koreans made up one third. of the industrial labor force in Japan.

Women, it should be noted, were just as much a part of this labor equation as men, though there was a darker corner reserved for women and girls. So-called comfort women for the Japanese soldiers. Bluntly put, they were sex slaves. As many as 200,000 Korean women were, quote, mobilized into this slavery, along with smaller numbers of Filipinos,

Chinese, and a handful of Westerners. Many of these women would end up in the exact same position servicing American troops after the war in U.S. occupied Japan. Berlin is occupied by the Red Army. To the strains of martial music, the Red Army stages a review in Berlin. It is over. The war in Europe is ended. Nazi Germany fell in the spring of 1945. Soviet troops overran Berlin. While Japan's leaders had decided to go on fighting, their strategic outlook was no longer about expanding the empire's sphere of influence.

It was to make the cost of prolonging the war so high as to prevent the kind of total destruction of the Japanese Meiji order that Hitler's regime had suffered at the hand of the Allies. On the American frontier with the Western family and Daniel Boone in the exciting days following the American Revolution. We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News. A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead. The president died of a cerebral hemorrhage. All we know so far is that the president died at Warm Springs in Georgia. Franklin Roosevelt, months into his fourth term as president, died in mid-April, 1945. His replacement, Harry S. Truman, former senator from Missouri, a machine Democrat, a creature.

of Congress, who had been made vice president in this most recent campaign over Roosevelt's previous selection, the progressive Henry Wallace. Before Roosevelt had died, and through the first months of Truman's term, the American Air Force, led by Curtis LeMay, had begun executing a firebombing campaign of Japan that by the late summer of 1945 saw the near total elimination of Japanese cities, that were unlucky enough to have a spot on what newspapers called LeMay's quote-unquote death list. From the Marianas, 1,500 miles northward over the Pacific

flies this great armada on what has become almost a daily mission, making absolutely certain that every ton of high explosive will count, reminding the Japanese of our promise that this is only the beginning. Millions of Japanese homes,

constructed from wood and paper, went up in American napalm. As many as 100,000 people died in a single night of conventional bombing over Tokyo. Soviet troops marched into Manchukuo, liberating it from the Japanese. The USSR was prepared to strike Japan to inflict the final defeat on the Meiji Empire. No doubt that would carry with it the same prestige and strategic leverage as the liberation

of Eastern Europe and the taking of Berlin had for the Soviets months earlier. This would be, shall we say, not an ideal outcome for Washington. Truman was persuaded that it was time to go nuclear. Hiroshima was hit with an American nuclear bomb on August 6, 1945, killing as many as 140,000 people. It was evident that atomic power to break the enemy must become the tale of two cities. Within 48 hours on August 8th, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and began launching its own invasion of the country. The following day, a second American nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing as many as 70,000 people.

The bomb was exploded above the city, and in the towering mushroom, Japan could read its doom. Within a week, the Americans earned the prize they had sought, the decision from the Japanese emperor to surrender unconditionally to the American, a complete strategic submission to the United States. But it was not only Japanese who were killed, maimed, with cancer or otherwise affected by America's nuclear bombing. Ten thousand Koreans, most of whom were conscripted labor in Japan's Imperial Corps, perished in the bombings.

One Korean in Hiroshima that day, Chengseng Yu reported a sudden blinding flash. Quote, on the following day, he was carried by a rescue truck to the Navy hospital in Kure. He lay there with gauze dipped in oil on his burned face, and after a few days, maggots hatched on the burns. Bruce Cummings writes how the Korean survivors of America's atom bomb attack were left to rot, quote, written off on racial grounds by Tokyo and given no help from a sole government ashamed of their existence. And what of the Korean peninsula itself? Well, for all of the development of the colonial years, Cummings notes,

quote, Korea remained fundamentally an agrarian society in 1945. Remember our description of Cuba, of the majority of the population, the farmers. Here, quote, nearly four out of five were tenants renting all or part of the land they worked. The landlords, many of whom didn't even manage their own land, were hiring agents to act on their behalf. They were uniquely parasitic. In fact, Korea was deeply in need of that old friend of this show land reform. One scholar, in fact, recommended land be given to those who toiled with no compensation.

The northerners in Korea would soon take that idea very seriously. In this late colonial period, quote, the Korean majority suffered badly at the precise time that a minority was doing well. Cummings sums up. Korea from 1937 to 1945 was much like Vichy France. Bitter experiences and memories continue to divide people even within the same family. In the final moments of the Second World War in August 1945, days before the atomic bombings, two mid-level American officials, military bureaucrats in the purest sense, pondered a map of Korea. Dean Rusk, whom listeners may recall from season two, as JFK's Secretary of State, Well, at this stage of his career, Dean Rusk was a mere colonel,

and with the post-atomic Japanese surrender practically in the mail, Rusk and another colonel had been ordered to figure out where to divide Korea for post-liberation occupation, where to draw the Soviet zone, and where to draw the American zone, much like in Berlin. Here's Dean Rusk's account, from his memoir about how the future borders of South and North Korea were invented by two American military officers late one night. We finally reached a compromise that would keep at least some U.S. forces on the Asian mainland, a sort of tollhold on the Korean Peninsula for symbolic purposes.

During a meeting on August 14, 1945, the same day of the Japanese surrender, Colonel Charles Bone Steele and I retired to an adjacent room late at night and studied intently a map of the Korean Peninsula. Working in haste and under great pressure, we had a formidable task. To pick a zone for the American occupation. Neither bone steel nor I was a Korea expert, but it seemed to us that Seoul, the capital, should be in the American sector. We also knew that the U.S. Army opposed an extensive area of occupation.

Using a national geographic map, we looked just north of Seoul for a convenient dividing line, could not find a natural geographical line. We saw instead the 38th parallel and decided to recommend that. You know, I'm going to be the You know,