Korea and the price of colonial liberation

2023-08-15 10:30:00

Maria del Pilar Alvarez*

Hoy 07:30

He August 15, 1945 In the afternoon, the Japanese heard a forceful radio message from Emperor Hirohito broadcast by the public broadcaster NHK. after having suffered one of the greatest atrocities in modern historydropping two atomic bombs one in Hiroshima and one in Nagasaki, Japan assumed its defeat.

On September 2, on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, he signed the surrender in the presence of General Douglas MacArthur, who would be in charge of the occupation of Japan until April 1951.

While the Japanese heard the Emperor for the first time explain that in the face of an unfavorable war situation it was necessary to accept the Joint Declaration of Peace, on the Korean peninsula they celebrated liberation.

The defeat ended 35 years of Japanese colonization (1910-1945). It would no longer be necessary to use proper names in Japanese, or be treated as second-class citizens, or give up their lives for Hirohito. The 15th of August, South Korea says ‘light is back’ and that is why this date constitutes one of the main national festivities called Gwangbokjeol.

The same day, North Korea also celebrates the end of Japanese oppression and calls it Chogukhaebangui-nal which translates as “the day of the liberation of the homeland”.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the man who survived two nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Ironically, the liberation of the Korean peninsula meant a new occupation and, even more serious, the division. Decisions that were made without taking into account the opinion of the local population.

Two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union ended neutrality pact that he had signed with Japan and declared war on it.

The USSR advanced on the north of China and Korea. In a strategy of containment and cornering Japan, on August 10, 1945, The United States sent troops to Busan, south of the peninsula. Both the USSR and the United States remained on the other side of the 38th parallel awaiting negotiation. The fall of Japan was almost a fact and the division of Korea too.

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On August 12, the US government proposed to Stalin to divide the peninsula into two areas of influence. The partition had been defined in 30 minutes by Colonel Charles H. Bonesteel and Major Dean Rusk of the United States Army. Why the 38th parallel? There are no relevant historical reasons for such a decision, but the colonial capital, Seoul, located just 38 kilometers from the southern border and some 54 kilometers from the current Demilitarized Zone, would fall under the jurisdiction of capitalist influence.

Oppenheimer

Thus began 3 years of tutelary governments, in the North the USSR and in the South the United States. On August 15, 1948, the Republic of Korea was established and on September 9, 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was declared.

Celebrating both Koreas on the same day the liberation of Japan is a clear sign of unity and a shared feeling of well-being in the face of colonial emancipation.

The Korean victims of the unimaginable violence wrought by the Imperial Navy that sexually enslaved over 400,000 womenrecruited thousands of forced laborers, persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered dissidents and pro-independence militants, and forced colonial subjects to die for an imperial project they did not crave.

still waiting a process of rectification by Japan that frees them from the injustices of the past. There is no doubt that Korea still pays a high price for liberation, but higher was the price paid by the victims of the horror for whom the sun shone again on August 15, 1945.