Last week, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol met with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, to settle a wartime labor compensation dispute between his country and its former colonizer brought about by Koreans who say they or their forebears were forced to work for Japanese companies before and during World War II for little or no pay. These people sued Nippon Steel Corporation and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in 3 separate cases, and in 2018 South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled in their favor, but the Japanese government instructed the companies not to pay, saying that the agreement signed between the two countries in 1965 settled the compensation matter for all time. The plaintiffs and their supporters, which at one time included the previous South Korean president Moon Jae-in, claim that this is a private matter not covered by the 1965 agreement, which was between governments.
Yoon plans to set up a foundation that will compensate the plaintiffs. The Japanese government is very happy, since no Japanese entities are required to contribute to the fund, but the plaintiffs and their supporters are not, since the main reason for their suit was for the cited companies, and by extension Japan, to acknowledge their actions toward Korean workers under Japanese rule, since Korea was a Japanese colony at the time. General opinions in both countries differ accordingly. A recent survey found that 59 percent of Koreans do not approve of Yoon’s plan, while 57 percent of Japanese do.
Yoon’s purpose is to normalize diplomatic relations (and please the U.S. government, which approves of the plan) by removing at least one of the historical obstacles to such normalization. As a member of the right-leaning People Power Party, Yoon wants to move forward in Korea’s relations to Japan, mainly for the benefit of trade, but he is also following a policy that Korean nationalists have advocated since the 1965 agreement, which is that Korea needs Japan to ward off its communist neighbor to the north. Many in Korea have always maintained that Japan should more fully acknowledge the brutality of its colonial rule from 1910-45, especially with regard to the suffering of specific groups, such as forced laborers and women pressed into sexual service at front-line brothels. Right wing elements, some of whose fathers and grandfathers fought and worked for the Japanese during the war, tend to see left-wing elements as being easily manipulated by North Korea, and, in fact, one of the planks of the nominally liberal-leaning Democratic Party of Korea is to reunify the peninsula.
What commentators have noted about this contention is how it has not dissipated over the years, even though Korea achieved its independence in 1945 when Japan surrendered and since the late 80s has become an economic powerhouse in its own right. The position of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, which has pretty much governed the country since the mid-1950s, is that Japan did nothing wrong in Korea; it certainly did nothing illegal, since the annexation treaty of 1910 that brought Korea under its control was considered internationally valid at the time. How that treaty came about and how it was enforced afterwards is something they don’t talk about. But the Koreans do. In fact, they don’t just talk about it. They dramatize it all the time.
I write about this now because I just finished watching all 24 episodes of the 2017 Korean historical drama series Mr. Sunshine on Netflix. Mr. Sunshine can be further categorized as a romantic melodrama, and while the main characters are all fictional, the background is the pre-colonial struggle within the kingdom of Joseon (Korea) against various foreign elements that, for all intents and purposes, invaded the peninsula to gain influence. Of these elements, which include Russia and the U.S., Japan is the most aggressive, and the series depicts this aggression in the most dramatic ways. (China, which used to control Joseon as a tributary, doesn’t get mentioned much in the series except as a sanctuary for rebel movements.)
I’ve never been a fan of Asian historical dramas, be they Korean, Chinese, or Japanese, and while Mr. Sunshine contains all of the genre’s requisite attributes, I found its focus on how Joseon came under Japanese rule compelling. As it turns out, while the series was immensely popular when it was first aired on the Korean cable channel nTV, it was criticized for the way it presented its Japanese characters, which to some was too lenient and to others too harsh. I confess to bewilderment regarding the former charge, since almost all the Japanese characters are villainous in a cartoonish way, practically twirling their mustaches (they all have mustaches) in glee as they subjugate the natives while comparing them to the lowest forms of life. As someone who watches a lot of Korean cinema, I found this depiction both amusing and surprising. In most Korean films that take place during the colonial era, the Japanese overlords tend to come across as oppressive but also cold and distant. It is their Korean factotums who tend to be despicable, since they are betraying their birthright for the benefit of their conqueror. Mr. Sunshine does away with this nicety. The Japanese are evil and sadistic.
But while this depiction may seem unnecessarily harsh from a historical perspective, it conveys an inescapable truth. Almost all the major events in the story are based on acknowledged facts. It is the emotional component that’s exaggerated, because it has to align with the dramatic contingencies of the Korean romantic melodrama, which calls for epic suffering on the part of all the sympathetic characters, in particular the lovers at the center of the tale.
In this case they are two people whose love is doomed from the get-go. Choi Yu-jin (Lee Byung-hun) is the son of slaves whose parents are killed by their nobleman master after his mother resists being given to another nobleman for sexual recreation. Yu-jin, still a young child, escapes death himself and is taken in by an American missionary who brings him to New York and raises him as his own son, renaming him Eugene. The boy grows up and joins the marines, becoming a war hero during the Spanish-American War. He is promoted to captain and later assigned to the American legation in Hanseong (present-day Seoul), where he intends to exact revenge on the family who murdered his parents. In the meantime, he continually crosses paths with Lady Go Ae-shin (Kim Tae-ri), a member of another noble family whose own parents were killed by a treacherous compatriot in an underground patriotic movement to fight against foreign intruders. Ae-shin, with the quiet approval of her grandfather, a mentor to the Joseon king, has become an expert marksman and anti-foreigner sniper.
The dynamic of the love story is irresistible: the former slave vs. the woman of high birth; the repatriated citizen of an interloping foreign country vs. the single-minded protector of the homeland. Through love, the two eventually find a common ideological goal that seems inevitable in the final analysis, but it relies—again, dramatically—on there being a common enemy, and that’s Japan in this case.
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