Studying In Japan

Teacher Toshio Yamagami was combing through the library at Osaka Prefectural Kitano Senior High School last fall when he stumbled across a set of wartime documents that took his breath away.

The records show a survey was conducted there to determine whether its Korean students were "ideologically sound." The survey was done at the request of the military police during World War II.

The 1944 survey was apparently intended to find out what problems might arise if Korean youths were conscripted into the imperial military forces.

The Korean Peninsula was still a Japanese colony at that time.

Yamagami, 61, taught night classes until they were discontinued at the end of March. He discovered four documents.

One was dated May 25, 1944, and titled "Inquiry on compiling and sending a list of teachers and students from the peninsula." The request came from the Otemae squad of the Osaka military police to the principal of then Osaka Prefectural Kitano No. 2 Junior High School, a predecessor of the school's night program.

There was also a reply from the principal, dated June 5 the same year, with various remarks on Korean students enrolled at the school, which did not have a Korean teacher.

The military police required the school to provide the names of all the Korean students at the school, as well as other data such as where they came from in Korea, current addresses, birthdays, religion, hobbies, whom they admire and evaluation of their attitudes and behaviors.

Under Japan's colonial policy, Koreans were obliged to take Japanese names. These, along with their original names, were also passed on to the authorities.

At that time, 19 of the 232 students at the school were Korean, ranging in age from 15 to 23. The school reported on every Korean student in the document, which bore a "classified" stamp.

The report listed Confucianism as the religion of 18 students. Cited as people they admired were Japanese figures such as Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the 16th-century warlord who sent troops to invade Korea; Hirobumi Ito, who served as the first Japanese resident-general of Korea at the outset of the 20th century; Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of Japan's Combined Fleet during World War II; and Hideki Tojo, then prime minister who was later hanged for war crimes.

Descriptions of these students' attitudes included: "highly motivated as the emperor's subject and eager to become a soldier."

However, the report noted that one Korean student was "being suspended from graduation because he was under investigation as a suspect of participating in Korea's national movement by police" back in his homeland.

According to another document found at the same time, the graduation of five Korean students was being put on hold because they had been detained by police in Korea. They were later expelled from the school.

During World War II, many Korean students were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the national movement, including Yun Dong Ju, a student at Kyoto's Doshisha University, who was arrested on suspicion of violating the Peace Preservation Law in July 1943. He died in a Japanese prison in February 1945.

In May 1942, Japan's wartime government announced it would start conscripting Koreans.

The request by military police for a report on Korean students at the school came right before inspections on prospective Korean soldiers began.

"Even in light of the fact that it was wartime, conducting an ideological survey on Korean students posed a grave problem with regard to their human rights," Yamagami said. "We need to pass on the fact for future generations."

The newly discovered documents are featured in a book titled "Kitano Teijisei 72-nenshi" (72-year history of Kitano night high school), which came out in late March.

Naoki Mizuno, a professor of modern Korean history at Kyoto University and an expert on Japan's wartime education policy to assimilate Koreans, placed high value on the documents.

"The military police went so far as to order an ideological survey on Korean students because it was concerned about whether Korean youths would be really able to fight as soldiers in the imperial military forces," Mizuno said.

"Documents belonging to military police were systematically burned at the end of the war. So the newly found documents are valuable, in that they help us learn about part of military police's activities that have been hidden behind a veil"

http://www.asahi.com/