Publishing houses even lacked for Korean language typesets. When some tried to make their own Korean flags to wave in celebration, they could not remember the exact way to render it others had their flags, kept hidden for many years. The end of the occupation and Naisen ittai left behind many Koreans who had never been taught Korean, at a loss for knowing only Japanese. This new fact joined other details learned on that trip, from our visits to museums and historic sites: The Seokguram Buddha in the coastal city of Gyeongju, for example, whose forehead once bore a massive diamond, stolen by Japanese soldiers the palaces of Korea renamed by the Japanese as “gardens” and converted to public parks, many of their buildings destroyed. My father had just died, and my brother and I were there to visit him and then travel on to our family’s ancestral shrine and pay our respects. We were in his home in Seoul, a house near Changdeokgung Palace - you could see it over the wall from his roof. How could it matter enough to me, to who I was, to put him through that? I wanted to ask questions, but given how painful it seemed for him to tell me this, I remember thinking questions could wait. He regularly spoke of the superiority of Korean language and culture, such that I expected him to bring it up at every visit.Īnd so this revelation startled me.
“Granfy’s first language,” he said, referring to himself, as he often did, in the third person by his self-chosen nickname. I first learned about the decades-long Japanese occupation of Korea in 1985, when my grandfather told me he still dreamed in Japanese.
In the latest article from “ Beyond the World War II We Know ,” a series by The Times that documents lesser-known stories from World War II, the author Alexander Chee looks back at the dark legacy of the Japanese occupation of Korea - and a once-unknown personal connection to it.
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