Punishing Japanese collaboration: Have we gone too far?

Shin June-bong

The author is an editorial writer at the JoongAng Ilbo.

Few things raise Koreans’ anger more than seeing pro-Japanese collaborators and their descendants living comfortably without consequence. The recent controversy surrounding actor Ha Young is one example. I believe it reflects a combination of Korea’s deep-rooted anti-Japanese sentiment and the fact that she comes from a family of doctors spanning four generations. The controversy over Ha and her great-grandfather has recently received extensive attention in Korea.

The Special Act on Asset State Confiscation for Pro-Japanese and Anti-National Collaborators to the State, mentioned by President Lee Jae Myung in his Liberation Day address, was also born of public anger. In 1997, a great-grandson of Lee Wan-yong won a lawsuit claiming that land in Bukahyeon-dong, Seoul, then worth about 3 billion won (approximately $3.37 million at the time), had been wrongfully taken from him. After selling the property, he then emigrated to Canada, fueling public outrage.

That anger led to the enactment of the law on confiscating pro-Japanese property in 2005. From 2006 to 2010, the first investigative commission recovered 2,359 parcels of land worth 237.3 billion won from 168 collaborators. The private Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities also began work in 2001, during the Kim Dae-jung administration, on its three-volume “Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators” (2009), which listed 4,389 people.

The dictionary itself stirred controversy by including figures such as former President Park Chung Hee and journalist Jang Ji-yeon. Still, it is difficult to dispute that this broader reckoning with the past was a historically necessary rite of passage.

Even so, I am uneasy about the current debate over Ha Young’s great-grandfather, Ahn Sang-ho. My concern is whether judgment of alleged collaboration is sometimes being delivered too hastily.

On Aug. 14, the Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities issued what amounted to an authoritative interpretation of Ahn’s record. It said Ahn was clearly a pro-Japanese collaborator because he served as a council member of the Taisho Friendship Association, an elite organization that openly advocated naisen yūwa, or “harmony between Japan and Korea,” an assimilationist concept of the colonial era. The institute has publicly characterized Ahn as a collaborator while noting that his activities did not meet its threshold for inclusion in its biographical dictionary.

Yet there are also scholars whose assessments are more nuanced. The Taisho Friendship Association does appear on lists of pro-Japanese organizations. The Special Act on Investigating the Truth of Anti-National Activities under Japanese Colonial Rule, which provided a basis for later property recovery efforts, designated people who actively promoted Japanese-Korean assimilation through social or cultural organizations as subjects for investigation. By that standard, the association qualifies.

But some scholars say that in practice it resembled something closer to today’s Korea-America Friendship Society or a Lions Club. Ahn could certainly be classified and criticized as pro-Japanese because he chose not to distance himself from the colonial authorities when he might have done so. But serving as a council member of the Taisho Friendship Association was not equivalent to serving on the Central Advisory Council, whose members are widely regarded as core collaborators.

If so, is today’s uproar over Ahn excessive?

Broadening the view, I think there are figures in other fields who have been condemned beyond the actual gravity of their collaboration. In literature, poet Seo Jeong-ju, widely known by his pen name Midang, is one example.

Seo appears only in the appendix listing pro-Japanese works in Im Jong-guk’s “Theory of Pro-Japanese Literature” (1966), a work credited with marking a major turning point in the literary reckoning with collaboration. His first poetry collection, “Hwasajip” (1941), had drawn more attention than expected. But when he wrote a total of about 10 pro-Japanese poems and prose pieces from 1942 onward, he was still a young writer in his late 20s.

The principal focus of Im’s study was on major pro-Japanese literary figures such as Yi Kwang-su and Choe Nam-seon. Seo’s collaboration was not examined in a separate section. Even “On New Writers and Others,” which dealt with the collaborationist activities of younger writers, included novelist Kim Dong-ni but not Seo.

Seo himself later discussed the period matter-of-factly in “Shameful Stories,” included in “The Complete Works of Seo Jeong-ju” (1972), published by Iljisa. A line often attributed to him — “I did not know Japan would lose” — does not actually appear there. Yet it has been repeatedly cited when Seo is criticized. Reading the essay, I come away with the impression that Seo was less an ideologically committed collaborator than someone who accommodated the regime to make a living.

Critics point to “Song of Corporal Matsui” (1944), often cited as his representative pro-Japanese poem, arguing that an intellectual like Seo could hardly have failed to foresee Japan’s defeat by December 1944. But there are also those who argue that he may indeed not have known.

Compared to doctors, writers and others who kept their distance from the Japanese colonial regime or actively resisted it, Ahn Sang-ho and Seo Jeong-ju will always deserve criticism. Yet there is also room to take mitigating circumstances into account.

There may be no emotional statute of limitations on punishing pro-Japanese collaboration. At least, that is how it feels today. But if so, must Korean society go through the same convulsion every time a case resembling Ahn’s comes to light?

In his essay “Paths in the Fog” from his work “Testaments Betrayed” (1993), Milan Kundera described human beings as those who move forward through the fog. When turning back to judge people of the past, Kundera said they see no fog on their path — the fog is no longer there.

In 2026, the course of history under Japanese colonial rule can seem self-evident to us. To those who actually lived through it, however, the future was still obscured by fog.

When judging pro-Japanese collaboration in the future, should we not keep that in mind as well?ii