Japanese’s Occupation in Korean During 1910 and 1945

In this reflection paper I will compare the same and difference among Japanese’s occupation in Korean during 1910 and 1945, the Nanking Massacre (1937-1938) during the anti-Japanese war in China and the Holocaust during WWII.

Since the Nanking Massacre and the Japanese’s occupation in Korean is both caused by Japan’s colonization and imperial expansion, it can be easily find out that the approach and effect of the Japan’s aggression is considerable similar. After the Chinese army’s defeat of the Battle of Nanjing in December 13, 1937, the Imperial Japanese army start to mass murdered hundreds of thousands of people, including both soldiers and civilians in Nanjing and its surrounding area, including guns shooting and massacring by bury alive in six weeks. At the same time, as between 20,000 and 80,000 females were sexually assaulted. Also it cannot be ignored that millions of Chinese traditional culture valuables were ransacked and destroyed during the war.

In the same way, during the forty-year rule on the Korean Peninsula, the Imperial Japanese army first destroyed any possibility of independence of Korea and also its culture by forcing Korean using Japanese name and language as official. Secondly, Japanese army intensified the crackdown which lead to a large number of outstanding Korean politicians were arrested, killed and exiled to the mainland China. During the war, many local civilians’ armed forced appeared were also been brutally persecuted unless they admitted the Japanese domain power and had willing to cooperate with the Japanese Army. Similar to Nanking Massacre, in order to satisfied the Japanese soldiers, the Imperial Japanese military forced Korean woman on the Korean Peninsula become the comfort women to meet soldiers sexual demand. Rarely of those innocent women who suffered and lived in such inhumane environment survived after the war.

When we compare the wartime Japanese militarism aggression and the Nazi German’s Holocaust during World War II, we could easily find that both of these two countries applied the huge and diabolical racist plan in their own continent. The German’s Holocaust is the campaign of Jewish ethnic cleaning throughout the whole European during the WWII and during the Japanese invasion of Korean, identically, Japanese linked themselves as the Asia’s superior noble and Korean in contrast, are recognized as a lower race especially after they became the vanquished country in the war.

However, the biggest differences between Nazi German and Japan is they behaviors after the World War II. On the side of German, they not only successfully cleared the Nazi residual but also admitted and faced up to its historical mistakes. On the contrary, Japan’s official and part of its civilians still denied some of the crime till today. Since the end of WWII, the Japanese government, the Ministry of Education, as well as many nationalist study groups have fought text book writers and historians to maintain the “official” story of Japanese war-time atrocities “Although some bravely fight to force Japanese society to face the painful truth, many in Japan continue to treat the war crimes as the isolated acts of individual soldiers or even as events that simply did not occur” (Chang ,200). There is no doubt that the citizen’s consciousness is mostly affected by their education and society’s domain opinions, but there is another possible reason refers that, form the potential perspective of Japanese citizens, most of them linked themselves as the suffer and victim of the war. It’s the militarists in the army who hid the truth to the nation and lead its people set foot on the path of invading which also brought pain to ordinary Japanese.