Gender, Class, and Race in Occupied Japan

"What first comes to mind when I think of Matsushiro are the thin white walls of the barracks in the so-called Korean Village. They were just cheap shanties of the thinnest wood, like books turned over. So many of them, they seemed to stretch on forever. It was incredible to a child's eyes. Mother told me later that there were about three hundred and eighty such units, each subdivided. We lived in one room, six mats in size, with a small earthen area at one end. Because nails were so important at that time, the floor was made only of pieces of wood resting on a frame, not even nailed down. On top of them were spread coarse, prickly rice-straw mats. It was so swampy that at night, when it froze, the ground buckled up in waves from the frost. During the day, as it melted, it grew soft and muddy. It was very unusual for my father to be home.

"I also remember the whores. They were painted white to the neck and they were always drunk. They walked along, spreading wide the bright-red lower parts of their kimonos. I now know they were 'comfort women,' brought here by force from Korea. I don't know why I remember those things, but small pieces of my memories are intact. I was five years old."

As we drive through Matsushiro, she points out the scenes and places of her childhood. "People call Matsushiro the 'Little Kyoto of t Shinshú region.' It was the castle town of the Sanada lords. You 'll find road signs for Zozan Shrine and Sanada Clan Temple, but no directions to Matsushiro Imperial Headquarters around here. Matsushiro Station was a little larger then, and there was a substation at the site. According to my mother's testimony, they burned the dead around near this substation. I was brought up looking at these mountains years. Togakushi is that sharp, rugged one. It has snow on the peak. The mountains are really beautiful, aren't they?"

Finally, she parks her car in what looks like someone's backyard. Standing next to a tunnel entrance is a signboard erected by Nagano City, identifying the site as Matsushiro Zozan Underground Shelter and providing an outline history:

"You see, they don't even mention the Koreans who dug it. Nothing!" says Yamane Masako, who for years has almost singlehandedly been unearthing the story of what took place at Matsushiro. "I do this work trying to discover why those Koreans were brought to Matsushiro by force and what happened to them. It's almost like Japan's Auschwitz. There are no documents showing how many Koreans were dragged here, and no figures on how many died here. There aren't even lists of the names of those who worked here. Japan lost athe war, and then burnt all the docments before the American Occupation forces could arrive—or so they claim, anyway."

These underground shelters, unprecedented in their gigantic size, were prepared in expectation of an impending U.S. landing on the main islands of Japan. Special shelters for the Emperor and Em;ress were included. Yamane wants to expose the fate of Korean workers like her father who carved the tunnels for the shelters out of the solid rock. For her, the agonies of discrimination she suffered as a girl with a Korean father began here, while those people she feels are responsible only seek to keep the world from finding out.

The Koreans building the Imperial chamber on August 15, 1945, disappeared overnight. Only their number, forty-six, is known from the postwar testimony of other workers. They vanished, without a trace. If we were able to find out where they were taken, we would find they were massacred to keep the world from finding out that the Emperor was planning to flee. They were there until that moment." She is wrought up and speaks explosively, her commitment and anger boiling over. "This is the entrance," she says pointing out a dark maw leading into the mountain. "Now, they open it to the public only on Saturdays and Sundays. We'll just go through the fence."

They built these new fences so that people wouldn't be able to see the whole thing. Before you could simply go in. Now, you're only permitted to go as far as the floor's been smoothed out, a mere fifty meters or so. You can't get the real picture from that alone. They only want to use safety as a pretext for keeping people out. [We squeeze through a narrow space between the edge of the wire net and the rock. The dim light behind us soon disappears. When she turns off her flashlight it is pitch black. It is cool and dry inside; the air is deathly still.]

This is the main shelter into which the government ministries were supposed to move for the final battle. Please watch your step. There are rough places. [Her roving light reveals sharp-edged rocks jutting up into the path and the raw face of rock on the walls.]

The tunnels are large, aren't they? A truck could drive through these shelters. It's five or six times as large as the Korakuen baseball stadium in Tokyo in all. My father dug this with his bare hands. They say no one was killed, no one injured during the construction. This tunnel is twice as long as the Tanna Tunnel [one of Japan's longest] and it was dug in half the time. Even in our own times, people died building that tunnel. Back then, there weren't any rock drills available. They were constantly pushed to hurry.They weren't allowed to rest even when they were injured. Twenty different horizontal shafts were dug. Each was assigned to a different group. They competed against each other. Each group had a Japanese boss, and under him a miniboss. Exploitation came down from the top, passing through many layers on the way. At war's end, they say each worker was officially paid two hundred fifty yen, but those who received the payments say they got only five yen. For them, five was quite a large sum, so large they feared they might be killed for it. The construction firms made great profits this way.

[Coming to an intersection, she keeps walking as if she knows every inch of these tunnels by heart. She stops. Ms. Yamane is completely still. A palm placed on the rock wall proves them dry. They are very rough. She moves the light up over the ragged rock all the way up to to the ceiling. The jagged rocks look as if they had been blasted and chiseled out just yesterday.]

I'm sorry. When I come here, I get really depressed. I realize they were going to survive here, while "one hundred million died together" outside. I hear the cries of agony among the rocks. I can feel the pain of whips on my back. These rocks maintain complete silence, but silent holes say so much. There are Hangul letters scratched by the Koreans on the walls in here. There are places where there are still ties for the mine-car tracks along the tunnel.

[We leave the tunnels of Zözan in silence. She drives on to the shelters where the Emperor and Empress were going to be housed.] The Peers' School [for the sons of the nobility] was supposed to be brought to this area. That building was to be the for the Emperor and Empress's quarters, his on the right and hers on the left. [She points at a single-story building that stretches along the mildly sloping hill.] From the inside of that building tunnels lead underground. There is a document in the Imperial Household Agency that indicates they were about to move here when they finally accepted the Potsdam Declaration. The Imperial General Headquarters were to be in the same shelter as the Emperor himself.

When people learned that the war was over, we were hiding in our "shelter." We hadn't been able to come out for a long time. My mother then left the ditch and came back with two cucumbers. They weren't very big. We ate them with some miso spread on them. That's my memory of the end of the war.

I also heard adults crying out in Korean, "Mansei! Mansei!" "Hurrah! Hurrah!" But among the Japanese villagers there was a sense of fear. They believed that the Koreans now would attack them. There would have been no reason to fear Koreans if they hadn't done anything wrong to them. Japanese women and children were evidently told not to go out, and hid themselves in the storehouses. But the Koreans just drank saké and danced with joy. It's reasonable, don't you think? They'd been freed from labor. But from the next day on, there was no way to eat. Nobody would hire Koreans. From that time on, our struggle to live was unbelievably severe. We stayed on in those shacks until 1960. There was no place else to go. They sent most of the survivors back to North Korea. My Japanese mother, too. I got off the train at the last moment, leaving my parents and sisters to sail from Japan.

My mother is still in North Korea. People like her are unable to come home, no matter how much they might like to. They're aged and live every day in tears. Her letters, which hardly ever reach us, say only, "send this" or "send that." We'd like her to get things, but the parcels never reach her. I feel so powerless when I read letters in which she wonders why humans are unable to go home when clouds can float there freely anytime. All of them suffered so terribly during the war. It's my mission to find a way to bring the aged back to Japan. I, too, was discriminated against. I, too, tried not to disclose who I was. I only felt able to tell my own children about myself after they reached the age of twenty. I had hidden from them the fact that my father was Korean. When I ask why I continued to live like that then, and why I think the way I do now, my thoughts go back to Matsushiro.

I recently obtained a copy of the diary of a Japanese sergeant who worked here at the time. In it, he describes how Koreans were forced to work twelve hours a day on only a bowl of sorghum, while the Japanese ate well and partied. Today, of all those brought from Korea, only one man still lives in Matsushiro. He says that large quantities of spoiled rice and wheat, and piles of workmen's shoes were found in storage here after the war, while at the time Korean workers labored with their bleeding feet wrapped in rags. When asked why he hadn't gone back to Korea, he replied that he had come to Japan with so many others from his village, and now he would be ashamed to go back, the lone survivor.

Things have been concealed for such a long time, but when I've walked up to villagers working in the fields, old people—those with consciences, anyway—have told me five, maybe six people died here every day. Some say they saw the injured carried out of the tunnel on top of shutters. During that period, smoke never stopped coming out of the crematorium. What does it mean that the crematorium was kept burning in this small village? It's still there. The villagers all watched as it sent up its continuous plume.

Construction went on for about ten months, from November 1944 to August 1945. Generally, it's believed that seven thousand to ten thousand Koreans were brought by force. If five or six died every day, that means roughly one thousand to fifteen hundred died. History books don't mention those who were injured or died. Do you believe that? Nothing has been told yet of the real history of Matsushiro.

People were told that they were digging storage facilities. This copy of the document "Matsushiro Storage New Construction" proves the: point. Even though it was called storage, villagers in their seventies and eighties tell me they knew from April 1945 that the Emperor would be coming because of the chrysanthemum seals on the lumber. It occurred to them that Japan must be losing the war if the Emperor was planning to escape to such a place. But back then, people wouldn't have said anything like that aloud, out of fear.

The man who had the Koreans in his hands at that time, the deputy head of the work unit of the construction company in charge, knows everything. He knows that they killed Koreans, starved them, and stole their wages. He is the only man who still knows what happened to the forty-six Koreans who disappeared on August 15. If he confesses, the whole picture will be revealed. He now lives in one of the largest houses in town. After the war, he built a fortune with hoarded goods. All the land around is his. He's not a native of this area, but after August 15, he made everything his own property. There were Koreans who dared to say that they'd kill him if they could. He ran away to Hokkaido for about three years or so and returned after the furor had cooled down. Today, he's one of the leaders of the Matsushiro Chamber of Commerce. Those who had power during the war still wield influence today.

I tried to talk to him once, assuring him I needed only five minutes of his time. He said to me "You're too beautiful. I'm unable to die although I don't want to live so long. So I don't have anything to tell." He's getting a little senile. When he dies, all the things he knows will be unknown forever. A few years ago, he had a large statue of the Goddess of Mercy built in Seisuiji Temple, facing the mountains where the shelters were dug. Its inscription reads, "To the memory of people who sacrificed their lives in the construction of the underground Imperial General Headquarters.... Pray for eternal peace." A man does not build such a thing without a guilty conscience.

The descendant of the last daimyo of the Sanada Clan is alive and well today. He still wields an incredibly strong influence over the town. He's been saying that the kind of thing I'm doing is a disgrace for Matsushiro. Everyone just keeps their mouth shut. Those who were there are gradually passing away, and the Koreans were never in a position to speak out. Silence was their only choice, if they wanted to live a life here. Just the other day, the authorities blocked the entrances to the under-ground shelters with fences, despite requests that the last Imperial General Headquarters should be preserved and left be open to the public. They're afraid it will hurt their chances to get the Olympic Games to come to Nagano! They're trying to draw down the curtain on the Showa era. It's inexcusable. I wonder how the Japanese today can be so undisturbed after what they did.

THE EMPEROR'S RETREAT

by Yamane Masako

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