The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 11 | Issue 52 | Number 3 | Article ID 4054 | Dec 27, 2013

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Lavish are the Dead: Re-envisioning Japan's Korean War　死者の奢り　あらためて日本の朝鮮戦争を思い浮かべる　

Tessa Morris-Suzuki

The Bodies in the Academy

In 1957, a young Japanese writer published acollection of short stories which quicklyattracted nationwide attention. The title of thecollection - Shisha no Ogori - is particularlydifficult to render into English, but has beentranslated by John Nathan as Lavish Are TheDead. The writer was Oë Kenzaburo, and thesuccess of this, his first published book, wasthe start of a career that would ultimately bringhim international fame and a Nobel Prize forliterature1

The title story of Lavish Are The Dead is asurreal tale of a young man who, like Oëhimself, is a student of French literature at theUniversity of Tokyo. To earn a little money, thestudent takes a job looking after dead bodiesthat are stored, floating in vast pools ofpreservative beneath the university's MedicalFaculty, awaiting dissection. As he works withthese bodies, the student enters into mentalconversations with the dead, who includesoldiers and civilians killed more than a decadeearlier in the Pacific War:

I saw the bullet wound in thesoldier's side; it was shaped like awithered flower petal, darker thanthe sk in around i t , th ick lydiscoloured.

Do you remember the war? Youmust have been just a child?...

What it amounts to is that I was

carry ing your hopes on myshoulders. I guess you'll be theones who dominate the next war.2

Oë's fable can be read in many ways. Viewedthrough one prism, it is a reflection on theforgetting of the Pacific War, whose whisperingcorpses float beneath the surface of nationalmemory, just as the dead of the story float intheir subterranean tanks beneath the halls ofJapan's intellectual establishment. But LavishAre The Dead, both in its subject matter and itssilences, can also be read as a strangelypowerful metaphor for the submerged presenceof the Korean War in Japanese society, cultureand memory.

In this essay, I explore the metaphorical andreal presence of the bodies of the dead in Japanduring the Korean War era, and use thisexp lo ra t i on as a s ta r t ing po in t f o rreconsidering the memory of the Korean War inJapan. Narratives of Japan's relationship to theKorean War, both in popular memory and inmany historical studies, have been dominatedby the theme of the Korean War boom –cynically described by then Prime MinisterYoshida Shigeru as a 'gift from the gods' – andits impact on Japan's postwar economic growth.Many studies of the period cite ChalmersJohnson's comment that the Korean War was 'inmany ways the equivalent for Japan of theMarshall Plan'.3 Other historians haveemphasized the political impact of the war ininfluencing the terms of the San FranciscoPeace Treaty and hastening the process ofJapanese rearmament, and some also point outthat Japan did in fact send minesweepers and

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other support to the war zone.4 But, partlyperhaps because the personal stories ofJapanese involved in the war have seldom beentold, even these narratives tend often to remainoddly abstract and bloodless, failing to capturethe physical dimension of the violence of war,from which Japan was not immune.

A focus on the physical presence of bodies –both living and dead – also makes visible twoother important dimensions of the Korean Warand Japan's connections to its violence. Thefirst is the centrality of the issue of race. Thespectre of race haunted the war, mostobviously, perhaps, in the emergence of USstereotypical images of Asians which would becarried over to later conflicts in Vietnam andelsewhere.5 But race in the Korean War hadcomplex and multilayered dimensions that gobeyond simple dichotomies between "white"and "Asian", and many of these dimensionswere, as we shall see, uncomfortably evident inKorean War era Japan.

Secondly, a focus on the physical and corporealrealities of the war highlights the deep regionaldifferences in Japan's experience of the KoreanWar. The tendency to view Japan's Korean Warhistory in abstract and economic terms is, Ishall suggest, closely linked to the tendency toview Japanese history from the perspective ofTokyo. The capital indeed reaped the economicbenefits of the war, while remaining relativelyunaffected by the physical pain and socialdisruption that it generated. But, for many ofJapan's regional port cities, particularly for theports of Kyushu, the impact of the war was verydifferent. It was here that both the violence ofwar and its complex racial dimension becamemuch more clearly visible.

History as Myth

Oë Kenzaburo entered Tokyo University in1953, shortly before the Panmunjom Armisticeput an end to the immediate violence of theKorean War (though without producing alasting peace settlement). Other than the

ambiguous reference to 'the next war', there isno mention of the Korean War in Lavish AreThe Dead. It is not clear whether his fable of astudent's encounter with the war dead arosespontaneously from Oë's fertile imagination, orwhether it was in part inspired by stories heardfrom his fellow students. There is a dream-likequality to the student's movements as he shiftsback and forth between the surface world of aneconomically booming Tokyo and the world ofthe dead that lies silent and invisible beneath.The smell of death permeates his body, and hebecomes unable to connect with the living, asthough separated from them by some invisiblemembrane.

The Japanese version of Wikipedia cites Oë'sstory as the source of a widespread Japaneseurban myth: the myth that university studentsand others were employed, and paid substantialwages, to prepare dead bodies for medicaldissection, or to embalm the bodies of dead USsoldiers sent back from the war fronts inVietnam and elsewhere. There is, Wikipediatells us, no basis to this myth.6 NishimuraYoichi, a prominent Japanese forensic surgeonand popular writer, devotes an entire chapterof his 1995 memoirs to the 'troublesomerumour' [komatta uwasa] that Japanese wereemployed in the morgues of US army bases topiece together the dismembered bodies ofAmerican war dead. This rumour, he says,'began particularly around the time of theKorean War, and flared up again later duringthe Vietnam War'. 'Now,' he continues, 'thisstupid myth no longer exists. But the rumour,probably woven together from the reality thatbodies were dissected for autopsies and arandom fascination with the bizarre, seems tohave remained deeply rooted for years and tohave been depicted in many different forms'.7

As Jan Harold Brunvand observes in his studyThe Vanishing Hitchhiker, urban myths containa certain metaphorical truth, expressing socialconcerns and fears in symbolic form. 8

Brunvand's reflections on this subject have left

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me wondering - if legends reveal submergedsocial anxieties, what aspects of sharedmemory cause historical facts to be consignedto the realms of urban myth? For, despite thecomments of Nishimura and of Wikipedia, thestory of Japanese students and the bodies of thewar dead is not a myth that has beenremembered as historical fact, but rather ahistorical fact that has been remembered asmyth. In the years just before Oë wrote LavishAre The Dead, Japanese labourers and someuniversity students were indeed beingrecruited to help process some 30,000 bodiesof American war dead which flowed throughJapan during the Korean War9, but publicmemory seems reluctant to absorb this reality,consigning it instead to the floating world offiction and fantasy.

Among the students employed for this task wasHanihara Kazuro, who published an account ofhis experiences in 1965. Hanihara had justgraduated in anthropology from TokyoUniversity and was about to start postgraduateresearch when, in April 1951, he and at leastone other anthropology postgraduate from thesame university, Furue Tadao, were recruitedby the US military and sent to Camp Jono in thesouthwestern city of Kokura to help reassembleand identify the dismembered remains of USservicemen sent back from the Korean front.10

The students' employment with the AmericanGraves Registration Service Group wasendorsed by an official contract between theUS military and Tokyo University, signed by theDean of the university's Science Faculty, KayaSeiji.11

At the Jo no base, the young Japaneseanthropologists worked alongside Americanexperts and a team of Japanese labourersbrought in to perform the menial tasks oftransporting the remains and cleaning themorgue: a place every bit as strange andmacabre as the subterranean world depicted inOë's short story. On busy days, the studentsexamined as many as sixty to eighty corpses a

day, most of them severely decomposedbecause they had been temporarily buriedwhere they fell when US troops retreatedbefore the onslaught from the north, and thenunearthed and sent to Japan when the tides ofwar turned. In words which echo the languageof Oë's story, Hanihara vividly evokes thestench of death which hit the workers whenthey first entered the morgue, and which clungto their clothes and bodies throughout theirtime in Kokura. And yet, for him, the work hadbenefits: it was, he felt, a unique opportunityfor practical study of the physical anthropologyof people of many different races. 'One thingwas for sure', he wrote, 'now and probably evenin the future it would be most unlikely that wewould ever have another chance to examine thebones of hundreds of white people and blackpeople'; and, as it turned out, not only of blackand white, but also of Hispanics, NativeAmericans, Asian Americans and people ofmixed race.12

Camp Jono, Kokura, Japan

The Korean War was, of course, a world war inminiature. To boost the 'global' image of theUN forces, the United States secured theparticipation of Thais and Ethiopians, Turksand Colombians. The war also took place at atime when the early stirrings of civil rights

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activism were beginning to be heard in theUnited States. It was, then, not only a multi-racial war but also one shadowed by uneasyracial consciousness. This seems indeed tohave been one of the reasons why Haniharaand at least two other Tokyo Universityanthropology postgraduates were brought in towork at the morgue. A report by the USmilitary published just after the Korean Warrecalled (with a slight re-adjustment of thefacts):

Our anthropologists included two Americans;one European, who had extensive experience inthe World-War-II program; and one Japanese,who was a professor from a leading universityin Japan; each highly trained in his specializedprofession. In fact, all of the major races ofmankind were represented among this smallgroup of experts who performed theanthropological work, a highly desirable butextremely unusual situation. A number ofindigenous [i.e. Japanese] workers were alsoemployed to perform such highly importanttasks as cleaning and scrubbing our facilities sothat we might maintain the high standards ofsanitation essential to the success of theproject.13 Hanihara went on to become one ofJapan's best-known physical anthropologists,famous particularly for his enthusiastic questfor the racial origins of the Japanese.

Mobile Bodies

The history of the Camp Jono morgue thusmakes us see the war, not in terms of abstracteconomic indicators, but in terms of humanbodies - the bodies of the dead and the livingthat move between Japan and Korea, andinteract in complex and sometimes surprisingways. Throughout the war, Japan and Koreawere constantly linked by an unceasing andmassive movement of people. In all around 1.8million Americans, some 90,000 BritishCommonwealth troops, and thousands of othersoldiers from eleven other countries servingunder the UN Command, fought for varying

lengths of time in the Korean War, and almostall spent some time in Japan on their way toand from the conflict. Many moved repeatedlyback and forth between Korea and Japan. Some'commuted': most US and Commonwealth pilotsserving in the war 'enjoyed a "normal" homelife in Japan when they finished daily duty.They flew out in the morning to bomb Koreantargets and returned to American bases inJapan in the evening'.14 Tens of thousands ofwar wounded, including seriously injuredprisoners of war, were airlifted to Japan fortreatment in hospitals in Kyushu, Osaka andTokyo: more than 9,000 war casualties wereflown to hospitals in southern Japan in one six-week period from October-November 1950alone.15

The flows of people were multidirectional,multiracial, and multinational. Around 1,700Filipino workers were brought to Okinawa bythe US military and by defense contractorssuch as the Vinnell Corporation at the height ofthe Korean War.16 One Japanese sailor whoworked on vessels carrying UN troops andsupplies between Yokohama and the KoreanWar front was astonished to find himselfworking alongside a multicultural crew whosemembers included not only Latino, Asian andAfrican Americans but also Malays, Indonesiansand Scandinavians.17

And then, of course, there was the movement ofJapanese and Koreans themselves between thetwo countries. Japan, which was under alliedoccupation until April 1952 and was not amember of the United Nations, was officiallyuninvolved in the military conflict. In practice,though, it is estimated that over 8,000 Japanesepeople were sent to the Korean War zone inmilitary related-roles.18 644 ethnic Koreansliving in Japan also volunteered for service inKorea via the pro- South Korean communityorganization Mindan, and were trained in USbases in Japan before being dispatched to thewar zone. The flow in the opposite directionincluded 8,625 Korean recruits to the KATUSA

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(Korean Augmentation to the United StatesArmy) scheme, who were sent to join the US7th Infantry Division at its base in Japan. Manyof these were young men rounded up more orless at random from the streets of Busan: 'inthe contingents shipped to Japan, schoolboysstill had their schoolbooks; one recruit who hadleft home to obtain medicine for his sick wifestill had the medicine with him.'19

Other more shadowy arrivals and departuresare yet to be ful ly documented. A fewprisoners-of-war captured by UN forces wereapparently transferred from Korea to Tokyo forquestioning, though few Japanese or US officialdocuments refer to this fact.20 Thousands ofKorean war refugees also fled the violence ofwar to Japan, but since the allied occupationauthorities and Japanese government refusedto allow them official refuge in Japan, theyarrived clandestinely on people- smugglingboats which dropped them off at remote spotsalong the coast under cover of darkness.21

Though Japanese were not officially called on togive their l ives in the war, they wereencouraged to make a different kind of physicalcontribution. In November 1950, the JapanBlood Bank was established, apparently at therequest of the American occupation authorities,to coordinate Japanese donations of blood tothe UN forces in Korea. The Japan Red CrossSociety also made appeals for blood donationsfor the war wounded. By the beginning of 1953,thousands of Japanese had donated (or moreoften, sold) blood, which was collected andflown to the Korean front in special nighttimecargo flights.22

The Silence of the Bones

While the transport planes were conveying thislife-saving cargo to Korea, a far more massiveseaborne operation was underway to return theremains of the American war dead via Japan tothe United States. A wartime report reveals themagnitude and uniqueness of the task:

never in the history of the United States, or ofany other nation, has there been a massevacuation of the remains of men killed inaction while hostilities were still in force. Thedeparture from the long established practice ofleaving remains in battlefield cemeteries orisolated locations until after the cessation ofhostilities necessitated the activation of anorganization capable of carrying out themanifold operations of receiving, processing,identifying, embalming, casketing, andshipping.23

The decision to take on this herculean taskseems to have reflected uncertainties about theeventual outcome of the war. During the firstweeks of combat, fallen US soldiers had beenburied in ground quickly overrun by advancingNorth Korean forces. After the Incheon Landingof September 1950, as South Korean and UNforces pushed northward, American war deadburied in recaptured ground were disinterredand moved to new cemeteries. But then Chinaentered the war and the tide of combat turnedagain. It was at this point that a decision wastaken to repatriate the bodies of US war deadvia Japan while the war was still continuing.24

This operation to bring home the dead wasrestricted to US servicemen: dead soldiers fromother forces under the UN command wereburied in a giant new cemetery at Danggoknear Busan (where some US servicemen werealso temporarily buried, awaiting removal toKokura and thence to the US).25

The first ship bearing the remains of the deadarrived in the port of Kokura on 3 January1951, and by the time anthropology studentHanihara Kazuro arrived at Camp Jono in Aprilof that year, the bodies of some 16,000 soldiershad passed through the Jono morgue.26 UnlikeOë Kenzaburo's fictional student, Hanihara didnot engage the dead in conversation. Instead,he observed them with an eager but detachedand scientific eye, meticulously measuringbones, identifying racial characteristics andfilling in the standardized diagram of a human

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skeleton to be completed for each body. (Theinstructions on the diagram read, 'black outparts of body not received').27

Unloading bones at Kokura

In the book he later wrote about h isexperiences, Hanihara carefully catalogued thephysical differences between the races on anevolutionary scale that placed the 'black race'closer to the animal kingdom than the 'white':indeed he expressed some pride in havingdeveloped such a sharp eye for racialdistinctions that 'provided they wereprototypical, I could tell a white person's bodyfrom a black person's even at two metersdistance, and even if there was nothing therebut a lower jaw-bone'.28 The presence of a largenumber of mixed race bodies troubled him,though, particularly since many soldiers whowere labeled 'Negro' on their army recordsshould clearly, according to his notions ofproper anthropological classification, havebeen labelled 'mixed blood'.29

Skeletal chart used at Camp Jono Morgue

Even so, Hanihara's account of his work inKokura has its moments of unconscious pathos.He recalls the one and only time he was calledon to determine whether human remains fromthe war front were those of a man or a woman.Since all US combat troops at that time weremen, it was rarely necessary to determine thesex of the dead. In this case, though, CampJono received the partial remains of a personprobably killed by a mine and, on closeinspection, the morgue's scientists decided thatthese must be the remains of a Korean whosebody had accidentally become mixed up withthose of American servicemen. This left openthe question of whether the body was that of aKorean soldier, or of a civilian caught up in thefighting. It was determined, in the end, that thebody was that of a man, but the bones (ofcourse) gave no hint whether this was a soldieror a civilian, a man from the North or the

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South, a communist or anti-communist or aperson utterly indifferent to ideology. Haniharaalso does not tell us what happened to thebones in the end.30 We are left only with thesense of the terrible loneliness of a human lifethat ended, nameless and unidentifiable in aforeign land, exposed to the anthropometricscrutiny of total strangers.

Hanihara entitled his memoir of Camp Jono'Reading the Bones' [Hone o yomu]. The boneslaid out on the tables at Kokura were, to him,entirely legible, transparently revealing theirrace, their age, and at times (through dog tagsand record-matching) their names and serialnumbers. But the bones, though legible, do notspeak. They tell no stories. Their lost livesremain infinitely silent.

The Ghost Ships

One evening, after finishing his work in themorgue, Hanihara Kazuro left the inn where hewas staying in Kokura and walked down to theSunatsu River, which flows to the west of thetown centre into the narrow straits separatingthe islands of Kyushu and Honshu. Kokura atthis time was a small city of around 200,000people, though during the first half of thetwentieth century, it had been one of Japan'smost important ports: like the neighbouringport of Moji, Kokura was perfectly situated toprovide access to the Korean Peninsula, andthrough Korea, to Japan's empire in Asia. Thecity had also been the intended target for thesecond American atomic bomb. It had beenspared only by a local blanket of clouds whichcovered the town on the morning of 9 August1945, making it impossible for the US pilots tofind their target. They flew southward anddropped the bomb on Nagasaki instead.

With the loss of Japan's empire, the nation'scentre of economic gravity had shiftedeastward, to Pacific coast ports like Yokohama,but the outbreak of the Korean War had againtransformed the economic and strategiclandscape, and with it, the landscape of

Kokura.

At the mouth of the Sunatsu River (writesHanihara) I turned left, and, glancing towardsthe sea that could be glimpsed through thegaps between the warehouses, stopped dead inmy tracks. A ship far bigger than anythingusually seen in this little harbour wasapproaching the wharf. Straining my eyes, inthe bluish moonlight I could make out the Starsand Stripes fluttering on the ship's stern...

The ship came to a stop about a hundredmetres from the place where I was standing. Atthat point barbed-wire entanglements had beenput in place, so I could get no closer. I guessthe ship must have come from somewherearound Busan. It was strangely quiet. I couldjust see a few people who appeared to beAmerican soldiers on the shore, but there wasno one on the deck of the ship. It was like aghost ship. At length, there was a greatclattering sound and a splash of water near theship's bow. It had dropped anchor.

Again, all was still. Then the American soldierson shore shouted something, but I could notunderstand what they were saying. Just as Iwas thinking of turning back, suddenly the bowof the ship began to move. A vast doorwayappeared, as though the ship's bow was gapingopen its mouth. Out from this mouth, like atongue, came a gangway that extended to thewharf.31

The next day, when he went to work, Haniharawas approached by a middle- aged Japanesemorgue cleaner who told him, 'a whole lot morebodies from Korea arrived yesterday. Thetrucks were going past all night, so it wasreally noisy... Looks like it's going to get busyagain'. The shipments of dead from Korea oftenarrived at night, and Hanihara believed thatthis was done to prevent their arrival frombeing observed by citizens of Kokura, whomight have drawn pessimistic conclusionsabout the course of the war from the sight ofthe great number of American dead returning

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from the Korean front.32

But the cover of darkness could not prevent theghost ships from casting a pall over the town.As historian Ishimaru Yasuzo writes, 'thehorrors of war such as the mass escape of USsoldiers and transportation of the bodies ofsoldiers who were killed on the KoreanPeninsula were deeply affecting the people wholived around Kokura Port and Moji Port'.33 The'mass escape' in question took place soon afterthe start of the war, on 11 July 1950, whensome 200 soldiers from the US 24th InfantryRegiment, on their way to the Korean Warfront, staged a breakout from Camp Jono, anddescended on the centre of Kokura, smashingshop windows, assaulting women and engagingin fights with local people. One Japanese manwas shot dead in the riot, several were injuredand, according to the recollections of the thenmayor of Kokura, Hamada Ryosuke, about 28women were raped.34

The Specter of Race

At that time, the US military was graduallymoving towards policies of racial integration,but widespread segregation remained. The24th Infantry Regiment, though under thecontrol of white commanding officers, was anall-black regiment whose members had been inJapan ever since the start of the occupation.They had been stationed in rural GifuPrefecture, where conditions had beenpleasantly peaceful, but throughout their timein Japan had faced repeated instances of racialprejudice in their interactions with otheroccupation force military units and with somemembers of the Japanese public. On theoutbreak of the Korean War, the troops of the24th Infantry Regiment had been hopeful thatthey would not be sent to the Korean front,since most members of the regiment had littlecombat experience. They were also very poorlyequipped for combat; and some surely sharedthe doubts expressed by 1st Lt. Beverley Scottof the 1st Battalion, who pondered why black

Americans like himself should 'give up theirlives for the independence of South Korea whenthey themselves lacked full rights at home'.35

The departure of the 24th Infantry Regiment toKorea was chaotic. The soldiers were supposedto sail from Sasebo, but were instead divertedto Camp Jono, where there was inadequateaccommodation to house them. From there, asthey discovered, they were to be shipped toKorea in a hastily assembled flotilla of 'fishingboats, fertilizer haulers, coal carriers andtankers'.36 It was against the background of thischaos, as the miseries of their situation and theprospect of impending death confronted thesoldiers, that the mass breakout and riotoccurred. Although those involved were only asmall fraction of the three thousand membersof the regiment, from the point of view of thecitizens of Kokura the riot was a traumaticintroduction to the realities of the Korean Warand American society. The rioters wererounded up by other members of the regimentand dispatched the next day to the battle front.A cursory investigation by the US militaryconcluded with an official declaration that noone had been killed or injured, and the KokuraRiot was then largely written out of the historyof Japan in the Korean War.37 In the context ofJapan's deepening security ties with the US,neither the American nor the Japanesegovernment wanted to probe the sensitiveissues of racial discrimination and violenceagainst women raised by the riot, andoccupation era censorship ensured that itreceived little publicity in the Japanese media.

Meanwhile, in their first six weeks in Korea the24th Infantry Division suffered 883 battlecasualties.38 Many of those who had passedthrough Camp Jono on their way to Koreareturned to the camp in the ghost ships, to belaid out on its bleak antiseptic tables whereeven in death - even in the effort to return theirbodies to their families - their mortal remainswere viewed through the prism of the race thathad overshadowed their lives.

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The Landscapes of Japan's Korean War

The stories of the ghost ships and the Kokurariot illustrate the direct connection of Japan tothe violence of war; they also make visible thegeographically uneven effects of the war ondifferent regions of the country. The contrastbetween towns like Kokura and central Tokyowas striking. Tokyo, of course, was alsointimately connected to the war, but in verydi f ferent ways. The United Nat ion'sengagement in Korea was being commandedfrom the Dai-Ichi Building, just across the roadfrom the imperial palace in the heart of theJapanese capital. The presence of the war'snerve centre in Tokyo brought with it an influxof other war-related activities. Foreignjournalists covering the war congregated inTokyo, since this was where the UN commandgave its press briefings; so too did the offices ofinternational agencies engaged in war relatedactivities, such as the International Committeeof the Red Cross. These command, control andinformation gathering activities, and thecrowds of foreigners they attracted to Tokyo,gave the city a rather fevered vivacity,captured in words by US journalist HansonBaldwin:

Tokyo is a city of glaring contrasts; we, theconquerors, live high, wide and handsome;parties, dinners, dances and flirtations providea silver screen obscuring but never completelyhiding the grim background of Korea. There issometimes almost a frenetic gaiety... The silvergleams; the cocktails are good; the wines arevintages; the liquers are numerous and theuniforms shine in the candlelight; at the door,the kimono-clad servants lined up in a row bowprofoundly to the departing guests.

But in the Dai-Ichi building, headquarters ofSCAP (Supreme Commander of the AlliedPowers) the lights shine far into the night andare reflected in the turgid waters of the moatsurrounding the Imperial Palace.

At a Japanese dinner, as the geisha fills the

little cups with sake, a Japanese newspaperman says: 'A retired general told me we wouldneed a minimum of eighteen divisions - severalof them armored - to defend Japan.39

Swiss photographer Werner Bischof, who livedin Japan from 1951 to 1952, captured the moodin his photographs of Tokyo: the jumble of newbuildings and advertisement hoardingsobscuring the bomb scars of the Pacific War,the smartly clad young women striding throughthe streets of Ginza, the earnest studentsdebating politics over cups of coffee andperusing the works of Picasso at an artexhibition.40 (See Bischof's photos at thewebsite www.magnumphotos.com). From theperspective of central Tokyo, it was easyenough to see the war as an abstract anddisembodied phenomenon whose effects onJapan were overwhelmingly economic andwholly beneficial. But in port cities likeYokohama, Kokura, Moji and Sasebo, the feel ofwar was very different.

Large parts of their harbours were sealed offby barbed wire barriers (like those describedby Hanihara), making them inaccessible tolocal fishing fleets and commercial vessels,many of which had in any case been mobilizedto carry troops and supplies to the war front. InMoji, for example, the Tozai Steamshipcompany supplied 120 small commercialvessels and their crews to the UN command tosupport the Incheon Landing.41 Militaryvehicles constantly rumbled through thestreets, and the superstructures of huge trooptransports towered over the docksidewarehouses. Bischof traveled throughout thecountry and as far as Okinawa, which wasunder separate and direct US militaryoccupation and, like the port cities of westernJapan, was utterly transformed by the outbreakof the war. There huge construction projects,mostly carried out by large Japanesecorporations, created a landscape of tar andconcrete, barracks and aircraft hangers on landconfiscated from local farmers. In Okinawa,

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Bischof photographed the giant B-29 bomberswhich roared down newly-constructed runwayson their bombing missions to Korea, the UNlogos on their sides surrounded with symbolicimages of the torrent of bombs they haddropped on the enemy.

The backstreets of Tokyo, to be sure, weredotted with the bars, strip clubs and brothelsthat flourish on the periphery of war - Bischofcaptured one particularly haunting image ofthe entrance to a Tokyo strip club, where thebooted, uniformed legs of a partly visible USsoldier loom over the small form of therecumbent woman within. But in the port townsof regional Japan and the base towns ofOkinawa, with their much smaller populations,the large red light districts that sprang up inthe shadow of the war had a far more visibleand socially overwhelming impact than they didin a metropolis like Tokyo.42

The War on the Docks

In places like Kokura, though the war certainlybrought economic growth and employment, itwas no 'gift from the gods'; instead, it wassomething very much more complex, morephysical and more filled with pain. There wasanother reason, too, why the war had greaterimmediacy in such regional and coastal towns.Places like Kokura and Moji had largepopulations of Korean migrants. Some hadbeen brought there as labourers during thewar. Others had been living elsewhere in Japanin colonial times, and had drifted to the portsafter Japan's defeat in the war, seeking ships totake them home to Korea, but had becomestranded in Japan because they lacked themeans to leave. Others again had crossed toKorea after its liberation from colonial rule onlyto discover that there was no work and housingfor them there, and had returned on people-smuggling boats to Japan's west coast andfound work as day labourers on the docks. It isestimated that in the 1930's about 20% of docklabourers in the ports of the Shimonoseki-Moji

area were Korean.43 The figures for the early1950s are uncertain, but were certainly large.

The Korean War was played out in miniaturewithin the Korean community in Japan. Whilethe pro-South Korean organization Mindanrecruited volunteers to fight on the Southernside, the pro-North Korean United DemocraticFront of Koreans in Japan [Zainichi ChosenToitsu Minshu Sensen, or Minsen for short]collaborated with Japanese communists instaging covert sabotage actions aimed atpreventing the transport of US/UN troops andsupplies from Japan to Korea. Many of theseguerrilla acts were carried out in the port citieswhere ships to Korea were loaded andunloaded. On the docks of Yokohama, Sasebo,Kokura and Moji a miniature and invisibleKorean War was being waged, as pro-communist dockworkers quiet ly andsystematically damaged the tanks and gunsthey were loading into transport vessels, or'accidentally' dropped military hardware intothe murky waters of the harbour.44

But as historian Ono Toshihiko discovered inhis interviews with Koreans who had worked onthe Moji docks during the Korean War, thestruggles of everyday life left many with littletime to engage with the politics of war. Theoutbreak of the war had aggravated the fearand prejudice that already severely restrictedjob opportunities for Koreans living in Japan.Agonizingly aware of the impact of the war ontheir homeland and on relatives still in Korea,many simply did what they had to do to survive,seizing the chance to labour through the night,loading military hardware onto the greatmilitary transports in return for the casualwages available to day labourers. One Koreanformer dockworker recollects that he had been,in his own words, so busy with the struggle forsubsistence that he was capable only ofthinking 'whichever side wins, the war willend'. Another recalls, 'we knew that thosetanks and things, when they were sent overthere [to Korea], were going to be used to kill

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people, but what else could we do? If we didn'tload them, we wouldn't have had any work.'45

Embodying Procurements

Through the symbolism of Lavish Are TheDead, Oë Kenzaburo probed the repression ofthe past: the concealment of the violence ofwar, the forgetting of lost lives, the segregationof the dead from the living. For much of thepast sixty years, I would argue, precisely thesame form of repression has shaped thememory of Japan's relationship to the KoreanWar. The vision of 'procurements' as anabstract phenomenon boosting Japan'seconomic growth has allowed historians andothers to see only the lavish generosity of war -the glittering surface of Korean War era Tokyo- while forgetting the dead: the whisperingcorpses beneath who were, in the end, a crucialsource of that generosity.

This vision of the war in quantitative economicterms makes invisible not only the millions ofvictims of the war within Korea, but even thehundreds of people from Japan (both Japaneseand ethnic Koreans) who were killed or injuredin the war. The quantitative imagery alsoobscures the terrifying and life-changingexperiences of the thousands of Japanese whowitnessed the war at first hand. Within theborders o f Japan i t se l f , the v iew o fprocurements in aggregate terms makes it easyto forget the particular and material ways inwhich the servicing of war affected Japaneseeconomy and society. So many small scalehistories, stories that fail to fit the image of'Japan's Marshall Plan', remain to be told:stories of the Japanese nurses who tendedcatastrophic war injuries, of workers whomanufactured napalm and other incendiaryweapons to be dropped on Korea (and were, insome cases, killed in accidental explosions as aresult46), of the women who were procured for'rest and recreation' by US/UN forces in the redlight districts of Tokyo, Yokohama, Sasebo,K o k u r a , O k i n a w a a n d e l s e w h e r e .

'Procurements' were not only a matter ofnumbers and upward curves on graphs. Theyalso involved lives and bodies.

The Korean War has never really ended. Nopeace treaty has ever been signed. Korearemains divided. Hardly a day passes withoutJapanese newspapers reporting on the militarythreat from North Korea, and hinting at thepossibilities of wars to come. In these tensecircumstances, the task of re-envisioningJapan's Korean War is an urgent one. It is timeto hear the bodies speak.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The research on which this article is based wasfunded by the generosity of the AustralianResearch Council.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of JapaneseHistory in the Division of Pacific and AsianHistory, College of Asia and the Pacific,Australian National University, and a JapanFocus associate. Her most recent booksare Exodus to North Korea: Shadows fromJ a p a n ' s C o l d W a r(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742554422/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) , Borderline Japan:Foreigners and Frontier Controls in theP o s t w a r E r a(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521864607/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) and To the DiamondMountains: A Hundred-Year Journey ThroughC h i n a a n d K o r e a(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1442205032/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20).

Recommended Citation: Tessa Morris-Suzuki,"Lavish are the Dead: Re-envisioning Japan'sKorean War," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11,Issue 52, No. 3, December 30, 2013.

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NOTES

1 Oë Kenzaburo (trans. John Nathan), "LavishAre The Dead", Japan Quarterly, vo. 12, no 2,April-June 1965, pp. 193-211.

2 Oë, "Lavish Are The Dead", pp. 199-200.

3 Chalmers Johnson, Conspiracy at Matsukawa,Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973,p. 23; see also William S. Borden, The PacificAlliance: United States Foreign EconomicPolicy and Japanese Trade Recovery,1947-1955, Madison, University of WisconsinPress, 1984, p. 146; William J. Williams, ARevo lu t i onary War : Korea and theTransformation of the Postwar World, Chicago,Imprint Publications, 1993, p. 209; MarkMetzler, "The Occupation", in William Tsutsuied., A Companion of Japanese History, Oxford,Blackwell, 2009, pp. 264-280, quotation from p.275; Aaron Forsberg, America and theJapanese Miracle: The Cold War Context ofJapan's Postwar Revival, University of NorthCarolina Press, 2000, p. 84.

4 For example, John Bowen, The Gift of theGods: The Impact of the Korean War on Japan,

Hampton VA, Old Dominion GraphicsConsultants Inc., 1984; Reinhard Drifte,'Japan's Involvement in the Korean War', inJames Cotton and Ian Neary eds., The KoreanWar in History, Manchester, ManchesterUniversity Press, 1989, pp. 121-134; MichaelSchaller, 'The Korean War: The Economic andStrategic Impact on Japan', in William Stuecked., The Korean War in World History,Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2004,pp. 145-176.

5 Christina Klein, Cold War, Orientalism: Asia inthe Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961,Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003.

6 "Shitai arai no arubaito", entry in theJ a p a n e s e v e r s i o n o f W i k i p e d i a(http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/), accessed 2January 2013.

7 Nishimura Yoichi, Hoigaku kyoshitsu to nowakare, Tokyo, Asahi Bunko, 1995, pp. 46 and50.

8 Jan Harold Brunvand, The VanishingHitchhiker: American Urban Legends and theirMeaning, New York, W.W. Norton, 2003.

9 Bradley Lynn Coleman states that theAmerican Graves Registration Service, whichreturned US remains via morgues in Kokuraand later also Yokohama, recovered theremains of 36,576 US servicemen killed inKorea. Bradley Lynn Coleman, 'Recovering theKorean War Dead, 1950-1958: GravesRegistration, Forensic Anthropology, andWartime Memorialization', The Journal ofMilitary History, vol. 72 no. 1, 2008, pp.179-222, reference to p. 217.

10 Furue later migrated to Hawaii, where hebecame a renowned forensic anthropologist,but his limited academic credentials were tobecome a source of controversy: it seems thathe never completed graduate study at theUniversity of Tokyo. See Thomas M. Hawley,The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the

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Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted Forin Southeast Asia, Duke University Press, 2005,pp. 106-108.

1 1 Hanihara Kazuro , Hone o yomu :Arujinruigakusha no taiken, Tokyo, Chuko Shinsho,1965, ch. 1; see also 'Chosen senso shitaishorihan: Aru jinruigakusha no kaiso', in Tokyo12-Chaneru Hodobu ed, Shogen: Watashi noShowashi, vol 6, Gagugei Shorin, 1969, pp.164-177.

12 Hanihara, Hone o yomu, quotation from p.10.

1 3 John D. Martz Jr. 'Homeward Bound( h t t p : / / w w w . q m f o u n d . c o m /homeward_bound_korea.htm)', QuartermasterReview, May-June 1954, accessed 8 January2013.

14 Nam G. Kim, From Enemies to Allies: TheImpact of the Korean War on US-JapanRelations, San Francisco, InternationalScholars Publications, 1997, p. 154.

15 'Home from Battle', Pacific Stars and StripesFar East Weekly Review, 18 November 1950.

16 See telegram from US Embassy Manila, 11February 1958, re Embassy tel 2918 (Tokyo86), in Okinawa Prefectural Archives, microfilmo f N a t i o n a l A r c h i v e s a n d R e c o r d sAdministration documents, Records of the USCivil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, box6 of HCRI-LA, folder no. 2, 'Foreign National -Filipino'; on the Vinnell Corporation, see forexample telegram from CG RYCOM Okinawa toCINCFE Tokyo, 29 November 1950, in OkinawaPrefectural Archives, microfilm of NationalArchives and Records Administrationdocuments, 'RYCOM Nov. 1950'.

17 Kawamura Kiichiro, Nihonjin senin ga mitaChosen Senso, Tokyo, Asahi Communications,2007, p. 22.

18 On Japanese sailors and labourers in the

Korean War zone, see Ishimaru, 'Chosen Sensoto Nihon no kakawari'. On the Red Crossnurses, see Kokkai Gijiroku, Sangiin, (record ofthe proceedings of the Upper House of theJapanese Parliament) 25 January 1953. OnJapanese base workers at the Korean War frontsee Tessa Morris-Suzuki, 'Postwar Warriors:Japanese Combatants in the Korean War(https://apjjf.org/-Tessa-Morris_Suzuki/3803)',The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 10,Issue 31, No. 1, July 30, 2012.

19 Roy E. Appleman, South to the Naktong,North to the Yalu, Washington, GovernmentPrinting Office, 1987, p. 386.

20 For example, Fangong yishi fendou shi,bianzhuan weiyuanhui ed., Fangong yishifendou shi, Taipei, Fangong Yishi Fendou ShiJiuye Fudaochu, 1955, refers to an instance ofan important Chinese POW being transferred toTokyo, where he was questioned by an officialof the GuoMindang. I am grateful to Dr. CathyChurchman for providing me with thisinformation.

21 For further discussion, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners andFrontier Controls in the Postwar Era ,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010,chs. 3 and 4.

22 'Chosen sensen ni tobu Nihonjin no chi: Sudeni nanasenninbun okuru' Asahi Shinbun(evening edition), 16 January 1953, p. 3.

23 John C. Cook, 'Graves Registration in theK o r e a n C o n f l i c t(http://www.qmmuseum.lee.army.mil/korea/gr_korea.htm)', The Quartermaster Review,March-April 1953 , accessed 4 January 2013.

24 Coleman, 'Recovering the Korean War Dead',p. 192.

25 Cook, 'Graves Registration in the KoreanConflict'.

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26 Cook, 'Graves Registration in the KoreanConflict'.

27 Hanihara, Hone o yomu, p. 67.

28 Hanihara, Hone o yomu, p. 83.

29 Hanihara, Hone o yomu, pp. 87-95.

30 Hanihara, Hone o yomu, pp. 131-138.

31 Hanihara, Hone o yomu, pp. 167-168.

32 Hanihara, Hone o yomu, pp. 44-45 and 168.

33 Yasuzo Ishimaru, 'The Korean War andJapanese Ports: Support for the UN Forces andits Influences, NIDS Security Reports, no. 8,December 2007, pp. 55-70, quotation from pp.63-64.

34 Interview with Hamada, in 'Chosen sensoshitai shorihan', pp. 174-75; on the riot and itsbackground, see also William T. Bowers,Wi l l iam M. Hammond and George L .McGarrigle, Black Soldier, White Army: The24th Infantry Regiment in Korea, WashingtonDC, United States Army Center of MilitaryHistory, 1996, pp. 79-81.

3 5 Quoted in Bowers , Hammond andMcGarrigle, Black Soldier, White Army, p. 65

36 Bowers, Hammond and McGarrigle, BlackSoldier, White Army, p. 79.

37 On the results of the enquiry, see Bowers,Hammond and McGarrigle, Black Soldier,White Army, p 80. Other than their book, I havefound no work in English on the Korean Warthat mentions the Kokura Riot. Very fewJapanese language histories of the Korean Warera mention it either, though it does providethe setting for Matsumoto Seicho's novel,Kuroj i no e , which was publ ished byShincho sha in 1965.

38 Bowers, Hammond and McGarrigle, Black

Soldier, White Army, p. 159.

39 Hanson W. Baldwin, 'Tense Lands in China'sShadow', in Lloyd C. Gardner ed., The KoreanWar, New York, Quadrangle Books, 1972, pp.128-138, quotation from p. 131. (Baldwin'sessay was originally published in the New YorkTimes Magazine on 24 December 1950).

40 Werner Bischof, Japan, London, Sylvan Press,1954. The heavily orientalist tone of the text,composed by Robert Guillain after Bischof'suntimely death in 1954, fails to obscure thepower of the photographs.

41 Ishimaru, 'The Korean War and JapanesePorts', p. 63; on Korean War conflicts overaccess to ports, see also Nakamoto Teruo,Sasebo-ko sengoshi, Sasebo, Geibundo, 1985,p. 165.

42 See, for example, Nakamoto, Sasebo-kosengoshi, p. 148.

43 Ono Toshihiko, 'Kita-Kyushu Mojiko no kowanrodosha to sono Chosen Senso taiken', ShakaiBunseki, no. 32, 2005, pp. 133-149, citationfrom p. 137.

44 Ono, 'Kita-Kyushu Mojiko no kowan rodosha',pp. 140-141; for further details of acts ofsabotage during the Korean War, seeNishimura, Osaka de tatakatta Chosen Senso,ch. 6.

45 Ono, 'Kita-Kyushu Mojiko no kowan rodosha',pp. 143-144.

46 To give just one example, three majorexplosions, one in January 1952, one in August1952 and one in June 1953, destroyed sectionsof Nihon Yushi's Taketomi factory, killing twoworkers and seriously injuring four others. TheJan. 1952 and June 1953 accidents are reportedin Nihon Yush i KK ed . , Nihon Yush iSanjunenshi, Tokyo, Nihon Yushi KK, 1967, pp.554-555; the Aug. 1952 explosion is reported inthe Asahi Shinbun evening edition, 19 August

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1952, p. 3.