At 86, Kim Do-im continues to hope that Japan will one day recognize its responsibility for an unknown massacre of several thousand Koreans committed in Tokyo a century ago, during which his maternal uncle disappeared.
The body of this relative has never been found and the precise circumstances of his death remain unknown. But Mrs. Kim is convinced: “He was killed only because he was Korean”.
“It hurts my heart” that there has never been an official apology from Japan for this largely hidden killing, the daughter of Korean immigrants who arrived in the country a century ago told AFP. “I want the government to apologize.”
On September 1, 1923, a terrible earthquake of magnitude 7.9 tore through the Kanto plain, where the Japanese capital was located, very densely populated and mainly built of wood at the time.
Huge fires, fanned by violent winds, will considerably increase the human toll of the disaster (105,000 dead). Panic seizes the inhabitants and the authorities fear that the situation will degenerate into riots.
Very quickly, rumors spread that Koreans would seek to take advantage of the chaos to loot, set fire to, kill Japanese people or even attempt a coup d’etat.
Encouraged by the authorities, citizen militias were formed, armed with bamboo spears, sabers or iron bars, and the hunt for Koreans began.
Korea had been a Japanese colony since 1910. Immigrants from that country were hated by Japanese workers because they represented “cheaper” labor.
And Korean students in Tokyo were seen by the government as “dangerous” separatists, Kenji Hasegawa, professor of modern Japanese history at Yokohama National University, told AFP.
The assessment of the massacre remains very imprecise, for lack of the will of the Japanese State to seriously investigate the facts.
A few months after the tragedy, the Japanese government assessed the death toll at a few hundred dead. “But researchers largely agree on an estimate of several thousand,” Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a professor emeritus of Japanese history at the Australian National University, told AFP.
“Many testimonies collected just after the events show that the police and the army participated in the killing,” adds this historian.
“A large number” of Chinese immigrants were also murdered during the events, which lasted several days, underlines Mr. Hasegawa.
Masao Nishizaki, 61, walks along the grassy banks of the Arakawa River in his working-class neighborhood in eastern Tokyo. Then he stops short: “It’s here”.
In front of a bridge that existed there in 1923, armed men filtered the population who wanted to reach the other side to flee the fires caused by the earthquake, he explains, reporting testimonies from the time.
Those who were identified as Koreans were “killed on the spot” and their bodies “piled up like wood”, said Mr. Nishizaki, director of Housenka, a local association for the memory of the massacre.
No one knows where the first rumors against the Koreans came from. But the “central role” of the state in their dissemination has been “consensus” among historians for decades, notes Mr. Hasegawa.
Beyond the theoretical threat that a few rebellious Koreans represented in the eyes of the state, the authorities were above all seeking to “control the crowds” of Japanese victims of the earthquake and fires, by “mobilizing” them against a fantasized enemy, believes this searcher.
Quickly after the bloodbath, the State threw the responsibility on the citizens’ militias, some of whose members were judged for form.
The government also organized a campaign at the time to “give the impression” that Koreans had really committed crimes at the time of the earthquake, a way of partly legitimizing the rumors and its tragic consequences, explains Mr. Hasegawa.
The mainstream media and Japanese textbooks are content to say today that “rumors” triggered the massacre, without implicating the state.
And since 2017, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike has broken with the tradition of her predecessors of sending a message of condolence at a commemoration of the massacre organized each September 1 by various associations.
To flatter her nationalist electoral base, Ms. Koike deemed it “politically advantageous” to consider that the circumstances of this massacre were controversial, and that it was therefore better to commemorate all the victims of the tragedies of 1923 in an undifferentiated way.
It is a way of “erasing” the memory of the massacre and “instilling doubt” about its authenticity, indignant Mr. Hasegawa.
For its part, the Japanese government invariably replies that it does not have the archives to reopen an investigation into these events.
Japan is often accused of revisionism over its violent militaristic past in Asia in the first half of the 20th century, and historical disputes chronically poison its relations with Beijing and Seoul.
“The risk of one day seeing the same mistakes repeated is always present if we do not learn the lessons of history,” said Mr. Nishizaki.
01/09/2023 16:27:45 – Tokyo (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
