[Lim Woong] What Korea still owes its patriots of 1945

Every Aug. 15, South Korea pauses to mark National Liberation Day, the anniversary of the day in 1945 when 36 years of Japanese colonial rule finally came to an end. For decades, Koreans were forced to take Japanese names, bow at Japanese shrines and endure the colonial exploitation of their labor and natural resources.

Leaving the past behind, liberation sounds like a clean break. Yet nothing about what followed was clean, and the way we observe the day today reveals as much about our present difficulties as about our past.

Scholars have long contended that Korea's liberation remained an unfinished project. Bruce Cumings, in “The Origins of the Korean War,” described how the Japanese colonial apparatus in Korea did not simply collapse; much of it was handed over intact to Korean elites who had cooperated with the colonial regime.

That unfinished settlement is why pro- and anti-Japanese labels remain political ammunition in Seoul today. Instead of debating taxes or housing, politicians weaponize rivals’ family histories, while the public rejects Cabinet nominees over their grandfathers’ conduct under Japanese rule.

It would be convenient to dismiss this as old baggage, yet the pattern runs deep and is far more ominous. Large fortunes in modern Korea were often seeded during the colonial period, and the families who collaborated with the Japanese, and later with the US military authorities, tended to keep their land, their businesses and their networks, whereas the families of independence activists typically returned from prison or exile with nothing but their love for their country.

Herein lies a distinctly Korean sense of grievance about the pro-Japanese legacy, one that never goes away. The collaborators prospered, acquired the finest neighborhoods, and sent their children to the most prestigious schools, and those advantages compounded across multiple generations. Ordinary citizens see this as akin to betrayal, for the national narrative holds that patriots should have been rewarded for their sacrifices and opportunists punished, yet history rendered the opposite verdict.

Against this backdrop, a television variety show featuring actor Ahn Ha-young struck a raw nerve in August. She spoke with evident pride of her family, a fourth-generation line of doctors, a dynasty of wealth and standing, and the mood among her admirers shifted almost overnight. Viewers found that her great-grandfather, Ahn Sang-ho, had belonged to a pro-Japanese organization and served on a committee mourning Hirobumi Ito’s death. His family later amassed wealth.

The actor eventually issued an apology, acknowledging that she had spoken carelessly of her family history. Many fans were angered not just by her remarks but by what she appeared to embody that evening: the disturbing display of an old-money family whose fortune, upon examination, seemed to bear the fingerprints of the colonial era.

In all fairness, guilt by blood association has no place in a democracy. Our Constitution explicitly prohibits punishing anyone for the actions of a relative. The anger directed at Ahn Ha-young was, in fact, anger toward the collaborator class, and she simply happened to be standing at the podium.

What the elders in her family owed the public was forthrightness, a willingness to admit that, yes, this is what occurred, here is what we know, and here is what we intend to do. Families in her position could take a page from history itself and restore assets of compromised origin, as the government's new special law on collaborator property, which took effect last December, now pursues through official channels.

All of this made me stop and ask: What, in the end, should we respect and value collectively as a nation? Wealth and fame are not dirty words. Someone who builds a company from nothing, employs thousands of people and pays their taxes deserves every compliment they receive. Reflexive contempt for anyone who has money is simply envy dressed up as ethics.

What people cannot stomach is something different: fortunes built on political connections, speculative real estate investments or private lending — sources of wealth that are far removed from what we would ordinarily regard as genuine value creation.

Honor works the same way. Titles grabbed by stepping on the weak or bought by flattering the powerful rightly disgust us, whereas the respect earned by a scientist who spent 40 years mastering her field, or by an activist who kept his convictions through oppression, is honor in the true sense and should be celebrated without reservation.

In light of whom Korea honors in times of war, we owe public servants their due in times of peace. Police officers, firefighters, teachers, nurses, public defenders, sanitation workers and physicians in the public system bear the weight of society on their shoulders. A nation that rewards them with low pay and long hours while its tycoons fly private jets has its values upside down.

Korea has pulled off the “Miracle on the Han River” and risen to the top of the global semiconductor industry. But along the way, we lost things money cannot buy back: empathy for those who lag behind, openness to difference, fairness toward competitors and a sense that the game matters more than the scoreboard.

And so, in the month of Liberation Day, I want to take a moment to pay tribute. To the men and women who fought for this nation’s independence, to the patriots who surrendered their youth, their families, their wealth and, all too often, their lives, I feel a respect so profound that words like “deep” and “endless” cannot contain it.

And I feel a heartfelt apology for how inadequately some descendants of independence activists have been treated, for how many of those who betrayed the cause still retain wealth that was never returned, and for how many of the ideals for which they fought and sacrificed we continue to trade away for the sake of convenience.

I doubt that everything my generation enjoys — the Hallyu wave, our economic prosperity and the comforts of contemporary life — came from our own hard work alone. None of it, I reckon, would exist today without the country they built and the sacrifices of those who fought for our independence.

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Lim Woong

Lim Woong is a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Yonsei University in Seoul. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.