Activist Once Sent Koreans to Doom

“The images of parents screaming and crying while looking for their daughters, the piercing eyes of the young girls who looked at me… those images have only been growing inside me.”

Sawada Junjo (78), who lives in Toyama city, Toyama prefecture, has received New Year’s cards with those words on them every year. The sender of those cards was Ikeda Masae, who once worked as an elementary school teacher in Korea during Japanese colonial rule.

What made those cards different from any other ordinary ones is that no name was written as a receiver of the cards. Instead, there was an enclosed letter, reading, “Please send these cards to those you know.” The sender asked Sawada to send his cards on his behalf because Sawada had led a campaign for compensations for those Koreans who were forcibly conscripted by Japan during the Second World War.

Ikeda had sent about 1,000 to 1,500 New Year’s cards every year by asking his acquaintances in order to ensure as many Japanese people as possible read and remember his confession and atonement.

In 1944, when Japan’s defeat was just around the corner, the abuse and atrocities committed by Japan were escalating to the extreme everyday. At that time, Ikeda, who taught Japanese language at Bangsan elementary school in Seoul was ordered by the Japanese General Government to send as many female students as possible to the war plant in Toyama.

At that time, Ikeda was infected with the idea that Japan was a nation ruled by an emperor and its people were supposed to obey whatever order came from the emperor. Therefore every night, along with other Japanese teachers, he went to door to door to entice young students into going to Japan, saying, “If you go to Japan, you will be fully fed, and you can also go to a female school.” At that time, he himself believed that as well.

In March of the next year, with tears in their eyes, six elementary students cajoled by his word stepped onto the train leaving from Seoul station together with 100 other girls, who thought they would have jobs in Japan.

It was not until August 1945, when Japan was defeated in the Second World War that he realized what he had done to those girls. Then, he began looking for those little students.

He found out that five out of the six girls did return to Korea but all of them refused to meet with him, saying, “I don’t want even to think about what happened during my stay in Japan.”

Ikeda, who had been tormented with the pang of conscience to the point where he couldn’t even look up into the sky in the direction of Korea after returning to Japan in December 1945, was finally able to locate the whereabouts of the last student in April 1991.

After a three-month painstaking search with a television broadcasting team in Toyama, he was to finally meet with the woman in Korea. In the face of Ikeda’s sincere apology and atonement, she didn’t resent him. All she said to him was a question in her quiet voice, “Are you happy?”

What made Ikeda realize the way to make a real apology was the letter sent to him months later from her daughter. She wrote in the letter, “What counts more than a hundred times apologies is practicing.” From then on, he began to let more people know about the sin he committed to his young, innocent students.

To the Japanese government, which was dragging its feet in resolving the issue of Korean “comfort women,” who were forcibly conscripted as sex slaves for the Japanese imperial army during the war, by saying, “It was done at the private level,” Ikeda cried out, “The order to mobilize young students during wartime was the order from the emperor of Japan, which could not be disobeyed under any circumstances.”

With determination, he said, “You should never go to the grave with bad things you did left unresolved,” and dedicated the rest of life to publishing a book titled, “Two Motherlands” and to testifying at various seminars and demonstrations to reveal the absurdities of some historians’ arguments are that say “what Japan did to its colony in Joseon turned out to be a good thing for Korea.”

By saving the pension he was receiving after working as a teacher until he was 50 years old, he donated the savings to a civic group that worked for the compensations of those mobilized against their will. Whenever he went to another city for testimony, he always took night buses in order to save on transportation fees. He even made the envelopes for his cards for himself by using advertisement flyers.

His testimony served as a significant opportunity to make the Japanese government stop withdrawing and admit its atrocities committed against Korea’s “comfort women” and to make an official apology regarding that issue. The New Year’s cards with a message of atonement that Ikeda had sent every year despite his weakened health for heart disease and aging was a small alarming bell he rang to the Japanese society, which is increasingly leaning toward glorifying its past wrongdoings.

After years of spreading Ikeda’s card to others, Sawada recently found out during a telephone call with his friend that there would be no more New Year’s cards.

Ikeda passed away on December 4 of last year, alone in his home in Ikoma city, Nara prefecture. His neighbors had grown suspicious of the letters that had been left untouched in front of his home, and found him four days after his lone death. He was 84 years old, and no will was found.

However, his cry toward the Japanese society is still resonating.

“Japan’s colonial rule is not a thing of the past. I was one of the members who took a part in that colonial rule. I hope that Japan’s young people will go to Korea and visit Independent Hall and see for themselves the history written by the victims of that time.”

iam@donga.com