Korean Kamikaze Causes Controversy

[Mulboyne]

[floatl][/floatl]IHT: Opponents try to block unveiling of memorial for a Korean kamikaze pilot
For decades, Tak Kyung-hyun (left) and 17 other Korean pilots who flew kamikaze missions for the Japanese in World War II have been widely viewed as traitors at home. A half-century after his death, Tak's Korean hometown is looking to change that legacy with the first memorial in South Korea to a former kamikaze. But as the unveiling approaches, opposition is growing from conservative residents who still harbor strong resentment against Japan's brutal colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. The 16-foot-high (4.6-meter-high) stone memorial, now covered with a tarp, was scheduled to be unveiled in the southeastern city of Sacheon on Saturday, the eve of Tak's death 63 years ago...The project had attracted little controversy until a group of activists began demanding this week that the city cancel the opening ceremony, threatening to disrupt the event and take down the monument. "He was a kamikaze, an aggressor," said Lee Sun-bok, head of a group opposed to the memorial. But Hong Jong-pil, a South Korean historian working on the memorial project, said the pilots should be seen as victims of the colonial period. He cited recent studies finding they did not volunteer for their suicide missions but were pressured or forced. "It's time to save those who have been lost in the black holes of history," Hong said...The state-run Korean Tourism Organization is backing the memorial, which it plans to promote to Japanese tourists...The project's driving force is a Japanese actress who has long sought to foster friendship between Korea and her country. "It's something the Japanese should do," said the 51-year-old actress, Fukumi Kuroda, who proposed the memorial and paid the bulk of the construction cost...more...

[Behan]

Korean Kamikaze pilots? Yeah, right. The next thing you'll try to tell me is the Imperial family is descended from Koreans, too.

[TennoChinko]

The 2001 movie HOTARU is loosely based on Mitsuyama's (Tak Kyong-Hyong) life:

http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/films/japanese/hotaru/index.htm

And this movie by Ishihara "Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0882797/ also includes the Mitsuyama/Tak Kyong-Hyong story...

[Samurai_Jerk]

Even if the guy was forced, putting up a memorial to him seems strange. I could see having some kind of small museum or a display at the local visitor center, but a large stone memorial in this case kind of implies he's some kind of hero.

But who knows, maybe the Japanese threatened to kill his parents or something. In ultra-confucian Korea, filial piety trumps all.

[Tengu Kid]

cant wait for takes reply to this.

`kimuchi peninsula NEVER abitrate by law or follwing of japan. remember that.`

[Greji]

cant wait for takes reply to this.

He's in cardiac arrest after the Chinese visit to the Emperor yesterday!

[2triky]

He's in cardiac arrest after the Chinese visit to the Emperor yesterday!

They should enshrine the Korean Kamikaze @ Yasukuni...that should get Take's panties in a bunch.

[Tengu Kid]

They should enshrine the Korean Kamikaze @ Yasukuni...that should get Take's panties in a bunch.

I believe they already are in a bunch. He tends not to sort them out after stealing them from white girls washing lines.

[Mulboyne]

This article covers similar ground:

AP: Protests halt unveiling of kamikaze memorial

For decades, Tak Kyung-hyun and 17 other Koreans who flew kamikaze missions for Japan in World War II were reviled as traitors at home. A half-century after his death, however, Tak's hometown of Sacheon pushed to change that legacy with the first memorial in South Korea to a kamikaze. But the 16-foot-high stone memorial stirred up so much protest that it was taken down and stored at a nearby temple before it was even unveiled. The response to the memorial shows just how much anger remains over Japan's brutal colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. "Tak was a pro-Japanese collaborator who died for and pledged allegiance to the Japanese emperor," said Kim Hyung-kap, who led protests against a scheduled unveiling a month ago. The city should commemorate Korean independence fighters from the town rather than a kamikaze, he said. The memorial was born out of revisionist thinking that the Korean kamikazes were not collaborators, but rather victims of the Japanese colonial period who were forced or pressured to take on suicide missions.

"It's time to save those who have been lost in the black holes of history," said Hong Jong-pil, a South Korean historian involved with the project. It was also an attempt to foster closer ties between Korea and Japan. The state-run Korea Tourism Organization planned to promote the memorial to Japanese tourists. Japanese actress Fukumi Kuroda proposed the memorial last year and paid most of the construction costs. But city officials canceled the unveiling when protesters and riot police blocked Japanese officials and tourists from entering the site for the ceremony. Recently, Kuroda and Hong sent a letter to the city warning they would sue unless the monument was restored to its original site. "I feel sorry for Tak as I failed to bring his wandering soul to his hometown," said Kuroda, 51.

Kuroda said the project was inspired by a dream she had in 1991 in which she met a kamikaze pilot on the beach in southern Japan. "He was smiling, telling me he was a pilot who died here," Kuroda said, speaking fluent Korean. "He said he didn't care about dying during a war but felt bad because he died under a Japanese name although he is indeed Korean." In 2000, Kuroda described the dream to the daughter of a former restaurant owner who was a mother figure for kamikaze pilots on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. The mother, Tome Torihama, cooked the pilots' favorite foods, kept their farewell letters and gave them final hugs. Her daughter, Reiko Akabane, told Kuroda that the tall, dark-skinned man in her dream "must be Tak." "Reiko said her mother especially cared much about him as he always came to the restaurant alone, stayed there quietly and looked so lonely," Kuroda recalled.

On the eve of his mission, the 24-year-old Tak visited the restaurant, jammed on his military cap and started singing "Arirang," a popular Korean folk song on love and separation, "in the saddest tone they had ever heard," Kuroda quoted Akabane as saying. Tak's family moved from Korea to Kyoto, Japan, in the early 1930s because of financial trouble at home, according to Kuroda and documents from Sacheon City Hall. He landed a job in a pharmaceutical company after finishing college and was engaged to a Korean nursing student in Kyoto called Kim Ok-hee. But when she went to Korea to discuss the wedding date with her parents, she never returned. Her parents feared it was dangerous in Japan. She eventually married another Korean man. "Mom has always told me she drove Tak into becoming a kamikaze," said her daughter, Jung Min-young. Figuring he would be drafted anyway, Tak entered a military academy in 1943 so he could become an officer and better support his family. He died in May 1945 when his explosives-laden plane is believed to have crashed in the water short of a U.S. warship that was his target.

Sacheon officials are waiting for the anger to subside before deciding what to do with the memorial, a rectangular pillar topped with a sculpture of a three-legged crow from Korean mythology. Lee Hyung-chul, a Japan expert at Seoul's Kwangwoon University, expressed reservations about the planned memorial. "I know Kuroda means well, but reviewing history should not be conducted lightly," he said. "That is not something that we should do based on an individual's dream."

[Buraku]

I can see why it was stopped, a kamikaze, an aggressor, who helped in the oppression of his own folk

There are traitors everyday, the American who joined the Taliban or sold secrets to Russia, the Jew who helped the Nazis. Koreans who actively took part as loyal subjects of Imperialistic Japan - are they all traitors?
You bet they are, but unfortunately the story is more complex and not just a case of black and white.

Now their families live with a new legacy, there are people in Japan who attempt to be ignorant of the fact that they are of Korean descent, Koreans in Korea who have a clear connection to Japan. Relatives who refuse to allow them and others to connect with them, multiple exiles and the Japanese citizens abandoned in China and Koreans who may have gone willingly to Japan to escape the poverty at home. Now days there folk from both sides who refuse to acknowledge the other.

I think this memorial could have worked at they just chosen a subject like displaced-exiled-people
instead this whole kamikaze bullshit had to b thrown into it