A book by Hildi Kang

The Japanese colonial occupation of Korea lasted from 1910 to 1945 and profoundly shaped the Korean Peninsula’s history. It set the ball rolling for what would eventually become the further fragmentation of Korean society that would lead to the Korean War, and the tense political climate we still have today. Beginning with Japan’s formal annexation of Korea in 1910, the occupation was marked by political suppression, economic exploitation, and efforts to erode Korean culture and identity. Author Hildi Kang has compared this presence to that of a “black umbrella” looming over Korean society: “The Japanese presence hovered like a cosmic umbrella above the peninsula, casting a shadow of distrust uncertainty, and fear over every life and every action” (King, Preface) The Japanese occupation is a particular time period often overlooked by western historians, a fact that makes 2001’s Under The Black Umbrella by Hildi Kang that much more of an important book to read.  

Hildi Kang is a California-based author and educator that is most known for a handful of books on Korean history. Hildi came to write Under the Black Umbrella due to a realization, upon speaking with her father-in-law, that the historical record of Japanese occupied Korea largely concentrated on the large events and political shifts during the timeframe or focused on the repression or numerous atrocities that happened. There was nearly zero mention of the normal everyday lives of the people that lived under the so-called “Black Umbrella” of Japanese rule during the time. After realizing the importance of what she was being told, and asking for permission to start a series of recordings of her father-in-law, she set out on a quest to return a voice to the people that lived through that tumultuous time and help understand how people lived then.   

Alongside her Korean husband, Kang Sang-wook, who largely conducted the interviews due to his native tongue being Korean, Hildi targeted older Koreans living in the San Francisco Bay area to get their stories. The book stresses that the sample is somewhat limiting due to them going for a single demographic of older Koreans that, by virtue of living there, obviously had enough money to move to America and live in San Francisco. For that reason, they are very open that it was hardly a representative sampling of all Korean experiences during the Japanese colonial period, but still had value for what they were able to collect. Had the authors gone for people that perhaps had stayed in Korea during this time, for just an example, it is very likely if not outright certain that the stories would be different. They did however try to get a wide swath of different lifestyles out of this group, including businessmen, teachers, farmers, and even former peasants that were still illiterate. Hildi worked hard to organize and highlight as many different experiences as they could.

In a similar method to how Kang interviewed her father-in-law, she was able to secure the participation of well over fifty additional Korean elders that fit her demographic of people old enough to have been adults during the occupation and still able to recall the events that transpired. The book notes that by the end up the project they had amassed well over one-thousand pages of translated and computerized words that then had to be pruned down to a manageable size.   

The formatting of this book is largely split into two halves, one labeled “Change by Choice”, and the other “Change by Coercion”, “Change by Choice” details interview stories that depict life under Japanese rule from 1920-1931, a time when the Japanese allowed Koreans more autonomy and as the book states “cultural accommodation”. (Kang, pg. 4) This was a time period characterized with Koreans largely being able to live their lives according to their own customs and beliefs, albeit with some beliefs resulting in harsh punishments. “Change by Coercion” is a collection of interview stories taking place between 1932 and 1945, a time when The Japanese pressed Koreans to assimilate into the Japanese way of life, even going as far to force many to fight in World War II on their behalf. There are other sections in the book including an introduction covering pre-occupation as well as the period before 1920, the so-called Dark Age of Subjugation, however it would have been unlikely to find anyone still alive that was an adult at this time, and many stories presented from this time period were second-hand at best. “Those who were adults during this period are no longer with us, yet many of the interviewees began their own stories with, “First let me tell you about my father. He was one of the very first to… become Christian, cut his long hair, go to western school, be an auto salesman.” (Kang, pg. 16)

Despite the short duration of that chapter, some of the stories presented are absolutely crazy, including one from the turn of the century involving an interviewee’s father where a Manchurian Warlord attempted to cement his legacy in perhaps the most unorthodox manner: “Here is a story my father told from his time in Manchuria. A Manchurian warlord had heard that he could live forever if he ate the liver ripped out of a living person. One day Father was summoned to the warlord’s headquarters…” (Kang, pg. 25) The Warlord wanted him to take body parts from captured soldiers so that he could eat them and become immortal.

One of the stories that stuck with me while reading this book was from an interviewee named Hong Eul-soo, who worked as a teacher turned businessman at some point in his life. Eul-soo lived in complete and utter poverty as a child, stating that his family was easily the poorest family in their village. This was due to his father being a Confucian scholar, however never taking the civil service examinations, which left him with no job whatsoever. They would eat tree bark and acorns to survive the winter and occasionally try to trap tigers for meat. The significance of this story is that if fully illustrates the difference in quality of life between those that lived in rural Korea and those that lived in Japan, as Eul-soo got to experience both worlds fairly young. Eul-soo was ignorant of the outside world, never even traveling to a neighboring village a mere eight miles away. When shown a world map that showed the sizes of Japan and Korea, both similar, as well as other much more massive landmasses, he states that this changed his life. “I was stunned. I was so struck by my own ignorance, I thought, How ignorant can I be? It is one thing to be a frog in a small well, but this is ridiculous. When I saw that Japan was only a little larger than Korea, it gave me confidence that if Japan could do things, then we could do them, too.”  (Kang, pg. 49) From that point on, he vowed to travel and gained an education, with Japan being his first target.

Eul-soo stole money from his mother and made a journey from his home to a larger town, then took a ferry to Japan. Even things we take for granted such as an automatic toilet were complete magic to Eul-soo and after witnessing one flush he fled a bathroom in terror fearing that he had broken something. That is how out of sync with the modern age he was at the time. Despite everything being stacked against him – being somewhat of a runaway that fled his village to make a better life for himself in Japan with only a tiny bit of money in his pocket, and a low-level Yakuza job, Eul-soo was able to do very well in school, even doing better than native Japanese people. “In that school we had four classes in each grade, labeled A, B, C, D. A Korean called Pak was in class A and I was in class B, and both of us were at the top in our respective classes. It made me very proud to have Koreans at the top of Japanese classes.” (Kang, pg. 51) Eul-soo eventually became a teacher and a member of a Japanese Communist study group. This earned him a short stint in prison and a desire to stay in the clear and not squander the luck his life had given him. Eventually he went back to Korea and became a Cotton tycoon, eventually retiring in America with his children.

Hong Eul-soo had a story that defied expectations in this interview. It was a rag to riches story under numerous circumstances that should have kept him a dirt-poor peasant being exploited by a hostile colonizer. Many Koreans of the time viewed the Japanese occupation as a bad thing and something that ruined the Korean way of life, but Hong Eul-soo was able to take advantage of his luck and become very successful in spite of world events going on around him. His views of the Japanese occupation, as a result were very positive, and although he yearned for a free Korea, he did not want to go back to his old life eating acorns and tree bark.  

While this story stands out due to defying expectations, not every Korean living during this time came out of the other side with such relatively happy stories to tell. Lee Ha-jun (also referred to as Yi) for example, was another person swept up in Korean Communist nationalist study groups that did not get a short stay in prison that Hong-Eul-soo was awarded. Instead he was dubbed a political prisoner surviving starvation rations for nearly two years until his release after World War II. Upon his release, Communists working to create a communist fatherland up north. Sick of his circumstances, he made sure to distance himself from the very thing that had ruined his life. “After liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, Mr. Yi received a letter from the North Korean communists, the People’s Reconstruction Committee of P’yongyang, saying, “Mr. Yi, let us work together to build our fatherland.” The day after he got the letter, he packed his things and traveled on foot to South Korea to get away from the communists.” (Kang, pg. 134)

When discussing the Japanese Colonial Period, which this book focuses on, there really is no consensus from scholars or the people that lived through it, as to whether it could be seen as a “good thing” or a “bad thing” as subjective as that is. As one can see from the very opposite personal accounts above, how one fared the occupation was entirely dependent on one’s circumstances and how one reacted to the occupation. On one-hand Japan did somewhat bring a bit of luxury to Korea, allowing them to modernize out of a backwards near-medieval lifestyle to something resembling other modern nations of the time. “Japanese Rule did bring material progress to Korea, The Japanese developed an infrastructure of roads, railroads, and harbors; modernized schools across the land; upgraded the administrative and judicial systems; and transformed the economy from Agrarian to semi-industrial.” (Kang, pg. 2)

These improvements, however, came at great cost as many resisted the encroachment of Japanese control, with many suffering great cost in doing so. Most of these aforementioned improvements were not designed with Koreans in mind, as they were done so that Japanese could further exploit their colony. For example, the book points out that Korean peasantry ate “Manchurian beans, millet, and barley instead of usual rice, for, increasingly, the rice harvest got sent to Japan.” (Kang, pg. 2) There was also a concerted effort to wipe Korean identity out entire, and unify everyone as a homogenous Japanese Empire. Many politicians made this one of their chief goals in their career. “The first governor, General Terauchi Masatake, put a Stranglehold on Korean political and economic development. He prohibited meetings, closed newspapers, and ordered burned over 200,000 books containing information such as Korean history, Korean geography, and free-thinking modern ideas.” (Kang, pg. 28)

While the methodology behind Under the Black Umbrella is admittedly not perfect, Hildi Kang has created an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand everyday life in Japanese-occupied Korea. The personal accounts and experiences presented in the book effectively illustrate the challenges ordinary people faced, demonstrating that a deeper understanding of history comes from studying a broad spectrum of personal narratives rather than focusing solely on “great men doing great things” or military tactics. Much like Kang’s father-in-law sharing his own seemingly mundane yet insightful stories, the book reveals that not everyone suffered greatly, not everyone played a significant role, and some were even unaware they were being oppressed, particularly in rural Korea, where hardship was already an inherent part of life. By exploring the lives of ordinary citizens simply trying to survive, Kang cuts through the fog of propaganda and presents a more authentic, unfiltered history.