The Korean War's forgotten Japanese

Officially, 22 nations fought in the Korean War. Japan was not one of them.

That makes the argument raised at a June 17 academic seminar in Seoul all the more striking. At the event, held by the Institute for Military History under South Korea's Ministry of National Defense to mark the war's 76th anniversary, one presenter argued that Japanese who participated in the conflict should be recognized as war veterans, or even war heroes. Park Yong-jun, a teacher and graduate student at Korea National University of Education, said the traditional focus on troop-contributing nations overlooks other forms of wartime participation.

Japan's involvement in the war extended beyond material support. Testimony and historical research published since the 1970s have shed light on Japanese participation in mine-clearing operations and military logistics.

After the successful Incheon landing in September 1950, U.N. forces planned another amphibious operation at Wonsan as they pursued North Korean troops. Their advance was blocked by roughly 3,000 naval mines. The mine-clearing mission relied on 46 minesweepers and 1,200 personnel from Japan's Maritime Safety Agency. One vessel struck a mine and sank during the operation, killing Nakatani Sakataro, 21, and injuring 18 others. U.S. X Corps later landed at Wonsan through waters cleared by those teams.

Park also highlighted the case of Hiratsuka Shigeharu, who had been working as a painter at a U.S. military base in Tokyo's Roppongi district but ultimately found himself on the battlefield. He was killed in the Battle of Gasan on Sept. 4, 1950. According to the presentation, roughly 40 Japanese individuals have been confirmed as participants in the Korean War. For many South Koreans, familiar mainly with the narrative that the war helped launch Japan's postwar economic boom, such stories remain largely unknown.

Park argued that both the U.S. and Japanese governments pushed these individuals to the margins of history. He called for discussion of how they might be remembered as contributors who served outside regular military structures.

Critics see serious problems with that argument. Japan was under Allied occupation at the time and was not a sovereign state. Those who took part were mobilized within that framework rather than serving an independent Japanese government.

The historical context raises even harder questions. The Korean War stemmed from the division of the Korean Peninsula, and the origins of that division are inseparable from Japan's colonial rule. Near the end of the war in 1953, Japan sent vessels to Dokdo on multiple occasions, landed personnel and erected markers identifying the islets as "Takeshima." During the seminar discussion, Park Sung-jin of the Academy of Korean Studies noted that many of the men aboard the minesweepers had previously served in the Imperial Japanese military, part of the apparatus that ruled colonial Korea. Recognizing them within a military honors narrative, he argued, would create the paradox of a former colony celebrating participants in the military system of its former colonizer.

The debate highlights the complexity of South Korea's relationship with Japan. The two countries remain bound by geography and history, however uncomfortable that reality may be. The book *Japanese Who Fought in the Korean War*, written by Fujiwara Kazuki and based on an NHK documentary, recounts the lives of people such as Takatsu Kenzo, who was orphaned during World War II and, while trying to keep a job with the U.S. military, was swept into the Korean War at age 19 and eventually experienced the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. Given the continuing disputes over issues ranging from the enshrinement of Koreans at Yasukuni Shrine to recurring controversies over Japan's interpretation of its wartime past, the idea of official South Korean recognition for Japanese participants in the Korean War may seem far-fetched. Yet the lives of ordinary people caught in the violence and upheaval of war are stories that deserve to be remembered somewhere.