Introduction

Photo by US Army Air Force

Photo by City of Hiroshima

The photograph on the left shows the aftermath of the world’s first atomic attack, on Hiroshima, in 1945. On the right is Hiroshima today. One could view the photographs as a metaphor for the recovery of all Japan after World War II – a great many Japanese cities looked like Hiroshima at war’s end. Japan not only recovered, but became one of the world’s great industrial powerhouses, challenging America’s postwar economic hegemony. The first part of this chapter is the story of how Japan accomplished this tremendous feat.

Korea has had a much more complicated postwar history. Although once a unified kingdom, Korea is now divided into two nations, socialist in the North and democratic in the South. Although the United States was involved in rebuilding both South Korea and Japan after the war, certain variables, particularly the occupation of the North by Soviet forces after the war, made the South Korean experience far more difficult. And although South Korea has recovered from the Korean War, a peace treaty was never signed; that smoldering conflict is the last remnant of the Cold War.

Japan - Surrender and Occupation

Japan surrendered to the Allies on September 2, 1945. Two events convinced Emperor Hirohito to ask for peace: the use of the atomic bombs and the Soviet invasion of Japanese-held territories in China and Korea, both in August. Hideki Tojo and his generals wanted to fight on despite the desperation of the situation. Hirohito, however, wanted to spare the Japanese people the inevitable slaughter which would follow an American invasion or repeated atomic attacks. Without Tojo’s knowledge, the emperor broadcast a recorded speech over the radio, ordering his people to surrender unconditionally. Since the emperor was considered a semi-divine being, the people were bound to obey his orders. Tojo knew that he’d been outmaneuvered. He had led Japan into war by controlling the emperor; now that he had lost control of the emperor, he had lost control of both the war and Japan.

After the surrender, President Truman chose General Douglas Macarthur to administer the occupation of Japan. MacArthur was a natural choice for the role. He had been overall Allied commander in the Pacific, one of only nine Americans to reach the rank of Five-Star General, and a Medal of Honor recipient for his campaign to liberate the Philippines. By the end of 1945, MacArthur had about 350,000 American troops under his headquarters, SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), in Japan on occupation duty.

MacArthur’s initial objective in Japan was to ensure that fascism in Japan was dead and would not return; he was to replace it with a Western-style democracy. The objective was, therefore, primarily political and social, just as it was in occupied Germany. Before the United States withdrew from Japan in 1952, this project would become one of the most intensive and successful political programs in history.

However, MacArthur’s plans to remake Japanese society were halted by one inescapable fact: virtually everyone in Japan was starving. The American bombing campaign had destroyed the nation’s infrastructure, so that such food as was still being grown could not be brought to the cities from the countryside. There was no point in writing a constitution while people were dying in droves; as one Japanese political scientist put it, “Democracy cannot be taught to a starving people.” Therefore, MacArthur’s first task was providing food to prevent widescale starvation during the first postwar winter. The program was a great success.

It wasn’t until 1947 that MacArthur created Japan’s postwar constitution, which gave Japan a parliamentary monarchy and enshrined human rights into law. The role of the emperor was reduced to a strictly ceremonial one, with all real power held by the people through their representatives. Article 9 of the constitution is notable; it prevents Japan from building a military or stationing troops overseas. This was designed to prevent re-militarization in Japan and a return to fascism. However, the need for Japan to protect itself from communism during the Cold War led to the creation of the capable Japanese Self-Defense Forces. These troops are legally designated as law enforcement, in order to avoid violating Article 9.

General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito. Compliments of US Army.

The emperor was a special problem for MacArthur. The general held war crimes trials in Japan, like those in postwar Germany, and hanged several leaders, including Hideki Tojo. Emperor Hirohito was theoretically guilty of war crimes, as he was Head of State at the time. MacArthur decided against prosecution, believing that it would turn the Japanese people against the American occupiers. Instead, he made the emperor publicly renounce his divinity, thus removing his supernatural authority from Japanese politics.

With the start of the Cold War, however, MacArthur changed his objectives in Japan. Fascism seemed vanquished and democracy solidly established; but the Americans felt that the threat of communism was growing in Asia, especially after Mao’s revolutionary victory in China in 1949. What the Americans now needed was a strong ally in Asia to support its new policy of containment. Japan would be the perfect ally, were it not still economically dependent on the United States. A strong Japanese economy would also dampen the allure of socialism in that nation, something the Americans were keen to do. Therefore, MacArthur decided on a “reverse course” to revise US objectives from democracy-building to economic development. This would build a wealthy Japan that could support its own military and assist the United States in protecting Asia from communism – even though Article 9 of the American-made constitution forbade both of those things.

Initially, MacArthur disliked the zaibatsu. The zaibatsu were large business conglomerates in Japan which cooperated much more closely than in American-style capitalism. They were essentially tight associations of corporations, banks, labor unions, and the government in order to overcome business problems collectively; they emphasized the common good of the economy rather than individual gains. SCAP was suspicious of the monopolistic nature of the zaibatsu system and its apparent socialist bent. The zaibatsu had also been deeply involved in the fascist armament program, further arousing American suspicion. Therefore, MacArthur began dissolving the zaibatsu companies and changing business regulation to suppress what remained; the idea was to come closer to the American system of competition instead of cooperation. But during the reverse course, this anti-zaibatsu policy was halted because the Japanese considered the zaibatsu important to economic recovery. The dissolution policy was halted halfway, leaving Japan with a watered-down, informal version of zaibatsu economics known as keiretsu, a system which exists to this day.

MacArthur also completely remade the Japanese agricultural sector. Over the centuries, wealthy landowners in Japan had acquired more and more land, concentrating ownership in a small elite until most of the rural population was reduced to low-wage tenant workers instead of independent land-owning farmers. This produced an economically-depressed rural Japan.

SCAP changed this situation in only three years, though it cost a great deal of American money to do so. MacArthur’s headquarters forbade anyone from owning more than a certain amount of land, forcing them to turn over the rest to the government, with compensation paid by SCAP. By this method, SCAP acquired millions of acres, amounting to nearly forty percent of Japanese farmland, from the wealthy landowners. It then resold the land in small lots to peasant farmers at affordable prices, allowing them to own their own farms. This produced a new agricultural middle-class in Japan, dispersing the wealth of the countryside and assisting Japan’s economic recovery.

The occupation was complicated by the unexpected start of the Korean War in June, 1950 (see Chapter 3). President Truman tapped General MacArthur to lead the UN response to North Korean aggression; a practical choice, since MacArthur was geographically close to the frontline with hundreds of thousands of US troops, who were immediately sent to Korea to stop the attack (MacArthur ran the war from Japan, and only visited Korea once).

The Korean War had several effects on the occupation of Japan. First, the Americans were keener than ever for Japan to build a military and assist America in containing communism in the East. That meant Japan needed its independence. The United States and Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty on September 8, 1951, ending the occupation and granting Japan its independence.

A more immediate effect was economic. The Korean War forced the United States to supply thousands of troops on the far side of the globe, and the long supply train caused a host of logistical problems. To solve this, as well as boost the Japanese economy, Japanese companies were granted the contracts to produce military supplies for the US forces. This not only gave Japanese manufacturing a much-needed boost, but also allowed the supplies to be shipped a much shorter distance from Japan to Korea, simplifying the logistical chain.

Postwar Economic Miracle

The war was the beginning of what is referred to as the “Japanese postwar economic miracle.” Along with the war contracts, Japanese manufacturing did all it could to improve efficiency. Management examined every step of the production processes, weeding out even the most insignificant inefficiencies. The keiretsu model aided economic recovery, with the government stepping in to guide improvements, removing financial or legislative roadblocks to development, and passing pro-business legislation. Various sectors of the economy assisted each other. Under the occupation, blue-collar union membership was now legal and strong, improving wages and thus stimulating the economy; but the government also prevented major strikes by negotiating between labor and capital. Finally, Japanese corporations reduced the ubiquitous insecurity of industrialized capitalism by guaranteeing lifelong employment of their workers. If someone took a job with a particular corporation, they could expect to remain there for their entire career, with corporations and workers each displaying loyalty for the other.

Workers making transistor radios in Japan, 1962. Compliments of the Truman Presidential Library.

All these factors allowed the Japanese economy, led mainly by manufacturing, to explode in a remarkable period of growth. Japan did suffer an economic setback during the 1973 oil crisis that resulted from the Yom Kippur War (see Chapter 11), but so did the entire global economy. Except for that blip, the Japanese economy surged, and even the mighty United States feared that Japan would soon overtake its own economy in the world market.

Although Japan’s close relationship with the United States and the favorable global economic situation were both causes of the postwar economic miracle, Japanese society itself held a key to the miracle. Japan has traditionally had a particularly strong work ethic; this is probably the result of the lack of arable land in the nation, which created a culture of very hard-working, disciplined farmers necessary to feeding everyone. This work ethic served Japan well after the war, but its extreme nature caused problems of its own. In the late 1960s, corporations started noticing workers dying, often on the job, from heart attacks and strokes at relatively young ages. Given that a quarter of employees were working over 60 hours a week, including unpaid overtime, corporations and governments concluded that these deaths amounted to what they termed karoshi (death from overwork). The term includes victims of stress-induced suicide. Both government and corporations have taken steps to reduce the incidence of karoshi, attempting to reduce demands placed on workers and provide necessary time off. Furthermore, Japanese workers are increasingly opting for part-time work, paid by the hour, instead of salaried positions. Karoshi is not just a Japanese phenomenon; China, Korea, and other Asian nations suffer a similar epidemic.

Despite the stress of overwork, the Japanese economy expanded exponentially, becoming the second largest GNP in the world (after the United States) and successfully competing with US products in the global marketplace.

The Japanese economy recovered from the oil crisis, but not from the next shock, which was self-induced. Low interest rates led to excessive borrowing and investment, which caused the Japanese stock market to become a speculative bubble, in which stock prices were vastly greater than the actual value of the companies. This is what caused the Great Depression in 1929, and the Japanese government knew it. But when the government raised interest rates to stop the over-borrowing and speculation, the stock market bubble burst, leading to a stock market crash and debt crisis. The result was that, all during the 1990s, economic growth was halted – this was known as the Lost Decade. In the decades since, the economy has never recovered to pre-crash proportions. The Chinese economy is now the second largest in the world after the United States; nevertheless, the economy of Japan is still the third-largest, commanding just over five percent of the world’s wealth.

A few major controversies continue to plague Japanese culture. People are having far fewer children than in past decades (a common occurrence in wealthy countries), so that the population is trending older; this in turn drives economic stagnation, as there are more retirees and fewer working-age people to create wealth and tax income. Another problem is Japan’s continued ambiguity towards World War II. While the successive emperors of Japan have apologized for the war, a strong nationalist sentiment remains; Japanese history textbooks often whitewash Japanese war crimes, and Japanese politicians continue to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial to deceased veterans – including some war criminals. Such attitudes continue to rankle the people of South Korea and China, who suffered terrible crimes at the hands of the Japanese during the war.

Nevertheless, Japan has risen from the ashes from war to become a major world economic power and cultural influence. Japanese food (particularly sushi) is celebrated worldwide, as are their films and video games. Popular Japanese art (amine and manga, for example) enjoy a worldwide fandom. After the war, Japan not only transformed its government and economy, but also opened itself to the world, contributing to the global culture while also being changed by it.

Post-World War II Korea

Although the Korean postwar experience shared some characteristics with Germany (division between Cold War rivals and intensive rebuilding, for example), the Korean War and slow democratic development in South Korea meant that the peninsula suffered far more than its European equivalent, and certainly much more than Japan. In a way, Korea demonstrated what would have happened in Europe had NATO and the Warsaw Pact chosen war to settle the German question.

Korea had been an independent kingdom prior to 1910, when Japan annexed the country and sent colonizers to run the government. Korean rebels resisted Japanese occupation constantly until the end of World War II.

Two events persuaded the emperor of Japan to surrender in World War II. The first was the atomic bomb; the second was the successful Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied China in August of 1945, which demonstrated that Japan could not hold anything it had taken. Besides helping to persuade Hirohito of the hopelessness of his cause, the invasion also changed the subsequent geopolitics of Asia. Soviet forces pushed into Korea from China, forcing the Japanese to retreat. When Japan surrendered, the fighting stopped, and troops from the United States entered Korea from the south to take over occupation from the Japanese. The result of this was that Korea was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States in a situation similar to the division of Germany. The dividing line between the two zones was the 38th Parallel line, which put nearly twice as many Koreans in the south as the north.

As with Germany, the Americans and the Soviets set up their respective occupation zones to reflect their own political cultures, even while they debated the route to reunification of the country. In the Soviet zone, Korean communists were given leading roles in the local government. In the South, the Americans promoted an anti-communist stance, but their program was far less effective than in Japan. The South experienced rebellions against US occupation, something that was never seen in Japan. They were put down by force.

As with Germany, the United States and the USSR struggled to find a way to reunite all of Korea under a single government. The United Nations agreed to hold elections for a united Korean government, but the USSR boycotted the election in the North. Finally, unable to reach any consensus, Korea was permanently divided, just as Germany had been. On August 15, 1948, the United States founded the Republic of Korea (ROK, also known as South Korea) in its occupation zone. It was a Western-style democracy, like West Germany. South Korea’s first presidential election in July 1948, under UN auspices, installed Syngman Rhee, an authoritarian and anti-communist politician. Across the border, the USSR created the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) in September 1948. The provisional government elected Kim Il-sung, a former communist guerilla who had fought Japanese occupation, to lead the new country. Two things unified the two leaders: each saw his government as the legitimate government of the entire Korean peninsula, and each was willing to use force to reunify all Korea under his own flag. This was what made the division of Korea potentially more explosive than Germany. The United Nations, for its part, recognized South Korea as the sole legitimate government of all Korea, because it had cooperated with the election process.

The Two Koreas

Map of North and South Korea in 1993. This shows the post-Korean War border as a dashed line. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Rhee had two primary policies: anticommunism within his own country, and reunification via violence against the North. Rhee was particularly undemocratic, passing laws which outlawed dissent, arresting tens of thousands of political opponents, and even assassinating political enemies. The early republic saw several communist uprisings, supported by the North, most notably on the island of Jeju; upward of 60,000 people were killed in these revolts. Rhee made little progress with the ROK economy. Almost his entire GNP consisted of US aid. Although the ROK held most of the agricultural land in Korea, the country remained impoverished as hundreds of thousands of refugees from North Korea flooded the country. Rhee did institute a successful program of land reform, similar to what MacArthur had carried out in Japan.

In North Korea, Kim combined all the communist parties into the Workers' Party of North Korea; opposition leaders either fled or were imprisoned. Kim immediately set up a communist government along Soviet lines, with the Worker’s Party as the sole political party. The party nationalized all industry and passed new legislation on labor and women’s rights. With Soviet assistance, he also created the Korean People’s Army (KPA), a force much more experienced and better-equipped than its counterpart in the south. And when the communist revolts in South Korea failed to overthrow the democratic government, Kim decided that the KPA was the only instrument which could reunify Korea under the communist banner.

The Korean War is covered in Chapter 3. Suffice it to say here that both Koreas were ravaged by the war, which spanned the entire peninsula in its course. Approximately five million soldiers and civilians died; over half that number were civilians, amounting to about ten percent of the total Korean population.

During the war, Syngman Rhee persecuted political opponents to retain power, aided by martial law considered necessary during the war. Even after the war, Rhee continued his autocratic path – since the war had ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty, the war technically continued, giving Rhee a permanent excuse to curtail civil liberties. At one point, Rhee pushed through a constitutional amendment making him exempt from the eight-year term limit for president, theoretically allowing him to become president-for-life. He also devolved democracy by concentrating administrative power in himself.

Though these moves were unpopular, the final straw was Rhee’s blatant rigging of the 1960 presidential election. Protests led by university students, known as the April Revolution, exploded all over the country, and the police and army killed dozens of the protesters. Before April was over, Rhee resigned the presidency and fled to the United States. He died in Honolulu in 1965.

In the North, Kim Il-Sung concentrated power into himself, purging, arresting and executing political opponents in the communist party. After Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 (see Chapter 2), the Soviets accused Kim of building up a cult of personality (including building giant statues of himself) and practicing the same depravations as Stalin. Kim remained unmoved; he considered himself as great a communist leader as Lenin or Stalin and looked down on the new Soviet leadership. Kim arrested tens of thousands of people, not only for political dissent, but for merely criticizing or seeming to insult him. Distinguishing himself from both China and the USSR, Kim implemented a national philosophy known as juche, or independence in economics, politics, and the military. Kim claimed that North Korea should not rely on other nations, including communist ones, for assistance, as it would weaken the nation’s international position. All of this earned Kim the displeasure of both his Soviet and Chinese comrades – but not enough for them to abandon an ally.

Kim’s policies towards the US and South Korea remained hostile despite the peace treaty. Kim publicly declared that reunification under communism was a “national duty,” and the late 1960s were tense indeed. There were several clashes along the DMZ (demilitarized zone) between the two Koreas, and in 1966, North Korean commandos entered South Korea and nearly succeeded in assassinating Korean president Park Chung-hee in the infamous Blue House attack. This was quickly followed by the North Korean seizure of a US spy ship, the USS Pueblo, and holding the crew hostage for nearly a year. Three years later, North Korea shot down an American spy plane, killing all aboard. The US claimed that neither the ship nor the plane had violated North Korean territory, but the US was deeply involved in Vietnam at the time, limiting the potential military response.

North Korea also distanced itself from China at this time; Mao Ze-tung was establishing ties with the United States and refused to support Kim’s efforts to restart the Korean War. Kim, for his part, derided Mao’s Cultural Revolution as “idiocy.” As a result, North Korea moved closer to the USSR, and began cultivating new relationships with authoritarian regimes around the world, such as Gaddafi in Libya and Pol Pot in Cambodia.

The postwar North Korean economy was slow to recover, especially in the agricultural sector. Kim collectivized farmland – that is, nationalized it (made it the property of the state) and forbade private ownership of either the land or the profits derived from it. The produce and profits would be distributed by the state. However, mismanagement (in the form of overestimating crop yields, probably to impress the leaders), as well as resistance to the program, led to a manmade famine which killed nearly a million people in 1954 – 1955.

In manufacturing, Kim followed the same path as Stalin, emphasizing the military and heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods. With Chinese and Soviet assistance, North Korea rebuilt its shattered manufacturing base and greatly expanded its infrastructure and educational sectors. It also improved its mining sector, selling extracted minerals on the international market to fund its manufacturing expansion. Within a few years, the North Korean economy was the equivalent of the South's.

Starting in 1973, however, the situation changed for the worse. Mineral prices fell on the international market, consequently reducing North Korean export income (a common problem in countries whose GNPs depend on exporting raw materials) and forcing the country to default on foreign loans. The country’s standard of living declined. Furthermore, as the capitalist world began to computerize manufacturing and business in the late 1970s, North Korea (along with the USSR) failed to make the shift to high technology, making it much less competitive in the international markets.

General Park Chung-hee’s Coup

In the South, Rhee’s removal ushered in a brief period of democracy, but not stability. Leftist groups, long suppressed and persecuted by Rhee and the right, now demanded reforms and justice. The government prosecuted thousands of police, military, and government officials who were accused of corruption or abuse of power. (A swing from one pole to the other is common after revolutions, as formerly suppressed groups press their new advantage and perhaps seek revenge.) But the new government had inherited a litany of economic and social problems from the Rhee administration, and the divided government was not up to the task of repairing them with any speed. The government’s relative ineffectiveness and the newfound freedom to protest led to many demonstrations against the government, and some in the military feared that the North would take advantage of the chaos to attack.

On May 16, 1961, Major General Park Chung-hee staged a successful military coup. He blamed the government, all the way back to Syngman Rhee, for following ineffective economic policies, which he contrasted with the Japanese economic miracle. He claimed that such policies weakened South Korea in the face of a continued communist threat. He pledged to repair the economy, strengthen relations with the United States, eliminate political corruption, and pursue peaceful reunification with the North. He also promised to hold elections within two years, and that he and his government junta would not run for office. In 1963, he kept his promise to hold elections, but decided to run for president as candidate of the Democratic Republican Party. He won the election in a close vote.

Major General Park Chung-he

Park then instituted a major economic program based on the Japanese model: he would use US financial aid to build up South Korea’s manufacturing base for an export-oriented economy. Like Japan, Park implemented business-friendly policies, and Park cooperated with the chaebol, which are large family-owned industrial conglomerates of immense economic and political power. Education and infrastructure were also expanded. Naturally, all this urban, industrial growth did little for the farmers, who continued to live in near-poverty. Park therefore launched a program to aid the rural poor with infrastructure, irrigation, and housing, all of which reduced rural poverty significantly.

Park also turned South Korea into a major international player. South Korea still had a poor relationship with Japan, which once brutally occupied the nation. Park established formal relations with Japan in 1965, accepting financial compensation from Japan (although not a formal apology, to the chagrin of many in his country). He also sent 300,000 South Korean troops to assist the United States in Vietnam (see Chapter 7), further cementing South Korea as a strong Cold War ally of the Americans.
Park narrowly won the 1967 presidential election, and it was at this point that his military junta ran up against the limits of Korean democracy. At the time, the Korean constitution forbade presidents from seeking a third term, but Park pushed amendments through the National Assembly to allow it. This resulted in major protests across the country and the political rise of opposition leader Kim Dae-jung. Park was able to hold on and win the 1971 presidential elections. However, his political opposition made gains in the National Assembly, threatening his power. In 1972, Park declared martial law, suspending both the National Assembly and the constitution. Rather than returning to civilian government, Park had taken South Korea into military dictatorship.

The rest of Park’s political career was fraught with controversy and conflict. He created a new constitution which granted his junta sweeping political power, removing presidential term limits and bringing the legislature, judiciary, and educational sector under his control. The president was no longer a directly-elected position. This led to years of massive protests and demonstrations, to which Park responded with suppression and violence. The economy continued to grow throughout this period, however.
Park’s reign came to an end in 1979 when he was assassinated by Kim Jae-gyu, Director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Kim’s position was in danger, and Park thought that he wasn’t sufficiently vicious in his suppression of demonstrators and political opponents; but it has also been revealed that he had secret pro-democracy leanings and was trying to moderate Park’s behavior. It is a longstanding controversy in South Korea over whether Kim killed Park for personal or political reasons. In any case, he was hanged for treason.

Park also remains a divisive figure. He greatly improved the South Korean economy and forged the nation into a strong international presence, but did so at the cost of democracy; he jailed and murdered political opponents. He was certainly problematic for the United States. The superpower was trying to contain communism and had to present itself as a protector of human rights and democracy worldwide. Having an anticommunist ally like Park behave like a dictator stained America’s image and provided fine propaganda material to the communists, who jumped on this example of capitalist hypocrisy.

North Korea and Kim Jong-il

Across the border, North Korea was increasingly impoverished and isolated. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1979 brought an end to détente (see Chapter 3) and increased pressure on the communist nation. Chinese – Soviet rivalry and distrust remained high, splitting the communist world at a time when Kim needed its economic support. South Korea was growing not only economically stronger, but also more respected around the world, particularly after Park’s removal from power. In 1981, Seoul (capital of South Korea) was selected as the site of the 1988 Olympics, and Kim’s proposal that the two Koreas co-host the Olympics was ignored. As the world had seen with the 1966 Blue House attack, North Korea typically addressed both its international and domestic problems with violence rather than negotiations.

In 1980, Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son, emerged as the heir apparent to his father’s almost godlike position in the country. He was already highly placed in North Korean military and politics. The younger Kim lacked the military credentials and experience of his father, but he soon found ways to distinguish himself, after his father’s fashion.

Kim Jong-Il. Image by the Kremlin.

In 1983, the younger Kim ordered the assassination of Chun Doo-hwan, President of South Korea, while he was visiting Rangoon in Burma. The bombing attack at a war memorial killed 18 South Korean officials and journalists; Chun escaped harm only because he was late to the event. Kim also ordered the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987, killing all 115 people aboard. These attacks were probably intended to tarnish South Korea’s image, making it appear weak and insecure just before the Olympics. Kim Jong-il probably also intended to show his own military and party that he was tough enough to confront South Korea. In international terms, the attacks only hurt North Korea, further isolating it. The US placed the nation on its list of terrorism-supporting countries.

Kim Il-sung died of a sudden heart attack in 1994, and Kim Jong-il took over as leader of North Korea. The country was now in dire economic straits. The collapse of the USSR ended about half of North Korea’s economic aid, leaving China as its last major supporter. Flooding in 1995 led to widespread famine in North Korea, compounding Kim’s problems. Kim’s unlikely response was a policy known as songun, or “military first.” This invested heavily in the military at the expense of the rest of the economy. It may be that Kim was trying to strengthen his relationship with his generals, as the military was his base of political and social power; it may have also been meant to dissuade the South from thinking that it could now attack the weakened North. As is typical with North Korea and other authoritarian countries, the real reasons for government policies are unclear, and we are left to guess.

One important development in North Korea, and one watched carefully by the global community, was its nuclear program. North Korea’s first nuclear power plant went online in 1986. As this and other planned reactors could help produce the plutonium needed to create nuclear weapons, the United States entered into a series of negotiations with North Korea to prevent it from obtaining such materials. It offered to build a reactor for North Korea (one which could not produce weapons-grade materials) if North Korea shut down its reactors. It also suspended military exercises with South Korea and offered certain economic aid. North Korea initially agreed, but the plan eventually broke down after long negotiations, and North Korea restarted its reactors. The nation must have put the reactor to its intended use because, in 2006, North Korea detonated its first atomic bomb. It also developed an indigenous ICBM to deliver nuclear warheads, possibly with the intention of threatening the United States mainland.

This brought North Korea and the Americans back to the negotiating table, which may have been Kim’s intention all along. The US offered economic aid if North Korea abandoned its nuclear ambitions. North Korea again shut down a reactor, only to restart it in 2009.

In 2010, North Korea again increased tensions on the peninsula with attacks on the South Korean navy and shelling of its territory; but North Korea was about to undergo another unexpected change.

Second Junta and Democratization

In South Korea, Park’s assassination led almost immediately to another military coup led by General Chun Doo-Hwan. Unsurprisingly, this led to a new round of protests, and Chun responded by arresting opposition politicians and activists. University students in the city of Gwangju launched protests which were put down by the military with force, causing over a thousand civilian casualties. Before the end of 1980, Chun had written a new constitution for South Korea. He pledged to restore democracy, and his constitution established the power of the National Assembly and Supreme court. But it also decreed that the President was to be elected by the indirect vote of politicians; by appointing military officers to government positions, Chun guaranteed that the junta’s chosen candidate would win. The public was not fooled by this anti-democratic system.

Economically, South Korea did quite well under Chun, his authoritarianism aside. The high-tech manufacturing sector thrived in the export market under careful government guidance. But since manufacturing only provides urban jobs, the rural economy stagnated, leading to a widening wealth gap and increasing regional tensions. And Chun’s authoritarian rule was already generating tension, as his political prisoners remained in jail and the media remained censured.

Tensions finally came to a head in 1987 after a university activist was killed by police during interrogation. This was the match that lit the June Struggle, a mass movement of over a million people protesting the government. Such was the social pressure that the junta’s presidential candidate, General Roh Tae-woo, declared that the next president would be chosen via direct election; he also called for improved human rights in South Korea. He passed the necessary amendments to the constitution, and in December he became the first directly-elected South Korean president in sixteen years, largely because the other parties were too divided to form a coherent opposition.

Roh Tae-woo made good on his pro-democracy promises, removing the last remnants of military rule. Hosting the Olympic games in 1988 boosted South Korea’s international prestige, and Roh took steps to improve relations with North Korea via a series of high-level talks, cultural exchanges, and denuclearization agreements.

Roh was followed in 1993 by Kim Young-sam, the first civilian president since 1962. Kim oversaw continued democratization and also a reckoning with the past, as both Chun and Roh were arrested, tried, and imprisoned for their roles in the coup following Park’s death, and for the Gwangju massacre and other human rights violations. Both former presidents were pardoned soon afterwards, however. In 1997, a financial crisis swept across Asia, including South Korea, where the economy was already slowing after the sharp growth of the 1980s. The new crisis allowed pro-democracy activist Kim Dae-jung to win the next presidential election in the same year.

Kim Dae-jung was perhaps the most notable South Korean president after Park. He addressed the 1997 financial crisis with an aggressive policy of government intervention which quickly ended the crisis. He also took steps to reform the chaebol system; the family-run conglomerates had grown monopolistic and were often accused of corruption. Kim instituted a series of changes which forced the chaebol to practice greater transparency in their finances, making crimes more difficult to hide.

But Kim Dae-jung’s greatest accomplishment was his 1998 “Sunshine Policy.” The two Koreas had been born out of the Cold War. With the fall of the USSR in 1991 and the subsequent end of the Cold War, South Korea suffered something of an identity crisis. Without a Cold War, was North Korea still an enemy? Furthermore, North Korea’s economy was a shambles, with millions of people starving; South Korea could assist the North in rebuilding its economy, which might temper the North’s hostility to the South. The result was a series of talks between the two Koreas and reunions of families separated by the border. For his efforts, Kim Dae-jung was awarded the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize. The program had its ups and downs, though. In 2002, US President George Bush labelled North Korea as an enemy in his “Axis of Evil” speech. Consequently, North Korea reversed its denuclearization program and even engaged in naval skirmishes with the South Korean navy.

Kim’s successor as president, Roh Moo-hyun, continued the Sunshine Policy with some success, providing considerable economic aid to the North. The program was not without its critics. Older generations, who remembered the war, may have been more reticent towards peace efforts. Others pointed out that North Korea’s own government was the cause of the North Korean famine, and believed that starvation would drive the North Koreans to overthrow their government. Food aid, they claimed, was forestalling the anticommunist revolt.

The Sunshine Policy ended in 2008. North Korea began testing new atomic weapons and the missiles necessary to carry them, while South Korea elected a conservative, Lee Myung-bak, to the presidency. This combination brought the policy to an end. There were further attempts to restart the policy in 2017, with cultural exchanges and talks; but they fizzled out by 2019, accomplishing little of consequence.
Since Kim Dae-jung’s presidency, politics have stabilized in South Korea, ending the days of military juntas. Corruption in government, however, seems all too common, as two former South Korean presidents have served time on corruption charges while a third committed suicide before he could be imprisoned. But the long story of South Korea has been one of strong postwar economic development, guided by the government, alongside slow democratization. Unlike Germany or Japan, Korea had no historical experience with democracy, so the system was slower to take root there. Furthermore, the Korean War, which technically never ended, allowed military governments to suppress political opponents on the grounds that they were pro-communist. Since the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, this is no longer a viable tool of political control; this allowed other political parties to gain traction.

North Korea under Kim Jong-un

Kim Jong-il died in December 2011; his son, Kim Jong-un, immediately assumed control of the party and nation, continuing the traditional cult of personality around the Kim family. He immediately removed potential political rivals by arresting and imprisoning them. Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was highly respected within the government; Kim had him arrested, publicly denounced for treason, and executed. In this way, Kim removed anyone who could pose a threat to his power.

In 2017, Kim successfully tested a ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States, upping the tension in one of the last remnants of the Cold War. Denuclearization talks were reopened with US President Trump, but quickly collapsed without firm agreements.

The youngest Kim has continued not only his family’s cult of personality, but also its Stalinist surveillance state. Life in North Korea is extremely regimented and monitored; no dissent is permitted, and even to be suspected of disloyalty is punishable with imprisonment or death (one of the crimes Jang Song-thaek was accused of was not clapping enthusiastically enough at public events).

A North Korean missile on parade. Image by the government of North Korea.

The North Korean economy remains state-controlled, still aligned with the juche principles of the Cold War. The collapse of the USSR meant that North Korea lost a major international supporter, and now must rely on China for economic support. North Korea has been embargoed by several nations and by the United Nations. Many of these embargoes were enacted after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in contravention of international law. China is now North Korea’s last major supporter, responsible for half its trade. China has had a tumultuous relationship with North Korea, and relations have waxed and waned over the years; nevertheless, China continued to support North Korea because it makes North Korea dependent on its northern neighbor. This gives China considerable power over what amounts to a buffer zone between its border and capitalist South Korea.

North Korea is very creative in securing income despite the embargoes and developed a unique economy based on crime. Although the extent of these efforts is debated, there is widespread evidence of the North Korean government producing and distributing counterfeit currency and illicit drugs. It is also accused of participating in human trafficking and the illegal arms trade. These efforts probably pay for the country’s nuclear program, as well as supply the party elite with luxury goods while the common citizen struggles to feed himself.

Conclusion

The postwar histories of Japan, South Korea, and North Korea were intimately linked to the Cold War, a situation which none of the three nations created. The Korean War could not have happened without the support of the USSR and China, making the peninsula just another front in the global struggle between superpowers. Continuous US support for Japan and South Korea were both predicated on the goal of preventing either country from falling to communism, and that each country would assist the US in the Cold War.

Japan had major advantages over South Korea in its journey into democracy. Japan had a democracy before the fascist coup of the 1930s; that meant that the people had experience in democracy and were able to return to it quite easily. South Korea had no such history, instead having been a colony of Japan. Furthermore, MacArthur ran a very effective rebuilding program in Japan, while the American occupation authority in South Korea was often downright amateurish.

The biggest difference between Japan and South Korea, however, was the Korean war. The war has kept South Korea in a constant state of tension. This permanent security threat allowed for the rise of authoritarian leaders who insisted that strong government control was necessary to protect the nation; anyone who insisted on more democracy was castigated as a traitor who would weaken the country and allow the enemy to win. This wartime authoritarianism delayed the development of democracy, particularly since South Korea had no history of democracy and thus no model of reference.

Despite the difficulties, South Korea eventually found its way to democracy, though the tensions with North Korea continue to smolder. South Korea and Japan have both grown into major international players, contributing to the global economy and culture. North Korea, by contrast, is now an international pariah, embargoed by most of the world. South Korea, aided by the United States, continues to guard the border between the two countries and skirmishes are always possible. Since war against North Korea is not considered an acceptable solution, due to the casualties it would entail, the situation with North Korea remains in limbo, and will probably stay that way until a coup or other change of leadership in North Korea changes the situation from within.