My grandmother suffered from asthma, so she often had coughing fits. Whenever she spotted me coming home from school or from playing somewhere, she’d arch her back and say, “Mabo, can you rub my back?” So I’d stroke and massage her small back for a few minutes. During those times together, she always said to me, “You’re a kind boy. You mustn’t be like your father. I just can’t understand why your mother made the mistake of marrying him.”
I could see why she used the word “mistake.” The Ishikawa family was respected and went back a long way in the area. There were many branches of the Ishikawa family in Mizonokuchi. They and the rest of the local people formed a close-knit community. My grandfather, Shoukichi, died before I was born, but I was always told he was a good and gentle man who looked after his family and others in his community. He sent my mother to a girls’ high school and encouraged her to learn how to sew. Though the family couldn’t be called wealthy, he did his best to provide his children with an education of sorts.
My mother was a woman of strong character. She had an oval face that was beautiful in its way. My father, on the other hand, had sharp, razorlike eyes, a well-built body, and muscular shoulders. I don’t know what my mother saw in him—perhaps she was attracted to his confidence and survival instincts. I do know that the local community was stunned when they started living together. Behind their backs, people called them “Beauty and the Beast” and wondered why she’d married such a terrible man.
My grandmother once said to me, “Koreans are barbarians.” I loved her, but I resented her remark. Though I felt Japanese—and felt it with complete conviction—I was half-Korean, as she knew perfectly well. My mother’s elder brothers, Shiro and Tatsukichi, occasionally made similar remarks. They’d been conscripted to serve in the Japanese army in Manchuria and always described Koreans as poor and unkempt, like a bunch of gorillas. They never had the guts to say anything like that in front of my father, of course. But when my father wasn’t around, Shiro would often say, “Miyoko had better divorce him as soon as possible. Koreans are just rotten to the core.” Though I always felt a twinge of discomfort when he said such things, I couldn’t help but agree with them. I had a strong sense of revulsion toward my father, who certainly lived up to the barbaric reputation of Koreans whenever he beat my mother. Given that we watched him torment her day after day—and that he frightened me and my sisters to death in the process—it was hardly surprising that I, like my grandmother, grew to dislike Koreans.
My father used to strut about the neighborhood with twenty or thirty Korean followers in tow. He was one of the top dogs in the Korean community, and he enjoyed picking a fight with any Japanese who got on his nerves. He didn’t care who it was. Special policeman? Sure. Military policeman? Bring it on. Koreans could depend on him for protection, but he scared the daylights out of Japanese people.
My father always insisted on doing things his own way. After the end of the Second World War, he opened a black-market street-side stall with several of his cronies. They sold canned food produced in the munitions factory where my father used to work, and sugar, flour, ship’s biscuits, clothes, and other items procured illegally from American GIs. One day my dad and his buddies got into a huge brawl with American soldiers over the merchandise he was selling. He was notorious for a reason.
Not that my father had many options. The Japanese defeat in World War II left 2.4 million Koreans stranded in Japan. They belonged to neither the winning nor the losing side, and they had no place to go. Once freed, they were simply thrown onto the streets. Desperate and impoverished, with no way to make a living, they attacked the trucks containing food intended for members of the imperial Japanese armed forces and sold the booty on the black market. Even those who’d never been violent before had little choice but to turn into outlaws.
In a strange sort of way, all this illegality actually set these people free. During the war, they had only two grim choices: they could either become soldiers in their enemy’s army or slave away as civilian war workers. The soldiers would be sent to the front to be used as human shields against the shells. The laborers would be worked to the bone—and sometimes death—in coal mines or munitions factories. The life of an outlaw was a kind of liberation.
At some point, my father joined what was then known as the General Association of Koreans in Japan, later to be known as the League of Korean Residents in Japan. This community for Koreans in Japan supported the principle of friendship between Japanese and Korean people and strove to help Koreans live a stable and regular life in Japan. But it wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Ever since before the Second World War, many Koreans with “permanent resident” status in Japan had respected the Communist Party. Communist policies were anti-imperialist, and the party campaigned for the rights of Korean permanent residents. After the war, not long after the Association was formed, a famous Communist by the name of Kim Chon-hae was released from prison, along with several other Communist Party members. These individuals had remained defiant in prison and had refused to change their thinking. After their release, they had a powerful influence on the Association, which naturally became more left-wing as a result. But the fundamental principle governing my father’s behavior at the time had nothing to do with socialism. The important thing for him was nationalism.
From my perspective, there wasn’t much difference between a socialist movement, a nationalist movement, and a brutal brawl in the black market. All of these people had a couple of things in common. They all had their own personal histories in Japan—and they were all poor. They just wanted to assert their own existence. And that meant fighting however they could to gain some kind of power.
Within the Association, my father became known as “Tiger.” No surprise there. He had his “action force” of loyal street fighters, in reality a group of guys who’d get together in front of the old shop, make a fire in an iron basket, and slug back liquor all day. I don’t know if they were discussing troubles in the black market or just waiting for their “action force” to be needed, but whenever something happened and their presence was called for, they’d spring into action and rush to the scene.
In the end, everything fell apart for my father. The General Association of Korean Residents was deemed a terrorist group and ordered to disband in 1949. The League of Koreans in Japan served as a replacement for many, but times had changed. By then, public order had been restored, and someone like my father, an impulsive and poorly educated street fighter, simply wasn’t needed anymore. What the newly launched League really needed at that time were skilled administrators—there was no place for my father, who couldn’t even read, in the new order. I can’t help but wonder now whether his rejection from that group ultimately made him more vulnerable to the promises he started hearing about a great life to be had in North Korea . . .
These days I find more and more memories coming back to me. Sometimes, I wish they wouldn’t.