US' unfinished involvement in Asia

By Eugene Lee

In several of my previous articles, I continued noting that the United States has unfinished business in Asia. Arguably, in the last 150 years, the U.S. has had a bigger influence on the region than any other big country, like China or Russia. And all of that time it was done under the slogan of the fight for freedom.

It is hard to trace all the wrongs, but they ended in the U.S. drawing lines. Those drawings eventually even welcomed a conflict into the region. I rephrase one author, after World War II, Dean Acheson, the U.S. Secretary of State, kept repeating the view of the Defense Department and the State Department, in essence, the much-heralded view of General MacArthur. In March 1949, the General had told the Arizona Daily Star, "From the line we hold beginning in Alaska and running from the Aleutians through Okinawa and the Philippines, we can with our air and sea power break up any amphibious operation of a predatory power embarking from the Asiatic mainland."

In those days Korea and Formosa (today's Taiwan) were put outside the system. The policy may have been wrong, and it was almost certainly foolish to broadcast it as we did but that does not alter the fact that the policy was policy and was based on the considered judgment of our military leaders. End of the quote.

A prelude to that was General Douglas MacArthur's supervision of the prosecution of 28 Japanese war criminals at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) ― the Tokyo Trials. The trials lasted from 1946 to 1948 and resulted in 25 death sentences, seven life sentences and two sentences of 20 years in prison. Later MacArthur also authorized the prosecution of thousands of other Japanese war criminals by the Japanese government. However, many Japanese war criminals were not prosecuted and even had their sentences suspended.

Some even were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for their cooperation with the Allies. Others were never caught or brought to justice. The trials were to ultimately serve an important purpose in bringing justice to the victims of Japanese war crimes and helping to prevent future atrocities. One of the Judges, Bert Roling, later lamented, "It is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the court by the U.S. government."

Why is that all a problem? It is simple. It is about who gets what and why. It is about fairness and eventually, about legitimacy. If you were thinking that everyone would get what belonged to them before colonization and would be reimbursed after you would be dead wrong. And there are many reasons for that.

A small example. If you read about Korea before 1900, you would find a completely different country compared to one, let's say, after the year 1946. Everything had changed! Before colonization, Korea was a kingdom run on archaic rules and practices. In some cases, the paperwork for land or any other property ownership, was nonexistent, as it was a normal practice to run things verbally. Some families were rich by title, not by paper. When colonized, if you weren't able to provide proper papers. Your land would be seized.

As a result, the land ownership in Korea by the Japanese went from 8 percent in 1910 to over 52 percent in 1932. Some of that land was redistributed between pro-Japanese collaborators, who helped the Japanese colonialists run the country. What happened after the liberation was quite a messy process, where yet again, the land was redistributed under Syngman Rhee's government. Though some citizens were able to get some small patches of land, they were heavily taxed and weren't able to use their land for any purposes, other than agriculture. The system of ownership after decolonization changed very little afterward, and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur, allowed it to happen.

His influence is still echoing in the present day. Gen. MacArthur was heavily involved in shaping views on intelligence. He emphasized the importance of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, for the U.S.'s success in Asia. Many machinations of the secretive M-fund are yet to be properly researched. According to some researchers, the M-Fund was named after General William Frederic Marquat, one of MacArthur's inner circle of advisers known as the Bataan Boys.

He, as the chief of the Economic and Scientific Section in SCAP headquarters and the figure in charge of zaibatsu, (chaebol in Korean, or conglomerates) and their dissolution during the occupation, allowed MacArthur to use the M-Fund to influence politics during the occupation as well as for other politically difficult operations, such as creating the Police Reserve Force, the predecessor of today's Self-Defense Force, after the outbreak of the Korean War. This gray financial area may well remain hidden for all of us indefinitely, as it may have repercussions on today's geo-financial politics in Asia.

In other words, "the fight for freedom," or "the freedom world," cliches that we hear even today, evoke the ghosts of the past that the politicians in the U.S. need to reconcile with and put them to rest in peace in order for countries, like South Korea and the North, to live normal lives and hopefully be one again.

Eugene Lee (mreulee@gmail.com) is a lecturing professor at the Graduate School of Governance at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Specializing in international relations and governance, his research and teaching focus on national and regional security, international development, government policies and Northeast and Central Asia.