Like the Great Britain and other

colonizing powers, Japan too followed the

gradual course of expansionist policy. Japanese
colonization followed similar chronology and
strategy as British in India. With the restoration
of monarchical power, in 1868, there started a
new wave of modernization and
industrialization in Japan. In a few years, Japan
achieved the status among powerful
industrialized nations of the world like The
Great Britain itself. With industrialization,
Japanese got infected with imperialistic
characteristics and vices of industrialist nations,
along with the greed of expanding Japan’s
territories. At the start of mid-1750, Asia was
suffering from colonization by Western powers,
which left no opening for colonization in East and South East Asia for Japan. Therefore, to buy
raw materials and to establish a market for its industrial goods, Japan invaded Korea. Japan
entered Korea with the purpose of trade, in 1876. But by 1910, Japan had officially annexed
Korea and crushed Joseon Dynasty. Japan’s rule lasted till 1945. Like British, Japan too ruled on
the policy of divide and rule.

 In order to establish control over its new protectorate, the Empire of Japan waged an all-
out war on Korean culture. Schools and universities forbade speaking Korean and emphasized
manual labor and loyalty to the Emperor. Public places adopted Japanese, too, and an edict to
make films in Japanese soon followed. It also became a crime to teach history from non-
approved texts and authorities burned over 200,000,000 Korean historical documents, essentially
wiping out the historical memory of Korea. During the occupation, Japan took over Korea’s
labor and land. Nearly 100,000 Japanese families settled in Korea with land they had been given;
they chopped down trees by the millions and planted non-native species, transforming a familiar
landscape into something many Koreans didn’t recognize.
 Nearly 725,000 Korean workers were made to work in Japan and its other colonies, and
as World War II loomed, Japan forced hundreds of thousands of Korean women into life as
“comfort women”—sexual slaves who served in military brothels. The occupation government
also worked to assimilate Koreans with the help of language, religion and education. Shinto
shrines originally intended for Japanese families became places of forced worship. The colonial
government made Koreans “worship the gods of imperial Japan, including dead emperors and
the spirits of war heroes who had helped them conquer Korea earlier in the century”. This forced
worship was viewed as an act of cultural genocide by many Koreans, but for the colonists, it was
seen as evidence that Koreans and Japanese were a single, unified people. Though some families
got around the Shinto edict by simply visiting the shrines and not praying there, others
grudgingly adopted the new religious practices out of fear. Japan had even waged war on
people’s family names. At first, the colonial government made it illegal for people to adopt
Japanese-style names, ostensibly to prevent confusion in family registries. But in 1939, the
government made changing names an official policy. Under the law, Korean families were
“graciously allowed” to choose Japanese surnames.

Many Korean writers have written about the traumatic experiences done by the Japanese
colonial government to assimilate its colonizers, and from their writings we come to know of the
violent events that constitute history. The two Korean English writers, Sook Nyul Choi in Years
of Impossible Goodbyes and Min Jin Lee in Pachinko, have scribbled the terrorizing acts of
Japanese colonizers in the colonized Korean peninsula. Sook Nyul Choi, an American-Korean
writer, is an important voice in the realm of fiction and is best known for her book Years of
Impossible Goodbyes. She was born in Pyongyang, North Korea. As a young refugee during the
Korean War, Choi learned to face injustice and cruelty with courage and determination. Choi’s
novels, which are based upon her own experiences, have enriched the lives of young people all
over the world. Choi emigrated to the Unites States to pursue her college education. She
graduated from Manhattanville College in 1962. Except for a brief period during which she
worked in the business world, she taught in public and parochial schools in New York and
Massachusetts for 20 years while raising her two daughters. Her book Years of Impossible
Goodbyes has been translated in more than 6 languages and has won numerous awards including
Best Books for Young Adults, ALA Notable Book and Judy Lopez Book Award by the National
Women’s Book Association.

Years of Impossible Goodbyes is set during the time period of World War2 and talks
about a ten-year-old girl Sookan, who along with her family resides in Pyongyang (the present-
day North Korea) under Japanese colonial rule. Sookan and her female family members are
forced to run a sock factory which belongs to Japanese empirical power. The Japanese army
captain Narita and other soldiers inspect the production of the factory regularly and confiscate
the family’s earnings and other items of value. They raid their house from time to time and also
cut down a pine tree that was adored by Sookan’s grandfather. Sookan and her younger brother
were forced to attend a Japanese school where children are brainwashed so they can become
loyal subjects of the Japanese emperors. As the brutal heinousness proceeds, the grandfather
eventually dies and their mother falls ill. Some of her family members are taken away to military
camps for prostitution. After the defeat in World War2 Japan ends the colonial rule in Korea but
Japanese start mass murder of Koreans in different areas which impels Sookan and her brother to
escape to the south part of Korea.
 Through the eyes of 10year old Sookan, we come to know of the ferocities committed on
behalf of the Japanese empire. The Koreans living under the colonial rule were forced to give up
their Korean identity by opting for Japanese names and Japanese family names. This act of
colonizers deprived them of their basic identity and left them in a state of perplexity and
uncertainty, as expressed by Sookan on her first day of school:

“I stood before her, feeling confused and afraid…My baptismal name and my Korean
name would be used only at home from now on. Here I would have to answer to this strange
Japanese name; I am someone I did not want to be and I had to pretend.”

Hangul and Chinese were also banned for the people. Korean people were only allowed
to use Japanese for the purpose of communication. Under the strict watch of Japanese soldiers, if
anyone was seen using any language, other than that of Empirical power, they were executed on
the spot. They were also forced to follow Japanese dress code:

“The Japanese wanted all Koreans to dress like them and speak only their language.
Everything Korean was forbidden.”

Furthermore, the kids were forced to go to a Japanese school where they were
brainwashed and forced to worship Japanese emperors as well. Sookan belonged to a Catholic
Christian family, but they were made to worship idols and Japanese emperors because
Christianity is seen as a religion of “The White Devils” who are at war with Japan:

“Their churches were closed and they were accused of insulting the Heavenly Emperor
and of being the White Devil’s spies…”

Korean kids were also divested from their education. Sookan and her brother were
forcefully enrolled in a Japanese school, where they spent their days in making weapons for the
Japanese soldiers who were fighting in World War2:

“After the chant about the White Devil’s inevitable defeat, we continued making weapons
in the school yard.”

The Korean kids at schools were indoctrinated from their cultural and religious believes
in the name of education so they could stay servants to the Japanese colonial rule.
 Through Years of Impossible Goodbyes, we come to know that enormities and
transgression on the colonized Korea were of such soaring levels that Koreans were kept hungry
and deprived of medicine so they would eventually die and their race would vanish from the
earth:

“What little rice we were able to buy was no longer available. They wouldn’t sell us rice
at any price.”

Their ration was sent to Japanese military camps and no medical assistance was available
for dying Koreans:

“I knew what they would say, ‘No doctors for the old dying Korean men. Doctors are
busy helping the Imperial soldiers.’ I expected as much.”

Sookan and her family were forced to run a sock factory by the Japanese government.
Japanese soldiers would come from time to time and take away the goods produced as well as
the family’s earnings. Similarly, all the harvested food by Korean farmers was also taken away
by force to Japan.

Japanese not only colonized the minds of Koreans but also their bodies. Sookan’s female
family members were taken away to military camps where they served as prostitutes. Japanese
government justified this heinous act by calling prostitution a “voluntary offering for the glory of
the Emperor”. The Korean girls were called as “spirit girls” and according to the colonial power
their sole purpose for existing was to please soldiers so they could perform better in the World
War2. Sookan’s aunt and her cousins, when taken away by the Japanese soldiers, killed
themselves to save their honor and dignity:

“I heard half of them killed themselves by jumping off the speeding trucks rather than be
locked in those latrines and used by those soldiers. Our poor girls!”.

Sookan’s father and elder brothers were taken away to fight in the war along with other
Korean men. While, the little boys of her family were often a target of Japanese soldiers who did
inhuman things with them just for sake of fun:

“The Japanese soldiers often amused themselves by forcing the boys to drink their own
urine. He cried as he recounted these terrible stories.”
 Such strict policies of assimilation were opted to produce “loyal and obedient” subjects
of the Japanese emperor and to manifest the idea that Japanese were indeed a superior race and
had all the right to govern over Koreans.

Sook Nyul Choi has used vast symbolism in Years of Impossible Goodbyes to highlight
malfeasance of Japanese colonial rule. Her most powerful use of symbols consists in her
presentation of certain characters in a way that they go beyond themselves and become symbolic.
The Japanese-army-captain, Narita, symbolizes Japanese Empirical government. In the novel, he
raids houses, forces shopkeepers from selling food items to Koreans and even forbids the use of
metal utensils in his locality: “Metal is not for your use. The soldiers need it for weapons.” All
his actions and rules are actually denoting the strict supremacy of the Japanese. Through the
character of Narita, the writer also manifested the common racist belief of Japanese and the
Empirical government that they are “superior” and the colonized Koreans are “subaltern”, as
Narita said:

“When will you stupid Koreans understand that you are our subjects and there is
nothing, we, the Imperial police of the Heavenly race, do not know…”.

The characters of grandfather and mother symbolize the condition of the colonized
people. The death and ailment of these two characters denotes the sufferings of Koreans under
the rule of their oppressors.
 Perhaps, the most extensive symbol in Years of Impossible Goodbyes is the grandfather’s
“pine-tree”. The pine-tree represents hope and beauty, it is the only beautiful thing left in the
city after Japanese occupation:

“Grandfather’s tree stood alone in the far corner of the yard, its dark green-needled
branches emanating harmoniously from the trunk, reaching out like a large umbrella. It was a
magic tree, holding in the shade of its branches the peace and harmony Grandfather so often
talked about.”.

It also symbolizes the unity of North and South Koreans which is crushed by Japanese
colonial rule, as Captain Narita orders to cut down the tree. Similarly, a large Buddha statue
symbolizes the Japanese colonial rule and its religious as well as cultural oppression. At the start
of the novel, the characters are seen being forced into worshiping that statue which is suggestive
of the dominance of Japanese. But when Japan loses the World War2 and its colonial rule in
Korea is near to an end, the Buddha statue breaks down which creates a chaos among the
Japanese. The novel ends at the breakdown of this large Buddha statue expresses the defeat and
end of colonial rule of Japan in Korea:

“I saw a huge stone Buddha come falling through the starry skies. With a great crash, it
landed right in front of me…The other students in the street began to shout with glee and gather
around the statue. The Japanese police and Captain Narita came running and shouted at us.
They tried to move the statue, but it would not budge…the Imperial soldiers struggled
fruitlessly.”

Min Jin Lee in her novel, Pachinko, like Choi, has portrayed a vivid image of the
atrocities declared by the Japanese colonial government and the tie-up of colonizers and the
colonized. Min Jin Lee is a Korean born American writer, who’s best known for her work
Pachinko. is a recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation (2018), the
Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard (2018-2019), and the New York Foundation
for the Arts (2000). Her novel Pachinko (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for
Fiction, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize,
and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. A New York Times Bestseller, Pachinko was also
a Top 10 Books of the Year for BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the New York
Public Library. Pachinko was a selection for “Now Read This,” the joint book club of PBS
NewsHour and The New York Times. It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, including
NPR, PBS, and CNN. Pachinko will be translated into 30 languages. In 2019, Apple ordered to
series a television adaptation of Pachinko and President Barack Obama selected Pachinko for his
recommended reading list, calling it, “a powerful story about resilience and compassion.”  The
novel has won many awards and hearts, as well as various critic’s acclamation:

‟Pachinko is about paying dues to a forgotten history; to the complex and fraught
Japan-Korea relationship that endured well into the 90s and lingers to this day. But it doesn’t
wear its heart—or historical truths—on its sleeve. What drives this novel is the magisterial force
of Lee’s characterization; her ability to ground the narrative deeply and intimately in the details
of daily life. Also threaded through it are questions of home, identity, nationhood and tradition—
including the belief of its female protagonists that ‘a woman’s lot is to suffer.” (Bron Sibree)

Pachinko, is a character driven tale that features a large ensemble of characters who are a
target of racism and barbarity, during the Japanese colonial rule in Korea. The novel opens up
with the tale of a poor fisherman family and their only son, Hoonie, who gets married to Yangjin.
The couple lives in poor condition under the rule of their colonizers. The story centers around
their children and grandchildren who climb the social ladder with the help of the game pachinko
(gambling). This tale highlights the contrast of colonizers and colonized, superior and inferior, as
well as the colonial tactics used by Japanese to rule over Koreans.
 The characters of the novel portray a strict contrast between the colonizers and the
colonized, as well as describing the common belief of the colonizer nation that “they are superior
beings and have every right to govern and dictate the lives of the colonized nation”. All the
Korean characters are of lower class such as peasants, fishermen or street vendors. While, all the
Japanese characters are of high status and belong to worthy professions. Even when Hoonie’s
descendants climb up in social status, they are still seen as “dirty beings” just because they are
Koreans. The writer has painted an evocative disparity among the two binaries: colonized and
colonizers, by describing a Japanese man as follows:

“He was dressed -tidy without drawing much attention to himself. His face was clean
shaven, and his fingernails were neat. The lenses of his eyeglasses were very thick and heavy
frames detracted from his good features.”

Similarly, Hoonie’s family is seen as carrying many physical deformities. The males in
her family born after Japanese invasion are all possessing physical deformities, some are crippled
and some paralyzed. This is suggestive of the incapacitated Koreans who are silent under the
brutal rule of Japanese colonization.

The main theme of the novel is seen in the story of the character Noa Baek. Min Jin Lee
gives us bleak illustration of Japanese cruelty through the story of this eight-year-old boy. Noa
Baek’s dressing while going to school is totally different from when he is at home. He is seen
following the hairstyle and dress sense of the Japanese school boys. This is redolent of the
identity crisis faced by the colonizer when they are under the rule of colonized. Japanese people
colonized the minds of Koreans to such an extent that their personalities and individuality
became hybrid and ambivalent. The Korean kids are seen as unwashed dirty creatures who do
not study and roam around in streets all day long. While, Japanese kids are seen as clean and
educated. This is suggestive that the colonizer nation is more superior and has every right to
govern and educate the less educated colonized:

“Noa Baek was not like the other eight-year-olds in the neighborhood. Each morning
before he went to school, he’d scrub his face until his cheeks were pink, smooth three drops of
oil on his black hair, then comb it away from his forehead as his mother taught him to do. In his
clean, pressed clothes, Noa looked like a middle-class Japanese child from a wealthier part of
town, bearing no resemblance to the unwashed ghetto children outside his door.”
 Koreans were considered as uneducated bastards by the Japanese. Therefore, there was a
misconception that the Koreans would perform poorly in school. While, the brilliant minds will
always be that of Japanese. The Korean students were also treated as slaves and forced to indulge
in cleaning:

“Noa was strong in both arithmetic and writing: and he surprised the gym teacher with
his adept hand-eye coordination and running speed. After classes ended, he tided the shelves
and swept the classrooms and walked home alone.”

Noa is also forced to use a Japanese name for himself in school. This manifests the idea
of superiority of Japanese in the colonial reign. His father was forcefully taken to jail. During the
colonial reign, Japanese Empirical soldiers took Korean people by force. This act was done to
silence the voice of Korean natives so they will forever be the loyal servants to the Japanese
empire:

“God had allowed his gentle, kindhearted father to go to jail even though he had done
nothing wrong. For two years, God had not answered his prayers, though his father had
promised him that God listens very carefully to the prayers of children.”

The women were also a victim of the brutalization of Japanese. Korean women were forced to
work like slaves in factories, raped and abducted at times and often killed. The Japanese did so
again to show their power over Koreans. The Japanese government had ordered the military to
expand its so-called “comfort stations,” or military brothels, in an effort to prevent further
atrocities, reduce sexually transmitted diseases and ensure a steady and isolated group of
prostitutes to satisfy Japanese soldiers’ sexual appetites.  In the novel, Noa’s mother also
becomes a victim to these inhumane activities:

“Let’s squeeze her melons.” The tall one grabbed her left breast with his right hand. “Very nice
and full of juice. You want a bite?” He opened his mouth wide close to her breasts and muttered
“The yobo has really big tits. Japanese girls are delicate, not like these breeders.”

The title of the novel suggests the theme as well. Pachinko, a game of chance not skill, is
a rather curious Japanese amusement. It can best be described as a combination of pinball and a
slot machine. Players purchase small silver balls that they drop or launch into the vertical
pachinko machine. The balls bounce off pins and bumpers, and players hope the balls land in
cups or slots that will win them prizes or money. However, the game usually ends with the balls
dropping out the bottom of the machine, lost to the player forever. It is a type of gambling. Like
the pachinko balls themselves, the many generations of the Korean family in the novel bounce
off the pins and bumpers of life, without much say in the direction of their lives. Forces like
colonization, World War II, wealthy gangsters, and a prejudiced Japanese society exert control
over the characters’ fates. They are all left to circumstances beyond their control as they try to
scratch out an existence in a country that sees Koreans as dirty criminals not worthy of any status
in society. Even when some later generations of the family become wealthy and successful, they
are never truly part of Japanese society. By the end of the novel, it becomes apparent why the
pachinko business is run by Koreans. The Japanese themselves see it as a shadowy enterprise
often linked to gangsters. Thus, it is often the only place outsiders can find a toehold to earn a
livelihood.

Both of these novels advocate the colonial atrocities done by Japanese in Korea. The
sheer atrocities faced by Koreans left a deep mark on their lives, identity, nationalism and even
stained their history. Even today, South Korea grapples with the fallout of Japan’s brutal
occupation, it hasn’t forgotten its resistance. March 1—the day of the independence protest in
1919—is celebrated as a national holiday in South Korea, a reminder not just of the resilience of
the Korean people, but of the years of occupation they withstood.