South and North Koreans jointly marked the liberation of the Korean peninsula from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule for the first time with joint celebration festivities this week in Seoul.
However any mention of the dominant role played by the United States in making possible that occasion on Aug. 15, 1945, was strictly taboo at the 60th anniversary observances Monday.
Instead, the emphasis was on inter-Korean reconciliation.
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Gen. Douglas MacArthur arrives at Atsugi, Japan near Tokyo on Aug. 30, 1945.
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"We are celebrating our own independence, not the United States," said a young Korean, startled by the question. "The U.S. role in Korea is a different subject."
In North Korea, the official propaganda not only omits all mention of the U.S. role but also attributes the liberation of the Korean peninsula to guerrilla warfare led by the late Kim Il-Sung in northeastern China.
The fact that Kim Il-Sung spent most of the war in or near the Soviet city of Khabarovsk before returning to North Korea aboard a Soviet vessel in 1945 remains a deep, dark secret to North Koreans — and to most South Koreans as well.
Heightening the irony was that a joint committee from North and South Korea did find time to raise a sensitive historical topic, namely the distortion of history by the Japanese.
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An anti-U.S. military rally in Seoul on Aug. 8.
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The United States, however, was by no means forgotten on the anniversary.
Thousands of South Koreans demonstrated in central Seoul demanding the withdrawal of the 32,500 American soldiers remaining in South Korea while several thousand conservatives rallied nearby attacking the North Korean regime as the "enemy" of South Korea and the South Korean government for pursuing reconciliation with the North.
Neither the anti-American nor the pro-American protesters cited the U.S. victory over Japan as a factor in Korea's liberation, which became a fact on the day of the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship Missouri. The leadership of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in bringing about the surrender is also taboo in both South and North Korea. Protesters are demanding destruction of MacArthur's statue overlooking Incheon harbor where he ordered the invasion on Sept. 15, 1950, that dislodged North Korean troops from the South during the subsequent Korean War.
Furthermore, South Koreans blame the United States for not pressing hard enough to come to terms with North Korea at talks in Beijing on Pyongyang's nuclear program.
South Korea's unification minister, Chung Dong-Young, opposing the U.S. refusal to go along with nuclear energy for North Korea, said flatly: "The right to use nuclear energy peacefully" was "an issue about which agreement is possible through discussion and dialogue."
That remark left U.S. diplomats hemming and hawing, claiming that there were no differences between Seoul and Washington on the topic, but that the U.S. could not comment on South Korean comments. The U.S. chief negotiator, Christopher Hill, planning to return to Beijing for more talks at the end of this month, has insisted North Korea begin to dismantle its own nuclear weapons facilities before receiving any aid at all, much less the twin lightwater nuclear energy reactors promised under the 1994 Geneva framework agreement, now a dead issue as far as the U.S. is concerned.
North Korea, meanwhile, is making propaganda hay out of the anniversary of "liberation" from Japanese rule.
South Koreans are currently investigating the extensive professional and personal ties between Koreans and Japanese during the Japanese colonial period, from 1910 to 1945.
The chief of the North's preparation committee, An Kyong-Ho, said he felt as if "reunification is imminent" while visiting Seoul over the weekend. The North's Workers' Party paper, Rodong Sinmun, said the whole show would "help end the division of Korea and lead to peaceful reunification."
