“We Did Not Know”

An actress spoke fondly of her great-grandfather on television. He had opened the first Western-style clinic in the capital, she said, and had treated Emperor Gojong. It was the ordinary pride of someone who loves her family.

Days later his name was found on the 1916 roster of Daejeong Chinmokhoe, a pro-Japanese association of Korean notables, along with a record of him boasting to the colonial government's own paper of how thoroughly he had assimilated. It was August, in the days before Liberation Day.

History always demands a decision, and cruelly, it asks who will answer for it. But the person called to answer this time made no decision at all. She took pride in something that happened before she was born, and when she learned the truth, she apologised.

So the questions remain.

We did not live in that time. Can we then pass judgment on the choices made in it?

No one would call it right that the descendants of those who complied are comfortable while the descendants of those who resisted are not. Nor is it easy to say that a child should spend a life in atonement for inherited wealth alone.

This contradiction cannot be what history wanted.

She has said she did not know. Her agency first called the reports groundless, then confirmed the name was indeed on the roster and apologised for that answer.

Whether to believe her is each reader's own judgment. It may well be, though, that it was hard to know. Her great-grandfather appears neither among the 4,389 names in the Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators nor on the state-certified list of 1,006. To this day there is no official service where either can be searched online for free.

Who knew and who did not will never be settled. But the responsibility for leaving it unknowable is not in question. That is ours.

What we may ask of descendants, then, is not an apology. The dead cannot apologise, and the living cannot repay a crime they did not commit.

That does not mean nothing can be done. Guilt is charged to a person; property is charged to unjust enrichment. This December the Collaborators' Property Investigation Committee reopens after sixteen years, and this time it will trace even the proceeds of assets descendants have already sold on. A way to demand accountability without judging a person already exists.

Of a person, then, only one thing remains.

History does not demand judgment. It demands a record.

Judgment has a statute of limitations. A record does not. The best we can do is to ensure that the next generation, faced with the same question, will not have to say they did not know.