Citation

Cha K. Korean studies of modern Chinese history 2010; 48: 1-30.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010)

DOI

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Abstract

In this research, the truth of the painful lives that the common people suffered in war areas during the Russo-Japanese war is to be revealed using the records of war experiences. In the first chapter, the records of war experiences are introduced and analyzed; in the second chapter, aspects including compulsory requisition of labor, rape, prostitution, damage from venereal disease, surging inflation and widespread contagious diseases. Records, diaries, letters written by war correspondents, soldiers, officers and laborers are used for the record of war experiences. More than half of the records of war experiences were written by Japanese people and rest of them are records of the Russo-Japanese War veterans, memoirs of Western missionaries who lived in China and news articles covering the war by war correspondents. By examining the compulsory requisition of labor, it was found that an enormous labor force was required to carry out various tasks simultaneously such as transportation of military supplies, telephone pole construction and railroad construction. The war broke out and immediately the Japan-Korea Protocol was made to prepare grounds to requisite laborers and supplies that were requested forcefully by mobilized local officials. The Japanese forcefully moved Korean laborers to Manchuria trashing them with a whip and they treated them like animals by marking a symbol or a letter on their faces or clothes to sort them in regiment. The Chinese people were compulsorily requisitioned as laborers by both Russia and Japan. Japan established military government offices in the occupied territory and commandeered an enormous labor force using the military government. To retrieve wages paid to Chinese laborers during the war period, Japan after raking their brains trying to devise a solution issued the lottery for the first time and successfully reclaimed money handed over to the Chinese people. Russia that occupied Manchuria requisitioned thousands or tens of thousands Chinese people to construct artillery forts and railroads, moved them to other areas, worked them like slaves and sometimes killed them in the end. It can be found all over in the records of experiences that both Russian and Japanese governments treated laborers in war areas like animals not human-beings. Women in war areas were exposed to such dangers like rape, human trafficking, prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases. A number of news articles about rape can be found in the records of war experiences as well as Korean or Chinese official documents and newspapers. According to numerous records, rape cases committed by Russian Cossack soldiers were so chaotically widespread in Korea and China that women were hard to be seen in war areas. Moreover, sex trafficking of women in Korea and Japan were rampant; noticeably, Russian soldiers sometimes committed human trafficking for themselves. Due to rape and chaotic prostitution, sexual transmitted diseases were so prevalent that the Japanese military authority had prostitute tested for STDs for fear of weakening military strength. In some areas, the environments where so-called comfort women who were forced into prostitution for the Japanese army during the Pacific War were generally put into had been already created at that time, e.g. tests for STDs, prostitution business dedicated to soldiers, policies to lower the price of sex, issuing an entrance permit of prostitution, and maintenance of the public order by the military police. Let's look back the situation where surging inflation and severe famine were prevalent. Even before the war broke out, both Russian and Japanese governments began to buy military supplies from China and Korea such as grains, cows and horses. As soon as the war broke out, inflation skyrocketed followed by lack of goods available, which made poor farmers and war refugees suffer from starvation. Furthermore, there was damage from drought, flood and hail in Korea due to anomaly climate and crop yields were not good during that period so orders to ban grain export were placed in Pyeongyang and Jendai. China faced similar situations as well. Especially, war refugees gathered in big cities like Liaoyang and on Shenyang and inflation in these areas surged two and three times and even five and six times. In those days of the war, dysentery, typhoid fever and scarlet fever were prevalent in Korea; smallpox, cholera, chickenpox and measles added to them were widespread in China. Specifically, the child mortality rate caused by smallpox was very high. Cholera was rampant in Russian during the war period and based on the fact that patients with cholera existed in Manchuria, it is highly possible that cholera must have been prevalent in Manchuria as well. As observed in the records of doctors served in the war, the existence of patients with unidentified diseases and quarantines established in different areas support the possibility. It is a subject that requires further research through collateral history and information in future.

Language: ko