(p.38)UTSUMI Aiko of Keisen University, Japan, conducted extensive research on Korean POW guards and found that more than 3,000 young Korean men were "recruited" (that is "press-ganged" or otherwise forced to "volunteer") for the prison guard corps. Many of [them] feared they would be shipped to Japan as indentured servants if they did not join the corps. Others were perhaps attracted by the high pay rates offered - 50 yen a month, a large amount at that time. [They] were classified as civilian employees rather than members of the military, and many hoped this status would prevent their transfer to the front line and ... allow them to be demobilized after their two-year contract was concluded. However, on joining, the new recruits were issued with uniforms, and their basic training was very much military in character, including weapons training. Despite the difference between the promise and the reality of the guard corps, few deserted, possibly because deserters were threatened with court-martial.
On the training and treatment of Korean guards in POW camps (page 39) The italics have been added:
So it is clear these guards were conned into joining the POW camp guard system, were brutalized, humiliated, stripped of their identity and demeaned, and then turned loose on the Allied prisoners in the camps. Having been trained in an intense atmosphere which stressed that savage physical violence could be inflicted on underlings anytime, anywhere, for any reason or for no reason at all, it's easy to see how they quickly came to see the defenceless Allied prisoners as "fair game".The Koreans were trained in Japanese and forbidden to use their native tongue. They were also given Japanese names in place of their Korean names. They were instructed to treat POWs as animals as a way of ensuring their fear and respect. They were trained primarily in the Japanese Field Service Code, and they were frequently beaten by Japanese officers, for no justifiable reason. The Geneva Convention was never mentioned. In other words they were trained as de facto Japanese soldiers, yet their rank of "kanshi-hei" (guard) was lower than that of a private, and there was no possibility of promotion. Clearly the Korean guards ... were treated as second-class soldiers within the forces, bound by the same iron discipline, yet enjoying none of the prestige accorded to Japanese soldiers. Indeed, one of their unstated functions ... was to give the Japanese soldiers someone to look down on, thus strengthening a sense of ethnic solidarity among the Japanese and minimizing the resentment felt by Japanese troops toward their officers.
Elsewhere in the book Tanaka (a researcher at Australian National University when this book was written) makes mention of a guard at the notorious Sandakan camp in Borneo who contradicted this code of conduct. He used to sabotage (more or less) the Japanese airstrip building work done by his prisoners. He was a Taiwanese (his adopted Japanese name was Toyoda) who routinely allowed the 35-40 POWs in his charge to stop work when no Japanese NCOs or officers were present, and who occasionally supplied them with fish and rice he bought with his own money from local villagers.
After the war Toyoda was sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment by the War Crimes Tribunal, but the sentence was reduced to 2 years when one of the 6 survivors of that camp made a submission to the tribunal describing his generosity.
And one last story related by Tanaka. Again it involved a Taiwanese guard assigned to Sandakan, but there is no reason to suppose Koreans in the POW camp system were not similarly affected by their treatment at the hands of their Japanese masters (although whether they reacted like this man did, I have no way of knowing). I mentioned this story - with fewer details - in another post a few days ago ("Japanese deserters"):
In early July 1945 (after the guards and POWS had left the Sandakan camp) a guard with the adopted Japanese name Nakamura was severely beaten by a Japanese officer for having a dirty rifle. A few days later Nakamura entered a hut where four Japanese officers - including the one who had beaten him - were housed. He fired his rifle at them and threw a hand grenade before turning the rifle on himself. The grenade failed to explode, but a 2nd-lieutenant was killed and a captain (the officer who had beaten Nakamura) and an NCO were wounded.
The captain was well enough to order punishment for all the Taiwanese guards the next day. Tanaka adds:
The brutality of the guards toward the POWs increased as a result.
