Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and then with Russia in 1904–5 over control of Korea. Throughout its history, Korea has attempted to fend off foreign invasions, driving away Westerners, ignoring Japan, and maintaining lukewarm ties to China, earning its moniker “the hermit kingdom.” However, as nations sought markets and hegemony in the nineteenth century, this imperialist impulse added to Korea’s own domestic problems. Peasant rebellions, soldier revolts, intellectual ferment, and failed attempts at reform led to the peninsula’s eventual colonization by Japan from 1910 to 1945.
The United States helped lay the groundwork for the Japanese annexation of Korea in the second year of the Russo-Japanese War, when President Theodore Roosevelt recognized Japan’s domination of Korea in the secret Taft-Katsura Agreement of July 1905, in part to check Russian expansionism and to gain Tokyo’s recognition of U.S. control of the Philippines. Roosevelt’s entrusting Japan to take control of Korea reflected his overall favorable impression of the country. For the U.S. president, Japan, with its evident modernization, representative Diet, written constitution, and military mettle, was superior among the Asians. Roosevelt went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his role in mediating the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War but ushered in four decades of brutal Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula.
The crucible of Japanese domination of Korea and the ensuing Japanese quest for military and political domination of East Asia gave rise to Kim Il Sung.
THE BIRTH AND ASCENT OF A GUERRILLA
North Korea’s Eternal President was born Kim Song Ju—Kim Il Sung was his nom de guerre—in Pyongyang, just two years after annexation by Japan in 1910. His father, Kim Hyong Jik, was born in 1894 during the last throes of the Joseon dynasty and before Korea succumbed to foreign powers; he married Kim’s mother, Kang Pan Sok, when he was fifteen years old and she was seventeen.
Like many other Koreans who railed against Japanese colonialism, Kim Hyong Jik joined the independence movement and was punished for his activism. His son would witness both his beloved father and his uncle go to jail for their nationalist activities and suffer the effects of their incarceration. Kim recalled his first visit to the prison, “a place of death and deadly venom.” He hardly recognized his father; every visible part of his body was swollen and bruised. Profoundly affected by the sight, Kim wrote in his memoir that seeing his father in prison was one of the most significant moments of his life, and that the “scars and wounds on Father’s body pained me physically and I swore to get even with the Japanese devils, that were not human beings at all, but Satan.” To honor the patriarch of the family, Kim swore to “give his all to the struggle to liberate the country at any cost.”
Given the political and economic environment of the time, Kim’s parents had short, difficult lives—his father died at thirty-one and his mother at forty. They left little money to support their children. But whatever legitimate connection the Kims had to the nationalist and revolutionary fervor of the time, their son amplified their roles and that of his entire lineage; for example, he claimed that his great-grandfather had participated in the fight to repel the ill-fated U.S. merchant ship General Sherman, which was attacked and destroyed in Pyongyang in 1866 when it attempted to open the country to trade, and that his grandfather had fought against imperial Japan.
Although Kim Il Sung’s image and history have been polished and embellished in the regime’s hagiography, by all objective accounts he was a bona fide Korean nationalist fighter, a ruthless killer of the hated Japanese, one of several leaders who gained fame and followers during that fraught period in Korea’s history. He earned his reputation as an efficient killer of Japanese police and soldiers in Manchuria, which had been occupied since 1931. During the 1930s and ’40s, he led guerrilla bands of fifty to three hundred men through hot and humid summers and icy, brutally cold winters. Kim and his brigade of Chinese and Koreans reportedly killed the leader of the Japanese Special Police, who had been trying to track him down in Manchuria, along with scores of Japanese officers and other law enforcement personnel.
The historian Bruce Cumings has noted that Kim “represented a younger generation of revolutionary nationalists filled with contempt for the failures of their fathers and determined to forge a Korea that could resist foreign domination.” In his memoir of more than two