Just before daybreak on a rainy summer morning last July, three large trucks pulled up to the gates of an outdoor sculpture museum south of Seoul with some unusual passengers. The trucks were carrying 70 wooden crates: inside, carefully wrapped in felt, lay the statues of 65 Korean scholars, one warrior and four children. Elegant, stylized figures chiseled from blocks of gray granite hundreds of years ago, they once stood guard over the tombs of Korea’s royal families. But the statues had not been seen in Korea for half a century. Most of them had disappeared during Japan’s occupation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. That morning, with dawn breaking and the skies clearing, workers reverentially pried open the first box. Before cranes pulled out the initial statue, curator Brian Jang and the museum’s director spread out a straw mat and bowed low to the ground twice. Jang was choked with emotion. “It was like welcoming back ancestors who had been taken away to Japan by force,” says Jang. “We had finally brought them back.”
The return of the stone sculptures was cause for celebration: Mamoru Kusaka, the Japanese businessman who owned them, had decided they rightfully belonged in Korea. But Koreans are acutely aware of how much of their cultural patrimony remains in exile. From the late 19th century until Japan’s defeat in World War II, Japanese colonial officials and private collectors amassed at least 100,000 artifacts and cultural treasures from all corners of the Korean peninsula. Japanese looters and government-sponsored archaeologists violated the tombs of Korea’s Kings and Queens, plundering finely worked gold jewelry, jade pendants and delicate celadon bowls. They carted off stone carvings, pagodas and priceless reliquary caskets from Buddhist temples and removed tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts from libraries. The choicest booty was often bestowed on the Emperorlike the prized blue celadon ceramics found only in the tombs of the Koryo dynasty nobility around Kaesong . Ancient pots and spears and the like disappeared into storerooms and collections at Japan’s biggest universities. Soon after the Japanese left, a young Korean National Museum official named Hwang Su Young went to Kaesong and surveyed the damage. “I saw tombs that were empty and destroyed,” Hwang, now 83, says angrily. “People came up to me and said, ‘They threatened me with guns and dug up my ancestors’ tomb.'”
More than 50 years after the end of World War II, governments and museums in the West are grappling with the legacy of Nazi art looting and are working to restore many treasures to their rightful owners. But the story of Japan’s plunder of Asia and in particular of Korea, where the worst abuses occurred, remains relatively unexplored. While conspiracy theories of hidden troves of gold looted by the Japanese abound, there has been little serious research into the issue of stolen art and artifacts. “It’s a wide open area,” says John Dower, a professor of history at M.I.T. and author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. “This one got truly buried.”
One reason for the burial: postwar discussions of Japanese cultural restitution were rapidly superseded by political considerations. A key opponent of Japanese restitution was General Douglas MacArthur, head of the U.S. occupation government in Tokyo after the war. In a transcript of a confidential May 1948 radio message that TIME has uncovered in the U.S. National Archives, MacArthur told the Army: “I am in most serious disagreement even with the minority view on the replacement of cultural property lost or destroyed as a result of military action and occupation.” MacArthur’s opposition had nothing to do with the legal, ethical or moral rightness of restitution claims but with immediate U.S. policy goals and growing cold war fears. Such a course would, according to MacArthur, “embitter the Japanese people toward us and render Japan vulnerable to ideological pressure and a fertile field for subversive action.”
Russia, China and Japan all jousted for control of the Korean peninsula at the end of the 19th century. After beating both countries on the battlefield, Japan made Korea a protectorate in 1905 before annexing it in 1910. The military had a dominant role from the start, running the country like a boot camp. Big business zaibatsu, or conglomerates, also became key players as Japan turned the colony into an industrial base, gearing up for war with China in the late 1930s. While some Koreans joined rebel groups, Japan’s overwhelming grip on the country subdued most resistance. Some of the Elite openly collaborated with the new rulers. But Koreans of every standing were second-class citizens, powerless to stop the official and unofficial looting of the nation.
