Gwangbokjeol (SoKor) Jogukhaebangui nal (NoKor)

The Koreas. They are my next-door neighbors now. Last month marked the double-six anniversary of the end of the Japanese colonial administration of Korea, and its partition into two political units as a result of the distance between the USSR and the United States in parceling out the spoils from Japan’s fallen empire, given that FDR died shortly after Yalta and Britain’s PM Churchill was on the way out after his conservatives were trounced by Atlee’s Labour Party.

I am presently teaching at Shenyang Aerospace University in Liaoning Province Dong Bei, northeast China. It was here where Zhongguo’s Qing Dynasty, the last of China’s royalty, maintained the Koreas in suzerainty, and before the Meiji restoration, Tokyo was referred to as Dongjing, the eastern city (Beijing, the northern city, and Nanjing, the southern city), as Hanoi was Dong Kinh, also an eastern city. Any conflict between N. Vietnam, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, non-Han Manchuria, Mongolia, and China is a quarrel within the same family.

The Koreas remain divided and though a huge segment of the South Korean population longs to be reunited with kin across the demilitarized zone, American military command over South Korea does not intend to end its stranglehold on the economic might of the region. Saber rattling continues to echo from the Pentagon. The latest came last week when in the middle of N. Korea’s famine and the need for foreign food assistance, we deigned to raise the fear specter another notch higher as we postured over Pyongyang’s alleged designs on nuclear energy and weapons of mass destruction.

This would not be so hypocritical were it not probable that the Kan’s premiership after the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear radiation suffered due to his alleged slowness to respond to the catastrophe, though the record will show that Japan’s Premier immediately announced deployment of national defense forces to the disaster area. It was restrained by the powerful energy lobby. The delay, according to a news weekly Japanese editor, was due to effluent coming out of one of the reactors being of weapon’s grade quality that could only have been the result of a discrete refinement process going on “illegally” under the purview of a nation sworn not to develop nuclear weapons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Might we add that an American corporation prominently in the business of producing armaments for the Pentagon is a partner in the Fukushima facility? It is part of the cozy arrangement between the post-WWII Japanese zaibatsu and the military-industrial complex that President Ike warned us about. The ¥en bankrolled the mighty dollar since the Korean War, supporting its slow descent into practical devaluation (monetary adjustment in U.S. political parlance) since the U.S. feds comfortably pegged it as the global medium of exchange, profiting over the use of its currency without actual concrete production, building the phantom wealth that is now the occasion of its internal collapse.

Why should this even be of any concern to folks in the Marianas? Well, Russians east of the Urals, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese are now the clients of our fledgling visitors’ industry. The historical crossroads of these ethnic groups happen to be the Manchurian plains and the Korean peninsula.

A little history. Japan prevailed over the Imperial Russian navy in the Yellow Sea in early 1900, an unthinkable feat that burst the invincible European supremacy bubble. Russia extended its trans-Siberian rail to Vladivostok but its port was only serviceable in the winter. Port Arthur (Dalian) in Manchuria was a year-round warm water port, so the Cossacks brought Byzantium to Songhuajiang in Harbin of Manchu land, the Qing dynasty’s homeland. Moscow ported in Liaoning’s warm water access to the Pacific until Japan and its favoring kamikaze triumphed over the Russian bear.

The Qing forbade the Hans south of the Great Wall from migrating to Manchuria, kept Korea a suzerain nation since the Jeoson Dynasty was in Jilin and Heilongjiang. Taking advantage of the weakened Qing in the Opium War against England and France, Japan took over Korea and the Qing ceded Formosa to sweeten the peace pot. Manchuria is north outside of China’s Great Wall so Japan treated it as a destination of its migrant population in the same way as the French treated Algeria down to Cote d’Ivoire in North Africa as fair game domain. Japan flexed its imperial muscles into a co-prosperity sphere in Asia.

We are establishing a historical perspective that says whatever quarrels abide between Japan, Korea, non-Han Manchuria and Nei Monggu, Tibet, Vietnam and Taiwan is a family affair. U.S. intrusion into Vietnam’s side of the South China Sea issue and SoKor in the Yellow Sea, not to mention our much heralded defense of Japan against Chinese aggression, the egging of Philippine nationalism v. China, our needling Xizang’s (Tibet) sovereignty and the militarization of Micronesia, serves imperial U.S. foreign policy interest first, along with the health of our military-industrial complex that pretty much run our homeland security focus and reluctantly revealed the rare earth mineral deposits in Afghanistan. Isn’t it time to give up on our imperial pretensions?

Fear, drummed up post-9/11, is our American export into the pocketbook and culture of the global economy, demonizing Saddam in our oil grab and chasing Gaddafi out of his golden caftans, along with isolating Kim Jong-Il (one-fourth of Korea is named Kim—Jin in Chinese—and we still don’t get it). From our Marianas view, it is better to view Russia and the U.S. as children of Europe vying on who takes care of Mama, and let the China-India yin-yang continue its familial interaction with the rest of Central and East Asia, and the Pacific.

Which brings us back to the Koreas. After 66 years, shouldn’t we let G.I. Joe leave Arirang alone and see if the Kims and the Paks, Chong and Kangs, can find the pivot point of their yin-yang? The CNMI might be better off in the process if we discover our interest lies in the ¥en, the ¥uan, and the won, as much as the ruble and the dollar.

Meanwhile, a belated Gwangbokjeol/Jogukhaebangui nal!