For my "History of Modern Asia" class we had to read "Lost Names" by Richard E. Kim. I thought it was a fantastic book, but I read a review on amazon that stated that the book is "revisionist nonsense" and that the Koreans were never forced to change their family names to Japanese names.
Was the book, which is fiction, making this facet of the occupation up? Was there a conscious effort by the Japanese to erase Korean culture?
Thank you!
I've touched on this in the past, specifically in the context of language policy in Occupied Korea. While I can't speak to the accuracy of the rest of the book (having never read it and probably not being qualified enough to do so anyway), I can at least say that yes, there absolutely was a push for Koreans to adopt Japanese names. This also occurred to some extent in Japanese Occupied Taiwan as well. In Korea, the official order came in 1939 under the so-called Name Order (sōshi-kaimei 創氏改名), headed by Governor-General Minami Jirō (南 次郎), which made adopting Japanese names a requirement. This was actually a reversal of a 1911 law that forbade Koreans from adopting Japanese names that might cause them to be mistaken as Japanese themselves.
Your review which says this never happened is quite off base.
From 1940, all government employees, families with children in school, and others affiliated with the state were more or less pressured to adopt new Japanese names. Eventually, about 84 percent of Koreans complied and adopted new names. (Buzo, cited below).
Was the book, which is fiction, making this facet of the occupation up?
No. It's not revisionist history to say that the occupying forces tried to force Koreans to change their names. They weren't 100% successful, but 84% is still quite significant.
Was there a conscious effort by the Japanese to erase Korean culture?
It most certainly was, and a well documented effort as well. It only lasted a few years before Japan was effectively expelled from the peninsula, and in 1946 it was put into law that Koreans could undo the name change. But even just in that short time a large majority of Koreans did end up taking Japanese names due to this policy.
If you can read Japanese (or Chinese characters otherwise) there's actually a website that lists a lot of the common name changes where the existing Korean surname was converted to a Japanese version, rather than an alternative which was adopting a completely unrelated surname. Some transcribed examples below:
Those are just a few examples from the link above. Again not everyone who changed their name followed these patterns, but many did. Other may have gone by geographical descriptors, or something completely different that they preferred for other reasons. There's more on this, in the form of personal accounts of those involved as well as other examples of name changes (pp.120-122), in Kang's Under the Black Umbrella. She writes:
The government stopped issuing permits and postmen stopped delivering packages to those with Korean names. However, many Koreans built into their new names some ingenious reflection of their Korean name, home- town, or a significant family attribute. (Kang, cited below)
As an aside: It really gets my goat when reviewers choose to criticise historical in/accuracies and make claims that something is revisionist without first making the effort to read up on the history to make sure. I rely on reviews a lot when approaching new books, but in cases like this I'm left feeling a little betrayed.
edit: Is the review you were originally referring to the one on Amazon.com? I got curious and went looking. If so, you can ignore that. The reviewer is twisting the numbers and timeline to suit his argument. Whether he's done so intentionally or is just mistaken I can't say. But I can say you shouldn't take his review that seriously. He himself says in a reply that you'd need to be an expert in history to make statements about the history, but I don't believe he means that about himself as much as those disagreeing with him. His review is what is revisionist. I'm glad it was an Amazon review and not an journal review, which is what I was bummed about above. I almost never go with Amazon reviews for anything close to nonfiction.
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