COLUMN ONE : Can Korea Break Free of Japan? : The peninsula’s people want to jettison all traces of the brutal colonial rule that ended in 1945. But from business to language to works of art, the two Asian nations are too thoroughly entwined.

MOKCHON, South Korea —  Oh Chol Hwang beholds the handcuffs and fetters, the clubs and swords, the gruesome wax dolls depicting Japanese military police torture techniques and declares himself a witness to history.

“All these things I saw here today, I experienced myself,” says Oh, 79, as he recalls life under Japan’s 35-year colonial subjugation during a recent visit to South Korea’s Independence Museum southwest of Seoul. “No matter how much the Japanese try to deny it, they can’t erase the memories of Koreans.”

The memories remain vivid for Lee Hyo Chae as well. A leading activist on behalf of Korean women forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers, Lee says her Christian father was hung upside-down and water--spiked with red pepper--was fed through his nose because he refused to bow to Japan’s Shinto gods.

Lee was investigated for writing a nationalistic poem; her high school classmates were arrested for the crime of secretly studying the Korean language and history--activities banned by the colonial rulers.

“I don’t have any memory of an innocent, happy childhood,” says Lee, 71. “It was hell.”

The Japanese colonialists are long gone, swept out in 1945 by their defeat in World War II. But the long shadow of their legacy still colors the national consciousness. Fifty years after Korea’s liberation, the Japanese still provoke anguished memories, fiery debate--and efforts to purge all remaining colonial traces, such as the ritual destruction of the old Japanese headquarters in Seoul scheduled for next month.

But as public attention centers on the lingering colonial legacy, many Koreans are confronting a jarring reality: It will not be enough to simply knock down a building to release the grip of their former rulers. The Japanese influence permeates virtually all aspects of Korean society--language and music, art and politics, education and business. And because the societies have become so entwined--through everything from Korean migration to Japan in the 4th Century to a Japanese pipeline of technology to Korea today--some say trying to separate the two is futile.

Western Modernization

Just as Korea introduced ancient Chinese learning to Japan centuries ago, Japan funneled Western modernization to Korea beginning in the late 19th Century. In the same way that purging Japan of Korean influence would rob it of everything from early temple architecture to pottery techniques, analysts say cleansing Korea of Japanese legacies would effectively eliminate its modern systems of business, government and the like.

“It’s very sad for ordinary Koreans, but Korea started its modernization mainly under Japanese colonial rule,” said one Japanese official in Seoul. “Fundamentalists insist on changing this, but if they abolished all the legacies, their system could not function.”

Many Koreans seem to agree. In a recent poll by the Joong Ang Daily News, 88.8% of those polled said colonial legacies remained, with government and politics the top area influenced.

The complex relationship between the two neighbors has spanned more than 16 centuries, beginning with Koreans’ early migration to Japan. Many scholars here--and a few in Japan--believe Korea provided one ethnic source for the Japanese people, the root of Japan’s Shinto religion, myriad Japanese art and cultural forms, and even Japan’s imperial family.

But, in what Koreans view as a bitter betrayal of their goodwill, Japan sent back pirate raids in the 13th Century and a military invasion attempt in the 16th Century. Finally, Japan colonized the sovereign kingdom from 1910 to 1945 in a struggle with Russia and China for influence over the strategically located Korean peninsula.

Despite the similarities in language and culture, which could lay the foundation for a rich symbiotic relationship, the long history of conflict has left deep grudges. The inability to resolve stubborn differences may ultimately stand as the greatest legacy of the history between these two countries so close and yet so far apart, said Fukuju Unno, a specialist in Korean studies at Meiji University in Tokyo.

“If we can’t resolve these problems now, we won’t ever be able to resolve them,” Unno said. “This is our last chance.”

To many Koreans, the biggest obstacle to a new friendship is what they view as unforgivable Japanese denials of their past.

Even memories as harsh as Lee’s pale compared to eyewitness accounts written by such observers as Frederick McKenzie, a correspondent for the Daily Mail of London dispatched to Korea in 1904. In the book “Korea’s Fight for Freedom,” he details the terror of an unbridled police state that beat, tortured and killed Koreans at will, with techniques almost unimaginable in their cruelty.

The Japanese took the best Korean lands, stole national treasures and denied people all freedoms--regulating their lives down to the color of clothing they could wear and the ways they could spend their own money, he wrote.

While McKenzie credited the Japanese with reforming the Korean currency, extending roads and rails, developing agriculture, improving sanitation and developing new industries, the British journalist wrote that the Japanese colonial rule, marked by contempt and cruelty, ranked as “one of the greatest failures of history.”

Japanese prime ministers have not come close to acknowledging such reported atrocities, but they have made a succession of ever-more explicit apologies to Korea. In 1993, Morihiro Hosokawa was the first to squarely apologize for such specific practices as forcing women to serve as sex slaves, men to toil as laborers and all Koreans to adopt Japanese names and speak the Japanese language.

Murayama’s Apology

This week, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama went one step further by announcing he would send letters of apology to each woman forced into sexual servitude, as well as inaugurating a semi-private “friendship fund” aimed at raising the equivalent of $22.7 million to aid Asian women victimized by Japan’s war deeds.

Likewise, Japanese educators have made considerable progress in improving their textbook treatments of the colonial period, which generally had been whitewashed.

Newly approved sixth-grade textbooks, for instance, not only teach that Japan took Korean land, forced Koreans to speak Japanese and hurt their pride. For the first time, one book introduces Japan’s bloody suppression of Korea’s 1919 independence movement of thousands of unarmed patriots, while another states: “Among Japanese, the view toward apologizing to Koreans and Chinese has spread.”

Widely praised by Koreans at the time, such gestures seem largely forgotten. They were neutralized by other acts, such as the recent failure by the Japanese Parliament’s upper house to pass a war apology resolution and by former Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe’s claim that the 1910 treaty formally handing Korea to Japan as a colony was “peacefully” and legitimately concluded.

Koreans argue the treaty was illegally foisted on a resistant King Kojong and affixed with a phony royal seal. Watanabe’s statement provoked Korean students to hurl a firebomb at the Japanese Cultural Center in Seoul--and reignited suspicions of Japan’s sincerity.

Many Koreans also reject the Japanese assertion that, evil as their rule was, it did contribute to modernizing society. Park Gol Sun, the Independence Museum’s chief researcher, said Korea would have modernized anyway, and the Japanese infrastructure only hastened the ransacking of their land.

And, despite Murayama’s announcement, few Koreans seem mollified by the “friendship fund.”

“No one in Korea wants money,” said Chi Ik Pyo, an attorney who is aiming to nullify the 1910 treaty and declare Japan’s colonization illegal. “We are trying to get the Japanese government to issue a sincere apology so we can join hands to build a future together.”

But so long as the Japanese continue to deny their deeds, Koreans are not about to openly welcome their continued legacies, activists here say.

“Eradication of the legacies of Japanese imperialism is meant not only to abolish the shameful past history, but also . . . to rehabilitate the national spirit,” said Chung Woon Hyon, a journalist and contributor to a new collection of essays, “The 19 Legacies of Japanese Imperialism.”

Removing all traces of colonial influence, however, is a Gargantuan task. Despite Japan’s relatively short formal rule--just 35 years in a 5,000-year history--it occurred at a critical moment: as Korea was just beginning to move toward modernization. Japan itself had recently opened after three centuries of isolation and began sharing with Korea its newly acquired Western technology.

The Japanese trained Korean soldiers and scientists, bureaucrats and educators. Many became leading figures--ranging from former president Park Chung Hee, who attended a Japanese military school, to the head of the Samsung business conglomerate, who studied at Waseda University in Tokyo and built his early business around joint ventures with Japanese partners.

A Cruel Irony

In what many Koreans regard as a cruel historical irony, the Japanese-trained officials retained their positions of influence even after World War II. Postwar Korean President Syngman Rhee found he needed their expertise, while the United States preferred the conservative colonial-trained officials to leftists and socialists, scholars here say.

Japan has also vastly influenced the Korean language. The Japanese modernizers introduced a host of concepts that did not exist in Korea and, as a result, also supplied the vocabulary of technical words needed to describe them, said Chung Dae Kyun, an associate professor of humanities at Tokyo Metropolitan University. Words ranging from export to auto to corporation are Japanese words rendered into Korean pronunciation.

Thanks to a “cultural cleansing” movement, Korea has excised from its public documents many of the Chinese characters with which it wrote the Japanese words. But the words now written in the Korean alphabet are still originally Japanese, he said.

Worse than the language, some say, is the influence over the Korean artistic soul, as reflected in music, poetry and literature.

The melodies and rhythms of Korean traditional song and Japanese enka are similar, appalling those who can’t stomach sharing common musical sensibilities with their erstwhile oppressors.

The Japanese also served as Korea’s model for an education system characterized by cram schools and rote memorization. After the war, Americans introduced liberal arts education, creating what Korea University professor Man Gil Kang called a “mixed-up” system.

This year, however, officials unveiled what could be far-reaching reforms to encourage more creativity in the schools--and to further weaken Japanese influences in favor of Western-style education.

After the war, bright Korean scholars and bureaucrats chose to study in the United States rather than Japan, weakening Japanese influence. “There is a tug of war between U.S.-trained economists and bureaucrats and the legacy of the Japanese administration,” said one Japanese official in Seoul.

Economically, however, the Japanese have always served as Korea’s most powerful model--and still do. The Korean family business grouping known as chaebol , which served as the engine of the nation’s spectacular postwar industrial growth, is based on Japan’s zaibatsu , or interlocking business conglomerates. The word chaebol , in fact, is the Korean pronunciation for zaibatsu , experts here say.

Today, Japan is Korea’s top foreign investor and biggest supplier of technology, responsible for 50% of the 8,766 technologies introduced between 1965 and 1993, the Korean government reported last year.

But as Koreans gain confidence as a rising Asian power--and acquire more personal exposure to Japan, thanks to loosened travel restrictions--some say the lingering legacies should be ultimately seen as simply another example of a shared heritage.

“Many legacies have become part of our lives, so I don’t think it’s necessary to remove all of them,” South Korean Foreign Ministry official Shim Yoon Joe said.

Still, reconciling the neighbors--and the conflicting Korean sentiments of hatred and respect toward the Japanese--will never be easy.

A 1994 poll of Korean youths showed that 49% believed the nation should be wary of Japan, while 61% believed it should learn from Japan.

In Pagoda Park, Ahn Yong Ho, 75, recalled shaking hands goodby with his Japanese colleagues at a pharmaceutical firm when they left Korea in 1945. “They said, ‘We’ll meet in 20 years,’ and, sure enough, they rose up again,” Ahn said. “We must admit they are more advanced than us and learn from their spirit of unity.”

But as he spoke, a mob surrounded him. “Don’t praise the Japanese!” one man shouted angrily. “That kind of statement brings contempt on Koreans!”

Ahn shrank back, silenced. His desire to see his nation let the past go was put off to another, distant day.

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau and Megumi Shimizu of the Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.