A lesser-known film by Kim Ki-young, The Sea Knows (1961) depicts the trials and tribulations of a young Korean student conscripted into the Japanese army. The film stands apart from the ground on which his signature psychological horror works—The Housemaid (1961), Woman of Fire (1971), and Insect Woman (1972)—are built. Moving away from the convoluted entanglements of human desire and monstrous criminal instincts, The Sea Knows turns instead to questions of war, loyalty, nationalism, democracy, individual freedom, and colonial oppression. A major hit upon its release in Seoul in 1961, the film was later overshadowed as Kim’s oeuvre became canonized around themes of rapid urbanization and its effects on modern city dwellers and their relationships. Yet, in retrospect, The Sea Knows may offer a crucial lens through which to understand contemporary Korean society, still marked by deep ideological polarization across politics, historical consciousness, and class.

The “sea” in The Sea Knows refers to the stretch of water in the Korea Strait known in Japanese as Genkai-nada and in Korean vernacular as Hyun-hae-tan, which separates Busan from Japan. Ferries regularly cross this route, carrying passengers from Busan to Japanese port cities such as Fukuoka in Kyushu. Today, the journey takes only about four hours by speedboat, covering a distance of roughly 180 kilometers, and remains a popular route for Korean travelers. Yet this passage is steeped in tragic historicity. During the colonial era, not only traders and migrant laborers but also conscripted students and those forced into labor in Japan crossed these waters. The route is thus heavily marked by the pains and oppressions of that period. In this sense, the title The Sea Knows carries layered meanings, evoking a collective memory of national hardship inscribed onto the geography itself.

Criticisms from Without

The protagonist, Aro-un, crosses this sea to Nagoya as a conscript in the Japanese army. The setting is 1944, already imbued with a foreboding sense of a war turning toward defeat. As a college student, he belongs to an educated elite—English-speaking and capable of handling modern machinery such as automobiles. Upon arrival at the barracks in Nagoya, however, he is confronted with the naked face of Japanese nationalism and imperial ambition, expressed through everyday acts of racism against Koreans. Mori, a low-ranking officer, subjects Aro-un to repeated physical abuse, justifying it as an efficient method of instilling the “spirit” of the Japanese army in a Korean recruit. This violence is accompanied by the constant refrain of the army’s “fifty-year tradition,” revealing a form of collective madness driven by national pride and militaristic discipline.

Alongside this brutal pragmatism stands Miyamoto, the company commander, whose belief in Japanese superiority takes on a more symbolic and almost mystical dimension. He is obsessed with the spiritual and physical power of the Japanese long sword, convinced that it embodies the essence of the nation. When faced with challenges, he theatrically brandishes or flings the sword, as if to assert that any obstacle before him will inevitably yield. These two figures represent dual aspects of wartime ideology: on the one hand, the coercive force that disciplines bodies into a unified national direction; on the other, the mythic belief system—here condensed in the image of the sword—that sustains and legitimizes that force.

Aro-un is positioned in clear opposition to this ideological formation. As a colonized subject and outsider, he emerges as a staunch critic of a collective mindset that pushes humanity toward inevitable destruction. Under Mori’s sadistic regime of violence and Miyamoto’s anachronistic faith in Japanese superiority, Aro-un maintains a commitment to values such as freedom, individuality, equality across cultures and ethnicities, and a sense of shared humanity. Even at the cost of his physical well-being, he distances himself from this vortex of madness by holding onto a rational and ethical stance. Crucially, his position as a bearer of such democratic values is inseparable from his marginal status: his critique is directed outward, against aggressors who have violated his territorial, political, and historical integrity.

This division between “us” and “them”—structured along axes such as liberal versus autocratic, democratic versus oppressive, and individualistic versus collectivist—appears morally clear within the film’s wartime setting. Yet such a binary, as later Korean history suggests, proves far less stable. The same framework would resurface, with disruptive consequences, in the political realignments of the 1990s, when the question of pro-Japanese collaboration re-emerged to unsettle established narratives of national identity.

 

Criticisms from Within

Here again, we encounter the dual structure of wartime ideology: the coexistence of brute violence and a belief in spiritual superiority. Yet Oshima pushes this critical insight further, probing not only the external operations of this system but also its internal psychic dimensions.

The arrival of Major Jack Celliers, played by David Bowie, unsettles this ideological and emotional equilibrium. Captain Yonoi’s carefully maintained balance—between pride, duty, order, and responsibility—begins to fracture as he becomes increasingly drawn to Celliers. This attraction carries a distinctly homoerotic charge, transforming Celliers into both an object of desire and an embodiment of Yonoi’s ideal of perfection. Yonoi’s fixation on form, discipline, and spiritual elevation—visibly manifested in his immaculately groomed appearance, body-contouring uniform, tightly fastened leather belt, and knee-high black boots—finds, perhaps for the first time, a living counterpart in another human body.

In this sense, Yonoi’s attraction to Celliers exceeds mere desire; it opens onto a deeper register of his mentality, and by extension, that of the Japanese war apparatus itself. Oshima begins with what appears to be a third-person account of Japanese wartime mentality, observed from the position of its victims. He then moves inward, suggesting that beneath the violent drive for domination and assertions of ethnic superiority lies a form of self-obsession—one that borders on a narcissism charged with repressed homoerotic desire. As a voice of criticism from within Japan, Oshima thus turns the gaze inward, exposing not only the mechanisms of power but also the fragile, conflicted psyche that sustains them.

 

Projection of Hate

Both The Sea Knows and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence offer critical reflections on imperial colonialism and war as violent manifestations of deeper internal dynamics. Yet the two films adopt distinct vantage points: one from the position of the colonized, the other from within the imperial center. While The Sea Knows clearly operates through a divisive structure of self and other, each aligned with opposing value systems, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence complicates such a bifurcation, turning inward to dissect the psychological and ideological underpinnings of wartime mentality.

In the Korean context, however, this very framework resurfaces decades later—no longer directed outward at a foreign aggressor, but turned inward, fracturing the postcolonial nation itself. It is in the political upheavals of the 1990s that this unresolved tension re-emerges with particular force.

In the 1990s, a new government was formed, drawing on the ideological shift made possible through the democratization movement of the 1980s. In the wake of this political transition, competing factions increasingly mobilized the memory of Japanese colonialism as a means of establishing moral legitimacy. One of the most potent rhetorical strategies was the invocation of “pro-Japanese” collaboration to characterize political opponents, at times extending to slurs such as “indigenous Japanese pirates,” which condensed historical resentment into a readily deployable political label. Such labeling did not merely function as historical critique but operated as a powerful mechanism of moral polarization, effectively positioning one side as aligned with national resistance and the other with the legacy of colonial subjugation.

This discursive structure bears a striking resemblance to the moral divisions articulated in The Sea Knows, where the line between aggressor and victim is sharply drawn and ethical clarity emerges through opposition. However, when transposed into the postcolonial political field, this binary no longer maps neatly onto external domination. Instead, it is redeployed within the nation itself, where the distinction between “us” and “them” collapses into a more unstable and troubling formulation: “the other” embedded in the collective “us.“

In this sense, what emerges is a projection of moral indignation—once directed at the Japanese colonial rulers—onto competing political factions within Korea. The result is not a consolidation of collective identity, but its fragmentation, as historical memory is instrumentalized in the struggle for contemporary political authority. This, however, is only part of a broader dynamic. A fuller account would also require examining the parallel force of anti–North Korea stigma, whose historical formation and political function would require a separate discussion.