Written by Kim from All About K-Content
The controversy surrounding actress Ha Young began with a family story that drew attention: four generations of doctors, including a great-grandfather who had studied Western medicine in Japan.
Then historical records concerning her great-grandfather, physician Ahn Sang-ho, began circulating, including his involvement in organizations associated with Japanese colonial rule and records concerning his substantial landholdings.
As explained in Part 1, there is currently no proof that Ha Young’s present-day wealth came from land Ahn received as a reward for collaboration. Nor should Ha Young be considered guilty of actions carried out by an ancestor who died decades before she was born.
But the controversy exposed a much older Korean argument.
What happens when historical guilt dies with a person, but property and privilege do not?
That question explains why pro-Japanese collaborators (친일파, chinilpa) remain such an emotionally powerful subject in South Korea more than 80 years after liberation.
Chinilpa Was Never Only About Political Beliefs
Korea was formally under Japanese colonial rule from 1910 until Japan’s surrender in August 1945, although Japan’s political and economic encroachment had begun years earlier.
Colonial rule required more than Japanese officials.
Korean police officers, bureaucrats, businessmen, landowners, intellectuals and local elites participated in the system to varying degrees.
This is where historical discussions can become overly simplistic.
Not every Korean who held a job under Japanese rule can reasonably be placed in the same category. Living under colonial rule inevitably meant interacting with colonial institutions.
Historians therefore distinguish between ordinary participation in colonial society and more active forms of collaboration: helping suppress independence activists, advocating assimilation into the Japanese Empire, receiving titles or benefits from Japan, assisting wartime mobilization or using political connections with the colonial government for personal advancement.
The word chinilpa is most relevant when it refers to that latter group.
And the anger is not simply about what those individuals believed or did.
It is also about what some of them received.
Colonialism Changed the Rules Around Land and Wealth
Land is especially important to understanding this debate.
Beginning before annexation and continuing through the 1910s, Japan reorganized Korea’s system of land ownership. The colonial government's nationwide Land Survey Project converted the previous landscape of ownership, cultivation and customary rights into a more standardized system of formally registered property.
That produced cadastral records, clarified some property claims and created a more systematic basis for taxation.
It was also a politically charged project of modernization, being carried out by a colonial state reorganizing Korean land according to a legal system designed for its own administration.
Many existing private ownership claims were recognized. At the same time, some customary cultivation and reclamation rights did not fit neatly into the new system of exclusive ownership. Disputes also arose over land classified as state property, while older forms of public, communal and overlapping rights became more difficult to maintain.
The result was not one simple process of seizure. It was a fundamental change in the legal rules governing land under an unequal colonial system.
Japanese companies and settlers subsequently acquired considerable amounts of Korean land through a mixture of state transfers, purchases and participation in the colonial economy. The powerful Oriental Development Company became one of the best-known examples.
None of this means that every wealthy Korean landowner during the colonial period obtained his property illegally.
Some inherited land. Some purchased it. Some operated businesses successfully within the colonial economy. Others benefited directly from their political relationship with the Japanese state.
The difficult question after 1945 was determining which was which.
Unfortunately, South Korea largely failed to answer that question in a timely manner when the evidence and people involved were still readily available.
Korea Did Try to Punish Collaborators After Liberation
The idea that South Korea simply pardoned chinilpa from the beginning is not quite accurate.
After the Republic of Korea was established in 1948, the National Assembly passed the Anti-National Activities Punishment Act and created the Special Investigation Committee on Anti-National Activities, better known in Korean as the 반민특위 (Banmin Teukwi).
Its mission was extraordinary: investigate Koreans accused of collaborating with Japanese imperial rule and bring appropriate cases to trial.
The committee began arresting prominent figures.
Among them was Noh Deok-sul, a former colonial police officer accused of brutally torturing Korean independence activists. After liberation, however, Noh had joined the police establishment of the new, democratic South Korean state.
His arrest was therefore about more than one former colonial policeman.
It exposed a larger contradiction: some of the very people the new republic wanted to investigate for serving Japanese colonial rule had already become influential members of its current police and security apparatus.
That put the committee on a collision course with President Syngman Rhee.
Rhee argued that experienced police officers were needed to fight communist forces and repeatedly pushed back against the committee’s activities. After Noh’s arrest, Rhee demanded his release and publicly attacked the committee’s authority.
“We are now at the very beginning of building our nation, and we must devote even greater effort to the work that lies ahead. Rather than allowing ourselves to be bound by the past and letting it become an obstacle to the future, we should renew the spirit of the people by clearing away the unresolved faults of the past…” (Rhee Syngman, January 10, 1949)
To outsiders, this may have appeared to be a simple rallying call for the nation to build itself up through greater unity. For the Korean people, however, this was nothing more than Rhee's gathering of political aides at the expense of turning a blind eye to the colonial "past".
The Police Raided the Investigators
Early that morning, armed police entered the Banmin Teukwi headquarters.
Committee personnel were detained. Members of its special police unit were disarmed and taken away. Its ability to conduct investigations was badly damaged.
This was not merely an unfortunate confrontation between competing government agencies.
After the raid, President Rhee publicly stated that the police action had been carried out on his instructions.
Committee investigators resigned soon afterward, and the institution never recovered its original power.
The numbers give some sense of how limited Korea's first attempt at reckoning ultimately became.
One widely cited statistical records 688 cases handled, 305 arrests, 559 referrals to special prosecutors and 221 indictments. Of these investigations, only 38 cases reached completed judgments before the special system was dismantled.
Even some of the people who initially received serious sentences were later released or had their punishments reduced.
For a colonial period that had lasted 35 years, the investigative process was remarkably brief. This incident is widely referred to by Korean historians as "첫 단추를 잘못 끼우다", translated literally as "the first button that was fastened incorrectly" — meaning that the journey of the new democratic regime started off on the wrong foot.
Liberation Did Not Mean Everyone Started Again From Zero
There was another reason the problem became so difficult.
When Japanese rule ended, South Korea did not immediately replace all of the institutions or personnel that had governed the country.
The U.S. military government, which administered southern Korea from 1945 until 1948, prioritized stability and retained significant parts of the existing bureaucracy and police structure. Officials and police who had served under the colonial system were among those employed after liberation.
Then came the emerging Cold War, political violence, division of the peninsula and eventually the Korean War.
Under those conditions, anti-communism and state survival increasingly took priority over dismantling networks inherited from colonial rule.
This is essential to understanding modern anger surrounding chinilpa.
Imagine two Korean families standing in August 1945.
In one family, an ancestor had spent years participating in the independence movement. Perhaps that meant imprisonment, death, exile, lost income, confiscated property or decades spent outside Korea.
In another family, an ancestor had prospered during colonial rule, accumulating land, education, professional credentials and political connections.
These are simplified examples, of course. The real experiences of Korean families were much more complicated.
But they illustrate something important.
After liberation, those two families did not necessarily return to the same starting line.
A building remained a building.
Land remained land.
An elite education remained valuable.
Professional networks remained useful.
And property could be passed from parent to child.
This is the distinction at the center of the modern debate:
Guilt is personal. Wealth is transferable.
Korea Eventually Began Going After Chinilpa Property
Decades later, South Korea tried to address the property question once more.
A special law created a presidential commission tasked with identifying assets acquired as a result of serious pro-Japanese collaboration and returning qualifying property to the state.
Between 2006 and 2010, the Investigative Commission on Pro-Japanese Collaborators’ Property examined property connected to colonial collaborators.
By the end of its work, the commission had ordered the recovery of property associated with 168 individuals — 2,475 parcels covering approximately 13 square kilometers. Their estimated market value at the time was around 237.3 billion won.
That is an important figure, but the legal principle behind it is even more important.
“Inherited collaborator wealth” is not merely a phrase used in political arguments or on social media.
South Korean law formally recognizes a category of 친일재산 — property accumulated through specified forms of pro-Japanese anti-national collaboration during the colonial period.
The principle is not that a descendant committed the ancestor’s crime.
It is that property legally determined to have been accumulated through qualifying collaboration does not automatically become legitimate simply because it has passed through several generations.
That is a property question, not hereditary criminal guilt.
So Why Is Korea Still Investigating This in 2026?
So why Is Korea still investigating this in 2026? Because the process was never completed.
The property commission ceased operating in 2010. South Korea was subsequently left without a dedicated commission carrying out the same investigative function, which made discovering and recovering additional collaboration-linked property more difficult.
In June 2026, South Korea enacted a new law recreating the Pro-Japanese Collaborators’ Property Investigation Commission.
The law was promulgated on June 2, 2026 and is scheduled to take effect on December 3, 2026.
On June 22, the Ministry of Justice formally launched a preparatory team to establish the new commission ahead of its return.
And the new legislation goes beyond simply searching for a surviving piece of land.
If qualifying collaboration-linked property was sold and can no longer be recovered directly, the law explicitly allows the state to pursue the proceeds received from its disposal.
At the same time, the law protects good-faith third parties who acquired property legitimately, reflecting the need to balance historical restitution with the security of later transactions.
In other words, 81 years after liberation, South Korea is still building institutions to answer property questions that its first post-liberation government never fully resolved.
Imagine a Different Postwar Germany
For international readers, Germany can offer a useful thought experiment — although the histories of Nazi Germany and Japanese colonial rule in Korea are not equivalent.
Although different in many aspects, a useful comparison can be made between their respective, subsequent treatments after the end of each regime.
After the Second World War, senior figures of the Nazi regime were prosecuted at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. That was followed by 12 Subsequent Nuremberg Trials involving 177 defendants, including doctors, judges, industrialists, diplomats, military officers and SS and police leaders.
The Allied occupation authorities also began creating systems for returning property taken from victims of Nazi persecution.
Historians may conclude that Germany's reckoning was incomprehensive. Former Nazi members returned to positions of influence. Numerous convicted figures were released early, and restitution disputes continued for decades.
However, let us imagine a different version of that history.
Imagine that soon after the war, Germany created a commission to investigate people who had served the previous regime — and police stormed its headquarters and dismantled its investigative force.
Imagine that many former officials of that regime remained useful to the new security establishment. Perhaps a serious process for determining whether particular fortunes had been accumulated through collaboration was delayed for decades.
Eighty years later, the descendants would not be Nazis merely because of their surnames.
But Germans might still reasonably ask:
Was the wealth ever properly examined?
That is the aspect of the German comparison that helps explain the Korean debate.
It is a thought experiment, one that can help explain what happens when a society's initial attempt at post-regime accountability is interrupted — and questions about property survive long after the people involved are gone.
This Is Why Chinilpa Is Not Simply a Debate About the Past
It is easy to reduce controversies like Ha Young’s to a question of whether modern Koreans are being too harsh about something an ancestor did generations ago.
Sometimes, they undoubtedly can be.
Social media encourages guilt by association. Historical nuance disappears quickly. And accusations of chinilpa can be weaponized politically or personally.
A descendant should not be ill-treated for certain family lineage.
But stopping the discussion there misses why the issue remains so powerful.
For many Koreans, the unresolved legacy of chinilpa is not really about inherited guilt.
It is about whether liberation ever fully addressed the distribution of wealth and power created under colonialism.
A person cannot inherit guilt.
They can inherit farmland.
They can inherit an apartment building.
They can inherit money, education, networks and the opportunities those advantages create.
None of that, by itself, makes the descendant guilty of anything.
But it does explain why Koreans continue asking where some family fortunes began — and why, more than eight decades after the Japanese Empire disappeared from the Korean Peninsula, South Korea is still trying to determine what should have happened to wealth accumulated through collaboration with it.
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