He also gave money to certain Japanese authorities to help them build roads and buildings. Sometimes he used his wealth to pay off important Japanese occupiers of Korea so they would not seize him and take him to Japan. He worried that if he ever was taken as a slave or as any kind of worker to help the Japanese in Japan, that he would never come back. It hurt him deep inside to turn his back on his own ethnic Korean people. Many nights he cried because he felt like he was a traitor to his own people in Korea. But he was coy enough and shrewd enough to realize that if he did not renounce his real ethnicity, he could be taken away or treated very badly in Korea, and that would not help his family or his country either.
When World War II ended and the Americans liberated Korea, things for my Grandfather Cho were better for a time, but then the next war came along and the communists from North Korea and China tried to take over the whole country. The Japanese at the end of WWII had raided Korea of much of its resources and that left many Korean people without cattle to raise for food, and without rice and other provisions. Things were bad, but my Grandfather was a resourceful man and he survived. He went along with the communists rather than fight them. People who did not cooperate with the communists were killed, or...
In fact Grandfather Cho let the communists take over his land, so he would be cooperating with them and would not be harmed. He did not want his wife to be hurt or to be raped or harmed in any way so he was smart enough to pretend to agree with the communist philosophy in order to survive and to help his family survive.
Imagine having to pretend to be something you are not. Imagine actually changing your name from Korean to Japanese, a culture you despise, just to avoid being killed. Think about how difficult it was for Grandfather pretending to be a Japanese person to avoid being killed or put into slavery, and then later explaining to Koreans (when the Japanese are gone) that you were just doing it as a ruse, as a way to disguise your real feelings. You love Korea and hate the occupation by Japanese, who were so cruel and bloodthirsty, but you pretended first to be Japanese, then later pretended to go along with communism, all just to survive. This takes a toll on a person's heart, and my Grandfather was hurt very deeply to have to lie and hide his real feelings. He is a capitalist through and through but there he was going along with ruthless communists just so he and his wife could stay together and wait for the end of the wars and for a better world for his family.
