TOYAMA--Tomi Sugiyama shows a pile of affectionate letters from her Korean former pupils who were forced to wear tags bearing Japanese-style names, speak in Japanese and show respect for the Japanese emperor.

Although wartime memories continue to plague relations between Japan and South Korea, Sugiyama, 98, has remained on friendly terms with the former students.

She said that when she was teaching on the Korean Peninsula during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule, she never understood the pain and sorrow that Korean children were suffering under the policies of Tokyo.

Still feeling guilty and now living at a nursing home in Toyama, Sugiyama has called for mutual understanding between Japan and South Korea in hopes that they can mend their relations that soured last year.

“It is the greatest, incomparable treasure in my life that I could be involved in Korea and was surrounded with the affection of people there,” she said.

Sugiyama was born on the Korean Peninsula in 1921 to a family that had moved from Japan to the southwestern province of South Jeolla to run a fruit farm.

The family later relocated to Taegu in the southeast to open a hat shop.

After graduating from a girls’ school in Taegu, Sugiyama studied at another school for girls in what is now Seoul. She started working as a teacher at an elementary school for Korean children in Taegu in 1941.

The pupils were forbidden from speaking in their native language and had to wear tags displaying their Japanese-style names.

Every day, the children were ordered to face the direction of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo for worship, bow deeply toward a facility honoring the Imperial Rescript on Education, and recite an oath as members of the Japanese empire.

Sugiyama said she believed those policies were essential to train Korean children to be fine Japanese citizens.

“We were told at school that Japan annexed Korea because of their bilateral friendship,” Sugiyama said. “In that way, our education was horrible.”

After Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, Sugiyama began to understand what the pupils had gone through.

When she was talking with a student she happened to meet on a street, a passer-by shouted at her in Korean.

The pupil told Sugiyama, who had never learned Korean, that the person said, “Do not speak Japanese.”

Sugiyama instinctively shouted back, “What is wrong with speaking in Japanese?”

After calming down, she realized that she had banned Korean children from communicating in their own language.

During the war, Japan’s governing authorities touted their measures as providing fair treatment for residents of the colony.

But Sugiyama’s salary was higher than those of senior Korean teachers. And only Japanese-managed shops and stores could be found along the main street in Taegu.

In autumn 1945, Sugiyama and her parents left Korea for Toyama to stay with a relative. Her students arranged an ox-drawn carriage to carry her luggage and bid her farewell at a port in Busan.

Sugiyama felt guilty about having taken advantage of the Korean students’ naiveness to enhance Japan’s rule. She decided that she would never teach again at school.

But Japan faced a dire shortage of educators in the postwar years, and Sugiyama had no choice but to substitute for an elementary school teacher who took maternity leave.

She continued her teaching career for nearly 30 years. And she carried the same sense of guilt even 75 years after the war.

But one wartime event at the school benefited all who were involved.

In a class for female fourth-graders, Sugiyama showed them basic Japanese sewing techniques, such as how to handle the needle. The pupils asked her to teach the way to make traditional Korean socks.

She did not know the Korean method, so she invited a guardian of one of the girls to instruct the class.

Sugiyama would have been punished under the assimilation policy if the principal and other staff members had known about the lesson.

Sugiyama now cannot recall why she allowed such a class, and she had even forgotten that she organized the lesson.

However, the sewing class left such an impression on the pupils that they invited Sugiyama to South Korea in 1976 for her first return to her “hometown” in 31 years. She has since traveled to the nation a few times to visit her former pupils.

During one of the exchanges, Sugiyama was reminded of the class when a former student said, “We well remember that we sewed the traditional socks.”

Sugiyama felt relieved because she realized that despite all the Japanese rules imposed at the school, she had still attempted to meet as many requests as possible from the pupils.

Last year, war-related issues led to a nose-dive in bilateral relations with wide-ranging effects, including a suspension of flights connecting Toyama and Seoul.

This year marks the 110th anniversary of Japan’s annexation of Korea and the 75th anniversary of Korean liberation from Japanese colonial rule.

Sugiyama, who started learning the Korean language after turning 60, suggested that the two countries follow the meaning of a Korean proverb that she loves: “If the uttered words are beautiful, the returned words will also be beautiful.”

She believes relations can improve if the two sides pay due consideration to each other’s stances and hold sympathetic conversations.