Organizer: Edward J. Schultz, West Oahu College
Chair: David R. McCann, Cornell University
Kim and Tanaka: Modernization, Social Change and the Division of Labor in
Colonial Korea: A Prosopography of Technicians in the 1930s
Alain Delissen, Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Between the Manchuria Incident (1931) and Pearl Harbour (1941), the situation and the status of Korea in the Japanese imperial system changed. In the wake of the continental war, the peninsula was more heavily industrialized and became a semi-periphery of greater Japan.
Thus, the 1930s make sense for the understanding of quick economic, technical and social change in a colonial context of national discrimination. They have a meaning per se. Moreover, they can be described as a possible soil out of which modern South Korea grew up. In both cases however, the historiography involved is highly sensitive. One should note that, beyond its most common expression (exploitation vs. development; collaboration vs. resistance), there is room left for a qualitative, descriptive approach of colonial Korea.
I propose to give new insights into the social history of this period. From a Directory of Chosen Technicians (Chôsen gijutsuka meibo) published in 1939 in Seoul, under the aegis of the Federation of Korean Industries, it is possible to portray a crowd of more than 7,000 people, Korean and Japanese, with their national and educational backgrounds, with their titles, ages, fields of activities, place of employment, trades. Borrowing from the methodology of prosopography, it is not only my intention to portray a social group, even roughly, but to articulate the emerging picture to the questions of social, economic and technical change heretofore mentioned. By doing so, I will also try to address differently the issues involved by the Japanese colonization of Korea and its historiography.
The Poetics of the 38th Parallel: The National Literature Movement in Divided
Korea
Myung-Hee Kim, City University of New York
This paper, a beginning of a larger project, explores preliminarily socio-historical and political contexts and literary texts to examine the relationships between ideology (anti-communism), national division (the 38th parallel), and literary formation (minjok munhak) as a 'national liberation narrative' in the neocolonial situation of South Korea. The Korean war and the national division along the 38th parallel were monumental events of 20th century Korean history that ruptured both individual and national life. Although the memory of the war has now diminished among South Koreans, it still stays with many as a wound that demands healing. As the national division ages nearly half a century, it has taken on an appearance of a natural phenomenon, rather than a politically or historically constructed one. This paper argues that anti-communism as a South Korean state ideology of division and containment of the "rescued" national half has some bearings upon this political amnesia, and further the formation of a post-liberation national literature, minjok munhak, as a counterforce to bring the South Koreans back to political consciousness and practice. To writers and critics of the minjok munhak camp, the divided nationhood stands, despite recent economic achievements, in the way of Korea's realizing meaningful historical development and national coming of age.
An Ch'angho as a Revolutionary Democrat: A Revisionist View
Jacqueline Pak, University of London
As one of the most influential nationalist leaders, An Ch'angho (1878-1938) has been a critical subject of literary and scholarly attention among the colonial and post-colonial Korean intellectuals, in addition to several Western scholars. Evolving from a heroic nationalist icon to an object of hostile criticism, there are, in fact, few other nationalists who have experienced as much recent academic controversy as Tosan (An Ch'angho's pen name). Consistently lionized as the very paradigm of a Korean leader and personality ideal by writers and scholars like Yi Kwangsu, Chu Yohan, An Byong'uk, Chang Iuk, Chong-sik Lee, and Arthur Gardner, An came under serious attack and scrutiny during the 1980s by Kang Dongjin, Michael Robinson, So Jungsuk and Pak Chansung, among others.
For example, the writer of "New Literature," Yi Kwangsu, and the poet of "New Poetry," Chu Yohan, who were also the Hungsadan (Young Korean Academy) members, offered the most exhaustive biographies as eye-witness accounts. Yet, aside from being overtly hagiographical, the works importantly failed to capture the essence of An Ch'angho who was the chief strategist and architect of Korean nationalist movement as a worldwide network of underground and exile activities. Moreover, An Byong'uk and Chang Iuk tried to systemize An Ch'angho's nationalist philosophy but they too narrowly conceived it only as moral self-reconstructionism. Chong-sik Lee also offered very rough characterization of An Ch'angho as a "gradualist" vis-à-vis Syngman Rhee and So Ch'aepil, the "propagandists," and Yi Tongwhi and Pak Yongman, the "militarists." Relying on such categorizations, Gardner wrote the first English thesis on An Ch'angho as "an advocate of gradualism."
Against overly patriotic and nationalist historiography, the late Kang Dongjin, who discovered the "Saito documents," attempted to address the complex problem of moderate nationalist-turned-collaborators, such as Yi Kwangsu and Chu Yohan in light of new sources. In this vein, Robinson asserted that Yi Kwangsu and An Ch'angho were essentially unrevolutionary "cultural nationalists" by examining Yi Kwangsu's Minjok Gaejoron (Treatise on the Reformation of National Character). He also contended that Yi and An's "gradualist" measures toward recovering independence were actually "a tacit acceptance of the colonial rule" of "passive collaborationism." So and Pak further developed the notion of An Ch'angho as a gradualist who originated the conservative "rightist" nationalist philosophy with an emphasis on cultural rather than revolutionary activities.
With the release of the entire collection of An Ch'angho's private papers by his family, however, there exists overwhelming documentary evidence against such previous knowledge of Tosan as a gradualist-pacifist educator or cultural nationalist whose main focus was only on the self-reconstruction of the Korean national character. Indeed, careful probing and decoding of the sources (i.e., with particular attention to the problem of appearance vs. reality in the colonialist-nationalist subtext and intertext) categorically reject previous views that An was merely a self-reform gradualist or a godfather figure of anti-revolutionary nationalist ideology and methodology. With over four thousand items and still growing, the Tosan Collection includes diaries, speeches, letters, documents, books, photographs, and artifacts, and is perhaps the most significant and extensive collection of a Korean nationalist thus far. The Collection not only provides valuable insights about the genuine nature and scope of the Korean nationalist movement and An's leadership, but also offers a rare glimpse of the actual modus operandi of the movement.
Here, several of An's most crucial sources including documents, diaries, speeches, letters, and books that reveal true revolutionary character of his nationalist leadership will be investigated. For instance, An's very private "Master Plan for Independence" was as much as a mobilization roadmap for the independence war as a prophetic blueprint for creation of a new democratic nation. An's Shanghai diaries and speeches also attest to his active interest and involvement in developing Korean military capabilities. As such, with a comprehensive strategy of the independence war and the primacy of the military action in his schematic vision of the nationalist movement, An Ch'angho was a philosophico-strategic militarist, rather than a gradualist or cultural nationalist. Thus, in this paper, I attempt to examine An Ch'angho's nationalist endeavors which were primarily aimed at creating Independent Korean democracy as in my dissertation, "Sage, Rebel, and Prophet: An Ch'angho and the Nationalist Origins of Korean Democracy."
The Empress and the Powers: The Assassination of Queen Min of Korea and the Late
19th-Century Power Politics in East Asia
Bonnie Oh, Georgetown University
The year 1995 marks the centennial of the death of Queen Min, (1851-1895), the queen of the Choson Dynasty's (1392-1910) penultimate King Kojong (1852-1919, r. 1863-1907). She was brutally murdered by the Japanese on October 8, 1895 at age of 45. The assassination of the Korean queen was plotted and authorized by Miura Goto, Japanese Minister to Korea, who regarded the queen as the major obstacle to the Japanese designs in Korea. But Miura's trial was a mere formality and his sentence inconsequential, hardly corresponding to the crime of killing a neighboring country's queen.
Despite the enormity of the offense, the cavalier treatment of the perpetrators of the offense by the Japanese authorities, and the disruption in East Asian international order, the Western Powers were remarkably unperturbed. Viewing through late twentieth-century spectacles, many questions rise as to why the Westerners' protest was so feeble. Were the Western Powers so enamored with the newly rising Japan on the one hand and yet so disgusted with the old decrepit Kingdom of Korea that they thought that Japan "deserved" to dominate Korea, and Korea "deserved" to be dominated by Japan?
Could we explain this lack of interest solely on the late nineteenth-century backdrop of imperialism, fortified by Social Darwinism applied to the international order? What would have made international interference on behalf of Korea possible?
These may be futile intellectual exercises, but this paper will attempt to answer these questions.
Romancing the Nation: Love and Resistance in the Early Modern Fiction of Colonial
Korea
Shiela Miyoshi Jager, University of Kansas
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Koreans saw the production and publication of a new kind of literary genre which took as its predominant theme the investigation of "civilized" love, particularly as this concerned the relationship between man and wife. Indeed, from the time Koreans began their deliberate pursuit of "civilization" under the oppressive rule of Japanese colonialism, the cultivation of marital affection based upon the "progressive" ideals of mutual consent between partners, equality of the sexes, and free expression of affection, was viewed as vital as much to the interests of the home as it was to the survival of the homeland.
My paper attempts to examine the link between the "rise" of the new novel (sinsôsôl) and the "rise" of nationalism in colonial Korea. In what way did the idealization of romantic love and the equality between the sexes, advocated by these modern writers, change the way Koreans saw themselves, particularly as they struggled to establish new notions about self, gender and society? Through an examination of the works of Yi Kwang-su, Ch'ae Man-sik, Yi Sang and Chu Yô-sôp, I explore the development of this early "modern" language of conjugal love and desire, and how it became critical in establishing a new nationalist rhetoric of resistance to colonial rule. I also show how the crisis of nationhood created by Japanese colonialism was expressed in these modern narratives as the crisis of manhood; weakness, impotence and the loss of national dignity all boiled down to the same frustration, a frustration that could only be relieved through the attainment of harmonious love relations between the "progressive" benevolent husband and the "modern" virtuous wife.