Organizer and Chair: Hyung Il Pai, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Cherie Wendelken, Harvard University
This panel covers some of the most important issues facing heritage management today such as: the pervasive role of government laws and institutions, indigenous peoples’ rights and claims, the rise of regional movements, and last but not least, how do you define/distinguish "tradition," versus "modernity" in contemporary society? The following papers address how such controversies have been played out in the past century in Korea and Japan by taking a multidisciplinary and cultural comparative approach. Pai’s paper will discuss the colonial origins of heritage management in South Korea, by focussing on the 80-year-old history of institutions such as national museums and the Office of Cultural Properties. They have been the principal arbiters responsible for the identification, (re)-constructions, and promotion of "national treasures and monuments" as sites of identity and power display in South Korea. Roberts’s paper is a personal account of his battles with bureaucratic committees as well as businessmen as a founding member of a local preservation society that has successfully restored a Samurai house in Kochi, Shikoku. This movement’s goal to build a museum to their castle-town heritage reflects the current desire on the part of regional authorities in their own search for local identity. Morris-Suzuki’s paper brings up another explosive issue in Japan of the problem of rising indigenous rights. By using the case study of a recent rediscovery of "Ainu" skulls, she points out the historical links between the field of anthropology and tourism in their efforts to collect and exhibit "the primitive /prehistoric" artifacts for public consumption. Finally, Hoffmann’s paper discusses the complex relationship between modern art and tradition in the two Koreas, and he analyzes the history of Korean brush painting in the context of nationalism and politics.
The Order of "Korean" Things: the 1916 Historical Remains Preservation Act and the Creation of National Treasures and Monuments
Hyung Il Pai, University of California, Santa Barbara
The 1916 Historical Remains Preservation Act of Chosen was the first comprehensive heritage management law enacted in the Korean peninsula by the Japan’s Governor-general Office of Choson. Its goal was to regulate archaeological, and art historical research; provide funding for the launching of scientific excavations, the systematic collections of Korean art, the building of museums, the restoration of relics and monuments; the enforcement of customs laws governing the export of Korean antiquities, and the establishment of academic committees, research institutions, and municipal offices responsible for the identification, protection, transportation, and promotion of Korean art and culture. This paper will focus on the registration process of what, by whom, how, and why something came to be catalogued as a "Korean relic" (koseki) such as: Kofun burials, Three Kingdom Buddhist sculpture, temple architecture, gates/fortresses, ancestral shrines, and celadon ware. This 80-year-old classification system is critical to understanding why in both Koreas today, historical remains identified, studied, reconstructed, and ranked by Japanese scholars continue to be displayed and promoted in national museums and at tourist sites as the most "authentic" Korean icons representing its ancient heritage.
I will conclude by addressing the three most controversial historical debates in South Korea and Japan: (1) the issue of the repatriation of Korean treasures (kokuho) in Japan; (2) who is to blame for the "plunder" of Korean art and culture; (3) who are the legitimate/illegitimate owners of museum collections and archaeological remains unearthed during the colonial period.
"Tourists and Headhunters": Reclaiming the Indigenous Heritage in Hokkaido and Sakhalin
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australian National University
In 1995, six skulls were discovered in a cardboard box in the basement of Hokkaido University. The labels suggested that three skulls belonged to the indigenous Uilta people removed around the 1920s or ‘30s from open-air burials at the settlement of Otasu in Karafuto. Their discovery aroused strong protests from indigenous organizations, who saw the removal and abandonment of these human remains as a continuation of a long history of the academic exploitation of indigenous peoples and as an insult to their dead. An (inconclusive) investigation was held to determine how the skulls had come to be in the basement, and whether they could be returned to their original communities for burial. This case raises wide issues about the ethics of collecting of indigenous remains, and mirrors similar controversies over anthropological collections in other parts of the world. It also raises problems of the relationship between ethnography and tourism, since Otasu was an artificially created settlement which was used by the Karafuto colonial government both as a site for ethnographic field work and as a tourist attraction. It seems likely that it was one of the tourists or ethnographers visiting the settlement who removed the skulls in the first place.
Using the Hokkaido University case as a basis for discussion, I will explore interconnections between representations of indigenous people in ethnography and tourism. I will conclude by presenting some strategies which indigenous groups in Japan have used to reclaim control over representations of their own heritage.
A Case Study of the Restoration of a Samurai House in Shikoku
Luke S. Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara
I will examine the political, economic, historical, and architectural issues manifested in a recent case of historic preservation. The house and outbuildings of a late Edo period samurai residence in the city of Kochi will become a small museum of castle town history and samurai life to be opened in mid-1999. I was one of the founding members of the citizens’ preservation group begun in 1989 and participated in the long and arduous process of convincing the city to buy the land from the owners and preserve the house in its original location. Despite the fact that this was the last such surviving residence from the old castle town, the preservation movement faced many obstacles such as conflicting political and economic interests versus attitudes toward "old things," a general degeneration of "peripheral" Kochi vis-a-vis cultural centers such as Kyoto, and the dominance of Tokyo as a center of scholarly authority and policymaking.
Center/periphery issues loomed large throughout the decade of the movement. For example, when specialists from Tokyo denigrated the value of the house, largely on the basis of misunderstandings of local history and material culture, many Kochi people were very willing to accept the authority of the center. But careful research on our part allowed us to refute the errors of their report. Since that time local people have been in charge of the evaluation, actual preservation and development of the residence. I will also address the influence of the media in the promotion of our movement.
Preserving the Tradition: Delineating North and South Korean Brush Painting
Frank Hoffmann, Harvard University
In this paper I will discuss the revitalization of post-liberation Korean brush painting (Chosonhwa in the North and Han’gukhwa in the South) and its complex relationship to modernity within the context of nationalism, politics, and cultural preservation.
Conventional wisdom has it that modern North Korean art is a remake of Soviet Socialist Realism with a touch of local color provided by chuch’e ideology as it has been translated into cultural politics since the 1960s, but in fact embodies a unexpectedly diverse and compelling body of forms, subject matters, and styles, while South Korean art movements—at least until the early 1980s—have been buoyed along by the tides of New York. By viewing modern Korean art as subaltern modernism, a remake of Western art movements, or an unfinished modernity project, essential pieces of the Korean modernity puzzle that don’t quite fit Western constructs are abandoned.
The Western capitalist concept of modernity—constructed against the concept of tradition and idealized as such as a social construct—obscures challenging realities in the Koreas and other parts of East Asia. For example, what about the continuity of p’ansori practice or non-modernized traditional-style brush painting? Should we take them as contradictions, left-overs, or parts of the contemporary art world—but not "modern" arts? And conversely, how "Korean" is modernized Korean-style brush painting? I will conclude by examining how Korea’s imagined and constructed modern narrative of nationhood challenges us to re-examine, if not rewrite, non-Western and non-capitalist modernity.