Organizer: James J. Orr, Bucknell University
Chair: Thomas W. Burkman, State University of New York, Buffalo
Discussant: Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
Japanese scholarship on Korea, Japan’s most proximate neighbor and erstwhile colony, has inevitably incorporated and constructed notions of the Japanese community itself. This panel joins three papers that address how Japanese scholars have used the study of Korea to help shape political practice and so define the imperial and post-imperial nation in three periods of the modern era. Alexis Dudden compares the practical curriculum designed to train promising Koreans for employ as colonial functionaries with the more theoretical course of study at Japan’s first-rank universities, and argues that the late-Meiji Japanese political order can only be understood by knowing both colony and colonized. Kristine Dennehy analyzes revisionist postwar scholarship on colonial Korea as a form of domestic political praxis. These correctives to colonial historiography brought forward a legacy of colonial liberation struggles that both affirmed the scholar’s freedom to criticize and resist the postwar Japanese state’s reverse course agenda, and expressed solidarity with Japan-resident (zainichi) Koreans in the Cold War context. James Orr explores the efforts by pacifist scholar-activist Yasui Kaoru to connect Japanese and North Korean scholars in the 1970s, and argues that Kim Il-Sung’s juche theory held particular appeal for the progressive academic because of its emphasis on a proactive subjectivity for both the individual and the ethnic nation. Papers will be made available beforehand and presentations kept short in order to allow for fuller participation from members of the audience.
Knowing Korea
Alexis Dudden, Connecticut College
Three years before Japan officially colonized Korea, on October 1, 1907, the Tokyo-based Oriental Society held opening ceremonies in Seoul to inaugurate classes at its new branch school. In several speeches heralding "racial harmony," the contributions of Japan’s Crown Prince were gratefully acknowledged. The school’s administrators aimed to offer a "junior year abroad" program that would expose students to a site of likely future employment. Unlike the Imperial Universities, the Oriental Society’s school in Tokyo (now Takushoku Daigaku) educated young men who would become colonial functionaries—not rulers. By analyzing the aims and actualities of the Society’s school in Seoul, I offer an example of how colonial knowledge was put into practice. My paper goes on to consider the Oriental Society’s school in Seoul in context with the more theoretical courses taught at the first-rank universities that were designed for future colonial rulers. Thus, I argue that knowing the colony and the colonized meant understanding the late-Meiji world.
Postwar Studies of Colonial Korea
Kristine Dennehy, University of California, Los Angeles
As part of a larger project entitled "Memories of Colonial Korea in Postwar Japan," this paper will focus on the academic writings published between 1945–1965 related to Korea during the colonial period. I will argue that the scholarship produced during these first 20 years of the postwar era represents a two-fold agenda on the part of postwar intellectuals. First, progressive scholars such as Yamabe Kentarô were seeking to debunk the historical narratives of the colonial period that were created by the Japanese state and used to justify imperial Japan’s exploitation and oppression of the Korean people. Such postwar scholarship was a central element in the process of asserting new-found academic freedom to criticize the state and bring to light a legacy of Korean resistance and liberation struggles. Second, these postwar histories are inextricably linked to the Cold War political environment and the status of the resident Korean minority in Japan. Furthermore, these correctives to colonial historiography must be looked at in the context of ongoing debates over the role of intellectuals in resisting the state’s agenda of remilitarization, particularly as Japan solidified its alliance with U.S. interests in Asia. The crisis of the Korean War and the accompanying complicated situation of resident Koreans (political, economic, and social) set the framework for the way postwar histories would be constructed.
Power to the People: Juche and the Pacifist Scholar Yasui Kaoru
James J. Orr, Bucknell University
In the last decade of his life, Yasui Kaoru devoted considerable effort to promoting intellectual exchanges between Japanese and North Korean social scientists. In 1972 he became the inaugural chair of an organization for that purpose, and on his retirement from Hôsei University in 1978 he became chair of an institute for research into Kim II-Sung’s juche thought. Yasui is best known today as the director general of Gensuikyô and pacifist leader of Japan’s ban-the-bomb movement in the late 1950s and 1960s; but as a Tokyo Imperial University professor of international law during the Asia-Pacific war, he helped develop cultural policy for occupied China and tried to convince other intellectuals to collaborate in the national war effort even as he tried, paradoxically, to defend the legitimacy of the academic’s special position as independent critic of state policy. Yasui subscribed to a philosophy of the social scientist as politically engaged scholar, and consistently worked for national solidarity during and after the war. Juche theory, with its emphasis on proactive subjectivity for both the individual and the ethnic nation (minzouku, in Japanese; minjok, in Korean) and its valuation of the intellectual worker’s contribution to the national project, resonated with Yasui’s existentialist and communitarian leanings. In this paper on Yasui’s organizational and rhetorical efforts to connect Korean and Japanese academics, I will explore the appeal that Kim’s juche thought had for an avowedly liberal, yet patriotic, social scientist such as Yasui.