Organizer: Michael Kim, Yonsei University

Chair: Carter J. Eckert, Harvard University

Discussant: Jie-Hyun Lim, Hanyang University

Collaboration with the Japanese remains an issue fraught with political controversy. The view that South Korean society has yet to purge itself adequately of its collaborationist past has led to the passage of a special law in December 2004 to identify and retroactively punish those who had betrayed the Korean nation during the colonial period. Yet coming to terms with collaboration and understanding this historical issue will require far more than the passage of laws intended to "rectify the past," for the entire phenomenon needs to be examined from alternative vantage points to reveal its full complexity.

This panel will attempt to historicize collaboration in colonial Korea and examine how the issue can be understood within the context of the larger trends and development that have shaped modern Korean history. Collaboration will be viewed in light of colonial Korea’s engagement with the Japanese Empire, the emergence of modern identities, and the formation of transnational networks within the East Asian region. The historical forces that induced collaboration with the Japanese Empire did not vanish entirely from Korea in 1945, for the issue can also be discussed in terms of the historical continuities between the colonial period and postliberation Korea. Collaboration also needs to be understood in terms of how the collective memories of the colonial period have been shaped in the postliberation media and how alternative explanations of the past can emerge in the popular culture of South Korea today. Through a variety of different approaches, this panel seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the collaboration issue and move the debate beyond the predominant nationalist narratives.

Michael Kim, Yonsei University

The legacy of Korean collaboration during the colonial period remains a problematic topic for discussion, for any examination of the issue inevitably encounters the presence of a powerful collective memory of widespread anti-Japanese resistance. Yet considerable collaboration did take place among Korean intellectuals who considered Korea’s future to be inextricably tied to the fate of the Japanese Empire, and there is a need to examine the inner logic of Korean collaborators in light of the broader historical trends that impacted colonial Korea.

Colonial intellectuals who witnessed the stunning successes of the Japanese military in the Asian mainland sought a role for themselves within the rapidly emerging New Order in East Asia. The rhetoric of naisen ittai and the possibility of Koreans playing an active role in Japan’s multiethnic empire proved to be a powerful attraction to Korean intellectuals who believed that assimilation with the Japanese was the only way to escape their colonized plight.

At the same time, Korean collaborators had their own views about the meaning of naisen ittai, and many saw considerable potential in the radical forces that were reshaping both Japan and the rest of East Asia to achieve equality for themselves within the colonial order. This fascination with the possibility of a new kind of Japanese Empire emerging out of the Pacific War was the topic of considerable debate among Korean intellectuals and a closer examination of this debate may reveal some important insights into intellectual history of the colonial period and suggest some important historical continuities in the postliberation period.

Kyu Hyun Kim, UC Davis

The Korean colonial experience under the Japanese rule (1910-1945) has remained a problematic subject in the postwar South Korean popular culture. Other than thoroughly formulaic and conventionalized portraits of the colonial Koreans as victims and the Japanese colonizers as (often caricatured) villains, the colonial period has tended to remain a lacuna in public imagination, a tendency best exemplified by the current anti-Japanese blockbuster film Hanbando, which leapfrogs the early part of twentieth century and behaves as if the greatest evil committed by the Japanese empire was assassination of Empress Myongsong.

This paper will examine the manners in which the colonial period is presented in a series of Korean cultural products, focusing on motion pictures, TV dramas and popular novels. These examples range from Pok Ko-il’s "counterfactual history" science fiction novel In Search of an Epitaph, to recasting of the right-wing terrorist Kim Tu-han as an anti-Japanese nationalist action hero in Im Kwon-t’aek’s Son of the General and the TV drama Yain sidae, YMCA Baseball Team, a sports comedy film set in the eve of Japanese annexation of Korea, Blue Swallow, the biopic of Korea’s first non-military aviator, Park Kyong-won, targeted by internet campaigns accusing it of being a "pro-Japanese" hagiography.

The analysis of these select examples will demonstrate that while nationalism retains the hegemonic position in the popular culture, various "non-serious" and genre-oriented (science fiction, horror, comedy) materials present a much wider and more complex range of perceptions of the colonial period in the context of modern Korean history. The paper will also argue that the discourse emanating from and surrounding these cultural products in fact reflect the challenges posed to the "grand narrative" of nationalism by alternative modes of approaching modern Korean history (such as the feminist perspective and exploration of the possibility of hybrid identity between being "Japanese" and being "Korean") and by increasing acknowledgement, if not full embrace, of the modernistic, metropolitan glamour of the colonial modernity among Korean artists.

Seung-Mi Han, Yonsei University

Drawing on the recent public discussions in Korea on the movie "Blue Sparrow (chung-yeon)", this paper will examine what kinds of ‘transnational’ networks had developed during the colonial period by those Koreans who had ventured to cross the borders of the national past within the newly expanding ‘empire’ in diverse forms. The life trajectories of "New Women" in colonial Korea and their networks would be the main focus of the paper, in order to explore how the expanding empire was perceived and lived by people in Korea, and how their lives were in turn evaluated and perceived by others. New Women’s life trajectories are chosen because there are relatively more information about them and because their career pursuits, ambitions, and life choices might not always have coincided with the moral boundaries of the newly emerging official nationalism. Instead of judging their life trajectories from the perspective of "official nationalism" only, the paper attempts to explore how their activities could be analyzed from different angles, adding sensitivity to the existing interpretation.

Collaboration in Colonial Korea: The Emergence of Modern Subjects and the Making of Citizens in the Postliberation Period is the elimination of the collaboration legacy with Imperial Japan an effective and viable notion? Establishing the task in terms of ‘eliminating the legacy of collaboration’ simply reflects the reality of the division and Cold War nationalism and the adoption of the nationalist and statist ideologies of the rival Koreas. Purging collaborators has been linked to the discussions on the authenticity of the separate regimes. However, such an attempt may simply amount to the internalization of existing historical trends in an uncritical manner. The debate centering on collaborators as objects to be purged from the annals of history, as if the gravity of their purported criminal conduct amounts to that of the ‘Original Sin,’ in effect, privileges the trope of resistance. Yet settling accounts with the issue of collaboration is related to the democratization of many East Asian nations. Thus, the current discussion on collaboration needs to be redirected to an inquiry into the ‘accountability’ for the act of ‘collaboration.’

Collaboration needs to be approached as one process through which the modern colonized subject was formulated. If we further divide collaborators as modern subjects that emerged towards the end of the colonial period into three sub-categories, ‘nationalist-bourgeoisie,’ ‘socialist,’ and ‘supra-modernist,’ then such a distinction can reveal a substantial portion of the formation of modern Korean subjects, alongside the rise of the ‘resistant subject.’ By hitherto privileging ‘resistance’, the Korean ruling class has appropriated the ideology of the ‘nation’ and obliterated alternate channels of modern subject formation.