Organizer: Chae-Jin Lee, Claremont McKenna College
Chair: Charles K. Armstrong, Columbia University
Jin-Ha Kim, University of Chicago
This paper examines the post-colonial impact of prewar Japanese State-Shintoism
on the North Korean construction of a liturgical regime, by which I mean
an exclusive type of ruling system that prescribes citizens’ access to the
given socio-political order as selectively limited in a liturgically determined
and theatrically performative manner. Both social functions and political status
are hierarchically distributed and theocratically legitimatized. The Great Promulgation
Campaign (taikyo senpu undo: 1870-1884) gave birth to State-Shintoism, which
doctrinally re-organized and ritually standardized the traditional myths and
ceremonies for national mobilization and nationalist discipline. It officially
functioned as the religious pillar of the ”Family State” (kazoku
kokka), where the spirit of state was personified into the institutionally consecrated
body of the sovereign-patriarch. The State-Shintoist kerigmatic orientations
of personality cult and self-sacrificial aestheticism and its indoctrinating
techniques including nationalist pilgrimages and dramaturgical rituals were
implanted into Korea for colonial cultural control. Such control apparatuses
would be re-mobilized for North Korean statecraft. The imperial imperative that “the
kami’s will is the Emperor’s will” was re-formulated into
the North Korean dictum that “[i]t is the ultimate demand of our Revolution
and the Revolutionary Will of our party and people, to make absolute the authority
of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung” (Kim, Jong-Il, 1974). This paper
traces the trajectories of the North Korean reincarnation as an endogenized
embodiment of the Shintoist pursuit of an ultranationalist utopia, where
life attains ultimate meaning only through total participation into the statist
cosmos divinely foreordained by the leadership principles.
Chizuko T. Allen, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This paper sheds light on the significance of royal women in formative Silla’s
ruling structure through a fresh look at early genealogies and successions.
Despite their mythical ambiguity and Confucian overlay, the early Silla accounts
related in the Samguk sagi and the Samguk yusa contain important information
regarding Silla’s royal women. Although early Silla queens’ deeds
are scarcely described, their matrilineal successions are amply found in these
accounts. Based on these native records as well as similar examples of joint
rule in early Japan, we can deduce that Silla was initially co-ruled by the
king responsible for military and political affairs and the queen in charge
of spiritual matters. A careful look at the royal successions in the early centuries
reveals gradual transformations in the women’s position, however. By the
fifth century, the kings succeeded in establishing a patrilineal succession
pattern as they extended their military and political power. Matrilineal successions
to the position of the queen lingered on for a few generations but discontinued
in the sixth century, when the government and clans were organized following
the Chinese models. Nevertheless, until the time of Silla’s peninsular
unification in the seventh century, its rulers were chosen from those who had
descended from royal fathers and mothers, and queens from narrowly selected
lineages. These constraints of the Kolp’um system testify to the lasting
force of the matrilineal traditions.
Jeong-il Lee, Los Angeles City College
The discourse on civilization and the practice of power relations continually
overlapped among pre-modern East Asian states long before the arrival of
western-style imperialism. As is well known, pre-modern China had been a
strong state sufficient to claim its geopolitical dominance as the Great Imperium
(Zhongguo) and cultural power as the Center of Civilization (Zhonghua) vis-à-vis other neighboring
areas of East Asia. Most of the Chinese, northwestern nomadic, and Korean states
had channeled the influence of the Sino-centric world system and civilization
into the enhancement of their state legitimacy and cultural progress. Chosôn
(1392-1910) was active in appropriating Confucian cultural policies to a civilized
order of its own along with the conventional attitude to practical diplomacy.
Ming (1368-1644) sought peace with Chosôn in cultural solidarity while
downgrading their surrounding Mongolian and Manchurian contenders to barbarians.
The emergence of the Manchurian Qing (1644-1911) as the last dynasty of imperial
China did little to disfigure the regional dynamics linking (geo-)politics and
cultural legitimacy. In light of this, I examine how the Chosôn court
and elites reconstructed the historicity of a Confucian civilization in Chosôn
while re-inscribing the memories of the erstwhile Ming in their version of the
Confucian tradition. The culturalist attitude enabled them not only to envision
Chosôn as the last bastion of Confucian civilization (sojunghwa) before
the barbarian empire, but also reinforce domestically their ideological rationale
for a civilized order after their subjugation to the Manchus. Therefore, my
presentation reconsiders the top-down paradigm of Chinese originality versus
non-Chinese replication in pre-modern East Asia. It will illuminate a stage
of “historical practice” in which diverse human agencies both inside
and outside of China utilized Pax Sinica and civilization to their locale,
and extrapolated both of them to fashion a universal pattern for their (geo-)political
and cultural engagements in this region.
Hongkyung Kim, State University of New York, Stony Brook
I am working on a comparative study on the thoughts of the School of Practical
Learning in the Choson Dynasty and the thoughts of the Study of the Past in
Tokugawa Japan. These two academic schools, challenging the long-lasting dominant
philosophical orthodoxy of Neo-Confucianism, arose from the same historical
context and are basically identical in their pursuit of the rehabilitation of
the true spirit of Confucianism. However, their philosophical orientation with
regard to details differs in many ways. In order to validate this point of view,
I have selected the most representative scholars from both schools and, giving
attention to the fact that all of them have made contributions to the new interpretation
of the Analects, have compared their philosophical perspectives in their commentaries
of the Analects. In this paper, I examine the differences between the interpretations
of the Analects in the Outer Chapters of the Ancient Teachings of the Analects
by Dazai Shundai (1680-1747) in the Study of the Past and in the Critique of
the Ancient and Contemporary Commentaries on the Analects by Tasan (1762-1836)
in the Practical Learning.
Sung-Deuk Oak, University of California, Los Angeles
After more than 25 years of mission work in Korea, the Protestant Churches
discussed the establishment of a union Christian college. It developed into
a most heated controversy in the history of Korean Christianity. The Presbyterian
missionaries and Korean leaders in the provinces of P’yong’an, Hwanghae,
Hamgyong, Kyongsang, and Cholla argued that the proper place should be Pyongyang,
which was the center of the Protestant Christians in Northern Korea, and that
it should protect the Christian younger generation from the secular influence
as well as train them as future church leaders. By contrast, the more liberal
Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries and Korean leaders in Seoul insisted
that the location should be Seoul, and that both Christians and non-Christians
should be educated for the maximum Christian influence upon the Korean society
in general. The controversy ended with the victory of the minority missionaries
in Seoul with the support of the mission boards in New York, and the Union Christian
College (today's Yonsei University) was erected in Seoul. What were the main
educational, missiological, ecclesiological, cultural, and political issues
of the “college question”? Why did the missionaries in Seoul defeat
the majority opinion? What were the results and lasting legacies of the controversy?
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