The present chapter is to ponder a two-part question. Korean historiography overwhelmingly depicts the Japanese era darkly, as the death of “old Korea,” perhaps even of Korean identity itself. So, the ἀrst part of the question: to what extent should we see death (eclipse, distortion, erasure) as historiographical vis-à-vis actual? Stated more bluntly, is the erasure of old Korea merely a product of more modern, nationalist historians, politicians, and ideologues, or did it actually happen and how much? The second part of the question is this: to what extent was erasure, variously historiographic and actual, really part of interweaving, mutually opposed, yet thereby mutually invigorating understandings of modernity, and therefore also enabling? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1996, 19) writes of colonization as providing an “enabling violence” or “enabling violation” that can free or enrich the discourse of culture and indeed of nation. To what extent is the Japanese era to be seen as containing seeds for the much later outbursts of new creativity in more recent times—the economic “Miracle of the Han,” the new avant-garde, the K-wave? (Chapter 3 will need to take this question further, to ask how the further tragedies of the Korean War and the long military dictatorship were also destructive of the past yet also enabling of later creativity.)
The question can be posed more bluntly. There are continual charges that colonization erased Korean culture; there was certainly erasure written on the fabric of the city of Seoul. There is also a more recent historiography (chapter 1) that would assert that colonization 24also brought enrichment (multiplicity, otherness) to the urban culture of Seoul, again written upon the city. So, in understanding Seoul there is a terrible tension, almost a dialectic, between erasure and enrichment. How are conflicting historiographies to be negotiated and the city thereby to be read?
The present chapter will be in four parts. The ἀrst will take the form of a selective history to the beginning of the Japanese era, with the second then extending the account to the end of that era. Both parts are to trace the political and social trajectory of Korea but also the evolution of the extraordinary diversity of ideologies, ideas, and cultural resources with which Koreans were later to confront the post-1945 world and which persist, even further enriched, into the present. Although reading as a form of history, the focus is on the geography and spaces of the city. Part 3 of the chapter deals more explicitly with the question raised above: in what ways might the Japanese intervention be seen as eroding—even erasing—old culture and identity and in what ways might it have been enabling of a new Korean modernity? Part 4 then deals with that further question of the extent to which erasure was actual and to what extent a product of modern Korean historiography—has the outrage been enhanced in some distorted national remembering? In that sense, part 4 returns to themes of chapter 1.
A note on method: to repeat from the preface, this and following chapters are based on an interweaving of themes and ideas—historiography, architecture, urban form, literature, ἀlm, religion, television, and popular culture. The purpose is to invoke reflection on challenging juxtapositions, throwing accepted ideas and their supposed underlying wisdom into doubt, thereby to see the city and its story anew.
Part 1
SEOUL AND KOREA BEFORE COLONIZATION
Ancient Korea is essential to any engagement with present Korea, and thereby Seoul, in three senses. First, it presents contested origins to legitimize North versus South, and Korea versus Japan, into the present day. Second, it provides the wish images in which modern Seoul’s past would be imagined and its present identity would be socially constructed, both physically and in cyberspace.1 Third, the old kingdoms were theaters of beliefs and ideologies, variously competing and overlapping, contested and hybridizing, contradictory yet coinciding, that 25still run through the culture of the present. They account in large part for the extraordinary intellectual vigor of the South and much of the vibrancy of Seoul.
Korea in antiquity was in some sense a peripheral kingdom, on the edge of a Sino-centric world. With its proximity to China, it came to share the latter’s Daoist and Confucian traditions; in the second century BCE it had adopted the Chinese writing system, and in the fourth century CE, its Buddhism. Like the Japanese, Vietnamese, Tibetans, and diverse Central Asian peoples in the orbit of ancient China, the Koreans regarded China as the apex of human civilization and were seemingly happy to adapt desirable Chinese ways of doing things (Clark 2000, 4). Subsequently, the Korean language was codiἀed and given an alphabetical structure in the fifteenth century, in part to differentiate the Koreans from the Chinese in the perennial search for clarity of identity through language (see chapter 1, in relation to the Benedict Anderson argument). In ancient times Korea was a fulcrum for the transfer of continental culture to Japan, while also being periodically caught up in raiding parties and the resulting skirmishes with its island neighbors.
The foundational legend has the proto-Korean Gojoseon (ancient Joseon, Chõsen, or Chosun) kingdom founded in 2333 BCE by Dangun (Tan’gun), the Posterity of Heaven. Its capital may have been in Liaoning (in present-day China) but around 400 BCE moved to Pyongyang. In 108 BCE a Han Chinese invasion ended Gojoseon, and a succession of small states ensued until the emergence of the three kingdoms of Baekje, Koguryo, and Silla. The mountain-ringed valley of the Han River had been chosen for the capital of the southwestern Baekje (Paekche) kingdom around 18 BCE. While the Baekje capital was somewhat mobile, shifting between sites, all of these were within the region that would now be called Greater Seoul—Wiryeseong (present day Hanam), north and south of the Han River, and Bukhan in northwest Seoul (present-day Goyang). In present-day Seoul’s Pungnap-dong there is Pungnap-toseong, a flat earthen wall at the edge of the Han River, oval-shaped and with a circumference of some 3.5 kilometers. Based on research during the Japanese occupation, it is speculated that this structure was an element of Hanam Wiryeseong, the ἀrst capital of Baekje. A further, outlying fortress of the supposed Hanam Wiryeseong is Monchon-toseong, with its surviving earthen ramparts on the Olympic Park site. In the fourth century the somewhat putative kingdom of Baekje became a more full-fledged kingdom, acquiring Chinese culture and technology through contact with the Chinese southern dynasties; in turn, Japanese culture, art and language were strongly influenced by the kingdom of Baekje. 26
The relationship between Korea (speciἀcally Baekje) and Japan is contested. At the extreme there is the view of Korea as the onetime ruler of Japan and “the fount of all Japanese civilization” (Farris 1994, 24–25). Against that is the more modest claim that Baekje art “became the basis for the art of the [Japanese] Asuka period (about 552–644)” (Hatada 1969, 20); furthermore, Bruce Cumings (2005, 34) cites recent evidence, “weighed dispassionately,” that Japan obtained metals, metal technologies, military technology, and strategy from Korea.2 Cumings also notes speculations on Korean origins of Japan’s imperial house (33), suggesting that such speculations may account for Japanese reluctance to permit the archaeological opening of imperial tombs—what might they ἀnd? The embarrassment (for Japan) continued: as recently as the late 1500s and early 1600s, massive numbers of Korean potters were forcibly abducted to Japan to engineer the birth of the Japanese Imari porcelain tradition. The contested relationship might be seen as underlying, in part, a determination on the part of many Japanese in the twentieth century to suppress Korea and all memory of it. Yet there is also Everett Taylor Atkins’ (2010) counterobservation of the extent of Japanese commitment to Koreana and a view of Korea as what Japan may have lost in its headlong rush to modernity.
Three kingdoms vied for dominance in the Korean Peninsula and adjoining Manchuria in ancient times. Baekje was centered on the southwest of the peninsula, and Koguryo was in the north, branching far into Manchuria and what is now Paciἀc Russia; between these two was Silla.3 In the 660s Silla effected a uniἀcation of the peninsula, also becoming strongly allied with Tang China;4 in the ninth century Silla in turn collapsed to yield a multiplicity of states. Then, in 918, the Goryeo (Koryo, Korea) state was founded and the Han valley, locale of the erstwhile Baekje capital, continued as locale for the new capital, at Gaeseong or Songdo (now Kaesong in North Korea but on the border with South Korea and effectively within the broader Seoul region).5 In 1392 the Yi (or Chosun, Joseon, “Morning Calm”) dynasty replaced Goryeo through a largely bloodless coup. The choice of name represented a claim for both antiquity and authenticity, casting back to that imagined birth of the Korean nation in the third millennium BC when king Dangun had founded Old Chosun. With the new dynasty in 1392, Goryeo (Korea) would cease; the nation would proclaim return to its (Chosun) origins.
The post-1945 partitioning of the peninsula also partitioned its historiography. Both North and South would claim Old (and new) Chosun; the North would title the country Chosun, the South would take the more recent (1890s) Han’guk. From the Three Kingdoms period, the North conferred national legitimacy on Koguryo, with its legendary center in the sacred mountain Paektu, which also 27thereby became central to the founding myth of the Kim dynasty—Kim Jong-Il, we are told, was born there.6 The South, contrarily, claims Korea’s true descent to be through Silla, with its capital at Kyongju or Gyeongju (north of Busan). The presidents of South Korea from 1961 to 1996, both those elected and the dictators, came from this region; the ἀrst president, Syngman Rhee, had his legitimizing ideology located in Silla.7 It is Baekje that is omitted from these rival claims of origin—and, more vehemently, from Japanese claims.8
In August 1394 Taejo, founding monarch of the Yi (Chosun) dynasty, established Hanyang (the present Seoul) on the same site as two previous dynastic capitals but as an entirely new foundation. Ryu Jeh-hong (2004, 17) argues that Taejo, having established his dynasty by coup, needed to “denaturalize” (destroy) Gaeseong, the previous “naturalized” capital of the Goryeo dynasty, and then to invoke the already “naturalized” pungsu, the Korean geomancy, bringing its principles to determine both the location and geometry of the new capital. Lee Sang-hae (2000, 15) has outlined two principles of Hanyang’s (Seoul’s) planning. One lay in the doctrine derivable from pungsu, seen as an “image-text”:
The name Hanyang is itself a reflection of its [pungsu] principles. In the theory of negative-positive (yin-yang in Chinese), yang denotes the sun ἀlled southern slope of a mountain overlooking its river to the south.9 Hanyang then means a site situated south of the North (pronounced “puk” in Korean) Mountain (pronounced “ak” in Korean), or Pukak [Pugak], and north of the Han River. In terms of geomantic conἀguration, the city occupied a valley encircled by a range of mountains: Pukak as the Principal Mountain; Namsan the Southern Mountain; Naksan the “Left Blue Dragon”; Inwangsan the “Right White Tiger.”10
The second principle flowed from the metaphysics of neo-Confucianism, whereby “the city was an instrument for implementing the ritual institutions, and the ἀrst order of its plan was the proper placement of guardian shrines of the state” (Lee Sang-hae 2000, 15).
The ἀrst decision facing the Chosun, in the context of this new orthodoxy, was the siting of the main royal palace, Gyeongbokgung Palace, in the north of the city but under the protecting south slope of Pugak, the North Mountain, which, however, was not visible from the palace due to an intervening mountain slope, but was majestically visible from the great north-south axis of Taepyeongno (now Sejongno, ἀgure 2.1). The city thereby gained the effect of legitimizing 28Taejo’s coup by naturalizing his palace. Jongmyo (Chongmyo), the royal ancestral temple, was to the east of the palace, and the shrine to the guardian spirits of land and crops to the west. The kingdom’s main administrative functions were located along the north-south Taepyeongno, which stretched from Gwanghwamun, the ceremonial gate to the palace, to Hwangtoyeon, an open plaza (Lee Sang-hae 2000, 14; Gelézeau 1997). Hanyang thereby became a “natural” city—nature and its spirits reigned (Ryu Jeh-hong 2004, 17).
FIGURE 2.1 The idealized city of 1394: four geomantic mountains, three main and three subsidiary gates, a discontinuous, bent axis (regularized in the Japanese era and renamed Sejongno in the present time), and palaces beneath the most sacred of the mountains, facing south. Source: based on Lee Ki-Suk (1979, 79–82); Kim Won (1981, 3–10); King (2008a); and Gelézeau (2014, 167).
The main gates to the city were to the east and the west, and, consequently, the main roads ran east-west. About six hundred meters south of Gwanghwamun, Taepyeongno was crossed by Jongno, the most important of these east-west roads, “the street of the bell” whose ringing would signify the opening and closing of the city gates, and the street of shops to serve the royal court and thereby the commercial and business street of the old city, a commercial preeminence that persists to the present day.11 North of Jongno were the residences of the aristocracy, to the south the plebeian districts. 29
While the north-south, east-west grid characterized the principal avenues of Hanyang, it did not have the same rigorous geometry that one would encounter in the Chinese cities, most notably in the Tang dynasty capital, Chang-an. The discontinuous Taepyeongno is one aberration; a stream running southeast from Kwanghwamun yielded the line of the diagonal Insadonggil; within its somewhat irregular grid squares, minor streets and lanes follow no discernible plan. The contrast between the processional avenues and the labyrinthine alleys behind them would appear to reflect an ancient tension between the display of power and the concealment of private space, a tension also evident in the Chinese metropolises—witness the tension between the gridded avenues of Beijing and the hidden hutongs (laneways) within the grid squares. (The ancient tension translates, in modern Seoul, into that between the grand corporate boulevards and the ordered arrays of seemingly identical apartment blocks, on the one hand, and a more chaotic, labyrinthine, disordered space of the “back streets,” alleys, and “real life” on the other. It is the dichotomy of morphologies introduced in chapter 1, ἀgure 1.1.)
Ideologies (1)
Throughout the Chosun era there was a continuing struggle between Buddhist belief and ritual, and Confucianism. The Chinese-style, Confucian civil service examinations were ἀrst held in Korea in 958. Confucians had long looked down on Buddhism as an intrusion distracting the masses from the hard work of building a society based on justice and propriety, where humanity and science would be the guide rather than superstition, the spirits, and the gods. Confucianists were especially offended by the seeming indolence of monks, as well as their celibacy and hence their disrespect of parents in refusing to beget children and thereby continue family lines.
In the United Silla period (668–918), Korean Buddhism had thrived, even while adjusting to Confucian norms, and the Silla capital of Kyongju was reported to have been dense with temples. The Goryeo kingdom (918–1392) likewise celebrated its adherence to Mahayana Buddhism while simultaneously basing its examination and administrative system on Confucian principles.12 The founders of the Chosun dynasty in 1392, however, attacked Buddhism and other folk religions as corruptions that served only to mislead the common people. The temples in towns and cities were demolished, and the founders ordered that no temples were to be built within the new capital of Hanyang (Seoul). Only temples in the mountains could remain standing (Clark 2000, 41). (The absence of temples in the present Seoul 30urban landscape, especially when seen against the forest of churches, is extraordinary.)
Neo-Confucianism had arisen in China in the Tang dynasty (618–904), reaching something of a zenith with Confucian scholars of the Song dynasty (960–1279). Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073) is seen as its ἀrst true pioneer. Neo-Confucianism developed both as a renaissance of traditional Confucian ideas and as reaction to the more metaphysical ideas of religious Buddhism and Daoism. Neo-Confucianism was a social and ethical philosophy that would bring a more syncretist and tolerant approach to Confucianism, more open to Buddhist and Daoist teachings—though not without resistance—and more academic and “scientiἀc.” While borrowing metaphysical ideas from Daoism, neo-Confucianism emphasized humanism and rationalism in the belief that the universe could be understood through human reason—the task was to create a harmonious relationship between the individual and the universe. Reason would supplant (Buddhist, Daoist) meditation.13
Neo-Confucianism was introduced to Korea by An Hyang (1243–1306) in the Goryeo dynasty, at a time when Buddhism was the dominant religion.14 It gained both influence and followers, mostly from an anti-aristocratic middle class that became the vanguard in overthrowing the old dynasty and setting up the Chosun. Neo-Confucianism became the state ideology of the new dynasty; Buddhism was seen as poisonous to neo-Confucian order and accordingly was restricted and persecuted. Although the early Chosun reformers might have been Buddhist in their private lives, they agreed that the organized Buddhist religion had to be suppressed, its monasteries and lands conἀscated, and their members returned to “useful” occupations. Remaining Buddhist clergy would be banished to mountain-dwelling monasteries and Korea would be a neo-Confucian state (Clark 2000, 9; also Duncan 1996).
The founding Chosun monarch Taejo had given priority to the establishment of institutions of Confucian learning.15 The fourth monarch, King Sejong the Great (r. 1418–1450), brought together Confucian humanism and progressive administration in what almost amounted to a welfare state. Arguably his greatest cultural achievement was the creation of the Korean alphabet, han-gul. Sejong’s reign is commonly seen as premodern Korea’s golden age: Koreans had invented movable metal type printing around 1234—two centuries before Gutenberg (in the 1450s)—perfecting the method in 1403. Then, in 1420, Sejong set technicians to the task of mechanizing the process: “We are prepared to print any book there is and all men will have the means to study” (Cumings 2005, 65, quoting Gale 1972, 233). 31There were similar advances in mathematics, the physical sciences, and technology that were comparable with China and certainly far ahead of the West and Japan.
Although Buddhism was restricted, Sejong returned to a private Buddhist devotion toward the end of his reign. There was always the Buddhist ἀghtback, however, and King Sejo (r. 1455–1468) signiἀcantly strengthened the Buddhist practices, in part to reinforce monarchical power by suppressing the yangban (“two branches”) class of office-holding aristocrats and the Confucian institutions. His successor, Songjong (r. 1469–1494), ninth king of the Chosun dynasty, worked to restore Confucian rule and reinforce the scholarly class.16 The anti-Sejo literati had used the institution of the royal lecture (haranguing the king) in an attempt to abolish Buddhist ritual and other anomalies from the life of the court.17 Land-tenure issues—hence those of social class—were always at the core of the struggles. Although tensions were always there, this was the peak of the resurgent neo-Confucian school.
Another basis of Confucian-Buddhist conflict related to the forms of society that each would imagine. Deeply embedded in Buddhism is the idea of human equality; enlightenment is open to all. Gong Fuzi (Master Gong, Confucius, 551–479 BCE), on the other hand, had taught that people are not created equal, nor do they become equal during their lives; some are stronger, some weaker; some will labor with their hands, others with their minds; what matters, rather, is the principle of mutual duties and obligations. A society’s most moral people should be its leaders, where moral knowledge is best acquired through the study of philosophy, history, and literature. Thus the soundest investment is in education; the pathway to honor and authority—to being truly respected and followed by others—is via success in the Confucian examination system. To the Confucian mind, the Buddhist focus on meditation and otherworldliness presented as indolence at one level, as unscientiἀc superstition at another, and the property and wealth of the temples would be put to better use if invested in the education of the people.
The Confucian system subsequently disintegrated—went underground—in the face of Western encounters and Japanese oppression, only to reemerge in the present age. John Duncan (2000) refers to “the plasticity of Confucianism” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Korea’s two most prominent neo-Confucian scholars were Yi Hwang (1501–1570) and Yi I (1536–1584); they are today commemorated on Korea’s one-thousand- and ἀve-thousand-won banknotes, respectively. Major thoroughfares in modern Seoul are named for them. 32
Boyé Lafayette De Mente suggests that, for older Koreans in the present day, the most important word in the Korean language might be aboji (“father”)—indeed, Korea’s traditional culture might be described as a father culture because of the central role that fathers played in the social structure and in day-to-day living for over ἀve centuries (De Mente 2012, 1). The place of women, by contrast, was always circumscribed (Seth 2002; Kim Youngmin and Pettid 2011). As something of a corollary to the neo-Confucian system, man and wife were to be placed in different realms of duty and obligation. Whereas women in the Goryeo period could enjoy a small measure of freedom—widows, for example, could remarry—the Chosun wife would ἀnd herself spatially conἀned, bereft of property, nameless, and effectively a gift to her husband’s family and household; she had no rights of inheritance. Her best hope—usually realized—was to rule the inner sanctum of that household (Ko et al. 2003; Jung Ji-Young 2011). Ancestors were to be venerated, with ancestor “worship” being arguably Korea’s most important tradition, albeit inauspiciously instituted with a new law in 1390. Also to be venerated were teachers, “the greatest Men in the Kingdom” (Ledyard 1971, 123, 218–219).
During the Goryeo era the wealthy ruling class had been referred to as the yangban (“two branches”) class, indicating the two types of official, civil and military, although it was in Chosun that the system reached its full power.18 Entry to the yangban required either having passed the merit examination or having been appointed as a favor by the king or a high official as “merit subjects.” There was always tension between the examination passers and the merit subjects in their struggles for power and royal support. The enormous power of the yangban and their bitter and often violent divisions progressively undermined the Chosun kings and reflected their corresponding weakness. It was in the yangban class that women were most constricted: marriage was a union arranged between two surnames and could not be changed within a lifetime. Husbands could kill adulterous wives; concubinage, on the other hand, was to be tolerated (Haboush 2003).19
There were exceptions to this repression, however. While neo-Confucian ideologues attempted the eradication of Buddhism, the common people retained attachment to Buddhist practices and their comfort, but also to folk religions, shamanism, geomancy, and fortune-telling. Though condemned by both Confucians and the modern world, these thrived then and still persist today, constituting a “second tradition” in conflict with elite culture. In this second tradition, women typically found pathways for their artistic expression; they could escape the constricting virtues: the shamans, for instance, were typically female. 33
The sudden shift in the status of Korean women at the end of the twentieth century, to be observed in chapter 5 below, must be seen as extraordinary against such a historical background.20
In 1592 the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded both Ming and Chosun realms in the Imjin War (Hawley 2005).21 Though ultimately defeated in a second invasion in 1597–1598 (principally by the Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin), the Hideyoshi invasions destroyed government records, cultural artifacts, archives, and historical documents. There was land devastation, population loss, and loss of artisans and technicians. As the land registers were destroyed, the basic class relationships were overturned; the class structure began to crumble.
Postwar uncertainty was complicated by the collapse of Ming China and the rise of the Manchu Qing and was spurred by the rise of revolutionary ideas. The yangban elite shunned Sejong’s han-gul alphabet as too easy, instead adhering to the idea that Chinese characters were beyond the ability of the lower classes and hence constituted a barrier to protect their own privileged positions. Slowly, however, use of the “too-easy” han-gul began to permeate to the otherwise bypassed royal and yangban women (and even down into the non-yangban strata), who began to produce a literature of diaries, memoirs, and stories. The theme of the novel Hong Kil-tong chon, by Ho Kyun (1569–1618), was that all people are born equal and that, if provoked, the lower classes together with the peasant class could become a powerful force in the struggle for social justice (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 244). There was also the Chunhyangga (Song of Chunhyang), one of the ἀve p’ansori (ancient song dramas) surviving today; it is about a woman of chaste reputation but also about resistance to the aristocracy (Eckert et al. 1990, 175, 190; Clark 2000, 72–74).22 It continues to be immensely popular and has been made into over a dozen ἀlms, as well as the more recently popular Korean drama series Delightful Girl Choon-Hyang of 2005, part of the Korean Wave output.23 Such ideas gave encouragement to the people and further undermined the prestige of yangban (gentry) society.
Even among the yangban, however, there were impulses to reform. A central theme of neo-Confucianism had been truth through a better understanding of reality—“the investigation of things” (Clark 2000, 15). A group of yangban accordingly set up their own school of thought called silhak (“practical learning”) in response to the increasingly metaphysical nature of neo-Confucianism, its arid scholasticism, and its disconnect from the rapid agricultural, industrial, and political changes in Korea from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Especially signiἀcant to the movement was the novelist and philosopher Bak (Park) Ji-won (1737–1805) (Park Ji-won 2011). 34Silhak scholar Yi Su-gwang (1563–1628) traveled to China and returned with the new Western learning then spreading in Beijing, also initiating a tradition of interest in Korean history (Eckert et al. 1990, 168). Western scientiἀc ideas—mathematics, astronomy, study of the natural world—had been introduced into China by Jesuit missionaries, and these in turn came to infect silhak. Jesuit philosophy and theological exegesis were also adopted, and some went so far as to establish their own branch of Catholicism in Seoul, as the beginning of Korean Christianity.
A consequence of the Hideyoshi invasions of the 1590s had been reinforcement of Korean ideas of the Japanese as barbarians, pirates, and cultural inferiors (Haboush 2016). Another had been a strengthening of Korean seclusion—a “contemptuous exclusiveness,” the nineteenth-century American intruders called it (Drake 1984, 105). Yet neighborly relations with the Japanese continued as Korean officials would be dispatched periodically to Edo; Busan in particular long facilitated the minimal official trade between Korea and Japan and, in the nineteenth century, developed into an almost extraterritorial base for Japanese commercial, agricultural, and then military ambitions (Kyung Moon Hwang 2010, 145).
While the Korean king acknowledged Chinese suzerainty and tributary obligations to the Chinese emperor, practically this amounted to very little: China’s policy was effectively one of “benign neglect,” leaving Korea with substantive autonomy as a nation. Japan, however, was perceived by the Koreans as yet another state in the Sinic thrall. By the nineteenth century, Korean policy was mostly one of “no treaties, no trade, no Catholics, no West, and no Japan” (Cumings 2005, 91, 100). There were bloody pogroms against native Catholics in 1801, 1839, and 1846 (Eckert et al. 1990, 183–184). By gunboat diplomacy, Japan established unequal treaties with China in 1871 and with Korea in 1876, albeit written within the norms of diplomatic language of the time. The barriers had been breached by the erstwhile cultural inferiors.
Ideology and the end of the Chosun age
In the nineteenth century, amid conditions of peasant revolt and virtual civil war, Ch’oe Che-u (1824–1864) formulated the ideology of Donghak, or “Eastern Learning,” to stand against “Western Learning” (Catholicism), though the doctrine also incorporated elements of Catholicism (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 258). Donghak was to rescue the farmers from prevalent poverty and unrest and to secure political and social stability. In a trance Ch’oe Che-u had experienced a revelation 35compelling him to spread a message of spiritual enlightenment throughout Korea.24 He envisioned a new world order based on human equality, a theme later formalized in the doctrine of innaecheon (“humans are Heaven”); in the new religion of Cheondogyo (Religion of the Heavenly Way), the orthodox form of Donghak, this became the central tenet of the religion’s theology, persisting into the present. Cheondogyo arose in 1860 as a mixture of elements of Confucianism, Buddhism, indigenous Songyo (teachings of the ancient Silla kingdom’s hwarang, or “flower of youth” class),25 native Korean beliefs in spirits and mountain deities, and modern ideas of class struggle that one might now consider Marxist, together with nationalistic and antiforeigner (anti-Western, anti-Japanese) sentiment; it also proclaimed a strong millenarian message, to the alarm of establishment circles (Eckert et al. 1990, 187). It underlay the abortive Donghak Revolution of 1894, which was seized, many decades later, as an ideological forebear by both North and South Korea (Bell 2004; Beirne 1999; Hong Suhn-kyoung 1968).
Ch’oe Che-u’s ideas rapidly gained acceptance, and he set his doctrines to music so that farmers could understand them more readily. There were satirical mask dances and village magic performances. His teachings were systematized and compiled as a message of salvation, incorporating the syncretized elements from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Songyo referred to above, together with modern humanist ideas. Exclusionism from foreign influences was another characteristic of his religion, which incorporated an early form of Korean nationalism and rejection of alien thought. The early Donghak slogan is revealing: “Drive out the Japanese dwarfs and the Western barbarians, and praise righteousness” (Hatada 1969, 100).26
Although the Chosun government executed Ch’oe Che-u in 1864 on charges of treason, his movement thrived and poverty-stricken farmers gathered under his standard. There were large-scale Donghak demonstrations in 1892; in 1893 Donghak believers went to Hanyang (Seoul) and demonstrated in front of the royal palace. The uprisings increased to effectively become a revolution. The Donghak Revolution occurred when Korea was on the verge of radical transformations that were in part precipitated by that revolution. Society was stagnating under a rigid Confucian social hierarchy whereby peasants were overtaxed and generally oppressed by corrupt government officials and the yangban class—the Donghak Revolution would have ended the taxation of the peasantry and crushed the yangban. External forces, including Western encroachment, the impending collapse of Qing China, and the aggressive rise of Japan, were causing considerable alarm in Korea (Bell 2004). In 1875 there was a Japanese provocation—the 36so-called Unyo Incident—followed by gunboat diplomacy in 1876 to force a treaty and the entry of a Japanese legation in 1880 (Eckert et al. 1990, 200–201).
Among many of the intelligentsia there was an emerging pro-Japan push, albeit enmeshed with elements of Korean nationalism.27 Following a military mutiny in 1882, a small and rather clandestine group formed, variously referred to as the Progressive or Independence Party, wanting to emulate Japan’s Meiji Restoration and hoping for Japanese support. Finding reform blocked by conservatives centered on the family of Queen Min, on 4 December 1884 they initiated a violent coup in Hanyang (Seoul). A false report of an uprising of Chinese troops based in the Chinese legation was conveyed to King Kojong, who was evacuated to Gyeongun Palace (today’s Deoksugung Palace) and then urged to seek protection from the garrison of the nearby Japanese legation. The Chinese troops moved into action, the coup was defeated, and key Progressives fled with the retreating Japanese guards to asylum in Japan. Among those fleeing was Seo Jae-pil (Philip Jaisohn, 1864–1951), who then traveled to America, where he studied medicine and became the ἀrst Korean to receive US citizenship (Lee Ki-baik [1961] 1984, 275–279).
Following their intervention, the Chinese tightened their hold on Korea’s government, though it was increasingly countered by mounting Russian presence and influence.28 From their refuge in Japan, Progressives continued in vain to call for reform (Kim Okkyun 2000, 256–258), while Korea descended into increasing chaos.
In 1894 Chon Pong-jun (1854–1895) assumed Donghak leadership, heading a popular revolt against the district authorities of Gobu County in Jeolla-do Province (around the present city of Gwangju); when peaceful demonstration proved ineffective, the farmers turned to violence and full-scale rebellion, which spread throughout the province. Again the immediate cause was the corruption of local officials, crushing taxation, and opposition to the yangban aristocracy, but also strong anti-Japanese sentiment. Alarmed at the support engendered by the uprisings, the royal court asked for Chinese intervention (Oliver 1993; Weems 1964). This, however, was a fatal move: Japan responded by invading in force, ἀrst driving out their Chinese rivals and occupying Hanyang, then turning to the Donghak, who were ultimately crushed. Chon Pong-jun was captured and beheaded, and Donghak troops and farmers were massacred by the Japanese. The Japanese demanded that the Korean government order Chinese troops to leave, as the Japanese officials announced their intention to maintain their presence in Korea to help sort out the country’s domestic mess. The Japanese military based itself south of the city at Yongsan, 37between Namsan and the river. On 23 July 1894 the Japanese occupied the royal palace and imposed “protection” on King Kojong. Two days later, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 erupted, with total victory going to the Japanese. On 8 October 1895, Queen Min was assassinated in Gyeongbokgung Palace, allegedly by Japanese “ruffians” at the behest of the Japanese minister. With the aid of Russian sailors, Kojong escaped to the Russian legation in February 1896, from where he succeeded in recovering some of his power, returning to Gyeongun Palace in February 1897. Caught in the middle between rising popular nationalism at home, China’s decay, and Japan’s expansionist modernization on its periphery, Chosun Korea clambered for survival, some assurance of independence, and the semblance of international equality, on 12 October 1897 declaring itself to be the Great Han (Daehan) Empire and its erstwhile king to be the Emperor Gwangmu—just like China and, more to the point, Japan.
Gwangmu (Kojong) ruled from Gyeongun (Deoksugung) Palace rather than the vastly grander and only recently reconstructed Gyeongbokgung.29 The extent of the latter made it difficult to defend in the increasing turmoil, as demonstrated in the assassination there of Queen Min; the Deoksugung, on the other hand, had a small periphery and was thereby more secure. Additionally, the Deoksugung had proximity to the Russian legation and thereby to its defending garrison—it was also no coincidence that Japanese advisors were now being replaced by Russians. The Deoksugung was also interesting for its architecture, for this was a hybrid assemblage like no other. Initially, like other royal palaces, it had comprised halls and other elements in traditional architectural forms, many dating from the 1592 war against the Japanese, and correctly oriented to the south. Subsequently the complex was reoriented to the east, against all tradition, with a new main Junghwajeon throne hall (from 1902) and the eastern gate becoming the Daehanmun imperial gate. In 1906 many of its elements were then reconstructed. The reorientation has the effect, intended or otherwise, of signaling a break from the Korean/Chinese orthodoxy. Equally radical was the insertion of a second, Western-style palace as the new imperial residence, including the imposing Neoclassical Seokjojeon, designed for Kojong by British architect John Harding in 1900 but not completed until 1910. Though Kojong was deposed in 1907, he continued to reside here until his death in 1919, and both he and the palace thereby became emblematic of the Daehan Empire’s claim for global (Western) connection but also of its lost independence.30
The spirit of independence was also expressed in 1896 with the founding of the Independence Club, principally by Seo Jae-pil, now 38returned from America; it mostly comprised veterans from the 1884 abortive coup (like Seo) and middle-ranking government officers. It was established to implement two symbolic projects, ἀrst the erection of Independence Gate to replace Yeongeunmun Gate (Welcoming Gate for Obligation, sometimes translated as Welcome to Beneἀcent Envoy of Suzerains), which was a symbol of unequal diplomatic relations between Korea and Qing China and of Korea’s tributary status. The Yeongeunmun had been built around 1407 in the Ming era, just outside Donuimun (Loyalty Gate), the great west gate to the city, for the ceremonial reception of the Chinese emperor’s ambassador; it was demolished in 1896 following the Japan-China Treaty of Shimonseki to symbolize the end of tribute. The second project was to transform the adjoining Mohwa-gwan (Hall of Cherishing China) into an Independence Hall and Independence Park (Eckert et al. 1990, 232–233).
A month after the declaration of the great empire, on 20 November 1897, the new nationalism was duly celebrated with the ceremonial inauguration of Dongnimmun (Independence Gate). Again architecture took on a symbolizing function. Whereas the Yeongeunmun had been in a Ming Chinese form, its replacement, Independence Gate, is in a modernist hybrid styling—its designer was Korean-American Seo Jae-pil, an independence activist, medical doctor, and founder of Korea’s ἀrst newspaper in han-gul.31 Despite Seo’s American experience, the styling presents paradoxically (to this observer) as akin to Japanese modernism of the time, though its avowed model was Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. Symbolically, the two supporting pillars of the old gate were left intact in front of the new one—its erasure and that of Chinese suzerainty would continue to be represented.
In 1905 Korea came to enjoy Japanese protection (more like Japan); then on 29 August 1910, it received the ultimate privilege of annexation, to become de jure part of Japan. Korea ceased to exist as a politically independent state.
Part 2
COLONIZATION
The post-1868 Meiji (Enlightened Rule) government in Japan found itself confronting three interlinked dilemmas. First, how was Japan to enrich and strengthen itself? From the 1880s onward an argument developed for “dissociation from Asia” (datsu-a ron) whereby Japan 39would distance itself from Asian countries to join the ranks of the Western imperialists. In this matter, Naoki Sakai (2000, 792) invokes the concept of negativity, “without which the reflectivity necessary for self-consciousness cannot be achieved.”32 Negativity might be implied in the notion of otherness, alterity, difference; it is certainly implied in defeat. Naoki Sakai cites the wartime historiography of Masao Maruyama, which asserted that the moment of negativity could be detected in Japanese thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whereas the Chinese never succeeded in giving rise to their own negativity. Implicit here, in the justifying argument of Japanese political superiority over China, was the old thesis of “flight from Asia, entry into Europe”—Japan should be capable of modernizing itself while (the rest of) Asia must wait for the West’s initiative (Maruyama 1974). Yoshimi Takeuchi ([1947] 1993), an ardent sinologist, argued the opposite; the point to be made here is that the material interests of Meiji Japan sought ideological justiἀcation in a historiography that was always already contested. To achieve this self-modernization and thereby join “the West,” the Japanese would need to acquire colonies in Asia, expanding from their islands to the Asian mainland. The foothold for this was seen to be the Korean Peninsula.
Second, the turn from feudalism to capitalism brought the need to secure commodity markets, then to secure export markets for Japan’s products; for these, colonies would be essential, especially with the Western powers entering an era of strident imperialism in the 1880s.
Third, Japan faced a need for food security following a population boom, with a related need for resettlement space. Many Japanese migrated to Hokkaido and other parts of the Japanese archipelago, as well as to the Americas and Australia. However, Korea and especially Manchuria were increasingly seen as the logical areas for colonization (Park Chan Seung 2010, 83–86).33
There are other arguments presented to throw light on the colonization of Korea. If Manchuria was viewed as the more logical sphere for Japanese expansion, then the colonization of Korea is seen in some part as a strategic attempt to keep other potential colonizers out (Russia, Britain?). Also running through Japanese legitimizing ideology was a thread of enlightenment, seeking to end Chosun corruption and decay and bring about a better-educated, more hygienic, and more industrious Korean population.34 Additionally, colonization was rationalized as Japan “returning” to an ancient origin. There were also some less noble arguments: after the Meiji Restoration and the end of the samurai age, invasions would provide an outlet for the energies of disestablished samurai; colonization, in turn, would provide opportunities to spread Japan’s “imperial glory” (Eckert et al. 1990, 198). 40
The Japanese annexation of Korea was a gradual process. In April 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army under General Kuroki Tamemoto effected a landing near Incheon, then moved on to occupy Seoul. The war concluded on 5 September 1905, ending Russian influence in Korea and Manchuria; on 17 November 1905 the Eulsa Treaty with Japan was arbitrarily imposed on Korea, with American support, establishing a Japanese protectorate.35 British acknowledgment soon followed.36 When Kojong mounted a diplomatic effort to reestablish sovereignty in 1907, he was forced to abdicate in favor of his son. A two-tier system of administration developed in Korea: on one hand was the royal government of the Daehan Empire; on the other was the Japanese Residency-General, or what Lee Ki-baik (1984, 308) terms “government by advisers.” While responsibility might still lie with the royal departments, the Residency-General was always influential. After the 1907 deposition of Kojong, all authority passed to the Residency-General.
General Terauchi Masatake, as the third resident-general to Korea, executed the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty in August 1910, thereby becoming the ἀrst Japanese governor-general. The ἀrst decade of the formal colonial period was the “military rule” era (Kyung Moon Hwang 2010, 162). In the cities, and especially in Seoul, there was effectively a police state as the Japanese struggled to stabilize their colony, although the consequence was to transform gathering discontent into an ensuing explosion, on 1 March 1919—the March First Movement.
Pro-Japan sentiment had persisted after the failed 1884 coup, manifesting in aspects of what Lee Ki-baik calls the “forces of enlightenment” (elsewhere the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement),37 and especially ambivalently in the 1904–1910 Ilchinhoe (Advance in Unity Society), which ardently embraced Japan’s discourse of “civilizing Korea” and saw colonization as an opportunity to advance its own populist agenda. Both the Japanese colonizers and the Korean elites disliked the Ilchinhoe for its aggressive activism, which sought to control local tax administration and reverse the existing power relations between the people and government officials. Ultimately, the Ilchinhoe members faced visceral moral condemnation from their fellow Koreans when their language and actions resulted in nothing but the emergence of the Japanese colonial empire in Korea (Moon Yumi 2013). There were also strong anti-Japan movements: as Brandon Palmer (2013) observes, Koreans’ long-standing animosity toward Japan culminated in active Korean resistance to colonial rule, of which the two main instances were the “righteous armies” and the March First Movement. From 1907 to 1912, small bands of righteous armies fought against colonial rule, with some 17,600 Korean ἀghters and 41civilians allegedly killed in the process of their suppression. The March First Independence Movement of 1919 was a peaceful peninsula-wide protest with nearly a million participants and a signal event in recent Korean history.
Ideologies (2)
The 1 March 1919 event needs to be seen in the context of continuing ideological evolution in Korea. Japan’s annexation of Korea came as an overlay across an intricate web of ideologies and beliefs. While neo-Confucianism had collapsed in the onslaught of (Japanese) modernization, its ideals of self-discipline, order, respect, appropriate behavior, and national dignity simmered beneath any surface of subservience. The Confucian insistence on the material, on science and “the real,” continued in tension with the Buddhist preoccupation with the immateriality of the phenomenal universe. Jesuit-infused Christian modernism and openness to Western science, philosophy, and theological exegesis had interlaced with both Confucian and Buddhist orthodoxies to yield, in turn, the still-persisting (in the twenty-ἀrst century) Donghak ideology.
Despite its virtual annihilation in 1894 at the hands of the Japanese, Donghak could stand as a powerful symbol of Korean resistance; furthermore, it was distinguished as an indigenous, democratic, nationalistic, and modern political philosophy. The argument has been that, whereas China eventually had to turn to an imported, Western ideology for its modernization (Communism), Korea could claim to have found a guiding ideology in its own traditions and powers of invention (Kang Wi Jo 1968, 48). Cheondogyo, the religious formulation of Donghak, had failed to be similarly crushed by the Japanese, becoming instead the vehicle for the historical enhancement of the Donghak myth of resistance. Kirsten Bell (2004) cites Kim Yong Choon (1978, vii): “What is Korean thought? Answering this question might involve several traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Shamanism, Christianity and Ch’ongdogyo [Cheondogyo]. However, Ch’ongdogyo alone is the major indigenous tradition developed in Korea, while Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity are of foreign origin, and Shamanism is relatively common in many parts of the world.”
Cheondogyo certainly had its nationalistic element and provided motivating ideology for the 1 March 1919 Korean Declaration of Independence and the consequent March First Movement against the Japanese. Of the thirty-three signatories to the declaration, fifteen were Cheondogyo; however, it should be noted, sixteen were Protestant (Kyung Moon Hwang 2010, 171). Nevertheless, other elements 42of Cheondogyo developed into the Ilchinhoe referred to above, which openly supported the annexation of Korea and from which it subsequently beneἀtted.
Nor was there any political consensus among the Christians. While there was nationalist sentiment, most entered a form of social contract with the authorities to refrain from political activities in order to avoid persecution. A degree of cooperation with the state persisted until the outbreak of war in 1937 when the issue of Shinto worship came to the fore, and then the 1942 expulsion of American missionaries.38 Even here, however, there was no social consensus: among Catholics, for whom shrine worship was common, the respect for Shinto shrines was less problematic.
This fragmentation of ideologies, both Cheondogyo and Christian, characterized positions toward the Japanese colonial authorities, as well as toward pathways to modernity. It characterized the March First Movement and then persisted into the diversity of positions that underlay the post-1945 maelstrom. The role of Christianity here cannot be exaggerated: the mission stations—churches, schools, hospitals, and missionary residences—expressed a Western civilization that created a sense of awe and mystery among Koreans, who were experiencing modern amenities for the ἀrst time. Missionary compounds provided a window on the Western world that was not distorted by any refraction through Japanese colonization or ideology. The demand for education was overwhelming; consequently some 800 schools accommodating approximately 41,000 students were founded by the missionaries, with many independence ἀghters among the alumni. The Christian population reached 315,000 in the mid-1930s, and around 500,000 by 1945; although their numbers were much smaller at the time of the 1919 uprising, the glimpse presented of a Western modernity was a powerful motivation.39
ἀ e March First Movement
The end of World War I and the breakup of empires had encouraged expectations of Korean independence. Erstwhile Emperor Kojong died in January 1919, with rumors of poisoning, and independence rallies against Japanese invaders occurred nationwide on 1 March, to be suppressed by force as a result of which some seven thousand people were killed by Japanese soldiers and police. In the aftermath of the 1919 suppression, on 13 April 1919 the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea was formed in Shanghai, with Syngman Rhee (1875–1965) as president. This did not achieve recognition by world powers, although a form of recognition was given by the nationalist 43government of China. The Provisional Government coordinated armed resistance against the Japanese Imperial Army during the 1920s and 1930s, including the signiἀcant Battle of Qingshanli in October 1920, in eastern Manchuria. The Korea Independent Army lured a larger Japanese force into battle, inflicting them with a major defeat and forcing a Japanese withdrawal from the area. The Battle of Qingshanli is considered a great victory for Korean guerrilla tactics.
In the aftermath of the 1919 uprising and events in Manchuria, the Japanese came to realize that they were on “the wrong side of history”—their form of repressive colonization had found itself in the wrong century. Always concerned with appearing “modern,” this realization was the beginning of their “cultural” policy, and there was a relaxing of Japanese control. In the 1920s the colonial government was headed by a more humane governor-general, Admiral Viscount Saito Makoto (1858–1936), who permitted Koreans to assemble, speak, and publish their own newspapers and magazines; he improved education and allowed Koreans to join religious and even political organizations (Clark 2000, 17). In 1907 the Japanese had passed the Newspaper Law, effectively preventing the publication of local papers. Only the Korean-language Taehan Maeil Sinbo continued publication because it was run by a foreigner, E. T. Bethell. Hence for the ἀrst decade of colonial rule there were no Korean-owned newspapers, although books and several dozen Korean-owned magazines were published (Robinson 1988). In 1920 these laws were relaxed, and two of the three major Korean daily newspapers, Dong-A Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo, were established in 1920. In 1932 a double standard applying to Korean vis-à-vis Japanese publication was removed. However, the Japanese government still seized newspapers without warning, with over a thousand such seizures recorded between 1920 and 1939. By 1940, with the Paciἀc War increasing, Japan again shut down all Korean-language newspapers. In the 1920s, however, the cultural nationalist movement was wide-ranging; certainly there was censorship, but there was also a vibrant liberal and even Marxist literary and artistic movement, well into the late 1930s (Robinson 1988).40
Many Koreans still advocated armed insurrection as the only path to independence; others, however, saw their task as the advancement of the culture and the reinforcing of identity to yield, ultimately, a future generation as the basis on which to build a new Korea. There were two moderate-nationalist movements that focused on a more gradual approach to national resurgence. The ἀrst was the National University Movement established in 1922 and led by the Society for the Establishment of a National University, as an outcome of intelligentsia concerns—there had been a long and proud tradition of elite 44education in Korea, though it was now deeply threatened.41 Colonial schools had a strong emphasis on Japanese language acquisition, cultural values, and Japanized Korean history; there were few opportunities for college education in Korea, so most college students ended up in Japan. A national fund-raising campaign was launched. Within six months, however, inἀghting among cliques, typical of the era, undid the project. The Japanese authorities announced the establishment of an imperial university for Seoul, the Keijo Imperial University (1924–1946), with new buildings scheduled for 1926 (Eckert et al. 1990, 290–291).
One factor in the collapse of the national university project was the withdrawal of support by the more radical student groups, including the All Korean Youth League. Student radicalism was strong, and paradoxically reinforced from Japan: Korean students traveling to Japan may have become somewhat assimilated into Japanese ways and thought, yet that was often into Japanese radical, left-wing thought, as Japan was also in some social turmoil at that time. Socialist thinking at the student level was in a mismatch with the second moderate-nationalist movement, the movement for incremental independence: worsening economic conditions, Government-General economic reforms, and general concern regarding economic dependency led to the Korean Production Movement of 1923–1924. Korean businessmen had been lobbying for subsidies and concessions so that they could compete on equal footing with Japanese enterprises; however, now the strategy shifted to mobilize national sentiment to support Korean industry and products. The effect of such a shift in consumer behavior would be the accumulation of Korean capital to compete with Japanese capital (Eckert et al. 1990, 291–293).
Repression
In April 1926 Sunjong, the last Chosun monarch, died. Apparently genuine sorrow combined with hostility toward Japan to produce an outpouring of both grief and anger. Mindful of how the death of Kojong had led to the March First Movement, the colonial police moved to suppress the threatened mass demonstrations, which, however, proceeded in a variety of forms. Student radicalization increased, spreading through the country and culminating in the Gwangju Incident of 1929, in which ἀghting erupted between Korean and Japanese students, the police blamed the Koreans, and there were mass arrests, followed by further escalations. By early 1930 demonstrations had spread across the country (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 364). The Gwangju Incident led to tightening military rule in 1931. Then with the outbreak of 45the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and World War II, Japan attempted the total Japanization of Korea, although the effort was always more frustrated than effective. The Japanese governor-general from 1936 to 1942, General Jiro Minami (1874–1955), ordered cultural assimilation of Korea’s twenty-three to twenty-ἀve million people: Korean culture became illegal; worship at Japanese Shinto shrines was made compulsory; and use of the Korean language was progressively banned, as was the study of Korean literature and culture, to be replaced with that of Japan; while the school curriculum was changed to outlaw teaching in the Korean language and to abolish the teaching of history. Koreans were pressured to adopt Japanese names. Korean cultural artifacts were destroyed or taken to Japan. From 1939 onward, education would be aggressively redirected to the task of converting Koreans into useful, Japanese-speaking imperial citizens.
Assimilation efforts became extreme, with total mobilization in 1943; Koreans would be educated as “new Japanese” (Palmer 2007). Lee Ki-baik has described the last, frenetic attempt at assimilation:
The leading ἀgures in the Korean Language Society were arrested in October 1942, on charge of fomenting a nationalist movement, and as a result of the severe torture to which they were subjected by the Japanese police, Yi Yun-jae and some others among the Korean linguists died in prison. Novelists, poets and other creative writers were forced to produce their works in Japanese, and in the end it was even required that Japanese be exclusively used in the schools and in Korean homes. Not only the study of the Korean language but also of Korean history was considered dangerous. (1984, 353)
Many Koreans were transported to Japan to work in mines and factories as Japanese workers were drafted into the military; women were also put to work, mostly in factories, although increasing numbers were sent with Japan’s military as cooks, laundresses, and coerced prostitutes—the “comfort women.”42
Using Japanese and Korean sources, Brandon Palmer (2013, 3) estimates that from 1937 to 1945 Japanese colonial authorities recruited at least 360,000 Koreans to serve in the military as soldiers or civilian employees, and a further million as industrial laborers within Korea. By the end of World War II, between four and seven million Koreans had been mobilized throughout Japan’s wartime empire.43 Resistance to mobilization manifested within Korea, even more so outside the country. The Shanghai-based Provisional Government formed the Korean Liberation Army in 1940, bringing together many of the Korean resistance groups in exile. On 9 December 1941 the 46government declared war on Japan and Germany, and the Liberation Army participated in Allied action in China and Southeast Asia. An assault on imperial Japanese forces within Korea was planned; however, with the 1945 Japanese surrender, this goal was never achieved. At war’s end, there were vast armies of Koreans who had fought on both sides.
ἀ e mobilization era and the question of assimilation
Where assimilation had always underlain colonialist ideology, with various threads running through Government-General policy, mobilization brought it to new levels of enforcement and extremism that seemed to go back to an earlier colonizing experience. Mark Caprio argues that Japan’s earlier history of colonial rule, notably of Ainu and Ryukyuan peoples, had tended more toward obliterating those cultures than incorporating those peoples as equal Japanese citizens. With their annexation of Taiwan in 1895, the Japanese moved more toward European models, such as England and France, in developing policies for assimilation.44 England’s assimilation of the Scots and the Welsh is cited. Caprio suggests that there was indeed a potential for Korean assimilation but that very few initiatives were taken to implement the policies. Instead, the Japanese maintained separate communities in Korea with two separate and unequal schooling systems, and very little intermarriage or effort to hide their disdain for Koreans as inferior (Caprio 2009).45
Takashi Fujitani (2011) makes the provocative comparison of Korean soldiers recruited or drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army with Japanese Americans similarly recruited into the US military. In the last years of the Paciἀc War, as Naoki Sakai (2000, 805) observes, referencing Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan and the United States engaged in the ideological war for the hearts and minds of multiethnic Asia.46 Both, accordingly, were compelled to adopt explicitly antiracist strategies in contradiction to popular perceptions of their histories. The dilemma for Japan was that it needed to project antiracism at precisely the moment when it had to forcibly recruit the Koreans into the effort of total warfare.
In their attempt to disavow racism even as they reproduced it, Japan and America moved closer together (Fujitani 2011). Sakai adds that after 1945, as the United States assumed responsibility for Japan’s colonies, Japan was relieved of the burden of decolonization. Korea, on the other hand, was left with the abiding bitterness of experiences of resistance versus collaboration, with its attendant uncertainties of identity. 47
Part 3
ERASURE OR RADICAL BREAK?
While the concern here is with the effects of the Japanese colonization both at the time of and subsequent to the 1945 liberation, there is always the question: to what extent are we observing the effects of colonization, and to what extent those of modernization? Certainly late Chosun was caught up in that maelstrom of modernity that marked the turn to the twentieth century. Furthermore, in some ways the 1910 declaration of formal colonization was tokenistic, as Japanization had been a gradual process of the preceding decades. The following discussion of modernity-colonization’s effects, observing the blurred boundary between Chosun and colony, will be thematic rather than chronological; its purpose is to explore how these effects are to be read off the space and fabric of modern Seoul.
Migration and land
In the late nineteenth century Japanese merchants had settled in Korean towns and cities seeking economic opportunity so that by 1910 Korea was reputed already to have Japan’s largest overseas community. Japanese settlers were interested in acquiring agricultural land even before Japanese landownership was legalized in 1906. Terauchi Masatake, as governor-general, advanced settlement through land reform, which was initially popular with the wider Korean population.47 Hwang Insang observes that colonial economic exploitation and control was symbolized in the Land Survey and the Company Law, with the former serving as the foundation of Japan’s colonial rule and the structural basis for economic exploitation of the colonial economy.48 A new Land Survey Bureau conducted cadastral surveys that established ownership on the basis of documentary evidence (deeds, titles, etc.); ownership was denied to those unable to provide such written proof, and these turned out to be mostly aristocratic and absentee landlords who could only quote traditional rights. Considerable private lands thereby fell into the hands of the Government-General. Additionally, under the Forest Law of August 1911, all government mountain forests came under the Government-General; a Forest Survey Ordinance in 1918 further extended forest areas to Government-General ownership.
As land was increasingly acquired by Japanese individuals and corporations, many Korean erstwhile landowners, together with 48agricultural workers, became tenant farmers; as often happens in Japan itself, they were forced to pay over half their crop as rent. Then, additionally, they had to pay tax. Landowners were mostly Japanese or Japanese collaborators, while tenants were all Korean. Cumings (1981) reports that in 1942 there were 2,173 Korean and 1,317 Japanese owning more than ἀfty chongbo (approximately 123 acres); the largest of those, holding 500 acres or more, comprised 116 Koreans and 184 Japanese. It is not possible to determine how many of those Korean landowners were enjoying the beneἀts of collaboration with the government.
By the 1930s the growth of the urban economy and the migration of farmers to the cities had weakened the power of the landlords. With the onset of the wartime economy, realizing that landlordism impeded increased agricultural productivity, the government brought the rural sector under the wartime command economy through a Central Agricultural Association in which membership was obligatory.
At the cataclysmic end of colonization in 1945, some 750,000 Japanese resided in Korea, contrasting with the 20,000 to 30,000 French nationals in Vietnam. Whereas most French in Vietnam were engaged in colonial administration, only 40 percent of the Japanese in Korea were in colonial administration, while the rest were civilians. Japan’s aggressive migration policy, however, had Japanese mostly settling in the Korean cities and seizing power in the Korean economy. They lived in their own quarters separate from Koreans and enjoyed a privileged status in education and health services.49
Economy
Cyhn Jin (2002) is among scholars who have argued that Japanese rule worsened economic conditions in Korea; Atul Kohli (2004), on the other hand, concludes that the economic development model instituted by the Japanese was crucial in Korean economic development and was maintained by the Koreans post-1945. The latter is a view also supported by Jones (1984) and by Savada and Shaw (1990), who argue that Japan’s economic development brought little beneἀt to Koreans although its aftermath was more positive, a point to be taken up following.
While the core interest remained colonial, namely to exploit Korea’s resources, in the 1920s new efficiencies and structural reforms were brought to this enterprise. Furthermore, restrictions on native enterprise were eased, thereby stimulating the emergence of many Korean family-based companies that would later evolve into the giant conglomerates that eventually came to dominate the Korean 49economy, such as Samsung and LG, a story to be reprised in chapter 3. Kyung Moon Hwang (2010, 165) especially draws attention to the family-owned Kyongsong Textile Company, which eventually branched out into other industries and regions, with factories in Manchuria and elsewhere. Especially influential has been Carter Eckert’s account of the same company (chapter 1). Eckert’s book had concentrated on a single, remarkably successful Korean family, the Kims of Koch’ang County. The brothers Kim Songsu and Kim Yonsu had proἀted from a Japanese opening of the rice market between 1876 and 1919, allowing them to accumulate capital, with which the family established the Kyongsong Spinning and Weaving Company, or Kyongbang, in 1919 for the production of yarn and cloth. From 1919 to 1945 Kyongsong grew substantially, a success that Eckert attributes in part to Japanese colonial control, as well as to government subsidies and loans and to Japanese-enabled access to raw materials (cotton from China), machinery and expertise (from Japan), and markets (initially China, later the Japanese military for uniforms). He further notes that Kyongsong provided support to the Japanese ideology of Naisen Ittai (“Japan and Korea as one”), reflecting only a weak commitment to Korean nationalism generally on the part of the Korean bourgeoisie. The group continued to prosper after 1945 and into the present.
In this era Korea acquired an industrial capitalist class whose interests were in harmony with Japanese imperial goals and that accordingly enjoyed colonialist support. Correspondingly there also arose an industrial proletariat, albeit minute alongside the larger, agricultural population; however, this was a very low-wage proletariat, without legal or political protection. By the 1920s there was also a developing proletarian sensibility within the (Marxist) intelligentsia movement of New Tendency literature (Kimberley Chung 2014).
Industrialization and the burgeoning of Korean enterprises brought a reordering of the social structure, not least through a dramatic rise in social mobility. Especially dramatic were changes in the status of women: increasing numbers moved into education and far more into factory employment. With the advent of the “new woman” or “modern girl,” new opportunities arose for new enterprises to produce the commodities and publications that a proto-bourgeoisie could be encouraged to demand. The publications, in turn, provided the media for women’s voices to now be heard. Increasing numbers of Koreans traveled to Japan for education, returning to Korea awakened by the liberty and “style” of a culturally advanced middle class that would then be emulated, albeit in the cities rather than the countryside, and then mostly in Seoul. 50
Henry H. Em begins ἀ e Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea with a reference to an essay of September 1932 in Tongkwang by Kim Ki-rim, announcing 1930s modernity as the era of short hair and calling on “Miss Korea” to cut her hair—the essay had argued that modernity would not be identiἀed by “sport, speed, sex,” but by short hair, and “women of status venturing outside in daytime unconstrained by marriage and motherhood. Indeed by the 1930s one could have seen in colonial Korea baseball games, beauty pageants, exhibitions, display windows fronting the new department stores, street cars, street lights, and cafés that enabled crowd watching” (Em, 2013, 1). Being modern was not easy. Some Korean women conformed to the dictates of colonial modernity; others, however, took deliberate pains to distinguish between what was “modern” (Western) and thereby legitimate and what was “Japanese,” hence illegitimate. Yoo (2008) suggests that what made the experience of these women unique was the dual confrontation with modernity and with Japan as a colonial power.
Diverse aspects of economic change related to new infrastructure. There was massive investment by the colonial government in communications and transportation infrastructure, schools and technical training centers, hospitals and other health initiatives—all, certainly, catering to the Japanese migrant population to assist the colonization process yet also improving the welfare of many Koreans. This might be seen as merely a continuation of innovatory programs under the old Daehan Empire whereby Seoul had acquired railways, trams, electricity, hospitals, industrialized mining, and other hallmarks of a modern city, except that these had been implemented when Korea was already coming under the Japanese sway.50 Furthermore, it was the acceleration and scaling up of these that distinguished the colonial era.
The experience of rapid industrialization and modern infrastructure under the Japanese, in both Korea and Manchuria, is seen to have had long-lasting effects. Cha Myung Soo (2010) has argued that “the South Korean developmental state, as symbolized by Park Chung-hee, a former officer of the Japanese Imperial Army serving in wartime Manchuria, was closely modeled upon the colonial system of government. In short, South Korea grew on the shoulders of the colonial achievement, rather than emerging out of the ashes left by the Korean War, as is sometimes asserted.” We return to this theme in chapter 3.
Education
The long lineage of the Korean educational tradition has already been referred to—Lee Ki-baik (1984, 119, 130) can allude to the struggles in 51the Goryeo (Koryo) age between the National University (founded in 992, in Gaeseong) and the more prestigious twelve private academies. The tradition had then been enriched over the centuries through Buddhist and Confucian insertions.51 The colonial imposition thus came on top of something very ancient, albeit privilege-focused, but also quintessentially Korean. The Japanese in Korea produced a public education system modeled after the Japanese school system, with elementary, middle schools, and high schools culminating in Keijo Imperial University (1924–1946) in Seoul. The university was closed by the US military on 22 August 1946 and subsequently merged with nine other colleges to form Seoul National University. As in Japan, education was seen primarily as an instrument of “the formation of the Imperial Citizen.” The public curriculum for most of the period was taught by Korean teachers in a hybrid system focused on assimilating Koreans into the Japanese Empire as well as emphasizing Korean cultural education. Integration of Korean students in Japanese-language schools and Japanese students in Korean-language schools was discouraged but nevertheless increased over time. Korean history and language would be taught alongside Japanese history and language until the early 1940s.
In 1921 there were government efforts to strengthen Korean media and literature throughout Korea but also in Japan. There were incentives for ethnic Japanese to learn Korean, although this may have been as much to garner Japanese cultural acceptance as to foster cooperation between Koreans and Japanese. Japanese policy moved more aggressively toward cultural assimilation in 1938 (Naisen Ittai, “Japan and Korea as one”), with reform advocated to strengthen the war effort. By 1943 all Korean language courses had been phased out.
Although the Japanese education system may have been detrimental to Korean cultural identity, its introduction of universal public education was instrumental in the improvement of Korean human capital: near the end of Japanese rule, elementary school attendance was around 38 percent. The system produced hundreds of thousands of educated Koreans who later became “the core of the postwar political and economic elite” (Duus et al. 1996, 336). Against that assessment is the reality that adult literacy was around 22 percent in 1945; in 1970, by contrast, it had reached 87.6 percent.
Park Chan Seung (2010) argues that colonial Korea developed as a dualistic society. The main lines of differentiation were between an upper class, mostly Japanese but also comprising small numbers of Koreans, and a great majority of Koreans with a relatively few Japanese. In other words, the divide became multilayered, as much economic as ethnic. 52
Transgressions, erasures, architecture
While debate persists among historians about the beneἀts or disbene-ἀts of land reform, educational development, and economic modernization, one ἀnds few mentions of the colonial government’s actions to conserve elements of Korean culture. Instead the emphasis is on Japanese acts of destruction of Korean heritage and identity. Some of this conservation effort was to attract tourism, yet there were also real attempts to promote aspects of Korean culture; Korean studies were a signiἀcant focus in Japanese scholarship, and there were committed Koreaphiles even among the Japanese administrators. The remnant royal family was especially used in the conservation of traditional Korean culture and was allocated a colonial government budget for that purpose; cultural organizations were similarly funded.
Nevertheless it is the erasures and cultural distortions of the colonial society that have especially preoccupied postcolonial commentators and popular media. K. Itoi (2005) asserts that the Japanese destroyed an estimated 80 percent of the historic shrines, palaces, and cultural monuments of Korea; however, no sources are given for this somewhat arbitrary and seemingly exaggerated claim.52 Certainly there was heavy-handedness; there was also pillaging, with tens of thousands of cultural artifacts removed to Japan.
On what had been the grand Gyeongbokgung Palace forecourt the Japanese built their own multistory, domed, administrative headquarters, the Government-General Building, oriented to the north-south axis of Taepyeongno (Taihei Boulevard in the Japanese era) but at an angle to the remnants of the palace. Gyeongbokgung Palace had been destroyed in 1592 during the (Japanese) Hideyoshi invasion, whereupon the royal family and the court moved to the second or Changdeokgung Palace, which, with the third or Changgyeonggung Palace and the Jongmyo ancestral shrine constituted a vast integrated realm termed the “East Palace” complex (Korean Institute of Architects 2000, 56–63). The main Gyeongbokgung Palace had been rebuilt in 1867, and stood until its destruction (“deformation”) again along with much of the city following the Japanese inἀltration and then annexation in 1910. It had been mostly abandoned in the late nineteenth century with Kojong’s removal to Deoksugung Palace and, while its destruction by the colonial government had the effect of erasing the centrality of the monarchy, many of the removed buildings were demolished and reerected at Changdeokgung Palace with the agreement of the royal family.
Kal Hong (2011, 16–31) and Todd Henry (2014, 92–129) have recounted the story of the 1915 Korean Industrial Exposition, constructed in the Gyeongbokgung Palace precinct, in part to extol the 53beneἀts of colonization and in part to open up the previously “forbidden” palace to the wider public, and thereby to erode the mystery and authority of the Chosun dynasty.53 The visitor entering through the ceremonial Kwanghwamun Gate would abruptly confront the monumental Ilhogwan (First Exhibition Hall) in a “Renaissance plus Secession style” immediately in front of the main throne hall, blocking the view to what had been the symbolic landmark of the Chosun dynasty. Then, for the 1929 Korean Exposition, the old palace buildings had been effectively cleared from the site; the exhibition complex was behind the recently completed Government-General Building, and the main axis of the exposition had accordingly been turned from south-to-north to east-to-west (Kal Hong 2011, 32–43). Visitors would enter from the east, through the now relocated Kwanghwamun Gate, which had been moved from its previous axial position, effectively to provide an unimpeded view to the Government-General Building. Whereas the earlier exposition dated from the more militaristic ἀrst decade of colonization, that of 1929 was in the more liberal era of the 1920s; accordingly, Kal reports, the latter celebrated progress under the Japanese guidance but also images of “Korean local culture,” “Korean atmosphere” and “Korean uniqueness.”54 However, it was a Koreanness achieved by some fake “ancient” buildings, ironically replacing the real palace buildings demolished to make way for them.
In any consideration of the Government-General Building, one needs to take a step back. In 1912 there had been a city ward improvement plan that clearly indicated the colonial government’s early ideas for their transformation of the city: the colonial headquarters building would be located between the Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung Palaces, from which axial and diagonal boulevards would radiate to the south, southeast, and southwest, with the rest of the city also organized on Beaux Arts principles. By the time of the 1919 city ward improvement plan, the decision had been made to place the Government-General headquarters (completed in 1926) in front of Gyeongbokgung Palace; likewise the radiating boulevards would also now focus on that site. Subsequently Beaux Arts planning ideas were abandoned and the principal streets of the historical city accepted, although they were to be straightened and widened (Jung Inha 2013, 10–11). So Beaux Arts ideas displayed in the 1929 Korean Exposition expressed a goal already under threat.55
The Government-General Building was designed by German architect George de Lalande. After his death in 1914, planning was taken over by Ichiro Nomura, architect of the equally grand Japanese Government-General Building in Taiwan. The building was ceremoniously dedicated on the auspiciously selected date of 1 October 1926. 54Its neo-Renaissance and Art Deco hybrid styling was that favored for the greatest symbols of empire, set initially in the seminal Tokyo Station of 1898–1914, of which more below.56
Todd Henry notes a critique of the Government-General Building as “an instance of geomantic rape” (Kim Song-nyae 2000, in Henry 2014, 266n49). Henry begins his account of Keijo (Seoul) with reference to the Government-General’s other “most auspicious” intrusion into the spiritual landscape of the city: “In the fall of 1925, after nearly fifteen years of planning and over ἀve years of construction, the Government-General, the colonial state that had ruled over Korea since its annexation by Japan in 1910, unveiled an imposing Shinto shrine atop Namsan…. Namsan was quickly becoming the geographic centre of a growing metropolis known in Japanese as Keijo (Kyongsong [Keongseong]; present-day Seoul), the empire’s showcase city on the peninsula” (Henry 2014, 1). With the completion of the Government-General Building in the old Gyeongbokgung Palace grounds and the construction of the grandiose Taep’yongno (Taihei Boulevard), now extended south from Jongno, Korea Shrine and the Government-General monument could be read as the two anchoring poles of both city and colony—the spiritual and the political.57 The Taihei axis further connected with the (Japanese) City Hall as civic focus, then, turning southwest around Namdaemun, most auspicious of the old city’s gateways, it continued to the new (Japanese) Seoul Station as symbol of (Japanese) modernity. More on this anon, especially its geomantic violence.
Choson Jingu (Korea Shrine) was in the shinmei-zukuri style of Ise Jingu, the holiest of all Shinto shrines, which honored two deities: Amaterasu, the mythical ancestress of the Japanese state, and Emperor Meiji, Japan’s ἀrst modern monarch. The shrine thereby symbolized an unbroken imperial line. Henry goes on to quote a mystiἀed Japanese proponent of Shinto who noted that Japanese would approach the shrine with reverence and prayerfully, whereas Koreans would do so merely with curiosity, just “looking around,” and asks, “What is the cause of this? Will Korea Shrine end up being a shrine only for the Japanese?”58 The focus of Henry’s book is on the spaces of colonial Seoul as “contact zones,” revealing the intersections of Korean and Japanese lives in the city, and thereby of their histories. The ambiguities of these intersections were represented in the architecture of colonialism.
New architecture
The incremental Japanese intrusion had been economic as well as military and ideological. The Korean government initiated a very active 55reform movement in 1894–1995 with Japanese tolerance, including a program of state capitalism and the initiation of a modern banking system.59 Japan’s increasing ἀnancial influence and the inflow of Japanese capital was met with efforts from the Chosun government to assimilate modern banking. The Daehan Cheon-il Bank was established in 1899 with the support of King Kojong, in the hope of protecting Korea’s national capital assets against the growing influence of the Japanese banks over Korea’s ἀnances. The bank’s head office, the Gwangtonggwan on Namdaemunno, was designed by the Architectural Bureau of the Takjibu, the Ministry of Finance of the Daehan Empire, as one of the few Western-style buildings of Korea in that era.
A ἀre badly damaged the Gwangtonggwan in February 1914, and the building’s detail was much altered when it was restored and reopened in 1915—in the Japanese era. It had been built mostly of red brick and granite, in a Neoclassical style, and on a symmetrical plan. Originally it had had Ionic pilasters, but after the ἀre the Ionic capitals were replaced by a hybrid Baroque–Art Nouveau form as the building took on the eclectic styling favored by the Japanese (ἀgure 2.2). The restyling may have served a quite speciἀc purpose: by making what was by then the Joseon Sangup Bank neo-Baroque, it was identiἀed with the grander Bank of Chosun designed in 1907 for the Japanese Dai-Ichi Bank and completed in 1912 as the central bank for Korea during the Japanese colonization.60 As was common in the Japanese colonial empire, it was in an eclectic, hybidized style, although with strong references to the French Renaissance. Seoul was to be architecturally Japanese, to signal the new identity of its institutions (ἀgure 2.3).
Another notable building of the last years of old Korea is the Daehan Hospital, one of Seoul’s most beautiful buildings. It was built in 1907 to house three merging medical centers, on a hilltop outer garden of Changgyeonggung Palace, with the Takjibu Architectural Bureau again responsible. The architect, however, was a Japanese employed by the Takjibu, and the building’s styling, not surprisingly, was typically Japanese-imperial neo-Baroque from the outset. The very large building of the former National Industry Institute of 1908 was also from the Takjibu and designed by a Japanese architect, this time in a German-Renaissance style and built entirely of wood. Though formally established by the Agriculture, Industry, and Trade Ministry of the Daehan Empire, it was more an initiative of the Residency-General and reflected Japanese policy. It was Korea’s highest institute of industrial education, with six departments, again reflecting Japanese policy: architecture, civil engineering, applied chemistry, metallurgy, dyeing, and ceramics. These hospital and institute buildings, and subsequently 56Keijo Imperial University, are gathered together in the Daehangno area of the East Palace complex.
FIGURE 2.2 Gwangtonggwan, 1909, restyled in the Japanese manner after the fire of 1915.
In the last years of Chosun there were also signiἀcant religious buildings in Western revivalist styles. The Chungdong First Methodist Church from 1897 is now Korea’s oldest existing Protestant church. It and the nearby Pai Chai Hak Dang, Korea’s ἀrst modern intermediate school from 1885, were both founded by American missionaries and are in decidedly American styles. They are in the old legation quarter of Jeong-dong around Deoksugung Palace.61 Arguably the ἀnest building from that genre of Western religious buildings is the Gothic Revival, Catholic Myeong-dong Cathedral. Completed in 1898, it was designed by French missionary priests, most notably Eugene Coste, but built by Chinese bricklayers using local red and black brick and with vaulted ceilings. The consequence is a curiously hybrid building: despite the French medieval styling, the smooth and precise brick surfaces are distinctively Chinese. The Myeong-dong Cathedral played a signiἀcant role in the 1980s dictatorship era as a refuge for demonstrators; it continues to serves as a locale for protesters for various causes (Clark 2007, 182).
Using the same ἀne brickwork and also in a Gothic Revival style from the same designer as Myeong-dong Cathedral is Yakhyeon Church, founded in 1892 and the oldest Catholic church in Korea (the 57last bloody pogrom against Catholics had been as recent as 1866);62 close by is Seosomun Park. Seosomun Gate area is located outside Seomun Gate, which served as an execution ground for the Chosun persecutions of Catholics, where forty-four Catholic Korean martyrs are buried.63
FIGURE 2.3 The Japanese colonial style in Seoul: the Japanese Bank of Chosun Building, completed 1912, later the head office of the Bank of Korea (architect Tatsuno Kingo).
The Romanesque-style Anglican Cathedral is from 1926, though it was completed only in 1996. It was designed by English architect Arthur Stansἀeld Dixon. There are also Anglican and Catholic cathedrals in Incheon (from 1891 and 1897, respectively), again in imported Western styles. These and many other churches mark both the increasing Christian penetration into late Chosun and Japanese Korea, and the increasing presence of other architectural traditions.
Altogether more purposely hybrid is the Cheondogyo Central Temple, dating from 1921. Cheondogyo had produced many independence activists, including a large number of the leaders of the March First (1919) uprising, as noted above. The temple building, coming fast on the suppression of that movement and designed by Japanese architect Nakamura Yosihei, suggests something of the subsequent conciliatory policy of the Japanese. Its architecture would be classiἀed as an eclectic amalgam of Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and decidedly internationalist.64
It is the railway system that most directly explains the architectural colonization. For Japan, the railway was central to both the imagining and the functioning of their empire, providing its connecting armature. 58In Korea, a new era began in 1899 with the opening of the Kyeongin railway linking Seoul and Incheon, the forerunner of the present subway Line 1; Yongsan Station opened in 1900 and then Namdaemun Station. Yongsan Station was reconstructed in 1906 and was what the Japanese believed to be one of the ἀnest architectural works in Korea. It was destroyed in the Korean War. Then in 1925 the Japanese built Seoul Station, replacing the earlier Namdaemun Station, in the same style as that of Tokyo—the new technologies of communication were to be the symbol of both the unity and the modernity of the empire (Coaldrake 1996, 227–230). The material effect of the railway system was to open Korea to regional and, ultimately, more global trade.
Tokyo Station had been designed by Tatsuno Kingo as the preeminent Meiji emblem of Westernization. It faced Imperial Palace along a nine-hundred-meter avenue and, in turn, connected via rail and ferry to Pusan (Busan) Station in Korea, also designed by Tatsuno. That station then connected by rail to Seoul Station, in the same eclectic style and designed by Tsukamoto Yasushi of Tokyo Imperial University; it, in turn, lies at the southern end of the Taepyeongno (Taihei Boulevard) north-south axis that was extended southward in the Japanese modernization of the city’s street network, and thereby linked to the Government-General Building at the northern end of the newly opened axis. As the governor-general faced the emperor via the new technologies of communication, the integrity of the empire was symbolized in the emblems of Westernization. In Seoul, Tatsuno Kingo is best represented by the old Chosun Bank Building of 1912, referred to above.
Seoul Station met yet another agenda. It and its accompanying rail links were built so that the Japanese could use the Seoul-Uiju and Seoul-Wonsan lines in their projected invasion of China.65 In the late 1990s Seoul Station deἀed photography: a highway access ramp cut diagonally across its façade, as if to “strike it out.” It presented the ultimate symbol of Korean erasure of the Japanese memory. In the 2000s the ramp was removed, the forecourt redeveloped according to prevailing urban design principles, and the station restored (ἀgure 2.4). It now functions as a ἀne exhibition space (of which more in chapter 3).
Both Seoul Station and the Government-General Building were central to the way the Japanese would represent their colonial capital. The size of the latter was exceptional, exceeding anything of the British in India or the Dutch in the Indies. Its signiἀcance, however, lay in far more than its style and its size. The cardinal principles of Korean architecture, as articulated by the modern nation’s most respected architect, Kim Swoo Geun (1931–1986), are (1) harmony with the natural setting, (2) love of simplicity and plainness, (3) moderate and elegant 59line (especially at the roof), and (4) human scale.66 The Government-General Building transgressed all four of these principles. As Lee Man-hoon (1995) notes, some forty-eight structures within the palace complex were demolished:67 “Among reasons for the Japanese to build the colonial government building in front of Kyõngbokkung [sic] was a theory that they wanted to crush the national spirit of the Korean people by interfering with the geomantic layout of the Chosõn [sic] capital, which was centered around the palace. By blocking powerful natural forces which emanate from the palace site located between Mts Pugaksan and Namsan, the Japanese hoped to make Korea their eternal servant” (1995, 80).
FIGURE 2.4 Seoul Station, completed 1925 (architect Tsukamoto Yasushi).
The past was to be disregarded, its memory thereby reduced to the insigniἀcant. Worse, the plan form of the Government-General Building—a double square—matched the (Chinese) character (il) that is the ἀrst part of the word “Japan” (Ilbon, Nippon) (Jane Song n.d., 45).68 However, when this was combined with those characters described by Pugaksan and the (Japanese built) Keongseong (Capital City) City Hall, the effect was to signify Great Japan.69 The city itself would proclaim the new nationality. A new geomancy would prevail: by removing the previous Kwanghwamun Gate—eternal separation of hidden, mysterious, royal power from a baser world—and by linking Government-General, city government, and railway, the newly 60constructed north-south avenue “made the imperial power visible in the urban space” (Kal Hong 2011, 48). One returns to Kim Song-nyae’s (2000) condemnation of the Government-General Building as “an instance of geomantic rape.” There was yet further violence: the Japanese cut a second major east-west road (Yulgongno), roughly parallel to Jongno and across the front of their Government-General Building (and thereby across any memory of the old palace), and—ἀnal outrage—cutting through the East Palace complex.70 However, it was even more brutal than a simple cut, for surviving members of the royal family still resided in the East Palace, and the effect of the bisection was to isolate the royal family in Changgyeonggung Palace, now to the north of the intruding road, from their ancestors in the Jongmyo Shrine to the south. The effect of the strategy was to reverse auspicious emblems of the Korean geomantic system, violating the symbolic landscape and destroying its power (Choi Chungmoo 1997a). As Ryu Jeh-hong (2004, 19), citing Choi Chungmoo (2002), summarizes the strategy, “The Japanese colonial regime made reverse use of several Korean cultural symbols of the geomantic system, destroying auspicious sites where influences on good fortune converged, thereby violating the sexual topography.” Todd Henry (2014, 29) refers to a “re-spatialising” of Keijo (Hanyang, Seoul), in part to desacralize the Korean royal house; the royal residence would be relocated while the previous palaces would be opened as public parks, the old sense of mystery and the sacred thereby transgressed. An unanswered question is to what extent these violations were real and intended, real but unintended, or constructed in later memory to be propagated as motivation to anti-Japanese sentiment. The answer will shift with the historiography of the moment. It suffices to observe the hyperbole that characterizes, seemingly universally, Koreans’ responses to the reordering of the city’s symbolic landscape.
Modernizing Japanese Seoul
While Japan’s annexation of Korea was with the alleged “consent” of the Korean emperor and his government,71 there was suppression of diverse Korean institutions and cultural expressions. It was always an ambivalent suppression, however: the Chosun dynasty had for ἀve hundred years suppressed Buddhism in favor of their own strict Confucianism; as noted above, Buddhism had retreated to the rural communities (“Mountain Buddhism”), and monks were forbidden entry to the city. In 1895 the Japanese effected an end to the policy, and Buddhism became free—but Japanized. Japanese officials and businessmen coming to Korea brought their own forms of Buddhism with 61them. Although Mahayana Buddhism had originally traveled to Japan via Korea, in the sixth century CE, within Japan it had diversiἀed into a variety of sects able to accommodate the relative diversity of Japanese culture—some sects even permitted monks to marry and have families, and the Japanese encouraged the Koreans to follow suit. The consequence was bitter division between the Chogye order, which maintained celibacy, and the T’aego order, whose priests married. Korean Buddhism was also affected by a Western missionary emphasis on a rationalist paradigm in religious discourse and then, following the anti-Japanese March First Movement, it became increasingly nationalistic—Japanized and nationalist (Cho Sungtaek 2005).
By the 1930s the Japanese were using architecture to signify the empire as modernizing and globalizing, as it had previously been mobilized to signify unity and integration. An early example of this more austere, modernist style was presented in the 1926 Dong-A Ilbo press building (ἀgure 2.5), as well as in the 1931 Main Hall of Keijo Imperial University designed by Park Gil-ryong, one of Korea’s ἀrst modern architects (Park had also been the architect for the iconic Hwasin Department Store on Jongno).72 A further example of the modernist style is the grand Art Deco building on Taepyeongno from 1935, built by the Japanese as the “center for citizens,” later the National Assembly hall, then subsequently the Seoul City Assembly Building, albeit more “internationalist” than Japanese (ἀgure 2.6). Equally “international” was the 1938 Seoul office of Mitsui and Company.73
Seoul planning
Kang Sukhi (b. 1934) writes of “the pre-modern customs that maintained the traditional style of living” that he recalls from his childhood in Seoul of the 1930s, the formative years for a later, innovative avant-garde.74 Ordinary life went on. Some elements in Korean society resisted the Japanese inἀltration, others collaborated, but most simply adjusted to the new realities.
FIGURE 2.5 The Dong-A Ilbo, completed 1926, the oldest press building in Korea—popularly claimed as an example of early Korean modernism.62
FIGURE 2.6 The Citizens’ Center, completed 1935, subsequently the National Assembly, now the Seoul City Assembly.
“Pre-modern customs” may have survived in Japanese Seoul, as Kang perceived; however, the survival was in the face of an agenda of modernization at the hands of the colonial government, although, as outlined above in relation to land reform, education, hospitals, economy, public institutions, and their architecture, it was a modernization that was already in motion in the 1890s and 1900s. The ἀrst manifestation of modern city planning came in 1897 with the construction of Tapgol (Pagoda) Park as a response to Western ideals of creating parks for the health and moral improvement of citizens, albeit the elite citizens in this case. Many common citizens had their homes razed in the process of its land clearance.75 Even before the ἀrst railway, linking Seoul and Incheon, the ἀrst electric tramway opened on 1 May 1899: the ἀrst tram departed Jongno for Cheongnyangni to the east of Dongdaemun Gate on 17 May, amid great pomp and celebration.76 There were nine carriages of which one was reserved for King Kojong, who used it to visit the tomb of his wife Queen Min, recently murdered by Japanese-sponsored assassins. The tram drivers and conductors were Japanese, until, on 26 May, a traffic accident involving a tram led to an anti-Japanese riot, a subsequent standoff, the departure of the Japanese drivers, and hence closure of the system until American tram drivers could be imported several months later.
The tramway was initiated by two American businessmen, Henry Collbran and Harry Bostwick.77 In return for the right to establish 63a tram service in the city, they were required to install electric lighting in downtown Seoul.78 In 1909 Collbran was forced to sell his company to the Japanese, who by then had established a virtual stranglehold on the Korean economy. The Japanese were equally as committed to tramways as to railways, although the rationales were different, and the network continued to grow. In 1910 Seoul had 37 tramcars, and by 1935 there were 154.
Hon-machi (Ch’ungmuro in the present Myeong-dong area) had been the historic center of the Japanese settler community, with Yongsan rapidly developing further south as Seoul’s boomtown and new home to the Japanese military, the railway, and a growing settler population.79 Where the settler region of the city, the “southern village,” received government investment in infrastructure and urban improvement, the “northern village” of the Koreans languished. Although the division was stark—indeed a “divided topography”—Henry (2014, 236n26) cites Namiki Naoto (1997) to the effect that there were increasing instances of ethnic mixing in both villages during the colonial period, suggesting that the division calls for a decidedly nuanced reading.80
The railway and the Japanese town of Yongsan marked the real breakout of Seoul from its old walled conἀnes. In 1914 the ἀrst formal expansion of the city boundaries occurred and the city walls began to lose both their symbolic and their functional signiἀcance. Tramways were developed from Gyeongbokgung Palace, now the site of the colonial administration, along the north-south axis of Taepyeongno, past the City Hall, farther along the axis that the Japanese had now extended through the old city, through Namdaemun (South Gate), past the new Seoul Station, and ἀnally to Yongsan and a new road along the Han River, which was bridged in 1917, to connect Yongsan to the burgeoning commercial area of Mapo (Henry 2014, 34).
The bridge and road from Yongsan led to Yeouido, an island in the Han River and locale for the Japanese aerodrome, and ultimately to the industrial center of Incheon. The old internal road structure of the city that had endured for ἀve centuries was suddenly replaced with that of a modern city: the main thoroughfares were widened and new roads built in a program termed “the ordering of streets,” which was effectively code for establishing economic, social, and military control over the city (Gelézeau 1997, 74).81
Between 1910 and 1926, the New Keongseong (Seoul) Program and Project for the Modiἀcation of the Districts brought changes partly linked to the imposition of road widening and straightening. The ἀrst urban planning ordinance had been promulgated in 1914 and, in a second expansion of the city boundaries, Yeongdeungpo (Yeouido) 64was the ἀrst area south of the Han to become officially part of Seoul (Korean Institute of Architects 2000, 22). A 1926 city plan proposed expansion of the historic city eastward and westward, to accommodate the influx of poor Koreans from the countryside; however, as the Japanese population was expanding southward to the booming Yongsan, the effect of the plan would be to reinforce ethnic segregation, thereby making it easier to favor the latter in the provision of urban services.82 The plan would also strengthen the connection between Seoul (via Yongsan) and Incheon, to the commercial beneἀt of the Japanese community. A further plan was published in 1928, notable for its advocacy of “land readjustment”; neither plan received signiἀcant government support.83 Another plan was proposed in 1930, and there followed a Town Planning Act in 1934.84 A program of residential, commercial, and industrial zoning was introduced, dividing the city into functional areas according to prevailing wisdom adopted from the West. Land readjustment was again introduced, and historic districts were to be razed; however, the only readjustments seem to have been in the suburbs.
Meanwhile Jung-gu, the old center of Chosun Seoul, continued as the commercial center of the expanding city; within Jung-gu, Jongno became the center of political control under the Japanese but also a focus of what little Korean entrepreneurial activity survived. Yongsan was the military zone while the city’s expansion was mostly to the south, beyond Yongsan.
Survival
There is another side to the coin of Japan and its late-colonial Korean “assimilation” and suppression. It is expressed in a tribute from Korean composer Kang Sukhi to his friend, fellow composer and foundational video artist Paik Nam June, whom we shall meet in chapter 5 (Kang Sukhi 2007). Kang sets out to depict the Seoul of the 1930s, the era of both his and Paik’s childhood—they were born in 1934 and 1932, respectively.
Despite the Japanese imposition of Shinto and emperor worship, Korean traditional culture persisted, based in the continuing fusing of Buddhism (albeit simultaneously indigenous and Japanized), Confucianism, and shamanism. In Kang’s memory, it was in shamanism that everyday customs were most ἀrmly grounded. Scenes from previous centuries seemed to persist:
Seoul in the 1930s preserved the premodern customs that maintained the traditional style of living. Although tramcars were running along the streets in the city center, there were boats from the 65West Sea carrying smelly pickled shrimps in Mapo. Women dressed in white, with their hair in chignons, could be seen washing clothes in Cheonggyecheon stream, which flowed through the centre of Seoul; well-dressed women with their faces hidden under long hoods; chimney-sweepers passing through narrow alleys striking gongs; men clad in white overcoats and gat, the traditional cylindrical hat, with long beards and outstretched smoking pipes between their lips; … the procession of funeral biers heading from Jongno…. Dozens of strips of funeral odes flapping from the bier procession. (Kang Sukhi 2007)
Kang describes the tramway and Dongdaemun Market, “where every kind of foodstuff was available and drapers were selling silk fabric by the roadside.” He recalls the tallest building on Jongno, Hwasin Department Store, a six-story building with Seoul’s only elevator and escalator. Hwasin Department Store of 1937 was designed by “the ἀrst Korean architect,” Park Gil-yong, backed by one of the few Korean entrepreneurs, Park Heung Shik (Korean Institute of Architects 2000, 72).85 Kang also remembered old palaces and shrines; however, there was also the Japanese Government-General Building: “Jungangcheong stood in front of the old palace blocking its view, so passers-by sometimes cursed it, saying, ‘Damn Japanese, blocking the view of our palace, where our king used to rule the country, with their colonial government building’” (Kang Sukhi 2007). There were also school excursions on a boat across the Han River to its still-rural opposite bank for picnics: “[T]hey took a boat across the river and had a wonderful time.” There was oppression, insurrection, but also a measure of cultural survival, of everyday life and fun. Suppression was never complete; indeed it could, in a later age, have had the countereffect of nurturing nostalgia and the (re)imagining of a never-lost identity. Lee Hoon, writing in 1936, could observe that Seoul was also quiet, indeed somnolent, a backwater, at a standstill. It lacked the vigor and bustle of a Western trading city or of Shanghai or Tokyo. It was merely an administrative center (Lee Hoon K. 1936, 195, in Cumings 2005, 162). Also rich in reminiscences of late colonial Seoul are the accounts from some fifty elderly Koreans in Hildi Kang’s (2005) Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910–1945. Most people, Hildi Kang says, have read or heard only the horror stories, which, though true, tell only a fragment of the truth of colonial life. There is also a truth that is more ambiguous and more human, of the small-scale realities of life in colonial Korea.86 Park Wan-suh, who was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, in her autobiographical novel Who Ate Up All the Shinga? (2009) recounts a childhood in which the 66whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean. Yet slowly, in her remote world, the tendrils of a darker nature began to insinuate themselves—there were Japanese, an iron-grip suppression, and war. Her account describes the hardships of everyday life.87
In a similar vein, Kyung Moon Hwang (2010, 179–182) has noted that cultural production in the late colonial era also focused on this life of the everyday.88 The ἀrst outpouring of “new literature” was in the 1930s, from novelists who had often graduated from newspaper reporting, and their writings, correspondingly, were mostly of “ordinary life,” whether mundane or tragic. Furthermore, these were ordinary lives in the interstices of tradition (memories, often a sense of nostalgia, loss) and a new modernity. So there was Ch’ae Man-Sik, whose masterpiece was the novel Peace Under Heaven and whose short stories critiqued the disrupting whirlwind of modernization on everyday life, as well as the extraordinary impact of new education and its dislocation of lives (Ch’ae Man-Sik 1993; also Kim Chong-un and Fulton 1998). Pak Tae-won wrote A Day in the Life of Novelist Kubo, serialized in 1934, as a plotless, Joycean meander through the streets and places of Seoul—the coffeehouses, restaurants, and theaters of the 1930s, as well as the grandest of new modernist symbols, the department stores.89 The splendid Seoul Station is seen as a place of people waiting, together yet isolated, lonely individuals (Walsh 2011; Hanscom 2013).90 The Korean Artists Proletarian Federation (KAPF), founded in 1925, rallied authors to the struggles of everyday life but also to the themes of class consciousness and Marxist critique (Kimberly Chung 2014).91 Typical here was Yi Kiyong, whose novel Hometown was serialized in the Chosun Ilbo newspaper in 1933 to 1934. Yi focused on villagers and their struggles to adjust to the exploitative social relationships of early capitalism. Again the theme was everyday life in the face of modernization rather than colonization. Kyung Moon Hwang (2010, 181) sees Yi’s novel as emerging from a melodramatic imagination; we will observe in chapter 5 that the transit from a melodramatic to an ironic imagination marks the rise of Hallyu, the Korean Wave, in the 2000s.
There were other everyday lives lived in Korea whose imagination and sense of identity would have been very different from those depicted in the Korean literature of the time. Jun Uchida (2011a) refers to the thousands of Japanese civilians, merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and adventurers who left for a new life on the Korean Peninsula. Though forming one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century, these settlers and their empire-building activities have all but vanished from the public memory of Japan’s presence in Korea. They were “interstitial”—their 67leaders played multiple roles, between the settler community and the Government-General, between Japanese colonizer and Korean colonized, between colony and metropole. Their stories were swept away in the Japan phobia that followed 15 August 1945.
Part 4
THE PROBLEM OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
We return to the question of disputed historiography introduced in chapter 1. While old memories and practices survived, there was also a real speeding up of the embrace of modernity, and a loss of old culture and its heritage. The extreme anti-Japanese sentiment that erupted post-1945, and that in many aspects persists into the present, is ample proof of a sense of destruction of national identity and its lieux de mémoire, sites of memory. To what extent, however, was this extinction real (having actually happened), perceptual (residing more in the constructed memories of Koreans, perhaps as a product of propaganda), or historiographical (existing in the contested depictions of events and the recountings of memories)? Then, to the extent to which it might have been real, how much was it intended, and how much more contingent on other agendas?
“Real” erasure
The modern chronicles of the Japanese intrusion into Korea, of the compelled “agreements” of 1904 and 1907 and then the formal annexation of 1910, mostly agree in their portrayal of imperialist aggression and, thereby, the attempted extinction—or at least assimilation—of the actuality of a Korean nation. Similarly there is reasonable consistency in accounts of the 1910s as a decade of suppression and insensitivity—the media suppression and the heavy-handed treatment of the palaces serving as instances. The 1920s and early 1930s are not so easily judged; the disruptions would seem more those of modernity’s onslaught, albeit speeded up by the “enabling violation” (Spivak 1996) of colonialism. Here there was still a sense of some continuity with the incipient modernity of late Chosun. With the 1937 mobilization and then the 1942 enforced assimilation, erasure must be seen as increasingly intended.
The 1910 annexation had presented a dilemma for the Japanese, as the Koreans were now “inside” the vastly expanded, “greater” Japan, 68yet it was not an unfamiliar dilemma. The Japanese Empire was in its Meiji form an assimilating state, in policy if not consistently in practice: local cultures such as the Okinawans, the Ainu (of Hokkaido and Sakhalin), and the Taiwanese were tolerated.92 Even Kyushu can be seen as a major variant of the system. The Japanese administrative system was correspondingly very decentralized. The assimilation of the Koreans therefore could appear to the Japanese as relatively unproblematic.
Benedict Anderson’s (1991, 149–150) comment on racism throws some light on the dilemma: “The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue’ or ‘white’ blood and ‘breeding’ among aristocracies…. on the whole, racism and anti-semitism [anti-Koreanism] manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.” Then again, “nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history” (149). Troubling to the Japanese memory, however, was the ancient role of Korea as transmitter of continental Chinese culture to the islands of Japan.93 The intermediary, erstwhile cultural colonizer, copulator, was to be erased—a task for Japanese historiography.
In 1925 the Korean History Compilation Committee was established, administered by the governor-general of Korea and engaged in collecting Korean historical materials and compiling a history of Korea. Ancient Korean history was distorted to validate Japanese colonization: Korea’s onetime rule over Manchuria was written out, and the northern part of the peninsula was portrayed as an erstwhile colony of China, while the southern peninsula is claimed to have been a colony of Japan under the hypothetical Mimana. Archaeological excavations were carried out and artifacts were preserved; where the evidence failed to support Japanese ideas, the evidence was simply moved to enable it to do so.
Mimana is a name used in a ninth-century Japanese text, Nihongi, and likely refers to one of the Korean states of the Gaya confederacy (ἀrst to fifth centuries). Mimana’s existence, location, and Japaneseness are disputed in East Asian historiography, especially between Korean and Japanese historians. One possibility is that Mimana refers to the Korean Baekje state that had relations with Japan.94
Chung Yong-Hwa has commented on the Japanese ideological self-justiἀcation for their imperialism in Korea. Since 1885 a Japanese version of Orientalism had been stressing the uniqueness of Japan from “the Orient” (Korea, China, and so on). Korea and China 69were seen as “un-scientiἀc” and still ἀlled with Chinese “servility” and Korean “wretchedness.” “Japan invented and emphasized Korea’s national diseases. Japan generalized Korea’s traditional culture as the yangbanism of class discrimination, dependence, and sadaejuui (doctrine of ‘serving the great’) and denounced it as the etiological cause of their restrictions. Claiming that they would cure such diseases and lead Korea into civilization, Japan justiἀed their imperialism” (Chung Yong-Hwa 2006, 129).95 Japan sent anthropologists to Korea to photograph traditional villages as evidence of Korea’s “backwardness” and need for modernization (Atkins 2010). Chung concludes, however, that Korean people subsequently produced their own sense of Orientalism (“auto-Orientalism”), falling into “the trap of ‘philosophy of enlightenment’” (2006, 130).
Naoki Sakai (2000) identiἀes what is arguably the most devastating incidence of Japan’s erasure of Korea, namely its postwar ideology and historiography. The US occupation administration intentionally allowed the Japanese to maintain their sense of cultural and historical continuity, thereby helping to nurture the desire of the Japanese to narrate their own self-serving story/history; war crimes would be mentioned, but not crimes against humanity nor those of colonialism. Leo Ching (2001) sees the “miracle” of postwar Japan as essentially an almost immediate turn from complete external orientation to complete internal orientation and subjectivity, all made possible by the US appropriation of Japan’s colonies and Japan’s immediate alliance with the United States in the Cold War. Japan never had to go through the harsh but important process of decolonization. Japanese nationalists, Sakai argues, are incapable of confronting the complicity between their nationalism and US hegemony; furthermore, “[a]s long as the Japanese were allowed to secure the sense of national cohesion in their cultural tradition and the organic unity of their culture, they would never be able to engage in serious negotiation with people in East and Southeast Asia who were directly victimized by or related to the victims of Japanese imperial nationalism. They may well be generous and forgiving to individual Japanese nationals but would never forget the past deeds of Japanese imperial nationalism. ‘They may forgive but never forget’” (Sakai 2000, 810). The effect of its mandated forgetting is that Japan was spared the crisis of decolonization and postcolonialism—no shame, no guilt. It is the “Japanese War Responsibility Amnesia” (801), to which must be added the post hoc nonexistence of colonialism.96
There is a counterargument. In Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945, Everett Taylor Atkins challenges the prevailing view that imperial Japan demonstrated contempt for Koreans through suppression of Korean culture. Instead he sees a past 70and present fascination with Korean culture; moreover, he argues that Japanese preoccupation with Koreana provided the empire with a poignant vision of its own past, albeit imagined, now lost. The gaze at Korea was through the lens of myth: their ancestors had migrated through Korea, and here they might ἀnd their “primitive selves.” They seemed to see in the Koreans a communal living and social solidarity that allowed Japanese to grieve for their own former selves and the values they had lost in their headlong drive for modernity. As Atkins observes, “[C]olonial access to Korea gave Japanese an opportunity to meditate intensively on their own historical and modern identity. The themes of loss and nostalgic longing for a purer cultural self are central to Japanese experiences of modernity” (Atkins 2010, 3).97 As Dusinberre (2013) comments, the originality of the Atkins argument is that it juxtaposes the historiography of the Japanese Empire with that key theme in the domestic historiography of twentieth-century Japan, namely popular nostalgia for a purer cultural identity—empire and the “epistemology of loss.”
In turn, Atkins suggests, speciἀc objects of the Japanese gaze—folk theater, dance, shamanism, material culture—became emblems of Korean postcolonial national identity. Atkins reminds us that “following accepted anthropological wisdom of recent decades, … the acts of gazing and being gazed at fundamentally transformed both the observer and the observed” (Atkins 2010, 1–5).98
Korean historiographical erasure
The paragraphs above refer to Japanese distortions of history. What, then, of Korean distortions? The fury in the immediate post-Japanese period was fanned by the independence ideologues returning from abroad, determined to suppress any internal and arguably more moderate voices and suborning the fury to legitimize their own grabs for power. There was virtually a contest of rival, ideologically driven expressions of outrage—who could be the most anti-Japanese? This is a story for chapter 3; the present point, however, is that the sense of outrage has survived in Korean writing and popular attitudes into the present. Nevertheless it is useful to observe that since around 2000 the voices have somewhat moderated, as a comparative reading of the journals can suggest—observe, for instance, the pages of Korea Journal.
More recent writing is now turning both to the “normal times” and “normal lives” of the 1920s and early 1930s, but also to Korean participation in a darker history. Japanese atrocities did not go unassisted. C. Sarah Soh (2008) recounts the stories of the so-called comfort women, mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese 71army. They have usually been labeled “victims of war,” a simplistic and convenient view that makes it easy to pin the blame on the policies of imperial Japan and relegate the events to a sad past. Soh, however, reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy were both complicit in the enslavement—women were cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home, others were press-ganged into prostitution with the help of Korean procurers. Finally, an array of factors, from South Korean nationalist ideology and policies to the ideologically delimited aims of the international women’s human rights movement, have contributed to the incomplete but persisting view of the tragedy. Bruce Cumings (2005, 179) comments, “Japan fractured the Korean national psyche, pitting Korean against Korean with consequences that continue down to our time.” This can be seen as the ultimate tragedy, albeit with Korean complicity.99
There is a recent footnote to the tragedy. In 2010 Korea marked the centenary of Japan’s annexation; the anniversary was not similarly marked in Japan.100 On 14 December 2011, there was installed a life-size bronze statue of a girl in traditional Korean dress, seated on a chair, hands on lap, gaze ἀxed on the Japanese Embassy across a narrow street in downtown Seoul. The statue, named the Peace Monument and ἀnanced by citizens’ donations, was installed to mark the thousandth weekly protest at the embassy by women, now in their eighties and nineties, who are survivors of the wartime sexual slavery. Japan’s chief cabinet secretary described the incident as “extremely regrettable” and announced that Japan would request the monument’s removal. The Korean government response was that they had no intention of ordering its removal. The erasure would be erased, truth restored (ἀgure 2.7).
A ἀnal reprise from Pierre Nora’s argument on lieux de mémoire:
Memory fastens upon sites, whereas history fastens upon events. (Nora 1996, 18)
FIGURE 2.7 The Peace Monument at the Japanese Embassy, installed 2011. Seoul is a city of protest like no other: protests against the Japanese, protests against the Americans, protests against the heritage of the dictatorship, protests by one political party against another; most often, however, the protesters are Christian—for Jesus.
72The Peace Monument, a site, is clearly meant to ensure that the memory survives, regardless of attempts to revisit the history.101
Afterword
There is some irony in the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea locating itself in 1920s Shanghai, arguably capitalism’s greatest carnival of corruption, “a Heaven on top of a Hell,” with its opium and prostitution (“The Singsong Girls of Shanghai”),102 and, from 1928 on, focus of General Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist (Kuomintang) Chinese regime located in Nanking (Nanjing) near Shanghai. Shanghai was also the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party (in 1921). Syngman Rhee’s putative government-in-exile would evolve in a political environment of intrigue, corruption, and anti-Communist violence.
Bruce Cumings (2005, 158) notes that outcast classes around 1900, in Korea as in China, turned to Christianity for its ideal of equality before God. By the 1920s, however, they were increasingly likely to turn to science, democracy, and socialism. Reformers such as Park Chung-hee and Kim Il-sung could ἀnd nothing in their own, Korean past—“They ran rushing to a future, the past of which [scholarship for its own sake, the erasures] they could not escape” (158).
Kim Il-sung (1912–1994), of a Presbyterian Christian background, had joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1931; he also joined various anti-Japanese guerrilla groups in northern China and, in 1935, became a member of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, a guerrilla group under the Chinese Communist Party. Also in 1935 Kim took the name Kim Il-sung, meaning “Becoming the Sun.” By the end of 1940, pursued by the Japanese, he escaped across the Amur River into the Soviet Union; he became a major in the Soviet Red Army and served in it until the end of World War II. With the Red Army’s unexpectedly easy entry into Pyongyang on 15 August 1945, Stalin realized that he needed someone to head a puppet regime; Lavrentiy Beria recommended Kim ahead of several more qualiἀed candidates, mostly because he had no ties to the indigenous (and thereby uncontrollable) Communist movement; indeed, he allegedly could not even speak Korean. In September 1945, the Soviets installed Kim as head of the Provisional People’s Committee. Arguably Kim’s greatest accomplishment was his establishment of a professional army, the Korean People’s Army, aligned with the Communists.103
The signiἀcance of this story is that Kim Il-sung and Syngman Rhee and their respective regimes had emerged from the two opposed ideologies of the maelstrom of 1930s and 1940s China. It was the making of modern Korea’s tragedy. 73
There were always, however, other persisting ideologies. Although Cheondogyo lost its religious adherents in the postwar (postcolonial) period, its power of national motivation persists. Kirsten Bell (2004) found, in the late 1990s, that contemporary Koreans would confess to little knowledge of it and that the Office of Religious Affairs estimated its surviving membership at only 26,000. Its ideology, however, continues to infuse the contemporary minjung culture movement (chapter 3); it is also claimed as the ideological foundation for North Korean Communism, while the Cheondogyo Cheongudang (Cheondogyo Young Friends Party) is one of the three major political parties in North Korea.
Present Korea can be seen as “saturated with ideas and ideologies” (Clark 2000, 59). In the South it is a maelstrom of Buddhist spiritualism and egalitarianism, Catholic and Protestant Christianity, and their various commitments to scientiἀc rationality and the goodness of work—all modulated by Confucian restraint, self-discipline, and respect for order and hierarchy; then there is the persisting memory of Cheondogyo, the minjung theology and movement, and the proliferating new religions; and always there are the reassuring practices of shamanism. Otherwise competing ideologies intersect, overlay, and strike new ideas off each other. The North, on the other hand, has only the glory of Kimilsungism, the cult of the Great Leader; the rest is beneath the surface, unexpressed.
NOTES
1. I take the idea of the wish image from Susan Buck-Morss (1991) and her magisterial critique of Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.
2. Kyung Moon Hwang (2010, 18–19) makes the point that Baekje’s contact was with islands to the east that were just coming together to form what we now know as Japan at the same time as the Silla uniἀcation of the peninsula (the 660s CE).
3. A useful supplement to an account of the successive and rival kingdoms of old Korea is Shin (2014), Korean History in Maps.
4. For a recent study of conditions enabling Silla’s alliance with the Tang and of the strength of that alliance against Koguryo in the eighth century, see Kim Jong-bok (2014).
5. On the geography and geomancy of Gaeseong (Kaesong) as Goryeo capital, see Lee Ki-baik (1984, 111–112).
6. On the legends of Paektu, see Lee Ki-baik (1984, 107); and Cumings (2005, 28).
7. Cumings (2005, 30) observes that An Ho-sang, Rhee’s ἀrst minister of education, produced the regime’s juche philosophy based in Silla ideals. Juche is the North Korean spelling of chuch’e, referring to their own guiding (legitimating) ideology.
8. To be discussed following is the Japanese fantasy of the mythical (Japanese) state of Mimana as the “true” origin of (southern) Korea.
9. These principles conform with the Rites of Zhou, officially attributed to the semi-mythical Zhou dynasty of the Chinese Warring States period and one of the classics of Confucianism. Nylan (2001, chap. 4); Kyung Moon Hwang (2010, 63).
10. There would seem to have been further agendas underlying the siting: its proximity to the river supported trade and commerce, while both Pugaksan and Namsan were topped by defensive mountain fortresses (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 217). Naksan, close by Changdeokgung Palace, was mostly demolished in an overhasty expansion to the east of the city during the Japanese colonial period; “Nasan Park,” Korea Tourism Organization, http://visitkorea.or.kr, accessed 10 July 2012. The mountain’s remnants now constitute Seoul’s Naksan Park. The other deἀning mountains retain their integrity.
11. Jongno and its commerce in the long Chosun era, with its so-called Six Licensed Stores late in the dynasty, is well described in Eckert et al. (1990, 120). Subsequently, in 1791, a “commercial equalization enactment” abolished all special privileges granted to commercial merchants except for the Six Licensed Stores, facilitating the development of three great markets operated by private merchants: at Jongno, inside the east gate (genesis of the present Dongdaemun Market), and outside the south gate (the present Namdaemun Market) (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 230).
12. Signiἀcantly, the Ten Injunctions attributed to Wang Kon or T’aejo, the founder of the Goryeo dynasty, insisted that state-sponsored Buddhist festivals must retain worship of the shamanistic and geomantic spirits of indigenous Korean religion; Korean distinctiveness was to be preserved (Lancaster et al. 1996; Kyung Moon Hwang 2010, 37).
13. In late Goryeo, the Chogye Buddhist sect arose, drawing promising young monks away from other Buddhist sects and emphasizing a concrete gradualism. Its key ἀgure in Goryeo was Chinul (1158–1210). Its effect was to prepare the ground for neo-Confucianism (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 132, 154). 269
14. An Hyang founded Seoul Munmyo (Munmyo Shrine) in 1398 in the reign of the ἀrst Chosun king, Taejo. It is Korea’s primary Confucian shrine, currently located on the campus of Sungkyunkwan University in the Jongno area.
15. On the role of Confucian scholars in the tumultuous overthrow of Goryeo and the foundation of Chosun, see Kyung Moon Hwang (2010, 61–67).
16. Keum Jang-tae (2000) traces the dominant role of Confucianism in the formation of “Korean Thoughts” following the fifteenth century and persisting into the present. Other publications by Keum similarly document the role of Confucianism in the formation of a Korean epistemology. On the later trajectory of Confucianism into the colonial period, see Duncan (2000; 2007, 36).
17. The royal lecture was of ancient lineage. For its use in the Goryeo dynasty, see Breuker (2010, 66).
18. See Lee Ki-baik (1984, 173–181); Eckert et al. (1990, 107–115); Hyung Moon Hwang (2010, 49), also “Yangban,” Encyclopædia Britannica, last updated 10 November 2016, http://www.britannica.com, accessed 4 September 2013. Lee Ki-baik explicitly deἀnes Chosun as a “Yangban Society” (1984, 172).
19. Haboush brings an entirely different view to the condition of women in the Chosun era, this time at the level of royalty, in her translation of the renowned Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong (2015).
20. In contrast, Kyung Moon Hwang (2010, 13–23) emphasizes the high status of women in the Silla state, including queen regnant Sondok as a driving force for the Silla uniἀcation.
21. Prior to these invasions of the 1590s, there had long been waves of Japanese maritime marauders, or waegu, beginning during the reign of the Goryeo kingdom of King Gojong (r. 1213–1259) and intensifying after 1350. See Lee Ki-baik (1984, 162). On the real achievements of Hideyoshi, as well as his alleged delusional ambitions of world conquest, see M. E. Berry (1989); and Turnbull (2002; 2011).
22. Also on women’s status and literature in the Chosun era, see Park Chan E. (2012).
23. Also titled Sassy Girl, Choonhyang; “Delightful Girl Choon Hyang,” KoreanDrama.org, http://www.koreandrama.org, accessed 15 July 2012. The case of Sassy Girl will be reprised in chapter 5. More generally, Lee Ki-baik (1984, 243–245) and Eckert et al. (1990, 174–175) observe that morality tales dominated a new genre of literature in that era—good overcomes evil, also the place of women. This might well be seen as foreshadowing themes that would later run through Korean Wave literature, ἀlm, and television. While there were anti-Japanese themes, the greater preoccupation was with stories of love.
24. For an outline of the rise of Donghak, and for writings on Ch’oe Cheu, see Duncan (2000). There had been earlier uprisings against the Chosun dynasty, most notably the Musin Rebellion of 1728 (Jackson 2016); these, however, were mostly factional, in which one faction sought hegemony over another. The Donghak Rebellion is to be distinguished as having a social class origin.
25. On the hwarang and the Hwarang Segi (Hwarang Chronicles), see Lee Ki-baik (1984, 54–55); and McBride (2008).
26. The official government sloganeering was little different: in 1871 the Daewongun (Yi Ha-eung, the father of King Kojong and the most powerful ἀgure in the kingdom for much of that reign) had stone markers set up on Seoul’s main thoroughfare proclaiming, “Western barbarians invade our land. If we do not ἀght, we must then appease them. To urge appeasement is to betray the nation.” Eckert et al.(1990, 197) see this stand as anachronistic and myopic, especially as China and Japan had already opened to the West in the 1840s and 1850s.
27. Korean nationalism was complex and divided (and divisive); Keith Pratt (2006, 20–24) identiἀes three distinctive manifestations, in political nationalism, 270minjung nationalism, and cultural nationalism. For an extended treatment, see Lee Ki-baik (1984, 302–305); and Eckert et al. (1990, 232–236).
28. Adding further to the complexity of Korean relations, the Russian expansion of influence into the peninsula provoked a British response; apparently with Chinese cognizance, Britain established a naval base in 1885, occupying Komun-do off the southern coast of Cholla, to contain Russia (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 280).
29. The Gyeongbokgung had been destroyed in the Hideyoshi invasions of the 1590s, eventually to be rebuilt by the Daewongun. The Daewongun had seen that such a reconstruction was crucial to reinforcing dynastic prestige. The project began in 1865, to be completed in 1867, at great expense and inflicting both social and economic damage (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 261–262).
30. The Seokjojeon was damaged in the colonial period and then again by North Korean arson in the Korean War. Its restoration was begun in 2009
31. Seo Jae-pil is a seminal ἀgure in the abortive 1884 coup and the 1890s reform movement. See Lee Ki-baik (1984, 302–304); Eckert et al. (1990, 232–234). Subsequently he was signiἀcant to the independence movement in the colonial period and then later as principal advisor to the post-1945 South Korean government of Syngman Rhee.
32. Yoshimi Takeuchi ([1947] 1993) is cited to the effect that “Asia” arrived at its self-consciousness thanks to “the West’s” or “Europe’s” colonization albeit, in part, colonization in imagination. The historical colonization of Asia is essential to the possibility called Asia.
33. Park especially cites Kwon Taeeok (2005); Omameuda (2006, 138–139).
34. As Alexis Dudden (2006) argues, there was also a legitimation in legalisms: there were always assiduously pleaded intellectual and “international law” justiἀcations put forward to underpin Japan’s imperial aspirations.
35. American Secretary of War (later president) William Howard Taft approved Japan’s domination of Korea in a secret agreement with Japan’s foreign minister, in exchange for Japanese quiescence about US colonization of the Philippines. This is seen by many Koreans as America’s ἀrst betrayal; the second was the division of Korea agreed upon, again secretly, at the end of World War II (Oberdorfer and Carlin 2013, 4).
36. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was renegotiated in August 1905, acknowledging Japan’s right to “guide” Korea in return for Japan’s recognition of British interests in China (Eckert et al. 1990, 238).
37. On the ideology and agenda of the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement, see Syngman Rhee (1904), written from a Seoul prison but not published until 1910. A partial translation into English is Kim Han-Kyo (2000, 299–305).
38. There were 58 jingu (Shinto shrines) in Korea, 322 smaller shrines, and 310 prayer halls; the largest, for the legendary Amaterasu, founder of Japan, and for the Meiji emperor, was Korea Shrine, or Choson Jingu, on Namsan, the sacred (to Koreans) Southern Mountain (Lautensach 1945, 391; Cumings 2005, 182; Henry 2014). Todd Henry (2014, 65–91) recounts at length the efforts of the colonial government to bring Koreans into the fold of Shinto worship.
39. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this point on the role of the mission stations in creating Koreans’ sense of awe toward Western modernity.
40. See Kyung Moon Hwang (2010, 167–169) on the role of women, and especially painter and radical writer Na Hyesok, in the cultural production of the 1920s. On such production in the 1930s, see Son Min-jung (2014).
41. On various aspects of the highly valued tradition of education in ancient Korea, see, for example, Lee Ki-baik (1984, 119, 130, 206–207, 222).
42. There is an extensive literature on the comfort women, who continue to haunt both Korean and Japanese memory and historiography. See, for example, C. Sarah Soh (2009); George Hicks (1997); and Yoshimi Yoshiaki (2002). The latter two look at the issues more broadly. 271
43. Palmer (2013, 195n2) cites Higuchi Yuichi (1992, 120, 131) and Hanil Munjae Yon’guwon (1995, 82–84).
44. On the Japanese assimilation policies and practices in Taiwan and the “devastating and transforming” effect on the Taiwanese political and socioeconomic fabric, see L. T. S. Ching (2001).
45. On the Caprio argument, see Palmer (2010). For another take on these inequalities, see Henry (2014).
46. On Reischauer, see Fujitani (2000); also Reischauer (1964).
47. Lee Young-ho (2014) provides an account of the interweaving of Japanese land reform measures with the Korean government’s autonomous land reforms in the early colonial period, revealing the failure to resolve the problems of a multilayered landownership system until the Japanese Residency-General forcefully took away the rights of multilayered landowners without compensation.
48. See Hwang Insang, “The History of the Statistical System of Korea: From the Choson Period to the US Occupation Period,” http://www.ier.hit-uac.jp, accessed 5 July 2015.
49. Park Chan Seung (2010, 88), citing Kim Young-geun (2002) and Kim Baek Young (2009), writes that the Japanese lived in the southern villages of Seoul south of the Cheonggyecheon Stream, with Koreans in the northern village that had been the aristocratic sector in the Chosun era. Also see Kal Hong (2011, 106); and Henry (2014).
50. The railway, it should be noted, was used very effectively by the Japanese to facilitate their 1904–1905 war with Russia for East Asian supremacy.
51. Lee Ki-baik (1984, 206–207) describes the role of private academies (sojae) that had existed since the end of Goryeo and had concerned themselves solely with education. Subsequently, in early Chosun another class of academy (sowon) proliferated, linked to the commemoration of past worthies and reinforcing the power of the neo-Confucian literati. These were state supported and performed a role akin to that of Buddhist temples in Goryeo. Many sowon were subsequently founded in the countryside by neo-Confucian literati who had been excluded from power in the capital (222).
52. Bartholomew (1993) gives the same statistic but in relation to Gyeongbokgung Palace. More speciἀc is Jin Jong-Heon (2008, 40–41), stating that only thirty-six of approximately three hundred original buildings of the palace remained standing.
53. There had been an earlier, small-scale Keijo (Seoul) Exhibition in 1907. Although proclaimed as a joint venture of Japanese and Korean businessmen, it was clearly dominated by the former, held in the area of the southern (Japanese settler) village, and backed by the increasingly aggressive action of the Residency-General.
54. Kal Hong refers to “Hakurankai Iho” [Exposition Report], Chosen (October 1929), 325–327.
55. On the Beaux Arts predilections running through Japanese goals for their new and newly appropriated ancient cities in Manchuria (Manchukuo), under the planning control of the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu), see Jung Inha (2013, 8–9).
56. On Tokyo Station, see Coaldrake (1996). For a detailed account of the Government-General Building and its context in the array of colonial administration buildings and their architecture throughout the Japanese colonial empire, see Nishizawa (2014). Yasuhiko Nishizawa observes that, in all their colonies, the administration headquarters came late, as initial building efforts had been directed toward education, health, and other sectors to overcome backwardness—presumably to attract colonizers from Japan.
57. Also on Namsan was Seoul Shrine, founded in 1898 by Japanese settlers. Henry (2014, 62–63, 80) recounts that there was always tension between the settlers 272Seoul Shrine and the government’s Korea Shrine, with the former a locus of settler opposition to the Government-General. There was also tension between Shinto and the government’s commitment to religious freedom. In 1929 indigenous deities were incorporated into Seoul Shrine, and in 1931 into Korea Shrine.
58. Henry (2014, 2) is quoting Ogasawara Shozo (1953, 73). In the vain hope of advancing some measure of assimilation, Shozo had unsuccessfully attempted to invoke native deities to inhabit Korea Shrine.
59. On these reforms, see Lee Ki-baik (1984, 290–292); and Eckert et al. (1990, 222–227). The economic reforms brought profound social change, including abolition of class distinctions. Korean history began to be taught in schools, and promising students were sent to Japan for higher study.
60. The Dai-Ichi Bank has a curious role in Korean history. It was founded in 1873 as the ἀrst bank and ἀrst joint stock company ever established in Japan and effectively the central bank until 1883. In 1884 it negotiated with the Chosun government for its Korean branch to be the monopoly agent for tariff management. It subsequently began issuing banknotes for Korea called Dai-Ichi Bank Tokens and became the de facto central bank for Chosun Korea. Following the 1904 Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty, it was deprived of its privileges in Korea by the new (Japanese) colonial government.
61. This was the area of the Russian legation, protector of the dynasty in 1896–1905. The legation was destroyed in the Korean War; its surviving main square tower is in a Russian Renaissance Revival style.
62. On Yakhyeon Catholic Church, as well as the Catholic Church and the martyrs’ memorials in Seosomun, see http://www.visitseoul.net, accessed 31 July 2015. On the background to the Chosun persecutions, see Cho Kwang (2004).
63. Also commemorating Catholic martyrs killed by Chosun is Saenamteo Church in Yongsan-gu, on the site of a former military camp that served as a place of execution of opponents of the dynasty; it holds the relics of nine Korean saints. Though of recent construction, the church is unusual in being in a Korean style. There were notable executions of Catholics in Seoul in 1801, 1839, 1846, and 1866.
64. The 1928 city plan (fortunately not implemented) would have obliterated Cheondogyo Temple, as well as Unhyeongung Palace (Henry 2014, 53).
65. “Old Seoul Station—Seoul, Korea,” Waymarking.com, 23 June 2009, http://www.waymarking.com, accessed 26 July 2012. On the quite extraordinary extent of the (Japanese) Korean railway system in 1926, virtually on the eve of the Manchurian intrusion, see Uchida (2009, 118).
66. Chung J. Young, pers. comm., 10 March 2006.
67. By some accounts “only” 47 were demolished (Chung J. Young, pers. comm., 10 March 2006); by leaving the main pavilion standing, the Japanese deformation became all the more explicit. Compare with the estimate of Jin Jong-Heon (2008), that 36 of the approximately 300 original buildings remained standing. It would seem that Jin’s account refers to the whole palace complex plus the ancillary buildings. Henry (2014, 98) refers to 123 palace buildings being “swept away.”
68. See also Henry (2014, 212). Henry observes, however, that the double-square plan form has been commonly adopted by modern architects and that the nationalistic reading by Korean critics is more recent—observers in the colonial era seem not to have raised the issue and, in any case, would have lacked the means to observe this symbolic calligraphy from above.
69. The City Hall, of 1926, was in a heavy-handed Art Deco—allegedly “European”—style. Henry (2014, 50) notes the signiἀcance of City Hall’s location immediately opposite Deoksugung Palace, center of the government of the erstwhile Chosun Daehan Empire. 273
70. This progressive transformation of the capital, including the deformation of its royal and geomantic magic, is well represented in a series of maps in Jung Inha (2013, 11).
71. This “consent” was subsequently denied. In June 1965 the Treaty of Normalization with Japan repudiated the legality of the annexation and of the consequent colonization (Kyung Moon Hwang 2010, 225–226). The very idea of normalization met with widespread opposition in Korea and with student rebellion in Seoul.
72. Park Gil-ryong (1898–1943) worked initially with the Government-General’s architecture department, where he designed the university main hall; he formed his own office in 1934 from which he designed the Hwasin Department Store, his masterpiece, in 1937 (Jackson and Koehler 2012; also Woo Don-Son 2014).
73. On the Mitsui and Company Building, later the USIS Building, see “Historical Japanese Architectures in Korean & Taiwan: Skylines & Photography,” Skyscrapercity.com, http://www.skyscrapercity.com, accessed 3 July 2011.
74. Kang Sukhi (2007).
75. Upon its inauguration in 1900, the park was open to the public on Sundays but reserved for the royal household during the rest of the week. Citing the royal exclusiveness as illustrating Korean “backwardness,” the Japanese opened the park on a daily basis in 1913. See Henry (2014, 41).
76. It is signiἀcant that the tram would traverse the commercial Jongno then, already in 1899, extend beyond the old city to the area that is now the University of Seoul campus.
77. Eckert et al. (1990, 231) observe that new Russian and US influence after 1895 enabled American businessmen to initiate the tramway, electricity generation and a city lighting plant, gold mining, and the Seoul-Incheon railway. The franchise for this last was awarded to James R. Morse, who in 1898, under some duress, sold it to a Japanese company.
78. Seoul’s ἀrst electricity had been installed in 1886, to illuminate Gyeongbokgung Palace (Henry 2014, 40).
79. A ἀne and well-illustrated discussion of the spaces of colonial Seoul, enriched with the memories of the author’s grandmother, is Jane Song (n.d. but probably 2009).
80. Henry (2014, 131–167) provides a very detailed and graphic account of hygiene and public health issues in the colonial period and of the very different policies and practices directed by the colonial authorities toward the two villages and their differentiated communities.
81. The street widening and reordering might be labeled “Haussmannization” in the manner most famously fashioned by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891) in the rebuilding of Paris. One can speculate that the Daehan would also have pursued this form of “erasure” of old Seoul if it had persisted. However, Henry (2014, 51) observes that the challenge to extend this rationalization beyond the arterial boulevards, into the internal capillaries, was never met.
82. Henry (2014, 49) suggests, however, that the expansion of the Korean quarters was a “concession” to the marginalized Korean community—effectively a sop.
83. On the land readjustment project, see Ishida and Kim Jooya (2014).
84. Henry (2014, 44–48) recounts the related story of the Keijo City Planning Research Association (KCPRA), founded in 1921 in the context of the cultural policy and following the model of the Tokyo-based Urban Research Association (URA) established in 1917. Both were extragovernmental agencies and both were divided into twelve departments to form the planning authorities of their respective cities. While the URA was mostly well resourced, it was politically constrained by powerful vested interests of the metropole; the KCPRA, by contrast, could rely on the backing of a powerful nonelected government but never had appropriate resources. 274
85. On the Hwasin Department Store and its much-reviled, alleged collaborator entrepreneur Park Heung Shik, see Cumings (2005, 171–172).
86. There are also the quasi-autobiographical novels and stories of Richard Kim. See especially Richard E. Kim (1988). Richard Kim recounts that when his novel Lost Names was translated into Korean and Japanese, both publishers translated “lost” with a word that implied “violently taken away.” In subsequent editions, he asked for the removal of the unwanted implication of “the haunting shadows of victims and victimizers” (197). Both publishers had difficulty with the request.
87. Park Wan-suh (1931–2011) was one of Korea’s most revered writers. Her work centered on families, family values, and biting critiques of the middle class and of strict Confucian mores; see, for example, ἀ ree Days in that Autumn (2001). Among her other fifteen novels, the best known would be ἀ e Dreaming Incubator, Year of Famine in the City, Swaying Afternoon, Warm Was the Winter that Year, and Are You Still Dreaming?
88. Lee Ji-Eun (2015) effectively places the rapidly evolving “modernization” of Korean women and their roles in this cultural production during the Japanese era.
89. In addition to Hwasin, there were four Japanese department stores by the end of the 1930s, all branches of department stores in Japan: Mitsukoshi, Chojiya, Minakai, and Hirata. They were part of Japanese capital’s attempt to capture the Korean market, bringing both new products and ἀerce competition. See Oh Jin-seok and Howard Kahm, “Colonial Consumerism: Capitalist Development and the Internal Management of Department Stores in Late Colonial Korea,” http://www.worldbhc.org, accessed 6 July 2015.
90. For translations of Pak’s work, see Pak Tae-won (2010a; 2010b). Henry (2014, 51) observes that, in novelist Kubo’s wandering in civic Seoul, there is no mention of City Hall and its plaza, alleged (by the government) to be the epicenter of civic life. Rather, it is the intense alienation of Taihei Boulevard and Seoul Station that seem most powerfully to evoke the civic spirit of Seoul.
91. Kimberley Chung (2014) has examined the New Tendency movement championed by KAPF that represented the beginning of “proletarian sensibilities” in 1920s colonial Korea. Its literature developed tropes of excess against the abject poverty of the masses, Marxist critique, descriptions of poverty, images of the body in pain, and the politics of the abject subject.
92. The contrary view, articulated earlier in this chapter, is that, especially in the cases of Ainu and Ryukyuan peoples, both policies and practices were more those of obliteration of culture than of assimilation (Caprio 2009).
93. This is dealt with by Atkins (2010), to be discussed below.
94. See Grayson (1977); Atkins (2010, 177–180); Seth (2006, 31–32). Atkins (2010, 177–180) writes that the “location, expanse, and Japaneseness of Imna/Mimana remain among the most disputed issues in East Asian historiography.” Korean scholars generally interpret the claim about Mimana as a product of a nationalist, colonial Japanese historiography (Schmid 2002, 263; Kim Chun-Gil 2005, 27–29; Seth 2006, 31–32). Kim Chun-Gil refers to the “the Mimana fallacy.”
95. Also see Henry (2014, 151), who cites newspaper reports of the time on the Japanese rhetoric of Keijo (Seoul) as the empire’s “diseased city” and its Korean population as without “civic morality.”
96. For more on Naoki Sakai’s arguments on Japanese cultural nationalism, see Sakai (1992; 2008). On the origins of Japanese cultural nationalism, see Fujitani (1998).
97. On obligated forgetting and obligated remembering (imagining) in both Japanese historiography and popular culture, see the work of John Dower, notably Dower (1999; 2012).
98. Arguing similarly is Brudnoy (1970). For critiques of aspects of Atkins’ study, see Aso (2012) and Dusinberre (2013). 275
99. A number of papers in Koh Wee Hock (2007) explore the more recent displays of Japanese ambivalence toward sexual slavery in World War II. There is Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s 2016 denial of forced wartime prostitution, apparently recanting a 1993 apology for the comfort women.
100. Korea Journal devoted a special issue to the event. See Park Chan Seung and Kim Hyun-ju (2010).
101. On the nature of that memory, see Yang Hyunah (1998). Comfort women are constructed as national virgins; the discourse of the violation of national virgins mobilizes the Korean sense of shame, which in turn serves to unify the nation. Thus the exchange value of shame for national unity is the basic capital that circulates in the symbolic economics of nationalism (Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo 1998a.
102. This is the title of a nineteenth-century novel by Han Bangqing.
103. For different perspectives on these events in North Korea, see Armstrong (2013); and Suzy Kim (2013).