Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea 9781503603110

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F I G U RI N G KO RE A N F U T U RE S

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F I G U RI N G KO REAN F UTU RE S CHIL DREN’ S LITERAT URE IN MODERN KOREA

DAF NA ZU R

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S S TA N F O R D, C A L I F O R N I A

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. The Korea Foundation has provided financial assistance for the undertaking of this publication project. Sections of Chapter 3 appeared previously in “‘They are still eating well, and living well’: The Grimms’ Tales in Early Colonial Korea” by Dafna Zur, in Grimms’ Tales around the Globe, edited by Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey. Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, with the permission of Wayne State University Press. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zur, Dafna, author. Title: Figuring Korean futures : children’s literature in modern Korea / Dafna Zur. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016052903 | ISBN 9781503601680 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503603110 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Children’s periodicals, Korean--History--20th century. | Children’s literature, Korean--History and criticism. | Korean periodicals--History--20th century. Classification: LCC PN5417.J8 Z87 2017 | DDC 895.709/9282--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052903 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion Pro

CONTENTS

Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Child and Modern Korea

1

1 The Youth Magazine in Early Colonial Korea

29

2 Figuring the Child-Heart

47

3 Writing the Language of the Child-Heart

75

4 The Proletarian Child Strikes Back

99

5 Playing War in Late Colonial Korea

123

6 Liberating the Child-Heart

161

Epilogue: The Turn to Science in Postwar North and South Korea

191

Notes

215

Bibliography

249

Index

273

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F I G U RE S

1.

First page spread of the inaugural issue of Sonyŏn, 1908

35

2.

“Haesang taehansa” (The Nautical History of Korea), Sonyŏn, 1908

37

3.

Korea and the Sea of Japan, Sonyŏn, 1908

38

4.

“Brave Youth at Sea,” Sonyŏn, 1909

41

5.

“Leaf Boat,” Ŏrini, 1924

48

6.

“Remaining Ink,” Ŏrini, 1923

70

7.

Cover of Ŏrini no. 8, 1923

72

8.

Conductor, Ŏrini, 1930

72

9.

“Tales of a Hero,” Pyŏllara, 1931

119

10.

Cover of Sinsonyŏn, April 1932

120

11.

Playing Soldier, Sonyŏn, 1940

131

12.

Marathon Cookies, Sonyŏn, 1938

134

13.

“Side by Side,” Sonyŏn, 1939

136

14.

“The Water Gun,” P’odo wa kusŭl, 1946

142

15.

Front matter of Sonyŏn no. 6, 1940

151

16.

“March in Place,” Sohaksaeng, 1949

177

17.

“Omega Bugs,” Hagwŏn, 1968

200

18.

“The Rising Seabed,” Adong munhak, 1965

206

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AC K N OW LE D G M E N T S

This project came to me before I knew I was looking for it. On the occasion of the birth of my second son, my parents brought from Israel the yellowing and dog-eared books of my childhood: Frog and Toad, The Little Fish That Got Away, Good Night Moon. Reading them with my wriggly two-year-old in my lap, I discovered a connection between my past child-self and the present moment. And so it seemed fitting to connect the scattered dots—a bilingual childhood, a home in many places, a love of fiction, a delight in the power of a secret language—through a project on the children’s literature of the Korean peninsula. From that moment, it was nothing but the generosity of scholars and the sustenance of family and friends that made this book possible. Early on, Kevin O’Rourke took me under his wing and attuned my ears to the sounds and textures of Korean poetry. Wŏn Chong-ch’an, whose name has graced multiple books and articles on children’s literature in the last two decades, answered my plea for help by shipping to Canada three enormous boxes of photocopied primary sources without ever having met me. In the early 2000s it was the questions posed in his work, as well as by the scholars Sŏn An-na, Cho Ŭn-suk, Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, and Kim Hwa-sŏn, that got me thinking about the possibilities in my materials. At the University of British Columbia, Don Baker, Jane Flick, Bruce Fulton, Steven Lee, Teresa Rogers, and Judith Saltman provided me with a foundation in Korean literature, Korean history, and children’s literature. Sharalyn Orbaugh has been a mentor and role model, her intellect, sincerity,

x  AC KNOW L E D GM E NT S

and kindness nothing short of humbling. Most of all, the dedicated and tireless Ross King remains my sharpest critic and keenest advocate, always pushing me to ask bigger and better questions, and believing in my project more than I ever did. He is a model of excellence and integrity in scholarship to which I can only aspire, and I am lucky to consider him a teacher and friend for life. The companionship of my ŏkke tongmu—Nathan Clerici, Asato Ikeda, Spencer Jentzsch, Eunseon Kim, Se-Woong Koo, Si Nae Park, Kari Shepherdson-Scott, JeongHye Son, and Scott Wells—made tolerable the unbearable slowness of research, and joyful the shared discoveries. Since then, the abiding friendship of Stefania Burk, Christina Laffin, and Gordon Reid has made Vancouver not simply a way station but another place that my family can call home. In particular, I have Christina Laffin to thank for helping me meet every single one of my deadlines when I never believed I could. When I entered the field of Korean literature not only did I gain a professional identity, I fell in with the warmest group of talented scholars and friends: Jinsoo An, Ruth Barraclough, Stephen Epstein, Chris Hanscom, Ted Hughes, Kelly Jeong, Immanuel Kim, Jina Kim, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Ji-Eun Lee, ­Jin-kyung Lee, Sunyoung Park, Janet Poole, Jiwon Shin, Vladimir Tikhonov, and so many others. In Korea, Kwŏn Youngmin, Kwŏn Podŭrae, Cheon Junghwan, Hwang Hoduk, and Yi Youngjae treated me as a colleague and not as the clueless novice I felt myself to be. One autumn-lake stroll in on a crisp, October morning in Ann Arbor with the brilliant Chris Hanscom and Youngju Ryu was a turning point: their probing questions and confidence in the project gave me the kind of push I needed to get it back on track. That same month, at the 4th Annual Rising Stars Conference organized by David Kang at the University of Southern California, I received feedback from Carter Eckert, J­in-kyung Lee, Namhee Lee, and others that helped me see the project in a different light. Later that summer of 2012, a priceless opportunity given by the SSRC Korean Studies Workshop for Junior Faculty to work with Nicole Constable, Maria Gillombardo, and Nancy Abelmann in the dreamscape of Asilomar reinvigorated my passion for the book’s story. It was the last time I saw Nancy. Her infectious optimism and appetite for life stays with me, and it is her title that graces this book. I write these words on the first anniversary of her passing, and how I wish I could call and tell her that for better or worse, it is done. The following year, Stanford’s Humanities Center’s Manuscript Review Workshop allowed me to work closely with the inimitable Ted Hughes, Kyu Hyun Kim, Seth Lehrer, Yumi Moon, Caroline Winterer, and Ban Wang. They

AC K NOW L E D GM E NT S   xi

identified the strengths and weaknesses that were no longer visible to me, and I hope that my revisions approach the kind of possibilities they saw in this project. I consider myself deeply fortunate to have found such a supportive and big-hearted Koreanist community at Stanford: Kyungmi Chun, Yongsuk Lee, Yumi Moon, Dan Schneider, Gi-Wook Shin, Kathy Stephens, and David Straub, are still to my amazement, colleagues and friends. In my department, Steve Carter, Connie Chen, Ron Egan, Haiyan Lee, Indra Levy, Li Liu, Yoshiko Matsumoto, Jim Reichert, Chao Sun, Melinda Takeuchi, Ban Wang, and Zhou Yiqun, welcomed me with open arms. Ban Wang especially has been an inspiration, his quiet wisdom and encouragement pushing the project forward through its critical stages. Further afield, the History Department’s Tom Mullaney, Matt Sommer, and Jun Uchida have provided me with food, laughter, and intellectual stimulation. Haerin Shin showed me the ropes when I first arrived, and Alvan Ikoku, Alexander Key, and Mikael Wolfe walked those ropes alongside me. The Faculty Success Program provided me the necessary accountability to move forward, with Ryan Powell’s voice cheering me on from afar. My students Hajin Jun and Eunyeong Kim helped this book come together in more ways than I can acknowledge. O Yŏngsik, Chang Chŏnghŭi, and Regan Murphy Kao graciously and swiftly answered my panicked, lastminute pleas for source c­opies. At Stanford University Press, Jenny Gavacs fostered the production of the manuscript and provided reassurance and direction that helped rein in its unruly details, and Jessica Ling, Olivia Bartz, and Kate Wahl saw it to fruition. I am grateful, too, for the invaluable suggestions of two anonymous reviewers. Friendship is the fuel that makes my life possible: the Lowenfels clan since the day I was born; Susana Ruiz and Jenny Woo, thirty years and counting; N ­ adine Tomaschoff and Hadas Prag, army buddies and keepers of the memories of our Bumly Days; Teresa Lee, the sister I always wanted; and my Concordia Language Village SupHo family, which each summer grants me the writing space I need, but don’t necessarily want, in the Minnesota woods so that we can raise another generation of global citizens. Most of all, and despite the impossibility of words to convey how important they are to me, I want to acknowledge my family: the Zur, Wilderman, and Kim extensions that have been rooting for me from across the globe. My parents in Jerusalem, Lila and Menachem, model lives lived fully and in dedication to what matters most. My brother, Yonah, remains my most precious companion in our split/double childhoods and through the rough waters of parenthood, and is always where I

x ii   AC KN OWL E D G ME N T S

go to remember who I am. My own children, Ilan and Oren, make me grateful to wake up breathing on this earth. Wise beyond their years, they chased me out of the house on tired afternoons to get back to the manuscript. And finally, I am beyond grateful to my greatest love and best friend in this world and the next, Eungsub Kim, who has the magical power to make anything possible.

F I G U RI N G KO RE A N F U T U RE S

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I N T RO D U C T I O N T H E C H I L D A N D M O D E R N KO R E A

S O M E T H I N G C H A N G E D at the turn of the twentieth century on the Korean peninsula. This was aside from the remaking of Korea from a sovereign nation into a Japanese protectorate in 1905, and aside from the shifting rural landscape and the reconfiguration of urban spaces by trains and trams, bridges and telephones, street lights and the cinema. It was at this time that childhood was discovered, when the child was identified as important enough to merit a new and dedicated form of print culture: the young reader’s magazine. This new medium enjoyed enthusiastic reception by steadily increasing numbers of readers as well as by Korea’s most dedicated literary luminaries. Its form and content evolved from one decade to the next, showcasing the voices and aspirations of writers, poets, and artists from across the political spectrum passionately committed to writing and illustrating for Korea’s future adults. Children’s literature was born. Archival materials from the Koryŏ (918–1392) and Chosŏn (1392–1910) ­dynasties—including paintings, diaries, and official documents—show that children had always been a part of culture. They were integral to social life: children were to be acculturated, raised to take their place in society according to dictates of age, class, and gender, and were expected to cultivate the material inheritance of their families and uphold the spiritual values of their ancestors. At the turn of the century, however, children occupied a new place in the world, their value celebrated not for their connection to the past but for precisely their difference and separation from it. Not only was their disconnection from the past to be relished, but they were recognized as discerning consumers of c­ ulture

2   IN T ROD U C T I O N

in their own right, deemed worthy of their own media filled with texts and illustrations that would be of interest to them alone. Chosŏn’s men and women of letters, educators and psychologists, artists and doctors, engaged in writing for children with a deliberate hand that had no precedent. The emergence of young readers’ magazines at the turn of the century was neither arbitrary nor accidental. It occurred at the intersection of tremendous political and social changes that were taking place on the Korean peninsula. Under Japanese colonial rule, Korean subjects engaged with scholarship about children’s bodies and minds, and were introduced to literature for children in Japanese. For the individuals and institutions that took on literature for children, the stakes could not have been higher, because this literature claimed to attend to the most contested spaces: nature and culture, past and future, home and nation. The new audience of young readers offered adult writers something unique and critically important: the possibility of addressing fresh, impressionable beings, and the opportunity to render the world legible to the young in a manner that had not before been attempted. But in order to make legible the past, present, and future—in fact, in order to imagine this new audience in the first place, and to write for it—three changes needed to occur. First, children had to be made visible. New ideas about children’s rights, welfare, education, and psychology, compounded with an exposure to the vibrant children’s culture in Japan, created the demand for a new type of writing for children that spoke to them at eye-level. Second, children needed to become literate. Not only in the sense of acquiring reading skills, although literacy was certainly central to this process. Becoming literate also entailed being initiated into a world of colors, symbols, and images that both reflected and prescribed the child’s experience. Third and finally, texts for children had to be stylized to suit this new audience. Children could not be addressed in the stiff renderings of classical texts that they had memorized for centuries. The texts of the past—written in Chinese, vernacular Korean, or a mix of the two—were deemed unsuitable, their modes of expression formulaic and far removed from colloquial speech, their content unrelated to children’s emotional tenor and real lives. The combination of these three factors—­ visibility, visual and textual literacy, and style—brought about the creation of literature for children in colonial Korea. At the outset, this book attempts to answer several broad yet related questions: how is it that children’s literature emerged as a genre in the midst of the loss of national sovereignty and how was it shaped by Korea’s colonial experi-

TH E C H I L D AND M O D E R N KO R E A   3

ence? What types of cultural regimes or fields of knowledge made it possible for children’s literature to grow at a time when the future of the sovereign nation was uncertain at best? What kind of polyphonic, contested expressions can be found in this otherwise ideologically dogmatic period, and how does literature for children illuminate our understanding of Korean modernity? What role did national liberation play in the way Korea’s competing ideological projects played out? And finally, if we can understand children’s literature as a mode of translation and interpretation—the translation of the complex world of grown-ups on behalf of the less sophisticated, less knowledgeable, and less experienced child readers—what do these “translations” tell us about what adults thought children should know, feel, and do about the world into which they were born? Discovering the Child-Heart Much of the scholarship on children’s literature tends to be driven by the question of origin: how does children’s literature begin? How does a literary establishment in any given place and time go from the absence of reading materials for young readers to producing materials explicitly targeting such an audience? What are the cultural and social conditions that make the emergence of such a literature possible? How do we define literature for children, and what kind of insights can literature for children provide that are otherwise inaccessible? One thing that makes such questions possible is the recognition, perhaps intuitive at this point in time, that childhood is a social construct. In other words, childhood—as a period that extends between infancy and adulthood—did not always exist. Once, the course of one’s life moved quickly from the realm of the home to a full incorporation into society with only a symbolic rite of passage to mark the transition. The oft-quoted Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Ariès published in 1960 (the English translation of the original French came out in 1962) has served as a pioneering yet contentious contribution to European scholarship on childhood for its claim to identify the moment when children and childhood came to have modern value. As Ilana Ben-Amos has shown, Ariès’ scholarship, for all its merits, was both Eurocentric and not entirely novel: ethnographic scholarship predating Ariès had already demonstrated that the transition from childhood to adulthood in many regions was rich in cultural and social significance, thereby indicating that this transition was neither seamless nor self-evident.1 Not to mention that the significance of the child as a cultural symbol can be traced from Confucian ethics in pre­modern China

4   IN T ROD U C T I O N

in the second century BC to Lockean philosophy in seventeenth-century Britain. The recognition of childhood as a social construct has made itself evident across cultures in different times, but its precise moment of origin has been difficult to pin down. So how is it that despite the awareness of children and the long existence of some semblance of a period distinct from adulthood, children’s literature is a relatively new phenomenon? Recent scholarship on the emergence of children’s literature converges on two conceptual points. The first is visibility—that children’s literature is born when the child moves out of society’s periphery to the center of social networks. The child is then deemed a critically important object of ideological socializing which, linked with a strong educational doctrine, forms the basis of literature for children.2 Generally speaking, the transition of the child from the periphery of culture to the center has been facilitated by changes in labor laws and public education, changes that shifted the child’s significance in the home from economically useful to economically useless but sentimentally priceless.3 The broader market and education systems have also been implicated, since social and aesthetic value is determined, as Seth Lerer explains, “out of the relationships among those who make, market, and read books.”4 Scholars have demonstrated that a host of social and economic changes work to transform the child into a social agent, consumer, and moving target for an array of social and market forces, all of which make the emergence of literature for children possible. But what about Korea, where children’s literature emerged later than its English- or Japanese-language counterparts? The scholarship here begins with Yi Chae-ch’ŏl, who first documented the development of children’s literature in Korea in his Adong munhak kaeron (Introduction to Children’s Literature) (1967) and Han’guk hyŏndae adong munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Children’s Literature) (1978). Yi attempted the very first genealogy and categorization of literature for children in Korea, and contended that it was a product of indigenous traditions of oral literature, local philosophies of enlightenment, and social transformations of the early twentieth century that together released children from age-old bondage to family and tradition.5 To this ground­breaking scholarship, Wŏn Chong-ch’an has offered depth and nuance in nineteen monographs and edited volumes, in which he has explored everything from the biographies of individual writers and artists to the circulation of children’s culture in Asia. In these works Wŏn argues that Korean children’s literature originated in the 1920s with the development of children’s activism, youth groups, and a broader market economy able to respond to the demands

TH E C H I L D AND M O D E R N KO R E A   5

of a new audience of readers. Wŏn notes that children’s literature in Korea could only emerge when children were taken out of the labor market and placed into schools.6 Chang Chŏng-hŭi finds the first instances of children’s literature earlier, in school textbooks of the early 1900s.7 But as Ch’oe Myŏng-p’yo argues,8 it appears that the youth groups of the early 1920s played the most crucial role in the emergence of children’s literature, both in determining the political identities of young people—what Yael Darr refers to as the “shapers of taste”—and in creating space for budding young writers.9 To different extents, then, the limited introduction of public education and the establishment of youth groups provided the structural support and patronage that made children’s literature possible. In Korea, this coincided with the loss of national sovereignty, which complicated the dissemination of national identity and ideologies of modernity, and pitted multiple interest groups against each other. The demand for children’s literature was created in part out of the anticipation of expanding literacy and in part out of a need to “translate” the world on behalf of the next generation, who were entering a markedly different world. If what made Korean children’s literature initially possible was the visibility of the child in society, then the second turning point was the growing interest in, and a belief in the accessibility of, the child’s mind, and the conviction that this mind provided clues into the origins of what it means to be human. In Korea, philosophies of the human mind and theories of child development, both local and global, shaped the belief in the existence of this privileged child’s mind, or as it came to be known, the tongsim, or the child-heart. The idea of the child-heart as a state of purity that could potentially be achieved even in adulthood had existed in East Asia from the times of Mencius and Laozi. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the child-heart again offered models of emulation to the intellectuals of East Asia such as Liang Qichao, who saw in the child-heart an untapped potential that could rejuvenate the nation both literally and symbolically. Under Japanese rule, Western conceptualizations of child development and education also found their way into the Korean colony. These included the works of John Locke (1632–1704), whose formulation of the tabula rasa implied that all people were born as blank slates and which brought Locke to inquire into the origins of the mind; Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who, in his widely influential text Emile explored the tension between the innate goodness of man and the corrupting influence of society; and Jean Piaget (1896–1980), who believed that children were functioning beings in their own right and should therefore not be considered imperfect adults.

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And perhaps the greatest challenge to the idea of the purity of the child-mind came from Freud, who viewed the child’s mind as a depository of sexual desires, and for whom the key to understanding adult neuroses involved accessing childhood memories and experiences.10 From Mencius to Liang Qichao, and from Locke to Freud, theories of the child-heart as a window into the origin of humanity shaped the conception of the child in East and West, not just biologically but metaphorically, not just as an adult-in-process but, as Carolyn Steedman puts it, the biological child as a cell with “an individual’s childhood history laid down inside its body, a place inside that was indeed very small, but that carried with it the utter enormity of a history.”11 This focus on the symbolic potential of the child-heart helps explain why scholars have long argued that literature for children is a manifestation of adult investment in the child’s interiority. In her highly influential book, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Jacqueline Rose argued that children’s literature is a genre whose interests so closely hinge on adult concerns that it cannot be called children’s literature at all.12 Karatani Kōjin considered the visibility of the child in culture to be so important as to have enabled the birth of modern fiction. Karatani explained that the moment the child comes to be appreciated as external and objective in the world is the moment of discovery of interiority, and is that which marks literature as modern.13 I, too, argue that Korean children’s literature—in which I include poetry, prose, illustrations, and miscellaneous textual forms published in children’s magazines or newspaper columns aimed at young readers—was developed alongside the concept of the child-heart, or tongsim. A combination of the character tong for child and sim for heart/mind, the child-heart was the concept through which Korean writers justified the need for a new kind of writing. Korean scholars have acknowledged the centrality of this concept for colonial writers, yet it has for too long been taken for granted, its mechanics obscured. It is my intention to flesh out this term and trace its political and social contours. As I will show, the term “child” and “heart” cannot be taken at face value. Tong alluded to the non-adult body, and sim rendered the child intellectually and affectively different, and entirely knowable. Perhaps the most important characteristic that marked the child as distinct from the adult—the most striking feature of the tongsim—was the perception of the child’s existence on the threshold of culture: the child was closer to the flora and fauna than to acculturated adults. The child’s inherent innocence and purity demanded simultaneous protection and careful engineering. It is the tongsim that required a

TH E C H I L D AND M O D E R N KO R E A   7

“translation” of the world, but that also embraced contradictory impulses of nature and culture, those very same elements under threat by the colonial regime. Why is this of consequence? I return to the questions raised earlier: what can an interest in children’s literature, viewed through the concept of tongsim, contribute to our understanding of the development of modern Korean literature? First, because children’s literature has been long considered a minor genre—on the fringe, of little consequence, hardly worthy of archival preservation—it enjoyed a certain degree of freedom in hosting polyphonic, contradictory voices that quietly challenged the mainstream. More importantly, in the words of Chris Jenks, “the child, as conceptualized within both the spectrum of everyday attitudes and the professional discourses of the social sciences, is employed, consciously though often unconsciously, as a device to propound versions of sociality and social cohesion.”14 There is something about the conceptualization of the child revealed by children’s literature that can reveal “versions of sociality and social cohesion” that may otherwise be obscured. Yet thus far, the term tongsim has been accepted at face value: by chalking up the entire production of children’s literature to artistic manifestations of the child-heart, scholarship has ignored its constructed and profoundly artificial structure, without illuminating how exactly this child propounded, to use Jenks’ term, “versions of sociality and social cohesion.” The indiscriminate use of the term has obscured a clearer vision of what the child meant to different interest groups in different periods. I argue that the tongsim concept and its manifestations prompted the production of a rich and diverse body of texts and images that inscribed, both literally and figuratively, pasts, presents, and futures on the bodies and souls of the young. It is the emergence of the child-heart, the stakes claimed by writers, and the insights that their texts provide that will be the concern of this book. Who were the stakeholders, the determiners of literary taste, in this period, and what did they hope to achieve? How did the idea of the child-heart emerge, and what forces did it contend with? The responses to these questions change across different periods of Korea’s colonial and postcolonial history. There were hints of the importance of the child-heart before it emerged in the late nineteenth century. The looming threat of colonialism politicized progressive intellectuals, bringing youth to the attention of the likes of Ch’oe Nam-sŏn (1890–1957) and Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950). Themselves barely out of their teens on the eve of colonization in 1910, they saw Korea’s youth as an antidote to the disaster unfolding before them, and decided that nothing short of a complete overhaul of Korea’s structures of thinking and feeling was needed to survive the

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struggle of the fittest taking place on the global stage. “Let us feast upon our ancestors’ nutritious blood and flesh!” cried Yi Kwang-su in his 1918 essay, “On the Centrality of Children.” He continues, “You are our center, our hope, and our joy!”15 Ch’oe and Yi, having recently returned to Korea from studying abroad in Japan, rallied their young peers to embrace their role in the new world order through scintillating magazines, and paid special tribute to the role of emotion as the critical foundation of Korean modernity. The title of his famous essay may have been “On the Centrality of Children,” but the target of Yi Kwang-su’s essay was not children but youth. Children did not become visible until another young intellectual, Pang Chŏng-hwan (1899– 1931), shifted the spotlight. Pang left the most significant mark on the history of the child and children’s literature in Korea. He brought the term ŏrini, or child, back into circulation; founded the national holiday Children’s Day, still celebrated in Korea each year on May 5; and published and edited the magazine Ŏrini from 1923 until his untimely death in 1931. It was this magazine, alongside Pang’s tireless advocacy of children’s rights in the mainstream media of the time, that delighted young readers and gave them a much-desired respite from the heavy-handed didactic materials that had been the mainstay of texts for young people. Pang gave textual and visual contours to the child-heart in a manner that would have a lasting impact on children’s culture in colonial and postcolonial North and South Korea. There were, of course, many others. Korea’s proletarian writers presented their own political and social agendas in the pages of their dedicated children’s magazines, with their own vested interests in shaping the affective world of the young. To these leftist writers, children were particularly valuable for the kind of privileged access to truth they inherently possessed. Following the disbandment of leftist organizations in the mid-1930s, writers of leftist sympathies contributed to children’s magazines that were published even in the most oppressive period of the late 1930s and early 1940s. For even as war swept over Asia and Japan militarized the peninsula, children became ever more implicated in the imperialist culture of late colonial Korea. Whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, writers continued to contend with the view of the child-heart as natural and outside culture. Even upon liberation in 1945, the idea of the child-heart— now imbued with a national consciousness—was a fruitful and productive way of accessing the interiority of the child. All along, the national child-heart was tenaciously embraced and mobilized, even while it was interpreted in widely diverse ways.

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The child-heart underwent an important qualitative change with the defeat of the Japanese, the division of North and South Korea, and the ensuing Korean War. While children’s writers appealed to the authority of science throughout the colonial period as the best method through which to understand the physical world, they also at times viewed science with suspicion as somehow interfering with the child-heart. But this changed with the dropping of the atomic bombs, the utter devastation of the Korean War, and the new world order into which North and South Korea came into being. Until the 1950s, the child-heart’s qualities had been maintained and fortified through the coupling of child and nature. But in the atomic age, the child-heart experienced a shift. Tongsim was still important, but rather than promoting the idea of a natural child on the threshold of culture, children’s magazines from the postwar period indicate that the child was to be the main agent of the transformation of nature. The fictional children of postwar children’s literature recognized nature’s inherent flaws and set out to master the universe through acts that ranged from raising the bottom of the ocean floor to exploring and colonizing other planets. The child-heart that had been defined by its privileged communication with nature, and that granted children a pristine goodness and deep wisdom, was now put to a new purpose. To continue to maintain a privileged view of the world, the child’s final mission was to become nature’s master. To better understand the emergence of children’s literature in Korea, it is necessary to review the unique landscape of Korean literature in the early twentieth century, and to appreciate the place of literature in the cultural life of Korea on the eve of Japanese annexation. For no sooner did discourse on nationhood begin to emerge than Koreans witnessed their sovereignty snatched away and their lives changed in a process that has since been termed “colonial modernity.” Since the concept was illuminated in the mid-1990s by Korean historians and by the volume of the same name edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, scholarship has had to contend with its implications, namely: how to understand the diffusion of colonial power and the emergence of modernity in a colonial context.16 Colonial modernity, as articulated by Shin and Robinson, is a complex and dense “ecology” of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity, whose interconnected and interactive nature allows for a more comprehensive understanding of history. But it also illuminates how cultural production often works in complex ways that do not conform to a binary understanding of oppression and resistance. Indeed, recent scholarship in the English language on Korean colonial fiction

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has provided new ways of understanding the scope and limitations of culture as it operated under colonial rule. Janet Poole, for example, points to the way that certain writers focused on unruly detail, drew on the idea of double exposure, and clung to antiques, in ways that disrupted the forward-moving temporality established by the colonial regime and provided a private space outside the clutches of the colonial state.17 Christopher Hanscom, on the other hand, argues that the crisis of representation—in which the very communicability of language was cast into doubt—served as a means for writers to explore not only what it meant to be a colonial subject but also a modern one assailed by the unknowability of the self and the overwhelming and chaotic power of capital.18 Sunyoung Park has demonstrated that even a writer like Kim Nam-ch’ŏn (1911–1953), denounced for having abandoned his leftist ideology in favor of a chauvinistic pan-Asianism, found a way to defy the “belligerent masculinity” of wartime Japan and instead turned to the everyday as a way of exercising materialist critique.19 Aimee Kwon has proposed to view colonial modernity through the concept of what she calls the “conundrum” of subjectivity, language, history, aesthetic representation, and recognition as a way of reevaluating the stakes of writing under a colonial regime.20 Ji-Eun Lee has shown how colonial print culture mobilized women for different and sometimes contradictory ends,21 thus introducing the problem of gender into the equation. Together, these nuanced analyses show how writers negotiated the manifestations of colonial power in their work. Scholarship on children’s literature from the period must also contend with the implications of colonial modernity. My use of the term is inspired by Shin and Robinson’s definition mentioned above: as a complex and dense “ecology” of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity, whose interconnected and inter­active nature demands a more comprehensive understanding of cultural production. Aimee Kwon characterizes colonial modernity as a paradox that “emerges not because there exists an internal contradiction between coloniality and modernity, but from the fact that such a contradiction was produced and imposed discursively and continues to undermine our understanding of the true intimacy between coloniality and modernity.”22 For me, colonial modernity is a way of thinking through a particular kind of knowledge production that is imposed discursively “from above,” but which is also created, interpreted, and circulated “from below.” This approach allows us to read colonial-period children’s literature as a production by colonial subjects whose subjectivities were themselves shaped in part by colonial discourses in a genre—literature for ­children—that is inherently invested in human engineering. In this sense,

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colonial modernity produced a qualitative shift in writing for children under Japanese colonial rule that can be traced in three ways. The first is through censorship, which, while peripheral to the book’s argument, still warrants mention since it was the means through which information and knowledge were restricted and controlled. The second shift in writing for children was produced through the visuality of children’s literature, by which I mean the literal and figurative renderings of knowledge whose dissemination and consumption were central to modernity. Here, the body of the child, and by extension its (gendered) social function, was figured in texts and reinforced in images as a way of molding the colonial and postcolonial subject. And lastly, a qualitative shift in writing for children was created by an extraordinary investment in affect. Children’s literature was, first and foremost, meant to elicit a certain reformed affective response—to comfort, excite, move, inspire—in a way that was deemed appropriate to the ideological projects underway. Visuality and affect are productive lenses that can illuminate the ways that children’s literature translated the world for Korea’s present and future colonial and postcolonial subjects. First, censorship. Part of trying to get at a deeper understanding of what colonial modernity meant for children’s literature inevitably leads us to question how censorship intervened in the production and publication of its content. If one of the concerns undergirding the concept of colonial modernity is the dissemination of colonial power in private and public spaces, then the control of information in the form of censorship becomes a tangible part of that process. As recent scholarship has shown, however, the censorship mechanism itself was complex, as it tried to keep up with shifting conditions on the ground. Starting with the sinmunjibŏp, the newspaper law of 1907, and the ch’ulp’anbŏp, the publication law of 1909,23 all newspapers, magazines, and other print materials were subjected to both pre-print and post-production, pre-circulation scrutiny. Thereafter, all materials—including translations, biographies, fiction of all genres, and literature for children—were routinely censored. These laws were not static, as Chŏng Chin-sŏk points out, and an appeal in 1923 brought about a change in some of the application processes in 1926 and again in 1931.24 According to Mun Han-byŏl, there were typically two categorical grounds for censorship: “disruption of the peace” (ch’ian panghae) and “offenses against public morality” ( p’ungsok chŏhae).25 In certain cases, censorship was straightforward, and any challenges to the colonial regime or lewd content were eliminated. But to a certain degree, the judgment was arbitrary, and Son Chi-yŏn, who points out that the writers and censors were often in dialogue with one

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another, explains that censorship at times depended largely on the whims of the censors.26 Such studies point to the fact that censorship was less systematic than might be imagined. A more detailed examination of the process of censorship of children’s materials has come under scrutiny only recently. Mun Han-byŏl’s discovery of the Translations of Seditious Texts for Boys and Girls and the Content and Classification of Vernacular Texts for Boys and Girls provides new insights into censorship from this period.27 Seditious Texts included a letter in the name of the police chief of the Government General that calls for the censorship of materials for children because of the growing interest in foreign patriotic tales and in stories that celebrate a spirit of independence. By contrast, Content and Classification reveals that children’s materials were typically censored for three reasons: for containing overtly nationalistic content (for example, reverence for historical figures, glorification of the Korean nation, examples of self-sacrifice, or content that was explicitly pessimistic); for overtly leftist content (works that incited class struggle, exposed exploitative social structures, or “revolutionary” content); and for being ideologically tainted more generally, including works that incited “solidarity” or “effort.” Censored pieces included stories portraying the destruction of a village that falls under the charms of modernization; calling for Korean children not to forget their language and history; and describing scenarios in which children came to understand exploitation and take action. Letters to the editor, according to Mun’s findings, were also excised, particularly those that called for children to work hard at school.28 Children’s literature continued to be published throughout the colonial period, and some of the materials, particularly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, were open about the discrimination and exploitation of children, grievances that censorship purported to prevent. Still, censorship played a role in shaping the magazines’ content, and therefore children’s materials, which were subjected to scrutiny, do not provide transparent access to the voices of writers of children’s literature. If anything, colonial-period documents are important indicators of the growing awareness of the popularity and subversive potential of children’s magazines in the 1920s, including their ability to instill nationalist identity and provide a broader understanding of the political and social context of Korea’s colonial present.29 At the very least, these documents indicate that children’s fiction was important and popular enough to warrant caution on the part of the colonial government, and thus children’s literature is all the more deserving of our attention today.

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Second, visuality. As I have indicated above, the emergence of children’s literature was predicated on the appearance of children in culture. Children were no longer relegated to the home or to schools as adults-in-progress. There was a surge of investment in the child as the new citizen that was deeply implicated in discourses of modernity, of what it meant to be playing, feeling children reacting to and shaping the world around them. This new investment involved a new kind of visibility of the child (as a member of the imagined community of both other children and the nation at large) as well as a new kind of visuality— texts and images created to cater to the kind of intellectual and affective qualities perceived as age-, gender-, and class-appropriate. Each chapter in this book will present examples of how illustrations—which were central to both the narratives and marketing of children’s magazines—became part of the developing semiotics of the child body and affect. My readings here are inspired by the existence of visual material less as distinct linguistic units but rather as something that “yields to the receiver a quantity of indefinite information, like statements but unlike words” in ways that do not obey the precise grammatical construction of written language.30 Roland Barthes’s distinction between the denotative and connotative meanings in images helps me read past what the images show and get to what they tell, the kind of knowledge and mythology embedded in them, and more specifically, the kind of hegemonic consensus that they elicit and render natural.31 In addition, one of the important functions of children’s literature at the time was the building of an imagined community of children and childhood, and images worked to remove the “social relations from local contexts” and recombine them across time/space.32 The analytical focus of this book will largely be textual material, but there is no question that the texts themselves were gesturing toward the visualization of a child audience that was reinforced in images. Visuality and visibility, then, are central to the discussion of children’s literature in that they help explain the impact of colonial modernity on this new literary category. The driving force of magazines for young readers was the recognition that the birth of the nation depended most critically on new forms of knowledge that extended to geopolitics, military history, poetry, and science. In children’s literature in particular, texts and illustrations were charged with the task of conveying a new kind of semiotic literacy that was crucial to the educational and enlightening process that was evolving under colonial rule. What started with the motivation to provide a semiotic education alongside informational content quickly developed into a veritable visual era of print

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c­ ulture. By all accounts, the urban landscape—particularly the Korean capital of Keijō, as it was known in the colonial period—was transforming before people’s eyes. Unremarkable streets were turning into spectacles of consumerism, and photographic images and illustrations appeared in magazines, newspapers, and billboards. Radio broadcasts filled the airwaves, and films, first silent and then talkies, became a fixture of colonial Korea’s urban culture. As recent scholarship has shown, the visual transformation of the city had direct implications for the world of letters, which was undergoing its own dramatic changes at the turn of the twentieth century. This point is brought out by Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan in his book about modernity and reading practices, Kŭndae ŭi ch’aek ilkki (Reading in Modern Korea), as well as Kwŏn Podŭrae in her exhaustive Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi kiwŏn (The Origins of Modern Korean Fiction). Jina Kim writes that “photography, film, radio, and the press came to play an active part in redefining literary activities, especially reading and writing.”33 Jiwon Shin has observed that the different mechanisms associated with the visual order—identification, recognition, misrecognition, gaze, sight, illusion, frame—“constituted an integral narrative device in modern fiction in articulating the shifting personal relation to material culture in Korea’s transition to modernity.”34 And Theodore Hughes argues that key political and aesthetic movements in Korea—the proletarian movement, nativism, modernism, and mass mobilization—“set in motion ways of seeing and writing” that informed not only colonial-period cultural production but also the postwar period.35 The evolving forms of visual culture, spurred on by the development of technologies that expanded both their production and dissemination, played an active role in shaping textual narratives, and influenced the way a growing number of people from disparate classes and age groups engaged with the world around them. The relationship between text and image in the context of nation-building returned full force in the wake of liberation when nothing was more urgent than the redefinition of historical and cultural symbols in the new Cold War order. Children were made visible for the first time in text and image, and they were immediately gendered. The gendering of the child was sometimes explicit and other times ambiguous, but attentiveness to the role of gender throughout this book will show that children were gendered subjects in the making. As Ann Stoler has argued, gender is essential to the understanding of the structures of colonial power. Stoler’s suggestion that “the very categories of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ were secured through forms of sexual control” is evocative not least

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because the iconic figures of the early twentieth century, the New Woman and the Modern Boy, were manifestations of colonial Korea’s changing gender dynamics, and because so much was invested in defining their scope and meaning.36 As recent scholarship has argued, masculinity and femininity were sublimated into service of the colonial state. Kelly Jeong describes the paradox of colonial modernity as a crisis of Korean masculinity, and Vladimir Tikhonov argues that ideal Korean nationalist masculinity was constructed out of borrowed terms from standard Confucian rhetoric and from Meiji Japan, built “on the all-permeating sense of national emergency and the painful anticipation” of the downfall of the Korean state.37 Hyaeweol Choi suggests that the ideals of femininity in the early twentieth century, captured by the term “wise mother and good wife,” can be traced to Confucian gender norms, to ideologies of Christian domesticity, and to the gender ideologies of Meiji Japan. These ideologies placed a high value on women’s place in the domestic sphere and sought to produce a submissive workforce, but at the same time they also challenged aspects of the traditional models of womanhood with prescriptions of modern education and homemaking.38 In colonial Korea, generally speaking, manhood signaled the degree of national prowess while womanhood provided a reflection of Korea’s level of civilization. Gender ideologies percolated through various institutions—schools, youth groups, and media—to shape the formation of Korea’s young with the aim of grooming boys for leadership and bread-winning skills and girls for enlightened girlhood and motherhood. As Choi explains, it became no less than a “national imperative” to modernize Korean girls’ education toward child-­rearing and scientific homemaking.39 Missionary schools, for example, emphasized domestic science as well as lessons on hygiene, lessons that were reinforced in the popular women’s magazines whose purpose was “to educate women so that they become good mothers for modern citizens.”40 The stakes involved in childrearing are evident in the polemics of literary luminaries such as Yi K ­ wang-su, who weighed in on the connection between girls’ education and national reform in magazines like Sin yŏsŏng (New Woman).41 In 1925 Yi wrote: The only duty that women have to humankind, to the nation and to society is to become good mothers and raise good children, and only women can do this. If a nation wants to produce good citizens, it first has to cultivate good mothers. Especially in Korea, where the population urgently needs to reform its national character, there is a particular need for many good mothers.42

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Pak Suk-cha argues that the discovery of the child in the 1920s is inseparable from, and in certain cases gave rise to, multiple discourses on motherhood in the same period.43 Kim Pok-sun, however, insists that girlhood did not emerge until the appearance of postwar civil society in direct relation to the imposition of anti-Communist ideology in South Korea, while Kim Yun-gyŏng insists that the “literary girl” did not emerge until 1949 with the expansion of education for girls.44 Hong Yang-hŭi argues that colonial textbooks exhibit a shift away from child-rearing and home management content in boys’ education toward “economic activity,” a shift that clearly demarcated the domestic sphere as the responsibility of girls.45 As these scholars have shown, school textbooks and popular magazines for girls and women provide insight into how gender roles were assigned by social institutions and implicated in colonial modernity. Educational materials for children and women were gendered, but what of fiction and poetry published in popular children’s magazines? Unlike Japan, where magazines for girls such as Shōjo-kai (Girl’s World), Shōjo no tomo (Girl’s Companion) and Shōjo kurabu (Girl’s Club) can be traced to the early 1900s, the word sonyŏ, or girl, is not to be found in Korea at that time. Ji-Eun Lee notes that in 1933, 92 percent of women were illiterate.46 But with the introduction of compulsory education, school attendance jumped from 64 percent in 1945 to 99 percent in 1959, and literacy followed suit.47 Girls’ magazines such as Yŏhaksaeng (Schoolgirl), launched in 1949, responded to the desire of its readers for material that reflected their gendered experience. 48 Han Chi-hŭi argues that Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s first non-adult magazine, Sonyŏn (Youth), discussed in detail in Chapter 1, addressed young women readers implicitly, but there seems to have been no need to create a term of distinction between the two genders because it was only the male experience that “counted” enough to be reflected in print culture.49 Ŏrini, the title of the first magazine to address children, and which was published in colonial Korea from 1923 (discussed in detail in Chapter 2), was a gender-neutral word; and the magazines that followed, from Pyŏllara (Star World) and Sinsonyŏn (New Youth) in the 1930s to Sonyŏn (Youth), Ŏrininara (Children’s World), and Sohaksaeng (Young ­Student) in the 1930s and early 1940s, did not explicitly cater to a gendered reader. While gender construction in children’s literature is not the primary focus of this book, the moments in which texts are complicit in gender building will be highlighted to show the extent to which future identities of Korea’s young were gender-bound.

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Colonial modernity permeated social life through censorship, and through the mechanisms of visibility and visuality. But perhaps the most important goal of making the child visible, was the education of a modern affect. By “­affect” (discussed in detail in Chapter 2) I mean the presumed precognitive, e­ xtra-cultural state of being that children were perceived to occupy thanks to their age and inexperience. Christopher Hanscom and Dennis Washburn argue in The Affect of Difference that representation and affect are linked in critical ways, particularly in the framing and formation of imperial projects in East Asia. As they put it, the sense of agency and subjectivity prompted by bourgeois aspirations—of which childhood is a significant manifestation—is at once encouraged and controlled since it can be seen to be in conflict “with the disciplinary power of the state” and other institutions such as the family, schools, and political identities.50 Affect in children’s literature was shaped in complex and multilayered ways: equally invested was the colonial regime (which often shifted its priorities and was less organized and deliberate than might be expected), as well as the Korean publishers and writers who harbored their own loyalties and visions of what children might want and need. The resulting texts and images were encountered by children whose interpretations of the texts were impossible to control. Operations of affect, as Hanscom and Washburn contend, are central to state power, and a reading of children’s literature at the time through the concept of tongsim, as well as through the multiple discourses of emotional education (kamjŏng kyoyuk), demonstrates just how central they are. If visibility and visuality focused on the body of the child, the concern with affect extended this concern since “the capacity of a body is never defined by a body alone but is always aided and abetted by, and dovetails with, the field or context of its forcerelations.”51 Affect, as Hanscom and Washburn contend, exists at “the intersection of ideology and the experience of social, political, and everyday realities;”52 and one way to theorize affect, Seigworth and Gregg explain, is through the lens of experience where “persistent, repetitious practices of power can simultaneously provide a body (or, better, collectivized bodies) with predicaments and potentials for realizing a world that subsists within and exceeds the horizons and boundaries of the norm.”53 The investment in children’s literature emerged precisely out of the newfound awareness that immersive, everyday experiences, such as family meals, mailing letters, interactions in the classroom, and running errands, would shape children’s internal world. Every moment had potential for social and existential epiphany, and was a teachable moment with implications that would last a lifetime.

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Korean children’s literature was marked by its investment in the body and heart of the child, the tongsim. Developments in child psychology and new methods of education helped writers understand that children were shaped by their environment in general, and by texts and images in particular. That explains why we find an unprecedented level of attention to child-centered texts and images that attempted to both narrate and prescribe the child’s experience. This is not to say that texts and images in young readers’ magazines worked according to their intention. Rather, I wish to point out that the magazine editors and writers believed in the transformation power of their texts and images, and that tracing their efforts to shape the internal world of children can reveal how writers read and anticipated their readers’ preferences. Korean intellectuals across the political spectrum recognized that young readers were not only a viable new audience that required their own reading material, but that texts had a crucial role to play in the lives of their families, their communities, and their nation. To raise the next generation—both to nurture and hoist them up to a new level of sophistication—children’s texts had to be composed with attention to content and language that had not been previously attempted. Figuring Korean Futures My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”

This poem by Wordsworth was written in a different continent and a century before this book’s story begins. And yet it illustrates one of the central and persisting features of Korean children’s literature, particularly as it came to be shaped under colonial rule. The relationship I speak of is that between child and nature. The spark that ignites Wordsworth’s poem is a natural occurrence, a rainbow in the sky, and its evocative power initiates physical movement that transverses space through a leap (up), and through time (to the past, present,

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and future). In this poem, Wordsworth’s plea (“So was it . . . so is it . . . so be it”) is this: that the wonder that he felt as a child—a wonder that, he seems to suggest, a child can feel in a manner that adults cannot—is a feeling that can and should bind one generation to the next as the most crucial piece of inheritance, one that can sustain a lifetime of pursuit of truth and beauty. From the very start, it was the privileged relationship with nature that was the very essence of the child-heart concept in Korea. Children’s perceived affinity with nature’s elements and creatures kept them always on the threshold of culture—almost part of it, but not quite. The idea of a natural child—natural in body and in heart, represented by the term tongsim—sustained decades of texts and images for children, and allowed writers the opportunity to meditate on the artifice of culture, as well as to access a host of transcendent truths. But it was also the relationship between child and nature that underwent the most radical transformation with the rise of the nuclear age, known also as the age of the loss of innocence, and that spelled the advent of a new relationship between child and nature that continues to this day. There is another way in which fleshing out the concept of the child-heart is important. The child-heart prompted a particular kind of imagination of past, present, and future at a time when this temporal continuum was reorganized through colonial modernity. As Janet Poole explains, the crisis that played out on the Korean peninsula under colonialism was, to a large extent, a crisis of time.54 Not only was the nation’s sovereignty undermined and its economy restructured, but the past was recast and the future grew uncertain by the day. Koreans agonized, celebrated, and otherwise grappled with one of the more troubling questions: now that the nation’s trajectory was set firmly on the course of progress under the auspices of the colonial state, where did this leave collective and individual histories? How did the new narrative of Korea’s past, present, and future coincide with lived experiences and cached memories? One way to respond to this was through children’s literature, which was tinged by nostalgia. Aimee Kwon identifies nostalgia as a central impulse in the assessment of Korean history and culture under the colonial regime. Nostalgia, she explains, held different meanings for the colonizer and colonized. For the Japanese, who were engaged in “technologies of categorization and excavation”—various projects of cataloging and classifying Korean culture— nostalgia turned the consumption of colonial artifacts into consumption of kitsch.55 For colonized Koreans, the consumption of Korean culture was accompanied by a national sense of urgency for the disappearing nation, “an

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attempt to preserve cultural assets that were increasingly under threat from both direct Japanese domination and the pervasive and ominous shadow of Western ­imperialism.” Kwon argues that both these nostalgic impulses guided the formation of ideas about Korean culture and history, but that the two were separated by an “untranslatable” gap. The two may have had nothing to do with real, lived experiences; rather, they were manifestations of either commercially driven consumption or sentimental yearning in the face of extinction. In any case, she writes that Koreans’ consumption of their own culture was shaped by the colonial economy and emerged as essentially “nostalgic.” It was a consumption that was colored by the ambivalent perception that the stagnation of the past had somehow justified colonization, and one that in practice relied on Japanese technologies of categorization and production of knowledge. There was no escape from the grip of colonial modernity—this was the extent of the saturation of colonial power. Kwon acknowledges that Korea’s nostalgic desire can be regarded as a projection of anxieties onto a past viewed as “ideal” rather than lived experience.56 Svetlana Boym pushes this concept of nostalgia further. Boym reminds us that while the longing for an ephemeral past is certainly one of its central elements, nostalgia—composed of the terms nostos (return home) and algia (longing)— is “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. . . . [It is] a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.”57 What is yearned for might not have existed in the first place, but this is secondary because the object of yearning is less a concrete time and place than an “affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.”58 The heart looks back, but the eyes look forward into the future. And it is precisely in this space—the space that opens between the heart that tugs toward the past and the eyes that look to the future—that children’s literature fulfills its most significant calling. I propose that the Korean writers who wrote for their young audience were driven as much by a longing for the past—their own past, real or perceived—as they were motivated by their visions for the future. Literature for children, then, offers a projection of the future as much as it captures a lost past. Boym also notes that nostalgia works often as a “defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” and as a “rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress.”59 This conceptualization of nostalgia helps us understand the reason why literature for children emerged with full force at this intersection of colonialism, modern-

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ization, and nationalism. If this was indeed a time when the pervading sense was, to borrow from Poole, that of a disappearing future, it was in writing for children that a future could be most effectively imagined. This coincides with Amir Eshel’s concept of “futurity,” in which he attributes to words the ability to anticipate a hopeful future, not just to capture the past. Eshel’s proposal that writing captures a “poetic movement toward the future” is particularly salient for literature written for children in the colonial period.60 Children’s literature became a privileged space in which writers could look to the present and the past and create a world of possibilities for the future. Building on this recent scholarship, this book, too, seeks to embark on an engagement with children’s literature from Korea’s colonial period that aims to broaden our understanding of how this literature might enrich the conversation about colonial modernity. It seeks to do so by approaching children’s literature as a site that simultaneously engaged with, resisted, and built on discourses arising from the colonial situation. Literature for children is central to understanding the interaction of the national, the colonial, and the modern because so much rested on the shoulders of the next generation who had to be inducted into a world different from the one adults grew up in. As the chapters will elaborate, the first children’s periodical, Ŏrini, drew its inspiration from Japan, where a vibrant children’s culture had been underway since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. It was in Japan that Pang Chŏng-hwan, the pioneer of children’s culture in Korea, learned the tricks of the trade from the likes of Ogawa Mimei. But Pang was not Ogawa. While Ogawa had the luxury of taking part in the building of a new children’s culture as part of a broader modernization movement, Pang was writing for a generation of children who were growing up in a colonized nation, and for whom future possibilities were curtailed, to say the least. How did these circumstances shape literary language, which was undergoing its own set of reforms colored by modernity, and how were these language issues resolved for this new audience of readers? How did the changes in discourse about the child, driven and orchestrated by colonial and modern structures, bear on the way the child’s affective world was understood and written for? Above all, if we take Poole’s heartfelt call to consider that, for the writers working in the colonial period, colonization and the gradual phasing out of the Korean language seemed irreversible, why write in Korean at all? What was it that adult writers hoped to convey and inspire in Korea’s young who were to inherit the earth? The task of understanding why children mattered in an era that is becoming more distant by the day is difficult, for several reasons. An obvious difficulty

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is that many of the men and women who lived out their childhood in the colonial period are either no longer with us, or their memories have since been so clouded by postwar ideological discourses that the details of their everyday lives have been obscured. What remains, however, are texts. Seth Lerer insists that “the child was made through texts and tales he or she studied, heard, and told back” and that books are “taken into childhood. . . . [They] foster social communication, and . . . in their interaction with their readers, owners, sellers, and collectors, teach and please.”61 It is by accessing literature written for children that I hope to reveal how and why children mattered for writers and intellectuals; what freedoms and possibilities writing for children opened up; and what dreams and visions children’s literature enabled in the transition from colonial to postcolonial Korea. • • • This book attempts to arrive at an understanding of the emergence of writing for children as a manifestation of the visibility of children through a close reading of children’s magazines, while attending to discussions of children’s literature and children’s emotional education in newspapers and books. This is by no means a claim that writers were not aware of children before the appearance of Sonyŏn in 1908. Nor is taking the 1923 launch of Ŏrini as the point of departure of children’s literature an attempt to claim that this beginning emerged in a vacuum. On the contrary, texts were written and illustrated with the explicit purpose of edifying children even in the Chosŏn dynasty. What makes the magazines examined in this book compelling, however, and what marks them as milestones in the development of children’s literature, is that the narratoradult voice began to speak directly to a child-reader whose body and mind were deemed knowable in an act of writing that assigned this audience to the realm of a childhood occupied by a child-heart. The contours of this knowable child, possessor of the child-heart, were created through a coming together of indigenous and foreign influences, as well as modern discourses about the child’s body and emotions. By speaking to this knowable child, children’s literature in Korea made the child visible and literate through stylized content that included age-appropriate texts and images. Other factors contributed to the emergence of children’s literature as well, such as changes in family structure, the emergence of youth groups that provided children with a new sense of age-based solidarity, and the birth of the culture of pastime that accompanied the rapid changes of industrial development and allowed for the distribution

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and consumption of print culture. These factors played a part in the birth of children’s literature in Korea, but the focus of the book will be largely on the manifestation of modern knowledge in texts and images. One thing this book cannot do is make a claim that colonial children were successfully shaped by the various agendas and contents of children’s magazines. While reader reception theory is a vibrant field and can illuminate the subtle, creative, and often subversive ways readers engage with texts, this method­ological inquiry has not been employed in writing this book. Part of the reason is that access to those who lived out their childhood in colonial Korea is limited, and the opportunities for collecting oral histories regarding children’s consumption of books are scarce. Another reason for the lack of attention to reader reception in this book is that the way real children interacted with text, or in which they “wrote back,” is less central to this project. This is not to say that Korean children’s periodicals from the colonial period, in their diverse offerings of folktales and how-to essays, crafts and detective novels, military songs and poetry, did not shape the subjectivities of their readers. Indeed, the inquiry into how the adult authors who penned children’s magazine content sought to do precisely this is what guides the questions posed in the chapters that follow. The degree to which they were successful in shaping young minds, however, is outside the scope of this study. In fact, whether adult writers can truly access their child readers and the degree to which they inculcate values has been in question since Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Rose argued that when writing for children, adults were more concerned with realizing their imagined ideal of the child than writing with “real children” in mind. “Children’s fiction,” she declared, “emerges out of a conception of both the child and the world as knowable in a direct and unmediated way.”62 Scholars who have agreed with Rose have shown that “what might be taken for children’s culture has always been primarily a matter of culture produced for and urged upon children.”63 Still others have insisted that “every literary act . . . contains [an] imbalance [of writer and imagined audience],” and that writers and illustrators are far more aware of their own motivations—and far more sensitive in their responses to these motivations—than she credits.64 Children’s literature and the search for the “real child” continues to be the subject of heated debate. This book traces the textual and visual production for young readers in ­Korean children’s periodicals between 1908, the year the very first magazine for non-adult readers appeared, and 1950, the year that marked the outbreak of

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the Korean War. As the Epilogue will show, what came after 1950 is a fascinating story about the divergence of North and South Korean children’s literature along certain predictable ideological patterns, but also the way their literatures converge in unexpected ways. A more detailed exploration of the development of North and South Korean literature in the postwar era will have to wait for elaboration in a later project. As it stands, this book examines children’s literature by fleshing out the concept of the child-heart from the early twentieth century, when the figure of the child emerged in public discourse as a powerful metaphor of Korea’s future, through the colonization of Korea and the ideological entrenchment that intensified in the post-liberation period. Throughout, the child, deemed physically and emotionally “natural” and intellectually unburdened by the past, was celebrated as the uniquely privileged protagonist of the present and future. This vision of the child was communicated to adults through mainstream media (books, newspaper articles, magazine advertisements), but also directly to children through a new medium: the children’s periodical. By reading children’s periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, this book argues that the figure of the child was particularly favorable to the project of modernity and nationbuilding. It was the child-heart that was the child’s greatest asset, since it was so discursively malleable. And indeed, throughout the colonial period and into the post-liberation space, the child-heart was conducive to the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization. Children’s periodicals, which were written and illustrated at the height of modernity, colonialism, and the post-liberation ideological struggle, reveal a narrative trajectory that begins with depiction of the child as an organic part of nature—nature’s instrument—and ends with depictions of the child as one who presides over nature. Ultimately, the book reveals the complex ways the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future hopes for the individual, family, class, and nation. • • • Chapter 1 situates the study of colonial Korean children’s literature in the intersection of politics and aesthetics at a critical juncture in its modern history. With the emergence of the modern political subject, youth came to embody the nation’s aspirations, and the child, which came into the spotlight a decade later, had to constitute a contrast to youth. This chapter outlines the social, political, and economic conditions that enabled the emergence of a print culture for

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non-adult readers in colonial Korea. It historicizes this emergence in its local and global contexts and against the backdrop of discourses on the role of youth that circulated among Korea’s prominent intellectuals and educators. This sets the stage for the overarching argument of the book: that non-adults were celebrated as uniquely privileged protagonists of the future not only because they were perceived as intellectually and emotionally unburdened by the past, but also because they were endowed with a child-heart conducive to colonial projects of human engineering and nation building. Chapter 2 contextualizes the fresh and diverse content in children’s periodicals with the emerging visual turn in print media. Texts and images in children’s magazines worked together to create a natural and affectively privileged child that served as the foundation of children’s literature in Korea. The concept of the child-heart made the child visible for the first time, and facilitated the building of a cultural literacy of text and image. At the same time, the manner in which it hinged on the relationship between child and nature reflected a degree of nostalgic yearning that coded future aspirations at a time when the future of the Korean nation was growing less certain by the day. Chapter 3 introduces one of the important contributions of children’s writers to Korean literary history, namely, their intervention in the debates on the “mismatch” of the spoken and written languages and the perceived inability of literature to capture and respond to the spirit of the people. While Kim Tong-in (1900–1951) and Yi Kwang-su are largely credited with the development of a modern literary vernacular, this chapter shows that the affective nature of the child-heart as one that demanded both respect and appropriate content motivated Pang Chŏng-hwan to develop child-heart-appropriate narrative techniques through theorization about the craft of writing, as well as through folktale translations. This piece of linguistic and literary history gives a more comprehensive picture of how child-specific language began to play a role in the development of young readers’ print culture. Chapter 4 explores children’s literature during a time in which leftist ideology captured the imagination of colonized Koreans and inspired hope for the creation of a more egalitarian society. These new visions were articulated in essays about writing that spoke of the need to merge content and form in order to capture the child-heart, as well as about the need for texts to mobilize children’s emotions. Proletarian writers thought of themselves as writing against the bourgeois child-heart and translated this concept into a natural moral instinct and outrage against the exploitation of the poor and working class.

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The writers who took up their pens for children in the mid-1920s—many of whom went on to become prominent literary figures in North Korea—sought to create a child-heart that, in its conscious efforts to counteract the bourgeois angelic disposition, was fueled by resentment and choreographed action. Noting the transnational connections with proletarian cultures in Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, this chapter examines the content and language of leftist writing and points to emerging developments in children’s literature that spilled into the formative period of 1950s North Korea, which became home to many of the leftist writers and illustrators active in the mid-twenties and thirties. Chapter 5 examines literature written for children at the height of imperialization policies in the late 1930s, the era considered most aggressive in its attempts to assimilate Koreans by eliminating Korean language and culture. The cultural production for children from this era is often referenced for its militaristic rhetoric and celebration of war. I argue that this transition to the militarized child was facilitated by the child’s organic qualities so celebrated in earlier decades, which made the hearts and bodies of children susceptible to regulation and discipline. Still, I find that humor, irony, and the belief in the transformative power of the imagination served as a powerful counter-narrative to the view of late colonial culture as foreclosed. This was the era that hosted some of colonial Korea’s most powerful anticapitalist, antiwar voices. Chapter 6 turns our attention to children’s literature at its watershed moment of liberation from its thirty-five years of colonization. In the five years between 1945 and the Korean War in 1950, the Korean peninsula experienced the euphoria of liberation, the arrival of the United States Military Government in Korea, the hardening of ideological positions and the ensuing mass migration across the 38th parallel, as well as the official establishment of two separate and mutually intolerant regimes. Children’s literature provides a fascinating counterpoint to these historical shifts by showcasing strong nationalist tendencies that set the tone for a new beginning while simultaneously presenting strong remnants from the colonial past. Most significantly, this chapter looks at the much-celebrated “new” concept of the child-heart and questions the extent of liberation in light of the manner in which the child-heart was mobilized for nation building. The Epilogue provides a brief glimpse into the postwar period and the reconfiguration of the literary field in North and South Korea through the emergence of scientific content in children’s magazines and their literary mani-

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festation in science fiction. The dropping of the atomic bombs and the devastation of the Korean War signaled the period known globally as the “loss of innocence,” a time during which the language of science and technology penetrated the fiction of the postwar Koreas and changed the terms of engagement with the natural world. The genre of science fiction, found almost exclusively in children’s magazines, put into practice a variety of contested theories: theories of education, of the relationship between science and art, and of the role of fiction in both describing and prescribing better futures. Ultimately, the postwar era demonstrates the break of the long-sustained bond between child and nature, and by extension a recalibration of the relationship between humans, culture, and the natural world. • • • Literature for adults from the early twentieth century has provided a powerful testament to the fraught bonds between Koreans and their language and culture as they navigated the tumultuous periods of colonialism, liberation, US occupation, division, and war. Until now, however, children’s literature has largely been excised from the narrative of Korea’s literary history. This book shows how literature for children illuminates some of the most fundamental relationships undergirding this period: those between the heart and mind, spirit and body, intuition and culture. Some literature for children reinforced ideas about the stability of the knowable world, while other fiction, written even during the most oppressive era of Japanese colonial rule, affirmed the belief in the transformative power of the imagination. Throughout the period under examination in this book, one thing is clear: never was the task of writing for children more important. The future of everything—family, nation, language, culture— hinged on the young. The converging and diverging ways in which the future was envisioned, and with it, the conception of the relationship between child and nature, is the story of this book.

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CHAPTER 1

T H E YO U T H M AGA Z I N E I N E ARLY C O LO N I AL KO RE A

T H E P RO L I F E R AT I O N of print media in early twentieth-century Korea was

marked by a recognition that effective dissemination of modern knowledge required a targeted attention to perhaps the most important audience of all— Korea’s young. Before the advent of public schooling in the early twentieth century, it was only the elite children of Chosŏn Korea who were educated and socialized through Confucian texts in classical Chinese, such as the Myŏngsim pogam (Precious Mirror for Illumination of the Mind) and Samgang haengsilto (Conduct of the Three Bonds). The absence of reading materials for young people’s pleasure and amusement reflected the invisibility of children and absence of childhood as a cultural phenomenon, an absence that was compounded by low literacy rates. But in 1908 the appearance of the periodical Sonyŏn signaled a shift in awareness of a new group of readers: Korean youth. The title of this magazine in itself marked a significant shift. Sonyŏn is a compound of the Chinese characters small (so) and years (nyŏn), together meaning literally “young in years.” This title has been translated as both “Youth” and “Boys.”1 The translation is made more challenging because Ch’oe Nam-sŏn also published, a few short years after Sonyŏn, a new periodical under the title Ch’ŏngch’un, which has also been translated as “Youth.”2 As I will argue in this chapter and throughout the book, the range of possible translations indicates that the terms for children, childhood, and youth were slippery. More importantly, the earlier issues of Sonyŏn seemed to address a younger audience, but with time the content grew dense and complex. I translate both

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titles, Sonyŏn and Ch’ŏngch’un, as “Youth” because both periodicals were missing the sustained vision, which was to come later, of the child as affectively and intellectually different. Still, Sonyŏn marked a significant shift in the cultural visibility of non-adults because it took on the project of molding and politicizing Korea’s youth. At the helm stood Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, himself only eighteen years of age when he established the magazine. Ch’oe deemed Korea’s youth to be untainted by the past and yet in urgent need of reform, and he invested in them the hopes that they would play a central role in the formation of the New Korea (Sindaehan) and help induct Korea into the modern era. The texts and visual material of Sonyŏn hinged upon an axis of adventure whose purpose was to extract Korean children from the binds of tradition and family and propel them into the bosom of the emerging nation. Change was slow to come, however: a decade later in 1918, Yi Kwang-su was still bemoaning the neglect of Korea’s young when he called for the desecration of the ancestors’ graves. Yi insisted that it was the family and Korea’s stifling traditional practices that posed the greatest obstacle to its progress as a nation. That the burgeoning nation was colonized by Japan posed a particular challenge to the confident projection of an unencumbered future for Korea’s young generation, one which Ch’oe and those after him were required to navigate with limited certainty. Roughly one year after he started serializing his 1917 novel Mujŏng (The Heartless), Yi Kwang-su published a short essay in Ch’ŏngch’un. The essay was “Chanyŏ chungsimnon” (On the Centrality of Children), and in impassioned kukhanmun prose—a combination of vernacular Korean and Chinese ­characters—he called for the displacement of parents and ancestors from their traditional pedestal and for the relocation of children to the center of Korean culture. Undermining filial piety, or hyo, as the cornerstone of Confucian values, he accused outdated practices such as long mourning periods and exaggerated parental reverence of depleting valuable time and resources. “Let us feast on our parent’s blood,” he cried, and “destroy the graves of the ancestors.” The irreverence of his appeal that parents should be prepared “to boil our bones and convert them into fuel, or like spiders, feed our children our own flesh,”3 must have shocked his audience. “On the Centrality of Children” is hardly a departure from Yi Kwang-su’s other contemporaneous works. Yi decried Korea’s outdated Confucian practices in the aforementioned Mujŏng (1917) and his essay “What Is Literature?” (1916).4 “On the Centrality of Children” echoes many of the prevalent discourses

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of its time, particularly the critique of Korea’s outdated cultural practices that had prevented the nation from progressing toward a Western-style modernity.5 What “On the Centrality of Children” does is underscore the new place that young people must occupy in the nation. The essay also anticipates the growing prominence of print media produced for young readers. Yi Kwang-su published it in 1918, in the heels of a flurry of non-adult magazine publications by Ch’oe Nam-sŏn that began with Sonyŏn (Youth, 1908–1911), continued with shortlived publications like Pulgŭn chyŏgori (Red Jacket, 1913), Aidŭlboi (For Children, 1913–1914), and Saebyŏl (New Star, 1913–1915), and ended with Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth, 1914–­September 1918). Then, in 1923, Ŏrini (Children, 1923–1931) came onto the scene and changed the trajectory of children’s literature. The move from the first title to the last, from the Sinitic-based title Sonyŏn in 1908 to the Korean vernacular title Ŏrini in 1923, indicates a semantic change: the term ŏrini consciously embraced the indigenous Korean sound and referenced a newly emerging group of children—not youth—who were deliberately made visible and for whom a new body of texts and images had to be stylized and made legible. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, though, children were hardly visible. Yi’s cry to feast on one’s parents’ blood and flesh draws our attention to the varying ways the role of young people had to be carved out on the pages of literary magazines. It also highlights the perception that despite the best efforts of the influential (and young) intellectuals of the early twentieth century, Korean children were still stunted by tradition and stifled by family. As Yi Kwang-su saw it, nothing less than a cannibalistic sacrifice of parents for the sake of their young would create a truly free and enlightened new generation. Sonyo˘n: The Emergence of the Young Reader’s Magazine The child is, of course, a physical entity, but as scholars have shown it is also a discursive construct that is crucial to the development and identity of the modern nation-state.6 Sharon Stephens notes that “the creation of a modern state and national culture is integrally related to the creation of new sorts of gendered and age-graded subjects and spaces and the establishment of institutions variously engaged in spreading these constructions throughout society.”7 These “gendered and age-graded subjects and spaces” have also been central to national interests such as self-regulation, politicization, and economic development. More pointedly, without the recognition of the categorical child as an entity with a unique sensibility that is distinctly non-adult, print culture for

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children would never have reason to appear. Simply put, literature for children is predicated always on the emergence of the child in culture.8 In Korea, too, the rise of print culture for youth and children—a distinctly elite endeavor— occurred with institutional and social transformations, particularly with the institutionalization of public schooling and the rise of mass print culture.9 More significantly, the emergence of the child as a discursive entity took place alongside enlightenment discourses of education and modern knowledge. In Korea, the period spanning roughly 1895 to 1910 is today referred to as the kaehwagi, or “the time of enlightenment,” an era marked by the decentering of China on the East Asian global stage, the rise of a national consciousness, and the emergence of Japan as an imperial and colonizing power. It was a time characterized by “experimentation and adaptation,” in which “leading intellectuals attempted to reconcile the new ideas and models originating from the West, as well as from contemporary Japan and China, with the very powerful equivalents from the Korean-Confucian tradition.”10 Youth had an important role to play in this period of experimentation: Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Kwangsu both saw youth as the only group capable of carrying Korea forward into a new future. Mass-produced print culture was particularly well positioned to carry out the momentous task of educating and reforming the youth of the new Korean nation. When one of Korea’s most prolific writers, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, published his first magazine for a non-adult audience, he had at his disposal a number of titles to choose from. The terms sonyŏn, ch’ŏngnyŏn, ŏrini, and adong—all of which correspond to “child” or “young person”—enjoyed a robust history.11 In the early twentieth century these terms gained new currency thanks to the growth of youth movements, print culture, and the dissemination of developmental discourses in East Asia.12 For example, Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao’s “Ode to Young China” (Shao nian zhong guo shuo), which appeared in 1900, traced the trajectory of Chinese history to show that China’s early, predevelopment stage had been slow and prolonged, but now that China was entering its vivacious youthful era, it could expect to develop accordingly.13 When Ch’oe Nam-sŏn titled his magazine Sonyŏn, he was positioning it within an ongoing historical and cultural conversation embedded in discourses of youth and nation. Ch’oe was born into a socioeconomically comfortable Christian home where he was exposed to the study of the Chinese classics, Western culture, and the English language. He was sent abroad to study in Japan twice, from

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1904 to 1905 and then again from 1906 to 1908. The second visit was particularly significant, for it was then that his exposure to publishing technologies and magazine circulation, including children’s magazines, inspired his decision to pioneer the same technologies in Korea. Ch’oe attested to such inspirations in an essay on the past and future of youth.14 In it, he expressed his amazement at the highly developed print culture in Shanghai and Japan, noting that it motivated him to develop a publishing industry of equal standing in Korea. It is also during these sojourns in Japan that he formulated his expectations of Korea’s youth, whom he described as students in their early twenties and whom he also sometimes addressed as “ch’ŏngnyŏn.” In essays included in T’aegŭk hakpo (T’aegŭk Bulletin, 1906–1908), a periodical that provided a platform for editorials on topics ranging from politics to music published in Japan, he expressed his expectations that young people would embrace activism and self-sacrifice for the Korean nation.15 Upon Ch’oe’s return to Korea in 1908 at the age of eighteen, however, he titled his first magazine publication in Korea Sonyŏn, which reflected a deliberate choice on his part to target readers in their early teens.16 Yun Yŏng-sil ­argues that the reason Ch’oe Nam-sŏn decided to call this first magazine Sonyŏn and not Ch’ŏngnyŏn was because the latter title was politically loaded, signifying young people with an already developed political subjectivity. She concludes that Ch’oe chose the title Sonyŏn because he set his sights on a younger, more impressionable audience that was still malleable yet primed for reform.17 Or perhaps, as Han Chi-hŭi suggests, Ch’oe’s choice of title was inspired by the foreign word for “boy” that he had been exposed to in his enlightenment education in Japan.18 We get a sense of his intentions from the front matter of the first issue, where he urges, “Make the sonyŏn read this, as well as their disciplining fathers and elder brothers.”19 The target audience, then, was much broader than the title Sonyŏn seemed to convey, indicating that Ch’oe expected the reading experience to be not only individual but communal. The works from which Ch’oe took his inspiration included such popular and widely circulating Japanese magazines as Kokumin no tomo (Citizen’s Friend) published in 1887; Shōnen-en (Children’s Garden), published in 1888; and Shōnen sekai (Children’s World), which ran from 1895 to 1933.20 Shōnen sekai included editorials, short stories, historical and legendary tales, and miscellaneous writings and illustrations that were meant to prepare young people to be proper citizens in their developing nation.21 Shōnen-en promoted its educational values not only to its youthful readers but also to their parents and

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educators, since it recognized “the need to include amusing stories for the consumer-driven market.”22 Japanese young readers’ magazines inspired Ch’oe Nam-sŏn for their potential for broad dissemination of information and their ability to galvanize their new audience. To conclude, the young reader magazines of this era flourished in Japan and Korea at a time when the anti-elder discourse in Asia posited the generational conflict as central to national development. At the same time, the term sonyŏn indicated a pre-political, and therefore not fully formed, stage in which young readers needed edification. Kil Chin-suk describes this stage as having been cultivated within a legacy of Christian morality and ending with young readers obtaining encyclopedic Western knowledge.23 Such was the modern subjectivity of the new Korean youth that Sonyŏn was charged with cultivating. Sindaehan: The New Korean Youth Ch’oe established the Sinmungwan Publishing House when he returned from Japan, and published the first issue of Sonyŏn in 1908 to modest fanfare from the press but a lukewarm response from readers.24 Interest in visual art was growing at that time, and the wide range of visual and textual content of Japanese magazines and increasing number of printed materials impressed Ch’oe. It was this distinctive visual content that set Sonyŏn apart from other literary magazines published in this period: no longer was magazine perusal solely a textbased reading experience, but it was a visual one as well. The act of seeing was a means to acquire knowledge. There was concrete knowledge to be gleaned from visual images, as represented by truth-telling photography and realistic illustrations that became a mainstay of most issues.25 Sonyŏn experimented with font, color, and text layout, and inserted decorative illustrations, repetitive icons, maps, and photographs in the body of the text. The use of color in the opening page of the magazine would no doubt have been alluring, and the decorative designs functioned not only as a welcome variation to long pages of text but also as a striking visual element that supported the text through repetitive reproductions of certain icons and images. Visually, text was arranged in a refreshing manner that responded to the textual content. For example, the poem, “Starquake” was laid out in a progression of diagonal lines from the top right to the bottom left, with a star placed at the top of each stanza.26 Sections of text were highlighted by enlarging or shrinking the fonts or printing them in bold (see Figure 1).

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F I G U R E 1. First page spread following the table of contents

of the inaugural issue of Sonyŏn, 1908.

Besides font size, decorative frames, and variation in line direction, visual tools such as photographs and illustrations also enhanced the viewing experience. Photographs played a particularly important role in producing visual literacy by promoting familiarity with modern images and creating associations between abstract ideas and their concrete equivalences. Images of faraway places and famous public figures, made available through the seemingly unmediated technology of the photograph, eliminated the distance in time and space of the form being represented and allowed for easy consumption.27 Typically, Sonyŏn opened with one to four photographs of famous landscapes (­Niagara Falls, the North Pole), monuments (Statue of Liberty, Arc du ­Triomphe, Palace of Versailles, the Colosseum), or famous Western figures (Edward the Seventh, Peter the Great, the Marquis de Lafayette, Benjamin Franklin, and Napoleon). The photographs were placed in the center of the page with spare subtitles as supplementary information, drawing the viewer’s largely undivided attention to the images. Ethnographic photographs, such as of aboriginal families and Japanese children in martial arts practice, also contributed to the compression of space and time, bringing distant cultures and peoples to the fingertips of

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readers for their viewing pleasure.28 And some of the photographs were explicitly political, such as the famous photograph from the inaugural issue of Sonyŏn that depicted the distinguished resident-general Itō Hirobumi towering over the Korean crown prince Yi Ŭn (see Figure 1). The gap between the two is further delineated by the contrast of the prince’s light-colored jacket with the dark color of Itō’s decorated tunic.29 And yet the precocious child wears an identical expression with that of the elder, and imitates his stance in the placement of his sword and the angle of the fingers resting on its hilt. The caption dryly identifies the crown prince studying abroad in Japan and the resident-general at his side. The image is static—both figures look deadpan at the c­ amera—but its implications may have caused ripples. In one sense it reinforces the larger theme of this magazine that spotlights youth and their imminent takeover of society—the young prince’s uncanny mimicry of the elderly statesman suggests that great things can be expected of the young man. At the same time, the context of colonial takeover is at once taken for granted—the dramatic pretext represented in the bland, abstract screen behind the two figures—and is also painfully obvious. Aside from photographs, multiple illustrations decorated the pages of Sonyŏn. They appeared either across from the text in single frames that supplemented the reading, or were lodged between words. They supported textual narratives by providing supplemental visual information, and at the same time interrupted its flow. Illustrations introduced a certain sense of interaction, physically drawing the eye to different places on the page and grounding the imagination in concrete images (Figure 2). The text often had to accommodate the images rather than the other way around—for example, the lighthouse in Figure 2 juts into the text like the bow of a ship cutting through water. Illustrations also appeared as recurring icons across multiple issues, reminding readers of the thematic connections between the texts. The series “The Nautical History of Korea,” offered the young reader a partial view of a lone figure in a boat on rough waves, suggesting that the reader is about to face the turbulent ocean waters alongside the boat’s passenger. A series about Napoleon was accompanied by his iconic head framed by a wreath of laurels. Other decorative drawings appeared repeatedly throughout the multiple issues. While they had no specific semantic significance, the helped create familiarity with the magazine’s brand from one issue to the next. Illustrated maps accompanied essays on world geography, a topic of great interest to the magazine’s editor. These maps shrank the world to palm-size dimensions while conveying details about their political and social climate. As

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F I G U R E 2 . “Haesang taehansa” (The Nautical History of Korea).

Sonyŏn 1, no. 1 (1908): 30–31.

John Pickles and Denis Cosgrove explain, map-drawing is closely implicated in the nation-building process and is essential to the effective rendering of geographical units as immutable and knowable.30 In Sonyŏn, the illustrated articles on world geography reflect a concern with a visualization of power dynamics. For example, in the first issue of Sonyŏn, young readers were encouraged to visualize countries as animals: Korea looked like a tiger while the East Sea resembled a rabbit (see Figure 3). There was an interactive aspect to this magazine as well—for example, readers were urged to take a bear-like illustration and submit their guess as to what province of Korea it resembled. Since few young people would have had travel experiences, such visual exercises were crucial to the process of building a spatial sense of nation. Other maps showed the countries of the world and their colonial territories, and focused especially on Great Britain and its extensive global empire. This was accompanied by Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s essay explaining the origins of Britain’s power. It conveyed Ch’oe’s ideas about the hierarchy of power and dominance, while visualizing literally, in a map of the British Empire’s extensive reach around the globe, the discourse of modernity in terms of world geography.

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F I G U R E 3 . Korea and the Sea of Japan. Sonyŏn 1, no. 1 (1908): 66–67.

The knowledge communicated through the photographs and maps was supplemented by informative articles, such as “Ponggil’s Geography Hour” (Ponggiri chiri kongbu), “Natural Sciences” (Igwa kyosil ), “English” (Yŏng’ŏ kyosil ) and “Classical Chinese” (Hanmun kyosil). Ch’oe also encouraged a dialogue with his readers by urging them to observe the language and customs of their surroundings and submit their impressions. Moral and ethical education was conveyed through sections like “Didactic Lessons” (Sonyŏn hun), and role models were exemplified through the biographies of Napoleon, Peter the Great, and George Washington. The visual framing of Korea within a Social Darwinist understanding of world politics was central to the kinds of creative prose and poetry included in the magazine. The transmission of modern knowledge was Sonyŏn’s main purpose, and the kind of knowledge it produced was deemed essential to the process of becoming a new citizen in Sindaehan, the Great New Korea.31 The New Korean Youth and the Axis of Adventure Ch’oe Nam-sŏn opened the first issue of Sonyŏn with the following pronouncement: “Let us make our great nation (taehan) into a nation of youth (sonyŏn);

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in order to realize this goal, let us educate and reform our youth so that they may bear that responsibility.”32 The purpose of education and reform, in his words, was to turn youth into enlightened thinkers whose responsibility lay not to their families but to their nation. The Sindaehan sonyŏn, or “the youth of the new and great Korea,” were encouraged to view themselves as critical participants in their nation’s development whose success depended wholly on their individual efforts. Throughout the magazine, youth were projected as embodying Korea’s potential for rejuvenation, reform, and enlightenment, all of which were narrated by a Social Darwinist understanding of progress as it unfolded in the context of early twentieth-century regional and global politics. And as the many essays and translations published in the magazine over the years of its publication (1908–1911) indicate, progress and mastery of Korea’s destiny were narrated along an axis of adventure created by the horizontal sea and vertical mountains.33 And Korea was privileged because of its advantageous geographic location—the peninsula offered open access to sea and land both. The sea was celebrated in such essays and poetry as the series “Nautical History of Korea: Why Have We Repressed Our Maritime Escapades?,” “About the Sea,” and “Surrounded on Three Sides by the Sea.”34 Inspired perhaps, as Theresa Hyun notes, by the works of Byron, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn encouraged his young readers to regard the sea as a metaphor for greater adventure and the wider world as the domain of their play. Not coincidentally, Ch’oe’s most famous poem, “From Sea to Youth,” is considered the watershed moment separating premodern and modern Korean literature.35 Peter Lee writes that this poem inaugurated the new poetry movement, citing the poem’s use of punctuation marks, stanzas of unequal length, a string of onomatopoeia in the first and seventh line of each stanza, and the dominant images of the sea and children.36 Theresa Hyun argues that Ch’oe introduced “new images of purity and absolute freedom” and that in breaking with existing poetic conventions, his imagery ushered in new modes of thinking.37 Interestingly, Lee and Hyun translate the title of this important poem differently: Lee renders sonyŏn as “children” while Hyun translates the poem as “From the Sea to the Boys.”38 These divergent translations demonstrate the instability of the signifier sonyŏn in terms of age and gender. For example, Brother Anthony translates the title of the poem as “From the Sea to a Boy,” while Jaihiun Kim translates it as “To the Boy From the Sea.”39 “From Sea to Youth” is written in mixed kukhanmun script—vernacular Korean mixed with Chinese characters—and is narrated in the voice of the

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sea, which boasts of its infinite power and ability to shatter any obstruction. The sea brags about its conquest of both the natural world (mountains and boulders) and the mortal champions of China and the West (Emperor Qin Shi Huang and Napoleon). The text of the poem is framed by illustrated waves along the bottom of the page and yin-yang circles ensconced in squares along the top. The lines of verse are arranged from top to bottom, bookended by a refrain that repeats in the opening and closing of each stanza. An audial effect is created by a vowel elongation indicated with a long dash. Brother Anthony translates the first stanza as follows: tcho—l sok, tcho—l sok, tchok, schwa—a Rushing, smashing, crushing, Hills like great mountains, rocks like houses: What are they? What are they? Roaring: Do you know, don’t you know, my great might? Rushing, smashing, crushing, tcho—l sok, tcho—l sok, tchok, schwa—a 40

In five out of the six stanzas of the poem, the sea proclaims its supremacy over all of nature’s elements and human figures. In the sixth and final stanza, it proclaims that it loves Korea’s sonyŏn for their courage and purity. The poem is significant in that it gestures toward the affinity between the sea—which commands majestic power geographically on the global stage and temporally over historical time—and the young, which the sea in the poem wishes to kiss as an affirmation of their connection. The youth/child/boy in this poem does not speak back, so it is impossible to know the age or gender of the child whom this poem addresses. One thing is clear: the young recipient of the sea’s attention is privileged and deserving of the an affection that has no parallel. Another poem that implicates both the sea and Korea’s youth in the development of the Korean nation is “Brave Youth at Sea.”41 The poem opens with a fullpage illustration of three boys in a boat threatened by violent waves. The sense of dramatic motion is intensified by the swirling lines against the boat, the water’s foam represented by frenetic dots, and dark, angular rock looming dangerously overhead (Figure 4). The poem opens: “Three youth of the Sea / are the grandest, most splendid youth / of the multitudes on the Korean peninsula.” A violent storm threatens to topple their small boat, but they persevere. During this ordeal they sing a song in praise of their native land and evoke Hananim, the

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F I G U R E 4 . “Brave Youth at Sea.” Sonyŏn 2, no. 10 (1909): 26–27.

maker and creator.42 The poem recounts the message conveyed by this maker, and speaks of the trials that still await: Long have we suffered in silence; violation has been like sweet honey. Mock us not—for there is a purpose. Will it be today? Will it be tomorrow?—wait with patience ’till the Eastern Sky is sundered by the rising sun and then act quickly, lose not a moment. If your faith runs deep and you persist, you will not be vanquished; it is said that nothing can stand in a hero’s way. Valiant boys! Brave hearts! You will prevail and be victorious. The Dragon Fortress will be ours

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And we will preside over the Temple of Jerusalem. Once we are the proud Masters of the World, We will build a road in the Rock of Truth and pave it with love, and fulfill our dream of founding the Land of Heaven here; from start to finish, the future is impeccable.

The sea imagery, which Kwŏn Podŭrae calls the “horizontal imagination” of the poem, is supplemented by a “vertical imagination” of mountains to create an axis of adventure. Kwŏn argues that this axis of adventure includes open spaces as the sea and mountains because open, uninhabited space is less confrontational, and therefore would have been less challenging to the Japanese censors.43 In “Brave Youth at Sea,” the three announce that they expect their mastery to stretch from the mythological Dragon Palace in the depths of the sea to the sacred temple in Jerusalem, and they embrace the destiny that will be realized at the end of their bitter struggle to build a utopia on earth. But Ch’oe is less explicit about how this conquest is to be achieved, partly because he is limited by the censor’s pen, and partly because he believes that the change must start within. He calls not for conquest by force but for the overcoming of the self: When we bring order to the world— if we believe that effort builds virtue— then gradually, greatness will come. To fulfill this grand calling, start with yourself. Then together, use our might and make ourselves beautiful and complete. We believe and depend on our strong hearts, on our formidable minds and the virtues that we accrue in the midst of this struggle will result, before long, in the conquering of the sea!

With regard to how this victory is meant to be achieved Ch’oe is less clear. He writes that “the love felt by our sonyŏn is not one that pushes toward conquest of the West nor of Japan. It is only this: self-encouragement, self-progress, self-fulfillment, self-protection.”44 In other words, Ch’oe emphasizes that the act of exploration along the axis of adventure is not, in itself, transgressive; it does not violate the boundaries set up by the colonial framework. The

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utopian vision suggested by the conquest of the Temple of Jerusalem and the Dragon Fortress are poetic, hypothetical ambitions aimed specifically at unthreatening spaces, and these ambitions cannot be interpreted as overtly nationalistic. The mission of the magazine Sonyŏn is educational, and its purpose is to accelerate the development of Korean youth rather than challenge the s­ tatus quo. While the term sonyŏn itself was not gendered, it appears that Ch’oe’s intended audience was a male one. The content of the magazine celebrates the kind of corporeal prowess and a command of geographical space that is associated with masculinity in the time of its publication. As Vladimir Tikhonov observes, Ch’oe and his contemporaries engaged in a discourse about the male body as inseparable from the nation, and viewed it as an embodiment of psychological and physical strength that is patriotic and contains the potential for violence.45 Han Chi-hŭi explains that although the term sonyŏn is seemingly gender neutral, it in fact signified the experience of teen male youth that excluded the female experience, thus turning the equivalent female term sonyŏ into an implicit, yet empty, signifier. She attributes this omission to the structural patriarchy of early modern Korea, which made minimal progress toward girls’ education and reformation of things like dress and hairdo, and all the while cultivated girls exclusively for domestic duties.46 And indeed, while Ch’oe’s magazine Sonyŏn wrote of adventurous male youth, women’s experiences were represented by biographies such as of Helen Keller and Joan of Arc. Women, when they were represented in print, were celebrated for their selfsacrifice for the nation or the home. By figuring the texts and images in such a way that they would gesture toward the desirable direction of Korea’s youth in support of colonial logic and Japanese expansion, Sonyŏn may have played a supporting role of Japanese policies or, at the very least, it did little to subvert them. Still, the magazine created a cultural space for literary and visual explorations for an audience that had never previously enjoyed any dedicated forms of print culture. As the very first magazine addressed to an audience of non-adult readers, Sonyŏn responded to a perceived need in the youth of Korea for both modern knowledge and entertainment. Through the texts, photographs, and illustrations, Sonyŏn sought to enlighten and inspire youth to imagine their crucial role in guiding Korea into a modern future. Herein lies the importance of Sonyŏn in the trajectory of development of literature for young people in Korea: first, in its recognition of the political and cultural potential of a non-adult audience,

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and second in its embrace of a form of stimulation and entertainment which set the tone, as Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan argues, for the kinds of texts that were to be produced in the coming decades.47 Into the Bosom of the Nation Ch’oe Nam-sŏn succeeded in producing a non-adult magazine the likes of which had not been previously available. Placing Korean youth at the center of its concerns, his magazine included essays, translations, and original prose and poetry that celebrated and educated, enlightened and entertained its young readers. This content emerged at a time of debate over the young person’s place in the future of the Korean state and the role that education and reform must play in the process of the next generation’s transformation into national citizens. It also came at a time of public discourse about reform of the family.48 Part of the narrative of natural progress, as suggested at the end of the nineteenth century by one of Japan’s leading ideologists, Katō Hiroyuki, was the belief that “in ‘civilized societies,’ natural selection favored those possessing superior ‘mental strength’—that is, superior knowledge and skills.”49 This belief justified the appropriation of lands of “inferior” people by those considered “superior” and therefore better positioned to make use of resources and land. This is why Korea’s youth—Korea’s future-in-the-making—became the focus of national discourse. And while there was some discussion about pedagogy, issues of children’s welfare and education were eclipsed by more abstract questions of loyalty to the nation and the acquisition of modern knowledge.50 What serves as a particularly striking contrast between the content of Sonyŏn and the children’s magazines that would emerge a decade later is the dialectic relationship between youth and nature. As opposed to what we will see in the later chapters of this book, the youth in Ch’oe’s poems, like those of “Brave Youth at Sea,” were presumed superior to nature’s elements, which played a metaphorical role as that which must be overcome in the discourse of development. The content of Sonyŏn exhibits a shift in discourse away from the adult generation in power. And while this did not yet mark the beginning of literature for children, it initiated a significant reconfiguration of the relationship between youth, nature, family, and the nation that would make children visible and childhood into a cultural phenomenon. In Sonyŏn, the family unit, which had been the bastion of identity and culture, the unit in which social interactions and duties were inscribed, was now the very unit from which the child needed to be

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rescued.51 The texts and images in Sonyŏn propelled young people into the horizontal and vertical frontiers, thus pushing them beyond those obstacles posed by outdated traditions and customs. A decade later these customs were still very much entrenched. Yi ­Kwang-su’s manifesto “On the Centrality of Children” is worth a second mention for the manner in which it exposes the limits of Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s project. The essay bemoans, in five sections, the outdated practices that have delayed Korea’s modernization as well as Koreans’ poor parenting skills. Yi begins by noting that Korean children spend the precious years of their youth serving their parents, and later waste time, money, and energy on their parents’ death because of senselessly long mourning periods and ancestor veneration. Parents are manipulative: some do not send their children to study because they cannot bear to part with them, while others are afraid of the inconvenience to the family’s finances that may be caused by their absence. Some bind their older children to child-minding chores, thus hindering opportunities for education and personal development, while others arrange their children’s marriages less in their children’s best interests and more out of their own. The answer, says Yi, is that parents should never interfere with their children’s choice of profession. Among his other complaints: parents treat their children as personal property (section two); they deliberately create financial dependence by passing their inheritance on to their children (section three); and they discourage their children from leaving home even for the purpose of learning skills that would advance their social standing. Finally, Yi concludes that Korea’s children pour their intellectual, physical, and financial resources into their parents’ graves (section five). He ends with the transgressive pronouncement mentioned earlier: “Let us feast on our parent’s blood . . . and destroy the graves of the ancestors.” Instead, the new generation must welcome and embrace an orphaned state of mind, and children should think of themselves as a new race that has descended to this land from heaven. Many were the customs and traditions that the early twentieth-century magazines for non-adult readers such as Sonyŏn tried to combat. Sonyŏn’s role in the emergence of literature for young readers was that it registered for the first time a new population of non-adult readers whose role was to usurp the older generation tainted by primeval customs and old modes of knowledge. Sonyŏn identified this audience as one full of unrealized potential and possibilities that could be unleashed only if it could be extracted from the trappings of the family and propelled into the bosom of the nation.

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What the early twentieth-century magazine Sonyŏn did not do was render children—as a category separate from youth—visible. Sonyŏn did not attend to the need to expand literacy through stylized text and images that conformed to advances in developmental psychology and education. Even more critically, Sonyŏn did little to confront the question of what it meant to send the child into the bosom of a modern and enlightened nation that was on the verge of colonization. It was very well to insist that Korea’s youth needed to be rescued through modern knowledge for the sake of the nation. But to write and illustrate for children required a recognition of the young body whose relationship with nature and culture marked it as new, and was articulated, as we shall see in the next chapter, in terms of a new concept: the child-heart.52

CHAPTER 2

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T H E J U N E 19 2 4 I S S U E of the children’s magazine Ŏrini opened with a spread

on the first page featuring the children’s song (tongyo) “Leaf Boat” and an accompanying illustration (see Figure 5): The leaf boat that set sail yesterday in the torrential rain; where has it gone? All that remains is a white paper sail Clinging to wet grass. Where is that verdant ferry, With Mister Bug on board? And what of the mast, and the deck? A pond is all that remains And the patter of rain.

The illustration depicts a ladybug riding a leaf on rough waters, the drama of the scene represented by the billowed sail and dotted lines that stand in for the rain threatening to upset this delicate boat. Compare this image to Figure 4 in Chapter 1 taken from the Ch’oe Nam-sŏn poem “Brave Youth at Sea.” Both poems capture a dramatic moment on the water, the tension in their illustrations created by the dissonance between the boat, the natural elements (water and precarious weather), and the passengers caught in between. But while the image from the magazine Sonyŏn in 1909 addresses Korea’s ­youthful future

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F I G U R E 5 . “Leaf Boat.” Ŏrini 2, no. 6 (1924): 1.

leaders and represents their metaphorical struggle against the rough waters of changing political and social tides, the image in Ŏrini and the melancholy poem appear to be addressing an entirely different audience. With the ladybug as lone traveler, we have been transported to a fantasy world of anthropomorphized nature that seems disengaged from politics, a poem bereft of any clear didactic message. It assumes a child’s view of the world, according to which a leaf in a puddle on a rainy day is transformed momentarily into a narrative about an esteemed customer whose pleasure cruise has been interrupted by inclement weather. The poem seems to suggest that only a child would stop to notice this detail or care about the fate of the ladybug. The story of this chapter, then, is that of the move from the image depicted by the illustration in Sonyŏn from 1909 to that depicted above in Ŏrini in 1924. It is the story of a discursive shift from youth to children; from detailed lines of verisimilitude to the abstract strokes of fantasy; from magazines published for politicized youth to magazines written for natural, organic, and ostensibly gender-neutral children. It explains what social, cultural, and discursive shifts made the child visible for the first time. By social shifts I refer to the rise of youth groups and their affiliated literary movements, as well as the slow

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growth in the number of schools and literacy, and of the resulting slow expansion of an imagined community of children. This is related to cultural shifts, by which I mean the visual turn in colonial culture, the growing visibility of the child, and the influence of Japan’s children’s culture. By discursive shift, I mean the way that educational and psychological philosophies created new conversations about what kind of cultural exposure was necessary to shape the ideal child. Together, these shifts point to the emergence of the term “child-heart” and the way this term came to be coded visually and textually in a manner that reinforced the idea of the child’s natural state to be protected and preserved. While the term is not new in Korean-language scholarship on children’s literature, its origins and contours have never been explored. I argue that this seemingly apolitical foundation of children’s literature, which celebrated the child-heart, and with it gave rise to the currency of childhood, can be read as future aspirations dressed up in nostalgic impulses that were political in their very essence. The disavowal of culture and politics as having any bearing on the child’s complicity in colonial modernity made the childheart, or tongsim in Korean, politically saturated to an extent that has previously been unrecognized. As Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan’s seminal research on reading practices in early colonial Korea tells us, mass-produced print culture became important in the early twentieth century thanks to changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of culture. He argues that in the move from voiced elocutions to silent reading, the kind of knowledge to be gleaned from texts promised to demystify hegemonic “elite” knowledge and thus challenged the social inequality inherent in the colonial economy. The main beneficiaries and agents of this change were Korea’s youth. They were, as Ch’ŏn describes it, the embodiment of the “new” in their tastes and aspirations, and their active consumption of culture is what prompted the dramatic increase in reading materials.1 The rise of youth, Kwŏn Podŭrae explains, is related also to the rise of the individual’s separation from the collective and the newfound confidence in the human ability to resist and overcome the laws of nature.2 This is important because the discursive power ascribed to youth paved the way both for a diversity of book production for young readers and also established a model of nature-defying youth, as seen in “Brave Youth at Sea” in the preceding chapter, against which the child would emerge in clear distinction. The process in which youth pushed against the calcified boundaries of knowledge, and the ensuing birth of youth movements that eventually

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spearheaded the rise of children’s literature, is described in detail by Ch’oe ­Myŏng-p’yo and warrants a brief summary of his main arguments. Ch’oe gives partial credit to the proletarian “wave” (borrowing Sunyoung Park’s term) for creating the space for Korea’s elite youth to disrupt entrenched conceptions of refinement and culture, which youth saw as compromised by class and age.3 Ch’oe argues that the youth organizations known as the Ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe in fact greatly relied on the burgeoning children’s organization, the Sonyŏnhoe, to stake their claims. In other words, it was the children’s organizations that gave the youth organizations the opportunity to embrace a fuller, more articulate aesthetic identity.4 The Sonyŏnhoe sprouted all over the country and provided young people of primary, middle, and high school age with the opportunity to gather and have sustained discussion about narrative and the craft of writing—critical at a time when literacy rates were so low. As noted earlier, in 1930 only 11 percent of Korea’s population was literate, and in 1929 only 20 percent of Korean children attended school. Children who lived in the country­side rarely attended school, and those who did had no opportunities to advance beyond middle school.5 All over the country children were exposed to literature through the readings that were hosted by the Sonyŏnhoe. These readings were central to the development of fiction, since they gave those leading the meetings a sense of their audience’s preferences and range of emotional capacities. The different styles of fiction that found their way into young readers’ magazines were a reflection of the kind of diversification of content that took place in the Sonyŏnhoe and created the foundation for a broader literary field. Literary works were discussed at meetings, and the young audience was encouraged to submit their own poetry and fiction, all of which had a direct and meaningful impact on the development of content in children’s magazines. In these groups the boundary between readers and writers, as well as between the categories of “child” and “adult,” were blurred in a way that made for the creation of a fluid genre, and many of the renowned writers of colonial Korea honed their craft in these Sonyŏnhoe children’s groups.6 As Ch’oe M ­ yŏng-p’yo states, the children and youth groups were crucial meeting spaces where a connection was forged between the Korean vernacular, the writing craft, and an emerging national identity. The children’s groups were also hotbeds for the cultivation of Korea’s major intellectuals who were invested in culture for children, and first among their publications was Ŏrini. It was published in tandem with the establishment of the Saektonghoe children’s

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literature writer’s group, which was charged with the broader mission of creating an aesthetic and genre-based field of literature for children.7 F ­ urthermore, the intervention of the indigenous religion of Ch’ŏndogyo, about which more will be said later in this chapter, played a decisive role in the development of children’s culture in Korea. At the same time, the gradual increase in the number of schools and textbooks used for literacy education also provides clues into the formation of literature for children. As Chang Chŏng-hŭi argues, textbooks from the colonial period have been largely read for their contributions to pedagogy or education policy, but as texts they reflect elements shared by literature, culture, politics, and society.8 She evaluates the contributions of what she terms tanhyŏng sŏsa, or short narratives, to the development of literature in Korea and points in particular to the development of the Chosŏn’ŏ tokpon (­Korean Language Reader), which saw first publication in 1911. Over the following decades, many of the folk stories published in these readers had Japanese origins and were heavily moralistic.9 Changes in orthography and content over time in these school readers, which were issued by the colonial government, reflected Japan’s cultural and political policies of assimilation. By contrast, while school textbooks were more easily controlled, commercial publications for children carried a wider range of voices, and it is here that the battle over the child-heart took place. A New Children’s Culture As recent scholarship has shown, colonial Korea’s visual transformation had direct implications for the world of letters, which was undergoing its own dramatic changes. Jina Kim speaks of visual narratives as a “prominent part of mass consumption and artistic practices,” while Jiwon Shin observes that the different mechanisms associated with the visual order—identification, recognition, misrecognition, gaze, sight, illusion, frame—“constituted an integral narrative device in modern fiction in articulating the shifting personal relation to material culture in Korea’s transition to modernity.”10 By contrast, Christopher Hanscom draws our attention to the often visual mechanisms that Korean modernist writers relied on to express in language the incongruity of signifier and signified under colonial cultural rule.11 And Theodore Hughes goes on to spell out what was at stake in the evolving and complex relationship between word and image in colonial Korea, arguing that key political and aesthetic movements “set in motion ways of seeing and writing” that informed not only

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colonial-period cultural production but that spilled over to the postwar p ­ eriod, 12 deeply implicated by Cold War politics. Evolving forms of visual culture, spurred on by the development of technologies that expanded both production and dissemination of print culture, directly shaped narrative techniques and by extension the way a growing number of people from disparate classes and of different age groups understood and engaged with the world. This early twentieth-century period was not only the age of the visual, it was also the era of the child. Due in great part to the Social Darwinist discourses that occupied East Asia in the late nineteenth century, discourses about the modern nation were framed in terms of a new imperative that tasked the nation’s youth with overturning outdated, decrepit, and stagnant practices. In China, Andrew Jones argues, “the figure of the child became a ubiquitous emblem of the nation and its developmental hopes.”13 Jones cites Zhou ­Zuoren—an intellectual of central importance in the anti-­imperialist sMay Fourth Movement in China, the younger brother of the renowned author Lu Xun, and one of the founders of a modern children’s literature in China—as one who believed that the child was “a flashpoint in a larger effort to make a clean epistemological break with the Chinese past.”14 In Japan, too, the 1868 Meiji Restoration brought with it a discourse about youth and renewal that, coupled with compulsory education starting in 1872, stimulated newfound interest in educational philosophy and even helped establish the middle class.15 The new discourses on children and education brought with them a surge of interest in literature, and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1890), “Koganemaru the Dog” (1891), and folktales like “Momotarō” (1894), sold in unprecedented numbers.16 Circulation of women’s and children’s magazines also disseminated ideas about motherhood, children, and youth. The most acclaimed of the children’s magazines was Akai tori (Red Bird) (1912–1936), whose writers hailed from Japan’s prestigious literary establishment and who became dedicated to the new genre of children’s literature.17 Akai tori attracted the best and brightest writers and artists in Taishō Japan and signaled the emergence of children’s literature on the literary stage. In early twentieth-century East Asia, then, youth in general and children more specifically came under focus in the discussions over renewal and development because they embodied the potential for growth and transformation that stood in stark contrast both to the n ­ oxious practices of the adult past and to the political youth. What of Korea? As seen in the preceding chapter, prominent Korean intellectuals recognized that youth were not only a viable new audience that required their own reading material, but that they had a crucial role to play

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in the evolving nation. But to raise the next generation—both in the sense of cultivating and nurturing, and of bringing them to a new level of sophistication and ­culture—an even younger age group needed to be reached: children. These young readers provided a particular challenge to the writers, editors, and educators in colonial Korea, because the content and language they needed had never been written. Texts and images had to perform a dual task: they had to respond to the perceived intellectual and emotional needs of children, needs now redefined by modern education and psychology, and to guide children through the present political uncertainties under competing ideological v­ isions. This chapter will contextualize these aesthetic choices as a way of highlighting the two most significant transitions that made children’s literature possible. The first was the process of making children visible and children’s literature visual. The second was the creation of the child-heart as an aesthetic of the body/mind that drew on the connection between the child and nature. The configuration of illustrations and texts in children’s literature from this period reflects the discourses that shaped cultural and political literacy and helped develop a children’s culture for the first time. Literary magazines, including those directed at children, were central fixtures of the print culture that was burgeoning in colonial Korea. With children, the challenge was to present the right kind of content that was at once entertaining and educational, or, in the words of an editorial from 1932, “Our unattractive, bland, heavy-handed textbooks are useless, as is their moralistic tone. What our children need are books that can be both candy and medicine.”18 Writers and publishers recognized the need to package their products in such a way that the lessons they were trying to convey—lessons that touched upon everything from education and family life to language and moral development—would be palatable. They understood that the way into children’s hearts was not only through the ears, although language, as we shall see in the next chapter, was integral to children’s literature. It was, even more importantly, through the eyes, in the form of images and colors accompanying a diverse range of prose and poetry. In order to produce the appropriate content, however, writers and illustrators needed to understand their audience. Who were these children and what were their specific needs? And how did they come to have the kind of critical mass that provided a sense of access to their particular sensibilities? It is in this context that a new keyword emerged: the ŏrini, Korea’s children. Like the sonyŏn-youth of the previous decade, the ŏrini-children too were

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deemed unspoiled. For writers, this younger audience embodied a great potential that could only be unlocked if their unique qualities were acknowledged. As one writer stated: “Our ŏrini are the protagonists of the world: and as such they must constantly renew their sturdy spirits, beautiful souls, and cheerful, hardworking minds in order to rise above their mothers, fathers, and teachers who are the protagonists of today.”19 To be sure, literacy rates were still extremely low, not to mention that most children lived in poverty and could not dream of an education, much less enjoy a culture of leisure.20 Judging by the growing use of the term ŏrini, however, it is clear that the child question—how to raise children in this new age and prepare them for a modern world—had become a popular concern. The term ŏrini—a vernacular term, unlike the Sino-Korean sonyŏn—­ signaled the first significant shift in the visibility of Korean children. The emergence of the ŏrini has been traced to Japanese influence, including exchanges between writers; the advent of public education and its reorganization of “familism” in favor of a more direct connection between the individual and the nation; and the influence of Christian missionaries and professionals in the field of family studies, early childhood education, psychology, and medicine.21 To these I add that the public exchange between educators, psychologists, writers, social activists, and religious leaders, all of whom weighed in on how to best shelter, dress, educate, entertain, and guide Korean children, paved the way for a literature for children. Children’s literature emerged as a response to the need to make the child culturally visible; to make children literate in the cultural and linguistic sense; and to stylize content that responded to the perceived intellectual and affective needs of the child. These needs converged around the term tong (child) and sim (heart/mind). Tongsim captured the body/mind dichotomy that was the driving force of writing and illustrating for children. It was to the dichotomy of tongsim that the education experts spoke, that the writers wrote, and the illustrators drew, and it is this lens through which I read the text and illustrations of children’s magazines. Scholars such as Cho Ŭn-suk and Wŏn Chong-ch’an have pointed to the prevalence of the tongsim construct in literature for young people; this chapter builds on their observations to flesh out the concept and its relation to the discourses that sustained it.22 The body/ mind dichotomy captured by tongsim created an affectively privileged child whose organic nature—so close to nature as to be part of it—encoded utopian aspirations at a time when the future of the Korean language and nation was anything but clear.

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Making the Child Visible Any discussion of children’s culture must contend with the positive force exercised by the indigenous religion of Ch’ŏndogyo. Founded in 1860, Ch’ŏndogyo upheld a vision of humanity that was captured by the concept of innaech’ŏn, meaning that the sacred is innate in all humans. This humanistic vision was one of the inspirations for the life work of Pang Chŏng-hwan, the pioneer of children’s literature in Korea. Pang was the son-in-law of Son Pyŏng-hŭi, the third patriarch of Ch’ŏndogyo, and he was also the editor of many of the important literary magazines of the time including the women’s magazine Sin yŏsŏng (New Woman) and the general-interest magazine Kaebyŏk (Creation). On the occasion of the first anniversary of the establishment of the children’s organization Sonyŏnhoe, made possible by Pang’s involvement, the following pronouncement was published in the daily newspaper Tonga ilbo: 1. Do not make false promises to ŏrini 2. Stay close to ŏrini and converse with ŏrini frequently 3. Always speak with ŏrini softly and in the polite form 4. Make sure ŏrini get enough sleep and exercise 5. Ensure ŏrini get haircuts and baths at appropriate times 6. Protect ŏrini from inappropriate images and take them to the zoo 7. Concern yourself not with marrying them off, but with shaping ŏrini into human beings.23

These seven directives provide the contours of the tongsim in its body/mind dichotomy. They call attention to both the physical well-being of children— baths, haircuts, sleep, and exercise—as well as their emotional needs—soft tones, frequent conversation, and appropriate stimulation. Pang elaborated his philosophy in an article published in the Ch’ŏndogyo Monthly: I love children. Above all I adore five- and six-year-olds just learning to talk. A six-year-old girl was sitting at the window by her mother, who was doing needlework. Outside, the grass was scorched by the sun’s rays, and in the distance a mysterious forest the color of jade stood as if guarding a secret. Just then a cool breeze kicked up, stirring the jade forest. Observing all this, the young girl turned to her mother and asked, “That whooshing sound is the mother of the wind, and rustling is the wind’s son, isn’t it?”

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Here you have it: children are poets and bards. Everything those beautiful eyes fall upon takes the shape of poetry and song.24

This passage attests to one of the important foundations in Pang’s thought, one that, as Wŏn says, was essential to the formation of literature and culture for children, namely the marking of children as affectively different. Note, however, that it is the narrator who imagines the sun’s rays beating down on the grass, who uses phrases like “the jade forest” to describe the scene, presuming to see what the child sees, or to have received a wordless communication of the girl’s vision of nature. When she does speak, it is of the wind making sounds and stirring up the leaves, and she organizes this information in her mind, creating a family out of the elements. Her ability to do so marks her as different from adults, and an almost prophetic figure: she demonstrates an attribute of all children, which is a privileged relationship with nature. This gives her (and by extension, children in general) special access to reality, because she can process the world in a more truthful way. Pang goes on to describe these “new workers for Ch’ŏndogyo” as angelic and pure. He adds, “Older siblings! Parents! Educators! Don’t give these delightful poets money or snacks. Read them children’s stories (tonghwa). Often and frequently.” Pang establishes the physical and affective difference of children—diminutive (ages five or six), sensitive to nature, able to process the world and organize it in a way that adults cannot. He calls upon siblings, parents, and teachers to see these children, recognize them, and give them what they need: not money (that might exacerbate greed) or sweets (that might promote self-indulgence), but fiction. Pang developed his theory of the child-heart further in his essay “In Praise of the Child.”25 He begins by observing a sleeping child, and extols the peace that he finds in the child’s sleeping face; he then goes on to compare the child to the face of Hanunim, the innate heavenly qualities:26 Ah! This ŏrini is now sleeping at my knees. The embodiment of absolute purity, absolute kindness, absolute beauty, and blessed with a tremendous force of creativity, this young hanunim sleeps in comfort. . . . Seeing her, the mind of the observer is purified.27

Pang attributes to the sleeper such qualities as purity, kindness, and beauty, evoking an almost sacred potential of the child to provide absolution. He goes on: Children are the first to jump for joy when shoots sprout from dry grass, when buds blossom on branches. It is children that sing with the lark when spring

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arrives, and children that prance with the butterflies when the flowers bloom. They delight in the stars, they croon at the moon, and they dance when it snows. Children love mountains, adore the sea, share affection with all things of the natural world. They dance with the sun. To them, all is happiness, all is love, all is friendship.28

Pang elaborates on one of the central tenets of the child-heart: its dialectic existence with nature. Children’s movements are just as involuntary as the blooming of flowers in spring. Language is practically superfluous—their singing is of a higher order, spontaneous and inevitable, like the song of the lark. In the final section of his essay, Pang argues for three crucial components that children “make beautiful”: the world of story, the world of song, and the world of image. There are three splendid forms of art in the world of children. No matter how grim reality may be, children see reality in the form of a story. That is why even the mundane becomes beautiful and is created with excitement. That is why everything is beautiful to children. Children might be lacking in experience, but they experience the world through stories. They hear stories on the laps of their mothers and grandmothers, and they turn these into children’s stories (tonghwa), enter the story world, and experience all that comes out of the stories. In the world of stories, a child can become prince, orphan, butterfly, bird. In this way children can extend their happiness.29

In Pang’s telling there is almost no boundary between the child and the world, or the world and the story, because the world is what children experience as stories. They are agents of change of the highest creative order, and they make the world a more beautiful place. Pang’s view of children’s songs, the second of three crucial components mentioned in the essay, reiterates his view of children having a spontaneous way of seeing the world and transcribing it into a language of poetry that directly conveys their feelings. On the topic of images, however, Pang elaborates: Children like images. They like to draw. They give birth to an art that is completely pure and lacking in artifice. If they find a man’s topknot amusing, they will draw it larger than his body; if they find a policeman’s sword strange, they will draw that out of proportion, too. How honest is their expression! How pure their art!30

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If the first two crucial components children need are storytelling and poetry— recall that Pang perceived these as more necessary than money or sweets—the third is visual art. Children’s illustrations are another mode of communication of children’s privileged view of the world. Their purity of mind and spirit is conveyed in the images children produce, the results of which carry kernels of truth about the world. Notice the two examples: the topknot and the sword. Children will find the first amusing and the second ominous; but not, says Pang, because they are told but because they simply know it to be so. To sum up, Pang’s understanding of the child-heart was as follows: it has privileged access to the natural world. Its movements emerge not from a socialized or cultured core but emanate spontaneously. What the child-heart feels is necessarily true, and when the child expresses this truth in language it becomes poetry, and expression in drawing becomes art. Pang’s thoughts express something close to some of Ch’ŏndogyo’s central tenets: that only when children are properly protected will the building of an earthly paradise be achieved.31 When we despair, it is only children who have the power to shed a ray of light into our hearts and illuminate the darkness, to energize and comfort us. Children know no sadness. They know no worries. They hate gloom. They are always cheerful and play with abandon. No matter where you prod them, joy and happiness will gush forth. They live for joy, play for joy, grow for joy. Ah, the power! The power of play and life! That is what children are. They are the source of evolution and the progress of mankind.32

Ch’ŏndogyo was a powerful generator of a new discourse about the child that demanded that children be seen and heard—and that materials for children would respond in kind. But it was Pang’s theorization that gave the child-heart its fullest form, and which then went on to stamp children’s literature for generations to come. The Japanese Connection While Ch’ŏndogyo precepts shaped the views of Pang Chŏng-hwan, no less important was the children’s literature and culture movement in full swing in Japan. Pang studied children’s literature and psychology at Tōyō University in Tokyo in 1919, and it was there that he founded the Saektonghoe, a literary group devoted to writing for children, in 1923.33 This was the golden ­period of Japa-

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nese children’s literature, during which the magazine Akai tori was published to great acclaim.34 The magazine was established in 1918 to promote children’s literature of artistic value and catered to the purchasing power of parents, particularly those vying to enter the middle class.35 Akai tori was published largely in reaction to the traditional attitudes touted in public discourse as well as in publications for young people. Up until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, children were incorporated into the feudal system, and were therefore acknowledged only in relation to the social position of their class.36 This began to change with reforms to the education system in 1872, when children were brought together regardless of class with the purpose of transforming them into loyal imperial subjects. Many contributors to Akai tori were social activists who opposed Japan’s stratified social order and insisted on recognizing children’s right to an education, to a childhood of freedom and creativity, and to a celebration of their child-heart.37 In these publications the child was assumed to have a sweet temperament, to be filial, hardworking, obedient—and poor and abused.38 These attributes reflect a particular view of the child, which in Japanese was given the name dōshin, or child-heart.39 The extent to which Pang Chŏng-hwan was inspired by Japanese magazines and intellectuals can be traced in his enthusiasm for translations, including the work of Iwaya S­azanami 巌谷小波. The fact that Pang chose for himself the penname Sop’a 小波, which was written with the same Chinese characters used by the Japanese author, was long a source of assumptions regarding the Korean’s debt to the Japanese, an assumption that has since been challenged in scholarship.40 Two additional Japanese role models that figured centrally in Pang’s entrepreneurial exploration of children’s magazines were Ogawa Mimei, author of Akai fune (The Red Boat), a collection of stories for children, and Suzuki Miekichi, who established Akai tori and also coined the term dōwa, or “children’s tale” (­tonghwa in Korean) as a replacement for the more frequently used term “folktale.”41 The narrative trends in Japan, along with the Ch’ŏndogyo-inspired understanding of the sacredness of childhood, came together in the magazine Ŏrini. That the child-heart was a peculiar state of mind and body that was attributed to children was an idea amenable not only to the nationalist project, but also to the kind of aesthetic identity of children’s magazines. Children’s magazines thus needed to stimulate children’s aesthetic affinities and at the same time uphold educational philosophies and commercial goals. The idea of the child-mind had existed in East Asia from the times of ­Mencius and Laozi, and was taken up again in the fifteenth century by the founder of the

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Wang school of thought, Wang Shouren (1472–1529). Pei-yi Wu notes that under the Wang school, “the innocence of children was strongly reaffirmed, and the preservation of this quality became more important than the mere acquisition of knowledge.”42 Wang’s theory of innate knowledge demanded that children be elevated in the Confucian hierarchy. Li Zhi (1527–1602), who was influenced by Wang Yangming, penned an essay, Tongxin shuo (On the Child-like Mind), in which he asserted that “the heart of the child is absolutely not false but pure and true. . . . If one loses the heart of the child then he loses his true heart,”43 and that “All great literature comes from the child-like mind.”44 The concept of the child-mind in ancient Chinese philosophy exhibited, as Anne Kinney notes, a sensitivity to children’s “natural proclivities” and brought about an “increase in literary works recounting the lives of deceased children.”45 In Japan, the concept was mobilized at a moment of reform and restructuring in which children had a distinct cultural role to play in the emergence of a middle-class. In Korea, tongsim became part of a larger conversation about the child’s body and mind. The child was attributed with privileged access to truth and knowledge at a time when access to both was complicated by colonial rule. Educating Emotion in Colonial Korea The visibility of the child in Korea was made possible by the transformation of familial institutions under colonial rule. Increasing numbers of Koreans were traveling overseas to study, thus bring about change to traditional community structures.46 The family was mobilized through a variety of policies—­ particularly the proliferation of the “improvement of family” (kajŏk kaeryang) discourses in newspapers and magazines that called on the family to do its part in the civilization process, namely, to produce modern citizens, and by extension, the modern nation.47 Changes in population-control policies tackled such things as infant mortality and underage marriage, and this period also saw the emergence of mental health professionals and the introduction of kinder­garten, all contributing to the transformation of the family unit. In this context, public discourse took a new interest in the physical and emotional well-being of Korea’s children. The circulation of child-related articles in newspapers and magazines, along with the slow proliferation of public schools, helped disseminate these discourses. Bona fide scientific authorities stamped their professional mark on everything from eating times to growth charts, and disseminated their specialized knowledge through print media. The

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child’s physical well-being and intellectual growth were now a concern of the general public. These discourses went beyond the child’s right to education and good health. Articles by educators and other professionals weighed in on the qualitative difference in intellectual and emotional capacities of the child, and pointed to the ways that these differences were to be addressed in the private home and in public, in kindergartens and schools.48 It was in the discourses about children’s emotional education, or kamjŏng kyoyuk, that the child-heart was articulated in scientific language. Emotional education was, in many ways, the driving force of pedagogy, and it is also what ­fueled the illustrations in children’s magazines that responded in their own ways to these concerns. If the discovery of interiority was what marked the emergence of a modern literature, then it was emotional education that identified this interior space in children and aspired to shape it. Identifying exactly what children’s affective constitution was, and what kinds of toys, texts, and illustrations might best address it, was the task at hand. Chŏn Ruisa was one of the first to use the term “emotional education” in the context of the child. An early pioneer of kindergarten education in Korea, she insisted that Korea model Germany’s kindergarten system and the child protection movement in the United States.49 She accused parents of destroying their children’s ability to develop proper reason by ignoring their emotional needs. She argued that children’s imaginations are uninhibited, so imposing limits based on outdated customs and tradition is akin to nipping the buds off trees. She added that the child’s aesthetic life (mijŏk saenghwal) is completely different from that of adults, and because children transport themselves outside of their reality in their play, their physical surroundings should not impose limits on their freedom or creativity. Children’s hearts and souls, Chŏn concluded, are prone to sentiment.50 A similar attention to the child’s sentiment is addressed in a 1929 Tonga ilbo article titled “Emotional Education of the Very Young.”51 In it, the anonymous author explains that a child’s concept of the world is fixed by age six, and that until then children are driven more by emotion than reason. In order to educate their emotion, then, adults need to understand the process by which children make sense of the world, because adults play such a central part in mirroring this world to children. As a part of this process, parents must take care to control their reactions and not overreact when a child falls, for example. Parents must also understand that children’s tantrums are completely natural and are a reaction to outside stimuli; parents should allow tantrums to run their course rather than try to contain them. In other words, a child’s excess of

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emotion is completely natural and must be allowed full expression rather than be harnessed or controlled. In another article, “Children’s Emotional Education,” that appeared in Tonga ilbo in 1929, Sin Yŏng-hyŏn explains that contemporary social ills—the growing gap between the rich and poor, the pervasive climate of anxiety and ­materialism—are a result of a defective exchange of person-to-person emotion.52 Sin views emotion as a material substance that, in the process of exchange between people, must mix (paehap) or fuse (yonghap) harmoniously. A successful mixture or fusion can transform anger into friendship, tyranny into compassion, and as a result, will envelop people like clean air. On the other hand, a blockage—commonly caused by “divergence in character” (sŏngkyŏk ŭi sangwi)—leads to extreme self-centeredness and isolation.53 Sin is of the opinion that people’s characters are not biased from the start, and therefore it is possible and necessary to strive for an exchange of beautiful and virtuous emotion (chinsŏn chinmi ŭi kamjŏng). The most urgent need is for emotional education for children. Because emotion is beautiful, pure, and powerful, it can cleanse people’s destructive negativity, avarice, and selfishness. Therefore, it is imperative to cultivate pure emotion in children, all the more important because they possess a great repository of feeling.54 He argues that childhood is a time when strong emotions are active, and so it is even more important to guide children’s emotion. In the absence of emotional education, children may grow to be abusive to both the people and animals around them. The association between children’s emotion and nature is brought into focus in newspaper articles, drawing the attention of parents as well as educators and other professionals to the mind/body connection captured by tongsim. Spring was touted as the best time for emotional education because flowers and trees can cultivate good feelings that intellectual stimulation cannot. Child psychologists argued that children are different in that they view flowers as playthings and trees as people. Children’s natural curiosity about the cycle of life makes nature the best classroom. Nature presents opportunities to teach moral concepts that are comforting and exciting, because nature is reasonable. It is imperative, then, that adults recognize the direct communication that children have with nature and realize the opportunities for emotional education that present themselves in nature.55 The concept of the child-heart as an organic metric of the child’s body and mind was presented theoretically in what seems to be the earliest book on child psychology of colonial Korea. Published in 1932 by Han Ch’i-jin, Adong ŭi Simni

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wa Kyoyuk (Children’s Psychology and Education), explains why childhood is important, what factors shape children and have lasting impact on their lives, and what institutions must be cultivated to insure the best possible development of the future of the nation. The author is himself a fascinating figure whose importance in scholarship has received recognition only in recent years. Han Ch’i-jin was born in 1901 in P’yŏngan province to an intellectual Christian family. With the aid of an older brother who was studying in the United States at the time, Han moved to Nanjing, China, at the age of 16 to complete middle school. Thereafter he spent a short time in Shanghai where he was involved in the independence efforts; photographs from the time capture him seated with figures such as An ­Ch’ang-ho, who then helped Han relocate to Los Angeles, after which he identified himself as Clarence C. Hahn. He received all three of his degrees at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1928 with a dissertation titled “A Criticism of Chinese Ethical Systems: Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.” He returned to Korea in July 1928, and his arrival was important enough to warrant mention in the Tonga ilbo under the title “Dr. Han, PhD in American Philosophy, Comes Home.”56 Han was first employed in 1932 by Ehwa Women’s University, and he later conducted research in Waseda University in Japan, publishing a book in Japanese on psychology. After liberation he was offered an official position by the United States Government in Korea, which he refused, instead focusing on his popular radio broadcasts on American democracy. Some evidence shows that he worked as a professor at Seoul National University in 1947. Then, some time around the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he was kidnapped and taken north, never to be heard from again.57 Kim Hak-chun mentions that Han established himself as an authority on psychology only in 1950, but Han’s ­Children’s Psychology and Education from 1932 shows that his interest in child behavior and the social and environmental that shapes us began years earlier. For Han, the stakes of understanding children were essential to reforming Korean lives. He understood childhood as an extensive period that requires a long gestation because of the biological and social complexity of humans, with at least five periods of development that lead up to adulthood. The existence of childhood, or adonggi, was exactly that which marked the difference between a civilized society and a barbaric one.58 Han explained the relationship between children and the environment as two prongs emerging from a single source, what he called the insangbop, or Formation Theory. Captured in a diagram on page 17 of his book, Han explains

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childhood development as the combination of innate potential and external environment. He viewed these two elements as mutually reliant, since any psychological state can only be realized through the physical environment. The reason that education and environment are so important is that the boundary between children’s inner and outer states is fluid: children, Han observed, express what they feel in a direct manner, so there is no discrepancy between inner state and external expression.59 Furthermore, what separates children from animals is children’s ability to relate to the world based not only on their past experiences but also on their projection of the future.60 Children’s habits were best rewritten through education and guided what he called sasang ŭi pangbop, or Imagination Systems, which are best shaped by texts.61 Texts, he said, had the ability to effect positive change in children by providing moral models of behavior.62 It was therefore the task of toys, books, and art to preserve the connections ­between child and environment. It was to these discourses of child psychology that writers and artists turned when composing their work. Fiction and Figures for the Child-Heart As this chapter has argued, a combination of factors made the child visible for the first time in Korea of the 1920s and 1930s. The path toward recognizing the child as a social entity had been paved by the youth discourse of the preceding decades. Youth group activism and Ch’ŏndogyo, the influence of Japanese models of children’s culture, Pang Chŏng-hwan’s pioneering of a child-first discourse, changes to the family structure under the colonial capitalist economy, and the conceptualization of emotional education all came together to form a new medium: children’s fiction. The fiction that began to be published in the children’s magazines of the 1920s and 1930s reflects the fusion of these elements in a new, consumable format. The poster child for this new fiction is one of the most famous and frequently anthologized pieces from this era, “Rock Flower and Little Star,” by Ma Hae-song.63 It is a story of loyalty and love between two unlikely friends: the romantic yet lonely Rock Flower, and the empathetic Little Star, who is obligated to return to the sky each night. Their affection blossoms until they are separated by the King of the Skies. Rock Flower falls ill with melancholy and is swept into the sea, and Little Star, yearning for his friend, is finally banished for having caused the other stars’ brilliance to dim with his tears. Little Star is finally cast into the sea and joins his friend in the depths.

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On the surface, this is an allegorical story meant to explain why sea w ­ aters glow in their depths. Yet it demonstrates the application of the mechanics of the child-heart: emotional education and affinity with ­nature. The opening of this story is biblical in scope: “To the south is a country, a warm country, where not the trace of a soul is to be found: not human, not beast, naught but a godforsaken sea and white beach extending far and wide.” Out of this desolate landscape, and against all odds, emerges a flower with multicolored petals—a child born into the world aware of nothing but its own desires. Its very first words are: “Ah! How cute and pretty I am, and yet there is no one to love me!” and then, “Ah! Surely someone from somewhere will visit today!” The rhetorical use of the verb ending –chugetchi (surely there will!) plays up the flower’s seemingly foolish expectation in face of the unlikelihood that anyone could possibly emerge from the barren surroundings. When Little Star hears the lonely sighs of Rock Flower, he decides immediately that he must descend. The decision to leave the sky despite a strict curfew is based on Little Star’s transcendental empathy—he is compelled to comfort this lonely creature. When the two meet, they bond without inhibition, as children do: they talk, run, and sing. Their play further strengthens their bond so that when they are forced apart by the authoritative adult figure, the Sky King, neither survives. The story sets out to convey ideas of love and loyalty through representations of inanimate objects with flat, contrasting characteristics (romance and melancholy versus empathy and courage). What is striking about this story is first that elements from nature are made to stand in for children, a common device in Korean children’s fiction from the 1920s. Nature speaks in the voice of a child so that the two—child and nature—seem organic extensions of each other. The other striking feature is the display of strong yet uncomplicated emotions: affection, yearning, melancholy, love. The feelings that emerge instantly between the two characters prove to be the cause of their demise but are also as inevitable as they are eternal. As the narrator explains directly to the young audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever looked into the depths of the sea? It looks clear even in its deepest parts. This is because Little Star’s light still shines in the bottom of the sea.” Here, the emotions of loyalty and melancholy are meant to outlast the story, and the characters are mere vessels of the emotions they contained. This piece of short fiction, which has endured for almost a century, embodies the qualities that were the foundation of children’s literature: an organic connection between child and nature and

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an emphasis on positive, strong emotions. This was the formula that shaped the ideal fiction for children. At the same time as fiction was developing for children, art education also came under scrutiny as a fundamental tool, alongside fiction, for children’s emotional development. Song Sun-il argued that the cultivation of art is critical for development, since children feel sublime joy when they hear a song, look at a picture, or hear a story.64 Chŏn Ruisa also stressed the importance of art education for children because of children’s tremendous sense of creativity and inherent aesthetic appreciation.65 For Chŏng In-sŏp (Zong In-sob), art education had to consider children’s inherent affinity with nature.66 Chŏng was particularly impressed by the work of Harriet Finlay-Johnson, an advocate of outdoor education. Finlay-Johnson believed that, when unencumbered by school structures and when immersed in nature, children could arrive at spontaneous language and uninhibited expression.67 Chŏng was clearly familiar with her work, and believed that this method was particularly relevant to education in Korea, where children were rarely allowed to make observations from nature. Chŏng advocated art education based on reading, music, and drama that would bring out the “natural” tendencies in children.68 He described the child’s life as a form of art, but argued that art education would foster a sustained appreciation of painting, sculpture, crafts, music, literature, drama, and dance. Art, he said, is not simply the product of emotions, but it contains reason and will exceed the limits of “standard” ( pot’ong) experience. Korea had to develop children’s freedom through stories, poetry, drama, dance, and illustrations in children’s fiction.69 For Sin Yŏng-hyŏn, art was also the ideal tool for emotional education. Fiction, he believed, uses compassion to convey a taste of freedom to the innocent child-mind. This is not “the rubbish being published these days in book stores about young people’s first love or taking vengeance over love.”70 Films and music can also be useful in emotional education, as long as their intentions are not lurid. Other than that, children’s stories (tonghwa) and children’s songs (tongyo) are excellent educational materials for developing the emotional world of children and the cultivation of beautiful emotion. Children’s environment must be staged with care by, for example, providing them with their own room and setting up a vase of fresh flowers each day, and parents should strive to keep a peaceful home and avoid fighting, speaking badly, and expressing

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negative feelings. Parents should avoid speaking too theoretically to their children since their emotion is stronger than their ability to reason. Articles about emotional and art education understood emotion as affect, or as an utterly biological and precognitive response that emerges prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs; that which is always prior to and/or outside consciousness; something that is irreducibly physical and autonomic, and therefore can be exchanged, “mixing” or “fused,” as Sin Yŏng-hyŏn argues.71 To reiterate the points made earlier: children were understood to have an excess of emotion, and therefore it was that much more critical for their emotions to be channeled in a way as to allow them to be free (for example, not curb their tantrums), but at the same time, guide them toward goodness through appropriate cultural media such as appropriate literature, music, and film. The understanding of emotion as affect, or a pre-ideological and precognitive life force with transformative power, has been critiqued by Ruth Leys, who argues, based on scientific evidence, that affect and cognition are, in fact, indissociable. She insists that evoking an affect/emotion dichotomy and perceiving these to be unstructured by culture discounts the way that all experiences are already colored—either by previous experiences or by the very technologies that allow for their expression.72 Lakoff and Johnson, rather, insist that modern neuroscience has long since discarded the old dichotomy of empiricism (all is experience) versus rationalism (human reason is innate) to argue that “evidence favor[s] the existence of both built-in and learned cognitive mechanisms” and that meaning is deeply grounded in sensorimotor experiences.73 As they explain, “how a person frames a particular situation will determine what they experience as relevant phenomena, what they count as data, what inferences they make about the situation, and how they conceptualize it.”74 They argue that what underlies our experience of the world is what they call embodied realism: the view that “the locus of experience, meaning, and thought is the ongoing series of embodied organism-environment interactions that constitute our understanding of the world.”75 Metaphors are conceptual, not linguistic—so that the way we make sense of the world is always a result of the interaction of one’s individual body and the outside world: “Corporeal or spatial logic, arising from bodily experience, is exactly what provides the basis for the logic of abstract thought.”76 Critique of affect theory highlights that emotion/affect is already culture laden, and cannot be viewed as an apolitical, precognitive drive that exists at

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the level of visceral instinct. But in 1920s Korea, emotions of children were attributed with transformative powers that were not formed or shaped by culture. In his chapter on children and language, Han challenges this idea of children’s language as something that exists outside the experiential world when he explains that thought (sasang) is not external to the thing it describes, but in order to understand the meaning of things, it demands a concretizing of the feeling of its existence.77 But the pervading wisdom of the 1920s was that children have emotion in great excess, and with the right kind of artistic cultivation that channels this extra-cultural, emotional excess, children could transform Korea into a better place. For this reason, the textual and visual aspects of children’s magazines were believed to have powerful aesthetic potential. In Ch’oe Yŏng-su’s words, “the image is a way of getting to the heart of the child’s life experience.”78 Korean children’s magazines expose the way that affective states become, in Ann Stoler’s words, “dense transfer points of power.”79 The texts and images of children’s magazines were produced so as to appeal to children’s emotions; they were designed aesthetically not just to produce but to shape affective responses; and they were structured and composed by adults who worked from the assumption that their child audience’s intellectual capabilities were secondary in importance to their affective ones.80 Ch’oe Yŏng-su argued that while science takes an object and examines its details, art contemplates the object’s existence.81 Beyond their contemplative role, however, artistic images also interpret the world when the viewers are less experienced: “When we read fiction in newspapers and magazines, the illustrations help us feel like we are witnessing the story.”82 Children’s magazines were to mediate the experience of being a child and interpret this experience on their behalf so as to allow for the best possible growth of the child-mind. Ch’oe concludes by calling on parents to help children cultivate their artistic potential, and explains that drawing will lead to the protection and preservation of the child and will bring about a bright future.83 He considered illustrations to have a restorative and transformative potential that went beyond their educational function. Patricia Clough suggests that “the object of study is inextricable from the apparatus or the technology of both its production and further elaboration.” 84 Attention to the “production and further elaborations”—the interaction between illustrations, layout, and text in children’s magazines—can elucidate, on one hand, “the way the state moves deeply into the lives of individual subjects through disciplining, through complex strategies of socialization that the institutions of civil society deploy in managing individuals subjected to the moral

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order.”85 It can also illuminate the views of writers and illustrators that children possessed a salvational, regenerative potential that could only be unlocked through the art of the image. Figuring the Child-Heart When Ŏrini was launched in 1923, it had already been fifteen years since Ch’oe Nam-sŏn had first exposed his readers to a scintillating world of text and image in Sonyŏn. As argued in Chapter 1, Ch’oe’s experimentations with color, photographs, maps, and illustrations made for a stimulating reading experience that buttressed the periodical’s claim to truth and knowledge, narrated within a Social Darwinist framework. In the magazine Ŏrini, however, Pang Chŏng-hwan was guided by a new conceptualization of the natural child-heart. Attempting to give equal space to the magazine’s entertaining and didactic mission, Pang included a diverse range of content—original stories and poems, cartoons, folktales from around the world, and polemic essays. Photographs and illustrations appeared on the magazines’ covers, along the page margins, and in the body of the text. The texts and images of Ŏrini structured children’s visual and textual literacy by contributing to the development of the Korean vernacular in a way writers perceived as tending to the linguistic needs of Korea’s children (see Chapter 3). Texts and images advanced cultural literacy by establishing a semiotic logic, which emphasized various configurations of children and the natural world that was at the foundation of the child-heart. And so the childheart was figured in accordance with a set of guidelines that insisted on the child’s organic qualities, proclivity for spontaneous play, and positive response to colors and images.86 While there were certain stylistic continuities from the preceding decade in the illustrations—particularly the layout with a small icon on the top righthand corner of the pages, and the inclusion of severe profile photographs alongside didactic essays—the illustrations gave Ŏrini a decidedly child-friendly feel in a way that Sonyŏn did not. The attentiveness to amusement is visible in the greater variety in genres, in the experimentation with fonts, and in the content and form of illustrations. Starting in the first issue of Ŏrini, the editor, Pang Chŏng-hwan, addressed his readers directly in a section titled “Remaining Ink” (Namŭn ingk’ŭ). The illustration that accompanied this section depicts a genderless child drawn in bold lines, holding a gigantic pen. The image (Figure 6) is fantastic in a manner different from those commonly found in Sonyŏn, where

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F I G U R E 6 . “Remaining Ink.” Ŏrini 1, no. 3 (1923): 12.

figures were drawn in realistic detail. The image is meant to appeal to a young reader in its suggestion that children are organic parts of the writing process. “Children,” Pang declared, “read didactic and self-cultivating texts in school, so I want us to read fun and playful pieces, and while doing so let us become purer and more kind! It is with these thoughts that I decorate Ŏrini.”87 Faces were drawn in a manner presumed suitable for young viewers: bold outlines; eyes framed by high brows; noses represented by a suggestive dot; and only the hint of a mouth and chin. Common illustrations included flowers, birds, dragonflies, and rabbits, and were printed small on the top of each story title. They were mostly decorative rather than serving a particular narrative purpose, but they were targeted at younger readers whose needs were perceived as demanding bold, simple lines and images of nature. Another way that images in Ŏrini participated in creating a broad, hegemonic children’s culture in Korea was by granting concrete form to the growing community of children. As the only magazine of its kind for young readers in 1923, Ŏrini attempted to expand its relevance by showing young readers that they were a part of a critical mass. For one, the magazine reached out to its

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readers by calling on them to submit their creative writing, letters, and photographs to the magazine, which were then published in sections such as “Readers’ Corner” (Tokcha tamhwasil ), “Selected Writing” (Ppop’hin kŭl ), and from 1925, a section that included photographs of the readers. The best creative works were promised prizes, with readers encouraged not to spend too much time polishing or decorating them but rather to keep them “simple” and “honest.” Readers’ opinions were solicited as a way for the editor, Pang Chŏng-hwan, to have direct access to their preferences: “Since I don’t know what many readers are thinking, please tell what you found amusing or not, and mail your suggestions on how to improve. I will adjust the content to your liking and publish your letters in this journal.”88 These letters were then published as promised, giving readers the sense that their opinions mattered as well as conveying the impression that they were part of a growing collective. This sense of a community was reinforced in the children’s group meetings where the magazines were circulated among their members. These results are visible in the aforementioned “Readers’ Corner” section of the magazine, which published letters by satisfied readers who often expressed their gratitude for the entertaining content in emphatic terms: “You have created a world of ŏrini for us and are making us believe that children rule the world. I would like to acknowledge Mr. Pang’s attention to us children through my loneliness and tears.”89 “This magazine is so much fun, I can’t believe I didn’t pick it up earlier!”90 Such responses in each issue created the space for its readers to connect and share their emotions. Korean children residing abroad also wrote letters from China and Japan, such as this letter from 1924: “The news published in issue five about the tears shed by Jilin’s Yi Sŏng-t’ae brought me to tears. I will pray that he will recover from his illness quickly and come back to Korea.”91 The child-heart figured most prominently on the covers of the magazine. In its early years, the covers carried snapshots of children in everyday moments: a child engrossed in a book or children arranged stiffly on a chair.92 Covers like the one in Figure 7 displayed images of children in a collage, giving the impression of the imagined community as a mass of individuals with collective power that they wield by looking directly at the camera. Later covers included photographs of cherubic, curly-headed children wearing angel wings. Starting in 1928 the magazine covers began carrying illustrations of birds, insects, balloons, and also occasionally children in nature. Whereas the earlier images (1923–1926) take up about a quarter to a third of the page, by 1927 the images take up almost the entire page and are in full color, as in ­Figure 8. The ­essence of the child-

F I G U R E 7. Cover of Ŏrini 1, no. 8 (1923).

F I G U R E 8 . Conductor. Ŏrini 8, no. 3 (1930): cover.

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heart is captured by this image in Figure 8: a bare-bottomed child, whose skin color blends in with his surroundings, conducts a flock of birds. Because he is fundamentally a part of his environment, his ability to lead the birds in song is natural. In a way, he is unwittingly participating in the very project of the adult hands steering the magazine: gently guiding natural children (birds) so as to be able to respond to the structured needs of society. In this way, the logic of progress and modernity that was embedded in the realistic images of Sonyŏn had shifted to a celebration of nature and emotion, captured in the pudgy arms and cheeks of toddlers and schoolchildren. Pang inaugurated the first volume of Ŏrini with this poetic pronouncement: Like a bird, like a flower, [the child] sings artlessly through young cherry lips, a song that is the sound of nature, the essence of the sky. Like a pigeon, like a bunny, [the child] runs, soft hair tousled by the wind, the embodiment of nature, the shadow of the sky. Absent is the greed of adults, lacking are scheming desires. Oh, faultless, candid, peaceful, and free Land of Hanul! This is the Land of our Children. We must never, ever pollute this Land of the Sky, and we must expand our Land in order for all people of the world to live in this clean Land. Ŏrini is composed of all the clean deeds that spring from these two wishes. We believe that when Ŏrini, the product of our earnest passion, will be embraced, there will sprout the seeds of the pristine spirit.93

To Pang, the child’s song is said to be without artifice, as spontaneous as birds and flowers, its body as soft as bunny fur tousled by the wind. In the first issue, the title Ŏrini was drawn in block letters hiding two peeping children. The letter design was inspired by art deco, and paid tribute to the scientific and technological advances of the era. But the children peeping from behind the blocks suggest the interruption of technology by nature, or the intimation that the natural child is lurking behind organized forms and reason, waiting to be discovered. Together, the illustrations and text reinforced the idea so crucial to Korea’s present and tumultuous moment—that the child’s excess of emotion is natural, and its presocialized state preserves something that Korea had lost. The child in this sense was an embodiment of nostalgia, a figure that carried traces of desire for a future of immersion in nature, of seamless communion with a world devoid of politics. This was not just a writers’ fancy: psychologists and educators weighed in on the close affinity the child enjoyed with nature,

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while writers and illustrators made the intimacy shared between child and nature manifest in texts and images. To all of these “taste-shapers” of children’s literature, the child-heart presented an opportunity to express a yearning for innocence—a time untouched by colonialism that was undergoing reconstruction by ideologies of “local color” and colonial kitsch.94 They sought a time that bypassed the capitalist rearrangement of daily routines and the growing demands of competitive, urban society. The child-heart represented the forwardlooking aspirations of these writers, curtailed by colonization with no end in sight, for every moment that the child was frozen in time was a moment that the illusion of purity and innocence could be extended. On paper, the almost sacred fusion of children and nature gave the illusion that children possessed that which must be retrieved—a communion with the environment that coded nostalgic yearning in face of an uncertain future.

CHAPTER 3

W RI T I N G T H E L A N G UAG E O F T H E C H I LD - H E ART

A S W E S AW in the previous chapters, the emergence of the child as a cultural phenomenon in 1920s Korea owed first to the spotlight thrown on youth in relation to discourses of national development and modernity, and subsequently to the confluence of factors such as social activism, Japanese children’s culture, and the circulation of pedagogical and psychological information about children. Their emotional and intellectual distinction was embodied by the concept of tongsim, or the child-heart. This distinctiveness demanded appropriate form and content that converged largely around emotional education that guided many of the texts and illustrations of the 1920s. What had not yet taken place was the kind of widespread literacy that would make engagement with text possible for all people regardless of gender, of social class, and whether they lived in the cities or the countryside. The problem of literacy was a complex one, and involved the resolution of several challenges. These included the traditional gap between spoken and written language, known as ŏnmun ilch’i and described as a “diglossic” linguistic ecology of vernacular Korean and Literary Sinitic; encounters with the foreign languages of Japan and the West and the ensuing discourses of modernization of language; and, with colonization, a negotiation of what Daniel Pieper describes as the interactive and competitive relationship between Korean and Japanese, nascent modern literary writing styles, translation and retranslation, and dictionary compilation.1 Those writing for (mostly illiterate) children in the 1920s

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had to invent the writing craft from the ground up. Writers and poets had to create, for the first time, texts that would respond to children’s linguistic and affective needs. Put simply, how was one to write the language of the ­tongsim, the child-heart? The invention of a written language for children emerged in the broader context of language debates that had been raging in the peninsula since the late nineteenth century. In face of the tumultuous political and social transitions, the undeveloped state of the Korean language and literature was identified as one of the sources of the nation’s ills. Two issues were of particular concern: the gap or “mismatch” between the spoken and written languages, and the perceived inability of literature to capture the collective spirit of the people. Both issues were central also to the debates on the language of literature for children. This is because children’s access to Korean took place mostly through speech, as the Korean language, which was available in the curriculum only to a small minority of children before 1910, soon atrophied in schools under colonial rule. Writing for children, then, had to engage with the aforementioned issues (the gap between spoken and written, imperative to reflect Korean spirit), but it had to do so with consideration of the child-heart and the importance of emotional education. To better understand how children’s writers intervened in the language debates of the time, a brief description of some of the central issues is warranted. The aspiration to close the gap between the spoken and written language was captured by the slogan ŏnmun ilch’i, or “the reconciliation of spoken and written language,” a movement inspired by the earlier one in Japan known as genbun itchi. In Japan, efforts to unify speech and writing privileged a vernacular style that would “produce a modern idiom that more closely approximated everyday speech,” a style that was a major feature of Meiji culture and literature, which reformers viewed as playing a role not only in the creation of modern Japanese literature, but also of the modern Japanese nation.2 ­Korea’s growing concern over the reconciliation of the gaps between writing and speech came at a time of encroaching imperialism and the imminent loss of political power, making language all the more important to national identity.3 Growing, too, was the hope that a more accessible written language would play a democratizing, empowering role in Korea’s stratified society and among its largely illiterate masses. The drive toward modern values of enlightenment had ushered in an expectation that written language would become accessible to the masses and capture the voice of the people. In debating how writing might best convey

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knowledge and emotion, every aspect—genre, content, orthography, grammar—came under scrutiny. In the early 1920s, two writers in particular, Yi Kwang-su and Kim Tong-in, made important contributions to the language debates that had lasting impact on the development of fiction. Yi is credited for having redefined the concept of literature from a form of scholarship to an aesthetic engagement that served “as a means of . . . finding a way into humanity and the world through the poetic formation of the national self.”4 He also articulated the importance of literature for its unique potential to access human emotion. Kim Tong-in, for his part, introduced “distancing techniques” through his deployment of the -ta verb endings and the third-person pronoun kŭ, both of which made it possible to cordon off an interior space that was at once private and at the same time a conduit of universal experience.5 Two main concerns of Yi Kwang-su are of interest here: his concern with form—the way that narrative language was organized and structured—and its function—the kind of work that literature must do, the traces it leaves on the psyche and emotions. We have already seen his concern in “On the Centrality of Children” with the detrimental influence of Confucian customs and the use of sinographs. He lamented, “Koreans still admire the Chinese script and Chinese classics without trying to escape from Chinese influence. . . . The old habits persist: some still insist on using this esoteric script, composing their literature by adhering to Chinese styles and forms.”6 This attitude was not unique to Yi; the decentering of China following its humiliating defeat by the Japanese in 1895 initiated a departure from the use of sinographs in favor of a mix of the two, known as kukhanmunch’e.7 The dynamic and dramatic negotiations around language, literary style, and spelling are beyond the scope of this chapter, but the point is that broader global and cultural shifts brought about competing ideas for writing reforms aimed at arriving at a standardized written language with the goal of being both easier to teach and better at approximating the spoken language—necessary for any independent nation that embraced its traditions. In the words of Chu Si-gyŏng, “the prosperity and decline of a nation lies in the prosperity and decline of its language, and the very question of the existence of nation lies in the existence of a language.”8 For Yi Kwang-su, however, the problem with the use of Literary Sinitic and sinographs was not just a matter of favoring the foreign over the indigenous, nor merely of the technical difficulties that were inhibiting literacy and devel-

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opment more broadly. The problem, as he articulated it, was the obstruction by Confucian morality of true, spontaneous emotion. He addressed his concern about this in his essay “What Is Literature?” We should use our living modern language when describing contemporary ­reality. . . . We do not need to strain ourselves finding Chinese words to express our feelings: we should just write them down as they come out of our mouths. . . . I am very happy to see that han’gŭl is more widely used in the Korean language and literature than ever before. Yet, I hope to see our literary language grow even further so that it can develop diverse styles. . . . New literature must be written in the purely contemporary everyday vernacular, which can be understood and used by anyone.9

Yi’s “What Is Literature?” came with both a question and an answer. Yi’s intervention began with the statement that literature was difficult to define because “its scope is vast and its boundaries are limitless.”10 Then he proceeds in his essay to do just that: to define the scope of literature and the features that differentiate it from nonfiction, both in style and function. Yi argues that literature causes its readers not just to think differently but to experience the world in an emotionally different way. Emotion is at the center of his argument, for, in his words, “only written expressions of human emotions and thoughts can be considered literature. . . . In literature, we do not study things; rather we feel them.”11 Yi argued that the kind of emotion that literature stirred up was both authentic and moral: it had the power to lead the reader to discover beauty and make readers more compassionate.12 But it was only possible to capture and convey emotion if there was language to do so. As Kwŏn Podŭrae points out, verb endings with a retrospective function, such as -tŏra, that were used in the New Fiction genre of the 1900s, positioned the narrator as an omniscient spokesperson of collective wisdom, thus collapsing the distance between narrator and characters and depriving time of its intrinsic value.13 In 1919, Kim Tong-in used the -ta verb ending for the first time as a replacement for the retrospective -tŏra which, in his words, could not possibly “express the keen psyche and emotion of the modern man.”14 Kim Tong-in’s -ta ending, in Kwŏn Podŭrae’s analysis, facilitated the creation of an insulated interiority that spoke to an audience to which it had no access.15 It also allowed the narrator to mediate the characters’ dialogue, as well as facilitated the insertion of the past and future tense that granted the narrative both texture and dimensionality that it lacked with the fairly transparent retrospec-

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tive -tŏra forms.16 Aside from standardizing the use of -ta, Kim T ­ ong-in’s use of the third-person pronoun kŭ for the central characters in his fiction created yet another layer of separation between the narrator and his subject that heralded the arrival of modern fiction. Kwŏn Podŭrae argues that if the reconciliation of the spoken and written was the goal, then the use of the verb ending -ta should never have been accepted, for this was not a spoken form. At the same time, Kwŏn demonstrates that the adoption of -ta cannot be merely ascribed to the imitation of Japanese, since Japanese fiction used a number of grammatical forms that were not adopted. The verb ending -ta was adopted because it proved to be the best way to express interiority in a way that spoke both to the personal and the universal.17 The changes to the written language came at the expense of Literary Sinitic, and can be appreciated through the view of the translator and Canadian missionary James Scarth Gale, who attempted to save “beautiful, idiomatic Korean . . . from newfangled trends in Korean literary style based on what [he] considered to be mindless imitation of foreign (especially Japanese) models.”18 It is within the context of these debates about the standardization of expression and the requirement that literature capture true emotion and modern structures of feeling that we can better understand how language for children came under scrutiny. Two writers who engaged with the question of language reform as it pertains to non-adult readers were Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Pang Chŏng-hwan. As noted in Chapter 1, Ch’oe was the first to shift his attention to a non-adult audience. He was the first to channel ideas about the role of non-adult Koreans in the political and cultural life of Korea through flagship periodicals like Sonyŏn and Aidŭlboi. And one of the ways in which Ch’oe developed a written language for young readers was through the transcription and translation of folktales. Pang, by contrast, sought to create a new kind of children’s culture and literature that would offer children comfort and entertainment, but would also draw public attention to children’s issues. Pang retranslated many of the same folktales translated by Ch’oe and published them in Ŏrini. That Pang felt compelled to retranslate Ch’oe’s published folktales in a different style points to the divergence in Pang’s and Ch’oe’s philosophies of education as well as their perceptions of their audience. At the same time, their interest in folktale translation points to the role that this genre played in early children’s literature in the development of national identity and the development of a written language for children. For both Ch’oe and Pang, the tales of the Brothers Grimm were useful as narrative conduits of tradition and moder-

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nity at a time of nascent national identity and bourgeois culture.19 Folktales provided translators with a safe space within which to experiment with the public’s relationship to authority and commitment to community, as well as the formation of a nascent national identity without explicitly challenging the status quo. At the same time, as translators, Ch’oe and Pang developed a fairy tale language that created a seemingly timeless connection with the past through modern tropes of storytelling. Child-Friendly Language for the Young Reader Some time ago I traveled to the city of Hamhŭng in South Hamgyŏng. I stepped out of the station and witnessed a [Japanese] officer kicking and slapping a [Korean] farmer. I thought it might be typical here in the countryside, but turned to the person next to me for clarification. I was told that the farmer had beaten a child over a triviality. The excessive beating of the farmer in public seemed unjust, but it paled in comparison with the beating of an innocent child. Just then, three Japanese happened to pass by the station, and said, “These Koreans think only adults are human. They don’t think children are human at all. . . . When children are in the presence of adults and dare to show some spunk, they’ll be called names like yonom, ŏrin nomi, or yonom chogŭmahan nomi, or yo—mŏri e p’i to marŭji anihan nomi and say, “how dare you speak to adults this way?”. . . . It crushes their spirit. Kim So-ch’un, “Changyu yusŏ ŭi malp’ye,” 1920

In his essay, “The End of Age-based Hierarchy: In Praise of the Liberation of Boys and Girls,” Kim So-ch’un stumbles upon a disturbing scene: a humiliating public beating of a Korean farmer by a Japanese officer. The feelings of resentment toward the Japanese aggressor, amplified by the power differential embedded in the colonial context, are overcome by an even greater resentment over the indecent beating of a child. Resentment turns into shame when the Japanese passersby make disparaging comments about Korean attitudes toward children. While the order of events is presented as (1) witnessing of the beating, (2) feeling that the beating is justified because the victim was a child, and (3) overhearing the Japanese criticism of “these Koreans,” the complexity of the situation is not hard to grasp. The beating of the Korean farmer by the Japanese police officer would be upsetting, but the criticism voiced by the Japanese is hu-

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miliation of a higher order: it is indicative of Korea’s backward culture, evident through the habitual mistreatment of children. The mistreatment of children was an issue addressed in public discourse in the early 1920s, and for which a solution was attempted through revisions of language. The social reform organization known as the Enlightenment Club (Kyemyŏng kurakpu) led a sociolinguistic campaign to use honorifics to and among children from 1921.20 In May 1921, the members challenged the way that second-person pronouns were being used to address children and suggested instead that polite language be adopted both toward and among children in order to inculcate mutual respect, a recommendation they made to the educational authorities.21 In a petition they submitted to the Bureau of Education (Hangmuguk), they proclaimed that the Enlightenment Club, represented by intellectuals from around the country, conducted research and found a strong need to encourage the use of polite language among children. Thereupon, on behalf of the Enlightenment Club, three individuals—Pak Sŭng-bin, Ko Wŏn, and Min Tae-sik—submitted a petition to the Bureau of Education a few days ago. As far as children’s education is concerned, the issue of how to use language is critical to the development of children’s intelligence and morality. The social customs of Chosŏn never permitted the use of polite language to children; children treat each other with vulgar and rough language, and adults treat children even worse. While one may attribute this practice to flaws in our social structure, it is also due to improper education. This important problem needs immediate resolution.22

Eunseon Kim argues that the goal of this “sociolinguistic campaign” was less to change attitudes toward children and more to instill cultural manners and civility in children within the broader ongoing project of enlightenment and modernization of structures of feeling.23 At the same time, the Enlightenment Club’s petition also indicates its members saw a direct connection between the politeness embedded in grammatical endings and children’s morality and emotional well-being. Polite endings were not just a matter of good manners, or of proper comportment—not just a problem of the tong, or body, of the child. They had direct implications for the heart, the sim. Folktale translations provide a lens through which to view the changing attitudes about language for children. As Heekyoung Cho argues, in early

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t­ wentieth-century Korea the division between writer and translator was much looser, and thus “a distinction between the original and the translated work was far less clear.”24 The implications are that translators not only took great liberties in their translations but in fact felt an imperative to play with the original and make it their own. Translations are instructive also because the presence of an original makes visible the choices of vocabulary, tone, and style. Ch’oe ­Nam-sŏn and Pang Chŏng-hwan both turned to the folktale genre as a productive site to develop their philosophies of literature and language for children. They engaged in the translation of foreign folktales as well as in the rewriting of Korean stories into contemporary language. As we will see, Ch’oe and Pang looked to the folktale not only for its entertainment value, but also for its potential to revive young people’s interest in their past, to preserve their colonized culture, and to convey modern knowledge. A Call for Folktales In October and November of 1913 Ch’oe Nam-sŏn put out a call for folktales titled “Collect Stories for Cash Prizes” in the young-reader magazine Aidŭlboi: All can agree that the stories of old were not only extremely entertaining but were also valuable for their educational value, and therefore we should lose no time in collecting these stories. Korea’s people of old had a rich imagination (ŭisa) and have left us many a good tale, but regrettably these have yet to be collected in one place and studied. This is lamentable, and I propose that we work with you, dear readers, to collect these stories that are spread throughout our country in a manner that will be both rewarding and fun. This will be a long-term project, and I will provide more with details in the next issue.25 Rules: – The stories must have been passed down only in Korea. You may not transcribe or translate folktales from other countries. – Avoid stories that are widely and commonly known. – The writing should be easy to read, the events clear, and be without unnecessary expressions.

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– Any length is fine. – There is no limit on how many stories can be submitted, or on the number of words. – As far as compensation is concerned, we will determine the value of the stories and pay between 20 and 50 chŏn. – Please mark your envelopes “story collection” (iyagi moŭm).26

This “call for folktales,” aimed at the readers of the magazine Aidŭlboi, encouraged young readers to connect with their communities and participate in the act of writing by recording stories in an easy-to-read, concise manner. The readers are addressed as “saranghanŭn yŏrŏbun,” or “Dear Readers,” indicating a sense of intimacy and respect. The stories’ intellectual value is alluded to, but they are described subjectively as entertaining (chaemi); the “unnecessary expressions” to be avoided are not spelled out. Although Ch’oe did not state this explicitly, one can assume that by “easy to read” he meant using the Korean script only rather than Literary Sinitic or mixed script. The call for submissions mobilizes its young readers to seek out stories, yet at the same time, it provides little objective detail (other than length and originality requirements) that might better guide their search. Further guidance was presumably provided by the stories that were published in the magazine starting from issue 5, which served as models for emulation.27 Ten years later, in August 1922, an announcement appeared in the popular general interest magazine Kaebyŏk. It was penned by Pang Chŏng-hwan, famous for his best-selling collection of ten translated folktales, Sarang ŭi sŏnmul (Gift of Love), published a month earlier.28 All nations are built on the foundations of their national character and their nation’s life; which, in turn, produces a nation’s own folk tradition, folk songs, children’s stories and children’s songs. The Americans and British have their own folktales and children’s songs; the Germans and French have theirs. These folktales, children’s stories, and songs form the foundation of national character and life, and energize and cultivate them. Consider the great contributions that the Tales of the Brothers Grimm made to the strength and courageous character of the German people . . . and you will reexperience the sublimity of folktales and myths. Ah, brethren! What do we have to show . . . the next generation? Because no one has paid heed, our folktales, our unique children’s stories and songs, have

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been buried on our watch; in our cities and in the countryside, the new generations know nothing and speak of nothing other than [Japanese tales]. Ah, brethren! We cannot let this continue. I feel this with all my heart; we must gather our strength and uncover tales that have been buried in every corner of the land for the sake of the revival of children’s literature, which is the source of our people’s spiritual character. It is for this purpose, for gathering the strength of our brethren from all over the country, that I propose and announce this collection contest.29

Pang’s call for folktales came on the heels of the 1919 March First movement, the exuberant pro-independence demonstrations that led to some relaxing of colonial policies and the beginning of what came to be known as the period of “cultural rule.”30 The context helps to explain why the importance of folktales as a means of capturing national character is so much more explicit than in Ch’oe’s call for folktales from a decade earlier. Pang thought fairy tales to be critical to the preservation of Korea’s colonized voice. He viewed Koreans’ lack of familiarity with their own folktales—especially given Korea’s rich storytelling tradition—as symbolic of the nation’s literal loss of sovereignty. The task of translating foreign folktales into Korean and of collecting Korea’s own tales, which had been begun by Ch’oe in 1913, can thus be understood as a longer struggle to both maintain a national identity in the face of colonial subjugation, as well as to develop the vernacular language and create a broad range of materials that would appeal and speak to a young audience. Getting readers to listen for stories with moral or symbolic significance was Ch’oe and Pang’s way of encouraging young people to think of storytelling as a conduit of transcendent wisdom. In the words of Chang Chŏng-hŭi, the transition from 1913 to 1922 was one from iyagi to t­onghwa: from “talk” to children’s stories.31 Yet this impassioned attention to fairy tales was not motivated by anticolonial sentiment alone. It was also informed by Japan’s own developing interest in fairy tales as a means of showcasing an authentic “folk” voice, as well as an effective tool for children’s moral and literacy education. Japanese writers began translating the Brothers Grimm in 1873, and their translations—some of which were based on the original German but most of which had been translated from English—served as the source texts for the Korean translators. Therefore, an examination of Korean translations of Grimms’ tales must consider how the Japanese source texts that fueled them were conduits of Japanese ideas of national identity and philosophies of literature and language, as well as tools

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of literacy and moral education. At the same time, these tales functioned as a means for Korean writers to jump-start their own storytelling traditions in modern form. Korea had a rich tradition of storytelling, of course, well before it was colonized by Japan in 1910. When the Grimms’ tales were introduced to Korea’s young readers, the folktale was perceived as both a modern narrative genre— modern in its ability to capture colloquial voices and modes of expression—and an authentic and indigenous narrative form that captured a true and timeless folk character. This perception was formed by its reception first in Japan. There, two literary figures were particularly influential in the development of the genre of folktales: Iwaya Sazanami (1870–1933) and Yanagita Kunio (1875– 1962). Iwaya spent two years in Germany and other European countries, where he gathered stories for his folktale collections; folktales served as his German language textbooks.32 Iwaya penned Japan’s first children’s story in 1891, and published the first volume of Japanese folktales in 1894. In 1895 he founded the children’s magazine Shōnen sekai, in which otogibanashi, or folktales, became a regular, generic feature.33 He also turned folktale reading into an oral performance for school children that regularly attracted audiences of five hundred to a thousand.34 Yanagita, for his part, played an important role in the repositioning of folktales as an important genre in Japan: he founded Japanese folklore studies and minzokugaku (native ethnology), and published a collection of short tales and local songs in his 1910 book Tōno monogatari (Tales of Tōno).35 Yanagita’s work contributed to a reconceptualization of Japanese culture: in his scholarship, he sought to expose the “deep structures of the culture of the common people as transmitted from antiquity.”36 Yanagita was hugely influential in his time, and his work would have been familiar to Korean intellectuals in Japan in the first few decades of the twentieth century.37 These two Japanese translators and folklorists had an immeasurable influence on Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Pang Chŏng-hwan, who saw the folktale genre as a medium to preserve an authentic Korean folk voice as well as an appropriate and desirable genre for young readers.38 Not only did Japan’s preoccupation with folktales predate Korea’s, but ­Japan’s own process of adapting Grimms’ tales for children also exerted an influence on the Koreans’ translations. In fact, from the start, the Grimm translations were intended for an adult audience, and not for children. They were purportedly faithful to the original and free of didactic editorial interference.39 Fukawa Gen’ichirō argues that only later, in 1873, did the translations appear as

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part of the new Meiji educational regimen. Fukawa finds that folktales that may have relied on the English source texts of Sargent’s Standard Third Reader (1859) and a reader by William Swinton, were translated in simple speech, designed to teach children how to read by taking out almost all the Sinitic characters, ­creating more white space on the page, increasing the size of the font, and including illustrations (some of which may have been plagiarized from the original English translations).40 Later translations of the Grimms’ tales also reflected the burgeoning nationalism of the Meiji era and the concern with reform and enlightenment of children’s behavior. Yoshito Takahashi notes that, for example, a version of “The Wolf and Seven Young Kids” published in September 1889 in the children’s magazine Shōkokumin (Young Citizen) was translated as a cautionary tale. It was altered to reflect the concern with morality (for example, by the removal of gruesome scenes) and promote a sense of national identity (by inserting Japanese elements and emphasizing the moral lesson of each tale) among young Japanese readers.41 Ericson notes the similarities between the historical moment in Japan and nineteenth-century German nationalism, and explains that “Meiji educators championed the morals and ethics embedded in retold folktales, while writers and publishers celebrated the popularity and effectiveness of the tales, stripped of the extraneous through countless retellings, conveying what they argued was the ‘essence’ of literature.”42 The 1916 Japanese translation of the Brothers Grimm, Gurimu otogibanashi (Grimms’ Tales), likely served as the source text for Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s and Pang Chŏng-hwan’s translations from the 1920s.43 In its introduction, the translator and compiler Nakajima Kotō explained that the forty-one tales were difficult to edit and compile because of ethical and nationalist considerations.44 This introduction is a reminder that the Japanese translations that Pang and Ch’oe were working with had already been interpreted by their translators, and had been adapted to suit the needs of a Japanese society that was undergoing its own creation of a modern national identity and an authentic folk voice. In 1922 Pang Chŏng-hwan published Sarang ŭi sŏnmul, a book of ten translated fairy tales.45 Pang did not reveal the source of his translations, but identified the tales by country of origin. Of the ten, two are Grimms’ tales: “Cham chanŭn wangnyŏ” (Briar Rose), and “Chŏndang kanŭn kil” (The Master Thief). This was not the first time that a Grimm tale translation was published in Korea,46 but it marked a turning point in the consumption of fairy tales because the publication of S­ arang ŭi sŏnmul had enjoyed unprecedented sales that demonstrated the broad interest in the folktale genre among Korean readers.47

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The publication of Sarang ŭi sŏnmul was followed by the simultaneous publications of Grimms’ tales in two magazines. In 1923, Pang Chŏng-hwan included several Grimm translations in the children’s magazine Ŏrini. In the same year, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn published his own translations of the Grimms’ tales in the magazine Tongmyŏng, adding to those he had published a decade earlier in Pulgŭn chyŏgori and Aidŭlboi. Though they published their stories in the same year of 1923, Pang and Ch’oe produced distinctly different translations because they followed divergent approaches to their materials, approaches they articulated in their essays on translation. I argue that the difference in their translations was a result of the varying perceptions they had of their audience. A comparison of the two provides a clue to their perception of the child-heart and its application to the writing craft. The Grimms’ tales proved to be just the right kind of materials to promote the development of a literature and language for young readers. The Grimms’ Tales in Korea The launching of Tongmyŏng (Light of the East) in September 1922, announced triumphantly on 24 August 1922 in the newspaper Tonga ilbo, was preceded by great anticipation: an editorial on 8 June 1922 noted that permission had been granted, with no date set, and two months later on August 19 a columnist noted that, amidst the struggle against censorship and strict publishing laws, Tongmyŏng, with Ch’oe Nam-sŏn at its helm, could be expected to make great strides in illuminating the political, economic, artistic, scientific, and religious life of Koreans.48 Tongmyŏng was finally published starting in September 1922 and thereafter appeared on a weekly basis until June 1923. Its editors and contributors included some of colonial Korea’s canonical writers such as Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, Yŏm Sang-sŏp, and Hyŏn Chin-gŏn. Ch’oe Nam-sŏn set the tone from the very first essay of the first issue, in “Mosaek esŏ palgyŏn kkaji: Chosŏn minsiron” (From Search to Discovery: On Chosŏn Nationalism).49 Written in the form of a letter, Ch’oe declares that discerning the Chosŏn national character (minsi) was the most pressing of issues, and calls for an awakening and reclaiming of the national spirit. As Yi Hŭi-jŏng observes, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and the other contributors used Tongmyŏng as a platform from which to criticize Japanese imperialism while disseminating knowledge about new ideological trends in the West and providing an organized narrative of Korean history. The magazines also paved the way for the newspaper Tonga ilbo’s broad range of

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family-friendly topics.50 Tongmyŏng’s contribution, and that which makes it important to the discussion in this book, is that it recognized both women and children as potential readers and consumers of culture. A second contribution is the manner in which Tongmyŏng made translations in general, and folktale translations in particular, a regular feature of the magazine. As a part of its civilizing mission, each issue of Tongmyŏng included literary translations of, for example, the work of Anton Chekhov, Jack London, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. From 14 January 1923 onwards, each issue also contained a Grimm tale in translation, fifteen tales in all. While the translator of the tales was not credited, the scholarly consensus is that they were the work of the editor, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, working from the Japanese source text Gurimu otogibanashi from 1916.51 Ch’oe’s translations in Tongmyŏng balanced the otherwise dense prose offerings of the magazine, reflecting the attempt on the part of the editors to provide reading materials for everyone in the family.52 In its breadth of content and in its attempt to appeal to multiple constituents in ­Korean society, Tongmyŏng stood firmly within the overarching trajectory of Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s oeuvre and his tireless advocacy for education and reform of Korean minds, young and old. Incidentally, this was not the first time Ch’oe translated and published Grimm folktales. Ch’oe Nam-sŏn had begun to develop a folktale language for younger readers almost ten years earlier, in his his young-reader magazines Pulgŭn chyŏgori and Aidŭlboi. This involved a move away from kukhanmun to an increasingly consistent use of the Korean vernacular script. It also involved using a language that, in the words of Kim Yong-hŭi, was more conscious of its literary q ­ ualities.53 Ch’oe also used the formal polite ending -ssŭmnida, normally reserved for speech uttered toward persons of elevated status.54 By addressing children politely, the narrative elevated them to a status they had not previously enjoyed. At the same time, Ch’oe’s style also revealed his affinity for classical literature, as exemplified by his deliberate use of the archaic -njŭk, -njira, and -oeda. These archaic expressions had somewhat of a patronizing tone because they created a layer of interpretation of the texts on behalf of the young reader rather than convey it in an intimate fashion. This tone was supplemented by Ch’oe’s own interjections, such as in the epilogue “Food for Thought” to his translation of the Brothers Grimm tale “The Four Skillful Brothers”: “Every person has something at which they excel and something they do not do well. . . . So each

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must discover his talents and make a single-minded effort to develop them, and I promise that the results will be beautiful.”55 Ch’oe Namsŏn’s translations were shaped by enlightenment discourses that considered the past as an obstacle to a meaningful future. He acknowledged that there were inherent inequalities in the world, but he expressed complete confidence in the individual’s ability to achieve excellence by sheer effort. As he explains in his essay “Grit,” the world was composed of people of all backgrounds and abilities, but what makes people useless or successful is the amount of their investment.56 “Grit,” he continued, “is what will make things happen and make you excel. No one can boast of their achievements without having worked hard.”57 Ch’oe’s concern was less to entertain children and more to encourage them to cultivate values that would serve their communities: good behavior, diligence, patience, and toil as a means of self-cultivation. Kwŏn Hyŏk-chun argues that Aidŭlboi must be reevaluated as the true cradle of children’s literature and Ch’oe Nam-sŏn its pioneer, because of the magazine’s language (syntax and orthography) and content (Ch’oe’s attempt at including a diverse and entertaining content). Kwŏn acknowledges that the anonymity of the contributors is a structural weakness of the magazine, but attributes that to the general limitations of the writing profession of the times.58 While I acknowledge Ch’oe’s orthographic shifts as well as changes in speech level endings that gestured toward an accommodation of children’s affective needs, the overall content of the magazine does not demonstrate a decisive break with more heavy-handed and didactic narratives of the past. A comparison of Ch’oe’s later translations with his Japanese source text reveals his working principles more clearly. In his translations, Ch’oe tampered with certain details to make the texts more readable and palatable to Korean readers. In certain stories, the characters’ German (or their Japanese equivalent) names are replaced by Korean ones. For example, Cinderella is Kyŏnghŭi who rides a horse-drawn carriage through the main streets of the capital. 59 Red Cap goes to visit her grandmother who lives not alone—for this would offend Korean sensibilities—but with Red Cap’s uncle.60 The seven kids, in their escape from the wolf, hide behind furniture one would typically find in a Korean home: the youngest hides behind a folding screen (pyŏngp’ung) and not behind the clock as in the original German and the Japanese translation.61 The Bremen musicians call each other by Korean titles such as Yŏboge! Ku Sŏbang! .62 The manner in which the folktale characters addressed each

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other—e.g., “Mun yŏrŏ chushyu, mangnae kongjunim!” (Open the door, oh Princess!), is of an aural quality that Hŏ Chae-yŏng finds was unique to folktales during the period of debate over the written and spoken language.63 Ch’oe adjusted the translations to the expectations of his audience not only with respect to proper nouns, but he also adapted the overriding narrative, editing and expanding it as he saw fit. For example, he omitted from the “Frog King” the entire ending in which the bands around loyal Heinrich’s heart snap. Yet in the opening, Ch’oe inserted an addition, noting that the well underneath the old tree was narrow in circumference but deep beyond imagination, and that “from ancient times it is said that its water tumbles in from the sea.” The narrator goes on to explain that “from time to time the water from the well shoots up into the air” and “even on a hot summer day, the well seems like another world.” This offers an explanation of the fascination that the princess has with this well, and it gives readers extra details at which to marvel.64 Other than such embellishments, Ch’oe introduced in his 1923 translations expressions such as “long, long ago” ( yennal yetchŏk) or “they are still eating well, and living well” to the new arsenal of fairy tale language in the vernacular, when he once preferred to start with the more abrupt opening, “There once was a peasant.”65 One might argue that expressions such as “long, long ago” were literal translations of similar expressions in Japanese, but they established a folktale language in Korean that stuck. While Ch’oe remained generally faithful to his Japanese source text, he added to and subtracted from it to create a bridge between the foreign and familiar. Some scholars have condemned Ch’oe’s translation style, marked by long, descriptive, and detailed free prose, as a “fictionalization” of the original narrative.66 Yet Ch’oe was fully aware of the decisions he made as a translator, and he addressed these in his essay “The Domestication of Foreign Tales.” There, Ch’oe argues that all Korean stories, even those considered indigenous, have their roots in foreign tales. But they evolved when they came to Korea, and that explains his own approach to translation: original stories must be adapted and made readily accessible for the benefit of the reader: Stories are only entertaining when the objects described in them are familiar. It is only when they are suited to their national culture that stories are powerful and can enjoy longevity. That race and customs are different from one geographical location to the next is obvious; different, too are the mountains, streams, plants, and grass, as are the animals of the land and sea, so that when stories travel from

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one part of the world to another, they must be adapted (pyŏnt’ong). . . . As long as the basic narrative is not broken, there is a need to adapt stories so that their readers can recognize and understand them at first sight.67

This marks a shift in his approach compared to his 1913 “call for folktales” in Aidŭlboi noted earlier in which he warns that the stories submitted by readers must be verifiably Korean. By 1923, Ch’oe justifies his tampering with the narrative to better suit the reader’s national character by arguing that all stories have roots elsewhere, and that any story will inevitably fail to convey meaning if readers are unfamiliar with its basic elements. Ch’oe sees storytelling as contributing to national identity, and therefore it is not only the privilege but also the duty of a translator to imbue the text with Korean elements. As Kim Hwa-sŏn and An Mi-yŏng explain, his view was that no translation could take place without transformation, without a basic shifting of narrative to suit “national” tastes.68 Ch’oe was convinced of the transformational power of literature and fairy tales, and believed in them as educational vehicles that would further propel Korea toward modernity, provided they were suitably “nationalized.” Pang Cho˘ng-hwan and the Language of the Heart In the 1920s, bolstered by the new visibility of the child and emergence of discourses about the child-mind, the craft of writing, too, began to undergo scrutiny beyond discussions of speech levels. Writing at this time, Pang Chŏnghwan, who was ten years Ch’oe’s junior, embraced a different approach to writing. Deeply influenced by Ch’ŏndogyo and inspired by the vibrant children’s culture that he witnessed in Japan, Pang set out to write in a way that would lift children’s spirits. At the same time, he addressed issues of education, children’s rights, and children’s media. About the craft of writing, he elaborated: Tong means child. Hwa comes from the compound word for “tale.” So tonghwa is a child’s tale. That means that even if others read or listen to them, tonghwa must still be written for children. The first condition, then, is that the tonghwa be something that children know and understand. . . . Say you want to talk about how hot it is. Simply referencing the weather report and pronouncing the temperature is pointless. Children understand heat if you say that it is so hot that even if you jump in the water naked, it is still hot. Or, for example, if you say that the distance between Ŭiju and Pusan is three thousand li and therefore very far, that makes no impression. But if you say it takes a strong walker twenty nights

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and twenty days of walking from daybreak to sundown, then children will immediately understand the distance. . . . The most important component of a children’s tale is that it give its readers joy. . . . The educational value is third or fourth in importance, but joy is first. . . . Stories without educational value can still be children’s stories, but joyless educational tales cannot be children’s stories.69

Pang elaborates on several points in this section. He insists that children’s stories convey content familiar to children, what they “know.” This betrays an assumption of a shared knowledge or experience by all children, regardless of gender, age, and class. More importantly, the way that knowledge is conveyed—the way it is couched in language—is crucial to Pang. Length and detailed language, or “too much information,” can inhibit a child from enjoying or understanding a story, as can a lack of entertainment value and an overly didactic tone or message. This differs from Ch’oe’s goal-driven essays about knowledge as empowerment. What remains to be examined is how these different approaches to language and narrative were expressed in their translations. Other contributors in Ŏrini also weighed in on the craft of writing and articulated the connection between the child’s privileged emotive state and writing. Yu Chi-yŏng for example, wrote several essays on the craft of writing children’s songs.70 He lamented the absence of songs for children, blaming centuries of unacknowledged childhoods and selfish parenting bound by custom and tradition. He provides eight directives for writing appropriate children’s songs: 1. Songs must be written in pure colloquial language (they have to come straight out of your mouth). They should not be guided by the written or lettered (munja) style. 2. One must be able to sing and dance to them. 3. Their content needs to be readily understandable to children or adults. 4. Write them with the heart, actions, and character of the child in mind. They should not depart from the child’s world or contain senseless or forced expressions for the purpose of conveying intent. Avoid words that carry unpleasant sounds, images, or thoughts. 5. Write them in a fair-spoken manner without craftiness and in a spontaneous way that captures clear, pure, fresh, and steady emotion. Do not stimulate the child’s emotion through overt intellectualization.

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6. Avoid writing that can only be understood through calculations or scientific knowledge—they should be understood intuitively, with the emotion. 7. Do not let content and plot guide you; rather, allow yourself to be led by the energy of the heart (simgi). Do not ramble. 8. Children’s songs should be useful for the art education of children. There is no point if they are not beneficial or even harmful to children. Neither should they be tedious, violent, vain, or depart from the truth.71

The first item is particularly interesting in that language is assumed to have a spiritual quality to which children have access, which is to be jotted down in a manner that avoids the trappings of “written or lettered” style. This implies either clichéd expressions, sinographs, or more abstractly to a structure and order imposed by grammar that interferes with, rather than illuminates, spontaneous speech.72 This installment elaborated on the connection between writing and emotion. In the following installment, Yu explains that while the spirit of the heart, or simgi, is crucial, it cannot be forced; nor can one afford to simply wait for it. Simgi must be pursued in the natural world: by listening to birds sing on a warm spring day, or by deciphering the doleful cries of wild geese in late fall. Recall the cover of Ŏrini in Figure 8, which depicts a bare-bottomed child in communion with a flock of birds. Together, Yu’s essay and the magazine cover image indicate that the child’s language is less a tool of communication than a wavelength shared by child and nature. Such is the mindset that must drive the craft of writing. The same year that Ch’oe Nam-sŏn began publishing his series of Grimm translations, Pang Chŏng-hwan published five of his own translations in Ŏrini. These included “Hwanggŭm kŏu” (The Golden Goose), “Ilgop mari kkamagwi” (The Seven Ravens), “Yŏmso wa nŭktae” (The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids), “Chagŭn’i ŭi irhom” (Rumpelstiltskin), and “Kaeguri wangja” (The Frog King). Like Ch’oe, Pang took generous liberties with his source text, adding to, omitting from, and embellishing the narrative, and like Ch’oe he did not identify his stories as Grimm tales. In fact, Pang’s translations take such liberties that it is hard to discern exactly what source text he was using, although he may have used the same 1916 text that served Ch’oe Nam-sŏn (and he may have used Ch’oe’s translations as a source as well). Pang’s interest in and exposure to German culture followed him throughout his life. In an essay in one of the first issues of Ŏrini, titled “Those P ­ itiful Yet Frighteningly Well-Disciplined German Children,” Pang describes his

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impressions following a classroom visit. “There are few people like the Germans: healthy, robust, knowledgeable, yet also refined and full of love.” He remarks on their discipline, orderliness, enthusiasm, and the freedom with which they can move from one activity to the next. They play, dance, sing, draw, sculpt, and listen to stories. “Ah!” he cries at the end of his essay, “How can the future of these children, who grow up sturdy and free, be anything but happy?”73 Yet inspired as he may have been by German culture and its emphasis on strength and national identity, Pang’s main preoccupation in this period was the creation of a new kind of children’s literature. As an active promoter of children’s rights, he sought to make a break with the dry, didactic, and moralizing reading materials for children, and advocated the creation of a new space for children. Ŏrini was intended to entertain, and at the same time to call attention to children’s economic and social plight by depicting the child protagonists in its pages as resourceful yet pitiful, precocious yet endearing. Pang made a conscious break with the discourse of the Korean enlightenment by promoting literature that adhered to aesthetic expectations of the emerging child-heart. Pang’s approach to translation is reflected in the page layout and in his narrative voice. In comparison with Ch’oe’s dense prose and closely packed sentences, Pang’s page has ample white space in the margins and greater spacing between the sentences. The sentences themselves are shorter, and Pang employs far more indigenous Korean expressions and mimetic forms (ŭisŏngŏ-ŭit’aeŏ) as opposed to Sino-Korean vocabulary: the princess sobs (hulchŏk hulchŏk); the wolf snores (k’urŭrŭng k’urŭrŭng); the kids squirm in his belly (mungk’ul mungk’ul and pulluk pulluk). Another technique Pang used is rhythmic repetition: he rendered “deep” (kip’ŭn) as kiptŭi kip’ŭn, and pathetic (kuch’ahan) as kuch’ahadŭi kuch’ahan. He often included a long dash (—) that stood in for vowel length, thus reflecting the aural quality of the text in its orthography. Small, or chogŭman, was chok—koman; yellow, or noran, was nu—rŏn; and white, or hayan, was ha—yŏn. Pang’s translations bring out an aural quality that injects the narrative with life. Pang also keeps the rhymes in his translation of the wolf ’s dying elegy in “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids,” something Ch’oe ignored. Pang’s translations were meant to be read aloud, for the enjoyment of young ears as well as eyes and thus better connect with their hearts. Besides employing such musical narrative techniques to draw in his readers, Pang did something else that demonstrates his sensitivity to his young audience: he omitted less-than-appropriate content. For example, in the original

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“The Frog King” and its Japanese translations (as well as in Ch’oe’s), the princess hurls the frog against the wall with a violence that is immediately glossed over when the frog is transformed into a beautiful prince who explains that he was put under a spell from which only she could release him. The princess and frog are joined in marriage in adherence to her father’s wishes; they wake up in the morning together and set off to claim their kingdom. In Pang’s translation, the transformed prince first explains that the evil spell necessitated a princess’s brutal treatment of him, something that excuses her bad behavior. Instead of the ambiguous reference to the couple sharing a bed, Pang immediately marries off the two in a large wedding ceremony. Pang’s translation, made visible through a comparison with the original text, demonstrates that he was guided out of a desire to entertain but also to teach.74 Lastly, Pang was attentive to the power of language in determining its audience. “For five years now,” Pang wrote in 1927, “I have avoided using [impolite] forms of speech [toward servants and children] altogether.” For Pang, the use of informal language was a vestige of corrupt customs, and he felt it was wrong to use it with those who are younger or lower in social rank.75 He admits this does not come naturally, and that he often finds, alone in his effort to change the way people speak, that children themselves fail to recognize when they are being spoken to. In keeping with his philosophy, Pang’s narrative voice in his translations ended with the formal -ssŭmnida. Pang’s knack for musicality, his sensitivity age-appropriate content, and his insistence on demonstrating respect for his young readers were the methods of child-language reform that he put into practice. Language of the Heart, Language of the Nation The translations and essays by Pang Chŏng-hwan and Ch’oe Nam-sŏn attest to the critical relationship they perceived between storytelling and national identity. They viewed the act of storytelling as one of both social significance (it reinforced the national identity of the reader by celebrating sounds and images native to Korea) and literary significance (it enriched Korean narrative through the establishment of storytelling language and through the domestication of foreign tales). Interestingly, the domestication of foreign texts through translation, which both Pang and Ch’oe subscribed to in their work, was already underway in Japan. Judy Wakabayashi explains that translators domesticated unfamiliar imports in an attempt to accommodate readers’ perceived under-

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standing rather than as a form of resistance to foreign culture.76 She adds, “it was translations that offered models to writers of original works, rather than the reverse. . . . Translations opened up new vistas in terms of content, language and presentation in a process that continued long after the appearance of the first original works fitting the definition of modern children’s literature.”77 Both Pang and Ch’oe, who spent significant time in Japan working with scholars involved in translation and adaptation, would have no doubt been inspired by these trends. When reading Pang and Ch’oe’s translations, however, it is clear that there is more at play than their sensitivity to the formative role of language in enforcing Korean national identity under threat or in establishing modern literary tropes. Their translations reveal that they negotiated their interpretations with a keen awareness of the perceived needs of their audiences. Ch’oe’s subscription to Social Darwinist principles and belief in the superiority of modern (European) knowledge made his choice to translate the Grimms’ tales a natural one. And Pang’s translations were driven by his culturally informed ideas about what he believed was content- and language-appropriate for children. Giuliana Schiavi argues that the translator is the agent who “by interpreting the original text, by following certain norms, and by adopting specific strategies and methods” builds a new relationship between a translated text and its readers.78 Emer O’Sullivan points to the “audible” places in the text as those where the translator is trying to communicate.79 These moments, for example the sanitation of the content or the domestication of details, are exposed when the German and Japanese source texts are read alongside the Korean translations. O’Sullivan’s theorization can be further nuanced by drawing attention to the fact that in this case, the process of translation is mediated also by a power differential: the ideas that are being “reprocessed” about the individual and nation in the Grimms’ tales were filtered through the language of the colonial oppressor. This complicates her linear diagrams, and demands a more complex visualization of the transference of language and knowledge in translation. This question remains: why the Grimms? Some Korean scholars have already pointed to the nationalistic character of the texts, and have drawn on the similarities between the project of preserving national identity undertaken by the Brothers Grimm and their Korean counterparts working under colonial rule in the 1920s.80 It is tempting to think that for Pang and Ch’oe translation was a tool of resistance: the Korean translators used the colonial language (Japanese) as a foundation to build upon and strengthen a new and modern Korean

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literary language.81 However, Jack Zipes, Donald Haase, and Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, offer more theoretically complex views of the Brothers Grimm’s tales.82 They turn their attention to the manipulative power of the language of these tales and highlight their role in constructing tradition and modernity. Zipes argues that despite its apparent subversive potential as an allegory of overthrowing authority, oral storytelling was appropriated and converted into literary discourse with the deliberate purpose of socializing its adult and child readers. The Grimms’ tales ask of their readers to consider what one must do “to use one’s powers rightly in order to be accepted in society or re-create society in keeping with the norms of the status quo.”83 In this sense, folktales were less subversive and rather were commodities of the middle class. In Jack Zipes’s words, the tales were not only the “products of the struggles of the common people to make themselves heard in oral folktales [but also] literary products of the German bourgeois quest for identity and power.”84 It is perhaps this quality—the tale as a literary commodity—that appealed to Ch’oe Nam-sŏn as an advocate of modernity and a forerunner in the development of modern literature in Korea.85 At the same time, Bauman and Briggs explain that the Grimms engineered a language of fairy tales that tried to reveal that a “shared national voice had been there all along.”86 Haase, too, argues that “in becoming convincing ventriloquists for the folk, they not only created the enduring idea that folktales give direct expression to national identity, but they also created a fairy-tale language whose apparent artlessness, purity, and simplicity seemed completely transparent and facilitated the translation of their tales as universal stories.”87 This aspect—of linguistic engineering and the coinage of fairy tale tropes as universal language— corresponds too with Pang’s and Ch’oe’s translational approaches, and with their desire to create an illusion of the continuity in the midst of colonial rupture. Bauman and Briggs demonstrate that in the process of engineering their texts, the Grimms in fact severed “the indexical links that connected tradition to localities” so that texts could come to define a national and universal space. This universal quality, incidentally, is what granted the tales an intrinsic propensity for translation.88 And it was this universal quality that made the Grimm tales into such potential fodder for the translation and rediscovery of Korea’s own folktales. As Bauman and Briggs explain, folktales, epics, legends, and other folk texts are crucial to the construction of the status of a nation as a modern entity in order to “embody continuities with the traditional base that (in theory) preceded it.” They argue that “producing and consuming traditional texts became a crucial part of the process of imagining the nation and making it

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seem to be real, a natural phenomenon with deep historical roots.”89 Herein lies the attractive quality of Grimms’ tales to the Korean translators. Ten years after Korea’s humiliating absorption into the Japanese Empire, the Grimms’ tales offered translators a site from which to reclaim tradition—with the fairy tale language developed by the Grimms—and at the same time, forge a modern language that imitated colloquial styles and modern voices.90 In the skillful hands of the translators, the Korean “transcultural” folktale genre was reborn. In doing so, to borrow Haase’s words, the translation also produced something new: “a transcultural text that communicates more than the sum of its cultural parts.”91 If Pang’s first mission was to promote a new culture of childhood, Yŏm Hŭigyŏng argues that his second was to promote nationalist, anticolonial sentiment.92 In her analysis of Pang Chŏng-hwan’s translations collected in Sarang ŭi sŏnmul, Yŏm concludes that what drove Pang’s translations was his desire to convey to children a sense of national identity. She argues that some of the subtle ways he communicated messages of empowerment were in his table of contents. For example, a tale that is attributed to Sicily rather than Italy offers a slight tip of the hat to this struggling nation.93 In his “Collection Contest,” Pang is emphatic about the connection between the survival of Korean culture and its stories. However, an examination of Pang’s translations of the Grimms’ tales in Ŏrini yields little evidence to support the argument that they were explicitly nationalistic. To be fair, there were few public venues in which one could openly display national sentiment. One might argue that Pang’s choice of works was the message: “The Seven Ravens,” “The Golden Goose,” “The Frog King,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “The Wolf and Seven Young Kids” are all celebrations of an unlikely protagonist that overcomes a formidable challenge against great odds. But the nationalist sentiment was not the driving force of the folktale translations of the 1920s. Rather, Pang and others were concerned with describing and defining the contours of the child-mind, and with developing a language that would contribute to this project. Emotional education was critical to the child-mind, and could be carried out most effectively through illustrations and the language of prose and poetry. Folktales in particular were deemed compelling vehicles of both national and modern character. By building a strong, aural voice in his narratives that brought out nuances of character, description, and color, Pang was contributing to the establishment of a genre that he hoped would not only revive Korea’s own storytelling but also empower young readers.

CHAPTER 4

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“ F I S H B O N E S ” by Yi Chu-hong is the story of a young girl by the name of Sundŏk whose impoverished family is unraveling before her eyes. Her father has been struck with debilitating heartbreak since the death of her younger brother, and her mother is too ill to rise from bed. Sundŏk is the only working body in the household: she sweeps the streets for pennies, her pus-filled blisters serving as a testament to her Sisyphean labor. One day, the heartless landowner Rich Man Kim pays the poor family an unwelcome visit in order to squeeze them for rent. As a gesture of good faith, Sundŏk’s sick mother rises to serve their haughty guest an unimaginable delicacy of fried herring. The girl’s mouth salivates painfully—she is starving, and the sound of her parched swallows reverberate audibly in the bare room—but her mother reassures her that the guest will surely be so polite as to leave some scraps on his plate. When the dish returns with nothing but the gleaming bones of the fish carcass, Sundŏk pounces on it, shoves the bones into her mouth, and begins to choke. Violent coughing ensues, at which point her father, between frustrated sobs, begins to slap his daughter with displaced aggression. Pus and blood splatter on the walls as the young girl calls out, “Father! Father! It’s alright. It doesn’t hurt. Hit me again. Every time you hit me it gets better. Father! Father! It’s all my fault.”1 “Fish Bones” was one of many pieces of short fiction, nonfiction essays, and poetry published for young readers in leftist literary magazines Pyŏllara (Star World, 1926–1935) and Sinsonyŏn (New Youth, 1923–1934). Korea’s p ­ rominent

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leftist intellectuals, including Pak Se-yŏng, Im Hwa, Song Yŏng, and Yi Ki-yŏng, recognized the critical importance of children’s literature as a site of early intervention that would facilitate a correct understanding of capitalism’s exploitative economic and social structures. These writers invested in the development of literature for children by publishing prose and poetry alongside meditations on the craft of writing for young people. And much like its adult counterpart in Korean leftist literature, children’s literature also participated in the imperative to raise class consciousness by exposing the ever-prevalent exploitation and by turning children’s lived spaces—home, school, alleys, and factories—into symbolically rich spaces of physical and affective representation. Even the open sea, once the final frontier in Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s poems of adventurism and maritime conquest discussed in Chapter 1, was recast as a stage for class struggle. As the names of the prominent leftist writers suggest, Korean proletarian literature for children was both an organic part of the broader leftist cultural production in Korea and a part of an internationalist and cross-cultural body of work circulating in Asia and the West that reached from Germany to Japan and Korea.2 Progressive and countercultural, the leftist movement rejected individualism, criticized elitist tendencies of traditional and bourgeois culture, and insisted on an uncompromising materialist approach. In particular the New Tendency writers, who worked in the 1920s and were part of the emergence of Korean mass culture, focused on the materialization of the body as a political signifier and dramatized in fiction the way that embodied politics clarifies the impact of economic and material changes “not only on the restructuring of colonial developmental society, but also on its affective dimensions.”3 The writers associated with the New Tendency movement had a great deal to say about the representations the child-heart in Ŏrini, a journal they viewed as hopelessly bourgeois. Their critique focused on the concept of the child-heart in tandem with a similar trend among proletarian Japanese writers whose work, as Samuel Perry suggests, “helped to shift the subject of Japanese children’s culture away from a romantic idealization of childhood and onto the everyday experience of living children themselves.”4 In Japan, proletarian magazines like Youth Battle Flag (Shōnen senki), founded in 1929, addressed audiences in Japan, China, and Korea, and featured Korean poets as cultural ambassadors. Makimoto Kusurō (1898–1956), the Japanese writer of children’s fiction and poetry who published the very first proletarian book for children, published the poetry collection Akai hata (Red Flag, 1930) for children. This poetry collection carried the words P’ŭroret’aria

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(proletarian) and tongyojip (collected children’s songs) in Korean on its cover.5 The dimensions of the leftist children’s movement in Korea, then, were internationalist and transcultural from the start. What does this body of work offer us? What insights can proletarian children’s magazines present beyond those already available through abundant publications for adults? I argue that, for one thing, children’s literature was of utmost concern for leftist writers precisely because young people were among colonial Korea’s most vulnerable populations. Urbanization and industrialization were changing the physical landscape as families and individuals pursued new work opportunities. With widespread poverty and with few welfare structures in place, children of the working class, many not yet in their teens, often found themselves laboring in factories and fields or looking after younger siblings while their parents worked outside the home. For these children, the gap between some of the poetry and prose published in the early children’s magazines of the 1920s—if they even had access to such magazines—and the reality of their lives could not have seemed wider. Their stories needed to be told, too. As discussed in previous chapters, the child was identified in the early 1900s as crucial to the transformation of the nation. To intellectuals like Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Kwang-su, only youth were in the position to bring about the kind of radical change that was needed. And literature for young readers provided leftist writers an opportunity to lay bare the contours of exploitation, to “capture that which is incomprehensible and outside the symbolizable.” 6 At the same time, proletarian literature for children also prescribed the kind of behavior necessary to disrupt the structures of inequality. While doing so, it struck a painful nerve, as public concern over the well-being of Korea’s young people was growing. It was one thing to be shocked by descriptions of adult bodily excess and violation. When the body concerned was that of a child, this shock was amplified. Drawing on established conceptions of children as having a natural proclivity to do and be good, the challenge that faced proletarian writers was to demonstrate how this proclivity could be transformed into a natural ability to see inequality, to demand justice, and ultimately, to rebel. It was also a linguistic challenge since they had to figure out a way to address the child through content that had been corrupted by bourgeois views of the childheart and was therefore anathema to proletarian ideology. To do this, leftist writers mobilized children’s bodies in their fiction, and turned bodies into the

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sites of awakening. Children’s unique affective capacity demanded more than just an appeal to sentiment. The raising of political and social consciousness could only be achieved through description of physical violations, depiction of painful struggle, and deploying of language that remained colloquial and avoided the trap of romanticism. Shock replaced poignancy and energetic optimism swept away gentle compassion as these tales of suffering dramatized the transformation of children into natural rebels. Leftist Children’s Culture: Global and Local Working children were part of the global industrial landscape in the early twentieth century. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, developments in education, child psychology, and welfare institutions brought about the emergence of child-centered spaces and the insistence that children be treated as affectively and intellectually different. Yet despite the discovery of “priceless” children7 cherished now for their affective qualities rather than for their economic value, the majority of Korean children were fully immersed in the colonial everyday. They ran errands, carried tools, performed physical labor that contributed to the household economy, and looked after their siblings while their parents eked out a living. It is little surprise, then, that proletarian literature, whose main concern was a critique of capitalist modernity and the bringing together of politics and aesthetics, was deeply invested in literature for young readers. Korean leftist intellectuals, recognizing that children were among the most vulnerable populations and that they were workers-inthe-making, wrote children’s fiction, poetry, and essays on the craft of writing for children with the purpose of instigating an early awakening of class consciousness. K ­ orean leftist magazines addressed the concerns of colonial Korean children, and they did so within a leftist cultural critique that began to develop from the mid-1910s.8 This is not to say that leftist cultural production for children emerged in a vacuum. On the contrary, it developed as a part of a transnational and cross-cultural conversation in Asia and the West that took a keen interest in children’s literature. Korean intellectuals read and even published in Japanese leftist children’s magazines which, as Samuel Perry demonstrates, were themselves attuned to transnational concerns.9 Korean writers sought to cultivate an international awareness of proletarian children by reporting on developments in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Japan. But just as Japanese

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proletarian writers translated leftist culture into their own cultural practices, Korean ­writers addressed concerns that were unique to their colonial condition. Always aware of the censorship apparatus, their challenge was to write in a way that engaged with the material conditions facing young people in Korea resulting from the loss of national sovereignty and capitalist exploitation.10 But they had to go a step further. Leftist culture had already developed into a compelling critique of capitalist modernity, and children often appeared in adult fiction. What writers needed to do was address this young audience directly. To do so, they developed views on how the craft of writing could best meet the child’s physical and spiritual needs. Ultimately, they drew on the prevalent concept of the child-heart to respond to inequality in the only manner they deemed appropriate: with fists clenched in fury. What were the global and local contours of the leftist movement that informed writing for children in Korea? Japanese proletarian magazines for children are particularly instructive, since they were actively engaged in broadening the horizon of their Japanese readers by informing them of the conditions of working-class children around the world. Japanese proletarian magazines for children were internationalist, anti-imperialist, antiwar, and sensitive to how the exploitative environment was distorting the futures of poor children. But of course, what motivated the leftist production in Japan was less imperialist expansion and more a concern with domestic challenges. Proletarian children’s culture was at the “forefront of liberal and scientific efforts to educate and protect children in Japan to empower them to become agents of their own transformation, and to secure an institutional framework to promote their healthy development.”11 But by turning their gaze outward, Japanese proletarian writers prepared the foundation for a “multiculturalism in Japanese children’s literature,” and at the same time “made an effort to socialize children into a community that extended well beyond the borders of the Japanese nation.”12 And it was this multiculturalist trend that threatened the Japanese authoritarian educational system. Take for example a poem from Shōnen senki, published in Japanese in celebration of Korean Children’s Day, which addresses an “international brotherhood” of children battling exploitation and discrimination: For Children’s Day, let us shout and protest the capitalist landowners: The future is ours. Do not exploit children. Do not collect primary school tuition. Make school supplies free.

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Do not assign children dangerous tasks. Put an end to night shifts for children. Worker children of the world, weak children of the world, unite!13

Shōnen senki editorials and letters stressed the need to “hold hands with our brothers from Chosŏn and China,” and that “the only way to put Korea back on its feet is to grasp the hands of Japanese workers and farmers and join in their struggle.”14 This and other publications in Shōnen senki made an impression on intellectuals and activists in Korea. One of Makimoto’s poems translated by Im Hwa, who studied in Japan for a year in 1931, describes the abject poverty of a family from the perspective of children who, through hunger and cold, stare at falling snow and imagine how content they might have been had the snow been rice or cotton.15 Makimoto’s endorsement of Im’s translation, calling it a “fine translation by the colonial poet,” attests to the transnational vision of leftist writers and their shared investment in children’s literature.16 Korean children’s magazines also reflected a growing awareness of, and investment in, an international community of children. But the kind of community the leftist magazines were interested in was deliberately different from the kind of imagined community of childhood that the magazine Ŏrini worked to build. The two leftist magazines, Sinsonyŏn and Pyŏllara, turned their young readers’ attention to the condition of children in Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States.17 For example, in “America’s Young Pioneers,” Kwŏn Hwan condemned non-proletarian fiction as elitist and exploitative.18 He questioned the reputation of the United States, arguing that its wealth was generated by large factories with unhappy workers who raise underprivileged children. These children were being forced to attend vocational schools and were then absorbed into the labor force while the children of the rich enjoy storytime in church. “Russian Factories,” by Ku Chin-hŭi, explained that the Soviet Union is the only country in the world that operates for the benefit its workers. He praised the five-year plan that brought impressive surpluses in harvests. He then described a factory in Stalingrad, which, aside from its productivity, had decent working hours and proper breaks for its workers. With great admiration, Ku spoke of the various construction and automobile industries that were under development in the Soviet Union.19 Thus, from their inception, leftist children’s magazines in Korea directed their gaze outward and encouraged Korea’s young readers to see themselves as participants in a larger struggle waged by working-class children from around the globe. In turn, these leftist magazines enjoyed an international outreach: by 1932 Pyŏllara had over

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ten thousand readers in Manchuria, Japan, the United States, and Cuba.20 The magazine’s editors encouraged the formation of an “international Marxist” children’s union that, as Jin-kyung Lee explains, imagined a “utopian space where ethnonational boundaries will already have been dissolved,” which was also a framework for writers to address issues of racial hierarchy in relation to class and colonial capitalism.21 Proletarian children’s literature in Korea took part in the broader transnational conversation on the effect of capitalist modernity on the children of the working class both by referencing these global struggles in magazines and by reaching out to readers beyond Korea’s borders. At the same time, proletarian children’s literature in Korea emerged within a mature leftist cultural movement. While the leftist movement has traditionally been narrowly viewed through the activities of the Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio (KAPF), formed in 1925 out of earlier leftist organizations, Sunyoung Park demonstrates that what she terms the “proletarian wave” was much broader: rather than being a single organized or institutionalized movement that was coherent and cohesive, it was “both a propeller and a catalyst” for debate among its constituents that sometimes held convergent and incompatible views.22 The proletarian wave contributed to expressions of “proletarian sensibilities” that appeared in print and visual texts from the 1920s. They disrupted narrative ontologies in the projects of modernity and “signaled a break with the Korean enlightenment invocation to step into the version of ‘modern’ history associated broadly with such notions as nation, sovereignty, and capitalist accumulation.”23 Bolstered by leftist youth organizations and a growing representation in leftist children’s magazines, newspaper articles, and plays, the proletarian movement sought to offer an alternative representation that countered the seemingly elitist and decadent sensibilities of the mainstream.24 And it sought to do so not only through adult-oriented fiction, in which the figure of the child frequently appeared, but also by addressing a young audience in their own register. Sinsonyŏn and, most notably, Pyŏllara, carried the voices of many of ­Korea’s prominent leftist writers. Sinsonyŏn (1923–1934) was edited by linguist Sim Myŏng-gyun and included contributions by educators, language scholars, and writers like Yi Chu-hong (author of “Fish Bones”). Pyŏllara (1926–1935) was edited by prominent leftists, including Song Yŏng, Im Hwa, and Pak Se-yŏng.25 By the 1930s, both Sinsonyŏn and Pyŏllara increasingly featured writers who targeted the disenfranchised and disadvantaged children of colonized Korea. The

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magazines contained creative writing (fiction, poetry, plays), illustrations and comic strips, nonfiction essays (on science, social science, history, and travel), translations, and musical scores. Never descending to pure entertainment for its own sake, the magazines worked to develop class consciousness in their young readers by depicting the evils of capitalist exploitation, hardships of workers and farmers, debilitating poverty, and suffering of children too poor to attend school. The leftists considered the idea of a utopian child space, so crucial to the emergence of children’s culture in the early 1920s, an unaffordable luxury because it was an experience shared by few and because it obfuscated economic and social relations. While child characters frequently appeared in adult leftist fiction as colonial capitalism’s most vulnerable victims, writers in Sinsonyŏn and Pyŏllara wanted to address children directly through literature dedicated to them and in a language that would both reflect and anticipate the everyday experiences of “real” children. They wished to register the inequalities inherent in the social and economic system and awaken their readers. It is within this leftist culture with both global and local contours that the craft of writing for children came under scrutiny. Writing for Proletarian Children When leftist writers picked up their pens to write for young readers, they were writing against a set of preconceived notions about their audience, as well as with stylistic conventions that had been part of the textual and visual landscape for children since the early 1920s. Specifically, they were working with the perceived needs of a young audience for content that they deemed close to their hearts and close to nature; for textual language that suited children’s intellectual and emotional development; and for material that celebrated childhood and thereby protected and cultivated children. Leftist writers considered children’s literature as an ideal educational and socializing tool that could break the illusion of bourgeois culture, which kept its mechanisms of exploitation and power hidden. Literature was ideal because it could capture the imagination of its impressionable, young audience and offer it alternative models through different forms, language, and imagery that worked with assumptions about children’s moral superiority and their ability to identify, call out, and resist exploitation. These stylistic conventions were held together by a notion embraced by ­Korea’s intellectuals across the entire political spectrum: children’s affect was

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qualitatively different from that of adults, and recognizing and writing for this child affect was the goal of children’s literature. This was true especially for leftist writers, who repeatedly appealed to children’s bodies as sites where the stakes were highest. For them, affect was what set young people apart and enabled a connection between content and form. Most importantly for leftist writers, affect, when gotten right, could trigger the kind of transformation needed for the revolution. Affect was a timeless emotive mechanism created through the fusing of the biological and social. Leftist writers described the scope of the child affect through language derived from physical science, architecture, and developmental psychology, and they aspired to mimic it through sound and image. In keeping with the theoretical underpinning of leftist writing, children’s writers insisted on reality as the only legitimate source for creative materials, and accused bourgeois writers of obfuscating the relationship between social conditions and individual experiences. Yet, despite their dismissal of bourgeois writers and magazines, leftist writers shared many of the same assumptions regarding child affect. In particular, they both believed in children’s innate ability to perceive truth and their natural sense of justice. And for leftist writers, the child’s body was the physical manifestation of affect: it was the site of suffering that made psychic agony visible but also made liberation possible. For leftist writers, children’s literature was above all a tool of political education and socialization. In the 1920s, the “crisis of access to schooling” (­iphangnan) was discussed fervently in the mainstream papers and attributed to the “policies and practices of the colonial regime.”26 For example, Kyung Moon Hwang points out that “a series of exposés” published by the Tonga ilbo found “that the spending for Japanese schools and pupils far outpaced that for their Korean counterparts but that the authorities were effectively robbing the Koreans by directing a far greater share of the tax revenue toward Japanese schools.”27 Popular magazines hoped to reach an audience unable to attend school, recognizing the potential of print culture to disseminate knowledge about the world. Editors and writers with a leftist agenda sought to convey to children an understanding of the world around them in Marxist terms and, on the most fundamental level, sought to make them recognize the exploitation taking place around them and better understand its underlying mechanisms. Essays such as “Explaining the Monthly Wage” and “Landowners and Tenants,” both by Song Yŏng,28 defined fundamental Marxist concepts (wages, labor, means of production, exploitation) within a social and historical context that

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demonstrated their urgency and relevance to the present moment. Other essays, like Kim Pyŏng-ho’s on the society of bees, exhibit the transnational character of these issues: for example, the interest in bees was featured in the work of one of the most prominent figures of Bolshevik feminism, Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952).29 So long as children’s literature provided a true reflection of reality, Kim U-ch’ŏl argued in 1933, it was as important to the field of literature as “peasant fiction” or “fellow traveler fiction.”30 Biographies were deemed educational because they offered role models that replaced the past heroes of bourgeois culture. For example, in “Who Is Marx?” Pak Yŏng-hŭi explains that “Marx must enter your hearts like a beacon of light. . . . He must not leave even for a moment.” Pak calls upon readers to reflect on the world around them, and to think of the oppressed and exploited workers who cannot, even after a full day’s work, enjoy a decent meal. He explains that Marx saw through hypocrisy and that he deepened his understanding of the exploited by experiencing their life on his own skin.31 Such biographies served as a way for leftist writers to provide a counter-narrative to the many biographies published in the magazine Sonyŏn two decades earlier, such as those of Napoleon and Bismarck, who, as Song Yŏng says in “On Heroes,” are no longer to be admired.32 Fiction was mobilized to educate and socialize, albeit in a less direct manner. Guided by the realist imperative to bring together form and content, and to converge the social and the aesthetic, leftist children’s fiction could be both gritty and moralizing. “Fish Bones,” the story mentioned at the opening of the chapter, is an example of fiction that exposes rather than spells out the exploitation and inequality that is the source of the family’s misery. It does so by literally staging the confrontation between the exploitative landowner and Sundŏk’s pathetic father outside of the frame but within earshot, so that the reader overhears the charged dialogue in real time, with Sundŏk, behind closed doors: Sundŏk’s father prepared the seating cushion for Rich Man Kim and groveled before him. “Idiot!” Rich Man Kim’s blue tendons bulged in his neck. “If you hated farming you should never have tried it. Fool, you destroyed my precious land. What am I supposed to do?” “I’m so sorry . . . I did get an early start, but we’ve had setbacks . . .” Her father’s dejected voice trailed off in the far corner. Listening to the two men from the next room, Sundŏk could imagine their movements and felt a

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searing jolt of pain. Her blood ran cold, her chest tightened, and her cheeks were streaked with tears. It wasn’t only because this man, younger than her father by at least five years, was talking down to him. It was also that at this moment her venerable father, a man so lofty and grand, seemed shockingly diminished. She was so angry and bitter she wanted to dig into the flesh of her own breast.33

Sundŏk’s father’s subservience and deferential tone causes his daughter, left to visualize this scene in the next room, to become angry to the point of selfmutilation. Rather than explain the system behind the exploitation, the story provides a snapshot of a poor family destined for tragedy. It begins with debilitating poverty that has cost the life of their precious infant boy and ends with the blood and pus of the girl’s wounds splattering on the walls of the house. The story demands that the reader consider the origins of this misery. Her wounds burst because her father slaps her on the back and shoulders to try to clear her throat of the bones she has swallowed—bones left by the heartless landowner, who was not satisfied with bleeding the family of its meager assets but had to indulge in hard-earned delicacies off their table. But the roots of the problem run deeper, as the names of the characters seem to imply. Kim Puja, “Rich Man Kim,” is the only character that is named other than the child Sundŏk, which means “Pure Virtue.” The characters are staged as archetypes that lend the story an allegorical significance, and which then leads the reader to understand the broader economic and social problems plaguing society. Even fiction written for the seemingly straightforward purpose of advancing literacy, like the series “Early Reader,” printed in large fonts in the vernacular script, had a strong leftist agenda. Of these, Yi Tong-gyu’s two-page story describes sixteen-year-old Kŭmnye laboring at a rich woman’s house where she cooks and cleans in exchange for a pittance. When Kŭmnye’s seven-yearold sister, Kŭmsun, goes to visit her older sister, she overhears the rich woman scolding Kŭmnye for eating from one of the beef dishes. The younger Kŭmsun runs home and asks her mother why her sister is forbidden from tasting the dishes she works so hard to prepare. The mother’s response to the young girl’s rage is a frustrating silence.34 In much of children’s prose from this period, adults like Sundŏk’s father grovel or, like Kŭmnye’s mother, remain silent. While adult poverty was deemed a result of their lack of consciousness, children’s impoverishment was ascribed a certain dignity. This served the purpose of connecting social injustice directly to adult inaction, thereby highlighting the moral superiority of children whose

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poverty is ennobling and a driving force of activism. Take for example the short story “Roasted Chestnuts,” in which a rich boy—again identified in the archetypical manner as “the landlord’s son”—is in the habit of guarding his snacks.35 Poor Chongsu catches the landlord’s son about to eat chestnuts he has just roasted in the fire. The landlord’s son tries to distract Chongsu by commanding him to find out whether the ringing of a bell is a warning of fire, although both boys know very well that it is the sound of the tofu salesman making his rounds. Relieved from the presence of the poor boy, the landlord’s son is about to partake of his delicacy when Chongsu returns and builds on the landlord’s son’s original fabrication: he describes the fire, and mimics the way the children in the fictitious burning house had to devour the last of their chestnuts, all the while eating the real ones and outsmarting the landlord’s son. Another short story, “Here and There,” by Yi Tong-gyu, is told in two parts: the first describes the corrupt and deprived lifestyle of the rich; the second, the ingenuity and boundless energy of the poor.36 In the first part we witness the dynamics in a rich household in which the “baby” of the house, nine-year-old Punam (“rich boy”), sleeps late under a silk blanket, is a fussy eater, and spends his allowance recklessly while the servants of the house eat leftovers, and Punam’s father, a factory president, exploits his workers. Punam is given a choice of lunch of either a “sandwich” or “sushi”—two nonnative options that would have seemed outrageous luxuries to readers at the time. The child rejects both in favor of sweet rice and nuts because he is afraid of being bullied in school. In both pieces of fiction, the worlds of the rich and poor children are clearly delineated through their material possessions (chestnuts and a silk blanket). The story shifts midway to focus on a group of children who band together to overcome their exploitation at the factory, and ends with a veritable celebration of poverty. The two stories are not connected, but they mirror each other: a rich home bereft of compassion and intelligence and a can-do spirit; and a poor home where the members care for each other. In the leftist fiction of the 1930s magazines, the moral superiority belongs to the poor, who find it easy to outwit and overpower their wealthy, corrupt peers. The adult inefficacy prevalent in leftist fiction also continued the tradition of much of the children’s literature from the earlier decade, which saw the resistance to grownups and even their removal as necessary for the protection of childhood and the building of a new, utopian society. But fiction was not mobilized for didactic purposes alone. Writers like Yi Chu-hong, author of “Fish Bones,” moved fluidly between his political fiction and seemingly disengaged, “pure” fiction through such touching portraits

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as that of Sukhŭi in “Postbox.”37 The large red object looks to the child like a wooden horse or a slab of rock until one day, while she hides behind it during a neighborhood game of hide and seek, she sees a man drop a letter into its mouth. Later she makes the connection between the letters she receives from her father working at a factory in Japan—the only indication the reader gets of the back story of her family’s economic situation—and the “red horse.” Since the letters are always delivered when Sukhŭi is asleep or out of the house, their source remains a mystery. She imagines the world of the adults in her life connected through complex underground tunnels that lead to the mailbox. When the letters and money stop coming from her father, and the quantities of food on the table dwindle, her mother hands her some rice cakes and leaves the child to mind the house while she goes to beg for food. Sukhŭi thinks of how much her father might enjoy the morsels, and so she attaches them to one of her letters to him. When it is returned to her, rice cakes and all, the very same day, she is saddened to think that he didn’t like the taste of the cakes until her mother explains the mail system to her. That explanation brings her to an understanding of the journey that words on the page undertake from home to the hands of the postman by motor vehicle and ship until they reach the post office on the other side of the sea and into her father’s hands. This short story stands in stark contrast to the same author’s dramatic “Fish Bones.” If “Fish Bones” meant to expose the structural exploitation and wretched injustice of the capitalist system, “Postbox” provides insight into the interconnectedness of laborers in transnational locations told from the child’s vantage point. Sukhŭi’s socioeconomic status is made secondary to allow the narrator to move along at the child’s pace: from the moment of discovering the “horse” until her well-intentioned but naïve decision to share her treats with her father by dropping food in the postbox in the expectation that it will travel through underground tunnels that she imagines connect Korea and Japan. Along the way the reader learns of her family’s difficulties, but the pedagogic purpose of the piece—which explains how letters are mailed, how they reach their destination, and how many systems are in place to make such a small miracle happen—is softened by the compassionate view of Sukhŭi’s longing for her father. Leftist writers of children’s literature intervened at the level of content to educate children and provide them with representational models that were close to their experience, while demonstrating the moral superiority of the working class and poor. But beyond content, leftist writers’ intervention worked also on the level of language, which, together with content, was to enact a kind of affec-

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tive response necessary for reform. As noted in Chapter 3, the vernacularization movement strove to develop literature as a site for exploring emotions and national identity, and as a representational tool of the lower classes, women, and children.38 Leftist writers insisted on dissolving the boundaries between the social and the aesthetic because colonial capitalist modernization had made these two inseparable while obscuring their interconnectedness, and it was this link that the leftists set out to expose. They opted for a realist mode of expression, staged in the everyday space of the workplace and in the present moment, in a mode that would reconcile “the concrete representation of real life in literature with a scientific worldview” and would focus “on the materialist critical analysis of colonial society.”39 The language they aspired to was one that mimicked colloquial exchanges and sounds from the physical environment so as to create an immersive reading experience. The effort to stake out new linguistic territory was clearest in children’s poetry, where leftist writers sought to retrieve language from the realm of the romantic in order to make it serve the same awakening purpose as fiction and nonfiction. In writing realism, the first step was to recognize the different stages of economic and social development, and it is here that leftist writers had a great deal to say. A particular source of critique of the existing writing craft for children was the unscientific boundaries between age categories of very young children (yua), children (adong, ŏrini), and youth (sonyŏn, ch’ŏngnyŏn), along with the undisciplined boundaries between genres of youth fiction, children’s songs, and children’s stories (sonyŏn sosŏl, tongyo, tonghwa). In their essays about the craft of writing, writers pointed out the misappropriation of genres, and also demanded that children’s literature address its multiaged audience in a manner that corresponded directly to each stage of intellectual and emotional capacity. To Im Hwa, childhood, or sonyŏn sidae, lasted from the time children learned to walk until they were in their twenties, the time that their intellectual thirst was most acute.40 Hŏ In, on the other hand, explained in his essay “Critique of the Artistic Children’s Poem” that the terms used to describe young people in different life stages were being used indiscriminately.41 He offered the following formula: yu’nyŏn meant children ages 4–7; adong, ages 8–13, and sonyŏn, ages 14–17. To him, the trend to write “sonyŏn fiction” was misguided, since sonyŏn as an age-group had only ten percent of the young child left in them.42 These categories were critical, Hŏ argued, because children’s consciousness—their ability to think and feel— was age-dependent. It was the fault of the bourgeoisie, he declared, that the term sonyŏn had become so rampant and so scientifically and theoretically unsound.43

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The problem, as Pak Se-yŏng saw it, was that leftist writers had inherited from their bourgeois counterparts a lack of understanding of children’s intellectual and emotional capacities. Children and their language were organic— he likened forging poetry to the carpenter whose skills could either make the lumber fit perfectly or, if done unskillfully, would cause a structure to collapse. In the same way, Pak notes that the language of songs (tongyo) and poetry (tongsi) had to be constructed in a way that was not forced. Poets, for example, must avoid words that are too long and complicated for children to understand. At the same time, poets had to intervene in the process of writing, because “simply jotting down words that come out of [children’s mouths] does not make poetry. Even if you think that those words are poetic, you must recognize that there are good words and good content, and you must craft them as such. This is precisely what sets apart good work from bad. This is what differentiates a pure poem from a false one.” And he confesses: “the problem starts with my own work: I have forced content, and I have forced language; I let pride and pronouncements get in the way of an understanding of children’s psychology.”44 The language problem was one that writers addressed from two different angles. From a structural angle, they pointed out that working-class children were simply unable to get the kind of education that would make them capable of managing sophisticated content. “I had no choice but to read Pak Hyŏn-sun’s work twice,” complains No In, “and I could not help but feel terribly frustrated. Why? Because I could not understand a single sentence. . . . The magazine Sinsonyŏn is supposed to be read by proletarian children working in the factories and fields. . . . Our readers are unable to attend school. I am certain that even children who graduate from elementary school wouldn’t be able to understand a word Pak wrote. Only the elite would be able to make sense of it; who, then, is he writing for? Think of your half-million readers and write so as to enter their minds above the cacophony of the factory machines.”45 The problem, then, was first and foremost the material conditions, the lack of education for all children, and the resulting illiteracy. Even more critical to the craft of writing than an appreciation of the material conditions and intellectual limitations of young readers was understanding the mechanism of affect, particularly with regard to age and class. Kim Pyŏng-ho, for instance, argued that bourgeois children and proletarian children respond with different emotions to the same objects. When looking at the moon, the bourgeois child will wrap his hands around his full belly, sing, think

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of going out to play, and feel the brightness and joy of the moon’s light. But the proletarian child will think of his father out in the fields. He will hope that the path will stay bright so that he can meet his father on the road. When it rains, the bourgeois child will rush to put on his new boots, but the proletarian child will fret over going to school without an umbrella and worry about his father going without a meal. Children who see their distressed, sweaty fathers cannot but feel anger and resentment.46 The emotive force was critical to literature in its ability to move children to action and to provide energy (him) that was strong enough to break the numbing inertia of bourgeois literature. Han Ch’ŏr-yŏm called this “instructive energy,” an energy that set young readers on the right path in a way that pricks them like a needle and propels them forward.47 Pak Ko-gyŏng, too, uses the term “energy,” or him, twelve times in his essay published in the August 1932 issue of Sinsonyŏn to dismiss pseudoscientific articles for not energizing the reader. Pak compliments poems whose moving energy comes from a strong colloquial style, and deplores the Sinsonyŏn June issue of the same year for lacking energy.48 For Cho Hyŏng-sik, the problem with leftist poetry and songs was the inability of these works to move beyond bourgeois sentimentalism and to express “collective emotion.”49 But where was this energy supposed to emerge from? For Pak Se-yŏng and others, the lack of energy, the inability to move the reader, comes from a numbness that results from stale materials that are not only repetitive but also utterly unrealistic. Children’s literature had to close the gap between content and language that was so conspicuous in bourgeois writing, and do so through attentive observation of detail and an honest depiction of life. Materials, said Pak, had to be sought from a wide range of sources, and accessing these required an expansion of one’s field of vision.50 In Yi Tong-gyu’s words, Many new children’s songs (tongyo) written today do not emerge from their writers’ reality (silch’ŏn) and for that reason many are false (kŏjit). This kills the life of a song and reduces its value. Many comrades make the error of assuming that it is enough to drop words like “factory” and “workers” to make it a proletarian song. But songs have to have the beauty of truth (chinsilmi). Songs that are forced are false. Cannot the many things we see, hear, and feel become the materials for our songs? I am asking that we sing in an honest manner. Saying “O bright moon” to the autumn moon and “O beautiful flowers” at a spring bloom sounds false in the ears of our poor comrades, just as it is insincere to make pronouncements about factory girls and struggles simply in order to make the rhymes work.51

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To Yi Tong-gyu, then, the problem of sincere emotion could be solved through a dedicated observation of real life and attentiveness to the material conditions of the speaker and the audience. Similarly, Han Ch’ŏr-yŏm explains that children’s literature must not ignore real life (hyŏnsil saenghwal ), children’s state of mind (simsŏng), and their ability to make sense of the world. He argued that the only way to achieve a unity of form and content, of words and feelings, was by drawing on real life: “I believe writers should explore a theme . . . so as to learn about the pure interior life of children, to be able to feel their sentiments without artifice, and to produce works accordingly.”52 Im Hwa, too, argued that children’s literature should not speak in abstract terms: “If children’s literature does not take its form thoroughly and completely from their concrete lives, then this literature will grow distant from children.”53 The debate among leftist colonial intellectuals over effective critiques of capitalism and colonialism emerged from their concern over writing practices. In essays about the craft of writing for young readers, they emphasized the central role that writing should play in educating the young and transforming them into consciously ideological workers. They insisted on creating age-­appropriate materials that would attend to the child’s affective capacities, particularly prose and poetry reflecting children’s privileged access to knowledge and truth. They demanded that language and content be aligned so as to awaken, excite, and inspire, in order to break through the numbing complacence created by bourgeois culture. This was the theory. But how was it practiced? What was the range of literary expressions it took, and how did the writers who developed ideas about the writing craft apply these ideas creatively in their own works? Song Yŏng, Pak Se-yŏng, Yi Tong-gyu, Hong Gu, and Im Hwa attempted to apply these theories in poetry and prose, and thus to expand the scope of these ideological and creative ideals. Their works dramatized children’s revolutionary explosive anger through realism and fantastical allegory in order to perform correct class consciousness. Their work needed to be capable of real critique, best achieved through a representation of the totality of life.54 In the past, unglamorous places like the dark corners of the factory, dilapidated schools, and gloomy alleyways had been largely ignored as spaces that could provide inspiration for fiction and poetry; now they were evoked as a way to enable children to perform and enact consciousness. The fantastical genre was used occasionally, too, but mostly in the form of allegory: inanimate objects or animals were temporarily given life to illustrate a political point in an age-appropriate manner.

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See, for example, Yi Tong-gyu’s poem “Let Us Sing.” Our song is one that boils the blood, it makes our fists clench and our teeth grind. Sing, comrades, sing this powerful song, The future is ours, this is our world. You work the machines in oil-drenched factories, Clutch handles in your sooty hands, Let us sing with all our might! Sing the song of machines and handles. Our song is a powerful one, it steadies our weakened hearts, makes our blood flow. Let us sing in loud, booming voices! The future is ours, this is our world.55

The poem is staged in a factory, where the reader is immersed in the grit and grime of oil and dirt. It is composed of twelve lines, each two lines adding to twelve syllables: Uridŭl ŭi norae nŭn [7] p’ikkŭllŭn norae, [5] Chumŏk ŭl chwige hago [7] i kalge handa. [5]

The rhythmic patterns give the poem a march-like quality, making it easier to sing or chant in a group. The fourth and twelfth lines repeat: “The future is ours, this is our world.” The lexicon is drawn from familiar tropes: machines, blood and sweat—a far cry from the poetry for the young published in Ŏrini in the 1920s. The poem does not stop at description: its rallying cry is facilitated by the strong pulse of syllabic alignment that is meant to lift up one’s spirit for action. Another of Yi’s poems, “Plant Rice,” takes the reader from the factory to the fields. Here, the festive, slightly chaotic opening of the poem is created by the words walgang talgang, a term describing the clanging sounds created by the repeated clashing of small, hard objects: Walgang talgang plant the hemp Make it grow all summer long

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After autumn, cut it down Finally have a nice, full gut. Take it to the landlord’s house Pay back your dues at the supervisor’s house. A handful here, a handful there and all that’s left is barely chaff. Should we boil it in this pot? Should we boil it in that pot? Or should we throw it at the greedy landlord And tell him to polish that off, too? 56

Like the previous poem, this poem is also presented in twelve lines, but this one has eight syllables in each line: Walgang talgang [4] pelŭl sim’ŏ [4] Yŏrŭm tongan [4] killŏnaeyŏ [4]

The first stanza sets up an optimistic scene: rice is planted and tended to by a community of laborers, with the expectation that this will sustain them and their families through the fall. But in stanza two, the harvest is depleted by the landlord and supervisor so that nothing is left for the farmers doing the actual labor. The final stanza ends with a bit of humor: the question of how to cook the remaining rice is less one of method and more a rhetorical absurdity: how do you cook something out of nothing? The final two lines express outright aggression, suggesting that perhaps it is best to throw it in the landlord’s face. Rather than celebrate moments of child and nature in language that attempts to approximate children’s diction, these poems dramatize resistance and perform acts of frustration and anger through rhythmic repetition. The poem speaks in the voices of the young, who are presumed to be inherently capable of recognizing exploitation and articulating their frustration in powerful words that translate into actions when adults have failed to do just that. Another favorite setting for proletarian literature was the school, the institution that was meant to provide children access to knowledge and skills but that remained largely outside the means of laboring families and their children. See, for example, “Angry Night” by Yi Ku-wŏl: Our school is a night school, and who’s to stop us? In rain or snow we are sturdy comrades They fear we are getting smarter by the day.

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Our school is a night school, and who’s to stop us? The teachers say we are bad, that we are poor. We know, we know what is in their hearts. Shall we push forward with clenched fists in this angry night? We shall show them how powerful we are. We shall fight with courage, we will persevere.57

The narrator addresses her peers who attend night school because they must work during the day. Despite the physical and emotional obstacles, the narrator’s passion is unrelenting. Rather than being an ally and advocate, the teachers are adversaries: they humiliate their students by branding them as morally inadequate (“bad”) because of their poverty and inability to pay tuition. But the narrator refuses to remain a victim, nor to be defined by poverty. Flanked by the dependable tongmu comrades, the narrator proposes to demonstrate their collective strength (poyojujago) and persevere. Leftist poetry and fiction established children’s innate ability to react to their surroundings and exemplified their moral superiority. Many of these works also eschewed resolution. Instead of neat and tidy endings, they opted for a reverberating cry of anger, a clenched fist, and a profound expression of sadness whose source is unstated but clear to all. In “Sangho’s Dream,” by Kim U-ch’ŏl, Sangho is a former top student whose poverty forced him to quit school and work at a factory.58 One day, Sangho flees his drunken, violent father and finds his way to his former school. There he meets his teacher, who flashes him a lukewarm smile, and his old elementary school rival and intellectual inferior, Manbok (whose name translates into “countless blessings”). Manbok is a high school student and the son of Rich Man Kim. Manbok asks Sangho about factory vacations, a puzzling concept to Sangho. Somewhere a bell rings and he wakes from his reverie to find that he had been dreaming. Now in the factory, Sangho inquires after vacations, but finds that no one has heard of the concept. He returns home dejected, his lunchbox empty as usual. Much of the fiction from this period ends openly in this way, wherein a child’s indignation and keen sense of injustice are left to ring in the ears of the reader. In examples where resolution or catharsis was not provided as part of the narrative, open endings were meant to elicit sympathy, hoping to translate the indignation a reader might have felt into action. More striking than the depiction of poor children’s superior morality and the open-ended nature of the narratives is that so much of the violence of exploitation was enacted on the body of the young. If the child’s affect a­ llowed

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for a convergence of the social and biological in the form of an extra-cultural emotional state that intuited political truths, then the child’s body proved to be the site where this affective mode was most clearly manifested. That flesh was at the center of leftist fiction is not, on its own, unique to children’s literature. Kyeong-Hee Choi has pointed to the trope of the impaired body in fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1930s, noting that fiction from that period is interested more in physical anomalies than in psychological ones.59 Choi argues that this bodily protest encodes an anticapitalist and anticolonial critique, which Brian Bergstrom explains is a way of recovering the laboring body from the capitalist discourse “that abstracts it into invisibility though the logic of commodity fetishism.” 60 But the body in leftist children’s literature does slightly different work, particularly in the dialectic relationship between text and image. Generally speaking, the majority of images printed in magazines of this period were of strong, laboring male bodies, usually gripping a shovel or flag, often depicted in a state of motion. A number of icons were repeated, such as a pioneer boy blowing a bugle, and a shirtless male body grasping a shovel (Figure 9). The images often displayed the body’s ability to withstand intense physical labor (Figure 10).

F I G U R E 9. “Tales of a Hero.” Pyŏllara (June 1931): 10–11.

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F I G U R E 10 . Cover of Sinsonyŏn (April 1932).

But in text, children’s bodies are exposed, attacked, and maimed—recall the bursting pus-filled wounds on Sundŏk’s back as she cries, “Father! Hit me again!”—and the violence is shocking all the more because it is enacted on the bodies of children. Such tropes exist in adult leftist fiction as well; see, for example, the recent collection of translated stories, Rat Fire, including Pak Yŏng-hŭi’s “The Hound,” in which a greedy master is torn to shreds by his own guard dog who then laps up the man’s spilled blood as he lies dying, and “The Blast Furnace,” by Song Yŏng, in which the Japanese laborer ­Kimiko becomes engulfed in flames. But in literature for children, the juxtaposition of innocence and violence is meant to induce a psychosomatic reaction in the reader. It was one thing to read adult fiction about the physical and social toll of the capitalist economy on the working men and women of colonial Korea. It was another to see violence inflicted on their children. In Yi ­T ’ae-jun’s “Tearful Initiation,” for example, the impoverished boy Kwinam is spit at, beaten, and humiliated by the rich son of his employer.61 In Hong Gu’s “Sprout Congee and Boiled Rice,” the poor child Samsoe is beaten to a pulp by a rich child before he recovers and wins in a showdown with the meat-eating Hyŏngsik.62

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Korea’s leftist writers provided a unique contribution to ongoing debates about children’s literature and culture. They, too, were concerned about the visibility of children in society and their cultural literacy, but both of these needed to be addressed with sensitivity to class and fundamental structural inequalities. Enhancing visibility meant making magazines accessible to readers who would otherwise not be able to engage with books, but also creating new protagonists from the ranks of children without any semblance of a bourgeois childhood. This extended to literacy, as leftist writers recognized that while children’s affect needed to be of primary concern in the shaping of narrative, the purpose of writing for children was to help them act on what they intuitively knew to be true. Their way of converging language and content was to turn to the neglected spaces of the working class—the factories, farms, and schools—and to demonstrate, through colloquial language and rhyming, rhythmical schemes, how workers’ inherent sense of justice and ability to recognize inequality made them both noble and ethically superior. At the same time, leftist writers dramatically staged the exploitation on the flesh. Children’s bodies became the main site of a conflict that exhibited the unassailable intimacy between the social and the biological. Children’s affective qualities—their inherent understanding of truth, their sensitivity to inequality—were precious to leftist writers, but the only way to capture these affective modes, so productive for the revolution, was through violations of the body. Ironically, it was this very same body that served the purpose of militarization and conscription in the later part of 1930s Korea, a subject to which we now turn.

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CHAPTER 5

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JA PA N E S E C O L O N I A L R U L E I N KO R E A began with formal annexation on 22 August 1910 and came to a close on 15 August 1945 with Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Korea’s thirty-five-year experience as a colony was remarkably dynamic, as colonial policies shifted according to on-the-ground realities. And yet today, the popular conception of the colonial era, reinforced in the South Korean educational system and recounted in the public imagination, is that Korea’s colonial era was a dark era that presented colonial subjects with but two choices: resistance or collaboration. Scholarship on the colonial period emerging in the past two decades has greatly complicated this narrative. Instead of viewing the history of these years through the lens of colonial development and exploitation, colonial modernity as a conceptual framework has facilitated a move beyond the binary forces of good (those who resisted) and evil (those who collaborated) to a recognition of the complex negotiations that enabled a variety of responses.1 Still, the period marked by the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 until Japan’s defeat in 1945 is most often associated with the amhŭkki, or dark era, and it is this period that has cast the longest shadow into the present. The period of 1937–1945 is associated with the more repressive policies of colonial rule, and for good reason: it was a time of forced name-changing, coerced visits to Shintō shrines, conscription into the Japanese army, and forced conversion of leftists. This was an era of systematized physical and spiritual control of the Korean colonial subjects, and children were a primary target.

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This chapter will begin by tracing a profile of this repressive period as a way of making explicit the cultural forces that shaped the children’s archival ­materials of this era. This is in order to better understand the context in which literature and poetry for children were produced and to show how the richness and diversity of responses—published in what became one of the few remaining Korean language publications still in circulation at the end of the 1930s—defy easy categorization. The works from this period range from proudly militant essays to pastoral poetry to complex and tragic portraits of colonial Korea’s poor. They attest to a condemnation of father figures for having failed to provide their children with a safe and nurturing environment; a profound belief in the healing power of nature and the transformative power of the imagination; and, particularly in the works of Hyŏn Tŏk, a scathing critique of class inequality that perpetuated poverty and deprived people of empathy. In an era of repression of leftist ideologies, much of children’s wartime literature is surprising in that it sustained and amplified the concerns of the left. That is, despite the abundance of tales of willful self-sacrifice on the battlefield, poetry and fiction for children presented an alternative world that challenged wartime rhetoric and fascist narratives of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the emotional, ethical, and intellectual lives of young people became a prime concern of educators and writers who articulated often competing visions of childhood in the poetry and fiction in children’s magazines. In the 1930s, many of Korea’s most celebrated and experimental writers—Yi T’ae-jun, Yi Sang, and Pak T’ae-wŏn among them— turned to children’s literature as a medium of expression. Much has been written about the craft of these writers and their negotiation with colonial power, but little attention has been given to their literature for children—the population whose future was perhaps at greatest risk because their connection to the past was being rewritten by the colonial authorities. How did the child-heart, a symbol of timeless innocence and organic synchronization with the natural world, withstand the whirlwind of accelerated militarization that engulfed Korea? Late Colonial Imperialization Known today as the most repressive era of Japanese colonial rule, the late colonial period was marked by a crackdown on leftist voices in public media, and to what has often been called “imperialization” (hwangminhwa), or the assimila-

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tion policies driven by Japan’s war effort and need for material and spiritual support for its imperialist ambitions.2 What was involved, in Todd Henry’s words, was a “collapsing” of the physical and affective space in a “highly choreographed and skillfully negotiated process of imperial subjectification.”3 This process intended to change the psyche of the Korean colonial subjects. Imperialization began with the silencing of the proletarian movement known as KAPF (Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio) in 1935. Theodore Hughes has noted that the disbanding of KAPF indicated the “first steps toward incorporation of the cultural sphere into what would become the regime of total mobilization.”4 Thus, with the opposition silenced, ideologically converted, or jailed, and with publications in the Korean language effectively censored, the ground was prepared for the cultural absorption of the Korean colony. 5 The coherence to the physical and spiritual domination of Koreans enacted through government-controlled institutions extended to children’s reading materials as well.6 Indicative of this institutional influence was a children’s version of the oath to the emperor that appeared in children’s magazines: 1. We are subjects of the Great Japanese Empire. 2. We gather our hearts in order to devote ourselves to loyal service of the Japanese Emperor. 3. We will undergo trials and tribulations to become upstanding, mighty Japanese citizens.7

By the late colonial period, print materials—newspapers, magazines, and other commercial publications including those for children such as Sogungmin (Young Citizens) and Sinsidae (New Era)—were mobilized to support the dissemination of the state’s ideology.8 Children’s culture helped transition children from passive recipients of social welfare programs to sogungmin, or “young citizens,” the pallbearers of the wartime colony. Han Min-ju argues that wartime children’s magazines interpellated colonial Koreans as part of the Japanese Empire, and that the many visual images of children looking yearningly at fighter planes or peering at maps of Asia with Japan at the center encouraged colonial Korean children to see themselves as a critical part of the war effort. Images of babies in helmets, toddlers with rifles, and advertisements for children’s health products that would help them develop into good soldiers worked to emphasize the importance of children’s growth for the sake of the empire and drew a direct connection between the young and the health and the prosperity of the nation. Children were encouraged to do physical labor, to volunteer in

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factories, and to exchange letters with soldiers on the front lines.10 They were to rise early, to be disciplined and attentive in school, and to perform daily calisthenics.11 This was part of what Han calls the discourse of wartime transition in which the “old order” was to be replaced by a new order of flawless human bodies inspired by fascist culture.12 Radio broadcasts for children, commissioned to foster children’s identities as future soldiers and workers of the Japanese Empire, also participated in these ideological campaigns.13 Children’s magazines in the Korean language continued to be published until 1940,14 and to a large extent reflect the participation of print media in the Japanese project of mobilization and indoctrination. Magazines like Sonyŏn (1937–1940; this magazine used the same title as the publication from 1908) and Ai saenghwal (Children’s Life, 1926–1944) disseminated Japan’s wartime rhetoric through didactic essays about obedience, news from the battlefront, advertisements for a range of health products, and creative fiction about self-sacrifice and bravery.15 Certain works by writers such as Yi Wŏn-su, Yi Ku-jo, Song Ch’ang-il, Kim Yŏng-il, and Pak T’ae-wŏn celebrated self-sacrifice and frugality, and encouraged young readers to embrace the collective mission of loyalty to subjects of the Japanese Empire. Alongside the attempts at physical and spiritual disciplining of Korean subjects, the name-changing campaign and gradual phasing out of the Korean language represented the more manipulative policies of the late colonial period. In the name-changing campaign, proclaimed in February 1940, Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese names. In 1930, there were 250 surnames for 20 million Koreans; the Japanese argued this was unmodern and bureaucratically cumbersome, and so they demanded that Koreans take on Japanese names.16 In addition, the Korean language was to be phased out through the education system in favor of kokugo, the Japanese national language. Education had to “foster within Korea’s youth the ‘spirit of industry and patriotism.’ . . . The instruction aimed to provide means for the Korean people to ‘rationalize their lifestyles and soften their [Korean] mannerisms.’”17 Schools were made to cultivate three principles: “clarification of the national polity, endurance . . . of Naisen ittai [“Japan and Korea as one body”], and discipline.”18 Civic education was replaced with “national education,” a greater emphasis was placed on a martial curriculum, and women were targeted for education because of their responsibility for health and education in the home.19 By the late 1930s, the education system in Korea was thus manipulated for the purpose of mobilization, both materially, in the form of the military draft, and spiritually, using

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rhetoric that encouraged all children to see themselves as a part of the greater Japanese Empire.20 While the influence of the assimilation policies was overreaching and extended beyond schools and other public institutions, Koreans exercised agency in ways the Japanese colonizers could neither predict nor control.21 Writers for children likewise were not solely mouthpieces of the colonial regime. Certainly, they were constrained by censorship and limitations on publishing and distribution, which undoubtedly shaped what and how they chose to write. And there were those who believed that Korea, as a Japanese colony, was following either a desirable path or, at the very least, a path of no return. As Christopher Hanscom and Janet Poole have shown, colonial fiction intervenes and intersects with reality in ways that do not allow for facile interpretation. Hanscom demonstrates that since Korea’s modernist writers were working under conditions of censorship and within an impossible “double bind,” which demanded that they be like Japanese but not too much alike,22 their basic tool of communication—the Korean language—was constrained in its ability to convey individual experiences, or for utterances to mean what they intended in a transparent way. Janet Poole, too, reveals the subtle ways that writers crafted their response to the sense of the gradual phasing-out of the Korean language and the suffocating sense of national demise.23 When reading literature for children, one finds a large number of explicitly jingoistic stories and images that express loyalty to the Japanese war effort, but children’s magazines hosted other voices as well. In fact, Korean children’s magazines provided a sanctuary for poetry and fiction that had long been excised from the school curriculum and other discontinued print culture. Thus, while the Korean language was being phased out in schools, and Korean poetry and creative fiction were replaced with Japanese poetry and mythology in school textbooks, children’s magazines like Sonyŏn and Ai saenghwal created a space for delight and subversive laughter. Yun Sŏk-chung wrote in his “letter from the editor” in the first issue of Sonyŏn in 1937: “Children, take a break from your studies and come to this gentle and affectionate magazine; it is sure to amuse you. Please guide it wherever you wish to go.”24 It had been several years since leftist magazines such as Pyŏllara and Sinsonyŏn had been discontinued, and Sonyŏn filled the void they left while striking a different chord. Pyŏllara and Sinsonyŏn were austere in layout and content and were devoted largely to the social and political awakening of their young readers; the 1937 Sonyŏn, by contrast, provided entertainment

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and diversion in both layout and content. It was a venue for meditation on the importance of Korean indigenous poetry, sijo; on the lives of Korea’s impoverished children; and on the disappointment in fathers and betrayal by the older generation. Above all, the significance ascribed to the natural world brought into relief the perennial question of culture and nature at a time when Korea’s natural scenery was being co-opted for propaganda purposes as the bastion of Korean culture, frozen in developmental time to be modernized or consumed either as colonial kitsch by the colonial regime or as nostalgic memories by the colonial subjects.25 At a time when so much was at stake in portrayals of nature, the repeated staging of children in natural surroundings and the portrayal of their presumed privileged relationship with the natural world represented a complex performance of the desire of Korean authors to return to an ideal, precultured and pre-colonized state. This was a transcendent state but one that, perhaps unwittingly, could also uncannily play into the colonial narrative of Koreans as simple and natural, and child-like. The late colonial years are often thought of as an era of collaboration of Korean writers with the colonial regime, especially in children’s literature. Early intervention in children’s social and political identities, particularly for children who had never experienced an independent Korea, could go a long way in fostering colonial identities.26 But while there was little evidence in the late 1930s that an end to colonial rule was even a remote possibility, I contend that the very act of writing for children in Korean indicates that writers still envisioned some kind of future for the next generation. That they found reason to reflect and anticipate children’s experiences shows that storytelling in Korean was still deemed critical to developing young people’s engagement with an uncertain world. The sheer diversity in children’s magazines—short stories, poetry, journalism, cartoons, allegories, quizzes, mazes, lessons in magic, arts and crafts activities, and jokes—seems to suggest that, at least so long as these magazines were in circulation, the future of Korean children was open to the imagination. Wartime Rhetoric in Late Colonial Children’s Fiction Little Masao is turning one, and the house is abuzz with preparations for his big day. More than anything, his father and mother are preoccupied with one concern. On this first birthday, the child will be asked to reach for one item out of an array on the table, and his choice will determine his destiny. Theirs is a modest arrangement: an offering of bracken and chestnuts, steamed rice cakes,

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a writing set, a gun and airplane, a ten-wŏn note, and a bowl of brass coins. What will little Masao choose? “Birthday,” a script produced for the radio and written by Kye Yong-muk, operates on three planes. The first is the story’s broad frame: the celebration of the boy’s first birthday beginning with the preparations, driven forward by the building anticipation of the child’s choice, and ending with the resolution of tension made by the child’s final auspicious action. The second plane is the introduction of a private exchange between the child’s father and one of the community elders, which provides a liveliness to the narrative by illustrating the anxiety surrounding the celebration, and sheds light on the relationship and hierarchy between the two men. Thus, the narrative demonstrates that the men’s private personas correspond to their public ones. The third plane of the story is the extensive narration that takes the listener inside the head of the child’s father as he frets about how to turn his son into a productive member of society. One suspects that the ending will be a good one, since early on the child is praised for having “manly cheekbones” and a promising face. But the child’s choice remains unpredictable, and much hinges on it; children who had reached for the pen or plate ended up impoverished. Anxieties are resolved in the end with a triumphant pronouncement from the child’s father, repeated twice for emotional impact: “You picked the gun!” and then, “Of course you picked the gun!”27 This work is an example of what Kim Hwa-sŏn has described as propaganda for mobilizing children’s physical bodies along with their interior, emotional spaces for the war effort.28 “Birthday” builds tension by indicating that this ceremony is not merely symbolic but has real, potentially grave consequences, since wrong choices have been proven to have life-long consequences. The story crescendos until the final moment with the relief at the fact that the “manly” one-year-old, by having chosen the gun, will dedicate himself to fighting on behalf of the Japanese Empire. The father, Sŏndal, has kept his Korean name, but his son’s, Masao, is Japanese, indicating that a transition toward a new order has already begun. Stories like “Birthday” not only reflected the degree to which war rhetoric had become normalized, but also provide an indication of how print and visual culture attempted to shape the childhoods of Korean youth at the height of the Pacific War. Fiction and poetry glorified self-sacrifice and rationalized military hierarchy. Published letters to and from soldiers delivered the battlefront to the home front and gave young readers a sense of participation and adventure.

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­ dvertisements brought together health products and consumer items, creatA ing a natural affinity between soldiers, health, and the nation. And nonfiction essays made model plane making and instructive essays on weapons of the future a familiar part of children’s education. Wartime magazines indoctrinated Korean readers in a worldview that glorified war and looked optimistically to its successful conclusion. Many works of fiction were unabashedly enthusiastic about the war effort. For example, “Tornado” by Kim Hye-wŏn glorifies the militaristic spirit through a positive portrayal of a Korean youth, known by his Japanese name Tasŭt’o, who aspires to become a patriotic subject.29 Tasŭt’o embraces the role of village protector after his father is drafted into the army, and saves the lives of soldiers in an act of bravery while serving his ailing mother with filial devotion. The work reproduces the rhetoric of naesŏn ilch’e, “Japan and Korea as one body,” by integrating a Korean child into the Japanese Empire, equal in all including name, thus providing young readers with models for emulation. Other works of fiction rationalized war by showing that children were naturally disposed to forming hierarchy and bullying weaker children. Yi Ku-jo’s short story “Playing War” opens with a description of a group of children and their lively imagination at play: Three boys were playing in a yard. The first boy broke off a piece of sorghum straw and balanced it on his shoulder. The moment it touched his shoulder it became a rifle. “What do you say about my rifle? I’m a soldier, I tell ya, a soldier!” Gun on shoulder, the soldier inflated his chest with pride. The second boy broke off a piece of sorghum straw and attached it to his left hip. The moment it touched his hip it became a sword. “What do you say about my sword? I’m an officer, I tell ya, an officer!” Sword at his side, the officer inflated his chest with pride. Now that the game was on, the third child had to get involved. So he broke off a piece of sorghum straw. He broke it off and mounted it. “What do you say about my horse? I’m a general, I tell ya, a general!” The mounted general inflated his chest with pride.30

The boys romp around until they find their first “victim,” the girl Makpuni, who unwittingly interrupts their play. They intimidate her with their make-­believe rifle, sword, and horse, yet the narrative remains detached and unalarmed at this display of threatening force. Their second victim, Pukchegi, gets more in-

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volved in their antics: they force him to get down on all fours and carry them on his back. They accept him into their ranks after he has withstood their bullying, and the story ends when the mounted general, now flanked by two soldiers and an officer, signals toward another approaching boy. The narrative voice is sympathetic to the boys throughout the story, and the accompanying images represent them in bold, thick lines suggestive of plump, childish features. The boys’ heads are held high and their faces lack any malicious expression (Figure 11). Together, the text and visuals obfuscate a sense of the real conflict taking place in the adult world. The story suggests that “boys will be boys,” that war play is natural, and that those who remain oblivious to military order are worthy of healthy mockery, and that girls have no place in this system. Poetry also participated in the rationalization of war by presenting war as harmless child’s play. The poem “Baby Soldier” depicts a precocious soldier with great affection: A six-year-old baby is a soldier A soldier at war with a chicken

F I G U R E 11. Playing Soldier. Sonyŏn 4, no. 12 (1940): 46.

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A bowl on his head A bottle cap decorates his breast A wooden poker is his sword. He comes after the chicken, Toy rifle aimed high, In hot pursuit of his enemy. He hides around the corner Bang! Bang! Bang! He fires at the chicken. A six-year-old baby is a soldier A soldier at war with a chicken.31

Published without illustrations, this poem can be read as an affectionate portrayal of children and their aspirations to join the world of adults. The “sixyear-old baby” mimics adult behavior with household props: bowl, bottle cap, wooden poker. The reader can imagine the panic that this poker-wielding child might induce in the unsuspecting chicken. The incongruity between the urgency of tone (the “hot pursuit”), the clever ambush tactics (hiding around the corner), and the target (a chicken), might elicit a smile of recognition at both the futility and precociousness of the child’s aspirations. Nonfiction essays and letters also participated in the indoctrination of young readers for wartime mobilization and were sometimes accompanied by detailed illustrations and photographs from the battlefront. The nonfiction works reflected the cult of warfare and a specific interest in air battle: essays explained the intricate science of bomb making, future battles, and the science of flight. Han Min-ju notes that model building was added as a school subject and was promoted also in Japanese magazines for youth. Images of children and planes appeared in many illustrations, depicting, for example, children looking longingly at planes or holding model airplanes, and planes delivering cigarettes, caramels, and other treats to delighted children below.32 In Yi Ku-jo’s story “Airplane,” the girl Yŏngae, alone and bored in the house, amuses herself by picking up a broom and pretending to shoot at a passing plane.33 Both male- and female-gendered children had an active role to play in the wartime economy, but “Airplane” is unique among children’s short fiction in that it features a young female protagonist when females were usually assigned support-

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ing roles and consigned to the home. Compare the way that Yŏngae uses her broom in “Airplane” with the male child’s wielding of the poker in “Baby Soldier” mentioned above. Both characters reach for the most convenient rifle-like item in their immediate environment. While the zeal with which they perform their roles is comparable, the items available to them indicated broader genderbased roles. Children were kept connected to the battlefront through soldiers’ letters that were published in sections such as “Letters from the Battlefront” (Chŏnsŏn t’ongsin) and “News from the Front Lines” (Chŏnsŏn nyussŭ), which recounted feats of bravery and the struggle of children and soldiers at home and abroad. One such story explains that a Japanese woman showed up in a local police station in the southern city of Kyŏngju and anonymously donated a gold ring for the cause. In another letter, soldier O Myŏng-bok reports from Manchuria about how he and his fellows soldiers delight in receiving letters from Sonyŏn’s young readers. He notes that he eats well, describes a recent battle on Chinese ground, and urges the magazine’s readers to continue with their correspondence. These letters, which would surely have been edited and handpicked for publication, sought to inspire young readers with a sense of adventure and optimism, and to give concrete form to their imagination of the battlefront. Advertisements for consumer products also played a role in fostering an organic link between health, a fighting spirit, and the nation. Mark Caprio notes that newspapers advertisements in the late 1930s moved away from a focus on beauty products to health products that “would increase a child’s appetite and lessen any fatigue they might experience from study and exercise.”34 For example, in an advertisement for a new type of cookie called Marathon King, two boy soldiers are drawn in bold, unintimidating lines (Figure 12). The swordwielding boy marches with his eyes fixed directly ahead, but the lack of detailed facial features gives him a caricatured, unthreatening appearance. The boy flanking him with the Japanese flag flashes a welcoming, open smile in the direction of the viewer. The description of the product reads, “Feel Energized, One Cookie at a Time.” Another ad, for Morinaga’s Milk Caramels, states that the company produces one and a half million caramels a day, which, if stacked up, would be thirty times higher than Japan’s Mount Fuji; thus, a famous Japanese landmark serves as the measure for the success of the company. On the bottom-right

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F I G U R E 12 . Marathon Cookies. Advertisement. Sonyŏn 2, no. 3 (1938): back cover.

corner of the same page is an illustration of three boys in salute under their respective Nazi, Italian, and Japanese flags. The fascist culture of wartime Japan is evident also in essays like “Models to Follow: The Hitler-Jugend and Mussolini’s Youth Groups” by Yang Mi-rim, which opens: “As you know, Hitler and Mussolini are two of the greatest heroes alive today. Their countries of Germany and Italy are our allies.”35 The essay details a visit of the German branch of the Hitler Youth to Korea in October 1939, an event discussed in the Maeil sinbo newspaper in August 1939.36 The June issue of Sinsidae from 1941 carried an image of the famous Korean marathon athlete Son Ki-jŏng photographed with the Hitler Youth representatives.37 Once Korean-language magazines were discontinued after 1940, children’s magazines in the Japanese language such as Sogungmin (Young Citizen) and Hantō no hikari (Light of the Peninsula) continued the task of promoting the war effort for young readers.38 There was also a severity in tone of some of the nonfiction essays published in Sonyŏn that, contrary to the hopes of the editor Yun Sŏk-chung that Sonyŏn would provide amusement, lent the magazine a decidedly didactic bent. Yi Kwang-su, for example, published a series of essays about manners. In the first

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issue of Sonyŏn from 1937 he writes in the essay “On Gratitude” that being ungrateful is tantamount to a crime: Always be grateful: when you eat, think about the perspiring farmers who worked to harvest your rice, and be grateful. . . . If you wear silk, think about the hard work of the silkworms; if you wear cotton, think about the cotton harvesters. If you pull a thread, think about the suffering factory workers, breathing foul air under inhumane factory conditions. Be grateful to the sky and earth as well; and above all, be grateful to your country for its generous bestowal of language and script, for its laws that make our lives comfortable, and be grateful to your teachers and guides, be they the Buddha, Confucius, or Jesus.39

In another essay, “On Blame,” Yi mobilizes rhetoric from a variety of religious and philosophical traditions to convey to children that moral behavior proceeds along clear guidelines, and that it is the role of adults to ensure that children are following these expectations.40 Fiction reinforced these lessons through allegories like “The Monkey and the Crab,” by Kye San-sun, in which a monkey, who tries to cheat the crab out of his rice cakes, ends up with a pinched bottom; or creative fiction such as, “Shame,” by Song Ch’ang-il, about two classmates, Sunae and Ok-hŭi, who develop hostile feelings for one another after a misunderstanding, and who are taught a lesson about loyalty, friendship, and the importance of moving past resentment.41 While children’s interior world of emotions, morality, and aspirations was to be guided by the content of children’s magazines, their bodies and habits were to be shaped through instructional essays on hygiene, health, and exercise, and through lessons on austerity and frugality. Todd Henry traces how the colonial regime encouraged Koreans to “identify with Japanese-dictated notions of modern life in the area of hygiene,” thus seeking to create “an organic connection between the health practices of individual Koreans and the overall salubrity of their surrounding communities.”42 The obsession with disciplining the mind and body became central with the intensification of the war effort. Militarization rhetoric is apparent in poems and illustrations, such as Pak Yong-jŏng’s “Side by Side” (see Figure 13), which was broadcast on the radio for children during line up at school: Ring ring ring goes the morning bell Wŏlsŏng Elementary, first and second grades. Time for calisthenics, first and second grades.

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Side by Side in white caps Side by Side in red caps Side by Side, standing side by side Side by Side and once around the yard. Side by Side fly the ducks, too, Side by Side standing side by side Side by Side and once around the yard. Side by Side the sunflowers, too Side by Side standing side by side Side by Side and around we go.43

The emphasis in this poem is on choreographed movements that reflect both a disciplined physical posture and a focused state of mind. The illustration that accompanied the poem depicts children in pairs, legs straight and arms tightly at their sides, distinguished from each other only by the black or white caps on their heads (Figure 13). The pairs are compressed more closely toward the left side of the frame, giving the impression of forward-moving momentum.

F I G U R E 13 . “Side by Side.” Sonyŏn 3, no. 3 (1939): 7.

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The preoccupation with children’s physical exercise, proper posture, and hygiene appears in essays and illustrations such as “Calisthenics,” which encourages exercise through rope-jumping and floor scrubbing, and advocates good study habits through proper posture; and “Winter Hygiene for Children,” which explains what to wear, what to eat, and the ideal indoor temperature for sleeping (15–20 degrees Celsius).44 Frugality was also emphasized in the context of war. The essay “War and Savings” called upon the young readers of Sonyŏn to be frugal for the sake of their nation.45 Too many children, it claims, indulge in wasteful habits; they must work together with a new heart and with diligence. A report titled “White Rice Is Shameful” reveals that some children still bring school lunches filled with white rice, which was considered a luxury and was to be sent to the battlefront.46 Instead of rice, children are urged to bring bread or noodles to school. Still another announcement demands that the New Year celebrations be curtailed. Now is the time, it admonishes, to cut down on the traditional presentation of food and clothing for the New Year. Snacking must stop, every penny must be put away for savings, and material goods should be donated.47 With the silencing of leftist voices in the mid-1930s, and taking into account the acceleration of Japan’s wartime involvement in 1937, it is little surprise that children’s magazines at the time reflected the degree to which wartime culture had become normalized. Between the physical and spiritual demands for sacrifice for the nation and the embrace of militarized culture in text and images, much of literature for children—written by adults and viewed as a tool for the socialization of young people—reflects the pervasive wartime rhetoric. But while school material served as a mouthpiece of the official agenda,48 and much of the fiction and nonfiction reinforced ideas about children’s role in the war effort, children’s magazines also published a range of texts and images whose ideological agenda was more ambiguous. Authors turned inward to highlight the troubled experience of childhood under conditions of capitalist exploitation, mobilized humor toward subversive ends, and celebrated the timeless connection between child and nature. To varying degrees, these less conventional works offered alternative voices to the militarized culture of the time. In doing so, they provided a certain denial of the pervasive militarized culture and at the same time expressed a certain future-oriented optimism and belief in the transformative power of laughter and the imagination.

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Voices of Contention It is not difficult to find examples of ways that children’s literature in the age of intensified assimilation and militarization, from 1937 to 1945, supported the colonial regime by reproducing and disseminating pro-war hegemonic rhetoric favorable to the Japanese military cause. And yet magazines like Sonyŏn and Ai saenghwal hosted other voices, including those of proletarian writers who had been the fiercest critics of colonial capitalism. They also published the works of modernist writers, who negotiated the complex relationship between politics, art and their experience as colonial writers in indirect ways. Children’s literature was subject to censorship as much as other print media, and, like all writers, writers for children faced institutional and political constraints. But they were fully engaged with colonial reality, aware that children were the colony’s future, and that their lives were being shaped by the colonial economy and education system. Thus while some writers undoubtedly celebrated Japan’s victories on the battlefield and embraced what they viewed as the inevitable absorption of Korea into the Japanese Empire, others sought out alternative narratives of what Korean children’s futures might look like. For one thing, colonial schools were less a bastion of assimilation than might be thought. Seong-cheol Oh and Ki-seok Kim note that while statistics show an expansion in the number of schools, actual enrollment data show that Japanese far outnumbered Koreans in attendance, and that opportunities for Koreans to obtain a secondary or post-secondary education were restricted.49 More significantly, they argue that elementary school entrance exams greatly disadvantaged Korean children of modest means because the exams took for granted cultural knowledge shared by members of the privileged classes.50 Indeed, the inability of impoverished children to attend school had been, as discussed in Chapter 4, a central concern of leftist writers. They perceived the inherent discrimination in the system, in which only the privileged few were allowed into the circle of skill-based knowledge that would reproduce itself, consistently excluding the working class.51 And as late colonial children’s magazines demonstrate, these issues persisted into the 1940s. The difficulty that children faced in continuing their education during the late colonial period is addressed in nonfiction pieces like one published in 1938 by Sin Yŏng-ch’ŏl. Sin notes that the month of March marks the beginning of a new school term, and he congratulates the students who successfully completed their primary schooling and who, with graduation, must be “singing like the birds and dancing like the butterflies.” However, he also points out that many young friends are unable

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to continue with their schooling, forced to help at home or to join the labor force.52 The leftist writer Song Yŏng, too, shared a story from his childhood: he hated school, he recalls, yet his parents forced him to go. Song recalls how his hateful teacher turned against one of the students and beat him mercilessly, at which point Song, claiming that he had to go to the bathroom, escaped through a hole in the wall of the outhouse.53 While neither of these pieces is overtly subversive, they challenge the view that colonial schools were the primary tool of social engineering. In Song’s recollection, the teacher’s cruelty forecloses any opportunity for learning. The most significant voice of contention in late colonial Korea was undoubtedly that of Hyŏn Tŏk (1909–?).54 It was perhaps an unlikely venue for his work, but Sonyŏn published Hyŏn’s short stories from August 1938 until the closing of the magazine in 1940. Despite his widely acknowledged talent, Hyŏn was doomed to anonymity in South Korea because of his short career, his relatively limited number of works, and his notorious status as a wŏlbuk writer who relocated to North Korea. Hyŏn’s works attest to a rich imagination and poetic expression, and a profound sense of identification with children, free of patronizing judgment. His intimate and sincere voice acquired an even more striking presence in Sonyŏn because of the contrast between Hyŏn’s work and the general gist of this pro-Japanese magazine. He succeeded in engaging politically and socially while avoiding the trap of overt didacticism. Hyŏn wrote sympathetically of the complex psychology of his young subjects, and wrote with a masterful subtlety. Over his career in pre-division Korea, Hyŏn wrote thirty-seven pieces of short fiction for children and ten young-adult novels.55 Hyŏn’s friendship with writer Kim Yu-jŏng brought him closer to the group of writers known as the Group of Nine, where he became acquainted with An Hoe-nam among o ­ thers.56 After liberation in 1945, he accepted a leadership position in the leftist literary organization Chosŏn Munhakka Tongmaeng (Korean Literary Writers’ Alliance), though he was not a member of the leftist organization KAPF nor was he politically active.57 Hyŏn went north with his family during the Korean War, where he was purged with other prominent intellectuals in 1962.58 Hyŏn Tŏk’s work appeared in Sonyŏn for the first time in August 1938 with a short story titled “The Sky May Be Clear.”59 This story examines the psychological state of a young boy, Mun’gi, who becomes flustered when the butcher hands him more change than he is owed. Mun’gi is distraught because he feels guilty for having accepted the change, yet he is unsure of the amount he was

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supposed to receive. On his walk home he meets his friend Sumani, who encourages Mun’gi to take advantage of the windfall. The children go on a shopping spree: they buy a ball and binoculars, go to the movies, and scheme up a business plan that would generate steady revenue. The ball and binoculars are later discovered in the boy’s room, however, and Mun’gi’s uncle reminds him of his moral duty. From then on, Mun’gi’s emotional state unravels and he makes a series of attempts to assuage his guilt but is unable to confess his crime. At first glance, the text appears to be a didactic story about taking responsibility and the consequences of lying. But the writer layers the story so that it illuminates the social structure in which the child is embedded. Mun’gi may live in material comfort, but the house is not his own—his mother has died, and he was abandoned by his father. Money is the source of Mun’gi’s growing anxiety: the trouble starts when the wrong amount of change is handed to him, a situation made worse by the spending spree encouraged by his accomplice and less fortunate Sumani. Later he is forced to steal from his aunt and then fails to confess this second crime, and as a result an innocent girl is beaten for his wrongdoing. His salvation comes at the end of the story in a twist, when he is hit by a car. In the hospital, he accepts this accident as an opportunity to atone for his sins, and his confession restores order to his relationships and frees his guilty conscience. The story is a critique of material wealth and the corrupting power of consumerism. It is also a statement about children’s disadvantaged position within the capitalist system. Hyŏn’s poetic skill succeeds in masking the story’s didactic messages by empathetically probing the boy’s state of mind. When Mun’gi goes on his first shopping spree, he buys a ball. Later, when he is reprimanded by his uncle, Mun’gi decides to get rid of the items he has bought in the hope that he can dispose of his guilty conscience and the evidence at the same time. Mun’gi’s guilt warps his sense of perception of the items wrongfully acquired: even as he grasps it, the ball seems to glow and expand to grotesque proportions. An innocent girl gets blamed for his crime, and while Mun’gi does not witness the beating directly, her sobbing reverberates in his head for hours. In his narration, Hyŏn succeeds in being critical and engaged, and yet he does not lose his sympathy for children’s attempts to come to terms with the world around them.60 Hyŏn’s short fiction attests to his fascination with psychological guilt and the social response that it engenders. What interests him is less a kind of a universal moralizing imperative that is supposedly available to young people if they re-

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ceive proper education (recall Yi Kwang-su’s essay “On Blame”) and more how characters can fail morally because of trivial incidents that occur outside of their control. What sets Hyŏn apart is his willingness to accept that children are capable of experiencing and expressing the entire range of complex human emotions: guilt, fear, jealousy, anger, sadness, and joy. In this sense, Hyŏn was able to present an unflinching examination of children’s society as a microcosmos of the adult world in which moral decisions are driven by economic constraints shaped by social and political structures. One of the ways Hyŏn explored the complex psychology of children and avoided the facile view of children as enthusiastic supporters of the colonial regime was through the strategy of linked short stories. This strategy allowed him to explore a range of characters both within the brief span of a short story— usually around a thousand words—and across multiple episodes in which the characters could develop, interact with others, and also often take different and sometimes opposite positions in a manner that fosters empathy. Hyŏn wrote two such cycles: the first, which featured preschool and primary-school-age children, was published in a collection titled Chosŏn adong munhakchip (Anthology of Korean Children’s Literature) in 1938 and then in the children’s daily newspaper Sonyŏn Chosŏn ilbo from May 1938 until May 1939.61 A second cycle, which featured primary- and middle-school children, was published in Sonyŏn between October 1938 and February 1940. Both were set in an urban neighborhood marked by recent industrial development: a railroad, a school within short walking distance, parents with company jobs. The first cycle featured four characters of distinct, identifying traits: Yŏng’i, a girl with a robust imagination; Noma, intelligent and brave; Kidong’i, rich and arrogant; and naïve Ttolttori, the youngest member of the group. The first cycle was republished in 1946 with illustrations by Chŏng Hyŏn-ung, whose illustrations graced countless pages in the magazines, newspapers, and books of this period.62 The first story in the cycle, “Water Gun” introduces the main characters.63 The first to appear is Kidong’i, who owns a water gun. Kidong’i loads it from water in the basin, aims randomly, and soaks the wall and the clay jars. He disturbs the trees and the birds resting in their branches. Kidong’i boasts of his power because, the narrator explains, “he has every right to.” Kidong’i, who has never done much to impress the neighborhood children, now holds their gaze captive. In this way, Hyŏn introduces the neighborhood’s rich boy—not as a child worthy of praise for his commendable behavior, but one who deems himself to be superior because he is in possession of a valuable object worthy

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of envy. Noma, on the other hand, does not have a gun, and so he asks Kidong’i for a turn with it. Kidong’i promises him a turn if Noma supplies him with water. Noma brings the water, and Kidong’i uses it, saving only the last few drops to squirt Noma in the face (Figure 14). When Noma runs home crying, his mother rebukes him for expecting to enjoy the same privileges as the rich boy. Noma’s desire for the water gun is so intense that he begins to see the water gun in every mundane household object, and he starts to design one in his mind. Hyŏn captures both the child’s rich imagination and his longing, and thus highlights the social tensions that dictate the child’s desire. Hyŏn remains at eye level with his characters, using repetitions and fragments that imitate speech and reproduce the children’s mannerisms. Although the reader learns about the children, their families, and their social and economic classes in subsequent stories, Hyŏn’s sensitive narrator refrains from passing judgment on them. Rather, he allows the reader to inhabit the children’s inner space and view the

F I G U R E 14 . Chŏng Hyŏn-ung, “The Water Gun.” P’odo wa kusŭl

(Grapes and Marbles) (Seoul: Chŏngŭmsa, 1946), 4.

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world from their eyes. This is apparent in the story “Only the Wind Knows.”64 Here, three “colored skirts,” pink, yellow, and blue, await the much-anticipated arrival of the cotton candy man. Hyŏn paints with a palette of sound as much as color. The reader gets a sense of the girls’ anticipation through the steady rhythm of the cotton candy man’s drum, twice repeated (“Tung tung tung. Tung tung tung.”) before and after each adult encounter. Hyŏn uses sound to build up anticipation through a repetitive exchange between the girls and the various characters they encounter: Pink Skirt: Have you see Cotton Candy Man? Oil man: Nope. Yellow Skirt: Have you see Cotton Candy Man? Oil man: Nope. Blue Skirt: Have you see Cotton Candy Man? Oil man: Nope.65

In his unhurried way, Hyŏn succeeds in capturing the girls’ optimism. This chant-like dialogue repeats itself verbatim three times more. In the children’s rich imagination, the wind is transformed into an informant, carrying both the sound of the drum and the promise of sweets. In “The Water Gun,” mentioned earlier, Noma’s desire for the toy gives rise to a unique perception of the world—in his eyes a wooden poker and a laundry bat are transformed into a water gun. Herein lies Hyŏn’s second strength as a writer: in his works, children’s imagination has true transformative power. It is imagination that poses the greatest challenge to the colonial regime, for it indicates that children have robust inner lives that can and will transform their realities. They create their own worlds, interactions, and networks of friendship that are protected from the outside—children can see beyond their immediate surroundings and create an alternative reality. For example, “Cricket” opens with Hyŏn’s typical technique of introducing the reader to sound through text:66 Kwittul kwittul kwittul kwittul. Kwittul kwittul kwittul kwittul. The cricket chirps. The cricket chirps forlornly in the shadow of the wall. The sun has set and the shadow is long, and Noma crouches by the wall, attentive to its sound. And then he is the heart of the cricket. Slowly, Noma begins to transform into the cricket. The cricket begins to transform into Noma. Kwittul kwittul kwittul kwittul. Kwittul kwittul kwittul kwittul.

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Through repetitions of sound, the narrator draws the reader into the dreams and aspirations the three young children in this text: Noma, Yŏng’i, and T ­ tolttori. Noma listens to the cricket, identifies with the cricket, and becomes the cricket. He grows so close to it that the cricket knows what is in Noma’s heart: the boy yearns for the return of his father. Yŏng’i hears something different in the cricket’s chirp: she feels that like her, it is waiting for the chestnuts to ripen. Ttolttori finds his dreams in the chirp: he wants to grow tall. The sound of the cricket allows the children to access their most private space, and share their deepest, most personal desires. That the evocative cricket chirp can stir rich and diverse responses from each child also attests to the power of language to ignite the imagination, and to the resilience of dreams in face of adverse reality. Besides the transformative power of the imagination that Hyŏn celebrates in so many of his stories, he also provides a critique of power. “Father’s Shoes” illustrates what happens when a child postures to assert power: Kidong’i is wearing very large shoes. They are his father’s shoes. In his father’s shoes, Kidong’i looks very respectable. He swings his arms and inflates his chest and sashays toward the playing children. “Out of my way! Out of my way!” In his father’s shoes, Kidong’i sounds just like him. In his father’s shoes, the children will surely fear Kidong’i as they fear his father. To make them more fearful he wears his father’s hat and suit and struts like his father. He swings his arms and puffs up his chest and sashays toward the playing children. “Out of my way! Out of my way!” But the children do not fear Kidong’i. Noma, Yŏng’i, and Ttolttori sit in a circle on a mat in the shade of the wall and play with stones. They think he hasn’t noticed that he’s wearing his dad’s shoes.67

Kidong’i continues to try and disrupt their play with his antics, but the children refuse to view him as he would like to be seen. Until this moment, Kidong’i has stood firmly on the opposite side of the economic divide: not only is he the only rich child in the group, he alone has a father who is present. Here, the children insist on viewing him as a boy their age wearing oversized shoes. The children have the final word in this exchange, voiced in succession by Noma, Yŏng’i, and Ttolttori in turn: “Do you think wearing grown-up shoes makes you the boss?” Hyŏn leaves the story here, allowing the children’s voices

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to ring out. He does not include Kidong’i’s response or rebuke. The story illustrates how resistance by a group bound by shared poverty can work as a powerful foil, not through force but through the refusal to adopt the bully’s viewpoint and claim to reality. Hyŏn provides a solution to the social and economic inequalities that the children have inherited by showing the power of community. In “The Brawl,” Kidong’i tries to pick a fight with Ttolttori: Kidong’i runs into Ttolttori by the stone wall. Kidong’i looks at Ttolttori angrily, scanning him from head to toe. Ttolttori returns the angry gaze. For a time they say nothing. Kidong’i saw Ttolttori yesterday, this morning, and a while earlier, so he has nothing new to say. For the same reason, Ttolttori has nothing to say. But Ttolttori looks angrily at Kidong’i. Kidong’i looks angrily at Ttolttori. Finally Kidong’i finds something to say. “What were you talking about with Yŏng’i?” “What’s it to you?” “You were talking about me, weren’t you?” “Why would we?” “If not, what then?” Ttolttori can’t recall what he and Yŏng’i talked about. He blinks. “I’m not telling.”68

In that moment Ttolttori realizes the power of withholding information. The two walk over to Noma and Yŏng’i, and Kidong’i confronts Yŏng’i in the same manner. She can’t recall her conversation with Ttolttori either, but she, too, pretends to keep information from the rich boy. Infuriated, he demands that they speak, but the story ends with the children’s final words, repeated three times: “So what if we did talk about you?” The children have managed to gain the upper hand against someone with the inherent advantages of class by feigning silence and secrecy. Hiding information not only provides them with strength, but it also brings them together as a community that can speak in one voice. The nature of Hyŏn’s work is that no single story can resolve the deep, structural issues facing the children. If on one occasion the poor children gain the upper hand, in the next they fall prey to Kidong’i’s antics, thus proving that class and purchasing power have decisive authority. In the story “Mask of a Leader” for example, Kidong’i takes Noma and Ttolttori by the hand to shop for toys at a toy store.69 This is not the “hole in the wall” store where they can typically find marbles, pencils, and cards. The toystore sells cars, trains, rubber

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dogs and elephants. As they imagine the toys they are about to see and fantasize about what they might take home thanks to Kidong’i’s coins, they pass their plain neighborhood store, and take a moment to look down upon it with contempt. But once they arrive at the toy store, Noma and Ttolttori realize that association with a rich boy will not grant them the purchasing power they need. Kidong’i chooses a bearded mask, the “mask of a leader.” From that moment he is transformed, the mask meshing naturally with his body to grant him swagger and authority. Noma and Ttolttori, for their part, follow behind with fallen faces. There is no redemption in this story, and no attempt to soften the bottom line. Kidong’i has the money to buy power and influence, and this gives him an advantage that cannot be glossed over. But transformation can take place even without the advantage of class. In the story “Courage,”70 the children engage in war play: Noma, Yŏng’i, and Ttolttori pretend to be sword-wielding, disciplined soldiers awaiting the command of Kidong’i, their sergeant. What identifies the sergeant’s rank is his clothing: Kidong’i wears a suit, dons a “helmet” on his head (a school cap), and grasps a shiny toy metal sword given to him by his father. By comparison, the other children’s clothes are tattered. Noma does not have the gear that would make him eligible for the position of sergeant, and so he decides to earn the position through a test of courage: a dash towards, and shaking of, the gate to the house with the big dog. While Kidong’i, Yŏng’i, and Ttolttori are too frightened to go near the house, Noma successfully completes this feat. “And that,” the narrator explains, “fulfills the qualifications for leader, even dressed in rags.” Throughout his cycle, Hyŏn demonstrates that the power of imagination is transformative because it facilitates empathy and the exploration of other points of view, and because it makes possible a deeper truth that transcends material circumstances. Hyŏn’s second cycle, published in Sonyŏn, speaks to a slightly older audience of middle school children, but stays rooted on the question of how knowledge and power are implicated in class difference. In this cycle, too, there are children from a variety of classes: Kisu, who has a rich uncle and a brother studying in Tokyo, and Inhwan, who has a rich father, appear the most frequently; alongside them are Sumani, Sŏngmin, and Tonghun, all from poor families. In these stories as well, the author is most interested in guilt that arises not from deliberate, ill-meaning action but from trivial incidents that expose moral weakness. For example, in a game of handball, when Ilsŭng pretends to

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be “safe” even though he knew he was “out,” he does so out of pressure to win for his team. The author examines how difficult it is to confess untruths when reputation and social value rests in the balance.71 By exploring the psychology of characters over multiple linked stories, experimenting with the possibilities inherent in different economic and social positions, and demonstrating the potential of the transformative power of imagination, Hyŏn Tŏk created fiction that empowered the children of late colonial Korea. That he did so in the proJapanese publications of his day attests to the truly polyphonic nature of late colonial Korean magazines and newspapers for children. Humor and Irony in Wartime Korea Humor, as Lydia Williams states, has the power to displace the real world and impose an imaginary world in its stead.73 Writing about children’s books, John Stephens argues, “By making the familiar strange and by overturning some conventional aspects of narrative and picture book modes . . . books are able to see the world differently, less seriously, and to question and sometimes subvert a variety of its ideologies and structures of authority.”74 The section called “Laughing Corner” (Kkal kkal taehoe) began to appear in Sonyŏn starting in August 1937, and it manifested a humorous and subversive engagement with the world that is particularly meaningful considering the context of late colonial Korea. “Laughing Corner” consisted of a series reader-submitted jokes, and was often accompanied by a diminutive illustrations. The jokes in “Laughing Corner” were not grouped under any apparent themes or categories, but were random vignettes that poked fun at traditional figures of authority. “Laughing Corner” gives insight into what readers would have considered transgressive and amusing at this time. More importantly, these moments of laughter expose the absurdities embedded in social hierarchies as well as small moments of resistance that would not otherwise have been condoned. Much of the humor is generated by figures acting out of character and outside their social class, and the more venerated the characters—police officers, teachers, parents—the greater the joy that was expressed in moments of misrecognition. The young readers of this magazine would have likely found this empowering, because the jokes located the young readers in a position of knowing insiders, as readers who recognize perhaps common folly. These vignettes made it permissible to laugh in the safety of private or communal reading space.

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For example, “Scatterbrained” pokes fun at an elderly man who walks around with one shoe on his foot and one shoe in his hand. Boy: What’s in your hand? What are you looking for? Old Man: For the life of me I can’t find its match! Boy: What’s that on your foot? Old Man: For the life of me I can’t find the match for that one, either!75

This permits a moment of fun at the expense of the old man, and allows the child to expose the old man’s folly without malice. In a similar vein, “Dangerous Planet” pokes fun at an old woman’s lack of sophistication: Ttolttori: Granny, I learned in school that the Earth is constantly turning. Ignorant Granny: Oh no! Stay away from that planet!76

The accompanying illustration demonstrates the gap between the boy’s wisdom and the grandmother’s ignorance: it depicts a boy balanced confidently on top of a tilting planet. The vignette demonstrates how children’s knowledge of the world puts them ahead of elders who would normally command veneration and respect. In addition to elders, official figures of authority were also frequently ridiculed in “Laughing Corner.” In “Beast,” a railroad attendant demands that a country simpleton pay an extra half-fare for his travel companion, a chicken.77 In response, the man takes off his jacket and says, “Am I to pay for all the fleas in my coat, too?” Laughter is created because of the gap in standards of hygiene between the city and the countryside, but the butt of the joke here is not just the simpleton but the station official, who would propose to charge fare for what the simpleton considers yet another animal traveling freely on his person. The negotiation of dues is also featured in “The Price of Medication”: Doctor: You should know that your wife’s devoted care was probably more effective in treating your illness than the medicine I gave you. Patient: Ah, in that case, I’ll just pay my wife.78

Here, a doctor’s attempt to compliment his patient’s wife backfires, and provides the patient an opportunity to avoid paying the doctor for his treatment. “Beast” and “The Price of Medication” reveal moments in which those pressed for payment present seemingly reasonable excuses to avoid paying their dues, and present trivial but amusing moments of resistance against a broader context of capitalist exchange squeezing the colonial economy.

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Teacher-student exchanges were also common subjects of “Laughing Corner,” as in “Gone Deaf.” A teacher calls his student’s name repeatedly, but the student does not respond. Finally, the teacher lashes out: Teacher: Why aren’t you answering me?! Student: You yelled so much in gym class yesterday, I’ve gone deaf.79

The accompanying illustration depicts what surely would be an intimidating situation: a teacher towers over his students, and the sound waves of his voice, represented by densely drawn, curved lines, push against the children’s faces. In the regimented and disciplined school culture of the time, an exchange like this might have elicited laughter because it was so unthinkable. These moments were particularly empowering because they allowed children moments of resistance in a context when no such power could be wielded. As in Hyŏn Tŏk’s work, it is in these moments of humor that children can be seen as enjoying authority rather than submitting to it. The subversive potential of such humorous vignettes is apparent when taken in context of the dominantly militaristic rhetoric of Sonyŏn. Aside from humor, irony in the works of Pak T’ae-wŏn has been overlooked in what have been called his works of regime collaboration, specifically his two child radio narratives, “Can’t Wait to Grow Up” and “Baby Captain.”80 On the surface, both seem to be typical pro-war fiction. “Can’t Wait to Grow Up” tells the story of five-year-old Namsu who perceives himself to be as important as his father, an authoritative figure in the neighborhood.81 Namsu demonstrates his intelligence by speaking in fluent Japanese and carrying himself in the poised, disciplined manner that models the expectations of K ­ orea’s young colonial subjects. The piece might be considered collaborative for its endearing portrait of a precocious child who aspires to be drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army as a way of performing his adulthood. However, the irony in the text is found in the gap between the way the child perceives himself and how ­others see him. The child insists he should be allowed to attend high school, to be recruited into the army, and to join his father’s fishing team. The preposterousness of his wishes and the fond laughter that his comic patriotism and precious behavior elicits create a gap between reality and fantasy, and raise questions about the possibility of the existence of an unironic self. When the reader titters at the absurdity of this child’s self-assuredness and the breach between the child’s view of the world and reality, a space opens for the question of the degree to which perception can be trusted.

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Pak’s second radio script, “Baby Captain,” features young Namsu again, and this script, too, is laden with irony that turns the straight-forward narrative inside out.82 Namsu walks out of his home with a helmet on his head, a mask on his face, and a megaphone in hand in search of neighborhood children to do his bidding. Armed with self-importance, the child imitates his father’s comportment, but none of the others respond. Namsu finds six- and seven-year-old children to play along with his game of “air raids,” but one runs home crying and the other gets distracted with her mother’s shopping errands and abandons her post with little fanfare. Disgusted with the lack of discipline in his “soldiers,” Namsu returns home, where his mother scolds him for taking his father’s megaphone. The child then disappears for hours, and at last is found sleeping soundly in the attic, having spent the remaining afternoon reading Japanese comics and eating strawberries. This episode, too, is marked by a gap between the child’s self-perception and the reality of his surroundings. As hard as he tries, the others resist the play, or break the trance of the world that he has imposed upon them. More strikingly, the child models himself on his selfimportant father, who holds a position of authority and who likes to criticize his fellow citizens for their moral laxity. It is possible, then, to read this narrative not as a testament to the internalization of war culture or naturalization of hierarchy, but as a subtle challenge to the hegemonic status quo and as a critique of the unironic sense of self-importance bred of colonial Korea’s unique social conditions. The Child-Heart in Late Colonial Korea One of the striking features of the late colonial children’s magazines is the continued presence of pastoral children’s poetry. As this chapter has pointed out, much of the prose, advertisements, and essays in the magazines were immersed in wartime culture. Nonfiction and fiction prose was invested in raising colonial subjects who would behave according to a moral code appropriate to wartime constraints. The magazines published for children at this time cultivated an interest in wartime scientific and technological culture (warplanes and ships), and promoted civic participation and attention to health. Children’s poetry, on the other hand, celebrated a benevolent, immersive natural world where children moved harmoniously with the elements. Poems were accompanied by images that captured children in communion with nature, embracing

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animals, talking to insects, being spoken to by trees, and even, as in Figure 15, intertwined so organically with nature that the very boundary between child and the natural world was blurred. That the bottom left-hand corner contains the “Oath to the Emperor” mentioned earlier in the chapter attests to the degree to which the boundary between imaging the child and social disciplining were threaded together seamlessly. The most important poet and editor of the late colonial era was the prolific Yun Sŏk-chung (1911–2003), who left his mark on all children’s magazines of the time and whose legacy has lasted to this day.83 His children’s songs were anthologized starting in the 1930s, and in his lifetime his work was acclaimed by Korea’s most prominent literary figures including Yi Kwang-su, Chu Yo-han, Chŏng Chi-yong, Kim Tong-ni, Sŏ Chŏng-ju, and Pak Mong-wŏl (Yongjŏng).84 In scholarship, Yun’s poetry has been largely identified as the epitome of the celebration of the child-heart. He wrote from a place of firm belief in the child’s

F I G U R E 15 . Front matter of Sonyŏn 4, no. 6 (1940): 7.

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innocence and in glorified childhood. His work has mostly been branded as escapist, accused of lacking engagement with the very real challenges facing Korea’s colonial children. But as I have argued, the concept of the child-heart deserves a close examination within colonial and postcolonial Korea’s historical trajectory, particularly in light of heated contestation over what children needed, emotionally and intellectually, to grow into proper colonial and national subjects. Certainly, the idealization of childhood and insistence on children’s purity played into socialization discourses guided by colonial priorities. This was particularly true in the period of accelerated assimilation from 1937 to 1945 under discussion in this chapter, when child purity was complicit in advancing the rhetoric of discipline and control for military purposes. But a close reading of the poetry from this period by Yun Sŏk-chung, Pak Yong-jŏng (whose poem, “Side by Side,” was discussed earlier in the chapter), and Yi Wŏn-su, reveals an attempt at structuring the experience of childhood that proceeds at a “natural” rhythm rather than a cultured or political one. Important, too, is that many of Yun’s poems were set to music—not called poems (tongsi), but children’s songs (tongyo)—and as such structured language competency as well, a significant contribution at a time when the Korean language was being phased out in schools. Particularly considering their location in the magazine—not as isolated writings but alongside wartime fiction and essays—the poems emerged as a powerful and empowering counterpoint to the main elements of wartime children’s culture. Take, for example, the poem “Daytime,” by Yun Sŏk-chung: He snatches the smoke with his two hands, but try as he may the smoke will not be caught. He stomps on his shadow with his two feet, But try as he may the shadow will not be stomped. It is early, and there’s nothing to do. The child wields the butterfly net on his shoulder, And is off to catch dragonflies.85

The narrator in this poem is experiencing the moment as a close observer, his intimate vantage point allowing him to capture the child’s movements and the intention expressed through these gestures. The readers of this poem will recognize that neither smoke nor shadow can be captured. There is no judgment passed, however, as the narrator remains respectful of the child’s past attempts

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and unflagging motivation. The illustration that accompanies the poem pictures the child walking energetically with swinging arms, his long shadow broadening the sense of space. There are two repetitive structures in this poem: the use of the word “two” (tu son ŭro / tu pal lo), and the repetition of the structure, “try as he may . . . it is to no avail” (“chabado chabado ani chaphyŏ / palbado palbado ani palp’yŏ”). These provide the rhythmic foundation for the poem, broken up by the third line, which opens up a window into the child’s state of mind in a specific temporal moment. In the illustration, the butterfly net is carried much like the multiple images of rifles, and the same verb—maeda, to wield, or throw over the shoulder—is used, a deliberate choice that can perhaps express resistance to the militaristic content of the magazine. In fact, under this poem is a didactic essay that preaches frugality for the sake of the nation. The page makes room for two incongruous texts: one didactic, the other whimsical. Seen together, it is possible to read the poem as preparation for the essay: practice catching dragonflies, and you will end up restoring the nation. But there is a certain tone deafness that exists between the two, leading more to the sense that even in this late colonial wartime era, the child stands at arm’s length from culture, and therefore can still occupy a space that is not defined by the developmental logic of the militarized colony. Much like Hyŏn Tŏk, Yun frequently celebrated the transformative powers of children’s imagination, as in his poem “The Postman and the Leaves.” The postbox, postman, and post office are recurring features of fiction and poetry in this period: Children pour out of every door They ambush the Postman. “I want a letter!” “I want a letter!” “There’s none for you today. Out of my way, out of my way!” “Aw, com’on!” “Aw, com’on!” They pluck the leaves off the trees. “Hey everybody! Come get your leaf letters!” They gather the letters of green, the postman ambles along the fields of rice.86

In the first part of the poem, the neighborhood children pour out of their homes and crowd around the postman. Yun uses a parallel, musical structure

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to describe the interaction between the children and the postman: the postman calls, “pik’yŏra pik’hyŏ,” and the children respond in a clamoring chorus, “andwaeyo/andwaeyo.” There is a double repetition in both utterances that creates a sonic, immersive effect, that provides an illusion of sound from multiple directions. Even while the children object by calling “andwaeyo,” they have already devised a solution—the leaves have been transformed, with the power of their imagination, into the letters they wish to receive. The last two lines show the postman moving out of the frame of the poem, disappearing into the embankments between the rice paddies. The world of serious correspondence, perhaps including those letters from the battlefront, has been made superfluous by the children’s creativity. This poem shares the page with an essay on the technology of trains and on their importance in the modern age. There is an incongruity between the scientific, technical content of an essay on the contribution of trains to industrial development, and the manner in which the children’s imagination can make a bureaucratic postal mission redundant. The children’s act of imagination creates an ambiguous, ironic space that challenges the authority of the practical and celebrates the inner world and the private communion of children and nature. “The Postman and the Leaves” introduces one of Yun’s abiding interests, which is the organic relationship between children and nature. Children appear in many of his poems, but even in those where they do not, their presence is implied by the tone and style. Take, for example, the poem “Morning Dew,” which occupies a two-page spread: Drops of morning dew, Descend each night Sleep in the grass, and withdraw. Drops of morning dew, The sun has not risen today, and they sleep on. Just so that they will not wake, The wind blows gently, gently, And the birds caress the air in silence.87

In this anthropomorphic poem the dew drops are described as fragile visitors who descend upon the grass and sleep in when the sun is slow to rise. The wind and birds, respectful of the dewdrops’ presence, are careful not to wake them,

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as parents might take pains not to wake their children. The drops of morning dew here are treated as children, and nature’s elements work together as their caregiver. Here is an inherently child-centered space in which anthropomorphized nature is meant to comfort the child reader. While not posing an explicit challenge to the regime, the presence of such songs in Sonyŏn indicates that a struggle for cultural hegemony—over the language and imagery most appropriate for children—was taking place even under conditions of late colonial wartime culture and censorship. Another poet who published in Sonyŏn, and one who is often compared to Yun Sŏk-chung, was Yi Wŏn-su.88 “Lullaby” conveys untroubled harmony between child and nature: Sleep, child, go to sleep. Mr. Sun has gone to his mountain bed, the hills and fields are sleeping, sleeping under a quilt of darkness. Sleep, child, go to sleep. The deer are sleeping in the hills, and in the branches of the trees the birds are sleeping, too, their heads drooping with sleep. Sleep, child, go to sleep. If you sleep, they say he’ll come, round Mr. Moon. Under your sleeping head He will bring with him dreams of the moon. Hush, hush dear child. Child, go to sleep.89

The accompanying illustration depicts a woman rocking her swaddled child to sleep with the full moon looming on the horizon. She calms the baby by listing animals—deer, birds—that have already gone to sleep, as well as the inanimate world—hills, fields—that is sleeping as well. This is to assure the child that it is not alone: nature is joining the child on its journey toward sleep. At the same time, throughout the poem are rhythmic structures and repetitive lines (­chajang chajang uri aegi ŏsŏ chagŏra) so that the sound reinforces the content in its calming tone. Wŏn Chong-ch’an writes that realism is a central concept of the works of Yi Wŏn-su.90 Many of Yi’s poems depart from the pastoral mood and engage

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with the harsh circumstances faced by colonial Korea’s children. For example, his “Hush Little Baby” is an intimate portrait of a young girl trying to lull her crying sibling to sleep by singing the Japanese equivalent of “hush little baby”: Kwinama, kwinama, Where do you live? Beyond the mountain? Do you have a mother and father? The west mountain, thick with trees, Glows red, red with the gleam of the setting sun The setting sun is in your eyes, kwinama.91

The rhetorical voice of the narrator appealing for news of the baby’s mother and father alludes to a stark reality that prevents the infant from being comforted by his parents. The melancholy tone of the poem is created by a tension between the child’s location within nature’s embrace—surrounded by tree-covered mountains—and the child’s loneliness expressed by the reflection of the setting sun in the child’s eyes. The illustration depicts a young girl looking calmly out of the corner of her long lashes at a baby strapped tightly to her back. Another of Yi Wŏn-su’s poems, “Gone to Cut Wood,” is an appeal by a young girl to the mid-winter sun to shine a while longer on her older sister. This poem, too, reveals a tragic reality in which a child must work through debilitating cold in order to help support her family.92 The sound that the woodcutting girl makes as she blows into her hands to warm them (Ho—ho—) is echoed by the wind stirring the brass bells in the village (Uu—Uu—) and by the crackling sound of the frozen creek (Kkong—kkong). The privileged relationship between child and nature makes it possible for the narrator to appeal directly to the sun (Haeya! ); the poem is staged in such a way as to give the impression that these children, while abandoned by adults, are embraced by nature. Typical of the kind of the privileged relationship between child and nature is a poem by Yi T’ae-jun, “Sleeping Child.”93 The child’s father is in the fields, the mother has gone to draw water, and the child, waiting for their return, has dozed off. He sleeps clutching a pillow, tears of loneliness pooled in his eyes. The fourth and last stanza of the poem introduces the twist of the poem: “Watching over the sleeping child / is the swallow / Watching over the sleeping child / is the cloud.” Overall the poem hints that the child has been abandoned by the adults for reasons beyond their control. But the child is being looked

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after by the birds and clouds whose painstaking surveillance provides a sense of security. With grand nature looking over him, the child is never alone. The sense that children were natural and had privileged access to the elements is reflected also in essays about language by Ch’oe Hyŏn-bae.94 In “The Fun Chosŏn Language,” Ch’oe praises the virtues of the Korean language for being able to create seemingly endless combinations of sound. Taking his examples from nature, he argues that Korean (or Chosŏn mal, as it was called under the Japanese) is clever in that it sounds like what it is trying to describe. For example, frogs, or kaeguri, are called so because of the sounds that they make (kaegul kaegul ), and seagulls, kirŏgi, are named for the sound of their cries (kirŏk kirŏk). “The words are particularly familiar to young children. This is how they learn language: they naturally name the animals around them according to the sounds they make.”95 Ch’oe is essentially suggesting that there is a direct correspondence between words and their meanings in Korean, and that the language is largely intuitive: “Animals are named for their sounds, and children know this well.”96 He chooses his examples from nature, thus enforcing the connection between children and the natural environment. This connection was supported by the children’s poetry published in each issue of Sonyŏn: typical titles included “Mr. Sun,” “Spring Rain,” “Baby Sparrow,” and “Lotus Flower” and included onomatopoeia and formulaic statements about nature. Considering that there would have been editorial intervention, the poems in Sonyŏn reinforced the idea that children were closer to nature, and shaped more by their natural environment than by the colonial culture in which they were immersed. Poems such as these appeared alongside prose and fiction that celebrated wartime culture, thus disrupting the purely ideological and didactic agenda of the late colonial magazine Sonyŏn. Children’s poetry and songs celebrated the bond between child and nature, conveying in text and image their shared organic roots. One way of reading the symbiotic relationship between child and nature is to see it as an expression of the “local color” (hyangt’osaek) movement. In this movement images of the countryside, women and children were presented as “exoticised rurality” in order “to stabilize the representation of Korea as a part or a region of the greater imperial realm.”97 From the perspective of the local color movement, idealized images of child and nature could be mobilized for the imperial project: by objectifying the child and celebrating a kind of primal connection to nature, a more complex view of the child’s interiority and the effects of the colonial economy on Korea’s young people could be put aside.

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An alternative interpretation of the connection between child and nature, however, suggests that portraying the child as immersed in nature was a way of projecting society’s conviction in childhood innocence. This link between child and the natural environment created a layer of protection that resisted imperial time and the agenda of industrialization and development. By establishing the child’s transcendent purity, one that is expressed through the child’s ability to communicate directly with nature, political or social structures could be indirectly critiqued as in Yi T’ae-jun’s “Sleeping Child,” in which nature fosters the child in the absence of its mother and father. In this sense, the child-heart of the late colonial period was engaged politically, though implicitly so, with questions of Korea’s future prospects. The Second Sino-Japanese War heralded an era of colonial policies that aimed to shape both the spirits and bodies of Koreans. Children born into this reality would grow up without their parents’ language and without memories of a non-colonial Korea, and therefore much was at stake in writing for children. The clamping down on leftist venues of expression, however, meant that the platforms for discussing class-based issues and for politicizing children were increasingly narrowed, and the children’s magazines that continued to be published had to follow strict guidelines or risk being closed down. Indeed, compared with the earlier leftist magazines where the child-heart was mobilized for revolution, the works published for children in the wartime era were far less explicitly political, unless it was for the purpose of war mobilization. On the surface, it seems as if the illustrations, essays, prose, and poetry of Sonyŏn had reverted to one of two extremes: either open enthusiasm for the war effort or an escapist storytelling in which children were embraced by the natural world. A closer examination of the prose and poetry of this period, however, reveals that the struggle for cultural hegemony continued despite the influence of wartime culture. Some content did inculcate young readers with a sense of colonial subjectivity, urging the disciplining of bodies and enticing young minds with stories of war machines and sacrifices of the soldiers at the front. But at the same time, voices of contention emerged through laughter and irony. Hyŏn Tŏk placed his trust in the transformative power of the child’s imagination. Through their imagination young readers could navigate the complexity of class conflict and arrive at a clearer understanding of such conflict. Humor in Sonyŏn interrupted disciplinary content by momentarily elevating young readers above figures of authority such as officers, elders, and teachers. Irony, too, was a means of subverting the very normalcy of wartime culture that held

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the fabric of society together. And poets such as Yun Sŏk-chung and Yi Wŏn-su created a privileged relationship between child and nature that provided a counterpoint to the idea of the natural soldier so crucial to the military rhetoric of the time. Poetry created the opportunity for children to experiment with language, to feel its rhythms and colors in a way that colonial policies could not control, and to do so while there was still an outlet for the Korean language. In this era of repression and increased threat to the future of the Korean language and culture, children’s literature allowed writers to explore the tensions between culture and nature, and to gesture toward the possibility of imagining prospects for a different future.

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CHAPTER 6

L I B E R AT I N G T H E C H I LD - H E ART For years our darling boys and girls have been forced to learn erroneous historical information, have been made to learn another’s language as their own and bow to a false God, and have been enslaved. Not knowing better, they obeyed; watching them caused tears of sadness to saturate our hearts. But now sky-blue freedom and verdant truth has arrived and with it the pure grace of spring. We are raising children of the New Chosŏn—how can this be anything other than a blessing for our land, our people? “Ŏrini nal” (Children’s Day), Tonga ilbo, 5 May 1946

T H E N E W S O F JA PA N ’ S D E F E AT was delivered by the Japanese emperor over the radio on 15 August 1945. It came as a shock to those who heard the announcement—and not all did, for it took some time for word of the liberation to spread to the entire Korean population. With the news, however, the colonial government and Japanese settlers began their evacuation.1 At the same time, expatriate ­Koreans living in Japan, China, and Manchuria poured back into the newly liberated land. For the first time since 1905, governance was to be handed back to the hands of the people of the Korean peninsula. It is easy to imagine the immense expectations that followed this longawaited independence. Liberation from four decades of Japanese occupation must have been exhilarating; but it also brought in its wake intense feelings of anticipation and anxiety about how best to realize the hopes and dreams of the colonized. Im Chong-myŏng describes this moment as one in which hegemonic knowledge and colonial-period conceptions of the world suddenly lost their currency; instead, a variety of programs and plans, as well as their strategies of implementation, collided.2 These plans were soon circumscribed by the Soviet military occupation in the North and the United States Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) in the South. The USAMGIK took charge

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of military, governmental, and cultural affairs in what was an increasingly hostile, post-division atmosphere.3 It was a combination of colonial legacies and the maintenance of colonial institutions by the USAMGIK, along with the help of the Korean capitalist elites that had flourished under the Japanese, that foreclosed significant structural change.4 Under the USAMGIK auspices, the system of surveillance and control over published materials continued in an attempt to prevent the spread of Communist sympathies.5 As Theodore Hughes notes, the literary field also attests to the volatility of this period, the output of which which included “collaboration confessionals, the reemergence of proletarian writers soon opposed by the reassertion of literature as an autonomous sphere in the name of pure literature, and the rapid formation of rival literary organizations,” resulting in the eventual splitting of the literary field into North and South Korean literature. 6 In order to negotiate a break from the past, Hughes explains, writers had to first return to colonial-period literary debates and movements.7 At the same time, writers grappled with certain continuities, namely the denial of sovereignty (this time by the US presence) and the censorship apparatus, which continued until 1988, and which included a ban on the reading and circulation of KAPF writers who went north (wŏlbuk chakka). Hughes notes that some post-1945 texts refer to liberation as almost a nonevent, so ambiguous were the implications of liberation in the sense of self-determination.8 What marks the “liberation space,” as it came to be known, was the intense and vibrant competition over every aspect of cultural production in Korea. Writers and poets explored the meaning of liberation amidst an intense ideological contestation over whether liberation was the “moment in a dialectical progression of an unfolding revolutionary history” in which the proletarian subject would assume control, or whether liberation signified “the location of moral legitimacy in national capital and a developmental subject.”9 At least until 1948, the censorship and limitations on reading and publishing were lifted, allowing for diverse publications to emerge.10 The rapid changes in consumer culture and the availability of choices made for a period of vibrant print and visual culture both for adults and children. Indeed, print culture for children was every much as implicated in the post-liberation struggle over defining the past, present, and future as adult print culture. Sŏn An-na argues that writers for children largely stayed away from ideological battles until the late 1940s.11 But the magazines in which writers published had clear ideological affiliations and agendas, something that certainly drove the

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content and brought into relief the stakes involved in understanding ­Korea’s past and defining its future. Contention, however, ended with division in 1948 and the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Division and war brought about a fortification of boundaries both geographic and ideological, and North and South Korea produced competing versions of their legitimacy: the former as the heir of an anti-imperialist legacy, the latter as a staunch antiCommunist state. This chapter examines the battle over the minds and bodies of Korean children in the post-liberation period. The Tonga ilbo editorial quoted at the opening of this chapter makes clear that the first post-liberation celebration of Children’s Day was symbolic for the future of the Korean peninsula. Its author explains that Korea’s children embody the possibilities that had been foreclosed for decades. “They are not merely the protagonists of a new generation,” the writer declares, “they are the heroes who will create a new era.” But the author notes that Korean children need liberating not only from colonial legacies: “Grown-ups have educated children as if they were mere playthings. . . . Children must be liberated (haebang) from the narrow world, the dark shadows of custom, outdated educational methods, and sent into nature, made to jump into the wide world, sent into the world of wonder and creativity.”12 What is striking about the editorial is the evocation of nature—“sky-blue freedom,” “verdant truth”—as a compelling argument for children’s liberation. The child and the natural world, as this book has argued, were from the start made to be “natural” companions. Poets and educators alike imagined children as occupying a space outside culture, and as having privileged access to a higher truth. This space granted children insight into class struggle, and at the height of wartime Japan, children’s pliability primed them for ideological molding but also granted their imaginations transformative possibilities. Now that Korea was liberated, nature was evoked again to provide affective potency to its fresh start. What did liberation mean for the writers and poets of the liberation space, including those who had bought into the pan-Asian vision of a Japanese Empire and celebrated children’s self-sacrifice? What of those who believed in the transformative power of childhood as a way of resisting the overpowering state narrative? Ideological loyalties aside, at this critical juncture the most urgent task was recovering Korea’s culture and language. Liberation made for a story of rebirth, and nowhere was this more aptly performed than in the pages of children’s magazines.

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Publishing in Liberated Korea Print media may have entertained different ideological views, but the general mood was one of optimism and of a shared goal: the rehabilitation of the Korean language and culture to its rightful place following decades of colonial rule. Rehabilitation was foremost on the minds of educators and writers for children as well. Together, their contributions formed an array of voices grappling over the past, present, and future of the peninsula. Children’s literature was an integral part of the general revival of the publishing industry. Yi Chung-yŏn explains that immediately after liberation, publishing houses in Korea suffered a shortage of both Korean alphabet typesets and a lack of staff with publishing expertise.13 But the industry soon recovered, and an onslaught of publications ensued. According to Yi, socialist content in the form of leftist pamphlets was particularly popular in 1946, at least until censorship practices were in place.14 Yi Chung-yŏn argues that the leftists had greater control over the print houses occupied and run by the Japanese, and he attributes their dominant presence to their post-liberation activism, the growth in the demand for reading materials, and the profit-seeking behavior of publishing houses and bookstores.15 Leftist writers, who had been silenced for a decade, assumed leadership positions, and reissued censored magazines like the proletarian magazines Pyŏllara, Saedongmu (New Comrade), and Adong munhak (Children’s Literature).16 Yet, a review of children’s literature from the post-­ liberation reveals that writers shared the concern over the revival of the Korean language and culture, regardless of their political convictions.17 They were also deeply invested in forging a new connection between children and the newly liberated natural landscape of Korea. Statistics of book publications in 1947 indicate a significant rise in educational materials and creative fiction, and a decline in just about all other genres.18 Textbooks comprised half of all publications in the years following liberation as part of the growing demand for materials that would rescue Korean children from the “false education” they had received under the Japanese educational system. But profit was of prime concern, and children’s books had either to be marketed as educational materials or to be mass produced in the form of graphic novels and pirated translations. Children’s materials had a relative advantage in this juncture, according to Sŏn, because they had both cultural value and marketing potential.19 Sŏn draws on a publication from 1948 that reveals that of the 170 “children’s reading materials” (adong tosŏ), only 11 percent were considered literary, 44 were educational, 39 percent were

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commercial, and only 6 percent were classified as magazines or multivolume works.20 The dominance of educational and commercial materials in the publishing market in the post-­liberation years helps explain the draw for South Korea’s canonical writers, including Ch’ae Man-sik, Kim Tong-ni, and Yŏm Sang-sŏp. Children’s magazines like Sohaksaeng (Young Student) could function both as an educational supplement and as a venue for writers to address a captive audience of new readership. Writers jumped at the chance to provide marketable writings suitable for the children of liberated Korea. But with the release of publications from their colonial era shackles, and in light of the explosion of publications of all manner of Korean language books, there arose a particular concern that profit, not quality, was driving the market for children’s books.21 Children’s graphic novels, or adong manhwa, grew in popularity to such an extent that their publication rivaled textbooks and fiction by 1949.22 The magazines that were published for young readers in this era were similarly attuned to questions of education and profit. These included the magazines Chugan sohaksaeng (Young Student Weekly, issues 1–46) and S­ ohaksaeng (Young Student, issues 47–79; 1946–1947), and Adong kurakbu (Children’s Club, previously known as Chindallae; 1947–1950), Ŏrininara (Children’s World; 1949– 1950), Saedongmu (New Comrade; 1945–1947), Pyŏllara (Star World; 1945–1946), and Adong munhwa (Children’s Culture; 1948).23 Together, children’s magazines provide insights into the contesting voices that made the child—and by extension, the future vision of the nation—their battleground. Published side by side in these magazines were works by anti-Japanese nationalists, who used this medium to voice their resentment of Japan and their concerns over a perceived Japanese threat, as well as works by writers who steered toward the center or left of the political spectrum and remained critical of capitalism and consumerism. Many of the writers and illustrators who published in the liberation space magazines went north sometime during the three to five years before the outbreak of the Korean War, and joined the ranks of writers and artists in North Korea. For everyone involved, liberation offered the promise of a true break with the past and a fresh start. At the same time, children’s writers and poets had to contend with the very recent past and the legacy of censorship and silence on the one hand and militarization on the other. Writing in the Ŏrininara in 1949, Chi Yong describes his impoverished childhood and the absence of opportunities to enjoy even the most fundamental pastimes like kite flying. He notes how difficult it was to make even a rudimentary spinning top from scratch, a confession that sounds

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poignant considering the prominence of model plane building in the children’s magazines of the previous decade as described in Chapter 5. Chi Yong’s private confession of his poverty contradicts the impression given by Sonyŏn with regard to the popularity of model-building, and is an example of how writers from this era reevaluated their colonial childhoods. Chi Yong writes: “Those of us who grew up without toys are making up for it through this magazine. It is so that you can see how much happier you are than we ever were.”24 One of the longest-running magazines from this period was Chugan ­sohaksaeng (Young Student Weekly), published by Ŭlyu munhwasa and edited by Yun Sŏk-chung. It was published in weekly issues from February 1946 to April 1947, and thereafter monthly under the title Sohaksaeng (Young Student) until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, totaling 79 issues in all. The weekly issues were twelve pages long, but after 1947 the magazine appeared in a longer format of forty pages. True to its name, Sohaksaeng was geared toward schoolchildren, and published both light, entertaining pieces as well as educational content on scientific, linguistic, historical, and anthropological topics. Poetry and serialized fiction were also a main fixture of the magazine. Throughout, Sohaksaeng strongly emphasized education and the continuing challenges of attending school on a regular basis. The very first issue of Chugan sohaksaeng reflects the energy and sense of urgency with which the magazine devoted itself to the task of writing for the newly liberated children of South Korea. Unlike the magazine Sonyŏn published in the late colonial period, Chugan sohaksaeng wasted little space: it had no separate cover or table of contents, and left little room for margins. Judging by the density of the visuals and text, it appears that the magazine tried to pack as much content as possible. The first issue started with an essay titled “Our Pride” by Yi Man-gyu.25 “Our Pride” boasted of the superiority of the Korean language and cited the global admiration of it. Other sections in the same issue included an essay on the surrender of the Japanese Emperor, an essay on the origins of the Korean people, an essay calling for children to embrace the study of science, and instructions on good writing practices. The themes in this very first issue set the tone for subsequent issues of Chugan sohaksaeng, which covered Korean culture, history, and language in an attempt to set right the misguided or general absence of information about Korea’s past. The series “Our Pride,” for example, continued in following issues, covering such landmarks as the Sŏkkuram, the Buddha carved into rock (issue 3); biographies of notable Koreans like Yi Sunsin, the Korean admiral who helped defeat an invading Japanese naval force

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in the sixteenth century (issue 4); cultural legacy, such as court music (issue 7); and general appreciation for the land, such as the essay “Korea’s Mountains and Rivers” in issue 8. Chugan sohaksaeng was heavily illustrated, reinforcing the language and history lessons with visual feedback. Text and image together helped strike a balance between education and entertainment. The combined power of word and image worked to uproot the visual and linguistic landscape shaped and constrained by colonial Japan. At the same time, Chugan sohaksaeng had to rely on the affective regime that had been in place since the emergence of children’s culture in the early twentieth century, namely, an appeal to children’s privileged relationship with nature and truth. How language education became infused with post-liberation and then postdivision language ideology, how the discourse of discipline and control was absorbed into the post-liberation order, and what happened to the relationship between child and nature when science and technology became increasingly significant for nation-building will be the main concerns of this chapter. Language and Writing in Post-Liberation Children’s Magazines The role of language was of intense concern and was central to the development of literature for young readers in Korea from the very start. As we have seen in Chapter 3, the child-heart demanded that a new language and content be invented for young readers. The language debates of the 1920s centered on the creation of a linguistic idiom that did not just imitate speech—as a part of the ŏnmun ilch’i movement, “the reconciliation of spoken and written language”—but could suit the needs of the child-heart. With the phasing out of the Korean language in schools in the later part of the colonial period, the discussion of the Korean language and its capacity to capture the Korean spirit was severely restricted. But national liberation also meant a liberation of spoken and written Korean. Language and writing emerged as the main conveyors of the Korean spirit. Under colonialism, Korean language scholars struggled to maintain the Korean language and battle illiteracy.26 The so-called Korean dictionary incident is symbolic of this struggle. A project to compile a Korean dictionary finally got underway in 1929, and despite many obstacles, a draft was ready in 1939. Permission was granted with stipulations for the publication of the dictionary, and the first draft was set in 1942. The ten grueling years of work that went into this project were stymied at the last minute when the Japanese raided the

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editorial office and seized the completed document. Finally, the law banning publications in Korean was rescinded in 1945, and by 1947 the number of active publishing houses grew from 45 to 581.27 Particularly popular in this period were books about social sciences, history, and language. The enforced silence on the written Korean language in the period leading up to liberation created a vacuum that publishers, educators, and writers alike were eager to fill.28 However, not all bode well for the spoken and written Korean language. Children’s culture was ground zero, the site where the communication of culture and language was most critical in the shaping of young minds. Judging by the children’s magazines of the post-liberation period, then, it becomes clear that there was a tremendous amount of anxiety about the lingering impurities of the spoken and written language, and even subtle resistance of young speakers to the new linguistic regime. This anxiety manifested itself in the concern with the revival of the Korean language and its correct use in writing and speech. Editors and writers of children’s magazines shared a concern about language as a representation of a newly liberated nation with a long and illustrious heritage. “We awaken from a 36-year nightmare,” wrote Kim Pyŏng-je in his 1945 essay “The Korean Language and Script.” The Japanese stole our lullabies and tried to obliterate our grandmothers’ folk tales. We were punished for writing our script in school, and even at home we were told that without Japanese we were good for nothing. If we dared to use our language in government offices and public places, not only were we unable to complete our tasks but we were made to suffer all manner of abuse. The Japanese did all in their power to obliterate our treasure, our han’gŭl. They took away our newspapers, our magazines. . . . But we have woken from that nightmare. Now it is time to relearn our language and to retrieve our stolen script. We have no one to fear. . . . Our nation’s soul is hidden in our language, and our nation’s pulse beats in our script.29

This essay is the earliest evidence in the post-liberation era and in children’s literature of what Ross King has called “script nationalism”—a confusion or conflation of language and script with national essence.30 It recalls the efforts of Ch’oe Nam-sŏn to preserve national identity through Korean folktales discussed in Chapter 3, and gestures toward the way that the liberated Korean language and script might set free the true Korean spirit. That the “Korean spirit” was something that could mean different things depending on gender and class

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was not discussed. Expressions of script nationalism such as the one by Kim Pyŏng-je reveal an anxiety about the yet unfinished business of recovering written and spoken Korean. Essays on language purity appeared frequently in Chugan sohaksaeng. “Write Han’gŭl, Win a Prize” (Sang t’agi han’gŭl paro ssŭgi), “Common Errors” (T’ŭlligi swiun mal ), and “Our Fun Language” (Chaemi na’nŭn uri mal) are a few examples. As we will see below, these essays provided practical instruction on spelling and grammar, but they were also rich sites of language ideology that provide a window onto Korea’s emerging political factions. They also reflect the persistence of Japanese and Chinese in everyday use. For example, in “Write Han’gŭl, Win a Prize” the reader is asked to point out spelling mistakes in the following sentences: – Japan was defeated by its own blood-thirsty soldiers and money-grabbing scoundrels. – King Sejong was a great king, and his invention of han’gŭl is to be flaunted to the entire world. – Our new nation’s children are early to rise; our nation is a good nation without late sleepers.31

These are examples of grammatical and orthographic puzzles whose pedagogical purpose (to reveal spelling mistakes) mask their otherwise explicit ideological concerns. Chugan sohaksaeng also hosted a series by Ch’oe Hyŏn-bae, who republished his essays from the late colonial period under a slightly different title, “Our Fun Language.”32 (Recall that the colonial-era title was “The Fun Chosŏn Language.”) In these post-liberation essays, he describes, for example, the charm of Korean and its use of mimetic forms (ŭisŏngŏ-ŭit’aeŏ) that make natural connections between the external world and language. In 1947, Yi Hŭi-sŭng took over the series “Our Pride” (Uri charang) to explain that the Korean writing system and language are sources of great pride because Korean has a diverse range of pronunciations compared to Japanese and is more musical than English and German.33 Other sections on language purity demonstrate how deeply Chinese and Japanese had penetrated the Korean language, and how anxious this made Korean educators. Yi Yŏng-ch’ŏl, in his series titled “Common Errors,” urged his readers to be more precise in their speech and writing and argued that Korean was essential in this new era: “If you learn Korean you can become president, a world-famous scholar, or a leader in society. We must abandon Japanese and

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Chinese and revive our own language; this will lead our people to live better lives and to the development of our culture.”34 The October 1949 issue of Sohaksaeng included a special address for the celebration of Han’gŭl Day in Korea. In it, Chang Chi-yŏng of the Korean Language Society (Han’gŭl hakhoe) recounts the history of language in Korea. He begins by noting that “our older sisters can read books in han’gŭl that we cannot” and that in the past literary Sinitic (hanmun) was the main writing system, but it was accessible only to the elite. Now was the time for children to return to han’gŭl.35 In the same issue, in a transcribed conversation titled “A Conference of Your Favorite Poets, Writers, and Illustrators,” children’s fiction writer Cho P’ung-yŏn wonders why young readers seem to be gravitating toward fiction over graphic novels. Illustrator Kim Kyu-t’aek responds that this is thanks to children’s increased fluency in han’gŭl and the entertainment value inherent in fiction, and fiction writer Chŏng In-t’aek attributes the growth in popularity of fiction to the ease with which children are learning the Korean script.36 Other sections attest to the persistence of Japanese in liberated Korea. In “Common Errors 2,” Yi Yŏng-ch’ŏl laments that Japanese is still widely spoken and demands that all Japanese words be excised from the vocabulary.37 In his series titled “A Children’s History of Han’gŭl” (Ŏrini han’gŭl yŏksa) he explores the history of the Korean script, and urges readers to abandon such derogatory names as amg’ŭl (female script) and ŏnmun (vulgar script) and to use the term han’gŭl instead.38 Yi writes that “it is because of the difficulty of the Chinese script (hanja) that the Chinese civilization, and by extension our own, is backward,”39 and laments the that Koreans still are loyal to Chinese script. An editorial in Sohaksaeng titled “Recovering Our Language” lists the words still being used in Japanese, noting that “the filthy imprint left by the Japanese on our language must be eradicated. . . . Though it has been four years since liberation, one can still hear Japanese in the streets. . . . We have decided to include ‘Recovering Our Language’ for those of you who cannot find Korean expressions for those commonly used in Japanese.”40 In the post-1945 era, the use of the Korean script was seen as an act of “repudiating the colonial past and heralding a new beginning,”41 but judging from the alarm in young reader magazines, the children who had been raised on Japanese and Chinese were slower to embrace language- and script-nationalism than was hoped. What writers sought was more than language reform, however. As the previous chapters have shown, language was to anticipate and capture the child-heart. In “Scent of Korean,” Kim So-un addressed young readers about

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“responsible speaking.” He divided language into sound and meaning. Sound, he said, has an inherent smell, color, and temperature. Sound reflects the soul of the speaker; utterances must be made with caution. The production of meaning, too, is the ultimate responsibility of the speaker; one must be wholeheartedly involved and deliberate in one’s speech: “It is essential to remember that only those who respect and love their language can cultivate a beautiful soul and a righteous way of being.”42 What these impassioned appeals in children’s magazines reveal is the extent of the problem of language and literacy at the cusp of liberation. Literacy rates were low, Japanese was still widely spoken, Chinese characters were still prevalent in writing, and orthography was not yet standardized.43 Liberation facilitated a return to the discussions about language purity and the direction of Korean orthography that harkened back to the nineteenth century and that existed in varying forms even throughout the colonial period. Yu Kil-chun, one of the first Koreans to study in Japan in the late nineteenth century, remarked in 1909, “we Koreans possess our own language and our own indigenous script. These enunciate thought and meaning by means of spoken sounds and transmit them by means of writing [in a spirit that] reaches back over four thousand years.”44 The Korean language was touted as the nation’s central asset, and scholars emphasized the danger of continuing the custom of writing in classical Chinese, warning that “if one uses another nation’s writing. . . . the human feelings of the ancestral country mutate, and the local customs are thrown into a state of confusion.”45 The concern about the purity of the spoken language and script cut across political lines and continued to resonate in the language policies of North and South Korea. North Korean language policy, which from the start sought to make the written language accessible to the populace at large, banned the use of Chinese characters and made language purity the center of its language journals and campaigns.46 In South Korea, various government committees declared campaigns to “purify” the national language of its foreign elements.47 The roots of North and South Korean language and script nationalism that predated the colonial period were laid bare in liberation-era children’s magazines. Recovering History: Yi Sun-sin and the March First Movement The readers of children’s magazines published in the post-liberation period had grown up with little living memory of an independent Korea, and the reclamation of language—viewed as an extension of Korean sentiment and

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an embodiment of national identity—was the first pressing task. But arguably as important was the revival of Korea’s past through a narrative of colonial resistance, as well as drawing a seamless line between the distant past and the present in order to turn the colonial era into a painful but temporary hurdle on that journey. The urgency of this reeducation is palpable in Sohaksaeng and Ŏrininara, and much of the fiction and nonfiction published in these magazines recast Korea’s past as anticolonial, with a focus on the events surrounding the March First movement and on biographies of notable figures such as Yi Sun-sin and Yu Kwan-sun. Post-liberation children’s magazines focused on historical symbols, events, and figures that fulfilled two main functions. First, they created a link between the distant past and the present, forming a trajectory of continuity that depicted the colonial era as an interruption—not a break—in its national narrative. Second, they introduced symbols, events, and figures that could galvanize readers and build an inventory of collective memory. Liberation offered an opportunity to begin with a clean slate, and stories had to be carefully curated so as to rebuild a national identity befitting Korea’s position in the new global order. As mentioned earlier, the magazine Sohaksaeng included a regular section titled “Our Pride,” which boasted of Korea’s relics including its Buddhist legacy (issue 3, 1946), the Kwanggaet’o stele (issue 18, 1946), and the Koguryŏ warrior tombs (issue 19, 1946). These cultural relics were celebrated not only for their historical significance, but also as evidence of Korea’s indomitable spirit. For example, in describing the Kwanggaet’o stele, Kim Yong-jhun explains, “The people of Koguryŏ were polite, courageous, and determined, and this spirit comes out in the stele’s letters. If we cultivate the same determined spirit and courageous mindset, we will also be able to write letters in the same style.” 48 Yi Hŭi-bok recommends that children engage in top spinning, kite flying, and see-saw jumping, saying that although these were copied by the Japanese, they in fact are original Korean pastimes with a history that can be traced back to Koguryŏ times.49 Such essays encouraged Korean children to engage in play without feeling they were imitating Japanese customs. The two most important events in the post-liberation period were the commemoration of the March First movement and Children’s Day. Each March issue of Sohaksaeng was dedicated to the 1919 independence uprising. Issue 40, for example, marked the second year of celebrating the event since liberation. This issue reported on the gathering of people in Pagoda Park, and

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listed the numbers of people who had been incarcerated and injured in the uprising. Issue 76 (1950) dedicated a large spread to the March First movement, marking its thirty-first anniversary. In “The March First Movement of 1919,” author Hong Chong-in frames Korean liberation within a broader, global context of colonized nations and international movements of liberation. 50 Ŏrininara published illustrations of bloodied and helpless young victims that would have elicited strong reactions in readers, such as one that depicted a Japanese officer about to strike an elderly man as his wife and grandchildren watch helplessly.51 In the March 1949 issue of Ŏrininara, writer Chi Yong recalled the bravery and sacrifice of children and adults, and reassured readers that the hateful collaborators from this period are in the process of being eliminated.52 At the same time, anxieties about a possible return of Japanese hostilities were kept alive through editorials titled “Korea, Watch Your Back!” in which young readers were warned that Japan was again on the rise.53 Courage and vigilance were encouraged in equal measure, and young readers were made to think of the immediate past as both a temporary setback and as a foundation of their postcolonial identity. Biographies were another regular feature of children’s magazines. Among the biographies of bona fide anticolonial fighters were European scientists whose spirit of individualism and ingenuity signaled a new period of entrepreneurship. The most frequently featured biography was not, however, of a foreigner but of Korea’s own general Yi Sun-sin (1545–1598), the renowned commander of Korea’s naval forces in the victory over the invading Japanese fleet in the 1590s. In the children’s magazines of post-liberation Korea, Yi was celebrated as a national hero and a symbol of the Korean struggle against the Japanese that began long before annexation in the twentieth century. In the 1930s and under colonial rule, Yi Kwang-su and Ch’oe Nam-sŏn both serialized the biography of this quintessential nationalistic hero. Yi Sun-sin’s profile and famous ship appear as regular icons to a serial feature titled “Tales of Korean History” (Chosŏn yŏksa iyagi) in the magazine Chugan sohaksaeng.54 These icons connected the pre-colonized past to the post-liberation present with Yi Sun-sin’s face and his ship underscoring the broader narrative. In 1946, Pak T’ae-wŏn began his serialization of Yi Sun-sin’s biography. In an announcement about the upcoming series, an editorial explains that the biography should be made mandatory reading. On the same spread as Yi’s biography was also the illustrated “Relic Viewing” (Yumul kugyŏng) series, which exhibited Yi S­ un-sin’s

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copper seal (Chugan sohaksaeng no. 37, 1947: 5), his nameplate (Chugan sohaksaeng no. 38, 1947: 3), his sword (Chugan sohaksaeng no. 39, 1947: 3), and other of Yi’s artifacts. The placement of these detailed visual guides lent legitimacy to the biography whose space on the pages it shared. Biographies of celebrated individuals had always been a part of children’s magazines, but the content in post-liberation magazines indicates the shifting politics of the time. In the 1900s, Napoleon and Peter the Great were championed by Ch’oe Nam-sŏn for the role they played in galvanizing national identity and military might. Marx and Lenin were lauded in the leftist children’s magazine Pyŏllara. Wartime Sonyŏn carried stories about Mussolini and Hitler. The post-liberation Sohaksaeng carried biographies of Chopin, Ibsen, Michelangelo, Edison, Newton, Dostoyevsky, George Washington, Joan of Arc, and Pestalozzi. They were celebrated for their nationalist fervor as well as for their creativity and individual genius, made possible by their perseverance as well as their embrace of their nation. Chopin, for example, “never forgot his love for his country” (Chugan sohaksaeng no. 18, 1946: 6); Michelangelo worked tirelessly and sculpted as if his life depended on it (Chugan sohaksaeng no. 25, 1946: 63); Gorky persevered in the face of all manner of adversity (Chugan sohaksaeng no. 39, 1947: 5); Dostoyevsky created a national literature that reflected the sensibilities of the population (Chugan sohaksaeng no. 40, 1947: 9); George Washington fought tenaciously against colonial opression (Chugan sohaksaeng no. 43, 1947: 4). The historical and biographical commemorations in children’s magazines marked a distinct break from the content of colonial-era children’s magazines in two ways. First, the protagonists worthy of emulation of the past were celebrated for their ability to create a strong collective in order to carry the nation forward. In this post-liberation period, great men (and a few women) were celebrated for their individuality and personal genius and creativity first, and then for the their national significance. Second, writers and editors used these historical records to create a bridge between Korea’s rich and illustrious past and the present. Establishing continuity was an important part of the effort to frame the colonial period as a tragic interruption in an otherwise seamless narrative of progress. There was a second kind of continuity, perhaps less expected, in the transition from colonial to postcolonial children’s magazines. This was a continuity in the discourse of discipline and sacrifice for the nation that had been central

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in wartime Korean magazines. Great emphasis was placed on the importance of self-sacrifice for the nation under Japan’s late colonial regime, particularly in light of the need for fighting bodies on the warfront and frugal subjects at home. As the next section will show, the now liberated nation was no less in need of disciplined and healthy bodies. Building a new nation required a consolidation of minds and bodies that would make new nationhood possible, particularly considering that by 1948 a counter-narrative was being created just across the new 38th parallel. The discourses of disciplined and healthy bodies hinged very much on the child-heart of the colonial period. The concept of the organic child with a privileged access to nature acquired new meaning in liberated Korea, and became central to the invention of the new South Korean nation. Spirit and Body in Service of the Liberated Nation In his poem “Forward, Forward,” published in 1947, Yun Sŏk-chung declared: Tongmu, tongmu, our tongmu Forward, forward Step in line, feet together, Forward, forward No distractions, keep on moving Forward, forward Cows, horses and dogs, Forward, forward Dragonflies and butterflies, Forward, forward The sun, moon, and clouds, Forward, forward.55

Yun’s poem evokes the kind of optimistic momentum symbolic of the liberation era. While a reassessment of the past was central to the formation of South Korea’s new national identity—particularly if it could frame the colonial era as a temporary interruption of what was otherwise a coherent narrative—this was the moment of rebirth, and the poem conveys a forward-moving energy. Yun’s poem demonstrates this expectation with the insistent, rhythmic repetition of the word ap’ŭro, or “forward,” which is also the title of the poem. The poem describes mobilization on a grand scale: children, animals, insects, and even

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the sun, moon, and clouds are called upon to move together in synchrony and march onward, toward Korea’s bright future. The mobilization of bodies and nature in the poem occurred against the backdrop of the New Life campaign (Sin saenghwal undong) inaugurated in 1946. As Im Chong-myŏng explains, colonial Korea witnessed similar renewal movements in the 1920s and 1930s, but the New Life campaign was the first attempt at forging a postcolonial identity through a purge of the past and the reformation of body and spirit. It was driven by elite men, such as Yu Ŏk-kyŏm, who went on to become the head of the department of education in the Interim Government, and Hong Chin, chairman of the Provisional Government. For them, the reformation of clothing, food, and drink was to lead to a greater, more significant reform of morals and values. The regulation of labor, production, consumption, and daily practices would bring about a spiritual reformation that was championed, in the early days of the campaign, by political, social, and religions institutions.56 In the words of Ham Ch’ŏ-sik, a children’s writer whose works appeared in the Christian magazines Ai saenghwal (Children’s Life) and Kidok sinbo (Christian Report): While liberation has opened the floodgates of freedom, our rural folk behave as if they have lost their axis. The delayed liberation of our country has caused political instability, which has brought about economic distress, not to mention the moral decay resulting from hopelessness, laziness, and complacency. . . . Country folk don’t know how to cook nutritious food, or how to raise young children. . . . The revival of the Korean countryside is the revival of the Korean people.57

Ham’s voice provides insight into how discourses of health and hygiene—which had been central to colonial mobilization—were refashioned to suit the demands of the post-­liberation space. Many of the concerns had not changed: rural lifestyles and customs were considered primitive and hindrances to Korea’s economic and social development. Under the colonial regime, the discourse of habit and custom reform justified colonial control and the exploitation of resources. Now, in post-liberation Korea, the reformation of daily practices was deemed necessary to effect a true break with the colonial past. Framed anew, these lifestyle reforms were seen as necessary in order to shake off the servility and “lack of independent thinking,” as well as laziness and complacency brought on by Japanese rule. A comparison of late colonial poetry with the poetry in the post-liberation era reveals these discursive similarities and differences. As noted in Chapter 5, the 1939 poem “Side by Side” emphasizes choreographed order and discipline, exem-

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plified by schoolchildren circling the school grounds and imitated by ducks and sunflowers. By contrast, the 1949 poem “March in Place” by Kim In-su demonstrates the change in momentum and visual language in liberation space poetry: One two three four March in place In the sky, white clouds Drift along. Gently does the breath of spring Brush our cheeks And circle the school yard Once around One two three four March in place.58

While the illustration of “Side by Side” shows children lined up stiffly (Figure 13), “March in Place” is framed with white space that bookends the row of boys staged in active, coordinated movement (see Figure 16). Teamwork is equally of

F I G U R E 16 . “March in Place.” Sohaksaeng no. 67 (1949): 10.

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value, clearly, but the liberation period illustration depicts a natural world that is unhurried (“drift”) and gentle (“breath” and “brush”). Here, nature is mobilized less to reflect children’s successful organization and more to attest to a positive and comforting energy that comes from their synchronized movements. Another noticeable change from the late colonial period in children’s magazines is the emphasis on nutrition and sports. Advertisements for medical or nutritional products, such as toothpaste, medicine, and chocolate existed throughout the colonial period. Sohaksaeng, however, provided information about health and physical conditioning that was incorporated into the magazine’s prose content, such as vitamin charts and articles about nutrition.59 For example, medical doctor Chŏng Chin-uk warned children about food poisoning, and urged them to have their bowel movements checked regularly and to stay covered at night even in summer.60 In addition, Sohaksaeng devoted pages of its magazine to encourage sports and exercise as a means of building up collective identity from the grassroots level. Koen de Ceuster shows how patriotism came to take precedence over health in the education system under the Japanese.61 In the post-liberation era, popular magazines built on the galvanizing potential of sports toward a similar end. Writing in anticipation of the 1948 London Olympics, Min Chae-ho declared: “Ladies and gentlemen, you all know what ‘strength’ is, do you not? Strength is power, strength is righteousness. This is true for spiritual power, and it is true for physical power as well. And what builds this strength is sports. . . . Sports are the pride of any nation. Isn’t it time that we put ourselves to the test and see who wins?”62 The September 1949 issue of Ŏrininara begins with an appeal to children to play soccer in order to strengthen their bodies, regardless of whether they are going to be professional athletes or not.63 The rules of baseball are explained by Yi Yŏng-min, the president of the Korean Baseball League: “This game is different from other sports. Even if you are of sound body, if you have a slow mind you will not be a good player. And even if you are smart, you will not be a good player if you are physically unsound.”64 As far as the connection fostered between the body and nation, post-liberation magazines reflect an interesting continuity of discourses from the late colonial period discussed in Chapter 5. A decade earlier, orderly and disciplined young bodies, primed for self-sacrifice, were desirable for war and an integral part of naisen ittai policies. In liberated Korea, these same traits were still considered desirable, but were now used to make a conscious break with the past, to take on a new postcolonial identity, and to bolster the sense of national citizenship.

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Legacies of Inequality and Division If there was a list of priorities for children’s writers and publishers in post-­ liberation Korea, the reclamation of the repressed Korean language, history, and culture would be at the top. Writers devoted themselves to reviving literacy by harping on the aesthetic and scientific qualities of han’gŭl and by condemning linguistic impurities—Chinese and Japanese—that were still part of the fabric of spoken and written post-liberation Korean. At the same time, writers sought to connect the post-liberation moment with the precolonial arc of history. Additionally, rhetoric of health and hygiene, which figured prominently in late colonial children’s magazines, continued with some adjustments. In the liberation moment, health and discipline were seen as markers of postcolonial strength and sports as an activity that would strengthen the body and build a national identity. These were some of the trends that can be traced in children’s magazines and newspapers that emerged in the transition to national sovereignty. At the same time, colonial-era concerns spilled over into the liberation era, the gravest among these being the lack of opportunities for Korea’s poor children and the persistence of social and economic inequalities. Liberation provided the sense that as a nation, Korea was finally in control of its destiny, and the inequalities inherent in the colonial system would be rectified to allow children to grow free and unencumbered. The renewed dedication to social and economic challenges was strengthened also by the opening of publishing venues to leftist writers, who had been silenced in the final decade of colonial rule. In the liberation period their appearance was short-lived, since many of them resettled in North Korea after the political balance in the US-occupied south shifted against them. Still, in the short time they were active, they condemned the “traitors” and “capitalists” that had sold out to the Japanese: the first essay published in the leftist magazine Pyŏllara, revived in 1945 after liberation, written by An Chun-sik, calls out collaborators such as Yi Wan-yong, Cho Chung-ŭng, Song Pyŏng-jun, and Yi Ha-yŏng—statesmen infamous for the roles they played in the process of relinquishing Korean sovereignty to the Japanese—by name.65 These accusations about collaboration made their way into fiction as well, for example in the works of Chŏng In-t’aek.66 Chŏng’s works resonated with many of the issues featured in the early and late colonial-era magazines, among them the exploitation of children by the upper classes. In his liberation space fiction, morally corrupt Koreans feature as the prime antagonists, those who made an easy fortune by exploiting their less fortunate countrymen

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under the Japanese. For example, in “Bright Path,” ­ten-year-old country girl Chŏnghŭi is sold by her impoverished father to the son of a wealthy Seoul man who made his fortune selling second-hand Japanese items at a large profit.67 The girl is promised an education, but instead endures beating and harsh treatment by her mistress, who stays home snacking, reading fiction, napping, and playing cards with her high society friends.68 Interestingly, the act of reading fiction is part of what marks this mistress as morally lax; rather than doing her share of the work, she allows herself the time to disappear into the fabricated world of words while ignoring the very real plight of the girl in her house. Above all, Chŏnghŭi dreads her mistress’s regular outings to the cinema, for which the woman prepares by donning all manner of unthinkable jewels and working her servants to the bone. Chŏnghŭi, with her innocence and diligence, is a striking contrast to her mistress, described by the neighbors as a pyŏrak puja, someone who struck it rich.69 Another indication that grave social inequalities had not been resolved in Korea’s shift toward independence is evident in the story “Sports Day.”70 In this story, a young boy named Kinami is preparing to run in his school’s sports event; his participation is made more poignant when he eats his diminutive meal away from the public eye because he is embarrassed by how little he has. His father was released from prison after liberation only to be recaptured by the Korean authorities for his leftist politics. Kinami is approached by the rich boy known only by his title, “son of director Yi,” who tries to bribe Kinami into throwing the race so that the rich boy will win. The rich boy’s entire wealthy family has come to watch the race, while the poor boy has no audience. The array of bribes that the rich boy offers is telling: Kinami refuses the American sweets, gum, and chocolate, and instead asks for the Korean snack of dried squid. But when Kinami realizes the rich boy’s asking price—the race itself— Kinami refuses, and wins. This story suggests the persistence of inequality, particularly in the way that rich children have inherited a sense of entitlement and an appetite for exploitation. It also indicates that American products are positioned to eclipse Korean products, thus hinting at a new kind of challenge facing Korean capital, and possibly a new face to colonization. The issue of inequality in education was also a perennial concern that did not disappear with liberation. Yi Hyŏng-u’s poem “School” from 1947 speaks to this issue directly: The teacher urges her to come more frequently Her friends tell her she must attend

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But Suni says nothing She bows her head and touches the hem of her shirt. She has quit her beloved school And is minding another family’s baby. What choice does she have? She cannot speak from the grief Tears stream down her pitiful face.71

This prose-like poem told in the third person presents in eight lines the frustration of a young girl. The poem’s short form provides little back story, but readers will immediately recognize the source of her plight: she is heartbroken that she cannot attend school, but her financial and social circumstances deny her that opportunity. The poem is accompanied by an illustration of an adult hanging over a diminutive girl with a baby strapped to her back and a puppy at her feet. In the background are pairs of students in uniform, the faded image of which foregrounds the teacher’s patronizing hand placed on the girl’s downturned head. The drawing implies that the system is supportive, but the seemingly cheerful baby on her back, ignorant of her sadness, hints at the larger imperviousness of the social and economic conditions that would bar Suni from pursuing her right to and desire for an education. The aspirations that accompanied the thrill of liberation were soon overshadowed by the US intervention in the southern half of the peninsula and the increasing unlikelihood of a unified Korea. The Korean peninsula was formally divided with the proclamation of the South Korean government on 15 August 1948 and North Korea on 9 September 1948. The ideological battles waged in mainstream media over the legitimacy of South Korea often made crude appearances in children’s magazines, where the struggle for hegemony was critical. While poetry and fiction attempted to reflect more gently the realities and aspirations of children in the post-liberation moment, some writers saw in children’s magazines an opportunity to lecture openly about the kind of grit necessary for the new nation. In a 1949 article, So Hyŏn addresses Korea’s young: For our nation to grow, young people have to grow and make this nation great. . . . Children who complain when it is cold are not tough. Tough children run outside and get warm by being active. Tough children don’t cry when they are scolded, but bow and apologize. . . . Such is the spirit of our nation.72

The tone is reminiscent of Yi Kwang-su’s moralizing lectures that appeared in the wartime magazine Sonyŏn discussed in Chapter 5. But subtler voices could

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be heard as well by those for whom children’s magazines provided an outlet to explore thorny political issues, particularly the role of the United States in the region. Ch’ae Man-sik’s short story “Strange Teacher” is one such example. In it, Teacher Pak is a despised instructor who once exhibited zeal for the Japanese and punished children for using Korean in school. After liberation, Teacher Pak is dismissed and is replaced by a kinder man, Teacher Kang, who had spoken Korean to the children all along despite the restrictions on the language. But Kang is soon expelled for his leftist sympathies, and Teacher Pak returns. This time, he is a fan of all things American. The story ends with the line, “In any case, Teacher Pak was a very strange teacher.”73 In typical Ch’ae Man-sik manner, the narrator withholds explicit judgment by using the limited perspective Ch’ae employed in his other satirical works (the young man in “My Innocent Uncle” and the young wife in “Ready-Made Life”). Ch’ae often borrowed his characters’ limited perspective to provide a deliberate, one-sided and literal view of the world, allowing the reader to insert her own counternarrative, thus effectively locating the reader in an apparently higher plain of comprehension than the fictional characters. Here, the child-narrator finds the teacher’s loyalties fickle, but describes this treacherous behavior using the understated adjective “strange.” Such a pale word affords Ch’ae the possibility of commenting on current events, such as the abuse of power by opportunistic power-seekers, while trusting that his young readers will be good judges of moral character. The Child-Heart in Liberated Korea Liberation from the Japanese presented the possibility of long-awaited sovereignty, but optimism about Korea’s future turned out to be short-lived as temporary foreign occupations transitioned into official, national division. In the years between liberation, division, and the outbreak of the Korean War, children’s magazines on both sides of the 38th parallel became the site of competing versions of the postcolonial narrative of Korean language, history, and culture. Both had to come up with a coherent national identity that would contend with the literary and pedagogical legacies of children’s culture developed before and during thirty-five years of colonial rule. What they shared was their subscription to the unshakable bond between the child and nature, and this bond was reaffirmed in the post-liberation literature through pastoral poetry and fiction. The concept of the child-heart disavowed political affiliations even

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while its basic presumptions about the extra-cultural position of the child were a political statement of their own. In 1947 Yi Wŏn-su developed perhaps the earliest and most influential account of the history of children’s literature in Korea. In “A Historical View of Children’s Literature,” he argued that Korean children’s literature essentially emerged in a vacuum, having received no meaningful inheritance. He acknowledges Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s contributions to the rise of a distinctly Korean literature for young people, but finds that children’s literature really began with what he terms the “Child-Heart Literature Movement” in 1922 with the emergence of Pang Chŏng-hwan. The problem, as he saw it, was that Western literature came into Korea through translation before Korea had had a chance to develop its own tradition. Hence Western literature was received in a critical manner which gave rise to sentimental literature that was unrealistic and immature. In its second stage, from 1925 to 1935, leftist children’s literature failed to point out the foundational problems of the children’s liberation movement, rejected the child-heart principle, and chose to view children as an integral part of society. But, “in the process of repudiating the principles of the child-heart, [leftists] rejected the existence of the child-heart altogether, and by repudiating sentimentalism and exaggerated juvenility, they created adult literature that basically ignored children’s emotions.” He goes on: It is time for children’s literature to move beyond the question of child liberation and its propensity for overtly political themes, rejection, resentment, and poverty, and to arrive at a literature for children that is truly democratic in spirit. By this I do not mean that there should be an emphasis on the principle of the child-heart, or [that children’s literature should be] a miniature version of adult literature. It is a literature that does not reject the child-heart but must be deeply connected to real society (sil sahoe) and that depicts real, living children. It is a truly progressive democratic literature that is needed by the next generation [which is] responsible for the future of a democratic Korea, a ­literature that is anti-feudal and that does not build barriers between adults and children. . . . Children’s literature must bravely dispose of the kind of servility cultivated under the Japanese colonizers and become literature that a new generation of children can appreciate. The child-heart is not angelic, and political tendencies do not always have to be extreme. We stand before a historical imperative for humans to create children’s literature that is based on life (saenghwal) but does not surrender to life.74

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There are several ways to read this essay, written by one of Korea’s bestknown writers with a career in South Korea that stretched well into the 1970s. First, note his ambiguity with regard to the “child-heart principle.” He uses this term four times: once to compliment the work of Pang Chŏng-hwan in the magazine Ŏrini, which he considered the first humanistic writing for children to have produced “beautiful tales” and expressed “children’s emotions.” In the following three uses he rejects the term half-heartedly, warning against ascribing to it too much importance. But in doing so, he ultimately strengthens the connection between the child-heart and children’s literature, tongsim and adong munhak, by using these two terms interchangeably and never challenging their very premise. He acknowledges that the prolonged colonial subjugation was partly to blame for an over-sentimentalization of literature for children, but places responsibility for the distortion of the child-heart with the leftist writers who mobilized literature for their own political purposes. The post-liberation era, Yi states at the end of his essay, is an opportunity to create a literature that can transport the next generation from its beleaguered past toward the future as a democratic (anti-Communist, anti-North) Korea. This is not a rejection of the concept of the child-heart itself but an attempt to reframe it in the postliberation era. Yi Wŏn-su put his theory into practice in his children’s novel, The World in the Woods (Supsok nara), published in Ŏrininara in nine installments between February and December 1949.75 Noma, who runs errands in his village while he waits impatiently for his father to return (from the city, the reader guesses), ventures out of his poor village and stumbles upon a child’s utopia called World in the Woods. This happy place has no beggars, no sad tears are shed, and no one experiences hunger. The World in the Woods is a place where adults who enter are transformed into children. Noma and his village friends battle the forces of evil that try to corrupt the place. The evil-doers take the form of malicious businessmen planning to sell luxury goods in order to create dependence and unquenchable desire in the World in the Woods’ citizens. While certain children become casualties—the children of the rich, Sunhŭi and Sundori, return to the adult world and grow into exploitative adults—the rest embrace their new home that is characterized by an equal measure of manual work, study, and a harmonious existence with nature. Yi Wŏn-su’s treatise on the new role of children’s literature in the post-­ liberation era noted above makes three central points: that children’s literature should be truly democratic; that it should reject a mindset of dependence

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and servility; and that it should celebrate the child-heart without idealizing it, and do so by forging a close connection between the child and “real life.” Read against his own abstract principles noted above, The World in the Woods appears to respond to these demands in the following ways. First, it demonstrates the values of democracy by giving equal attention to children of all classes (­apple-selling, working-class Yŏng’i and the wealthy Sunhŭi and Sundori). Also, it rejects the kind of exploitation that would create inequalities. The ironically named “Freedom Fighters” Sunhŭi and Sundori are in fact fighting to introduce their luxury goods into the World’s market, which would then undermine the ability of the children to produce their own goods. This is related to Yi’s second principle, the rejection of servility and dependence, which he emphasizes in his novel by making labor a proud and joyful part of the children’s routine. The World in the Woods is one in which the children attend school and participate in manual labor that contributes to the collective good—never are they working for their own self-interest. Yi’s third principle celebrates the child-heart in connection to “real life,” and he does so in the novel by folding children into society and demonstrating how they can become fully empowered agents of their own destiny. While he rejects overt politics, Yi’s fiction displays his own convictions about the free market and its destructive potential; about the hierarchy of the value of labor (Noma, the protagonist, dreams of becoming an engineer, while the rich children dream of protecting their family fortune); and about gender (Sunhŭi dreams of wearing an apron and becoming a famous matron, while Chŏnggiri dreams of becoming a journalist).76 Above all, The World in the Woods is a celebration of children’s harmonious relationship with nature. This utopian space, a children’s paradise, is marked by the fact that children can communicate with all animate and inanimate objects. When Noma is abducted by the Freedom Fighters, Yŏng’i is able to find him thanks to the talking apple she shared with him, which speaks to her from inside her stomach. The World in the Woods is a utopia precisely because of the porous boundary between children and nature. This is Yi Wŏn-su’s vision of the liberated child-heart: the building of organic unity between community and nature in accordance with principles of self-sufficiency and manual labor, which produces a pure joy that is the ultimate aspiration of all. Most histories of children’s literature in Korea have embraced Yi Wŏn-su’s periodization of children’s literature, crediting Pang Chŏng-hwan with the emergence of children’s literature, lamenting the overly politicized agenda of the leftist writers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, dismissing the literature

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of the late colonial era as pro-Japanese propaganda, and championing the postliberation as the formative era of children’s literature.77 Children’s magazines published in the liberation space reflect the intensity of feelings surrounding questions of Korea’s future. The writers and publishers from this era believed unequivocally in the need for acquisition of Korean language, writing, and history coupled with national disciplining of sound young bodies. But there was a concern, as well, about how thoroughly children needed to be liberated in order to achieve all this. For Yi Wŏn-su, as for many others, the most contested space was the child-heart. In 1948, poet, publisher, and editor Ch’oe Yŏng-su, who as we have seen in Chapter 2, weighed in on the connection between art and children’s emotional development, wrote: We use the word tongsim in writing and in conversation all the time. In that word we search for distant memories, and we long for secluded purity. But ours is a kind of romantic treatment of memories and longing that we look for in the word tongsim, while we should be delving into the very concept and investigate the essence of tongsim. Our treatment of tongsim has been as superficial as licking the rind of a watermelon instead of eating its flesh, and we’ve satisfied these longings with a picture here, a sentence there, an automated response, to ill effect. Tongsim is subjective in emotion, pure and clean, and is not something you can experience objectively or merely take an interest in; rather it is a part of our cultivated growth, a fundamental feature of our lives. Rather than approach it technically, we should think about how tongsim contributes to our cultivation, and never use the word tongsim lightly again. Tongsim in its pure form does not exist for the sake of adults. It should be developed for its own sake. This realization will help unravel the knots of reality and will provide the first step in supporting the next generation.78

Here, Ch’oe first tries to redefine the child-heart. For too long, he argues, the term has been manipulated for adults’ needs and for personal gain (to fulfill longing, or relive lost memories), and has therefore become devoid of authentic meaning. But rather than doing away with the concept or deeming it obsolete, he proposes a revision, a new approach that accepts the concept’s existence for its own sake. He proposes to turn to tongsim for guidance and insight into understanding spiritual growth that will guide a new generation of postliberation children. For him, tongsim has intrinsic value that can and should

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produce its own meaning regardless of the political convictions of the shapers of its content. The energy with which the term tongsim made its appearance in this era is telling: from 1941 to 1946 few references to tongsim can be found in the major newspapers. But in 1946, tongsim once again entered public discourse in newspaper articles, fiction, and poetry. In an article around Children’s Day in 1947, a writer warns against adult manipulation of the holiday and cries, “Let us make sure that children’s tongsim can spread its wings.”79 In “I Wish for Snow,” Kim Kwang-ju longs to sustain the delight he experienced as a child and wishes that people could live inside their tongsim; and Ch’oe I-gwŏn’s story “Tongsim” tells of a group of boys who contrive a solution to a child’s lost shoes on a frigid winter evening as an example of compassion and ingenuity.80 Of course, writers meditated on the concept of the child-heart well before liberation, as well. In 1933 and 1934, for example, Yun Sŏk-chung engaged in a heated debate with one Yu Hyŏn-suk, a kindergarten educator. That the exchange between this preeminent (male) poet for children and a (female) educator drew such attention in the mainstream media attests to the kind of stakes that were perceived in interpreting the child-heart correctly, and serves as a telling introduction to what changed, if at all, between the conceptualization of the child-heart before and after liberation. Under the title “Random Thoughts on the Child-Heart,” Yun published several observations in the women’s magazine Sin yŏsŏng. Yun notes that parents stifle their children by dressing them in fine clothes that they are then warned not to sully; that society rewards children for selfishness and punishes them for cooperation; and that children’s use of language is natural and creative.81 These three observations are brought forward more broadly as an indictment of society at large and parents more specifically for repressing children’s spirit. He offers a scathing critique of a public singing event organized by the Kaptcha Kindergarten, which lined children on a stage before hundreds of spectators. He denounces this “smiling competition” for interfering with the natural affect, breath, and rhythm of children. Children, he declares, are “natural scholars”—they instinctively know how to dismantle and investigate objects around them.82 In this essay, Yun describes what he views as the violation of the child-heart by adults who try to place constraints on children instead of recognizing their natural creative impulses. The response from Kaptcha Kindergarten educator Yu Hyŏn-suk was sharp. In a three-day response published in the Tonga ilbo, she accuses the poet of pretentious idealism and contributing to widely held misconceptions about

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kindergarten. She points to his hypocrisy—he suggests that kindergartens do not provide equal opportunities for all children, but the magazine that he edits, Ŏrini, sells for ten chŏn and is therefore unavailable to underprivileged children (“Why not give your magazine away?” she asks). Contrary to the poet’s opinion that performance is a cruel manipulation of children, she insists on the value of organizing such public events. The problem, she says, is the gap between theory and practice—he waxes philosophical about tongsim while she is in the trenches, trying to better children’s lives.83 In his public response, the poet rebuffed her critique by accusing Yu of placing the children on stage and making them fearful and anxious, and he demanded that children be liberated in the full sense of the term.84 This fiery exchange shows how invested writers and educators were in providing the right kind of content for what had become the uncontested existence of the child-heart. It also gives a glimpse into some of the gendered aspects of this heated debate, with mothers and female early childhood educators working with boots on the ground to provide children with an empirically based foundation, and the almost exclusively male writers meditating on the child-heart and its bearing on the nation. Yun Sŏk-chung’s response in 1934 about the need for liberation anticipates the actual liberation of the Korean peninsula in 1945, which provided poets and educators the opportunity to reshape the child-heart. For Yun, post-liberation children’s poetry was driven by forward-moving momentum in which children and nature are organically linked. For example, in his 1950 poem “All Together” Yun writes: A wave of blowing leaves, A throng of running children, The wind kicks up, moves the leaves, moves the children. A clump of drifting clouds, A flock of gliding birds, The wind kicks up, moves the clouds, moves the birds.85

The illustration accompanying the poem depicts children running together, framed by leaves, wind, and clouds. The momentum here is born out of optimism for the future enhanced by children’s harmonious communion with nature. It is the parallel that is drawn between child and nature—the one that is at the very foundation of the concept of tongsim—that secures the connection between children and their liberated, postcolonial land. The connection is seemingly apolitical—recall how hostile Yun was to any trace of ideological

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or otherwise manipulative control by adults. But the connection he forges in his post-liberation poetry between children and nature is manipulation by a different means. By insisting that the new Korean child was an extension of the natural landscape—a landscape that was being contested by the growing hostility between North and South Korea—this kind of post-liberation poetry emptied the child of any agency, voice, class, gender, or any other political or social marker. In 1978, in his speech accepting the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and the Creative Communication Arts, Yun Sŏk-chung declared that “tongsim knows no boundaries. . . . It is our conscience. It transcends time and space and can communicate with animals, trees and rocks; it is the conveyor of affection.”86 In the post-liberation era, writers of all political convictions wrote poetry and fiction that continued this steady, unwavering belief in the child-heart. In their theoretical explications, they argued for a future-oriented liberated child-heart that would sustain Korea’s new identity as a postcolonial and sovereign nation. It is the investment in the relationship between child and nature in their works that turns out to be most revealing. The physical space itself was now liberated, but the battle over the symbolic space continued and was central to the nation’s development of its identity. Towering mountains and clear streams, dramatic shifts of the season, and Korea’s national relics made for a powerful narrative of an emerging nation, almost involuntarily and spontaneously propelling itself into the future. Here is where children’s fiction and poetry found new momentum. After 1945, the conviction that children have a privileged relationship with the natural world, which had been at the foundation of children’s literature since the early twentieth century, was repurposed: the landscape, the flora, and the fauna were now mobilized to bolster and embolden the development of a truly spontaneous, harmonious national identity.

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E PI LO G U E T H E T U R N TO S C I E N C E I N P O S T WA R N O RT H A N D S O U T H KO R E A

T H E S I G N I N G O F T H E A R M I S T I C E AG R E E M E N T on July 27, 1953, brought

long-awaited relief from incessant bombing, civilian displacement, and deadly combat along the 38th parallel. With the declaration of ceasefire, North and South Korea directed all their energies into the urgent project of rebuilding. It had been eight years since the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, and North and South Korea were located in the eye of the Cold War storm. It is at this time that the two Koreas identified science and technology as solutions to the most pressing challenges of the era: the physical rehabilitation of their war-torn countries, and the building of military prowess to prevent any future invasions. Technological advancement also offered new sources of energy, innovative modes of transportation, and cutting-edge communication technologies that heralded nothing short of a utopian future. In doing so, this future reconfigured humans’ relationship with the natural environment. How was Korean literature for children, premised so fundamentally on a harmonious relationship with nature and on the blurring of the boundaries between child and the environment, to refigure these epistemological changes? Science was the panacea for the economic, political, and social woes of both North and South Korea. The key to this new vision was science education, and it had to start early—with children. Children had to be appropriately inducted into the world of science and technology to take control of and shape the machines of the future. Science needed to be fun, engaging, and exciting; information about science and technology needed to be disseminated through

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as many channels as possible. In response, periodicals like Haksaeng kwahak (Student Science) in South Korea and Sonyŏn kwahak (Children’s Science) in North Korea began to be published. These periodicals answered the demand for popular magazines and the educational imperative to inspire the new generation to become the engineers of the future. Popular science magazines were not the only media that spread the gospel of technology, however. Scientific content became a staple of general interest and youth literary magazines. In these periodicals, scientific knowledge was more than just numbers, formulas, diagrams, and hard data. Sonyŏndan (Boy Scouts) in North Korea and Hagwŏn (Study Hall) in South Korea dedicated regular features to science education, highlighting topics on science and technology through prose and cartoons. The magazines also featured essays by poets and fiction writers facing a new challenge: how to navigate the new relationship between science and narrative, between rational methods of understanding the world and the art of fiction. This new creative territory culminated in a new genre exclusive to young reader periodicals: science fiction (kwahak sosŏl). This genre recast the ties between child and nature, rupturing the bond that had sustained the child-heart, the tongsim. While the child-heart persisted and even received renewed attention in North and South Korea, it now implied a new hierarchical relationship in which the child, once deemed close to nature, was now to become its ultimate master. As this book has argued, the bond between child and nature, captured by the term tongsim was at the center of children’s literature from its emergence in the early twentieth century. The concept of tongsim held that the child was natural, on the threshold of culture but not yet fully inducted into it. It shaped the language, narrative content, and images written and illustrated for children, as well as four decades of discourse about the intellectual and emotional needs of Korea’s future generations. Tongsim both described and prescribed what was deemed “natural,” whether this meant an agent of pure sentiment, a rebel, a colonial subject, or a national citizen. But with the end of the Korean War and with all hopes pinned on the promise of freedom and progress delivered by science and technology, the bond between child and nature was broken. No longer was the child an extension of nature. Rather, the child was now an agent tasked with the control of nature and sometimes a victim of nature’s sinister tendencies. North and South Korean writers diverged in their confidence in humankind’s ability to expose and overcome nature’s obstacles. Either way, the child was now integrated as a social and political being, one as much impli-

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cated in politics and affected by the whims of nature as adults. To navigate this new reality, the child was encouraged to obtain a distinct set of skills defined by a new language of science. The new scientific discourses worked in several ways. First, they conveyed an urgent sense that science was the means to secure national security. Second, they appealed to the strength of science as the arbiter of reality and truth. Third, they demystified nature by reducing it to formulas and data. It was the exciting new genre of science fiction that ultimately brought these discourses together. Koreans were both beneficiaries and victims of the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945. Though it brought about Japan’s defeat and Korea’s liberation, roughly forty thousand Koreans living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed instantly or in the following months.1 Five years later, during the Korean War (1950–1953), North Korea was considered a nuclear target for the United States, and rumors of an imminent attack drove many North Koreans to flee.2 The ravages of the Korean War cemented the view that the future belonged to those who could impose their will militarily and that nuclear weapons were the key to national security. It was clear to both North and South Korea that embracing the arms and space race spearheaded by the Soviet Union and the United States was not a luxury but a necessity for survival. The importance of science did not end with national security and state development. Scientific discourse—by which I mean not only technical and professionalized content, but also the language of science and the scientific method as an ontological approach—had worked its way into literary discourse since the colonial period.3 In the postwar era, too, science was evoked as a method of achieving direct access to the physical world and therefore to a truth of a higher order. And popular magazines for young readers served as the pedagogical tool that could disseminate this critical knowledge. In North Korea, magazines like Sonyŏndan, Adong munhak, and Sonyŏn kwahak, and in the South, magazines such as Haksaeng kwahak and Hagwŏn, breathed new life into scientific content through story and image. These magazines provided hard data in the form of graphs and formulas, as well as informative do-it-yourself experiments. They also conveyed scientific knowledge through short fiction, essays, cartoons, and images, which blurred the boundaries between information and ideology. But most importantly, these narratives described and prescribed a new relationship between humans and their environment, one that demonstrated a confident control of the natural world. If the child-heart was one that had to be fundamentally natural, outside culture, and thoroughly organic, this new era

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heralded a new child: one for whom nature was entirely demystified. This child was now ready to be fully integrated into the world.4 This was not a self-evident process. Fiction writers reflected upon the intersection of science and literature in essays that explored what it meant to be writing fiction under the shadow of scientific methodologies. From these explorations emerged the science fiction genre, the practical application of scientific discourse to creative writing. Science fiction challenged writers to impose narrative structures on purportedly universal scientific facts. And while North and South Korean science fiction demonstrate significant thematic differences, their shared demystification of nature and subsequent severing of the childnature relationship signaled a break from the colonial past and a new era of writing for the child. Science for Young Readers Both North and South Korean magazines for young readers made it clear that the practice of science for young people was not solely a matter of education and edification, but of national security. This imperative is captured succinctly in a 1956 essay penned by the South Korean minister of education who, in his essay “Anti-Communist Spirit Above All!,” calls on school-age readers to remember their duty to study “for the sake of the ­nation. . . . School work is antiCommunist in essence, and its purpose is unification.”5 And in a 1955 essay, “Will the Satellite Launch Be Successful?” author Yu Sin echoes the American slogan “Atoms for peace,” and warns that the Cold War may turn hot, and thus it is critical that the United States develop the ability to launch a satellite into orbit.6 Similarly, North Korean magazines like Sonyŏn kwahak featured articles whose scientific content was couched in Cold War ideological rhetoric. “Mine Detector” (Chiroe t’amjigi), for example, included a detailed manual on how to construct mine detectors at home. “Super Receiver,” an illustrated vignette, demonstrates over eight illustrated panels the way that soldier Ri Nam Kil performs a heroic act through his knowledge of science. Ri is charged with the dangerous task of repairing a damaged communication line that is preventing contact between the company commander and a platoon leader. He finds the damaged section, but doesn’t have the pliers to fix it and has run out of spare wire, and has been mortally wounded. As a last resort, he realizes that his body can serve as a conductor. He grabs the lines in each hand, thereby facilitating the communication. This illustrated vignette serves a double purpose—both

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to demonstrate a scientific principle (the body can conduct electricity) and to show how this critical this knowledge is for national security.7 Scientific narratives in the North and South presented science as the discipline that could provide access to truth about the natural world, as well as political and social truth. By showing the design and logic behind everything from the transition of the seasons to the mechanics of the toothbrush, science narratives presented the physical world as logical and accessible. In “Veritas Travels: In Search of the Cradle of Science,” for example, the narrator “I” is invited by a young man named Veritas to join him for an exploration of the past. Veritas explains: In the past, scientists from all over the world tried their best to capture me, and went to great lengths to do so. Astronomers used huge telescopes to look for me, physicists and chemists used scales and chemicals in the lab to meet me, and biologists used microscopes on animals and plants to find me. Even mathematicians went to great pains and used complicated formulas to do the same . . . but I always kept a slight distance.8

If we are to take the narrative at face value, it suggests that those engaged in scientific inquiry may come close to the truth but never capture it. On the other hand, the very embodiment of truth suggests that it is within reach, at least for scientists. Essays such as “Learn from Grand Nature” by Hwang Sin-dŏk also reveal the view of the natural world as inherently truthful. Young students are particularly prone to feelings of jealousy and longing, and these feelings can easily lead young people down the wrong path. Therefore, it is better to gaze upon the sprawling grandiosity of nature and find in it both scientific principles and great value. Truth (chilli) can be found in a cloud drifting in the sky; it hides inside random pebbles on the ground. . . . Nature is a warehouse of treasure—go and learn from it!9

Scientific principles did not illuminate the intricate fabric of the physical world alone, but also of the political and social world. In the North Korean magazine Sonyŏndan, an eleven-part series titled “Rocket Travels” takes the young protagonist around the world. He begins his journey in the United States, where skyscrapers tower over huddling, homeless masses. From his vantage point atop the rocket, the narrator is able to observe the gratuitous violence inflicted by the United States and its allies in the Middle East, Africa, and

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South America. At the same time he bears witness to the flourishing of socialism in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe.10 Perhaps most importantly, scientific content in postwar-era magazines of both the North and South promised a degree of control of nature that had been elusive in the preceding five decades. This was expressed most potently by the frequency of the use of the term chŏngbok, or “conquest,” when discussing mastery of the natural world. North and South Korean science magazines shared a vision of a transcendent liberation that would be realized through space exploration and time travel. This vision was motivated partly by anxieties about national security, but more significantly, it marked a new relationship between child and nature, a relationship that was explored more profoundly in science fiction. The Science of Fiction and Science Fiction in Postwar South Korea It was not just scientific magazines that sought to educate their young audience. Literary magazines like Hagwŏn presented writers with a venue to navigate the implications of scientific inquiry on the art of fiction writing.11 Hagwŏn also started carrying the new genre of science fiction for young readers. In this new genre, writers had to confront the possibility of writing speculative fiction at a time when technological and scientific advances facilitated the demystifying of the physical and spiritual world. The attempts to reconcile fictional narrative and scientific truths are evident in essays such as “Lying and Fiction” by Yi Mu-yŏng.12 In this essay, Yi argued that fiction can only be written with a proper “spirit of fiction” (sosŏl ŭi chŏngsin), meaning fiction as a container of “pure truth” (ch’amtoen chilli). ­Fiction is that which seeks after and brings together Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. He asserted that while some may say that fiction is fabrication (kŏjit) and writers are fabricators of falsehoods, it is in fact that which describes the world as it should be. In this sense, Yi says, fiction is science: fiction describes that which is scientifically plausible. It is that which navigates the border between common sense and imagination—it takes a scientifically plausible and common sense experience, and through language it moves the reader.13 Similarly, in a six-part essay published in 1962, An Su-gil attempts to define the language of fiction as both rooted in the world of things that can be measured scientifically, and as that which transcends the moment.14 In his essay, An makes four main points. First, although fiction mimics life, the communication of experience that fiction facilitates is not a scientific one (kwahakchŏk

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chŏndal, or what An describes as intellectual communication from head to head), but an artistic, and therefore emotional, one (yesulchŏk chŏndal, from heart to heart). Second, while fiction draws from real life (sil saenghwal ) as it must, it differs from journalism in that it does not simply report how things are but why they are so, and how they could or should be. Third, he explains that real life can be accessed through a scientific, systematic process that involves, among other things, careful observation (kwanch’al), and these scientific processes reveal a universal Truth. And last, that there is visual feedback provided by fiction that is unique to this genre, and the visual world (as opposed to the audial world of oral literature or poetry) is valued because of its objectivity: fiction makes us see the world beyond its surface. Of these three points, the third is particularly interesting in the way that it relies on scientific concepts to convey the privileged access of fiction to truth. This “real life truth” that An speaks of seems to diverge from the socialist concept of the everyday—it is not a political or social truth that illuminates the faulty structures of society that lead to inequality and exploitation. An likens the truth uncovered by fiction to water that has been purified, thus removed of all contaminants.15 A work’s theme is like the “nutrients of an apple,” and the plot “brews in the mind of the writer” and boils until it reaches fermentation.16 The conditions and movements of things must be carefully observed, and expressed concisely through sentences that have speed (sokto) and momentum (pangnyŏk).17 He closes: “Now is the time we need precision, concision, speed, and momentum. This is true from both the perspective of our daily lives and also from a scientific perspective. . . . Contemporary fiction (hyŏndae sosŏl) must have more precise and concise sentences than modern fiction (kŭndae sosŏl), and have more speed and momentum.”18 An’s approach, to summarize, is to elucidate fiction writing in terms of scientific building blocks and to show how fiction arrives at a transcendental truth. An thus aligns the work of the writer with that of the scientist, both of whom arrive at a truth located in the tangible, visual realm. As a literary periodical for young people, Hagwŏn published a wide variety of types of fiction (sosŏl), including mystery (t’amjŏng), adventure (mohŏm), romance (sunjŏng), and science (kwahak). It was science fiction that most clearly marked a new relationship between child and nature. For five decades, educators, psychologists, and writers addressed a child-heart that was organically part of nature, whose untamed character had to be preserved and protected, but also guided and socialized. But South Korea was now in a post–Korean

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War, post–atomic bomb era in which technological and scientific innovation was a national priority. This demanded a new kind of fiction: one that celebrated the child’s liberation from nature, but also impressed upon the child that the natural world was to be feared and controlled. Before the postwar era, little if any original science fiction was published, with the exception of adaptations such as Yi Hae-jo’s Iron World (Ch’ŏl segye)— a work based on a Chinese translation of Jules Verne’s Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum (1879).19 Cho Sŏng-myŏn attributes the absence of a vibrant science fiction tradition to Korea’s late arrival at a technological and industrial foundation, while Haerin Shin points to the country’s tradition of realism.20 Original science fiction began to be published in postwar period young readers’ magazines like Haksaeng kwahak and Hagwŏn in South Korea and in Adong munhak and Sonyŏn kwahak in North Korea. The most prolific writer of postwar science fiction in South Korea was Han Nag-wŏn (1924–2007). Han debuted with the serialized novel Lost Boys (Irhŏbŏrin sonyŏn) in 1953, and continued to publish for over forty years.21 His work has been celebrated for having popularized science for young readers, for drawing attention to the space race and the Cold War, and for presenting a largely optimistic view of the technological future.22 What is missing, however, is a broader analysis of this work that takes into account his suspicion of the supernatural, his implicit social critique, and above all, his ambiguous attitude toward scientific and technological development. His vision was far more violent and dystopian than has been acknowledged, with its allusions to political trials, torture, civil war, and an imminent danger of annihilation. The young people implicated in his fiction, both as characters and implied readers, had a relationship with nature that was far more fraught with anxiety than anything that had been seen in the past. While Omega Bugs (Uju pŏlle omega ho, 1967–1970) was not included in the 2013 collection of Han’s work, this novel, serialized in Hagwŏn from 1967 to 1970, is typical of the writer in that it places a group of Korean youths as witnesses and eventual problem-solvers of a threat of global proportions. Aliens from Jupiter have invaded the earth in a UFO and are abducting Earthlings. The Jovians also attack Earth with powerful radioactive weapons and infest the land with giant centipedes, whose bite drives their victims insane. Omega Bugs opens with the first-person narration of Iru, who, along with his younger schoolmates Chinman, Aena, and Mihye, is enjoying a day outdoors on Mt. Pukhan in Seoul: “It was the height of spring, and the fields and moun-

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tains were full of the season’s energies: flowers and butterflies, fresh leaves and birds, fair sky and clear streams.”23 The natural elements are in order, and the youngsters are at the center of the universe, both figuratively and literally. Iru reflects: “I lay flat on a boulder and stared up at the sky. It entered my field of vision as if it belonged entirely to me.”24 These observations serve to anchor the protagonists in a physical world seemingly under their control. The next moment, two eagles are seen plummeting to the ground. A flashing light blinds the youths momentarily, and soon they come across hikers partaking of a feast of roasted wild boar that inexplicably collapsed at their feet. Chinman helps himself to the meat and consequently become unresponsive to his friends. In trying to understand the source of his malady, all four youths end up in a Jovian spaceship that collects them from the streets of Seoul and takes them under the sea. Until the dramatic end of the novel, the four become implicated in a Jovian conspiracy to enlighten the Earthlings, first through scientific conversion and later by force, through the release of giant centipedes and a radiation attack, and lastly by making the rivers and sea swallow up the earth’s continents. The sequence of the plot is promoted by an unscientific phenomenon that requires assessment and resolution that can only be achieved through scientific knowledge and methodological examination. Iru, for example, is able to assess the threat of the centipedes only through careful observation and scientific analysis. The Jovian underground city is a vision of a technological utopia, where the environment is carefully mastered. In this way, the novel celebrates scientific investigation and shows that it cultivates positive control of the environment. These details also educate the reader about a variety of things scientific: laboratory experiments, medical research and antibiotics, antimatter, and electric currents. Omega Bugs demonstrates that the youths’ fluency in scientific methodology and their comfort with technology enables their understanding of complex scientific problems, which leads them to solve a global crisis. At the same time, it entertains a sober awareness that some forces of nature are beyond man’s control. Doctor Wŏnil wins the trust of the youth by admitting to an audience of reporters the possibility that not all of nature’s forces can be tamed. He explains, “The strongman should never forget that a more powerful species is bound to come along. No organism on this planet has even survived longer than a million years.”25 Omega Bugs ends on a dark, if not decidedly dystopian, note. While Iru and Aena are hustling back to Earth after successfully taking charge of the ship,

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the situation on Earth is bleak: the continents are slowly being drowned by the swelling of oceans and rivers caused by the Jovian’s radiation attacks that have melted the glaciers of the North Pole. The earth has been turned into an apocalyptic wasteland. In the end, nothing has survived—the earth is destroyed and is shrouded in a nuclear cloud. Nonetheless, the novel ends somewhat optimistically, since Iru and Aena discover a medication that will reverse the psychological bondage wreaked by the bugs on the remaining humans on board their ship. They have found a way to save their friends, and steer their spaceship off to a new beginning. Yet the image of this last episode leaves little hope (Figure 17). It depicts a spacecraft dwarfed by the godforsaken landscape, hovering aimlessly between bleak sky and inhospitable ground. This is not a vision of scientific triumph, but a stark projection of a world that, in its pursuit of scientific and technological superiority, may very likely wipe itself out. Although the last section of the novel is titled “New Beginning,” the destruction wreaked by both humans and nature is irreversible, and there is little indication of what kind of beginning awaits this unlikely crew.

F I G U R E 17. “Omega Bugs.” Hagwŏn (December 1968): 309.

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Engineering Utopia: Science Fiction in Postwar North Korea Scientific education was a key priority from the early postwar period in North and South Korea, and science became a regular feature of children’s magazines in educational popular science magazines like Sonyŏn kwahak and in literary magazines like Sonyŏndan and Adong munhak. The scientific content in these magazines attests to the degree to which they had to contend with the new centrality of science and technology. At the same time, writers grappled with the role that fiction could play in shaping reality, both through its depiction of the present and its ability to anticipate the imminent, utopian future. And of the imaginative narratives available, science fiction was best poised to show how science, technology, and the environment were implicated in the North Korean political discourses of development. The work of this genre was multifaceted: it had to be rooted unequivocally in reality, and it had to educate and provide real data. At the same, it had a mobilizing mission: to demonstrate the superiority of humans over nature and to establish the childscientist as the new protagonist of North Korea. Following division, the North Korean literary field underwent a transformation that reflected its efforts to reconcile long-simmering internal debates from the colonial period with external influences, particularly from the Soviet literary establishment. Debates over the direction of the literary establishment extended also into the realm of children’s literature. Included in the 1953 “Proclamations of the National Writer’s Association” (Chŏn’guk chakka yesulga ­taehoe kyŏlchŏngsŏ) published in the literary magazine Chosŏn munhak (Chosŏn Literature) was the declaration, “We must take particular interest in the development of creative writing and the arts for children.”26 Soviet models served as inspiration for much of North Korea’s early children’s literature. This is apparent in the works of literary luminaries like Paek Sŏk; in portraits of Tolstoy and Pushkin hanging in the classrooms in which Korean children participated in their after-school circles; and in the abundance of translations of Soviet prose and poetry. Russian science fiction appeared in translation in the Korean children’s magazine Adong munhak starting in 1956. The first piece, “We Landed on Mars” by Boris Lyapunov, was set in 1995 and recounts the arrival of a team of explorers who discover that Mars’ gravity is weak, the trees are blue, the sky is dark-blue bordering on purple, and two moons circle the planet. Tension in the story is created when communication with Earth is briefly cut off, but the team eventually returns home safely.27 “We Landed on Mars” was the only translation of science fiction to appear

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in Adong munhak. This story was followed, almost every month, with original science fiction prose, poetry, theater scripts, and nonfiction. These narratives resounded with a passionate cry for the mastery of a brutal, untamed environment, as well as an enthusiastic embrace of technology and science, an enthusiasm that emerged as a part of global Cold War discourse and cult of technology. Just as Mao’s and Stalin’s engineering projects were staged as military campaigns against nature, the struggle between Communism and Western imperialism was articulated as one between rational man and nature. This framing of the Cold War struggle was conducive to the dramatization of scientific fiction for young readers. With the Stalinist influence on the emergent North Korean literary field also came the prevalent view of the environment as a wild, irrational space that must be controlled. Nothing spoke more of the conquest of nature than raising the ocean floor, and no mastery of the universe was articulated better than through adventures into outer space—two scenarios that figured centrally in North Korean science fiction. These works of fiction took the young reader from the depths of the sea to the far corners of the solar system and were set in the socialist utopias of a not-so-distant future. They celebrated young, courageous, diligent, scientifically minded, and inquisitive boys and girls of North Korea who, often with Soviet guidance, thwarted evil plans devised by American imperialists, or, more frequently, were charged with the task of conquering hostile terrain to exploit much-needed resources such as oil, water, and nuclear power. These fictional pieces incorporated a wealth of scientific jargon, intended not merely to delight but also to underscore the crucial role of scientific knowledge for the economic and military survival of the North Korean state. At the same time, science fiction narratives responded to the larger debates raging among writers of children’s fiction about the direction of North Korean literature. Science fiction forced writers to grapple with one central tension: the exact, rational discipline of science and the art of fiction. Five months after the signing of the armistice ending the Korean War, Kim Myŏng Su, a literary critic and member of the North Korean Federation of Writers, published an essay on children’s literature in which he declared that “the task of proper cultivation of our children demands that we create a prosperous future for our nation and . . . it is children’s literature that must play a key role in fulfilling the glorious responsibility of this task.”28 Kim and his contemporaries voiced concerns about the use of age-appropriate language in children’s fiction, its literary quality, status in the literary establishment, and future trajec-

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tory. Such concerns about literature for children were not new: conversations had begun in the colonial period among proletarian writers, such as Song Yŏng, Im Hwa, Pak Se-yŏng, Paek Sŏk, Yi T’ae-jun, and Ri Wŏn U (Yi Wŏn-u). Their debates about the form and function of realism and the critical role that scientific imagination should play in North Korean fiction continued from the 1930s. Realism had been the guiding force of narrative in Korean fiction at the turn of the century and was theorized into a scientific narrative methodology by early colonial writers and proletarian intellectuals and writers.29 The term hyŏnsil, or reality, which was at the center of these literary and visual debates, embodied the perceived need to awaken readers and viewers to reality as a critical step in their correct understanding of the mechanics of power and class. From these colonial-era debates, three keywords persist in the critical writing about children’s literature of the early 1950s: reality (hyŏnsil), imagination/­ fantasy (hwansang/kongsang), and science (kwahak). The consensus among critics of children’s literature was that realism as a narrative mechanism, which involved engaging in “correct” depictions of the social mechanisms of good and evil, must be the goal, and that raw material must be drawn from children’s real lived experiences.30 In a 1955, for example, critic Ri Wŏn U wrote that narrative should be based on material from everyday life, but that the inspiration for writing should emerge scientifically because “all children see, hear, feel, and then interpret those feelings in the same way.”31 Ri elaborated further in a booklength work on children’s literature in which he insisted that the material of literature be adjusted to the different stages of the child’s development, and that the way to tap into appropriate material for children was through kwanch’al, or scientific observation of their environment.32 The term “science” appeared frequently as a part of the attempt to redraw the limits, functions, and possibilities of literature for children in North Korea. As noted above, scientific content began to appear in children’s magazines at the same time that critics started noting the lack of material that might cultivate children’s interest in science.33 Han Sŏr Ya argued that children’s literature must go beyond the narrow limits of school life to include “scientific fantasy”; Han Sik called for the best literary minds to join the ranks of children’s literature writers, emphasizing the need for creating scientific reading material; and Kim Myŏng Su praised short fiction that featured scientific investigation.34 ­Science, then, was a buzzword in postwar North Korean children’s literary circles. At the same time, writers warned that scientific jargon might detract from the entertaining qualities of children’s literature. The most outspoken critic of

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the increasingly politicized and didactic content of children’s literature was the renowned poet Paek Sŏk. He spoke of the importance of cultivating children’s imagination, and insisted that reality, while being the most important element of poetry and fiction, may still exist in abstract forms. Paek was particularly passionate about depicting nature in poetry for children, and expressed his belief that the natural world facilitates an understanding of the man-made world.35 And indeed, the children’s magazine Sonyŏndan reflected Paek’s insistence on greater integration of children in nature, featuring articles such as “Inside the Nature of Our Hometown,” which taught appreciation of horticulture and animal husbandry, as well as essays like “A Year in Our School’s Garden,” which promoted hands-on science education.36 Such essays demonstrate how immersion in nature leads to an intuitive understanding of the material world. Some writers warned against an overemphasis on formulas and data, demanding science and fantasy be balanced in equal measure: “Children’s dreams must be driven by science . . . but the attempt to curtail the fantasy and imagination that is the organizing force of their dreams is as foolish as blocking the pulse of development of their hopes for the future.”37 Ri Wŏn U’s solution was to insist that literature show children the world as it could be. “We must write stories that offer a view of the future that is scientifically imaginative,” he wrote. “The discovery of new theories, scientists that unlock the secrets of our planet, and scientific research on the planets of the solar system must be the foundations of fantasy.”38 Science fiction was productive for two reasons: it could provide children with the critical scientific information that would build the skills needed to develop their nation’s resources, and it would inculcate young readers into politics through the deceptively value-free language of science. Science fiction was the literary form that would best place children as agents of change of nature, thus fully integrating them as social and political actors in the world. Between 1956 and 1965 the magazine Adong munhak published science fiction that included plays, essays, poems, and works of fiction. This genre responded to the imperatives of literature to provide a reflection of the real and cultivation of the imagination that many had agreed was what children’s literature most needed. The works shared four main characteristics. First, they established North Korea as the vanguard of deep-sea and space exploration. Second, they promoted scientific education by injecting texts with scientific jargon, numbers, and facts. Third, they reinforced political awareness by highlighting the American threat while cultivating ideological sensibilities. Last, they spoke of the urgent need to reform the environment and to develop alternative energy

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sources, thus establishing the superiority of humans over nature as a prerequisite for achieving utopia. The Rising Seabed (Pada esŏ sosanan ttang), a serialized novel written by Kim Tong Sŏp and illustrated by Ŏ Sun U, exhibits the four characteristics mentioned above.39 It recounts the adventures of a boy-girl pair of explorers, Chŏl Su and Suk Hŭi. One day it occurs to the pair that if the floor of the sea could be raised, it would increase the amount of tillable land and permit access to resources deep in the earth.40 Their aspirations are affirmed by scientists on site, who attest that nature can be transformed to meet humans’ social and economic needs. Science is not a means simply to understand the natural world but also to develop tools to harness nature for the benefit of mankind. At the children’s insistence, one of the scientists agrees to reveal to them a glimpse of the future, and his cigarette smoke transports them forward in time. The children are then reintroduced as full-fledged scientists committed to marshaling the deep sea for its energy to benefit the North Korean people. They travel to the ocean depths and find an unlimited supply of their favorite seafood delicacies, and they drill through granite to discover minerals and oil. The two are pursued by an American, whose attack causes them to veer off course and consequently drop into unmarked territory. This misadventure is a turning point, for they discover a key component: atomic material with energy that can be manipulated to raise the ocean floor. The two create a new map of this terrain, and at the end of the novel they raise the bottom of the sea to the wonder and delight of the throngs of young people waiting above. The purpose of science is reaffirmed as the means of liberating man from the shackles of nature and conquering it for the benefit and happiness of all. The Rising Seabed is staged in a near future, post-unification era in which the Americans have been mostly marginalized, and it demonstrates how North Korean triumphs may benefit the entire world. North Korean authority is established through the naming of undersea vegetation and the mapping of new regions. In keeping with the informative function of science fiction, measurements in The Rising Seabed are provided in detail, such as the precise amount of land gained from raising the bottom of the sea. At the same time, an appreciation of North K ­ orea’s place in current global politics is fostered through the seemingly unbiased language of science: for example, the American “Harry Man” is portrayed as a foul-mouthed, raspy-voiced, snake-eyed, gun-toting, morally deranged representative of the free world who tries to kill the children from his submarine that looks as crooked and sinister as its captain.

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But most importantly, this novel speaks to the requisite reform of the environment and the superiority of humans over nature through the term taejayŏn kaejo, or the Great Reform of Nature. The need to reform nature is framed less as a desire for grandeur than as a practically motivated desire to correct nature’s mistakes. The Rising Seabed ends with the successful raising of the bottom of the ocean, when spectators of all ages are gathered to observe a phenomenon described as “a reform of the environment that neither the spirits or God could ever achieve.”41 (See Figure 18.) People cheer and rub their eyes in disbelief as the water clears way for the risen land. “The bottom of the sea, having never seen the light of the East Sea, is finally exposed. . . . It shines like a newborn’s face peering upon the world for the first time; it wears the ashen countenance of those who have been oppressed their entire lives.”42 The bottom of the sea has been liberated from nature’s tyranny. A scientist pronounces: “This victory is precisely about liberating ourselves from the shackles of nature, which has subordinated us from the beginning of time.”43 It is interesting to contrast the image shown earlier from the South Korean serialized novel Omega Bugs and the image from the North Korean serialized novel The Rising Seabed. They were written contemporaneously—1967 and 1965, respectively—and both feature supernatural forces that bring about significant changes to the sea and land. The images share a scientific vision

F I G U R E 18 . “The Rising Seabed.” Adong munhak (April 1965): 76–77.

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of the future in which young people have a central role to play in mobilizing medicine, science, and technology to find a solution to the “problems” of nature. In this sense, both ­novels demonstrate the break in the child-nature bond, so that rather than being viewed as an organic part of the natural environment, the young person is now depicted as tasked with mastering nature and, by extension, the nation. But there is also a stark difference between the two narratives revealed by the images. The South Korean image (Figure 17) places the spacecraft in the center top, but it is effectively dwarfed by the swelling waves. The lines are drawn in such a way as to draw the eye first to the violence of the sea, sketched in forceful strokes that suggest wild motion, and then to the spacecraft, which is placed in the softer, smooth lines of the sky and is distinguishable from the two moons only by its artificial structure and location in the center of the page. By contrast, the North Korean image draws the eye from the commanding human figures on the left, across the page to the right where the sea has now been converted into land. Still, both texts reveal the major difference between prewar and postwar fiction for young readers: a decisive change in the relationship between the child and nature. The postwar, post-nuclear, post-division era marked a change in this relationship, which was the defining feature of the child-heart and which gave rise to and shaped literature for young readers in modern Korea.

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Conclusion The atomic bombings of Japan marked an end of an era for the Korean peninsula. They hastened the end of the Second World War and Japan’s defeat. At the same time, they ushered in the era of division as Cold War politics played out on Korean soil, partitioning the country and then sealing their divided fate through the Korean War. The world into which the two Koreas emerged as separate sovereign nations was one in which the United States and the USSR were in the process of securing global hegemony through ideological, military, economic, and technological maneuvering. The dominance of the two Cold War powers was symbolized by their nuclear prowess, as well as their ability to conquer the final frontiers of outer space and the deep sea. This new world of military and technological expertise required skilled workers, and in the two Koreas young people had to be trained to ensure that their countries would not fall behind. Science and technology had to be made popular, and the task of making them so was assigned to popular literature for children. So compelling was the scientific discourse that it did not remain confined to specialized content, but penetrated creative writing. It provided writers in both North and South Korea with a challenge: to write fiction in a way that aligns with the scientific method and arrives at a truth that is not just ideologically sound but also scientifically valid. Writers’ response to this challenge was to harness language derived from science and apply it to fiction; to insist on objective and rational observation as the basis of creativity; and to bring language and observation together in a way that could anticipate imminent reality. And nowhere was the imperative to write imaginative fiction with scientific tools more apparent than in the science fiction genre. Writers in both the North and South subscribed to the premise that science and technology would lead to social and political liberation. Writers of fiction in both the North and South shared the belief that science and technology would reveal the mysteries of the world through data coded in text and images. In them, alien infections could be treated by antibiotics; outer space and the deep sea were easily accessible and existed for the purpose of providing humans the resources they needed; and aliens interacted in predictable social ways that mirrored the communist/capitalist systems, and were therefore either worthy of emulation or destruction. The two Koreas differed slightly in their confidence in the benevolent implications of nature’s conquest. North Korean science fiction tended to describe a scientific and technological utopia that was imminent. In their telling, once

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a few rogue Americans and other negligible capitalist distractions were eliminated, the natural world would find its true calling as the playground of human ambition. South Korean fiction was slightly more suspicious about the possibility of controlling nature. At the closing of Omega Bugs, for example, the earth’s continents have been completely submerged in water, and the young travelers have no choice but to seek out a new planet and start anew. In South Korean fiction, the break from nature is real, but its implications are ambiguous and reflect a growing disillusionment with the political and social structures that posed palpable threats to the well-being of its youth. But what North and South Korean science fictions ultimately demonstrate is the end of the foundation of the child-heart: the intimate relationship between the child and the natural world. The relationship between child and nature, celebrated by the term tongsim, guided the writing for children from its very emergence in the early twentieth-century. Tongsim implied that the child was necessarily natural, on the threshold of culture but not yet fully inducted into it, and must therefore be shaped by carefully crafted language, narrative content, and images. The concept of the child-heart also drove decades of discourse on children’s emotions, which were viewed as the most elusive yet most critical component of the child-heart. At its very foundation, the child-heart was a manifestation of the balance between nature and culture, between children and their environment. But the atomic bombings and the Korean War marked the severing of the bond between child and nature. Now, the future of the competing North and South Korean nations depended on the ability to understand, and more importantly control, nature. Once, the child was a natural extension of nature: “the child loves the mountains, loves the sea, loves all the many parts of grand nature, is the most intimate with nature, is the one who dances with the sun,” intoned Pang Chŏnghwan, the founder of Ŏrini and the most prominent advocate of children’s literature and culture in the early twentieth century.44 But postwar Korean fiction saw the child as potentially nature’s most vulnerable victim. North and South Korean writers diverged in their degree of optimism that humans could expose and overcome nature’s obstacles. But what they shared is the conviction that children were fully integrated as social and political beings, implicated by politics, and affected by the environment. It was precisely their child-hearts that primed them for the ultimate job of asserting control over nature. • • •

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The last several decades have seen a tremendous growth in Korean studies scholarship in the English language. This scholarship has helped locate ­colonial-period cultural production within regional and transnational discourses and has enabled a much more nuanced understanding of how storytelling and notions of class and gender were transformed under the colonial regime. It has also brought to light members of Korean society who were doomed to obscurity for too long, such as leftist intellectuals, the working class, and Korea’s “new” women. Today, we understand much better how colonial institutions exercised control and can better trace the rich variety of responses to that experience. The colonial everyday has also come into view as a space that was both saturated with colonial power and at the same time offered spheres of resistance or other productive meaning-making endeavors that cannot be neatly compartmentalized as national or colonial. And yet the genre of children’s literature has been largely excised from this broader picture. The concept of childhood emerged alongside ideas of children’s education as a critical part of modernity in the early twentieth century. But while many of the actors involved—intellectuals, educators, and writers— have received sustained interest, the materials produced for children—children’s magazines, folk story collections, children’s corners in the daily papers—have attracted much less interest. The relative paucity of sources is one reason for this, but it is also a symptom of a larger omission. Plainly speaking, collectors did not deem magazines for children as worthy of preservation. The National Library for Children and Young Adults in Seoul, which opened in 2006, houses incomplete collections of colonial-era materials. It was only in 2010 that the very first multivolume series of historical children’s literature materials came to light. Published under the title Han’guk adong munhak ch’ongsŏ (The Library of Korean Children’s Literature), it includes many of the representative magazine publications from the colonial, wartime, and postwar periods. It is not an exhaustive collection by any means, since many of the magazine issues reproduced in this multivolume publication are missing or in poor condition. Still many mainstream magazines can be found only in the hands of private collectors. And it was not until 2016, ten years after this book project began, that the very first edited volume of children’s literature criticism from the early twentieth centutry, Han’guk hyŏndae adong munhak pip’yŏng charyojip (A Compilation of Contemporary Korean Children’s Literature Criticism), was published. At more than a thousand pages in length, it promises to be the first of several volumes that will certainly make the systematic investigation of Korean children’s literature easier in the future.45

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But as this book has attempted to demonstrate, literature written for children in the colonial period is critical to a fuller understanding of what it meant to live and write as a colonial subject, and what kind of past, present, and future it allowed its writers to imagine. This is because from the earliest transformation of Korea under Japanese colonial rule, writers and intellectuals recognized that literature had a critical role to play: more than other forms of expression, it was uniquely privileged in the way it mobilized emotion. It reformed the minds of its readers, but more importantly, it moved their hearts. And reformation of the heart was absolutely essential in the creation of new subjects—essential both to the early reformers of the twentieth century, to colonial rule, and to the postwar regimes. Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s magazines Sonyŏn, followed by his magazines Pulgŭn chyŏgori, Aidŭlboi, and Saebyŏl, started this trend by shifting the spotlight away from adults to youth, from the past to the future. It is in this context that children—not politicized youths who were adultsin-the-making, but children—became so critical, and their literature so central, to the building of a Korean future and to the survival of their culture. Their childness carried with it implications of a pre- or extra-cultural existence, natural beings in the organic, uncontaminated sense of the word, and this organic essence afforded writers exciting opportunities to experiment with language and content. Writers and critics alike were drawn to the concept of the tongsim since it encapsulated the difference between children and adults and set children apart physically and emotionally. It also underscored the deep investment in emotional education that was so central to the project of modernity. Even leftist writers, who criticized the bourgeois trappings of tongsim, never doubted the existence of the concept; instead, they used it for their own competing visions of the child-heart for its latent potential for revolution. The belief in the existence of tongsim was the engine driving the production of materials for children from the very start. This belief motivated rich and diverse productions of texts and images that negotiated the tumultuous transitions from colonial rule to liberation and on to the establishment of North and South Korea. Wŏn Chong-ch’an has recently argued that children’s magazines were much more ideologically fluid than has been acknowledged.46 And indeed, the voices that emerge from the pages of children’s magazines weave a complex tapestry of the child as pure, yet enlightened; innocent, yet rebellious; obedient, yet politically engaged; natural, yet the master of nature. These configurations were at times organic extensions of hegemonic ideological discourses, but at other times they went against the hegemonic grain, both

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­ escribing and anticipating the experience of being a child in Korea during the d first five decades of the twentieth century. The belief in the existence of a child-heart persists today, both in North and South Korea, and continues to be a concept that is contended with both creatively and critically. In the last sixty years of division, the belief in the physical and psychic difference of children, captured by the term tongsim, has promoted a range of fiction and critical treatises that engage with this concept. The childheart was particularly productive, for example, in literature relating to the Korean War, because it provided an opportunity to capitalize on the affective investment in the nation-building narrative through the emphasis on children as victims. This made it possible to mobilize the indignation and anger necessary for the sustenance of long-term hostility.47 In South Korea, the child-heart made possible the posing of unthinkable, unutterable questions—whose war is this and why are we fighting?—of the hegemonic, anti-Communist narrative in South Korea about the origins of the Korean War that had to be much more sublimated in adult literature.48 And today, a search for the term tongsim brings up a growing list of critical articles and books about children’s literature, as well as collections of prose and poetry. Scholars have noted the continued resilience of the term well into the 1970s and 1980s, and have mapped the ways that the term has obscured more nuanced understanding of children’s fiction.49 While the term still appears to be often taken for granted, there is a growing consensus that tongsim as a concept has limited rather than enriched more sustained critiques of children’s literature in post-liberation Korea.50 Meanwhile, in North Korea, a recent creative writing handbook, Tongsim kwa adong munhak ch’angjak (The Child-Heart and Writing Children’s Literature), holds that tongsim must be the moving force behind writing for children and must direct everything from plot to characters to language to the colors in the cover art.51 In a chapter devoted entirely to understanding the child-heart as a prerequisite for creative writing, authors Chang Yŏng and Yi Yŏn Ho explain that tongsim is a psychological state that combines the body and spirit of children and is the product of specific historical and social forces, making the tongsim of the socialist child different from that of the capitalist child.52 This handbook emphasizes the lack of children’s analytic abilities and their tendency to absorb the world with few inhibitions. Literature for children must take this into account and both anticipate and reflect these tongsim-specific needs, following Kim Jong Il’s statement that “in children’s literature the manifestation of art must be as sensory as possible to accommodate the sensitive emotions and

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emotionally aesthetic way in which children view the world.”53 Tongsim continues to be a compelling concept both in North and South Korea today. In one of the foundational studies of theory and children’s literature, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, John Stephens writes: Children’s fiction belongs firmly within the domain of cultural practices which exist for the purpose of socializing their target audience. Childhood is seen as the crucial formative period in the life of a human being, the time for basic education about the nature of the world, how to live in it, how to relate to other people, what to believe, what and how to think—in general, the intention is to render the world intelligible. Such ideas as these are neither essential nor absolute in their constitution but are constructed within social practices, and the intelligibility which a society offers its children is a network of ideological positions, many of which are neither articulated nor recognized as being essentially ideological.54

Stephens’ argument about the rich and layered nature of literature for children, one that is often hidden in plain sight, has been one of the inspirations for this book, which has traced the trajectory of children’s reading materials in Korea from their earliest attempts at making the child visible, through the development of written and illustrated content that would build textual and cultural literacy, to a robust market with dedicated audiences in the postwar period. As I have shown, literature for children in Korea presents itself as a contested site not only for opposing ideological positions but also for what it means to be a child as an individual, a family member, and as a subject and citizen. That the term tongsim is one that writers and critics continue to grapple with in both North and South Korea speaks to the sustained desire to see difference, to imagine untapped potential, to dream not just of an idealized past but of a future of humanity that is benevolent, intuitive, and politically engaged. This book has taken the term tongsim and examined the investments in it to find that in its foundation it embodied a relationship between child and nature, a relationship that was pre- or extra-cultural, and whose mechanics masked its political nature. This fundamental connection demanded content and language that could guide children in their emergence in the world. The connection between child and nature also privileged children with a perceived ability to see truth and to act intuitively when the adult world around them was blind and stunted. But with the emergence of scientific discourses and particularly with the atomic bombing of Japan, division, and the devastating Korean War,

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s­ cience fiction narratives in particular asserted children’s superiority over nature, thus effectively severing their age-old bond. Not long ago, my eight-year-old son looked across the table and said, “I really want to know what it feels like to be a grown-up.” It was a reminder that imaginings can go both ways. How revealing could it be to have adult literature written by children? They might compose poetry about senseless multitasking, about financial- or career-related pursuits, or meditations about fears of death and illness. Perhaps these kinds of narratives would not look too different from what adults write themselves. For if the child was once viewed as a fully acultural being that is not shaped by politics or does not (or should not) have access to self-knowledge, self-doubt, or knowledge of the world until he or she reached the age of maturity, this is no longer the case. The multiple discourses that shape the child, including those that children develop about themselves, are crucial indications of the kind of present we wish to create, and the future that we both fear and hope for.

N OT E S

I N T RO D U C T I O N 1. Ben-Amos, “Adolescence as a Cultural Invention.” 2. Shavit, “Historical Model of the Development of Children’s Literature.” 3. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child. 4. Lerer, Children’s Literature, 7. 5. Yi Chae-ch’ŏl, Adong munhak ŭi ihae, 53–54. This book is a republication of Yi’s original book from 1967. 6. The literacy numbers from this era, however, are not very encouraging. In the 1920s the Korean peninsula was still largely rural, with over 80 percent of the population engaged in farming, forestry, and fishing and with about 90 percent living in rural areas. The few schools scattered around the country catered to families who could afford to release their children from household and child-care duties. In 1931, for example, colonial records show that only 20 percent of Korean children were enrolled. Wŏn Chong-ch’an, “Han’guk adong munhak,” 88. 7. Chang Chŏng-hŭi, Han’guk kŭndae adong munhak, 13. 8. Ch’oe Myŏng-p’yo, Han’guk kŭndae sonyŏn munye undongsa, 17–20. 9. Darr, Kanon be-khamah kolot. Darr’s book is a fascinating survey of the polyphonic voices that emerged in literature for children in the roughly two decades before the establishment of Israel, and it has served as an inspiration for many of the questions that I raise in this book. The similarities between Israel and the two Koreas—particularly in the mobilization of literature for the purposes of nation-building on the one hand, and the struggle of different interest groups and “shapers of taste” for hegemony on the other, is fascinating and deserves closer examination. 10. For a survey of Western intellectual history and theories of child development, see Cleverley, Visions of Childhood.

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11. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, 92 (italics in the original). 12. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan. 13. Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 115. Karatani pushes against the notion that child psychology or the division between children and adults is in any way universal, noting both the culture-specific context in which the awareness of the child emerged in Japan, as well as how the discovery of the child was predicated on the capitalist reorganization of contemporary society (including schools and the military). 14. Jenks, Childhood, 8. 15.  Yi Kwang-su, “Chanyŏ chungsimnon.” 16.  See Shin and Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea, 1–18. Kyu Hyun Kim elucidates the arguments raised in favor of and against this term, and shows why it has proven so contentious and compelling to historians, particularly in the way that Robinson and Shin have approached it. See Kim, “Reflections on the Problems of Colonial Modernity.” 17. Poole, When the Future Disappears. 18. Hanscom, The Real Modern. 19.  Sunyoung Park, “Everyday Life as Critique in Late Colonial Korea,” 886. 20.  Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire. 21. Lee, Women Pre-scripted. 22.  Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire, 9. 23.  Chŏng Chin-sŏk, “Ilche kangjŏmgi ŭi ch’ulp’an hwan’gyŏng.” 24. Ibid., 27–30. 25.  Mun Han-byŏl, “Chosŏn ch’ulp’an kyŏngch’al.” 26.  Son Chi-yŏn, “Singminji Chosŏn esŏ ŭi kŏmyŏl ŭi sasang kwa pangbŏp,” 130–33. 27.  Mun Han-byŏl, “Ilche kangjŏmgi adong ch’ulp’anmul ŭi kwalli ch’egye,” 416. Mun notes that the Seditious Texts contains content from twenty-four books that were censored between 1926 and 1927, while Content and Classification is more of an instructional manual that contains a detailed record of the censorship process. Mun notes that after this period, children’s censored materials were included in the general censorship volumes rather than collected in their own dedicated volume. 28. Ibid., 421–426. 29. Ibid., 432. 30. Metz, Film Language, 26. Quoted in Evans, Visual Culture, 12. 31. Barthes, Mythologies; and Barthes, Image, Music, Text. See also Gramsci, “Hegemony, Intellectuals, and the State.” 32. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. 33.  Jina Kim, “Intermedial Aesthetics,” 47. She argues that the yŏnghwa sosŏl, or cinematic novels, were “entwined in a symbiotic relationship [that] generated new intermedial reading, viewing, and hearing experiences.” Ibid., 58. 34.  Jiwon Shin, “Recasting Colonial Space,” 54. 35. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, 20. 36.  Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” 14.

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37.  See Kelly Y. Jeong, Crisis of Gender; and Tikhonov, “Masculinizing the Nation.” 38.  Hyaeweol Choi, “‘Wise Mother, Good Wife.’” See also Theodore Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea, 70. 39.  Hyaeweol Choi, “‘Wise Mother, Good Wife,’” 6. While the demands for education may have been vociferous, Choi notes that there was marked disparity between ideals and reality. In 1919 only 2.2 percent of girls and 10.2 percent of boys attended primary school; ten years later this had increased to 7.9 percent girls and 30.0 percent boys in primary school, with even fewer going on to middle school. Ibid, 8. 40. Ibid, 13; Ji-Eun Lee, Women Pre-scripted, 8. 41.  Sinyŏsŏng was edited some of the time by the pioneer of children’s literature in Korea, Pang Chŏng-hwan. 42.  “Mosŏng chungsim ŭi yŏja kyoyuk,” Sinyŏsŏng 3.1 (1925). Quoted in Hyaeweol Choi, “‘Wise Mother, Good Wife,’” 14. 43.  Pak Suk-cha, “Adong ŭi palgyŏn kwa mosŏng tamnon,” 255. 44.  Kim Pok-sun, “Sonyŏ ŭi t’ansaeng”; Kim Yun-gyŏng, “Haebang hu yŏhaksaeng yŏn’gu.” 45.  Hong Yang-hŭi, “Singminji sigi namsŏng kyoyuk.” 46.  Ji-Eun Lee, Women Pre-scripted, 104. Lee provides a succinct summary of scholarship on women’s literacy in the colonial period in note 5 of the introduction, pp. 137–38. 47.  Kim Pok-sun, “Sonyŏ ŭi t’ansaeng,” 206. According to the website of the National Archives of Korea, illiteracy rates for 12-year-olds and older after Libration stood at 78 percent. By 1958 this rate had dropped to 4.1 percent. The standard of literacy was reading, arithmetic, and basic science at a second-grade level. See http://theme.archives. go.kr/next/hangeulPolicy/business.do (accessed February 6, 2017). 48.  Kim Yun-gyŏng, “Haebang hu yŏhaksaeng yŏn’gu,” 37. 49.  Han Chi-hŭi, “Ch’oe Nam-sŏn ŭi ‘sonyŏn’ ŭi kihoek.” 50.  Hanscom and Washburn, eds., The Affect of Difference, 4. 51.  Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 3. 52.  Hanscom and Washburn, eds., The Affect of Difference, 6. 53.  Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 7. 54.  Poole, “Late Colonial Modernism and the Desire for Renewal.” 55.  Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “Conflicting Nostalgia,” 117. 56.  Kwon notes that the Japanese imperialist nostalgia was “an illegitimate and imaginary relationship to Korea’s bygone days based not on an actual memory but on the present colonizing desire to subsume even a past prior to colonization.” Ibid., 118. 57. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiii (emphasis mine). 58.  Ibid., xiv. 59.  Ibid. xiv, xv. 60. Eshel, Futurity, 4. Eshel argues that “contemporary literature creates the ‘open, future, possible’ by expanding our vocabularies, by probing the human ability to act, and by prompting reflection and debate.” Ibid. 61. Lerer, Children’s Literature, 1–2.

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62. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 9. 63. Jenkins, The Children’s Culture Reader, 95. 64.  Rudd and Pavlik, “The (Im)Possibility of Children’s Fiction,” 223; Nodelman, Touchstones. Volume One. In his article “The Case of Children’s Fiction,” Nodelman writes that while “children” in the phrase “children’s literature” are not real but “merely artificial constructs of writers,” this is in fact no different from other fiction written for an implied audience. He takes issue with Rose’s agenda and argues that she overstates her case about adult repression and nefarious adult interests. Ibid., 98–100. CHAPTER 1 1.  See Allen, “Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s Youth Magazines”; Mostow, ed., The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, 10; Peter Lee, ed., A History of Korean Literature, 341. 2.  Theresa Hyun, “Translating Indian Poetry,” 146. Kwŏn Podŭrae describes the magazine Ch’ŏngch’un as targeted at middle-school students. See Kwŏn, “1910 nyŏndae ŭi ijung’ŏ sanghwang,” 34. 3.  Yi Kwang-su. “Chanyŏ chungsimnon.” 4.  See Ann Lee, trans., Yi Kwang-su and Modern Korean Literature, 96. For recent scholarship in English on Yi Kwang-su, see also Ellie Choi, “Selections from Yi Kwangsu’s Early Writings”; Treat, “Choosing to Collaborate”; and Jooyeon Rhee, “On ‘The Value of Literature.’” 5.  Han Ki-hyŏng explains that Yi Kwang-su read of Korea’s past as a period of Chinese cultural imperialism. See “Ch’oe Nam-sŏn ŭi chapchi palgan,” 327. 6.  For the emergence of the child as a cultural category in various geographical locales, see the ground-breaking scholarship of Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood; Cho Ŭnsuk, Han’guk adong munhak ŭi hyŏngsŏng; Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature; Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China; Hsiung, A Tender Voyage; and Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child. 7. Stephens, Children and the Politics of Culture, 15. 8.  See also Nikolajeva, Aspects and Issues, 28. 9.  Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan’s scholarship elucidates the rise of reading practices in the early twentieth century. See “Kŭndae ch’ogi ŭi taejung munhwa.” 10.  Kyung Moon Hwang, “Country or State?” 1. Schmid notes that “the fifteen years between 1895 and 1910 were variously described as a time of change, an era of reform, a period of transition, and, most of all, a time of crisis.” Korea between Empires, 7. 11.  On the circulation of these terms in Korea, see Cho Ŭn-suk, Han’guk adong munhak ŭi hyŏngsŏng, 39–54. 12.  Andrew Jones writes on the developmental discourses in China and the conflation of the child and nation in Developmental Fairy Tales. 13.  Zarrow, “Old Myth into New History,” 230. 14.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Sonyŏn siŏn.” 15.  Cho Nam-hyŏn, Han’guk munhak chapchi sasangsa, 46.

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16.  Kwŏn Podŭrae, “Sonyŏn, Ch’ŏngch’un ŭi him,” 166. Han Chi-hŭi assesses the target readers of Sŏnyon at anywhere between ages 9–17, after which they started reading the magazine Ch’ŏngnyŏn, in “Ch’oe Nam-sŏn ŭi ‘sonyŏn’ ŭi kihoek,” 137. 17.  Yun Yŏng-sil, “Kungmin kukka ŭi chudongnyŏk,” 101. 18.  Han Chi-hŭi, “Ch’oe Nam-sŏn ŭi ‘sonyŏn’ ŭi kihoek,” 130. 19.  Sonyŏn 1, front matter. There are no page numbers assigned to this section, which appears in the third page of the first volume, before the table of contents. This appeal was included in issues 1–7, and then again in issues 12, 14–17, and 19 and 20. 20.  See Carter, “A Study of Japanese Children’s Magazines, 1888–1949.” 21.  Ōtake Kiyomi, Kŭndae Han-Il adong munhwa, 39. 22.  Chŏn Sŏng-gon, Kŭndae “Chosŏn” ŭi aident’it’i, 38; Ikeda Junya, “Meiji jidai matsuki no jidō bungaku,” 18, quoted in Carter, “A Study of Japanese Children’s Magazines, 1888–1949,” 56. 23.  Kil Chin-suk, “Munmyŏng ch’ehŏm kwa munmyŏng ŭi imiji,” 47. See also Han Chi-hŭi, “Ch’oe Nam-sŏn ŭi ‘sonyŏn’ ŭi kihoek,” 132. 24.  The magazine sold only six copies of the first issue, and then only as many as 30–40 copies for the later issues. See Kwŏn Podŭrae, “Sonyŏn, Ch’ŏngch’un ŭi him,” 159–60. 25.  Yun Se-jin, “Sonyŏn esŏ Chŏngch’un kkaji.” 26.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Sŏngjin.” 27.  For more on photography in the colonial period, see Poole, When the Future Disappears, especially 19–32. 28.  Kil Chin-suk, “Munmyŏng ch’ehŏm kwa munmyŏng ŭi imiji,” 70–75. 29.  Mun Sŏng-hwan also speaks about how photographs commodified images and offered them for easy circulation, so that what once would have been an extremely rare spectacle—Chosŏn period portraits, for example—could now be owned and even displayed alongside other easily acceptable images. See “Ŏlgul kwa sinch’e ŭi chŏngch’ihak, 126–27. 30.  Denis Cosgrove notes that “to achieve immutability (for example, by means of a scientific map), the information contained undergoes transformation, a process which, in principle, is not different from that of artistic production of spatial images.” Cosgrove, “Maps, Mapping, Modernity,” 37. See also Pickles, A History of Spaces. 31.  Han Ki-hyŏng argues that Ch’oe Nam-sŏn was trying to convey a kind of knowledge Korean youth would need to achieve a higher level of civilization while pushing against the confines of colonial censorship. See “Ch’oe Nam-sŏn ŭi chapchi palgan.” 32.  The quote appears in issues 1–7, 12, 14–16, and in the last one, issue 20. 33.  Kwŏn Yong-sŏn argues that the mountains are depicted as the symbolic backbone of the nation’s history and spirit, while the sea is meant to be a site of education and to represent the connection of the Korean nation to the rest of the world. See “Kukt’o chiri ŭi palgyŏn,” 100–102. 34.  See Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s essays, “Haesang taehansa,” “Padaran kŏs’ŭn irŏhan kŏsio,” and “Sammyŏn hwanhaeguk.”

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35.  “Hae egesŏ sonyŏn ege,” was likely inspired by Byron’s narrative poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which Ch’oe translated and included in Sonyŏn in 1910. Ch’oe was a prolific translator, and Sonyŏn published his translations of Tolstoy’s short stories, excerpts from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and poems by Byron. See Theresa Hyun, “Byron Lands in Korea.” 36.  Peter Lee, Modern Korean Literature, xvi–xvii. 37.  Theresa Hyun, “Byron Lands in Korea,” 296. 38. Ibid., 291. 39.  See Anthony, “Modern Poetry in Korea”; and Jaihiun Kim, Modern Korean ­Poetry, xxiv. 40.  Anthony, “Modern Poetry in Korea,” xiv. 41.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Pada wi e yong sonyŏn.” 42.  This “maker” is rendered with the Chinese character for master, pronounced chu in Korean, and vernacularized as skŭisŏ, or “His Eminence.” On the construction of terminology in Korean monotheism see, Baker, “Hananim, Hanŭnim, Hanullim, and Hanŏllim.” 43.  Kwŏn Podŭrae argues that in his translations of Tolstoy in Sonyŏn, Ch’oe deliberately eliminated anarchist and antinationalist elements because, in his words, “the youth of Korea do not need this right now.” See Kwŏn, “Sonyŏn kwa T’olsŭt’oi pŏnyŏk,” 64. Ch’oe Hyŏn-sik agrees that Ch’oe Nam-sŏn stayed in the realm of the philosophical to avoid censorship. See Ch’oe Hyŏn-sik, “Sindaehan kwa taejosŏn.” 44.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Pada wi e yong sonyŏn.” 45.  Tikhonov, “Masculinizing the Nation,” 1032–33. 46.  Han Chi-hŭi, “Ch’oe Nam-sŏn ŭi ‘sonyŏn’ ŭi kihoek.” 47.  Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan, “Kŭndae ch’ogi ŭi taejung munhwa.” 48.  Kim Hyŏn-suk, “Kŭndae maech’e rŭl t’onghae pon ‘kajŏng,’” 73–86. 49. Tikhonov, Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea, 139. 50.  See Cho Yŏn-sun, “Kaehwagi (1906–1910) ch’odŭng kyoyuk”; Cho Ŭn-suk, Han’guk adong munhak ŭi hyŏngsŏng; and Cho Ŭn-suk, “Kŭndae kyemong tamnon.” 51.  A decade later Kim Hye-gyŏng shows that the family was most heavily targeted for reformation at a time of the rise of the middle class and the development of institutions such as the education and welfare systems. See, Singmin chiha kŭndae kajok ŭi hyŏngsŏng. 52.  Recent scholarship on Ch’oe and the magazines that followed in the wake of Sonyŏn indicate that Ch’oe may have already began to shift his writing style to accommodate younger readers. See Kim Yong-hŭi “Aidŭlboi, Saebyŏl chi e nat’anan y­ uktang kwa ch’unwŏn ŭi ‘iyagi’ ŭisik.” While Kim Yong-hŭi holds that Ch’oe’s magazines Aidŭlboi and Saebyŏl relied heavily on plot summary and journalistic tone rather than an immersive style of writing, Kwŏn Hyŏk-chun argues that Aidŭlboi must be viewed as the origin of modern children’s fiction because it played a pioneering role in addressing an audience of defined age (elementary school) for which Ch’oe Nam-sŏn created ageappropriate content. He notes in particular the significance of the short story “Sendungi

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kŏmdungi” (Brighty and darky) published in issue 12 of Aidŭlboi, as the first attempt at creative fiction for children. Kwŏn Hyŏk-chun, “Aidŭlboi ŭi adong munhak sajŏk ŭiŭi e taehan yŏn’gu.” A more comprehensive integration of these works into an argument of the overall children’s magazine production of the 1910s will have to wait for a future opportunity. CHAPTER 2 1.  Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan, “Kŭndae ch’ogi ŭi taejung munhwa,” 308–14. Ch’ŏn describes some of the chaos that accompanied the book boom, including the difficulty in discerning the quality of popular books and the stiff competition posed to Korean publications by Japanese books. 2.  Kwŏn Podŭrae, Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi kiwŏn, 203. 3.  Ch’oe Myŏng-p’yo mentions in particular the youth organization affiliated with KAPF (the Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio), known as the Chosŏn sonyŏn munye yŏnmaeng (Korean Youth Literary Federation) created in 1927, which published its first affiliated magazine, Mugunghwa, for young readers. See Han’guk kŭndae sonyŏn munye undongsa, 31. 4. Ibid., 17. 5.  Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan, “Kŭndae ch’ogi ŭi taejung munhwa,” 310. 6.  Ch’oe Myŏng-p’yo, Han’guk kŭndae sonyŏn munye undongsa, 18–20. 7.  For a seminal history of the Saektonghoe, see Chŏng In-sŏp, Saektonghoe ŏrini undongsa. 8.  Chang Chŏng-hŭi, Han’guk kŭndae adong munhak ŭi hyŏngsang, 11. 9. Ibid., 17–18. 10.  Jina Kim, “Intermedial Aesthetics,” 47; Jiwon Shin, “Recasting Colonial Space,” 54. 11. Hanscom, The Real Modern. 12. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, 20. 13. Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales, 23. 14. Ibid., 24. 15.  Mark Jones argues that the rearing of children became the defining emblem of middle-class identity in early twentieth-century Japan because of its symbolic and economic significance in a quickly growing empire. See Children as Treasures. 16.  For discussion of the development of modern Japanese children’s literature, see especially Ortabasi, “Brave Dogs and Little Lord”; Piel, “Loyal Dogs and Meiji Boys”; and Henry, “Japanese Children’s Literature as Allegory of Empire.” 17.  Ericson, “Introduction,” xi. 18.  “Pot’ong hakkyo ŏrinidŭl egenŭn ŏttŏn ch’aek ŭl ilkke halkka?” (What Books Shall We Assign to Our Elementary School Children?), Tonga ilbo, 7 October 1932. 19.  Cho Chae-ho, “Ŏrinidei sŏnmul,” 2–3. 20.  On the rise in literacy, see O Sŏng-ch’ŏl, Singminji ch’odŭng kyoyuk ŭi hyŏngsŏng, 133–50. Kwŏn Podŭrae notes that already by 1919 in educational ordinances the Korean language was established as having an inferior function to Japanese, so that while Japa-

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nese was to be developed as a language through which to express one’s mind and intentions, as well as the language through which to enjoy literature, Korean was to be developed as a tool for everyday practical use. See “1910 nyŏndae ŭi ijung’ŏ sanghwang,” 33. 21.  Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Adong munhak kwa pip’yŏng chŏngsin; Kim Yŏng-sun, Han-Il adong munhak suyongsa yŏn’gu; Ch’ŏn Mi-gyŏng, Kŭndae kyemonggi kajŏngnon; Kim Hye-gyŏng, Singmin chiha kŭndae kajok ŭi hyŏngsŏng. 22.  See Cho Ŭn-suk, Han’guk adong munhak ŭi hyŏngsŏng; and Wŏn Chong-ch’an, “Sonyŏn i ŏrini ka toegikkaji.” 23.  Tonga ilbo, 2 May 1922. The author is unclear, but it is likely Pang Chŏng-hwan. See An, Sop’a Pang Chŏng-hwan, 208. 24.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Tonghwa rŭl ssŭgi chŏn e.” 25.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Ŏrini ch’anmi.” 26.  Don Baker historicizes the indigenous terms for Heaven and God, and their role in supporting a narrative of Korean modernity. In Baker’s words, the term H ­ anullim, which means “Honorable Heaven,” “appears only in the few vernacular documents Ch’ŏndogyo began producing from the early 1880s,” that this term “once indicated the actual physical sky,” and that we find no statements “claiming that monotheism was an indigenous Korean tradition or that Hanullim was a common vernacular term for God.” See “Hananim, Hanŭnim, Hanullim, and Hanŏllim,” 127–28. 27.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Ŏrini ch’anmi,” 67. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 69. 30. Ibid., 70–71. 31.  Yi Ton-hwa, “Innaech’ŏn ŭi yŏn’gu.” 32.  Pang, “Ŏrini ch’anmi,” 67–68. 33.  According to Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Pang knocked on the door of Yun Kŭg-yŏng (1903–1988), introduced himself, sat down at Yun’s piano and played a sad Japanese tune, and then turned to ask him, “Why do we sing Japanese songs?” See Wŏn, Adong ­munhak kwa pip’yŏng chŏngsin, 142. 34.  Akai tori was published in 196 issues between 1918 and 1936, with a brief hiatus in 1923 following the Kantō earthquake and then again between 1929 and 1931. The magazine included artwork, musical scores, contributions by readers, and poetry and prose by some of the most prominent writers of the time. Keith, “Doshinshugi and Realism,” 73. 35.  Kawahara Kazue, Ŏrinigwan ŭi kŭndae, 73–92. 36. Ibid., 13. 37.  The goal of the child-mind principle was “to attribute humanity to children, to recognize their unique psychology, and to strive for an education that foster[ed] free and creative thinking. It [was] the antithesis of the old feudal education system.” Kan Tadamichi, quoted in Carter, “A Study of Japanese Children’s Magazines, 1888–1949,” 78. 38.  Kawahara Kazue, Ŏrinigwan ŭi kŭndae, 105–6. 39.  In “Doshinshugi and Realism,” Elizabeth Keith concludes that a majority of the compositions in this children’s magazine were written in a didactic and realistic mode,

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and she therefore challenges the argument about the prominence of the romantic view of the child-heart in Akai tori. 40.  For example, Yi Sang-gŭm traces the appearance of Pang’s penname to 1918, long before he met Iwaya and indeed, before Pang showed any sustained interest in literature for children. See Sarang ŭi sŏnmul, 113–15. 41.  Piel, “Loyal Dogs and Meiji Boys,” 218. Miekichi is quoted as having said, “I have always felt quite dissatisfied with the numerous fairy tales that are out in the world. . . . I feel they are unpleasant for children.” See Keith, “Doshinshugi and Realism,” 58. 42.  Pei-yi Wu, “Childhood Remembered,” 146. 43.  Quoted in ibid., 147. 44.  Quoted in Jin Jiang, “Heresy and Persecution in Late Ming Society,” 20. 45.  See Kinney, Chinese Views of Childhood, 5; and Yiqun Zhou, “Confucianism,” 2009. 46.  Kim Hyŏn-suk, “Kŭndae maech’e rŭl t’onghae pon ‘kajŏng,’” 81. 47.  Chŏn Mi-gyŏng, Kŭndae kyemonggi kajŏngnon; Kim Hye-gyŏng, Singmin chiha kŭndae kajok ŭi hyŏngsŏng, 102–8. 48.  Kim Hye-gyŏng, Singmin chiha kŭndae kajok ŭi hyŏngsŏng, 195–96. Kim notes not only the importance of Western missionaries and their new pedagogical approaches, but also notes the impact of textbooks circulated by the Japanese, including Kodomo kenkyūron taikei, An Outline of Research on the Child, a ten-volume work published in 1930. 49.  Chŏn Ruisa, “Yi Taŭm Chosŏn.” 50.  Ibid., April 29. 51.  “Yua kamjŏng kyoyuk,” Tonga ilbo, 14 November 1929. 52.  Sin Yŏng-hyŏn, “Adong ŭi kamjŏng kyoyuk.” Sin was a journalist who was promoted to managing editor of the Taehan sinmunsa (Korean Newspaper Company), in 1946. 53. Ibid., 4 June 1929. 54. Ibid., 5 June 1929. 55.  “Pom kwa ŏrini chayŏn ŭi kyosil esŏ tongsim ŭl killŏ chuja” (Spring and the Child: Let Us Cultivate the Child-Mind in the Classroom of Nature), Tonga ilbo, 23 March 1934. 56.  “Miguk ch’ŏlhak paksa Han Ch’i-jin si kwiguk” (Dr. Han, PhD in American Philosophy, Comes Home), Tonga ilbo, 11 July 1928. 57.  Kim Hak-chun, “It’yŏjin chŏngch’i hakcha Han Ch’i-jin.” 58.  Han Ch’i-jin. Adong ŭi simni wa kyoyuk, 6–11. 59. Ibid., 10–16 60. Ibid., 49. 61. Ibid., 67. 62. Ibid., 102. 63.  Ma Hae-song, “Pawinari wa aegibyŏl.” Ma is one of South Korea’s canonical children’s authors. Like many of his peers, Ma studied in Japan in the 1920s and was one of the founding members of the aforementioned Saektonghoe, a group of authors

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and poets dedicated to writing for children during their overseas study in Japan. This piece has been anthologized repeatedly since its publication, most recently in 2013 by the publisher Munhak Kwa Chisŏngsa. It is also the subject of contention over its original publication date. See Wŏn Chong-ch’an, “Chalmottoen adong munhaksa yŏnp’yo.” 64.  Song Sun-il, “Adong ŭi yesul kyoyuk.” A prominent leftist poet, essayist, and fiction writer, Song (1902–1950) has been almost completely erased from South Korean literary history, while North Korean literary history has granted him a prominent place. See Im Ki-hyŏn, “Song Sun-il ŭi saengae.” 65.  Chŏn Ruisa, “Yi Taŭm Chosŏn,” 29 April. 66.  Chŏng In-sŏp, “Adong yesul kyoyuk,” 11 December. Chŏng (1905–1983), who went later by the name Zong In-sob, was a literary critic, translator, and scholar both in Korea and in England whose contributions include the English language publication Folk Tales from Korea published in English in 1952. 67.  Harriet Finlay-Johnson (1871–1956) was a teacher in the UK. Her book, The Dramatic Method for Teaching (1912), was one of the first practical handbooks for reformminded pedagogues in the spirit of what later became an approach associated with John Dewey. See Finlay-Johnson, The Dramatic Method of Teaching. 68.  This is also part of Finley-Johnson’s book: in chapter 11, “Manual Work,” she notes that “I nearly always found that the children’s games connected themselves naturally with some form of handwork.” Ibid., 187. 69.  Chŏng In-sŏp, “Adong yesul kyoyuk,” 13 December. 70.  Sin Yŏng-hyŏn, “Adong kamjŏng kyoyuk,” 6 June. 71. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 248; Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect”; Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28; Sin Yŏng-hyŏn, “Adong kamjŏng kyoyuk.” 72.  Leys, “The Turn to Affect.” Patricia Clough suggests that “affect is theorized in relation to the technologies that are allowing us both to ‘see’ affect and produce affective bodily capacities beyond the body’s organic-physiological constraints.” See The Affective Turn, 2. 73.  Johnson and Lakoff, “Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism,” 248. 74. Ibid., 246. 75. Ibid., 249. 76. Ibid., 256. 77.  Han Ch’i-jin, Adong ŭi simni wa kyoyuk, 119. 78.  Ch’oe Yŏng-su, “Ŏrini ŭi kŭrim ŭn ŏttŏk’e chido halkka.” 79.  Stoler, “Affective States,” 7. Interestingly, Stoler finds much of her material in the realm of the home: materials related to child-rearing, wet nurses, and education, indicating that the home in general and the child in particular are privileged sites to track the residue of affect and affect-control. Texts were crucial, of course, to the colonial project; Jun Uchida details, for example, the way that texts and scholarship about Korea were viewed as a means of achieving moral suasion of the colonized population. See Uchida, Brokers of Empire, especially chapter 4. 80.  An editorial argued that children of 5 or 6 years of age enjoy “sentimental” read-

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ing, and overly intellectual books should be avoided in favor of books with artistic value. “Pot’ong hakkyo ŏrinidŭl egenŭn ŏttŏn ch’aek ŭl ilkke halkka?” Tonga ilbo, 7 October 1932. 81.  Ch’oe Yŏng-su, “Ŏrini ŭi kŭrimŭn ŏttŏk’e chido halka.” 82. Ibid., 7 November 1934. 83. Ibid. 84. Clough, The Affective Turn, 15. 85. Ibid., 19. 86.  An exception was made for the colors red and black, which were seen as counter­ productive. See “Pot’ong hakkyo ŏrinidŭl egenŭn ŏttŏn ch’aek ŭl ilkke halkka?” Tonga ilbo, 7 October 1932. 87.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Namŭn ingk’ŭ.” 88. Ibid. 89.  “Tokcha tamhwasil,” Ŏrini 4.1 (1926): 58. 90. Ibid., 58–59. 91.  “Tokcha tamhwasil,” Ŏrini 2.7 (1924): 40. 92.  There were also multiple covers with images of Western children. Wŏn attributes this to lagging technology in Korea, as well as to pervasive censorship that made it easier to use foreign images. Wŏn Chong-ch’an, “Tongsim ŭi yŏksasŏng.” 93.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Ch’ŏŭm e,” 1. 94.  Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “Conflicting Nostalgia.” CHAPTER 3 1.  Pieper, “Korean as Transitional Literacy,” 393. The term ŏnmun ilch’i connotes an inherent duality (“the reconciliation of spoken and written language”) that implies diglossia, a situation in which two varieties of the same language are used within a community of speakers. Ross King challenges the use of the term diglossia and its applicability, particularly to the pre-twentieth-century linguistic ecology of Korea. He writes that “the inherent ‘twoness’ in diglossia—the ‘either/or’ dialectic implications endemic to the ‘di-’ prefix in the term—[has] played into modern Korean script nationalism, leading most Korean researchers to cast hanmun and han’gŭl as villain and hero, respectively, in teleological grand narratives of the long struggle of han’gŭl to overcome adversity and discrimination in benighted pre-modern ‘ideographic’ times in order to finally win the day in an enlightened modern and phonographic Korea.” See King, “Ditching ‘Diglossia,’” 8. King prefers the phrases “mismatch between speech and writing” or “gap between speech and writing.” Ibid., 13. 2.  “Brave Dogs,” 187. Ortabasi argues that children’s literature, particularly translation of foreign fiction, made a significant contribution to the development of this new literary style in Japan. On the role of translation in the development of modern Japanese literature, see Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore, 37; and Tomasi, “Quest for a New Written Language,” 333. 3.  Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, 37–39. 4. Workman, Imperial Genus, 62. See also Jong-yŏn Hwang, “The Emergence of Aesthetic Ideology”; and Kwŏn Podŭrae, Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl, 287.

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5.  Kwŏn Podŭrae, Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl, 262–93. On the role of interiority in the emergence of modern fiction in Japan, see Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 114–35. 6.  Yi Kwang-su, “What Is Literature?” 302. The original can be found in the Maeil sinbo, 15 November 1916. 7.  King, “Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea,” 33–72. On the decentering of China in this period, see Schmid, Korea between Empires. 8.  Quoted in King, “Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea,” 48. Chu Si-gyŏng (1786–1914) was one of Korea’s first linguists, or “Korea’s third language entrepreneur” in Ross King’s terms. See King, “Nationalism and Language Reform,” 42. Chu is considered the father of modern linguistics in Korea. See ibid., 42–49. 9.  Yi Kwang-su, “What Is Literature?” 306. Michael Shin argues that for Yi Kwangsu vernacular Korean represented “a qualitative leap. . . . More than just a matter of standardizing spelling rules, its development also involved finding ‘neutral’ forms of expression within an extremely hierarchy-conscious language.” See “Interior Landscapes,” 253. 10.  Yi Kwang-su, “What Is Literature?” 294. 11. Ibid., 295 (italics in the original translation). 12.  Yi wrote for children as well, and Kim Sŏng-yŏn argues that, despite his frequently patronizing tone, Yi Kwang-su should be considered one of the founders of children’s literature for regarding children as serious constituents. See Kim, “Yi Kwangsu ŭi adong munhak yŏn’gu.” 13.  Kwŏn Podŭrae, Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi kiwŏn, 262–64. Peter Lee describes the New Fiction genre as that which was “burdened with a traditional moral stance and an overreliance on coincidence, [but also one that] was written in a prose that attempted to unify the spoken and written languages.” Peter Lee, Modern Korean Literature, xvi. For an in-depth exploration of New Fiction, see Yoon Sun Yang, “Enlightened Daughter, Benighted Mother,” and her forthcoming book, From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea (Harvard University Press). 14.  Kim Tong-in, “Chosŏn kŭndae sosŏl ko.” 15.  Kwŏn Podŭrae, Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi kiwŏn, 276. 16.  Yi Hŭi-jŏng, “‘Ch’angjo’ Sojae Kim Tong-in sosŏl,” 239. 17.  Kwŏn Podŭrae, Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi kiwŏn, 273–93. 18.  King, “James Scarth Gale,” 2. For the first in a new series of annotated editions of Gale’s mostly unpublished literary translations, see King and Park, eds., Score One for the Dancing Girl. 19.  See Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity; Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick; Haase, “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies.” 20.  The Enlightenment Club, or Kyemyŏng kurakpu, was established in 1918 by thirty-three individuals and prominent intellectuals (including Ch’oe Nam-sŏn), whose primary concern was the development of Korean culture. They concerned themselves with reform of language, customs, food and dress, and relied on print culture and public lectures to disseminate their ideas to a wide audience. See www.encykorea.aks.ac.kr. 21.  Tonga ilbo, 30 May 1921.

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22.  Chosŏn ilbo, 25 September 1921. 23.  Eunseon Kim, “‘Discovering’ Linguistic Politeness for Modern Society.” 24.  Heekyoung Cho, Translation’s Forgotten History, 11. 25.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Sanggŭm chunŭn iyagi moŭm” Volume 2, 17. 26.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Chikhisil il” Volume 3, 38. Quoyed in Kwŏn Hyŏk-jun, “­Aidŭlboi kejae,” 46. 27.  Chang Chŏng-hŭi observes that a total of 39 submissions out of countless others were published. See “Chosŏn tonghwa ŭi kŭndaejŏk ch’aerok kwajŏng yŏn’gu,” 315. 28.  Sarang ŭi sŏnmul contained ten folktale translations including three Grimm tales, and it sold about 200,000 copies, a remarkable number for the period. See Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, “Minjokchuŭi ŭi naemyŏnhwa,” 149–50. 29.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Chosŏn korae tonghwa mojip.” The ad ran in three volumes, 26–29, between August and November of 1922. The deadline was set for November 15. Pang ran a similar advertisement in the women’s magazine Puin (Wife) in August and September 1922. See Chang Chŏng-hŭi, “Chosŏn tonghwa ŭi kŭndaejŏk ch’aerok kwajŏng yŏn’gu,” 310–11. 30.  As Janet Poole notes, however, this label can be misleading, since the military was still central to colonial rule at this time. Poole, When the Future Disappears, 8. 31.  Chang Chŏng-hŭi, “Chosŏn tonghwa ŭi kŭndaejŏk ch’aerok kwajŏng yŏn’gu,” 324. 32.  Ōtake Kiyomi, Kŭndae Han-Il adong munhwa, 53; Yi Sang-gŭm, Sarang ŭi sŏnmul, 686. 33.  Carter, “A Study of Japanese Children’s Magazines, 1888–1949,” 61; Henry, “Japanese Children’s Literature as Allegory,” 219; Piel, “Loyal Dogs and Meiji Boys,” 215. 34.  Yi Sang-gŭm, Sarang ŭi sŏnmul, 688. 35.  Ortabasi, “Narrative Realism and the Modern Storyteller,” 127. 36.  Tanigawa Ken’ichi, quoted in Morton, Modern Japanese Culture, 100. One of the central concepts of his work was that of the jōmin, a descriptive category of the everyday life of the common people living in the villages. See ibid., 138. 37.  The connection between Yanagita and Iwaya is addressed by Ericson, “Introduction,” xii; Melek Ortabasi explains that Yanagita made a few references to Iwaya’s writings in his own work on folklore, and had a number of disciples working in Korea (personal communication, 17 May 2011). 38.  As Roger Janelli demonstrates, the discipline of folklore studies in Korea was formed largely under the influence of Japanese folklore scholarship, which itself had been shaped by continental European scholarship. See “The Origins of Korean Folklore Scholarship.” 39.  Tsuzukihashi, “Nihon ni okeru Gurimu shōkai no rekishi,” 19. 40.  Fukawa, “Anderusen dōwa to Gurimu dōwa,” 149–50. Thanks to Christina Laffin for assisting me in finding and interpreting this source. 41.  Takahashi, “Japan und die deutsche Kultur.” I am grateful to Keimyung University faculty for helping me interpret this text. 42.  Ericson, “Introduction,” ix–x. 43.  Thanks to Shirin Eshghi for helping track down these Japanese originals.

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44.  Tsuzukihashi, “Nihon ni okeru Gurimu shōkai no rekishi,” 21. 45.  The original 1922 publication is no longer to be found; the earliest version available is its eleventh printing, published in 1928. Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, “Minjokchuŭi ŭi naemyŏnhwa,” 150. 46.  The first translations from the Grimms’ tales were Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s translations of “Princess Mouseskin” (“Stanim ŭi kan kot”) and “The Four Skillful Brothers” (“Ne ao tongsaeng”) in the first and second volumes of Pulgŭn chyŏgori (1913); and “The Clever Farmer’s Daughter” (“Kyejip ai sŭlgi”) and “The Three Spinners” (“Sil spobi saeksi”) in the second and tenth volumes of Aidŭlboi (1913–1914). In 1920 the prominent educator O Ch’ŏng-sŏk translated “How Six Made Their Way in the World” (“Changsa ŭi iyagi”) in the magazine Haksaenggye (Students’ World). See Ch’oe S­ ŏk-hŭi, “Togil tonghwa ŭi Han’guk suyong,” 239. Kwŏn Hyŏk-chun claims that the story “Chikkŏri assi” in volume 7 of Aidŭlboi is also a Grimm tale, but I have not been able to identify the source text. None of the source texts are referenced in the translations. 47.  Despite the decade-long effort to collect and publish Korean tales, the first Korean folktale book published by Koreans came out in 1926, well after the publication of multiple Japanese collections See Kim Kyŏng-hŭi, “Sim Ŭi-rin ŭi tonghwa undong yŏn’gu.” Recent scholarship by Kim Kwang-sik finds that no fewer than sixtyone volumes of folktales were collected by the Japanese before 1945, of which twentyeight are recent archival discoveries (cited in Chang Chŏng-hŭi, “Chosŏn tonghwa ŭi kŭndaejŏk ch’aerok kwajŏng yŏn’gu,” 304n2). Of these, the best known is perhaps The Chōsen dōwa shū, which came out in 1924 and was intended less for the consumption of the colonial subjects than for the Japanese colonizers and settlers as a way of expanding their knowledge of Korea. For a history of the translation of Korean folktales into Japanese, see Kwŏn Hyŏk-nae, Chosŏn tonghwajip. For a fascinating study of the reliance on texts to explain the “Korean mind” to Japanese colonial settlers, see chapter 4 in Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire. Chang Chŏng-hŭi sheds new light on the decade-long, national effort spearheaded by Ch’oe Nam-sŏn in Aidŭlboi. Ch’oe and Pang’s effort resulted in the collection of seventy-five stories, all before The Chōsen dōwa shū was published. See “Chosŏn tonghwa ŭi kŭndaejŏk ch’aerok kwajŏng yŏn’gu.” 48.  See “Chapchi Tongmyŏng hŏga” (Permission given to the magazine Tong­myŏng), Tonga ilbo 8 June 1922; “Tongmyŏng chapchi Chosŏn kaemyŏng ŭi ponghwa ka twelka” (Will Tongmyŏng Serve as the Beacon of Korean Reform?), Tonga ilbo, 19 August 1922; and “Tongmyŏng ch’anggansa” (Launching Tongmyŏng) Tonga ilbo, 24 August 1922. 49.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Mosaek esŏ palgyŏn kkaji,” 3. This was the first of eleven installments. A political cartoon at the center of the page shows a man with “Great unity” (taedong ilch’i) written on his arm, trying to wake the sleeper, “Korean society,” with a hand-held brass kkwaenggwari plate while calling, “Time to wake up.” “Great unity” refers to the philosophy of Kang Youwei, for whom “the ultimate significance of the nation-building project arose from its self-transcendence in the universalist utopia, ­Datong, where there would be no barriers of class, gender, culture, and nations.” See Duara, “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty,” 1035.

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50.  Yi Hŭi-jŏng, “1920 nyŏndae chapchi Tongmyŏng.” 51.  Ch’oe Sŏk-hŭi, “Togil tonghwa ŭi Han’guk suyong.” See also Kim Hwa-sŏn and An Mi-yŏng, “1920 nyŏndae sŏgu chŏllae tonghwa ŭi pŏnyŏk,” 335n8. 52.  The magazine also did its part to include young readers by encouraging them to submit their own original prose. See “Sonyŏnnan sinsŏl” (Youth Letters to the Editor), Tongmyŏng 1 (October 1922), 17. In this section I make many of the same observations as Kim Hwa-sŏn and An Mi-yŏng, whose analysis was thorough. Though extensive, the authors did not have access to the original Japanese text, which I was able to consult. 53.  Kim Yong-hŭi, “Aidŭlboi,” 63–68. 54.  See Kwŏn Hyŏk-chun, “Aidŭlboi ŭi adong munhak sajŏk,” 54. 55.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Ne ao tongsaeng,” 5. 56.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Aessŭm.” 57. Ibid., 22. 58.  Kwŏn Hyŏk-chun, “Aidŭlboi ŭi adong munhak sajŏk,” 54–56. 59.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Chaet’usŏngi wangbi,” 1. 60.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Spalgan moja,” 17. This detail is missing from the Japanese translation, which otherwise stays faithful to the original text. 61.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Yŏmso wa nŭktae,” 1. 62.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Puremyŏn ŭi ŭmaksa,” 17. 63.  Hŏ Chae-yŏng, “Kŭndae kyemonggi ŏnmunilch’i ŭi ponjil,” 463. 64.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Kaegori ŭi wangja,” 17. 65.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Kyejip ai sŭlgi,” 1. 66. Kim Hwa-sŏn and An Mi-yŏng, “1920 nyŏndae sŏgu chŏllae tonghwa ŭi pŏnyŏk,” 347. 67.  Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, “Indo ŭi pyŏlchubu t’osaengwŏn,” 6. Kim Hwa-sŏn and An Miyŏng articulate the nuances of pŏnan versus pyŏngt’ong in “1920 nyŏndae sŏgu chŏllae tonghwa ŭi pŏnyŏk,” 337. 68. Kim Hwa-sŏn and An Mi-yŏng, “1920 nyŏndae sŏgu chŏllae tonghwa ŭi pŏnyŏk,” 337. 69.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Tongyo chinnŭn i ege.” 70.  Yu (1896–1947), pen named Pŏdŭlsoe, was a writer and critic of children’s literature who received his higher education in Japan. In Korea he was a journalist and writer of poetry, fiction, and screenplays. 71.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Tongyo chiŭsiryŏnŭn pun kke,” 26–27. 72.  Yu applies his eight points two issues later in a detailed analysis of two poems, one which succeeds in executing all eight points (particularly in its successful capture of the child heart), and one which fails on each one. See Yu, “Tongyo chinnŭn pŏp.” 73.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Pulsanghamyŏnsŏdo musŏpke k’ŏ ganŭn Togil ŭi ŏrini.” 74.  Kim Hwa-sŏn and An Mi-yŏng make many of the same observations. See “1920 nyŏndae sŏgu chŏllae tonghwa ŭi pŏnyŏk,” 344–48. 75.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Simburŭm hanŭn saram.” 76.  Judy Wakabayashi, “Foreign Bones, Japanese Flesh,” 227.

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77. Ibid., 243–44. 78.  Schiavi, “There Is Always a Teller in a Tale,” 7. 79.  O’Sullivan, “Narratology Meets Translation Studies,” 80.  Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, “‘Neishŏn’ ŭl sangsanghan pŏnyŏk tonghwa”; Ch’oe Sŏk-hŭi, “Togil tonghwa ŭi Han’guk suyong,” 240–63. 81.  Kim Hwa-sŏn and An Mi-yŏng, “1920 nyŏndae sŏgu chŏllae tonghwa ŭi pŏnyŏk,” 331–55. See also Cho Jaeryong, “Traduction en face de la modernité et du nationalisme,” 205–20. 82.  Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity; Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion; Haase, “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies.” 83. Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 70. 84. Ibid., 62–68. 85.  Bauman and Briggs argue that the Grimms contributed not only to the creation of the fairy tale as a middle-class commodity but to the shaping of the image of the modern child. They note that the Grimms’ tales “played at least a small role in shaping a romantic image of the child as embodying the same sort of naïveté associated with both the past and contemporary peasants. Traditional texts thus bear value for constructing the idealized affective parameters of a bourgeois childhood as well as imparting instructions on how to become a responsible national subject.” Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 222 (italics in original). 86. Ibid., 220. 87.  Haase, “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies,” 28. 88.  “The Grimms actively encouraged translation of the KHM [Kinder und Hausmärchen]. . . . They conceived of [them] as providing a model that specialists in other countries should emulate in collecting and publishing folktales and other genres. . . . Just as the KHM could embody a national prototype that they had largely created, the Märchen were readily comparable to narratives that were cut on the same mold.” Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 223. 89. Ibid., 224. 90.  Bauman and Briggs note that the Grimms crafted an “illusion of intertextual fidelity” that “made the texts into powerful devices.” Ibid., 214. 91.  Haase, “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies,” 30. 92.  Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, “‘Neisyŏn’ ŭl sangsanghan pŏnyŏk tonghwa”; Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, “Minjokchuŭi ŭi naemyŏnhwa.” 93.  Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, “’Neisyŏn’ ŭl sangsanghan pŏnyŏk tonghwa,” 164–65. CHAPTER 4 1.  Yi Chu-hong, “Ch’ŏng’ŏ ppyŏktagwi,” 30. Yi (1906–1987) boasted of one of South Korea’s longest-lasting careers in fiction writing for children. He graduated from high school in Seoul and then lived for a time in Japan where he worked in a factory. Yi was a prolific writer and editor, who left a diverse range of genres including poetry, translations, and film scripts. See Pak T’ae-il, “Yi Chu-hong ŭi ch’ogi adong munhak.”

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2.  Samuel Perry mentions the connection between German theories of children’s literature and Soviet writings and the formulation of a proletarian theory of childhood in Japan in Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan, 23. Yael Darr’s fascinating study of children’s magazines before the establishment of Israel, penned by many Soviet-­ inspired educators, also points to a shared leftist culture with unexpected connections around the globe. See Darr, Kanon be-khamah kolot. 3.  Kimberly Chung, “Proletarian Sensibilities,” 44. 4. Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan, 21. 5.  Ōtake Kiyomi, Kŭndae Han-Il adong munhwa, 145–46. 6.  Philip Nel claims that “when progressives want to change the future, they always start with the young.” Nel, “Learning from the Left,” 82; Kimberly Chung, “Proletarian Sensibilities” 44. 7. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child. 8.  Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave, 2. 9. Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan. 10.  As Mun Han-byŏl shows, both original and translated children’s literature was subjected to the censor’s scrutiny. Mun uncovers new archival materials from the late 1920s that indicate that censored children’s reading materials were done so on the grounds of nationalistic or overt leftist content, as well as the presence of other less specific ideological reasons. He notes that one of his archival sources, the Puron sonyŏn sonyŏ tongmul yŏngmun (Seditious Texts for Boys and Girls), contained a classified letter in the name of a police administrator that addressed worrying trends in children’s literature, including leftist thought and a yearning for independence. See Mun, “Ilche kangjŏmgi pŏnyŏk sosŏl,” 426; and Mun, “Ilche kangjŏmgi adong ch’ulp’anmul ŭi kwalli ch’egye.” 11. Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan, 16. He notes, for example, that the Communist-affiliated New Education Research Institute set out to confound the argument that poor children were inferior to their bourgeois counterparts, and to make a much stronger connection between the egregious conditions of poor children’s environment and impoverished children’s academic achievements. Ibid., 48–51. 12. Ibid., 68. Perry notes that the educational movement was inspired by Soviet ideas and iconography as well as by educational theorists in Germany, and was intimately connected to the international phenomenon of the historical avant-garde. Ibid., ix, 31. 13. Ibid., 45. The poem from Shōnen senki was translated from Ōtake Kiyomi’s Korean translation of the Japanese original. See Ōtake, Kŭndae Han-Il adong munhwa, 143. 14.  Quoted in ibid., 143–44. 15.  See ibid., as well as Perry’s discussion of this poem in Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan, 46. 16.  Ōtake Kiyomi’s seminal study from 2005 demonstrates how children’s culture traveled in both directions such that both Japan and Korea were significantly influenced by print culture at the time. Kim Yŏng-sun also argues there was a rich cross-pollination of ideas between Japanese and Korean children’s literature. See Kim, Han-Il adong munhak suyongsa yŏn’gu.

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17.  Julia Mickenberg’s fascinating study provides an account of leftist American literature under Cold War politics. She notes that in the antifascist league of 1941, children’s literature was discussed for the first time, and at the heart of the discussion on the topic of “Socially Constructive Literature for Children” were the questions of “how to educate children to reject racism, to support the rights of labor, to embrace an international community, and to condemn imperialism.” See Mickenberg, Learning from the Left, 13. For more on the Young Pioneers youth groups in the United States, see Mishler, Raising Reds. 18.  Kwŏn Hwan, “Miguk ŭi yŏng p’aionia.” Kwŏn received much of his education in Japan, where he majored in German literature at the Imperial University in Kyoto. He joined the Tokyo branch of KAPF in the late 1920s. 19.  Ku Chin-hŭi, “Rŏsia ŭi kongjang.” 20.  Ryu Tŏk-che, “Pyŏllara wa kyegŭpchuŭi adong munhak ŭi ŭimi,” 326. 21.  Jin-kyung Lee, “Performative Ethnicities,” 105. 22.  In her book on the contribution of the proletarian wave to the culture of colonial Korea, Sunyoung Park suggests that the legacy of the leftist movement should be appreciated both for its material contributions (literature, magazines, film) and for the quality of critique it offered, which lingered in North Korea immediately after division, and which enriched the labor movement of South Korea in the 1970s. Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave. 23. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, 23. On the narrative ontologies of modernity, see Kimberly Chung, “Proletarian Sensibilities,” 100. Son Yu-gyŏng explores the work of Kim Kijin and his position that the affect produced by capitalist greed is responsible for eliminating humane affect. See Son Yu-gyŏng, P’ŭro munhak ŭi kamsŏng kujo. 24. In 1923, the first socialist youth group was formed, the Musan Ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe, or “disenfranchised youth group,” in which socialists began to formulate a Marxist-­ Leninist influenced mission statement. See Yi Ki-hun, “1920 nyŏndae sahoejuŭi ŭi inyŏm ŭi chŏn’gae,” 292–96. 25.  Wŏn Chong-ch’an observes that Pyŏllara has historically been read as politically opposite of the bourgeois magazine Ŏrini, with Sinsonyŏn occupying a liminal, ambiguous space between the two. According to Wŏn’s recent revisions, the editors and contributors of Sinsonyŏn came almost exclusively from a group of educators who were disciples of “language entrepreneur” Chu Si-gyŏng (mentioned in Chapter 3), and who shared ties to the religion of Taejonggyo. Wŏn argues that this group propounded a nationalist vision that had more in common with Ŏrini than has been acknowledged. (See “Sinsonyŏn kwa Chosŏnŏ hakhoe,” 111.) Wŏn also notes that Pyŏllara’s leftist trend can be traced to the 1930s, a transition he claims has more to do with weaker structural issues and external influences than from an organic, leftist identity of the magazine. (See Wŏn Chong-ch’an, “1920 nyŏndae Pyŏllara ŭi wisang.”) I don’t mean to contribute to the polarized view of cultural production in colonial Korea by drawing exclusively on these magazines in this chapter on leftist culture, but I rather wish to emphasize that some of

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their distinctly leftist content offered a viable response to the child-heart of the preceding decade that rested on many of the same assumptions and underlying mind-body mechanisms of the child-heart concept. Part of the challenge with obtaining a balanced view of the magazines discussed in this chapter has been a lack of access: many issues of the periodicals discussed here are still missing or inaccessible. Once more of these issues are readily available, a different view of the leftist children’s culture of colonial Korea will likely be available. 26.  Kyung Moon Hwang, Rationalizing Korea, 177–78. 27. Ibid. 28.  Song Yŏng, “Wŏlgŭp iran muŏsinga”; Song, “Chiju wa sojagin.” 29.  Kim Pyŏng-ho, “Pŏl sahoe.” Kollontai was the first female diplomat who “defended a vision of emancipation premised on equality, comradeship, and personal autonomy, where society would take responsibility for domestic labor while enabling individuals freely to express their sexuality.” Sypnowich, “Alexandra Kollontai,” 287. ­Kollontai’s views on marriage and society were published in her Love of Worker Bees (1923). 30.  Kim U-ch’ŏl, “Tonghwa wa adong munhak.” The term “fellow traveler fiction,” as Sunyoung Park notes, is a contested one that was introduced first by Yŏm Sang-sŏp to refer to the “nationalists who supported the socialists’ fight against Japanese imperialism and the collaborative Korean bourgeoisie, and who should thus be regarded as worthy allies by the socialists.” See The Proletarian Wave, 72–73. Kim U-ch’ŏl was born in 1915, and was known for his critiques of children and peasant literature. He moved to North Korea after the division. 31.  Pak Yŏng-hŭi, “Maksŭ nŭn nugu in’ga.” 32.  Song Yŏng, “Yongung iyagi.” 33.  Yi Chu-hong, “Ch’ŏng’ŏ ppyŏktagwi,” 27–28. 34.  Yi Tong-gyu, “Yunyŏn tŏkpon.” Yi (1911–1952), pen name Ch’ŏra, was born in Seoul. He debuted in 1931 and was invited to publish in the young reader’s magazine Sonyŏn munhak alongside Song Yŏng and Pak Se-yŏng. He moved to North Korea in 1946 and became a professor at the P’yŏngyang sabŏm taehak (P’yŏngyang Teachers College). He served in the North Korean army as a writer and was killed in the Korean War. A collection of his works was published posthumously in North Korea in 1956. See Kim Myŏng-sŏk, “Yi Tong-gyu sosŏl yon’gu.” 35.  Yi Chu-hong, “Kunbam.” 36.  Yi Tong-gyu, “Itchokchŏtchok.” 37.  Yi Chu-hong, “Uch’et’ong.” 38.  See Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave, 98–105. 39.  Yoon-shik Kim, “KAPF Literature in Modern Korean Literary History,” 412; Sun­young Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism,” 186. 40.  Im Hwa, “Adong munhak munje.” 41.  Hŏ In, “Adong yesul sip’yŏng.” 42.  Ibid. Hŏ breaks down sonyŏn into the following ratios: 10 percent yunyŏn, 50 percent sonyŏn, and 40 percent ch’ŏngnyŏn.

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43. Ibid. 44.  Pak Se-yŏng, “Tongyo, tongsi ŏtt’ok’e ssŭna,” 34. 45.  No In, “Chom tŏ swiupke ssŏ tao.” 46.  Kim Pyŏng-ho, “Tongyo kanghwa,” 1. 47.  Han Ch’ŏr-yŏm, “Ch’oegŭn p’ŭro sonyŏn sosŏlp’yŏng.” 48.  Pak Ko-gyŏng, “Taejungjŏk p’yŏnjip ŭi killo!” 49.  Cho Hyŏng-sik, “Uridŭl ŭi tongyosi e taehaya,” 30. 50.  Pak Se-yŏng, “Kosikhwahan yŏngyŏk ŭl nŏmŏsŏ.” 51.  Yi Tong-gyu, “Tongyo rŭl ssŭryŏnŭn tongmu tŭl ege,” 14–15. 52.  Han Ch’ŏr-yŏm, “Ch’oegŭn p’ŭro sonyŏn sosŏlp’yŏng,” 28–29. 53.  Im Hwa, “Adong munhak munje,” 4–5. Son Yu-gyŏng notes that affect and aesthetics were central to Im Hwa’s theory. She points out that for him, the ideal archetype is not merely a worker, but one for whom feeling (kamgak) is something that exists both on the surface and deep within the whole person. In order to practice this ideal, Im insisted on a concrete stance and that literature expose the incorrect materialism of “universality” and “standardization.” See Son, P’ŭro munhak ŭi kamsŏng kujo, chap. 5. 54.  Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism.” 55.  Yi Tong-gyu, “Norae rŭl purŭja.” 56.  Yi Tong-gyu, “Pe rŭl simŏ.” 57.  Yi Ku-wŏl, “Punhan pam.” 58.  Kim U-ch’ŏl, “Sangho ŭi kkum.” 59.  Kyeong-Hee Choi attributes this trend partly to the censorship apparatus. She argues that the persistence of physical disabilities allowed Korean writers “to represent uneven and unequal access to modernity under Japanese domination while gaining critical distance from the trappings of modernity.” See Choi, “Impaired Body as Colonial Trope,” 434. 60.  Bergstrom notes that bodies are often inscriptive surfaces “off which the traces of sensation and exploitation can be read and interpreted” and they play a role in social critique that is “commensurate to but qualitatively distinct from intellectual logic.” See Bergstrom, “Revolutionary Flesh,” 314. 61.  Yi T’ae-jun, “Nunmul ŭi iphak.” 62.  Hong Gu, “K’ongnamul chuk kwa ibap.” CHAPTER 5 1.  Kyu Hyun Kim, “Reflections on the Problems of Colonial Modernity.” 2.  Some examples of how Japan facilitated wartime preparations include its increase of the colony’s health facilities to handle wartime casualties, and the broadening of rhetoric of physical wellness, frugality, and biopolitical control of Koreans. See Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies, 149. The law regarding Army Special Volunteers, enacted on 22 February 1938, led to roughly 360,000 Koreans serving in the Japanese military as soldiers or civilian employees, another 750,000 working in mines and wartime industries

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in Japan, and a million more employed as industrial laborers within Korea. See Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 3. 3. Henry, Assimilating Seoul, 169. 4. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, 49. 5.  Both Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave, and Poole, When the Future Disappears, contest the argument that writers in this period made a choice between capitulation and resistance. Their nuanced readings show how their craft gave voice to their dilemmas in a way that resists facile binaries. 6.  As Mun Han-byŏl notes, children’s published materials were censored throughout the colonial period for lewd and subversive content. Mun, “Ilche kangjŏmgi pŏnyŏk sosŏl”; and Mun, “Chosŏn ch’ulp’an kyŏngch’al wŏlbo.” 7.  The adult version, known as the Hwangguk sinmin sŏsa (Oath to the Emperor) was: “1. We are Imperial Subjects who loyally serve the nation; 2. As Imperial Subjects we solidify our sense of unity through undying loyalty and cooperation; 3. As Imperial Subjects we cultivate training through trial and tribulation and exalt in the way of the Emperor.” See Yun Ch’i-ho and Sang-t’ae Kim, Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi, 1916–1943, 404. Jun Uchida notes that “by the end of the war . . . a student’s ability to recite the ‘oath as subjects of the imperial nation’ became an index of [assimilation].” See Brokers of Empire, 393. Kim Hwa-sŏn argues that the inflection of the children’s oath was more futureoriented, indicating that young people are on a trajectory with a clear and achievable end-point. See Kim Hwa-sŏn, “Taedong’a kongyŏngkwŏn ŭi chŏnjaeng.” See its appearance in print in Figure 15. 8.  Mark Caprio notes that the press was “instrumental in both instructing the people of the present circumstances that the empire faced (including wartime news), and instructing them on their special duties as imperial subjects.” Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies, 156. 9.  The magazine Sinsidae (1941–1945) was circulated for the benefit of a wide audience ranging from the literate elite to the masses unable to read Japanese. As Yi W ­ ŏn-gyŏng argues, the magazine served as a powerful propaganda tool in the hands of the Japanese Governor-General. Yi, “Chapchi ‘Sinsidae’ ŭi sŏngkyŏk kwa yŏksa tongmul,” 205. S­ ogungmin was published roughly between 1938 and 1944, although the beginning and final volumes are missing. It was edited at least part of the time by Takamiya Tahei and published by Kyŏngsŏng ilbosa. See http://adanmungo.org/view.php?idx=12175. 10.  Han Min-ju, Kwŏllyŏk ŭi tosanghak, 175–77. 11. Ibid., 163. 12. Ibid., 166. In Japan, too, the popularity of stories such as The Three Human Bombs (Nikudan san yūshi) and to a lesser extent Major Kuga Noboru (Kuga Noboru shōsa) in the early 1930s attests to a similar trend. Such stories appeared in a wide variety of forms including film, songs, manga, and children’s fiction. The Three Human Bombs, a story based on three soldiers who carried a bomb to blow a hole in the enemy defenses for their comrades, was particularly popular. Yamanaka, Senji jidō bungakuron, 30–31. Robert Tierney notes that Tsunami Yūsuke, a bureaucrat, public intellectual, as well as

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published poet and fiction writer, ­argued that “literature, and particularly children’s literature, must play an important part in fostering the emotional disposition that underlies any successful imperial project.” Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, 113. 13.  Kim Hwa-sŏn, “Ilchemal chŏnsigi singminji,” 71. Yun Paeng-nam, a central figure in radio broadcasting in colonial Korea, argued that the radio alone could provide colonial children the kind of education that they were not receiving at home or in schools, specifically in order to develop and refine their sensibilities. Yun, “Radio ­munhwa wa ijung pangsong,” cited in ibid., 73–74. 14.  Among the print media that were discontinued in this period were Sinsonyŏn (New Youth) in 1938, K’at’ollik sonyŏn (Catholic Youth) in 1938, Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily) in 1940, Sonyŏn (Youth) in 1940, and the Tonga ilbo (Tonga Daily) in 1940. See Pak Yŏng-gi, “Ilche malgi adong munhak kyoyuk yŏn’gu,” 49n12. 15.  Sonyŏn, published between 1937 and 1940 by the Chosŏn ilbo and edited by Yun Sŏk-chung (1911–2003), included works by Korea’s most celebrated writers of the colonial era. Yun ­Sŏk-chung edited Ŏrini after Pang Chŏng-hwan’s death, and he also edited Sonyŏn, Sonyŏn ­chungang, Sonyŏn Chosŏn ilbo, and Yunyŏn in the colonial period, and Ŏrini sinmun and Sohaksaeng after liberation. Ai saenghwal, published between 1926 and 1944 in 218 issues, was one of colonial Korea’s longest-lasting children’s magazines. It was a Christian magazine, and many of its contributors, such as George L. Paik, were missionaries. See Ch’oe Myŏng-p’yo, “Ai saenghwal yŏn’gu”; and Chŏng Sŏn-hye, “Ai saenghwal sok e ssakt’ŭn Han’guk adong munhak.” For recent book-length evaluations of Yun Sŏk-chung’s life and work, see No Kyŏng-su, Yun Sŏk-chung yŏn’gu; and Kim Che-gŏn, Yun Sŏk-chung yŏn’gu. 16.  Jun Uchida writes that “for most of the 3.2 million families or 80 percent of the Korean households who adopted Japanese names by the 10 August deadline, the decision was based on a variety of factors: official or peer pressure, the reolution of their family clan, or, as with the case of army volunteers, a pragmatic calculation of personal gain.” See Brokers of Empire, 380. 17. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies, 147. 18. Ibid. Naisen ittai, or in Korean Naesŏn ilch’e (“Japan and Korea as one body”), was the wartime policy of the Government-General in Korea. It was a policy of ethnic engineering that, in Uchida’s words, “led to an unprecedented level of institutional integration of colony and metropole” whose goal was both the mobilization of the colonial and mainland populations for total war, and the integration of colonial subjects “into the emperor-centered polity.” See Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 355–56. In chapter eight of her book, Uchida shows that while the official design of this assimilation policy may have been totalizing, there emerged a gap in perception between the Korean population who tried to leverage this policy for civic equality, and the Japanese settlers who used the policy to elevate their own standing. Ibid., 357. 19. Ibid., 153. At the same time, Seong-cheol Oh and Ki-Seok Kim point out that the statistics are misguiding since they do not show the extent to which Koreans were largely underrepresented in schools, nor do they reveal the inferiority of Korean educa-

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tion compared to Japanese education in that Koreans were educated for menial labor and low-level work. The larger stories that remain untold by the statistics are that ­Koreans often initiated a growth in educational institutions, putting up the funds themselves in order to exercise more agency and overcome illiteracy. While Oh and Kim do not address the continuities in education from the precolonial period, particularly the disregard for women’s education, it is still valuable to consider the extent to which the educational system was complicit in the imperialization movement, particularly with regard to the mobilization of educational content for children for ideological purposes. See Oh and Kim, “Expansion of Elementary Schooling under Colonialism.” 20.  Brandon Palmer notes that the Japanese were wary of the Korean participation in the Japanese military both for their perceived lack of readiness to serve, as well as for the threat they might pose to the colony. Palmer argues that some Korean recruits used their newly earned status as Japanese soldiers for social and financial gains. He concludes that the assimilation of Koreans was to facilitate smooth mobilization rather than as a method to transforming Koreans into Japanese citizens of equal rights. See Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 184. Wan-yao Chou concludes that the enthusiastic response among Koreans to the call of military service can be explained partly by coercion, but also partly to the successful marketing of the campaign as one of “the citizens’ three great obligations”; to successful community outreach, particularly to schools and youth organizations; and to peer pressure, along with a sense of opportunities that conscription promised. See Chou, “The Kominka Movement,” 66–67. 21.  Todd Henry cites such behaviors as indifference to Shintō reverence and a lack of active participation, as well as a tweaking of certain customs to better suit Korean sensibilities, and the use of the Korean language. See Henry, Assimilating Seoul, 62–91. Kwŏn Myŏng-a, too, argues against the assumption that Japan’s colonial project was monolithic or that colonial responses were predictable. On the contrary, responses were diverse, varied according to gender and class, and were complicated by aspirations for status that were as much dictated by capitalist social and economic structures as by colonial ones. See Kwŏn, Yŏksajŏk p’asijŭm. Jun Uchida observes much the same tensions in her work on Japanese settlers, who viewed increased civic participation among Koreans with anxiety, since “qualified Koreans found relatively more opportunities in wartime than had hitherto been granted in bureaucratic appointment, enterprise, factories, and higher education,” partly because many of these positions had been vacated by conscripted Japanese settlers. See Brokers of Empire, 388. 22. Hanscom, The Real Modern. 23. Poole, When the Future Disappears. 24.  Yun Sŏk-chung, “Sonyŏn ŭl naemyŏnsŏ.” 25.  Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “Conflicting Nostalgia.” 26.  Jun Uchida observes that the colonial regime understood the importance of universal education and conscription since, in their words, “the uppermost strata of [Korean] society 60 years from now will be dominated by children currently of age ten and below.” Brokers of Empire, 366.

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27.  Kye Yong-muk, “Saeng’il.” 28. See Kim Hwa-sŏn, “Taedong’a kongyŏngkwŏn ŭi chŏnjaeng”; and Kim ­Hwa-sŏn, “Ilchemal chŏnsigi singminji chuch’e.” 29.  Kim Hye-wŏn, “Taesŏnp’ung.” 30.  Yi Ku-jo, “Pyŏngjŏng nori.” 31.  Han P’ar-yŏng, “Aegi pyŏngjŏng.” 32.  Han Min-ju, Kwŏllyŏk ŭi tosanghak. 33.  Yi Ku-jo, “Pihaenggi.” 34. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies, 157. 35.  Yang Mi-rim, “Pon padŭl Hit’ŭllŏ yugent’ŭ.” 36.  “Pando ŭi kŭmsu kangsan ch’ajŏ, Hit’ŭrŏ yugendŭ naebang” (The Hitler Jugend Tour the Peninsula). Maeil sinbo, 18 August 1939. 37.  Yi Wŏn-gyŏng, “Chapchi Sinsidae ŭi sŏnggyŏk.” 38.  Han Min-ju, Kwŏllyŏk ŭi tosanghak, 180–87. For a fascinating review of the wartime connections between colonial Koreans and Nazi Germany, see Hoffmann, Berlin Koreans. The bilingual magazine Hantō no hikari underwent several iterations, first under the title Kajŏng chi u (Family Companion) in December 1936, and then under the title in Japanese, Katei no tomo, from August 1938. The name was changed again in 1942 to Hantō no hikari, and the final issue was published in August 1944. A total of 38 issues of Hantō no hikari were published by the Chosŏn kŭmyung chohap yŏnhaphoe (Chosŏn Financial Union Association). See Cho Yu-gyŏng, “T’aep’yŏngyang Chŏnjaenggi (1941– 45) Chapchi Hantō no hikari.” 39.  Yi Kwang-su, “Komapsŭmnida.” 40. Yi Kwang-su, “T’at.” Other essays in this series include “Whipping” by Yi Ŭnsang, Sonyŏn 2 (19372): 20–22; “Success Comes after One Hundred Tries” by Chu Yohan, Sonyŏn 4 (1937): 14–16; and “Putting Things Back in Place” by Yi Kŭng-no, Sonyŏn 9 (1937): 38–39. 41.  Kye San-sun, “Wŏnsungi wa ke”; Song Ch’ang-il, “Pukkŭrŏm.” 42. Henry, Assimilating Seoul, 130–31. See also Mizuno Naoki and Chŏng Sŏn-t’ae, eds., Saenghwal sok ŭi singminjijuŭi, on the modern, disciplined colonial body in popular discourse. 43.  Pak Yong-jŏng, “Narani, Narani.” 44.  “Sonyŏn ch’eyukkwan,” Sonyŏn 4 (1937): 56; “Ŏrini ŭi kyŏul wisaeng,” Sonyŏn 12 (1939): 58. 45.  Sonyŏn 8 (1940): 44. 46. Ibid. 6 (1940): 36. 47. Ibid. 1 (1939): 62. 48.  Pak Yŏng-gi, “Ilche malgi adong munhak.” Pak notes that in the later phases of the colonial era, poetry, which was central to children’s magazines, was no longer published in Korean textbooks, and that only some was published in Japanese textbooks. The short fiction published in textbooks consisted mostly of Japanese mythology.

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49.  Seong-cheol Oh and Ki-seok Kim, “Expansion of Elementary Schooling under Colonialism,” 119. Jun Yoo argues that the colonial government was less successful in setting up educational institutions than it claimed. Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea, 66–67. 50.  Oh and Kim, “Expansion of Elementary Schooling under Colonialism,” 124. 51.  While they do not address questions of class or gender in their chapter, Oh and Kim do argue that vocational education in Korea had a different purpose from that in Japan since Korean students were trained for unskilled labor. Ibid., 133–35. 52.  Sin Yŏng-ch’ŏl, “Tokhak ŭi kil.” 53.  Song Yŏng, “Majŭl pŏnhan iyagi.” 54.  Hyŏn was born into a once prominent family that lost its wealth due to his father’s reckless management. He attended high school for only one year before his poverty prevented him from continuing his studies, which drove him closer to leftist ideology. Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Han’guk kŭndae munhak ŭi chaejomyŏng, 60–76. Hyŏn’s debut took place when one of his short stories won first prize in a newspaper competition in 1927. His official appearance on the literary scene came several years later, in 1932. 55. Ibid., 82. 56.  The Kuinhoe, or Group of Nine, created in August 1933, represented a form of a proletarian counter-group to the KAPF that differentiated itself by virtue of its lack of political affiliation. Members of this group included Chŏng Chi-yong, Yi T’ae-jun, Pak T’ae-wŏn, Yi Sang, and Kim Yu-jŏng. See Wŏn Chong-ch’an, “Kuinhoe munin.” Hyŏn’s work was also widely acknowledged by Im Hwa, Kim Nam-ch’ŏn, and Paek Ch’ŏl. Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Han’guk kŭndae munhak ŭi chaejomyŏng, 79–82. 57.  Pak Yŏng-gi, “Ilche malgi adong munhak,” 105–6. 58.  Yi Kyŏng-jae, “Hyŏn Tok ŭi saeng’ae,” 496. 59.  Hyŏn Tŏk, “Hanŭl ŭn malkkŏnman.” The story appears in translation under the title “The Sky” in Azalea 1 (2012). 60.  Hyŏn’s talent has been noted in recent scholarship. Pak Yŏng-gi points out that Hyŏn’s child characters have the potential to overturn the colonial order and restore people to their original state of goodness. Kang Chun-ho notes that Hyŏn contributed greatly to Korean literature through his creative work that resisted the idea of literature as a didactic device; O Hye-jin notes that Hyŏn’s characters behave like real children with real emotions; and Wŏn Chong-ch’an praises Hyŏn for his portrayal children as charming and sincere without falling into the trap of sentimentalism. See Pak, “Ilche malgi adong munhak kyoyuk yŏn’gu”; Kang, “Hyŏn Tŏk ron”; O, “1930 nyŏndae adong munhak ŭi chŏn’gae”; Wŏn, Han’guk kŭndae munhak ŭi chaejomyŏng. 61.  The stories published in Sonyŏn Chosŏn ilbo in 1938 were republished in 1946 as a book under the title P’odo wa kusŭl (Grapes and Marbles). It is available online through the University of Washington: http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/ cdm/compoundobject/collection/korean/id/9684/rec/13 (accessed 9 September 2015). Figure 14 is taken from the republished version of 1946. 62.  Chŏng Hyŏn-ung was born in 1911 and studied at the Kawabata School of Fine Arts in Tokyo in 1929. From 1937 he illustrated for the magazine Sonyŏn. His draw-

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ings can be found alongside the words of canonical writers including Yi Ki-yŏng, Ch’ae ­Man-sik, and Yi T’ae-jun. He went to North Korea after the Korean War and enjoyed a successful career there as an artist. See Chŏng Chi-sŏk and O Yŏng-sik, Chŏng Hyŏn-ung. Chŏng’s art is on the cover of this book, Figure 11, and Figure 14. 63.  Hyŏn Tŏk, ““Multtakch’ong,” Nŏ hago an nora, 17–21. 64.  Ibid., “Param ŭn algŏnman,” 22–25. 65. Ibid., 23. 66.  Ibid., “Kwitturami,” 51–54. 67.  Ibid., “Abŏji kudu,” 45–46. The entire story is on pp. 45–47. 68.  Ibid., “Ssaum,” 55–56. The entire story is on pp. 55–58. 69.  Ibid., “Taejang ŏlgul,” 73–76. 70.  Ibid., “Yonggi,” 147–49. 71.  Hyŏn Tŏk, “Kwŏn’gu sihap.” 72.  Hyŏn Tŏk, “Chip ŭl nagan sonyŏn.” 73.  Williams, “We Are All in the Dumps with Bakhtin,” 131–32. 74. Stephens, Language and Ideology, 156. 75.  Yi Tu-yong, “Chŏngsin,” 17. 76.  Pak Su-in, “Wit’aehan chigu,” 68. 77.  Chang Myŏng-ch’an, “Chimsŭng,” 31. 78.  Cho Sŏng-p’il, “Yak Kap,” 68. 79.  Yun Ki-su, “Kwi mŏg’ŭn t’at,” 78. 80.  Kim Hwa-sŏn argues that these scripts reflect the degree to which war had become a regular and rational part of children’s lives. See Kim Hwa-sŏn, “Ilchemal chŏnsigi.” The scripts can be found in Kim Tong-in, Pangsong sosŏl myŏngjaksŏn. 81.  Pak T’ae-wŏn, “Ŏsŏ k’ŭja.” See also the treatment of specific and universal irony in Hanscom’s The Real Modern, chap. 5. 82.  Pak T’ae-wŏn, “Ŏsŏ k’ŭja”; Pak T’ae-wŏn, “Kkoma panjang.” 83.  For a contemporary example of the Yun Sŏk-chung’s lasting influence, see a KBS special performance of his songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjRPSzlVahU (accessed 12 September 2015). 84.  Kim Che-gŏn, Yun Sŏk-chung yŏn’gu, 17. For a bibliography of articles on Yun, see ibid., 20. 85.  Yun Sŏk-chung, “Taenat.” 86.  Yun Sŏk-chung, “Ch’esinbu wa namunnip.” 87.  Yun Sŏk-chung, “Isŭl.” 88.  Yi Wŏn-su (1912–1981) published his first poem in Pang Chŏng-hwan’s magazine Ŏrini in 1925. He straddled the ideological divide, showing socialist tendencies while also publishing in pro-Japanese magazines. He went on to have an illustrious career as a magazine editor, writer, and poet in South Korea. See Wŏn, “Yun Sŏk-chung kwa Yi Wŏn-su.” 89.  Yi Sŏk-chung, “Chajang norae.” 90.  Wŏn Chong-ch’an, “Yun Sŏk-chung kwa Yi Wŏn-su,” 7. 91.  Yi Wŏn-su, “Poya nenneyo.”

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92.  Yi Wŏn-su, “Namu kan ŏnni.” 93.  Yi T’ae-jun, “Honja chanŭn aga.” 94.  Ch’oe (1894–1970) studied under Chu Si-gyŏng before he went on to study in Japan’s Imperial University in Kyoto. He was a “linguist and leader in the vernacular movement” whose work “transcended the narrow academic confines of linguistic ­analysis” and who “turned his attention to the broader questions of cultural identity and cultural subservience.” Robinson, “Ch’oe Hyŏn-bae,” 21–22. 95.  Ch’oe Hyŏn-bae, “Chaemi nanŭn Chosŏn mal: tongmul irŭm,” 45. Ch’oe wrote a similar series of essays after liberation called “Chaemi nanŭn uri mal.” After Korea’s liberation, the term Chosŏn mal (Chosŏn language) was replaced by uri mal, or “our language.” 96.  Ch’oe Hyŏn-bae, “Chaemi nanŭn Chosŏn mal 2,” 43. 97.  Poole, “Late Colonial Modernism,” 191. CHAPTER 6 1. Robinson, Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey, 100. 2.  Im Chong-myŏng, “Haebang konggan kwa sinsaenghwal undong,” 220. 3.  Dae-suk Suh notes that “politicians of all persuasions made demands on the occupation authorities, and violent uprisings and armed riots were common occurrences.” Suh, “The War for Korea,” 150. 4.  As Michael Robinson explains, one of the first decisions of General Hodge, the military governor of the USAMGIK, was to not recognize the authority of the people’s committees in the South. “Even before arriving, Hodge had been warned by the frightened Japanese to expect Communist subversion within the local provisional authority.” Robinson, Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey, 107. 5. Millet, The War for Korea. 6. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, 60. 7. Ibid., 63. 8.  Ibid. The term “liberation space,” Hughes reminds us, emerged in the 1980s precisely in order to capture the ongoing contestation over the meaning of liberation (66). Hughes argues that North and South Korean literature is less a divided national literature that emerged independent of each other as much as it is “an array of texts forming themselves in relation to the colonial past, competing statism, and global Cold War cultural production” (90). 9. Ibid., 64–65. 10.  Yi Chung-yŏn, Ch’aek, sasŭl esŏ p’ullida, 117. 11.  Sŏn An-na, Ch’ŏn ŭi ŏlgul kajin adong munhak, 99. 12.  “Ŏrini nal” (Children’s Day), Tonga ilbo, 5 May 1946. 13.  Yi Chung-yŏn, Ch’aek, sasŭl esŏ p’ullida, 117–18. 14. Ibid., 47–51. Other pamphlets from this period that enjoyed popularity were what Yi Chung-yŏn calls works of “enlightenment” about language and history, and of “instigation,” which were meant to ignite discussion of social issues. 15. Ibid., 55–58.

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16.  The senior editor of Adong munhak was Chŏng Chi-yong (1902–1950), poet and educator of colonial Korea who was kidnapped to North Korea (nappuk) during the war. Other contributors included prominent leftist writers such as Pak Se-yŏng, Song Wansun, Yi Tong-gyu, and Yi Chu-hong. Sŏn An-na, Ch’ŏn ŭi ŏlgul kajin adong munhak, 102. 17.  Kim Chong-hŏn also finds that liberation space magazines were generally political tolerant of one another. Kim, Tongsim ŭi palgyŏn, 14. 18.  Yi Chung-yŏn calls this period a “revolution” in publication. At the same time, Yi acknowledges that basic survival was still the foremost concern, and books were largely a luxury. Yi Chung-yŏn, Ch’aek, sasŭl esŏ p’ullida, 69–74. 19.  Sŏn An-na, Ch’ŏn ŭi ŏlgul kajin adong munhak, 99–101. 20. Ibid., 101. 21.  See “Adong munhwa ŭi kŏnsŏl kwa p’agoe” (Construction and Destruction of Children’s Culture], Chosŏn chung’ang ilbo, March 1948. Quoted in Yi Chung-yŏn, Ch’aek, sasŭl esŏ p’ullida, 150. 22. Ibid., 161. Graphic novels by Kim Yong-hwan, for example, were apparently snatched off the shelves as soon as they were published; he also illustrated stories and short cartoons for the magazines Sohaksaeng (Young Student) and Ŏrininara (Children’s World). 23.  Other magazines, which I was unable to obtain at the time of writing, include Adong munhak (1945–1947) and Sinsonyŏn (1946), and the right-leaning Sonyŏn (1948– 1950), Saessak (1946–1947), Ŏrini (1948–1949), and Adong (1946–1948). 24.  Chi Yong, “Changnankam ŏpsi charan ŏrŭn,” 11. 25.  Yi Man-gyu, “Uri charang,” 1. Yi (1889–1978) was an educator who was prominent both throughout the colonial period and in the postwar era, publishing both in the American-occupied South and later in North Korea, where he maintained his reputation as an educator and intellectual. Among his works are the Kajŏng tokpon (Family Reader), and Chosŏn kyoyuksa (History of Korean Education). The pride in Korean culture explored in Chugan sohaksaeng stands in contrast with his open embrace of Japanese assimilation policies in the late-colonial period. See Yi Kil-sang, “Hwangminhwa sigi Yi Man-gyu.” 26.  See King, “North and South Korea”; and Song Seok-Choong, “Grammarians or Patriots.” 27.  Yi Chung-yŏn, Ch’aek, sasŭl esŏ p’ullida, 14–23. 28. Ibid., 60–61. Yi also notes that although much criticism was directed at the low quality of the books published in the liberation space and their purely profit-driven motivations, the sheer number of them attests to the copious consumption of books and the passion for reading in this period. Ibid., 40. 29.  Kim Pyŏng-je, “Uri mal kwa kŭl.” Kim went on to become an influential authority on linguistics in North Korea, authoring books, dictionaries, and works on dialectology. 30.  Ross King notes that Korean “script nationalism” manifests in an almost cultlike respect and even worship-like reverence for both the invention of Korean script (the hunmin chŏng’ŭm), and for King Sejong, the Chosŏn dynasty monarch who invented and promulgated it. “North and South Korea,” 222.

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31.  Chugan sohaksaeng (February 1946), 12. The final sentence “Our new nation’s children are early to rise; our nation is a good nation without late sleepers” was set to music and remains popular to this day. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lrxSZ6I8elY (accessed 20 February 2017). 32.  Ch’oe Hyŏn-bae, “Chaemi nanŭn uri mal.” The series continued over multiple issues. 33.  Yi Hŭi-sŭng, “Uri charang.” Yi (1896–1989) was a prominent scholar of language who played a central role in the creation of reference books on orthography and standardized language. He was among those arrested in 1942 over the publication of the ten-year project of the Korean dictionary and spent three years in prison. After liberation, he became one of the leading linguistics scholars in Korea. Having been tenured at Keijō Imperial University, he then became a professor at Seoul National University, its successor institution. He occupied several important administrative academic positions and published several volumes of poetry and prose. For other examples of his essays in the series, see issues 36, 37, and 47 of Chugan sohaksaeng, 1947. 34.  Yi Yŏng-ch’ŏl, T’ŭlligi swiun mal 2” (Common Errors, 2), Chugan sohaksaeng no. 26 (1946), and “T’ŭlligi swiun mal 4” (Common Errors, 4), Chugan sohaksaeng no. 28 (1946). Yi (1909–?) was active between 1930 and 1960 in the field of children’s literature. His first work appeared in Ŏrini in 1925. He published in newspapers and magazines, and was also an educator. See Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Adong munhak kwa pip’yŏng chŏngsin, 358–63. 35.  Chang Chi-yŏng, “‘Hangŭllal’ ŭi ttŭt.” 36.  “Aedokcha yŏrŏbun i choahanŭn siin, sosŏlga, hwaga chwadam,” 28–29. Cho P’ung-yŏn (1914–1991) was a writer and editor of the literary magazine Munjang in the late colonial period who became a full-time children’s writer after the Korean War. Kim Kyu-t’aek (1906–1962), a graduate of art school in Japan in the 1930s, illustrated many of Korea’s colonial writers’ fiction in the 1930s including Yi Kwang-su and Hong Myŏng-hŭi. He also penned his own satirical fiction. See Yi Chu-ra, “1930 nyŏndae Kim Kyu-t’aek.” Chŏng In-t’aek (1909–1953), who went north during the Korean War, has been the focus of renewed interest in recent years, particularly in light of his friendship with Yi Sang and Pak T’ae-wŏn on the one hand, and his “collaborationist” Japanese-language fiction on the other. See Yi Yŏng-a, “Chŏng In-t’aek,” 174. 37.  Yi Yŏng-ch’ŏl, “T’ŭlligi swiun mal 2.” 38.  Yi Yŏng-ch’ŏl, “Ŏrini han’gŭl yŏksa,” Sohaksaeng nos. 37 and 37 (1946). 39.  Yi Yŏng-ch’ŏl, “Uri munhwa wa han’gŭl.” 40.  “Urimal toro ch’atki,” Sohaksaeng no. 55 (1948): 41. 41. Schmid, Korea between Empires, 257. 42.  Kim So-un, “Mal ŭi hyanggi.” Kim (1907–1981) was in Japan when his studies were interrupted by the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. He continued to live in Japan and dedicate himself to education. He was also a celebrated translator from Korean into Japanese, published in works such as Chōsen minyōsen (Korean Folk Songs) in 1936. 43.  King, “North and South Korea,” 210–12. 44.  Quoted in King, “Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea,” 38. King de-

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scribes Yu Kil-chun (1856–1914) as Korea’s first modern “language entrepreneur,” who composed the inaugural editorial in mixed Korean and Sinitic script for Korea’s first newspaper, the Hansŏng sunbo. See Ibid., 36. 45. Ibid., 56. 46.  King, “North and South Korea,” 211–12. See also Jentzsch, “Munhwaŏ.” 47.  King, “North and South Korea,” 216. 48.  Kim Yong-jun, “Uri charang: Kwanggaet’o wangbi.” 49.  Yi Hŭi-bok, “Kŭ sich’o wa naeryŏk,” 16–17. 50.  Hong Chong-in, “1919 nyŏn kwa 3 wŏl 1 il.” Hong (1903–1998) was born in P’yŏngyang and was expelled from school for participating in the March First demonstrations. He later worked as a journalist and after liberation was appointed the main editor of the Chosŏn ilbo. His emphasis on other newly liberated nations in Asia is reflected also in the magazine Ŏrininara in a series about the “Weak Nations of the World” that reports on the state of present and former colonies. In the April 1949 issue is a report on the Dutch colony of Indonesia. The article accuses Holland, a country slightly smaller than Korea’s South Hamgyŏng Province, of exploiting a country sixty times its size for a period of three hundred years, during which it drained the country of its rubber, oil, cotton, and steel resources. In return, Holland inflected its colony with starvation, ignorance, and death (16–17). Another article covers a report on Burma and its struggle for independence (no. 5, 1949: 34–35), Malaya (no. 6, 1949: 27), and the British control of Palestine (no. 10, 1949: 19). 51.  Ŏrininara (March 1949): 4–6. 52.  Chi Yong, “3 wŏl 1 il.” 53.  “Chosŏn-a chŏngsin ch’aryŏra” (Korea, Watch Your Back!) Chugan sohaksaeng no. 4 (1946): 2 (author’s name missing). 54.  See, for example, Chugan sohaksaeng no. 7 (1946), 5. 55.  Yun Sŏk-chung, “Ap’ŭro ap’ŭro.” 56.  Im Chong-myŏng, “Haebang konggan kwa sinsaenghwal undong,” 223–35. 57.  Ham Ch’ŏ-sik, “Chosŏn nongch’ŏn kwa kyemong undong.” 58.  Kim In-su, “Chejari kŏrŭm.” 59.  Sohaksaeng no. 66 (1949): 13. 60.  Chŏng Chin-uk, “Kaŭl ŭi saengni wisaeng.” Adult magazines such as Sin ch’ŏnji also advertised health products for children, including, for example, the “nation-­ building pill.” Thanks to Kenneth Koo for alerting me to this source. 61.  De Ceuster, “Wholesome Education and Sound Leisure,” 59. 62.  Min Chae-ho, “Haebang hu’ŭi Chosŏn sŭp’ooch’ŭgye,” 5–6. 63. “Kong,” Ŏrininara (September 1949): 11. 64.  Yi Yŏng-min, “Yagu wa sohaksaeng,” 10. 65.  An Chun-sik, “Chosŏn haebang kwa sonyŏn sonyŏ ege.” 66.  The famous illustrator Chŏng Hyŏn-ung, whose works decorated the pages of children’s magazines throughout the late wartime period and into liberation, credited Chŏng In-t’aek’s creative fiction with stimulating newfound interest in literature among young people. See Sohaksaeng no. 71 (1949): 28–33.

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67.  Chŏng In-t’aek, “Palgŭn kil.” 68. Ibid., 14. 69. Ibid., 15. 70.  Chŏng Wŏn-sŏp, “Undonghoe.” 71.  Yi Hyŏng-u, “Hakkyo.” 72.  So Hyŏn, “Ŏnjena k’ŭn ttŭsŭl p’umtja.” 73.  Ch’ae Man-sik, “Isanghan sŏnsaengnim.” 74.  Yi Wŏn-su, “Adong munhak ŭi satjŏk koch’al.” 75.  Yi Wŏn-su, “Supsok nara.” Excerpts from the novel were published as follows: 1949.2: 12–15; 1949.5: 23, 28–31; 1949.6: 20–23; 1949.7: 3–7; 1949.8: 31–35; 1949.9: 20–24; 1949.10: 26–30; 1949.11: 15, 16–20; and 1949.12: 15–19. Interestingly, a reprint of the novel published by Ungjin in 1995 changed not only the language but some of the content as well, reflecting changes in pedagogical and ideological approaches to literature for children. 76.  Writing about this same period, Kim Yu-gyŏng argues that it was not until the publication of the magazine Yŏhaksaeng (Schoolgirl), launched in 1949, that the concept of the “girl” in literature really took hold. See Kim, “Haebang hu yŏhaksaeng yŏn’gu.” 77.  See Yi Chae-chŏl, Han’guk hyŏndae adong munhaksa. Kim Chong-hŏn also notes that Yi’s scholarship was tainted by anti-Communist ideology, which limited his ability to engage evenhandedly with a range of children’s magazines of diverse political associations. See Kim, Tongsim ŭi palgyŏn kwa haebanggi tongsim munhak. 78.  Ch’oe Yŏng-su, “Tongsim.” 79.  “K’iuja parŭge ssikssikhage singsinghan Chosŏn ŭi saessak” (Well and Valiantly, Let Us Raise Our Country’s Sprouts), Kyŏnghyang sinmun, 4 May 1947. 80.  Kim Kwang-ju, “Nun i wassŭmyŏn”; Ch’oe I-gwŏn, “Arŭmdaun tongsim.” Kim Kwang-ju (1910–1973), a fiction writer who studied in China during the Japanese occupation, returned to Korea upon liberation and continued to write and serve in such capacities as the cultural section editor of the newspaper Kyŏnghyang Sinmun. 81.  Yun Sŏk-chung, “Tongsim chapki.” 82. Ibid. 83.  Yu Hyŏn-suk, “Tongsim chapki rŭl ilkko Yun Sŏk-chung ege tapham.” 84.  Yun Sŏk-chung, “Tongsim chapki e taehan na ŭi pyŏnhae.” 85.  Yun Sŏk-chung, “Tte rŭl chiŏ.” 86.  Quoted in Kim Ch’an-gon, “Tongsim ŭi kiwŏn,” 61n25. The full transcript of his speech can be found in the anthology of his work titled “Kukkyŏng nŏmŏon munhaksang” (The Literary Prize That Transcends National Borders), in Yun Sŏk-chung chŏnjip (Collected Works of Yun Sŏk-chung), vol. 24, p. 131, published in 1988 by Ungjin ch’ulp’ansa. E PILOGUE Sections of this chapter appeared in Zur, “Let’s Go to the Moon: Science Fiction in the North Korean Children’s Magazine Adong Munhak, 1956–1965.” Copyright © 2014 Journal of Asian Studies (May 2014): 1–25. They are reprinted with permission.

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1.  Chŏng Ong-sik and Kang Chŏng-min, Haek mugi, 21 (quoted in Kwŏn Podŭrae, “Kwahak ŭi yŏndo,” 392n17). 2. Cumings, North Korea, 25. See also Kwŏn Podŭrae, “Kwahak ŭi yŏngdo, wŏnjat’an kwa chŏnjaeng,” 401. 3.  As Hanscom argues, modernist writers pushed against the allure of empirical facticity and pointed instead to the way that the language of fact—and by extension, fact itself—was embedded in a system of knowledge that was highly subjective. Hanscom notes that debates around “facticity” in the 1930s questioned the confidence in the relationship between the subjective experience of the world and the seemingly objective unfolding of history. Hanscom, “Matters of Fact.” See also the three recent edited volumes that cover the engagement of literature with science over the last century in Hwang Chong-yŏn, ed., Munhak kwa kwahak. 4.  Han Min-ju argues that the 1930s children’s science magazine Paektusan worked to instill wonder and demystify nature alike. While this seems to contradict my argument, I propose that while scientific education and content provided young readers some access to the natural world in the colonial period, this content never undermined the basic and foundational bond between child and nature to the extent that we see in the postwar era. See Han, “Masul ŭl purinŭn kwahak.” 5.  Yi Sŏn-gŭn, “Mŏnjŏ pan’gong chŏngsinŭl!” 6.  “Ingong wisŏng ŭn kwayŏn palsa toel kos’inka,” Hagwŏn (October 1955): 54. 7.  Kim Kwang T’aek, “Chiroe t’amjigi”; Pak Ung Kŏl, “Sanggŭp chŏnhwasu.” 8.  Yi Chong-gi, “Werit’asŭ yŏhaenggi.” 9.  Hwang Sin-dŏk, “Taejayŏn ŭl paewŏra!” Hwang (1898–1983) was born in North Korea, studied at Waseda University in 1921, and graduated from Japanese Women’s University in 1926. After her return to Korea she worked both as a journalist and as an activist for women’s rights, and turned to education in postwar Korea. 10.  Wŏn Kwang Su, “Rok’et’ŭ yŏhaeng 1,” Sonyŏndan (September 1958): 24–25. 11.  Hagwŏn was established in 1952. It enjoyed robust sales and popularity, publishing around 100,000 copies when other magazines rarely printed over half that quantity. It supported the cultivation of a new generation of writers by soliciting contributions and awarding literary prizes. See Pak Mong-gu, “Haksaeng chŏnŏl Hagwŏn,” 65; and Chang Su-gyŏng, Hagwŏn kwa hagwŏn sedae. 12.  Yi Mu-yŏng, “Kŏjinmal kwa sosŏl.” Yi (1908–1960) completed his middle school education in Japan. He also is said to have lived for four years under the tutelage of Japanese author and critic Katō Shūichi. He made his debut as a writer in the mid-1920s, and was also active as a journalist. 13. Ibid., 294–97. 14.  An Su-gil, “Sosŏl ŭi ch’ŏt kŏrŭm.” An (1911–1977) was born in the northern part of the peninsula. He went to Japan in 1930 to attend school but never completed his studies. Between 1932 and 1945 he worked as a journalist for Kando and Manchurian newspapers, and later, in the post-liberation period, was active in several writer associations. 15.  An Su-gil, “Sosŏl ŭi ch’ŏt kŏrŭm 3,” 163–64.

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16.  An Su-gil, “Sosŏl ŭi ch’ŏt kŏrŭm 4,” 119–20. 17.  An Su-gil, “Sosŏl ŭi ch’ŏt kŏrŭm 6,” 163–64. 18. Ibid., 164. 19.  Im T’ae-hun, Uae ŭi midiolloji, 243–73; Kim Chae-guk, “Han’guk kwahak sosŏl ŭi hyŏnhwang,” 96–97. Kim notes that the Chinese translation was based on the Japanese, which was based on the English, which was based on the original French. 20.  Cho Sŏng-myŏn, Taejung munhak kwa chŏngjŏn, 180; Haerin Shin, “The Curious Case of South Korean Science Fiction,” 81–82. 21.  Han was born in North Korea and even worked for a time for P’yŏngyang Broadcasting as an anchorman, but emigrated South during the Korean War. He was particularly influenced during his work for the UN in its broadcasting department of the psychological operations division. He also translated Alice in Wonderland, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and War of the Worlds. See Kim I-gu, “Kwahak sosŏl ŭi saeroun kanŭngsŏng,” 160. Many of Han’s works were republished in the 1990s, including the most recent anthology, Han Nag-wŏn kwahak sosŏl sŏnjip (Collected Science Fiction of Han Nag-wŏn), Seoul: Hyŏndae munhak, 2013. 22.  Kim I-gu, “Kwahak sosŏl ŭi saeroun kanŭngsŏng,” 162–65. 23.  Han Nag-wŏn, “Uju pŏlle omega ho,” (June 1967): 282. 24. Ibid., 285. 25.  Ibid., (April 1968): 281–82. 26.  Chosŏn munhak (October 1953): 139–40. 27.  “Uridŭl ŭn hwasŏng e watta,” Adong munhak (April 1956): 69–79. 28.  Kim Myŏng Su, “Adong munhak ch’angjak,” 97. 29.  After socialist realism was adopted officially in the Soviet Union as the aesthetic guideline for national literature in 1934, Korean writers debated its relevance for Korea. As a proponent of socialist realism, Im Hwa “constantly urged writers to depict an ‘ideal’ in their works,” and his was one of the voices that carried over into North Korea after socialism was banned in the South. See Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism,” 183–84. Brian Myers offers a condemning view of North Korean socialist realism, and argues that Han Sŏr Ya, one of its main proponents, had a worldview that was “fundamentally incompatible with the ideology [that] socialist realist literature is by definition obliged to reflect.” Myers, Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature, 3. 30.  Kim Myŏng Su, “Adong munhak ch’angjak,” 104. 31.  Ri Wŏn U, “Kŭl ŭl ŏttŏk’e hamyŏn chal chiŭl su issŭlkka.” 32.  Ri Wŏn U, Adong munhak ch’angjak ŭi kil. 33.  “Chosŏn chakka tongmaeng chungang wiwŏnhoe che 5 ch’a sang wiwŏnhoe esŏ” (From the Fifth Meeting of the Chosŏn Writers Alliance Central Committee), Chosŏn munhak (January 1954): 146–49. 34.  Han Sŏr Ya, Che 2 ch’a Chosŏn chakka taehoe munhŏnjip (Collection of Second Conference of Chosŏn Writers) (Pyongyang: Chosŏn chakka tongmaeng ch’ulp’ansa, 1958), 31 (quoted in Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Pukhan ŭi adong munhak, 197); Han Sik, “Adong munhka ŭi chungyosŏng,” 41 (quoted in Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Pukhan ŭi adong munhak, 79–80); Kim Myŏng Su, “Haebang hu adong munhak ŭi palchŏn.”

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35.  Paek Sŏk, “Tonghwa munhak.” 36.  Ri Ki Bong, “Kohyang ŭi chayŏn sok esŏ”; and Kim Kil Cha, “Hakkyo chŏngwŏn esŏ ŭi han hae.” 37.  Han Sik, “Adong munhak ŭi chungyosŏng,” 46–47 (quoted in Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Pukhan ŭi adong munhak, 81). 38.  Ri Wŏn U, Adong munhak ch’angjak ŭi kil, 115. 39.  Kim Tong Sŏp, “Pada esŏ sosanan ttang.” 40.  The possibility of transforming the bottom of the sea into tillable land was mentioned also in the South Korean magazine Hagwŏn in 1962. It emerges from a report on the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, and appears as one of the exhibitions that promises that the ocean floor will be mined for oil and that it will be transformed into farmland to feed the growing populations of the world. See “21 segi ŭi inhan saenghwal” (Life in the Twenty-first Century), Hagwŏn (September 1962): 240–43. 41.  The iconography in this image is typical of North Korean depictions of the Dear Leader, standing with one arm extended in a way that attracts the viewer’s gaze and draws a straight narrative line from the leader into the ongoing development. Kim Tong Sŏp, “Pada esŏ sosanan ttang,” (April 1965): 74. 42. Ibid., 75. 43. Ibid., 77–78. 44.  Pang Chŏng-hwan, “Ŏrini ch’anmi,” 67. 45.  Ryu Tŏk-chae, ed., Han’guk hyŏndae adong munhak pip’yŏng charyojip. 46.  Wŏn Chong-ch’an, “1920 nyŏndae,” 69. 47.  For an elaboration on the Korean War in children’s literature, see Zur, “Textual and Visual Representations of the Korean War”; and Zur, “The Korean War in Children’s Picturebooks of the DPRK.” 48.  See Zur, “Whose War Were We Fighting?” 49.  Kim Ch’an-gon, “Tongsim ŭi kiwŏn”; Sin Hŏn-jae, “Han’guk adong munhak ŭi tongsimnon yŏn’gu” and Adong munhak ŭi sup ŭl kŏtta; Kim Chong-hŏn, Tongsim ŭi palgyŏn. 50.  Sin Hŏn-jae argues that the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s brought a new critique of the concept of tongsim through theories of early child development, Foucaldian identification and country-identification, and a close reading that has complicated the traditionally politicized interpretations of children’s literature. See Sin, “Han’guk adong munhak ŭi tongsimnon yŏn’gu,” 115–21. 51.  Chang Yŏng and Yi Yŏn Ho, Tongsim kwa adong munhak ch’angjak. 52. Ibid., 21. 53. Ibid., 279. See also Kim Jong Il’s theories on children’s literature in Chuch’e munhaknon, 248–57. For an overview of the development of literature for children in North Korea in the past six decades, see Wŏn Chong-ch’an, Pukhan ŭi adong munhak. 54. Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, 8.

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Zur, Dafna. “The Korean War in Children’s Picturebooks of the DPRK.” Pp. 276–98 in Exploring North Korean Arts, edited by Rüdiger Frank. Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2011. ———. “Let’s Go to the Moon: Science Fiction in the North Korean Children’s Magazine Adong Munhak, 1956–1965.” Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 2 (2014): 327–51. ———. “Textual and Visual Representations of the Korean War in North and South Korean Children’s Literature.” Pp. 271–303 in Korea 2010: Politics, Economy and Society, edited by Rüdiger Frank, James E. Hoare, Patrick Köllner, and Susan Pares. Leiden: Brill, 2010. ———. “‘They are still eating well, and living well’: The Grimms’ Tales in Early Colonial Korea.” Pp. 99–117 in Grimms’ Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception, edited by Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey. Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2014. ———. “Whose War Were We Fighting? Constructing Memory and Managing Trauma in South Korean Children’s Fiction.” International Research in Children’s Literature 2, no. 2 (2009): 192–209.

INDEX

Adong kurakbu (Children’s Club), 165 Adong munhak (Children’s Literature): editor and contributors, 242n16; The Rising Seabed (Pada esŏ sosanan ttang), 205–7, 206–7 (fig.); science fiction, 198, 201–2, 204–7; scientific content, 193, 201 Adong munhwa (Children’s Culture), 165 advertisements, 130, 133–34, 178 affect: of children, 17; children’s bodies and, 107; emotions and, 67–68. See also emotional education affective response: child-heart and, 58, 65–66, 209; of children, 61–62, 67–68, 102; in children’s literature, 11, 17, 211; colonial rule and, 11, 17; to nature, 56, 62; in proletarian children’s literature, 106–7, 111–12, 114–15, 121 Aidŭlboi (For Children): audience, 220– 21n52; content, 89; folktales, 82–83, 87, 88–89, 91, 228n46; influence, 211; language and writing style, 89, 220– 21n52; years of publication, 31 Ai saenghwal (Children’s Life), 126, 127, 138, 176, 236n15

Akai tori (Red Bird), 52, 59, 222n34, 223n39 An, Su-gil, 196–97, 246n14,15 An Chun-sik, 179 An Hoe-nam, 139 An Mi-yŏng, 91 ancestors, 30, 45 Anthony of Taize, Brother, 39, 40 Ariès, Philippe, 3 art education, 66, 67. See also visual art assimilation policies, 51, 124–27, 152, 236n18 atomic bombs, 191, 193, 208. See also nuclear age Barthes, Roland, 13 baseball, 178 Bauman, Richard, 97–98 Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman, 3 Bergstrom, Brian, 119 bodies: of children, 58, 101–2, 107, 118–20, 121; disciplined, 175, 178; embodied realism, 67; fascist view, 126; impaired, 119, 234n59; mobilization for war, 129; in service of nation, 175–76,

2 7 4    IN D E X

178; social roles, 234n60. See also health and hygiene body/mind dichotomy, 54, 60. See also child-heart Boym, Svetlana, 20 Briggs, Charles L., 97–98 British Empire, 37 Byron, Lord, 39, 220n35 capitalism, 105, 112, 185 censorship, 11–12, 103, 127, 138, 216n27, 225n92, 231n10 Ch’ae Man-sik, 165, 182 Chang Chi-yŏng, 170 Chang Chŏng-hŭi, 5, 51, 84 Chang Yŏng, 212 Chi Yong, 165–66, 173 child development, 5 child-heart (tongsim): affective response, 58, 65–66, 209; centrality, 6, 209, 211; in colonial period, 19, 24, 49, 187–89; development of children’s literature and, 6, 7, 49, 211–12; emergence of idea, 5–7, 18, 49, 54, 62–63; in images, 71–74; Japanese views of, 59, 223n39; language of, 76, 167, 170–71; in late colonial period, 150–55, 158; leftist view of, 8, 100, 101–2, 103, 211; in North Korea, 212–13; nostalgia and, 24, 74; Pang on, 56–58; in postwar period, 8–9, 170–71, 182–85, 186–87, 189, 192, 209; in proletarian children’s literature, 183, 211; in stories, 64–66; use of term, 7, 212–13, 248–49n50; visibility of children and, 6, 54, 55; Western views, 5–6. See also nature, children’s relationship with childhood: colonial socialization, 152; discovery in Korea, 1–2, 13, 31–32, 54, 210; girlhood, 16; idealization, 152, 158; modernity and, 31, 52–53, 211, 216n13; as social construct, 3–4, 31 child-mind principle, 59–60, 222n37

child psychology, 62–64 childrearing: child-heart and, 55; discursive shift, 49; emotional education, 17, 61–62, 66–67, 76, 98, 211; in Japan, 221n15; women’s roles, 15–16. See also family children: bourgeois, 113–14; gendering, 14–16; imaginations, 61, 130, 143–44, 153–54, 158, 163, 203, 204; invisibility, 29, 31; Korean terms, 32; maltreatment, 80–81; militarized, 125–26, 130– 32; physical well-being, 61; political and social consciousness, 101–2, 106, 107–10; societal roles, 4, 101. See also education; poor children; visibility of children; working-class children children’s culture: Japanese, 21, 52, 58–59; leftist view of, 106; in wartime, 125, 129–30, 137, 158 Children’s Day, 8, 103, 163, 172, 187 children’s literature: affective response, 11, 17, 211; age categories, 112; audiences, 2, 13, 18, 22–23, 53–54; books, 164–65; censorship, 11–12, 138, 231n10; in colonial period, 10–11, 12, 13, 19, 21, 51, 211; demand for, 2, 31, 53; development, 2, 4, 20–21, 22–23, 51, 53–54; educational content, 18, 53, 134–35; genre boundaries, 112; historical sources, 210; histories of, 3, 4–5, 10, 183, 185–86; Japanese, 2, 52, 58–59, 85; language, 75–76, 79–80; in late colonial period, 124, 127–37, 138, 158–59; North Korean, 201, 202–7, 212–13; nostalgia, 19, 20–21; in postwar period, 162, 164–65, 184–86, 189; scholarship on, 3, 4–5, 10, 23, 210; school readers, 51; socialization function, 213; visuality, 11, 13–15, 53; wartime rhetoric, 129–37, 152, 235–36n12; Western, 183. See also fiction; folktales; poetry; proletarian children’s literature; songs

I ND E X   2 7 5

children’s magazines: advertisements, 130, 133–34; biographies, 108, 173–74; censorship, 12, 225n92; Christian, 126, 127, 138, 176, 236nn14–15; collections, 210; educational content, 13, 53; emergence, 1–2, 8; fiction, 50, 64–66; gender in, 16; for girls, 16; ideological affiliations, 232–33n25; interactions with readers, 23, 37, 70–71; Japaneselanguage, 134, 238n38; popularity, 1, 12; proletarian, 8, 99–100, 103–6, 119, 127; reader reception, 23; scientific content, 246n4; visuality, 34, 68–69. See also individual titles children’s magazines, in late colonial period: discontinuance, 134, 236n14; educational content, 150–51; entertainment, 127–28; fiction, 139–47; leftist writers, 138–39; nationalism and, 125–26; poetry, 150–55; wartime rhetoric, 126, 127, 129–37, 158. See also Sonyŏn (Youth; 1937–1940) children’s magazines, in postwar period: child-heart and, 186–87; on child’s relationship to nature, 9; educational content, 166–67, 169, 172, 173–74, 178; essays on colonial childhoods, 165–66; ideological affiliations, 162–63, 164, 165, 181–82; language, 167, 168, 169–71, 179; nationalism, 172–73, 174–75; North Korean, 192, 203; poetry, 175–76, 177–78, 180–81; publications, 164–65, 166; scientific content, 192, 193–96, 201, 203, 204. See also science fiction children’s magazines, Japanese: Akai tori, 52, 59, 222n34, 223n39; educational content, 33–34; folktales, 85, 86; for girls, 16; as inspiration fo Korean editors, 33–34, 59; proletarian, 100, 102, 103–4 China: child-mind concept, 59–60; children’s literature, 52; education,

63; print culture, 33; Second SinoJapanese War, 123, 124–27, 158; SinoJapanese War (1895), 77; views of childhood, 52, 59–60; youth, 32 Cho, Heekyoung, 81–82 Cho Chung-ŭng, 179, 244–45n65 Cho Hyŏng-sik, 114 Cho P’ung-yŏn, 170, 243n36 Cho Sŏng-myŏn, 198 Cho Ŭn-suk, 54 Ch’oe Hyŏn-bae, 157, 169, 241n94 Ch’oe I-gwŏn, 187 Ch’oe Myŏng-p’yo, 5, 50 Ch’oe Nam-sŏn: education, 32–33; essays, 37, 87, 89, 90–91, 228n49; on folktales, 82–83, 84, 85; folktale translations, 79–80, 86, 87, 88–91, 93, 96–97, 228n46; influence, 183; in Japan, 32–33, 96; on nationalism, 87–88; periodicals, 29–30, 31, 32, 79, 87–88, 211, 220–21n52; poetry, 39–43, 44, 47; translations, 220n35, 220n43; view of youth, 7–8, 30, 32, 33. See also Sonyŏn Ch’oe Yŏng-su, 68, 186–87 Choi, Hyaeweol, 15 Choi, Kyeong-Hee, 119 Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan, 14, 44, 49, 50 Chŏn Ruisa, 61, 66 Ch’ŏndogyo, 51, 55–56, 58, 64, 91 Chŏng Chin-sŏk, 11 Chŏng Chin-uk, 178 Chŏng Chi-yong, 151, 239n56, 242n16 Chŏng Hyŏn-ung, 141, 142 (fig.), 239– 40n62, 244n66 Chŏng In-sŏp (Zong In-sob), 66, 224n66 Chŏng In-t’aek, 170, 179–80, 243n36, 244n66 Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth), 29–31 Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily), 236n14. See also Sonyŏn (Youth; 1937–1940) Chosŏn munhak (Chosŏn Literature), 201 Chosŏn Munhakka Tongmaeng (Korean Literary Writers’ Alliance), 139, 245n78

2 7 6    IN D E X

Christianity: children’s magazines, 126, 127, 138, 176, 236nn14–15; gender norms, 15; missionaries, 54, 236n15; missionary schools, 15; morality, 34 Chu Si-gyŏng, 77, 232n25 Chugan sohaksaeng (Primary Student Weekly), 165, 166–67, 169. See also Sohaksaeng Chung, Kimberly, 101 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 68 Cold War: science and technology, 194, 202, 208; visual culture, 14, 52. See also Korean War; nuclear age; postwar period colonial modernity: affective response, 17; children’s literature and, 10–11, 21; complexity, 9, 123; cultural implications, 9–10; family roles, 60; gender and, 15; nostalgia and, 20, 49; visuality and, 13 colonial period. See children’s magazines; Japanese colonial rule colonial power: gender and, 10, 14–15; nostalgia and, 20 Confucianism: classic texts, 29, 77; criticism of, 30–31; education, 29; filial piety, 30; gender norms, 15; morality, 51, 78; view of children, 59–60 Cosgrove, Denis, 37 cultural literacy, 69 Darr, Yael, 5 De Ceuster, Koen, 178 dictionary, Korean language, 167–68 diglossia, 75, 225n1 education: art, 66, 67; in Chosŏn era, 29; in colonial period, 16, 50, 76, 107, 126–27, 138–39, 215n6, 224n79, 237n19; crisis of access, 107; gender norms, 15, 16; of girls, 15, 16, 43, 126, 217n42; inequality, 138–39, 179, 180–81, 237n19, 239n51; kindergarten,

61, 187–88; missionary schools, 15; night school, 117–18; phasing out of Korean language, 126, 127; in postwar period, 16, 164, 179, 182; public schools, 32; school enrollment, 50, 138–39, 215n6, 217n42, 237n19; scientific, 191–92, 193, 194; study abroad, 60, 63; textbooks, 5, 16, 51, 53, 127, 164–65, 224n79, 238n48; Western influences, 5. See also emotional education; literacy emotional education (kamjŏng kyoyuk), 17, 61–62, 66–67, 76, 98, 211 emotions, 67–68, 78. See also affect; affective response Enlightenment Club (Kyemyŏng kurakpu), 81, 226n20 Ericson, Joan E., 86 Eshel, Amir, 21 fairy tales. See folktales family: changing views, 44–45; Confucian view, 30; generational conflict, 30, 34, 45; magazines for, 87–88; reforms, 44–45, 60, 220n51; traditional, 45. See also childrearing; gender; motherhood fascism, 126, 134 femininity, 15 feminism, Bolshevik, 108, 233n29 fiction for children: in magazines, 50, 64–66, 99–100, 130–31, 135, 139–41, 146–47; realism, 198, 203, 204; truth and, 196–97. See also Korean literature; science fiction; stories Finlay-Johnson, Harriet, 66, 224n67 folktales: adult audiences, 85–86; didactic, 51, 86, 88–89, 95, 97; from foreign countries, 69; Grimms’ tales, 79–80, 83, 84–87, 88–91, 93, 96–98, 228n46, 230n85; Japanese, 51, 52, 84–86; Korean, 79, 82–84, 85, 90, 228n47; national identity and, 80, 82, 83–85,

I ND E X   2 7 7

86, 90–91, 96–98, 168; translations, 79–80, 81–82, 84, 86, 88–91, 93, 94–95 Freud, Sigmund, 6 frugality, 126, 135, 137, 153, 175 Fukawa Gen’ichirō, 85–86 futurity, 21 Gale, James Scarth, 79 gender: colonial power and, 10, 14–15; of magazine readers, 16, 43; masculinity, 15, 43; norms, 15, 16, 43; in wartime stories, 132–33. See also girls; women Germany: children, 93–94; Grimms’ tales, 79–80, 83, 84–87, 88–91, 93, 96–98, 230n85; Hitler Youth, 134; kindergarten, 61; nationalism, 96 girls: education of, 15, 16, 43, 126, 217n42; emergence of concept, 245n76; magazines for, 16; sonyŏ term, 43. See also women graphic novels, 164, 165, 242n22 Gregg, Melissa, 17 Grimms’ tales, 79–80, 83, 84–87, 88–91, 93, 96–98, 228n46, 230n85 Haase, Donald, 97, 98 Hagwŏn (Study Hall): Omega Bugs (Uju pŏllae omega ho), 198–200, 200 (fig.), 206–7, 209; popularity, 246n11; science fiction, 196–97; scientific content, 192, 193, 248n40 Haksaeng kwahak (Student Science), 192, 193, 198 Ham Ch’ŏ-sik, 176 Han Chi-hŭi, 16, 33, 43 Han Ch’i-jin, 62–64, 63, 68 Han Ch’ŏr-yŏm, 114, 115 Han Min-ju, 125–26, 132 Han Nag-wŏn: career, 198, 247n21; Omega Bugs (Uju pŏllae omega ho), 198–200, 200 (fig.), 206–7, 209 Han Sŏr Ya, 203, 247n29 Hanscom, Christopher, 10, 17, 51, 127

Hantō no hikari (Light of the Peninsula), 134, 238n38 health and hygiene: modernity and, 135, 137; nutrition, 178; in postwar period, 176, 178, 179; in wartime, 126, 135, 137, 234–35n2 Henry, Todd A., 125, 135 Hiroshima, 193, 208 history: accounts of colonial period, 171–73; biographies, 35, 38, 43, 108, 134, 166–67, 173–74; nostalgia, 19–21 Hitler, Adolf, 134, 174 Hitler Youth, 134 Hŏ Chae-yŏng, 90 Hŏ In, 112 Hong Chin, 176 Hong Chong-in, 173, 244n50 Hong Gu, 115, 120 Hong Yang-hŭi, 16 Hughes, Theodore, 14, 51, 125, 162 humor, 127, 147–49, 158 Hwang, Kyong Moon, 107 Hwang Sin-dŏk, 195, 246n9 hygiene, see health and hygiene Hyŏn Tŏk: on class inequality, 124, 147; life and career, 139, 239n54; stories, 139–47, 142 (fig.), 158, 239n60 Hyun, Theresa, 39 illustrations: in advertising, 133–34; appealing to children, 61, 68, 69–70; by children, 57–58; maps, 36–38; modernity and, 13; in Ŏrini, 47–48, 48 (fig.), 69–70, 70 (fig.), 71–73; of poems, 151, 153, 155; in postwar period, 167, 177–78; of science fiction, 200 (fig.), 205–6, 206–7 (fig.); in Sonyŏn, 36–38, 37 (fig.), 38 (fig.), 40; in wartime, 131, 131 (fig.), 132, 133–34. See also photography; visuality Im Chong-myŏng, 161, 176 Im Hwa, 100, 104, 105, 112, 115, 203, 234n53, 239n56, 247n29

2 7 8    IN D E X

imagined community, 13, 49, 104 imperialization (kōminka) policies, 124– 27, 158. See also Japanese colonial rule independence. See postwar period inequality. See social inequality interiority. See child-heart irony, 149–50, 158–59 Itō Hirobumi, 35 (fig.), 36 Iwaya Sazanami, 59, 85 Japan: childhood in, 216n13, 221n15; children’s culture, 21, 52, 58–59; children’s literature, 2, 52, 58–59, 85; culture, 85; education, 52, 86; folktales, 51, 52, 84–86; gender norms, 15; literature, 76; Meiji restoration, 52; nationalism, 86; print culture, 33, 34; proletarian writers, 100–101, 102–3; Second Sino-Japanese War, 123, 124–27, 158; Sino-Japanese War (1895), 77; translations of foreign texts, 95–96; women’s magazines, 52. See also children’s magazines, Japanese; Pacific War Japanese colonial rule: agency of Koreans, 127, 237n21; assimilation policies, 51, 124–27, 152, 236n18; censorship, 11–12, 103, 127, 138, 216n27, 225n92, 231n10; collaborators, 179; criticism of, 87–88; cultural production, 210; dark era (amhŭkki), 123–24; end of, 161; family policies, 60; gender dynamics, 10, 14–15; imperialization policies, 124–27, 158; Korean literature, 9–10, 14, 127; Korean responses, 19; later histories in children’s magazines, 171–73; legacy, 162, 165–66, 170, 182; March First movement, 84, 172–73; name changes, 126, 236n16; oath to Japanese emperor, 125, 235n7; print culture, 10, 13–14, 22–23, 49; responses, 123, 210; scholarship on, 123, 210; social change, 2, 5, 22–23; time

period, 123; visual culture, 14. See also colonial modernity; education Japanese language, vernacular style, 76 Japanese language in Korea: after liberation, 170, 171; children’s magazines, 134, 238n38; genbun itchi movement, 76; literature, 79; in schools, 126; use of, 221–22n20 Jenks, Chris, 7 Jeong, Kelly Y., 15 Johnson, Mark, 67 jokes. See humor Jones, Andrew, 52 Kaebyŏk (Creation), 55, 83–84 Kaehwagi (time of enlightenment), 32 KAPF, see Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio Karatani Kōjin, 6 Katō Hiroyuki, 44 Keijŏ, visual and print culture, 14 Kidok sinbo (Christian Report), 176 Kil Chin-suk, 34 Kim, Eunseon, 81 Kim, Jaihiun, 39 Kim, Jina, 51 Kim, Ki-seok, 138 Kim Hak-chun, 63 Kim Hwa-sŏn, 91, 129 Kim Hye-wŏn, 130 Kim In-su, “March in Place,” 177 (fig.), 177–78 Kim Jong Il, 212–13 Kim Kwang-ju, 187, 245n80 Kim Kyu-t’aek, 170, 243n36 Kim Myŏng Su, 202–3 Kim Nam-ch’ŏn, 10, 239n56 Kim Pok-sun, 16 Kim Pyŏng-ho, 108, 113–14 Kim Pyŏng-je, 168, 169, 242n29 Kim So-ch’un, 80–81, 95 Kim So-un, 170–71, 243n42 Kim Tong-in, 77, 78–79, 151

I ND E X   2 7 9

Kim Tong-ni, 165 Kim Tong Sŏp, The Rising Seabed (Pada esŏ sosanan ttang), 205–7 Kim U-ch’ŏl, 108, 118 Kim Yong-chun, 172 Kim Yong-hŭi, 88 Kim Yong-hwan, 242n22 Kim Yŏng-il, 126 Kim Yu-jŏng, 139, 239n56 Kim Yun-gyŏng, 16 King, Ross, 79, 168 Kinney, Anne Behnke, 60 Kollontai, Alexandra, 108, 233n29 Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio (KAPF), 105, 125, 139, 162, 221n3, 232n18 Korean language: animal names, 157; debates on, 76–77, 171; dictionary, 167–68; kukhanmun script, 30, 39, 77, 83; Literary Sinitic, 75, 77, 79, 170; in literature, 78–79; mismatch of spoken and written, 75, 76–77; national identity and, 76, 77; ŏnmun ilch’i (reconciliation of spoken and written language), 76–77, 79, 167, 225n1; polite forms, 81, 88; purity, 169–70, 171, 179; reforms, 77–79, 95; relationship of word sounds and meanings, 157, 169; revival in postwar period, 164, 166, 167, 168–70, 179; in schools, 76, 81; suppression by Japanese, 126, 127, 168; use of, 221–22n20; vernacular, 69, 75, 84; written script, 83, 88, 109, 168–69, 170, 171, 225n1, 242n30 Korean literature: in colonial period, 9–10, 14, 127; in early twentieth century, 9, 39, 77; language reforms and, 78–79; New Fiction, 78, 226n13; new poetry movement, 39; in postwar period, 162; reflection of Korean spirit, 76, 77; scope, 78; visuality and, 14. See also children’s literature Korean War, 163, 191, 193, 208, 212–213

Ku Chin-hŭi, 104 Kuinhoe (Group of Nine), 139, 239n56 Kwon, Nayoung Aimee, 10, 19–20 Kwŏn Hwan, 104, 232n18 Kwŏn Hyŏk-chun, 89 Kwŏn Podŭrae, 14, 42, 49, 78, 79 Kye San-Sun, 135 Kye Yong-muk, 128–29 labor, of children, 101, 102. See also working-class children Lakoff, George, 67 language: child-friendly, 81–82, 88, 91–93, 94, 95, 98; of child-heart, 76, 167, 170–71; of children, 68; in children’s literature, 75–76, 79–80; diglossia, 75, 225n1; in proletarian children’s literature, 105, 106, 111–13, 115; of proletarian writers, 101, 102, 111–13; of science fiction, 208; vernacular, 112. See also Japanese language; Korean language Lee, Ji-Eun, 10, 16 Lee, Jin-kyung, 105 Lee, Peter, 39 leftist ideology, 107–8, 164, 165. See also proletarian culture Lerer, Seth, 4, 22 Leys, Ruth, 67 Liang Qichao, 5, 32 liberation. See postwar period literacy: challenges of increasing, 75–76; of children, 2, 48–49, 113, 217n50; cultural, 69; levels in Korea, 50, 54, 171; visual, 69; of women, 16. See also education Li Zhi, 60 local color (hyangt’osaek) movement, 157–58 Locke, John, 5 Lyapunov, Boris, 201 magazines. See children’s magazines; women’s magazines

2 8 0    IN D E X

Ma Hae-song, 64–66, 223–24n63 Makimoto Kusurō, 100, 104 maps, 36–38 Marathon Cookies advertisements, 133, 134 (fig.) March First movement, 84, 172–73 Marx, Karl, 108, 174 Marxism, 107–8. See also leftist ideology; proletarian writers masculinity, 15, 43 media. See children’s magazines; newspapers; publishing industry; radio scripts; women’s magazines men. See gender; masculinity militarized child, 125–26, 130–32 Min Chae-ho, 178 minds. See child-heart model building, 132, 166 modernity: capitalist, 105, 112; childhood and, 31, 52–53, 211, 216n13; children and, 13, 105; hygiene and health, 135, 137; photography and, 35, 219n29; visuality and, 13–14, 51; youth and, 30– 31, 45–46. See also colonial modernity motherhood, 15–16, 52, 188. See also childrearing mountains: imagery, 42, 156; Korean, 39, 167, 189, 219–20n33; sea and, 40. See also nature Mun Han-byŏl, 11, 12 music. See songs Mussolini, Benito, 134, 174 Nagasaki, 193, 208 Nakajima Kotō, 86 Napoleon, 35, 36, 38, 108, 174 national identity: folktales and, 80, 82, 83–85, 86, 90–91, 96–98, 168; Korean language and, 76, 77; South Korean, 175; storytelling and, 91, 95 National Library for Children and Young Adults, 210 nationalism: children’s roles, 31, 52–53,

101, 125–26; Korean, 87, 98, 165, 172– 73, 174–76, 181–82; masculinity and, 15, 43; in postwar period, 14, 172–73, 174–75, 181–82, 189; script, 168–69, 170, 242n30; self-sacrifice and, 174–75; sports and, 178, 179; symbols, 14; youth roles, 38–39, 44 nature, children’s relationship with: affective response, 56, 62; critique of modernity and, 158; curiosity, 62; educational use, 66–67; emotional education and, 62; fantasies, 185; as fundamental connection, 213; human superiority to nature, 44, 49; illustrations, 151, 155; language and, 93, 157; in magazines, 24, 73–74, 128; North Korean views, 201, 202; nostalgia and, 49, 73, 128; in nuclear age, 19, 191, 192–94, 197–98, 207; Pang on, 56–57; in poetry, 18–19, 47–48, 154–55, 156–57, 159, 188–89, 204; in postwar period, 9, 163, 185, 189, 209; in science fiction, 192–94, 197–99, 202, 204–7, 209, 213–14; scientific view, 195, 196; in stories, 65–66. See also child-heart Nel, Philip, 101 New Life campaign (Sin saenghwal undong), 176 New Tendency movement, 100 newspapers: advertisements, 133; children’s, 141. See also Tonga ilbo No In, 113 North Korea: child-heart in, 212–13; children’s literature, 201, 202–7, 212–13; children’s magazines, 192, 203; establishment of government, 181; iconography, 248n41; language policy, 171; legitimacy, 163; science fiction, 198, 201–2, 204–7, 208–9; science magazines, 192, 193, 194–96; Soviet occupation, 161; writers, 139, 162, 165, 179, 202–4, 233n34. See also postwar period

I ND E X   2 8 1

nostalgia: child-heart and, 24, 74; in children’s literature, 19, 20–21; children’s relationship with nature, 49, 73, 128; in colonial period, 19–21, 49, 74, 128, 217n59 nuclear age: atomic bombs, 191, 193, 208; child-heart, 9; children’s relationship with nature, 19, 191, 192–94, 197–98, 207. See also Cold War Ŏ Sun U, 205 Ogawa Mimei, 21, 59 Oh, Seong-cheol, 138 Ŏnmun ilch’i (reconciliation of spoken and written language), 76–77, 79, 167, 225n1. See also Korean language Ŏrini (Children): child-heart and, 69, 71–74; content, 69, 184; covers, 71–73, 72 (fig.), 93, 225n92; criticism from left, 100; first issue, 69–70, 73; folktales, 69, 79–80, 87, 93, 94–95, 98; gender neutrality, 16; illustrations, 47–48, 48 (fig.), 69–70, 70 (fig.), 71–73; interactions with readers, 70–71; Japanese influence, 21, 59; “Leaf Boat,” 47–48, 48 (fig.); Pang and, 8; price, 188; Saektonghoe and, 50–51; title, 31; writers, 92–93; years of publication, 31 Ŏrini (term), 8, 31, 53–54 Ŏrininara (Children’s World): articles, 244n50; essays, 165–66; fiction, 184; gender neutrality, 16; historic accounts, 172, 173; sports articles, 178 O’Sullivan, Emer, 96 Pacific War: atomic bombings, 191, 193, 208; Japanese defeat, 161, 208; Koreans in Japanese military, 234–35n2, 237n20. See also wartime rhetoric Paek Sŏk, 201, 204 Paektusan, 246n4

Pak Hyŏn-sun, 113 Pak Ko-gyŏng, 114 Pak Se-yŏng, 100, 105, 113, 114, 115, 203, 242n16 Pak Suk-cha, 16 Pak T’ae-wŏn, 124, 126, 149–50, 173, 239n56 Pak Yŏng-hŭi, 108, 120, 234n61 Pak Yong-jŏng, 152; “Side by Side,” 135–37, 136 (fig.), 176–77 Pang Chŏng-hwan: on children, 55–58, 94, 209; Ch’ŏndogyo and, 55; on folktales, 83–84, 85; folktale translations, 79–80, 82, 86–87, 93, 94–95, 96–97, 98; influence, 8, 64, 183, 185; interest in German culture, 93–94; in Japan, 21, 58–59, 96; language of heart and, 94, 98; magazines edited, 55, 217n44; nationalism, 98; penname, 59, 223n40; “In Praise of the Child,” 56–58; Sarang ŭi sŏnmul (Gift of Love), 83, 86–87, 98, 227n28; on writing for children, 91–92, 95. See also Ŏrini parents. See childrearing; family; motherhood Park, Sunyoung, 10, 105 Perry, Samuel, 100, 102 photography: modernity and, 35, 219n29; in Ŏrini, 69, 71; in Sonyŏn, 35 (fig.), 35–36. See also illustrations Piaget, Jean, 5 Pickles, John, 37 Pieper, Daniel, 75 poetry: in children’s magazines, 34, 38, 39–43, 44, 47, 135–37, 152–57, 177; children’s relationship with nature, 18–19, 47–48, 154–55, 156–57, 159, 188– 89, 204; indigenous, 128; language, 113; new poetry movement, 39; pastoral, 150–55, 159; in postwar period, 175–77, 180–81; proletarian, 103–4, 116–18; realism, 155–56, 204; wartime

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rhetoric, 131–32; of Wordsworth, 18–19. See also songs; and individual writers Poole, Janet, 10, 19, 21, 127 poor children: in colonial period, 101, 128, 138–39, 165–66; in poetry and stories, 104, 108–10, 180; in postwar period, 179. See also working-class children postcolonial period, see postwar period postwar period: censorship, 162; childheart, 8–9, 170–71, 182–85, 186–87, 189, 192, 209; children’s literature, 162, 164– 65, 184–86, 189; children’s relationship with nature, 9, 163, 185, 189, 209; cultural production, 162–63; division of Korea, 161–62, 163, 181, 208; education, 16, 164, 182; health and hygiene, 176, 178, 179; Korean language revival, 164, 166, 167, 168–70, 179; Korean literature, 162; in late colonial period, 8; leftist ideology, 164, 165; moral reforms, 176; nationalism, 14, 172–73, 174–75, 181–82, 189; New Life campaign, 176; optimism, 163, 175–76, 182–83; poetry, 175–77, 180–81; print culture, 162–63, 164–65; proletarian culture, 164; proletarian writers, 162, 179, 242n16; publishing industry, 164–65, 168, 242n28; reform movements, 176. See also children’s magazines, in postwar period; Cold War; Korean War; North Korea; nuclear age; South Korea poverty. See poor children print culture: for children and youth, 31– 32; in China, 33; in colonial period, 10, 13–14, 22–23, 49; in early twentieth century, 29, 31–32, 49; in Japan, 33, 34; mass, 32, 49; in postwar period, 162–63, 164–65; technology and, 52 proletarian children’s literature: affective response, 106–7, 111–12, 121; aims, 102, 103, 106–7, 111–12, 115; biographies, 108; bodies of children, 101–2,

107, 118–20, 121; censorship and, 103; child-heart and, 183, 211; criticism of, 183; debates, 203; fantasy genre, 115; fiction, 99–101, 102, 108–12, 118; illustrations, 119, 119 (fig.), 120 (fig.); international context, 102, 103–5; language, 105, 106, 111–13, 115; magazines, 8, 99–100, 103–6, 119, 127, 164, 232–33n25; Marxist concepts, 107–8; poetry, 103–4, 116–18; realism, 112, 115, 203; similarities to mainstream, 106–7; in United States, 232n17; violence, 119–20 proletarian culture: ideology, 100, 105, 106, 107–8; international, 100–101, 102, 103–5; legacy, 232n22; in postwar period, 164; suppression by Japanese, 125 proletarian organizations, 50, 105, 125, 221n3, 232n24 proletarian writers: cultural critique, 102, 103; debates on children’s literature, 203; Japanese, 100–101, 102–3; language, 101, 102, 111–13; New Tendency movement, 100; in North Korea, 162, 165, 179, 233n34; in postwar period, 162, 179, 242n16, 245n78; publications, 105; in wartime, 138–39; on writing craft, 112–15; writing for children, 8, 99–101, 102–3, 106–15, 120–21, 211. See also Hyŏn Tŏk propaganda, 129, 150–51, 235n9 publishing industry: in postwar period, 164–65, 168, 242n28; profit motives, 165. See also children’s magazines; print culture Pulgŭn chyŏgori (Red Jacket), 31, 87, 88, 211, 228n46 Pyŏllara (Star World): content, 104, 105– 6; contributors, 105; discontinuance, 127; fiction, 99–100; foreign readers, 105; gender neutrality, 16; ideology, 232n25; illustrations, 119 (fig.); in postwar period, 164, 165, 179

I ND E X   2 8 3

radio scripts, 128–29, 149–50, 236n13 Rat Fire, 120 reader reception, 23 realism: in fiction, 198, 203, 204; in poetry, 155–56, 204; in proletarian children’s literature, 112, 115, 203; socialist, 247n29 religion. See Ch’ŏndogyo; Christianity Ri Wŏn U (Yi Wŏn-u), 203, 204 Robinson, Michael, 9, 10 “Rock Flower and Little Star” (Ma Haesong), 64–66 Rose, Jacqueline, 6, 23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5 Russian writers, 201. See also Soviet Union Saebyŏl (New Star), 31, 211, 220–21n52 Saedongmu (New Comrade), 164, 165 Saektonghoe, 50–51, 58, 223–24n63 Schiavi, Giuliana, 96 schools. See education science: children’s magazines, 192, 193–96, 201, 203, 204, 246n4; discourses, 193–94, 208; education, 191–92, 193, 194; interest in, 191–92, 202, 208; methods, 198; national security and, 193, 194–95, 197–98, 202 science fiction (kwahak sosŏl): dystopian, 198–200; illustrations, 200 (fig.), 205–6, 206–7 (fig.); language, 208; nature-child relationship in, 192–94, 197–99, 202, 204–7, 209, 213–14; in North Korea, 198, 201–2, 204–7, 208– 9; prewar, 198; Russian, 201; in South Korea, 197–200, 206–7, 208, 209; writers, 196–97, 198, 208 script nationalism, 168–69, 170, 242n30 seas: imagery, 39–42, 100, 219–20n33; ocean floors, 248n40; science fiction set in, 205–6, 209 Second Sino-Japanese War, 123, 124–27, 158 Seigworth, Gregory, 17

Sejong, King, 169, 242n30 Shin, Gi-Wook, 9, 10 Shin, Haerin, 198 Shin, Jiwon, 14, 51 Shōnen senki (Youth Battle Flag), 100, 103–4 Sim Myŏng-gyun, 105 Sin Yŏng-ch’ŏl, 138–39 Sin Yŏng-hyŏn, 62, 66, 67, 223n52 Sin yŏsŏng (New Woman), 15, 55, 187, 217n44 Sinmungwan Publishing House, 34 Sinsidae (New Era), 125, 134, 235n9 Sinsonyŏn (New Youth): audience, 113; content, 104, 105–6, 114; contributors, 105, 232n25; covers, 120 (fig.); discontinuance, 127, 236n14; fiction, 99–100; gender neutrality, 16 So Hyŏn, 181 Social Darwinism, 38, 39, 44, 52, 96 social inequality: bourgeois children, 113–14; critiques of, 179–80; in education, 138–39, 180–81, 237n19, 239n51. See also poor children; working-class children socialist realism, 247n29 Sogungmin (Young Citizens), 125, 134, 235n9 Sohaksaeng (Young Student): biographies, 174; content, 166; essays on language, 170; gender neutrality, 16; health information, 178; historic accounts, 172–73; illustrations, 177 (fig.); poetry, 177; publication, 165, 166 soldiers’ letters, 133 Sŏn An-na, 162, 164–65 Son Chi-yŏn, 11–12 Son Ki-jŏng, 134 Song Ch’ang-il, 126, 135 Song Pyŏng-jun, 179, 244–45n65 Song Sun-il, 66, 224n64 Song Yŏng, 100, 105, 107, 108, 115, 120, 139, 203

2 8 4    IN D E X

songs: of children, 57, 73; emotional education and, 66; language, 113; in late colonial period, 152; proletarian, 114; writing, 92–93, 114. See also poetry Sonyŏ (girl), 43 Sonyŏn (term), 112 Sonyŏn (Youth; 1908–1911): aims, 30, 38, 43, 46; audience, 16, 33, 38–39, 43, 45, 219n16; biographies, 35, 38, 43, 108, 174; colonial power and, 43; educational content, 37–38, 39, 43, 44, 219n31; establishment, 30, 31; inaugural issue, 33, 34, 35 (fig.), 36, 37, 37 (fig.), 38 (fig.), 38–39; influence, 43–45, 211; interactions with readers, 37; Japanese magazines and, 33–34; poetry, 34, 38, 39–43, 41 (fig.), 44, 47; sales, 219n24; title, 29– 30, 32, 33, 39, 43; translated works, 220n35, 220n43; visual elements, 34–38, 35 (fig.), 37 (fig.), 38 (fig.), 40, 41 (fig.), 47–48, 69 Sonyŏn (Youth; 1937–1940): advertisements, 133–34, 134 (fig.); alternative voices, 138, 139–41, 146–47; biographies, 134, 174; editor, 236n15; entertainment, 127–28; essays, 132, 134–35, 137, 157; fiction, 130–31, 135, 139–41, 146–47; first issue, 127, 134–35; humor section, 147–49, 158; illustrations, 131, 131 (fig.), 151 (fig.), 153, 155, 239–40n62; poetry, 135–37, 136 (fig.), 152–57; soldiers’ letters, 133; wartime rhetoric, 126, 157, 158 Sonyŏn Chosŏn ilbo, 141 Sonyŏndan (Boy Scouts), 192, 193, 195–96, 201, 204 Sonyŏnhoe, 50, 55 Sonyŏn kwahak (Children’s Science), 192, 193, 194–95, 198, 201 South Korea: children’s literature, 212; establishment of government, 181; language policy, 171; legitimacy, 163,

181; national identity, 175; science fiction, 197–200, 206–7, 208, 209; science magazines, 192, 193; United States Military Government in Korea, 63, 161–62, 241n4; US role, 181, 182. See also postwar period Soviet Union: feminism, 108, 233n29; leftist writers on, 104; literary influence on North Korean writers, 201, 202; occupation of North Korea, 161; science fiction, 201. See also Cold War sports, 178, 179, 180 Steedman, Carolyn, 6 Stephens, John, 147, 213 Stephens, Sharon, 31 Stoler, Ann, 14–15, 68 stories (tonghwa): children’s experiences of world, 57; emotional education and, 66; reading to children, 56; tales and, 84; use of term, 59; writing, 91–92. See also fiction for children; folktales storytelling: for children, 56, 58, 128; Korean tradition, 84, 85; national identity and, 91, 95 Suzuki Miekichi, 59 Takahashi, Yoshito, 86 technology: advances, 198, 208; airplanes, 132; atomic bombs, 191, 193, 208; interest in, 191–92, 194, 202; print culture and, 52. See also photography; science Tikhonov, Vladimir, 15, 43 Tolstoy, Leo, 201, 220n35, 220n43 Tonga ilbo, 55, 61–62, 87, 107, 163, 187–88, 236n14 Tonghwa, see stories Tongmyŏng (Light of the East), 87–88 tongsim. See child-heart United States: child protection, 61; leftist children’s literature, 232n17; leftist

I ND E X   2 8 5

criticism of, 104; South Korea and, 181, 182. See also Cold War United States Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), 63, 161–62, 241n4 urban culture, 14 USAMGIK. See United States Military Government in Korea Verne, Jules, 198 visibility of children: as audience of children’s literature, 22; child-heart and, 6, 54, 55; demand for children’s literature, 2, 31; development of children’s literature and, 4, 44–45; factors in, 58, 64; gender and, 14; social shifts and, 4, 48–49, 102; visuality and, 13; of working-class children, 120–21 visual art: art education, 66, 67; by children, 57–58, 68; local color movement, 157–58. See also illustrations visual culture, 14, 51–52 visuality: in children’s literature, 11, 13–15, 53; children’s responses, 68; in colonial culture, 49, 51–52; knowledge acquisition through, 34, 37–38; Korean literature and, 14; in magazines, 34, 68–69, 193; modernity and, 13–14, 51; of scientific content, 193. See also illustrations; photography visual literacy, 69 Wakabayashi, Judy, 95–96 Wang Shouren, 59–60 wars. See Korean War; Pacific War; Second Sino-Japanese War wartime rhetoric: in children’s literature, 129–37, 152, 235–36n12; in magazines, 126, 127, 129–37, 158; in poetry, 131–32 Washburn, Dennis, 17 Williams, Lydia, 147 women: biographies, 43; femininity, 15; feminism, 108, 233n29; gender norms,

15, 16, 43; motherhood, 15–16, 52, 188; teachers, 188. See also gender; girls women’s magazines, 15, 52 Wŏn Chong-ch’an, 4–5, 54, 56, 155, 211 Wordsworth, William, “My Heart Leaps Up,” 18–19 working-class children: affective responses, 113–14; educational opportunities, 117–18, 138–39, 179; in other countries, 104; visibility, 120–21; vulnerability, 101, 102, 103. See also poor children World War II. See Pacific War Wu, Pei-yi, 60 Yanagita Kunio, 85 Yang Mi-rim, 134 Yi Chae-ch’ŏl, 4, 245n77 Yi Chu-hong: “Fish Bones,” 99, 108–9, 111; life and career, 105, 230–31n1, 242n16; “The Postbox,” 110–11 Yi Chung-yŏn, 164 Yi Hae-jo, 198 Yi Ha-yŏng, 179, 244–45n65 Yi Hŭi-bok, 172 Yi Hŭi-jŏng, 87 Yi Hŭi-sŭng, 169, 243n33 Yi Hyŏng-u, 180–81 Yi Ki-yŏng, 100, 245n78 Yi Ku-jo, 126, 130–31, 132–33 Yi Ku-wŏl, 117–18 Yi Kwang-su: “Chanyŏ chungsimnon” (On the Centrality of Children), 8, 30–31, 45, 77; on literature and language, 77–78, 226n9; “On Blame,” 135, 141; “On Gratitude,” 134–35; view of women’s roles, 15; view of youth, 7–8, 32, 226n12; “What Is Literature?,” 78; on Yun Sŏk-chung, 151 Yi Man-gyu, 166, 242n25 Yi Mu-yŏng, 196, 247n12 Yi Sang, 124, 239n56 Yi Sun-sin, 166–67, 172, 173–74

2 8 6    IN D E X

Yi T’ae-jun, 120, 124, 156–57, 158, 203, 239n56, 245n78 Yi Tong-gyu, 109, 110, 114–15, 116–17, 233n34, 242n16 Yi Ŭn, 35 (fig.), 36 Yi Wan-yong, 179, 244n65 Yi Wŏn-su: career, 240n88; “A Historical View of Children’s Literature,” 183–85; poetry, 152, 155, 156; realism, 155–56; stories, 126; The World in the Woods (Supsok nara), 184, 185 Yi Yŏng-ch’ŏl, 169–70, 243n34 Yi Yŏng-min, 178 Yi Yŏn-ho, 212 Yŏhaksaeng (Schoolgirl), 16 Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, 98 Yŏm Sang-sŏp, 87, 165 youth: cultural visibility, 30; hope for, 7–8; modernity and, 30–31, 45–46;

political role, 30, 32, 38–39, 44; print media for, 31, 49. See also children youth groups: development of children’s literature and, 5, 64; literary, 48, 50–51; socialist, 50, 232n24 Yu Chi-yŏng, 92–93, 229n70 Yu Hyŏn-suk, 187–88 Yu Kil-chun, 171, 244n44 Yu Kwan-sun, 172 Yu Ŏk-kam, 176 Yu Sin, 194 Yun Sŏk-chung: on child-heart, 187–89; as editor, 166, 236n15; poetry, 151–55, 175–76, 188–89; as Sonyŏn editor, 127, 134 Yun Yŏng-sil, 33 Zhou Zuoren, 52 Zipes, Jack, 97