Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era [Illustrated] 0824838211, 9780824838218

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HISTORICAL MATERIALS

Imperatives of Culture SELECTED ESSAYS ON KOREAN HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND SOCIETY FROM THE JAPANESE COLONIAL ERA

EDITED BY

KOREAN CLASSICS LIBRARY

Christopher P. Hanscom Walter K. Lew and Youngju Ryu

Imperatives of Culture

KOREAN CLASSICS LIBRARY: HISTORICAL MATERIALS

Imperatives of Culture Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era

Edited by

Christopher P. Hanscom, Walter K. Lew, and Youngju Ryu

University of Hawai‘i Press/Honolulu Korean Classics Library

© 2013 The Regents of the University of California All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13    6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   Reclaiming culture : selected essays on Korean history, literature, and society from the Japanese colonial era / edited by Christopher P. Hanscom, Walter K. Lew, and Youngju Ryu.     pages  cm.―(Korean classics library: historical materials)   Includes index.   ISBN 978-0-8248-3821-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Korea―Politics and government―1910–1945.  2. Korean essays―20th century―Translations into English.  3. National characteristics, Korean.  I. Hanscom, Christopher P., editor of compilation.  II. Lew, Walter K., editor of compilation.  III. Ryu, Youngju, editor of compilation.  IV. Series: Korean classics library. Historical materials.   DS916.535.R43 2013   951.9’03―dc23 2012042921 Korean Classics Library: Historial Materials Series Editors: John Duncan, University of California, Los Angeles Namhee Lee, University of California, Los Angeles Robert Buswell, University of California, Los Angeles Series Editorial Board: Donald Baker, University of British Columbia Sun Joo Kim, Harvard University Jay Lewis, Oxford University Charles Muller, Tokyo University Young-chan Ro, George Mason University Ken Robinson, International Christian University, Tokyo Edward Shultz, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa Senior Editorial Assistant: Jennifer Jung-Kim, University of California, Los Angeles Translations in this series have been funded by a generous grant from the Academy of Korean Studies, Seongnam, Republic of Korea. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Design and composition by Wanda China Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

Contents



Foreword by John Duncan



Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

vii xi

  1 Yi Kwangsu | introduction and translation by Ellie Choi

1

  2 Sin Paegu | introduction and translation by Jiyeon Kim

29

  3 Mun Ilp’yŏng | introduction by Sophia Kim, translation by Hijoo Son

42

  4 Ch’oe Namsŏn | introduction and translation by Nayoung Aimee Kwon

64

  5 Chŏng Inbo | introduction and translation by Seung-Ah Lee

88





On National Reconstruction

Urging the Vanguard of Social Movements to Come Forward The Social Standing of Korean Women

Images of Korea in Japanese Literature Chosŏn’s Five Thousand Years of Ŏl

  6 Paek Namun | introduction and translation by Charles R. Kim

104

  7 Kang Kyŏngae | introduction and translation by Sonja M. Kim

132

  8 Kim Kirim | introduction by Mickey Hong and Walter K. Lew, translation by Walter K. Lew

154





The History of Korean Society and Economy A Theory on the Present Stage of the Korean Economy The Path Chosŏn Women Must Tread Two Hundred Yen for My Manuscript On Leaving Kando, a Farewell to Kando

Soliloquies of “Pierrot”—Fragmentary Notions on “Poésie”

  9 Ch’oe Chaesŏ | introduction and translation by Christopher P. Hanscom 165

The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes by a Stream and “Wings”

10 Kim Namch’ŏn | introduction and translation by Youngju Ryu

The Judas Within and Literature

181

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Contents

11 Kim Tongni | introduction and translation by Chiyoung Kim

The True Meaning of Pure Literature: A Present Task of National Literature A Personal Opinion on Writing Literature—on the Inclination of My Literary Spirit

12 Son Chint’ae | introduction and translation by Mickey Hong

Preface to Introduction to the History of the Korean Nation

197

209



Contributors 221



Index 225

Foreword

It is hard to find the words to express my delight that this important anthology is finally going to press. Some years back, Christopher Hanscom, then a PhD student in Korean literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, approached me with an idea about a project that would have our graduate students translate a number of essays by major Korean thinkers of the colonial period. Chris and I spent some time going through various colonial-era publications and subsequent compilations of essays, most notably the 1972 edition of the Anthology of Renowned Essays of Modern Korea (Han’guk hyŏndae myŏng nonsŏl chip) published by Sindonga, identifying a number of pieces that seemed worthy of introduction to an English-speaking audience. Chris, in collaboration with a number of other graduate students, then applied to UCLA’s Center for Korean Studies for funding for a translation workshop, an application that was approved enthusiastically by the center’s faculty advisory committee. The workshop involved multiple sessions. At the first session we discussed the purposes of the project and the potential audience for an anthology, made preliminary choices of texts and translators, and decided to invite the participation of a small number of graduate students at other universities who had expertise on some important texts. At subsequent sessions, translators shared early drafts while working on such matters as the format of the book, the integration of translations and introductions, a style sheet, and romanization. Walter Lew played a particularly important role in guiding the group on these issues, and Youngju Ryu made substantial contributions to the overall conceptualization of the project. Seeking to maintain the collaborative nature of the undertaking and to ensure high-quality translations and introductions, we established procedures by which the translators reviewed and commented on each other’s work. The project languished for a few years, partly for lack of funding and partly because most of the translators were preoccupied with finishing their PhD dissertations. Nevertheless, a few years ago we received authorization from the Academy of Korean Studies to include the anthology in the Historical Materials series of the Korean Classics Library translation program. This provided the funding to complete the project. We decided to have Chris Hanscom, Walter Lew, and Youngju Ryu serve as volume vii

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editors; they have labored long and hard to transform this diverse collection of translations and introductions into a coherent whole. Although all the translations and introductions had been reviewed by other members of the group, we turned to outside talent for reviews of some of the translations while I myself reviewed and edited several of the more difficult translations and introductions. In selecting texts for this project, we followed a small number of principles: 1) the degree to which texts could be considered representative of the debates among Korean intellectuals and between Korean and Japanese intellectuals of the colonial period; 2) the extent to which some texts could shed light on what have been relatively unexplored aspects of colonial intellectual life; and 3) the relevance of texts to current debates about the nature of the colonial experience and its effects on post-liberation Korean society and culture. We had in mind a volume that could be used in undergraduate and graduate courses on Korea as well as in more general courses on East Asia and that would also be attractive and useful for a general educated audience with interests in modern Korea and East Asia. Reviews by our three outside referees suggest that we may have accomplished our goals. I can only hope that this anthology will contribute to better appreciation of the modern Korean experience as well as to greater general understanding of the travails of the intellectuals of colonized peoples. John Duncan, Director Center for Korean Studies University of California, Los Angeles

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our gratitude first to John Duncan, who has been a tireless supporter of this project from its inception. The many hours that he put into this volume are representative of both his consistent encouragement of young scholars and his ongoing efforts to build the field of Korean studies. Robert Buswell and Jennifer Jung-Kim were also instrumental in bringing this volume to press, and we are greatly indebted to them for their invaluable contributions. The Center for Buddhist Studies and the Center for Korean Studies at UCLA have also provided vital financial and logistical support throughout. We are very grateful to Leif Olsen and Jiyun Kang for their excellent work reviewing portions of the translations and to Sherin Wing, Minsuh Son, and Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins for their outstanding efforts in helping to edit and standardize the final product. Finally we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their incisive and helpful comments, and Patricia Crosby, our editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, for her care and thoughtful attention to the manuscript. This work was supported by The Academy of Korean Studies Grant, which is funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD, Basic Research Promotion Fund) (AKS 2007-AB-2002).

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Introduction

The colonial era (1910–1945) was a difficult time in Korean history. As national sovereignty was lost the imperative to clarify cultural identity became ever more important. The translations collected in this volume span a wide range of topics, disciplines, and ideological positions, a diversity that reflects the thought and expression characteristic of the period. These pieces, originally published in some of the most prestigious and widely circulated periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s, have been selected in part to indicate the breadth and depth of cultural production during a period when Korean-language publications flourished and the working out of national and cultural identity became increasingly crucial. It was during the early twentieth century that culture came into question not only as a category spanning national, colonial, and imperial identities but also as one that was intimately tied to other key issues of the period, from class and social reconstruction to language, gender, and the idea of a people itself. Culture can be seen as an imperative in this context from a variety of perspectives: the acculturating imperative of empire, the demand to become an imperial subject; the related but contradictory imperative to embody or act out a local culture that could serve as a justification for the civilizing mission of the colonial project, an injunction against coevality; or the imperative to claim a national culture in resistance against the assimilatory forces of colonial rule. While culture is not the only key concept dealt with in these collected essays, it is a concept that reveals the complexity of both imperial and national identities and the political projects that undergirded them. This volume thus takes part in an ongoing re-evaluation of the colonial period in East Asia, focusing primarily on the era of Japanese colonization in Korea. Both the volume and scope of scholarship dealing with this period have expanded over the past decade, exceeding earlier modes of analysis in thinking across disciplines and national boundaries about colonization and the legacy of Japanese empire. Translations of historical and literary critical writing from the Korean colonial era have not, however, kept pace. Without claiming comprehensive coverage, this volume aims at filling that gap, providing translations of colonial-era primary source material in English. xi

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It would be impossible to represent fully the proliferation of ideas and texts that emerged in the colonial period. However, the authors selected for inclusion here are among the most well-known intellectuals, historians, writers, poets, and literary critics from the early twentieth century. The pieces chosen to appear in these pages are meant to reflect a heterogeneity of topical, disciplinary, and ideological approaches. Although the collection is bracketed by works published as early as 1921 and as late as 1948, the primary focus is on the key decade of the 1930s, when, after over two decades of formal colonization and under increasingly stringent colonial policies, Korean language and culture were under greatest threat. This was a period of intense surveillance and censorship across the Japanese empire, and the content and tone of the pieces included here should thus be understood not only in the context of modernization—the socioeconomic developments related to the entry of Korea into the emergent global system of nation-states—but also as products of and responses to this specific colonial environment. This collection is a testament to the difficulty of categorizing or delimiting intellectual work from the colonial period. In the first place, the essays regularly blur the distinction between historical and literary analysis and description, prompting us to seek ways of thinking and writing that exceed the narrow constraints of disciplinary specialization. Second, these are pieces that draw on resources not limited to Korea or East Asia but spanning areas and time periods in ways that challenge the wisdom of limiting our interpretations within a nation-state paradigm. Third, many of these texts engage with the particular—the local (social, economic, cultural, political) context—while at the same time positioning that context in relation to the global or international (world literature or culture, global economic development, the international proletariat, world history). Finally, these essays represent a diversity of ideological positions across which it is nonetheless possible to find illuminating convergences and similarities. Partly as a consequence of the complexity of positioning these essays in relation to received disciplinary categories, we have relied in ordering the pieces not only on a rough chronology by publication date but also on theme and intellectual lineage. Setting the terms of the debate, the pieces by “cultural gradualist” Yi Kwangsu and Marxist Sin Paegu lead off in a contrastive pair, raising issues of culture, class, language, history, and social organization that run throughout the volume, issues “debated among intellectuals of the day, from the meaning of post–World War I reconstruction to the consequences of the emerging leftist imperative,” as Ellie Choi writes in her introduction to Yi’s “On National Reconstruc-



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tion.” Kim Tongni and Son Chint’ae provide a closing bookend to the collection, showing in their essays from the mid- to late 1940s how concepts and trends seen in earlier pieces play out in the immediate post-liberation period, ideas that are re-inflected in the context of national division and post-colonial history. The interposing eight essays center on the decade of the 1930s and are loosely grouped by theme or method, as with the approach that Mun Il’pyŏng, Ch’oe Namsŏn, and Chŏng Inbo take to diverse topics by turning to the ancient past, or in the common interest that Kim Kirim and Ch’oe Chaesŏ show in the capacity of literary language to express the particularities of their historical moment. While it is hoped that the loose chronology will help to orient readers unfamiliar with the period or these authors, the sequencing of the volume with attention to thematic approaches and intellectual or ideological concerns contains a latent pedagogy that we hope will also prove productive. In what follows, after a brief overview of the colonial period, several major themes suggesting interconnections between the essays are introduced. These themes include nation and nationalism, class, gender, the status and function of language, and history and historiography. Our intent is not to limit or predetermine the reception of these works by promoting particular interpretive frameworks but rather to encourage a range of potential approaches by revealing a number of possible (but not exclusive) ways in which these diverse essays might be approached. While each piece is briefly summarized here, the reader may turn to the in-depth introductions preceding individual translations for historical and biographical information specific to each. The period during which Japan formally colonized Korea has proven influential not only in terms of scholarship but also in regional politics, economic relations, and cultural production, a painful thorn embedded in the Korean national imaginaries. An array of contemporary issues either originate in or have been strongly inflected by the colonial experience, from domestic and international politics in the region (including the struggle for historical and actual ownership of contested territories; the claims to restitution and demand for apology of the so-called comfort women, who were recruited or coerced into sexual slavery to Japan’s military forces; and protests against the annual visit of the Japanese prime minister to the Yasukuni shrine) to a number of recent popular films set in colonial Korea. It is also possible to see the roots of national division on the peninsula in the varied politics of resistance that developed during the colonial period, particularly with the rise of nationalism and communism from the

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1920s,1 and certainly claims to political legitimacy of governments in both North and South Korea have stemmed from a mythology born in part in the colonial period.2 The colonial era is typically divided into three periods. The first period is that of military rule, or the “dark period” (amhŭkki ), beginning with formal colonization in 1910 through 1919, when the March First uprising yielded changes in colonial policy. The second is the period of “cultural policy” or rule (munhwa chŏngch’i; J. bunka seiji ) from 1920 through the early 1930s, when restrictions in areas such as Korean-language publications, business activity, public gatherings, and service in government were relaxed under a policy of assimilation (tonghwa; J. dōka). And finally was the period of imperialization (J. kōminka) beginning roughly from the 1931 Manchurian Incident and intensifying throughout the 1930s, particularly after Japan’s entry into war on the continent in 1937. The texts selected here are primarily drawn from the difficult decade of the 1930s, when the exigencies of an expansive war effort led to increasingly heightened constraints and demands on the colonized. It was during the 1930s that well-known efforts at molding Koreans into model imperial citizens intensified: compulsory worship at Shinto shrines; the “national language movement” (J. kokugo undō), with the Korean language (treated as a second language in schools even prior to formal colonization in 1910) greatly restricted (when not banned, as in the case of film) by the late 1930s and early 1940s; the “name-changing campaign” (J. sōshi kaimei ) that replaced Korean names with Japanese names from 1940;3 the active recruitment of military volunteers; the coercive recruitment of hundreds of thousands of women into sexual slavery for the imperial military; and the recruitment and forced migration of hundreds of thousands of laborers.4 Political sovereignty for Koreans had ended with the signing of the annexation treaty in August 1910, but it was under imperialization in the later colonial period that Korean cultural identity came under sustained threat. It was here that the above-mentioned assimilatory policies and practices were implemented “with great brutality in all Japanese colonies” in the attempt to “smother . . . the identities of the colonized and repress . . . any form of cultural difference.”5 It is thus not surprising that many of the articles translated here take Korean language, culture, and history as central topics; nor is it surprising that these authors do so by situating that culture at the intersection of local and global history. From Yi Kwangsu’s recommendation of cultural reconstruction in 1921 to Son Chint’ae’s post-colonial re-discovery of the national self in 1948, these works often attempt to locate, describe, preserve, or extend a national culture, either through the historical work of description or through the



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comparative work of situating Korean culture globally during a period of intense transnationalization and under the common temporal mode of modernity. At the same time, these pieces were written in a context in which diverse political responses to colonization and the accompanying encroachment of a capitalist socio-economic organization were under formation. From Marxist-Leninist appeals to historical materialism as a method and international class struggle as practice to a variety of nationalist re­sponses that sought the return of sovereignty to a Korean government, it was during the colonial period that many of the concepts, ideals, and debates that continue to structure the discourse around politics and culture on the peninsula found their origins. Under conditions of systematic and racist oppression and in combination with the pressures of rapid modernization, national culture, language, class, gender, the status and function of literature and the arts, and the role of the historian and the status of Korean history took on a crucial importance for these authors. Naturally these categories and concepts overlap, and it is in part the cross-disciplinary approach that many of these articles take that make them of comparative interest in a post-colonial re-reading of the period. It is remarkably difficult to label any one of the essays collected here as exclusively “historical” or “literary critical” by either topic or methodology. At the same time, it is productive to think of these concepts across the different levels on which they function. Language, for instance, may be treated as an everyday phenomenon, as a tool and object of ideology, or at a symbolic level, with no one level distinct from the rest. When the Korean language was assigned the status of a second language in Korean schools under the ideological imperative of (linguistic) assimilation, for instance, the practical application and use of that language in everyday life came under stress. It was under these conditions that the Korean language took on importance as a symbol of national identity. Thus the status and function of language under colonial rule is one central issue dealt with across several of these essays. It was during this period—when the simple use of the Korean language took on an inevitable and dichotomous political significance in relation to colonial power—that the intimate connection between language and ethnic-national identity was formed.6 While the dangers of this culturalist conception of identity have been well documented,7 the treatment of language in these pieces is not uniform. Yi Kwangsu, who in 1917 produced what is widely considered the first novel written in the Korean vernacular, treats language itself as both a necessary sign of the modern and as a political tool in his 1921 “On National Reconstruction.” Here language is an agent of cultural

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change and a medium in which the “contagion” of the reformative concept could be spread, yielding both self- and national awakening. Over a decade later, Kang Kyŏngae—portrayed as a diasporic author keenly aware of class and gender status in Sonja Kim’s introduction—saw the Korean script (hangŭl ) as both an empowering tool for women and as a way for the intellectual to act in and on society. Ch’oe Namsŏn understands language as expressive of culture, and in his “Images of Korea in Japanese Literature” treats language as an artifact that gives evidence of the long-standing cultural relationship between Korea and Japan. As Aimee Kwon points out, in his idealization of Korea’s literary past Ch’oe carefully reverses the value placed on the terms of that relationship through a comparative analysis of the place of Korean language and culture in both the East Asian cultural sphere and the context of world culture. Not only national language but also literary language takes on multiple roles across practical, ideological, and symbolic levels in these translated pieces. Here language exists at the intersection of aesthetics and politics as emergent genres of realism and modernism became inflected with political and ideological value. While the resulting split between realism (as a resistant and nationalist mode of literary production) and modernism (as an apolitical “art for art’s sake”) has arguably structured Korean literary history across the twentieth century and into the present, this division is hardly clear cut in the essays translated here. Kim Kirim’s “Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot’: Fragmentary Notions on ‘Poésie’ ” (1931) pre-dates the poet and critic’s better known “Historical Position of Modernism” (1939),8 where he examines modernism’s position in literary history and relation to social reality. In the aphoristic “Soliloquies” we can see a connection with Kim’s later suggestion that it is the self-conscious reflection of language upon itself that is modernism’s legacy, as he holds forth on both the poetic use of language and the place and function of literature in relation to society. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, writing closer to the middle of the decade, delves more deeply into the relationship between language and reality in his comparative reading of authors Pak T’aewŏn and Yi Sang. The question of how an author was to wield language in order to give a perspective on external (objective) or internal (subjective) reality was a question fraught with political implications during a period in which an accurate rendering of the socio-political reality of the colonized was frequently met with censorship or punishment. Leftist author Kim Namch’ŏn published “The Judas Within and Literature” in 1937, two years after the colonial authorities disbanded the Korean Artistic Proletarian League (KAPF), of which he was a prominent member. In part reacting against the modernist sensibilities and styles



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that Ch’oe Chaesŏ treats in his article, Kim understands the writing of literature itself as a political act. As Youngju Ryu points out in her introduction to the essay, Kim characteristically struggles to overcome the tension between his political views and his literary practice. Writing in the post-liberation period, author and critic Kim Tongni likewise weighs in on the relationship between literature and its national and global context, and defends a focus on individual (rather than class or social) experience as the basis of “pure literature.” Opposed to a literary mode that takes its primary function as the reflection of social reality, in “The True Meaning of Pure Literature” Kim places literature in a “humanist” context and sees “national” literature as developing out of the individual’s participation in this world-historical identity. Both Kim Namch’ŏn and Kim Tongni took retrospective—albeit very different—positions on literary developments during the 1930s and sought a renewal of literary language out of the institutional and linguistic destruction of a coercive colonization. Concerned with literary practice, with the meaning of “literature” in national and global contexts, and with the relationship between literature and ideology, the terms laid down by these authors and critics remain deeply influential in Korean letters into the present day. As with literature and literary criticism, the status of Korean history and historiography during the period developed both out of the local context of colonialism and what Charles Kim describes in his introduction to Paek Namun’s work as “the aporetic division between universality and particularity” that continues as “a central problem in modern Korean historiography.” The determination that we find in these pieces to locate Korean history both “in the past” and “in the present”—as both an object of study and a mode of understanding the present situation in light of that past—can itself be seen as stemming from an effort to undermine the history of Korea put forward under Japanese colonial rule. Whether in response to the “common ancestry” (J. Nissen dōsoron) argument that subsumed Korean historical and cultural identity under a dominant Japanese past9 or theories of stagnation that held that a “backward” Korea was historically inferior to (and hence subject to colonization by) Japan,10 the status of history came to the fore during this period of crisis. In this sense, the “history” performed in these pieces can be thought of as a preservation and extension of local or national culture across the ideological spectrum and in the face of colonization and its attendant discriminatory historical discourse constructed to justify Japan’s imperial efforts. At the same time, this history can be thought of in relation to its place in a larger developmental or evolutionary world historical schema,

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from the dialectics of Marxist history to the movement from aristocratic to “people”-centered national cultures. Sin Paegu, for instance, takes an explicitly Marxist perspective on history in his 1921 “Urging the Vanguard of Social Movements to Come Forward,” a counterpoint to Yi Kwangsu’s more “gradualist” recommendations of the same year. Published in New Life, one of the earliest leftist journals in Korea, Sin’s piece reflects a growing emphasis on the masses or the people (minjung) within a historical-materialist narrative of capitalist development. As Jiyeon Kim emphasizes in her introduction, the author calls for the development of a revolutionary social movement in Korea and a critique of both colonialism and moderate nationalist “cultural activists.” The implicit connection here between Korean and world history is made explicit in socio-economic historian Paek Namun’s 1933 History of Chosŏn Society, where he argues for the place of Korea in universal or global history. Utilizing a historical materialist approach, Paek sought to explain the particularity of the Korean case and at the same time to refute colonialist claims of the stagnancy of Korean history. While Sin and Paek situate Korea within (or in comparison with) the unilinear temporality of a Marxist historical narrative, nationalist historians Chŏng Inbo and Mun Ilp’yŏng turn to ancient history to bolster claims for the function and symbolic meaning of Korean history in the colonized and modernizing present. In his “Chosŏn’s Five Thousand Years of Ŏl,” Chŏng turns to the distant past to create a myth of tradition, a core of cultural identity that he terms the ŏl (spirit, soul, or mind) of the nation, “the one major line that passes . . . throughout our long history no matter how history itself changes or is transformed.” In Chŏng’s complex and fascinating argument, this “spirit” is at once the “light” that gives meaning, value, and structure to historical events and a means of “knowing the ‘self as self’ ” that is possessed by individual members of the nation. One becomes “dull” and “aimless” without this spirit, but, though lost, ŏl may be recovered. Mun as well sought the renewal of national spirit (which he calls Chosŏnsim, the “core” or “heart” of Korea) through the recuperatory effort of the historian, both aiming to increase popular awareness of Korean history and taking the marginalized people (minjung) as the object of his analysis. Indicative of what Sophia Kim calls Mun’s interest in the margins of society and his emphasis on non-political topics, his revisionist history in “The Social Position of Korean Women” (1929) turns to the ancient transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society as the basis for arguing for a leveling of gender relations as a necessary component of a “civilizing” modernization process. While the inequality of men and women is seen as a potential symptom of “stagnancy,” equality signals entrance into “human history.”



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Finally, Son Chint’ae’s preface to Introduction to the History of the Korean Nation (1948) may be read in its post-liberation context as both a reaction to political polarization just prior to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 and a synthesis of historical and historiographical trends that developed throughout the late colonial period. It is particularly in the prescriptive thrust of Son’s writing in this piece—seen both politically, in the proposed movement toward solidarity in the elimination of internal class and political struggles, and historiographically, in the imperative to render accurate and ethically holistic national histories—where we can see the reaction to the increasingly pronounced split between Left and Right during the late 1940s in Korea. As well, in continuing to privilege the narration of cultural identity in history and to locate national history in relation to international or world history, Son’s writing self-consciously builds on previous scholarship, for instance extending Paek’s focus on the marginalized classes toward a more holistic nation (minjok)-centered history. While it is the “discovery of ‘ourselves’ ” and of the “nation” that gives the practice of history its purpose and value, Son does not rely solely on an empiricist approach or on an interested or biased mode of writing. It is rather the critique of history—both the events narrated and the method of organizing and relating those events—that is the starting point for the historian, for whom “the highest objective of historical studies is to understand a theory and method that could justly grasp the historical facts as they are, and then perform a comprehensive critique of those facts in all their complexity . . .” Like those writing before him, Son, too, brings issues of political praxis into contact with disciplinary constraints, albeit in a post-colonial context where, as Mickey Hong notes in her introduction, “Koreans needed to be reminded of their common history despite the cruel reality” of impending national division. Whether in a transnational mode that views Korea in relation to global and progressive development, a transhistorical mode that posits a timeless and essential cultural identity, or a transcultural mode that finds commonality across ethnic-national boundaries, in these essays we find both the attempt to take part in a global or world culture beyond the assimilatory efforts of the colonizers and the assertion of not only sameness but also difference, locating in its very particularity the value of Korean culture in relation to broader global culture or history. While “culture” was a medium through which colonial rulers were able to represent the colonized population as mired in the past and in need of the civilizing and progressive influences of the metropole, it was also a coded, polysemous keyword through which identity could be asserted within the censorial

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constraints of the colonial administration. Put differently, cultural identity presented an opportunity for the positive representation of the difference posited in both colonial and nationalist discourses, and at the same time an opportunity to comparatively theorize sameness across national boundaries and in relation to something like world culture or global history. Across generations, disciplines, and geographical borders, the writers collected in this volume can be thought of as intellectuals attempting to find their way through this complex and contradictory reality. Throughout these essays we see attempts to preserve, articulate, or expand Korean identity, a dynamic revealed in these texts across a variety of disciplines and ideological standpoints. Functioning both as a progressive concept and as a transhistorical representation of national spirit, culture provided the medium for these important and timely writings that in their own ways express the desire to relocate the lost nation outside of the vagaries of time and the indices of colonized space.

Notes 1. See Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005), esp. 139–184. 2. Cumings points out that the difficult memory of the colonial period leads to a “collective revulsion” and reluctance among historians to deal with the period and at the same time the emergence of a compensatory and legitimizing myth­ ology in both the North and the South, as “one Korea indulges in a myth that everyone resisted and the other in a myth that no one collaborated.” See Bruce Cumings, “The Legacy of Japanese Colonialism in Korea,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 481–482. 3. Wan-yao Chou, “The Kōminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interpretations,” in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, ed. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 50. 4. By 1944, almost 12 percent of Koreans were living outside of Korea (Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 175); for labor recruitment policies, see Michael Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial Japan (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. 187–208. 5.  Robert Thomas Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 31. 6. “The link between ethnicity and language was formed almost irrevocably during the colonial period.” Young-mee Yu Cho, “Diglossia in Korean Language and Literature: A Historical Perspective,” East Asia: An International Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 11. 7. See esp. Naoki Sakai, “Introduction: Nationality and the Politics of the



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‘Mother Tongue’,” in Deconstructing Nationality, ed. Naoki Sakai, Brett de Bary, and Iyotani Toshio (Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2005), 1–38; and Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). See also Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 8. Kim Kirim, “Modŏnijŭm ŭi yŏksajŏk wich’i” (The Historical Position of Modernism), originally published in Inmun p’yŏngnon 1, no. 1 (October 1939). We refer here to the version reproduced in Kim Kirim chŏnjip (Collected Works of Kim Kirim), vol. 2 (Simsŏltang, 1988), 53–58. 9. See Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-Images, trans. David Askew (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002), esp. 64–80. 10. See Owen Miller, “The Idea of Stagnation in Korean Historiography: From Fukuda Tokuzō to the New Right,” Korean Histories 2, no. 1 (2010), 3–12.

CHAPTER 1

Yi Kwangsu Introduction and Translation by Ellie Choi

Introduction Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950), arguably Korea’s most prominent colonial intellectual,  was  a  figure  whose  life  was  inextricably  linked  to  the  changing  tides of international politics as they played out in East Asia.1 He is triply famous, first for penning Heartless (Mujŏng, 1917), remembered as Korea’s  first modern novel; second for being one of the student drafters of the February 8 Declaration of Independence, which sparked the March First  Movement; and third for becoming a Japanese collaborator from 1939. The controversy surrounding Yi Kwangsu’s story is not exceptional, but it does illustrate the difficult situation of the colonial elite whose “location of culture” was the imperial metropole. Yi’s magnum opus, “On National Reconstruction ” (Minjok kaejoron),  was first published in May 1922 in the magazine Creation (Kaebyŏk).2 The treatise provided a blueprint for the Korean nationalist movement and demonstrated Yi Kwangsu’s expansive political vision as well as his deep understanding of 1920s global intellectual currents. This rich and complicated essay hit at the heart of issues debated among intellectuals of the day, from the meaning of post–World War I reconstruction to the consequences of the emerging leftist imperative. Although many of the ideas in “On National Reconstruction” were not new, the piece was instrumental in driving a wedge between cultural nationalists, who advocated a moderate approach to autonomy through gradual educational programs, and Marxist radicals, who rallied for the immediate overthrow of Japanese capitalist imperialism through revolution. In the 1920s and during the so-called cultural-policy (bunka seiji ) period, the birth of periodicals like Creation reflected the broad intellectual emphasis of nationalists on social reform, education, and cultural devel1

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opment.3 Even the name of the newspaper, Creation, mirrored the editors’ identification of themselves with what they believed was the “world trend of reconstruction.” In his 1921 precursor to “On National Reconstruction,” titled “The Core Class and Society” (Chungch’u kyegŭp wa sahoe, 1921), Yi wrote that all societies had a core class (chungch’u kyegŭp) of intellectuals and men of property whose output equaled the highest level of achievement of that particular society. He further proposed that Korea should locate this core class in its own culture and train it to man the modernization project.4 This belief in vanguard leadership became a mainstay of Yi Kwangsu’s social vision and would come under attack from leftist intellectuals, who looked toward the masses for national identity. Those advocating the moderate (cultural nationalist) stance tended to be from backgrounds that gave them the luxury of studying abroad and witnessing modernization in progress. The cultural nationalist platform had existed all along, beginning with late nineteenth-century enlightenment, self-strengthening (chagang) ideals, but ended up being labeled differently following the emergence of the Left. It is with the Marxist challenge during the 1920s that the nationalist visions of this earlier enlightenment-era group—belief in educated leadership, transformation of nationalist mass consciousness, the necessity of a literate readership to promote nationalism—began to be viewed as rightist and “bourgeois” in opposition to the newly transformative leftist vision. Loyal to their self-strengthening roots, Yi Kwangsu, Ch’oe Namsŏn, Kim Sŏngsu,5 and other cultural nationalists believed that the Korean people, as yet unqualified for membership in a modern society, had to be educated and prepared for self-rule. They believed Marxism was untenable in a society that had not yet reached full capitalist development and instead committed themselves to building a functioning civil society of engineers, industrialists, businessmen, writers, technicians, and intellectuals for the Korean minjok. Culturalist ideas were put into practice with the formation of the Korean Language Research Society (1921), the Society for the Creation of a National University (1922), and the Korean Production Movement spearheaded by the Society for the Promotion of Native Production (1923). Leftist nationalists did not believe in the importance of such cultural endeavors in light of the fact that most Koreans were still living in poverty. In calling for reforms within the confines of colonization, moderates like Yi Kwangsu were criticized by more radical nationalists for ignoring their colonized status and seeking sanctuary in the realm of culture. For Korean bourgeois intellectuals, this retreat to culture (culturalism) was motivated by a set of factors different from the Japanese equivalent, namely, the desire to avoid politics altogether, to work within the



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parameters of the colonial state, and to avoid interruption of their work by being arrested.6 The politically passive vision of “On National Reconstruction” thus linked Yi’s version of culturally focused nationalism to what has become one of the most controversial issues in Korean history: the politics of collaboration with the colonizer. Some regard “On National Reconstruction” as an early indicator of Yi’s post-1938 collaborative activities, all the more unforgivable because Yi Kwangsu had been the promising young author of the February 8, 1919, Tokyo Student Declaration and an active member of the exiled Shanghai Provisional Government.7 Nationalists from both ends of the political spectrum also found unacceptable Yi’s suggestion in “On National Reconstruction” that Korea continue to endure colonialism for decades while it conducted its moral reconstruction of the people’s essential character (minjok sŏng). What incensed Yi’s Marxist detractors in particular was the argument that, since reconstruction is essentially apolitical, capitalists, imperialists, democrats, and laborers can coexist peacefully. Asking how Yi could even suggest that they work with greedy capitalists, Yi’s Marxist critics accused him of not understanding the root of social struggle.8 Unfortunately, because most extant scholarship focuses only on the political implications of Yi’s work, mainly his association with Japanese colonial cultural production, the more interesting subtleties of his argument in “On National Reconstruction” are overlooked. For example, the section entitled “National Reconstruction Movements Seen in History” abstracts and translates Chosŏn pasts into a historicist narrative organized under the rubric of “reconstruction.” It offers as well an impressive overview of major global political movements, from the youth education efforts of Socrates and Plato through the military policy of Frederick of Prussia to the reasons why the March First Movement in Korea failed. As incongruous as these historical events seemed, Yi Kwangsu maintained that their successes and failures were dependent on the organization of youth, group cultivation, institutional development, mass psychology, and financial preparation, all ideas at the heart of his vision of social and political reconstruction.9 Like many Asian modernizers, Yi vilified a degenerate Confucian past, locating the misgovernment of the previous corrupt Chosŏn elite as the root of the present degradation of the Korean national character. For Yi, the rejection of Confucian principles was a prerequisite to propelling Korean society toward a new future. Yi consequently emphasized morality, achieved through practice of resolute honesty (musil ) and decisive action ( yŏkhaeng), and believed Korea’s degraded national character

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(t’araktoen minjok sŏng) could be reconstructed through moral cultivation and cultural programs. Such moral development was a part of the disciplinary subject formation that Yi envisioned as crucial to proper group cultivation (suyang tongmaeng). Strong groups and associations were the primary methods of a national reconstruction project upholding moral, intellectual, economic, and physical development. Such reconstructed individuals and groups (the core class, chungch’u kyegŭp) would build up a new civil society, a politically disengaged realm in which the people would develop their ethnic identity as Koreans. This reconstruction was to be a gradual one, as radical movements were precarious and shortlived. Yi estimated that it would take the Korean reconstruction movement thirty years to recruit ten thousand stable individual supporters. “On National Reconstruction” is usually criticized by left-leaning intellectuals for its political conservatism, but this interpretation ignores the liberal strains in Yi Kwangsu’s political thought during the early 1920s.10 Yi detested what he believed were the idealistic, irrational, and radical political motivations behind movements like the French Revolution (1789– 1799) and the subsequent drafting of the First Republic’s Constitution, which he dismissed as “fanciful,” but admired the establishment of the British Constitution. Influenced by the pragmatist and analytic philosophical thought introduced to Asia by John Dewey and Bertrand Russell,11 Yi claimed that the English were a freedom-loving people (a comment that appeared to blatantly ignore the realities of the British empire), arguing that the British model was successful because its constitution came into being gradually as a set of underlying principles built through trial and error and consequently more adaptable and sturdy than the idealistic French Constitution. Yi argued that the reconstruction of the Korean nation must likewise be conducted gradually, through time, discipline, and effort. Yi Kwangsu’s distaste for radical movements led him and other cultural nationalists to emphasize gradualism, sound organization, and planning in the realm of culture, a preparatist formula that critics have denounced as politically conservative or, worse, fascist.12 Articles debating “On National Reconstruction” usually gloss over the influence of mass psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), whom Yi Kwangsu himself cited several times, despite the French philosopher’s obvious impact on Yi and Yi’s contemporaries who studied in Japan. Yi Kwangsu’s insight into the problems of radical social movements, the power of language on mass psychology, and the importance of mental contagion in implementing social change were all borrowed directly from Le Bon. This recognition is important least of all because it placed “On National Reconstruction”



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within a larger global debate on the immutability of so-called innate national characteristics, prompting us to re-evaluate comparatively the work of a major public intellectual of the colonial period in relation to Korean and world history.

On National Reconstruction* Opening It is with great hope and a burning heart that I dedicate this essay to my brothers and sisters who are also concerned with the future of the Korean people and the problem of how this nation (minjok) is to overcome the present decay and enter into a happy, prosperous future. The concept and program for national reconstruction (minjok kaejo) was conceived among colleagues abroad13 and, cohering with my own beliefs, has now become my life’s purpose.14 I regard the task of introducing this concept into Korea as a supreme honor and once more wish to express my thanks and respect to senior colleagues who had the foresight and sagacity to spearhead this project. I hope that this idea will take root, flower, and bear fruit in the pure hearts of my beloved young brothers and sisters. Penned November 11, 1921, the opening day of the Washington Peace Conference 1. The Significance of National Reconstruction The concept of “reconstruction” freely circulates around the world these days. When the Great European War [First World War] ended, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in Paris ushered in a collective global reconstruction. The consequent founding of the League of Nations was enthusiastically heralded as a vehicle of global reconstruction. It is because of this that the word “reconstruction” today is so freely applied to various matters large and small. The fact that the term “reconstruction” is so popular these days is a sign of the concept’s preeminence in the minds of people the world over. In truth, that the word “reconstruction” can be seen in new books, newspapers, magazines, and even product advertisements and is heard in speeches and everyday conversation is quite likely an unprecedented *Yi Kwangsu, “Minjok kaejoron,” Kaebyŏk (May 1922): 18–72.

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phenomenon. The passing of an era and the inception of a new one with a different mindset generally brings reform, change, and revolution. However, it is truly the distinguishing characteristic of this era that the public mind (insim), dissatisfied with mere renewal, reformation, and revolution, seeks a more penetrating reconstruction that is fundamental, systematic, and comprehensive. “This is the age of reconstruction!” is the catchphrase of the current era, and it encapsulates the spirit of the times. Reconstructing an imperialist world into a democratic one, a capitalist world into a communist one, an era of the “survival of the fittest” into one of mutual cooperation, and a sexist society into one of gender equality, are these not the calls for change that reverberate in today’s intellectual circles?15 This spirit of the times has also spread throughout our land and is heard in every direction as the call for reconstruction. The transformation that we, the Korean people, must urgently achieve is the reconstruction of the Korean nation.16 What then does it mean exactly to reconstruct the nation (minjok kaejo)? Since each nation is in a constant state of change along a particular course, we can call a nation’s history a record of that country’s vicissitudes. From the Tangun era to the Three Kingdoms period and again from the Koryŏ dynasty to the Chosŏn dynasty—especially in the periods before and after the Japanese invasions17—and the Kabo Reforms, in the case of the later period, we can clearly see the state of continual transformation in which the Korean people have lived.18 If I reflect on the thirty years since my birth I can readily see how much Korea has changed.19 Leaving politics aside, our mode of dress, dwellings, and customs as well as the content of our very thoughts and even our emotional makeup have all transformed beyond recognition. Men have cut off their topknots and women no longer cover their heads. Are these not drastic changes? Change is not a thing of the past but can be observed in the present moment. Our attitudes have altered drastically since March 1 of two years ago and will continue to transform from this day forward.20 However, these are changes that occurred naturally or as chance events, much like physical or chemical changes happening in the natural world that might appear to be coincidental. Put another way, these ­changes are not unlike those that take place undetected in the development of an unenlightened barbarian race. What sets the civilized man apart is that he can establish his own goal and proceed in a calculated manner toward accomplishing it, monitoring his pace and progress periodically along the way. A civilized man does not rely on natural inclinations or impulses



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but follows a clear life plan. His every action, big and small, converges in the realization of this set goal, thus making planning and effort his distinguishing traits. Similarly, the identifying characteristic of a civilized nation lies in its self-conscious realization of its purpose, the pursuit of a systematic and unified plan toward the attainment of that goal, and the actuation of that plan through a systematic and unified effort. The history of a primitive people or a people who have yet to acquire clear self-realization is therefore like the record of changes in natural phenomena, whereas the history of a people who have already achieved a high degree of civilization is the record of the realization of their goal and a testament to the planning and effort it took to attain that goal. In the same way, a change in the goals of a primitive, uncivilized people comes about naturally through chance events, whereas the transformation of the objectives of a highly civilized people reflects a process of conscious reconstruction. What conditions bring about the emergence of reconstruction? It happens when a nation awakens to the fact that the goals, plans, and traits it already has are not suited to its survival and prosperity. It occurs when a people realize that striving for a goal according to their natural inclinations or intentions is the path to ruin. Such self-awareness and capacity to render judgment are in themselves marks of a high degree of cultural power; those nations that never acquire this self-realization ultimately find their downfall in a state of ignorance. When a nation is capable of examining the fundamentals of its life and wisely judges its course to be degenerative, it can take the first steps toward rebirth, and reconstruction is born. Furthermore, once this judgment is reached, the nation can wisely establish a new courses—a new goal—and program and alter the lives of the people (minjok saenghwal ). This conscious, organized effort is the sole path to national revival and can only be achieved by a people who are intelligent, courageous, and full of vigor. What I have suggested above is that national reconstruction requires a redirecting of the course of the people’s lives and a fundamental structural transformation of the nation’s purpose and plans. This does not mean only partial reform or repair. If we were to speak of the nation as a house, everything from its orientation and the arrangement of the rooms to the materials from which it is constructed should be refashioned according to a completely new blueprint. Should old materials be re-used, they should be incorporated only if they meet the specifications of the new plan. Consequently, national reconstruction is not a trivial matter to be flippantly proclaimed but, as I have emphasized before, a wholehearted, all-or-nothing gamble that occurs when a nation realizes that it is

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on the brink of its demise. It is hard to find even two or three instances of successful national reconstruction in history (during the past four to five thousand years). It seems that it is almost impossible to achieve without the vigor of youth. In the next section, let us gain a better understanding of what national reconstruction means by examining a few examples from history. National Reconstruction Movements Seen in History The first thing to take note of is the national reconstruction movement conducted by philosophers like Socrates and Plato in ancient Greece. During this time, the Greek people were so puffed up with pride and conceit about their victory over Persia, thriving commercial advancements, and cultural efflorescence that they fell into self-centeredness, cunning, and debauchery, which rapidly corroded their daily lives and community foundations. . . . [Original pp. 21–22, four lines omitted] Although we consider Socrates and Plato forefathers of philosophy, in truth their aim was not to develop the foundations of philosophy but rather to find a way to save their beloved country and its people. Even though their philosophical precepts became over time the objects of reverence, from their point of view, bearing in mind that the country for which they fought all their lives could not be salvaged, they can be considered as having failed. Their souls, looking on from beyond the grave, would regard with sorrow the fact that their country perished while their philosophical tenets survived. [Original p. 22, five lines omitted] Thus, Socrates dedicated the rest of his life to youth education. He was a true pioneer of democracy, education of the people, and the national reconstruction movement. [Original p. 22, seven lines omitted] His admirable character, faith, and zeal notwithstanding, his life’s work met with failure. We know that his work ended when he died from drinking the poison he was given, but there remains the question of why he failed. This truly is a monumental issue, significant for the light it sheds on the possibility or impossibility of national reconstruction. The reason for his failure was that he did not understand the importance of collective enterprise. The national reconstruction project is an enormous undertaking that continuously requires immense manpower and financial resources over a long period of time. [Original pp. 23–4, twenty-five lines omitted] There are several ways to achieve [national reconstruction]. Philosophers such as Confucius and Mencius adopted the strategy of selecting pupils, as did Sakyamuni [Buddha], Jesus, and Socrates. Zisi,21 Plato, and some modern thinkers chose to disseminate their ideas through writing.



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Still others spread their ideas by traveling around and preaching. All are important and necessary ways of preserving and disseminating ideas, but among these methods the one of greatest consequence is the organization of a collective. Using this method, Jesus established a community called the church, which his students then continued and perfected according to his will. Other religions such as Buddhism have managed to survive and disseminate their teachings by using the community as a tool. With the development of the field of sociology, we have come to understand how beneficial the group is for the preservation, propagation, and realization of ideas and have naturally learned to use this as a weapon.22 The Young Men’s Christian Association, founded on the three principles of spirit, mind, and body, as well as anti-smoking and anti-drinking societies are all good examples. [Original pp. 24–25, eleven lines omitted] The next notable historical examples of national reconstruction movements are those of Prussia during King Frederick’s time, Russia during Peter the Great’s era, and the intelligentsia during the Russian socialist uprising, as well as Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Even though all of these examples are of interest to those of us about to embark on a major reconstruction movement, it is not necessary to explain or criticize each case individually. On the other hand, I would like to emphasize that whether in Prussia, Russia, or Japan, without a national reconstruction movement each country would have perished and that in every case the reconstruction movement was based on collective action. I think it is necessary, then, to say a few words on how the reforms of Peter the Great, King Frederick, and the Japanese emperor were based in collective action. As one might expect, if we look at what is recorded in historical texts it would appear that every king or emperor ran the country on his own, when in reality that king or emperor was only a figurehead or representative of a larger group who undertook the operation of that country. Considering the history of Japan’s reformation,23 for example, gathered around the Japanese emperor were politicians such as Kido Koin, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Saigō Takamori, Itō Hirobumi, and Ōkuma Shigenobu; ideologues and educators like Fukuzawa Yukichi, Mori Ōgai, and Niijima Jo; philosophers and scholars like Katō Hiroyuki, Inoue Tetsujirō, Miyake Setsurei, [and] Tokutomi Sohō; writers like Tsubouchi Shōyō; businessmen like Shibusawa Eiichi; and countless other capable people who were members of the collective that held as its founding principles the Oath in Five Articles [Charter Oath] and the Rescript on Education. In that this powerful but generally speaking nameless group that constructed the new Japan carried on their national reconstruction endeavors under the common banner of the Great Japanese Empire, and because they struc-

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tured their reconstruction project with a common purpose, following orders from the central leadership, theirs can be considered having been a collective effort. [Original p. 26, two lines omitted] In the next section I will comment on our present national reconstruction movement and begin to illustrate the kind of national reconstruction that I intend to propose, or rather to introduce. The Korean National Reconstruction Movement since the Kapsin Coup There were probably many who thought “We cannot let this happen” and sought ways to initiate reconstruction when they noticed the Chosŏn dynasty’s gradual downfall, but, because no one stood up or spoke out, it is hard to talk about the situation before the Kapsin Coup.24 It is said that Chŏng Yagyong had many new ideas, but I have not yet had the chance to read his writings.25 However, although he might have had many novel ideas, we cannot really call him a pioneer of national reconstruction since his influence was limited to writing essays. About forty years ago, in 1884, there was an attempt to reform the government by individuals like Kim Okkyun and Pak Yŏnghyo. This was a movement to subvert the power of the Min clan, which, clustered around the figure of Queen Min, had politically dominated the entire country from the capital to the provinces, and to place control of the government in the hands of promising young men who had recently imbibed the air in post–Meiji Japan. . . . [Original pp. 26–31 omitted. A central point in the rest of this section is that previous Korean reform attempts had failed because there was not enough group organization or solidarity among individuals. This is because they lacked a foundation in youth mobilization, which Yi regards as central to a successful reconstruction movement.—Trans.] 2. National Reconstruction Is Moral Reconstruction of a nation means reconstruction of its national character. The life of one nation takes countless forms and has political, economic, and cultural (religious, artistic, philosophical, social) aspects. Although the actual everyday lives of the people are extremely complex, their dayto-day forms and content are determined by an underlying national character (minjok sŏng), in itself an extremely simple thing and determined by one or two basic moral factors. For example the Anglo-Saxon race is



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freedom-loving and possesses a realistic, enterprising, and social-minded national character, whereas the Germans are possessed of an intellectual, analytical, and organized national character. Latins prioritize equality and have passionate natures, while the Chinese are self-centered and individualistic. Among these, let us single out the Anglo-Saxon race. Look at their private, social, and national lives. Is not every single aspect of their liberated, realistic, progressive, and collaborative existences the expression of their fundamental national character? First, let us look at the Anglo-Saxon political system. As the first constitutional state, England is the world’s most powerful and advanced nation, where the ideal of civil liberty has its roots. However, while the British are freedom-loving, they are at the same time practical, and, unlike the French, who instigated a fanciful revolution and tried in a radical and emotional manner to establish an impractical, fanciful constitution, the British have strengthened their civil liberties in an extremely realistic and gradual manner. The result is that, unlike the French, who proclaimed freedom in a fanciful, emotional, and extreme manner, comprehensively but only at the theoretical level, the British enjoy the most thorough and far-reaching freedom.26 The British do not have a constitution established on idealism. As is well known, the British Constitution is no more than a case-by-case accumulation of separate provisions. Where theoretical comprehensiveness and logical coherence are concerned, it cannot be compared to the constitution promulgated by the vigorous and energetic young men of the National Consultative Assembly for the Chinese Constitution.27 The British Constitution is said to be the worst in the world, characterized by its abundant contradictions and lack of organization. The difference between the two is that the Chinese Constitution is a fabricated constitution, whereas the British Constitution is a functioning constitution. In England, that which is not useful in practice is in truth regarded as useless. In this sense the British are deeply realistic and gradualist. The kind of freedom they call for is not just freedom in theory but also in practice. Even such a makeshift constitution is successful in preserving the rights [of British citizens] at the practical level. Inasmuch as the British do not allow the state to interfere with personal freedoms, they are extreme individualists. So well-honed is their sense of civic duty, however, that when it comes to the needs of their country, society, or community (this does not apply only to the state but to whatever association to which they happen to belong), they easily sacrifice individual freedoms. And because this sacrificial attitude is born out of the ideal of freedom, it is in itself another form of freedom. The British fought the recent European war with an army of such volunteers. [Original p. 33, nine lines omitted]

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British commerce and colonial policy also exhibit these qualities. Within the colonial structure, the religion and customs of the occupied and the lifestyles of others are respected and allowed to develop freely. This is a manifestation of the free mentality of the British. They acknowledge the value of others’ national characteristics and do not try to deliberately alter others according to their own standards. Not only do the British possess the wisdom of knowing that they cannot change others’ natures according to their own norms, but they also cherish their own freedom so much that they cannot tolerate impinging on the freedom of others. . . . [Original p. 36, five lines omitted] Their colonies are flourishing, and the various colonized peoples enjoy a relative degree of freedom, while Britain reaps the full benefits of colonialism. Egypt and the Philippines are good examples of the success of Anglo-Saxon colonial policy. The fundamental characteristics of freedom, practicality, volunteerism, and gradualism are at the root of these successes. Consequently, the foundation of the everyday lives of the English and the success or failure of their basic livelihood is to be found in their essential national character and psychological makeup. The study of national psychology conducted by a leading French scholar, Gustave Le Bon, in his famous work The Psychology of Peoples, most succinctly summarizes the points I have iterated above: “language, institutions, thought, religion, arts, and culture are each essential expressions informing the national character of which they are a part” (second page, first line of The Psychology of Peoples).28 Let us turn our attention to the basic cause of the degeneration of the Korean people. How did the Korean people regress to such a state? The Japanese have cited the misgovernment of the Yi dynasty as the root of our decline, and Westerners similarly point to such maladministration. That this is the most conclusive and direct explanation for our decay does not need re-emphasizing. This nevertheless does not explain the origins of that decay, for to say that prosperity in England and America can be attributed to their good administration does not hold much meaning. In regard to past maladministration as the cause of Korea’s demise, the responsibility rests with the ruling class, that is, the king and the yangban [landed elites]. Indeed, Korea has had an unchallenged ruling class for at least the past three hundred years. The fact is that the blame lies with the person of the king and with the minority ruling elites like the ­Tongin and Sŏin (Easterners and Westerners) and the Noron and Soron (Old and Young Doctrine) factions, who comprised a very small percentage of the total population but hereditarily dominated both government and education.29 It is an irrefutable fact that these individuals were directly responsible for ruining the government, corrupting commerce, neglecting the people’s education, and corroding public morals and the people’s minds.



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Moreover, when the ruling class of the neighboring state [Meiji Japan] was importing the West’s new civilization for their Great Reform, [Korea’s] ruling elites did not embark on a strategically organized plan of revitalizing reforms by taking advantage of that neighboring state’s encouragement and support in a timely manner. This, the greatest crime of them all, is to the lasting regret of our people. If we follow this logic a bit deeper, however, the blame actually falls on the whole nation and, taking it even further, the root cause can also be found in the people. If [the Korean people] had an affinity for freedom, as the British do, and equality, like the French, then we would not have tolerated an unreliable ruling class. And if the ruling group had valued equality, freedom, social consciousness, and progressiveness, we Chosŏn people would not be in our current plight. Be it the governing yangban or the governed commoner (ilban minjung), both are victims of a degraded national character. We might be tempted to blame the ruling class for our fallen national character, but in this case we will also have to hold the lower classes responsible for enabling and supporting the rule of the elite class. Even were our only choice to blame the former rulers, the yangban, for the degeneration of our nation, in the final analysis the fundamental reason for this degeneration is a degraded national character. [Original pp. 35–36, twenty lines omitted] The failure of the common people and the ruling class to reform this maladministration is a moral issue as well. Of course there must have been those who realized this and who probably thought, spoke, and wrote about the problem. Since the Analects and Mencius ultimately do not teach falsehood or hypocrisy, those able to quote lines [from these works] by memory should have been familiar with such phrases as “Sacrifice yourself for benevolence,” “Sacrifice heart and mind for the state,” “Suppress human desire and preserve heavenly principle,” and “Loyalty to ruler and love for country.” Yet, those same people were unable to reform the maladministration, first, because of laziness, which prevented action; second, because of timidity, which hindered action; and third, because of a lack of faith and belief in community, which could foster firm solidarity among like-minded people. Reform should not be undertaken at the level of idle fancy or empty theory but should exist entirely at the level of real practice. This requires tremendous courage, as by nature the great task of challenging past political systems and habits and tearing down the old to construct the new is laborious and dangerous. National reform is not possible through the efforts of one or two individuals but only through a solid, capable group. If we examine Chosŏn history, however, the method of most reformers was to present a single memorial to the king or prime minister. Even recently,

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relatively progressive reformers like Kim Okkyun and Pak Yŏnghyo were unable to rally more than ten or so people and thus in the final analysis could not create a solid, powerful association. In recent years there have been several reform-minded groups, but they did not possess the kind of stability and solidarity I have previously outlined. Since 1884, there has really been no organization comprised of more than three individuals that has been able to establish firm solidarity for more than three years. Why is this? It is because of dishonesty, laziness, mistrust, and lack of socialmindedness. If people are dishonest, they distrust one another, and, if they do not trust each other, solidarity is not possible. The most important requirement for communal life is trust, but if only liars and swindlers gather then what kind of organization could there be? Second, an association is created to do work, but if it only exists at the level of idle dreams and empty theory then what can come out of it? Third, what can result from a union where people have no faith, do not uphold each other’s plans, have no loyalty to the group, and cannot rely on each other? Betrayal is the vice that plagued the history of Chosŏn social relations and organizations. This is why we were never able to reform the previous government. [Original p. 37, three lines omitted] Just as the prosperity of the British and American people stems from their national character, our country’s downfall lies in our national character. The rise and fall and prosperity and decay of a people depend on national character. National reconstruction must accordingly begin at the root of that nation’s character, its moral makeup. . . . [Original pp. 38–46 omitted. In the following omitted section, “Is the Reconstruction of National Character Possible?” Yi Kwangsu calls for fundamental changes in the Korean national character and distinguishes between alterable and unchanging traits of the people. He distills essential positive and negative characteristics, citing ancient foreign texts like the Record of Mountains and Seas (Sanhai jing, fourth century BCE), Book of Later Han (Hou hanshu, 220–589 CE), and Records of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi, third century CE) that contain old Chinese commentaries about Korea, “the land of gentlemen.” He concludes that, despite some unhealthy national characteristics, in general the Korean people possess some positive traits that make national reconstruction possible.—Trans.] How Much Time Is Required for the Reconstruction of National Character? I have stated that national reconstruction is possible and in particular that reconstruction of the Korean national character would be easy. Anyone



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who contemplates how to transform a multitudinous populace one individual at a time—to inspire twenty million people into leading civilized, rich, and powerful lives—might in truth be a bit stupefied. Such a person will try to discover a miraculous road, a shortcut through which to bypass hardships and achieve sudden prosperity. This of course is the common tendency for any individual or people facing adversity, but it is nonetheless an unhealthy frame of mind. When an impoverished person seeks prosperity, he wants through luck to become an overnight millionaire instead of accumulating wealth through hard work and diligence. He looks for a gold mine or delves into rice speculation, although it is hard to find even one overnight millionaire among 10,000 who has made it through these methods. The remaining 9,999 people spend their lives chasing empty dreams and in the end die impoverished. If the individual had accumulated wealth through diligence instead of speculation, he would have died with enough to support himself throughout his life. It is perhaps possible to become an overnight millionaire through luck, but becoming a scholar or a great man (wiin) requires hard work and diligence, not fortune. The rise and fall of a nation is not like becoming an overnight millionaire but akin to becoming a scholar or a great man. This does not come about through others’ assistance or instantaneous fortune but through the cultivation of morality and wisdom, a striving to improve life for individuals and society, and a gradual accumulation of wealth. The Versailles Peace Conference, League of Nations, and the Washington Conference have little bearing on the improvement of the Korean people’s lives.30 Even if their happiness was contingent upon political independence, that independence would not be granted by the League of Nations or the Washington Peace Conference like some parcel received in the mail. Political freedom is a kind of legal procedure, achieved not only through movements but when a nation is capable of independence and has garnered international approval. (We have had to learn this lesson through painful past experience. We will never again make the foolish mistake of seeking salvation from outside, nor revisit the shame of seeking results through sheer luck.)31 The fundamental task at hand is national reconstruction through a “great path of righteousness.” It is only after Koreans develop the ability to carry on civilized lifestyles as individuals and as a people that we will have the qualifications and capability to determine our fate according to our will, (whether this be assimilation, selfrule, independence, or a major globally significant revolution.)32 Thus, with regard to improving the lot of the Korean people, there is no shortcut that bypasses national reconstruction. In other words, the only tenable solution is the reconstruction of the nation. Seeking answers through a lucky

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shortcut will simply mean another lifetime of wasting time and energy. How much longer will we continue to pursue this childish and foolish belief in chance? Let us now delve into the main topic of our discussion and evaluate how long the reconstruction of the Korean nation will take. For our investigation, let us first consider the time necessary to achieve individual reconstruction, because national reconstruction is really a matter of the transformation of each constituent individual. Individual character reconstruction is initiated at the moment of realization (chagak) of the need for change. With this consciousness begins the search for a belief (sasang) that captures the essence of this new character. This process will take considerable time. One might think that reconstruction is complete at the moment that this new thought is internalized, but this is not the case. Of course the realization of this new thought is crucial, but, if we speak in terms of construction, internalization is only the initial blueprint stage. A blueprint does not automatically result in a house, nor does a new belief system create a new personality. [Original pp. 48–49, thirty-one lines omitted] Ten Steps 1. One individual among the people experiences a moment of self-awakening. 2. The person forms a new plan for reconstruction based on that moment of self-awakening. 3. The first acquires a second like-minded colleague. 4. The first and second colleagues acquire a third, and the three individuals collaborate and work toward the common goal of reconstruction and thus increase their numbers. 5. The group’s idea of reconstruction is communicated to the entire populace. 6. That idea is taken as a subject for debate among the general populace. 7. In order for that idea to ultimately triumph, it becomes public opinion for the whole populace; that is, it becomes the idea of the whole populace. 8. At this point a central figure that represents public opinion emerges and directs the lives of the people according to that idea. 9. Ultimately that idea becomes absolute truth, transcending the realm of debate and achieving [the status of] mental contagion. 10. In the end, that idea exceeds the realm of intellect and enters the



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realm of emotional habit, and finally national reconstruction is achieved. . . . [Original p. 49, four lines omitted] The next step is propaganda, of which there are two dependent factors, one not more important than the other. What are these two factors? They are the rallying of like-minded people and the dissemination of ideas. Pivotal to the gathering of like-minded colleagues is the effective propagation of thought, and crucial to the effective propagation of thought is the gathering of like-minded colleagues. It is only with strength in colleagues’ numbers that there can be sufficient mouths, hands, bodies, and finances to broaden the scope of propaganda. Most of all, an organization comprised of members is the most effective, concrete propaganda mechanism. [Original p. 50, five lines omitted] The Korean population of seventeen million comprises no more than 4 percent of China’s population. The case of the Korean people is extremely uncomplicated because we share a common lineage, language, and nature. This is why there is no differentiation by religion or class in Korea, as is the case in China and India, and no real obstacle to a unified lifestyle. It is likely that national reconstruction in China and India would be exceedingly difficult, and I believe China and India would fare better if they initiated reforms at different levels according to region, dialect, and religion instead of approaching reconstruction as one nation. As the Korean people are uncomplicated—unified as a single nation in terms of character, language, and daily life—we can say that Korea has a fundamental advantage in terms of unified reconstruction. Even in terms of writing—the most crucial element in the propagation of ideas—though a bit inconvenient to print, the Korean alphabet is particularly useful for education and incomparably convenient. Keeping these various advantages in mind, let us now estimate the time reconstruction would take. For our purposes, we will speak in terms of the slowest possible rate. How long will it take to get from the establishment of a reconstructive organization to a point when that idea becomes the foundation of public opinion? Before determining this, we first need to decide on what conditions are necessary to control the public opinion of a whole nation. The most decisive factor in the governing of public thought is garnering, as supporters of this idea, more than half of the nation’s intellectual class, more precisely, more than half of the class that controls all of the organs of national life. If not only those in possession of the idea [of reconstruction] but also those with the power to implement [that reconstruction] were to adopt this idea as their common goal and unify

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behind one organization, the movement would be incomparably effective. Then, how many of the intellectual class who dominate the institutions of our national life do we need? By all the institutions of national life I mean the organizations of government, economy, education, various civic organizations (mingan kyŏlsa), religious institutions, as well as academia and the arts. To be more specific, by intellectual class I mean politicians, bureaucrats, industrialists, professionals, ministers, scholars, military officers, artists, journalists, and local leaders. [Original pp. 51–52, thirteen lines omitted] As people might needlessly worry about misfortunes such as internal collapse or government orders to disband, it is only through careful, methodical, and strict selection of members—especially with an unforgiving policy toward regulation-breakers—that we can ensure against disintegration of the group. In addition, it will only be through strict separation from politics or current events and a focus on individual cultivation and devotion to cultural projects that we can avoid disbandment by the [colonial] government. We can therefore ensure the continuation of this reconstruction organization by strict observance of guidelines and by not interfering with the government and current events.33 [Original pp. 52–53, fourteen lines omitted] Recruiting ten thousand members, however, should not be considered the completion of national reconstruction but its foundation. This moment will mark only the beginning of the central goal of the national reconstruction project. National reconstruction will be an ongoing project spanning fifty, one hundred, two hundred years, to be spearheaded not just in the cities but also in each village, where schools, lecture halls, reading rooms, game rooms, and gymnasiums will be built. The reconstruction enterprise will be finished when colleges and technical schools, libraries, museums, and academic research facilities, as well as major publication houses, art galleries, playhouses, assembly halls, and clubhouses in each of the thirteen provinces, are built. Through these social projects, the Korean people will become a civilized, superior nation through moral, intellectual, economic, and physical transformation. This mission will never end but continue in perpetuity to transform the Korean people. I believe that the principle and method of this reconstruction is applicable not only to Korea but also to the rest of the world; it is also China’s only means to salvation. However successful Sun Wen, Gu Wei-jun, and Wan Zheng-yan are in conducting their foreign diplomacy and in their revolution, even after a hundred thousand revolutions the only salvation for the Chinese people will still be through the agency of a national reconstruction project.34



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3. The Content of Reconstruction [Original pp. 53–56 omitted. In this section, Yi Kwangsu presents a detailed outline for how this reconstruction of individuals and groups should be realized. Each reconstructed individual is to achieve excellence in his or her field, which will collectively bring about mass improvement. Reconstruction is not only of character but also of intellect and ideology and requires a thorough reform down to the individual’s daily habits.—Trans.] The foundation of the kind of national reconstruction that I am speaking of is the philosophy of resolute honesty (musil ) and decisive action ( yŏkhaeng). If we talk about the above points as a whole, they can be reduced to two ideas: honesty and action. By honesty, I mean never lying, not engaging in duplicitous activity, and devoting oneself to genuine words and action. By action, I mean avoiding empty ideas and empty theory and taking immediate action, whether with correct ideas or things that must be done, as soon as they are spoken of or thought up. Across the depth and breadth of the universe these two make up the basis of all human morality, as without honesty and action no form of morality can exist. Likewise, an individual’s success or failure depends on these, as does that of a nation, a state, or any other group. [Original pp. 56–64 omitted] The Means to National Reconstruction [Original pp. 64–67 omitted. Yi Kwangsu emphasizes the importance of method when embarking on the project of reconstruction. For Yi, the surest way to national reconstruction is the strengthening of groups and organizations that share the common goal of reconstruction. In this way, individual awakening and cultivation always serve the goals of the larger community.—Trans.] The reason we need organizations is to be able to manage projects for the dissemination of our principles and realization of our objectives. Groups are important, but there is also a need to utilize the press to disseminate our vision among the general populace. Furthermore, as we come to establish the need for moral education and specialized education in a skill beyond that of normal schooling, should we be unable to work toward such goals, these too will become little more than impractical theory. What is required is the provision of schools and libraries. If we are calling for physical fitness education, then we must also provide facilities for hygiene and exercise and books about hygiene and fitness. To develop all these facilities we need a large amount of money as well as a multitude of men of talent. Where, then, should we procure all this? From sound

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organizations. Our past efforts did not have adequate financial support. Among those who managed newspapers, magazines, and schools, how many were truly willing to raise the necessary funds? Projects begun with the attitude “We can do it if we have the heart” or “All we have to do is begin” do not last more than a few days. The idea that we can do anything if we have heart is a maxim to inspire perseverance and help us weather hardship, but so long as the heart does not provide us with food or turn into lumber, we cannot do much with it. Only power achieves real results, and, in this case, power means manpower and funding. [Original pp. 68–69, seven lines omitted] Someone who devotes a proper amount of virtue (meaning trustworthiness, diligence, loyalty, and courage) to one area [of knowledge] and has considerable expertise can be called a specialist. To earn such a distinction requires more than ten years of earnest mental training and experience. Trying to direct a specific enterprise without being a specialist is nowadays nothing more than a daydream. In financial terms, a short-term project like rescuing flood victims in some locality can be done by gathering donations; however, spearheading educational movements, magazine publishing, and other long-term projects definitely requires a stable source of revenue. There are only two ways to secure stable funding. In the first case, each member of the group pays a fixed amount during a set time, in the same way that membership dues and state taxes are collected. Second would be a basic collection system in which group members contribute money to be set aside, saved so as to accrue interest. This system would apply to various modern enterprises like commerce, education, and other social projects. Between these two options, the most reliable is the basic collection system, from which the revenue from accumulated interest should exceed the projected expenses. With a membership-fee collection system it would be difficult to amass more than a set amount unless the organization had special licenses such as are given to a state or a religion. Any organization that aims for longevity must have the above-mentioned manpower and financial resources, because without them—no matter how sound the philosophy and planning—nothing will go beyond the level of empty theory. Consequently, for anybody working toward national reconstruction, the establishment of a strong organization is the only means to achieve these two goals. We can appreciate the need for associations through the above illustration. If we build a large, stable organization comprised of reconstructed individuals, sound men of character, and unified groups, keeping our eyes fixed on the gradual realization of our vision, then our project will



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be laid on a firm foundation and we should be able to see steady growth without regressing. Because our reconstruction method will be built on comprehensive principles, it will have a solid foundation that will continue in perpetuity. The many details of this project are better discussed elsewhere. Conclusion I have presented above the meaning of national reconstruction and have given examples from history. I have also discussed the absolute importance and urgency of the Korean people’s national reconstruction, as well as its ideal and method. There are those who are pessimistic and those who are optimistic about the future of the Korean people. Among the variety of reasons for pessimism are Korea’s complicated international situation, the fact that Korea is currently extremely impoverished both financially and spiritually, and the idea that the Korean character is inherently so decayed as to render prosperity impossible. Each of these grounds for pessimism contains an element of truth and should not be dismissed out of hand. The optimists also have reasons for their faith in Korea, from their childish and fatalistic belief that the Will of Heaven rotates so that bad fortune yields to good, or the idea, in contrast to the pessimists, that the Korean people possess an innate, superior nature identifiable from ancient times. There are even those who look for hope to some larger worldhistorical trend. (It is not worth our while to waste words on those who haven’t given any thought to the destiny of their own country.) There are some aspects of this optimism that could be useful, but the kernels of truth behind the pessimism are more helpful for our purposes. In reality, the optimists’ reasons are childish and shallow. A belief in the reciprocity of the Will of Heaven does not deserve our attention (although this thought influences many Koreans). Faith in the Korean people’s essentially superior character is not credible in this current situation, and, even if our national character did contain some superior traits, in the light of the current state of moral corruption, the inferior traits prevail. Such reasoning, therefore, cannot be the basis for optimism. There is some wisdom in the thinking of those who have faith in the mainstream of global currents and claim that they can revive the nation through the “new civilization” and “new thought,” but to speak of these in terms of truth or political significance would be unpardonable. The optimists’ best, most positive impulse is their advocacy of cultural movements. They lecture on their beliefs, establish schools and organize committees, and operate newspapers and magazines; in short, they

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try to set us on a happy and prosperous road to national salvation through cultural projects. This of course is the right kind of self-realization (chagak) and for the most part is an endeavor signaling a happy and prosperous route to the creation of a happy and prosperous people. However, in that the Korean people are too backward and impoverished to rely on the strategies others have adopted, we need to find a more fundamental and expeditious path, lest we be unable to catch up in time. In our present condition, we Koreans are so debilitated that we cannot undertake even cultural projects, in the same way that some patients require camphor shots before they are able to nourish themselves and exercise. Even if we were to build schools, they would fall apart; we do not have the strength to maintain them. This would be the case as well if associations were formed or magazines and newspapers founded. The present situation is one in which there are none to undertake cultural projects and no capital to carry out those projects. Let us build manpower; let us collect funds. This is what we need the most urgently. Then what is my own opinion? You have undoubtedly already gleaned from what I have expressed in this essay that I am very pessimistic about the Korean people’s fate. I believe all the reasons for pessimism are grounded in truth. We are indeed in a very difficult position. It would be hard to imagine a worse condition than our present spiritual and material degradation. The present state of our nation’s character is also deteriorated, no matter its origins. Such a people can only sink further and further, easily slipping into doom’s path. Ultimately, there is no room for optimism. If ignored for much longer, in thirty years our impoverishment will be beyond repair. If my words seem harsh, just look at the past thirty years! How much has our character become bankrupt, order been undermined, wealth diminished, and confidence deflated! The only thing that has progressed is our attainment of new knowledge, but knowledge is only a tool—in the hands of the capable, a blessing, but in the hands of the unqualified, a calamity—the benefits of which will not compensate for even one-tenth of the losses. What then is the path to salvation? Only national reconstruction, as I have illustrated in the main portion of this work. It would be most comprehensive to call it a cultural movement, but a cultural movement appropriating similar visions from other nations, adding to the unique, fundamental, and organizational methods suited to the Korean situation, a cultural movement by establishing organizations, the most organized, long-lasting and extensive cultural movement by those very organizations. Yes, this is the only way to save the Korean people. Finally, I should explain in advance that the reconstruction move-



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ment should not be related to politics, religion, or any other ideology (i.e. capitalism, socialism, imperialism, democracy), or be conducted under the umbrella of any independence, self-rule, or assimilation movement. As the nature of reconstruction lies only in the national character and the lives of the people, it should be limited to the scope of an educational undertaking based in the three principles of spirit, mind, and body, as outlined above, and under no circumstances should it become politically colored. Rousseau’s idea that “Before you become a politician, soldier, or minister, become a person first” provides a good guideline for the reconstruction movement. Although our allies will be comprised of different professionals and believers, the call to honesty, hard work, faith, public service, dedication to a skill or art, career, education, and so on is common to any ideologue or believer. Through cultivation in a reconstruction organization, any religious believer will become a better believer and any socialist will become a better socialist, for such is the essential condition of human beings. I have just outlined the principles and strategy behind national reconstruction. I am without question a proponent of these ideas and believe that there are many readers who share my vision. It is therefore with faith that all of this will be realized in the near future that I fling my insignificant life, like a handful of dirt, into this noble endeavor. On the evening of November 22nd, 1921

Notes 1. Yi Kwangsu, writer and political activist, was one of the most important public intellectuals of the colonial period. He was known not only for his nationalist activities, like his involvement with the March First Movement, but also for his scholarship and later political collaboration with the colonial state. He won acclaim for Mujŏng (The Heartless, 1917), considered Korea’s first mature example of modern fiction, and used his literary influence to promote the cultural nationalist cause. See Ann S. Lee’s introduction to and translation of this work in Yi Kwangsu and Modern Korean Literature, Mujŏng (Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2005). See also Michael D. Shin, “Interior Landscapes: Yi Kwangsu’s ‘The Heartless’ and the Origins of Modern Literature,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 248–287. Yi was a prolific writer not only of fiction but also of short stories, political treatises, poetry, and literary theory. Although Yi’s writings demonstrate a refined literary sensibility, they are heavily colored by his politics, which often feature Japanese-educated protagonists epitomizing his ideal of the

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reconstructed individual. In the second half of his literary career, his writings began to reflect his ch’inil (collaborative) proclivities, and were often about young intellectuals, like himself, educated in the Japanese cultural sphere. By 1939, Yi was openly working for the Japanese colonial government as president of the Korean Writer’s Association. 2. Kaebyŏk was a publication of the Ch’ŏndogyo Church, an organization to which Yi was closely linked from his early years as a junior high school student. Yi was sponsored by the Ch’ŏndogyo organization for study in Japan at the Meiji Gakuin (1907–1910), an academy run by the Presbyterian Church. See Kim Chŏngin, “ ‘Kaebyŏk’ ŭl naŭn hyŏnsil, ‘Kaebyŏk’ e tamgin hŭimang” (The Circumstances Surrounding the Publication of Kaebyŏk and the Hopes It Contained), Yŏksa wa hyŏnsil (History and Truth) 57 (September 2005): 21–48. 3. Michael Robinson, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–1925 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 57. 4. Originally published in Kaebyŏk 13 (July 1921); see also the version reprinted in Chu Yohan et al., eds., Yi Kwangsu chŏnjip (Yi Kwangsu’s Collected Works), vol. 17 (Seoul: Samjungdang, 1962–1964), 151–158. 5. Kim Sŏngsu was the scion of a wealthy landowning family from Chŏlla Province. He was Yi Kwangsu’s senior at Waseda University and an avid supporter of cultural advancement programs. Kim funded Yi’s education at Waseda and used his considerable power and finances to spearhead many educational projects. He founded Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily) and what is today Koryŏ University. See Carter Eckert’s Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991). 6. Michael Shin’s research focuses on post-Kantian culturalism as an important intellectual movement that swept Japan during the Taishō era. Shin’s thesis is that for those who could not accept Marxist ideology, the realm of culture became an autonomous construct to retreat to when political participation was no longer tenable. See Michael D. Shin, “Nationalist Discourse and Nationalist Institutions in Colonial Chosŏn, 1914–1926” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2002). 7. The February 8, 1919, Tokyo Student Declaration (2.8 Tongnip Sŏnŏn) was initiated by the Korean Student Organization of Tokyo (Tonggyŏng Chosŏn Yuhaksaeng Haguhoe), comprised of Korean students matriculated abroad in Tokyo. The organization became just one of the many groups (Ch’ŏndogyo, Christians, Buddhists, students) that participated a month later in the March First Movement of 1919. Yi Kwangsu was entrusted with writing what is now remembered as the February Eighth Declaration of Independence. He then escaped to Shanghai on February 5, three days before the document was officially released. On February 8, 1919, the Declaration was read at the Korean YMCA meeting, where the police arrested almost thirty students. 8. See Sin Illyong’s rebuttal of Yi Kwangsu’s argument, “Critiquing Yi Kwangsu’s Minjok kaejoron,” in Sinsaenghwal (New Life) 7 (1922): 2–18. 9. These were distillations of youth cultivation principles propounded by “Tosan” An Ch’angho (1878–1938), a nationalist leader and Yi Kwangsu’s mentor,



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who adopted a gradualist approach to gaining independence. When the Shanghai Provisional Government (SPG) was formed in April 1919, Syngman Rhee became prime minister and An the home minister. An, who believed that the key to Korea’s future lay in training capable individuals, formed elite organizations like the America-based Hŭngsadan (Corps for the Advancement of Scholars) to provide a rigorous preparatory program for future citizens of a free Korea. The ideas of honesty (sil ) and action (haeng) that Yi Kwangsu writes about in this essay were derived from An Ch’angho’s code of conduct for the Hŭngsadan, an organization founded in San Francisco in 1913. Disaffected with the SPG, An Ch’angho formed the Asian branch of the Hŭngsadan in Shanghai in January1920. Yi Kwangsu was the first member of the Hŭngsadan outside of the United States and lived in the same house with An for a year in Shanghai. Other early members were Chu Yohan, Son Chŏngdo, Ch’a Yisŏk, and Yi Kyusŏ. The ideas are also outlined in an earlier essay by Yi Kwangsu published under the pen name Noa and titled “Chungch’u kyegŭp kwa sahoe”(The Core Class and Society), Kaebyŏk (Creation) 13 (July 1921). 10. Yi Kwangsu’s admiration for British constitutional and legal history was influenced by analytic philosophy such as that of Bertrand Russell, whose 1916 Principles of Social Reconstruction was widely read in East Asia following his 1918–1919 visit to Japan and China. Other forms of Yi Kwangsu’s liberalism were manifest especially in his belief in the importance of educating women as intellectual equals to educated men. He was a proponent of free love and spoke against child marriage, a practice common in the late Chosŏn dynasty from which he had personally suffered. His first marriage, to Pak Hyesun, had been an unhappy arranged one. 11. John Dewey also visited Asia during the late 1910s and shared many of his ideas with major Japanese and Chinese intellectuals. For example, Dewey’s trip to China was hosted by Hu Shi (1891–1962), who had studied under him at Columbia University. 12. See, for example, Myŏngsik Kim, “Yŏngung chuŭi wa p’asisŭm—Yi Kwangsu ŭi mong ŭl kyeham” (Hero Worship and Fascism—Questioning Yi Kwangsu’s Dream), Tonggwang 31 (March 5, 1932). 13. Refers to An Ch’angho, who gave an earlier lecture in Shanghai on “reconstruction” in 1919. See An Ch’angho. “Kaejo” (Reconstruction),” in An Tosan chŏnsŏ (Complete Works of An Ch’angho) (Seoul: Samjungdang, 1963), 544–549. 14. Origins of the term kaejo (reconstruction) can be traced back to as early as the 1910s, with the introduction of Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction into Japanese and Chinese intellectual circles. The term “reconstruction” (K. kaejo, J. kaizō, C. gaizao) became a catchphrase in Asia and was transculturated by both Korean and Chinese students studying in Tokyo for their own nationalistic purposes. There was, for instance, a monthly magazine in Tokyo called Kaizō (Reconstruction), published from 1919 to 1955. Prominent nationalists like Liang Qichao (1873–1929) in China were working with the concept, as were Korean nationalists like Yi Tonhwa (1884–?), whose article on the concept of kaejo appears alongside Yi Kwangsu’s essay in the May 1922 issue of Kaebyŏk.

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15. In the version edited by Sŏ Taesu, published in the Yi Kwangsu chŏnjip (The Complete Writings of Yi Kwangsu), vol. 17 (Seoul: Samjungdang, 1962), the phrase “a capitalist world into a communist one” is omitted. This might be a reflection of the polarized Cold War intellectual climate of the 1960s in South Korea. 16. I am taking the liberty of using the words “people” and “nation” interchangeably when translating the term minjok. The concept of minjok is closer to “ethnic nation.” Yi Kwangsu never refers to Korea as “Korea” but as “Chosŏn.” For translation purposes, however, I sometimes refer to Chosŏn as Korea, using the two terms interchangeably. 17. Yi refers here to the Imjin Wars (Hideyoshi Invasions, 1592–1598), during which Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s (1536–1598) armies attempted to conquer Chosŏn and eventually attack Ming China as well. Hideyoshi’s hordes were vanquished by a combined army of Chosŏn and Ming soldiers, led by Admiral Yi Sunsin (1545–1598), a celebrated military hero. 18. The Kabo Reforms were a series of radical reforms initiated by the Korean government in the context of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and under pressure from the Japanese. Although the reforms were only partially successful, they are regarded as part of the Enlightenment self-strengthening attempts spearheaded by progressive, reform-minded Korean leaders before the annexation of Korea in 1910. 19. Yi Kwangsu was thirty years old when he composed this essay. 20. Yi is referring to the March First Movement of 1919, a mass anti-Japanese demonstration that ultimately failed to win independence but brought about a major shift in colonial policy. The movement sparked debates within the Japanese government that resulted in the less draconian bunka seiji (cultural policy) rule of the 1920s. 21. Zisi (483–402 BCE), the only grandson of Confucius, is said to have taught Mencius. The Doctrine of the Mean is attributed to him. 22. Here Yi is referencing the development of the field of mass psychology as a subset of sociology and in particular the work of Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931). Japanese sociologists and ideologues were using Le Bon’s ideas on the crowd to address Japan’s particular social problems during the era of so-called Taishō Democracy, which was marked by public outbursts beginning with the 1905 Hibiya riot and culminating in the 1918 Rice Riots and brief explorations into political liberalism. For an in-depth treatment of the Taishō social issues, see Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 23. The Meiji Reformation or Revolution of 1868. 24.  The Kapsin Coup of 1884 was an attempt by the pro-Japanese Progressive Party to seize power and overturn competing foreign influences at King Kojong’s court. Kim Okkyun (1851–1894) and Pak Yŏnghyo (1861–1939) were members of the failed coup. The leaders of the December 4, 1884, coup, Kim Okkyun and Sŏ Chaep’il (1866–1951), fled Korea following the failed attempt. 25. “Tasan” Chŏng Yagyong (1762–1836) is remembered as one of the most



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important thinkers of the Chosŏn dynasty. He is often identified with the Sirhak School (Practical Learning), a seventeenth- to nineteenth-century intellectual movement whose proponents believed that all information and arguments should be judged on their practical effect. 26. The Kaejoron’s publication was received with biting attacks in its more militant equivalent, New Life (Sin Saenghwal ). In the June 1922 issue, the editor, Sin Illyong, issued a caustic rebuttal to the Kaejoron. Calling Yi a “decadent” scholar, Sin disparages Yi’s view of Great Britain as a free nation (chayuguk) that rose to power due to its high moral character. He questions whether Yi knows world history at all, since Great Britain, according to Sin, cannot be regarded as a nation that loves freedom and respects it in others. Sin exhorts Yi to re-study the history of British occupation in China, India, and the United States. As a Marxist advocating dynamic social change, Sin also takes exception to Yi’s disdain for the French Revolution, reminding Yi of its importance to egalitarianism. 27. The Constitutional Assembly marked the culmination of an attempt by modern-minded Han Chinese elites (the Manchu court officials tended to be virulently anti-Western and in favor of the status quo) to implement constitutional reforms after the failure of the Hundred Days Reform and the suppression of the Boxer Rising. Modern-thinking Chinese intellectuals were convinced that Japan’s constitutional monarchy was one of the reasons for its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). In April 1911, a cabinet of high officials and Manchu nobles modeled after the Japanese was appointed and a parliament was also envisioned, but the Revolution of 1911 preempted the whole initiative. See Andrew Nathan, Peking Politics 1918–1923: Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 28. Yi was likely citing the Japanese translation of Le Bon’s text Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (1894), Minzoku hatten no shinri (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Bunmei Kyōkai, 1910). Le Bon was dismissed by French contemporaries due to his virulent disdain for socialism/communism, a movement that he argued was as much a brainwashing ideology as any religion. The Meiji state adopted many of Le Bon’s policies because of the French thinker’s belief that each race or people possessed fundamental characteristics. Yi Kwangsu also derived most of his ideas about national character from Le Bon’s writings, but Yi’s focus is on the question of whether it is possible to alter racial or national traits. Interestingly, Le Bon was also a major opponent of French assimilation policies, which is understandable since he believed that each race had relatively fixed personalities and traits. 29. Tongin (Easterners) and Sŏin (Westerners) were rival groups vying for power and influence at the Chosŏn court during the late sixteenth century. The Soron (Young Doctrine, late seventeenth century) and Noron (Old Doctrine, late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) were later rival offshoots from the earlier Westerner (sixteenth century) group. The use of the term “factionalism” can be pejorative because of its association with Japanese imperialist historians’ critiques of what they perceived as fundamental deficiencies in the Korean national character.

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30. It was at the Versailles Peace Conference (Paris Peace Conference, 1919) that U.S. president Woodrow Wilson introduced his Fourteen Points; in particular, the article on self-determination inspired nationalists from countries struggling for independence the world over. Korea tried to send delegates to the conference in hopes of garnering international support for its independence movement, but only Kim Kyusik (1881–1950) managed to arrive in France and even then could not gain an audience with relevant officials. 31. These two sentences are blacked out in the Kaebyŏk publication. This excerpt is translated from Sŏ, The Complete Writings of Yi Kwangsu, vol. 17, 194. 32. This portion was also blacked out in the Kaebyŏk publication. See ibid. 33. Yi Kwangsu’s more radical contemporaries were enraged at Yi’s suggestion that Korea was not yet ready for independence as well as at his idea that national reconstruction could happen within the context of colonization. 34. Sun Wen (1866–1925), Gu Wei-jun (1885–1985), and Wan Zheng-yan (ca. 1918) were all Chinese nationalists who worked to reconstruct what they perceived as the depravity of the Qing dynasty. Sun Wen is most famous for creating what became known as the Three People’s Principle (San-min-zhu-yi), the core of which consists of people’s rights, people’s lives, and the nation (C. minzu, K. minjok). The Three People’s Principle was a driving force behind the 1911 Republican Revolution, which Sun Yat-sen spearheaded before relinquishing the presidency to Yuan Shikai. Gu Wei-jun held prominent positions in the Chinese Republic, and in 1919 he was a delegate to the Versailles Peace Conference, along with Wan Zheng-yan.

CHAPTER 2

Sin Paegu Introduction and Translation by Jiyeon Kim

Introduction “Urging the Vanguard of Social Movements to Come Forward” was published in the first and second issues of the magazine New Life (Sinsaenghwal ).  New Life was one of several leftist journals launched in the early 1920s, when, in the aftermath of the March First Movement, the Japanese colonial government established its “cultural policy” (munhwa chŏngch’i; J. bunka seiji ) and briefly loosened restrictions on organizational and publishing activities. Many journals that started publishing in this period— such as, for example, Creation (Kaebyŏk), which became a major intellectual journal in the 1920s—frequently contained radical socialist ideas.1 However, while Creation encompassed both leftist and nationalist ideas, the writers for New Life consisted almost exclusively of leftist intellectuals.2 New Life differed from Creation also in its short lifespan. Its first issue was published in March 1922, but the publication was suspended abruptly in November of the same year when its president, Pak Hŭido, and several  other writers were arrested, tried, and imprisoned in an incident that is remembered as the first trial of socialists in colonial Korea.3 After the failure of the March First Movement, the nationalists who had fought for independence adjusted their strategy to be what they viewed as more realistic and feasible within the limits of the contemporary political situation and began to focus on cultural activities and the education of the Korean masses. At the same time, students and intellectuals disappointed by what they saw to be the half-heartedness and political ineffectiveness of nationalists gravitated toward socialism, influenced also by the unwillingness of the West to support Korea’s efforts for independence. In the early 1920s, both nationalists and leftists actively engaged in 29

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publishing ventures. Leftist writers introduced socialist ideas by translating and summarizing Marxist texts on the one hand, and on the other hand criticized the structure of Korean society without directly addressing the issue of colonialism. Their critique was also directed at the moderate nationalists, who, in their view, were only motivated by the conservative and ultimately selfish cause of protecting their privilege. “Urging the Vanguard of Social Movements to Come Forward” addresses several major issues that surfaced throughout the short history of the journal: the hardship of the common masses, the transition from the traditional Confucian society to a new capitalist society and subsequent formation of a new hegemonic group, and a critique of the moderate nationalists. The name Sin Paegu gave to these nationalists was “cultural activists.”4 Culture was one of the major themes that New Life writers frequently discussed. Far from being a singular, timeless entity applicable to all members of a nation, culture, for these writers, was constantly in flux and needed to be grasped in terms of difference. They emphasized the evolution of culture through industrial development and highlighted the difference between bourgeois and proletarian culture.5 Sin’s article, however, avoids a lengthy discussion of theories of culture and of social evolution and directly addresses the actual situation of Korea. In secondary sources, Sin Paegu is mentioned as one of the main leftist intellectuals of the 1920s, although the details of his life are barely known. We know that he went to Manchuria around 1910 and was briefly part of the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai. He returned to Korea sometime after the March First Movement and became a key figure in socialist groups of the 1920s. Around 1922, he organized several socialist associations, including the Chosŏn Worker’s Cooperative Association (Chosŏn Nodong Kongjihoe) and the Association of Proletarian Comrades (Musanja Kongjihoe), both of which are mentioned in his article, but he appears to have maintained some degree of ambivalence toward these same organizations. After 1925 he stopped directly participating in socialist activities, or any kind of political activity for that matter, in contrast to New Life members such as Pak Hŭido (1889–1951), who is said to have become involved in pro-Japanese activities in the 1930s and 1940s. “Urging the Vanguard of Social Movements to Come Forward” is divided into three main sections. It begins by introducing the concept of socialism in a historical context by surveying the socialist movements of several European countries. Sin’s approach, like that of his fellow writers at New Life, is more fragmentary than systematic and supported by a naïve enthusiasm for “scientific and logical” socialism. This relates to the



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fact that many leftists who were active in Korea in the early 1920s were students of socialism rather than activists, thus not alert to the discrepancy between the theory and the actual practice of socialism.6 Even though Sin Paegu himself, as mentioned earlier, was active as an organizer, it is doubtful whether such organizations motivated the open involvement of the masses. Propagandistic claims for the perfection of Marxist theory, however, were an important part of the overall communist strategy. Sin goes further in his effort to convince the reader about the inevitable advent of a socialist society by graphically describing the disaster of World War I as the agent of capitalism’s demise in the West and summarizing pivotal moments in the labor movements of England and France. The traces of censorship in the original text provide a glimpse of the limits of the Japanese colonial government’s tolerance of radical content during the era when their so-called cultural policy was in force. While several explicit expressions in the article were permitted, discussions of the Russian Revolution and of colonialism were struck from its pages.7 In the second part, Sin Paegu describes in empathetic terms the Korean situation and the plight of the common folk.8 He points out the fact that the number of (factory) laborers was extremely small and that the lower classes consisted mainly of peasants (including tenant farmers). Here he talks about how a new dominant social group is replacing the former yangban elite and engaging in a new form of oppression vis-à-vis the masses. This new group, identified more or less as the bourgeoisie, consists of landlords and capitalists but also includes those he terms “cultural activists.” This line of argumentation develops into a sharp critique of the incompetence and immorality of the so-called intellectuals and moderate nationalists. Sin assaults the political ambivalence of the nationalists who adjusted their goals from acquiring independence to self-governing and then again to suffrage and reproves the self-centered nature of their various cultural activities, activities that in Sin’s view do not benefit the common people. In the last section, Sin calls rather abruptly for the emergence of socialist activists and political leaders: the vanguard. The word I have translated as “vanguard” is sŏnguja, which literally means “those who run ahead.” Although it has a broader connotation than chŏnwi, the politically charged term and a direct translation of “vanguard,” I felt justified in using the word “vanguard” given the context in which Sin used the term sŏnguja. In the early 1920s, the Korean masses were still too weak both materially and spiritually to foster the emergence of a proletarian leader from their own ranks.9 The main protagonists of the socialist movement were therefore students and intellectuals, as implied in Sin’s article. In

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this sense, the sŏnguja of social movements and the sŏnguja of nationalist movements are not to be differentiated from one another in terms of their social background but rather according to the paths to social improvement they prescribed. Sin Paegu does not discuss the specific path and methodology for the vanguard of the social movements upon whom he calls, likely because neither Korean leftists nor international communists offered detailed answers. In his conclusion, Sin Paegu still maintains his ideal vision, declaring that “the common people will find their own way themselves,” but he remembers to add that “every affair needs momentum to carry the work further.” The anxious but hopeful Korean leftists in the early 1920s had much longer to wait for that momentum to gather.10

Urging the Vanguard of Social Movements to Come Forward* I I would like to begin by talking about the meaning of social movements. By starting this way, I may appear to be underestimating our public’s common sense, but it is not my way to be pretentious or to ignore reality. The word “movement” takes on a variety of meanings depending on what precedes it. In recent years, such terms as “independence movement,” “self-government movement,” or “cultural movement” have become popular, and the concepts these terms represent are now familiar to almost everyone. On the other hand, it seems that none but an interested minority understands the meaning of terms like “social movement” or “labor movement.” For this reason and at the risk of being long-winded, I want to provide an overview of how social movements have unfolded recently in several different countries. After the Industrial Revolution in Europe, capitalism reached its apogee. It then fermented, matured, and finally decomposed. Just as a tick sucks too much blood from a cow and dies as its guts explode, the recent Great War in Europe was the result of the extreme expansion of capitalism, whose utter destruction played itself out like a moving picture before our eyes. The industries of Europe were demolished like a fish being hacked [to pieces] on a cutting board. What followed was a devastating tragedy unparalleled in human history. Even before the end, however, there were prophets who knew that capitalism was the root of every evil and that it would collapse at the very highest point of its development. Discovering *Sin Paegu, “Sahoe undong ŭi sŏnguja ŭi ch’ullae rŭl ch’okhanora,” Sinsaenghwal 1 (1922): 34–38; 2 (1922): 15–20.



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socialism, these prophets proclaimed mutual support, explored historical materialism, declared class struggle and the worldwide solidarity of workers, and elucidated socialism as the truth of freedom and equality. In their numerous writings, they advanced their view that the socialist revolution and reconstruction would result in the most perfect utopia capable of guaranteeing humanity’s happiness. Attempting to actualize this vision, some even became martyrs for truth, their lives cut short by the guillotine or in prison. Now that European industry lies in ruins, some people anticipate the revival of capitalism while others forecast the construction of a new socialist world. Surely we are facing one of the most critical moments in all of human history. In southern Europe, D’Annunzio’s11 influence is prevalent, and in northern Europe, Lenin fired up the great furnace for the socialist experiment. Of course, each prophet is differently motivated and situated, and yet we must credit their tireless efforts with achieving scientific socialism as a rational system. And this advance opens up a critical opportunity for us now. Let me return to the discussion of social movements in foreign countries by looking at the case of England. In 1915, in the city of Clyde,12 Kirkwood,13 Murphy,14 and others embarked on a strike and restored the power of labor unions, which were becoming organs of the government. In 1917, when the Labor Party submitted twenty-seven propositions for social reform, the government once again tried to resolve the problem by organizing an industry council. The council’s plan, however, was foiled when the unions of miners, transport workers, and rail workers came together in the Triple Alliance to mount a formidable challenge. The miners’ union, in particular, strongly pressed the government to nationalize the mines. In 1921, all three unions called for a large-scale general strike, forcing the then–prime minister, Lloyd George, to beg and plead in order to prolong his lease on what little remained of his political life. We can call this philosophy by the name “guild socialism.” In France, labor unions are called the syndical. The French achieved the freedom to organize only in 1884, which by 1890 led to the formation of 1,006 unions with 139,678 members. By 1905, the numbers had grown to 4,623 unions and 781,344 members. During the pre-war period, French socialists organized the CGT,15 with the total membership numbering around 600,000. The CGT was an industry-based rather than occupationbased organization. The particular strength of French socialism in recent years has been its ability to engage in direct action involving the simultaneous use of four strategies: strike, sabotage, revolt, and boycott. French syndicalists were also unique in another way. Even though they differed little from other labor organizations at first, indignant syndicalists turned

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to anarchism when some union leaders were co-opted by the authorities. Becoming the heads of political parties or taking up government posts, these former union leaders showed no mercy in their suppression of labor actions such as strikes. And now that we know that syndicalists were given a seat in the 1921 International Communist Congress in Moscow, we can assume that a major qualitative change has taken place once again in their [political] program. [Original pp. 36–38, 35 lines of text omitted (34 lines censored)] Social movements in Korea face the same situation. Even though I have no appetite for self-denigration, I must confess that it would not be an exaggeration to say that we have almost nothing [in the way social movements]. What we do have are a few wandering youths who call for a movement, enthralled by bits and pieces of [social]ism’s truths that they have come across. Of course, we do have several organizations that resemble [labor associations] such as the Chosŏn Workers’ Cooperative Association (Chosŏn Nodong Kongjehoe), the Great Association of Workers (Nodong Taehoe), the Association of Proletarian Comrades (Musanja Tongjihoe), and the New People’s Alliance (Sinin Tongmaenghoe);16 yet I cannot help but wonder how many of their members would show their true worth as fighters. Nevertheless, there does appear to be a considerable number of organizations or schools in both the cities and the countryside that have sprung up in the name of labor. Although it is difficult to decipher whether they advocate simple cooperationism, direct action, or a hodgepodge of different isms, they certainly seem to be infused with a new kind of energy. Moreover, when remembering the events of the New Year, when a chance incident indirectly sparked a social movement of sorts and caused a crowd of thousands to come together and cry out in one voice, it is impossible to ignore the feeling that the winds are blowing and gradually spreading the news. This feeling leaves me both joyous and fearful. [5 lines censored] I hope that the discussion above, though abbreviated, will aid our understanding of the meaning of social movements. II We can see the truth of social movements and at the same time can realize the vast and lofty value they contain. A social movement is not an artificial or false construction, but a self-evident and unshakeable truth arising from both the progress of social history and natural tendencies of humanity. Try as we might, we cannot evade this fact. For what is truth if not the



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desire to cast off our present inhumane society of tears, of hunger, of cold, of vice, deceit, corruption, inequality, and agony—in short, our capitalist society—and aspire toward one without hunger and cold, a society of laughter, of freedom, of equality, of pleasure, and of flower gardens—in short, a society wherein ideals have been realized? Some argue that the proletariat, out of its own greed, adheres to ­biases that conflict with the development of history and interfere with human progress. This, however, is only a myth the bourgeois class embraces in self-defense. There is no room for doubt since [the socialist idea] has been proven by a supremely scientific, systematic, and coherent theory. III If this is the truth beyond a shadow of doubt, we have to examine ourselves. If we fail to reflect in all seriousness upon the unfair suffering of the proletariat all around us, our words do nothing but repeat vague ideas that are as decadent as they are old. How could such ideas be of any value? This is the reason why I believe that, if we do not carefully examine the present Korean situation, we cannot speak about the future of the common people (minjung) of Korea. During the several hundred years since its founding, the Chosŏn dynasty was ruled by the dominant class of intellectuals or privileged elite who insisted on frugality and failed to promote industry. As a result, Chosŏn’s poverty reached a climax and the common people were denied the resources necessary for progressive development. What’s more, in the midst of terrible troubles, [word censored] was taken away by the invasion of foreign powers, and [line censored]. The situation has completely changed. The institutions of earlier times that allowed the aristocratic clans and central bureaucrats (with the concurrence of society in general) to view themselves as the most glorious of the human races regardless of their personal characteristics, appear to have been shattered now. On the other hand, the flame of capitalism is gradually spreading and hindering the development of the common people as a whole. Take a look around. In the countryside, a hundred-sŏk17 landlord holds the lives of one hundred households in the palm of his hand, and in the cities, a thousand-sŏk landlord has one thousand households at his beck and call. A capitalist who own factories owns the workers as his slaves. This is what the changing times have produced. Let us first look at the lives of tenant farmers, who form the majority of Chosŏn’s population. Suppose there is a tenant family of five or six who cultivate ten turak18 of land (we should note that there is only a small number of tenants who even have ten turak of land) and produce two sŏk [of

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rice] for each turak. Of these, one sŏk is paid to the landlord; even the most benevolent of landlords asks for a minimum of one sŏk as a matter of custom, and there are many landlords who demand up to 1.7 or 1.8 sŏk. This might make us think that the farmer will now keep the remaining ten sŏk from the twenty produced from the ten turak of land he tilled. Alas, this is not the case either. There is a land tax of two wŏn levied for each turak, for which the tenant is alone responsible. After the tax of twenty wŏn for the ten turak is deducted, there now remains only seven or eight sŏk. From this, the expense of transporting the grain amounts to four to five wŏn for short distances and about ten wŏn for long distances. In addition, about two to three wŏn for each turak need to be spent on fertilizers. That makes twenty to thirty wŏn for the ten turak. What’s more, during busy seasons, it is impossible not to employ some extra hands. Thus, most of the grain [the farmer produces] is spent in one way or another, such that the farmer will stand with only a broom in his hand upon the threshing field, staring blankly at the distant mountains and smacking his lips or hitting himself in the head. The example I have given is not an exaggeration designed to incense the readers. In the three southern provinces, in fact, there are often situations far worse than what I have described. What about the case of factory workers? Since Korea’s industrial development is at a rudimentary stage, there are not that many large factories to speak of, but some so-called government-owned factories and other small-scale privately owned factories do boast of employees numbering in the tens of thousands. These workers labor twelve to thirteen hours a day for a wage that ranges from thirty or forty chŏn19 to one or two wŏn. This is an extremely low sum when compared to workers’ wages in other countries and does not allow Korean workers to eke out even the barest living. One sees these workers walking down the street with extremely wan and wrinkled faces, like patients who have not recovered from serious ailments. An even more absurd sight is that of tax pamphlets or overdue notices making their way into the run-down homes of workers. The pamphlets decorate the moldy walls, even though these workers remain illiterate because they have no spare time to learn to read. One also sees people crouched in their homes, shivering in the heart of winter because their door panels have been ripped off for the unpaid taxes. More appalling even is the frequent sight in southern regions of red flags flapping by the gates of those homes whose owners have been unable to make their tax payments. Those who have paid their taxes in full have white flags placed in front of their homes, though I have not witnessed this practice in person. What in the world could be the meaning of this practice? Are delinquent taxpayers being rewarded with red flags? Do white flags mark



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the surrender of the non-delinquent taxpayers? It had been my understanding that in this gray society of ours, the color red was taboo. Could the matter of flags have arisen then from a case of ignorance or poor night vision? Whatever the case may be, a grave injustice is committed in the way the proletariat is being ridiculed and punished. Perhaps the error itself is a telling sign. Even though the entire world today is like a kettle boiling over with calls for labor and social [reforms], who would even be cognizant of the fact that the entire 80,000 square li20 of Korean land is turning into a haunt of hungry ghosts? Oh, how unbearable all this is! Oh, how unbearable all this is! IV It is clear that the standard of living in a given society depends on the level of industrial development in that society. Industrial development, in turn, depends on social institutions, and the nature of social institutions depends on the firm resolve of the common people. Since the days of old, however, the history of Eastern peoples has been like a boat without a compass on the open sea, pushed hither and thither by the tides and winds with never a certain destination, until the boat finally founders in a storm or upon a reef. Without any principle or resolve of its own, the entire East could do nothing but perpetuate the status quo, thereby inviting misfortune upon itself. Especially severe has been the case of Korea, whose tendency to seek temporary relief with stopgap measures in lieu of adopting a farsighted plan has led to the present adversity. Thrust into this cruel situation, it is as if, amid the resentment and sorrow brought on by death, they [the common people of Korea] can do nothing but stare blankly, unable so much as to taste the joys of life. But look at the dreadful way the so-called intellectuals carry on. How can even the most unemotional of individuals fail to shudder with dismay? We may be able to ignore the outdated scholars in the remote mountains and countryside who address aloud the Heavenly Emperor (Ch’ŏnhwangssi),21 talk about how “energy follows the principle (ibal kisŭng),” and who believe in the “Three Bonds and Five Relations” (samgang oryun). Their fate is like the setting sun on western hills. Let us focus also on the so-called intellectuals who have studied in universities of the United States, England, Japan, or China, or who have received higher [modern] education in Korea. They now occupy central positions in Korea as teachers, as editors of journals, as heads of various organizations, banks, companies, and government agencies. As such, this class contains the major architects of [Korea’s current] superstructure, and from this class we

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can observe the emergence of a new aristocracy ruling over the common people in direct as well as indirect ways. If we look beneath the surface of how these intellectuals live, we can see that some deceive the common people with their ever-changing policies, while others pursue their own interests by temporarily evading trouble with false words. Among them, those who are considered the most promising and capable might become the followers of the latest trends and participate in some insignificant movements and end up spending a year or two in prison. (I am not completely unsympathetic to them.) They then tout themselves as heroes, role models, and celebrities, cherishing their reputations and turning them into commodities to be advertised to the common people. They also become arrogant and self-indulgent, as if the ultimate authority rested with them. We the common people are far from blind to the obvious intentions of these slaves of cheap reputation, who without an iota of sincerity seek only to parade their fame to the world. Look around you! There are many among the common people whose sacrifice has been greater. Many gave up lives, sprinkling wild plains far away with their blood, but you will not see a single one of them boasting of their efforts. Though their parents, wives, and children become vagabonds, you will not see a single tear of self-pity on their faces. Does this not expose the despicable mindset of that class of beings called intellectuals? The popular slogan to which this group pays lip service is “cultural movement.” What this phrase means, however, is extremely ambiguous and elusive. For some, a cultural movement is equal to nothing more than putting up a doorplate bearing the name of Such and Such Society with funds borrowed from some aristocrat. For others, a cultural movement consists of performing minor repairs to a shabby house and opening it up to accommodate a few scholars of one’s closest acquaintance, who then function like a kept political party that sings the government’s praise. Then there are those scumbags who used to grovel before high officials of old. Armed with phony smiles and cunning sophistry, they now fawn on men of renown they consider to be superior in the hopes of securing something for themselves, while at the same time squeezing money out of naïve provincial gentlemen to use for their own living expenses. With their ghost organizations, they perform ghost dances and ghost theater while oppressing their honest critics and persecuting their fellows. These scoundrels also argue that what they do goes by the name of cultural movement. Yet another group of individuals has established organizations on borrowed money with the ostensible purpose of providing a platform for the common people to express themselves. Racking up several thousands



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of wŏn in restaurant debt in less than half a year, these men preach patronizingly to the common people while continuing to fawn on aristocrats. Such typical bourgeois behavior also goes by the name of cultural movement. So does the act of dreaming about independence in the morning, lecturing on self-government in the evening, and advocating the right to vote the next morning. Thus, the parameters of the so-called cultural movement are truly as vast as the Sahara Desert. Within these parameters, sheep jump, foals run, wild beasts roam, and birds fly, and the desert’s exact contours are not distinguishable to simple-minded common folk like us. Where are these ideas headed? We cannot see any clear direction in them. How can their impure thoughts have an intent and purpose that would be of use and benefit to the common people, that is to say, the proletariat? I find it exceedingly difficult to trust those who cannot go a single day or night without deceiving the common people. V What, then, is the future of the proletariat, the group that comprises 80 to 90 percent of the entire population? Will they forever be [word censored] the gentlemen and aristocrats, that is [word censored]? No, they will not. The common people will find their own way. Yet, every affair needs an impetus to carry the work further. In order to give the common people this push before they can perform the work by themselves, we have to cry out and urge the vanguard of social movements to come forward. This vanguard must consist of serious and passionate [social]ists who have shed all the customs, pretenses, and corruptions of old, and who have the capacity both to think through and carry out the task of reconstructing the society. They must be proactive individuals who embrace truth and devote themselves to breaking the ground for the common man’s utopic future, rejecting any religious superstition and standing firm against capital, against power, and against any other pressure that may be exerted upon them. This is what it means to be the vanguard. The time is ripe. Common people wander in great misery. Vanguard, I call you by name!

Notes 1. Several journals received special permits from the colonial government that allowed them to address political issues to some extent. Besides Sinsaenghwal and Kaebyŏk, Sinch’ŏnji (New World) and Tongmyŏng (Eastern Light) also received such permits. See Michael Robinson, “Ideological Schism in the Korean Nation-

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alist Movement, 1920–1930: Cultural Nationalism and the Radical Critique,” in Journal of Korean Studies 4 (1982–1983): 241–268. 2. According to Robert Scalapino and Chŏngsik Lee, intellectuals in this period were more like “petit-intellectuals” who graduated from secondary schools and worked as teachers or reporters. More than half of the members of the Korean Communist Party consisted of either intellectuals or petit-intellectuals that were also categorized in the group of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois. Robert Scalapino and Chŏngsik Lee, Communism in Korea, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 123–131. 3. Kim Chunyŏp and Kim Ch’angsun, Hanguk kongsanjuŭi undongsa (The History of the Korean Communist Movement), vol. 2 (Seoul: Ch’ŏnggye yŏnguso, 1986), 37. 4. Other writers for New Life also criticized cultural activists. Yi Kwangsu’s essay “Minjok kaejoron” (On National Reconstruction), which appeared in the May 1922 issue of Kaebyŏk , invited a harsh critique from the leftist writers. One example is Sin Illyong’s “Ch’unwŏn ŭi minjok kaejoron ŭl p’yŏngham” (Critiquing Yi Kwangsu’s “Minjok kaejoron”), New Life 7 (1922): 2–18. See Ellie Choi’s discussion in the preceding chapter. 5. See Yi Sŏngt’ae, “Hyŏndae munhwa ŭi panghyang” (The Direction of Contemporary Culture), Sinsaenghwal 9 (1922): 2–8. See also Kim Myŏngsik, “Kumunhwa wa sinmunhwa” (Old Culture and New Culture), Sinsaenghwal 2 (1922): 2–6. 6. Asian economic development is an example of such discrepancy between theory and reality. Under the influence of colonialism, Asian economies did not experience a state of full capitalist revolution. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, 61–65. 7. Kim and Kim, History of the Korean Communist Movement, 37. 8. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Sin avoids using the terms associated with traditional status stratification such as p’yŏngmin or sangmin to refer to the lower classes. 9. It was only after the mid-1920s that farmers and laborers began to take bigger roles in social and labor movements. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, 103. 10. The Korean Communist Party (Chosŏn Kongsandang) was first organized in 1925 but underwent a cycle of continuous break-up and reorganization until the end of the colonial period, mainly due to the effectiveness of the colonial police. The socialists’ strategy of incorporating nationalists also yielded disappointing results, leading to the dissolution of the New Korea Society (Singanhoe, 1927–1931), an umbrella organization consisting of both nationalists and leftists. 11. The reference is likely to Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), an Italian intellectual known for ultra-nationalist and irredentist ideas. He co-authored Carta del Carnaro, the constitution for a short-lived independent state of Fiume, which later provided the blueprint for Italian fascism. 12. Industrial towns by the Clyde River in Glasgow, Scotland, were collectively referred to as the Clydeside.



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13. David Kirkwood (1872–1955), an engineer from Glasgow, was a socialist leader and labor organizer during the early years of the twentieth century, when the workers of Clydeside engaged in prolonged confrontations with the management of munitions manufacturers and scored meaningful victories. He was later elected to the House of Commons and served multiple terms as a member of the Parliament. 14. J. T. Murphy (1888–1965), a metalworker from Sheffield, was a trade union organizer and a leading figure in the Shops Stewards’ Movement. 15. Confédération Genéral du Travail (General Confederation of Labor). 16. The Association of Proletarian Comrades was organized in January 1922, while the Chosŏn Workers’ Cooperative Association, the Great Association of Workers, and the New People’s Alliance were founded in February 1922. The New People’s Alliance merged with the Association of Proletarian Comrades later in 1922 and became the Proletarian Alliance (Musanja Tongmaenghoe). 17. One sŏk is equal to approximately five bushels. 18. One turak measures a plot of land that can grow one tu (approximately 180 liters) of seeds. The actual size of the plot will vary depending on the quality of the land. One sŏk equals ten tu. 19. One hundred chŏn equals one wŏn. 20. One li equals 0.4 kilometers. 21. In this context, Ch’ŏnhwang (Heavenly Emperor) referred to the ancient Chinese creation myth of Samhwang Oje (C. Sanhuang Wudi), commonly rendered in English as Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.

CHAPTER 3

Mun Ilp’yŏng Introduction by Sophia Kim Translation by Hijoo Son

Introduction Mun  Ilp’yŏng  (1888–1939),  pen  name  Hoam,  was  a  historian,  teacher,  journalist, and one of the few male writers to address women’s issues for a primarily male intellectual readership during the colonial era. His writings on women are thus of great interest, and yet they remain overshadowed by Mun’s important contributions on other subjects. In many ways, his views were typical of male intellectuals of his generation, but the large body of writings he left behind grants us a unique opportunity to chart the evolution of his views concerning the changing societal perspective on gender relations, especially with the rise of the New Women’s movement in the 1920s. Mun was born on May 15, 1888, in Ŭiju, North P’yŏngan Province,  and died at the age of fifty-two. As a teenager, Mun traveled to Japan to broaden his knowledge and scholarship,1 and graduated from Meiji Academy (Meiji Gakuin) in three years. Upon his return to Korea, Mun took  up teaching posts at various schools (Taesŏng in P’yŏngyang, Yangsil in  Ŭiju,  and  Kyŏngsin  in  Seoul)  while  serving  as  an  active  member  of  the  Association for the Glorious Literature of Chosŏn (Chosŏn Kwangmunhoe).2 However, once Japan annexed Korea in 1910, Mun lost his zeal for teaching and returned to Japan to study political science. After less than two years at Waseda University, Mun realized that studying political science in a Japanese university with the ultimate goal of restoring Korea’s independence was a futile endeavor. He departed for Shanghai in 1912. The six years Mun spent in Shanghai were critical to his intellectual and political development; his ideas were influenced both by people he associated with and by the sociopolitical changes that were taking place in  42



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China at the time.3 Mun became actively involved with Tongjesa, a secret pro-independence organization,4 and became well versed in nationalist tenets. At the same time, his interests shifted to such areas as Buddhism and political populism. The latter he saw as a driving force in history. In 1918, Mun returned to Korea and a year later participated in the March First Movement as one of the demonstration’s leaders.5 He read his piece “The Plea” (Aewŏnsŏ) in public, asserting that the Korean people’s strong desire for national autonomy should be grounds for national independence. For these activities Mun was arrested and served eight months in prison. Upon his release, Mun published historical essays in various newspapers and taught history in many different schools to sustain his livelihood.6 In 1927, at the age of thirty-eight, Mun decided to return to Japan for a third time to continue his studies. Exasperated by the distortions of Japanese colonial historiography, Mun returned to Korea before a full year had passed and began working as a reporter for Home and Abroad News (Chungoe ilbo) of the New Korea Society (Singanhoe) and as editorin-chief of the newsletter for the Organization of Korean Self-Production Movement (Chahwal Mulsan Changnyŏhoe). When Pang Ŭngmo (1890– 1950) took over the ownership of the Chosŏn Daily (Chosŏn ilbo) in 1933, Mun was hired as an editor, remaining in that post until his death. It has been noted that Mun’s most significant works on Korean history date from after 1933. He contributed many articles to the Chosŏn Daily, particularly for special features on Korean history, as a way of boosting subscriptions and also increasing popular awareness of Korean history. Mun’s participation in the activities of the Korean Studies Movement revealed his overarching ambition: to create historical narratives for the general public by simplifying the language, thereby making history more accessible.7 What differentiated Mun from his scholarly peers at the time was his methodology. Instead of pursuing new fields of research, Mun utilized a broad palette of familiar topics to educate and enlighten the general populace about the nationalist movement. He thus wrote on a range of subjects that mainstream historians would not commonly address, such as the arts, geography, science, the writing system, historical relics, and nature. Mun’s interest in non-political topics and diverse subject matter seems also to have been a natural consequence of increased Japanese censorship of political writings following the Manchurian Incident in 1931. Many Korean scholars argue that Mun’s ulterior motive in exploring a broad swath of traditional Korean culture was to help create national awareness with deeper cultural implications rather than to indulge in overt anti-Japanese rhetoric. One thing is certain: Whatever the motivations may have been,

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Mun’s avoidance of overtly political topics ensured the survival of his work. Mun’s writing was also characterized by an interest in those at the margins of society. Overcoming a monarchy-centered historical narrative, Mun placed emphasis on the role of rebels and the common people.8 His massive corpus of written works also demonstrates his interest in foreign policy.9 After Mun’s death in April of 1939 at the age of fifty-two, his works were published posthumously by the Chosŏn Daily. Of his 144 identifiable literary works, about 90 percent were published between 1927 and 1939. For the Chosŏn Daily alone, Mun produced about 1,000 articles in a period of nine years. That averages approximately 125 pieces per year, more than a third of the total articles printed in the newspaper. In addition, Mun submitted historical essays to other newspapers and magazines, and also gave public lectures. He was a prolific writer indeed. As equitable gender relations was considered one of the criteria for modernity, Korean traditions that oppress women provided the focal point for major reforms in the 1920s. “The Social Standing of Women,” serialized from August 15 to September 27, 1929, in the Chosŏn Daily, is generally regarded as Mun’s most important contribution to women’s issues. This piece reflected the climate of reform that emerged with the so-called New Women phenomenon as well as echoed the new counterhegemonic discourse proposed by feminist activists of the 1920s. The New Women’s movement was born, according to the feminist scholar Insook Kwon, as a consequence of the expansion of modern educational opportunities for women and Korean women’s exposure to Christianity as well as to the concepts of Western feminism against Confucian patriarchy.10 The writings of Swedish reformer Ellen Key (1849-1926)11 and Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen12 had far-reaching impact concerning the concept of “free love”—that is, advocating the idea of marrying for love—motherhood, and liberalism. These views fueled strong demands for social reform and a break from Confucian custom. The impact was not limited to Korean women; it was felt by Korean male intellectuals as well. Mun, for example, clearly engaged with the contemporary discourse on women when he criticized “Confucian feudal conceptions” of morality that existed in the male-centered society of Korea and called for reforms of polygamy and other discriminatory customs. Taking the critique even further, Mun argued that the idea of chastity, which disgraced and even led to suicides by many allegedly unfaithful women, should also apply to men. Requiring only women to uphold the virtues of unconditional filiality and chastity, he argued, reveals the narrow-mindedness of male standards.



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What distinguishes Mun from mainstream feminists, however, is the fact that, instead of denouncing the past altogether, he illustrates for his readers historical examples of Korean women in high political and social positions who wielded both power and prestige. He suggests that Korea might have been a matriarchal society at one time and that sexual and marriage practices were much more liberal in pre-Chosŏn Korea. The nascent feminist leanings in Mun’s writings, however, were still limited in certain respects. For example, he considered adulterous affairs to be the worst of vices. In his personal life as well, he maintained rather paradoxical views on women. Although Mun sent his wife to be educated at a modernized school, he punished his daughters harshly if they came home past curfew.13 In addition, Mun criticized the women’s movement for its lack of cooperation with the nationalists and the socialists.14 The seeming contradictions in Mun’s views on women make better sense when we consider how traditionalist thought reemerged in the mid-1920s as a counterweight to the ideas of liberal progressivism. Many nationalist Korean male intellectuals expressed concern that the decline of traditional values and the challenges posed by the New Women to the Confucian patriarchy weakened the resolve of the nationalist Korean struggle for liberation from Japan.15 Even the Japanese colonial administration supported the conservative organizations that adhered to Confucian values; promoting the Confucian family in Korea as a state-sponsored concept went hand in hand with the suppression of radical ideologies and a preemptive strike against the rise of independence movements.16 The traditionalist resurgence in Korean society gave rise to the ideology of the “good wife and wise mother,” which replaced in the 1930s the rebellious identity of the first New Women generation. The bulk of Mun’s writings on women were written in the 1930s. In keeping with the times, Mun celebrated motherhood, stressed the value of the family, and criticized women who took part in what he saw as irresponsible radical behavior. Mun’s views were amply displayed in his biography of Sin Saimdang.17 Such reaffirmations of the Confucian value system reinforce Mun’s subtle support for the ideological and strategic position of superiority for the Korean male nationalists in relation to their female counterparts. It is difficult to establish Mun’s definitive views on women based on his few written works on the subject, but his writing remains representative of the views of Korean male intellectuals at the time. He recognized that the improved status of women was both a prerequisite to developing a modern society and one of the marks of modernization as such. But just how far could the goal of liberating women from “premodern shackles” be pushed before it clashed with an increasingly culturalist articulation of

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nationalism in colonial Korea? Mun’s essay offers a glimpse of both the dilemma and an intriguing attempt at reconciliation.

The Social Standing of Korean Women* I According to sociologists, human society evolved from the female-centered organization of the past to the male-centered organization of today and will evolve again from its present form to one where the two sexes will attain equality. Modern society is in the process of this very transition, and the women’s issues and struggles rocking the world today relay the news of these recent developments. At such a juncture, it hardly needs repeating that a male-centered civilization that excludes the sex that makes up half of the population is fundamentally crippled. As civilizations founded on force teeter on the brink of utter ruin, only civilizations founded on love can come to their rescue. A civilization of love can be established only with the cooperation of women. In primitive times, women’s position was superior to men’s. Then the division of roles in everyday life led to the subordination of women until eventually a male-centered society was born. The male-centered society thus represented the first [sexual] revolution, a revolution mounted against a female-centered society. With the women’s movement today, we may be experiencing the second [sexual] revolution, which is being carried out against a male-centered society. Viewed in this light, human history is in its second stage today, and the twentieth century is bringing about great changes in the position of both sexes. In Korea as well, the past decade saw the development of a women’s movement from its initial dispersed form into something more centralized. Even though the movement may appear on the surface to be stagnating due to external circumstances, the incontrovertible fact is that women worldwide are awakening to a sense of self and that Korean women are seeking to join this new global current. This change is meaningful from the perspective of the global women’s movement, but it becomes positively astounding when we consider the particular situation of Korean women. Of all the women in the world, Korean women have been the most chained to long-established customs, their entire world confined to narrow inner quarters; for this reason, the Korean women’s liberation movement deserves a closer *Mun Ilp’yŏng, “Chosŏn yŏsŏng ŭi sahoejŏk chiwi,” 12-part series published in Chosŏn ilbo (August 15–September 27, 1929).18



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look. Conducting a historical study of Korean women’s social position up to the present would be a fruitful endeavor indeed. Because Korean history first began to be written only after the demise of the female-centered society and the establishment of a male-centered society, it remains the record of patriarchies. As for ancient historical records, the archive is incomplete to the extent that there remains little textual evidence of a matriarchal system. Yet, if one looks carefully, one may discern traces of past matriarchal organizations, however faint or ambiguous their outlines. Not only were there many goddesses such as Lady Yuhwa and Holy Mother Sŏndo among the deities that the ancient people worshipped, it was women who oversaw the proper performance of sacred rituals.19 From this, we can gather that gynecentric traditions surviving even up to the Three Kingdoms period allowed women’s social position to remain considerably high. Those who devote themselves to the service of deities may be denigrated nowadays as mere shamans, but the further one goes back in history, the more one sees how reverently these figures were treated. For example, in early Silla (57 BCE–668 CE),20 royal princesses were the keepers of royal holy shrines, and in Koguryŏ (37 BCE–668 CE), the beautiful women who entreated the oracles of the national shrine were likely of noble birth. A reason for supposing this is that shamans during this time were the objects of veneration by the rest of the society. Given that a great number of these revered sacred figures were women, we may infer the high social standing of women more generally during this period of shamanic belief. With economic changes and the spread of Confucian and Buddhist moral thought in particular, women’s standing gradually declined, but, even during the ascendancy of Confucianism and Buddhism, women sought to bolster their weakening position by continuing to uphold the superstitious beliefs of shamanism. II The transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society took a long time. While the transition to the latter did bring about a general decline in women’s power, vestiges of a matriarchal society survived in superstitions or customs that continued to be practiced. For example, though not included in the official history, the clan record of the Hŏ family indicates that one of King Karak’s seven sons took the mother’s surname of Hŏ.21 Even if one doubts the historical veracity of the account, it can be seen as a custom surviving from the time of matrilineal societies, wherein the son succeeded his mother’s line rather than his father’s. In Koguryŏ, following a couple’s engagement, the woman’s family would build a small dwell-

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ing for the son-in-law behind their own. On the night of the wedding, the groom would go to the bride’s home and kneel in front of the gate and beg for acceptance into the family by calling out his own name three times. Only after being granted permission from the woman’s family could the man and the woman consummate their relationship as husband and wife. The groom would live at the bride’s home until their first child was born and move into the groom’s house only after their child had reached a certain age.22 Again, this custom is a remnant of matrifocal times when a man joined his wife’s household rather than the other way around. Marriage arose as a means of designating the people between whom a sexual union can take place exclusively and longitudinally. And as the individual practice spread throughout society, these unions naturally became far removed from the sentiment of love. Social status and wealth became the determining factors; thus, marriages were arranged based upon lineage distinctions or family finances. However, before marriage was thus institutionalized in Korea, men and women were less inhibited by social custom and had more freedom in matters of sexual mores. In Koguryŏ, for example, marriage usually took place after the man and woman had enjoyed each other [sexually]. From today’s perspective, this custom may appear to have made fornication a prerequisite to formal marriage, but it was not considered so at that time. Rather, love between a man and a woman was seen as the basic element in a marriage. The fact that all kinds of romances were taking place between the royalty and commoners attests to this freedom in choosing the love object. Let us take the example of Princess P’yŏnggang, whose story became half truth and half fiction.23 [As the story goes, the princess] gave up her wealth and status, throwing away fame and fortune as if they were nothing but a worn-out shoe, and wandered among the flowers of Nangnang Hill and under the moon of Changan looking for the lover of her dreams.24 Wasn’t this how she met Ondal the Idiot and built a new home of sacred love? People laughed scornfully at Ondal and called him an idiot, but Princess P’yŏnggang must have decided that she wanted him as her husband because she saw a lover in him. Of course, this story is an example of marrying for love rather than fornication per se, but it is nonetheless true that relations between men and women were quite liberal during the Three Kingdoms period and that premarital sexual relations were not greatly prohibited. The private exchanges of pleasure between Lady Yuhwa and Haemosu, Queen Munhŭi and Kim Ch’unch’u, and Lady Manmyŏng and Kim Sŏhyŏn all became famous historical episodes and resulted alike in the birth of great sons.25 However, as the institution of marriage was held in great esteem, adultery was treated as the worst of crimes, so much so that in Koguryŏ’s ances-



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tral state of Puyŏ, men and women who engaged in illicit affairs were sentenced to death. The punishment for the jealous wife was also cruel: After she was killed, her body was thrown behind Puyō’s Nam Mountain. The latter example makes it clear that women received disproportionately harsh punishments in sexual matters under the law even in these early times. Already, men were creating legal institutions that would increase their authority and demand absolute chastity of women. III If the reason why men demand chastity in women derives from the desire to preserve a pure patrilineal bloodline, new women (sin yŏsŏng) today argue that the same logic should also be applied to men, deploring loudly that, in a male-centered society, oppressive demands are only made of women. Such oppression, however, is characteristic of male-centered societies where women are seen as private possessions [of men]. It is also an undeniable fact that these trends become more notable as a culture becomes more androcentric. Thus, it is not without reason that women’s rights were the strongest in the least culturally developed of the Three Kingdoms: Silla. Well-known stories abound of Silla beauties of the Sixth Head Rank gathering at the royal court to enjoy themselves with song and dance while evaluating one another’s spinning. The practice encouraged the production of hand-made goods. It is also well known that women were active in buying and selling goods in Silla markets, which shows how great an effort they made toward the development of a handicraft industry and how their rights were strengthened as they worked in cooperation with men in the sphere of economic production. Moreover, women’s rights were furthered by the fact that three were crowned: Queen Sŏndŏk (r. 632–647), Queen Chindŏk (r. 647–654), and Queen Chinsŏng (r. 887–897). Even though queenship was not unique to Silla, it nevertheless attests to the superior position of women in politics at this time. These three queens of extraordinary talent left a legacy of meritorious deeds in both the political and cultural realm. The above example furnishes yet another piece of evidence that women are no less capable than men. However, the ways of the world do not turn on the question of ability alone. Regrettably, Korean history produced no queen to follow these three. In a culture that became increasingly male centered, women, no matter how superior, were no longer permitted to take a visible position in society. As a result, Korean women began to be active beneath the observable surface of the society, carrying out their activities with such ingenuity that they could not but influence

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men. In terms of epoch-making historical events, it would be difficult to find one that does not bear traces of women’s involvement. We see the influence of women in the downfall of King Kyŏnhwŏn of Later Paekche (r. 900–935) and King Kungye of T’aebong (d. 918), both of whom held the world in their hands for forty-plus years toward the end of Unified Silla. In contrast, Wang Kŏn’s (877–943) success owed much to the support of one of his wives, Lady Yu. When Wang Kŏn refused to heed his aides’ request to ascend to the throne, Lady Yu jumped out from behind the curtain and exhorted him not to hesitate when both Heaven’s Mandate and people’s minds willed his kingship, thus forcing him to don the royal dragon robe. Lady Yu’s words melted the heart that Wang Kŏn’s aides could not, and the Koryŏ dynasty was founded as a result. When a woman’s secret maneuvers result in such a magnificent feat, surely one can no longer belittle them as feminine guile. The daughter of a wealthy man from P’ungdŏk, Lady Yu first met Wang Kŏn when he was a general leading a march through her native area. She happened to venture outside and they fell in love instantly, getting married that very night. It appears that relations between the sexes were quite relaxed during the Koryŏ period as well. Even though the Koryŏ period witnessed sinification of family relations, following the general adoption of Chinese-style last names by the commoners, the official state religion remained Buddhism. While Buddhist moral admonitions for women were harsher than in other religions, the focus of Buddhism was not so much on the present but on the afterworld. Such an otherworldly orientation meant that the direct impact of Buddhist tenets on the social position of women was not extensive. We may conclude that, until the end of the Koryŏ period, restraints on women were not terribly severe. IV Koryŏ was a successor to Unified Silla in every respect, and it inherited Silla’s system of endogamy as well. Of the Three Kingdoms, Koguryŏ abandoned the practice of endogamy early on, but consanguineous marriages were prevalent in Silla. Within the royal household, members of one’s own family were called sŏnggol (hallowed bone), and nieces, aunts, cousins, or other close kin became lawful wives. The men of the royal household could not take even the most blue-blooded of aristocratic women as anything but concubines. These practices remained unchanged in the early Koryŏ period. The royal family was designated as yongjok,26 and marrying out of the clan was strictly prohibited. Several kings even took their own sisters as royal consorts, and close-kin marriages were popu-



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larly practiced among commoners as well. However, a queen selected from the same clan would change her family name by taking her mother’s, such as Kim or Yu. Among commoners, as well as royalty, the practice of endogamy generated countless critics who denounced it as corrupting human morality. Finally, King Sukchong (r. 1095–1105), Koryŏ’s fifteenth monarch, abolished endogamy in the first year of his reign (1096), and King Ŭijong (r. 1146–1170) also promulgated a prohibitory decree on these practices in the first year of his reign (1147). Yet, the custom had been such a long-established tradition that an isolated decree could not effectively abolish it entirely. Since the time of King Ch’ungyŏl (r. 1274–1308), many generations of Koryŏ kings married Mongol princesses of the Yuan dynasty, thus becoming Yuan imperial sons-in-law. As a part of this process, many Koryŏ kings brought their Yuan princesses to the royal palace at Kaesŏng. Numerous Koryŏ women were also sent to the Yuan court. Lady Ki, for example, even became the second queen of Emperor Shun (r. 1333–1370). On several occasions, the Yuan monarchs who thus established relations with Koryŏ through marriage advised against endogamous marriage practices. During its rule, the Yuan dynasty ceaselessly demanded the tribute of young girls from Koryŏ or had Yuan soldiers of the so-called Manzi Army (Army of the People of Song)27 select their wives from among Koryŏ’s commoners. In response, the Koryŏ government established a separate office to oversee Yuan’s coercive demands for certain lower-status women such as widows, wives of rebellious subjects, or daughters of monks. The women thus captured and sent to Yuan were so overwhelmed by a longing for their homeland that their cries of sorrow were said to reach the heavens. Oh, how cruel the fate of these women who were sacrificed for politically motivated marriages! In addition, the large numbers of women sent off to Yuan, groups of tens up to hundreds at a time, raised concerns about the depletion of Koryŏ’s population. Within the intellectual community, there were some concerned thinkers who advocated that the practice of polygyny be adopted and enforced as a solution to the northern flow of women and the subsequent decrease in Koryŏ’s population. Although this plan was never actualized, one can infer from the proposition just how urgent the situation must have been. At the same time, evidence indicates that Koryŏ society did not follow strictly the custom of monogamy; such accounts as that of a highranking official who kept as many as thirty concubines attest to the existence of polygyny. In Parhae of old, as well, stories have been told of a jealous wife becoming vicious enough to kill her husband’s concubine by poisoning, but such misdeeds could not stamp out the practice of

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polygyny completely. As long as men remain unsatisfied with just one woman, they will take beautiful women as their concubines, and such a custom represents one of the most oppressive aspects of male-centered societies. While our historical records do not often transmit accounts of this kind, our royal courts have been populated from time immemorial with ladies and consorts [to live] alongside queens, and Korean men of noble or wealthy background often kept mistresses in addition to their lawful wives. As for commoners, whether or not they could maintain concubines was determined by their economic means, since the court did not legally prohibit the practice of polygyny. Not only did it tacitly approve of the custom of concubinage, it actively encouraged it. Men’s self-indulgent desires lie at the bottom of the practice of polygyny, but in later times, men cleverly manipulated Confucian mores to justify their actions, often citing the need to secure a male heir as the reason for taking a concubine in cases when the lawful wife was unable to bear a son. It must be made known, however, that there were a great many men who kept concubines even though they already had sons. V In Korea, the strict ban on widows’ remarriage dates back to the late Koryŏ period, when Confucian customs began to be practiced. The prohibition was limited mostly to the wives of scholar-officials, but after the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty, the central government took a step further. During King T’aejong’s reign (1400–1418), a harsh law that prevented the sons of remarried women from attaining high office came into effect. During King Sŏngjong’s reign (1469–1494), the expression “for generations” was appended to the existing provision, effectively guaranteeing that the descendants of remarried women would not be able to attain high office for generations to come (Yi Nŭnghwa, Customs of Korean Women). The practice would be well-nigh unimaginable in any society that is less addicted to empty social forms than Chosŏn was, and it represents for me the very height of men’s oppression of women. What were the consequences of prohibiting widows’ remarriage and thereby suppressing the vigorous life force and ebullient love within these young women? Sometimes the prohibition led to unintended and hidden social vices, but for the most part, these regulations created a period during which there was an outpouring as never before of filial daughters and virtuous wives. For every family, there was an [officially honored] filial daughter; for every village, a virtuous woman to call its own. Of course, this is not to say that there were no filial and chaste women in Korea



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prior to the Chosŏn dynasty, but they were as rare as a phoenix’s feather or a unicorn’s horn. The Chosŏn period phenomenon thus serves as a testament to how central the role of women was in expressing the unique characteristics of a Confucian polity. From today’s perspective, such uniform and all-encompassing manifestations of filiality and chastity may be dismissed as no more than a type of slavish morality. However, these morals provided the wellspring from which one could build a reputation to last a lifetime. Indeed, those women who were recognized as filial or chaste commanded deep respect; one would bow one’s head in their presence. It is important to realize that the light of Confucian morality was able to shine all the more brightly in the Chosŏn period through the passionate devotion of women who embodied the guiding principles of filiality and chastity. Yet, a complicated picture emerges when we examine more closely the motivations for women’s practice of these virtues. The sentiments of filiality and chastity are manifestations of a pure and natural love, but the original vitality of such feelings dissipates and the feelings themselves lose all meaning when chastity and filiality become mere social prescriptions. A woman who takes her own life following her husband’s death may be acting nobly, and yet if her action is solely a matter of social custom, is this not just as evil as the practice of the live burials of yesteryear? A civilization that has evolved to a certain degree will recognize the criminality of the practice of burying living slaves along with the dead. How, then, can it be maintained that a wife’s live burial should be lauded and encouraged as an honorable death? Of course, there will be some who argue that the practice was necessary to maintain public morality during specific periods, but we should nonetheless be cognizant of the custom’s logical contradictions. Are not husbands and wives said to be “different bodies, same essence” (isin tongch’e)? Whether it is a husband toward his wife or a wife toward her husband, what difference can there be in their duty toward each other? That only the wife is encouraged to take her life following her husband’s death is the result of being confined within a narrow-minded ideological viewpoint based on male standards. Most repressed by these intolerant morals, traditional Korean women spent the whole of their lives abiding by their husbands, only to follow them to their deaths. In this sense, the great development of Confucian civilization seen in the Chosŏn dynasty was matched by an equally great restraint on women’s freedom. Women had to cover their faces when venturing outside the home and sequester themselves deep inside the inner quarters when at home, occupying a sphere completely separate from the men’s. These practices were consolidated during the Chosŏn period.

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VI Korean women’s position within the home was similar to that of the married women of the Greek city-state of Athens, where women were allowed to share their husbands’ beds but not their dining tables. In short, the wife entered into a type of master-and-servant relationship vis-à-vis her husband, and she yielded unconditionally to his commands. It was understood that her chief responsibilities were to cook food, make clothes, and raise children, as these services were demanded by her husband. As for women’s education, it was standardized within the household and effected around the mother’s dictates. While some differences did exist depending on women’s individual characters or special features of household customs, these did not in the end transgress accepted parameters. Obedience was the spirit of education for women, the ideal virtue for which all women should strive. While the emphasis on women’s virtue is a general characteristic of societies where men are dominant over women, women’s submissiveness is further expounded within the Confucian belief that “a wife’s proper duty is to obey” ( yisun wijŏng ch’ŏppu chido). According to the principle of Three Obediences, a woman was to obey her father in her natal home, obey her husband after getting married, and finally obey her son after her husband’s death; in short, a woman submitted to the head of her household from her birth to death. As if the principle of Three Obedi­ences was not enough to control women, Confucian morality further bound women with the proclamation of the Seven Evils, even if only a few of these evils, outside of adultery, were actually used as substantive causes for a divorce. Chastity and obedience thus became the two absolute treasures that every woman must possess. Evidence of the prevalence of this idea was the common practice of using the characters of sun [順 obedient] or chŏng [‌貞 honest] in girls’ names. In this way, the Chosŏn dynasty completed the project of familialism and women’s morality some several thousand years after Confucianism was first imported into Korea. While there are some who believe that Confucianism began to affect women’s lives the day it entered Korea, history does not bear out this claim. Throughout the Three Kingdoms’ and the [Unified] Silla period, and even during the Koryŏ period when China’s family structure was duplicated in Korea, women held the right to divorce and remarry, suggesting that the mores of chastity and obedience had not yet been fully adopted. It was only in the Chosŏn period that the establishment of women’s morality as we know it today was fully realized in accordance with what I have described above. Full realization, however, simultaneously brings about stagnation, stagnation leads to the onset of decay, and decay inevitably heralds extinction. This general rule



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holds true for the case of sexual morality. No matter how well intentioned its exercise, the absolute insistence on sexual morality that starves women of life and kills their spirit cannot be justified when it disregards the very preciousness of the individual character. VII What in this world merits our respect or deserves to be cherished? I answer that there is nothing worthier of our respect than life itself. By the same token, nothing is more immoral than an attempt to block the spirit and strength of life seeking to extend itself limitlessly. How much more applicable the statement becomes when a great number of people’s lives, and not just a handful, are thus harmed? From this point of view, we cannot let stand a kind of sexual morality that has not extended life or freedom to millions of women and that now presents an obstacle to social progress, no matter how much it may have contributed to our civilization in the past. Indeed, it will only be a matter of time before this kind of sexual morality disappears altogether because it has already lost its existential value. There is nothing more to be said concerning this evil. The practices of polygyny and the Three Obediences are characteristic customs of a male-dominated society. While the two practices do not appear to be related to each other at first glance, a closer examination reveals that the evils of polygyny are to be observed only in those societies that impose unilateral submission on their women in complete disregard of the women’s humanity. Within an institution that demands women’s absolute subjugation to male heads of households, women cannot, as a rule, inherit any property. It is no surprise, then, that Chosŏn women had no inheritance rights. Whether the assets are accumulated through the shared labor of a husband and wife or consist of the dowry a wife has brought with her into the marriage, all becomes the outright possession of the husband, or at least becomes entrusted to him. When the husband dies, these assets are inherited by the son; if there should be no son, one of the husband’s kinsmen is adopted [into the deceased husband’s lineage] as the heir to his property. Never is a widow permitted to receive an inheritance. The widow is then left to live as a parasite upon the adopted son, and, should he turn out to be a fool who squanders away his inheritance, the widow will be forced to fend for herself, barefoot in the cold, as it were. How unjust is a system that keeps a human being from supporting herself with the very fruits of her labor just because she is a woman? Even though there have been rare exceptional cases in which the household head, either during

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his lifetime or after his death, divided his property among his dependents and allowed his daughter or wife to receive a portion, the household head was never obligated to include women among those who would inherit his wealth. Thus a woman was barred from holding any rights at all concerning the property she needed in order to secure her life and position in society. Simply put, she was no different than a minor or a disabled person in the degree of her disempowerment and dispossession, for she could not handle matters concerning her inheritance or life without her husband’s consent. In direct contrast, a wife could not interfere in her husband’s affairs. For this reason, there were many cases of women belonging to lower social strata who were forced to starve and endure all manner of abuse simply because they happened to have a scoundrel for a husband. VIII It goes without saying that unequal opportunities in education and the lack of inheritance rights for women were institutional defects that created great disadvantages for women. Irrational marriage customs that allowed parents to marry their children off as they wished—along with an overemphasis on the institution of marriage—have also engendered much evil, as I have discussed above. What we cannot overlook here, however, is the fact that overly strict regulations regarding the relations between the sexes have given rise to the very opposite of the intended effect: Crimes of illicit intimacy between men and women have not been uncommon in Korean society. The segregation of women and men was not unique to the Chosŏn dynasty; it was also a common custom at one time or another in such places as ancient Greece and Rome in the West and China and India in the East. But Chosŏn stands out in the rigidity and exhaustiveness with which it enforced this separation. Even in China, where Confucianism originated, the rules of propriety between men and women found in Lesser Learning (Sohak; C. Xiao xue) and The Pattern of the Family (Naech’ik; C. Nei ze) were talked about but not practiced. In Chosŏn, however, these rules penetrated people’s everyday lives and were embodied in the very layout of the domestic space. The house was divided into inner and outer quarters, and “women did not allude to the outer quarters” while “men did not allude to the inner quarters,” as the saying went. Men indeed did not venture into the inner quarters and women did not venture outside the gates, and the domestic situation was reflected in the very names by which husbands and wives were called: sarang yangban [gentleman of outer quarters] and anangne [resident of the inner quarters], respectively. When husbands and wives observed such rigid rules of propriety be-



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tween themselves, how much stricter would the rules have been for men and women in other spheres of life? In instructing girls and boys, [the custom of] keeping the two sexes apart from the age of seven (namnyŏ ch’ilse pudongsŏk) was considered the golden rule, and even close relatives were segregated from the age of seven. The practice was put in place for the purpose of preventing the vice of illicit intercourse. However, such immense preventive efforts did not result in a commensurate degree of success. After all, no amount of pressure exerted from outside can stem the tide of affection overflowing from within. The greater the external pressure, the stronger the reaction against it is bound to grow. While Confucian propriety may appear on the surface to have been seamlessly enforced, there were lascivious affairs and even violent killings over matters of the heart between men and women. One thinker went so far as to write that there was no moral law in this world as idly talked about but never upheld as adultery, and that this was so because adultery, more than marriage or prostitution, was a product of love. Setting aside for the moment the question of love’s purity or impurity, one can argue that the desire for the opposite sex is indeed an expression of love in the broadest sense, even though a society that places great value on the institution of marriage tends to criminalize adultery as the worst of vices. Long ago, in Judea, for example, women who were partners in illicit affairs were stoned to death according to the laws of Moses. In Chosŏn as well, the state decreed the heaviest of punishments to be exacted upon adulterous women. Yet, from the simple fact that adultery could not be stamped out no matter how severe the punishment, we can clearly see that neither law nor force can control love between men and women. IX Having discussed the topic of adultery, I would be remiss if I did not pause to speak briefly on the subject of prostitution. It is difficult to know exactly when prostitution began to be practiced in Korea, but common sense would have us suppose that it postdates the institutionalization of marriage. The reason for supposing this is that in an era before marriage sexual exchanges between men and women would have been quite free, obviating the need for prostitution. As early as the Three Kingdoms period, there were female entertainers who sang and danced for men of common background for money, and some argue that the origins of prostitution in Korea date back to this time. My own view is that, even though prostitutes did exist before, it was during the Three Kingdoms period that the practice of prostitution became widespread. From the fact that the fa-

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mous lover of Kim Yusin, the foremost statesman of Silla, was a female entertainer named Ch’ŏngwan, we can surmise the existence of professional prostitutes at this time. Men who could not receive satisfaction from their wives likely sought satisfaction from these female entertainers. By the beginning of the Koryŏ period, a government office called kyobang was established for the purposes of training professional female entertainers and supplying female musicians and singers for official banquets. There were even cases of female entertainers from the kyobang improving their status by leaps and bounds by becoming royal consorts. The Chosŏn dynasty continued the Koryŏ system, keeping a centrally administered kyobang in each province, county, or town, for the express purpose of entertaining Chosŏn officials or foreign envoys. In terms of their official status, female entertainers were considered one type of bonded labor belonging to the government, but they were able to sell their bodies privately to make a living. The best these women could aspire to was to become the concubine of a wealthy nobleman. Aside from female entertainers known as kinyŏ, there were many other groupings of prostitutes. With the spread of poverty and development of cities, their numbers gradually increased. Recently, there have been discussions of abolishing the system of licensed prostitution. In relation to prostitution we can also think about the trafficking of women.28 While the buying and selling of women may not be the same as prostitution, what the two practices have in common is that a human body is purchased for money.29 Among the poor, selling one’s daughter or buying oneself a wife does not appear to be considered a strange practice at all. What an insult it is to women’s character that this custom passed down from ancient times remains active in parts of our society today! The evil practice of kidnapping widows, which sometimes led to violence and even to murder, persisted in the countryside up until ten or so years ago, but the harsh punishments meted out to those who committed this act eventually led to its elimination. From now on, we must also work toward eliminating the vice of trafficking in women. X The one group that has considered the trafficking of women a crime and attempted to stay clear of it while discouraging the practice among others is undoubtedly the Christians. Since arriving in Chosŏn, Christianity has sought to eradicate not only the practice of female trafficking but also the ban on remarriage of women, discrimination against secondary sons, and a host of other long-standing social evils and superstitions. These achievements are recognizable to all. Of the impact that Christianity had in usher-



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ing in a new culture in Korea, those seeking to discuss women’s place in society cannot overlook the great change it brought about in the lives of women. Replacing Confucianism of old, modern Christianity has dominated the lives of Korean women. First, Christianity has allowed women to discover that they possess souls just as men do and that before God men and women are equal. Second, women have gained the right to go to church on Sundays and listen to sermons alongside men, which liberated them from their lives of confinement. Third, literacy among women has grown because the desire to read the Bible has led to a reverence of the vernacular script among the general population of Korean women. The effect is clearly observable in rural areas of the two western provinces where Christianity has become popular, but some change in women’s lives can be felt even in the three southern provinces where Christianity has not yet made great inroads. Given this, how can one deny that Christianity has had a great impact? Moreover, the women’s schools established as part of the Christian missions represent the very beginning of women’s education in modern schools in Korea. In these Christian schools, Korean women were able to acquire knowledge, however rudimentary, of science and hygiene. Of the women educated in the new style today, only a minority has not taken the first step in Christian churches or schools. One can see just how influential Christianity and the accompanying influence of Western civilization were in guiding Korean women. Therefore, it is impossible to discuss the issue of Korean women without taking into account women’s relationship to the Christian Church. After taking their first steps toward new education by the means afforded by the Christian Church, Korean women achieved higher and higher levels of education as more programs for women were developed. Then, with the conclusion of the Great War in Europe (WWI), the Paris Peace Conference heralded the beginning of the movement to reform the entire world. In Korea, the special domestic situation at hand and relentless provocations from the outside led a large number of women, despite their delicate nature, to join men in the nationalist movement. A phenomenon never before witnessed in thousands of years of Korean history, such participation indicated that women had begun to open their eyes to social concerns. The March First Movement thus served as a turning point that galvanized women to action, and in its aftermath women turned their eyes toward seeking knowledge. As enthusiasm for learning grew, the number of women who went abroad to study increased by the day. In all these ways, there is no denying that the consequences of the March First Movement helped to advance women’s social position in Korea. From its beginning as an overtly political movement, the women’s movement in Korea developed in stages into

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an educational campaign calling for expansion of women’s education, and then into a social movement concerned with women’s issues. XI The preceding discussion attests to the fact that Korean women today have awakened, though the number of such women may yet remain quite small. More significantly, the economic changes shaking the foundations of women’s social positions have created conditions of life that no longer permit women to stay in their inner quarters without ever stepping outside. No matter how noble her background, a woman no longer covers her face with a shawl as she walks on the street. Aboard a streetcar, she sits next to a man she does not know, rubbing shoulders with him. Such actions would have been considered scandalous just ten short years ago, but today we have come to regard them as normal behavior. And more changes are coming our way. Women who have taken off their shawls and begun to sit shoulder to shoulder with men will soon take a step further and support themselves by working alongside men. Every woman, whether educated or not, will have to find her place in the workforce, perhaps as a factory worker, teacher, store clerk, switchboard operator, bus attendant, actress, or even midwife. The gradual increase in women workers can occasion some social problems in everyday life. An example of one such problem is the growing social trend to marry later in life. While it used to be the case that men and women were married in their teens or early twenties, there are now many twenty- or thirty-year-olds who have not been able to marry. This situation will give rise to a gradual increase in the number of spinsters, and whether they like it or not, these women must become self-reliant. Putting aside the question of whether the trend toward late marriages makes women genuinely happier or not, we can note that, since women’s liberty would grow only to the extent that they are able to achieve economic independence, women’s social position will also have to improve almost as a matter of course. In the past, no matter how poor a woman was, she did not have any difficulty getting married. The belief that it would not do to have a woman stay in her natal home beyond marriageable age was so strong that there were even cases where the government supplied the funds necessary to marry off those women whose families, despite their scholar-official lineages, had fallen into penury. But this is not the case today. How, then, can the increasing number of spinsters be curbed? Even if the government were to intercede as in the past to encourage marriage, there is nothing that can be done about the trend toward



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late marriages when it results from fundamental economic changes. As this trend inevitably becomes more pronounced in the future, Korea will begin to look like other, more developed nations in the way independent women will compete with men in the job market. While it may be far in the future before women are able to pose a threat to men’s jobs, there is no denying that today there are already indications that such competition lies ahead. We must realize that these economic changes, more than the earlier-discussed changes wrought by Christianity or any other force, are changing women’s lives in the most fundamental way. Nevertheless, feudal forms of morality, traditions, and customs are still binding the majority of women. The situation has led those few Korean women who are self-aware to consciously begin to take part in the women’s movement. In the women’s movement, then, the two strands of activism that have remained separate for so long—the nationalist agenda on the one hand and socialist agenda on the other—have come together, calling for women’s liberation. This recent phenomenon reveals that the present is a historic moment for Korean women in their march toward gender equality.

Notes 1. In Japan, Mun met other Korean students studying abroad, including Hong Myŏnghŭi (1888–1968) and Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950). He was also influenced by Self-Strengthening Movement activists such as Ch’oe Kwangok and Chang Ŭngjin. As an active member and secretary of the T’aegŭk Scholarly Association (T’aegŭk Hakhoe), a group that supported self-strengthening reform programs led by former government officials now studying abroad, he published several articles in T’aegŭk Scholarly Review (T’aegŭk Hakbo) as part of his independence movement activities. See Ch’oe Kiyŏng, “Mun Ilp’yŏng,” Hanguksa simin kangjwa 15 (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1994), 151–152. 2. Founded in 1910 by Ch’oe Namsŏn (1890–1957), the association was an organization aimed at enhancing a unified sense of national consciousness among the public by publishing Korean classics. 3.  As a translator of Japanese intellectual writings in Shanghai, Mun was profoundly influenced by the concept of republicanism as advocated by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925). 4. The strongly nationalist Tongjesa, founded by Sin Kyusik (1879–1922) in Shanghai, placed a strong emphasis on national history and the national spirit. Religion (taejonggyo) also figured prominently in the development of a new, pragmatic foreign policy espoused by the group. Leading members of Tongjesa included Sin Kyusik, Pak Ŭnsik (1859–1925), Sin Ch’aeho (1880–1936), Hong Myŏnghŭi, and Cho Soang (1887–1958). 5.  Different scholars give different dates for Mun’s return to Korea from Chi-

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na. While the majority of scholars argue that he returned to Korea sometime between 1918 and 1920, Ch’oe Kiyŏng puts the year at 1914. See Ch’oe Kiyŏng, “Mun Ilp’yŏng,” Hanguksa simin kangjwa 15 (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1994), 152–153. 6. One of Mun’s former students remembered Mun frequently mentioning his financial difficulties in class and expressing his frustration at how this lack of security prevented him from engaging in historical research. See Hong Yibyŏn, “Hoam Mun Ilp’yŏng,” in Hanguksa ŭi pangbŏp (Method in Korean History) (Seoul: T’amgudang, 1968), 326–339. 7. To simplify his written language, Mun went through numerous drafts before submitting the final version, making sure that everything he wrote was clear and easy to follow. Mun even had one of delivery boys read his piece back to him to ensure that the “average person” would be able to understand the key points. See Kim Kwangnam, “Mun Ilp’yŏng ŭi inmullon e taehayŏ,” (On Mun Ilp’yŏ ng and His Work) Sahak yŏngu (Historical Studies) 36 (1983): 247–270; I rely on Kim’s work throughout this paragraph. 8. See Yi Kibaek, “Hoam Mun Ilp’yŏng kwa kŭ ŭi sahak” (Retrospective on Hoam Mun Ilp’yŏng and His History), in Hoam saronsŏn (Treatise on Hoam) (Seoul: T’amgudang, 1975), 182–190. 9. Mun’s interest in foreign policy is well-documented in Fifty-Year History of Korea–U.S. Relations. See Mun Ilp’yŏng, Hanmi osip nyŏnsa (Seoul: T’amgu­dang, 1975). 10. Kwon Insook defines the “New Women” as a category of women who received a modern education in Korea or studied abroad in Japan and Europe in the early twentieth century. Greatly influenced by Western and Japanese feminisms, these women were the first generation of Korean women to openly challenge the Confucian patriarchy. The three most representative figures of this group are Na Hyesŏk (1896–1949), Kim Wŏnju (1896–1971?) and Kim Myŏngsun (1896–1951). Although they were known for their radical departure from entrenched traditional Korean social expectations of the time, they were also severely criticized by the nationalists and in mass media for their scandalous personal affairs. See Kwon, “ ‘The New Women’s Movement’ in 1920s Korea: Rethinking the Relationship Between Imperialism and Women, ” Gender and History 10, no. 3 (November 1998): 381–405. See also Ch’oe Hyesil, Sin yŏsŏngdŭl ŭn muŏsŭl kkum kkuŏtnŭnga (What Did “New Women” Dream Of) (Seoul: Saenggak ŭi namu, 2000). 11. Ellen Key, the author of Love and Marriage, advocated marrying for love and equal rights in divorce in line with modernist thinking. She also called for a re-evaluation of motherhood. 12. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House inspired Na Hyesŏk in 1921 to write a poem of the same title, adopting the spirit of Ibsen’s protagonist, Nora. Nora leaves her house and husband to declare her freedom and independence. 13. Mun’s daughter published a commemorative essay following his death. See Mun Soyŏng, “Abŏji ŭi sarang kwa kyohun” (The Love and Teachings of My Father), Yosŏng (Women) (June 1939): 86–89. 14. See Hanguk yŏsŏng yŏnguhoe (Korean Women’s Research Center), Han­ guk yŏsŏngsa (History of Korean Women) (Seoul: P’ulpit, 1992), 27–43.



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15. Kwon, “New Women’s Movement,” 393. 16. Ibid., 396. According to Kwon, the Japanese colonial administration awarded large sums of money to dutiful sons and wives in the Confucian mold. The Japanese colonial government also suspended the publication of the magazine Sin yŏja (New Woman) after just four volumes. 17. Mun’s “Nyŏryumyŏngsŏin Sin Saimdang” (Feminist Writer Sim Saimdang), published first in 1935 (and again in 1937), offers an admiring account of the most famous “good wife and wise mother” in all of Chosŏn history. Reprinted in Mun Ilp’y ŏng, Hoam chŏnjip: Mun Ilp’yŏng yugo (Seoul: Chogwangdang, 1939), 2:90–92. 18. Reprinted in Mun Ilp’yŏng, Hoam chŏnjip: Mun Ilp’yŏng yugo (Seoul: Chog­wang­dang, 1939), 2:324–344. 19. Lady Yuhwa was the daughter of Ha Paek and the mother of King Tongmyŏng (r. 58–19 BCE), the founder of the Koguryŏ dynasty. Sŏndo Sŏngmo, or the goddess of Sŏndo Mountain, appeared in the dream of Buddhist nun Chihye, who lived during the reign of Silla’s King Chinp’yŏng (r. 579–632). According to Samguk yusa (vol. 5, chap. 7), the goddess offered to help Chihye in rebuilding Anhŭng Temple. 20. Silla’s victory over Koguryŏ in 668 marked the end of the Three Kingdoms period and the beginning of the Unified Silla period. 21. Also known as Kim Suro (?–199), King Karak was the founder of the kingdom of Karak. 22. Yi Kibaek calls this practice sŏ’ok, or the institution of “son-in-law chamber.” The custom is also referred to as sŏhon chedo. While this practice is commonly thought to be a remnant of the matrilineal descent system that prevailed in Neolithic times, Yi states that doubts have been raised regarding the actual existence of such a system. See Yi Kibaek, A New History of Korea, trans. Edward W. Wagner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 6. 23. Princess P’yŏnggang was the daughter of King P’yŏngwŏn (r. 559–590) of Koguryŏ. 24. Changan was the capital of the Tang dynasty, and Nangnang was one of the Four Chinese Commanderies. 25. Haemosu was a legendary king of Northern Puyo (first. c. BCE–second c. CE). Kim Ch’unch’u was the birth name of King T’aejong (r. 654–661), the twentyninth king of Silla, who took Lady Munhŭi as his queen. Kim Sŏhyŏn was a general who lived during the reign of King Chinp’yŏng (r. 579–632) of Silla. 26. Literally, yongjok means “kinsmen of the dragon.” The word refers to the royal family. 27. Manzi, or “Southern Barbarians,” was one of the classifications reserved for the former subjects of the Southern Song. 28. The Korean term for prostitution is maeso, literally “selling smiles.” 29. Mun makes a distinction between maemae, buying and selling of women, and maeso, prostitution.

CHAPTER 4

Ch’oe Namsŏn Introduction and Translation by Nayoung Aimee Kwon

Introduction Along  with  Yi  Kwangsu  (1892–1950)  and  Hong  Myŏnghŭi  (1888–1968),  Ch’oe Namsŏn (pen name Yuktang, 1890–1957) is considered one of the  three  “geniuses”  of  colonial  Chosŏn.1  Yet,  unlike  Yi  or  Hong,  Ch’oe  received little attention by scholars in Korea for decades after the colonial period, despite having been one of the most prolific and prominent intellectuals of the time.2 One reason may be the vast scope of his work, which  spans the fields of literature, history, folkloric studies, Buddhism, and geography, among others. Another possible reason for the belated scholarly interest in Ch’oe is that he is considered to have collaborated with the Japanese during the latter part of Japanese rule. Because his scholarship is seen as tainted from the perspective of Korean nationalism, some scholars have been reluctant to pursue in-depth studies of Ch’oe and his work. Under severe criticism  by his contemporaries, Ch’oe himself was compelled to write a confession in which he admitted that, when he was forced to choose between the road of scholarship and that of fidelity to the nation, he chose the former.3 The silence surrounding Ch’oe may thus be emblematic of the conflict between the old and persistent obligation for Korean historians to assign praise or blame to the object of their study—in this context within a nationalist framework—and the problem with narrating the colonial experience in terms of a simple oppression/resistance or resistance/collaboration dichotomy.4 As a young man Ch’oe had become involved in the patriotic enlightenment movement (aeguk kyemong undong), founding the monthly journal  Youth (So’nyŏn) in 1908 at the age of eighteen for the purposes of instruct64



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ing young people, whom he considered the leaders of the enlightenment movement.5 In the first issue, he published “From the Sea to a Young Man” (Hae egesŏ so’nyŏn ege), generally considered the first Korean work in what came to be known as the “new poetic form” (sinch’esi ).6 In 1910, Ch’oe established the Association for the Glorious Literature of Chosŏn (Chosŏn Kwangmunhoe) to popularize classical writings. After the March First Independence Movement in 1919, for which he co-authored a Declaration of Independence, Ch’oe was jailed and after release had his activities restricted and subjected to surveillance by the Japanese government as part of the brutal crackdown on the peaceful demonstrations that spread throughout the peninsula as well as to overseas communities. However, it was around this time that his hitherto untarnished reputation as a nationalist scholar began to be questioned. In 1928, Ch’oe became involved with the Chosŏn History Compilation Committee (J. Chōsenshi Henshūkai), which was established by the Japanese colonial government. In the 1930s, Korean historians criticized his writings as resembling Japanese colonial slogans including “Nissen dōsoron” (common ancestry of Japan and Chosŏn) and “Nissen ittai” (Japan and Chosŏn as one body).7 He also supported the Japanese government policy of mandatory worship at Shinto shrines. In 1939, Ch’oe became a professor at Jianguo Imperial University, established by the Japanese in the puppet state of Manchukuo. Toward the end of the Pacific War, Ch’oe wrote many works promoting the Japanese imperialist effort and encouraging Korean youths to participate in the war. After liberation in 1945 Ch’oe became a target of nationalist ideologues, and in 1949, under the Law for the Punishment of Persons Who Engaged in Anti-National Activities (Panminjok Haengwija Ch’ŏbŏlpŏp), he was arrested as a collaborator.8 Many historians locate Ch’oe’s shift away from an earlier nationalistic stance beginning in the late 1920s or early 1930s.9 The essay translated here, “Images of Korea in Japanese Literature” (Ilbon munhak e issŏsŏ ŭi Chosŏn ŭi mosŭp), was originally delivered by Ch’oe in 1931, in Japanese, to an audience in the Department of Social Science at the Library Bureau of Japan. The title and circumstances may lead one to expect an ingratiating introduction of “Chosŏn” as an object viewed through the filter of an imagined monolithic Japanese literary gaze. Likewise, the beginning of the essay may be read as being in line with the Japanese justification of colonization based on common heritage. However, the content takes a surprising turn, with the central strain of the essay reflecting Ch’oe’s idealization of Korea’s literary past. The basic thesis is that Korean and Japanese literatures merge closer and closer until they are indistinguishable the further back one goes in time. Rather than showing a sudden shift

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in ideological stance as some scholars may claim, Ch’oe’s thesis is in line with his other theories of Korea’s glorious ancient past such as his 1927 “On Purham Culture” (Purham munhwaron).10 Despite later nationalists’ criticism of Ch’oe’s writing as reflecting colonialist theories of “Nissen dōsoron” and “Nissen ittai,” in this essay Ch’oe does not use the link between Korea and Japan to justify Japan’s colonial subjugation of Chosŏn. While enumerating significant moments of Japanese literary history, Ch’oe manipulates imperial ideologies of “Nissen dōsoron” and “Nissen ittai” to reverse the colonial argument for his own purpose of espousing the superiority of Chosŏn as nothing less than the originator of Japanese literature. Ch’oe concurrently inserts historical references to Japan’s role in modern Korean history into an indictment of Japan’s interference in Korean politics that led directly to colonization. Such readings of Ch’oe’s later works have often, however, been mired in the issue of collaboration, an ill-defined and controversial topic the discussion of which is often reduced to politically interested fingerpointing that arguably glosses over the complexity of the colonial era. The simple binary of collaborator/nationalist is a fuzzy one at best, and the issue as a whole remained a taboo subject for many years following liberation.11 The over-simplification of Ch’oe’s own tumultuous history— for instance, the marking of the exact date when he is said to have turned from staunch nationalist to pro-Japanese—reveals the insufficiency of such accusations. In this light, Ch’oe’s complex attitude toward Japan exceeds this simple dichotomy. With his own high regard for modernization, Ch’oe chose to learn from Japan’s ability to assimilate itself to a changing world dominated by imperialist powers. However, he did not advocate modernization at the cost of devaluing the significance of Korean cultural legacies or the right of Koreans to self-rule. Rather, he clung to what he envisioned as an essential Korean-ness that may have given him hope for an independent Korea. This desire comes across in some of the connections he makes in an attempt to prove Korean superiority in ancient literature. Although the following is a little-known and perhaps problematic piece in Ch’oe’s corpus, its central argument is representative of Ch’oe’s more well-known publications and sheds light on the agonized attempts of a colonized nationalist trying to negotiate and come to terms with his colonial situation. He does this by rewriting a genealogy of Korean literature’s significant and intimate links not only to Japanese literature but to world literature at large.



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Images of Korea in Japanese Literature* Autumn with its trilling insects and winter with its chilly winds are commonly considered lonely and desolate seasons. But the truth is, as long as reading remains a most enjoyable pastime, exhilarating days like these with lingering nights are perfect for “intimacy with a reading lantern.” Surely, autumn and winter are seasons for reducing tension and acquiring mental solace. I believe this too is what Yoshida Kenkō meant when he wrote the following in Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa): “The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you never knew.”12 It seems quite meaningful that the authorities of Japan’s libraries designated this time as “reading week” to inspire people to reflect anew and to give them food for thought through various events. Mr. Ōyama, the head of this prefectural library, has requested that I take this opportunity to share with everyone for about an hour some interesting facts regarding Korea’s literary arts, particularly in relation to books. However, as I am most uncomfortable with public speaking, I declined and suggested he approach someone more capable. But Mr. Ōyama insisted that under the circumstances finding an alternate would be impossible. As his former student and having received repeated requests, I could hardly refuse, and so, although I lack confidence, I chose to follow my duty. It has already been more than twenty-eight years since I first came to Japan under different circumstances. It was at the height of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904,13 when, like now (1931), clouds of battle were darkening the plains of Manchuria. At that time, the emperor of Korea14 sent about fifty exchange students to Japan, and I went to Tokyo as one of them.15 Because language acquisition was the most urgent task at hand, a special class was established at the Tokyo First Middle School where we studied Japanese in addition to the regular curriculum. Mr. Ōyama was the teacher in charge of our class at the time. Of course, there were different teachers responsible for various subjects, but the most highly regarded among the students and the one most respected and admired was Mr. Ōyama. He was extremely knowledgeable and gifted, but what moved us *Ch’oe Namsŏn, “Ilbon munhak e issŏsŏ ŭi Chosŏn ŭi mosŭp,” in Yuktang Ch’oe Namsŏn chŏnjip, vol. 9, ed. Yuktang chŏnjip p’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe (Seoul: Hyŏnamsa, 1973–1975), 416–429.16

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most deeply was his chŏng,17 which felt like a spring breeze. [Original p. 416, seven lines omitted] There is a Korean proverb that says that Korea is the land of chŏng, and so we had come to believe that chŏng was somehow a particularity of Korea. However, in a country where we could not even communicate, our first lesson in Japan, which we learned through the love of Mr. Ōyama, was that Japan, too, was a land of chŏng. Afterward, we discovered Japanese proverbs such as “Chŏng is not for the sake of other people,” “People stand under chŏng,” and “Even stone gates established by spirits can be opened by chŏng.” When we learned that the essence of Japanese literature was said to be sympathy, we realized even more deeply that chŏng had no national boundaries. Humans have various sources of power such as knowledge, will, money, and authority, but the power of love, or the power of chŏng, is truly the greatest among them. Each of the other powers is limited in varying degrees spatially or temporally, but in contrast the power of chŏng is universal and eternal. The anguish of young Werther18 felt in the suffering of brilliant Genji,19 the tears of Kasuga no Tsubone20 scattered upon the Maid of Orléans21—these are examples of human chŏng. Among various cultural assets created by humanity, literature draws out and takes as its seed touching images and admirable achievements of humans. As long as literature takes human chŏng as its subject and its lifeblood, it fundamentally must belong to the whole world, to all of humanity. The love between a mother and son as recorded on ancient Egyptian papyrus is no different from that found in the serialized romances we read in current newspapers. The sweet nothings whispered atop a fifty- or hundred-story high-rise in New York City are the same as those murmured under the shady palms on the islands strewn across the South Pacific. Moreover, for countries that are most intimately linked in terms of ethnicity, culture, history, and geography, the connection of literary bonds must be even more rich and vivid. A salient example is the relationship between Korea and Japan, which was particularly intimate in the ancient period. Of course, there is no need to dwell on specifics, but I would like to introduce a few interesting facts, beginning with some recent examples. I shall omit contemporary cases with which everyone is familiar and begin the talk around the time of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895).22 Thirty-seven years ago, on December 23, 1894, a book titled Royal Concubine Chang: A Story of the Chosŏn Court was published. The author was the famous Fukuchi Ōchi,23 but the source materials were gathered by Inoue Kakugorō, who, as a leading member of the Friends of Constitutional Government (Rikken Seiyūkai), was at one time quite renowned in politi-



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cal circles. Because of his pock-marked face, he was nicknamed Shōgun Crab Shell, and he became an incessant supplier of gossip for the newspapers. In 1882, Mr. Inoue was employed by the Chosŏn government. He established the Office of Culture and Information (Pangmunguk), the government publishing house that issued the newspaper Hansŏng Sunbo.24 He was quite an accomplished man who conferred with the late Kim Yunsik (1835–1922),25 foreign affairs minister and prominent scholar at the time, and helped initiate the use of Korean writing in mixed script.26 During his approximately four-year stay at Kyŏngsŏng,27 Inoue recorded the behindthe-scenes stories of the political milieu, which he gathered from those in close contact with sources of recent history. Upon returning to Tokyo, these [stories] fell into the hands of Mr. Fukuchi, and with his first-rate literary embellishments developed into the historical fiction Royal Concubine Chang: A Story of the Chosŏn Court. . . . [Original pp. 417–418, 64 lines omitted. Here Ch’oe summarizes in detail the historical melodrama of the vicissitudes of the life of royal concubine Chang, a woman of humble origins whose extraordinary beauty and charm inspire the devotion of King Kojong but who meets a tragic death at the jealous hands of Queen Min. Although Fukuchi’s story focuses on the scandalous intrigues of the royal inner chambers and ends with Chang’s ghost possessing Queen Min and a warning that evil deeds will surely be revenged, in his summary Ch’oe concludes that this is more than just a story of a palace love triangle. Rather, in the context of the international tensions of the times, the tale serves as a significant chapter in modern history. Ch’oe repeatedly draws attention to the important role of Queen Min28 in Chosŏn history: “Indeed, the most complicated and precarious moment of modern Chosŏn history revolves around the sun of Queen Min . . .” Throughout this section, allusion to the murder of Queen Min by Japanese officials is made both implicit and explicit.—Trans.] On one hand this book is considered fictional, but when Korea became the target of universal interest at the height of the Sino-Japanese War, the book was publicized as revealing court secrets of a foreign country and caused quite a stir. Because of its verisimilitude, timeliness in relation to historical events, and the reputation of the author, the response to the book was vociferous. Moreover, this is not simply a work of fiction but, with the exception of slight exaggerations and a number of mistakes, it is worthy of respect as an incomparable source of a living history of the first thirty years of the reign of Kojong. For quite some time, it was lost to the world and was valued as a rare text only among storytellers, but it has now been recorded in the documentary fiction section in volume 13 of The Complete Works of Meiji Culture, and thus has been restored to the world.

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As you know, from the Meiji Restoration until the Sino-Japanese War, the diplomatic history between Chosŏn and Japan experienced a period of great transition, and diplomatic conflicts that arose stimulated public interest about Chosŏn. Influenced by this trend, publications about Chosŏn continually appeared. Among them are fictional titles such as Chicken Entrails: Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms of Japan, China, and Korea as well as literary works of Chosŏn like New Stories from Golden Turtle Mountain (Kŭmo sinhwa)29 and “Twenty-one Poems Recalling the Capital” (Isibil to hoego si ), the reprinting of which were undertaken vigorously and made widely available through the help of great writers. However, if one wonders which work of the Meiji period on Chosŏn was most outstanding, it is Fukuchi’s Royal Concubine Chang. Furthermore, it arouses more interest when noting that Queen Min, who foreshadowed the tragic end of Royal Concubine Chang, was herself victimized by the “Kyŏngbok Palace calamity”30 not quite a year after the publication of Royal Concubine Chang. Somehow there seems to have been a karmic relationship between the strange events in the lives of Royal Concubine Chang and Queen Min. Though [works on] Chosŏn during the Meiji period (1868–1912), no matter the title or format, were in the end nothing more than documents of reality, pure literary works rooted in the imagination were seen in the works of the Tokugawa period (1600–1867). Entering the Taishō (1912– 1926) and Shōwa (1926–1989) eras, literary trends began changing at a dizzying pace with depictions of innovative scenarios. If we were to discuss the most distinctive of recent trends, it is certainly the popularity of documentaries of true stories. Works that are highlighted in today’s newspapers and magazines are thus various documentary works, and more than a few specialty magazines of such works exist. However, it is said that there is nothing new under the sun, and likewise the newly trendy documentary works have in actuality had a long history in Japanese literature, to the extent that they can be considered as one of the most important genres of Edo literature. In the past, works of documentary literature were called “records” (silhwamul ), storybooks that blended truth and imagination for the readers’ amusement, based on world events that had shaken people’s senses. In other words, the stories that draw the largest readership in today’s papers are similar to Date Family Disturbance (Date sōdō),31 The Soga Brothers (Soga kyōdai ),32 Banzuiin Chōbei,33 and Greengrocer Oshichi (Yaoya Oshichi ),34 nothing more than slight variations on actual events. “Records,” in other words, were the most popular literary genre of the Edo period. Recently, such “records” were compiled into a huge multivolume set entitled Complete Works of Modern Chronicles by the Waseda University Press, and those stories con-



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sidered to be the earliest versions of such records were separately thrown together in a book titled Ancient Chronicles. Among the first stories found in Ancient Chronicles were “The Murder of a Tang Person” and “A Novel View of P’a’s Dream.” “The Murder of a Tang Person” was a work written in 1765 by the hermit scholar Tōbu Inshi, and “a Tang person” refers not to a Chinese, but to a Korean. Japan’s initial contact with foreigners was with the state of Karak on the southern tip of the present Kyŏngsang Province, and the meaning of Kara gradually expanded to signify “foreign country.” Eventually Korea and China were together called Tang (Kara), and as you all know, hairy Westerners eventually came to be referred to as ketō (hairy Tang). Later, Tang (Kara) came to signify China only, but among the people in general, the habit of referring to a foreigner as a “Tang person” (Kara hito) still lingered. Thus, it seems that even during the Meiwa period (1764–1772), a Korean was still referred to as a Tang person. [Original pp. 422–423 omitted. In this section, Ch’oe summarizes the revenge story set in the port city of Nagasaki wherein a man of Chosŏn falls in love with a Japanese courtesan of the Maruyama pleasure quarters. Meanwhile, in Chosŏn his wife and her lover plot and kill him upon his return. Unaware of the evil deed, the courtesan bears their son while awaiting their reunion. One night, the ghost of the murdered man appears in her dreams and cries out for revenge. The man who killed him has become a member of the Chosŏn delegation to Edo, and the story ends with the son avenging the father’s death before he himself is executed for killing a high official. Following the summary of the story, which includes details of names, settings, and dates, Ch’oe introduces the documents, including a letter of confession by the murderer, on which the above story is presumably based. The historical context is the rise of the Tokugawa bakufu and the attempts to restore diplomatic relations with Chosŏn, severed since the Hideyoshi invasions. Formal exchanges were restored in 1608; however, tensions remained. In 1765, the same year as the setting of the above story, a member of the Chosŏn delegation was murdered by a Japanese diplomat. Ch’oe records the names, dates, and settings that correspond to those of the above story and notes that the event was recorded in detail on the Chosŏn side. Moreover, the murder of a member of the Chosŏn delegation by a Japanese diplomat became an international topic of news and was adapted for a genre of revenge stories with a twist of foreign intrigue such as the play The Han Chinese and Korean Letters, the Beginning of Their Tricks (Kanjin kanmon tekuda no hajimari ) and the ballad drama Japanese Skill in Chinese Textile (Morokoshiori yamato teki ). These, along with “The Murder

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of a Tang Person,” are commonly referred to collectively as The Revenge of Hongan Monastery (Honganji adauchi ). Ch’oe goes on to discuss close diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan and the ginseng trade, summarizing three short stories—each set in a different region of the Japanese islands—about the legends of the miraculous medicinal powers of Korean ginseng.—Trans.] There are quite a few similar stories about ginseng and the Chosŏn connection, but I’ll stop here. I would only ask that you remember that during the Tokugawa period there were not a few literary works of a Chosŏn style that were stimulated by the comings and goings of envoys from Chosŏn. Aside from this, during the Tokugawa period, which followed the warring period, education and culture were highly promoted, and in this regard a special friendship was extended to Korea and Korean literary works were translated one after another. The aforementioned New Stories from Golden Turtle Mountain (Kŭmo sinhwa)—which imitated the Chinese tale New Tales Written While Cutting the Wick ( Jiandeng xinhua), itself already made famous by Tales of the Peony Lantern (Botan dōrō) and such— was a short story collection chock full of “thrills” which was already printed in the second year of Jōō (1653) in Edo. Year 2 of the Jōō era was sixteen years before 1669, when the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) was first published.35 They also looked up to the Korean envoys as accomplished scholars and writers and considered meetings with them as joyous literary events. When they met, there were many cases of carefully binding into books and publishing letters that were exchanged, articles, and such. There are also many stories regarding these but I will omit them here. Going back further in time, we find the famous historical records of Hideyoshi’s invasions, and with one side as the invading army and the other as their prisoners, the cultural relations between the two countries and their people became quite abnormal and grim. A new world was opening up in the literary relationship between Korea and Japan with a focus on the ideas of Kirishitan Jashūmon,36 with an introduction of Portuguese elements and the complex ideas of exoticism, but I will also omit these elements at this time. Before this period, during the Ashikaga era (1333–1572), in relation to our topic here, the focus was on what we Koreans call wako raiders37 of that period, and again if we go further back to the Kamakura era (1185–1333), what the Japanese call the Yuan invaders become the focus of Japanese and Korean relations. Various historical conflicts and complex psychological upheavals of this era are reflected in the literature. Fascinating examples are Record of Tranquility (Taiheiki ), An Account of our Divine Sovereigns



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and True Royal Line ( Jinnō shōtōki ),38 and literature of the Five Mountains ( gozan bungaku).39 Also, in Nichiren’s (1222–1282) new religion, the shadow cast by Korea was not inconsiderable, but I will not touch upon these aspects as they require extensive discussion. If we were to look at the particularities of the literatures of the Muromachi and Kamakura eras with a focus on entertainment, we could see the emergence and development of folktales and fairytales. Among collections that compile stories passed down among the people from ancient times, during the Kamakura era there are those of the genre of “companion stories” such as Treatise of Ten Rules ( Jikkunshō) and Collection of Things Written and Heard, Then and Now (Kokon chomonjō).40 And, among collections that developed these old legends into what could be considered adult fairytales, we can cite what came to be known in later times as otogi zoshi,41 such as the “Tale of Soga” (Soga monogatari), “Story of Dream and Mystery” (Mugen monogatari),42 “Tale of Ame-no-Wakahiko” (Ame-no-Wakahiko monogatari), Urashima Tarō,43 “Story of a Clam” (Hamaguri sōshi), “Story of a Fox” (Ko sōshi), “The Battle between the Crow and the Heron” (Arogassen monogatari),44 Princess of Kazashi (Kazashi no himegimi ), Land of the Bodhisattva (Bonten koku),45 and Minister Yuriwaka (Yuriwaka daijin).46 As everyone knows, there were among folksongs of various new literary forms in the Ashikaga period those that used folk legends as their starting point. Diachronically these stories were inherited from the traditions of imperial Nara and Heian eras, and synchronically they are a part of a current of myths that silently seeped into every corner of the world. It is of profound interest to regard these not just as one aspect of Japanese literature or merely as source documents of the literary exchanges between Korea and Japan but also as one part of the wider history of world cultures with a focus on legends. In terms of the ballad genre, “Feather Dress” (Hagoromo) and “Mirror of Matsu Mountain” (Matsu yama kagami) are good examples. In fairytales the closeness between Korea and Japan is so deep that, if one thoroughly researches them, every idiosyncrasy disappears and one can only conclude that these works differ in language but are otherwise identical. It was difficult to determine which might be of particular interest to you. When we look at the five works in Bakin’s47 book, Magazine of Imitation Jewels (Enseki zasshi ), that have been classified as fairytales and whose origins have been traced—“The Battle Between the Monkey and the Crab” (Sarukani gassen)48 or “Peach Boy” (Momotarō)49 or “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow” (Shitakiri suzume),50 “Old Man Blossoms” (Hanasaka jisan), and “Kachikachi Mountain” (Kachikachi yama)51—we find that similar folk legends also exist in Korea, often in the form of the same story with

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a few modifications. The story line of “Peach Boy” is about valor, and as a success story it is considered the pride of Japanese fairytales. However, there is one version that links the story to Master Yŏ of Korea’s Ye state52 as well as to Tosŏn of Silla.53 It is also related to the story of Koguryŏ’s King Tongmyŏng,54 which we know through a Chinese telling, and the story of Silla’s Prince Ch’ŏnilmo (J. Ame no hiboko) as transmitted in Japan. Moreover, Southern China also has an old version of this kind of story in “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow,” which is the same as Korea’s representative fairytale “Tale of Hŭngbu” (Hŭngbu chŏn).55 In Mongolia we find a story, “The Battle between the Monkey and the Crab,” that has been passed down in Korea as the tale of the old bean-picking woman and the tiger. This same title can also be found in picture books and in the legends of Indonesian natives. . . . There are many amusing examples of the relationships between Korean and Japanese fairytales and throughout the world. . . . But let me stop here. The further back we go from the Heian period we find that the features of the era and the social aspects change and become much like those in Korea. The intertwining of Japan’s [national] style with Chinese culture, the intermingling of Shinto and Buddhism, the common people’s preoccupation with thoughts of peace, and the brilliant lifestyles and abundant leisure of the privileged classes all recall the vivid images of similar circumstances in Silla and Koryŏ. One gets the sense that the atmosphere and lifestyle portrayed in the Heian period’s representative work, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari ), are not particular to Japan but seem to depict contemporaneous Korea as well. Korea, unfortunately, did not give birth to such a gifted writer as Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 973–?),56 but I believe that, had there been a humanistic work portraying the same period’s social life [in Korea], the East would have been endowed with another Tale of Genji. As an experiment, let us look at the first chapter of The Tale of Genji: The emperor at that time had a much-beloved consort who was not of high social position. She bore him a precious jade-like prince. The emperor wished to make him the crown prince, but he was concerned about the first-born prince, who had the support of influential families. The emperor spent his days worrying about the best course of action. To protect the prince from the envy of others, the wisest option seemed to be to place him in a lesser position with a lower profile. But because of his ambition for his son, the emperor could not make a decision. Then, there came an impetus that caused the emperor to lay aside his concerns about the affair and resolve the matter once and for all. It happened that a retinue of envoys arrived from Koryŏ, and there was a rumor that among them



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was a brilliant physiognomist. The emperor secretly sent the second-born prince disguised as a commoner to the envoy to have the fate inscribed on his countenance interpreted. The physiognomist, taken aback, cocked his head to one side and nodded to himself. Considering it curious, he said, “This is a face of one who can become the father of the state and rise to the ultimate position of emperor, but I worry that as emperor you will have many problems. If, however, you become a pillar of the court and help with the affairs of governance, the interpretation will be different.” Upon hearing these words, the emperor was gratified to know that his concerns were not unfounded. He had the prince demoted to the rank of minister and bestowed upon him the surname of Genji.57 The Koryŏ mentioned here is probably Parhae, as Koryŏ had already fallen by this time. Stories in Japan about the fulfillment of a strange prophesy made by a physiognomist from Koryŏ/Parhae are commonly seen in other writings as well. [But] The Tale of Genji is the chef-d’oeuvre of classical Japanese literature and the oldest work in the East’s history of fiction. This excerpt is the starting point of a book that is the very emblem58 of the passionate lifestyle of the nobles, and the person who catalyzes this beginning is none other than a physiognomist from Koryŏ. Also, in the pages [of Genji] there [are references to] Koryŏ’s customs such as ways [text missing in original] to relieve worries and add to merriment; Koryŏ’s walnut-colored paper for writing down sad songs and words of longing; for exorcisms, there are the rosaries of Kim Kangja, which had been passed down from Paekche traditions; for banquets, Koryŏ’s blue-colored satin; and so on. Koryŏ traditions are deeply embedded in in the world of Genji. Although it is not explicitly stated whether the source was Koryŏ or Parhae, when we consider various facets of the lives of Heian nobles such as seasonal celebrations or leisure activities,59 we begin to get a glimpse of the cultural similarities between Korea and China that went beyond material things. Therefore if we read Genji carefully, we can get a vivid and believable sense of the lifestyles of ancient Korea for which there are few documents or artifacts. [Original pp. 425–426, forty-three lines omitted. Here, Ch’oe writes in broad strokes, giving some examples of similarities shared between Korea and Japan in terms of clothing, food, and architecture.—Trans.] There are many similarities in annual traditions and celebrations in Chosŏn and Japan. It is interesting to uncover those practices that have been transmitted and have evolved with different meanings in each place. For example, it is uncertain exactly when it began, but there is a tradition called tapkyo (bridge promenade) that is still observed in Chosŏn. On the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the first month of the New Year, men and

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women walk in groups along a bridge. In the Korean language, the word tari signifies both a bridge and legs, and from this homonym came the folk belief that by walking on a bridge in the first month one can prevent leg pains for a year. While researching Heian customs, I discovered that the Korean tapkyo may be a variation of what is called tapka (bridge song). Tapka has a long tradition in Korea. During the Tang period, it was a grand annual festival during which people erected lampposts along bridges or hung lanterns in front of their houses, and everyone came out to walk around and view the lights and sing songs. It is likely that the custom was transmitted to Silla and Japan, which were closely linked to the culture of Tang’s Changan. In Korea, the traditions of both lantern festivals and the bridge song were performed; in Japan only the bridge song was performed from the time of Emperor Jitō.60 But, because the lantern tradition was not passed down [in Japan], it became a palace custom. Talented singers were chosen from the capital city, and men on the fourteenth or perhaps fifteenth day of the month and women on the sixteenth day of the month entered the palace courtyard and sang congratulatory songs, dancing and walking from palace to palace in single file. The bridge song was the most elaborate of the various customs of the Heian period and was a major event enjoyed by entire families, as seen in several places in the The Tale of Genji. It seems to me that the Korean bridge songs lost their traditional meaning and became linked to the custom of bridge crossing, based on the homonym that gave rise to the neologism tapkyo. Even more amusing is to consider the refrain at the end of each bridge song, “ten thousand years arare,” and the fact that bridge songs were also called “ararebashiri.” What might be the connection between this “arare” and “Arirang,” the representative Korean folk ballad? The standard interpretations thus far have linked “arare” to “arasho,” meaning “it shall soon be.” However, to apply this sort of celebratory meaning only to this song is unsatisfactory; it seems there must be some common root linking such an expression of enjoyment to Korea’s arirang. If true, it is fascinating to imagine that the “Arirang” that continues to be performed in Korea today also graced the lips of those in the Heian period. When we see that these customs and feelings were the same, and when we recall that the people of early Korea and early Japan shared the same admiration for Chinese literature and had similar religious beliefs that were a mixture of Shinto and Buddhism, we realize that the rich and vivid Korean coloration of Heian life was no mere coincidence. I agree with a famous Japanese historian’s remark when he looked at the customs of Korea that it was as if a panoramic picture of the Heian period was spread before his eyes.



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What would it be like to go even further back and consider the world of legends as depicted in Tale of a Past Time (Konjaku monogatari )61 or Nihon reiiki62 and to examine the emotions depicted in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves of Poetry (Manyōshū)?63 The words are different and there are some variations in forms of expression; there is furthermore a big gap in the number of documents that have survived. Nonetheless, when we examine the few materials still extant in Korea, we recognize that the basic thoughts and social background of which they are composed are almost completely identical to Japan. Moreover, if we take one step back to the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan) and look at the beginnings of the myths recorded there, the gaps or barriers that distinguish Korea from Japan vanish and there is only a common idea of Northeast Asia in toto and a sense of an accumulation of lifestyles. Myths such as those found in the Kojiki have of course been transmitted among the Japanese people as uniquely Japanese foundation myths, but they are not unique to Japan. The rabbit of Inaba in the tale of Okuninushi no kami, the snake of Yamada in the story of Susanoo, Kashihara of Yamato, or Kujifuru of Takachio—none of these belongs only to Japan. Rather, they can also be found in Korea and are common myths of a large area stretching beyond Korea and Japan to the north and the west. These myths transcend both Korea and Japan, or, rather, both are included in a greater world that can perhaps be called the “heavens” that stretch out before our eyes. I regret that I will not be able to expand on the details due to time constraints. The above sketches have been a broad survey of the intimate links in literature, with a focus on chŏng as the connection, between Korea and Japan for the past several thousand years. Analogous to spreading a fan to its full breadth then slowly moving toward the pivot, the further back one goes, the narrower the gap, and, in the end, one reaches a point of origin in which no distinction between the two sides exists. If we were tracing all this systematically, we would have gathered all these together and then excavated the reasons and significance behind such connections, but it seems wise to postpone such meticulous endeavors for a different occasion. Likewise, there are those who explain the similarities in the legendary myths of the ancient periods with theories of the oneness of the Korean and Japanese people, but one cannot draw such facile conclusions on such an important matter. It would be different if one had an ulterior agenda, but as a scholar I will refrain from any thoughtless conjectures. How, then, would I explain the many similar and even identical features in the ancient cultures of the two countries? My first answer would be that this is due to their common cultural origin. Japan and its people

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cannot be said to be purely native to Japan but received almost everything from the continent. Furthermore, it was the Korean peninsula that played the role of transporting, sowing, and cultivating continental culture in Japan. Regarding the long history of Japan, everything from methods of constructing houses, ship building, weaving, casting metal, firing ceramics, mending clothes, making wine and soy sauce, growing silk worms, pounding grains, to everyday kitchenware and to that with greater cultural value such as literature, the arts, and advanced ethics and religion, all were imported from Korea. Even the seeds of the trees that colored Akitsu Shima64 blue were brought from Korea, and it is said that boats were first built in order to transport such treasures. Even myths tell us that those things that Japan lacked were supplemented by things that Korea had in abundance. Accordingly, the Korea that appears in Japanese myths is a land of treasures, the land of the bygone mother, the land of origin, and the land of eternity. Of course these are only myths and legends, but such myths do not appear from a vacuum. In other words, myths and legends confirm the memories and gratitude of the Japanese people for the fact that Japan imported all cultural assets from Korea in prehistoric times. If we wish a glimpse of how significant the reception of Korean culture was to the Japanese, we can consider one example. It is recorded in an ancient history book called Fuso ryakuki. On the first month of the first year of Empress Jingū,65 Chief Minister Soga no Umako (?–626), the head of the progressive faction at the time,66 following the petition of [text missing in original], built the Hōkō Monastery at Asuka. On the day the pillar was to be raised, he and the one hundred participants all wore Paekche dress, to the delight of all the spectators. This is a well-known story, as it was the first time that a Japanese person had worn foreign attire. Paekche clothing at the time was considered to be very distinguished, somewhat akin to the way Western clothing was regarded in the early-modern era. In addition, during special rituals and occasions, donning full Paekche attire was a guaranteed way to attract attention. This is nothing more than a story of attire, but during the Asuka era, all technical products of Korea, including architecture and implements, were highly esteemed, and Korean and especially Paekche products became the standard for regulating the value of goods. In the same light, it is an established fact that the ancient Japanese considered Chosŏn the motherland of culture and, at one point in the Japanese ancient period, from the Yamato era through the Asuka and Nara periods, various records indicate that migration from the Korean peninsula was much greater than we might think. The majority of these immigrants were culturally superior



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and greatly admired by the government and the people at large. They were treated very well and their social status and power were quite high. For instance, during the cultural zenith of Japan’s ancient period, many accomplishments such as those of Prince Shōtoku (574–622)67 involved Korean people both in the background and at the center. At the same time, their women were greatly admired and were matched with native Japanese men, which provided opportunities to deeply inscribe Korean culture onto the fabric of Japanese life. Even among deified rulers such as Empress Jingu and Emperor Kammu (737–806)68 were those from Korean lineage, so one can imagine the prestige of Koreans at the time. As with their other cultural treasures, it is only natural that their myths and legends also came to be adopted by the Japanese people. Moreover, ever since the importation of record-keeping methods around the Three Kingdoms period by a Paekche person, the duty of recording historical texts for the next five or six centuries was done either by the people of Chosŏn or their descendants. Therefore, when considering the ancient history of Japan, one can easily imagine why there is the obvious scent of Korea in the ancient myths and legends. There are cited in the Nihon shoki and other sources several books written by Koryŏ and Paekche people whose names are no longer known in Korea. And when we consider the fact that, in the Buddhism of Asuka certainly and in the six sects of Nara, those who were responsible for enlightening the people were Chosŏn monks, we come to think about how the old myths of Korea, used as a method of proselytizing, seeped deeply into the minds of the people. At the same time, there were many Japanese who came to Korea. Among them there were many who took Korean women as wives and bore children of mixed heritage. Another important opportunity for Korean culture to flow into Japan was through the exchange students who went, one after another, to the capitals of Paekche and later to Silla in order to study Buddhism. When we look at folksongs we see that it was the people of Korea who taught the ancient Japanese, who had only simplistic expressions, how to convey emotions in beautiful and refined ways. In rendering the same chŏng and circumstances, the expansion of “Ana-ni-yasi,69 how good a lad! . . . Ana-ni-yasi, how good a maiden!” (Kojiki, book I, chapter 4)70 to “In a humble little house/Nestling in a reed-plain/Spreading out the clean/ Rustling sedge-mats/The two of us slept” (Kojiki book II, chapter 54)71 and “A Lord returning home/Has come! Said they—/And I well-nigh swooned/Thinking it was you” (“By the Maiden,” Manyōshū xv: 3772),72 one cannot avoid thinking of the help that was obtained from the people and culture of Korea. And of course it was not just a matter of coincidence

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that Wani (K. Wang In),73 the writer of “Now the winter yields its place to the springtime!/Flowers blooming on the trees”74 and whose descendants came to form a hereditary line of chief scribes, came to be revered as the god of waka-style poetry. I think that Chosŏn’s position in the ancient literature of Japan is symbolized here.

Notes 1. See Cho Yongman, Yuktang Ch’oe Namsŏn (Seoul: Samjungdang, 1964), 28. 2. In recent years, there has been a welcome rise in scholarly attention to Ch’oe Namsŏn. For example, in 2003, a new compilation of original facsimiles of Ch’oe’s writings was issued, Yuktang Ch’oe Namsŏn chŏnjip (Collected Works of Ch’oe Namsŏn) (Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2003). Scholarly monographs have also begun reevaluating Ch’oe. See, for example, Yuktang Yŏngu Hakhoe, ed., Ch’oe Namsŏn tasi ilki: Ch’oe Namsŏn ŭro parabon kŭndae Hangukhak ŭi t’ansaeng (Re-evaluating Ch’oe Namsŏn: The Birth of Modernity in Korea as Seen through Ch’oe Namsŏn) (Seoul: Hyŏnsil Munhwa, 2009); Yu Sihyŏn, Ch’oe Namsŏn yŏngu (Research on Ch’oe Namsŏn) (Seoul: Yŏksa pip’yŏngsa, 2009); Chŏn Sŏnggon, Kŭndae “Chosŏn” ŭi aident’it’i wa Ch’oe Namsŏn (The Identity of Modern “Korea” and Ch’oe Namson) (Seoul: Cheiaenssi, 2008). In addition, post-colonial theory and critical nationalism studies have made substantial strides in the last decade in South Korea. 3. “Chayŏlsŏ” (Confession), in Yuktang Ch’oe Namsŏn chŏnjip (Complete Works of Yuktang, Ch’oe Namsŏn), ed. Yuktang chŏnjip p’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe, 15 vols. (Seoul: Hyŏnamsa, 1973–1975). 4. My thanks to Henry Em for challenging me to think through reasons behind this silence in modern Korean historiography. 5. These young leaders of Chosŏn were understood by Ch’oe to be males for the most part. Later, Ch’oe did attempt to publish a woman’s magazine, Arŭmdaun kajŏng (Beautiful Home), some speculate as an attempt to bypass the severe censorship at work by the governor-general. All of his magazines were subject to censorship, and many were forced to shut down. Ch’oe himself was jailed several times for his critical writings on Japanese policies. See Chŏng Chinsŏk, Hanguk hyŏndae ŏllonsa ron (On the History of the Modern Korean Press) (Seoul: Chŏnyewŏn, 1984), 145. 6.  This “new” or “modern” poetry is considered to show Western influences, a movement toward freer verse away from the regulated verses of the past like sijo, which Ch’oe himself continued to write prolifically. Some literary scholars interpret the pervasiveness of the sea motif in Ch’oe’s earlier poetry as revealing a youthfully optimistic outlook on the world. 7. Both slogans were used to justify Japanese colonial rule of Chosŏn by espousing “commonality,” yet the privileged semantic position of Japan as naichi (inner land) in both reveals the implicit inequality of the relationship.



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8. This law was approved after several rounds of debate on its scope and with extreme reluctance by the then new president Syngman Rhee (Yi Sŭngman), placed in power through controversial U.N.-/U.S.-sponsored elections in the south. Rhee tried to protect his unstable support base by claiming that in the already volatile post-liberation political situation, prosecuting people for their actions during the colonial period would stir up unnecessary discord. An investigation committee was formed but, with the growing opposition of the president and amid accusations of a communist conspiracy, the ransacking of the records of the committee, and even a murder plot against one of the committee members, it was soon disbanded. 9. See Chŏng, Hanguk hyŏndae ŏllonsa ron, 157. Chŏng gives the exact date as October 1928, when Ch’oe resigned from his position at the Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily) and became affiliated with the governor-general’s Chosŏn History Compilation Committee. 10. See Allen Chizuko, “Northeast Asia Centered around Korea: Ch’oe Namson’s View of History,” Journal of Asian Studies (November 1990): 787–806, for a discussion of the problematics of Ch’oe’s most well-known texts, “Tanggunnon” (On Tangun) (1926) and “Purham munhwaron” (On Purham Culture) (1927). Considering these texts and Ch’oe’s intellectual background, Allen attempts to clarify Ch’oe’s contributions to Korean historiography as well as the tensions of intellectual life under Japanese control. Allen concludes that, though on the surface some of Ch’oe’s writings, in their resemblance to those of the Japanese Kokugaku scholars of the time, may seem anti-nationalistic from a colonized Chosŏn perspective, close examination of his writings shows that he was in fact a staunch nationalist attempting to carve out a space for Chosŏn within a multi-ethnic, multi-national empire. 11. Now the issue from time to time takes center stage depending on the shifting political climate in contemporary South Korea, and any sense of reckoning remains controversial and incomplete. There has been a steady rise in publications about collaboration since the initial era of silence. Some well-known enumerations on “pro-Japanese” sentiment include Kim Pyŏnggŏl, ed., Ch’inil munhak chakp’um sŏnjip (Selections of Pro-Japanese Literature), 2 vols. (Seoul: Silch’ŏnmunhaksa, 1986); Panminjok munje yŏnguso, ed., Ch’inil p’a 99-in (Ninety-nine Pro-Japanese), 3 vols. (Seoul: Tolbegae 1993); and Chŏng Unhyŏn, Nanŭn hwangguk sinmin irosoida (I Am an Imperial Subject) (Seoul: Kaemagowŏn, 1999). It may be worth noting that Ch’inilp’a rŭl wŭihan pyŏnmyŏng (An Apologia for Pro-Japanese) was banned in Korea and was published in Japanese translation in Japan. See Kim Wŏnsŭp, trans., Sinnichha no tameno benmei (Tokyo: Soshisha, 2002). Im Chong’guk is considered the first scholar to dare to bring the issue to the fore with his landmark study, Ch’inil munhangnon (On Pro-Japanese Literature) (Seoul: P’yŏnghwa Ch’ulp’ansa, 1966), after the Normalization Treaty between Korea and Japan was signed in 1965. In 1991, a think tank, the Research Center for National Issues (Minjok Munje Yŏn’guso), was established for the explicit purposes of carrying out Im Chong-guk’s legacy of exposing pro-Japanese figures in Korean history. They

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have published, among other works, the controversial multi-volume Pro-Japanese Name Dictionary (Ch’inil Inmyŏng Sajŏn, 2009), which now also has an app for mobile devices for those who want to search it on the go. 12.  English translation from Donald Keene, trans., Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 12. 13.  Japan declared war on Russia in February 1904 as a result of Russia’s failure to respond to Japan’s request to “exchange Korea for Manchuria.” American and British consent to recognize Japan’s free hand in Korea was secured following the war through the secret Katsura-Taft Agreement (July 29, 1905) and the second Anglo-Japanese Alliance (August 12, 1905). Japan annexed Korea in 1910. 14. Kojong (1852–1919, r. 1864–1907) was the second to the last monarch of the Chosŏn dynasty. He elevated himself to the status of emperor after the Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. He ascended the throne at age twelve, and his father, the Taewŏngun, served as an influential regent from 1864 to 1873. Kojong struggled to balance the foreign powers that were preying on Korea as well as the disagreements between the “traditional” Confucianists and Japan-backed advocates of Westernization. His consort, Queen Min (1851–1895), who resisted the increasing role of Japan in Korea, was violently assassinated by the Japanese, and Kojong was forced to abdicate his throne in favor of his imbecile son, Sunjong (1874–1926, r. 1907–1910). 15. In October 1904, Ch’oe Namsŏn went to Tokyo as one of the Royal Exchange Students chosen by King Kojong but returned to Korea after three months. In March 1906 he enrolled in Waseda University, but when the annexation of Chosŏn became a topical issue, he and a group of angry students left the school and went back to Chosŏn. 16. This translation is based on Yun Chaeyŏng’s Korean translation of a speech given in Japanese by Ch’oe Namsŏn at the Department of Social Science for the Japanese Library Week on February 2, 1931, and published in Yuktang chŏnjip p’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe, ed., Yuktang Ch’oe Namsŏn chŏnjip 9 (Complete Works of Yuktang, Ch’oe Namsŏn), 15 vols. (Seoul: Hyŏnamsa, 1973–1975), 416–429. The initial plan of the editorial board of the Complete Works was to publish the original Japanese versions of Ch’oe Namsŏn’s texts in a sixteenth volume, but only fifteen volumes, excluding the Japanese originals, were published in the end. In the preface to volume 1, the editor of the Compete Works states that all “pro-Japanese” texts of Ch’oe were systematically excluded from the collection. The missing original Japanese version may be emblematic of the tumultuous history of Japanese writings by Koreans. 17. Chŏng (C. qing, J. jō), a difficult word to translate, signifies affects such as love, affection, sympathy, compassion, sincerity, emotion, and feeling. 18. Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). 19. Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) was written by Murasaki Shikibu, ladyin-waiting to the empress of Emperor Ichijō, and completed early in the eleventh century.



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20. Eponymous heroine of the historical drama for kabuki written in 1891 by Fukuchi Ōchi. She was asked by the shogunate to become Tokugawa Iemitsu’s nurse and accepted the position after her first husband divorced her. Through her skillful maneuvers Iemitsu became the third Tokugawa shōgun in 1623. 21. Jeanne d’Arc (1412–1431), heroine of France. At the turn of the century, with the rising sense of crisis in Chosŏn, educational movements arose that focused on instilling pride in Chosŏn culture. Greater interest in world history was also shown, particularly about nation-building and the rise and fall of nations that might serve as examples in the Chosŏn context. Also popular among the people were biographies on heroic world figures such as Three Heroes of Italian Nationhood, Biography of George Washington, Emperor Peter the Great, and Biography of Joan of Arc. 22. In 1894, Chinese and Japanese troops entered Chosŏn to quell the Tonghak Peasant Rebellion. When the rebellion subsided, Japan refused to withdraw its troops under the pretext of securing Chosŏn independence from Chinese influence and various “modernization” reforms. Japanese troops forcibly occupied the Chosŏn palace and a puppet regime was established. A “request” by the puppet government to drive out the Chinese was engineered, giving Japan the excuse it needed to declare war on China on August 1, 1894. By its victory in 1895, Japan had infiltrated deep into the affairs of Chosŏn. 23. Journalist, playwright, and politician Fukuchi Ōchi (1841–1906) founded the newspapers Kōko shimbun and Tokyo nichi-michi. He established the Kabukiza Theater and adapted old kabuki plays for the stage. He also wrote books of reminiscences on the decline of the Tokugawa shogunate. 24. Hansŏng sunbo was the first Korean newspaper published thrice monthly by the newly established Office of Culture and Information in 1883 through the efforts of the Progressive Party. A government publication focusing on domestic politics and current developments in Chosŏn as well as abroad and introducing Western civilization, it was published for less than a year. 25. Kim, who had established the Korea Educational Association (Taedong Hakhoe) and wrote historical works related to the diplomatic history of the Chosŏn dynasty, was also an active member of the Progressive Party (Kaehwadang), or the Independence Party, which pushed for radical changes toward “enlightenment” such as abolishment of class distinctions and restructuring of the political process based on the model of Japan’s Meiji Restoration (1868). 26. At this time, efforts were made to study and standardize Korean writing (hangŭl ) such as the establishment of the Korean Language Institute by the Ministry of Education in 1907. 27. Kyŏngsŏng (J. Keijō) was the colonial-period designation for the Korean capital. 28. Queen Min (1851–1895), known posthumously as Empress Myŏngsŏng, in Chosŏn competed with the Taewŏngun to manipulate the king. She opposed the modernizing Kabo Reforms initiated by the Japanese, who assassinated her on October 8, 1895. Her murder severed Chosŏn-Japanese relations and sent the king

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fleeing to the Russian legation, marking a strong Russian influence in Chosŏn that lasted until the Russo-Japanese War. 29. A collection of short stories of the romance genre by the early Chosŏn writer Kim Sisŭp (1435–1493). He is said to have been influenced by Jiandeng xinhua (New Tales Written While Cutting the Wick) by the early Ming writer Ch’ü Yu (1341–1427). Five stories are extant today. 30. Ch’oe is referring to the murder of Queen Min at Kyŏngbok Palace by a Japanese military party by order of Miura Gorō, the minister to Chosŏn. 31. Date sōdō consists of plays and ballads based on a family succession struggle of the 1660s and early 1670s between members of the Date family, lords of the Sendai domain (now Miyagi Prefecture). 32. Also known as Soga monogatari (The Tale of Soga Brothers), this is a medieval prose tale of revenge. 33. Banzuiin Chōbei, a sewamono, or domestic drama, was first performed in 1881. The protagonist, Chōbei, is a fallen samurai struggling to adapt to the social upheaval of the late Edo period. 34. Yaoya Oshichi (ca. 1711–1715) is a play by Ki no Kaion (1663–1742), an early Edo writer. 35. The Kojiki, dated 712, is considered the oldest extant historical text of Japan. Arranged chronologically, it contains stories of Japan’s ancient emperors as well as ancient myths and legends. Ch’oe here refers to a later edition of the book first published in the Edo period. 36. A heretical religion of Christians. 37. Wako were Japan-based marauders who raided the Korean and Chinese coasts from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. 38. Written in 1343 by Kitabatake Chikafusa (1293–1354). 39. Poetry and prose composed in Chinese by the monks of the major Zen temples, particularly during the Muromachi period. 40. Also called Kokin chomonshū, this was a collection of tales with moral lessons for the young, dating from the early part of the Kamakura period (1185–1333). Originally compiled in 1254 and later amended. 41. Otogi zoshi was a general term for fairytale-inspired short stories of the Kamakura period. 42. A story in which the protagonist is a ghost or a divinity. 43. In the standard version of this folktale, a young fisherman named Urashima Tarō rescues a turtle being harassed by children. The turtle metamorphosizes into a beautiful woman who lures him into the dragon palace of the sea, where they spend three magical years. The man returns to his hometown with a box that the woman has given him with a warning never to open it. He finds that everything has changed and everyone is a stranger. In desperation, he opens the box, upon which he suddenly transforms into an old man. The three years at the dragon palace were actually three hundred years. 44. A tale from the Muromachi period thought to be written by Ichijō Kane­ yo­shi (1402–1481), it is an anthropomorphism of a fight between two birds.



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45. A Buddhist work, the story of an aristocrat and the daughter of the Buddhist god Bonten (bodhisattva). 46. A folk legend about the adventures of a nobleman who returns from many years of trials and marries the beautiful daughter of a lord. In some versions he wields an iron bow. Because of the resemblance to the story of Ulysses, some scholars believe the legend to be of foreign origin. Others contend that the themes of testing a hero and recognition by tokens are universal. 47. Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848), an important author from the late-Edo period. 48. A folktale of revenge of a monkey and a crab. 49. A folktale about the adventures of the peach boy, Momotaro. Emerging from a peach found by an elderly woman washing clothes on a riverbank, Momotaro is adopted by the woman and her husband. Once old enough, he sets off on a journey of adventure with various animal friends. The tale exists in many versions and became widely popular late in the Edo period (1600–1868). 50. In this folktale, a sparrow eats a greedy old woman’s rice paste. In anger she snips off the sparrow’s tongue. An old man helps the sparrow and is rewarded with a box of treasures. Upon hearing this, the old woman goes to the sparrow to demand her box, from which emerge goblins and snakes. 51. The protagonist of this folktale is a tanuki (raccoon, dog, badger-like creature), a common trickster figure in Japanese folklore, who teases an old man and woman who become so angry they threaten to make soup out of him. The tanuki deceives and kills the old woman and serves the soup he makes out of her body to the old man. A rabbit avenges the old woman by playing his own tricks on the tanuki. 52. The Ye were a people who lived in northern Korea during the late centuries BCE. 53. Tosŏn was a famous geomancer of the late ninth and early tenth centuries. 54. King Tongmyŏng was the legendary founder of Koguryŏ. 55. This morality tale of Chosŏn, originally from Mongolia, is about an evil older brother, Nolbu, and a good younger brother, Hŭngbu. Hŭngbu nurses the broken leg of a swallow that in gratitude gives him a gourd seed, which Hŭngbu plants and from which grow giant gourds full of treasures. Seeing this, the greedy older brother breaks the leg of a healthy swallow then bandages it to receive a gourd seed to plant. Out from the giant gourd emerge goblins and demons who punish Nolbu for his greed. 56. The writer is known only by her court name, Murasaki Shikibu. Several years after her husband’s death, she served Akiko, empress consort of Emperor Ichijō. She likely began writing The Tale of Genji in 1001. She is also known for The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu (Murasaki Shikibu nikki ). 57. Ch’oe appears to be paraphrasing here from the first chapter of Genji. 58. Here, Ch’oe uses the English words “neon sign.” 59. Ch’oe here gives a list of games and pastimes: T’amun ( J. tanin) is a game of skill in which participants would “each draw a single rhyme character (as in a

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lottery) from those set out on a table” and develop a poem from this character (see Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Royall Tyler [New York: Penguin Books, 2001], 155n2); unsae ( J. infutagi ) is a game in which “one of the players would cover a character in a Chinese poem, and the aim was to guess the hidden word from the context, the rhythm, and one’s own poetic erudition” (see Ivan I. Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan [New York: Kodansha America, 1994], 151); paduk ( J. go) is a game for two imported from China; ssangnyuk ( J. sugoroku) is a game for two similar to backgammon, played with pieces on a board, that has been traced to Indian origins; sŏllak ( J. funagaku) are boating excursions on which the participants would play music and sing songs; chorak ( J. torigaku) is “bird music,” a type of gagaku, or court music; t’agu ( J. dakyū) is a type of polo (see Morris, World of the Shining Prince, 153). 60. Empress Jitō (645–702), the forty-first sovereign (r. 686–697), was the second daughter of Emperor Tenji and wife of Tenji’s younger brother, who later became Emperor Temmu. After Temmu’s death in 686, she ascended the throne as reigning empress in 690. During her reign she was responsible for completing and enacting the Asuka Kiyomihara code, Japan’s first set of administrative and penal laws. 61. A collection of more than one thousand short tales is said to have been compiled at a retreat in Uji, southwest of Kyōto, by a nobleman, Minamoto no Takakuni (1004–1077), from tales told him by passers-by. This tradition has been discredited because the work contains references to events after 1077 and because, although many of the tales are evidently based on oral tradition, others derive from literary sources including Buddhist scriptures, Chinese histories, and secular Japanese works. 62. Also called Nihon ryōiki, the full title is Nihonkoku gempō zen’aku ryōiki (A Record of Miraculous Instances of Good and Evil in Japan). It is the earliest collection of setsuwa (Buddhist morality tales), compiled around 822 by a Buddhist priest of the temple Yakushiji in Nara. The 116 tales depict intervention in human affairs by supernatural elements and share the theme of Buddhist cause and effect. 63.  The oldest extant anthology of Japanese poetry dating to the Nara period. 64. Akitsu Shima is an ancient name for the main Japanese island of Honshū. 65. According to the Nihon shoki (720), Empress Jingū, who ruled as regent sometime during the late fourth to early fifth century, subjugated Kyushu and then sailed to Korea to defeat the forces of the state of Silla. Shortly after her return to Japan she gave birth to the future emperor Ōjin. Jingū is believed to be a composite of several ancient shaman-rulers, and her legendary military exploits are said to be based on Japanese campaigns in Korea late in the fourth century. 66. Political figure of the Yamato court (ca. fourth to mid-seventh century) who sought to establish the Soga family’s dominance over the court through kinship ties with the imperial house and collaborated with regent and heir-apparent Prince Shōtoku in strengthening the central government. 67. Prince Shōtoku was a statesman of the Asuka period (late 6th c.–710). As



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regent for the Empress Suiko, he exercised political leadership, centralized the government, and strengthened the ties between the state and Buddhism. 68. Kammu (r. 781–806) was the eldest son of Emperor Kōnin (709–782; r. 770–781). Because his mother was a commoner of Korean origin, Kammu was not originally in the line of succession, but he was named crown prince in 772 through the efforts of his father-in-law, the court official Fujiwara no Momokawa (732–779). 69. An exclamation of wonder and delight. 70. Kojiki, trans. by Donald L. Philippi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968). 71. Ibid. 72. Chikami no Otome (8th c.). Otome was the wife of Nakatomi no Yakamori, a courtier and poet. From One Thousand Poems, trans., Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). 73. Wani (ca. 400 CE?) was an immigrant ( J. kikajin) who went to Japan from the Korean state of Paekche in about 400 CE and became a scholar and administrator in the service of the Yamato court. According to the chronicles Kojiki and Nihon shoki, Wani (or Wani Kishi) was sent by the Paekche king on the recommendation of an earlier scholar-immigrant to be tutor to a son of Emperor Ōjin. He is said to have brought with him the Analects of Confucius and the “Thousand Character Classic.” 74. Found in the preface to Kokinshū, the first great imperial anthology, compiled in 905. Kokin Wakashu: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, Helen Craig McCullough, trans. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1985).

CHAPTER 5

Chŏng Inbo Introduction and Translation by Seung-Ah Lee

Introduction Chŏng  Inbo  (1893–1950?)  was  born  in  Seoul  and  was  known  by  the  pen  name Tamwŏn, athough he often went by his artistic pen name, Widang. In  1910, when Chŏng was seven, Korea was annexed by Japan. That same year,  he began to study under Yi Kŏnbang (1861–1939), a renowned Confucian  scholar who specialized in Wang Yangming learning. Chŏng then visited  Kando1 in 1911. He moved there with his mother in 1912, but stayed only a short time because a season of disastrous harvests forced him to return to Korea. Going abroad to Shanghai to study in 1912, he led an impoverished life at a small inn where many other young Korean scholars had gone to escape  colonial  rule  in  Korea.  Among  them  was  Sin  Kyusik  (1880–1922),  the founder of Tongjesa, a mutual aid society that gathered together these young scholars in exile in Shanghai. The society’s main goal was the independence of Korea. Hong Myŏnghŭi (1880–1968),2 Mun Ilp’yŏng (1888– 1939),3 and Sin Ch’aeho (1880–1936)4 were some of the more recognizable members of this society. Upon receiving news from Korea in September 1913 that both his mother and wife had died, Chŏng returned to Korea. From 1913 to 1922, Chŏng avoided involvement in public activities.  He  retreated  from  the  world  and  studied  in  Chinch’ŏn  and  Mokch’ŏn,  both in Ch’ungch’ŏng Province, until 1923, when he moved back to Seoul  and began teaching classical Chinese, Korean history, and Korean literature at the Yonhŭi School.5 He also served as an editorial writer for the East Asia Daily  (Tonga ilbo).  After  Korea’s  liberation,  he  became  dean  at  Kukhak  College,6 and also held a position as the chair of the Board of Inspection in the government of the Republic of Korea before resigning because of conflict with President Syngman Rhee. In 1950, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War (1950–1953), Chŏng was abducted to North  Korea, where he is said to have been killed in a U.S. bombing raid. 88



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Chŏng Inbo was one of the most prominent scholars of the colonial period and was particularly active in writing essays on Korean history and literature in the 1930s before withdrawing from public life in the face of Japanese demands for assimilation late in the decade. Korean historians of the time are typically described as belonging to three groups. One, represented by the Chindan Hakhoe (a scholarly society formed in 1934), took an empirical approach to the study of history, focusing on examining and validating the historical facts presented in primary sources. A second, known for the study of socio-economic history and led by such men as Paek Namun (1894–1979),7 followed a Marxist line of interpretation that sought to refute what they viewed as stagnant Japanese interpretations of Korean history. The third, of which Chŏng is considered representative, was comprised of nationalist historians. Regarding this group, the Korean historian Ch’ŏn Kwanu explains: The 1930s was the time when the nationalist perspective of Korean history was dominant. The Manchurian Incident (1931–1932) put an end to all independent movement activities that had continued in Korea and abroad since the March First Movement (1919), and the direction of the movement shifted to an intense search for a way to preserve and promote national spirit. . . . Discussions on Korean studies became very active at this time. Sin Ch’aeho’s narrative of ancient Korean history, which was written before Sin’s imprisonment but published while he was in prison, had a heavy influence on Korean history. Chŏng Inbo was a representative figure of this group of historians who tried to preserve and promote the national spirit.8

Chŏng Inbo’s collected works were published in six volumes by Yonsei University in 1983.9 The first volume is comprised of his poetry (sijo)10 and criticism on both Korean and Chinese literature. The second volume includes essays on Korean history written in a mixed script of vernacular Korean and Chinese characters in addition to epigraphs and poems in classical Chinese. In this volume, Chŏng discusses historical figures and his interpretation of Wang Yangming Learning. The third and fourth volumes contain the essays on Korean history that were serialized in the East Asia Daily. From January 1933 to August 1936, Chŏng published a series of essays on Korean history known as “Chosŏn’s Five Thousand Years of Ŏl.”11 The fifth and sixth volumes contain his essays on Korean history written in classical Chinese. The two most significant characteristics of Chŏng’s historical research are his emphasis on ancient Korean history and his examination of such

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scholars as Yu Hyŏngwŏn (1622–1673),12 Yi Ik (1681–1763),13 and Chŏng Yagyong (1762–1836).14 These scholars had been on the periphery of mainstream scholarship in the late Chosŏn, but Chŏng Inbo brought them to the center of twentieth-century historical research by referring to them as scholars of Practical Learning (sirhak; J. jitsugaku) and suggesting that the import of their work, in contrast to the sterility of the Cheng-Zhu Learning that dominated in the Chosŏn period, was the way in which they sought “creativity based in fact.” Chŏng’s argument was subsequently developed by such men as An Chaehong (1891–1965?)15 into the view that Practical Learning represented the rise of early-modern thought in Korea, just as jitsugaku was seen as early-modern thought in Japan. Chŏng’s next significant thesis was in respect to ancient Korean history. According to O Yŏnggyo,16 Chŏng made six major points in his twovolume Studies of Korean History (Chosŏn sa yŏngu). First, Chŏng understood Tangun to be a real historical figure rather than the mythical founder of Korea. Second, Chŏng limited the controversial territory of Four Han Commanderies17 to the region between the Liao River and Sea of Bohai, arguing that the commanderies represented only a temporary occupation by the Chinese of territories outside the Korean peninsula that had once been part of Korea proper. Third, he suggested that Paekche established a Chinp’yŏng Commandery in the area west of the Liao River from which it traded actively with China. Fourth, he rejected the idea that Japan had ruled Korea in ancient times through the so-called Mimana Nihonfu.18 Chŏng argued that Mimana (K. Imna) was the former name of either Koryŏng or Hapch’ŏn and not the name of a territory once occupied by an ancient Japanese state. Fifth, he argued that the Three Kingdoms (Silla, Paekche, Koguryŏ) had a common origin and numerous similarities as well as emphasizing their resistance against foreign forces. Sixth, Chŏng reinterpreted the controversial King Kwanggaet’o stele. The stele, composed to commemorate the accomplishments of Koguryŏ’s King Kwanggaet’o, describes Koguryŏ’s expedition to assist Silla when it was beleaguered by Wa incursions. Since it was written in classical Chinese, however, the sentences often lack grammatical subjects, a common characteristic of classical Chinese. After the stele was rediscovered in the 1880s, Japanese scholars and military officials published the text with an accompanying translation that argued that the stele described a Japanese conquest of Korea and thus, by extension, confirmed the existence of the Mimana Nihonfu.19 In his article “Interpretations and Summary of the Epigraph of King Kwanggaet’o” (Kwanggaet’o kyŏngp’yŏng anho t’aewangnŭng pimun sŏngnyak), Chŏng Inbo argued that the stele depicted Koguryŏ’s subjugation of Silla and Paekche and refuted the Japanese attempt to claim that Korea’s Three Kingdoms had been vassal states of Japan.



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In his serialized essay “Chosŏn’s Five Thousand Years of Ŏl,” Chŏng searches for Korea’s “ŏl” (variously defined as spirit, mind, or soul), which he argues existed for five millennia, because he believed that Koreans needed something to awaken and unite them while under colonial rule. Spiritual sustenance was an essential part of this idea. For that reason, Chŏng constructed a concept of a flourishing and eternal ŏl that he claimed Koreans could revive in order to regain national independence. Although it can certainly be argued that Chŏng was creating a myth of tradition, this myth was in response to the spiritual desolation and national crisis that permeated his times. The preface to “Chosŏn’s Five Thousand Years of Ŏl” is very abstract and in places almost impenetrable due to Chŏng’s combined use of classical Chinese and Korean vernacular, in addition to his idiosyncratic use of particles.20 Chŏng claimed to have deliberately made this piece difficult to understand in order to avoid censorship by Japanese authorities. However, considering that he left the essay virtually unchanged even when it was republished as a single volume after liberation, the inscrutability of the text must be attributed largely to his writing style, which was based on his education in classical Chinese, and to the lack of standardization of Korean grammar in the pre–1945 era. Some South Korean scholars have argued that the difficulty of Chŏng’s writing is one of the reasons so little attention has been paid to his research, despite the historical significance of his arguments. Chŏng’s ideas did not, however, go totally unnoticed. Park Chung Hee, who ruled South Korea from 1961 through 1979, revived Chŏng’s concept of ŏl in his 1968 “National Charter of Education” (Kungmin kyoyuk hŏnjang), wherein he stated that Koreans must revive the ŏl of their ancestors and study with healthy bodies and sincere minds. These ideas were derived directly from Chŏng Inbo’s writings. Although the historical accuracy of some of his arguments has been brought into question by later scholarship, most South Korean scholars rate him highly for his efforts to construct and preserve a sense of Korean identity during the difficult years of the colonial period.

Chosŏn’s Five Thousand Years of Ŏl* A man’s body is seven ch’ŏk.21 When we consider the enormity of time and the vastness of space, we realize that one man is merely a grain of millet in the vast sea. There is, however, something that cannot be confined to *Chŏng Inbo, “5 ch’ŏnnyŏngan Chosŏn ŭi ŏl,” serialized from January 1, 1935, to August 27, 1936, in Tonga ilbo.22

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those seven ch’ŏk. The “ŏl”23 of the “self-as-self” is one with the nation, on the one hand, and with all mankind or all the myriad things in the world, on the other. When a man behaves nobly and aids others, he freely gives his head, his eyes and brain, his arms and legs. He does not hesitate to abandon or belittle his family, fame, power, or wealth. When he does good for others, he can feel their pain and sorrow even though they are separated from him as though by a thin membrane. The courage to save others when they are in danger is not simply saving others but rather soothing one’s own pain and saving one’s own self from imminent danger. If, however, this vast self cannot escape from a man’s seven-ch’ŏk frame, it becomes narrow, small, and concerned with temporary physical comfort so that it doesn’t even crease its forehead when it causes harm. However, if we examine the constituent elements of this frame, it is nothing other than the physical body, desire, and the individual, which, when they are in control, can break down the strongest defenses and leave the once expansive and broad self as a miserable and pitiful thing. The physical body is a self-body, desire is self-desire, and the individual is a self-individual. Since all of these are selves, they do not accept being controlled by others. Therefore, only the self-as-self can control and overcome these selves. This is not something in which others can take part. The one who closes up has to be the self, and the one who opens up has to be the self also. However, it should be known that essence of the self does not originally exist within a membrane; once such a membrane appears and hardens, the self falls into depravity. The self that is the self-as-the self has no membrane to separate it from the nation, with which it forms one body. Even though the self of the group may be broad and deep, if, as the interior, it is unable to secure the exterior and if the exterior is able to control the interior, all things will scatter and individually become uncontrollable. How can one weak man withstand attacks from the multitude? If the ŏl of the self-as-self can gather the spirit and spread it out like stars in the winter sky and tear open the membrane dividing the individual from the nation so as not to be subject to the limits of time and space, a man of only seven ch’ŏk would be as vast as the heavens. [Original pp. 127–130 omitted. Here Chŏng discusses how Buddhist concepts of sentient beings are relevant to the notion of ŏl.—Trans.] Now, if we look briefly at the cumulative reasons for our recent debility, they are scholarly narrow-mindedness and physical weakness. Whatever the type of scholarship, if one is sincere the results will abound. However, if one forces things the results will be limited. Being sincere is



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following one’s self, and being forced is following others. Our scholars have studied only superficial things, like the indentation on a wooden club or a raised vein on one’s hand, without penetrating deeply into the marrow, only adding to the roster of successful civil service examinees and burnishing their families’ names. Therefore, if they have made any effort, it has only been the minimal effort of reading books. They have done nothing for their own minds. It has been their disposition to come to understanding through books without expending any effort. Their uncritical pursuit of the right phrases, lacking serious training or even brief practice, has led to the repetition of emptiness and the accumulation of falsehoods to the extent that our scholars have sought learning outside the real mind.24 I will discuss later how this began and subsequently developed; the point here is that this style of learning has already been transmitted in this fashion for such a long time that scholarship and self-mind have become obscure and have been nothing but tools for seeking fame, resources for raising one’s status, instruments for establishing oneself while cutting off others, and schemes for fulfilling one’s personal needs and desires. Chang Yu (1587–1638)25 had the following to say in criticism of scholarship, old and new, in Chosŏn: There are no scholars in our country. There are only men of limited capacity who have absolutely no sense of resolve. Because they have been told that Cheng-Zhu Learning is valuable, they observe it in word and form. They know no other learning because they are preoccupied with orthodoxy. How can they have gained anything?

What Chang Yu said is no exaggeration. The renowned Qing official Zeng Guofan once decried the way in which common literati just followed the trends without any view of their own. If scholars do not have true listening, they tend to hear what others hear; if they do not have true vision,26 they focus where others focus. Thus when a strong man does or says something, they follow like a mass of ants, writing in the morning and reciting in the evening, examining traces and talking of blame. They exhaust their ears and eyes, their minds and thoughts, upholding the desires of another until after some time the ethos changes and they are left bereft of purpose or meaning. Then they gather again behind the words of another person, following after until their spirit and their energy are spent. Even though they have the same sensory organs and bones as the sages, they do not aspire to the form of the sages but rather pursue that which is favored by the multitudes. Even though they waste their entire lives reacting to the criticism or praise of mediocre men, they do not regret it even as they

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die. This is truly foolish and regrettable. Unfortunately, there are similarities to this in recent Chosŏn scholarship and ideas, as educated men will probably know. We must recognize that the branches of today have roots planted in the past. [Original pp. 132–133 omitted. Chong discusses in the omitted passage physical weakness and its debilitating effects on the spirit.—Trans.] The reception of learning is a precious thing. But there is no need to say that, if the vessel that receives learning is narrow, then the learning itself will be narrow. How is it that our reception of learning has come to such a pass? The body, like learning, can be noble or inferior, depending on how it is used. Physical weakness has become a chronic disease; even though one might be said to be robust, it is a question of how he uses his body. When a robust body upholds narrowness, it becomes weak. Even if one’s body is not completely debilitated, his weakness will prevent him from doing more than carefully attending to errands that he cannot fully accomplish. How has our use and mastery of ourselves come to be like this? Generally speaking of the civil and the military, the military is the root and the civil is secondary.27 Thus we should not speak of sages and the worthies without first according full respect to strength, ferocity, and bravery. It is through those traits that a dynasty exists, that a nation is preserved, advances, flourishes, and becomes great. Confucius himself believed that “one must win at war.” Furthermore, when he spoke of the way of the scholar and said that the scholar would face “birds and beasts of prey with their talons and wings, without regard to their fierceness; he would undertake to raise the heaviest tripod, without regard to his strength,”28 he was speaking of death-defying courage. When we look at how Mozi (ca. 470–391 BCE), who walked for seven days and seven nights to the capital of the state of Chu in order to forestall an attack on the state of Song even when it was not his responsibility, we can see his strong military nature.29 Furthermore, Sakyamuni Buddha, who turned his back on hereditary privilege to become an ascetic, was called a Mahariva (great hero) and his actions were termed as fearless. But if we only imagine the prolonged final flutterings of his breath or consider him like a trembling young beauty, what is there for us to emulate? One of the disciples of Xiangshan30 praised his master, saying, “A single arrow never left his hand, and he never forget Shanhaiguan Pass and Yellow River (territory lost to the Jurchen).” This shows the real Xiangshan, and when we see that the techniques of the Xiaolin constituted a revival of Chinese martial arts, we become clearly aware of the spirit of Buddhism.31 Where, then, has been the ŏl that is the central thread throughout



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our five thousand years of history? Usually, physical weakness is either naturally born or of ones’ own making. Therefore if one has an internal burst of energy, physical strength will follow in proportion to the level of self-exertion. . . . Such a burst of energy should come from the self in order to become strength, and the self must want strength for such a burst of energy to happen. If it is done only as a matter of form and not substance, there will be no sincerity or true intention. Expressing one thing externally but meaning quite another internally means that everything is false. How can this lead to a burst of energy? [Original pp. 137–138 omitted. This passage contains further elaboration on physical weakness, form versus substance, and the narrowness of scholarship.—Trans.] Has our central thread of five thousand years actually been so trivial? I believe ŏl has survived for five thousand years. If so, then, why is our ŏl so dark? Because ŏl never rests, there should be no end to the burst of energy arising from it. When a swordsman fights an opponent, he attacks repeatedly with strong strokes despite a wound so deep that it penetrates his back and cuts his thigh and calf so that he bleeds heavily, turning his surroundings crimson. He then stumbles and his pulse becomes very weak. Even though he lies down as if he were already dead, as long as a single spark remains he can attack in close quarters with the sword in his hand. I heard from a fighter that the true face of courage reveals itself in such close quarters. [Original pp. 139–140 omitted. This passage contains criticism of conventional Confucian learning and social ethics that are based in form and not substance.—Trans.] All learning must have ŏl as its master if it is to be genuine. Any kind of physical training should also have ŏl as master if we are to discuss true bravery. If we examine our five thousand years of ŏl, its times of brightness and dimness, of expansion and contraction, we will be able to observe our times of prosperity and decline, of rise and fall. Ŏl should be at the heart of any single technique or art, no matter how small, if we are to say that it has life. Alas! Today, when these cumulative debilities have long since formed, what we have to do is similar to gathering many flecks of gold dust to make a single bar of gold. [Original pp. 141–144 omitted. Here Chong engages in a critique of the limitations of conventional Neo-Confucian self-cultivation.—Trans.] Whenever we see a dull person, we say that he lacks ŏl and when we see a man sitting aimlessly, we say that he has no ŏl. Ŏl is as simple as that. However, whether one has great bravery or cowardice and wretchedness depends on whether one has ŏl. It is not easy, however, to determine the

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clear and distinctive features of ŏl. Ŏl is not visible. Its dimness and brightness, its existence and demise can only be seen as the reflection of actual deeds. Everything that has been done in the past is now nothing but cold smoke and freezing wind, but the light cast on ŏl from these deeds does not dissipate after the demise of the people who committed the deeds. Even in the case of the remote West, past traces remain long after affairs are done. Ŏl should thus be perceived constantly in even the smallest things. Furthermore, our ancestors have passed down our ŏl throughout the vast expanse of time. If we trace it back through the long five thousand years of our history in relation to our times of prosperity and decline, dissolution and expansion, we should ask when it was bright, when it was fervent. If, in the middle of singing, dancing, wailing, or shedding tears, we suddenly turn and look back we will see the presence of ŏl. This is because we have kept a single bloodline from past to present, over the many years that have passed. We will understand the importance of the brightness or dimness of Chosŏn’s ŏl when we examine the haziness of our remote past or the weakness of our recent past. We should understand the urgency in investigating the entirety of Chosŏn through the brightness and dimness of its ŏl. We need to illuminate the brightness and dimness of Chosŏn’s ŏl so as to shed light on past affairs that have been worn by wind and washed by rain. When we say that our history is precious, we are not referring to the number of pages and lines in books, nor are we asserting the value of the sentences written there. Though there is historical value in the thick trunk and the many detailed branches of traces with their diverse beginnings, developments, and results, those are not enough for our inquiry. All worldly affairs have myriad beginnings. However, the foundation of everything is the human heart, and, though history changes hundreds and thousands of times, if we follow the marrow and veins [of the past], it is a reflection and unfolding of the human heart. We cannot calculate the shifts in a human heart, which can be genuine or false, empty or real, dishonest or sincere, deceitful or true. However, the central thread is this ŏl, and because of this ŏl we can find the one major line that passes, like a dragon in the clouds, throughout our long history no matter how history itself changes or is transformed. As we follow the trunk and branches of historical affairs, we see a flash of ŏl, which almost immediately seems to disappear. By observing these intermittent flashes, we can realize that ŏl has continuously existed even though it may seem not to be there. Through the retreat or emergence of ŏl, we can also see dissolution and growth, flourishing and decline reflected in historical affairs. At the same time, we can also see that the shift from retreat to emergence and emergence to retreat are the



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distinctive traces of an endless accumulation of hardship and resistance. Therefore, if we look into that ŏl that reveals itself as flashes in the traces of history and realize that it is the great thread that has existed throughout all time, then we can know that it is in the light of ŏl that events become valuable and history becomes valuable. [Original p. 147 omitted. This passage contains further discussion of the use of ŏl to investigate history.—Trans.] Five thousand years of history belong to us. The ancient people who have gone and the events that have unfolded are things of the past, although we may find them in writings. Even though writings may seem to bring events that have already occurred before us, they are nonetheless just writings and are neither the people nor the events themselves. The past is the past, but it is our own past. Though oaths and sincerity, flashes of lightning and peals of thunder are the past, they are still our past. [The passage] “The four quarters entrusted their borders to us, and we gained extensively in territory and population. Neighboring countries pledged their trust and envoys were exchanged”32 is the past, but it belongs to us. [The lines] “The remote mountains of Kusŏng are small and numerous. Wind and rains come from the south and the flag points to the north”33 are in the past but they are our own. [The lines] “Okchŏ perished in a single night; such is mind of Heaven”34 are from the past but they are our own. The lines “We set forth food but draw our swords; one body falls but the people rise”35 are from the past but they are our own. [The poem] “Though this body may die, though I may die and die a hundred times,/ though my body turns into earth, and whether or not I have a soul,/my undivided heart for my lord does not fade”36 is the past but it is our own. [The poem] “The autumn light sinks on the island. Flocks of wild geese fly high in the coldness./With an anxious mind, I toss in bed at night./The rising moon shines on my bow and sword”37 is the past but it is our own. It is a fact that various shameful affairs have occurred in our history, in both remote and more recent times, and even today. Nonetheless, we always had superior moments and brilliant flashes that made up our past, that are our own. If we think only of physical bodies, the ancient people are not us and we are not the ancients. However, if we consider ŏl, then we realize that the ancient people are us and we are them. When we follow the traces of the ancients and encounter their marrow and blood, we will then understand that their veins are our veins. When we observe the excellence, superiority, bravery, and rectitude of our past, we ourselves will believe that there is a penetrating something inside us that has been passed down. If we follow throughout time this vein that pulses with the fluttering banners and beating wings of our many heroes and patriots,

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we will feel chills running up our spines when we grasp that penetrating something inside of us that has been passed down from our ancestors. Thus the past is still alive. Who could say that the past is something that has already unfolded and gone? Thus, although there may be many ways to explain why we do not rely on our own mind but seek everything from outside, the greatest reason is that we do not know the self-as-self and furthermore have long forgotten that we need to know the self-as-self. When we see how the central thread of five thousand years has reappeared clearly from time to time through the hundreds and even thousands of trials and tribulations of history, we realize that it remains as brilliant and bright as before. Nonetheless, we fail to raise our downcast eyes even a little and continue to try to see our history through the smallest things. […] Furthermore, it is not uncommon for petty and vulgar men with heavy burdens to dismiss the nobility of our nation and resort easily to saying such things as “There is nothing we can do,” or “It has always been like this.” If we knew ourselves even a little, we might have fallen, but not to this point. People are capable of deep emotion. This sense of emotion is a vein that runs through our ŏl. It is this emotion that forces us to raise our faces and shed tears when we read our classics or about affairs that happened in the past. Actually, this is too superficial. This vein is obvious to all of us who share the same blood. This vein produces an emotion that is unlike the emotion that comes from outside, and the difference between the two is not simply a question of shallowness or depth, of weakness or strength. As long as we reach out to our past, we will feel the throbbing of our ancient pulse in the here and now even before we actually touch it. Why is it that we do not try to know ourselves? Why is it that we do not try investigating our ŏl? Let me compare ŏl with a person’s eyes. While closing and opening his eyes, how many times does a person witness the flourishing and decline, the dissolution and growth of the outside world? Therefore, if scholarship does not contain ŏl, it is false. If rites and rituals do not contain ŏl, then they are empty. If literature does not contain ŏl, then it is unsuccessful. As for history, it cannot be anchored without ŏl. Nothing can be without it. With ŏl things are genuine, without ŏl they are false. With ŏl things are real, without ŏl they are empty. Because we did not respect and value the importance of ŏl, the sole principle38 of all things—ultimately our words, affairs, behavior, and actions—is without essence. As a consequence, the waves we encounter are growing stronger. Alas! There is no greater sorrow than the death of one’s spirit. The old saying that the death of one’s



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body is secondary applies to us, yet I can find no indication of any change in direction. Even though you do change direction, without this sole principle the goal it is aimless. It is not easy to uncover Chosŏn’s five thousand years of ŏl. If we seek for it only according to old conventions because to do otherwise is difficult, then we will simply sit and watch days and nights as this ŏl grows increasingly obscure, our desolation deepening over time as fathers age and sons grow. Even though we may fear making a blunder, we should take the initial step of dividing our five thousand years into early and late in order to find the central thread. We should also write down and explain in detail how it was obscured by wind and rain as well as how it flourished and declined, dissolved and grew. Once we have made the old vein pulsate, we can use our penetrating emotion to make alive again the past that has already unfolded and gone. At the same time, we should endure and wait to use the old and heavy stem as the rudder of our boat. Those who will say that this sounds hackneyed are themselves hackneyed. We must transmit the truth and destroy the false without asking when and how. Not a single person should take this lightly. Not only that, but everyone should realize that it is every individual’s responsibility. Others cannot know the details of one’s thoughts; even oneself cannot fathom the specific roots of one’s own thoughts as they sink, rise, sink, and disappear. Yet the more difficult things are to fathom, the more there are powerful ways to govern them in their entirety. We should therefore be self-reflective and self-illuminating and not mislead ourselves even momentarily. If we turn around and stand on our own through obtaining this ŏl of self-as-self, everything revealed by that bright light will be worthy of our attention. We will not stop searching for the roots of thought no matter how deep or remote they may be. This is something we are compelled to do on our own in the most difficult circumstances without the participation of others. If the thought we found is based upon ŏl, then it is the very thing that our heroes and patriots relied on for over five thousand years. If this thought is contrary to ŏl, then it cuts our connection to the veins of our heroes and patriots. The emergence and continuation of even the minutest ideas are extremely important and great. Thus we should repeatedly examine them and diligently advance on our own. One hundred years passes [quickly] like the morning and evening. The body is weak like the plantain plant. However, not even the universe can overcome the ŏl contained within one seven ch’ŏk body. There is nothing the true essence [of ŏl ] cannot penetrate. Whenever we see a dull man or a man sitting aimlessly, we say that he has no ŏl. Ŏl can be this easy to recognize. It is not only easy to understand, but everyone has it. When anyone lacks the ŏl that everyone

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else possesses, it is urgent that it be recovered. It can be recovered since, even though it may now be lost, it is something that everyone originally possessed.

Notes 1. Kando (C. Jiandao) is the region of northeastern China adjacent to the Tuman (C. Tumen) River, where many persons of Korean ancestry live. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Korean peasants began to move into that area to escape famine and poverty. More arrived as refugees during the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), and even more, including political refugees, came after Japan annexed Korea in 1910. Kando became a center of organized anti-Japanese military activities during the years of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. 2. Hong was a writer and politician who participated in the independence movement. He chose to go to North Korea in 1948. He is best known as the author of the historical novel Im Kkŏkchŏng (Im Kkŏngchŏng). 3.  Mun studied in Japan before going to China in 1912. After several years he returned to Korea, where he devoted himself to the study of Korea’s history. For more detail, see the introduction to the translation of his piece on the social position of Korean women in chapter 3 of this volume. 4. Sin was an important figure in the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement of the 1900s who went into exile in China after Japan colonized Korea. He became active in anarchist circles while in China but is best remembered for his nationalist historical writings. 5. Known as Yonhŭi Chŏnmun Hakkyo, it was the precursor to the presentday Yonsei University. 6. First established during the colonial period, the school changed its name to Kukhak College (College of Korean Studies) and specialized in Korean studies after liberation. Later it became known as Usŏk University, which was absorbed into Korea University in 1972. 7. Paek Namun was the most prominent Marxist historian of the colonial era. For more detail, see the introduction to the translations of his works in chapter 6 of this volume. 8. Ch’ŏn Kwanu, Hanguk kŭndaesa sanch’aek (Excursion into Modern Korean History) (Seoul: Chŏngŭm munhwasa, 1986), 279. 9. Chŏng Inbo, Tamwŏn Chŏng Inbo chŏnjip (Collected Works of Chŏng Inbo), 6 vols. (Seoul: Yŏnse taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu, 1983). 10. Sijo is the most popular, elastic, and mnemonic poetic form of Korea. Dating from the fifteenth century, the sijo is a three-line poem, each line consisting of four rhythmic groups, a minor pause occurring at the end of the second and a major at the end of the fourth. An emphatic syntactic division is usually introduced in the third line, often in the form of an exclamation, presenting a leap in logic and



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development. See Peter H. Lee, Anthology of Korean Literature: from Early Times to the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1981), 92. 11. Chŏng Inbo argued that Korean history began with Tangun in 2333 BCE, extending the span of Korean history back almost five thousand years. Chŏng appears to have deliberately used the native Korean word ŏl instead of the Chinese derived word chŏngsin, which is a more common term for spirit, in order to emphasize its uniquely Korean features. 12. Yu Hyŏngwŏn systematized the Practical Learning methodology of the institutional approach to government (kyŏngse ch’iyong) that stressed reform in the land system, administrative structure, and military organization. The aim was to promote the sound development of an agricultural economy based on the independent, self-employed farmer. He passed his years in isolation in a farming village, engrossed in research based on his personal experiences with the realities of local society. The result of this lifetime of study was his treatise entitled Pangye surok (Literary Collection of Yu Hyŏngwŏn), which was completed in 1670. In it he examined and criticized in detail such features of the Chosŏn order as the land system, education, government personnel appointments, government structure, official salaries, and the military service system. See James B. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). 13. Yi followed in Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s footsteps. His best-known work, Sŏngho sasŏl (Literary Collection of Yi Ik), displays the diversity of his scholarship. Almost encyclopedic in its coverage, it arranges its subject matter under five broad headings: the physical environment, the world of living things, the human condition, Chinese classical scholarship, and belles-lettres. 14. Chŏng Yagyong (pen name Tasan) is the scholar regarded by modern historians as having applied the institutional approach in the most comprehensive fashion. While living in exile for eighteen years and forced retirement for seventeen more as a result of the Catholic Persecution of 1801, he wrote many works in which he analyzed and criticized conditions in the Chosŏn dynasty on the basis of his personal experiences and investigations. 15. An Chaehong was a prominent journalist, historian, and independence activist of the colonial period who strove to bridge the gap between the Left and Right during both the colonial and post-colonial periods. He was taken to North Korea in 1950, where he reportedly died in 1965. See John B. Duncan, “The Problematic Modernity of Confucianism,” in Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State, ed. Charles Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 2006), 39. 16. O Yŏnggyo, “Chŏng Inbo,” in Hanguk ŭi yŏksa ka wa yŏksahak ha (Historians and Historiography of Korea 2), ed. Cho Tonggŏl (Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏngsa, 1994). 17. The Four Commanderies, Lelang, Lintun, Xuantu, and Zhenfan, were believed to have been located in northern Korea and southern Manchuria. Chŏng Inbo and some Korean scholars of later years argue that the Four Commanderies were located outside the Korean peninsula. Recent scholarship, however,

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has confirmed that the Lelang Commandery was, in fact, located in northwestern Korea. 18. According to Kume Kunitake’s 1889 interpretation of the Nihon shōki, Japan once colonized part of southern Korea, from which it exercised control over the Korean Three Kingdoms. During the colonial period, apologists for Japan’s colonialization used that argument as a historical justification of the annexation of Korea. See Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 73–75. 19. Yi Hyŏnggu and Pak Nohŭi, Kwanggaet’o taewangbi sinyŏngu (New Studies on the Epigraph of the Great King Kwanggaet’o) (Seoul: Tonghwa ch’ulp’an kongsa, 1986), 9–11. 20.  The particles are crucial in Korean grammar to indicate the subject, object, or topic of a sentence. 21. One ch’ŏk is slightly less than one foot. 22. Republished in Chŏng Inbo, Chosŏnsa yŏngu (Research in Chosŏn History) (Seoul: Sŏul Sinmunsa, 1946), 1–29. 23. Ŏl can be translated as spirit, mind, or soul. Chŏng opted to use the pure Korean term ŏl rather than the more commonly used Sino-Korean term chŏngsin, probably in order to highlight the Korean-ness of his concept. 24. “True mind” (K. silsim) was a key concept for Korean advocates of Yangming Learning and was similar to Wang Yangming’s idea of “innate knowledge” (C. liangzhi ). Here we see Chŏng’s critique of Zhu Xi Learning from a Yangming Learning perspective. 25. Chang Yu (pen name Kyegok) was a prominent official of the early seventeenth century, renowned for his scholarship and virtue. 26.  The original reads 目이 眞悅함이 없으면 衆目의 注하는 바. The character 悅 means joy or delight and doesn’t seem to fit here. I suspect that 悅 yŏl is a misprint for 閱 yŏl, which means to examine or look closely. 27. Here Chŏng is turning upside down conventional Confucian notions of governance, under which the civil branch of government enjoyed unquestioned superiority over the military branch throughout the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910). 28. From the section of the Li Ji (Book of Rites) titled “Ru Xing” (Conduct of the Scholar). See The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism, vol. 28, ed. Friedrich Max Müller, trans. James Legge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 404. 29. Mozi was a Chinese thinker known for his pacifism and doctrine of universal love. He supposedly was able to dissuade the Chu from attacking the Song even though Chu officials threatened him with death. 30. Lu Jiuyang (1139–1193), founder of the Neo-Confucian School of the Mind, whose ideas were later developed by Wang Yangming during the Ming period. This school became widely known as Yangming Learning. 31. One of the criticisms of the School of the Mind made by orthodox Zhu Xi Learning adherents was that it was Buddhism in disguise. Chŏng appears to be recognizing that by including Lu Xiangshan here in his discussion of Buddhist spirit.



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32. These lines are from the Monument for King Chinhŭng at Maun Pass (Chinhŭng Wang Maullyŏng Sunsu Pi), erected in 568. Chinhŭng (r. 540–576) was a Silla king who presided over the great expansion of Silla’s territory in the midsixth century. The translation is by Peter H. Lee, Sourcebook of Korean Tradition, vol. 1, ed. Peter H. Lee and Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 19. 33. Kusŏng was a fortress in what is now North P’yŏngan Province, where Koryŏ forces won an important victory over Liao invaders in 1018. Chŏng gives no citation for this quote. 34. Okchŏ was the name of a people who lived in the northeastern corner of Korea and were conquered by the Chinese Han dynasty in the second century BCE. Chŏng gives no citation for this quote. 35. Chŏng gives no citation for this quote. 36. This poem was written by Chŏng Mongju (1337–1392). He was a loyal defender of the Koryŏ dynasty who was assassinated for his refusal to support the founding on the new Chosŏn dynasty. 37. This poem was written by Yi Sunsin (1545–1598), the admiral renowned for his exploits against Japanese invaders during the Imjin War of 1592–1598. 38. The term in the original is kodori (고도리), given in the phonetic script. As a pure Korean term, kodori means mackerel, and does not make sense in this context. It seems more plausible that it is a Sino-Korean term, possible either 孤道 理 (sole principle) or 高道理 (high principle). Typical usage would have the latter as 最高道理 (highest principle), but I opt for sole principle based on the way in which Chŏng frequently uses 孤 to mean “single” or “only” throughout this essay.

CHAPTER 6

Paek Namun Introduction and Translation by Charles R. Kim

Introduction Life Paek Namun was born on February 11, 1894, in Koch’ang County, North  Chŏlla Province.1 He began his formal education at the Suwŏn School of  Agriculture and Forestry (Suwŏn Nongnim Hakkyo).2 After graduating in 1915, he taught for a time at the Kanghwa Public Normal School (Kanghwa  Kongnip Pot’ong Hakkyo) before resigning in 1918 to resume his studies.  Paek entered the Tokyo University of Business Administration (presentday Hitotsubashi University) in 1919 and studied there with a number of  notable liberal economics scholars. During his time in Japan, he also began to study Marx and Engels’ early writings. Soon after his return to Korea in 1925, he found a position at the economics department of Yŏnhŭi College (present-day Yonsei University). In the early years of his tenure there,  he improved his ability to read classical Chinese texts with Chŏng Inbo,  who taught in the history department; at the same time, he expanded his knowledge of Marxist socio-economic methodology.3 In the latter half of the 1920s, Paek published a number of essays on Korea’s historical and  contemporary economy as well as several critiques of bourgeois scholarship and social reform policy.4 In 1933 he published the first major Marxist interpretation of Korean history, The History of Korean Society and Economy (hereafter CSK).5 At this time Paek was emerging as an important figure  in the Korean intellectual world. He had co-established the Society for the Study of the Korean Economy (Chosŏn Kyŏngje Hakhoe) in the previous  year and remained active as a public intellectual by publishing in newspapers and journals. One year after releasing The History of Feudal Society and Economy in Korea, Part One in 1937, Paek was imprisoned for over two  years (March 1938–July 1940) on charges of violating the Peace Preserva104



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tion Law of 1925.6 After his release Paek kept out of public view for the most part until the end of colonial rule. However, under heavy pressure from Japanese authorities, he gave a lecture on February 14, 1941, in support of the regulated imperial economy and the Greater East Asian CoProsperity Sphere.7 Immediately after Korea’s liberation, Paek established the Korean Academy of Sciences (Chosŏn Haksurwŏn) on August 16, 1945. The Academy of Sciences, he hoped, would become a politically neutral research organization aimed at shaping national policy and constructing an autonomous national culture.8 Later in the same year, Paek was active in the National Committee on Educational Planning (Chosŏn Kyoyuk Wiwŏnhoe), which was organized through the United States Army Military Government in Korea. However, in the early months of 1946, his focus shifted from education to politics. On February 5, 1946, he became the head of the southern section of the moderate-leftist New People’s Party (Sinmindang), and two months later he published The Path for the Korean Nation, a text in which he proposed a coalition between contending political forces.9 But his vision for a Left-Right alliance had little chance of realization in the rapidly polarizing domestic political world of the time, and his fortunes as a politician dwindled, eventually leading to his retirement on December 7, 1946. Paek made his way northward in the following year and, in March 1948, was criticized by the North Korean Workers’ Party for his “opportunism” and “factionalism.”10 He was subsequently rehabilitated and had a long career as a North Korean statesman, holding prestigious but politically impotent positions, including Minister of Education and president of the Academy of Sciences. Paek died on December 12, 1979. Selections Setting aside Paek’s activities as an aspiring academic and political leader, I will focus on his roles as a historian and critical intellectual in the 1930s. The latter two roles correspond to Paek’s “perception of Korea” (Chosŏn insik) and his “perception of present reality” (hyŏnsil insik), a distinction drawn by the historian Pang Kijung.11 The two pieces I have selected for translation serve as examples of these complementary “perceptions.” In the first piece, the opening chapter of CSK, Paek makes a strong claim for the universal nature of Korea’s historical development. This theoretical stance on the interpretation of Korea’s past, or Paek’s “perception of Korea,” forms the basis of his critical assessment of its colonial present, which he covers in the second piece, “A Theory on the Present Stage of the Korean Economy” (hereafter GR).12

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One of Paek’s major scholarly concerns was to overturn the theoretical assumption that particularities determined the historical course of the Korean nation.13 This general assumption was shared alike by colonialist historians sympathetic to Japanese imperial domination and nationalist historians critical of it.14 Paek turned to historical materialism—in his view, the most advanced social scientific approach available—in order to demonstrate that the Korean socio-economic formation did in fact follow universal laws of historical development and thus did not constitute a historical aberration. What he deemed universal was actually quite specific. On the one hand, he used Stalin’s five stages of historical development as the framework for his analysis of Korea’s past, and, on the other hand, he applied the dialectical materialist method to show that internal social forces generated historical change in Korea from its ancient past to the present.15 Covering roughly three millennia beginning in 2333 BCE—the putative starting point of Korean society—CSK is the first of two full-length studies completed by Paek on Korea’s economic historical development. In terms of the Stalinist framework, he covered the first two stages of history: primitive communist society and ancient slave society. As its title indicates, Paek’s second major study, The History of Feudal Society and Economy in Korea, is an analysis of Korea’s feudal stage, which Paek argued began in the latter part of the Unified Silla era (669–935) and extended into the Chosŏn era (1392–1910). Although he could not complete any additional full-length works to argue the point at length, Paek believed the dissolution of feudal society was a process that began internally in the late Chosŏn era. It was his view, moreover, that in the course of colonization by Japan, the onset of capitalist society from within was overwhelmed by the transplantation of capitalism from without, a topic he discussed in GR. In spite of Paek’s emphasis on Korea’s adherence to the universal laws of historical change, he also believed that particular conditions did result in the comparatively slow tempo of its developmental process. Yet, rather than stop at this observation, Paek sought to concretize these particularities in order not only to explain the society’s specific historical course but also to diagnose the present stage and make prescriptions for progressive change in the future. This, he believed, was the duty of social science. In this sense, GR is Paek’s diagnosis of mid-1930s Korean society, which he perceived as semi-feudal. An outcome of the colonial transplantation of capitalism, this condition consisted both of capitalist agricultural estates and industries and of feudalistic rural class relations and tenant practices. Moreover, he deemed class struggle within Korean society and national struggle between colony and metropole to be overlapping phe-



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nomena, hence the “dual conflict within the Korean economy.” He argued that class conflict in the countryside followed ethnic lines, with large-scale landlords and agricultural estates constituting the Japanese side, and tenant farmers, owner-cultivators, and small-scale landlords constituting the Korean side. Class conflict in manufacturing regions also corresponded to the national conflict because the owners of industrial capital represented imperial interests and exploited Korean laborers. Paek believed that progressive social change could only occur after national liberation, the event that would enable the formation of a viable indigenous bourgeois class. Only then would Korean society shed its feudalistic elements and advance to the capitalist stage by means of a bourgeois revolution. Remarks One might say that Paek’s insistence on the universal nature of Korea’s historical development was his way of grappling with the aporetic division between universality and particularity, a central problematic in modern Korean historiography. In this sense, even as Paek stated in clear terms his distance from the particularist view of history, he remained within the bounds of the same problematic; indeed, the latter presupposed the emergence of a universalist view of history, and Paek was able to identify this earlier than most. Suffice it to say, once Paek set the wheels in motion, later historians frequently revisited the particularity-universality binary.16 As social historical texts, the two selections translated here invite reflection on the complex nature of colonial Korean society in the narrow sense and imperial Japanese society more broadly. Paek’s socio-economic critique followed the early Korean nationalists’ critique of Japanese imperial domination; indeed, his was a critique of a critique. Significantly, the conditions of production for this second-degree critique existed within the imperial social space itself.17 Up to the mid-1930s, far from leading the life of an underground dissident, Paek took advantage of the opportunities afforded Korean elites to achieve academic and professional success, in large part based on his ability to make incisive critiques of the dominant forces in the intellectual and social worlds within which he was active.18 A Note on the Translation A number of contemporaries criticized Paek for the overall inaccessibility of his language. Other critics found fault with his mechanical application of Marxist methodology to Korea’s past. Readers may get a sense of both in the selections below. Throughout, I have tried to strike a reasonable bal-

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ance between literal and literary translation, but in many cases, my rendering strays considerably from the latter ideal, due in part to Paek’s own penchant for long-winded, convoluted prose. An overriding concern with presenting a precise translation, in terms of Paek’s ideas and his analyses, has led me to sacrifice general conciseness and fluidity.

The History of Korean Society and Economy* Chapter 1: Methodology for the Study of Korean Economic History Methodology for the Study of Korean History In the study of Korean history, we must take as our task both the concrete and true-to-life elucidation of the processes of change in historical and social development and the theorization of these changes’ practical thrust. The task can only be accomplished using historical dialectics—the general principle of movement for human societies—to provide a concrete analysis of historical changes in the class relations and social structures that govern the life of a nation and to abstract from it the general nomothetic nature of these changes.19 As one part of human history, this will in time make it possible for us to grasp the essence of the process by which contemporary capitalism transplants itself and develops on the world historical scale. At the same time, it will reveal the future course for global society. But how have studies of Korean history been conducted up to now? In terms of content, they are filled with such accounts as: histories that focus on the question of political power and its external constraints in detailing the rise and fall of given dynasties; chronicles of rulers and ministers dealing with the actions of kings and the advancement and demise of ministers; records of an autocratic state detailing such things as the amendment or repeal of a decree, the success or failure of a ruler, and the praise or censure of an official; and histories of wars. Turning to their compilation format, these histories are chronicles that follow closely the Chinese gangmu style.20 Moreover, when we examine the dispositions and aims of the compilers, we find that they subscribe to the orthodoxy. An investigation of the essential reasons why these histories have come to possess such qualities reveals two distinctive points. The first is the elision of the life of the masses and the developmental process of social formations, which *Excerpts from Paek Namun, Chōsen shakai keizaishi (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1933).21



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together must constitute the primary axes of history. The second point is that, since these histories are merely side-by-side juxtapositions (Nebeneinander)22 of historical phenomena, there is an absence of a set of principles to explain history’s successive changes. These faults, however, were unavoidable, given the limitedness of general historiographical knowledge at the time, not to mention the class constraints of the bureaucratic or state historian. These shortcomings should be forgiven, and as archival histories these texts are precious gifts for later historians. We have been entrusted with the tasks of dealing with these classical histories in an appropriately critical manner and of collecting and analyzing, by means of the most rigorous standards of contemporary historical research, all the destroyed or overlooked sources and remnants in order to establish a historiography that traces the coherent development of our nation as a whole. To do this is not merely to critique our past but also to look toward the future. Herein lies the praxis of the study of history, and such an understanding must inform how the discipline’s general trends are delineated. How have our most recent sempai contributed to the study of Korean history? They have focused their energies on empirical archival research or on surveying historical ruins and collecting relics. Each, of course, is a necessary task, but in another respect it is also our predecessors who brought in a foreign import from Japan called the “particularist view of history,” a new yet unfortunate imprint in the realm of Korean historical studies. Their particularist view of history, the ideology of the German Historical School, was entirely the product of the nationalist movement wherein emergent German capitalism resisted England. Since this coincided with Japan’s emerging capitalistic national condition, it was imported en masse and has resulted in the rapid growth of the field of Japanese historical studies. Conversely, in the case of our sempai’s quick and astute importation, they were deprived of a chance to establish themselves due to the sudden changes in our nation’s condition, and, as wandering scholars ( fahrende Schüler) in search of artifacts, they have been politically cast aside. Yet, at the level of ideas at least, their project to particularize Korea’s cultural history as an autonomous microcosm (mikrokosmos) has become a relatively deep rooted practice. Beyond this type of particularization, there is also a distinct version of particularity that is produced, defined, and circulated by the state. This is the ideology of the bureaucrats, known as “Korea’s unique circumstances.” To distinguish between the two forms, we may describe the former as mystical and sentimental and the latter as monopolistic and political. Nonetheless, insofar as they reject historical laws’ common applicability to the development of human society, they move

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along the exact same track and are thus reactionary. In order to break new ground in the field of Korean historical studies, these two types—in actuality, two variants—of particularization must be vigorously rejected. Furthermore, with respect to theories, the natural environment theory based on human geography, the theory of cultural particularism based on ethnology, and the Ricardian theory of individualistic cultural values are all theories of the particularist view of history. For the devotees of the particularistic theory of Korea’s unique cultural history, the above views would comprise the imports to be embraced most enthusiastically, but they are essentially useless for historical science.23 The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of individuals as living human beings. The first historical activity by which these humans distinguished themselves from animals was not thinking but rather the production of their means of subsistence. Thus, the first established fact is their physical organization and, with this as a condition, their relationship to their given external natural world . . . Human existence manifests itself in the way individuals express their lives. What they are, therefore, coincides with their productive manner (Weise), or, in other words, it depends on what they produce and how they produce it. Consequently, what people are depends on the material conditions of their production. Here we see that determinate individuals, who are engaged in productive activity according to a fixed mode, form determinate social and political relationships under fixed productive relations.24

In short, “human existence is the actual process of living.” However, humanity does not merely live passively or impressionably. In production, humans are not in relation exclusively with nature. Within a fixed mode, they produce only by working cooperatively and exchanging their labor with one other. In order to produce, they enter into fixed connections and relations with one another, and indeed it is only through these social connections and relations that their relationship to nature is formed and production is carried out . . . The social relations within which individuals produce—that is, the social relations of production—transform in concert with the change and development of the material means of production and, thus, of the productive forces. The relations of production in their totality constitute what are known as social relations or society in general and also constitute, in fact, a society in a set stage of historical development, that is to say, a society possessing a unique and particular character. Ancient society, feudal society,



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and bourgeois society are such totalities of productive relations, and, at the same time, each denotes the set and specific stages of development in human history.25

In short, the only particularity that can be found in historical science is that of a society’s historical stage of development. And since such particularities are not fantastic but concrete, they form one interwoven succession (nacheinander) due in truth to the inherence of developmental qualities.26 In the case of the entire process of historical development for our Korea, even though we are aware of differences both great and small in, among other things, geographical conditions, racial physiognomy, or the external characteristics of our cultural forms, we must acknowledge that superficial particularities are not peculiarities that should be distinguished from the laws of historical development applicable to other civilized nations. Following the monistic principles of world history, Korea has traveled on virtually the same track of development as other nations. The slow tempo of our developmental process and the degree of distinctiveness in our cultural forms are by no means essential characteristics. “A Negro is a Negro. It is only because he began under certain circumstances that he becomes a slave.” In other words, no matter how Asiatic the developmental history of the Korean nation may be, the internal laws of development within its social formation are themselves entirely world historical. Thus the slave society of the Three Kingdoms era [37 BCE–668 CE], the Asiatic feudal society beginning in the Unified Silla era [668–935 CE], and transplanted capitalist society are universal-historical characteristics (!) that reveal the entirety of recorded developmental stages of Korean history up to the present. Each stage possesses its own distinctive laws, and it is in this that the possibility exists for the nomothetic study of Korean history. Moreover, it is only by using world historical methodology that we can understand the internal forces in the history of our national life’s development and discover a radical resolution, unknowing of despair, in response to the overpowering particularities of reality. Object and Method for the Study of Korean Economic History The Korean nation does not consist of the children of a peculiar tradition but of normal, biologically evolved humans. Their history, which must be distinguished from that of animals, began with their production of subsistence materials, the conditions of which were based in their physical organization. In that regard, this economic history is also the history of the Korean nation’s genesis. Furthermore, the concrete content of this production is the constitutive relations between laborers and the means

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of production, which, as constitutive, form the foundation of society. The political and cultural history of Korea has also unfolded in connection with these relations in the process of its formation, growth, and change. In addition, if Korea’s economic history takes as its object of study the process of historical evolution of economic structures—which form the basis of social formations—in their reciprocal relationship with political and ideological forms, then in that very sense economic history is the foundational history of the development of the Korea nation. Some may think of Korean economic history as a chronicling of such things as clothing, dwellings, agriculture, handicraft industry, trade, transportation, markets, currency, taxes, kye, and po.27 Yet, though these certainly constitute important data in the study of economic history, they do not comprise economic history qua historiographical theory. Such descriptive enumerations of external economic phenomena, economic institutions, and economic forms not only fall into a mechanical interpretation but also fail to elucidate the transformative relations between productive forces and productive modes that represent the decisive elements in Korean nation’s historical development. What we mean by the study of Korean economic history is a scientific demonstration of the following for all eras in which the social existence of the Korean nation has been delineated: the internal connections within economic structures, the development of immanent contradictions, and both the nomothetic nature and the inevitability of the successive shifts in productive relations arising from these contradictions. In more concrete terms, our object of study becomes the following four social formations: primitive communist clan society, which constitutes the point of origin for the Korean nation; the slave economy of the Three Kingdoms era, when Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla vied against one another; the Asiatic feudal system lasting from the Unified Silla era to the most recent times; and the commodity production system currently in progress. In other words, the task of concretely corroborating the transformation from a prehistoric classless society to a class society—or, internally speaking, the developmental process of historical modes of production from communal tribal living to the mode of drawing in surplus products and surplus value— must constitute the duty of the historical study of the Korean economy. If we posit that it is futile to carry out this task solely through the collection of materials on economy, then it is imperative that we ground our work in some methodology marked by the regularity of the laws of history. Put simply, as all the mysteries of modern civil society can be understood through an analysis of commodities, the internal constitutive relations between Korea’s laborers and its means of production in the past must be



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analyzed, critiqued, and fundamentally grasped by following their temporal line of historical development. Here we must put to use the magnificent refuse (!) that up to now domestic and foreign scholars have completely overlooked, either consciously or unconsciously. In other words, through the analysis of the nomenclatures of kinship systems that are now fossilized, we can approximate the contours of prehistoric communist clan society. And through the investigation of the statutes of the slave system, we can portray the historical scenes of civilization during the Three Kingdoms era and apprehend the slave economy in its essence. In the same fashion, through discernment of the labor relations of slave and cultivator as bonded agricultural labor, it is possible to view in their entirety the characteristics, development, and collapse of the Asiatic feudal economy, which began in the Unified Silla era, passed through the Koryŏ dynasty [918–1392], and extended to the end of the Yi dynasty [1392– 1910]. Although documents concerning Korean economic history exist in abundance, they are scattered in fragments, have been raided by bookworms, or remain stowed away in state archives. While merely abridging, collecting, and organizing these materials requires considerable time and painstaking effort, more must be done. Using these materials to narrate the past from a single scientific perspective is even more important. Thus, determining the developmental laws of the Korean economy historically is the task at hand for the study of Korean economic history. The Point of Departure for the Study of Korean Economic History Notwithstanding the designs of our cultural particularist historians, Korea of today represents one link of world-historical capitalism. The stage that preceded the current one was the slow development of feudal society in its Asiatic form, and, prior to this, we find the state form headed by the slave-owning class. In addition, we come across vestiges of the primitive communist order through meticulous examination of such things as fragments, artifacts, and primeval languages of the primitive social form scattered throughout the ancient documents. This primitive communist society is the one social formation that economically, historically, and spiritually accounted for our ancestors’ communal life in the interval between the age of savagery and the age of civilization. It finally entered the process of dissolution, however, as it prepared for the gradual growth of its material productive forces, an embryonic property system, and a class society. This primitive communist society is precisely the point of departure for Korean economic history that we must study. In other words, as the point of departure for Korean economic history, primitive communist society can be delineated from a variety of angles, though its form, of course, is not typical.

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The duration of the primitive communist order is by nature extremely long. Together with the slow development of its productive forces, its form changes of its own accord, so that at its height and in its latter stages the attributes of this communal formation are also transformed. Yet, just as we can grasp the whole through its parts, can we not skillfully deduce the form of an agrarian communist order on the verge of decay by relying on its traces? Herein, I seek to depict the features of communal clan society in primitive Korea using myths, legends, ancient documents, tomb artifacts, and the like.

A Theory on the Present Stage of the Korean Economy* 1. The Dual Conflict within the Korean Economy A theory on the present stage of Korea’s economy demands an analysis of the actual structures of society, on the one hand, while calling necessarily for a theory on policy, on the other. In order to fulfill these requirements, we must, at the very least, carefully examine the distinctive features of current policy and systematically analyze the overall historical process by which Korea’s economy developed up to the present stage. However, since a brief essay is not suited to treating such broad problems in their entirety, I want to limit myself to sketching the particular contours of the present stage, building on observable aspects of Korea’s current economy and society. For what, in real terms, has Korea, a sacrificial object offered for the sake of East Asian peace, undergone that sacrifice?28 To begin with, because Korea is a market for Japanese goods, Japanese products comprise approximately 80 percent of Korea’s total import volume; conversely, the current autarkic policies, including the one aimed at increasing rice production, indicate that Korea is a supply site for raw materials. At the same time, an investment volume totaling two billion yen attests to the fact that Korea also comprises an investment market for Japan, as the extortion of variable capital through industrial capital grows more systematic by the day. These functions, moreover, are only expanding. Korea is thus a site of transplantation for Japan’s imperialistic capitalism. Must we then simply designate Korea’s current economic structure as capitalist?. When we consider comprehensively such things as the importance of agriculture in the overall economy, class composition of *Paek Namun, “Chōsen keizai no gendankai ron,” Kaizō 16, no. 5 (April 1934): 68–84.29



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villages, relations between landlords and tenants, and characteristics of tenant rents paid in crops, we discover that residual elements of the feudal system are still strong in Korea’s rural economy. We can, moreover, locate the uniqueness of Korea’s rural economy in those agricultural policies designed to preserve elements of the feudal system within today’s imperialistic system of capitalism. In this way, we identify a mixture of a feudal system and a capitalist system within the overall structure of Korea’s economy. Yet, because Korea is a colony, we must see these two components as no more than class developmental relations in an imperialist economy rather than focus on the relative importance of each in the economic structure. In essence, then, this combination must be designated as a unique developmental form of the wholly unified Korean capitalist economy. This is the reason why what seems politically to be a conflict between nations appears socio-economically as a conflict of capitalism. Thus, in the case of the latter, domestic class conflict within Korea is an important social phenomenon that must not be overlooked; nonetheless, to the extent that the weight of migrated capitalism is dominant in terms of the total structure of Korea’s economy, national conflict and capitalist conflict come to coincide with one another almost perfectly. The particular nature of Korea’s economy today resides precisely in this dual conflict. 2. The Reemergence of the Concession System in the Company Law This dual conflict within Korea’s economy may be seen as having been established through the political transformation of August 1910 (the annexation of Korea). Of course it is possible to trace its latent developmental process back to an earlier time, but I believe that this description is, politically speaking, the most fitting. With respect to the history of capitalist development in Korea, the historical significance of this political transformation is of decisive importance. How we understand the present stage of Korea’s economy and, of course, how we see the future political course of our nation depend on whether we have a methodologically critical view of the upheaval of August 1910. Since it is an issue of such importance, we shall set it aside here and await the opportunity to conduct a detailed analysis at a later time. At any rate, the dual conflict within Korea’s economy has undergone increasingly unified development in concert with the tempo of its capitalist growth, and it is possible to divide into three broad stages the entire developmental process to the present. In brief, these include: first, the stage of special-permission policy associated with the Company Law during the time of Governor-General Terauchi [1910–1916]; second, the stage of

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liberalism associated with the so-called cultural rule that pertained during the time of Governor-General Saitō [1919–1931]; and third, the stage of monopoly associated with the regulated economy during the time of Governor-General Ugaki [1931–1936]. First off, the Company Law was promulgated on December 29, 1911, as Governor-General of Korea’s Decree No. 13. This law was a minor ordinance, its text amounting to no more than twenty articles and eleven operative regulations. Yet, in reality, it proclaimed the power of life and death over the management of commerce and industry in Korea. By stating in Article 1 that “to establish a company, one must receive permission from the governor-general,” the Company Law adopted an unconditional policy of special permission. It stipulated in Article 5 that “if a company violates this law—or, otherwise, violates directives or conditions stipulated for permission that are founded in and issued forth through this law—or if it commits an act injurious to public order or upstanding practice, then the governor-general of Korea can order the cessation or the prohibition of operations, closure of branches, or dissolution of the company altogether.” In other words, it warned that the governor-general would eliminate any questionable elements in the functioning of commercial and industrial companies in order to preserve security. Moreover, in Articles 12 and 13, the Company Law established the right to impose penal labor or imprisonment of up to five years or fines of up to five thousand yen in cases in which an individual or group set up a company without permission, received permission by submitting a false report, or performed operations in violation of orders provided for in Article 5. It is said that the distinction between public and private law has been a legal tradition since Roman times, but what have been the real effects of this company controlling ordinance? It goes without saying that indigenous Korean capitalists were the ones who suffered the most deleterious effects, even though the law did make stipulations for foreign companies in Korea as well. For an indigenous capitalist planning to establish a company, the first step in the process was a mandatory police background check. The modern principle of freedom of enterprise was simply ignored. In the end, the Company Law, as a system of special permission, did no more than exhibit the true character of the industrial policy in the initial period of capitalism’s transplantation. In other words, according to the intentionally planned restrictions placed on the Korean economy by the period’s industrial policy, it followed that, while we must supply raw materials, we must not manufacture goods, and while we must buy manufactured goods, we must not sell them. In reality, then, the theater of activity for politics and commerce was provided exclusively according to the arbitrary will of government



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officials. As a result, disastrous handicaps were imposed on indigenous capitalists, both politically and economically. What’s more, even though the military rule of this period may have been shaped by political motives and the general situation of the time, the policy it created in conjunction with the system of special permission appearing in the Company Law can be compared, in a certain sense, to the guardianship policy of a police state in the era of early modern mercantilism. 3. The Historical Significance of Cultural Rule during the Saitō Years The Company Law, which performed special functions like those discussed above, was repealed on April 1, 1920, through the passage of Regulation No. 7. It has even been said that the commencement of so-called cultural rule during the Saitō years—which brought about the replacement of the military system with a regular police system, elimination of uniform and sword for bureaucrats and schoolteachers, special licensing for publications and presses, implementation of a preparatory survey for a system of self-governance in the countryside, and the repeal of the Company Law—marked the beginning of liberal cultural rule. How, then, should we understand this stage? Could we say that Japanese authorities sheathed their swords to persuade by the pen, or that in the place of a policy of militarist surveillance they granted freedom based on the early modern theory of natural law? Neither is likely the case. Police spending in 1920, the year after Governor-General Saitō’s appointment, totaled some 24,643,000 yen, the highest of the entire Taishō era (1912–1926). Is this not a case of a police state in both name and fact? If so, one might view the historical significance of the so-called cultural rule of this period as the systematization of capitalism’s migration.30 Under the euphemism of “industry first,” for instance, the Program to Increase Rice Production was established, and, together with the installation of irrigation cooperatives, it brought about revolutionary changes in the rural economy. In other words, it made a major social impact by bringing about the redistribution of landholdings, the dispersion of petty cultivators, and the downfall of small-scale landowners. Increases in rice collections were of course the real outcome; and yet, despite the fact that this was the fruit of the peasants’ productive efforts, the social impact of the policies that increased the amount of Korea’s rice exports only by steadily increasing the imports of millet and foreign rice, as well as making the number of petty cultivators swell, bring to mind the form of Oppenheimer’s bee-keeper nation.31

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Moreover, if we take a brief look at the realm of commerce and industry, great progress was made in the migration of capital during this stage of cultural rule. For instance, in 1919 there were 280 enterprise companies with a total subscribed capital of 157,225,400 yen. In 1927, these companies numbered 1,035 with a total subscribed capital of approximately 326,920,600 yen. In addition, there were 929 factories with a total capital stock of 117,510,000 yen and industrial production amounting to 191,672,000 yen in 1919; in 1928, there were 2,279 factories with a total capital stock of approximately 419,518,000 yen and production reaching upwards of 233,600,000 yen. As we can see from the summary above, this stage of cultural rule was in truth a period of remarkable growth for the industrial revolution in Korea. At the same time, both organized strikes and tenant disputes proliferated rapidly during this stage, marking the start of a new era in the history of the labor movement. Ultimately, then, the historical task in this stage of cultural rule—the organizing symbol of command in the process of rapid development of capitalism’s migration—was not the reform of existing economic and social handicaps, but their exacerbation, amounting to nothing more than the superficial amelioration of social relations of conflict under a cultural guise. It then follows that the repeal of the Company Law was not the direct bestowal of a laissez-faire policy on the people of Korea; it was the exacerbation of handicaps already in place and a return to individualistic commercial law of regulationism. In reality this sort of nominal policy of free competition, on the one hand, becomes the conferral of special privilege, and, on the other hand, necessarily becomes a structure of exploitation. All the indices that pertain to Korea’s economic development up to the present attest to this fact. [Original pp. 72–73, section 4, “The Nature and Mission of the Self-Renewal Campaign,” of the Japanese-language source omitted. Starting in this section, Paek analyzed what he saw as the four distinguishing qualities of Korea’s present stage.32 He covered the first—“the stimulation of the economy in rural farming and fishing villages by means of the path to selfrenewal”—in sections 4 through 6. In this section he drew a distinction between, on the one hand, modern, capitalist individualism as it occurs in accordance with the universal laws of historical development and, on the other hand, the particular version of individualism as it appears in the Self-Renewal Campaign that began in 1932.33 As Paek saw it, while in the former case rational, self-interested pursuit of material wealth would lead to the emergence of a full-fledged bourgeois class, the latter was contributing in the present stage to the deepening of the class conflict between



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landlord and tenant and constituted “the death knell signifying the economic downfall of Korean peasants.” The Self-Renewal Campaign in the countryside, Paek believed, was neither purely collective nor purely individualistic. Although it was resulting in the proliferation of cooperative assemblies,34 it was not capable of producing a true “national-level, cooperative renewal,” which had been made evident in the suppression of the “political self-renewal movement of March 1919.”35 Conversely, notwithstanding the campaign’s frequent appeals for improvement beginning at the individual level, Paek pointed out that in the final instance its designers were emphasizing the spiritual aspects of renewal at the expense of individual pursuit and advancement. In short, Paek perceived the campaign as a scheme to get Korean peasants to enjoy their work and produce more through diligent and independent endeavor in order to serve the interests of the metropole.—Trans.] [Original pp. 73–75, section 5, “The Political Significance of the Program to Create Owner-Cultivators,” of the Japanese-language source omitted. Beginning in 1932, this ten-year program was ostensibly designed to create more owner-cultivator households by distributing subsidized, lowinterest loans to tenant farmers for the purchase of land plots. Paek believed that, in spite of the nominal shift to the status of owner-cultivator, this program was hardly favorable to its participants because they often bought low-quality land at above-average prices. Moreover, since the conditions for loan repayment failed to take into account certain key factors, such as inflation and increases in tax rates, the livelihood of participants could not be expected to improve appreciably. After pointing out the failure of similar programs enacted in Western European nations and in Japan, Paek argued that in actuality this “government-produced” program was being implemented in Korea as a measure to check the quantitative and qualitative growth of tenant disputes. Jumping from 275 incidents involving 3,285 individuals in 1927 to 667 incidents involving 9,237 individuals in 1931, tenant disputes, Paek suggested, had become more collective in nature and had turned their focus from concerns over the transfer of cultivation rights to demands for decreases in or exemption from tenant rents.—Trans.] 6. Ethnic Trends in Landownership and the New Task of Tenancy Law As we can see from the above, the external explosion of the crisis in Korea’s rural economy began with the tenant disputes of the peasants. Ini-

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tially this was a movement appealing for the preservation of tenant cultivation rights, reduction or exemption of tenant rents, and the like, but recently it has come to mount a powerful demand based on an awareness of the tenant masses, that is, as the real self-renewal campaign.36 This rural economic movement must be seen essentially as a problem centered on landownership, and, as long as this land problem is not grounded in a political solution, a fundamental resolution is completely impossible. Thus, the tenant dispute movement has the potential to transform into a political movement. Herein resides the political significance of the Tenancy Law’s enactment. We shall now take a look at the relations of landownership as the basic conditions for the latter. Table 1  Area of arable land by type of possession, 1926–1931

year

total area of wet fields and dry fields

total area of ownercultivated lands

% of total arable land cultivated by owners

total area of lands cultivated by tenants

% of total arable land cultivated by tenants

1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931

4,378,957 4,387,727 4,291,395 4,392,116 4,388,664 4,384,509

2,156,894 2,082,824 2,014,943 1,970,463 1,948,928 1,918,836

49.2 47.4 45.8 44.8 44.4 43.7

2,222,063 2,304,904 2,377,452 2,421,652 2,439,736 2,465,572

50.7 52.5 54.1 55.0 55.5 56.0

Note: Unit of measure is chō; one chō equals 2.45 acres.

In brief, the area of arable land increases annually, but if we examine its composition, it is only the area of wet fields that is showing sharp increases, while the area of dry fields is decreasing in contrast. It goes without saying that this is the outgrowth of the Program to Increase Rice Production, which is based in Japan’s imperialistic food supply policy. However, in a general sense, we may view it as an outcome of agricultural productive capacity. Moreover, with respect to the relations of ownership, table 1 shows that against decreases in owner-cultivated lands, tenant lands are increasing steadily each year and now occupy close to sixtenths of total arable land area. In this fashion, the proportionate increase of tenant lands tells of the consolidation of land plots—by landlords, to be sure.37 This trend grows more apparent when we examine the relations of class division in rural villages. As we can see in the official statistics shown in table 2, the number of small and medium landlords is decreasing in accordance with the



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Table 2  Class distribution in rural villages by number of households, 1926–1931

year

large landlords

small and medium landlords

ownercultivators

ownertenants

tenant farmers

1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931

20,571 20,737 20,777 21,326 21,400 23,013

84,043 84,359 83,824 83,170 82,604 81,691

525,474 519,389 510,983 507,384 504,009 488,579

895,721 909,843 894,381 885,594 890,291 853,770

1,193,099 1,217,889 1,255,954 1,283,471 1,334,139 1,393,424

sharp increase in the number of large landlords. In addition, the ownercultivators, despite being lionized as the mainstay class of rural villages, are only following the course to their demise. Whether what amounts to the Program to Create Owner-Cultivators will indeed arrest this decline or whether it will end in a reappearance of the international pattern of failure is a question reserved for the future. Yet is not the future of the government-produced owner-cultivator already presaged in the figures summarized in table 2? Furthermore, only tenant cultivators are showing sharp numeric increases in proportion to the extent of land consolidation by large-scale landlords. The essential nature of this land consolidation, moreover, can be inferred from the relations of land ownership classified by ethnicity. Here, if we examine large-scale landlords in possession of thirty chōbu [K. chŏngbo] or more of land at the end of 1930, we find the following.38 Table 3  Area of arable landholdings classified by ethnicity, late 1930 number of landlords

[total] area of landholdings

average landholding per person

Korean Japanese

4,162   870

340,970 216,704

 81.92 249.08

 Total

5,032

557,674

—

ethnicity

Note: Unit of measure is chō; one chō equals 2.45 acres.

To summarize, table 3 shows that the average size of landholding for a single Japanese landlord is over three times that of his Korean counterpart. This, in brief, indicates the ascendancy of foreigners in the landlord class of plus-30 chōbu. In particular, compared to plus-1,000 chōbu

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Table 4  Composition of arable landholdings, classified by ethnicity, 1930 size of landholding

30–50 chōbu 50–100 100–300 300–500 500–100 Over 1,000  Total

koreans

japanese

1,921 1,439  760*   32   10

290 270 197  49  27  37

4,162

870

*760 is the combined total for 100–300 and 300–500.

Korean landlords, who number only ten, foreign landlords occupy the decisively dominant position. Moreover, the largest foreign landlords are distributed throughout all thirteen provinces. Collectively, their holdings are the highest in South and North Chŏlla Provinces, followed by South Kyŏngsang Province, South Ch’ungch’ŏng Province, Hwanghae Province, and Kyŏnggi Province.39 In addition to the above, according to a somewhat outdated Tax Department survey from the end of 1922, the area of arable land in possession of sub-30 chōbu Japanese landlords totaled 99,267 chōbu. It is certainly not unreasonable to assume that this figure has at least doubled in the ten years or so since, reaching an estimated 200,000 chōbu. Moreover, sales of uncultivated land at the end of 1927 totaled 10,931 chōbu, and the Oriental Development Company’s arable landholdings amounted to 67,764 chōbu in late September of the following year. Beyond this, there is land with special relations of ownership falling under the category of joint enterprises, which have both Japanese and Koreans as either shareholders of a company or members of a cooperative. In actuality, this type of jointly managed land presupposes exploitation based on the hegemony of the Japanese. At the end of 1928, this type of land totaled 107,296 chōbu, and, even when we count only six-tenths of this figure, it comes to 64,378 chōbu. When we add up the individual parts from above, the total reaches roughly 560,000 chōbu. If we enter into the equation the trends of foreign capital investment in arable lands and tally all the latest figures, the total easily exceeds 600,000 chōbu. While what constitutes Korea’s indigenous capital would primarily be landed capital, approximately one-seventh of 4,390,000 chōbu—the total area of arable land in Korea—constitutes the modern land possessions held by foreign landlords. Furthermore, approx-



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imately eight-tenths of the seventy to eighty thousand koku that comprise the total of Korea’s rice exports come from these modern landholdings, and it appears that the commodification of Korean rice, along with the capitalization of land management, also started in these lands.40 These, then, are fundamental characteristics of Korea’s rural economy: modern landholdings coexisting with dispersed petty farming in terms of forms of landownership and semi-feudal relations of tenancy in terms of social relations. More concretely, growth in total area of arable lands, increases in the number of large-scale landlords, the demise of small- to medium-scale landlords and owner-cultivators, and marked increases in the number of tenant farmers are characteristics of the process of class division in the rural economy and represent the most conspicuous phenomena in Korea today. Moreover, so-called “owner-tenants” and tenant farmers, who together constitute the groups that live under conditions of semi-slavery and feudal tenancy relations, are forced to pay tenant rents in addition to being exploited for costs of production, fertilization, public utilities, high interest on private debts, and interest on credit union loans. In addition, the total number of farming households adds up to 2,882,000, or nine-tenths of all households in Korea, and the combined number of “owner-tenant” and tenant households comprise eight-tenths of this figure. If we examine this phenomenon in relation to the inevitable fall of owner-cultivators into the class of tenant farmers, it becomes clear that tenant farmers actually comprise the overwhelming mass of the Korean peasantry. Moreover, their precarious condition consists of being dispossessed of the products of their own labor—Korean rice—and being forced to subsist, if at all, on substitutes of foreign rice and Manchurian millet. [Original p. 78 of the Japanese-language source omitted. Here Paek returned to his division between economic and political conflict. As he saw it, the current economic conflict in the countryside had the potential to transform into a political conflict through further collective tenant struggles, particularly those on large agricultural estates, and through the entry of peasants into the urban labor force. In the remainder of the section, he presented his critique of the Tenancy Law, which shared much in common with his assessments in the preceding two sections.41 In brief, he perceived the Tenancy Law as a measure designed to ease the growing tensions between tenants and landlords, while protecting the interests of the latter. He argued that the law ostensibly safeguarded tenant cultivation rights, but in reality it constituted the “sole weapon” of landlords against tenants because it furnished the former with the power to shorten or terminate contracts whenever the latter was delinquent in rent pay-

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ments. Paek also observed that the acquisition of cultivation rights would be more difficult under the Tenancy Law, since it would require the tenant’s guarantee of joint liability for the payment of rents. Closing the section, Paek turned his attention to a group of Korean notables who were said to have sent telegrams to certain Japanese officials in support of the legislation. He believed that their positive stance on the measure, putatively in support of tenant interests, was a result of their accurate assessment that in the last instance the law served the interests of their landlord “accomplices” by keeping tenants constrained “within feudalistic legislative relations.”—Trans.] [Original pp. 79–80, section 7, “Restoration Policy in the Form of the Assistance Campaign of Self-Renewal,” of the Japanese-language source omitted. In this section Paek examined what he deemed to be the second distinguishing feature of the Korean economy in the present stage: the restoration of Chosŏn-dynasty institutions in the countryside. For Paek, the resort to sahwanmi and hyangyak constituted the appropriation of feudal systems of exploitation in the colonized, semi-feudal present. Paek suggested that enthusiasm over the sahwanmi system was unwarranted because its putative objective of dissolving the practice of usury had yet to be reached: indeed, debt in rural villages still totaled some 800 million wŏn.42 As for the hyangyak system, he characterized its original Chosŏn-era incarnation as part of the ideological system that legitimated the absolutist feudal state and enslaved commoners, even as it purported to educate them.43 To conclude, Paek questioned whether the anachronistic restoration of these systems can truly open the “path to self-renewal” in the context of Korea’s current rural economic crisis.—Trans.] [Original pp. 81–82, section 8, “The Autarkic Program Arising from Japanese State Policy,” of the Japanese-language source omitted. According to Paek, the third distinctive characteristic of Korea’s present economy, the imperial autarkic program, produced two components. Paek referred to them in abbreviated form at the end of the section: “nanmen hokuma,” or “cotton in the South, flax in the North.” He set out by arguing that the promotion of cotton production in the southern part of Korea was essential for the Japanese textile industry to remain competitive on the international level. Rather than continuing to rely on cotton imports from the United States, India, and China, policy makers sought to increase cotton production within the empire, in particular within Korea, in order to achieve self-sufficiency and greater stability in the textile industry. Their ten-year plan began in 1933 and, according to Paek’s critique, was based



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on unrealistic figures that did not adequately account for changes in cotton consumption within Korea, on the one hand, and on a highly controlled sales system that utilized authorized merchants and outlets, on the other. Conversely, the plan to increase flax production, which had a “deep connection to the war economy,” was a means to the achievement of selfsufficiency in the manufacture of military supplies. As agriculture in Hokkaido shifted increasingly to rice production, northern Korea was slated to become an important supply site for flax. The ten-year plan for flax production in this region included land reclamation projects, the conversion of existing fields, and the establishment of flax-spinning sites.—Trans.] [Original pp. 82–84, section 9, “The Industrialization of Northern Korea and Monopolization by Foreign Capital,” of the Japanese-language original omitted. Paek turned here to what he regarded as the fourth distinctive feature of the economy: industrialization in northern Korea. He began with a survey of the status of energy resources and industrial raw materials, both of which were more heavily concentrated in the northern part of the peninsula. In the first half of the section, he discussed the potential for growth in the extraction of coal resources and the generation of hydroelectricity and tidal power. He then shifted to a brief examination of industrial raw materials in the northern regions, which among other things included iron, alunite, and magnesite. Paek saw current reclamation projects in northern Korea as nothing more than initial steps in the monopolization of the region’s raw materials and energy resources by Japanese industrial companies.—Trans.] 10. Conclusion In summary, the two diametrically opposed phenomena in the Korean economy of the present stage are, on the one hand, the Rural Revitalization Campaign and restoration policy arising from the path to self-renewal and, on the other hand, the sudden flourishing of large-scale industry emerging from the autarkic program and the reclamation of land in northern Korea. Regarding the former, we can conclude that the impoverished peasant masses, who are dispossessed of their principal means of production and the products of their labor, will not find relief in a peasant policy that preserves the status quo. In contrast, the sudden rise of large-scale industry in northern Korea is at once a process of change for the Korean economy and the stage of monopoly for Japanese industrial capital. As a result, the socially interchangeable relations between the destitute peasant masses in cultivating regions and the industrial reserve forces in manufac-

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turing zones will hereafter grow increasingly complex. Moreover, there is the possibility that the intensity of their class consciousness and their collective organized nature will grow even stronger in the industrialization process of the Korean economy. Is a theory of reconstruction for the autonomous capitalism of the Korean nation even possible at the present stage, pregnant as it is with such a major historic impetus? Since a theoretical investigation of this point promises to be a politically momentous task, I will wait for another opportunity to conduct a detailed analysis. Yet, at the least, we can conclude that the policy position espoused by the group of our dignified gentlemen who call for the path to self-renewal by means of a conversion from agriculture to industry is one of extremely shortsighted opportunism. At best, such a position is no more than a tribute to the class of labor aristocrats. The same is true of any attempt to theorize the reconstruction of national capitalism. It runs counter to the laws of history and essentially amounts to nothing more than a tautology for the government-produced path to self-renewal.

Notes 1. To write this introduction, I have relied heavily on Pang Kijung’s definitive study on Paek Namun (Pang Kijung, Hanguk kŭnhyŏndae sasangsa yŏngu: 1930–1940-yŏndae Paek Namun ŭi hangmun kwa chŏngch’i kyŏngje sasang [Research on Modern and Contemporary Korean Intellectual History: Paek Namun’s Scholarship and Political-Economic Thought of the 1930s and 1940s] [Seoul: Yŏksa pip’yŏngsa, 1992]). I also benefited a great deal from reading Henry H. Em’s “Universalizing Korea’s Ancient Past: Paek Nam-un’s Critique of Colonialist and Nationalist Historiography” (paper presented at the “Between Colonialism and Nationalism” conference, Ann Arbor, Michigan, May 2001). I would like to thank the author for allowing me to use his paper here. Finally, I found useful information in Leonid A. Petrov’s “Foreign and Traditional Influences in the Historiography of Paek Nam-un,” accessed October 15, 2001, http://www.north-korea.narod.ru/ paek.htm. 2. Pang notes that this institution was “the premier state-run institution to which Korean students could advance in the 1910s” within colonial society. After liberation, the school became the College of Agriculture at Seoul National University. See Pang Kijung, Hanguk, 38n27. 3. Chŏng Inbo (1893–1950) was an “uncompromising nationalist” historian commonly associated in the 1910s with pioneering Korean nationalist intellectuals such as Sin Ch’aeho (1880–1936) and Pak Ŭnsik (1859–1925). In the early 1930s, he was an important figure, along with An Chaehong, in the Korean Studies Movement (Chosŏnhak Undong).



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4. See Pang Kijung’s study for a bibliography of Paek’s works. Pang, Hanguk, 379–381. 5. Paek Namun, Chōsen shakai keizaishi (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1933). 6. This law was enacted in both Korea and Japan to control the activities of communist and anarchist dissidents, who were deemed “thought criminals.” The law was revised in 1928 to make the act of leading or organizing subversive political groups a crime punishable by death. As Japanese militarist exploits escalated during the 1930s, official tolerance for various types of politically oriented activity diminished even further, and the Peace Preservation Law was used more widely to prosecute increasing numbers of individuals. 7. Pang Kijung, Hanguk, 215n149. 8. Paek first proposed the creation of this type of intellectually autonomous, national-level organ in the previous decade. See “Haksul kigan pudae ŭi yangsŏng—chungang ak’ademi ch’angsŏl” (Fostering a Core Force for Academics: The Creation of a Central Academy), Tonga ilbo, January 1, 1936. 9. Paek Namun, Chosŏn minjok ŭi chillo (Seoul: Singansa, 1946). First published in Seoul Sinmun, April 1–13, 1946. 10. Pang Kijung, Hanguk, 292. 11. Ibid., 185–186. While the term Chosŏn insik appears directly in Paek’s writings, hyŏnsil insik is a contrastive category used by Pang. 12. Paek Namun, “Chŏsen keizai no gendankai ron,” Shisō ihō 17 (December 1938): 303–325. First published in Kaizō 16, no. 5 (April 1934): 68–84. The 1934 version was censored, while the 1938 version was not. Shisō ihō (Thought Bulletin) was a restricted publication that appears to have circulated only among Japanese authorities. 13. While Paek was critical of scholars who based their historical interpretations on unscientific, mythologized conceptions of the Korean nation, he too presupposed the existence of a relatively stable Korean socio-economic formation beginning in 2333 BCE with the emergence of Tangun and the Old Chosŏn kingdom (2333–194 BCE). Thus, in the opening chapter of CSK, he is able to speak of the “point of departure for the Korean nation” and the “point of departure for Korean economic history.” According to Pang Kijung, Paek considered the development of the primitive tribal kingdoms of the Samhan (ca. 1st c. BCE–1st c. CE), Koguryŏ (37 BCE–668 CE), and Puyŏ (ca. 1st c. BCE–346 CE) as the “first step in the formation of the nation.” Paek viewed the subsequent establishment of the Three Kingdoms (Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla) as the formation of slave societies that “assumed the unified relations of the nation.” In this sense, he considered Korea a “nation of precocity” (chosuksŏng ŭi minjok). Finally, Pang also notes that, while Paek did not regard the latter as sharing the same theoretical status with the modern nation-state, he never did discuss at length the difference between his conception of nation (i.e., the one emerging in the transition to ancient slave society) and the modern conception. See Pang Kijung, Hanguk, 122–123. 14. In the first translation below, Paek refers to Korean nationalist historians as “roving scholars” who seek “to particularize Korea’s cultural history as an au-

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tonomous microcosm.” Conversely, he refers to historical interpretations sympathetic to the imperialist cause as “a state-produced version” and “the ideology of the authorities.” Elsewhere in CSK he identifies Sin Ch’aeho and Ch’oe Namsŏn (1890–1957) as examples of the former and Shiratori Kurakichi (1865–1942) and Oda Shōgo (b. 1871) as examples of the latter. See Paek Namun, CSK, 14–15. For a discussion of colonialist and nationalist historians, see Henry H. Em, “Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct: Sin Ch’aeho’s Historiography,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 336–362. See also Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires, 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 146–160, 171–198. 15. Stalin’s five stages of history, or his “five main types of relations of production,” include the primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist systems. 16. For instance, in South Korea the issue of interpreting the process of Korea’s particular historical development in relation to Western European history— the “universal” model—was a key topic in the debate over the periodization of Korean history. The latter was a crucial problem for the historiographical discussions that emerged in the years following the student revolution of March–April 1960). See Hanguk kyŏngjesa hakhoe, ed., Hanguksa sidae kubunnon (Debate over the Periodization of Korean History) (Seoul: Ŭryu munhwasa, 1970). 17.  Further research is necessary for a more complete understanding of these conditions. Preliminarily, I would point to the Japanese academic world, within which Marxist socio-economic methodology became extremely influential beginning in the 1920s. Its influence clearly extended to Paek and other Korean intellectuals, and it seems quite plausible that Paek was able to publish his more piercing critiques and escape the stamp of the most stringent censors by using at least two linguistic screens: the Japanese language and the specialized language of social scientists. To be sure, the 1934 version of GR did not go uncensored, yet it seems that, for readers familiar with the specific type of socioeconomic critique Paek was making, the fundamental message of the text remained more or less intact. Indeed, the censor(s) for GR concerned themselves only with excising the text’s most provocative words and sentences. Based on my limited reading of his other writings from the 1930s, in comparison to the two selections here, his Korean-language essays tend to be less overtly critical of specific Japanese policies, authorities, and intellectuals. Perhaps these writings were subject to heavier restrictions, since they usually appeared in mainstream Korean publications such as Tonga ilbo and Sintonga, and thus were intended for a more general audience of educated Koreans. See Michael Robinson, “Colonial Publication Policy and the Korean Nationalist Movement,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 312–346. 18. At the same time, it is important not to overlook the real risks Paek did take or the twenty-eight months he spent in prison between 1938 and 1940. His imprisonment came soon after Japan’s war mobilization efforts had begun in ear-



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nest. The intensification of intelligence activities that ensued must have played a role in Paek’s arrest. 19. Throughout both selections I have translated the word minzoku (K. minjok) as “nation” or “national.” For more on Paek’s conception of nation, see note 13. 20. Paek is referring to the format refined by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) in Outline and Digest of the General Mirror (Tongjian gangmu). The gangmu system was designed to convey moralistic concepts from Nature and Principle Learning through commentaries of historical events. In Korea, the system saw wide usage beginning in the seventeenth century, as the influence of Nature and Principle Learning widened. A representative Korean work based on this compilation format is Outline and Digest of Korean History (Tongsa kangmok) by An Chŏngbok (1712–1791). 21. Translated from the original text in conjunction with Pak Kwangsun’s Korean-language translation, Paek Namun, Chosŏn sahoe kyŏngjesa, trans. Pak Kwangsun (Seoul: Pŏmusa, 1989), 21–27. In this selection and the next, elements enclosed by parentheses appear in the original, while those enclosed by square brackets are my own. 22.  Non-Korean terms that appear in the original as such are italicized in this translation. 23. Hani Gorŏ, Tenkeiki no rekishigaku (Historical Studies of the Age of Transformation) (Tokyo: Tetto shoin, 1929), 128. 24. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Doitche ideorogī (The German Ideology), trans. Kawakami Hajime, Morito Tatsuo, and Kushida Tamizō (Tokyo: Warerasha, 1930), 72–75. In rendering this quotation, I consulted the English-language translation found in Robert C. Tucker ed., The Marx and Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), 146–202. 25.  Karl Marx, Chinrōdō to shihon (Wage Labor and Capital), trans. Kawakami Hajime (Kyoto: Kŏbundo shobŏ, 1921), 53. Cf. Tucker, Reader, 207. 26. Hani Gorŏ, Tenkeiki, 129. 27. Kye is a type of rotating credit association. During the Unified Silla and Koryŏ eras, po were state-organized units that accumulated money and grain, lent them to commoners in need, and applied interest collected on these loans to state projects. As reflected in the names of the various po, these funds were used for such things as education (hakpo), emergency relief (chewibo), and the P’algwan festival ( p’algwanbo). Kye has a particularly long history and has taken on a variety of forms. In the Chosŏn era, certain kye were organized to finance regional-level social projects, thus taking on a function similar to that of po in the preceding dynasties. 28. The underlined passages in this essay were censored in the original. 29. Reprinted in Shisō ihō 17 (December 1938): 303–325. I have used both versions of the text for this selection (Paek Namun, “Chōsen keizai no gendankai ron,” Shisō ihō 17 [December 1938]: 303–325, first published in Kaizō 16, no. 5 [April 1934]: 68–84). Throughout the translation I have relied primarily on the 1934 version because of its cleaner print. I have used the 1938 version only to fill in censored parts, which appear underlined below. In addition, I frequently consulted

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Ha Ilsik’s Korean-language translation of the essay, which appears in Ha Ilsik, ed., Hwip’yŏn: Paek Namun chŏnjip 4 (Oeuvre: The Collected Works of Paek Namun, vol. 4) (Seoul: Iron kwa silch’ŏn, 1991), 205–225. As in the preceding selection, all elements enclosed by parentheses appear in the original, while all those enclosed by square brackets are my own additions. Finally, all notes for this selection are my own. 30. In this section “migration of capitalism” (ijū shihonshugi ) and “migration of capital” (ijū shihon) appear in the place of terms such as “transplantation of capitalism” (ishoku shihonshugi ) and “transplantation of capital” (ishoku shihon). This occurs only in the 1934 text; in the 1938 text, “migration” is replaced by “transplantation.” The distinction between the two is not entirely clear to me. Paek may have used “migration” initially to denote that capital/capitalism was moving from Japan to Korea in a preliminary sense, that is, before “transplantation” actually occurred. 31. Paek is referring here to the German historical sociologist Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943). Oppenheimer divided the process of national formation into six stages. “In the second stage,” he wrote, “[the conqueror] is like the bee-keeper, who leaves the bees enough honey to carry them through the winter.” For Oppenheimer, the transition to this second stage is of “incomparable historical importance” because it meant that for the first time conquering peoples spared their victims and began to exploit their productive labor, thereby allowing for the further integration of previously disparate tribal groups. This crucial shift “gave birth to nation and state, to right and the higher economies.” Paek appears to recall Oppenheimer’s bee-keeper nation only in the most general sense, not to suggest that Korea and Japan were currently in the second stage of Oppenheimer’s scheme but to underscore the relations of exploitation between “conqueror” and peasant obtaining in Korean society at the time. See Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically, trans. John M. Gitterman (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922), 65–69. 32.  In the interest of conserving space, I have summarized five sections, along with a passage from section 6. The abrupt shift from translation to summary in the latter part of section 6 may appear strange to some readers. I felt it important to include Paek’s analysis of class and ethnicity, which makes up the bulk of that section. The passage I have decided to summarize is, in a certain regard, the repetition of a recurring argument in the essay; namely, that Japanese colonialist policy was designed to legitimate and facilitate Japan’s economic exploitation of Korea. Since the whole of section 6 is quite long, I thought it reasonable to translate the essential first part at the expense of omitting the second part. 33. See Gi-Wook Shin and Do-Hyun Han, “Colonial Corporatism: The Rural Revitalization Campaign, 1932–1940,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 70–96. Shin and Han call this program the “Rural Revitalization Campaign” (Nongch’on Chinhŭng Undong), while Paek refers to it as the “Self-Renewal Campaign” (Jiryoku Kōsei Undō) or the “path to self-renewal” (jiryoku kōseido). The



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former two note that the official publication of the Rural Revitalization Campaign was called Charyŏk kaengsaeng (Self-renewal). Conversely, Paek uses the term “rural revitalization” at several points in this essay, primarily in this section but also in the conclusion that follows. 34. Paek lists the following cooperative assemblies: the Village Revitalization Assembly; the Society for Abstaining from Tobacco and Alcohol; the Early Risers’ Club; the Society for the Promotion of Dyed Clothing; the Diligence, Thrift, and Savings Club; and the Society for Married Women. 35. Paek was referring to the March First Independence Movement of 1919. 36. “Awareness of their subsistence” (seikatsu ishiki ) appears to be related to the Marxian concept of class consciousness. 37.  In both the 1934 and 1938 versions, the appearance of the word kenkō (doing simultaneously) is an apparent typographical error. Ha Ilsik proposes kempei (“annexation” or “consolidation”) as a correction, and I have followed his suggestion here. The phrase “consolidation of land” (tochi kempei ) also appears in the paragraph that follows. 38. One chōbu is the equivalent of one chŏ, or 2.45 acres. 39. These include some of the most fertile regions on the Korean peninsula. 40. One koku equals 4.96 bushels. 41. Paek mentioned in this section that he did not know the precise content of the Tenancy Law. Thus it appears that at the time he was writing, the legislation was a subject of public discussion, but it had not yet passed. It was enacted as the Korean Agricultural Land Law (Chōsen Nōchirei) later in the same year (1934). 42. Sahwanmi was the late nineteenth-century appellation given to the staterun hwangok system, which was designed to provide relief for peasants during lean years, famines, and the annual spring grain shortages (ch’ungunggi ). The state accumulated grain stores by collecting from cultivators at the close of harvesting season, particularly in abundant years, and peasants could borrow from these stores when needed. The system went by a variety of names during its long history, which spans the Three Kingdoms, Koryŏ, Chosŏn, and colonial eras. The provisions for the new sahwanmi system were enacted in 1895 and lasted until 1917, when state-level regulation of grain stores shifted to the village level. 43. The hyangyak system was adapted during the Chosŏn era from the writings of Zhu Xi (1130–1200). It was designed to limit corruption and to promote virtuous conduct and mutual cooperation at the village level.

CHAPTER 7

Kang Kyŏngae Introduction and Translation by Sonja M. Kim

Introduction: Crossing Borders—Manchuria, Class, and Gender in the Works of Kang Kyŏngae Unlike  other  well-known  women  writers  of  her  time,  Kang  Kyŏngae  (1906–1944) came from a humble socio-economic background. Born April  20, 1906, in Songhwa, Hwanghae Province, she was the daughter of a farm laborer who died while Kang was three. Two years later, her mother remarried an elderly invalid who offered some financial stability at an exacting price: Kang and her mother lived like servants, at the mercy of  this man and his children, with whom Kang fought on a near daily basis. Despite these hardships Kang learned to read, and her literary talents and interests were evident from an early age. Dubbed “tiny bookworm,”1 she would read fictional works and classics such as The Tale of Ch’unhyang and Samgukchi to her neighbors.2 In 1915, Kang was sent to the local girls’ school and then to elementary  school  in  Changyŏn,  Hwanghae  Province.  Without  funds  to  purchase school supplies or pay her tuition, Kang would often resort to stealing, incidents she portrayed in “Two Hundred Yen for My Manuscript” (Wŏngoryo  ibaek  wŏn,  1935)  and  “Monthly  Fee”  (Wŏlsagŭm,  1933).  In  1921 Kang left for the city of P’yŏngyang to receive a middle school education at Sungŭi Girls’ School, a Christian mission school, with the financial  support of her stepsister’s husband. There she was involved in student literary  circles  and  met  the  well-known  intellectual  and  literary  figure  Yang Chudong, with whom she studied literature and started a romantic relationship. This meeting proved to be pivotal in her literary career. After being  expelled  in  1923  for  her  participation  in  a  student  strike  protesting the strict regulations and Christian nature of the school—aspects that reflected the school’s conservative approach to women’s roles and educa132



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tion—she followed Yang to Seoul, where they lived together for a year before he resumed his studies in Japan. In Seoul, Kang attended Tongdŏk Girls’ School, was involved in literary circles, was exposed to socialism and new currents of thought, and read voraciously. It was also at this time that she began writing. Upon returning to her hometown after her separation from Yang, she started a night school and participated in the local branch of the Kŭnuhoe.3 It is unclear when or why Kang first went to the region in Manchuria then called Kando (C. Jiandao; J. Kantō), known today as the Korean Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture in the southeastern region of Jilin Province, People’s Republic of China.4 After a brief sojourn in Kando, she married an activist, Chang Ha-il, whom she likely met there in the early 1930s. The two resided in Yongjŏng (C. Longjing) village in Kando, where they led relatively ordinary lives. His teaching and her writing, however, suggest their connections with leftist groups and ideas. A freelance writer, head of the Kando branch of the Chosŏn Daily (Chosŏn ilbo), and housewife, Kang wrote and published the majority of her works while living in Kando. In 1939 Kang left the literary scene altogether and returned to Korea to receive medical treatment for a serious illness. Her condition worsened and she died in 1944, before she could witness the liberation of Korea. Until recently, relatively little was known about Kang Kyŏngae. Apart from limited autobiographical episodes in some of her works, she did not write extensively about herself nor leave behind personal letters or memoirs. As she lived in the northern part of Korea and Manchuria, source materials have been hard to come by. Kang’s socialist leanings discouraged research by South Korean scholars working in a rigidly anti-communist environment after WWII, and her early death prevented her from leaving behind a larger body of work. Nevertheless, there are several aspects of her life and writing that attract the interest of scholars today. She stands out as a female writer with leftist sympathies whose less-privileged background informed her realistic portrayals of ordinary Koreans. Distinctive as well was that she wrote about her time in Manchuria. Throughout the 1930s, Kang published short stories, poems, essays, and longer works of fiction in major newspapers and women’s journals such as the Chosŏn Daily, East Asia Daily (Tonga ilbo), New Woman (Sin yŏsŏng), New East Asia (Sin tonga), Three Thousand Ri (Samch’ŏlli ), and New Family (Sin kajŏng). Since the late 1990s, when her works were collected, edited, and published and thus made more accessible, scholars have recognized Kang as an important writer of this period.5 They use her writings as a window into the lives of laborers, peasants, prostitutes, guerilla fighters, and other marginalized members of Korean colonial society.

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Scholarship on Kang Kyŏngae’s writings focuses on the critical realism that characterizes her depictions of the lives of women and the poor and her treatment of class and gender. Although not directly affiliated with the leftist literary group KAPF (Korea Artista Proleta Federacio, 1925–1935) or the Korean Communist Party, Kang had leftist inclinations and participated in the proletarian arts movement.6 Her works exhibit a strong historical and socio-political consciousness, exposing social contradictions through the perspective of struggling socialist intellectuals or by focusing on the underprivileged trapped in tragic life situations beyond their control, whether it be poverty, war, patriarchy, capitalist exploitation, imperialism, or a combination of factors. She alerts her readers to the social plight of common people, often by using shockingly graphic images: maggots crawling out of the cloth wrapping the baby’s head in “Underground Village” (Chiha ch’on, 1936); the suicide of a prostitute in “Sympathy” (Tongjŏng, 1934); the rape of a mother sold to a man by her own husband to support his opium habit in “Opium” (Mayak, 1937). Perhaps her best-known work, the novel The Human Problem (Ingan munje, 1934), displays most clearly Kang’s use of fiction to address social issues that were pertinent to intellectuals and the underprivileged within Korea’s colonial context, issues such as peasant tenancy, exploited labor, and the victimization of women.7 Kang’s later works are more sophisticated and less blatant in their critical realism, whether due to increasing censorship or a growing maturity in her writing.8 It is the interplay among peasants, women, and Kando in Kang’s writings that is compelling. It is such interactions that offer potentially powerful symbols for colonial nationalist projects as well as socialist messages critiquing capitalism, imperialism, gender relations, and human indifference. Scholarship on Kang’s well-known fictional work has recently emerged.9 The pieces chosen for translation here are a few of Kang’s autobiographical essays written between 1930 and 1935 and covering a variety of topics, from the roles of women to life in Manchuria. “The Path Chosŏn Women Must Tread” was published in the “Women’s Column” of the Chosŏn Daily News in 1930 as an editorial piece. It perhaps reveals most directly Kang’s position on women’s issues, which resonates with the platform of the socialist women-dominated Kŭnuhoe. According to Kenneth Wells, the Kŭnuhoe’s original agenda for women’s liberation combined liberal-feminist concerns for marriage by choice and abolition of customs such as arranged marriage at a young age and prostitution, moderate concerns for women’s education and literacy, and socialist concerns for women’s economic independence and rights, all of which were eventually subsumed under the larger banners of socialism and nationalism. While



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Kang’s other works display her interest in the plight of women as a social problem in its own right, her call here for women’s roles in creating a new society suggests the partnership women were ideally to share with men in solving social and economic problems. Male-female relationships are touched on slightly as well in “Two Hundred Yen for My Manuscript.” In this story, Kang recounts a domestic dispute with her husband over how best to spend her paycheck, although the main message again is how women could best live with fairness and righteousness without being blinded by fanciful desires for material possessions. It is perhaps Kang’s discussion of Kando in the final essay translated here, “On Leaving Kando, A Farewell to Kando” (1932), that is most fascinating for the history and rare glimpse it provides of Korean migration to Manchuria. Manchuria, Charles Armstrong has pointed out, has been relegated to the periphery in the Korean historical imagination, characterized as a wilderness of “exile, escape, and experimentation.”10 Manchuria also figures centrally in North Korean historiography and the historical consciousness of early twentieth-century intellectual Sin Ch’aeho (1880– 1936). It has recently been revisited in South Korean historiography in works that discuss Korean subjectivity and exiled groups in the context of liberation and division in the events leading to and in 1945. Moreover, Manchuria is included in the Japanese historiography of Japan’s imperial enterprise.11 Home to various ethnic groups and kingdoms in the distant past (Jurchens, Puyŏ, Parhae, Khitans, etc.), Manchuria shared a border with Korea that remained ambiguous and porous, compromised by the crossings of traders, smugglers, envoys, and peasants throughout the Chosŏn period.12 The homeland of the Qing rulers, Manchuria was contested territory among the international powers of Japan, Russia, and China in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, a combination of international politics, crop failures, and domestic disturbances encouraged Korean migration across the borders into Manchuria. This movement of Korean settlers—displaced peasants, exiled anti-Japanese resistance fighters and nationalists, or settlers encouraged by the Japanese colonial state—increased in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most settled in the northeastern section known then as Kando, and the total Korean population in Manchuria increased steadily from some 202,070 in 1910 to 607,119 in 1930 and then 1.5 million by 1944.13 A multi-ethnic and relatively unpoliced region, replete with ambivalent identities and ethnic discourse, Kando offers enormous possibilities for the historian. Attention to Kando, where the metropole met the colony, highlights fault lines in Japanese colonial policies and rule and suggests a model of “territorial osmosis” as opposed to outright subjugation.14 This

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yields other perspectives, including the possibility that the diasporic identity of Korean subjects complicates conventional characterization of Koreans as victim or their actions as anti-Chinese or anti-Japanese. While Kang does not address these issues head-on in “On Leaving Kando, A Farewell to Kando,” in recounting her experiences and thoughts while traveling by train from Kando to Korea she paints a picture of life in Kando during a time of increasing Japanese mobilization and control. Her social commentary is revealed in her use of sharp contrasts between the landscapes of the two regions, between those she sees outside and inside the train, and between the celebratory air of returning soldiers and the defeated figures of fleeing refugees at the railroad station. In addition to her other contributions, Kang provides us with a complex and remarkable first-hand account of life in Kando in the 1930s.

The Path Chosŏn Women Must Tread* What is the socially beneficial path that we, the women of Chosŏn, must tread as either individual parts or an integrated whole as we head toward a united purpose, all the while remaining aware of the limitations of the present environment? I will write down some of my views in order to pose this question to my Chosŏn sisters who are of the same mind. Of course, within the home, helping men by contributing to the peace and harmony of individual households and raising children into strong and productive members of society is women’s shared and natural responsibility. But to the extent that there are many flaws in our society, there must also be a special mission for Chosŏn women. Because our own well-being and prosperity, as well as those of our beloved husbands and children, depend on the condition of the larger society of which each household is a part, we women cannot but take interest in that society. People tend to think of society as an arena for men’s activities and of women as suited only to preparing food and raising children. However, child-rearing and food preparation are not simply an important issue for the home but can also be socially pertinent. In this sense, then, the domestic and the social together make up one large cohesive body. Without trying to distinguish what constitutes societal problems and what doesn’t, and what differentiates the two [home and society], I want to ask just what *Kang Kyŏngae, “Chosŏn yŏsŏngdŭl ŭi palbŭl kil,” Chosŏn ilbo, November 28–29, 1930. This piece was printed as a reader’s contribution to the newspaper’s “Women’s Column.”



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Chosŏn women’s tasks and mission might be at this juncture. Although the tasks may be countless in this chaotic and wretched society of ours, I will write down briefly what I consider to be the most urgent of them. Reading. This is a task of singular urgency for Chosŏn women. We must not shirk the responsibility of reading at least the newspaper every day. Beyond that, we need to read magazines and books. Where else will we find the strength to support our husbands and forge ahead,and the courage to run, leading our children by the hand? If we do not read, our thinking will be superficial. We will then be unable to love our husbands in a genuine way and our husbands, in turn, will think of us as mere playthings and feel contempt for us. Without my having to dwell on it here, readers should already be fully aware of how necessary it is to read whenever there is time. Moreover, we must realize that as Chosŏn women our particular mission goes beyond knowledge for our own sake. Our mission is none other than to spread hangŭl. If we were to ask what percentage of Chosŏn women know hangŭl, I doubt that there would be five out of a hundred. It would not be too much to say, then, that it is the mission of those women who know hangŭl to open up their homes to local women and teach them during long winter nights, considering it their duty to teach twenty women each. Furthermore, in cities and villages alike, we are daily bringing economic ruin upon ourselves. I believe in the great necessity of encouraging local production. As much as possible, we should satisfy ourselves with what we produce. With plunging grain prices, one tu of rice now costs less than sixty to seventy sen.15 Precisely at a time like this our task is to persuade our husbands to curtail alcohol and cigarette consumption and as Chosŏn women to discontinue [our own use of] facial cream, facial powder, perfumed hair oil, and so on. It has been said that Gandhi’s wife, as a first step in the anti-British movement, took the spool and taught Indian women how to use looms. Although some may argue that a depression is a prelude to economic revival, I think this is true only up to a point. Beyond that point, however, I fear that our society will fall into ruin and ultimately be annihilated, and for this reason I would like us to follow in the steps of Gandhi’s wife. My sisters, to be a woman is not to abandon oneself to despair! Indeed, the greatness of women’s strength is gradually becoming a widely acknowledged fact. I have confidence that Chosŏn men, though they may lie dormant now, will rush forth like lions once we awaken them with our shouts. I have earlier discussed the path we must tread in this process, but, in conclusion, we must not forget that the power to reform the home resides entirely with women. By extending the effective use of our time

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through reforming our lifestyles in the home, let us forge ahead on this path together. This will bring about social reform, and it is here that we may be able to catch a glimpse of light in our lives.

Two Hundred Yen for My Manuscript* My Dear Sister K.,16 I welcomed your last letter and read it with much joy. How glad I am to hear that you have recovered a bit of your strength! In the end, is there anything more important than one’s health? K., so the impending graduation brings you more anguish than joy, more despair than hope? Given your situation, I can certainly understand why you feel this way. But amidst your anguish and despair, you must come to a realization. And from it, you must discover a new path ablaze with joy and hope. K., you asked for my views on love and marriage, but I still lack the knowledge to express these simply in writing. All I can do is write down in awkward, unadorned words every aspect of my life these days and all the feelings that arise from this life, trusting in your wisdom to disregard what is to be disregarded. K., as you well know, I’ve recently received two hundred yen for serializing a long work of fiction in D. newspaper.17 This is the most money I have ever had in my life. I suppose this is the reason why my head suddenly became invigorated and filled with all sorts of fancies. K., you may already have guessed this, but I grew up in a difficult family environment and didn’t have much comfort even after becoming an adult. What little education I have, I owe to my brother-in-law. As a child, I never wore colorful holiday clothes and ate nothing but millet.18 Even when I went to school, I never had the supplies I needed. At the start of each school term, I would cry because I could not buy my own books and would end up using someone else’s old books. I don’t know how many times I sat there with my little heart aching because I had no paper and no brush. K., I still remember clearly an episode from my first year of school. I was to take my term exams the next day but had no paper or brush. Not knowing what else to do, I stole them from my classmate. What a scolding I got from the teacher! The other children teased me mercilessly with their cries of “Hey, thief! Thief!” Worse yet, the teacher glared at me and punished me while other students played outside during recess. Like a *Kang Kyŏngae, “Wŏngoryo ibaek wŏn,” Sin kajŏng (February 1935).



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dummy, I had to stand by the window with my arms raised.19 On the playground my classmates were clapping their hands, delighted with the snowman they had made, while I laughed and cried, amused by the comical lips and eyes of the snowman even in the misery of my punishment. K., when I was young I was naïve enough to think of stealing someone else’s things. By middle school, though, I was unable to get up the nerve [to steal] no matter how destitute I was. The money for tuition that came from my brother-in-law barely covered food and monthly fees. Sometimes it did not even cover the monthly fees, so many a time I was unable to hold up my head and look directly at my teacher, and, even when I did not understand the schoolwork, I could not ask [for help] with an easy heart. So I naturally lost confidence and became a kind of idiot, unable to make even one close friend. Because I was so lonely, I came to rely on God all the more, and every night I would go into the dormitory auditorium and sob my prayers. But the anguish did not disappear; it only grew greater each day, each month. My peers had parasols and watches, wore new skirts and chŏgori,20 knit wool scarves and sweaters. Thinking of it now it all seems funny, but at the time I was so envious I could have cried. When I saw classmates knitting scarves from plush yarns, I would caress the yarn in spite of myself until the tears came. The experience of touching wool yarn, so uniquely associated with the days of girls’ schools! Each time my husband asks me “Why don’t you know how to knit?” the thrilling sensation of feeling a classmate’s yarn comes back to me as I reminisce about my school days. K., one summer—the day before the start of the break—everyone was busy preparing to go back home. At that time synthetic silk was not yet available. Everyone wore a skirt and blouse of lightly starched ramie as delicate as the wings of a dragonfly and bought white or black parasols. I didn’t know what to do; I wanted a parasol so badly I could have died. Nowadays even average housewives have parasols, but at that time I thought only women students carried them, and I came to believe that a parasol was a silent indicator of one’s status as a student. Being an immature girl, I felt that I didn’t want to go home at all if I didn’t have a parasol. So I kept on crying. One of my roommates—I don’t know whether she sensed this or wanted to tease me—got a worn parasol from somewhere and gave it to me. I was so happy, but how could I rush to take it? So, I sat there, feigning a lack of interest, and with a laugh she left the room. I immediately grabbed the parasol and tried to open it, but not even one spoke was intact. At that moment, even though inexpressible anger and sorrow surged up to my throat, I could not throw away that parasol. K., I think I’ve digressed too much. You should be able to guess the

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kind of life I’ve led in the past from this account . . . In an attempt to speak of my present, I have revealed a past that I would rather not dwell on. Anyway, K., before the payment for the manuscript arrived, the thought “What should I do with that money?” kept me up late into the night. Reflecting on it now, I’m rather embarrassed, but the thoughts that coursed through my head then were these: “First, we’ll need winter things, a fur coat, scarf, shoes. Then maybe a gold filler to close the gap between my front teeth, a gold band not too wide, or a watch . . . No, I don’t know what my husband would say. But, as this is money I earned, what can he say? If I don’t take this chance, I will never be able to have a gold watch. I’ll just close my eyes tight and buy it without thinking. And maybe I’ll get a new suit for my husband. His suit is so ratty.” Then, one day, I clasped the manuscript fee in my hand. K., my husband and I were so happy! That night, while looking at the unusually bright lantern, I asked my husband, “What should we do with this money?” I wanted to hear what he thought. My husband silently sat down and mumbled as though he were talking to himself. “Well, folks like us are better off with no money . . . But, since we have the money now, we should use it, right? The most urgent thing is to get our comrade Ŭngho into a hospital for treatment . . .” The surprise made me dizzy and speechless. I thought that my husband’s face as he looked at me was like a dog’s and his eyes like a cow’s. “And after that comes Hongsik’s wife. We should care for them through the winter, no?” I didn’t want to hear any more. So, I turned my head and stared blankly at the wall. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel sorry for my husband’s comrade Ŭngho or our friend Hongsik’s wife. Before the money arrived, I had wanted to do everything we could to help them. But actually holding the two hundred yen in my hand, such thoughts disappeared without a trace. I couldn’t help feeling this way. I hadn’t replied, and my husband looked at me for a good while before asking, in a slightly raised voice, “OK, what would you like to do with the money?” At this question, my tears gushed forth even though I bit my tongue. How exasperating my stolid, stony husband seemed to me at that moment. Even when we got married, he never gave me a wedding ring or bought me a pair of shoes as other men do. He didn’t have any money then, so I didn’t make an issue of it. But now that there’s money—money that I earned, no less—shouldn’t he be telling me to go ahead and spend it on things I have wanted my whole life, like a ring or shoes? But the thought didn’t even seem to have occurred to that dunce of a man. It was this more than anything that I resented. Just consider the shoes I’m wearing now, which were given to me a few years ago by the wife of my husband’s



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friend Kim Kyŏngho when I went to Seoul because of an ear infection. He kept on telling me to try on his wife’s shoes. How shabby my shoes must have seemed for him to take that kind of pity on me. I cannot express the unhappiness I felt at that time. Why would I, whose feelings are just like the next woman’s, want to wear shoes someone else had been wearing? But when I looked down at my shoes, I couldn’t bring myself to refuse. I turned her shoes over, and there wasn’t a single hole. A part of me wanted to take the shoes, but, since I didn’t know what my husband would say, I wrote him a letter. A few days later his letter of consent arrived. That’s how I came to wear those shoes. Nonetheless, every time I looked at them the feeling of displeasure would return. Tonight, that feeling surged up to my throat and came out in loud wails; I cried like a child. My husband sprang to his feet and slapped my cheek so hard I could hear its smack. It only added fuel to the fire of my rage. “Why do you hit me? Why are you hitting me?!” I lunged at him. My husband’s eyes flashed like a tiger’s; he rushed toward me and hit my head, shattering the lantern in the process. The whole room was filled with the smell of kerosene. “Go ahead, kill me!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. This is it, I thought. I can’t live with this man. “The likes of you should die a hundred deaths,” my husband said, panting in anger. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re thinking? Hmph. Now that you have some money in your hands, you don’t give your husband any respect. Go on, you shameless bitch! Take your money and go back to your family tomorrow. I can’t live with a disgraceful bitch like you. You’re sly like a fox . . . So you want to become the sort of slut they call a modern girl21 nowadays. I guess you have to be one to be a first-class writer. Well, I’m not qualified to be the husband of a first-class writer. You want to fry your hair,22 coat your face with flour, wear a fur coat, a gold watch and diamond ring and still be a writer who proclaims the cause of the proletariat. Be my guest!” He grabbed my hand and dragged me. I was chased out of the house. K., words can’t describe how cold the wind is in this northern land. Although I have been here for four years, I have never experienced such fierce wind as I did that night. It seemed as though the whole world was a giant slab of ice. The clear moon high up in the sky froze your eyelids at a mere look, and the fierce wind scattered powdered snow. The snowflakes cut through my skin like knives. I folded my arms and remained standing in the snow. At that moment, it seemed that my head was about to explode with so many thoughts. “What should I do?” I muttered to myself, trying to figure out what decisive attitude to take, and grabbed onto

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a strand of thought among the many that were spinning in my head. The first that rushed out was the thought that I could no longer live with that man. Even for all the gold in the world, I could not live with him. Then what should I do? Should I return to my hometown? Hometown . . . “Did that girl leave her man again? I knew it. How could any man stand a slut like her for more than a few days?” I saw the scornful faces of the people in my hometown and my mother’s anguished look! I recoiled from the image. Then can I go to Seoul and work for a newspaper or a magazine? But I realized I would be seen as being no different from other female journalists who are lately perceived as inciting love scandals. . . . Where to go then, what to do? How about going to Tokyo to study? But how would I pay the tuition? In my position, it seemed that what I would be pursuing would be not just any course of study but a study in corruption. When I came to this conclusion, I felt as though the world had deserted me and that I had no one who would welcome me anywhere. It was as though no one would hold my hand except for that man sitting inside the house panting like a tiger. K., what would you call this? Could it be love? Hot tears spilled forth again. I thought of what that tiger man had said as he snarled at me. Hongsik’s wife, the image of their children’s shabby rags, and the frightfully emaciated face of Ŭngho came to mind. The sight of Hongsik’s wife and children trembling after Hongsik’s imprisonment! Ŭngho suffering from a heart disease he had contracted in prison! The two hundred yen in my hand. . . . can save them. I’m still healthy. I’m not in rags. Isn’t it sheer vanity to want more? It became clear that I had been dreaming a dangerous dream up to now. K., what use is a gold watch, gold ring, or wool coat in my position? If I could save the life of a friend with the money, how right it is that I should do so. They are my husband’s friends. No, aren’t they my friends too? I ran to the door at once. “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” As soon as I said this, the door opened. I ran in and grasped my husband. “I was wrong. I won’t do it again.” My voice broke, and a choked cry came out. But K., you must know that this cry was entirely different from the earlier cry. My husband sighed and stroked my hair. “It’s not that I don’t understand how you feel. I know you have only one skirt, one blouse . . . But you’re not naked. You have clothes. What worries do you have? But look at our comrade Ŭngho or Hongsik’s wife. See, with this money in our hands, would it be right to leave our friends alone to die of illness or starvation? . . . I guess that’s why it’s hard to remain constant under changing circumstances. I confess I don’t feel the same as I did when we didn’t have that money.”



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My husband clucked his tongue and became silent. I knew that these words came after he too had given our argument some thought and while I was standing outside. I also knew that his outburst was not so much directed at me as at himself, a means to control all the unpleasant thoughts that filled his head. Something flashed through me and I felt emboldened. “Let’s buy ourselves something cheap to wear and a mal of rice and a bushel of firewood.23 We’ll give the rest to them! After all, we can always make more money later, right?” My husband enfolded me in his arms and cried, “I knew you would come around!” K., I must be tiring you with such a drawn-out story. I know that you have many fantasies about the future as graduation grows near. Of course, one cannot but have such moments, and I’m not blaming you for indulging in these fancies. But, I hope you’ll step beyond such idle thoughts and heed reality. What is happening to those suffering in the southern provinces now? Aren’t tens of thousands of people fleeing to desolate Manchuria, leaving their beloved hometowns behind? But who gives them clothing and food when they arrive in Manchuria? They come nonetheless, hoping against hope that their lives will be better here. But upon arriving, many wander the wide plains having lost their wives and children to restaurant work or to rich men who have taken them as their concubines. This is not the fate of migrants from the southern provinces only. Just recently, didn’t a group of people come to Wŏnsan from as far away as Ullŭng Island, carrying their belongings on their backs and heads? In any event, aren’t you aware of the fact that the indigent masses of Chosŏn, indeed the proletariat all over the world, wander on the brink of starvation? K., right now in Kando the whole of the masses tremble with fear at the sound of the guns and swords of the t’obŏltan.24 On account of this, peasants can neither cultivate crops in the fields nor cut down trees in the mountains. Trying to survive, they crowd into areas of relative safety like Yongjŏng or Kukcha. But how will they feed themselves? Here, human life is cheaper than a dog’s. K., do you ever despair that you can’t have a more advanced education or a sweet home of your own? Close your eyes and think carefully about how valueless such pessimism is. An opportunity may present itself and you may be able to realize your ideals, but such a realization is bound to be temporary and you will surely return to the position of the masses in the end. What will you do then? Kill yourself? K., your book learning is quite excellent as it is. But now is the time for you to gain genuine knowledge through practice and thereby strive to improve your value in society. However, if you become absorbed only in

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improving your exchange value ignoring your social value, then you’ve failed, you’ve been defeated. This is not to treat you as a commodity or as goods but to let you know that there are two directions that the human character we call a person can choose.

On Leaving Kando, a Farewell to Kando* The morning of June 3, 1932 A single plane, its propeller whirring, took off into a sky so clear that it seemed as if it had just been washed, and the lingering train bid the village of Yongjŏng [C. Longjing] farewell with one long whistle. As soon as I wove my way through the numerous passengers and grabbed my seat, I leaned against the window and looked back at Yongjŏng shimmering in the distance. What suddenly came to mind at that moment was what had happened last year when I first set foot here. At that time the National Party flags25 fluttered marvelously above the radiant greenery that lined the streets of Yongjŏng, and the minor-key melody of the kkangkkangi26 filled the spaces between red-and-white brick ­houses underneath the beautiful violet rays spreading across the spring sky. But the sight of beggars wandering the streets! Neither the spring day nor the sound of the kkangkkangi seemed to make an impression on them as they followed the strangers scattered across the platform, stretching out their hands, their wretched hands! As I thought of those past days, it was as though I could see in front of me the child beggar who had followed me pitifully at the station. When I opened my eyes again, I saw through a grove of poplar trees an airplane growing smaller above the streets of Yongjŏng and the flags of Manchukuo27 fluttering in the late spring wind. As though in a dream, or as if looking at a masterpiece of a painting, I saw through the train window rice paddies and fields and far-off green hills still asleep amidst the misty fog. The fragrance of flowers mixed with the strong scent of grass in the still-fresh morning air brushed warmly past my nose. The flowers of hulled millet in the paddies bloomed red and yellow, and millet shoots sprouted in rows to one side, opening their *Kang Kyŏngae, “Kando rŭl tŭngjimyŏnsŏ, Kando ya chal ikkŏra,” Tonggwang (August and October 1932). Treated here as a single work, this piece was originally published in two parts, each with a distinct title that is reflected in the title selected for the translation: “On Leaving Kando” (Kando rŭl tŭngjimyŏnsŏ), Tonggwang (Light of the East) 36 (August 1932): 84–89; and “A Farewell to Kando” (Kando ya chal ikkŏra), Tonggwang 38 (October 1932): 63–65.



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leaves wide toward the burning sky to receive sunlight. So innocently and sweetly, like a baby seeking the milk-giving breast of the mother! . . . From somewhere I heard the chirping of a mountain bird. Amidst the clanging of train wheels, the bird’s cry faded in and out of hearing. “Where are you going?” Startled at the sound, I turned and saw a female student with a tray hairstyle.28 I stared at her for a moment. “I’m going to Seoul. Where are you going?” I replied, thinking that we may become travel companions to Kyŏngsŏng [ J. Keijō]. “I’m going to Hoeryŏng.”29 White teeth flashed between her lips as she smiled. “Is that so? Then we should travel together.” Just then, a young boy dozing off across from me fell onto the lap of the Japanese passenger next to him. “Ara!”30 The female student sitting beside me sprang to her feet and sat the child up, chattering all the while in fluent Japanese. The Japanese passenger, who had dodged the dozing child, was drawn into conversation with the girl student and gently patted the boy. Lending half an ear to their conversation, I looked out the window again. I couldn’t find any sprouts in the field approaching us, and, as I continued to look around, these words came back to me, ringing achingly in my ear: “In the countryside, many fields lie fallow, I hear, because there’s no one to till them. I guess we’ll starve to death this year.” I looked back at the disappearing fields with a pained heart. They were a tangle of weeds. At that moment, I felt my heart stop as though I had swallowed a rock. When farmers see those fields, what must they feel? How much regret? How much sorrow? It is only the farmer who knows the taste of dirt, the pleasure of watching millet sprout and grow daily. There must be something I can’t even imagine that courses through the farmer when he faces his field. As I mused like this, a song came to mind. Though it is spring now Spring, when all of nature is restored— Spring is unknown in this land, unknown. With fog and rain, grass at the foot of yonder mountain grew green One sprout grows an inch in this rain Rainwater fills the paddies to the levees, and yet— Ah, the fields unplowed The paddies untilled Not a fistful of earth have I clutched in my hand.

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Feeling the urge to write down this song, I rummaged through my basket but found neither paper nor brush. I suppressed the urge and glanced at the female student sitting next to me. She was reading a copy of Housewife’s Companion.31 The Japanese passenger kept his gaze steady on the female student and grinned ear to ear. Finally, he asked, “Where in Hoeryŏng are you?” Lightly lifting her head, she answered, “I’m at the Provincial Hospital.” At this reply, I realized that she was a nurse, and when I looked at her again it dawned on me that a medicinal odor emanated from her body. The young student across from me, who had been dozing just a moment before, was now sitting next to the female student and glancing quietly at the magazine. “Would you believe it? This child is going to Sangsambong alone.”32 The female student looked at me, pointing at the child. Surprised, I scrutinized him. He was a pleasant-looking lad with a round face and large eyes. “How old are you?” Bowing his head, he replied, “I’m seven.” “Really? You’re quite brave. Where are you going all by yourself?” “I’m going to Sambong.” “Do you have parents?” The child hesitated and mumbled inaudibly. “Speak clearly, child,” the girl said gently as she looked at the child. But the child would not answer. When I laughed absent-mindedly and sat back down, [the girl exclaimed,] “He’s crying!” The girl lifted the child’s head and looked into his face. When I glanced in his direction, I saw large tears streaming from those black eyes. I realized then that he was probably an orphan and I regretted asking my earlier thoughtless question about his parents. Wondering how much my question must have hurt the child’s feelings if he was in fact without parents, [I said,] “Come here, take a look at this.” Taking the Housewife’s Companion from the girl and placing it on my lap, I showed him the picture on the cover. The child wiped his tears and stole a few glances at the picture. I felt several sets of eyes focused on him. In no time the train arrived at Anch’am on the Tuman River.33 Before I had time to exchange many words with the child the train was pulling out of the station, my bags having been inspected one by one by a Chinese patrol officer. The girl shook me lightly by the shoulder and exclaimed, “That’s the Tuman River. Look at all the fish!” As soon as she spoke, I turned my head and looked down. I saw gold and silver fish weaving their way through the water, which due to the



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willow branches drooping along the riverbank appeared to have a green cast emanating from within. One, two, three, four—I counted the fish to myself before forgetting the number and starting all over again. “There’s a fish—and another!” The child pointed with his little hand. “Can you see them too? Where are they? Show me,” I whispered, grasping his hand tightly and looking at him. The child lowered his head and remained silent, perhaps embarrassed by my response to his unwitting outburst. In that moment, I knew for certain that that child was a poor orphan who had grown up without a father or mother. Chosŏn land was visible beyond the river! Even the mountain scenery was very different from the kind found on this side of the river. The rise and fall of the mountain peaks exuded charm at every turn, and the hills were covered up to their peaks with the dense green of gleaming oak and bush clover trees like fog on a rainy day. As soon as the train reached Sangsambong Station, the child, who was now sitting next to me, jumped up. I grabbed my basket and followed him. “We’re finally here . . . Hey, what’s your name?” I felt that it would be a shame to say goodbye to my traveling companion without at least learning his name. Quietly stepping down from the train, he answered, “It’s Sunbong.” “All right, Sunbong. Take care.” When I entered the Customs Inspection Office and looked around, Sunbong had gone through the gate. He looked back one last time and melted into the crowd. I stared a while at the spot from which he had disappeared, somehow feeling as though I had lost something. Thirty minutes later, we left Sangsambong Station. The nurse and I talked about Sunbong, and I pictured again his black eyes. A police officer searched my belongings and body, asked me a few questions, and then proceeded to the nurse. She met him with her usual affability and fluent Japanese. The train wound along its way with the Tuman River on its right. You river that flows through the drooping willow branches, the river that I never tire of seeing—how many times did you reflect the faces of people with purpose in their hearts and carry the bodies of the righteous in your bosom? Visible through the trees, I saw that the mud huts of the poor were far more numerous than last year. But amidst them I could still see children playing their innocent little games. Turning my head to the other side, I saw construction workers on the Kirim-Hoeryŏng line34 clinging skillfully to rock walls, chipping away. I became dizzy looking down at them and closed my eyes for a while. The more I looked, the more faint I felt. The workers loaded rocks onto their backs and walked quite a dis-

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tance before setting them down. Other workers were waiting there to pile up the rocks, one on top of the other. I glanced anew around the inside of the train, but not a single person seemed to be looking at the scene. They were men in suits, students, or well-bred ladies. I, too, for that matter, had never [in my life] touched a single rock. What do students learn? How do the so-called gentlemen of the intellectual class live? And what about me? What have I learned? How have I fed and clothed myself? How have I lived until now? Haven’t I fed, clothed, and maintained myself by mercilessly squeezing the sweat and blood out of these workers? Isn’t what we are learning, nay, what we have already learned—the technique of exploiting their labor even more? Never having touched a rock or clutched a fistful of earth, knowing neither the firmness of rocks nor the suppleness of soil, I—no, not only me, but also the other people on this train—can sit comfortably in this luxurious train and marvel idly at the beauty of nature. Rather than continue on in this way, I should simply break my pen in two. What is it that I have written? All that I have learned has not led me to write anything even remotely different. Nothing I write escapes this complacency. My dear students, do you not wish to feel the heat of the sun on your soft white skin, the solidity of rocks with your tender hands? Shouldn’t these be the first things we learn? And through this lesson, do you not wish to become strong workers, sound fighters? I long for that rockroughened hand. I yearn for those feet. I long for those blackened cheeks, tempered like steel by the sun! How trustworthy is that hand! While I was immersed in these thoughts, the train arrived at Hoeryŏng Station. I followed the girl with whom I had been traveling down onto the station platform, which was bustling with people meeting or sending off passengers. I looked around and saw a steady stream of soldiers emerging from the freight car in the front. Later I learned that they were a regiment returning from the Hunch’un region. Then, from the rear passenger cars on my side, hundreds of Chinese descended, with men carrying loads on their backs and women carrying loads on their heads. They were Kando refugees who were crossing through Chosŏn on the way to China’s mainland. I stared blankly at them for a while, feeling my heart constrict with a frustration that I could not put into words. In the confusion of the moment, I was pushed out into the street. The soldiers ordered themselves into a procession and marched in front of the crowd to the clarion call of a trumpet. The resounding cries of mansei!35 The waving Japanese flags clutched in the kosari36-like hands of young, innocent students! Those black eyes!



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The bayonets glittering in the sunlight seemed to exude the stench of blood and above them hovered countless ghosts of soldiers slain in the prime of their youth for their alleged affiliations with the XX party. I didn’t have the courage to walk on any further. My traveling companion grabbed my hand and bid me farewell. “Good-bye.” Barely able to mutter a word, I watched the girl disappear and regretted that I had not learned her name. Countless refugees threw vacant, furtive glances at the marching solders, crouching as though the mere sight made them afraid. Among the milling crowd, I saw people who must have left their beloved homes with the hope of protecting their lives, carrying tattered bundles, not knowing which direction to take . . . There were probably many Koreans among them. At six in the afternoon the train left Hoeryŏng Station. I felt more at ease than on the light gauge rail, and I leaned against the window and looked out. Just then some officers came by; I closed my eyes, pretending to be asleep to avoid being pestered by them and then in fact fell asleep. Now and then when I opened my eyes from sleep I could see the evening sun hanging red from mountain peaks high and low. Morning, the second day, still dawn From the dark blue fog emerged faint shapes of stubby pine trees, and white foam erupted from below, the ocean waters of the East Sea. And where the sky barely touched the horizon a cluster of flickering stars descended as if in a dream. Already farmers were standing at the head of the fields and on paddy dikes, hoes in hand. The green of newly planted rice seedlings stretched as far as the eye could see. From time to time, shabby straw thatch-roofed houses nestled amid the woods, white laundry draped over straw fences, and cows lei­surely lying by the green riverbanks would flit past. I, who had lived for a time among the bare red hills of the monotonous Kando landscape, felt as though I had been transported into a veritable fairyland. And yet, what does the blackened smoke spewing from the large factories scattered here and there bode for the future? The encroachment of big capitalists, the panorama of their furious ventures can be vividly seen. The train presented all this to me and then went around a turn in the mountains, passed through a tunnel, and raced breathlessly toward Kyŏngsŏng. But my heart flew in the opposite direction, toward Kando. Ah, my life. The impoverished multitude displaced by the war and wandering as if lost! The spectacle of refugees fleeing to the city in the hope of surviving—refugees consisting exclusively of women, children, and the elderly, not knowing where their men were or whether they were

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dead or alive—flashed again across my mind. Those who had lost their families before their very eyes but had no one to speak to about their plight, paralyzed by this desperate reality, even their tears have fled far from them. Only death and starvation lie waiting in their path. But Kando, be strong! Fight on with determination! May your endless scorn befall those who desert you as I have! I looked out over the steep hills of Sambang as the train rushed past Wŏnsan.

Notes 1. “Tot’ori sosŏlchangi,” literally “fiction acorn.” 2. Yi Sanggyŏng, Kang Kyŏngae: Munhakesŏ ŭi sŏng kwa kyegŭp (Kang Kyŏngae: Gender and Class in Literature) (Seoul: Konkuk University Press, 1997), 18. Tale of Ch’unhyang is based on the p’ansori (a Korean traditional narrative and music genre) Ch’unhyangga, which features the love story between the daughter of a kisaeng (officially sanctioned female entertainer) and son of the local magistrate and aspiring civil servant of the late Chosŏn. Korean artists also adapted this tale for the screen and stage during the colonial period. Samgukchi here most likely refers to the popular Chinese fiction Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was widely read by late-Chosŏn literati and served as inspiration for other artistic forms such as the p’ansori Song of the Red Cliff. See Peter Lee, ed., A History of Korean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 284. 3. The Kŭnuhoe (1927–1931) was the sister organization to the Singanhoe, a nationwide coalition that attempted to build a united front between leftist and cultural nationalist movements. According to Kenneth Wells, the leftist understanding of women’s issues and their platform for reforms initially dominated the Kŭnuhoe’s articulation of a women’s reform platform. Kenneth M. Wells, “The Price of Legitimacy: Women and the Kŭnuhoe Movement, 1927–1931,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 191–220. 4. In this introduction, I use the Korean terms for geographical place names. 5. Kang Kyŏngae chŏnjip (Complete Works of Kang Kyŏngae), ed. Yi Sanggyŏng (Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 1999). 6. Sunyoung Park notes that, based on Brian Myers’ research, variants of the Esperanto for KAPF include “Korea Artista Proleta Federacio” and “Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio.” See Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism and Its Contemporary Manifestation,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 188. 7. Ingan munje has recently been translated into English. Kang Kyŏngae, From Wonso Pond: A Korean Novel, trans. Samuel Perry (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2009).



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8. Kyeong-hee Choi, for instance, argues that Kang’s use of the trope of disability and bodily anomalies in “Underground Village” allows her to critique Japanese colonial rule despite censorship by inscribing the Korean nation-state on the figure of disability. Kyeong-hee Choi, “Impaired Body as Colonial Trope: Kang Kyŏng’ae’s ‘Underground Village,’ ” Public Culture 13, no. 3 (2001): 431–458. 9. These include the aforementioned scholarship by Kyeong-hee Choi, Sunyoung Park, and Samuel Perry. Park’s larger body of work encompasses Korean proletarian and realist literature during the colonial period, and she reads a genuine feminist perspective in Kang Kyŏngae’s fiction, as does Ruth Barraclough. See Barraclough, “Tales of Seduction: Factory Girls in Korean Proletarian Literature,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no. 2 (2006): 345–371; Sunyoung Park, “Everyday Life as Critique in Late Colonial Korea: Kim Nanch’ŏn’s Literary Experiments, 1934–43,” Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 3 (August 2009): 861–893. 10. Charles Armstrong, “Centering the Periphery: Manchurian Exile(s) and the North Korean State,” Korean Studies 19 (1995): 1–16. 11. Other scholarship that examines the place of Manchuria within the Japanese metropole, within its empire at large, and in Korean history and memory includes Barbara J. Brooks, “Peopling the Japanese Empire: The Koreans in Manchuria and the Rhetoric of Inclusion,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930, ed. Sharon A. Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 25–44; Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires, 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Kim Ch’unsŏn, “1880–1890 nyŏndae ch’ŏngjo ŭi ‘imin silbyŏn’ chŏngch’aek kwa hanin ijumin silt’ae yŏngu” (The Policy of ‘Populating the Border Regions’ in the 1880s and 1890s and the Situation of Korean Migrants), Hanguk kŭnhyŏndaesa yŏngu 8 (1998), 5–36. 12.  The PRC’s “Northeast Project,” a research initiative launched in 2002 that probes the culture, geography, history, and archeology of northeast Asia, particularly the early kingdoms of Koguryŏ and Parhae, has spurred Korean nationalist sentiments and research on both sides of the DMZ. While these activities focus primarily on a much earlier time period than the twentieth century, a resurgence of academic interest in Manchuria is also encouraging the broadening of the scope of Korean historical scholarship beyond the Korean peninsula. See Yongsan Ahn, “Competing Nationalisms: The Mobilisation of History and Archeology in the Korea-China Wars over Koguryo/Gaogouli,” Japan Focus (February 2006), http:// www.japanfocus.org/-Yonson-Ahn/1837; Kyeong-chul Park, “History of Koguryo and China’s NE Asian Project,” International Journal of Korean History 6 (December 2004): 1–28; and Dong-Jin Jang, Kyung-Ho Song, and Min-Hyuk Hwang, “China’s Northeast Project and Contemporary Korean Nationalism,” Korea Journal 49, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 120–153. 13. Cited in Park, Two Dreams in One Bed, 44.

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14. See Park, Two Dreams in One Bed. 15. Tu is a unit of measurement for rice and grains and is often used interchangeably with mal. Sen is a monetary unit likened to a penny, with one hundred sen amounting to one yen. Economic policies implemented by the Japanese rulers initially oriented Korea’s agricultural production for export to meet the needs of the metropole, thereby tying it more closely to the world’s economy. The global economic depression of the 1930s thus dealt a heavy blow to Korean farmers with the accompanying fluctuation in rice prices. For discussion of rural deterioration in colonial Korea, see Gi-Wook Shin and Do-Hyun Han, “Colonial Corporatism: The Rural Revitalization Campaign, 1932–1940,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 70–96. 16. Tongsaeng is a term used to address younger sisters and brothers, whether related by blood or friendship. K. is used instead of a name, suggesting that K. is a real person whose identity Kang wants to protect. The similarity of the content of this essay to aspects of Kang’s biography suggests that the piece is strongly autobiographical, even though the subheading to the title lists it as “fiction” (sosŏl ). 17. Kang is most likely referring to the Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily), in which she published her representative work, Ingan munje (The Human Problem), in the latter part of 1934. 18.  Because it was more affordable and available, millet was often eaten as an alternative or supplement to rice, which was considered a staple. 19. The raising of arms was, and still is, a common form of punishment in schools. Sitting by the window was perhaps so she could see her classmates playing while she was being punished. 20. The Korean-style V-neck, long-sleeved shirt that clasps at the center, usually with long ties that stream down. 21. Non-Korean words that appeared in the original text as such have been italicized throughout. 22. That is, get a permanent wave. 23. Mal is a unit of measurement used for rice; 1 mal = 4.765 U.S. gallons. 24.  Typically, a punitive force that manages a conquered group. Here, Kang is probably referring to police or warlord forces that in actuality harass the populace. 25. The flag of the Guomindang, which later became the Taiwanese national flag. 26. Haegŭm, a stringed instrument. 27.  Kang uses the term osaekki, which literally means “five-barred or -colored (blue, red, black, white, and yellow) flag.” This is most likely a reference to the flag of the Manchu state (1932–1945). 28. A foreign hairstyle for women in which the hair is swept back loosely (resembling a tray) without the customary part and tied into a bun at the nape of the neck. 29. Hoeryŏng is a city in North Hamgyŏng Province. 30. A note of surprise or startlement in Japanese.



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31. Housewife’s Companion (Shufu no tomo) is considered by scholars today as one of the so-called Big Four Japanese women’s magazines. See Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 80. It was also popular among educated women in colonial Korea. 32. Sangsambong is a city in North Hamgyŏng Province about fifty kilometers from Yongjŏng. 33. Kang uses the names for the river, “Tuman” and “Tomun,” interchangeably. I use “Tuman” to be consistent. 34. The railway line between Kirim (C. Jilin, J. Kilin) and Hoeryŏng. 35. Mansei literally means “10,000 years” and refers to celebratory cries such as “hurrah” (usually with both arms raised) or “long live,” depending on context. 36. Kosari are bracken fiddleheads (young tightly curled fronds), a type of edible wildlife fern, which is a common ingredient in the Korean diet. Here, it highlights the delicate or dainty nature of the hands of the children.

CHAPTER 8

Kim Kirim Introduction by Mickey Hong and Walter K. Lew Translation by Walter K. Lew

Introduction Poet,  critic,  and  literary  theorist  Kim  Kirim  (1908–?;  given  name  Kim  Inson; pen names G. W., P’yŏnsŏkch’on) played a major role in the directions taken by modern Korean poetry from the 1930s onward. These  included developments away from what Kim saw as the previous decade’s vague sentimentalism and self-absorption and toward new constructivist and other avant-garde techniques, modernism’s materialist belief in the objective structure of language, and dedication to the integration of feeling and progressive cultural critique. His poems were first collected in Weather Chart  (Kisangdo,  1936)  and  Customs of the Sun (T’aeyang ŭi p’ungsok,  1939).  His  equally  influential  theoretical  works  first appeared in periodicals beginning in 1930 but were not compiled in  book  form  until  the  turbulent  period  between  liberation  from  Japanese rule in 1945 and the outbreak of the Korean War five years later.  Among these, the most important titles were Poetics (Siron, 1947) and The Understanding of Poetry (Si ŭi ihae, 1949). The aphoristic piece included  here, “Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot’: Fragmentary Notions Regarding ‘Poésie’ ” (1931),  predates  his  more  systematic  treatises  and  is  distinguished  by  the often mischievously leaping associative style by which Kim plays with ideas of language, reading, and cognition; chides particular literary traditions for their foibles; and pithily characterizes what societal functions poetry has performed at various points in history. It thus offers us striking glimpses of a wide variety of Kim’s literary views; some of the  thirty-three sections were, in fact, incorporated into later essays with little or no revision. In our context, it serves to reveal aesthetic and ideological tensions and points of both transition and accommodation often 154



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overlooked in subsequent conceptualizations of Korean literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Born in Haksŏng, North Hamgyŏng Province, to an affluent landowning family,1 Kim entered Posŏng Higher Normal School in Seoul, where his fellow students included such future literary figures as Im Hwa (1908–1953).2 After withdrawing from Posŏng, Kim went to Japan and attended Rikkyō Middle School and Nihon University, where he graduated in 1930 from the Department of Literature and Arts. Nine years later, Kim also earned a degree in English literature from Tōhoku Imperial University. Under the influence of contemporary Anglophone poets and critics like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, W. H. Auden, and I. A. Richards, as well as Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Kim adamantly set out to redefine Korean poetry. He skillfully handled the double mission of contributing as both a careful theorist and an exemplary poet who adapted notions of literary intellectualism (chujijuŭi ) within a framework cognizant of the historical, aesthetic, and political predicaments faced by colonial Korea’s new literary generation. He was also an active critic who supported early on the experiments of such writers as the controversial Yi Sang (1910–1937).3 Immediately upon earning his first university degree, Kim returned to Korea and began writing for the Chosŏn Daily (Chosŏn ilbo). His output encompassed all genres, including poetry, criticism, prose fiction, essay, and drama. He was one of the founding members of the exclusive Group of Nine (Kuinhoe),4 formed in 1933 and often regarded as holding a more purely aesthetic outlook than left-wing movements for proletarian literature, culture, and social change, such as the Korean Artistic Proletarian League (KAPF).5 Kim, inspired by the anti-fascist British poet Stephen Spender,6 gradually became active in leftist politics. After the liberation from Japan, Kim became a full-fledged socialist writer who championed proletarian causes for the new nation.7 In 1945 Kim taught at various universities and a year later joined the Alliance of Korean Literary Scholars (Chosŏn Munhakka Tongmaeng), which included many former KAPF members. Inspired by the nation’s restored sovereignty, Kim published books at a furious rate until the outbreak of the Korean War, at which time he was kidnapped to North Korea.8 It seems probable from the lack of evidence to the contrary that he did not continue his literary career there. Kim welcomed the explosion of “-isms” that enlivened Western aesthetic modernism, seeking to overcome the melancholic mood that pervaded the 1920s after the ultimate failure of the March First Movement’s protest against Japanese colonial rule. He helped to introduce and inter-

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pret such avant-garde movements as Dada, surrealism, futurism, and imagism, in part to displace the moribund or sentimental legacies of romanticism and neoclassicism. As can be seen in “Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot,’ ” however, Kim was by no means uncritical of new foreign currents; increasingly, both his poetics and poetry evolved from attempts to embody Western notions of modernism to geopolitically conscious definitions of Korea’s own modernity. The poems in Kim’s first book, Weather Chart, evince modernist characteristics like detached personae, fixation on visual imagery, and criticism of failed concepts of civilization. In contrast, his second book of poems, Customs of the Sun, is a conscious effort to attain a unity that extends the metaphor of the forenoon (ojŏn). This was a notion he expounded in the series of articles “The Poetics of Forenoon” (Ojŏn ŭi siron, 1935), where it stands for what is modern versus the afternoon of classicism’s “tired state of mind.”9 The book’s title connotes a practice of intellectual awakening and renewal of expression as opposed to dark, lunar sentimentalism and decadence. The Sea and the Butterfly (Pada wa nabi, 1946) is Kim’s most intense exploration of imagism, his technical mastery allowing him to render hopeful visions celebrating Korea’s and language’s liberation. If we turn to Kim’s literary critical writings, such as the article “ ‘Poésie’ and ‘Modernity’ ” (‘P’oesi’ wa ‘modŏnit’i,’ 1933), we can see that, several years before Weather Chart, he was already theorizing the emergence of a new poetic self, which he compares to a camera lens. Characterizing the poetry of the past as dogmatic, metaphysical, partial, instantaneous, emotional, spiritualistic, imaginary, and egocentric, Kim diametrically opposes to it a new poetry that is critical, practicable, whole, and temporally extensive, a synthesis of feelings and intellect, materialist, constructivist, and objective.10 Two years later, Kim offered another important schematization of his poetics in the aforementioned two-part “Poetics of Forenoon,” the first part dealing with theoretical foundations and the second with technique. He distinguishes “traditional poetry or poetry in existence (sein)” from the “intentionally produced modern poetry that ought to be (sollen).”11 He determines that the latter is “constructive” and “artistic,” a superior “poetry of intellectualism” that is the antithesis of spontaneous poetry based in sentimentalism. Although Kim espouses an intellectualist approach, he objects to art that undervalues human participation. He concludes that T. S. Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry,” of “depersonalization,” is an artistic theory of the void. Even if the disappearance of humanity defines modern civilization, Kim believes that poetry cannot



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survive under such conditions, for “if we consider the intellect that represents classicism as the skeleton, romanticism or humanism, representing physical emotion, are its muscles and blood.” He pursues wholeness and freshness in a synthesis derived from the dialectic between intellectualism and humanism. As mentioned earlier, “Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot’ ” differs stylistically from Kim’s later “scientific” theorizing of poetry, which adopted much from I. A. Richards’ Science and Poetry (1926). However, many of the germinal ideas of his poetics are already firmly planted in its “fragmentary notions.” These include, among others, his awareness of words as objective entities, a declaration of the death of symbolist and neo-romanticist poetry, the location of beauty in labor and dynamic action rather than stillness and stagnation, an insistence on the vital relation between the poet and a historically specific audience, and his sense of the poet as belonging to both present and future generations. Unfortunately, the South Korean government, misconstruing his leftist political stance, accused Kim of voluntarily going to the North and did not lift the ban on his work until 1988. As a result, the writings of one of the founders of Korean modernism were not publicly available for nearly four decades and, like many other authors and artists who ended up in North Korea (either of their own volition or not), his name was censored. Much research will be required to make up for this neglect, for Kim Kirim was an artist and intellectual who toiled for the future of Korean literature with great ingenuity, learning, integrity, and insight.12

Soliloquies of “Pierrot”—Fragmentary Notions on “Poésie”13* 1. Reality and Sensation I have never looked to poetry for anything but the action of its lived sensing and critique of reality. 2. Secondary Meanings The secondary (hidden) meaning of a word and the secondary (hidden) relations between words, the new, previously unconceived-of relations between one word and another: Doesn’t the sacred realm awaiting the poet in that regard lie before one like a virgin forest? *Kim Kirim, “ ‘P’iero’ ŭi tokpaek—‘P’oesi’ e taehan sasaek ŭi tanp’yŏn,” Chosŏn ilbo, January 27, 1931.14

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3. Snake Spirit The all-consuming craft of poésie 15 gives objective shape even to one’s passions. Poésie is cold-blooded like a snake. 4. Nonsense Outside of the world of children, where is it possible for impossible things to exist so lightly? 5. A World That Is All-Too-Small There is a poet who does nothing but run in circles like a squirrel16 around the center of a single theme. If I were forced to speak on the matter, is it not unnecessary for a poem to have anything like a subject? There is a poet who keeps writing a single poem his whole life, fixed upon the most likely meanings. 6. Poésie— What we call poésie: Is it not the igniting17 of a dream closing its eyes over sensations blazing up at every moment? 7. Composition Among our century’s most important discoveries was a great18 word. “Composition”—It indicates (1) a selected fundamental piece of reality’s (2) organic unity-based (3) creation of a new reality. It is the conscious reordering19 of reality. Thus, it is both negativism and surrealism.20 8. Poésie Poésie is a certain adventure. 9. Concepts I dislike it when that knowledge of yours only operates in your head. 10. Dreaming Senses Imagination—So-called illusions are our senses when they descend upon reality and dream a short while in its recesses. Unknown flowers that do not even recognize themselves. 11. Your Castle21 My interest flees from you when you speak only of yourself.



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12. Blowing Alone on a P’iri Please stop blowing all alone on your p’iri.22 When you do that, you are as desolate as the nonsense of a poplar tree trembling by itself in the desert. 13. The Audience and You I want to read your spirit as it moves across the world of an audience. 14. Essence Don’t speak excessively on any point. Don’t dress up any essence that you’ve grasped in the garb of a lot of words. “Bare thought and emotion are bold like a naked woman.”—Bréton • Eluard23 15. Your Spirit I saw the ghost of a reader that said it was your spirit.24 So at last I see your spirit moving toward the world in multifaceted ways. Only at such times does your humanity shine forth. 16. Utopia A certain imagining and empty illusion—When your dreams build a house only in your mind (pitiful surrealist!), I see the ashes of your skull. Please show me a dream that soars up and out. 17. The Beauty of Work at Work In the past, artists always painted the idle hours of idle people. The discovery of people at work and the beauty of their labor are like literature’s own theory of earthly motion. 18. Poetry and Women There is no pestilence like poets who make love their topic. Goethe and Dante, too, how could they have been such debauchees?25 19. The Multitude Magnificent expression has no fear of the multitude (taejung). 20. Peril Always bear in mind what you will write. But shield your poetry from writing even a single letter of anything that is useless.

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21. Constraint Free verse is not a matter of abandoning old-fashioned poetry’s rhythm, melodiousness, or even its formal rules. It only excises what constrains it. The time has come again for us to throw everything away, even free verse. Natural language in its most liberated state: That is where we must discover poetry. 22. Classics and Corpses I call the poetry of our symbolist or neo-romanticist originators “classical.”26 Such poems of decline (though oddly current), I also call “corpses.” 23. Resistance Resistance, a desire arising from new radiance, is struggle. 24. The Poet He is a person of his times. At the same time, a person beyond his times. 25. Force “Equilibrium” is a situation in which several “forces” confront each other nicely in a compromise. Not a potent array, but a shriveling up. “Force” is disequilibration. 26. Nervous Emergency A “poem” is an emergency expressed in the poet’s nerves the very moment they become agitated by his internal or external senses. 27. Understanding What we see is a passing phantasm. Only what attains understanding becomes art. This understanding, a rational embrace—that is, in love does it commence.27 28. Leaping Forward It is a heroism absolutely needed to save human history from normalcy. 29. The Folk Poet28 Long ago, the folk poet was a spokesman for the people. His magnificence29 arose from the practice of facing the masses and calling out to them in the form of a powerful declaimer.



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However, the modern (kŭndae) poet always presupposed individuals in isolation. As for today’s poet, isn’t it necessary to become an orator once again? 30. Artistic Activity Artistic activity first sets out from its selection of material. 31. The Death of Rhythm Rhythm died with the fatuous music of symbolism. The present age loves its transcendent leaps at a tempo too quick to be romantic. 32. The Surrealist Fallacy The surrealist tries to gaze through the “window of individual vision” at his own “individual metaphysical soul.” 33. Becoming Prose In the very beginning, poetry was the livelihood of government officials and prophets. Afterwards, it was retaken from the royal court and sold its body to the bourgeoisie. But with the growth of the people (minjung), poetry drew close to them as well. Comprising poetry’s nobility, rhythm is formalism. The beauty, resilience, and harmony one finds in the natural state of the people’s everyday language is the new art of prose.

Notes 1. For a comprehensive treatment of Kim’s career and work, see Kim Yuch’ung, ed., Kim Kirim (Seoul: Munhak segyesa, 1996). Kim’s works are also collected in Kim Haktong and Kim Sehwan, eds., Kim Kirim chŏnjip (Collected Works of Kim Kirim), vols. 1–6 (Seoul: Simsŏltang, 1988). 2. Im Hwa, a poet and essayist, emerged early on as the leader of KAPF, which he joined in 1926. KAPF is an acronym for the organizational name in Esperanto, Korea Artista Proletaria Federacio (”Proleta” sometimes alternating with “Proletaria”), which can be translated into English as the Korean Artistic Proletarian League. He went to study film in Tokyo in 1929 and returned to Korea in 1931. “My Older Brother and a Brazier,” one of the series of narrative poems he published, was praised by Kim Kijin (1903–1985) as the finest proletarian poem. 3. Yi Sang, one of the most experimental writers during the 1930s, produced

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works in overlapping genres including poetry, essays, and short stories. He was praised by Kim Kirim as “the best reader of surrealism.” See Kim Yunsik, Yi Sang yŏngu (Research on Yi Sang) (Seoul: Munhak sasangsa, 1988), 158. 4. The membership of the Group of Nine changed over time but at various junctures included such important writers as Yi Hyosŏk (1907–1942), Kim Yujŏng (1908–1937), Yi T’aejun (1904–?), Chŏng Chiyong (1903–?), Yi Muyŏng (1908–1960), Pak T’aewŏn (1909–?), and Yi Sang (1910–1937). 5. Formed in 1925 from the merging of earlier leftist literary groups, KAPF formally adopted its name two years later and, after a turbulent history, was officially dissolved in 1935. Im Hwa, Kim Namch’ŏn (1911–1953), Kim Kijin (1903– 1985), and Pak Yŏnghŭi (1901–?) were all prominent KAPF authors, though far from homogenous in their views and writing. 6. Spender (1909–1995) resolutely spoke out in the 1930s against the fascism of the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and the Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1892–1975). 7. Kim Yuch’ung, ed., Kim Kirim, 304. 8. See Kim Kyudong, “A Kirim sŏnsaeng kwa Inhwan” (Ah, Mr. Kirim and Inhwan), in Siin ŭi pinson (The Poet’s Empty Hands) (Seoul: Sodam, 1994). 9. “Ojŏn ŭi siron” (The Poetics of Forenoon), Chosŏn ilbo (20 April–1 May, 17 September–4 October, 1935). 10. See “ ‘P’oesi’ wa modŏnit’i’ ” (Poésie and Modernity), Sin tonga (July 1933). 11. In German, sein and sollen mean, respectively, “to be” and “should be.” 12. Recently published studies on Kim Kirim include Kim Yunjŏng, Kim Kirim kwa kŭ ŭi segye (Kim Kirim and His World) (Seoul: P’urŭn sasang, 2005); Yi Misun, Kim Kirim ŭi siron kwa susahak (The Poetics and Rhetoric of Kim Kirim) (Seoul: P’urŭn sasang, 2007); and Cho Yŏngbok, Munin kija Kim Kirim kwa 1930 nyŏndae ‘hwalcha-tosŏgwan’ ŭi kkŭm (Kim Kirim and the Dream of a ‘Printed Library’ in the 1930s) (Seoul: Sallim, 2007). 13. The Pierrot character of French pantomime theater is a male fool in white makeup and a loose-fitting costume who is often alluded to in modern literary works as a figure of both merriment and melancholy. Poésie is the French word for poetry, but can also more broadly refer to the “poetic” quality of other genres and forms of art as well. 14. The present translation of “ ‘P’iero’ ŭi tokpaek—’P’oesi’ e taehan sasaek ŭi tanp’yŏn’ ” is based on 1) its original newspaper publication in the Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily) (27 January 1931) (CI hereafter) and 2) the version printed in Kim Kirim chŏnjip 2: Siron, si-ŭi ihae, sisa-ron, sip’yŏng (Complete Works of Kim Kirim, Vol. 2: Poetics, Analysis of Poetry, Essays on the History of Poetry, Poetry Reviews) (Seoul: Simsŏltang, 1988), 299–303 (K hereafter). The K version often substitutes Korean hangŭl orthography for Chinese characters and uses standardized contemporary spellings of words. Although I have not recorded such minor differences in the following notes, I do describe more significant discrepancies, as in the notes for sections 15 and 27. I thank Mickey Hong for her suggestions in regard to earlier drafts of the translation.



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15. All non-Korean words that appear as such in the original are italicized in this translation. 16. CI has 사람쥐 (human rat) where K has 다람쥐 (squirrel); “human rat” in the original appears to be a misprint. 17. CI has 發花 where K has 發火; I have chosen the latter, translating it as “igniting.” 18. K omits the word hullyung han, restored here and translated as “great.” 19. K replaces CI’s 整現 with 整理, which I believe is correct and have translated as “reordering.” 20. Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement that formalized many aspects of earlier Dada disruptions on the basis of Freudian and Marxist theory. Organized in Paris beginning in the 1920s by such writers and artists as André Breton (see n. 22 below), it quickly spread to other modernist cultures around the world. It placed particular emphasis on explorations of the individual’s unconscious through such techniques as automatic writing and the juxtaposition of dream images. Yi Sang (1910–1937) is generally considered the first major Korean Dada and surrealist poet; Kim Kirim was nonetheless an important supporter of his work. 21. K gives 城廓 where CI has 城郭; both can be translated as “castle” or “citadel.” 22. The p’iri is a small Korean reed pipe. 23. André Breton (1896–1966) and Paul Eluard (1895–1952) were both French surrealist poets, the former being the author of the movement’s most influential manifestoes. 24. The CI version of this sentence would be translated as “I have never seen a reader’s ghost say that it was your spirit” or “I have never seen the ghost of a reader who says he/she was your spirit.” I have followed the K version, which substitutes the verb issŭmnida for ŏpsŭmnida in CI’s “Tangshin-ŭi 魂-irago hanŭn 獨自-ŭi 幽靈-ŭl pon iriŏpsŭmnida,” for the sake of consistency with the following sentence, although either version is plausible. K also replaces the three Chinesecharacter words in this sentence with the hangŭl spellings for, respectively, hon, tokja, and yuryŏng. I surmise that 獨自 is a misprint for 讀自 and have translated it as “reader.” 25. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet and philosopher who wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther; Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), the Italian poet who wrote The Divine Comedy. 26. Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century Western European literary trend marked by an often mystical sense of the correspondence of all symbols, affects, and perceptions with both each other and an invisible world beyond them. Its main poetic precursors were Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) and Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), and its representative poets in France included Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), among others. Symbolism is often considered a neo-romanticist response to realism because of its emphasis on the individual’s ineffable emotions and its sense of

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nature as containing mysterious symbols of transcendental forces. It helped form, in turn, the sensibilities of such poets as William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). In Korean literary history, the prolific poet and translator Kim Ŏk (1896–?) is credited with introducing symbolist and neo-romanticist currents, which Kim Kirim criticized for having supposedly led to excessively fervent, decadent, or narcissistic writing. In the present section, Kim Kirim makes his characteristic dismissal of both the romantic and classical (kojŏn), two traditions that are conventionally seen as being opposed to each other. Kim usually deplored the former for its emotionalism and the latter for its lack of relation to most people’s daily lives and the urgency and dynamism of modern, technologically advanced societies. In his essay “Poésie and Modernity,” for instance, Kim asserted that “the poetry of ‘romanticism’ investigated emotions. Symbolism caresses feelings and sentiments. However, emotion is not the fundamental essence of poetry. If emotion were the essence of poetry, then a weeping face or enraged voice would be the most poetic thing” (“P’oesi wa Modŏnit’i,” K, p. 82; originally published as “Si ŭi ‘modŏnit’i’ ” [Poetry’s Modernity], Sin tonga [New East Asia], [ July 1933]). 27. K omits this entire sentence for no apparent reason. 28. K gives minyo siin where CI has only 謠詩人, translated here as “The Folk Poet.” 29. K has widae where CI has 雄大; their meanings are similar, translated here as “magnificence.”

CHAPTER 9

Ch’oe Chaesŏ Introduction and Translation by Christopher P. Hanscom

Introduction Ch’oe Chaesŏ (1908–1964),1 a well-known and prolific literary critic, graduated  from  Keijō  Imperial  University  (now  Seoul  National  University)  with a degree in English literature in 1931, the same year that he began publishing literary criticism.2  Ch’oe  completed  graduate  school  at  Keijō  Imperial University in 1933, was appointed a lecturer there, and continued to publish articles in the mid-1930s on American and European literature along with translations of authors such as James Joyce. He advocated the establishment of a theory of intellectualism in modern literature and introduced Korean readers to the works and ideas of T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, I. A. Richards, and others. It was in part through these critics that he approached the chaos of the modern period and attempted to construct a scientific basis for a method of analytical interpretation and critical judgment.3 Ch’oe continued to teach at various universities and produced literary criticism throughout the 1930s and into the postliberation and postwar periods, editing the Liberal Arts Review  (Inmun p’yŏngnon)  from  1939  and  National Literature  (Kokumin bungaku)  into  the  1940s, publishing the influential Theories of Literature (Munhak wŏllon) in  1960 (following roughly a decade of silence after 1945).4 During the late 1950s and early 1960s he produced works on, among other topics, humanism and aesthetics in Shakespeare, literature and ideology, and methods  of literary criticism.5 Of  particular  interest  is  Ch’oe’s  work  during  the  1930s,  when  he  wrote  with  critics  such  as  Kim  Hwant’ae,  Kim  Munjip,  and  Yi  Hŏgu  against the method and theory of proletarian literary criticism. It was here that Ch’oe brought his critical approach to bear on a Korean literary scene 165

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typically (if over-simply) characterized as divided between the politically interested and the purely aesthetic. Ch’oe, writes critic Kwŏn Yŏngmin, “aimed to establish a literary theory on the basis of Western intellect, a rational critical spirit that could overcome the limits of proletarian aesthetic criticism.”6 While Kim Hwant’ae and Kim Munjip looked to impressionist criticism (insangjuŭi pip’yŏng), Ch’oe attempted to institute a neoclassicism (sin kojŏnjuŭi ) on the basis of an intellectualist literary theory (chujijuŭi munhangnon), seeking to surpass the perceived didacticism and rigidly politicized interpretation of proletarian criticism. The critic was for Ch’oe at this point “nothing more than a mediator between the author and the reader.”7 The critic’s role consisted of two main efforts: introducing European literary trends into the Korean literary community and at the same time diligently critiquing Korean authors and works. Along these lines he published “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism” (Rialijŭm ŭi hwaktae wa simhwa, 1936), “Poverty and Literature” (Pingon kwa munhak, 1937), and “Yi T’aejun as an Author of Short Stories” (Tanp’yŏn chakkarosŏŭi Yi T’aejun, 1937), concentrating especially on the works of Yi Sang, Pak T’aewŏn, Yi T’aejun, Kim Kirim, Ch’ae Mansik, and Im Hwa. He also published various works on problems of intellect, satirical literature, and morality, gathered into a volume of criticism entitled Literature and Intellect (Munhak kwa chisŏng) in 1938. During this decade, a combination of factors compelled Ch’oe to continue his opposition to the methods of the proletarian critics as well as to attempt to overcome the limits of that criticism in his own work. The dismantling of KAPF8 in 1935 by colonial authorities signaled a simultaneous freedom from the political-aesthetic binary that had structured debates in Korean literary circles and a greater urgency to respond to the often oppressive changes wrought under colonial modernity. With the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the increasingly harsh governance of the Korean colony as the Japanese imperial machine prepared for war came a heightened consciousness of general crisis and the imperative to link cultural production to social developments in new ways. By the mid-1930s, according to Kwŏn, the predominant literary theories in Korea were based in a conceptually diverse humanism, and it was within this context that Ch’oe sought a literary spirit and a critical method that could confront the social crises that proletarian criticism had been unable to negotiate. Ch’oe eventually turned to a theory of satire, which he discovered in part in the writings of Aldous Huxley, as a means of facing the crises of the 1930s. Literary crisis, he argued, was a result of social crisis, but the two were not equivalent. For social or political upheavals to become full-



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blown crises in the literary world, the author must undergo a loss of faith or belief—typically, belief in a form of universal truth. “It takes no courage for an author, when he has lost faith in himself, to collect and unify and compile as art simple fragmentary impressions of a scattered anguish,” Ch’oe wrote in “On Satirical Literature.” “This sort of bankruptcy of the self is, in the end, grounded in social crisis.”9 Satire, for Ch’oe, began with a consciousness critical of one’s own existence and became a means of overcoming crises of the self, of society, and of art. He argued that, when it has become impossible to actively confront a crisis (restrained, for example, by the threat of colonial censorship or imprisonment), a modern people, immersed in the despair and emptiness of a contemporary reality shaped by logic(s) of capital and colonialism, must turn to a literature that can disclose and dissect that emptiness and despair. For Ch’oe, then, the mission of modern literature became the recognition and faithful representation of the figure of the dismembered self within this reality, and the origins of satire were to be found in a pessimism based on the impossibility of employing regular literary tactics to change or even depict the objective conditions of such a reality.10 This critical strategy was necessary to confront both the specifics of a colonial modernity and the universalizing demands of a scientific approach to literary criticism. It required the appreciation of an aesthetic concerned not only with a depiction of the outer world but one that would encompass the psychological reality of everyday life as well. Consequently, if the modernist aesthetic of Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, or Charles Maurras exhibited “a concern with outlines and borders which protect against the ‘chaos’ of subjectivity,”11 then Ch’oe can be seen moving beyond this aesthetic in his 1936 article “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism,”12 extending realism to include not only scope (the external, sensory) but also depth (the internal, emotional) in his analysis of the work of writers Pak T’aewŏn and Yi Sang.13 In this article, Ch’oe performs a reading of Pak’s Scenes by a Stream (Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng) and Yi’s “Wings” (Nal­ gae), creatively appropriating terms and concepts from psychoanalysis and cinema in his critique.14 What both authors have in common, according to Ch’oe, is an objective approach to their subject matter: Pak depicts the object world (the city and the day-to-day interactions and activities of its citizens) while Yi takes the interior world of the subject as the raw material of his art. These tendencies coincide with certain general aspects of modernist writing born of an increasingly crowded and commercial urban environment. One author may observe in anonymity, capitalizing on the duplicity allowed within the conditions of modernity, allowed to “see the world, be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the

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world.”15 Another author may turn inward, focusing “a cruelly analytic eye on himself, making alien and objective what hitherto had been inward and personal.”16 These two tendencies parallel Ch’oe’s characterization of “extroverted” and “introverted” writers, and the objectivity that both may potentially realize produces the “expansion” and “deepening” of the article’s title. The expansion of realism refers specifically to the broadened scope of the material, the social world that the anonymous and cameralike eye of Pak can record in his work, while the deepening of realism refers to the intensified and at times morbid examination of the internal and the psychological in Yi’s “Wings.” This critical approach to realism moves beyond the ideologically motivated socialist realism of the KAPF authors yet does not abandon the attempt to depict reality in a socially responsible and effective manner. “By interconnecting the depiction of reality with the author’s objective attitude, Ch’oe Chaesŏ qualified realism itself as a descriptive method,” writes Kwŏn. “This was directly opposed to the socialist realism under debate at that time, which held that the essence of realistic literature was an active consciousness of social progress. Ch’oe Chaesŏ adhered to the thoroughness of objectivity even as he remained wary of any realism fettered to a doctrine or sunk in materialism.”17 Yet Ch’oe moved beyond his own limited definition of realism in his critique of the works of Pak and Yi. In his reading of Pak’s work, Ch’oe laments the author’s apparent failure to connect the fictional realm with reality, to “make us feel the power of the larger society that directs and influences the narrow world that appears within the overall composition of his work.” Again we see the influence of Eliot, who wrote that “language in a healthy state presents the object, is so close to the object that the two are identified.”18 Ch’oe requires this word-to-object correlation of Pak, yet he moves beyond this simple equation in his analysis of “Wings” and argues that objectivity can be applied to the subjective world as well, a world equally open to the “clear eyes” of the artist. Of Yi, Ch’oe requires a moral basis, finding that the author’s attitude toward society and its institutions (marriage, commerce, etc.) is oppositional and objective yet lacks a consistent outlook, an ethical system in which a truly critical perspective on society could be grounded. The critique that Ch’oe renders, then, seems to locate a lack of “belief,” faith in a form of universal truth that could underlay these works and provide the basis necessary for both an accurate depiction and dissection of modern existence and an effective critique of a society mired in crisis. In this sense, Ch’oe’s work during the 1930s represents not only an attempt to come to terms with the particular political and aesthetic contra-



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dictions of colonial-period literature in Korea but as well an effort to find a place for art and criticism within the modern itself.

The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes by a Stream and “Wings”19 * I Pak T’aewŏn’s novel Scenes by a Stream was serialized in the August, September, and October issues of Morning Light,20 and Yi Sang’s short story “Wings” was published in the September issue of Morning Light. Unlike many of the works that we typically see today, these two were not extemporaneous creations. Both authors seem to have put pen to paper with a definite aim and exerted themselves for a lengthy period of time. We are pleased that to a significant extent the authors’ aims have been realized in these works. The material selected for these two works is quite different. Scenes by a Stream depicts the lives of people in the contemporary world,21 their activities in one corner of the city, while “Wings” describes the subjective world of a highly intellectualized Sophist. Yet these two works find their common characteristics in the manner of their observation and the technique of their description. That is, each author has attempted as much as possible to relinquish subjectivity in confronting the object, resulting in Pak’s viewing the object in an objective manner and Yi’s viewing the subject in an objective manner. Since to some extent these two approaches— the expansion and the deepening of realism22—are representative of two tendencies of the modern literary world, they raise issues in which we have a deep interest. The statement that Pak views the object objectively and Yi views the subject objectively may strike the reader as odd. Yet if we recognize that a psychologist who can observe scientifically (relatively speaking) his own mental processes and a second-rate poet who sees all natural phenomena in a sentimental way can exist side by side, we certainly know that it is by no means a bit of sophistry. Unless clearly intended for a particular purpose, the erasure of any distinction between the subjective world and the objective world is dangerous in literary criticism. Yet we must first of all do away with the naïve logic that an author taking the subjective world as his material is subjective and the author dealing with the objective world *Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Rialijŭm ŭi hwaktae wa simhwa: Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng kwa ‘Nalgae’ e kwanhayŏ,” Chosŏn ilbo, October 31, November 3, 5, 6, and 7, 1936.

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is objective. Moreover, when we consider that certain authors tend to be treated better nowadays simply because they work with objective rather than subjective material, we cannot but abhor this simplistic moral prejudice. Insofar as writers are artists, they do not value the subjective world over the objective world, and vice versa. It is inevitable, of course, that an author, swayed by heredity and culture, cannot approach these two worlds with the same degree of familiarity. Here we feel the need to apply the psychoanalyst’s “psychological type” to literary criticism. Human intellect can be divided into three types. Those whose motives for action always come from the outside are referred to as the “extroverted type.” The opposite is the “introverted type,” whose motivations come from within. These two types are, so to speak, extreme examples, and somewhere between the internal and the external rests a middle type. Though numerically a majority, their way of life is so ordinary that it does not draw our interest. The extroverted mind is always inclined toward the external world, and it seems alive only when immersed in the objective world. On the other hand, the introverted mind prefers to continually reflect on its own internal world and feels pleasure and security only inside this internal world. We cannot command any artist to choose between these two worlds because artists are innately inclined one way or the other and their art is formed out of this inclination. Yet we are entitled to require sincerity; whether of the external or internal world, it is something that one must observe truthfully and represent accurately. This is equivalent to requiring an attitude of objectivity and realism from the artist. Artistic reality is not confined to the external or the internal world only. Reality is formed through observation conducted in an objective manner. The problem is not one of subject matter but of perspective. Artistic character is determined by whether one sees with eyes clouded by the film of subjectivity or whether one sees with clear eyes, free of any such membrane. The focal point of this dispute might concern the phrase “clear eyes, not filmed over.” I feel, however, that the question of the presence of the camera in cinema casts a not inconsiderable light on our problem. No one will claim that the human eye can function as a camera does. Yet we can find examples in modern literature of the artist’s effort to take on a camera-like existence and cases in which this effort resulted in a degree of success. II A writer cannot match the photographic functions of the camera, but the writer can perform functions that the camera cannot. That is, the writer can



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be at the same time both the camera and the director who operates the camera. As a camera, the writer can almost entirely transcend individualistic deviations; while working as a director the author cannot separate himself from the customs of subjectivity, nor is there any need for him to do so. The scenes a camera captures and the system by which a camera moves are determined by individuality, and the dignity and value of art lie in the fact that this determination is based on individuality. The writer can, according to his or her psychological type, turn the camera toward the external world or toward his or her own interior world. In the former case, the situation is relatively uncomplicated. In the latter case it is extremely delicate, however, as the relationship between observer and observed is located within the same person. For autobiographical poets or authors who write stories about themselves, who candidly reveal their lives and emotions, this may not devolve into a serious problem. Yet while an analysis and observation of the human interior from one’s position as an artist—in the same way the author of “Wings” analyzes the observing artist and the observed character (as a person engaged in daily living) within himself, to some extent distinguishing between the two— might be pathological, I would say that Yi’s efforts reach a previously unattained height of human intellect. To be sure, this is not healthy, as the development of self-consciousness is premised on the fragmentation of consciousness. Yet if we can say that the status quo of modern man is just such a fragmentation of consciousness, then the task of an honest artist will be to express frankly that condition of disintegration. Just as an author of the extroverted type takes his camera and photographs the external world, the honest artist must turn his own camera upon himself and photograph his interior world. If at this point the camera is veiled by the screen of subjectivity, then the work has no value whatsoever. The feelings that stem from everyday life, taken as the raw material, and the sentiment of an artist who deals with those emotions as artistic subject matter are entirely different things. If an artist does not know how to deal with the emotions that stem from his own life with the stern attitude of a scientist, then it would be best to discard that material. Having such a camera-esque consciousness when depicting the external world is relatively simple, but working on one’s interior world using such a technique is not only difficult but may even be, in certain situations, cruel. We respect, then, Pak’s lucid description of a section of the bustling city but all the more admire Yi’s ability to systematically capture the fragments of a pulverized individuality within the frame of his camera. Our interest in Scenes by a Stream is not an interest in the flow of the story, or even in the colorful personality of the author himself. If we are

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conscious of the author in this work at all, it is only a consciousness of his absence. That is, when we read this work we are not conscious of an author, in the same way that when one watches cinema there is no consciousness of the existence of the camera. The position of the author is not inside this work but outside it. He does not willfully manipulate the characters in accordance with some made-up story; rather, he moves or rotates his camera according to the way the characters move. Of course, this “camera” is a literary camera—it is the eye of the author. Pak is always careful not to have a speck of the dust of subjectivity settle on the lens of that eye. The result, unusual in our literary world, appears before us as a vivid and multifaceted representation of the city. Readers of this work will to a significant extent acknowledge the author’s success in this method. III The author’s camera first turns toward the laundering site at Ch’ŏnggye Stream, a kind of social space where news of the day-to-day inner workings of the neighborhood is exchanged and where women of the servant class satisfy their thirst for energetic gossip. There, we can hear such exclamations of the quotidian as, “For heaven’s sake, why are raincoats so expensive these days?” as well as an unsympathetic criticism of the shoe shop owner who, tossed about on social currents, is on the path to ruin. The sorrow of life and the rhythm of humor that these women create at the streamside—an area with the strongest flavor of Seoul—flow together with their beautiful Seoul dialect. The author sat quietly in some appropriate spot and carefully observed their actions and conversation, later presenting these observations without bias. It is a passage that whets one’s appetite. The next scene takes us to the barbershop. In the same way that the laundering site serves as a news exchange for the women, the barbershop is the clearinghouse where the men can express their feelings on life. Here a petty official, Min, is plunged into gloom, reminded of his young mistress upon seeing his aging face reflected in the mirror. The author’s searchlight penetrates the surface actions of the character, casting its light into the black interior world of the old man. Here Pak suspends his operation of the camera and in its place the camera of the young barbershop boy begins to pan about. This youth is in fact the masterstroke of this work of fiction. He is at once a character in the work and at the same time an observer. With his abundant curiosity and clear eyes untainted by bias, he observes thoroughly the life flowing by outside the barber shop window, and with the naïveté and charming humor of a boy he renders his youth-



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ful criticism. This entertaining youth reminds us of the author himself. Accordingly there is no need to distinguish between the youth’s camera and the author’s own camera. The author subsequently borrows the boy’s eyes on further occasions and puts them to work capturing a cross-section of reality. In contrast to the first section of Scenes by a Stream, which examines comparatively superficial aspects of life, the second section enters deeply into human existence and endeavors to follow its emotional undulations. Titled “A Boy from the Countryside,” this segment expresses well the isolation, skepticism, and despair of city living through the life of a lonely boy. In contrast to the intellectual and active barbershop boy, this youth represents the sentimental, passive aspects of city living. We could ask if perhaps this too is an embodiment of one aspect of the author. The pathos and humor of social life are pursued as themes and flow like music through, among other chapters, “Unfortunate Woman,” “A Happy Event,” “Downfall,” and “Min’s Melancholy.” Just as before, the author’s camera shifts rapidly from the boy’s interior to the servant’s quarters, the house of Min’s mistress, and on. Among these episodes, “A Happy Event” is the most impressive. Here we are reminded of Dickens. Proceeding into the third section, and using the same technique as before, the author depicts, among other things, a group immersed in the city council elections; gloomy Min; the isolation and misery of people without money; and the traffic in love and passion, focused mainly on a certain café. Throughout each of these scenes the author consistently maintains a camera-like presence. Approaching as close to reality as possible without actually colliding with it, he attempts to describe it from as many angles as he can. At this point, however, a question arises, namely, whether or not the world of this work, the streamside, is itself an independent world or a hermetically sealed one. Of course, there are connections between the streamside and the outside world. For example, such a connection with the outside world is alluded to in the case of the shoe shop owner’s downfall, or the dry goods merchant’s election campaign, and at two or three other points. However, these allusions are no more than hints only partially sketched out, and the author does not seem interested in them per se. This is of course something that cannot possibly be attempted through a camera’s function. It is a problem of the author’s own consciousness that lives behind [the camera]. For example, if the author had the same sensibility and opinions as Galsworthy,23 then he would make us feel the power of the larger society that presses upon and directs the narrow world that appears within the overall composition of his work. According to the

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“Author’s Afterword,” Pak’s work is one part of a longer piece of fiction being planned out. I would like to see a more tightly knit consciousness of this social relatedness in Continued Scenes by a Stream.24 IV We are sorry to see, though, that, where the directorial function is concerned, Pak did not enjoy the same success. His camera does a good job of filming what it is aimed at. However, previous to this filming, was there no room for more consideration of such points as where to aim his camera or how to link certain scenes with a purpose? If it is true that film directors need something more than the mere skill of directing itself, then it is true that writers to an even greater extent need something more than the skill of writing. That “something” beyond technique is in the end a unified consciousness that flows through each descriptive detail—perhaps an economic criticism of society, perhaps an ethical perspective on life. Whatever the case, it is the sense of unity that the reader comes to feel even after being pulled this way and that. On this point I harbor some doubt about Scenes by a Stream. But before we could comment on the overall composition of the work, we would need to scrutinize more closely the author’s method, which emerges in various sections. As we previously encountered an unfathomable poem in Kim Kirim’s “Weather Chart,”25 here we find a very difficult work of fiction in Yi Sang’s “Wings.” Whatever else this may signify, I believe that we will see evidence here of the beginnings of success for the intellectualist tendencies in our literary world. Though this is a trend that readers may find taxing, it must be welcomed without hesitation. “Only when the body crumples in exhaustion is its mind bright as a silver coin,”26 the author himself writes in the opening of the story. Here we see one type of modern human where flesh and spirit, life and consciousness, common sense and wisdom, legs and wings come into conflict and struggle. Where spirit scorches flesh, consciousness overwhelms life, intellect conquers common sense, and wings dominate legs, Yi Sang’s art is born. Accordingly his fiction begins where ordinary fiction ends, that is, from the point where life and action leave off. Could this ever really become material for art? We can surmise that according to traditional views this would not fall within the realm of art. Yet we have no reason whatsoever to reject the true expression of an individual’s consciousness (albeit a pathological one) as artistic activity, especially when that individuality represents the condition of the modern spirit.



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Then what sort of “individuality” appears in “Wings”? Let us investigate the origins of this fiction, giving in plain language an account of “I,” the main character in this work. “Everything was okay as long as I wasted each day in utter idleness.”27 When it comes to living, this narrator is incompetent. He is completely dependent on his wife, existing, like a parasitic plant. Yet his incompetence is not only in economic matters but in instinctual life as well. He does love his wife, yet his is not the love of a man for a woman but the fearful submission of a dog before its master. Just imagining the scent of his wife’s body makes his own body writhe, yet he cannot muster the courage to conquer her even once. In addition, he does not know how to associate with other people by any ordinary standard. Day and night he lies in his room, which “fits his body and mind well, like an article of clothing,” all contact with the outside world suspended. Moreover, he is even incapable of feeling emotions associated with ordinary human living. For example, he does not know how to feel jealousy, even as his wife (perhaps a waitress at a café or a kisaeng)28 idles away the time and jokes with visitors in the next room. While the narrator is in that sense an incompetent man, his nerves and sensibilities are as sharp as a razor. Taking advantage of his wife being out, he amuses himself with the bottles of cosmetics arranged on her dressing table. “The vials are more captivating than anything in the world. Selecting just one, I gently remove its stopper, bring it to my nose, and inhale lightly, almost holding my breath. When the exotically sensual fragrance pervades my lungs, I feel the soft, autonomic shutting of my eyes.”29 The fact that he plays with a magnifying glass indicates the unsound condition of his nerves as well. “I refract the sun’s parallel rays and gather them at a focal point until it heats up, singeing the paper and giving off wisps of smoke. It’s only a matter of seconds before a hole appears in the burning paper, but the suspense is so pleasurable that it almost kills me.”30 If he were to be examined by a doctor, the proper diagnosis might be given. For us it is sufficient to describe this narrator as someone defeated by the struggles of daily life. If Yi Sang had stopped here, however, there would be no such thing as Yi Sang’s art. If there had been no process of turning over again in his mind the reality [hyŏnsil] that he has betrayed, then he would have forever been a failure, beyond saving. Anger at the reality that has defeated him, this is precisely the substance of Yi Sang’s art. And he intended to dissolve this anger at reality by profaning reality. What form does this profaning of reality take? Using intellectual devices such as satire, wit, ridicule, derision, exag-

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geration, paradox, and self-mockery, the author resolutely carries out the desecration of family life, money, sex, common sense, and comfortable living. The life that the narrator and his wife lead could in no way reasonably signify “married life.” It is not simply that the wife is a tyrant and the husband a coward. Through each episode, which cannot possibly be judged according to common sense, the magnification of the wife’s authority and the caricature of the man’s position implement a reversal of values regarding marriage. This cannot but be a desecration of family life and even more so of the idea that Korea is a land of decorum.31 V In order to meet with other men and keep her husband in the next room, the narrator’s wife periodically gives him a small sum of money. Each time, he puts the money in a savings bank that he keeps beside his bed. Yet “the only happiness it afforded me was the slight, fleeting sensation that lasted from the moment my fingers touched a coin until it vanished into the bank’s slit.”32 Then “one day I took the bank and threw it in the latrine. I didn’t know exactly how many coins were in it at the time, but there were definitely a lot.”33 How far this ignorance strays from the world of common sense! He has completely lost the ability to use money. One evening he takes the money from the savings bank and, intending to spend it all, roams about all night, yet he is unable to realize this desire and simply returns home. Such a desecration of money! Rousseau hoped for the coming of an age in which those with money would be ashamed, red in the face.34 Yet above and beyond being ashamed at having money, how much more serious a debasement of money it is to be ignorant of how to use it. In this way “Wings” profanes all common sense and comfort. This is revenge for real-life failures and at the same time preparatory to clearing away obstacles so that the narrator can, with his wings, fly free. After a day and night of wandering the streets in doubt, despair, and fatigue, he feels a miracle taking place within him. All of a sudden, I feel an itch under my arms. Aha! The itching is a trace of where my artificial wings had once sprouted. Wings that are missing today; pages from which my hopes and ambition were erased flashed in my mind like a flipped-through dictionary. I wanted to halt in my steps and shout out for once:



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  Wings! Grow again!   Let’s fly! Let’s fly! Let’s fly! Let’s fly just one more time.   Let’s fly once again!35

There is no place for him to be in the wide world outside of his narrow, dark room. Even that room is not his world. Where, then, can a home for his spirit be found? Perhaps it will be a world in which long ago his wings took to the air, a world of poetry. Yet for this narrator, seized by vertigo and looking down from the rooftop of the Mitsukoshi department store on the gray, muddy world where “weary lives swayed languidly . . . exactly like the fins of . . . goldfish,”36 will there again be a day when his wings will sprout and he will fly? For us, “Wings” displays a deepening of realism rarely seen in our literary world. Until now there has been no individual who agonized to this extent over the fragmentations and contradictions of the modern; we have not seen a work that realizes these concerns rather than lamenting about them in vain. Compared to Scenes by a Stream, a step toward the expansion of our literary realism, we can say that “Wings” is a step toward a deepening of that realism. Yet, when we read this work we cannot conceal the feeling that there is one thing lacking. It might be called a high artistic refinement, or perhaps a strong verisimilitude; in any case, there is an important element lacking in this work. I think that this can be explained as the absence of a moral element. The author has a definite attitude regarding society. This is a pose that appears in each episode of the work. Yet this is no more than a fragmentary pose, not a consistent outlook on life. We can confirm that it is [Yi’s] habit to hurl contempt upon common sense and desecrate reality. However, I would hesitate to answer lightly the question of whether this has become the author’s ethical perspective, guiding principle, or critical standard. He knows how to insult, how to destroy the world, but on the far side of such insults, we cannot as yet discover his own individual world. This can also be seen as a flaw in the overall composition of the work. Each episode in the work takes the form of a riddle. By understanding the paradox that is the writer’s starting point we can, with relative ease, use our mental capacity to decipher the riddle of each episode, as if solving an algebraic equation. Further, he has only artificial means to connect the episodes to one another. This work is not formed out of the rhythm of life, a rhythm derived from real life; rather, scenes are artificially linked. Perhaps this is the primary reason for the lack of artistic refinement and verisimilitude in this work. The unnaturally loud laughter and unpleasant jeering expressed on occasion throughout the work do not arise from the

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author’s morals but can be considered as triggered by an artificial motivation on a surface level. Acquiring a moral element is perhaps a serious challenge that will decide the future of this author.

Notes 1. Ch’oe’s pen name (ho) was Sukkyŏngu; he also wrote under the pen names ( p’ilmyŏng) Haksuri and Sangsusi. 2. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Misukhan munhak” (Unaccomplished Literature), Sinhŭng (New Rising) 5 (1931). 3.  It is possible to see the influence of T. S. Eliot’s objective, “factual” approach to literary criticism here. “Criticism must always profess an end in view, which, roughly speaking, appears to be the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste,” Eliot wrote in 1923. A critic “must have a very highly developed sense of fact. . . . The sense of fact is something very slow to develop, and its complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilization.” T. S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” in Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), 13, 19. 4. Serk-bae Suh, “The Location of ‘Korean’ Culture: Ch’oe Chaesŏ and Korean Literature in a Time of Transition,” Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 1 (February 2011): 57. 5. See Suh. While here I deal narrowly with Ch’oe’s literary criticism during the 1930s, Suh’s thought-provoking article analyzes Ch’oe’s later embrace of Japanese colonialism and his positioning of Korean culture within the sphere of East Asian empire in the 1940s. 6. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, “Ch’oe Chaesŏ wa sosŏl changnŭ ron ŭi hangye” (Ch’oe Chaesŏ and the Limits of a Theory of Genre in Fiction), in Hanguk minjok munhak non yŏngu (Research on the Theory of Korean Ethnic-National Literature) (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1988), 332. See also Kim Hŭnggyu, Munhak kwa yŏksajŏk ingan (Literature and the Historical Human) (Seoul: Koryŏ Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 1993). 7. Ch’oe, “Munhak palgyŏn sidae” (An Era of the Discovery of Literature), Chosŏn ilbo, November 21–29, 1934. 8. Korea Artista Proleta Federacio is the Esperanto title of the Chosŏn Proletarian Artists’ Alliance (Chosŏn P’ŭrollet’aria Yesul Tongmaeng), the organization around which leftist literature and criticism had been centered in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 9. Ch’oe, from “P’ungja munhangnon” (On Satirical Literature), Chosŏn ilbo, July 14–29, 1935. Quoted in Kwŏn, “Ch’oe Chaesŏ,” 335–336. Japanese literary critic Kobayashi Hideo also wrote on the “anxiety of modern literature” in the 1930s, which “for him reflected a general loss of faith in the stability of social and cultural institutions.” See Seiji Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 206.



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10. Kwŏn, “Ch’oe Chaesŏ,” 337. 11.  Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 196. 12. “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes from a Streamside and ‘Wings’ ” (Riŏllijŭm ŭi hwaktae wa simhwa: Chŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng kwa ‘Nal­ gae’ e kwanhayŏ) was published in five installments in Chosŏn ilbo, October 31, November 3, 5, 6, and 7, 1936. 13. Pak (1909–1986) and Yi (1910–1937) are generally considered to be among Korea’s pioneering modernist writers of the 1930s. Particularly in regard to its experimental use of language and close attention to the technique or style of the writing, Pak’s work is seen as representing one of the new strains of literature that emerged out of the realism of the 1920s. Yi, trained as an architect, wrote both poetry and fiction during his short career, and is also known for his experimental and idiosyncratic treatment of the experience of modern life in his work. 14. Pak serialized Scenes by a Stream in Chogwang (Morning Light) from August to October, 1936. Yi’s “Wings” was published in the same periodical in September 1936. 15.  Charles Baudelaire, in Nicholls, Modernisms, 17. These aspects of modernist practice—the simultaneous “aloofness” of the flâneur and “surrender” amidst the anonymous urban crowds—emerge in Nicholls’ discussion of Baudelaire and the irony of the modern. 16. Nicholls, Modernisms, 18. 17. Kwŏn, “Ch’oe Chaesŏ,” 339. 18. Eliot, Selected Essays, 285. 19. Translation taken from the original printing in Chosŏn ilbo, published in five installments on October 31, November 3, 5, 6, and 7, 1936; and from the version reprinted in Kwŏn Yŏngmin ed., Hanguk ŭi munhak pip’yŏng (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1995), 1:551–562. Installment numbers from the original printing have been added to the text by the translator. 20. Chogwang, a Seoul-based literary journal published between November 1935 and December 1944. 21. Ch’oe uses the phrase “set’ae injŏng” here, meaning something like “the prevailing state of human society.” Set’ae, or set’ae sosŏl, (usually translated as “a fiction of manners”) was a term that subsequently came under contestation, used by leftist critics to negatively evaluate the fictional works of Pak and other authors as being purely descriptive and hence apolitical. See Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron” (On the Fiction of Manners), Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily), April 1–6, 1938. 22. Non-Korean words that appeared in the original text as such have been italicized throughout. 23. John Galsworthy (1867–1933). English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, known for his satirical depiction of the English upper middle class, most famously in The Forsyte Saga. 24. Pak T’aewŏn serialized Sok ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng (Continued Scenes by a Stream) in Chogwang from January to September 1937.

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25. Ch’oe published an analysis of Kim Kirim’s poem “Kisangdo” (Weather Chart) in an article titled “Kisangdo e taehan sogoch’al” (A Brief Inquiry into ‘Weather Chart’), Chosŏn ilbo, August 1936. 26. Translation taken from Yi Sang, “Wings,” trans. Walter K. Lew and Youngju Ryu, in Bruce Fulton and Youngmin Kwon, eds., Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 66. 27. Ibid., 68. 28. Kisaeng: a female entertainer. 29. Ibid., 69. 30. Ibid. 31. Ch’oe uses the phrase “tongbang yeŭi chiguk” for Korea here, literally the “country of courteous people in the East” or the “land of decorum.” 32. Ibid., 72–73. 33. Ibid., 73. 34. Ch’oe was familiar with Rousseau’s work and translated Irving Babbitt’s (1865–1933) Rousseau and Romanticism into Japanese, published as Ruso to roman shugi (Tokyo: Kaizosha, 1939–1940). 35. Yi, “Wings,” 83–84. 36. Ibid., 83.

CHAPTER 10

Kim Namch’ŏn Introduction and Translation by Youngju Ryu

Introduction Born  Kim  Hyosik  in  South  P’yŏngan  Province,  Kim  Namch’ŏn  (1911– 1955?)  was  a  literary  critic  and  fiction  writer  best  known  for  his  active  involvement  in  the  KAPF  (Korea  Artista  Proleta  Federacio;  Chosŏn  P’ŭrollet’aria  Yesul  Tongmaeng).  In  the  span  of  some  twenty  years  between his first published essay on the bolshevization of cinema (1930) and  his last fictional work detailing the experiences of a North Korean soldier  (1951),  Kim  Namch’ŏn  remained  prolific,  producing  nearly  fifty  works  of fiction, several plays, numerous articles of literary criticism, and even exegeses of selected writings by Lenin and Gorky. Like many other writers of his generation, Kim Namch’ŏn led a life that closely paralleled the  vicissitudes of political power in colonial and post-liberation Korea; he was tried twice by the colonial government for his activities relating to the proletarian literature movement but was ultimately purged in postwar North Korea, ostensibly for holding literary views contrary to the ideals of proletarian realism but more likely for his affiliation with the so-called  Pak Hŏnyŏng line of the South Korean Workers’ Party.1 The great unifying theme of Kim Namch’ŏn’s career, however, remained the creative tension between his political views and his literary practice. We can read in both his works of fiction and his criticism the signs of an intense struggle  to negotiate the proper relationship between proletarian ideology and literature. Broadly, Kim Namch’ŏn’s career can be divided into three stages. In  the first phase he served as an enthusiastic promulgator, along with the leading KAPF critic Im Hwa, of the bolshevization of Korean literature. He emphasized the role that the arts must play in proletarian revolution, participating directly in organizing labor and calling a strike at a rubber  181

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factory in P’yŏngyang. Based on these experiences in the vanguard of the labor front, Kim Namch’ŏn produced fictional works such as “Factory Newspaper” (Kongjang sinmun, 1931) and “Rubber” (Komu, 1931), with the intention of creating a literary medium for political action. The second phase of his career corresponds roughly to the years between 1933, when Kim Namch’ŏn ended two years of imprisonment following his arrest during the colonial government’s first round-up of KAPF members, and Korea’s liberation in 1945. During this period of great personal anguish and general uncertainty regarding the direction of class-conscious literature, Kim Namch’ŏn paid greater attention to aesthetic concerns in writing and formulated many of his most original ideas on relations between the intellectual writer, his text, and the social world in which he lived. In the final phase, Kim Namch’ŏn’s literary activities were guided by the goal of building “national literature” (minjok munhak).2 In the post-liberation space of ideological contestation and international power struggles, the project for Kim shifted from one of reclaiming the sovereignty of the lost nation to one of building a nation anew. “Construction of National Literature” was the common slogan embraced by post-liberation Korean writers, but the question of just how this goal was to be achieved was differently answered by the Left and the Right as well as by the different groups within the Left. The camp was split between writers who sought to join hands with a wide range of moderate and progressive elements in order to build a “democratic national literature” (minju chuŭi minjok munhak)3 and those who emphasized the primacy of class and insisted upon the imperative of a “proletarian democratic national literature” ( p’ŭrollet’aria minju chuŭi minjok munhak). As a key member of the former group, Kim Namch’ŏn sought to expand the readership base for national literature. Notable among his activities during this period are his forays into children’s literature and the theater, both as means of expanding the arena of popular culture. “The Judas Within and Literature”4 dates from the second phase of Kim Namch’ŏn’s career. An understanding of this piece must take into account the historical context of the political and intellectual milieu of 1937, a time when the KAPF had been forced to disband, Japanese censorship and political oppression were growing stronger in anticipation of greater imperial expansion, and proletarian goals of a literary campaign were clearly in decline. Modernist works of emerging writers like Yi Sang and Pak T’aewŏn were heralding a kind of literary sensibility that seemed to have little to do with political slogans or the concerted struggle of the masses; in fact, the technical sophistication of these works tended to make the literature of proletarian realism appear lackluster and formulaic in



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comparison. What’s more, some of the leading leftist critics were defecting and declaring their volte-face quite publicly. “An ideology is gained and literature lost,” Pak Yŏnghŭi (1901–?) had proclaimed just three years earlier in his now-famous declaration of his ideological “change in direction” (chŏnhyang);5 Paek Ch’ŏl (1908–1985) embraced a middling theory of humanism to fill the space vacated by proletarian ideology. In such an atmosphere of disillusionment and political ennui, Kim Namch’ŏn’s serious exploration of realism as the literary method of choice reflects both a modification of his earlier views on the relationship between literature and political ideology and his ultimate loyalty to the cause of class struggle. He was no longer so naïve as to suggest that there was no difference between himself and the workers he had earlier helped to organize at the rubber factory; rather, his recognition of “the Judas within,” that is, the acknowledgement of his status as a “petit-bourgeois intellectual,” and his insistence on the need for unstinting self-criticism were attempts to hold fast to the connection between the literary and the socio-political. Throughout his career, through many highs and lows, writing remained a profoundly political act for Kim Namch’ŏn. Two concepts foregrounded in “The Judas Within and Literature” deserve further explanation here. The first is the notion of “self-indictment” (kobal ), which he developed at great length in two prior articles, “The Writer and the Spirit of Self-Indictment: For a Concrete Discussion of New Theories on Creative Writing”6 and “The New Dimension in the Writing Method: Once Again on the Topic of the Literature of Self-Indictment.”7 This concept of kobal, however, first emerged even earlier in the process of the so-called “Water” debate Kim Namch’ŏn carried on with fellowKAPF critic Im Hwa (1908–1953), though he had not used the term kobal at the time. “Water” was the title of the highly autobiographical story Kim Namch’ŏn had written based on his prison experiences. Upon its publication in June of 1933 in the journal The Public (Taejung), Im Hwa criticized what he perceived to be the execrable absence in the story of proletarian literary qualities.8 In its depiction of a leftist intellectual who, in the harsh environment of prison, finds that his immediate physical desire for water far overshadows any considerations of committed political action, Im Hwa saw precisely the attitude of compromise against which proletarian literature must guard. Pak Sŭnggŭk, another leftist critic, further stoked the fire, and Kim Namch’ŏn responded with the idea of self-indictment in a piece called “Laughing at Literary Puerility.” I confess my anguish. I, Kim Namch’ŏn, as yet an immature intellectual from petit-bourgeois background, confess the lack of firmness in my

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The acknowledgment of his own petit-bourgeois tendencies and the affirmation of the hope that he might exorcise these tendencies through vigorous and conscientious self-criticism formed the core of what Kim Namch’ŏn would later call the “literature of self-indictment” (kobal munhak). Thus, the theory of kobal munhak was Kim Namch’ŏn’s answer to the question that plagued the leftist writing circle in the second half of the 1930s: What was a writer committed to political action to do when action was no longer practically possible? Kim saw correctly that it was the strength of the ideological commitment, demanded by and secured within the collective identity of a powerful organization like the KAPF, that had allowed intellectuals from a petit-bourgeois background to combat the sensibility, habit, and outlook of the class to which they were born and emerge as champions of class struggle. In the absence of such organizations, these writers were left to their own petit-bourgeois devices; confronted with mounting pressure from the outside, many were floundering hopelessly. Kim argued that it was precisely at such a critical juncture that the committed writer needed to fix an unremitting gaze on himself and expose his own petit-bourgeois qualities rather than seek to justify them. He insisted on the difference between self-indictment and self-justification (the latter exemplified by what he called an “intellectual self-embrace” in Paek Ch’ŏl) and between making compromises with the “Judas within” and struggling against it to the bitter end. When the enemy outside could no longer be fought, the least one could do was fight the enemy within, and kobal munhak was Kim Namch’ŏn’s attempt to keep himself from being co-opted into the hegemonic order of colonial capitalism. For a writer who once advocated the use of literature as a weapon in class struggle, this emphasis on individual introspection was, to be sure, something of a retreat from the frontline. Though the theory of self-indictment was well received by left-leaning critics on the whole,10 its valorization of negative self-reflection also became the target of criticism. Of these, the most cogent was the one articulated by Im Hwa in “The Reconstitution of the Subject and the World of Literature.”11 Im Hwa’s attack on kobal munhak occurred on several fronts. He argued, first, that the excessive emphasis on negative aspects of reality had an unhealthy influence on other Korean writers; second, that the emphasis on the individual author failed to consider the question of the work’s worldview; and, third, that



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the spirit of self-indictment could not turn itself into the positive energy needed to comprehend the basic structures and conflicts undergirding social reality. Kim Namch’ŏn himself acknowledged to a degree the merits of this critique, although he was quick to point out that Im Hwa too glibly sidestepped the question of the author’s subjectivity. “The Judas Within and Literature” was written in part to address these concerns through the notion of morals. The question of morality, then, represents the second of the two central concepts in this essay. Morality, as Kim Namch’ŏn conceived of it, represented the avenue through which a writer could achieve an understanding of objective reality. In a slightly different formulation, the writer’s moral sense served as the medium for bringing objectively verifiable truths into the subjective realm of literary expression. It was from this perspective that Kim Namch’ŏn equated the exposure of the “Judas within” to the first moral principle of a petit-bourgeois writer; conscientious self-reflection represented the first step toward genuine engagement with the external world. What the times demanded, Kim argued, was “a meticulous physical examination” before the strapping on of the “proper scientific mindset.” Thus, the literature of self-indictment became the necessary preparation for greater things to come rather than an act of masochistic self-indulgence, as some of its critics had charged. Citing Gorky, Kim wrote that the bitter hatred that served as the very substrate of the critical spirit was equal in its intensity only to the great and fundamental love of humanity. It was the belief that human beings could be reformed and the hope that his own subjectivity might be reconstituted through an active effort that served as the premise for the literature of self-indictment. Like Judas, who ultimately cast away the thirty pieces of silver for which he had sold his teacher and his soul and overcame the base greed within himself in the final moment of his death, the writer who engaged in the literature of selfindictment sought not simply to expose but ultimately to triumph over the bourgeois qualities within him. The essay remains, however, less than perfectly clear about how such a mediation between a critical view of the self and genuine engagement with the world might actually be achieved. For all the qualities of the modern hero that Kim Namch’ŏn conferred on Judas—fragmented from within by conflicting desires and stretched to the limit by external forces—the moment of his triumph did not restore him to society but took him irrevocably away from it. Thus Judas, though Kim Namch’ŏn considered him a model for Korean petit-bourgeois intellectuals, is by Kim’s own logic a problematic model at best. Kim, however, seems to have been unaware of this contradiction. The weakest aspect of his logic may have

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been his readiness to accept binary oppositions as such rather than approach them in a properly dialectical fashion. Ironically, Kim Namch’ŏn’s attempts to reconcile seemingly dichotomous relations—part/whole, subject/object, individual/society, ideal/reality, aesthetics of writing/ worldview—seem to have been premised on a view of their fundamental irreconcilability. Despite such limitations, “The Judas Within and Literature” offers an exciting glimpse of both the concerns that preoccupied the Korean literary world during the latter half of the 1930s and the evolution of Kim Namch’ŏn’s thought over time. As one of the most important literary critics to emerge from the ranks of the KAPF, Kim Namch’ŏn’s place in the history of early-modern criticism in Korea hardly needs emphasizing. The essay provides a particularly intriguing entry point to his thought, linking as it does the theories of kobal munhak and moral munhak considered by many to be Kim Namch’ŏn most significant and creative contributions to literary criticism. However, the singular appeal of the essay may actually lie elsewhere. Kim Namch’ŏn’s “Judas Within and Literature” is a passionate plea for conscience in a world where the convenience of compromise was increasingly being mistaken for genuine wisdom.

The Judas Within and Literature* The First Moral Principle of a Petit-Bourgeois Writer 1 To a non-Christian like myself, the New Testament does not contain many scenes capable of completely enthralling me. But when, after riffling through one book after another, the restless heart turns to the Bible, it usually opens to a few places: Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and John 13. Beginning in these pages is an account of the series of events occurring around the festival of Passover, from the arrest of Jesus Christ by the soldiers and chief priests to his crucifixion on the hill of Golgotha. We probably know this scene better from the depiction in da Vinci’s Last Supper. Who among us has not been moved by Christ’s shocking prediction, “I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me,” and the resulting wave of agitation that sweeps across the expressions and actions of the disciples seated around him? To no lesser a degree than da Vinci’s painting, the *Kim Namch’ŏn, “Yudajŏgin kŏt kwa munhak,” Chosŏn ilbo, December 14– 18, 1937.



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descriptions of the same scene in the scriptures have the power to excite me anew every time I read them. For it is here that the many layers of the veil covering Christ’s person and teachings lift to reveal Christ the man. The description in John 13 is especially visceral and presses upon me all the more powerfully. On this momentous occasion of sharing his last meal with his twelve beloved disciples, Jesus declares that there is one among them who will hand him over to his enemies. From the position encoded in the dictum “love thy neighbor,” an impossible poetic fantasy, this declaration is already an enigma. The disciples clamor about Jesus, asking, “Lord, who is it?” Christ replies, “It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” Without blinking, he then hands the piece of bread to Judas Iscariot, son of Simon. Numerous theologians have offered a religious explanation for Christ’s action, but I see in it a view of Christ gripped by feelings that are all too human. One detects no love for the enemy here, no attitude of compromise, but only the most biting, stern, and merciless denunciation of the wretched Judas, a fabric merchant’s son who has found favor in Satan’s eyes. And when Judas takes the bread, Jesus urges him sternly, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” While everyone else remains in a state of confusion, Judas makes an indignant exit from the room. The book of John tells us, “As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out. And it was night.” The scriptures, however, do not give us a single detail regarding Judas’ state of mind as he makes his exit and hurries over to the chief priests. The lack of detail clears the path for the literary imagination to take hold. This scene fills me with a strange excitement of a literary kind. But before discussing my excitement, let us first examine an additional scene from the scriptures. Toward the end of the last supper, Simon Peter, Jesus’ leading disciple, attempts to alleviate Jesus’ sadness by asking him, “Lord, why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus looks back at him and replies, “Will you really lay down your life for me? I tell you the truth, before the rooster crows you will disown me three times.” When Jesus is taken by the priests and the soldiers into the high priest’s courtyard, Peter, who had vowed to die for the Lord, follows him with another disciple and remains outside the door. Noticing Peter, a servant girl standing watch at the door asks him, “You are not one of his disciples, are you?” Peter assures her that he isn’t and denies his teacher. While his Lord is suffering insult and persecution in the courtyard, Peter, who had pledged loyalty unto death, denies his Lord three times in utter trepidation. But even before he has finished his third denial, he hears the

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rooster crow, and the sound shakes him to the very root of his being, body and soul. The Bible is not very detailed in describing Peter’s anguish, but all four writers of the Gospels record in a brief but memorable way the scene of Peter’s bitter weeping. Hearing the rooster’s crow, Peter is said to have walked out and wept loudly, striking the ground with his fists. One cannot help but feel with an almost physical force of despair the denunciation directed at Peter the man. 2 In their treatments of what happens to Judas after he exchanges his teacher for thirty pieces of silver, there is something overly inhospitable about the Gospels, which were written, after all, with a particular religious purpose in mind. To my knowledge, the only reference to Judas is the meager three lines in Matthew 7. From the very beginning, Judas was a character of the weakest moral strength among the disciples. Perhaps this is the reason why he is also the most human. The only disciple from the region of Judea, Judas was the one best acquainted with the maddening scent of money. As a failed fabric merchant fond of drinking, Judas appears to have been debt-ridden. The treasurer for the group, Judas received constant censure from the other disciples for borrowing from communal funds for drinking or paying off his personal debts. Moreover, Judas was thirsty for personal recognition. While the disciples were taking the opportunity of the teacher’s absence to strategize by the banks of the beautiful Jordan about the plan to take over Jerusalem, Judas is said to have burned with the desire to become the head of the entire operation. In the end, the Bible attributes Judas’ betrayal of Jesus for thirty ­pieces of silver to Satan’s attack, but when we consider all the surrounding circumstances, we can see how Judas’ many weaknesses made him vulnerable in the first place. On the night of the last supper, as he stepped out into the night already grown pitch dark, Judas must have felt bitterness and anger at Jesus for his words and actions during the meal. And it is this Judas who remains so vivid before our eyes. At the same time, it is clear that Judas did not imagine, not even in a dream, that Jesus would be hung on the cross. Matthew records it thus: When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty silver coins to the chief priests and the elders. “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”



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“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.” So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.

This brief reference causes us to spin limitless threads of imagination. Throwing away the money he had loved so dearly, Judas goes to the mountains and puts an end to his agony by hanging himself. To me, this death is no less valuable than the holy acts of the other disciples. In the foregoing discussion, I have relied on my paltry knowledge of the scriptures to indulge my view in a long-winded manner. I want to locate, however, a literary spirit of unprecedented loftiness in the three moving scenes we have witnessed above: Jesus exposing the traitor among his disciples, Peter weeping bitterly after denying his teacher, and Judas hanging himself in penitence for his act of betrayal. To my mind, it is in Judas that these three human emotions come together after passing through a couple of stages to cohere into a type. Why is it that we feel such a decisive pull in the scene of Judas’ suicide when he flings away the silver coins for which he had sold his soul and hangs himself, thereby achieving the final sublimation? This scene fascinates us to an even greater degree than Christ’s uncompromising and merciless denunciation of the disciple who will try to exchange him for thirty pieces of silver and Peter’s bitter tears as he beats his breast for his cowardice, skepticism, hesitation, and lack of moral courage. Together, these three scenes compel us powerfully, giving us a sense of that intuitive something that is linked to the spirit of modern literature. But it is particularly in Judas that we detect the closest physical resemblance to a modern-day petitbourgeois like ourselves. In his tormented death, therefore, I think we can discover the first moral principle of a petit-bourgeois writer. To carry out the first task of the lofty literary spirit that seeks to articulate a genuine critique of all things, a writer must wage a holy war with the Judas within himself, choosing to suffer deathly anguish rather than compromise. As such, the moral stand of a writer who tackles the first problem of literary practice is no different from the exalted inspiration, described above, that the scriptures give us. And herein lies the fearsome relevance of Judas, which justifies our efforts to wrest him away from the Bible and model him as our ancestor. In truth, the very nature of modernity is such that, wherever it spreads its wings, we find there the qualities of Judas. A bit of literary and social explanation may be necessary here to accompany the claim that the first moral principle of a realist writer should be to locate the Judas within himself before brandishing the pen that is his sword against the external object besieging him.

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3 That a writer always presents a given issue from his subjective standpoint is a thesis worth paying close attention to. The fact is, even when a writer discourses on a lofty matter that pertains broadly to the entire human race, he does so from within his subjective position. The question is not what the writer’s thoughts and beliefs may be about the state, society, nation, class, humanity, and the like, but the degree to which these lofty entities take on a breath and a heartbeat in the writer’s work as a matter affecting him personally. An individual writer does not express his vision of the world directly as an abstract concept; rather, this vision gains articulation as it passes through the subjectivity of the writer. One may then ask: Is the problem of the greatest urgency and personal importance to the writer, the problem that commands his breath at the core of his being, also as urgent and as important from the perspective of the nation, class, and history? For the modern writer, the most difficult and urgent task must be how intensely he can apprehend these issues as his own personal problem. It is only in such a context that we can pose the problem of the subject’s reconstruction or fulfillment. This is the reason why Mr. Im Hwa is entirely correct in pointing out that a writer does not solve the problem of subjective reconstruction by gaining a theoretical understanding of one worldview or another. But why does one detect an inescapable hole in Mr. Im Hwa’s subsequent discussions when he tries to resolve this problem with a few lines of theoretical explication? The reason lies nowhere other than in Mr. Im’s bracketing of the problem of the self. By shelving it as a matter fully elucidated already, Mr. Im sidesteps the question of the writer’s subjectivity that anyone attempting to formulate the reconstruction of the subject must confront fully at least once. He abstracts the problem of the “writer as individual” to the problem of “writers in general” and makes his way directly into the world of literature from there. When [the notion of] “writers in general” is grasped as an abstract concept, the question of the writer’s subjectivity may be very easy to resolve, but the project of subjective reconstruction and fulfillment will have to be abandoned for the convenience of an explanatory model. In actuality, this problem does not have the degree of internal unity that would allow the already established concept of the “realist writer” in general to be applied to it. The incontrovertible, though wretched, fact is that the problem [of the committed writer] is split from within in a much more confusing way. This is the reason why the writer as an entity is not to be understood generally and abstractly but to be investigated concretely, with all seriousness. En-



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gaging in the slightest bit of contemplation, we can understand that the [writer’s subjectivity] first emerges as the manifestation of Judas within the writer himself. These are desperate times, and writers have been brought to the realization that they cannot do anything at all without first resolving the problem of the self. This may be the reason why the attempt to expose the Judas within and to grapple uncompromisingly with it as the first step in the process of creative practice becomes the moral [obligation] of the modern writer. The writer must insist on the path of self-perusal, self-negation, and self-criticism, struggling with the Judas within to the very end until a conclusion is reached, right or wrong. This is also the reason why literary self-accusation by writers of a petit-bourgeois background represents one of the directions the literature of accusation (kobal munhak) must adopt. But what exactly is meant by the phrase “the Judas within”? Regarding this question, no insight whatsoever can come from the superficial fact that Judas sells his teacher for money. The phrase does not simply refer as a matter of common sense to the vulgar phenomenon of petitbourgeois intellectuals deserting certain “isms” they had adhered to or betraying their ideological beliefs. The question of “the Judas within” is one that must be raised alongside the intense reflection that “selling oneself” occasions. When viewed this way, the two travelogues of André Gide are of the greatest interest to us.12 The interest we feel in his first travelogue stems not from his critique of uniformity, which is argued more awkwardly than by even Lion Feuchtwanger,13 but of the glimpses it offers of Gide’s agonized struggle with the Judas within himself. This noble inner struggle ends, however, in a contemptible loss and selling of self in the revised travelogue. We might observe here that Gide tasted wretched defeat at the hands of “the Judas within.” 4 It is the poet more than anyone else who must stand decisively at the vanguard of the problem. Despite the fact that poetry, ever since the days of Homer’s epics, has become a literary form stripped of the social basis of its beauty, the modern age still cherishes it like a priceless treasure for its power, greater than that of any other literary genre, to appeal intuitively and thereby penetrate to the very heart of things. Rarely can any other genre so boldly present the problem of the writer himself. The example of Baudelaire is highly instructive in that he gained a place in the pantheon of the great poets with his magnificent expressions of the self’s fragmentation. Where there is a desire to seek shelter in vulgar romanti-

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cism or generalized meditations on life rather than confront squarely the Judas writhing within oneself, letting the sparks fly where they might, the spirit of poetry cannot be maintained. It is unfortunate that many Korean poets seek a shelter where they can forget themselves in contemplations of the seasons rather than immerse themselves in the actual current of the times. Indeed, we have been witness to many such cases of destruction all around us as the spirit of poetry becomes steeped in irresolution! These poets seek to be the six senses that forecast the seasons rather than the meteorologists who forecast history. For them, the basis of the feeling of pathos is simply that spring will invariably continue to give way to summer, summer to autumn, and autumn to winter, no matter how the world fares, whether or not civilization and the human intellect are laid to naked waste in a major crisis. Even the uncompromising poetic spirit that occasionally emerges from this cycle quickly degenerates into a cry as hollow as it is hackneyed, overlaid as it is on the Judas within, since it bypasses the problem of the poet himself like an express train. The poetic spirit becomes nothing but a steam whistle signaling the movement of a train to and fro on a fixed route. Gorky once referred to the two emotions of love and hate as the highest gifts given to man; the literary spirit that results from the writer’s struggle with the Judas within constructs itself upon the exquisite beauty of the unity between these two emotions. The object of denunciation is located in the field of hate. But what sustains this uncompromising and ceaseless struggle with the object of hate is the noble spirit of affirmation and love toward humanity, the belief in the power of the human will to ultimately obliterate the object of hate. To be sure, the desire to expose the Judas within springs from the feeling of hatred, but this feeling cannot exist where there is no lofty spirit of love and the belief in the possibility of redemption. What I am describing here should not be confused with the absurd desire for self-consolation sometimes harbored by petit-bourgeois intellectuals. The reason is that the direction that human reconstruction of the petit bourgeois must adopt should coincide as a matter of principle with the aspiration of the rational mind toward a scientific understanding of one’s historical position. Therefore, the attitude of intellectual self-caress displayed, for example, by Mr. Paek Ch’ŏl, which seeks to establish intellectuals as the cultural class that has existed without change from time immemorial, cannot give birth to this kind of intense literary spirit. Rather than building love upon the hate-driven denunciation of the Judas within, Mr. Paek Ch’ŏl seeks safe affirmations of the self through smug compromise and self-



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indulgence. His is a cleverly concealed example of an intellectual selling his heart. The times make severe demands of us writers to fix our eyes upon ourselves and solve the problem of self within the larger social context. Now is a moment when a meticulous physical examination is needed before we can arm ourselves with the proper scientific mindset. It may be that ours is an era when the process of honest self-examination will be equivalent to the process of scientific armament. We must build up science—on this there can be no disagreement. Approaching the study of the arts or creative writing as a science, it is quite natural to refuse to admit troublesome worries into its midst. I am confident that I would be second to none in acknowledging this. However, to the extent that the question of methodology in creative writing remains the arena where science (theory) and art are brought together in the most physical fashion (friction, opposition, synthesis) where the writer’s praxis is concerned, can we really afford to overlook how the writer is struggling with his own problems? Discussions such as the interpenetration of the worldview and the writing method—and whether a literature of accusation represents an example of realism—are necessary, to be sure. But for the modern writer, has it not been the case that the more urgent question is not how to depict but how to live? In fact, does not the terrible collision of life and art become an even more important problem? And is it not here that the question of subject-formation is raised in the first place? 5 As long as the writer does not inquire into himself and induce creative practice in a genuine attempt at self-reconstruction, social problems will always be presented merely as reproductions of comments on current events. A theory of agriculture will parade about as the reality of the countryside, and a theory of love as love itself. And when things come to such a state, not even a faint shadow of the writer’s creative breath or passion will remain. A given problem can be contemplated and presented only from the writer’s subjective position, and reconstruction of the subject is possible only when the writer becomes fully conscious of himself, including those aspects of the Judas within him. As the direction of the writer’s selfreformation leads him toward creative practice, the first moral principle of a petit-bourgeois writer comes into being. At the same time, the problems at the level of society, state, nation, and class—indeed all of humanity— will be refracted for the first time through a non-distorting prism. The writer’s attempt to defend realism with all his might against the intrusion of idealism is a problem that must be raised in conjunction with

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the aspirations of the above-described literary spirit. It is self-evident that the overcoming of any subjective or meditative tendencies that we may be committing in our literary practice is possible through the literature of self-indictment, which is one manifestation of the spirit of self-indictment. Of course, it hardly needs to be said that literature of self-indictment is related neither to the genre of the so-called I-novel nor to literary cynicism. The I-novel by nature constructs itself around the writer’s recording of the minutiae of his life; the genre tends to confine the writer inside the shell of his own inner consciousness. Self-indictment, in contrast, draws the writer out and into active collision with society, seeking reconstruction of the subject through this process. The two genres are fundamentally opposed. Self-derision, pessimism, and cynicism all belong to what the literature of self-indictment would critique as “the Judas within”; thus, no further elaboration on this point may be necessary. One of the opponents of the literature of self-indictment once singled out my proposal as an example of a writer deriving a worldview from himself. This is obviously a preposterous charge. What meaning can all the lip service paid to the worldview have when the problem of the self is thrown into the river of forgetfulness? Is the construction of subjectivity and ideology even possible where the mouthing of a particular worldview fails to stir the heart in the slightest? How is it that the grand worldviews professed in daily columns or lectures on literature become a handful of empty formulas the moment the writer steps over into more creative genres like the miscellany and the essay? I have a record of rejecting such worldviews. But this rejection was motivated by the desire to complete a true worldview within myself. Judas, through his agonizing death, succeeded in turning into something almost sublime that aspect of himself that triumphed when he sold his very soul for thirty pieces of silver. Resorting to suicide, the very last available measure, Judas ultimately managed to overcome the Judas within himself. The descendants of Judas who live in this modern age, however, will probably choose agony-ridden death as a means of overcoming the Judas within, where the highest of emotions, uniting hatred and love, dominates all means to an end. Perhaps these modern descendants of Judas will strike the earth and weep like Peter. They may despise this inner struggle that causes an agony almost as painful as death. Whatever the case may be, they will most certainly leave valiant traces of their struggles with the Judas within until they have fully succeeded in reforming themselves. And yet, there may be those among our dear writers who would prefer the position of the other eleven disciples. Failing to comprehend the meaning of Christ’s comments regarding Judas, and ignorant of Satan’s



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grip on Judas, they might have supposed that Judas was only going out to buy necessary items for services to be held or to give alms to the poor. These writers are free, of course, to seek bliss in such befuddled ignorance.

Notes 1. One of the central figures of the post-liberation communist leadership, Pak Hŏnyŏng (1900–1955) played an instrumental role in the formation of the South Korean Workers’ Party. When the U.S. occupational government placed him on the most-wanted list, Pak escaped to the North and served in a number of key positions within the government. With the unification of the North and South Korean Workers’ Parties in 1950, however, his position effectively became subordinate to Kim Il Sung’s, and he was ultimately executed in a massive purge of former South Korean Workers’ Party members. 2. On August 16, 1945, one day after liberation, Im Hwa, Kim Namch’ŏn, and Yi Wŏnjo (1909–1955) founded the Headquarters for the Construction of Korean Literature (Chosŏn Munhak Kŏnsŏl Ponbu). Their emphasis was on building a united front of workers, peasants, and the progressive middle class in order to create a new national culture free of feudal and Japanese imperialist remnants. The organization’s outlook on the “united national front” followed Pak Hŏnyŏng’s “August Thesis.” 3.  Expressing strong dissatisfaction with what they perceived to be the headquarters’ marginalization of the class question, such writers as Yi Kiyŏng (1895– 1984) and Han Sŏrya (1900–1963) formed a rival group called the Korean Proletarian Literature Alliance (Chosŏn P’ŭrollet’aria Munhak Tongmaeng). 4. “Yudajŏgin kŏt kwa munhak,” Chosŏn ilbo, December 14–18, 1937. 5. “Ch’oegŭn munye iron ŭi sin chŏngae wa kŭ kyŏnghyang” (Latest Trends in Development of Literary Theory), Tonga ilbo, January 2–11, 1934. 6. “Kobal ŭi chŏngsin gwa chakka—sin ch’angjak iron ŭi kuch’ehwa rŭl wihayŏ,” Chosŏn ilbo, June 1–5, 1937. 7. Ch’angjak pangbŏp ŭi sin kungmyŏn—kobal ŭi munhak e taehan chaeron,” Chosŏn ilbo, July 10–15, 1937. 8. Im Hwa, “6 wŏljung ŭi ch’angjak” (On Works Published in June), Chosŏn ilbo, July 12–19, 1933. 9. “Munhakchŏk ch’igireul unnora,” Chosŏn ilbo, October 12, 1933. 10. Yi Hŏngu, for example, wrote that “at the present time, so lacking in ambition, passion, or burning desire, the spirit and passion that seek mercilessly to indict all existing confusion and contradiction demand a critical task of us.” See “Sasang, saenghwal e taehan chasŏng” (Self-Reflection Regarding Thought and Life), Chosŏn ilbo, August 8, 1937. 11. “Chuch’e ŭi chaegŏn gwa munhak ŭi segye,” Tonga ilbo, November 1–16, 1937. 12. André Gide (1869–1951), French novelist and essayist. Gide was also a

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noted travel writer, criticizing French colonialism in Africa in such works as Voyage au Congo (Travels in the Congo, 1927). The two travelogues Kim alludes to here are Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (Return from the USSR, 1936) and Retouches à mon retour de l’U.R.S.S. (Afterthoughts on the USSR, 1937), written after Gide’s journey to the Soviet Union in 1936. Though he remained a devoted communist sympathizer in the 1930s, Gide bitterly denounced the kind of communism he witnessed during his Soviet trip. 13. Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958), a prominent novelist and playwright in Weimar Germany. Kim’s reference to the “critique of uniformity” here may refer to Feuchtwanger’s criticism of the Nazi Party. Feuchtwanger would pay for his views after Hitler’s ascendancy and only narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis, ultimately finding asylum in the United States.

CHAPTER 11

Kim Tongni Introduction and Translation by Chiyoung Kim

Introduction Kim  Tongni  (1913–1995),  the  author  of  “The  True  Meaning  of  Pure  Literature” and “A Personal Opinion on Writing Literature,” is among the best  known  of  Korean  fiction  writers.  With  such  widely  read  works  as  “The  Shaman  Painting”  (Munyŏdo,  1936),  “Legend  of  Yellow  Earth”  (Hwangt’ogi, 1939), and “Post-Horse Curse” (Yŏngma, 1948), he created  a unique world of mysticism and folklore by drawing on the native traditions of Korea. At a time when the Korean literary world was split between modernist and realist tendencies, these works opened a new realm  of literature distinct from both. Kim Tongni was born in Kyŏngju, a region particularly rich in traditional legends, folktales, and Silla history. The ancient character of his native place may have contributed to the distinctive incorporation of traditional elements in his work. Unlike many other Korean intellectuals of the  period, Kim did not go abroad to Japan to study but conducted his studies in rural Korea under the great influence of his oldest brother, Pŏmbu, a famous Confucian scholar. During this period of study, Kim became a close associate of Sŏ Chŏngju’s1 and explored many of the themes that held Sŏ’s  interest as well, such as Buddhism and the aesthetics of Korean folk life.  He made his literary debut in 1935 when his short story “A Descendent of the Hwarang”2 (Hwarang ŭi huye) won the spring literary contest held  by the Central Daily (Chungang ilbo). The following year, “Mountain Fire”  (Sanhwa) won the spring literary contest sponsored by the East Asia Daily (Tonga ilbo), and, with subsequent works that employ mysticism, such as  “The Shaman Painting” (Munyŏdo) and “The Rock” (Bawi, 1936), he secured his reputation as a young writer of great promise. From this point until his death in 1995, Kim Tongni led a long and illustrious life of letters.3 197

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Although his literary criticism is overshadowed by the brilliance of his fiction, Kim Tongni was one of the leading critics of his day and an active contributor to many important literary debates. In particular, he played a pivotal role in the “generational controversy” (sedae nonjaeng)4 of the late 1930s and in the “Left-Right controversy” (chwau nonjaeng)5 of the years immediately following Korea’s emancipation from Japanese colonial rule (1945–1948). From the post-liberation era, he headed a right-wing literary circle known as the Association of Young Writers (Chŏngnyŏn Munhakka Hyŏphoe) that later evolved into the Association of Korean Writers (Hanguk Munhakka Hyŏphoe), the group that secured a dominant position in the South Korean literary world. Two key concepts recur in Kim Tongni’s literary criticism: “pure literature” and “literature as a form of life that aspires to the ultimate.” In “The True Meaning of Pure Literature,” Kim Tongni outlines his thesis of the former concept as one intimately linked to the historical integration of humanism and nationalism. In “A Personal Opinion on Writing Literature,” he develops the latter concept, a phrase that encodes his literary philosophy. Together, these two articles encapsulate Kim Tongni’s distinctive theory of literature. Although written in the post-liberation era, they reveal the ideas that guided a new literary trend initiated by young authors and poets like Kim Tongni and Sŏ Chŏngju in the late 1930s, a trend that emphasized traditional Korean folk life and its lyricism. Kim Tongni first introduced his idea of pure literature as a “literature that defends humanity” during the generational controversy of the late 1930s. In the course of this controversy, he emphasized the importance of the distinct individuality and personal experiences of the writer in achieving literary expression. His position took issue with the older generation’s conviction that literature should reflect society and strive toward the reformation of historical reality. He continued to expand on the notion of pure literature in the turbulent post-liberation era by opposing it to propagandistic Marxist literature. “The True Meaning of Pure Literature” was thus an attempt to offer a scholarly basis for pure literature through investigations of humanism and nationalism: Kim settled on the now-famous concept of “humanism of the third stage” as the theoretical justification for pure literature. To put it simply, third-stage humanism was humanism without what Kim Tongni perceived to be the negative aspects of rationalism. In that an overly zealous commitment to logic and science was linked in his mind to a Marxist materialistic conception of history, the Western Enlightenment’s valorization of logic and science was quite problematic for Kim. He argued instead that human existence and its spiritual character carry



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a meaning that far transcends the logic of material science. In this context, Kim defined pure literature as literature that aspires to the humanism of the third stage and national literature as pure literature at the level of the nation. This definition of national literature was forged in clear view of his opposition, that is, writers who propounded the goal of people’s democracy or proletarian liberation in literature. In contrast to the Marxist emphasis on class and society, Kim privileged individuality and the nation, which he saw as being more fundamental concepts. Beginning in mid-1946, Kim’s position became very influential in South Korea on account of the explicitly anti-Marxist policy adopted by the government and the concomitant migration of Marxist writers to North Korea. This hegemonic position notwithstanding, Kim’s theory of pure literature was arguably controversial in some ways. First, the logic that enabled him to equate pure literature with the defense of humanity and ultimately with national literature was circular and largely unsubstantiated. Second, his critique of rationalism tended to be carried out unilaterally without discriminating between rational and instrumental reason. Finally, in choosing to invoke an abstract notion such as “the defense of humanity” rather than investigate a concrete historical time period and a specific social context, Kim ultimately concealed from view actual problems that plagued Korean society following liberation. Despite such controversial aspects, Kim Tongni’s literary views need to be reconsidered from a perspective that takes into account the writer’s desire to construct a distinctive literary theory independent of Western influence. He understood the problems associated with the blind application of Western intellectual theories to the peculiarities of the Korean situation, problems that many of his contemporaries had overlooked. This was the reason he rejected the linear historicism of Marxists as formulaic and universalistic. Kim Tongni was able to perceive that the complex multiplicity of life could not be fully grasped solely through exercises in objectivity. Criticizing scientific materialism’s method of trying to comprehend logically the objective world in its totality, he focused on the particular life of individual subjects and attempted to locate in it a logic that might transcend reason. Even though he did participate in political movements in the post-liberation period, his object in literature remained a transcendental ideal beyond the limits of historical time and political ideology. He summarized this ideal by coining a new phrase: “literature as a form of life that aspires to the ultimate.” First used in the article “The Literary Spirit of the New Generation,” the neologism received fuller treatment in “A Personal Opinion on Writing Literature.” Like “The True Meaning of Pure Literature,” this article relies on circuitous reasoning, but

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critics generally agree that it offers Kim Tongni’s most detailed discussion of his own literary views. When “A Personal Opinion on Writing Literature” was first published in the journal White-Clad People (Paengmin) in 1948, Kim Tongni was criticized by Cho Yŏnhyŏn, another leading critic belonging to the Association of Young Writers, for “confusing literature with philosophy and religion by failing to discriminate between thought and faith.”6 Probably on account of this critique, Kim revised the article to stress the difference between literature and religion. He included this revised version in his first collection of critical essays, Literature and Humanity (Munhak gwa ingan, 1952). I have chosen to translate this revised version because it is more detailed and reflective of the author’s intention. In “A Personal Opinion on Writing Literature,” Kim considers the practice of writing literature as “a form of life that aspires to the ultimate.” According to Kim, “life that aspires to the ultimate” meant experiencing oneself as an incarnation of the universe, participating in the unfolding of the common fate bestowed on humanity, and achieving ultimate oneness with the universe. Evident here are the roots of Kim Tongni’s vision in traditional Eastern cosmology; that is, that the world is an organism, and the universe resides in even a tiny particle of dust. For Kim Tongni, this “life” was the highest and most genuine form of existence, and he hence likened it to finding the divine within the human. A particular characteristic of this divinity was that it existed in every human being but in different manifestations. Since it was not a fixed entity as in organized religions but something that renewed itself in every individual, it could be reified differently and creatively without having its essence compromised. Through this concept, Kim Tongni was able to combine, without being inconsistent, the seemingly contradictory projects of highlighting individuality and of finding an archetype of life. The argument also confirmed the view he expressed in the late 1930s that literature was “an organic embodiment, the coming together of the world’s rhythm and an individual’s pulse under specific engagements of writing.”7 The meaning of this key phrase is still debated among scholars. However, we can see the embodiment of this view in his mystical and incantatory short stories, most notably “The Shaman Painting,” “Legend of Yellow Earth,” and “Post-Horse Curse.” The demands that Kim Tongni placed on literature were grand: He sought to locate in it the essential source of life and the archetype of the human spirit that could transcend temporal, historical, and political limitations. Korean tradition, local legends, and shamanism provided the medium for this search. Kim Tongni’s theories thus represent a genuine effort to honor the distinctive qualities of Korean literature and articulate



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a way of looking at inner and outer realities other than from the prescriptions of the Western intellectual tradition. It is here that the significance of Kim Tongni’s critical work may be located.

The True Meaning of Pure Literature: A Present Task of National Literature* I Among some literary groups and within general society there is a growing tendency of late to consider pure literature only in its passive aspect and see it merely as academic or as an aesthetic literature. By revealing the true meaning of pure literature, I hope to correct this misconception. Pure literature is, in a word, literature that upholds the original principles of the literary spirit. These original principles lie, naturally, in the defense of humanity. Humanism, always the basis of pure literature, demands this defense of humanity, especially now that the creative consciousness of humanity premised upon full possession of individuality is undergoing expansion. If humanism is the fundamental basis of pure literature as I am defining it, on what does its historical inevitability rest? Limiting our inquiry at first to the West, we can give a summary treatment of Western literature by dividing it broadly into three stages. The first stage is that of ancient humanism, represented among the Greeks by Socrates and Plato and their concern with the rational human mind and in the Hebraic tradition by Jesus Christ and the securing of humanity through the growth of the elevated soul. This period is characterized in content by protests against and destruction of mythic and superstitious commandments or sophistry, the consequence of which was the establishment of the foundation of humanism at its most basic level. Ushered in by the Renaissance, the second stage represents what might be called the victory of anthropocentrism over theocentrism. Though referred to as a revival of the first stage of humanism, the second stage began as a reaction against theocentrism and hence placed particular emphasis on the Hellenic legacy of the rational mind. It is true that the blossoming of this rational human mind gave rise to the scientific thought of today, but an overly zealous commitment to the modern scientific ethos also brought forth mechanistic scientism and formulaic scholarly theory.8 Mythical *Kim Tongni, “Sunsu munhak ŭi chinŭ—minjok munhak ŭi tangmyŏn kwajerosŏ,” Sŏul sinmun (September 15, 1946), 4. Translated from Kim Tongni, Munhak kwa ingan (Seoul: Ingansa, 1952), 105–109.

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idols of ancient times and the codified sacrality of the Middle Ages were replaced by a new, modern idol, and its name was science. The very crystallization of the mechanically scientistic point of view was none other than historical materialism. In this way the aspiration toward a third stage of humanism was proclaimed by such philosophers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Dilthey, and in literature by Hesse, Mann, Gide, Huxley, et al. The current global trend toward democracy can also be considered one aspect of the worldwide desire for humanism, whose aim is to ensure the freedom of individuality and the dignity of humankind. In Korea today, however, special circumstances in politics and society and unnatural relations between these two realms have led to the ascendancy of mechanistic scientism, a disease characteristic of underdeveloped societies. Thus, writers belonging to the Writers’ Alliance,9 whose core members come from what used to be called the “tendency group,” are continually proposing formulaic theories within the schema of a materialist conception of history that bear names like “the scientific worldview,” “progressive realism,” “revolutionary romanticism,” and “the scientific creative method.” We must remember, however, that this kind of modern scientific idolatry not only restricts the desire for cultural creation in a world-historical context but also represents a cancer hindering the establishment of a national culture. As a rule, a national literature must be based on a national ethos, and a national ethos is, in essence, nothing more than humanism on the level of the nation. We achieved the current expansion of our national ethos after a half-century of suffering from cruel ethnic repression at the hands of another nation; it is our courageous national ethos forged in the crucible of history that led us to freedom. We can see this humanism at the national level as a result of the inevitable inheritance of world humanism, democracy. When we consider a national ethos as humanism on the national level, we can see that it is impossible by their very nature to separate pure literature, which has humanism as its core content, from national literature, which is grounded in a national ethos. Just as the national literature we seek is a part of world literature, what we call our national ethos will instantiate humanism on the national scale as a part of world-historical humanism. The spirit of pure literature today is that which contains humanism at the level of the nation in its world-historical aspect. What I have called the perspective of world history here signifies the inclination toward the humanism of the third stage in the history of world thought, as discussed above. This humanism can be truly unleashed only by uncovering new spiritual sources derived from the creative sublation of the Eastern and the Western spirit. What the spirit of pure literature in our land aspires to establish is a national literature that simultaneously



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achieves the status of world literature. This can be accomplished by establishing a literature that draws upon the greatness of Eastern wisdom while illuminating the world historical nature of third-stage humanism, which is grounded in the current historical moment of a burgeoning national spirit. In order to accomplish this goal we must first cast off our infantile prejudices against pure literature. In addition, every one of us must develop the proper perspective for establishing a national literature by experiencing the national ethos through our own individuality, conscience, and sincerity, and by a resounding confirmation of the humanism of the third stage through a creative sublation of this national ethos. In the end, we can conclude that the only correct way to practice the true meaning of pure literature is to endeavor to fulfill its world-historical mission by creating a new human spirit.

A Personal Opinion on Writing Literature—on the Inclination of My Literary Spirit* When asked what it means to write literature, only a rare few among those who profess to be writers will actually be able to give an independent answer. We often hear such phrases as “literature for everyday life” or “literature for human life,” on the one hand, and “literature for literature’s sake” or “literature for art’s sake,” on the other. But it is a strange phenomenon indeed that even those who affix such opinions or interpretations to the function or nature of literature do not know what the actual writing of literature is in and of itself. The kind of literature does not matter; as long as it is literature they are writing or think they are writing, they cannot be ignorant of what “writing literature” really means. By literature, we usually mean poetry or fiction (we might also include plays and literary criticism). This is fine of course. The question then becomes, what does it mean to write poetry or fiction? A poet or a fiction writer should not turn to dictionaries, introductory texts on literature, and the like, for an answer. These texts may be used as references but cannot provide the answer itself. A poet or fiction writer must ask himself what it is to write poetry or fiction and find his own answer to the question. There are numerous vocations in the world; the variety is in truth almost limitless: shoemakers, tailors, noodle makers, plate makers, farm*Kim Tongni, “Munhak hanŭn kŏse taehan sago—na ŭi munhak chŏngsin ŭi chihyang e taehayŏ,” in Paengmin (March 1948), 42–45, translated from Kim Tongni, Munhak kwa ingan (Seoul: Ingansa, 1952), 95–103.

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ers, carpenters, sellers of general merchandise, lawyers, doctors, military and government officials, waterworks clerks, bicycle repairmen, Bible ladies, bank and corporate employees, and so on. Writing poetry or fiction should not be just another vocation. If a work of poetry or fiction is manufactured just as a pair of shoes or sheets of paper are made, then a poet or fiction writer would be no more than a manufacturer of poetry or fiction, a mere craftsman or reporter. Such an attitude toward literature ought to be denounced as much as is the attempt to make literature a political tool.10 II What is the truest, most noble meaning of writing literature? It is my belief that writing literature should be nothing less than a form of life that aspires to the ultimate. What, then, is a form of life that aspires to the ultimate?11 This discussion must proceed from the premise that the starting point for any cultural production or creation is affirmation of life. The reason is that no cultural form, let alone literature, can be born where life itself is being negated. Even those like Jesus Christ or Schopenhauer12 who devoted their entire lives to explaining the meaninglessness of existence actualized their lives precisely through this explication, and though they might have denied certain ideals or the principles of life, they did not deny life itself. Therefore, whether or not an individual as a thinking subject denies the principles (or ideals) of life, he continues to affirm life as long as he desists from giving up on life or stops living altogether; even the denial of life’s principles may be seen as expressing an affirmation of life in a particular way. Likewise, if all cultural production is possible only where life is manifest, then writing literature cannot escape this principle either. To write literature, therefore, must first be to live life. How, then, can living life be equivalent to writing literature? There are various gradations of living. First, in the most general sense, existence can be said to encompass all living phenomena, including wild beasts and domesticated animals. The next level of existence is vocational life, the most common form of living carried on by the species of animals called humans. People are born. They then grow up, take on jobs (or lose them), and make families (or lose loved ones). They eat, sleep, work, and may or may not amuse and console themselves through diversions. Then they get old and that’s that. Eating, sleeping, procreating, and playing in this way, human beings are no different from beasts, but they alone have vocational life because they are rational and social animals. This form of life thus represents a higher



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level of existence than the mere phenomenon of living. In the end, however, the highest ideal sought by this vocational life is no more than to establish [a social] order of greater fairness, more equal distribution of material possessions, jobs with greater comfort due to the advance of science, economic abundance, and more amusements. Of course, there is no harm in having these; in fact, people should strive to have such things. With this kind of life, however, there is no continuity of existence. The question is, what comes next? Can we content ourselves with living some years in relative comfort, relative convenience, relative leisure and happiness, and ending our lives there? Those who can fulfill their thirst for life this way will probably stop here. All of their cultural production would be confined to this second level of existence as well. But those who cannot be satisfied with this, those whose thirst for life will not rest easy here, they are the ones who will seek the third level of life. This next level is what I have termed above “life that aspires to the ultimate.” It is at this point that humanity comes to embrace divinity (sinmyŏng)13 out of the desire to overcome finitude. If the expression “embracing divinity” is objectionable, it can also be understood as an attempt to find an incarnation of the universe within the self.14 More specifically, we come to discover that an organic relationship that cannot be severed exists between ourselves and the universe, owing to the fact that each of us is born into the universe and maintains an existence within it, and that we are bound by a common fate as far as this organic relationship is concerned. We need to discover this common fate conferred on us and move toward its unfolding. Unless we pursue this task, we remain eternal fragments of the universe, unable to experience ourselves as its incarnations. In the absence of this experience, our lives cannot achieve oneness with the universe. What I call “life that aspires to the ultimate” is precisely this discovery of the common fate bestowed on us and a striving toward its expression. This is also what it means to write literature. Only through this can we fulfill the ultimate in our lives. III When the meaning of “writing literature” and “life that aspires to the ultimate” is considered in this way, a question naturally arises about the relationship between writing literature and religious cultivation. The differences are self-evident. In form, religion is based on praise, prayer, and faith, whereas literature involves contemplation, imagination, and creation (expression). In content, religion calls on its believers to offer their obedience, devotion, and faith to a god already discovered and

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embodied, while in literature each individual seeks a god that is ever renewed in or through himself. Moreover, such searching does not disturb the autonomy of literature, since the “self” in every individual is a human being. The reason why all individuals are human is that, although humans have certain similarities to animals, they have something that differs from or surpasses animals. If we did not have, or if it was possible for us not to have, this distinct, transcending element, there would be no basis for differentiating humanity from other animals. But since we do in fact have, and cannot but have, this distinct, transcending element, we cannot but seek the essence of that difference. This search is not separate from the aforementioned quest for divinity in or through the human self. When we consider that advocating the autonomy of literature is no different from seeking the essence of humanity and aspiring to its ideal, I believe it will not be difficult to understand that “each individual’s search for an ever-renewed god in or through himself” does not impair the autonomy of literature. Nor is it impaired by my assertion that writing literature is “a form of life that aspires to the ultimate.” Here, I would like to caution that the system of Western thought, particularly in the modern period, has divided literature, philosophy, religion, politics, science, and mathematics into disciplines too professionalized and too separate from one another. It is our belief, however, that we cannot accept that any one discipline be subordinated to or dominated by any other discipline. At the same time, we have come to believe that no discipline can deny life that aspires to the ultimate at its core. We are, first and foremost, living entities. All literary creation must focus on how we can live more truthfully, more beautifully, more profoundly. In principle and in point of fact, realization of “life that aspires to the ultimate” is possible through any of the different disciplines, including literature, politics, religion, philosophy, education, and science. Confucius and Ghandi, for example, pursued this life through politics. For Lao-Tzu, Socrates, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Bergson, philosophy was the vehicle, and for Tao Qian, Wang Wei, Du Fu, Li Bo, Dante, Goethe, Tolstoi, and Dostoevsky, literature. Newton, Pascal, and Einstein each achieved this life through science. I should add before concluding that I of course do not believe that pursuing “a form of life that aspires to the ultimate” is the only way of writing literature. Just as there are numerous levels of meaning and myriad values in literary works, there are myriad ranks and levels to writing literature. But when I use the term “writing literature,” I refer to its loftiest and truest dimension rather than to literature in general. In this essay, I have elaborated on what I consider to be the ultimate horizon that writing literature must aspire to; the title of this essay accordingly bears the phrase “a personal opinion.”



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Notes 1. Sŏ Chŏngju (1915–2000) is a well-known Korean poet who published poetry collections such as The Flower Snake Collection (Hwasajip, 1941) and Silla Notes (Silla ch’o, 1960). 2. Hwarang refers to an elite group of young men during the Silla dynasty. 3. Kim received numerous prizes, including the Art Institute Prize (Yesul Wŏnsang) and the Korean Citizens Medal (Taehan Minguk Kungmin Hunchang) and held key posts in Korean literary institutions such as the Korean Authors’ Association (Hanguk Sosŏl Kayŏp Hoe) and the Korean Art Institute (Taehan Minsuk esulwŏn). 4. The “generational controversy” took place in the late 1930s, a collision between members of an older generation who were in their thirties at that time and the younger generation who were in their twenties. The debate originated in the discussions on the “pure” that took place between Kim Tongni, Yu Chin’o, and Kim Hwant’ae, among others. See, for example, Yu Chin’o, “Aspiring to the Pure” (Sunsu e ŭi chihyang), Munjang (June 1939); Kim Tongni, “Another Opinion on the Pure” (Sunsu yiŭi), Munjang (August 1939); Kim Hwant’ae, “Dispute on the Pure” (Sunsu sibi), Munjang (November 1939); and Kim Tongni, “The Literary Spirit of the New Generation” (Sin sidae ŭi munhak chŏngsin), Maeil sinbo (Daily News), February 21–22, 1940. 5. This controversy took place during the post-liberation era between rightwing literary circles represented by the Association of Young Writers (Chŏngnyŏn Munhakka Hyŏp′hoe) and left-wing literary circles represented by the Literary Alliance (Munhak Tongmaeng). Representative articles that engaged in the controversy include Kim Tongni, “The True Meaning of Pure Literature” (Sunsu munhak ŭi chinŭi), Seoul sinmun (Seoul Daily News), September 15, 1946; Cho Yŏnhyŏn, “Crisis of Literature” (Munhak ŭi wigi), Ch’ŏngnyŏn sinmun (Youth News), April 2, 1946; Kim Pyŏngkyu, “Problems of the Pure and Humanism” (Sunsu munche wa hyumŏnijŭm), Munhak 3 (April 1947); and Kim Tongsŏk, “The Identity of the Pure: On Kim Tongni” (Sunsu ŭi chŏngch’e—Kim Tongni ron), Sin ch’ŏnji (December 1947). 6. Yŏnhyŏn Cho, Munhak kwa sasang (Literature and Thought) (Seoul: Segye munhaksa, 1949), 169. Cho was a prominent literary critic of the post-liberation era who along with Kim Tongni led the right-wing literary movement. He strongly opposed Marxist literary ideology and tried to articulate and expand on Kim’s theories of pure literature. 7. Kim Tongni, “Na ŭi sosŏl suŏp” (My Literary Training), Munjang (March 1940): 174. 8. “Formulaic scholarly theory” seems here to indicate the Marxist conception of materialist history. 9. The Korean Writers’ Alliance (Chosŏn Munhakka Tongmaeng), a leftwing literary association in the post-liberation era. Led by Im Hwa, Yi Wŏnjo, and

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Kim Namch’ŏn, the group called for a national literature that furthered the cause of popular democracy. 10. Kim is referring to Marxist literary circles. 11. A phrase coined by Kim Tongni, its meaning is still in debate among Korean scholars. Meaning “aspiring to the ultimate,” the word kugyŏng has also been used in Buddhism to indicate “the understanding of the Buddha.” In this vein, “life aspiring to the ultimate” (kugyŏngchŏk salm) may roughly be interpreted as an investigation of the eternal truth through one’s life or inner self. See Kim Yunsik, “ ‘Kugyŏngchŏk salm ŭi hyŏngsik’ ŭi munhakkwan hyŏngsŏng e taehan yŏngu” (A Study on the Formation of the Literary Point of View of a “Form of Life That Aspires to the Ultimate”), Hanguk hakpo (Korea Bulletin) 71 (1993): 2–45; Kim Yunsik, “ ‘Kugyŏngchŏk saeng ŭi hyŏngsik’ ŭi munhak sasangsajŏk wising” (The Status of a “Form of Life that Aspires to the Ultimate” in the History of Literary Thought), Chakka segye (Writers’ World) 67 (November 2005): 96–117; and Im Yŏngpong, “Kim Tongni sosŏl ŭi kudojŏk sŏnggyŏk” (The Truth-Seeking Character of Kim Tongni’s Fiction), Uri munhak yŏngu (On Our Literature) 24 (2008): 341–371. 12. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), a German philosopher known in Korea as one of the representative thinkers of nihilism. 13. “Sinmyŏng” refers to the phrase “ch’ŏngi sinmyŏng” (the heaven, the earth, and the gods), which indicates the operating principles and entities of the universe in Korean shamanism. 14. This belief derives from the organicist view of the universe in classical Eastern thought. Kim Tongni was deeply influenced by his brother Pŏmbu, a famous scholar of Eastern philosophy. According to this philosophy, one should investigate and realize the very nature of the universe in the self, a self that already contains that universe within.

CHAPTER 12

Son Chint’ae Introduction and Translation by Mickey Hong

Introduction The  preface  to  his  seminal  work,  Introduction to the History of the Korean Nation  (Chosŏn minjoksa kaeron,  1948),  is  Son  Chint’ae’s  manifesto  for  a  new Korean history free from what he repeatedly criticizes as the monarchism  (wangsil chuŭi )  and  aristocentrism  (kwijok chuŭi )  of  previous  historiography. A pioneer of Korean folklore history, Son Chint’ae (pen  name  Namch’ang)  was  born  on  December  28,  1900,  in  Tongnae,  South  Kyŏngsang  Province.  He  entered  Waseda  University  in  1921  with  the  support of a Korean benefactor. He was intellectually influenced by his advisor, the Japanese historian and anthropologist Nishimura Shinji (1879–1943).1 Son was an original member of the Color Stripes Club (Saektonghoe)  founded  in  1923  by  Pang  Chŏnghwan  (1899–1931)2 with other Koreans in Japan to promote children’s cultural activities and protect their rights. Son wrote many poems throughout his career. The first to be published, “A Shooting Star” (Pyŏlttong), appeared in Children (Ŏrini), a children’s magazine that the Color Stripes Club started. After graduating with a degree in history and sociology in 1927, Son worked as a librarian at Toyo Press, meeting famous scholars, including  Shiratori  Kurakichi  (1865–1942).3 He also traveled throughout Korea to collect materials for folklore studies under the sponsorship of the Japan  Academy (Nippon Gakushiin). The academic climate of the time in Japan  was profoundly affected by Western discourses on race, nationalism, and philology. When he wrote “The Formation of the Korean People and Their Culture” (Chosŏn minjok ŭi kusŏng kwa kŭ munhwa, 1927)4 Son already perceived the danger of ideas about racial superiority, as expressed, for instance, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899). Warning against unscientific treatise based  209

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merely on “imagination and dogmatism,”5 Son proclaimed the need for Koreans to recognize the importance of aesthetics in their own national culture before adopting and imitating what was foreign. While he clearly embraced the Enlightenment movement and was opposed to remaining static in a rapidly changing world, he emphasized the need for solidarity among Koreans as they mobilized to “construct a great Korean culture.”6 After publishing several books on folklore studies in Japanese, including Collected Old Folksongs of Korea (Chōsen kogayōshū, 1929), Extant Shamanist Songs of Korea (Chōsen shinka ihen, 1930), and Collected Folk Stories of Korea (Chōsen mindanshū, 1930), Son returned to Korea in 1933 and began to lecture at Yonhi (Yŏnhŭi) College.7 Along with his colleagues Song Sŏkha (1904–1948) and Chŏng Insŏp (1905–1983), he formed the Korean Folklore Studies Association (Chosŏn Minsok Hakhoe) and published Korea’s first folklore studies journal, Korean Folklore (Chosŏn minsok). It is commonly held that the reason Son shifted focus from folklore to history after liberation is because historical research had been impeded by the Japanese colonial government. However, that conjecture may be unfounded, for Son did lecture on Oriental cultural history at Yonhŭi College before 1945. Just as Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) had sought a “new nativism”8 in post-war Japan, Son felt after World War II the impetus for a new national history that was free of ethnocentrism and less isolated from international currents of thought. Thus, his post-liberation transition from folklore studies to history can be seen as an expansive development integrating folklore into national history rather than switching to anotherfield of study. But recent research into Son’s unpublished manuscripts indicates that he was developing the ideas contained in the Introduction to the History of the Korean Nation during the late 1930s.9 In 1946, one year after liberation, what had been Keijō (K. Kyŏngsŏng) Imperial University became Seoul National University and Son a professor in its history department. He then began to actively publish historical works, including Research on the Tales of the Korean Nation (Chosŏn minjok sŏlhwa ŭi yŏngu, 1947), Research on the Culture of the Korean Nation (Chosŏn minjok munhwa ŭi yŏngu, 1948), and The Road That Our Nation Has Walked (Uri minjŏk ŭi kŏrŏ on kil, 1948). After the establishment of the new South Korean government, Son was appointed vice-minister of education and editor-in-chief of its publications, posts he held until 1949, when he became dean of the Teacher’s College of Seoul National University. It was a tumultuous time in Korean history and Son, already in poor health, had to face a number of challenges on campus. Students were fighting each other while protesting against a new reform policy aimed at modeling the university after the American higher-education system as well as against



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the new government’s draconian, anti-communist National Security Law instituted in 1948. He was physically attacked by students who opposed Hakto Hoguktan (National Student Defense Corps, NSDC) but sustained only a bullet wound to his finger. The NSDC, “a government-controlled nationwide student body organized as a paramilitary unit,” was “intimately tied to anti-communist education.”10 He stepped down as dean of the Teachers’ College to become dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Seoul National University in 1950, less than a month before the Korean War broke out. Son was captured by North Korean forces while hiding on Samgak Mountain near Seoul just before the United Nations Command Forces recaptured the city in September 1950. Not much is known about his life after he was taken to the North; however, it appears as though he proved to be as resilient in his ideology as he was visionary in his conception of a new Korean history. He refused to cooperate with the North Korean government and as punishment was sent to labor on a farm, where he died some time during the 1960s. The historical urgency that compelled Son to finish Introduction to the History of Korean Nation despite his illness was that, in 1948, it was clear that Korea would be separated into two regimes with the establishment of the Republic of Korea in the south under President Syngman Rhee (1875–1965) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north under the leadership of Kim Il Sung (1913–1994). It was a time when Koreans needed to be reminded of their common history despite the cruel reality of the nation being severed by both international politics and internal conflict. Son began the preface with a sense of regret that the study of Korean history was dominated by records that pertained only to the royal family and disregarded the bulk of the nation, the people (minjok). Indeed, Introduction to the History of the Korean Nation was not written by collating information from the official annals; rather, it was rich with descriptions of indigenous customs and oral traditions that Son had meticulously compiled from a wide range of sources. He exhorted Korean historians to find a new scientific methodology to enable them to write a new history that placed Korea within the context of world history, and he began his book with an anthropological overview of the world’s peoples and the Koreans’ place among them. In his preface, Son makes five main points: one, national history is not the history of the ruling class but of the nation; two, conventional understandings of Korean culture are undeniably monarchical and aristocratic; three, the Korean aristocracy exploited the people of the lower classes and caused internal class friction; four, aristocratic culture developed from

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interaction with the culture of the common people that is ultimately national, thus the latter should not be considered subordinate or secondary; and five, the Koreans have struggled among themselves as much as against foreign entities. Son is widely admired in South Korea today as one of the founders of the “new nationalism” (sin minjok chuŭi ), and the principles Son enunciated in this preface have inspired South Korean historians from the 1960s through today. Son makes a strong case at the end of the preface for abolishing usage of the Tangun calendar11 as well as royal dynastic calendars in favor of the Western calendar. This proposal was not only for the sake of convenience; it was put forward as an act of liberation from a monarchical system and a step in creating a more accessible Korean history that could be promoted to the rest of the world. Just as Robert J. C. Young reminds us that the brass line in the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich that marks longitude zero is a colonial legacy serving to delineate “Occidental” from “Oriental,”12 Son tried to make readers of his time question tradition and convention and what it meant to be bound to them.

Preface to Introduction to the History of the Korean Nation* There is no need to dwell on the fact that our history has been entirely monarch-centered in the past. This is clear from observing the chronicle form of our historiographical writing: records describing what happened in a certain month of the year of a certain king. This is also clear from the fact that, while these records are filled with innumerable accounts related to the royal family, for which we now feel no interest and whose value we can no longer appreciate, references to the life of the people of the nation are rare. Monarch-centered viewpoint is not particular to our history but is rather a phenomenon that is common among all nations of the world. Yet, such thought and tradition were especially strong among the Han Chinese, and various nations of the Far East have followed the same way of thinking. Not only the structure and content of recorded history, but also the culture of the past in its entirety—thought, morals, politics, economics, law, arts, etc.—were centered on the royal court and therefore on the aristocratic ruling class, a point that will be discussed in detail throughout the body of this book. This preoccupation with court and aristocracy is the in*Son Chint’ae, “Sŏsŏl,” Chosŏn minjoksa kaeron (Seoul: Ŭryu munhwasa, 1948). Reprinted in Son Chint’ae sŏnsaeng chŏnjip (Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1981), 1:289–297.

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evitable historical outcome of the form of government, what I would call an aristocratic state. Furthermore, it is undeniable that since the inception of aristocratic government two thousand years ago we have been ideologically and politically absorbed into and anesthetized by the system. It is not easy, absorbed and anesthetized as we are, to discover ourselves in a genuine and cool-headed manner in all fields of study. Examining only the discipline of history, we can ask how many works have truly broken free of the old fetters, how many scholars have made serious efforts to escape from this tradition. The only pioneer who has bravely broken with this tradition is Paek Namun (1895–1974).13 I respect his works, including The Socioeconomic History of Korea (Chosŏn sahoe kyŏngjesa, 1933) and The Socioeconomic History of Feudal Chosŏn Chosŏn ponggŏn sahoe kyŏngjesa, 1937). But Paek only discovered a part, not the whole of us. We do not know if this is Paek’s conscious intent, but, being too absorbed in discovering the subjugated class, he neglected to discover the people of the nation. This study is an attempt at such a discovery; I have tried to outline our history from the standpoint of the nation. I have devoted a considerable amount of my faculties to open up the history of the nation from this new perspective, writing when my health was impaired by an illness that I have struggled with for a long time. When I think of how little I have achieved, I cannot help but become embarrassed. Time and health permitting, I hope I can forge ahead in writing a less faulty history of the Korea, but for the present my wish is that this work may perform a pioneering role in the historiography of the Korean nation. My greatest desire is that many national historians will come forth and quickly render my humble piece of writing rubbish. The next matter which I must address is the methodology in writing a history of the nation. The study of history is not undertaken by simply enumerating past historical facts or focusing on the a particular class. Nor should history be investigated only for the welfare of a single citizenry or a single nation. Rather, the highest objective of historical studies is for the historian to employ a theory and method allowing him to grasp the historical facts as they are and then perform a comprehensive critique of those facts in all their complexity. This is the road to true well-being of the nation and to bring about progress and peace for all humanity. In history, there have been periods of peace and periods of war. Each of these had international and domestic aspects. In times of peace, ­whether domestic or international, the people were happy, there was goodwill among nations and construction, growth, and cultural exchange. During times of war, friction between classes and the jockeying for political ­power among the aristocracy characterized the domestic scene while

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battles among nations and destruction of culture were features of the international scene. Therefore, in order to strive for people’s happiness in domestic affairs, we must eliminate class conflict and political power struggles. In order to attain international well-being, the whole world must overthrow the age-old evils of domination, exploitation, and strife and find a way to achieve the sovereignty of, and goodwill among, all nations. Whereas we cannot achieve latter alone, the former is a relatively easy problem that we can solve on our own. Thus, the fundamental tasks facing Korean history today must be to eliminate internal class and political struggle and to discover a theory that will contribute to the construction of an ideal, peaceful society while resolutely guarding the spirit of national independence. For these reasons, I have sought to put together the history of our nation based on the following. 1 The history of Korea is the history of the Korean people. From the beginning of recorded time we have shared a common history, common fate, and innumerable struggles as people of a common blood. We have also lived in the same region (even if at the end of the Three Kingdoms period the northern half of our territory was separated and its people lost to us)14 and enjoyed the same culture. This is also the reason why there has been very little intermarriage between the people of our nation and other nations. Thus, for Korea, the citizenry is the nation, and Korean history becomes the history of our nation. We cannot understand Korean history scientifically if we neglect this undeniable historical fact. The word “nation” was not used in the past because the aristocratic ruling state of our monarch-centered past obstructed the development of such thought and terminology. Even though the term did not exist, the nation itself undeniably did. Whether the nation is a reality in the present or in the future is to be considered fortunate or unfortunate is another question, but in historical studies taken as a science we cannot ignore or overlook the historical significance of nationhood, in the same way that we cannot ignore the monarchical system and the aristocratic government of the past. Historians can criticize historical facts but they cannot deny them. Now more than ever, when national liberation and national independence movements are making fierce progress in the world, it is the proper attitude of a serious scientist to understand historical facts as they are and only then criticize. Therefore, in Korean history the question of the nation becomes the heart of investigation and consequently takes on the primary, the most fundamental, importance. Since all historical facts throughout the prog-

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ress of Korean history, including battles with other nations, class struggle, politics, culture, and so on, have to be criticized and evaluated from the position of the nation, the nation is indeed the fundamental perspective through which to view Korean history. 2 I referred [above] to the form of government from the Three Kingdoms period on as an aristocratic one. By that I mean a government of absolute monarchs and powerful aristocrats. Over a period of fifteen to sixteen hundred years, all cultural development centered on the monarchs and aristocrats. The politics and culture of this aristocratic government are historical facts of just as great importance as the question of the nation. Therefore, historical science has the duty of critiquing these facts, not the right to ignore or overlook them. In this book, I have attempted a critical study of the nature of the aristocratic government and culture from the perspective of the nation. 3 Aristocratic government, developed from a foundation of unlimited private property, inevitably provoked the misfortune of internal class struggle. This inevitability is a common fact around the world but it is also undoubtedly the greatest wrong committed in human history. At the same time, it is also one of the most important of historical facts. I will further examine in this study the course of this wrong in the history of the Korean nation, as well as the negative influence it had on the life and survival of the nation. 4 Next we deal with the culture of the nation in general. Even if the mainstream of past Korean culture was aristocratic (a tendency common around the world), this did not mean that it had no connection whatsoever to the people [minjung]. In the same way that the so-called aristocratic ruling class arose from the base of the people, so did its culture grow from the ground of popular culture. However aristocratic the culture might have been, it did not consist purely of aristocratic elements; it had to have emerged from the relationship between the two classes. What some may view as a particular class culture I would consider a kind of national culture because the nation consists not of a single class but of the two classes

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together. Needless to say, from the point of view of nation, the culture of the people was never ideal or even close to ideal. It was always a culture dominated by the ruling class, and what belonged to the people was subordinate and secondary. Be that as it may, the significance of that culture being a national culture cannot be denied. Our duty is to critique this fact from the position of the nation. From this perspective, I intend to promote those aspects of the national culture that were superior, while criticizing clearly those aspects that were flaws. A mere arrangement of facts is no more than the retelling of an old tale in fits and starts. 5 Everything previously mentioned has been about the internal workings of the nation, but now, when we turn to foreign relations, we see unending repetition of alternation between periods of war and periods of goodwill. Regrettably, however, goodwill among nations in the true sense of the word hardly existed in the past. Even during the thirteen hundred years following Silla’s unification, an exceptional period during which there was peace at least with the Chinese nation, Korea had to live with the humiliation of serving China as a tributary state. Warfare and antipathy among nations was inevitable because of the essential nature of the aristocratic state. Since aristocratic governments always dealt with their peoples as a means to perpetuate aristocratic rule, class struggle continued ceaselessly within nations; how much more true this would be of foreign relations. From this perspective, the history of the period of aristocratic rule was internally a continuation of class friction and struggle and externally a repetition of warfare with other nations. This is also one of the grave historical wrongs that aristocratic governments committed. But this is also an undeniable historical fact and we cannot reject it simply because it offends our feelings. It is the task of the scientist and the ultimate object of the historical research of the nation to discover the true road toward the future goodwill of the world’s nations by studying the roots of this fact. Aristocratic states have often waged battles that threatened the life and existence of foreign nations because of the vain desires and greed of emperors and their subordinate aristocrats for territory and subjects. As a result, they have done nothing but commit crimes in human history. It is the current trend of world history for [the government of] each nation to live within its borders and manage the lives of its people independently. I have also turned my attention to the fact of world wars. There are idealistic intellectuals in the world who want to eliminate the accounts from historical texts for fear that they would cause discord. There are also, on the

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opposite side, many patriots who eulogize the occasions of victory and do their best to conceal facts of defeat in order to exalt the pride of the nation. In my opinion, neither is scientific in method. Science must be impartial, not narrow-minded. I have striven to treat facts for what they are, studying the causes of victory and defeat while grasping their essence in order to discover a framework for the well-being of the nation and goodwill among humanity. One who has the presence of mind to coolly reflect on and criticize the facts he has experienced, whether he is the victor or the defeated, will progress forward; but for one who is uselessly intoxicated by victory and strives to conceal the shame of failure, there awaits only the trap of repeating defeat rather than victory. A nation like ours whose history is more often that of defeat than of victory must be more penetratingly self-examining and determined regarding this matter. Finally, I will talk about the narrative format of this text. 6 I have used only Western calendar years in this text. Some use only the Tangun calendar, but this reflects the error of narrow-minded, ultra-nationalistic thinking, limiting the nation’s historical field of vision and causing confusion in our efforts to gather knowledge. The history of Korea does not exist alone as Korean history but always coexists with world history and must be understood synchronically in relation to world history. If we were to use the Tangun calendar, China the Yao calendar, Japan the Jimmu calendar, Islamic countries the Mohammedan calendar, and Europeans and Americans the Gregorian calendar, not only would the burden of converting the years distract from the understanding of important periods in our historical knowledge, but educating the people by such methods would cause enormous confusion and hinder the process of learning about Eastern, Western, and other foreign histories. If we say we are presently in the middle of the twentieth century, all the world knows what this means, but, if we say it is the end of the forty-third century, only a few even among Koreans would understand. It would be a different matter if there were a strong tradition of using the Tangun calendar, thereby making it convenient for us to understand our history. But there is no need to start a tradition that does more harm than good and that in the end would prove futile. At present, when the life and history of the nation are progressing in the same direction as the rest of the world, to stand apart from the global trend is simply a reaction against the humiliation of past subordination (when we shamefully had to use a foreign country’s calendar). In the past

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using the Christian calendar was degrading, but it is no longer in the least disgraceful. We use the world’s common Western calendar for educational efficiency and effectiveness; only so will foreigners understand our periodization with ease when reading our historical texts. 7 When describing a historical fact, I have used the Western calendar year. Using reign names to indicate eras is a monarch-centered, servile system. The historical facts we are dealing with do not belong only to an individual king but to the nation as a whole, and one cannot understand a period from knowing that something took place in a certain year of a certain king. Systems that unwittingly implant consciousness of the royal are exceedingly harmful in educating the people. Yet this method is still widely used in textbooks as if they were history books from the Middle Ages. In extreme cases, texts are supplemented with a chronological table of kings that students are forced to memorize. This is exceedingly ignorant and unprincipled. Among kings, those who had a sense of or valued what the nation was need to be remembered, but there is no reason why the rest should be. Furthermore, why must the citizens of a democratic nation-state memorialize the world of the royal family? This practice is not only useless for all but professional researchers, but also goes against democratic principles. 8 I refer to the three periods of the Korean history as the clan-based communal-society [ssijok kongdongch’e sahoe] period (Neolithic period), the tribalstate period (Chalcolithic period), and the aristocratic-state period (the age of metal tool usage and agricultural production). I use this periodization to abolish the former monarchic periodization and distinguish historical periods based on politics, economics, and national development. I have followed the convention of designating the period from the Three Kingdoms on as the period of aristocratic states within which dynasties are noted but not treated as separate historical periods.

Notes 1. Nishimura Shinji taught Japanese history and anthropology at Waseda University beginning in 1918. Some of his writings on Japanese history were



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banned during the war years of the late 1930s and early 1940s for being overly liberal. 2. A pioneer in spreading children’s literature and an activist for children’s rights. 3. The influential founder of the Department of Oriental History at Tokyo Imperial University. He was a German-educated liberal historian who was a teacher to Hirohito (1901–1989) when he was crown prince. Shiratori, who conducted substantial research on Korea, is now regarded as a representative scholar-apologist for Japanese colonial rule in Korea. 4. Published in Sinmin (Citizen), August 1927. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. The original name of what became Yonsei University in 1957. 8. Although the concept is elaborated in Shinkokugaku-dan (Talks on New Nativism), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Oyama Shoten, 1946), Yanagita began using the term shinkokugaku as early as 1929. 9. Ch’oe Kwangsik, Namch’ang Son Chint’ae sŏnsaeng yugo chip (Posthumous Works of Son Chint’ae) (Seoul: Koryŏ Taehakkyo Pangmulgwan, 2002). 10.  Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 88. 11.  At the time of its founding in 1948, the Republic of Korea adopted a calendar based on the year (2333 BCE) that the mythological Tangun founded the first kingdom in Korea. 12. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1. 13. A Marxist historian of the colonial and post-colonial period who eventually went to North Korea. Please see Charles Kim’s introduction in chapter 6 of this volume. 14. From ca. 57 BCE to 668 CE Korea was divided into the three kingdoms of Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla.

Contributors

Ellie Choi, an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University, is an intellectual historian of modern Korea during the Japanese empire. Her dissertation (PhD, Harvard University, 2009), “Space and National Identity: Yi Kwangsu’s Vision of Korea during the Japanese Empire,” explored the relationships among space, history, and nationalist discourse as they relate to issues of multiple temporalities and ethnic national identity. Her book manuscript, organized around five key sites in the Japanese empire to which Yi traveled, complicates cultural nationalism within a multiethnic empire. Christopher P. Hanscom (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006) is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the UCLA. Author of The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea, a study of theories of language and modernist fiction in 1930s colonial Korea, his research interests include the relationship between social and aesthetic forms, comparative colonialism, and concepts of race and culture under Japanese empire. Mickey Hong is a professor and the director of the Korean Studies Program at Los Angeles City College, where she established California’s first associate degree in Korean language. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation is on 1930s Korean modernist poetry. Charles R. Kim is an assistant professor of Korean history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include narratives, nationalism, cultural practices, and public discourse in South Korea. His publications include “The April 19th Generation and the Start of Postcolonial History in South Korea” (Review of Korean Studies, September 2009) and “Moral Imperatives: South Korean Studenthood and April 19th” ( Journal of Asian Studies, May 2012). Chiyoung Kim (PhD, Korea University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Korean Education at the Catholic University of Daegu. Her pub221

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lications include Yŏnae ranŭn p’yosang: Hanguk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi hyŏngsŏng kwa sarang (The Representation of Love: Love and the Formation of the Modern Korean Novel, Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 2007) and “Munhak kaenyŏm ch’egye ŭi kyebohak—sanmun punnyubŏp ŭi pyŏnhwa kwajŏng ŭl chungsim ŭro” (The Genealogy of the Literary Genre System—with a Focus on Prose Genre Classification, Minjok munhwa yŏngu [Korean Cultural Studies], 2009). Her research focuses on Korean conceptual history, particularly such concepts as literature, art and literature, humanities, love, and detective work. Jiyeon Kim is a research professor at the Bangudae Petroglyphs Institute and lecturer in the Department of History and Culture of Ulsan University, Korea. Her dissertation (University of California, 2009) is on commemorative paintings produced by chungin and other members of the marginal elite of late Chosŏn. Her research interests include art and social networks in the Chosŏn period, the politics of commemorative paintings, and the formation of artistic networks and identity in early twentieth-century Korea. Her article exploring how a late-Chosŏn court painter Kim Hongdo presented himself through the depiction of his residence was published in the 2012 issue of Archives of Asian Art. Sonja M. Kim received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently assistant professor of Asian and Asian American studies at Binghamton University (SUNY), where she teaches courses on Korean history and East Asia. She has published articles on health and medicine in Korea and is working on a book manuscript exploring medical knowledge and practices surrounding women’s health and childbearing in early twentieth-century Korea. Sophia J. Kim (1971–2008) graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and earned her master’s degree at Cornell University. She was a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in Korean history and cultural studies. For her dissertation prospectus titled “Nationalized Bodies: The Colonial Politics of Physical Education (1895– 1945),” she conducted extensive fieldwork in Japan and Korea in order to examine the convergence of discursive and material practices in both the colonial and nationalist education of the body. Nayoung Aimee Kwon is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Arts of the Moving Image, and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Her research considers colonialism and post-



Contributors

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colonial legacies in the Asia-Pacific, focusing on Korea and Japan. Her book in progress, “Translating Empires: The Conundrum of Modernity and Collaboration in Korea and Japan,” examines controversial interactions of Japanese and Korean writers and translators in the Japanese empire. She is also co-editing a special issue of the journal Cross-Currents on trans-colonial cinematic co-productions between Korea and Japan. Seung-Ah Lee is an advanced PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and teaches at Los Angeles City College. Her dissertation is a comparative study of the concept of the hero in traditional East Asian popular fiction. Her research also focuses on the relationship between premodern and contemporary cultural forms, particularly current historical dramas and hallyu. Author of “The JYJ Republic” (in Idol: From H.O.T. to Girls Generation [Imaejin, 2011]) and a forthcoming book on JYJ, Lee has also translated Lady Sa’s Journey to the South. Walter K. Lew’s books include the award-winning Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and Excerpts from: ∆IKTH 딕테/딕티 DIKTE for DICTEE (1982) (Yeul Eum Sa, 1991), on the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Lew also edited Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung (Wesleyan, 2000) and the anthologies Premonitions and Muae 1 (both Kaya, 1995); Kŏri: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Fiction was co-edited with Heinz Insu Fenkl (Beacon Press, 2001). With Ashley Ford, Lew produced for centennial celebrations in 2010 of the writer/artist Yi Sang’s birth the limited-edition artist’s book Est-ce que la ligne a assassiné le cercle? Youngju Ryu is assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Michigan and the author of Writers of the Winter Republic: Authoritarianism, Democratization, and South Korean Literature. Her main research interest concerns the role of literature in Korea’s political transformations. In addition to her work on Korean literature of the authoritarian era, she has also explored the relationship between popular culture and Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War and problematized the relationship between truth and reconciliation in textual memories of the Korean War. She is currently at work on an examination of the legacies of authoritarianism in contemporary South Korean cultural texts. Hijoo Son is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Sogang University. She received a BA from the University of Chicago and an

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MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, all in history. She has published articles on the Korean diaspora, migration policy, and art theory in the United States and Korea. Her research interests include Korean migration history, diaspora studies, visual culture, art theory, and related policy issues for a multicultural Korea.

Index

2.8 Tongnip Sŏnŏn. See February 8 Tokyo Student Declaration adultery, 48–49, 56–57, 63n25 aeguk kyemong undong. See patriotic enlightenment movement An, Chaehong, 90, 101n15 An, Ch’angho, 24n9 Association for the Glorious Literature of Chosŏn, 42, 61n2, 65 Association of Proletarian Comrades, 30, 34, 41n16 associations: literary, 42, 61n2, 65; Marxist, 34, 41n16, 105; nationalist, 2, 3, 24n9, 43, 61n4, 88; pro-Japanese Imperialist, 65, 68, 81n9; socialist, 30, 34, 41n16 Banzuiin Chōbei, 70, 84n33 Baudelaire, Charles, 163n26, 179n15, 191 Bergson, Henri, 206 bourgeoisie. See intellectualism bridge song (festival), 75–76 British Constitution, 4, 11, 25n10 Buddhism, 43, 47, 79, 94, 102n31, 197 bunka seiji. See “cultural policy” capitalism: causing Korean economic problems, 106–108, 113–116, 130n30; expansion of, 32–33, 35; World War I causing demise of, 31 censorship: Japanese Imperial, 31, 34, 35, 43, 80n5, 182; purposely writing to avoid, 91; in South Korea, 157 CGT (Confédération Genéral du Travail), 33, 41n15 Ch’a, Yisŏk, 24n9 Ch’ae, Mansik, 166

chagang. See self-strengthening nationalist ideals Chang, Yu, 93, 102n25 China: constitution, 11, 27n27; education in, 42–43, 61n3; historical record, 72, 77, 84n35; Japanese and Korean cultural similarities, 54, 56, 76, 86n59; Korea as tributary state, 216; reform in, 17, 18, 28n34; refugees in, 88, 100n1. See also Confucianism; Japan; Manchuria Cho, Soang, 61n4 Ch’oe, Chaesŏ, 165–169, 178n1 Ch’oe, Namsŏn, 2, 64–66, 80n2 chŏng, 68, 77, 82n17 Chŏng, Chiyong, 162n4 Chŏng, Inbo, 88–91, 101n11, 102n23, 102n27, 104, 126n3 Chŏng, Yagyong, 26n25, 90, 101n14 Chongju, Sŏ, 197, 198, 207n1 Chōsenshi Henshūkai. See Chosŏn History Compilation Committee Chosŏn Daily (newspaper), 43, 44, 133, 155 Chosŏn Haksurwŏn. See Korean Academy of Sciences Chosŏn History Compilation Committee, 65, 81n9 Chosŏn ilbo. See Chosŏn Daily Chosŏn Kwangmunhoe. See Association for the Glorious Literature of Chosŏn Chosŏn Nodong Kongjihoe. See Chosŏn Worker’s Cooperative Association Chosŏn Proletarian Artists’ Alliance. See Korean Artistic Proletarian League Chosŏn Worker’s Cooperative Association, 30, 34, 41n16 Christianity, 44, 58–60, 186–189 chungch’u kyegūp. See core class of intellectuals

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Index

class: bourgeois revolution, 107; common people, 3, 8, 30, 31, 35–39, 40n9, 43–44, 62n7, 83n26, 93–94, 119–126, 144–150, 211–212; conflict, 106–107, 114–115, 213–216; “core class of intellectuals,” 2, 15–18, 37–39; equality, 44, 45–46; landownership division, 119–126; ruling, 12–13, 27n29, 212–213; youth leadership, 64–65, 80n5. See also women’s issues collective enterprise: importance of, 8–10; necessary for reform, 13–14, 19–21 colonization: British, 12; Japanese, 18, 28n33, 29, 106. See also Korean Colonial Era common people: blind following of leadership, 93–94; education of, 3, 8, 43–44, 62n7, 83n26, 90, 101n12; future of, 37–39; plight of, 30, 31, 35–37, 119–126, 144–150; political activity of, 40n9, 211–212. See also ruling class Company Law, 115–117 Confucianism: aspiring to the ultimate life, 206; decline of women’s value in, 47, 52–55; Japanese government support of, 45, 63n16; principles, 3–4, 25n10, 30, 44, 62n10; warlike nature of, 94. See also China constitution: British, 4, 11, 25n10; Chinese, 11; French, 4 core class of intellectuals, 2, 15–18, 37–39. See also vanguard class of intellectuals Creation (magazine), 1, 24n2, 29 CSK. See History of Korean Society and Economy cultural gradualism: as bourgeois philosophy, 2, 104, 127n4; core class of intellectuals, 2, 15–18, 37–39; critique of, 30, 31, 35, 110–111; as “cultural policy,” 29, 39n1; education programs, 1, 2; Korean history as a driving force in, 42–46; reconstruction timeline, 4, 8, 13–19, 40n10; self-strengthening nationalist ideals, 55, 61n1, 118–119 cultural identity: in history, 42–46, 70–72, 79, 210–218; international, 11–12, 13, 14, 33–34; Korean, 3–4, 10, 12–22, 30, 37–39, 210; morals in, 19, 24n9,

185–186, 189; “ŏl,” 91–100, 102n23; relationship between Korea and Japan, 65–80, 90–100; self-strengthening nationalist ideals, 55, 61n1, 118–119. See also Korean Colonial Era; Nationalism; religion cultural nationalists. See cultural gradualism “cultural policy,” 1, 29, 39n1 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 33, 40n11 Dante (Dante Alighieri), 206 Date Family Disturbance, 70, 84n31 Date sōdō. See Date Family Disturbance decisive action, 3, 19, 24n9 democracy, 201–203, 207n9 Dewey, John, 4, 25n11 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 202 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 206 education: in China, 42–43, 61n3; of common people, 3, 8, 43–44, 83n26; criticism of, 93–94; cultural gradualist, 1, 2; nationalist pride, 83n21; “practical learning,” 90, 101n12; for reform, 19–21, 210–211; of women, 25n10, 54, 59, 80n5, 136–138 Einstein, Albert, 206 Eliot, T. S., 156–157, 163n26, 165, 167, 168, 178n3 elite. See intellectualism endogamy, 50–51 equality (gender), 6, 11, 13, 44, 45–61 February 8 Tokyo Student Declaration, 1, 3, 24n7, 65 folklore: Chinese, 37, 41n21; Japanese, 70, 84n31, 84n32, 84n33, 84n34, 87n72, 87n73; Korean, 60, 70, 82n15, 83n28, 84n30, 197–201, 209–210 Four Commanderies, 90, 101n17 Frederick of Prussia, 3, 9 “free love,” 44, 48–49 French Revolution, 4, 11, 27n26 Friends of Constitutional Government, 68 Fukuchi, Ōchi, 68, 83n23 G. W. See Kim, Kirim Gandhi, Mahatma, 206

Genji monogatari. See The Tale of Genji Gide, André, 191, 195n12, 202 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 206 Gorky, Maxim, 191 Great Association of Workers, 34, 41n16 Greengrocer Oshichi, 70, 84n34 Group of Nine. See Kuinhoe Haksuri. See Ch’oe, Chaesŏ Hansŏng Sunbo (newspaper), 69, 83n24 Heartless (novel), 1 Heidegger, Martin, 202 Hesse, Hermann, 202 historical materialism, 104–126, 127n6, 128n15. See also Marxism History of Korean Society and Economy, 104, 105–106 Hoam. See Mun, Ilp’yŏng Homer, 191 honesty. See morals Hong, Myŏnghŭi, 61n1, 61n4, 64, 88, 100n2 Hulme, T. E., 165 humanism: as basis for pure literature, 201–203; in poetry, 156–157; thirdstage, 198–201 Huxley, Aldous, 166, 202 Ibsen, Henrik, 44, 62n12 ideology: cultural gradualism, 1, 2, 4, 8, 13–19, 15–18, 29, 37–39, 39n1, 40n10, 42–46, 51n1, 55, 104, 118–119, 127n4; democracy, 201–203, 207n9; historical materialism, 104–126, 127n6, 128n15; Marxism, 1, 3, 27n26, 29–39, 89, 155, 161n2, 181–195; socialism, 29, 30, 33–34, 40n6, 133–134, 136–144. See also political movements Im, Hwa, 155, 161n2, 162n5, 166, 183, 184–185, 190–191, 195n2 Inoue, Kakugorō, 68–69 intellectualism: “core-class,” 2, 15–18, 37–39; in literary criticism, 165–169, 192–193; in poetry, 154–161; vanguard class, 29, 31, 39, 40n2 Japan: Korean collaboration with, 1, 64–65, 66, 80n7, 81n8, 81n11; literature influenced by Korea, 65–80; national

Index

227

reconstruction movements in, 9–10, 26n23, 42–43, 61n1; particularist view on history, 106, 109–110, 127n13, 127n14; social problems in, 26n22. See also China; Korean Colonial Era Japanese history: Ashikaga period, 73; Edo period, 70; Heian period, 74–76; Kamakura period, 73; Meiji period, 69–70; Russo-Japanese War (1904), 67, 82n14, 83n28; Shōwa era, 70; SinoJapanese war, 69–70, 100n1; Taishō era, 70; Three Kingdoms period, 79, 90; Tokugawa period, 70, 72 Japanese literature: closeness to Korean literature, 73–75, 77, 80, 84n41; fairytales, 73–75; myths/legends, 77, 78; “records,” 70–72 Jesus (of Nazareth), 8, 9 Kaebyŏk. See Creation Kando. See Manchuria Kang, Kyŏngae, 132–136 Kant, Immanuel, 206 KAPF. See Korean Artistic Proletarian League Kapsin Coup, 10, 26n24 Kara hito. See Tang person Kenkō, Yoshida, 67 Key, Ellen, 44, 62n11 Kim, Hyosik. See Kim, Namch’ŏn Kim, Inson. See Kim, Kirim Kim, Kirim, 154–157, 162n5, 162n12, 166, 174, 180n25 Kim, Namch’ŏn, 162n5, 181–186 Kim, Ŏk, 163n26 Kim, Okkyun, 10 Kim, Sŏngsu, 2, 24n5 Kim, Tongni, 197–201, 207n3 Kim, Yujŏng, 162n4 Kim, Yunsik, 69, 83n25 Kojiki, 72, 77, 84n35 Korea: future of, 21–23; marriage in, 25n10, 44–57, 60–61, 214; patriarchal society in, 47–61; place in world history, 65–80, 105, 108–114, 209–218; poverty in, 2, 15, 35–37, 55–56, 58, 60, 119–123, 138–144. See also political movements; religion

228

Index

Korean Academy of Sciences, 105, 127n8 Korean Artistic Proletarian League, 162n5, 166, 168, 178n8, 181–186. See also Marxism Korean Colonial Era: censorship during, 210; Company Law, 115–117; “cultural policy,” 29, 39n1; Japanese rule, 115–126; justification for colonization during, 65, 120, 121, 122, 209, 219n3; Manchurian Incident (1931), 43, 89, 166; March First Movement, 1, 3, 6, 24n7, 25n20, 29, 30, 43, 59, 65, 89, 119, 155–156; Peace Preservation Law of 1925, 104–105, 127n6; social problems in, 26n22; Tenancy Law, 120–124, 131n41. See also colonization; cultural identity; Japan; Korean history; Manchuria Korean economy: capitalism in, 31–33, 35, 106–108, 113–116, 130n30; industrial development, 35–37, 118, 125–126; and lack of ŏl, 92–93, 96; landownership in, 119–126, 120, 121, 122; modern, 21–22, 154–161 Korean history: ancient, 89–100, 218; Chosŏn dynasty, 10, 13–14, 26n16, 35, 52–53, 54–57, 58, 64–66, 82n15, 83n21; Korean War, 88, 211; Koryŏ dynasty, 50, 51–52, 58; Three Kingdoms period, 47, 48, 49, 57, 63n25, 214–215, 219n14; Unified Silla, 47, 49, 63n20, 216; universal nature of, 105, 108–114, 214–215. See also Korean Colonial Era Korean Language Research Society, 2 Korean literature: folklore history, 197–201, 209–218; as “form that aspires to the ultimate,” 199–201, 204–205, 206, 208n11; intellectualism in, 154–161; literary criticism, 165–178, 178n3, 178n5; as “self-indictment,” 184–186, 190–191, 193–195; and similarities to Japanese, 65–80, 82n17; symbolism in, 160, 163n26 Korean Production Movement, 2 Kuinhoe, 155, 162n4 Kŭnuhoe movement, 133, 134, 150n3 Kwon, Insook, 44, 62n10 Kwŏn, Yŏngmin, 166

labor movements: meaning of, 32–34; realizing societal ideals, 34–35; role arts play in, 181–182. See also political movements language: to empower women, 42–61, 133, 134, 150n3; and historical moment, 154–161; importance of Korean, 65–80; and individualism, 197–206; for political purposes, 1–23, 29–39, 181–195; symbolism in, 160, 163n26 Lao-Tzu, 206 Le Bon, Gustave, 4–5, 12, 26n22, 27n28 leftist politics. See Marxism Lenin, Vladimir, 33 Lewis, Wyndham, 167 literary criticism, 165–178, 178n3, 178n5, 181–195, 198–201 literature. See Korean literature Mallarmé, Stéphane, 163n26 Manchuria, 133–136, 144–150, 151n11, 151n12. See also China; Korean Colonial Era Manchurian Incident (1931), 43, 89, 166 Mann, Thomas, 202 March First Movement, 1, 3, 6, 24n7, 25n20, 29, 30, 43, 59, 65, 89, 119, 155–156 marriage: adultery in, 56–57; changes in Korean, 50–52, 60–61; child, 25n10; endogamy, 50–51; to foreigners, 214; “free love,” 44, 48–49; polygyny, 51–52, 55; satire in, 174–178; subjugation of women in, 54–56 Marxism: literature, 104, 105–106; revolutionary philosophy in, 1, 3, 27n26, 29–39, 40n2, 89, 155, 161n2; untenability of, 2, 202, 204, 208n10; writing as a political act, 181–195. See also historical materialism; Korean Artistic Proletarian League; socialism matriarchy, 46–48 Mauras, Charles, 167 Mencius, 8, 13 minjok. See Korea minjok munhak. See Korean literature minjung. See common people modernism: in literary criticism, 167–169, 182–183; in poetry, 154–161

morals: British, 27n26; Korean, 3, 15, 19, 24n9, 185–186, 189 Mun, Ilp’yŏng, 42–46, 61n1, 61n3, 88, 100n3 munhwa chŏngch’i. See “cultural policy” Musanja Kongjihoe. See Association of Proletarian Comrades Namch’ang. See Son, Chint’ae national character. See cultural identity national literature. See Korean literature nationalism: criticism of, 30, 31, 35, 110–111; “New Nationalism,” 209–218; out of humanism, 198–203. See also cultural identity New Life (magazine), 29, 30, 40n4 “New Nationalism,” 209–218 New People’s Alliance, 34, 41n16 New People’s Party, 105 New Women’s movement, 44, 45, 62n10 Newton, Isaac, 206 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 202 Nishimura, Shinji, 209, 218n1 Noa. See Yi, Kwangsu Nodong Taehoe. See Great Association of Workers ŏl, 91–100, 102n23. See also religion otogi zoshi (Japanese fairytale), 73, 84n41 Paek, Ch’ŏl, 183, 184, 192–193 Paek, Namun, 89, 100n7, 104–108, 126n1, 127n8, 127n12, 127n13, 127n14, 128n18, 213, 219n13 Pak, Hŏnyŏng, 181, 195n1, 195n2 Pak, Hŭido, 29, 30 Pak, T’aewŏn, 162n4, 166, 167–168, 169–174, 179n3 Pak, Ŭnsik, 61n4 Pak, Yŏnghŭi, 162n5, 183 Pak, Yŏnghyo, 10 Pascal, Blaise, 206 patriotic enlightenment movement, 64, 100n4 Peace Preservation Law of 1925, 104–105, 127n6 Peter the Great (Russian czar), 9 petit-bourgeois writing. See intellectualism Plato, 3, 8, 206

Index

229

Poe, Edgar Allan, 163n26 political movements: decisive action, 3, 19, 24n9; finances for, 20–21; Kŭnuhoe movement, 133, 134, 150n3; March First Movement, 1, 3, 6, 24n7, 25n20, 29, 30, 43, 59, 65, 89, 119, 155–156; New Women’s movement, 44, 45, 62n10; patriotic enlightenment movement, 64, 100n4. See also ideology; Korea; labor movements polygyny, 51–52, 55 poverty: and ŏl, 92–93, 96; of women, 138–144 proletariate. See common people propaganda: as communist strategy, 31; using cultural organizations for, 17 P’yŏnsŏkch’on. See Kim, Kirim Queen Min, 60, 70, 82n15, 83n28, 84n30 radical movements. See political movements Read, Herbert, 165 reconstruction timeline (Korean), 4, 8, 13–19, 25n14, 40n10 “records,” 70–72 reform movements. See cultural identity; political movements religion: Buddhism, 8, 9, 43, 47, 79, 94, 102n31, 197; Christianity, 44, 58–60, 186–189; Confucianism, 3–4, 25n10, 30, 44, 45, 47, 52–55, 62n10, 63n16, 94, 206; cultivation of in literature, 205. See also cultural identity; Korea Richards, I. A., 157, 165 Rikken Seiyūkai. See Friends of Constitutional Government Rimbaud, Arthur, 163n26 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23 Royal Concubine Chang: A Story of the Chosŏn Court, 68–69, 70 ruling class, 12–13, 27n29, 212–213. See also common people Russell, Bertrand, 4, 25n10, 25n14 Saitŏ, Governor-General, 116, 117 Sakyamuni. See Buddhism Sangsusi. See Ch’oe, Chaesŏ satire, 166–167, 168, 174–178, 178n9

230

Index

self-strengthening nationalist ideals, 2, 15–18, 55, 61n1, 118–119 Shanghai Provisional Government (political group), 3, 24n9 Shiratori, Kurakichi, 209, 219n3 Shōgun Crab Shell. See Inoue, Kakugorō silhwamul. See “records” Sin, Ch’aeho, 61n4, 88, 89, 100n4 Sin, Kyusik, 61n4, 88 Sin, Paegu, 29–32 sin minjok chuŭi. See “New Nationalism” Sinin Tongmaenghoe. See New People’s Alliance Sinsaenghwal. See New Life social movements. See labor movements; political movements socialism: history of, 29, 30, 33–34; in Manchuria, 133–134, 136–144; theory of, 40n6. See also Marxism Socrates, 3, 8, 206 Soga Brothers, 70, 84n32 Soga kyōdai. See Soga Brothers Son, Chint’ae, 209–212 sŏnguja. See vanguard class of intellectuals South Korea: anti-communist environment in, 80n2, 133; censorship in, 157; popularity of pure literature concept, 199–201; turmoil in after liberation, 210–211 South Korean Workers’ Party, 181, 195n1 Spinoza, Baruch, 206 Stalin, Joseph, 128n15 Sukkyŏngu. See Ch’oe, Chaesŏ symbolism (in literature), 160, 163n26 The Tale of Genji, 74–75, 76, 85n57, 86n59 Tamwŏn. See Chŏng, Inbo Tang person, 71–72 Tangun calendar, 212, 217–218, 219n11 tapka. See bridge song tapkyo. See bridge song “Tasan.” See Chŏng, Yagyong Tenancy Law, 120–124, 131n41 Three Obediences (principle of), 54–55 Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors (myth), 37, 41n21

Tolstoi, L., 206 Tongjesa, 43, 61n4, 88 vanguard class of intellectuals, 29, 31, 39, 40n2. See also core class of intellectuals Verlaine, Paul, 163n26 Versailles Peace Conference, 5, 15, 28n30, 28n34, 59 Widang. See Chŏng, Inbo women’s issues: economic self-reliance, 60–61, 136–138; education, 25n10, 54, 59, 80n5, 136–138; inheritances, 55–56; Kŭnuhoe movement, 133, 134, 150n3; sexual servitude, 49, 56–57, 57–58, 63n28, 63n29, 140–143; Three Obediences principle, 54–55; widow remarriage ban, 52–53. See also class world history: British, 4, 11, 12, 25n10, 27n26; French, 4, 9, 11, 27n26; peace conferences, 5, 15, 28n30, 28n34; place of Korea in, 65–80, 105, 108–114, 209–218 “world trend of reconstruction.” See cultural gradualism World War I, 59, 65 Yang, Chudong, 132 Yaoya Oshichi. See Greengrocer Oshichi Yeats, William Butler, 163n26 Yi, Hyosŏk, 162n4 Yi, Ik, 90, 101n13 Yi, Kŏnbang, 88 Yi, Kwangsu, 1–5, 23n1, 24n2, 24n7, 25n10, 26n16, 26n17, 26n19, 26n20, 26n22, 27n26, 27n28, 28n33, 40n4, 61n1, 64 Yi, Kyusŏ, 24n9 Yi, Muyŏng, 162n4 Yi, Sang, 155, 161n3, 166, 167–168, 169–172, 174–178, 179n3 Yi, T’aejun, 162n4, 166 Yi, Wŏnjo, 195n2 yŏkhaeng. See decisive action Yu, Hyŏngwŏn, 90, 101n12 Zisi, 8, 26n21

Korean Classics Library: Historical Materials

Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era edited by Christopher P. Hanscom, Walter K. Lew, and Youngju Ryu

Korean Classics Library: Philosophy and Religion

Salvation through Dissent: Tonghak Heterodoxy and Early Modern Korea George L. Kallander

Production Notes for Hanscom/Imperatives of Culture Jacket design by Guy Horton Composition by Wanda China with display type in Lucida Sans and Scala Sans Pro and text in Book Antiqua Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc. Printed on 60 lb. House White, 444 ppi.

KOREAN HISTORY / LITERATURE

“Imperatives of Culture is a landmark in bringing important Korean texts from the colonial period into the Englishspeaking world. Intellectuals and writers who were central to debates over Korean identity and culture—which in the 1930s and 1940s the Japanese were trying to eradicate— illumine with insight and often brilliance the dilemmas of an ancient nation captured by a curiously ‘late’ (or late-coming) twentieth-century imperialism. These essays also cast their reflection down to the present, as divided Korea enters its seventh decade. This book rewards multiple readings and will be most useful in the classroom.” —Bruce Cumings, Chair, Department of History, University of Chicago “Here, finally, for the first time in English we have in one volume the signature voices of many of Korea’s pioneering modernists of the colonial era in their own words and in all their stunning diversity and complexity. Together with the excellent introductions that accompany the original essays, these translations are a gift to all seeking to understand Korea in the larger context of twentieth-century modernity.” —Carter J. Eckert, Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888