Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora 1557291047, 9781557291042

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Mobile Subjects

Mobile Subjects

Yeh

Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora

INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES

CENTER FOR KOREAN STUDIES

65810cov-IEAS_MobileSubjects.indd 1

KRM 36

INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ● BERKELEY

Edited by Wen-hsin Yeh KOREA RESEARCH MONOGRAPH 36

3/26/13 4:08 PM

Notes to this edition This is an electronic edition of the printed book. Minor corrections may have been made within the text; new information and any errata appear on the current page only. Korea Research Monograph 36 Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora Wen-hsin Yeh, editor ISBN-13: 9781-55729-165-3 (electronic) ISBN-13: 978-1-55729-104-2 (print) ISBN-10: 1-55729-104-7 (print)

Please visit the IEAS Publications website at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/ for more information and to see our catalogue. Send correspondence and manuscripts to Katherine Lawn Chouta, Managing Editor Institute of East Asian Studies 1995 University Avenue, Suite 510H Berkeley, CA 94720-2318 USA [email protected]

May 2015

Mobile Subjects

Korea reSearCH MoNoGraPH CeNTer For KoreaN STUDIeS

Mobile Subjects

Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora

edited by Wen-hsin Yeh

36

A publication of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Although the institute is responsible for the selection and acceptance of manuscripts in this series, responsibility for the opinions expressed and for the accuracy of statements rests with their authors. The Korea Research Monograph series is one of the several publications series sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies in conjunction with its constituent units. The others include the Japan Research Monograph series, the China Research Monograph series, and the Research Papers and Policy Studies series. Send correspondence and manuscripts to Katherine Lawn Chouta, Managing Editor Institute of East Asian Studies 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor Berkeley, CA 94720-2318 [email protected] Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mobile subjects : boundaries and identities in the modern Korean diaspora / edited by Wen-hsin Yeh. pages cm — (Korea research monograph ; 36) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55729-104-7 (alk. paper) 1. Korea—Emigration and immigration—History. 2. Migration, Internal— Korea—History. 3. Koreans—Foreign countries—History. 4. Colonization— Social aspects—Korea. 5. National characteristics, Korean. 6. Nationalism— Korea. I. Yeh, Wen-Hsin, editor of compilation. II. University of California, Berkeley. Institute of East Asian Studies, issuing body. JV8757.M63 2013 305.8957—dc23 Copyright © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. Front cover: Lake Cheonji, on the border of Korea and China. © Boldstock/Inmagine.com Cover design: Mindy Chen

2013001943

Contents

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2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

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Acknowledgments Wen-hsin Yeh Introduction Wen-hsin Yeh Korean Migration in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria: A Global Theme in Modern Asian History Kwangmin Kim Status and Smoke: Koreans in Japan’s Opium Empire Miriam Kingsberg Women on the Loose: Household System and Family Anxiety in Colonial Korea Sungyun Lim An Indispensable Edge: American Military Camptowns in Postwar Korea W. Taejin Hwang U.S.-Educated Elites and the Phenomenon of Study Abroad Jane Cho Homes on the Border: Ethnicity, Identity, and Everyday Space in Yanbian Yishi Liu Exit, Voice, and Refugees: A Case Study for Understanding Political Stability and Emigration in North Korea Ivo Plsek Contributors Index

1 3

17 38

61

88 123

148

183 217 221

Acknowledgments

WEN-HSIN YEH

This volume, “Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora,” originated with a 2007 Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2007-MA-2002), in support of a multiyear project at Berkeley that I had the privilege to lead as principal investigator. The Academy was keen to promote the study of Korea in American academia. It was responsive to the proposal that Korea may be fruitfully studied from a nonpeninsular perspective that places Korean influence and activities in the broader context of continental and maritime East Asia. With the project, we proposed to make Korean presence across its northern borders the primary focus of our study. We also proposed to take into account postcolonial Korean-American interactions. Happily, the Academy lent its support to this approach, enabling us to convene a group of advanced doctoral researchers whose principal fields of emphasis had been the politics and histories of China, Japan, and the United States. The group held regular meetings in Berkeley in 2008. It also organized a workshop in Berkeley in 2008, presented a conference at Korea University in 2009, and mounted a second workshop in Berkeley in 2010. The result is this volume, which has taught all its participants an invaluable amount about Korea and would not have been possible otherwise. For the organization of the project in all the stages that led to the current volume, we would like to thank, at Korea University and Berkeley, the individual efforts of Sungtaek Cho, Hong Yung Lee, John Lie, Kevin O’Brien, Steve Vogel, and the late Jon Gjerde. For their invaluable intellectual input and advice we would like to thank those who have served as discussants and respondents in Seoul and Berkeley, especially Seomin Kim, Hong Yung Lee, Yumi Moon, Kyu Hyun Kim, and Ken Wells. For their outstanding program and administrative support, we would like to thank Aaron Miller, Hilary Finchum-Sung, Martin Backstrom, Caverlee

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Cary, and Dylan Davis at the Center for Korean Studies and the Institute of East Asian Studies at Berkeley. And as a personal acknowledgment of gratitude, I would like to thank the contributors to this volume, from whom I have learned so much in their respective areas of expertise. The group began as a doctoral workshop in multiple areas and disciplines. Today I am proud to see that a majority of the contributors have graduated into the ranks of tenure-tracked junior professors. In addition, I would like to thank Hong Yung Lee for his friendship, guidance, and the privilege of visiting Seoul in his company; Sungtaek Cho for the sharing of ideas and the privilege of collaboration; and Clare You for showing me the elegance and poetry in Korean culture. It will be the enterprise of another lifetime for me to ever reach their level of understanding. A little bit of Korean studies in this life meanwhile has gone a long way to reshaping my understanding of East Asia, for which I am most grateful.

Introduction

WEN-HSIN YEH One of the most powerful driving forces in modern Korean history concerns the construction of a unified nation centered upon the Korean peninsula, a construction that in turn would be predicated upon the construction of a shared heritage of a people who trace their common ancestry to the mythical Tangun. In this regard, the Koreans, like many other people of East and Southeast Asia, have experienced their modernity in terms of nation-building and the transformation of the population from royal subjects to full national members.1 But in the long stretch of the twentieth century, the Koreans have also set themselves apart from the Japanese, the Chinese, and others with a national construction that has privileged an ethnonationalistic discourse at the expense of alternative constructions of collective identity.2 Much of this development has to do with the specifics of Korea’s modern history. In the late nineteenth century, the educated Korean elite, thanks to the signing of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, took up in earnest their search for a Korean people and a Korean nation. The idea of a modern Korean nation was born when the peninsula was caught between the

1  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 2  Gi-wook Shin, Ethno-Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Ethnic nationalism, with the three thousand ri [Korean, villages] of the peninsula and the mythical genealogy of Tangun, was not, of course, the only probable form of collective identity available to the Koreans in their modern days. Alternative possibilities had presented themselves at various moments in the construction of collective identities, and elite politics evolved around border-crossing conceptions of race and class as well as universal norms of civilization. More for historical reasons than logical necessity, the bloodline as an organizing category triumphed over all alternatives—so long as the Koreans are yet to fulfill their national aspiration in the creation of a unified and independent Korean state, coextensive in territorial reach with the imagined homeland of the historical Korean nation and people.

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warring empires of China and Japan.3 Prior to this moment, the Chosun court and the yangban elite had held up, to be sure, their vision of a Korean kingdom. They had also done much to build their version of centralizing Korean institutions. Yet after Shimonoseki and in light of the looming crises, Korean elites saw the defenselessness of their traditional institutions and caught glimpses of a different construction of the Korean nation. In this new vision, the nation was to be centered upon the power of the people instead of the prestige of its rulers. Thanks to a new wave of intellectual mobilization, “Korea” came to embody, by the turn of the twentieth century, a Korean-speaking people who shared a history and a natural geography coextensive with the reach of the Korean peninsula. Korean intellectuals of the late nineteenth century turned to disciplines such as archaeology and linguistics to find the symbolic resources for the historical construction of a Korean nation and its people. They used learned disquisitions as well as popular writings to advance the idea that there was an inalienable connection between the Korean people and their land. They argued that calling the peninsula their homeland was the birthright of the Koreans as descendents of Tangun. The demands were strident, precisely as their realization seemed threatened or even doomed. Yet as the crises deepened, the people of the peninsula found themselves becoming the most mobile subjects in East Asia. Millions of Koreans were uprooted from their homes in the subsequent decades of wars and colonialism. Japanese annexation of Korea took place in 1910. Colonial policies of expansion, modernization, and assimilation unleashed socioeconomic dynamics that challenged the established Korean ways of life of the nineteenth century.4 The number of Korean subjects sojourning in Japan in 1945 was estimated to approach 2.4 million.5 Another 1.5 million Koreans were said to have crossed the northern rivers into Manchuria to help bring the Manchu homeland under Japanese imperial sway. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, Korean presence in the sparsely populated Russian Far East was so significant that it prompted Stalin’s government to force their relocation to the Soviet Republics in Central Asia.6 As 3  Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires: 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 4  John Lie, “The Discriminated Fingers: The Korean Minority in Japan,” Monthly Review 38, no. 8 (1987): 17–23. 5  Figure derived from Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 26, 91n93. 6  Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” The Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (1998): 813–861. Also Tamara Troyakova,”Transnational Migration and Identity Transformation in the Russian Far East,” and Alexei Starichkov, “Ethnic Koreans in the Russian

Introduction

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Korean movement followed the reaches of the Japanese imperial flag, the collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945 inevitably changed the dynamics of Korean mobility across Northeast Asian space. In Manchuria, the Koreans encountered palpable Chinese hostility in the years after the SinoJapanese war, which once again pushed them to relocate across the new Sino-Korean borders. From the perspectives of mobility, the mid-twentieth century witnessed a shift in the dynamics of population flow in response to yet another set of factors. The end of the war brought home to Korea an exiled Korean political elite who had spent the colonial years away from the peninsula. Just as these exiles set foot on their home soil, the outbreak of the Korean War in the 1950s dramatically redefined the politics of the country and once again set the Koreans on the move.7 In the second half of the twentieth century, South Korean migration to the United States picked up in momentum. Korean towns and communities cropped up all across California, which, with an estimated total of nearly one million Koreans, had become by the end of the century the most important site of Korean presence outside the peninsula. Postcolonial North Korean crossings into Manchuria were also significant, despite the tight control maintained by the Communist governments of both China and North Korea over the movement of the populations. Yanbian in China on the North Korean border emerged as a “third Korea” on the peninsula, when South Koreans arrived to trade and invest after 1991, upon the normalization of diplomatic relationships between China and South Korea. Mobility or dispossession from the homeland, no less than nationalistic aspirations, has been an important condition of Korean modernity. Over the course of the past century, millions of Koreans were on the move, crossing national borders, checking travel documents, and contesting their identities. Such frequent encounters with boundaries inspired tales, changed lifestyles, stirred up debates, broke up social patterns, and adjusted expectations. The impact could be felt in all spheres of life, from home and work to school and community. Through text as well as practice, mobility changed a people’s self-understanding and reshaped national awareness. Foreign encounter in turn helped to set Korean domestic agenda. Far East and Russian-Korean Relations,” papers presented at the “Russia and Russian Civilization in the North Pacific” conference, May 19, 2011, University of California, Berkeley, co-sponsored by the Far Eastern National University (Vladivostok, Russian Federation) and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (UC Berkeley). 7  William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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The first objective of this volume is thus to draw attention to the modern Korean experiences with mobility, experiences that played an important role informing Korean constructions of an ethnonationalistic discourse of territoriality. Much has already been written to shed light on the latter. Not nearly as much has been done to examine Korean mobility, especially in connection with the formation of Korean subjectivity from the nonpeninsular perspectives of movement and mobility. By drawing attention to mobility in subjectivity—to the contested nature of subjectivity in the processes of mobility—this volume seeks to connect the experiences of Korean diaspora with those of the homeland, thereby enriching an understanding of Korean nationalism from its flip side. Sojourning and migrating Koreans who were away from Korea sought accommodations with their new environments. Upon return to the homeland, they become bearers and conduits of foreign attributes. The Manchurian days of Kim Il-song brought home to the North visions that contrasted sharply with those brought to the South by Syngman Rhee after his American years. Scholars have argued that the diverse and fractious nature of sojourning Korean networks in the colonial days had much to do with the postcolonial divisions in the Korean political community. Space and spatial differences mattered, in other words, in the social changes and political developments that attended the return of the sojourners. Korean nationalist discourse has consistently insisted upon the spatial centrality of the Korean peninsula. Korean experiences with diaspora emphatically give importance, meanwhile, to the colonial spatial hierarchy that marginalizes the homeland. A second emphasis of this volume is thus to draw attention to disparities in the hierarchical spatial positionings of Korea in nationalistic and colonial discourses, and to examine their pragmatic ramifications. Korea under colonialism saw the dominance of foreign power and presence. Central to Korea’s colonial experience was the dispossession of the Koreans—culturally, socially, economically, and politically—in their homeland. It is inherent in the nature of colonial rule that colonial subjects became estranged from their home country without ever leaving it. Tension between placement and dispossession, resistance and receptiveness, coercion and persuasion not only marked the everyday experiences of the Koreans on the peninsula; it also spurred postcolonial controversies over colonial legacies. Not all Koreans, of course, found themselves equally advantaged or disadvantaged within this charged and changing situation. There are far more reasons for the postcolonial construction of Korean national discourse to be contentious than to be consensual. By placing diaspora over nationalistic discourse, a third objective of this volume is to shed light on the contending configurations of power, interest, and

Introduction

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discourse—deterritorialized and dispossessed as well as the opposite—in the construction of Korean modernity. Boundary issues between the Qing and Chosun Korea could be traced as far back as the early sixteenth century, when the Chosun kings and the Jurchen chiefs of Jianzhou, whose descendents were to become the Qing emperors of China, were both paying tribute to the Ming emperors in Beijing. Disputes between the two contesting tributary states broke out from time to time over the right to gather ginseng in each other’s territories. Both parties resorted to the Ming court, which was expected to broker the peace between the two contestants.8 In 1712 the boundary was formally drawn between Manchuria and Korea under the reign of Kangxi.9 A Qing imperial mission ascended the peak of the Paektu Mountains and identified the sources of the Yalu and the Tumen Rivers. A stele was erected and a fence was built to mark the banks of the rivers as the boundaries separating Manchuria and Korea. Eighteenth-century Chinese rulers granted the Koreans the authority to punish any Qing subject trespassing into Korean territory. The border was no cause of friction between Beijing and Seoul even as local people freely crossed the rivers in competition for economic gains. Things began to change in the second half of the nineteenth century when the Qing, in response to a perceived Russian threat to its security, relaxed court restrictions on the migration of Han Chinese into Manchuria.10 Han immigrants, upon reaching the more remote Tumen region, found that the Koreans had already established themselves in better farmlands. The Korean response, as Schmid has shown, was the ingenious argument that there had been two Tumen Rivers instead of just one, and that the 1712 boundary stele had established Qing territorial right to the north of the northern branch of the two rivers.11 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the dispute over Kando, the valley in between the two branches of the Tumen, was to be the source of many riots, countermeasures, and armed feuds between local Korean and Chinese settlers.

8 

Seonmin Kim, “Ginseng and Border Trespassing between Qing China and Choson Korea,” Late Imperial China 28, no. 1 (June 2007): 33–61. 9  This paragraph draws on Seomin Kim, “Negotiations for Border Control between Qing and Choson in the Eighteenth Century,” UC Berkeley–Korea University Forum on “CrossCurrents,” Berkeley, June 22–24, 2011. 10  Robert H. G. Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Series, Harvard University, 1970); James Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 11  Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 201–211.

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In the context of such changing circumstances, three Korean men, dispatched by their local officials, crossed the Yalu in the summer of 1872. Earlier, there had been a major outbreak of violence between the Koreans and the Chinese in the borderland north of the river. It was the mission of the three to spy on local conditions and gather information. Their trip produced a diary that provided an eyewitness account of the transformation of this part of the world that straddled the acknowledged borders. The diary, as Kwangmin Kim argues, would offer one of the most valuable accounts of the changing borders between two discursive regimes of boundary-making by the Chinese and the Koreans. In his chapter, Kwangmin Kim identifies 1860 as a year of major significance when, with the Treaty of Tianjin, the Qing court opened up Niuzhuang as a treaty port for trading with the Europeans. The coming of the Europeans—the Russians in particular—changed the economic dynamics in the region. It brought to the farms and the forests of Manchuria the forces of an international network of trading. It also provided incentives that drew into Manchuria Chinese merchants as well as Korean migrants, with capital and labor that further commercialized the agrarian economy. The Treaty of Tianjin changed the calculations of Qing officials in Shengjing. These new calculations in turn impacted Koreans making their usual ways of living. Kim argues that Koreans who arrived into this region now became settlers rather than sojourners, thanks to a new Qing understanding of resources, population, and the management of borderlands. In the upper reaches of the rivers and at the foot of the Paektu, labor was scarce while resources were plentiful. Qing officials in Shengjing now saw the Korean population in the region as being of great value. The Koreans were not only a source of tax revenue and economic labor; they represented, in addition, fresh resources for the military recruitment necessary for the Qing defense in its wars against the Russians. Kim follows the activities of the three spies and seeks to map the economic transformation of the border region after the opening of the treaty ports. To the dismay of the Korean spies, Korean communities north of the river had become rather Sinicized. Many had shaved their foreheads and were wearing queues, much like the subjects of the Qing. They had become “fake barbarians” in Chosun terms. The Sinicization of the Koreans in this region had much to do, Kim argues, with the legal and the economic dynamics that accompanied Manchuria’s transition from a tributary zone to a bounded territory under a new international system. The Qing had put into practice legal stipulations that differentiated people of different national origins; citizens of different nations were to enjoy different rights with regard to residence and the ownership of land. Korean migrants who had crossed the rivers into Manchuria were no longer imperial

Introduction

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subjects within the orbit of an all-encompassing tributary system. They were pressed for tax contributions and military services in the national armies of the Qing. They had become national subjects who had to choose their primary nationalities and be counted accordingly. The opening up of Niuzhuang as a treaty port ushered in a new era of capitalist transactions in the Northeast Asian hinterland. Miriam Kingsberg argues that Japan, no less than Victorian Britain, was an opium empire.12 It was not only that trade in narcotics helped to finance the imperial project but also that addiction, viewed as a social disease and quantified in medical statistics, was built into a hierarchical racial ideology of superiority and inferiority that separated the Japanese from the Koreans and the Chinese. In the 1920s and 1930s, narcotics trade thrived in Manchuria. There were many drug dealers and users among Japan’s imperial subjects. Against the backdrop of “racial profiling,” there were judges who punished the criminalized and doctors who treated the pathologized. Kingsberg argues that in a burgeoning trade of narcotics, the authorities and the professions conjoined to build a racial ideology, predicated upon clinical and social sciences, that categorized the Japanese as a race too pure to be contaminated, whereas the Chinese were too inferior ever to rise above the drugs. Standing in between the Japanese and the Chinese were the millionplus Koreans who had migrated into Manchuria as Japanese subjects. These included not only the farm workers who had crossed the borderland for centuries but also a growing number of clerks and merchants who settled in major cities such as Fengtian (Shenyang). In the eyes of the Japanese, the Koreans in Manchuria, a domain that was peripheral to the imperial heartland, were almost Japanese. Koreans in the Japanese Empire were not pure enough to be above the drugs. But they were good enough to function as drug dealers instead of addicts. On the Korean homeland, they were fit for full assimilation as Japanese. At a third site such as Manchuria, the Koreans now passed into the ranks of the colonizing elite and functioned as intermediaries between the Japanese and the Chinese. Koreans in Manchuria, women as well as men, engaged in the opium trade. They moved high-grade opium from Japanese-controlled suppliers on the Korean peninsula across the Yalu into Manchuria. They made huge fortunes, as in the case of Baek Hongyong, who ran an entire distribution network with the help of compliant Korean men, and was proud of making her daughter “the richest little girl in all China.”13 12  Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999). 13  Miriam Kingsberg, “Status and Smoke: Koreans in Japan’s Opium Empire,” this volume.

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Meanwhile Koreans in Manchuria earned the antipathy and resentment of the Chinese, who saw the former as minions of the colonialists and turned their rage on Korean settlements. What the Koreans had to pay, as a price of their almost elite status in Japanese Manchuria under the empire, was a massive post-1945 Chinese retaliation against the Koreans as collaterals of the fallen empire. How the Koreans in Manchuria fared contrasted sharply with the experiences of the millions of Koreans who had moved to Japan proper, where they encountered downright prejudice and discrimination, as part of Japan’s construction of Japanese superiority.14 Kingberg’s chapter underscores the point that colonial racial discourse was never evenly exercised across the imperial realm. For mobile colonial subjects, spatial factors mattered in the constructions of boundaries and identities. Baek Hongyong was not only the most successful drug dealer running a network of male Korean pushers in Manchurian towns; she consorted effectively with Japanese men for the supply of the drugs as well as for their political protection. Colonial conditions encouraged the subversion of gender norms in Korean families, reconfiguring familial dynamics on the home front. The power of the state could be felt on the margins as well as the heartland of the empire. In her chapter on the household system in Korea, Sungyun Lim uses legal cases to examine the dynamics between colonial law and Korean families. The Meiji Civil Code, a tool of social reform in Japan, was applied to Korea alongside the implementation of a household registration system. The code was the result of legislative compromises and contradictions. It was also intended as a tool to achieve certain social results. It was removed from the reality on the ground in Japan. It was equally removed from the reality on the ground in Korea. Lim examines the Legal Records (Koto hoin hanketsuroku) of Korean civil cases tried under the code. She finds that widowed women were winning court cases as heads of households against their in-laws, especially in adoption cases. Meanwhile women were unsuccessful in obtaining divorces, and the press printed many stories concerning women abandoning their families. There was a general anxiety about Korean women being on the loose. The data from the court and those from the press point to divergent discursive trajectories about the place of women in Korean families under Japanese rule. Lim argues that the visibility of the missing women was a result of the gendered constructions of men and women in colonial administrative and legal codes. The implementation of the Meiji Civil Code strengthened the 14 

About the Koreans in Japan, see Lie, “The Discriminated Fingers.”

Introduction

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legally constructed boundaries around nuclear familial units and weakened the traditional connections in extended families. It placed married women under the authority of the male heads of households. It also accorded widowed women the status of heads of households. The latter was in keeping with a Korean tradition, by which a widow was to look after the perpetuation of her husband’s lineage. In the past, a widow, fulfilling her obligations within the context of an extended family, would have been under the watch of her in-laws. In the colonial period, the Meiji Civil Code, by recognizing the nuclear family at the expense of the lineage, turned a widow’s obligation into a source of power against her in-laws. Meanwhile the household registration system placed the male head of a nuclear household at the center and recognized the existence of the household wherever the men were registered to be. This registration system failed to take into account the increased spatial movement of Korean men either for work as the economy industrialized, or for study as the peninsula became part of an empire with its core lying elsewhere. Under colonialism, chances were that men moved about far more than did women. Yet, thanks to the administrative constructions of gendered expectations, the absence of these men from home, unlike that of women, was hardly ever captured either in Korean press or in colonial records. Empires, of course, come and go. They also come in different forms. Some equip themselves with formal institutions and territorial designs, while others do not. One condition nonetheless persists: power relationships remained asymmetrical between the Korean locals and their foreign handlers. By the mid-twentieth century, the Japanese Empire was gone and the American century was on the rise. Taejin Hwang takes up the issue of gender and class in South Korea in the 1950s and 1960s in the mixed community of U.S. military camptowns. Hwang sees camptowns as borderlands structured by the power of sovereign entities. Camptown interactions were local affairs with domestic ramifications. They were also episodes in international interactions that impacted treaties and alliances. At the most fundamental level, U.S. military camptowns in South Korea were borderlands of transaction, where American soldiers found sex and Korean men accessed American goods with the help of their women. Many seasoned Korean women who operated sex services around U.S. military bases had also been comfort women attached to the Japanese military. Their access to American goods enabled a level of consumption and a style of life that, for a while, benchmarked postwar Korean modernity. It was a hard calculation to balance for the South Korean government: whether to endure a sense of national humiliation or to deny the country a major source of much needed capital. Although income from the

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American military presence accounted for a significant amount of the capital that was funding Korea’s industrialization, the same presence posed a morally corrupting influence on traditional Korean values. Meanwhile, beyond an underground sex trade across the Korean-American civilian and military boundaries, American soldiers and Korean women formed marital bonds despite the walls and the rules of the “frontiers within.”15 There was simply no way to separate the security benefit from the destabilizing influence that arose from the presence of American soldiers among Korean civilians. America held its sway, in the end, even as Korean society battled its anti-American ambivalence. An advanced American educational degree would open many doors in South Korean society. And an American residency green card was among the most sought after possessions even in elite circles. The first group of Korean students dispatched to the United States arrived in 1883. Their mission was to acquire the latest in advanced knowledge and to equip themselves for better service to their country. In the following decades, Korea’s elite sent their sons to study in Japan. Korean writers of this time stressed the importance of Western learning. Japan was a major conduit for Koreans in their access to the West, even though many would have preferred to go to the source in Europe. The fall of the Japanese empire in 1945 set in motion a different set of dynamics. As Jane Cho shows in her chapter, the number of Korean students seeking advanced degrees in the United States sharply increased in the postwar years. The outbreak of the Korean War and Korea’s increased dependency upon the United States ushered in another period that witnessed not only an increase—to the thousands—of Korean students going to America but also the unmatched prestige of an American degree in Korean society. An overwhelming majority of the Korean political elite of the 1960s had received their education in the United States. These included not only the sons of the affluent—the businessmen and the political elite of yangban ancestry—but also the orphaned and the dispossessed who had built, through their service in the platoons and elsewhere, personal connections with Americans in Korea. Korean dependency on American support for security and development in the 1960s turned an American 15  See Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), for an explication, via the experiences of the postwar zainichi [Koreans in Japan], of the concept of “frontiers within,” established via institutions such as immigration checkpoints, repatriation camps, detention centers, Red Cross outposts, and military bases. The homeland is transformed into a borderland where state power is conspicuous and absolute. I am indebted to Miriam Kingsberg for bringing this work to my attention.

Introduction

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advanced degree into a commodity of high prestige and a ticket into officialdom. This was particularly so at a time when a majority of Koreans were hardly able to gain access to an indigenous college education. In applied sciences and engineering, Korean institutions of higher education built special ties with Stanford University. Such connections helped to nurture the pool of technological talent critical for the rise of Korean industry and technology in the third quarter of the twentieth century. The presence of Americans in Korea had subverted the usual expectations of social hierarchy and enabled the rise of a technocracy. There were many ways for the power of the state to be felt. There were also many ways for local societies to mount resistance. Yishi Liu’s chapter zeroes in on the question of how, materially, the Koreans who had crossed from North Korea lived their “Koreanness” vis-à-vis their probable alternatives over the course the twentieth century. The Sino-Korean borderland known today as Yanbian became an autonomous region after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. China and North Korea—the DPRK—fought shoulder to shoulder during the Korean War. Under the People’s Republic, Koreans who lived on the Chinese side of the border enjoyed full rights as Chinese citizens, yet remained Korean both in self-constructions and in Chinese constructions. Liu shows that Korean-Chinese children of Yanbian grew up being educated in Korean as well as Chinese. They lived a Korean style of life and built Korean-style housing: setting their chimneys in a certain orientation, placing their kitchens in a particular space, gravitating toward one form of heating instead of another. Presumably they had been doing so under the Qing, the Japanese, and the Manchuko, as well as the People’s Republic. In the vernacular architecture of housing, there was a formal code of expression that helped to communicate, over time, a shared understanding among the local Chinese and the Koreans alike of the suitable forms, functions, and spatial relationships within the structure of a Korean home. It is the contribution of Liu’s essay to offer a descriptive analysis of the components and composition of this form. It is striking, of course, to juxtapose Liu’s findings with the happenings on the other side of the Sino-Korean border, where over the course of the third quarter of the twentieth century, government policies and land reform measures in South Korea had placed new infrastructure in Korean villages, destroying the very social fabric that defined the traditional community and engendering a modern Korea predicated upon “the death of the peasant” in the processes of industrialization.16 A majority of Korean 16  John Lie, Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 108–18; Sungjo Kim, “The Capitalist Rearrangement of Peasants’ Space

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Wen-hsin Yeh

peasants on the peninsula desired new styles of housing and new patterns of roads as signs of modernity. And the Korean government in the South was intent upon the production of a modern Korea with an urbanized population and a marketized free economy. The Korean communities of socialist Chinese Yanbian, in contrast, experienced none of these changes for decades. Liu argues that, precisely because the Koreans of Yanbian were “Chinese” in citizenship and “Korean” in ethnicity, in order to fulfill the ideological interest of the Chinese nation-state—to be included as one of the nationalities in China’s “unified and multiethnic nation” after 1949— the Yanbian Koreans were compelled to perform their ethnicity, in Chinese imagination, as a “Korean minority” within the larger Chinese context. In the 1990s, DPRK refugees crossed the Tumen into the Chinese Yanbian in search of relief from the famine that had gripped their homeland. Ivo Plsek shows that Yanbian, sometimes called a “third Korea” because of the number of North Koreans who live there, played an instrumental role in the development of modern Korean identity, both in spite of and because of its location within China. Plsek’s essay examines the North Korean refugee issue in the 1990s and 2000s, constituting the biggest Korean population movement since the end of the Korean War. Plsek asks whether the migration, which came about as a result of economic failure in the mid-1990s in the DPRK, had the potential to force changes upon the political construction of the North Korean state. DPRK refugees had defied an internal system of constraint governing the mobility of the North Korean population from place to place: from the country into the city and from province to province. They also traced their problems to the state’s mismanagement of the controlled economy. Plsek asks whether a crisis of economic origin might have turned into a political one. Meanwhile the destitution of the Northern refugees, thanks to media coverage, was being played out in the full view of the world. Plsek’s paper takes into account how this element of international representation might have forced both the North and the South to grapple with their respective definitions of Korean identity—considerations that in turn would have affected their responses to the crisis. Chinese authorities, to be sure, had a role to play in the control of the Korean flight into Chinese territories. The PRC generally collaborated with the DPRK in the enforcement of DPRK domestic policies. When the North Korean outflow peaked in the second half of the 1990s, PRC officials responded by permitting DPRK authorities to enter into Chinese territories for the enforcement of Korean laws. It was only in the 2000s, in the New Village Movement of South Korea,” paper presented at the UC Berkeley-Korea University Forum on “Cross-Currents,” Berkeley, June 22–24, 2011.

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when Western media told stories of DPRK refugees petitioning the South Korean Embassy in Beijing—media stories implying parallels with those of refugees and embassies between the two Germanies a decade earlier—and upon the insertion of Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) into this discussion, that the governments of the DPRK, the PRC, and even the ROK joined hands in denying the North Korean refugees certain benefits that they might otherwise have expected. The DPRK and the PRC governments, in short, handled the refugee flow with flexibility. Despite the criticisms in the Western press, their handling averted a political crisis that would have destabilized the DPRK. This handling conformed to norms and expectations about boundaries and nationalities that were distinctly different from Western expectations. The discursive insertion of the latter, at least in this instance, appeared to have done little to improve circumstances on the ground. To wrap up, the essays in this collection, by focusing on mobility, offer a rich and complex picture of changing circumstances on the Korean peninsula over the course of the past one-and-a-half centuries. They underscore the point that there have been intimate connections between national constructions and spatial mobility. They demonstrate the intellectual fruitfulness of an approach to the peninsula that brings in the continental as well as maritime dimensions of the Korean diaspora. Modern Koreans have been mobile subjects who have moved across boundaries and divisions, their movement cutting across a fragmented space of colonial hierarchy and discursive contestation. To access these experiences and to build incrementally upon them to a larger historical narrative of Korean modernity, let us begin with the tales of three Korean spies, once upon a time across the River Tumen.

ONE

Korean Migration in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria A Global Theme in Modern Asian History

KWANGMIN KIM

On June 1, 1872, three Korean spies—Choe Chongbŏm, Kim Taehŭng, and Lim Sŏkgŭn—crossed the Yalu (Korean, Ap’nok) River to begin a six-week journey through the Sino-Korean borderland. They traveled on behalf of Chosun Korea’s Huchang County. A mere year earlier, the people on the northern side of the river had engaged the army of Huchang County in a fierce skirmish remembered by the locals as the Battle of Marokpo (Horse and Deer Dock). Huchang County prevailed in this war over timbercutting rights.1 Following the conflict, Huchang County officials sent the spies to collect information about the people who remained—and who might seek vengeance at any time. Huchang County was thus especially interested in obtaining information regarding the military preparedness of the community. At the same time, Huchang County also wanted to know what had attracted Koreans to the area in the first place. By the 1870s, Koreans of the northern counties were defecting from their towns and villages and crossing the river in large numbers. Huchang County officials viewed this development with suspicion. Reports circulated that many migrants believed that the area across the Yalu and Tumen Rivers was a paradise where Jin’in (True Person) or Ko’in (High Person) resided. The Huchang county officials asked the spies to collect information about this rumor. 1  For a brief explanation of the Battle of Marokpo, see Yu Sung-ju, “Choson Hugi Sogando Ijumin E Taehan Ilgochal: Kangbuk Ilgi Ui Haejae E Pucho” [Korean immigration to the western Kando during the Late Chosun Period: An introduction to Kangbuk Ilgi], Asea yon’gu [Asia Research] 59 (1978): 302.

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One of the spies, Choe Chongbŏm, left a record of the journey. The report survives today under the name of Kangbuk Ilgi (Diary of [travels] north of the [Yalu] River).2 This account is valuable as the only detailed contemporary account of Korean migrants from a local perspective. Choe likely anticipated the enduring legacy of this community. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Koreans in Manchuria grew more numerous and naturalized as “Chinese” (Zhongguo ren) at the behest of the Chinese state. Today the ethnic Korean community remains the mainstay of the pluralistic population of the Yanbian Chaoxianzu Autonomous Prefecture on the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.3 Using the diary in conjunction with Qing archival sources, this chapter investigates nineteenth-century Korean migration into southern Manchuria. I portray the Korean migration as a global phenomenon—not an isolated development, but a part of structurally interrelated migration movements that took place all over China’s borderlands during the early modern and modern period. I contend that the Korean migration was 2  In this article, I use the photo-reproduced version of the text included in Kukhak Chinhŭng Yŏnʼgu Saŏp Chuʼujin Wiwŏnhoe (Korea) [Committee for the Promotion of National Studies], Kangbuk Ilgi; Kangjwa Yŏjigi; Aguk Yŏjido [Diary of (travels) north of the (Yalu and Tumen) Rivers; Record on the geography of the west side of the (Tumen) River; Map of the (territory) of Russia] (Sŏngnam-si, Korea: Hanʼguk Chŏngsin Munhwa Yŏnʼguwŏn [Academy of Korean Studies], 1994) (hereafter, KBIG). For previous scholarship on KBIG, see Chŏng Kubok’s introductory article to KBIG, included in the aforementioned collection; Yu, “Choson Hugi Sogando Ijumin E Taehan Ilgochal”; Ho Kyong-jin, “Chungguk Choson Munhak Choecho Ui Chakpumgua Ku Changjak Paekyong E Taehayo” [The first work of Chinese-Korean literature and its background], Hanmun hakpo [Journal of Classical Chinese Literature of Korea] 18 (2008): 1311–37. 3  Choe likely recorded his diary for submission to the Huchang county government. As officials expected, the diary provided valuable information on the borderland area. The work appended a colored map depicting mountains, rivers, and villages. The text of the diary furnished critical geographical and demographic information on each place the spies visited. It also noted the distance between points of interest. For these reasons, contemporaries referred to Choe’s account as the “spy diary” (Korean, sejak ilgi). However, it is not impossible that he wrote it for general readers. Originally, scholars assumed that there was only one handwritten copy available, stored in the library of the Academy of Korean Studies. However, scholars recently discovered a copy in the Yonsei University library, and I have found a third copy in the East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The fact that multiple copies of this book exist suggests the possibility that Choe wrote it for a wide audience, possibly for commercial purposes. See Chŏng, Introduction to KBIG, 11; Ho, “Chungguk Choson Munhak.” Another feature that distinguishes the work from a simple catalog of information is the author’s insertion of his own viewpoint. One may easily infer that the text was written by a member of low-rank yangban literati, who identified politically with the Chosun government. The Korean term ilgi (Chinese, riji) is not necessarily always translated as “diary.” It could just as easily be translated as a “journal.” I prefer the term “diary” due to the strong subjective viewpoint.

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essentially a relocation of agrarian labor, stimulated by the growing integration of the borderland economy into global capitalism. The interregional or transnational migration that took place in China’s borderlands (including those that eventually became Chinese territories, such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Manchuria, as well as those that did not, such as Southeast Asia and Korea) was arguably the most important socioeconomic development of the early modern and modern era. Joseph Fletcher, the first historian to speculate on the importance of this migration, examines it from a distinctly China-centered point of view. In his perspective, migration in the borderlands was the result of an internal Chinese economic dynamic, with increasing demographic pressure on resources causing a crisis in the Chinese agrarian economy. Fletcher further argues that migrations had a crucial impact in Sinicizing the frontier and contributing to the formation of the modern Chinese state. The Qing empire ruled the borderlands as distinctive cultural, economic, political zones separate from China until the late nineteenth century. However, faced with the threat of European imperialism, the Qing rulers changed their policy, establishing a Chinese-style administration, encouraging Chinese immigration, and levying taxes to support the Qing military. In this way, the Qing borderland became Chinese territory, and the Qing empire, a Chinese nation-state.4 In recent decades, historians have challenged this China-centered view, examining migration across China’s borderlands from the standpoint of the borderlands themselves. Students of the Chinese movement into Southeast Asia have pioneered this new direction in the scholarship. Looking at the case studies of Malaya and Singapore, Carl Trocki argues that the in-migration of Chinese from the southern coast was firmly rooted in local economic dynamics, articulated within the context of Southeast Asia’s growing interconnections with China, as well as global capitalism. Rather than contributing to the construction of the Chinese nation, Chinese migrants became an integral part of modern Southeast Asian history, playing a crucial role in economic development and modern state-building in Southeast Asia.5 This chapter applies Trocki’s borderland-centered approach to the Korean migration into Manchuria in the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, it also aims to identify parallels and structural historical interconnections 4 

Joseph Fletcher, “The Heyday of the Ch’ing Order in Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Tibet,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, pt. 1 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 5  Carl A. Trocki, Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore, 1784–1885, 2nd ed. (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007); Carl A. Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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between the Korean migration into Manchuria and the Chinese migration into Southeast Asia. In so doing, I seek to establish the Korean migration as an integral theme in the global history of modern Asia. I believe this research will constitute a significant contribution to a systematic and comprehensive understanding of transnational and transregional migrations in Asian borderlands, which to date have only been explored as particularistic developments within specific geographical contexts (e.g., Southeast Asia, Xinjiang, Manchuria, and so on). At first glance, the comparison between Southeast Asia and Manchuria may seem inadequate or even ill-advised. However, a closer look at both regions reveals that they shared important borderland characteristics, such as the influence of multiple political and cultural units (Chinese, Russians, Koreans, and the indigenous Jurchen tribes), as well as demographic and cultural fluidity. For the purposes of this study, the most important commonality was the status of both regions as an economic frontier—the underdeveloped hinterland of a dominant China. Resources were abundant, while the labor for development was scarce. Both Southeast Asia and Manchuria boasted rich forests that could only be exploited by migrant laborers. This paper argues that, as in Southeast Asia, European commerce in the trade ports changed the commercial landscape, economic structure, and ethnic relations of the Sino-Korean borderland.6 The transformation of the economy—essentially through the emergence of the commercial production of ginseng—stimulated the mobility of Korean agrarian laborers across the Sino-Korean border. A new kind of borderland came into being: a multiethnic community built around commercial agriculture, featuring the division of labor along ethnic lines—Chinese merchant capital and Korean field-workers. Based on the experience of the Korean migrants and their relations with the local military authority of the Qing, this chapter also proposes a new interpretation of the construction of the modern Chinese nationstate from a borderland perspective. The needs of the local branches of the Qing government were different from those of the center, and the process of state-building in the borderland was different from the empire-wide dynamic. The Qing never acknowledged Korean migrants living north of the rivers as legal residents. Yet despite orders from the center, local military commanders preferred to tax rather than evict the Koreans. Indeed, borderland leaders competed fiercely with other states—namely Russia and Chosun—to control, tax, and even recruit Korean migrant laborers.

6 

Trocki, Opium and Empire, 30.

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The proactive attitude of Qing authorities in Manchuria regarding the control of Korean laborer migrants may reflect a fundamental change in the state’s attitude toward the local economy. Notably, the central government eventually followed the lead of local military authorities. In the 1880s, the Qing government decided to naturalize the Korean migrants as Chinese (Zhongyuan zhi min). It also asserted control over the Sino-Korean borderland occupied by the Korean migrants, calling it China (land of the middle plain) (Zhongyuan zhi di). In so doing, the Qing declared both population and space part of the Chinese nation-state. In other words, in a localized vision of the Sino-Korean borderland, the construction of the Chinese nation-state is seen to result from competition over Korean labor. The exploitation of new commercial opportunities in the Manchurian borderland would have been impossible without the agrarian migrants. The modern Chinese territorial state originated as a response to opportunities created by the growing integration of the local population into global capitalism in the late nineteenth century. As agrarian laborers, Korean migrants were the ultimate prize, embodying all the new financial possibilities the Manchurian borderland had to offer in the late nineteenth century.7

7  For a general history of the Sino-Korean borderland, see Yang Zhaoquan and Sun Yumei, Zhong Chao Bianjie Shi [History of the Sino-Korean borderland] (Changchun shi: Jilin wen shi chu ban she, 1993). For a Korean perspective, see Kim Han-gyu, Han-Chung Kwangye Sa [History of Sino-Korean relations] (Seoul: Aruke, 1999). On Sino-Korean border disputes during the Qing/Chosun period, see Seonmin Kim, “Ginseng and Border Trespassing between Qing China and Chosǒn Korea,” Late Imperial China 28, no. 1 (2007): 33–61; Kim Kyongchun, “Hanchong Kukkyong Munjae Ui Ilsijom: Pomwol Ul Chungsim Uro” [A perspective on the SinoKorean border problem: Border crossing], Kyongju sahak 6 (1987); Andre Schmid, “Tributary Relations and the Qing-Choson Frontier on Mount Paektu,” in The Chinese State at the Borders, ed. Diana Lary (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007). On the Korean Chinese community, see Andre Schmid, “Looking North toward Manchuria,” South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 1 (2000); En Chong-tae, “Taehan Chegukki ‘Kando Munje’ Ui Chui Wa ‘Sikminhwa’” [The Kando problem during the Taehan Cheguk Period and colonization], Yoksa munje yongu [Researches on Historical Problems] 17 (2007); Yu Pyong-ho, “Pukkando Hanin Ui Kukjok Ul Tullossan Chongil Yangguk Ui Kyosop E Taehan Yongu Tonggambu Pachulso Sigi Rul Chungsim Ruo” [Qing-Japan negotiations regarding the citizenship of the Koreans in North Kando], Chunang saron [Journal of Joong-Ang Historical Studies] 21, no. Special issue (2005); Pal Ui-ryong, “Kundae Tongasia Ui Kukkyong Uisik Kwa Kando” [Kando and border consciousness in the modern East Asia], Chungguksa yongu [Research on Chinese History] 32 (2004); Zhao Xingyuan, “Qing Zhengfu Dui Yuejing Chaomin De Zhengce” [Qing government policy toward the border-crossing Chosun Koreans], Beihua daxue xuebao: Shehui kexueban [Journal of Beihua University: Social Science] 4, no. 3 (2003); Zhao Xingyuan, “‘Jiandao’ Wenti De Youlai Ji Yanbian” [Origins and development of the “Jiandao (Kando)” problem], Beihua daxue xuebao: Shehui kexue ban [Journal of Beihua University: Social Science] 1, no. 3 (2000): 65–69.

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The Demography and Economy of the Borderland Community When the Korean spies arrived in Marokpo on June 1, 1872, they discovered a bi-ethnic community of Koreans and Chinese. They immediately encountered twenty locals (eighteen Koreans and two Chinese). Using the term by which Chosun Koreans called Chinese who adopted Manchu hairstyles and clothing, the spies referred to the Chinese as “barbarians” (Korean, ho’in). The twenty locals were panning for gold in the river. When they saw the spies, they were instantly wary. Although the spies told them, half truthfully, that they had come to find a “paradise,” the party did not believe their explanation. The locals warned the spies that, although the area did not have any officials—by which they probably meant the Qing government—it was politically organized. To defend themselves against Korean raiding parties disguised as beggars, they had recently selected headmen called hoesang hoedu or hoesang t’ongsu. These headmen punished and executed “suspicious persons.” The locals exercised their power over the Korean spies and detained them for the night. The spies were let go the next day—not, however, before the locals had figured out their real identity. The spies had to beg for their lives in front of about fifty “barbarians” armed with rifles and bats. In all likelihood, the locals would have not killed them even if they had not begged. By that time, the headmen of the area had likely communicated among themselves, and decided to use the spies to convey their military preparedness to the Huchang government indirectly. Choe’s rendering of this initial encounter sheds light on many aspects of life in the borderland community.8 Hoesang policed the area, detaining travelers and permitting the passage of outsiders. According to an agreement between the Qing and Chosun governments, habitation within one hundred li of the northern and southern banks of the rivers was prohibited. Thus, borderland settlers were, so to speak, illegal residents. They had to defend themselves from various potential threats, including bandits, robbers, and, most of all, the Qing and Chosun military forces, which could attack and annihilate them at any time. For the purposes of this chapter, the demography of the community as described by Choe is even more striking than its political organization. The community was decidedly bi-ethnic: Chinese and Korean. If one considers the possibility that it also included local Manchus, the population was multiethnic. The initial encounter between the spies and the goldseekers suggests that the ratio of Koreans to Chinese was 9:1. However, 8 

The Korean spies noted the term hoesang was neither Chinese nor Korean in origin. No such concept existed in Chinese or Korean.

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this group was almost certainly not representative of the local population as a whole. Naturally, the diary does not provide comprehensive statistical data regarding ethnicity; however, fragmentary information that appears later confirms that the Chinese constituted more than 10 percent (in this case, 2:20) of the population of the area. Nonetheless, Koreans outnumbered Chinese by a wide margin—probably more than 7:3.9 This demographic reality is quite understandable, and even expected. The Musan and Huchang Counties of Chosun Korea, from which the Korean migrants primarily emigrated, were Korean border towns located right across the river. Chinese migrants from north China, who were numerous in Manchuria at the time, could have come to the area as well. But they did not. The distance and prohibitive landscape of Mount Changbaishan likely prevented many from settling in the borderland. Thus, the Koreans were the major source of labor north of the Yalu. The spies would learn of another demographic feature of the area two days later, when they met one of its most influential Korean headmen: Tohoesu (Great Hoesu) Shin Tae of Hyŏl’am’pyŏng. A typical Sinicized Korean elite, referred to pejoratively by the Korean residents as a “fake barbarian” (Korean, kaho), Shin Tae worried about increasing mobility across the river. Enumerating the weapons stored by his hoesang, which included eighty-five “barbarian rifles,” twenty “big rifles,” and forty-eight Chosun “bird rifles,” Shin Tae palpably distrusted the new migrants.10 Shin Tae mentioned that he collected the weapons held by Koreans—the 48 Chosun 9  According to the diary, the Koreans were primarily recent migrants from northern Korean counties such as Huchang and Musan, located at the southern shore of the rivers. The diary does not provide any specific information regarding the place from which the Chinese in the area had emigrated. There are a few possible origin points for the Chinese. They may have settled in Manchuria before the rise of the Qing in the seventeenth century. Frederic Wakeman calls them “transfrontier men.” Alternatively, they may have been new immigrants from north China—Shandong and North Zhili, in particular—during the Qing period (1644–1911). The diary implies that the majority of the migrants were non-literati, recent arrivals from north China. Notably, the diary distinguishes between local Chinese residents and migrant Chinese by calling the former “barbarians” (ho’in). Theoretically, one could apply this term to all Qing-era Chinese, because the dynasty required all Chinese to adopt the Manchu hairstyle and clothing. However, apparently, the author of the diary only used the term to denote the native Chinese in the region. For instance, Choe does not deploy the term to refer to a well-mannered, possibly well-educated Chinese owner of a hostel, who migrated to the region from north China and described himself as a Ming loyalist. The description of this personage also raises the possibility that the term “barbarian” had class connotations. 10  The borderland community had many reasons to arm itself. The first was the need for policing. Because the area was not subject to Qing or Chosun authority, policing was conducted by the community. In addition, the settlers had to defend themselves from outside threats, particularly bandits (usually referred as “horse bandits” in this area).

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bird rifles—at the beginning of the winter (Korean, yipdong) and returned them to their owners at the end of the winter (Korean, hansik). Shin Tae feared that Korean members of the community would cross the frozen river, secretly communicate with new Korean migrants, and cause trouble. Shin Tae’s concern, even hostility, reveals two important characteristics of the borderland community. First, mobility across the river had increased around the time the diary was recorded: most of the Koreans in the area (or, at least, most of those mentioned in Choe’s report) were recent migrants. In fact, even “old timers” like Shin Tae had arrived only ten years earlier. Second, existing settlers in the community felt the need to control the influx of newcomers. Elites did not wish to stifle in-migration, but they did seek to control the rate. And this desire derived from the constraints of the political economy within which they were operating. The borderland community was engaged in the commercial production of certain high-profit forest goods native to the area—most notably timber and ginseng. A constant influx of labor was a precondition of commercial production. However, an uncontrolled influx of migrants could undermine the profits of the developers by potentially furnishing labor to competitors.11 Commercial production of ginseng dominated the Sino-Korean borderland. The spy diary records numerous large-scale ginseng farms. One of the most memorable landscapes Choe described was a ginseng farm the party visited on July 2. On this day, the Chosun spies arrived in a place called Shitouhe, in which three Chinese residences were clustered along the river. The inhabitants all owned ginseng farms. One big ginseng farm required tilling for ten days; smaller farms, six or seven days. The fields were white with flowering ginseng plants. Viewed from a distance, the area seemed to be blanketed in snow. The operation of ginseng farms was a recent development in the SinoKorean borderland. A Chinese official confirmed that commercial agriculture in ginseng began in the area only in the 1860s. According to a 1908 report on a community in Tanghe, in the area of Mount Changbaishan (Jilin Province), the first Chinese migrants arrived in the area in 1801, and engaged primarily in hunting, pearling, and the gathering of ginseng, medicinal herbs, and fragrant plants. “Illegal cultivation,” primarily of ginseng and other medicinal herbs, even opium, did not begin until 1862. 11 

European travelers and Qing government officials also left records on these kinds of communities scattered around Mount Changbaishan in the 1880s and 1900s. They describe a society of ginseng farmers, hunters, and woodsmen, bound together in the pursuit of profit in the market. They also mentioned the communities’ “guild”-like political organization, with police and military capacities. See Robert H. G. Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 111.

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Once begun, ginseng farms spread quickly, becoming the major source of income for the community. The Jilin official reported that the annual income of the community “guild” (likely, the hoesang) included six thousand liang of tax from ginseng gardens. The “guild” also collected six hundred liang from the cultivation of peimu (a medicinal herb), five hundred liang from xixin (another herb), fifteen hundred liang from opium, and three thousand liang from timber. What is interesting about this list is that there is no mention of gathering. The hunting and gathering economy clearly gave way to commercialized agriculture at some point after 1862. By the late nineteenth century, the economy was completely dominated by commercial agriculture.12 Why did illegal cultivation begin after 1862? This is an important question to which I return later. However, in this section, I would like to explore the impact of commercial ginseng farms on the local socioeconomic structure. Large-scale ginseng cultivation required the investment of vast sums of capital, supplied by merchants. Commercial farming also demanded a huge corps of agrarian laborers to work as hired hands. As a result of plantation production, the community was transformed from a simple, more or less egalitarian population of ginseng diggers, to a world dominated by merchants and operated by agrarian laborers. This development significantly changed the nature of the Korean migration into Manchuria. Migration related to the production of ginseng was not a new development in the late nineteenth century. With its high profit margins, ginseng had always been a lucrative commodity. Throughout the Qing period, when the Imperial Household Department and its licensed merchants monopolized ginseng production, numerous people crossed the Tumen and Yalu Rivers from both Korea and China to dig the herb. They did so in spite of severe punishments levied on border-crossers: in most cases, execution.13 Early Korean and Chinese ginseng diggers and hunters were seasonal migrants who had no cause to relocate permanently. The development of the commercial ginseng farm, however, gave the migrants a reason to remain. In the borderland community that the spies visited in 1872, the capitalists were Chinese. Throughout Manchuria, Chinese dominated the ranks of merchants during the Qing period. Due to the demographic and geographic realities spelled out earlier, agrarian laborers were primarily, but not exclusively, Korean. Koreans were the most abundant, skilled, and cheapest workers available in the area. In fact, throughout Manchuria, 12 

Lee, The Manchurian Frontier, 108. Kim, “Ginseng and Border Trespassing”; Kim Kyongchun, “Hanchong Kukkyong Munjae Ui Ilsijom.” 13 

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northern Koreans were the only viable source of agrarian labor for Chinese merchants. To facilitate migration, the borderland needed a labor recruiting mechanism. The diary suggests that Korean elites—the hoedu and tʼongsu—organized migrants on behalf of the community. Chinese owners of the ginseng farms depended on the t’ongsu to obtain access to Korean laborers, a fact that increased the political power of Korean elites. By interviewing the t’ongsu Kim Yŏ’ok, the spies learned how the system of the labor recruitment worked in practice. Korean Migration and the Qing State The Korean spies met Kim Yŏ’ok on June 8, in a place called P’an’nae’dong by Koreans and Sandaogou by Chinese. Kim was originally a hunter from Musan, a Korean county located across the river. Like Shin Tae, Kim had migrated to the borderland about ten years earlier. At that time, he borrowed money to organize a hunting trip to Mount Changbaishan. On the hunting trail, in a thick forest divided by many large and small streams, he crossed the Sino-Korean border of the Yalu River without even realizing it. The hunting trip was not productive, and Kim could not repay the debt he had incurred. Thus, he decided to remain in the area, rather than return to Musan. By the time the Korean spies visited him, Kim had become a local hoedu. Kim showed the Korean spies a registry of the adult males and weapons under his control. According to this register, 277 Korean households (1,465 adult males) and 220 Chinese households (792 adult males) inhabited the area. Kim’s arsenal had 20 “big rifles” and 216 “barbarian rifles.” Kim supervised four Chinese headmen, each of whom controlled one village.14 During his conversation with the Korean spies, Kim made the interesting remark that two hundred households of Koreans in this area regarded him as a chakju. The spies did not clarify the definition of chakju. The term might be translated as master of labor, master of work, or master of agriculture. It is certain that these two hundred households had special relations with Kim, beyond his role as a hoedu. In any case, Kim served as the manager of the laborers of these two hundred households, comprising roughly one thousand adult males (as extrapolated from the general household-to-adult male ratio of the Koreans in the community under Kim’s control). Whatever the exact nature of Kim’s power, his so-called “followers” were entirely dependent upon him for their livelihood, and he exercised the power of life and death over them. Most likely, Kim was 14 

At the time, his father, Kim Wontaek, became tae hoedu of all lands within 150 li, from a place called Chŏng’kŭm’dong (Chinese, Qingjindong) to Sam’do’gu (Chinese, San’dao’gou).

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a strongman/labor recruiter/agricultural developer of the type that Carl Trocki considers crucial to the development of plantation agriculture in the Malay peninsula near Singapore. In Trocki’s account, kangchu (masters of the river, a name highlighting the concentration of agrarian development along the riverbanks), who were often secret society leaders, acquired the right from the government to bring new land under cultivation, and recruited the necessary labor. To fund agrarian development, they contracted debts with wealthy local Chinese merchants (taukeh), and redistributed them as loans to laborers on the farm. On the basis of their status as strongmen and migration managers, they played a crucial role in the evolution of plantation agriculture (including pepper, gambier, and opium) in the highly commercialized environment of Singapore and its hinterland.15 The role of kangchu (master of the river) in Southeast Asia provides an interesting counterpoint for Kim’s position as chakju (master of labor/ work/agriculture) in the development of commercial agriculture in the area around Mount Changbaishan. Like most of the kangchu, Kim was a literal strongman—a former hunter. He was also an early settler in the area. These qualifications made him the perfect candidate to recruit and control labor, the most important element in bringing the difficult mountain forest terrain under cultivation. Kim was also an attractive choice as a business partner for any merchant who embarked on a ginseng venture in the area. On that note, it is interesting that Kim mentioned his and his followers’ indebtedness to the Chinese. Kim said that he incurred a debt of nearly ten thousand liang to the Chinese because he had arrived in the area without any money. He also told the spies, “Many of the people who arrived here in the recent past borrowed heavily to avoid starving.”16 Like the strongman-developers in Southeast Asia, Kim likely functioned as a channel for the distribution of credit to the laborers under his control. In this way, he could exercise the ultimate influence over them. Certainly, Kim Yŏ’ok’s followers were by no means unique in their economic situation. Regarding the community under Shin Tae’s control, the Chosun spies noted that between 80 and 90 percent of the Koreans were poor and worked for the Chinese. In fact, during their journey, the Korean spies met numerous impoverished Koreans. A significant portion of them worked on ginseng farms for the Chinese. Others provided labor for different kinds of agriculture, and commercial enterprises such as timber cutting and gold mining.

15  16 

Trocki, Prince of Pirates, 103, 172, ff.; Trocki, Opium and Empire. KBIG, renshen (1872)/6/8.

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Of course, Korean migrants had their own, somewhat self-serving way of justifying their relationship with the Chinese. On June 19, the spies chatted with several Korean employees of a Chinese headman. The Koreans claimed that the Chinese were only masters “on the surface.” The Chinese gave them food, clothes, and interest-free loans. Debts were easily incurred and repudiated, as the Chinese could not pursue the laborers if they ran away. Yet although the Korean informants seemed satisfied with their situation, they were nevertheless dominated by Chinese capital. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the development of commercial agriculture in the Sino-Korean borderland was Kim’s ability to coopt the local Qing military authorities. In 1872, the Qing government still did not recognize settlement in the Sino-Korean borderland. Beijing required the military authority in this region—the Hunchun xieling—to destroy any residences and farms it encountered. (This policy was terminated only in 1881.) Thus, without the tacit approval of the Hunchun xieling, commercial agriculture or indeed any development in this borderland would not have been possible. When Kim discussed this issue with the Korean spies, he did not seem greatly concerned. In his words: “When the Qing itinerant officer (tongxun) used to come by, [we] bribed him and he left us alone. Even if [the Qing] send troops (jiajun) [next time], if we pay them off, there probably won’t be any trouble.” Kim added, “Every year, the itinerant officer comes with soldiers and announces that [he will] expel ‘bandits.’ However, has he ever done it? We pay them. It is as if they came here to collect tax.”17 The only difficulty was raising the money. Kim’s statement hints at the intriguing possibility of a systematic, cooperative relationship between the borderland community and the local military establishment. Insightfully, Kim Yŏ’ok likened his payment to the Qing military officer to a tax. Of course, no Qing source confirms this relationship between the local military establishment and the borderland community; it was most likely hidden from Beijing. Korean primary sources, on the other hand, allude clearly to sustained collaboration between the migrants and the military, as in an 1867 discussion between the Chosun and Qing governments regarding the repatriation of a Chosun subject, Yi Tong’gil. In 1867, the Chosun government requested that Yi be returned to Korea. According to the Chosun king’s letter, Yi had crossed the border to settle in Hunchun, and afterward lured many Koreans from the northern provinces to follow him into Qing territory. Yi Tong’gil was, in other words, an early Kim Yŏ’ok: a strongman/labor recruiter/agriculture developer. The Chosun king suspected that the Qing military authority in Hunchun 17 

KBIG, renshen (1872)/6/9.

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was turning a blind eye to illegal Korean immigration. According to the Chosun king, the Hunchun authority was “accustomed to” the presence of the migrants and did not want to return them. The Chosun king blamed the Hunchun authorities for tacitly protecting illegal Korean residents for their own benefit. At first, the highest military figure in the area, the Jilin general, vehemently denied the presence of a Chinese or Korean population along the Tumen and Yalu Rivers, but then Yi Tong’gil, under the alias Yi Chŏngsan, was captured by the Tumen River. Yi Tong’gil was formerly a resident of Kyŏngwon Prefecture. According to the Chosun king, Yi was a gangster (Korean, muloe; Chinese, wulai), powerful and fearless enough to strike a local Chosun official. After this incident, he fled to Qing territory. He brought with him his family, including his father, mother, brothers, and nephews. Yi subsequently recruited Korean migrants for farm work on the land he had developed along the river. Apparently, Yi cultivated quasi-familial relations with his laborers. One man taken into custody by the Qing military claimed that Yi Tong’gil had adopted him as a son when he first arrived in the area. The Qing also intercepted a female migrant whom Yi had wedded to the man.18 It is difficult to believe that the Qing authorities were not aware all along of the existence of Yi Tong’gil and his people, as their activities took place within the jurisdiction of the Hunchun xieling. More likely, as the Chosun king suggested, the Hunchun military authority protected Yi in defiance of Beijing. Hunchun’s commanders knew about Yi and his enterprises but feigned ignorance. Yi’s relationship with the Hunchun in 1867 anticipated Kim Yŏ’ok’s collaboration with local Qing representatives in 1872. These cases show that cooperative relations between the Korean migrant community and the Hunchun xieling were a systematic development. Needless to say, the Hunchun’s reason for tolerating the Korean migrants was its desire to develop a new revenue source. Salaries for bannermen (members of the elite military units of the Qing dynasty called “Eight Banners”) had never been adequate, and became less so during the declining years of the Qing. The Hunchun military authority also needed funds for improving defenses in the face of Russian military expansion into southern Manchuria after the signing of the Beijing Treaty in 1860. I will explain this development in detail shortly. For now, suffice it to say that, as a result of this treaty, the Hunchun commanders had to face the 18 

Guo Tingyi, Yushu Li, Xunan Lan, and Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, Qingji Zhong Ri Han Guanxi Shiliao [Sources on China-Japanese-Korean relations during the Late Qing Period], ed. Chu ban, vol. 2 (Taibei Shi: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, 1972), 141, document no. 109, TZ9/10/22 (November 14, 1870). Also see Yi Tong’gil’s confession in Qingji Zhong Ri Han Guanxi Shiliao, vol. 2, pp. 145–47; document no. 112, TZ9/12/10 (January 30, 1871).

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Russian military across the Hunchun River. In order to build adequate defenses against the Russians, the Hunchun xieling needed additional income. However, with military buildup in other parts of the empires and wars such as the Taiping Rebellion, the Second Opium War, and others commanding the primary attention and wealth of the Beijing government, local military officials were forced to develop local sources of revenue. Further, any additional income for bannermen would greatly boost morale. Thriving on the commercial production of ginseng and other enterprises, the Chinese-Korean borderland community represented a rather spectacular source of potential revenue for the Qing military authority. In fact, even prior to the late nineteenth century, the Qing military establishment in Manchuria had advocated registering illegal Chinese migrants for taxation, with only limited success. By the 1860s, the Hunchun xieling’s tacit recognition of the Korean community shows that the local military establishment was willing to expand its revenue base even without the approval of the Beijing government.19 Korean Migration in Global Context The preceding sections have established two points. First, unlike earlier arrivals, late nineteenth-century Korean migrants into southern Manchuria were agrarian laborers. Second, the change in the occupational profile of the Korean migrants resulted from the inception of commercial agriculture in the region—most notably ginseng farming. Korean migration into Manchuria unmistakably paralleled Chinese migration into Southeast Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the flow of traders and sailors gave way to coolie laborers in response to increasing investment in commercial agriculture by local merchants. My question is whether these developments simply paralleled each other, or were, rather, interconnected developments with the same root cause. In other words, can we identify singular borderland conditions, common to the political economies that surrounded China during the early modern and modern period, that link the two transnational or transregional migrations—one in Manchuria, the other in maritime Southeast Asia—to a theory of global development in Asian borderlands? The answer to this question depends on whether one can also identify the global dynamic that contributed to the rise of the Chinese coolie labors in Southeast Asia, namely, intensified relations with European capitalism, in late nineteenth-century Manchuria. In this regard, what is notable is the specific timing of the origins of ginseng farming and of the Korean migrant community itself in the area around Mount Changbaishan. Choe’s 19 

Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History, 102–3, 112–13.

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diary clearly states that the majority of the Koreans in the region—including “old-timer” elites such as Kim Yŏ’ok and Shin Tae—came to the area only in the 1860s. In addition, the “illegal cultivation” of ginseng in the Tanghe District, which I mentioned earlier, did not begin until 1862, even though the area had been populated since 1801. What happened in the 1860s to bring about commercial agriculture and Korean labor migration? A member of the Korean community suggested to the spies that a specific event in 1867 influenced the timing of the migration. According to him, a new head of Musan Prefecture collected one hundred thousand shi of grain from the people, prompting those who could not pay their share to flee across the river. Although this report may have contained some truth, it likely does not reflect the full story. To the Chosun government, migration north of the river was by definition criminal behavior for Koreans. Thus, the person who made this statement may have sought to justify an a priori illegal action by citing the wrongdoings of Korean officials. More fundamentally, those who fled from Musan had no reason to cross the river; they could easily and legally have settled elsewhere. The area north of the river, therefore, must have exerted some positive attraction. Maybe, one member of the community explained to the Korean spies, rumors of a paradise in this area attracted people from northern Korea. However, the “paradise” the migrants found scarcely resembled their expectations. Manchuria was a paradise of economic opportunity, created by the growing integration of the Sino-Korean borderland into the global economy. The 1860s saw the opening of European treaty ports in Manchuria. The treaty ports functioned as Western entrepôts in China, in much the same way as Singapore did in Southeast Asia. As a result of the Treaty of Tianjin of 1858, signed by the Qing and the British, French, Russians, and Americans, the first treaty port in Manchuria opened in 1861. From 1861 to 1911, the Qing government opened twenty-eight treaty ports in the region. The first treaty port in Manchuria was Niuzhuang, located on the Bohai Sea at the mouth of the Liao River. In 1861, 33 British and other European steamboats, totaling 11,346 tons, entered Niuzhuang. By 1864, 302 steamboats, together weighing 88,281 tons, stopped at the port. In other words, trade increased roughly eight-fold in only three years. Niuzhuang exported soybeans, soybean cake, soybean oil, tobacco, fur, and ginseng to major treaty ports in coastal China, including Tianjin, Shanghai, Ningbo, and Hong Kong. Through these cities, some Manchurian exports found their way to markets outside China. Meanwhile, the ports also furnished goods from the outside world, including cotton cloth, silk, salt, porcelain, and various “Western” products. Goods entered the Liao river valley and spread throughout Manchuria as well as the eastern part of Inner

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Mongolia. By the early twentieth century, Niuzhuang had trading relations with the ports of thirty countries, and the economy of central and southern Manchuria was firmly linked to the global market.20 The most important commodities exported from Niuzhuang were soybeans and soybean products. Ginseng also comprised a substantial portion of exports, including those designated for markets outside China. The regulations of the Shanghai Customs House, established in 1858, listed “Manchurian ginseng” (guandong renshen) as an export item subject to duties of five percent.21 Access to the global market almost certainly stimulated the ginseng trade in southern Manchuria, occasioning the rise of commercial cultivation of ginseng in the Sino-Korean borderland in the 1860s and the large-scale influx of Korean agrarian laborers into southern Manchuria. If the British first came to impact the borderland economy from the Liaodong Peninsula in the west, Russian influence originated from the direction of Vladivostok in the east. Under the Romanovs, Russia signed the Treaty of Beijing with the Qing government in 1860, only two years after the Tianjin Treaty between China and the British. Under the terms of Article 1 of the Treaty of Beijing, the Russian and Qing governments agreed to fix the territorial boundaries between their empires along the Amur, Ussuri, and Sungari Rivers. By this agreement, the Russians acquired the area now occupied by Vladivostok. In addition, the two governments also agreed to permit Chinese and Russian civilians to conduct tax-free trade with one another along the rivers (Article 4). As a result of this treaty, Russian military power and commerce in southern Manchuria expanded considerably.22 Russian merchants had been active in the region of Heilongjiang in northern Manchuria since the seventeenth century. However, all China-Russian trade had been conducted within the confines of a designated town—first Nerchinsk, and later Kyakhta. With the signing of the Beijing treaty, Russian merchants could expand commercial operations all along the Sino-Russian border and especially into southern Manchuria. 20 

Fei Chi, “Wan Qing Dongbei Shangbu Geju Bianjian Yanjiu” [Transformation of the structure of treaty ports in the northeast during the Late Qing Period], Shixue jikan, no. 2 (2007): 75–76. On the opening of the treaty ports in Manchuria, also see Wang Gesheng, “Qingdai Dongbei Shangbu” [Treaty ports in the northeast during the Qing Period], Shehui kexue jikan, no. 1 (1994); Lǚ Xiulian, “Lun Jindai Yingkou De Kaibu Dui Dongbei Diqu De Yingxiang” [The impact of the opening of Yingkou (Niuzhuang) on the modern northeast], Jilin shifan daxue xuebao, no. 2 (1988). 21  Wang Ermin, Wan Qing Shangyue Waijiao [Commercial treaty diplomacy of the Late Qing Period] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009), 86. 22  On the Beijing Treaty and its impact, see S. C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History, 103.

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Though perhaps dwarfed by the impact of the British, the expansion of Russian trade likely also encouraged local commerce in southern Manchuria. The “commodity” most prized by Russia was neither ginseng nor timber but Korean labor itself. In a region where resources were rich but population was sparse, the ultimate prize was the migrants, who made possible the large-scale commercial production of timber, ginseng, grain, and so on, for huge potential gains. Like the Southeast Asian rainforest, which needed Chinese coolie labor for development and integration into the world economy, the Manchurian mountain forest on the Sino-Korean borderland demanded Korean migrant workers. For this reason, the Russians heavily recruited Korean laborers within their newly acquired territory. The Zhang Baotai incident of 1863, which took place only three years after the establishment of Niuzhuang as the first treaty port in Manchuria, illustrates the tensions aroused by the competition for Korean labor. Zhang Baotai was a Chinese immigrant from the region of Rehe. An official document referred to him as a “wanderer” (youmin). Unable to earn a living in Rehe, he meandered toward Hunchun, a southern Manchurian town on the new Russian border. There, he cut timber to support himself. In the forest, Zhang came upon what he believed was a silver mine. Zhang had heard that Russia had the technology to extract precious metals, and that they could protect wanderers like him. To attract the Russians to the region and profit from his discovery, Zhang drew a map of the area and crossed the border into Russian territory to seek help from the Russian authorities. However, Zhang’s plan failed. After he crossed the Sino-Russian border, he found four houses, inhabited by fifty Korean male and female wanderers like him. A Russian authority had lured them to the area to bring new farmland under cultivation. Zhang threatened to report this violation to the Chinese and Korean governments—a critical mistake. The following day, the Russians, likely acting on information provided by the Korean wanderers, captured Zhang and brought him before a Russian official. The two had difficulty communicating, and the Russian was suspicious that Zhang was a spy who had come to collect information about the Koreans who lived in the area. Thus, the official sent him back to Hunchun, where the Qing investigated the matter and decided to try Zhang for the crime of colluding with an outside power. It is significant that economic adventurers like Zhang believed, mistakenly or not, that the Russians could be partners and patrons of trade. For this research, the most important aspect of the Zhang Baotai incident was his testimony that the Korean laborers were developing farmland in the new Russian territory, under the protection of the Russian authorities.

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Certainly, the Russians considered the Korean laborers much more useful than Chinese economic adventurers like Zhang Baotai, who was sacrificed to protect the secret employment of the migrants. The Russian pursuit of Korean labor significantly promoted mobility in the Sino-Korean-Russian borderland. In any given year after 1860, large numbers of Korean laborers migrated to Russian territory via the Qing borderland. In 1867, for instance, a Qing military officer patrolling the mouth of the Hunchun River saw two hundred Korean males and females riding on carts in the direction of Russian territory. Through communications with the leader of the group, the officer found out that the Russians had recruited several thousand Koreans to work in the area along the Jixin River.23 Activities like these exacerbated mounting tensions between local Qing and Russian military forces. To avoid provoking the Russians, the military authority in Hunchun cautioned soldiers to follow but not disturb the Korean migrants. The Qing feared hostile collaboration between the Koreans and the Russians. The government in Beijing, meanwhile, sought a diplomatic solution. Beijing wanted all three governments—Russian, Chosun, and Qing—to cooperate in halting migration and repatriating settlers. However, local Qing forces had a different outcome in mind. They saw as much opportunity as danger in the migration of Korean laborers. The local military officers of the Qing wanted to settle the Korean wanderers within Qing territory. They suggested that legalizing the presence of the migrants would prevent them from seeking Russian protection.24 This justification notwithstanding, the Qing military authority in Hunchun also likely coveted Korean labor. Like the Russian Far East, Hunchun lacked the labor to develop its rich resources, including farmland. However, until the 1880s, the area was officially closed to civilian migration. The Qing military officials were willing to turn a blind eye to borderland communities, such as that visited by Choe and his fellow spies, if they were willing to pay bribes. Conclusion This chapter locates the late nineteenth-century Korean migration to Manchuria in a global context. Kangbuk Ilgi (Diary of [travels] north of the [Yalu] River), an 1872 journal recorded by three Korean spies dispatched by a local government in a northern Korean province to collect information 23 

Qingji Zhong Ri Han Guanxi Shiliao, vol. 2, p. 50, document no. 36, TZ6/2/14 (March 19, 1867). 24  Qingji Zhong Ri Han Guanxi Shiliao vol. 4, p. 1785, document no. 981, KX11/3/29 (May 13, 1885).

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on borderland settlements, provides an unexpectedly rich account of the workings of the migrant community, as well as hints of the global context in which it operated. The late nineteenth-century Korean migration to Manchuria was part of a broader frame of structurally interrelated, transnational, and transregional movement. Throughout China’s borderlands—most notably Southeast Asia—merchant capital drew agrarian labor to work on commercial plantations. This new migration occurred in response to the expansion of European commerce in Asia, resulting in the growing integration of the borderlands into global capitalism. Put simply, the Korean migration was the borderland community’s response to its encounter with global capitalism. By locating Korean migrants in the context of global population flows seeking to profit from opportunities created by the spread of capitalism, this chapter restores agency and a sense of independent rhythm to the Korean migrations. I challenge previous Chinese and Korean scholarship, which portrays Korean migrants as passive, marginal actors affected by the political, natural, and economic developments at the boundaries of each national history. At the same time, I highlight the novel historical character of the late nineteenth-century Korean migrations. Prior to the opening of the treaty port of Niuzhuang, Koreans came to Manchuria to escape taxes, natural calamities, wars, and so on. However, the acceleration of migration in the 1860s and after was distinctive, as a product of and response to the penetration of the global capitalist economy into the Asian borderlands. By exploring the relationship between the Korean migrant community and the Qing local military authority, this paper also provides a borderland perspective on the building of the Chinese nation-state. Qing military leaders on the frontier competed fiercely with Romanov Russia and Chosun Korea for control over Korean migrants, the most important source of labor and tax revenue in this resource-rich, population-scarce area. Qing state-building in the Sino-Korean borderland may have been a response to the empire’s desire to exploit new revenue possibilities offered by the inclusion of the borderland into global capitalism. In the end, Huchang County’s worry about the potential of attack from the borderland community was justified. Emboldened by the protection provided by the Qing local military, the borderland community was indeed planning another attack on the Chosun border. On July 3, Li Sŏngyun, a hunter from Musan, warned the spies that the residents of Shitouhe, under the leadership of a Chinese hoedu named Wang Laodawai, had collected two thousand liang to stockpile gunpowder and rice for the coming fall. The spies had learned at the beginning of their journey that the borderland community had organized and armed itself, but they had

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not known why. The “fake barbarian” Shin Tae had informed them that the community was arming itself against raids by new migrants and attacks by Qing and Chosun forces. However, this was only a half-truth. A previous acquaintance of one of the spies, whom the three met on July 9 in a place under Shin Tae’s control, told them that the local Chinese had reportedly lost several hundred thousand qian after the new magistrate of Huchang county prohibited “cutting timbers and sending them downstream.” The Chinese had also lost roughly ten thousand jin in the Battle of Marokpo. They therefore demanded one thousand liang from both the Korean and Chinese communities. They used the sum, two thousand liang, to buy gunpowder and open a road for timber transport. As the spies feared, the borderland community had mobilized in preparation for another clash with the Chosun army. In so doing, they anticipated recouping the loss of their investment, and ensuring future access to timber. A day after receiving this information, on July 10, the spies visited Shin Tae a second time. On this occasion, Shin Tae told them that Magistrate Cho’s prohibition of timber cutting the previous winter had grievously impacted the borderland community, which depended on logging for its livelihood. Cho had also sent troops to kill the local settlers. Shin Tae asked the spies whether Magistrate Cho would revoke the ban on timber cutting, in light of the willingness of the settlers to fight to the death for the privilege. Apparently forgetting their disguise, the spies answered, “How could Magistrate Cho permit again now what he prohibited last winter? Last year, the fighting cost four thousand liang, but this sum was provided by the Huchang government, without any contribution from the people. Now the government is prepared again: if the Chinese cross the border illegally, the Huchang army will cut off their heads on the river to defend the border.”25 Shin Tae invited the spies to remain overnight as his guests, but the angry trio left and sought shelter in the home of a Korean resident of Marokpo. While the spies slept, a mob gathered outside the house and discussed when and how to kill them. Sensing trouble, the Korean spies fled to the banks of the Yalu River. Without a boat, however, they were stranded. They shouted to a military officer on the Korean side, begging him to rescue them. Initially, the soldier mistook them for Korean residents of the borderland community, and refused. Eventually, however, he came to fetch them. As the boat carrying the spies left the riverbank, close behind, in hot pursuit, were several dozen Chinese. Among them was Shin Tae. He was holding a bat in his hands.

25 

KBIG, renshen (1872)/7/10.

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We may never know whether the borderland community actually followed through on Shin Tae’s threat to attack Huchang County again in 1873. Korean and Chinese primary sources produced by Seoul and Beijing make no mention of a second skirmish. However, the borderland remained volatile. In 1885, Xing Kelu, a resident of Jiudaogou in Tonghua County, on the Qing side of the Manchurian frontier, gathered a party to cross the border and cut timber on the Korean side. Huchang County attempted to collect tax from the would-be migrants, igniting a violent conflict. Xing and his men killed a Chosun subject, Pak Chin’goeng, and returned to Qing territory with five Chosun hostages. One of the men captured was Kim Taehŭng—most likely the same Kim Taehŭng who joined Choe on the spy mission of 1872. Following protests by the Chosun government, Tonghua County ordered Kim Taehŭng released and punished those responsible for killing Pak Chin’goeng.26 In many ways, this incident was a repetition of the Marokpo battle. Settlers on the Qing side of the Sino-Korean border raided the Chosun side for timber. As in 1871, Huchang County tried to tax the marauders. Kim Taehŭng was probably the military officer responsible for collecting the tax. By calling Xing a “civilian” (minren), a term usually generally used in reference to the Chinese, sources on the conflict implied that Xing was Chinese. However, he might have been (to borrow a term from the spy diary) a “fake barbarian”—a Korean who had adopted Chinese clothing and hairstyles. He may even have entered the Qing tax register of the Tonghua County government. Even if Xing was Chinese, the participants in the raid were almost certainly predominantly Koreans. In summary, although this incident did not develop into a small-scale war, it nevertheless had all the essential elements of the Marokpo battle. Repetition of conflict in the borderlands was scarcely surprising, given the ongoing nature of the condition that gave rise to the Sino-Korean borderland community in the first place: European commercial expansion that stimulated the local economy. However, the 1885 incident differed from the 1871 Battle of Marokpo in one critical respect. By 1885, the SinoKorean borderland community was already under the civilian administrative control of Tonghua County. By this point, the Qing central government had realized the revenue potential of the borderland community, normalized the illicit relations that its local forces had established with settlers in the region, and asserted firm control over the community. For this reason, the Tonghua clash of 1885 did not develop into a small-scale war in the same way that Marokpo had fourteen years earlier. 26 

Qingji Zhong Ri Han Guanxi Shiliao, vol. 4, p. 1970, document no. 1094, KX11/11/17 (December 22, 1885).

TWO

Status and Smoke Koreans in Japan’s Opium Empire

MIRIAM KINGSBERG

Japan was an opium empire, in which the revenues of state-sponsored and state-sanctioned drug trafficking financed the conquest and administration of East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Beyond its economic role, opium also fulfilled important ideological functions as a signifier of racial status. Imperial Japan was characterized by a strong awareness of both ethnic confraternity and difference. Within a pervasive consciousness of race, imperialists deployed opium to mutually constitute the (allegedly) abstinent, elite Japanese and the “addicted” and therefore inferior indigenes they came to rule. Borrowing ideas from Social Darwinists in the West, prewar Japanese thinkers cited the relative absence of opium use in the home islands as a sign of the superior racial and cultural “fitness” of the Yamato people.2 By contrast, they deemed narcotics consumption among other Asians an expression of degeneracy and ineptitude for self-sovereignty. This binary had obvious uses within the ideology of expansionism, legitimating the Japanese as both liberators freeing the “slaves of the poppy” and as new masters guiding their charges from depravity and backwardness to civilization and enlightenment.3 1  Following the conventions of both the primary and secondary literature, I use the terms “opium,” “opiates,” “narcotics,” and “drugs” interchangeably, except in cases where greater clarity is desirable. 2  Kikuchi Yūji, “Ahen mondai ni kanshite (2),” Dojin 4, no. 4 (1929): 25–32. Writers presented Japanese “fitness” in both racial and cultural terms. As Michael Weiner observes, these categories were seen as functionally equivalent in the imperial age. See Michael Weiner, “The Invention of Identity: ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in Pre-War Japan,” in Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, ed. Michael Weiner (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–16. 3  Inoue Kōbai, “Ahen kyūshoku taiken ki (ni),” Dōjin 4, no. 7 (1930): 25–34.

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The case of the Koreans, Japan’s most mobile subjects, highlights the significance of opium as a marker of ethnic status across multiple geographic contexts. The thirty-five year period during which Japan ruled Korea (1910–45) witnessed the entrenchment of a vision of the Koreans as a fraternal race with a unique potential to “become Japanese” (dōka). To this end, the colonial state attempted to eradicate drug use, a behavior regarded as inimical to Japanese identity. Yet doubts on the part of the government regarding both the desirability and feasibility of assimilating the Koreans bedeviled what ultimately became an inconsistent and ineffective campaign against opium. Japanese rule of Korea stimulated rather than stamped out the supply and consumption of narcotics in the early twentieth century. Approximately two million Koreans left the peninsula during the years of imperial control. Tens of thousands sought economic opportunity in Japan, where they came to constitute the largest ethnic minority within a mostly homogenous society. As a visible domestic Other and source of unwelcome competition in the unskilled labor force, Koreans were stigmatized as drug-ridden contaminants of an abstinent and superior population. By contrast, migrants to Manchuria, numbering over 1.5 million by 1945, lived among several hundred thousand Japanese and approximately thirty million Chinese. Imperial ideology did not distinguish the Chinese as candidates for assimilation in the same way as the Koreans. The Chinese, occupying the lowest rung on the racial hierarchy of empire, were viewed as incorrigibly backward. Alleged collective addiction to opium signified racial degeneracy and unfitness for self-sovereignty. In their distaste for excessive intimacy with the Chinese, the Japanese of Manchuria pressed the Koreans into service as subordinate partners in imperialism. In this setting of ethnic plurality, they refigured the Koreans as an “intermediate elite,” “Japanese” enough to dispatch tasks on behalf of the imperial state, and “different” enough to specialize in the “dirty work” of administration: interaction with the Chinese. From the perspective of the Koreans in Manchuria, particularly urban migrants, the narcotic economy provided opportunities to improve living standards and secure a position within the ruling group. Exercising the privileges of Japanese citizenship abroad, they reproduced the patterns of consumption and trafficking set by the imperialists, thus drawing closer to the Japanese. However, the deployment of intermediate elite status in the drug market also exacted a steep price for the Koreans. The Chinese population grew increasingly hostile to these migrants, viewing them as collaborators in a Japanese conspiracy to “drug the Han people into submission.” Nor, from the Japanese perspective, was intermediate elite status a stepping-stone to full integration into the ruling group. Rather, the

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utility of the Koreans to the Japanese elite depended on their remaining subordinate and hence uniquely qualified to liaise with the Chinese. Koreans and Narcotics Regulation in Imperial Japan In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry and his “Black Ships” forced an isolationist Japan to open trade relations and cede various sovereign privileges to the United States. Negotiating a follow-up agreement in 1858, the early modern government obtained a pledge from the Americans to refrain from exporting opium to Japan. Most of the major Western nations, including Holland, France, Great Britain, and Russia, subsequently signed similar treaties.4 The great powers, seeking new markets in which to sell a burgeoning array of industrial manufactures, feared that demand for opium might reduce Japan’s ability to purchase other products—a situation that had already come to characterize trade relations with China.5 Japan, moreover, acquiesced to foreign contact at a time when the great powers were beginning to question the morality of their involvement in the opium business. Observing the social and financial damage that opium had inflicted on China under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the nations of the West voluntarily declined to export the narcotic to Japan. Likewise, with the example of China before them, many Japanese bureaucrats wished to proscribe the circulation of opium completely. The drug was, however, too deeply embedded in local medical practice for a total ban to be viable.6 As a result, policymakers devised a strict regulatory framework predicated on supply-side limitations. In 1870, the government passed the Raw Opium Control Regulations (Nama ahen toriatsukai kisoku) and the Laws Concerning the Sale of Smoking Opium (Hanbai ahen en ritsu), requiring doctors and pharmacists to record and report quantities of the drug prescribed to patients. Following a nationwide survey in 1874–75, the state established a comprehensive regulatory system for domestic poppy cultivation and imports. The production of opium was forbidden to all private citizens except for a few permit-holders. The newly created Sanitation Bureau processed imported poppies into opium paste for distribution through a network of offices in Japan’s major cities.7 Following a series of well-publicized violations, the 1880 Criminal Code 4  Satō Saburō, Kindai Nit-Chū kōshōshi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kō bunkan, 1984), 185–220. 5  William B. McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (New York: Routledge, 2000), 27. 6  Yamawaki Teijirō, Kinsei Nihon no iyaku bunka (Tokyo: Heibōsha, 1995), 173–98. 7  Control of Opium in Japan: Report of the Japanese Delegates to the International Opium Commission (Shanghai, 1909), 3–16.

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legislated fines and prison terms for the illicit import, manufacture, possession, use, and sale of opium and smoking implements. When Japan acquired its first colony, Taiwan, in 1895, it formed a government monopoly to profit from and gradually extirpate the large and lucrative market for opium on the island. In 1897, the Japanese Diet also established a state monopoly over opium in the metropole. Under the new regulations, opium purchased abroad by government agents was processed in a central facility and funneled to local authorities, from which licensed pharmacists might acquire it for sale to consumers. Meanwhile, the Tokyo Hygiene Lab assessed the morphine content of domestically grown poppies and purchased crops deemed adequate for a fixed price. Harvests that did not meet government standards were destroyed.8 In 1910, Japan acquired its second formal colony, Korea. The Chōsen Sōtokufu [Office of the Governor-General] subsequently initiated a land reform campaign that squeezed millions of peasants from their ancestral fields and prompted a massive wave of emigration from the peninsula. Tens of thousands of Koreans found new livelihoods in the Japanese home islands, where they were tolerated as a source of cheap unskilled labor in an age of industrialization and militarization.9 Struggling to gain a foothold in the labor market, many Koreans succumbed to poverty, despair, and drug use during prolonged unemployment abroad.10 In 1926, one survey counted 1,030 Korean morphine users in the city of Osaka. Within a decade, this population had tripled to more than 3,700. In Tokyo, authorities estimated that approximately three thousand of the forty thousand resident Koreans were drug users.11 “P. S.” was a typical case. Born into a poor farm family that could offer him no inheritance, he trained as a cook and migrated to Japan to work in a Chinese restaurant. After losing his job, he found employment in a bathhouse, where the four female attendants were addicted to drugs. P. S. began using morphine himself after contracting a gastrointestinal disorder.12 Another Korean migrant, the miner and factory worker “L. H.,” became dependent on refined narcotics during a relapse of gonorrhea. Addiction drained him physically

8 

“Ahen hōan,” Yomiuri Shinbun, March 12, 1897, 3. For a recent treatment of the experience of the migrant Korean community in interwar Japan, see Ken Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 10  Tazawa Shingo, Ahen shiryō (Taipei: Tazawa kagaku kōgyō kenkyūjo, 1932), 83. 11  Sakai Yoshio, “Ahen oyobi ruiji ‘arukaroido’ mansei chūdokushō no kōkateki chiryō to sono hōsaku,” Kanazawa Ika Daigaku zasshi (1928), 25–60. 12  Park X. Soo, “Yoi ryōrijin kara kojiki made,” in Mayaku chūdokusha to naku: Tō-A wo ahen kara kaihō seyo, ed. Majima Kan (Tokyo: Ajia seisaku kenkyūjo, 1935), 74–75. 9 

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and financially; after selling all of his possessions, he turned to dealing to support himself.13 For many Korean women migrants, drug use accompanied or precipitated entry into the sex industry. At the age of seventeen, “J. W.” followed a friend to Japan, where she found work in a factory. The job, however, lasted scarcely a month. With no education, family connections, or Japanese language ability, J. W. could not find another position. In desperation, she accepted an offer of housing from a Japanese pimp. Along with eight other Korean women, she provided sex to Korean clients. Within a year, she had given birth to a child of uncertain parentage. J. W. contracted syphilis and became dependent on morphine while receiving treatment for the disease in a hospital. As her addiction worsened, she moved from one flophouse to another in search of clients who could provide her with drugs.14 In another case, “Y. Y.” married for love at the age of seventeen, but when her husband moved to Japan to study and ceased to write to her, his mother sold her to a brothel. A wealthy client brought her to Tokyo, where she had his baby. Y. Y.’s patron became active in the labor movement, which worried her so much that she developed a nervous condition. A doctor treated her with morphine injections. Becoming dependent on the drug, she severed her relationship with her lover and moved into lodgings with three other addicts, supporting her habit through petty theft.15 Although most Korean narcotics consumers began using drugs for medical reasons, many Japanese of the imperial age viewed addiction as a signifier and outcome of innate moral depravity. Korean drug users, one contemporary observer charged, formed “addiction gangs” to idle away their time in “underhanded ways.”16 A widely circulating newspaper reported an incident in which a group of fifteen or sixteen Korean morphine consumers, led by a thirty-six-year-old used goods dealer, “rampaged” through a Tokyo suburb in search of items that could be stolen to exchange for drugs.17 Dramatic coverage of overdoses, such as the grim discovery of the body of a Korean who had been injected and left to die in the street by a friend one chilly September night in 1926, further reinforced popular distaste for migrants.18

13 

Lee X. Ha, “Hōrō seikatsu to mayaku no mitsubai,” in Majima, ed., Mayaku chūdokusha to naku, 40–43. 14  Jung X. Wal, “Jokō kara fubai e,” in Majima, ed., Mayaku chūdokusha to naku, 70–73. 15  Yoon X. Yi, “Joshō kara sōharahi made,” in Majima, ed., Mayaku chūdokusha to naku, 65–72. 16  Kikuchi Yūji, “Ahen han no tokui ten ni oite,” Keisatsu kyōkai zasshi 333 (1928): 60–65. 17  “Mohi kanja wo atsumari: Senjin ga settōdan,” Yomiuri Shinbun, February 6, 1931, 7. 18  “Mohi chūsha no ayashii Senjin tsukamaru,” Yomiuri Shinbun, September 8, 1926, 3.

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Japanese medical professionals also helped to entrench views of denizen Koreans as biological incubators of narcotic poison. In 1936, Dr. Sakai Yoshio, a renowned professor at the medical college of Tokyo Imperial University, the leading institution of higher education in the empire, predicted that Korean migrants would corrupt Japan within ten years, transforming the homeland into a nation of drug users. Sakai reported seeing, in Tokyo’s chic Ginza district, alleyways and dance halls crammed with Koreans selling heroin injections. He urgently appealed to his fellow citizens to protect Japan’s “beautiful customs,” which included abstinence from narcotics.19 The government also became involved in efforts to isolate and eliminate potentially “contagious” Korean opium consumers. In addition to deporting drug users, the Tokyo metropolitan police opened an addiction ward at a central hospital. Beginning in the mid-1930s, this facility provided detoxification treatment to hundreds of drug users annually (including a rising number of Japanese).20 Private individuals also took action against the threat of drug dependence. Citing the need to preserve the fitness of the Japanese race-nation (minzoku ryoku) against the “terrifying” specter of contamination from resident Korean addicts, Namae Takayuki, Japan’s “Father of Social Welfare,” founded the Mayaku Chūdokusha Kyūgokai [Association for the Relief of Narcotics Addicts] in 1933.21 Namae, a longtime bureaucrat in the Home Ministry and prominent Protestant reformer, secured donations from various members of the elite, including a past superintendent of the metropolitan police, a representative in the House of Peers, a former mayor of Yokohama, the vice-minister of the imperial household, and national and municipal officials. With this funding, Namae established a hospital for recovering addicts in Tokyo. By 1940, his clinic had treated over six hundred drug users.22 Upon entering Namae’s clinic, described by one reporter as “practically a barrack . . . partly surrounded by black fences,” a patient underwent immediate and unmediated detoxification in isolation in a dark room. After two weeks, when they had recovered from the worst symptoms of withdrawal, convalescents were placed on a strict daily schedule. Rising at 19 

Sakai, “Ahen oyobi ruiji ‘arukaroido’ mansei chūdokushō no kōkateki chiryō to sono hōsaku,” 28. 20  Sakai Yoshio, Tō-A no reimei wa mayaku no genzetsu yori (Tokyo: Shintō kagaku kenkyūjo, 1939), 20–22. 21  Mayaku Chūdokusha Kyūgokai, Mayaku Chūdokusha Kyūgokai nenpō Shōwa jūgo nen (Tokyo: Mayaku Chūdokusha Kyūgokai, 1939), 11. For more on Namae’s work with drug users, see Kurahashi Masanao, Nihon no ahen senryaku: Kakureta kokka hanzai (Tokyo: Kyōei shobō, 1996), 204–35; and Kurahashi Masanao, Ahen, teikoku, Nihon (Tokyo: Kyōei shobō, 2008), 144–69. 22  Namae Takayuki, Waga kyūjū nen no shōgai (Tokyo: Daikūsha, 1988), 165.

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daybreak, they breakfasted, did calisthenics, and set about manual labor until noon, with only one ten-minute break. Inmates tidied their rooms, cleaned the local Shintō shrine, swept the neighborhood streets, washed clothes, and sorted waste paper. After lunch, they returned to these tasks until 5:00 p.m. (4:30 p.m. in winter). In the evenings, they played ping-pong, listened to the radio, and took judo lessons from the Korean manager of the clinic, Cho Sei-ki. Within three months, the Association declared, the patients had developed a spirit of industriousness that would enable them to resist relapse and support themselves.23 In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who understood narcotics consumption among Korean migrants as a function of eugenics that brooked no interference (as long as it did not affect the Japanese population), Namae viewed Korean drug users as victims worthy of rehabilitation efforts. Yet his treatment program perpetuated negative stereotypes of Koreans as lazy, ignorant, and lacking autonomy. In 1935, he gave the following statement to the press: It is true that some of [the Korean patients] leave in their desire to get the drug, but 90 percent of them come back. The fact is that they have no friend[s], no income and stealing cannot be expected to be always successful. Moreover, they all have a nameless dread of the unbearable doom with which they are confronted, and feel that they must accept what is inevitabl[e] unless they discontinue the habit. Under the circumstances, they realize that this is the only place in the wide world for them.24

Patients absorbed and repeated these biases. A twenty-eight-year-old Korean female patient and former geisha identified as Kyo narrated her experience as follows: I never could stop the vice [taking morphine injections] although I was desperately anxious to get rid of it. I am going to stay here for good. You know the drug habit is a horrible thing, but you can not get away from it once you acquire it. . . . [W]hen I used to be addicted to it, I was emaciated, pale, could not sleep at night and did not care to eat. It was an awful feeling, and I had to have morphine to forget it. Since I came here, I have become a different woman. I now eat enormously as I am regaining my health. In a month and a half more, I will be completely restored to health. I do not care for the drug now and will never take to it again.25 23  Mayaku Chūdokusha Kyūgokai, Mayaku Chūdokusha Kyūgokai nenpō Shōwa jūroku nen (Tokyo: Mayaku Chūdokusha Kyūgokai, 1940), 17–20. 24  “Successful First Year for Anti-Drug Clinic Brings Plans to Extend Free Cure Facilities,” Japan Advertiser, Oct. 20, 1936. 25  “Successful First Year for Anti-Drug Clinic Brings Plans to Extend Free Cure Facilities,” Japan Advertiser, Oct. 20, 1936.

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Kyo’s testimony affirmed the Korean drug user as lacking self-discipline, moral worth, and human dignity. Before-and-after photographs visually reinforced this impression. As a morphine addict, Kyo cringed in the grip of a nurse, eyes cast down in shame. Restored to health by the clinic, she faced the camera serenely and independently.26 In 1938, police arrested Cho Sei-ki and four other staff members on charges of violating the human rights of patients. Although Cho was convicted and forced to leave the clinic, Namae never believed the allegations against him. In fact, Cho may have been a victim of his nationality. In the initial years of the clinic’s operation, the Korean was needed to communicate with co-national patients. Of the fifty-seven patients admitted in 1933, nearly 90 percent were Korean. As time passed, however, the hospital came to serve an increasing number of Japanese admissions, who may have felt uncomfortable taking orders from the Korean manager. By 1940, over 40 percent of drug users seeking treatment were Japanese.27 An enterprise that had begun as an effort to isolate addicted migrant outsiders ultimately came to showcase the instability of projected racial differences between the Koreans and the Japanese. Narcotics Regulation in Colonial Korea Policymakers and ideologues considered the Koreans, among all imperial subjects, the most likely candidates for transformation into “Japanese.” Insofar as the colonial government of Korea, the Chōsen Sōtokufu, sought to remake the Koreans as Japanese, it endeavored to suppress opium consumption, a behavior inimical to this identity. Antidrug policies, however, were hamstrung both by ideological doubts regarding the desirability of assimilating an allegedly inferior people, and by the desire for economic profit in the drug market. Upon its establishment in 1905, the Japanese protectorate of Korea outlawed opium smoking. Following annexation of the peninsula in 1910, Japan revised this legislation to accommodate a more gradual prohibition strategy that helped to underwrite the financial costs of colonial administration through the establishment of a lucrative government monopoly over the drug. In contrast to its stated intentions, the monopoly system stimulated the narcotics market by legalizing the sale of opium by licensed state agents. Members of the Chōsen Yakugyōkai (Korea Pharmaceutical Association) later recalled dispensing controlled substances to customers with a matter-of-fact air that eschewed any responsibility for propagating 26  27 

“Rescue Home Aids Victims of Drugs,” Japan Advertiser, June 14, 1935. Namae, Waga kyūjū nen no shōgai, 165.

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drug dependence. The Japanese pharmacist Nakatani Yoshisaburō arrived in Korea as a youth and acquired a permit to sell opiates in 1907. “It was axiomatic that morphine was prescribed frequently,” he later remembered. “Red packages were cocaine; white were morphine. The Koreans already had their own syringes.”28 The Sōtokufu did make an effort to hold these pharmacists accountable for their sales—but only in order to collect taxes. To protect the profitability of its monopoly, the state aggressively prosecuted and punished Korean traffickers who sold drugs without the benefit of a license. The number of prisoners sentenced for opium violations increased from 98 in 1912, to 691 in 1918. All save a handful of offenders were convicted: during the 1910s, fewer than 10 percent received a verdict of not guilty. Over 98 percent of violators were punished. Between 1910 and 1920, the state flogged nearly nine hundred convicted drug dealers. In 1921, however, in recognition of Korean “progress” toward dōka, the authorities eliminated corporal restitution, which was not considered suitable for “civilized” offenders. Prison was by far the most frequent punishment: over seven-tenths of defendants received this sentence. The number of prison sentences imposed for drug-related violations increased from less than one hundred in 1912, to nearly seven hundred in 1918.29 Imperial Japan viewed incarceration as an opportunity to remodel wrongdoers, whose infractions placed them outside the national community (kyōdōtai), into model citizens.30 In colonial Korea, the penitentiary offered a space for the transformation of outsiders into “Japanese.”31 In 1919, an appeal from the Korean independence movement to the American embassy in Beijing cited narcotics dealing by Japanese as a 28 

Nakatani Yoshisaburō, “Nakatani Yoshisaburō wo kakonde,” in Zai-Sen Nihonjin yakugyō kaikō shi, ed. Kubo Ken (Tokyo, 1961), 7. 29  Nearly all of those imprisoned for drug violations were men: no more than thirteen females in any year were sentenced to penal servitude for such crimes. This difference likely reflects the reluctance of judges to try women—a phenomenon described by legal researchers Clayton Mosher and John Hagan as the “paternalistic” or “chivalry” thesis—as well as a lower rate of female involvement or the assumption of criminal responsibility by male associates. According to Mosher and Hagan, courts have historically viewed women as playing a subordinate and peripheral role in drug sales. Some women dealers, such as Baek Hongyong (described later), took advantage of this bias to achieve great success in the market. Clayton Mosher and John Hagan, “Constituting Class and Crime in Upper Canada: The Sentencing of Narcotics Offenders circa 1908–1953,” Social Science 72, no. 3 (1994): 613–41. 30  Richard Mitchell, Janus-Faced Justice: Political Criminals in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1992). 31  The state also imposed fines as a penalty for trafficking in a limited number of cases. In 1918 and 1919, the years for which data are available, a mere twenty-five convicted drug dealers were fined. Nihon teikoku tōkei nenkan, vols. 37–38 (Tokyo: Naikaku tōkei-kyoku, 1918–1919).

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key grievance of the subject population under colonial rule.32 Even as the Sōtokufu purported to stamp out the opium trade, it turned a blind eye to smuggling by Japanese migrants. In one particularly scandalous case, a Japanese couple at the head of a large illegal distribution network was caught and sentenced to a mere three months in prison in December 1928. Released in the spring of 1929, the husband and wife returned to their native Osaka. By the end of the year, they had funneled morphine worth over one hundred thousand yen to Korean confederates.33 The discriminatory blindness of the courts encouraged the in-migration of Japanese seeking quick profits in the drug market. Known as tairiku rōnin (mainland adventurers), these “riff-raff carpetbaggers” moved easily across northeast Asia, serving as physical conduits of narcotics.34 In addition to smuggling opiates, they also posed as roving doctors and pharmacists, dispensing habit-forming remedies to unsuspecting consumers. In an environment in which modern scientific medicine was slow to develop, people used opiates not only to relieve pain, but also to inhibit the coughing associated with common respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis, and to still diarrhea during periodic outbreaks of cholera and dysentery.35 During the 1920s, cross-national partnerships arose to facilitate the acquisition and distribution of refined narcotics such as morphine and heroin, which could not yet be manufactured locally. Japanese dealers, predominantly tairiku rōnin, furnished contacts with suppliers in Taiwan, Manchuria, China, and the metropole; Koreans functioned as a liaison with the consumer base. Multinational drug trafficking networks surfaced mainly through their brushes with the law. In 1925, a Japanese national, his Korean wife, and two Korean associates were arrested for running a morphine ring. To collect evidence against the four, prosecutors made inquiries to authorities in Osaka and Tsuruga in metropolitan Japan, Andong in Manchuria, and Vladivostok in Russia.36 Narcotics consumption kept pace with supply. By 1922, 1.7 percent of all deaths of Koreans in Korea were attributed to drug addiction.37 In this year, the British consul of Seoul cabled the Foreign Office: 32 

“Koreans Appeal for American Aid,” New York Times, March 30, 1919. R. L. Jarman, ed., Japan and Dependencies: Political and Economic Reports 1906–1960, vol. 12, Korea- Political and Economic Reports 1924–1939 (Oxford: Archive Editions, 1993), 472. 34  Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “Opium’s History in China,” 1–27, in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 35  Kodama Masakuni, “Ahen moruhine mondai no kaiketsu,” Man-Sen no ikai 79 (1927): 43–55. 36  Jarman, ed., Japan and Dependencies, vol. 12, 155–87. 37  Imamura Yutaka, Chōsen ni okeru jinkō ni kansuru sho tōkei (Keijo: Chōsen kōsei kyōkai, 1943), 77–80. 33 

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Miriam Kingsberg There seems to be a considerable amount of illicit use of the drug [morphine] among the Koreans. One of the American doctors at the Severance Hospital tells me that he thinks it is fairly prevalent, particularly in the south. I discovered in the autumn that a small lane leading to a side gate of this consulate-general is a rendezvous of morphine injectors and their clients, and as they took no notice of the police I was obliged to complain to the police to prevent them from gathering there.38

The consul’s successor wrote in 1927, “Miserable looking wretches obviously under the effect of narcotics are not infrequently seen in the streets of Seoul often in a dying condition.”39 In the late 1920s, one observer estimated the total number of opiate consumers in Korea at up to one hundred thousand people.40 In 1930, negative publicity regarding the drug economy prompted the colonial government to legislate the public registration and mandatory treatment of opium users. The Chōsen Sōtokufu issued permits to applicants, redeemable at intervals for a fixed, theoretically falling, quantity of narcotics. Opium users required the approval of a doctor to obtain a license, but police sanitation staff, responsible for administering physical examinations, regularly disregarded this provision in exchange for a bribe. To prevent more people from becoming smokers, the government stipulated a fixed time period during which permits would be issued. Compliance with the new system was not high. In the first year of the campaign, 5,094 Koreans applied for licenses. To rehabilitate these individuals, the Sōtokufu established the Kan-Min Gōdō no Chōsen Mayaku Chūdoku Yobō Kyōkai (State-Society Alliance against Drug Addiction in Korea). In its mission statement, the association committed itself to researching and treating drug addiction and to providing preventative education. Japanese and Korean doctors alike derided this organization as a mere mouthpiece for government propaganda.41 The colonial state also sponsored the construction of a national network of institutions to cure narcotics addicts. In the 1930s, thousands of drug users received treatment in these public facilities. In 1936, a Korean doctor, Kim Rin-song, published a study of the drug users who had passed through his clinic in the city of Pyongyang. Since opening in 1930, the hospital had provided care to 620 drug users, including 517 males and 38  Jarman, ed., Japan and Dependencies: Political and Economic Reports 1906–1960, vol. 11, Korea: Political and Economic Reports 1906–1923, 415. 39  Jarman, ed., Japan and Dependencies, vol. 12, 406. 40  Kikuchi Yūji, “Shina no genjō to ahen haidoku mondai,” in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku kankei zakken- honpō no bu (Gaimushō shiryōkan, 1928). 41  Kubo Kiyoji and Gwang Shin-haeng, “Chōsen ni okeru mayaku ni kansuru kenkyū,” Chōsen igakkai zasshi 30, nos. 7–8 (1940), 118–24.

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103 females. All except ten were Korean. Over a third of patients were unemployed; the remainder included laborers, farmers, peddlers, shopkeepers, barbers, and prostitutes. More than half had no formal schooling; five-sixths claimed to own no property. Generalizing patient demographics to the drug user population at large, Kim concluded that most addicts were wastrels who could not be trusted outside the hospital environment. Their low moral character and lack of assets and skills were evidence of “unfitness” that the clinic sought to rectify with surveillance, indoctrination, and occupational training.42 Hospital treatment for drug dependence generally involved administering analgesics that purported to ease the symptoms of opiate withdrawal. These preparations frequently contained narcotics themselves. As a result, the “cure” often simply shifted a patient’s addiction from one substance to another. Of nearly two thousand drug users who entered a state clinic in Seoul in 1930–31, 95 percent were discharged as completely cured (that is, all symptoms of withdrawal had disappeared). By 1933, almost half of these former patients had relapsed.43 Although the state claimed to have rehabilitated nearly all registered drug users in Korea by 1939, mortality data suggest that the actual narcotics user population remained substantial through the end of the colonial era.44 The results of the anti-opium campaign paralleled those of the general movement to transform the Koreans into Japanese: superficial achievement that could not withstand close scrutiny. The net effect of Japanese colonialism was to stimulate rather than suppress the drug market. Koreans and Narcotics Regulation in Japanese Manchuria Across the Yalu River border between Manchuria and Korea, Koreans were not, as they were at home, a colonial population subject to the “improvements” of a superior sovereign. Nor did they hold the status of migrants to Japan: conspicuous Others within a homogenous and hostile society. Historian Barbara Brooks has identified three distinct and competing Japanese views of the Koreans in Manchuria: (1) potential threats to the “colonial” order, (2) compatriots, and (3) Japanese citizens who deserved the right to naturalize as Chinese citizens.45 Building on Brooks’s schema, I 42 

Kim Rin-song, “Heian Nandō ni okeru kako nana nenkan no mayakurui chūdokusha chiryō no tōkeiteki kansatsu,” Man-Sen no ikai, no. 183 (1936), 1–16. 43  Du Congming, Du Congming yanlun ji (Taipei: Du Congming boshi huanli jinian jiangxue jijin guanli weiyuanhui, 1955), 217–24. 44  In 1937, the last year for which data are available, the Ministry of Welfare attributed the deaths of 3,212 Koreans to addiction. Imamura, Chōsen ni okeru jinkō ni kansuru sho tōkei, 77–80. 45  Barbara J. Brooks, “Peopling the Japanese Empire: The Koreans in Manchuria and the

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situate the Koreans in Manchuria in the multiposition of an “intermediate elite,” between allegedly abstinent Yamato migrants and opium-smoking Han locals. Unwilling to interact with the unalterably inferior Chinese, the Japanese cast the Manchurian Koreans in the role of intermediaries, conferring upon them legal status as Japanese citizens and suggesting their fitness for a task the imperialists themselves did not savor: executing orders on behalf of the regime. Koreans found intermediate elite status useful in reaping vast profits as suppliers in the drug market—a niche that provided them with a stake in the continuation of imperial rule. The exercise of their privileged position, however, jeopardized the safety of Korean communities, as many Chinese came to identify them with a Japanese conspiracy to drug the Han population into submission. While provoking the hostility of the Chinese, moreover, Koreans failed to achieve full membership in the ranks of the Japanese. Ultimately, their utility to the Japanese in Manchuria required them to remain in place between imperialist and subject. In Japan and Korea, Japanese depictions of Korean opium use buttressed the imperialist understanding of the former as superior and the latter as inferior. In Manchuria, however, the presentation of narcotics consumption by the elite and intermediate elite served to whitewash differences between the two communities. Opium use by non-Chinese was a sensitive topic within the public forum. In the early years of imperialist influence in Manchuria, Japanese writers constructed narcotics as a Chinese social issue, and turned a blind eye to the embarrassment of drug use by Japanese and Koreans. The exposure of opium consumption among the imperialists, after all, imperiled the notion that the “Japanese” were abstinent and therefore racially superior. Because this possibility challenged the legitimacy of the empire, researchers went to great rhetorical lengths to conceal it. Only when the phenomenon of drug use among the elite and intermediate elite had grown too prevalent to ignore did writers and policymakers begin to address it. In 1934, a prominent Japanese doctor called attention to opium as “not just a problem among the Chinese and Manchurians” but also “a particular feature of the lifestyle of the Japanese and Koreans in Manchuria.”46 Mortality and medical data provide some indications of the scale of narcotics consumption by migrants. Koreans, who never made up more than 0.3 percent of all residents in the Kwantung Leased Territory (KLT), Japan’s foothold in southern Manchuria, 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. 46  Morinaka Kiyoshi, “Ahen chūdoku no hanashi,” in Gendai shi shiryō 12: Ahen mondai, eds. Okada Yoshimasa, Tatai Yoshio, and Takahashi Masae (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1986), 93.

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contributed an average of nearly 4 percent of all drug-related fatalities annually from 1912 to 1941. Meanwhile, 1.5 percent of those treated in local addiction clinics were Korean.47 Ironically, given the perception that opium consumption was inimical to Japanese identity, imperial elites also comprised a disproportionate share of detoxification patients and addiction fatalities in Manchuria.48 In contrast to depictions of opium use among the Chinese, which regularly invoked comparisons to beasts and slaves, commentators characterized Japanese and Korean narcotics use as a “misfortune.” In 1934, a daily tabloid asserted that 20 percent of the Japanese and Koreans in Manchuria had become heroin addicts. Rather than condemning these individuals in the forceful terms used to denounce their Chinese counterparts, the reporter attempted to evoke pity on the part of the reader, calling the situation deplorable (kanashimubeki) and declining to attack the morals or humanity of the drug users.49 Writers also adopted the strategy of blaming narcotics consumption among Japanese and Koreans on the racially degenerate Chinese. “The drug evil,” one bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry asserted, “spreads from China like cholera and the plague.”50 Another writer attributed Korean opium use to exploitation by the Chinese: Generally speaking, the Koreans in Manchuria are still very low in [terms of their] level of civilization and standard of living, due chiefly to geographic reasons and to the adverse effects, still remaining, of the old Chinese North-Eastern regime. . . . The extreme poverty, from which they had suffered, and the state of insecurity, in which they found themselves, led gradually to their degeneration, both mental and physical; they lost their spirit of saving, developed a stronger disposition to rely on others, losing completely their sense of independence. Finally they were given so completely to indolence and self- indulgence that it seemed impossible to cure them from it.51

Another rhetorical strategy to deflect criticisms of Japanese and Korean opiate users involved differentiating among substances. Writers denouncing Chinese drug consumption focused on the opium pipe. They deemed smoking opium the epitome of backwardness and degeneracy, the source 47  “Kantō Kyūryōsho yōran,” in Shokuminchi shakai jigyō kankei shiryō shū: “Manshū, Manshūkoku,” vol. 9, Kantōshū no bu: Iryō to eisei, eds. Shin Kitsu and Nagaoka Masami (Tokyo: Kindai shiryō, 2005), 108–41. Data are not available for the year 1935. 48  Kantō tōkei sho, vols. 3–36 (Dairen: Kantō Totokufu/Kantō-chō/Kantō-kyoku, 1908– 1941). Data are not available for the year 1932. 49  “Osorubeki heroin no haidoku to zen-Man ni man’en suru inja,” Dairen jihō, February 15, 1934, 7. 50  Andō Akimichi, Kokusai ahen mondai kenkyū (Dairen: Kantō-chō zaimu bu, 1931), 1. 51  “Koreans in Manchuria,” Milestones of Progress 4, no. 2 (1940): 49–69.

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and symbol of China’s racial debility and decline. Although at least some imperial elites and intermediate elites transgressed cultural taboos against smoking opium, the majority of Japanese and Korean narcotics users gravitated toward synthesized alkaloids such as morphine and heroin. As the price of smoking opium rose and refined narcotics became more widely available, most Chinese drug users in Manchuria also came to consume alkaloids. Nonetheless, Japanese writers persisted in identifying the Chinese with smoking opium, and Koreans and Japanese with refined narcotics. Unlike smoking opium, these drugs were not perceived as a “traditional” statement against “modern” progress; rather, they represented the very output of modernity itself. As a Japanese pharmacology professor wrote in 1937, “Smoking opium in primitive fashion or taking it internally was the only method of taking drugs known to those who indulged . . . in olden times, but modern science has introduced morphine.”52 The debut of heroin was even more recent: it was released for the commercial market for the first time in 1898, on the eve of Japan’s penetration of Manchuria.53 Not only refined drugs themselves but also the method by which they were ingested provided the opportunity to display “modern” behavior. Japanese writers portrayed smoking as an indolent and backward Chinese practice. The pipe was rejected—idiosyncratically, as the simultaneous embrace of tobacco consumption demonstrates—as incompatible with Japanese culture.54 Injecting, on the other hand, required a syringe, a symbol of modern biomedicine that combined the allure of Western technology with the affinity for needles nurtured by traditional East Asian medicine.55 In Manchuria, the Korean injector who would have suffered significant social stigma at home found that his habit identified him with the large community of Japanese intravenous drug users.

52  Itō Ryōichi, “Hōten fujin ni oite mitsubai seraruru mayaku ‘hakumenyaku’ ni oite,” Manshū igaku zasshi 14, no. 3 (1937), 523–33. 53  David F. Musto, “Introduction: The Origins of Heroin,” in One Hundred Years of Heroin, ed. David F. Musto (Westport, CT: Auburn House, 2002), xv. 54  During the early twentieth century, smoking tobacco in pipes and cigarettes took hold in Japan as a hallmark behavior of the “modern” individual. See Kuboi Norio, Kitsuen doken “Dai Tō-A” gen’ei: Nihon no sensō to tabako, ahen, dokuen (Tokyo: Tsuge shobō shinsha, 2007). In English, see Ernest M. Satow, “The Introduction of Tobacco into Japan,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society 6, no. 1 (1878): 68–84; and Barnabas Tatsuya Suzuki, “Tobacco Culture in Japan,” in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 76–83. 55  Marcus Aurin, “Chasing the Dragon: The Cultural Metamorphosis of Opium in the United States, 1825–1935,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2000): 414–41; Frank Dikötter, Lars Laaman, and Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 173–91.

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Like using drugs, dealing offered opportunities for Koreans in Manchuria to position themselves within the ranks of the imperialists, as well as to earn straightforward economic rewards. The ubiquity of the trade reduced entry barriers. A Scottish medical missionary wrote, “Tabloids and syringes are sold openly, and pedlars [sic] go about the country charging a couple of cents for an injection.”56 China complained to the Japanese Foreign Ministry that “throughout Manchuria . . . [o]pium and narcotics are commodities which are supplied upon demand as easily as food and the supply seems unlimited.”57 In 1934, a British consul reported, “In a recent directory of Kirin [Jilin] Province the opium retailers are listed among the butchers, bakers etc. . . . Only priests abstain from the traffic.”58 A contemporary Chinese saying wryly noted the presence of dens “every five steps” (wu bu yi lou, shi bu yi ge).59 Koreans often arrived in Manchuria in a state of near desperation. Squeezed from their ancestral fields by the land reform policy of the Chōsen Sōtokufu, they sought refuge and opportunity in a new land. Among those who settled in cities and had few nonagricultural skills, the drug traffic was an easily learned and potentially lucrative occupation. “Just as the bulk of the rural class goes in for rice farming, so it seems that most of those taking residence in cities enter the opium trade,” concluded the Manchuria correspondent for the New York Times in 1932.60 Some observers estimated that up to 90 percent of urban Koreans in Manchuria trafficked in opiates and assisted in the manufacture of refined narcotics.61 In one street in the vice district of the city of Harbin, a police investigator discovered that thirty-nine out of forty drug dens were operated by Koreans. In contrast to Japanese traffickers in Manchuria, who were predominantly young, single males, the overwhelming majority of these den managers lived with spouses and children. In all cases in which the ages of offspring were recorded, their birth predated arrival in Manchuria. Although the small size of the study limits the extent to which these findings may be generalized to the larger Korean community, the data nonetheless

56 

Dugald Christie, Thirty Years in Moukden, 1883–1913: Being the Experiences and Recollections of Dugald Christie, C. M. G. (London: Constable and Company, 1914), 199. 57  International Anti-Opium Association, Opium Cultivation and Traffic in China: An Investigation in 1923–1924 (Peking: International Anti-Opium Association, 1924), 18. 58  Jarman, ed., Japan and Dependencies: Political and Economic Reports 1906–1940, vol. 14, Manchukuo, Political and Economic Reports, 1932/3–1935, 497. 59  Kurahashi Masanao, “Chō Sakurin seiken no ahen kaikin seisaku (1927 nen),” Aichi Kenritsu Daigaku bungaku ronshū, no. 44 (1995): 80–56. 60  “Koreans a Problem in North Manchuria,” New York Times, July 3, 1932. 61  Quoted in Eguchi Keiichi, Nit-Chū ahen sensō (Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho, 1988), 181.

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suggest that most Koreans in the drug market of Manchuria arrived as family men rather than rootless adventurers.62 Korean suppliers formed a human link between Japanese and Chinese, for whom mutual distaste often impeded interactions in the drug market. Although some migrants undoubtedly thrived without cross-national connections, for many Korean dealers, success depended on their position as intermediate elites. In Fushun, a coal mining town in southern Manchuria, the ten or so morphine and heroin dens clustered on the east bank of the Daguan Bridge were all managed by Korean adventurers and patronized by Chinese customers. A resident of the area later recalled that, in winter, drug users who had exhausted their resources were cast out into the wind and snow. Some, seeking shelter beneath the ramparts, froze to death where they lay, giving rise to the bridge’s grim nickname: Da Qiao lüguan (Big Bridge Hotel).63 On the border between Manchuria and Korea, a Korean woman, Baek Hongyong, found employment as a mule on behalf of a Chinese operator. Dissatisfied with her cut of the profits, the entrepreneurial Baek withheld several packages of drugs to market on her own. Stretching the volume of powder with vitamins, sugar, and flour, she sprinkled it along the bottom of tin lunch pails for clandestine distribution. In time, she built her own supply network, procuring morphine from the largest Japanese manufacturing concern in China, distributing it among a fleet of Korean dealers, and extracting a percentage of their sale price. Though her underlings depended on a Chinese client base, Baek herself avoided interaction with customers. “It was easier this way, for I could freely communicate with my own kind. I did not have to worry that someone was cheating me in Mandarin,” she recalled.64 Exploiting their intermediate elite status, Korean drug dealers in Manchuria generated profits on a scale unimaginable in Korea or Japan. Baek boasted that her opium empire had made her daughter “the richest little girl in all of China.” She herself had “more money than our whole family could have possibly spent in a lifetime. Money bulged from every crack, hole, and panel. It was under our bed, above our heads, and in our bedding.” She also deposited savings in bank accounts in the names of friends—a risky proposition, as several trusted companions withdrew 62  Satō Shin’ichirō, Daikan’en no kaibai: Kan minzoku shakai jittai chōsa (Tokyo: Hara shobō, 2002), 140–43. 63  Yao Yunpeng, Wei Dan, and Yang Shangqing, “Daqiao lüguan de yangui,” in Jindai Zhongguo yandu xiezhen, ed. Wenshi jinghua bianji bu (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1997), 239–40. 64  Helie Lee, Still Life with Rice: A Young American Woman Discovers the Life and Legacy of Her Korean Grandmother (New York: Scribner, 1996), 121.

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some or all of her illicit funds for their own use, leaving her with no legal recourse.65 Although Baek was, by her own admission, not a representative case, the revenues of the trade were undeniable. Korean migrants to Harbin in the mid-1920s were said to earn several hundred yen per day dealing drugs, allowing even those who arrived in a state of poverty to achieve a stable lifestyle.66 In addition to purely economic rewards, drug dealing also helped to position the Manchurian Koreans closer to the Japanese elite in the social realm, as market ties were parlayed into personal relationships. Baek used the revenues from her drug business to open a restaurant, where she entertained Japanese clients. Kim Taegun, the manager of a Fushun den, found that his business prospered after his marriage to a Japanese wife with ties to the narcotics underworld. Cultivating connections with the Japanese military further enhanced his success.67 Koreans also capitalized on their intermediate elite status in dealing with law enforcement. In contrast to colonial Korea, where justice fell disproportionately heavily on Korean narcotics offenders, the opium regulatory regime of the Kwantung Leased Territory tended to turn a blind eye to infractions by both Japanese and Koreans.68 The judicial system viewed the protection of imperial elites and intermediate elites, rather than interference with their activities, as its main duty. The Japanese army, moreover, benefited enormously from bribes and kickbacks from unlicensed drug traffickers. This revenue comprised an indispensable source of funding for militarism and expansionism in the years leading up to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. The army accordingly pressured the organs of justice to deal leniently with narcotics offenders, and even suppressed evidence against them.69 As a result, police seldom cracked down on trafficking, except when visits by foreign reporters or investigators made arrests necessary to save face.70 In each year from 1909 through 1936, nar65 

Lee, Still Life with Rice, 122. Yamazaki Masao, “Senjin wo chūshin to seru Harupin no kōsatsu,” Chōsen oyobi Manshū 193 (1923): 33–36. 67  Yao, Wei, and Yang, “Daqiao lüguan de yangui,” 240. 68  Outside Manchuria, consular officials may have taken drug crime more seriously. In an article on drug dealing in the treaty port of Tianjin, Motohiro Kobayashi suggests that Japanese law enforcement “did make a fairly earnest attempt under extremely difficult circumstances to bring . . . traffickers under control in the 1920s and 1930s.” See Motohiro Kobayashi, “Drug Trafficking by Resident Japanese in Tianjin,” in Brook and Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes, 152–66. 69  Erik Esselstrom, Crossing Empire’s Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 143–44. 70  For example, a forthcoming visit by a League of Nations commission in 1930 prompted a crackdown on vice in the city of Dairen. In the months preceding the survey, the British 66 

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cotics traffickers comprised well under 1 percent of all suspects taken into custody by KLT police. Of those arrested, only a small number were tried: during the same period, narcotics violations made up just 5 percent of the total caseload of the Kwantung district and high courts.71 Although the majority of defendants received a guilty verdict, conviction did not automatically lead to punishment. Some Chinese were flogged for criminal activity, but Koreans, like Japanese, were exempt from this discipline. Fines were small, seldom representing a significant fraction of a dealer’s profits. A prison term might last as little as three months—a sentence one British consul dismissed as “grotesquely light.”72 In the three decades from 1908 to 1938, only 554 individuals (of all nationalities) served time in the KLT penal system for drug offenses. These offenders represented barely 2 percent of the total prison population in the leasehold.73 In Korea, by contrast, in the fourteen years from 1912 to 1925, more than four times as many Koreans were incarcerated for narcotics violations.74 In Korea, the colonial regime deemed involvement in the opiate economy inimical to the Japanese identity it wished its subjects to assume; hence, offenders were routinely singled out for rehabilitation. In Manchuria, by contrast, judicial leniency bound Japanese and Koreans together by giving them a mutual interest in the continuation of imperial rule. In the 1930s, the Japanese government also considered schemes to make use of intermediate elite drug dealers by relocating them in rural communities. The proposed resettlement sought to deepen Japanese penetration of Manchuria by interspersing imperial settlers among Chinese in agricultural communities. In 1933, the Japanese Foreign Ministry asked consular officials to evaluate the possibility of dispatching city-based Korean drug dealers to the frontier as farmer-colonists. In response to this inquiry, bureaucrats in Xinjing, the Manchukuo capital, received over twenty communiqués from personnel in six cities.75 Yet although diplomats were universally enthusiastic about eliminating lawbreakers from their jurisdiction, plans for resettlement soon foundered. The Japanese consul observed, “[T]here are signs . . . of more diligent attempts on the part of the Japanese Government to deal with the traffic, but these measures have been probably no more than the Government’s reaction to the impending visit of the Commission of Investigation appointed by the League—and past experience has shown such zeal to be ephemeral.” Jarman, ed., Japan and Dependencies: Political and Economic Reports 1906–1960, vol. 2, Japan: Political Reports 1923–1931, 397. 71  Kantō tōkei sho, vols. 4–31 (1909–1936). 72  Jarman, ed., Japan and Dependencies, vol. 2, p. 397. 73  Kantō tōkei sho, vols. 3–33 (1908–1938). 74  Nihon teikoku tōkei nenkan, vols. 31–44 (1912–1925). 75  Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu, Gaimushō shiryōkan.

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consul of Fengtian, the city with the largest number of intermediate elites, described drug dealers as a bad influence on “good” Koreans. He appointed a researcher to survey all Korean households within his jurisdiction, but the project encountered severe resistance and was abandoned.76 The consul of Jiandao, a border jurisdiction that contained a majority Korean population, anticipated such hostility and objected preemptively to the entry of migrant homes.77 Among consuls that managed to complete their investigation, the number of candidates for resettlement ranged from 27 in the suburb of Jinzhou in southern Manchuria, to 827 in the mid-sized port of Niuzhuang.78 Altogether, the Foreign Ministry estimated the population of urban dealers and dependents at about twenty thousand.79 Ultimately, however, the inability of various authorities to cooperate and inadequate funding proved insurmountable challenges to the deployment of the Koreans as agricultural colonists in most areas.80 Even those diplomats who amassed a sufficient budget encountered unexpected obstacles. In October 1933, the consul of Harbin announced the relocation of over eight hundred Korean narcotics traffickers to a village called Hedong. With an existing population of approximately three hundred households, Hedong was utterly unable to accommodate the newcomers.81 The often involuntary association of many Koreans with imperial initiatives such as the agricultural resettlement campaign, which ignored the property rights of Chinese farmers, fatally damaged the reputation of all Koreans in the Chinese national mind. Sino-Korean relations were generally friendly through the 1920s, despite periodic episodes of friction between migrants and the Chinese government, and some resentment concerning the acquisition of Chinese land by Koreans.82 The intensification 76  Letter from Consul Kajiwara to Foreign Minister Uchida, August 1, 1933, in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu; Letter from Consul Morioka to Foreign Minister Uchida, May 24, 1933, in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu. 77  Letter from Consul Nagai to Foreign Minister Uchida, February 15, 1933, in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu. 78  Letter from Consul Gotō to Foreign Minister Uchida, August 6, 1933, in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu; Letter from Consul Arakawa to Foreign Minister Uchida, January 3, 1933, in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu. 79  Letter from General Mutō to Foreign Minister Uchida, September 26, 1933, in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu. 80  Letter from Consul Kajiwara to Foreign Minister Uchida, August 1, 1933, in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu. 81  Letter from Consul Morishima to Foreign Minister Hirota, October 1933, in Ahen sono ta dokuzaiyaku torishimari kankei zakken: Manshūkoku no bu. 82  For more on Sino-Korean relations in rural Manchuria, see Yoda Yoshiie, “Manshū

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of Japanese imperialism and narcotics operations in Manchuria, however, impaired the peaceful coexistence of these communities. Beginning in the late 1920s, Chinese nationalists denounced Japan’s alleged campaign to “drug the population into submission” (duhua or du-Hua zhengce). The imperialists, writers contended, sought to weaken Chinese resistance to imperial rule and establish control over China through the physiological channel of mass addiction. Koreans were seen as key instruments of this campaign. V. K. Wellington Koo of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republican government declared, “In view of the large number of Japanese nationals (including Koreans) and firms involved in the smuggling and selling of narcotics in China, it is difficult to believe that the Japanese Government is not behind the policy of selling poisonous drugs to undermine the health of the Chinese race.”83 As views of Korean migrants soured in the late 1920s, the Chinese government passed legislation restricting the property rights and other privileges of intermediate elites.84 In the wake of the Mukden Incident of 1931, leading to the establishment of the state of Manchukuo by the Japanese military the following year, defeated Chinese soldiers and other outraged nationals attacked and looted Korean communities, destroyed homes, and assaulted and raped civilians.85 An incident in the village of Fushansi in 1934 illustrates the complexities of Sino-Korean relations in the Manchukuo age. According to eyewitnesses, a group of local Korean drug dealers demanded money in exchange for a promise to leave the local population unmolested. When the village headman agreed to underwrite the bribe, the dealers countered with a demand for additional funds. Unable to pay, the headman fled, whereupon the Koreans rampaged through the village. Resident Chinese farmers fought back, killing the dealers. The deaths outraged Koreans throughout Manchuria. In response, they organized a committee to recover the bodies, pressure the Japanese administration to punish the villagers, and seek protection and compensation for the relatives of the victims.86 ni okeru Chōsenjin imin,” in Nihon teikoku shugi ka no Manshū imin, ed. Manshū imin shi kenkyūkai (Tokyo: Ryūkei shosha, 1976), 491–603; Jinnō Morimasa, Rekishi kara kakusareta Chōsenjin Manshū kaitakudan to giyūgun (Tokyo: Shohan, 1998); and 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). 83  V. K. Wellington Koo, Memorandum on the Sale and Smuggling of Narcotic Drugs in China by Japanese Subjects and Firms (Beijing, 1932), 1. 84  Yoda, “Manshū ni okeru Chōsenjin imin,” 498–516. 85  Park Kang, Zhong-Ri zhanzheng yu yapian (Taipei: Guoshiguan, 1998), 127. 86  “Drug Dealers Massacred: Chinese Farmers Wipe Out a Korean Gang,” Japan Chronicle, September 22, 1934.

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Although the frequency of violent outbreaks like the incident in Fushansi declined after the founding period of Manchukuo, Sino-Korean hostility lingered. Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, Koreans again suffered a wave of reprisals from Chinese neighbors who did not differentiate between them and the imperialist elite. Left undefended and isolated after the defeat of the Kwantung Army and the departure of hundreds of thousands of Japanese colonists, Korean migrants fell victim to assaults by Soviet troops and Chinese civilians alike. Conclusion To the Chinese, the Koreans of Manchuria were an intermediate elite. To the Japanese, they were an intermediate elite. In other words, Korean migrants in Manchuria were imperialist aggressors in the Chinese mind, but did not win acceptance by the Japanese as full partners. Indeed, from the perspective of the Japanese, the utility of the Koreans depended on maintaining a boundary between the intermediate and full elite. Deemed racially inferior to the Japanese and superior to the Chinese, Koreans were imbued with the authority—indeed, they were seen as possessing a special aptitude—to deal with the subject population. Rather than passively accepting this status, the intermediate elite negotiated its relationship to opium in ways that supported personal and community interests. In some ways, Koreans in Manchuria were fortunate compared to their co-nationals at home and in Japan. Japanese nationality was theirs to claim; they did not suffer the humiliation of a degrading campaign of ethno-cultural reprogramming, as in Korea, or exclusion from mainstream society, as in the Japanese home islands. Yet like their counterparts throughout the imperial realm, they experienced the opium empire as a chaotic and shifting terrain in which being or not being “Japanese” was a condition that pervaded every aspect of social and individual life. By filling a vital niche in the narcotics market, Koreans undoubtedly augmented and facilitated the transfer of illicit revenues to the expansionminded Kwantung Army—whether or not they were aware of this flow. But identifying these dealers as “collaborators,” even unwitting collaborators, overlooks the fact that opium was also a significant source of finance for anti-Japanese resistance movements of the imperial age. The major claimants to political authority in early twentieth-century China—warlord governments, the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek, the Communist Party under Mao Zedong, and “bandit” armies—established drug regulatory regimes partly to fund their opposition to the Japanese imperial machine. Korean patriots may have taken part in the illegal narcotics trade with the intention of devoting the proceeds to resistance efforts led

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by the Korean communist movement, which germinated in Manchuria, and other anti-Japanese initiatives. For most Koreans, however, questions of collaboration and resistance were likely secondary to the problem of negotiating a challenging, often confusing social topography over which they had limited control. Baek Hongyong, the female narcotics dealer discussed earlier, migrated to Manchukuo with her children and husband when the latter came to feel that life had become unbearable in Korea under Japanese rule. Across the Yalu River, where the campaign to make the Koreans into Japanese was less intensively sustained, the family began a new life. Baek’s husband considered himself a patriot, although he was more inclined to devote himself to the pursuit of material luxury and women than to the local resistance movement. But for Baek herself, opium was simply a means of furthering her family’s fortunes. Through a practical strategy of cooperation, she was able to acquire wealth beyond her wildest imaginings. She did not forgive the Japanese for the colonization of her homeland and was not indifferent to its political fate. But survival came first, and she did not apologize for it.

THREE

Women on the Loose Household System and Family Anxiety in Colonial Korea

SUNGYUN LIM

Introduction: Mobile Women as Social Problem On June 22, 1925, Tonga Ilbo published a story about a runaway wife entitled, “With an Awareness That Women Also Needed Education, a House-Wife Runs Away from the ‘Doll’s House’.” With a title that was an obvious pun on Henrik Ibsen’s famous play, the article relayed a story about a woman named Yu Chin-kyŏng, who ran away from her home of a “respectable family” (myŏng’mang’ga) in a rural town.1 According to the article, upon hearing that her husband, who was staying in Japan for education, had moved in with a Japanese “modern woman,” Yu realized that “women too must learn,” and ran away to Seoul in the dark of the night. After putting her child to bed, she sneaked out of the house, and stepped onto a train headed for Kyŏngsŏng (Seoul). The following morning, the aghast in-laws found three letters, addressed to the father-in-law, mother-in-law, and husband. In the letter to her husband, Yu reportedly wrote, “It is my utmost regret (chŏlchŏnji han) that I have not had education. I wish that you marry a good wife who is chaste and wise (hyŏnsukhan yangchŏ) and lead a happy life.” In Seoul, she enrolled at a women’s school (kyŏngsong mo’nyŏ chahak’kwan). When she was pressed by her natal parents to return home, Yu shaved her head, threatening that she would rather enter a Buddhist nunnery than return home. Together with reportage on the alarming rate of divorce, the article expressed a heightened anxiety in Korea about women who were 1  Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was introduced to Korea in 1921 in a translation printed in the newspaper Maeil Sinbo. Kim Suk-yi, “Yibsen ui yesulgwa sasangi hanguk kundae munhak e kichin yonghyang,” Sisa mundan 20 (December 2004): 59.

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increasingly stepping outside of the boundary of the family.2 In the 1920s, a growing number of articles began to report on the rising divorce rates among Korean couples. Many articles pointed to the fact that more and more wives were demanding divorce. A newspaper article entitled, “Everyone Is Demanding a Divorce” (Nŏdo nado rihon haja) reported about two cases where the wives filed for divorce after their husbands abandoned them.3 The details of the incidents were rather grim. In one of the cases in the article, a wife with small children was not only deserted by the husband but found, when she came back from visiting her natal family, that her father-in-law had sold all of her furniture and mortgaged her home for a loan. She finally filed for a divorce. Still, the tone of the article reprimands the wives rather than the husbands, expressing the fear that more accessible divorce would pull more families apart. Here again, the absence of the husbands was less problematized than the legal severance and movement of the wives away from that household. In opposition, women’s columns tried to paint these women in a different light, as victims of the Korean family, where the mothers-in-law were oppressive and the husbands sexually frivolous. Although the common factor in these cases seems to have been missing husbands (either studying abroad, working elsewhere, or simply deserting), the absence of men was rarely problematized. In other words, there seems to have been a gendered imbalance in the perception of mobility in colonial Korea. The question is, then, why were only “moving women” a problem, when both men and women were mobile? One obvious answer is that, traditionally, women’s proper position in Korean society was in the home, and that their deviation from this prescribed position easily earned social reprimand. While changing social conditions in the colonial society meant that traditional prescription of morality was exercising less and less influence over people’s actions, it still retained power to sway in the pages of the media and added a sense of emergency to the perceived threat posed by mobile women. The above hypothesis is certainly part of the explanation, but it does not explain the whole picture. In this chapter, I will argue that anxiety regarding mobile women was an administratively constructed problem, rather than a reflection of an actual increase in mobility of women. The problem was with hyper-visibility of women’s status changes due to the structure of the household registration system. In other words, the 2  Five to six cases a day appeared in the local courts according to a contemporary editorial. Hong Nan, “P’yong’non: Ihon sosong Kyokchŭng,” Sin yŏsŏng (February 1925), cited in Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 82. 3  Tonga Ilbo, November 26, 1924.

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househead-centered registration system made women’s movement to and from households more visible than men’s. In addition, as I will examine below, hyper-representation of women in the colonial courts also added to the anxiety. Especially, the strengthened rights of widows under the colonial civil courts made widows more visible as sources of familial conflict. The fact that widows often gained the upper hand in family disputes against their in-laws further exacerbated the anxiety about treacherous women. Below I will explore the social anxiety about mobile women during the colonial period as an issue produced by the administrative and legal systems rather than by an actual increase in the mobility of women from families. My examination of the household system of colonial Korea and Meiji Japan will explore the social effects of the system on both countries. Contrary to previous scholarship on the Meiji Civil Code focusing on its preservation of family collectivity, I will show that a more significant and dominant effect of the Meiji family law came in the form of its new unit of “household,” which cut into the traditional ties of extended families. This strengthened boundary of the household had the unintended effect of strengthening widow rights in colonial Korea. By examining a number of lawsuits involving widows and widow rights, I will show how such strengthened rights of the widow increased the level of tension and anxiety about women and their rights. In short, I want to show that the household system, both through the registry and its enforcement in the colonial court, produced a sense of anxiety about women in colonial Korea. Either as dangerously moving, or as the marker of boundary for the household, women were perceived as a threat to family collectivity. Missing Women as Administrative Problem On the side of local administration, another kind of problem of moving women was brewing. Household registry, initially established in 1909, was producing much confusion in its administration, and numerous inquiries from local and provincial offices hit the desk of the chief of the Justice Division (Hōmu Kyokuchō). In July 1922, the governor of Northern Pyŏng’an Province sent an inquiry to ask for advice on an anomalous registration case. The head of a household had died, leaving behind his mother and great-aunt. In principle, the mother was to inherit that household, yet it turned out, the mother was no longer living with the family: “The mother, since November 1914 [eight years prior] had already become the wife of another man, B, and moved to his house and moreover gave birth to his daughter. She is registered in household A, but in reality she is living as a member of B’s family. So it is not customarily recognized that

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she inherit household A. How should we handle this matter?” [emphasis added].4 In answer to the above inquiry, the chief of the Justice Division ordered the mother to return to household A and inherit the headship until she adopted a suitable heir for the household. It was her duty to adopt an heir for her (late ex)-husband, so that the household and the ancestral worship could be continued. The inquiry was a typical kind that local administrators addressed to the chief of the Justice Division or the Chūsūin (Korean, Chungchuwon), the Korean advisory committee to the government-general. The answers were then widely distributed (through circulars and journals such as Shihō kyōkai zasshi) among colonial administrators for reference. Such inquiries were numerous. The household registration system was still relatively new, and in addition to incessant revisions to the law, local administrators had to deal with many unforeseen instances.5 Confusions were bound to arise in this whirlwind of changes. The registration system itself was soon to see a major reform in July 1923, which generated a sharp increase in the amount of inquiries. The above inquiry was, on its surface, about an inaccurate household register, but actually it was a judgment about a “moving” woman who had disrupted the household. One can see this in the shifting usage of “wife” (Japanese, tsuma; Korean, chŏ) and “concubine” (Japanese, mekake; Korean, chŏp) when referring to the woman in question. In the inquiry, the governor had called the mother a “wife” of another man (B), and thus tried to give legitimacy to that relationship and in turn emphasize the fact that she already did not have a place in the household of A. But the answer of the chief of the Justice Division denied the legitimacy of the mother’s current relationship and referred to her instead as a “concubine” of B, declaring that she was officially part of household A and thus had the obligation to inherit it in order to ensure that it was passed on to a legitimate heir. The governor’s definition of “wife” was “sole spouse”; since B had no other spouse, the widow in question was the primary wife. The answer of the chief of the Justice Division stated a different criterion of defining wife. Since the mother was not officially registered as B’s wife, she was his “concubine.” The chief’s definition actually predated 1923 reform in the Household Registration Law (Japanese, Kosekiho; Korean, Hojŏkpŏp; 4 

Chōsen shihō kyōkai, Shihō Kyōkai Zasshi (Keijō [Seoul]: 1924–1944, serial), vol. 1, no. 8, 153–54. 5  The new Household Registration Law was promulgated in 1922, but before then, there were many changes to laws governing family relations, including the 1915 Official Circular No. 240, which restricted the age of marriage, process of divorce, and dissolution of adoption, and the adoption of the Japanese age for marriage without consent in 1921.

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promulgated December 1922, implemented 1923), which confirmed that definition; the reform only recognized registered familial relationships as legally effective. As in the above case, the Japanese colonial administration struggled to match actual living situations with the household registration. Many people married, divorced, and remarried without recording it in the household registers, and thus without notifying the state. Eventually, the colonial state enacted reform of the Household Registration Law in 1923, which recognized only those family relations recorded on the Household Registry as legally effective. This reform shifted the power of defining familial relations from customary realms to the state, and was in one sense an attempt to extend the reach of the state into the lives of the colonial subjects.6 All births, deaths, adoptions, marriages, and divorces were to be reported in the registers, and thus controlled by the registration regulations. Yet, in another sense, it was an attempt to ignore the discrepancies between the registers and the lived reality: if it was not registered, then the relationship (marriage or birth) did not exist in the eyes of the state.7 A significant part of the “moving women” problem derived from the registration system itself. Because the household registration system registered the household as a unit and the household head as the center of the family, defining a person’s location concerning the household was as important as information about his or her personal status—birth, death, marriage, or divorce. If the person was to be the household head, as was the case with the mother in the above case, then the problem became even more vital. Also, the movements of the family members were bound to be more readily recognized and problematized than the movement of the household head. As was shown in the inquiry case above, the mother’s movement to another family was easily caught and problematized. The change of status of the household head—that is, his marriage, divorce, or remarriage—was only registered through the recording and deleting of his wives’ records on or from his household register. In other words, he, or his record, did not move at all. It was the women’s records that moved around. Consequentially, more incidents of administrative problems arose 6  Yi Yŏng-mi, “Kankoku Kindai Koseki Kanren Hōkyu No Seitei Oyobi Kaisei Katei: ‘Minsekihō’ Wo Chūshin Ni” [Establishment and demise of the laws concerning household registers in modern Korea: Focusing on the Household Registration Law], Toyo bunka kenkyū, no. 6 (March 2004). 7  As part of a process to implement monogamy and stomp out concubinage, remarriage with concubines was condoned, although it was against previous customs. When the concubine became a proper wife through remarriage, her son could become the eldest son and heir, if he was the eldest in age. Nomura Shōtarō, “Chōsen Ni Okeru Genkōno Yōshi Seido” [Current adoption system in Korea], Shihō kyōkai zasshi 6 (1927).

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with cases of women who married, divorced, or remarried, than with those of men. Likewise, there was a higher possibility for administrative mistakes with women’s registers. Thus, movement of women posed more problems, and consequentially it was much more problematized. Inquiries about women’s double registers, remarriage without proper divorce procedures, registry based on false information, registry based on confused legal interpretation (such as inkyo [retirement of the household head], a Japanese practice not acknowledged in Korea) surfaced again and again throughout the 1920s. A 1925 letter inquired into the case of a woman who was registered with the name of her husband’s previous wife; the error was noticed only when the husband died and the woman became head of the household.8 Another inquiry questioned the legitimacy of a remarriage because the wife had failed to “return” to her natal family registry after the death of her first husband.9 The administrative preoccupation with women’s registers becomes ironic once one examines the kinds of problems caused by missing household heads. While their absence created graver problems, they were less problematized in the public media.10 When the household head, supposedly the fixed center of the family, went missing, the whole household was administratively paralyzed. The household head had various legal rights over the family members, and his (or, rarely, her) absence caused grave problems. Until the household head returned to his family, or until his death was confirmed, the inheritance, divorce, or marriage of other family members were technically on hold. The missing household heads, in their absence, still had great power over their family members. They had the right to claim paternity over all the children of their wives, even those conceived and born during their absence. In 1923, a woman was denied the right to register her son in the birth father’s register as sŏja (a son born to a concubine). She had been living with the birth father since her husband had gone missing eight or nine years before. She could not get a divorce since she did not have the permission of her husband, who was the household head. And when her son was born, he had to be registered as the legitimate son of her missing husband, because she was

8 

Shihō Kyōkai Zasshi, vol. 4, no. 2, 1. Shihō Kyōkai Zasshi, vol. 2, no. 12, 99. This requirement was repealed just one year after. Shihō Kyōkai Zasshi, vol. 3, no. 2, 29. 10  Missing men in colonial Korea seem to have been a widespread phenomenon that was under-appreciated, and possibly for a political reason. Jun Yoo relays a case of a Korean woman questioning the feasibility of a modern home for a wife of a political refugee. Chŏn Ŭn-jŏng, “Kŭndae kyŏnghŏm gwa yŏsŏng chuche hyŏngsŏng kwajŏng,” Yŏsŏng gwa Sahoe 11 (November 2000): 35, cited in Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea, 82. 9 

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legally still in a marital relationship.11 The missing family head’s wives often remarried, but they could not get legitimate divorces, and thus their remarriages were often annulled. In one case, a remarried woman was ordered to return to her old household with her son from the previous household and inherit the household of her missing husband. Her remarriage was deemed unlawful since she was not properly divorced from her previous husband.12 In another case, a missing husband returned to find his wife cohabiting with another man and tried to sue her for adultery. The administrative decision, fortunately for her, was that he could not sue for adultery.13 Another part of the problem with the household registration system was that it did not fit the reality of family life in colonial Korea. While the number of divorces and remarriages of women may very well have increased during the colonial period, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that the registration itself was designed for a stable family with a married couple and other family members who depended upon the father serving as the household head. The problem, of course, was that increasingly smaller numbers of families were living as the registration system intended. More women were divorcing and remarrying, men still took in concubines and had children out of wedlock, and, most importantly, more men were going missing. This begs a different question, that is, why did the Japanese colonial state implement such a system set up for failure? What was the point of the household registration system? Below, I will examine the creation of the household registration system in Meiji Japan and explore the objectives and effects of the household system. I will then examine the social effects that the household system had in colonial Korea. In doing so, I will focus on its effects on women, especially how widows were overrepresented in the familial civil suits. This, I argue, explains the social anxiety about moving women and destructive effects on traditional family in colonial Korea. Previous studies on family in colonial Korea have focused on the assimilatory effects of Japanese colonial legal policy on Korean family custom. Mostly, the concern has been with the destruction of Korean family customs, a destruction that, these studies argued, led to “annihilation of the nation” (minjok malsal). The assimilation policy was expressed in the implementation of the Japanese household registration system in Korea, and culminated in the 1939 reform of the colonial civil law (Minjirei, or the Civil Ordinances), which forced Koreans to take Japanese-style surnames 11 

Shihō Kyōkai Zasshi, vol. 2, no. 12, 96. Shihō Kyōkai Zasshi, vol. 2, no. 12, 94. 13  Shihō Kyōkai Zasshi, vol. 1, no. 2, 24. 12 

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(sōshi kaimei). This scholarship mostly focused on the effects of colonial policy on Korean family customs. More recent scholarship, from a feminist perspective, has focused on the strengthening of patriarchal authority under the colonial rule. These studies have argued that the implementation of the household system in colonial Korea strengthened the patriarchal authority of the househead, more so than in the precolonial Chosun dynasty. These studies have focused on the debilitating effects of such strengthened patriarchal families on the rights and status of women. Yang Hyun-ah, who was among the first to probe gendered bias in the colonial law, has explored how the patriarchal bias of the Confucian family ideology came to be preserved and rigidified in the colonial legal system in Korea.14 Yang’s argument is twofold. First, that the origin of the Confucian patriarchal family as it appeared in the colonial civil law was not in the Korean tradition but in the Japanese family system. Second, that the Japanese family system was imported into Korea through colonial fossilization of Confucian family custom, all in the name of recognizing Korean customs. This common culture of Confucianism between Korea and Japan functioned to transfer the Meiji family system smoothly to Korea. Hong Yanghee followed suit with her research. Broadening the scope of research from law to include matters of ideological education, Hong sees the family policy in colonial Korea as a process of Japanification, that is, of incorporating the Korean family (its system as well as customs and culture) into the Japanese family. Hong argues that this process was achieved through three venues; first, by the implementation of household registers (koseki), second by the assimilation of family customs through the manipulation of customary laws in the colonial civil courts, and lastly, through ideological education on the roles of women and men in the families.15 While these scholars were successful in exposing the role of the colonial civil law regime in gendering Korean society, their preoccupation with the metropole-colony binary has led them to overlook the gender conflict within Korean society. Most significantly, they have attributed the process of the household system formation solely to the writing of the Meiji Civil Code in the metropole and not to the struggle between genders within the colonized Korean society. Yang Hyun-ah states the significance of probing 14  Yang Hyun-ah, “Hanguk ŭi Hoju Chedo: Sikminji Yusan Soge Sumshinŭn Kajok Chedo” [The House-Head System in Korea: A family system breathing in the colonial legacy], Yŏsŏng gwa sahoe 10 (1999). 15  Hong Yang-hee, “Chosŏn Ch’ongdokpu ŭi Kajok Chŏngchek Yŏngu: Ka Chedo Wa Kajŏng Yideologi Rǔl Chungsim ŭro” [The family policy of Japanese colonialism in Korea: With the focus on family system and home ideology] (Ph.D. dissertation, Hanyang University, 2004).

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into the colonial family as the following, that “colonial family law and system is one area where we can investigate how Japanese Confucian tradition at the time was translated into Korea.”16 Yang therefore considers the colonial law in Korea primarily as a translated import from Japan. Where Yang attributes the origin of Korean customary laws to Korea, she does it in the precolonial past. One of the major problems she finds in the colonial customary laws is that they were fossilized or ossified versions of family customs that were taken out of the context of the Chosun dynasty society. According to Yang, therefore, patriarchally biased colonial customary law had its origins in the family customs of the Chosun dynasty, and these customs were preserved and ossified through colonial legal policy, which had its patriarchal bias tracing from the Japanese family system. What this formula does not investigate, though, is the process and reception of such ossified family customs in Korean society during the colonial period. In other words, Yang depicts Korean society as a passive receptor of colonial legal policy and does not attribute much agency or variablity to Korean society. If it was the patriarchal pull that created the gender-biased family custom in the Chosun dynasty period, then is it reasonable to believe that it was less inclined to do the same under the colonial rule? While I acknowledge the significance of investigating the impact of the Japanese family system on colonial family law in Korea, I also propose that we do not lose sight of the gender dynamics within Korean society. The Writing of the Meiji Civil Code and the Establishment of the Household System We can understand the failure of the colonial household registration as a case of failed high-modernist ideology toward social legibility as articulated by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State. He asks, “[W]hy the state has always seemed to be the enemy of ‘people who move around’.”17 He seeks the answer in the desire of the modern state not only to be able to read the society but also to make the society legible, in order to implement largescale social engineering projects, thereby fulfilling its high-modernist ideology.18 Nonconformity to or irregularity in local customs and norms, let 16  Yang Hyun-ah, “Envisioning Feminist Jurisprudence in Korean Family Law at the Crossroads of Tradition/Modernity” (Ph.D. dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1998), 345. 17  James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1. 18  “In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 5.

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alone non-sedentary people, were major hindrances to making the society legible to the state. Scott sees how the state’s desire for a legible society has played havoc with many societies, insofar as the state’s disregard for local knowledge and know-how was considered to be a nuisance to the legibility. The intention of the Japanese colonial state was similarly control oriented when implementing the Household Registry. Pak Myong-su and Yi Chul-ho argue that the Household Registry together with other statistical surveys that the Japanese colonial state carried out was a modernist effort to gauge the strength of the nation and the colony.19 Yi Yong-mi, as well, has argued that one of the most significant aspects of the household registration system was that it extended the reach of the state into the everyday lives of colonial subjects.20 Yet, as seen above, the format of the registration system, where the household was the basic unit, was a hindrance to accurate tracking of colonized subjects. Why did the Japanese state implement a registration system that was so ineffective? What was the purpose of the household system? What other objective did the Japanese state have for the registry? The dominant argument in the previous studies of Meiji Civil Code was that it compromised individual rights by protecting the collectivity of the traditional family system. In other words, what had been intended to be a modern civil law based on individual principles was distorted through revisions pressured by conservative demands to preserve a traditional family system. Suppressing the disintegrating effects of modern society had been a concern for the Japanese state ever since the beginning of the Meiji Period. In fact, the writing of the modern laws had precisely these concerns in mind, and the laws were engineered precisely to control—as much as possible—the ill effects of the capitalism that Japan was trying to promote in the economic sector. The Meiji Japanese state, therefore, was faced with two contradictory calls when writing their Civil Code. One was to facilitate capitalistic economic development through protecting individual rights in property. The other was to ensure the collectivity of the family so that the capitalistic economic relations would not too drastically disintegrate traditional families. Facilitating capitalism entailed disintegrating people from land and freeing individuals from familial bonds. Protecting traditional communal bonds entailed keeping individuals bonded to the family under the leadership and guidance of the family head. How Japan would reconcile the two opposite (and even contradictory) pulls toward 19  Pak Myŏng-su and Yi Chul-ho, Sikmin Kwollyok Kwa T’onggye (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2003). 20  Yi Yŏng-mi, “Kankoku ni okeru Minjikanshū no Seibunpōka Katei ni Kansuru Saikin no Kenkyū Dōkyō” [Recent research on the codification of civil customs in Korea], Tōyō bunka kenkyū, no. 7 (2005).

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individualism and communalism was the big question that the Meiji oligarchs faced when writing and implementing the first modern laws for the nation. If the Meiji land tax reform facilitated the capitalization of land and disintegration of people from the land, the Meiji Civil Code was the important device that tried to tamper the individualizing effect. The 1873 Reform had revolutionized the tax system in Japan by making all tax monetary and by mandating that all land tax be levied not on the cultivators but on the land itself and its market value. In order to enforce this system, people who were previously listed in the Land Register (kenchichō) were now registered in the Household Register (koseki). In turn, the land was declared as “free”—free to be bought, sold, and privately owned by anyone regardless of class. Before the 1873 Reform, only the overlords (daimyō) could officially own land. While the peasants enjoyed various customary use-rights, they were forbidden to sell or mortgage the land that they cultivated; the ruling warrior class (bushi) was likewise forbidden to own land outright. With implications far beyond the tax system, the Land Tax Reform meant great transformations for all strata of Japanese society. For peasants, it meant being deprived of the security of customary rights and being thrown into tenancy or, sometimes, being totally expelled from the land. For the upper class with means, it meant a potential disruption of the familial order, with the equal right to land ownership infringing upon the authority of the household head. The household registration system was, in its design, contradictory in its effects on the new land system. While these two reform measures—viewed by some as the two most fundamental reforms of Meiji Japan—were seen as necessary in order to stabilize the tax base of the newly modernizing Japanese state, they were ultimately contradictory policies.21 While the Land Tax Reform declared everyone equal, the household registration system supported the exclusive rights and authority of household heads. This contradiction, in turn, could be traced to a conflict between the Department of State (Daijōkan) and the Ministry of Justice (Shihōshō). Those anxious about the disruptive effects of the Land Tax Reform called for the strengthening of the household system and the preservation of household head’s rights—to which the Meiji state conceded. Even though the Department of State and the Division of Judicial Matters (Hōseikyoku) were both more interested in the success of the Land Tax Reform than the strengthening of the household system, they could not ignore the loud voices of concern about the rural community. Indeed, the stability of the rural economy and society eventually became critical in 21 

Fukushima Masao, Nihon Shihon Shugi to “Ie” Seido [Capitalism and family system in Japan], Todai Shakai Kagaku Kenkyu Sosho (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1967).

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the success of the new tax system. Strengthening the household system, meanwhile, emerged as the quickest and most effective means to revive the rural economy.22 It was in this context that the vice-minister of agriculture and commerce, Maeda Masana, argued in his famous opinion letter that Japan needed to reestablish the household system in order to revive the agricultural economy.23 The two contradicting demands of Meiji society were what protracted the process of writing of the Civil Code writing. The initial draft of the Meiji Civil Code was subject to lengthy process of debates and revisions, eventually erupting in the Meiji Civil Code Debate (1889–92). One of the critical points of the debate was whether Japan should recognize the individual or the family as the basic social unit. Those espousing the protection of the family system, namely, those in the deferment faction, argued that this system was the last moral building block of the new Japanese empire. To these scholars, the family system ensured not only that Japan preserved what was essential to the national polity (kokutai) but also its traditional social order. With the abolishment of the status system in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, the ensuing industrialization and labor unrest, the beginning of women’s entrance into the work force, and imperial expansion and its potential of unrest, there was a heightened sense of anxiety about social order during this period. To some, the family system and the “beautiful customs” that it embodied provided a measure of insurance against the total destruction of morality and social order. Deferment faction scholar Hozumi Yatsuka argued that the ie (the household) had to be defended as the founding block of society. In order to preserve and support the collectivity of the family, this faction suggested that the new Civil Code employ the principle of primogeniture, which would, in turn, ensure the continued practice of ancestor worship. Ancestor worship was lauded by Hozumi Nobushige (older brother to Hozumi Yatsuka, the engineer of the family-state ideology) as the essence of all Japanese social groups in his Ancestor Worship and the Japanese Law. He argued that Japanese law should be formulated to ensure the continuity of this institution.24 With Japanese social order maintained by ancestor worship, all members of the Japanese nation would be encouraged to worship the imperial family—the main branch of all Japanese families.25 22 

Masao, Nihon Shihon Shugi To “Ie” Seido, 163. Ito Masami, Gaikokuhō to Nihonhō [Foreign law and Japanese law], Iwanami KozaGendaihō (Iwanami Shoten, 1966), 33. 24  Hozumi Nobushige, Ancestor Worship and the Japanese Law (Tokyo: Z. P. Maruya, 1901). 25  Hozumi Yatsuka, “Minpō Idete, Chūkō Horobu” [The Civil Code will destroy loyalty and filial piety] (1891), in Minpōten Ronsō Shiryōshū, ed. Hoshino Tōru (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1969), 82–85. 23 

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Economic considerations were also part of the equation. Hozumi Yatsuka and Hozumi Nobushige both argued that the family system based on the collective household was a better fit for the Japanese economy, which was heavily agricultural and dependent on collective family labor. On the other side of the spectrum, the enforcement faction believed that protecting the family system could not coexist with the principles of modern law. They argued that the family system was untenable in protecting individual rights. Ume Kenjiro argued that individual rights were not only the desired principle of modern social relations but also were critical in ensuring the smooth development of the industrial economy. Furthermore, Ume argued, Confucian family morals were already in decline and the civil code regulating family relationships should be forward-looking rather than reinstate old norms that were already in decline. Familial relationships should instead be regulated by the civil code provided by the state.26 Ume’s position represented the complex conditions among which the new Japanese Civil Code was positioned. While many feared the possibility of accelerating the disintegration of traditional social relations in Japanese society with the new Civil Code, they also could not ignore the tenets of individual rights that were swiftly becoming universal in the civilized world. The Civil Code, after all, was Japan’s main tool in abolishing the unequal treaties and gaining equal ground with the European nations in economic and diplomatic relations. As a late developer, Japan also had the chance to learn about the development of law and its relation to economic development in Europe and could not help but see the necessity for a strong economy to have a proper civil code with clearly defined individual rights. The above conflict in principles played itself out in a debate over the specific codes concerning the family. Many codes that were proposed to protect the family system became topics of heated debate. They included the principle of primogeniture in the succession of the household headship and the inheritance of household property; acknowledgment of concubines and shoshi (recognized sons born out of wedlock); and the protection of the household head’s authority over that of parental authority. Primogeniture, the traditional principle of inheritance since the Tokugawa Period among the ruling class of the samurai, was considered the major means to ensure the continuity and security of the household system. Considered contrary to the principle of equality, however, this principle faced major challenges from the beginning. Georges Bousquet, the legal advisor for the compilation of the Civil Code, opposed this principle and 26 

Wagatsuma Sakae, “Kazokuseido Hōritsuron No Hensen,” Minpō Kenkyū 7 (1969): 71–168.

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advocated its abolishment, pushing instead for an equal distribution of inheritance among the sons.27 The recognition of shoshi posed a more vexing question. Ume adamantly refused the recognition of shoshi, as this meant recognizing the concubine, who was in the process of being outlawed—or rather, being ousted from the legal realm. Already in 1878, the draft Penal Code excluded the term “concubine,” thereby implicitly denying the existence of such a category of person. In 1880, the Council of Elder Statesmen discussed whether to include the category of “concubine” in the penal codes. While some supported its inclusion on the ground that without concubines the imperial household would have a difficult time ensuring primogeniture, Hosokawa Junjirō argued that concubinage was against the principle of equality between the sexes. In the end, support for concubinage won the debate, but many of the supporters missed the meeting for the vote, allowing the proposal for a revised draft (with concubinage clause) to be defeated.28 This omission of concubinage in the penal code ended up affecting the writing of the civil code, where it had been absent as a category since the 1881 draft. This, in turn, led to the additional process of legally recognizing sons of concubines as shoshi to be included in the family registry.29 The Meiji Civil Code (1898) born out of the Civil Code Debate was a compromise between the two positions described above, the deferment faction supporting family collectivity and the enforcement faction supporting individual rights. Yet, the compromise was an incomplete one. The problem caused by the two contradicting principles never became fully resolved. As such, the Meiji Civil Code was based on two contradictory principles, the family and the individual. In some sense, the Civil Code Debate was not resolved but deferred in the Meiji Civil Code. As observed above, various measures that strengthened family collectivity and the authority of the household head significantly compromised individual rights. Yet the collective nature of the family was also much curtailed. While all family members were technically under the supervision of the household head, the power of the household head over its members was greatly reduced from what some of the deferment faction members had appealed for. Still, all members of the family were registered as individuals, and their individual rights were acknowledged in principle. 27 

Hayakawa Noriyo, Kindai Tennosei to Kokumin Kokka: Ryosei Kankei O Jiku to Shite [Modern emperor system and the nation-state: Focusing on gender relations] (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2005), Chapter 5. 28  Tezuka Yutaka, “Genrōin No Mekake Rongi” [Debate over concubinage in the Council of Elders] (1957), in Meiji Minpōshi No Kenkyū 2, Tezuka Yutaka Chosakushu, vol. 8 (1991). 29  Tezuka, “Genrōin No Mekake Rongi.”

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A quite different analysis has dominated the discussion of family system in Japan. While the registration system itself and the census survey that Pak and Yi focused on indeed have a modernist objective, analysis of the household system itself—taking the collective household as the basic unit, and placing its members under the authority of the household head—has been focused on in its conservative aspect, the collectivity of the household. To some scholars, the conservative and traditional aspects of the household system were deliberately designed to offset the ill-effects of its modernizing effects. Historian, Yoda Sei’ichi has argued that the household system was a state remedy for the individualizing effects of legal reforms in areas outside the family law. In Kazoku shisō to kazokuhō no rekishi, Yoda examines the Meiji Civil Code debate within the larger context of the Meiji legal debate as a whole, which included an important debate on the commercial code.30 As he writes, “Previous studies of (Meiji) legal debate have focused on studies of the Chapter on Personal Status (Jinjihen) of the Civil Code and the issue of patriarchal family state ideology, symbolized by Hozumi Yatsuka’s Minpō idete, chūkō horobu (The Civil Code will ruin loyalty and filial piety).”31 Yoda suggests that the greater incorporation of Japanese customs into the Civil Code—the outcome of the debate—was a remedy used by the Japanese state to ease Japan’s incorporation into the world capitalist system rather than being an expression of its adherence to feudal absolutism. In other words, using the language of custom to reinforce the collectivity of household economy, the state strengthened the household system to temper the individualizing effects of the newly reformed commercial law. The two contradictory moves (one toward removing the individual from the collective community, and another to tie the individual back to the traditional folds of community) inspired the historian Kano Masanao to argue that the family (ie) in the Meiji Period was strengthened as a concept (gidai), while the actual conditions of the family were being disintegrated.32 What has not been examined fully, so far, is how the household unit itself cut into the traditional bonds of the extended families. As I will examine below, while the family collectivity was preserved in the form of the household, the legal clarification of the household unit and the strengthening of the rights of the heads of each household meant that traditional claims of familial relations and rights, which had been more fluid and 30 

Yoda Sei’ichi, Kazoku Shisō to Kazokuhō No Rekishi [History of family ideology and family law] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2004). 31  Hozumi Yatsuka, “Minpō Idete, Chūkō Horobu” (1891), in Minpōten Ronsō Shiryōshū, ed. Hoshino Tōru (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1969) 32  Kano Masanao, Senzen Ie No Shisō [Pre-war thoughts on family] (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1983).

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wide-reaching, came to be denied under the new Civil Code. In other words, the household system introduced by the Meiji Civil Code was a new invention that was significantly different from the traditional family. Therefore, while certain elements of the Civil Code certainly preserved old family customs, the household boundary that was strengthened under the same code was a new element significant enough to fundamentally change the old family system. One civil case from 1878 shows how family law and the household principle actually curtailed the collectivity of the larger family in Japan. This case that occurred on July 27, 1878, involved a civil suit between Arabe Ryūji and his father, Arabe Heizaemon, over the issue of household inheritance.33 In 1858, Ryūji, the eldest son, divided his household from Heizaemon’s; in 1878, Heizaemon retired as the household head and passed the household onto his younger son, Heijū. A year later, however, Heijū passed away without a son, leaving the family scrambling to find an heir. When Heizaemon himself passed on, Ryūji objected to the inheritance of the household by Heijū’s sister, Kama (who was also Heizaemon’s daughter), saying that his son, Koji, was the rightful heir. Ryūji’s claim was that only sons could be household heads; daughters could be made heiresses only when there were no other suitable sons. The court (Daishin’in), however, backed Heizaemon, ruling that Ryūji, as a member of another household, had no right to meddle in the Heijū household’s business of deciding an heir. Neither could Ryūji send Koji to Heijū’s household to be the heir; Koji was a proper son (chakushi) and an eligible heir to his own household, and therefore unfit to be adopted into another household. This case touched on many of the central concerns of the contemporary debate over family law (e.g., issues of daughter inheritances, household boundaries, and divisions of household). While the principle of inheritance was formulated to support the prerogatives of the household head, its enforcement in practice did not necessarily result in strengthening the collectivity of family. Instead, by strengthening the household boundary (even when the boundary of the family violated the boundary of the household), it, to a certain extent, had the opposite effect. This was partly related to the state’s desire to prevent the hasty division of households by families eager to avoid military conscription. But when everything is said and done, the most striking aspect of this case is the state’s desire to imprint its own version of the family boundary, as recorded in the household registers (koseki), rather than succumb to the more nebulous boundaries of the family being claimed by the litigants. In this way, the Meiji 33 

Meiji Zenki Daishinin Minji Hanketsuroku [Verdicts of the superior court from early Meiji period], ed. Sakae Wagatsuma, vol. 1 (Kyoto Sanwa Shobo, 1957), 193–94.

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state ensured that the principle of household collectivity and the authority of the household head could bolster the authority of the state, instead of competing private authorities. In such a way, the family law and the household system were modern inventions, rather than mere vestiges of tradition. The Meiji government produced the household system as a compromise between multiple and contradictory needs of Meiji society. First of all, the registry aimed to keep track of citizens for military conscription purpose. Secondly, it was meant to preserve family collectivity against the disintegrating forces of modernization and capitalization. Yet, in the process of implementing the registry, the state clarified and strengthened the boundary between households, and this, in the end, cut into the collectivity of larger, extended families. In order to satisfy multiple and contradicting needs, the household system ended up being a compromise between individualistic principles and the collectivity of the family—and the state, as the guarantor of the household boundary, inserted itself between the households. Below, we will see how this new system of organizing citizens into households influenced the Korean family. Household and Division of Lineage in Korea: Hypervisibility of Widows What does the creation of the Meiji household system tell us about the household system in Korea? In light of the process of how the household system was created originally in Meiji Japan, we can surmise that the household system, as imperfect as it was in keeping track of colonial subjects, was fulfilling other multiple and contradicting purposes in colonial Korea as well. In other words, while the fact that a registry system with the household as a unit did not fit the increasingly disintegrating Korean society, the colonial state nonetheless wanted to deter disintegration by making the collective and stable household the norm. At the same time, just as it did in Meiji Japan, the household unit cut into the older community of the lineage. What was peculiar about the Korean case was that the widow emerged as the boundary marker for households. The ambivalent position of widows between the household and the lineage made them much more visible and as dangerous perpetrators of familial conflict. Enforcement of household boundary was probably why widows feature prominently in colonial civil cases concerning family matters. Especially, widows were in the center of conflict surrounding adoption choices. As we can see in figures 1–3, which I compiled from civil case records from the legal decisions records (Kōtō Hōin Hanketsuroku), adoption cases constituted 30 percent of all family-related civil cases in colonial Korea

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(see figure 1). Among them, widow-involved cases made up more than half, 54 percent (see figure 2). Figure 3 shows that around 30 percent of all family-related civil cases involved widows. These charts show that there was high representation of widows in family cases, and that widow representation was higher in adoption cases than in other matters. The dominance of widow-related adoption cases in colonial Korean civil court cannot entirely be attributed to the colonial household system. The tension over customary widow rights existed in the precolonial period, and in some sense, the problem merely persisted into the colonial period. Widows held special customary rights in Korean tradition, which put them in an ambivalent position against the patriarchal power of lineage elders. The widow of a family head could become the family head when there was no heir apparent, as chongbu (the eldest daughter-in-law), and become the purveyor of the family’s ancestral worship. Widows were given such special rights to ensure the stability of the lineage. As the (temporary) household head, a widow was to protect and rear the future heir of the family (if there was one), or if there was no heir, to designate and adopt a suitable heir for her husband. This traditional privilege placed widows in an ambivalent position that benefited lineage interest, but at the same time threatened patrilineal authority in the family. As Martina Deuchler, a historian of Chosun dynasty, has documented, customary widow rights were a source of conflict between widows and their in-law relatives even before the onset of Japanese colonial rule. Deuchler documents a number of cases where families brought suits against a widow family head for improper or unsatisfactory choice of heirs. 34 But the colonial household system did play a significant role in perpetuating and in some sense exacerbating the widow problem into the colonial period. The new administrative boundary around the nuclear family that was implemented through the colonial household system was meant to cut into old lineage ties. In the process of implementing the new household system, the colonial state strengthened the traditional rights of widows, which were threatened by lineage elders. Widows were time and again vindicated in their rights against threats from lineage elders who wanted to usurp their rights. Lineage elders, on the other hand, were time and again denied their influence over their daughters-in-law across the household boundary. In other words, the widow cases in colonial Korea were an

34 

Deuchler, Martina. The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1992, 144-145 and 159-161.

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Figure 1. Adoption cases among family cases: 30 percent.

Figure 2. Widowinvolved cases among adoption cases: 54 percent.

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Figure 3. Widowinvolved cases among family cases: 30 percent.

example of existing patterns of conflict that were modified and strengthened under the new legal system brought in by the colonial power. The persistence of existing patterns of conflict over widow rights was enabled by the use of customary laws in the colonial judicial system. The choice to define family matters as special and unique and therefore inviolable by extension of the metropolitan Civil Code was derived through a long process of legal policy development in colonial Korea. The establishment of Japan's protectorate status over Korea marked the beginning of its legal reforms in Korea. As was the case in Japan, reforming the judicial system and implementing modem (Western) law were crucial in terminating Chosun Korea's unequal treaties with Western imperialist countries.35 Rescinding the unequal treaties and thus severing the Western countries' ties to Korea was crucial for the monopolization of Japanese interests in Korea-a fact that the Japanese resident-general was acutely aware of. As the first measure of legal reform, the Resident-General Ito Hirobumi formed a system of legal advisors; judges and lawyers from Japan were invited to local regions in Korea to "advise and assist" the Korean administrator-judges in legal matters. Korea had reformed its judicial system in 1895 during the Kabo Reform-reform efforts initiated by the court following and in resistance to the Kapshin Coup in 1884-by implementing new judicial procedures. Yet, compared to the Japanese legal system, there was still much left to be desired. The civil cases and criminal cases were 35 Yi YOng-mi, "Chosen Tokanfu Ni Okeru Homu Chosakan Seido to Kanshii Chosa Jigyo: Ume Kenjiro to Oda KanjirO Wo Chiishin Ni" [Legal survey officials system and the customs survey under the Korean residency: Focusing on Ume KenjirO and Oda Kanjiro] (1), Hogaku shirin 98, no. 1 (2001): 203.

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still undivided, and the local administrators doubled as judges. Without any legal or administrative authority, however, the Japanese legal advisors had limited means to induce reform in the local courts. In the chaotic Korean legal system, Itō Hirobumi saw an immediate need for a proper system of civil law. With a background in law and having himself been a significant contributor to the writing of the Japanese Constitution, Itō envisioned a civil law for Korea that was separate from the Japanese Civil Code. Itō entrusted the process of writing the Korean civil law to Ume Kenjiro, the Japanese legal scholar, who, as part of the enactment faction in the Meiji Civil Code Debate, participated in writing the Meiji Civil Code. Ume’s original plan was to produce a separate commercial law for Korea and implement the Japanese family law in Korea.36 But after the untimely deaths of both Itō and Ume, the legal policy was drastically changed, and the separate civil law policy was dropped. The new legal scheme was to extend the Japanese Civil Code to colonial Korea. In 1912, the government-general promulgated the Ordinance on Civil Matters (Minjirei) and implemented the Japanese Civil Code in its entirety in Korea, with the important exceptions of family and inheritance matters. As such, family custom became an even more prominent issue in the colonial civil law regime. Even with the exception of family and inheritance matters to be governed by Korean customs, the overall framework for Korean civil law was nearly identical to the Japanese Civil Code. Accordingly, the same contradictions between the collectivist and individualist principles emerged in colonial Korea as well. Similar issues and debates over the authority of the household head, concubinage, shoshi, and such, also emerged in Korea in both the custom surveys and the civil courts. Also, concerns that grew out of the Meiji context dictated the focus of early surveys and investigations into family customs. Even in later surveys, the metropolitan concerns continued to dictate the focus of investigation. In 1915, a survey 36  Yi, “Chōsen Tōkanfu Ni Okeru Hōmu Chōsakan Seido,” 158. Why Ume, who was part of the “enactment faction” (dankōha) in the Meiji Civil Code Debate, suddenly took this pro custom direction for Korea is an interesting question. Ume’s position was somewhat ambivalent in 1892 concerning the Japanese custom; he thought customs should not be changed abruptly, but that change was needed (“preserve the good customs, reform the bad ones”) to “advance the society.” (“Ideally, you would change the customs according to ethics, then reform the laws. But for the especially evil customs, it is not unnecessary to first reform the law, and then reforming the customs with it, and thereby sustaining the ethics. We think this civil code will be out-of-date in ten years. But it will produce the need to continue to wash away the old customs.” Ume Kenjiro in Hoshino, Minpōten Ronsō Shiryōshū, 240.) Yi suggests that Ume had learned his lesson in the Japan case, that one has to respect customs until the society is advanced enough to embrace Western law. Anyhow, this plan was abandoned when Itō was removed from Korea and eventually assassinated in 1909.

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was conducted with special attention to the “retirement of the household head” (koshu inkyo) and “woman household head” (onna koshu).37 The family system of the Meiji Civil Code imported into Korea through the Household Registration Law (Minsekiho, 1909) thus clashed with the traditional family system in Korea, which had strong attachment to consanguine ties. In other words, although both family systems strongly espoused patriarchy, there were crucial differences in their definition, especially in terms of family boundaries, giving rise to strong conflicts between the two systems. Therefore, the critical impact of the Japanese Civil Code in colonial Korea was not that it strengthened or weakened the patriarchal ideology but that it enabled the colonial state to define the boundary of the family. The provision of the Ordinance on Civil Matters that family matters in Korea were to be dealt with by following Korean customs did not stop the colonial state from imposing this new boundary on the family in Korea. Redrawing family boundaries did more than reorganize the family system and the social order. It also meant drastically restructuring property relations within the Korean context, from one of communal ownership to another of individuals and nuclear families. Ancestral burial grounds of old and prominent families, not to mention agricultural lands, were traditionally owned by the clan, the managerial rights to which were granted to the heir of the main family. When the colonial land survey compelled land owners to register their land with the colonial administration, it assumed individual ownership, causing great confusion and distress to tenants who had enjoyed customary rights of tenancy and cultivation over the land. Because this new colonial definition of property meant that there was only one owner per land, many families were thrown into chaos, having to delineate the prerogatives of the lineage heir. Once this heir of the core family was declared to be the land’s sole owner, traditional restraints on his ownership (especially in terms of selling or mortgaging the land) also became practically ineffective. In this context, where the familial ownership of land was being disrupted by the new colonial land policy, the traditional power of the family patriarch was also being curtailed. As will be shown in the following case, the family patriarch became no longer able to claim the rights to property owned by members of his family who lived outside of his household, even if the traditional norms had prescribed otherwise. 37 

Chŏng Pyŏngjo, Ogun ui kwansŭp chosa pogosŏ [Custom survey report from five counties], 1923, manuscript. The five counties are Talsŏng and Kimchŏn from Northern Kyŏngsang Province, Taejŏn and Ch’ŏngju from Northern Ch’ungch’ŏng Province, and Ch’ungju from Northern Ch’ungch’ŏng Province.

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Posing a grave challenge to the new land ownership system implemented by the colonial government were the issues of graveyard and ritual estate (wito), the land owned by the lineage to service ancestral worship. While the colonial government acknowledged the communal ownership of such land by the lineage, this opinion sat awkwardly within the overall structure of individual ownership that forbade any customary rights or restrictions. Among the six earliest cases in the Chosun Superior Court concerning property ownership, five of the six concerned burial sites and another three of the six concerned the customary boundary around burial sites that forbade the burying of persons from a different lineage. Of the latter, all three cases concerned the question of whether the customary boundary of one burial site affected the ownership of another’s land. Customarily, one’s burial site had around it a space where no other people could be buried. The higher the status of the person, the larger was this space. The problem arose when the owner of the burial site did not own all the extra space. When another person who owned this extra space buried his own relative in it, this met with protests from the owner of the first burial site who protested that the second person was violating his customary rights. In a nutshell, it showed a conflict between customary rights and personal ownership. Invariably, the colonial court ruled in favor of the latter. If the owner of the first burial site did not own all the customary land around the burial site, he could not protest another person’s use of this land. Due to similar complications, more cases concerning communal ownership were presented in front of the courts in 1915 and 1916, including two cases of lineage members who had sold their communal land without the consent of other lineage members. In both cases, the lineage members had registered the communal land under their names as individual property and conducted the sales with proper seals and documents. Although the colonial court acknowledged the communal status of both pieces of land, there was little that they could do to prevent these individuals from claiming the communal lands as their own. All the court could do was to rebuke the individuals for foregoing the customary process of consulting the other members of the lineage before the sale. In 1911, the court saw an even messier case concerning a gravesite. This case between two family members shows how traditional familial propriety or customary rights had lost ground to the claims of individual ownership instituted by the new colonial regime. More to the point, it shows how the new focus on exclusive ownership functioned to curtail the customary claims of lineage that had spanned family boundaries. Within the framework of exclusive ownership of property, the customary rights of the core lineage family over other families based on ritualistic grounds were

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no longer sanctioned. This case involved the plaintiff—a second nephew of the accused—burying his father on land that the accused claimed as his. The accused went to the police claiming that there was an “unidentified body” in his land. Failing to find the person who had buried it, the police exhumed the body. The plaintiff was suing to have the body reburied at the site. As it turned out, the burial site was part of a larger patch of land that the plaintiff’s great-grandfather had given to his younger brother, the accused’s grandfather. While agreeing that the land was given to the ancestor of the accused, the plaintiff argued that the burial site itself was a “shamanistic ground” (ŭmsaji) and, therefore, excluded from the gift. Arguing that the injunction that had forbade anyone from owning this shamanistic ground was now lifted, he stated that it should be returned to its rightful heir—himself—as he was the great-grandson of the original owner. The accused, meanwhile, denied any such customary restrictions on the land. One can assume that before the institutionalization of registered ownership, customary propriety binding these two relatives would have prevented the accused from exhuming the body of his second cousin buried on his land. After all, the deceased second cousin was of the main family and would have had a ritualistically higher position. Stating that there were no such customary restrictions from the property being a “shamanistic ground,” the colonial court upheld the accused’s right of ownership. Since the accused had the right to decide whom to bury in his land and since he had done all he could to find the person who had buried the unidentified body, his decision to exhume it was entirely justified. The following case shows how the new civil law regime in colonial Korea utilized new household boundaries to pit the interests of the lineage against those of the nuclear family. Korean family custom in these cases was only acknowledged to strengthen and support the household boundary. It also shows how women—especially as widowed household heads—functioned as a frequent site of conflict between these two interests. Widows under the new colonial law were able to claim their customary right to inherit the family headship with the help of the newly strengthened boundary around the household, which roughly corresponded with that of the nuclear family. The colonial court actively utilized the ambivalent position of the widow (head of the household, but daughter-in-law of a larger family) to enforce the boundary of the household. Traditional rights of the widow thus found new support from the new colonial system of the household. The case we will examine is from 1917, involving a widow named Yi Se-sŏn.38 Yi had the misfortune of losing both her husband and infant son 38 

Chōsen Kōtō Hōin shokika, (Chōsen) Kōtō Hōin Hanketsuroku [Verdicts from the (Chosun) superior court], vol. 4, p. 1.

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in 1914. When her husband passed away, her brother-in-law, Ko Sŭnghwan, took away her husband’s land, and refused to give her any harvest from that land, prompting her to sue him. Yi subsequently won the case in both the local and appeals courts, but Ko took the case to the Superior Court. Ko’s argument ran as follows: “Because women are dependents they cannot act upon property. It is Korean custom to have a close relative in the lineage to manage the property, but the appeals court has failed to investigate such an important custom, and therefore, previous decisions are illegal.” The Appeals Court indeed had denied such a custom: “Even though the plaintiff argues that there were customary rights for a household head [koshu?] to manage the property for a widow when her husband dies without an heir, the husband in question died after he had divided his household from the plaintiff’s household, and therefore the plaintiff has no such rights to claim” [emphasis added]. To this, Ko responded, “The Appeals Court considers as if the plaintiff and the defendant are not of the same household but that is absurd. In Korean custom, brothers are of one body and they are one family regardless of whether or not they live together. Also it is beyond question that a brother’s wife is also part of the family. That the Appeals Court does not recognize us as one family, based solely on the division of the household recorded in the registers, is ignoring Korean custom.” In other words, Ko was claiming that he had the right to manage (and usurp the profit from) the property because he was the elder in the family. The Appeals Court was denying the fact that Ko was part of the family. The court was saying that since the deceased brother “divided house,” that is, registered his family separately from the main family (bunke), they were no longer one household. These clashing interpretations of family by Ko and the colonial court reveal a wide disjuncture between the colonial law and local customs of the colonized. Even though family matters were to be ruled by Korean customs, they came under intense negotiations with the Japanese code. So when Ko spoke of “close relatives in the lineage,” the court interpreted this as the “household head”; and when Ko spoke of his brothers as members of an inseparable family (probably meaning that family ties cannot be severed), the court substituted the concept of “household” as defined in the Household Registers. For the colonial court, this “miscommunication” served the purpose of upholding the integrity of the household. In the end, as it did to many similar cases, the Superior Court upheld the widow’s right to inherit her husband’s property in the absence of a male heir. This decision upheld the boundary of the household. No matter how close in relation, Ko could not claim power over his brother’s property,

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because they were registered in separate households and, therefore, not of one family. Widows were the visible placeholder of the boundary between the households. Upholding the widow’s right to inherit the household property directly enforced the boundary of the household. This case aptly illustrates how property inheritance cases in colonial Korea hinged upon a contested definition of the family. As was often the case in the early Meiji Period as examined above, family boundary was a decisive factor in inheritance cases. The boundary of the family, however, was defined by the state, not by Korean customs. Maintaining the boundary of the household register as the boundary of the family, the colonial civil court ruled that there were no inheritance rights outside of the family—a decision that acknowledged the household unit as a substantive legal category.39 What does this all mean? The implementation of the household system theoretically strengthened the authority of the patriarch in the colonial family law. In practice, however, it sometimes had the opposite effect. As in the cases above, the colonial state showed a marked preference for upholding the household boundary and protecting the nuclear family against the extended reaches of the lineage. The women triumphed in court only when the loss of their cases would have meant a threat to the boundary of the household unit. The same can be said of the land ownership cases. The new household unit, which more or less corresponded to the nuclear or stem family, had dual functions: curtailing the authority of the patriarch over the larger family unit and enforcing a certain sense of collectivism in the colonial subjects. In terms of the latter, while preserving a certain sense of collective order, it also significantly and effectively disrupted the older order of collectivism. In this way, Japanese colonial family law shaped a new relationship between Korean families and the colonial state. The state thus effectively got rid of a competing object of loyalty, the lineage. With the new family law, the lineage power weakened, making nuclear families much more directly accountable to the state. In the process, widows’ rights as household heads became stronger, as the colonial state strengthened the household boundaries. Both the widows and the colonial state certainly benefited in the new household system, but it was the widows who emerged as the dangerous entities dividing the family. The widows, therefore, were subject to an increased number of lawsuits brought against them by their in-laws.

39  Yang Hyun-ah, “Shikminjigi Hanguk Kajokpŏp Ui Kwansŭp Munjae I: Shigan Ŭisik Ŭi Siljong Ŭl Chungsim Ŭro” [The problem of custom in the Colonial Family Law in Korea, I: Focusing on the missing time consciousness], Sahoe wa Yŏksa 58 (2002).

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Conclusion Above, I have tried to explain the anxiety about mobile women in colonial Korea as being a product of the administrative and legal systems, rather than as a reflection of social change. The household registration system, imported from the Japanese metropole, was structured in a way that privileged the (usually male) household head, and made the status change of other family members, especially women, more visible. Not only were women’s movements (through marriage and divorce) more visible than those of men, they had higher rates of administrative errors, which not only gravely affected the everyday lives of these women but also made them more administratively problematic in the eyes of the colonial state. Their frequent movement became the problem of the colonial state. The household system as enforced in the colonial civil court also made women more visible as a source of family conflict. As widows’ customary rights to become household heads were supported by the colonial court, their rights emerged as a new threat to the lineage collectivity. Overrepresentation of widows in family cases attests to the threat Korean families felt about the newly strengthened widow rights. A divorce case from 1931 illustrates the gravity of the “moving women” issue in colonial Korea. The decision of the colonial civil court also shows how much stake the colonial state had in a stable household system. In this case, both the husband and the wife accused each other of malicious desertion.40 According to the wife, she was forced out of the house soon after their wedding, due to the husband’s abuse. The husband also refused to pay her living expenses, forcing her to get a job at the post office. The husband denied her allegations. According to the husband, it was the wife who deserted him. She frequently returned to her natal family for this reason and attended school without his permission. He pleaded with her to quit school and focus on homemaking, but to no avail. It was true, he said, that he witheld living expenses while she was at her natal family, but this was to entice her to return home. That she was forced to find employment was ludicrous; she got a job merely to satiate her vanity, he argued. Therefore, he claimed, he did not maliciously desert her. On the contrary, it was she who deserted their home, getting an education and employment against his will. The husband’s portrayal of his wife’s life sounds a lot like the kind of life the runaway wife, Yu Chin-Kyong, aspired to. It was also the kind of life Yu’s family feared that she would lead. The husband was fighting an uphill battle. Malicious desertion was usually charged against the husband and was a legal provision to protect the wife. He was probably 40 

Chōsen Kōtō Hōin shokika, (Chōsen) Kōtō Hōin Hanketsuroku, vol. 18, p. 76.

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banking on the negative image of “mobile” and independent women so dominant in the press and tried to portray himself as a victim of desertion. The wife, faced with a divorce suit, instead of defending her right to an independent life, also portrayed herself as a victim of desertion. In the end, the wife’s strategy of playing the victim proved to be successful, and she obtained the divorce and alimony. The husband was punished for not upholding his end of the marriage bargain by refusing to provide for his wife. The above case shows how powerful the negative image of moving women was in colonial Korean society. Both the husband and the wife manipulated their images to play with the social anxiety about the disintegration of the family. The husband portrayed himself as a victim of a newly independent woman, and the wife as a victim of a traditional and despotic husband. The court’s decision to uphold the wife’s claim as the victim is quite telling about the concern of the colonial state. Rather than endorsing the wife as an independent woman, the state was protecting and strengthening the household with this decision. The husband had the obligation to support his family members, and without him meeting such obligations there was no guarantee of stability of the household. Also, per the principle of the household system, the husband as the household head could not be deserted. Therefore, even if the husband’s painting of his wife’s life was true and that she was indeed a dangerous moving woman, there was no room in the legal and administrative system to acknowledge the husband as deserted. The husband, like other missing husbands mentioned above, could not be mobile in the state’s eyes. In some sense, the threatening story of the moving woman, perhaps together with the anxiety it created, was tamed. The wife could not win the divorce as a dangerous moving woman but only as the dejected victim of the cruel husband.

FOUR

An Indispensable Edge American Military Camptowns in Postwar Korea

W. TAEJIN HWANG

A central sequence in Sin Sang-ok’s 1958 film, Hell Flower (Jiokhwa), intercuts a cabaret show and dance party inside a U.S. military camp with a group of Korean men stealing goods out of this installation. While the gyrating dancers on the stage engross the American servicemen, accompanied by Korean women bused in for the dance, two of the women slip out and approach the GIs guarding the garrison perimeters. As the two women seductively distract the American guards, a group of Korean men penetrate the installation through the barbed wire fence. The scene of the men loading and then driving off with the stolen goods is juxtaposed with the lively dancing inside. The multiple seductions and desires of the American military camp—as the place of sexualized entertainment and coveted American goods—as well as the “labor” of the inhabitants of the contiguous and interdependent Korean camptowns are masterfully captured in this scene. In the camptowns (gijichon), communities that developed adjacent to or near U.S. military installations, Korean women worked in the sex industry while the men facilitated the selling of American goods in the Korean black market. It is here in the camptown, caught between “Hell” and “Flower,” that Sin Sang-ok situates and depicts the postwar nation in transition. Clustered around American military camps within the geopolitical borders of postwar Korea, camptowns served as “borderlands” between two sovereign states. Camptowns are conceptualized as borderlands to denote their multiple geographies—as physical sites delineating territorial boundaries as well as militarized socio-economic and border-cultural spaces emerging from the “lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a

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third country.”1 Borderlands consist of three components. Foremost, as the boundaries shared by two or more domains, borderlands are where power and intercultural relations are exploited, negotiated, and created. Second, borderlands influence the “peculiar and contingent character” of the overarching relations. In the case of Korea, camptown creations and conflicts did not stay contained; what happened in this borderland reverberated into greater Korea and affected U.S.-Korea relations. At the same time, although the “conflict and brokering” of the borderlands shape the “outside,” camptown patterns are ultimately determined by the greater structural changes. The third and final characteristic, therefore, is that borderlands have “discrete turning points.”2 The distinct junctures of postwar camptowns coincided with shifting Cold War bilateral political configurations and Korea’s rapid industrialization. American military camptowns constituted both the dispensable and indispensable “edge” of South Korean modernity in the immediate postwar decades of the 1950s and the 1960s.3 Although located on the periphery of Korean society, marginalized as places of “dispensable” people, violent clashes, and sexual exploitations, camptowns also represented an indispensable edge for postwar Korea. Camps and camptowns presented opportunities of employment and foreign currency earnings for economic development, as well as serving as important loci of desired American 1 

Gloria Anzaldua describes borderland as an “open wound,” “a vague and undetermined place” that is “in a constant state of transition.” In this place, a border culture emerges from “the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country.” Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 3. 2  “Borderlands” and “frontier” as theoretical concepts and their significance in North American history have received extensive critical attention. Historians Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron define “frontier” as borderless lands, a “meeting place of peoples in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly defined” and “intercultural relations produced mixing and accommodation as opposed to unambiguous triumph.” “Borderlands,” on the other hand, redeposits the importance of geography, the physical site, into the historical analysis. For comprehensive historiographical discussion, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “Forum Essay: From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 816. 3  Here, I examine “Korean Modernity” from a geohistorical perspective that emphasizes the development of a more fully integrated industrial economy and the rise of a democratic or representative political form, rather than the esoteric philosophical treaties that stress universal secular rationality. South Korea’s particularities of colonial legacy, division, and war as well as the process of incorporation into the international Cold War world system as an American ally conditioned South Korea’s postwar modernization. Thus, Korea’s particular modernity took the form of rapid industrialization and integration into the international liberal economic system, yet under a militarized rather than democratic political form.

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culture. While the purpose of gijichon was to buffer Korea’s “mainstream” from the foreign military presence, goods and cultures overflowed from these borderlands and “contaminated” the everyday life and the cityscape of Seoul. And the camptown women proved “indispensable” in creating and sustaining these reverberating patterns. Moreover, these spaces came to be an important origin place for trans-Pacific migration, propelling a significant movement of Koreans to the United States as military wives, mixed-race progeny, and international adoptees. This paper consists of two interdependent sections. The first section chronicles the overall structural changes—the rise, systemization, decline, and alteration of camptowns coinciding with U.S.-Korea Cold War relations as well as Korea’s industrialization. The second section explores the lives of those who came into contact in these spaces, with a concentration on the women, who constituted the majority of their populations. By looking at socioeconomic creations and conflicts, this section discusses the tensions surrounding the power negotiations, not just among the camptown inhabitants and the American military personnel but also between the two nations at large. It considers the ambivalent attitudes regarding this space in the postwar Korean national imaginary. Borderlands: The Postwar Construction and Development of Camptowns The evolving Cold War alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK) as well as Korea’s own compressed industrialization and modernization conditioned the rise, systemization, decline, and alteration of camptowns. From 1945 to the 1990s, American military camptowns transitioned through four phases: the foundation years of 1945 to 1953, beginning with the American Military Government (AMG) to the end of the Korean War; the postwar systematization and “heyday” of the mid-1950s to the late 1960s; the increased regulations and reductions of the 1970s; and the decline of traditional camptown prostitution as well as its coexistence with an industrialized and globalized sex industry from the mid-1980s to today. The second period, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, constitutes the focal years of this chapter. Coinciding with the building of American military Rest and Recreation (R&R) facilities after the war, the Korean government concentrated prostitution into specific geographic areas beginning in 1957.4 From this postwar period until the early 1970s, camptowns experienced their “peak.” This “heyday” coincided with the 4 

Lee Na Young, “The Construction of U.S. Camptown Prostitution in South Korea: Trans/Formation and Resistance” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 2006), 103–4.

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height of U.S.-ROK Cold War alliance as well as the beginnings of Korea’s compressed economic development. The first phase of the camptown development encompasses the years from 1945 to the final days of the Korean War. Although it was not until after the war that the camptowns and military prostitution were systematically established, the AMG from 1945 to 1948 laid the essential foundation of gijichon prostitution. The American military entered Korea in September of 1945 via the port city of Incheon, and, by the end of that year, a nearby town called Bupyong had become the first camptown. The construction of additional camptowns in Itaewon in Seoul and “Hialeah” and “Texas” in the southern port city of Busan, as well as in cities such as Jinhae, Daegu, Gwangju, and Jeonju soon followed. The AMG also maintained the remains of Japan’s colonial infrastructures of clearly demarcated space for commercialized sex and a government-controlled registration system with compulsory venereal disease examinations.5 The women who worked in the clubs and brothels, often simple frame houses that had sprung up in neighborhoods adjacent to American military camps, were former prostitutes who had catered to the Japanese, returning wartime comfort women, as well as rural and urban poor.6 The life of I Bok-sun bridges the colonial and liberation periods. I Bok-sun, forced to serve as a comfort woman in Japan and then in China, barely survived the Pacific War to return to Korea. Ashamed by her wartime legacy, she could not face returning to her hometown. Instead she turned to the then burgeoning camptowns of the American occupation period, where she stayed for the next thirty years.7 The Korean War “systematized” the temporary prewar and wartime U.S. military camptowns into more permanent “comfort stations.” Camptowns along the frontline, such as Yongjugol in Paju-gun and Bosan-dong in Dongducheon became notorious postwar gijichons. For example, Bosan-dong developed in conjunction with the 1951 construction of Camp Casey in Dongducheon, north of Seoul. Chosen for its natural and infrastructural advantages, Dongducheon witnessed the establishment of five major American military camps (Camp Casey, Camp Castle, Camp Hovey, 5 

The Japanese colonial government officially sanctioned special commercialized red-light districts in 1904 and, in 1916, began to grant licenses to operate, with detailed regulations to control prostitutes with compulsory venereal disease examinations. The American military government “inherited” some of these districts established during the colonial period. Lee, “The Construction of U.S. Camptown Prostitution,” 62–69, 77, 101. 6  Ji-yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 20. 7  Saeumteo (Sprouting Land), “Gijichon, Gijichonyeosung, Honhyeoladong Siltaewha Sarye” [Research on conditions of camptowns, camptown women, and mixed-race children] (Dongducheon: Saeumteo, 1997).

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Camp Mobile, Camp Nimble) in 1951.8 Bosan-dong and much of the entire city of Dongducheon subsequently grew in conjunction with Camp Casey, one of the largest military installations in South Korea.9 The population of Dongducheon grew exponentially after the construction of these installations: in 1950, 7,200 resided in Dongducheon; by 1955, the number had increased to 21,387; the population more than doubled again by 1965 to 53,568; and it peaked in 1970 with 60,245 residents. Moreover, a service economy heavily dominated the city, with twenty-seven clubs, one hotel, one hundred and one motels, thirty cafés, eleven saunas, sixty-nine beauty salons, and fifty barbershops in 1967. Whereas nearly 60 percent of the nation was employed in the agricultural sector during the 1960s, only 9 percent of Dongducheon residents were in agricultural households in 1967.10 American GIs conferred the nickname “Little Chicago” on Dongducheon, conjuring up the image of a wild and “lawless” borderland; in the 1950s, as in Al Capone’s Chicago, pimps, gangsters, black marketeers, prostitutes, and GIs shared this world. In a similar pattern as Dongducheon, other camptowns developed throughout the southern half of the peninsula, with a heavy concentration in Gyonggi Province.11 The distinctive socioeconomic culture of these gijichons, accordingly, formed around American servicemen and camptown women. The economy of camptowns consisted of entertainment and service industries for the GIs and Korean women: clubs and bars only 8 

Dongducheon was chosen as the site of a major American military installation based on two major reasons: the natural environment and the remnant of the Japanese colonial transportation system. The Soyu Mountains on the north side of Camp Casey created a parabolic arc, providing natural cover from long-distance bombs, and the area also had plenty of natural water sources. Dongducheon, moreover, sat along a major transpeninsular rail-line completed during the colonial period. The U.S. military evacuated and dispersed Koreans who had lived and farmed on the land by November 1952. The ROK government issued requisition documents in 1956, but they became worthless amounts of compensation. Kim Byoung-Sub, “Dongducheonsi Doshi Seongjang Gwajung Yeongu” [A study on the urban growth process of Dongducheon-si] (Master’s thesis, University of Seoul, 2004), 15, 19–20, 24-25. 9  Camp Casey has housed four different U.S. infantry divisions (3d, 1st, 7th, 2nd) since the war. 10  Kim, “A Study on the Urban Growth Process of Dongducheon-si,” 30–31. 11  Songtan grew into another well-known gijichon after 1951 when the 417th Squadron constructed an airfield, displacing one thousand farmers. Both the nearby city of Pyeongtaek and adjacent town of Anjeongri near the wartime airfield, Camp Humphreys, became centers of U.S. military prostitution. The largest gijichons, therefore, solidified around Yongjugol in Paju, and Dongducheon and Uijeongbu north of Seoul; Anjeongri, Songtan in Pyeongtaek, and Osan on the southern outskirts of Seoul; and Itaewon in the nation’s capital. In addition, camptowns formed in Daejon, Daegu, Waegwan, Chuncheon, Gunsan, Mokpo, and Jinhae— basically wherever American military servicemen were stationed.

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catering to foreigners, stores that sold American goods, illegal currency dealers as well as hair salons, laundry services, tailors, photo and portrait studios, souvenir shops, pool halls, and international marriage agencies made up gijichons.12 The Korean War and the forces of abject poverty—and wartime displacement and deaths that created millions of widows and orphans— forced a number of women into prostitution to ensure the survival of themselves and their families.13 Yun Geum-suk was one of the countless displaced during the war. Three months after Yun went to North Korea for an arranged marriage at the age of nineteen, the Korean War broke out. Separated from her husband during the war, she headed back south in search of her family. In order to survive, she prostituted herself to an American during this time. Yun did not have the courage to find her family after the war ended and worked in the camptowns for some thirty years, never knowing whether or not her family survived the war.14 Given the high number of foreign troops stationed in Korea during the war (from 214,000 at the beginning of the conflict to 325,000 by 1953), approximately 65,000 prostitutes worked in Seoul alone by 1951, and approximately 20,000 by the end of the war. It has been estimated that in the immediate postwar year of 1955, there were about 110,642 prostitutes nationally, of whom 61,833 catered to American soldiers.15 As U.S. camptowns became widespread, the American military and the Korean government began officially to organize gijichon prostitution into R&R systems after the war, thus marking the beginning of the second phase. In the 1950s, eighteen camptowns formed throughout Korea. On January 27, 1960, Seoul Ilbo [Seoul daily] announced that the hope to attract “servicemen to stay in Korea on their Rest & Relaxation leaves, which would occupy the most important part of this year’s Korean tourist business, is expected to materialize soon, as an agreement was reached between the Transportation Ministry and the 8th U.S. Army authorities.”16 This early 1960 announcement coincided with the systemization—what Lee Na Young calls the period of “permissive promotion”—of camptown economies. The ROK government proclaimed the Tourism Promotion Law in August of 1961 and established the Korean International Tourism Corporation in 1962. Camptown clubs became “special tourism facilities businesses” and enjoyed tax-free alcohol. Reciprocally, each camptown 12 

Saeumteo, “Research on Conditions of Camptowns, Camptown Women.” Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 28. 14  Saeumteo, “Research on Conditions of Camptowns, Camptown Women.” 15  Lee, “The Construction of U.S. Camptowns in South Korea,” 104–5, 111–12. 16  “UN Servicemen on R&R to Stay in Korea,” Seoul Ilbo, 27 January 1960. 13 

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club had to pay five hundred dollars per month into government coffers under the Tourism Promotion Law.17 The contradiction between illegalization and regulation of prostitution practiced by the AMG from 1945 to 1948, therefore, continued after the war by the ROK government. A year after outlawing prostitution in Korea, the Park Jung-hee government established 104 “special districts,” which included 32 military camptowns.18 By 1964, the number of special districts increased to 145 and decreased to 72 in 1972, coinciding with troop reductions and subsequent base closures.19 A member of the ROK’s military government even constructed the “American Town” in Gunsan. Created in September 1969 by General Bak Tae-hwa and eventually incorporated, daily buses brought in American servicemen from the nearby military camp while the women lived in small rooms managed by the “American Town” corporation. For the Korean government, camptowns not only “confined” unhealthy American influences into limited areas while catering to the foreign military, but they also provided a livelihood for a sector of the displaced population and earned essential foreign exchange for the developing economy.20 The Korean government did not attempt to enforce its own antiprostitution law, because camptown economies contributed to the rapid industrialization. The military coup led by Park Jung-hee in May 1961 cut short the brief democratic experiment that had been ushered in the previous spring by the student uprising of April 1960.21 National security, envisioned as both anticommunism and strongly military, and economic development constituted the two pillars of Park’s regime (1961–1979). The state-directed and export-led development coincided with opportune external forces to energize the development in Korea from the mid-1960s. The “Miracle on the Han” extracted a tremendous human and social toll, however. The state, through its agricultural policy, dislocated millions of farmers, thus creating a large low-cost industrial labor pool for the benefit of export producers. In just one decade, from 1967 to 1976, approximately 6.7 million people left their land, and the rural population declined from 17 

Lee, “The Construction of U.S. Camptowns in South Korea,” 122. In 1962, the Park Jung-hee junta signed on to the United Nations’ 1949 “Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others.” 19  Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, 26. 20  Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, 24. 21  Park’s political usurpation marked the return to authoritarian rule, intrusion of the military into government for the next thirty-two years (1961–93), and the period of what Seungsook Moon calls “militarized modernity.” The idea of “strong and wealthy nation” equating to modernity guided the postwar nation building and also defined national identity as well as provided legitimacy to the regime. Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 18 

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54.4 percent of the total population to 35.7 percent.22 Women, over 60 percent of them between ten and twenty-nine years old, made up more than half of those who traveled from the country to the city.23 The state not only expanded this mass labor pool but also enforced labor discipline by suppressing strikes and delaying rises in wages as long as possible.24 This development strategy also created a profusion of urban poor, with an estimated three million slum dwellers in Seoul by 1977.25 Social welfare systems did not develop, however, in accordance with this social disruption. And the massive population dislocation and urban poverty that the compressed development had created also forced unprecedented numbers of poor and rural women to seek their livelihood in the sex industry.26 After the war, the combination of poverty and dislocation from industrialization sustained camptown prostitution. The common backgrounds of camptown women included low levels of formal education, poverty, absent or incompetent parents, and, in many cases, a history of sexual abuse or physical violence.27 Many of these women partook in the rural exodus to urban centers seeking employment and often ended up in the city’s slums. Before entering camptowns, moreover, most worked in factories, as domestic laborers, or in other service industries including prostitution. Camptowns may have been a last resort or a result of being tricked, kidnapped, or sold to camptown club owners by their current pimps.28 In her autobiography, The Big Sister of America Town, Kim Yeon-ja recalls growing up in the countryside and attributes her early self-destructiveness to being raped at the age of eleven and again in high school. Upon moving 22 

Beginning in 1966, the government used its control over grain and financial markets to lower prices and deny farmers sufficient credit to modernize production. As a result, average farm household income fell to approximately 65 percent of average urban worker household income by 1969. Millions of people left the farms, hoping to find employment in the newly growing export industries. Martin Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development: Economic Change and Political Struggle in South Korea (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 171–72. 23  Of those who traveled from the country to the cities, women made up 53 percent from 1961 to 1965, 51 percent from 1965 to 1970, and 54 percent from 1970 to 1975. Young women also made up approximately 30 percent of all wageworkers during the 1960s and constituted almost half of all manufacturing workers by 1973. Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development, 181. 24  Michael E. Robinson, Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 133. 25  Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development, 177–78. 26  John Lie, “The Transformation of Sexual Work in 20th-Century Korea,” Gender and Society 9 (June 1995): 310–27. 27  Camptown women’s advocacy NGOs, such as Duraebang (My Sister’s Place) and Saeumteo (Sprouting Land), and researchers, such as Katharine Moon and Ji-Yeon Yuh, have identified these common patterns in various studies and oral history compilations. 28  Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, 30.

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to Seoul, Kim eked out a living as a shoe-polisher and lived in one of the city’s slums. In 1962, at the age of twenty, Kim voluntarily went into the Seoul Municipal Women’s Shelter (Seoul Sirip Bunyeo Bohoso) to learn a skill. Although she trained to be a barber, Kim headed to Dongducheon in 1964, at the age of twenty-two, in hopes of making a lot of money quickly. What was supposed to be a brief stay turned into decades in the camptowns, during which time she worked as a sex worker and club manager before becoming a community organizer and camptown activist.29 Camptown economies also contributed to earning essential foreign exchange for the developing economy. The beginnings of rapid industrialization as well as the corresponding period of permissive promotion of camptowns also coincided with the intensification of the U.S.-ROK Cold War military alliance. In particular, South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War provided both political and ideological legitimacy for Park’s regime as well as an essential infusion of foreign capital at a critical moment. Foremost, this military cooperation was based in part on political reciprocity. According to Charles K. Armstrong, “[T]he Johnson administration under its ‘More Flags’ campaign sought to internationalize the war, giving the war the appearance of an allied effort rather than a unilateral U.S. action. In exchange, Park Jung-hee won renewed U.S. backing for his unpopular dictatorship and a continued American troop commitment.”30 Economic benefits, however, proved even more crucial. The ROK contributed a cumulative total of three hundred thousand combat troops to the Vietnam War, second only to the U.S. itself, between 1965 and 1973.31 In return, war-related income in the form of U.S.-paid equipment, wages, and housing for ROK army divisions, contracts to Korean overseas construction firms, and other procurements amounted to over one billion dollars.32 As Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru had called the Korean War “a gift from the gods” for stimulating Japan’s postwar economy, South Korea’s economic takeoff in the mid-1960s would not have been possible without the “infusion” provided by the Vietnam War. Fighting in Vietnam thus strengthened both pillars—national security and economic development—that helped sustain Park’s regime. 29  Kim Yeon-ja, America Town Wangeoni: Juki Obun jeonkkaji akeul sseuda [Big sister of America town: Uses desperate effort until five minutes before death] (Seoul: Samin, 2005). 30  Charles K. Armstrong, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (2001): 533. 31  4,687 ROK soldiers were killed and some 8,000 wounded in the Vietnam War. Armstrong, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” 531–32. 32  According to Armstrong, “In 1967 alone war-related income accounted for nearly 4 percent of SK’s GNP and 20 percent of its foreign exchange earnings.” Armstrong, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” 533.

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As designated and promoted R&R destinations for the soldiers, camptowns also became conduits of foreign currency earnings during their “heyday.” An estimated thirty thousand women worked in the camptowns in the 1960s, which equated to one prostitute per every two American soldiers.33 Koreans referred to Dongducheon as Don (money)-ducheon, a play on words to indicate just how much money flowed out of this city.34 In 1964, camptown economies earned almost ten million dollars, which accounted for approximately 10 percent of that year’s foreign earnings. By 1969, approximately forty-six thousand Korean workers in camptowns earned seventy million dollars, and in general, U.S. troops contributed 25 percent to South Korea’s GNP in the 1960s.35 The third phase of camptowns witnessed increased regulations as well as active promotion by the ROK government. The Vietnam War, which afforded an economic boon for South Korea, also ironically brought about the major shift in American military commitment in the peninsula. The unpopularity of the Vietnam War instigated change in American Cold War foreign policy in Asia. In 1969, the Nixon administration called for the scaling back of American overseas military commitments, and for its allies, especially in Asia, to provide primary manpower for their own defense. Accordingly, the stationing of sixty-two thousand U.S. servicemen throughout the 1960s decreased to forty-five thousand in 1971. Fearing further troop withdrawals as well as to ensure continued foreign currency earnings, the Korean government agreed to accommodate the U.S. military’s camptown concerns and demands. As Katharine Moon extensively documents, both governments sought to control venereal disease and also to promote nondiscriminatory behavior toward black GIs by regulating camptown women.36 The ROK government established or refurbished 33  Those registered were concentrated mostly in Seoul (2,231) and its surrounding Gyeonggi Province, such as Dongducheon (53.3 percent of the total number of registered military prostitutes). Lee, “The Construction of U.S. Camptowns,” 124. This figure did not count the unregistered women (hipari), often older women who also sought livelihood in the camptowns by selling flowers or snacks, acting as solicitors for younger women, and at times prostituting themselves for a fraction of club rates. Saeumteo, “Research on Conditions of Camptowns.” 34  Kim, “A Study on the Urban Growth Process of Dongducheon-si,” 29. 35  Lee, “The Construction of U.S. Camptowns,” 125. 36  Camptowns had been racially segregated from their beginnings. Whites normally boycotted bars serving black servicemen; establishments catering to black soldiers were euphemistically referred to as “DMZ”—Dark Man’s Zone. Inspired by the civil rights and black power movements raging in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, black soldiers increasingly demanded the end of de facto segregation and discrimination. Fearing escalation into race riots among its ranks, the American military demanded that the camptown establishments desegregate and that the ROK government take an active role in enforcing this new policy. Moon, Sex Among Allies, 71, 84, 102.

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health clinics in every camptown, subjected all licensed women to regular exams and forced them to carry a VD identification card.37 Those infected had to be confined in the “Monkey House,” a name conferred on the clinics by the women, until treated with U.S. military-contributed medical supplies. Along with this increased control over the bodies of the women, the government policy also deemed the camptown women “patriots” for earning foreign currency for the nation and “personal ambassadors” for facilitating Korean-American relations.38 The decline of camptowns, largely due to Korea’s rapid industrialization, marked a fourth phase in the history of camptowns. The uncertainty of American commitment after the Nixon Doctrine further intensified Park’s determination for economic and security independence.39 Korea’s “compressed modernity,” which ensued in the 1970s and 1980s, from its stunning economic growth to the rapid rate of transformation from agrarian to industrial society, was indeed breathtaking.40 The social transformations due to this “compressed modernity” consequently shaped camptown patterns. First, Korea’s economic growth meant the devaluing of the 37  Katharine Moon documents that “[t]he ROK government allocated a total of 380 million won in 1971–72 (approximately $1 million in 1971 terms) to improve health and sanitation in camptowns, with 224 million won (approximately $600,000) earmarked for the prevention and treatment of VD.” Moon, Sex Among Allies, 80. 38  Kim Yeon-ja, who worked in Songtan in 1971, recalled gathering in a large hall along with over one thousand other women for lectures sponsored by the local government. The regular lectures consisted of “obvious and repeated repertory” of government officials thanking the women as “hidden patriots” and encouraging them to contribute to earning dollars with “courage and dignity.” The officials also beseeched the women to “clean-up” their attire and language in the presence of the GIs, “who were here to help our country.” Then the chief of the health clinic would remind them to get regular VD examinations. Kim Yeon-ja, Big Sister of America Town, 123–24. 39  Park announced in 1972 the Emergency Decree for Economic Stability with the twin objectives of stability and economic growth. Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI), as the linchpin of the Third Five-Year Plan (1972–76), replaced the light-industry development of the 1960s. The concentration on HCI served dual purposes of economic development as well as military strengthening. To direct and foster this shift to HCI, the government set export quotas to provide incentives and to drive industrial development, protected selected chaebols (conglomerates) from international competition in domestic markets, and funded HCI education and training centers. Notably, the vocational education budget doubled from 1970 to 1979, and in 1971, the state established the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea’s leading science institution. 40  The 1960–95 period saw a stunning 238-fold increase of the total GNP (from 1.9 billion dollars to 451.7 billion dollars) and a 128-fold increase of the per capita GNP (from 79 dollars to 10,076 dollars). During this time, “the farm population shrank from 58.2 per cent in 1960 to 11.6 per cent in 1994, attesting to an almost complete transformation from agrarian society to industrial society over merely three-plus decades.” Chang Kyung-Sup, “Compressed Modernity and Its Discontents: South Korean Society in Transition,” Economy and Society 28, no. 1 (February 1990): 32.

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U.S. dollar and in turn, decreased GI economic power. Second, the revised American military policy discouraged spending in the Korean economy and also more strictly regulated the outflow of Post Exchange (PX) goods into the Korean market by limiting the PX allowance per GI. Moreover, the makeup of the military had shifted with the continuous increase of women in the service; women made up 13 percent of those stationed in Korea by the early 1990s.41 Finally, the expanded sex industry in mainstream Korea also offered more lucrative alternatives to camptowns from the mid-1980s. No longer confined to “special districts,” the sex industry started to diversify into new forms starting in the mid-1980s.42 These factors significantly altered the makeup of the camptowns. The number of registered camptown women decreased to about eighteen thousand by the late-1980s. Dongducheon at this period had about seven hundred to eight hundred registered women and the Dandelion Association, the self-governing group formed by the women in Bosan-dong, dissolved in 1989 due to low membership.43 With the decreased economic appeal of camptowns for Korean women, foreign workers from the Philippines and Russia began to replace Koreans beginning in the mid-1990s. Of the 899 women working in 309 clubs in Dongducheon and Uijeongbu in 2004, 811 of them were foreign workers, comprising over 90 percent of the total.44 Another factor in “importing” foreign workers was the rise of Korean organizations dedicated to exposing and preventing American military crimes. The horrific and brutal murder of Yun Geum-i in 1992 by a private, Kenneth Lee Markel III, in Bosan-dong, is considered to be a pivotal turning point in galvanizing Korean civil society organizations.45 Today, with further troop reductions as well as the consolidation and relocation of American military installations under way, camptowns are closing down 41 

Kim, “A Study on the Urban Growth Process of Dongducheon-si,” 45–46. This included prostitution carried out not just in places like brothels but also pandering of sex in bars and restaurants, as well as in hotels, public bathhouses, massage parlors, motels, video shops, barbershops, and room-salons. Saeumteo, “Research on Conditions of Camptowns.” 43  Saundra Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, eds., Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: The New Press, 1992), 176. 44  Kim, “A Study on the Urban Growth Process of Dongducheon-si,” 47–48. 45  On October 28, 1992, Kenneth Lee Markel III murdered and mutilated Yun’s body. Yun was twenty-six years old at the time of her murder, working as a prostitute in Bosan-dong. Lee Sohee, “Understanding the United States through the Crimes Committed by Its Troops in Korea” (Seoul: Pamphlet by the National Campaign for Eradication of Crimes by U.S. Troops in Korea, 2004). In light of civilian critical attention to camptown prostitution, clubs began to look for women from economically weaker countries, with potentially less accountability and threat of legal recourse in Korea. Kim, “A Study on the Urban Growth Process of Dongducheon-si,” 48. 42 

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altogether or attempting to revamp their image as family-friendly international shopping districts. In the fifty years from the 1950s to the 1990s, an estimated total of 250,000 to 300,000 women worked in the camptowns.46 The evolving Cold War alliance between the United States and the ROK as well as Korea’s industrialization and modernization conditioned the transformation of these borderlands. Although the greater structural changes determined camptown developmental patterns, the creations and conflicts within these borderlands also dialectically shaped the “outside.” Despite being designated as buffer zones to safeguard the “mainstream” host nation from the foreign, these Korean-American contact zones did not stay in the “fringe-edge.” The distinctive camptown culture seeped into the heart of Korean society. The local inhabitants, the American military, the Korean government, and Korea at large clashed over and negotiated the significance of these sites. Indispensable Edge: Camptown Creations and Conflicts On January 8, 1960, an editorial cartoon in Donga Ilbo (Donga daily) illustrated a soldier standing guard in front of a gate with a pair of hair-clippers holstered on his right hip. The caption reads, “After the hair-shaving incident, guards are to be equipped with portable clippers” (figure 1). On the front page of Chosun Ilbo (Chosun daily) the following day, another caricature, titled “Peculiar Disease,” depicted a woman touching her shaved head, while looking into a hand mirror and crying. A man, rubbing his bald head, sits directly behind her. “Since it is said that a malignant disease can be prevented by a forced head-shaving in some countries, it is strange that this damned habit of gluttony and this high blood pressure are still incurable, even though I am bald headed,” the caption explains (figure 2). These two images in the popular dailies and their seemingly odd obsession with haircutting during the first days of the new decade were commentaries on an “incident” that occurred around 1:00 a.m. on January 2, 1960. On the first night of 1960, two Korean women had walked through a hole in the barbed wire fence surrounding Camp Beavers, near Dongducheon. These unauthorized intruders went into a barrack to solicit pay for sex. A soldier apprehended the two women and took them to the orderly room, where two sergeants of the U.S. Army 7th Infantry Division, under the orders of the camp commander, Captain John W. McEnery, shaved all of the hair from the heads of these Korean women. Thereafter, the U.S. personnel turned the women over to the Korean National Police.47 46  47 

Saeumteo, “Research on Conditions of Camptowns.” “January 19, 1960 letter to Director Kang Hak, Rhee, National Police, ROK from U.S.

Figure 1. Entitled, “After the Hair-shaving Incident,” the editorial cartoon that appeared on January 8, 1960, in the Donga Daily sarcastically commented: “After the hair-shaving incident, guards are to be equipped with portable clippers.” Source: Donga Ilbo, 8 January 1960.

Figure 2. The Chosun Daily editorial cartoon, “Peculiar Disease,” in a similar manner as the Donga caricature, criticized the seemingly inappropriate actions of the American military personnel: “Since it is said that a malignant disease can be prevented by a forced head-shaving in some countries, it is strange that this damned habit of gluttony and high blood pressure are still incurable, even though I am bald-headed.” Source: Chosun Ilbo, 9 January 1960.

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While several American papers briefly reported this New Year incident, Korean newspapers covered it ardently for the first three weeks of January 1960.48 The word choices made on each side of the Pacific in describing the women and the altercation, however, differed noticeably. While Korean newspapers referred to them as “Korean women,” without an emphasis on their profession, and as “victims” in an “act of lynching,” American coverage identified them as “aggressive prostitutes” and the perpetrators of an “invasion” of the installation.49 For instance, the AP report, “Shaved Head Women’s Story,” opens with the testimonial of Kim Ae-soon, one of the two women who had her head shaved. Kim Ae-soon recounted that although they had “cried and begged” and promised that they would never return, “they brutally kept on cutting our hair.” The reporter then claimed that Kim “talked . . . appealingly” and while “shedding tears continuously,” spoke of feeling “terrified” and “abashed” during the early morning of January 2.50 Besides her sense of bewilderment and humiliation, Kim also explained why she requested compensation from the U.S. Army authorities. Kim stated, “We got to eat in order to live, by any means. I would not care for myself, if I were not a mother of a son who was born between an American soldier and me at my refuging [sic] place, in the early stage of the Korean War.” The portrayal of Kim as a victim and a dedicated mother fulfilling her maternal duties for the survival of her child, of a mixed-race progeny of an American soldier no less, suggested that Kim deserved sympathy. Korean editorials also linked this particular incident with past grievances and “lynchings” in their demand that in order to prevent such humiliating and arbitrary forms of justice in the future, the outdated wartime “Daejon Agreement”—giving the U.S. unilateral jurisdiction over criminal offenses committed by American soldiers—be replaced by a bilateral Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). By the second week of January 1960, the hair-shaving “incident” of two Korean women had ignited a Provost Marshal,” 8th U.S. Army Adjutant General Section, Classified General Officer Correspondence 1959–63, RG338/290/C/59/6 Box 30, NARA. 48  The Information Section of the 8th Army compiled excerpts from stateside newspapers as well as translated Korean media coverage on the U.S. military, for the use of the headquarters staff of the U.S. Command in Korea. All quoted newspaper articles and translations of Korean newspapers regarding the January 1960 hair-shaving incident are from “World and Korean News Roundup,” 1960. “World and Korean News Roundup,” 8th U.S. Army Information Section, Publications 1958–1960, RG338/290/67/24/6/Box 1499, NARA (hereafter, “World and Korean news roundup”). 49  Washington Star, 7 January 1960; New York Herald Tribune, 21 January 1960, as transcribed in “World and Korean news roundup.” 50  The 5 January 1960 AP report, “Shaved Head Women’s Story,” was carried by Hangook, Segye, Donga, Yunhap, and Chosun dailies. The second woman remained silent throughout the commotion.

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national discourse on postwar sovereignty. Kim Ae-soon’s brief encounter with “power” garnered her a moment in the historical spotlight and Kim became part of the “official” record.51 Camptown Creations The New Year head-shaving incident indicated the frequent contact between GIs and camptown women. Kim Ae-soon expressed bewilderment at the arbitrary punishment, considering that the hole in the fence at the rear side of the barracks “had been used as either an entrance or an exit by both in-and-out company soldiers and Korean women, to or from the nearby village.” Kim claimed that she herself began to enter the company area with a GI through the fence sometime in November of the previous year. And because “she used to come in and out through it so many times . . . she could not figure the numbers.” Clearly, this had not been the first “invasion” of the installation; the hole in the fence had served as a gateway to and from the U.S. military camp and the nearby Korean town for both the American GIs and Koreans. Kim, thus, had been made a punitive example for transgressing what had been a fluid boundary of a mutually participatory system. Compiled data by the American military attest to the frequency of contact between Americans and Koreans, albeit with an emphasis on crimes and transgressions committed by Koreans. In a January 19, 1960, letter to the director of the Korean National Police in response to the hair-shaving uproar, the U.S. provost marshal, David P. Schorr, Jr., brigadier general, expressed the seriousness of the situation surrounding the area of the 7th U.S. Infantry Division, which had “set the stage for these incidents.”52 The provost marshall claimed that in the previous six months, a total of 4,322 Koreans had entered the installations of the 7th Infantry Division without permission. Of the trespassers, “3,266 have been females; 85 percent of them were estimated to be prostitutes; 65 percent of them were estimated to be repeated offenders.”53 According to the “Crime Prevention Programs” 51  In order for the lives of “infamous men” to reach us, “a beam of light had to illuminate them, for a moment at least,” postulates Michel Foucault. And the source of this historical “light” was the encounter with “power.” Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, eds. Paul Rainbow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2000), 161. 52  7th U.S. Infantry Division occupied military camps in Dongducheon area from 1951 to 1971, including the site of the hair-shaving incident, Camp Beavers, and one of the largest military camps in Korea, Camp Casey. 53  “January 19, 1960 letter to Director Kang Hak, Rhee, National Police, ROK from U.S. Provost Marshal.” 8th U.S. Army Adjutant General Section, Classified General Officer Correspondence 1959–63, RG338/290/C/59/6 Box 30, NARA.

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report submitted to the commanding general, over eleven thousand illegal trespassers were apprehended on military installations during the 1959 calendar year. And of these, women constituted 72 percent, and all were considered to be engaged in prostitution and to be “actual or potential thieves.”54 During the same period, moreover, almost three hundred thousand dollars worth of personal and military supplies and equipment was stolen from military installations. The report identified the fence as the key gateway for the vast majority of those apprehended. Although the report admitted that it “would appear reasonable to expect that some of these illegal entrants were assisted in entering by U.S. personnel,” they had “no data on this.” What the provost marshal entreated as “these serious conditions” exposed the explicit contentions of the porous fence, prostitution, and theft. At the same time, the report also implicitly addressed the camptown sexual and black market economies and the indispensable role of the women within this system. Although the statistics compiled by the American military emphasized Korean transgressions, Kim Ae-soon’s testimony as well as the following court case of Major William W. Hogewood, Jr., suggests mutual participation in the GI-Korean socioeconomic arrangements of temporary cohabitation as well as in the black market system.55 A military investigation into Major Hogewood, who had been the secretary of the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) Officers Open Mess, was conducted in his absence as he had already rotated out of Korea, but was pieced together through the testimonies of Korean employees at the military camp, four camptown prostitutes, and several of Hogewood’s former American colleagues. A Korean male employee of the base testified that he had brought cases of whiskey, cola, and beer as well as cans of food to Major Hogewood’s girlfriend with Major Hogewood on thirteen different occasions. The recipient of these goods was a Korean woman with a “GI-name” of “Mary.” Mary testified that she sold most of the goods into the black market through her male servant. Mary and Major Hogewood lived together for about two months before “he left and went with another girl.” This “another girl” was “Candy.” To live with “Candy,” Hogewood brought her a mixture of MPC (Military Payment Certificates), Korean currency, bottles of whiskey, beer, cola, and 54  “Crime Prevention Programs” and “U.S. Military Personnel Taking the Law into Their Own Hands” from “Commanding General’s Conference of 26 February 1960 Concerning Measures to Prevent Further Taking of the Law into Their Own Hands by U.S. Military Personnel,” 8th U.S. Army Adjutant General Section, Classified General Officer Correspondence 1959–1963, RG338/290/C/59/6 Box 301, NARA. 55  “Mess Fund Investigations 1953–1954,” 8th U.S. Army Adjutant General Section, Administrative Files 1953–1955, RG338/290/67/22/04-05/Box1394, NARA.

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one radio. Like Mary, Candy also sold most of the items into the black market. Finally, Gene P. Recchia, a club steward of the Officers Open Mess explained that Hogewood could easily pilfer from the warehouse since he had a key. When asked whether the indigenous employees could have taken the liquor, Recchia replied, “You have to use a certain amount of common sense in dealing with Koreans and know just about how much they can steal. The quantity we noticed missing was too large for Koreans to be taking.” The investigation calculated that Hodgewood’s arrangements with Mary and Candy had cost the military $222 in cash and $1,488 in goods. The alleged actions of Major Hogewood reconstructed through these testimonies also revealed a system of mutual participation in the extensive black market. That Hogewood openly enlisted the labor of a Korean employee to deliver the stolen goods to his girlfriend, and that Recchia could freely comment on the “commonsense” amount of goods that could be stolen by indigenous employees, indicated the pervasiveness of American goods filtering through the camptowns. Seoul Ilbo (Seoul daily) in August 1960 reported that six million dollars worth of PX items flooded the Korean black market a year.56 For instance, diverted PX goods traveled from Dongducheon via the train and were sold in the “Goblin Market” (dokkaebi sijang) in Seoul. It was not a coincidence that Dongducheon train station held the record for the highest percentage of women passengers and cargo during this period.57 Most of the merchandise from the PX first went to one of the four “Yankee” markets in Seoul. Then these articles were transferred to retail traders and into the hands of awaiting customers at department stores, general stores, and even street stalls. Almost every item could be bought at a “Yankee” market, but foodstuffs made up the biggest portion of PX articles. Some 40 of the 175 grocery retailers in the Seoul markets specialized only in PX foods, from which American products such as cola, coffee, and canned goods could be purchased. PX and American military camp food products also influenced the local cuisine, such as the popular spicy stew, budae jjigae (literally, “army base stew”). Camptowns in Uijongbu and Dongducheon became famous for concocting this fusion of Korean spices with canned meat, such as Spam, and leftover foods from American military camps. Other than foodstuffs, top PX items consumed by Koreans included foreign cigarettes, liquor, 56  “PX Routes: Six Million Dollars Worth of Items Pass into Korean Markets a Year,” 28 August 1960; “The Post Exchange Commodities Are Being Brought to the Local Markets Through Various Routes,” 29 August 1960; “Three Tons of Coffee Reach Korean Markets Daily,” Seoul Ilbo, 1 September 1960, in “World and Korean news roundup.” 57  Kim, “A Study on the Urban Growth Process of Dongducheon-si,” 29–31.

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and luxury and toiletry items “such as high-grade perfumes and pearl necklaces . . . mainly sold at department stores and high-class haberdasher’s shops . . . at indefinite prices.”58 From foreign music to liquors that could be found in wealthy homes of Seoul, camptowns disseminated American culture and goods.59 Moreover, the trajectory of Hogewood’s stolen cases of liquor—shipped from the United States to provide familiar consumer products to overseas GIs but stolen and smuggled off the installation by a GI to pay for his off-base “home” with a Korean woman, who then in turn disposed of the goods into the eager black market from which these goods became coveted items in the greater Korean society—showed the extent of all those involved in this elaborate system. Hogewood, of course, was not alone; other GIs also participated in the black market system. The Korean police identified Korean PX workers, GIs, and prostitutes as the main culprits in diverting PX goods. As for the GIs’ role, Seoul Ilbo explained that “[m]any American servicemen buy some articles at the PX when they go out on passes or leaves, and sell the merchandise in black markets to obtain hwan. A large amount of PX commodities is pouring into the local markets through these Americans.” The women also acted as indispensable intermediaries. “Most luxury items are obtained and sold by these street girls,” explained the same Seoul Ilbo article, and “PX goods brought to the local markets through these girls reach an enormous amount.” Another Seoul Ilbo article reiterated, “our people are fond of luxury and spend almost four hundred million hwan a year on luxury items and toiletry articles, most of which reach the market via prostitutes.” Heinz Insu Fenkle’s autobiographical novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, chronicles an “Amerasian” boy’s childhood in the chaotic and harsh streets of Bupyong, a camptown, in 1960s Korea. As a legal wife of an American serviceman, Insu’s mother had free access to the PX and the commissary in the Yongsan installation. Insu recalled how his mother would “buy a shopping-cart load of American goods—mostly rationed 58 

It reported that six billion hwan worth of American cigarettes and more than one hundred million hwan worth of PX liquor were consumed annually in Korea. “Three Tons of Coffee Reach Korean Markets Daily,” Seoul Ilbo, 1 September 1960, “World and Korean news roundup.” 59  Along with consumer products, camptowns also were conduits of American culture. For example, American music filtered through the U.S. military radio station, AFKN, and Korean professional singers adopted lyrical styles of American mainstream singers. Some popular Korean singers of the 1960s began their careers singing at clubs in Itaewon, entertaining the American military personnel. Choi Jongil, “A Study on ‘Americanization’ Expressed in Itaewon Space” (Master’s thesis, Seoul National University, 2002), 26–27.

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items like coffee, powdered milk, baby formula, cigarettes—and then she would take an Arirang taxi out to a market in Seoul and sell everything to a Yankee goods vendor at the Hollywood market near Pagoda Park.” On the days that Insu accompanied his mother into the “fantastic chaos of Seoul,” he would drink “cold cans of Coca Cola with black marketers and petty criminals.”60 The women negotiated with both sides of the borderland, the GIs and the Korean black marketeers, to facilitate the flow of American goods from military camps to the greater Korean market. The brief domestic arrangements between Hogewood and both “Mary” and “Candy” exemplified the intersection of sex and American goods that constituted the central economic and social patterns of these borderlands. The camptown landscapes also loomed large in the popular visual medium of film from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, considered Korea’s “Golden Age” of cinema.61 The landscape of Hell Flower is that of a seductive American military camp and its lawless camptown. The melodramatic plot of the film unfolds mostly in a U.S. military camptown, Bupyeong, filmed near the Army Supply Command (ASCOM) headquarters in the city of Incheon, located west of Seoul.62 The camptown in Bupyeong was the first gijicheon established in the post-liberation and AMG years of 1945–48. The two central scenes in Hell Flower involve the acquisition of American goods. In contrast to the “successful” first robbery, the scene described at the beginning of this paper, the climactic train heist sequence 60 

Heinz Insu Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother (New York: Plume, 1997), 120. Until the full impact of the Motion Picture Law of 1962 and the increased censorship under the autocratic rule of Park Jung-hee took effect, the period of 1955 to the late 1960s is considered the Golden Age of Korean cinema. The films of the Golden Age constituted “a body of work as historically, aesthetically, and politically significant as that of other well-known national film movements such as Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, and New German Cinema,” according to Abelmann and McHugh. Golden Age films captured South Korea’s postwar reality as a divided nation engaged in modernizing while dependent on a foreign power. As film scholars have highlighted, the juxtaposition of the “walking wounded” of the war against the modern cityscape of new consumerism—an “odd pastiche of a real and symbolic economy of American goods, language, money, and influence, all of which saturated the South Korean landscape”—constituted a resonant theme. Nancy Abelmann and Kathleen McHugh, “Introduction: Gender, Genre, and Nation,” in South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, eds. Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 2–5. Moreover, amid the depictions of the breathless chaos of a modern urban life was the essential component of capturing the nation at a crossroads in gendered and sexualized terms. The broken family/nation of the postwar Korea was explicitly represented through men’s damaged and women’s sexualized bodies, from which, ultimately, a remasculinized national imaginary emerged. Junghyun Hwang, “Specters of the Cold War in America’s Century: The Korean War and Transnational Politics of National Imaginaries in the 1950s” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2008), 135–80. 62  Jiokhwa [Hell flower]. Directed by Sin Sang-Ok. 1958. Videodisc. EBS, 2006. 61 

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culminates in a catastrophic vortex of gunfire. As the train full of American supplies runs toward the military camps near the DMZ, a group of camptown men attempt to detach a cargo train. Their plan is foiled by their betrayal to the authorities by “Sonya,” a camptown prostitute and a quintessential “free woman.” Sonya is punished and killed by her Korean lover, who had masterminded the train heist. Access to these goods determined the power hierarchy among the inhabitants of the military camps and camptowns. The success of the first and the failure of the second robbery hinged on women’s cooperation, since they had freer access to the inside of the fence and could seduce and ultimately coopt the Americans into the scheme. In the film, the emasculated Korean men attempt to forcefully upset this gendered and sexualized dynamic by bypassing the mediator (the women) and subverting the dominant source (Americans). The vital economic role performed by these “free women” for camptowns and beyond created impossible contradictions for a nation that could neither deny their existence nor embrace them. Beyond brief sexual encounters through the club systems, some American personnel and camptown woman created a more extended arrangement of cohabitation, like Hogewood’s agreements with “Mary” and “Candy.” For instance, approximately two hundred women out of one thousand military prostitutes in the Yongsan area cohabited with American soldiers as “married couples” in 1962.63 Compared to the daily strains of dealing with clients and pimps in clubs and bars, this domestic arrangement often proved more profitable than the insecurity of nightly work. Besides improved economic stability, such exclusive relationships also opened up the possibility of marriage and immigration to the United States. In the “heyday” of camptowns, marriage between Korean women and American servicemen peaked. The New York Times reported in 1965 that about one hundred American servicemen married Korean women each month in South Korea. In 1964, 1,265 American servicemen took Korean wives, which meant that one out of forty servicemen stationed in Korea married a Korean that year. Due to the high number of marriages with the locals as well as problems of GIs abandoning their wives, the 8th U.S. Army (EUSA) set up education classes on interracial marriages and tightened marriage regulations. Not to be deterred, however, marriage service agencies in camptowns profited by facilitating the paperwork for marriage and migration for a fee of about two hundred dollars.64 The American GIs played a direct and inadvertent role in propelling a significant migration of Koreans to the United States. 63  64 

Lee, “The Construction of U.S. Camptowns,” 142. “Marriages by G.I.s Problem in Korea,” New York Times, 24 October 1965.

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Korean military brides made up the largest group of adult Korean immigrants from 1945 to 1965, when immigration from most of Asia was blocked in the United States. Between 1950 and 1989, some ninety thousand Korean women immigrated to America as wives of U.S. soldiers. Subsequently, by sponsoring their extended families, these women played a crucial role in later Korean-American immigration.65 For the women in Insu’s world, “the prostitutes and husband-seekers who lined up outside the gates for escorts, [and] the unsponsored wives,” the “promise of America” loomed large. Insu’s mother describes her own once-idealized America: And really, I did think the streets in America are gold or something. I used to think every American was a millionaire and everyone owned his own house and had a car and drank Coca-Cola instead of water and had meat for every meal. I don’t know where I got those ideas, but I had them. My friends who came back tell me that everything will be a disappointment, but I don’t care. I have to go there and see for myself.66

To a remarkable degree, Koreans shared this “American fever” in the postwar decades. For the women who chose to marry American soldiers and leave Korea, America promised an escape. As Ji-Yeon Yuh posits, especially for military brides, adoptees, and racially mixed “Amerasians,” their indelible association with the Korean War and the continued garrisoning of American soldiers made them “ideal” candidates for migration.67 Pushed out by the war and its consequences, the camptown women “bartered” their lives in Korea for what they hoped would be a piece of the American dream. Camptown Clashes Although borders demarcating the military camps and the camptowns often proved porous, the installations officially were protected American spaces. As the 1960 New Year incident revealed, these border conflicts could demand the attention of the highest political echelons of Korea and 65 

By inviting their family members to the United States under the family reunification provision, it is estimated that military brides are responsible (directly and indirectly) for bringing 40 to 50 percent of all Korean immigrants since 1965. Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, 164. 66  Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother, 121, 267–68. 67  Yuh contends that most of the Korean migration since 1950 can be traced to the Korean War and its consequences. Especially in the postwar reconstruction period, the Park Junghee government encouraged migration through the 1963 Emigration Act to relieve perceived pressures of unemployment. Ji-Yeon Yuh, “Moved by War: Migration, Diaspora and the Korean War,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (2005): 278–80.

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Figure 3. The Hangook Daily editorial cartoon, “The Latest Gossip on the Women’s Head Shaven Incident,” captured how the tensions surrounding the incident had escalated to the point of enlisting the involvement of the highest political echelons of the two nations. The caption reads: “Wishing that the hair as well as the Korean-U.S. friendship will return to the previous state.” Source: Hangook Ilbo, 14 January 1960.

the American representatives in Korea. A January 1960 editorial cartoon in Hangook Ilbo (Korea daily), “Latest Gossip on the Heads Shaven Incident” (figure 3), shows a bald-headed woman in a Korean traditional dress (hanbok), sitting and holding a mirror while a uniformed figure with captain bars on his hat brushes her head with a substance from a jar. Directly behind the captain is a civilian, and behind the civilian is another uniformed officer. As the caricature conveys, camptown contestations such as this particular incident involved others, whether directly or symbolically,

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far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands. The uproar surrounding this incident caused the ROK Home Ministry and the Foreign Ministry to make a report to President Rhee and to hand an “official memorandum of protest” to the U.S. ambassador. Twenty-two Korean legislators also raised a motion recommending early conclusion of a SOFA. The U.S. ambassador, Walter P. McConaughly, and the UN commander in chief, General Carter B. Magruder, visited the ROK Foreign Ministry to officially express their regret for this incident. The U.S. military also acted quickly to mitigate the situation by relieving the responsible captain of his command and transferring him, while compensating each of the two women with 480,000 hwan ($960).68 Motivations behind such swift responses by the U.S. military and the demand for far-reaching actions by Koreans suggest that borderland clashes at times symbolized greater significance for the two nations. For the U.S. military, at least on the ground level, Korean transgressors posed the unruly nuisance of theft and venereal disease among its troops. The Washington Star reported on January 7 that the incensed captain “had ordered head-shaving in hopes of halting an invasion by camp followers . . . who cut holes in fences, evaded guards, entered barracks, and caused a high venereal disease rate.”69 It continued that Captain McEnery had issued the order without the knowledge of his superior, the battalion commander. The captain had decided to take the law into his own hands by not only punishing Koreans but also by promising to reward his men with three-day passes for “catching prostitutes.” Frustrated, the captain created his own high-handed “justice” system.70 And at the root of this controversy was the concern at the high venereal disease rate among the soldiers. The “Crime Prevention Programs” report cited that the VD rate for U.S. troops in the I Corps area had increased from 228 per thousand in 1958 (23 percent) to 328 per thousand (33 percent) in 1959. The report adduced that “it is an accepted medical axiom that disease incidence among the military is directly related to the prevalence of that particular disease within the local civilian population.” Again, the report unquestioningly 68 

The value of $960 in 1960 has the same buying power as $6,864.65 in 2009. This sum was six to seven times the 1960 per capita GNP. 69  Washington Star, 7 January 1960, “World and Korean news roundup.” 70  The hair shaving, at the same time, was not as an arbitrary or random disciplining measure as it seemed. It had historical precedence, as attested in a dispatch that quoted a U.S. Army spokesman, who “recalled that in the West, hair-cutting of those ‘followers of units’ have been traditional punishment since long ago.” Seoul, 8 January 1960. The problem and the outrage, as pointed out by several Koreans in their editorial responses, was that Korea was not the “West,” and wartime measures had been implemented in a peacetime situation. Hangook and Seoul, 8 January 1960, “World and Korean news roundup.”

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considered the local women as the transmitters of VD who were thus fully responsible for the increase in the infection rate among the GIs; absent was a discussion of GIs as willing “consumers” of the sexual economy as well as VD carriers and infectors of the women.71 Although the American side shied away from negotiating a bilateral Status of Forces Agreement, the USFK did want the Korean government to actively intervene and regulate these matters of the borderland. If the ground-level problem of venereal disease motivated Captain McEnery’s hair-shaving policy, SOFA constituted the fundamental concern for General Magruder and the upper echelon of the USFK. General Magruder responded to the incident by calling together a conference concerning “Measures to Prevent Further Taking of the Law into Their Own Hands by U.S. Military Personnel” on February 26, 1960, which was attended by the highest ranked American military officials in Korea.72 According to the confidential memorandum of the conference, “incidents which would have passed with a minimum of notice heretofore will be built up to serve the Koreans’ purposes.” According to General Magruder, this Korean purpose was “one in which the Koreans want a Status of Forces Agreement.” Then General Magruder pointed out that prostitution and pilferage, the two causes of friction, were “aggravating,” yet “neither [was] serious militarily.” The problems of prostitution and theft were secondary to the concern that Koreans would use such sensational borderland incidences as leverage to pressure the United States into a new bilateral agreement. As the article, “Koreans Call for GI Trials” in the Baltimore Sun on January 9 pointed out, “The U.S. has Status of Forces treaties covering off-duty offenses in many of the countries where large American Troops contingents are stationed, but not Korea.” For the USFK, signing a new bilateral agreement would mean relinquishing extraterritorial advantages as well as a contradiction of the American Cold War rhetoric. The wartime agreement signed in Daejon in 1950 gave complete advantages, such as unilateral criminal jurisdiction, free Korean 71 

To control the VD rate among its men, the United States Forces in Korea (USFK) provided “active and vigorous special services and education programs” and encouraged the men “to attend the church of their faith and participate in religious retreats,” in order to “fill spare time, to entertain, and to divert.” As for the breached barbed wire fences, all that the command could do was to conduct “daily and frequent inspections and repair [the fence] immediate[ly] when required.” “Crime Prevention Programs” from 8th U.S. Army Classified General Officer Correspondence, 1959–1963, 8th U.S. Army Adjutant General Section, Classified General Officer Correspondence 1959–1963, RG338/290/C/59/6 Box 301, NARA. 72  “Commanding General’s Conference of 26 February 1960 Concerning Measures to Prevent Further Taking of the Law into Their Own Hands by U.S. Military Personnel,” 8th U.S. Army Adjutant General Section, Classified General Officer Correspondence 1959–1963, RG338/290/C/59/6 Box 301, NARA.

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land usage for U.S. military installations, and not having to negotiate with Korean labor unions representing those employed on military camps. Another reason, more ideological than material, perhaps stemmed from the contradiction presented by the ROK demand for a SOFA. On December 29, 1959, just a few days before the hair-shaving incident, the Washington Star proudly declared that the three hundred thousand American military personnel “swarming all over the Far East . . . have assumed a political role in addition to their regular military duties.”73 And these “diplomats,” the Washington Star claimed, “have contributed to . . . a growing feeling among free Asians that their freedom is more secure if they stand with the U.S. and improved relations between individual Americans and local people in Far East.” The rhetoric of American GIs as both Cold War soldiers of “containment” and ambassadors of “integration” abounded in this period. General Magruder, in his December 19, 1959, prepared statement for briefing the visiting members of the U.S. Congress and media, also reiterated a similar sentiment that the presence of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen in Asia served not only military but also diplomatic and political purposes. “The Republic of Korea offers us a showplace for democracy, just as does the Republic of Germany,” General Magruder contended. Thus, if a staunch Cold War ally as South Korea demanded a SOFA, it exposed that the “invited” American “ambassadors of democracy” did not always live up to their professed ideals. For Koreans, the significance of this case did not stem from its uniqueness but rather its typicality. The Korean press described the incident as yet another “lynching” in a far more extensive history of violence against Koreans at the hands of Americans. One indication of the frequency of these “incidents” was the fact that despite all the commotion surrounding this particular 1960 New Year incident, in the following month, members of the 444th unit of the EUSA beat seven Korean villagers with a club and then forced them into a water hole, completely stripped, in the middle of winter. GI crime statistics between 1962 and 1967 compiled by the Bureau of Korean National Police indicate 48 incidents of burglary/robbery, 807 of assault, 302 of bodily injury, and 57 murder cases.74 According to official Korean government statistics, roughly 52,000 crimes, ranging from car accidents to robbery, arson, mugging, physical and sexual assault, rape, and murder, were committed by the troops and civilians related to the U.S. 73  “Military Diplomats Help to Alter Political Climate,” Washington Star, 29 December 1959, “World and Korean news roundup.” 74  Han Woo-Seok, “Juhan oegugin ui beomjoe” [Crimes of foreigners in Korea], Sin DongA, March 1968, 245, as quoted in Sang-Dawn Lee, Big Brother, Little Brother: The American Influence on Korean Culture in the Lyndon B. Johnson Years (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002), 41.

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military from 1967 to 2002.75 This figure constitutes the crimes reported to the police since the 1967 SoFa agreement and therefore, the actual number dating back to 1945 is likely much higher. as Magruder had warned, the Korean public discourse also turned the women’s humiliation into “their” grievances and “national” indignations in demanding a SoFa. January 8, 1960, editorials claimed, “We cannot but feel unpleasantness with racial shame and the humiliation that we were insulted too much by foreign soldiers.” In Seoul Daily, another editorial expressed, “We cannot help but feel national indignation.” and in Pyunghwa Ilbo (Peace daily), another writer asserted, “It cannot be said to be too extreme, if we say that it is a sign of their scorn of all the Korean women and Korean Nationals.”76 In their rally around the two Korean prostitutes of an american military camptown—the very people and place that Korean society marginalized—”them” became “we.” This hair-shaving incident represented yet another humiliating chapter in the frustrated collective memory of empty promises of change by the officials of both nations. editorials featured in Seoul, Chosun, and Hangook on January 7 and 8 all reminded that: [W]e, two years ago, unanimously urged the conclusion of roK-US administrative agreement to prevent misconducts against us by american soldiers when a Korean school boy was shot and killed by an american servicemen near Kimchun railway station. . . . at that time, the foreign minister, agreed to the public opinion, declared that he would do his best for the conclusion of the agreement. Since then we have heard nothing of that, and we do not know what caused that effort to fail, either.

The public discourses not only clearly articulated the unforgotten history of grievances but also how this new “lynching” was a symptom of the absence of a bilateral agreement on criminal jurisdiction. as feared by the U.S. military, Koreans discussed the incident by evoking contradictions between american rhetoric and practice in their military presence in asia. The Korean usage of the word “lynch” conjured highly critical images of Jim Crow segregation and the virulent violence against blacks in the United States at the time. This linguistic association contradicted america’s self-image as the beacon of democracy. The Korean editorials contended that the soldiers had made a mockery of prostitutes and disdained indigenous persons, despite “the fact that they 75 

Lee Sohee, “Understanding the United States through the Crimes Committed by Its Troops in Korea.” oh Yeon-ho estimates as many as five a day, two thousand a year, and nearly one hundred thousand total from 1945 to 1990. oh Yeon-ho, Deoisang urireur seulpeugae hajimala! [Make us sad no more!] (Seoul: Baeksan Seodang, 1990). 76  Chosun and Hangook, 7 January 1960; Seoul, 8 January 1960; and Pyunghwa, 19 January 1960, “World and Korean news roundup.”

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have a mission to maintain high self-esteems and cultures as overseasstationed American servicemen.” Therefore, they “fear[ed] that the incident might be a fine propaganda datum to the communists who always try to alienate Koreans’ feeling from that of Americans.”77 A Seoul editorial concurred that this kind of incident “fundamentally [shook] the achievements the United States had built in the free Asian nations in the common fight against communists.” To remedy this “misperception,” which could fuel anti-American propaganda, the editorials urged the conclusion of an ROK-U.S. administrative agreement. By doing so, as a Pyunghwa editorial on January 19 asserted, based on “the American servicemen’s new notion of Koreans and Korean sovereignty . . . the sincere friendship between ROK and U.S. could be established.” Feeling deeply indebted to Americans, Koreans could not call their benefactors a “den of murders” or “den of rapists”—as Americans had referred to Korea as “a den of thieves”— but they could evoke America’s “honor” and challenge them to live up to their espoused democratic image.78 The ostracized women of camptowns briefly became a cause through which Koreans protested what they considered an outdated and unequal relationship and began to assert a more independent sovereignty vis-à-vis their “big brother” in the postwar period.79 The editorials clearly demonstrated an awareness of disparity in American treatment of Koreans compared with other nations, which in turn signaled lack of American respect for Korean sovereignty.80 Thus, for the participants in this public discourse, this national affront could be remedied, in part, with the signing of a more equitable bilateral agreement. But in 1960, Korea lacked the power to realize the renegotiation.81 Although in many ways “a tempest in 77  “We Again Urge the Conclusion of ROK-U.S. Administrative Agreement,” Chosun and Hangook, 7 January 1960, “World and Korean news roundup.” 78  Sang-Dawn Lee, Big Brother, Little Brother, 8–9. 79  The editorials contended that when the Daejon Agreement was signed, “[O]ur government had no time to think of national prestige or any restriction of sovereignty,” and thus it should be replaced because “circumstances have completely changed in these days, ten years after that.” Chosun and Hangook, 7 January 1960, “World and Korean news roundup.” 80  Editorials in Chosun and Hangook claimed that “such a agreement as the U.S. has presently with NATO countries including Turkey, which stipulates all the crimes committed by U.S. servicemen, with the exception of violation of military orders, are to be subject to the criminal jurisdiction of the host country, could be applied to Korea, at least at the same level of agreement as the U.S. has with Japan should be concluded to Korea.” 81  Editorials, frustrated by yet another cosmetic solution to the problem, expressed their outrage. An editorial in Chosun on 13 January 1960 declared, “We were thunder struck at the lukewarm measures taken by the authorities of both ROK and U.S. about the incident.” And most of all, it criticized their own government. The same editorial castigated, “With this, we were again astonished at our government’s inefficiency that they showed.” Despite the

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a teapot,” the dispute surrounding this particular incident nonetheless indicated attempts at redefining Korea’s sovereignty and modernity, which were conditioned by the contradictions of foreign dependency. And in this political renegotiation between the two nations, the “personal” sexual economy of the camptown women in the borderlands proved central, as Cynthia Enloe puts forward in her “personal is political” argument.82 At the same time, although the New Year incident became a cause through which Koreans rallied to redefine Korea’s position vis-à-vis the United States, the relationship of greater Korea with camptowns was conflicted. Chosun carried two juxtaposed editorial cartoons relating to camptowns on the same day. In contrast to the “Peculiar Disease” (figure 2) caricature that opened this section, which clearly criticized the American logic of shaving heads to decrease “malignant disease,” the second caricature was more condemning of the women. “Truck Full of PX Articles Stolen” depicts a woman looking out of a window, her enlarged hand, with sharp claw-like nails, stretched outward with a small PX truck on the palm (figure 4). Her mouth is wide open as if she is going to swallow the truck. The caption reads, “They must have considered this warehouse of pilfered properties a high-class restaurant.” Unlike the depiction of the head-shaven women as “victims” of American “lynching,” the latter cartoon criticized camptown women as voracious consumers of American goods and as central instruments in the organized black market. The aforementioned editorial cartoon, “Latest Gossip on the Heads Shaven Incident” (figure 3), which shows a bald-headed woman in a traditional Korean dress in contrast to the ubiquitous association of camptown women with Western clothing, ultimately suggests a wishful projection of “tradition.” As the caption reads, “Wishing that the hair as well as the Korean-U.S. friendship will return to the previous state,” it imagines a return to the past of nonthreatening, modest women. The contradictions expressed in these political cartoons—camptown women as both victims and devouring consumers and camptowns as both indispensable and problematic economic sites—was also explored in another contemporary film. The Stray Bullet (Obaltan, directed by Yu Hyeon-mok, 1961) has been critically hailed as the canonical film of Korea and acclaimed for its postwar realist social criticism.83 Based on Yi Beom-seon’s 1959 short story, fervor surrounding this incident, it, too, faded from the pages of the newspapers after the “gestures” of apology and acceptance took place. 82  Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 195–97. 83  Obaltan [The stray bullet]. Directed by Yu Hyun-Mok. 1961. Videodisc. Cine Korea, 2002. Both the Motion Picture Promotion Corporation’s 1995 list of the “Ten Best Korean Films”

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Figure 4. The Chosun Daily’s editorial cartoon, “Truck Full of PX Articles Stolen,” blames and criticizes the women of camptowns for facilitating the black market system. The caption states, “They must have considered this warehouse of pilfered properties a high-class restaurant.” Source: Chosun Ilbo, 9 January 1960.

“Obaltan,” the film is an allegory of postwar Korea presented through a disconsolate family from the North living in a war refugee shantytown, “Liberation Village” (Haebangcheon), near Yongsan Garrison in Seoul.84 and the 1998 Chosun Daily poll of the “Fifty Best Korean Films” confirm the number-one status of The Stray Bullet. Yu’s critical depiction was made possible because the film was produced during the short-lived democratic Second Republic following the Spring Student Uprising on April 19, 1960. The film was later banned by the Park Jung-hee government. 84  “Liberation Village” was a refugee camp set up immediately after the war in Itaewon,

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Differing from Hell Flower, where the threatening aspects of modernity are contained in the supposedly isolated “hell” that is camptown, in Stray Bullet the symbolic and material camptowns have “contaminated” the everyday cityscape and “infiltrated” the family. For one, when Cheol-ho, the protagonist, looks out of the bus window and spots his younger sister, Myeong-sook, sitting next to an American soldier in a jeep in the bustling heart of Seoul, he turns away so that he cannot see. Cheol-ho chooses to deal with his demasculinized position by averting his gaze from the familial and national shame. Similarly, all that Myeong-sook’s former fiancé can do is to limp despondently away when he encounters Myeong-sook soliciting an American soldier in front of the Chosen Hotel, a place exclusively reserved for U.S. military personnel at the time in downtown Seoul. Evidence of camptowns—American goods, “free women,” and American GIs—did not stay within the peripheral edges, but rather filled the postwar space, from the heart of the capital city to the home. Finally, although Cheol-ho first refuses the “tainted” money his sister earns from American soldiers, he eventually accepts and spends the money on having his rotten teeth—symbolizing the “sick” society—taken out.85 In order to alleviate some of the pain of the postwar Korean home/society, Cheol-ho, the head of the household/nation, reluctantly but ultimately takes the “tainted” money earned from the prostitution of his sister/the nation’s women to foreign soldiers. With this “realistic” resolution to the film, Stray Bullet captures the ways in which these borderlands have “contaminated” postwar Korea. Conclusion In this recentering of the periphery, camptowns and their inhabitants occupy an undeniable place in Korea’s postwar history. Although camptowns and their inhabitants have occupied an ambivalent place, the popular cultural sites of silver screens and the impassioned discussions in the pages of daily newspapers as well as the political and military meeting rooms suggest the significance of these borderlands. Both the symbolic and material significance of camptowns, therefore, was not lost to Koreans engaged in this public discourse. This dichotomy of camptowns—as places of “dispensable” intercourse and violent clashes as well as “indispensable” which consisted of makeshift shacks made from scraps from the Yongsan Garrison as well as tent villages. In contrast, tall apartment buildings and multi-story mansions housed UN families, ambassadors, and embassy employees starting in 1956. Choi, “A Study on ‘Americanization’ Expressed in Itaewon Space,” 31. 85  Hyangjin Lee, Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 121.

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sources of foreign currency and consumable American modernity, situated somewhere between “Hell” and “Flower”—could neither be ignored nor celebrated. Camptowns constituted an edge of postwar Korea, where the “unstable negotiation of identity and power” took place among Koreans and between the Self and the Other.86 Additional References Books, Articles, and Unpublished Works An, Jinsoo. “Screening the Redemption: Christianity in Korean Melodrama.” In South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, edited by Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann, 65–98. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Bailey, Beth, and David Farber. The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Cho, Eunsun. “The Stray Bullet and the Crisis of Korean Masculinity.” In South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, edited by Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann, 99–116. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Choi, Chungmoo. “Nationalism and Construction of Gender in Korea.” In Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, edited by Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, 9–31. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. Chung, Hye Seung. “From Saviors to Rapists: G.I.s, Women, and Children in Korean War Films.” Asian Cinema 12, no. 1 (2001): 103–16. ———. “Hollywood Goes to Korea: Biopic Politics and Douglas Sirk’s Battle Hymn (1957).” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 25, no. 1 (March 2005): 51–80. ———. “Toward a Strategic Korean Cinephilia: A Transnational Detournement of Hollywood Melodrama.” In South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, edited by Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann, 117–50. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Cumings, Bruce. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: Norton, 1997.

86 

Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), xi.

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———. “Silent but Deadly: Sexual Subordination in the U.S.-Korean Relationship.” In Let The Good Times Roll, edited by Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, 165–75. New York: The New Press, 1993. Goedde, Petra. GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Hurst, G. Cameron, III. “It’aewon: The Gentrification of a Boomtown.” Universities Field Staff International Reports, no. 29 (1989). Kang So-Yeon. “1950-yeondae Yeoseong Japchiui Pyonsangdoen Miguk Munhwa wa Yeonsung damnon” [The represented American culture and female discussion in 1950s women’s magazines]. Sangho Hakpo 18 (October 2006): 107–35. Kim, Myung Ja. “Race, Gender, and Postcolonial Identity in Kim Ki-duk’s Address Unknown.” In Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, edited by Frances Gateward, 243–64. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007. Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Korean Film Archive. Traces of Korean Cinema from 1945–1959. Seoul: Munhak sasangsa, 2003. Lie, John. Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. “The State as Pimp: Prostitution and the Patriarchal State in Japan in the 1940s.” Sociological Quarterly 38, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 251–63. Limon, Martin. Jade Lady Burning. New York: Soho Press, 1992. McHugh, Kathleen. “South Korean Film Melodrama: State, Nation, Woman, and the Transnational Familiar.” In South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, edited by Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann, 17–42. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Moon, Katharine H. S. “Prostitute Bodies and Gendered States.” In Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, edited by Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, 141–74. New York: Routledge, 1998. Oh Ji-yeon. “Migun Gijichon Maechulyeoseongdeului Jubyeonjeok Munhwa” [Marginal culture of prostitutes in American GIs town in Korea]. Master’s thesis, Seoul National University, 1997. Rapoport, Amos. “On Cultural Landscapes.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 3, no. 2 (1992): 33–47. Taylor, Peter J. Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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Films Battle Hymn. Directed by Douglas Sirk. 1957. Videodisc. Universal, 2001. Bueongiwa na [Owl and me]. Made by Durebang. 2003. Camp Arirang. Directed by Diana S. Lee and Grace Yoonkyung Lee. 1995. Jayubuin [Madame Freedom]. Directed by Han Hyeong-Mo. 1956. Videodisc. KOFA, 2005. The Steel Helmet. Directed by Samuel Fuller. 1951. Lippert Productions. Videodisc. Eclipse from the Criterion Collection, 2007. Suchwiin bulmyeong [Address unknown]. Directed by Kim Ki-Duk. Videodisc. Tube Entertainment, 2001. The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military. Directed by J. T. Takagi and Hye Jung Park. 1996. Newsletters, Pamphlets, Reports, and Other Resource Materials Durebang [My sister’s place]. Durebang Iyagi [Stories of Durebang: Fifteenth anniversary celebration resource materials]. 2001. ———. Widaehan Gundae, Widaehan Abeoji: Hangugeseo Migungundaewha Maechun [Great army, great father: Militarized prostitution in South Korea]. 1995. Ministry of National Defense, Republic of Korea. “We Go Together” (Gatchi Gapshida): ROK-U.S. Alliance and USFK. Seoul: Ministry of National Defense, 2002. National Campaign for Eradication of Crimes by U.S. Troops in Korea. “Consistent Contradictions: The Mismatch between an Imagined North Korea and the Real Role of the USFK.” 2007. ———. The Tenth Anniversary Celebration Resource Materials. 2003.

FIVE

U.S.-Educated Elites and the Phenomenon of Study Abroad

JANE CHO

On June 17, 1965, Chosun Ilbo proudly presented the success story of a Park-Lee couple.1 Donning graduation regalia, the pair held up their diplomas and beamed into the camera. The article boasted that even the American media buzzed with excitement over the accomplishments of this son and daughter of the “Land of the Morning Calm.” It praised the husband-wife pair for becoming the first married couple in the long history of the American University to receive their doctoral degrees on the same day. Then the news articles turned to personal details. Though they had prestigious degrees, Park and Lee came from humble backgrounds fraught with hardships that many Korean newsreaders could relate to. The couple spent their formative years enduring the dire consequences of a regime change and the devastation of civil war. Park, along with his seven siblings and parents, had fled to Pusan, the southernmost tip of Korea, where the family rebuilt their lives from the ground up as war refugees. Lee, on the hand, had lost both her parents early in her life, and her older brother had raised her. When the Korean War struck, the orphaned brother and sister fled to Pusan, and there the couple met. Even amid a civil war, Lee had studied assiduously and gained acceptance at Ewha University. After a year at Ewha, she finalized her plans to get an American education and left for the United States. The following year in 1953, her boyfriend Park also vowed to earn the highest degree—an American doctoral degree. Park spent a year at another elite Korean university and then headed 1 

Won-su Chŏn, “Kat’ŭn nal ka’t’ŭn hakkyosŏ pubu paksa kach’i t’ansaeng: Pak Chŏng-su Yi Pŏm-ju ssi Miguk Amerik’an Taehak esŏ hagwi” [Same day, same school, the birth of an educated couple: Doctors Pak Chŏng-su and Yi Pŏm-jun from American University], Chosun Ilbo, June 17, 1965, 7.

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for the United States. Shortly after being reunited in the United States, Park and Lee became engaged. A few years later they were married, and, between their wedding and graduation, they had two sons. Their doctoral degrees completed their success. The article announced that after being away for nearly a decade, they would be coming home “richer” on many fronts. Korean newspaper readers learned that people just like themselves had dreamed big, worked hard, and achieved their goals. News articles on U.S.-educated persons focused on the personal, rather than the academic, experiences of Korean international students, building a sense of familiarity between the articles’ protagonists and the readers. Most articles mentioned their age and marital status; some even included details of family planning. Articles clearly identified unmarried doctorates and noted (down to the date of engagement and pending wedding) if their eligibility would change.2 If they were married and were parents, then the articles listed their children’s ages and names. Accounts of long separations between the student and his spouse and child(ren) exemplified these scholars’ devotion and sacrifice for knowledge. Such details satisfied the readers’ curiosity, and served as fodder for the forming lore of fame and success awaiting U.S.-educated Koreans. The attention and praise heaped on these Koreans who held America’s highest degree undoubtedly seeped into the dreams and plans of other Koreans, students as well as their parents. The perception and reception of the U.S.-educated and of U.S. education in Korea are part of the overall history of the Korean diaspora. As with all migrants, the students’ choices and decisions unfolded on a complicated plane with spatially and temporally crisscrossing considerations. Prospective students used the societal and educational standards formed in Korea to evaluate how their education in the United States would affect their future lives back in Korea. Evidentiary news articles about success created inspiring images of those educated in the United States and foreshadowed the reception that they would receive when they returned. Given that very few students had the means to visit Korea during the entire period of their studies in the United States, they updated and at times replaced the images and values they brought from Korea with their experiences and expectations gained in the United States. To the extent time and interest allowed, students kept abreast of what was happening back 2 

For an example of such an article, see “Miguk esŏ irŭm ttŏlch’in tu yeohak’to paksa kwajŏng esŏ janghakkŭm t’an Pun Pok-cha yang’gwa Sin Myŏng-suk” [Two illustrious women scholars earn scholarship for their doctoral studies: Misses Yun pok-cha and Sin Myŏng-suk yang], Chosun Ilbo, November 8, 1964, 5.

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Table 1. Korean Students in the United States in Selected Years. Year

Korean Studies in the United States

1946

16

1950

302

1955

1,815

1960

2,310

1965

2,666

1970

3,857

Source: Institute of International Education, Open Doors (the figure for 1945–1946 was not available, so the figure for 1946 is used instead).

in Korea, but much of how they thought Korea would perceive and receive them with their U.S. education was informed before they left Korea. U.S. education for any Korean foreign student begins in Korea. Though Korean attitudes toward the United States fluctuate between positive and negative, with a definite tilt to the negative since the early 1980s, the reputation of a U.S. education as a knowledge base enjoys an unprecedented, if not uncritical, popularity and respect. The largely uninterrupted growth in the number of Korean students going to the United States attests to the strength and lasting power of this image (see table 1). How and why did this happen? The history of international students is one of contact. In the case of many developing nations with strong ties to the United States, the contact between Americans and foreign students began before the students arrived on American campuses. Initially, American missionaries tiptoed into the country and introduced their worldview and lifestyle as well as their religion. Then, the American Cold War warriors marched in with a new American template to use in the marketplaces, government chambers, and schools—to name some of the most affected areas. Along with the new paradigm, involved Americans provided the needed information and support for Koreans going to the United States for further studies. Each “first generation” Korean foreign student received indispensable help directly from an American missionary, soldier, or educator, or indirectly through acquaintances of these Americans. Through these persons, Korean students tackled the greatest obstacles to studying abroad: finding information and getting funding. Once the connection had been made, many more points of contact emerged to help subsequent generations of Koreans receive their U.S. education.

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The increased contact between American educators and Korean students also reflected the history of the times. The U.S. military occupation of Korea from 1945 to 1948 produced the largest (not accounting for the years when the number of Korean students were in the single digits) annual percentage increase of Koreans studying in the United States; in both 1947 and 1948 the number of Korean foreign students increased roughly 250 percent. Given that there was a lag time of one year between applying and enrolling at schools and between approving and implementing government projects, these years coincide with increased U.S. government involvement and American contacts in Korea. Between the end of U.S. occupation and the first year of the Korean War, when relief and collaborative program were minimized, the annual increase of Korean students to the United States averaged 13%. Then the number spiked again in 1953, averaging 87% increase for the next three years.3 These figures corresponded to the ebb and flow of U.S. military presence and involvement in Korea. The resulting critical mass of U.S.-educated Koreans, along with Americans in Korea, added to the availability of information and led more students abroad. Until the U.S. military entered Korea at the end of World War II, American missionaries were the dominant group of Westerners in Korea. For a brief period between 1903 and 1905, Hawaii accepted Korean immigrants who displayed one or both of the following characteristics: intimate contact with American missionaries residing in Korea, and desire for themselves or their children to pursue an American education. One historian goes as far as to say that Koreans considered Hawaii a stepping stone to an American university.4 In his 1961 autobiography, Easurk Charr wrote that in his case, American missionaries had served as information brokers and role models.5 So, with the support and reference provided by American medical missionaries, Charr and his “scholar cousin” left Korea for Hawaii. They wanted to be trained in modern medical science to help Koreans, much like the missionaries. Like the countless students before and after them, Charr and his relative came with the end goal of reforming Korea. As late as 1966, one Korean scholar made a blanket statement, “Korean students are well-screened ‘educational missionaries’ to this country

3  Figures computed from data published in Open Doors, 1948-2008: Report on International Education Exchange (New York: Institute of International Education, 2010). 4  Korea Science and Engineering Foundation, Han’guk kwahak kisulja ŭi hngsŏng yon’gu 2: Miguk yuhak p’yon [A study on the formation of modern scientists and engineers in Korea II: Studying in America] (Seoul: Han’guk Kwahak Chaedan, December 1998), 42. 5  Easurk Emsen Charr, The Golden Mountain: The Autobiography of a Korean Immigrant, 1895–1960 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1961).

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[the United States] and will be members of the elite group in Korean society when they return home.”6 A U.S. education represented more than knowledge. Service to the Korean national cause became a rhetorical and literal rationale for study abroad, starting with the first student. Yu Kil-jun was a member of the initial Korean delegation sent to the United States in 1883.7 He opted to stay and learn more about America in hopes of contributing to his country’s advancement.8 By the early 1900s, the idea of the United States as a haven for scholars and political dissidents took hold in Korea. Around this time, China and Japan applied pressure on Korea to conform to their political needs. Korean intellectuals and politicians reacted by looking beyond Korea’s neighboring countries and affixing their gaze on the United States for their nation’s viability. So by the time Japan had forcibly annexed Korea in 1910, Koreans considered the pursuit of a U.S. education as an act of political rebellion, as well as an escape from a fettered Korea. With the end of Japanese rule in 1945 and the ensuing U.S. military government in Korea, there were more points of contact between Americans and Koreans than ever before. U.S.-educated Koreans, with the support of the U.S. military, took key leadership positions in the new republic. The Korean War was the watershed for study abroad, and the United States became the choice for study abroad. The American involvement in the war and in postwar reconstruction added to the growing prestige of and pride in studying in the United States, by elevating and affirming people with cooperative knowledge of the United States. American-educated Koreans

6  Hyung Tae Kim, “Relationships between Personal Characteristics of Korean Students in Pennsylvania and Their Attitudes toward the Christian Churches in America” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1966), 2. 7  Pyong-Choon Hahm notes that those Koreans who visited the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century were particularly impressed by its public education and were convinced that the country’s strength lay in its ability to educate its people. For more detail, see Pyong-Choon Hahm, “The Korean Perception of the United States,” in Korea and the United States: A Century of Cooperation, edited by Youngnook Koo and Dae-Sook Suh (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 23–52. 8  Yu Kil-jun enrolled in Dummer Academy in Massachusetts. Upon learning about the failed political uprising, he left behind his meager belongings with his American host and left for Korea. These artifacts along with some of his letters are now housed in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Upon returning to Korea he wrote Soyu Kyon Mun [What I saw and heard in my visit to the West]. According to historian Bong-youn Choy, “Many intellectuals read the book and were inspired to go to the West to learn about other nations.” See Bong-youn Choy, Koreans in United States (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979), 71. The most detailed English-language account of Yu-kil Jun’s sojourn in English can be found in Kay E. Black, “Peabody’s Korean Connection,” 19–27 in the pamphlet “The Peabody Museum of Salem 1987 Antiques Show,” in Henderson Papers, Box 2, Folder “Peabody Museum, 1987.”

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comprised a small group of elites whose influence grew as the U.S. government deepened its “patronage” in Korea. The wish to go abroad was part of the larger phenomenon of miguk byung (“American fever”). This “affliction” descended and permanently settled on Korean universities. An American education was the greatest symbol of status—a key to and manifestation of success. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that all students at one point or another daydreamed about studying in the United States, especially at elite universities like Seoul National University (SNU). One 1950s SNU graduate explained, “There was an unquestioned assumption that we [SNU undergraduates] would help drive Korea’s modernization.” It was understood that in order to do this, he asserted “we needed to go abroad [to the United States].”9 A 1960s SNU graduate, Walter Kwang Woo Han, gave a much more personal reason.10 He wanted to escape the penury and constant physical hunger that plagued his life. Even at the nation’s most prestigious university, the poverty that clung to him stunted the relationships he had with others, and there was every indication that it would continue to harass him. He learned that the United States could provide the answer. This desire for change also repeats itself in the life story of another Korean. Lee entered SNU nearly a decade after Han and, like him, wanted to shed his lower class identity. He explained, “I wanted to be successful. The possibility of raising my social status [with a U.S. education] was much better. There was no guarantee that a U.S. Ph.D. would lead to success, but the chances were much higher. Yes, much, much higher.”11 He resolved to join the ranks of the U.S.-educated and did.12 An exceptional quality of a U.S. education, as understood by these Korean students, was that it was available to everyone. Koreans did not, however, accept all persons and things American with an open heart. Although the Korean public held U.S. education in high esteem, the general image and reception of the United States was full of tension. The truth of the matter is that the relationship between Korea and the United States has always been Janus-faced. Given the unequal power dynamic between the countries, few Koreans directly criticized the United States during this time. The negative reporting and opinions came mostly from Americans themselves. A veteran correspondent for the Asia Desk of the Chicago Sun wrote, “When our troops landed in South Korea on Sept. 9 

Interview with Cha, August 12, 2008, Seoul, Korea. Name has been changed according to the interviewee’s wishes. 10  Interview with Walter Kwang Woo Han, August 31, 2008, Pleasanton, California. 11  Interview with Lee, August 12, 2008, Seoul, Korea. Name has been changed according to the interviewee’s wishes. 12  Lee eventually went on to become the vice provost of Seoul National University.

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7, 1945, thousands of Koreans danced, and cheered, or shouted Mansei, or ‘Live a thousand years.’ Within six months, surly Koreans were demanding to know how soon the ‘liberators’ would go home.”13 There was a range of acceptance and rejection of things American just as there were multifaceted images of the American culture and people. There was also a schizophrenic image attached to Koreans seeking U.S. association. Among those Koreans leaving for the United States were “loose” women cavorting with American soldiers on the one hand and respectable scholars coveting knowledge on the other. Cultural historian So-Yeon Kang found that this dichotomous image of Americans also existed in Korean women’s magazines. In analyzing how these magazines depicted American culture in the 1950s, Kang found that there were two types of readers: fashion-forward women eager to imitate American actresses as objects of envy, and more conservative “women of virtue and cultivation [who sought and had] advanced awareness of America.”14 Implicit in this categorization is that there were not only two distinct groups of readers but also two distinct images of American women. Yet, U.S. education as a concept and commodity received unequivocal, widespread public acceptance. It was positively associated with powerful politicians and educators, both Koreans and Americans, starting in the period of the U.S. Military Government in Korea (USMGIK). Political figures are by nature public figures, and were among the most visible U.S.-educated persons. The first occupant of many newly created posts in Korea, from head of state to the ambassador to the United States, had doctoral degrees from the United States. Prior to, and often during, their tenure these men were referred to as paksa (a technical term for doctor of philosophy as well as a catchall label denoting expertise). According to Dong Suh Bark, a scholar in Korean public administration, “[T]he top political positions [prior to the military coup of 1961] were occupied by those who had returned from study in the United States.”15 Those with an American education made sure to advertise this fact. They slipped into their speeches and writings references to their time in the United States. The first elected president, Syngman Rhee, adopted the Americanized 13  Mark Gayn, “‘Liberators’ Turned Zones into Military Bases,” Chicago Sun, November 2, 1947, in George A. Fitch Papers [hereafter, Fitch Papers], Box 7, Folder “News Clippings,” Harvard-Yenching Library and Archives, Cambridge, MA. 14  So-Yeon Kang, “1950-yǒndae Yǒsǒng chapchi e p’yosangdoen Miguk munhwa wa yǒsǒng tamnon” [The represented American culture and female discussion in 1950s women’s magazines], Sanghǒ Hakpo 18 (October 2006): 135. 15  Dong Suh Bark, “The American-Educated Elite in Korean Society,” in Korea and the United States: A Century of Cooperation, eds. Youngnok Koo and Dae-Sook Suh (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 271.

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practice of signing and referring to himself by his first name followed by his surname; general Korean practice places the surname before the given name. Former Korean Ambassador Yang told his audience in 1956 that the “happiest years of my life have been spent in Hawaii” where he had been a practicing medical surgeon.16 Just as high-level bureaucrats gained power through their U.S. education, lower bureaucrats strengthened their position through their American connections. As early as April 1946, the Public Relations Office of USMGIK started an English-language course for Koreans wishing to study in the United States. With an enrollment cap of one hundred, it was only open to public servants nominated by their bureau or section chiefs. The same news release also announced that, pending negotiations, one hundred scholarships might become available, suggesting that the language course was in preparation for a fully funded study abroad program.17 A more defined avenue of study abroad was the Fulbright program. Though Korea was a small part of the whole Fulbright program, the impact of the Fulbright scholarship carried great positive consequence for its Korean recipients. The Fulbright program in Korea began in 1950, vetting applicants for their potential to become leaders. U.S. embassy personnel affirmed its success by labeling one-third of roughly three hundred recipients from 1950 to 1957 as “leaders.”18 By its second decade in Korea, this U.S. Department of State program included judges, prosecutors, and special assistants to the Republic of Korea president as its alumni.19 Fulbright’s forty-year commemoration in Seoul in 1990 gathered illustrious figures from all areas of Korean society. One Korean sociologist present at the celebration pointed out an interesting fact: comparing the historical meeting between the North Korean and South Korean delegates and the Fulbright commemoration, gatherings that took place one week apart in the same location, more high-level Korean politicians attended the latter.20 16 

“Yang, Korean Ambassador to the U.S.,” August 9, 1956, Korean Information Bulletin 7, nos. 8 and 9 (August-September 1956), in George Fox Mott Papers [hereafter, Mott Papers], Box 22, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA. 17  Public Relations Office, Headquarters XXIV Army Corps Newsletter, Seoul, Korea, April 23, 1946, Mott Papers, Box 19. 18  Gregory Henderson, [no title] [n.d.], in Henderson Papers, Box 1, Folder “Writings and Speeches: Korea.” 19  “Fulbright-Hays Korean Grantee Directory, 1961–1972: Eleven Years of Educational Exchange.” Courtesy of Horace Underwood, director of Fulbright Korea, photocopy in author’s possession. 20  Il-joon Chung, “Haebang ihu munhwa chegukchuŭi wa miguk uhaksaeng” [Postliberation cultural imperialism and U.S. study abroad], Yŏksa Pip’yŏngsa 17 (November 1991): 130.

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The positive link between higher education and high office manifested itself in the roster of Korean politicians. Korean scholars Bae-Ho Hahn and Kyu-Taik Kim conducted an impressive analysis based on questionnaire responses they collected from Korean political leaders in “the topmost stratum of Korea’s political hierarchy from 1952 to 1962.”21 Using the father’s occupation as an indicator of class, they found, as expected, that 51 percent of the politicians were sons of landlords or businessmen; they were from the upper and upper-middle classes. What was unexpected was that roughly 25 percent of all political leaders in their study were from the lower class, identified as sons of tenant farmers or laborers. For the politicians with humble backgrounds, Hahn and Kim identified that formal education was the key factor in facilitating their rise to the ranks of the political elite. Seventy-four percent of these men from the lower class had received formal education at the undergraduate or postgraduate levels, with 13 percent having earned doctorates from universities abroad.22 Higher education proved to be the catalyst for change for those with no previous contact or experience with political or economic power. For the entire period examined, more than half of the leaders had studied abroad. Hahn and Kim also found that in the years between 1952 and 1961, “[T]he number of leaders who spent four years studying in Japan [was] almost the same as the percentage of those who spent over ten years in other countries, mainly in the United States.”23 To put this into perspective, these politicians served at a time when 90 percent of the total Korean population had either no formal education or only primary education. Hahn and Kim confidently could claim that “a university education is now for all practical purposes an absolute prerequisite for advancement to a top-level political position, in Korea.”24 Along with these national politicians, leaders in higher education were among the most visible and public figures in Korean society.25 A U.S. 21  Bae-Ho Hahn and Kyu-Taik Kim, “Korean Political Leaders (1952–1962): Their Social Origins and Skills,” Asian Survey 3, no. 7 (July 1963): 305–23. 22  Hahn and Kim, “Korean Political Leaders,” 311. 23  Hahn and Kim, “Korean Political Leaders,” 318. 24  Hahn and Kim, “Korean Political Leaders,” 311. 25  For much of Korea’s recorded history, the ruling elites were also its intellectuals. Government posts were filled by civic examinations, which tested candidates’ knowledge of classical teachings. The symbiotic relationship between lettered persons and political power lent itself to elevating both the political and social status of these men. In turn, many of the intellectuals viewed themselves as the legitimate voice of the people. Though the relationship between the government and academia has changed over time, university professors have often served as advisors to government groups and as the moral voice of the public. In more recent times, professors from elite universities have commanded so much airtime that they are nicknamed “teleprofs.” One American visiting professor at Seoul National University

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education became especially important in academia. Following Korea’s independence from Japan, the U.S. and Korean governments made a concerted effort to replace Japanese-educated experts with American-educated instructors in the Korean universities. Some critics have argued that U.S. influence on Korean higher education was “self-imposed with American encouragement and assistance,” while others postulate that there was no option but to adapt or adopt the American system.26 What is clear is that both governments actively initiated and supported this conversion. During the Korea War, key Korean scholars were sent to the United States for “safekeeping” and “retraining” during the war.27 Then following the war, key scholars studied in the United States as a part of the SNU Project.28 For those educators not familiar with the United States, observation tours and workshops led by either American educators or Korean returnees were recalls that he regularly saw his colleagues on television or saw their pictures next to articles or columns they had written. He noted drily that they were obviously in great demand. For more observations of the visiting professor see, Fredric Marc Roberts and Kyun-soo Chun, “The Natives Are Restless: Anthropological Research on a Korean University,” National Association for Foreign Student Affairs [NAFSA] Working Paper, no. 10, “The Korea Papers: Profiles in Educational Exchange.” Paper presented at the Advanced Professional Development Symposium on the Educational System of Korea, held in conjunction with the NAFSA Region VI conference in Columbia, Ohio, October 25–29, 1988. 26  Youngnok Koo and Dae-Sook Suh, eds., Korea and the United States: A Century of Cooperation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 102. 27  This group of awardees included acting presidents of universities, deans, and mathematicians. Half of this select group was directly affiliated with Seoul National University. “8 Korean Leaders Study at Top U.S. Universities,” Korean Messenger 1, no. 5 (Fall 1952): 1, 4, in Mott Papers, Box 23. 28  The Seoul National University [SNU] Project took place between 1954 and 1962. Sponsored by the U.S. government and supported by the Korean government, the SNU Project fit into the larger project of knowledge transfer from the U.S. to Korea. It was central to the two governments’ plans to revamp Korea’s higher education as a whole by restructuring Seoul National University in part. The U.S. government hired the University of Minnesota to undertake this large-scale project. The plan laid out by the American consultants was straightforward. American professors went to Korea to begin SNU’s conversion into a more efficient institution of higher learning modeled on American universities. Equipped with appropriate teaching and management experiences from the U.S., these professors oversaw the construction of buildings and procured necessary equipment and research materials. Shortly after their arrival, select Korean professors left for the U.S. to receive an American education that would bring them up to date with current research, legitimize their expertise, and identify them as conduits of modern education. These individuals returned to Korea after a prescribed amount of time and continued the reconstruction efforts begun by the outgoing American scholars they replaced. As for Seoul National University, the massive infusion of American money and knowledge plugged it into a network of “modern” universities and more importantly provided it with the funding needed to become “modern.”

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set up, and the Korean educational system itself was reorganized and patterned after that of the United States.29 The increased interaction between Koreans and Americans after the Korean War, as well as information from those who had gone abroad made studying abroad more accessible.30 In part, the SNU Project and other participant training programs strengthened the valuation of a U.S. degree as a criterion for elite faculty positions. In particular, those Korean scholars with U.S. Ph.D.s became “symbols of modernization and advancement” and valued members of the emerging elite.31 Following the liberation, high-profile educators immediately emerged as self-appointed vanguards of educational reform. A close-knit group of educators gathered at a private residence to discuss the direction of Korea’s education. Most of those convened were U.S.-educated with doctoral degrees. At a time when there were no graduate programs in Korea and only a few doctoral degree holders, this was truly a star-studded meeting. Those present formulated a postliberation educational plan that promoted the American educational system, a system that also validated their qualifications.32 Most, if not all, of the U.S.-educated professors in this early period held the Korean public’s respect for what they stood for. They had entered their teaching profession under Japanese colonial rule when few Koreans entered tertiary education, let alone taught it. Most were Christian converts who taught at schools established by American missionaries. Hwal Ran Kim and Nak Joon Baek were among the most prominent Korean educators of this group. To English speakers, they were known as Helen Kim and George Paik. Helen Kim was the first Korean female recipient of a doctoral degree. Shortly after completing her doctoral degree at Columbia University in New York she became Ewha Womans University’s seventh president in 1936, the first Korean woman to lead a Korean 29 

For more details on the structural changes of the Korean educational system see: Jeongkyu Lee, Historic Factors Influencing Korean Higher Education (Somerset, NJ: Jimoondang Publishing Company, 2000); Byung-hun Nam, “Educational Reorganization in South Korea under the U.S. Army Military Government: 1945–48” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1962); Kyu Young Park, “The Reconstruction of Educational Theory: Confucianism, Practicalism, and Pragmatism”(Ph.D. dissertation, Loyola University, 1996); Roy W. Shin, “The Politics of Foreign Aid: A Study of the Impact of United States Aid in Korea from 1945 to 1966” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1969). 30  Koo and Suh, Korea and the United States, 108. 31  Ha-Joong Song, “Who Stays? Who Returns?: The Choices of Korean Scientists and Engineers” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1991), 86. 32  Yi T’ok-ho, Chinmi sadaejuui kyoyuk ui chongae kwajong (Seoul: DahUm Publishers, 2001), 21.

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university.33 George Paik also received his doctoral degree from the United States. He returned to his alma mater, Chosun Christian University (now Yonsei University) to teach and in 1946 took the helm as its president. To influence Korean educational elites, the U.S. Department of State funneled American scholarships to Korea’s top experts. During the USMGIK, the U.S. government focused mainly on technical and vocational training; but with the Korean War, the focus shifted to high-ranking administrators, professors, and bureaucrats. The U.S. government also used the FulbrightHays program to establish and strengthen the U.S.-educated in Korea. A directory of the nearly four hundred grantees pursuing more than three dozen areas of studies Korean grantees from 1961 to 1972 shows continued focus on inserting and exerting American technology and ideals.34 Teaching English took the overwhelming lead, reflecting its growing popularity and importance as the language of discourse, power, and ultimately privilege. Chemistry and engineering, providing a fundamental basis for the technology transfer, took the lead in the sciences. The most grants, however, went to the social sciences. More specifically, they went to individuals studying education, journalism, law, and political science. The overwhelming majority of the Fulbright scholars listed a higher education institution as their then-present affiliation. These scholars were not only in positions to interpret and broker information but also had a captive, willing audience in their students. Aspiring Korean students needed information and connections. The desire to go abroad increased, but how it could be achieved was initially a mystery to all but a few hopefuls. It was not enough for people to know about others who had studied in the United States. Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, they needed to know the people, whether they be Americans or Koreans who knew Americans. Religious organizations and a few U.S. universities extended scholarships to Korean students, but the opportunities for Korean students were limited. Though few pieces of written information fluttered into people’s hands, most information came by word of mouth. Without a doubt, information was at a premium. And this information was scarcer the further one looks back. Especially from 1945 to the early 1960s, both wealthy and destitute Korean students began their study abroad journey with the personal assistance of Americans in Korea who helped them acquire visas, school acceptance, and scholarships. During this time, no study abroad experience operated without American assistance; the level of American involvement 33  Ewha Womans University Archives, Ewha Old and New: 110 Years of History (1886-1996) (Seoul: Ewha University Press, 2005). 34  “Fulbright-Hays Korean Grantee Directory.”

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was only a matter of degree. Cal Power’s inspirational devotion to his former houseboy is now well-known, thanks to Billy Kim’s bestselling biography, published after Kim was appointed president of the Baptist World Alliance from 2000 to 2005.35 For Billy Kim, it began with Cal Power’s question about whether he wanted to study in the United States. Receiving an affirmative reply, Powers brought Kim a school application to sign and then filled out the rest himself. He then took Kim to the U.S. Embassy in Pusan to get proper documentation, a drawn-out process that required Powers to postpone his return to the United States six times to see it to completion. Powers purchased Kim’s boarding pass and then arranged for not one but two officers to greet Kim in America, since he would not return to the United States in time to welcome Kim himself. Power’s aid was Kim’s constant companion through his high school, college, and graduate school years in the United States.36 Gi-Il Choi, in comparison, denied that he had received help from Americans. However, the events leading up to his enrollment belie this assertion. Having received a scholarship from a wealthy Korean patron, he needed an American visa. Choi says, “I knew someone, so he got a visa from the consul general [for me].”37 That someone was an American official. Once in the United States, he stayed at the home of the former American advisor to President Rhee before beginning his U.S. education at a university as arranged by his American friend. Ironically, the chance to get the most elite of all forms of higher education, American education, was available to some of the poorest Koreans— orphaned, destitute children. In the early 1950s, when only the most affluent Koreans could dream of sending their children abroad, the poorest of all poor in Korea, albeit in very small numbers, could also dream. For those without higher connections, American soldiers were among the first points of contact for Koreans. Orphaned busboys or errand boys to American platoons stood alongside scions of yangban [the privileged social class during the Chosun dynasty] families aboard ships leaving for San Francisco. The latter far outnumbered the former, but such opportunity for the “downtrodden” was celebrated and circulated far more widely and quickly. Kim noted matter-of-factly in his biography that he was poor before the war and poor after the war, so the war did not really affect him. 35 

The Baptist World Alliance is a worldwide alliance of Baptist churches and organizations that claims to represent over forty-seven million baptized believers. “Baptist World Alliance,” Wikipedia, accessed March 16, 2009. 36  Kŭn-mi Yi, Kŭ rŭl mannamyŏn maŭm e p’yongan i onda: Kim Chang-hwan moksa iyagi [If you meet him, peace will enter your heart: Pastor Kim Jang Han’s story] (Seoul: Chosun Ilbosa, 2000). 37  Interview with Gi-Il Choi, June 14, 2005, Brookline, Massachusetts.

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Yet this teenage boy had the good fortune to work as a houseboy, considered to be the best job on the U.S. army bases. There he met a humble American soldier who sponsored and supported his studies in the United States. Kim left for the United States in 1951 with four other students who were in their twenties and, according to Kim, from “high class.”38 Choi’s background differed drastically from Kim’s. Choi was born into privilege and educated in both Korea and Japan before he joined the inner circles of Korea’s first president. He regularly met with Americans, not to clean their houses but to discuss the best course of action for Korea. Then he fell out of favor with those in power and so left Korea to pursue his graduate studies in the United States. Encounters between Koreans and Americans brought on by the Korean War only grew with time. At the start of the war, it was rare for GIs to sponsor, let alone befriend, Korean soldiers or civilians. A 1951 editorial by a reverend stationed in Korea read, “Only an occasional G.I. gets over the barrier, or comes to know Korean soldiers in the same outfit.”39 In acknowledging the goodwill of American soldiers toward Korean civilians, an American consultant reported, “It wasn’t always so when our boys first went to Korea. . . . [They] knew very little about that nation and were somewhat contemptuous toward the ‘gook’ as they called the Korean.”40 By the end of the Korean War, these same soldiers had contributed upward of half a million dollars to wartime relief for Korean civilians. They became the literal and figurative foot soldiers of a battle against communism and a battle for the hearts and minds of people. “Waifs” and orphans attached themselves to army units hoping to find food and barter items, as well as the illusive security and affection that had disappeared from their lives. Some of the friendships that formed between the Americans and their young friends lasted beyond their short encounters. There were countless lesser known and forgotten stories of American soldiers’ generosity. For example, army officer Robert E. Echols planned to sponsor a young Korean friend he had met during his threeyear tenure in Korea to attend college in the United States. Before leaving Korea, Echols equipped young Joe with the proper documents and recommendation letters for schools, “vouch[ing] for his [Joe’s] integrity and fine character.”41 Some Americans even accompanied their friends 38 

Yi, Kŭ rŭl mannamyŏn, 47. Reverend Edward Adams, New York Times editorial section, March 7, 1951. Adams was the field secretary of the Board of Foreign Mission of the Presbyterian Church in Korea. 40  Reprint of Howard Rusk, M.D., “The GIs Give a Hand to the Koreans,” New York Times Magazine, October 11, 1953. Found at http://www.Koreanchildren.org/docs/nyt-028Q.htm, accessed on April 2, 2009. 41  Robert E. Echols of the U.S. Army to Gregory Henderson, July 20, 1958, in Henderson Papers, Box 1, Folder “Personal Correspondence + Embassy Material: 1958–1962.” 39 

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across the Pacific Ocean to their American schools. Lieutenant Colonel Price and his wife personally escorted their former houseboy to Michigan to begin his studies in engineering.42 When money precluded Mrs. Yang In Ai from achieving her dream of studying in the United States, American soldiers rallied to her side. The offering given through the chaplain’s office made up the largest portion of her scholarship.43 The largesse and doggedness of such ordinary American soldiers resulted in unprecedented educational opportunities for their Korean friends. These exceptional cases provided extraordinary fuel for the growing popularity of study abroad as they elevated the goodwill of Americans in the eyes of the Korean public. American educational experts and consultants hired by the U.S. government to aid Korea were an obvious source of information about study abroad. American missionaries from precolonial and colonial times in Korea had been most accessible to their church members and fellow religious adherents; however, American educators and technical experts of the postwar time were recruited to help Korea as a nation. In speaking of American teachers who served in developing nations, Jonathan Zimmerman says their goals were no different from those of missionaries. In fact, Zimmerman writes, “All teachers are missionaries, too, inasmuch as they try to get students to behave or believe in new ways.”44 For these educators, the “way” was U.S. education. In the 1940s and 1950s, a limited number of educators and technical experts entered Korea to assess the state of Korean education. These educators called for the retraining of Korean teachers, but few developed practical means or opportunities for further studies. One particular mission report attributed “lack of knowledge of modern teaching techniques [as] one of the main reasons for unsatisfactory class room conduct.”45 The survey of this particular mission resulted in the U.S. Congress voting to disburse twenty-five educators to Korea in the fall of 1948. Teachers assigned to the Teacher Training Center in Seoul ran workshops for Korean educators from every educational level. An American staff of about twenty worked with over five hundred Koreans in Seoul.46 Given that the 42  “USAFIK Communication Officer Takes Koreans to US,” Headquarters XXIV Corps, Officer of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, press release for American Press via Tokyo Army News Service, May 4, 1948, in Fitch Papers, Box 7, Folder “Misc. Materials on Korea.” 43  South Korean Interim Government, Department of Public Information (Seoul, Korea), Press Release, 28 April 1948, in Fitch Papers, Box 7, Folder “Misc. Materials on Korea.” 44  Jonathan Zimmerman, Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 112. 45  “The Teacher Training Center,” [1948?], in Walter H. Orion Papers [hereafter Orion Papers], Box 1, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA. 46  American Mission to Korea for Teacher Education, “Teacher Training Korean: Seoul, Korea (October to November 1948),” 30, in Orion Papers, Box 1.

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new teaching method being imparted was discussion-based rather than lecture-based learning, the trainees were up close and personal with these Americans. Korean participants’ evaluations indicated heightened awareness and curiosity about American education and positive interaction with American educators. These encounters prepared the way for even greater contact between Koreans and Americans. American educators visiting Korea acted as unofficial advisors to prospective students. One such person was Thomas Benner. Hired during the Korean War first by the United Nations and then by the U.S. Department of State, he believed U.S.-educated persons were essential to Korea’s educational restructuring. In 1953, he personally escorted fourteen Koreans to the United States to begin their studies.47 Visiting professors served as valuable references to their Korean pupils. It was not uncommon for students to make their college selection based on their professors’ home institution. Further, the presence of these American soldiers and educators on the Korean peninsula raised awareness, increased contact, and wedged the “idea” and possibility of study abroad in students’ minds. The U.S.-educated became the greatest source of inspiration and information for others wanting to study abroad. American educational assistance programs and their officers served as initial points of contact, but as more Korean program participants returned, they themselves became the information brokers. Experiences from their study abroad shaped their careers and slipped into social settings as interesting stories that served to remind the listeners of their American education. In the fifties and sixties, how many Korean could talk about seeing a football stadium made entirely of steel? The eyewitness of this incredible “modern monument” had seen it during his study abroad. In our interview, his hushed tone still carried the incredulity he felt when he first saw the sports arena. He marveled, “Americans used steel for sports—not for guns and cannons.”48 Another talked about a nation with all-you-can eat stations in the school cafeterias. The United States he saw and lived in was truly a land of plenty.49 Casual mentions of hobnobbing with future American diplomats or “important Americans” dotted some returnees’ stories. Since many of the returned Koreans entered higher education as professors, they held audiences with students from elite universities. These students in turn saw in study abroad a way to realize the constant social affirmation they received that they would be tomorrow’s leaders. 47  “UNESCO Representative Goes to Korea,” Periscope on Asia, no. 142, September 6, 1951; “Dr. Thomas Benner Has Brought 14 Korean Students to America,” Korean Messenger 2, no. 4 (December 1953): 8, in Mott Papers, Box 23. 48  Interview with Choi. 49  Interview with Han.

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Newspaper articles, biographies, and academic rosters strongly suggest that the overwhelming majority of Koreans studying in the United States had an undergraduate degree from Seoul National University. As the most selective university in Korea, it was a meeting place of high achievers. Moreover, SNU had large clusters of U.S.-educated professors in select departments. The U.S. government had literally paid to place them in these departments by funding their studies in the United States. Such technical assistance had aimed to rehabilitate Korean higher education with superior, American education; ultimately U.S. educational assistance to Korea was a Cold War assignment to get Koreans to think more like Americans. The U.S. government collected many dividends on the dollars it spent educating these professors, since the standard of having a U.S. education began with them and became entrenched through their students. These U.S.-educated professors sent their brightest, most motivated students to the United States. Many U.S.-educated SNU alumni pinpoint their decision to go abroad to their college days. For many of these undergraduates, their publicly revered U.S.-educated professors were constant reminders of what a U.S. education could do for them. Students also gathered and distributed information informally through acquaintances and colleagues. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, they talked incessantly about their desires and plans to go abroad with each other. One professor, himself foreign-educated, declared that the “study abroad fever” raged among Korean students.50 Information also percolated down from more senior students who at one point or another had desired, sought, or even received admission and funding from an American university. Almost all of my interviewees laughingly noted that invariably someone knew someone who was studying in the United States. When the admission letters arrived, no matter how distant or removed the acquaintance, any connection was better than none. In the case of Lee, it was his father’s friend’s daughter’s husband who was studying in the United States. This relative stranger greeted Lee when he arrived at San Francisco Airport in the early 1960s.51 Kwang Ok Kim, on the other hand, contacted her sister, who had recently wed and joined her foreign student husband in Minnesota.52 Choi, who did not return to Korea after his studies, received numerous letters, telegrams, and telephone calls from his relatives in Korea asking for help and sponsorship to the United States.53 50  Kyo-ho Yi, “Dogil yuhak saenghal” [Life of a foreign student in Germany], Kidokkyo Sasang 63 (March 1963): 28. 51  Interview with Hong Yung Lee, September 23, 2008, in Berkeley, California. 52  Interview with Kwang Ok Kim, August 11, 2008, in Seoul, Korea. 53  Interview with Choi.

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Though not specific to Korean students, one U.S. survey on foreign students showed that knowing U.S.-educated countrymen mattered in a student’s decision to go abroad. This investigation commissioned by the U.S. government in the early 1960s stated, “Each time someone decides to study in the United States he reinforces in his community the possibility of others’ doing so.”54 Researchers found that of the nearly fifteen hundred foreign students interviewed, 95 percent knew others in their homelands who had studied in the United States. Roughly two-thirds of this group knew someone who had studied at the same university. Of those pursuing a doctoral degree, 98 percent knew compatriots who had studied in the United States. Anecdotally, Koreans fit this profile. Along with the general foreign student population, the Korean student community also burgeoned, enlarging the contacts available to those wishing to go abroad. Students applied to schools, hoping that other Koreans already there would help them. Koreans arrived at schools like the University of Minnesota, George Peabody College of Teachers, and Washington State University in large numbers when the U.S. government entered into contracts with these schools to train Korean educators. For example, Korean students made up the largest foreign student body at the graduate school at George Peabody College of Teachers during the tenure of the technical assistance project.55 Privately funded students also gravitated toward these schools simply because they had information about them. Once in the United States, many students transferred schools, enlarging the universe of schools being attended by Koreans. This helped not only in getting information about more schools to Korean students but also in raising awareness among admissions officers and registrars at American universities, which led more schools to recognize and accept Korean students. By the late 1950s, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers issued a placement guide for administrators scrambling to place Korean students in the right classes.56 However, the life stories of foreign students make it evident that these administrators relied most heavily on Korean students already present at their schools. 54  Operations and Research Inc., “Foreign Students in the United States: A National Survey” (Washington, DC: U.S. Advisory Commission on International Education and Cultural Affairs [1965?]), 6. 55  For information on Korean foreign students at George Peabody College for Teachers, see Joy Ann Hays, “The Foreign Students in the Graduate School at George Peabody College for Teachers, 1956–1962” (Ph.D. dissertation, George Peabody College for Teachers, 1962). 56  Clara Hankey Koenig, The Republic of Korea: A Guide to the Academic Placement of Students from the Republic of Korea in United States Educational Institutions (Washington, DC: American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, 1958).

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U.S.-bound students also tapped into another source: foreign language institutes and information centers. The United Nations established the Foreign Language Institute (FLI), which catered to diplomats, businessmen and women, and students preparing for their trips abroad.57 Soon after, the U.S. government set up a Language Training Center (LTC) specifically designed for Koreans going to the United States.58 Both institutes served a narrow group of people, those who already had the support to go abroad. Information centers, on the other hand, were open to everyone. American aid, both private and public, held open the doors of the Truman Educational Counseling Center and the United States Information Service (USIS) Center in Seoul. According to an informational pamphlet about the Truman Center, Korean students flocked to its center for information. It reportedly provided guidance to an average of eight thousand to ten thousand students annually from 1952 to 1976.59 That would be nearly a quarter of a million students served, or roughly five times the number of Koreans who actually went to the United States to study in the same time period.60 The USIS Center was the main source of written information for those wishing to go to the United States. Though its utility as the primary reference decreased over time, it occupied an important place, especially for those students who had little personal contact with Americans or U.S.educated Koreans. The following excerpts, the first from the early 1960s and the second from the mid-1960s, testify to the key role of the USIS in students’ college selection. “I went to USIS and picked out three schools: East, West, and someplace in the middle [of the United States]. I ended up picking [the university in the] West because it was in California. See, there was this popular song about California. . .”61 “There was no information at the time. Nothing. [Pause.] Actually I went to USIS and found the addresses of colleges and wrote letters to them. At that time everything was random. . . . We [the students] just went there and checked [for] the addresses of universities. I applied to several.”62 Ironically, these information centers limited the scope of study abroad at the same time they provided more literature, more opportunities, and 57  Charlotte Drummon Meinecke, “Education in Korea” (Seoul: Ministry of Education, 1958), 32, in Mott Papers, Box 8. 58  Herbert Wesley Dodge, “A History of U.S. Assistance to Korean Education: 1953-1966” (Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1971), 259. 59  “The American Kor-Asian Foundation: A Program History, 1952–1976,” in Mott Papers, Box 3. 60  Institute of International Education, Open Doors. 61  Interview with Han. 62  Interview with H. Y. Lee.

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more contacts. Their printed sources presented U.S. education as Koreans’ best, and often their only, option, as the centers’ library collections focused on showcasing American universities and colleges. The Truman Center held as an objective “prepar[ing] young people for advanced higher learning opportunities, particularly in the United States” [emphasis added].63 The USIS Center, a field office of the United States Information Agency, considered these occasions as opportunities in public diplomacy. Student visitors sifted through the glossy catalogs of American universities and colleges. Nearby were mail-order catalogs from popular U.S. stores and carefully selected works translated in Korean at the USIS, all aimed to project a positive image of the United States. As a significant arm of “public diplomacy,” all USIS Centers, including the one in Seoul, aimed to win the hearts and minds of people.64 While the U.S. government projected positive images of an American education, the Korean press lionized U.S.-educated Koreans. Though there were few Koreans earning U.S. degrees, the news articles reported their progress and accomplishments, giving them far greater visibility than their small numbers would suggest. Benedict Anderson’s seminal work Imagined Community (1983) argues that a shared activity, like the ability to read and write the same language, for example, contributes to a common ground, which in turn gives the practitioners a sense of belonging to each other.65 In this regard, these success stories connected these elites to the general public as fellow countrymen and women, whose accomplishments elevated the nation as a whole. The U.S.-educated became objects of pride even for those who did not pursue higher education. In a society where success and status were used interchangeably, the positive newspaper coverage informed citizens that a U.S. education was a marker of status, further popularizing study abroad. In the case of Korean students, newspapers played a significant role in recording and interpreting the accomplishments of the U.S.-educated. These news articles familiarized and shaped the information for the general public. A search for titles of news articles containing keywords relating to American doctoral education from 1945 to 1970 in Chosun Ilbo yielded numerous articles, from the front page to its entertainment section.66 A quick overview of the articles examined reflects the changing composition 63 

“The American Kor-Asian Foundation, Annual Report 74–75,” Mott Papers, Box 6. The USIS Center remained under the U.S. Department of State, along with other cultural and educational exchange functions, until 1978. 65  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). 66  Chosun Ilbo was one of three mainstream newspapers commandeering the Korean newspaper readership then and in the present. 64 

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of U.S.-educated Koreans. Articles from the 1940s focus on U.S. education in terms of how it could help Korea’s postwar educational restructuring. Holders of U.S. doctoral degrees appear in articles as members of the observation tours that spearheaded Korea’s postwar reconstruction. By the late 1950s, the students who had left in the years surrounding the Korean War began receiving their doctoral degrees. Many more Koreans entered and finished their doctoral programs in the following decade. Articles announce their accomplishments and graduations, inclusive of their pictures, family information, translated titles of their dissertations, exact dates of graduation, and their postgraduation job assignments. Then, starting in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, Chosun Ilbo carried fewer graduation announcements. Instead the articles shift to actual experiences of study abroad rather than on degree conferment. This reflected in part the numerical growth of the U.S.-educated, which chiseled away at the novelty of a U.S. education in Korean society. However, these changes do not suggest a decline in the popularity of study abroad. On the contrary, the news articles respond to people’s curiosity and desire to connect more intimately with the scholars by providing greater details of their personal lives. Chosun llbo articles from 1945 to 1970 relating to American doctoral education displayed one or more of the following characteristics. First, they were informational or factual; they announced lectures given by U.S.educated scholars. Second, some articles linked American education, delivered through the U.S.-educated, to Korea’s modernization. Third, these articles became a forum for exhortations or calls for action; U.S. education became the answer or way to change what was not right in Korea. Fourth, the articles served as a platform to discuss the people and culture of the United States. Last, and most significant for this discussion, these articles made for great human interest stories. Together these articles raised public awareness and familiarity with U.S. education and the U.S.-educated, inserting imported American knowledge as part of the collective identity and solution. Factual articles announced the lectures and research trips of Korean professors. At least for those heralded in the newspaper, topics of these talks had no relevance to their academic specialty, but rather derived from their experiences as Koreans living in the United States. For example, Professor Suh from Washington University was a Russian specialist, but his lecture was on Koreans in the United States.67 As the hype about going abroad intensified, the newspaper addressed its readers’ desire for more concrete 67 

“Miguk ŭi Han’gukindŭl: Sŏ Doo-hwan paksa kangyŏnghoe” [Koreans in the United States: A lecture by Professor Suh Doo Hwan], Chosun Ilbo, July 10, 1962, 4.

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information about studying in the United States. Chosun Ilbo invited four recipients of doctoral degrees from American universities and held a press conference.68 Using a question-and-answer format, students explained the changes and opportunities their U.S. education had brought them. Kang, a political scientist, opened the discussion with a topic of great interest— education as a way to personal success. “The more U.S. work experience one has, the higher his salary and his social status [in Korea],” he affirmed. His fellow panelists highlighted other positive aspects of studying abroad, while countering the tacit criticisms circulating in Korea about foreign students. Kim acknowledged that a lengthy study might remove students from Korean politics and problems, and Dong added that yes, they could become more Americanized. But what, they asked, was the problem with working hard, becoming more driven and practical in order to achieve a better life for themselves? To conclude, each panelist gave his practical advice to future foreign students. One respondent implored all wishing to go abroad to learn to type. He said, “This will save you a lot of time.” Another panelist dissuaded students from setting too many goals: getting married, making money, and earning a degree. He felt qualified to state the obvious, “Getting a Ph.D. is difficult.” All discussants mentioned that just coming to the United States did not automatically lead to success. Yet, none refuted the basic assumption that a foreign degree led to a better life. News articles also promoted the link between an advanced U.S. degree, equated with American knowledge, and national success. Chosun Ilbo presented these personal accomplishments as sources of national pride. When a Korean couple received their American doctoral degrees together on the same day, as described in this chapter’s opening, the news article declared that they had elevated “Korea’s prestige in the world.”69 Other articles made sure to celebrate the first Korean accomplishments, noting that Korea too held a place in that particular field in the modern world. A 1960 article declared that a U.S.-educated mechanical engineer was not only the first Korean but also the first Asian to become a member of a prestigious committee.70 Another article celebrated the graduation of the second officially U.S.-trained doctor of dentistry, as shared by the first officially trained dental expert, since Korea’s liberation.71 Also to affirm Korea’s modern advancements, graduation announcements included 68  “Miguk yuhak, ne Paksa hagwi suryonja ŭi chwadam” [Roundtable of four Ph.D. recipients], Chosun Ilbo, July 29, 1965, 5. 69  Chŏn, “Kat’ŭn nal,” 7. 70  “Han’guk i naŭn suŏje konghak paksa haeoe’sŏto Go Kwang-rim” [Korean engineering doctor abroad: Go Kwang-rim], Chosun Ilbo, January 15, 1960, 3. 71  “Miguk sŏ Yi Yŏng-ok ssi ch’ihak paksa hagwi rŭl hoetŭk” [Yi Young-ok earns DDS in the United States], Chosun Ilbo, January 14, 1957, 3.

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transliterated technical, science titles. The titles of these theses sounded completely foreign but impressive, and authenticated the technical knowledge gained. Without a doubt, a foreign education mattered greatly in form. There was a 1969 account of a woman who overcame incredible hardship to earn a doctoral degree from a Korean university. As a sign of her dedication to scholarly pursuit, she vowed that someday she would earn an American doctoral degree.72 The assumption, shared by the Korean public, was that an American education was better. There were also those articles that contrasted U.S. education and the U.S.-educated with Korean education and the Korea-educated. A number of top Korean educators used this public forum to implore Koreans to work harder and to seek practical knowledge. In 1948, Dean Yoon of SNU was amazed at how American students worked endlessly and called Koreans to do likewise.73 Nearly a decade later, O Ch’ŏn-sŏk, a Korean educator who received his Ph.D. under John Dewey at Columbia University, argued that the problem rested on errant educational philosophy that emphasized theory over application. He called for “basic, rudimentary [knowledge] that gives the person the ability to make a product with his hands.”74 A prominent Korean medical researcher explained in 1968 that “the essence of U.S. education is in its undergraduate and graduate school. Their purpose is not about degrees but about willingness to do research [to work] until death.”75 Educators were united in calling for, to borrow the subtitle of a 1968 Chosun Ilbo article, “With a U.S. Ph.D.—A New Tradition.”76 These news articles highlighted the positive aspects of the United States, its people, and institutions. Foremost, the articles asserted, American scholars desired knowledge, not degrees. Students and educational observers witnessed the humility and practicality of American academics and their sincere desire to share their knowledge in such simple terms that even a Korean visitor with limited English could understand. Koreans marveled at the unassuming manner of renowned American scholars. Albert Einstein’s much used, nondescript pen left quite a lasting impression 72  “Kungnae uir ŭi yŏmunhak paksa Yi Hye-suk yŏsa” [Yi Hae-sŭk, the sole Korean Ph.D. in Women’s Studies], Chosun Ilbo, March 20, 1969, 5. 73  “Kwahak chisik i saenghwalhwa: Miguk hak’kye si ch’al Yŭn Il-sŏn paksa indo kwiguk tam” [Everyday science as seen by Dr. Yŭn Il-sŏn during his U.S. tour], Chosun Ilbo, June 16, 1948, 2. 74  “Miguk ŭi kyoyuk kwa uri nara ŭi kyoyuk O Ch’ŏn-sŏk paksa ŭi kwiguk tamesŏ” [American education and Korean education, Dr. O Ch’ŏn-sŏk upon his return from the U.S.], Chosun Ilbo, July 5, 1963, 5. 75  “Miguk ŭi ŭihak’gye” [American medical sciences], Chosun Ilbo, July 25, 1968, 5. 76  “Chŏng So-yŏng chamu ch’agwan, Miguk sŏ paksa hagwittan sechŏnt’ong” [Secretary of State Chŏng So-Yŏng, with a U.S. Ph.D.: A new tradition], Chosun Ilbo, May 25, 1968, 2.

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on one Korean.77 Another Korean educator reported on America’s advanced knowledge and plenty; no universities he toured lacked adequate funding.78 Korean foreign students countered the negative “rumors” of American schools and students with their lived experiences. In 1970, responding to “Korean press coverage of all American youths as rebellious hippies,” a Korean foreign student bristled, “My [fellow Korean] classmates study arduously. It’s normal to study until three in the morning and a lot of Americans do the same.”79 These newspaper selections framed the image of United States, as it related to its education, in a positive light, chasing away any shadows on hallowed academic grounds. Aimed for the general public, newspapers embraced Korean foreign students as protagonists of human interest stories. They featured the personal lives of these scholars as success cases, often emphasizing the personal difficulties they endured and overcame. Articles frequently honed in on their personal lives while relegating information about their academic expertise to a sentence or two. There were straightforward announcements listing the “vitals” such as their name, age, date of graduation, place and degree earned, and thesis title. These tended to be tucked away in the “who’s who” section of the newspaper at the bottom of the page, usually clustered with news about which government appointees had filled, left, and resigned from their posts. More often than not, articles on Korean students were displayed prominently with far more specific details. Those U.S.-educated students who received the most attention served as inspirations. Numerous articles showcased them as ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary feats. These stories helped balance their peculiar position in Korean society as elites with humble roots. The key to this conversion, of course, was the U.S. education. Though the U.S.-educated comprised a small, elite group, whenever possible the news coverage remarked on their “common” origins. The longest articles usually covered persons from disadvantaged backgrounds, dramatizing the hardship they experienced. A Korean bachelor made his country proud by earning a Ph.D. at twenty-two years of age. Even more noteworthy, he had received no help from his parents. He lectured and tutored on the side to cover his tuition and living expenses.80 Another story 77 

“Kwahak chisik,” 2. “Miguk hak’gye rŭl sich’al han Yi Sung-nyŏng paksa kwiguk” [Observations on the U.S. educational system, Dr. Yi Sung-Nyŏng upon his return from the United States], Chosun Ilbo, June 13, 1963, 5. 79  “Mo Hye-jŏng yŏsa, mullihak paksa rŭl anko Miguk sŏ toraon” [Dr. Mo Hye-jŏng’s return with a U.S. Ph.D.], Chosun Ilbo, September 6, 1970, 5. 80  “Miguksŏ Ch’ŏrhaik paksa 22: se ŭi Pak Sam-yŏl keun” [An American Ph.D. at 22 years of age: Pak Sam-yul], Chosun Ilbo, July 14, 1959, 3. 78 

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told of a student skipping meals just to make ends meet, because he had left Korea with only enough money to cover his trans-Pacific voyage.81 The image being created was that an American education was available to students from all walks of life, to all who were extraordinarily intelligent and resourceful. The trickle of Korean students to the United States became a flood as the U.S. government and individual Americans stepped into the newly independent country and into the lives of its citizens. An unplanned result of U.S. assistance to Korea following World War II was its contribution to the emergence of a culture of migration and of seeking public and private solutions abroad. All the actors involved acted out of their own self-interest and desires within the shared platform of Cold War history. This chapter has discussed how the Korean government and individual Koreans saw in the United States a reflection of what they hoped to achieve, and seized the opportunity presented to them. Just as large-scale technical and development funding from the U.S. government altered the Korean landscape, scholarship and sponsorships influenced individual outlooks and worldviews. Korean international students were agents of change. They asserted a disproportionate level of influence on Korean civil society, government, and other Koreans. They enjoyed near complete social approval in their choice to pursue their dreams in the United States. In the time period examined, U.S.-educated persons as a group contributed to the positive image of the United States as a land of opportunities abounding with paths to “success.” Moreover, this positive perception of the United States implied that Koreans could be a part of its plenty. And with it, a culture of respect and desire for study abroad, a culture of seeking solutions abroad, a culture of migration emerged. The increasing visibility of the U.S.-educated and the growing availability of information about study abroad worked in tandem to push an ever-increasing number of Koreans to the United States.

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SIX

Homes on the Border Ethnicity, Identity, and Everyday Space in Yanbian

YISHI LIU

The form of rural Korean Chinese dwellings has changed in response to deep social and political fluctuations since the arrival of Korean migrants in Yanbian in the middle of the nineteenth century. I argue that housing construction practices have helped to continually reinforce ethnic Korean identity. By examining state policies in connection with Korean Chinese rural houses in Yanbian, this study affirms the role of the state in constructing ethnic identity.1 Oriented toward China’s frontier, adjacent to North Korea and Russia, Yanbian Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture is the largest administrative entity in Jilin Province. Subdivided into six municipalities, the prefecture is presently home to 806,000 Koreans.2 Koreans began migrating to this region in the late nineteenth century, due to nationwide famine in the 1  A portion of this paper appeared as a field report in Traditional Dwelling and Settlement Review Fall 2009), under the title “Constructing Ethnic Identity: Making and Remaking of Rural Korean Chinese Houses in Yanbian, 1881–2008.” The initial research for this paper was made possible by a grant from the Academy of Korea Studies (AKS) in Seoul and the Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS) of the University of California at Berkeley. The author acknowledges and appreciates AKS support and other fellowships from IEAS. The author took all the pictures and redrew the surveying sketches, except where sources are specified. 2  According to a 2002 provincial survey, this area covers approximately 42,700 square kilometers. The prefecture consists of six municipalities: Yanji, Longjing, Helong, Tumen, Dunhua, and Hunchun; and two counties, Antu and Wangqing. For more details on the distribution of the Korean minority in China, see Zaixian Zhu, “Dui Zhongguo Chaoxianzu ren kou fen bu yu te dian ji qi fa zhan qu shi de fen xi” [Analysis of the distribution of the population and characteristics of China’s Korean minority], in Chaoxianzu yanjiu luncong [Research Series on the Korean minority], ed. Research Centre on Nationalities of Yanbian University, vol. 5 (Yanji: Yanbian University Press, 2001), 223–49.

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Korean peninsula. Though Yanbian was officially designated an autonomous prefecture in 1952, its status as a formal administrative region can be traced to the late Qing dynasty. The legalization of the residency of Korean immigrants in Yanbian in 1881 marked a crucial moment in the agrarian history of Manchuria. Since then, Korean Chinese in Yanbian have experienced social and economic change under political regimes with very different ethnic policies. The Korean minority is culturally quite distinct from any other group in China. Unlike many minorities, which came under Chinese rule through the expansion of the Qing state, ethnic Koreans entered Chinese territory as immigrants. As such, they naturally transmitted to Manchuria peninsular cultural practices that regulated most of life, including language, religion, furnishings, dress, hairstyles, music, art, food habits, festivals, temporal organizations, and not least, the built form. Altogether these practices defined the group, gave it identity, and contained the essentials. In response to various political pressures, Korean Chinese were forced to change many aspects of their culture (lifestyle, behaviors, social structures, and so on); under other circumstances, they made changes on their own. I will argue in the next pages that although built form is a small part of culture, particular physical elements play a central role in the success of Korean Chinese as an ethnic minority in the border region in Manchuria. Since cultures change, there is the question of how long a group maintains its identity, that is, remains recognizable both to itself and to others as being distinct, since it takes agreement by both parties to maintain group boundaries. Moreover, the rate of change of cultural variables is all the same. In this connection, I propose that the distinction between the core of culture (which changes little and slowly) and its periphery (which changes quickly) is potentially useful for the analysis of built form in relation to ethnic identity, particularly in situations of rapid culture change. The core elements, such the large heatable bed (gudul) and the lifestyle it reflects in this case study, manage to maintain the ethnic distinctiveness of the group. By the time Koreans began migrating in large numbers to Yanbian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Korea had already been molded as a “nation” in the modern sense. As a result, Koreans consciously maintained certain ethnic characteristics. Scholars have agreed that ethnicity is not a natural commodity, a simple by-product of descent, culture, and genetic transmission. Instead, they have emphasized its socially constructed aspects, that is, the ways in which racial boundaries, identities, and cultures are negotiated, defined, and transformed through social interaction inside and outside of ethnic communities.3 The (re)con3 

On the conceptualization of ethnicity and its social constructs, see, for example, M.

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struction of ethnic identity by a minority group can thus be understood as a continuous process, in conversation with internal movements towards self-definition, as well as external forces, such as labeling by the state and other outsiders. Ethnic boundaries, identities, and cultures are in many ways “politically constructed”—negotiated, defined, and produced by political policies and institutions.4 Recent borderlands and ethnic studies scholars have unraveled the issue of ethnicity on a global scale in ways that challenge conventional notions of the political in late modernity, particularly in the context of Southeast Asia, where the sovereignty of the state on the frontier is marginal and sometimes even abandoned.5 In the age of globalization, the issue of maintaining ethnic identity especially as manifested in built form has become more complicated. In the traditional situation, designers were in many cases the users themselves, and they were members of the same group. Moreover, clients and users were often the same. At present, neither of these conditions is valid: many environments that in the past were vernacular are now being professionally designed and increasingly standardized; the clients, mainly the state in the case of rebuilding Korean Chinese villages in Yanbian, are rarely users and have very different views of life. By examining contemporary ethnic policies in relation to rebuilding ethnic houses in Yanbian, I argue in this chapter that the nation-state was and remains the dominant institution in society to effectively regulate and shape the ethnic boundaries and identity of Korean Chinese. Connecting the material development of the rural Korean Chinese house to everchanging Chinese ethnic and frontier policies in Yanbian, I argue that Chinese ethnic policies have been instrumental in the process of (re)constructing minority identity. Through the study of the physical environment, I situate architecture within the rubric of ethnic identity, modernity, and globality, and reaffirm the strong role of the Chinese state in identity formation. Korean Chinese homes existed not only in their physical and spatial form but also as a state of mind. Due to the location of Yanbian on a Spector and J. Kitsuse, Constructing Social Problems (New York: Aldine, 1997); and J. Holstein and G. Miller, eds., Perspectives on Social Problems: Reconsidering Social Constructionism, vol. 5 (New York: Aldine, 1993). For a comprehensive literature review of ethnic studies, refer to J. Nagel, “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture,” Social Problems 4, no. 1 (1994): 152–76. 4  J. Nagel, “The Political Construction of Ethnicity,” in Competitive Ethnic Relations, eds. S. Olzak and J. Nagel (New York: Academic Press, 1986), 93–112. 5  L. Ross, G. Vos, T. Tsuda, eds., Ethnic Identity: Problems and Prospects for the Twenty-First Century (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2006); and M. Baud, and W. van Schendel, “Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 211–24.

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geographical border, “a region where two different civilizations face each other and overlap,” interaction with other ethnic groups and everyday, face-to-face accommodations were inevitable.6 Though ethnic Koreans retained many traditional architectural features, they also adapted to new geographical, cultural, and human surroundings. Once settled in Yanbian, ethnic Koreans created a new, hybrid housing form that might be termed Korean Chinese “overlap” architecture. Comparing housing plans in the Korean peninsula with those in Yanbian reveals both initial differences and change over time. The rural house of Korean Chinese was a literal realm of resistance against attempts to assimilate the Koreans. Even under the more tolerant ethnic policies of the Chinese Communist Party after 1949, the distinctive hybrid forms of Korean Chinese houses have endured massive political upheavals and the homogenizing force of globalization. In summary, both Sinicization and globalization have failed to assimilate and eliminate the Korean Chinese identity in Yanbian. In order to discern the impact of different ethnic policies on material culture, a long historical lens, covering several political regimes, is required. I refer to primary and secondary sources on Chinese ethnic policies of different time periods, and incorporate the findings of my analysis of selected ethnic Korean rural houses accordingly. I examine the rhetoric and intentions of central and local governments, as well as the on-the-ground social realities they targeted, including household consumer goods, family structure, the allocation of rooms for specific domestic functions and activities, and the changing layout of space. In most traditional rural houses, “designers were either the users themselves or designers and clients typically shared the same culture.”7 In the case of Yanbian, architects and inhabitants were members of the same group, that is, local Korean Chinese farmers. As an ethnic minority, this agricultural people stood outside the state apparatus, and the way they built their homes revealed the repercussions of confrontation, negotiation, and resistance to state ethnic policies. To demonstrate the impact of political measures on the Korean Chinese identity in terms of dwelling forms, I situate changes in architecture within a chronology of Chinese politics from the late Qing period to the present.8 6  S. R. Ross, “Foreword,” in S. R. Ross, ed., Views across the Border: The United States and Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), xii. 7  A. Rapoport, “Culture and Built Form: A Reconsideration,” in Amos Rapoport, Thirty Three Papers in Environment-Behaviour Research (Newcastle: Urban International Press, 1990). 8  The Korean immigrants were skilled in rice cultivation. In 1908, a Qing official wrote in a famous report on immigrant issues in the frontier region, “Currently, the number of Korean immigrants is approximately one hundred thousand, of whom most are farmers.” See

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Ethnic and frontier policies in Yanbian can be roughly periodized into several phases: assimilation of the Koreans as Chinese under the Qing (1881–1911), discrimination under warlord government (1912–31), assimilation as Japanese under Japanese administration (1931–45), communism under Mao (1948–78), the “open-door” policy of Deng Xiaoping (beginning in 1978), and finally, public support for minority rights since 2001. To better understand continuity and change in Yanbian’s rural homes in relation to regime shift, I look back at the early history of Korean migration to Manchuria, and the housing forms brought to Yanbian from the Korean peninsula. It is to this specific history that I now turn. The Legalization of Residency in 1881 and the Formation of Ethnic Korean Communities in Yanbian Long before the emergence of modern nation-states, migration linked neighboring China and Korea. Korean migrations were noted in written records well before the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) of the Manchus.9 In the seventeenth century, the Manchu emperors restricted all ethnic groups other than Manchus from entering Manchuria, in order to preserve the traditions of their homeland apart from the Han Chinese life and culture. The vast virgin land of Manchuria had been reserved for Manchus and their allies (Mongols) in case they had to retreat from the Middle Kingdom. Despite official bans on settlement by both the Chinese and Korean governments, Koreans continually crossed the border to Yanbian to cultivate wet rice and harvest ginseng.10 Prior to the 1880s, Koreans mainly came to Manchuria as short-term migrants, and did not build permanent homes for fear of discovery by local officials.11 Wu Luzhen, Yanji bian wu bao gao [The report on the border affairs in Yanbian], in Changbai Congshu I, ed. Li Shutian (Changchun: Jilin Historical and Cultural Materials Press, 1986), 144. Another gazetteer, complied during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, noted, “Wet rice agriculture in Jilin Province became prosperous upon the arrival of the Korean immigrants . . . most of whom cultivated wet rice fields in Yanbian.” See Liu Shuang, Jilin xin zhi [New Gazetteer of Jilin], published in 1934, in Changbai Congshu IV, ed. Li Shutian (Changchun: Jilin Historical and Cultural Materials Press, 1991), 170. 9  Yuanshi Jin, “The History of Korean Immigration into Manchuria,” Journal of Yanbian University (Social Science), no. 3 (1996). The majority of the Korean population in pre-nineteenth century China assimilated into Chinese society. 10  During the early and high Qing years, Koreans moved to Yanbian and built huts, which attracted the attention of both the Korean and Chinese governments. Qing Emperors Kangxi, Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang ordered Korean huts burned and illegal Korean bordercrossers expelled. See Institute of Modern History of Central Academy, eds., Qing ji zhong ri han guan xi shi liao [Foreign relations between China, Japan, and Korea in the Qing dynasty] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History of Central Academy Press, 1972). 11  It should be noted that the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) of Korea was under Qing suzer-

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At the end of the nineteenth century, however, in the face of increasing Russian (and later Japanese) aggression in Manchuria, the Manchus modified their exclusion policy, recruiting Chinese immigrants from inland provinces such as Shandong and Hebei to cultivate the sparsely populated region. Only after the legalization of residency in 1881 did Koreans start to build houses on their newly acquired land.12 The opening of the frontier, and Japan’s takeover of Korea (first as a protectorate in 1905 and then as a formal colony in 1910), instigated new waves of Korean immigration into Yanbian. Yanbian was also opened to Han Chinese settlers, though they largely eschewed the area due to its remoteness, compounded by inadequate transportation. Over the next few years, Koreans came to dominate the ranks of migrants to the region. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the total population of Yanbian had reached about 130,000, among whom 100,000 were Koreans.13 The acceleration of Korean immigration into Yanbian, the meeting point of the Russian, Korean, and Chinese frontiers, greatly troubled the Qing court. While settlement helped to populate the frontier, immigration nevertheless had to be controlled to forestall the growing influence of the Russians and Japanese in Korea. In the last years of the Qing, more and more Koreans moved to China to flee Japanese oppression or economic hardship. Other migrants used China as a base for organizing antiJapanese resistance. The first Korean immigrants to Yanbian, mostly farmers, brought with them construction traditions and ideas from the Korean peninsula. They settled in villages, normally consisting of no more than twenty immigrant households with a common surname. By 1900, Yanbian contained more than three hundred of these villages, collectively establishing a sizable Korean community.14 Between 1881 and 1931, the number of Koreans in Yanbian ainty until 1895, when China was defeated in the Sino-Japanese War. The influence of the Qing peaked in 1882 in the aftermath of a palace revolution in Korea. The countries shared certain political features, such as Confucian ideology, a bureaucratic system, etc. Traditionally, Koreans came to Yanbian as short-term economic migrants, returning seasonally to the Korean Peninsula. For the most part, they did not form permanent villages until the 1890s. See Chunshan Jin, Yanbian di qu chaoxian zu she hui de xing cheng yan jiu [A study of Korean communities in Yanbian] (Changchun: Changchun People’s Press, 2001), chapter 2, “Formation of Korean Villages in Late Qing,” 59–97. 12  Koreans at that time used thin wood rods to support the walls, and covered the roof with thatch. See Hunchun fu du tong ya men dang an xuan bian II [Selected archives of the Hunchun vice-commenter-in-chief] (Changchun: Jilin Literature and History Press, 1991), 322–33. 13  Jin, A Study of Korean Communities in Yanbian, 92. 14  Huishu Shen, Zhongguo Chaoxianzu ju luo di ming yu ren kou fen bu [Distribution and names of locations of Korean-Chinese communities] (Yanji: Yanbian University Press, 1992), 32–39.

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Size of Population

1910

202,070

1912

238,403

1914

271,388

1916

328,288

1918

361,772

1920

459,427

1922

515,865

1924

531,857

1926

542,185

1928

577,052

1930

607,119

Note: In 1930, Korean immigrants in Yanbian accounted for 63 percent of all Korean immigrants in Manchuria. Source: Chunshan Jin, A Study of Korean Communities in Yanbian (Changchun: Changchun People’s Press, 2001), 169.

increased from about 10,000, to a more precise count of 396,850 (table 1). On the eve of Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Korean population had reached 635,000 people, representing 74 percent of the residents of Yanbian.15 The migration of Koreans to Yanbian in the late nineteenth century was accompanied by the transmission of architectural ideas and construction techniques from the peninsula. Feng shui and Confucianism served as guiding principles for the siting and spatial organization of traditional houses.16 The homes of well-to-do people were generally made of adobe brick, with an inward courtyard surrounded by colonnades and open rooms. A strong hierarchy of visual and mental privacy was enhanced by thresholds, gates, screens, and walls, marking the boundaries between 15  Sébastien Colin, “A border opening onto numerous geopolitical issues,” China Perspective 4 (2006). 16  Feng shui is a traditional art and philosophy that deals with the evaluation of landscapes and geographic sites. Feng shui originated in China and spread to the Korean peninsula. For more information on how feng shui was used to select sites for Korean villages, see Sanghae Lee, “Siting and General Organization of Traditional Korean Settlements,” in Dwellings, Settlements and Tradition: Cross-Cultural Tradition, eds. J. Bourdier and N. Al-Sayyad (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989); see also Sun-young Rieh, “Boundary and Sense of Place in Traditional Korean Dwelling,” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 3, no. 2 (2003): 62–79.

Figure. 1. Photo of tiled-roof and thatched-roof homes in a Korean village. Source: Hong-Seok Oh, Traditional Korean Villages (Seoul: Ewha Womans University Press, 2009), 133.

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outside and inside, and male and female spaces. Unlike the simple intersections of four sloping surfaces commonly used in northern Chinese houses, a distinctive vertical plane was normally inserted on both ends of the massive hipped roofs of grey or dark blue tile (figure 1). Rural houses, on the other hand, were made of mud walls with plaster surfaces, and roofs were often covered with mud and thick thatch. Humble thatched dwellings of this sort did not include a formal courtyard, and space was not partitioned by gender, as in homes owned by the wealthy. Nonetheless, a hierarchy of privacy may still be discerned in planning. Colonnades with deep eaves played a crucial role in the movement from one room to another, as there was no opening between rooms, and doors were often open to the colonnade floor outside the room. The homes of modest, self-supporting farmers, even those large enough to comprise several buildings, were usually covered by thatched roofs. Rice, which grows to a height of around one meter, provided straw for thatch as well as food for human consumption. In its raw state, however, the straw could be bound together for roofing in a limited number of ways, restricted further by government injunctions. As a result of these constraints, most thatched roofs were hipped, with four sloping sides. Materials such as tiles or straw not only influenced the shape of the roof but also reflected the economic circumstances of the household. The same may be said of the walls around the house and the front gate. Thatchedroof houses were commonly enclosed by trees, and featured gates made of bush clover. In both tiled-roof homes and less formal thatched-roof homes, there was little distinction between windows and doors. Often, a single opening functioned as both door and window, allowing the passage of people, sunlight, and air. The dual function of the aperture was reflected in its name, changmun, comprised of the word for window, chang, and door, mun (figure 2) In traditional Korean aesthetics, distinguishing each and every object was unnecessary, as long as convenience was met. The window-door units on elevation unified the interior and exterior. Windows naturally reflected indoor life, or, conversely, were formed as a result of indoor life projecting itself outward. Inhabitants often used windows as a metaphor to describe familial relationships, highlighting their close connection with the interior life of the household, and the oneness of the indoor-outdoor. The most striking feature of the traditional Korean house was the flat heatable bed (Korean, ondol; Chinese, kang; Korean Chinese, gudul). Built of brick or thin stone slabs, the surface of the ondol was often covered with wooden boards or fiberboard, and decorated with yellow lacquer polish. The ondol was, and remains, the center of everyday domestic life, including activities such as eating, playing, lounging, entertaining, etc. The ondol

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Figure 2: The window-door system on the elevation. Photo taken by the author, June 2008.

also defined the interior layout of the house. Koreans set the elevation of the ceiling as the combined height of a man sitting on the ondol and standing, which explains why Korean dwellings looked lower than Chinese homes, in which inhabitants customarily sat on chairs. Manchu, Han, and Korean Chinese housing cultures significantly influenced each other, developing jointly in sophistication. Continuously interacting with Han Chinese and others, Koreans in Yanbian evolved dwellings and an ethnic identity that differed significantly from those of their peninsular forebears. Ethnic Conflict and Contest in Daily Space: 1881–1948 In the final years of the Qing dynasty, Koreans moved to Yanbian in increasing numbers, either to flee Japanese rule and economic hardship, or to use China as a base for anti-Japanese resistance movements.17 Though 17  In 1910, resident ethnic Koreans in Yanbian totaled 202,070; by 1915, the population had risen to 282,070; in 1920, to 459,427; and in 1930, to 607,119. Jin, A Study of Korean Communities in Yanbian, table 4-1, p. 169.

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immigrant Koreans played a crucial role in local agriculture and the taming of the frontier, Yanbian officials remained suspicious of the migrants. In a 1907 report to Beijing, a Chinese official wrote, Koreans who have moved here should obey the regulations of our country, and abandon their old customs. [However,] local officials failed to force them to cut hair and change their style of dress; as a result, Korean immigrants here look alien to us. . . . There are more than 50,000 Koreans in Yanbian, while Chinese are only one-fourth of that number. The region has now become almost a Korean colony.18

From 1881, adopting Chinese dress, hairstyles, and nationality were prerequisites for the legal ownership of land in Yanbian (ti fa ru ji, changing one’s hairstyle for naturalization).19 In 1910, one year before the fall of the Qing, the government issued its “Regulations for the Naturalization of Immigrant Koreans.” The law intended to segregate Koreans from Chinese for the sake of surveillance, and, more importantly, “to convert the temperament of Korean people, make them true Chinese, and eventually realize ethnic assimilation.”20 Despite these ambitions, Koreans owned 55 percent of the land in Yanbian under cultivation in 1929.21 Mistrust between local Chinese and immigrant Koreans increased when Japan annexed Korea in 1910, and claimed all ethnic Koreans as Japanese citizens. The presence of Koreans in Manchuria allowed Japanese police to extend their jurisdiction, on the pretext of protecting Korean farmers, “the best Japanese subjects,” while suppressing the anti-Japanese movements of recalcitrant subjects. Such rhetoric alarmed the Chinese, who believed that “behind the Koreans were the Japanese, and on the pretext of protecting the Koreans, the Japanese police made inroads into the hinterland of Manchuria.” Korean settlers in Manchuria were seen by the Chinese as 18  For this quote from Wu Luzhen, “Yanji bian wu bao gao” [Frontier affairs in Yanji] to the central government, see Jin, A Study of Korean Communities in Yanbian, chapter 2, “Formation of Korean Villages in the Late Qing,” 93. 19  After Japan’s 1910 annexation of Korea, China required the Koreans to naturalize as Chinese. This measure was a response to fears that Japan might deploy the Koreans, whom it considered imperial subjects, to claim additional territory. For more details on the problems of Korean citizenship in Manchuria, see Lanying Zhao, “Dongbei Chaoxian yi min jing ji yu wen hua kao cha” [A study on economy and culture of immigrant Korean communities in Manchuria, 1840–1945], Northeast Asia Forum 13, no. 5 (2004). 20  See Jin, A Study of Korean Communities in Yanbian, chapter 2, “Formation of Korean Villages in the Late Qing,” and chapter 5, “Duality of Citizenship and Property Ownership,” 194–212. After the Japanese annexation of Korea, larger numbers of Koreans moved to China. Some merely fled Japanese rule or economic hardship, while others intended to use China as a base for anti-Japanese resistance. 21  H. K. Lee, “Korean Migrants in Manchuria,” Geographical Review 22, no. 2, (1932): 196–204.

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pioneers of the Japanese invasion; thus the Chinese tightened restrictions on migrant tenancy and residency rights.22 Fearing increasing Japanese encroachments and the possibility of an imperialist conspiracy between ethnic Koreans and Japanese in Manchuria, the successive warlord governments of Zhang Zuolin (1875–1928) and his son, Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001) intensified pressure on Koreans to assimilate as Chinese. The warlords also expelled a few Koreans from Yanbian.23 Within China’s anti-Japanese movement, the drive to exclude Koreans gave birth to a chain of rivalries and resentments among the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, in turn exacerbating the Sino-Japanese struggle over the exercise of police authority. As a result, numerous disputes between Chinese and Manchurian Koreans regarding land tenure flared up between 1928 and 1930. The most significant of these conflicts was the Wanbaoshan Incident, which erupted near Changchun between May and July 1931, just a few months before the Mukden Incident of September 18 that resulted in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in its entirety.24 Following the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932, Koreans, as Japanese citizens, enjoyed a higher status than Han Chinese, but were prohibited from using their own language, a measure intended to identify them more closely with the imperialists. Housing form and domestic space served as an arena for Korean Chinese to survive as an ethnic group in Manchuria and transmit idiosyncratic lifestyles and cultural values to younger generations, from the late Qing through the Japanese colonial regime. As Rapoport has noted, values are frequently embodied in images such as housing form, and they result in particular lifestyles, the ways in which people characteristically make choices about how to behave, what roles to play, and so on.25 Today, the single-story dwellings of the ethnic Korean minority in small villages in the Yanbian still remain quite distinctive from Han dwellings. Like homes in the Korean peninsula, Chinese Korean rural houses divide space by light wooden sliding screens that can be opened and closed according to need. Latticed door panels allow summertime ventilation. From the outside, windows and doors are difficult to distinguish from 22  Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, trans. Joshua Fogel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 22–24. 23  On expulsion policies in Yanbian before 1931, see Jin, A Study of Korean Communities in Yanbian, chapter 6, “Chinese Expulsion Policies and Responses by Korean Communities,” 244–53. 24  For more details on the Wanbaoshan Incident, see Yu Jing, “The Beginning and End of the Wanbaoshan Incident,” in The History of Changchun (Changchun: Changchun Press, 2001), 304–77. 25  A. Rapoport, “Culture and Built Form.”

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Figure 3: The kang in a Manchu house (left) and in a Han Chinese house (middle), and the gudul in a Korean Chinese house (right). Plan drawn by the author.

each other—a particularity quite unimaginable in a Han Chinese house. Korean Chinese houses often have four bays, which violates the Han stipulation of an odd number of bays. Ethnic Koreans in Yanbian also continue to place a high priority on the gudul, which is used as a multipurpose room.26 Like Han Chinese and Manchu houses, Korean-style dwellings also include a heatable bed, but those in the latter tend to be larger in size and connected to a more powerful stove. In a Manchu house, the kang has a U-shape, which allows the placement of a shrine tablet on the west wall and leaves room in the center for movement. The Han Chinese kang is most commonly I- or L-shaped, to leave space for chairs, tables, and other furniture. Activities on the kang and activities on the floor are equally important. The Korean Chinese gudul, on the other hand, is the setting of everyday life. Korean Chinese maintain a “floor sitting culture,” as opposed to a “chair sitting culture” (figure 3). Another unique aspect of Korean Chinese houses is the layout of the kitchen. The location of the kitchen within the home is closely related to lifestyle. In Manchu and Han Chinese houses, the kitchen occupies one side of the central bay, facing the entrance, and separated from the kang and other rooms by partition walls. A Korean Chinese kitchen, however, is next to the wide gudul. While Han and Manchu Chinese kitchens are generally installed on the ground level, those in Korean houses are built slightly below the ground (figure 4). Since the gudul is comparatively large, 26  Some scholars, including Koreans, write the word also as “gudle.” Ondol, a word of Chinese origin, denotes a system; gudul (a pure Korean word), denotes a material (stone). I thank Professor Song Sany-yong for raising this point.

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Figure 4: Three fire holes and fire pit in the kitchen of a Korean Chinese house in Lutian Village. Photo taken by the author, June 2008.

Korean Chinese houses have three fire holes (one more than Han Chinese and Manchu houses). Multiple flues are embedded under the floor and fed directly by fires in the kitchen stove. The proximity of the kitchen and the living room, with its gudul, enables men and women to talk during cooking, a custom unique to the Korean way of life. The larger stove keeps the gudul at a comfortable temperature and makes an insulating partition unnecessary (figure 5). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Koreans, though forced to change or abandon many elements of their culture, such as clothing and hairstyles, consciously organized to promote education and maintain their own language, with the aim of protecting their ethnic

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Figure 5: Section of a Korean Chinese house showing the construction of roof and the gudul. Source: Redrawn from Y. Zhang, Jilin min ju [Vernacular house in Jilin] (Beijing: Beijing Architectural Industry Press, 1985), 13.

identity and autonomy.27 Domestic architecture, too, served as a repository of tradition beyond the reach of mistrustful magistrates. As the local government was neither able to provide any economic aid to Koreans nor willing to regulate building forms (until very recently), Korean immigrant peasants were free to build their houses according to peninsular custom. “Hybridity,” one of the most disputed terms in postcolonial studies, commonly refers to “the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization.”28 Nezar Al-Sayyad considers hybridity the result of fundamental interaction among parties with concretely differing positions of power, who must nevertheless cohabit.29 Hybridity, a process within which elements encounter and transform each other rather than simply coexisting, has the potential to evoke resistance where the colonial subject hybridizes and the dominant power fails. In the next few pages, I examine the hybrid nature of the Korean Chinese house and the changing meanings attached to it over time. Hybridity in ethnic Korean houses served as a form of resistance to assimilation and colonization policies under the Qing and the Japanese. 27  The associations include private schools for young children, such as Dacheng Middle School. See Shoushan Qian, “Chaoxianzu feng su lei xing ji qi feng bu qu yu” [Distribution of Korean-Chinese customs], China’s Borderland History and Geography Studies 36, no. 2 (2000). 28  B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2003), 118. 29  N. Al-Sayyad, “Preface,” in Hybrid Urbanism, ed. N. Al-Sayyad (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 9.

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Figure 6: Plans of the prototypes of a typical folk house in the north of the Korean peninsula, surveyed by Yoshiyuki Iwatsuki in 1924. Source: Shiro Sasaki, “Research Trends Geographical Studies on Korean Housing,” Collection of International Studies at Utsunomiya University, no. 12 (2006): 3.

Figure 7: The typical plan of Korean Chinese houses in Yanbian, surveyed in 1953. Note the variations and modifications from figure 6. Source: Redrawn from Y. Zhang, Jilin min ju [Vernacular house in Jilin] (Beijing: Beijing Architectural Industry Press, 1985), 23.

However, Yanbian also shows that hybridity cannot be always seen as counterhegemonic or oppositional vis-à-vis the state, and reading ethnic Korean homes as “hybrids” is inseparable from China’s ethnic policies and the migrants’ perception of their own identity. Several features reveal the hybrid nature of Korean Chinese rural houses. Floor plans of Korean homes underwent a number of modifications upon construction in Manchuria (see figures 6 and 7).30 The kitchen was 30 

In 1924, Yoshiyuki Iwatsuki drew prototypes of Korean folk houses as part of a larger study of Korean domestic architecture in Manchuria. He classified Korean folk houses into five types according to geographical division. See Shiro Sasaki, “Dai ni ji se kai i zen no ho bun bun hen ni mi ru kan min ka no chi ri gaku teki hen kyo no ni seki” [Research trends

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Figure 8: A Korean Chinese chimney (Lutian Village) is built as a diminutive tower with a square vertical wooden pipe, placed beyond the endwall of the house. Photo taken by the author, June 2008.

further compartmentalized, and more space was allotted for cowsheds and storage, to reflect the demands of rice cultivation. Homes also came to contain more bedrooms, suggesting an increase in family size. An external chimney became a visual marker of Korean dwellings. In contrast to traditional Korean houses, chimneys in Korean Chinese homes are built as a diminutive tower, with a brick base and a square vertical wooden or adobe pipe. They are placed beyond an endwall instead of in the center of the roof (as shown in figure 8). Chimneys typically protrude well above the in geographical studies on Korean housing], Collection of International Studies at Utsunomiya University, no. 12 (2006), 1–12.

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ridgeline in order to lessen the danger of igniting the thatch. This adaptation may be found in Manchu houses dating back to the prehistoric era.31 Korean rhythms of everyday life also changed subtly in the early stages of mass migration to Yanbian. In the Korean peninsula, the horizontality of a rural dwelling was often accentuated by a colonnaded façade that shielded an elevated wooden platform, marking a transitional space between outside and inside. Raised some forty centimeters above the foundation stones, the colonnaded wooden platform was a functional space in which household members and visitors removed their shoes before entering and sitting on the gudul inside. Due to the harsh Manchurian winters, however, Korean Chinese preferred to take off their shoes inside the house. As a result, the external colonnaded floor became more decorative than functional, and finally disappeared from many recently built and rebuilt houses. Changcai Village of Longjing City, one of the six municipalities of Yanbian Prefecture, is home to approximately one hundred Korean Chinese households, with a total population of 323 people. Changcai was one of the first villages established in the 1880s by immigrant Koreans from Hamgyŏngdo. In this village, I found Korean Chinese houses with many variations on Iwatsuki’s prototypes (see figure 6). In both tiled-roof and thatched-roof houses, the colonnaded floor is minimized or absent completely. Tiled-roof houses originally featured a full external colonnaded floor, but later the main gudul room and kitchen expanded to bring this feature into the interior of the house. In typical thatched-roof houses, the colonnaded floor is entirely merged with the gudul room, allowing both family members and visitors to take off their shoes inside the house. In villages where Koreans and Chinese live together, L-shaped and even Ishaped kang have come into use for pragmatic reasons.32 Korean Chinese people changed their lifestyle to accommodate specific natural and cultural circumstances of Yanbian (figures 9 and 10). The royal record of the Chosun dynasty, which ruled the Korean peninsula from 1392–1910, indicates that the ondol was used to prevent illness.33 More than a simple standard feature of traditional Korean houses, the subfloor heating system was a key determinant and site of everyday health. When Koreans fled famine at home to cultivate wet rice in Yanbian, they used the gudul to keep the body warm during the long, severe Manchurian 31 

Dawei Tang, “Dongbei Fushun manzu min ju de te se” [Characteristics of Manchu houses in Fushun, Manchuria], “Journal of Liaoning Institute of Technology 7, no. 4 (August 2005). 32  Dongxun Jin, “Chaoxianze de kang wen hua ji qi wen hua chuan cheng,” Journal of Yanbian University (Social Science) 37, no. 2. (June 2004). 33  Kim June Bong, “The Etymology, Development, and Future of the Ondol and Gudle,” in The House of Ethnic Koreans (Beijing: Minzu Press, 2007).

Figure 9: The Li residence in Changcai Village, built in the 1910s. Note that the external colonnaded floor has shrunk to a smaller portion, unconnected to the gudul room. Photo taken by the author, June 2008; plan drawn by the author.

Figure 10: The Gao residence in Lutian Village, built in 1905. Note that the external colonnaded floor is totally merged with the gudul room. Photo taken by the author, June 2008; plan courtesy of Lin Jinhua at Yanbian University.

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winter. Despite other changes in domestic architecture, the gudul has remained central within the interior space of Korean Chinese houses, providing comprehensible, unwritten cues for behavior. As a cultural core, the gudul helps to reinforce and redefine the identity of the group. A house is more than a shelter to live in; it is a social institution that embodies lifestyle and contains various cultural practices of a specific group. Many ethnic minorities in China, such as the Miao, the Tu, and Tibetans, all developed unique housing forms of their own. Under the ethnocentric policies of the Qing, housing forms were one of the few ways by which Korean Chinese could effectively mark their ethnic distinctiveness within a foreign land. In the absence of state regulation, almost all features of domestic architecture—height, size, decoration, number of bays, principles of spatial arrangement—demonstrated a sense of closeness with the Korean peninsula and uniqueness of immigrant nationality. The singular gudul and its associated lifestyle became a force for communal coherence and collective resistance to coercive ethnic assimilation measures under the Qing and the warlords. During the era of Japanese rule, the empire sought to bring all Koreans—those on the peninsula, and those in Yanbian and Manchuria—under its “protection.” Both the Chinese and Japanese authorities sought to win the support of the Korean Chinese. Although some individual Yanbian Koreans aligned themselves with Japan, the collective contribution of the Koreans to defeating Japan, and, subsequently, the Nationalists, were major reasons behind the decision to grant Yanbian the status of an autonomous prefecture following the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Communism had a long history among Korean Chinese in Manchuria. The Manchurian headquarters, composed primarily of émigré activists, was disbanded and incorporated into the CCP around 1930. The CCP occupied the forefront of the power struggle in Yanbian during the Japanese occupation. The CCP won the allegiance of many Koreans by promoting ethnic equality and freedom from Japanese colonial rule.34 Korean Chinese played an important role in building the new socialist country by fighting against Japan and then against the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War of 1946–49.35 Official propaganda acknowledged the considerable contribu34 

According to communist propaganda, the idea of class struggle replaced ethnic struggle and independence. Thus, Korean Chinese communists believed they suffered from class repression more than ethnic discrimination (on the part of both Japanese colonizers and the Nationalists). Within this framework, the success of the Chinese socialist revolution also meant the liberation of Koreans from class repression. 35  For example, when the Communists took over Changchun in April 1946, a regiment composed of Korean “brothers and comrades” led the frontal assault. See “Wu Hengfu and the 4/14 Campaign,” in Changchun Cultural and Historical Materials 5 (1988): 127–38.

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tion of Korean immigrants and their descendants to the development of northeast China, while submerging the unpleasant memory of collaboration with Japanese.36 Yanbian and Korean Chinese Rural Houses under Maoism: 1949–1978 The communists viewed Korean Chinese as valued allies in the fight against Japan and the Nationalists, and as a loyal and respectable minority.37 The class position of most ethnic Koreans as “peasants” further situated them within communist ideology as a reliable social constituency. The older generation, which had experienced considerable hardship during the war years, welcomed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its promise to enable them to own land. Most Koreans of the first PRC generation gratefully accepted China as their own nation.38 New ethnic policies guaranteed respect for the traditions and customs of minorities, support for education in their own language, and political participation through regional autonomy. Ethnic Koreans regarded themselves not only beneficiaries of this “enlightened” minority policy but also as benefactors of the Communist Party. Many Korean Chinese who had contributed to the founding of the PRC subsequently achieved membership in Chinese high society; examples include General Zhao Nanqi and Minister Li Dezhu. Upon establishment, the PRC declared itself a “unitary multiethnic state,” comprising people from many nationalities. The ethnic policy of the PRC distinguished between ethnic identity and political identity. Local ethnic groups were authorized to deal with economic and cultural issues, but the state maintained a firm grip over political life. The strong ethnic affiliation of a minority was presumed to intensify its political loyalty to China, creating a complementary identity that was Korean by culture and Chinese by citizenship. Between 1952 and 1957, Yanbian came to enjoy genuine regional autonomy. The Korean minority was strongly represented in the various 36  For an official account of the history of the Korean minority in Manchuria, see Chaoxianzu jianshi [Brief history of the Korean nationality] (Yanji: Yanbian People’s Press, 1964). 37  According to official reports, there have been no serious social problems regarding ethnic issues since the establishment of Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture in 1953 (even during the turbulent Cultural Revolution). After reform, Yanbian was the first autonomous prefecture to institute the Ordinance of Autonomous Administration, and in 1994, 1999, and 2005, Yanbian was praised by the State Department as an exemplar of ethnic consolidation. See Jin Xian, “The Successful Practice of Ethnic Autonomous Policies in Yanbian,” Journal of Ethnicity in China 1 (2009). 38  See Choiwoo Gil, “The Korean Minority in China: The Change of Its Identity,” Development and Society 30, no. 1 (June 2001): 119–41.

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branches of the CCP and local government, and the prefecture was considered a “model of autonomy” by the central government. It was the most advanced autonomous administrative entity in China. However, Yanbian underwent several upheavals in the following years, including the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), and other policies and mass movements. After the PRC was founded in 1949, the prototypical Korean Chinese house underwent little change. Though Korean Chinese villages were collectivized under communism, and the state infiltrated society to an unprecedented extent, officials made few efforts to improve local housing conditions.39 In the 1950s and 1960s, political campaigns against landlords and the rich brought rural housing development to a standstill, while the confiscation and redistribution of property made some resources available for poor peasants and the homeless. The Cultural Revolution subsequently left rural housing in shambles for another decade. Reflecting the style of northern Korea, roofs on rural houses in Yanbian remained covered with mud and thick thatch.40 During the 1950s and 1960s, the use of old materials and construction techniques upheld the ideology of communist modernization, in which industrial construction was prioritized, and consumption viewed as immoral. Political pressure on the rural elite sent a strong signal to all rural households that displays of wealth were decadent and likely to provoke adverse consequences. With private assets under attack, conspicuous consumption became unsafe. As long as housing was livable, no efforts were made to improve it. Richer households that had escaped land redistribution kept a low profile, and some tiled-roof houses were converted into offices for village committees during the Great Leap Forward. Under Mao’s leadership, ethnic and cultural differences were replaced by class divisions. Ethnic Koreans considered themselves Chinese nationals of Korean origin. The question of ethnic identity remained dormant until after the Cultural Revolution. However, the ethnic policies of the CCP nonetheless solidified many aspects of Korean Chinese identity during these years. Encouraged to retain music, dance, and other traditions, Korean Chinese naturally became more conscious of themselves 39 

In some villages, a study room of brick or adobe mud served as a center for the study of communist propaganda and a meeting place for local councils. But few records on common rural houses have been found and the officially initiated project of renovation of shabby thatched Korean Chinese houses is but a very recent phenomenon. See the official website page of Antu City, Yanbian, . 40  Y. Zhang, Jilin min ju [Jilin vernacular houses] (Beijing: Beijing Architectural Industry Press, 1985), 138–50.

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as a community. Their voluntary isolation was reinforced by the population registration system, introduced in early 1950 and enforced starting in 1958. In combination with rationed supply, the population registration system anchored people to their native place, monitoring them and preventing unauthorized movement from the countryside to the city. Despite their loyalty to the CCP, during the Cultural Revolution, Koreans suffered more than most ethnic groups in northeast China. Many Korean leaders and intellectuals were falsely charged with spying or separatism. This persecution, which reminded many Korean Chinese of their differences from mainstream society, was in many ways the wellspring of a passion for maintaining ethnic distinctiveness during the subsequent reform era.41 Throughout the Mao era, restrictions on freedom of residence and movement helped to maintain the boundaries of Korean Chinese ethnicity. Due to the scarcity of modern construction materials, houses were built in the same way as in the past, except that cowsheds were moved away from the main house, as farm animals and tools were handed over to the communes. Sheds were used for storing grain and farm tools. Thatchedroof houses dominated the rural landscape, while the interior remained centered around a large gudul. Zhang Yuhuan, a renowned Chinese architectural historian, completed a book manuscript on vernacular houses in Jilin Province under official aegis in the early 1950s. The book cites the gudul and thatched roof as the two distinctive characteristics of ethnic Korean houses. If the use of the gudul represented a form of resistance before the PRC, under Mao it became a conscious artifact of cultural identity encouraged by the state. After reform, the government subsidized minority traditions, and today’s present ethnic policies actually nurture a strong cultural identity that contributes to unity and stability in the border regions. Changing Norms and Forms: 1979 to the Present In 1978, the government reorganized rural production by introducing the family contract responsibility system and guaranteeing private home ownership in rural areas. Increases in household income led to a rural 41 

During the years of the Cultural Revolution, many Korean leaders and intellectuals were falsely charged with spying or separatism. The Cultural Revolution greatly marginalized Koreans in socialist China. Choiwoo Gil argues, “in the decade following 1966, minority education and Korean usage were strongly undermined. The emphasis on ethnic identification was strongly criticized as cultural degeneration and political retreat. Koreans were marginalized. This experience has remained in the collective consciousness of Koreans, who have considered themselves as marginals since their immigration.” See Gil, “The Korean Minority in China.”

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housing boom, which spread from the economically advanced coastal areas in the east, toward the remote mountain villages. In 1984, the Law on the Autonomy of Regional Nationalities committed the state to respecting ethnic customs and the use of minority languages in education. Above all, the legislation emphasized economic development. As Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of Chinese reform who visited Yanbian in 1983, explained, “If we do not do well economically, ethnic autonomy is but an empty slogan.”42 Reforms in science, commerce, health, taxation, and education followed Deng’s visit to Yanbian, marking the first stage in the opening of the prefecture to the outside world, especially South Korea. In a 1991 visit in Yanbian, Jiang Zemin, Deng’s political heir, encouraged the local authorities to continue using the Korean Chinese as an economic bridge to the two Koreas. In 2001, the state announced its “Strategy of Developing the Great West,” aimed to accelerate the economic development of minority-heavy western China and Yanbian (though the latter is situated in the northeast). The government also initiated “Activities to Bring Prosperity to Border Areas,” which provided ethnic Koreans with subsidies to rebuild their houses. Revised frontier policies have not only channeled tangible material civilization to Yanbian but have also caused significant social change. Since reform, as a result of the weakened system of household registration and booming business with North Korea and Russia, many Han Chinese have moved to Yanbian. Conversely, Korean Chinese have sought opportunity in South Korea or other parts of China, including cities.43 Historically, the population of Yanbian Prefecture reflected the typical pattern of “push” diasporas, who choose to engage in food production in their new zone of settlement. Korean Chinese lived in remote agricultural communities centered around small-scale farming, especially of rice. However, with China’s economic boom in the 1990s, Yanbian has begun to industrialize.44 GDP growth and increasing contact with South Korea since the normalization of diplomatic relationships between the two countries in 1992 have had a great impact on the lives of many Korean Chinese, and have brought 42 

Xiaoping Deng, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 1 (Beijing: People’s Press, 1994), 167. This quote is taken from one of Deng’s speeches on Tibet in the 1950s, but the idea of promoting the economy has dominated ethnic policymaking since the 1980s, and this is the statement frequently quoted today by high-ranking CCP officials. 43  Quan Xinzi, “Guanyu chaoxianzu nuxing shewai hunyin jiben moshi de tantao” [A study of the basic patterns of international marriage regarding ethnic Korean women in Yanbian], Eastern Frontier Journal of Yanbian University 4 (2007): 99–105. 44  Si-Joong Kim, “The Economic Status and Role of Ethnic Koreans in China,” in The Korean Diaspora in the World Economy, eds. Fred Bergsten and In-bom Choe (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, January 2003), 128–30.

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Figure 11: Combination of internal space due to the change in family structure in Korean-Chinese communities. Enlargement of storage (top left), of bedroom (top right), and of gudul-living room (right). Drawn by the author.

profound changes to Chinese society at large. A 2008 census recorded the population of Yanbian as 2,185,500: 58.34 percent Chinese, 38.76 percent Korean and 2.9 percent other minorities.45 By contrast, Koreans made up 74 percent of the population of the prefecture in 1945. Like Han Chinese and other ethnic groups, Korean Chinese have undergone deep social and political changes in response to reform. The status of women has risen, the traditional multigenerational family has steadily given way to the nuclear model, and conjugality has replaced parenthood as the dominant theme of domestic life.46 The household contract responsibility system, a 1978 reform milestone, has helped to accelerate these trends. In the 1990s, a survey of a village in Helong County of Yanbian 45  Bureau of Statistics of Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, 2008 Yanbian tong ji nian jian [The annual statistics of Yanbian] (Changchun: Jilin People’s Press, 2008). 46  For a criticism of PRC feminism, see L. Rofel, “Liberation Nostalgia and a Yearning for Modernity,” in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, ed. C. Gilmartin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 226–49.

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Figure 12: An enlarged gudul room in a Korean-Chinese house, built in the 1970s in Lutian Village. Note the Western-style furniture and modern electric appliances. Photo taken by the author, June 2008.

showed that nuclear households accounted for thirty-six out of fifty-eight Korean families (accounting for 62.1 percent of all families).47 Domestic architecture reflects the consequences of this transformation of family structure. The downsizing of the Korean Chinese family particularly affected housing forms and spatial arrangements. Each dwelling came to belong to one nuclear family. In previous decades, bedrooms were small, and compartments and partitions were used to divide spaces, enabling a multigenerational family to comfortably cohabit under one roof. Decreasing average family size allowed small rooms to be combined into larger ones (figure 11). For instance, in a house built in the 1970s in Lutian Village in Hunchun, a gudul room was enlarged through the removal of 47  Tingji Piao, “Chaoxianzu she hui jia ting jie gou bian qian yu xing bie ping deng yan jiu” [Transformation of Korean-Chinese society and family],” Dongjiang Journal 23, no. 4 (2006). The survey was conducted in 1994.

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Figure 13: An abandoned house in Lutian Village. The whole family went to Seoul as immigrant workers, an epitome of the decaying Korean-Chinese villages. Photo taken by the author, June 2008.

partitions between the living room and the adjacent bedrooms, and modern furniture and electronic appliances were installed (figure 12). Thanks to their strong ethnic identity, today many young, bilingual Korean Chinese find jobs in trading industries in big cities like Beijing and Qingdao. Others venture to Seoul as migrant workers, leaving behind villages in the border region. Rapid social mobility has produced some dislocation in Yanbian. Young women, attracted to cities, leave men in small villages without hope of finding brides. Despite government pressure to reproduce, the birthrate is quite low in the region. In many cases, entire families migrate, and their houses are deserted to rot (figure 13). Almost all the Koreans I encountered during my fieldwork supported China’s new ethnic policy, which is credited with greatly improving economic opportunities and life in general. This positive attitude toward government policy strengthens their identification with China as homeland. However, as some scholars have noted, the ethnic policy of the PRC

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Figure 14: The development of the Korean Chinese house form in Yanbian. Note the removal of the cowshed from the house and other changes in the layout. Source: Redrawn from Baishou Li and Songhao Jin, “A Study of the Korean Chinese Rural House in Northeast China,” Anthropology and Ethnography, no. 6 (2007): 141.

presupposes a distinction between ethnic identity and state consciousness.48 Local ethnic groups are able to deal with local economic and cultural matters, but the state retains firm control over political life. Thus, Korean Chinese today develop a Korean cultural identity and a Chinese political identity. A 2004 survey found that over 70 percent of young Korean Chinese think themselves as Chinese by citizenship and Korean by culture.49 After reform, Korean Chinese peasants found that they could afford larger houses, more expensive building materials, and modern electric appliances. The cowshed was moved out of the main dwelling, and glazed windows appeared in the façade, altogether changing the traditional appearance of the home (figure 14). Various aspects of interior and exterior form and layout also came to display a standardized notion of modern life in several aspects. Recent developments in spatial layout reflect a growing concern for hygiene and a healthy state. In the aforementioned provincial survey of the 1950s, the cowshed is part of the layout of a traditional Korean Chinese house. However, the cowshed came to be seen as an “unhealthy” part of the house, and was removed in response to increasing attention to hygiene. Contemporary households also made use of modern Western appliances such as refrigerators, natural gas stoves, and water purifiers. In one house built in the late 1990s in Lutian Village, the large gudul room was furnished with Western-style wardrobes and other electric appliances (figure 15). Rooms also became more specialized to accommodate not only domestic activities and functions (cooking, eating, sleeping, bathing, and relaxation) but also the accumulation of consumer goods made available 48  49 

See Gil, “The Korean Minority in China.” See Gil, “The Korean Minority in China.”

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Figure 15: The interior of a Korean Chinese house in Lutian Village, built in the late 1990s, showing the Western-style furniture and appliances in the gudul room. Photo taken by the author, June 2008.

through global industrial capitalism. Homes now contain Western-style furniture, specialized equipment, and a variety of clothes, cooking utensils, and other material possessions (figure 16). Nonetheless, the traditional Korean way of life has not simply vanished. The kitchen continues to serve as the backdrop for the inculcation of a Korean Chinese ethnic identity. There, the young are taught formality, cleanliness, and proper behavior while watching food being prepared. In an affordable housing complex built in 2007, a thin glass partition was used to separate the kitchen and the main gudul room. Glass distinguishes cooking and living space without blocking visual exchange. Modern building materials thus help to maintain tradition. Homes in the complex are built around the gudul, which occupies the largest room. The gudul, a cultural core that has physically maintained group identity and lifestyles, has made no concessions to the process of globalization, which has brought so many other changes to rural Yanbian.

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Figure 16: The standardized plan for new Korean Chinese communities to house two families, subsidized by the state in 2005. Note the glass partition separating the gudul room from the kitchen. Plan drawn by the author according to surveying records.

Profound material change in ethnic Korean rural houses occurred in response to China’s increasing incorporation into the world economy. If “hybridity” may be viewed as a form of resistance to major changes in the reform era, its object is the “homogenizing, unifying force” of globalization. Yet the potential of globalization to enhance traditional culture should not be overlooked. Globalization cannot be properly understood outside the local context in which it operates. Though some authors believe that globalization is a process of cultural homogenization on a global scale, others argue that it is better characterized as a diverse phenomenon that brings together cultures originating in different nations and regions, and that this results in “pluralism” and great variability among users as opposed to the much greater homogeneity of traditional situations.50 The material development of Korean Chinese housing forms supports the latter view. The integration of Yanbian into the global economy also highlights the power of globalization to redefine and reinforce a group identity. China regards the modernization of South Korea as a model for 50  Some scholars of globalization, such as John Tomlinson (author of Cultural Imperialism), maintain that the globalization of culture consists of cultural integration and disintegration processes that transcend the nation-state unit. Processes of cultural homogenization take place on a global scale. Other scholars argue that cultural globalization is a complex interaction of diverse phenomena consisting of global cultures originating from many different nations and regions. See A. King, Spaces of Global Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 30–32.

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its own economic development, and the cultural influence of the latter, particularly on young Chinese Koreans, is quite extensive. Korean Chinese consume various Korean cultural commodities; for instance, many use faddish posters showing popular Korean movie stars to decorate the walls of their houses. Despite its potential to standardize elements of everyday life, globalization also buttresses unique minority identities. In 2005, the state enacted a new policy called “Constructing New Socialist = Rural Communities,” a sign of its attention to the plight of farmers and agriculture in the new millennium. This plan seeks to narrow the income and lifestyle gap between urban and rural China. For the first time, it mobilizes the state to improve infrastructure in the countryside, including rural housing.51 Implemented nationwide, the project took off in Yanbian in 2007. Rural houses were classified according to condition; for those requiring renovation, the thatched roof was replaced with tiles, and plastered mud walls with brick and mortar. Dilapidated houses were to be demolished and rebuilt on the original site. Underfunding limited achievement: as one official report admitted, in constructing new rural communities, “The central problem of rebuilding rural thatch-and-mud houses is that peasants generally fail to raise enough money.”52 Public subsidies alleviated some of the strain. In Yanbian’s Antu County, a Korean Chinese household could receive up to RMB 12,000 to renovate or rebuild a house. By 2008, nine hundred thatched houses had been renovated, and plans laid to rebuild more homes in 2009.53 Scholars interested in vernacular architecture may deplore the rapid transformation of rural Yanbian, as “renovation” may prompt the disappearance of Korean Chinese ethnic and cultural traits. However, the resilience of Korean Chinese communities in response to external circumstances should not be underestimated, especially when supported by the state. For instance, in the newly built Korean Chinese community in Yueqing Township of Tumen City, Yanbian, construction materials, technologies, and the introduction of architectural elements such as glazed windows, iron security doors, corbel friezes, and tiled roofs in bright colors, have altogether altered the look of traditional dwellings (see figure 17). 51  See the official document, “The Suggestions on the Design of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan of National Economic and Social Development,” approved at the Fifth Plenary Session of the Sixteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, October 2005. 52  A quote from “An Efficient Integration of Thatch-and-Mud Housing Renovation and the Construction of New Rural Communities in Antu,” on the official website of the Yanbian government: . 53  “The Report on Thatch-and-Mud Housing Renovation in Antu County in 2008,” on the official website of the Yanbian government, .

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Figure 17: Newly built houses for ethnic Koreans in Yueqing Township in 2007, part of the state-led project to construct new socialist rural communities. The glazed windows and color scheme altogether change the traditional appearance of Korean Chinese houses. Photo taken by the author, June 2008.

However, the gudul continues to dominate the living room and family life (see figure 18). Conclusion The Korean Chinese house in Yanbian during the reform era provides an example of hybridity that does not resist authority, thus raising questions about the nature of hybridity itself. The Chinese state has encouraged the local government, headed by elected ethnic Koreans, to manage the cultural and economic affairs of the prefecture, while the central government maintains its position at the apex of political power. Intertwined with ethnic policies, hybridity does not necessarily represent a political message against the state. On the other hand, it remains a form of resistance to major changes caused by standardization, restraining the homogenizing

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Figure 18: Inside the newly built house in Yueqing Township, the gudul still dominates the organization of internal space, showing the continuity of the Korean Chinese lifestyle. Photo taken by the author, June 2008.

tendencies of contemporary globalization in much the same way as it challenged harsh ethnocentric policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Hybrid homes attest to the Korean Chinese community’s ability to withstand cultural domination and homogenization, and suggest new antimonolithic models of cultural exchange and growth. Groups construct “ethnicity” through the formation and re-formation of cultural and social boundaries. I have argued that the ethnic policies of various regimes in Manchuria, alongside other external social and economic processes, have shaped identity. However, ethnicity is also the product of actions undertaken by ethnic groups as they form and re-form their boundaries and culture. In order to understand the interplay between the agency of ethnic groups and the larger social structures with which they crystallize into identities, I have examined changes in ethnic Korean rural dwellings since the 1880s.

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The architecture of homes, including the materials and manner of construction, size and contents, and arrangement in settlements, is perhaps the most important physical manifestation of any civilization. Housing standards reflect the level of economic development, lifestyles, and social and political priorities. The homes of Korean Chinese in Yanbian bear the imprint of an ethnicity constructed in the context of various forces, including ethnocentrism and globalization. Often the accommodation to politics is direct, such as the impact of state feminism on family structure, which has in turn resulted in the rearrangement of interior layouts. The unique gudul has also evolved to withstand different regimes, while continuing to serve as a training ground for the unwritten rules of the Korean Chinese lifestyle. Today the state deems Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture a model of ethnic unity and stability. Though the present relationship between the Korean Chinese and the Chinese state is largely cooperative, frontier policies have met with less success in other border regions with a heavy minority presence. In Tibet and Xinjiang, recent uprisings and riots have challenged the ethnic measures of the PRC.54 We may anticipate future alterations and amendments in public policy, which domestic architecture will no doubt continue to reflect.

54  Just two of the recent protest movements by minorities in China to engage the attention of Western audiences are the uprising in Tibet, which took place in March 2008, and the riot in Xinjiang in July 2009.

SEVEN

Exit, Voice, and Refugees A Case Study for Understanding Political Stability and Emigration in North Korea

IVO PLSEK

The 1990s were a particularly difficult period in the life of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The disintegration of the Communist Bloc in the early 1990s was a major blow to the regime in Pyongyang. Deprived of Soviet subsidies and favorable terms of trade, for the first time in its history, the DPRK had to survive on its own. Sustaining itself, however, turned out to be beyond the state’s capabilities. The North Korean economy recorded an immediate economic slump and soon the government began to repress domestic consumption with the campaign “Let’s eat two meals a day.” Then, in 1995 and 1996, the country suffered from heavy floods that were followed by a severe drought one year later. These natural disasters exacerbated the already desperate economic situation. A massive famine broke out, setting off a large refugee movement from the DPRK. Under these circumstances and with the example of East Germany’s collapse fresh in mind, many journalists, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began to think that North Korea’s political machine could likewise disintegrate under the pressures of emigration. This, however, did not happen. How did Pyongyang survive the crisis? And how close was North Korea to a regime implosion similar to that of East Germany (GDR) in 1989? The objective of this chapter is to answer these inquiries. To do so the chapter is organized as follows: First, I provide a short historical comparison of the DPRK’s emigration record during the Cold War with the developments in the 1990s, to show that the refugee crisis was indeed unprecedented in Korean history, not only in its scope but also in the way North Koreans managed to leave their

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homeland. However, despite these unusual circumstances, it should have not been automatically assumed that the refugee crisis would destabilize North Korea. Using Hirschman’s theory of Exit and Voice, I argue that population outflows have both stabilizing and destabilizing effects on a government, depending on the circumstances under which they occur. In the case of North Korea, refugee outflows alleviated some of the pressures from the political system and provided a temporary cushion for the regime in Pyongyang during the difficult years of the crisis. Moreover, I show that those who expected North Korea to crumble under the migration pressures based their assumptions on a false analogy with East Germany. The substantial part of this chapter is then dedicated to a detailed comparison of the two countries. I demonstrate that the North Korean crisis never reached the same menacing proportions as had been the case for the GDR in 1989 and argue that this was mainly due to China’s and South Korea’s positions toward the refugees, which prevented the crisis from escalating. I also show that North Korea’s domestic conditions were not conducive to a bottom-up revolution. The paper concludes with observations about possible long-term effects on the DPRK’s political system, arguing that the exposure North Korean citizens have had to Chinese economic prosperity in the last decade could prove dangerous to the rulers in Pyongyang in the future. North Korea’s Emigration: History and Current Situation 1950s to 1990s The DPRK’s political system and emigration policies were predominantly designed on the Soviet model. And the Soviet Union held a particular disdain for allowing free emigration. As Alan Dowty puts it: Soviet opposition to emigration springs from a combination of historical Russian isolationism and the peculiar characteristics of Soviet Marxism. Shaping the policy are such central features as the supreme power of the state, the stress on collective interest, the ideology of mobilization, the sense of threat from a hostile world, the fear of external communication. . . . These tendencies were reinforced after 1945 by the heavy wounds inflicted by the war. . . . To allow unchecked movement would run counter to all the basic instincts of the Soviet system as it has evolved over the years.1

This characterization unequivocally applies to North Korea. In fact, the DPRK was inclined to adopt even more stringent controls on exit, entry, 1 

Alan Dowty, Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 195.

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and internal movement than its Soviet counterpart. First, the legacy of isolationism ran deeper in Korean history than was the case of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the geographical location of North Korea (sharing borders with the armies of its nemeses, South Korea, the United States, and Japan) necessitated stricter controls on exit and entry. Last but not least, the DPRK has extensively used a system of internal passports to control domestic movement.2 This system has been a critical tool for discriminating among the rights and privileges of various groups within its society, as the designations between “urban” and “rural” have been firmly tied to substantial differences in access to political power, food, education, and career prospects. Moreover, these domestic restrictions on movement have been used for security reasons to keep unreliable strata of society far from central authorities.3 Hence, if allowing free movement was perceived as being antithetical to the basic instincts of the Soviet political system, this was even more true for pre-1990s North Korea. A few basic data demonstrate this. The Soviets kept emigration under strict control basically until perestroika but the “exit” option was not completely shut off. They granted permission to leave to selected ethnic groups, and they also used emigration as a tool for getting rid of well-known dissidents. However, to the knowledge of this author, there is no documented case in which the DPRK officially authorized emigration after 1953. Those who emigrated from North Korea did so despite the authorities, not with their approval. And the number of these defectors is remarkably small. Between the end of the Korean War and the start of the refugee crisis in 1994, a mere 693 North Koreans managed to flee to South Korea (see table 1). This is about fifteen to twenty defectors annually.4 Put into a comparative perspective, the accumulated number of escapees from the DPRK in forty-three years, at 693, was less than a one-month average for East German escapees to West Germany in 1983—the historically lowest year for the East-to-West German migration. In absolute terms, the 693 North Korean defectors compare to 3,456,000 East Germans who escaped to the West between 1945 and 1988. In short, emigration from North Korea before the mid-1990s was virtually nonexistent.

2  Restrictions on domestic movement are a strong indicator of how repressive a state will be toward emigration. 3  Domestic travel was basically unobstructed in the Soviet Union, but leaving one’s town in North Korea required a travel permit from the local People’s Security Agency (police), and passes would be inspected at several checkpoints during one’s journey. 4  Andrei Lankov, “Bitter Taste of Paradise: North Korean Refugees in South Korea,” Journal of East Asian Studies 6, no. 1 (2006): 105–37.

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Ivo Plsek Table 1: Number of North Koreans Entering South Korea (annual)

1953– 1960– 1970– 1980– 1959 1969 1979 1989

1990 9

1991 9

1992

275

210

59

63

8

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

41

56

85

71

148

312

583

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

1993 8 2002 1,139

1994

1953–1994 (total)

52

693

2003

1995–2009 (total)

1,281

17,291

1,894 1,383 2,018 2,544 2,809 2,927 Source: ROK Ministry of Unification and J. Lee, “Ethnic Korean Migration in Northeast Asia,” paper presented to the international seminar Human Flows across National Borders in Northeast Asia, Monterey, CA, 2–3 November 2001.

1994 to the Present In the light of the pre-1994 emigration record, the population outflows bursting into large waves of refugees in the mid- and late 1990s were a spectacular development in North Korean history. At their peak (1997 to 2001) as many as forty or fifty thousand refugees were fleeing annually from North Korea.5 The emigration itself can be roughly divided into five phases.6 In the first phase, limited to 1994, the movement was constrained mainly to the northern provinces of the DPRK, where the food rationing system collapsed first. At this point, almost no one tried to settle in China. During the second phase (1994–95), flows to China increased as food insufficiency became a nationwide problem; refugees began to stay in China for short periods of time. The third phase (1995–96) corresponds with the full outbreak of the famine in Korea. This was also the real beginning of a mass movement out of the DPRK. At this point, refugees began seriously to consider China and other countries as permanent places of settlement. The forth phase (1997–2001) marked the real peak of the crisis. In this period, migration became a nationwide phenomenon within North Korea. The fifth phase (2002 to present) is distinguished from the previous phases by the extent to which the North Korean refugee problem has become inter5 

See later in this chapter for a detailed discussion. Bernhard Seliger, “North Korean Migration to China: Economic, Political, and Humanitarian Aspects of a Forgotten Tragedy,” Harvard Asia Quarterly (2004): 4; Young-hwa Lee, “Situation and Protection of North Korea Defectors in China,” , accessed 1 May 2008. 6 

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nationalized (especially due to staged and highly publicized ambushes of Korean escapees at several foreign embassies in Beijing in 2002). At the same time, the Chinese and North Korean governments have stepped up their efforts to staunch the flows. Their efforts have succeeded, as the number of runaways has rapidly declined and the situation has stabilized in recent years.7 A few notable observations need to be made about the refugee flows and their development since 1994. First, the conditions of the mid-1990s provided the principal push for the massive outflows. Yet the famine was not the sole reason for emigrating. Throughout the course of the next decade, the refugee movement adopted a life of its own, encompassing a large spectrum of motivations, behaviors, and actors in the race to exit. For example, in the initial stages migration flows were short-term “food searches.”8 In the later stages, however, the majority of emigrants became permanent escapees, searching not just for survival but also for a better life. Attracted by the prosperity of the Chinese cities, and even more so by the prospect of living in South Korea or the United States, the pull factors for leaving complemented, if they did not replace, the push factors. This is linked to another important development. While in the initial stages the escapes appear to have been ad hoc, desperate ventures into Chinese territory, with time, they become much more organized and informed attempts to exit North Korea. For instance, in a survey of 1,346 refugees conducted in China in 2004–05, only 5 percent claimed that they had no prior knowledge about the conditions in China before their escape, whereas 89 percent said that they had received information through “word of mouth.”9 North Korean refugees also began to adjust strategies for escape based on the information they were getting about the situation behind the borders: they communicated with their relatives, coordinated escapes, and had money smuggled to North Korea. In essence, the longstanding barrier between the DPRK and the outer world that Pyongyang tried to impose on its populace was breaking down. Looking at the very mechanics of exit from or reentry into North Korea, it is furthermore obvious that Pyongyang’s control over certain branches of its administration became very loose. This applies especially to the border units assigned to patrol the Chinese-North Korean frontiers, where border trafficking had become a common occurrence with established practices 7 

W. Courtland Robinson, “North Korea: Migration Patterns and Prospects,” CSIS: Working Paper Series, 2010. 8  W. Courtland Robinson, “Famine in Slow Motion: A Case Study of Internal Displacement in North Korea,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 19, no. 2 (2000). 9  Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (Washington DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, January 2011).

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and prices.10 Additionally, not just the guards at the border but certain segments of the North Korean internal security apparatus malfunctioned. Various records indicate that escaping from detention centers (i.e., after repatriation from China) was possible; even more telling are the indications that by paying bribes, citizens were able to avoid punishment.11 Refugee surveys also show that a large percentage of North Koreans were repatriated from China repeatedly, meaning that they were able to stage a flight across the borders several times.12 All this is in stark contrast to what we knew about North Korea prior to the end of Cold War. During that time, it would have been unheard of for a repatriated North Korean to have a second chance to escape the country or for a person to buy his or her way out of legal punishment through bribery.13 To sum up, if we compare the two eras, pre- and post-1994, in North Korea it is evident that what began to transpire in the mid- and late 1990s was an extraordinary aberration from the history of North Korean emigration up until that point. Comparing the few hundreds of runaways who managed to leave North Korea in the period between 1953 and 1994 to tens of thousands of refugees after 1994 demonstrates that this problem was not just a simple trickle but a real rupture in the North Korean “dam.” Refugees, Regime Stability, and the Application of Hirschman’s Model But how significant was this development for the stability of the North Korean regime itself? Were the population outflows destabilizing the regime, or were they actually helping the leadership in Pyongyang to alleviate some of the pressure from its system? In other words, what is the relationship between population outflows and a political regime’s stability? Albert O. Hirschman’s general economic theory in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is helpful in answering these queries.14 In this classic study, Hirschman proposes a schema in which members of a declining organization can 10  About three-quarters of refugees revealed that they obtained help when escaping North Korea, and within this group, half of them had paid for such help. Haggard and Noland, Witness to Transformation, 32. 11  On escaping from detention centers, see Soo Hyun Jang, “Living as Illegal Border-Crossers: Social Suffering of the North Korean Refugees in China,” Korea Journal 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 212–32. On bribes, see Byung-Yeon Kim, “Markets, Bribery, and Regime Stability in North Korea,” East Asian Institute, EAI Asia Security Initiative Working Paper, no. 4. (Seoul: Seoul National University, April 2010): 1–35. 12  Haggard and Noland, Witness to Transformation. 13  Scott Snyder, “Transit, Traffic Control, and Telecoms: Crossing the “T’s” in Sino-Korean Exchange,” Comparative Connections 4, no. 1, 89 (First Quarter 2002): 1–9. 14  Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

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react to deterioration in the quality of goods, services, or benefits by either choosing “exit” (emigration) or “voice” (domestic protest, possible regime change). Exit is defined as a private act of leaving, and is exercised when better goods or services can be obtained elsewhere. Voice, on the other hand, stands for the act of organizing protests with the intent of achieving improvement in the provision of goods or services. Voice is not merely an individual choice; in order to be effective, it requires organization and group action that is able to overcome inherent obstacles associated with collective action problems. Hence, it is more costly than exit. Moreover, the relationship between the two is antithetical. First, exit tends directly to undermine voice. In Hirschman’s words: “[E]xit deprives the potential carriers of voice of their most articulate and influential members . . . the more pressure escapes through exit, the less is available to foment voice.”15 Secondly, if members of a society have the options of both exit and voice, they are more likely to choose exit. This “tends to atrophy the development of the art of voice.”16 Hirschman successfully applies this theory to many historical cases including that of East Germany, demonstrating that emigration has had positive effects on the political and economic situation of states. In the case of East Germany, he argues that its political climate was much more tranquil and its civil society more apathetic than in other East European satellites, not due to greater repression as one would intuitively expect but due to the GDR’s inefficiency in curbing emigration flows.17 If this logic is applied to North Korea, it follows that its porous borders did not necessarily pose an existential threat to Pyongyang’s rule. Rather, they provided the North Korean regime with a certain “safety valve” that siphoned off the potential for domestic unrest in the most desperate times of late 1990s. This was true especially if we consider the following facts about the crisis. First, property abandoned by emigrants increased the relative size of resources for domestic consumption (trespassing borders required extreme maneuverability, and attempts at selling property at local markets would have aroused the suspicions of local authorities, hence there were no outflows of assets). The relative share of food reserves, and therefore the capacity of Pyongyang to deal with the food crisis also increased proportionally with population outflows (in this way emigration did not only export the burden of scarcity, it also enabled the state to 15 

Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. 17  For details, see Albert O. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic: An Essay in Conceptual History,” World Politics 45, no. 2 (January 1993): 173–202. 16 

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combat scarcity better domestically).18 Further, money sent by emigrants to their struggling families helped alleviate some of the difficult conditions in North Korea.19 Last but not least, the refugee crisis was paradoxically a victory in disguise in the field of extortion diplomacy. The threat that North Korea could fall apart and the potential cost that such a situation would entail prompted China and South Korea to donate millions of dollars in aid to keep Pyongyang alive (at its peak this aid was designed to feed roughly one-third of the entire population).20 It is clear, however, that population outflows do not always have positive effects on a regime’s political stability. The East German state’s collapse in 1989 is the prime example. The relaxation of borders between Austria and Hungary encouraged thousands of young Germans to leave, which led to domestic turmoil. Thus, the situation in East Germany demonstrates that voice and exit can work in conjunction as agents of political change. This happens when private exit, if shared by many, becomes a public exit that signals the weakness of incumbent regime; this lessens the barriers to collective action and creates conditions for the formation of public voice. If public voice is formed and if the organization of a political opposition representing this voice ensues, regime change or regime breakdown becomes very likely.21 This is how emigration, even in a very short amount of time, can destabilize a state. And it is precisely this process that many pundits and media referred to when evaluating the potential consequences of the North Korean emigration situation.22 It 18  This was significant given that 70 percent of the population in North Korea were until that point dependent on the state’s food provisions for their livelihood. 19  A large number of emigrants left with the implicit goal of helping their ailing families. Out of the fifteen thousand North Koreans who managed to settle in South Korea by 2008, at least six thousand were remitting money to the North, and the volume of remittances was growing each year. Choson Ilbo estimates that at least six million U.S. dollars were transmitted directly from the South annually, a sum that could keep alive tens of thousands of families per year in the North Korean realities. We also need to bear in mind that this figure represents probably only a fraction of the help that Koreans receive from their relatives in China. “Refugees’ Remittances to N. Korea ‘Growing’,” Chosun Ilbo, 10 February 2009. 20  For an elaborate version of this argument, see Kelly M. Greenhill, Strategic Engineered Migration as a Weapon of War: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 230–61. 21  For details, see Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic.” 22  See Victor Cha’s argument in James Dao, “U.S. Is Urged to Promote Flow of Refugees from North Korea,” New York Times, 11 December 2002; “Escape from a Prison State,” Washington Post (editorial), 3 July 2001; Hamish McDonald, “ Beijing Is Loath to Dump the Last of Its Little Red Mates,” Sydney Morning Herald, 14 January 2003; “Influx of N. Korean Defectors Could Cause Problems,” Daily Yomiuri, 21 February 2003; Duncan Currie, “Kim Jong Honecker? Our Strategy for Dislodging the North Korean Tyrant Should Recall East Germany,”

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is also this process that the South Korean and Chinese authorities tried to prevent, other governments encouraged, and a number of activists and several international human rights NGOs sought to bring about on the Chinese-Korean border.23 As one officer for the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) put it: “These guys [activists and various NGOs] are serious. Regime change by refugee flows; this could be ‘the next big thing’.”24 One of the most prominent among the activists, Norbert Vollertsen, expressed this sentiment in equally plain language: “As a German who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, I understand the destabilizing impact an exodus of refugees can have on totalitarian regimes… I will continue our efforts to create a steady flow of refugees. . . . The only way to truly help the North Korean . . . is to hasten the collapse of Kim Jong Il’s murderous regime.”25 In the same vein, Sam Rho, a leading figure of the Seoul-based Commission to Help North Korean Refugees (in 2001, the largest organization assisting asylum-seekers in the South) revealed that spurring mass exodus “is our objective. . . . If many refugees escape, then North Korea will be crushed like an Easter egg.”26 Such sentiments had a strong following within the Bush administration as well. For instance, one senior administration official said: “When Hungary and Czechoslovakia opened their borders to East Germans, it helped speed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Supporting refugees from North Korea could stress their system, too.”27 In a contribution to the Washington Post, Richard Lugar, the then-chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly urged Washington to “authorize the resettlement of some North Korean refugees in [the U.S.] and press [U.S.] allies to do the same,” for this could “spark a greater flow of North Koreans from their gulag-like country” and thus maybe “hasten the fall of the Pyongyang regime, much as the flight of East Germans in 1989 helped undermine the communist system there.”28 Mark Palmer, former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, argued that Russia could play a critical Weekly Standard, 20 February 2005; Melanie Kirkpatrick, “Pastor Buck Is a Rescuer . . . Helping North Korea’s Refugees Is the Key to Regime Change,” Wall Street Journal, 18 December 2006. 23  The analysis and some of the original sources quoted in this passage are based on Greenhill, Strategic Engineered Migration. 24  Quoted in Greenhill, Strategic Engineered Migration, 233. 25  Norbert Vollertsen, “Prisoner Nation,” Wall Street Journal (Eastern editon), 5 February 2003. 26  George Wehrfritz and Hideko Takayama, “Riding the Seoul Train: An Underground Railroad Leads North Korean Refugees to the South,” Newsweek International, 5 March 2001. 27  Quoted in James Dao, “U.S. Is Urged.” 28  Quoted in Yong-Jung Joo, “Senator Wants Open Door for Defectors,” Chosun Ilbo, 18 July 2003 (http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2003/07/18/2003071861016.html).

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role in this: “With Putin there is a chance. . . . We should work hard on him to let refugees come out into Russia and to create the kind of flows that I personally saw coming through Hungary in 1989, which really is what led to the collapse of East Germany.”29 A similar thought guided the writing of a bill by Congressmen Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) that aimed at allowing North Korean refugees to immigrate into the United States. A well-connected journalist said that the bill was intended to inspire other nations to follow suit, with “the idea . . . an idea with precedent . . . that like a puncture in a balloon, this opening would quickly deflate North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s cruel and crazy regime.”30 But from the debate thus far it is clear that emigration and regime stability are not related in this simple linear fashion. The German example of emigration patterns from 1949 to 1961, 1961 to 1989, and in 1989 demonstrates that population outflows can be both stabilizing and destabilizing to incumbent regimes depending on their character and the conditions under which they occur. Therefore, if the GDR’s regime collapse in 1989 is to serve as a guide to North Korea, we should take seriously the circumstances under which these events unfolded in Germany and examine whether the same or at least approximately comparable circumstances existed in the case of North Korea. The German experience suggests that at least two major conditions are necessary: first, the flows have to reach critical proportions to enable public voice in domestic politics. For this to happen: (1) a substantial part of the populace must be willing to exercise the exit option; (2) domestic government should either be reluctant or unable to stop population outflows; and (3) the international environment should accommodate or at least not hinder these flows. Secondly, once emigration reaches a necessary magnitude that could signal the regime’s weakness to potential opposition forces and the broader public, a particular mix of domestic conditions are required for the exploitation of this “opportunity for rebellion.” Among these the following appear to be crucial: access to information that would make large private exit into public knowledge; the existence of underground groups or societal groups that could play a leading role in guiding the political contestation process; and sufficient economic, political, and 29  Quoted in James Brooke, “To Fill Empty Far East, Russians Look to Refugees,” International Herald Tribune, 8 December 2003. 30  Mitchell Koss, “Refugees Could Undo Kim,” Los Angeles Times, 24 August 2003. In another commentary on the legislation, John Feffer holds that the proposed bill got its direct inspiration from the activities of Vollertsen: John Feffer, “Second Act: A New Bill in Congress Seeks to Encourage Mass Emigration from North Korea. But Will It Work?” American Prospect 15, no. 2 (2004): 13.

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social sophistication of the public that could challenge the ruling authorities. If North Korean stability was supposed to have been threatened by the refugee flows in a similar way to that of East Germany in 1989, the above-mentioned conditions should have been at least partially present. In the remainder of this chapter, I will demonstrate that this was not the case. Pyongyang’s Reaction to Refugee Flows The nationwide famine that cost at least one million Korean lives and left many more ailing was a sufficient motivating factor to spur a massive out-migration. Moreover, as argued earlier, the “run for survival” was complemented by strong economic incentives for escape, as the contrast in well-being between North Korea and South Korea or even the quickly developing China had become large, far larger than that between the former East Germany and its western neighbor.31 Thus, the condition of a population willing to leave, or having the necessary motivation to do so, was certainly met. But did Korean authorities, like their counterparts in East Germany in 1989, allow or at least tolerate the flows? The evidence on this question is mixed. Various accounts by Korean refugees, government agencies, human rights organizations, and journalists lead us to the belief that Pyongyang reacted in a manner typical of its pre-1990s emigration policies: escape from North Korea was apparently prohibited at any cost. For example, it was reported that the regime’s surveillance systems kept operating during the peak of the famine or that the patrolling efforts even increased (Korean authorities supposedly declared the border regions as “ frontline areas” and formed a new “10th Corps” unit to prevent defections as early as in 1995).32 As a warning, Kim Jong-il was also reported to have ordered numerous executions of human traffickers in the border cities of Sinuiju and Hyesanjin, in a move to reestablish control over the northeastern provinces from which most refugees originated and where local unrest was reported.33 The authorities went supposedly even so far as to ban public 31 

The difference in per capita income between East and West Germany before unification was estimated to be between 1:2 and 1:3, while that of North to South Korea could have been between 1:8 and 1:11 in the late 1990s. Marcus Noland, Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2000). 32  Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and The Looming Threat of North Korea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Euichul Choi and others, eds., “White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea,” Korea Institute for National Unification, 1999. 33  Nanchu and Xing Hang, In North Korea: An American Travels through an Imprisoned Nation (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2003). Two documentaries seen by the author show footage of public executions in North Korea during the famine: Jung-Eun Kim, director,

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funerals for those who died of starvation in order to avoid public gatherings in the border areas.34 Furthermore, Kim Jong-il allegedly appealed several times to Beijing for help to curb the emigration flows and North Korean agents were reported to have been allowed to operate freely inside China in order to carry out intimidation campaigns and even abductions against North Korean runaways and those who tried to help them.35 These efforts were further supported by the formation at the DPRK’s embassies and consulates of so-called “arrest teams” that consisted of three to four security officers and diplomatic personnel with the task of individually tracking down and deporting Korean escapees.36 Last but not least, we learn about the grave dangers that refugees were exposed to when crossing the border into China and the brutality with which the DPRK’s officials treated fleeing or repatriated Koreans. Punishment for this crime ranged from internment in labor camps to torture and public execution. Additionally, blanket punishments were meted out for whole families.37 In sum, it appears that North Korea’s approach toward its post-1994 emigration was as one would have expected given its previous record of zero toleration for exit. If we inspect all the existing evidence in a greater detail, however, we find data that contradict these assertions about the DPRK’s continued rigid position toward emigration. First, it is striking that every fifth refugee is reported to have voluntarily returned to North Korea.38 If Pyongyang had attempted to impose harsh punishments on escapees, as is often argued, North Korea: Shadows and Whispers (London: Journeyman Pictures, 3 November 2000). JungEun Kim, director, North Korea: Living Hell (London: Journeyman Pictures, 27 March 2001). 34  David H. Satterwhite, “North Korea in 1996: Belligerence Subsiding, Hunger Worsens,” Asian Survey 37, no. 1 (1997): 10–19. 35  Becker, Rogue Regime, 27. “150 N. Korean Agents Chasing Defectors in China,” Korea Times, 21 March 2002. 36  Choi and others, “White Paper on Human Rights.” 37  See, for instance, Robinson, Famine in Slow Motion; Human Rights Watch, “The Invisible Exodus: North Koreans in the People’s Republic of China,” vol. 14, no. 8 (November 2002); David Hawk, “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps, Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photographs,” U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (Washington, DC, 2003); Good Friends, “Human Rights in North Korea and the Food Crisis: A Comprehensive Report on North Korean Human Rights Issues” (Seoul, 2004); Amnesty International, “Starved of Rights: Human Rights and the Food Crisis in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (17 January 2004); Rhoda Margesson and others, eds., “North Korean Refugees in China and Human Rights Issues: International Response and U.S. Policy Options,” CRC Report for Congress (26 September 2007): 1–37. 38  Approximately 20 percent of the 1,346 respondents returned to North Korea on their own will in the survey by Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland, Witness to Transformation, 93. In Robinson’s survey, “Famine in Slow Motion,” with 381 refugees hiding in China, 212 (56 percent) planned to go back to North Korea.

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the number of returnees by volition would never be so high. To put this in perspective as well, there are virtually no incidents of runaways trying to sneak back after a successful escape from countries such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary (countries whose penal code and punishment record were on the whole much more generous than those of North Korea). Nor are there any known cases in which escapees would try a similar run several weeks or months later as was the case with North Korean refugees.39 The phenomenon of kotjebi (children between the ages of twelve and eighteen who live a life of wandering back and forth between China and Korea, while fleeing security forces on both sides) would be likewise unimaginable in the realities of the border controls in the former Eastern European communist satellites.40 Secondly, North Korean authorities were remarkably flexible when it came to real punishments for escape, despite the fact that escape was considered “treason against the fatherland and the people” according to Article 86 of its 1992 Constitution, and defection or attempted defection was defined as a capital crime in Article 47 of the 1987 North Korean penal code. Punishment for repatriates or for those caught when escaping varied according to age, gender, activities and time spent in China, and motive for escape. Family background, place of origin, and former status or profession held in North Korea also played a critical role in determining the degree of punishment.41 As a result, some repatriates were hardly punished at all, and at least half of the refugees managed to be released after one or two weeks in custody. Again, such treatment appears to be unusually lenient for offenses that were technically a capital crime.42 Moreover, Kim Jong-il himself, allegedly, pledged a lenient approach toward refugees. In July 2000 during the historic inter-Korea summit, he declared his compassion for Korean runaways by stating that “the escapees were dropping tears.” And some Korean defectors reported that they were suddenly released by local authorities upon the receipt of instructions from 39  As many as 40 percent of those repatriated to North Korea reenter China. “100,000 Refugees: Grim Life in China,” Dong-A Ilbo, 27 February 2002. 40  On kotjebi, see Byung-Ho Chung, “Living Dangerously in Two Worlds: The Risks and Tactics of North Korean Refugee Children in China,” Korea Journal 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 191–211. 41  See, for example, Keum-Soon Lee, “Cross-border Movement of North Korean Citizens,” East Asian Review 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 37–54; Elisabeth Rosenthal, “North Koreans Widening Escape Route to China,” New York Times, 5 August 2002. 42  To reflect the more flexible approach to Korean runaways, the DPRK’s legal code had in fact to undergo major changes in 1999 and in 2004 with provisions that began to distinguish between various types of escapes and with significantly more forgiving penalties. See YoungHo Park and others, “White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea,” Korea Institute for National Unification (2010).

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the central authorities (which included personal instructions from the leader himself).43 Third, if Pyongyang indeed had tried to stop the outflows at whatever cost, we would expect to see some concrete measures at the border such as barbed wire, a significant increase in the presence of the North Korean army, or at least landmine signs as a scare tactic. Remarkably it is difficult to come across any evidence that such measures were adopted.44 One explanation for this lack of strict barriers could be that the 880-mile border with China could not be effectively guarded. Alternatively one could point out that North Korea was in such desperate condition that it was not able to afford any of these actions. But neither of these arguments is particularly persuasive. Despite the length of the border between China and North Korea, crossings mainly occurred at a slow pace (on foot) and only at a few focal points.45 It would not have been difficult or costly to localize and secure these critical areas. Secondly, even if Pyongyang was in a desperate situation, it was still able to rely on its army of 1.2 million. Had a contingent of forty thousand more well-fed soldiers been deployed along the whole length of the Tumen River (304 miles), where the majority of crossings occurred, each solider would have had to patrol only twentyseven yards of the frontier in a twelve-hour shift. Obviously, this would have critically curtailed the flows. Put together, it seems that both “looking the other way” (or even using emigration as a “safety valve”) as well as efforts at curbing North Korea’s emigration were part of Pyongyang’s response to the refugee flows—and the divider between these two responses was the time frame in which they occurred. Based on the analysis of the existing literature, it appears that until sometime between 2002 and 2004 (depending on the source) Pyongyang did not undertake any sweeping measures to stop the flows. It is only after this time period that we witness invigorated attempts at preventing Koreans from leaving.46 The critical question therefore is why 43  Soo-am Kim and others, eds., “White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea,” Korea Institute for National Unification (2007): 306–7. 44  Even finding testimony that fleeing refugees were shot at—a common occurrence on the borders of the Eastern European communist states—proved to be difficult. It rarely came up in interviews with refugees, and the few articles on the topic suggest that shooting was not common practice. E.g., “This is the first time in years that there have been reports of defectors being shot. North Korean border guards have never before shot defectors once they had reached the Chinese side of the border.” Quoted in Clifford Coonan, “North Korea Border Guards Kill Five Defectors to China,” Independent, 11 January 2011. 45  These points are close to cities with high concentrations of ethnic Korean Chinese population, such as Yanji, Hunchun, Tumen, and Longjing on the Chinese side. 46  See the following literature for explicit arguments that North Korea’s security began to tighten significantly in 2002–2004 or after: Jaeho Hwang, “Northeast Asia’s Pandora’s Box:

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the policy changed in the early or mid-2000s, if the peak of the refugee flows occurred a few years earlier. To answer the question, one should probably consider three factors that came to play a role at the same time: first, the internationalization of the refugee issue brought additional political pressure on North Korea to curb the flows (possibly great demands came from the Chinese authorities). This was compounded with the fact that the so-called “Seoul train” (an intricate covert network of smugglers, NGOs, relief workers, volunteers, etc., who helped or profited from helping North Koreans escape to South Korea) became too widespread around the year 2002.47 Third, it was only after 2002 that the political and economic situation of North Korea stabilized and Pyongyang began to show real interest in handling the issue of refugee outflows. Some argue that until this time, North Korean leadership basically turned a blind eye to the problem, probably believing that the exodus did not pose a severe threat, or that letting some people out was beneficial both to the economy and to social stability.48 Others take this argument even further and posit that not caring for certain parts of the Korean population was a deliberate policy of “triage” (gimin) (the intentional abandoning of people who are not loyal to the regime) in order to strengthen its political strength.49 Still others disagree with the notion that Pyongyang intentionally let people starve or escape, claiming that it is necessary to analyze separately central and local government incentives, suggesting that the lenient approach toward emigration might have been a product of dissonance between the center and the periphery.50 With no access to North Korean government documents, it is presently difficult to adjudicate whether “looking the other way” was a deliberate policy or a position that was adopted out of necessity. But it is certain that Pyongyang did not adopt a diehard attitude toward the flows: it did not make use of the hard-core measures available to its leadership and did not fully commit to stopping the flows during their peak.

North Korean Escapees,” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 49–72; Andrei Lankov, “North Korean Refugees in North China,” Asian Survey 44, no. 6 (NovemberDecember 2004): 856–73; Andrei Lankov, “Two Countries, Two Systems, One Porous Border,” Asia Times Online, 14 August 2007; Jon Herskovitz, “N. Korea Cracks Down on Those Trying to Flee,” Reuters, 5 March 2007. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Escape from North Korea,” New York Times, 4 June 2007; Haggard and Noland, Witness to Transformation. 47  In 2002 for the first time, more than one thousand refugees found their way to South Korea, a huge increase from previous years (see table 1). 48  Lankov, ”North Korean Refugees in North China.” 49  Hwang, ”Northeast Asia’s Pandora’s Box”; Andrew S. Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine (Washington DC: Institute of Peace Press, 2001). 50  Hazel Smith, “Improving Intelligence on North Korea,” Jane’s Intelligence Review (April 2004): 48–51; and email correspondence with the author in January 2011.

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In sum, the DPRK’s reaction was not similar to that of East Germany in 1989. Korean authorities did not issue visas for those who wanted to leave; neither did they allow trains to pass through the Korean territory so that refugees would safely find their way into exile as in the case of the GDR. But neither was North Korea’s reaction what one would have expected given its Cold War emigration record and its instinctive loathing for allowing any exit from, or entry into, North Korea. Willingly or not, Pyongyang showed an unexpected degree of flexibility in handling the issue of Korean runaways. It did use the occasional scare tactic to send a signal that emigration would not be tolerated, but at the same time the government appears to have looked the other way on emigration until its own situation became stabilized. Consciously or not, Pyongyang seems to have understood how to draw the line between refugee flows that would alleviate pressure from a political system and those that would cause its collapse. North Korea’s Environment The next prerequisite for regime destabilization is conducive external conditions that would allow a refugee crisis to escalate. But the environment surrounding the DPRK never created such a situation. It is here, in the different role international factors played, that the East Germany-North Korean analogy definitely begins to fall apart. China An expert on North Korea, Andrei Lankov, has argued that Chinese authorities “want to show North Koreans that they don’t care that much about the domestic security and survival of the North Korean regime. And if this regime will not behave itself, they can open the floodgates for refugees and they just run [sic] away from North Korea via China to the South undermining the political stability of North Korea.”51 But China does care. Both Beijing and its provincial authorities consider it a given that the DPRK cannot be allowed to fall. This simple notion has thoroughly informed Chinese behavior toward North Korea in general and the refugee crisis in particular. Broadly speaking, there are two reasons for this. First, if the DPRK destabilizes, the brunt of the problem will be carried by those who border on North Korea. In this regard the Yanbian Autonomous Region in Jilin Province, with its Korean Chinese population, would be a natural target as was the case already during the refugee crisis. The DPRK’s disintegration would bring economic and social havoc, which would threaten 51 

Quoted in Jason Strother, “China’s Repatriation of N. Korean Refugees: Another Target of Activists,” World Politics Review, 10 April 2008.

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some of Beijing’s expensive developmental policies in the whole region of northeast China. Secondly, in geopolitical terms the current status quo allows Beijing to control one of the most strategic and historically greatly contested parts of East Asia-Manchuria. The demise of the DPRK would likely result in an expansion of U.S. influence in this area, thereby severely compromising China’s own security and economic interests.52 These basic considerations have made Chinese authorities anxious about the possibility of mass outflows spiraling into anything similar to what happened in East Germany. Hence, the Chinese government adopted a multitude of measures in the last decade to safeguard Pyongyang’s continued rule. Economically China has provided 90 percent of the DPRK’s energy imports, 80 percent of its consumer goods, and has been the DPRK’s largest food supplier. It is widely believed that Beijing even by-passed the United Nations World Food Program to directly donate food to North Korea’s military.53 On the diplomatic front, Beijing kept propping up the DPRK’s leadership even when North Korea renewed its nuclear program in 2002—a move that strongly contradicted China’s own strategic interests. Last but not least, China essentially became the subcontracted police force for the North Korean state when it came to controlling of North Korean population movement. The policing was done in several ways: to begin with, Chinese authorities have ignored international norms on refugee treatment while honoring several secret extradition treaties with the DPRK. As a result the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been forcibly deporting all captured refugees to North Korea (see table 2). Chinese security forces have also monitored aid organizations in northeast China, closed churches suspected of assisting North Koreans, imprisoned those who were actively involved helping North Koreans to defect, and rewarded its citizens for turning in illegal immigrants.54 Second, the PRC erected barbed-wire 52 

For a thorough analysis, see Carla Freeman and Drew Thompson, “The Real Bridge to Nowhere: China’s Foiled North Korea Strategy,” Working paper, United States Institute of Peace (2009); and Carla Freeman and Drew Thompson, “Flood across the Border: China’s Disaster Relief Operations and Potential Response to a North Korean Refugee Crisis,” SAIS: U.S.-Korea Institute, 1 April 2009. 53  Dick K. Nanto and Emma Chanlett-Avery, “North Korea: Economic Leverage and Policy Analysis,” CRS Report for Congress, RL32493 (22 January 2010); and Jayshree Bajoria, “The China-North Korea Relationship,” Council on Foreign Relations, 7 October 2010, , accessed 2 January 2011. 54  See for instance Kyong-bok Kwon,” China Unlikely to Release Korean Journalist,” Chosun Ilbo, 23 December 2003. The rewards were so high that one businessman was even encouraged to deceive a full bus of North Koreans and send them directly to a police station claiming they were on their way to South Korea. Don Kirk, “China Ferrets out North Korean Refugees,” New York Times, 30 July 2001.

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Table 2: Number of Koreans Repatriated by Chinese Authorities (1996–2007) Years Refugees

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

589 5,439 6,300 7,200 14,000 6,000 4,800 8,000

2004 —

2005

2006

Total

5,000 1,800 59,128

Note: Chinese authorities do not disclose any data on the number of repatriated refugees. This table was complied using available sources and is therefore an imprecise estimate of the actual numbers. For the years 1996, 1997, and 1998: the Korea Institute for National Unification’s “White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea 2003” (2003). For years 1999 and 2000: Elisabeth Rosenthal, “China in Campaign to Expel Koreans Who Enter Illegally,” New York Times, 3 May 2000. The year 2000 was particularly perilous for refugees hiding in China as the PRC was preparing for a historic visit by Kim Jong-il in June. Rosenthal holds that in that year the figures for forcible extraditions reached at least 14,000 but could have been close to 2,000 per month, i.e. 24,000 per year. Citing Amnesty International, Hwang also claims that in March 2000 alone, 5,000 North Koreas were repatriated. See Jaeho Hwang, “Northeast Asia’s Pandora’s Box: North Korean Escapees,” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 49–72. In 2001, 6,000 were repatriated in June and July only: U.S. Committee for Refugees, “World Refugee Survey 2002: North Korea,”

posted 10 June 2002, last accessed 10 February 2011. In 2002, a Chinese researcher at the Chinese Social Science Academy argued that 4,809 refugees were deported (Korea Institute for National Unification,“White Paper on Human Rights,” 489). In December 2002, China started a one-hundred-day campaign of raids and repatriations. By mid-January it had sent back 3,200 refugees with another 1,300 waiting to be deported. See In-Ku Kim, “China Arrests 48 Defectors,” Chosun Ilbo, 20 January 2003. For the year 2003: “China Forcefully Repatriated 150 North Koreans a Week: USCR,” Chosun Ilbo, 25 May 2004. For the year 2004: no estimate was found. One can however surmise that a large number of deportations took place, given that the number of refugees resettling in South Korea significantly drops in the following year. For the years 2005 and 2006: Sunny Lee, “China opens to Korean refugees,” Asia Times Online, 20 July 2007.

fences around foreign embassies to strengthen their surveillance and thereby prohibit Korean refugees from entering these compounds.55 This was in line with the general effort to prevent North Koreans from seeking asylum at any of the foreign consulates located at its territory. In this way China effectively prolonged the journey that refugees would have to travel by a

55 

When Koreans managed to climb over the barriers, Chinese authorities usually allowed a transfer to South Korea via a third country. But the numbers indicated that this was only a fraction of those who were trying to reach South Korea each year. For instance, in 2002 and 2003 (at the height of the embassy runs) Beijing permitted some two hundred refugees to leave China officially. The total number of North Koreans arriving to the South in those years was, however, 2,420. This means that 90 percent of the refugees had to avoid Chinese authorities when looking for a way to get to South Korea. “Six North Korean Escapees Enter German School in Beijing,” Chosun Ilbo, 1 June 2004.

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few thousand miles before being able to ask for asylum.56 Fourth, China built barriers along the North Korea-China border at strategic crossing points, such as the several-foot-high barbed-wire fence around the Chinese city of Dandong.57 It also employed a contingent of 150,000 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces in the border regions in order to reinforce the policing of the North Korean frontier.58 In other words, China’s policies in the last sixteen years have considerably increased the distance, danger, cost, and difficulties involved with escape from North Korea. It is generally believed that the PRC significantly stepped up its efforts to curtail Korean emigration only after the problem burst onto the international scene in 2002, when a few activists organized refugee ambushes at several embassies in Beijing with foreign TV media present. Existing evidence does show that life in China became extremely difficult for the refugees after these events. If previously local authorities seemed to look aside and even tolerate their existence in the border regions (most of the local police were ethnic Korean Chinese), after 2002 North Koreans could no longer be seen in public and had to withdraw deeper into Chinese territory. The security environment tightened as fines for hiding refugees as well as rewards for turning them in increased. Beijing ordered police crackdowns far more frequently than in previous years and the Chinese PLA stepped into the region.59 But looking closer allows us to see that the process of repressing Korean refugee outflows had started already in the mid- or late 1990s and only grew in force with increasing years. For example, as early as in 1996, a 56 

Thailand—located approximately three thousand miles from the China-Korea border— has been the main conduit country through which North Koreans apply for an asylum before reaching their final destinations. Bertil Lintner, “North Korea’s Underground Railroad to Thailand,” Asia Times Online, 9 November 2006. 57  Norimitsu Onishi, “Tension, Desperation: The China-North Korea Border,” New York Times, 22 October 2006; “China Erects Massive Fence on N. Korean Border after Test,” World Tribune, 25 October 2006, , accessed 10 March 2011,. 58  Alan Fung, “North Korea on the Borderline: Part 1: Soldiers Head for the Frontier,” Asia Times Online, 30 September 2003; David Scofield, “Koreans: The Refugees Nobody Wants,” Asia Times Online, 30 September 2003; Joseph Kahn, “China Moves Troops to Area Bordering North Korea,” New York Times, 16 September 2003. 59  Elisabeth Rosenthal, “North Koreans in China Now Live in Fear of Dragnet,” New York Times, 18 July 2002; Scott Snyder, ”Transit, Traffic Control, and Telecoms”; Robert Marquand, “A Refugee’s Perilous Odyssey from N. Korea: N. Koreans Continue to Seek Escape Routes through China, Despite Beijing’s Crackdown,” Christian Science Monitor, 16 August 2002; Gady A. Epstein, “Stemming Flow of N. Korea refugees: Their Plight Grows Worse as China Seeks to Tighten Restrictions at the Border,” Baltimore Sun, 24 February 2003; Bruce Klingner, “The Tortuous North Korean Refugee Triangle,” Asia Times Online, 22 September 2004; Lankov, “North Korean Refugees in North China.”

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Chinese Public Security officer repeatedly asked the DPRK’s Border Patrol deputy director to take firm measures against illegal migrants. In 1997 the first batch of legal measures was adopted by the Chinese Congress against those who would hide Korean refugees, and in the years that followed several waves of large-scale police raids took place (in 1999, 2000, and 2001).60 Since the year 2000, Chinese authorities have also more frequently monitored and targeted NGOs and aid workers that were helping Korean runaways. Fines for hiding Korean nationals were likewise raised from 500 yuan (US$60) before 1999 to 5,000 yuan ($600) in 1999 to the staggering sum of 30,000 yuan ($3,600) in 2000.61 Most important, however, are the numbers of repatriated Koreans, which show that China, quietly but devotedly, was moving against North Korean runaways much before the wider international community took notice of the refugee problem. The position of Chinese authorities toward Korean refugees is succinctly captured in a statement by a Chinese expert on the PRC’s interests in North Korea: “This risks exploding out of control. . . . Everyone knows about the Hungary example. . . . We don’t want that to happen here.”62 It was the unilateral actions of Budapest’s government that provided the major breakthrough in mid-1989 for the disintegration of the GDR. A decade later, the Chinese authorities were still painfully aware of the role that Hungary played in Eastern Europe. With its police crackdowns, forced repatriations, installations of barbed wire, and deployment of elite military forces, China behaved much more like what one would have expected from the North Korean regime than anything like Hungary. The result was that not only crossing into North Korea became difficult, but China’s vast hinterland with all its perils and complications turned out to be another effective barrier blocking escape from North Korea. South Korea South Korea’s stance toward the North Korean refugees has been also characterized by reluctance to help escapees. Prior to the 1990s, the South 60  Mikyoung Kim, “Political Construction of Human Rights: With a Focus on North Korean Refugees in China,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago IL, 30 August 2007; Jeanyoung Lee, “Ethnic Korean Migration in Northeast Asia,” paper presented to the international seminar “Human Flows across National Borders in Northeast Asia,” Monterey, CA, 2–3 November 2001. 61  Christian F. Mahr, “North Korea: Scenarios from the Perspective of Refugee Displacement,” Rosemarie Rogers Working Paper Series, Working Paper no. 11, MIT, February 2002; Hwang, “Northeast Asia’s Pandora’s Box.” 62  Quoted in John Pomfret, “North Korea Refugees Leave China; Beijing’s About-Face Ends Embarrassing Month-Long Standoff,” Washington Post, 24 June 2002.

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explicitly encouraged defection from the North; those who managed to sneak out were welcomed as “freedom fighters” or “hero defectors” and rewarded generously for their efforts. The small number of defectors and their political import as sources of information and propaganda made this a useful policy. The early 1990s saw, however, a significant reversal in the approach toward fleeing North Koreans. One of the major reasons for this reversal was the crucial turnaround in the relationship between South and North Korea wrought by Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine Policy and its continuation during the Roh Moo-hyun presidency. After decades of antagonism, this policy significantly improved coexistence on the peninsula. Yet the price of the improvement in inter-Korean relations was the deliberate neglect of the North Korean refugee problem. This was apparent especially when Kim Dae Jung was in office. He was repeatedly criticized for having traded the human rights of the runaways for a better political relationship with the North.63 Besides North Korea, ROK authorities were also careful not to strain their relationships with Russia and China—two countries that considered Korean refugees to be illegal migrants and a nuisance that ought to be contained within DPRK borders. Being mindful of this position, South Korea’s diplomatic missions in China and Russia have often been reluctant to offer help to Korean asylum seekers.64 The concern for good neighborly relations is evident in the behavior of South Korean officials as early as 1995. With no more than ten refugees having arrived to the South (and forty-one in total by the end of 1995), the assistant minister at the national Unification Board already proclaimed: “In principle, we welcome all defectors from the North. . . . But diplomatically, there could be very many complicated matters.” Thus, unlike West Germany, which used its economic and political weight to put pressure on its communist neighbors to improve conditions for fleeing East Germans or to even negotiate their safe passage to West Germany, the ROK’s government tried to keep the plight of North Koreans from the purview of the public, and out of tough diplomatic negotiations with North Korea and other countries.65 63  See, for example, “Bring The Couple to South Korea,” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 1 December 1998; “Speak up on NK Refugees,” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 13 September 1999; “Why No Press Conference for Defectors?” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 2 July 2000. 64  James Brooke, “Russia Turns Sour on North Korean Refugees,” New York Times, 3 January 2005. 65  On many occasions, Bonn used its economic aid as a leverage in negotiations over the conditions and treatment of escaping East German citizens. For example, West Germany offered the Hungarian government a loan of five hundred million DM if it allowed East Germans to freely emigrate to the West. Likewise Foreigner Minister Genscher arranged for the transfer of thousands of Germans from the embassies in Prague and Warsaw.

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Inspecting the behavior of South Korea’s administration in a greater detail, it becomes obvious, nonetheless, that its, at best, lukewarm stance toward North Korean refugees was not merely a matter of diplomatic concerns. The ROK’s diplomats have been known to regard North Korean asylum seekers as “irritants.”66 And in a dispute over the handling of a few defectors, angered Chinese authorities even revealed that it was Seoul who asked the Chinese government for help in keeping the runaways out of its embassy in Beijing.67 Russian authorities likewise showed their displeasure at South Korea’s attempt at doublespeak, that is, trying to blame Russia for the desperate situation of North Koreans in China while being reluctant to assume responsibility if Russia allowed free passage through its territory.68 Located only thirty miles from the border with North Korea, central authorities in Seoul have been simply wary of the hazards and costs that they would incur in the event of a large refugee exodus from the North. The massive movement of East Germans to West Germany before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the cost of German unification has been in this regard a very alarming lesson for Seoul.69 The Constitution of West Germany (FRG) stipulated that anybody who held German citizenship before December 31, 1937 was automatically entitled to FRG citizenship.70 This applied to all East Germans and meant in practice that upon their arrival to the West they were immediately guaranteed the same legal protection and all the generous social benefits that the FRG’s extensive welfare system provided to its citizens. The willingness of hundreds of thousands of East Germans to defect can be easily understood in light of such treatment. South Korea’s Constitution carries a similar stipulation, rendering every North Korean automatically a South Korean citizen. The reality is, nonetheless, more complicated. With an increasing numbers of escapees arriving in South Korea, former foreign minister (and current UN Secretary General) Ban-Ki Moon stated 66  Hyun-ho Kim, “North Korean Refugees Also Deserve ‘Sunshine’,” Chosun Ilbo (English), 4 July 2001; “Why No Press Conference for Defectors?” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 2 July 2000. 67  Benjamin Neaderland, “Quandary on the Yalu: International Law, Politics, and China’s North Korean Refugee Crisis,” Stanford Journal of International Law 40 (Winter 2004): 142–77. 68  Song-joon Hwang, “Russia Complains,” Chosun Ilbo, 28 January 2000; “Blaming Russia and China,” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 29 January 2000. 69  The ROK’s government has financed a whole cottage industry of research that looks into the consequences of the GDR’s disintegration and reunification with the West. Most of these studies point out to the social dangers and enormous burden that a similar process would entail in the case of the Korean peninsula. 70  This law was upheld by a ruling of the German courts, when FRG recognized the sovereignty of East Germany in 1972, and the ruling even extended legal protections to those who helped East Germans in their escape to the West. Hyun-ho Kim, “North Korean Refugees.”

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that Seoul “shouldn’t have to take unlimited responsibility for wandering North Korean defectors.” (This was a correction to an earlier statement in which he asserted that Seoul would not permit any new defectors to the South).71 The remark is symbolic of the deep schism within the South Korean government and its society. Publicly, the Sunshine Policy has renewed feelings of shared identity with the North, and the sense of brotherhood between both nations. Privately, however, the financial costs, the difficulties entailed with the integration of Korean refugees, and ultimately the unwillingness to destabilize North Korea have played even a more crucial role in setting limits on the South’s willingness to engage with the runaways. The numbers of received North Koreans are indicative of this split. While more and more Korean refugees have been settling in the South each year, the total number of around eighteen thousand immigrants in the last sixteen years is scant compared to approximately one thousand refugees per day that West Germany accepted in 1989. And while West Germany kept its door wide open to all East German citizens despite the substantial costs associated with that policy, South Korea lowered its settlement payments to incoming refugees in order to prevent further defections as soon as refugee numbers began to increase.72 As the South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young declared: “It is not desirable for anyone to organize defections, intentionally bringing people out of North Korea . . . for the people in the North to live their lives in the North with their families is necessary both for individuals and for coexistence and coprosperity.”73 All in all, in the last sixteen years South Korea has shifted from supporting North Korean escapees to discouraging them. This approach did not reflect the thinking of the whole society or of those officials in the ROK government who were supportive of the North Korean runaways. But these sentiments coexisted with considerations for good diplomatic relations with powerful neighbors, with considerations for domestic security, and with a strong desire to preserve the South Korean standard of living. It was eventually these latter motives that had a much greater influence on the ROK’s policies toward the fleeing North Koreans. And in this regard, South Korea’s role in the crisis looked like anything but that of West Germany. 71 

Quoted in Klingner, “The Tortuous Route.” For details, see Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland and others, eds., “The North Korean Refugee Crisis: Human Rights and International Response,” U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (Washington, DC, 2006). Andrei Lankov, “Bitter Taste of Paradise.” 73  Quoted in James Kirk, “North Koreans ‘Eat Worse Than Pigs’,” Asia Times Online, 1 February 2004. 72 

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The Magnitude of the North Korean Refugee Crisis in Comparative Perspective For the East German scenario of regime disintegration to take place, refugee flows had to reach a critical threshold at which private exit empowers public voice. I have shown that in North Korea conditions conducive to arriving at this critical juncture did not exist. Although the populace was willing to emigrate in masses, neither did Pyongyang tolerate the flows the way former East Germany did nor did its neighbors permit the crisis to escalate. But despite these constraints, it is still possible that the volume of outflows reached proportions necessary for regime destabilization. To test this proposition, we need to examine the actual numbers of North Korean refugees and the general threshold at which exit starts to work in tandem with voice. Estimates of how many people left North Korea vary greatly from source to source. The most conservative assessments by the governments of South Korea, China, and Russia usually claim that 10,000 to 30,000 North Koreans were hiding in China in late 1990s.74 On the other end, a few reports set the figures as high as 400,000 to 500,000, though 150,000 to 300,000 refugees are the commonly cited figures.75 Most of these estimates are, however, only snapshots of the number of refugees staying in China at a particular point in time, and they do not capture the total amount, the annual amount, or the number of permanent refugees who left the DPRK. In order to do so, they would have to account for three types of North Korean migrants: those who left for short periods of time (i.e., returning to North Korea within six months); those who stayed in China long term; and those who managed to leave permanently for South Korea or received asylum in other countries. Of these three groups, reliable data exist only for the last category, immigrants into South Korea and elsewhere. From 1994 to 2009 approximately 19,000 refugees managed to permanently settle in a third country.76 Given the considerable obstacles that Koreans have to overcome when seeking permanent residency, it is reasonable to assume that the figures reflect only a fraction of the actual escapees who left the DPRK and still linger in China and to a much smaller degree in Russia and Southeast Asia. If the figure of 19,000 represents only 10 percent of all those Koreans, then about 190,000 in total “voted with their feet” over the 74  Dae-yeol Kwon, “Foreign Minister Asks Restraint on NK Refugee Problem,” Chosun Ilbo, 7 October 1999; “North Korean Refugees,” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 8 October 1999. 75  For the higher estimates, see Shim Jae Hoon, “A Crack in the Wall,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 29 April 1999; Paul Mooney, “Escaped Converts,” South China Morning Post, 7 February 2004; Andrei Lankov, “Changing North Korea: An Information Campaign Can Beat the Regime,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 6 (November/December 2009): 95–105. 76  Robinson, “North Korea.”

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course of the last sixteen years. This would mean that on average 11,000 Koreans left permanently each year, though the flows would be unevenly distributed with much greater concentration around the peak years. One can thus argue that at the height of the crisis at many as 40,000 to 50,000 could have escaped permanently annually, while thousands more crossed the borders for a short period of time. The question is whether a volume of fifty thousand refugees was sufficiently large to become regime threatening, as was seen in East Germany in 1989? Obviously the concrete numerical threshold at which population outflows begin to induce political instability will vary from country to country depending on the particular mix of domestic and international conditions and the very properties of exit and voice. However putting the North Korean refugee crisis in a comparative perspective with Cuba and East Germany might provide a rough reference through which to judge the extent of danger of the crisis.77 Cuba lost 24,000 citizens per year due to emigration from 1959 to 1995 (in total 895,000 citizens).78 The Castro regime has faced constant migration pressures but these pressures were significantly intensified during four separate refugee waves (1959–62, 1965–73, 1980, and 1994). Cuban emigration never recorded an average greater than 54,000 escapees per year for five consecutive years, and the highest outflow in one year was in 1980 at 125,000. The East German Republic suffered an average loss of 89,000 citizens annually from 1949 to 1989.79 The distribution was likewise uneven. From 1949 until 1961, 211,000 citizens left the GDR every year, which led eventually to the erection of the Berlin Wall. After that, this average dropped dramatically to 21,000 citizens per year. In 1989, 344,000 East Germans managed to escape East Germany (of them, 245,000 did so between August and November 1989). The population flight of 1989 was the single highest in the GDR’s emigration history and was greater than the sum total of the previous twenty-two years. If we apply these figures to the Korean refugee problem, it becomes clear that the crisis did not reach East German proportions (in just three 77 

Cuba and East Germany were challenged by refugee flows throughout their existence and are relatively comparable to North Korea in terms of land, population size, and the character of their political regime. 78  Only emigration to the United States is considered. Estimates are rounded up to the nearest thousand and calculated based on Josep M. Colomer, “Exit, Voice, and Hostility in Cuba,” International Migration Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 423–42; John Scanlan and Gilburt Loescher, “U.S. Foreign Policy, 1959–80: Impact on Refugee Flow from Cuba,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 467 (May 1983): 116–37. 79  Calculations are based on data from Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic,” 179, and rounded to the nearest thousand.

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months of 1989, the East Germans lost more population than the total North Korea has lost over the last sixteen years). Even if considering the upper estimates of 50,000 Koreans crossing the border with China annually, these volumes remain far below the magnitude of the East German crisis. The annual size of the Korean emigration is comparable at its peak to refugee outflows under Castro in 1959–1962 and 1965–1970. However, these flows did not destabilize Castro’s regime—on the contrary, the general agreement is that Castro actively used these flows for solidifying his political position. Thus this simple extrapolation shows that the threshold for a regime implosion in a country of similar size and political structure to that of North Korea could require a sustained outflow of refugees of at least 100,000 to 200,000 annually for several years or a major shock to the system of at least 300,000 emigrants in one year. A constant flow of 40,000 to 50,000 refugees annually would most likely only serve as a political safety valve for the stability of the incumbent regime (something that happened in East Germany between 1961 and 1989 and in Cuba on the whole). In short, the North Korean outflows should have been at least five times larger than they were during their peak if the Cuban and German cases were to serve as a guide. It is not clear whether those who tried to instigate the collapse of North Korea in a manner akin to that of East Germany were aware of the difficulties that lay ahead, but we can conclude that they faced extremely unfavorable odds. DPRK’s Destabilization under Refugee Pressures: Alternative Scenarios Let us finally posit that the North Korean refugee flows had reached similar proportions to those of the GDR in 1989. How likely would a bottomup regime disintegration have been in this case? Again a detailed comparison with East Germany is instructive. The GDR’s regime collapsed rapidly and entirely unexpectedly. Only three months after Hungarian foreigner minister Gyula Horn announced that his government would no longer keep closed borders to Austria, the Berlin Wall crumbled. But how did the crisis, which started far behind the borders of East Germany, develop so quickly into a domestic revolt? The role of media is key to answering this question. When Hungary began to dismantle the fences at its frontiers, and later when thousands of Germans took the escape route through the Austrian-Hungarian border while others were climbing over the embassy wall in Prague, all Germans were able to witness these spectacles live, from their homes.80 From this media coverage, East German 80  With the exception of a few districts in the city of Dresden, every German household received West German TV and radio and most followed these on a daily basis. Foreign journalists were also allowed in East Germany and the events of 1989 (including the embassy

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citizens reliably learned about the possibility of escape, and many were encouraged to follow, thereby further escalating the crisis. The images that flooded German TV sets also served as an unambiguous testament to the decline of power of the Communist authorities. With the reportage of each successful exit or domestic demonstration, the news alleviated some of the insecurities about a possible reappraisal. The coverage also reinforced Germans that their resentment against the regime was shared by large swathes of the populace and thus mitigated the insecurity over whether others would join in the protest. In this way, the reporting helped overcome the most fundamental problems of collective action in bottom-up political contestations. Finally, the reportage had an important protective function. Some of the GDR’s officials became very reluctant to use raw force against the demonstrators under the press attention (the Tiananmen solution was seriously contemplated for a long time but eventually was not employed because the leadership split over the decision). Similarly, the limelight of cameras provided a certain sense of security for the protesters, who believed that they would not be crushed by the regime with everybody watching (whether this was a naïve belief or not was not relevant in that context). In sum, the media’s reporting became the critical tool by which private and silent exit metamorphosed into a loud public voice in East Germany in Fall 1989. In this regard, the situation in North Korea, however, could not have been more different. At the time when the refugee crisis peaked (i.e., the years with the highest likelihood for a regime destabilization), the DPRK’s authorities controlled most of the information flow to and from North Korea and held an absolute monopoly on mass communications within the country.81 Korean radio operated on a different wavelength from international broadcasters, and officially no receivers were sold that would enable the DPRK’s citizens to listen to news from abroad (receivers had also to be registered with government authorities, and tampering with the devices or listening to foreign news was punishable by law).82 There were no Radio Free Europe, samizdat publications, or any other form of unchecked public communication either. Nor were there any foreigners who could report on the situation in the North. Some observers argue that probably only 10 percent of the population was aware of the reality behind Korean borders.83 Thus, even in a situation in which hundreds of thousands of throngings in Prague, Warsaw, and Hungary, and domestic demonstrations) were covered even by the GDR’s domestic media. 81  Lankov, “Changing North Korea.” 82  “Congressional Panel Examines Broadcasting to North Korea,” Chosun Ilbo, 28 October 2005. 83  Selling S. Harrison, “Promoting a Soft Landing in Korea,” Foreign Policy, no. 106 (Spring 1997).

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Koreans would have been leaving the North annually, the likelihood that this would have become public knowledge that would have transformed into public voice was extremely small in North Korea. But even if we consider the possibility that every North Korean citizen could have been informed of a massive refugee crisis at the North Korea-China border, a bottom-up disintegration would have been highly unlikely. Few Germans in 1989 harbored any illusions about the state of the GDR’s political freedom or economic performance in relation to its western neighbor. Millions of East Germans (five million alone in 1987) had visited their relatives or spent their vacation in West Germany during the Cold War years. They were perfectly aware of the possible opportunities that an alternative government, or an alternative form of governance, could provide. The success of West Germany kept the expectations of GDR’s citizens high, and when the opportunity presented itself, they loudly demanded that their expectations be fulfilled. Not only young Germans wanted to leave but also those more loyal to the regime; those who decided to stay behind; required far-reaching changes including changes in the political leadership. We can only conjecture how North Koreans would react if they were in a similar position. The question of loyalty (the third concept in Hirschman’s model) would have evidently played a role.84 The refugee surveys, however, are hardly encouraging in this respect. There have not been any indications of latent protest groups or disobedience to the leadership.85 Not only in recent years but even during the massive and often lethal famine, rather than staging major protests, North Koreans died quietly. More importantly, apart from the Korean People’s Army, there have been no institutions capable of channeling mass discontent into political action: there have been no groups such as the Solidarity movement in Poland, Charta 77 in the former Czechoslovakia, or church organizations as there were in Hungary and East Germany. Not even alternative poles of moral authority that could legitimate dissent as the Pope did in Poland have existed in North Korea.86 Koreans generally 84 

Hirschman implicitly distinguishes between two types of loyalty: (1) Passive loyalty is a type of behavior in which individuals await the improvement of services or goods without engaging in protest. This type of loyalty undercuts exit but does not reinforce voice and could occur for instance in the case of a broader public that trusts its regime or is too docile to undertake any actions to improve its situation. (2) Active loyalty also prevents individuals from exercising the exit option but as a result activates voices for reform (e.g., loyalists who are ready to undertake even drastic actions in order to improve the situation of a firm or state to which they pledge loyalty). North Koreans’ choice of one of these behavioral patterns over the other would be crucial. 85  Haggard and Noland, Witness to Transformation. 86  Marcus Noland, “Korea after Kim Jong-Il” Policy Analyses in International Economics 71 (January 2004).

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do not seem to think much about politics, and the very small numbers of Korean intelligentsia have been rather too docile or outright scared to present a feasible opposition to the regime. Admittedly it is unclear how loyal the North Korean populace truly felt toward its leaders. Kim Jong-il had never enjoyed the same popularity with the Koreans as his father, and the economic and human disasters over the period of his rule only exacerbated these sentiments. But numerous scholars argued that the overall trust in the system has been nonetheless strong.87 Lastly, even if we were to disregard all these factors and assume that North Koreans would rebel in a true bottom-up fashion against the state, it is still very difficult to imagine that an economically crippled and spatially fragmented society such as that of North Korea, where the major means of transport for the public remains a bicycle, would have had a chance against the loyal, well-equipped, and, in Pyongyang, barricaded political elites with a large army at their disposal.88 In this light, projecting German experiences onto North Korea was and remains a highly speculative and in many ways misled endeavor. Long-Term Effects for North Korea From a humanitarian perspective, the North Korean refugee crisis that began to develop in the mid-1990s and continued for the next decade and half was a tragedy. Escaping famine, economic deprivation, and political repression, most North Koreans who crossed their borders experienced only further destitution, humiliation, and disappointment. They were caught between two worlds: one that was viciously dysfunctional and another that rejected them. Thus, the situation of North Korean refugees in many ways has only underscored the greater realities that exist on the Korean Peninsula today. The regime in Pyongyang has mismanaged its state to such a degree that the DPRK has become too “toxic” for it to be allowed to fail. This fact, paradoxically, spawned a union of purpose between North Korea and its neighbors. Their preference is for the status quo, that is, for a territorial and demographic status quo with a stable political rule in North Korea. It was this collective preference of various state authorities that has strongly worked against the North Korean refugees. Nonstate actors, mainly NGOs operating in South Korea and various political groups within U.S. politics, attempted to counter this consensus. They wanted to fundamentally challenge the realities of contemporary 87 

Noland, “Korea after Kim Jong-Il”; B. R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010). 88  “Re: On North Korean Bikes,” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 13 December 2000; Norimitsu Onishi, “With Cash, Defectors Find North Korea’s Cracks,” New York Times, 19 October 2006.

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North Korea and saw the refugee crisis as the potential vehicle toward achieving this goal. Their intention was ultimately to help the general populace in North Korea, believing that encouraging population outflows was the assured way of realizing this aim. They cannot be completely faulted for looking to the East German example as the template for a regime change for North Korea during the refugee crisis; after all, East Germany for a long time seemed to be the least likely candidate for regime disintegration among all the former Soviet satellites, and yet it was eventually one of the first to go. Why would North Korea not undergo the same fate? Nonetheless the analysis in this paper shows that this thinking was based more on wishful extrapolations than a realistic assessment of the situation that existed in North Korea. Too many conditions needed to be in place for an authoritative regime to succumb under the pressure of refugee flows as East Germany had in 1989. And the North Korean crisis met almost none of these. In fact, very few countries have. This does not mean, however, that the North Korean crisis will not have any negative effects for the long-term stability of North Korea. These effects will not come in the form of exile opposition, as some have wished. The refugees lack a base from which they could organize an effective resistance. China and Russia offer little opportunity for Korean runaways to live a “normal refugee life,” let alone carry out political activities against Pyongyang. And South Korean authorities have not looked favorably at attempts to launch anti-North Korean actions from the ROK’s territory either.89 Likewise, the social conditions of most North Koreans in South Korea (belonging to the economically weakest strata of the ROK’s society) do not bode well for political activism. The erosion of the information monopoly on which both Pyongyang’s rule has been based, however, could prove detrimental in the long term. The state’s capacity to keep its populace unaware of what is happening beyond the DPRK’s borders has been compromised with the refugee crisis. By now tens of thousands of North Koreans have, for shorter or longer 89 

For example, Hwang Jang-yop—former secretary of the North Korean Workers Party and the most prominent North Korean leaders to ever defect to the South—was prevented from acting as a spokesman against the DPRK by South Korean authorities (this entailed problems with publishing his work, not allowing him to travel to the United States to speak in front of Congress, etc.). See “N. Korean Defector’s Decade-long Ordeal,” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 28 December 2006. But even inconsequential and rather naïve acts such as sending balloons with radio transmitters across the border to the North met with a strong reaction by the ROK’s authorities, including police beatings of the activists (Vollertsen) involved. Nam-in Kim, “Vollertsen Bloodied but Unbowed,” Chosun Ilbo, 26 August 2003. Likewise attempts by a handful of North Koreans to run a Free North Korea radio broadcast one hour each day were met with harassment, threats, and eventual closure. Aidan Foster-Carter, “Double Jeopardy for North Korean Defectors,” Asia Times Online, 18 May 2004.

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periods of time, experienced a different reality during their stays in China.90 Young North Koreans shuttling between both worlds have become intimately familiar with Chinese and South Korean music, lifestyle, affluence, and worldview. The border regions of North Korea are flooded with products from the PRC (which include DVDs, cell phones, computers, videos, etc.) and probably very few people in these areas believe now that North Korea is a paradise surrounded by impoverished nations. These developments might have a strong impact on the future of the North Korean regime. We have witnessed this already in the former Eastern Bloc. The revolutions that brought down the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s started in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary rather than Mongolia, Uzbekistan, or the Soviet Union itself. In other words, it was not superior armies or ideologies, but the material well-being and daily lifestyle of Western nations that were the driving forces for the monumental changes in the communist East. The same could be true for North Korea. The ever increasing prosperity of the Chinese cities that North Koreans have had the opportunity to observe first hand, could prove to be extremely dangerous to the stability of the DPRK’s regime in the future, especially if the traditionally ostracized border regions of the DPRK continue to be exposed to the rapidly rising wealth and economic well-being of their, formerly much poorer, neighbor. This could put the periphery under enormous pressure and drive a wedge between the local and central authorities. East Asia has already witnessed, in the Meiji Restoration, a major reconfiguration when the periphery challenged its central leadership. The central vs. periphery dissonance could once again become an event changer for the whole region. Additional References Bezlova, Antoaneta. “Beijing’s Limited Clout with Pyongyang.” Asia Times Online, 23 April 2004. “Bring the N. Korean Refugees Here, and Quickly.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 20 March 2008. Brooke, James. “Bush Urged to Press China on Providing Relief for Refugees Secretly Fleeing into North Korea,” New York Times, 24 February 2003. ———. “Seoul Tries Hard to Keep Its ‘Sunshine Policy’ Free of Clouds.” New York Times, 6 September 2004. “China Forcefully Repatriated 150 North Koreans a Week: USCR.” Chosun Ilbo, 25 May 2004. 90 

Some estimate show that as many as 80 percent of the populace in frontier towns such as Musan have visited China at least once. Seliger, “North Korean Migration to China.”

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Choe, Sang-Hun. “Nine North Koreans Escape to Vietnam.” New York Times, 24 September 2009. Dale, Gareth. Popular Protest in East Germany, 1945–1989. London: Routledge, 2005. French, Howard W. “Glimpse of World Shatters North Koreans’ Illusions,” New York Times, 24 March 2005. “Help Defectors from North Korea.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 1 September 1999. Hirschman, Albert O. “Exit, Voice, and the State.” World Politics 31, no. 1 (1978): 90–107. “Humiliating Diplomacy.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 15 January 2000. Joo, Yong-jung. “Hwang Says Reunication Should Be Swift.” Chosun Ilbo, 3 November 2003. Kim In-Ku. “China Arrests 48 Defectors.” Chosun Ilbo, 20 January 2003. Kristof, Nicholas D. “Invisible North Korea Famine Isn’t Always What It Seems.” New York Times, 12 October 1997. Lankov, Andrei. “The Official Propaganda in The DPRK: Ideas and Methods.” North Korea Studies website, , accessed 3 May 2008. Lee, Sunny. “China Opens to Korean Refugees.” Asia Times Online, 20 July 2007. “Listen to the Cries of North Koreans.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 26 April 2007. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (PRC). “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s Press Conference on March 14, 2002.” , accessed 21 February 2011. Ministry of Unification (ROK). “Settlement Support for Dislocated North Koreans.” , accessed 23 March 2011. Miyazaki, Jamie. “‘Invisible’ N. Korean Refugees All Too Visible in China,” Asia Times Online, 14 May 2004. Morawska, Ewa. “Intended and Unintended Consequences of Forced Migrations: A Neglected Aspect of East Europe’s Twentieth Century History.” International Migration Review 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 1049–87. “N. Korean TV Depicts ‘Wretched’ Lives in the South.” Chosun Ilbo, 31 July 2009. “N. Korea Resistance ‘Growing’.” Chosun Ilbo, 8 December 2008. “No More Defector Interviews?” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 3 December 1999. “North Korean’s Human Rights.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 4 May 2002. Pollack, Detlef. Politischer Protest: Politisch alternative Gruppen in der DDR. Opladen: Leske & Budrich Verlag, 2000.

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Robinson, W. Courtland, and others, eds. “Mortality in North Korean Migrant Households: A Retrospective Study.” The Lancet 354 (24 July 1999): 291–95. Rosenthal, Elisabeth. “China in Campaign to Expel Koreans Who Enter Illegally.” New York Times, 3 May 2000. Ross, Corey. “Before the Wall: East Germans, Communist Authority, and the Mass Exodus to the West.” Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (June 2002): 459–80. “Save the North Refugees.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 4 December 1997. Shin, Hyo-seop. “The Biggest Fool of the 21st Century.” Chosun Ilbo, 6 February 2007. Smith, Hazel. “North Koreans in China: Defining the Problems and Offering Some Solutions.” In Crossing National Borders: International Migration Issues in Northeast Asia, edited by Tsuneo Akaha and Anna Vassilieva. Tokyo: United Nations Press, 2005. Snyder, Scott. “North Korea’s Challenge of Regime Survival: Internal Problems and Implications for the Future.” Pacific Affairs 73, no. 4 (Winter 2000–2001): 517–33. “Speak Out Loud about N. Korean Refugees.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 11 October 2005. Suh, Jae-Jean, and others, eds. “White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea 2003.” Korea Institute for National Unification, 2003. “Three Refugees Test Government.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 28 May 2002. “Time for Policy on NK Defectors.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 16 March 2002. “Time to Look at the Essence of the Defector Issue.” Chosun Ilbo (editorial), 30 September 2004. Torpey, John. “Revolutions and Freedom of Movement: An Analysis of Passport Controls in the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions.” Theory and Society 26, no. 6. (December 1997): 837–68. U.S. Committee for Refugees. “World Refugee Survey 2002: North Korea.” Posted 10 June 2002. , accessed 10 February 2011. Wolf, Charles, and Levin, Norman D. “Modernizing the North Korean System: Objectives, Method, and Application.” RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy, 2008. WuDunn, Sheryl. “Defectors Find That the Welcome Mat Is Fraying.” New York Times, 19 April 1995.

Contributors

Jane Cho (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is a visiting lecturer in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation was titled “Immigration through Education: The Interwoven History of Korean International Students and U.S. Foreign Assistance.” Her current research interests focus on how immigration affects practices surrounding funerals, weddings, and childbearing within the Korean diasporic community. W. Taejin Hwang (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is a lecturer at the Underwood International College of Yonsei University in South Korea. Her dissertation was titled “Borderland Intimacies: GIs, Koreans, and American Military Landscapes in Cold War Korea.” Her research focuses on Cold War transpacific migrations of institutions and peoples, and she is currently examining American postwar developmentalism in Asia. Kwangmin Kim (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is assistant professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and postdoctoral associate at the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. He specializes in early modern Chinese history (the Ming-Qing period) and has a particular interest in the transformation of the Chinese borderlands and East Asian world order from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. His research focuses on the role of the two global currents of the early modern world—colonialism and transnational trade—in transforming East Asia. His most recent publication is “Profit and Protection: Emin Khwaja and the Qing Conquest of Central Asia, 1759-1777,” Journal of Asian Studies 71:3, August 2012. He is currently preparing a book on trade and state building in Qing Central Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Contributors

Miriam Kingsberg (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is assistant professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her book, Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (forthcoming, University of California), examines illegal drugs as the foundation of a global consensus on the nature of political legitimacy in nations and empires. She is currently researching the history of anthropology, archaeology, and national identity in twentieth-century Japan. Professor Kingsberg spent 2010–2012 on leave as an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Sungyun Lim (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is assistant professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research interests include the histories of modern Korea, the Japanese empire, women, and law. Her dissertation, “Enemies of the Lineage: Widows and Customary Rights in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945” examines the transformation of Korean family customs under Japanese colonial rule. She is currently preparing her book manuscript as the Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (2012–2013) at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Yishi Liu (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is a lecturer at the School of Architecture in Tsinghua University in China.  He is researching modern Chinese architectural history and has published articles in Architectural Journal (Jjan zhu xue bao) and Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. Ivo Plsek is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at Waseda University in Japan. Born in the Czech Republic, Plsek has spent several years working and studying in South Korea, China, and Japan and received his M.P.P. (Master’s degree) from the KDI School of Public Policy and Management in Seoul. His dissertation project investigates the role of political elites in the reconciliation politics of Japan and Germany after 1945. Wen-hsin Yeh is Walter and Elise Haas Chair Professor in Asian Studies and the Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair in History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also an Honorary Professor of History at Peking University. She has served as Director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies since January 2007. An authority on twentieth-century Chinese history, Yeh is author or editor of fifteen books and numerous articles examining aspects of Republican

Contributors

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history, Chinese modernity, and the origins of communism and related subjects. Her books include the Berkeley Prize-winning Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (University of California, 1996) and The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937 (Harvard University, 1990). Shanghai Splendor (University of California, 2007) is an urban history of Shanghai that considers the nature of Chinese capitalism and middle-class society in a century of contestation between colonial power and nationalistic mobilization. She has received many awards and fellowships in Chinese studies, including the American Council of Learned Societies’ Senior Scholar Fellowship, a Freeman Foundation Grant, the Chiang Chingkuo Foundation Senior Scholar Research Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Faculty Research Award. In 2011 she received the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

Index

“Activities to Bring Prosperity to the Border Areas,” 172 Adelman, Jeremy, 89n2 adoption, 10, 64n5, 77–78, 79 adultery, 67 agriculture: agrarian laborers, 25–26, 27–29, 32; agricultural resettlement, 56–57; dislocation of farmers in the ROK, 94–95, 95n22; ginseng cultivation, 20, 24–25, 30–31, 32; in the Sino-Korean borderland, 24–25, 28, 30, 32 Al-Sayyad, Nezar, 162 American Association of College Registrars, 140 American culture, 107n59, 129 American servicemen: black soldiers, 97n36; children of, 103, 107–8; cohabitation with Korean women, 105, 109; as contacts for Koreans studying abroad, 135, 136–37; crimes committed by, in Korea, 114–15; friendships with Koreans, 136–37; marriage with Korean women, 109–10. See also camptowns; Korean War; U.S. military occupation of Korea American Town (Gunsan), 94 American University, 123 ancestor worship, 72, 82 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Community, 142 Angeongri, 92n11

Antu County (Yanbian), 179 Anzaldua, Gloria, 89n1 appliances, 176 Arabe household, 76 architecture: and ethnic identity, 13, 148, 149, 150–51, 159, 168, 171, 182; and family structure, 174. See also housing construction; roof construction Armstrong, Charles K., 96 Aron, Stephen, 89n2 assimilation, 39, 45, 67, 158–59, 162. See also hybridity autonomous prefectures. See People’s Republic of China, ethnic policies of; Yanbian Autonomous Region Baek Hongyong, 9, 10, 46n29, 54–55, 60 Baek, Nak Joon (George Paik), 133–34 Bak Tae-hwa, 94 Baltimore Sun, 113 Baptist World Alliance, 135, 135n35 “barbarians” (ho’in), 22, 23n9 Bark, Dong Suh, 129 Battle of Marokpo, 17, 36, 37 Beijing Treaty (1860), 29 Benner, Thomas, 138 black market, 88, 105–7, 108, 117, 118 black soldiers, 97n36 borderlands: camptowns as, 11, 88–89, 100, 119–20; characteristics of, 20, 89; and the Chinese nation-state, 20–21; defined, 89n1, 89n2; in the global

222 borderlands (continued) history of modern Asia, 20; policing of, 22, 23n10. See also camptowns; DPRK, border with China; SinoKorean borderland Bosan-dong (Dongducheon), 91–92, 99 Bousquet, Georges, 73–74 bribery, 188 Brooks, Barbara, 49 Brownback, Sam, 192 built form. See architecture Bupyong (Bupyeong), 91, 107, 108 burial sites, 82–83 Busan, camptowns of, 91 California, Korean communities in, 5 Camp Beavers, 100, 104n52 Camp Casey, 91–92, 92n9, 104n52 Camp Humphreys, 92n11 camptowns (gijichon): and the black market, 88, 105–7, 117, 118; as borderlands, 11, 88–89, 100, 119–20; as conduits of American culture, 107n59; economy of, 92–93; entertainment at, 107n59; and foreign currency, 97; and the hair-shaving incident, 100–104, 111–17, 112n71; and industrialization in Korea, 94; in Korean cinema, 108–9, 119; and Korean migration, 90; and Korean modernity, 89–90; locations of, 91–92, 92n11; phases of, 90–91; present status of, 99–100; and the sex industry, 88, 90, 95–96, 97–98, 98n37, 99, 99n45, 105; and tourism, 93; trespassers in, 104–5; and U.S.-Korea relations, 89; women working in, 97, 97n33 Castro, Fidel, 208 center and periphery, 213 chakju (master of labor), 26 Changbaishan, 24, 27 Changcai Village (Yanbian), 165, 166 changmun (window-door), 156; photo of, 157 Charr, Easurk, 126

Index Chicago Sun, 128 Chinese Communist Party: drug regulatory regime of, 59; and Korean Chinese, 168–70, 168n34, 168n35 Chinese-Russian trade, 32 Cho Sei-ki, 44, 45 Choe Chongbŏm, 17; Kangbuk Ilgi by, 18, 18n3, 22–23, 24, 34–35 Choi, Gi-Il, 135, 136, 139 Chōsen Sōtokufu (Office of the Governor General), 41, 45–46, 47, 48, 53 Chōsen Yakugyōkai (Korea Pharmaceutical Association), 45–46 Chosun Christian University, 134 Chosun (Joseon) dynasty, 7, 20, 152–53n11, 165 Chosun Ilbo (Chosun Daily), 116nn80–82, 118, 123, 142–47; cartoons in, 100, 102, 117, 118 Choy, Bong-youn, 127n8 Chung Dong-Young, 205 Cold War, 89n3, 96, 114, 125, 183 collaboration and resistance, 59–60 comfort women, 91 commercial code (Japan), 75 Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, 191 communism, 60, 168. See also Chinese Communist Party “compressed modernity,” 98 concubines, 65n7, 66, 73, 74 Confucianism, 68–69 “Constructing New Socialist = Rural Communities,” 179 Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons, 94n18 cowsheds, 176 “Crime Prevention Programs” reports, 104–5, 112 Criminal Code (Japan, 1880), 40–41 Cuba, 207, 207n77, 208 Cultural Revolution, 170, 171n41 customary rights, 71, 78, 81–84, 86 Daejon Agreement, 103, 113–14, 116n80

Index Daijōkan (Department of State), 71 Dairen, 55–56n70 Dandelion Association, 99 Dandong, 201 defectors: from East Germany, 185; from North Korea, 185, 186, 203, 205; political activities of, 212, 212n89. See also DPRK; North Korean refugees; refugees Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. See DPRK Deng Xiaoping, 172 dentists, 144 detention centers, 188 Deuchler, Martina, 78 divorce, 10, 61–62, 64n5, 67, 86–87 doctoral degrees, 123–24, 129, 131, 133, 142–44. See also study abroad dōka (becoming Japanese), 39, 46 Donga Ilbo (Donga daily), 100, 101 Dongducheon, 91–92, 92n8, 96, 97, 99, 106. See also Camp Casey Dowty, Alan, 184 DPRK: analogy with East Germany, 192–93, 193n31, 198, 202, 203, 205, 207–11, 212, 213; border with China, 187–88, 196, 196n44, 201; emigration from, before 1994, 184–86; emigration from, since 1994, 186–88, 189–90, 196–97, 201; emigration policies of, 184–85, 193–95, 195n42, 196–98; executions in, 193, 193–94n33; food crisis in, 186, 187, 189, 193, 210; as a fragmented society, 211; media control in, 209, 212–13; in the 1990s, 183; nuclear program of, 199; political prospects of, 184; punishments for repatriates, 195, 195n42; regime stability, 188–93, 198–99, 211–12, 213; remittances to, 190, 190n19; restrictions on domestic movement in, 185. See also North Korean refugees; People’s Republic of China, and North Korean refugees drug addiction. See narcotics addiction Durabang (My Sister’s Place), 95n27

223 East Germany: analogy with the DPRK, 183, 184, 192–93, 193n31, 198, 202, 203–5, 204n69, 207–11, 212, 213; exit and voice in, 189, 190; media coverage of, 208–9, 208–9n80; number of refugees from, 185, 207; and West German citizenship, 204 Echols, Robert E., 136 education: educational assistance, 134–35, 137–38; Korean system of, 132–33, 137–38; in the United States, 127n7, 128, 145–46; of women in Korea, 61. See also study abroad 1873 Reform, 71 Einstein, Albert, 145 Emergency Decree for Economic Stability (South Korea), 98n39 Emigration Act of 1963 (South Korea), 110n68 Enloe, Cynthia, 117 ethnic identity: and architecture, 13, 148, 149, 150–51, 159, 168, 171, 182; social construction of, 3, 149–50, 181. See also assimilation ethnonationalism, 3, 3n2, 6 Ewha University, 123, 133 exit and voice (Hirschman), 184, 189, 190, 206 extended families, 75–77, 85. See also lineages family: boundaries, 62, 81, 82–85; patriarchy and, 68–69; structure of, and housing construction, 174, 182. See also family law family law: in colonial Korea, 10–11, 63, 64n5, 68, 69; in Meiji Japan, 72–73, 75–76 farmers. See agriculture Feffer, John, 192n30 feng shui, 154, 154n16 Fengtian, 57 Fenkle, Heinz Insu, Memories of My Ghost Brother, 107–8, 109 film: of public executions in North

224 film (continued) Korea, 193–94n33; South Korean, 108–9, 108n62. See also Hell Flower; Obaltan Fletcher, Joseph, 19 foreign currency, 97 Foreign Language Institute, 141 frontiers: contrasted with borderlands, 89n2; “frontiers within,” 12n15. See also borderlands Fulbright program, 130, 134 Fushansi, 58–59 Fushun, 54 GDR. See East Germany Genscher, Foreign Minister, 203n65 George Peabody College of Teachers, 140, 140n55 gijichon. See camptowns ginseng, 7, 20, 24–26, 30–31, 32, 152 GIs. See American servicemen global capitalism, 18–19, 21, 35, 75 globalization, 177–78, 178n50, 181 Goblin Market (Seoul), 106 Great Leap Forward, 170 gudul: compared to the Chinese kang, 160; enlargement of, 173, 174–75; and ethnic identity, 168, 171, 177, 182; furnished with Western appliances, 176–77; and the kitchen stove, 160–61; in renovated dwellings, 179, 180; variations on, 165–67. See also ondol gudul room. See gudul Gunsan, 94 Hagan, John, 46n29 Hahm, Pyong-Choon, 127n7 hair-shaving incident, 100–104, 111–17, 112n71 Han, Bae-Ho, 131 Han, Walter Kwang Woo, 128 Hangook Ilbo (Korean daily), 116nn80–81; cartoon in, 111 Harbin, 53, 55 Hawaii, Korean immigrants in, 126, 130 Hedong, 57

Index Hell Flower (Jiokhwa), 88, 108–9, 119, 120 heroin, 43, 47, 51, 52, 54 higher education. See study abroad hipari, 97n33 Hirschman, Albert O.: on loyalty, 210, 210n84; Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 188–89. See also exit and voice hoedu, 22, 26 hoesang (headmen), 22, 22n8 Hogewood, Major William W., Jr., 105–6, 107, 108, 109 Hong Yang-hee, 68 Horn, Gyula, 208 horse bandits, 23n10 Hōseikyoku (Division of Judicial Matters), 71 Hosokawa Jinjirō, 74 houseboys, 136, 137 household contract responsibility system, 171, 173 household heads, 66, 74 Household Registration Law (1922), 64n5; 1923 reform of, 64, 65 household registration system: and assimilation policy, 67; and family boundaries, 76–77, 81, 85; and family life in colonial Korea, 10, 65, 67, 68, 70, 77, 80–81; and land tax reform, 71–72; and patriarchal authority, 68; problems with women’s registers, 65–66; and state control, 70; and women’s mobility in colonial Korea, 62–65, 86, 87. See also family law housing construction: and ethnic identity, 13, 148, 149, 150–151, 159, 168, 171, 182; and family structure, 174; and feng shui, 154, 154n16; of Koreans in Manchuria, 153, 153n12; in Yanbian in the 1950s and 1960s, 170–71; in Yanbian after PRC reform, 176–77. See also Korean dwellings; roof construction Hozumi Nobushige, Ancestor Worship and the Japanese Law, 72–73 Hozumi Yatsuka, 72–73, 75 Huchang County: and attacks from the borderlands, 35–36; emigrants from,

Index 23; sent spies to Manchuria, 17–18, 18n3; and timber cutting, 36, 37 Hunchun military authority, 28–30, 34 Hungary, 202, 203n65, 208, 208–9n81, 210, 213 Hwang Jang-yop, 212n89 hybridity, 162–63, 178, 181–82 Hyesanjin, 193 I Bok-sun, 91 Ibsen, Henrik, A Doll’s House, 61 illegal cultivation, 24–25 imprisonment, 41, 46, 46n29, 47, 56 industrialization: and migration of women in Korea, 95, 95n23; in South Korea, 13–14, 94–95, 96, 98 inheritance, 76, 83–85 inkyo (retirement of household head), 66 intellectuals in Korea, 131n25 intermediate elites, 39–40, 50, 54–55, 59 intravenous drug users, 52–53 Iron Curtain, 213. See also East Germany Itaewon (Seoul), 91, 92n11, 107n59, 118–19n85 Itō Hirobumi, 79–80, 80n36 Iwatsuki, Yoshiyuki, 163n30, 165 Japan: Koreans in, 4, 10, 39, 41–42; as an opium empire, 9; sex industry in, 42, 44; trade relations with the West, 40 Japanese colonization of Korea, 4, 6, 39, 41, 153; and drug policies, 45–49 Japanese identity, 38–39 Jiandao, 57 Jiang Zemin, 172 Jin’in (True Person), 17 Jinzhou, 57 Johnson, Lyndon, 96 Joseon (Chosun) dynasty, 7, 20, 152–53n11, 165 judicial reform in Korea, 79–80 Jurchens, 7 Kabo Reform (1895), 79 Kando, 7 kang, 160, 165. See also gudul; ondol

225 Kang, So-Yeon, 129 Kangbuk Ilgi (Diary of [Travels] North of the [Yalu] River) (Choe Chongbŏm), 18, 18n3, 22–23, 24, 34–35 kangchu (master of the river), 27 Kan-Min Gōdō no Chōsen Mayaku Chūdoku Yobō Kyōkai (State-Society Alliance against Drug Addiction in Korea), 48 Kano Masanao, 75 Kapshin Coup (1884), 79 Kennedy, Edward M., 192 Kim Ae-soon, 103–4, 105 Kim, Billy, 135–36 Kim Dae Jung, 203 Kim, Hwal Ran (Helen Kim), 133–34 Kim Il-song, 6 Kim Jong-il, 192, 193, 194, 195, 200, 211 Kim, Jung-Eun, 193–94n33 Kim, Kwang Ok, 139 Kim, Kyu-Taik, 131 Kim Rin-song, 48–49 Kim Taegun, 55 Kim Taehŭng, 17, 37 Kim Wontaek, 26n14 Kim Yeon-ja, 98n38; The Big Sister of America Town, 95–96 Kim Yŏ’ok, 26–28 Ko Sŭng-hwan, 84 Ko’in (High Person), 17 Koo, V. K. Wellington, 58 Korea. See DPRK; Japanese colonization of Korea; Joseon (Chosun) dynasty; South Korea Korean Chinese: ethnic identity of, 13–14, 18, 170–71, 175–76; as farmers, 151–52n8, 172; household structure of, 173–74; under Maoism, 169–71; persecution of, 171, 171n41; under reform in the PRC, 173; residing at border-crossing areas, 196n45; and South Korean culture, 179. See also Korean dwellings Korean cinema, 108–9, 108n62. See also Hell Flower (Jiokhwa); Obaltan (The Stray Bullet)

226 Korean dwellings: bedrooms in, 164; chimneys of, 164–65; colonnaded façade, 165–67; gudul in, 160–62, 177, 178; hybridity in, 162–63; kitchens of, 160–61, 163–64, 177, 178; plans of, 163; renovation of, 179–80, 181; rural, 156; two-family, 178; types of folk houses, 163n30; of the well-to-do, 154–56. See also housing construction Korean educational system, 132–33, 137–38 Korean elites in Manchuria, 22, 26; intermediate elites, 39–40, 50, 54–55, 59 Korean independence movement, 46–47 Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 98n39 Korean International Tourism Corporation, 93 Koreans: and the drug market in Manchuria, 47, 50, 59; drug use in Japan, 41–45; drug use in Manchuria, 50–51; drug use under colonial rule, 47–49; as ethnic minority in Japan, 39, 41–42; immigration to Manchuria, 152–53, 153n11; as intermediate elite in Manchuria, 39–40, 50, 54, 55, 59; Japanese views of, 49; migration to the United States, 109–10, 110n66, 110n68; potential for assimilation under Japanese rule, 39, 45; resettlement in Manchuria, 56–57; in the sex industry in Japan, 42, 44; women migrants, 42. See also Korean Chinese; North Korean refugees Korean spies in Manchuria, 8, 17, 22, 35–36 Korean War, 5, 91, 93, 96, 127 Korea Pharmaceutical Association (Chōsen Yakugyōkai), 45–46 kotjebi, 195 Kwantung Army, 59 Kwantung Leased Territory, 50, 55–56. See also Manchuria

Index labor recruitment in Manchuria, 26–27, 33–34 land ownership, 53, 81–83 Land Tax Reform, 71 Language Training Center, 141 Lankov, Andrei, 198 Law on the Autonomy of Regional Nationalities (1984), 172 Laws Concerning the Sale of Smoking Opium (Hanbai ahen en retsu), 40 Le Dezhu, 169 Li Sŏngyun, 35 Liberation Village (Haebangcheon), 118, 118–19n85 Lim Sŏkgŭn, 17 lineages, 77–78, 81–82, 83–85 loyalty, 210–11, 210n84 Lugar, Richard, 191 Lutian Village (Yanbian), 167, 174, 175, 176, 177 Maeda Masana, 72 Magruder, General Carter B., 112, 113, 114, 115 Malaya, 19 Manchuria: agricultural resettlement campaign in, 56–57; assimilation of Koreans in, 158–59; borderland skirmishes, 7, 17, 36–37; Chinese merchants in, 25; Chinese residents of, 23, 23n9, 39; commerce in forest goods, 24; communism in, 168; cultivation of ginseng in, 20, 24–25, 30–31, 32; drug trade in, 9, 39, 50, 53–55, 59–60; drug use in, 39, 50, 58; European treaty ports in, 31; expulsion of Koreans from, 159; under Japanese rule, 39, 49–50, 159; Korean immigrants in, 4, 5, 17, 24, 35, 148–49, 151–52, 153–54, 157–59, 157n17, 158n20; Korean labor in, 25–26, 27–29, 32, 33; Korean spies in, 8, 17, 22, 35–36; after 1945, 10; North Korean crossings into, 5; policing of, 22, 23n10, 28, 158, 159; population of the borderlands,

Index 23, 23n9; under the Qing, 8–9, 20–21, 28–30, 35; Qing restrictions on immigration, 152, 152n10, 158, 158n19; rumors about, in Korea, 17, 31; SinoKorean relations in, 7, 57–59, 158–59; villages established by Koreans, 153. See also Kwantung Leased Territory; Yanbian Autonomous Region Markel, Kenneth Lee, III, 99, 99n45 marriage, 65n7, 67, 109–10 Mayaku Chūdokusha Kyūgokai (Association for the Relief of Narcotics Addicts), 43–45 McConaughly, Walter P., 112 McEnery, Captain John W., 100, 112 media and regime destabilization, 208–9 medicinal herbs, 24–25 Meiji Civil Code: in colonial Korea, 80, 80–81; contradicting principles behind, 70–71, 74; drafting of, 72–74; and the family, 10–11, 63, 68, 75–77 Meiji Civil Code Debate, 72–74, 75, 80n36 Meiji Restoration, 213 merchants, 25, 32 miguk byung (American fever), 128 military brides, 109–10, 109n66 Ming dynasty, 7 Minjirei (Ordinance on Civil Matters), 67–68, 80, 81 Miracle on the Han, 94 missionaries, 125, 126, 137 modernity: “compressed,” 98; in postwar Korea, 89–90, 89n3, 94n21 Moon, Ban-Ki, 204–5 Moon, Katharine, 95n27, 97, 98n37 Moon, Seungsook, 94n21 morphine, 52, 54 Mosher, Clayton, 46n29 Motion Picture Law of 1962 (South Korea), 108n62 Mukden Incident, 58, 159 Musan County, emigrants from, 23, 31 Nakatani Yoshisaburō, 46 Namae Takayuki, 43–44, 45

227 narcotics addiction: among Chinese migrants in Manchuria, 39, 50, 58; among Korean migrants in Japan and Manchuria, 39, 41–45, 50–51; among Koreans under colonial rule, 47–49; refined narcotics versus smoked opium, 51–52; viewed as moral depravity, 42. See also opium narcotics trafficking: and “collaboration,” 59; by Japanese in Korea, 47; and Koreans as an intermediate elite, 39–40, 50, 54–55, 59–60; by Koreans in Manchuria, 9, 39, 53–55, 59–60; and law enforcement by Japanese, 55–56, 55n68, 55–56n70; multinational networks, 47; punishments for, in Korea under colonial rule, 46, 46n29, 46n31, 56; punishments for, in Manchuria, 56; by tairiku rōnin, 47. See also opium narcotics treatment centers: in Japan, 43–45; in Korea under colonial rule, 48–49; in Manchuria, 51 Nationalist Party, 59 nation-building, 3–4 Niuzhuang, 8, 9, 31–32, 57 Nixon Doctrine, 98 North Korea. See DPRK North Korean refugees, 14–15, 183–84, 185–187, 200, 206, 212–13; South Korean policies on, 202–5, 212, 212n89; number of, 206–8. See also defectors, from North Korea Obaltan (The Stray Bullet), 117–18n84, 117–19 Official Circular No. 240, 64n5 ondol (heatable bed), 156–57, 160n26, 165. See also gudul opium: economic and ideological functions of, 38–39; regulation of, in imperial Japan, 40–41; smoking of, 51–52; used by elites and intermediate elites, 50. See also narcotics addiction; narcotics trafficking opium pipes, 51–52

228 Ordinance of Autonomous Administration, 169n37 Ordinance on Civil Matters (Minjirei), 67–68, 80, 81 orphans, 135 Paik, George (Baek Nak Joon), 133–34 Pak Chin’goeng, 37 Pak Myong-su, 70, 75 Palmer, Mark, 191–92 Park Jung-hee: censorship under, 108n62; coup of, 94, 94n21; and emigration, 110n68; policies for economic growth and security, 98; regulation of prostitution, 94, 94n18; and the U.S.-ROK military alliance, 96 Park-Lee couple, 123–24, 144 peimu (a medicinal herb), 25 Penal Code (Japan), 74 People’s Liberation Army, 201 People’s Republic of China: ethnic policies of, 169, 169n37, 172, 175–76, 182; normalization of relations with South Korea, 5; and North Korean refugees, 14–15, 194, 198–202, 199n54, 200n55, 206, 212–13; policy toward DPRK, 198–99 Perry, Commodore Matthew, 40 Poland, 203n65, 208–9n81, 210, 213 policing, 22, 23n10, 158, 159 political leaders, education of, 131 Power, Cal, 135 Prague, 203n65, 208, 208–9n81 Price, Lieutenant Colonel, 137 primogeniture, 72, 73–74 prostitution. See sex industry “push” and “pull” diasporas, 172, 187 PX merchandise, 106–8, 117. See also black market Pyeongtaek, 92n11 Pyongyang, drug users in, 48–49 Pyunghwa Ilbo (Peace daily), 115, 116 Qing dynasty: restrictions on immigrants in Manchuria, 152, 152n10,

Index 158, 158n19; suzerainty over Korea, 152–53n11. See also Manchuria, under the Qing R&R (Rest and Recreation), 90, 93, 97 racial segregation, in South Korean camptowns, 97, 97n36 Rapoport, A., 159 Raw Opium Control Regulations (Nama ahen toriatsukai kisoku), 40 Recchia, Gene P., 106 refugees: and regime stability, 188, 190–93, 206–8; repatriation of, 188, 194–95, 194n38, 195n39, 202; shooting of, 196n44; voluntary return of, 194–95. See also defectors; North Korean refugees regime destabilization: conditions for, 198, 212; and material well-being, 213; media coverage and, 208–9; refugee flows and, 188, 190–93, 206–8 “Regulations for the Naturalization of Immigrant Koreans” (1910), 158 remarriage, 65n7, 67 Rest and Recreation facilities, 90, 93, 97 Rhee, Syngman, 6, 129–30 Rho, Sam, 191 Roh Moo-hyun, 203 roof construction, 165, 170, 171, 179; images of, 155, 162 Russia: and Korean migrant labor, 20, 33–34; military expansion into southern Manchuria, 29–30; and North Korean refugees, 204, 206; trade with China, 32; and the Treaty of Beijing, 32–33 Russian Far East, 4 Saeumteo (Sprouting Land), 95n27 Sakai Yoshio, 43 Sanitation Bureau (Japan), 40 Schmid, Andre, 7 Schorr, David P., Jr., 104 Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State, 69–70 Second Republic (South Korea), 118n84

Index Seoul: black market in, 106, 108; camptowns of, 91; slums of, 95. See also Itaewon (Seoul) Seoul Ilbo (Seoul daily): on the black market, 106, 107; on the hair-shaving incident, 115; on the R&R system in Korea, 93 Seoul Municipal Women’s Shelter, 96 Seoul National University, 128, 128n12, 131–32n25, 132n27, 139; SNU Project, 132–33, 132n28 “Seoul train,” 197 7th U.S. Infantry Division, 104, 104n52 sex industry: and the black market, 105–7, 108; and camptowns in postwar Korea, 88, 90, 95–96, 97–98, 97n33, 98n37, 99; causes of prostitution, 91, 93; and foreign currency, 97; hair-shaving incident in South Korea, 100–104, 111–17, 112n71; and industrialization in Korea, 94, 95; under the Japanese colonial government in Korea, 91, 91n5; in mainstream Korea from the 1980s, 99; ROK antiprostitution law, 94, 94n18. See also venereal disease Shin Tae, 23–24, 27, 36, 37 Shitouhe (Manchuria), 24, 35 shoshi (sons born out of wedlock), 73–74 Sin Sang-ok, Hell Flower (Jiokhwa), 88, 108–9, 119, 120 Singapore, 19, 27 Sino-Korean borderland, 8, 20–21, 28, 187–88; and Russian territory, 33–34. See also DPRK, border with China Sinuiju, 193 SNU Project (Seoul National University Project), 132–33, 132n28 Songtan (Pyeongtaek), 92n11, 98n38 Southeast Asia: borderlands of, 150; Chinese migration to, 19–20, 30; compared with Manchuria, 20; development of plantation agriculture in, 27; and North Korean refugees, 206

229 South Korea: as model for modernization, 178–79; North Korean refugees in, 185, 186, 190n19, 200, 200n55, 206; policies on North Korean refugees, 202–5, 212, 212n89; research on East Germany, 204n69 Soviet Union: domestic travel in, 185n3; emigration policies of, 184–85 soybeans, 32 Spring Student Uprising (1960), 118n84 Stalin, Joseph, 4 Stanford University, 13 State-Society Alliance against Drug Addiction in Korea (Kan-Min Gōdō no Chōsen Mayaku Chūdoku Yobō Kyōkai), 48 Status of Forces Agreement, 113–16 “Strategy of Developing the Great West” (2001), 172 Stray Bullet (Obaltan), 117–18n84, 117–19 study abroad: American assistance for Korean study, 134–35, 139, 141–42; assistance from other Koreans, 139–40; by the disadvantaged, 146–47; information centers for, 141–42; in Japan, 131–32; and Japan’s annexation of Korea, 127; in the Korean press, 142; by Korean students, 123–26, 131–32; and the Korean War, 127–28; language courses for, 130, 141; obstacles to, 125; by orphans in Korea, 135; and political positions in Korea, 129–31; returnees, 138, 144; scholarships for, 134; schools attended by Korean students, 140; social status and, 128; U.S. survey of foreign students, 139 Suh, Professor, 143 Sunshine Policy, 203, 205 tairiku rōnin (mainland adventurers), 47 Taiwan, 41 Tanghe (Jilin Province), 24–25, 31 Tangun, 3n2, 4 taxation, 20, 28–30, 37, 71

Index

230 Teacher Training Center (Seoul), 137, 137–38 teleprofs, 131–32n25 Tiananmen, 209 Tianjin, drug trafficking in, 55n68 Tibet, 182, 182n54 ti fa ru ji (changing one’s hairstyle for naturalization), 158 timber, 24, 36, 37 Tomlinson, John, 178n50 Tonga Ilbo, 61–62 Tonghua County, 37 t’ongsu, 22, 26 Tourism Promotion Law (ROK, 1961), 93–94 Treaty of Beijing (1860), 32–33 Treaty of Shimonoseki, 3–4 Treaty of Tianjin, 8, 31 treaty ports, 31 Trocki, Carl, 19, 27 Truman Educational Counseling Center, 141, 142 Uijeongbu, 99 Ume Kenjiro, 73, 74, 80, 80n36 unequal treaties, 73, 79 United States: Korean students in, 12–13, 123–26; military presence in South Korea, 11–12; policy toward DPRK, 191–92; South Korean migration to, 5. See also American servicemen; study abroad; U.S. military occupation of Korea United States Forces in Korea, 113–15. See also American servicemen United States Information Service (USIS) Center, 141, 142 University of Minnesota, 132n28, 140 university professors, 131–32, 131–32n25 urban poverty, 95 U.S. military occupation of Korea: and prostitution, 91; and study abroad, 126, 129, 130. See also American servicemen

venereal disease, 91, 91n5, 97, 98n38, 112–13, 113n72 Vietnam War, 96, 96n31, 97 Vollertsen, Norbert, 191, 192n30, 212n89 Wakeman, Frederic, 23n9 Wanbaoshan Incident, 159 Wang Laodawai, 35 Washington Star, 112, 114 Washington State University, 140 West Germany: and East German refugees, 203, 203n65; policies toward East Germany, 204, 204n70, 205 widows: civil cases of, 10, 11, 83–84, 85; customary rights of, 78; rights and responsibilities of, in colonial Korea, 63–64, 77–79 wives, abandonment of, 62 women: education of, in Korea, 61; and the Korean family under Japanese rule, 10, 81; mobility of, in Korea, 61–62, 86–87. See also sex industry; widows women’s magazines, 129 World Food Program (UN), 199 Xing Kelu, 37 Xinjiang, 182, 182n54 Yanbian Autonomous Region: administrative status of, 149, 168, 169–70, 169n37; area of, 148n2; as borderland, 150–51; during the Cultural Revolution, 170; and DPRK destabilization, 198–99; dwellings in, 13, 148, 154–57, 159–64, 179; ethnic and frontier policies in, 152; Han Chinese in, 172; industrialization of, 172; as model of stability, 182; municipalities and population of, 148, 153, 172; relations with South Korea, 5, 172–73; social mobility in, 175. See also Korean Chinese; Manchuria Yang Hyun-ah, 68–69

Index Yang In Ai, 137 Yang, Korean Ambassador, 130 Yi Beom-seon, “Obaltan” by, 117–18 Yi Chul-ho, 70, 75 Yi Se-sŏn, 83–84 Yi Tong’gil, 28–29 Yi Yong-mi, 70 Yoda Sei’ichi, 75 Yoshida Shigeru, 96 Young, Lee Na, 93 Yu Chin-kyŏng, 61, 86 Yueqing Township (Yanbian), 179–80 Yuh, Ji-Yeon, 95n27, 110, 110n68

231 Yu Hyeon-mok. See Obaltan Yu Kil-jun, 127, 127n8 Yum Geum-suk, 93 Yun Geum-i, 99, 99n45 zainichi, 12n15 Zhang Baotai incident (1863), 33–34 Zhang Xueliang, 159 Zhang Yuhuan, 171 Zhang Zuolin, 159 Zhao Nanqi, 169 Zimmerman, Jonathan, 137

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES The Institute of East Asian Studies was established at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1978 to promote research and teaching on the cultures and societies of China, Japan, and Korea. The institute unites several research centers and programs, including the Center for Buddhist Studies, the Center for Chinese Studies, the Center for Japanese Studies, the Center for Korean Studies, the Group in Asian Studies, the East Asia National Resource Center, and the InterUniversity Program for Chinese Language Studies. Director: Associate Director:

Wen-hsin Yeh Martin Backstrom

CENTER FOR BUDDHIST STUDIES Chair: Robert Sharf CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES Chair: Andrew Jones CENTER FOR JAPANESE STUDIES Chair: Steven Vogel CENTER FOR KOREAN STUDIES Chair: John Lie GROUP IN ASIAN STUDIES Chair: Bonnie Wade EAST ASIA NATIONAL RESOURCE CENTER Director: Wen-hsin Yeh INTER-UNIVERSITY PROGRAM FOR CHINESE LANGUAGE STUDIES Executive Director: Thomas B. Gold

KOREA RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS (KRM)

24. Lancaster, Lewis R., and Richard K. Payne, eds. Religion and Society in Contemporary Korea. 1997. 25. Shin, Jeong-Hyun. The Trap of History: Understanding Korean Short Stories. 1998. 26. Pai, Hyung Il, and Timothy R. Tangherlini, eds. Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity. 1998. 27. Hesselink, Nathan, ed. Contemporary Directions: Korean Folk Music Engaging the Twentieth Century and Beyond. 2001. 28. Choi, Byonghyon, trans. The Book of Corrections: Reflections on the National Crisis during the Japanese Invasion of Korea, 1592–1598. 2002. 29. Dilling, Margaret Walker. Stories inside Stories: Music in the Making of Korean Olympic Ceremonies. 2007. 30. Kim, Hyuk-Rae, and Bok Song, eds. Modern Korean Society: Its Development and Prospect. 2007. 31. Park, Hun Joo. Diseased Dirigisme: The Political Sources of Financial Policy toward Small Business in Korea. 2007. 32. Finch, Michael, trans. Min Yŏnghwan: The Selected Writings of a Late Chosŏn Diplomat. 2008. 33. Pettid, Michael. Unyŏng-jŏn: A Love Affair at the Royal Palace of Chŏson Korea. 2009. 34. Park, Pori. Trial and Error in Modernist Reforms: Korean Buddhism under Colonial Rule. 2009. 35. Patterson, Wayne. In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876–1888. 2012. 36. Yeh, Wen-hsin, ed. Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora. 2013. RESEARCH PAPERS AND POLICY STUDIES (RPPS)

40. Hao, Yufan. Dilemma and Decision: An Organizational Perspective on American China Policy Making. 1997. 41. Wakeman, Jr., Frederic, and Wang Xi, eds. China’s Quest for Modernization: A Historical Perspective. 1997. 42. West, Loraine A., and Yaohui Zhao, eds. Rural Labor Flows in China. 2000. 43. Sharma, Shalendra D., ed. The Asia-Pacific in the New Millennium: Geopolitics, Security, and Foreign Policy. 2000. 44. Arase, David, ed. The Challenge of Change: East Asia in the New Millennium. 2003. 45. Kang, Sungho, and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds. Geopolitics and Trajectories of Development: The Cases of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and Puerto Rico. 2010. SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS

Han, Theodore, and John Li. Tiananmen Square Spring 1989: A Chronology of the Chinese Democracy Movement. 1992. Scalapino, Robert. From Leavenworth to Lhasa: Living in a Revolutionary Era. 2008. Thompson, Phyllis L., ed. Dear Alice: Letters Home from American Teachers Learning to Live in China. 1998. PUBLICATIONS WITH THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF EARLY CHINA

Loewe, Michael, ed. Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide. 1993. Qiu, Xigui. Chinese Writing. Trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman. 2000. von Falkenhausen, Lothar, ed. Japanese Scholarship on Early China, 1987–1991: Summaries from Shigaku zasshi. 2002.

For a complete catalogue and current prices, see http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/catalogue.html

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Mobile Subjects

Mobile Subjects

Yeh

Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora

INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES

CENTER FOR KOREAN STUDIES

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KRM 36

INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ● BERKELEY

Edited by Wen-hsin Yeh KOREA RESEARCH MONOGRAPH 36

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