The growth of the state both drove and reflected the dynamics of the Japanese takeover, not only in enforcing a militarily supported conquest, but in penetrating Korean society so deeply that overwhelming force proved mostly unnecessary. The “soft” features of the takeover, in fact, might have had a greater and more lasting impact in naturalizing foreign rule: changes to the financial and banking sectors; the government investments in communications and transportation infrastructure; the construction of schools and technical training centers; and the establishment of hospitals and other mechanisms to improve healthcare and hygiene—including, stunningly, a protectorate-period effort to enforce medical exams for prostitutes! To be sure, all of these measures were aimed first and foremost at facilitating a transition to foreign rule, catering to the Japanese migrants flooding the peninsula, and eventually enhancing colonial exploitation, but these steps also improved the welfare of many Koreans as well. The majority of Koreans—those in the countryside—of course felt little to no change in their daily lives, but they likely sensed few consequences from the political changeover either. Many Koreans simply had little incentive to resist the takeover.
Did Koreans, then, “sell out” their country? For two large groups, this might have been the case: the thousands of officials, like Yi Wanyong and Song Pyngjun, and other direct beneficiaries who provided legal and institutional assistance; and many, mostly lesser-known Koreans whose actions hinged not on payments but rather on implicit promises and hopes for material improvements and “enlightenment.” But one could argue that many societies had to make such a Faustian bargain, often absent of considerations of national political autonomy, in coming to grips with the economic and political dislocations of the modern era. At least the Koreans, whether in accommodation, resistance, or someplace in between, claimed a role in determining their own fate amidst the maelstrom of external forces pushing upon them. They would undergo another such trial of autonomy and modernity following their liberation from Japanese rule in 1945.
17
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The Long 1920s
CHRONOLOGY
1919 March The March First independence uprisings
1919 April Convening of the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai
1920 Commencement of the “Cultural Rule” policy by colonial government
1920 Inaugural publication of the first two native Korean newspapers of the colonial era
1921 Special exhibition of Na Hyesk’s paintings in Seoul
1925 First issue of the journal, New Woman
1927 Beginning of Na Hyesk’s extended visit to Europe
1929 Return of Na Hyesk to Korea, divorce from husband
OPENING OF A SPECIAL EXHIBITION OF NA HYESK’S PAINTINGS, 1921
On March 18, 1921, a special exhibition of Western-style paintings opened in downtown Kyngsng (Keijo), the official name of the Korean capital of Seoul in the colonial era. It represented the first such show dedicated to the works of a single painter, but notably, the artist was a young woman in her mid-twenties, Na Hyesk. Perhaps more remarkably, just two years earlier Na had been imprisoned for five months for having participated in the March First Independence Movement, a mass uprising against colonial rule that sparked bloody reprisals. Na’s quick social rehabilitation and ascent to artistic distinction owed much to the rapid changes that enveloped the lives of Koreans at this time. Her new husband, for one, was a rising young Korean lawyer with connections to the upper echelons of colonial politics, business, and publishing. Indeed the sponsors
of her exhibit were the two official government newspapers of the time, one published in Japanese and the other in Korean. The success of this exhibition also demonstrated how dramatically the socioeconomic transformation of colonial Korea facilitated the rise of groups and individuals who relied upon new opportunities and different forms of social identity and collectivity.
Na Hyesk, in fact, proved a pioneering figure in another way as well—she was a forceful voice in the flourishing public discourse of her times, in which she argued for greater recognition of both of her primary identities, as artist and as a woman. Her life and work constituted a microcosm of Korea’s “roaring twenties,” the maturation period of colonial rule that established significant societal patterns enduring well past this decade. One could argue that the 1920s actually began in the opening months of 1919, when the independence uprisings led to the closure of the somber 1910s and the commencement of what officially was proclaimed “Cultural Rule.” Henceforth appeared a blossoming of cultural expression, associational activity, and articulations of nationhood in the re-invigorated realm of publishing. As the rise and equally dramatic fall of Na Hyesk’s public profile demonstrated, the transformation of Korea in the long 1920s was centered on social and economic developments that affected nearly everyone, especially Korean females.
THE MARCH FIRST MOVEMENT AND CULTURAL RULE
It is difficult to say whether the loosening of social and political restrictions that marked the 1920s would have eventually emerged regardless of the March First Movement of 1919, but certainly the uprisings spurred the colonial authorities to deploy substantial corrective measures. The first decade of the colonial period, the so-called “military rule” era characterized by stifling limitations on social activity, suppressed the outward expression of people’s discontent, but this served only to intensify the ensuing explosion. The trigger came from a confluence of three major events, one in Korea, another in Japan, and a third in Europe. In the West, 1918 was the year of reckoning of the Great War (First World War), and among the resolutions that the victorious powers advanced was to encourage self-determination among fledgling nations. The Euro-American leaders had in mind the peoples of Europe and did not envision the independence of overseas colonies, but this was exactly how these utterances from Versailles were taken by liberation movements around the world. Indeed, the Korean students who had flocked to the metropole, especially to Tokyo, in the 1910s found there not only greater educational opportunities but, ironically, also a much freer atmosphere for political thought and agitation. They organized themselves into publishing a manifesto of Korean independence in February 1919, and soon they joined forces with like-minded students in their homeland to recruit social and cultural leaders for a mass demonstration for independence. The timing, however, would be dictated by news in late February of the death of Kojong, the last autonomous monarch of pre-annexation Korea, and by the likelihood that people from throughout the country would gather in the capital for his funeral.
The drafting of the Declaration of Independence by a renowned author, the gathering of eminent religious and social figures to serve as official representatives, and other secret planning for the demonstrations targeted March 1, two days before the funeral, as the date. On that morning, the thirty-three signers of the Declaration gathered in Seoul to read aloud the document in Pagoda Park, and soon throngs of people marched down the streets shouting “Long Live Korean Independence!” This scene was soon repeated throughout the country, and everywhere the scale and ferocity of the demonstrations, with upwards of one million participants nationwide, stunned and befuddled the authorities. This undoubtedly accounted for the senselessly ruthless measures taken to crack down on the demonstrators, with the cycle of suppression and resistance escalating into atrocities that included random shootings, massacres, and burnings of churches and entire villages. Perhaps the best-known victim of these reprisals, and hence also the most renowned female of this era in the nationalist annals, was Yu Kwansun. Yu was a schoolgirl in Seoul when March First broke out, but quickly went down to her home town in Ch’ungch’ng province to rally the locals for the cause. She was captured, brutalized, and eventually killed in prison, one of countless activists who became martyred. Even the colonial government’s tallies totaled more than 500 deaths and thousands of injuries over the course of the spring, with unofficial counts claiming exponentially larger numbers. Pacification would eventually come in th
e summer, but almost everything had changed.
The one thing that did not change was Korea’s colonial status. The March First Independence Movement ultimately failed to achieve its primary goal of gaining Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule. But the significance of March First, judged by its effects both internally and externally, was still enormous. Outside the country, representatives of disparate efforts to achieve independence, militarily and otherwise, were inspired to gather in Shanghai in April that year to organize a government in exile. This effort soon faltered due to ideological and other divisions among the activists, but the independence movements continued throughout the colonial period, if along divergent tracks. Within the peninsula, meanwhile, the March First Movement elicited a sweeping reevaluation of colonial rule on the part of the Japanese government. Japanese leaders were not ready to grant independence, of course, but they realized that harsh enforcement was counterproductive. Hence, the new Governor General instituted a comprehensive program that combined a discreet strengthening of bureaucratic and police forces with an outwardly more benign governing approach that encouraged Koreans to pursue social, economic, and cultural activities more freely. This so-called Cultural Rule, then, constituted a strategy of co-opting Koreans into the colonial system by allowing them a greater stake in its development.
The scale and scope of the changes that followed, particularly beyond the political realm, were extensive. Publication restrictions were lifted, and the two oldest Korean newspapers still circulating today, the Tonga ilbo and Chosn ilbo, began publishing in 1920. In the economy, the pursuit of a core benefit of turning Korea into a colony—that is, the exploitation of its natural resources—remained preeminent, but in the 1920s this effort gained improved efficiencies and structural reforms. While these developments consigned more Koreans to life as struggling tenant farmers, they also provided opportunities for other Koreans to gain commercially from the agricultural sector. Furthermore, the Government General’s easing of restrictions on native enterprise stimulated the emergence of many Korean companies, including those businesses that would later turn into the giant conglomerates dominating the South Korean economy, such as Samsung and LG. The most formidable and conspicuous of such family-owned companies, the Kyngsng Textile Company, eventually branched out into various industries and even different regions, as it built factories and branches in Manchuria and elsewhere. The colonial government’s accelerated extension of communication and transportation networks, meanwhile, spurred further urbanization and the concentration of wealth, construction, and influence in these growing population centers. The precipitous migration out of the rural areas and the ensuing dissolution of traditional ties, both familial and otherwise, would have far-reaching social ramifications. Most striking of all, perhaps, the loosening of legal restrictions and enforcement methods led to a boom in associational activity among Koreans, who joined hundreds of clubs, organizations, and other groups catering to countless interests and social identities.
These developments, together with the incorporation of thousands of Koreans into the colonial state, also engendered a reordering of the social structure by facilitating a dramatic rise in social mobility. The fundamental transformation and even overturning of Korean social hierarchy had begun in the late nineteenth century, but the colonial circumstances intensified these trends, particularly in urban centers. In these areas, the Korean social structure looked very different from that of a few decades earlier, as the diversification of the economy and occupations, together with legal reforms, further minimized the impact of hereditary status. Descendants of previously despised groups such as butchers and shamans organized campaigns to gain social acceptance, and many from secondary status backgrounds ascended to the highest levels of the new social elite. Most striking of all, perhaps, were the changes affecting women. From kisaeng courtesans and peasants in the countryside to the housewives and wage workers in the cities, females began to reshape the social landscape in a way unprecedented in Korean history.
KOREAN FEMALES IN THE NEW AGE
The most dramatic impact of the urbanization, industrialization, and increased availability of education in the 1920s might have been experienced by women. These changes affected mostly those females in the cities, but extended to the rural areas as well. In both environments, Korean females as a whole found room to explore new life paths and claim a greater role in determining their own lives. It marked the beginning of an unfolding of female subjectivity that, through its development in fits and starts the rest of the twentieth century, would leave a major imprint on how Koreans came to view gender roles in the modern era.
The most distinctive type of woman in the 1920s went by the terms “new woman” or “modern girl,” a phenomenon visible in contemporary Japan and China as well. Concentrated in Seoul, these females shared a background of having been educated in the major cities (though often they had moved from the countryside), a strong consumerist orientation, and family connections to the new social elite, often through marriage to urban professionals. The New Woman appeared frequently in the contemporary literature, often portrayed in contrast—and not always flatteringly—to the more traditional women who still constituted the overwhelming majority, as an allegory on the choices and dilemmas presented by the rapidly changing world. They also appeared in articles, notices, and advertisements in the burgeoning publishing sector targeting their bourgeois lifestyles. These publications included women’s magazines that dished out advice on everything from fashion to hygiene. Most of the readers were either students or graduates of the growing number of girls’ secondary schools in the urban centers, and some could point to an experience of schooling abroad, especially in Japan, as the source of their worldly perspectives and tastes.
The urban, educated women not only appeared as emblems and consumers of the publishing world, but also as producers. Female authors, translators, essayists, and critics contributed to the construction of a distinctively modern Korean literary culture, the most formative period for which was the 1920s. New magazines and literary journals, such as New Woman (Sin Ysng), catered to women’s interests and provided a forum for female writers. Na Hyesk, though known better for her paintings and essays, also expressed her ideals of female emancipation through poetry and short stories, the earliest of which was published in 1918. Renowned female contemporaries included Kim Iryp, who also founded in 1920 Korea’s first women’s journal, Kim Myngsun, whose novels explored the depths of female subjectivity, and later in the 1930s, Kang Kyngae, a realist storyteller whose works depicted the plight of Korea’s underclass.
Korean women also made their mark in the realm of the arts. City dwellers eventually came to know of Yun Simdk, for example, the great singer whose concerts became lavish spectacles, and of Ch’oe Snghi, the dancer who mesmerized audiences throughout the world before working as a propagandist for Japan’s war effort in the 1940s. Na Hyesk was the third figure in this famed Korean triumvirate of female artists of the colonial period. Having demonstrated her precociousness as a school girl from a well-to-do Seoul family, she went to Japan in her late teens to enroll in a girls’ art school. She returned to her homeland just in time to get caught up in the 1919 March First Movement, which derailed her career path as an artist, however briefly. After getting married under the condition—unheard of at the time—that she be allowed to continue her artistic career, Na developed her talents further by displaying her works in various exhibitions, including the solo exhibition of her own works in 1921. Motherhood and a brief move to Manchuria to follow her husband, who had become a diplomat in the Japanese empire, curbed her artistic activities somewhat. By the late 1920s, however, Na was on the move again, this time on a whirlwind tour through Europe with her husband, where in Paris she trained further in oil painting techniques. In Paris she also became involved in a scandalous affair with a well-known Korean nationalist figure, and within a year after her return to Korea in 1929, her husband divorced her, and she lost custody of her childr
en. Although she experienced a few successes as a professional painter thereafter, her artistic career eventually suffered from a lack of public interest, and she lived out her life in obscurity, much of it in Buddhist temples, until her death in 1946.
The relatively small number of paintings attributed to Na Hyesk that can be considered reliably authentic today show indeed a master craftsman deserving of status as one of the accomplished Korean painters of her era, regardless of gender. But Na Hyesk’s historical significance stems also from her opinions as a social commentator and chronicler, and from her own actions. Even in her student days in Japan she expressed reservations about the prevailing “wise mother, good wife” model and insisted that females shape their lives in accordance with reason and self-confidence. In a 1921 newspaper editorial entitled “Painting and Korean Women,” which provided a prelude to the opening of her single-artist exhibition, she deplored the social biases resulting in a lack of opportunities for Korean women to develop an interest and talent in painting. This stood in contrast to the visibility of female poets and writers, she noted. In a veiled reference to herself, Na proclaimed, “I am convinced that female painters can appear if only an effort arose to facilitate interest in painting among common women.”
In her later writings, she expressed views that would have been considered radical even half-a-century later. In a long magazine essay entitled “Thoughts on Becoming a Mother,” published in 1923, Na shredded the niceties of the motherly ideal and asserted that her experiences contradicted everything she had been taught. She wrote of the difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing, and of the resentments she built up against society, her husband, and even her baby for impinging on her career and personal freedoms. There must be an implicitly conspiratorial character to the social conventions that divided men and women into their respective roles, she wondered. Upon her return from Europe, she openly praised the model of gender relations that she observed in the West and even speculated that cohabitation before marriage, or a “test marriage,” could allow women to become better informed before taking the plunge. After the failure of her own marriage, in writings such as “A Divorce Confession” she called for the liberation of women’s sexuality, lamented the social and familial conventions that constrained females, and condemned the hypocrisy of typical Korean males regarding chastity. She even put into practice her calls for female empowerment by suing Ch’oe Rin, the nationalist activist with whom she had become involved in Paris, for “infringement on a woman’s honor.” She accused Ch’oe, in other words, of abandoning her despite his role in the events that led to Na’s public disgrace and divorce, and she demanded monetary restitution. These actions failed to rehabilitate her artistic career or social standing, but Na Hyesk demonstrated that Korean women could aspire to new levels of assertiveness, even if society as a whole remained unaccommodating.
A History of Korea Page 19