Indeed the radio, specifically the regular live reports from Berlin, played a central role in igniting Koreans’ interest in Son Kijng’s great Olympic quest. When the day of the marathon came, Koreans huddled around their radios in the late hours of Saturday, August 9, 1936. Immediately following an update around midnight that Son had joined the lead pack about a third of the way into the race, however, the broadcast, in accordance with its regular schedule, cut off the coverage from Berlin. While the rest of the country had to wait until the next morning for the results, a group of people gathered just outside the Tonga ilbo headquarters received updates from a newspaper employee who had managed to establish telephone contact with Tokyo and Berlin. These people were the first to know when, around 2am, came finally the joyous announcement that, indeed, Son Kijng had won the Olympic marathon, and moreover, that another Korean, Nam Sngnyong, had taken the bronze medal. The following morning the country erupted in celebration, and a pervasive giddiness over this happy occasion would endure for months, even infecting the reporters at the Tonga ilbo enough, two weeks later, to alter Son’s photo.
The newspaper workers behind this act were displaying an extreme example of the double duty that Korean reporters generally pursued in the colonial period—as eyewitnesses and chroniclers on the one hand, and as activists, opinion makers, and artists on the other. In fact, a great number of colonial period writers also had worked at one time as newspaper reporters. The line between observer and storyteller tended to blur—along with that between popular and high culture—through this connection and the serialization of novels in newspapers and periodicals. Furthermore, the themes explored by these literary works mostly focused on the here and now, and on daily events—as if, indeed, they were elaborations of newspaper reports. The first great concentration of canonical works in modern Korean literature emerged in the late colonial period and was suffused with the details of everyday life, from the tedious to the tragic.
Many of the most notable authors of novels and short stories won their renown through portrayals of daily, often mundane life in late colonial Korea. Ch’ae Mansik, known primarily for his masterpiece, the novel Peace Under Heaven, used his short stories to satirize, critique, and observe bemusedly the often dumbfounding dynamics of modern existence. His short story, “A Ready-Made Life,” for example, depicts the legions of “petit bourgeois intellectuals” who, armed with an education and high tastes but no practical skills, drift about contemporary Seoul in search of jobs and meaning in their lives. The lead character, one such “ready-made life,” rescues himself from his absurd destitution and desperation by returning to simple, indeed traditional, priorities. Another important chronicler of life in Seoul was Pak T’aewn, author of innovative narratives that at times dispensed with conventions, such as plot, for the sake of chronicling the pedestrian. “A Day in the Life of the Novelist Kubo” (serialized in 1934), for example, is an autobiographical stroll (“Kubo” was Pak’s pen name) through Seoul relayed through streams of consciousness and snippets of observations, in a narrative style that often changes tenses and narrator in the same paragraph. Scenes of the rapidly modernizing capital city attract the attention of Kubo, who notes the goings on in theaters, restaurants, coffee houses, and that great symbol of high-class urban leisure at the time, the department store. What he finds in the teeming metropolis, however, often leads to alienation and disenchantment. In the splendid Seoul train station, for example, he senses only a throng of lonely individuals: “Although the place is so packed with people that Kubo can’t even find a seat to squeeze into, there’s no human warmth. Without exchanging a word with those sitting next to them, these people are preoccupied with their own business, and should they happen to say anything to each other, it’s only to check the train schedule or something along those lines.” While the extraordinary pace and social impact of changes in the urban landscape are enough to devote an entire novella to the impressions of a curious observer, the novelties of modern life are not necessarily to be celebrated. Indeed, the effects are often lamented and feared.
Realist depictions of the underbelly of modern life and of the sad, sometimes brutal struggles of common people had appeared in the early 1920s, most notably in the works of Hyn Chin’gn. But the late colonial period witnessed an intensified politicization of literature through an explicit engagement with pressing sociopolitical issues. This trend was exemplified by KAPF, the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation, an organization founded in 1925 to rally authors toward the theme of class consciousness and the finer points of Marxism and historical materialism. KAPF also reflected larger social trends toward leftist activism, as seen in the founding of the Korean Communist Party in 1925, in the attempt to unify nationalist movements under the leadership of socialist activists in the late 1920s, and in the increasingly hostile agitation of factory labor movements and peasant unions well into the 1930s. Revolutionary leftist influence extended to the realms of social criticism, theater, cinema, music, and the fine arts, but had perhaps the most palpable impact on literature. The representative writer of KAPF was Yi Kiyng. After publishing several harrowing chronicles of struggling peasants in his short stories, Yi unveiled his great novel, Hometown, through serialization in the Chosn ilbo newspaper from 1933 to 1934. Hometown chronicles the attempts by a colorful cast of villagers—in effect, Korea’s proletariat, given the relatively underdeveloped factory labor force—to adjust to the exploitative forces of early capitalism. It employs the ready tropes of proletarian literature, such as the heroic socialist intellectual in the role of the vanguard, but the success of this novel owed much to the compellingly lifelike characters and a grippingly melodramatic story that transcended conventions. Indeed, the work of KAPF writers moved even Korean authors who were not members, or even leftist in inclination, to infuse their works with a greater social consciousness and attention to the people’s daily travails.
Whether through such literary works or via the new media of radio, phonographs, or cinema, culture in the late colonial period revealed to Koreans the countlessly variegated manifestations of each others’ lives. Cultural production gave meaning, then, to the dizzying onset of industrial capitalism—the exploding proliferation of occupations and activities; the appearance of big machines, vehicles, buildings, and cities; and advances in transportation and communications, including especially the newspaper—that rendered contact with a greater world a recurring reality. By instilling a sense of collective plight and subjectivity, both as Koreans and as modern people, the revelation of larger society and the experience of daily life aroused a sense of transformation, modernity, and nationhood much more solidly than could calls to action and political movements. Even the occasional bursts of nationalist ardor served more as exceptions that reinforced the more powerful effects of the churning quotidian. The true historical significance of the Son Kijng photo incident, then, lies in its illumination of the centrality of newspapers in the unfolding process of modernity in the late colonial period. To be sure, debates about the propriety of colonial rule, ardent calls for independence, and enticing visions of a better, autonomous future continued to spark passions well into the 1930s. To the large majority of Koreans, however, life in the late colonial period remained firmly wedded to the here and now. Even to those who could afford to dwell on the grander issues, it was an open-ended time, and anything seemed possible. That soothing ambiguity would come to a screeching halt, however, once the colony became mobilized for war.
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Wartime Mobilization, 1938–45
CHRONOLOGY
1935 Official order for school children and public employees to bow to the Japanese emperor
1937 Eruption of the (second) Sino-Japanese War
1938 Proclamation of wartime mobilization measures
1940 Shutdown of the two major Korean language newspapers
1940 Order to take Japanese names; organization of all Koreans into neighborhood patriotic associations
1945 Defeat of the Japanese empire in the Pacific War
THE VISIT BY AUTHORS YI KWANGSU AND CH’OE NAMSN TO JAPAN, 1943
Two of the foremost and best known Korean intellectuals of the colonial period, Ch’oe Namsn and Yi Kwangsu, made a discreet visit to Meiji University in Tokyo on November 24, 1943. This took place at the peak of the “Greater East Asia Holy War,” so named by the increasingly strident propaganda effort that appealed for sacrifice from imperial subjects. Yi and Ch’oe traveled to Japan to assist this mobilization of manpower by urging a group of young Koreans studying in Japan to join the war effort as student soldiers. Afterward, the two writers gathered in a roundtable discussion with the event’s host, another Korean author, to assess the reception and meaning of their message, and to expound on their motivations for their appearance. They also recounted their own experiences as young Korean students in Japan forty years earlier. Their lives thereafter had traversed the entirety of the period under
Japanese domination, during which they won recognition as two of the most pioneering and influential figures in Korean letters. That they found themselves in old age promoting the dissolution of Korean identity itself constitutes a profound if not tragic irony, as well as a microcosm of the final years of colonial rule as the country became swept up by war.
The experience of wartime mobilization left a pronounced imprint on Korea. It exposed Koreans to the horrific technologies of the most devastating war in human history, brutalized them through sexual slavery and forced labor, and stripped them of basic features of their ethnic identity, including even their names and language. Perhaps most significantly, these concluding years of Japanese rule came to dominate the prevailing perception of the colonial period as a whole, spawning a resentment, bitterness, and distrust among Koreans that would haunt their subsequent history. For despite the difficulties and extreme tensions of the wartime years, there remained a substantial minority of Koreans who took up the Japanese cause. Their numbers, in fact, likely were far larger than those of the celebrated independence activists, working mostly from outside the peninsula, whose impact proved greater in shaping Korea after liberation than in bringing it about. As with Yi Kwangsu and Ch’oe Namsn, the actions of these “collaborators” during the wartime mobilization period have ceaselessly challenged ongoing attempts to arrive at a reckoning of Korea’s colonial experience.
INDUSTRIALIZATION AND STATE DOMINATION
Every society immersed in modern wars has faced the ferocity of mass mobilization, and in the ruthless spectrum that ranged from food rationing to Stalinism or the Holocaust, Koreans’ experience during the Second World War likely sits closer to the latter. But while the litany of abuses can readily be dramatized to fit a narrative of unrelenting horror, the experience was uneven in its severity, depending on one’s socioeconomic standing, geographical location, and, terribly for many women, gender. And while the hardships seem to have come in many forms and touched every facet of Koreans’ lives, they mostly resulted from the intensification of two phenomena that had been growing for a couple of decades.
First was industrialization, which began sporadically in the early years of the twentieth century and received a major kick-start during the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s following Korea’s transformation into a base for Japanese expansion into the Asian mainland. The economic growth that accompanied this shift had turned Korea’s urban areas, especially Seoul, into centers of advanced consumer and popular culture. The colonial government’s demand for industrial expansion and infrastructural improvements stimulated the cycle of occupational diversification, increasing expectations for economic opportunity, and urbanization. During the 1930s, and particularly in the wartime years, the mass movement of people extended to beyond the peninsula as well, as peasants escaped rural poverty and followed work opportunities to Japan and Manchuria, where Korean capitalists even established factories. These mass migrations would present a major challenge to social stability following liberation in 1945.
Manchuria as a cauldron of modern Korea
The formative experiences of the two dominant Korean historical figures of the second half of the twentieth century, Kim Il Sung and Park Chung Hee, took place in Manchuria during the last decade of the colonial period. Kim Il Sung (b. 1912), who went on to rule North Korea for fifty years, grew up in Manchuria and eventually led the most successful of several anti-Japanese communist guerilla groups operating in tandem with their Chinese counterparts. In contrast, Park Chung Hee (b. 1917), long-time president and the person most closely associated with South Korea’s accelerated economic development in the 1960s and 1970s, came of age as one of the few Koreans selected for training in the Japanese Military Academy in Manchuria. Though they both exploited nationalist sentiment to bolster their rules later, this strong contrast in their experiences as young men in Manchuria decisively shaped their respective destinies, and in turn those of their states, following liberation in 1945. In fact, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Manchuria, both before and following the establishment of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in the early 1930s, served as Korea’s great frontier, the place to which Koreans could escape to forge a new life. In turn the forms of communal existence established there appear to have influenced significantly the social and political patterns back home.
Manchuria’s pivotal role in Korean history was not a modern novelty, however. Since the ancient beginnings of state formation in northeast Asia, the peoples of Manchuria supplied an impression of the (uncivilized) Other against whom Koreans conceived their own ethnic or national identity. As late as the seventeenth century, after the Manchus subdued Chosn on their way to conquering China itself, Manchuria continued to compel Koreans to sharpen their sense of self. The name for certain Manchurian tribesmen, Orangk’ae, in fact became synonymous with a common derogatory reference to the northern peoples—whether Malgal, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongol, or Manchu—and turned into the default Korean term for “barbarian.” This tendency also reflected the nostalgia for a mythical era when Koreans were said to have ruled this territory, and in turn the likelihood that Koreans, deep in their collective sub-consciousness, understood that they and these “barbarians” might have common origins. Japanese colonial rulers also promoted this idea by integrating their two conquered territories of Korea and Manchuria into a single extension of the Japanese homeland, claiming that this process reconstructed an ancient civilizational bond. Whether in spurring resistance to (Kim) or embrace of (Park) this process during the late colonial period, Manchuria’s function as the cultivator of Korean leaders, and as the experimental cauldron of Korea’s modern existence more generally, continued its long historical role of shaping Korean identity.
The intensification of economic activity occurred throughout the 1930s. The most dramatic leaps in industrial output and the accompanying socioeconomic development, however, came with the shift to a wartime footing. Following the eruption of hostilities between Japan and China in 1937 and the formal proclamations of wartime mobilization measures in 1938, Koreans experienced a precipitous surge in the range and intensity of economic activity. The established sectors of early industrialization, such as textiles and food processing, were joined by the rapid growth of heavy industries catering to war: armaments, chemicals, machinery, and oil and gas. Factories churning out these products began to concentrate in special corridors along the west-central and north-eastern coasts, and the numbers of Korean factory workers and managers increased exponentially in line with equally enormous increases in industrial production. By the closing months of the war in 1945, industry accounted for nearly 40 percent of the total economic output in Korea, which a decade earlier was still overwhelmingly agrarian.
For the most part, this remarkable expansion was not designed to improve the lot of the Korean people themselves. In Korea, the deprivation from mobilization for twentieth-century war was made worse by the colonial state’s ov
erbearing efforts to intensify both the economic and “spiritual” fortitude of its subject people. The colonial state, in short, instituted a relentless drive toward total war. This in turn reflected the state’s development into an entity that actually surpassed industrial growth as an institutional force in the wartime years. In channeling the economy toward war, the colonial state forcefully blunted organized worker actions throughout the peninsula, even in the rural areas, where strikes by peasant unions had become increasingly vociferous. The searing trials of both urban and rural laborers undergoing these battles with factory owners and the state would contribute greatly to the creation of a proletariat in the concluding years of colonial rule.
The state’s impact on the people’s lives reached its comprehensive peak in the radical assimilation policies of the wartime years. Colonial authorities had always mouthed assimilation as a central goal, and indeed had explicitly stated this as a motive for annexation in the first place. But the irreconcilable reality of ongoing legal discrimination in the colonial system—from bureaucratic recruitment and compensation to segregation in educational and business opportunities—had marginalized this objective. Beginning in the latter 1930s, however, as war loomed in the air, the colonial state began to institute measures to coerce a psychological identification with the Japanese empire—to turn Koreans into “imperial subjects”—that veered toward totalitarianism. In 1935 came a government order for Korean schoolchildren and public employees to begin their day with a ritual bowing toward the east in honor of the Japanese emperor, soon followed by orders for Koreans to make visits to Japanese religious shrines. These steps intensified the battle with Korean Christian groups that would end with the expulsion of all Western missionaries from the peninsula in 1942. The authorities also began to prohibit children from speaking Korean in school. The two major Korean language newspapers were shut down in 1940. And as if to put a final stamp on the drive to suppress a separate Korean identity, in 1940 came the promulgation of what has often been considered the most egregious order, that to adopt Japanese names. The authorities instituted this measure more to streamline surveillance and mobilization of the subject people than to humiliate them, and disregarding this directive did not result in legal repercussions for everyone. But soon it became clear that, for anyone whose livelihoods depended on the colonial system—for example, professionals—taking a Japanese name was unavoidable. The harrowing tales of honorable Koreans forced to dishonor their ancestry by registering their new names tend to inflate the ultimate impact of this measure. Undoubtedly, however, the name-change law carried great weight as a symbol of the forced assimilation campaign, which continued to spread through slogans such as “Japan and Korea as One Body.”
A History of Korea Page 21