Western Perception of Korea 1890-1930
Comparative Study on the Relationship between
Reciprocity and Colonial Discourse
Author: Su Young Park
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
UPPSALA UNIVERSITY
Comparative Study on the Relationship between
Reciprocity and Colonial Discourse
Author: Su Young Park
Masters Thesis, Spring 2008
Supervisors: Lars M. Andersson & John Rogers
Examiner: Gunnel Cederlöf Examination Date: December 16, 2008
Abstract
This thesis examines reciprocity in texts written by the West about the East, and studies how reciprocity influenced the dominant colonial discourse. In Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said argues that texts about the Orient written by the West especially during the imperial period, are full of prejudice and a will to dominate the Orient. He calls this attitude Orientalism.
By focusing on reciprocity, I argue that the texts written by the West about the Orient do not always carry Orientalist views. The sources I refer to are travel writings on Korea produced during the period 1890-1930. These materials come from various nationalities including Britain, Germany, Russia, Sweden, and the United States. So my starting point differs from Said who only focused on Britain and France.
I examine the characteristics of the dominant discourse, focusing on
(1) what role reciprocity played in the formulation of the dominant colonial discourse;
(2) how the nationality of the traveler influenced that discourse;
(3) how the personal attributes of the traveler, such as gender and occupation, influenced the discourse.
This thesis finally suggests that a low degree of reciprocity results in agreement with the dominant discourse, while a high level of reciprocity leads to disagreement with the dominant discourse. Moreover, different nationalities produced different slants to the dominant discourse. However, it remains true that not all the texts written by British travelers used Orientalist viewpoints, and that it was also Britain which most produced the colonial discourse. This thesis also suggests that while a gender element did not play a significant role in the formulation of the dominant discourse, personal attributes such as occupational status did influence the dominant discourse.
This thesis has been written within the masters program "Roads to Democracy(ies)". It does not deal directly with democratic developments but rather approaches the subject by studying one of the key issues related to the spread of democracy - colonialism and the Western perception of the Orient.
Keywords: Orientalism, reciprocity, travel writing, the Other, perception of Korea, image of Japan, dominant discourse, colonialism, textualism, topos
Contents
Abstract 2
Chapter 1. Introduction 4
1.1 Aim and Questions………………………………………………………………….….4
1.2 Theory……………………………………………………………………………….…6
1.2.1 Who are the Orientals and Who are the Occidentals? ……………………….….6
1.2.2 Textualism and A Relation between Knowledge and Power………………..…...9
1.2.3 Travel Writing and Contact Zone………………………………………………10
1.2.4 Criticism of Said’s Orientalism………………………………………………...12
1.3 Sources………………………………………………………………………………..16
1.4 Methodology………………………………………………………………………….20
1.5 Previous Research…………………………………………………………………….22
1.6 Background…………………………………………………………………...………25
1.6.1 Textual Background………………………………..………………….………..25
1.6.2 Historical background……………………………………………………..……28
Chapter 2. Analysis: Period I (1890-1905) 30
2.1 The Western Perception of Korea….…………………………………………………30
2.1.1 The Koreans and the Korean National Character………………………………30
2.1.2 Government and Political System………………………………………………37
2.1.3 Women and Society…………………………………………………………….40
2.1.4 Religion…………………………………………………………………………42
2.2 Comparative Study on Reciprocity…………………………………………………...48
2.2.1 George N. Curzon, Problems of the Far East. Japan-Korea-China
(Britain, 1894)…………………………………………………………………..48
2.2.2 Willy A:son Grebst, I Korea (Sweden, 1912)……………………………..….50
2.2.3 Siegfried Genthe, Korea-Reiseschilderungen (Germany, 1905).........................53
2.2.4 Vatslav Seroshevskii, Корея, (Russia, 1905)......................................................58
Chapter 3. Analysis: Period II (1905-1930) 64
3.1 The Western Perception of Korea……………………………………………………64
3.1.1 The Koreans and the Korean National Character………………………………64
3.1.2 Government and Political System………………………………………………68
3.1.3 Women and Society…………………………………………………………….70
3.1.4 Religion…………………………………………………………………………72
3.2 The Western Image of Japan………………….……………………………………....74
3.2.1 Image before the Russo-Japanese War………..…….………………………….74
3.2.2 Image after the Russo-Japanese War………………..………………………….78
3.3 Comparative Study on Reciprocity…………………………………………………...85
3.3.1 William F. Sands, Undiplomatic memories (USA, 1930)……………………...85
3.3.2 Frederick A. McKenzie, Korea’s Fight for Freedom (Britain, 1919)…………88
3.3.3 Elizabeth and Scott, E.K. Robertson Keith (Author), Elizabeth Keith
(Illustrator) Old Korea: The land of morning calm (Britain, 1946)……………93
3.3.4 Henry B. Drake, Korea of the Japanese (Britain, 1930)……………………….95
Chapter 4. Conclusion 101
Bibliography 105
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 Aim and Questions
Edward Said, in Orientalism in 1978, claims that the texts on the Orient produced by the West are full of prejudices, defining the Orient as an irrational, backward, or peculiar space, whose qualities do not change. Said calls this Western discourse Orientalism. He asserts further that Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The term Orientalism was first used in France in the 1830s, originally to describe knowledge about the Orient, or a genre of romantic-fantasy literature or painting. However, since Said used this term, Orientalism has no longer had a neutral meaning. For Said, Orientalism is “European domination of the Orient,” and, as a tool to serve colonialism, it even complies with the imperialist power.
The Orient on which Said mainly focuses in Orientalism is the Islamic world of the Middle East, which has challenged Europe, and so Europeans have held the formidable East in fear or awe. In some respects, the Far East, to which Korea belongs, was not a threatening opponent to Europe. Nevertheless, it is possible to adapt the theory of Orientalism to Korea with the help of Said’s argument: that the period of growing Orientalism matched the period in which the European empire expanded in Asia and Africa, from 1815 to 1914. Even though Korea was not a colony of the European countries, Korea was a kind of “the Other,” which was thought to be in need of corrective intervention by the West.
The purpose of this thesis is to examine reciprocity by using travel accounts concerning Korea, and to study how reciprocity influenced the dominant colonial discourse during the heyday of colonial expansionism 1890-1930.
It is difficult to perceive others or other objects without subjectivity. We tend to evaluate others and different cultures depending on our values or the circumstances under which we grow up and are educated. When Western people visited Korea during the peak period of imperialism, therefore, they might have been saturated with a dominant colonial discourse, and thus it might have been hard for them to keep their eyes “neutral” or “innocent.” Interacting with Korean others, they showed various kinds of attitudes concerning whether they supported or resisted to the colonial discourse. This thesis will deal with how Western travelers interact with Koreans, and study what role reciprocity plays in the formulation of the dominant discourse or discourses.
The material sources of the thesis are eight travel texts, whose nationalities include Germany, Russia, Sweden and the United State, as well as Britain. This is a different starting point from Said, who treated only Britain and France. Said points out that there is a strong connection between nationality and Oriemtalist discourse, stating that British and French texts have unparalleled Orientalist characteristics in quantity or consistency. By analyzing the eight texts, I will study whether the traveller’s nationality played a significant role in the formulation of a dominant discourse. Moreover, since four of the eight material sources are produced by Britain, it can also be tested whether or not the British nationality is deeply associated with colonial discourse.
Lastly, I will study the role played by the traveller’s personal attributes, such as gender and occupation, in the formulation of the dominant colonial discourse. Grouping the eight authors by gender, there are one female and seven males. Categorizing them by occupation, there are two governmental members, three journalists, two artists, and one ethnologist. This thesis will examine how the traveller’s gender and occupation influenced the formulation of the dominant colonial discourse.
To summarize, analyzing Western travel accounts concerning Korea during the period 1890-1930, I examine what characterized the dominant discourse, especially focusing on the following questions:
1. What role did reciprocity play in the formulation of a dominant discourse?
2. What role did the traveler’s nationality play in the formulation of a dominant discourse?
3. What role did the traveler’s personal attributes, such as gender and occupation, play in the formulation of the dominant colonial discourse?
1.2 Theory
1.2.1 Who are the Orientals, and Who are the Occidentals?
Said argues in Orientalism that the Orient is not the Orient as it is, but “a constituted entity,” defined and molded unilaterally by the West. The Orient is an imaginary geography, divided arbitrarily by Europe, and located outside of the familiar European space of “ours.” The unfamiliar space, therefore, is full of invented imagination and “quasi-fictional quality.” This space is “a closed field” like “a theatrical stage,” which is characterized by no further extension. In a closed space neither activity nor evolution takes place, and human existences are recognized only as a group. Thus, the Orientals are perceived not as individuals but collectively, destitute of autonomous or sovereign characteristic. The West has constructed its own identity by differentiating the alien Otherness in this way; the Occident is advanced, rational, logical, and balanced, while the Orient is “the same, unchanging, uniform, radically peculiar object.” The Orient also has backward characteristics, such as tendency to despotism, habit of inaccuracy or indifference. The Orient is thus not the Orient as it is, but as constructed by the European will to dominate “the Other.”
Said himself raises a potential polemic argument, that this idea seems to imply that there exists “the real Orient,” which could be identified in a proper way. However, whether a true Orient exists is not the ultimate concern for Said. Said enunciates this as following:
“It is not the thesis of this book to suggest that there is such a thing as a real or true Orient (Islam, Arab, or whatever)…. On the contrary, I have been arguing that ‘the Orient’ is itself a constituted entity, and that the notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically ‘different’ inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence proper to that geographical space is equally a highly debatable idea.”
As the passage suggests, what matters concerning Orientalism is not the misrepresentation of the Orient, but a description of the Orient designated with unchanging, fixed, essential qualities. It is also a criticism of Said’s that the mechanism of this essentialist way of thinking is continuously handed down through “the guild tradition of Orientalism.”
Who though is the West that is thus describing the Orient? Is there a West that exists like a massive family, which has carried out the sustained project of inventing the Orient? According to Said, the West “plotted Oriental history, character, and destiny for hundreds of years.” The West is a subject that has built its own identity and definition, and that “overrides” the Orient in order to set up its own superior identity and power. The West is Europe, including such as nations as Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, which possessed colonies, and the United States, which has practiced imperialism since the late nineteenth century. Among them, Said identifies Britain, France and the United States as the main powers developing Orientalist discourse with a constant national interest.19
Bonnett, in The Idea of the West, questions this conception of the West. Bonnett maintains that, according to Said, the West has persistently conceived of the Orient as being Orientalized, and thereby created its own definition or identity as the Western project. According to Bonnett, however, the West or the Western identity is not a self-invention by the West, but rather, it is a mutual representation deployed by both the Western and non-Western sides. Bonnet holds up as an example Fukusawa Yukichi (1835-1901), one of the influential thinkers during the period of Japanese Western modernization. Fascinated with the Western countries during a long trip to Europe, Fukusawa introduced Western ideas and ways to Japan, contending that Japan must import not only “the outward forms of civilization,” but also “the spirit of civilization.” The characteristic of the West that Fukusawa most admired were its “open, transparent and rational system,” and that it is “meritocratic in social structure and critical in disposition.” In order to accept the outward forms and the spirit of Western civilization, Fukusawa intended to sweep away the old Japanese customs, to leave behind the “bad” Asian neighbors who seemed to be too backward to adopt Western civilization, and finally to “cast our [the Japanese] lot with civilized nations of the West.”
In a similar case, Yu Giljun (1856-1914), one of the Korean progressives, wrote
Seoyu gyeonmun (A Record of Personal Experience in the West) in 1895, after traveling in Europe and the United State in the 1880s. Yu maintains in this book that Korea should no longer regard the West as barbarians and try to know the West, just as Japan swiftly made progress after learning from the West. Yu calls both Europe and the United State “the West,” whose ideas and systems are different from the East, but still advanced.
As the above examples of the two Oriental thinkers suggest, it is true that not only the Western viewpoint but also the non-Western takes part in establishing the representation of the West. The images of the West, thus, can be said to be a “disparate body,”26 each part of which has its own image and theory, which are united into one identity. When Said speaks of the West, however, it is not as seen from Oriental eyes. Said’s concern is not the pure representation of the West (likewise not the real Orient), but the West which has controlled the Orient with intention, particularly under the circumstance of their having greater power than the Orient. When there is unbalanced power between two sides, an unequal and unilateral relationship appears in their knowledge of each other. It is this uneven relationship between the West and the East on which Said focuses in Orientalism.
1.2.2 Textualism and A Relation between Knowledge and Power
Said explains the process by which the West knows the East as a link between knowledge and power. Orientalism is a result of the exercise of great strength by the West over the East. In the process of knowing others, the stronger have the arbitrary will to speak of, define, and construct the weaker, while the weaker have less voice. When the West perceives the East, the West produces the knowledge more than the Orient does. This relationship is illustrated in the sphere in which texts are produced. For instance, when the West creates expressions like “static” or “languid” to describe the Orientals, such text continues to be cited in the text of subsequent scholars and to be written over the prior texts without being critically examined. In this continuous process the object of the text becomes simplified and schematized, and finally the Orient becomes the “reality” that the text describes. Said illustrates this process as following (the italics are mine):
“Orientalism, which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities, and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality.”
Said presents a more theoretical example of the Oriental Otherness by citing the master-slave relationship of Anwar Abdel Malek. That the Orient has a fixed reality as a text means that it becomes “an object,” not an active “subject.” The object is alienated, defined and maintained by others. Thus, the Orient, an object of the West, is destitute of an evolving essence, which becomes even transcendently and intangibly detached from history.
Through this process, the Western exercises great power. The more reality Western text produces about the Orient, the more authority the Western voice has. This unbalanced, unilateral relation of knowledge and power continues to be reproduced in a dialectic manner. Said articulates this process: “Once again, knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.”
For Said, this power over the Orient is the cultural strength of Gramsci’s theory. Orientalism is “the result of cultural hegemony at work” based on agreement and mutual consent, rather than the regulating power of the military, the police or a central bureaucracy. The characteristic of cultural hegemony is not coercive, but subtly pervading, and therefore, the idea of European superiority over the Orient permeates into an internal system and controls the Orient. This inner constraint is not forcing, but is even sometimes productive, and for this reason, the cultural hegemony is capable of sustaining Orientalism with a durable and persistent influence.
Nevertheless, political strength is not excluded as one of the powers exercised in Orientalist discourse. Said considers the assertion of political power, especially when he illustrates colonial power over the East since the late nineteenth century. Before this period, Orientalism had maintained an academic attitude toward the East, but since then Orientalism, as a tool to serve colonial authority, has complied with imperialist political power. Furthermore, with the support of racial theory and second-order Darwinism, Orientalism at this period manifests its explicit and political aspiration to dominate over, or ontologically obliterate the East. The Orientalist discourse for Said, consequently, is produced in “an uneven exchange with various kinds of power,” which is not only a matter of cultural hegemony but also of political power. Other types of power are also specifically mentioned, such as intellectual power, which appears in modern science, and moral power, which creates such idea that “they” do not have the same manner of acting or understanding as “we” do.35
1.2.3 Travel writing and Contact Zone
This thesis analyzes travel or residency texts written by Europeans and Americans who visited Korea from 1890 to 1930. Travel writings have been attractive sources for the study of Orientalism because they contain imperial legacies in colonial language and culture. In travel writings, writers’ textual attitudes can be seen through the following steps: First of all, travelers read previous texts before leaving for the Orient. Travelers prefer “the schematic authority of a text” to “the disorientations of direct encounters.” The textual preference may lead travelers to find something similar to that which they have already read in texts, or provide travelers with a sense of déjà vu in a new place, a result of much reading. Coming back to their place of origin, travelers write about the Orient. If the text is written over the prior text with nothing new, the text produces “topos.” Topos is a set of stereotyped expressions, just constantly same ideas added following the previous text without creating new one, even though new experience takes place. In topos, there remains only cliché from one text to another, with the reality excluded.39 The Orient through this textual process comes to take on the reality that the text describes. These repetitive texts not only threaten the “authenticity of the experience,” but also leave “a paradigm” or “a structure” to the following traveler. Moreover, under the circumstance of the greater strength of the West over the East, the East is written as the West perceives it to be, without being able to talk back to the Western writers.
On the other hand, travel accounts are relatively free from authority. Travel writings are different from official reports written by scholarly travelers, or governmental functionaries. Travelers have less duty to follow Orientalist tradition, and thus describe as many feelings and emotions as they experience in unfamiliar places. As a result of their direct contact with new places, they create new texts. This distinguishes travel texts from the authoritative texts produced by governments, public institutions, or trading companies. Writing new text is equal to refusing preceding textual authority or a dominant cultural discourse.42
Pratt calls such a real space in which travelers can experience the Other as “contact zones.” Contact zones are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,” even though there are sometimes “asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.” According to Pratt, cultures in contact zones encounter each other in a mutual way, not in the unilateral one. Travellers in contact zones continue to respond to the materials firsthand before them, and to experience the Other through interactive activities. Contact zones, therefore, are the meaningful space in which travel writings overcome the textual pitfall and put an end to biased Orientalist views. Although travellers have preconceptions about the Other, he/she can have a chance to revise these, and eventually to create a different cultural discourse than the existing dominant one.
1.2.4 Criticism of Said’s Orientalism
Monolithic Orientalism
Clarke’s main argument in Oriental enlightenment (1997) is that there were various discourses in favor of the Orient in the nineteenth century, which were different from the dominant colonial discourse. Western modernity at the time was not based on a solid faith, but rather underwent anxiety and self-doubt. Reaction arose against Western scientific rationalism and nihilism, such as Nietzsche’s announcement of “the death of God,” which weakened the religious and moral frame supporting the Western enlightenment tradition. By this time, the West had come to realize that different civilizations with developed ideas and manners existed beyond the West, and it began to look for a “therapy” to heal its sense of loss and crisis. This brought about the growth of the exploration of the Orient.
The main criticism of Said’s Orientalism is that Said illustrates Orientalist discourse not as pluralistic, but as “single narrative,”46 and “a remarkably persistent framework of analysis.” Lisa Lowe argues that Said assumes that “Orientalism monolithically constructs the Orient as the Other of the Occident.”48 Lowe continues to claim that Orientalist discourse is diverse and heterogeneous, and that its formation is “internally complex and unstable.” Orientalism, therefore, is an “uneven matrix of orientalist situations across different cultural and historical sites.”49 Lewis also suggests that Orientalism is “a diverse field of activity and representation” and “a flexible and heterogeneous discourse,” made up of a number of competing discourses.
All of these criticisms point out that (1) Said deals with Orientalism as a monolithic discourse; (2) Said maintains that all Orientalist texts appearing in the period of European imperial expansion are written to comply with colonial power; (3) Said ignores the humanistic products of scholarly Orientalism. If these criticisms are reasonable, such questions may arise as: why does the affirmative Orientalism not attract Said’s interest? Or is Said being methodologically negligent?
Much the criticism of Said seems to originate from the fact that Said limits the objects of his analysis to a few nationalities: Britain and France, the most imperialistic countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to Britain and France, such countries as Germany, Italy and Russia also produced Orientalist discourses. Said, however, points out that it was Britain and France which made the most significant progress in studying the Orient, and that these two were far superior in terms of quality, quantity and consistency in Orientalism, in comparison with any other countries. The United States was also mentioned as being interested in the Orient, as preparing for imperial influence in the nineteenth century, and as becoming a great empire in the twentieth century. Said is aware that there have been many different Orientalist discourses. Said asserts, however, that his main goal is to reveal the history that Orientalism has served colonial authority and complied with imperialist political power, particularly in these countries, Britain, France and the US. Strictly speaking, therefore, Said does not deny conflicting elements in Orientalism, and he also admits its humanistic results. Said shows that there are diverse, heterogeneous discourses among Orientalist discourses, by illustrating such terms as official Orientalism and personal Orientalism, by which he can defend himself from criticism (1) and (2).
Official Orientalism and Personal Orientalism
Among texts from Britain and France, Said classifies two different kinds of Orientalism: official Orientalism and personal Orientalism. Official Orientalism is qualified to acquire professional authority by supplying the most useful knowledge for Orientalist discourse. On the contrary, personal Orientalism is what is less practical for the national and cultural hegemony of the epoch, not capable of being placed in an Orientalist library: for example, residency and personal statements, or literature, whose qualities are not competent to enter “the guild of professional Orientalists.”
Nerval’s and Plaubert’s texts are example of personal Orientalism. The two texts are related with Orientalist discourse, but fail to acquire official authority. The two texts have common characteristics that modify Oriental materials for the purpose of personal aestheticism. In case of Nerval, he came to the Orient with a vision of the old and the mysterious, but the Orient he dreamed of was merely a “commemorative absence.” This “emptied Orient,” says Said, cannot be considered as a qualified conception of professional Orientalism. Compared to Nerval’s negative image of the Orient, Flaubert’s was much more realistic. Yet the Orient for Flaubert was still a place which only provided sexual fantasy, just as the Orient of the time was of use as a destination to which to send superfluous populations, such as delinquents or poor people. The testimonies of Oriental residents and the experiences in these two texts are too much “purely autobiographical and indulgent descriptions” for any other subsequent Orientalists to add scholarly narratives to these texts. This is why they did not meet the requirements for official Orientalism, and remained just as a personal one.
With these cases, Said tries to illustrate that not all texts from Britain and France form the same, single narrative, and that even though there are many diverse discourses, some fails to become official discourse. These personal Orientalist discourse cannot supply useful knowledge for the national or cultural hegemony.
When Said speaks of Orientalism, he excludes this personal Orientalism.
Humanist Orientalism
Said gives another example, that of Gibb and Massignon, whose texts have Orientalist humanistic feature. Gibb’ and Massignon’s texts are different from personal statements, and are classified as professional one. However, Said points out that in Gibb’s case, he showed off his friendship with Muslims, but the friendship was not associated with truthfulness, but was rather a kind of use. Besides, Gibb never mentioned European colonialism in discussing Islamic nationalism. In Massignon’s case, even as a humanist with compassion for the Orient, he could not in the end resist the pressure of Orientalist tradition, and tried to modify the Orient as in the way he wanted.
With these cases of Gibb and Massignon, Said tries to illustrate that even though they are official Orientalism having humanists merit, they are still short of genuine humanism. Said seems to regard “genuine humanism” as the truthful Orientalist discourse. However, Said, in his book Orientalism, does not present an example which has humanist Orientalism and at the same time is completely free from the Orientalist authority. Due to this meager attempt, Said seems to be unable to escape the criticism that he overlooks the humanist fruits in Orientalist discourses. Said does not specifically mention what characteristics humanist Orientalism has. Inferring from what he says as deficient elements in the texts of Gibb and Massignon, the features of humanist Orientalism are: truthful relation with the Orientals; a will not to modify; critical attitude toward European colonialism or his/her own national Orientalist tradition.
In some sense, this thesis is a trial to find whether or not this genuine humanism exists in Western texts. This theme will be examined in the light of “reciprocity.” Reciprocity is an open attitude toward “the Other,” which leads us to truly respond to new materials and new customs. In encountering “the Other,” we cannot easily clear out our subjective cognition, but reciprocity enables us to be free from prejudice. True reciprocity guides us to perceive the others as having “evolving” characters, discarding an essentialist attitude, which sustains the idea that there are fixed qualities in them. It also leads us to keep our eyes “neutral” or “innocent,” and to critically rethink our existing values or dominant discourse with which we have already been saturated. Sincere reciprocity opens a possibility for us to access to genuine humanism. A perspective of “reciprocity,” therefore, can be a pertinent approach to finding humanist Orientalism in Western texts. Said, in his book Orientalism, lacks of this perspective, and thus has no chance to consider true mutuality. It may be natural, because all the texts he deals with are short of genuine humanism. This thesis will investigate whether there is a truthful Orientalist discourse that Said neglects (or does not present).
1.3 Sources
The material sources of the thesis are travel texts and testimonies of residents produced by the Western people who visited Korea during the period 1890-1930. The nationalities of the material sources are Britain, Germany, Russia, Sweden and the United State. Except for Britain, the other four countries were not supreme empires at the time, but they were also related to the imperial powers in one or other way. To mention each characteristic briefly, Germany belatedly participated in colonial aggression after German unification in 1871, and complained of its smaller colonial territory compared to Britain or France. Sweden sold its only colony, a West Indian island, to France. Russia, which had continued to expand in territory since the era of the tsarist state, was succeeding in its expansion in Central Asia, but failed in the northern part of China. The United State was not that concerned with colonial territory, but began to think of following “the fashion.”
The eight material sources are divided into two periods: 1890-1905 and 1905– 1930.
Period I: 1890-1905
- George N. Curzon, Problems of the Far East. Japan-Korea-China (Britain, 1894)
- Willy A:son Grebst, I Korea (Sweden, 1912)
- Siegfried Genthe, Korea-Reiseschilderungen (Germany, 1905).
- Vatslav Seroshevskii, Корея, (Russia, 1905)
- George N. Curzon (1859-1925), Problems of the Far East. Japan-Korea-China (Britain, 1894)
Curzon visited Korea, as well as Japan and China, during 1892-1893, and the book,
Problems of the Far East, appeared in London in 1894. Before this trip, he had first visited East Asia in 1887-1888, but at that time he did not visit Korea, nor left a text about Korea. Curzon was a promising statesman in Britain. He entered the British Parliament at the age of 27 in 1886, and served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for India in 1891. When he was 39 in 1898, he was appointed as the Viceroy of India and as Foreign Secretary afterward. He was said to be an “explorer of wilderness and a student of effect civilizations,” referring of his travel-loving mind. He had been to Korea as a personal traveler rather than as a member of a government. But judging from his career as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary for India, and would-be Viceroy of India, it can be easily presumed that the aim of his journey to the Far East was more political, rather than the pure interest of a traveler.
- Willy A:son Grebst (1875-1920), I Korea (Sweden, 1912)
Before Grebst came to Korea, he had stayed in Japan as a reporter during the RussoJapanese War in 1904. At the time Japan did not permit correspondents to visit Korea where the war was breaking out. However, Grebst decided to head for Korea with a forged name card, “Cotton Garment Company,” out of strong desire to go to the war zone. He stayed in Korea from December 1904 to the end of January 1905, when his identity was detected by the Japanese. His book, I Korea appeared in Sweden in 1912. Grebst was not only a successful writer of travel books, but also the founder and editor of the weekly magazine Vidi (1910-1920). This magazine was rather infamous publication, known for its populistic journalism and anti-Semitism.
- Siegfried Genthe (1870-1904), Korea-Reiseschilderungen (Germany, 1905) Siegfried Genthe, a newspaper reporter of the Köln, Germany, was dispatched to collect news of the Boxer Rebellion in China in the autumn of 1900, and afterward came to Korea in June 1901. He stayed in Korea until November 1901, and his text appears serially in the Köln Newspaper from October 1901 to November 1902. After leaving Korea, he was sent to Morocco, and there he went missing in March of 1903.
One year later, his dead body was found on the riverside not far from the place where he had disappeared. Korea-Reiseschilderungen was published in 1905 by his newspaper colleague, Georg Wegener, after his death.
- Vatslav Seroshevskii (1858-1945), Корея (Russia, 1905)
Vatslav Seroshevskii was born in 1858 in Warsaw of a Poland under the occupation of the Russian empire. Involved in the socialist movement in 1880, he was condemned to exile to Verkhoyansk in Eastern Siberia. He tried to escape but failed, and was sent on another exile to a Yakut village. There he wrote an ethnological book, Yakut in 1892, which received the gold medal from the Russian Royal Geography Association in 1896. With this career and as a member of the expedition of Russian Royal Geography Association, he participated in the study of the Ainu in the northern part of Japan during 1902-1903. Immediately after this he visited Korea, and his travel writing appeared in Polish and in Russian in 1905. Seroshevskii used to be the chairman of the Poland Writers Union in the 1920s and of a literature section in the Poland Art Academy in the 1930s.
Period II: 1905 – 1930
- William F. Sands, Undiplomatic memories (USA, 1930)
- Frederick A. McKenzie, Korea’s Fight for Freedom (Britain, 1919)
- Elizabeth and Scott, E.K. Robertson Keith (Author), Elizabeth Keith (Illustrator)
Old Korea: The land of morning calm (Britain, 1946)
- Henry B. Drake, Korea of the Japanese (Britain, 1930)
- William F. Sands (1874-1946), Undiplomatic memories (USA, 1930)
Sands was raised and educated to be a diplomat, coming from a political family background in which both his grandfather and father had been the Admiral of the Navy in the United States. At the age of 22, Sands started a career as second Secretary of the Legation in Tokyo for two years, and immediately afterward, in 1898, he came to Korea. He was appointed as first Secretary of the Legation, but gave up this position one year later, to be an advisor of the Korean Royal Court at the age of 25. After a six-year career as an advisor for the Korean King, he left Korea and maintained a status as a diplomat in South America. From 1927, he began teaching at the School of American History and Diplomacy in Georgetown University. The book, Undiplomatic memories, was published in 1930, long after he left Korea. It can be supposed that he added some matured opinions to his young experience as he followed the subsequent colonial history of Korea.
- Frederick A. McKenzie (1869-1931), Korea’s Fight for Freedom (Britain, 1919)
McKenzie, a correspondent of the London Daily Mail, first came to Korea when the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, and continued to stay in Korea until 1907, collecting news material on significant historical events in Korea. He wrote The Tragedy of Korea in 1908, which was his first text based on his observation of the fading Korean Kingdom. Attracting European interests, he was requested to publish another edition, but he wrote a new text titled Korea’s Fight for Freedom. This book appeared in London in 1920, and in this new text McKenzie not only dealt with some of the same material as the first book but also added new information on the Korean social and political situation under the Japanese colonial occupation.
- Elizabeth and Scott, E.K. Robertson Keith (Author), Elizabeth Keith (Illustrator) (1887-1956) Old Korea: The land of morning calm (Britain, 1946)
Old Korea: The land of morning calm is a collaborative work of sisters who were born in Scotland. Elizabeth, the elder sister, paints the illustrations, and Elspet writes the main contents of the book. According to David Kamansky, a director of the Pacific Asian Museum, Elizabeth is one of the outstanding Western painters who came to the Orient to draw Korea, Japan, and China. Before her visit to Korea, Elizabeth stayed in Japan for five years, learning Oriental woodprint. Elspets had come to Japan earlier than her sister, and was long engaged in publishing New East Press of Japan with her husband. The two sisters came to Korea on March 1919, when the Independence Movement in the spring of 1919 was still going on. After a three-month stay, Elspet returned to Japan, and Elizabeth stayed further to paint and later visited Korea again in 1936. Old Korea: The land of morning calm was published in London in 1946 after a long postponement due to the Second World War.
Keith, the last name of the sisters, will be used in mentioning the text in this thesis.
- Henry B. Drake (1894-?), Korea of the Japanese (Britain, 1930)
Henry Burgess Drake, a British novelist, was employed by the Japanese colonial government in 1928, and taught English at a university in Seoul for two years. Before and after he stayed in Korea, he had some novels published, such as The remedy
(1925), Cursed Be the Treasure (1926), The Captain of the Jehovah (1936), etc. Korea of the Japanese is based on his experience of a two-year residence in Korea, and appeared in London in 1930.
Grouping the eight authors by nationality, there are one Swede, Grebst, one German, Genthe, one Polish Russian, Seroshevskii, one American, Sands, and four British persons, Curzon, McKenzie, Keith, and Drake. Categorizing them by occupation, there are two governmental members, Curzon and Sands; three journalists, Grebst, Genthe, and McKenzie; two artists, Keith and Drake; and one ethnologist, Seroshevskii. And there is only one female author, Keith. Compared to the texts of the first period, the texts of the second period are characterized by the experiences of the residents.
1.4 Methodology
To analyze the source material I have divided it into two periods: 1890-1905 and 1905–1930. The first (1890-1905) is the period during which Korea first opened its door to the international world and tried to practice Western modernity. The second (1905–1930) is the period during which Korea failed in carrying out Western modernization independently, and was eventually colonized by Japan. Four source materials for each period are analyzed and compared, mainly in terms of two subjects: (1) The perception of Korea, (2) The relationship of reciprocity and the dominant colonial discourse.
Firstly, I analyze the Western perception of Korea by classifying items according to four categories: (1) the Koreans and the Korean national character, (2) the government and the political system, (3) woman and society, (4) religion. In analyzing the perception of Korea, I explore each author’s textual attitude, by which the following aspects can be examined: if the traveler overwrites the prior text uncritically or creates a new idea; if the author obtains a new perception to correct the existing prejudice. The results indicate how the author interacts with Koreans, which provides a basis for the next part of the study, reciprocity.
Secondly, I will examine reciprocity in each text, and study what role reciprocity plays in the formulation of the dominant discourse. Reciprocity is difficult to measure in the manner of mathematics or statistics, but I will judge reciprocity by the following aspects:
1. Does the author treat Koreans as persons, or as a group? If as a person, what kind of existential values does the author designate for them?
2. Do Koreans have their own voices, or are they supposed to be silent in the text? If they have voices, how much space do their narratives take up in a text, and how do they represent themselves?
3. What are the travellers’ textual attitudes? Does the text repeat existing representations of Korea, or produce new opinions?
4. Does the experience in the contact zone have an effect on the travellers’ perception? If they had prejudice before, do they try to correct it?
With these measurements, I analyze the degree of each traveller’s reciprocity, and study the relationship between reciprocity and the dominant colonial discourse - this part falls to the first aim of this thesis. In this process, the other two aims will be also examined and answered: what role did the traveler’s nationality, and personal attributes (gender and occupation) play in the formulation of a dominant discourse?
This thesis also explores the relationship of reciprocity and the Japanese version of Orientalism. Since Japan was the emerging colonial power in Korea at the time, the Western travelers who visited Korea were influenced by the Japanese colonial discourse as well. The Western travelers thus tended to project a double layer of Orientalist perception onto Korea. By studying the Western image of Japan, I examine how the Japanese version of Orientalism manifests itself in the Western traveller’s perception of Korea, and how it is related to World Power hegemony.
In chapter one, I introduce the aim, theory, sources, and background of this thesis. In chapter two, I analyze the Western perception of Korea during the period 1890-1905, and study the relationship between reciprocity and the dominant colonial discourse. In chapter three, which follows the same format as the chapter two, I study the Western perception of Korea during the period 1905–1930, and examine the relationship between reciprocity and the dominant colonial discourse. I analyze the Western image of Japan in this chapter. Finally, in chapter four, I conclude this thesis by answering the questions that I raised in the first chapter: how reciprocity influenced the dominant colonial discourse during the heyday of the colonial expansionism 1890-1930; what significant role the traveler’s nationality and personal attributes play in the formulation of a dominant discourse.
1.5 Previous Research
The study of applying Orientalism to the case of Korea has produced two main research streams in Korean academic circles. The first stream is to study the inner “Self” when the Koreans met the Western “Other.” In other words, it deals with the internalizing process of Orientalism. First encountering the Western others in the late nineteenth century, Koreans began to establish a self-identity by the standard of Western ideas and ways. Before this, Koreans had thought of themselves by means of the traditional notion of civilization, which is different from the Western one. The Western notion of civilization is to see the level of civilization as one single linear process from barbarity to civilization. Thus, in the Western mode of civilization, the self and the other, or the East and the West, are placed somewhere in a hierarchical order according to its modernized development.
On the other hand, before Western civilization arrived in Asia, the Chinese notion of civilization was that of a repeating circular process, rather than a single linear one. Therefore, the Oriental notion of civilization had no feature of expanding itself outward, but requested others to come to China if needed. This Confucian standard of civilization, influential over the Eastern countries, had been transformed into the Western one, especially since Japan recognized the Western civilization as true, superior, and succeeded in Western modernization, finally becoming a civilized state. When Korea opened its door to the Western countries in the late nineteenth century, they accepted this notion of civilization and evaluated “the self” by means of the Western criteria of civilization. Moreover, the elements of Social Darwinism and racism in the concept of the Western civilization influenced Korean modern intellectuals when they were looking for their own self-identity.
Jeon Bokhui studies the positive and negative influences of Social Darwinism in Korea during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Jeon points out that the positive aspect was to motivate Koreans to carry out a modernization, but the negative was to give a legitimate excuse for Japanese imperialism to pervade into Korea, since Japan was considered as the strong partner to be collaborated with in the tasks of modernizing Korea and defending it against the whites’ invasion.
Heo Donghyeon examines the effects of Social Darwinism in the 1880s on two representative progressive elites, Yu Giljun and Yun Chiho, each of whom belonged to different traditional clan. Yu, on Confucian grounds, tried to reform Korean society in the direction of self-strengthening, whereas Yun, in spite of setting same goal on Christian grounds, had defeatist feelings and an inferiority complex toward the West and Japan, eventually becoming pro-Japanese during the colonial period.63 Koen De Ceuster focuses on Yun Chiho’s case in his doctoral dissertation, especially dealing with the dilemma of the Korean representative elite, who was to be both a nationalist and pro-Japanese during the Japanese colonial period.
Jang Inseong’s study focuses more on the effect of Social Darwinism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in respect of the racial discourse in Korea and Japan. In case of Japan, racial discourse was much more active than in the Korean case, in that the Japanese used the notions of race and nation vigorously to support the colonial discourse, whereas the racial discourse in Korea was meager even in the discourse on the origin of nationality.65
Kim Jeonghyeon explores the systematizing process of the Japanese version of Orientalism during the Japanese colonial period. Japan makes into “the Other” China, which used to be the center of Asian Confucian civilization, and Korea, regarding these as backward and static nations in order to govern the same Asian races. East Asia thus was constructed by two layers of Orientalism: the Western and the Japanese mode of this.
Jeong Yonghwa‘s study on “auto-Orientalism” is also worth mentioning. Jeong focuses on the impact of Western modernization and colonization on the formation of Korean self-identity during the period 1880s-1900s. He points out that the extreme focus on the European-based notion of civilization led Koreans to distort their selfconsciousness, to feel an inferiority complex towards Western culture, and to produce a prejudice against their own traditional self, that is, “self-Orientalism.”
The other stream is to study the Western perception of Korea and to focus on how the West perceived and represented the Orient during the imperial time. This research has become more active since the latter part of 1990s, seemingly due to the increase in the translation and publication of the Western travel texts into the Korean language. Before the late 1990s, there had been several studies on Western images of Korea, but the textual materials were rather limited regarding the pro-Korean texts, such as those of Homer B. Hulbert, or James S. Gale, who displayed a familiarity or fondness with the natives’ customs and history during their long residence in Korea.
Since the late 1990s, the study of Western images of Korea has expanded to include various travel writings. In study of Isabella Bird Bishop’s travel text (1898), Wang Hanseok points out that Bishop sustained a neutral perspective on Korean culture, a negative on Korean religion with a Christian viewpoint, and a transit viewpoint from negative to positive on the Korean national character. Bishop’s travel writing was rather characterized as an ethnographic text, with a strong element of cultural relativism.
Lee Eunsuk, in the study of Georger Ducrocq’s Pauvre et douce Corée, (1904), points out that at a time when the image of Korea was as being a savage and cruel place, due to the persecution of French missionaries, Ducrocq suggested Korean attractiveness with poetic descriptions that refused the ethnocentric viewpoint.
Lee Jiun investigates the origin of the view of Korea in German literature from the mid seventeenth century to the 1910s, with the methodology of Said’s Orientalism. Lee’s focus is that the European image of Korea was invented, and persistently distorted with the connection of European power and discourse. In a similar way, Frederic Boulesteix examines the representations and identity of Koreans seen in French literature from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. The feature of this study is to include various kinds of texts such as letters, essays and diaries, as well as the Orientalist texts. Thus Boulesteix approaches the materials not only from the Orientalist perspective but also from the non-Orientalist.
Park Jihang compares two British texts, George Nathaniel Curzon (1894) and Isabella Bird Bishop (1898), each of whom has been studied actively before, but separately. Park compares the representations of Korea and Japan in Curzon’s and Bishop’s texts, and studies how masculinity and femininity displayed in the colonial discourse. Park refuses to adopt a unilateral methodology of gender distinction, but eventually argues that Bishop’s text displayed a more complicated connection to the colonial discourse than Curzon’s typical masculine colonial discourse.
The study of reciprocity in this thesis has not been dealt with in the previous research. Therefore, the main subject, the relation between reciprocity and colonial discourse, is first tried in this thesis. Also, with the exception of the Curzon’s and Sand’s text, the six texts of the source materials of the thesis have been little studied. Among these six, only that of Genthe is even briefly mentioned (by two pages), in Lee’s book as one who possessed a rare, balanced perspective on Korea at the time. The other five texts have never been studied before. The reason for this scarcity is considered to be that previous research has mainly focused on British and French texts, and that some texts have only recently been translated into the Korean language: Grebst (2005), Genthe (2007), Seroshevskii(2007) and Keith (2006). Also, as Frederic Boulesteix points out, since Korea became less attractive for Western travelers due to its colonized status, few travel writings were produced during the period 1905-1945, which results in less material to study.
1.6 Background
1.6.1 Textual Background
The first European text properly dealing with Korea was written by Gregorio de Céspedes, who had been sent to Japan in 1577 as a Spanish missionary. He came to Korea while Japan was invading the country in 1593 (the Hideyoshi Invasion). He left four letters from this time regarding missionary work in Korea and the miserable scenes of the war. The book, Missionaries’ Story, which includes these letters, appeared in 1601 in Spanish.
In 1655, Martino Martini, who had been residing in China as an Italian missionary from 1643 to 1661, wrote Novus Atlas Sinensis (New Chinese Map), in which the history, geography and customs of Korea were introduced. In this book, Martini mapped Korea accurately as a peninsula for the first time, which before had been imagined to be either an island or a mainland. However, Martino Martini had never been to Korea, and what he wrote was what he heard from the Chinese. Martini’s text was also full of an imaginary, fairy tale-like abundance of gold, silver, or pearls, which was likely to attract European readers. By this time, Adam Schall von Bell, a German missionary in China, also introduced Korea in Historica narration (Historical narration) in Latin in 1665. His textual attitude was rather neutral in saying that “We know only a little about Korea, of which only a few parts are translated. We could not find information about Korea in European texts…. We know almost nothing about the Korean people and their natural circumstance.”(my translation)
These two narratives about Korea are in strong contrast with each other. A common point between them is that the writers had never been to Korea. However, the one told about Korea on the basis of the story that he heard of or on the basis of historical materials in other country, but the other showed an excessively careful manner in telling of an unknown country.
In 1653, a boat of the Dutch East India Company was wrecked around the Jeju Island of Korea. The boat had left Jakarta of Indonesia and was heading for Japan. The surviving thirty six members of the crew, from among the original sixty four, landed on the island, and all of them were taken to the Korean King in Seoul. They were not allowed to leave Korea, but were interned with restricted lives within the country. Thirteen years later, Hendrik Hamel, one of the survivors, finally escaped Korea and came to the Nederlands via Japan. He wrote Hamel's journal and a description of the Kingdom of Korea 1653-1666 in 1668, which covered many parts of the Korean way of life. This book is said to be the first full-scale text that introduces Korea to Europe, which before had no separate volume about Korea. In some respects, however, it is also said that this text was not trustworthy travel writing, since it was written for the purpose requesting salaries from the Dutch East India Company, which were not paid during the period of detention.
After this, a gap in perception between Korea and Europe continued for around two centuries. Some disguised French missionaries secretly came to Korea through the Chinese border, but most of them underwent the repetitive process of missionary work, disclosure, torture and execution. They did not leave texts, except for some translations of the Bible into Korean. Korea did not still allow Europeans to enter inland until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1874, the French father Claude Charles Dallet wrote Histoire de l'Eglise de Corée, based on collected materials sent by missionaries who had been in Korea under a secret status. This book was almost the first Korean history written by a European, and remained a kind of standard reference for those who wanted to travel Korea. Curzon and Genthe read this book, according to their comments in their texts.
Another volume appeared in 1882, written by William Elliot Griffis, who had been teaching natural science at Tokyo University in Japan during the period 18701874. He was writing about Japanese history, and at some point, realized that in order to better understand Japan, he should study Korean history as well. He finally wrote
Corea, the hermit nation, but the materials that he referred to or cited were mainly based on texts from Japanese or Chinese historical data, or a text of Dallet. The common characteristic of Dallet’s and Griffis’ texts was that they were not based on their own experience in Korea.
Most of the travellers who came to Korea at the end of the nineteenth century tended to obtain information about Korea from the last three texts: Hamel, Dallet and Griffis. At least two of these texts are referred in the source materials of this thesis, especially in the texts of the first period; Curzon read Hamel and Griffis; Genthe, Hamel and Dallet; Seroshevskiisky, Hamel and Griffis. Only Grebst refers to other texts, such as Homer B. Hullbert, or Angus Hamilton. Thus, it can be said that those three texts played a kind of standardizing role for the Western travellers as they established their first perception of Korea.
1.6.2 Historical Background
During the nineteenth century, a time when the European imperialists had colonies from South America and the African inland to East Asia, Korea remained one of the least known countries in the world. Korea had contact mainly with China and Japan, whose national borders were close to Korea. The three countries had a long history of both cooperation and conflict. China and Japan had known the West, and the West had also recognized the two countries by trading through the East India Company since the seventeenth century. Korea, however, refused all interactions, and never had official cultural or commercial exchange with the West until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the end, Korea opened its door to the outside international world and signed a treaty with Japan in 1876, the United States in 1882, France in 1886 and Russia in 1888.
After the Treaty of Kangwha with Japan in 1876, Korea dispatched a special envoy composed of seventy five members to observe the path of the Japanese as they adapted Western civilization. In the book, Corea, the hermit nation, Griffis portrayed this encounter of the Japanese and the Koreans with a contrasting description (my translation): “The Japanese stood with all the exterior marks of approaching civilization, whereas the Koreans took the representative appearance of vanishing barbarity.”
According to Griffis, Japan, unlike Korea, had been exchanging commercial products with Europe for two centuries, even if within a limited open port. This indicated that in some senses Japan had been ready to accept the West for a long period before the first treaty with the United States in 1854. Also, with such commercial experience Japan possessed the potential to not fall a victim of Western imperialist aspirations, even though Japan was unfairly meddled with by the Western countries at the time at which it officially opened up. Moreover, since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan tried to make Western modernization rapidly by dispatching a large group of inspectors to Europe to adopt advanced Western products and its spirit. In contrast to Japan, however, Korea, without any commercial experience with Europe, was reluctant to practice modernization, even though she formally opened her door toward the outside world. Most of the Korean Confucian literati, with only the exception of a few progressives, took on the conservative attitudes that China is the center of civilization, and that the West and Japan are barbarians, for the reason that they do not believe in Confucian’s ethics.
In the meantime, the World Powers were competing for concessions and for expansion in Korea, and under these circumstances Korea easily fell pray to the Powers. Japan was the most ambitious power to colonize Korea. In the end, Korea, neither able to make an independent modernization, nor to sustain national autonomy, became a Protectorate of Japan in 1905. Five years later, Korea was annexed, becoming a part of Japanese territory, and no longer nation-state from 1910 to 1945.
Chapter 2. Analysis: Period I (1890-1905)
2.1 The Western Perception of Korea
- George N. Curzon, Problems of the Far East. Japan-Korea-China (Britain, 1894)
- Willy A:son Grebst, I Korea (Sweden, 1912)
- Siegfried Genthe, Korea-Reiseschilderungen (Germany, 1905).
- Vatslav Seroshevskii, Корея (Russia, 1905)
2.1.1 The Koreans and the Korean National Character
- George N. Curzon, Problems of the Far East. Japan-Korea-China (Britain, 1894) Throughout the text, Curzon shows an enthusiastic attitude to the British Empire. This would seem natural considering his career as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary for India at the time that he was visiting Korea. He dedicates the book to “those who believe that the British Empire is, under providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen and who hold, with the writer, that its work in the Far East is not yet accomplished.” In the text, Curzon deals with political, social, and economic situations, and the prospects for the British Empire in East Asia, more than with natural scenes or features of the natives. However, he allows more spaces for Korea than for Japan and China, as he thinks that Korea remains, “next to Tibet, the least known part of Asia.”82 In addition, he feels that he is breaking almost new ground, since there are few authoritative books about Korea that can be referred to.
His first impression of Koreans is that they are all dressed in white costumes, which gives him a very unique feeling. In the distance, a group of Koreans look like “white mileposts or tombstones,” and a group of “swine” when they are moving.83 Koreans wear white clothes even in winter, but Curzon doubts if the costume is comfortable or clean. He experiences unclean Seoul with so many labyrinthine, narrow, and dirty streets. The exterior of the houses are not beautiful. They are all made of the same materials, mud, paper, and wood, which makes them look colorless, an impression made even more monotonous by the inhabitants all wearing white. The reason the Koreans do not embellish houses is because of sumptuary laws, which set restriction on the size or the color of buildings.
Curzon writes that Korean men are “stalwart, well-built, and bear themselves with a manly air, though of docile and sometimes timid expression.” In general, individual Koreans give him a favorable impression. The upper classes are “polite, cultivated, friendly to foreigners,” and the lower, “excitable, cheerful, talkative,” and “good-tempered.” However, both classes are indifferent at some point, and have a characteristic of “complacent languor,” in which they never hurry in any urgent situation.
Another characteristic of the Koreans is idleness. Having visited Japan twice, Curzon is familiar with the Japanese people, and thus often compares the Japanese and the Koreans.: “[T]he two nations are unlike – the tall, robust, good-looking, idle Koreans, and the diminutive, ugly, nimble, indomitable Japanese.” The Japanese are “nimble-witted,” “active, and businesslike,” but Koreans “indolent,” static, and laggard. Japan is making an amazingly rapid progress in assimilating the Western reform and modernization, whereas Korea is waking up from its long sleep, and “still half stupefied by its long repose.” This characteristic of the Korean people is similar to that of Orientals in general, which Curzon had already described in his earlier book,
Persia and the Persian Question (1892). In this text, the Asian individuality is,
“in character a general indifference to truth and respect for successful wile, in deportment dignity, in society the rigid maintenance of the family union, in government the mute acquiescence of the governed, in administration and justice the open corruption of administrators and judges, and in every-day life a statuesque and inexhaustible patience, which attaches no value to time, and wages unappeasable warfare against hurry.”88
As the passage suggests, there is a common feature between the Koreans and the Western Asians in terms of a lack of hurry or the presence of inertness. In Curzon’s account, however, Eastern Asia is different from Western Asia. Western Asia is under the “unyielding and pitiless clutch of Islam,” whereas Buddhism in Eastern Asia is mild and not antagonistic to Western civilization. Eastern Asia will thus easily accept Western ideas and ways. In the meantime, with its advanced technology and science, the West possesses a higher intelligence and moral than does the East. In America and Africa, for instance, the disparity between the indigenous and western is so huge that European civilization easily triumphs with no serious competition. In Japan, the West has been victorious as well, yet it is still not dominant in China. In the long run, however, Curzon predicts the “subtle” and “sophistic” Western civilization will permeate into and win over the Orientals.
- Willy A:son Grebst, I Korea (Sweden, 1912)
When Grebst was staying in Japan, he was motivated to visit Korea by a Swedish naval officer who speaks of Korea as “one of original inhabitants who have the longest history in the world.” Grebst describes his expectations for what he considers to be the unique, unimaginable experience of landing in a new country, which no friends have visited so far. The Koreans he first encounters in the quay of Pusan are smoking long pipes, tall, and tough-looking. They have “indifferent facial expressions but looks mild and amiable.” Grebst, like Curzon, compares the Koreans with the Japanese from the first sight. The Koreans are taller than the Japanese by one head, and have a “natural and placid attitude.” They have rather “rough and imposing” manners, which is far from the Japanese “obsequious and exaggerated attitude.”
It is easily found that most of the travel writings compare the Koreans with the Japanese, especially regarding “manners.” Generally it is said that the Japanese have good manners and Koreans bad. In Bishop’s text, for example, she had received a good impression of the politeness of the Japanese in general, but had many troubles with the “unmannerly curiosity” of the Koreans. Some Korean women and children even tried to pinch her arms to see if she had “the same flesh and blood” as their own. In A;son’s text, however, he contrasts the Japanese manners as exaggerated or flattering with the Korean as natural and imposing. The difference between Bishop and Grebst can come from the different perspective of gender, and also it can be due to whether there is a Westernized experience or not. In a Korean setting, the Korean people, ignorant of the West, regard the Western people as the object of their curiosity rather than as those whom they treat well with Westernized etiquette.
There is also a difference between Bishop’s and Curzon’s texts. Bishop describes even the Korean upper classes as rude, which is contradictory to Curzon, who refers to them as polite and friendly to foreigners. The difference between Bishop’s and Curzon’s account can be attributed to the perspective of the Korean natives. That is to say, Bishop, as a European woman traveler, could sustain white supremacy over the Japanese people, but she could not in Korea, for the Korean upper classes, which tended to regard women as inferior on the basis of Confucian values, treated Bishop according to “gender,” more than “race.”
Grebst’s text has same depiction as Curzon’s relating to the Korean’s laziness and loathe to work. Interestingly though, he tries to explain the reason why Koreans dislike labor. Grebst points out that the most important virtue for Koreans is “propriety.” Propriety is an essential value, especially for the upper class. For them, whatever has the appearance of labor is not propriety; for instance, dressing himself, riding a horse, or lightening the pipe for himself. It is also labor to engage in business. This is why the upper class is discouraged from entering industry or enterprise, and rarely produces industrial goods, except for basic daily necessities. Curzon also describes the Korean upper class, the yangban, in a similar manner as Grebst’s. According to Curzon, the yangban, proud of their correct behavior, insist on work only in officialdom and education. When entering into a trade or manufacturing business, they feel shame, which results in “incurable laziness” and extreme indigence in Korea.
In Grebst’s text, however, there emerge new narratives concerning the Koreans’ idleness. Grebst visits a tramline of the American-Korean joint corporation, and quotes what he heard from an American staff member; “I had the experience throughout operating the tramline that the Koreans are quicker learners and the ones whom I trust more than the Japanese.” Also Pierre, a teacher at a French missionary school in Seoul, says to Grebst, “Koreans are brainy people, and if they awake from the lethargic conditions, they can ignite their original sense of inquiry.”97 These phrases are contradictory to what Grebst has already said about the Koreans’ dormant and static character, but suggest a different account that the Koreans can change under the different circumstances. Whether Grebst perceives this or not, he questions further if there exists an unchangeable essence of a particular national identity.
- Siegfried Genthe, Korea-Reiseschilderungen (Germany, 1905)
Siegfried Genthe visited Korea in 1901 after collecting news of the Boxer Rebellion in China as a newspaper reporter of the Köln, Germany. He writes that, except for Hamel’s book, the texts about Korea written by foreign travelers or scholars were produced only in China and Japan until the nineteenth century. Thus, he describes a great feeling of excitement at the moment he first steps into the long and completely secluded country (my translation): “Full of the people wearing bright white garments and black hats, the street of Seoul looks oddly exotic and fantastic. This is the original aspects of the Koreans, never to be seen in China, Japan or any other places.”
He describes Korean outer garments, hats, hair styles, manggeon (a headband made of horsehair), etc. Especially the hats seem to be of little use, but they look like works of art, manufactured wholeheartedly for hundreds of years. After spending some days in the country, Genthe speaks of the Korean character, and provides a somewhat different image from Curzon’s or Grebst’s (my translation): “The Korean people are by nature good-hearted, generous, and friendly to the guest. They have a liberal, cheerful character with brisk, loud voice, rather than a bellicose temper. They enjoy a grand mood of drink occasionally.”
Genthe and Curzon visited monasteries in the same mountain, Gumgang. In Curzon’s text, the monastery is written of as being “a pleasure house” where Koreans visit for sight-seeing, quote some poems, or compose a stanza, rather than as a place for religious duty. He also describes the temple as a place of “semi-aesthetic, semisuperstitious nature-worship,” and even noisy. Genthe read Curzon’s book before he visited Korea. In the monastery, Curzon’s description of the Buddhist temple came to his mind, writes Genthe. But Genthe’s impression of the temple is different from Curzon’s. Seeing a group of Koreans gazing at the landscape around the temple, Genthe depicts them as “deeply fascinated” with the natural beauty. The monastery is also described as a place where busy Europeans, only searching for money, fame and power, can get away from worldly lust and feel relieved. In a sketch of monks Curzon describes them as displaying “depravity,” most of them becoming monks because of laziness. Genthe, however, describes the monks as retired, poor but honest, and was impressed by their religious lives.
The difference between the two texts seems to originate from the preconceptions they already possessed before visiting Korea, or from a dissimilar textual attitude and topos. Curzon tries to support his own opinion about temple with a previous text written by Hamel 240 years previously. Hamel in his book Hamel's journal and a description of the Kingdom of Korea 1653-1666, described the temple as a place of prostitution, or as a saloon where the yangban brought Gisaeng. Curzon refers to the remarks of Hamel, which is the only cited phrase in his entire book: “[T]hey might better be called Pleasure-houses than Temples, which is to be understood of the common monasteries, where the religious men love to drink hard.”
On the contrary, Genthe, already having read Curzon’s text, does not follow the earlier one, and seems to try to develop his own idea. Concerning the prior account on the depravity of Nun, Genthe even comments that this seems to be due to the uncritical acceptance of previous texts by travelers or Christians, who regard the missionaries as special holders of virtue, and who regard the heathens in a negative way.
- Vatslav Seroshevskii, Корея (Russia, 1905)
Seroshevskii’s text is somewhat different from other texts. Not starting with a description of the appearance or impression of natives, he begins from the first scene with a contrast between Japanese modernity and Korean pre-modernity. Immediately before visiting Korea, he stayed in Japan for over one year in order to study Ainu ethnicity, and experienced Japan’s modern progress, which seemed to strongly captivate him. Accordingly, the moment he steps into the open port in Korea, it is natural for him to contrast the two countries.
First of all, he describes the Japanese residential district as well organized with clean schools, luxurious buildings, etc. On the other hand, he describes the Korean village as indigent, with compactly located houses and winding, dirty alleys. The Japanese, dwarf and skinny, are dressed in various colors, smile, and walk speedily, but the Koreans, tall and serious-looking, dress a monotonous white tone, and Korean women even leave their breast uncovered. Japanese engineers and supervisors look decent holding modern tools, but many Korean laborers stand surrounding them exposing their naked brown skin and drowsy facial expression. Finally he asserts (my translation):
”The dwarf Japanese are no doubt a capable people. They implant their own way of life into here and there in Asia, and the Chinese and the Koreans are willing to obey the Japanese since they regard the Japanese as a brother. Moreover, the Korean merchants, poor, dull, and rude, are not yet able to do something without the help of others’.”
It seems that before or after coming to Korea Seroshevskii read an extensive amount of texts to investigate this new country, but as a folklorist, one month is not enough for him to validate the information. He sometimes produces self-contradictory accounts. He writes, for example, that Koreans are deficient in practicing passion and effort in agriculture, but he is also impressed by the courage and perseverance of the Koreans, seeing the well cultivated land at the 2,000 meters altitude. He also writes over the previous book. In his text, Pusan had belonged to Japan for 400 years, the information of which he borrowed from the Griffis’ text, who wrote Korean history based on Japanese materials. This is also true of Curzon. Curzon describes Pusan as being a Japanese colony, since the Japanese army withdrew from Korea after the Hideyoshi Invasion in 1593.
Seroshevskii revises some misleading information in the light of his own experience. For example, he corrects Griffis’ account that whenever Korean children encounter their father, they kneel down on the street, no matter dirty or muddy it may be. Seroshevskii writes there is no blind obedience in the Korean kinship relationship. The family relationship is sincere, simple-mannered, and has no difference from that of the Europeans. He also adds that the family tie of the Koreans even surpasses that of the Europeans in genial and righteous behavior.
2.1.2 Government and Political System
Seroshevskii states that the ills of Korean society come from government officials and the yangban. The Yangban are the privileged, hereditary class, exempted from tax and military service. This class is similar to the European nobles, though with the difference that the yangban widows are prohibited from remarrying, a practice that originated from the Oriental idea that a wife is the property of the dead husband. No matter how poor, the yangban are not engaged in commercial or manufacturing business. Thus the yangban do not have any work or means in life except for government service. Accordingly, the yangban and the bureaucracy are closely connected, which generates chronic problems based on the blood relationships in Korean society and politics. Seroshevskii’s criticism of the bureaucracy is even harsher than that of any other writers. The Korean bureaucrats make all progressive reforms into “a piece of paper” in order to sustain old customs, the royal prerogative and their vested rights.112
Seroshevskii also claims that it is due to a bureaucracy that has been static for 300 years that the Korean creativity and enterprising spirit faded away. Koreans used to influence the Japanese by transmitting art and science, which are now vanishing. Moreover, Korea has tried to make the country appear less attractive or barren, with a view to preventing the foreign powers from plundering or acting with aggressive lust. This is why there are few trees around the coastal towns, and why the Koreans are reluctant to produce luxuries or artistic works, and rarely develop underground resources, such as gold, steel, and silver, etc. As a consequence, there is “a grave atmosphere like a mourning house” in Korean society. The Korean people are indifferent in public matters, and thus distrust and suspicion are everywhere.
In some senses such an account is dissimilar from Grebst or Genthe. The two latter also point out the illness of Korean bureaucracy, but in describing the Koreans’ character, they rather stress the cheerful and optimistic sentiment. This disparity might depend on where the travelers are, or whom they meet, but Seroshevskii’s strong antipathy against the privileged class and his description of Korean society as gloomy seems more to be due to the socialist consciousness of his career.
Curzon also states several reasons for the inert character of the Koreans and their poverty, such as the corruption of the government officials, the disregard for physical labor of the upper class yangban, the government’s discouragement of private enterprise, and the long absence of contact with foreign countries. In particular, the yangban are described as carefree, even when facing competition or crisis, and “proud and punctilious as a Spanish hidalgo.” The difference from Seroshevskii’s text is that Curzon describes the harmful influence of the Korean bureaucracy as part of the same, general symptom resulting from of the whole Oriental regime. Curzon says,
“[T]he Korean polity... [is] inseparably associated with the Asiatic system and recognizable in every unreformed Oriental State from Teheran to Seoul. A royal figurehead enveloped in the mystery of the palace and the harem, surrounded by concentric rings of eunuchs, Ministers of State, officials and retainers. ... A hierarchy of office-holders… [is] leeches in the thinnest disguise; a feeble and insignificant army, an impecunious exchequer… and an impoverished people - these are the invariable symptoms of the fast vanishing regime of the older and unredeemed Oriental type.”
According to Curzon, the old Korean regime has become weaker under the influence of Western modernization since Korea opened its door to the outside world, and the sacred concept of the royal authority is also withering and becoming humble. From the Western perspective, the main interest concerning the Korean government at the time was how the Korean monarchy had been changing to more closely resemble the Western system. Therefore, when Western people saw the Korean government, they were more concerned with whether it practices a Western concept of “progress” and “civilization.” It should not necessarily be a “less authoritarian forms of politics.” In discussing the Oriental government, therefore, the Westerner’s viewpoint was more likely to approach by the rhetoric of modernization rather than the concept of democracy. In the meanwhile, Griffis criticizes the Korean Court, by pointing out that the democratic element in the Korean monarchy seems to be far reaching, for there has never been division between the Korean Royal Court and functions of rhe government.
In contrast with Griffis and Curzon, Gillmore, a teacher at the Korean Royal School for four years, presents somewhat different viewpoint. According to Gillmore, Korea is a system of absolute monarchy system in theory, but the King’s personal disposition or power does not have that big an influence on the national administration. There are traditional restrictions, subjects to Confucian principles that the ruler or the government officials should observe. Korean subjects can affect the functions of government. They can open for a mass rally concerning policies that they disagree to, and they can deliver their own opinions by silently demonstrating in front of the Royal Court. If this protest is accepted as reasonable, the Royal Court modifies its policy, but if not, the government lets the public know the correctness of its policy through “Bang” (notification document) that is distributed several times all over the country to pacify disturbances. The subjects thus do not always obey the King, and the both sides possess a common national consciousness and ethics that make a consensus possible.
2.1.3 Women and Society
The Korean women have different modes of seclusion depending on their position in society. The women that the Western travelers freely encounter in the street are mostly from the lower class. Women in the middle class cover their body and face with changot (sleeved apron) when they appear in the street. Women in the upper class are rarely visible in the street because they use a closed palanquin carried by two men so as not to let people see their appearance.
The features commonly ascribed to women of the lower class are hard-working and patience. In Curzon’s text, Korean women are cleaning white cotton clothes all day long and beating them with a wooden cylinder to make a gloss. This tap, tap, tap, sound is easily heard from a closed house, and he suspects that the white garments in Korea are a sort of secret plan by men to keep the women working. He makes a contrast between these Korean women and Japanese women: “the hard-visaged, strong-limbed, masterful housewife of Korea, and the shuffling, knock-kneed, laughing, bewitching Japanese damsel.”
The image of the hard-working lower class is overlapped with the appearance of ugliness and barbarity. In Grebst’s text, Korean women are “never beautiful,” leaving their breasts exposed from the short, upper dress. The description of revealed breasts is one of the typical images at the time that appeared in the Western texts, along with photographs. The image is easily linked to that of barbarity, which continues to be handed down to the subsequent accounts. This visual materials, however, was apt to be produced in a studio or on a street in order to attract Western readers. Only Genthe, however, views this barbarian image in a different way. He observes young Korean women giving the breast to a child without any selfconsciousness or reluctance to do so before people. Genthe describes the scene as the natural sense of the mother that they do not have to feel shameful, and explains that this is why the Korean women do not cover their breasts.
On the other hand, women of the upper class are characterized by seclusion and circumspection. In Grebst’s account, the Korean women are protected in the Anche more than the Turkish women are in the Harem. The representation of fidelity and modesty follows this image as well. Seroshevskii says that Korean women are at once a tender mother and a faithful housewife, a reputation which Japanese women hardly catch up. A secluded Anche also indicates another aspect of the few rights of the Korean women. For example, a Korean woman does not have the right to divorce, and a man can have a concubine to bear his descendants. In Grebst’s text, the upper class rarely divorce, but the low class do divorce in the case of woman’s incurable disease, theft, childlessness, infidelity, jealousy, incompatibility with her parents-in-law, etc.127 Curzon refers to this polygamy custom as amoral. Bishop also points out that the Korean woman has no “domestic happiness,” quoting a remark of a Korean man, “We marry our wives, but we love our concubines.”
Meanwhile, Grebst also adds that with a short stay it is difficult to know the inner side of Korean women, and that most of his account on Korean women is assisted by the previous texts. He opens another possibility of opinion on Korean patriarchal custom by citing a Japanese remark that Korean men seem to ignore their wives, but that in fact many Korean men are “hen-pecked husbands,” who tend to hide this feeling to others for their honor’s sake.
Hullbert, in The Passing of Korea, points out that it is not correct to measure the civilization of a people by the treatment of women: “(U)nder existing moral conditions, the seclusion of women in the Far East is a blessing and not a curse, and its immediate abolishment would result in a moral chaos rather than… in the elevation of society.” Gillmore, observing a married couple, that of his Korean teacher and his teacher’s wife, writes that a wife is a beloved being to her husband, and Korean people are royal and family-minded. Although Koreans get married by contracted custom, without knowing each other, they could be happy and the status of Korean women is not as bad as Western people presume. He exemplifies that Korean men use polite terms and discuss business matters with their wives, and that wives are respected in homes and play key roles in making their home harmonious. Griffis also refers to the influence of Korean women in contrasting to Japanese women, in that Japanese women do not take up an official position, but Korean Queens have taken political powers in the past history.
2.1.4 Religion
Buddhism, Confucianism, Spirit-worship, or a combination of all of them
For Europeans, the religion of the Koreans is a very “intricate study,” because to explain the clear line between a religion and superstition is not simple. The Korean religions described in the European texts are Buddhism, Confucianism, spirit-worship, and in some case a sort of the combination of all of these. Hullbert says that if a religion is a genuine one that a human truly pursues when in trouble, then the original religion of the Koreans is spirit-worship, which generally includes animism, shamanism, fetishism, and nature-worship. The Koreans possess all these as a “composite religion,” each of whose character has no enmity between the different cults. For instance, a Korean depends on the Buddhist element at one time, and at another time reverts to his ancestral fetishism. Similar idea is seen in Grebst’s text in the way that Koreans are Confucians when in society, Buddhists in philosophy and spirit-worshippers when in trouble.
Seroshevskii points out that Buddhism and Confucianism were imported in the fifth century. Buddhism reached its peak in the tenth century, but waned in the fourteenth century to then be expelled from the city to the remote places. Confucianism, an ethical system rather than a genuine religion, replaced the ousted
Buddhism and has been dominant since the fourteenth century. Curzon says that Confucianism develops by long connection with the Chinese, and its ethical outcome is the sense of filial piety, unquestioning obedience to the sovereign, and duty to the aged and to friends. Ancestor worship is a typical religious form for the upper class influenced by the sense of filial piety of Confucianism. Therefore, male descendents are the most desirable to the Koreans, for they pay a tribute to the ancestors even after their parents passed away.
From Seroshevskii’s perspective, Confucianism will be declining with the waning of the dominant class. The reason for this is that Buddhism had been more influential than Confucianism in folk belief despite being long persecuted, and that Buddhism will revive with the animated desire of worldwide Buddhists and with active European scholarly studies. Seroshevskii continues to mention that in a sense, Korean Shamanism is more deeply permeated into the Koreans’ spirit than is Confucianism or Buddhism. For example, the types of demons that the Korean people feel afraid of and worship are numerous, and thus there are a number of mileposts at the entrance of a village or a city which exorcise the evil spirits. The Korean people also go to a female sorceress or soothsayer before they set up a significant business. The shamans even penetrate into the upper class and the Royal Court, and interfere with political matters so closely that they often become obstacles to national reform and progress. Seroshevskii pays attention to the influence of Shamanism and Buddhism on each other. He states as examples that Korean Buddhism adopts Shamanic charms into formal religious rites (not that strong as in Mongolia or Tibet, which turned into Lamaism). In turn, Shamanism is also influenced by Buddhism, in that the first Shaman, a blind fortuneteller, should be trained through special practices of Buddhism and Confucianism, and that Shamans chant a charm which is borrowed from Buddhist scriptures. Such influential exchange can be seen in Bishop’s text too. She describes Korean Shamanism or Demonism, as milder than that of northern Asia, which is probably due to the influence of early Buddhism.
In Genthe’s view, the Korean people are educated with Confucian ethics in youth, become a follower of spirit-worship which has been passed down from antiquity, and by the time of death lead a devoted Buddhist life, holding a funeral in
Buddhist custom and facing death with an idea of metempsychosis. Genthe adds that since the Koreans do not settle down in one single religion, another new religion can be easily propagated in Korea.
Christianity
Christianity in Korea at the time was of great interest for the Europeans, not only for the reason that Christianity, originating from Western civilization, is a completely alien belief to the Koreans, but also because Christianity acts as a kind of proxy for the abstract thinking of the Korean people. Therefore, Europeans are much concerned with how Christianity becomes rooted in the Korean society, or how it fits for their sentiments. In Grebst’s text, the mission of Christianity in Korea is described as relatively undemanding, for the Korean people already possess a monotheistic notion, “Hananim,” whose quality is very similar with that of God in Christianity. Grebst quotes a remark of a missionary (my translation):
“This word, Hananim – heaven master - is compounded of the words ‘Hana’-heaven, and ‘nim’-master. All Koreans believe in Hananim as the Supreme Ruler of the universe. Hananim rules all the gods in the heaven and the land, and his attributes are surprisingly similar with the concept of God in Christianity. Therefore foreign missionaries use the term Hananim when they teach the Koreans the meaning of Jehovah of Christianity.”142
Seroshevskii focuses on the fact that Korea is the only country in the Far East in which the Christian community emerged of her own voluntary will. Christianity first appeared in the eighteenth century among Korean scholars, and without Europeans participation. Lee Seunghoon, a son of a Korean envoy in Beijing, studied Christianity there, and became a missionary with the baptismal name “Petros.” After returning to Korea, he greatly encouraged the other Korean scholars to become Christians. The number of Christians in Korea was around 4000 by the time of 1790, and they even petitioned a bishop in Beijing to approve a Catholic priest and a bishop that they selected for themselves in Korea. Seroshevskii adds that Catholicism at the time was such a religion of “the poor, the oppressed” that it could permeate deeply into the Koreans’ mind.
Hullbert presents an interesting connection between the Korean nationality and Christianity. He explains the character of the Korean people as “rationally idealistic,” which is “midway” between the Japanese and the Chinese:
“The Japanese are a people of sanguine temperament. They are quick, versatile, idealistic, and their temperamental sprightliness approaches the verge of volatility. … The Chinese, on the other hand, while very superstitious, are comparatively phlegmatic. He sees no rainbows and pursues no ignes fatui [illusions].”
Hullbert continues that compared with the Japanese and the Chinese, the Koreans have the temperament of “rationality and emotionalism,” “cool-headed and hotheaded,” like the mid-geographical position between the two countries. Therefore, Confucianism is “too cold and materialistic” to appeal to the sentimental side of the Koreans, and Buddhism “too mystical” for their philosophical aspects. Christianity, however, is fitted for the rationally idealistic temperament of the Koreans, for the religion of Christianity has features both of the rational and of the mystical.
Tonghak
Curzon and Seroshevskii are both interested in the new religious party in Korea, “Tonghak.” At the time when Curzon was visiting in Korea, 1893, Tonghak was becoming active. In Curzon’s text, Tonghak is described as a politico-religious party, which literally means “the Party of Oriental Learning.” Its slogan was the prohibition of all foreign religions and powers and the expulsion of the foreign merchants, which appealed to the Conservatism of a solid part of the Korean people.
Seroshevskii approaches Tonghak in the light of the spirit of resistance against exploitation and oppression by the Korean bureaucracy, rather than as a conservative movement against Western influence, as Curzon explains it. It is not fundamentally hostile to the existing societal order, but demands the enlightenment of the people and the reform of the ruling class. Tonghak rejects Western ideas, but it does not oppose Christianity. Rather, it borrows some elements of the Christian religion. Its founder was so impressed by the spirit of Catholic martyrs that it adopted their concept of monotheism, and created “Chun-Ju,” whose literal meaning is “Lord of Heaven.” Tonghak has neither shrine, nor idol, nor does it deal with the future life after death. It is mainly based on the Oriental religions of Confucians ethics, of Buddhism that purifies mind, and of Taoism that keeps the body and spirit from material desire.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Tonghak Movement, with these religious and political doctrines, raised extensive rebellions against the government. In the spring of 1894, thirty thousand individuals with numerous arms almost reached Seoul, and defeated 800 government soldiers. In order to put down the rebels, Yuan Shih-kai, a delegate of China, urged the Korean King to request the aid of China. In the end, China dispatched troops to Korea, which provided a justification for Japan to send its troops under the agreement of the Convention of Tientsin. Eventually, the stationing of the two foreign troops in Korea was to ignite the Sino-Japanese War in 1894.
Summary
As seen from the passage above, there are both common and different perceptions on Korea in the four texts. Speaking of some aspects that are stressed differently in each author’s text, first of all, in Curzon’s account, the representation of the Korean national character is the same as that of the Western Asians. He groups the Koreans into the general group of the Orientals, and depicts their characters as having common features, such as never in a hurry, indifference, inertness, etc. This grouping also occurs in the description of the Korean government. He criticizes the Korean politics as displaying the same general symptom as the whole Oriental regime, with its corruption and its harmful influence of bureaucracy.
Grebst’s representations of the Korean character are somewhat similar to Curzon’s; lazy and dormant. But new opinions follow after a while, such as their being brainy people or quicker learners. This transiting idea is due to his new experience, trying to see Korean people in individuality, not in a group. In describing Korean impoliteness to foreigners, he does not follow the prior texts, but creates his own idea, such as this being natural or imposing. He does not represent Korean women as typical of a barbarian society either. He leaves open other possibilities in estimating the rights of women in Korea, by saying that it is impossible to know the inner aspects of Korean women after a short stay.
Both Grebst and Genthe offer neutral representations of Korean religions. Comparing them more delicately, Grebst tries to explain why Christianity fits for the sentiment of Korean people, but Genthe restrained even this kind of a comment on Christianity. In his description of the Korean character, Genthe suggests relatively new representations, like liberal, cheerful, and generous. Relating to the Korean women, only Genthe takes on an attitude of cultural relativism, explaining why some Korean women uncover their breasts. He tries to form his own ideas, not following the previous authors’ views; for example, Genthe offers completely different accounts concerning the monastery, monks, nuns, and natives gathering at the temple, even though he has read Hamel and Curzon.
Seroshevskii represents Koreans as being dirty and sluggish, living in a premodern, backward society, which is a clichéd topos regarding non-Western societies. In particular, it seems to be his socialist consciousness that affects most of his perception of Korean politics and religion. For instance, he harshly blames the blood relationship between the privileged class and bureaucrats, and criticizes Confucianism in the light of the ethics of the vested class. He also offers a positive description of Christianity and Tonghak in the sense that Christianity supports the poor and oppressed, and Tonhgak resists the corruption of the privileged.
2.2 Comparative Study on Reciprocity
2.2.1 George N. Curzon, Problems of the Far East. Japan-Korea-China (Britain,
1894)
Curzon’s narrative has few personal feelings. He seems to repress private sentiments during the trip. He offers as much allegedly objective information as possible with a dry writing style. Unlike the other three texts which are written as chronicals, Curzon’s book is structured by classification into topics. Readers are not expected to follow the writer’s impressions and feelings.
Curzon mentions the Korean King in a separate chapter, stating that his disposition seems amiable, generous, and people-loving. At the audience with the King though, Curzon does not convey any conversation with the King. The only native Korean Curzon reports a conversation with is the Foreign Minister. The Foreign Minister, already knowing Curzon to be a Minister of the Crown in England, says that Curzon must be a relative of Her Majesty the Queen of England, a comment which reflects the fact that in Korea, it is not easy to be a member of the Court without having kinship with a King or a Queen. He also asks what Curzon’s salary had been and if the perquisites must have been very large. This is the only part of the conversation in Curzon’s text, in which Curzon seems to imply that the Korean monarchial system is pre-modern. Let alone direct conversation, there is little description of native individuals. Curzon encounters many Koreans during the trip, but does not portray any specific inhabitants. When he visits a monastery with a long history, he does not record any conversation or impression about a monk or an abbot. Natives in his text do not have their own voice, through which the readers can imagine what they are really thinking. Instead, the natives are described as “a group” or as in a similar category as the general Orientals. Mutual interaction with the indigenous people is absent, and there is only the repeating of the same clichés as in the previous texts, without any attempt to find out new ideas on Korea.
Curzon’s concern is much more on the political and economic aspects of Korea. He seeks the possibility of adopting Western civilization in Korea and British commercial advantages in this process. Britain is not the prevailing power over Korea at the time. Japan had already possessed the mint and the bank ahead of the Western Powers, encroaching on the Korean economy, and the Korean government was in a large debt to Japan. The aim of Britain in Korea, thus, is not to lose this balance of economic power shared with Japan and the Western Powers. Economic advantage is a partial goal of the British Empire in those Asian countries whose territory is not a British colony. It is explicitly revealed in his text that “Asian dominion” except for Europe, Canada and Australia, is crucially important, and the wealth and prestige coming from the Asia are “the foundation stones” of the British Empire.
Curzon admits that all the modern equipments that the West brings to the East, like loans, concessions, banks, mints, factories, etc, are “filling Western purses at the expense of Eastern pockets,” However, the East should employ such foreign strength as “servants,” to make an independent progress towards modernization. If Korea rejects the employment of foreign servants, it will result in Korea inviting in “foreign masters.” Therefore, allowing a patent right or a lease to foreigners is the way not to lose sovereignty in the future, but just a cost of meeting the Western civilization.
In Curzon’s text, expansionism is described as a virtue for the race. He is disappointed to see that China was defeated in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, for he thought China had been taking after the example of European expansionism, but she did not even think about a foreign expedition. The Chinese preparation for the war was just to defend the coast-line, which shows the Chinese lack of the expansionist’s quality. Ruling different blood through foreign expeditions is a contribution to the enhancement of patriotism, loyalty, or self-respect for the nation. In Curzon’s view, therefore, China is inferior because she is short of all these attributes.
Curzon’s viewpoint on the Japanese expansion in Korea is worth attention. In his account, Japan imitates the British Empire and tries to reproduce its glory in the Asia. However, the reform made by Japan in Korea is like “the task of Sisyphus.”155 The reason is that Japanese imperialism is still immature. She rules another nation in a hurried and oppressive way, under the strength of soldiers and policemen. Moreover, considering that the two countries are hereditary enemies and that the Koreans do not have any eagerness for reform at the moment, the Japanese “reforming craze” only generates abhorrent feeling among the Koreans. He supposes that overruling Korea is more difficult than expected, which is beyond the control of Japan. With a comparison between Japanese and British imperialism, Curzon says Britain displays “colonizing genius” in its expansion policy, but Japan lacks this ability. Even if Japan wants to be “The Great Britain of the Far East,” they fail in their colonial policy because they do not have “the hereditary instinct for expansion” as Britain does. He writes: “Nor in their long and dramatic history is there any indication of capacity to rule or educate subject races of different blood. All their most valuable national properties they have acquired from, not given to, others.”158
It is not difficult to point out that in the above passage, Curzon is deeply saturated with a superior sense of British imperialism and white supremacy. Such racism culminates when he quotes and deputes Pearson’s book, National life and Character: a Forecast. Curzon feels “dismal” reading Pearson’s thesis, which predicts that the future of Eastern Asia will be under “the Yellow Race,” not “the
White,” that is, under China, and “neither Great Britain, nor France, nor Russia.”
2.2.2 Willy A:son Grebst, I Korea (Sweden, 1912)
Grebst assigns large parts of the text to his interactions and relations with the indigenous people, which is absent in Curzon’s text. In A;son’s narrative, the native guide and interpreter, Yun Sangal, plays an important role as much as Grebst himself. Yun Sangal, a young man who is being educated in a French missionary school, is full of a sense of duty to introduce Korean history and customs to a foreigner. The relationship between Grebst and Yun Sangal does not seem to be that of domination and subordination, as is much seen in other travel writings. A;son writes about Yun Sangal, poor but of good family origin, he seems to regard him as a “thoughtful companion” of Grebst’s, the relationship of which is equal, not “employer and employee.”160 Sometimes Grebst follows him without any objection to the place to which Yun Sangal want to take him. On another occasion, Grebst spends many hours trying to persuade him, when Yun Sangal resists to go to the prison where A;son wants to see an execution. Moreover, Grebst attempts to know more about Yun Sangal’s spirit. Grebst keenly observes the moment of the Christianity in Yun Sangal’s mind conflicting with the remnant of a superstition he used to possess. Despite the benefit of Western education, Grebst writes, it will not be easy for the implanted Western religion to make him discard the national soul remaining in his unconsciousness.
When Grebst encounter the indigenous people, he receives them with an open attitude and with pleasure to communicate. He recalls when the inhabitants take a close look at his face with a lamp, their stare, blended with curiosity and fear, is “bad manners but not rude ones.”162 While visiting the prison, in particular, Grebst was inspected by a jailor to see whether he has “a horn” in his back, and if Sweden is the land where only one-eyed people live, but he tolerates this “odd physical examination” to the end, finally laughing. Grebst gives the same opportunity to the natives to observe him as they do to him.
Grebst tries to maintain the viewpoint of cultural relativism when he meets new things in Korea. Like Curzon, Grebst considers the Koreans’ white clothes to be impractical, considering cleanness or convenience, but he adds that they could be seen as graceful from the perspective of the Koreans. Curzon and Grebst watch a string concert. Neither of them understand Korean music that well. Curzon describes Korean music as “plaintive,” and “monotonous,” and Grebst, despite non-sympathy, introduces the Korean musician’s idea in detail; Korean music imitates natural sounds such as the wind, waves, and leaves’ shivering, which are irregular, not precisely organized. This is why Korean music is “free” to the extent that it resembles the natural phenomenon. Both Curzon and Grebst describe Korean dancing. Curzon’s impression is that it is “free from indelicacy,” and Grebst’s that it is “graceful and dignified.” A;son adds a love story of a young foreign diplomat who fell in love with a dancing-girl, Gisaeng. The story ends with the foreign diplomat’s suicide by gunshot, which in some sense seems to give a more sentimental and romantic tone in Grebst’s text in comparison with Curzon’s.
Another feature of Grebst’s account, compared to Curzon, is that such discourse as that the laggard Koreans should be reformed or enter the Western modernization as quickly as possible is hardly seen. Rather, Grebst feels pity for the fact that good Korean hand-made products are replaced by products of mass mechanism that are made in America or Europe. Grebst does not criticize Koreans for working in a slow way. He shows a nostalgic sentiment for the past by deploring the fact that the old ways fade away and the new ones appear (my translation):
“The more competition, the more advantage the nimble possess. It will take a long time for the Koreans to open their eyes and adapt to the current of the times. It goes without saying that Koreans will be out of the race before they realize what they should do in order to survive in this competition.”
As the passage suggests, Grebst sympathizes with Koreans who are incapable of jumping onto the current trend of Westernization, and laments over how long their custom will be able to survive in the face of the Western civilization.
Grebst’s new perception of a new place is also another characteristic. While staying in Japan, Grebst heard that the inland scenery in Korea is dull and uninteresting, but during the trip to Korea, Grebst, attracted by the landscape of the inland, realizes that the other travelers’ accounts cannot be trustworthy, which tended to judge the entirety only by the part. His political perspective upon Japan is also changing. He observes by accident the conflict between Japanese and Korean military groups, and goes to the spot where Korean farmers were executed for the reason that the farmers protested against the Japanese plunder of their land. Through all that he witnesses, Grebst comes to doubt the impression that he had already gained in Japan (my translation):
“Since it had an enchanting outer beauty in all things, I did not need to think the opposite side of it, but in the end I could see the authentic in Korea. I witnessed the cruelty and coldness of the Japanese here. It is said that ‘Japan is a Western civilized country,’ but this is wrong. Although Japan shows off her power by means of swift brain work and brightness, and has the illusion of self-praise, it has to run thousands miles in order to catch up the point of the Western enlightenment.”167
This passage is also permeated by a sense of the superiority of Western civilization, but the difference between A;son and Curzon is that Curzon regards Japanese imperialism as immature and inferior with the sense of the superiority of the British Empire, but Grebst brings up Western civilization in order to criticize Japanese imperialism as a “ferocious oppressor” tormenting the weak. After this realization, the representation of Japan in Grebst’s text turns into “rampant, shameless, and bellicose,” or “the dwarf.”
The sympathy with the colonial people is also dissimilar between Curzon and Grebst. In Curzon’s case, he claims that despite mercilessness of the process of Western modernization, Korea should make this transition at any costs, and if it is necessary for this, Japanese colonialism is inevitable. A;son, however, rejects this view of power-centered history. He writes in a sad tone that there is nobody who supports the pathetic Koreans, and that this is a principle of world history (my translation):
“[T]he ‘world’ would not do something so stupid as putting its hands into boiling water, only if there was any way to avoid this. The wheel of history has rolled in this way until the present. The powers do whatever they want, whereas the weak do not hear even the echo of their screams.”169
2.2.3 Siegfried Genthe, Korea-Reiseschilderungen (Germany, 1905)
In comparison with the former two writers, the most distinctive feature of Genthe is that he calls himself a “European barbarian.” This phrase appears often in his text, and not just once. The word, European barbarian, from the standard of the contemporary understanding, can be said to combine two incompatible meanings. By using this phrase, it can be presumed that Genthe does not take on an absolute criterion about the concepts of civilization and barbarism, and that he shows a strong narrator’s will not to see the natives’ custom and history from the Western standpoint. Moreover, Genthe has a distinct idea of mutuality and “contact zone” by saying that it is natural to exchange curiosity or even impolite questions at the place where “two completely unfamiliar human beings having no similarities initially encounter and communicate.”
Genthe’s travel writing is consequently characterized by an effort to keep his own sense of neutrality and to look for the good features in new things and new customs, even if they are uncomfortable to him. Also, resisting topos and the authority of previous texts, he tries to actively revise what was biased in them. For instance, regarding Korean’s dirtiness, Genthe says that Koreans would say the same thing if they saw German laborers; Korean’s idleness, he quotes a German manager at the Danggogae Mine that they are “satisfied” with Korean laborers; bothersome curiosity, he writes Germans do the same in observing the indigenous. As to Korean rooms which Curzon and Grebst describe as inconvenient, owing to the burning floor, Genthe, explains in scientific mode that only the Korean people have developed a heating system on the floor. Moreover, he refers to “Gibsin” (shoes made of straw) as more useful than leather shoes when walking on the sharp pebbles or rocks in the Korean mountains. Also, he adds that to Koreans’ eyes, European life style may look more “fanatical,” because even to Europeans’ eyes, Americans appear “morbid.”
While staying in Korea, Genthe reads Dallet’s book, Histoire de l'Eglise de Corée, which was the book most read by travelers visiting Korea at the time, but he doubts its authority. Genthe points out that this book is full of awful and bloody cases in which the French missionaries underwent ordeals in Korea. “The more I get to know about Korea and the Korean people, the more skeptical I become about the authenticity of the prior texts.” Genthe happens to meet a French missionary who collected plant samples. The French missionary could not understand the Korean language and was ignorant of Korean geography, despite a long stay. Yet, Genthe witnesses, he holds a finished paper titled “Region and Inhabitants, Moral and Customs” about the Koreans, even with little communication with the natives. However, on his name card, it says: ‘Member of Academy, Member of Museum.’ Genthe writes how superficial the report is, and that those texts must all be verified before publication. He is afraid whether readers believe these “spurious scholars.”176 Although Genthe shows an idealistic attitude of a cultural relativist in a contact zone, Genthe’s reciprocity has a dissimilar element from Grebst’s. Genthe rarely follows the individual sentiments or emotions of the natives, which was the distinctive characteristic of Grebst’s narratives. Genthe mentions one Korean individual in relative detail: Lee Jaeho, who helps him to explore the Halla Mountain. Except for him though, the inhabitants, or interpreting guides who accompanied Genthe throughout the trip, are rarely described. They exist in Genthe’s text, but their individuality, their own remarks or features, are not well portrayed.
Another characteristic of Genthe’s narrative is a heroic sentiment. This appears the most strongly when he explores the Halla Mountain in Jeju Island, which is located at the end of the southern part of Korea. Since Jeju Island is famous for its rebellious character, owing to a penal colony in the past, Genthe feels tension before leaving. Moreover, a few weeks before his trip, it happened that Catholics and missionaries were executed by its inhabitants, which makes him feel more heroic and adventurous. Genthe saw there for the first time Koreans who do not wear white costumes, and whose faces look appalling and like marble. Genthe confronts a protest from the residents who believe that if a foreigner climbs up the Halla Mountain, the spirit of the mountain would rage. Eventually, with the help of Lee Jaeho, a governor of Jeju Island, Genthe ends up climbing the mountain. His exploration does not include any kind of capitalistic aspiration for using nature. He only depicts the victory of the expedition in a very epic style. Struggling against all the harsh conditions, Genthe prides himself on the fact that he stands on the summit of the Halla Mountain, its height measured for the first time by a foreigner.
Genthe’s text has a strong ego-centered character. He prefers describing natives and native customs through his own voice, rather than offering them a chance to speak for themselves. There is such an abundance of remarks and emotions that Genthe wants to express that he seldom assigns space in the text for the natives. In a sense, he is the protagonist in the narrative, and the others are minor roles.
This ego-centered narrative and cultural relativism do not seem to be reconcilable, but the two elements coexist in his text without conflicting. It seems to be rational thinking that connects these two different attitudes. As a rational, egocentered narrator, Genthe has a tendency to write mostly about his thoughts, his opinions, and his ideas in the process of interacting with the native people. He spends much time during the trip thinking about himself or his identity. He comments many times on German nationality, and gets an impressive feeling when he meets a German American who still has not lost the sense of his mother tongue. German national identity is often compared with the British one. Genthe hopes that Germans learn the sense of “perseverance and tenacity” of the British, who are proud of their blood, and keep their language and traditions.
In A;son’s text, by contrast, accounts of his identity or national feeling are rarely seen. Grebst seldom mentions Swedish characteristics or national identity. He only makes a brief comment on Swedish women when he writes about Korean women, in order to say that Swedish women should appreciate their excessive right compared to Koreans. More than Genthe, Curzon shows a strong sense of pride and superiority in his British nationality. Curzon writes that the British are “too robust to be homesick, too busy to repine,” and of the “valour of our ancestors and intrepid spirit of our merchants.” Seroshevskii, a Polish Russian, also rarely speaks of his national identity. Even when he meets a Polish woman while visiting a factory and hears of a Russian engineer who was supposed to build the factory but ran away with the design document, Seroshevskii never mentions the Polish or Russian character. However, he uses such expressions as “Russian invader” twice when he mentions the Russo-Japanese War.
Genthe has a strong attachment for the past. His nostalgia for the past is much more intense than that of Grebst. In Genthe’s text, aspirations for the primitive and the fresh, “untouched by civilization,” are depicted in a melancholic tone. He adores the tranquility in a village still pastoral and noiseless from the lack of industrialization. He feels that it is a pity that Korean costumes, whose roots go back five hundred years, are no longer to be preserved. He writes that the Korean hermit is more appealing than the “Chicagoan chasing a dollar.”180 This sentiment is no more than intellectual nostalgia in a modernized society. Nostalgia is a longing for something that is already gone, even though you would not want to go back there. Genthe’s ideas on Korea are in the same position as this. He hopes that Koreans adhere to the old traditions, and at the same time that Koreans accept their coloniality as well. This sense of ambiguity is well seen when he visits a German mine.
Genthe visits a German mine in Danggogae in order to confirm the German adventurous spirit and its enterprising activity in Korea. Moving toward the mine, he hopes the “fantastic day” will come when this remote town will all of a sudden become prosperous, like the gold-cities of “Johannesburg” or “Witwatersrand.” He has no doubt that such a cultivation of nature by the Powers will bring wealth to Korea. He regards the Japanese as domineering, “haughty and bellicose,” but thinks that its ruling over Korea would eventually bring benefit. He feels it is regretful that Germany lost the good opportunity to peacefully colonize Korea, and that Korea only has German consul, not a consul general. He seems to have little recognition of the asymmetry between the dominant and the subordinate that comes in the relationship between the imperialist and the colony. Rather, he thinks only of the positive effect that the Powers would offer a colony.
Genthe admires the noble-savage, and at the same time approves of colonialism. This ambivalent feeling seems to come from either his indifference of the relationship between empire and the colonized, or from his own idea of “time.” In other words, he sees the “time” of empire and of colony as being different. He does not follow the concept of “time” in the dominant discourse. The theory of racism or of social evolution at the time classified the empire and the colony by a hierarchical order based on the idea that “time” is same. But Genthe regards “time” between the West and the East as neither identical, nor measured as superior or inferior. For Genthe, “time” and “civilization” does not go with together. This idea can be viewed in Genthe’s account that the West might be better off in “civilization,” but the Koreans in “time” (my translation):
“The Western barbarians, who are managing a life chased by time, calculate time by means of money. And we are stingy with time... When it comes to time, all the Koreans are affluent… and immensely rich. To keep the peaceful pace of the Orientals, we aliens should adapt ourselves to this view of life.”
Here, for Genthe, time is a mental quality that is distinguished from material civilization. He views time and civilization as belonging to different categories. This might lead to further speculation that Genthe disagrees with the standpoint of the linear progress of Western civilization. With this logic, Genthe thinks that the Koreans will be able to obtain the mental quality of time and the material benefit provided by colonialism at the same time. This odd but genially harmonized relationship thus let him think that a gap between the West and the East, if any, is not because of a hierarchical quality, but because of a difference in “time.” Consequently, it is not surprising that nowhere in Genthe’s text are there implicit or explicit hints as to Western superiority over the Orient, nor accounts as to the inferior essence of the colonized.
2.2.4 Vatslav Seroshevskiishevskii, Корея (Russia, 1905)
Seroshevskii is an admirer of Japanese modernity. In his text, there is neither criticism of the Japanese colonial aspiration in Korea, nor such accounts as Curzon’s of the Japanese imperialism as being oppressive or doctrinarian. Seroshevskii never doubts that Japanese coloniality would benefit Koreans in any case. He writes (my translation):
“If a country gains economical advantage due to the mental development of the neighbor countries, the country [Japan] is lucky and happy. More importantly, if a country is aware of this timely fortune and makes a response, the country [Korea] is definitely even happier. The Japanese spirit of progress and humanism has contributed to the humane evolution of the Twain cannibals for eight years. Hopefully, they would also provide advancement for the pathetic Koreans.”
Before arriving at Seoul, Seroshevskii accompanies one Korean guide/interpreter. The native guide appears many times in the text, but it is not easy to recognize his personality. They communicate a lot, but the conversation is going on with only objective questions and replies, such as “what is the building?” or “what is Pabalma (post horse)?” In Seroshevskii’s text, the native guide does not have individuality, but only plays a role in linking a storyline. The second native guide/interpreter, Sin Moonkyun, is different. He is a progressive official with experience of living abroad. In a sense, it can be said that Sin has a similar standpoint as Seroshevskii, in criticizing the conservative aspects of Korean society. Seroshevskii often presents Sin’s dialogue (my translation):
“We cannot see hope. We don’t have the funds to educate people, to open schools, and to send students to go abroad. The reason that there are no funds is that the government officials steal the money, and the reason for their theft is… that the coffers of the state are empty.”
“The foreigners only think of making use of us.… They occupy the best horses, the best woods, but do not do their duty. … They blame us for receiving a bribe, but who spoils us? Who gives the bribe? Who is it that tempts us with money to betray the nation? It is you, foreigners. Korea is now collapsing from this...”
At the beginning of the trip, Seroshevskii rarely has interactive communication with Koreans. He consistently admires the Japanese for their successful modernization and believes that the Japanese influence promotes the reform of Korea. However, from some point, he begins to listen to the native carefully, and presents the native’s own deplored voice as to the foreign influence or aggression. Yet Seroshevskii himself does not add any comment or judgment to the native’s account. This might mean that he wants to keep an objective distance from the native’s sentiment, or that he leaves a possibility for the readers to agree or disagree with the native’s voice as it is. One day, Seroshevskii shakes hands with Sin, and he recalls afterward that through the two fastened hands, “something like a friendship began to arise.”186 As the trip continues to its end, Seroshevskii comes to open his mind to Koreans, and so to their mutual relations.
When Sin expresses his anger that the Western Powers only aim at utilizing Korea, Seroshevskii responds, “how are the Japanese then?” This question seems to be unnecessary because Seroshevskii is doubtlessly enthusiast for the Japanese role in Korea. In this unexpected question, however, Seroshevskii seems to want to know something more. Sin replies:
“They are the worst. They are catching our necks alive with a trap. They open banks to lend us money. Sooner or later we are to be their slaves. Do you know that one thirds of the land in Seoul has already been taken by them? More and more properties are being held in their security.”
Seroshevskii continues to ask: isn’t it only the Japanese that abolish the slavery, carry out the useful reforms, and improve the national economy in Korea? Sin’s reply is: those things are only superficial satisfactions. The Japanese intend to root out Koreans, to leave only outer skins, and to eliminate the spirit from the Koreans. Seroshevskii probably expects Sin’s answer, but by constant questioning he seems to want to know what the Japanese are really like from the native’s perspective. Seroshevskii describes Russia as the “Russian invader” in the context of the Russo-Japanese War, but he never uses the word to describe Japanese imperialism. He takes into consideration only the Russian expansive trait, not the Japanese one. However, Seroshevskii begins to perceive the potential Japanese imperial aggression from a different viewpoint. That means that Seroshevskii starts to have a mutual relationship with the Koreans, and that he is following the sentiment of the natives. He begins to have a fellow feeling with the people who are becoming the subjects of colonization.
Seroshevskii’s questioning whether Japan is providing a useful reform in Korea shows another aspect of his concern: in other words, a conflict in his mind between modernity and coloniality. Sin is the native progressive who eagerly pursues true reform in Korea and at the same time is worried about the damage to national autonomy. In order to achieve modernization, Korea should rely on the Japanese coloniality, but this causes a national subordination. This dilemma between modernity and coloniality is one of the main problems for nations which are first opening their door to the international world.
There were three kinds of attitudes relating to the acceptance of Western civilization in Korea at that time. The first one is the conservative standpoint, which opposes the Western ideas and materials, asserting that Westernization would destroy Korean values and traditions. They also argue that acceptance of foreign influence makes the Korean nation more subordinated to Japan. Thus they were antagonistic not only to the West but also to Japan. Choe Ikhyeon, one of the Confucian literati, says, “Now that the Japanese are dressed in the Western style, use the Western gun, and board the Western boat, Japan is the West.”
The second attitude is to combine Oriental values and Western technology: summarized as “Eastern Ways, Western Machines.” The idea is that Korea should not only adapt to the irresistible flow of Western civilization but also sustain its traditional values.
The third one maintains that Korea should accept both of Western technology and its mental aspects. They modeled their view on the Japanese case, which shows a successful adaptation to Western modernization. Unlike those who hold the former views, these are a minority group that is mainly composed of progressive elites who study abroad or favor Christianity. Yun Chiho, who studied in the United States in the 1890s, perceives one hand the expansion of the Imperial Powers as “international crimes,” but on the other hand acknowledges that it is “an unavoidable necessary evils” that the strong race dominates the weak one. He deplores the fact that the dominant principle in the world is “might,” not “right,” but eventually cannot but admit that “might is right” among different nations. Accordingly, the progressive propose that the only way for a nation to keep autonomy from foreign intervention is to make a swift modernization. In order for this, Korea should learn from the experience of Japan. To the eyes of Korean progressives, the Japanese aggressive lust for dominating Korea was hardly visible because it was lurking under the role of a helper. Consequently, the more Koreans desire for progress and modernization, the deeper Koreans come to be subordinated under the influence of Japan.
Seroshevskii comes to understand this view through Sin, especially “the dilemma between civilization and independence.” Aware of this, he sympathizes with Sin’s distress that it is difficult for the colonized to succeed in modernizing and keeping national autonomy at the same time. This feeling is apparent in that Seroshevskii reflects not only on the native’s identity but also on his own identity, and that as a Pole under Russian occupation, he comes to identify himself with the colonized people.
Summary
The main interest of the thesis is to study reciprocity in the Western texts on Korea, and how reciprocity influenced the dominant colonial discourse. Curzon encounters many natives during his trip, but rarely enjoys mutual interaction with them. Koreans are described as a group, not as an individual. He does not include Koreans’ voices, and Koreans do not have a chance to represent themselves in his text. Consequently, Curzon also loses the opportunity to gain a new opinion of the Koreans, and only produces the repetitive topos on Korea. Not challenging the Orientalist view on the East, he reproduces the colonial discourse.
Grebst enjoys a delicate mutual interaction with the natives person to person, and strongly sympathizes with the natives’ sentiments. Koreans in his text are described as individuals with existential value, and have the opportunity to represent themselves through their own voices. With this active reciprocity, Grebst corrects the existing prejudice, and expands his new perception on Korea. He does not follow the previous texts, nor does he agree with the Japanese colonialism. He criticizes the world’s power-centered relationships and resists the dominant colonial discourse.
Genthe’s reciprocity is somewhat complicated. He seems to enjoy reciprocal interaction with natives, but rarely describes them as individuals, except for one case. Most of the Koreans are portrayed as a group with minor roles or voiceless. Nevertheless, he does not repeat the prior representations of Korea. Rather, he tries to correct the existing prejudices and produces his own opinion. This ego-centered, rationality is the characteristic of Genthe’s reciprocity.
It is also complicated judging whether Genthe agrees to the dominant discourse, or not. He regards the imperialist’s expansion as an inevitable trend of the time, and at the same time he is an earnest admirer of the Oriental mode of life. He is not against the colonial discourse, but he is against that of civilization or industrialization. His sympathy is not toward the “colonial” people, but rather toward the savage-noble natives who are losing their own traditional way of life because of the Western modernizing process. In other words, he is in the ambivalent position of longing for the past and the future at once. If there is a direct point at which Genthe clashes with the dominant Western discourse, it is his strong suspicion about the Orientalist guild system. Witnessing a “shamscholar” by chance, he becomes more convinced that the Western texts produce false knowledge about the voiceless Orientals. He does not disagree with the colonial discourse, but disagrees with the system that is producing the dominant discourse, that is, the unbalanced relation of knowledge and power.
Seroshevskii rarely shows reciprocity with natives at first. But since he interacts with the second interpreter/guide, he starts to sympathize with Koreans, and experiences a conflict in his mind between modernity and coloniality. Seroshevskii becomes aware of his colonized identity which seems to have long lurked during the trip. He used to agree to the colonial discourse at the beginning of the trip, but finally rethinks it. His mutual feeling is somewhat different from Grebst’s. Grebst’s is a deep sympathy, or an empathy with the natives. Seroshevskii’s is that of feeling the same fate as the colonized. In other words, he is in the same position as the Koreans who are concerned about the twofold task of modernization while struggling to sustain their national independence.
All in all, it is clear that a low degree of reciprocity results in agreement to the dominant colonial discourse (Curzon), while high degree of reciprocity results in disagreement to the dominant colonial discourse (Grebst). Seroshevskii shows both results because his reciprocity transits from low to high, and the attitude toward the dominant discourse from agreement to disagreement. However, it is difficult to generalize Genthe’s case because his reciprocity is partly weak and partly strong. This complex reciprocity results in a complicated relationship with the dominant discourse: to simplify it, agreement to the dominant discourse but disagreement to the structure of producing it.
Chapter 3. Analysis: Period II (1905-1930)
- William F. Sands, Undiplomatic memories (USA, 1930)
- Frederick A. McKenzie, Korea’s Fight for Freedom (Britain, 1919)
- Elizabeth and Scott, E.K. Robertson Keith (Author), Elizabeth Keith (Illustrator)
Old Korea: The land of morning calm (Britain, 1946)
- Henry B. Drake, Korea of the Japanese (Britain, 1930)
3.1 The Western Perception of the Korea
In 1905, Japan took control of the internal administration in Korea by a treaty of protectorate. Ito Hirobumi, the Japanese Resident-General came to be an actual governor of Korea. The Korean Royal Party still remained, but it was only nominal and powerless compared to the Japanese armed forces. The Japanese, throughout the triumphs of the two wars with China and Russia, came to show off their talent of dominating other races. The Korean Emperor, deprived of any administrative and executive power, was finally forced to abandon the throne in July 1907, and the Korean Army was disbanded in August of the same year. Finally, Korea was annexed by Japan and ceased to exist as a nation-state from 1910 to 1945.
During this period, texts about Korea written by Western travelers are considerably diminished in number for the reason that Korea, a colonized place, was no longer attractive to visit. Nevertheless, some books produced at this time have such characteristics as concerns about the Korean independence movement, or controversial interests in Japanese colonialism. Before this period, Japanese colonial power was not obvious but was detected as potential, but since it became evident after 1905, travel writings begin to deal with evaluations of Japanese imperialism and of the colonized Koreans, which makes the colonial discourse more heated.
3.1.1 The Koreans and Korean National Character
- William F. Sands, Undiplomatic memories (USA, 1930) - Frederick A. Mekenzie, Korea’s Fight for Freedom (Canada, 1919)
Sands describes diplomats, including himself, sent to the Far East as pure idealists, even little trained, and chosen in a small town in the Midwest in America. He came to see “diplomacy in the raw” in Korea, whose value was said to be almost “insignificant” and thus might be more adventurous. He was twenty four years old when he first came to Korea and resided there for six years as Secretary of the Legation and an advisor to the Korean Royal Court. His life in Korea might have been full of the experiences of an idealist, as he said, but when his book was published (at fifty six years of age), his text seems to be more matured and implicit. He mentioned that when he was in Korea, the Japanese press was rudely censorious of him because he was highly critical of every single Japanese policy. Yet, when his text appeared in 1930, it takes on a rather cautious sense of balance related to the political circumstances around Korea and Japan, rather than being clear and easy, which seems generally to be due to his status as a diplomat.
Compared to Sands, McKenzie’s text is far more lucid. As a correspondent of the London Daily Mail, he wrote another book, The Tragedy of Korea (1908), which was a kind of the first volume of Korea’s Fight for Freedom (1919). In the preface of the latter book, he writes that when the first book was published, he was criticized for having an “anti-Japanese” perspective and for “exaggeration and worse” about Japan, and that it seemed a “hopeless task to plead for a stricken and forsaken nation.” However, he was sure that nobody had written more insightfully than himself about the Japanese character.
Sands and McKenzie’s texts have many common accounts of Korea. No longer are descriptions appearing that the Koreans are idle, dirty, or inert. Compared to the first period, new representations of Koreans are seen, such as genuine, peaceful, courageous, and persevering. In Sands’ text, the Korean people are “peaceful and harmless” unless they are desperately suppressed, and thus no nation is more easily governed than the Koreans.197 It often happens, even in Japan, that somebody made a surprise attack with no reason while he was traveling, but this never happens at any place in Korea. Rather, Korean inhabitants living deeply in the mountains are so naïve that they are easily startled by a slightest scaring action made by Sands as he attempts to want to drive away the people gathering to see him. 198
Sands also explains, relating to the Koreans’ cowardice, that this is due to their oppression, from domestic sources and abroad, for centuries. Yet, the Koreans stand until their condition becomes unbearable, and become wild when something breaks out. It was peasants who kill a tiger at arm’s length with an iron mace that resisted the French and American navy, whose weapons were far superior in the 1860s and 1870s at Kangwha fort. They did not think of the Koreans as cowards. Korean soldiers were “clumsy fighters” with archaic weapons, but they were fighting until the bullet of an American rifle penetrated their body.
Similar to Sands, McKenzie sees Koreans as being “mild, good natured,” and “eminently pacific.” Koreans seldom fight without a serious reason, and endure hardships without complaining. This seems to be a result of the past government, which did not stimulate the ambition, enterprise and progress of the people for five hundred years. However, McKenzie adds, like Sands, that “[d]espite their usual good nature, they were capable of great bursts of passion, particularly over public affairs.” McKenzie gives as exemples two independence rebellions. The first is the “Righteous Army” in 1906, and the second is the March First Movement in 1919. Especially during the latter movement, the Koreans resisted the Japanese oppression without any means or weapons. To protect themselves, the Koreans did not use violence, nor did they surrender to torture. Once some people were arrested to be dragged to prison, others were ready to follow them. The Korean people had been represented by “’cowardice’ and ‘apathy’” but the taunt is no longer persuasive, writes MeKenzie. He continues, “[i]t seems evident that either the world made a mistake in its first estimate of the Korean character, or these people have experienced a new birth.”201
- Elizabeth and Scott, E.K. Robertson Keith (Author), Elizabeth Keith
(Illustrator) Old Korea: The land of morning calm (Britain, 1946)
- Henry B. Drake, Korea of the Japanese (Britain, 1930)
Keith describes the Koreans character as having dauntless courage and an unyielding spirit. When she visited Korea, the March First Movement was still going on, and thus she witnessed the movement on the spot. She writes that, all over the country, men and women, young and old, yangban and laborers, even bar girls, parade along the street reciting the Declaration of Independence and shouting, “Daehan doglib manse” (“long live an independent Korea"). The people participating in the movement maintained their imposing and dignified air, even though they were arrested and dragged away by the Japanese police. The Koreans, who were regarded as being only good-natured, inert, and despicable, create a rebellion, the likes of which the Japanese had never imagined.
Keith meets Korean men in order to paint pictures. She likes to portray the Korean country scholars whose feature is poor but well educated, self-restraint and polite. She describes them as strolling in another world, beyong earthy anxiety. She visits a yangban, who used to be a bureaucrat at the Korean Royal Court. However, they only have a superficial conversation, and do not discuss deep political subjects. From the gloomy atmosphere of the house, she notices that the families are being watched by the Japanese colonial government. She writes that the Koreans are withering in shackles, for they have to report to the Japanese police whom they meet, or which book they read. She also witnesses that the Korean white costumes are stained with black ink, and that when she visits Korea again in 1936, most of the traditional Korean costumes have been replaced by the Japanese school uniforms and hats.
During her stay in Korea, Keith tries to learn about the Korean people and their history, through some acquaintances and books. James S. Gale, a Canadian missionary, tells her that the Korean people have an “ingenuous mind” living in a pure, spiritual world, which is completely different from the condition in modern civilization. She also quotes Hullbert, that historically, the Korean literati had been better respected than the military, and thus soldiers had an lower status than even the middle class, which is a different tradition from the Japanese with its pursuits of a militarist policy.
Drake’s text has a different characteristic than the former ones. Drake, an English writer and teacher in Korea, uses many metaphors and symbols in his writing. His text does not seem to be so much a travel book as a document made for his own personal satisfaction or aestheticism. He begins the first chapter by describing a visit made to him by three colonized students when he is about to return to England after a two-year-stay in Korea. The young students ask Drake to write about their miserable nation after his return to England. Seeing their sullen faces, Drake thinks that they regard Britain as a kind of mother land, reverential and powerful, capable of liberating their wretched country from the bondage of fetter. He writes, however, that if he portrays Korea, he would rather admire the Korean mountains, the deep blue sea, and the temples than write about what is asked for by the students.
He views the Korean people not only as openhearted, sociable and fond of laughing, but also as lazy, lethargic and sluggish, with drowsy eyes, which is almost the same image as was typical in the texts of the first period. Women cleaning and beating clothes with a wooden cylinder are described as being in the world of unconscious satisfaction and of absolute patience and labor. Dirty sewage, winding, narrow streets and piles of garbage are also represented as images of Korea images. He compares businessmen of Korea, Japan and China: the Japanese have a natural talent for imitation, but this is seen from a national perspective. Considering a single person, the Chinese are better as cutters or shoemakers. In particular, the Chinese salesman sticks to the customers to make a sale, finally tiring them out. By contrast, the Korean salesman waits, sitting outside until the host permits him to enter. However, he neither shows off the products, nor does he try dealing. If the customers are not interested, he moves to the next door without saying any words. This example seems to show the old Korean custom that regards labor as despicable, and the new trend in which Koreans are trying to adapt to a business mind but are still far from used to it.
3.1.2 Government and Political System
Compared to the first period, the overall perceptions of the Korean political situation in the second period are focused on the Korean government’s lack of will to reform, criticism of the Western Powers for abetting this situation, and recollections of the Independence Club for having tried to establish a constitutional monarchy but failing.
The Korean King was represented as a character who is unsuited for the tasks of making progress and reforming the Korean government. Sands, an advisor to him for five years, describes the King as kind, amiable, and of a gentle deposition, trying to adapt himself to a complicated civilization, but to have an unsuitable temperament. Even though he loved his people, the King could not rid himself of the old consciousness that “he was the master of his people and what was theirs was his.” Moreover, the King was always surrounded by his attendants, and therefore, what Sands said to the King concerning reforms in Korea was apt to be misunderstood or twisted when they later discussed these.
McKenzie also says of the Korean King that, since he came to the throne in his early childhood, he had been harried by various influences that he could not understand nor control. Moreover, especially after the murder of the Queen in 1894, he became so suspicious and tentative that he seemed to hold onto his own prerogatives as the only thing on which he could rely. Thus, when the King believed that the power of the Throne might be limited by establishing a constitutional monarchy, he entrusts his lot with the anti-Progressive group. McKenzie further points out that the Korean yangban, whose status was equal to the Norman Barons who restrained the power of the Norman Kings of England, had not possessed enough strength to resist the King during the five-hundred-year monarchal period.
Sands and McKenzie focus on the Independence party, which tried to introduce some measure of democracy, but in the end disbanded. Many patriots who had learned democratic ideas and those of reform from Western missionaries gathered in Independence Club to publish a newspaper and to enlighten the mass of the people with the consciousness of human dignity. According to McKenzie, they had an excellent comprehension of the Parliamentary principle and were trained to have democratic qualities. For instance, when they heard that Russian military officers came to drill Korean troops, they discussed this subject and decided to oppose it. Over 10000 members of the club sat quietly night and day in front of the Palace to plead with the King to call off this contract. The Korean government finally accepted this petition and withdrew the plan, despite having to pay damages for the cancellation of the contract.208
The main demands of The Independence Club were to refuse foreign intervention, to be careful in granting foreign concessions, to have important offenders face public trial, to have honesty in the State finances, etc. Compared to the old Korean administration, McKenzie recalls, the Independence Club could have been a more valuable governmental organization. Sands also writes, “If it had not been for the Russo-Japanese war, a revolution might easily have come from them.” Afterward, however, it was to be dissolved by the Emperor, surrounded by those who opposed the progressive Independence Club.
Both Sands and McKenzie point out that the Western Powers did not earnestly want Korean reform. Sands, who used to be both a Secretary of the Legation and an advisor to the Emperor, recollects that advisers or Ministers and foreign contractors from European countries wanted disorder in Korea, for they were able to clutch national interests under the cover of constant intervention. Even if they had not taken territory, they coveted having a monopoly of concessions. Here, Sands tries to distinguish between American policy and European expansionism. The United States was always in a nonpartisan or a neutral position concerning European matters. Americans think it unnecessary to go along with the extreme imperialism of the
European Powers, whose policy is to partition territory of Africa or in other countries.
Seroshevskiisky in the first period also once argues that the Western Powers only pursued profitable concessions by means of plotting and bribing, not wanting a true reform in Korea. Except for the British and the United States, European countries supported the reactionary Cabinet, because a weaker Korean regime gives more advantages to them in the future. In McKenzie’s text, the Western Powers, including Britain and the United States are described as “one great happy family,”213 openly making a great fortune at the cost of the Korean government.
3.1.3 Women and Society
The characteristic representations of women in this period are as transiting from traditional to modern. Korean women are no longer represented with only a traditional image. Sands points out that Korean women have an influence in the household, which implies that seclusion does not mean the absence of rights for women. In particular, Sands focuses on the case of the last Korean Queen (Min princess), who had a fairly influential power in conducting state affairs before she was murdered by the Japanese. Differing from the common view that she was pro-Russia and opposed the reform party and Japan, Sands maintains that she was not anti-foreign and did not adhere to vested rights. On the contrary, she realized that the Korean government should accept foreign products and was in need of reform in order to survive among the influential Western powers, but she was also inexperienced and especially did not know “how to trust” foreign nations.
McKenzie compares Korean women with Japanese. When the Japanese invite male guests, women receive and bow to them, even though they do not have food at the same table. Korean women though, a wife or a daughter, are kept in anpang (zenana) and do not come out, even while McKenzie was staying for a long period at a Korean friend’s house. The only women he could meet were women of low class or who were covered with a veil on the streets. However, this changed remarkably over a period of twenty years, he writes. In the March First Movement of 1919, Korean girls and women, no longer kept in anpang, pour in the streets uncovered, and parade freely as men do.
Keith is also deeply impressed by the Korean women who take part in the movement. The girls of the yanban family, who used to seesaw in the inner yard to peep at the outer world through the fence, deliver the secret papers, distribute the Declaration of the Independence, put up with tortures, and participate in the activity of underground organization during the Independence Movement of 1919. She writes that when needed, Korean women show how strong they are. Another observation of Keith’s is that it used to be regarded as shameful if they are not married by the age of twenty, or if a widow remarries, but recently this kind of prejudice is changing. Moreover, in the male-dominated custom, women in the past did every household chore and the men were served, but now the young male begins to share the household work with the women.
In Drake’s text, a modern Korean woman appears who is educated in Western society. Park Maria, a daughter of the family with whom Drake is staying, went to America to study at the age of 7 and came back to Korea at 21. Drake describes her as a westernized individualist and a woman whose character makes her alienated in
Korean society, for the reason that she longs for individual freedom but this freedom is not yet allowed in Korean custom. Drake and Park Maria disagree about the Japanese colonial presence. Park Maria criticizes the Japanese for their forceful implantation of their law into Korea, without the Koreans’ consent, and maintains that if the Koreans had power, they would fight against them. Drake says that even if every Korean cursed the Japanese, he would still advocate for Japan, for the British are doing the same in India as the Japanese in Korea.
They disagree as to the meaning of freedom. Park Maria contends that freedom is a natural product like the air, and that a human being has a right to pursue his own satisfaction. Therefore the Japanese should withdraw their dominance over Korea, for they oppress the freedom of the Korean people. Drake disputes her definition of freedom by comparing this to the freedom of children. The young cannot create an order, and thus, they are not qualified to possess freedom. Drake continues that freedom is not a product of chance but a product of an effort handed down through generations. By extension, Drake’s remark is to say that freedom is a fruit of the strong, and that the weak, incapable of protecting themselves, are not to enjoy freedom yet.
3.1.4 Religion
The religious discourse of the first period, such as that about Shamanism, Buddhism, or Confucianism, scarcely appears in the second period. Instead, Christianity is mostly mentioned as one of the main factors providing the momentum for Korean Westernization and liberalization. Reference is still made though as to whether Christianity is well fitted for the Koreans. Keith states that the reason that Koreans easily accept Christianity is not only that they have a monotheistic notion, “Hananim,” but also that the Koreans have their own easy language in which to read and learn the Bible, which is a different circumstance from that in India or China. Moreover, that the Koreans respect all teachers, even if they are poor, helps them to understand with ease the lives of Paul and his pupils.
Sands also says that the Christian spirit was well understood by the Korean people, since Buddhism has the same aspects of asceticism, contemplation, ritual and the monastic life as those of the Catholic religious life. Koreans also respect missionaries with reverential attitude held for all teachers. However, Christianity is sometimes misunderstood because of its materialism. Some Orientals think that the Western people are engaged in religious work for the purpose of political power. Orientals sense nationality in Christianity, feeling that the Western countries tried to gain political influence by using the pawn of executed missionaries. Sands points out that there are differences in the mission work carried out by the French and the Americans. The French priests had been accustomed to the natives’ lifestyle and customs, and are interested in Christianizing Koreans, but not westernizing them. By contrast, American mission work pays more attention to teaching modern knowledge or to building hospitals or schools, which afterward provides a basis for the Korean people to be westernized and liberalized. As a matter of fact, this had produced a large number of the reformists or the Progressives in Korea, almost all of whom become in the end nationalists resisting Japanese occupation.
Christianity in Korea, from the perspective of McKenzie, acts like “the pioneers of civilization.” It educates children, reforms the household and abolishes the wall between the anpang and society to allow Korean women to learn Western ideas and freedom. Moreover, Christianity has always supported the Koreans by opposing the Japanese assimilation policy during the most depressing part of the Japanese colonial period. Japan was not fond of this kind of Christianity in Korea, and thus began to confiscate missionary books and to persecute the church. McKenzie recounts an example that around one hundred and five Christians were accused of conspiring for the assassination of Count Terauchi, the Governor-General of Korea. This was “the Conspiracy Case” of 1910, made up by the Japanese who had wanted the missionaries to stand by them, but had failed in controlling the missionaries under their power. The Korean Christians, well aware of this feud between Japan and mission work, did not give any visible sign of organizing the March First Movement of 1919, so as not to harm the missionaries.222
Summary
Compared to the perceptions of Korea in the first period, the overall perceptions of
Korea in this period have changed as the political circumstances have changed. Sands describes Koreans as peaceful, harmless, courageous, etc, not any longer idle or dirty. He feels sorry for the Korean government’s lack of will to reform, but more harshly criticizes the European imperialist’s lust, which constantly induces a disorder in the Korean political circumstance. On the other hand, he distinguishes American foreign policy from that of European expansionism, and thinks of its political influence as positive.
McKenzie represents the Korean character as good-natured, persevering, and passionate, asserting that the world should revise the previous misconceptions of Korea, those of cowardice and apathy. He recalls that the Independence Club could have been a more democratic organization than those now in place, and criticizes the World Powers for intervening in Korean politics. In his views, America is just as much a member of “the happy family” as the European Powers, all of whom desire to make a fortune at the expense of the Korean government.
Keith describes Koreans as courageous, dauntless and unyielding. She is especially impressed by the role of women in the March First Movement of 1919. Korean women are no longer kept inside, and actively participate in the movement without wearing veils. She believes that the only ones who love Koreans are Christians, not the Japanese, and focuses on how Christianity has been easily accepted into Korean society.
Drake’s perception of the Koreans is different from those of the previous authors. Drake still produces the same expressions of the first period: lazy, sluggish and drowsy. His description of Korean women is also similar to that of the first period: cleaning and beating clothes all day long with an attitude of unconscious satisfaction. But he presents, in particular, a native educated woman with whom he contests the definition of freedom.
3.2 The Western Image of Japan
3.2.1 Image before the Russo-Japanese War (1905)
In McKenzie’s text, the expansive aspiration of Japan and its oppression of Korea had been even detected before the Russo-Japanese War. However, the Western people, even those who favored Korea, had expected the Japanese to play a positive role in
Korea. Hullbert, a publisher of The Korea Review, who had been living in Korea since 1886, expresses such anticipation by saying that despite the oppressive atmosphere of the Japanese, it would be less humiliating for Korea to be helped by Japan in the business of education or reform than by Russia. McKenzie quotes Hullbert’s remark: “Russia secured her predominance by pandering to the worst elements in Korean officialdom. Japan holds it by strength of arms, but she holds it in such a way that it gives promise of something better.”
Nevertheless, McKenzie points out that even though Japan was thought to be more helpful in reforming Korea than Russia, the Japanese did not want a true reform in Korea. The reason is that if Korea makes a rapid improvement, it would not suit their ultimate purpose. McKenzie writes that the Japanese set up the transportation and communication network over the Korean territory, but that this is for the swift movement of their army, which is to make Korea a militarily strategic place in Asia. Sands suggests a similar idea about Japan as McKenzie’s. Sands recalls that he tried to make Korea a neutral country, but every single reform he attempted meets a “consistent objection” from the Japanese politicians. It was evident that Japan did not want a progressive Korea or Koreans to reform themselves, because “reform raised an obstacle in the way of annexation.”
Having spent two years in Japan, Sands was familiar with the Japanese character. He sees that the Japanese are not only courteous, orderly, and friendly, but also have the habits of a bully. “No one on earth,” he writes, “resents a blow with the hand more quickly and more fiercely than the Japanese. The Japanese does not fight except to disable or kill.” Their diplomacy is still “that of the man of the sword,” and the civil servant had not yet been bred. If somebody is carrying out an abnormal behavior, such as behavior that is outrageous or violent, it may be right to assume that there is “a motive” in its background that is provided by a state, not simply by the person.
Curzon’s standpoint on the aspirations of Japanese imperialism is also sharp and accurate in the light of political and economical events. Curzon writes that the Japanese possessed the capital in Korea, and were constantly pressing for concessions of all descriptions, eventually to fasten their grasp on Korea. He foresees that in a few years Japan will monopolize Korean national resources. Furthermore, Japan copied the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1858, which she bitterly complained of at the time, adapting them to the Korean case without any reluctance. Nevertheless, hardly anybody imagines that Japan would be able to match Russia during the RussoJapanese War. Sands maintains that Japan knew of a defect in the Russian Army, that is, if military troops are corrupted, no matter how dauntless the single soldier may be, they cannot stand long. The key policy during the modern formative period of Japan is to believe, “force must be met by force.” Sands illustrates his idea as follows:
“The rest of Asia did not realize, as did Japan, that the superiority claimed for European civilization probably was not an intrinsic property, but rested mainly upon certain governmental, social, and economic theories and upon applied science. The Japanese felt that in mastering these theories and principles they could prove to Asia and to the world that far from being inferior to the European, the Asiatic civilization fortified by the accidental utilitarian advantages of Europe, is really and essentially superior to it. … [T]hat proof would lie in successful war.”
With its triumph in the Russo-Japanese War, the Western Powers came to know Japan differently and acknowledged her as a civilized country. Inazo Nitobé’s book,
Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899), which argues that the Japanese success is due to the spirit of the Samurai and not Western arms or technology, also attracted the interest of Europeans. Even Beatrice Webb, a Fabian socialist, admired the Japanese capability of civilization, saying that their courage and self-restraint made Europeans disgraceful by comparison.
Japanese pride very greatly increased. They evaluated themselves as being so good at adapting Western civilization that there must be similarities between the Japanese and the Westerners. Since 1870, Western theories concerning race and Social Darwinism had been introduced and actively accepted in Japan. Thus, the Japanese were deeply absorbed in the idea that only the strong have a right and the weak lose in the competition to survive. Finally, they learned that the Western success is thanks to their domination of other less civilized races, so they followed the same method of the acquisition of colonie or military success through wars.
However, it was not easy for the Japanese to get over the sense of Western superiority in regard to civilization or biological characteristics. They thought the Westerners are better in height, weight or intelligence, and in 1885 Takahashi Yoshio, a learner of Fukusawa Yukichi, even suggested that the Japanese should marry the superior race in order to improve the national quality. Furthermore, with prompt Western modernization, they tried to differentiate themselves from their Asian neighbors, by claiming that they were descendants of “the Huns,” not the “Yellow race.” Japanese advocates, like Taguchi Ukichi and Takekoshi Yosaburo, maintained that the Japanese could adapt themselves to Western civilization so successfully that there must be “irrefutable evidence that the Japanese were of the Aryan race.”
This argument provided, on the basis of a transformed Western theory of race, support for the idea that the Japan was so superior that it could dominate the other Asian races. This theory was supported by the twin triumphs of the wars, the SinoJapanese in 1894 and the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The Russo-Japanese War especially allowed Japan to be positioned in the same rank as the Western imperial Powers, since it had been called a war between “the White” and “Asian races.” Before the Russo-Japanese War, there had been a pessimistic notion that Japan could not govern over other nations. Curzon doubted that Japan had the “colonizing genius.” After the success of the war the situation had completely changed.
3.2.2 Image after the Russo-Japanese War
According to Sands, it was a result of Japan’s keen observation of the West that once it had set a certain policy, it overcame obstacles and achieved it. In Griffis’s text, Japan had a persistent policy to annex Korea from the beginning. Long after Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea in 1592, Japan once again planned an incursion into Korea in the 1870s. However, this idea met opposition from the Japanese envoy, who had returned from an observation tour of the world in 1873. The reason is that they thought that Europe had considerable interest in Asian political matters at the time, that Russia was close, and that China was too inimical to them. If they declared war on Korea, they might find themselves in an economic crisis, or face a conflict with China. In addition, there was the even greater threat that this might drag Russia into the war. The Japanese Cabinet rejected a proposed invasion, but some military leaders began to devise a new plan to occupy Korea.
After the Russo-Japanese War, the parties signed the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905, the Second article of which states that Japan has a right to guide, protect and supervise Korea, and that Russia should not interrupt.239 None of the Great Powers could stop Japan’s actions in Korea from then on. With the ongoing momentum of this process, Japan made Korea a Protectorate in November 1905, and finally annexed the nation in 1910. The Westerners who traveled to or stayed in Korea at this time could not avoid dealing with this political circumstance. They evaluated Japanese colonialism by their own experiences and values. Yet the perceptions of Japan in their texts are not always the same.
Keith is a strong critic of the Japanese militarism. She writes that Japan quickly woke up to catch the chance of accepting Western civilization with the kind help of the Western countries, while Korea is slowly waking up from its medieval sleep to face assassination or foreign incursions. Western society at the time is so impressed with Japan’s rapid modernization that Japan is regarded as being a suitable nation for the task of leading Korea’s development towards becoming a civilized country. This, however, was a misjudgment. The Japanese are far from being “a good teacher,” but instead are rather cruel and ruthless. Japan dominates Korea by using its far more advanced material and military strength.
Keith continues that in Japan, there are some moral groups opposed to the Japanese dominance of Korea and that especially respected Korean culture and art. A member of this group says that the Japanese military is like “a crazy dog,” and that it seems to possess inherent courage in physical terms, but little in moral terms. Yanagi Muneyosi, a Japanese art critic and a great lover of Korean art, condemns the Japanese colonial rule by saying that the Koreans are forced to worship the Mikado (the Emperor of Japan), deprived of the opportunity to learn Korean history, and robbed of Korean historical artifacts. During the Hideyoshi Invasion of the late sixteenth century, Japan, having longed for the Korean blue pottery, captured Korean ceramicists who they forced to settle down in Satsuma to produce the famous Satsuma ceramics. They are again pillaging Korean cultural assets during the colonial period, such as paintings, sculptures, and pottery, to make these into their own treasures. These should all be returned to Korea, writes Keith.242
Drake’s voice is different from Keith’s. He has a confused opinion on Japan. On one occasion, he regards the method and appliance of Japanese colonial aggression to be hateful, but on another occasion, he approves of Japanese colonialism. He points out that Japan shows cunning and a haughty manner in the process of reforming Korea. Their method seems to be proper for salvaging Korea at present, but also reveals illegitimate aspects. He doubts whether the Japanese plan to train the Korean people to govern themselves in the future, and is skeptical about the capabilities of the Japanese as colonizers, saying that they “never learn how to help others.”
On the other hand, he thinks that some races lack the ability for selfgovernment, and that in the East, only the Japanese do not lack this ability. He is also convinced that Japan does have some altruistic feelings for the Koreans. Japan is making a great effort to advance Korea, which is lethargically advancing to the rank of being a modern country. He says that while it is true that Japan colonizes Korea for its own strategic necessity and commercial profit, it is more important that the
Japanese are eager to change Korea as the British are doing in India. The Japanese would feel guilty unless they extended the benefits of modern progress into Korea. It would also be a serious problem for mankind to leave Korea as a decaying or collapsing society. Furthermore, Drake presents a new account of ways in which the Japanese effort shows an element of Oriental sentiment. In other words, Japan and Korea are brothers who lived apart for many years, but now the brother has to return home to rule over the Koreans.
This idea, in fact, is a copy of that which Japan used at the time to justify her domination over Korea, a theory of “common ancestry” or “common race.” This is a somewhat different idea from that which they argued before the 1930s. During the early colonial period, Japan tried to demonstrate racial difference between the Japanese and the Koreans, using the idea of the Darwinian struggle of the weak and the strong to support their annexation policy. However, they realized that they could not ignore their similar racial characteristics to the Koreans, and that it is not easy to assimilate the Korean people into the Japanese on the basis of Darwinian Theory. Therefore, they began to put the emphasis on a different ideology, that of, “national integration,” which is to reunite the two divided races, rather than an imperialist relationship of domination and subordination. They even described it as an “amalgamation” and not an “annexation.” This idea can be seen in the following remarks by Kita Teikichi: “Korea is a branch family that shares ancestors with our country.” “The branch family returned to the home of the main family. It did not disappear: it merged with the main family. Korea was not destroyed, and the Koreans are not a destroyed people. They have truly returned to their source.”
When Drake says that Korea and Japan used to be brothers, related to the same ancestor, he seems to be influenced by such Japanese ideology. This theory, however, was thought to bring the Koreans into “a condition of clouded consciousness,” to heal their injured national self-esteem by saying that we are one. Also, some Japanese thought that the pure assimilation of the two nations was impossible and doubted this theory, considering it to be “superficial.”
McKenzie points out that it is evident that after the Russo-Japanese War, Japan would eliminate every trace of Korean nationality. He quotes one of the influential Japanese in Korea:
“This will take several generations but it must come. The Korean people will be absorbed by the Japanese. They will talk our language, live our life, and be an integral part of us. There are only two ways of colonial administration. One is to rule over the people as aliens. This you British have done in India, and therefore your Empire cannot endure. India must pass out of your rule. The second way is to absorb the people. This is what we will do. We will teach them our language, establish our institutions, and make them one with us.”
McKenzie vividly and concretely describes the situation of the days when Japan forced Korea to sign the treaty of protectorate in 1905, which led to an end to Korea’s right to internal administration and independent foreign relations. Ito Hirobumi, the Japanese Resident-General, brought a letter of the Emperor of Japan which coercively demanded the protection of Japan. Ito Hirobumi also conciliated those Korean ministers who firmly resisted the Japanese demands by saying that it was time for Korea and Japan to show themselves as a united power, which was crucial for peace in the Far East. He proposed “a picture of a great united East,” in which “the Mongol nations” came together to cope with “the white man” trying to subjugate the Orientals. This was the actual ideology of Japanese imperial expansionists to justify the protectorate status of Korea at the time of 1905. Japan appealed for a common Oriental alliance between Japan, China and Korea, with the idea that “Asia is one,” and “Japan is the leader.” This idea was also described in Sands’ text as “a federation of the three Oriental empires: Japan, China and Korea,” in which Japan, the most successful in Westernizing, guides the other two countries. Sands seems to think that it would be a plausible alliance, but in McKenzie’s text, Korean ministers do not trust Japanese belief, because the unity of Asia only means “the supreme autocracy of their [the Japanese] country.”255
During the debate between Ito Hirobumi and Korean ministers which lasted for days, the Japanese armed troops surrounded the Palace menacing with their power, which created a fearful atmosphere in which to force to sign the treaty. For the Korean ministers, who had already experienced the case of the brutal murdering of the Korean Queen by Japanese bullies in 1894, this amounted to a death threat.256 In the end, amid discord amongst them, some of the ministers came to sign the treaty.
The protectorate treaty of 1905 was followed by formal annexation in 1910. In McKenzie’s text, during the period from 1910 to 1919, the Japanese imperial administration in Korea was of “the harshest and most relentless form” and “the greatest failure of history.”257 Terauchi Masatake, the first Governor-General, says of the Koreans that they are “to be absorbed or to be eliminated.” McKenzie writes that Terauchi Masatake would beat the Koreans “with scorpions,” while Ito Hirobumi “with whips.”258
In order to eliminate all traces of Korean nationality, the first act is to search for the libraries, to collect Korean public documents, historical texts, etc, and to burn them. This is aimed at “debasing the Koreans and robbing them of their ancient culture.”259 The Japanese also prohibited the Koreans from publishing all types of periodicals, such as regional newspapers or scholarly magazines. They issued sumptuary laws, which stated that the number of dishes at each meal should be limited; that the length of a pipe should be less than twelve inches; that the Koreans should wear dark-colored dress in winter instead of a white one; that their sleeves should also be lessened, and so on. In particular, the prohibitions concerning men’s topknots made Koreans feel more violated than when the Queen was murdered. Every Korean man who marries adopts the topknots in place of the long hair of their youth or unmarried status. Thus a topknot is a symbol of being an adult. McKenzie considers that this type of custom should have been treated by the Koreans themselves
Sands’ account it is considered as a probable alliance, but in order for that, he argues that Japan should take into serious account the Koreans’ antipathy against her. Sands, 1930, pp. 226-8 255 McKenzie, 1920, p. 66.
256 Ibid., p. 67.
257 Ibid., pp. 129-130.
258 Ibid., p. 123.
259 Ibid., p. 141.
in their own interest to reform. He gives the example of Koreans living in Manchuria who have themselves had their topknots cut off, since they considered them to be inconvenient. This is the right way to carry out a reform, writes McKenzie, but the absurd Japanese regulations left Koreans feeling more hostile.
The Koreans began to resist the Japanese oppression after the protectorate treaty of 1905. In particular, various types of rebel groups formed in regional locations, composed of young men, tiger hunters, and disbanded old soldiers, who fought against the Japanese army. McKenzie was the first foreigner to go to the front to meet them in person. The rebels, with neither proper weapons nor a national, systematic organization, were “doomed to certain death, fighting in an absolutely hopeless cause,” writes McKenzie. Their sparkling eyes, however, were telling, “We may have to die… Well, so let it be. It is much better to die as a free man than to live as the slave of Japan.” McKenzie writes that he went numb to seeing so many abominable scenes of massacres of the inhabitants by the Japanese army. The villages which the rebels had passed were burnt down, and the villagers were slaughtered on the grounds that they might help or stand by the rebels. Then a number of households would join the rebels in a reprisal against this, which brought a continuous, vicious cycle of revenge.
Unlike this armed struggle, the independence movement in March of 1919 was a peaceful demonstration. Woodrow Wilson’s Declaration of the rights of weaker nations in 1918 inspired the Korean people to retrieve their national autonomy and political self-determination. Full of expectation, the Koreans organize a non-violent revolution in a national scale. They even plan not to harm Japanese people, nor their property. No Japanese are damaged. However, Japan commits atrocities in quelling the movement. Koreans are like herds of sheep being dragged into a slaughterhouse, and they are confined, tortured, and punished without trial.263 Over 30000 people are injured or executed during the three months that followed the movement’s occurrence. It is unbelievable that Japan has not left such a blemish to her nation.
Foreign representatives, businessmen, and missionaries, having lived in Korea, all condemn Japan for the cruelty of the colonial dominance, saying that the Japanese military, policemen, and the military police system had been learned from Germany.265 In the end, Japanese religionists and politicians are sent to investigate the colonial regime. Among them, Dr. Ishizaka, Secretary of the Mission Board of the Japan Methodist Church, reported the followings as the features of the rule of the Japanese Government-General of Korea: 1. Discrimination in education: 2. Plunder of lands, which forced Korean farmers into exile in Manchuria and Siberia: 3. The military police system, which has absolute power of search, detention, arrest, and even torture: 4. Military tyranny, in which even school teachers wear swords: 5. Destruction of the Korean language, history, customs, etc.266
McKenzie points out that it may be true that there had been material progress in railways, agriculture, an effective administration, etc, but these were for the benefit of Japan herself. The Japanese constantly insist on the eradication of the Koreans’ national ideals and ancient ways, to make them into “Japanese of an inferior brand.”267 He compares Japan to “a crude and vixenish tempered woman of peasant birth,” whose husband had earned great wealth by fortune, and was now “treating an unfortunate poor gentlewoman who had come in her employment.”268 McKenzie argues that the Japanese set about the colonial task in “a wrong spirit,’ and “fundamentally mistaken ideas,” and that they “overestimated their own capacity and underestimated the Korean.”269 At the time, people in the world believed in the Japanese mode of Orientalism, which regards the Koreans as those who never try to protect their rights, or to carry out a revolution, and “submit themselves to tyrannical repression.”270 McKenzie, however, refutes this: “The Japanese struck an unexpected strain of hardness in the Korean character. They found, underneath the surface apathy, a spirit as determined as their own. They succeeded, not in assimilating the people, but in reviving their sense of nationality.”271
injured, and 12522 arrested between March and December. See: Eckert, Carter J., Korea old and new: a history, (Harvard University. Korea Institute, 1991), pp. 278-279.
265 Kendal, 1919, p. 58.
266 McKenzie, 1920, pp. 220-221.
267 Ibid., p. 130.
268 Ibid., p. 141.
269 Ibid., p. 130.
270 Duus, 1995, p. 412.
271 McKenzie, 1920, Preface, p. 12.
3.3 Comparative Study on Reciprocity
3.3.1 William F. Sands, Undiplomatic memories (USA, 1930)
Sands’ identity during his stay in Korea seems to be independent and consistent, but this might not to be necessarily true. He makes the following statement in search of the roots of his American identity, which interestingly suggests a similar perspective to Said’s Orientalism:
“The tradition of the incompatibility of the East and West, and of some inherent enmity between them, is an age-old thing in Europe, and it was the basis of the whole diplomatic fabric under which we lived in the East. It is a throw-back to the time when the Asiatic was stronger and the European fought for his life against him. If one were to go into far history it is traceable to… the struggle for survival of a nascent Christian Europe against mass invasions from Africa as well as Asia. It was then that the continents hardened into hereditary enemies…. The European Christian… needed to assert himself strongly and arrogantly against the stronger and superior civilization of the African and Asiatic ‘pagan’ in order to survive at all. When Europe, after centuries of development, came back into contact with Asia on the far side of the world, all that ancient arrogance, tinged with an ancient fear, flamed to life again…. This time the people of the West carried national prestige and commerce on their banner.”
According to Sands, America had been different from Europe, but since America had joined “the family of (European) nations” during the hostile period of relations between the West and the East, America could not but accept the European tradition. Moreover, though the Orientals distinguish America from Europe in respect to theory, in practice they blend the two when they use the term, “anti-foreign” to resist the foreign powers. Sands says, it “forced us into common action in spite of the theoretical distinction between us.”274 That is to say, Sands ascribes the American identity as originating from both sources: on one hand, taking part in European Orientalism “in the nature of things,” and on the other hand, being regarded as a Western foreign power by the Orientals.
Even though America and Europe became inevitably united, Sands considers that American policy at the time was different from European imperialism. Growing up under the influence of Roosevelt and Kipling, his generation had felt the “white man’s burden.” The United States had always taken a neutral attitude concerning European matters. Attention was given as to whether there really existed a European diplomatic conspiracy, or as to how to react when Europe had a bad effect on America. Sands seems to have made such a national identification with the US while acting as an advisor to the Korean Royal Court: that is, America (or he) was opposed to European expansive policy, and had no desire to occupy territory in Japan, China, or Korea. Sands says:
“I had no intention to Americanize Korea. On the contrary, I wanted to keep the native culture as completely as possible, only familiarizing them with Western ways in sufficient degree to keep them out of unnecessary trouble. I wanted to keep foreign help to Korea international, but to make it co-operative rather than competitive.”
In Sands’ text, the neutralization of Korea and peace treaties are often described as the only method for Korea to survive among major powers, especially Russia and Japan. Sands suggests various kinds of progressive reforms, such as improvement of education and the administration, and even pleads with Ito Hirobumi for a neutral Korea. However, this idea, which he expresses as ‘my own favourite child,’ not only meets the open opposition of Russia and Japan, but was regarded as “pernicious activities” by those who thought themselves as responsible for their own national interests.
Sands mentions H.N. Allen, a previous Minister of the American Legation in Korea, and implies that Sands has a different national identification from Allen. In Sands’s account, Allen is an influential diplomat who knows the Korean customs very well, and whom the Korean King and the Koreans trust. Allen successfully manages most of the American concessions, such as railways, goldmines, or a power plant, which is a typical characteristic of an imperialist activity. Sands never refers to what he himself did for American concessions as Allen or other European representatives did in Korea. However, Sands describes Allen and his American group as playing the role of “imperial instrument which does not contain imperial motive.” From the nuance of this expression, it can be presumed that Sands wants to distinguish himself from Allen and the American group, and that his life of Korea was not as an “instrument” of Western imperialism, but rather that it was pure and sympathetic with the Koreans and their fate.
As a matter of fact, Sands allots more spaces to the experiences he had when he was acting as an advisor to the Korean Royal Court than when he was acting as a Secretary of the Legation. Sands accepted the new career as an advisor, following Allen’s encouragement that “if anything could be done for the salvation of the Koreans, only Americans could do it.” Sands recalls this moment in this way: “at the very competent age of 25, I felt capable of pulling the grand khan (The Korean King) himself out of any amount of trouble, and I liked the Koreans.”281
Sands does not secure a comfortable life as an advisor in the Palace. He travels from corner to corner of the country in search of new missions. He goes to a remote province to meet Tonghak rebels, and crosses over the national border to catch up with a head of the Chinese bandits who plundered a Korean village in Manchuria. He has also been to Jeju Island with one hundred soldiers to investigate the case of the revolt in which the inhabitants slaughtered the Christians. These episodes are described without a tone of exaggeration or heroism. It can be assumed from this recollection that the young Sands is “the adventurer in diplomacy”283 as the Japanese labeled him, full of a sense of ideal justice.
He has also a definite philosophy regarding race and Orientalism: “The real barrier did not seem to me to be any difference of race, or to lie in the facile maxim that ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’“284 Sands sympathizes and interacts with many Korean people, low or high class, enjoying traditional plays and participating in a wedding ceremony in countryside. Yet, strangely, Sands rarely describes the inhabitants as having their own voices or opinions. Even though some natives appear with voice, the natives are only presented in examples in which they are impressed and benefited by Sands’ generosity, humanism and political favor. Even when Sands interacts with native elites, sharing friendships and discussing social and political affairs with them, they are not speakers, but just listeners or passive agents who are to follow Sands’ advice or his supposedly civilized plan. That is to say, Sands does not describe the natives as having an equal existence to himself. They are only a non-civilized, colonized people in needs of the white man’s project and ideals.
As an adventurous idealist, Sands seems to have a modest heroism by which he wants to be recognized as a respectful individual by the Koreans. At the same time, he enjoys the power of being an advisor of the Korean King. The authority he possesses offers opportunity for him to try out what he wants to do in Korea, and to interfere in the Koreans’ political and social lives. His text, accordingly, is imbued with the sense of pride and the superior responsibility of a Western civilized person with the white man’s burden.
3.3.2 Frederick A. McKenzie, Korea’s Fight for Freedom (Canada, 1919)
Compared to Sands, McKenzie’s concern about Korea shows a different mode. In Sands’ text, there is only the writer’s voice, not natives’ ones, but in McKenzie’s text both voices can be equally heard. From time to time, McKenzie’s and the natives’ voices blend into one voice, and readers can hear the colonized voice vividly.
One of the features of this reciprocity in McKenzie’s text is that the natives are described as having equal existence to McKenzie himself, and as civilized people. Korean elites or officials are regarded as those who think of democracy, believe in human justice, or express progressive idea and virtues, rather than only being the beneficiaries of Western civilization. Furthermore, even uneducated people, such as an errand boy, or the lower classes, are depicted as meaningful individuals that are able to behave in an autonomous way and in pursuit of sacrifice and patriotism.
Another characteristic of McKenzie’s text is that it includes not only his voice, but also that of the natives’ to a considerable extent, which was absent in Sands’ text. McKenzie presents memoirs, documents, and narratives written by Koreans at important historical moments, and lets the readers hear their voice directly and vividly. For example, McKenzie conveys a text by Seo Jaephil, a member of the Independence Club: “the passing of the Independence Club was one of the most unfortunate things in the history of Korea,” but eventually, “the seed of democracy was sown in Korea through this movement.” In addtition, such texts are included as; the letter of the Emperor of Korea to the President of the United States ; articles of the native paper, the Whang Sung Shimbun (1905 11 20), deploring after the protectorate treaty, “Our people have become the slaves of others, and the spirit of a nation which has stood for 4000 years… has perished in a single night. Alas! fellow-countrymen. Alas!” ; a narrative of a Commander of the rebels, “Our men want weapons. … They are as brave as can be…. Buy guns for us and bring them to us. Ask what money you want....” ; and his boy’s begging after hearing this to give the rebels their guns so that they might defeat the Japanese; many statements of the accused in prison after being tortured during the March First Movement in 1919; The Proclamation of Korean Independence, written “in the lofty tone,” which aspires for liberty and peace in the new Asia, struggling against Japanese militarism.
The third distinguishing characteristic in McKenzie’s text is that it criticizes the injustice of the Western Powers and resists their system of hegemony, in which the voice of the weak is ignored. McKenzie’s text not only speaks for the weak, but also traces why the voice of the weak is not accepted in the international society. One thing in common between Sands’ and McKenzie’s text is that both criticize the concession diplomacy of the Western Powers and their indifference regarding the independence of Korea. Sands tries to differentiate the American case from that of the others on the grounds that America maintains a neutral attitude. However, the United States, from the perspective of McKenzie, is not concerned with the independence of Korea either, and on this point entirely ignores her voice.
The Emperor of Korea, being aware of the signing of the Japanese protectorate in 1905, decided to dispatch Hullbert as a confidential mission to President Roosevelt of the United States. The Emperor placed too much trust in the treaty between America and Korea of 1882,291 and naively believed that the US would help to protect Korea against Japanese aggression. Hullbert, with a letter from the Emperor, arrived in Washington after a long journey, but the American government did not receive him for days. It was revealed afterwards that there was a conspiracy between Japan and America behind this deliberate delay. Japan, knowing of Hullbert’s departure, speedily concluded the protectorate treaty in Seoul, and informed America that the Korean government officially assented to the protectorate. McKenzie writes that America had intentionally waited for the formal notification from Japan to arrive at Washington, before opening the letter from the Emperor of Korea that Hullbert had brought.292
Hullbert states afterward:
“[T]he (American) administration… accepted Japan’s unsupported statement that it was all satisfactory to the Korean Government and people, cabled our legation to remove from Korea, cut off all communication with the Korean Government, and then admitted me with the letter.”293
American government responds to this:
“The letter from the Emperor of Korea which you intrusted to me has been placed in the President’s hands and read by him. In view of… the fact that since intrusting it to you the Emperor has made a new agreement with Japan disposing of the whole question to which the letter relates, it seems quite impracticable that any action should be based upon it.”294
Some years later, President Roosevelt recalls:
with weak Oriental nations. Afterward, Hullbert was expelled by the Japanese government in 1908. See: McKenzie, 1920, pp. 84-6. 89.
291 One clause of the agreement says that if other powers deal unjustly or oppressively with either Government, the other will exert their good offices, on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable arrangement, thus showing their friendly feelings. See: McKenzie, 1920, pp. 21-22.
292 Ibid., pp. 71-76. 293 Ibid., pp. 72-73 294 Ibid., p. 73.
“To be sure, by treaty it was solemnly covenanted that Korea should remain independent. But…it was out of the question to suppose that any other nation, with no interest of its own at stake, would do for the Koreans what they were utterly unable to do for themselves.”
McKenzie maintains that America was aware that the signing of the protectorate treaty was made under force in Seoul. However, President Roosevelt “was anxious to please Japan” at the time of Japan’s highest prestige, and thus “he deliberately refused to interfere” with the Korean case. Moreover, Roosevelt was so greatly influenced by his old friend, Mr. George Kennan, who had vilified the Korean people as apathetic, dull, ignorant and idle by nature, that he was easily convinced that “the Koreans were unfit for self-government.”
According to McKenzie, while Japan’s national reputation became elevated in the international society, the conditions in the colony of Japan were different, which was rarely known to the rest of the world. The Western people living in Korea, well aware of the ruthlessness of Japanese colonial rule, attempted to let this be known to the world, but the world did not pay attention. McKenzie points out that the reason for this is not only the prestige of the Japanese people after their splendid victory in the Russo-Japanese War, but it is also the result of Japan’s subtle propaganda.
The Japanese monopolized all forms of communications in Korea. In the Japanese press, it is stated that the Righteous Army that is resisting Japan are insurgents who “commit all sorts of horrible crimes, such as murdering peaceful people, both native and foreign, robbing their property, burning official and private buildings.” The Japanese also showed an excellent skill in organizing “their claque in Europe and America,” For instance, the Japanese remind diplomats and consular officials of Britain and America of how disgraceful it is to be a persona non grata to Tokyo. Moreover, they prepared the “Annual Report of Reforms and Progress in Chosun (Korea),” and distributed this to the libraries and influential figures in America and Europe. In addition, when influential foreign people visited Korea, the Japanese only showed material achievements, while covering up such wrong-doing as torture, suppression, legal robbery, state-regulated prostitution, etc. Returning home after appreciating this superficial progress in Korea, foreign journalists consequently produce texts that provide “laudation of the Japanese and contemptuous abuse of the Koreans.” The Japanese, in the end, succeeded in creating a representation of the Koreans as “an exhausted and good-for-nothing race,” and convinced the world that Koreans need Japanese rule because Koreans are “a degenerate people, not fit for self-government.”
The international political situation became deluded by this Japanese version of Orientalism and by their skillful diplomacy. Even before Hullbert was rejected in Washington, H.N. Allen, the American Minister for Seoul, had sent two letters to the American Government to draw attention to the Japanese occupation and to its oppression in Korea, but these were also ignored. Shortly after that, Allen, being a persona non grata for Japan, was summoned to the homeland, and replaced by Edwin V Morgan.
According to McKenzie, Britain also ignored voices from Korea. Ernest T.
Bethell, an editor of the Korean Daily News, had long persisted in writing hostile articles against the harsh Japanese policy in Korea, arguing that the Japanese protectorate treaty of 1905 is invalid. Japan tries to appease this young English journalist, but in vain. Finally, Japan protests to the British Government that Mr. Bethell is agitating disorder and enmity in the country, and requests that his journal be banned. The interesting point here is that of which country Mr. Bethell is considered to belong to when he is accused of disturbing the order of the resident country in 1906. For Bethell, it is Korea, but the British Government decides that the resident country is Japan, since Korea is a protectorate of Japan at the time. It therefore concedes the Japanese accusation of Bethell’s being guilty of causing disturbance. Eventually, Bethell is tried twice in a special consular Court, and is sentenced to imprisonment in Shanghai. He only survives a few years, dying in 1909. Moreover, the British press set the principle to the correspondents that they should maintain a pro-Japanese attitude during the Russo-Japanese war. This tendency being sustained after the war,
McKenzie’s article, written as a correspondent of the London Daily Mail about the atrocious deeds of the Japanese to the Korean Righteous Army, did not appear in the British press.
From the beginning, McKenzie’s text criticizes the hegemonic structure of the world which does not take into consideration the weak, nor the voice of Westerners who are speaking for them. Another strong concern of his is to warn the world of Japanese militarism. Experiencing the Japanese militarists for decades in Korea, McKenzie foresees that the potential aggressiveness of Japanese imperialism will be a fatal menace to world peace. The Japanese militarists will be “steadily increasing aggression in Manchuria, growing interference with China, and, in the end, a titanic conflict.” If the world responds weakly, there will be “a great war in the Far East almost certain within a generation.”
3.3.3 Elizabeth and Scott, E.K. Robertson Keith, Old Korea: The land of morning calm (Britain, 1946)
Keith’s text has many similarities with McKenzie’s. She also sympathizes with the native’s sentiments and their political situation. In particular, she was greatly moved by the activities of women in the March First Movement in 1919. She even visits a prison with American principal of a girls’ school, to meet a girl arrested during the movement. Keith has to move her eyes in order to properly see the girl’s face because the partition has only a tiny hole. The girl does not look “sad,” but rather with “delight,” says Keith. When the girl relates why she is participating in the movement, her face does not look like it is appealing for “a pity,” but rather it is that of “a victor.” The principal was crying listening to her, but the girl was quiet and calm.310 Keith also sketches a woman of a yangban family, who was held and tortured in prison. She writes that her body still has the marks of torture, but that her facial expression was pacific, not painful, nor grudging.
Keith also paints and describes the ordinary daily lives and sentiments of the natives, from the farmer to the royal family, from the young to the old. She goes to observe a shaman dancing and wailing, depicting this as being like an incantation calling on the odd feeling of antiquity in the human consciousness. Keith’s sense of fairness appears even when she was invited to see the Japanese Governor-General. The first impression she receives is that he does not look pitiless, and so Keith thinks that it is the Japanese colonial system rather than a human being, that is the more wrong. However, during the interview with him, Keith imagines a torture taking place somewhere nearby. She also expresses her humanistic concerns for the natives by taking part in the fund-raising campaign to eliminate tuberculosis in Korea. Keith served to draw a design of a Christmas seal three times in 1934, 1936 and 1940.
In Keith’s text, the natives have their own voice. She presents, for example, a young Korean doctor with whom she has many conversations. She agrees with his opinion that Japan sacrifices moral consciousness, the love of mankind, and freedom of speech for the sake of colonial rule, that the Japanese civilization is only based on materialism, and that unless a huge force awakes them, there is no hope for them. She also presents a trial record of an old Korean viscount. When asked by an examiner what real strength is, he replies that real strength is the united Korean spirit. The Japanese take pride in their strength in warfare, but cannot crush the Korean spirit shown in the Independence Movement.315
In Keith’s text, the account of Alice Appenzeller is presented, a person who had served in Korean schools for twenty years and has observed the two nations with independent eyes. According to Appenzeller, the Japanese deliberately spread a bad reputation about the Koreans’ character, to make people in the world believe that the Koreans are “ignorant” and “backward.” However, it is the Japanese who are the most aware that the Koreans are an intelligent and sagacious people. As long as Japan maintains its power, however, there is nothing except a war to prevent Japanese expansionism in Asia.
Keith displays the native’s political desires in her sentimental mode. She cites some sentences from the Declaration of Independence in the spring of 1919, describing it as a piece of poetry rather than as a political declaration.
“We the sacred descendants of Tankoon Where all surrounding us is the enemy.
Under humanity's flag let us perish.
Shadowed from the great black cloud is the perfect round moon
Which to us great hope will show.”
3.3.4 Henry B. Drake, Korea of the Japanese (Britain, 1930)
Compared to the prior three texts, Drake’s text includes more personal statement. His text is positioned somewhere between travel writing and literature. He seems to be reluctant to describe reality. Instead, he is absorbed in his imaginative consciousness, attempting to satisfy his personal aesthetic desires on a foundation of Oriental materials. The colonized people in his text seem only to be an inspiration for his artistic content, rather than existing as real existential beings. Drake, hired by the Japanese government, gives lectures in a university of the colonized country and enjoys a privileged life and the Koreans’ reverential attitude towards a teacher. However, he keeps a distance from the natives, not attempting to deeply enter the natives’ sentiments. Seeing the naïve, young eyes of the colonized students asking to write about their country when he returns to England, he is only filled with a superior sense of his own nation, and is comfortably satisfied with being a citizen of Great Britain.
He mostly associates with European missionaries or delegates, but when he feels like traveling, he is accompanied by a native student. Yu Sikuk, one of his students, appears in his text several times, but only to be described as having a kind of colonized slave mentality. Drake portrays him as having an attitude of pride when he claps pompously to call for an innkeeper during the trip, on the grounds that he is accompanying a white professor. It is sometimes incomprehensible that his feelings, indifferent and cynical, react differently when he meets nature. He admires the beauty of Gumgang Mountain with entirely poetic expressions (my translation): “To climb up the peak of the mountain… is to feel the magical trace of antiquity. Feeling the mountain is not simply a response of a spirit, but an indescribable rapture enchanting blood and bone.” Except for nature, however, he does not seem to try to find out anything new in the natives and native culture.
Drake’s viewpoint on Korea and Japan is that the former is not able to be independent, and the latter is detestable in her method of governing other people. Thus, the Orient must be “molded” again by the West, a vision that is not different from Curzon’s. Even though 30 years have passed, Drake still repeats Curzon’s discourse that only Great Britain possesses the colonizing genius and hereditary instinct for ruling other nations, which shows Drake’s uncritical textual attitude toward the dominant national discourse.
This pretentious ethnocentrism is supported by his personal view of life. He believes that God rules human beings and creates all things on the earth in the most appropriate relations. Thus, although all Koreans curse the Japanese, they should adapt to the Divine Providence. That the strong swallow the weak is the inevitable trend of time. This principle might be against justice, mercy, and even human tenets, but there is another law that is even stronger than this. That is, the world follows the fateful, dispassionate principle of power.321 According to Drake’s discourse, the weak people are doomed to be colonized, and their destiny is already confirmed within the Divine order. The colonized, therefore, have an essence that can neither be changed nor evolve, which shows the typical viewpoint of the Orientalist. A British citizen, a fatalist, and a believer of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, all these qualities are so closely combined in Drake that he always feels superior not only to the natives, but also to the other Western peoples in Korea.
Nevertheless, something of a grave pathos is sensed in his text, which is a very dissimilar element to Curzon’s account. Full of energy and pride in being a citizen of Great Britiain, Curzon never shows any kind of skeptical sentiment relating to national or personal matters. Drake’s text, however, for all the same sense of superior identity as Curzon’s, has another aspect, something dark, pessimistic, or disoriented, with a sardonic, uninterested writing style. This seems to be related to his reason for being in the Orient.
What is he looking for then in the Orient, where he only identified himself with a pompous, superior national feeling? Drake, who rarely enjoys a mutual relationship with the indigenous people, mentions only one native in detail. Park Maria. Drake devotes many pages to her ideas and emotions. They conflict over the meaning of “freedom.” Park Maria argues that freedom is naturally given to humans and thus the Japanese rule, oppressing the freedom of the Koreans, is not just, while Drake negates this on the grounds that freedom does not exist for those who are incapable of keeping it. With this disagreement in their basic philosophy, Park Maria says of Drake’s character that it is “logical and sensitive.” Delicately reacting to this comment, Drake wonders whether this is a compliment or a jeer. One day, he becomes emotionally shaken on hearing Park Maria blaming him for being “an imperialist” and “a puppet” of a powerful and ruthless government, and that he has the white man’s burden of a fervent duty to oppress weaker people for the sake of his own benefit. When he hears this criticism of his personality, he is considerably bewildered. He seems to feel great confusion in his self-identity, as though looking at his image into the mirror. He thinks over Park Maria’s remark with great sensitivity. It seems to be the first time for him to hear his own character, his personality, described by others, and more specifically by a colonized woman. Finally, he confesses: “When I left her, I made fun of myself, recollecting the humiliating interview.” In this remark, Drake seems to be detesting his self-image.
There are two Westerners whom Drake describes elaborately in his text. One is Hunt, who is a member of the Anglican Church, an expert in the Korean arts, and familiar with Buddhism. Drake visits a temple with him, and sees Hunt politely bow to the monks with two hands gathered. Drake feels impressed to notice Hunt express reverence for the teachings of Buddha and admire the symbolic meaning of a Buddhist statue. Hunt does not show any kind of unfriendliness towards heathens. Drake writes that Hunt’s behavior, which is likely to be censored for apostasy or idol worship, pleases him.
The other is a German father, Calitos, whom Drake met in the northern part of Korea. He lives in the dirty Korean traditional house, sleeping on the floor without a bed, and eating Korean foods with inhabitants for nineteen years. Drake could not even eat these for two years. His life, indigence itself, is not only different from that of the other missionaries, but is a pure one of the native’s. Drake writes, very much impressed, that his life of poverty is not a result of resignation, but rather of maturity. Calitos feels comfortable and optimistic, even in conditions of extreme deficiency, which shows the peaceful patience to harmonize with the anguishes of fate.
The descriptions of these three people obviously stand out in Drake’s text. Drake tries to represent them with a sincere and delicate attitude, while he refers to others in a superficial and indifferent mode. Each of these three people seems to have an effect on Drake’s existential concerns in a different way. Park Maria seems to inspire him with an inquiry into his personality and identity; Hunt, with a respectable embracement on heterogeneous religion and culture; Calitos, with a calm perseverance about his indigent fate. They are all unlike Drake. One is the colonized, another is a citizen of Great Britain but a humble and free spirit, and the other is a modest acceptor of his destitute life. It seems that the reason for Drake to consider them earnestly is that he wants to reflect on his own existential life through them, their remarks, or their attitude towards life.
It can be presumed that the main reason for Drake to stay in the Orient is not to explore the Orient itself, but to look for his own existential orientation throughout the journey. This personal desire is likely to occupy him wherever he goes, East or West. It seems to be for this reason that he appears to be disoriented, even with his superior national consciousness, and why he persistently narrates about himself, not about the natives, even during his stay in the Orient.
Summary
Sands, an adventurous idealist, seems to enjoy reciprocity and exchanging thoughts and friendships with native friends. With an unbiased philosophy as to the Orient, he rarely produces topos. He is concerned about Korean sovereignty among the World Powers. However, his reciprocity is not based on an egalitarian foundation, but on that of a civilized pioneer with a sense of white supremacy. He deals with a native as a person but also as a passive agent who should follow his project and his ideas. The native’s own voice is rarely heard in his text.
The United States was interested in a different kind of imperialism from that of Europe, and practiced influence rather than occupying territory. Sand does not seem to be free from such a national identification with America. Even though he tries to distinguish himself from Allen, whose role in Korea Sands regards as “a tool of imperialism” (Sands does not directly use the term of “an imperialist”), Sands’ life in Korea was not that different from that of a potential imperialist. That is, Sands interferes in the natives’ affairs and engages in the life of influencing Korean politics. He blames European expansionism, but takes an affirmative attitude towards the American form of political influence.
It is rare to see such a strong mutual engagement with the natives as that of McKenzie. At a time when the strong ignored the rights of the weak, his text shows the exceptional characteristic of speaking for the voiceless people. From an errand boy or a disbanded soldier to the progressive elites or conservative politicians, his text covers various kinds of native voices vividly. McKenzie does not describe Koreans as a beneficiary of the Western civilization as in Sands’ account. The Koreans in McKenzie’s text are equal to the civilized, as subjective existences who consider human justice or ideals. As a critic of the unequal knowledge-power mechanism, he strongly blames the Powers’ hegemony and the dominant colonial discourse.
Keith’s text is characterized by being at once sentimental and political. Moved by the Koreans’ fortitude and courage in the March First Movement of 1919, she deeply sympathizes with Koreans. Keith’s text has similarity with Grebst’s in that she corrects the existing topos after new experiences and perceptions. It also has a common aspect with McKenzie’s in that she listens to the natives carefully and regards them as an equal existence, and that as a British citizen she does not possess any superior national consciousness, and rather resists the dominant colonial discourse.
Drake’s account is a typical example of prejudice and ethnocentrism. He does not feel like interacting with or listening to the natives. He believes that the weak are to be dominated by the strong, which is similar to Curzon’s view. The two British authors, Orientalists full of a superior national consciousness, support the dominant colonial discourse. Drake, however, is somewhat different from Curzon in that he interacts deeply with one native woman, whereas Curzon interacts with none. Drake seems to desire to fill the emptiness of his disoriented mind and to look for a kind of spiritual salvation by interacting with special individuals in the Orient. Drake’s journey in the pursuit of a life rescuer, however, does not seem to find an end, no matter where he is, the Orient or any other places.
All in all, it is clear that strong reciprocity resists the dominant colonial discourse (McKenzie’s and Keith’s case), while weak reciprocity supports it (Drake’s case). Sand’s case is not easily generalized. Sands, whose reciprocity treats natives as a passive agent, disagrees to the eurocentric colonial discourse, but supports American political influence.
Chapter 4. Conclusion
As seen above, each account has its own characteristics. It is hard to see that there is a single unitary, common discourse among them. Depending on reciprocity, nationality, and personal attribute, multi-vocal discourses have been produced. The purpose of this thesis is to study what characterized the dominant discourse. In particular, I posed the following questions that are to be answered at the end:
1. What role did reciprocity play in the formulation of a dominant discourse?
2. What role did the traveler’s nationality play in the formulation of a dominant discourse?
3. What role did the traveler’s personal attributes, such as gender and occupation, play in the formulation of the dominant colonial discourse?
Although the eight texts do not have a monolithic discourse, I can classify them into four different types relating to the first question, the relationship of reciprocity and the dominant discourse. The first category is a low degree of reciprocity. Curzon’s and Drake’s texts belong to this. They rarely doubt the previous Orientalist views, and reproduce the clichéd topos concerning the Koreans. Believing that there is a fixed and unchanging essence in the colonized people, they neither try to find out new features, nor create new opinions. Consequently, the texts with weak reciprocal relationships tend to support a colonial discourse.
The second is a type of complex reciprocity. Genthe and Sands belong to this. Both try to interact with Koreans, but their reciprocity is complicated. They do not follow the authority of the previous text and refute Orientalist views, but they do treat Koreans in Orientalist manners. Genthe, whose reciprocity is based on ego-centered heroism, regards Koreans as a group and not as possessing their own individual existence. Sands, whose reciprocity is based on naïve white supremacy, thinks of Koreans as a person, but also as a passive agent. In these two texts, Koreans do not represent themselves in their own voice, and are only to be represented through the writer’s pen. For Genthe and Sands, the attitudes toward the dominant colonial discourse are not simple either. Genthe agrees with it, but disagrees with the unilateral relationship of knowledge and power. Sands disapproves of the direct European colonialism, but approves of American political influence. The relationship of reciprocity and the dominant discourse cannot be generalized in Genthe’s and Sands’ case. Vague or partial reciprocity results in a dual attitude to the dominant colonial discourse.
Thirdly, Seroshevskii’s mutuality is characterized by evolving itself. At the beginning, Seroshevskii does not enjoy interacting with the (would-be) colonized people, but as time goes by, he feels a kind of fellowship with them. His attitude towards the colonial discourse also changes along with this sense. Abandoning an admiration of the colonial discourse, he comes to sympathize with the Koreans’ dilemma between modernity and coloniality. His mutual engagement develops into an identification of having the same fate of being colonized, and the dilemma seems to be a new theme for him to have to answer for his country’s sake. As his reciprocity transits from low to high, therefore the attitude toward the dominant discourse changes from agreement to disagreement.
Fourthly, the high level of reciprocity can be seen in Grebst’s, McKenzie’s and Keith’s accounts. Their common features are strong interaction, critical textual attitude, and new perception. They regard Koreans as having an equal existence to themselves, and do not show any will to modify. With a critical mind toward colonialism, they all reject the dominant discourse, and condemn the relationship by which the World hegemonies are connected to each other. Therefore, they struggle against the misleading representations produced by both the Western and the Japanese Orientalism. In particular, McKenzie’s and Keith’s resistances to the colonial discourse are even stronger than Grebst’s, which seems to be due to the different circumstance prevailing during their stay in Korea. The time of McKenzie’s and Keith’s residence in Korea was far tenser in regard to the Japanese colonial dominance. This special condition is likely to lead them to be engaged more intensely in a mutual relationship with the natives.
All in all, except for the complicated reciprocity, it is clear that there is an interrelation between reciprocity and the colonial discourse: a low degree of reciprocity results in support for the dominant colonial discourse, while a high level of reciprocity results in resistance to the dominant colonial discourse.
This thesis also aimed at studying the role that the traveler’s nationality plays in the formulation of a dominant discourse. The nationality of material sources are one Swedish (Grebst), one German (Genthe), one Polish Russian (Seroshevskii), one American (Sands), and four British (Curzon, McKenzie, Keith, and Drake). Unlike Britain, the other four countries were not one of the supreme empires at the time, but they were related to the imperial powers in one way or another. The four nationalities display various modes of the relationship with the dominant colonial discourse. Genthe (German) approves of the colonial discourse, but rejects civilization and the unequal relationship of knowledge and power. Sands (American) criticizes the European colonial discourse, but agrees to American political influence. Seroshevskii (Polish Russian) displays a transiting mode in his relationship with the dominant discourse, from agreement to disagreement. Only Grebst (Swedish) resists the dominant colonial discourse. Another nationality that resists the dominant colonial discourse the most is British (McKenzie and Keith), and the nationality that approves of it the most is also the British (Curzon and Drake). From this result, different nationalities produce different slants to the dominant discourse. However, it remains true that not all the texts written by the British used Orientalist viewpoints, and that it was also Britain which most produced the colonial discourse.
The last purpose of this thesis was to analyze the role that the traveler’s personal attributes, such as gender and occupation, played in the formulation of the dominant colonial discourse. Keith is the only female author among the eight. She rejects the dominant colonial discourse the most, with a critical textual attitude and new perceptions. The other male authors show diverse modes in their relationship with the dominant discourse: agreement (Curzon and Drake), disagreement (Grebst and McKenzie), duality (Genthe and Sands) and transit (Seroshevskii). It can be said from this result that a gender element does not influence the formulation of the dominant discourse.
Another personal feature, occupation, influenced the dominant discourse in one way or another. There are four different types of occupation in the material sources: governmental members (Curzon and Sands), artists (Keith and Drake), journalists (Grebst, Genthe, and McKenzie) and an ethnologist (Seroshevskii). To compare the types of occupation to which at least two authors belong, firstly, a governmental career seems to show an interrelationship with the dominant discourse, as supported by the fact that Curzon shows a strong relationship with it, and Sands, in a dual, American way. In Sands’ case, his nationality seems to play a more significant role in the formulation of the colonial discourse than his personal attribute. Secondly, being an artist does not influence the formulation of the dominant discourse, because Keith and Drake show the opposite modes of relationship with it. However, being a journalist does seem to have interrelationship with the dominant discourse. Grebst, Genthe, and McKenzie, all journalists, adopt the most critical attitude towards the unilateral connection between knowledge and hegemony that World Powers exercise on the East.
All in all, I explored what aspect characterized the dominant discourse, through studying reciprocity, nationality, and personal attributes. In encountering “the Other,” we cannot easily change our nationality or personal traits. Reciprocity, however, an open attitude of sympathy or empathy, or an independence from existing prejudices and authority, leads us to approach genuine humanism. In the colonial period, strong reciprocity overcame the prejudices concerning the East. Sincere reciprocity is still needed in our times, or might be needed until such time as there is no longer the wall between “us” and “the Other.”
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