Intimate Empire

 

[ COLLABORATION & COLONIAL MODERNITY IN KOREA & JAPAN ]

NayouNg aimee KwoN

I N T I M A T E E M P I R E

Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan

N AYOUNG A IMEE K WON

                                           Duke University Press     Durham and London                                                    2015

© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ∞

Typeset in Arno Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc.,  Bogart, Georgia

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kwon, Nayoung Aimee.

Intimate empire : collaboration and colonial modernity in Korea and Japan / Nayoung Aimee Kwon.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5910-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5925-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Japanese literature—Korean authors—History and criticism.  2. National characteristics, Korean. 3. Korea—History— Japanese occupation, 1910–1945. I. Title.

pl725.2.k67k96 2015

895.609′9519—dc23 2014046256 isbn 978-0-8223-7540-1 (e-book)

Cover credit: Kim Saryang’s postcard correspondence from Tokyo to Korean author Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi, reprinted with permission from Mr. Kim Jihoon of the estate of Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi. Originally published in Kim Yŏngsik, ed., Chakko munin 48-in ŭi yukp’il sŏhanjip Pa’in Kim Tonghwan 100-chunyŏn kinyŏm. Minnyŏn, 2001.

For my parents, Myung Hae Jun and Yong Sam Kwon

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

On Naming, Romanization, and Translations xiii

1          Colonial Modernity and the Conundrum of Representation 1

2          Translating Korean Literature 17

3          A Minor Writer 41

4          Into the Light 59

5          Colonial Abject 80

6          Performing Colonial Kitsch 99

7          Overhearing Transcolonial Roundtables 131

8          Turning Local 154

9          Forgetting Manchurian Memories 174

10       Paradox of Postcoloniality 195

Notes 213

Bibliography 247

Index 263

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From conception to completion, this book has taken over a decade to write while in transit among three countries and stumbling across three languages. Along the way, I have been sustained by the generosity of many individuals, and I am indebted to the hospitality of those who have kindly opened up their homes, classrooms, libraries, collections, and conversations to this itinerant’s many comings and goings.

First, my teachers at ucla guided me from the beginning: Peter H. Lee, John B. Duncan, Namhee Lee, Seiji M. Lippit, Jinqi Ling, and the late Miriam Silverberg. This book could not have been conceived or realized without their intellectual rigor and generosity of spirit through the years. Friends from graduate school days supported me as fellow travelers and co-conspirators at various stages of the journey: Takushi Odagiri, Chiyoung Kim, Jennifer Shin, Mickey Hong, Seung- Ah Lee, Yingzi Stella Xu, Charles Kim, Sonja Kim, John Namjun Kim, Min-S uh Son, Hijoo Son, Ellie Choi, Todd Henry, Koichi Haga, Youngju Ryu, Chris Hanscom, and Jinsoo An. I thank Hyaeweol Choi for the opportunity to teach at Arizona State University and the wonderful colleagues there for their warm hospitality during my stay.

In Korea, I am grateful to Kwon Youngmin for welcoming me to Seoul National University. Kim Chul and Lee Kyounghoon kindly allowed me to join their seminars and collaboratives at Yonsei University. One of the most influential was Hanil munhak yŏnguhoe (aka Suyohoe), which became my home away from home in Seoul. Other teachers and friends

I continue to learn from include Sin Hyŏng-g i, Seo Jae-k il, Cha Seung-k i, Baek Moonim, Kwŏn Myŏnga, Jung Jaewon, Tajima Tetsuo, Kim Yerim, Pak Hana, Yi Hwajin, Choe Yŏngsŏk, Chŏng Chonghyŏn, Kim Chaeyŏng, Makase Akiko, Hwang Hoduk, Yi Yŏngjae, Kim Chaeyong, and Chung Kŭnsik. I thank each of them for ongoing dialogues.

In Japan, I thank Hotei Toshihiro for kindly hosting me at Waseda University. In Tokyo, I have also been the beneficiary of the teaching and friendship of Ōmura Masuo, Sim Wŏnsŏp, Kim Ŭngyo, Nam Bujin, Kwak Hyoungduck, Pak Hŭibyŏng, Cho Kiŭn, and Fujiishi Takayo. I would like to thank Yonetani Masafumi and the graduate students at Gaidai, and Kawamura Minato and his graduate students at Hōsei University for making me feel welcome in their seminars. Watanabe Naoki and friends at Inmun P’yŏngnon Yŏnguhoe deserve special gratitude: this became yet another home away from home when in Tokyo.

Shirakawa Yutaka has been a thoughtful supporter of my work. I would like to especially thank him for graciously sharing ideas and resources, including rare photographs, and for introducing me to the Noguchi family who have so kindly made available their stories and personal collections to me. In Kyoto, I continue to be inspired by Mizuno Naoki for his intellectual generosity and rigor. I also thank Matsuda Toshihiko at Nichibunken for kindly sharing his expertise on colonial era police records.

At Duke, I could not have wished for a more supportive group of colleagues and friends to accompany me at the final stretch of this journey. I would like to thank the Franklin Humanities Institute for sponsoring my manuscript workshop and to all the participants for their rigorous and careful reading of the manuscript: David Ambaras, Leo Ching, Kyeong-H ee Choi, Eileen Chow, Hae-Y oung Kim, Reed Malcolm, Ellen McLarney, Walter Mignolo, and Naoki Sakai. I am especially grateful to Naoki Sakai, Kyeong-H ee Choi, and Reed Malcolm, for traveling from far away, and for their thoughtful comments, criticism, and encouragement at this crucial junction. Ellen and Eileen also deserve special mention for being the best writing team, cheering me toward the finish line. I thank miriam cooke, Shai Ginsburg, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Guo-J uin Hong, Carlos Rojas, Rey Chow, Hwansoo Kim, Eunyoung Kim, and Cheehyung Kim for their continued guidance and friendship. I am grateful to several people who have read all or parts of the manuscript and offered their insights at crucial stages: Takashi Fujitani, Jin-K yung Lee, Theodore Hughes,

               x    •       acknowledgments

and Jonathan Abel. I thank library specialists Kris Troost, Luo Zhuo, and Miree Ku for their research expertise. Special thanks to Elizabeth Brown for her careful and incisive editing and warm encouragement in preparing an early draft. J. Rappaport expertly added the final touches at the last stage of production.

The research, writing, and publication were generously supported through grants from Fulbright- Hays, the Fulbright iie, the Korea Foundation, Duke University Arts and Sciences, the Andrew W. Mellon/Franklin Humanities Institute, the Asian Pacific Studies Institute, the Triangle Center for Japanese Studies, and the Office of the Dean of the Humanities.

Parts of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in an earlier version as “Colonial Modernity and the Conundrum of Representation: Korean Literature in the Japanese Empire,” in Postcolonial Studies 13, n0 .4 (2010): 421–3 9. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as “Conflicting Nostalgia: Performing The Tale of Ch’unhyang (春香傳) in the Japanese Empire,” in Journal of Asian Studies, 73, no. 1 (February 2014): 113– 41.

The following individuals and institutions were instrumental in securing images and permissions: Chung Wha Lee Iyengar, from the estate of Yi Kwangsu, and Hatano Setsuko for help acquiring rare photos of Yi Kwangsu; Liu Chih-F u, from the estate of Long Yingzong, with special thanks to Wang Huei-C hen and Shin Ji-Y oung, for their help accessing a copy of a rare correspondence between Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong; Jihoon Kim from the estate of Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi for permission to reprint rare postcard correspondences. I would also like to acknowledge the archivists at Seoul National University Rare Book Archives; Waseda University Archives; Tsubouchi Shōyō Memorial Museum; Ōhara Institute for Social Research, Hōsei University; and Meiji Gakuin Archives of History.

At Duke University Press, I thank Ken Wissoker for having faith in the project and for his grace and expertise in shepherding it through the various hurdles, and Elizabeth Ault and Sara Leone for their professionalism and guidance in the final stages of the publication process.

Finally, my family is my anchor, and I cannot adequately express my appreciation for their constant love, encouragement, and patience. It is with boundless love and gratitude that I dedicate this book to my parents, Myung Hae Jun and Yong Sam Kwon, whose paths as teachers I myself have embarked upon, and whose lifelong love of books, I have inherited: 감사합니다.

                                                                     acknowledgments                                                                                                            •                                                                                                          xi

ON NAMING, ROMANIZATION, AND

TRANSLATIONS

Naming is a complex matter in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Many proper names can be read or rendered in multiple ways in K orean, Japanese, and variant hybrid forms. When we take into account pseudonyms, pen names, colonial name changes, and so forth, each name holds yet more multiplicities. For example, the author Chang Hyŏkchu is also known as Chō Kakuchū, Noguchi Kakuchū, Noguchi Minoru, and so on. Following one convention with consistency for all names would have been impossible in this book, and while variants are introduced at times, I have often chosen one rendering per author to reduce confusion.

Romanization of words from Korean, Japanese, and Chinese follow the McCune Reischauer, Hepburn, and Pinyin systems respectively. Exceptions were made when more commonly known conventions are available (e.g., Seoul or Tokyo), or in cases when authors have expressed alternative preferences. Japanese and Korean terms are sometimes given together with corresponding initials J and K respectively. Proper names for authors who publish primarily in Asian languages follow cultural conventions of given names following surnames. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

 

ONE

COLONIAL MODERNITY AND THE

CONUNDRUM OF REPRESENTATION

In embarking on an examination of the contentious and divided modern histories of Korea and Japan, we might do worse than begin with the following: a small story just seven short pages, long forgotten but significant, of their once shared literary past. The Japanese-l anguage short story “Aika” (Love?) appears with a byline of a colonial Korean author, Yi Pogyŏng, who is labeled as a “Korean exchange student” (Kankoku ryūgakusei). We now know that this story was penned on the eve of Japan’s colonization of Korea by none other than Yi Kwangsu (1892–1 950?)—the father of modern Korean literature. In the following decades, as Korea was becoming more deeply subsumed into Japan after being demoted to colonial status, Yi Kwangsu (Pogyŏng was his given name) would soon become one of the most prominent and contested colonial writers in the Japanese empire. Yi wrote “Aika” in Japanese as a student studying abroad in the imperial metropolitan center of Tokyo. His travels paralleled the journey toward “enlightenment,” what Edward Said elsewhere calls the “voyage-i n,”¹ of so many of his colonial counterparts from around the world into the heart of empire. Yi affectionately called “Aika” his “maiden work” (ch’ŏnyŏjak), a melancholy story about the unrequited homoerotic desire of a Korean schoolboy Bunkichi/Mungil for his Japanese classmate Misao.² The story was penned nervously in the formative years by the young boy who would quickly rise to

Fig. 1.1 Yi Kwangsu’s “Aika” from Shirogane gakuhō. Reprinted from Meiji Gakuin Archives of History.

fame as the “father of modern Korean literature” and then seemingly just as quickly fall infamously as a traitorous colonial collaborator (even changing his name to the Japanese Kayama Mitsurō). This rise and fall of Yi Kwangsu or his journey toward becoming Kayama Mitsurō is still contested and little understood, and the story “Aika” takes us back to a primal scene of scandalous confluences in Korea and Japan’s contested colonial encounter at the turn of the twentieth century.

After wavering impotently in the dark, hovering at the threshold of the

2    •      chapter 1

Fig. 1.2 Table of Contents for Shirogane gakuhō lists Yi as a “Korean Exchange Student.” Reprinted with permission from Meiji Gakuin Archives of History.

guesthouse where Misao lodges, Bunkichi/Mungil wonders anxiously to himself whether Misao would reciprocate his affections:

Bunkichi/Mungil went to visit Misao in Shibuya. Joy and pleasure and boundless hope filled his breast. Stopping along the way to visit one or two other friends had only been a pretext. Night was falling, and the street was becoming hard to see. But Bunkichi/Mungil was determined to make

Fig. 1.3 Students and teachers at Meiji Gakuin. Yi Kwangsu is standing in the last row to the far left. Reprinted with permission from the Meiji Gakuin Archives of History. Special thanks to Professor Hatano Setsuko for sharing a copy of this photo.

Fig. 1.4 Students and teachers at Meiji Gakuin. Yi Kwangsu is the third from the right in the second row from the top. Reprinted with permission from the Meiji Gakuin Archives of History. Special thanks to Professor Hatano Setsuko for sharing a copy of this photo.

his way to Misao. . . . He passed through the gate and walked toward the entrance. His heart was beating even faster and his body was shaking. The storm door was shut and everything was deathly quiet. Maybe he’s asleep already. No, that can’t be. It’s only a little past nine. It’s the middle of exams, there’s no way he’d be in bed already. It must be that out here they lock up early. Should I knock? Someone’s sure to come to the door if I do. . . . But Bunkichi/Mungil was unable to stir. He held his breath and just stood like a wooden statue. Why? Why did he come all this way only to find himself unable to make a move? It wasn’t that he thought he’d get into trouble if he knocked, or that he stopped his raised fist at the last second; he simply did not have the courage. Right now Misao must be hitting the books hard for his exams. He would never dream that I am standing here now. There are only two thin walls between us, but our thoughts are a million miles apart. What should I do? All that expectation and joy melted like spring snow.

Do I give up and just leave like this? Despair and pain tightened Bunkichi/ Mungil’s chest. He turned around and began to tiptoe away.³

The conflicted emotions contending within Bunkichi/Mungil’s solitary soliloquy is noteworthy. After much agonizing, he remains stiff and “unable to stir,” in an impasse to decide one way or another and “make a move.” The thin wall renders his love so close, yet so far away (seemingly “a million miles away”), and exacerbates his impossible longing. Powerless to endure the silence from the absent object of his desire, Bunkichi/Mungil finally turns back, alone and dejected. The story ends with him laying himself down on train tracks, tearfully awaiting the train to speed by and put an end to his lonesome misery.

Despite its long absence from their literary histories, this story is remarkable for both modern Korean and Japanese literatures, in form and content, textually and meta- textually.⁴ Loosely based on snippets of the writer’s own life, it was written in the imperial language of Japanese in the metropolitan form of the “I- novel,” a fictionalized, self- conscious, confessional narrative that would become the canonical form in modern Japanese literature.⁵ It also prefigures important themes in the rise of modern Korean literature, not the least with Bunkichi/Mungil’s final lament, “stars are heartless” (hoshi wa mujō da) which anticipates Yi’s later masterpiece, Mujŏng (The heartless), which would inaugurate a national canon and be considered the first modern novel of Korea.⁶

Such confluences of cultures between Korea and Japan (especially but not limited to their literatures) have long been evaded in both postcolonial nation- states.⁷ Although Yi would subsequently grow up to become one of the most

prominent figures (not only in colonial Korea, but in the Japanese empire at large), this work—like other Japanese-l anguage writings by former colonized subjects—was long forgotten after the abrupt collapse of the empire in 1945, in both Japan and Korea. Only in 1981 would it become available in Korean translation.⁸ In Japan, it would not be published in an anthology on postcolonial literature until 1996, almost a century after it was first written.⁹

Intimate Empire examines the broader significance of such intimately shared but disavowed colonial pasts in the modern histories of Korea and Japan and their contested legacies in the Asia-P acific. “Disavowal” here means the ambivalent and unstable play of recognition and denial.¹⁰ While I begin with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic senses of the concept, I am more interested in how it translates to the social context of imperialism. The secret desire for the colonial Other in this story hints at the unspeakable nature of such colonial intimacies that have yet to be fully recognized or reckoned with in the postcolonial aftermath. The imperial encounter as a discomforting scene of desire (coexisting, yet with repulsion) has become familiar from other globally translated and documented colonial contexts, for instance, from Europe’s empires. The works of those who have become luminaries of the postcolonial canon, such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Marguerite D uras, Jacques Derrida, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Salman Rushdie, and many others, are wrought with famous scenes of colonial miscegenation and the resulting anxieties. Although ubiquitous in narratives of Europe’s encounters with its colonial Others, these contact zones of transcolonial misogyny still remain some of the most troubling and conceptually difficult aspects of colonization to address in postcolonial reckonings (I will return to this ubiquitous challenge in chapter 10.

The homoerotic tension in “Aika” further alludes to the particular complexity of the imperial history of Japan and the rigorous policies of assimilation (in language, culture, and political affiliation) of intimate Asian neighbors like Korea, with centuries of proximate and shared cultures and histories. Japan’s ultimate goal was the formation of imperial subjects for wartime and imperial expansions into the “Rest” of Asia in what was couched as a mutual struggle against Western imperialism. In Korea (and to a lesser degree, in Taiwan), the goal was said to become one with Japan, as exemplified in the slogan Naisen ittai (内鮮一体, Japan and Korea, One Body).

However, such a Pan- Asianist impulse was always self- divided and self- contradictory. It involved the simultaneous production and consumption of the colonized as same and yet different. This contradiction undergirds all colonizing endeavors but took on a particular valence in the experience of colonizing proximate neighbors who were already closely affiliated—geographically, culturally, historically, and ethnically—long before the fact of colonial penetration. In such a case, the always already unstable divide between the colonizers and the colonized had to be managed closely. The production and consumption of colonial identification on the one hand and differentiation on the other wavered throughout the colonial period, depending on the empire’s shifting needs and policies within constantly changing degrees of regional and global liaisons of affiliations.

In this context, many prominent colonial intellectuals, like Yi Kwangsu, were actively and rigorously mobilized for imperial agendas, and many even internalized the desire to “become Japanese” in order to overcome racial discrimination in the imperial hierarchy.¹¹ The story “Aika” anticipates the challenges raised by the life and works of Yi Kwangsu and many other prominent figures within modern Korean history and culture. It is difficult for Koreans to reconcile Yi’s prominence as both a patriotic nationalist leader and a traitorous pro-J apanese collaborator. How does a postcolonial nation come to terms with the paradox of these seemingly incompatible and mutually exclusive, and yet intimately coexisting characteristics in someone who played such an influential role in the construction of modern Korean art and society? Yi went from penning The Heartless, the aforementioned first “modern Korean novel” about patriotic national reconstruction, and a draft of the declaration of independence demanding freedom from Japanese rule, to actively leading the way in espousing the assimilation of Korea into Japan (Naisen ittai) by the era’s end. However, in postcolonial Japan, the artistic endeavors of colonized subjects like Yi, who had been pressured to stand before the public at the forefront of imperial policies, were completely erased from its history.¹² The story “Aika” and Yi’s own life, along with the lives of countless other significant colonial- era figures from Korea, inscribed conflicting desires of the colonized in their collusion (voluntary or coerced) with the colonizers that neither side wanted to remember in the postcolonial aftermath.

At the height of the Japanese empire (1895– 1945) and especially after the so-called Manchurian Incident of 1931,¹³ colonial Koreans were rigorously assimilated and mobilized to cooperate with Japan’s imperial expansions. The Korean language was increasingly censored and a rising number of colonial Korean intellectuals were educated in Japan, wrote in Japanese, and collaborated with the Japanese in order to produce cultural works and have their voices heard. Japanese-l anguage writings and translations by colonized Koreans were at the forefront of cultural debates in both Japan and Korea. However, immediately following the empire’s collapse in 1945, the writers and their works were put on trial (literally and figuratively) and their very existence was repressed in divided national discourses for over half a century.

This book examines the rise and repression of this controversial body of writings by colonized subjects at the contact zones of empire, and the ways in which these writings have reverberated since. The objects of inquiry are the writings of those who were on the front lines of cultural debates during one of the most contested and least understood moments of the colonial encounter between Korea and Japan, as well as the colonial and postcolonial debates surrounding them. Many of the works considered here have been defined within the rhetoric of colonial assimilation (Naisen ittai, Japan and Korea, One Body) during the colonial period and then in the postcolonial aftermath, as a literature of collaboration (ch’inil munhak, 親日文学), where ch’inil literally means “intimacy” or “collusion” with Japan. Rather than relying on such binary notions of assimilation versus differentiation (during the colonial period), or collaboration versus resistance (in later postcolonial assessments), this book proposes that we need to reframe the scandalous confluence of cultures under imperialism, as embodied by these texts, within a more historical term of intimacy. In this reformulation, the term “intimacy” is historically derived and translated from both the colonial-e ra rhetoric of Naisen ittai and the postcolonial rhetoric of ch’inil. This critical move allows us to cut across the impasses of imperial and nationalist binary rhetoric to redefine intimacy as an unstable play of affects informed by desire, longing, and affection—all of which coexisted with the better-k nown violence and coercion undergirding empire. This unstable play of affects was violently elided post- 1945, when the rigid colonizer/colonized binary came to the fore as the organizing framework of re-m embering colonial history on the Korean peninsula in Korea and Japan. Furthermore, redefining colonial collaboration as the uncanny coexistence of desire (or intimacy) along with coercion (and violence) at the scene of the colonial encounter also signifies broader impasses of the ambivalent experiences of colonial modernity.

In recent decades, pioneering scholars have begun an earnest examination of colonial modernity. In the case of East Asian studies, for example, Tani Barlow and a team of collaborators inaugurated one of today’s most influential Anglophone journals on East Asian cultural productions by way of thinking through this problematic (positions, issue 1). This and other contributions, both coeval and subsequent, such as the later anthology Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, as well as Colonial Modernity in Korea (coedited by Gi-W ook Shin and Michael Robinson), stand at the forefront of a broad transnational outgrowth of scholarship wrestling with precisely what is meant by this suggestive but elusive term. For example, Shin and Robinson expressly declined to define colonial modernity at this early stage, leaving it open so as to encourage further transnational dialogue. Joining the ongoing conversation of many scholars who subsequently have been inspired by and have been building upon these important contributions, Intimate Empire proposes to reconsider this problem of colonial modernity as a “shared but disavowed” conundrum of modernity experienced in colonial subjection.

“Colonial modernity” is a paradoxical concept that is difficult to pin down. Komagome Takeshi points to the “ambiguity” of colonial modernity, its exact meaning often depending on the individual writer evoking the term.¹⁴ This difficulty is further compounded because of its ironic resemblance to the imperial apologist rhetoric of colonial modernization (Ch’ŏn Chŏnghwa, Yonetani Masafumi, Yun Haedong, and others).¹⁵ This book does not conceive that the condition of modernity in the non-W est is a priori different from or alternative to that of the West in its empirical conditions. Instead, it takes as self-e vident with many others (Fredric Jameson, Walter Mignolo, Arjun Appardurai, Gayatri Spivak, Leo Ching, Rey Chow, Yun Haedong) that modernity is a globally shared condition, coeval and ushered in by worldwide shifts wrought by the uneven global dispersion of capitalism.¹⁶ It is, however, important to note that this unevenly shared predicament of modernity resulted in significant differences in the ways modernity was experienced by those who were defined as if they were in development and in need of catching up by external standards. Walter Mignolo has diagnosed the problem of coloniality as the constitutive “darker side of modernity,” as its unacknowledged but intimate counterpart. Likewise, this book argues that the paradox of colonial modernity emerges not because there exists an internal contradiction between coloniality and modernity, but from the fact that such a contradiction was produced and imposed discursively and continues to undermine our understanding of the true intimacy between coloniality and modernity. What are actually constitutive and coeval (coloniality and modernity) have been discursively and hegemonically severed and forced into a contradictory relationship (psychically and politically) as if they were incompatible and not coeval. This rhetorical move had dire consequences for those lives most burdened by it; those experiences of the colonized that were relegated into a forever distant place and time in the hierarchy of the modern world order (see Fabian, Time and the Other).

In this book, I narrowly redefine colonial modernity as the experience of modernity in colonial subjection, whether through actual colonial domination or the hegemonic power and occupation of the West, both real and imagined (psychic, political, economic, militaristic, territorial, etc.). Colonial modernity is defined as a disavowed conundrum shared between the colonizer and the colonized in Korea and Japan, and more broadly shared throughout the non- West, with troubling implications for postcolonial legacies into the present. Reframing our understanding of colonial modernity thus further allows us to think through intimate yet unexamined connections between the paradox of colonial modernity and the paradox of postcoloniality, as will be further examined in chapter 10.

This book considers the devastating implications of such disavowed yet intimate histories for the lived experience of the colonial modern subject and their legacies. The refusal to recognize the modernity of his or her experience violently imposed impasses and antinomies deep into the fabric of that life. The fundamental contradiction or impasse that the colonial modern subject was forced to negotiate on various levels, bodily, psychically, linguistically, and politically, is characterized in this book as a “conundrum of representation.” This conundrum of representation of the colonial modern subject will be examined using the case study of a body of imperial-l anguage texts by colonized cultural producers. These texts reflect the condition of modernity lived in the shadows of both direct colonial rule (by Japan in the case of Korea) as well as the omnipresent threat of Western imperialism (for both Korea and Japan). These are in essence (both literally and metaphorically) translated or self-d ivided representations emerging out of the social context of colonial unevenness, in which colonial cultural producers—artists and writers, for example—necessarily and strategically were compelled to borrow the language of the hegemonic imperial Other in an attempt to voice themselves and to have the Self heard at the imperial discursive table in the language of that imperial Other.

The conundrum of representation via the imperial language of the colonial modern experience translates, mimics, and illuminates anew what has become a truism to characterize the modern experience at large as a “crisis of representation.” This so-called universal crisis was said to arise from “the challenge of representing new content, the historical experiences of the modern world, in the context of changing social norms about the status of art and literature themselves.” In practice, this is said to have produced works of art and literature that displayed formal characteristics such as fragmentation, stream of consciousness, anxiety, and atomization, and thus revealing a lack of faith in language to represent “reality as is.”¹⁷ However, such a characterization was never meant to recognize the experiences of the colonial modern subject who is often relegated to the status of a mere object in canonical texts. In response, there have been numerous important interventions to document the coevalness in the modernist forms produced by non- Western artists. For example, Seiji Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese Modernism and the anthology Modanizumu (edited by William J. Tyler) have examined the case of Japanese modernism; Leo Ou- Fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern and Lure of the Modern by Shu- mei Shih examine the Chinese case; and more recently Theodore Hughes’s Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea and Christopher Hanscom’s The Real Modern consider the case of Korea. Following such important endeavors, this book asks: how would characterizations of artistic content and form translate across the imperial divide when we put the politics of the imperial language and translation at the center of the colonial modern impasse?

In other words, what is meant by the conundrum of representation here is both inspired by and translates beyond this oft- cited truism in modernity studies at large which, because of their myopic tendency toward a Western- centric view of modernism, elaborate a universal “crisis of representation” that is more about the psycholinguistic reaction to representing the fractured existence of modern life than to the geopolitical circumstances that might have grounded such a fracture in the first place. There have been numerous deconstructive critiques from within studies of European modernisms and their inherent blind spots, following such pioneering contributions as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Said’s Culture and Imperialism, and Jameson’s Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. This book joins these discussions to consider the intersection of modernity studies with postcolonial studies toward another path for understanding representations arising out of the modern experience of the colonized, which are to be sure just as fragmented, atomized, and rife with anxious stream of consciousness as are the works of Western colonizers, but which necessarily take on specific and salient forms (form and content) for the colonial modern subject such as Korean writers and their Japanese counterparts at the colonial contact zones in the shadows of Western standards of value.

For the “Rest” who were modern but were denied full recognition as such in the hegemonic but all- too provincial logic that equated modernity with the West, modernity was a self- contradictory experience.¹⁸ In this Eurocentric discourse, modernity itself was colonized and accepted as the purview of the West, and then “exported” to colonial Korea and semi- imperial Japan,¹⁹ and elsewhere in the non-W est. An instilled sense of the self as “belated” and “lacking” vis- à-vis a standard or value system set elsewhere—the self perceived and experienced as Other—is central to the colonial modern experience of the global majority, though never acknowledged as authentically modern in hegemonic discourses. This happens in degrees, infecting in concentric circles outward from imperial centers into the “non- West”; likewise, the “West” is not one. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in Provincializing Europe, for example, argues for the need to deconstruct Europe from within and without. Naoki Sakai’s ongoing interventions interrogating essentialism in multiple languages have been important (Translation and Subjectivity and Traces). Roberto Dainotto in Europe in Theory has critiqued the internal dynamics behind the formations of Others within Europe. In the Japanese empire, this sense of belatedness or Otherness is shared by both the colonized (Korea) and the colonizer (Japan), aligning and complicating the colonial binary relationship, in ways dissimilar to dynamics more common in the dominant European empires.

The conundrum of representation for the colonial modern subject is  mani fold:

1. Conundrum of (modern) subjectivity: The subjectivity and agency of the colonized become paradoxical as the requisite membership to the bounded nation-s tate (with its privileges) is stripped away from the colonized subject. The conundrum consists foremost in being modern yet being denied, not only discursively but institutionally and systemically, the most fundamental “rights” of modern subjecthood. Since the modern subject is invariably linked to the nation- state form, for those living under the threat or actuality of colonization, or the related predicaments of occupation, exile, and so forth, the lack or the constant fear of losing this requisite nation-s tate status through colonial subjection causes tremendous anxiety, collectively and individually.

2. Conundrum of language: In addition to the universal inability to represent reality as is through language, the colonial modern experience is further burdened by the coercive lure of the normative universality of the imperial language. For the colonial modern subject, the mother tongue is always an Other. In Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida begins a powerfully personal indictment starting at the scene of coloniality from the position of a postcolonial subject; however, he regrettably ends his musings by subsuming the predicament of the m(other) tongue into an amorphously broad “Universal” condition. I would like to keep in mind

the earlier parts of his critique and extend its relevance to the colonial modern subject’s constant need to translate the self as well as broader concepts into and from imperial cultures. Furthermore, the question of language is intimately connected to the question(s) of subjectivity and history.

3. Conundrum of history: For those relegated to the “waiting room of history” (those without history, according to Hegel), the question of who speaks for and passes down these histories has been wrought in controversy from the colonial to the postcolonial eras (Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe). As unbelievable as it may seem, the modernity and the “timeliness” of the colonized and the formerly colonized, once deemed belated and lacking, are still being contested today.²⁰

4. Conundrum of aesthetic representation of form and content: Violent metaphors of deracination, transplantation, and devouring inundate the anxiety of influence experienced by the colonized in their encounter with mighty empires. The pressure to translate native content into Western forms is tremendous and has continued long after the end of formal colonial rule. The tension between viewing art as an expression of the self or viewing it as a collective representative continues to haunt the artistic productions of the colonized and the formerly colonized. It is worth pointing out that such anxieties rarely plague those self-s ituated in civilizational centers. For example, the modernist artists and writers centering themselves within the West blithely borrowed “primitive” forms and content not only without anxiety but also without any qualms about whether to give credit where due. In the colonial modern experience, the questions of translating form and content become even more complex since the self is often perceived as Other. There is a deeply self-c onscious sense of alienation that emerges from the problem of translating the self as Other for an imperial or world audience in the hegemonic language of the Other.

5. Conundrum of recognition: Philosophical, civilizational, ethical, and political questions are implicated in the failure to accord recognition to the colonial modern experience as representations of human effort on multiple levels. The history of the global failure to account for these experiences persists from the colonial to the postcolonial, although involving different degrees of disavowal.

In his essay “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,”

Edward Said critiques prior claims to universality and links the declining legitimacy of Eurocentric perspectives to what he in turn calls the “crisis of modernism.”²¹ He locates the origins of this crisis not in universal artistic formalism, but in the ethical, political, and historical failures of hegemonic Eurocentric narratives. Said argues that these narratives that have claimed to represent universal modern experiences have utterly failed to take into account the humanity of [Europe’s] various Others. This glaring neglect, he charges, occurred over and over again, despite the fact that the “alterity and difference [which] are systematically associated with strangers, who, whether women, natives, or sexual eccentrics, erupt into vision . . . to challenge and resist settled metropolitan histories, forms, modes of thought.”²² Said critiques willful blindness of such metropolitan narratives as “paralyzed gestures of aestheticized powerlessness,” which assume a “self-c onscious contemplative passivity” and demonstrate the “formal irony of a culture unable to either say yes, we should give up control, or no, we shall hold on regardless.”²³ The prevailing reluctance of imperial powers to let go of their empires, territorially and psychically, and the postcolonial implications will be examined in chapter 10.

Unlike many metropolitan canonical texts, in their self-a ssured (although misguided) certainty of their centrality, identity, and self-s ameness, the imperial- language “representations of the colonized” never had the luxury of evading their constitutive imperial landscape, either on the textual or meta- textual levels. The writings of colonized writers who aspired to address the imperial discursive space are painfully marked by the paradoxes and contradictions of empire on every level—from the context of being produced under imperial rule and being consumed across a colonial divide; it is this conundrum of representation that emerged in the barred or disavowed condition of the colonial modern encounter. It is an experience shared across the colonial divide between Japan and Korea as well as by the majority of the world’s population but which has paradoxically been relegated to the devalued status of the particularity of the “minor,” or the minority, that this book proposes to engage. It is a conundrum fully embedded in the violent history of imperial encounters, but one which has been historically marginalized (from local, regional, and global markets, as well as discursive spaces) and only seldom taken seriously as a model or representation of “human effort”—to borrow Said’s phrasing—in the global modern experience.

Taking seriously Said’s critique of collective failures of understanding global modern experiences thus far, this book asks: how then might the modern experience translate differently when refracted through the prism of the perspective of those who had to live through it in colonial subjection? In other words, how might our collectively inherited myopia be illumined otherwise when we actually take into account those Others who have long been absented in prior narratives of modernity, according to Said’s critique? Also, how might familiar key terms from imperial encounters such as “collaboration” and “translation” take on new meanings when they are refracted through the parallax lens of the colonial modern encounter shared between the colonizer and the colonized and whose experiences were both deemed as translations of a Western originary modernity?

Deliberately translating and defamiliarizing universalist claims to modern experience at large, this book argues that the conundrum of representation in imperial-l anguage writings penned by the colonized writer for imperial or metropolitan audiences necessarily arises from a different sort of “self- consciousness” or “aestheticized powerlessness”—one which includes and extends far beyond the issues of literary formalism noted by Said.

Furthermore, this book examines an altogether different type of failure and blindness of insight in the colonial encounter: the inordinate labor of translation of colonial writers, embodied in the unacknowledged efforts of the colonized to translate themselves into the imperial language in an attempt to participate in the imperial discursive space. The (naïve?) hopes of the colonized to be heard at the imperial discussion table face- to-face with their subjugators, where their fates were determined, without self- determination, were ultimately crushed in the hierarchical structures undergirding empire.

The book chapters are organized around select “translated encounters” of transcolonial collaborations between the colonizers and the colonized. The question of “collaboration” is taken away from the binary rhetoric of the empire and nation (Naisen ittai and ch’inil) to reexamine mutual implications at the various scenes of the colonial encounter: the production, consumption, and repression of the so-called literature of collaboration written by colonial Korean writers predominantly in the Japanese- language for imperial audiences; the negotiations of colonial writers in their roles as translators, native informants, or (self-)ethnographers; the examination of such transcolonial coproductions as theatrical performances and roundtable discussions (zadankai, Japanese [hereafter J]; chwadamhoe, Korean [hereafter K]) between the colonizers and the colonized; and the mass media curation and reproduction of translated colonial literature and culture as kitsch objects of colonial collections, or assimilated as sites of imperial “locality” (chihō) in the expanding empire. These various forms and forums of colonial collaborations between the colonizers and the colonized and the history of their rise and repression offer us an essential key to understanding anew broadly shared but disavowed histories and legacies of imperial relations in Japan and Korea, the Asia-P acific, and beyond.

Ultimately, Intimate Empire pays attention to an archive of imperial- language writings by the colonized that have until now been marginalized in local and global theories and discourses on empire and modernity. Taking translation as both an object of inquiry and a tool of critical methodology, this book brings such translated texts into conversation with more familiar metropolitan terms.²⁴

In other words, this case study of Korea’s colonial encounter with Japan is offered not to provide a particular or aberrant example little known by its peripheral geographical location in obscurity and therefore in need of excavation or translation, but rather to reveal what was actively repressed to shed light back on and refract upon the blind spots of the center.²⁵ In paying attention to these hitherto disavowed efforts, this book will illuminate our collective failure to reckon with shared colonial pasts and will document how this failure not only devastated the individual authors and translators but also brought about detrimental national, regional, and global misunderstandings of empires past and present.

NOTES

Chapter 1. Colonial Modernity and the Conundrum of Representation

1.   Edward Said describes the “voyage- in” thus: “[It is a] powerful impingement, that is the work of intellectuals from the colonial or peripheral regions who wrote in an imperial language.” Culture and Imperialism, 243. See chapter 3: “Resistance and Opposition,” particularly section 6, “Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition,” 239– 61. Said is mindful of the moments of resistance and opposition to imperialism produced from its margins. While my focus is on a wide range of complex affects, not necessarily unequivocally resistant or oppositional, at work in the colonial interaction, I hope to open up a space through the critical encounter in which to read these affects oppositionally in order to critique imperial logic.

2.   Many personal and place names are rendered simultaneously in Japanese and Korean readings in this book because the Sino- Korean/Japanese characters may be read as either/or. Unless marked by glosses by the author, their indeterminacy in the majority of written texts is significant. The name is glossed as Bunkichi in “Aika” but even in such cases, echoes of plural reading possibilities coexist.

3.   The English translation by John Wittier Treat appears as part of a welcome retro-spective on Yi Kwangsu. I have relied on Treat’s masterful translation here with some minor modifications. Yi Kwangsu, “Maybe Love (Ai ka),” in Azalea. This passage is from 321– 22. For the Korean translation, see Yi Kwangsu, “Saranginga,” translated by Kim Yunsik, in Munhak sasang, 442– 46.

4.   I discuss intimate textual and metatextual intercourse or interconnections through-out the book. By metatextual intercourse, I am referring to the text’s intimate relationship to extratextual elements beyond the narrative content such as the language and form in which the story was written as well as broader transnational historical contexts and social circumstances within which the text was produced and consumed.

5.   The story was published under Yi’s given name, Yi Pogyŏng, in the student coterie journal Shirogane gakuhō of Meiji Gakuin the year before Korea’s annexation by Japan. Yi, “Aika,” 35– 41. I discuss the significance of what I call the “colonized- I- novel” in chapter 3.

6.   See Kim, Yi Kwangsu wa kŭ ŭi sidae. See also Treat’s translation, “Maybe Love (Ai ka),” for an excellent rendering into English and for emphasizing this important link. Other themes that will become canonical to modern Korean literature are the anguish of youth as the paradigmatic modern subject; absence of the love object (both allegorically and literally); and the unacknowledged but prevalent connection to Japan and Japanese, in form and content.

7.   Throughout the book, I refer to the contentiously shared legacies of Korea and Japan’s colonial relations as “postcolonial.” The concept of the postcolonial is itself contested and paradoxical as pointed out by many. I will defer to chapter 10 a more theoretical engagement with the problems of the postcolonial in East Asia and elsewhere, and here use this term to signify both a temporal aftermath, following the colonial era (post- 1945 in this case) as well as the contending responses to the colonial conditions and ongoing legacies in Korea and Japan.

8.   “Saranginga,” translated by Kim Yunsik, in Munhak sasang, 442– 46.

9.   Kurokawa, ed., “Gaichi,” no Nihongo bungakusen, vol. 3, 21– 26.

10.             Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 43– 44; Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho- Analysis, 118–2 1.

11.             For a pioneering study on the context of Taiwan, see Ching, Becoming “Japanese.”

12.             How do these experiences relate to the erasure of the fates of the so-called comfort women and conscripted soldiers who were mobilized to die for the empire? Writers like Yi Kwangsu were at the forefront of mobilizing soldiers. See Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, Fujitani, Race for Empire, and Kawashima, The Proletariat Gamble, for nuanced studies about these historical aporias.

13.             Also known as the Mukden Incident. On September 18, 1931, the Japanese army staged a bombing of a small area on the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden, and then blamed the Chinese as a pretext to invade northern China. A puppet regime of Manchukuo was subsequently established and, after censure from the global community, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations.

14.             Komagome, “Colonial Modernity for an Elite Taiwanese, Lim Bo- Seng.”

15.             The Korean- language translation of Shin and Robinson’s aforementioned book is titled Korea’s Colonial Modernity: Beyond Internal Development and Colonial Modernization. Also see Chŏng Yŏnnae, Hanguk kŭndae wa singminji kŭndaehwa nonjaeng.  16. Jameson, Singular Modernity; Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Ching, Becoming “Japanese”; Spivak, Other Asias; Mignolo, Darker Side of Western Modernity; Yun, Singminji kŭndae ŭi p’aerŏdoksŭ.

17.             See Lewis, Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, 1– 34.

18.             Hall, “The West and the Rest”; Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique” and “You Asians.”

19.             Japan’s ambivalent status in relation to other imperial powers as the sole non- Western imperial power is rendered as semi- imperial, akin to the ambivalent semicolonial status of some colonies in between multiple imperial powers.

214   •        notes to chapter 1

20.For a cogent critique, see Harootunian, “ ‘Modernity’ and the Claims of Untimeli-ness,” 367– 82.

21.Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 200, 293– 316, 313.

22.Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 313.

23.Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 315.

24.My aim here is not to impose so-called Western theory on a different world expe-rience in uncritical ways. Yet given the hegemony of theories of modernity which emerge from the Western experience—and the hegemony of Western theory generally—it is as impossible for postcolonial thinkers today to evade these terms and conditions as it was for the colonial subjects with whose thoughts this chapter engages. Rather than reinvent the wheel, however, I seek to retool these theories by putting other global experiences in conversation with and in contention with them—a process that inevitably exposes their limitations and occasional hubris.

25.See, for example, Rey Chow, “Things, Common/Places, Passages of the Port City: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong Author Leung Ping- kwan” on postcolonial Hong Kong.

Chapter 2. Translating Korean Literature

1. Some scholars stress the significance of the year 1937, as it marked Japan’s invasion of China and the implementation of new policies of war mobilization under the Konoe Home Ministry (the first Konoe cabinet was established in June 1937).

Others prefer the year 1938, which marked the launch of Governor General Minami Jirō’s (1874– 1955) increasingly harsh assimilation policies; while others again favor the period from 1939 to the early 1940s, when censorship of Korean- language media intensified, and Japanese- language texts by Koreans rapidly increased in volume.

2. Gaichi, literally means outer territories. It can also be translated as colony, hinter-lands, and so forth.

3. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea; Yi Yŏn- suk, Kokugo to iu shisō.

4. For Korea, see Paek, Chosŏn sinmunhak sajosa, 398– 99; Im, Ch’inil munhak non; Chŏng, “Yi Kwangsu, Kim Saryang no Nihongo Chōsengo shōsetsu”; Chŏng,

Hanguk kŭndae ŭi singminji ch’ehŏm kwa ijung ŏnŏ munhak; Kim Yunsik, Ilche malgi

Hangguk chakka ŭi Ilbonŏ kŭlssŭgi non; Lee Kyoung- Hoon [Yi Kyŏnghun], Yi

Kwangsu ŭi ch’inil munhak yŏngu; Kim, Chul [Kim Ch’ŏl], Kungmunhak ŭl nŏmŏsŏ; Kim Chaeyong, Hyŏmnyŏk kwa chŏhang; Yun Taesŏk, “1940 nyŏndae ‘kungmin munhak’ yŏngu”; and Yun Taesŏk, Singminji kungmin munhak non.

                 For Japan, see Im Chŏnhye, Nihon ni okeru Chōsenjin no bungaku no rekishi; and An Usik, Hyōden Kin Shiryō. See also Isogai Jirō and Kuroko Kazuo, eds., Zainichi bungaku zenshū. Some recent literary histories have also begun to deal with resident Korean literature in substantial ways: see, for example, Inoue Hisashi and Komori Yōichi, eds., Zadankai Shōwa bungakushi. Other works that have contributed significantly to the issue are Hayashi Kōji, Zainichi Chōsenjin Nihongo bungakuron; Ōmura Masuo and Hotei Toshihiro, eds., Kindai Chōsen Nihongo sakuhinshū 1901– 1938; Shirakawa Yutaka, “Chang Hyŏkchu yŏngu”; Shirakawa, Shokuminchiki Chōsen no sakka to Nihon; and Nam Pujin, Bungaku no shokuminchishugi.

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