Book Review: Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945 by Carter J. Eckert – RMHP

Book Review: Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945 by Carter J. Eckert – RMHP




Book Review: Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945 by Carter J. Eckert
Rachel Minhee Park in Literature, Reviews December 29, 2016 1,049 Words



I’ve been slowly chipping away at this book for about a month and finally got to finish it during the holidays. It was… an interesting read to say the least, and it felt very fateful to read it during this time (in case you haven’t been following the news, his daughter, Park Geun-hye was the first female president of South Korea and was recently impeached). It was a little eerie because the book also includes pictures of various figures Eckert describes in his book, and there was a picture of Park Chung hee and Park Geun hye as a little girl together on an outing in the country just being normal. It’s precisely this normalcy that is so unsettling – it looks like it could be a picture in one of my own family albums and yet here are two of the most controversial figures of South Korea’s past and present.

Anyways, this book came out very recently (just last month I believe) and I bought it because of my personal research interests which revolve around art and literature under authoritarian regimes. In fact, I wrote about President Park Chung-hee’s rule in my undergraduate thesis because in many ways, he was one of South Korea’s most militaristic and authoritarian leaders. And while he could perhaps be credited for modernizing South Korea and “saving” its economy in the post-war years, he also did a lot of atrocious, terrible things in the name of saving the nation. But I also strongly believe that the world is not black and white; its mostly different shades of grey and so it is up to us to always educate ourselves to the best of our abilities and come to our own conclusions. And so with that in mind, I picked up this book and hoped to find out more about this weirdly mythologized figure of South Korea, whom I studied only in the context of his presidency, but never really before that.

Overall, I found the book interesting and informative, but maybe because I came into it with the expectation that it would be about Park Chung hee and his life specifically that I came away a little disappointed. Eckert’s book is not so much about Park Chung hee’s life as it is about the development of the military as an institution in East Asia during the early 20th century. He uses Park Chung hee more as a temporal frame and entry point into the history of the military (the Imperial Japanese Army and the Manchurian Military Academy). This history is certainly useful in that it gives a unique insight and perspective into the mindset of Park Chung hee and other MMA (Manchurian Military Academy) graduates and perhaps “humanizes” him a bit more. We hear about the strict physical and mental training that the cadets at the academy had to go through, about the extraordinary global circumstances that made the Japanese military the heart of Japan’s national identity, and the complex position Korean cadets were in as the colonized of the Japanese, yet also fighting for the Japanese in their army. Basically, shit was really crazy – they made you keep journals and then the commanding officers would read them and make comments and punish you if a thought was seen as bad or unworthy of someone in the military. One cadet told another cadet to kill himself because of a dishonorable action and the other cadet (very reasonably I thought) told him he was crazy. So the other cadet cut him with a sword and ran away. Later, thinking that he had killed his fellow comrade and filled with shame and dishonor, he ended up killing himself. Yeah, these are only a couple of examples.

I think that the name of this book gives the wrong impression and is misleading, but I also heard that this is only volume one, so perhaps the subsequent volumes will align better with the name. If you go into this book expecting a detailed account of Park Chung hee’s life and his rise to power, you will be disappointed. Rather, you should expect a rich and thorough detailing of how the Manchurian Military Academy was developed and how its curriculum shaped the mindset of all the people that attended, including Park Chung hee. Eckert is undoubtedly a great writer and historian and I appreciate the way that he distills such a complex history that spans centuries and countries into a cohesive narrative. I also really liked his gesture of starting each chapter with a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a quote from an institution, and then a quote from Park Chung hee himself. For instance, Chapter One, “Militarizing Time: Waves of War” begins with the following epigraphs:


Are you not moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

The present time is clearly like the period of Warring States, with every country contending for wealth and power. – King Kojong, 1881

Looking at conditions today, both internal and external, we cannot help but feel keenly a gravity and urgency beyond anything we have known before. – Park Chung Hee, October 1, 1961.

In this way, Eckert gives each chapter and section of the book a cohesive thesis and unifying thesis (plus I’m also a huge fan of epigraphs but always get a ton of shit for using them so props to Eckert for bringing them back). And in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense for Eckert to frame the book in this more general way than to focus simply on Park Chung Hee: the military shaped a whole generation of military leaders and set the stage for the numerous militaristic leaders that would seize power in South Korea – not just Park Chung hee, but the many that also followed him. So despite my initial feelings of disappointment, I am very glad I read this book and learned about a history and institution that is often ignored or overlooked when studying South Korea. I would hope that the newfound emphasis Eckert places on the military as the foundation of South Korea and its development leads to new paths of study and perspectives on a nation that has been through much turmoil both in the past, and currently in the present.