CULTURES OF YUSIN: South Korea in the 1970s | Edited by Youngju Ryu | Pacific Affairs

CULTURES OF YUSIN: South Korea in the 1970s | Edited by Youngju Ryu | Pacific Affairs



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VOLUME 93 – NO. 1




CULTURES OF YUSIN: South Korea in the 1970s | Edited by Youngju Ryu


Perspectives on Contemporary Korea. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018. vi, 320 pp. (Table, B&W photos, illustration.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-472-05396-4.

Youngju Ryu’s edited volume of essays, Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s, is a welcome supplement and counterpoint to earlier recent collections on developmental dictatorship and the Park Chung Hee era (Yi Pyŏngch’ŏn, ed., Kaebal tokchae wa Pak Chŏnghŭi sidae: uri sidae ŭi chŏngch’i-kyŏngjejŏk kiwŏn, Seoul: Ch’angbi, 2003; translated into English as Lee Byeong-cheon, ed., Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-hee Era: The Shaping of Modernity in the Republic of Korea, Paramus: Homa & Sekey, 2006; and Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel, eds., The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea, Cambridge: Harvard, 2013). The Yusin era (1972–1979), from the promulgation of the Yusin Constitution that formalized Park Chung Hee’s dictatorship, to his assassination by the director of his own apparatus of totalitarianism, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), was a period of profound anti-democracy and rapid industrialization. To borrow Prasenjit Duara’s phrase, the essays in this new collection are attempts at “rescuing history from the nation.” While the collected essays embark from the common acknowledgment of Park Chung Hee’s monolithic Yusin culture as both the constructive and detrimental foundation for contemporary Korea, the authors consciously employ a post-nostalgic perspective after the popular rejection of “Yusin Redux” with the Candlelight Revolution (2016–2017) that ended the presidency of the dictator’s daughter. The plural Cultures of Yusin explores ideas and spaces that were not necessarily oppositional, but informal, peripheral, or alternative to the prescribed Yusin “cultural project of hypernationalization” (12).

Ryu bookends the collection with the observation that Koreans and scholars of Korea are no longer constrained by the Yusin paradigm “that posited development and democracy in largely oppositional terms” (288). She notes the ironic pattern underlying the April Student Revolution (1960) and the June Democratic Uprising (1987) that occurred before and after the Yusin era, that radical progressives did not directly win the support of the masses, but that it was the heavy-handed government reaction against radical progressives that moved the masses, conservative by default, to effectively support the reformers. While relatively absent of violence, there was a similarly ironic pattern behind the recent Candlelight Revolution. Largely as a product of relentless state conditioning, many South Koreans had for decades persistently responded to the dislocation of ambiguity and modernity with an abstract nostalgia for Park Chung Hee and Yusin culture, the illusory certainty of dictatorship and development. Progressives largely failed to discourage such nostalgia, as the “assessment of Park as a ‘great’ president [was] widely shared by both supporters and critics alike” (4). Only when the abstract was made concrete by his daughter’s presidency, did the delusional appeal of Yusin culture self-destruct. In four short years, Park Geun-hye went from riding a popular presidential election victory, to weekly demonstrations of millions of Koreans demanding her resignation and prosecution.

The chapters cover diverse subjects, but two overlapping themes are prevalent, one of literal and metaphorical spaces beyond the reach of the Yusin regime’s coercive social control, and the other, an antagonism of individualism versus national collectivism. Eunhee Park describes the significance of informal kye (rotating credit associations) that never became successfully incorporated into the formal banking system, but grew to ubiquitous popularity, particularly among lower and middle-class women, contributing not only to mass prosperity, but also serving as a lifeline for small and medium size enterprises—all neglected by the Yusin regime’s obsession with big businesses in the “Big Push” for heavy industrialization. Several authors explore imagined spaces previously neglected by scholars of the Yusin era. Irhe Sohn describes “Techniscope action movies,” including popular martial arts “Westerns” set in the hinterlands of colonial Manchuria, of untamed individualism that appealed to lower-class men. Sunyoung Park explores alternate realities in science fiction, and Joan Kee alternate possibilities in performance art. Se-Mi Oh describes the celebrated Yusin architect Kim Swoo-geun’s “Master Plan” for the modern capital which was left incompletely realized because of Park’s anti-communist aesthetic. Han Sang Kim describes how the liberal Western ideal of homeownership, filtered through an emerging “my home” (maihōmu) owning Japanese middle class, into a frustrating Korean fantasy that still generates antiestablishment resentment.

Won Kim describes how even progressive intellectuals who had originally founded journals like Ch’angbi in the 1960s with “pro-Western tendencies” (37) of privileging modernism over tradition, nevertheless succumbed to using the state’s own vocabulary of nationalism in competing with the Yusin state in the 1970s by embracing native progressivism in “national literature” and “sprouts of capitalism” as a consequence of Koreanness becoming constrained by popular anti-colonialism and the illiberal state’s anti-Westernism. There were inherent contradictions that ultimately made Yusin totalitarianism unrealizable no matter how much coercion, torture, and murder was applied. Park was force fitting a Meiji Japanese model of industrial development, social control, and ethnic nationalism, which became necessarily anti-Japanese because Korean sovereignty had to be independent and anti-colonial. Ryu quotes Janet Poole’s description of fascism as “the desire for a kind of capitalism without capitalism… the dream of capitalism without its excesses” (11). Park’s “Korean-style democracy” (Han’guk-sik minjujuŭi) was literally without democracy, the dream of a society without individuals. Serk-bae Suh describes a particularly empowering phenomenon in which subversive writers like Kim Chi-ha and others inverted the common paradigm of Jesus as an omnipotent authority into Jesus as an impotent supplicant in need of human rescue. This form of humanism posited the agency and responsibility for saving the people in the hands of the people and not a higher authority, divine or political.

The essays in this edited volume are nuanced but accessible, and Ryu does an admirable job in bridging a coherence to the different narratives. The authors are relatively young scholars, and there is no doubt there will be more on the subject forthcoming. Meanwhile, this work elevates the critical discourse on Yusin in the sense of rescuing history as a step toward constructive progress.

Tae Yang Kwak

Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, USA

Last Revised: February 28, 2020