PARK CHUNG HEE AND MODERN KOREA: The Roots of Militarism 1866–1945 | By Carter J. Eckert | Pacific Affairs

PARK CHUNG HEE AND MODERN KOREA: The Roots of Militarism 1866–1945 | By Carter J. Eckert | Pacific Affairs



BOOK REVIEWS, NORTHEAST ASIA


VOLUME 91 – NO. 2




PARK CHUNG HEE AND MODERN KOREA: The Roots of Militarism 1866–1945 | By Carter J. Eckert


Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. xii, 472 pp., [20] pp. of plates. (Maps, illustrations.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-65986- 475.

This book is divided into two parts: the first is about the development of Park Chung Hee as a military officer, while the second traces the roots of South Korea’s modernization from the 1960s under President Park Chung Hee. The book’s first part, titled “Contexts,” consists of “Militarizing Time,” “Militarizing Minds,” and “Militarizing Places and Persons,” while the book’s second part is composed of “Politics and Status,” “Politics and Power,” “State and Society,” “Tactics and Spirit,” and “Order and Discipline.”

Although Chosŏn society had a strong tradition that “esteem[ed] civil literati culture (mun) while looking down on all things associated with the military (mu)” (56), the necessity of reforming effete Chosŏn society was gaining in urgency in the face of a growing crisis emanating from outside Korea and which accompanied the global militarization process. This process of reform also helped produce male-centered, racist martial notions that were often laced with and buttressed by Social Darwinist concepts.

In 1896, a Korean military academy was established during the Korean emperor’s refuge in the Russian Embassy. This attracted the best-qualified young Korean men between 18 and 27 years of age regardless of social background. These were the products of the first wave of militarization in premodern Korean society, and this wave of military training continued even after Korea’s annexation by Japan in 1910, and up until the Korean Independence Movement of March 1919.

The second wave began in the 1920s, in particular through the Japanese-imposed mandatory military training in schools, something that was supported by Korean cultural nationalists. Although the military training was regulated by the Japanese government-general in Korea without any public consensus, the Dong-A Daily, the most popular Korean newspaper at the time, published an editorial in support of the training. The first educational institutions to start the training were normal schools and commercial schools, including the Taegu Normal School where Park Chung Hee was educated.

Another catalyst of militarization in the colonial period was the Manchurian Incident of 1931. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo provided an opportunity for Koreans to raise their status and power, particulary those who entered the Japanese military, for military life attracted men, like Park, who “cherished ambition” (87–88). The Manchurian Military Academy (MMA), which emulated the Japanese Military Academy (JMA), was a melting pot composed mainly of ethnic groups from Manchuria, Japan, and Korea, and provided an opportunity for the best students, including those from poor families. In sum, the development of the military officer Park Chung Hee does not just tell the story of one individual’s trajectory; it is emblematic of the social discourse of the period in the first part of this book.

The second part of the book presents a precise examination of the MMA. The influence and impact of the curricula of and life in the MMA on Park was the most important root of the prototype of South Korean social norms in the 1960s and 1970s as established by President Park. The author stresses the atmosphere in Japanese society in the 1930s, when ambitious young military officers attempted several military coups and social reforms to carry out the so-called Shōwa Restoration. The military’s intervention in politics seemed not to violate social and political norms. Moreover, Korea’s Chosŏn Dynasty was established through a coup in 1392 and the short-lived Kapsin Coup in 1884 was positively portrayed during the colonial period. According to the author, such precedents made it possible for Park to implement a military coup in 1961 with the object of saving South Korean society. The Japanese officers who were involved in failed coups of 1930s Japan moved on to Manchukuo, where they played critical roles not only in key institutions like the South Manchurian Railway, but also in the Manchukuo Government and the MMA. The MMA cadets were trained under the idea of total war, which might be positioned as between socialism/communism and the ideals of the Shōwa Restoration, as the author points out.

The author further argues that 1970s Korean society was an incarnation of MMA ideas. As a Japanese government publication expressed it during the Asia-Pacific War, the essence of the total war idea was “to activate the fundamental energies of national growth and development” and to link “defense and economy inseparably” (213). The total-war system had two prerequisites. One was the reform and regulation of the economy, which would “introduce state planning and coordination over the entire range of the economy” and “ensure the ‘full capacity’ of the nation in all areas could be ‘mobilized and uniformly exercised’” (213). The second prerequisite was psychological mobilization, where businessmen served the state interests and people lived under a unitary sense of “mutual dependency” and “national co-existence and co-prosperity,” adhering to the so-called idea of total-war thinking (213–216). The psychological side was connected with the ideas of “certainty of victory,” “can-do” spirit, and “no slacking,” which are mentioned in the latter part of the book.

In conclusion, the author argues that among the MMA Korean graduates, no one embraced this ethos more thoroughly and enthusiastically than Park Chung Hee, and he and his fellow alumni found “a home in South Korea and Korea’s martial lineage, honed at the MMA in Lalatun and JMA in Zama, gained a new lease on life” (322), despite the fact that the legacies of the MMA and JMA vanished in Japan.

Starting from 1990, the author conducted countless interviews with individuals involved in the military academies at Lalatun and Zama, and cites an impressive range of primary sources and works in Chinese, as well as in English, Korean, and Japanese. In addition, through fieldwork in the former locations of the MMA and the JMA, Eckert is able to vividly describe the geographical characteristics of these sites in order to illustrate the conditions of the cadets at the time. However, I wonder how the author might, in the second volume of this study dealing with Park post-1945, tally his own logic regarding war criminals during the Asia-Pacific War with the creation of another “total-war system” in post-1945 South Korea, a system accompanied by its own inevitable security crises and human rights violations. Park’s activities after his commission as a second lieutenant, which was not clearly detailed in this study, will be a key part of that logic. For answers, researchers must await the next volume in this series, which will detail the third wave of militarization in Korean society after 1945.

Tae-Gyun Park
Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

---

Last Revised: August 30, 2018