JINI KIM WATSON
The world has become a smaller place, forcing people in all corners of the earth to compete with each other.
(Pak Unshik, 1906)
Introduction
Compared with the European empires, Japan was without doubt a latecomer to colonial expansion: its territories by 1931 were limited both in number and population, consisting of Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto (Sakhalin), the Kwantung Territories, Nanyo (the South Sea Islands) and the puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria). Yet, with the addition of the Chinese territories and the extensive regions of South East Asia acquired in the early 1940s, Japan’s eventual empire boasted some 400 million subjects*three-quarters the size of the British Empire.2 It has been pointed out that many of these latter territories were acquired opportunistically as their European colonial masters withdrew, but the lack of recognition of Japan as a colonising country, rather than wartime aggressor, has tended*until very recently*to hinder analysis of its former colonies as ‘postcolonial’ states.3 Japanese colonialism may be differentiated in that it initially colonised neighbouring territories and peoples of a similar race and cultural background (other East Asians with ties to Chinese civilisation) and, as Leo Ching points out, the Allies’ absolute victory in World War II stripped Japan of its colonies and subsequently turned it into an occupied country.4The field of postcolonial studies, once primarily focused on ex-British and French colonies, haswidened considerably in the last decade or so and this has drawn attention to the complexities of Japan’s hitherto overlooked imperial career;5 for example, recent work has been done on Taiwan’s postcolonial status, and Tani E Barlow has designated China as ‘semi-colonial’. Yet, Japan’s two long-time former colonies*Korea and Taiwan*are more usually considered (and indeed celebrated) in terms of modernisation studies, the Area Studies subfield in which industrialisation, urbanisation, rationalisation of the economy, and linkage to the global market are all simply undertaken in the name of ‘ ‘‘political development’’ toward the explicit or implicit goal of [American-style] liberal democracy’.6 If East Asia has been all but ignored by postcolonial studies, we might say it has been over-privileged by modernisation studies.
Focusing on just one of these sites, this essay begins with the question: how might a properly postcolonial understanding of present-day South Korea be furthered by consideration of its status as preferred object of modernisation studies and ‘Asian Tiger’ success story? And, more specifically, in what ways does the history of Japanese imperialism and racism intersect with neocolonial discourses of modernisation and development? While I will briefly trace some of the historical forms of Japanese imperialism*its emergence in competition with European powers, its status of exceptionality, and reliance on nineteenth-century discourses of ethnography*I want finally to consider its more current effects in the disciplines of post-war Area Studies and modernisation theory. In other words, I investigate the ‘fit’ between forms of scientific racism introduced under Japanese colonialism and the evolutionary ladder of development naturalised today in accounts of Korea’s modernisation.
In analysing the Japan!Korea relationship from this perspective, I both use and test the limits of certain established theoretical tools of postcolonial studies. While the theme of anti-colonialism has certainly been fundamental to the building of a national consciousness in both of Japan’s long-time colonies, Korea and Taiwan, the dominant tropes of postcolonial theory, including hybridity, the critique of Eurocentrism, and deconstructive analyses of power, have neither emerged from, nor taken root within, the context of East Asia. In bringing workon this region into dialogue with more recognised postcolonial theorisations, however, my aim is not to confirm their universal applicability. Rather, I argue that certain aspects of the colonial relation, in particular the Eurocentric notions of progress and race that Japanese imperialism relied on, have been under-analysed in East Asia and remain unquestioned in their modern incarnations. Beyond simply searching for the historical roots of Japan’s exceptionality as an Asian imperial power, this study both analyses how the ‘fundamental structure of the relation between colonizer and colonized’7 is manifested in a specific, non-European context, and examines the endurance of the racial epistemologies it produced.
Competing imperialisms and imperial mimicry
Asia is, and can be one, only under the imperial eyes of the West.8
An enormous amount has been written on the Meiji period (1868!1912) of Japanese history, an era of spectacular growth and the rapid adoption of European technologies. Formed within this period, Japan’s colonising impulses must be understood as an integral part of the country’s effort to modernise through Westernisation. In the intensely competitive geopolitical situation of the late nineteenth century, a Japanese-led counterforce against the West was perceived as the only means of resisting European domination of the globe. In 1887 the Japanese Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru urged:
what we must do is to transform our empire and our people, make the empire like the countries of Europe and our people like the peoples of Europe. To put it differently, we have to establish a new, European-style empire on the edge of Asia.9
After attaining Taiwan (Formosa) in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, further regional control through the defeat of Russia in 1904, and then rule over the Korean peninsula in 1910, Japan felt itself elevated to the ranks of the great Western imperial powers, and regarded its first colony as ‘a symbol of the nation’s equality with the West and of its participation in the great work of modern civilization’.10 In the struggle for pieces of China, European-style imperialism was confirmed as the order of the day and Japan set out to not only emulate it, but surpass it. Several historians have noted, however, that the centuries-old national imaginary that went along with European colonisation simply did not exist in Japan; in Jansen’s phrase, ‘there were no Japanese Kiplings’.11 As a result, along with modern economic theories, Western, and particularly British, colonialist thought and practices were actively studied and appropriated (right down to copying British colonial uniforms and architecture), and a chair in Colonial Studies at Tokyo University was established.12 Taiwan and Korea played typical colonial roles as providers of raw materials (rice, sugar and minerals), labour and markets for the expansion of resource-poor Japan. Not long after Japan had reinvented its own state institutions on the model of Western imperial nations, it implemented similar reforms in its colonies. Results included modern education, finance, trade and transport systems, the rationalist replanning of the colonial capitals Seoul and Taipei, and the construction of grand, neo-Baroque administration buildings and governor’s mansions as symbols of Japan’s imperial power.13
When considering the kind of postcolonial critical tools which might interrogate or deconstruct Japanese colonial thinking and practices, the first difficulty isin recognisingthat thelatter’s origins arenotin Japan. Postcolonial scholars note that Japanese colonialism was at once the purest face of colonial brutality, and colonialism’s mere imitation. In Chungmoo Choi’s words:
Japanese imperialism reproduced the fictionality of the European colonial discourse. It was a pastiche of the European Enlightenment. Japanese imperialism simulated and reproduced this grand but empty narrative, in yet another form of colonialism, not with any Enlightenment pretense but through a pastiche of colonization.14
When understood as mere pastiche, however, the attempt to ‘unbuild’ the logic of Japanese colonial domination is stymied at the first step. If Japan’s greatest crime was the defensive desire, against US and European domination, for a ‘European-style empire on the edge of Asia’, it is easy for the critical moment to be simply deferred to the original, European colonial system and the interest in Japan reduced to the study of an aberration among colonial histories. Our task here is, then, to analyse the cross-cultural currency of colonialist justifications and rhetoric, and the longevity of those racialised conceptions of nation and culture despite their apparent ‘second-order’status.
The specific challenges in understanding Japanese colonialism become clearer when relating it to postcolonial theories developed in the context of European ex-colonies, such as Homi Bhabha’s seminal account of colonial mimicry and its destabilising effect on authority. Bhabha defines colonial mimicry as ‘the [colonist’s] desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’.15 While this certainly applies to the Japanese attempts to assimilate the Koreans and Taiwanese and bring them out of their ‘stagnating’ culture, this is predicated on the prior moment of Japan’s mimicking the West in its imperialist project. The structure of colonial mimicry is thus anticipated by the form of imperial mimicry.
Harry Harootunian has commented on the particular dilemma that this prior mimicry has produced for historians. Despite the Meiji period’s modern reinvention of Japan, which secured for it ‘diplomatic and political recognition earlier and sooner than any country of Europe, it was still seen as a latecomer, whose ‘‘imitated’’ achievements remained superficial’. Because of this,
The ambiguity confronting historians is the problem of accounting for this experience, which either was assimilated into the history of Western modernity as a late but superficial imitation or was seen as a moment in the modernizing process that might permit it to catch up with the West.16
What we see here are the very epistemological origins of post-war modernisation theory: postcolonial nations are assumed to be on the road of ‘catch-up’ with the developed world via the implementation of Western institutions of state and economy. While Japan’s post-war economic ‘miracle’ was taken as the irrefutable proof of such a catch-up, I will show that this logic of success is both historically and theoretically dependent on the earlier moment of imperial mimicry. Elsewhere, Harootunian has explained the logic of modernisation theory as it developed in Cold War US social sciences:
Owing to this epistemological failure [the elimination of the long duration of history], a different kind of social science capable of explaining development and change was required, especially one that might offer an alternative to Marxian conflict models and its conception of revolutionary transformation. This was provided by structuralist-functionalism, which in the 1950s rearticulated the Social Darwinist conception of evolutionary adaptation and development and was reconfigured into an export model of growth that was called modernization and convergence theory.17
In order to see the tautological nature of such a model, it is crucial for us to recognise the earlier ‘convergence’ of Japanese imperial mimicry, modernisation and Social Darwinism; that is, what are those evolutionary assumptions that allowed Japan to seamlessly move from territory-hungry empire to modernisation theory’s triumph*and to what effect on its former colonies?
It is here that the ambiguity of Japan’s imperial status as the subalternising or subalternised is conveniently skewed through Japan’s double ideological position: it is both able to identify with the West (as an equal, colonising power) and against it (it is the frontline of Asian resistance against Western domination).18 As we have seen, on the one hand, the Japanese are collectively in a similar structural position to Fanon’s native elite to whom the white coloniser extends ‘exceptional’ status*but within a structure of mimicry at the geopolitical, rather than colonial, level. Bhabha quotes Fanon: ‘You’re a doctor, a writer, a student, you’re different, you’re one of us.’19 Along these lines, Japan is construed as different from the rest of Asia and therefore on a par with Europe (it enjoyed a prestigious treaty of alliance with England from 1902 to 1923, for example), by virtue of its modern military and imperial successes, especially its victory over Russia. On the other hand, Japan’s 1910 annexation of Korea was partly couched in terms of protecting and modernising its Asian neighbour, indicating Japan’s defensive participation in the anti-colonial struggle and ensuring that its own expansion could not be construed as colonial aggression.20 Put simply, Japan’s interstitial identity as most advanced Asian (or least Asian) nation allows it this flexible geopolitical stance. The appropriate descriptor for imperial latecomers such as Japan and the US is Walter Mignolo’s notion of ‘colonialism with two eyes’21*one looking defensively towards potential colonisers and one looking opportunistically to potential colonies. What is to be stressed, however, is that for Japan, both these positions turn on a thoroughly modern employment of scientific racism that privileges Europeans; in the first, Japan proclaims solidarity with its neighbours on the basis of a newly-available, racialised Asian identity against the West (‘we are your protective Asian brothers’), while in the second Japan is ‘almost white’ (‘we have joined the club of European colonial powers’).
We see here how Japan is already figured as a kind of ‘hybrid’: as part of the backwards East, it must imitate the technologically and scientifically superior Europeans in order to become a civilising coloniser with the ‘moral’ obligation to reform its own inferiors, namely, its Asian neighbours. It is precisely here*at the scene of conflict with, and desire for, the West*that the Japanese national identity emerges, in Bhabha-esque fashion, ‘by virtue of the processes of iteration and translation through which [its] meanings are very vicariously addressed to*through*an Other’,22 that is, the West.23 Accordingly, history textbooks in imperial Japan were written to ‘foster the character and attitude of conquerors and to educate Japanese people that Japan had progressed to the extent that it had by extricating itself from Asia’ (emphasis added).24 It is precisely this teleological movement ‘up and beyond’ a backwards Asia that has the deepest resonances with modernisation studies.
By the late 1930s, Japan’s empire had begun to expand into areas not so clearly culturally or racially ‘related’ as Korea, Taiwan and China, forcing a corresponding change in ideology. In 1940, the foreign minister Matsuoka Yosuke named his new vision for a Pan-Asian unified polity the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’,25 now evoking ‘close’*but not the same*races, histories, geographies and economies. Most striking in this new program is the way it was again driven by Japan’s necessary comparison of ‘Asia’ to the powerful West, and the sense that this time it would be the vanguard, not the follower,ofanewworldorder.In1942PrimeMinisterTojoHidekiannounced,
it is truly an unprecedentedly grand undertaking that our Empire should, by adding [the regions in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere], establish everlasting peace in Greater East Asia based on a new conception, which will mark a new epoch in the annals of mankind, and proceed to construct a new world order along with our allies and friendly powers in Europe.26
Despite its benevolent claims, this amounted to a political structure in which, as Lieutenant Motizuki informed the recently acquired Philippines, ‘all the races in Greater East Asia can express themselves to their utmost according to the position designated by their respective Bun [position], having Tenno [the Emperor] as center’.27 In other words, the official line of ‘liberat[ing] Greater East Asia from the thrall of the Anglo American powers’28 did not mean liberation from racial hierarchies within Asia. At stake here is not how the Japanese could have proposed a ‘new world order’ based on a racialised hierarchy, but how the very concept has become indispensable to the rationale and discourses of expansionism and development.
Orientalism in the Orient
[B]y the twentieth century [...] Orientalist conception had no distinct spatial origin.29
While modernisation theory assumes an inherent backwardness to the former colonised world, its ultimate view of history is redemptive: holding up Japan as the poster-child, it presumes that with enough effort and the right tools, all Third World nations can potentially follow the path to Western-style development, economic prosperity and liberal-democratic stability. Yet, this positioning of Japan as the most evolved model dangerously elides, I argue, both Japan’s historical role in imperialism and the way racial epistemologies formed in this period are themselves constitutive of such developmental narratives: the very translatability of Orientalist structures of knowledge needs further analysis.
In an analysis of late-Meiji travelogues, Seung-mi Han shows how Japanese texts may be just as orientalising as the Western discourses identified by Edward Said in his classic work.30 Inspired by the work of British anthropologists, the Japanese enthusiastically adopted the disciplines of anthropology and ethnology and developed their own branch of ‘Oriental ethnography’.31 Learning from the way Western colonialism’s ‘scientific knowledge stabilizes racial hierarchy and firmly establishes the self/other binary position’,32 the Japanese marked off their own ‘other’ as the Koreans, Manchurians and Taiwanese, to justify their own localised ‘civilising mission’. Han observes that in these travelogues ‘there is no attempt to engage with the Korean Other except for hierarchising each other’s places in the absolute ladder of civilization’.33 To determine those discursive operations through which, as Said has shown, colonial power is legitimised, Han identifies typical romanticising and objectifying descriptions of the Japanese travelogues, such as the following:
[At Anju] the rice fields are extensive, green, and beautiful, and the Koreans with white clothes standing in the middle of the rice fields look like cranes or herons from afar. But sometimes, they really are white herons and cranes [...].34
In this idyllic scene, the Koreans simply merge with the picturesque native flora and fauna of the Korean landscape. If Said has shown how European ethnographic writings were often based on the narrative of ‘degeneracy’* that the Asiatics were once noble but were unable to modernise*the Japanese orientalising discourse works within this epistemology, yet must perform a further mythologising move. Han explains: ‘What was distinctive about Japan was that it had to invent away to explain its own identity as both ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘Asian’’.’35 It did this by simply painting itself as the most enlightened Asian race, whose task was to lead the others out of their Oriental darkness. To support this, there emerged a crucial discourse on the historical relationships between races, which constructed the Korean race as both different*as othered, static object of ethnological and anthropological study*and potentially the same, exhibiting similarities which became the ideological basis of the Japanese 1910 annexation.36 This necessarily ambivalent relationship does not, however, render racial discourses any less effective. Han remarks ironically with regard to the Japanese travelogues, ‘as long as the discursive constructions of the Other presuppose relations of power and domination, Said’s Orientalism can also occur among Oriental countries’.37 This puts the ‘othered’ Korean and Taiwanese races in a double displacement: already within the frame of the ‘yellow peril’ of the Orient, they are constructed, in a slightly altered model, as Japan’s Orient.
Stefan Tanaka has provided an in-depth account of the way that Japan, in order to modernise, needed to separate itself ideologically from the ‘backward’ Asian continent. Through reinterpretations of proto-history, this effectively made China (and Korea) Japan’s primitive past, paralleling the way the West saw the Orient as its past.38 Let us recall Arif Dirlik’s succinct summary of the function of Orientalism:
[It] was an integral part (at once constituent and product) of a Eurocentric conceptualization of the world that was fully articulated in the course of the nineteenth century, that placed Europe at the center and pinnacle of development, and ordered the globe spatially and temporally in accordance with the criteria of European development.39
In a phenomenon he describes as ‘the Orientalism of the Orientals’, Dirlik delineates how the very tropes of Orientalism have since been adopted by those who were its object of derision. If Orientalism ‘was a product of capitalist modernization (and colonialism) in Europe’, then the entry into modernity of the non-West entailed the extended currency of fundamentally Orientalist concepts.40
Hyung Il Pai’s study of Japanese colonial archaeology and ethnology on the Korean peninsula further demonstrates how these imported disciplines were used to construct an extremely complicated narrative of Korean development based on a sequence of ‘racial conquests’, which hierarchised the races while claiming their intrinsic relatedness. It posited ‘the common ancestral origins of the Korean and Japanese races’,41 but claimed the Korean branch had failed to develop, casting the latter as Japanese who went astray and who needed re-civilising. By the time of Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 call for self-determination of nations and the 1 March 1919 uprising in Korea*also a response to harsh colonial policies*this narrative became crucial for the defence of the colonisers’ increasingly un-civil rule. One self-styled Japanese ethnographer wrote,
Since they are one and the same people, not only does the annexation of Korea to Japan truly realize the principle of self-determination, but the fact that they are the same people will also provide an excellent ethnological [jinshugaku] reason for the annexation if it becomes an international problem.42
Japanese colonialism is thus grounded on the most classical of European colonial fantasies*to civilise a ‘lesser’ people and ‘extend the blessings of political organization throughout the rest of East Asia and the South Pacific, just as the Romans had done for Europe and the Mediterranean’43*and yet simultaneously proclaims that it was not a coloniser!colonised relationship at all. The much promoted metaphorical relationship of naisen ittai, referring to ‘the union of the inner land [Japan] and Chosen [Korea] into one body’,44 sought to portray a sense of corporeal connectedness and integration while also reinforcing a distinct hierarchy for each group: in short, the Japanese as the administrators, governors and profiteers, and the Koreans as the labour force.45 By hierarchising the parts of the body (the main ‘body’ of the metropolis was indisputably Japan), Korea was effectively turned into a kind of caste. Later, Minami Jiro, Governor-General of Korea from 1936 to 1942, would speak of the need for a coordinated defence and economic system in the region by comparing the tripartite relationship of Japan, Korea and Manchukuo ‘to a living body in which Japan was the torso (dotai), Chosen [Korea] the arm (ude), and Manchukuo the fist (kobushi)’.46 We thus see that there is no necessary contradiction in a non-white coloniser using Orientalist knowledge structures to dominate another non-white people. As long as Japan is recognised as more modern, and therefore ‘more white’ by Europeans, the racial sleight of hand succeeds.
National counter-narratives
I once applied the term invasion neurosis to Korean prehistorians writing today.47
The ambiguous racial relationship between Japan and its ex-colonies is most salient in its prefiguring of the historical time of ‘catch-up’ assumed by modernisation theory. For the latter, as for the Japanese Orientalists, advanced Western nations are assumed to be the ultimate measure and end-point; below this, other nations arrange themselves variously on the civilisational ladder according to development levels and internal competition. The problem with mainstream postcolonial Korean nationalisms is the failure to question the European-defined temporal horizon of this system established during colonialism. The dissemination of such ideas of racial ordering was, of course, important to Japan’s expanding imperial designs, but these ideas were already being adopted by Koreans facedwith the now-inescapable imperial system. As early as the late nineteenth century, this new attitude was encapsulated by munmyo˘ng kaewha*‘civilization and enlightenment’48*echoing the Meiji policy, bunmei kaika, of opening up to the West. In this discourse, the Western values of progress and modernity were already accepted as universal and sharply contrasted with those of Korea’s previous sphere of influence, the barbaric Middle Kingdom, now understood to be sliding backwards into Oriental darkness. Fundamental to Korea’s munmyo˘ng kaewha was the theory of Social Darwinism which arrived through Japanese and Chinese translations of Western works. Yu Kilchun, for example, ‘one of munmyo˘ng’s greatest advocates’ and one of the first Koreans to study in both Japan and the US, developed his own theory of competition, dividing humans into five races that correlated with geographic, physical and civilisational characteristics: the yellow (North East Asians), white (Europeans), black (Africans), brown (South and South East Asians) and red (Native Americans).49
Yi Kwangsu (1892!1950), a founder of Korean modernist literature and nationalist ideologue (who later turned Japanese collaborator), illustrates the pervasiveness of self-orientalisation in the colonial period. In his 1922 work Kaejoron, he argued that Kaejo (reconstruction) of the Korean nation was necessary before independence was possible. The main object of this reconstruction and enlightenment was nothing other than the national character (minjokso˘ng). Reform was thus understood as neither a political nor a religious affair, but primarily an educational project, which, only after fifty to a hundredyears, would produce atrulyindependent and modern Korea on a par with Western nations. Michael Robinson summarises Yi’s understanding of the different levels of world development which culminated in the premier imperial power: ‘[t]he historical development of its national character had brought England into the twentieth century with a respect for law, rationality, and a stable political system’.50 Yi’s often-stated goals of free-will, individualism and capitalist development would therefore result from a new national, racial disposition modelled (tautologically) by England as the most evolved people. His gradualist conception of national independence, similarly expressed in his novels, thus came very close to*and was eventually completely congruous with*the colonial precept of extended tutelage for the unenlightened races.
We can account for Yi’s remarkable attitude by considering the mediating presence of imperial Japan and its status as the paradigmatic modern Oriental nation. Although it was the hated coloniser, it nevertheless had successfully self-reformed and brought itself ‘into the twentieth century’, thus reinforcing for Korean nationalists the conceptual unity of racially and culturally defined enlightenment and modernity. It is no surprise that for Yi, the desire for a modernity like England’s or Japan’s becomes the desire to become a more evolved race. Although Yi’s logic seems extreme*and for many years his work was ignored by patriotic Korean intellectuals for its collaborationist tone*more recent accounts of the Korean nation remain within this very understanding of racial epistemology.
Pai’s analysis of Korean nationalist histories of the 1990s shows how the profound influence of Western-inspired ethnological determinations of the colonial period persists in counter-narratives that employ the very same terms of racial hierarchies, conquests and influences. Much Korean nationalism during and after colonisation has relied on the counter-myth of a historically pure and advanced Korean race and culture, which dates, according to the thirteenth-century text Samguk Yusa (Tales of Three Kingdoms), to exactly 2333 BC. Through this archaeological counter-strategy, ‘the dawn of Korean civilization was pushed back to predate that of Japan and rival that of ancient China’.51 Although these rewritings of history have undoubtedly been successful in refuting condescending colonial narratives, Pai senses a double bind that results from continuing to argue over the historical sovereignty and cultural advancement of the peninsula.
Today’s Japanese scholars as well as Korean nationalist historians continue to rely on ‘conquests’ and ‘influences’ going in one direction or another to explain culture change. In this sense, they have not been able to shake off their past imperialistic and colonial legacy. I once applied the term ‘invasion neurosis’ to Korean prehistorians writing today.52
What is notable here is the content of the conquests and influences: it is nothing other than civilisational advancement, technological innovation and a progressive national character, echoing exactly those qualities identified by Yi Kwangsu in the Anglo-Saxon master race. Although the Korean peninsula had been unified for hundreds of years in the political and geographical stabilityof the Choson dynasty (1392!1910), Paik Nak-Chung argues that this new racism and ethnicism were distinct products of the coloniality/modernity package, and that ‘no strong sense of ethnic identity was to be found throughout the Chinese ecumene’.53 While it is difficult to ascertain exactly to what degree pre-modern peasants understood their identity in ethnic-racial terms, it is clear that with the prohibition of Korean language, history and eventually Korean names, colonial elites developed a new sense of identity by employing the colonial disciplines of anthropology and ethno-linguistics to ends such as the standardisation of the Korean language into dictionaries and the cataloguing of cultural treasures. This important attempt to prevent cultural annihilation, however, inadvertently leaves unquestioned the epistemological assumption of such disciplines: namely, that cultures and races exist ahistorically and are simply there to be ‘identified or evaluated as objects of epistemological or moral contemplation’.54 In criticising the ethnocentricityof colonial canons, one ends up only positing an alternative ‘native’ canon; in contesting the coloniser’s ‘more original culture’, one’s only move (taken by the Korean prehistorians) is to claim a longer, purer, more developed one, thus confirming the reifying Orientalist eye. It is this concept of a national cultural essence already existing within a hierarchised ladder that underpins both colonial ideology and modernisation theory’s conception of history.
More strikingly, in a study of recent historical fiction, Jahyun Kim Haboush notes that, ‘Koreans exhibited a strong desire to locate modernity within rather than outside their tradition’.55 This results in the locating of a national soul in fictional ideas of a pre-colonial, native modernisation that could have done what Japan did. That is, the ultimate kernel of nationalism is to be found in the traces of an internal self-reform, achieved or intended, before being forcibly modernised by Japan. The relationship to Western models of culture and scientific modernity again remains unquestioned: such modernity was always already implicitly desired. Rather than challenge the forms of technological and economic violence inherent in the dual system of coloniality-modernity, Korean nationalist historians and historical novelists search for evidence of a latent, indigenous will to reform, where the teleology of such reform is completely complicit with dominant Euro-American values of capitalist progress. What is most tragic, then, is that neither an alternative version of modernity, nor an alternative path to it, can be imagined within these postcolonial re-inscriptions.
Triangulated postcolonialism
As this trope of transnational community would have it, colonial history, world wars and Cold War trauma may be washed away in this Asia-Pacific.56
Along with the exiled Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai and the Korean National Revolutionary Party of the 1930s, Koreans throughout the peninsula, Japan and Manchuria all struggled for independence from Japan. In a sense, however, these efforts were ultimately pre-empted by the Allies’ outright victory over Japan in 1945. If successful anti-colonial struggles are the very foundation of much postcolonial thought,57 for Korean nationalist historians, this pre-emption leaves the uncomfortable question of ‘Why couldn’t Korea achieve its own liberation?’ and a necessary emphasis on Korea’s absolute exploitation by the ruthless Japanese. Hakjoon Kim summarises the rule of the ‘beastly vampires’ as follows:
a massacre of innocent people, endless forced conscription into the valley of death, the recruitment of many flower-like young Korean women by Japanese imperialists in the name of the ‘voluntary service corps’ for the enjoyment of Japanese soldiers, group experiments on humans that exceeded the practices of the Nazi’s Auschwitz and unbearable human exploitation and contempt.58
The problem with this account isthat it leaves little room for a national identity other than avictimisation based onunadulterated anti-Japanese sentiment: the Korean body is simply the passive surface onto which every conceivable Japanese atrocity is inflicted. Such historical accounts of the Korean nation thus acknowledge Japanese colonial violence but*like the above versions of national culture*leave the underpinning, Western-derived notions of progress and racial superiority firmly intact. Completely absent from the more orthodox anti-colonial discourses is attention to what I call the triangulated structure of colonial influence coming through Japan from the West, a structure that is perhaps best analysed around the more subtle question of cultural transmission.
In a 1976 essay (whose very title indicates the debt to Sartre), ‘The Situation of the Writers under Japanese Colonialism’, Kim U-chang examines the first group of Korean colonial writers to be influenced by European literature. He identifies the defining characteristic of these writers as an ‘individual outlook and the general modality of, let us say, self-reflective interiority’, directly influenced by the pillars of Western literature: Goethe, Kierkegaard, Gide and Vale´ry. Not considered, however, is the way that Japanese and European influences were conflated as both being representative of the ‘enlightened West’. Most of the elite writers of this period went to study literature in Japan, since it was ‘closer to Europe than Korea’, where they learned ‘the craft of imaginative writing and critical outlook from reading modern Western literature, especially Russian and Japanese literature’ (emphasis added).59 For the Korean colonial writer, Tokyo is just as much a centre of Western culture as Paris.
In a more recent survey of Korean national literature by Kim Hunggyu, the genre of the ‘new fiction’ [shin sosoˆl] that appeared at the turn of the century is described as a narrative which ‘extolled the modernization of Korea through the importation of Western culture and technology’, and whose protagonists ‘turned to Japanese or Western people for help in overcoming crises, which often they were able to resolve only by going overseas to study’.60 Although Kim U-chang rightly points out that under the Japanese, the ‘process of colonization is transformed into the process of civilization’,61 the ambiguity over whose civilisation this might be*Japanese? European? American?*is telling. These otherwise attentive postcolonial analyses neglect to account for the way Japan’s translation of the West has influenced the Korean understanding of modernity, nation and culture. Paik Nak-Chung confirms the ambiguity of the Japanese colonial structure: while its ‘success in emulating Western industrial (and colonial) powers did pose a challenge to the simpler variants of Eurocentrism, [...] in a deeper sense it reinforced the ‘‘universality’’ of the reigning world system and its ideologies’. Because Japan’s anti-Western propaganda allowed ‘the capitalist world system [to] impose [...] its colonial rule through an Asian surrogate [...] its Eurocentrism worked more insidiously and in some senses more effectively’.62 Kim Uchang’s ambiguous account is perhaps best confirmed by Yi Sang, Korea’s pre-eminent modernist writer of the 1930s. In a short story entitled ‘Tokyo’ [‘Tongkyong’], the colonial protagonist revels in a metropolitan landscape made up of neon signs, cars, coffee shops, balloon ads and department stores. Whether he is drinking Brazilian coffee at a French cafe´ or seeing the New Japanese Theatre Movement, most notable is the use of transliterated English words*and not Japanese*to denote those universally modern institutions of ‘shop girls’, ‘apartment’, ‘neon’, ‘promenade’, ‘taxi’ and, indeed, the adjective ‘modern’.63 The result is that for the colonial intellectual in Tokyo, Western-style modernity is already implicitly understood as global modernity.
Kim U-chang’s essay goes on to describe how ‘colonialism works by installing itself in the midst of the psyche of the colonized even before the latter is aware of it, injecting their secret contempt for one’s own subjugated culture and envy and admiration for the dominant culture of the colonizer’.64 What demands recognition here is how this has played out in postindependence Korea. The unique configuration of postcoloniality here, I argue, is precisely the indirect status of the ‘dominant culture of the colonizer’*the West’s*in combination with the unique Cold War pressures on the peninsula. Despite Korea’s staunch rejection of everything Japanese on the surface*resuming diplomatic relationships in 1965 but banning all Japanese-language cultural products (films, music, comics) until as late as 1998*the conviction that Koreans need to self-reform and go ‘overseas to study’, now primarily to the US, has proven remarkably persistent.65 That is to say, the relationship with the tenets of Western modernisation, politics and culture, perceived as superior, has not come under as much scrutiny as its Japanese vehicle. The post-war southern occupation by American armed forces (1945!1948) and subsequent reign of the US-picked, Princetoneducated, anti-communist Syngman Rhee (in power from 1948 to 1960) established a neo-imperialist relationship with Anglo-American culture in a structure perhaps only slightly more subtle than that envisioned under the ‘forty-year tutelage’ originally planned by Roosevelt. Paradoxically, the effort to eradicate any trace of the Japanese colonial consciousness left South Korea, under the Cold War military and political domination of the US, free to ‘adopt [...] Western cultural ancestry as their own’ as well as ‘the logic of modernization that privileges Western culture’.66
Not surprisingly, while the Japanese-trained military dictators*most notoriously Park Chung Hee, who ruled from 1961 to 1979*are publicly reviled, the Japanese precedent for state-supported capitalism has had a much more enduring career. What is scandalously elided here is the constituent relationship between imperial or dictatorial violence and modernisation. Like the Western nations, Japan modernised in part because of its colonial possessions; Korea’s current standing among the leaders of Third World development similarly disavows the role of postcolonial dictatorships and US neocolonialism in achieving the accumulation of its capital. The history of Japanese imperialism can therefore not be divorced from the ‘rankings’ of modernisation theory as it has developed since the Cold War: the notion of Japan as tech-savvy leader with Korea and the other Asian Tigers running a close second obscures the smooth transformation of imperial violence into present-day notions of national ‘progress’ and ‘success’. In reality, American loans and America’s post-war occupation of Japan engineered a safely pro-US capitalist economic motor for the Pacific, while the fifty-year US military presence in South Korea supported dictators like Park and ensured the ‘stability’ of many Korean institutional and social structures*education, industry, a centralised government*which still bear the indelible stamp of Japanese colonialism. Indeed, it is precisely South Korea’s success and its interpellation into the larger phenomenon of Asian Tiger ‘miracle economies’ that has made it even more resistant to a postcolonial analysis. In recent attempts at an Asian regionalism articulated through organisations such as APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), Rob Wilson detects the unmistakable imprint of Japanese expansionism and imperialism, where such discourses are merely updated into ‘a narrative of a co-prosperity sphere [that] now takes in the Asia-Pacific of the 1990s’.67 Heavily promoted by US corporations, the region is simply posited as a ‘capitalist archipelago’, thereby disguising the very real unevenness in power and wealth between its leader (or former coloniser) Japan and other member countries (or ex-colonies) for whom Japan-style prosperity is held up as their only (im)possible future. It is precisely the ‘discontinuous interconnectedness between the metropolitan discourse and the internal(ized) hegemonic discourse [which] (post)colonial discourse must interrogate’68*but which the virulent demonisation of Japan as the brutal coloniser prevents Koreans from doing.
The best and the rest
[T]he process of modernization was historically evolutionary [...].69
Choi has written of the unavoidable identification of South Korea with the US as the latter simply stepped in as the new colonial master after liberation. She cites a Korean experience of watching the 1963 anti-Chinese American film, Fifty-five Days at Peking: ‘As the head of the allied armed forces, Charlton Heston, marched through the gate of Peking through the strewn bodies of the tattered and ugly-looking Chinese people, we all applauded excitedly. We had already become a white race.’70 In the 1960s and 1970s*a period of frantic industrialisation, proletarianisation and increasing income disparity*success in nothing other than US economic terms constituted the overriding ‘postcolonial’ discourse:
By this time, a tall metallic tower had been erected in front of Seoul’s city hall. The tower’s electronic bulletin board ceaselessly blinked the dollar amount of export revenue and reminded people of the estimated annual export goal: $100 million (U.S.). This blinking billboard hurried the South Koreans to the international market to auction off their wealth of cheap labor. Earning dollars was ‘a sacred patriotic mission!’ [...] The state’s official narrative of modernization and development denied workers acceptable working conditions, the right to unionize, and access to compensation.71
The clearest expression of the extent to which Korea wholeheartedly grafted this new imperial ideology onto the Japanese colonial one may be military dictator Park Chung Hee’s Saemaul (New Village) national industrial policy. This was promoted as ‘the good-life movement’ and justified by the unarguable logic of ‘We must first escape from poverty’.72 Confirming, rather than refuting, a hierarchical worldview or ‘global design’73 in which Japan and the West were winners and Third World countries the losers, Park devised a rhetorical strategy which firmly positioned South Korea as ‘on the way up’: while the Korean language had expressions for developed countries, so˘njin’guk (literally ‘leading-developed-nation’), and developing countries, hujin’guk (‘behind-developed-nation’), Park used the neologism chungjin’guk to designate Korea as a ‘middle-developed-nation’.74 The nation’s future direction was made explicit with such slogans as so˘njin’gugu˘ro, literally ‘towards an advanced country’.75
Such a promotion also finds its precedent in the colonial era. Japan’s acquisition of new territories in South East Asia in the 1940s called for the conscription of many Koreans as soldiers, labourers and ‘comfort women’ (army sex slaves), as well as for tightened assimilationist policies. Some Koreans at home, however, began to enjoy a slightly higher status as the older, more trusted and more ‘Japanese’ colonials. The invasion of Manchuria was seen by many to signal an improved status within the expanding Japanese empire, and in 1942 the administration of Koreawas shifted from the Colonial Ministry to the Home Office.76 One Christian reformist hoped, ‘having secured that great treasure house [Manchuria] the Japanese nation may be inclined to be somewhat more generous in its political and economic treatment of the Koreans in Korea’.77 Carter Eckert explains how fluency in the imperial language and culture also allowed for significant elevation within the ranks:
[...] when they went to Manchukuo, or beyond Manchukuo to even more distant parts of the empire, they could now also to some extent leave behind the psychological burden of colonialism and feel the empowerment of an insider, a feeling that the Japanese authorities did their best to encourage during the war with constant propaganda celebrating the ‘oneness’ of Chosen [Korea] and Japan.78
Grounding this identity as privileged insider was further confirmation of the idea that Japan had succeeded in its decision to ‘‘‘exit from Asia and enter Europe’’ (datsua nyuo)’,79 the implication now being that Korea, in terms of the ladder of civilisation and race, was just below Japan. The long-lasting and real racism against South East Asians, large numbers of whom today come to Korea as disdained guest workers, may be one legacy of this ‘promotion’ within the Japanese empire. In Dirlik’s words, de-Europeanised racism flourishes in the current era: ‘Orientalism, which earlier articulated a distancing of Asian societies from the EuroAmerican, now appears in the articulation of differences within a global modernity as Asian societies emerge as dynamic participants in a Global Capitalism.’80 In short, Korea has only been too ready to accept the terms of, and its place in, the global capitalist system largely dictated by Japanese and Western powers.
Such an idea of progression is perfectly congruent with the racial paradigms of modernisation theory, which we might see as a newer version of Yi Kwangsu’s idea of cultural development coterminous with geography and nationality. Within the disciplinary assumptions of post-war US Area Studies, Cumings recounts that, ‘Japan got favored placement as a success story of development, [and] China got obsessive attention as a pathological example of abortive development’.81 To deal with the Cold War divisions, different epistemologies were invented: ‘communist studies for North Korea, North Vietnam and China; modernization studies for Japan and the other halves of Korea and Vietnam’.82 In such a model, of course, Park Chung Hee’s brutal dictatorship is seen not in terms of the legacy of Japanese militarism and imperial rule, nor as a remainder of Korea’s still unresolved civil war and US military occupation. Rather, the teleological time of modernisation simply naturalises the country’s political and labour oppression as an evolutionary stage on the path to independent and democratic modernity. In other words, just as imperial Japan and some elite Koreans were allowed to rise within the ranks of the European imperial powers, so too Park’s program of heavy export-led industrialisation and fierce labour exploitation (speciously referred to as ‘Confucian Capitalism’ in the economic literature) allowed Korea to gain a comparative advantage within the new global system of capitalist tutelage for Third World countries. The failure of Korean postcoloniality is precisely the repetition of this logic.
We can conclude that while Japan’s imperialism is unique for coming out of a perceived ‘inferiority position in the world’,83 postcolonial Korea cannot but perceive itself as coming out of a double position of inferiority, and is therefore doubly inscribed within a national, racialised ranking, where the highest position is necessarily occupied by white Anglo-America. Koreans may not be quite as white (or economically successful) as the Japanese, but are certainly more white (or economically successful) than South East Asians, Africans or African Americans.84 Far from being evidence of decolonisation, the ongoing ressentiment toward the Japanese only reinforces the sense of Korea’s own failure to modernise first, understood by Korean nationalists as the primary reason for its colonial experience.85 Yet, the desire to have beaten Japan and the West at their own game fails to recognise the violent tautology at the heart of modernity: to have become modern first is to have been a coloniser. In sharp contrast to this, consider Lisa Lowe’s understanding of decolonisation, drawing from Fanon’s definition:
a process of thorough social transformation that disorganizes the stratified social hierarchy beyond the nationalist party’s capture of the state from the colonizer. Decolonization [...] does not prematurely signify the end of colonialism but refers to the multifaceted, ongoing project of resistance struggles that can persist for decades in the midst of simultaneous neocolonial exploitation.86
Because of Korea’s ‘instantaneous’ liberation from Japan, there was no ‘nationalist party’s capture of the state’, nor did the subsequent US occupation allow for a ‘thorough social transformation’. Rather, the fact that Japanese colonialism was over all too quickly and cleanly at the hands of the Allied forces has only clouded the project of resistance to neocolonialism. Korea’s relative economic success in a US-led globalised economy has made it increasingly difficult to challenge those Western discourses of enlightenment and evolutionary modernity first utilised by Japan, or to ‘disorganise’ colonial hierarchies both within the state (evidenced by the succession of military governments until the 1990s) and without (the system of global capitalism and more recent IMF economic surveillance). Korea’s tutelary modernity is thus more the result of the internalisation of, and not the repudiation of, Japanese colonial hierarchies.
The complexity of viewing Korea as a postcolonial nation (or nations) comes not only from these contradictions, but from the apparent lack of depth (and therefore obvious aberrance) of Japanese colonialism. By casting them as the perfectly evil, ideologically hollow colonisers, Koreans have been able to pinpoint the racism in Japanese expansionist desires, but not to question the very epistemology of racism at the core of the modern, (neo)colonial world. In 1906, just as the Japanese were tightening their grip on Korea, Korean scholars such as Pak Unshik were rapidly coming to understand the implications of a modern worldview based on this racial system:
The world has become a smaller place, forcing people in all corners of the earth to compete with each other. This means that those peoples who are educated and powerful are superior to those who are uneducated and weak. The strong view the weak as barbarians and believe that they can do whatever they want, including committing mass murder, to the weak to bring them into subjugation. Thus the weak face the prospect of the gradual destruction of their culture and eventual extermination. The slaves taken from Africa and the North American Indians have suffered this fate. This is a tragedy, a terrible tragedy. The oppression of the weak by the strong is like the battle for supremacy on the earth between animals and human beings thousands of years ago. Competition between people is therefore natural, and the victory of the strong over the weak should also be accepted as natural.87
The predicament specific to non-Western peoples is that the possibility of entrance into and success within modernity remains contingent upon not remaining in the position of Pak Unshik’s ‘tragic’, subjugated Africans or Indians in a system where ‘the victory of the strong over the weak should also be accepted as natural’. Modernisation theory has merely reworked such Darwinian logic into a system of evolutionary economic development. The work of postcolonial criticism, it seems to me, is precisely to continue to track and critique the ever-changing and self-renewing currency of such systems.
Notes
1 This article only attempts to deal with postcolonial South Korea. While North Korea’s anti-imperialist attitude is another manifestation of postcolonialism on the peninsula*and the problem of the two Koreas is itself a legacy of colonialism*it is beyond the scope of this article. Where the post-division period is indicated, ‘Korea’ is used as shorthand for ‘South Korea’.
2 Peter Duus, ‘Introduction: Japan’s Wartime Empire: Problems and Issues’, in Peter Duus, Ramon H Myers and Mark R Peattie (eds), The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931!1945, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp xi!xlvii, pp xii!xiii.
3 One factor excluding Japan and its ex-colonies from the now well-established field of postcolonial studies is undoubtedly the difficulty of a non-European colonising language and culture in a discipline that has generally taken root in English departments.
4 Leo Ching, The Disavowal and the Obsessional: Colonial Discourse East and West, Working Papers in Asian/Pacific Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University, 1995, p 18.
5 For example, see Kuan-hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, 1998; and Ping-Hui Liao, ‘Postcolonial Studies in Taiwan: Issues in Critical Debates’, Postcolonial Studies 2(2), 1999, pp 199!211. See also T E Barlow (ed.), Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. 6
Bruce Cumings, ‘Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations and Area Studies During and After the Cold War’, in Masao Miyoshi and H D Harootunian (eds), Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, pp 261!267, p 264.
7
Leo Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, p 19.
8
Leo Ching, ‘Yellow Skin, White Masks’, in Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Kuan-hsing Chen (ed.), London: Routledge, 1998, pp 65!86, p 70. 9
Quoted in Marius B Jansen, ‘Japanese Imperialism: Late Meiji Perspectives’, in Ramon H Myers and Mark R Peattie (eds), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895!1945, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp 61-79, p 64.
10
Mark R Peattie, ‘Japanese Attitudes toward Colonialism’, in Myers and Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, pp 80!127, p 82.
11 Jansen, ‘Japanese Imperialism’, p 76.
12 Peattie, ‘Japanese Attitudes toward Colonialism’, p 87.
13
Despite the growing influence of the modern architecture movement by the 1920s and 1930s, the Japanese sought to imitate the European neoclassical style of the nineteenth century with its clearer imperial connotations. See W H Coaldrake, Architecture and Authority in Japan, London: Routledge, 1996. 14
Chungmoo Choi, ‘The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea’, in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (eds), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, pp 461!484, p 467.
15
Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p 86.
16 Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp 59!60. 17
H D Harootunian, ‘Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire’, in Miyoshi and Harootunian (eds), Learning Places, pp 150!174, p 158.
18
Ching, Becoming Japanese, p 27.
19
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p 44. 20 In an extraordinary piece of imperialist justification of 1924, Kita Ikki claims subaltern status for the Japanese in terms of a global class struggle, though his conclusions may not so much be anti-capitalist as hyper-capitalist: ‘As the class struggle within a nation is waged for the readjustment of unequal distinctions, so war between nations for an honorable cause will reform the present unjust distinctions. The British Empire is a millionaire possessing wealth all over the world; and Russia is a great landowner in occupation of the northern half of the globe. Japan with her scattered fringe of islands is one of the proletariat, and she has the right to declare war on the big monopoly powers. The socialists of the West contradict themselves when they admit the right of class struggle to the proletariat at home and at the same time condemn war, waged by a proletariat among nations, as militarism and aggression [...] If it is permissible for the working class to unite to overthrow unjust authority by bloodshed, then unconditional approval should be given to Japan to perfect her army and navy and make war for the rectification of unjust international frontiers. In the name of rational social democracy Japan claims possession of Australia and Eastern Siberia.’ Quoted in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983, p 98. 21
Walter Mignolo and Leo Ching’s seminar ‘Global Coloniality’, Duke University, NC, Fall 2001.
22
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p 58. 23
Pai Hyung Il notes that the extensive archaeological and art historical research done by the Japanese in Korea was invariably translated and published in English, sometimes in Chinese, and never in Korean. See ‘The Politics of Korea’s Past: The Legacy of Japanese Colonial Archaeology in the Korean Peninsula’, East Asian History 7, 1994, pp 25!48, p 38.
24 Yi Won-sun, quoted in Kazuhiko Kimijima, ‘The Japan!South Korea Joint Study Group on History Textbooks and the Continuing Legacy of Japanese Colonialism’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 30(2), 1998, pp 47!52, p 50. 25 Duus, ‘Introduction: Japan’s Wartime Empire’, p xxii. 26
Quoted in Duus, ‘Introduction: Japan’s Wartime Empire’, p xxiii. 27
Lt. S Motizuki, The Nippon Spirit, Department of Information, Imperial Japanese Army, 1943, p 30. 28 Quoted in Duus, ‘Introduction: Japan’s Wartime Empire’, p xxvii.
29
Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997, p 115. 30
Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978. 31
Seung-mi Han, ‘Colonial Subject as Other: An Analysis of Late Meiji Travelogues on Korea’, in Helen Hardacre with Adam L Kern (eds), New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp 688!701, p 697. 32
Choi, ‘The Discourse of Decolonization’, p 467. 33
Han, ‘Colonial Subject as Other’, p 692.
34
Quoted from Voyages to Manchuria and Korea, in Han, ‘Colonial Subject as Other’, p 696. 35
Han, ‘Colonial Subject as Other’, p 693. 36
In this sense, Ching notes that Japanese colonialism has more in common with French assimilationist colonial policies. Ching, Becoming Japanese, p 98. Robert Young explains aspects of the French centralised colonial system: the ‘colonies were integrated within France as de´partements d’outre mer and were thus not technically colonies’. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, p 32. This is contrasted with the English policy of loose association with its colonial populations. 37
Han, ‘Colonial Subject as Other’, p 700.
38
See Stefan Tanaka’s Japan’s Orient: Rendering Past into History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
39
Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, p 108.
40
Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, p 122.
41 Pai, ‘The Politics of Korea’s Past’, p 39. 42
Torii Ryuzo, quoted in Han, ‘Colonial Subject as Other’, p 699. The Japanese term ‘jinshugaku’ to translate ‘ethnological’ is supplied by Han.
43 Tokutomi Soho, quoted in Peattie, ‘Japanese Attitudes toward Colonialism’, pp 81!82. 44
Han-Kyo Kim, ‘Japanese Colonialism in Korea’, in Harry Wray and Hilary Conroy (eds), Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese History, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983, pp 222!228, p 226. 45
Racial differentiations between Japanese and other Asians followed the European model andwere coded as white/non-white. See Nancy Brcak and John Pavia’s ‘Images of Asians in the Art of the Great Pacific War, 1937!45’, in Timothy J Craig and Richard King (eds), Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002, pp 291!304.
46
Carter Eckert, ‘Total War, Industrialization, and Social Change in Late Colonial Korea’, in Duus et al. (eds), The Japanese Wartime Empire, pp 3!39, p 12. 47 Pai, ‘The Politics of Korea’s Past’, p 44.
48 Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires 1895!1919, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p 32.
49
Schmid, Korea Between Empires, p 33, p 87.
50 Michael Robinson, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea: 1920!1925, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988, p 69.
51 Pai, ‘The Politics of Korea’s Past’, p 27.
52 Pai, ‘The Politics of Korea’s Past’, p 44.
53
Paik Nak-Chung, ‘Coloniality in South Korea and a South Korean Project for Overcoming Modernity’, Interventions 2(1), 2000, pp 73!86, p 75.
54
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p 114. 55
Jahyun Kim Haboush, ‘In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea: The Discourse of Modernity in Contemporary Historical Fiction’, in Kai-wing Chow et al. (eds), Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001, pp 189!214, p 194.
56
Rob Wilson, ‘Imagining ‘‘Asia-Pacific’’ Today: Forgetting Colonialism in the Magical Free Markets of the American Pacific’, in Miyoshi and Harootunian, Learning Places, pp 231!260, p 245. 57
‘The origins of postcolonialism lie in the historical resistance to colonial occupation and imperial control, the success of which then enabled a radical challenge to the political and conceptual structures of the systems on which such domination had been based’ (italics added). Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, p 60.
58
Hakjoon Kim, ‘The Political Culture of South Korea as Influenced by National Division’, Korea and World Affairs 8(3), 1984, pp 543!556, p 547. 59
Kim U-chang, ‘The Situation of the Writers under Japanese Colonialism’, Korea Journal 16(5), 1976, pp 4!15. See also, for example, Choi Won-shik, ‘Seoul, Tokyo, New York: Modern Korean Literature Seen through Yi Sang’s ‘‘Lost Flowers’’’, Korea Journal 39(4), 1999, pp 118!143.
60
Kim Hunggyu, Understanding Korean Literature, Robert J Fouser (trans.), Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, 1997, p 117.
61
Kim, Understanding Korean Literature, p 15. 62
Paik Nak-Chung gives the everyday example of the way that the Japanese promoted Western-style clothing during the colonial period, whereas ‘if the Japanese had imposed their own attire, Koreans would have felt a much stronger urge to revert to traditional Korean costume at the time of liberation’. See ‘Coloniality in South Korea’, p 75.
63
Yi Sang, ‘Tongkyong [Tokyo]’, in Yi Sang Cho˘njip Vol. 3: Sup’il, Yoon-sik Kim (ed.), Seoul: Munhak Sasang, 1993, pp 95!100. In other words, having already become loan-words in Japanese, these nouns of modernity are re-loaned to Korean. This is not to say that the Korean language was not also influenced by Japanese; however, the mediation of English and European loan-words through Japanese renders the colonial relation invisible.
64
Kim U-chang, ‘The Situation of the Writers’, p 5.
65
It is usually recognised that in order to get a professor’s job at a university in Seoul a graduate degree from an American university is required*despite the fact that Korea has over 1000 of its own universities.
66
Choi, ‘The Discourse of Decolonization’, p 465.
67 Wilson, ‘Imagining ‘‘Asia-Pacific’’ Today’, p 244.
68
Choi, ‘The Discourse of Decolonization’, p 466.
69 Harootunian, ‘Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire’, p 158. 70
Kim Chong-gi, quoted in Chungmoo Choi, ‘Transnational Capitalism, National Imaginary and Protest Theater in South Korea’, boundary 2 22(1), 1995, pp 235!261, p 239. 71 Choi, ‘Transnational Capitalism’, pp 250!251. 72
Quoted in James K Freda, ‘Discourses of Han in Postcolonial Korea: Absent Sufferings and Industrialist Dreams’, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3(1!2), 1999, para. 23.
73
See Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 74
My thanks to historian Seonmin Kim for this information.
75
Schmid, Korea Between Empires, p 267. 76 Peattie, ‘Japanese Attitudes toward Colonialism’, p 124.
77
Yun Ch’iho, quoted in Eckert, ‘Total War’, p 33.
78
Eckert, ‘Total War’, p 34.
79
Paik, ‘Coloniality in South Korea’, p 76.
80
Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, p 115.
81
Cumings, ‘Boundary Displacement’, p 264.
82
Cumings, ‘Boundary Displacement’, p 265.
83
Cumings, ‘The Legacy of Japanese Colonialism in Korea’, in Myers and Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, p 489.
84
Cumings also notes how many American Koreans believe themselves to be ‘right after whites’ in the racial hierarchy. See his Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York: Norton, 1997, p 448. 85
For example, Yi Tae-Jin writes of the early twentieth-century, pre-colonial attempt of Korea to modernise itself and the way ‘Japanese colonial rule mercilessly cut off the full realization of the ingenious plan that harmonized both the old and the new in establishing a modern and independent Great Han Empire, a new Korea’, p 121. See his ‘Seoul at the Beginning of the 20th Century: Urban Development Based on Western Models’, Korea Journal 39(3), 1999, pp 95!121.
86
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, p 107.
87 Pak Unshik, quoted in Kim Hunggyu, Understanding Korean Literature, p 33.
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