Colonial Modernity In Korea

491 Pages·2000·16.309 MB·English

by  Gi-Wook Shin

Colonial Modernity in Korea
Harvard East Asian Monographs, 184
Harvard-Hallym Series on Korean Studies
The Harvard-Haltym Series on Korean Studies
The Harvard-HaUym Series on Korean Studies, published by the
Harvard University Asia Center, is supported by the Korea Institute
of Harvard University and by Hallym University in Korea. It is com­
mitted to the publication of outstanding new scholarly work on Ko­
rea, regardless of discipline, in both the humanities and the social
sciences.
Professor Carter J. Eckert Dr. Soong Jong Hyun
Director President
Korea Institute Hallym Academy of Sciences
Harvard University Hallym University
Colonial Modernity in Korea
Gi-Wook Shin and
Michael Robinson, editors
Published by the Harvard University Asia Center
and distributed by Harvard University Press
Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London, 1999
© 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Printed in the United States of America
The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in
coordination with the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, the Korea
Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and other faculties
and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly
understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries.
The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional
issues in Asia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Colonial Modernity in Korea / Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, editors.
p. cm. - (Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 184) (Harvard-Hallym
series on Korean studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-14255-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Korea—History—Japanese occupation, 1910-1945. 2. Nationalism—Korea—
History. 3. Japan—Politics and government—1912-1945. 4. Imperialism.
I. Shin, Gi-Wook.’ II. Robinson, Michael Edson. HI. Series: Harvard-Hallym
series on Korean studies.
DS916.54. C651999
951.9'03~dc21 99-037149
Index by the editors
Printed on acid-free paper
Last figure below indicates year of this printing
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
First paperback edition, 2000
Contents
Preface vii
Contributors xi
Introduction: Rethinking Colonial Korea 1
Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson
Part I: Colonial Modernity and Hegemony
Modernity, Legality, and Power in Korea
Under Japanese Rule 21
Chulwoo Lee
Broadcasting, Cultural Hegemony, and Colonial
Modernity in Korea, 1924-1945 52
Michael Robinson
Colonial Corporatism: The Rural Revitalization
Campaign, 1932-1940 70
Gi-Wock Shin and Do-Hyun Han
The Limits of Cultural Rule: Internationalism and
Identity in Japanese Responses to Korean Rice 97
Michael A. Schneider
Colonial Industrial Growth and the Emergence of
tiie Korean Working Class 128
Soon-Won Park
Colonial Korea in Japan's Imperial
Telecommunications Network 161
Daqing Yang
vi Contents
Part 17; Colonial Modernity and Identity
7 The Price of Legitimacy: Women and the
Künuhoe Movement, 1927-1931 191
Kenneth M. Wells
8 Neither Colonial nor National: The Making of the
"New Woman" in Pak Wansö's "Mother's Stake 1" 221
Kyeong-Hee Choi
9 Interior Landscapes: Yi Kwangsu's The Heartless and
the Origins of Modern Literature 248
Michael D. Shin
10 National Identity and the Creation of the Category
"Peasant" in Colonial Korea 288
Clark Sorensen
11 In Search of Human Rights: The Paekchong Movement
in Colonial Korea 311
Joong-Seop Kim
12 Minjok as a Modem and Democratic Construct:
Sin Ch'aeho's Historiography 336
Henry H. Em
Epilbgue: Exorcising Hegel's Ghosts: Toward a
Postnationalist Historiography of Korea 363
Carter J. Eckert
Reference Matter
Notes 381
Index 455
Preface
Over the last fifteen years there has been a burgeoning interest in the
study of colonialism. The rise of post-structuralist theory and its cri­
tique of the dominant mode of history writing has led to a torrent of
new studies that have challenged many of the core subjects of this
body of historical work. The nation as a subject and the concepts
of nationalism, anti-colonialism, national liberation, development,
modernization, and de-colonization that provided the frame for na­
tional narratives are all constructs that are being contested and re­
thought. New approaches to the study of power, collective identity,
culture, and modes of representation have opened an entire field of
postcolonial studies. In one sense at least, postcolonial studies seek
to destroy the artificial break imposed by the closure historical nar­
ratives create in "ending" colonialism after World War II and begin­
ning a new era of nation-states in the non-Westem world. It seeks
continuities and causal relationships between the forces active dur­
ing the colonial era and the social, political, and cultural experience
of postcolonial nations. In the case of Korean studies, this is a won­
derful development. The study of postcolonial North and South
Korea offers innumerable possibilities for understanding important
global, cultural, political, economic, and transnational phenomena in
the late twentieth century.
For those focusing on the Korean post-colony, however, the fact
that theory runs ahead of our basic historical understanding of Ko­
rea's colonial period hampers scholarly progress. Among East Asian
societies, core historical, social, and cultural knowledge of Korea in
the West lags considerably behind research on Japan or China. This
viii Preface
fact is particularly troublesome for postcolonial studies because in
order to examine the post-colony it is necessary to have some his­
torical grounding on the forces that shaped the "precolonial" period.
Thus revisionist arguments about power, politics, interstate rela­
tions, political identity, cultural flows, cultural hybridity, class, and
gender in postcolonial Korea easily fall prey to an inadvertent ahis-
toricism. As we point out below, there is no lack of historical litera­
ture on twentieth-century Korea. Its utility, however, given the trans­
formation of our ideas about the nature of nationalism, modernity,
and colonialism, remains suspect. Too often, imaginative studies of
postcolonial Korea draw from a highly truncated representation of
the historical forces that shaped Korea before 1945.
This volume emerged from the idea that historical studies of the
Korean colonial period needed a jump start in order to join more
successfully the scholarly conversations in other fields of study. We
hoped to gather scattered revisionist studies already under way in
the United States, Japan, and Korea and discuss as a group different
methods for resifting our historical understanding of colonial Korea
in response to the changing discourse on nation, colonialism, and
modernity at this moment. This volume presents the fruits of that
discussion.
The project began as a rough idea in the summer of 1993, and
the generous support of a number of institutions and individual
scholars made this volume possible. The initial idea was incubated
by a grant from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) sponsorship of a con­
ference planning workshop. We met with Bruce Cumings, Chung-
moo Choi, and Qark Sorensen in Chicago in October 1993 to thrash
out the outlines of our original conference proposal. The generous
advice and criticism received at this workshop expanded our origi­
nal thinking and were crucial in our search for further support.
The excitement generated by this workshop ultimately attracted
the interest of a diverse group of funders, and for their support we
are profoundly grateful. The National Endowment for the Humani­
ties provided a major grant (RX-21592-95) for the original conference
at UCLA in the spring of 1996. The SSRC-ACLS, University of Cali­
fornia Pacific Rim Research Program, Yonsei Institute of Korean
Studies in Seoul, Korea, and the UCLA Center for Korean Studies
provided additional welcomed support We are especially indebted
to the enthusiasm of Dean Jamison of the UCLA Center for Pacific
Preface ix
Rim Studies, Robert Buswell and Eileen Sir at the Center for Korean
Studies at UCLA, and Young-Shin Park of Yonsei University.
The generous funding of our project allowed us to design a con­
ference that joined scholars from North America, Korea, Japan,
Europe, and Australia. An original group of invited studies was
augmented by a call for papers from junior scholars a year before
the conference. This open call located original and exciting work in
progress by younger scholars from a number of disciplines. We were
also able to select four graduate students representing major Korean
Studies centers in the United States to participate in the general con­
ference discussion. The ultimate conference succeeded beyond our
wildest dreams. The discussion was multidisciplinary and theoreti­
cally informed, and it subjected our essays to sustained criticism that
greatly aided the authors in their subsequent revisions. Ultimately,
the supportive tone of the conversation and enthusiasm generated
by insightful critiques motivated the assembly of the final volume in
what seems to us record time for such a project.
As important as our individual authors was a wonderful group
of discussants culled from different disciplines in both Japanese
and Korean studies. Peter Duus, Stephen Vlastos, Hori Kazuo, Sung
Young Cho, Chungmoo Choi, Carter Eckert, Donald Clark, and
Carolyn So acted as conference discussants, and they pushed our
often very preliminary work to another level. We were aided as well
by timely commentary from John Duncan and James Matray.
We wish to thank our research assistants James Freda, Jennifer
Jung-Kim, and Grace Lim of UCLA and Todd Munson of Indiana
University for helping in innumerable ways. Thanks are due as well
to Elizabeth Underwood and Cho Sökkon for their participation in
the original conference. Finally, we owe a special debt of gratitude to
John R. Ziemer, Executive Editor of the Harvard University Asia
Center Publications Program. He arranged for two extraordinarily
helpful anonymous readings of the manuscript, expertly edited our
often confused prose, and generally breathed life into what had be­
come a rather unwieldy and complex manuscript.
Gi-Wook Shin, University of California, Los Angeles
Michael Robinson, Indiana University