I posted an entry at Frog in a Well Korea that might interest the reader of the Japan blog.
Thinking about the Japanese woman in Korean-Japanese (内鮮一体) couples
Thinking about the Japanese woman in Korean-Japanese (内鮮一体) couples
When I was preparing for my oral exams last semester, the professors who do not work on East Asia (I had a European historian and a Latin American historian in my committee) were always fascinated by the nature of “inter-racial marriage” in the Japanese empire. Both in the history of childhood and youth and the history of modern empire, the most complex and flexible interpretations of “race” happened on the ground where colonial societies had no choice but face the existence of inter-racial sexuality and mixed children. In the Japanese empire, inter-racial marriage was not problematized in the same way as it was in European empires. For example, in two articles of roundtable discussion on marriage (結婚改善座談会) published in Korean Social Work (朝鮮社会事業 – yes I still love this journal) in May and June 1935, the participants, mostly Japanese bureaucrats and educators in Seoul, never discuss problems of inter-marriage. The central problem was rather an increasing number of old single women in Korea. Their presentation of statistics of the marriage success rate among graduates of the elementary school bears much resemblance to today’s discussion of unemployment rates. They agree this is a problem that “kyoka dantai (moral suasion groups)” should become involved in. Another major issue brought up during this roundtable is, of course, the ways in which people conduct wedding ceremonies. For the participants, excessively luxurious wedding ceremonies often exhaust village economies. The venue of wedding ceremonies was also discussed — e.g. whether it was appropriate to imitate Taisho Emperor and to use the Chōsen Shrine for ordinary people’s wedding.
The lack of discussion on inter-racial marriage by contemporary experts is not the only interesting feature to note. “It is an open secret among Korean scholars,” one professor of modern Korean history said to me the other day, “that there were a significant number of married couples between Korean men and Japanese women but there is so little study on it.” This is another surprise to non-East Asian historians. In other places it is men from the colonizing countries and women from colonized societies that married, and this feminization of colonies is often regarded as an aspect of Orientalism. There were, of course, married couples between Korean women and Japanese men, but as Oguma Eiji has already pointed out, the Government-General in Korea encouraged Japanese women to marry Korean men because, they thought, Japanese mothers were supposed to build the foundations of Japanese culture in the home.
How do you define “coloniality” in this relationship represented by couples of Korean men and Japanese women? To offer my half-baked thought first, we really need to re-think how the ‘Japanese woman’ was interpreted in relation to modernity. I cannot easily connect this to the discussion of coloniality — or assure that it is a useful concept here.
One chapter in Nam Pujin (南富鎭)’s book 文学の植民地主義 (Colonialism in Literature) deals with the issue of colonialism in love and marriage affairs. He introduces a number of Korean writers who wrote stories in which a Korean man dreamed of marrying a Japanese woman, a Korean couple who pretended as if they had been a Korean-Japanese couple, a Japanese woman who marries a Korean man, and mixed children who grew up hating their Korean origins owing to the social discriminations they received, and so on. Nam recognizes some “coloniality” in that it is usually Koreans who have to “confess” their origin, and will come to be “understood” by their Japanese partners even in recent love stories. His discussion of the novels from the 20s and 30s is more thought-provoking. Nam points out that “Naisen kekkon (Korean-Japanese marriage) was consistently the most trendy topic for literature, and despite its political nature, it was the most popular fantasy and hope to overcome obstacles that the state and ethnicity impose on one’s love and marriage” (27). We cannot say that Naisen kekkon was as prevalent among Korean masses as Korean writers and intellectuals experienced, but it seems to me that discussion of such marriages could appear fresh and even rebellious in a way that was not necessarily directed against the Japanese colonial government, but against older generations or elite Korean families.
Nam Pujin also presents a convincing argument that Japanese women represented ‘modernity’ in the eyes of Korean masses. This itself is an interesting and anomalous case from a comparative perspective. But at the same time, the story is not simply a reverse sexual representation of imperial modernity. Japanese women represented much more than that. What caught my attention was Nam’s description of a novel called 処女の倫理 (Ethics of the Virgin) written by a well-known Korean writer Chang Hyakchu 張 赫宙 in 1939. In this novel, an independent-minded Japanese woman fell in love with and married a Korean man, but was betrayed by him because he had an official Korean wife, and was discriminated against within Korean society. According to Nam, “double marriage” was quite common since many Korean intellectuals either abandoned or ignored their official wives whom they were forced to marry at younger age, and had love affairs with Japanese women. However strongly Korean men desired a Japanese woman as if it would symbolize an achievement of modernity, this particular novel depicted very unstable power relationships that could be caused as a consequence of such a phenomenon.
There is another piece of evidence on the complexity of the issue that I found in the roundtable article mentioned above. Mōri (a commissioner to the Government-General in Korea) says, “Ladies who were raised in Korea face difficulty in finding a marriage partner.” It soon becomes clear that he is referring to Japanese women who grew up in Korea. The first reason he gives is “women who grew up in Korea are too used to luxury and cannot even sew a Kimono. Those who grew up in Japanese (naichi) rural areas are pretty good at this.” According to Mōri, Japanese men preferred naichi women who were not as “modernized” as those who grew up in Korea. It makes sense that Japanese officials and business people who were dispatched to Korea received extra salaries and benefits, and their children regarded themselves as upper-class in comparison to both the average Japanese and Korean families. Does this mean what “the real Japanese woman” represented differed significantly for Korean writers and for Japanese men?
Given the resulting mess, I cannot pin down who colonized whom or even how we could know of it in this issue of Korean-Japanese marriage.
Cities and Nationalisms Conference
This conference will take place in London on 17-18 June 2010.
“Cities have been intimately connected with nationalisms of many kinds. The architecture and spatial design of cities have commonly been intended to bolster national pride. So have the nationalist ceremonies that cities have staged. Yet cities have also been places of contending nationalisms or counter nationalisms in which urban territorial divides have helped shape and maintain competing or actively hostile group loyalties. Cities have also sometimes promoted themselves as cosmopolitan and hospitable to all nations. This conference aims to explore the nature and rich variety of connections between nationalisms and cities in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Cities explored include Alexandria, Belfast, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Cape Town, Cork, Cracow, Hong Kong, Kinshasa, Kirkuk, London, Montreal, Paris, Prague, Shanghai, Tel Aviv and Washington.
Speakers include: Robert Bickers (Bristol), Iain Black (Cambridge), Bill Freund (Kwa-Zulu Natal), Tim Harper (Cambridge), Paul-André Linteau (Québec) and Prashant Kidambi (Leicester)”
The conference does have some Asian focus, and I will be chairing the panel on Chinese cities.
More information here http://www.history.ac.uk/events/conferences/941
Evidence and Torture
As can be seen in this New York Times article and BBC report from May 31 reports some interesting news on the legal front when it comes to torture:
The top judicial and law enforcement bodies in China have issued new guidelines that seek to halt the use of torture in obtaining confessions or witness testimony, especially in death penalty cases.
The rules, announced Sunday, would nullify evidence gathered through violence or intimidation and give defendants the ability to challenge confessions presented during their trials.
There are two new sets of guidelines issued on May 30, the 《关于办理死刑案件审查判断证据若干问题的规定》focusing on death penalty cases, and the《关于办理刑事案件排除非法证据若干问题的规定》which focuses on other criminal cases.1 The New York Times notes that China’s authorities have been willing to recognize the problem for some time, citing a 2003 report by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate admitting that forced confessions had led to hundreds of deaths suspects. While bans of torture have been on the books in the post 1949 period at least since the late 1950s, even at the level of law, some organizations have long complained that the bans do not define torture comprehensively enough, let alone back these laws with real action.2
A Xinhua article announcing the regulations suggests that judges previously could exclude such evidence but lacked sufficiently detailed guidelines, leading to many cases in which it was accepted:
The new regulations define illegal evidence and include specific procedures on how to exclude such evidence.
Lu Guanglun, a senior judge at the Supreme People’s Court, said such details do not exist in the Criminal Procedure Law and its judicial interpretations.
“This is the first time that a systematic and clear regulation tells law enforcers that evidence obtained through illegal means is not only illegal but also useless,” said Zhao Bingzhi, dean of the law school at Beijing Normal University.
“Previously we could only infer from abstract laws that illegal evidence is not allowed. But in reality, in many cases, such evidence was considered valid,” he said.
The guidelines ban evidence obtained through torture but also other problematic evidence. Danwei helpfully translates the six kinds of evidence now banned for use in death penalty cases listed in a 新京报 article on them.
A Long Road
The continued failure to eliminate torture in China is deeply troubling, and clearly not enough is being done. However, the Chinese Public Security Bureau (公安部) has recognized, at higher levels, at least, that confessions gained from torture ultimately do more harm than good as far back as the Sino-Japanese War and even earlier.
In a posting here at Frog in a Well last year, Working to Protect Your Human Rights, I reviewed Chinese Communist Party efforts to eliminate torture (刑讯) in favor of an approach of persuasion (说服) with arrested treason suspects during the Sino-Japanese War in Shandong Province. Internal party reports that I have read urged treason elimination cadres to “protect human rights” (保障人权) and continue to refer to the problem and criticize responsible units all throughout the war and into the civil war period, suggesting that they were never fully successful.
To expand on the examples in the above mentioned posting, take for example, one April, 1943 document criticizing the work of the “treason elimination department” (鋤奸部）of the Communist Party in the Jioadong base area of Shandong that can be found in the Shandong Provincial Archive. This document, “A summary of an investigation on the Jiaodong Trotskyist case and initial opinions on the work of the Jiaodong treason elimination work” (膠東托派案的審查總結及對膠東鋤奸工作的初步意見) is one of many similar documents I have come across reviewing and condemning mistakes made by the treason elimination cadres, especially on cases related spurious cases of “Trotskyist traitors” that plagued the party long after the CCP stopped focusing on the supposed Trotskyist threat and shifted its focus to punishing spies for the Japanese and other collaborators. In this document, all Trotskyist cases from 1941-43 are said be basically mistakes (基本是錯誤的) and the treason elimination organs must take responsibility.
Though a number of different problems are listed, the most relevant is:
In interrogation work, one of the most serious issues is the from top-to-bottom universal use of of torture, which are evil acts in violation of our policy (自上而下普遍的使用刑訊，這面真是犯政策的罪惡行為).3
The opinion concludes that, “not only have these personal mistakes caused psychological and physical harm to the health and progress of cadres, but are also a threat to our political prestige.” It calls for a reorganization of the treason elimination department to better control and supervise their work, and calls for the better education of its cadres.
Though they rarely show any kind of moral outrage, astute analysts within the Communist Party have long recognized that torture has an impact both on the cadres who carry it out, but also the prestige of the Party. This I believe is a substantive difference between them and the widespread torture sanctioned and promoted by the KMT’s wartime agents up to the highest level, including Dai Li, and torture carried out by many other totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. These documents do not call for these acts to be better hidden from the public, but consistently call for their elimination and the reform of cadres responsible.
Since outwardly advertised condemnations of torture by the party match internally distributed condemnations of the same in the case of the CCP, then studying the persistence of torture in Communist China from the wartime to the present day ought to focus on understanding why and how the gap opened up between not the external and internal policy, since I haven’t found much evidence of one, but between the higher level cadres and the interrogation officers on the ground. This is the kind of gap which was targeted in United States attempts to grapple with the widespread persistence of police torture (“third degree” interrogations) among the police in the Wickersham report of 1931.4
More Needs to Be Done
Issuing clear guidelines blocking “illegal” evidence obtained through torture is an important step in the right direction. This can be seen as a message delivered to two primary recipients. First, China is making a statement to its own people, who have been outraged by the tragic-comical case of Zhao Zuohai who was tortured into confession and imprisoned for over a decade for committing a murder of someone who wasn’t even dead. Second, the judiciary is sending a message to interrogation officers in the Public Security Bureau who may be proud of the confessions they extract through their violent means.5 PSB officers likely have incentives to produce such confessions in terms of an increased number of cases solved as well as personal satisfaction that a villain has been caught and prosecuted. If they believe that a bit of “third degree” interrogation will starve them of that solved case and allow a guilty (or innocent) suspect go free, then this may reduce the occurrence of such abuses.
However, this is just not enough. There is ample evidence that having such rules of evidence on the books is simply insufficient to create real changes in the interrogation room. We need only look in neighboring Japan for evidence of this. Japan outlawed torture as early as 1879 but a truly shocking variety of torture techniques were widespread until 1945. In the postwar 1947 constitution, Article 36 explicitly states that, “The infliction of torture by any public officer and cruel punishments are absolutely forbidden.” while Article 38 states pretty much what China has stated in its newly announced regulations, “Confession made under compulsion, torture or threat, or after prolonged arrest or detention shall not be admitted in evidence.”
A clear legal prohibition on using evidence tainted with torture doesn’t help if the courts do not admit that the practice occurs. In the forty years leading up to 1994, there were over 12,000 complaints of torture in Japan, of which only fifteen complaints were accepted in court, with only eight resulting in police punishment.6
The reality is, however, that police torture does exist in postwar Japan, with beatings and other objectionable practices in interrogations continue down to the present day. We must note, however, that there is little evidence that the severity of torture, the numbers of deaths, etc. are anywhere near the scale of torture reported in the Chinese case. Outright beatings of suspects and prisoners have been seem to be on the decline in postwar Japan and a variety of other more subtle forms of psychological and physical pressure have become more dominant.7 In a case reminiscent of the Zhao Zuohai debacle in China, we might remember the release last year of Sugaya Toshikazu whose DNA tests showed he wasn’t the perpetrator in a murder for which he had already served 17 years in prison. Sugaya claims to have been threatened and beaten by detectives into making his confession.
There is growing anger about this issue in Japan and in 2006 the director of “Shall We Dance” Suo Masayuki produced the film “I just Didn’t Do It” to highlight the problem of forced confessions.8 What it shows, however, is that merely banning torture is not enough. Allowing lawyers access to prisoners during all interrogations, and ideally the filming of all prisoner interrogations (now trivial in terms of technological costs, even though it is widely opposed by police around the world) are really the only ways we can guarantee that confessions are obtained legally and without coercion.
UPDATE: Ella Chou has a good posting about this with a more informed discussion about where things need to go from now: Death Penalty, Torture, and Criminal Justice in China.
UPDATE 2013.5: Just read a fantastic overview of the development of rules regarding interrogations and torture in China over the past two decades by Ira Belkin, “China’s Tortuous Path Toward Ending Torture in Criminal Investigations” in Michael McConville and Eva Pils, ed. Comparative Perspectives on Criminal Justice in China (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013). Must read for anyone interested in this issue.
According to the 新京报 article, the latter guidelines for regular cases bars the use of illegal evidence in deciding the case (非法取得物证不可以定案) and will ask officers to testify as to whether or not there was torture.
See Amnesty International’s 2001 report on torture in China, section 4.
Shandong Provincial Archives G024-01-0648-001 膠東托派案的審查總結及對膠東鋤奸工作的初步意見 1943.04.27
Its conclusions on torture in the US are found in its Volume 11 “Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement.” One of the authors of the report famously said that it, “was greeted by the police with two answers which they regarded as conclusive: first, there wasn’t any third degree; and second, they couldn’t do their work without it.” Quoted in G. Daniel Lassiter Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment Springer (2004), 55.
One could argue that China’s human rights critics outside of China are a third recipient, but I’m not convinced it played a primary role in motivating the creation of these guidelines. My suspicion is that, this time, the primary motivation was domestic in origin.
See Rajendra Ramlogan “The Human Rights Revolution in Japan: A Story of New Wine in Old Wine Skins?” Emory International Law Review (Spring, 1994), 182.
In addition to beatings and the “binding fingers” these other techniques include threats to ruin the reputation of the suspect, forcing suspects to stand in a fixed position and waking the suspect in the middle of the night (sound familiar?), offering to allow family to be seen if confession is made, etc. See Jeff Vize “Torture, Forced Confessions, and Inhuman Punishments: Human Rights Abuses in the Japanese Penal System” UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal (Spring, 2003), 334. In US State Department reports on human rights abuses in Japan, the period from 200-2009 focuses mainly on accusations of violence against prisoners within the highly secretive Japanese prison system. Another technique, which reminds of Tokugawa practices forcing suspected Christians to step on Christian images, is the forcing of suspects to step on the names of their ancestors, referred to as the practice of fumiji (踏み字).
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch it. The Hong Kong DVD version of it available in the Harvard Law School video collection is too scratched up to watch. Its Japanese title is それでもボクはやってない.
A Question of Credibility: The ASCK
Of late I have become depressed by what I see as a lack of credibility in some of the efforts to counter the flood of media reports and bombastic condemnations of North Korea. I believe that continued calls for dialogue and warnings against escalation must be accompanied by an honest and active critique of North Korean policies together with a full recognition of the agency of the North Korean state as an actor – not merely a re-actor to the policies of South Korea, the United States, or other parties.
Concerned Scholars
In 2005 I joined an organization called the ASCK, the “Alliance of Scholars Concerned About Korea.” I was only in the second year of my PhD program, but was delighted to hear of an organization of scholars and graduate students who were concerned about US polices towards the two Koreas and sought to promote dialogue, cooperation, and peace on the peninsula. I believed that this organization, reminiscent of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) that led academic opposition to the Vietnam War among scholars of Asia, could help provide historical context for the tensions among the Koreas, warn against potentially ineffective US policies, and perhaps spread a better understanding of the North Korean regime’s domestic and international polices that critiqued its many flaws without demonizing it.
I became disillusioned with the organization, however, when I came to see that the most distinctive and consistent aspect of its portrayal of the Korean Crisis was what it avoided, rather than what it focused upon. In its statements, emailed calls for action, and on its webpage I found that, time and time again, the ASCK carefully avoided treating North Korea as a strategic actor responsible for its own actions. Either it treats North Korea as if it were some kind of otherwise harmless chemical substance that only explodes in reaction to certain other chemicals, or else when it calls for action, North Korea is appended at the end of a list of concerned parties, as if it were some minor last minute addition to a shopping list, “Buy me some milk, bread, carrots, oh, and while you are there, a pack of gum.”
Even on issues that did not directly involve tensions between the Koreas, I have been troubled by inadequacies in some of their campaigns. In the past few years ASCK has supported the efforts to spread the work of the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission which has done valuable work, especially in uncovering information about atrocities committed during or just before the Korean War, but the overwhelming emphasis of reporting on their findings is about atrocities committed by anti-Communist forces in a way that occasionally leaves out context or perspective. ASCK has justly protested against heavy-handed political intervention into the revision of history textbooks by conservative forces in South Korea, a position I agree with, but if it cares about history education it should also then be willing to point out the problems in the narratives of existing South Korean textbooks and call for their reform. The ASCK has supported House Resolution 121 on the “Comfort Women” issue, again a laudable cause, but given how distant this is from the organization’s professed goals, one would hope they would direct somewhat more energy into a statement condemning North Korean treatment of returning refugees, or the abuse of its own people, which is undeniably closer to the heart of their mission.
Silence, and Other Sins
It is in its handling of the tensions with North Korea, however, that the ASCK has been truly disappointing. When North Korea carried out its nuclear weapon test in October, 2006, I expected a strongly worded statement of condemnation from the organization attached to an appeal for calm and a realistic appraisal of the alternatives going forward. Nothing. Following North Korea’s May, 2009 nuclear test, I thought surely this time the ASCK would be forced to make a statement condemning the test. Almost all of the current ASCK steering committee and other leading members did stir in June, 2009, but in an unexpected manner when they signed a circulated “Statement from Professors in North America Concerned about Korean Democracy” (English | Korean) deploring the fact that, since the election of Lee Myung-bak, “Korean democracy had lost its way.” It condemned the suppression of candlelight vigils, and problematic government moves against the freedom of press and online activism.
I too was concerned by Lee’s handling of the protests, even if I believe it is too much to say that Korea’s young democracy had “lost its way.” If anything it has been the progressive movement that has lost its way, and as a result, lost the trust of the Korean people who subsequently elected a conservative President. It is now a time to regroup, rethink, and plan for the next election. It was not, however, so much the position espoused in the 10 June 2009 statement signed by over two hundred professors (I’m not sure what organizations led the drive to collect them) that dismayed me as the fact that the ASCK or its members put together no statement and collected no signatures at the time condemning a North Korean nuclear test that happened only a few weeks earlier on 25 May, 2009 and coming, rudely, only two days after the suicide of former president Roh Moo Hyun. Compared to the more muted response to the 2006 test, which nevertheless led to the unanimous passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1718, this time even China and Russia were surprisingly vocal in their strong condemnations, which helped lead to the passing of the more sharp-toothed UN Security Council Resolution 1874 in June of last year. But ASCK mobilized no scholars against these tests, or even bother, at this point, to weigh in on the dangers of United Nations sanctions being unproductive, even if justified in their condemnation.
I don’t think North Korea would have cowered at the spectacle of having its nuclear tests criticized by a few academics: it is not about that. It is about credibility; it is about taking the right position, of being willing to make a clear honest statement about something that touches the heart of one’s issue, and avoid the hypocrisy that plagued so many progressives in the Cold War who took a stand against American imperialism but fell silent when faced by the horrors of Communist oppression.
Sometimes the ASCK does speak up and mention North Korea, but when it does so, it is reluctant to treat North Korea like a full participant in the crisis, even when arguably (and I’m not even asking them to go this far) it is the primary source of tensions.
Let us look at two representative examples:
1) “Time to End the Korean War” (2003)
It is always the United States which is the primary target for the ASCK. Article two of this statement singles out the US for criticism and accuses it of pushing the Korean peninsula “perilously close of war” (Poorly chosen words, at any rate, since a major push of the ASCK is to get everyone to realize that the war never ended) and specifically mentions its “threats of embargo, preemptive strikes and regime change” but nowhere in the statement is there an acknowledgment that the DPRK plays a significant role as an obstacle to peace on the peninsula.
It is very unfortunate that the supporters of the statement listed at the bottom which, to ASCK’s credit, includes almost all of the leading scholars of Korea in the United States and Europe—many of whom I deeply respect—did not point out this disturbing asymmetry. At the very least they could have appended a watered down phrase to article two saying something along the lines of, “and the policies of the DPRK haven’t exactly been helpful, either.”
2) “A Transnational Appeal for Peace and Security in Northeast Asia” (2009)
The ASCK is a master of passive constructions designed to avoid difficult questions of responsibility, except when such responsibility can be directly attributed to anyone except North Korea. In this appeal, found on the positions page of the ASCK, we learn that “The United States, South Korea, and Japan are tightening sanctions” but “Tension is rising,” “military tensions actually increased,” and the “Northeast Asian region was swept by fears by a sudden change in the nuclear situation.” This sudden change, we learn, came at the end of a chain of events which places North Korea in the position of the victim. Here is the narrative as portrayed by the ASCK:
In April Pyongyang “announced that it would launch a satellite.” There is no mention of why this might be a very bad idea, completely counter productive, a potential violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1718, and that a communications satellite is not the best use of an economically failing state’s resources. President Obama and the Security Council condemned the launch and tightened sanctions. North Korea then, on May 25, “responded to what it viewed as the statement’s infringement on its sovereign right by conducting a nuclear test.” The UNSC passed Resolution 1874 to punish North Korea “for what it believed” to be a violation of previous resolutions, and North Korea “in turn” tested more missiles. This was all part of a “vicious cycle of confrontation.”
Later in the document, again in reference to North Korea’s launch of a satellite, a whole paragraph is supplied to present North Korea’s argument in defense of its satellite-loaded missile launch, but not a single sentence is spared in the document to outline why most of the world, except for such noble supporters of democracy as Cuba, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, have expressed sentiments ranging from concern to outright shock and condemnation. No mention is made of the fact that it is highly likely that delivering a satellite into orbit was not the only, likely not even the primary purpose of the launch. Instead, North Korea’s claims are presented without any skepticism.
This entire narrative only functions, however, if we see each step as directly connected to the previous one – of each move being a reaction to some previous provocation. This, I believe, is not only incredibly naive, but seriously underestimates the intelligence and strategy of the North Korean regime.
More troubling in this statement is how little is expected of North Korea. It calls on Obama and Chairman Kim Jong-il to “return to a course of dialogue” but all of the rest of the demands made in the statement are directed to other governments: the United States, South Korea, Russia, China, and Japan. It does not ask North Korea to stop nuclear tests, stop firing its missiles, or end its constant threats of war. It brings up the Japanese frustrations with North Korea over the abduction question but does not ask North Korea to address them. On the contrary, in what must be an ominous reference to colonialism it notes Japan’s “historical responsibility for the present crisis,” and notes Japan’s “refusal to fulfill its obligations to provide oil to North Korea under the Six-Party agreements” without any reference to North Korea’s failures to follow through with its many broken promises.
In other words, if someone is coming to this issue without any prior knowledge of the background of events, they can not be blamed for getting the impression that North Korea is a pitiable, if feisty victim of international bullying.
A Call For A New ASCK
These two examples are part of a pattern that is deeply troubling. Barring a major shift in its approach, I believe graduate students and scholars who might sympathize with the noble goals set out in the ASCK mission statement should distance themselves from this organization, and refuse to support any statements such as those listed above. I sincerely hope a new cooperative alliance of scholars concerned about Korea will eventually take its place. There is a desperate need for such an organization, but the statements put out by the ASCK risk creating suspicion and attracting ridicule. Progressive supporters of direct dialogue between the United States and North Korea, a defusing of the military tensions, and a final peace treaty are often vilified as “pro-North Korean” or seen as apologists for its oppressive regime. I believe the vast majority of ASCK members and statement supporters are strongly opposed to North Korea’s Stalinist dictatorship and its oppressive policies and their individual writings often confirm this. Doubtlessly some of them believe that there is enough in the media already which condemns North Korea’s nuclear tests, its domestic oppression, and its brinkmanship, and that therefore an organization such as the ASCK plays an important balancing role by focusing on its counter-critique. To those friends I can only say that I think this is both a tactical mistake in terms of lost potential support, as well as morally troubling.
As historians and academics studying Korea, there is nothing wrong with us taking a firm political stand. There is no apolitical history, the very questions we ask in our research already betray the assumptions that guide our scholarship. However, some questions, when asked, present themselves like a mirror, reflecting naturally, if uncomfortably, back upon ourselves.
Now, as tensions are reaching a new peak following the likely North Korean sinking of the South Korean vessel Cheonan, it is more important than ever that all of us engaged in the academic study of Korea who are deeply concerned about the future of peace on the Korean peninsula speak up. If we support continued dialogue, a carefully moderated response, and oppose any talk of military retaliation, we should do so without denying North Korean responsibility and, despite our justified skepticism of all state parties, tentatively accept the most likely explanations provided. If the ASCK refuses to provide such a voice and live up to its mission, then we should either create an alternative organization or individually make our positions known.
-Konrad M. Lawson
South Korea and Thailand–(Comparative) Developmental Contexts
I’ve been playing with this image for quite some time now, and am still trying to build a “thick” context around it for a piece that should (finally!) get submitted sometime later this summer. Okay, so what do Thailand and South Korea–more specifically, Hyundai Construction–have to do with each other?
I’m interested in this more as a broad question of emerging diplomatic and economic relations between NE and SE Asia during the early Cold War, or to put it in other terms, new opportunities enabled by the passing from Japanese Empire to American Empire.
(1) This image, from the early 1960’s, displays a welcome banner put out for Mr. Pakorn Angsusingha (I’ve also seen a transliteration of his name as Pakon Angsusing), a Thai academic and bureaucrat, by Hyundai Construction, presumably outside their Bangkok offices, circa 1965. He’s (Angsusingha) involved in a lot of social work and community development projects for Thailand, with community development being a Thai priority (1958-1961), prior to the nation-wide focus on ARD (Accelerated Rural Development) in the mid-1960’s. Essentially these are large nation-buidling projects, getting villages to identify with Bangkok, and they have a strong anti-Communist component.
(2) When Hyundai begins to bid for road projects in Thailand, there are not yet strong relations between the two countries, but Thailand also has a strong military government, and was one of the first to support the ROK during the Korean War, even sending its troops.
(3) Both countries had ICA-funded projects in Public Administration, with the University of Indiana helping to build building the field in Thailand (at Thammasat University) and the University of Minnesota doing comparable work at Seoul National University. These projects would not have been exactly the same, of course, but emerging Thai and South Korean elites were both learning a similar language of development and administration in the late 1950’s, early 1960’s.
So this sign, which precedes the Pattani-Naratiwat project (1965-1968), and which precedes Hyundai getting the bid (sometime in late 1965), does not place me in the context of the negotiations between Hyundai and IBRD / World Bank, but it does indicate that it should not be surprising that these two actors would meet each other: one with aid dollars to spend on building anti-Communist roads, and another with new expertise and American patronage interested in gaining more experience. There are lots of interesting things going on with South Korea in SE Asia even prior to formal involvement with Vietnam, after all.
Update: Japanese to the Rescue
In April I made a short posting about an interesting work of fiction from 1907, called Death Trap by R. W. Cole1 that depicts a future German invasion of Britain that is repulsed only thanks to the valiant efforts of the Japanese military.
Thanks to the wonderful marvel that is inter-library loan, one of the Hampshire County Libraries in England was kind enough to loan Widener library its copy of the 1907 book long enough for me to take a quick peek at it this afternoon and scan the pages from the end of the book which depicts the Japanese liberation of an occupied Britain. Since the book is no longer protected by copyright, if you are interested, you can download my quick scans from the book as a PDF here.2
Reading the original I find this to be a really wonderful example of a widespread admiration for Japan found throughout the world in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war. At the climax of Cole’s novel, when the Germans had “almost achieved their purpose of crushing England to submission,” and mobs of desperate civilians “paraded the streets of north and east London crying for peace at any price,”3 there are suddenly sounds of artillery coming from the Kent coast. The Germans react with concern, determine that the Japanese have arrived, but are confident of ultimate victory. A massive naval battle ensues between the Germans and Russians on one side, with the British and Japanese on the other. “Several ships were missing from the Russian and German squadrons, for the Japanese torpedo-boats had delivered attacks of unsurpassed audacity and skill the previous night.” Though the fleets were equally matched,
“The Germans and Russians fought like heroes, but the strategy of the Japanese admiral, who stood with folded arms directing the battle from his conning tower, was superior to theirs. Hours passed. The little yellow man still calmly gave his orders and watched the battle. Ships were battered by shells, rammed, sunk and torpedoed. But the yellow men were triumphant everywhere, and soon their enemies’ ships floated as useless hulks upon the waves…”4
Shortly thereafter, “thousands of Japanese army officers landed at Liverpool…All were ready to take over their commands at once, and at the head of all were field-marshals who had fought in Manchuria. Almost every member of this vast array of officers had seen service in the Russo-Japanese War.”
Despite the fact that the Japanese are described as “little yellow men” Cole repeatedly returns to compliment them on their intelligence and skill. It is the German army which is described as, “raw hordes of half-trained men”5 and the British military forces are merely the frontline soldiers who are commanded by their more superior Japanese leaders, as Cole writes, “The presence of innumerable Japanese officers of all ranks in the British amateur army had greatly improved its value.” Even before the final clash of armies in the British countryside, “parties of British infantry and cavalry under Japanese officers were always dropping down from apparently nowhere, and cutting off stragglers, intercepting ammunition and commissariat wagons, sometimes even firing on the artillery trains.”6
This is again shown in the description of the final battle:
“At last the armies met, and the Germans went into action confident of victory. But they were roughly undeceived, for although the rank and file were weak and ineffective, the Japanese officers were far superior in dash and science to the Kaiser’s. After all, the strength of an army lies in its brains, and the British and their Japanese allies had both brains and numbers.”7
When the battle went badly, the Germans attempted to retreat and escape from “this Hell of anguish and defeat. But the doors were already closed by British troops led by skilful Japanese.”8
When the Germans had been surrounded, the British and Japanese victors exacted severe peace terms on a shocked Kaiser. However, “the final victory gave [Britain] little satisfaction, for it was universally known that it was due to the highly-skilled aid of Japan, and not to the martial prowess of the British.”9 As would be happen in reality only a decade after this novel was published, Germany lost its imperial possessions, Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France. This humiliating fate was “all wrought by the despised yellow monkeys from the Far East.”10
A novel like this is only one of many publications in the first few decades of the twentieth century that are filled with admiration for Japan, its martial culture, and its rapid industrialization. Already here though we see a depiction of the Japanese that would endure in future wars: the emphasis on a contrast between their diminutive stature and the supposed fact that they are essentially an usually gifted and intelligent people, or in the words of one German officer in the novel, “Those Japanese are very clever.”11
Brett from airminded.org points out in a comment to that posting that Cole also wrote a book that posits the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon empire into space. Read more about this over at his blog.
I scanned the title page, the first chapter, and then the last few chapters from around where the first mention I noticed of the Japanese.
p. 273
p. 278
p282
p. 283
p. 284
p. 297
p. 311
p. 311
p. 277
The Will of a Traitor
In The Will of a Traitor, posted next door at 井底之蛙, I write about the controversial will of China’s most famous collaborator, and an interesting English translation of the text by Kim Bonggi, one of the founders of a newspaper that eventually became today’s Korea Herald.
The Will of a Traitor
There is a lot of treason to be found in the vicinity of LOC number DS777.5195.W34 in the Harvard-Yenching library. It’s Wang Jingwei (汪精衛) territory, infamous puppet lord of wartime occupied China, and reviled former patriot turned running dog of Japanese imperialism. He is also known as Wang Zhaoming (汪兆銘 Wang Chao-ming), Wang Jingwei being his pen name. On the shelves nearby we find books by and on his underlings Chen Gongbo and Zhou Fohai, equally reviled figures who lived long enough to go on trial for being Chinese traitors, or hanjian (漢奸).
In the Harvard-Yenching library’s English language collections, this section houses an unusual volume only a few pages in length:
Will of Wang Chao-Ming
Translated by Bonggi Kim
The Korean Republic
Seoul, Korea
It opens, “This translation of Wang Chao-ming’s will into English is intended to look into his cause in collaborating with imperialist Japan.”1 Following a short introduction is the dozen page translation of what claims to be Wang Jingwei’s final written testament. It is signed October, 1944 — he would die in November, before Japan’s defeat and the text is now known as “My Final State of Mind” (我最後之心情), a document whose authenticity has been contested ever since the original was first published in the Hong Kong Chunqiu (春秋) in early 1964.2 Its publication was also widely reported in Japan, including the English language Japan Times.3
Justifying Collaboration
This text attributed to Wang, if real, is of historical interest because its author offers detailed justifications for collaboration with Japan, and writes about his plans for the postwar period.4 “We planned to hand over to the Nationalist government the areas recovered from the enemy occupation,” he writes, though at the time, the “enemy” Japan is his military ally. Using the famous “Shield” argument used to justify Vichy collaboration with Nazi Germany, Wang goes on to say, “the Nanjing government entered into an alliance with Japan as a means to fight for lost sovereignty and get as many materials as possible under Japanese occupation.”5 He writes of his successes so far in supporting Japan’s war effort including the overturning of unequal treaties, recovering foreign concessions, and claims that he has “not tolerated any foreign intervention in domestic affairs…”6 He worries about the fate of Manchuria, which Japan refuses to return to China, but claims that he must press on in his efforts. “I am well aware of the forthcoming surrender of Japan,” and is optimistic since the Japanese show renewed sincerity in their negotiations with him.7
In his closing, Wang even expresses hope for the future of Sino-Japanese relations after Japan’s defeat, which will ultimately hinge upon a thorough enlightenment of the Japanese people and the magnanimity of the Chinese government.8
Kim Bonggi – The Korean Translator
The translation of this text is, perhaps ironically, interesting for a similar reason. Following the copy of the translation, we find attached a letter from the translator, addressed to the chief librarian of the “University of Colombia” in New York.9 In it, Kim writes with what can only be interpreted as a significant degree of sympathy for Wang. In the letter, dated August 10, 1964, we find the following passage.
Wang, A leading political figure in modern China, played a vital role in the formation of the country. His collaboration with the [sic] however, tarnished his image as the great patriot with lifelong devotion to his country.
Many Chinese people, in fact, did not hesitate to call him a traitor, but others think that he was forced to bow to the inevitable and that what he did was a risk that had to be assumed in the interests of the Chinese people.
Whether servile collaboration with the Japanese militarists is precisely the term for the acts of Wang is still open to debate, but it is not difficult to suppose that his actions proceeded from the difficulty of finding solutions to the problem of a war that had been dragging on with no end in sight. He strove to regain the lost sovereignty of the Chinese people, but he fell short of the affecting it despite his determination. Even his death was at one time rumored to be an unnatural one.
Whatever his real motive was, it cannot be denied that the last words of Wang himself will be helpful in determining why he made the decision to establish the Nanking government with the support of the invading Japanese. As far as his will is concerned, it is apparent that he did not act for personal gain, but rather with the hope that he could restore the lost land of China through negotiations—not through force of arms against the overwhelming odds with which China was forced at the time.
In order to avoid attaching undue significance to his real motives which resulted in the establishment of the Nanking regime in collaboration with the invading Japanese militarists, I had better refrain from commenting on the issue; nevertheless, I sincerely hope thet [sic] the material which I send you will be of some interest in helping your studies on matters that concern the modern history of China.
Kim Bonggi, born in 1921 or 1920, was one of the founders, in 1953, of the English language newspaper, The Korean Republic, and at the time of writing this letter, its “President-Publisher.” That newspaper later became The Korea Herald but during the anti-government protests and martial law atmosphere of 1964 it was, like most of South Korea’s media, barely more than a propaganda pamphlet and devoid of criticism for the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee.
According to this biographical entry, 김봉기(金鳳基) was born in Seoul, graduated from Seoul University10 and held positions in two conservative newspapers, the Chungang ilbo and Chosŏn ilbo, as well as serving on the council of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League.11
What led Kim to translate this Chinese text into English, or even if he merely posed as its real translator, go through the trouble to have it sent to an American university?
Kim was under 25 at the time of Japan’s defeat in 1945 so this did not leave him much time to progress along the careers paths under Japanese colonialism that could have given him the brand of collaborator.12 However, at the peak of Japan’s power in 1942, he was surely old enough to have been caught up in the excitement of Japan’s seemingly unstoppable military advances against the colonial powers of the West or to at least have begun thinking about what his place would be as a Korean in a Japanese empire.
On the highly symbolic March 1st and August 15th anniversaries in 1964, Kim’s Korean Republic was filled with stories of a valiant Korean resistance to Japan and reported on celebrations commemorating Korea’s final liberation from its colonial master, but reading Kim’s August letter I think we can see clearly the sympathy many Koreans who had lived through the Japanese colonial period felt for the collaborator’s dilemma, and believed, though they might be careful where and how they expressed their views, that even despised figures like Wang Jingwei might ultimately be remembered one day as national heroes.13
UPDATE: For one more location which has a more rich, if very dated, discussion about the mysterious document and the controversy surrounding it, see John Hunter Boyle’s bibliographical note in his China and Japan at War, 1937-45: The Politics of Collaboration (1972) on pages 395-397.
Wang Jingwei, Kim Bonggi trans. Will of Wang Chao-Ming Unpublished manuscript in Harvard-Yenching library. Hollis number 009048141.
See 沈立行 《汪精卫的《日记》和“遗嘱”之谜》纵横 2000.2, 56-57 for an inconclusive discussion of its authenticity.
I haven’t checked the microfilm of their early May, 1964 issues to see if their reporting on the will included any translation of the document but if they did, it might be interesting to compare it to Kim’s.
The Chinese text can be found online at 人民网 here as of 2010.4.12. Wang Jingwei justified his collaboration in a number of other texts as well, including in a March 30, 1939 open letter “A Reply to an Overseas Chinese” (复华侨某君书). See 劉傑 「汪兆銘と「南京国民政府」―協力と抵抗の間 in 劉傑, 楊大慶, 三谷博 eds. 『国境を越える歴史認識―日中対話の試み』 (Tokyo, 東京大学出版会 2006) for the full text in Japanese.
ibid., 6.
ibid., 10.
ibid., 11.
It is remarkable that he sees only the need for the magnanimity of Chinese government policy, and not by the Chinese people who suffered under Japanese occupation. The original Chinese is, “將來戰後兩國能否有自動提攜，互利互賴，仍有賴于日本民族之徹底覺悟，及我政府對日之寬大政策。”
I assume Columbia University Starr East Asia library has the original letter and document. A CLIO library search reveals an entry for the translation and attached letter located at DS778.W3
Unless he actually graduated from the Japanese run Keijō Imperial University and someone changed the name to its postwar equivalent, this would seem to suggest he completed his university education after the summer of 1946.
亞細亞反共聯盟 in Korea, these organizations, founded throughout Asia in the 1950s still exist but have changed their names. They are national chapters of the World League for Freedom and Democracy, formerly the World Anti-Communist League. Kim was also involved in the 大韓公論社, which appears to have published a number of things, but I don’t know much about the organization.
Someone by the name 김봉기(金鳳基) is listed on a recently published list of suspected Japanese collaborators, in the category of “pro-Japanese” organizations, but I am not sure this is the same person. Another 김봉기(金鳳基) was executed in 1907 for his anti-Japanese resistance efforts.
The political cartoon shown here is by 麦非, and can be found in 沈建中 ed. 抗战漫画 (Shanghai, 上海科学院出版社, 2005), 206.
AAS 2010: Annexation Centennial
Final exams crash onto my desk tomorrow, but I’m as organized as I can be in advance, so I thought I’d do a little belated AAS blogging, especially about the pair of panels on Saturday commemorating the centennial of Japan’s annexation of Korea and the 50th anniversary of Hilary Conroy’s groundbreaking study of same.
Continue reading →
Academia/Colonial/Conferences/English/Frog in A Well/Historiography/Korea/Korea-China/Korea-Japan/US-Korea
AAS 2010 Blogging: Annexation Centennial
Final exams crash onto my desk tomorrow, but I’m as organized as I can be in advance, so I thought I’d do a little belated AAS blogging, especially about the pair of panels on Saturday commemorating the centennial of Japan’s annexation of Korea and the 50th anniversary of Hilary Conroy’s groundbreaking study of same.
Continue reading →
May Fourth
Did you know that May 4th is Star Wars Day? Yet another example of how history piles up.
Guides at Frog in a Well
Here at Frog in a Well we have attempted to occasionally go beyond our role as a publisher of three group weblogs on the history of East Asia. Though it still has very few entries, our Frog in a Well Library contains some primary historical documents. The East Asian Libraries and Archives wiki contains a slowly growing collection of entries with useful information about libraries and archives in East Asia, as well as other information on databases, organizations, and links to other similar resources.
We would now like to announce a new addition: Frog in a Well Guides. Here we would like to host a collection of guides, created by students or scholars of East Asia. We currently imagine these to be primarily bibliographies or research guides tailored to specific areas of research on East Asia. It is inspired by other wonderful existing resources such as the Modern Chinese History bibliography, the Korean History Bibliography, and most of all the wonderful work by students of Professor Henry Smith’s Japanese Bibliography course at Columbia University.
All the guides will be published with a Creative Commons license to allow the greatest possible freedom in using them, and we welcome edited, revised, or expanded versions of existing guides by new authors. Also, each guide will have its own page on the EALA wiki where anyone may leave comments, or recommendations for others to incorporate in future updated versions.
Our first guide has been contributed by our own Sayaka Chatani, PhD Candidate at Columbia University:
A Basic Guide to Resources on Japanese Colonialism
The EALA wiki page for the guide, if you have suggestions can be found here. Many thanks to Sayaka for contributing this.
Guides at Frog in a Well
Here at Frog in a Well we have attempted to occasionally go beyond our role as a publisher of three group weblogs on the history of East Asia. Though it still has very few entries, our Frog in a Well Library contains some primary historical documents. The East Asian Libraries and Archives wiki contains a slowly growing collection of entries with useful information about libraries and archives in East Asia, as well as other information on databases, organizations, and links to other similar resources.
We would now like to announce a new addition: Frog in a Well Guides. Here we would like to host a collection of guides, created by students or scholars of East Asia. We currently imagine these to be primarily bibliographies or research guides tailored to specific areas of research on East Asia. It is inspired by other wonderful existing resources such as the Modern Chinese History bibliography, the Korean History Bibliography, and most of all the wonderful work by students of Professor Henry Smith’s Japanese Bibliography course at Columbia University.
All the guides will be published with a Creative Commons license to allow the greatest possible freedom in using them, and we welcome edited, revised, or expanded versions of existing guides by new authors. Also, each guide will have its own page on the EALA wiki where anyone may leave comments, or recommendations for others to incorporate in future updated versions.
Our first guide has been contributed by our own Sayaka Chatani, PhD Candidate at Columbia University:
A Basic Guide to Resources on Japanese Colonialism
The EALA wiki page for the guide, if you have suggestions can be found here. Many thanks to Sayaka for contributing this.
Frog in a Well Guides: A Basic Guide to Resources on Japanese Colonialism
Here at Frog in a Well we have attempted to occasionally go beyond our role as a publisher of three group weblogs on the history of East Asia. Though it still has very few entries, our Frog in a Well Library contains some primary historical documents. The East Asian Libraries and Archives wiki contains a slowly growing collection of entries with useful information about libraries and archives in East Asia, as well as other information on databases, organizations, and links to other similar resources.
We would now like to announce a new addition: Frog in a Well Guides. Here we would like to host a collection of guides, created by students or scholars of East Asia. We currently imagine these to be primarily bibliographies or research guides tailored to specific areas of research on East Asia. It is inspired by other wonderful existing resources such as the Modern Chinese History bibliography, the Korean History Bibliography, and most of all the wonderful work by students of Professor Henry Smith’s Japanese Bibliography course at Columbia University.
All the guides will be published with a Creative Commons license to allow the greatest possible freedom in using them, and we welcome edited, revised, or expanded versions of existing guides by new authors. Also, each guide will have its own page on the EALA wiki where anyone may leave comments, or recommendations for others to incorporate in future updated versions.
Our first guide has been contributed by our own Sayaka Chatani, PhD Candidate at Columbia University:
A Basic Guide to Resources on Japanese Colonialism
The EALA wiki page for the guide, if you have suggestions can be found here. Many thanks to Sayaka for contributing this.