Korean Nationalism (Japanese Period)

 

 

  1. What is nationalism: 

A) definition by revisionist anthropology:  Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism first appeared in 1983. Since that time it has become one of the standard texts on the topic of nations and nationalism. The following definition is one of the most commonly used by scholars in the field.

    "In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

"It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that 'Or l’essence d'une nation est que tons les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses.” With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that 'Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.' The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically-as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society.' We may today think of the French aristocracy of the ancien régime as a class; but surely it was imagined this way only very late. To the question 'Who is the ‘Comte de X?’ the normal answer would have been, not 'a member of the aristocracy,' but 'the lord of X, 'the uncle of the Baronne de Y,'or 'a client of the Duc de Z.'

"It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destorying the legitamcy of the devinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.

"Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings”.

B) Definition by revisionist social history:  Ernest Gellner was one of the most important scholars of nationalism. His book, Nations and Nationalism (1983) remains one of the most important books in the field.

"In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all circumstances. Moreover, nations and states are not the same contingency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other; that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a tragedy. But before they could become intended for each other, each of them had to emerge, and their emergence was independent and contingent. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the nation. Some nations have certainly emerged without the blessings of their own state. It is more debatable whether the normative idea of the nation, in its modern sense, did not presuppose the prior existence of the state. Take the Estonians. At the beginning of the nineteenth century they didn't even have a name for themselves. They were just referred to as people who lived on the land as opposed to German or Swedish burghers and aristocrats and Russian administrators. They had no ethnonym. They were just a category without any ethnic self-consciousness. Since then they've been brilliantly successful in creating a vibrant culture. This is obviously very much alive in the Ethnographic Museum in Tartu, which has one object for every ten Estonians and there are only a million of them. (The Museum has a collection of 100,000 ethnographic objects). It's a very vital and vibrant culture, but, it was created by the kind of modernist process which I then generalise for nationalism and nations in general. The central fact seems to me that what has really happened in the modern world is that the role of culture in human life was totally transformed by that cluster of economic and scientific changes which have transformed the world since the seventeenth century. The prime role of culture in agrarian society was to underwrite peoples status and peoples identity. Its role was really to embed their position in a complex, usually hierarchical and relatively stable structure. The world as it is now is one where people have no stable position or structure. They are members of ephemeral professional bureaucracies which are not deeply internalised and which are temporary. They are members of increasingly loose family associations. What really matters is their incorporation and their mastery of high culture; I mean a literate codified culture which permits context-free communication. Their membership of such a community and their acceptability in it, that is a nation. It is the consequence of the mobility and anonymity of modern society and of the semantic non-physical nature of work that mastery of such culture and acceptability in it is the most valuable possession a man has. It is a precondition of all other privileges and participation. This automatically makes him into a nationalist because if there is non-congruence between the culture in which he is operating and the culture of the surrounding economic, political and educational bureaucracies, then he is in trouble. He and his off-spring are exposed to sustained humiliation. Moreover, the maintenance of the kind of high culture, the kind of medium in which society operates, is politically precarious and expensive. It is linked to the state as a protector and usually the financier or at the very least the quality controller of the educational process which makes people members of this kind of culture.”

C) Definition by the critical Marxist historical scholarship: Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. “I do not regard the 'nation' as a primary nor as an unchanging social entity. It belongs exclusively to a particular, and historically recent, period. It is a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the 'nation-state', and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationality except insofar as both relate to it. Moreover, with Gellner I would stress the element of artifact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations. 'Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent ... political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality.' In short, for the purposes of analysis nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.  The 'national question', as the old Marxists called it, is situated at the point of intersection of politics, technology and social transformation. Nations exist not only as functions of a particular kind of territorial state or the aspiration to establish one - broadly speaking, the citizen state of the French Revolution - but also in the context of a particular stage of technological and economic development. Most students today will agree that standard national languages, spoken or written, cannot emerge as such before printing, mass literacy and hence, mass schooling. It has even been argued that popular spoken Italian as an idiom capable of expressing the full range of what a twentieth-century language needs outside the domestic and face-to-face sphere of communication, is only being constructed today as a function of the needs of national television programming. Nations and their associated phenomena must therefore be analyzed in terms of political, technical, administrative, economic and other conditions and requirements. For this reason they are, in my view, dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist. If I have a major criticism of Gellner's work it is that his preferred perspective of modernization from above, makes it difficult to pay adequate attention to the view from below.
That view from below, i.e. the nation as seen not by governments and the spokesmen and activists of nationalist (or non-nationalist) movements, but by the ordinary persons who are the objects of their action and propaganda, is exceedingly difficult to discover. Fortunately social historians have learned how to investigate the history of ideas, opinions and feelings at the sub-literary level, so that we are today less likely to confuse, as historians once habitually did, editorials in select newspapers with public opinion. We do not know much for certain. However, three things are clear.
First, official ideologies of states and movements are not guides to what it is in the minds of even the most loyal citizens or supporters. Second, and more specifically, we cannot assume that for most people national identification - when it exists - excludes or is always or ever superior to, the remainder of the set of identifications which constitute the social being. In fact, it is always combined with identifications of another kind, even when it is felt to be superior to them. Thirdly, national identification and what it is believed to imply, can change and shift in time, even in the course of quite short periods. In my judgment this is the area of national studies in which, thinking and research are most urgently needed today.”

  2.  Korean Nationalism under the Japanese.

 

-         first proto-nationalists of the 1890th – USA and Japan-educated Social Darwinists/Christians, mostly of upper-high class background. Gathered around Korea’s first ever bilingual (Korean/English) newspaper, The Independent (Tongnip Sinmun, founded on April 7, 1896: today’s “Newspaper day” in South Korea). Their view of nation – mixture of elitarist diplomatic/military (“we are to compete with others”) and democratic (advocacy of some primitive forms of human rights) discourses, strongly influenced by the “core” (USA) and “sub-core” (Japan) currents, thus lack of attention to the danger of colonization (or view of colonization as inevitable phenomenon: typical Social-Darwinism). Their view, for example, on establishing of Russian concessions in Manchuria:

                      “We care very little who owns the railroads and steamships that carry our cargo and ourselves when we transport our good or when we are travelling. All we care for are good accommodation and rapid transportation. If these can be accomplished by Russia’s energy and diplomatic skill, we would rather praise her for it than entertain any jealousy or ill feeling. China is absolutely incapable of accomplishing any such feat for the good of her own people or the peoples of the world. Then, let some nation go there and open up the immense territory for the good of the whole universe. The result of such enterprise will certainly to benefit Chinese themselves. (…). History tells us that wherever Western civilization has made its appearance, the place was transformed into a new country altogether. The (…) plains of the Western prairies of America have become happy homes of many million souls (…). We hope the time will soon come when Western civilization will penetrate every corner of the Continent of Asia (…)”(English editorial, The Independent, November 14th, 1896).

                      The Independent also, as a matter of principle, welcomed foreign (European) agricultural immigration to Korea, and also trade in Korean resources (rice, etc.) with Japan. Its idea of “Korean reforms” – extremely pro-Western and elitarist – “under experienced foreign guidance”, and under the guidance of those members of Korean elite who already received Western/Japanese education. Their “nation” as inherently hierarchical construction, with the Westernised elite occupying upper tier, as “civilizers” of Korea.

At the same time: Strong idea of horizontal links between members of various strata (Independence Club, campaigns for governmental accountability, against corruption, for some elementary form of democracy) – points to the gradual establishment of the idea of the prevalence of non-hierarchical/non-traditional – “national” – relationships.  

-         Early colonial period – Sin Ch’aeho historical scholarship presents first truly nationalistic narratives. Beginning of the “invention” of the nation through the nationalistic re-writing of the past and re-construction of the “high culture”   narrative.                            

 Photo 1: English-Korean newspaper of the first proto-nationalists.

 

First narrative – “New Way of Reading History” (“Toksa sillon”, 1908), first established the Korean History as that of Korean “nation” (before, it was rather history of the dynasties, and not usually written in vernacular Korean). History for everybody (totally new concept, before the reading of history was very elitarian thing) – “New Way…” was serialized in a commercial newspaper (formally owned by a British subject, to use his extraterritorial privileges in the struggle against Japanese harassment). Loyalty of everybody to everybody inside the “national” framework – Sin proclaims that “state belongs to the peoples of the nation” (not to the dynasty, as was usual before). Totalising discourse: all past Korean dynasties are painted as succeeding “national states”, with “national consciousness” (or treacherous lack of such), and high culture of the past is re-structured around new nationalist motifs (famous aristocracy/gentry generals made into “patriotic national warriors”, etc.).  Territorial irredentism – Sin’s quest for Manchurian territories as a part of “Korean National Space”. Social Darwinist traits: “the superior [nations] survive, and the inferior collapse” (ujon yeolmang), Korea must “struggle with the world if we are to gain independence in the world.” Thus, cult of heroes – leaders of “struggles” in history: roots of North Korean Kim Ilsung cult, or Pak ChongHee personality cult. Later, in the 1920s, Sin comes to the idea of “national history” as a “perpetual struggle” between “national I” and “Others”, and concludes that coalescence of human groups into “nations” and “struggle” between them are indeed the main content of history.

-  “National” policy of the Japanese: Koreans, gentry and peasants alike, are made (“lumped”) into a nation (as Japanese were), but in very pejorative sense: to the Korean “nation” (Chosenjin), all the negative qualities Japanese presumably lacked, are systematically ascribed. “Making of Japan’s own Orient” – stereotypes of European “Orientalism” are applied to Koreans (“lazy”, “unruly”, “feminised”, “dirty”, etc.). The presumed task of the Japanese colonial rule: “to re-store/re-generate Korean nation” (making it more Japanese in the process). Thus, the task of the colonial nationalism of the colonized is to “contest and re-cover” the “national” narrative: the idea of “nation” remains, but it should be positive, worthy nation, or, at least, currently negative but  “re-storable” without Japanese “help”, on Koreans’ own efforts.

- a)Sin Ch’aeho’s “Declaration of Korean Revolution” (1923) – “recovery of the indigenous Korea” by “smashing the gangster-Japan” (“national Other”) is the aim, but this “indigenous Korea” is very new indeed – “national culture” without Confucian “slavish mentality”. Basically, radical anti-elitist anti-colonial nation-building project.  Strongly influenced North Korean mentality. Especially influential – discourse of the “minjung” (masses) – real “national subject of the History” in late Sin Ch’aeho. “Awakened masses” (anarchist group, in reality), were to awaken “the fettered masses” by a series of assassinations and bombings, to build an “equalitarian national society” as a result.

 

b) Pro-elitist moderate nationalist “recovery” project – Lee Gwangsu, “On national Reconstraction” (1922) – using Gustave Le Bon’s ideas of “national soul” and “racial consciousness”, exhorts Koreans to “retrieve their pure/pre-Confucian selves” and “prepare to the independence and nation-building” through eugenic selection (rational marriage theory), “cultivation of good national qualities in education” and business activity, under the guidance of established business/cultural elite (which presumably already “recovered themselves).

Manchurian Incident (September 18, 1931), caused Lee Gwangsu to write an extreme Social Darwinist poem, “The New Understanding of Might”:

                    “The Cosmos is Might. All phenomena are the rhythm of the energy’s metamorphoses. There is no Cosmos without Might. Now, the war clouds are hanging heavy over the continent of Asia. The attack is signalled, the storm is ordered, and the cannon smoke is rising. This is the expression of a nation’s might. The strengths of two nations collide with each other.

                     There are no plainer representations of the form of Might than War. It is just like wind, water and lightning representing best the force of Nature.

                     War requires healthy physical, intellectual, and spiritual strength […] War between two nations is, in the end, the comparison of the complex strengths of the two contestants. 

                     But the problem is just that we do not possess this strength, The Might of body, brains, and spirit. That is why, on today’s scene where the whole of humanity is mobilized and already gone into action, we cannot assume a role and just crouch behind the curtain, a bunch of people without even a family name! But, when we acquire strength, humanity will politely send us an invitation to the scene.

                     Today is the day of the cultivation of strength!”

                     As Japan’s control over Korean becomes more established, and conservative trends inside Japan itself – stronger in the 1930s, most of the Korean “moderate nationalist” become more pro-Japanese and Social Darwinist. In accordance with popular “Pan-Asianist” ideology, they maintain that only “assimilation” of Koreans into greater “Yamato minjoku” (Great Japanese Race) may help the “Yellow race” to overpower “White race” and secure “Yamato minjoku” domination over Asia. Thus, their nationalism is being appropriated by Japanese Social Darwinist/racist ideology, also with obvious fascist traits (Kokkashugi – kukkajueui – the doctrine of unconditioned loyalty of an individual to a state or race).

 

Both projects – published in newspapers/semi-legal periodicals - greatly obliged to the growth of print capitalism in colonial Korea. Total newspaper circulation – around 100,000 daily copies in 1929. Thus, creation of horizontal community bound by sense of cultural homogeneity and mutual loyalty – “nation”. Commercialisation of the big-time newspapers and journals in 1930th , their profits, and their consequent lack of enthusiasm for radical versions of nationalism and readiness to find a ground for a compromise with the Japanese project of “recovering Korea” through colonial development. Total collaboration of the former moderate nationalists from the mid-1930th onward, their unconditional agreement with Japan’s “Chosenjin” “national project”.

 - Some Korean militants went into exile in China and the Soviet Union and founded early communist and nationalist resistance groups. A Korean Communist Party (KCP) was founded in Seoul in 1925; one of the organizers was Pak Hŏn-yŏng, who became the leader of Korean communism in southern Korea after 1945. Various nationalist groups also emerged during this period, including the exiled Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in Shanghai, which included Syngman Rhee and another famous nationalist, Kim Ku, among its members.

Police repression and internal factionalism made it impossible for radical groups to exist for any length of time. Many nationalist and communist leaders were jailed in the early 1930s (they reappeared in 1945). When Japan invaded and then annexed Manchuria in 193l, however, a strong guerrilla resistance embracing both Chinese and Koreans emerged. There were well over 200,000 guerrillas--all loosely connected, and including bandits and secret societies--fighting the Japanese in the early 1930s; after murderous but effective counterinsurgency campaigns, the numbers declined to a few thousand by the mid-1930s. It was from this milieu that Kim Il Sung (originally named Kim Sŏng-ju, born in 1912) emerged. By the mid-1930s, he had become a significant guerrilla leader whom the Japanese considered one of the most effective and dangerous of guerrillas. They formed a special counterinsurgent unit to track Kim down and put Koreans in it as part of their divide-and-rule tactics.

 

Result: by 1945, Korea possessed manifold and diverse versions of nationalist narrative: gradualist developmental (Lee Gwangsu), radical “people-revolutionary” (late Sin Ch’aeho – communists), etc. Common features of all those narratives: all were profoundly soaked in the cult of violence (Social-Darwinism of Lee Gwangsu, preaching of terror by Sin Ch’aeho), and strongly un-liberal or anti-liberal (idea of “national leadership” of Lee Gwangsu, “awakened masses” of Sin Ch’aeho). Especially right-wing versions of Korean nationalism (typically, Lee Gwangsu), were extremely influenced by international totalitarian discourses (racism, Social Darwinism) and prone to being “appropriated” by stronger great power-ideologies (European colonialist ideology of “civilizational mission”, Japanese imperial discourse). All presupposed post-Confucian, horizontal “national” community steeped in “glorious” history and territoriality and common literary culture, and all were quite uninterested in democracy and human rights. It all bade little good for the post-Japanese realities.

  

 Right-wing “continuation” of totalitarian” traditions of colonial nationalism after 1945:   

Park Ch’an-seung (a South Korean left-wing historian): “Influenced both by the thought of An Ho-sang (who had studied philosophy in Germany) and Chinese theories of statism, Yi Pôm-sôk's National Youth Corps, for example, rallied around such slogans as "The Nation is Supreme" and "The State is Supreme." An Ho-sang's notion of the "One-People Principle" (ilminjuûi), yet another statist formulation, became the dominant ideology of the Syngman Rhee regime. Statism, then, continued to exert a powerful influence, particularly in the area of education: the Student National Defense Corps was created in 1949, and the term "subjects' school" (kungmin hakkyo) was retained as the official designation for primary school. Indeed, statist thought provided the socio-cultural basis allowing the Syngman Rhee dictatorship to prolong its rule”.

 

Net resource on Korean colonial nationalism: http://www.oocities.org/Tokyo/Towers/5067/k-sun.htm - Ideology and Leadership