Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan by Nayoung Aimee Kwon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan by Nayoung Aimee Kwon Mark E. Caprio (bio) Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan. By Nayoung Aimee Kwon. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2015. xiv, 277 pages. $89.95, cloth; $24.95, paper. The element of contradiction inherent in Japan’s assimilation policy, and for that matter in nearly all assimilation experiments under colonial conditions, receives at least brief mention in most academic studies on this history. The colonial subjugators’ rhetoric of union with the colonized never quite squared with their policies to advance discrimination and segregation. Intimate Empire takes this discussion to a deeper level through in-depth examination of examples where this contradiction actualized, in venues where colonizer interacted with colonized subjects and their culture. Facades created to accentuate togetherness, Nayoung Aimee Kwon argues, only partially obscured a “simultaneous need [for the colonizer] to differentiate colonized subjects” (p. 109). The “intimacy” in this relationship accented this differentiation as the Japanese colonizers strove to protect their social space at the apex of the hierarchical relationship in which, over time, Koreans were placed between the colonizers and the peoples of Japan’s later acquisitions in the South Pacific and Manchuria. The Koreans colonized, caught between the familiarity of tradition and the lure of modernity, never found comfort in either world. They were reduced to secondary status in Japanese eyes and dismissed as collaborators in postliberated Korean society. Kwon centers her discussion on examples of literature that appeared during a “Korea boom” period, a time when objects from a vast array of fields in the colony were deemed “significant only as a symbol of ‘Koreanness’” (p. 29). The need for these objects to pass the litmus test of “colonial modernity,” here defined as “a globally shared condition, coeval and ushered in by worldwide shifts wrought by the uneven global dispersion of capitalism” (p. 9), contributes to this colonial contradiction. In this context, the Japanese accepted the task of defining to Koreans the standards they needed to reach to gain the status of “modern people,” in the realization that their European and U.S. counterparts regarded the Japanese standard as inferior. The Korean could only rise from the dregs of this hierarchy after the colonizers added to their empire; in a similar vein, the Japanese position was cemented as secondary to that of the Western colonizer. Japanese literature was regarded as secondary in this hierarchy, and Korean literature was seen as inferior to that of the Japanese. Kwon focuses on occasions when the sacred protection of this hierarchy took precedence over recognizing Japanese products as superior to those of their colonized subjects. [End Page 179] Kwon focuses the plight of the modern colonial subjects around five conundrums of representation that confined them during the period of colonial rule, and even after liberation: subjectivity (though modern, their status as such was unrecognized); language (the lure of the “universal” colonizers’ language); history (its colonizer creators who assumed the task of writing the colonized peoples’ past); aesthetic representation of form and content (pressure to translate native content into “modern” form); and recognition (the postcolonial disavowal of the colonial experience) (pp. 12–13). These conundrums contributed to the dilemma of assimilation policy where assimilation (dōka) coexisted with differentiation (ika). In the literary field, the main focus of this work, Korean writers, though invited to participate with their Japanese counterparts, found themselves judged as “minor” participants in a collective Korean literature rather than on the basis of their individual talents, as was the case with Japanese writers. Kim Saryang’s experiences reflect a number of the above conundrums. His “Letter to Mother,” penned as he traveled from his home in P’yŏngyang to Tokyo to attend the ceremony for the prestigious Akutagawa Literary Prize in May 1940, illustrates the “coercive lure of the normative universality of the imperial language” (p. 12). In his letter, Kim confesses to his mother his anxieties over traveling to the imperial capital. However, he does this in Japanese rather than his native Korean despite his mother being illiterate in the colonizers’ language. One might wonder how he conveyed to his mother his request, also...