YELLOW MEN’S BURDEN: EAST ASIAN IMPERIALISM, FORENSIC MEDICINE, AND CONJUGALITY IN COLONIAL KOREA

Abstract

This article explores the role of forensic medicine in the colonial civilizing project of East Asian imperial power on the Korean Peninsula. It does so by focusing on how state-sponsored projects of forensic medicine forged a link between Confucian conjugal practice (i.e., early marriage), savagery, and the affliction of the subaltern female subjects, which in turn helped construct the colonial burden to “emancipate” suffering female subjects from indigenous patriarchy and the legacies of Confucian rule in colonial Korea (1910–1945). At the intersection of feminist theory and the postcolonial history of medicine, I examine the medical discourse of emancipation and civilization in the context of global colonialism. To do so, I draw on Gayatri Spivak and other post-colonial studies scholars who powerfully reflected on the British colonial construction of the White men’s burden to save brown women from brown men and patriarchal practices such as sati (widow immolation) in colonial India. I propose to interrogate how Japanese imperialism and its discourse of forensic medicine constructed the Yellow men’s burden to save Yellow women from “fellow” Yellow men and exploitative early marriage allegedly perpetuated by indigenous Confucian patriarchy. I delineate these points through a case study of the Japanese physician Kudō Takeki (1879–?) and his forensic medical studies on young Korean women and female slaves in 1920s and 1930s Korea. This paper also draws attention to how uncritically the Korean community adopted, appropriated, and incorporated Kudō’s racialized colonial frameworks into their own production of knowledge on women’s crime and early marriage. Kudō’s study presented then cutting-edge scientific theories and methods to advance his agendas. In contrast, indigenous Korean scholarly investigations were not perceived as being grounded in biomedicine or scientific-statistical methods. This gap was exactly the one through which the colonial medical scientist chose to navigate.