Colonial Korean Research Articles

식민지 조선의 프롤레타리아 소설에 재현된 삐라를 둘러싼 정동과 출판문화

식민지 조선의 프롤레타리아 소설에 재현된 삐라를 둘러싼 정동과 출판문화

Cultural Assimilation in the kokugo (国語) Classroom: Colonial Korean Children’s tsuzurikata (綴り方) Compositions from the Early 1930s

-

해방 후 첫 官認 교과서 『국사교본』의 한국고대사 서술 분석

국사교본은 진단학회가 미군정청 문교부의 요청으로 편찬한 한국사 교과서이다. 저자는 김상기와 이병도로, 고대사 부분은 김상기가 집필하였다. 해당 도서는 해방 후 첫 관인 한국사 교과용 도서라는 의미가 있고, 저자들이 당시의 주요 고대사 연구자들이라는 점에서 역사교육사나 사학사적으로 매우 중요한 위치에 있다. 국사교본의 한국고대사 부분은 이후에 나오는 임시 교육과정인 교수요목의 제정에도 영향을 끼친 것으로 파악된다.BR 국사교본은 한민족의 기원에 대해 민족 이동설의 입장에서 만주와 한반도로 이동해 온 것으로 서술하였다. 이것은 이후 말발굽형 동이 문화권설로 발전하게 된다. 고조선사는 전조선, 후조선, 위만조선으로 시기에 따라 3분하였고, 요서 지역까지 그 영향력이 미친 것으로 보았다. 그리고 신라의 삼국 통일기를 한국사의 중요한 분수령으로 파악하여 그 이전과 이후로 시대 구분하였다. 이러한 서술들은 오늘날 한국고대사의 기본 이해와는 일치하지 않는 부분이 많지만, 당시의 한국사 연구 상황을 고려한다면 가장 정제되고 심도 있는 내용이었음이 분명하다.

Translation's Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature by Heekyoung Cho

Reviewed by: Translation's Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature by Heekyoung Cho Kelly Y. Jeong Translation's Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature by Heekyoung Cho. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016. Pp. xiv + 242. $39.95 cloth. Heekyoung Cho's Translation's Forgotten History presents a study of "the role of translation in the formation of a modern literature by examining how colonial Koreans appropriated Russian literature, through the medium of Japanese relay translations, while in the process of building their own modern literature in the early twentieth century" (p. x). It also "provides a broader East Asian perspective from which to understand the formation of modern literatures" (p. xi). The author's research suggests that "Russian literature became one element in a form of anti-imperial cosmopolitanism in East Asia" during this period (p. xii). Cho thus presents the underexplored history of localization and indigenization in the formation of modern Korean literature, in which foreign literature, ideas, and images play a pivotal role. This book is a much-needed work that fills a gap in knowledge in the study of the relationship among Russian, Japanese, and Korean modern literatures. Due to Cold War politics as well as the linguistic challenge of being familiar with all three languages, this book is the first of its kind (p. 27). Cho's book is informed by meticulous research. Its author's insights include the fact that literature is a "dynamic process of negotiating various foreign and local values" (p. 27) and that Korea's encounter with foreign texts during the formative years of its modern literature is a site where modernity, colonialism, and nationalism intersect (p. 95). Cho also effectively cites works of several Korean literary historians and theorists, connecting her own scholarship with theirs. Since Cho views literature as a process rather than a monument, it is not surprising that she critiques the pervasive amnesia about the impure origins of national literature and the negotiated and hybrid nature of national languages, as well as the erasure of translated foreign literature from mainstream national literary history. This criticism reminds the reader of several other Korean-studies monographs that focus on similar contexts to explain how postcolonial, postwar South [End Page 292] Korea's national literature is partly established through a denial and erasure of leftist and North Korean literature.1 These books also discuss ways in which translation becomes an essential element in constructing a hegemonic national literature and its history in the modern era. In her analysis, Cho borrows Naoki Sakai's concept of "the regime of translation" to explain the relationship between Japanese and Russian literatures and the formation of modern Korean literature, arguing that "national literature has inherently been comparative literature" (p. 6). Also at stake in Cho's book is the cultural politics of a subjugated Korean culture in the colonial era. Following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Cho claims that a "translator's 'choices' and ensuing 'differences'—and distortions—made in the translated text were ethical in a subjugated culture because indigenization itself was one way of demonstrating agency under cultural and political dominance" (p. 22). As an example, Cho notes the irony of typical "relay translations" in colonial Korea—these works are translations into Korean from Japanese, but their originals are actually Russian—and points out that this kind of translation leads to the construction of the Korean language as an "equivalent linguistic entity vis-à-vis the colonizer's language" (p. 23). Thus, colonial Korean intellectuals' process of making their own modern literature was "doubly complex" (p. 25) in a fashion typical of a colony; they took Western literature as their model but viewed Japanese literature as a kind of sieve that, ultimately, they wanted to discard. Therefore, as Cho points out, this "social context legitimizes liberal and unfaithful translation as a disruptive, if not subversive, practice, and complicates the judgment about the ethics of literal translation in colonial Korea" (p. 25). With this context in mind, she uses the term "translation" to refer to two things. First, "it denotes a broad spectrum of substantial practices and texts. It includes types...

Selling Smiles: Emotional Labor and Labor-Management Relations in 1930s Colonial Korean Department Stores

Abstract Department stores were the most luxurious retail institutions in colonial Korea in terms of their architecture, interior design, and product offerings. While Korean department stores closely resembled their Western and Japanese counterparts in form and function, the Korean department stores were unique for their position in developing retail practices and policies within a colonial context. Specifically, department stores hired young female workers to provide emotional labor to both customers and managers, which illustrated the transition from precapitalist to capitalist modes of emotional labor. Furthermore, the creation of a corporate culture and employee training programs that demanded a specific type of emotional labor resulted in various reactions from the employees, including complaints, criminal acts and violence, and the rise of class and political consciousness. Consequently, the evolution of labor-management relations in 1930s Korean department stores offers a gendered perspective on the economic and cultural aspects of Japanese control over life on the Korean peninsula, particularly through the bottom-up view of female department store workers.

Japanophone Literature? A Transpacific Query on Absence

This essay inquires into the significance of the absent category of Japanophone literature in light of the recent rise of a global discourse on Sinophone literature and other postcolonial critical genealogies. This discussion of broader postcolonial taxonomies sets the stage for an investigation into the position of Japan as a minor empire in relation to its European counterparts. The precarious location among divided literary fields of colonial Korean writers, such as Kim Saryang, provides a segue into linking contested postcolonial and cold war legacies in the Asia-Pacific.

전시체제기 일본 유학생의 사회 진출과 식민지 엘리트의 위상 - 조선공업협회 『朝鮮技術家名簿』 분석을 중심으로 -

전시체제기 일본 유학생의 사회 진출과 식민지 엘리트의 위상 - 조선공업협회 『朝鮮技術家名簿』 분석을 중심으로 -

A Study of the Story of a Gnostic Gingko that Appeared in colonial Korean Media: Focusing on the Boundary Area between the Legend and the True Story in the Ghost Story

A Study of the Story of a Gnostic Gingko that Appeared in colonial Korean Media: Focusing on the Boundary Area between the Legend and the True Story in the Ghost Story

The Colonial Korean, Native Diaspora, and his Death - A study of Kim Nam-Cheon’s “A Beautiful Story(美談)”

The Colonial Korean, Native Diaspora, and his Death - A study of Kim Nam-Cheon’s “A Beautiful Story(美談)”

The Colonial Korean Theaters in the sight of ‘Sound’

The Colonial Korean Theaters in the sight of ‘Sound’

A Survey on Research Trend in modern Japanese History

The Japanese modern history research trends from 2014 to 2015 could be summarized as follows. This paper, based on the awareness of the issues of Korea specific Japanese modern history, was divided into three subject. A first subject is about “How the Japanese modern had been created”. Researches of this subject show its own interpretation about the Meiji Restoration. Other researches of this subject is looking for the breakpoint or the continuity between the early modern and the modern Japan. The second subject is about the “Imperial Japan and colonies”. These researches focus on not the war itself, but the war system. Also researches about during the interwar period have been activated. And researches for the colonial Korean entities in Japan modern history are the main current of this subject area too. This subject has advanced through various angles. The last subject is about “What the contemporary Japan is to us”. These researches are proceeding through various themes to understand contemporary Japan. However some of these researches have concentrated only on the educations, especially history education. Now for the implementation of the awareness of the issues about Japanese modern history in Korea, it is necessary to promote the network and the forum between researchers.

On the Context of the Citation of Legal Texts in the Court Decisions in Civil Cases in the pre colonial Korean Empire, 1895~1908

On the Context of the Citation of Legal Texts in the Court Decisions in Civil Cases in the pre colonial Korean Empire, 1895~1908

Characteristics of Colonial Cities Development and Korean Capitalist Formation under Japanese Rule - Focusing on the Park Ki - sun and Park Yeong - cheol family in Jeonbuk Province

Characteristics of Colonial Cities Development and Korean Capitalist Formation under Japanese Rule - Focusing on the Park Ki - sun and Park Yeong - cheol family in Jeonbuk Province

Direction of Colonial Korean Literature in 1940 ­ Focusing on Lim Hwa and Kim SaRyang's Literary Perspectives

Direction of Colonial Korean Literature in 1940 ­ Focusing on Lim Hwa and Kim SaRyang's Literary Perspectives

The Vernacular Aesthetics of Conte Adaptations of Western Films in Late Colonial Korea

Abstract When four contes were serialized under the title of “Yŏnghwa esŏ odǔn kkongt’ǔ” (contes adapted from films; hereafter Cinema Conte) in the Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn daily) in 1937, they provided an important assessment of imperial Japan’s success with its cinema control polices in colonial Korea. The 1934 Regulation Ordinance for Motion Pictures stipulated that Japan begin reducing the number of Western film screenings in the colony to protect both the growing Japanese and colonial cinema. The policy’s full effect was expected to materialize by 1937. Cinema Conte’s adaptation process of four Western films into contes reflects this context of Western films’ reception in colonial Korea in 1937. The four authors of Cinema Conte highlight Japan’s institutional restrictions on Western films and the colonial Koreans resultant sense of deprivation by transforming Western movie satires into contes, a genre considered marginal at the time, while directing their satire against the contemporary, politically induced distortion of colonial Korean’s cultural experience of Western films. In this sense, Cinema Conte represents a political aesthetic, or aesthetic politics, which illustrates the unique emotional toll the geopolitical status as a colony had on Koreans. At the same time it performed the cultural work of sublimating Koreans’ frustrated passion into potent pathos.

Enlightening the Other: Colonial Korean Cinema and the Question of Audience

The Japanese colonial authorities treated Korean subjects like pupils, and further, like metaphorical children in a number of ways. They attempted to enlighten Korea, and one of the most effective tools of enlightenment for the mostly illiterate colonial population was film. It was a powerful material of propaganda and governing due to its massive popularity since its introduction in the colony. Upon the Korea Film Decree announcement by the Government General in 1940, the colony’s movie theaters became schools that only screened educational films. With this historical context in mind, this essay provides a study of the late-colonial era films released in the 1940-1945 period, including Homeless Angels, Love and Vow, Volunteer, Portrait of Youth, and Suicide Squad at the Watch Tower. My analyses focus on the intertwined issues of colonial enlightenment and propaganda, as well as the issues of ethnography, censorship, and narrative strategies of the films. The films are often packaged as melodrama through a heavy use of music, but this genre facade actually leads to the films’ narrative failure as both melodrama and propaganda. Thus I argue that the Japanese colonial authorities’ attempt at enlightenment via propaganda films ultimately failed. In lieu of a conclusion, this essay ends with a consideration of postcolonial desire for a national cinematic tradition, and the implied ethics of film viewing in postcolonial worlds.

A Study on ‘Fantasy’ and Practice of Colonial Korean Cinema

A Study on ‘Fantasy’ and Practice of Colonial Korean Cinema

Musical acculturation through primary school activities during Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945)

Global colonialism and continuing post-colonial influences caused widespread cultural change at the interface of different cultures. Musical acculturation can be observed in most colonised countries. Some pro-colonialists apologetically allege that through colonisation the colonised territories would receive developmental aid and economical benefits. If this was the case, did Korean music education also benefit from Japanese colonisation as is commonly claimed? And also, was Korean school music acculturated by the Japanese curriculum? To answer these questions, I scrutinised the intentions of colonial Korean music education through interviewing 42 witnesses who attended primary schools of the time, simultaneously analysing school activities such as morning assembly and the military draft, both of which show musical content. The interviews focused in particular on the day-to-day life at school, pedagogic content and impacts of colonial education on pupils’ later life and cultural identity.

Stepping into the Newsreel: Melodrama and Mobilization in Colonial Korean Film

As part of a project on melodrama in Korean film, this article examines the ways that films from the late colonial period (1937–1945) blurred the traditional boundaries between newsreel documentary and fictional features in an attempt to suture the film spectator into the cinematic representation of what Andre Bazin called, in relation to the newsreel, “total history.” Drawing on theoretical discussions of sentimentality and melodrama, the article compares the earlier fictional film to the wartime film Korea in order to trace how melodrama was transformed through its incorporation into political propaganda. It discusses how narrative cinematic techniques such as point of view, shot/reverse shot, and crosscutting allowed Korea Strait to draw the viewer into spectacles of mobilization that were formerly represented through the more anonymous mass medium of the newsreel documentary. The remainder of the article touches on the films and , discussing how the interpretive excess enabled by melodrama remained visible after the hybridization of fictional film and newsreel, primarily through the disjuncture between the films’ melodrama narratives and their spectacles of mobilization. In conclusion, the article suggests that the gradual elimination of any narrative excess in 1940s films reflects an apprehension about the multiple codings, identifications, and interpretations enabled through the combination of melodrama narrative with political propaganda.

Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era ed. by Christopher P. Hanscom

Reviewed by: Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era ed. by Christopher P. Hanscom Eunhee Park Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era edited by Christopher P. Hanscom , Walter K. Lew , and Youngju Ryu . Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press , 2013 . 230 pp. Imperatives of Culture is a great collection of twelve selected essays by colonial Korean intellectuals of the left and right, such as the “cultural gradualist” Yi Kwangsu (Chapter 1) and the Marxist Sin Paegu (Chapter 2). This book also touches on various themes, such as women’s issues (Chapter 3, on Mun Ilp’yŏng), diaspora in Manchuria (Chapter 7, on Kang Kyŏngae), modernism and “fragmentary notions” in the poetry of Kim Kirim (Chapter 8), and the so-called “literature of self-indictment” (kobal munhak, Chapter 10, on Kim Namch’ŏn). Judging from the great endeavors that the participating scholars made in each translation, the many tribulations this work underwent on the road to publication (as the Foreword implies) have been vindicated by the end result. Each chapter begins with an insightful commentary that effectively unfolds the complex colonial intellectual world in a novel, interdisciplinary way. The commentary section contains each intellectual’s biography, works and contributions. The commentators were responsible for selecting the texts and making the commentaries and translations, which help readers to better comprehend these intellectuals and their selected works. Within the translated texts, relevant commentary is added depending on the situation and at the [End Page 142] commentator’s discretion. For instance, in order to reduce a lengthy text and better convey its meaning, in Chapter 5 Seung-ah Lee omits several parts of the original and replaces them with summaries (pp. 91–97). As the title implies, throughout the book culture plays a crucial role in challenging the nation-state paradigm of colonial Korea, but the authors also attempt to position this culture within the global context (xii). Instead of attempting to define “culture” directly, this book attempts to show colonial Korea through the eyes of the twelve colonial intellectuals and to clarify their ideals about the nation-state, national spirit, people, and history. This book gives a new meaning to the 1930s, suggesting that it laid the foundations for the ideological schisms of the post-liberation era. To do so, language took on multiple, crucial roles in deepening the rifts. By comparing the two post-colonial intellectual essays—regarding the role of national literature (Kim Tongni, Chapter 11) and new nationalism (Son Chint’ae, Chapter 12)—with the essays from the colonial period, readers can get a sense of how colonial intellectuals sketched out a framework for nation-building. To show ideological diversity, this book dedicates a considerable amount of space to the works of Marxist and socialists groups, including the writings of Marxists Sin Paegu (Chapter 2) and Paek Namun (Chapter 6), and the socialists Kang Kyŏngae (Chapter 7), Kim Kirim (Chapter 8) and Kim Namch’ŏn (Chapter 10). To those less familiar with colonial Korean literature, this book provides a good overview of socialist and Marxist intellectuals during the colonial period. I believe it is rare to find books that collect such diverse works by different ideological groups, so this book can serve as a good reference for those interested in colonial literature and history. That colonial Korea was connected to the global context can be seen in the diverse worldviews of the authors. Yi Kwangsu was influenced by mass psychology through the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon (p. 12). Sin advocated the “serious passionate socialist” movement (p. 39) and Paek understood mid-1930s Korea as a “semi-feudal” society riven by the “dual conflicts” of class and national struggle (p. 106–107). Likewise, each intellectual explored the uniqueness in “Korean-ness.” The lack of similarities or agreement among the twelve authors may confuse some readers, but this may be intended, because “culture is a concept that reveals the complexity of both imperial and national identities and the political projects that undergirded them [these collected essays]” (xi). However, the density of this book may act as both a strength...