Korean Activists Research Articles

Left-wing nationalist-populist movement and identification: A psycho-political analysis of the “comfort woman” statue movements in South Korea

Sonyosang (girl statue in Korean) is a bronze statue symbolizing “comfort women,” the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women physically, mentally, and sexually exploited by the Japanese Empire during WWII. As a backlash against the 2015 ″comfort women” agreement between the South Korean and Japanese governments, Koreans have installed 384 girl statues across South Korea. Based on ethnographic research that I conducted in South Korea between 2019 and 2021, including in-depth interviews with Korean activists who raised funds for or participated in creating, installing, and managing girl statues in South Korea, this research examines how the girl statue movement in South Korea has developed into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement and how affective identification with the statue generates a populist identity. To this end, this research firstly discusses how former President Park Geun-hye's undemocratic political measures recall the memory of minjungism (Korean populism) that led the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s, enabling Korean nationalist leftists' demands to form a chain of equivalence in the girl statue movement. Secondly, relying on Melanie Klein's theory of identification, this article examines how the ‘people’ is constituted through affective forms of identification with the girl statue. By doing so, this article demonstrates that the growth of the girl statue movement into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement blurs boundaries between the psychological, the personal, the national, and the (geo)political.

유일한의 미주 독립운동과 고려경제회

Compared to other representative indepedence movements, Ilhan New’s activity as a chairman of the Korea Economic Society has received less attention than it deserves.
 In order to create positive public opinion about Korea in the U.S Ilhan New insisted on the necessity to utilize Korean military power during the Pacific War and on Korean’s capability of building and running their nation post-war. It played a positive role in encouraging the U.S. policy toward Korea to be more beneficial to Korea. However, Ilhan New judged that working through Planning and Research Board and the United Korean Committee in America Mission, to which he belonged, to be limited.
 Therefore, he created the Korea Economic Society as a non-profit organization.
 The Korea Economic Society’s main activity was to publish it’s own journal called Korea Economic Digest. It supplemented the limitations of Ilhan New’s previous press strategy that used only Korean activists and KED’s writers consisted of many American experts on Korea. These writers supported Ilhan New’s independence movement and attempted to persuade the U.S.
 government-related ministries and public-private agencies by citing Korea’s strengths and potential values as seen by non-Koreans.
 In other words, the Korea Economic Society could be considered a valuable association in that sense that defended and promoted Korea through journalism in response to the U.S. government’s tendency to draw negative conclusions through public researches on Korea during the Pacific War period. In addition, it was unique because it was a private association that reflected New Ilhan’s special independence movement strategy which was to promote Korea through the journalism.

Performing memory and testimony after a national disaster: the Sewol mothers in Talking about Her (2016), VEGA (2016), and His and Her Closet (2016)

ABSTRACT In response to the Sewol Ferry disaster and mishandling of the South Korean government, Korean activists and artists mobilized collaboration with the victims’ families to produce activist theatre productions that center not only the trauma of those most affected by the disaster but also their lived experiences and wishes, especially those of the mothers. Furthermore, the performance community has come to include and represent the mothers not only as victims but as active participants whose grief is transmuted through performance into political activism. Combining tools of active viewing and participant observation, this article examines three of these works—Talking about Her (2016a) and VEGA (Jaguar 2016), which are performance pieces adapted from testimonies by the mothers, and Yellow Ribbon’s first performance, His and Her Closet (2016b). This article focuses on the ways these works, through utilizing the memories and testimonies of the mothers, have come to constitute a kind of collaborative public counter-memory against state cover-ups and unempathetic accounts, centering demands for change in commemoration practices and transforming the meaning of Sewol into a catalyst for political and social change.

Minjung Kayo: Imagining Democracy through Song in South Korea

AbstractDuring South Korea's authoritarian period (1961–87), student activists employed songs to express their anti-government and pro-democratic views. Known as minjung kayo (people's songs), these protest songs can be traced to the modern American folk music embraced by South Korean youth in the 1960s. By the late 1980s, however, minjung kayo carried emphatically anti-American, nationalistic, and socialist tones, echoing the minjung ideals that strove to achieve authentic ‘Koreanness’. This article unravels the complexities underlying the process of minjung kayo's development into an emblem of the pro-democratic movement, which entailed a shift away from its initial reflective and poetic style inspired by American folk music (exemplified in the songs of Kim Min-ki) and a move towards the militant style influenced by the Marxist composer Hanns Eisler. It argues that minjung kayo embodied the complex relationship South Korean activists held with their colonial past and autocratic present, as well as visions of their democratic future.

The Audiovisual Turn of Recent Korean Documentary Cinema: The Time-Image, Place, and Landscape

Abstract This article discusses several documentary films since the 2010s that portray the place and the landscape related to Korea's social reality or a personal or collective memory of its past, classifying their common trope as the “audiovisual turn.” The trope refers to the uses of the poetic and aesthetic techniques to highlight the visual and auditory qualities of the images that mediate the landscape or the place. This article argues that the films’ experiments with these techniques mark formal and epistemological breaks with the expository and participatory modes of the traditional Korean activist documentary, as they create an array of Deleuzian time-images in which a social place or natural landscape is reconfigured as the cinematic space liberated from a linear time and layered with the imbrication of the present and the past. The images, however, are read as updating the activist documentary's commitment to politics and history, as they renew the viewer's sensory and affective awareness of the place and the landscape and thereby render them ruins.

Melancholia is (geo)political! Postcolonial geography in the Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul

This article examines how melancholia constitutes a psycho-geopolitical space interweaving Korean subjects’ psychic and political lives with the dynamics of the (post) Cold War alliance between Japan and the US. The Wednesday Demonstration is the weekly protest in Seoul that calls for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government for comfort women who worked in the sexual slavery system under the Japanese Empire during WWII. The fact that the weekly protests have continued for 30 years since 1992 signifies that the comfort women issue has remained an unresolved (geo)political issue between South Korea and Japan for three decades, despite apologies and monetary compensations by the Japanese government. This article offers a psychoanalytic-geopolitical rationale for the endless grief of Korean postcolonial subjects who cannot accept the measures of the Japanese government regarding the comfort women issue. Based on 1-year’s participant observations and in-depth interviews with Korean activists who engaged in the Wednesday Demonstration from September 2019 to August 2020, this article aims to accomplish three goals. Firstly, this article shows how Korean postcolonial subjects were/are haunted by colonial past. Secondly, I examine why Koreans cannot complete mourning for comfort women in the context of ROK-US-Japan geopolitical relations. Lastly, this article interrogates how ethno-nationalists intervene to turn melancholia into a motivation for ethnic solidarity and how their attempt might have failed by exploring a Korean postcolonial subject’s psychic lives. In doing so, I argue that the wounds of Koreans related to the comfort women issue are not simply from colonial history, but they are postcolonial wounds that have not healed ‘appropriately’ under the (US-sponsored) South Korean/Japanese (post-)Cold War security arrangement.

Human Rights Activism Among North Korean Refugees in the UK: Hope for a Democratic Future?

Social work plays a crucial role in defending the human rights of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees from systems of oppression. This paper explores the meanings and challenges of human rights activism and its driving forces among North Korean refugees in the UK. The data are drawn from life history interviews with 10 participants, together with two activists’ public speeches. The findings suggest that gaining awareness of human rights after their escape had significant implications for the activists, giving meaning to their life and sparking on their activism. Simultaneously, they expressed misconceptions and criticisms from other fellow North Korean refugees as one of the greatest difficulties they encountered in their work. I argue that to overcome such challenges human rights activism requires altruism and a creative imagination that envisions better future lives for other North Korean people. Based on this, I propose altruistic political imagination (API) as a concept that captures North Korean activists’ experiences, built on Passy’s (2001) notion of political altruism, to put emphasis on the visionary aspect of their activism. I maintain that the concept of API potentially has a wider appeal to those activists who face similar situations to North Korean activists, as well as social work practitioners who work with forced migrants and/or marginalised communities.

Borderline society and ‘rebellious mourning’: the case of South Korean feminist activism

ABSTRACT In this article I propose two concepts – a borderline society and ‘rebellious mourning’ – to present a conceptual framework for understanding contemporary Korean feminism. This article argues that borderline society is both a concept and a product of co-existing and contesting ways of Korean women’s speaking against the culture of gender-based violence to consider the (imagined) topography for their co-existence as one that requires the psychic conception of reality as a counterpart to the patriarchy. Given that the 2016 femicide accelerated the movement of Korean women speaking about their experiences as an act of mourning, borderline society provides an understanding of how Korean women perform it. Drawing on contemporary news clippings and websites related to Korean feminist activism, this article examines how ‘rebellious mourning’ is embodied through the cultural practices of Korean activist groups. While Womad stands in opposition to #MeToo because of its negation of the patriarchy, Flame, Femi, Action is situated as a point of contact between the two. This article will thus provide a new understanding of the particularity of Korean feminism based on the link between the psyche and gender subjectivity of women speaking up, thereby placing a specific local situation into the broader context of constructing activism.

Representing the Unrepresentable in South Korean Activist Performances

On 16 April 2014, the Sewol Ferry capsized in the southern region of South Korea: 304 passengers died, including 250 high school students. Despite an international outcry, there has not yet been a comprehensive investigation into what caused the Sewol to sink and why the passengers were not rescued promptly. This article discusses how performance can represent something that defies explanation because we do not know how or why it happened. Yellow Ribbon’s Talent Show, Namsan Arts Centre’s From Pluto, and Camino de Ansan performed the role of the students who died. Taking these three case studies, this article analyzes the ways in which they strive to represent the unrepresentable as they attempt to document the sinking and achieve justice, while memorializing the victims and arguing for the necessity of a more safety-conscious society. Areum Jeong is Assistant Professor in Humanities at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute. Jeong’s research takes a transnational approach to Korean and Korean-American film, literature, theatre, and performance. Her current book project explores how performance documents death, loss, and memory in South Korean and diasporic communities.

The “Savage–Victim–Saviour” Story Grammar of the North Korean Human Rights Industry

ABSTRACT The article examines how the “human rights industry” has used the narratives of North Korean human rights activists and how actors are connected through their networks from a discourse-network perspective. It focusses on the coverage of the three most-cited North Korean refugee activists in the English-language Western media in recent years – Shin Dong Hyuk, Park Yeon Mi and Lee Hyeon Seo – and analyses their memoirs, public speeches and newspaper articles. The study finds that Western publishers have followed Makau Mutua’s “savage–victim–saviour” story grammar in their portrayal of the North Korean activists’ public discourses and that politically conservative, economically libertarian, ideologically anti-communist and religiously Christian groups have influenced these activists. While the political and material environments provided similar structural conditions for all three activists discussed in this study, there were variations among them in terms of access to resources and their exercise of individual agency. The author argues that by employing the voices and performances of North Korean activists, the human rights industry has played a significant role in strengthening and legitimising the hawkish policy of political conservatives in Seoul and Washington against Pyongyang.

The First #MeToo Activists: Contemporary Campaigning in Support of the Former Japanese Military “Comfort Women”

The First #MeToo Activists: Contemporary Campaigning in Support of the Former Japanese Military “Comfort Women” Caroline Norma Activists today continue to rally around the history of the Japanese military's sexual enslavement of women and girls in the China and Pacific wars of the 1930s and 1940s. Their activism is undertaken mostly to extract state‐level apology and reparation from the Japanese government for these crimes of enforced prostitution or “military sexual slavery.” It is undertaken on behalf of, together with, and in the name of survivors and their descendants. Recently, though, with declining numbers of elderly former “comfort women” able to join campaigning, there have emerged other rationales for continuing with the movement for justice. South Korean activists now mobilize against “sexual violence in war” wherever it occurs in the world, as reflected in an installation of the War and Women's Human Rights Museum in Hongdae that commemorates, in spite of its name, specifically the history of Japanese military sexual slavery and activism by survivors. Walking through the museum, visitors eventually end up on a floor exhibiting crimes of sexual violence in conflicts like that in the Congo. This framing of the contemporary movement aligns with international efforts to spotlight crimes of rape in war, which recently culminated in the awarding of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize to a doctor and a survivor who have “helped to give greater visibility to war‐time sexual violence.” We might well worry about wartime sexual violence in countries like the Congo, but, in this article, I question this framework for “comfort women” campaigning. It dilutes and diverts political action that might otherwise produce good results in contemporary Northeast Asia for women and children, I argue; in suppressing the region's sex industries, for example. Further, the framework inadvertently replicates overly broad castings of the “comfort women” issue that are favored by defenders of the country's wartime record, like that of Japan's current Prime Minister Abe Shinzou. In a speech addressing the issue in 2007, he waxed lyrical that “[t]he 20th century was a century when human rights were violated in many parts of the world. So we have to make the 21st century a wonderful century in which no human rights are violated.” Reframing the criminality of the Japanese military's prostitution system as a problem of “sexual violence in war” weakens, furthermore, the movement's effectiveness, because campaigners are not usually residing in countries plagued by war, let alone crimes of wartime rape, I suggest. In other words, as Samuel Moyn criticizes of contemporary “human rights” campaigners who rally around crimes of states abroad while overlooking serious problems of inequality in their own societies (2012), framing the problem as one of “rape in war” sloughs the history of Japanese military sexual slavery from the reality of contemporary Northeast Asia and estranges it from large‐scale industries of female sexual exploitation operating in countries like Japan, which, I believe, are relevant and important targets of campaigning if we accurately understand the historical cause of what the “comfort women” endured (Moyn ). The historical cause of what the “comfort women” endured is, in Rikkyo University historian Onozawa Akane's view, Japan's pre‐war civilian sex industry (Onozawa ). In a 2010 monograph, she shows this industry operating cheek by jowl with the military's sexual slavery scheme. In line with this understanding of its origins, I argue that campaigning to suppress prostitution in contemporary times respects, and accurately reflects, the historical experience of survivors of military prostitution in its targeting of the historical cause of their enslavement, which is carried over today in the form of large‐scale pornography and prostitution industries in Japan in particular (see Miyamoto ), as a threat to present‐day women and girls, as they were in the girlhoods of survivors. Onozawa is not the only researcher to see the military prostitution system as historically attributable to Japan's pre‐war civilian sex industry in this way, nor is my call for social movement mobilization in alignment with this understanding original. Later in the article, I describe the work of a number of other Japan‐based historians and political theorists who arrive at the same conclusion...

Zainichi Korean Artist Fung Sok Ro in the Diasporic Intersections and Flows

ABSTRACTAs a Korean artist and activist, Fung Sok Ro, the first generation in his family to be born in Japan, had to negotiate between his family who were directly involved with the Chongryun organization that supported North Korea and an identity that questioned his position. During his 30-year career, Ro has become known for his thoughtful and splendidly dignified sculptures that confront his Korean diasporic history.

THE VIETNAM PIETA: SHAPING THE MEMORY OF SOUTH KOREA’S PARTICIPATION IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Conceived to commemorate the victims of South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War, the statue of the Vietnam Pieta invites us to question who shapes the memory of this neglected facet of the conflict. The present article analyzes the various actors involved in this contentious process in and across both countries, starting with the South Korean activists behind the statue’s making and the movement for recognizing the crimes committed by their army. Examining these activists’ advocacy work since the late 1990s, the article argues that they are triply situated in the fight over remembering South Korea’s intervention in Vietnam. Truth advocates first appear in a position of privilege and leadership vis-à-vis Vietnamese victims of South Korean military wrongdoings, which raises the issue of the material and political asymmetries at stake in the construction of memory. Simultaneously, the same advocates occupy a position of marginality vis-à-vis the dominant public discourse held on the war by Hanoi and Seoul, whose common interest lies in deepening their mutually beneficial but unequal economic partnership. Thirdly, the memory of the conflict pits truth activists against another group within their own civil society: veterans’ organizations aggressively denying all war crimes accusations. Ultimately, remembering the war is not the object of a bilateral dispute between the South Korean and Vietnamese states, but rather a site of domestic tensions within South Korea itself.

A Case of Creative Activity as a Human Right: Korean Activist Artist Sung-dam Hong

The arts encourage us to wake up, often by shocking us into a novel consciousness (Ayers, Greene, & Alexander-Tanner, 2012). Further, from the perspective of the artist, the basic human right to cr...

Inadequate Innocence of Korean Comfort Girls-Women: Obliterated Dignity and Shamed Self

The experiences of Korean comfort girls-women before and during World War II are a paradigmatic example of how military sexual violence has the power to obliterate women’s dignity and shame them into nonexistence. I propose that their horrific experience of sexual slavery under the Japanese military caused intense and lasting shame that resulted in the Korean comfort girls-women’s sense of self being entrenched in shame. Moreover, I argue that the innocence of Korean comfort girls-women was and continues to be inadequately recognized. The Japanese government refuses to admit its legal accountability and has not provided just reparations to Korean comfort girls-women for its treacherous and systematic sexual enslavement of Korean and other comfort girls-women. The Korean government and the people of Korea have been too slow to accept the innocence of these women, to embrace their pain, sorrow, and suffering, and to advocate for justice for them. This conversion of their innocence into inadequacy or shame, actively by the Japanese government and passively by the Korean government and its people, compounded these women’s long, miserable suffering for half a century until the silence was broken in 1991 by a brave woman, Kim Haksun, with the support of Korean activists.

The Prison and the Postcolony: Contested Memory and the Museumification of Sŏdaemun Hyŏngmuso

Abstract Seoul’s Sŏdaemun Prison is famous in South Korea today as a site of heroic resistance where Korean anticolonial activists were martyred at the hands of Japanese colonial officials. This narrative is complicated, however, by the fact that the prison continued to be used after the fall of the Japanese Empire as a tool to suppress political dissent, right up until its final decommissioning in 1987. This study inquires into the political context surrounding Sŏdaemun Prison’s decommissioning and finds that the decision was made by the Chun Doo Hwan administration in the run-up to the Seoul Olympics and was more concerned with the erasure of contemporaneous political excesses than the preservation of colonial memory. Sŏdaemun Prison’s transformation into a site of colonial tourism in the following decade was carried out as part of a larger move in urban planning to overwrite the memory of the postcolonial authoritarian past, a process that reveals much about the limitations and contradictions of South Korean democratization.

Political Migration of Korean Activists through Czechoslovakia in the Post-World War II Period

The existence of intra-Korean migration between World War II and the Korean War is well known: North Korean landowners and Christians, South Korean communists, and millions of war refugees fled across the 38th parallel, resulting in over two million separated families on the Korean Peninsula. But there were several Koreans who had resided in the US for decades who found their way to Pyongyang via Prague between World War II and the height of the Cold War. Why did they leave for North Korea? Why through Czechoslovakia? What were their fates after they landed in North Korea? This is a story of eleven Korean activists, from three groups, who left their footprints in Czechoslovakia on their journey between the US and North Korea. Eight of them continued to Pyongyang, two returned to the US, and one remained in Czechoslovakia for good. Eight vanished after arriving in Pyongyang, two survived and led comfortable lives in the US, and one took his own life in desperation in Czechoslovakia. We explore the settings in which their stories unraveled, the destinies of the eleven migrants, and the links among them, corroborated by witness interviews and newly discovered materials from Korean, US, Czech, and Russian archives.

The Prison and the Postcolony: Contested Memory and the Museumification of Sŏdaemun Hyŏngmuso

Seoul’s Sŏdaemun Prison is famous in South Korea today as a site of heroic resistance where Korean anticolonial activists were martyred at the hands of Japanese colonial officials. This narrative is complicated, however, by the fact that the prison continued to be used after the fall of the Japanese Empire as a tool to suppress political dissent, right up until its final decommissioning in 1987. This study inquires into the political context surrounding Sŏdaemun Prison’s decommissioning and finds that the decision was made by the Chun Doo Hwan administration in the run-up to the Seoul Olympics and was more concerned with the erasure of contemporaneous political excesses than the preservation of colonial memory. Sŏdaemun Prison’s transformation into a site of colonial tourism in the following decade was carried out as part of a larger move in urban planning to overwrite the memory of the postcolonial authoritarian past, a process that reveals much about the limitations and contradictions of South Korean democratization.

Note from the Editor

Note from the Editor Sem Vermeersch, Editor-in-chief As of this issue, I will be taking over as editor-in-chief from Milan Hejtmanek, who is retiring from Seoul National University (SNU) this summer. Prof. Hejtmanek became editor in 2010, and his wisdom and steady hand have ensured that the journal has continued to flourish. I would like to thank him for his efforts, and wish him a happy and productive retirement. This year also marks the 30th volume already of the Seoul Journal of Korean Studies. It started in the Olympic year of 1988, and initially was dedicated especially to introducing the research achievements of SNU professors to an English-language audience. Published by the Institute of Korean Studies at SNU, it provided translations of original research articles that were representative of the latest research trends in the humanities in Korea, and as such provided an invaluable service to the international academic community. Following the merger of the Institute of Korean Studies and Kyujanggak in 2006, the journal was reorganized under the editorship of Cho Eun-su. Henceforth it was published twice a year, and invited contributions from Korean Studies scholars from across the globe. While most of the authors who contribute to the journal are now based outside of Korea, we continue our efforts to serve as a bridge between scholars in Korea and abroad. We continue to actively seek contributions from Korean scholars at SNU and beyond, while many foreign scholars who have spent a period of research at the Kyujanggak Institute of Korean Studies publish the outcome of their research with us. In the constantly shifting and evolving world of academic journal publishing, we try to maintain the highest possible standards of scholarship. Also, we aim to provide a platform for detailed, source-based forays in archives and libraries that are often longer and more substantial than the average academic article. At the same time, we continue to emphasize the importance of an interdisciplinary spirit, in that articles should appeal to and be accessible to Korean Studies scholars across various [End Page 1] disciplines. The contributions in this issue attest to that. Although one of the slimmest volumes published so far, this is the outcome of a strict review process and the fact that some research needs more gestation than the quick “turnover cycle” of academic publishing these days allows for. The articles in this issue are diverse in their approach and subject matter, but have in common that they explore previously underutilized sources. Michael Kim’s article delves into the world of colonial ginseng production and consumption, and by mining a wide variety of media from the colonial period uncovers the fascinating links between pharmaceutical research and creative entrepreneurs. The article by Vladimír Hlásny and Jung Byung Joon is a detailed exploration of the interlocking fates of eleven Korean activists who tried to make it to North Korea via Czechoslovakia in the post-war period. Finally, Luis Botella and Antonio Doménech reconstruct how archeology as an academic discipline and a profession was built virtually from scratch in the same post-war period. The careful reader will notice interesting links between the articles; for example there is the link between the European-trained archeologists Kim Chaewŏn and Han Hŭngsu, the former contributing to the development of archeology as a discipline in the south, the latter making initial forays in the north before his purge in the 1950s. Although the former appears in the context of a review of the field of archeology and the later as a key figure for political activism, they show the merit of reading outside one’s own discipline to discover new perspectives. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2017 Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies

Political Migration of Korean Activists Through Czechoslovakia in the Post World War 2 Period

The existence of Korean migrations between South and North Korea's between the Second World War and the Korean War is well known. Because of political and economic reasons, North Korean land-owners and Christians escaped toward the south and South Korean communists ran across the 38th parallel toward the north. During the Korean War, millions of war refugees moved back and forth. As a result, there are over two million separated families on the Korean peninsula.But there were several Korean's who had resided in the US for decades who found their way to Pyongyang via Czechoslovakia in the period between the end of the Second World War and the 1950s. Some of them were US citizens and served in the US Army during the Pacific War. Nearly all of them were of a Christian background and were well educated in the US. Why did they choose to leave for North Korea? Why did they pass through Czechoslovakia? What had their lives been like in the US and what were their fates after they landed in North Korea? What legacy did they leave in Czechoslovakia?This is a story of eleven Korean activists who made their way through Czechoslovakia on their journey between the US and North Korea. They passed through Czechoslovakia one by one, and left their footprints in Czechoslovakia. Eight of them continued on to Pyongyang, two returned to the US, and one remained in Czechoslovakia for good. Eight disappeared from the political scene after they arrived in Pyongyang, two survived and led comfortable lives in the US, and the one in Czechoslovakia, in desperation, committed suicide.We will explore the situation in which the stories unraveled, briefly recount the stories and destinies of the eleven migrants, and shed light on links among them. Particular attention will be paid to their activities in Czechoslovakia, corroborated by newly discovered materials from Korean, US and Czech archives as well as from witness interviews.