Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–1925

Michael Edson RobinsonWith a new preface by the author

korean studies of the henry m. jackson school of international studies

Clark W. Sorensen, Editor

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korean studies of the henry m. jackson school of international studies

Over the Mountains Are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households and Their Adaptations to Rapid Industrialization, by Clark W. Sorensen

Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–1925, by Michael Edson Robinson, with a new preface by the author

Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–1945, by Carter J. Eckert, with a new preface by the author

Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty, by James B. Palais

Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea, by Gi-Wook Shin

The Origins of the Chosŏn Dynasty, by John B. Duncan

Protestantism and Politics in Korea, by Chung-shin Park

Marginality and Subversion in Korea: The Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion of 1812, by Sun Joo Kim

Building Ships, Building a Nation: Korea’s Democratic Unionism under Park Chung Hee, by Hwasook Nam

Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945, by Mark E. Caprio

Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945, by Brandon Palmer

Heritage Management in Korea and Japan: The Politics of Antiquity and Identity, by Hyung Il Pai

Wrongful Deaths: Selected Inquest Records from Nineteenth-Century Korea, compiled and translated by Sun Joo Kim and Jungwon Kim

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Cultural Nationalism

in Colonial Korea,

1920–1925

Michael Edson Robinson

With a new preface by the author

university of washington press

Seattle & London

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This publication was supported in part by the Korea Studies Program of the University of Washington in cooperation with the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

© 1988 by the University of Washington PressPreface to the 2014 edition © 2014 by the University of Washington PressPrinted and bound in the United States of America17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

university of washington presspo Box 50096, Seattle, wa 98145, usa www.washington.edu/uwpress

library of congress cataloging-in-publication dataRobinson, Michael Edson. Cultural nationalism in colonial Korea, 1920–1925 / Michael Edson Robinson ; with a new preface by the author. pages cm — (Korean studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies) Originally published: Seattle : University of Washington Press, 1988. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-295-99389-8 (paperback)1. Nationalism—Korea—History—20th century. 2. Nationalists—Korea— History—20th century. 3. Intellectuals—Korea—History—20th century. 4. Korea—History—Japanese occupation, 1910–1945. 5. Korea—Politics and government—1910–1945. 6. Korea—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title. DS916.55.R63 2014 951.9'03—dc23 2013048055

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum require-ments of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.∞

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To June and Homer

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface to the 2014 Edition xi

Introduction 3

1. Modern Korean Nationalism 14

2. The Rise of Cultural Nationalism 48

3. Within Limits: Moderate Nationalist Movements 78

4. The Radical Critique of Cultural Nationalism 107

5. Intellectual Crisis in Colonial Korea 137

6. Conclusion 157

Notes 167

Guide to Romanization 191

Bibliography 197

Index 213Univ

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ix

Acknowledgments

I began to work on the research for this book in 1975 in preparation for my Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Professor James B. Palais of the University of Washington. I owe a profound debt of grat-itude to Professor Palais for his tireless support and encouragement and his invaluable scholarly criticism and advice at all stages of this project. I would also like to thank Professors Kenneth B. Pyle and Bruce Cumings for their assistance and encouragement during and after my graduate studies.

The research and preparation of this book was supported at var-ious stages from the following sources: National Language Fellow-ship Grants, H.E.W. Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, Social Science Research Council, John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Faculty Fellowship, and the International Cultural Society of Korea. While in Korea, I benefited from the guid-ance and support of Professor Kim Junyop at the Asiatic Research center of Korea University. In addition, discussions with Professor Lew Young-ick of Hallyon University provided me with insights that improved the manuscript. Professor Sin Yongha also helped me at crit-ical times during my stays in Korea, and I must also acknowledge Kim Kunsu for opening his collection of colonial periodicals to my scrutiny. Finally, I owe a special debt to Professor Chong Chinsok for giving unselfishly of his time and expertise as I submerged myself in the often baffling world of Korean colonial publications.

I would also like to thank my colleagues at the University of South-ern California Department of History. In particular, I benefited from discussions and comments from Professors John E. Wills Jr. and Gor-don M. Berger. Special thanks are also due the staff of the U.S.C. Department of History, especially Martha Rothermel who, without complaint, prepared the manuscript in its numerous incarnations.

In addition, I am grateful to the University of Washington Press for their interest in the manuscript. The labors and professional skill of my editor, Margery Lang, greatly enhanced the manuscript. I, of course, am responsible for any errors or omissions.

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x Acknowledgments

My greatest debt I save for last. I wish to thank my parents, Homer and June, for giving me the gift of learning and introducing me to the world of books. Their interest in teaching led me to the life of scholar-ship. And, finally, a special thanks to my wife, Ellen Brennan, for her patience, support, and love during both the dark and light moments.

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xi

Preface to the 2014 Edition

The research for Cultural Nationalism was done largely in the mid-1970s, reflecting my training in political science theory based on structuralist understandings of nationalism’s antecedents. The book thus does not utilize the vocabulary that evolved in the late 1980s to describe nationalism as a constructed notion, nor was I aware, when writing it, of the uses for narrative theory. By the 1990s, a better understanding of intellectual and cultural history had come to dom-inate the field. If it had been written then, this would have been a different book.

However, the work still has legs. Indeed, the debate in the 1920s between radical nationalists, who were informed by their enthusiasm for social revolutionary programs, and their older, moderate to liberal capitalist and “culturalist” colleagues, presaged the emerging global struggle between alternate paths to modernity. It is sometimes hard to remember that in the 1970s, leftist intellectuals in North America and Europe, in the absence of a true understanding of the Cultural Revo-lution, were still interested in Maoism and the great experiment under way in the People’s Republic of China. I wonder how the nationalist debates would be framed today, if we began our study from scratch without the context of the Cold War.

Framing the discourse of the 1920s as the emergence of the decisive left-right fissure of the nationalist movement served to highlight and create the historical roots of what became a divided Korea after 1945. While not denying the pivotal role played by the joint occupation of the US and the USSR, historicizing the roots of Korea’s divided nation-alist movement added depth to the discussion of how the combined leadership of Korea’s nationalist and socialist movements was effort-lessly (or so it seemed) polarized in the crucial 1945–48 interregnum, before the emergence of separate Korean nation-states. Highlighting the early ideological divide between fundamentally different visions of a future Korean nation helped us understand the distortions in each Korean state’s master narrative deployed for legitimation pur-poses. In the mid-1970s, nationalist historians berated my choice of

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xii Preface to the 2014 Edition

Yi Kwangsu’s essays as representative of a moderate nationalist strat-egy. Apparently Yi’s later vilification as a collaborator was enough to discredit his earlier writings, yet any serious examination of the debates at the time would find Yi in the middle of nationalist activity and speaking for a broad segment of activists. Moreover, working on this project at the height of Park Chung Hee’s Yusin repression made it difficult to discuss the breadth and quality of socialist discourse evi-dent at the time, as I had picked subjects that did not fit into a highly politicized and narrowly framed nationalist history. Had I been in the North trying to do the same, I probably would not have been able to do this study at all.

Happily, historical study in contemporary South Korea is no longer completely tyrannized by the crushing weight of political correctness or censorship. That said, in East Asia’s struggles over the narrative and memory of the Great Pacific War, we still see evidence of how politi-cally controversial historical interpretation can be manipulated. While politicized nationalist historians continue their attempts to police his-tory, they are unable to suppress the burgeoning interest in subjects considered out of bounds in the 1960s and 1970s. Over time I think this study helped stimulate an opening for the serious consideration of the intellectual, social, and even economic history of Korea under Japanese colonial rule. The field of colonial history greatly expanded after the late 1980s, both in South Korea and among non-Korean his-torians. And serious study of the period allowed us to qualify the 1945 break and see continuities once obscured by the politics of division.

This study makes a number of assertions that still inform our under-standing of the intellectual debates of the 1920s:

• The fragmentation of the Korean nationalist movement was located in this decade and found its expression in the burgeoning publishing world of the early cultural-policy era.

• The new Japanese censorship regime that came with Saitō’s reforms was much more porous than originally believed, and it allowed a much broader scope of ideological debate than might have been expected.

• The sources of cultural nationalist inspiration lie in the intellectual activity of the Korean Enlightenment in the decades preceding annexation.

• The cultural policy ultimately shaped the nationalist debate in favor of a more moderate, accommodationist line by selectively silencing the voice of the radical left over time.

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Preface to the 2014 Edition xiii

In addition, the book’s consultation of colonial publications as sources demonstrated their validity in broadening our understanding of intel-lectual, social, and political history of Korea before 1945.

If I were to redo this study today, it would remain substantially the same, but I would insert myself more freely in the narrative. I remem-ber feeling constrained by training that taught historians to remain “objective” and remote. Clearly, however, I was working inside a par-adigm that offered a certain charged vocabulary as well as a world-view from which I could hardly detach myself. Acknowledging that would have made the task easier. I would integrate subsequent theo-retical advances in our knowledge of the phenomenon of nationalism. I would also integrate the insights of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) with regard to the role of publications in this process of imagining.

Modern Korean nationalism began as an elite project in the late nineteenth century and progressed through the first decades of the twentieth century, culminating in the great outpouring of the March First movement in 1919. This movement is often considered the arrival of modern, mass nationalism in Korea. But now I would submit more boldly that while colonial repression helped create a nationwide unity of loathing that exploded in 1919, it was only with the expansion of the Korean press and publishing thereafter, and the discourse it pro-duced, that the real process of creating a positive and permanent sense of what it meant to be Korean in the third decade of the twentieth century began.

Michael RobinsonBloomington, Indiana

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