Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945

By E. Taylor Atkins

This remarkable book examines the complex history of Japanese colonial and postcolonial interactions with Korea, particularly in matters of cultural policy. E. Taylor Atkins focuses on past and present Japanese fascination with Korean culture as he reassesses colonial anthropology, heritage curation, cultural policy, and Korean performance art in Japanese mass media culture. Atkins challenges the prevailing view that imperial Japan demonstrated contempt for Koreans through suppression of Korean culture. In his analysis, the Japanese preoccupation with Koreana provided the empire with a poignant vision of its own past, now lost--including communal living and social solidarity--which then allowed Japanese to grieve for their former selves. At the same time, the specific objects of Japan's gaze--folk theater, dances, shamanism, music, and material heritage--became emblems of national identity in postcolonial Korea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2010
• ISBN: 9780520947689

E. Taylor Atkins

E. Taylor Atkins is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University and the author of Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan.

Book preview

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support

of the Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of

California Press Foundation.

Primitive Selves

COLONIALISMS

Jennifer Robertson, General Editor

1. Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan, by Ming-cheng M. Lo

2. A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan, by Eve M. Troutt Powell

3. Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, by Heather J. Sharkey

4. Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, by Sabine Frühstück

5. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945, by E. Taylor Atkins

Primitive Selves

Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze,

1910–1945

E. Taylor Atkins

pub

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Atkins, E. Taylor, 1967–

Primitive selves : Koreana in the Japanese colonial gaze,

1910–1945 / E. Taylor Atkins.

    p. cm. — (Colonialisms ; 5)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26673-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-26674-2 (paper : alk. paper)

1. Korea—History—Japanese occupation, 1910–1945. 2. Korea—Colonial influence. 3. Postcolonialism—Korea. 4. Korea—Foreign public opinion, Japanese. 5. Korea—Relations—Japan. 6. Japan—Relations—Korea. 7. Imperialism—Social aspects—Japan—History—20th century. 8. Japan—Cultural policy. 9. Public opinion—Japan—History—20th century. I. Title.

DS916.55.A86 2010

951.9'03—dc22                          2010008920

Manufactured in the United States of America

19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10

10  9    8    7    6    5  4    3    2    1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

For my teachers

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

1. A Long Engagement

2. Ethnography as Self-Reflection: Japanese Anthropology in Colonial Korea

3. Curating Koreana: The Management of Culture in Colonial Korea

4. The First K-Wave: Koreaphilia in Imperial Japanese Popular Culture

Epilogue: Postcolonial Valorizations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Danjo no fukusō (men and women’s clothing)

2. A Croat couple from the valley of Serezan near Zagreb, Moscow Ethnographic Exhibition, 1867

3. Ndonga women photographed by C. H. L. Hahn

4. Korean children with changsŭng

5. Korean changsŭng

6. Charm at the palace courtyard entrance, Kuba, ca. 1908–9

7. Haida totem at entrance of Chief Anetias’ house, Masset, British Columbia

8. Cabinet card by Hudson’s Gallery, Tama, Iowa (ca. 1880)

9. Changnimjip (blind man’s house), Osan

10. Korean women with headscarves

11. Three police officers at Hanwangmyo (royal burial site)

12. Imna Tae Kaya Stone Monument, Independence Hall of Korea, Ch’ŏnan, Republic of Korea, June 2003

13. Ethnomusicologist Tanabe Hisao

14. Construction of the GGC administrative building (ca. 1916–17)

15. Sheet music for Saijō Yaso’s rendition of Arirang (ca. 1932)

16. "Keisang [sic], Korean Dancing Girls"

17. Postcard featuring kisaeng and geisha

18. Cap from the dome of the former Government-General headquarters, Independence Hall of Korea, Ch’ŏnan, Republic of Korea, June 2003

Acknowledgments

This project, no less than my previous ones, originated with my music mania. In this case, I developed a fondness for Korean music (particularly p’ansori narrative singing and samul nori drumming) as a Fellow at the Asian Studies Development Program’s Korean Society and Culture Institute in 2000. One of my first thoughts was to wonder how Japanese reacted to Korean music and other performing arts during the colonial period. This book is what happens when one starts thinking and doesn’t have sense enough to quit.

Another impetus to write this book developed from my teaching interest in colonialism, which must be one of the most complex of all human relationships. It is so easy—and not the least bit inappropriate—to condemn colonialism as a relationship of dominance, injustice, and exploitation, but it is so much more difficult to comprehend why such relationships develop in the first place, why they endure, and what comes of them. The economic and human tolls entailed in maintaining colonies, not to mention the misguided idealism that motivated so many to venture to distant lands, make it impossible to ascribe colonialism merely to profit-mongering. Likewise, the tangible social and material benefits accrued by some classes of colonized peoples compel us to acknowledge a consent to be dominated, even a concession of metropolitan superiority, that many find incomprehensibly masochistic, given today’s construction of low self-esteem as the theoretical root of all evil. I cannot claim to have answered these questions with a shiny new theory of colonialism—much greater minds have tackled that task—but I hope that I have at least done justice to the colonial imbroglio in this account.

My first words of thanks go to the faculty and staff of the ASDP Korea institute, particularly director Ned Shultz; and to my students at Northern Illinois University, who in innumerable ways have inspired me to ponder the perplexities of colonial relationships. I also owe a special debt to my dear friend and fellow p’ansori enthusiast Katharine Purcell. On a train from Andong to Seoul, we carelessly tossed around the notion of writing a comparative analysis of p’ansori and the blues. Two and a half years later it was in print. It was in the course of our research that I ran across the vague, scattered references to Japanese suppression of the Korean solo opera that piqued my curiosity and set me on this quest. So, to Sistah Kate, a big kamsa hamnida, much love, and all the boiled peanuts she can eat.

Invaluable grant support came from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, and the Japan Foundation. I am grateful for speaking and teaching engagements that enabled me to use the East Asian collections at Harvard-Yenching, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.

The comparative dimension of this book has been of central importance to me, intellectually and personally, and it has required that I consult my friends and colleagues in other fields on a regular basis. I very much appreciate numerous conversations with Sean Farrell, Eric Jones, and Kristin Huffine, without which my thoughts would be substantially poorer. Sundiata Djata, Heide Fehrenbach, Beatrix Hoffman, Nancy Wingfield, and Christine Worobec commented helpfully on grant applications and prospectuses. My colleague John Bentley kindly shared his genius, providing assistance and feedback on my translation efforts. The comments, suggestions, and encouragement I received from Sabine Frühstück, Hosokawa Shūhei, Hyung-il Pai, and Louise Young were invaluable. I offer special thanks to Michael Robinson, whose encouragement of this project from its inception sustained me through multiple bouts of self-doubt. It was likewise indescribably validating that Jennifer Robertson, a scholar whose work I have long admired, showed such interest in this project and solicited the manuscript for inclusion in her Colonialisms series. This led to wonderful working relationships with Sheila Levine, Kate Marshall, Emily Park, and Caroline Knapp of University of California Press. It is my blessing and honor to have placed Primitive Selves in their care.

It seems to me a miracle that this book has seen the light of day. It was conceived in a haze, with the onset of a chronic sleep disorder, and completed in the throes of serious depression. I confess this not as an excuse for the book’s shortcomings, but only so that others similarly afflicted may know what they might nonetheless accomplish—especially if they have a Lynette Swedberg in their corner. My family and friends never wavered in their faith in my ability to git ’er done. If you like what you read, thank them.

I will donate 100 percent of my author’s royalties from Primitive Selves to the Tahirih Justice Center, a not-for-profit organization that coordinates pro-bono legal, social, and medical services for immigrant women and girls in the United States who are victims of gender-based violence, trafficking, and exploitation. For more information, please go to www.tahirih.org.

Note on Transliteration

I have followed the revised Hepburn system for romanizing Japanese terms and the McCune-Reischauer system for Korean, except for Seoul (instead of Sŏul) and in cases where an author publishing in English uses an idiosyncratic spelling. The Republic of Korea adopted the Revised Romanization of Korean in 2000 (for instance, rendering Chosŏn as Joseon). There are other romanizations of varying degrees of systemization. My opinion, as a frustrated Korean newbie, is that McCune-Reischauer’s diacritical marks make it easier to pronounce the eight vowel sounds, but the Revised Romanization is more accurate for consonants. I am in no position to suggest yet another alternative. Since McCune-Reischauer remains the standard in Anglophone scholarship, I have chosen to use it here.

Introduction

While staying in Kyōto in September 2004, I went to see a pretty bad movie (which will remain nameless, but I will say its main character is named Van Helsing). I’ve never been so glad I saw a bad movie in my life. One of the seemingly endless commercials preceding the werewolfery featured a percussive jam session of Japanese taiko and Korean samul nori drummers. All too quickly the rhythmic orgy ended, followed by an announcement for the Japan-Korea Friendship Year (Nikkan yūjōnen) scheduled for 2005. The campaign encouraged and promoted initiatives from private citizens and civic organizations for economic and cultural exchange, special events, and educational programs to facilitate the deepening relationship between Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK).¹ Though wearing distinctive national dress, and beating on emblematic national drums (taiko and ch’anggo), the two troupes created a seamless rhythmic groove designed to inspire similarly sinuous collaborations between these neighbors.

I had unwittingly waded into the crest of the so-called Korea Wave (Hallyu in Korean, Kanryū in Japanese). This was my fifth journey to Japan, and the country was experiencing a Korea boom unlike anything I had personally seen before. Probably only someone who has haunted Japan’s plenteous record stores as much as I have could appreciate the sheer volume of Korean pop music now available in Japan. In the first decade of the new millennium, a number of K-pop stars had secured huge, devoted followings in Japan, and Korean songs had become a staple in Japanese karaoke. More surprisingly, Korean dramas were broadcast nightly on Japanese television, following the astounding Japanese response to the Korean miniseries Winter Sonata. Add this to the strong (and risibly unreciprocated) support Japanese soccer fans showered on South Korea’s over-achieving national team in the 2002 World Cup, and it seemed clear that Korea had resurfaced in Japan’s mass consciousness sixty years after the ignominious fall of the Japanese empire.

Certainly this resurgence has not been altogether pleasant. North Korean nuclear saber rattling has raised apprehensions in Japan, stoking the political agendas of Japanese politicians who have long sought to revise the so-called peace clause (Article 9) of their constitution. Relations with South Korea have warmed considerably in the last decade, in part because of a sense of mutual interest in declawing the North. But other issues continue to sour Japan-ROK relations: how to narrate colonial history to middle school students through the medium of the textbook; who holds prior sovereignty over Tsushima/Taema-do, situated in the straits between the two countries; and what to call the body of water to Japan’s north and Korea’s east, the Sea of Japan or the East Sea. As the ad for the Japan-Korea Friendship Year demonstrates, there is some hope that these tensions can be ameliorated through cultural exchange, that music, television dramas, animated films, and other performing arts will promote the kind of international understanding and genuine warmth to which politicians and diplomats may publicly aspire, but which pride and thorny issues of national interest render unattainable. Primitive Selves contends that the early-twenty-first-century Japanese enthusiasm for quotidian Koreana, and the concomitant faith that it constituted a viable conduit for intercultural union, are not without precedent.

I neglected to mention why I was in Kyōto in September 2004. I was hunting Arirangs. Having recently become enamored of certain genres of Korean music, and wondering how they fared under colonial rule, I had begun investigating how Arirang, a song that many Korean authors insisted was oozing with indignation toward Japanese, had become a huge hit in Japan. It took me a while to realize how fortuitous it was to be engaged in such research while vicariously surfing the K-Wave. I had my hook.

Primitive Selves advances three principal arguments. First, it challenges the prevailing historiographical characterization of imperial Japanese attitudes toward Koreans and their culture. With precious few exceptions, most historians insist that Japanese were contemptuous of Koreana and determined to obliterate any evidence or memory of an independent national culture and identity through aggressive assimilation directives. A recent call for papers from Journal of Genocide Research includes the Japanese occupation of Korea as a case of cultural genocide, indicating how well ensconced this view is.² The evidence presented here, however, suggests that there was indeed space for assertions of Koreanness within Japan’s imperial culture, and that Koreana held considerable appeal for some government officials, scholars, hobbyists, and consumers in Japan’s emerging mass media culture.

The second argument attempts to explain this appeal: colonial access to Korea gave Japanese an opportunity to meditate intensively on their own historical and modern identity. The themes of loss and nostalgic longing for a purer cultural self are central to Japanese experiences of modernity. Seldom, however, do these themes intrude on imperial studies, where the self-satisfied arrogance of Japanese imperialism takes center stage. The Japanese gaze on Koreana articulated anti-modern ambivalence, offering concrete images of pre-modern others with whom the modern self could be readily contrasted. Contradiction and nostalgia were thus defining aspects of Japanese colonial discourse. So Primitive Selves attempts to integrate two abiding aspects of modern Japanese history: empire and the epistemology of loss.³ That is not to say that I insist upon the singularity of Japan’s experience of colonial modernity. On the contrary, I have found it most enlightening to situate this history within a comparative, global context of colonial ideologies and practices. Studies of imperial Japan and colonial Korea infrequently reference other empires (the reverse is even rarer), assuming that the reactive nature of Japan’s imperial expansion and the cruelty of Korea’s colonial experience are nonpareil. Because so much of Japan’s imperial praxis was mimetic of others, it is worth noting the resemblances in concept and approach, while still remaining attentive to the distinctive qualities of this particular colonial relationship.

Finally, following accepted anthropological wisdom of recent decades, I argue that the acts of gazing and being gazed at fundamentally transformed both the observer and the observed. A shamanic rite (kut) or mask dance (t’alch’um) performed in the presence of Japanese ethnographers and photographers was no longer just what it had been, a spiritual cleansing of the community or a parody of social elites. Such practices were now markers of difference and performances of identity, signifiers which distinguished the observed Koreans from the Japanese spectators. The function of these practices had changed from serving internal community and spiritual interests to acting as resources of knowledge for external observers, loaded with information about what made Koreans Korean. The awareness of being gazed at instigated among Koreans a revaluation of the social worth, meaning, and significance of what had been commonplace practices, culminating in the post-liberation efforts to preserve and promote them as emblems of Korean identity. On the other hand, the Japanese witnessing these practices were likewise transformed by the experience, as they digested and incorporated what they saw into their own (personal and national) narratives and self-conceptions. Cognizant of ancient ethnological and cultural ties between themselves and those upon whom they gazed, they could not help but ponder who they really were, if they indeed were encountering their own primitive selves.

For some time now, scholars of imperialism have adopted and employed a notion of the gaze rooted in Michel Foucault’s philosophy of the exercise of institutional power through individual bodies and the normalization of customary behaviors. Whereas in popular use, gaze has a rather detached, even lackadaisical connotation, when applied to imperial studies it denotes a much more proactive, even nefarious, practice: surveillance. The gaze so conceived is an assertion of power by one party over another; the prerogative to gaze and the tools and technologies that make it possible are monopolized by the state, the colonial power, or whatever institution or individual is in a position of dominance. As the lens through which the ‘Other’ is interpreted and subsequently depicted, the gaze generates information, which in turn produces knowledge about those who are dominated.⁴ Hegemonic parties seek and use this knowledge to better manage and discipline populations under their control. In other words, no gathering of data in the context of unequal power is innocent, no matter how well intentioned, sympathetic, or magnanimous the gazers may be. Colonial studies thus conceived typically imply that the very acts of observation, data collection, and intellectual elucidation are affirmations of supremacy, cloaked in the self-deluded rhetoric of scientific detachment and neutrality. In much postmodern discourse, this fact alone invalidates both the veracity of the knowledge gathered and the morality of the enterprise of knowing an other.

This is more or less the concept of gaze that I employ here, but with some reservations about the questionable presumptions on which it rests. The best-known application of this theoretical position is Edward Said’s hugely influential Orientalism (1978), which basically argues that the exotic Orient (by which Said meant primarily the Islamic cultures of the Middle East) was a figment of the Occidental imagination, expressed in literature, art, and other forms of expressive culture. Orientalism, Said contended, was a peculiarly European, Manichean habit of mind that posited the fundamentally alien nature of the Oriental in contrast to the Occidental self; furthermore, artistic expressions of this mentalité, far from being innocuous, constituted an exercise in domination that was positively injurious to those being scrutinized. Said’s critics rightly object to his presuppositions that such a gaze is one-way (as if the gazed-upon are incapable of gazing back, with equal distortion and miscomprehension) and that it is a peculiarly Western practice dating from the Enlightenment (as I describe in Chapter 2, the ethnographic gaze as a way of knowing the alien other has a long, multicultural history).

More fundamentally, while I am no apologist for imperialism, I am not persuaded that the acquisition and application of knowledge to administer the governed is in and of itself malevolent. One problem I have always had with the eternally paranoid, vulgarized version of Foucauldianism to which many scholars subscribe is the usually unstated, unexamined premise that institutions such as the state, professional organizations, schools, hospitals, and the like are inherently wicked and intent on suppressing individual freedom and diversity. I have no delusions of convincing them that the anarchic utopia they (perhaps unconsciously) envisage might be much more dangerous than the disciplined society we currently inhabit. At any rate, I am perfectly willing to concede that Japanese efforts to know Korea were motivated by a desire to ensure the efficacy and longevity of colonial rule, but not to agree that it would have been better to rule Koreans in ignorance of their beliefs and customs. Many of the Japanese Koreaphiles whose observations form the evidentiary base for this book seem to have been sincere in their belief that Japanese could more ably, and ethically, govern Koreans if they knew something about them.

Besides, as I hope Primitive Selves demonstrates, the Japanese gaze on Korea was as much a gaze on the self as on the alien, and the former gaze was sometimes harshly critical. One of the unique twists in this particular colonial relationship was the widely accepted belief in the common ancestry of Japanese and Koreans, which made gazing on the other as much an act of introspection as surveillance. It was not uncommon for Euro-American colonial observers to be seduced by the primordial simplicity of native life, in contrast to the fussy complexities of modernity, but the presumed racial and ethnic distance made it quite difficult for them to imagine truly being connected to that life. For Japanese, however, who had long, well-documented ethnological, historical, and cultural ties to Koreans, it was far less challenging to visualize themselves as but one generation removed from the lifeways, belief systems, and expressive forms they observed in Korea—a fact that they did not always agree was cause for congratulation.

My thinking here has been influenced most profoundly by two works of scholarship, which I repeatedly reference: Nicholas Thomas’s 1994 book Colonialism’s Culture; and Andre Schmid’s article Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem’ in the Historiography of Modern Japan. Both are examples of new imperial studies in that both are as attentive to the cultural impact of empire on imperial states as they are to the effects of imperial policies on colonized peoples, but I have found these two works to be particularly insightful and pertinent to the problems I address here. Thomas argues that colonialism is not best understood primarily as a political or economic relationship that is legitimized or justified through ideologies of racism or progress, but rather as a cultural process. The coherence of colonial projects, Thomas maintains, was compromised by both internal contradictions and the intransigence and resistance of the colonized; scholars have attributed to colonial powers too much influence, authority, consistency, and self-assurance, when in fact there is far more to colonial relationships than a global and transhistorical logic of denigration of subjected peoples. He characterizes the act of colonizing as fundamentally reflexive, a form of self-fashioning for those who perform it, be they colonial officials, explorers, travelers, chroniclers, soldiers, or even observers and readers who never set foot in the colony. Moreover, such reflexivity was not always to the benefit of the colonial power: There are too many forms of colonial representation which are, at least at one level, sympathetic, idealizing, relativistic and critical of the producer’s home societies. Thomas thus prefers to speak of colonialisms in the plural, to do justice to the specificity of ideologies and practices in different settings, even within the same empire.⁵

Like most theorists of imperialism and colonialism, Thomas makes no specific mention of the practices and ideologies of the Japanese empire, but I find his insights quite applicable here, especially in the Korean context. Japan’s formal empire—consisting of Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto, and Micronesia—and its later occupation of Manchuria, China’s eastern seaboard, and most of Southeast Asia, are too often seen as the products of a peculiar strategic coherence and unity of purpose, based on modern Japan’s sense of political and economic insecurity, and justified by a self-serving, hypocritical ideology of pan-Asian brotherhood. Recently scholars have tried to redress this deficiency with important work on specific colonies and occupied territories in Japan’s empire, but much remains to be done in order to reconceptualize this empire as a system of multiple colonialisms. Thomas offers a framework for understanding colonialism as a disjunctive set of ideas and practices, affecting the colonized and the colonizer with comparable (if not necessarily equal) impact, beset with irreconcilable contradictions, and shaped fundamentally by conditions—and peoples—on the ground.

Schmid’s article (published in The Journal of Asian Studies in 2000) chides historians of Japan and its empire for neglecting Korea in their narratives. A historian of Korea who authored the prizewinning book Korea Between Empires, 1895–1919 (2002), Schmid contends that English-language studies of Japan have been slow to interweave the colonial experience into the history of modern Japan. In his view, much of the literature is marked by a top-down, metrocentric approach that renders colonial history tangential to the main narratives of the modern Japanese nation and, in some instances, comes precariously close to reproducing versions of Japanese colonial discourse. Citing the impact of new imperial history on the study of British national history, Schmid (quoting Bernard Cohn) hopes to prod historians of Japan to view the metropole and colony as a unitary field of analysis, and to assess the effects of empire building on Japan’s successful modernization process, rather than viewing the empire as the outcome of that process.⁶ Schmid’s provocative article drew testy responses from some of the historians whose work he criticized, but I was one Japan historian who found it not only persuasive but epiphanic.⁷ I cannot claim to have addressed all of his concerns here, nor to have produced the kind of transnational history he advocates, but in both my teaching and my research it has become habitual for me to envisage the histories of modern Japan and Korea as interlocking and mutually constituting.

Like most studies, this one began with one simple-sounding question—what were Japanese reactions to the satire and defiance of vernacular performing arts of Korea?—and expanded in unforeseen directions to include folk religion, Buddhism, geomancy, archaeology, and mass media. The reader may ask why I initially chose to focus on folk performance (minzoku geinō in Japanese, minsok yenŭng in Korean). Aside from the personal aesthetic pleasure I had come to derive from much Korean music, there were two aspects that made this area of focus intellectually captivating. For one thing, minsok yenŭng were visual and aural signifiers of Korean difference, in-your-face proof of the cultural distinctiveness of Korea, which was not insignificant when Japanese were determined both to demonstrate the derivative Sino-centrism of Korean culture and to Japanize as much of it as they could. I argue here, contrary to historiographical precedent, that these performances of Korean distinctiveness could not only persist under Japanese imperialism, but even contribute positively to a multiethnic pan-Asian cultural regime. The other intriguing aspect was the inherently subversive content of so much Korean performance art, which entertained its audience by exposing the hypocrisy and injustice of the social order, by cleverly rolling the real world over to show its ass.

The satire of Korean folk performance was so sharp because the precolonial Korean state was so assured of its own virtue. The Chosŏn regime (1392–1910) prided itself on having exceeded China in the implementation of a Confucian moral order, but actually created what was arguably the most inflexibly stratified society in East Asia. Though, like China, it had a civil service examination, hereditary status was required to sit for it: only the sons of male yangban aristocrats and their primary wives—not secondary wives or concubines—were eligible. Koreans also placed more emphasis on consanguineous kinship than did Japanese, who in the absence of a male heir frequently adopted one via marriage to a daughter. Dissatisfaction was rampant among Koreans not privileged by this de facto caste system, and was duly expressed in their arts.

In Pongsan, Hwanghae-do, villagers performed masked dance dramas skewering Buddhist clergy and yangban playboys alike for lechery and avarice—the debauched priest’s mask was typically pockmarked, indicating the quality of his karma.⁸ The p’ansori opera Ch’unhyang-ka is even more ingenious, presenting a tale of elite corruption and commoner virtue disguised as a Confucian morality tale. The daughter of a lowly kisaeng, Ch’unhyang refuses the advances of the local governor to remain chaste for her absent husband, and suffers mightily for it. While yangban audiences applauded the story’s didactic celebration of wifely fidelity, commoners nodded knowingly to themselves that no hereditary elite had a monopoly on moral virtue. As popular literature, the late Marshall Pihl remarked, "p’ansori rejected the aristocratic assumption of a historical mandate for the social status quo and emphasized the contradictions and inequities of the real world in which the common people struggled to survive.⁹ By masking themselves and their message, literally or figuratively, subaltern Koreans thus deployed their arts as weapons of the weak."¹⁰ Because of their traditionally subversive qualities, these arts were natural objects of interest to the colonial regime, inspiring curiosity and aesthetic appreciation, but also apprehension that it had taken the yangban’s place as the butt of common folks’ jokes.

According to some Korean folklorists, such fears were not unfounded. In their respective studies of Korean oral literature, Cho Dong-il and Andrew Nahm argue that commoners deployed invisible forms such as popular ballads (kagok) and folk songs (minyo) to create an underground broadcast that lamented the loss of sovereignty, expressed the disruption and disorientation that accompanied modernization, and excoriated Japanese imperialists. Others have documented so-called anti-Japan variations on the durable Arirang song, as Chapter 4 recounts.¹¹ In fact, Cho contends, such songs proliferated among the common folk well before the imposition of colonial rule, such as this ballad from the 1894 Tonghak peasant revolt, the event that instigated war between China and Japan:

Those who are fluent of speech are summoned to court,

Those who can work get to the public cemetery,

Girls who can produce get to be whores,

And those who have muscles are called to slave labor.¹²

As the outlook for a viable, independent Korea dimmed, Nahm remarks, the songs and poems grew ever bleaker in content. The songs and poems of the colonial period proved indisputably that the Korean people were far from being satisfied or happy with Japanese rule and they told and retold countless numbers of stories about the trials and tribulations of the subjugated and oppressed people.¹³ In the sources I have examined, Japanese observers seem to have been more irritated by the inexorable grimness of Koreans’ attitudes than with any direct, explicit criticism of their authority. They regarded this despondency as a national characteristic, for which they had no particular responsibility.

Caveats are a necessary part of every Introduction, so much more so in this one. There are limits to what this study intends to and can accomplish, because my knowledge of the Korean language is quite rudimentary. I am well aware that it causes great offense to some scholars and readers for a linguistically unqualified researcher to tread into their territory; when a Japan specialist ventures into Korea studies without adequate language skills, it appears to some as a metaphor for the insensitivity and ignorance with which Japan invaded Korea itself. I have kept in front of me a harsh review of Peter Duus’s study of Meiji Japanese attitudes toward Korea, The Abacus and the Sword (1995), which was criticized for being too onesided. I think these criticisms are perfectly valid if a study purports to be more than it can be (which Professor Duus’s does not).¹⁴ I am always chagrined to walk into a bookstore and find a book that claims to say something definitive or provocative about Japan but