When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea

By Janet Poole

Taking a panoramic view of Korea’s dynamic literary production in the final decade of Japanese rule, When the Future Disappears locates the imprint of a new temporal sense in Korean modernism: the impression of time interrupted, with no promise of a future. As colonial subjects of an empire headed toward total war, Korean writers in this global fascist moment produced some of the most sophisticated writings of twentieth-century modernism. Yi T’aejun, Ch’oe Myongik, Im Hwa, So Insik, Ch’oe Chaeso, Pak T’aewon, Kim Namch’on, and O Changhwan, among other Korean writers, lived through a rare colonial history in which their vernacular language was first inducted into the modern, only to be shut out again through the violence of state power. The colonial suppression of Korean-language publications was an effort to mobilize toward war, and it forced Korean writers to face the loss of their letters and devise new, creative forms of expression. Their remarkable struggle reflects the stark foreclosure at the heart of the modern colonial experience. Straddling cultural, intellectual, and literary history, this book maps the different strategies, including abstraction, irony, paradox, and even silence, that Korean writers used to narrate life within the Japanese empire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231538558

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Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

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Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poole, Janet, author.

When the future disappears : the modernist imagination in late colonial Korea / Janet Poole.

pages cm — (Studies of the Weatherhead Institute, Columbia University)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16518-1 (cloth : acid-free-paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53855-8 (e-book)

1. Korean literature—20th century—History and criticism.   2. Modernism (Literature)—Korea.   3. Colonialism in literature.   4. Postcolonialism in literature.   5. Language and languages in literature.   I. Title.

PL957.5.M63P66 2015

895.7’09112—dc23

2014009491

A Columbia University Press E-book

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover Design: Jordan Wannemacher

Cover Image: Courtesy of Chang Jae Lee

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Disappearing Future of Colonial Fascism

1. The Unruly Detail of Late Colonialism

2. The Sociology of Colonial Nostalgia

3. A Private Orient

4. Peri-urban Dreams

5. Imperialization, or the Resolution of Crisis

6. Taking Possession of the Emperor’s Language

Epilogue. Afterlives

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

As I was writing this book there were moments when I felt as if I had created my own disappearing future, so stubbornly did the book refuse to be finished. Now that I can finally experience something close to the sense of an ending, I thank everyone who made the writing of this book possible, and sometimes even pleasurable. Yi T’aejun liked to believe that writing blooms from the individual alone, and sitting at the keyboard day after day can feel like a lonely enterprise to be sure. But I appreciate now more than ever how utterly mistaken he was.

Although this is not my dissertation, some of the research and questions I explore here stem from my work in graduate school. I thank my exemplary committee members for their help and support: Paul Anderer, Charles Armstrong, Harry Harootunian, Hwang Jongyon, and Tomi Suzuki. Harry Harootunian has been nothing short of an inspiration with his endless curiosity, enthusiasm, and encouragement. But, more than that, his work on interwar modernism in Japan offered me both a guide and a challenge to map the constellations of modernism in colonial Korea. Hwang Jongyon has always patiently answered all manner of questions, both large and small. I consider myself extremely lucky to have met him so many years ago. Carol Gluck taught one of the first seminars I attended at Columbia and made me realize for the first time that I could be a writer. She has continued to support me in the best ways possible ever since.

During a long period in Seoul I received more help than I ever deserved. In particular I thank all the members of Kim Chul’s fascism seminar: Baek Moon Im, Cha Seung-ki, Kim Chul, Kim Hyun-Joo, Kim Ye-Rim, Kwon Myoung A, Lee Kyoung-Hoon, Shin Hyung-ki, and all the other participants who introduced me to the study of colonial era literature. I have been a poor correspondent since I returned to North America, but I hope I can repay their help one day. Lee Jaeson took me in when I first went to Seoul, seeing me through a last minute bureaucratic wrangle that threatened to upset my work before it even began. Kim Jae-Yong sent me, unsolicited, some vital photocopies—I am very grateful! Meanwhile, Sam Perry kept me motivated through the first stages of research with early morning tennis on the courts at Sogang University, and Suh Jiyoung has always been available for questions and advice.

My happiest memories of grad school are of summer writing retreats on the New Jersey seashore with Laura Neitzel. Through the highs and lows of graduate life I received phenomenal support from Joy Kim, Sarah Kovner, and Leila Wice. At New York University Keith Vincent pushed me further on my engagement with literary texts and was always the best partner for brainstorming syllabi and suggesting books to read. I thank my colleagues from New York University who helped me through my first years of teaching: Rebecca Karl, Tom Looser, Hyun Ok Park, Moss Roberts, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Zhang Xudong, and Dawn Lawson in the excellent library.

In Toronto I have been blessed with a growing community of colleagues whose work inspires me. Andre Schmid has read many of these chapters at different stages, patiently telling me to send the manuscript away. Evie Gu was a particularly strict taskmaster one summer when I was feeling lazy. Linda Feng cajoled me over the finish line. Meng Yue always has a creative spark, while Tom Keirstead, Graham Sanders, and Vincent Shen have been ever supportive chairs. I am glad to work with Jotaro Arimori, Eric Cazdyn, Amanda Goodman, Ken Kawashima, Kyoungrok Ko, Johanna Liu, Hsiaowei Rupprecht, Atsuko Sakaki, Curie Virag, Yiching Wu, and Lisa Yoneyama. Ikuko Komuro-Lee has, always smiling, helped me to negotiate the world of difficult Japanese names, while Yurou Zhong has provided tea and chocolate. Hana Kim is a most supportive librarian. Paul Chin, Norma Escobar, and Natasja VanderBerg have made my work life easy, especially over the final weeks of writing. My enormous gratitude goes to Sungjo Kim, who stepped in at the end and, with the greatest of efficiency, took on the thorny task of obtaining copyright for the images reproduced here. Meanwhile, the many students at the University of Toronto have forced me to understand and articulate the difference between what is important and what does not really matter.

Andrea Arai is always willing to chat late into the night, keeping my spirits nourished and endowing the elsewhere with a special warmth. Henry Em offered much support as I wrote the early chapters. A long time ago Kim Brandt read my dissertation and offered me some pointers at an early point in the process. I am most grateful to the reviewers for the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Columbia University Press, especially to the anonymous reviewer, who suggested serious revisions. I have tried to follow your advice and only hope that you will consider your reviewing work to have been worthwhile.

I have received much support from Columbia University Press for this work and my translation efforts. I thank Jennifer Crewe for her continued belief in the viability of works in the humanities and translations of Asian literatures. Jonathan Fiedler, Anita O’Brien, and Kathryn Schell have been a pleasure to work with. And I am awaiting with great expectation the always fabulous work from the design department. Because the cover arrives at the very end, I did not get to publicly thank Chang Jae Lee for his beautiful cover work on my translation of Yi T’aejun’s Eastern Sentiments, so I thank him here for designing a book that could match Yi’s high aesthetic standards. I have received much support too from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Dan Rivero, who was so comforting as things threatened to fall apart. I thank you for that.

This kind of slow, archival research would not be possible without the generous support of funding agencies who appreciate that the richest rewards may appear only in the long run. I gratefully acknowledge the help I have received from the Korea Foundation (many times over), the Social Science Research Council in the form of an International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the International Communication Foundation, and the Northeast Asia Council at the Association of Asian Studies.

Finally, I recall here the late Marshall Pihl, who first set me off on this journey twenty years ago, when he helped me to move from England to Hawai’i and the even more foreign world of graduate school. I hope this work will offer a small amount of vindication to his spirit.

At home my brother, Chris, would shame me into action from time to time as his voice rose incredulously with the words, Is that still the book you were working on ten years ago? Fortunately he will have to ask different questions from now on. Rachel was always enthusiastic and understanding. And my mother has been a constant supporter through Skype. It is so great to know that I will not have to experience alone the joy and relief of finishing.

I dedicate this book to those who were at my side as I wrote every word. To Dew and Grace: I’m sorry that I deleted everything you typed. You were only trying to help, and did so, immeasurably.

A question of time lies at the heart of this book, which explores the ways in which the work of poets, philosophers, fiction writers, and essayists living on the Korean peninsula during the final decade of Japanese colonial occupation was fueled by the sense of a disappearing future and the struggle to imagine a transformed present. Haunted by the paradoxical disappearance of that which was yet to appear, their works turned to the past and the repetitive present of the everyday just as that past was being consigned to the museum by an imperial state at war. The cold breeze that passes over Ch’oe Myŏngik’s disenchanted protagonist on a visit to the Harbin Museum whispers that the separation of the past from the present and its rearrangement as chronological narrative, so central to the time consciousness of modernity, fail to communicate anything other than the estrangement of an icy death. That same chronological time equally fails to offer any futural promise in the short stories, essays, poems, and novels appearing from the second half of the 1930s, which, with their fragmented, episodic, and cyclical structures, replace the hope, dreams, and ambition of youth from earlier colonial stories with the compromise of middle age and old men struggling to cope in a strange, new world. The disappearing future suggests a profound loss of faith in the ideology of progress and modernization as the industrialization of the peninsula speeded up. The industrial societies of Europe shared such a loss of faith, but what also disappeared with the future in late colonial Korea was the idea, or hope, of postcolonialism itself. As colonial rule took on a more recognizably fascist form, the imperialization policies of the Japanese empire threatened the imagination of a national future reaching into a distant horizon. Korea’s writers bore a special burden as the attempted elimination of Korean as a public language emerged as one major strategy on the part of the imperial state. It is to this moment that we can trace, perhaps surprisingly, a creative and varied exploration of the nature of time in modernity from those to whom the time of the modern appeared most often, but not only, as foreclosed. The imprint of that foreclosure was held within the very form of the writings they produced, and it left behind some of the most intriguing works of mid-twentieth-century global modernism. The loss of a future did not bring an end to stories of time, but it did raise the question: what happens to time when the future becomes unimaginable and unnarratable?

If the future appears absent in late colonial fiction, it is all too overwhelmingly present in the writing of its history. The historian of late colonial Korea faces two major problems: she writes from the position of knowing that colonial rule came to a sudden end with Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War a mere three to four years after the final colonial era publications of many of the writers mentioned in the following pages, and she writes across, but still within, a sixty-year-plus history of the Cold War world in which the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Republic of Korea set up competing states on the same peninsula and are still at war. The writers discussed here, then, have been subject to a triple censorship—by the colonial censor as they wrote, by postcolonial states for their collaborative actions, and by Cold War states for their postdivision choices of north or south. The crisis of representation they encountered is part of a longer twentieth-century history of Korean modernity in which capitalism, colonialism, and Cold War converge in a peculiarly intense fashion. That crisis has been only deepened by the historicist logic, through which history is so often told as a prelude to the present, which has exerted great influence on the ways in which late colonial writers and their works have been read.

The extent of that influence has reached even to the fundamentals of whose works can or cannot be legally published. Those who willingly, or unwillingly, moved to the north of the country during the late 1940s—the so-called wŏlbuk chakka (crossing-to-the-north writers)—were subject to a publication ban until 1988 in South Korea.¹ The effect of this ban on the writing of Korea’s colonial cultural history can be gauged if we consider that, of the writers discussed in this book, Yi T’aejun, Pak T’aewŏn, Ch’oe Myŏngik, Im Hwa, O Changhwan, and Kim Namch’ŏn all either moved to or stayed in the North. In other words, almost all the writers I discuss were persona non grata during the first four decades of the history of the Republic of Korea. Much work has been done to reintegrate these writers into the literary history of South Korea, especially during the past decade, but the effect of the long ban is still felt. In North Korean scholarship, many of these writers have fared little better as they fell out of favor during the purges of the late 1950s.² And the effect of the ban on whose work has been translated into English is, if anything, even more striking.³

When it comes to the narration of late colonial history, there are perhaps four common narratives invoked to incorporate writers from the time into the differing national histories that have appeared since then. The first is a tale of total capitulation, which ironically mirrors the imperialist rhetoric of total mobilization. Here the choice to write in Japanese, for example, is read as unequivocal support for the imperial regime, and the figure of the former revolutionary is supposed to testify to the decisive collapse of the leftist movement in the wake of brutal suppression in the early 1930s.⁴ Strategy comprised a second narrative, invoked in the immediate wake of liberation and expounded most famously by the writer Kim Saryang, whom metropolitan critics had widely praised for his fictional depictions of Koreans in Japan.⁵ Somewhat sheepishly defending his own colonial career, on which he now claimed to have had second thoughts, Kim defended his choice to write in Japanese by arguing that there was nothing honorable in silence at the moment of crisis, unless one had continued to write in Korean in secret.⁶ That in fact constituted the third narrative, in which there was a period of lying in wait for colonial rule to end, exemplified by the repetition of the ways in which writers such as Hwang Sunwŏn continued to write in Korean but buried their work in anticipation of liberation.⁷ This option tends toward anachronism in its prior knowledge of the short-lasting nature of the total war era, a knowledge that contemporaries did not share. A fourth version of late colonial history has been most perfectly shaped in literature from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which depicts the anticolonial guerrilla warfare in Manchuria as a successful war of resistance. The problem of narrating past to present in a linear, causal fashion is resolved by imposing a narrative of constant struggle leading to victory over the colonial power.⁸ In this case the struggle justified the postliberation political settlement and still holds power in the Democratic People’s Republic today.

Without claiming to have resolved irrevocably the problem of anachronism that historicism creates, this study is shaped by the decision to focus on how writers conceived their own futures, including those who bought into the fascist project. I have found Tani Barlow’s advocacy of future anteriority as historical method helpful in considering how later knowledge of the imminent end of colonial rule and coming division shapes the historiography of late colonial Korea, which struggles to deal with a period when alternative futures for the nation were considered. As Barlow writes, the conjecture that those who preceded us knew where in human time they were located when they acted historically is, I suggest, a potentially disabling inference.⁹ Barlow’s stress on the tense of future anteriority in her work on Chinese feminism is helpful for thinking through the lateness of late colonialism, which, after all, appears only in retrospect. In histories that highlight the tense of future anteriority, the emphasis is not on what once was but on the what will have been, that is, on the imagination of the future in a moment, regardless of what actually came to pass. Such histories aim to return the quality of contingency to the writing of history and relieve the subjects of the past from the burden of representing the past merely because they were there, as if they instantiated or embodied their own present in a way that can be sufficiently excavated.¹⁰ Such a stance should effect major changes in the ways in which late colonial history is more usually narrated.

In popular South Korean histories, the period of the late 1930s and early 1940s has been known as a dark period (amhŭkki), as if it were a black hole where conventional notions of time, and perhaps also responsibility, disappeared.¹¹ The reluctance to discuss this period stemmed from the difficulty of writing into national history an era when an alternative future for the nation was imagined and practiced. It also arose from legal and ethical issues arising from a period that has led to kidnapping, executions, official tribunals, and public shaming.¹² In 2002, sixty years after the end of colonial rule, scholars worked with groups from South Korea’s National Assembly to once more draw up an official list of collaborators in an attempt to produce a more accurate picture of writers’ and artists’ positions toward the colonial power.¹³ One of the working groups’ emphases, which is also a more recent academic trend, was to look at the content of Japanese-language works rather than passing judgment by virtue of the choice of language alone. Yet it is still difficult to consider the motivations and situation of late colonial writers, other than in relation to their apparent support, or lack thereof, for the idea of national culture, and difficult to consider their work without considering their motivations.¹⁴

Nevertheless, the dark period also attests to the ways in which the history of fascism in the Japanese empire has been subjected to that same historicist logic that declared a Sonderweg, or special path, in Nazi Germany and described wartime Japan as having entered a dark valley. Such rhetorical figures attempt to rewrite the era as a time when the peoples of Germany and Japan are supposed to have stepped outside the history of modernity and behaved irrationally or reverted to their cultural essence. Thus the history of fascism was, until recently, written as a period of aberration or a blip when people momentarily lost their minds before somehow returning, or being returned, to the path of a true modernity, whose ideologies of progress, development, and democratization could thus be reaffirmed.¹⁵ In recent years historians have instead devoted much effort to rewriting the history of fascism as an integral part of modernity and to thus examining the relationship between modernism and fascism. By refusing to consign fascism to an atavistic past, they have forced a consideration of fascist legacies in the present; once the dark period is no longer allowed to remain in the dark, as it were, it can exert a different and powerful presence in relation to the present.

This book is part of the broad effort to rewrite the history of the late colonial period into the global history of modernity and fascist cultures.¹⁶ This means to consider fascism in the colonies and not just in the metropolitan centers where it is more easily imagined. I write easily because this book takes fascist culture to refer not only to culture under fascism but also to a culture that actively espouses fascism. It therefore demands the recognition that Japanese fascism was coproduced in its colonies and not merely resisted or tolerated, although that certainly occurred as well. My tactic of reading a few texts closely stems from the belief that what has been excised from the historical record is precisely the strategies and forms through which the writers of occupied Korea attempted to critique their own lives and dream their own futures. Despite all the difficulties, writing did emerge, whether in Korean or Japanese, and form was given to the dilemmas and dreams of Korea’s nascent bourgeoisie. Their work opens up a history that has been rendered unseen by historicist ideologies of progress, development, and nation.

In writing this book, I have been influenced by Peter Osborne’s rethinking of modernism as what he calls the cultural affirmation of a particular temporal logic of negation, which produces the search for the new.¹⁷ This negation does not take place in a historical vacuum but as an affirmation of the global culture of time that is modernity, driven by the expansion of capitalist markets. As global as modernism is, however, it also bears the imprint of its location and situation. If negation is the fundamental dynamic of modernism, then the content and form of that modernism will differ according to the object of negation—what so often is termed tradition—and the conditions under which that negation takes place. It will also differ according to different models available for the mode of negation itself.

Osborne’s work demands that we consider modernism as much more than a set of literary practices and forms identified predominantly with certain European literatures. And yet scholars persist in discussing modernism as a purely artistic phenomenon intrinsic to the development of modern European literature, rendering it hard to recognize Korean modernism as such.¹⁸ Caught up in its own ideology, modernism has been considered a mere formal innovation or an artistic movement, defined as a reaction against traditional representational practices, regardless of the fact that it is modernism’s privileging of the new that produces the concept of a traditional representational practice in the first place.¹⁹ Until recently, Korean modernist works have been recognized in terms of their proximity to European models and thus judged as later, inauthentic imports or incomplete attempts at mimicry. By emphasizing the status of modernism as temporal-cultural form, Osborne tries to retrieve it from its use in chronological periodizations of style, or as the name for a self-conscious artistic movement. Such common uses of the term, he argues, disregard modernism’s temporal dynamic as the condition of possibility of a . . . distinctively future-oriented series of forms of experience of history as temporal form and thus fail to recognize its pervasiveness and contradictory complexity.²⁰ What is at stake is not only the categorization, and valuation, of particular literary works but the very form for the narration of both history and the future.

Elsewhere Osborne has argued that modernism is not only a consciousness of the historical time of modernity but also an ideology that represses its geopolitical origins in the West and subsequent universalization with colonial rule.²¹ It has been well argued by now that the politics of modernism were to locate all that is new and hence privileged in the mythical West. Globally this temporal scheme depended on positing a lack in the non-Western other. Historians of colonialism, such as Anne McClintock, have noted that colonialism thus places the colony in anterior time to the colonizer, a move that worked to legitimate imperialism as a means of gradually leading those backward regions forward in time toward European progress and reason.²² Colonies could never be allowed to achieve simultaneity with Euro-America because that would bring to an end this spatial hierarchy of temporalities, along with the fragile identity of the West itself.

Japanese colonialism availed itself of this same logic to justify its own violence but also stimulated a rich panoply of modernists against modernity: writers and philosophers whose work could, sometimes self-consciously, sometimes not so, provide the base for an alternative pan-Asian universalism that reinforced Japan’s temporal hierarchy within Asia at the same moment that it questioned the dominance of so-called Western thought and offered a center for Asian intellectuals’ identification.²³ Such flourishing pan-Asianisms rendered particularly complex the romantic antiquarianism that prospered in Korea, as in Japan, for if the turn to the past was a specifically colonial ideology that accepted the colonizers’ terms, as the anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon criticized, then it often offered a more viable way for the colonial subject to join imperial time.²⁴ The modernism of late colonial Korea appears to struggle to envision a future, but that does not mean that it is any less future oriented than other modernisms. And like other modernisms, that future orientation took on differing political shades.

One of those shades was fascism, which I understand here as the desire for a kind of capitalism without capitalism, as it were. Following Slavoj Žižek and others, here fascism refers to the dream of capitalism without its excess, that is, without class division, peasant and labor unrest, or the threat of communist revolution—in other words, so much of what capitalism gives rise to.²⁵ Marilyn Ivy has recently summarized fascism as the erasure of class divisions by appealing to the nation as an organic community that transcends these divisions while keeping in place existing property relations.²⁶ Anyone who reads the lectures of the literary critic Ch’oe Chaesŏ from the early 1940s, as I do in chapter 5, would harbor no doubts that fascism had arrived in Korea. According to Ch’oe, any fiction that ignored the happy situation of communal harmony in Korea to describe unhappy and impoverished peasants could no longer be considered realism.²⁷ It is hard to imagine a property relation more central to modernity than that of colonialism. Fascism in late colonial Korea took the form of the rhetorical disavowal of the colonial relation; capitalism without capitalism also necessarily meant colonialism without colonialism. The wartime injunctions to become Japanese and to rethink Korea as a region, and not a colony, of the imperial nation performed that disavowal, which acted to keep in place existing property relations of class and empire.

To avail myself of fascism’s comparative conceptual power is to place colonial Korea in the history of global modernity rather than consign it to the small box of cultural exceptionalism in which the late colonial policies of the imperial state are narrated under the terms of mere cultural assimilationism, the term more usually used when discussing Korea’s colonial history. Late colonial Korea did indeed undergo policies of assimilation, but not so much assimilation to being Japanese as assimilation to the fantasy of fascism and its production of the fantasy of something called Japanese culture, a process that also had the effect of realigning and reinforcing ideas of something called Korean culture. This is why we can trace back to this period the origins of so many of the aesthetic and cultural notions of Koreanness that still thrive, from unself-conscious immediacy to the beauty of sorrow.²⁸ Under fascism the idea of culture takes on a particular significance, a fact that is noteworthy for those of us who work on Korea’s colonial history, where the period from 1920 through either 1931 or 1937 is generally dubbed the era of cultural rule, as if somehow the military disappeared for a while. During those years a flourishing cultural sphere was allowed to emerge in the media and arts so long as it did not nurture aspirations for political autonomy. Under colonial rule Korean identity would ideally be cultural and not political, but under late colonial rule that cultural identity would simultaneously have to support the war cause. Paradoxically these policies endowed the realm of culture with added significance not only for imperialist forces but also for any kind of anticolonialism, as it offered a space for practices where notions of self, whether individual or communal, were elaborated and contested. Aesthetics and politics were not easily separated.

Bruce Cumings has characterized Japan’s colonialism in Korea as developmental, by which he does not mean to praise the results of that rule but rather to describe the way in which it turned to infrastructure and industry in order to integrate the colony into the imperial market, producing a nascent industrial revolution in its wake.²⁹ The experience of temporal dislocation that was modernity in colonial Korea was rendered most visible in the cities, whose population surged throughout the decade with the influx of impoverished peasants, new factory workers, and Japanese immigrants. By 1940 the population of Seoul had reached one million, of whom almost one-third were Japanese residents, and other cities also grew, especially those on the north-south railroad line that continued up into Manchuria. Widening roads, rising buildings, and expanding tram and bus networks were transforming the urban environment irrevocably. Both slums and new housing developments were coalescing around urban peripheries, the first apartment buildings were going up, and Seoul’s downtown commercial core was lit up each night with neon lights. Korea’s cities staged the encounter between the height of fashion, the newest technologies, grinding poverty, and the unequal distribution of resources in a visible demonstration of the increasing coexistence and disparities of old and new, rich and poor.

In histories of Korea the disjunctural time of the late colonial era (ilche mal), which refers to roughly the decade preceding the liberation from formal colonial rule that came with Japan’s defeat, is most often woven into a political history. After the second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the already harsh colonial surveillance regime, which had been stepping up its repression of anticolonial and communist movements since the Manchurian Incident of 1931, took a distinct turn to focus on making colonial subjects self-identify as imperial subjects, a policy referred to generally as imperialization (hwangminhwa/kōminka). The now infamous slogan naisen ittai (literally, the Japanese homeland and Korea as one body) appeared as imperial rhetoric and declared Korea to be not a colony—as it had been since formal colonization in 1910—but a region of Japan with the goal of solidifying support for the labor of war soon in progress on two fronts and demanding more bodies to staff factories and fight battles. With its proximity to the newly founded state of Manchukuo and the warfront in China, Korea had taken on a vital strategic importance, and its full exploitation, or what was termed total mobilization, demanded that colonial subjects not only cease to protest their status and treatment but actively identify with the cause of war, enough to be prepared to pick up a gun and die on the battlefield. They had to become believers.

Today the era known as late colonial is remembered mostly by a few iconic events: the voluntary and forced drafting of millions of men and women to staff mines, factories, and on occasion sexual labor camps; the drafting of Korean men into the Imperial Army; the order announced in 1939 that Koreans should adopt Japanese-style names; the forced attendance at Shintō shrine services; the closing of the vernacular press in 1940; and the increasingly widespread adoption of the Japanese language both in public life and at home. As the war deepened, writers and artists were expected to produce works in line with the narrative of victory in war, through their work and the ubiquitous writers’ tours to encourage students to join the army and to celebrate their sacrifice as martyrdom, and increasingly to write in the Japanese language rather than the Korean of their custom. The enforcement of Japanese language use, at least in the public realm and ideally extending into private life, was one of the most controversial policies aiming to encourage Koreans to identify with a Japanese future.

The degree to which the Government General had come to view the Korean language as harboring the potential to foster alternative communities to that of Korea as a loyal region of the Japanese imperial state became dramatically visible in what became known as the Language Society Incident of 1942. Members of the Korean Language Society involved in producing the first Korean language dictionary were rounded up, imprisoned, and tortured on suspicion of conspiring against the imperial state. Two of them died in prison.³⁰ Perhaps it should not surprise that the project to preserve words as the material embodiment of a Korean social life and to explain them through other Korean words should be viewed as a gesture of self-referentiality and autonomy. During the years of the Pacific War, writers increasingly faced the prospect of publishing in Japanese or not at all, and, although their choices differed, the possibility of the Korean language passing into disuse became not quite so unimaginable after all. If Korea’s early modern reformers had presumed the existence of the nation with its own language, stretching into the distant future, by the height of the Pacific War their faith was beginning to shake.

The particular resonance of the imperialization policies for the generation of writers discussed here was painful. They were for the most part born just before or after colonial rule had been imposed in 1910. They had no lived memory of precolonial society, and all their schooling had taken place within the colonial education system. The majority of them had, furthermore, pursued higher education in the Japanese metropole. But they were also the generation of writers whose careers had been forged on their return to Korea in a flourishing Korean language media of the 1930s, which benefited from increased literacy rates and the emergence of a market where, for some, money could be made. Newspaper sales had trebled over the course of the decade, and a range of magazines and journals appeared catering to increasingly specialized readerships.³¹ Whereas in the previous decade publishers had lost money, sometimes bringing financial ruin on themselves with their