우물 안 개구리

It’s been quite some time since I have posted (teaching two classes this semester has had that effect), but I wanted to catch up by mentioning several conferences that I’ve been to this spring, and to give a plug for one or two others that I’ve heard about.

  Two took place earlier this spring at NUS, “Emerging SE Asian STS” (January 2009) and “Toward a Trans-Asian STS” (March 2009), and the other was that traditional behemoth, AAS (Chicago 2009).

  I’m lumping these together collectively because I think there remains a lot to offer in terms of comparative work with South Korea and other emerging / new nations which received substantial aid in the 1945-1970 period, including the ROK, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Vietnam.   That is, I’m becoming more obsessed lately with the loose notion of “comparative developmental states,” rather than South Korea or post-war  NE Asia in isolation. 

  Specifically, I’m interested in the role of South Korea as an agent of international / US construction interests, looking at the build-up of expertise and funding by Hyundai.  Just to cite one quick example, Hyundai worked on the Pattani-Naratiwat highway project (Dec. 1965-March 1968) in southern Thailand (almost on the Malaysia border) for their first big international project, losing money and going beyond the time projection in the process.  But the project was mobilized as a success and Hyundai contruction subsequently gained access to the Vietnam market, winning bids through RMK-BRJ, a Texas-based consortium (Think “Friends of LBJ,” as Brown and Root funded his 1948 Senate run) that controlled many of the bids coming from the US Navy.  Lee Myung-Bak was there, too, and many Korean elites used this context (SE Asia, Thailand and Vietnam) to build their careers.    

  I’ll be working on this more later, but mention it now as I’m familiar with the military role played by the South in Vietnam, but am just beginning to recognize the infrastructural role, especially when present-days scandals about construction in Iraq are still emerging.  It’s also another area with overlaps between Imperial japan and Imperial America, with South Korea acting as an on-site representative in the latter case.

  That’s just a brief note for now, and wondering if anyone out there has anything to say about “Scientizing Korea’ at USC this spring (April), or the upcoming Japanese science workshop (May) at UCLA?

Seungsook Moon at Japan Focus has an interesting historiographical essay about the contested life and legacy of Park Chung Hee, who led Korea through the 60s and 70s. The debate is particularly interesting because it parallels discourses which are ongoing in other post-dictatorial societies, including the debates about Stalin in Russia, Mao and Deng in China, Chiang Kaishek in Taiwan, etc. The history itself is fascinating, though I do wish Moon had spent a little more effort mediating some of the factual basis for the competing narratives.

On April 16 this year, my teacher and the man who basically created the Korean history studies in the former USSR, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak, has passed away. His death greatly saddened everybody in the Korean studies in Russia and many other parts of the “post-Soviet” space, and was marked by obituaries in some South Korean newspapers (Tonga Ilbo, Hangyoreh, Seoul Sinmun and a handful of others). Not that much, however, emerged on Mikhail Pak and his scholarship in English, and his death seemingly did not attract that much attention in the Anglophone academia. In order to convey some understanding about what Mikhail Pak and his scholarship meant to me and many of my colleagues, I decided to put here the obituary commissioned to me by Acta Koreana. It is expected to appear in Vol. 12, No 1, in June this year:

Obiturary: Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak (Pak Chunho), (21.06.1918–16.04.2009)

Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja, Oslo University)

In the world of the Korean Studies in the successor states of the former USSR, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak was widely recognized as a ”living legend”. He is known as the scholar who made the historical studies on Korea into a legitimate field of its own in the Soviet and Eastern European academia. He is also credited with creating a systematic, analytical framework for understanding Korea’s ancient and mediaeval history, which largely defined the way Korea’s past has been described in the Soviet and post-Soviet academic world since the 1950s onward. His lifelong enterprise, the fully annotated, academic translation of Samguk Sagi into Russian, firmly put Korea on the map of the Russophone world history studies, giving the non-Korean studies majors a direct access to a first-hand source on Korea’s ancient history and thus largely succeeding in “de-ghettoizing” the Korean history field as a whole. A caring pedagogue, whose extremely liberal approach and respect for the individuality of each and every student looked like a rare bright spot in otherwise quite authoritarian world of the Soviet humanitarian academia, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak tutored several generations of the Soviet and post-Soviet Russophone Korea specialists, who further developed his approach to the Korean past.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak (Korea name: Pak Chunho) was born on June 21, 1918 in a large Korean village, Yanchihe, in the border region of Russia’s Maritime Province, to a family of a well-educated second-generation Korean immigrant. His native village, Yanchihe, was famed in the 1900-1910s as a breeding ground of the nationalist movement, and his family was on close terms with some of its leaders, including a legendary Korean self-made man and one of the chief sponsors of the 1907-1908 ‘righteous armies’ movement, rich trader Ch’oe Chaehyǒng (1860-1920). In the 1920s and 1930s, in Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s formative years, the leadership of the Soviet Union-based Korean national movement was firmly in the hands of ‘national Communists’, the people who envisioned future, independent Korea as a beacon of Asian socialist revolution, but also struggled to preserve Korean cultural legacy among the émigré community. One of these ‘national Communists’, Kye Pongu (1880-1956), a former activists of the early 1900s ‘enlightenment’ movement who became, after Russia’s 1917 October Revolution, one of the closest comrades of a renowned Korean Communist leader, Yi Tonghǔi (1873-1935), was Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s teacher of classical Chinese and Korean history in the early 1940s. At that time, both met in Kzyl-Orda in Kazakhstan, where so many Russian Koreans were forcibly exiled in 1937. In many ways, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s scholarship and personality were animated by Russian-Korean Communists’ ethos and élan – by their deep attachment to the Korean cultural legacy as the nucleus of the “cultural nation”, and by their quest for social justice and modern development. The forcible removal of all the ethnic Koreans to Central Asia in 1937 added a sense of urgency to this commitment. Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s translation of Samguk Sagi, started in early 1950s, was partly motivated by his ardent wish to transmit the Korean traditional culture to the new generation of Soviet Koreans, who no longer could study their language and legacy in the place of their exile and had to read Korean sources in Russian. In this way, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak was definitely a Soviet-Korean intellectual with a deep sense of ethno-cultural commitment. His later engagements with the Russian-Korean associations of the 1990s-2000s (he used to chair the All-Soviet/All-Russian Association of Koreans from 1989, and remained its honorary chairman until his death) was a logical continuation of his passion for the case of Korean national culture. He also retained the Marxist beliefs of his youth, albeit in more critical and self-reflective form, until his death.
The sense of mission as a guardian of the endangered Korean tradition aside, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak as an intellectual was largely formed by MIFLI (Moscow Institute for Philosophy, Literature and History). He studied there in 1936-41, side to side with such future luminaries of the Soviet culture as novelist K.Simonov (1915-1979) and poet A.Tvardovsky (1910-1971). MIFLI was renowned for its commitment to erudite cultural education - Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak majored there in Latin for three years, before switching to East Asia and eventually to Korea – and for its tradition of non-dogmatic, open-minded Marxism, which contrasted a lot with the growing fossilization of Stalinist ‘Marxism-Leninism’ elsewhere in the USSR. Creativeness in applying the Marxist formulae to the Korean material was amply showed by Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak when, after getting his junior doctorate in 1947 with a dissertation in late 19th century Korean political history, he was appointed in 1949 to teach Korean history at the mecca of the Soviet scholarly world, Moscow State University (MGU).

In mid-1950s, in several articles published in the most authoritative historical journals of the USSR (some of them were then republished in Chinese), Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak directly challenged an influential Marxist interpretation of Korea’s ancient history by a group of veteran Korean Marxists who ended up becoming a nucleus of North Korea’s humanitarian academia, including mighty Paek Namun (1894-1979), North Korea’s long-time Minister of Education. While Paek Namun and many others viewed 1-7th centuries Korea as “slave-owning society” – thus mechanically applying the classical Marxian model based on the experiences of the Mediterranean society, to the Korean case – Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak suggested that Korea at that point was at the “early feudal stage”. Korea’s “early feudalism” as viewed by Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak, was characterized by a pronounced role of the state-centered redistributional apparatus and much more developed bureaucratic organization that the feudalisms in contemporaneous Europe, and also demonstrated lots of “transitional” traits, archaic clan-based communities inherited from the pre-class era still remaining the backbone of the societal structure. While the wholesale characterization of all the developed pre-capitalist state societies as “feudal” is hardly acceptable for today’s historian, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s challenge to the mechanical application of the “slave-owning mode of production” dogma was hugely productive. Eventually, the North Korean scholarship moved to recognizing the 1-7th centuries proto-Korean states as “feudal” as well (but the “slave-owning society” was applied to Ancient Chosǒn rather than discarded). In the USSR, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s disciples – including such prominent historians of ancient Korea as Roza Shataevna Dzharylgasinova and Sergei Vladimirovich Volkov – were now free to describe the first states of the Korean Peninsula for what they really where, namely agrarian bureaucracies ruled by the aristocratic classes. At least at the Korean historical studies, the deadly grip of the Stalinist orthodoxy was almost not felt, since anybody who did not wish to custom-tailor the Korean history to the rigid model of “primitive communism to slave-owning society to feudalism” could resort to invoking Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s authority. This authority was firmly buttressed by the scrupulous textual research. Silla Chronicles of Samguk sagi, translated and published in Russian in 1959, brought him the prestigious senior doctoral degree (Russian version of habilitation – 1960). Then, the successive translations and publication of the Koguryǒ Chronicles and Paekche Chronicles (1995) and the whole text of Samguk Sagi (2001) made him one of the best-known experts in the Korean historical texts study in the whole world.

A Soviet/Russian-Korean national activist and one of the greatest living specialists in Samguk Sagi and Korea’s early history, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak was also a great manager of scholarship. Much of his organizational talent was demonstrated after the Soviet collapse in 1991, when much of the humanitarian scholarship in the former USSR became a victim of a headlong “transition to capitalism” followed by general disorder and impoverishment. In 1991 he managed to attract South Korean sponsorship and to establish an independent International Center For Korean Studies (ICFKS) at Moscow State University, which, to this day, published more than 30 monographs on Korea, played host to many important international conferences and provided access to a well-stocked Korean research library to growing numbers of students and researchers. Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s authority – cemented also by several South Korean governmental medals he received in the 1990s and 2000s – was crucially essential for ICFKS fundraising in South Korea, and, by extension, for the survival of the Korean studies as such in post-Soviet Russia. It remains a matter of serious concern whether ICFKS, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s most-loved brainchild, will be able to continue its activities on the same level without its founder’s unparalleled charisma.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak died on April 16, 2009 at his own home, while checking his granddaughter’s draft translation of yet another Korean classic, Samguk Yusa. He died with a Korean classical work at his hand – a death which represents well the very essence of his life.

Note: The History Carnival is still looking for a May 1st host, as well as hosts for the summer and beyond. Contact Sharon Howard (sharon$@$earlymodernweb$.$org$.$uk) to volunteer.

This is not a timed test, but you will be required to account for your periodization afterwards. This is not a graded exercise, as the answers are usually blatantly obvious or impossibly indeterminate. Whether this is a professional or recreational exercise is entirely between you, your cooler students, and your tenure committee.

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Apparently inspired by the success of other international publicity campaigns around disputed lands — Tibetan independence, Pakistani claims to Kashmir, the Golan Heights, etc. — some Korean business owners in New York are trying to raise the profile of the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute by publicizing it in English on dry cleaning bags.

This is part of a larger push to broaden Korean diaspora engagement with the homeland and leverage overseas success into diplomatic weight. This includes trying to instill a sense of the importance of the Dokdo issue — as Koreans see it — into second and third generation Korean Americans. I’m not sure what the benefit is to tying Korean American identity to a post-colonial maritime resource dispute instead of … well, almost anything from the panoply of Korean history and culture seems like it would be more likely to succeed in the long term and have greater benefits.

Speaking of generations, the North-South separation has had linguistic consequences over the years. Most of the examples given seem to be in the political realm, terms which have taken on specific meanings within the Kim-cult/juche system. After decades of living in a more or less permanent state of political terror, I would imagine that most North Koreans would be very careful, precise with their language. The culture shock for individual defectors is already pretty severe; the culture shock of reunification in Germany was substantial, though the political system in East Germany was never as thoroughly totalitarian, information was never as tightly controlled.

I remember the shocked look on my students’ faces fifteen years ago when I told them that we actually had no idea how decisions were made or leaders picked in North Korea, that it was more or less still a “black box.” I find it fascinating that we’re starting to get a better public picture of the internal processes of North Korea.

One of the reasons is the steady stream of refugees. In the Financial Times, Matthew Engel reports on a Korean enclave in the SW London suburb of New Malden. The relatively closed and self-reliant society is mostly middle-class, “bourgeois,” but among “the beginnings of an underclass” are North Koreans. I get the impression from the article that many of them are illegal immigrants, and their “underclass” status comes both from their lack of professional skills and their desire to remain outside of official notice.

Mitchell Lerner, at Ohio State University, believes that he’s found the key to understanding the Kim dynasty of North Korea: juche. And when “self-reliance” is slipping, domestically, they bluster internationally to bolster their credentials as strong and independent leaders. It’s counterintuitive: when they need help the most, they can’t get it. But their legitimacy as rulers is based on juche. He writes

In the political realm, it called for chaju (independence), in which North Korean leaders governed without constraint from outside pressure or internal challenge. Economically, juche called for charip (self-sustenance), which required a largely self-contained economy based on domestic workers using domestic resources to satisfy domestic needs. In international relations, juche advocated chawi (self-defense), a foreign policy based on complete equality and mutual respect between nations as well as the right of self-determination and independent policymaking.

Juche, simply, demanded the people subordinate themselves to the state, and the state in turn would advance their collective interests in accordance with the uniqueness and majesty of Korea, and always in pursuit of greater economic, political, and international independence.

By justifying the position of the suryong (single leader) and uniting the people behind him, juche successfully advanced Kim’s interests.

I’d call that a fairly textbook kind of fascism: emphasizing the independence of the nation, the subordination of the people to the nation, and the fuhrerprincip — the leader who embodies sovereignty. Even the reliance on the US as a hobgoblin echoes the “we have been denied our rightful place in the world” rhetoric of the early 20c fascist regimes. The only thing that distinguishes North Korea from them, really, is the longevity of the Kim dynasty. The Kim refered to in the above excerpt is Kim Il Sung, the founder of the DPRK; his son, Kim Jong Il, is one of the only examples I can think of of a successful fascist succession.

However, by closely associating the government’s legitimacy with its successful pursuit of juche, Kim had opened the door to potential disaster. When he triumphantly achieved juche, North Koreans would perpetuate and even embrace his rule. But if the pursuit was unsuccessful, the most fundamental justification for the regime would appear violated.

Legitimation of a government is always a double-edged sword. Some forms of legitimation have a sharper back edge than others: the Confucian Mandate of Heaven is like this, as well.

When considered within this framework, Kim’s tendency to behave more aggressively when he seemed to be at his weakest makes sense. Unable to deny economic and political instability that suggested his government was not acting in accordance with juche principles, Kim redoubled his efforts to demonstrate his strength and independence in the third juche realm, foreign policy.

He does a nice job fitting the periods of economic trouble with the eras of international tension. He also does a good job illustrating the claustrophobic environment — the limited, controlled media, the cradle-to-grave indoctrination, the purges, etc — which makes North Korea such a surreal place.

Update: Speaking of Surreal, Curzon has a post on Reverend Billy Graham’s relationship with North Korea, starting with his missionary ancestors. [via

The December History Carnival is up, and it includes a few Korea bits. Also lots of other neat stuff.

I’ve been looking at disease patterns in the early stages of the USAMGIK occupation, focusing on the cholera outbreak of spring and summer 1946, covering roughly April to September of that year, and peaking with the summer rains in June and July. I’m still not certain that a single disease identity is the correct frame, as there was some question of translation in the Japanese context–this according to Crawford Sams, with GHQ PHW (Public Health and Welfare)–and a number of competing disease entities as well, typhus primary among these.

In any case, leaving the question of identifying a disease entity aside for the moment, the patterns of quarantine and policing established by both USAMGIK and GHQ contain numerous interesting overlaps with previous policy. For one, the movement of repatriated ethnic Koreans back to Japan for a variety of reasons in 1946 and 1947–family property left behind, seeking to return to work in Japan, allegations of black market activity–meant that this group, along with Taiwanese, rapidly became identified with the disease itself in the Japanese press. There’s already a good bit of scholarship on this point–e.g., both Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Christopher Aldous have published on migration controls and disease policy (typhus) in Japan–indicating that the outbreak of cholera tended to reinforce existing prejudices and beliefs about ethnic Koreans.

Within Korea, the disease created the conditions for a mobilization based upon the introduction of “Western” medicine to a greater extent than had previously existed. That is, food controls, restrictions of the use of “night soil,” controls over sources of potable water, survey of animal populations, and even restrictions regarding large public gatherings (including funerals) were all among the practices put into effect to try to limit the spread of cholera, generally passed along by contaminated food or water sources. I have yet to find any local medical records (still working largely from USAMGIK bulletins here and Korean newspaper accounts), but it’s fair to speculate that this general policy felt a lot like Japanese policy regarding public health for much of the 1920’s and 1930’s. And the use of “local area doctors” (USAMGIK’s term for certain groups of TKM practitioners, although again, the translation issue is not always clear) meant that practitioners of traditional Korean medicine were enrolled as a last line of defense in terms of reporting the spread of disease. As both Park YunJae (Yonsei) and Shin Dong-Won (KAIST) have written about the reliance upon traditional practitioners fifteen to twenty years earlier, there’s considerable room here for speculation about how these new policies were received.

Finally, the disease did not respect boundaries, and two further problems added to the complex situation. One, the movement of Japanese forces and ethnic Koreans, primarily from North (Manchuria) to South (the DMZ, with some destined for Pusan) across the border rendered the migrations controls ineffectual. This was also the case for Southern Japan, where individuals could cross by boat into Japan unorbserved. Two, the lack of reliable information and communication with the Russians / Northern representatives only exacerbated the situation.
I still don’t know exactly what to do with this information collectively, except to note that it has a lot to do with the “national style”–itself a problematic label–that South Korea would later adopt with respect to medical practice, and to recognixe that the polciing aspect of public health definitely continued beyond the colonial period into the occupation and the subsequent formation of new states.

     I just returned to SG this past weekend from BAKS (British Association Korean Studies) 2008, and wanted to post as the film panel in particular intersects nicely with something posted earlier this summer.  For those interested in a brief summary of the conference as a whole, please see Philip Gowman’s take at: http://londonkoreanlinks.net/2008/09/12/baks-conference-report-looking-forward-looking-back/.

     To return to the issue of film, the Tuesday afternoon panel (9 / 9) offered a number of interesting film clips, one of which featured two scenes from “Homeless Angels” /  집없는 천사.   To be fair, I would have to see the entire film to say more; but for now, I agree with a basic reading of the film which reads the placement of these Korean orphans in terms of a paternalistic Japanese state and ithe attempted formation of new imperial subjects through tutelage.  The scene I’m referring to specifically in making this claim comes near the close of the film, and features one of the characters saluting / reciting while the Japanese flag is being raised: in effect, the perfomative force of the scene is roughly equivalent to a recruitment pitch.

     The speaker / presenter also raised an interesting point in conjunction with this film–and I want to be careful, as I’m operating here on jet lag, and may be conflating points made across the entire panel–pointing to the recurring popularity of the trope of the displaced orphan, with (1) “Boys Town” featured as one of the earliest films approved and shown by USAMGIK, and with the subsequent appearance of (2) Douglas Sirk’s (1957) “Battle Hymn.” 

     While I’m not comfortable with making sweeping juxtapositions from the standpoint of history–would want to know much more about the circumstances underlying each of the three films before making any links–the loose observation in the previous paragraph does lend itself to some interesting comparative questions.  Namely, what were the economic / social / political / communitarian ideals informing the practice of dealing with refugees (particular orphans) during and in the aftermath of the Korean War?  I’m familiar with an overall take that places New Deal reformers, broadly construed, in Japan and Korea for the respective occupations, but does this suggest potentially that 1930’s American-style social welfare practices were simply mapped onto the issue of dealing with refugees and orphans?  Can we complicate this further with the recognition (see Dan Rodgers and Atlantic Crossings)  that much of the New Deal was informed by an eclectic set of borrowed practices from earlier European practices related to social welfare?

     What I’m fumbling at here, in a none too articulate fashion, are ways of comparing the social welfare practices adopted under USAMGIK (and during the subsequent Korean War), and the comparable practices mobilized under Japanese Imperial authority only a decade or two earlier.  In what ways were Americans attempting to form new subjects of Korean orphans (perhaps new “South Korean” subjects?)–if we put this to the same litmus test as the Japanese Imperium–and how were  American practices distinct / different?  My recollection of images of orphans from the Holt folks (see the historical introduction at the Holt International website, which links the 1955 founding of the organization to Holt’s viewing of a film about Korea) is that they were generally designated as ”Korean,” but is this an innocent designation or does it assume a case where half of the peninsula subsumes the whole? 

I’m trying to do this kind of work for medicine now (looking at material and pedagogical changes in medical education pre and post war), and wondering what this might look like in a similar  context.  I also recognize that the question of distingiushing between categories and attributing sources of authority becomes almost hopelessly muddled, as what’s “Japanese” and ”American” is rarely clear, and there’s a signficant difference between the offical rhetoric and on the ground practice.

Tang Dynasty Times has the latest — and a great collection it is, too — and promises to have a second edition in a month!