Comments on: BAKS 2008

By: Don Gordon Bell

Don Gordon Bell — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 16:36:19 +0000

I know that is a late post, but I just wanted to comment on lirelou statements, …”Koreans are loath to adopt anyone who is not a relative”. This has actually changed over the recent past. Korean Government and NGO have documented over 87,000 Domestic adoptions from 1939-2008. This does not include over 20,000 Private Adoptions that are Not covered in Gov. Stats. Confucian thinking on blood is still very strong but cannot overcome the infertility problems that leads to adoption outside of the extended Korean family. Society has changed but not completely, 90% of these Domestic adoptees do not know that they were adopted, with secrecy motivated by the shame of not being able to have ‘real’ children. Several Movie/TV talents have Openly adopted just three years ago two daughters (it is less threatening to adopt a girl- she won’t be listed in the family registry after she gets married a woman is listed in the husband’s family registry). Perhaps 10-15% are able in various degrees of Openness but Korea still has a long way to go in accepting domestic adoption openly, as it should.

By: lirelou

lirelou — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:36:49 +0000

My impression of Korea is that Koreans are loath to adopt anyone who is not a relative, and thus anyone whose blood lines are not known. That leaves the state as the only possible “pater familias”. This in contrast to Taiwan, for example, where adoptions between blood relatives are generally not approved. Tough place to be an orphan, which may be why so many Korean orphans ended up overseas.

By: John DiMoia

John DiMoia — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:42:52 +0000

Hi,

I wanted to add to both comments above:

Owen, I couldn’t agree with you more, the film panel / s were great, especially on the question of the occupation years,
about which apparently still more materials exist, as the work of recovery in archives continues. According to the presenter
from NYU, there are even a few USAMGIK instructional films out there for public health (aimed at nurses),
something that I would love to see. Health is such a weird mix because the “bilingual world” gets even more confused,
as you have a small number of elite Korean and Taiwanese physicians who speak Japanese and read and write German,
the lingua franca of science and biomedicine before 1945.

And Sayaka, yes, I agree, and what I saw was framed that way primarily because of time concerns, so I’m sure a viewing of
the entire film would help. I’ll have to load up on DVD’s when I’m in Seoul in December, assuming that I can find some of
these earlier titles in commercial form. Also, As you may know, folks at Columbia are putting together–or
they were as of several years ago–an archive of film material from Ted Conant. I think he was with the UN, and Dr.
Amstrong showed us some of the raw footage from the 1960 demonstrations that Conant shot.

By: Sayaka Chatani

Sayaka Chatani — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:03:19 +0000

Hi. You really should watch the whole 집없는 천사, and see if you get a similar sense with the Korean Film Archive’s impression that the last scene is a sudden insert just to pass the censorship. The Japanese government itself was confused with the nature of the movie, apparently.

The issue of orphans is interesting and I would love to know if you find out anything on the question you ask here. It is also important to bear in mind that there were many half-American orphans (born between Japanese/Korean women and American soldiers) whom the state officials often had no idea of how to legally deal with.

By: Owen

Owen — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:25:42 +0000

Thanks for posting on this John. No disrespect to anyone else who presented, but the film panels definitely seemed to be the stars of the conference.

Personally I was struck by another aspect of the late colonial films – particularly the one that we got see in full, ‘Spring on the Peninsula’ (반도의 봄 – 1942). This was its depiction of the bilingual world of the late colonial (Korean) intellectuals/middle classes, who are seen in the film constantly switching back and forth between Korean and Japanese. Obviously this may have been partly a result of pressures from the colonial government which in the early 1940s was moving towards an outright ban on the use of Korean in films, but I got the impression that it also reflected the lived reality of a layer of the Korean population in the late colonial period. It felt like a window onto a world that even as a historian of Korea you never really get to hear much about, perhaps because the early 40s seems to be generally neglected in Korean history and perhaps because of the connotations of collaboration, assimilation and shame that bilingualism might carry.