There’s an interesting article up at Japan Focus this week, “Disarming Japan’s Cannons with Hollywood’s Cameras: Cinema in Korea Under U.S. Occupation, 1945-1948” by Brian Yecies and Ae-Gyung Shim. For the most part, it’s a pretty conventional occupation history, done with official USAMGIK sources, Korean newspapers, plus some secondary sources on the early occupation period, and reveals that USAMGIK used cinema, especially Hollywood imports, as a way to reeducate the formerly colonial subject population. Nothing too surprising there: US efforts to use American media to engineer democratic and capitalist cultures is pretty much a universal story in the post-war.

The twist here: a steady theme running through the article highlighting the disconnect between the values depicted on screen (intentionally or unintentionally) and the culture of the audience. Again, there’s nothing terribly new there: if the Koreans were already democratic pro-American capitalists, then the program wouldn’t exist in the first place. But the authors offer no obvious evidence either regarding audiences’ comprehension or tension with the material presented and make claims for the effects of the program which boggle the mind. This seems to be the result of conflating vocal conservative voices with popular reception. For example, this early passage sets the stage for a lot of the rest of the article:

Generally speaking, Koreans had had long-standing Confucian traditions that required physical separation between noblemen and commoners on the one hand, and men and women on the other hand. Confucianism provided the foundational social, moral and legal guidelines and customs between people of all ages. Not only did cinema-going in this era enable all walks of life to mingle together in ways that were different from traditional Korean moral values, but the images, themes and motifs presented in the onslaught of spectacle Hollywood films, which was not a new phenomenon, did continually present ‘American’ situations that shook the roots of traditions and worried traditionalists.

This rings rather false to me. First, the conflation of social customs with Confucianism and the conflation of conservatives with tradition, but more the idea that modern egalitarian ideas were new to most Koreans in the post-colonial age, after a third of a century of Japanese modernization – industrialization, migration, education and other changes. There is some discussion of “a formal survey of local attitudes in Korea” but it’s not clear to me that an American survey of attitudes at that point would produce results other than confirmation of American attitudes.

Worse, the evidence offered in the article about the surprising popularity of movies with untraditional and complex moral presentation suggests that the movies weren’t disturbing their audiences at all. They write “Almost immediately, these first Hollywood films made a splash in the marketplace as audiences lapped them up with enthusiasm,” but they can’t stop there. They finish that sentence with an unsourced and unsupported, “whether of not they understood them or appreciated the cultural values they contained.”

In the conclusion, Yecies and Shim suggest that the success of Hollywood and other movies in the 60s is a result of the acculturation to such fare in the ’40s. In fact, they credit the movie program with success beyond any reasonable expectation: “USAMGIK’s aim of reorientating Koreans away from the legacies of the former Japanese colonial regime was achieved with surprising ease by allowing hundreds of Hollywood spectacle films back into the region.” If the USAMGIK program was a success, then it couldn’t have been too far out of the mainstream. They discuss the pre-’45 movie scene, which sounds quite lively until the wartime rationing kicked it, but seem to dismiss it as a factor in their post-war discussion. It’s as though pre-liberation Koreans were nothing more than pre-colonial traditionalists with an overlay of colonial ideology, reeducated with great discomfort through the power of Humphrey Bogart and Roy Rogers. I suppose there must be more to this story, but the evidence presented here is grossly inadequate to prove the rather astonishing assertions being made.

On the plus side, one of the other articles at Japan Focus this week is Mark Caprio’s expanded version of the talk he gave at the AAS Conroy panel, in which he takes a contemporary right-wing revisionist discourse on Korean annexation and exposes the ahistoricity of it in great detail.

I would like to introduce two recent publications on colonial bureaucrats here. One is Okamoto Makiko, Shokuminchi kanryô no seijishi (岡本真希子『植民地官僚の政治史：朝鮮・台湾総督府と帝国日本』, Politics of Colonial Bureaucrats）Sangensha, 2008, and the other is Ôtomo Masako, Teikoku Nihon no shokuminchi shakai jigyô seisaku kenkyû (大友昌子『帝国日本の植民地社会事業政策研究』, A Study of Colonial Social Work Policies of Imperial Japan）Minerva, 2007. Their works are both impressive in the scope of research and their ability to compare the nitty-gritty of colonial rule in Taiwan and Korea. From research of Sheldon Garon and many others, Japan’s historians all learned that government officials, especially those in the famous Home Ministry played a huge role in promoting social reforms and modernization and that their power permeated many aspects of people’s everyday life. There is no reason to believe that it was very different in the colonies. Despite the reasonable guess about the role of colonial bureaucrats, we did not have a good grasp of basic facts about them until these publications came out.

There is so much information in Okamoto’s thick volume and I would highly recommend that anyone who studies anything about colonial Korea/Taiwan use this as a reference book. Okamoto did an excellent job in departing from the concentration, in previous scholarship, on personal networks (“who knew whom” etc.) and focused instead on the system, laws, and principles that regulated the flows of people. I learned so much about the differences of status between the Government-General in Korea and the Government-General in Taiwan — e.g. By 1919 when the Cultural Policy was implemented, there was a wide consensus among Japanese politicians on the fact that the GGK had already established a semi-independent status unlike the GGT and the other colonies. The GGK and the GGT also diverged in the recruitment of local populations into the colonial bureaucracy. While the number of Korean officials increased, that of Taiwanese officials remained extremely low. Okamoto also elaborates upon how the GGK operated (or at least tried to operate) independently from the Japanese home government in many different ways. Her elaboration on how the quickly changing political climates in Japan influenced the top personnel in the GGK and GGT, changing the relationships between the Japanese government and colonial bureaucracy, is also impressive.  We still have a long way to go in dissecting the work of colonial bureaucracies. But with her work, we can finally refer to the Government-General with more pluristic terms — as a group of people, rather than one monster-like control machine.

Ôtomo’s work on colonial social work probably enjoys a little more limited audience. Her empiricism is striking and it is quite refreshing to read details of social welfare laws and programs without once mentioning Foucauldian governmentality. Her main argument is to show how the colonial officials tried to regulate modernization in the colonies (「抑制された近代化」). That itself is not eye-opening but what interested me was how similar the social work techniques were between the colonies and Japan — the use of “方面委員 (district commissioner)” programs, the emphasis on moral suasion (教化）and local improvement, for example. Ôtomo tries to define “modernization” in a scientifically measurable way (the “levels” of labor policy, poverty, economic security etc), but her work more interestingly demonstrates how colonial officials defined “the direction” of modernization.

Yet the costly Iraq war must also be recognised as a sideshow in the Bush global counteroffensive against Islamist militancy, just as the far more costly Korean war was a sideshow to global cold war containment.

So says Edward Luttwak, in an extensive attempt to speed up the process by which History justifies and valorizes the policies of this administration. [via] He’s mostly engaged in a bit of dramatic post hoc, ergo propter hoc whereby a shift in government policies towards extremist Islamic groups is the result of Pres. Bush’s Trumanesque firmness, but the damage done to the success — military and diplomatic — of the initial Afghanistan campaign by the Iraq campaign isn’t taken into account at all.¹ The Korean war — which I have a lot of trouble seeing as a “sideshow,” given the direct involvement of Chinese and Russian forces and a lot more actual shooting than in Europe — advanced the cause of anti-communism. It was a success, in the sense that it preserved South Korea as a non-communist state and it was the last full-scale conflict between the great powers for some time. The only sense in which Korea could be called a “sideshow” is that Truman’s containment policy engaged a lot of other parts of the world as well.

He then goes on to mangle Chinese history — Tang, Song and Ming dynasties never conquered anyone, right? — and to cast the future of Asia in binaries (China: convergence or communist collapse? India: corruption stagnation or “traditional” good Brahmin governance?), as well as giving the administration credit for North Korean disarmament instead of noting their years of footdragging on same which have exacerbated the proliferation problem.

Truman deserves better.

1. He’s also assuming that al Qaeda’s “call to action” attacks were likely to inspire imitators rather than revulsion in the short run, which seems like he’s taking their own rhetoric way too seriously. Romantic nihilists have been claiming that “the masses are on the brink of revolution” and “dramatic action will awaken them” for over two centuries now.

I’ve recently been looking through 한국전쟁과 집단학살 (Organized Massacres and the Korean War) by 김기진. The work focuses primarily on crimes against civilians carried out by United States forces or Korean forces and has a large section which reproduces, in a regretfully somewhat badly edited form, a lot of US archival documents found at the National Archives.

My impression, and that is all this is since this is not my area of expertise, is that the documents themselves don’t really reveal anything earth-shatteringly new. A lot of the documents included reproduce contemporary media reports of atrocities and consist of internal debates about investigations into whether the accusations are true, or are responses to letters by the UN or the International Committee of the Red Cross.

I was interested in these conveniently collected documents for a number of reasons, but one of the documents in the collection that may be of interest to readers here was responding to a report submitted by Gregory Henderson on an alleged atrocity against forty captured “Communists” many months before the opening of the most violent stage of the Korean War in June of 1950.

Gregory Henderson

Henderson had a long career working in the Foreign Service in Korea and later became one of the leading Korea scholars in the United States, most famous for his work, The Politics of the Vortex. He passed away in 1988. In addition to his government service and scholarship, he was also an avid collector of Korean art, which became an issue of some controversy for a time.

When the North launched a full invasion in 1950, Henderson was US Vice Consol but his imprint can be seen all over US diplomatic records in the years before and long after the Korean war. Two quick examples: when I was looking through RG59 State Department records at the National Archives a few years ago I found a summary of discussions between Henderson and Kim Koo in a March 8th, 1949 RG59 report sent back to the US. The report noted in its conclusion of Henderson’s encounter that, regarding Kim’s ambitious efforts to pursue dialog with the North, “The general consensus among high Korean officials is that Mr. Kim Koo is a pure opportunist and capable of resorting to any kind of machination to achieve power.”

Henderson was certainly no friend to Communism and knew what their forces were capable of. In one report included in 김기진 collection, he reports on the “Communist Conviction Machine” and the horrible executions carried out in areas occupied by North Korean forces.¹ He also saw Communists in strange places. Many years after the Korean War, in a report he prepared for the CIA, entitled “A Study On The Influence Of Communists On The Korean Government” he came very close to suggesting Park Chung-hee and many of his associates were either Communists or fellow travelers. The accusations seem strange now in retrospect but in his claims in the report we see some stretching of the facts on Henderson’s part, which might be good to keep in mind when reading other documents by him.

Over 100,000 Killed

One of the things that Henderson gets mentioned the most for online and in various publications is for a statement he made about the violence in the early stage of the Korean war by forces of the South, claiming that “probably over 100,000″ people had been killed without appropriate legal process. I have never read the full original quote by Henderson so it is always unclear to me exactly how the number is delimited and situated in time and context.²

I find the almost obligatory mention of this quote in most accounts of wartime atrocities by the US and South Korean forces frustrating. Using it out of context and without any further backing is just lazy scholarship aiming to imprint a large number on the reader. It can detract from other more persuasive evidence that can be found in the archives. I was pleasantly surprised to come across a bit more detail of Henderson’s observations before and during itself in 김기진’s book and quote one of these documents in full below.

From the document we learn that Henderson has passed on a shocking anecdote about the killing of forty “Communists” and an equally disturbing quote by a Lieutenant on the scene in the fall of 1949 (before the North’s invasion). If the story is true, it is a damning example of the use of “People’s Courts,” usually associated with Communist occupations, by South Korean forces, depending on the identity of the “Communists” involved, military participation in a case of civilian massacre. If the “Communists” were all armed guerrillas, the incident would hardly redeem the forces involved and would join dozens of similar incidents taking place in Cheju and all over Korea, especially from 1947-1953.

It is also worth noting that, if true, this anti-Communist “people’s court” was set up about a year after similar courts set up by pro-Communist mutinous forces in the Yŏsu Rebellion came to dominate the headlines in the South Korean media in October 1948 but before the most infamous people’s courts set up by North Korean forces in Seoul and all over the south when they occupied most of the peninsula through the summer of 1950.

Also interesting in this report is the US “investigation” into the accusation. This report may not include a complete summary of the investigation, but if it is, then it is very dissatisfying attempt to get to the truth of the matter.³ It is hard, of course, to make any hard conclusions about the incident without knowing more about how Henderson got the information about the incident beyond the quote of the Lieutenant, or without other independent sources.

Here is the full document as quoted in 김기진’s book on p418:

RG 338⁴ , Box 24 File 338-3006

United States Military Advisory Group to the Republic of Korea
Office of the Chief | 7 October 1949
Memorandum to American Ambassador:
Subject: Report of Gregory Henderson dated 6 September 1949

On September 6, Henderson’s report to you entitled “Conditions at Odaesan” I find that he made this statement:

“Some weeks ago, around July 20th, some forty Communists had been captured by the Army as a result of a joint operation of several units. A local ‘people’s court’ had been allowed to ‘try’ most of them. The inhabitants had shown their anti-Communism by condemning all of them to death. “They were used,” the Lieutenant reported zealously, “as targets to increase the courage of our soldiers.” Apparently bayonet practice is taken up rather seriously by this unit.

“The Lieutenant was proud of his work and of his unit. The men were now, he said, engaged in picking out good positions for the winter.”

This did not smell very good and the letter was addressed to the Senior Adviser, 8th Division, to investigate it. A formal investigation was made. Results of that investigation are as follows:

Briefly the company concerned was on 20 July located at Hajinburi. Lt. Kim, the commander, stated he did not make the statement quoted above, had no knowledge of forty Communists being captured by the Army and no knowledge of People’s courts and that his company did not execute prisoners. The chief of police stated that he was stationed at on 20 July but it’s not have any knowledge of 40 Communists being captured by Army and that they did not have any peoples courts or executions there. As two records, the 10th Regiment revealed nothing of this incident. To the best knowledge of the 10th Regiment, 40 Communists have never been taken at any one time.

1. See pages 43 and 259 in 한국전쟁과 집단학살.
2. Is this statement made in his The Politics of the Vortex, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 167? I have seen one footnote pointing here but I don’t have the book.
3. There is, for example, no mention of an attempt to interview locals at Odaesan about the incident.
4. National Archives Record Group 338 is “United States Army Commands, 1942- ”

This week, I’m reading through some fascinating issues of the journal of the Korean National Police from 1947-1949 (民主警察). I’m finding its articles to be really useful for my topic and was surprised to see that its pages included contributions by Horace Underwood, Kim Ku, John R. Hodge, as well as leading American military and civilian advisors to the Korean police during the US military occupation in early post-liberation Korea.

There are also some some fun sections that are less directly useful to my dissertation research. Some issues have a section at the back with practice test questions for police officers (the police academy entrance exam or qualifying exam? I didn’t look closely enough to determine what the questions are for).

Here are some of the test questions in the “common knowledge” (常識) section:

Define the following:

安重根
八路軍
貪官污吏 – corrupt officials (UPDATED – see comments)
잔 알 하-지
蔣介石
카이로會談
UN總會
朝鮮五大島 – the big islands, not the small controversial ones
칼 맑스

Write the Hanja for these words and then define them:

음모 (陰謀) – As in, Communist conspiracy
인류애 (人類愛) – As in, don’t torture your suspects.
전평 (全評 = “全國勞動組合評議會의略稱으로 世界勞聯에加入한左翼勞動團體의一이다”)
훈민정음 (訓民正音)
리(이)순신 (李舜臣)
반탁운동 – The anti-trusteeship movement, protesting US and Soviet trusteeship over Korea active late 1945-1948
배은망덕 (背恩妄德)