While the discussions on the Asia lists have been a bit wooden for a while, other H-Net communities are lively and thriving, and the book reviews are a fantastic resource. Moreover, I know some of the current leadership of H-Net, and I have great confidence that they’ll take it in interesting directions with new technology and new paradigms. That said, though the leadership, editors, reviewers and participants are all volunteers, they still need money for technical support, infrastructure and other expenses, and we can’t rely on state institutions of higher learning for this sort of thing. Donate!

The 2010 Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging nominations are open through November, so there’s still two weeks to riffle through your archives and pick your best work, and your friends’ best work, and the best stuff off your RSS reader. The categories are, as in the past, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Group Blog (which we won back in ’05), Best Series of Posts, Best Single Post, and Best Writer (which Alan Baumler won in ’06). I’m judging Best New and Group Blog, so we can’t win that again this year; otherwise, the field for Asianists is wide open! Nominate!

The 2011 ASPAC Conference will be a joint event with the WCAAS Conference, to be held at Pomona College, June 17-19, 2011. In a remarkable feat of organization, the Conference website is already live and accepting paper proposals, though the deadline isn’t until mid-March. The theme is “Asia Rising and the Rise of Asian America” but proposals on all topics in Asian studies are welcome. Submit! (and let me know if you’ll be there; we’ve never had a blogger meet-up at ASPAC before!)

Final exams crash onto my desk tomorrow, but I’m as organized as I can be in advance, so I thought I’d do a little belated AAS blogging, especially about the pair of panels on Saturday commemorating the centennial of Japan’s annexation of Korea and the 50th anniversary of Hilary Conroy’s groundbreaking study of same.

The Reconsidering panel chaired by my old friend Hyung-gu Lynn covered a good variety of disciplinary perspectives, not to mention being equally split between Korean and Japanese panelists. The focus was on the Protectorate era Lynn characterized the papers as demonstrating an “agnostic, open-ended committment to history” rather than the sort of “methodological nationalism” which often dominates conversations on this era.

The most striking presentation, I thought, was Toyomi Asano’s discussion of Ito Hirobumi’s Resident-General-ship and the legal reforms and proposals of that period. Asano argued that Ito’s proposal of a federation-style annexation and elimination of extraterritoriality rights for Japanese residents in Korea suggests that the colonial occupation of Korea was not a foregone conclusion; ultimately, Asano argued for an abandonment of teleological narratives in which Japanese domination of Korea was a foregone policy and against dichotomous colonization-or-independence binary absolutes. It’s true that Ito’s reputation among Japanese residents in Korea was “pro-Korean” and the merger proposal Asano outlined certainly seemed reasonable — an independent Korean judiciary and parliament, integration of the Korean royal family into the Japanese Diet — but as much as I agree that we need to have an open mind about missed possibilities in history, I’m not convinced. Asano’s right that Ito’s revision of Korea’s civil and criminal code laid a foundation for modern governance which persists — with modifications — to this day, and Ito’s rhetoric was reasonable, but I don’t know that there’s any reason to ignore the self-serving nature of both, not to mention Ito’s fairly aggressive moves against the Korean royal family, the disbanding of Korea’s military and violent suppression of anti-Japanese movements and guerrillas.

Doongook Kang’s analysis of Liang Qichao’s rhetoric related to Korea provided an interesting window into the Protectorate era, bringing Chinese discourses into the mix in a time when China is largely considered irrelevant to the Japan-Korea dynamic. During this time period, Liang’s comments on Korea mostly concern the causes of Korean decline, and there’s a fairly rapid shift involved. Before 1906, Liang focused on Japanese Imperialism and other external causes, but after that he’s emphasizing Korean internal factors, failings which, he argued, made colonization inevitable. What’s particularly interesting about Kang’s analysis is that it highlights the replacement of Chinese and Korean sources in Liang’s writing with Japanese sources (including textual errors), and Liang’s willingness to absorb Japanese rhetoric on Korea seems to be at the root of the change in tone. Korean intellectuals who took Liang Qichao seriously faced a choice about how to respond to these new arguments: some rejected Liang’s ideas and remained strong proponents of a revitalized Korean nationalism, while others became more pessimistic.

Yumi Moon tracked the positions of the notoriously (but not entirely deservedly, which was her point) collaborationist Ilchinhoe organization’s positions over the Protectorate era. Starting from an argument that reform, in 1904, was more important than sovereignty, the Ilchinhoe consistently tried to leverage the Japanese presence into reform opportunities; as anti-Japanese activities became more intense, the Ilchinhoe’s position in Korean society became more marginal and more dependent on Japanese support. Throughout, the Ilchinhoe’s hope for Korean development remained strong, but the form and substance of independence became separated; the biggest weakness of the Ilchinhoe’s position (and this goes back to Asano’s paper as well) is that their argument depended on the honest good will of the Japanese as developmental colonialists.

The second panel was more of a festschrift for Hilary Conroy’s 90th birthday than anything else, and wasn’t quite as focused, but the presentations were individually very interesting. Conroy himself gave the closing speech and, aside from some interesting reminiscences, the one thing he said that really stuck with me was that he should have switched the order of the title and subtitle of his book. The full title, which nobody remembers, is The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868-1910: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations. If the subtitle had come first, Conroy argued, non-Asianists might have read it and it would have been a significant contribution to the political science literature; as it was, only Japan and Korea specialists read it and the lessons of the “problems inherent in the realist approach” were largely ignored until decades later.

For obvious reasons, my interest was most piqued by Wayne Patterson’s analysis of the relationship between international labor migration and annexation. He argued that Japan’s moves to strip the Korean government of its foreign relations power were partially inspired by Japan’s concern about anti-Japanese racism in the US. The brief window of Korean migration to Hawai’i in the first decade of the 20th century created a crisis: the use of Koreans as strikebreakers in Hawai’i was part of the movement by Japanese emigrant laborers to transmigrate to the US mainland, where their presence was increasingly being met with racial hostility. In order to reduce the pressure to transmigrate from Hawai’i, Japan wanted to stem the flow of Koreans to Hawai’i, reduce competition and raise wages. In addition, the attempt by Horace Allen to use emigration as a lever to expand US business interests in Korea was threatening Japanese economic and political control. Japan used Korean migration to Mexico — the result of a temporary lapse in regulation — to raise concerns about the mistreatment of Koreans overseas, then used their influence in the Korean Foreign Ministry to cut off funds for Yun Chi-Ho’s investigatory mission. As a result, Korean emigration was cut off entirely, and Japan was several steps further along in bringing the Korean government entirely under Japanese control, but it had no appreciable effect on the reception Japanese immigrants were getting in California or Hawai’i.

Peter Duus’ presentation placed his work on Korean colonization in the context of testing theories about imperialism, describing the Japanese takeover as the result of ad hoc decisions made to appeal to a variety of economic and political interests, but lacking a coherent or long-range plan until after the Russo-Japanese war. Alexis Dudden’s talk was a portion of this Japan Focus piece about the current discourses on Korean-Japanese history in Japan, especially the rise of nationalistic rationalizations of Japanese imperialism. Mark Caprio covered some of the same ground, directly challenging some of what you might call Japanese Exceptionalism with regard to its colonial history: Caprio rejected attempts to place the annexation and assimiliation policies outside of the normal categories of imperialism, arguing in essence that distinctions without a difference shouldn’t excuse abusive systems of power and control.

Excellent panels, both, and kudos to the AAS for scheduling them sequentially rather than simultaneously. (Crossposted at Frog in a Well: Japan)

In spite of the lovely Korean Studies Center which headquartered the conference, ASPAC 2007 didn’t have a lot of Korean content. In fact, with the exception of one paper on a mixed panel, I think I saw it all.

AAS President-Elect Robert Buswell gave the keynote address at the banquet on Saturday night, speaking on “Korean Buddhist Journeys to Lands Real and Imagined.” Though it was a bit long and specialized for an after-dinner discourse, I found it thought-provoking. I didn’t however, take notes, so you’ll have to wait for the paper (I’m sure there’s a paper in the works) to get the details. I was struck by a few thoughts, though.

• Given the frequency of Korean Buddhist travel as far as India, and the ease with which they navigated China in particular, I think we need to reconsider travel in Asian history. It’s clearly more of a norm than an exception, at least for certain categories of people. That means a great deal more integration among elites, more awareness of neighboring (and even distant) cultures than our traditional national-limited cultural histories suggest. It also means that western travellers like Marco Polo need to be considered a very small part of a much larger travelling and writing public; yes, I’m reconsidering Marco Polo, somewhat, because narratives like the ones Buswell described put his journies into a much more plausible context.
• The “imagined” travelogues to legendary and/or allegorical lands constitute a rich fantastical literature which ought to be considered in comparison with work like The Odyssey and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The next morning I went to the “History, Identity and Modernity in Korea” panel. Except for Jong Myung Kim’s chronicle of Buddhist Daily Ritual manuals¹ all of the papers were about gender in Korean society, and the combination was quite substantial.

Chizuko Allen’s “Early Korean Women Seen in Royal Successions of Silla” was a classic feminist re-reading of genealogy, stripping away the patriarchal distortions of Silla history contained in the later Samguk sagi and Samguk Yusa chronicles. Rather than arguing for a matrilineal system, for which the evidence is weak, Allen was arguing for a cognatic system in which households, rather than lineages, controlled power and inheritance.² That was supported by tomb evidence of co-rulership, as well as by the Japanese example of Himiko³, and the general rule, as Allen stated it, that women’s positions are better off the farther back you go. The Koguryo state had a stronger patrilineal system from earlier, and the rise of military affairs, iron/oxen rice agriculture and, of course, Chinese influence, produced a shift to patriliny in Silla as well.

Jee-Yeon Song’s “I am Mrs. Nobody: Korean Women’s Marriage Denial through Catholicism in the Early 19th Century” qualified as the most unfamiliar material for me, and would be a fantastic case study for history of gender or religion students, in addition to Asian history. The key conflict here (and I could really see a great movie coming out of this, too) was between the women who kept the Catholic faith and even proselytized after the Rites controversy and Jinsan prohibition (1791) and Korea’s neo-confucian society and family system which abhored spinsterhood. Apparently Korean Catholic women believed that virginity was a better state for Christian faith, and that marriage diluted devotion, so they used a variety of techniques — including coded pseudonyms, the source of the paper title — to convince people that they already were married or were widows. This went well beyond the neo-Confucian and Buddhist emphasis on chastity and sexual regulation because it effectively removed the women from the “three obediences” and the ancestral cult. Song described it as the first collective resistance by women to neo-Confucian social norms. Part of the problem was that the Catholic model of marriage was fundamentally different — no concubinage or ancestral rituals, but remarriage and spinsterhood were permitted — so that it would have been hard for these women to fit into the traditional family structure anyway. Starting in the 1850s, French missionaries began pressuring Korean Catholic marriage resisters to abandon their positions, threatening excommunication for women who refused to be married. There seem to be two things at work here: reclaiming the proselytizing initiative for the missionaries instead of the natives, and the lack of ability of the missionaries to protect the women from social pressures.⁴ Part of what made this topic interesting is the way in which the cloistered household arrangements in upper-class society made propogation of the faith in secret a possibility (and no, I don’t understand why the missionaries would give that up, except if they wanted more control).

Finally, Yunmi Won’s paper on “Changing Foodways of Korean Middle-class Women” talked about the “excessive and impulsive consumption” in the globalization process, and the growing gaps in consumption patterns by class, age, and gender. Western style foods — including westernized versions of “oriental” cuisines — are rapidly gaining popularity and market share in Korea, particularly among middle class women. This echoes rising interest in Western-style clothing and architecture/interior design among this group as well, both of which were used as tools for marketing the Western foods; children and “romance” were also key features of marketing to women.⁵ Whereas women’s consumption is trending towards western sophistication, men’s consumption emphasizes traditional “as mother used to make” food styles. I was also struck by her discussion of restaurants as a kind of “private sphere” for women, because they see the home as their locus of work, which is associated with a public sphere. Coffeehouses were particularly important in this social formation, and even Starbucks in Korea has shifted to a café model instead of a takeout model⁶ Women who abjure the modern line now have their own term: “bean paste girls.”
This divide has, predictably, sparked considerable anxiety in social commentaries, which is mixed up with discussions of South Korea’s rising rates of divorce and “never marrieds,” and declining birth rates.⁷

If you’re only going to have one panel on a country, you could do a lot worse than a panel which covers a thousand years of gender history.

1. they’ve changed, both in sutra and mantra selection and procedure, and certain sects have been more influential than others. If there was a deeper thesis in there, I missed it, but it was Sunday morning
2. I started to doubt, during the presentation, that royal households are a good example of social norms: aristocracies tend to bend norms where necessary to preserve their power, and often show inconsistencies which are not echoed in “normal” society
3. co-ruler with her brother, followed by another co-ruler generation
4. I asked whether it was part of the social compromise the French Catholics might have made in order to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the patriarchal Korean ruling class, but Song didn’t seem to think that was a likely argument.
5. Won showed a video of an L-G Card commercial in which cuisine and couture were vividly blended, and a pizza commercial featuring a “secret garden” atmosphere with high-fashion clothes, and the immortal tag line “How do men live without pizza?”
6. I think it’s time for a full-bore multinational anthropological treatment of Starbucks along the lines of Golden Arches East, don’t you? Also of Pizza Hut, which I’m pretty sure is in the major Asian markets at this point.
7. all of these are predictable results of rising education levels and economic independence for women, especially if you know anything about the Japanese case. The anxiety and pointless public fulmination are also entirely predictable.

I’m spending a few weeks in Korea, mainly for the Academy of Korean Studies organised World Congress of Korean Studies that will be taking place this weekend in Chejudo. A few days ago I had the enjoyable experience of visiting the Hongsŏng area (South Ch’ungch’ŏng Province) together with one of our other contributors, Pak Noja. This was a sort of pilgrimage to see the birthplace of Manhae Han Yongun (1879-1944), the Buddhist reformer, poet and political activist whose writing we have been translating together. We also had the opportunity to visit the lovely Sudŏksa temple nearby, a place I would highly recommend.

Seeing the site of Manhae’s birthplace brought a number of thoughts and feelings to mind, but the sense of being somewhere historically significant or imbued with any atmosphere was unfortunately not one of them. Of course, this could be attributed to my attitude as much as anything else. But seeing a place that has been so obviously constructed in very recent times as a facsimile of the location where Manhae may have been born, I think most people might have similar feelings. The site consists of two small thatched cottages (초가집) one of which is the management office and the other a replica of the house where Manhae was born. Higher up, there is also a shrine to Manhae in the usual style of a small building within a walled compound with a grand gate. Besides that there is an expanse of freshly-paved wasteland, a few stele with inscribed poems (시비) and what appears to be a small museum, currently under construction.

Although it seems they were constructed in the early 1990s, the two thatched cottages were nicely done and pretty enough. But I think there were two things about this place that made it profoundly ‘ahistorical’ for me. One was the expanse of paved ground, a barren nothingness, ready to be trampled on by hordes of daytrippers or school children (actually the place seems rather forlorn and only one coach turned up while we were there). The other was the lack of any real context – it seems that whatever material remains of the village where Manhae was born and lived have long since disappeared to be replaced years later by these disembodied symbols of the world that the young Han Yongun existed in.

Noja pointed out this stone inscription, which is of the three additional points written by Han Yongun at the end of the Proclamation of Korean Independence (1919). The rest of the document was written by Ch’oe Namson. An English translation of the three points:

1. This work of ours is in behalf of truth, religion and life undertaken at the request of our people, in order to make known their desire for liberty. Let no violence be done to anyone.
2. Let those who follow us every man all the time, every hour, show forth with gladness this same mind.
3. Let all things be done decently and in order, so that our behavior to the very end may be honorable and upright.

Yesterday I went for a look around the new National Museum of Korea, located at Ich’on in Seoul, on what I believe was once a US Army golf course. As you can see from the picture below, this site of historical education has a similar expanse of emptiness in front of it, heightening the effect of the massive blank walls of the building. In some ways I quite like this sort of brutalist architecture, but you can’t help feeling that this is a crude attempt to impose upon the visiting masses a sense of awe at the weighty authority of Korean history. What I saw of the exhibitions inside (the history section) , was excellent however. I would recommend the parts on Chosŏn dynasty socio-economic life, thought and international relations which are refreshingly clear and lacking in nationalistic tones.

Last week I attended (actually, I think the word “crashed” is more accurate) the 2nd International Forum on Korean Studies held by Korea University. The conference featured a number of interesting speakers from different fields related to the study of Korea, was extremely well funded, and gave me an opportunity to meet many interesting scholars and students in the field, including someone who I believe will soon be introducing themselves as a new contributor here at Frog in a Well – Korea. It also featured a number of speakers and commentators who focus mostly on Japan but were willing to make the forage into the field of Korean studies, including Naoki Sakai and a truly inspiring young professor I had a chance to study intellectual history with at Waseda University: Umemori Naoyuki. One of our fellow contributors here at Frog in a Well, Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja) also participated as a discussant.

I was going to give a short overview of some of the papers that were presented but it appears as though they are all available for download at the official homepage for the event: 2nd International Forum on Korean Studies.