When I was preparing for my oral exams last semester, the professors who do not work on East Asia (I had a European historian and a Latin American historian in my committee) were always fascinated by the nature of “inter-racial marriage” in the Japanese empire. Both in the history of childhood and youth and the history of modern empire, the most complex and flexible interpretations of “race” happened on the ground where colonial societies had no choice but face the existence of inter-racial sexuality and mixed children. In the Japanese empire, inter-racial marriage was not problematized in the same way as it was in European empires. For example, in two articles of roundtable discussion on marriage (結婚改善座談会) published in Korean Social Work (朝鮮社会事業 – yes I still love this journal) in May and June 1935, the participants, mostly Japanese bureaucrats and educators in Seoul, never discuss problems of inter-marriage. The central problem was rather an increasing number of old single women in Korea. Their presentation of statistics of the marriage success rate among graduates of the elementary school bears much resemblance to today’s discussion of unemployment rates. They agree this is a problem that “kyoka dantai (moral suasion groups)” should become involved in. Another major issue brought up during this roundtable is, of course, the ways in which people conduct wedding ceremonies. For the participants, excessively luxurious wedding ceremonies often exhaust village economies. The venue of wedding ceremonies was also discussed — e.g. whether it was appropriate to imitate Taisho Emperor and to use the Chōsen Shrine for ordinary people’s wedding.

The lack of discussion on inter-racial marriage by contemporary experts is not the only interesting feature to note. “It is an open secret among Korean scholars,” one professor of modern Korean history said to me the other day, “that there were a significant number of married couples between Korean men and Japanese women but there is so little study on it.” This is another surprise to non-East Asian historians. In other places it is men from the colonizing countries and women from colonized societies that married, and this feminization of colonies is often regarded as an aspect of Orientalism. There were, of course, married couples between Korean women and Japanese men, but as Oguma Eiji has already pointed out, the Government-General in Korea encouraged Japanese women to marry Korean men because, they thought, Japanese mothers were supposed to build the foundations of Japanese culture in the home.

How do you define “coloniality” in this relationship represented by couples of Korean men and Japanese women? To offer my half-baked thought first, we really need to re-think how the ‘Japanese woman’ was interpreted in relation to modernity. I cannot easily connect this to the discussion of coloniality — or assure that it is a useful concept here.

One chapter in Nam Pujin (南富鎭)’s book 文学の植民地主義 (Colonialism in Literature) deals with the issue of colonialism in love and marriage affairs. He introduces a number of Korean writers who wrote stories in which a Korean man dreamed of marrying a Japanese woman, a Korean couple who pretended as if they had been a Korean-Japanese couple, a Japanese woman who marries a Korean man, and mixed children who grew up hating their Korean origins owing to the social discriminations they received, and so on. Nam recognizes some “coloniality” in that it is usually Koreans who have to “confess” their origin, and will come to be “understood” by their Japanese partners even in recent love stories. His discussion of the novels from the 20s and 30s is more thought-provoking. Nam points out that “Naisen kekkon (Korean-Japanese marriage) was consistently the most trendy topic for literature, and despite its political nature, it was the most popular fantasy and hope to overcome obstacles that the state and ethnicity impose on one’s love and marriage” (27). We cannot say that Naisen kekkon was as prevalent among Korean masses as Korean writers and intellectuals experienced, but it seems to me that discussion of such marriages could appear fresh and even rebellious in a way that was not necessarily directed against the Japanese colonial government, but against older generations or elite Korean families.

Nam Pujin also presents a convincing argument that Japanese women represented ‘modernity’ in the eyes of Korean masses. This itself is an interesting and anomalous case from a comparative perspective. But at the same time, the story is not simply a reverse sexual representation of imperial modernity. Japanese women represented much more than that. What caught my attention was Nam’s description of a novel called 処女の倫理 (Ethics of the Virgin) written by a well-known Korean writer Chang Hyakchu 張 赫宙 in 1939. In this novel, an independent-minded Japanese woman fell in love with and married a Korean man, but was betrayed by him because he had an official Korean wife, and was discriminated against within Korean society. According to Nam, “double marriage” was quite common since many Korean intellectuals either abandoned or ignored their official wives whom they were forced to marry at younger age, and had love affairs with Japanese women. However strongly Korean men desired a Japanese woman as if it would symbolize an achievement of modernity, this particular novel depicted very unstable power relationships that could be caused as a consequence of such a phenomenon.

There is another piece of evidence on the complexity of the issue that I found in the roundtable article mentioned above. Mōri (a commissioner to the Government-General in Korea) says, “Ladies who were raised in Korea face difficulty in finding a marriage partner.” It soon becomes clear that he is referring to Japanese women who grew up in Korea. The first reason he gives is “women who grew up in Korea are too used to luxury and cannot even sew a Kimono. Those who grew up in Japanese (naichi) rural areas are pretty good at this.” According to Mōri, Japanese men preferred naichi women who were not as “modernized” as those who grew up in Korea. It makes sense that Japanese officials and business people who were dispatched to Korea received extra salaries and benefits, and their children regarded themselves as upper-class in comparison to both the average Japanese and Korean families. Does this mean what “the real Japanese woman” represented differed significantly for Korean writers and for Japanese men?

Given the resulting mess, I cannot pin down who colonized whom or even how we could know of it in this issue of Korean-Japanese marriage.

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.

There’s a lot of presentist fallacies and overdrawn conclusions — just because a society has a reputation for sexual restraint doesn’t mean that it is and always was asexual — in this article [Thanks, sepoy, but I don't do personal memes here] about sexual imagery in Korean artifacts and art, but it does have some images and facts which are potentially very interesting. Any suggestions for richer, better substantiated works or websites on Korean art (or sexuality and gender issues) which could put this stuff into proper context?