Education is always an important issue in history, and I regret that I have read works on the history of Korea’s modern education only sporadically. As I try to organize my notes while reading both secondary and primary sources recently, I get confused about exactly what issues are on debate back then and now. I am hoping that other people will give me clearer thoughts on this. (I’m writing this off the top of my head so my apologies for not providing specific names of historians as much as I should.)

I realized there are two very common topics in the historiography. One is how we conceive traditional and private 서당 (書堂, sodang) vs public elementary schools (普通学校). It is a fact that, compared to Taiwan, the spread of elementary schools in Korea was very slow during the colonial period, and sodang continued to sprawl even in the 1930s. Traditionally, historians see this as the failure of Japanese education, and/or the flourish of strong ethnic-centered education among Koreans. Many of the city history volumes and local history articles (written in the 1980s-2000s) I read emphasize this point. So this is an indication of the “undying national identity” for them. Historians like 渡辺学 also use the numbers of those schools as evidence that the Japanese colonial government was not the main agency that provided modern education. The fact that the Japanese forced to shut down many night schools and private schools in fear of socialist activities helps their point on the antagonistic relationship between sodang and elementary schools.

On the other hand, more recent scholars like 板垣竜太 show complementary relationship between  sodang and elementary schools. Many Korean children studied in both schools, and many of the same local elites donated money and negotiated with the local office to establish a sodang and to upgrade it to an elementary school. Both 板垣竜太’s work on Sangju and 김영희’s work on a village in 충청남도 show that the government depended on those local elites in introducing modern education if not an elementary school itself, and these two parties were more cooperative in making sodang into a modern institution. I myself also was surprised to find that, in 1922 when their concern for socialist activism was heightening, 『全羅南道青年会指導方針』regarded sodang more ideal for training rural youth than elementary schools. I just realized that those historians who use the government’s sources emphasize the conflict between sodang and elementary schools, and those who study local cases see more cooperation between the two.

The other issue is the emphasis to 実業教育 (practical education or vocational training). I find this issue more confusing in the historiography. Many tend to consider practical education the emblem of modern education, and discuss that Korean enlightenment thinkers already emphasized the importance of it before the Japanese rule started. There is some ambiguity about how to judge the Japanese call for practical education in the 1920s, but starting the 1930s, historians usually find an excessive amount of 実習 (on-site practice), and an neglect of knowledge-based education. I know 実業教育 does not necessarily mean 実習, but 実習 was justified as an integral part of 実業教育. To my confusion, many historians (again, I’m sorry for not specifying who, but in general) cannot make up their mind regarding whether the overall emphasis on practical training should be celebrated (as always is when they discuss Korean enlightenment thinkers), or considered oppressive when implemented by the Japanese, given a long tradition of Confucius training of Korean intellectuals. Reading 『文教の朝鮮』 and 『朝鮮社会事業』, I find that even among the Japanese activists, emphases on 実業教育 and Confucius thoughts coexisted for a long time. I suspect that the issue at stake was more about class differences, rather than how “modern” it sounded or how “Korean” or “Japanese” practical education represented. By “class differences,” I mean more than just “the lower class appreciated 実業教育 more than the elite.” I read an article about a diary written by a relatively well-educated young guy in 1930, in Dongbok, Cholla Namdo. He owned his own land, which made him upper-middle class already, but he was always disappointed at his farming job and had to remind himself of the importance of 実業主義 over and over. In his case, the emphasis on practical education and hard labor was supposed to help him fill the gap between the dream of obtaining higher education and the reality in front of him.

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)

I’m having great fun with this class, but I’m still discovering vast areas of ignorance as we move along:

• Eunuchs: The Kabo reforms abolish the office of Eunuchs, but how many were there and how important?
• Seven Day Week? By 1896 there clearly is a seven day week in place, but when was that put in place? Is it part of the Kabo calendrical reforms?
• The books I’m reading don’t refer to Tonghak and to early Progressives (or conservatives) as “nationalist”: They call them “incipient” and “proto” but won’t actually admit to modern nationalism until 1905 or 1910. Do they think ‘nationalism’ only exists in a modern context, and Korea’s context isn’t modern until some kind of political transition? This seems arbitrary: though Korea may not be modernizing effectively in the 19c, I find it hard to see how Korea’s not pretty well enmeshed in a modern context by, say, 1880. I suppose you could have the ever-popular “is anti-imperialism really nationalism” debate all over again (it’s kind of fun to do with the Boxers, once), but it seems unnecessarily fussy to me, at least on first reading. I don’t see what distinction they’re making and they’re not explaining it, either. We shouldn’t use jargon unless we’re willing to explain it.

In my first post here I said that I was going to be teaching a Korean history course for the first time: I lied. Or rather, I was scheduled to teach it, but the course didn’t make its minimum enrollment. However, the time has come to try again.

The last time I did this, I was going to focus it on upper-level undergrads and make it as much about primary sources as possible. The only four books I’d ordered were Korea Old and New: A History (Eckert, Lee, Lew, Robinson, Wagner), The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, and the two volumes of the new Sources of Korean Tradition from Columbia.¹ Ambitious and, apparently, off-putting in the extreme.

I’m torn, really, on the question of whether to teach a “Rice Paddies” style course — all of Korean history in a single semester — or break it up (as I have my China and Japan courses) into pre/post 1700 (and start with the later one, which should draw more students at first). If I teach the whole history, I might well keep the poetry — I do poetry in my China and Japan courses, and the Korean stuff is lively and diverse — but I can’t see using the Sources sets as-is. This time I want to pitch the course much more broadly, and draw in some of the business and language students — Koreans actually make up one of our largest groups of foreign students, and our business department has a long-standing interest in Korea — so that the course really does reach critical mass. So I’m thinking that the heavy dose of Columbia primary materials is probably not a great idea. That said, I prefer to have students read primary materials as much as possible, or ethnographic-style observations, or historical scholarship which evokes a clear and detailed recreation of a moment or era.

I’d love to hear thoughts from our readers about what works and what doesn’t, what’s come out recently that’s good for students, and especially if there are better textbooks at this point.

Update: I just ran across Kenneth Robinson’s Korean History Bibliography, which looks like a great starting place.

1. Vol. 1: From Early Times Through the Sixteenth Century ; Vol. 2: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries

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.