I have been collecting notes for a study of the treason of interpreters. This may not make it into my dissertation, but I find the topic fascinating. In the history of collaboration, interpreters often figure prominently. They speak for the occupier, they ask questions for him, they feed him the information he needs to establish and maintain power. They usually come to their position by virtue of their language abilities, but very often such abilities are the product of a long and deep intimacy with the culture and people of the occupier, either through prolonged residence or study in the occupier’s country, personal relationships, or a hybrid identity.

A Classic Image of the Treasonous Interpreter

(From the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution in Beijing)

These treasonous interpreters are often portrayed as the quintessential running dogs of the enemy, groveling selfish figures standing just behind their master who sell out their nation for whatever benefits might come their way. It is not surprising, then, to find them a major target of attack by insurgents. Interpreters for the Israelis in Gaza, for the Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, for the Japanese in China and Korea, indeed everywhere, including hated German-Norwegians who interpreted for the German occupation in my own hometown in Stavanger, are often tried as traitors in the aftermath of a conflict, but are also frequently the victims of brutal assassinations and torture by forces of the resistance.

Of course, the language skills of these interpreters are not necessarily indicative of their sympathy for the enemy. Like any other collaborator who freely chooses or are, to various degrees, coerced into working for the occupation, these interpreters often merely see themselves as continuing their trade, or making use of suddenly useful skill. I think this observation can cut both ways: their constant visual proximity and ability to speak for the invader has led to a demonization of interpreters that is well out of proportion to their crime, when seen as a kind of trade of services for the enemy (as opposed to helping them run puppet regimes, for example, or carry out acts of violence on their behalf). On the other hand, as with everyone else whose continued provision of the services of labor and goods to an occupier or other enemy in wartime enable it to maintain its power, the consequences have moral implications.¹ Now let us look at one case that offers what I think is a rather typical case of the most common twists and turns in the career of a treasonous interpreter.

Kim Yong Hyun

The recent anniversary of the opening of the most violent stage of the Korean civil war on June 25, 1950, when North Korea launched a full invasion of the south, found me in the National Library in Taiwan. Organizing some of my notes on North Korea there, I got distracted reading the memoir of a Korean interpreter Kim Yong Hyun.²

Kim, who spoke good English, served the US forces for a time as an interpreter for the 2nd infantry division. Then, captured by Chinese forces he eventually found himself face to face with an aggressive North Korean soldier in an interaction that could have gone much worse for him than it did.

In his answers to the queries of the North Korean, we learn that Kim had attended middle school in Japan, leaving Hiroshima only a year before the city was destroyed. His association with Japan is not something a suspect person would want to carry about given the risk of being called a pro-Japanese traitor, but as we will see, even North Korean officers could have a Japanese higher education in their past. Kim trained to become a teacher, which is a career that always risks putting him among the class of the intellectual bourgeoisie. Finally, he fled North Korea, moving to the south in February 1946. This, the North Korean informed him, made him a “traitor” and a “running dog.”

This is true, in legal terms, as North Korean law made fleeing to South Korea a treasonous crime until 1999, when a distinction was made between migrants and treasonous defectors.³ While technically, Kim could have been shot for this treason, at least at this early stage, North Korea seems to have been going relatively easy on those who “illegally crossed the border” (불법월경) or “guiding someone across the border (월경안내). In trial records found in captured North Korean documents in the National Archives in Washington DC, it seems the going rate for such a crime was 1-3 years.⁴ Add to this the fact that Kim had worked for the Americans, and he found himself to be a real “American running dog.” Fortunately for Kim, he claims the Chinese military refused to hand him over to his North Korean accuser.⁵

Despite his anti-communist tone, Kim has glowing praise for the Chinese soldiers who kept him in captivity. This is consistent with much I have seen out there on the unusually benevolent Communist Chinese policy towards prisoners (though there are important exceptions and they often lacked supplies to fully feed them. Read more in these two postings.), whether they were Japanese or Americans. They, “never gave us any harsh lectures on ideological issues. They didn’t bother our prisoners in any way.”⁶ That same night Kim found himself in a position that I think is the key dilemma for talented multi-linguals in a wartime or occupation situation. Called over by a Chinese officer, Kim would be offered a proposition he would have been either extremely courageous or foolish to turn down:

“Comrade,” the [Korean-Chinese] interpreter began, “Would you be kind enough to interpret in English for us.

I nodded. They ushered in an American prisoner. I recognized him instantly because he was from my own outfit – a full sergeant who was one of our platoon leaders. We nodded in mutual agreement.”⁷

After this first job for the Chinese, he was asked to become a regular interpreter for the Chinese, translating Americans who were being interrogated by their Chinese captors. He accepted,

Well, what can I say? The offer was too good to refuse. My instinct to survive dominated my mind at that moment. “I would be happy to oblige.”

Kim would receive good food and treatment for his work but he was at once placed in a new position as a “running dog” for the Chinese. Later he served North Koreans more directly, a camp commandant, again translating during an interrogation of an American soldier and, moreover, asked to pretend he was a North Korean officer despite continuing to wear an American uniform while in captivity.⁸

In an amazingly frank exchange, if true, between this prisoner and the North Korean commandant, the latter said he was a college student in Japan during the war, when he was conscripted into the Japanese military. He was eventually captured by American forces in the Philippines who, despite the Japanese propaganda suggesting otherwise, he found to be “very civilized.”⁹ After returning to Korea he was a professor for a time but moved north to see the workings of Communism himself. Here was a Japanese trained North Korean camp commandant in charge of the imprisonment and interrogation of American forces, which he had once himself been a prisoner of.

The story that follows traces the escape of Kim from North Korea, or rather, his return to Seoul as a “Liberated UN soldier” and his escape thereafter across the lines. He returns to work as an interpreter for the Americans, serving as a G-2 officer and interpreter under a colonel in the 73rd Heavy Tank Battalion.¹⁰

As with all memoirs, especially those which contain whole dialogues between the author and people that are based on conversations many decades earlier, the source must be treated with great care. A very familiar, at least to me, picture emerges, however: Kim memoir is a world in which characters are divided roughly between those who are “hard-core” communists, thus blinded by ideology, and the more mixed up humane characters who are just trying to get by. It is a world where collaborators survive and live on, where the Viktor Komarovskies (from Dr. Zhivago) are not the villains.¹¹ You can almost hear that great quote by Komarovsky in the film:

There are two kinds of men, and only two, and that young man is one kind. He is high-minded. He is pure. He is the kind of man that the world pretends to look up to and in fact despises. … There’s another kind. Not high-minded, not pure, but alive.¹²

Update: Charles Montgomery over at Korean Modern Literature in Translation was kind enough to mention this post here and says it reminds him of a passage in a work by Kim Yong-Ik. The quote is so apt for the discussion here:

“Eating greedily he looked curiously at my concise English-Korean dictionary on the shelf. ‘The language of an occupying army is a meal ticket, you know.’ He smiled faintly” (Kim, Home Again (1945) 27).

1. I don’t think I have ever gone into much detail on my own views of this, but to sum up my position when it comes to the “treasonous” nature of such acts: I don’t have a problem with calling things treason when they are, but for me, treason is never, by itself, morally objectionable. This should be kept in mind whenever I raise related issues here at Frog in a Well.
2. Yong Hyun Kim, Susanne Kim Nelson ed. Into the Vortex of War: A Korean Interpreter’s Close Encounter with the Enemy. (AuthorHouse, 2008)
3. As of the major 1975 revision, it was covered in the section for “counter-revolutionary crimes” in articles 52 or 53 of the criminal law, which apparently states that fleeing to a foreign country is punishable by death and confiscation of all property. Institute of North Korean Studies. North Korea’s Criminal Law (1991). In Sup Han has a discussion of the recent changes to this law over time, In Sup Han “The 2004 Revision of Criminal Law in North Korea: — a take-off?” Santa Clara Journal of International Law 1 (2006), 130.
4. See RG242 SA 2005 6/43. By contrast, a case of “Reactionary attempted rape” (反動 強姦未遂) I saw there got 1 year and 6 months.
5. Yong Hyun Kim Into the Vortex of War: A Korean Interpreter’s Close Encounter with the Enemy (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2008), 46-48.
6. Ibid., 48.
7. Ibid., 48.
8. Ibid., 56.
9. Ibid., 60.
10. Ibid., 82
11. Of course, those familiar with Korean literature need not look to Viktor Komarovsky or the Good Soldier Švejk. Reading Kim’s memoir I was reminded of the fantastic character of Kapitan Ri (꺼삐딴 리) in the short story of that name by Chŏn Kwangyong, who managed to survive under Japanese, Soviet, and US regimes.
12. Is it in the written version as well? It has to be one of my absolute favorite lines.

In The Will of a Traitor, posted next door at 井底之蛙, I write about the controversial will of China’s most famous collaborator, and an interesting English translation of the text by Kim Bonggi, one of the founders of a newspaper that eventually became today’s Korea Herald.

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)

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.

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.