kotaji 거타지

This is crossposted from Frog in a Well.

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.

So one rightwinger takes over from another in Japan - big deal you might say. Well, maybe and maybe not. Actually just what kind of a difference Abe might mean for the East Asian geopolitical landscape, Japanese domestic political economy and the left/social movements in Korea and Japan is something I’m curious about. Hence I thought that I might try to gather together here over the next few weeks some interesting reading materials on the new Japanese PM and what he stands for.

1. Basic materials
First something entirely trivial: Abe Shinzo’s homepage which attracted attention at Digg for its use of what seems to be Unix command line gobbledigook on the front page (see above), not to mention the fact that Japan’s youngest prime-minister-in-waiting for god knows how long sits smiling behind the ultimate token of youthful hipsterism, a shiny Mac Powerbook. Actually, there is also a link there to his English profile, although the Wikipedia page on him is probably considerably more useful in this respect.

2. Japan’s shift to the right
An excellent piece from the dependable Hisane Masaki in the Asia Times looking at Abe Shinzo himself, the general shift to the right in Japan, and focusing particularly on Abe’s declared ambition of revising Japan’s ‘Peace Constitution’ so that the Japanese army can take a more proactive role in overseas operations (among other things). In a similar vein is this article from Julian Ryall for Al Jazeera. One thing that seems to come out in both of these articles is that Abe is considerably to the right of Koizumi and perhaps also less of a pragmatist. I suppose there is a chance that this will also make him less of a successful politician.

3. The economic and geopolitical background
Another in a line of great articles on Asian politics in New Left Review is this one from Taggart Murphy on ‘East Asia’s Dollars‘ and once again dear readers it’s a freebie so go ahead and read it. It focuses particularly on Japan’s role in supporting the US economy with its dollars and looks at the reasons why it continues to be so tied to the US.

4. The view from Korea
A worthwhile piece originally from the Hankyoreh in which Lee Jong-won puts Abe into the “ideological and military right” as opposed to the economic right or the realist right.

5. What will Abe do?
Right on cue Hisane Masaki provides an updated version of the analysis piece linked above on Abe and the possible direction he will take now he is in power. Clearly, when you look at this first paragraph summary, even a child could see that some of his stated goals are in a full 180 degree contradiction with one another:

Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has set forth an imposing agenda, which includes repairing strained relations with China and South Korea, revising parts of the constitution, reforming education, winning for his country a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and closing the income gap while maintaining 3% economic growth.

More soon…

I mean it’s about time there was a backlash against football nationalism in Korea, not it’s about time that I wrote something here (although that’s true too). Earlier this week the Korea Times reported that an alliance of citizen’s groups (NGOS basically) have got together in Korea to express concern about the way in which World Cup fever in Korea distracts attention away from important social, and political issues. We’re not talking here about a serious analysis of sports nationalism and capitalism, but still I’ve got to admire them for trying. I’d be more than happy to see some prominent organisations and people here in the UK who had the balls to mount such a campaign.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also been something of an internet backlash over the behaviour of Korean fans at the team’s friendly with Ghana in Scotland last Sunday, where they played the kwaenggwari (small noisy cymbal) during the Ghanaian national anthem. The article also picks up on the uneasiness that football fans feel about the commercialisation of football and the way no opportunity is wasted to try to sell something to the captive audience of flag-waving fans whether they’re sitting at home or forming red waves in front of Seoul’s city hall.

This has interesting tie-ins with what is happening here in England/UK (confusing distinction for many people at times like this). On the one hand the fact that the South Korean team was up against Ghana is interesting to me as there are quite a lot of Ghanaians around where I live and the flags have been very much in evidence (particularly since they squashed Korea 3-1 on Sunday!). Of course there are lots of England flags being flown from cars everywhere you go but also others like Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire and Portugal. In fact I’ve seen two cars in the last few days that were flying both England and Ghana flags, one on each side. So our multicultural community actually gives you twice the chance of being on the winning side.

Having said that, I do get a sense that there might be the slightest hint of a backlash here too, even before the World Cup has begun. The problem, as in Korea, is the massive and overwhelming commercialism of the event. I mean people have long complained about the commercialisation of sport but this has reached epic proportions - finding a brand name or a piece of advertising that is not using the England flag or at least a reference to football is almost impossible. This kind of overkill can only drive sane people slowly round the bend and must make people question what the hell it’s all about. The BBC reported that there has been some controversy about flying England flags, although it mainly centres around health and safety issues or the possible negative environmental effects of using more petrol when you have a flag on the side of your car (really).

Anyway, I expect that Korea and England are not peculiar and capitalism is having its wicked way with football nationalism in every one of the 32 competing countries (ok, perhaps not the US as they don’t care about ’soccer’ and prefer colonial wars to whip up nationalist sentiment). It’s one of those classic paradoxes of capitalism eating itself - I think the logic goes something like:

“Football nationalism is good because it unites everyone, makes the workers forget about their rubbish daily lives and distracts people from all the dodgy things going on in the world that they might be worrying about otherwise. In other words football nationalism is noble and lofty and it suits us down to the ground…. But we’re going to shit all over it anyway by trying at the same time to use it as a way of selling people all sorts of things they don’t want and can’t afford (new tellys) or stuff that’s just plain bad for them (Maccy Ds, Mars bars and Coke).”

[For readers of Korean, who want something a bit more coherent, in-depth and politically clued-up on the subject of football nationalism, the latest edition of Ta Hamkke has a two-page special on the subject.]

Via the Marmot (as ever) comes this link to a fantastic map of an imaginary Corea. China: don’t say you weren’t warned.

This Hangyoreh manp’yŏng [satirical cartoon] was linked by the Marmot and is just so good I had to reproduce it here:

In the distance a crowd of Koreans run adoringly toward the Korean-African-American [American] Football superstar and new Korean national hero, Hines Ward. Meanwhile, in the foreground a group of mixed race kids stand outside an impregnable fortress with a signboard reading ‘Single Nation/Race’ [a centrepiece of South Korea’s postwar nationalist ideology has been the idea that the Koreans are a single homogenous ‘race’ of people, probably descended from the ancient progenitor, Tan’gun]. The title in the top right reads, ‘A short trip outside the fortress’.

All in all, a wonderfully clever and apposite bit of satire - sometimes I think it’s a shame that Korean satire does not seem to extend beyond the political cartoon to other media.

The Korea Times had an article a couple of days ago on hard to find and rather neglected historical spots in Seoul. Unfortunately, as is often the case with the KT it could do with some more editing. That aside, it does have some interesting tidbits of historical information, including something about the house of Korean nationalist Yŏ Un-hyŏng, who I have written a bit about here before.

Apparently the house has not been well-preserved and is now a noodle restaurant (if it’s the one that I’m thinking of it’s quite famous for its k’alguksu). Apparently a plaque commemorating the fact that Yŏ lived there had to be moved over the road due to the objections of the restaurant which didn’t want the ‘red’ association. This is despite the fact that Yŏ was not in any way a ppalgaengi (red), but a sort of centrist nationalist. Although the article mentions that he was assassinated in 1947, it fails to mention that his killing, at the Hoehwa-dong intersection, was almost certainly ordered by Syngman Rhee.

Part two of some thoughts on the new book about Korea’s modern history, crossposted once again from Frog in a Well.

Continuing on the subject of the new, controversial history book 해방 전후사의 재인식 (‘A new understanding of Korea’s liberation’), I wanted to link to this rather helpful article from Joongang Daily which lists the contrasting views of the book and its more leftwing 1979 predecessor (해방 전후사의 인식) on a number of key subjects. And here is my even-more-simplified version of the same list:

1. Responsibility for the division of Korea:
(1979) It was Syngman Rhee’s fault basically.
(2006) Stalin gave the order to establish a government in North Korea in September 1945, so basically it was his fault.

2. Views of the Korean War:
(1979) It is one-sided to claim that North Korea invaded. It was actually a civil war [pace Bruce Cumings] to reunify the peninsula.
(2006) The Korean war was actually an international war, part of the USSR’s strategy of keeping the US in check.

3. Perspectives on Syngman Rhee:
(1979) Rhee was an anti-democratic American lackey
(2006) Rhee was a Machiavellian politician who made progress on the political/democratic front and laid some of the foundations for South Korea’s later economic growth.

4. Evaluation of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung:
(1979) Kim Il Sung got rid of (North) Korea’s colonial semi-feudal past and fostered a new democratic state.
(2006) Kim Il Sung organised North Korea after liberation like one of his guerilla units with mass mobilisation campaigns and the like.

5. Removing remnants of Japanese colonialism:
(1979) North Korea was successful in removing the remnants of Japanese colonialism while South Korea wasn’t due to US reluctance.
(2006) Remnants of Japanese colonialism continued in both North and South after liberation.

I have to say that on most of these issues I think I fall down on the side of the latest, supposedly rightwing, book. Since I am certainly not rightwing in my views of Korean history (or anything else), it does make me wonder again whether the Korean press have really been giving the correct impression of this book. I think part of the problem here is that the left-right debate over history (and other things) is perceived in a certain way in South Korea, for historical reasons.

In the past it has been a confrontation between authoritarian anti-communism and Stalinism. The problem is that both sides in this equation have really been disintegrating over the last decade or more. Hence this attempt to create a new more ‘rational’ right that disassociates itself from the authoritarian past, is not obsessed with ‘reds under the bed’ and accepts the achievements of Korea’s democracy movement. On the other side there are also now many on the left who do not accept the left-nationalist version of Korean history that is basically an application of Stalinist ideas straight out of 1950s Soviet textbooks. I suppose the ironic thing here is that a number of the centrist/liberal politicians who are currently in power with Roh Moo-hyun’s government were closely associated with the 1979 book or the left-nationalist movement of the 1980s and so perhaps have a closer allegiance to the ideas that it contains than do people who are to their left.

For some further reading on the reaction to this book you can have a look at this article from Oh My News, which reports on a recent speech by Sŏ Chung-sŏk, head of the 역사문제연구소, or Institute for Korean Historical Studies (who publish the journal 역사비평). He makes a couple of interesting points. First, he thinks that this book has been published for political reasons and it is strange that they are specifically attacking such an old book since the work of many progressive scholars has since revised a lot of what was said in the original 1979 book. He also claims that many of the people who have written articles for the new book are not specialists annd hence their work is somewhat suspect. This sounds like a bit of a cheap point, but if you look at Sŏ’s own publications list he certainly is in a position to comment on the historiography of the postwar period.

Read part one here.

Besides his specific defence of Marx against Said’s accusations, Habib also attacks the way in which,

‘Orientalism’ as a word has thus been so degraded that anyone can use it for anything one disapproves of, even when the disapprover may himself be a dyed in the wool ‘Orientalist’!

The meat of Habib’s criticism is also absolutely to the point:

The essential weakness of Edward Said and those who follow him and speak of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘colonial discourse’ in the same breath lies in the failure to see that colonialism (including imperialism, neocolonialism, etc) does not form the only major influence over Oriental scholarship in the west or in the Orient. There is too easy a readiness on their part to assume that such ideas as those of gender and racial equality, and of nation and democracy, that arose in the West in modern times, and obtained popular acceptance through upheavals like the French Revolution of 1789 and the Soviet Revolution of 1917, have exercised no influence at all on modern studies of Oriental societies. Yet who can read Wellhausen’s Arab Kingdom and its Fall without being convinced that his analysis of the Umayyid Caliphate, as structured on distinct classes based on political and economic dominance and subjugation, is derived from ideas that social democracy had introduced in the Germany of his time. In India D D Kosambi, drawing quite firmly on the Orientalist tradition of scholarship, aimed at reconstructing ancient Indian history through the application of Marxist concepts. Modern democratic, as against colonial, notions have thus created an increasing belief that Oriental societies, like all human societies, are susceptible to the same methods of study—indeed, with the same essential assumptions—as the history of western societies. There has accordingly developed within Oriental learning almost parallel, but ultimately conflicting, trends based respectively on colonial and what may be called universalist approaches.

So, the basic problem with Said’s critique of Orientalism seems to be that, like quite a bit of other post-colonial scholarship, it often produces a mirror-image of colonial discourse and thereby paradoxically ends up validating it to some extent. Towards the end of his article Habib strikes a rather optimistic note, arguing that our expanding knowledge of the human past inevitably leads to a better (more universalist) understanding of human history and the overturning of previous mistaken ideas.

However, he also notes that it has been relatively easy for those who actually provide support for ‘neo-colonialism’ to co-opt scholarship heavily based on Said’s critique of Orientalism. Habib uses as an example the work of the Indian Subaltern group, but another example of such potentially co-optable scholarship might be recent attempts to ‘overcome’ nationalism and nationalist historiography in Korea. The complaint that most Korean historiography is tainted by nationalism or is overly Eurocentric because it attempts to apply Marxist or other theories of European/North American origin to an East Asian society has long been a common one among many of the more conservative US scholars writing on Korean history. The charge of ‘irrational nationalism’ (the echoes of good old-fashioned Orientalism are very strong in this phrase) has also, ironically, been one of the favourite accusations levelled by the Japanese neo-nationalists against Koreans protesting Japan’s revisionist history textbooks.

I’m not making an argument for either nationalist or Orientalist scholarship here, just agreeing with Habib that there can be a tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water and disregard all previous historical scholarship as either Orientalist (written by Western scholars) or nationalist (written by ‘native’ postcolonial scholars). This in turn can form part of a discourse that repudiates past (or perhaps present) anti-colonial struggles themselves as overly nationalist or ‘totalizing’. Thus, the critique of Orientalism and Eurocentrism can turn away from the work of striving for a universalist understanding of human history and come perilously close to Orientalism itself.

It could be argued that the late Edward Said and his critique of Orientalism have become sacred cows in their own right. It seems that many of the fundamental insights of Said’s classic book, Orientalism, are valid and have rightly reached the level of orthodoxy in many universities (I sometimes wonder whether SOAS should alter its name to read the School of Orientalism and African Studies). But it’s not difficult to feel uneasy about the slack and sometimes less than discriminating application of the term. This concern is expressed very clearly in a sharp article by the Indian historian Irfan Habib that was originally published earlier this year in the journal Social Scientist and has been republished in the latest issue of International Socialism Journal.

Habib’s basic criticism of Said is that he applies the accusation of ‘Orientalist’ to far too broad a spectrum of scholars working on Asia and Africa, arguing that anything written in the ‘West’ is inherently Orientalist, Eurocentric and racist, ignoring the fact that there has been much good scholarship by Western historians that cannot be accused of any of these vices (Habib brings up the examples of Joseph Needham and Ignaz Goldziher). In the process Said himself, Habib argues, uses some rather dubious and unfounded arguments, based on highly selective and misleading quotation. Habib particularly takes him to task for his treatment of Marx – a treatment that has helped to turn the Marx = Eurocentrist equation into a modern day commonplace:

Marx as a subject of Said’s study… offers further examples of the cavalier way in which Said can stuff anyone he dislikes or wishes to belittle into his nasty basket of ‘Orientalists’. Much has already been said on this matter by Aijaz Ahmad in his essay, ‘Marx on India: a Clarification’ (In Theory, Delhi, 1994, pp221-242). He shows that Said builds his interpretation on just two passages taken from Marx’s two articles published in the New York Tribune in 1853, and seems to be unacquainted with what Marx wrote elsewhere on India. Here it must be added that while Marx necessarily relied on (the quite extensive) European reports on India, the picture that he drew out of it, of the social and economic devastation that British rule caused in India, was largely his own—and this was hardly an ‘Orientalist’ enterprise under Said’s definition. Moreover even in Marx’s second essay, apparently consulted by Said, there is a passage looking forward to the Indians overthrowing ‘the English yoke’ (K Marx and F Engels, Collected Works, vol 12, Moscow, 1979, p221). Marx also writes in the very same article of ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation [which] lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies where it goes naked.’ And yet, again and again in his book, Said sneers at Marx as being, at the end of the day, a pro-colonial ‘Orientalist’. So we are told, ‘This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx’ (p3). The view that ‘Indians were civilisationally, if not racially, inferior’ is indirectly ascribed to Marx on page 14. On page 102 Said goes so far as to put Marx among those writers who could use all the following ‘generalities unquestioningly’: ‘An Oriental lives in the Orient, he lives a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism, and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism.’ The italicised words constitute a fantastic misrepresentation of Karl Marx’s writings on Asia. But Said does not still stop here. On p231 he puts Marx among those who held that ‘an Oriental man was first an Oriental and only second a man’—a meaningless formula seemingly coined simply to belittle Marx.

Amidst all the hullabaloo surrounding the joint North-South celebration of the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, the problems related to the government’s recognition of nationalist heroes provide an interesting sideshow.

Until 2004 the South Korean government clung fast to its traditional anti-communist ways and refused to acknowledge the contribution of independence fighters tainted with any sort of leftwing politics. But this year 47 are being honoured, including Kim San, apparently known as the ‘Che Guevara of the East’ (if you can believe what the Korea Times says).

On the other hand, some have not been so lucky yet. According to a Hankyoreh editorial (thanks to Muninn for bringing this to my attention), Jo Bong-am (조봉암), a left independence activist who later struggled against Syngman Rhee in the 1950s, has not been included because he received a guilty verdict from the supreme court. The editorial points out that the verdict against Jo for espionage (for which he was executed) was completely fixed and politically motivated. But it seems Jo and his descendants will have to wait a bit longer for due recognition.

While the recognition of long-dead independence fighters might seem purely symbolic, I think it is important and particularly significant in terms of building a more realistic view of Korean history, undistorted by the anti-communism of the past. By coincidence, I have a book on Jo Bong-am sitting on my shelf waiting to be read, perhaps this will spur me on a bit.