Vladimir Tikhonov

Social Darwinism and nationalism in Korea : the beginnings (1880s-1910s) : "survival" as an ideology of Korean modernity

The book deals with the influences exerted by Social Darwinism upon Korea’s modern ideologies and discourses in the 1880s-1900s. It argues that Social Darwinism constituted the main keystone for many pivotal discourses in early modern Korea, especially nationalism.

Masculinizing the Nation: Gender Ideologies in Traditional Korea and in the 1890s–1900s Korean Enlightenment Discourse

This paper deals with ideal masculine types in the gender discourse of Koreas modernizing nationalists during the late 1890s and early 1900s. It begins by outlining the main gender stereotypes of Koreas traditional neo-Confucian society, and it argues that old Koreas manhood norms were bifurcated along

Korea in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1850s–1945: Between Orientalism and Revolutionary Solidarity

The current article deals with the Russian and Soviet attitudes toward Korea and Koreans since the first modern visitations of Russians onto Korean soil in the 1850s and until the end of the Colonial Period in Korea (1945). Before the October 1917 Revolution, these attitudes, largely, did not significantly differ from colonial Orientalism elsewhere. Koreans were to be “saved” by the Russian Empire from their “primitiveness” and “inaptitude” and also from Japan’s encroachments. By contrast with the imperialist ideologies in more liberal states of Western Europe, Tsar officials also wished to save Koreans from the “liberal heresies,” for which they were not “mature” enough. Some changes in attitudes became visible after the Russo-Japanese War, as Korea was no longer a target for Russian imperial aggrandizement. The Korean Independence movement and its fight against Russia’s own erstwhile battlefield enemy, Japan, came to receive relatively sympathetic press coverage. The presence of the second generation, bilingual Russian Koreans among the interpreters of Korean affairs for the Russian public, was an additionally important factor. With the October 1917 Revolution, colonized Korea came to be perceived as the Soviet Union’s ally in its anti-imperialist struggles. Even Korean nationalist terrorists of non-Socialist persuasion were seen as potential allies, to be reeducated and integrated into the Communist-led anti-imperialist movement. This internationalism, however sincere many of its adepts (a good number of the Russian cadres who worked with Korea were Jews, a former persecuted minority themselves) could be, was, however, tinged with a feeling of superiority. The Soviet Union was the revolution’s center—and Korea qualified for a faraway periphery at best. By the mid-1930s, as the Soviet Union was gradually developing into a dictatorial state, increasingly nationalist and less and less interested in its erstwhile internationalist commitments, these superiority attitudes were mutating into sentiments of distrust toward Korean ethnic Others, now routinely suspected of being “secret agents of Japan.” These sentiments laid the discursive foundation for the forcible removal of Maritime Province Russian Koreans to central Asia in 1937. Still, due to the continuous importance of October 1917’s internationalist legacy for the Soviet policies and ideology, Stalin’s Korea policy did not fully metamorphose into Tsar-like imperialism—outright annexation of Korea, wholly or in part was never even debated. The Soviet pursuit of these geopolitical interests was restricted by the ideological constraints stemming from the revolutionary legitimation of the Soviet state.

Social Darwinism as History and Reality: “Competition” and “The Weak” in Early Twentieth-Century Korea

ABSTRACT By the time of Korea’s forced integration into the Japanese Empire in 1910, Social Darwinism was established as the main reference frame for the modernizing intellectual elite. The weak had only themselves to blame for their misfortune, and Korea, if it wished to succeed in collective survival in the modern world’s Darwinist jungles, had to strengthen itself. This mode of thinking was inherited by the right-wing nationalists in the 1920s–1930s; their programs of “national reconstruction” (minjok kaejo) aimed at remaking weak Korea into a “fitter” nation, thus preparing for the eventual independence from the Japanese. At the same time, in the 1920s and 1930s some nationalists appropriated the slogan of solidarity and protection of the weak, nationally and internationally, in the course of their competition against the Left. After liberation from Japanese colonialism in 1945, “competition” mostly referred to inter-state competition in South Korean right-wing discourse. However, the neo-liberal age after the 1997 Asian financial crisis witnessed a new discursive shift, competition-driven society being now the core of the mainstream agenda.

Communist Visions for Korea’s Future: The 1920-30s

The evolution of the Communist programs in colonial-era Korea went through several stages. The first Communist groups of the early 1920s were keen to emphasize that their revolution aims at Communizing Korea as a part of the world revolution project initiated by Russian Bolsheviks, although such Communist groups as the “Shanghai” Communist Party were in reality more nationalist than socialist in orientation. Then, the underground Korean Communist Party, founded in April 1925, following the current Comintern theories, defined Korea’s coming revolution as “bourgeois-democratic” in character, and stronger emphasized the importance of united front struggle together with the more radical nationalists. Changing Comintern line and general radicalization brought by the Great Depression led Korean Communists of the later 1920s-earlier 1930s to revise their programs and accentuate the mobilization of broad social strata to the anti-colonial struggle, rather than alliance with nationalists. The post-colonial political system was redefined as a “people’s democracy.” The “agrarian revolution”—land redistribution—was emphasized as its main project. After 1936, the Communists switched back to the united front strategy, but “agrarian revolution” retained a prominent place in their programmes. These programmes, with their visions of democratized new nation state, played a role in forming the Left’s visions after Korea’s liberation in 1945.

Korean Nationalism Seen through the Comintern Prism, 1920s–30s

One of the benchmarks of the Comintern’s approach to the non-European world was its (conditional) approval of the anticolonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa, even if they were not orthodox Communist. This approach pioneered the engagement with non-Western, emancipatory anticolonial nationalisms on a worldwide scale, and was later followed by the Soviet policy of allying with and assisting “progressive” national-liberational regimes in the Third World in the 1950–80s. The present paper deals with the implementation of this approach in the case of Korea in the 1920s–30s. It finds that the main task that the Comintern originally set for itself in the case of Korean (non-socialist) nationalism was to organize it into a representative “national party” à la China’s Guomindang (Nationalists), which had the potential to become an effective partner of the Korean Communists within the framework of a broader anticolonial alliance. Different factions among the ethnic Korean cadres of the Comintern—which had hardly any non-Korean experts on Korea— suggested different nationalist and religious groupings as potential nuclei for such a “national party”; an autochthonous Korean religion, Ch’ŏndogyo, was commonly recognized as one of the preferred options. These plans were shelved by the end of the 1920s, as the Comintern’s politics radicalized, and were reactivated after 1935, with the Comintern’s shift to the tactics of the antifascist alliance. By that time, however, Korean nationalism inside Korea had been largely either co-opted or silenced by the Japanese. In the end, the Communists came to be seen as the political force with primary responsibility for the task of national-liberation.

The Images of Russia and Russians in Colonial-Era Korean Literature: The 1930s

This essay deals with the images of Russia and Russians, as they appeared on the mental map of the world of Korea’s intelligentsia of the 1930s, reflected in the prose and travelogues of that period. Politically, the attitudes toward the Soviet Union were sharply divided, with the radical Left (excluding the anarchists) offering almost unconditional support to the “motherland of the world’s proletariat,” the moderate Left and moderate nonleftist nationalists being positive about many but not necessarily all sides of the “Soviet experiment,” and the colonial government, together with a number of radical (often Christian) right-wing nationalists, taking a harshly anti-Soviet stance. In the world of literary imagination, however, the images of Russia and Russians offered by the writers of different ideological and political backgrounds were often converging. This essay shows that for both the 1930s Korean writers with a background in the communist movement (exemplified here by a female novelist, Paek Sin’ae) and the mainstream authors without any radical connection (typified here by another prose writer, Yi Hyosǒk), Russia and Russians represented a civilizational “middle ground” of sorts. They perceived Russia as 1) a European country that in many ways looked most similar to Asia, and particularly Korea; 2) a mighty modern nation-state that simultaneously seemed to be hopelessly backward, even in comparison to colonial Korea; and 3) a country with a racially white population that, however, in the case of Manchuria-based Russian émigrés, could be even more marginalized inside the Japanese empire than its colonial Korean subjects. The Russians’ image was imminently self-contradictory: they were culturally “noble” Europeans, often associated with the “gracious and splendid” Western classical music or architecture; but at the same time, Harbin, with its easily recognizable Russian minority, was seen primarily as a space of criminal lawlessness and a haven of commercialized sex and eroticism. All of these features were hardly associated with nobleness in the increasingly austere mobilizational atmosphere of the late 1930s Japanese empire, entering its hopeless all-out war against China and later the United States. The key words best expressing the “essence” of Harbin Russians were sorrow or pity — exactly the epithets often used by the Japanese colonialist scholars or authors about Korea itself. Korean authors, in a way, were sympathetic to the Harbin Russians, viewing them as either equally or even more marginal than colonized Koreans; but at the same time, pitying their plight was a way in which colonial Korean authors could relatively improve their own discursive standing, being comparatively more “centrally” positioned inside the Japanese imperial system.

Contentious Activism and Inter-Korean Relations

while OSK, the contemporary incarnation of the Shōchiku Girls’ Opera, marked its 90 anniversary in 2012. Watanabe Hiroshi’s treatment of the former, extending as far as 1970 in its exploration of the role of musical theatre in national consciousness, neither acknowledges Shōchiku, nor gives any nod to Anglophone scholarship, although Jennifer Robertson’s earlier work on Takarazuka delves intensively into its founder Kobayashi’s vision for the creation of a national theatre. Hosokawa’s chapter, by contrast, deftly incorporates comparison of the Shōchiku group with Takarazuka in the post-Kanto earthquake years. In all, this book offers a wealth of in-depth information and analysis on myriad aspects of cultural practice and its reception in and around Osaka, as well as related domestic and international influences and connections. It will surely be highly valued as a reference work for specific genres, and also as one which provides a detailed overview of the musical culture of that significant but often under-studied region.

One Religion, Different Readings: (Mis)interpretations of Korean Buddhism in Colonial Korea, Late 1920s-Early 1930s.

In colonial Korea (1910–1945), Buddhism’s sheer resilience and popularity drew attention of the Japanese colonial scholars, who initiated in the 1910s–1920s what they viewed as ‘‘scientific’’ study of Korean Buddhism. The attempts at ‘‘scientification’’ of Korean Buddhism research—exemplified by Keijō Imperial University professor Takahashi Tōru (1878–1967), also known for his research on Korean oral literature and Confucian philosophy—undoubtedly broadened the scope of academic inquiry and contributed to systemization of materials on Korean Buddhist history. However, the ‘‘scientism’’ of the colonial scholars was from the very beginning tarnished by their Orientalist attitudes. They viewed Korean Buddhism as ‘‘slavishly dependent’’ upon Chinese tradition and Korean state authorities. These colonialist attitudes provoked a heated nationalist response. Prominent ‘‘cultural nationalists’’, such as Ch’oe Namsŏn (1890–1957), reacted by painting a picture of East Asia’s ancient Buddhist tradition with Korea in its centre. This picture, its visible shortcomings notwithstanding, eventually laid the fundament for the nationalist view of Korean Buddhist history in post1945 South Korea.

Sakyamuni’s Spirit: Dialogue With A Journalist

One of Korea’s most eminent Buddhists and political activists in the independence movement during the long years of Japan’s colonization of Korea, Han Yongun was a prolific writer and outstanding poet, known especially for his poetry collection The Silence of the Lover. This book concentrates on translations of his principal non-literary works.