Hyun Ok Park is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at New York University.

Two Dreams in One Bed

EMPIRE, SOCIAL LIFE, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NORTH KOREAN REVOLUTION IN MANCHURIABy HYUN OK PARK

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3625-9

Contents

PREFACE……………………………………………………………………………………………xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………………………….xviiINTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………….1ONE The Politics of Osmosis: Korean Migration and the Japanese Empire…………………………………….24TWO Between Nation and Market………………………………………………………………………..64THREE Agency of Japanese Imperialism………………………………………………………………….96FOUR Multiethnic Agrarian Communities…………………………………………………………………124FIVE Colonial Governmentality………………………………………………………………………..162SIX The Specter of the Social: Socialist Internationalism, the Minsaengdan, and North Korea…………………198EPILOGUE…………………………………………………………………………………………..231NOTES……………………………………………………………………………………………..241GLOSSARY…………………………………………………………………………………………..281BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………….285INDEX……………………………………………………………………………………………..303

Chapter One

The Politics of Osmosis: Korean Migration and the Japanese Empire

Japan considered the occupation of Korea to be the first step in the colonization of Manchuria, China proper, India, and ultimately the rest of Asia. In such a dream, the expansion of the Japanese empire hinged not on a dependent relationship between the metropole and each colony, with the latter serving the former as a provider of resources or a market. Rather, the dream rested on an intricate relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, with the latter acting as a series of vessels that would allow Japan’s sovereign power to flow outward in succession, from one to the next, forming an extensive Asian community. I conceptualize this cascading strategy of empire building as the politics of osmosis. In the osmotic process, the moving bodies of Koreans, not immobile institutions or movable things per se, embodied Japan’s power in Manchuria like the cellular webs of a larger, expanding body. This claim to power was mobilized as a strategy to displace Chinese authority over Koreans and their lands and establish suzerainty over Manchuria. The politics of osmosis entailed the logic of territorial expansion and the logic of capitalist expansion, for which a following reading of Pukkando, a novel by An Sugil, works as an allegory. Issues pertinent to the reading of the novel include the relationship between the Japanese power holders and Korean peasants as bedfellows who both dream of obtaining land; the dual position of Koreans as colonizers and colonized; and the social as a locus of the triangular relations among Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese that is organized by nationalist and capitalist time.

READING PUKKANDO

Manchuria occupied a new place in the Korean literary imaginary, since Korean writers settled in Kando (a district of Jilin Province in Manchuria and currently the Korean Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture) during the colonial period and wrote in Korean even after its use was banned in Korea. The lives of the colonized on a new frontier galvanized the production of Manchurian imaginaries. The plight of Koreans, their suffering at the hands of bandits and Chinese landlords, and the allure of new, fertile land were familiar literary representations of Manchuria. As many of these writers went to live in North Korea after liberation, their works were largely unavailable to South Korean readers during the cold war. One of the best-known writers who moved to South Korea after liberation is An Sugil, who worked for Manson Ilbo, a Korean newspaper in Manchuria. Among An’s key works, Pukkando stands in opposition to Pukhyangbo, which is more controversial. Published as a serialized novel from 1944 to 1945 in Manson Ilbo, the latter portrays Koreans as dedicated colonial subjects who embraced as their own Japan’s official project of creating new farms for relocated Korean peasants. While Pukhyangbo branded the author as a collaborator, Pukkando can be counted as a work of redemption. Written between 1959 and 1967 in South Korea, Pukkando‘s two volumes narrate the epic of Korean migration to Manchuria from the 1860s to 1945 and lives caught between Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism. The second volume, which treats the period from the early 1910s until 1945, is an orthodox nationalist narrative that depicts Koreans as victims of imperialism and heroes of anti-Japanese struggle. But the first volume, the focus of my reading, offers a rare account of the preceding period, which has been largely overlooked in nationalist literature and historical studies of Manchuria. More importantly, the representation of the earlier period of Korean settlement offers essential insights into the dual subjectivity of Koreans, who negotiated their lives as colonizers of Manchuria who were themselves colonized by Japan.

Pukkando belongs to a nationalist literature that envisages peasants as the subjects of a new history in which peasants not only secure their means of living but also become enlightened constituents of a modern nation. In the novel, the social life of peasants is dialectically opposed to that of modern citizens, as the inept government cannot protect impoverished peasants from natural calamities, forcing them to relocate on a new frontier. The generational unity of the family resolves this opposition, which leads to productive farming and a stronger nation. The genealogy of the protagonist family begins with its migration from southern Korea to a region bordering China. This migration is part of an official project of guarding Korean territory after the Choson state obtained the northern Tuman River region from China in 1432. The second uprooting of the family and its neighbors comes after four centuries of prosperity, when a persistent drought results in the family’s financial devastation. This coincides with a new national crisis following the attacks by French, Russian, American, and Japanese warships. In the late nineteenth century, the family moves to (northern) Kando-Pukkando.

The migration to northern Kando represents the survival of the family and the nation. On the one hand, it is literally the final attempt at survival by the impecunious peasants. When migration is prohibited and violators are sentenced to death, the choice for the peasants is between dying of hunger and being executed by the state. On the other hand, the migration to Kando is figuratively the passage to a new Korean nation. Hanbok, a protagonist in Pukkando, was one of the few Koreans who risked his life to farm in Kando. As Kando is located just across the Tuman River from Hanbok’s village in Korea, farming there requires crossing the river daily. He usually sets out for Kando in the dark and returns home before dawn, having farmed throughout the night. Hanbok’s clandestine farming is inadvertently revealed by his son when the boy trades three potatoes for a friend’s toy. When his exposure leads to an official investigation, Hanbok turns this misfortune into an opportunity to aver his belief that Kando is really Korean territory. In the end, he helps the Korean government to establish proof of its territorial right to Kando.

The reacquisition of this territory signifies a new period of nation building, as corrupted state officials have succumbed to the power of China and failed to refute the centuries-old claim of China to this land. Hanbok leads a wave of Korean migration that turns this frontier into yet another flourishing village. By obtaining land and operating schools for children, Hanbok resolves the conflict between farming and education that has spanned three generations and sown enmity between his grandfather and his father, as well as between his father and him. The Confucian principle considers the patrilineal family-especially the father-son lineage-to be the nucleus of the national community. According to Confucianism, rule of the whole world begins with command of one’s own body and family and the ideal relationship between the state and its people must mirror the innate relationship between the patriarch and his family. Father-son conflict symbolizes the breakdown of the national community and subsequent threats to the survival of the patriline. The resolution of generational conflict in Hanbok’s family in Kando connotes the resolution of this national crisis.

The following analysis of three episodes from the book offers three examples of bedfellow-type relationships that Koreans develop with the Chinese and Japanese. Although they take place in different historical contexts, these episodes are not necessarily a chronicle of fleeting triangular relationships. They can be considered synchronic metamorphoses in which national and capitalist time-though the latter is often suggestive-produce variant modes of the triangular relationship. All of the events within specific historical contexts inscribe Koreans to the a priori space of the Korean nation in different registers. Their national identity is brought into tension with their capitalist pursuits, including the maintenance of private property rights and the expansion of market activities. The first triangular relationship among Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese reinforces Korean nationalism, as it develops when China, fearing Japanese encroachment on Manchuria, stipulates naturalization of Koreans as Chinese nationals as a prerequisite for landownership. The compromise between Korean and Chinese nationalism yields aberrant forms of naturalization and landownership. The second triangular relationship involves the united front of Korean and Chinese nationalisms against the corrupt states of China and Korea. This new national and global consciousness is transformed into a popular politics coupled with material gain. The third relationship revolves around the pursuit by Chinese and Japanese policemen of a Korean felon in a city. The chase represents the increased exchange value of Koreans, their double oppression as a result of the territorial rivalry between China and Japan, and the advantages that Koreans carve out by turning these rivals against each other. These advantages can also be taken as a signifier of the commodification of Korean labor, which both the Chinese and Japanese powers sought to appropriate in order to develop Manchurian agriculture. In each relationship, international historical events coalesce with those of Koreans in Kando to dramatize emergent configurations of Korean subjectivity arising from their dual position as colonizer and colonized. Instead of standing apart from one another, the three episodes exhibit variant dimensions of the triangular relationship.

“Potato Tales”: Social Life and the Nation

The episode of the potato incidents offers the first venue for the emergent opposition between Koreans and Chinese, which accelerates as Japanese imperialism advances. China had been defeated in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), which broke out when China and Japan sent troops to Korea allegedly to quell the Tonghak peasant rebellion. In the treaty signed at Shimonoseki in 1898, China conceded the full independence of Korea and transferred the Liaodong Peninsula of Manchuria and the island of Taiwan to Japan. In 1870 and 1881, respectively, authorization of the migration of Korean and Chinese peasants by Korea and China had rekindled age-old territorial disputes. After its defeat in the war, China feared that Japan would intervene in these territorial disputes. The Qing government therefore began to pressure the Koreans of Kando to become naturalized as Chinese citizens.

At that time, naturalization took the cultural form (Hukpok pyonbal or Ch’ibal yokpok) of enforcing Manchu clothing and hairstyles-black clothes with wide, long sleeves and hair shaved in front and worn in a long ponytail in back. This Manchu custom contrasts with the Korean practice of wearing white clothes and different hairstyles according to marital status-short hair in front and a long ponytail in back for unmarried men and hair tied and worn on top of the head for married men. In seeking a concession from the Koreans, the Qing authorities presented naturalization as a process as easy as cutting the front hair for unmarried men and untying hair for married men. Pukkando relates that many Koreans felt that the soul of the nation “would not forgive such naturalization,” since Confucian custom identifies one’s hair as a bequest of the ancestors.

The issue of naturalization, however, exceeded the matter of one’s national identity. As the Qing government required it as a precondition for landownership, the matter of naturalization concerned the sovereignty of Koreans over their social lives. Being products of labor, potatoes in Pukkando symbolize the labor of producers, which increases the value of land. The property rights to one’s land are equivalent to the sovereignty over one’s social life since the value of land is inextricable from the labor one expends on it. The novel’s potato incidents depict the tension between social life and national identity, which is posited as an opposition by the Chinese law that entwined nationality and landownership. In the novel, the issue of naturalization presents Koreans with the thorny dilemma of choosing between keeping their national identity and defending their rights to their lands. A deepening of this predicament, in tandem with mounting tensions between the Chinese and Koreans, sets the stage for a potato incident. During their playtime, Ch’angyun-Hanbok’s grandson-and his friends steal potatoes from a farm owned by the village’s richest Chinese landlord. Ch’angyun’s action is triggered not just by hostility toward the landlord but also by disdain for his Korean neighbors, who increasingly seem to succumb to the landlord. The landlord’s household members reprimand Ch’angyun by simulating his naturalization-changing his clothes and hair to the Manchu style.

Hanbok’s death from the shock over this incident facilitates a compromise between social life and naturalization in his village. Before his death, the villagers had debated the contending positions on the best “method to love the village.” In the first proposition, the one recommended by the Chinese government, a couple of their representatives would become naturalized and register under their names the land tilled by the unnaturalized village members. The opposition, led by Hanbok, not only reinvoked Kando as Korean territory but also affirmed Koreans’ right to ownership of their land: “Regardless of whether the Korean government is too weak or corrupt to claim sovereignty over Kando, it is not feasible for us to give to China the land on which we poured our sweat and blood. Even though the naturalization of a couple of our representatives is a practical strategy to maintain our ownership, it would be grounds for the next generation to become slaves of the Chinese people.” Adopting this strategy after Hanbok’s death, the Koreans elect their representatives and create their own land title-apart from the official title that the Chinese government had issued to nominal landowners-which will distinguish real and nominal landowners. The elected representatives at first help the Koreans in their negotiations with local Chinese officials over taxation and other legal matters. But, as Hanbok predicted, they increasingly exert power over the other Koreans.

Ch’angyun’s potato incident brings his family back to the time of crisis in Korea by resuscitating the repressed memory of an earlier potato incident, one that involved his grandfather (Hanbok) and father (Changson) before their migration to Kando. In the repeated potato incidents, the crisis of the entwined national and social order is encoded on and resolved by the father-son relationship. As Hanbok once resolved the schism between his grandfather and father, Ch’angyun does the same for his grandfather and father. Ch’angyun’s incident causes Hanbok to remember his own saga of illegal farming. Hanbok is overcome with pride, but it is mixed with apprehension over the conditions that are once again threatening the family’s livelihood. Guilt over Hanbok’s subsequent death induces Ch’angyun to fight with his best friend. They mock each other, calling each other “Chinese” (Ch’angyun once wore Manchu clothes and the father of his friend has adopted Chinese naturalization in his role as a village representative). Ch’angyun breaks his ankle after falling from a cliff and becomes ill. While Changson at first blames his son for his foolishness, Ch’angyun’s remorse, even in delirium, leads Changson to a tearful reminiscence of an event that had been deeply suppressed for decades. Years ago, when Changson’s trading of the potatoes for a toy led to the arrest of his father, the enraged Hanbok declared that he would “kill whoever reported my farming in Kando to the government, even my child.” Changson now suspects that the lesson learned from this first potato incident must have nurtured the perseverance and determination necessary to survive in Kando. Ch’angyun’s potato incident seems to bring closure to a generation-long tension in his family, as well as the conflict in the village over naturalization.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Two Dreams in One Bedby HYUN OK PARK Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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