Center for Korea Studies Publications. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2019. ix, 344 pp. (Tables, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 9780295746708.
The International Impact of Colonial Rule in Korea, edited by Yong-Chool Ha, brings together notable experts to reflect on the international implications of Japanese colonialism. Japan became a global power through its successes in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Yet the historical impact of Japan’s conquest of Korea has received little academic attention. The book addresses this gap in the scholarship by pointing out that while Korea may not have existed “legally” on the international stage, international relations remained important considerations for the colony.
The chapters are organized into three sections. The first three chapters focus on the propaganda that rationalized Japan’s annexation of Korea. Hakjoon Kim’s essay, “A Devil Appears in a Different Dress: Imperial Japan’s Deceptive Propaganda and Rationalization for Making Korea Its Colony,” provides a useful summary of Meiji era (1868–1912) Pan-Asianist ideology and how negative images of Korea legitimated Japan’s aggressions. Sang Sook Jeon’s essay, “Establishing Japanese National Identity and the ‘Chosŏn Issue,’” offers a discourse analysis of the Meiji oligarchs, and explains how the conquest of Korea encouraged the Japanese to achieve national development despite a strong sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West. Andre Schmid’s chapter, “Japanese Propaganda in the United States from 1905,” brings a fresh perspective to Japanese propaganda in the English language. Schmid provides an extensive overview of Japanese publications to show how they became the primary source of information about Korea and supported negative stereotypes of Koreans among American authors.
The second section contains two chapters that explore Korean perceptions of international relations during the colonial period. Yong-Chool Ha and Jung Hwan Lee’s “The Impact of the Colonial Situation on International Perspectives in Korea: Active Imaginations, Wishful Strategies, and Passive Action” presents a statistical content analysis of Chosŏn Ilbo and Keijō nippō editorials from 1920 to 1930. In the fifth chapter, “Modern Utopia or Animal Society, ” Yumi Moon explores the wartime imaginary of the United States during the late colonial period. Moon’s findings show that Koreans tended to portray America in an ambiguous fashion right up to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. America became the enemy of the Japanese empire, but idealistic images of the nation persisted within the colonial media.
The third section offers a broad range of views on Korea from the outside during the colonial period. In “The British and American Perceptions of Korea during the Colonial Period,” Daeyeol Ku analyzes the international politics surrounding the Korean Peninsula. Ku addresses the question of how images of Japanese colonial rule had a concrete impact on events like Japanese demands on China during WWI and the March First Incident in 1919. Sergey Kurbanov’s chapter, “Russian Perception of Koreans and the Japanese Colonial Regime in Korea during the First Quarter of the Twentieth Century,” discusses how Japanese efforts to portray an image of enlightened colonization did not strongly influence Russian perceptions due to their direct experiences in Korea. A similar conclusion can be found in Kezhi Sun’s chapter, “Chinese Understandings of Korea in Modern Times, 1910–1945: Observations and Reflections,” in which the author explains how the Chinese largely rejected Japanese claims to pursue an enlightened colonial rule. The final essay by Naoko Shimazu, “Publicizing Colonies: Representations of ‘Korea’ and ‘Koreans’ in NIPPON,” presents an overview of a special Korea issue in the English-language magazine Nippon. The author analyzes the ambiguous positioning of Korean culture in propagandizing the achievements of the Japanese empire during WWII.
The volume contributes to our understanding of colonial international relations and is a welcome addition to the English-language scholarship. However, there are some issues to highlight. The first two chapters attempt to connect Japan’s colonization of Korea to a prehistory of Meiji expansionism. Yet here we need to keep in mind Sebastian Conrad’s observation that efforts to understand German imperialism in a linear fashion from the prehistory of German colonialism can be somewhat problematic, because many of the ideas were never realized and they had developed in an entirely different historical context (German Colonialism: A Short History, Cambridge University Press, 2011). There are attempts to place diverse intellectual movements into a single teleological explanation of Japanese expansionism. Yet establishing a string of causation from such a diverse range of thinkers may be an inherently difficult task.
Further issues of historical context can be found in Ha and Lee’s essay in the fourth chapter, which focuses on passive “wishful thinking” expressed in colonial editorials in the 1920s about Korea’s inability to participate in autonomous international relations. There may be the problem of selection bias as many of the same writers in the Chosŏn Ilbo after the Manchurian Incident in 1931 actively supported Japanese aggressions in China and advocated a role for Koreans within an expanding Japanese empire. Depending on the period, the perceptions of the outside world shifted dramatically. Providing a stronger rationale for why the specific examples were chosen would allow the reader to better understand the arguments in the chapter.
Similar points about the selection criteria for sources can be raised with the chapters that address images of Korea from abroad. The essays all offer excellent introductions to a diverse range of primary sources. Yet several of the contributors present images of Korea without providing enough contextual information or explanations of their significance. Perceptions change over time and may vary depending on the position of the authors More information about how the primary sources fit into the arguments presented in the available secondary sources would improve several of the essays. Overall, the volume makes a compelling case for the importance of the “Korea issue” on the international stage. Hopefully, further research in this direction will clarify the international dimension of Japanese colonialism and provide new insights on the colonial legacies that continued to impact the international relations of the Korean Peninsula after 1945.
Michael Kim
Yonsei University, Seoul