Korea Research Monograph 38. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2021. xxiv, 338 pp. (Tables) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-557-29189-9.
This work, translated from the original Korean and covering the period 1945 to 1980, consists of chapters by various authors who strive to bring subaltern history back to life as tales of forgotten tragedies that befell the people of South Korea. While the essays are organized chronologically, they are grouped according to themes that highlight the diversity of issues, particularly on Cold War triumphalism, construction of hyper-nationalism, and spread of the developmentalist discourse, which shaped South Korean culture, society, and politics under authoritarianism. Taken together, the themes and issues successfully render a mood of heartbreak and misfortune, which is perhaps the intention of the editors. With vivid descriptions of events and personalities harvested from contemporaneous writings, it guarantees the reader a powerful “moment in time” experience.
As Yerim Kim points out in her chapter, “The State as Betrayal and People as Refugees,” for the Korean diaspora, returning to Korea was the only way to effectively distance oneself from the real risk of violence one faced by remaining elsewhere in the erstwhile Japanese Empire. Yet, many of those who returned to the peninsula in the postwar period to escape foreign refugee status abroad did so only to find themselves relegated to domestic refugee status at home. Cheon Junghwan’s chapter on “street politics” describes how post-liberation Korean men and women quickly changed their hairstyles, dress, and diet to celebrate their independence from the Japanese. However, he also points out how with the 1946 anniversary celebrations of the failed anti-Japanese March First Movement, both the political right and left were already holding their own separate rallies and waving separate flags—the Taegeukki for the rightists and Red Flag for the leftists. Hyeryoung Lee’s chapter, “Days and Nights of Taking up Arms,” laments how, as leftist armed young men were targeted by Korean personnel associated with organs of the US Military Government, “What’s infuriating is that those who were not killed by the Japanese ended up perishing at the hands of their own countrymen.”
The reader is told in Kim Dong-choon’s chapter, “The State as God,” how those who had been unable to flee Seoul as it was occupied by North Korean troops during the Korean War were later widely considered by returning South Korean authorities as “traitors” or “suspected enemies,” and how many family members of wolbukcha (a person who “went north”) became victims of mass persecution. In Lee Bong-beom’s chapter, “Morals and Liberal Democracy after the Korean War,” we learn that after the war, the South Korean government aggressively cracked down on what it considered to be decadent morality, as represented by prostitution and Japanese cultural influences, and promoted moral education to stave off materialism and liberal views on sex, which were then gaining ground in society. In Chang Se-jin’s chapter, “Traveling in Asia,” we are informed that South Korean travel writings in the 1950s were divided into a “friend/foe” mode, in constructing a symbolic union among anti-communist countries in the region, such as Taiwan and the Philippines, while relegating Asian socialist states, such as India, Burma and Indonesia, to the other side of the divide.
In his chapter, “The Intellectual Landscape of 1964,” Kim Kun Woo details how by making “emancipation from poverty” the most urgent national concern and mainstream discourse, the Park Chung-hee regime largely succeeded in equating developmentalism and nationalism with democracy, and setting them against communism and liberalism/individualism. In the chapter, “The April Revolution and the May Coup,” Boduerae Kwon criticizes the widely held belief that the April 19, 1960 revolution was led by university students, for they began appearing only in the last phase to prevent demonstrations by high school students from ratcheting up the disturbances, and argued that the May 16, 1961 military coup came to be accepted by Koreans because of widespread poverty. In my view, this chapter could better have been placed before Kim Kun Woo’s chapter and as a lead-in to it, by providing the historical setting to 1960s’ intellectuality.
Continuing with this theme of the April 1960 uprising as belonging to the “youth generation,” Kim Miran’s chapter observes that, after the students dropped out of the political arena following the May 16 coup, they were deprived of their reformist image by the state, which described them as immature while attempting, quite successfully, to incorporate them as participants in nation-building. Developmental state-building for the Park government meant not only reorganizing the street grids, erecting landmark buildings, and constructing highways, but also, as described by Kim Baek Yung in the chapter, “A Spatial Sociology of the April 19 Uprising and May 16 Coup,” reducing the size of squares in downtown Seoul from the early 1960s, to put them under stronger government control by thwarting public assembly and resistance. Kim Won’s chapter, “Those Deprived in 1971,” brings attention to the riot, or what he calls an urban uprising, of the underclass and downtrodden residing in Kwangju Complex, and in doing so, draws our notice to the “losers” of Park’s economic modernization.
In Yoo Sun Young’s chapter, “Hostess Movies and the Hypernationalization Project of the Mobilization Regime,” we witness citizen responses to the government’s crackdown on popular songs and soft pornography (“hostess movies”) as a form of subversive pleasure outside and against the state. Next, Kim Sunghwan’s chapter on the boom in nonelite writings demonstrates that workers as writers in labor literature were, against expectations, able to represent their experiences authentically with erudite language. The final chapter, Kim Jung Han’s “Counter-Violence and Anti-Violence,” subverts popular perceptions by viewing the Citizen Army’s role in the 1980 Gwangju (Kwangju) Uprising as basically defensive.
In the book’s Introduction, North Korea is referred to as “‘Choson minju konghwaguk’ (literally, Korea People Republic; xiii). This is quite an oversight. The official name of the country is “Choson minjujuui inmin konghwaguk” (Korean Democratic People’s Republic). For its audience, this monograph need not be limited to experts on Korean politics, culture, or society, although it does presuppose some acquaintance on the part of the reader with South Korean history, as the topics dealt with and styles of writing are rather academic. If there is a common thread that runs through the chapters, it is the casting of the postwar US military government, rightwing Rhee administration, and presidency of General Park Chung-hee in a rather unethical light, something that justified the politics of resistance and struggle for democracy in South Korea. However, whether one agrees or not with the perspectives and narratives offered by the authors, this work constitutes an invaluable reminder of the largely overlooked or neglected political culture and social history of South Korea in the period prior to democratization.
Chien-peng Chung
Lingnan University, Hong Kong