Sins of the Father, Part 1: The Manchurian Experiment

It smacks of orientalism to use the term “dynasty” in reference to current East Asian politics. The days of kingdoms and emperors are gone, the nation-state having become the global standard. Too often I read references to Xi Jinping as an "emperor,” and they just come off as lazy journalism. No one in China believes that Xi has a divine mandate to be their leader any more than Americans truly think that God whispers policy suggestions to Ted Cruz. All the same, when you look at the current batch of leaders in East Asia, its hard not to see the family pedigrees that enabled their rise to power.

For this blog post, I would like to focus on three heads of state: Park Gyun Hee of South Korea, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and Shinzo Abe of Japan. You were probably aware that North Korea has always been led by the descendants of its founder, Kim Il-Sung. You might not have known that in South Korea, Park Gyun Hee’s father, Park Chung-hee, was a controversial dictator who was in power for much of the 60s and 70s, or that Shinzo Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was the Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960. These three men were each significant leaders and their policies dictate much of the current dynamics in East Asia today. In positions of power, each demonstrated a unique ability to reshape society, economics, and their militaries.

But before these men rose to power in their own country, they all participated in or against Japanese colonialism in Manchuria. Their experiences were foundational for the ideology of Kim Il-Sung, Park Gyun Hee, and Nobusuke Kishi, and their descendants have, in many ways, continued the projects of their fathers. If we are to understand the ambitions of South Korea, North Korea, and Japan today, let us look to the history of Japanese colonialism, and how it has influenced these three leaders. To go forward, we must go back. To see the future of East Asia, we must step into the frigid deserts of Manchuria in the 1930s.  

Image Courtesy of Wikimedia

Manchuria is located in northeastern China and is a popular setting for a number of Asian westerns. I would recommend The Good, the Bad, The Weird, an outrageously entertaining Korean film that makes up for its historical inaccuracies by capturing the essence of Manchuria at this time. Following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, which had ruled from 644 to 1912, China was plunged into a chaotic decade known as the Warlords Period. Capitalizing on the lawless period, the Japanese drummed up a pretext for invading the region and seized Manchuria.  

Like all other colonizers in history, the Japanese aimed to legitimize their takeover of the region. Conveniently for them, the Qing dynasty originated from Manchuria, and so they installed Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty in the top slot of a puppet state they called “Manchukuo.” Puyi had spent much of his life being pushed around and manipulated since his family had fallen from power, so he settled nicely into the role of a figurehead. All decisions in Manchukuo were made by military leaders and bureaucrats sent to manage the colony.

The brutality of the Japanese colonization in Manchukuo cannot be understated. Drug trafficking, slave labor and human experimentation were all facilitated under Japanese policy in Manchuria. One of the most infamous examples is Unit 731, a division of the military that performed horrific torture on civilians and prisoners under the banner of “research.” I won’t go into details here but there is fairly lengthy Wikipedia article that covers the atrocities they inflicted on an estimated 250,000 men, women, and children. After Japan’s surrender, Douglas MacArthur gave immunity to the researchers in return for their findings. While Unit 731 is one of the more extreme examples, even the basic economic policy of Manchukuo functioned on human rights violations.

Both forced labor and the opium trade based in Manchukuo demonstrate the racism of Japanese colonization. In a move borrowed from the British Empire’s playbook, the Japanese cultivated opium to generate profit and destabilize foreign powers. Just as the British trafficked opium from India to weaken the Chinese state, so too did the Japanese grow opium in Manchukuo and distribute it across Asia. In 1937, the League of Nations reported that 90% of opium was produced by Japan. By locating both the production and distribution in Manchukuo, the Japanese government could claim ignorance while inflicting a public health crisis across Asia. Once Japan’s aggression in China became part of the larger WWII conflict, factory production in Manchuria was accelerated with slave labor. Manchuria is rich in natural resources and the Japanese hoped that it could serve as an industrial base for their military expansions. The Japanese here pressed an estimated 10 million Chinese laborers into high-risk jobs, such as the Benxihu Colliery, the site of the deadliest mining disaster in history.

While there was no single architect of these atrocities there was a bureaucrat who ensured that each was accomplished efficiently and through the combination of private capital and Japanese military support. Nobosuke Kishi, the grandfather of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, laundered money, oversaw heroin trafficking, and brought private capital into Manchukuo industry. He was also, by most accounts, a racist bigot and serial hedonist, gleefully patronizing the sex industry fueled by kidnapped Korean and Chinese women. Kishi created his models for economic development before he came to Manchukuo, influenced by trips to Germany and the scientific management theory of Fredrick Winslow Taylor. It was in Manchukuo, however, that Kishi was able to shape a society towards his vision. Later in life, he would describe Manchukuo as “a scientific, conscientious, bold experiment … a truly unique modern state formation.” Under Kishi’s management, private enterprise directed the Japanese military to commit atrocities throughout Manchuria.

Image Courtesy of Japan Philippines Society

Kishi was far from the only imperialist Japanese (businessmen, intellectuals, and the military establishment all pushed for expansion) but he was unique in that he facilitated a truly military-industrial complex for the purpose of that imperialist vision. Prior to Kishi’s appointment as Manchukuo’s Deputy Minister of Industrial Development in 1935, the military refused to allow private enterprise in Manchuria, instead managing the economy themselves. For the first half of the twentieth century, Japan’s economy was dominated by massive corporation known as zaibatsus. Typically controlled by a single family, zaibatsus possessed holdings in multiple industries and had their own in-house banking institution to fund operations. As opposed to large corporations in the United States, zaibatsus have generally held a more cooperative role with the state instead of dictating select policies to generate greater profits (looking at you, Koch Brothers). The Japanese government relied on the zaibatsus to establish trade connections, develop industries that served the national industry, and invest in Japanese colonies.

But how did Kishi incentivize the zaibatsu? Simple, he guaranteed them the cheapest labor possible. Under Kishi, wages in Manchuria were dramatically lowered and as the war accelerated, he eventually ignored wages and instituted slave labor. 10 million Chinese were forced into high-risk labor, such as at the Benxihu Colliery, the site of an industrial accident that killed an estimated 1,549 miners.  Kishi believed in the superior of the Japanese, (or Yamato) race, a belief that encouraged him to enslave the necessary labor. One historian quotes Kishi saying that Chinese should be “mechanical instruments of the Imperial Army, non-human automatons, absolutely obedient” to the Japanese colonizers. This racist urge for dominance was also present in Kishi’s sexual appetite. Kishi was known to frequent prostitutes, demand sex from waitresses at restaurants, and given his position in the Japanese leadership, was undoubtedly aware of the “comfort women,” Korean women who the Japanese army kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery.

Nobosuke Kishi entered Manchuria with an established viewpoint on markets and administration. He had studied the planned economies of the Soviet Union and Germany, and had embraced the Yamato superiority argued by a number of authors. For him, Manchuria was a place to apply these different theories. He did not learn lessons here so much as conduct experiments, letting private business dictate military procedure. In Kishi’s mind, only profit could enable expansion. These profits did not even need to come from honest sources, as his involvement in the drug trade illustrates. Kishi’s consuming drive for economic development blinded his morality, allowing him to endorse the drug-trade, sex trafficking, and the enslavement of the Chinese to feed a mercantilist machine.

There was another man in Manchuria at this time, a lieutenant who was observing the experiment of Manchukuo just as closely as Kishi. This man too respected the relationship between private capital and militarism, but felt that Manchukuo had the relationship backwards. Park Chung-hee, the father of current South Korean president Park Geun-hye, studied the situation in Manchuria closely, biding his time for the moment to implement a similar experiment in his own home.

Image Courtesy of Britannica

In 1939, Park Chung-hee was 23-year-old elementary school teacher in the Korean countryside, brimming with ambition and hungry for adventure. Previously, he had applied to the Japanese military academy but had been denied and was now too old to be accepted. Sitting down at his desk one afternoon, Park Chung-hee decided that if he demonstrated enough passion to the Japanese military, he would surely be accepted into the military. And so he pulled out a paper and quill, found something sharp and wrote a letter written in his own blood, requesting a chance to fight with the Japanese in Manchukuo. The letter, titled “Loyalty Up to Sacrificing My Own Life,” would set Park Chung-hee’s life on an upward path in the military hierarchy, continually ascending until he became the dictator of South Korea from 1961-1979.

From his “blood letter” onwards, Park Chung-hee would always enjoy a theatrical flavor with his reverence to the Japanese military. Some reports say that Park Chung-hee would wander around the gardens of the presidential palace wearing his old Japanese uniform. While serving with the Japanese, he took the name “Masao Takagi.” Armchair psychologists might claim that Park Chung-hee was attempting to erase his identity as a Korean, but I think this speaks more to the admiration Park Chung-hee had for the Japanese military and economic policies than an attempt to erase his Korean identity. Park Chung-hee’s personal philosophy was founded on a militarist values. After a military coup in 1961 gave Park Chung-hee dictatorial powers over South Korea, he could begin leading a country with this philosophy.

Park Chung-hee is fondly remembered as the architect of “The Miracle on the Han River,” an economic development project that made Korea one of the most successful countries in the world. Like Manchukuo, the “Miracle on the Han River” married large business interests and the military into a state-run military-industrial complex. The most visible legacy of Park Chung-hee’s development model is the dominance of the chaebols, massive conglomerates run by families. These corporations are modeled on the zaibatsus Kishi wooed to invest in Manchuria. Samsung, Hyundai, LG and a small handful of other corporations are the current backbone of the Korean economy. Like the zaibatsus, these businesses have diverse holdings that cater to needs across Korean societies. While you may know Samsung for their exploding smartphones, they also sell fire insurance to cover any incidents related to those phones, and own a medical center to treat any burns you could have received from their phones. The dominance of these chaebols across such diverse industries is a direct result of economic stimulation undertaken by the Park regime.  

But what makes this policy militaristic? Park Chung-hee favored businesses with clear strategic value, such as energy and industrial production, but the true militarism of Park Chung-hee’s regime came from his use of the military to legitimize the government and their policies. Nobosuke Kishi used private capital to direct the military, while Park Chung-hee used the military to direct private capital. Park Chung-hee brought an officer’s discipline to his governing style, frequently inspecting construction projects and demanding exact deadlines and progress reports. A diplomatic cable from the United States described Park’s leadership as “that of a general who desires that his orders be carried out without being subjected to the process of political debate.” In his personal life, Park Chung-hee lived modestly and apparently put a brick in his toilet to conserve water. In contrast to the infamously corrupt Nobosuke Kishi, Park Chung-hee refused the bribes or embezzlement that typically cushioned any military salary while stationed in Manchuria.

Park Chung-hee in Uniform. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

These anecdotes of thrift and discipline were not the only militarist aspects of Park Chung-hee’s regime. The military and intelligence services committed brutal crackdowns of dissenters and critics, one notable case being the kidnapping of a major opposition leader who had been hiding in Japan. In military prisons, Park’s cronies would chain their political enemies over fire pits or stage mysterious accidents to kill opposition politicians. Even in these vicious tactics of political suppression, there remained a kind of discipline to their actions. Under Park, the typical sadism of dictatorial regimes was focused and directed. This in no way mitigates the human rights violations and objectively evil actions that he approved of, but I still feel this distinction is crucial. This surgical methodology was another lesson that Park took from his time in Manchuria.

In Manchuria, Park witnessed the depraved violence under the Japanese as hedonistic businessmen dictated military policy. Even the policy of sexual enslavement by the Japanese can be traced to the consumptive mindset of the private firms that Nobosuke Kishi brought into the region. The forced labor polices in Manchuria were a result of Kasha's racism, and this same racism encouraged the sexual entitlement of the Japanese towards the Chinese and Koreans. Park learned from these unregulated acts of exploitation and flipped Kishi’s machine upside down. In South Korea, the military would control business, not the other way around.

For both of these men, the Manchukuo experiment would be centered on themes of militarism and capitalism, and which force would lead the other. Northeastern China is a rich in natural resources, which generates an understandable focus on industrial production. For both of these men, the state was to function as a rational, capitalist agent. Legitimacy was derived from the material production of the economy, and it was the duty of the state to grow wealth and ensure that wealth was protected and invested. But the rationality of these two men was countered by an equally effective, irrational style of production. On the opposite side of the colonization, in the communist resistance, a young Korean man began to appreciate the value of symbolic victories over material ones. The state did not need to produce material value, but could instead produce imagination. This young man was Kim Il-sung, and though his experiences in Manchukuo are a vital piece of his story, but they were never as significant as the subsequent fictions he crafted around them.

Kim Il-sung shrouded much of his personal history in shadows, but here are the established facts of his life. He was born in 1912, the same year that 52,000 Koreans were arrested by the Japanese for politic activities. He was the son of a patriotic peasant family, and his parents were committed opponents of the Japanese colonization of Korea. Like many Koreans, they came to Manchuria for economic opportunities but also by the opportunities to join the anti-colonial movement there. In lawless Manchuria, a diverse coalition of communists and bandits from both China and Korea were mounting a bitter resistance movement to the Japanese. Kim Il-sung would receive some formal education in China but his true learning would be on the battlefield.  

Image Courtesy of Wikimedia

When he became a guerilla fighter in 1926, Kim Il-sung joined a cosmopolitan army. The communists were the leading resistance fighters in Manchuria, a fact that can be credited to their support from Comintern, the Soviet organization devoted to the agitating communist revolt across the globe. The Chinese Communist Party began as a small group of academics and students, but arms and monetary support from Comintern shaped them into a dangerous political force. Though Manchurian annexation pitted Chinese against Japanese, this conflict must be recognized as multi-national, not bilateral. The Soviets backed the Chinese communists, who fought the Japanese, while both sides bolstered their ranks with Koreans. In this pyramid of conflict, a Korean like Kim Il-sung comes off as an insignificant character pulled around by larger powers.

The brilliance of Kim Il-sung was that he portrayed his years in Manchuria as a patriotic Korean struggle. North Korean propaganda reversed the pyramid, giving himself a commanding role in the fight against Japan. Kim owed most of his rise to power to intervention from China or the Soviet Union, but he succeeded in turning his cosmopolitan identity into a purely Korean one. As I will try to demonstrate, while fighting the Japanese, Kim fought on behalf of the Chinese, not the Koreans.

Kim Il-sung was an undeniably effective guerilla fighter. After joining the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1931, his unit of Korean and Chinese fighters proved to be a thorn in the side of the Japanese. Within years the Japanese had a price on his head and he switched his birth name, Kim Song-ju, to Kim Il-sung. Ironically, it was the Japanese efforts to combat Koreans that brought Park Chung-hee to Manchuria. It is almost impossible that Park Chung-hee and Kim Il-sung ever faced each other directly, but they were all pulled into an orbit around Communist resistance to Nobosuke Kishi’s tyranny in Manchukuo. You might think there was a literary quality to this struggle, where hyper-capitalist militaries and cosmopolitan communists duked it out the Wild West of East Asia. Well, you wouldn’t be the only one who saw the literary potential of this drama.

With the Century, the autobiography of Kim Il-Sung, is one of the most beloved books in North Korea. This seems a silly claim, since there is probably a very short list to choose from of favorite North Korean books, and the Dear Leader probably wrote most, but With the Century recognized as having genuine literary merits. A professor of mine here said that, despite its propagandistic qualities, the book is beautifully written. In this autobiography, we see the meteoric rise of a poor farm boy who discovers communism at age thirteen and devotes his life to creating a utopian state. With the Century is a crucial piece of the massive historical project that North Korea has engaged in. Not only are these efforts to control the history of the Korean peninsula, but also the history of a single man. Kim Il-sung grew up in China, was a member of a Chinese anticolonial movement, and later fled to the Soviet Union, who facilitated his ultimate rise to power during their occupation of the northern half of Korea. With the Century and the propaganda effort it is a part of flips the relationship between a man and his times. Kim Il-sing is not considered in the context of the wars he fought in, but those wars and foreign affairs are re-contextualized into his celestial path towards the throne of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Kim Il-sung with his family in the Soviet Union. Image Courtesy of Alpha History

I believe that Kim Il-sung learned this lesson of recreating history almost accidentally, when one of his strikes against the Manchukuo state was absorbed into a context of Korean independence. As the campaign against communist guerillas intensified, the Japanese ironically created one of the most important moments in the imagined history of Kim Il-sung. In 1937, the Japanese had been brutally suppressing Kim Il-Sung and his communist allies and the young revolutionary was growing desperate for a victory. In typical warfare, such a victory would have seemed unlikely, given that Kim Il-sung was running an amateur operation when compared to the professional Japanese military. However, in guerilla warfare, symbolic victories are just as important as tactical ones. Reminding the people that you can harass and injure the enemy is just as important as dealing a truly significant blow against him. For Kim Il-sung, an attack in Korea, deep behind enemy lines, was just the tonic to reinvigorate his cause. It is unclear why he chose the Pochonbo Police Station, located in the northwestern side of Korea, but this attack would become a defining moment in both Kim Il-Sung and North Korea’s history.

North Korean histories contextualized the attack on the Pochonbo Police Station as a challenge to Japanese dominance in Korea, but this assessment is backwards. Korea provided soldiers for both sides in Manchuria, but the industrial and tactical infrastructure located in Korea exclusively served the Japanese military. By striking in the Korean peninsula, Kim Il-sung was undermining the Japanese in Manchuria. It was a symbolic attack intended to show, in the words of Kim Il-sung “that imperialist Japan could be smashed and burnt up like rubbish.” Kim would also claim that the Pochonbo Attack created a nationalist spirit amongst Koreans, and while this may have been true, this was an unintentional result. The Pochonbo was a battle of the Manchurian Pacification campaign, not the start of a Korean resistance movement.

Some South Korean academics would later accuse Kim Il-sung of being an imposter planted by the Soviet Union. The Japanese had killed the real Kim Il-sung, they claimed, and the Soviet Union had trained a replacement to rule North Korea on their behalf. It was a theory intended to discredit Kim Il-sung and it is completely false. But this propaganda effort touches at something deeper in the North and South Korean psyche: how does each side reconcile the legacy of Kim Il-sung? To the South, he has a better record as a patriot and colonial resistor than most of their leaders have had. Most of South Korea’s elites today are the children and grandchildren of collaborators. In the face of atrocities such as the comfort women and the systemic annihilation of Korean pride, the families of the elites instead searched for profit and status. If Kim Il-sung was an imposter, the South can separate current ideological divides from the historical record; Kim Il-sung becomes a hero for the whole Korean peninsula, rather than just a hero for the North. Rather than acknowledge his turn toward communism and their own compliance with the Japanese, it becomes easier to create a fiction of a brave Korean whose identity was appropriated by the Soviet Union.

North Koreans pay homage to Kim Il-sung. Image courtesy of The Guardia.

 For North Korea, the historical revisionism around Kim Il-sung has created an imposter of sorts. The man who lived most of his life in Manchuria, fought the Japanese alongside Chinese communists, and retreated to the Soviet Union, was reimagined as a Korean nationalist. With the Century creates a narrative of Kim Il-sung’s destined rise to free the Korean peninsula and establish a communist utopia. Kim Il-sung was a cosmopolitan guerilla, engaging in an international conflict in which Korea was a secondary player. The imposter Kim Il-sung is not found in the presidential cemetery but instead lives in the North Korean history books. Kim Il-sung was acutely aware of the significance of his years fighting in Manchuria, and knew that he must own that significance rather than let his rivals dictate it. He constructed a propaganda machine that traveled through history, revising the story of his life.

Kim Il-sung is technically still the “Eternal President” of North Korea. His son and grandson have inherited the functions of leadership, but he remains the spiritual source of government legitimacy. North Korean propaganda antics are ridiculed across the world, but we should be wary to discount their potency. While claims about Kim Jon-il’s record-breaking golf game merit some chuckles, the deification of Kim Il-sung represents a much more insidious form of social control. In my last post, I wrote about the power of history in dictating collective thought in a nation. The reimagining of Kim Il-sung’s Manchuria exploits is only the tip of the iceberg in North Korean propaganda around him, but it is a foundational piece to his cult-of-personality. Kim Il-sung’s Manchuria lesson was the power of his own historical narrative to create a national identity that posited him as the hero and role model for his nation.

Manchuria is a crucible for 20^th century East Asian history. In this Wild West, the Japanese performed an imperialist project that exploited people and resources alike. The racism and greed of Nobusuke Kishi inclficted forced labor, drug trafficking, and systematized sexual assault on the Chinese people. These atrocities were a necessary piece of his “Manchukuo experiment” that subjugated the military to private businesses. Park Chung-hee observed this experiment, recognizing the potential of Kishi’s state-run capitalism but disturbed by the second-tier place of Japan’s military. After seizing power in South Korea, Park Chung-hee inverted the combination that Kishi devised and the military dominated business interests. Both Kishi and Park Chung-hee tinkered with their respective military-industrial complexes and Kim Il-sung responded not by out-producing these societies materially. Drawing from his experiences as a guerilla in Manchuria, Kim Il-sung instead created symbolic victories and fictionalized his life story. He assimilated the history of North Korea into the history of his own life. The philosophies for each of these three leaders would become state policy, embroiling East Asia into their personal conflict. 
Thank you all for taking the time to read this post! It has been a busy month for me here at Yonsei University, and I am sorry it took so long to produce. The story of these three men is not over yet, and I look forward to sharing more with you about them and their descendants. With just a couple months left in Seoul, I am trying to soak up as many experiences as I can, and I will try to bring many of those to this blog once I finish this detour into history. In the meantime, I would love to hear any thoughts, opinions, questions, or feedback you have on this post. Thanks! 

Sources

http://apjjf.org/-Seungsook-Moon/3140/article.html - “The Cultural Politics of Remembering Park Chung Hee

Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion (Summary provided by University of Pennsylvania) http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14203.html

The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History by Don Oberdorfer 

Korea, Old and New: A History by Carter J. Ecker, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson, and Edward W. Wagner

Who's Afraid of a Little Ethno-Nationalism?

Quick Update: I am sorry for the late post. If you received the link to this blog in my initial email, you know that I was hoping to post about every week, but this post is coming in well over a week behind schedule. Last week was Korean Thanksgiving and classes were canceled, so I went to the southern city of Busan for the holiday with a couple friends. It was a great time, and there is a good chance that I will be back there in a couple weeks for the Busan International Film Festival. I am sorry that I was not able to post, but hopefully this entry can make up for it. I will try to maintain a more regular schedule of posting in the coming weeks.

Courses have been in going on for about three weeks now, and I have been enjoying them quite a bit. University-sized classes are certainly a curveball for me, but the topics are interesting and the professors really know their shit. I am even more impressed that said shit is being communicated to me in their second language. My class experience deserves its own post since communicating across languages, cultures, and the pedagogy differences between Kalamazoo and this university is all worth exploring. But for now we can leave it at this: Classes are good and I am learning a great deal.

One of my classes, PreModern Korean history, is proving extremely interesting for me and so far has only covered different schools of history in Korea. Now that may only sound interesting to me because I am a history major, but I assure that this is a topic of astronomical importance. – “He who controls the past controls the present, he who controls the present…” – and all that 1984 jazz. Orwell was right to use the word control. By declaring the parameters of how one studies history, you’ve won the argument before it has even started. Limit the ways people examine past events so they inevitably get the answer you want, and you control how people identify themselves, their nation, and others around them. Think about how much effort Bill O’Reilly has been putting into history (Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, and his forthcoming Killing Nemo), and you get a sense of how influential history can be. The Korean peninsula has hosted several schools of history, but only three have been endorsed by the state.  

The first of these schools is Confucian history, which granted the elite members of medieval society a great deal of power. Confucianism handles history in a very functional way, akin to an instruction manual on how to lead. As new kingdoms were overthrown, the usurpers rushed to publish historical tracts proving that the previous rulers were poor leaders who did not demonstrate effective leadership. Along with providing lessons for future rulers wishing to prevent their usurpation, these texts had excellent value as propaganda against the previous rulers. Because Confucian history imparts distinctly Chinese values, it guarantees social and cultural capital to those with the means to study Chinese philosophy and language. Perhaps it was this unequal distribution of power and devotion to ancient philosophy that made Korea so easy for the Japanese to conquer?

Whatever the reason, the Confucian scholars found themselves out of a job as the Japanese colonizers started rewriting the history books for their own benefit in the early twentieth century. The guiding principle of Japanese Colonial history was that Korea was a backwards nation that was incapable of developing without the outside help of other nations. Thus, Japan’s shameless land grab was actually for the Korean’s own good and should not be questioned under any circumstances. Bit of a “White Man’s Samurai’s Burden”, eh? But I shouldn’t be flippant about this. Japanese colonization was brutal, particularly once WWII began, and to convince a population that they might actual deserve such treatment? Nasty business. But in the midst of this intellectual oppression would emerge a school of history potent enough to challenge the Japanese Empire and define Korean identity even today.

This was Minjok, or National History, developed by Sin Ch’aeho, a kind of rogue thinker that found himself repeatedly thrown in prison for founding reading groups and publishing criticisms of the Japanese Empire (he has become quite the role model for me). Sin Ch’aeho proved brilliant at subverting the theories that the Japanese used to justify invading Korea and the means by which they were spread. Japan builds a large print and media industry to spread Japanese propaganda? Sin Ch’aeho and his pals slip some anti-colonial works in there and spread them to the masses. Japan claims that Koreans are a backwards people? They still group them into a single society, and here lies the greatest mistake that Japan could have made, and which Sin Ch’aeho eagerly capitalized on.

See, what sets Minjok apart from other schools is that there had never before been a clearly defined “Korean identity.” There was certainly overlap between the different kingdoms the peninsula had seen over the last two millennium, but they were constrained to their geographic and temporal space. Living in the Choseon Kingdom (1392-1897), you would be more likely to call yourself a Choseonite than a “Korean”.  Sin Ch’aeho challenged this by asserting that all Koreans were descended from Tan’gun, a mythical figure that was the offspring of a god and female bear. He reminds me of Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome who found time to kill his brother in between suckling milk from their surrogate wolf mother. Through Minjok history, the subject was not the different kingdoms and their Confucian scholars, but the descendants of Tan’gun.

This identification of a Korean ethnicity had massive implications. Minjok history proved deeply unifying for Korea, and both the North and South still consider Sin Ch’aeho a national hero, his legacy transcending the 38^th parallel. As part of their absurdist foreign policy, North Korea recently claimed to discover the bones of Tan’gunn and constructed a massive shrine at the sight. Many Koreans consider their peninsula to be a single nation that has been divided between camps, but which will eventfully be reunified. Minjok is a crucial source for this belief that all Koreans are brothers and sisters that can one day live in piece. In fact, it may be the only shot the world has at ending possibly the single tensest point of geopolitics. Korean ethno-nationalism has undeniably enabled some wonderful things in Korea.

Yes, make no mistake of it, ethno-nationalism lies at the heart of current interpretations of Minjok. Sin Ch’aeho later had an anarchist streak that contradicted some of his early work, but this fact is largely ignored in Korea. As Minjok is understood today, the unifying factor in medieval Korean kingdoms, anti-colonial movements, and the current regimes is race. Ethno-nationalism has become quite the buzzword in the United States, as Donald Trump and his Alt-Right cronies are bringing it into the mainstream. While proving beneficial in the Korean context of anti-colonialism, connecting race and citizenry is scary stuff. Populations are on the move, globalization is rocketing us into one another, and modern nations are obligated to make room for diverse citizenry. As someone who grew up in liberal America, ethno-nationalism triggers an ideological gag-reflex.

But that is the big picture take on Korean nationalism that I pick up in the classroom. Ultimately, my impressions of this country are created through smaller-scale, personal interactions. I have a friend here who is loosely Korean-American (he’s mostly lived in the US, but his parents are missionaries and he has called both Singapore and Japan his home for a number of years). We’ve had a variety of interactions where vendors will hear him speak Korean, realize that he doesn’t speak it well enough to have grown up here, and ask him if he is a “displaced Korean.” I asked him if he feels displaced, and he responded, “only when someone tells me that I am.”

This friend is far from the only “displaced” Korean studying at Yonsei. I couldn’t estimate the percentage, but I have met at least a couple dozen Korean-Americans in the month I have been here. For many of them, this isn’t their first time in Korea, and they have family located in the area. This is a wonderfully new take on study abroad for me. As you can surmise from my last post, I conceptualize study abroad as a willful embrace of the completely foreign. I had a couple of friends who spent the recent Korean Thanksgiving break with relatives that live here, and at least two of them have grandparents in Seoul. There are many experiences that I can share with these friends, but we ultimately occupy very different positions here in Korea. While I am the foreigner approaching with fresh eyes, they are, to many Koreans, the displaced brethren returning home. Ethnic-nationalism has given my Korean-American friends a sense of belonging. My own time here is only enhanced by the diversity of experiences around me, so I am pleased by the folks who have found a sense of home in a place that reminds me very little of mine. All the same, this remains a massive issue, so let’s look at it from the largest political entity I regularly interact with here: Yonsei University.

Universities are a diplomatic space. I first had a hint of this when I stumbled into a conference on the Chinese film industry at the University of Minnesota. Watching academics from around the world discuss this film and the regional politics impacting it, I felt something deeper happening. Professors delivered lectures on anything from gender relations in China to international relations between East Asia and Europe. If a single one of those ideas is suitably sexy enough to find its way into the mainstream discourse of China or the United States, then that conference will have developed a new strain of thought in the world. While my fellow exchange students and I are not academics concocting radical theories, this university will undoubtedly influence our worldview.

Their efforts will not be wasted. If you are studying abroad, it means you have an education and that your family has at least some spare change between the couch cushions. Those facts alone make the students here better off than most of the human race in terms of financial potential and influence. I’ve covered this in more depth on my last post, but university study-abroad efforts deserve as much scrutiny as their faculty, teaching philosophy, or endowment spending. With each of these distinct components, the university puts forward a defined political message into the world that is transmitted through the students.

How do I see ethno-nationalism affecting that message? I can’t give a clear answer, but I do not believe that collecting the Korean diaspora is not an explicit goal of the university. This speaks, perhaps, to how ingrained Korean ethno-nationalism is. Korean-American students in my class are not treated any differently, and the fact they have family around seems to be taken for granted. Students are beckoned back to Korea through other means – encouragement from family, loyalty towards the peninsula, or the siren lure of K-Pop – but not by Yonsei, which is busier pulling in foreigners like myself.

 This marks the second post in which I make Yonsei sound like a brainwashing institute managed by the Sith. I cannot stress enough that I believe this school has a genuine commitment to making the world a better place. Personal epiphanies about the institutional machinations have shaken me up somewhat, and I am still reeling from the ways that both this place and Kalamazoo College have influenced me. Both places will have me made a better person by the time I leave them, but all the same, nobody likes the feeling they are being manipulated. At the very least, I can take comfort in the fact that Yonsei University is not actively promoting Korean ethno-nationalism.

But neither is Yonsei making any particular effort to dismantle it. Migrant rights are a major issue for me. I believe that if you take the tremendous personal effort to move to a new place, and that you are willing to work hard and follow the local rules, than by God you deserve a place there. Knowing that a Korean-American who has never been here could feel more at home then a Chinese laborer who has slaved away in a dead-end job for years is troubling. I have no idea what this school could do to reject the bonds of race and citizenship in Korea, but perhaps courses like my Premodern History one are a start. Sin Ch’aeho extensively identified the flaws of Japanese Colonial history before responding to them. You must find the constraints on your thoughts before you have any chance of escaping them.

While ethno-nationalism inevitably generates prejudice and violence, I think that my daily interactions with it here are largely harmless. It’s a wonderful experience to see students who are already familiar with where they study abroad, and it acts as a fresh perspective to my self-centered assumptions that Korea must be alien to be authentic. It isn’t my place to tell Korea “how they ought to be,” and this blog has no chance of changing any minds here. There are factors so much larger than myself at play– the colonial resistance to Japan, the legend of Tan’gun, and the dream of a unified Korea, all stemming from a particular brand of historiography. So show some caution the next time you read about history, and never let anyone tell you that the field is irrelevant.