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.