nanoomi

The Korea Herald had an article about Francis Schofield, the “34th patriot” involved in the Samil movement, and a conference being held on the 40th anniversary of his death. It was nice to see a photo of him, as I’d only seen one or two smaller ones before:

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The Joongang Ilbo reports on the unveiling of Gwanghwamun, including this quote from President Lee:

“Gwangwhamun was blocked and neglected, and the flow of our national spirit was choked off,” he said, adding, “We incessantly endeavored and struggled for the country’s independence.”

Obviously he (or his speechwriter) thinks that destroying the old Government General Building was a good idea, as it was the first step in unchoking the geomantic axis of energy flowing between Seoul’s major mountains that determined where Gyeongbokgung was built when the city was founded. It seems a bit much to call the lines of energy on which the capital of the Joseon dynsasty was built the “national spirit,” but then I’m no speechwriter.

An article from a week or so ago looked at some of the controversies surrounding Gwanghwamun’s restoration (such as whether the sign should be in Hangeul or Hanja) but had some errors, such as saying that “it had been destroyed by the Japanese” 300 years ago (actually, most of the palaces were destroyed by angry mobs of Koreans who burned slave registers, among other things, after the royal family fled north before the Japanese troops arrived). It also says that:

During the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945), the Japanese moved Gwanghwamun to the east side of the palace to give the new General Government Building a clear view down Sejongno in 1927. In fact, the Japanese tried to destroy the gate outright, but Korean intellectuals successfully petitioned for its preservation.

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A few months ago I stumbled on a book at Yonsei University Library which presented readers with images and maps of Seoul, places to visit, and future plans – all from the 1950s. Or so I think; I forgot to write down the book’s name, and no date was visible.

There are a few clues, however. If you look at the photo above, of Namdaemunno, you can see the Bank of Korea on the left, and the old post office – built in 1916 – on the right (here’s a photo from a similar view taken during the colonial era).

Now, this may be an older photo, taken years before the publication of the book. The reason I say that is because the post office was heavily damaged during the Korean War (it was shelled and burnt out, though its walls still stood intact), and I’m not sure when it was finally demolished (a shame, as it was a beautiful building, but understandable, as reconstruction, not preservation, was the goal of everyone at the time). One little thing I noticed in the photo above are the jeeps.
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A few weeks ago I posted unification posters done by some of my students. In the comments, Ben Wagner noted the similarities between this poster…

…and this colonial era poster calling for 내선일체 (naisen ittai, or ‘Japan and Korea as one body’), which I posted here:

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Yesterday I mentioned Robert Neff’s post at the Marmot’s Hole quoting from (and showing a photo from) a 1958 article about the future covering-up of Cheonggyecheon. At the time I remembered some films from the past featuring the stream, including Homeless Angels (1941), which I wrote about here. In that post, I showed this photo and wrote:

Perhaps the stream above is Cheonggyecheon, but it’s worth remembering that there were dozens of streams in Seoul that were covered up in the 20th century by both the Japanese and Korean governments.

Choi In-kyu, the director, went on to direct several other (less “pro-Japanese”) films before being kidnapped off to North Korea during the Korean War, including “Hurrah for Freedom” (1946), the first DVD put out by the Korean Film Archive. It includes a scene in which the main character, an independence fighter, has rescued his friend from a Japanese police officer (I guess we’re assuming he wasn’t Korean) by stabbing the officer, and flees over (and then under) a bridge crossing Cheonggyecheon. I’m quite certain this is the same bridge (Gwanggyo) seen in the post at the Marmot’s Hole, which is now the second bridge to be seen along the restored stream when walking from its source. Thanks to panorama software and a screenshots of a pan across the bridge, we can see almost the full length of the bridge.

Here’s a shot of what it looked like underneath:

What really prompted me to post these was a comment by Sperwer at the Marmot’s Hole mentioning the fact that Obaltan, (The Aimless Bullet), a 1961 film by Yu Hyeon-mok considered a classic today, features a scene in which one of the main characters flees the police after a robbery by running through Cheonggyecheon – under the then-ongoing construction which was covering the stream:

(Due to it being a panorama made from screenshots taken from a pan, both people seen above are the same person)

Very cool. I watched the film when the DVD came out back in 2002, but did not know anything about Cheonggyecheon at the time (it was later that year that it became mentioned more often in the English-language press), so it was fascinating to watch it again, knowing where this scene took place.

http://populargusts.blogspot.com/2010/05/cheonggyecheon-in-films.html

A worthwhile article by Robert Neff appeared in the Korea Times the other day about Ernest Bethell, who published English and Korean-language newspapers which openly challenged and criticized the Japanese rule of Korea 100 years ago. While I thought I’d read a fair amount about Bethell in the past, Neff (as always) digs up information I hadn’t come across before.

While I knew that he had been sent to Korea from Japan to cover the Russo Japanese War (like these journalists) and had been let go because Japanese control of information in Korea made their international press releases more informative than reports from most journalists in the field, I hadn’t known this:

Bethell insisted that he was dismissed for another reason. “My instructions from the Chronicle were that the policy of the paper was pro-Japanese and I was told that my correspondence would have to fit in with that policy.”

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Yi Kwang-su (Photo from here.)

Last week Andre Lankov wrote an interesting piece in the Korea Times about the life of Yi Kwang-su, which got me interested in him, not because of his novels or literary criticism, but more because I’d been reading Gi-wook Shin’s Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, which discusses his influence on Korean nationalism. The way the Korean nation is perceived today has been influenced especially by two people: Shin Chae-ho and Yi Kwang-su.

As described in Andre Schmid’s book Korea Between Empires 1895-1919 (and also in Henry Em’s essay “Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct: Shin Ch’ae-ho’s Historiography” in Colonial Modernity in Korea), Shin Chae-ho’s most influential work was the essay “Toksa Sillon,” or “A New Reading of History,” which was first published in 1908. In it Shin was the first to take the relatively new concept of “minjok” (see Henry Em’s essay) and combine it with Dangun, the mythological precursor of the Korean people via the Jokpo, or family genealogical record. Ignoring court-based histories and the previous attention paid to Kija (the Chinese sage who founded an early Korean kingdom and provided a link to China when it was the center of the east Asian world), Shin made the minjok, the ethnic nation, the subject of his history, which allowed him to connect Korea to the greatness of Goguryeo (and a time when “Korea” included a great deal of Manchuria) and Dangun. Shin’s essay was incredibly influential, and though it should be noted that though his use of genealogical concepts made a “bloodline” implicit, Schmid makes no mention of Shin explicitly utilizing that idea. To be sure, Shin saw the nation in an organic manner, with his worldview influenced by Social Darwinism. It was Yi Kwang-su, however, who would contribute (or at least popularize) other ideas to fine-tune Shin’s concept into one that endures up to the present.

As Lankov notes, “Yi was born in 1892, in what is now North Korea. He was 10 years old when his parents died, but the village community took care of him as he had already become viewed by his fellow villagers as a local prodigy.”

Beong-cheon Yu’s book Han Yong-un & Yi Kwang-su: Two Pioneers of Modern Korean Literature says that Yi was taken in by the Dongak movement, while Lankov describes it as the Cheondogyo sect. At any rate, “It was sect leaders who provided Yi with a scholarship to study in Japan where he went in 1905. In Tokyo, he acquired a native fluency in Japanese. Indeed, Japanese, not Korean, was the language he used in his first fiction writings.” Yi also learned English there, and in the 1930s was described as being able to speak “beautiful English.”

There he became acquainted with Western writers, and especially respected Tolstoy. According to Yu, in 1910 he returned to Korea, to his hometown of Osan (in northern Korea), and became a teacher (and also got married). He later had a falling out with the religious officials who took over the school, and wandered around northeast Asia for several years, visiting Shanghai, Vladivostok, Manchuria and Chiba in Siberia. His planned trip to San Francisco was made impossible by World War I, and he moved back to Japan and enrolled in Waseda University. There he wrote many essays, especially about literature, and became famous when his book Mujeong (“Heartlessness”) was serialized in 1917 in the Maeil Sinbo (formerly Ernest Bethell’s Daehan Maeil Sinbo, which was secretly bought by the Japanese and published from 1910-1944, and the only vernacular Korean newspaper published by the Japanese authorities from 1910 to 1920, and 1940 to 1944). Mujeong is considered the first modern Korean novel, and made Yi a celebrity (and hated by some critics) overnight. (It’s reviewed here.) He also caused a scandal when the woman about to become Korea’s first doctor, Heo Yeong-suk, nursed him back to health after his first bout with tuberculosis and he divorced his wife to elope with Heo to Peking. [Yu, 88-91]

Yi’s non-fiction writing focused on the purpose of literature in Korea and its relationship with the Korean nation, making it clear that nationalism influenced his way of seeing the world. Michael D. Shin’s essay “Interior Landscapes and Modern Literature,” from Colonial Modernity in Korea, discusses and quotes from some of his essays, especially “What is Literature?” (1916), Korea’s first example of modern literary criticism. In it he views munhak, or literature, in a different way than in the past because of jeong “which he uses to describe a wide range of emotions.” Shin notes Yi’s assertion that “in the past emotion had been ignored because “humanity did not have a clear conception of individuality (gaeseong).” Shin describes Yi writing that “although the human mind consists of three factors – knowledge (chi) emotion (jeong) and will (eui) – people in the past “regarded jeong as lowly and considered only knowledge and will important.” [...] “The thoughts and emotions of the Choson people were restricted by an intolerant moral code for around five hundred years after the founding of the Yi dynasty.” [p. 256]

See the rest of the post here.

From Gusts of Popular Feeling.