Korean Studies Internet Discussion List KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
Hildi Kang, Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2001. 166 pages, xviii. ISBN 0-8014-3854-3. Cloth 25.00.
Reviewed by Mark Caprio
Rikkyo University, TokyoHildi Kang developed the idea to write Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea while listening to her Korean father-in-law tell stories of his experiences during the period of Japanese occupation. Missing from these memories were the accounts of Japanese atrocities preserved in the "passionate stories of martyrs" that she had come to expect. In conducting the research that culminated into her book, Kang came to realize that "under the shade cast by the Japanese presence, some people, some of the time, led close to normal lives" (p. 21). The recollections that she collected contribute an essential (but to date neglected) ingredient to our understanding of Korea's colonial history. Their contents disturb the neat package that pits the colonizing (Japanese) aggressor against the colonized (Korean) victim.
Under the Black Umbrella is essentially a volume compiled from a collection of authors - fifty-one to be exact. Kang's contacts also tell stories that they heard from parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents and thus enable her readers to gain a sense of Korean life before annexation as well. Kang's interview style appears informal: rather than preparing a list of questions she left the direction of the discussion to her informants. In addition to providing personal insights to newsworthy events, such as the 1919 March First Movement, their memories allow us a glimpse of the mundane: daily Korean-Japanese interactions, work experiences, income and expenses, and overseas travel. Attitudes that the Korean harbored toward their Japanese subjugators, both negative and positive, embroider the tapestry Kang weaves of the everyday life that many residing on the peninsula endured over this period.
To date the majority of English language accounts by Koreans of their lives during the thirty-six years of colonial rule have been written by individuals committed to exposing the atrocities committed by the Japanese. Their stories tell of patriotic efforts trampled by the heavy foot of the omnipresent colonizer, an oppression that forced many of these writers to flee their country. Two of the more popular accounts of this genre are Richard Kim's Lost Names and Peter Hyun's Man Sei!. Earlier, Louise Yim (My Forty Year Fight for Korea) and Induk Park (September Monkey) introduced us to the lives of female participants in the March First Movement. More recently painful first-hand recollections of the plight that the comfort women faced in the latter part of this history have added a valuable (albeit terribly sad) dimension to our understanding of this period. Other second-hand scholarly accounts that have incorporated discussion of Korean daily life include Carter Eckert's Offspring of Empire and Soon-won Park's Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea. Kang's work represents the first book written in English devoted specifically to the oral histories of a wide variety of ordinary Koreans under Japanese rule.
The stories contained in Under the Black Umbrella complicate not only the neat picture of colonial life in Korea but colonial situations more generally. The multiple voices that Kang amplifies reflect the Japanese arrogance and brutality found in the majority of portrayals of this period. They also append positive experiences, however, including the kindness and respect that a number of Japanese extended toward the Korean. We can expect that the majority of the people residing on the Korean peninsula during the Japanese occupation would identify with the response that Kang commonly heard when she asked her informants to talk about their experiences: "nothing much happened to me." Indeed, she had to discard a number of her interviews because the informant apparently had nothing extraordinary to relate.
Those who felt their stories worth preserving, though, offered experiences from both extremes: some endured terrible hardships and repression at the hands of the Japanese resident in Korea while others remember this encounter in more positive terms. Watching a Japanese inspector force a farmer to eat the worms that inhabited his grass roof left Chông T'ae'ik with a bitter impression of the colonizers (p. 104). The help and advice that Hong Ûlsu received from his yakuza (Japanese gangster) boss encouraged the businessman through to his graduation from Tokyo's Aoyama University in 1932 (pp. 31-2). It was not always the Japanese who left them their most bitter memories. Yi Hajôn, for example, complained that it was the Korean prison staff members who tortured him (p. 91). Clever Koreans, reported Hong Ûlsu, participated in robbing their fellow countrymen of their land, as well (pp. 12-3).
These oral histories are especially helpful in adding to our understanding of Korean participation in Japanese institutions. Statistics of Korean participation in these institutions were used by the Japanese to demonstrate the success of their assimilation policies. Kang's informants interject doubt into such a conclusion. Many remember their participation as stimulated by a desire for personal gain; others felt compelled to cooperate. Kim P. (anonymous) reported that she used her father's employment and connections to secure entrance into a better (predominately Japanese expatriate) school. Kang Pyôngju remembered the Japanese "child-catchers" patrolling neighborhoods to "round up children and force them to attend primary school," although education was voluntary at the time (p. 51). His attendance in a Japanese-administered school was decided after his Korean teacher was shot in the leg during the March First Movement. His father, a doctor, had to formally enroll his son in school before he was allowed to administer aid to the injured man (p. 52).
Nor were Korean visits to Japanese Shinto shrines always undertaken to demonstrate acceptance of Japanese assimilation policies. Informants remember these visits for reasons other than their respect for Japanese deities. Yi Okpum recalls the visits as necessary for survival: the shrine served as the distribution center for food ration tickets (p. 113). Yi Okhyôn, and other Koreans on Japanese police black lists, took part in Shinto ceremonies to avoid endangering their already fragile existence (p. 114). Ch'u Pongye recalls the beautiful view from the shrine site that overlooked the city of Pusan as ideal for her picnics (p. 114).
Japanese discrimination against the Korean people is evident from statistics and other second-hand accounts left from the period. Kang's informants offer first-hand experiences of this injustice. Ch'oe P'anbang felt discrimination in his job at the Ministry of Communication: the Japanese got stipends for "hardship assistance" and housing that augmented their already inflated salaries; Koreans were assigned the less popular graveyard shift more frequently than their Japanese counterparts; and the Japanese promoted their kind more readily than the Korean worker (p. 70). Yang Sôngdôk complained that the Japanese received permits to open stores quicker than the Korean merchants did. This advantage placed them in a better position to eliminate any future Korean competition (p. 70). Korean students attending colleges, reports Kang Pyôngju, faced (and insisted on preserving) segregation in all aspects of their lives, from their out-of-school activities to their living arrangements: they did not mix in student committees and resided in dorms segregated by building. Opposition to attempts to mix the two peoples forced plans for integrated rooms to be downgraded to integrated dorms segregated by hall (pp. 53-54).
A number of informants, however, do not recall this time as laden with anti-Korean discrimination. Kim Wôngôk, who worked alongside Japanese on an opium farm, felt that he received equal pay, promotions, and treatment (p. 67) and that he enjoyed a similar experience after being transferred to another job in a different city during the war. His boss, Kim recalls, "looked like a typical Japanese. But he did not talk or act typical," for he criticized his country's "narrow island mentality," likening the Japanese to a "little frog in a little pond." Even more strikingly, Kang Pyôngju was so respected in his village that even the local Japanese police chief would bow to him whenever they passed on the street (p. 59).
Some stories told by Kang's informants reveal encounters on a basic human level that blur the distinctions generally separating Japanese and Korean. The two peoples, united by a shared fate, at times found affinity in their desire to lead a normal life rather than hostility over ethnic differences. One such experience is reported by Kang Sang'uk who recalls exchanging comic books, attending birthday parties, and playing marbles with his Japanese neighbors. He even joined his Japanese friends in poking fun at the Emperor's speeches, although not in public (p. 116). Even people hounded by the Japanese secret police managed to develop a humane relationship with their pursuers. Yu Hyegyông's family fed the detective assigned to watch over her father and eventually they all became good friends. After all, she recalls, "we were all humans" (p. 108).
Hildi Kang's work injects a much neglected human dimension into our understanding of the thirty-six years of Japanese rule in Korea by attaching voices to the statistics, reports, memos, and other documents generally used to recreate Korean-Japanese interactions during this difficult period. She has produced an essential supplement to other works that have appeared on this history, as well as a companion to be read in conjunction with the oral histories of other colonial situations. Those not familiar with Korean colonial history, however, may find the book troublesome. The author does provide a thumbnail sketch of political and social developments at the beginning of each new section of her book, but these summaries only contextualize her informants' recollections; they are not intended as a conclusive history of this period.
Those familiar with this history might question points raised in these brief summaries, such as Kang's periodization of the era. Labeling the 1931-1945 period as the "years of assimilation" without explanation is misleading: in the eyes of the Japanese, assimilation policy characterized the entire period. The last fifteen years represented an intensification of this policy during a wartime situation rather than a change in the way the colony was to be administered. Similarly, Kang simply borrows her figures for casualties of the March First Movement from Lee Ki-baek's well-known A New History of Korea (p. 344), even though he does not cite his sources, rather than referring to the more thorough work of such scholars as Frank Baldwin ("The March First Movement: Korean Challenge and Japanese Response," Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1969, p. 233).
Readers might also find Kang's endnotes frustrating: to use they are limited in number (only 30), and many of them contain careless mistakes in page numbers and misquotations. Kang's bibliography does offer us an adequate list of the essential works published in English on this history, although she neglects Soon Won Park's very informative history of the Onoda Cement Factory mentioned above. Kang readily acknowledges limitations (such as subject selection) in her research methodology that prevent wider conclusions being drawn from her study. Her sampling is limited to Koreans who had accumulated the means to move to the San Francisco Bay Area, and this does not necessarily represent a fair cross-section of Koreans. Furthermore, she has collected accounts in which informants recall events and feelings experienced over a half-century previous. As is the case with oral histories in general, we have no way of knowing the extent to which the period that separates the event from its retelling has dimmed our informants' memories, or the extent to which postwar interpretations of this history have influenced their accounts of this time. These caveats, though, should not distract the reader from the richness of the memories Kang's efforts have preserved. Instead, we should lament the fact that such a project has not been carried out previously, when potential informants were not as distanced from their experiences.
Citation:
Caprio, Mark 2002
Review of Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (2001)
Korean Studies Review 2002, no. 2
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr02-02.htm
Return to Index of Reviews
Return to Entry Page