[KS] History, colonial and otherwise

[Richard C. Miller]

REPLY sends your message to the whole list
__________________________________________

Greetings, all.

There are a couple of points I think we would do well to keep in mind when
considering these issues of Korean colonial history. First of all, we need
to make some sort of distinction between the past (what happened) and
history (the narrative we construct about the past). There are many ways to
construct historical narratives, all of which are constructed in keeping
with the historian's concrete experience of the past as reflected upon in
the present--and I'm including the grandmothers who unravel their memories
as historians here. Kushibo and Henny have already pointed out that postwar
Korean historians have had reasons for painting the Japanese as the eternal
evil that have everything to do with contemporary domestic politics and
nothing to do with "objective" history. However, these contemporary
domestic needs color every aspect of the presentation history, not just
those currently considered controversial. History, as a practice, is a
subject, not an object.

For example, writing (in English, anyway) in 1962 in a brief history of
Korea, Ha Tae-Hung described the kingdom of Paekchae, 5th-7th centuries, as
"patriotic citizens" who were "unwilling to live under the Chinese yoke."
He also refers to the Wa people as "the Japanese Navy." If we remove the
anachronisms from these two sentences, as perhaps we might be tempted to do
in a fit of "objectivity," we are left with the words "to" and "the," and
not much else. But when we do that, we lose the overall thrust of Korean
history, in the eyes of Ha Tae-Hung: the continual struggle of a
primordially unified people (he begins the history with, of course, the
bear myth) in the face of Chinese and Japanese colonialism.

Han Woo-keun, writing in 1971 (in Korean, but also translated into
English), goes to more effort to show the complexity of the conflicts of
the same period, noting that China at the time was itself split into
multiple countries (the Northern and Southern Dynasties), and that the
various Korean kingdoms, while bring a measure of unity to the "tribes" on
the penninsula, also engaged in "large-scale military conflict and the
political maneuvering and treachery that went with it." For him, Korean
unity was not primordial at all, but came about through shared political
and military conflict, much of it between Korean polities and not between a
unified Korea and unified foreign nations.

To me, Ha Tae-Hung's account seems overly simplistic and transparently
nationalistic, while Han Woo-keun's account seems more "objective." Han
Woo-keun's construction of fragmented Korean and Chinese polities that
achieved unity almost in spite all of their efforts to the contrary strikes
a chord with me--this is how I see events unfolding today, and not just in
Korea. But this fit with my perceptions is purely circumstantial, since I
was hardly either the writer or the intended audience of his work. Many
other people, perhaps fired by the romantic narrative of the struggle of
the Korean people for freedom, would find his account unpersuasively
wishy-washy, focusing on details to the detriment of the larger picture. So
it is difficult for me to escape the conclusion that "objectivity" is at
bottom a "subjective" position.

For me, the task in reading history is not to look for the one point of
view that will present the facts as they really occurred, but rather, on
the assumption that history is a narrative that we construct about the
present, to read many points of view against each other and try to
understand them in the contexts they provide each other. After all, during
the colonial period there were Korean collaborators as well as victims,
Koreans who did better than they perhaps would have had the Yi system
continued as well as those who lost everything. There were Japanese on all
sides as well, not to mention all the other foreigners involved--remember,
the Japanese fought two wars on and around the penninsula before annexing
Korea, and neither of them was with Koreans. (There's also that matter of
the Korean battle flag that was a recent subject on this list...it's not
residing in Tokyo, is it?) If the goal of reading history is to develop an
understanding, rather than to justify praise or condemnation, this, I
think, is the appropriate strategy.

Richard
--Richard C. Miller
--UW School of Music
--Manado, Indonesia
--rcmiller at students.wisc.edu
  http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~rcmiller/