[KS] Re: Colonial Photography and Women's Bodies

[Josephine.Wright]

Dear Hyung Il, 

I have also noted the phenomenon of exposed flesh, particularly breasts, in colonial and even later photographs of Korean women.  In a book on Cheju women divers in Japanese in the 1980's by Han Lim Hwa, there are several photographs of diving women loading bags of topshell  onto tractors with their wetsuits pulled down to their waists and their breasts exposed. A Korean book about the 1932 Cheju Haenyo's Uprising against the occupying Japanese "Cheju Heanyo's Fight Against Japan Document", by the Memory Project Promotion Committee, the early 20th century photograph on the cover of a lone diver has been re-touched to extend the black cloth of her suit to cover her breasts. The photograph in its original form is reprinted inside the book, with both breast exposed. Later examples also include the photograph inside the cover of Bruce Cumings and Jon Halliday's "Korea: The Unknown War", the caption reading "Women at Taegu army depot watching as their menfolk go off for training in the South Korean Army, summer 1950". A woman who appears to be in her forties or fifties holds some dishes from a meal just finished and her cropped top is unbuttoned and hangs open. It doesn't seem to be the purpose of this photograph to capture her undressed state but rather the expressions on all these women's faces, her naked chest seems incidental to the rest of the action. 

I completed one year of ethnographic field work in a woman divers' village on Cheju in 2000 and 2001. I am completing a PhD dissertation in anthropology on that resaerch at the Australian National University in Canberra. The women in Cheju, like divers in Japan, now wear rubber wetsuits, greatly increasing the time they can stay in the water in both summer and winter, and thereby having a large impact on the ecological and economic conditions they work under.  According to the women I worked with there, prior to the 1980's, when rubber wetsuits began to be imported from Japan (initially via relatives who were divers there), women wore a cotton or linen outfit in either black or white. Frequently these outfits were secured with a strap that ran around beneath both or one breasts, and one over the shoulder leaving one or both breasts exposed. According to several elderly divers, many women did not wear these cotton bathing suits, which they attributed to  changing morality during the Japanese occupation, because sometimes they just did not have one, and they continued to dive naked into the postwar period. Note that "Naked" can often mean scantily dressed rather than not dressed at all, and can therefore refer to having worn those light suits. Occasionally during such discussions,  younger women tried to prevent older women from elaborating on having dived unclad in the past. This is largely due to the fact that Jeju women's public nakedness and exposed flesh while diving has been repeatedly used as a means of denegrating Cheju people as proof that they are backward and underdeveloped. Clearly  Korean moral codes around the body have been greatly  influenced by the Colonial experience and since then, by close contact with the United States through aid and military presence. Similarly, Cheju people's sense of what parts of the female form should be kept hidden has changed in recent years in response to the increasing influence of south Korean national imagery in Jeju. During my research, many women stressed that I should wear both singlet and underwear under my wetsuit so as not to be naked underneath my wetsuit and therefore make my self vulnerable to being called old fashioned (Chon).

On the other hand, the suits may date back much further than the Colonial period. An eighteenth-century Korean Map depicts Cheju women divers at work in the sea and they appear to my eye to be wearing the white cloth outfits that are often ascribed to a much later time. There was considerable contact between Japanese and Cheju divers so it is not surprising that  their technologies were similar.  Also visible are their gourd net floats. According to David Nemeth, who reprinted the detail from the map in his 1987 book The Architecture of Ideology: Neo-Confucian Imprinting on Cheju Island, Korea, the divers are "apparently performing for a temporary encampment of Yi state officials on tour". The map was  published in Yi Son-gun's 1979 edition of the 1702/ T'amna Sullyokdo Namwhan Pangmul /[T'amna Inspection Maps: Various Things Observed in the South], commissioned in 1702 by Yi Hyong-sang. Maps by Kim Nam-kil. Sungnam, Korea: Academy of Korean Studies.

The white cloth diving suits feature in the memory of the 1932 Haenyo uprising against the Japanese. Thousands of women divers marched in the streets of a north-eastern Cheju town wearing their diving outfits as a form of protest against exploitation by Japanese fishing boses and fisheries authorities. Their "nakedness", as it is often called, was intended to shock and offend, indicating that there were significant distinctions in public morality relating to place- between the beach and town as sites for various states of dress and undress.  Rather than firing into the crowd during the demonstration, as the women rocked the governor's car and sang loudly, the police are said to have flicked ink into the crowds of women from their fountain pens. Over the next weeks and months armed police traveled from dive site to dive site executing women who had ink stains on their suits, culminating in massacres on Udo and the deaths of somewhere around five thousand women. 

Finally, in relation to images of Japanese diving women (Ama), a book by Italian filmmaker Fosco Maraini ["The Island of the Fisherwomen" 1962 New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.]  contains many pictures of young women diving that are wearing only a kind of loin cloth and the photographs are indeed very exotic and even pornographic in style. In the text he explains that the older women rather than these teenage girls are the "real divers" but that he specifically asked for younger divers for their potential as photographic subjects. However, there are several unposed photographs of older men and women standing around in groups in the village and several women are wearing clothing only on their lower halves. Men, too, have their chests exposed in these photographs. Clearly in Japan, Korea, and Cheju, meanings and expression around the body have continued to change in response to constantly changing social environments associated with colonialism, nationalism and globalising influences. 

-- 
Josephine Wright
PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
Coombs Extension Rm 2.28
Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia

email: josephine.wright at anu.edu.au
Phone: 61-2-6125 1262

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