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A with a Place in the World:

A Postcolonial Critique of the Imagined of South

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of in the Graduate School of The Ohio University

By Hyeseon Jeong Graduate Program in Geography

The Ohio State University 2014

Dissertation Committee:

Daniel Sui, Advisor Darla Munroe, Advisor Nancy Ettlinger Kendra McSweeney

Copyrighted by

Hyeseon Jeong

2014

Abstract

If are imagined communities, how are they imagined geographically?

This dissertation answers the question by investigating discourses of geographical self- awareness in . Coming out of colonial exploitations of military and moving into the geopolitical economy of the , yearned for a form for their and a place for it in the world. became a principle of geographic knowledge production, which then defined what the Korean nation ought to be in the international context. In the lack of democratic institutional consolidation, nationalism became not only an effective governmentality but also a popular of social movements. Reading theories of nationalism, feminist geography, and postcolonial theory, the dissertation posits that geographical knowledge governs the way the nation is imagined. Specifically, it shows how the discourse of vulnerable has affected the imagination of Korean-ness.

Employing critical discourse analysis of newspapers, speeches, and government documents since liberation, the dissertation investigates the imagined geography of nationalism and its discontents in South Korea. The Korean peninsula is perceived as a naturally well-demarcated land that has always had its own identity associated with the

Korean nation, a homogenous people who have maintained their national identity for five

ii thousand years. The peninsula is also imagined as being vulnerable to nature and neighbors, which the Korean nation has overcome with diligence and ingenuity. and geography are constantly nationalized to produce the imagined community of nation into a reality. The dissertation investigates three moments of nationalization in South

Korea: the politicization of ‘,’ economic development and foreign aid donorship, and the controversy over the Jeju naval base construction.

Chapter 1 introduces the geography and and critically reviews the politics that produced the Korean peninsula as an anthropomorphized geographical entity, or a geo-body. I argue that the geo-body of the Korean peninsula dominates the discourses of colonial experience, economic development, and . Chapter 2 points out that the South Korea rhetoric on the Japanese military

‘Comfort Women’ is different from its international counterpart and argues that nationalism reframes the history as a Japanese exceptionalism and appropriates subaltern women’s experience. Chapter 3 scrutinizes the political controversy over constructing a naval base on the to show that the discourse on ‘commies’ is produced more by South Korea’s sovereignty crises than by geopolitical insecurity. Chapter 4 reviews the development of South Korea’s foreign aid and argues that international development assistance is desired to overcome the donor’s own colonial . Finally, Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by discussing its contribution to a postcolonial geography of

South Korea and directions for future research.

iii

To Danok Baek and Daewon Jung

Acknowledgments

Writing this dissertation has been a great privilege. I learned many things, gained a new worldview, and became comfortable with it. I owe a tremendous debt to numerous people who gave me the opportunity to study, enlightened me with their knowledge, and helped me overcome hardships and my own weaknesses. They opened a door for me to further learning that is now to begin.

I am forever indebted to my advisors, Sui and Darla Munroe, for having guided and supported me both academically and personally. This dissertation was not possible without them. My sincere thanks also go to my committee members, Nancy

Ettlinger and Kendra McSweeney, for their invaluable teaching, insightful comments, and endless advices. Jeeseon Park-Saltzman, Becky Mansfield and Cathy Rakowski have guided me as well through research and personal ordeals. Words hardly express my gratitude to them. The Ohio State University provided me with a perfect environment for study as well as generous funding for research including the International Affairs Grant and the Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship. The Department of

Geography not only made me a geographer but gave me pedagogical experience through a Graduate Teaching Associate position. I also thank the Institute for , the

Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Mershon Center for International Security

v

Studies for providing opportunities for their services and opportunities for networking across disciplines.

Many people have been the source of endless inspiration and encouragement despite geographical distance and time difference. I count myself fortunate for having in my life Hee-Jeong Oh and Eunsun Oh, who taught me how to question. Doowon Suh guided me to academia with his passion for knowledge and love for young scholars. Judy

Han ushered me to geography. Zane Ivy taught me how to write and Joel Wainwright taught me how to read. In addition, I had the privilege of learning from and making friends with Naomi Adaniya, Ola Ahlqvist, Ishan Ashutosh, Nurcan Atalan-Helicke,

James Baginski, Hyowon Ban, Jessica Barnes, Katherine Bennett, Sayoni Bose, Larry

Brown, Diane Carducci, Peter Xiang Chen, Mat Coleman, Kevin Cox, Nicholas Crane,

Nicolle Etchart, Shaun Fontanella, Kyung In Huh, Kapil Kanala, Colin Kelsey, Eugene

Lee, Luisa , Seung-Ook Lee, Mitch Lerner, Bernhard Malkmus, Shaniquea Ormsby,

Sunwoo Paek, Mary Thomas, Jennifer Williams, and Theresa Wong. They made my life during graduate education intellectually stimulating and personally enriching.

Last but not least, I am extremely grateful to my parents and sisters for their love and support. Their positive vibes have saved me from pessimism and nihilism. My deepest respect and most heartfelt thanks go to Hyungwook Yim who has made me laugh, think, and endure.

vi

Vita

2003 ……………………………….. B.A., ,

2005 ……………………………….. M.A., International Relations, Korea University

2005-2009 …………………………. Researcher, Korean Women’s Development

Institute

2009 to 2014 …………………….. Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of

Geography, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Geography

Minor Field: Women’s and Sexuality Studies

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... v

Vita ...... vii

Fields of Study ...... vii

Table of Contents ...... viii

List of Tables...... xi

List of Figures ...... xii

Note on ...... xiii

1. Introduction ...... 1

1.1. Theoretical framework...... 1

1.2. Background ...... 8

1.2.1. The Korean nation and its vulnerable geography ...... 8

1.2.2. The national geo-body ...... 16

1.2.3. Divided imaginaries ...... 22

1.3. Method and structure of the dissertation ...... 36 viii

2. Death becomes her: national appropriation of ‘Comfort Women’ ...... 40

2.1. Frameworks by scale ...... 40

2.2. Theories of nationalism and women...... 45

2.3. The ‘Comfort Women’ exceptionalism ...... 53

2.3.1. Crime ‘Made in ’ ...... 57

2.3.2. Dishonorable common noun, honorable proper noun...... 70

2.3.3. Polarized representations...... 82

2.4. The nation’s selective listening ...... 92

3. Homo Sacer under construction: ‘commies’ and the Jeju naval base ...... 95

3.1. The ‘commies’ at the base ...... 95

3.2. Theories of sovereignty and homo sacer ...... 98

3.3. The contested landscape of the Jeju naval base ...... 106

3.3.1. US Pivot to Asia ...... 106

3.3.2. Military security vs environmental security ...... 116

3.3.3. ‘Commies’ of Jeju ...... 130

3.4. Militarizing the nation ...... 139

4. Giving to Belong: Aid as a Marker of Development ...... 140

4.1. Celebrating the graduation ...... 140

4.2. Theories of foreign aid...... 142

ix

4.3. South Korea’s aid ...... 159

4.3.1. The developmental dictatorship ...... 159

4.3.2. The authoritarian graduate...... 165

4.3.3. The Korean brand ...... 172

4.4. Gift of self-constitution...... 175

5. Conclusion ...... 178

References ...... 186

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List of Tables

Table 1 Simplified chronology of regimes on the Korean peninsula ...... 12

Table 2 Official development assistance to South Korea (1945-1999) ...... 162

Table 3 Aid to South Korea ...... 163

Table 4 Structure of Saemaeul Movement...... 166

xi

List of Figures

Figure 1 Nam-sun’s tiger geo-body ...... 20

Figure 2 Beautiful Land of Tiger Spirit (槿域江山猛虎氣象圖). Artist unknown, produced in the early twentieth century. Owned by Korea University Museum...... 27

Figure 3 Tiger geo-body sitting on ...... 28

Figure 4 Tiger geo-body facing the ocean ...... 29

Figure 5 Korean peninsula flag (Hanbandogi) ...... 31

Figure 6 statue facing the Japanese Embassy in ...... 91

Figure 7 Naval bases in South Korea and the Jeju naval base under construction ...... 108

Figure 8 Jeju’s strategic location in ...... 115

Figure 9 Jeju naval base candidates...... 117

xii

Note on Language

All translations from Korean to English are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

Transliterations of Korean names and words are according to the 2000 revised

Romanization system devised by the National Institute of the (Standard

No. 2000-8). While the McCune-Reischauer system is preferred by scholars for its ease of pronounceability to non-Korean readers, I adopt the government system because it is closer to the original Korean spelling and does not have typesetting constraints for the superscript and subscript marks.

Personal names that have their own divergent orthography are respected irrespective of the principles. I follow the received Korean practice of placing surnames before given names, except for those who write primarily in Western .

All references to Korea are to Korea before the 1948 division. South Korea refers to the Republic of Korea, and to the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.

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1. Introduction

1.1. Theoretical framework

In his discussion of the European imagination of the Orient, coined the term ‘imaginative geography’ to refer to arbitrarily produced geographical knowledge and its power (Said 2003). Europe draws boundaries between itself and non-Europe regardless of the latter’s acknowledgement of the boundaries. The non-Europe is rendered exotic, irrational, or incomprehensible. Such imaginative geography is produced by ‘designating in one’s mind a familiar which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs,”’ which is a hardly innocent or scientifically objective process. (Said 2003, 54). Once the distinctions are made, differences and distance between ours and theirs are exaggerated and value-laden. The geography of ‘ours’ provides rationale and justice to our existence and ways of life and that of ‘theirs’ defines what they are (Gregory 1995).

Said’s discussion of received much praise and criticism at the same time. It opened the door to postcolonial theory by revealing the way knowledge and contributed to the subordination of the colonized. Nonetheless, it was criticized for not paying enough attention to differences within the Orient and too simplistically

1 analyzing Europe as the knower and non-Europe as a single object of study. The power imbalance between Europe and non-Europe is undeniable, but that does not negate that knowledge is produced from where the latter stands. Besides, while Said’s project was intended to be ‘a multicultural critique of power using knowledge to advance itself’ (Said

2003, 335), the power was uncomplicatedly assumed as European. The project had limitations in explaining non-European imperialism, not to mention how the subjugated responses to colonial geography.

In response to the unilateral ‘imaginative geography’ that presupposes the conquering gaze of the colonial power over the colonized, Emma Teng conceptualizes

‘imagined geography’ in her research on ’s imperial and colonial expansion to and its self-constitution as the Middle Kingdom (Teng 2006). While Said argues through the concept of ‘imaginative geography’ that the empire imposes a colonial discourse of the colonized upon the latter through the former’s ideas and images of the latter, which in turn constitutes the former as the superior, Teng focuses on the empire’s own imagination of itself and self-constitution through her concept of ‘imagined geography.’ The empire produces geographic knowledge about itself as the powerful and the superior without ever traveling every corner of its imperial territory, not to mention the other’s. Whereas imaginative geography is concerned about dramatizing differences and distance between the empire and the barbaric, imagined geography is concerned about defining what our land is and converting the other’s into ours as she shows in the case of Taiwan being transformed from ‘a ball of mud’ into part of the Middle Kingdom

(Teng 2006, 17).

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Teng raises a valuable point on the subjectivity of the knower in the production of geographical knowledge. It resonates with Donna Haraway’s proposal for ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway 1988). Revealing the colonial gaze and criticizing it is not enough to produce alternative knowledge as it runs the risk of ‘romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful’ (Haraway 1988, 584). It is important to remember that the perspective of the less powerful is neither unproblematic nor innocent.

Whether it is the colonizer or the anti-colonial, the production of national geographical knowledge is a conscious process to imagine ‘our land’ as much as to imagine a common

‘we.’ Whether the land is imagined a heartland or a hinterland has significant influence on how the ‘we’ on the land is imagined. Geographical perception is an indispensible factor in the constitution of nation.

Theories of nation are largely categorized into three: primordialism, ethno- symbolism, and modernism. While they trace different origins of nation, they are in agreement that a nation is socio-historically constructed than organically born. A nation is defined as a group of people with a common ancestral and cultural heritage. Members of the group enjoy relative equality among themselves based on the alleged homogeneity.

Despite its definitive and absolutist implication, nation is a relative concept. A nation exists only in relations with other nations by defining ‘us’ vis-à-vis ‘others.’ The distinction is often made based on the differences between things shared within groups.

It is considered to share certain factors in common, such as common descent, language, territory, political entity, customs, and religion, but none of these is causa sine qua non.

They are only required as anchors to which to adhere its imaginations of the nation.

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Benedict Anderson is one of the most influential in theorizing nation. In his canonical book on nationalism, Imagined Communities, Anderson dubs nation as an imagined political entity (Anderson 1991). Anderson studies various types of across the world and concludes that the idea of nation was modeled after

American and French nationalisms and spread to colonies through print-capitalism. A nation is imagined with no clear knowledge about who the members are. However, the nation is real as much as the image of the nation so imagined constitutes the community’s reality. Once the nation is born, evidence is written into history to support the legitimacy of the nation instead of being found in history (Hobsbawm 1992). While Anderson’s theory is helpful, it is vulnerable to criticism for not showing how the process of imagination occurs and why nations develop around certain features such as territory or ethnicity.1 On the other hand, Kohn, one of the founding scholars of nationalism, argues that the most important feature that defines a nation is the territory that is combined with a strong will to build a national identity (Kohn 1944, 15–16). Eric

Hobsbawm resonates with Kohn when he argues that nation is ‘a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state’ (Hobsbawm 1992, 9–10).

The idea of nation as something essential, primordial, and inherent has been promoted through the process of nation-state building to constitute an arbitrary connection between people and territory.

1 Anderson (1991) is a revised version of Imagined Communities (1983) and includes a chapter on geography based on a reading of Thongchai Winichakul’s theory of geo-body, which I discuss below.

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The discipline of geography pays attention to the territorial logic of the imagined homeland of the nation and extends the modernist theory of nation. From this perspective, the concept of nation as we know it today emerged out of the political economy of the 18th century Europe that necessitated a cultural form and political system of the nation-state for capitalist economic growth (Gellner 1983). Nation is a fundamentally geographical invention because it naturalizes national landscapes and associates them with people occupying them. It is borders that create nations. The state practices borders to produce and protect its territory and the nation makes the borders obscure by making national landscapes taken for granted (Agnew 2007; Sparke 2005).

Hence Cynthia Enloe claims that the nation-state is the most stable political system because it combines the vertical authority of the state with the horizontal identity of the nation (Enloe 2000, 46).

The love of one’s natal land, or topophilia, is useful to build a nation-state. We develop exclusively affective ties to our physical environment because we are familiar with it and because it is loaded with personal experience and shared memories (Tuan

1974). It can be aesthetic, tactile, familiarity and attachment, or means of gaining a livelihood. The ties to our homeland become a special sense of place that assigns positive values such as safety and security to the homeland. This sense of place can be extended to non-local environment and provide a territorial basis of national identity when facilitated by certain discourses. Nationalism is one of them that constantly

(re)produces the nation as primordial and give political legitimacy to the nation-state

(Gellner 1983). In other words, a nation emerges from nationalism, not the other way

5 around. Nationalism socializes members of a community as citizens who have the common legal right to a territory and regulates them with common duties (Smith 1991).

Hence, the nation is instrumental for institutionalizing a certain mode of governmentality.

The stronger the imagination of the membership is, the better the nation’s existence is manifested in every day politics and economy. Mark Purcell well illustrates how a nation and its territory are imagined through his study of the Copts in Egypt (Purcell 1998).

Geography is an indispensable aspect of the national imagination, especially according to the Westphalian order that privileges the nation-state as a desired form of the nation. In his research of the Thai nationalism, Thongchai Winichakul argues that the nation is imagined as a territorial embodiment (Thongchai 1994). He studies the process through which modern geography came to represent Thailand on the map as a closed polygon, as if it was a piece of jigsaw puzzle among many others. He finds that the encounter with European colonial powers transformed the borderless spatiality of the nation into a bounded territoriality through negotiations of treaties and defining borders on the map (Thongchai 1994). The bound-ness and fixity of the new geographical imagination creates an animated that sits on the national territory, which he names the geo-body. ‘[The geo-body] appears to be concrete to the eyes as if its existence does not depend on any act of imagining … but the geo-body of a nation is merely an effort of modern geographical discourse whose prime is a map’ (Thongchai 1994, 17).

Understanding Thailand as a bounded territory created the Thai nationhood as a geopolitical unit that conforms to the logic of Westphalian sovereignty. Modern mapping anticipates the emergence of nation-states as it divides the world into distinctively

6 identifiable objects and creates space on the map for their geo-bodies to come (Thongchai

1994, 130). Once a colonial practice, mapping a territory in a postcolonial context is the political manifestation of a nationalist geographic discourse (Anderson 1991). It imagines and visualizes a nation as objectively identifiable and thus legitimizes national borders. Thongchai hence argues that a map does not represent reality, but the hegemony of modern cartography produces reality. Imagined territories become real when they are represented on the map.

The geo-body is produced by the nationalist desire to give a visualized form to the national identity (Ivarsson 2008; Callahan 2009). Sumathi Ramaswamy expands the theory of geo-body by investigating how the geo-body is transformed into the motherland for which to live and die (Ramaswamy 2009). In colonial , the British colonial regime introduced modern mapping as a way of disenchanting and modernizing India. A

Hindu goddess was born in response to the colonial project in the form of , or

Mother India. She was increasingly portrayed on a map to represent the nation and became modified to conform to the territorial boundaries of India. A halo of flames was placed on her head and her hair and scarf were widely suspended in the air: India became cartographed. Political challenges and crises were expressed as a wounded

Mother India or a distressed Mother India. The geo-body of the Indian nation became an anthropomorphic existence to ‘generate love-service-sacrifice’ for the nation

(Ramaswamy 2009, 288). The geo-body is no longer only the territorial embodiment of the nation but also the visualization of the values the nation aspires to.

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This dissertation investigates how the values embedded in the national geo-body the imagination of the national identity. Specifically, my research question is how the South Korean discourse of vulnerable geography affects the Korean-ness—the ways in which Koreans ought to be. In this chapter I discuss the imagined geography of South

Korea by scrutinizing the development and transformation of its geo-body. The South

Korean geo-body was produced at the turn of the 20th century through an encounter with imperialism and has undergone transformations in accordance with the the has been situated with. Anti- desires a national identity in the grammar of Westphalianism and promotes nationalism. In the efforts of ‘nationalizing’ its identity, the Korean peninsula was imagined as a territorial embodiment of the Korean nation. However, the national identity of South Korea as a postcolonial and post-Cold

War construct is in conflict with its imagined geography.

1.2. Background

1.2.1. The Korean nation and its vulnerable geography

In South Korea, the geography of the Korean peninsula is narrated to be both vulnerable and indomitable. It is vulnerable because its peninsularity exposes the country to constant threats out there. And yet it is indomitable because it embodies the spirit of tiger. The ambivalent narrative is imposed upon the Korean nation, which does not succumb to foreign powers and progressively leaps toward the world. However, the

8 narrative implicitly refers to the Korean nation in South Korea, instead of the Korean nation as a whole.

The Korean nation emerged from the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age as an

exceptional, homogeneous people possessing a unique culture, and established a

that was different from that of the Chinese.

Outline of Korean History, 1983, 15, recited from Em 2013, 102

Our country is surrounded by three seas. We are gifted with marine resources and

beautiful sceneries. And yet, due to the geography, we were frequently invaded

by foreign powers.

The Seas of Chungmugong, the Seas of Invincibility

In only six decades since we recovered our country from the Japanese imperialism,

we made our homeland an advanced country towering high over the world. No

other nation, no other state, has made a miracle such as what we have achieved.

Greetings, The Independence Hall of Korea

The quoted passages are representative of a popular discourse on the nation and its geography in South Korea: a vulnerable geography that invited numerous foreign invasions and a homogenous people that overcame all the challenges and achieved a remarkable development. The first quote is from a university-level textbook on Korean

9 history in South Korea. It claims that Koreans are a nation of long history that goes back thousands of years and are distinctive from their neighbors ethnically and culturally.

Koreans proudly call themselves danil minjok—a nation of single ethnicity—that has kept its racial purity for over four thousand years. The second is from a lecture on

General Lee Sun-sin (1545-1598), a military hero of the Dynasty (1392-1910), organized by the National Library of Korea together with a newspaper publisher (Chosun

Daily) and a book publisher (Kyobo Books). As the passage states, it is argued that the nation has been disadvantaged by its location on a peninsula and was frequently invaded by other nations throughout history, which culminated in the Japanese colonialism (1910-

1945). Finally, the last passage from the website of the Independence Hall of Korea illustrates the way South Korea’s post-war economic growth is celebrated. The dominant narrative explains that Koreans were exploited to the bottom during the Japanese colonial rule and were left with nothing when they were liberated. The people’s diligence and ingenuity made a unprecedented economic and social development that the world reveres.

Interestingly, the trope of vulnerable geography and the trope of ethnic homogeneity are compatible in the discourse. If a nation had been invaded by other groups over time, the people could not have maintained the same ancestry easily. The trope of ethnic homogeneity assigns an invincible spirit to the people despite its history that records a series of defeat to foreign powers. The trope of geographical vulnerability excuses the people for their weaknesses. At the same time it underlines the greatness of the Korean nation for succeeding in preserving the national heritage. Choi Nam-sun

(1890-1957), one of the most influential intellectuals during the Japanese colonial rule

10 and the drafter of the Declaration of Independence in 1919, argued the unique national heritage in the following words (N. Choi 2007, 138):

The most fundamental characteristic about Korea is its long history. Egypt, India,

and China are considered to be the world’s most ancient nations. Their ,

however, have been discontinued innumerable times by foreign nations. Korea

has been maintaining the same society for four thousand years since its foundation

by .

The origin of the Korean nation is traced back to the mythical kingdom of Joseon, as known as Ancient Joseon (). It is estimated to have existed from BC 2333 to

BC 108. Later the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) was named after the mythical kingdom in order to justify its foundation through a military coup d’état. According to the myth, a god named Hwanwoong descended from heaven to govern the humanity. He built a city on top of Mount Taebaek, a mythical mountain located in the Korean peninsula.

Hwanwoong had a son between a bear that he turned into a female person, whose name is

Dangun. Dangun established the kingdom of Joseon with its capital in .

Koreans have been legitimately occupied the Korean peninsula ever since. There is little historical evidence that proves the ancestral connection between people of Ancient

Joseon and Koreans today, not to mention the very existence of Dangun’s ancient kingdom of Joseon. Throughout history, the myth has been geopolitically encouraged.

The myth was first recorded as part of the Korean history in the Memorabilia of the Three

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Kingdoms () published by Dynasty (918-1392) in 1281. In the thirteenth century Goryeo was attacked several times by the of Dynasty and finally capitulated to it in 1270. The capitulation did not terminate Goryeo Dynasty but established commanderies and the Goryeo kings had to vow their loyalty to their counterparts in Yuan (Em 2013, 26). The Dangun myth became historical truth because of the political necessity to recover Goryeo Dynasty’s pride against Yuan

Dynasty ( Lee 2005, 65). The Korean history was constructed since then as a continuum from Ancient Joseon (BC 2333–BC 108) to Goryeo (918-1392) and Joseon

(1392-1910) as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Simplified chronology of regimes on the Korean peninsula

~BC 2333 Three North-South 918 - 1392 - 1910 - - ~BC 108 Kingdoms Era States Era 1392 1910 1945 (BC 57 - 935) Japanese (Ancient) Goryeo Joseon colonial Joseon (BC 37 - 668) (698 - 926) regime Baekje

(BC 18 - 660)

The Korean nation ( minjok) as a nation of single ethnicity (danil minjok) was yet to be born. Kingdoms after kingdoms were built as tribes were defeated by one another. Merging of various tribes took place throughout the history until the early days of Joseon Dynasty (Jeon Lee 2005). The word nation (minjok) was introduced from

Japan at the end of the nineteenth century as Japan’s intervention of Korea’s diplomatic

12 relations became extensive. Through his analysis of the first newspapers, Baik Dong- argues that nation was synonymic to race in the minds of Koreans at first as shown in the usage of the term in expressions such as ‘Asian nation (dongbang minjok)’ and

‘white nation (baegin minjok)’ (Baik 2001, 164). As Korea’s sovereignty was increasingly threatened by Japan’s imperialism, particularly around the Russo-Japanese

War (1904-1905), newspapers increasingly used expressions such as the Korean nation and Dangun’s people and scholars became obsessed with ancient (Baik

2005, 130). While Goryeo and Joseon Dynasties used Dangun to justify their regimes’ territorial occupation, they did not identify Koreans as Dangun’s people. The self- awareness of the Korean nation as a homogenous and equal community was constructed through the experience of the Japanese colonialism (Em 2013). For example, the 3rd of

October was first celebrated during the Japanese colonial rule as the day Dangun established the Korean nation. After liberation and the division of the peninsula into

North and South , the inaugural congress of South Korea made the day a national holiday, National Foundation Day, and adopted a system to number years from Dangun’s foundation of the nation in BC 2333. The congress stipulated by law that the Dangun heritage is recognized in order to manifest the national homogeneity and originality of its history. What the South Korean regime intended to manifest through Dangun was not only the homogeneity of Koreans but also its legitimacy to be on the Korean peninsula vis-à-vis the North Korean regime. North Korea also celebrates the 3rd of October as the

National Day since 1994. Dangun is explained in the following words (Korean Grand

Encyclopedia, 1999, recited from Myers 2011, 74):

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Thousands of years ago, on a beautiful peninsula in the center of , there

emerged one of mankind’s first distinct races, the Korean race. […] a great

emperor named Tan’gun united Koreans into a state named Chosŏn, taking

Pyongyang as his capital. Koreans were thus the first Asians to achieve

nationhood, a crucial first stage of civilization.

While the government discontinued the practice of numbering years from Dangun’s foundation of the nation for administrative practicality, some social groups and politicians argue for reviving the practice until today.

The continuum of the Korean nation serves to justify the people’s occupation of the Korean peninsula. Since Silla conquered Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668,

Koreans have occupied a relatively stabilized territory. Nonetheless, borders between

Korea and China were constantly redrawn and Koreans did not recognize their territory as confined to the Korean peninsula. As a matter of fact, Joseon did not stop desiring to recover Goguryeo and Balhae’s territory in (Ryu 2009, 69). A peninsula is a geographically distinctive feature but there is nothing intuitive about the boundaries between a peninsula and a continent. Geographical boundaries of the Korean peninsula are also a product of the colonial and postcolonial geopolitics (Schmid 1997; Schmid

2002).

The geopolitics of the turn of the century challenged the territoriality of the

Korean nation. Korea lost its diplomatic representation to Japan in 1905. Through

14 negotiations and modern geography introduced from Japan, Koreans came to recognize their land as a bounded territory on a peninsula (Baik 2005; Ryu 2009). Settling China’s ownership of Gando ( in Chinese), borderland between Korea and Manchuria,

Japan negotiated the border between China and Korea in lieu of the latter. The northern border of the Korean peninsula against China was concretized by the Gando Convention in 1909, giving birth to the Korean geo-body as a peninsula. The Gando Convension not only paved the way to Japan’s annexation of Korea by demarcating the Korean territory beyond China’s intervention but also brought a transnational change to the borderlessness between Korea and Manchuria (W. 2010). Now the Korean peninsula was recognized as a geographically well-distinguished territory.

The experience of colonialism produced nostalgia to a homeland of one’s own, especially in the context of forced migration for labor exploitation and , mobilization to battlefields overseas, and diaspora independence movement. The Korean peninsula became the symbol of the Korean nation. The constitution of South Korea, which was written in 1948 after the liberation and division of the nation in 1945, proclaimed the Korean peninsula as its territory. This is unlike most constitutions that refrain from confining their territories to specific geographical areas and prefer using geographically unbound administrative terms. The uniqueness of the South Korean constitution mainly results from the country’s denial of the legitimacy of the North

Korean regime. However, it also reveals that occupying the Korean peninsula has become a prerequisite of the Korean-ness.

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1.2.2. The national geo-body

Since the late 19th century Imperial Japan had its geographers survey the Korean peninsula in preparation for colonizing the peninsula, which was completed in 1910.

Equipped with modern geographic knowledge and tools that they learned from Germany,

Japanese geographers produced modern maps and identified the Korean territory as a peninsula. The etymology of ‘peninsula’ is in words paene (almost) and īnsula

(island). This sixteenth century word literally means ‘almost an island.’ Japanese geographers translated peninsula to 半島 (pronounced ‘hanto’ in Japanese and ‘bando’ in

Korean). It means ‘half island.’ Korean newspapers around the turn of the century started calling their territory as Joseon bando or Han bando.

Japanese geographers not only produced modern maps but also a metaphoric discourse on the nature of peninsulas and peninsulians. The Japanese imperial desire politically interpreted the half-ness implied in ‘hanto’ as ‘incompleteness’ and projected it onto the people on the peninsula (Ryu 2009). Peninsularians were considered immature, short-tempered, and submissive due to the vulnerable nature of their geography. Korean people were called Hantojin (半島人, peninsulians) in Japanese, and were considered inferior to Japanese people.2 It conveniently served Imperial Japan’s

2 Koreans were also called Joseonjin (朝鮮人, Joseon people) in Japanese. This word soon gained the same connotation as Hantojin.

16 project to colonize Korea in the process in which Japan gradually took over Korea’s sovereignty.

To concretize the colonial discourse on the defects of the Korean nation, they came up with a metaphoric geo-body for the Korean peninsula. As Imperial Japan prepared for the colonization of the Korean peninsula since the late 19th century,

Japanese geographers explored the peninsula and published books on Korean geography.

One of them was Bunjiro, professor of the Imperial University of , who likened the form of the Korean peninsula to that of a rabbit in his 1903 publication in

English (Koto 1903, 1–3):

[T]he Korean peninsula is bounded by a well-defined topographic feature, the

equatorial range of Chyang-paik-san, and a southerly-lying basin drained by the

Amnok Gang and the Tu- Gang. [...] This Asiatic Italy, fitly called by WE

Griffis the “Land of the Hermit Nation,” was secluded from the rest of the world

for a long time, and even her old neighbours, the Japanese and the Chinese were

strictly and vigilantly prevented from penetrating into the country. It is a unique

patch of the earth's surface, terra incognita in all respects, excepting eight free

ports and the two inland towns, where over 20,000 Japanese and men of other

nationalities have made themselves at home [...]

As is well known, the outline of Italy is compared to that of a boot. That of Korea

may be taken to represent a rabbit in a standing position with Chyol-la Do for the

hind legs, Chhyung-chhyong Do for the anterior extremities, Hoang-hai Do and

17

Phyong-an Do for the head, and -gyong Do for the disproportionally large

ear; Kang-uon Do and Kyong-syang Do will then correspond to the shoulders and

back. The Koreans have their own fictitious representation of the outline of their

country. The figure, they imagine, is that of an old man, his back bent with age,

his arms folded in the attitude of paying paternal homage to China. They thought

their country was by nature formed to be a dependency of the Middle Kingdom,

and this notion drove its deep into the mind of the literary class, though it

has been dispelled since the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95.

The rabbit metaphor for the Japanese imaginative geography of the Korean peninsula soon became a popular colonial discourse. Nationalist scholars tried to overwrite the colonial geography with its own imagined . In response to the rabbit metaphor, a Korean geo-body was devised in the shape of a tiger (Figure 1). It was drawn by Choi Nam-sun. Choi was a student of geography at Waseda University, Tokyo,

Japan before he came back to Korea and started his own publishing company in 1908.

Rejecting the Korea indigenous geography based on geomancy, Choi was attracted to modern geography whose territoriality lays the foundation of the nation-state (Jong-ho

Lee 2009, 225).

In 1908 Choi published a monthly magazine Youth, where he emphasized the importance of geographical knowledge through numerous pieces of his (Kwon

1990). Youth was one of the first modern magazines and the very first magazine whose target readers were young Koreans. Its publication was so groundbreaking in the history

18 of that the 1st of November, the day of its foundation, is commemorated as the National Day of Periodicals. In the inaugural issue of Youth, Choi wrote a short lecture on geography and refuted Koto’s account on the rabbit-shaped geography of

Korea (N. Choi 1908, 67):

Our Korean peninsula has a shape of a tiger that is climbing the Asian continent

with its forepaws all stretched out as if it was flying. It symbolizes the lively

progressive spirit and the unlimited development of our land. Boys should be

encouraged to train their minds by looking at this image.

Choi’s alternative geo-body is a roaring tiger positioned on the map of the Korean peninsula with its forepaws clenched against the Asian continent. It looks as though it is about to sprint. Tiger is an animal that is most associated and identified with the Korean people. It is the most represented animal in Korean folklores and even appears in the

Dangun mythology of national foundation. It is often described both intrepid and clumsy and as humanly as possible. Unlike rabbit, tiger is imagined to be intrepid, autonomous, and masculine. By using the metaphor of tiger, which was already well anthropomorphized in the minds of the Korean people, Choi anthropomorphized the national territory and projected the values of tiger to the nation. The Korean nation was imagined to be strong, progressive, and undaunted by imperialism.

19

Figure 1 Choi Nam-sun’s tiger geo-body

Source: Choi, Nam-sun. 1908. ‘Bongil’s study of geography.’ Youth 1(1): 67.

20

Colonialism engenders the fundamental grammar that makes the imagination of a national culture possible (Anderson 1991). If mapping is to colonial powers a tool for territorial expansion, it is to the colonized a means of self-affirmation. The colonized yearns for a form, a place in the world. Cartography of the geo-body makes the imagined community a geographical reality (Ramaswamy 2009, 8). The geo-body is the substantial embodiment of national territory. An anthropomorphized geo-body prescribes the nation’s future with hope of liberation and prosperity.

The territory had been occasionally represented in the shape of a tiger before Choi published the imagery. Choi’s drawing and accompanied interpretation of the spirit of the Korean nation received a good reputation. For example, Hwangseong Daily praised it for shedding a new luster to the nation.3 In response to the popularity, Choi used the tiger image in many other publications and even gave the geo-body a name as Taebaekbeom

(Great white tiger). A white tiger is considered the head of all the tigers. Taebaek is often dubbed as the spine of the nation because it is the longest mountain range on the peninsula and it does correspond to the spine of the tiger geo-body. Below is part of a poem Choi dedicated to Taebaekbeom (N. Choi 1909):

[…] The is not big enough

When you roar your spirit in four thousand years

The earth is not big enough

When you stretch yourself from the corner of the continent

3 Hwangseong Daily, 11 December 1908, ‘Maps and ideas.’

21

At one big roar of yours, all the states come and bow

You are the king

At your glance that beacons like a lightening, all the evils disappear

You are the god […]

In 1910 Imperial Japan annexed the Korean peninsula to its territory. Most

Korean language periodicals and newspapers were discontinued as well as Choi’s Youth.

Public education followed the colonial curricula. Nationalist geography had no ground to stand on. The tiger geo-body was forgotten and overwritten by the colonial geo-body.

1.2.3. Divided imaginaries

Figure 2 shows 槿域江山猛虎氣象圖 (Geunyeok gangsan maengho gisang do), which loosely means Beautiful Land of Tiger Spirit. Estimated to have been produced in the early 20th century, the painting gained popularity in the 1980s. Founded in 1905 as the first modern university in Korea, Korea University represents itself with a symbol of roaring tiger.4 The tiger is again associated with the spirit of the Korean nation. In 1983 the university’s museum held a special exhibition of tiger-themed paintings and sculptures in celebration of the university’s anniversary. Beautiful Land of Tiger Spirit

4 Founded as Boseong University, it was renamed as Korea University after liberation in

1946.

22 was first first shown to public at the exhibition and attractd much interest. The museum explained the painting in the following words:

According to classic writings, the Korean peninsula had been originally

conceptualized in the shape of a tiger. After the annexation of the Korean

peninsula, the Japanese colonial government learned this and published that the

peninsula was in the shape of a rabbit in both Korean and Japanese textbooks.

The intension was to emphasize the weakness of the Korean nation. Even after

liberation, primary and secondary schools in South Korea have taught students

that our land looks like a rabbit. However, this painting, whose artist and year of

production is unknown, shows a tiger roaring toward Manchurian grassland that

once belonged to Goguryeo.5

The following year, one of the instructors at the university made copies of the painting and distributed them for free to the general public. In 1986 his campaign developed into an organization called ‘Tigers’ Club.’ Every week the Club made 300 copies of the tiger-map and handed them out to passersby in downtown (. Jeong 1998).

They encouraged that every household hangs the tiger-map on the wall.

Indeed, the image soon became popular. Tiger went well with the thriving economy of the country in the 1980s and 1990s. It was regarded to represent the Korean

5 Kyunghyang Daily, 4 May 1983, ‘Classic painting representing the Korean peninsula as a fierce tiger.’

23 nation advancing toward the world.6 The tiger geo-body was applied to various commercial advertisements and printed on everyday items as mundane as notepads. The tiger geo-body was as influential as to make a village change its name. In 2001 a cape village on the eastern seashore changed its name from Janggigot to Homigot. Homigot is literally translated to ‘tiger tail cape.’ The village assertes that its location corresponded to the tiger’s tail despite the fact that Beautiful Land of Tiger Spirit (Figure 2) shows the tiger’s tail on the western seashore whereas Choi’s drawing (Figure 1) has the tail on the eastern shore. The village argues that a tiger’s tail symbolizes prosperity as a tiger runs and commands its group using its tail. It attracts tourists with a tiger-themed park at the cape.

The revived popularity of the tiger-shaped geo-body coincided with South

Korea’s economic development. The Tigers’ Club that circulated copies of the tiger geo- body painting argued that the image invokes the high spirit inherent in Korean people and guides them away from social evils such as consumerism and crimes. The regained national pride through economic growth encouraged right-wing nationalism to grow, which spoke to Korean people in the language of one-Korean-ness. At the same time, the tiger geo-body urges South Koreans to live up to the expectations of the nation. One should protect and fight for the nation by serving their military duties; one should promote the national economy by being entrepreneurial; and one should bring honor to the nation by endeavoring to succeed in the world.

6 Kyuanghyang Daily, 29 November 1983, ‘Seoul Olympic emblem and mascot decided.’

24

The geo-body is a social construct to which national values are projected. As the nation needs to be constantly reproduced by the discourse of national unity, the geo-body is used as a convenient means of visualizing and reconfirming the nation as a geographically identifiable entity. The recent transformations of the South Korean geo- body suggest that the geo-body is a useful tool to justify political projects as well.

One example is the tiger sitting on China (Figure 3). This picture was produced in the context of China’s Northeast project (東北工程). In 2002, the Chinese government launched a five-year research project on the history of the Northeast borderland. The Northeast borderland refers to Manchuria, which the Korean states of

Goguryeo and Balhae once occupied. The Northeast project and South Korea’s counter- attempts to rewrite its history created disputes between the two . Figure 3 was produced in this context and encouraged rhetorics of ‘reclaiming our old land’ in South

Korea.

Figure 4 (Right) shows a more recent example. It is the tiger geo-body facing the southern ocean instead of the northern continent. It is a reproduction of the 1913 tiger geo-body (Figure 4 Left), which was produced right after the Japanese annexation of the

Korean peninsula. A -based Korean newspaper, Sinhangukbo, printed the modified tiger geo-body on its 1913 calendar and distributed copies to its subscribers (M.

Jeong 2013). The tiger may be roaring toward Japan, given the geopolitics of Korea that time. This ocean-facing tiger had been buried in a Japanese archive and gained a new life a century later. As discussed in Chapter 4, South Korea has been building a new naval base since 2011. Located on its southernmost island, Jeju, the base lacked justification

25 because the country’s primary enemy had been defined as North Korea. It attracted suspicion that the base construction project was motivated by the US military’s plan to rebalance powers in Asia. As protests against the base construction grew, the ocean- facing tiger geo-body circulated on the web. The artist and year of production is unknown. It circulates through blogs that argue that the Jeju naval base is indispensible for the future of the nation.

26

Figure 2 Beautiful Land of Tiger Spirit (槿域江山猛虎氣象圖). Artist unknown, produced in the early twentieth century. Owned by Korea University Museum.

Source: Korea University Today, 22 July 2010, ‘槿域江山猛虎氣象圖.’

27

Figure 3 Tiger geo-body sitting on China

Source: Yonhap News, 10 May 2006, ‘New Hanbando tiger “occupying” Chinese continnt.’

28

Figure 4 Tiger geo-body facing the ocean

Sources: (Left) A calendar published by Sinhangukbo (1913), recited from Dong-A Daily,

4 Jan 1997, ‘Korean peninsula is a tiger taking off.’ (Right) Artist and year of production unknown, circulated on the Internet in 2012 and 2013 in the context of the debated over the Jeju naval base construction.

29

Whether facing the continent or the ocean, however, these representations of the tiger geo-body commonly overlook one important fact that the peninsula has been divided since the end of WWII. In addition, they are hardly used in discussion on unification. Although the tiger is depicted lying on the peninsula, the Korean spirit symbolized by the tiger does not include North Korea any more. The nation cartographed by the tiger geo-body is no longer the Korean nation imagined before the division of the peninsula but the South Korean nation despite its overly used rhetoric of national unity. The tiger spirit communicated by the geo-body corresponds to development, progress, and prosperity. Its implications are strictly capitalist and nationalist that the tiger geo-body is more fondly used by conservative groups.

The tiger geo-body is not used in North Korea. As mentioned earlier, the tiger was erased by the colonial geography and rediscovered in South Korea only in the 1980s.

I pose three hypotheses to explain why the South Korean revival of the tiger geo-body did not spread to North Korea. First, the original design of the tiger geo-body was conceived by Choi Nam-sun, who is not celebrated in North Korea. Choi was a vehement nationalist until the 1920s but was later coopted by the Japanese colonial government. Besides, he spent the remaining of his life in South Korea after liberation.

Second, the tiger is in the shape of roaring toward the Asian continent. It does not deliver resonate with the realities of North Korea, whose arch-enemy is the USA and best friend is China.

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Figure 5 Korean peninsula flag (Hanbandogi)

Sources: (Upper Left & Right) Images in the 1980s political pamphlets, recited from

Jager, 2003, Narratives of Nation Building in Korea, 62-64. (Bottom Left) Kyunghyang

Daily, 30 September 2002, ‘ Asian Game: a small unification.’ (Bottom Right)

Voice of People, 2 Oct 2007, ‘President Roh crossing MDL.’

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The third hypothesis is the popularity of the Korean Peninsula flag (Hanbandogi) did not make room for another geo-body in North Korea (Figure 5). Ideologies and the

Cold War geopolitics divided the Korean peninsula into two and the people in South

Korea into two as well, one in favor of and another in opposition to reunification.

Nonetheless, the two countries have tried to represent themselves as one nation to the world, at least in the field of sports, by participating in world games as a unified team. In preparation for the 1964 Swiss Olympic Games South and North Koreas negotiated the possibility of teaming up and in the process North Korea suggested the design of

Hanbandogi to represent the unified team. They ended up participating separately in the

Games but similar discussions followed for decades whenever there was a chance to represent the Korean nation with a unified team.

Finally in 1991 a unified team participated in the 41st World Table Tennis

Championships in Chiba, Japan with Hanbandogi to represent it. The two countries entered the stadium together as Team ‘Korea.’ At medal ceremonies, the Korean peninsula flag substituted the two countries’ flags and , a century-old folk song, substituted their anthems. The example was followed in several more occasions in the

2000s.

In South Korea, the Korean peninsula flag has been favored by political organizations in favor of unification with North Korea. Figure 5 Upper images show the modification of the Korean peninsula flag in reference to unification of North and South

Koreas. Its popularity reached its peak during President Roh Moo-hyun’s term (2003-

2008), who had an engagement policy toward North Korea and initiated many economic

32 cooperation projects. During his term, the Korean peninsula flag appeared in many official occasions and its use expand beyond sports events. Figure 5 Bottom Right shows the flag adorning President Roh’s visit to North Korea in 2007.

The popularity of the Korean peninsula flag created a controversy between conservative and progressive groups. Right-wing groups such as the Conservative Party

(Hanaradang) and the Veterans’ Group argue that the flag denies the sovereignty of

South Korea and opposed to its uses even at sports events. On the national liberation day each year, South Korea is divided into those with the Korean flags and those with the

Korean peninsula flags. The rejection of the Korean peninsula flag stems from the understanding that the flag originated from North Korea and hence it endorses the values of the North Korean regime. This is well illustrated by Kim Jeong-rae, professor of education at Busan National University of Education, who argues:

The Republic of Korea has become one of the world’s ten most prosperous states

thanks to the constitution that values liberal and market economy.

Each citizen makes achievements that surprise the world in their own profession

because of the constitution that protects life, liberty, and private property and

assures various rights. […] While South Korea has become a welfare state with

remarkable economy and democracy, North Korea has been deteriorating under

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violent oppression. […] The Republic of Korea has nothing to do with the

suspicious Korean peninsula flag. Using the flag is denying the constitution.7

The controversy over the Korean peninsula flag shows that the rhetoric of Korean one-ness has different meanings according to who adopts the rhetoric. The Korean origin from Dangun’s Joseon thousands years ago is rarely challenged. The history is strongly associated with the territorial conception of the Korean peninsula. The national history and geography mutually reinforce each other and construct South Korea’s postcolonial identity that longs for recognition from other nation-states. The tiger-themed geo-body of the Korean peninsula has gained popularity as a representation of the identity.

Nonetheless, the Korean peninsula on the Korean peninsula flag is rejected by right-wing groups as a denial of the very identity of South Korea. The discourse of Korean one-ness that had been reconfirmed in association with the Korean peninsula is being increasingly challenged.

The imagined geography is so powerful that the discourse of extraordinarily unique people on a vulnerable geography is widely accepted beyond South Korea. Most introductory accounts on Korea and Koreans on public media describe the Korean people as one of the oldest and most homogenous nations and pity its geographical destiny.

7 Munhwa Daily, 15 July 2011, ‘Korean peninsula flag is not the flag of the Republic of

Korea.’

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Koreans are an ancient people, one of the few in the world who can trace a

continuous history and presence on the same territory going back thousands of

years.

Lonely Planet (Richmond, Hornyak, and Low 2013, 339)

As a result of its geographical location, the Korean peninsula has been at the

mercy of political upheavals throughout its entire history, and has often been the

subject of rivalries between neighboring powers. It has suffered frequent

invasions, not least at the hands of Japan, who annexed the entire peninsula in

1910, closing the door on almost two thousand years of uninterrupted regal rule,

spread over several dynasties—each with its own fascinating tale to tell.

The Micheline Guide on Korea (Gilbert 2012, 52)

The imagined geography is encouraged by nationalism and manipulated by the state power to win hegemony. The 1980s witnessed a renaissance of nationalism in South

Korea (Jong-oh Lee 1995; D.-C. Kim 2000). Growing movement, heightened resistance to US imperialism, and economic development were combined to produce a complex discourse of nationalism (G.-W. 1996; K. H. S. Moon 2003).

Nationalism speaks to South Koreans on a wide range of economic, social, and political issues. It does not have a unified voice, especially when it comes to unification with

North Korea. Despite the rhetoric of one nation with thousands of years of history, South

Korea is a nation-state constructed only a few decades ago. The history had been

35 interrupted by decades of colonialism and hardly anyone remembers what Korea as one nation used to be by itself. Particularly, South Korea has been defined as the opposite of

North Korea, ideologically, politically, and economically (Grinker 1998; Watson 2012).

While unification is regarded as the ultimate hope and an end to national mourning, the narrative remains rhetoric in the absence of clear ideas of what it means to be not South

Korean, nor North Korean, but Korean.

1.3. Method and structure of the dissertation

I use critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2013). Discourse refers to a coherent set of ideas that structure the way we think and the way we act on the basis of that thinking. In other words, discourse disciplines us into certain ways of thinking and acting.

As we casually accept the reality with which we are presented, discourse joins power with knowledge (Foucault 2010). Discourse analysis addresses questions of power/knowledge. It aims to reveal the social production of discourses and their effects

(Rose 2012, 147). Discourses are articulated through various types of verbal and non- verbal texts as well as our practices. Critical discourse analysis primarily looks into language and textual materials and addresses the structure of narratives as well as their production, distribution, and consumption (Fairclough 2013). In this dissertation, narratives on ‘Comfort Women,’ ‘commies’ in Jeju, and ‘graduation from aid’ were collected from newspapers and magazines of national circulation since 1945.

36

Chapter 1 reviewed the process of nationalizing the history and geography of

Korea in response to the Japanese colonialism and the conflict between different imaginaries of Korean-ness through a scrutiny of the Korean geo-body. Nation is an imagined community. The imagination of the nation is a continuous process that responds to the changes in the geopolitics of the nation. The geo-body emplaces the nation on the map and hence produces the nation as a reality in the minds of the reader of the map. The geo-body and its changing connotations in South Korea illustrate how the imagined geography is indispensible for this never-ending process of ‘nationalization.’

Conflicting conceptualizations of the Korean nation contribute to a controversy over the use of geo-bodies in their efforts to keep the imagined community intact to their liking.

In the rest of the dissertation, three moments of nationalization are investigated: the politicization of ‘Comfort Women,’ economic development and foreign aid donorship, and the controversy over the Jeju naval base construction.

Chapter 2 investigates the discourse on ‘Comfort Women.’ While the rediscovered history is interpreted through a rights framework at international forums, it is exclusively understood as a crime committed by Japan against the Korean nation as a whole in South Korea. The nation is imagined as one body and to have suffered equally from the atrocity, although in reality only low class women in poverty fell prey to the systemic violence, more often than not by the hands of their compatriot

Koreans. The cruelty of the crime is narrated as if it was exceptional to Japan despite the fact that similar systems were replicated in South Korea during the and even after the War. Victims of the Japanese system are recognized as sex slaves and honored

37 as national martyrs, whereas victims of the Korean systems are condemned as dishonorable whores. Violence against sex slaves or sex workers goes unnoticed unless the assaulters are not Korean. Reading postcolonial theory of nationalism, the Chapter argues that nationalism performs a selective listening and archives only records of victimization, contributing to the reproduction of the narrative of vulnerable geography and invincible spirit of the Korean nation.

Chapter 3 scrutinizes the political controversy over constructing a naval base on the Jeju Island. It questions why the environmentalist chants of protesters against the base construction earn them the derogatory name of ‘commies.’ After WWII, ideologies and the Cold War geopolitics divided South and North Koreas. The unstable sovereignty of the country excused extreme state violence against the politically marginalized in the name of national security against and North Korea. The discourse of vulnerable geography of South Korea contributes to the demonization of ‘commies.’

South Korea was constituted in is produced more by South Korea’s sovereignty crises than by geopolitical insecurity. The Chapter reads Giorgio Agamben’s theory of homo sacer and interprets ‘commies’ as the South Korean homini sacri. The state produces homo sacer to legitimize and reproduce its power.

Chapter 4 reviews the transformation of the country from a recipient of foreign aid to a donor. The geography of South Korea is imagined as an obstacle created by nature and imperial geopolitics for the nation to overcome. South Korea is narrated as a small land endowed with no valuable natural resources or industrial infrastructure and blocked by a Communist regime in the north and three seas otherwise. In the 1960s and

38

1970s while South Korea laid the foundation for rapid economic growth through labor extensive industries, the discourse led to a conclusion that the country had nothing but human labor to exploit and develop its economy. The country’s membership to the

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its Development

Assistance Committee (DAC) is celebrated as overcoming the disadvantaged geography and entering the advanced world. The Chapter analyzes the country’s discourse of foreign aid from the vantage point of gift theory and finds that its aid is marked with the identity as a historically unprecedented graduate of aid. The Chapter argues that aid donation is not only motivated by economic and political gains from the donor-recipient relationship but also from the desire for identity and recognition as a donor.

Finally, the dissertation concludes with Chapter 5 where I discuss the dissertation’s contribution to a postcolonial geography of South Korea and directions for future research.

39

2. Death becomes her: national appropriation of ‘Comfort Women’

… these elusive figures mark moments where neither medicine nor poison quite

catches. Indeed, it is only in their death that they enter a narrative for us, they

become figurable.

Spivak 1999, 245, emphasis original

2.1. Frameworks by scale

The point of departure for this paper is the observation of the discrepancy between the international discourse on the Japanese military (or the

‘Comfort Women’ system after the way Japanese military called the victims) and the

South Korean one. During the Asia Pacific War (1931-1945), Imperial Japan recruited over 200,000 women from Japan and then Japanese colonies and occupied territories and made sex slaves for its military (UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1998/13, 22 June 1998).8 The

Japanese government acknowledges that Imperial Japan’s military authorities operated

8 ‘Contemporary Forms of Slavery: Systematic , Sexual Slavery and Slavery-like

Practices during Armed Conflict,’ p.38. Final Report by Gay J. McDougall, Special

Rapporteur to the Commission on Human Rights.

40

‘Comfort Stations’ across Asia and was involved in recruiting and managing ‘Comfort

Women’ in the 1993 Kono statement.9 Treated as part of military supplies, the women were put under extreme sexual exploitation and ethnic discrimination. Most of the victims were recruited with a promise of bogus jobs in military industrial complexes (UN

Doc. E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1, 4 January 1996).10 The sexual slavery started as an employment scam targeting women from impoverished families before it became systematic war-time .

The history had been almost forgotten in the post-war era until the late 1980s when it became a research focus under the leadership of the South Korean Christian women’s movement. As evidence was found and reconfirmed, ‘Comfort Women’ became a national issue. Organizations were born for the purpose of restoring truth and doing justice to the history and the victims. One of them was the Korean Council for the

Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (hereafter the Korean Council), which has become the centripetal force for the movement both domestically and internationally. A weekly demonstration attended by people of different politics, religions, and classes has been held in Seoul, South Korea, since 1992 to redress the

9 Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, 4 August 1993, ‘Statement by the on the result of the study on the issue of “Comfort Women”.’

10 ‘Report on the mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of

Korea and Japan on the issue of military sexual slavery in wartime,’ p.5. Report submitted by Radhika Coomaraswamy, Special Rapporteur to the United Nations

Commission on Human Rights.

41 history and advocate for the survivors. In addition, the Asian Conference for

Redressing the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue, which was first convened in Seoul by the

Korean Council, has been held across Asia, almost biannually since 1992, by a number of women’s organizations in collaboration. Finally, the history of ‘Comfort Women’ became internationally politicized in the mid-1990s as it was brought to the United

Nations.

The international discourse on ‘Comfort Women’ is about wartime violence and women’s human rights, whereas the history is discussed in terms of the Japanese colonial exploitation of the Korean nation in South Korea. In the United Nations, the issue is discussed at the Human Rights Council and defined as a case of sexual slavery. The

2000 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery— a people’s tribunal organized under the leadership of the Korean Council—confirmed that the Japanese military used rape as a weapon of war and that the ‘Comfort Women’ system was a crime against humanity (Matsui 2001). In South Korea, on the other hand, the history is primarily understood as ethnic discrimination. The final years of Japanese colonial regime in Korea are called a period of radical assimilation, or cultural genocide

(minjok malsal), characterized by the mobilization of Koreans for compulsory labor, the ban on the use of Korean language and the coercion of residential registration with

Japanese names (U.-T. Kim 1987; Kang 2005; Chung 1994; Heo, Lee, and Gong 2003;

Dudden 2005; Caprio 2009). The ‘Comfort Women’ system that coincided with this period is understood as one of the radical assimilation policies and analogous to a

42 national rape. Consequently a matter came to be requiring a national redemption, owing to the alleged ethnic homogeneity of the Korean nation.

As I will elaborate below, the sufferings of the sex slaves were results of ethnic discrimination, patriarchal oppression, and class subjugation (e.g. H. Yang 1997; J. .

Kim 2004; 2008; Yamashita 2012). The South Korean discourse, however, uncritically reduces ‘the resolution of the issue of “Comfort Women”’ to a formal apology and reparations from the Government of Japan to the survivors. Feminist scholars are critical of the nationalist interpretation of the history (H. S. Kim 1997; H.

Yang 1997; E. H. Kim and Choi 1998; Shim 2000; Y.-M. Park 2000; Y.-S. Shin 2002; J.

L. Kim 2004; Izumi 2007; Soh 2008; Ueno 2004; Varga 2009; Yamashita 2012). Some, however, argue for the possibility of feminist nationalism in the success of the politicization of ‘Comfort women’ (Chai 1997; Chung 1999; H.-K. Kim 2009). From a feminist nationalist perspective, women’s sexual subordination is closely related to the geopolitical conditions of their nation and hence nationalism can contribute to improving women’s status by promoting national autonomy (Jayawardena 1986; West 1997; Herr

2003). Especially, Hee-Kang Kim considers the South Korean ‘Comfort Women’ movement as a successful movement because it made the history a diplomatic issue between South Korea and Japan and at the same time an international women’s human rights issue. Kim asserts that ‘[w]hile androcentric nationalism has subjugated Korean , the feminism has been successful in challenging the androcentric nature of nationalism’ (H.-K. Kim 2009, 112), but fails to provide any convincing evidence to support the claim.

43

This paper critically reviews the reductive nationalist logic of the discourse on the history of ‘Comfort Women’ in South Korea. Thematically, research on the ‘Comfort

Women’ issue has largely focused on revealing the organized nature of the violence by the state, and particularly the Japanese government’s legal responsibility for it (e.g. M.

Kim 1996; W. S. Park 1997; Lie 1997; Y.-M. Park 2000; C. R. Kim 2009; Y.-M. Park

2010), the survivors’ memory of and trauma from the violence (e.g. Shim 2000; H. Yang

2008), and the successes and failures of the movements on ‘Comfort Women’ (e.g. J. L.

Kim 2004; A. Song 2013; N.-Y. Lee 2013). In other words, three actors—the state, the survivors, and social movements—have been the focus of research on ‘Comfort Women.’

The focus of this paper is on the other hand the discourse—i.e. the practices that constitute the truth of a society (Foucault 2010). The paper scrutinizes the discourse on the history of ‘Comfort Women’ and identifies three narratives that produce the ‘Comfort

Women’ exceptionalism.

In the nationalist discourse, ‘Comfort Women’ are represented in isolation from the history of subaltern women. ‘Comfort Women’ are framed as an exceptional crime committed by Japan even though historical facts state differently. It is interpreted not as a case of violence against women but a case of discrimination against the Korean nation.

Survivors of ‘Comfort Women’ are represented accordingly, not as women but as martyrs of the nation. The findings contribute to the literature on gender and nationalism in South

Korea (e.g. E. H. Kim and Choi 1998; Soh 2008; Yamashita 2012). In the subsequent section, I review the literature on nationalism and gender, with particular attention to the subaltern experience of nationalism through reading two postcolonial scholars, Partha

44

Chatterjee and Gayatri Spivak. The next section discusses the relationship between

‘Comfort Women’ as a system of Imperial Japan and comfort women as a common noun for sex workers in South Korea. Finally, the paper rgues that the nationalist discourse on the Japanese military sexual slavery well illustrates the pharmakon of nationalism in

South Korea. Resolving the history of ‘Comfort Women’ would require not only the

Japanese government’s apology and reparations but also a reflective discussion in South

Korea on the role nationalism played in the history and in the continued sexual exploitation of women and the severed link between ‘Comfort Women’ and the experience of subaltern women.

2.2. Theories of nationalism and women

Nationalism is a liberal ideology that presumes an equal relationship between members of a collective. Anchoring to cultural traits or feelings of collective belonging such as language, it produces the image of nation as essential, primordial, and homogeneous around which for individuals can unite (Hobsbawm 1992).

Industrialization during the nineteenth century encouraged the growth and expansion of nationalism as it could be an effective cultural binding agent and political system

(Hobsbawm 1975; Gellner 1983). Industrial economy requires the reproduction of patriotically dedicated, disciplined labor. Nationalism presumes a common ancestral and cultural heritage among individuals and projects a common future for them. The nation becomes an instrument of governmentality that socializes individuals as citizens (Smith

45

1991, 16). The nation distinguishes those within from those outside and regulates those within with a certain set of common values and duties. From this perspective, nationalism is ‘not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness’ (Gellner 1964, 169), but the production of nations for the political legitimacy of modern states. Nationalism can facilitate the mobilization of labor and resources for the nation-state and obscure exploitation and subordination of the masses. As a result, nationalism is easily manipulated by capital and the elites that ‘monopolize the concept of the nation, posing as the spokesman of the nation and the defender of national interests’ (Liu 1952, 4).

Marx and Engels therefore argued that the proletariat should reject nationalism that hinders solidarity of workers across borders and ‘must constitute itself the nation,’ not in the bourgeois sense of the word (Marx and Engels 2002, 102 emphasis original).

In most industrial societies nationalism is antipodal to revolutionary ideologies that are internationalist such as (Hobsbawm 1992, 122). In colonial societies, however, with active interventions by the elites threatened by the world-wide spread of the ‘imagined communities,’ nationalism develops in response to capitalist imperialism and promises the colonial societies a future of their own (Anderson 1991). Nationalism promotes self-consciousness as it speaks to postcolonial subjects in the language of resistance to imperialism, and yet it is insufficiently critical of Westphalian liberalism that travels around the world piggyback on imperial capital (Chatterjee 1986, 168).

Westphalian liberalism—the ideology that a sovereign nation-state with citizens of equal rights shall not be ruled or exploited by others—turns a blind eye to issues of class, race, and gender. It may liberate postcolonial subjects from imperial powers but at the same

46 time it institutionalizes patriarchal and capitalist social orders of imperial capital. In the pursuit of a nation-state, postcolonial societies desire the ‘national development’ and embrace the capitalist social orders of Westphalian liberalism. In defending against the violence of imperialism and pursuing national development, nationalism tolerates and externalizes its violence against the marginalized in the name of nation (Hobsbawm

1975). Nationalism, therefore, is a pharmakon—a substance that can be both beneficent and maleficent—to postcolonial societies. No remedy is completely harmless; there is always a dialectical relationship between medicine and poison in it (Derrida 1981, 99).

When a discourse addresses only one aspect of a pharmakon, the dialectical relationship between the medicine and poison in it is destroyed. Translating pharmakon into either medicine or poison, therefore, ‘cancels out the resources of ambiguity and makes more difficult, if not impossible, an understanding of the context’ (Derrida 1981, 97).

Nationalism as pharmakon is constantly at the risk of imitating imperialism.

With few exceptions who advocate the possibility of feminist nationalism (West

1997; Herr 2003), feminist scholars are skeptical of nationalism. Nationalism entails particular gender practices that (re)produce the nation by defining its identity and territory and prescribing its membership. Women are constructed as biological and cultural reproducers of the nation, more as an element for the nation’s purity than a subject of the nation (Yuval-Davis 1997). The nation as home and family of a community is imagined with women within home and family. Women’s bodies are appropriated and made into a marker of the nation (McClintock 1993; McClintock 1995).

Women bear the responsibility of representing the nation’s honor through their ‘proper’

47 behavior and their ‘proper’ clothing (Yuval-Davis 1997, 46). The nation, in its nostalgic image, is sought in women, while the forward-looking project of nation-building imagines a masculine nation (McClintock 1993, 65). In this way nationalism contributes to the institutionalization of gender differences and the nation is identified with the future of male constituents. Nation-building culminates in a heterosexist male project (Mayer

2000).

At the same time, women, especially those uneducated, vulgar low-class, and in rural poverty, are often considered an obstacle to modernization (Radcliffe 1996).

Women represent the problems of the nation’s tradition that must be overcome for the nation’s development. Nationalism resolves the so-called ‘women’s question’ by constructing a ‘new ’ who is culturally superior to the Westernized woman

(Chatterjee 1990; Chatterjee 1993). Colonization forces postcolonial subjects to adapt to new material realities in the world: a new mode of production and exchange, new institutions of government, and new sets of knowledge to learn. It is only a matter of time that the spiritual realities will have to change in order to follow suit. In its struggle to protect the national identity, postcolonial subjects strive to maintain the spiritual space intact (Chatterjee 1993, 120). This task is assigned to women. Social space is divided into the world and the home: the former is as a material space where one needs to struggle for practical interests (the outer) and the latter is a spiritual space where one’s true identity is rooted (the inner). A man’s place is in the world where he struggles for the nation’s material development, while a woman’s role is assigned in the home to safeguard the spiritual values of the nation. Nonetheless, she is not inferior to Western

48 women: she is educated, sophisticated, and discreet enough to represent the nation and not made a sex object as her counterparts are. She is an ideal woman who is knowledgeable, capable of modern tasks outside the home, and knows her place in the home. Through her she demonstrates the spirituality of the nation, the honor of the nation.11

But the is not only a true member of the nation but also a mythical creature (Bannerji 2001). She is a postcolonial construct of , a figure of essentialized gender roles, and a vessel of traditions (Chatterjee 1993, 132). The figure

11 In analyzing the postcolonial paradox of the women’s question, Chatterjee introduces a distinction between ‘traditional patriarchy’ and ‘new patriarchy’ in the context of the

British colonialism in India. However, his discussion of patriarchy can be misleading because the traditional and new forms of patriarchy are presented as distinctive when the new patriarchy produces the exact same dichotomy between the virgin and the whore as with traditional patriarchy. While Chatterjee’s main argument is a valuable one that nationalism can be a form of violence against women, his theory of patriarchy remains a circular assertion about the relationship between patriarchy and nationalism and the dichotomies they produce about world/home, material/spiritual, and outer/inner. He argues that nationalism produced a dichotomy of the material and the spiritual and that the dichotomy became embedded into a more abstract dichotomy between the outer and the inner. He continues to argue that the outer/inner dichotomy produces the world/home dichotomy. The spatial division of gender roles between the world and the home, however, is attributed to traditional patriarchy.

49 of new woman creates the illusion of women’s emancipation and dismisses the political urgency of discrimination and inequality women face in the nation’s new reality.

Nationalism is a passive revolution—a reformist compromise that prevents a fundamental social transformation—that leaves little room for women to make their own voices heard

(Chatterjee 1993, 211). The paradoxical relationship between women and the nation is well illustrated in the issue of .12 Sati refers to both the practice of widow-burning and a widow who goes through the practice. To the colonial state of British India, a widow jumping into the funeral pyre of her late husband represented a call for rescue.

Their object of protection was celebrated as a subject shaping its own destiny out of the violence of Indian traditions. To the Hindu locals, sati was women’s own choice to serve their karma. The ban of sati meant an imperial denial of cultural heroism. The violence against women committed by the colonized legitimized the discourse of the colonizer, and the colonizer’s disrespect for the colonized in turn legitimized the discourse of the colonized. Women with free will were effaced between the two moments of patriarchal subject-formation and imperialist object-constitution (Spivak 1999, 235). What both the

12 This section presents a literature review on nationalism and masculinity with a close reading of Spivak’s ‘History’ chapter in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the Vanishing Present (1999). The chapter is a rewrite of ‘The Rani of Sirmur:

An Essay in Reading the Archives’ (1985) and ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988).

Through case studies of sati the chapter problematizes the historiography that establishes master narratives, the pretentious flashlights for the rescue of the Third World women, and our complicity in muting the subaltern.

50 colonizer and the colonized saw in a widow was not a woman but an already sati.

Imperialism and nationalism are ‘dialectically interlocking’ (Spivak 1999, 287).

Spivak extends the discussion of the paradox through two examples of sati. The first is the Rani of Sirmur who entered the 19C British historiography when she decided to become a sati to follow the Raja deposed by the British colonial power that attempted annexation of the ancient kingdom (Spivak 1999, 231). The Rani’s sati was a useful excuse for the colonial power to justify its intervention to the kingdom in the name of restoring women’s history (Spivak 1999, 228). However, the way British historiography represented the Rani was highly selective. The colonial discourse brought her to light only in the context of sati (Spivak 1999, 238). It did not bother to record the Rani’s name, not to mention her life before the controversy. Neither did it follow her life after the controversy. There is no record on whether she had died as sati or from a natural cause. Her plea for sati was heard and narrated in medias res so that the story conforms to the logic of the master narrative (Guha 1997). The second figure of sati illustrates the epistemic violence of anti-colonialism. A member of the 20C Indian independence movement, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri killed herself in an attempt to protect the secret political mission she was assigned with. Lest her death would be mistaken as a case of illicit pregnancy, she left a note on her decision and waited for the onset of menstruation before committing suicide. It was an autonomous use of her body to fight against the hegemonic discourse on women. This interruptive speech act was, however, unintelligible to patriarchy. Her suicide note was displaced and her death was rewritten as a case of illicit pregnancy. Despite her meticulous efforts, the master narrative of

51 patriarchy overwrote her decision and Bhuvaneswari’s suicide was reduced to sati.

Underscoring the failed communication, Spivak raises a rhetorical question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (1999, 269, emphasis original):

The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with

‘woman’ as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female

intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown

with a flourish (Spivak 1988, 308).13

Neither colonial power’s discourse on human rights and nor nationalism’s sovereignty can salvage the subaltern. The fact that the Rani of Sirmur and

Bhuvaneswari were not subaltern and yet failed to register their voices amplifies the irreducible quandary in which the subaltern finds herself. The subaltern cannot speak, in the languages of the elites, of their own desires. Imperialism and anti-imperialism have dissimilar strategies but their languages both talk about development of nations to which

13 Here I quote the conclusion of the original ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (1988), which resonates with the ‘Comfort Women’ case. The conditional statement—‘The subaltern cannot speak.’—was often miscommunicated as a deterministic assessment and criticized for ‘muting the subaltern.’ In the ‘History’ chapter (1999), Spivak replaces the conclusion a personal lamentation (308): ‘I was so unnerved by [Bhuvaneswari’s] failure of communication that, in the first version of this text, I wrote, in the accents of passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak! It was an inadvisable remark.’

52 the subaltern do not belong. The question cannot be reduced to who hears the subaltern, because the subaltern is only heard in medias res so that their speech agrees to the master narrative.

One of the challenges of postcolonial societies is that they have to establish themselves upon imperial knowledge. Power structures create knowledge that upholds their power over subject populations. As Foucault succinctly puts it, ‘knowledge constantly induces effects of power’ (1980, 52). Imperialism produces the episteme that positions postcolonial subjects as history’s other (Spivak 1999, 215). The colonial experience, therefore, cannot be reduced to ‘either rupture or continuity’ (Spivak 1999,

225, emphasis original). The desire of postcolonial subjects is validated only when it conforms to the desire of the colonial power. But the epistemic violence does not smear from the outer/inner boundary. Anti-imperialism conjures up the mythical ‘we’ that is equally intolerant of differences. In its effort to produce a homogenous and unified nation, anti-imperialism often turns a blind eye to class, gender, and race. By extending its one-ness to those who ‘cannot speak,’ who are granted no sanction for resistance but ordered to represent the master narrative, nationalism encourages the muting of the subaltern (Spivak 2010, 83).

2.3. The ‘Comfort Women’ exceptionalism

The invention and evolution of the Japanese military sexual slavery is well documented by many scholars including Hicks (1995), Chung (1997), Yoshimi (2000)

53 and Tanaka (2002) in detail. Imperial Japan designed the sexual slavery in the course of invasion of China in the early 1930 in order to boost soldiers’ morale as well as to prevent VD and . The Japanese military first brought registered sex workers from

Japan to China and later mobilized local Chinese women to meet the increasing demand.

However, concerns were raised about the possibility of Chinese women’s espionage.

Other nationals were recruited as alternatives, among whom Korean women were the majority. Korea had been annexed to Imperial Japan since 1910 and the government had the authority to draft civilians and supply labor to strategic war industries according to the 1938 National Mobilization Act.

Women in poverty were drafted with empty promises of employment at military industrial complexes overseas in the name of Voluntary Service Corps (挺身隊), which is transliterated as jeongsindae in Korean. Voluntary Service Corps was a comprehensive name for various types of forced labor Imperial Japan mobilized from Korea and often a disguise for the Japanese military sexual slavery. However, the official euphemism the

Japanese military used to refer to its sex slaves was ‘Comfort Women’ (慰安婦), which is transliterated as ‘wianbu’ in Korean. In South Korea after liberation the history of

‘Comfort Women’ was rather known as Voluntary Service Corps. When survivors came out and revealed the coerciveness of the system in the 1990s, the name Voluntary Service

Corps was critically reviewed and rejected. In addition, survivors of forced labor—the legitimate victims of Voluntary Service Corps—did not want to be mistaken for survivors of sexual slavery and problematized the confusing usage of Voluntary Service

Corps to refer to ‘Comfort Women.’ In the absence of a politically correct name to call

54 the victims, South Korean advocates devised the expression of Japanese Military

‘Comfort Women’ (ilbongun ‘wianbu’) in order to reveal the involvement of the Japanese military in the sexual slavery and to highlight the deceptive nature of the system and the term.14 The term ‘Comfort Women’ is always used in quotation marks to problematize its patriarchal utilitarianism toward women and the ironical euphemism.

When the Korean Council first attempted to politicize the history internationally, they approached the United Nations in the hope that the Japanese government would respond to their demands in the international forum (Korean Council 2008, 100). Taking advantage of the expanding international olitical system of the 1990s, the advocacy movement articulated the issue in universal terms (Kern and Nam 2009, 240). The issue was interpreted as a human rights issue and the organization was directed to the UN

Commission on Human Rights (now the UN Human Rights Council). This resulted in the appointment of a special rapporteur on the issue at the Sub-Commission on the

Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the UN Commission on

Human Rights in August 1993. It was through this process that the issue was defined as a case of sexual slavery. North Korea collaborated with South Korea at international forums to testify the atrocities and condemn Japan.

In addition, the 2000 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s

Military Sexual Slavery—a people’s tribunal organized under the leadership of the

14 The Korean Council > War and Women’s Human Rights Museum > Terminology

(https://www.womenandwar.net/contents/general/general.nx?page_str_menu=040701, accessed on 27 November 2013).

55

Korean Council and held in Tokyo, Japan—confirmed that the Japanese military used rape as a weapon of war and that the ‘Comfort Women’ system was a crime against humanity (Matsui 2001). At international forums the history of ‘Comfort Women’ is a human rights issue and a case of wartime violence against women. In South Korea, on the other hand, the history is discussed almost exclusively in terms of the Japanese colonial exploitation of the Korean nation. ‘The resolution of the issue of “Comfort

Women”’ is unconditionally equated to a formal apology and reparations from the

Government of Japan to the survivors. It is important to recognize that sexual slavery and sex slaves are expressions rarely used in South Korea. While scholars adopted the terms in their research (e.g. C. Yun 1997), the survivors are instead called ‘Comfort

Women’ victims (‘wianbu’ pihaeja) or ‘Comfort Women’ grandmas (‘wianbu’ halmuni).

They are called grandmas out of the Korean practice of extending kinship titles to respectfully address non-relatives.15 As discussed later in this paper, however, it is also worth noting that grandma is a desexualized name to call women.

A recent scandal at the National Assembly around the terms to address the history of ‘Comfort Women’ revealed how unfamiliar South Koreans are with the expression of

Japanese Military Sexual Slavery. On 9 July 2012 Chosun Daily reported that US

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton criticized the euphemism of the expression ‘Comfort

Women’ and used instead the expression ‘sex slaves.’ The report attracted much interest

15 Survivors of the sexual slavery are called grandmas as halmuni in Korean, lola in

Filipino and ama in Taiwanese. Sarah Soh argues that activists in the and

Taiwan adopted the practice from their South Korean counterparts (Soh 2008, p.73).

56 from the public and a number of newspapers responded by publishing reviews of the history of ‘Comfort Women.’ In response to these reports, the Minister of Foreign

Affairs and Trade stated that his Ministry would give a positive consideration of replacing the term ‘Comfort Women’ with ‘sex slaves.’16 The scandal led to nothing as the advocacy movement rejected the change, explaining that Japanese Military ‘Comfort

Women’ was a strategic term it had reclaimed. The scandal revealed an undeniable gap between the connotation of ‘Comfort Women’ grandmas and ‘sex slaves’ in the public discourse of the history. As discussed below, this gap signifies the differences between international and domestic discourses on ‘Comfort Women.’

2.3.1. Crime ‘Made in Japan’

Non-Koreans frequently ask why the ‘Comfort Women’ issue was raised decades after liberation (M. Yun 1997, 180). In a magazine published in 1997, Yun Mi- hyang, then general affairs director and now standing representative of the Korean

Council, lists four main reasons for the ‘oblivion’: [1] Japan operated the system in secret and destroyed records of the history when it lost WWII to the Allies; [2] the interim government of the US military in South Korea turned a blind eye to Japanese war-crimes in order to restore order and facilitate capitalist expansion in East Asia; [3] the patriarchal

Korean culture silenced the survivors; and [4] the and the subsequent authoritarian regime hindered reflections on the colonial history as well as the growth of

16 , 22 July 2012, ‘Much ado about nothing in government at a word by Clinton.’

57 civil society and women’s movement. Chung -Sung, one of the pioneers in the scholarship of ‘Comfort Women,’ also presents the same analysis for the reasons why the history had been ‘buried in time’ (Chung 1994, 173). As both correctly point out, Japan’s concealment, US connivance, and South Korea’s patriarchy and dictatorship contributed to delaying any discussion on the history in South Korea. What is problematic is that their analysis implies that the history was not known in the country until ‘Comfort

Women’ survivors came out and testified the atrocity. On the contrary, the history was already in the public memory. For example, Kyunghyang Daily published a reader’s discontent with the process of diplomatic negotiation between South Korea and Japan in

1962 in the following terms:

I was drafted by the Japanese military to South Sea Islands … On my way back

after the defeat of Japan I met a woman in and was heard-broken. This

Korea woman of a red-light district implored, ‘I was drafted to jeongsindae

[‘Comfort Women’] and became a toy for Japanese. They left me here and there

are many women like me here. Are you going home? Please help us have our

bones buried home.’17

What was absent was not the data or survivors but an audience interested in seeking truth about the history. Scholars such as Hyunah Yang argue that enough records and witnesses were readily available to make an argument for the history (H. Yang 1998,

17 Kyunghyang Daily, 16 October 1962, ‘Japan should apologize to South Korea.’

58

127). Yang further argues that the inattentiveness originates from the patriarchal national pride (H. Yang 1998). Women's chastity belongs to men of the nation and women who bring a patriarchal shame do not belong to the nation (Shim 2000). The experience of

‘Comfort Women’ was too shameful for the nation that it was better to be forgotten. This logic of male pride can be found in the practice of eunjangdo during Joseon Dynasty.

Eunjangdo refers to a dagger upper-class women carried with them as an accessory. On the fashionably ornamented dagger was often inscribed a phrase that read ‘unscattered devotion of heart.’ The suggested use of the dagger was for a woman in danger to kill herself—not her attacker—before her chastity (or fidelity, if married) be ruined along with the honor of her family. When one was no more a ‘proper woman,’ she was expected to choose death. In the same manner, the death of ‘Comfort Women’ was anticipated and mourned pre factum. Ironically enough, the advocacy movement used eunjangdo as a memorabilia to highlight the legitimacy of the movement (Yamashita

2012, 199).

The interpretation of the history of ‘Comfort Women’ changed in response to the reactions by the South Korean public and the Japanese government. Until the 1980s, the history of ‘Comfort Women’ was barely discussed in public and the demand for truth and justice was rare. Japanese colonialism had ended only a couple of decades prior, and the history of ‘Comfort Women’ existed in the public memory. And yet, there was no discourse on the history before the victims came out. What had been forgotten was not the history, but the very victims. The first-ever testimony made by a Korean survivor of the Comfort Women system was in 1975 in Okinawa, Japan. The late Bae Bong-gi (then

59 aged 61) had been sent to a ‘Comfort Station’ in Okinawa along with other ‘Comfort

Women’ and been living as a stateless person since the US military occupied the island in

1945 (Korea Chongshindae’s Institute 2002). Only after the island was returned to Japan in 1972, Bae became a registered alien and the Japanese media reported her testimony in

1975.18 Bae’s story was published in South Korean newspapers as well but the newly found ‘evidence’ of the Japanese atrocity was not celebrated. The victims were still presumed to have been dead. Newspapers merely lamented the tragedy as they reported

Bae’s survival in Japan:

The tragedy of [‘Comfort Women’] is that they were not able to return home after

the war. Most of these women died from exploitation, STDs, war fires and the

like. Few alive were too old or too shameful of their past to come back home.19

The death of the victims was presumed without hesitation even after a survivor made the courage to come out. The patriarchal shame that discursively killed the survivors is discussed in the next section.

18 Since then Bae was taken care of by —the General Association of Korean

Residents in Japan, an organization of Zainichi Koreans that unofficially represents the

Government of North Korea in Japan. In 1972 Chongryon launched an investigation of the history of forced migration of Koreans by Imperial Japan in collaboration with

Japanese human rights lawyers.

19 Dong-A Daily, 21 September 1979, ‘Jeongsindae: Japanese Society in Shock.’

60

While the news about Bae did not attract much attention, it motivated Yun

Chong-ok, professor of English literature at in Seoul, to trace the history of ‘Comfort Women.’ Born in Korea under the Japanese colonial regime in

1925, Yun had witnessed that unmarried of 14 years or older were frequently taken away by Japan, and she herself had to quit school for fear of being drafted (C. Yun 2001).

She went to Okinawa to interview Bae and from then on continued to conducted fieldwork at former ‘Comfort Station’ locations in Japan, Thailand, and Papua New

Guinea (Korea Chongshindae’s Institute 2002). Her research was published in South

Korean newspapers but again it did not receive much enthusiastic attention (Korean

Council 2008, 46). Hence, when the late Kim Hak-Soon (then aged 64) came out and identified herself as another survivor of ‘Comfort Women’ in 1991, which was the first time in South Korea, the advocacy movement carefully hosted a press conference on

August 14, a day before the annual celebration of the country’s liberation from the

Japanese colonialism (Korean Council 2008, 76).20

On the Independence Day, Kim’s testimony was published in numerous newspapers. The headlines read ‘17 year old stamped down,’ ‘Still enraged by the

Japanese flag,’ or ‘Reparations should be made for the humiliation.’21 They chose a nationalist frame that would resonate with the postcolonial nation. The strategy seemed

20 August 14 is commemorated as the International Memorial Day of ‘Comfort Women’ since 2013.

21 The headlines are respectively from Kyunghyang Daily, 15 August 1990; Hankyoreh,

15 August 1990; and Dong-A Daily, 15 August 1990.

61 to work as far as raising awareness of the history. Ironically, women were soon erased from the discourse, leaving only the nation to matter. For example, an excerpt below from a paper prepared by the women’s subcommittee of a politically progressive organization illustrates the way the victims were appropriated by the nationalist discourse

(NDMRI 1992, 139):

We should reconfirm that the jeongsindae issue is not only a women's issue but a

pan-national one caused by the invasion and plunder by Japan ... we should not

spare any effort to turn the momentum into a broader sense of national autonomy.

The survivors have become important evidence the nation can use to prove the atrocities of Imperial Japan. Their experiences are heard only in medias res and appropriated to establish truth for the nation. In this way, the victims’ sufferings are abstracted into the sufferings of the nation. In the process the experiences of individuals, especially as women from poor families, are made obscure.

Women’s groups were not immune from the nationalist interpretation and appropriation of ‘Comfort Women.’ In May 1990, President Roh Tae-woo made an official visit to Japan to discuss regional security and economic collaboration. Civil organizations such as the Korea Liberation Association, the Association for the Patriotic

Martyrs, the Korean Association of Pacific War Victims and Bereaved Families protested in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul against the visit on the account that the agenda

62 of the visit did not include reparations for the victims by Japan.22 Taking the opportunity, the Korean Church Women United (hereafter KCWU), the Korea Women’s Associations

United, and the Seoul branch of the National Council of Representatives of Women

University Students got together and released a statement that requested the Emperor of

Japan to apologize for the atrocities of the ‘Comfort Women’ system. The organizations were not only dedicated to the ‘Comfort Women’ issue as they also condemned the

Japanese government for its neocolonial policies toward South Korea in the statement and asked for better treatment of Zainichi .23 Although the statement aimed at redressing the history of ‘Comfort Women,’ the victims were mentioned to remind South Koreans of Imperial Japan’s exploitation of and violence against Koreans and of the unbalanced diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan (K. H. S.

Moon 1999, 318).

Later that year the Korean Council was established for the resolution of the

‘Comfort Women’ issue.24 The Korean Council has seven demands to the Japanese

22 Hankyoreh, 17 April 1990, ‘Organizations disregard “1968 Agreement” and seek reparations;’ and Kyunghyang Daily, 22 May 1990, ‘8 organizations protest against

President Roh’s visit to Japan.’

23 Hankyoreh, 20 May 1990, ‘Investigate truth of “Comfort Women” and apologize’; and

Korean Council (2008, p.68).

24 The first organization established in dedication to the history was the Korea

Chongshindae’s Institute, which opened in July 1990 for the investigation of the history.

The Korean Council was established in November 1990.

63 government: [1] acknowledge the crime, [2] reveal the truth in its entirety, [3] make an official apology from the Diet, [4] make legal reparations, [5] record the crime in history textbooks, [6] establish a memorial for the victims and a history museum, and [7] punish those responsible.25 It is apparent in these demands that the organization understands that the history of ‘Comfort Women’ should be redressed by the Japanese government and sees their role in pressuring it.

This pressure is ongoing. On January 8, 1992, on the occasion of Prime Minister

Miyazawa’s visit to South Korea, the Korean Council held a demonstration seeking for the Japanese government’s apology in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. They also announced that they would not stop the demonstration until their demands were met. For over two decades since then, the ‘ Demonstration for the resolution of the

Japanese military “Comfort Women” issue’ has been held every Wednesday at noon in front of the Embassy. Activists and citizens in support of the demands gather around the octogenarian survivors and chant toward the Embassy ‘Apologize. Apologize.

Apologize.’

As explained earlier, the Korean Council does interpret the history as a war-time violence against women and contributes to international discussion and activism on the subject. They also voice anti-war messages and collaborate with women’s organizations on various women’s human rights issues. For example, on the 2012 International

Women’s Day the organization launched a fund raising campaign for women victims of

25 The Korean Council > Activities > Goals (https://www.womenandwar.net/contents/ general/general.nx?page_str_menu=0101, accessed on 22 November 2013).

64 wartime violence and some of the survivors pledged to donate any reparations they would receive from Japan to the Butterfly Fund, which has been helping victims of the DR

Congo civil war mass rape and the War. Nonetheless, their anti-war and feminist messages are marginalized by the demands toward Japan they communicate at weekly demonstrations.

Social movements frame their issues in response to the society’s value system

(Benford and 2000). The media rhetorically refers to ‘Comfort Women’ whenever

South Korea is situated on unfavorable ground vis-à-vis Japan. Anti-Japanese sentiment among the public is centered around the history of colonial exploitation, which is often exemplified by the experience of ‘Comfort Women.’ Feminist scholars are critical of the advocacy movment for its deliberately nationalist interpretation of the history (H. S. Kim

1997; H. Yang 1998; J. L. Kim 2004; Yamashita 2012). While I am not in disagreement with them, I insist on giving more attention to the already existing discourse on the history. As discussed earlier, the history of ‘Comfort Women’ was not completely unknown before the survivors came out but ignored as a patriarchal shame outliving the national pride. The nationalist framework succeeded in raising awareness on the history while losing sight of violence against women by the nation. This is the pharmakon of nationalism.

Complicity by Koreans in the ‘Comfort Women’ system is hardly discussed. In everyday representations of the history of ‘Comfort Women,’ it has been consistently interpreted as an exceptionally brutal crime committed by Japan. Nonetheless,

65 testimonies suggest that a number of Koreans participated in most steps.26 In order to recruit and transfer women from Korea to ‘Comfort Stations’ overseas, it required close collaboration between local recruiters, transportation businesses, the police, the General-

Government of Korea, the military, and concerned ministries of the Imperial Government

(Presidential Committee 2009, 583). In addition, some ‘Comfort Stations’ were operated by Koreans commissioned by the Japanese military (ibid.). However, the discourse on the history is almost exclusively focused on condemning Japan.

This exclusive focus is partly explained by the Japanese government’s response to the scandal. Before the 1993 statement that acknowledged the involvement of the

Japanese military in the recruitment and management of ‘Comfort Women,’ the initial response of the Japanese government to the survivors’ testimonies was a forthright denial. In addition, domestic politics in Japan encouraged politicians to disrespect the

1993 statement. In South Korea, Japan’s repeated denial of the history encouraged the

‘Comfort Women’ movement to focus their efforts on holding Japan legally accountable

(Korean Council 2008, 54).

Not limited to the history of ‘Comfort Women,’ collaboration of Koreans with the

Japanese colonial government has been a thorny issue. Collaborators had acquired better positions to accumulate wealth and exercise power and maintained elite status after liberation. While the acts of collaboration were publicly condemned and civil society

26 Collections of testimonies were published into books by the Korean Council and are made available online at www.hermuseum.go.kr, a website of the Ministry of Gender

Equality of South Korea opened in 2005 in dedication to the history.

66 organizations repeatedly requested that the South Korean government investigate the history, identifying the collaborators was a big political burden for the government.

Finally in 2004, a special law was passed to redress the history of Japanese colonialism and collaboration of Koreans. The law established a special committee for the investigation of collaborative activities, the Presidential Committee for the Inspection of

Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism (2005-2009, hereafter the Presidential

Committee), whose missions included among other things identifying Koreans who had mobilized Korean women against their will and supplied them to the Japanese military as

‘Comfort Women.’

The actions of the Presidential Committee fell short of stated objectives. The

Presidential Committee investigated pro-Japanese activities in Korea and overseas from

1904 to 1945. Despite the fact that most Korean women had been drafted from the

Korean peninsula, the Presidential Committee limited its investigation to Korean

‘Comfort Women’ recruiters who had worked in Japan (Presidential Committee 2009,

Vol. II. p. 252). This resulted in only one suspect, who was dismissed in the end due to lack of evidence (ibid.). The Presidential Committee identified a total of 1,005 Korean collaborators but none with the charge of recruiting ‘Comfort Women.’ This did not cause any commotion in the country, not even from the advocacy movement.

The anti-Japanese discourse on the history of ‘Comfort Women’ occasionally includes criticisms against the South Korean government. The criticisms mainly concern two things: representation of the survivors against the Japanese government in their struggle to receive an apology and reparations and welfare services for the survivors. For

67 example, until 2005, the South Korean government maintained that all issues between citizens and states of the two countries had been resolved for good by Article 2 of the

1965 Agreement on the Settlement of Problems Concerning Property and Claims and on

Economic Cooperation between Japan and the Republic of Korea.27 The Agreement is one of four agreements the two countries signed in 1965 to officially normalize diplomatic relations. In the process of negotiation for the Agreement, the South Korean government exchanged the right to reparations of the victims of forced labor with grants and loans for the national economy (Y. Kim 2008, 107). As a result, the South Korean government received USD 600 million in grant and loan from the Japanese government, which became the seed money for the rapid economic growth in South Korea in the

1970s and 1980s.

The right to reparations, however, was limited. The damage and distress of

‘Comfort Women’ was not known at the time of negotiation for the Agreement and there has been a debate whether the survivors have a standing to make claims for their sufferings against the Japanese government despite the Agreement. In March 1993, however, when the number of survivors identified exceeded 100 and the advocacy movement was growing fast, President Kim Young-sam announced that ‘the “Comfort

Women” issue calls for Japan to disclose the truth but no material reparations are necessary.’28 This announcement was made without any consultation with the survivors

27 Consult Kim Chang Rok (2009) for a detailed discussion on the Agreement and its interpretations regarding the ‘Comfort Women’ issue.

28 Maeil Business, 13 March 1993, ‘No reparations for “Comfort Women” to seek.’

68 or the advocacy movement, not to mention the public.29 While the President was highly criticized for it, the same stance was repeated announced by his administration and its successors. In lieu of reparations from Japan, the South Korean government provided the survivors with allowances and housing on a permanent lease in 1993 and 1998.30

By declaring its intention not to ask for reparations, the government wished to avoid diplomatic conflicts with its one of the most important economic and political allies. At the same time, it was a move to keep the moral high ground vis-à-vis its former colonizer (K. Yang 2002, 627). South Korea becomes the sole sufferer and all the wrongdoings belong to Japan. This stance, however, led to a conflict between the survivors and the government when 109 survivors filed a constitutional complaint against the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2006 for nonperformance of Article 3 of the

1965 Agreement (2006 Heon Ma 788). Article 3 states that any conflicts arising on the interpretation and application of the Agreement should be addressed through diplomatic channels. The complaints thus held the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade responsible for not raising the issue of ‘Comfort Women’ to the Japanese government and not performing their duty according to the Article. The Minister insisted that the atrocity had been committed by Japan and Japan should be responsible for all damaged caused by it. In his letter to the Constitutional Court the Minister claimed that ‘it is based

29 Hankyoreh, 16 March 1993, ‘Korean Council seeking response from President.’

30 The government offers physical and mental treatment subsidies for the survivors and commissions scholars to conduct research on the history since the Ministry of Gender

Equality was established in 2001.

69 on a wrong premise to hold responsible the South Korean government along with the

Japanese government for the sufferings of ‘Comfort Women’ victims.’31 It is important to note in the case that both the survivors and the government agreed that the harm had been done by the Japanese government. They only disagreed on the South Korean government’s duty to raise the issue to the Japanese government.32 The complexity of the ‘Comfort Women’ system that spans across class and gender was reduced to the crime of Imperial Japan.

2.3.2. Dishonorable common noun, honorable proper noun

As discussed earlier, the Japanese military sexual slavery used to be called

Voluntary Service Corps (jeongsindae) before the 1990s. After the history was fully revealed, the victims became referred to as ‘Comfort Women’ (‘wianbu’). In this expression wianbu is a proper noun that refers to the victims of the systemic violence against women by Japan during the Asia-Pacific War. However, the word had been in use in South Korea for decades before the 1990s as a common noun that refers to sex workers.

31 Letter of response on the constitutional complaint 2006 Heon Ma 788, Minister of

Foreign Affairs and Trade, p.3.

32 The survivors won the case in 2011 and the Minister was ordered to actively seek a diplomatic resolution to the issue.

70

The Standard Korean Language Dictionary defines wianbu as common noun that refers to ‘women mobilized for men’s sexual comfort, especially for the military in war times.’33 Below is a newspaper article published in 1963 that uses the word as a common noun:

Jeongsindae [Voluntary Service Corps]: So-called virgin looting. Girls were

taken to war fronts and made wianbu [comfort women], with whose bodies

Japanese soldiers were served. Many Koreans hurriedly arranged marriage of

their daughters lest they be plundered. No one knows how many Korean girls

were taken away and what happened to them.34

Here wianbu (comfort women) is used as a common noun to describe the way women were exploited by Japanese soldiers. It is noteworthy that the article explains Voluntary

Service Corps with the term comfort women, not vice versa. This implies that comfort women was already in the South Korean vocabulary and that its sexual connotations were not in use in reference to the Japanese military sexual slavery already familiar to South

Koreans of that time.

As a matter of fact, the history of the term comfort women (wianbu) in South

Korea began in the early 1950s when the South Korean military operated its own version

33 Standard Korean Language Dictionary, National Institute of the Korean Language.

34 Kyunghyang Daily, 14 August 1963, ‘Words to remember on Independence Day,’ emphasis added by the author.

71 of comfort stations (G.-O. Kim 2012; I.-H. Lee 2004; J.-M. Park 2011a). During the

Korean War (1950-1953) the South Korean military organized Special Comfort Corps of comfort women. Records show that the military had 261,604 troops in 1952 (J.-M. Park

2011a, 54), and that the total number of comfort women the military hosted that year was

89 and the accumulated number of the comforted 204,560 (G.-O. Kim 2012, 320).

Testimonies reveal that some were abducted, suggesting that women accused of affiliation with North Korea could have been forced to work at comfort stations (G.-O.

Kim 2012, 326). The Korean military comfort women were sometimes called the ‘fifth category’ supply—a nonexistent category—because comfort women did not officially exist (G.-O. Kim 2012, 325). Park Jeong-Mi suspects that the majority of the South

Korean military leadership had served the Japanese military before liberation and could have adopted the Japanese military sexual slavery to the South Korean military (J.-M.

Park 2011a, 43).

Comfort stations were established for the Allied forces as well. Since the Allies won World War II and liberated the Korean peninsula from the Japanese colonial rule in

1945, the occupied the southern half of the Korean peninsula and USSR the northern half. At the breakout of the Korean War, the UN Security Council commissioned the US military to defend South Korea. In 1951 the South Korean government prepared ‘Measures to provide comfort to the UN forces’ and established comfort stations and dance halls accordingly (I.-H. Lee 2004; Hayashi 2012). Lee -ha and Park Jeong-Mi suggest the possibility of the Allied forces asking for the South

Korean government to provide entertainment and sexual services. Whether or not the

72

Allied forces made such requests, establishing comfort stations involved the South

Korean government who justified the measures as a necessary evil to return the favor of the Allies (I.-H. Lee 2004; J.-M. Park 2011a).

On 27 July 1953 the Allies signed an agreement on armistice with North Korea and China. The South Korean military dismissed its comfort women the following year in accordance with the ban of licensed prostitution. However, the armistice did not end the history of comfort women in the country. On 1 October 1953 the governments of

South Korea and the United States signed the Mutual Defense Agreement, which institutionalized the United States Forces Korea (USFK).35 As US military bases became stabilized, camptowns developed around them for the provision of R&R (rest and relaxation) for US troops, i.e. prostitution (K. H. S. Moon 1997; K. H. S. Moon 1998).

Since then the term wianbut (comfort women) was reduced to refer to sex workers catering to US soldiers in South Korea (J.-M. Park 2011b, 149).36 Below is a newspaper article published in 1963 that explains the term:

35 USFK has 93 military camps with 26,000 troops in South Korea as of this .

36 A white paper published by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 1964 refers to sex workers in downtown as prostitutes (changneyo) and those catering to UN forces as comfort women (wianbu) (Park 2011b, p.175).

73

After liberation, women who threw away the virtue of chastity and served foreign

soldiers were called yanggalbo or yanggongju. The term wianbu [comfort

women] was devised to replace these distasteful terms.37

The article suggests that wianbu (comfort women) is a more nuanced term than the pejorative terms such as yanggalbo (Western whore) and yanggongju (Western princess).

While it shows how the word wianbu (comfort women) entered into the South Korean vocabulary as a common noun, it does not trace back the origin of the term to the state- mobilized sex workers during the Korean War or to the Japanese military sexual slavery.

The article rather suggests that the word was created anew as if there had been no comfort women in the past. This is the common noun comfort women that was in use until the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ was politicized and ‘Comfort Women’ became a proper noun in the early 1990s. The proper-noun comfort women refers to women mobilized by government during the Korean War whereby the common noun comfort women refers to women who voluntarily offer sexual services.

Another difference between the proper noun and the common noun is the implication of coerciveness. While the South Korean government was involved in regulating comfort women in US military camptowns, as discussed below, it did not have to recruit them. The devastated post-Korean War economy ensured enough supply of comfort women. That camptown sex workers are not forcibly mobilized does not change the fact that a majority of them were from low-class, disprivileged families and were led

37 Kyunghyang Daily, 9 April 1963, ‘Terms devised by journalists.’

74 to make the ‘choice’ of life as comfort women. Nonetheless, as the South Korean economy grew in the 1970s and 1980s condemnation toward camptown sex workers increased for voluntarily selling their bodies to foreigners (K. H. S. Moon 1998, 150).

The common noun lost the implication of sex mobilized by government and sex workers earned contempt and disregard (J.-M. Park 2011b, 149). Later when the Japanese

Military ‘Comfort Women’ advocacy movement began, they highlighted the brutality of the sexual slavery and the coerciveness of the Japanese military in recruiting and exploiting the victims. Still, vehement opposition to calling the victims ‘Comfort

Women’ is not uncommon until today because the voluntary nature and immorality implied in the common noun comfort women had been a daily acceptance for decades.

If the common noun comfort women was more nuanced term than yanggalbo and yanggongju, more subtle terms were also employed. With the promulgation of the1961

Dissipative Behaviors Prevention Act (yullak haengwi bangji beob), all types of prostitution were banned and the official terms to address prostitution and prostitutes became dissipative behaviors (yullak haengwi) and dissipative women (yullak yeoseong), respectively (J.-M. Park 2011b, 262). US military comfort women were indirectly called camptown women (gijichon yeoseong). Ironically enough, while the terms prostitutes

(maechunbu) and comfort women (wianbu) were gradually replaced by these less explicit terms in the official discourse on prostitution, practices of prostitution were becoming more extravagant. This would not have been possible against the government’s strong will against prostitution. On the contrary, one year after the anti-prostitution law was passed, the government established 104 ‘special districts’ for prostitution, most of which

75 were located near US military bases (K. H. S. Moon 1997, 42). Prostitution in US military camptowns grew under the auspices of the South Korean government and the US military. Camptowns have hosted bars that only cater to non-Korean patrons and provide a tightly managed system of prostitution:

Towns around US military camps are suffering from a recession after the

government increased tax on alcoholic beverages. The government decided on

measures to boost the economy in these towns. … They include establishing

community health centers for wianbu …38

The dollars US soldiers spent in camptowns were an important source of foreign currency earnings (K. H. S. Moon 1997; Soh 2008). Camptown prostitutes were often publicly encouraged and praised for contributing to the country’s economic development (K. H. S.

Moon 1997; Soh 2008; J.-K. Lee 2010).

… they say that the camps are equipped with all kinds of entertainment facilities

and that the US military authority encourages soldiers to spend their money

within the camps. US soldiers leave the camps only to get girls.39

38 Dong-A Daily, 11 August 1962, ‘Discussion to overcome recession around US military camps.’ As discussed earlier, wianbu is used in this article as a common noun to refer to camptown prostitutes.

39 Maeil Kyungje, 24 April 1969, ‘Deprived USD targets.’

76

Education: Three-tier education program will be implemented for the health

improvement of prostitutes. … (B) Return: KRW 210,000 of government budget

is allocated to facilitate the return of the physically or mentally impaired

prostitutes. …40

What makes prostitution unexceptional to and rather expected at military bases all around the world are calculated policies that shape men’s sexuality, structure women’s economic opportunities, allow entertainment businesses, and manage public health

(Enloe 2000, 81). The led to a reduction of the size of US troops in

South Korea. It was responded to with the camptown clean-up campaign (1971-1976), which was a joint measure between the South Korean government and the US military to better control and manage camptown sex workers. A clear illustration of the military exploitation of women’s sexuality, it was also an opportunity for both parties to show each other the importance of the ROK-US military alliance (K. H. S. Moon 1998, 151).

The campaign included education programs on and STDs for both Koreans and

US servicemen in camptowns and ordered prostitutes to take regular STD check-ups.

Camptown sex workers were monitored and regulated by the state, but not protected.

They were condemned for promiscuity and immorality. They were constantly exposed to crimes by US soldiers, in the forms of battery, rape, theft and even murder. Newspapers

40 Kyunghyang Daily, 10 September 1962, ‘ROK-US Friendship Commission, the new coordinates of friendship.’

77 reported murders of wianbu almost regularly published. After the history of Japanese

Military ‘Comfort Women’ became common knowledge, camptown sex workers were critically reviewed as a modern version of ‘Comfort Women.’ Nevertheless, such a perspective was not widely shared. As discussed earlier, it was rather distinguished from

‘Comfort Women’ on the account of its allegedly non-coercive nature. The discourse on

‘Comfort Women’ maintained a safe distance from allegedly voluntary prostitutes, which included camptown sex workers.

In addition, nationalism appropriated the two issues differently, the former to overcome Japanese colonial history and the later to fight against US military imperialism.

This is well illustrated in the movement prompted by Yun Geum-yi’s death in 1992. Yun was one of thousands of camptown sex workers before she was beaten to death by a private in the vicinity of Seoul on 28 October 1992. Her body was found with two beer bottles in the womb, an umbrella penetrating the body from the anus, and a coke bottle in the vagina. Camptown sex workers had been organizing protests against regulations of and human rights violations by the South Korean government and the US military, which met unenthusiastic response from social movements and the public (K. H. S. Moon 1997;

H. Jeong 1999). The brutality of the murder of Yun, however, encouraged thousands of

South Koreans to join the protests by camptown sex workers for justice to Yun’s death.

Yun’s mutilated body was allegorized as the ‘victimized’ Korean nation (H. S.

Kim 1998, 189). The crime was interpreted not as a wrongdoing of a private but that of the US Army and further that of the US imperialism. An ad hoc coalition of 46 organizations—women’s groups, religious organizations, student organizations, labor

78 unions, and political organizations—was formed. It is important to note that the movement was not for or against the government-sponsored camptown prostitution, neither for sex workers’ human rights. It was for the effective persecution of the assaulter through the revision of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and South Korea.

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) defines the relationship between South

Korea and the US military. Drafted in the 1960s, SOFA has been criticized for its unbalanced terms and for not having confidence in the South Korean judiciary. The original Agreement stipulated that the US military automatically gain jurisdiction over

US military suspects within South Korea’s jurisdiction unless the latter notified the former of intension for trial within 15 days from recognition of the suspected act. The

South Korean authority could have custody of a US military suspect only when imprisonment was sentenced. With no suspect in custody, investigation was hardly done by the South Korean authority and South Koreans complained that verdicts were in favor of the US military. When Yun was murdered, the submissive South Korean police immediately gave up the assaulter’s custody to the US Army Criminal Investigation

Command on the account that SOFA states that suspects remain within the US jurisdiction before verdict. South Koreans feared that the assaulter would be released by the US authority without punishment (H. Jeong 2005, 18).

But the real fear underneath the protests for Yun was against the US imperialism.

South Korea had been a close ally of the US and anti-Americanism was almost nonexistent until the 1970s. However, when Chun Doo-hwan’s came into

79 power after a coup and a massacre in , which the US had given tacit approval to, antagonism grew against the US among the South Korean public (Shorrock 1986; J. Kim

1989; G.-W. Shin 1996). In the lack of democratic institutions for politics, anti-

Americanism was increasingly transformed into patriotic nationalism (C. H. Oh and

Arrington 2007; K. H. S. Moon 2013). ‘Anti-Americanism in South Korea is in part an effort to confront the history and legacy of and the nationalism that was framed and imposed by dictators to justify their rule’ (K. H. S. Moon 2003, 141).

In the context of growing anti-Americanism, justice for Yun became a matter of national pride. Both women’s groups and groups against US imperialism problematized the structural domination of the US over South Korea. The Korean nation as a unified subject occupied the victim position instead of Yun (H. S. Kim 1998; E. Kim, Moon, and

Jeong 2002). Protests developed into a movement against the unfairly privileged status of US soldiers, and against the US military presence in the country (N.-Y. Lee 2011). It attributes to the political in the 1980s and 1990s. South Korea was also under pressure from the US to open its market including rice. Since the country had been already heavily influenced to buy weapons from the US, concerns about losing food security and subsequently sovereignty were growing.

As the revision of SOFA was prioritized over the issues of camptown sex workers, feminist perspectives were marginalized. After Yun’s assaulter received a guilty verdict, the ad hoc committee transformed into a standing organization—the

National Campaign for Eradication of Crimes by US Troops in Korea—that investigates

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US military crimes and promotes revisions of SOFA.41 Yun’s death is by far one of the most remembered US military crimes in South Korea. The brutality of the murder, the subsequent SOFA revision, and its influence on protests against US military crimes all contributed to the memory. The brutal murder of Yun cannot be separated from the fact that she was a sex worker. She was killed as a woman, or more precisely, a subaltern woman. However, her life as a sex worker was not heard because what mattered was her death as a national martyr. Yun’s death was sublimated into national damage done by US imperialism.

As the murder was interpreted as South Korea’s sovereignty violated, Yun’s body was symbolized as the nation invaded. The nationalist discourse around the murder made a martyr out of Yun. Anti-Americanist groups called Yun ‘our good sister (uri chakhan nui).’ The very fact that the assaulter was not Korean was enough to make Yun ‘our sister.’ The term nui is a Korean kinship title used by male speakers to address their younger female sibling. The nation that grieves Yun’s death is imagined male, the sex in charge of protecting female members of the family. It mourns the brother’s loss instead of the sister’s sufferings. In addition, Yun was imagined a ‘good (chakhan)’—kind and obedient—sister. Suddenly a camptown sex worker transformed from a patriarchal shame and national dishonor to a national martyr. But the martyrdom did not save the rest of camptown sex workers as it only signified the assaulter—US military.

41 Upon the South Korean government’s requests, revisions were made in 1991 and 2001, which made possible for the South Korean authority to secure custody of US military suspects from indictment.

81

This created a chasm between women’s groups and groups against US imperialism, which is well illustrated in the debate over the use of a photograph of Yun at protests. The photograph was a bird-eye view of the crime scene where Yun’s naked body was found. Void of the respect for the deceased, the photo contained nothing but the brutality of the crime. At memorial protests held by anti-imperialist groups, the photograph was used in place of a formal portrait. Women’s groups argued that displaying the photograph was another act of violence against women because it expressed only a functional interpretation of women’s body. Nonetheless, the display was repeated. One anti-imperialist group even produced a poster with the photograph, which is sold online with a dozen more photographs of US military crime scenes. As is the case with historiography, photography represents the logic of those who take the photo and circulate it (Butler 2009, 67). Framed by anti-imperialism, Yun’s post-mortem photograph leaves no room for prostitution and violence against .

The connection between the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ and US military camptown comfort women remains broken since then.

2.3.3. Polarized representations

What first encouraged women’s organizations to investigate the history of

Japanese military ‘Comfort Women’ was the flourishing sex tourism of the 1980s. Since diplomacy was normalized between South Korea and Japan in 1965, an increasing number of Japanese men visited South Korea for sex tourism. The so-called gisaeng

82 tourism reached its peak in the 1970s: for example, 80% of the total population of tourists in the country were Japanese in 1973 (KCWU 1983, 7), and 98% of the Japanese male tourists were unaccompanied by women in 1976 (Lie 1995, 318). Yayori Matsui lamented in her article published in 1974 that Japan was invading South Korea economically and sexually (Barry, Bunch, and Castley 1984, 65). Sex tourism became a more important source of foreign currency earning than camptown prostitution as US soldiers’ salaries began to lose value in comparison to the booming economy of South

Korea in the 1980s (J.-K. Lee 2010, 127).

The name gisaeng came from the Korean term for women hired by governments for entertainment in pre-colonial Korea for centuries. While gisaeng performed a variety of functions, they were distinguished from ‘proper’ women mainly in the sense that they were located outside the traditional value of chastity and could be taken by the elites as concubines. In South Korea prostitution was banned by the1961 Dissipative Behaviors

Prevention Act but sex tourism grew in the loopholes deliberately crafted by the South

Korean government for prostitution for foreign nationals. Government-sponsored tourism agencies provided cultural education to women entertainers and issued them a certificate (Korean Church Women United 1983, 24). The women were required to complete junior high school education and pass periodic health tests as well. Here again the state mobilized women entertainers’ ‘public-sex work’ for economic development in the same way it did camptown sex workers for national security (Soh 2008, 207).

The sex tourism led KCWU to a conclusion that the South Korean government’s tacit sponsorship for sex tourism to be analogous to the ‘Comfort Women’ system during

83 the Japanese imperialism (KCWU 1983). It is worth remembering that the same criticism was raised against camptown prostitution but disappeared, whereby in this case it encouraged an investigation of the history of ‘Comfort Women’ and developed into a national movement. This is because in all three cases of wianbu (comfort women), prostitution was understood as a problem of imperialism (Eom 2006). The victims of

‘Comfort Women’ fell prey to the Japanese imperial expansion; camptown sex workers were created by US military imperialism; and gisaeng tourism was a form of Japanese neocolonial exploitation of Korean women. As these issues were taken up by the discourse of nationalism, they developed into anti-Japanese and anti- discourses, respectively.

As the resolution of the ‘Comfort Women’ issue became a matter of national pride, the victims of ‘Comfort Women’ were transformed to ‘daughters of the nation

(minjok-ui ttal)’ who were violated by outsiders. The family metaphor forbade any sexualized references to the victims. They were invariably portrayed as innocent little girls abducted by ruthless Japanese soldiers. Anything that could suggest any variations to the stereotype was rejected, especially opinions that question the coerciveness of the recruitment process.

The taboo against sexual references in the discourse of ‘Comfort Women’ is well illustrated in a public scandal. In 2004, a popular live TV debate program on MBC hosted a debate on the legislation of the inspection of collaborations for Japanese

Imperialism.42 On the question of the history of ‘Comfort Women’ and Koreans’

42 MBC 100 Minute Debate, 2 September 2004, ‘Legislating Justice to History.’

84 collaboration with the Japanese military, one of the panelists, Professor Lee Young-hoon of Seoul National University, argued that truth should be revealed about collaboration in forcibly mobilizing women and qualified the argument by suggesting that the history of

Japanese military sexual slavery should be reflected in relation to the South Korean military’s operation of comfort stations during the Korean War and the tacit approval of prostitution in US military camptowns. His opponent criticized him for comparing the victims of ‘Comfort Women’ with prostitutes.

The debate created a public outrage. The Korean Council requested a formal apology from Lee and Seoul National University and the National Women’s Committee of the ruling demanded Lee’s apology to the people of South Korea.43 Lee posted an apology on his university webpage and paid a visit to the survivors to seek forgiveness. This happening reveals the extreme aversion of sexual references to the discourse on ‘Comfort Women’ in South Korea. What Lee pointed out was the continued violence against women that took place in South Korea in South Koreans’ complicit indifference. The public, however, criticized him for comparing ‘Comfort Women’ to prostitutes and implicitly suggesting that the survivors provided sexual services for compensation.

The nationalist discourse does not allow any challenge to the stereotype of

‘Comfort Women.’ Nor does it have any tolerance for sexualized depictions of the

43 Dong-A Daily, 4 September 2004, ‘Professor’s thoughtless remarks … Korean Council demanding apology;’ SBS News 8, 5 September 2004, ‘Uri Party seeking apology on remarks on “Comfort Women.”’

85 history. Another scandal earlier in 2004 illustrates this. Netian Entertainment contracted a popular female actress and produced a photography project thematizing ‘Comfort

Women.’ On 12 February the company released a few shots of the photography and announced that the photography was scheduled to be serviced through mobile networks the following month. The released photos were set in scenes of the Asia-Pacific War in

Palau, the Philippines, where the actress was photographed in traditional Korean costume and yet half naked. The photography targeted South Korea’s rapidly growing mobile adult contents market, whose sales recorded over USD 100 million.44

Their marketing strategy failed, however, as the sexualized representation of

‘Comfort Women’ infuriated the public. Newspapers editorials cried in unison that the photography should not be released. Women’s organizations together with 132 ‘Comfort

Women’ survivors released a statement and condemned the project for dishonoring the victims. They also filed an injunction against the project for the protection of the survivors’ personal rights, stating that the project was wrongfully motivated to humiliate the survivors. The public joined them through online petitions and protests against

Netian Entertainment and the actress. In two days mobile network companies announced cancelation of the photography service.45 Netian Entertainment and the actress apologized in public for dishonoring the survivors and burned all the negatives in front of

44 Weekly Kyunghyang, 26 November 2004, ‘Good enough to get naked.’

45 Dong-A Daily, 24 February 2004, ‘Big 3 mobile networks not servicing Lee Seung- yeon nude.’

86 the media. The actress was not able to come back on TV screen for years afterwards, while the mobile adult contents market did not cease to grow.

The ‘Comfort Women’ nudity infuriated the public because it violated the taboo of sexualizing the daughters of the nation. The aversion of sexual references in discussing the history comes from the patriarchal pride of the nation that cannot be outlived by humiliation. A sad ending with an honorary death was more desirable than life in dishonor. The two incidents of 2004 outraged the public because they too candidly exposed the taboo against the patriarchal nation’s shame (Y.-S. Choi 2004, 350). The taboo creates an arbitrary break in the lives of ‘Comfort Women.’ In the discourse on

‘Comfort Women’ the survivors were born again from a patriarchal shame of the nation to important witnesses of the colonial crime. Renamed as ‘daughters of the nation,’ they are represented only either as young and innocent girls before they were recruited into the system or as strong-willed octogenarians who survived the violence of sexual slavery, the colonial discrimination against Koreans, and the distress of the war. The girls symbolize the vulnerability of the nation under the colonial rule and of the women who were victimized by the sexual slavery. The white-haired octogenarians represent the Korean nation’s indomitable spirit. In the polarized representation of ‘Comfort women’ remains the brutality of the crime but not the ‘Comfort Women’ themselves. The stereotypes erase the involvement of Korean collaborators in the sexual slavery, the 45 years of indifference that South Korea showed to the history of ‘Comfort Women,’ and most importantly the very experiences of the survivors. Their subaltern experiences of the colonial Korea that forced them to warfronts, their daily lives there, and especially the 45

87 years they had to remain silent. According to the testimonies, some ‘Comfort Women’ were sold to the Japanese military by their kins; some of the survivors were asked for a divorce when their husbands found out their past as ‘Comfort Women.’ The survivors’ sufferings did not end when the colonial rule ended. However, there is no room in the discourse for discussion on what is omitted by the nation’s selective listening.

When history is written based on testimonies, the listeners are part of the creation of the history because their interactions validate the testifiers and they record the testimonies into a coherent knowledge (H. Yang 2008). This is how the representational vacuum is created. The representational vacuum is filled with current political tensions between South Korea and Japan. This is well demonstrated by the ongoing confrontation between South Korea and Japan over a monument dedicated to ‘Comfort Women.’ At the 1,000th Wednesday Demonstration on 14 December 2011, the advocacy movement unveiled a bronze monument at the very spot where the survivors sit through the demonstration every week—in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul (Figure 6). The monument represents a seated young girl and an empty chair next to her. The girl is dressed in a traditional Korean dress but as if she was hurried taken away from home. Her eyes gaze at the Japanese Embassy. No emotion is expressed in her face but her fists in the lap are clenched. Despite the clenched fists, the monument is named

‘Peace Monument.’ At a meeting between the Japanese Prime Minister and the South

Korean President, the Prime Minister requested the South Korean government to remove the monument for the security and safety of the Embassy, which the government

88 ignored.46 In several months, the monument was vandalized by Japanese visitors who put on the monument a message that read ‘Takeshima is Japanese territory.’ The vandalism was retaliated by a Korean man who drove his truck to crash into the front gate of the

Japanese Embassy. His truck bore the message ‘Dokdo belongs to South Korea.’47

Dokdo and Takeshima both refer to an island of a postcolonial territorial dispute between

South Korea and Japan. The island does not have a place in the history of ‘Comfort

Women’ but discussions on the history are often concluded as discussions on the territorial dispute over the island.

The confrontation is spreading abroad by South Korean and Japanese diaspora nationalism. A copy of the monument was placed at the initiative of the Korean

American Forum of in Glendale Central Park in Glendale, CA in July 2013.

The monument has attracted much protest, vandalism and conflict between South Korean and Japanese diaspora communities ever since to the point the Mayor of Glendale expressed regret about allowing the monument.48 The White House has received more than 100,000 to a petition that requests the removal of the monument.

In front of the Japanese Embassy, the Peace Monument is surrounded by safety cones and the police discourage on-lookers from sitting next to the girl statue. Easily

46 Seoul Daily, 18 December 2011, ‘Japanese PM asks for the girl statue removal.’

47 Daily Yomiuri, 10 July 2012, ‘Man crashes truck into gate of Japan’s embassy in

Seoul.’

48 LA Times, 5 November 2013, Glendale's 'comfort women' memorial still stirs controversy.

89 missed by passers-by, below the statue is the shadow of the girl adorned with black stone mosaic. The shadow is drawn in the image of a stooped old woman. The contrast between the statue and the mosaic and between the girl and the old woman reveals the bifurcated discourse on the history. In the tit for tat vandalism of the monument, there are no ‘Comfort Women’ to be commemorated. The monument is already marking the death of the survivors. The girl statue communicates only what the South Korean nation wishes to see in ‘Comfort Women’—a girl who maintains her purity before she was violated by the Japanese military and who has already become an activist after decades of demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy (Y. Park 2013). At the same time in

South Korea, more copies of the monument were placed across the country and are being planned.

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Figure 6 Girl statue facing the Japanese Embassy in Seoul

Source: Chosun Daily, 13 August 2013, ‘Do you know why the Girl is seated with raised heels?’

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2.4. The nation’s selective listening

In 2007, I designed a government-funded training for a group of Afghan women and arranged their visit to the survivors of the sexual slavery to learn about war-time violence against women. Since I had not asked for testimonies when arranging the visit with their advocacy organization, I was fairly surprised when the survivors introduced themselves by offering testimonies. It started as the organization coordinator said: ‘Let us hear the grandmas now.’ In the testimonies their life stories were narrated in medias res. They started by identifying how young they were when the Japanese took them away. Their journeys home and lives thereafter were left untold. When one survivor ended her testimony with the statement, ‘I will survive until the Japanese repent and apologize for what they have done to me,’ another survivor started hers. The interpreter for the Afghan women could not finish her job due to heavy emotions, and I replaced her extemporaneously. Soon I found myself mechanically processing the information from

Korean to English with my eyes fixed on my notepad. I raised my head to look up only when one of the survivors said to another: ‘Look, those soft-hearted are shedding tears for us.’ The Afghan women were all crying.

The experience was symbolic: I maintained a critical perspective only until I replaced the interpreter. I became too immersed in the task of interpretation and in the narrative to notice anything else. Storytelling itself is an event that both the teller and the listener are part of (J. L. Kim 2004, 12; H. Yang 2008, 94). In a way every story is told in medias res because it is made into a narrative coherent to the purpose of narration.

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The Japanese Military Sexual Slavery is discussed as an imperial violence, particularly in order to expose the cruelty of Imperial Japan. It is occasionally addressed as violence against women, but mostly in international forums. In South Korea where prostitution is illegal and yet accounts for over 5% of GDP, the issue of the sexual slavery does not problematize the exploitation of subaltern women. It resonates only with the nationalist discourse. It is a taboo to discuss the issue in relation to prostitution or anything sexual.

The taboo is what I mean by the discursive sati of subaltern women by nationalism. This paper challenges the taboo by juxtaposing the proper noun wianbu

(Japanese military sex slaves) with the common noun wianbu (prostitutes). The common noun comfort women became Western whores, whereas the proper noun ‘Comfort

Women’ became national martyrs. In the meantime, they were isolated from prostitution and violence against women committed by Korean nationals. ‘Comfort Women’ became an international issue through a human rights framework and collaboration with women’s organizations around the world, but in South Korea it remains as violence against the

Korean nation. The taboo ironically reveals the deliberate dissociation of ‘Comfort

Women’ with prostitution in South Korea and the patriarchal shame the nation tries to hide. ‘Comfort Women’ and Yun are too ‘dangerous to the integrity of the masculinist discourse of nationalism’ (E. H. Kim and Choi 1998, 7). I argue that nationalism appropriated the subaltern experience of ‘Comfort Women’ system and resulted in severing the relationship between the history of ‘Comfort Women’ and the history of sexual exploitation.

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Nationalism can be empowering for the subaltern because it presents a vision that includes them and provides ‘a space to be international actors’ (Enloe 2000, 61). But nationalism typically arises from the masculinized past and dreams a masculinized future.

The ‘Comfort Women’ were retroactively constructed as a national exploitation by the nation re-imagined by the masculinist nationalism of the late twentieth-century geopolitics (H. Yang 2008, 83). The systemic violence against subaltern women became evidence of the exceptional crime committed by Japan and ground for the Korean one- ness. Nationalism performs a selective listening (H. S. Kim 1997). In order for the nation to be imagined homogenous, selective listening is rather imperative. This is why the subaltern including ‘Comfort Women’ mark ‘moments where neither medicine nor poison quite catches’ (Spivak 1999, 245). The boundaries between the outer and inner spheres of nation and between imperialism and anti-imperialism are not so clean cut. In building a homogenous nation, nationalism ends up mimicking the violence of imperialism in its struggle against the latter (Bhabha 1994).

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3. Homo Sacer under construction: ‘commies’ and the Jeju naval base

3.1. The ‘commies’ at the base

Jeju has been a liminal space in the history and geography of Korea (Huh 2011).

It was only when Joseon Dynasty completely annexed the island in the early fifteenth century that the island became part of the geography of Korea. It had had a state of its own before and developed a unique culture. Its is so distinctive from other

Korean that UNESCO classified it as a critically endangered language in 2010.

Residents of Jeju have historically, culturally, and geographically manifested their identity different from that of mainland Korea. This volcanic island is the biggest island around the Korean peninsula. And yet, it lies at the southern-most point and has only about 600,000 people. This is approximately 1.2% of South Korea’s national population. Its isolated geography prevented the island’s economy from growing.

Islanders complain that Jeju has duty free shops for tourists but not a single department store for the Jeju residents. Mostly engaged in tourism, fishery and agriculture, Jeju produces less than 1% of the country’s GDP.49

49 Government of Jeju Special Self-Governing , 2012 provincial statistic. In

2012, Jeju’s GDP recorded KRW 11,978 billion (approximately USD 11 billion).

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On this island, a new naval base has been under construction since 2011. A small group of local farmers and fishers who have lost their livelihoods have been fighting a lonely battle against the base construction. Some of them quit their daily businesses to devote themselves to protest against the construction. They argue that the government bulldozed the construction plan, ignoring the result of a referendum, in which 94% of the voters opposed hosting the base.50 Activists from ‘mainland’ South Korea— environmentalists, pacifists, and religious leaders—have joined the locals, camping in tents next to the construction site and chanting slogans against the base construction and for environmental protection. The chosen location is subject to numerous environmental regulations to protect endangered species such as corals. They sued the government for bypassing democratic procedures and breaking environmental standards in hurriedly pushing through the construction plan.

Every morning the protesters block the construction traffic with their bodies. The

Jeju police department has been guarding the construction site from the protesters. It is fortified with police forces deployed all the way from Seoul and private securities hired by the construction contractor, Engineering & Construction Group. There have been a series of clashes between the protesters and the police, which resulted in numerous injuries, arrests, and lawsuits. More than 500 protesters have been arrested in their struggle against the naval base construction and the accumulated fines they owe amounts

50 Save Jeju Now, August 2012, Monthly newsletter.

96 to about USD 270,000.51 Despite the confrontation, the new base is expected to open for operation by 2015.

The government and those for the base construction call the protesters 종북좌파

(Jongbuk jwapa), which is another way of condemning a person as a ‘commie.’ In South

Korea, the word ‘commie’ has the connotation that whoever is called one is sympathetic to the North Korean regime and demises the interests of South Korea. South Korea was born after WWII when the Allies liberated the Korean Peninsula from the Japanese colonial rule and divided it into South and North Koreas. The Korean War (1950-1953) left the two countries in armistice until today. Ever since, North Korea has been South

Korea’s primary enemy. ‘Commies’ are considered the enemies of the state, deserving no rights under law and to be eradicated for the sake of the national security. The alleged existence of ‘commies’ in the country legitimized the authoritarian regime in South

Korea from the 1950s to the 1980s. As soon as the protesters were identified as

‘commies,’ even their environmental chanting was considered not bona fide but a tactic to sabotage national security.

In this chapter I read Giorgio Agamben’s theory of sovereignty to interpret the conflict around the Jeju naval base. Following Kim Deuk-jung (2005), I apply

Agamben’s theory of homo sacer to the discourse on ‘commies’ in South Korea. In addition, I examine the limitations of environmentalism as a resistance strategy against sovereign power and militarism. My main data sources are the Report of the

Investigation on the Jeju Naval Base prepared by a consortium of five opposition parties

51 News Cham, 20 February 2013, ‘Gangjeong village bombed with fines.’

97 in August 2011 (hereafter the 2011 Investigation Report), the Navy’s website for the Jeju

Civilian-Military Complex Port (jejunbase.navy.mil.kr), and an international movement against the base, Save Jeju Now (savejejunow.org). I show that the condemnation of

‘commies’ transforms environmentalist chants into praises of the North Korean regime and generates the much needed public support for the base construction in Jeju. I argue that the discourse of vulnerable geography reinforces the trope of ‘commie’ and makes everyone precarious to the possibility of becoming a ‘commie.’

3.2. Theories of sovereignty and homo sacer

Sovereignty is a concept that informs the discussion of the state and its power

(Eudaily and Smith 2008). In Problematic Sovereignty (2001), Krasner identifies four different types of sovereignty. First, domestic sovereignty refers to the structure of public authority within a territory and its control over the territory. Second, interdependence sovereignty is the ability of public authority to regulate movements to and from a territory across borders. Third, international legal sovereignty is the recognition of public authority as a juridical equal state by other states. Lastly,

Westphalian sovereignty is the autonomy of public authority within a territory without any influence of external authorities. These are, however, not different power structures but different political moments when the state exercises sovereignty. The four types mutually constitute one another and crisis in any type of sovereignty may bring the other types of sovereignty in crisis as well. The four types exemplify the state power in

98 domestic politics and in international relations without questioning how the power came to reside in the state.

Geographers have investigated sovereignty and its relationship to territory. In pre-modern society sovereignty came from territoriality and territoriality came from sovereignty. They were inseparable and exercised by one authoritative figure, the sovereign. In modern society sovereignty is not necessarily defined in terms of territoriality. Sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor is it exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis (Agnew 1994). The dominant Westphalian model of state sovereignty in and international relations theory is not adequate today because it mistakenly emphasizes the geographical expression of authority as invariably and inevitably territorial (Agnew 2005).

Michel Foucault’s theory of power is useful to explain sovereignty of modern states. The Enlightenment brought liberties to individuals and made them modern subjects (Foucault 1995, 222). The modern politics of individuality required for the state to control the multiplicities and establish order (Foucault 1995, 218). Particularly, capitalist economy required a secured supply of labor, which necessitates the production of docile bodies, or useful citizens: ‘the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’

(Foucault 1990, 141). Such production could not be done by coercion with juridical measures; useful citizens are made by discipline at hospitals, schools, workshops, and prisons. Discipline is a technology, a modality for exercising power, ‘the ensemble of minute technical inventions’ (Foucault 1995, 220). It can work in various scales in the

99 form of social institutions and the state apparatuses function to assure that discipline reigns over society as a whole. The underlying logic of discipline is panopticism— constant supervision and subsequent reinforcement of asymmetry of power between the subject and the subjected (Foucault 1995, 223).

Foucault calls this administration of bodies and meticulous management of life biopower (Foucault 1990, 139–140). Biopower is one of the markers of the transition to the modern episteme is the transformation of human bodies into the object of politics

(Foucault 1990). In pre-modern states, sovereign power had the right to decide life and death—‘the right to take life or let live’ (Foucault 1990, 136). In this sense, privilege originated from the power to suppress life. This modern power over life has evolved into two forms: disciplines and regulations, or the anatomo-politics of the human body and the bio-politics of the population (Foucault 1990, 139). The anatomo-politics refers to the making of a docile body, or the production of a useful citizen, whereas the bio-politics focuses on the management of the labor force as a whole.52 ‘The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life’ (ibid).53 Modern juridical system has power over life in the form of capital punishment to establish and maintain order. Bio- power is exercised at the expense of the juridical system in the form of the norm. Thus,

52 However, biopolitics is used as a term that encompasses what Foucault originally distinguished into the anatono-politics and the bio-politics.

53 The deployment of sexuality is one of the most important concrete arrangements that form the social body in the nineteenth century.

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‘law operates more and more as a norm ... into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on)’ (Foucault 1990, 144).

Giorgio Agamben elaborates Foucault’s argument in terms of the politicization of body and life. The representative political regime of modern era made everyone sovereign before law and over their own existence (Agamben 1998, 139). Agamben proclaims that the decisive event of modernity was the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis (Agamben 1998, 4). While bios refers to life as a member of society in ancient

Greek, zoe refers to life as a simple living being, a bare life not predicated by law

(Agamben 2005, 60). The inclusion of zoe into the political sphere, Agamben argues, demarcates the intersection between juridico-institutional power and biopower and constitutes the sovereign power of modern society. ‘[T]he production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’ (Agamben 1998, 6, italic original).

Drawing from the debate between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, Agamben contemplates the significance of political exceptions to sovereignty in the modern political system. Living under the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State of the Nazi Reich, Benjamin and Schmitt engaged themselves in the debate on the state of exception. Schmitt distinguishes between commissarial dictatorship and sovereign dictatorship. While the latter emerges from the distinction between constituent power and constituted power, the former emerges from the distinction between norms of law and norms of the realization of law (Agamben 2005, 33). Schmitt is interested in the commissarial dictatorship that separates the force of law from the law (Agamben 2005,

38). The sovereign can decide whether to realize law or to make an exception, i.e. to

101 declare the state of exception and cease the exercise of liberty. Benjamin refutes the argument by arguing that the gap between the norms of law and their realization cannot be reconciliated by the sovereign decision but is rather constituted by the sovereign

(Agamben 2005, 56). He further argues that the real state of exception is the rule in which we live that allows the sovereign power to make exceptions and subsequently prolongs the tradition of the oppressed (Agamben 2005, 57). The state of exception is a sovereign attempt to incorporate anomie—violence outside of law—into law. Such law negates its own meaning and is no longer law. Agamben agrees with Benjamin and argues that the state of exception cannot be interpreted through the paradigm of dictatorship (Agamben 2005, 47).

Agamben interprets the state of exception as ‘force-of-law sous rature’ (Agamben

1998, 59). The crossing out (sous rature) is done by the struggle between juridical order and pure violence. In emergency (as defined by the sovereign), the sovereign can declare a state of exception and transcend law in the name of the public good. This implies that there is always the possibility that the rule of law can be suspended. Modern society is always under the possibility of the state of exception anytime (Agamben 2005, 57). The sovereign power to declare the state of exception is a void in both juridical vacuum

(anomie) and pure being that is not predicated by law. It is not just a temporal moment of power, nor merely an isolated space where the judiciary system does not reach (i.e. camp). ‘[T]he voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states’ (Agamben 2005, 2).

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Inclusion is effectively done by exclusion. Every society sets a limit to what counts a politically relevant life (1998, 139). Some lives are assigned no juridical value, left outside the law. These are bare lives, hominess sacri, of which killing does not constitute homicide. One of Agamben’s examples is the Jews under the Nazi regime, but anyone can be excluded from the polis and become homo sacer. In other words, the exclusion of these lives from the protection of law, or the suspension of law toward these lives, constitutes the sovereign power (ibid.). Every society hence sets a limit to the politicization of life because the power to include is effectuated through the power to exclude (Agamben 1998, 9). The sovereign effectuates the power to include through the power to exclude. The entire political system of sovereignty is established in the exceptional situation that excludes bare life from and still captures it within the political order (ibid). In modern society, it is the state that monopolizes the ultimate sovereign power, even the power to suspend the law and the power to turn bios back to zoe. By this activity, certain lives become politically irrelevant lives. Agamben calls such a life homo sacer. The latin term sacer has a double meaning of sacred and damned and therefore designates the one that cannot be touched without dirtying the one who touches or getting itself dirty (Agamben 1998, 79). Homo sacer lies outside of the law, deprived of quality life, i.e. the Hobbesian natural right. It bears no juridical value. Therefore homo sacer is the one who can be killed without making the killing count a crime by the law (Agamben

1998, 71). The power productive of homo sacer is the power that makes exceptions

(Agamben 1998, 82):

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What defines the status of homo sacer is therefore not the originary

ambivalence of the sacredness that is assumed to belong to him, but rather

both the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken

and the violence to which he finds himself exposed.

With the power to make exceptions to law, the state is located both outside and inside the juridical order (Agamben 1998, 15). It embodies the nexus between law and violence and thus implicates homo sacer within it. This exclusion from the sphere of law reduces those excluded to bare life, vulnerable to the sovereign’s whim and will. This is why

‘only bare life is authentically political’ (Agamben 1998, 106). The sovereign power is established in the sovereign’s preservation of his natural right and making only himself rise above the law to do anything to anyone. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign and the sovereign is constituted in the production of homo sacer. The two are located at the opposite ends of exception, and being so they constitute each other. Killing it is merely the actualization of its ‘capacity to be killed’ inherent in the condition of homo sacer (Agamben 1998, 114). ‘[T]he production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998, 83).

From the vantage point of the state, the suspension of law ironically enhances security. However, to those governed the power that suspends the law at anytime demises security. The exclusion of the sovereign power from the sphere of law reduces those politically marginalized to bare life, vulnerable to the sovereign’s whim and will.

In other words, the very mechanism of sovereign power is fear. State power wins support

104 in the midst of the fear for security threats and the state establishes its sovereign authority over people in the absence of security crisis by creating the fear of exclusion. The state maintains its power over people by monopolizing the capacity to suspend the law and by opening the possibility of exercising the power anytime (Agamben 1998, 83–84):

[A] limit sphere of human action … is that of the sovereign decision,

which suspends law in the state of exception and thus implicates bare life

within it … [T]he sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are

potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom

all men act as sovereigns.

Ironically, the production of homo sacer is not a unilateral working of the state. The accusation of homo sacer does not require any proof. When the state of exception is always a possibility, everyone is virtually living in the state of exception where they can make homo sacerout of anyone. In this sense, everyone is virtually homo sacer and the sovereign at the same time (Agamben 1998, 84).

The theory of homo sacer, however, does not elaborate on the constitutive power of the geopolitical and the concomitant workings of the social networks in the production of the biopolitical. This may be the case because Agamben’s points of reference are exclusively drawn from the German and the US military imperialism. The two were the mightiest superpowers in the twentieth century. Based on these examples,

Agamben’s sovereign state looks like an autonomous entity not necessarily embedded in

105 social relations a la Poulantzas (2000). This is why many readers of Agamben use his theory to analyze the state politics at the scale of country as if the sovereign is located on an island in isolation of the specific influence of external forces and internally in abstraction from the complicated networks of actors. In the following section, I ground

Agamben’s theory in a postcolonial case of sovereignty crisis by reviewing the case of

South Korea, a country that badly needed to build sovereignty, both internationally and domestically.

3.3. The contested landscape of the Jeju naval base

3.3.1. US Pivot to Asia

Since the Korean War (1950-1953), military defense has been one of the top priorities of North and South Koreas. In South Korea, North Korea is defined its

‘primary enemy (jujeok)’ and every able-bodied man in their twenties receives mandatory military training for two years. The country had allocated 20 to 30% of its national budget to defense every year, which has been decreasing after the Asian financial crisis in

1997. The defense budget for 2013, for example, was USD 32 billion out of a total of

USD 318 billion.54

Military presence on Jeju had been limited. The army has a training camp, but no bases. The air force had a few failed attempts to construct a base since the late 1980s, but

54 Ministry of Strategy and Finance, 2013 Budget.

106 operates a small airport instead.55 Only the Navy has Jeju Defense Command in

Seogwipo, a small base with three battalions under the command of the southern fleet in

Mokpo. The Navy has ~70,000 troops, which are largely divided into three fleets. Each fleet defends each of the three seas of the peninsula (Figure 7).

55 Voice of Jeju, 2 May 2005, ‘Air Force in use of Altre Airport.’

107

Figure 7 Naval bases in South Korea and the Jeju naval base under construction

Note: Donghae, and host the three fleets, respectively. The Navy

Logistics Command is located in Jinhae and the Navy Operations Command in Busan.

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In 2007, the Navy disclosed a plan to build a new naval base on Jeju Island. The total cost of the proposed base on Jeju will amount to over USD 900 million. The Navy acquired 29 hectares from the locals and 20 hectares through reclamation. The Jeju

Naval Base will have the docking capacity to host two 150,000gt vessels simultaneously and 20 warships including Aegis missile cruisers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines (K. Kim 2012). The Navy’s rationale for the new base can be summarized in four points:56

1. The national economy depends on trade. The Jeju coastal sea should be

protected because most of the country’s merchant ships pass through it.

2. Strategically located between China and Japan, Jeju is the hub of the Naval

operation and a military chokepoint for potential geopolitical threats in the

region.

3. Neighboring countries such as China and Japan are fortifying their military

forces. South Korea should protect its people and peace in the region by

fortifying its military forces as well.

4. The Navy is in need of a new base to host the Naval task forces. Until now,

the task forces have been dispersed in multiple bases.

56 The Navy > Introduction to the Jeju Civilian-Military Complex Port (http:// jejunbase.Navy.mil.kr, accessed 1 February 2013).

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Notably, North Korea is hardly mentioned in the rationale. Jeju is South Korea’s southernmost island and is not the strategic location for defense against North Korea.

This is why the construction of a naval base on Jeju came as a surprise because Jeju’s geographic location has provided little rationale for military presence. The protesters argue that the construction of a military base on Jeju lacks justification. The location is not strategic for defense against North Korea. The 2011 Investigation Report agreed on fortifying the Navy by building a new base but concluded that the Navy’s rationale for choosing Jeju for the location of the new base was not persuasive.57

Instead of calling on the usual suspect, North Korea, the Navy claims that there is heightened security threat in the Jeju coastal sea due to the growing military forces of

China and Japan. It argues that South Korea should fortify its military defense as China and Japan are enhancing their military powers. Indeed, the incumbent Liberal

Democratic Party of Japan tries to revise its pacifist constitution and step up its defense posture. While Chinese military expansion cannot be understood in isolation from the context of the US-China arms race (Zhang 2011), it is undeniable that China has been increasing its military budget as its economy grows (The Economist 2012).

Growing military forces of China and Japan, however, do not automatically explain why Jeju has been chosen for South Korea’s military fortification. If the increased military capacity of the neighboring countries increased insecurity in South

Korea, military presence should be fortified in the most insecure place. However, there has been no military assault or threat to the Jeju coastal sea in the history of South Korea.

57 2011 Investigation Report (pp. 39-40).

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The Jeju coastal sea has been protected by the coastal guard and there has been no increased security threat to replace the coastal guard with the Navy. In addition, China and Japan’s military forces have always been stronger and their economies bigger than those of South Korea’s (S. M. Moon 1995; T. Kim 2012). The two neighbors have much bigger economies than South Korea and the latter cannot keep up with the formers’ military spending. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s database, South Korea has been already spending a higher percentage of GDP on military than the two countries: its military expenditure has been over 2 to 4% of GDP whereas

China recently increased its military budget to 2% and Japan has kept its military spending around 1%.58

Military threat means aggressive intentions supported by military forces (Walt

1985). South Korea’s insecurity should be assessed not only in terms of the military capacity of China and Japan but also in terms of their positions toward South Korea. The

Navy evaluates the two countries’ aggressive intentions based on the ongoing territorial conflicts concerning the islands of Ieodo between South Korea and China and Dokdo between South Korea and Japan. However, these conflicts are diplomatic issues motivated by domestic politics of concerned countries and have never involved any military actions ( 2012).

Questions remain as to why Jeju was selected in the first place and whether the security concern was big enough for the government to bypass regulations and

58 Military expenditure database, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

(milexdata.sipri.org).

111 democratic procedures and expedite the base construction process. Instead of defending the country, protesters further argue, it is likely to provoke military actions from neighboring countries. Instead of promoting peace, they suspect, the base will serve a mission of the US military in the Asia-Pacific region ( 2010; Ko 2011).

The Jeju naval base can be understood only in the context of South Korea-US military alliance. The South Korean government has been heavily dependent on the USA for its security and sovereignty, even from the days of its predecessor, the Korean

Provisional Government during the Japanese colonial rule Korea had been dependent on

US in its diasporic nationalist movement (R. S. Kim 2011, 137). Based on the 1953

Mutual Defense Treaty between South Korea and USA, the United States Forces Korea

(USFK) has been stationed in South Korea since the Korean War. It has more than 85 active installations in the country with about 37,500 US military personnel assigned.59

The same treaty allows US aircrafts and vessels to have free access to any port or airport in South Korea at anytime. Article X.1. of the 1966 US-ROK Status of Forces

Agreement reads ‘United States and foreign vessels and aircraft operated by, for, or under the control of the United States for official purposes shall be accorded access to any port or airport of the Republic of Korea free from toll or landing charges.’ The new Jeju naval base is not an exception.60 At a hearing in the South Korean parliament, Jang Hanna, member of the Democratic United Party, presented evidence that the Commander of the

59 USFK, Global Security (globalsecurity.org).

60 Mother Jones, 16 July 2012, ‘The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military

Bases.’

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US Naval Forces Korea requested modifications to the design of the Jeju naval base for easy access by US battleships such as CVN-65 (nuclear-powered aircraft carrier).61

The US military has been ‘rebalancing’ its power to Asia since the end of the

Cold War, especially as China rapidly expanded its power globally ( 2014). The doctrine has been supported by the rhetoric of ‘Pivot to Asia.’ In her article in Foreign

Policy, the US State Secretary Hillary Clinton stated that ‘new global realities’ require the USA to ‘innovate, compete, and lead in new ways’ and make a ‘strategic turn to the

Asia-Pacific region’ to deploy its interests (Clinton 2011). The ‘new global realities’ refers to the emergence of China as a major force in the world economy and politics.

This position was reiterated by President Barack Obama when he said to the Australian parliament: ‘The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay’ (Obama

2011). The US Navy will thus locate 60% of its forces in the Asia Pacific by 2020 to encircle China.62 The Jeju naval base and its expedited construction is motivated by the doctrine (Kirk 2013).

In addition, the US military wants a new base in the Asia Pacific because of the planned relocation of its Marine Force in Japan. There are approximately 47,000 US troops in Japan according to a 1960 bilateral security treaty. In 2006, the governments of

Japan and USA agreed on a roadmap for military redeployment, according to which part

61 Jejusori, 7 September 2012, ‘Jeju naval base designed for US nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.’

62 The Wall Street Journal, 23 August 2012, ‘U.S. Plans Naval Shift toward Asia.’

113 of the US Marines would leave Okinawa by 2014 (Yoshida 2010). The strategic location of Jeju cannot be mistaken in thix context (Figure 8).

The US Pivot to Asia, or the US military’s relocation from Okinawa, is hardly discussed in South Korea. The history of South Korea did not have any point in time without the US military presence in the country. It is no news that the US is here to stay.

It is rather celebrated for the security of the country. Domestically, what justifies the Jeju naval base is the imagined geography of South Korea. The trope of vulnerable geography encourages a discourse that urges South Korea to preemptively defend its territorial land, water, and sky, not from realistic threats but from any possibility of such threats. For example, Kang Hyo-baek, professor in law at Kyung Hee University, suggests that South Korea should adopt a proactive defense strategy in the following words:

An upside-down map of the Korean peninsula reveals that Jeju is the head of

South Korea. Without a proper-sized naval base, the country is a hareubang

without a hat.63 The base is a prerequisite to defend the territorial water, which is

wider than the territorial land. … Does peace come naturally? … The Jeju naval

base is not a matter of ideology but of national defense, security and survival.64

63 A hareubang is a totem carved in stone native to Jeju. It is in the shape of a man with a hat. It symbolizes fertility and dispels evil.

64 Korea Defense Daily, 22 March 2012, ‘Urgent need to build the Jeju naval base.’

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Figure 8 Jeju’s strategic location in Northeast Asia

Note: Jeju is closely located to major cities in Northeast Asia including Shanghai (304 miles), (521 miles), Taipei (640 miles), Tokyo (981 miles), Vladivostok (994 miles), and Kong (1,065 miles).

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus, 18 June 2010, ‘Jeju and a naval arms race in Asia.’

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In the above quotation, Kang justifies the new base construction not as a defensive response to a threat from neighboring countries but as a proactive measure to keep peace.

‘Does peace come naturally?’ The question suggests that what is natural on the Korean peninsula is not peace but insecurity and conflicts. This logic finds Jeju to be a strategic location for increasing the country’s security because South Korea is blocked to the north by North Korea and should invest in a southward expansion toward the ocean. The discourse spreads online accompanied by an anonymous painting of the Korean peninsula in the shape of a tiger roaring southward toward the ocean (Figure 4).

3.3.2. Military security vs environmental security

Initially in 2002 the Navy had decided to build the new base at a port village called Hwasun (Location A on Figure 9). Villagers of Hwasun opposed to the plan. The

Government of Jeju expressed opposition for fear that the presence of a military base would harm the image and reputation of the island as the most popular tourist destination in the country. The Navy recanted the decision in six months and selected Wimi

(Location C) as its next candidate location. This too was aborted by strong local opposition in 2005. In April 2007, the village council of Gangjeong (Location B) volunteered to host the base. Gangjeong is another port village located between Hwasun and Wimi, almost 10km apart from each. This time, the Government of Jeju immediately declared Gangjeong as the new base location, which was confirmed by the Ministry of

National Defense in June.

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Figure 9 Jeju naval base candidates

Note: (A) Hwasun, (B) Gangjeong, and (C) Wimi.

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The plan to construct the base on the Gangjeong coast soon revealed many problems. First of all, it bypassed democratic procedures. The village mayor had held a special meeting to pass the decision even without a voting. Villagers of Gangjeong established an emergency measure committee, dismissed the village mayor who had held the special meeting, and elected a new mayor who was against the base construction.

The new village mayor, Gang Dong-gyun, host a vote on the issue of the base construction, in which 69% of the village (725 out of 1,050 effective votes) participated and 94% of them voted against. The Governor of Jeju, however, did not recognize the result.65 As a ‘self-governing province,’ Jeju grants its governor the supreme authority.66

As long as the Governor of Jeju supports the base construction, the village has low chance of winning the battle through administrative procedures.

The Navy violated property rights as well. The construction plan required 49 hectares of land. According to the Navy, 20 hectares were acquired through reclamation and 29 hectares were purchased. The villagers claim that the Navy acquired only ~40% of the 29 hectares through purchase from non-islander land owners such as hotels and some pro-base villagers. As the rest of the village would not sell their land, the Navy exercised eminent domain. According to the Act on Land Acquisition and Compensation

65 Statement of Appeal against the Jeju naval base, released on 11 May 2011 by 63 civil society organizations against the Jeju naval base.

66 Article 1.1 (Objective) of the Special Law for the Jeju Special Self-Governing

Province. The Governor has authority over local matters in most policy areas except for diplomacy, defense, and justice.

118 for the Public Good, the government has the authority to transfer ownership of private land for state projects such as national defense, public infrastructure, and public services in order to ‘promote public interest and appropriate protection of property rights.’ The villagers argue that they were threatened by government officials to take compensation for their land.67

Thirdly, the construction plan was in violation of many environmental protections.

In raising their voice against the base construction, Gangjeong residents and protesters focused on the importance of environmental security and publicized the government’s violation of environmental regulations. Jeju is famous for its beautiful sceneries and unpolluted nature. Created from volcanic eruptions two million years ago, the island has a unique geography. Thanks to warm currents, the island enjoys subtropical oceanic and has been dubbed South Korea’s natural paradise. It is one of the most popular places for honeymoon and tourism is the island’s biggest industry.68 The island is protected by numerous environmental regulations. Gangjeong villagers and the protesters highlight the following four protective statuses in their campaigns against the base construction:

67 Gangjeong Village, 19 September 2012, ‘The truth about land compensation.’

68 Government of Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, 2012 provincial statistic.

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1. Only Jeju hosts both a UNESCO-MAB Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World

Heritage in the country.69 Biosphere Reserves are sites of demonstration of

optimal practices to harmonize nature and human. The base construction destroys

nature and such harmony.

2. The coastal area around Gangjeong is protected as an Absolute Preservation Area

(APA). Activities such as construction of buildings and roads or harvesting are

prohibited within APAs.

3. The South Korean government recognized the soft coral habitats near the

Gangjeong shore as a National Natural Monument in 2004. The base construction

will cause sedimentation of sands in the sea and kill the coral communities.

National Natural Monuments are protected by the Heritage Protection Act and the

Jeju Governor is responsible for the protection.

4. The government designated 13.7 km3 of coastal area around Gangjeong as an

Ecological Preservation Area (or Marine Protected Area) in 2002. The Natural

Environment Preservation Act regulations development of EPAs in order not to

disrupt ecological balance in the areas.70

They took legal measures to revoke the construction plan and launched awareness raising campaigns. Although they limited their voice to strictly environmental concerns,

69 UNESCO recognized the Biosphere Reserve in 2004 and the World Heritage in 2007.

These sites are on the island but not directly related to the location of the base.

70 2011 Investigation Report.

120 the protesters at Gangjeong are not situated in a political vacuum. Their complex ideological composition is reflected in the opening paragraph of the Official Statement of

Appeal, published by the protesters:

The coast of Gangjeong Village in Jeju is now suffering. In 2006, the South

Korean government named Jeju as the Island of Peace to commemorate the deep

sorrow of the April 3rd Massacre. The coast was appointed as a Biosphere

Reserve, World Heritage Site, and Global Geopark by UNESCO. The

government also designated it as an Absolute Preservation Area, but it is now

threatened by the naval base construction.71

The abrupt change of topic from politics to environmentalism cannot be overlooked. The statement first mentions that Jeju is ‘suffering’ without specifying from what it suffers.

Before the cause of the suffering—the worrisome environmental degradation by the base construction—comes the April 3rd Massacre. It suggests that Jeju has already suffered from the April 3rd Massacre, but falls short of explaining the significance of the

Massacre and quickly moves to the natural beauty and purity of Jeju. It is as though the statement had more to say about the politics of the Massacre and Jeju, but refrained from it, and strategically chose to convey environmental concerns. I discuss this in detail in the following section.

71 I slightly rephrased the paragraph for better reading. The original English version of the official statement of appeal can be found at http://www.savejejuisland.org.

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The protesters’ efforts to utilize environmental institutions failed largely in two ways, resulting in increasing the state power over nature and people. One is the litigation over the cancelation of the Absolute Preservation Area and another is the campaign to protect gureumbi, a volcanic rock formation of the Gangjeong coast.

The island is protected by numerous environmental regulations. One of them is the Special Act for the Development of Jeju, which protects the environment and culture of Jeju and promotes tourism, agriculture and fishery. One of the measures the Special

Act introduced for environmental protection is the designation of ‘Absolute Preservation

Area (hereafter APA). Among the protective regulations on the Gangjeong coast, the

APA status is the strongest of all because it prohibits all construction activities in the concerned area.72 In these protected areas, activities such as construction of buildings and roads or harvesting crops and fish are prohibited. Under this Act 10 percent of Jeju is protected as absolute preservation areas.

On December 23, 2009, the Governor of Jeju canceled the protective status of some 105,295m2 of seashore of the Gangjeong coast. As the status is defined by the

Special Law that governs the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, the designation and cancelation of the status is within the autonomy of the Jeju Governor with the agreement of the Provincial Assembly. The Provincial Assembly soon recanted its agreement but the Governor did not recognize it, either. The Gangjeong villagers immediately appealed the cancellation of the APA status of the coastal area. The court dismissed the

72 Article 15.292 (Absolute Preservation Area) of the Special Law for the Jeju Special

Self-Governing Province.

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Gangjeong residents’ appeal against the APA status cancelation on the ground that the residents did not have standing in the case. The court interpreted that no individual rights were violated by the APA status cancelation to give the residents of Gangjeong standing in the case. The residents argue that the court denied their ‘right of green access to justice’ (Sangjin Kim, Kang, and Park 2011). The residents of Gangjeong appealed the cancelation to the Jeju provincial court. The court dismissed the appeal on the account that the residents did not have standing to appeal. In other words, the court refused to judge the legitimacy of the cancelation of the absolute preservation area status. The residents appealed to the Gwangju High Court and then the Supreme Court, only to hear repeated dismissal of the case on the ground of no standing.

The practice of ‘protected areas’ has received various criticisms. They are largely categorized into three: (1) protected areas are not effective; only some cases contribute to protecting , (2) protected areas give power to the state over people, particularly indigenous people, and deprive them of their right to nature, and (3) the practice of designating protected areas produces a myth of pristine nature and privileges some parts of nature at the expense of other parts. The myth of pristine nature— produced through the practice of protected areas—not only deprives people of their right to nature but also reduces people to mere users of nature. Hence they have a say when their livelihood depends on nature, but their voice is substantially limited if there is no economic interest involved in an environmental dispute. Protected areas may end up irrevocably dividing people and nature.

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What makes an area be protected and protected from what? In other words, who protects nature against whom and why? Why had the Gangjeong seashore been designated as an absolute preservation area in the first place? The government of Jeju had found the area’s underground water, endangered species, and landscape aesthetics worth protecting. The seashore has such a unique geological structure that fresh water, not seawater, springs from volcanic rocks of the seashore. It is also home to many endangered species including indigenous corals and crabs.

The Jeju provincial government confirmed upon the cancelation of the APA status that there had been no change to the environmental value of the seashore. Then why did the Jeju provincial government cancel the status? The cancelation of the APA status was made at the request of the Navy to give way to the new naval base. The Jeju provincial government stated that the cancelation was for national security and for the development of Jeju through the economic by-products of the base. Jeju is the biggest island in South

Korea but it produces less than 1 percent of the country’s GDP. Its biggest industry is tourism, followed by fishery and agriculture. Residents of Jeju often complain that the island has duty free shops for tourists but not a single department store for the islanders.

The provincial government has been always under the pressure of economic development of the island.

The residents of Gangjeong sought annulment of the cancelation of the APA status on the ground that the cancelation revealed procedural errors and that the cancelation would cause environmental damage to the protected area. However, the court dismissed the appeal for annulment by saying that the residents did not have standing in

124 court on the specific issue. The court states: “Retaining the APA status over the seashore would make the residents of Gangjeong continue to enjoy the indirect benefit of the seashore such as underground fresh water, biodiversity, and landscape but would not cause them any individual, direct, and specific benefit from the seashore.”

In other words, the court saw that only those who have their private interests violated could have standing in this case. What had been protected by the APA status was public interest; hence the cancelation of the APA status does not violate any private interest. If the residents could demonstrate that their livelihood depended on the seashore, they might have a case in court. However, the APA status had been prohibiting any kind of economic activity on the seashore. When the government designates an area as an APA, people are implicitly assumed to be potential exploiters of nature, those who only cause harm to pristine nature. The APA status effectively designates the state as the sole protector of nature from people.

The case reveals the arbitrary distinction between public interest and private interest in the logic of protected areas. We make use of nature as public goods and private goods. Ironically, we may claim our right to nature as private goods but not to nature as public goods because the state knows better than individuals how to protect public goods. McCarthy and Prudham (2004) argue that the public/private divide of environmentalism, the liberal basis, leads to neoliberalization of nature.

Environmentalism is an effort of resistance to capitalist control over nature. In pursuing the objective, however, environmentalism leads to empowering the state to scientifically administer nature. But the modern state is based on the liberal idea (classical Lockean

125 liberalism) to ‘develop’ nature, to turn it from non-value to value. For the wise use of nature, or the effective use of nature as public goods, the state introduces environmental regulations that legitimate particular social orders. The free-market environmentalism or the green capitalism allows the state to collect fees for using nature, to divide and sell parts of nature, and trade permits to emit tonnes of carbon dioxide.

In the mean time, the Navy began the construction on December 27, 2010.73 The villagers lost their land, livelihood, and hometown to the base construction. They block the construction traffic with their bodies until the police carry them away from the construction site. The same repeats every morning. They argue that the construction and operation of the base will cause irrevocably detrimental damage to Jeju’s natural beauty and purity. The protesters focused their opposition to the base construction around two natural features of Gangjeong—the rocky coastline made of gureumbi and the endangered coral communities surrounding the construction site. Gureumbi refers to the coastal rock formation covering the Gangjeong coastal area. Produced when volcanic lava flowed into the ocean during the formation of the island, gureumbi provides a unique landscape to Jeju. The cancelation of the APA status allowed the Navy to bomb the coastal rock formation and lay foundations for the base. In response, the protesters campaigned to raise awareness of the ecological and spiritual value of gureumbi. The coastal rock is considered to have spiritual value to the locals as fresh water springs from it despite its location on the edge of the coastline. They used banners and chants that

73 Jemin Daily, 27 December 2010, ‘Naval base construction launched with a number of protesters arrested.’

126 anthropomorphized the lava formation such as ‘Don’t kill gureumbi,’ or ‘Listen to the song of gureumbi.’

The villagers sued the Minister of National Defense for having approved the

Navy’s construction plan before fulfilling the procedural requirement of environmental impact assessment. The court ruled in favor of the villagers and declared annulment of the construction plan in October 2009. In March 2010 the Minister approved the construction plan again after conducting the environmental impact assessment and slightly revising the original plan. In July 2012 the Supreme Court closed the case by overruling the court’s decision to annul the construction plan.74 At the same time, the protesters conducted their own environmental impact assessment of the base construction on coral communities and other endangered species. They found 40 species of corals, spread among 8 orders, 19 families and 26 genera near the construction site and concluded that sedimentation from the base construction would cause immediate and long-term death to thousands of endangered corals (Greenpeace East Asia, Save Jeju

Now, and Green Korea United 2012, 12, 22).

Their strategy ended up carrying the issue away from the base construction and giving the Navy a leeway to justify the base. The gureumbi campaign created a controversy over the ‘truthful’ representation of Jeju and its nature. The Navy published a communiqué, which stated that there is no such thing called gureumbi but only a coastline called gureumbi. The Navy argued that such a coastline expands 195km in Jeju

74 Hankyoreh Daily, 5 July 2012, ‘Supreme Court rules the base construction legit.’

127 and has no value for preservation based on a geological survey report on it.75 In addition, the Navy’s environmental impact assessment found a smaller number of corals than the independent assessment by the protesters. According to the Navy, the coral habitats are located far away from the construction site and the construction would cause minimal damage to corals and other endangered species.76 Following the Navy’s examples, media poured out arguments that deny the uniqueness of gureumbi and the existence of endangered species. Some of their headlines read: ‘Gureumbi is just another rock,’

‘Gureumbi is found everywhere you turn,’ and ‘No coral habitats at the base site.’

Gangjeong’s environmental narrative appeals to the image of Jeju as a pristine island. The imagined geography of South Korea, however, is a more powerful discourse than Jeju’s environmental narrative. As discussed in the previous section, the vulnerable geography of the Korean peninsula anticipates security threat and justifies the ‘necessary evil’ of military violence. As long as militarism is justified as a way of saving lives, the logic of geopolitical security wins over environmentalism. In addition, it can be easily coopted by hegemonic ideologies as was the case in Jeju. Anti-base movements around the world have problematized natural degradations caused by military bases (Lutz 2009).

The lesson from the anti-US military base movement in Okinawa is that closing one military base leads to the reinforcement of other military bases (Akibayashi and Takazato

2009, 265).

75 The Navy, 9 March 2012, A communiqué on gureumbi.

76 The Navy, 27 July 2010, A communiqué on claims against the Jeju naval base.

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The Gangjeong protesters bypassed political issues by strategically promoting environmentalism. Taking advantage of the controversy over the new base’s environment, however, the Navy announced their plan to construct an ‘eco-friendly’ base and publicized their high-end and professionalism in preserving nature. As a matter of fact, militaries around the world are increasingly ‘going green’ to align themselves with post-Cold War politics (Durant 2007). Ecological philosophy overcomes the nature/culture dualism inherent in environmentalism and sheds light on the interconnectedness between society, the psyche and nature (Guattari 2008, 28):

What runs underneath the public/private divide is ultimately the arbitrary divide of nature and culture. In Jeju, the regulation of absolute preservation area ended up preserving not nature but the absolute power of the state. Taking advantage of the dispute over the environmental protection of the seashore, the Navy announced their plan to construct an ‘eco-friendly’ base and publicized their high-end technologies and professionalism in preserving nature. The nature/culture dualism inherent in environmentalism allows everything to go green, even militaries.

Is all of environmental history a history of crimes, the story of how human beings

have raped virgin nature? We have long known from ecology that the ideal of

‘untouched nature’ is a phantom, a product of the cult of virginity. An impartial

environmental history does not recount how humanity has violated pure nature;

rather, it recounts the processes of organization, self-organization, and decay in

hybrid human-nature combinations (Radkau 2008, 4).

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3.3.3. ‘Commies’ of Jeju

The protesters at Gangjeong are led by a consortium of political, environmental and religious groups. Their chants are environmentalist. Nonetheless, they are condemned as ‘commies.’ On 20 July 2011, Chosun Daily allocated one full page to the controversies of the Jeju naval base. The newspaper argued that the construction of the

Jeju naval base which was indispensible for national security was disrupted by protesters.

The paper further argued that the protesters were not Gangjeong villagers but non- islander ‘lefties’— activists for unification with North Korea, opposition party members, and labor unionists.77 While there had been the naming of ‘commies’ in the context of the Jeju naval base conflict before, the report by Chosun Ilbo was the first formal acknowledgement of the political accusation in public. Following Chosun Ilbo’s lead, the media overflew with articles attacking the protesters. The ruling Saenara Party’s MP

Kim -seong called the protesters ‘puppets of Kim Jong-il,’ and another MP Jeon Yeo- ok named them ‘Jongbuk jwapa,’ which can be roughly translated into the political left dedicated to the North Korean regime.78 From then on, Gangjeong protesters are called devotees to North Korea.

77 Chosun Ilbo, 20 July 2011, ‘Lefties’ outlet in Gangjeong.’

78 Ohmynews, 27 July 2011, ‘Protesters of Jeju are puppets of Kim Jong-il;’ Headline

Jeju, 8 August 2011, ‘Gangjeong sues Kim Mu-seong;’ and Headline Jeju, 8 March 2012,

‘NK devotees against Jeju naval base.’

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종북좌파 (jongbuk jwapa), or hereafter NK devotees, deserves discussion. It is a neologism that emerged out of a chasm within the political left when the Socialist Party and the Democratic Labor Party had a discussion on merging the two parties in 2001.

After a heated debate, the Socialist Party dismissed the merger proposal. In order to distinguish the DLP from them, the Socialist Party denounced the DLP as NK devotees:

‘Some DLP members prioritize the diplomatic agenda of the North Korean Worker’s

Party of Korea over the demands of the people in South Korea. … These are the political group dedicated to the North Korean regime.’79

The neologism spread fast when the conservative Saenara Party came to power since 2008, particularly in the context of the Jeju naval base controversy. The Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs produced a series of education DVDs, one of which was titled ‘The Truth about NK Devotees.’ The DVD defined NK devotees as ‘interest groups that comply with the regime of North Korea and contest every policy of the South

Korean government.’ One of the examples the DVD illustrated was the anti-base movement in Jeju. It criticized the movement by arguing that ‘under the façade of environment and peace, it is a typical anti-government movement led by indecent external forces.’80 The DVD series were distributed to local school district offices for showing to students in 2012.

The government participated in the neologism more blatantly. In May 2012, upon his return from , President Lee Myung-bak made a radio speech and urged for

79 Yonhap News, 21 December 2001, ‘No political alliance with Jongbuk figures.’

80 Ohmynews, 17 October 2012, ‘Anti-government means NK devotee.’

131 changes from ‘blind devotees of North Korea.’ Myanmar and North Korea are connected by the memory of the 1983 , in which North Korean espionage attempted assassination of the South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan during his visit to

Myanmar. President Lee’s visit in 2012 was the first presidential visit since the accident.

In the speech, President Lee contrasted Myanmar to North Korea by praising the former’s economic reforms and democracy and calling for investment to the country. Criticizing

North Korea for continuously denying its involvement in the 1983 Rangoon Bombing,

President Lee sent out a warning toward NK devotees:

North Korea presents a problem as it repeats the same assertions as always.

However, a bigger problem is the NK devotees among us who echo the assertions.

The international community urges North Korea to change. Blind devotees of

North Korea in our country need to change as well.81

While the term NK devotees was born out of a debate on the positionality on

North Korea and reunification of the two countries, now the question has become ‘who among us are NK devotees?’ Government offices took caution when submitting information to the National Assembly for fear national security information would land in the hands of NK devotees.82 This South Korean McCarthyism reached its peak in late

81 Policy Briefing, 28 May 2012, the 91st Presidential Radio Speech, emphasis added.

82 Kyunghyang Daily, 24 July 2012, ‘Prime Minister hid information from “NK devotee”

MPs.’

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2012 during the presidential election. Everyone named everyone else as NK devotees and was busy distinguishing themselves from NK devotees. The proliferation of the term effected a vindication of the existence of NK devotees in South Korea.83 NK devotee is not only applicable a name to politicians. As illustrated at Gangjeong, anyone against government policies or ‘national interests’ defined by the majority now becomes NK devotee. It is regardless of political positionality toward the North Korean regime. The term which was born out of an internal conflict of the political left now became a weapon against the political minorities as a whole.

In this sense, NK devotee has successfully revived the Cold War politics of

빨갱이 (ppalgaengi). Ppalgaengi is a vulgar expression that refers to a communist infiltrator, which I to ‘commie.’ For fear of North Korea’s espionage in and attempt at subversion, South Korea has been preoccupied for decades with excessive ideological phobia toward communism (Jho 2008, 36). The so-called red complex was manipulated by authoritarian regimes as they repeatedly solved their political quandaries through the production of ‘commies.’

The birth of ‘commies’ took place at none other than Jeju. When Korea was liberated from the Japanese colonial rule in 1945, the Allies had the Korean peninsula under trusteeship: the northern half in the hands of USSR and the southern half under the

83 It was later revealed that the National Intelligence Service (former KCIA) had played a significant role in manipulating public opinion on the Gangjeong protesters and spreading the neologism NK devotees by mobilizing employees and paid Internet shills. I do not elaborate on this because it is beyond the question and scope of the dissertation.

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US military government. In 1948 the South established its own government with the sponsorship of the US government and under the auspices of the United Nations (Kang

2005, 185). Protests took place in Jeju against South-only elections that would result in the concretization of the division of the peninsula. The US military suspected the protesters to be aligned with communists in North Korea (Cumings 1981). In a communiqués between the South Korean government and the US Embassy in South

Korea, those executed were described as ‘Communist guerillas’ (D. Y. Lee 2002). The

US military wanted to eradicate any embryo of political disruption in South Korea, given the Cold War confrontation with the USSR, China and North Korea just across the border. The newly established South Korean government needed to bring stability and prove its capacity to do so to the US military. In addition, it did not want to risk US economic aid to the country by hosting communist citizens (D. Y. Lee 2002). The government solved the sovereignty crisis through violence with the support of the US military. The April 3rd Massacre executed around 30,000 Jeju civilians, without any trial, based on their alleged affiliation with the Communists in the North (Seong-nae Kim

2001).

Another big red hunt soon followed. When ordered for deployment to quell protests in Jeju, an army regiment rose against the government in Yeosu. It soon occupied neighboring cities including and grew into a popular uprising. The government and the US military defined the uprising as a revolt by Communists to overthrow the South Korean government. Another 10,000 were killed without trial after allegedly identified as Communists.

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Bruce Cumings dubs the Massacre as ‘a magnifying glass and a microscope on the politics of postwar Korea’ (Cumings 1981, 268). The Cold War divided the Korean peninsula into North and South Koreas; the two countries are de jure and de facto in armistice of the Korean War; and South Korea hosts the US military ever since. The

Massacre illustrates the geopolitics that created the two Koreas and the ideological politics that dominate them. In Birth of ‘Ppalgaengi,’ Kim Deuk-jung identifies the

Massacre and the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion as the embodiment of ‘commies’ (Deuk- jung Kim 2009). The uprisings were threats to the newly born South Korean government.

In order to overcome the sovereignty crisis, the government named those involved in the uprisings as subversive Communists who were aligned with the North Korean regime and terminated them. It was not that ‘commies’ were executed in Jeju and Yeosu but that the executed became ‘commies.’

Through these tragedies the name ‘commie’ entered the Korean lexicon as that deserved to be killed. Communists were derogatorily called ‘commies’ who had the evil intention to topple the state ever since. ‘Communist’ as a political identity was erased in the South Korean vocabulary. There is only ‘commie’ as a name to call the . The authoritarian regime lasted in South Korea until the late 1980s by taking advantage of the production of ‘commies.’

Kim’s analysis is informed by the theory of homo sacer (Agamben 1998). A

‘commie’ in South Korea is the figure of homo sacer. A ‘commie’ is a figure against whom the state required protection. And yet, identifying a ‘commie’ does not require any evidence. Nor does a ‘commie’ deserve a trial. ‘Commie’ is a death sentence that places

135 those named so outside of law (Deuk-jung Kim 2009, 559). The South Korean state was constituted by a series of red hunting that started from the Massacre and the Rebellion rather than by the constitution. In armistice with North Korea since the Korean War

(1950-1953), South Korea has justified the state power in the name of national security against North Korea. The sovereignty of the South Korean government was established on anti-communism. The South Korean state has legitimized its political use of violence against those who challenge its hegemony by invoking the image of ‘commies’ brainwashed with the North Korean ideology. The appellation of ‘commie’ is a death sentence. No evidence is necessary to call somebody a ‘commie.’ This makes everyone vocally articulate anti-communism and antagonism toward North Korea in order not to be subject to the production of homo sacer. At the same time, it silences dissents because any argument against the sovereign may constitute homo sacer.

The production of homo sacer is not a unilateral working of the state. Everyone is virtually homo sacer and the sovereign at the same time (Agamben 1998, 84). It is especially true in the contested landscape of the Jeju naval base where the production of

‘commies’ is not limited to the sphere of state apparatuses. Everyone can be accused of devotion to the North Korean regime. Concomitantly, they can accuse others of the same. Every South Korean vocally articulates anti-communism and antagonism toward the North Korean regime. They learn how to do it from the instance they are born and officially at the age of seven when they enter into the mandatory public education system.

Until the 1980s there was a national contest for children annually for anti-communism drawing. What encourages the participation in the production of homo sacer is fear. In

136 order not to be subject to the production we comply in silence. The fear and complicity are the rock bottom of the production of homo sacer and the sovereign.

Central to the conflict around the Jeju Naval Base is the issue of sovereignty (Cha

2010; Ko 2011). The appellation of ‘commies’ reinstates order in the face of (potential) chaos. The hegemonic project of the Jeju naval base was produced through the production of homo sacer. What is under construction is not only the base but homo sacer of NK devotee. As soon as the movement against the Jeju naval base was denounced as NK devotees, the Cold War ideologies were easily evoked to legitimize the state power to bypass democratic procedures. The Jeju naval base became an indispensible project for national interests and any argument against the base was reduced to promoting the interests of North Korea. The statement by the Gangjeong protesters refrained from elaborating the implication of the April 3rd Massacre. Instead of eliminating “commies,” the state power still continues to reproduce them decades after the end of the Cold War. The conflict around the Jeju Naval Base construction well illustrates the process of producing a politically exceptional space (Jeju) and a politically exceptional being (‘commies’). Agamben’s theory of sovereignty sheds light on the working of the South Korean state in its struggle to produce justification for the Base.

The project was very successful: the political exceptions not only produced the public opinion favorable for the Base construction and hostile to the ‘commie’ protesters. The

Jeju naval base became an indispensible project for national interests and any argument against the base was reduced to promoting the interests of North Korea. The hegemonic project of the Jeju naval base was produced through the production of homo sacer. In the

137 process, the state power was reinforced. Homo sacer and the sovereign are mutually constitutive.

To summarize, those against the Jeju naval base were dismissed as NK devotees because they were suspected for not being bona fide environmentalists but hiding their true intention against the state. No evidence was necessary to prove their alleged connection to North Korea because what was against the interest of South Korea was automatically for the interest of North Korea. It was not only the anti-base movement that was accused of working for North Korea but almost all social movements that were deemed anti-state. The Jeju naval base became an indispensible project for national security. Any argument against the base was reduced to promoting the interests of North

Korea. The hegemonic project of the Jeju naval base was produced through the production of homo sacer.

The history of South Korea is full of homines sacri who were named ‘commies’ and rendered vulnerable to the state violence. It is especially true in the contested landscape of the Jeju naval base where the production of ‘commies’ is not limited to the sphere of state apparatuses. Everyone can be accused of devotion to the North Korean regime. Concomitantly, s/he can accuse others of the same. For example, everyone in

South Korea vocally articulates anti-communism and antagonism toward North Korea.

They learn how to do it from the instance they are born and officially at the age of seven when they enter into the mandatory public education system. Until the 1990s there was a national contest for children annually for anti-communism drawing.

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3.4. Militarizing the nation

The new base is expected to open for operation by 2015. Strategically located between China and Japan, the island fell prey to the Cold War geopolitics and has become now once again a military hotspot. The construction of the Jeju naval base gained legitimacy by the production of NK devotees on Jeju. Two decades have passed since the end of the Cold War, but the names NK devotees and ‘commies’ still have deep resonance in South Korea. This is because the country’s sovereignty was founded in the logic of the War. Hegemony is the power produced in the language of universality. In the case of Jeju the universality runs in the discourse of national security. South Korea is therefore always imagined as a weak and small state that is located on a vulnerable geography. The struggle over geography is ‘not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings’(Said 1994, 7).

The fear that fuels the imagined geography justifies militarism as a way of promoting security. As long as militarism is justified as a way of saving lives, the logic of security wins over environmentalism as it did on Jeju. The imagined geography of South Korea will remain vulnerable until its identity is not defined by the division of the peninsula. It could be either unification or not. Whichever it becomes, it will constitute another national identity that is different from the current rhetoric of complex and yet one

Korean-ness.

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4. Giving to Belong: Aid as a Marker of Development

4.1. Celebrating the graduation

On January 1, 2010, South Korea has become the twenty-fourth member of the

Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development (OECD). The Committee’s nickname is ‘Donors’ Club’ because the majority of foreign aid is donated by DAC member countries. South Korea’s membership to DAC was celebrated because it meant the transformation of the country from a recipient of foreign aid to a donor. Indeed, South Korea is one of few countries that have ‘graduated’ from receiving foreign aid. Coming out of decades of colonial exploitation and the destructive Korean War, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world and was heavily dependent on aid until the 1980s. The membership to DAC is epochal to the country’s history and vindicates its rapid economic growth.

However, the celebration of the membership and accompanied aid practices of

South Korea raise questions on what foreign aid really is. South Korea’s membership to

DAC was celebrated as a epochal event that marks the country’s ‘graduation from aid’ and a beginning of a new history as an advanced country (T. J. Lee 2003; Drazkiewicz-

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Grodzicka 2013). The discourse on South Korea’s foreign aid is disproportionately focused on the country’s increased distance from countries (still) receiving aid and decreased distance to advanced countries that give aid. During the past decades of economic development, South Korea used to identify itself as small, weak, and backward country. The geography of South Korea was imagined as an obstacle created by nature and imperial geopolitics for the nation to overcome. The narrative had it that South

Korea was a weak and small land endowed with no valuable natural resources or industrial infrastructure and blocked by a Communist regime in the north and three seas otherwise. The membership to DAC is celebrated as an entitlement because it means overcoming the obstacle.

This chapter focuses on foreign aid as a sub-category of international aid that is primarily negotiated by governments in order to shed light on the symbolic power of foreign aid to represent the hegemony of the donor. The chapter analyzes South Korea’s discourse of foreign aid from the vantage point of gift theory. In the following section, I review the literature on foreign aid and the gift theory. The rest of the Chapter analyzes

South Korea’s economic development through Saemaeul Movement and its aid initiative of Global Saemaeul Movement. I argue that aid donation is not only motivated by economic and political gains from the donor-recipient relationship but also from the desire for identity and recognition as a donor.

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4.2. Theories of foreign aid

Foreign aid largely refers to the voluntary flow of resources from a government to another in peace time. It includes various kinds of resources granted or loaned at softer terms of finance than the market offers in order to promote economic, social, and political development of developing countries. International aid is offered by not only donor governments but inter-governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations such as religious groups, private foundations, and charities. Some corporate foundations are as big as small states and can exercise power over developing countries with their aid.

Nonetheless, the former provide a disproportionate majority of international aid either directly to recipient governments or through inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations. While the role of the private sector is growing in the decision making process for foreign aid (Arase 1994), foreign aid was born out of the Cold War geopolitics and the growth of private sector interventions is a post-Cold War phenomenon in which trade relations are highly influential to foreign aid practices

(Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor 1998). Hence the state (national) scale still dominates the discourse of international aid: e.g. the United States helped South Korea; France aids

Haiti. The donor is understood as an autonomous decision making on whether to provide aid or withhold it if the recipient is considered to be a rogue state (Hyndman 2011, 50).

Less attention is paid to the process how a foreign aid discourse is produced within the donor country (Van Belle, Rioux, and Potter 2004).

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A great portion of foreign aid is donated by 26 states that are members to OECD-

DAC. Most research on foreign aid is dependent on DAC’s country-level data and takes country as the unit of analysis (Findley et al. 2011). While it is often stated that DAC is responsible for over 90% of foreign aid, it is hard to verify it. Statistics on aid by non-

DAC members is not mandatorily collected by any and the information relies on voluntary reports from non-DAC members to DAC. In addition, non-DAC members have their own definitions of aid and do not conform to DAC’s aid guidelines. DAC defines its aid as official development assistance (ODA), which refers to grant or concessional loan from one government to another primarily for the purpose of enhancing economic growth and welfare provision or overcoming disasters and economic crises.

Non-ODA resources include the aforementioned private aid, and private flows at market terms, and other official flows—resources provided by donor governments but more commercial in nature than concessional. I do not agree to the categorization because

ODA and non-ODA are only technically distinguished and are not different in the sense that they are both subject to negotiation between the donor and the recipient. In this chapter foreign aid is broadly defined to include both ODA and non-ODA. It includes all kinds of flow of resources that are negotiated between states, from grants to debt cancelation and to loans.

Cross-border aid activities between states or tribes can be found throughout history, but they were conducted on an ad hoc basis as needs arose. In modern Europe, it was a common practice for a colonial government to provide aid to its colonies in order to develop infrastructure for business and trade and to provide welfare programs. The

143 institutionalization of foreign aid is a recent phenomenon. During WWII, the Bretton

Woods system was agreed upon among the Allies to lay down monetary orders between states and rebuild the world economy from the war. The agreement included a measure for member states to pull resources and establish the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for short-term loans and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development

(IBRD) for long-term loans.

Foreign aid as bilateral aid started from the Marshall Plan (1948-1952) of the US government (Ruttan 1996; Butterfield 2004). The Marshall Plan was based on the containment policy of the Cold War era that aimed to build a buffer zone of economically stable countries and deter the spread of Soviet Communism (Reinert 2006, 1). The

Truman administration passed the Economic Cooperation Act in 1948 for the purpose of

‘supporting free people in the world from subjugation and military pressures’ and transferred massive economic assistance for facilitating economic reconstruction of the war-torn Germany and other parts of Europe. The Marshall Plan was expanded to the third world under the administration’s Point IV program:

[W]e must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our

scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and

growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are

living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are

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victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty

is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas.84

In 1953 the US government established the Foreign Operations Administration to coordinate foreign aid to its allies all over the world for a longer term under one government agency of management. In 1961 the Kennedy Administration declared that its aid would not be ideologically bound but humanitarianly motivated. The Foreign

Assistance Act was legislated and the Foreign Operations Administration was replaced by today’s Agency for International Development (USAID) (Butterfield 2004, 59).

Foreign aid of today—the institutionalized flows of resources from one government to another in peace time—was officially born.

From then on, foreign aid has been explicitly framed with the development discourse. McNamara’s Nairobi speech (1973) aligned the US aid policies with modernization theory (Escobar 2012; Pearce 2001; Ruttan 1996; Sanyal 2007). In addition, foreign aid became associated with the development initiatives that the United

Nations spearheaded throughout the four consecutive Development Decades (1960-2000) and the Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015). However, foreign aid rarely leads to development results and most aid recipients half a century ago are still dependent on aid today. Donor governments suffer from donor fatigue—skepticism against aid.

The hegemony of development discourse encourages every policy, program and project to be reframed as development regardless of their results. This is a symptom of

84 Truman, Henry. 1949. Department of State Bulletin. January 30. 123.

145 developmentalism. The modern idea of development emerged around the early nineteenth century out of the disillusionment with the promise of industrialization

(Cowen and Shenton 1996). Development as a doctrine of intervention aimed at the amelioration of the social crisis that accompanied the industrial revolution. Capitalist economy necessarily entailed destructive dimensions such as poverty and unemployment. The idea of development came out to bring the economy back to order and soon became associated with planning and public policy that aimed at maintaining incessant progress and still establishing order (1996, 117). However, the ultimate authority of development continues to be capital (1996, xv). Hence the process of development is at odds with the positive connotation of development because the process itself encompasses destructive dimensions (1996, 438).

As a result, foreign aid’s explicit relation to the idea of development is not supported by practices of aid policies and development results. Since the 1980s donors have increasingly mobilized foreign aid in accordance with their neoliberal policies for

‘globalization’ of the recipient economies (, Jones III, and Fröhling 2005;

Roberts, Secor, and Sparke 2003; Roberts 1998). In response, international development organizations grew and requested transparency and systematization of the delivery and monitoring of foreign aid (Armstrong 2004; Bond 2006; Burris 2007; Edwards 1999;

Hammami 1995; Hulme and Edwards 1997).

The literature on foreign aid and development has been dominated by development economics and international relations studies (Holdar 1993; Overton,

Murray, and McGregor 2013; Pankaj 2005). Development economics investigates how

146 economic growth can be achieved, whether aid provision contributes to certain social and economic outcomes, and how foreign aid should be coordinated with other economic policies (Boyce 2002; Chang 2002; Easterly 2006; Lahiri 2007; Rostow 1960; J. D. Sachs

2006; Schumpeter 1934; Stiglitz 2003). When it comes to the question what motivates foreign aid, development economics looks into domestic factors of the donor country than international ones. The question is largely answered by two theories: public choice theory and public interest theory. Public choice theory interprets foreign aid as an expression of the donor government’s self-interests in the recipient such as political staility (McKinlay and Little 1978; McKinlay and Little 1979; McKinlay 1979; Ruttan

1989; Ruttan 1996). On the other hand, public interest theory suggests that foreign aid is motivated by the donor’s moral dedication to humanitarian causes and that with reforms of management it can alleviate poverty and promote development ( 2000;

Lancaster 2000; Lancaster 2007; Lumsdaine 1993; Noel and Therien 1995; J. D. Sachs

2006).

In international relations studies, scholarship on foreign aid may be categorized into idealism, Marxism, and political realism. Idealists are largely interested in reforming the mode of aid delivery in order to align aid activities with humanitarian goals (Boyce

2002; Buss and Gardner 2008; Dunning 2004; Edwards 1999; Hulme and Edwards 1997;

Freedman 2000; Hilhorst and Jansen 2010). Other scholars of foreign aid turn to various strains of Marxism and interpret foreign aid as an accumulation strategy and integral to the workings of capitalist states. This hegemonic view explains that the state utilizes foreign aid in order to solicit commitment and dependency from the recipient toward the

147 donor (McKinlay 1979; Ruttan 1989; Ruttan 1996). Foreign aid has played a significant role in incorporating the Third World into the world system and expanding the international market for capitalist interests of the First World (Tarrant 1980; Wood 1980;

Wood 1986; Roeder 1985; Davis and Dombrowski 2000; Hout 2002; Easterly 2006;

Reinert 2006; Patterson 2009; Lankester 2012).

Political realists pay more attention to geopolitics. In his paper A Political Theory of Foreign Aid, Hans Morgenthau theorized foreign aid as the modern equivalent of diplomatic bribe that aimed the recipient country’s political stability and acquiescence

(Morgenthau 1962, 302). If foreign aid serves other agendas such as economic development as it is often claimed, it would require drastic changes in both economic and political structures. The elite of the recipient country may resist. The donor state would not want to risk such disruptions and perceive the recipient’s economic development to be counterproductive (1962, 307). Hence Morgenthau called aid for development

‘conspicuous industrialization’ (1962, 303). Political realism follows the tradition of

Morgenthau and interprets foreign aid as a tool designed for geopolitical or geoeconomic interests of the donor. Donor governments utilize aid in order to promote stability in recipient countries or solicit recipient governments’ complacency to or participation in the former’s political agenda domestically and internationally (Zimmerman 1993;

Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor 1998; Alesina and Dollar 2000; Davis and Dombrowski

2000; Duffield 2002; Akram 2003; Boden 2008; Sorens 2009; Fleck and Kilby 2010;

Vreeland 2011).

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From this perspective, the end of the Cold War did not change the nature of foreign aid. The Cold War has been merely replaced by other wars or geopolitical concerns such as the war on terror or energy crisis. They argue that foreign aid practices do not correspond with the rhetoric of human needs and economic development as donors continue to provide aid to corrupt governments when they show low likelihood of aid effectiveness (Alesina and Dollar 2000; Akram 2003). Therefore foreign aid does not contribute to development but only grow welfare colonialism (Pankaj 2005; Reinert

2006). Some studies support the theory by showing a correlation between foreign aid and voting patterns at international forums to suggest that states use foreign aid as a political reward (Boden 2008; Vreeland 2011). Such correlation is not only relevant to the Cold

War rivalry. The War on Terror renews the geopolitical role of foreign aid (Fleck and

Kilby 2010). Besides, even multilateral development organizations such as the World

Bank shows the same pattern of correlation between donation and voting results (Dreher,

Sturm, and Vreeland 2009).

The study of foreign aid has been minimal in the discipline of geography other than the mapping of aid flows (e.g. Potter et al. 1999; Tarrant 1980). This is not intuitively understandable, given the political and economic importance of foreign aid and, as discussed below, its almost ubiquitous public-private networks (Duffield 2002).

And yet, it is not altogether necessarily regrettable if one reviews all the status quo theories the disciple produces. For example, in an article published in Progress in Human

Geography, The study of foreign aid: unbroken ground in geography, Sven Holdar encourages geographical research of foreign aid with the following argument: ‘With

149 foreign aid being one of the major instruments that western governments can use to promote their interests in the third world, the study of the geographic distribution of aid is necessary to understand the character of first-world-third-world relations’ (Holdar 1993,

454).

On the other hand, foreign aid and development has been one of the central topics in anthropology. Anthropologists have been long faced the ‘moral dilemma’ between participation in the development process and staying out. By participating, they facilitate development to problematize the local poor and put their cultural integrity at risk; by staying out, they help perpetuate the costs and disadvantages of the local poor (Bennet

1988, 2). This anxiety led the post-development studies (Escobar 1991; W. Sachs 1992).

They are critical of the naturalness of development in the political and the economical and argue for putting a closing to development to make it a historically specific experience (Escobar 2012, 676).

I attribute the marginal status of geographic research on foreign aid to the marginality of foreign aid in market economy. Geography after the spatial quantitative revolution has studied the flows of capital, goods, and human labor. Spatial patterns of aid or the small percentage of exchanges foreign aid represents did not attract spatial scientists or economic geographers. As outcomes of ad hoc political and economic decisions, foreign aid is less formulaic than transportation, migration, or trafficking. On the other hand, political geography could have been interested in foreign aid but it was dominated by classical geopolitics.

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The Dictionary of Human Geography starts its entry on geopolitics with this mockery, ‘a catch-all category for international violence, an orphaned sub-field of late imperial geography resurrected in neo-imperial America’ (Gregory et al. 2009, 300).

Colloquial uses of the term often implicate violence or insecurity among states: e.g.

‘Japan and China has a geopolitical problem,’ ‘Brazil’s leadership change is a geopolitical challenge,’ or ‘energy security is a major geopolitical issue of our time.’

They draw the meaning of geopolitics from the classical geopolitics that describe relations among states in regard to territorial arrangements (e.g. Kjellen’s geopolitik,

Mackinder’s Heartland, Ratzel’s Lebensraum—space within which the state as an organism grow). In classical geopolitics the states are the supreme actors that make policy decisions. National boundaries are taken for granted. Aid is a tool to deter violence and enhance security.

Critical geopolitics points out that the states as supreme actors and their territories are effects of imagined . Ideologies of classical geopolitics are focused on territorial threats, neoliberal reconfiguration of the international market. On the other hand, ‘critical geopolitics’ is interested in the practices that produce or render certain sociospatial structures intelligible (Coleman 2009). It seeks to deconstruct the geopolitical practices that reproduce the global power structures in order to ‘challenge some aspect of taken-for-granted geopolitical knowledge by looking at its social production, the parameters of its discursive economy’ (Dalby and Tuathail 1996, 452).

Critical geopolitics apply poststructural and postcolonial theories to the study of geopolitical practices and reveal practices that rationalize nation-states as the unit of

151 social organization and naturalizes the power disparities among them (Dalby 1994, 595).

From this perspective, we can see the inconsistency of globalization, the borders closing and the borders opening, and the bodies that cross and the bodies that are blocked (Slater and Bell 2002, 356).

During the Cold War era aid was given to forge geopolitical allies and manifest economic superiority over the other. The literature of aid and development underwent radical changes around the end of the Cold War. The historic event profoundly transformed the geopolitical condition of the world. As the Second World demised, the contrast between the First and Third Words became the most prominent in geopolitical relations. The dimorphous subjectivities and economic inequality of colonialism/imperialism shaped the relations into North-South divide. The post-Cold

War geopolitics conceptualizes insecurity as originating from ‘underdevelopment’ rather than ideological differences or territorial threats (Slater 2004, 6). David Slater attributes this new tradition to the Truman Doctrine (Slater 2004, 65). The states perceive the instability of the Third World as a threat that replaces the Cold War (e.g. immigration, diseases, , terrorism in the midst of the allegedly open borders of the flat world).

This perspective justifies intervention against underdevelopment. Development was reinvented as a security measure and foreign aid as a geopolitical tool.

Jennifer Hyndman calls this new thread of fear—that less developed countries may invade or infect developed countries—the geopolitics of fear (Hyndman 2011). The state produces the geopolitics of fear and justifies aid on the grounds that it makes people in donor states feel safer. In security and fear can drive aid politics in donor countries by

152 producing a feeling of greater safety if aid is used to stabilize conflict and disaster elsewhere (Hyndman 2011, 55). In this sense, the distribution of international aid is effects of both development and security considerations. Both capitalist interests and political power of the state are considered as determinants of aid policies. Neoliberal policies are well overlapped with foreign aid practices through the discourse of aid for trade and aid effectiveness (Hyndman 2009, 869).

The geography of fear wages a global civil war against underdevelopment

(Duffield 2008). It is a metaphoric war between populations supported by the capitalist regime of accumulation as opposed to those expected to be self-reliant. Foreign aid is provided as a containment of the war. States are now prepared for wars not by making political and military alliances but by constructing public-private networks across borders

(Duffield 2002, 1063–1064). In this ‘new public-private security paradigm’ foreign aid has become a tool to discourage isolationist behaviors and attitudes and enhance security

(Duffield 2002, 1066). While I do not share Mark Duffield’s optimistic view on the future of foreign aid—that through the flows of resources, networks are developed, international trade and cooperation increase, interdependence and mutual security is enhanced—his conceptual proposition of ‘new public-private security paradigm’ is insightful. Foreign aid is disbursed by bilateral governments but administered through complex public-private networks that involves more than conventional actors of international relations and that affect not only state relations but our everyday lives.

The end of the Cold War raised many new questions about foreign aid. First of all, it disrupted the pivotal condition—ideological geopolitics—that comfortably located

153 foreign aid in the hand of the state, or more specifically of the Western capitalist powers.

Now foreign aid has lost its foremost usage in the building of the cordon sanitaire against communism. Researchers, primarily international relations theorists, investigated the correlation between donors and recipients through research questions such as ‘Who gets foreign aid and how much?’ (Akram 2003), ‘Who gives foreign aid to whom and why?’

(Alesina and Dollar 2000), and ‘Does international politics influence aid provision decisions?’ (Dreher, Sturm, and Vreeland 2009). These questions pursue the changing nature of aid in the post-Cold War era and the discourses and practices of development, which ultimately come to this: what motivates aid in the absence of geopolitical enemies to bribe against?

Concomitantly, the end of the Cold War not only transformed the geopoliticial conditions but also increased the popularity of postcolonial theories. The North-South divide provoked critical perspectives on the representations that often accompanied—the global North as the Self, the prosperous, and the advanced and the global South as the

Other, the impoverished, and the underdeveloped (Slater 2004, 19). In the discipline of geography, in particular, aid and development gained substantial significance as research objects through postcolonial theories. Beforehand, the discipline had paid scant attention to the subject matter in the midst of the Cold War. Research on aid is still marginal in the discipline but development has become one of the geographical concepts.

The influence of postcolonial theories led to a recent increase in the study of aid and development from the vantage point of gift theory. Gift theory originates from the

French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss. In his seminal work, The Gift (1923), Mauss

154 theorizes gift as a form of economy. Distinctive from market economy, the gift economy is not oriented toward the exchange of material resources. Gift is a voluntary extension of resources; its primary focus is not but the creation or reinforcement of social relationships. Unlike other types of economy, gift economy incurs delay in time in the process of a gift being given, received, and reciprocated. Hence gift creates social relationships because it obliges the recipient to reciprocate in the future. It mitigates conflicts and creates a sense of common life. In the process of giving and being reciprocated, the gift economy creates and perpetuates alliance between equal participants (Mauss 1990). Gift has the power to remind recipients of their relative poverty and others’ power over them. Gift creates the sense of debt and gratitude and humiliates recipients. Gift elevates donor to the generous, the wealthy. When a gift fails to be reciprocated, it creates hierarchy between them—the honorable that respects the alliance and the dishonorable that does not. Gift formalizes and naturalizes the hierarchy between a donor and a recipient (Mauss 1990).

While Mauss pays more attention to the mechanism of gift, Jacques Derrida focuses on the ontology of gift. As Mauss pointed out, gift resides in the circuit of reciprocity. Derrida expands the theory by scrutinizing the premise of reciprocity. He argues that gift entails the anticipation of reciprocation or at least appreciation. However, reciprocity negates the assumption that the original gift was freely given between equals.

Even when it is not reciprocated, it produces the anticipation of appreciation. As a de facto debt, gift institutionalizes morality and power in the relationship between the donor and the recipient (Derrida 1992). Hence gift cannot but entail self-interest or calculative

155 reasoning. Derrida argues that as soon as it appears as a gift, it is not a gift anymore because a genuine gift requires anonymity of the giver so that no relational benefit to giving is accrued. A gift is impossible because a genuine gift requires anonymity of the giver and cannot actually be understood as a gift, such that no relational benefit to giving is accrued (Derrida 1992).

From this perspective, foreign aid is interpreted as not gift but debt (Hattori 2001;

Silva 2008). As the gift of aid is expected not to be reciprocated, the donor acquires a moral high ground vis-à-vis the recipient. The generosity of the donor is visualized through foreign aid as the donor embosses their national flag on the donated goods, dispatches their nationals as development experts, and hosts rituals where the recipient honors the donor (Silva 2008; Kapoor 2008; Mason 2011). Foreign aid produces the image of a generous nation for the donor (Kapoor 2008). At the same time it euphemizes and naturalizes the hegemony of the donor and the hierarchy between the donor and the recipient (Hattori 2001). The unreciprocated gift of foreign aid allows the donor to assume the position of symbolic domination over the recipient. The development of the recipient that the donor pursues through foreign aid becomes a patrimonial doctrine that dominates the recipient. Foreign aid is therefore a negative gift that naturalizes persistent unreciprocity of capitalism and normalizes the global hierarchy and social inequality.

To the donor, foreign aid has a self-constituting effect. Poverty, illiteracy, and violence in developing countries become the responsibilities of donor countries as members of the global community (Biccum 2011). April Biccum (2011) observes that global education and development advocacy successfully transform the problems of

156 capitalism into the responsibilities of global citizens. Foreign aid is founded on market- based solutions to poverty and (re)produces neoliberal subjectivities (Biccum 2011,

1334). Foreign aid contributes to the sovereignty consolidation of the donor (Biccum

2011, 1336):

[W]hile the foreign aid regime abroad consolidates national sovereignty by

extending its state apparatus in other territories, its communication to the

domestic public consolidates sovereignty at home through its repetitive equation

with what it means to be British or Australian and ‘developed.’

Foreign aid can not only serve the donor’s political and economic interests, but also create the socio-cultural hegemony of the developed. The colonial desire to become a ‘reformed, recognizable Other’ (Bhabha 1994, 86) motivates developing countries to comply with the hegemony and mimic the donor. Recently, new donors emerged who used to be on the other side of aid activities such as Brazil, China, India, , and

South Korea. From the vantage point of gift theory, foreign aid by emerging donors is theorized as a notarization of their modernization and development and consolidation of their sovereignty (Drazkiewicz-Grodzicka 2013; Mawdsley 2011; Yeh 2013; Six 2009;

Woods 2008). They dismantled the established roles and modes of aid delivery to a degree that the conventional understanding of foreign aid did not apply any more (Six

2009; Drazkiewicz-Grodzicka 2013).

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Modernity is considered as a rupture from pre-modern. In case of Poland, foreign aid is desired to fabricate such a rupture between its history as a developing country and its future as a developed country. Since its EU membership in 2004, Poland is writing a new history as an emerging donor. Despite its experience as a COMECON donor for 50 years, Poland establishes its identity as an aid graduate donor who has a new future to write. Its past as an aid recipient was reframed as an experience that makes the quality of

Polish aid better than other donors’ aid. In order to establish itself as an EU member, its past as a COMECON member is downplayed but narrated as a recipient of aid. The country is detaching its future from the past to craft a new identity as an EU member, as an established donor, as a modern state (Drazkiewicz-Grodzicka 2013).

Aid is a process of self-recognition and a signifier of power and position in the global economy (Mason 2011). Emerging donors seek to establish a point of departure by closing the history of unreciprocated gifts through ‘reversing the aid chain and fulfilling the obligation to give’ (Drazkiewicz-Grodzicka 2013, 72). In addition, emerging donors are motivated to provide foreign aid for the sense of belonging to the powerful. While some gift theorists optimistically look at the possibility of South-South cooperation defying the politics of gift (Mawdsley 2011), the rhetoric of cooperation does not erase the power of finance. The case of South Korea illustrates this.

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4.3. South Korea’s aid

4.3.1. The developmental dictatorship

South Korea’s economic development is widely explained by developmental state theory along with other economies in East Asia. The economic success of the newly industrializing countries in East Asia won the developmental state theory much popularity in the 1980s. In explaining the Japanese economic ‘miracle,’ Chalmers

Johnson distinguished the characteristics of the Japanese state from the socialist planning state of the USSR and the liberal regulatory state of the US and named the former a

‘capitalist developmental state’ (Johnson 1982). The state creates a multitude of institutions manpowered by elite economic officials to coordinate the private sector, form policies through coordination with capitalists, and as a result becomes able to give direct instructions to the market. Capital becomes international as it grows and becomes less interested in making long-term investment in any specific national economy. On the other hand, the state can govern the market for better economic success by redistributing resources, controlling the financial system and promoting exports of goods and imports of technology, thanks to the economies of scale, learning, and better efficiency in infrastructural investments (Wade 1990).

The capitalist developmental state defines the purpose of the state in terms of leading economic growth instead of providing welfare. And yet it promotes private property and competition. This is why society does not oppose to the authoritarian rule

159 of the state. Society conforms to the state for the sake of both individual economic gains and national development (Johnson 1982). Johnson’s theory was widely accepted across disciplines and applied to explaining economic development in other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (e.g. Evans, Rueschemeyer, and

Skocpol 1985; Amsden 1989; Woo-Cumings 1999). Others utilized the theory to investigate why the same kind of economic development was not possible in other regions such as and expanded the theory by discussing the historical context in East Asia that allowed the birth of developmental state (e.g. Jenkins 1991). In the newly industrialized countries in East Asia, the state was capable of governing the market because it successfully won hegemony in expense of democracy. Peter Evans argues that bureaucracy in the developmental state can succeed because it has a corporate coherence due to long-term career commitments (Evans 1995, 12). Other types of states are less successful in connecting individual members of society to the collective goals of the state. In conclusion, Evans theorizes the combination of the bureaucratic corporate coherence and various social ties as ‘embedded autonomy’ that makes the developmental state successful (Evans 1995).

Developmental state theory is not immune from criticism. Its statist view is harshly criticized by Marxist scholars who argue that the theory fails to pay attention to class structures (Poulantzas 2000, 13). It conceptualizes the state as an internally cohesive actor and fails to uncover the complex and dynamic internal workings of the state (C.-I. Moon and Prasad 1994, 364). The theory excuses authoritarian regimes and prioritizes development over democracy. Particularly, East Asian bureaucracy is

160 presumed to be organically benign, functional, and rational (C.-I. Moon and Prasad 1994,

372). Developmental state theory assumes the state bureaucracy’s rationality, competence, and manipulative power as given and makes incomplete causal links between state structure and economic performance (B.-G. Park 1998, 273). In addition, there was no single mode of developmental state in East Asia but multiple ‘distinct modes of state linkages and relations with capital and labour’ (Douglass 1994, 560).

While there is no dispute on that the states in the East Asian countries enjoyed an unusually high degree of autonomy from society, the historical contexts and outcomes varied too much to produce a coherent theory that could explain all (Douglass 1994, 556).

South Korea developed its economy by keeping foreign influence in check and taking care of to grow whereas transnational corporations account for much of

Singapore’s economic development. Taiwan and grew small and medium- sized corporations than conglomerates. In short, the developmental state, which is autonomous from society and governs the market, was conjured up by scholars to make sense of the economic development of East Asia (Douglass 1994).

More importantly, the theory pays scant attention to the geopolitical conditions of the successful East Asian cases. South Korea is a good example. South Korea made seed money for industrialization in two ways. First, Japanese industries in the southern half of the peninsula became property of the South Korean government according to the Initial

Financial and Property Settlement between the US and the South Korean governments

(Gong 2000, 64). Unlike other ex-colonies which lost a substantial amount of national wealth as colonial capital moved away along with the imperial power’s return, South

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Korea did not suffer from such exodus of capital developed during the Japanese colonial rule because Japan was retreating defeated. Second, between 1945 and the early 1990s,

South Korea received a total of USD 12.7 billion of official development assistance

(ODA), mostly from the US, Japan, and European countries (Table 3). In the absence of industries and savings, foreign aid comprised a great proportion of the government revenues until the 1970s. The generous amount of foreign aid was one of the decisive factors for South Korea’s rapid economic growth. The government’s unmatched autonomy over foreign aid disbursement developed a cozy relationship between politics and capital to give birth to an ‘aid-state-’ system (Dae-hwan Kim 1991)

Table 2 Official development assistance to South Korea (1945-1999)

Period Aid (in USD millions) 1945-1960 Post-Korean War reconstruction 3,097.9 1961-1975 First half of Decades of Development 3,941.4 1976-1990 Second half of Decades of Development 3,510.8 1991-1999 Transition to graduation 2,226.2 Total 12,776.3 Sources: KOICA (2004) and G. G. Lee (2004).

The biggest donor to South Korea was the US (5.5 billion), followed by Japan (5 billion). Including military aid, the US alone provided USD 12 billion to the country between 1946 to 1980.85 The US military had occupied the southern half of the Korean

85 USAID. 1980. US Overseas Loans and Grants and Assistance from International

Organizations.

162 peninsula even before South Korea was established. Located surrounded by Communist regimes in USSR, China, and North Korea, South Korea had significant geopolitical importance to the US government’s containment policy against Communism. Whereas the Japanese government provided aid more as a compensation of its colonial exploitation than development assistance, the US aid to SK was motivated by its rivalry with

Communism during the Cold War. Facing the influence of USSR and China in North

Korea, the US military government provided aid under the Mutual Security Act. At first, food supplies accounted for 41.6 percent of the aid and later it was more for economic development. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, South

Korea received the second largest amount of foreign aid from the US, next to Vietnam.

Aid from the US had significant influence to the South Korean economy even to a degree that aid entered everyday vocabulary of lay people such as ‘ICA houses’ and ‘AID loan apartments.’ ICA refers to the International Cooperation Agency, predecessor of AID

(Agency for International Development). The US had direct and significant influence on

South Korea’s economy by not only providing aid but also constituting an important pillar of the Economic Planning Board during the country’s rapid economic growth.

Table 3 Aid to South Korea

Year Purpose Modalities Major donors 1942-1952 Short-run relief Grant, relief goods USA 1953-1961 Defense, stability, Grant, commodities, USA, UN rehabilitation technical cooperation 1962-1975 Transition, long- Concessional loans, USA, Japan term growth technical 163

cooperation, volunteers 1976-1996 Stability, growth Non-concessional Japan, Germany, loans IFIs 1997-2000 Overcoming Asian IMF bailout IMF/IBRD financial crisis packages Source: Kharas et al. (2011, 34).

While foreign powers influenced South Korea’s economic policies and diplomacy,

South Korea enjoyed relative autonomy in the disbursement of foreign aid (Taekyoon

Kim 2013). The particularity of geopolitics that South Korea was situated with guaranteed the flow of aid from the US. For example, the administration pursued import-substitution-industrialization (ISI) despite the advice from the US government in favor of export-oriented industrialization (EOI). The succeeding Park

Chung Hee administration adopted EOI but directed government supports toward monopoly business, against despite the US government’s policy against monopolies.

Nonetheless, the US kept providing aid to South Korea, contributing to the growth of the

South Korean developmental state (Taekyoon Kim 2013). Since South Korea and Japan normalized their diplomatic relations via the Basic Treaty in 1965, the Treaty package loans from Japan gradually replaced grants from the US. Businesses grew into chaebols as they received international loans with the government guarantee of payment in addition to the government’s preferential finances to businesses (Yi 2004, 144). The

South Korean developmental state had a grace period to mature domestic capital for international market through the intermediary of foreign aid before it was exposed to foreign direct investment (Reiffenstein and Nguyen 2011). 164

4.3.2. The authoritarian graduate

What if the US stops its aid and attention to South Korea tomorrow? How should

we be prepared for the future? Facing a strong enemy beyond the 38th parallel in

the wars of military, politics, and economy, we have no time to hesitate and

contemplate. All our efforts should be put together to boost the national economy

and nothing else.

President Park Chung Hee 1963 (recited from H. Kim 1999, 24–25)

During South Korea’s rapid economic growth, the authoritarian regime won hegemony in various ways. One of them was the production of ‘commies,’ alleged forces of subversion against whom geopolitical fears and sovereignty crises were projected

(Chapter 3). Another was Saemaeul Undong, or the New Villege Movement. The

Saemaul Movement began in 1970 by the initiative of President Park Chung Hee as a rural development program. The movement began with a road pavement campaign: the government distributed 300 bags of cement to each village and people surrendered their land to make way to pavements (Y. Oh 2005, 200). Soon it was expanded to productivity enhancement campaigns at factories, beautification campaigns in cities, and education campaigns at schools. While the movement emphasized voluntaristic attitudes, a nation-wide network of community organizations was created and movement goals set by the government were delivered top-down through the network (B. Kim 2011, 60).

165

During the 1970s production increase, thrift and savings increase, and security promotion were the three priorities of the movement. Villages with good achievements were honored and rewarded with government supplies. Under the principles of ‘diligence, self-reliance, and cooperation,’ labor was exploited without proper compensation, welfare programs were replaced by self-help projects, and community social relations were centralized under the close monitoring of the government (Sonn and Gimm 2013).

Nonparticipation was blamed as the alleged laziness and inferior conventions that held the nation back.

Table 4 Structure of Saemaeul Movement

Scale Administrative structure Division of labor Country Office of the President and Making policies, developing instructions, Ministry of State Affairs coordinating administration among government offices Region Office of Saemaeul Movement Setting local goals and coordinating roles among concerned organizations Village Saemaeul leaders Securing resources and labor, conducting local projects Source: Lee and Choi (2013, 140).

As discussed in Chapter 1, poverty and insecurity have been attributed to the geography of the Korean peninsula. Saemaeul Movement communicated the same fatalism and blamed geography for South Korea’s weakness. The Korean peninsula has an unfavorable location, which explains foreign invasions and consequent poverty of the nation (Saemaeul Research Group 1980, 5, 30):

166

The Korean peninsula is protruded from the Northeast Asian continent located

between a southward power of China and a northward power of Japan. In this

power dynamics, we were always under the fear and threat of war and did not

have a day of peace. […]

Our sovereignty has an extremely taxing and painful history for thousands of

years. It is engraved with a series of ordeals. To us Koreans these ordeals were

bitter sufferings of the nation; to others they were challenges to the status quo. Be

they sufferings or challenges, they left damages to our sovereignty, at least 931

times throughout the history.

The motto of Saemaeul Movement was ‘We can also be better off (Urido hanbeon jal sala bose).’ This phrase not only meant improving economic conditions but changing the mentality of and subsequently the identity of the nation. International financial institutions largely categorize countries into developed, developing, or less developed based on income level. Based on Rostow’s theory of modernization, South

Korea had been self-identified as a hujinguk (underdeveloped country) vis-à-vis seonjinguk (advanced country).86 Graduating from the status of a hujinguk and becoming a seonjinguk was the collective top priority of the nation.

86 Rostow’s theory on the stages of economic growth was very influential in constituting the binary discourse on advanced countries and underdeveloped countries. For example, his book titled View from the Seventh Floor (1964) is a political essay based on his

167

UN statistics show that the gap between seonjinguk and hujinguk is widening due

to their different income levels. Our time is not characterized by the conflict

between Communism and but a conflict between ‘poor land’

and ‘rich land.’ […] Hujinguk means many things but most importantly it refers to

a dual society of a modernized privileged class and a non-modernized

unprivileged class. […] A hujinguk is characterized by aiming at achieving

independence, liberal capitalism and welfare society.87

In the 1970s South Korea faced another challenge: ‘graduation from aid.’ The expression ‘graduation from aid’ originates from World Bank. These categories decide a country’s eligibility for grant or loan application. World Bank makes loans to low- and middle-income countries through IDA (international development association) and IBRD

(international bank for reconstruction and development). IDA loans are concessional with low or 0% interest rates and only low-income countries are eligible for them. When the economy grows and the country becomes no longer eligible for IDA grants or loans, it graduates from the IDA. Now the country is eligible for IBRD loans, which are non- concessional and have market interest rates. ‘Graduation from IDA clearly marks a major milestone in a country’s progression through the process of economic and social experience as Chairman of the Policy Planning Council of the US government. The book was translated into Korean as Seonjinguk and Hujinguk (1966).

87 Kyunghyang Daily, May 26 1962, ‘Underdeveloped country’s nationalism.’

168 development’(International Development Association 2012).88 As South Korea’s GNI per capital reached USD 520 in 1975, the country became no longer eligible for IDA finances. In the 1970s the imminent graduation from IDA was considered a big challenge for the country. A newspaper editorial published in 1970 lamented the upcoming graduation in the following words:

End of grant provisions has been long expected. It is the paradox of South Korea

that it has to celebrate this bad news. […] They say that aid is being terminated

because South Korea now can self-sustain. In reality, however, South Korea is

forced to self-support because aid is being terminated. […] Now we have to pay

close attention and be responsive even to the leaves blowing in the wind. Bad

news is bad news but we have to overcome this passive mentality, or else our

minds will always be confined to paradoxes.89

Saemaeul Movement began in this context. It was justified as a proactive challenge to the vulnerable geography and unfavorable fate of the nation. Labor and resources were forcibly mobilized against the threat of military invasion from North

88 36 countries graduated since IDA began business in 1961, but many of them fell back to the IDA eligible status, which World Bank calls as ‘reverse graduation.’ As of the fiscal year of 2013, a country is eligible for the IDA finance when it has no creditworthiness and its GNI per capita is below USD 1,195.

89 Dong-A Daily, 29 May 1970, ‘The certificate of graduation.’

169

Korea and the imminent termination of aid from the Allies. Nonparticipation was blamed as the alleged laziness and inferior conventions that held the nation back (Saemaeul

Research Group 1980, 21):

What determines a nation’s destiny is its geography. In other words, the quality

and quantity of national territory and population are the most decisive factors for

the nation’s future. These are the invariables of the nation’s security.

Saemanul Movement means our nation’s desire for prosperity as well as a will to

break from the convention of idleness and pave the way to a new life. Our nation

had boasted of a long history of five thousand years. In truth, however, the

history does not have a chapter in which our nation pioneered in something

through challenge against nature. In a sense Saemaul Movement represents a

positive attitude to rectify our old fatalism and seek after new potentialities from

nature, pinning our hopes onto the future.

The Park Chung Hee administration found excuses for its authoritarian dirigisme and in Saemaeul Movement. Park came into power through a military coup d’état in 1961. The South Korean constitution did not allow a third term for a president. In

1969 Park forced a to allow a third term. In 1972 he declared a state of emergency and remained in power until he was assassinated in 1979. Saemaeul

Movement’s binary discourse on underdeveloped countries and advanced countries was an effective tool to legitimize the state of emergency.

170

Weak and small countries that are located between big powers need to be clever

to survive and gain independence and peace in the dynamic geopolitics. If we

learned our history correctly, we could find out what we need to do today. […]

Those who do not assume the mission of the nation are spiritual vagabonds who

do not have a state. We had many of these vagabonds among us in the past.

A nation has an eternal life. It is a timeless actor. A state exists as a guardian of

the security and prosperity of the nation. Without the state, the nation cannot

prosper. A stateless people can never have an opportunity to express themselves,

however talented they are. The country and I are one. This is the truth. […]

The [the declaration of a state of emergency and the martial

law on 17 October 1972] emphasizes a correct historical understanding. It aims at

tightening disciplines of the nation. […] In short, the October Restoration means

hard work and establishing a welfare state for the prosperity of the nation. The

October Restoration is equal to Saemaeul Movement. […] There should be no

bystanders or dropouts among us. Every citizen should actively participate in it

and I trust them to do so.90

Saemaeul Movement did bring many reforms that contributed to the social and economic development of the country. And yet it became the authoritarian regime’s biopolitical

90 Dong-A Daily, 12 January 1973, ‘President Park’s press conference.’

171 strategy to ‘inscribe the discourse of developmentalism in [people’s] bodies and souls’

(Sonn and Gimm 2013, 30).

4.3.3. The Korean brand

While foreign aid had been significantly reduced in the 1980s, South Korea was still receiving aid from international organizations such as UNDP for social welfare programs in the 1990s. Pressure from donors increased for South Korea to graduate from aid. This created a debate domestically on what was more cost-beneficial for the country between maintaining the developing country status and winning notarization of its development (Jang 1996). South Korea started providing aid to developing countries in

1991. The Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) was founded in 1991 by transforming the Korea Overseas Development Corporation (KODCO), a government agency that facilitated overseas labor migration to increase remittances.

As aid activities grew, South Korea’s ‘graduation from aid’ earned another layer of meaning. As discussed above, ‘graduation’ is a term used by international financial institutions to refer to the termination of preferential treatments (e.g. tariff and tax cuts or aid and loans) as the beneficiary economy grows enough not to justify the treatments.

At first, South Korea interpreted the graduation as a risk. Soon the country reinterpreted it as an opportunity for inclusion into advanced countries. The aid the country has received is narrated as a national shame that testifies its poverty in the past. To overwrite the shame, giving aid to other poor countries is desired. Giving foreign aid was a way to

172 belong to developed countries and mark the country’s graduation from backwardness.

Graduation not only means that the country needs no more foreign aid from others, but it also means that the country successfully has transformed from a hujinguk to a seonjinguk.

South Korea’s graduation from aid was marked by its membership to OECD

(organization for economic cooperation and development) in 1996 and to OECD’s

Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2010. DAC is a group of 25 donor countries and is often dubbed as the donors’ club. South Korea’s membership added an

Asian member and a postcolonial country to DAC the first time since its establishment in

1961. To win the membership, South Korea increased its aid volume, prepared a law on international development cooperation, and streamlined its aid structure according to

DAC guidelines. South Korea celebrated the membership as a notarization of its eligibility to be shoulder-to-shoulder with advanced countries. Internationally, its membership to DAC was considered a testimony of the effectiveness of foreign aid and

South Korea was praised as a textbook example’ of the success of international development aid (USAID 2011).

However, the small amount of aid South Korea provides and its conventional modalities attracted criticism. DAC members are strongly encouraged to meet 0.7% of

ODA/GNI target. In 2011 South Korea provided USD 1,325 million worth of ODA, which amounts to 0.12% of its GNI (OECD 2012). DAC also recommends untied aid so that recipients of aid are not bound to procure supplies from donor countries. However,

South Korea’s untied aid ratio was 32% in 2010, far from meeting its commitment of 75%

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(ibid.). Its records are not good in providing multilateral aid and aid to non-governmental organizations as well.

Since the 2000s South Korea has experimented with global Saemaeul Movement as an international development program. The idea is that South Korea’s aid is distinctive from aid from traditional Western donors because the former knows by experience how to develop a country. Korea Saemaeul Undong Center promotes the movement as a solution to global problems such as global warming, water shortage, poverty, and HIV/AIDS.

What is the solution to all the problems listed above? Where in the world do we

find a place where all the problems were solved in less than half a century? Many

people around the world are turning to South Korea's 'Saemaeul Undong' for a

solution.91

In 2011 the South Korean government launched a taskforce team to strategize

Saemaeul Movement as a model for South Korean style of foreign aid. It has announced that ‘Global Saemaeul Undong’ should be the new brand name for South Korean development aid. The government criticizes developing countries for not having the spirit of self-reliance and cooperation and western donors for giving charity to developing countries. In 2014 the government has allocated USD 25 million to transfer Saemaeul

91 Weekly Saemaul, 17 September 2010, ‘Need for tribe-based Saemaeul Undong in

Africa.’

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Movement to developing countries in Asia and Africa.92 It plans to invite government officials and community leaders from recipient countries to South Korea and train them on the principles of Saemaeul Movement and dispatch South Korean volunteers to recipient countries.93 South Korea’s newly earned identity as donor transformed

Saemaeul Movement into a symbol of the country’s accumulated development know-how and a brand name of the country’s allegedly more effective aid modality (T. J. Lee 2010).

4.4. Gift of self-constitution

Foreign aid has been analyzed in the context of donor-recipient relationship.

Foreign aid enables traditional (Western) donors to enjoy domination and moral superiority vis-à-vis recipients. Gift theory reveals that the donor is motivated to give aid for the constitution of the subjectivity as donor as much as political and economic gains aid brings. The analysis of South Korea from the vantage point of gift theory suggests that to a postcolonial donor aid giving not only constitutes the donor’s relationship with the recipient but also that with other donors. The case argues that foreign aid by postcolonial donors can contribute to the analysis of donor subjectivity. Foreign aid is an illustration of the paternalistic characteristic of developmentalism. The expression

‘graduation from aid’ well demonstrates it. The wealthy assumes the authority to identify what is wrong with the poor. With their generous donation and expert knowledge, the

92 E-Today, 4 January 2014, ‘More budget for Saemaeul Movement.’

93 Maeil Economy, 11 January 2013 ‘Saemaeul 2.0.’

175 wealthy can fix the problem for the poor. The expert knowledge and modern technology of the wealthy justify their intervention. There is little room for discussion on imperial capital, colonial history, and geopolitics. The recipient is guided by the donor through the training of modernity until graduation to stand alone. The recipient is therefore forever in debt to the donor.

South Korea achieved a rapid and remarkable economic growth in the last half of the twentieth century. Graduation from backwardness, however, required the country not only graduation from aid but graduation from its discourse of weal and small state’s fatalism. South Korea made it an opportunity by creating a new identity as an advanced country through foreign aid provision. The donorship grants the country a membership to the donors’ club, or the sense of belonging to advanced countries. Its decades-old discourse on the vulnerable geography encouraged the country to seize the opportunity to become a global actor state. The political and economic gains that the donor may expect from providing aid are not only collected from the relationship with the recipient but also from the relationship with other donors.

In its effort to build a distinctive donor identity, the country initiated Global

Saemaeul Movement based on its economic development during authoritarian regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. The case shows that postcolonial foreign aid can be a marker of development. However, South Korea’s development was not only achieved by the spirit of self-reliance and cooperation, nor only by the abundance of foreign aid. The geopolitics of the Cold War provided South Korea with seed money to industrialize the economy and autonomy to protect its nascent industries from global capital. Saemaeul

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Movement was an effective governmentality to supply disciplined labor for the industrialization. The Global Saemaeul Movement initiative lacks critical reflections on the history and reduces foreign aid to a means of highlighting South Korea’s own experience and creating the country an identity to distinguish itself from developing countries as well as from other donor countries.

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5. Conclusion

[T]he recognition of ourselves as geographical agents—as Homo geographicus …

not only places us back in the world, but also reveals the fragmentary quality of

other more familiar models of ourselves …

Robert David Sack (1997, 24)

As the epigram suggests, our understanding of ourselves are affected by the meanings of the space we are situated in. We are where we think (Mignolo 2000, 89). In this sense, geography is about assigning meanings to space. Geography reveals the boundaries that one draws in one’s mind between familiar places and foreign places, calling the former ‘home’ and the latter ‘the other.’ It magnifies the differences between the home and the other and the different sets of values assigned to them. Our unconscious spatial frameworks govern the way we perceive the world (Lewis and Wigen

1997). Geography is the representation of such perceptions, our worldviews.

This dissertation is an attempt to contribute to postcolonial geography.

Postcolonial geography aims to critically investigate the production of geographical knowledge and its contribution to the imagination of who we are. The ‘post’ in postcolonial can be a chronological marker only when ‘colonial’ is an event that can end

178 in time. However, colonial representations and exploitation of the colonized territories do not come to an end at the moment of . ‘Colonial’ signifies the epistemic violence that dominates Western discourses of civilization, modernity, progress, development and democracy. ‘Postcolonial’ therefore does not mean ‘after colonialism’ but ‘a critical mode of enquiry … concerning the location and differential impact of the agents of knowledge’ (Slater 2004, 20, italic original).

The dissertation is a postcolonial reading of the geography of South Korea. I qualify the geography with ‘imagined’ to highlight the ways values are inscribed in the physical geography of the country and the postcolonial mode of enquiry that I take on to scrutinize the ways such values affect the Korean-ness. By imagined geography I mean the representation of national territorial ‘home’ situated in ‘the world.’ In a way, all geography is imagined geography because meanings are produced based on our limited and imperfect knowledge about the world. And yet, ‘imagined geography’ in the context of the dissertation refers to the geographical self-constitution--active exercises of envisioning one’s geographical situatedness.

South Korea has a small landmass which is directly bordered to its only arch- enemy, North Korea. Born after the end of WWII, its history is only decades old. The

South Korean discourse on the geography of South Korea recognizes these facts and yet compensates them with different representations of the country. The Korean peninsula is considered to have been the legitimate territory of the Korean nation for thousands of years. Consequently, the Korean nation is imagined to have thousands of years of history.

The Korean territory is narrated to have a vulnerable geography, due to the fact it is

179 located on a peninsula and neighbored by two superpowers—China and Japan. The alleged history of keeping the nation pure for thousands of years despite the vulnerable geography provides a source of national identity and pride. The imagined geography of

South Korea reveals complicated and sometimes contradictory understanding of the self.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the discussion of the contradictions of the imagined geography. The encounter with the Japanese colonial power encouraged the production of the Korean geo-body. The Korean peninsula was recognized as the organic nesting place of the Korean nation, and at the same time the people who shared the place was conceptualized as a nation. The Korean people were constructed as a nation with the longest history and the purist ethnic homogeneity. The profile of the goe-body was likened to that of a tiger, an animal that had been most anthropomorphized in the folklores. The positive and masculine values embodied in a tiger were projected onto the Korean peninsula and to the Korean nation. The Korean nation was imagined as a people who are never daunted by the liminal geography of the peninsula, nor by the threats and attacks of neighboring powers.

The division of the peninsula into North and South Koreas, however, brought challenges to the imagined geography. North Korea has become an exception to the honorable history of the nation. While unification is narrated as an unquestionable future of the nation, North Korea is no longer unanimously included in the Korean one-ness.

The controversy over the use of the Korean Peninsula flag reveals the unspoken conflict between political groups over the idea of unification and the discrepancies between their respective definitions of the Korean we-self.

180

Chapter 2 investigates the nationalist discourse on the Japanese military sexual slavery during WWII. The system made many women across Asia sex slaves of Japanese soldiers during the war. The shared experience of the sexual slavery and the recognition of the crime as violence against women’s human rights helped raising international awareness of the history and an international movement to redress the crime. In South

Korea, however, the history is narrated as a crime against the Korean nation. This narrative substantiates the cruelty of the Japanese colonial regime as well as the vulnerable geography of Korea. Though a majority of victims were drafted from Korea, they were low-class women in poverty and did not represent the whole population of the

Korean nation. Not only compatriot Koreans had been involved in recruiting the victims while serving the colonial power, the independent South Korea replicated the military sex slave system during the Korean War. The Japanese ‘Comfort Women’ is not an exceptional moment in the Korean history but is located in a chronology of state exploitation of women.

As the nation assumes the victim’s subjectivity in terms of the Japanese ‘Comfort

Women,’ anything that does not conform to the hegemonic nationalist discourse on the history is interpreted as a challenge to the nation. The Japanese government is condemned for its ambiguous and often dismissive stance on its responsibility for the history. The disappointment and resentment toward the Japanese government was materialized into a statue in the shape of a Korean girl established in front of the Japanese

Embassy. As the Japanese government and civil society request the relocation of the statue, communities in the US are erecting replicas of the statue in the

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US. The history of ‘Comfort Women’ is internationalized once again through the conflict between South Korean and Japan over the statue. The original victims of former sex slaves, however, are forgotten in the nationalist rivalry between the two countries. They are only remembered when the media occasionally reports obituaries of the octogenarians.

Chapter 3 discusses how the trope of vulnerable geography has made Jeju a liminal space. Jeju is the southernmost island of the Korean peninsula and has a small economy based on agriculture, fishery and tourism. In 1948 the South Korean regime was paving the way to statehood of its own in disconnection with its North Korean counterpart. Protests took place in Jeju against the suggested separate statehood. The

South Korean regime named the uprising a Communist attempt to subversion in disguise and executed around 30,000 civilians without trial. The North Korean regime has been defined as the primary enemy of the state and anyone sympathetic to the North or antagonistic toward the South has been identified as a homo sacer, one who is banned from the legal protection and can be sacrificed without making the killing a crime.

The Korean McCarthyism produced a neologism, ppalgaengi, which is loosely translated into ‘commie’ in English. At the same time, the discourse of vulnerable geography produced the fear of war and poverty lingering every corner of the South

Korean society. Anyone could be accused of being a commie. Everyone was a potential homo sacer and at the same time a sovereign power that could turn everyone else a commie. In 2011 the South Korean government started building a naval base on Jeju without successfully justifying the need to build the base there. Environmental concerns and locational inappropriateness for defense against North Korea were raised, leading to

182 a suspicion of the purpose of the base construction in relation to the US Pivot to Asia. As protests against the base construction took place in Jeju, however, the protesters were again identified as commies. The possibility of the existence of commies automatically justified the base construction, putting an end to the debate over the legitimacy of the Jeju naval base.

Lastly, Chapter 4 analyzes the discourse on South Korea’s economic development and aid donorship. The trope of vulnerable geography encouraged developmentalism in

South Korea. The country was self-identified as a weak and small country that was

‘underdeveloped’ due to its geography and indolent national character. The authoritarian regime set development the nation’s utmost priority and led rapid economic growth.

Much of its industrialization effort was financed by foreign aid, growing chaebols and creating a close alliance between politics and capital. The authoritarian regime mobilized resources and labor from the public in the name of development. The most exemplary case in point is Saemaeul Movement, a nation-wide development initiative in the 1970s and 1980s. Saemaeul Movement was promoted as an active challenge against nature and the disadvantaged geography of the Korean nation. The authoritarian regime utilized the discourse to win legitimacy of the martial law.

In the 1990s South Korea began providing aid to developing countries. Foreign aid was narrated as a way to break free from the country’s poverty in the past. Theories of foreign aid have shed light on the political and economic gains a donor could expect from a recipient by providing aid. The gift theory on the other hand shows the effect of self-constitution a gift entails on the donor and the recipient. Aid provision gave South

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Korea an opportunity to rewrite its identity as a graduate from aid, an advanced country, and a member to the donors’ club. In addition, South Korean aid is utilized as a symbol of South Korean development. Saemaeul Movement is redefined as a compilation of the country’s development know-how. Global Saemaeul Movement is selected as South

Korea’s aid program and brand name.

The experience of colonial rule and the Cold War geopolitics contributed to South

Korea’s self-recognition as a weak and small state in the geopolitical periphery. At the same time, the Korean nation is imagined as masculine and powerful to have maintained the national homogeneity for thousands of years in spite of constant threats and attacks to which the territory has been exposed to. The history is interpreted to testify the nation’s indomitable spirit, diligence, and love for peace. The dissertation shows that the imagined geography encourages the narrative of Korean one-ness through the examples of anti-, McCarthyism against ‘commies,’ and authoritarian developmentalism. In the examples, the Korean nation is imagined in various ways, sometimes contradictory. South Korea concerns the preservation of its national culture and homogeneity but desires development through changing the national defects of passive fatalism. It aspires to a position among advanced countries, a good place in the world.

The dissertation provides a critical reading of the geography of South Korea by disrupting the very inconsistencies in the imagined geography of South Korea. It contributes to a ground for a scholarly conversation about nationalism, sovereignty, developmentalism, and identity. The findings of the dissertation encourage more

184 research projects on the imagined geography of South Korea. The ongoing territorial disputes between South Korea and its neighboring countries, the relationship between diaspora nationalism and imagined geography, and the images of South Korea promoted by the ‘ (hanryu)’ of pop culture are some of the possible projects. While the dissertation limited its scope of investigation to South Korea, its research question on the vulnerable geography of the Korean peninsula could be raised to North Korea’s national identity formation.

185

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