ACTA KOR ANA VOL. 14, NO. 1, JUNE 2011: 313–352

BOOK REVIEWS

Inside the Red Box: North Korea’s Post-Totalitarian Politics. By Patrick McEachern. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 320 pages. (ISBN-10: 0231153228; ISBN- 13: 978-0231153225)

Patrick McEachern’s book Inside the Red Box begins with an anecdote from the inter-Korean summit of June 2000.

Party Secretary Kim Yong-sun of the DPRK told the South Korean president that the US military must remove its troops from the peninsula. Kim Jong Il reportedly interrupted, “What problem would there be if the US military remained?” Seeming surprised, Kim Yong-sun began presenting the party line [that] the United States must withdraw…..Kim Jong Il again interrupted, “Secretary Yong-sun, stop that. Even though I try to do something, people under me oppose it like this. Perhaps the military, too, must have the same view … as Secretary Yong-sun.” (1)

Underling contradicts boss in front of important guest, whereupon boss announces that insubordination is common in his organization! Such a scene would be screamingly phony even in a car dealership. But at the apex of North Korea, a state that boasts of unified, unquestioning loyalty to Kim Jong Il’s every word? The Soviets staged their good cop-bad cop act more credibly. According to Richard Nixon, they would take their “argument” into an adjacent room, leaving the visiting delegation (or so they hoped) to ponder the advantages of making a bold concession before it was too late. Then again, the Soviets had more respect for the Americans than Kim Jong Il ever showed to his South Korean counterpart. The reader expects Patrick McEachern to go to town on the above anecdote. As a foreign service officer and a former North Korea analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, he must see through such tricks quicker than anyone. But no. “My theory of North Korean politics,” he tells us, “holds out the possibility that events like these are not staged….It is possible 314 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

that this display actually reflected different bureaucratic positions within the state that Kim seeks to control.” (2) It is indeed possible that a dictator would inform an enemy state—with which his own state is formally at war—that he lacks the full support of his own elite. But is it likely? McEachern goes on to write, “The popular view that only one man matters in North Korea quickly breaks down upon investigation.”(3) It does not break down nearly as quickly as the view that divergent bureaucratic interests and positions cannot exist under one-man rule. One could instance Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China in this context, or the Yushin-era Park Chung Hee regime for that matter. But perhaps the most well known and pertinent example is the Third Reich, which was racked by far more intense disagreement between party, military and various ministries than anything McEachern can find evidence of in Pyong- yang. And yet Nazi Germany remains perhaps the most perfect example of a one- man dictatorship in history. One could conceivably argue that Hitler was not the only German who mattered, depending on what one means by the verb, but he always mattered more than the in-fighting that went on beneath him. I find nothing in McEachern’s book to suggest that the same cannot be said of Kim Jong Il, not least because the dictator espouses a comparably unifying and appealing form of paranoid ethno-nationalism. Part of the weakness of Mc- Eachern’s book is his apparent assumption—hence the unfortunate title—that this is a late Cold War communist state, and thus one held together none too firmly by a failed, outworn ideology. If North Korea really were such a place, the Kim Jong Il regime’s internal rivalries might indeed merit more study, presuming we had any reliable information on them. It is, however, manifestly not such a state. Now that North Korea has deleted the very mention of the c-word from its constitution, which enshrines military-first nationalist socialism instead, no writer or journalist should henceforth be allowed to call it a communist state without backing up the claim. Having said all the above, I concur wholeheartedly with McEachern’s opinion that North Korea is no longer a totalitarian state. The country clearly entered a post-totalitarian phase as it slid into famine in the 1990s. Apparent today to any visitor who leaves the showcase capital city is the existence of a second economy and second society, even if the latter remains atomized. (There is still no sign of the sort of civil society that came together in Eastern Europe after Stalin’s death.) But it is one thing to reject the totalitarian model, and quite another to assert that North Korea is not a one-man dictatorship. For the sake of argument I have so far acted as if I accept McEachern’s assertion that North Korea’s army, party, cabinet, foreign service, leader etc think differently about the economy, the nuclear program, Pyongyang-Washington

Book Reviews 315 relations, and other central policy problems. Alas, no convincing evidence of such differences of opinion is anywhere provided. Not for nothing does the book kick off with such an unconvincing illustration—and re-use it in full later on. (135) Much is made of apparent policy shifts on various fronts under Kim Jong Il’s rule, the idea being that these reflect a leader trying to drive the coach of state while his horses strain in different directions. KPA statements are held up here and there as evidence of serious military opposition to the foreign ministry’s professed readi- ness to compromise, despite the fact that our source for most of these statements is the Korean Central News Agency, that rigorously party-censored government mouthpiece. McEachern will need much stronger evidence than that if he is to get away with startling assertions that Kim Jong Il “cannot rule by fiat,” (2) and that in North Korea, “Bureaucratic losers … continue to voice opposition publicly to the chosen policy direction.” (41) Yet again, it seems, we are dealing with a North Korea watcher who refuses to take the personality cult seriously. I defy Mc- Eachern to find a single example of public bureaucratic opposition to any genuine regime policy, least of all to foreign policy. It is embarrassing to have to point this out, but statements made during negotiations purely for the benefit of Americans do not constitute a “chosen policy direction.” The flip-flops that followed the currency reform of late 2009 do indeed indicate differences of elite opinion in regard to economic affairs. This does not mean that anyone is daring to differ with the Dear Leader himself; his is a military-first dictatorship after all, and if Kim is like his father he has no strong convictions on the economy, and no real understanding of finance. As for the nuclear, military and diplomatic fronts, I see little in the past fifteen years that does not reflect a very consistent (and successful) policy of deception, brink- manship and blackmail. The foreign ministry has a crucial good-cop role to play in this policy, and has always played it brilliantly. Thus are the arms negotiators celebrated in domestic propaganda as “diplomatic warriors” who bamboozle the Americans while refusing to make concessions. Yet after all this time, McEachern still believes that Kim’s foreign ministry has “advocated internally for diplomatic solutions to the North’s economic and security challenges.” (93) Here too the comparison to Nazi Germany is helpful. Before World War II one could conceivably have compared Germany’s frantic armament with Ribben- trop’s peaceful noises, or the Hitler-Stalin pact with flare-ups of anti-Soviet propa- ganda, and concluded—much as McEachern does in puncto North Korea—that the leader had his hands full pleasing ideologically-diverging constituents. We now know that when it came to the big questions, the Germans were all on the same page from the start. Perhaps we should not be surprised after all that the author is a foreign service

316 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

officer. The business of the United States State Department is negotiation. Hence it will always persist in putting North Korea “inside the red box,” because our record of negotiating with communists is far more encouraging than our record of talking peace with paranoid nationalists. Diplomats also prefer the hawks-versus- doves model of North Korea—of which McEachern’s model is an only super- ficially more complex variant—because it allows for unflagging optimism in the face of annual displays of aggression and bad faith. None of this is to say that Patrick McEachern’s book is without considerable merits. All in all, I am glad that it was written; if it encourages North Korea watchers to pay closer attention to the various institutions inside the Kim Jong Il regime, it will have done an important service. As with Bruce Cumings’s work, one can learn a lot of history from it even while remaining highly skeptical of its central thrust. The prose is always lucid; there is no more jargon than absolutely necessary. Aware that his thesis will meet with strong opposition, the author ex- presses himself throughout with maximum care and thoroughness. Especially well-done is the book’s chapter four, an excellent overview of North Korea’s political institutions that I plan to keep close at hand. (It lends itself well to classroom use.) While one may disagree with the author’s interpretation of the facts, the facts themselves are invariably accurate, as are the many quotes translated from North Korean sources. If I may end on a quibble: most experts agree that the Kim Jong Il regime introduced the military-first principle to the North Korean public on January 1, 1995, though McEachern is perfectly correct in saying that it was not formally sloganized until late in 1997. The point is important, because the earlier date, in my view, shows that North Korea began manifesting its bad faith in the Agreed Framework even before the Americans began reneging on it.

BRIAN MYERS Dongseo University

Waxen Wings: The Acta Koreana Anthology of Short Fiction from Korea. Edited by Bruce Fulton. St. Paul, Minnesota: Koryo Press, 2011. 238 pages. (ISBN: 978-1-59743- 203-0) $15.00

Waxen Wings: The Acta Koreana Anthology of Short Fiction from Korea edited by Bruce Fulton is a breakthrough in the translation and publication of Korean short stories into English. It is the first collection of modern Korean short stories whose criteria for choosing works seems to have included a simple analysis of whether or

Book Reviews 317 not the works would be enjoyable and comprehensible to Western readers who have little innate understanding of Korea or her culture. The beauty of choosing such stories is that they draw readers in with sugar and not medicine, and intro- duce them to Korean culture in general. Waxen Wings is also a bridge collection in the sense that it can be read either as an academic text, or purely for the joy of reading. Waxen Wings covers the two canonical realms of Korean modern fiction, colonial and division, although it only briefly explicitly introduces readers to the Japanese Colonial era. The first colonial piece is “In the Mountains,” by Yi Hyosŏk, the colonial importance of which is explained in a brief note which informs us that the naturalist tone of the work was forced on the author by the Japanese; Yi originally wrote political works, but the Japanese suppressed the proletarian literature movement in Korea, forcing authors to chose less controversial subjects. In any case the story follows a man forced out of the city to the bliss he discovers in the countryside. The second and more traditional colonial work, is “Con-stable Maeng” by Ch’ae Manshik. Ch’ae was an author with wide skills, from the political yet funny “My Innocent Uncle” to the coming of age story, “China-town.” In “Constable Maeng” Ch’ae, through the eyes of a police constable, gives a snapshot of Korean history just after Japanese colonization has ended. As a serious work written in a light-hearted tone (just consider the constable’s rather liberal definition of what it means to be a non- corrupt policeman!), it is marred only by a rather didactic final paragraph, the hammering of which destroys some of the light tone that has preceded it. The collection changes gears with the allegorical “Weaver Woman” by O Chŏnghŭi. Like Ch’ae, Oh has written a well-respected novel named “China- town,” though hers featured the coming of age of a female protagonist, and her short story “The Bronze Mirror” is included in a previous collection, “The Land of Exile.” “Weaver Women” is a meditation on barrenness in a neo-Confucian country, a meditation that is well-served by the stories’ fractured but calm structure. In many ways this is an ‘era-less’ piece as its lessons can be applied to any period of Korean history or society. Next up, and stepping toward pundan munhak, is the redoubtable, and unfortunately recently deceased, Pak Wansŏ and her “We Sell Shame.” In “We Sell Shame” Pak combines the two themes of her authorial life, the cost of the Korean Civil War and separation, as well as the effect on family relationships of Korean economic development. To these she adds a look at social life in general, and ends with a scathing attack on hagwŏn and cram schools, which is really a scathing attack on a society that has become obsessed with status. All this in a very few pages, three marriages, and a re-union of “friends.”

318 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

Kim Wŏnil’s “Prisoner of the Heart” is the longest work in the collection and directly focuses on post-war splits in Korea; it is also a complex story of semi- redemption. The narrator, a student rebel in 1960, returns to Korea as his brother, still a political rebel and under arrest because of it, begins to fail and die. Kim interlaces a variety of “then and now” scenes, which show how characters have developed and changed. There is a highly amusing scene in which the narrator and an old friend discuss the current (the story takes place in 1989) unrest and the friend bemoans that today’s protestors won’t pause their protests until yesterday’s protesters are making over 10,000 dollars per year. Using a series of flashbacks, Kim portrays the strength of his mother in the post-colonial and civil war periods—this is a strength that is sapped by the impending death of her political son. The story contrasts bible versus socialism, youth versus age, dreams versus reality. There are lots of big ideas in this story, but Kim manages to herd them all, by placing them firmly within the lives of his characters. At the end a reader can’t help but sympathize as the narrator relives his past, and in a small and personal way, returns to the glories and brotherhood of his youth. In the last third of the book, Fulton moves to what might be called “post- modern” or perhaps “international” fiction. The final four stories would be right at home in any collection of modern fiction, even though the stories are quite different from each other. Kim Yŏngha’s “The Pager” is an amusing and sad story of a nondescript, nearly sad-sack man who, after his fiancée leaves him for a new man and education overseas, makes a bold, amusing and completely out of his normal comfort zone move on a woman he meets in the subway. This woman, he feels, is more his type. Over the next few days Kim follows the lives of both characters as the “will they meet, won’t they meet?” tension begins to build towards a climax. Kim ends with a neat and surprising reveal, and then ties the story together with one last little flourish. “Corpses,” by P’yŏn Hyeyŏng, is a combination whodunit/horror story that works its way right under the skin of the reader. An extremely uncertain protagonist is repeatedly being called out of work to identify various body parts that might belong to his wife; a wife who drowned most mysteriously while on vacation with her husband. As the story continues, reader and protagonist seem pulled down by the same aquatic suction, and the end is appropriately water- logged and creepy. “The Glass Shield” by Kim Chunghyŏk is also creepy in its own way. It begins as a lark—a tale of two inseparable friends who prank the art world and society. By complete accident the hapless two become famous performance artists. As the story concludes, however, it becomes something different; a meditation on friend-

Book Reviews 319 ship and separation. These two disparate sections are well melded together, and while the conclusion of the story may be a bit of a downer, it still rings with truth. The title story is reviewed last here, because it is the most powerful story in the book (I think Professor Fulton agrees, as it is the title story). “Waxen Wings” by Ha Sŏngnan is a powerful story with obvious references to the fable of Icarus in its title. “Waxen Wings” can be read in many ways: it can be seen as a fable of over-reaching, like Icarus, its predecessor; it can be read to mean that you should be careful what you want, for achieving it might come in forms you don’t expect; it can be read to demonstrate that even the most noble goals can have unexpected and sometimes tragic outcomes; it can be read to mean that your goals should be reasonable, in fact; it can be read in all these ways and no doubt more. Told in short sentences and flashbacks, it begins with the present, “Your watch says 3:14,” and then quickly cuts back to childhood memory, “This is very dangerous. Who started this?” “Waxen Wings” follows a nameless narrator through her quest to defy gravity, ignoring the obvious signs of danger that she passes on the way. The conclusion is unexpected and poignant and one of the beauties of this story is that no matter how you read its ‘moral,’ that reading will apply, nearly seamlessly, to Korean history. It is another of the beauties of this story that most readers will also recognize its moral (whichever one they take) to be appropriate somewhere in their own lives. A revelation of a short story,” Waxen Wings” raises hope that somewhere in this world a skilled translator is busy working away on Ha’s other stories. A note about the introduction is also in order. In just over nine pages, Fulton manages to neatly outline the history of Korean modern literature in a way that should make it accessible to the naïf reader. The introduction is worth reading on its own merits. I should also note that the translators and translations are varied, but all quite good. The only thing that can sometimes be difficult is that Fulton does not use the revised Romanization rubric of Korea, instead using McCune- Reischauer, which can be a bit difficult to the English-reading eye. But that is a minor point in the face of what is a triumph on every other ground. Waxen Wings proves a fun book to read and there are very few volumes of translated Korean literature about which that can be unreservedly be said. Fulton should be praised for going outside of the canon for themes, even if he did rely upon familiar authors, at least in the first few stories. In addition, these all seem to be relatively new translations and so Fulton avoids the ongoing problem of re- presenting stories considered canonical within Korean culture (e.g. the relentless re-translation and republication of “Buckwheat Season”). In the past, when asked what to recommend for beginners at Korean literature I have, with some reservations, recommended Land of Exile, or Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology,

320 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

sometimes even suggesting a complete reading of the KLTI/ Jimoondang Korean Library of Translated Literature. All of these are noble collections and good works, but Waxen Wings immediately replaces them as the best introduction to modern Korean translated literature, particularly for the reader who comes to the table with no previous knowledge of Korea. This outstanding collection should serve as a model for other anthologists; a collection of interesting works, well translated, and well presented.

CHARLES MONTGOMERY Dongguk University

Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings (1880s–1910s): “Survival” as an Ideology of Korean Modernity. Brill’s Korean Studies Library, Vol. 2. By Vladimir Tikhonov. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 255 pp. (ISBN 9789004185036)

This second volume in the newly inaugurated Brill Korean Studies Library is a welcome addition to works on the last years of the Chosŏn Dynasty/Taehan Empire. It is an admirably researched work, utilizing a wide range of materials in Korean, Chinese and Japanese, a wealth of secondary literature in English, as well as several works in French, German and Russian. The author, Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja), of course, is already well known in the Korean studies community for his outstanding command of the Korean language. In eight chapters the book examines the influence of Social Darwinism on the development of nationalism in Korea. The first chapter entitled, “Introduction: Social Darwinism and the Ambivalences of Modernity,” outlines “the zeitgeist of pre-colonial and early colonial modernity in Korea.” (p. 1) The author identifies Social Darwinism, with its conception of human life—and by extension the life of nation states—as a ‘struggle for survival,’ as providing the dominant ideology for “Korea’s modernization-oriented elites.” (p. 8) He goes on to argue that although Social Darwinism was also influential in China and Japan, it did not play the ‘pivotal’ role that it did in Korea. In fact, Tikhonov goes as far as to suggest that for several decades at least Social Darwinism in Korea replaced Neo-Confucian- ism as an “all-explaining, all-encompassing creed.” (p. 13) In the second chapter, “Social Darwinist Pioneers: The Cases of Yu Kiljun and Yun Ch’iho,” the author introduces two of the leading lights of Korean modernization at the end of the nineteenth century. The well-known Korean reformer Yu Kiljun encountered the biologist Edward Morse, “one of the first apostles of both Darwinian and Spenserian theory in Japan,” (p. 21) and

Book Reviews 321 eventually took up residence with him in Salem, Massachusetts and was mentored by him in preparation for entering Governor Dummer Academy, which was to be Yu’s stepping stone to Harvard Law School. Yu Kiljun is best known for his work Sŏyu kyŏnmun (A record of personal experience in the West), which reveals the influence not only of Morse but even more clearly that of Fukuzawa Yukichi. Tikhonov, however, first introduces a less well-known, unpublished work Kyŏng- jaeng non (On competition), which focuses on interstate competition and attempts to place this competition into the acceptable Confucian framework of “com- petition in virtue.” (p. 30) In the face of the realities of the imperial rivalry over Korea, Yu chose to throw his lot in with Japan, a nation that was seen as being preferable to Russia on grounds of racial closeness. Yu was later to convert to Christianity, but without rejecting Korea’s earlier religious traditions and at the same time venerating Korea’s putative founder Tan’gun as “the spiritual basis for Korean patriotism.” (p. 35) Tikhonov, nevertheless, argues that Yu viewed Christianity and Tan’gun in an instrumentalist way as simply being necessary means to the end of survival in a competitive world. At this point the younger reformer Yun Ch’iho is introduced. Yun came from the same intellectual milieu as Yu Kiljun but ultimately gained greater direct exposure to Protestant Christianity and western ideas during his extensive periods of study at the Anglo-Chinese College in Shanghai and Vanderbilt and Emory University in the United States. Having converted to Methodism while in China, Yun was disgusted by the hypocrisy of American racism, and from his diaries, appears to have continuously struggled with his faith in Christianity. At the same time he also clearly became uprooted from his own Korean background and was highly critical of Korean and Chinese ways. As a way of making sense of the world, he “completely accepted the fashionable doctrines of Social Darwinism.” (p. 42) Also, unlike Yu Kiljun, he rejected Korea’s other religious traditions, which he viewed as “an impediment to survival and progress.” (p. 52) The chapter goes on to make a brief mention of another Christian convert who achieved prominence in the twentieth century, Yi Sŭngman (Syngman Rhee), arguing that Yi’s tendency to look at the world in terms of “Communism vs. the free world” was a consequence of his internalization of Social Darwinist ideas in his youth. (p. 55) Having introduced these three important Korean intellectuals, the chapter concludes that their interpretations of Social Darwinism, based on Euro-American originals, were ultimately to be supplanted in the mid-1900s by East Asian versions of Herbert Spencer’s theory. Chapter 3, “Social Darwinism for the Public: The Tongnip Sinmun (The Independent) and the Popularization of Social Darwinism in the 1890s,” examines the role played by Sŏ Chaep’il and the Tongnip sinmun in popularizing Social

322 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

Darwinian ideas among the wider Korean populace. From his editorials, Sŏ Chaep’il appears to have bought into the idea of a racial hierarchy and to have drawn comfort from the fact that Koreans, although beneath Europeans and Americans in this hierarchy, were nevertheless above Africans and Native Americans. In the first section of this chapter Tikhonov focuses on the attention paid in the Tongnip sinmun to western-style gymnastics and military exercises and the role they were perceived as playing in enabling Koreans to begin to compete militarily with the rest of the world. Sŏ Chaep’il, an American citizen, who before his lengthy sojourn in the United States had attended a military academy in Japan and participated in a Japanese-sponsored coup in 1884, perhaps understandably saw Japan as a role model for Korea in its race to catch up with the Western nations. Nevertheless, in his editorials he was swift to defend Korean interests in no uncertain terms when he perceived that they were under threat from Japanese encroachment. Tikhonov argues, however, that despite Sŏ’s castigation of the unjust actions of Japanese in Korea, he never abandoned his view that “Korea had to follow Japan’s example and build a partnership with Japan in order to survive in the struggling, Darwinian world.” (p. 78) In the concluding section, Tikhonov reveals what he describes as Sŏ’s “Victorian disdain for the ‘natives,’” based on an account of Sŏ’s arrogant be- havior in Yun Ch’iho’s diary and other evidence for Sŏ’s sense of superiority— most probably based on his command of the English language, his unrivalled acquaintance with life in the United States, his U.S. medical degree and his marriage to an American woman of high social standing—that can be found in many of his writings. Ultimately, Sŏ was forced to abandon his position as editor of the Tongnip sinmun, but was still able to return to the United States with a small fortune in the form of the remaining salary for his ten-year contract as an advisor to the Korean government. The chapter concludes with a brief mention of an- other major nationalist figure An Ch’angho, who, Tikhonov argues, was exposed to Social Darwinist thought both from the Tongnip sinmun and from his lengthy sojourns in the United States and concludes that “An Ch’angho’s ‘philosophy of strength’ (him ŭi ch’ŏrhak) may be characterized as the comprehensive, coherent, self-conscious ideology of Korea’s bourgeois modernization and nation-state building.” (p. 81) Chapter 4, “Salvation of the State and Race: Social Darwinism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” examines the influence on the “Korean reformist public” of the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao, who as a result of the failure of the Hundred Day’s Reform (1898) had been forced to flee to Japan. The author focuses on Liang’s editorial Aiguoshuo (On patriotism), which was first published

Book Reviews 323 in the Qingyibao and subsequently republished in both the Hwangsŏng sinmun and the Tongnip sinmun. The key point of this editorial was its analysis that patriotism derived from competition among nations, which explained why China, which had experienced long periods of unification, was less patriotic than European nations, which had experienced long periods of interstate warfare. After the demise of the Tongnip sinmun in 1899, Liang’s writings appeared in various Korean publications, most notably the nationalist Taehan maeil sinbo. The author argues that Liang’s reference to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, particularly the idea that due to the disruptive nature of innate human selfishness “the delegation of one’s rights to the authorities” was necessary, appealed to those in Korea who advocated reform from above. (p. 87) The remainder of the chapter demonstrates on the basis of various early twentieth-century Korean texts, including writings by Yi Kwangsu and Sin Ch’aeho, how Confucianism was reinvented as a ‘national ethical teaching’ in conjunction with a revival of Korea’s ‘great military past’ and was advocated as being the key to bringing Korea onto a par in terms of ‘wealth and power’ with Japan and the West. In this way the author claims to clearly expose “the degree to which residual Confucian moralism was integrated into the Social Darwinist nationalist discourse of the new age.” (pp. 90–91). The chapter concludes with the observation that both anti-Japanese independence advocates and Japan-centered Pan-Asianists were in agreement that, in addition to military drills and physical exercises, a common religion might also be an essential component in ‘national survival,’ an observation that leads the reader into the theme of the following chapter. In Chapter 5, “Survival, God and Buddha,” Tikhonov argues that Korean Buddhist leaders such as Han Yong’un presented Buddhism as a ‘world religion’ that best fitted “modernity’s assumedly ‘scientific and rational’ paradigm.” (p. 114) The author also approvingly notes that Han Yong’un, unlike Yun Ch’iho and Sŏ Chaep’il, who he argues compromised their Christian beliefs to accommodate Social Darwinism, did not subordinate Buddhist ethics to the ‘law of the survival of the fittest.’ The chapter continues with an overview of both attacks on and defenses of Buddhism in China and Japan during the period in question. Liang Qichao’s pro-Buddhist views are examined in some detail, but the longest section in this chapter is dedicated to the Korean Buddhist ideologue Han Yong’un, who was clearly indebted to Liang Qichao as well as to his experience of Buddhism in Meiji Japan for many of his ideas. This chapter also touches on the contributions of other prominent Korean Buddhists in the colonial period such as Yi Kwangsu and Yi Nŭnghwa. The author concludes the chapter with praise for Han’s “under- standing of Social Darwinist ‘laws’ as temporarily limited and axiologically sub- ordinate to Buddhist ethics” and for his refusal to collaborate with the Japanese in

324 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

contrast to such prominent contemporaries as Yun Ch’iho and Yi Kwangsu, who Tikhonov argues were unable to overcome their Social Darwinist worldview and as a consequence came to accept the official wartime ideology of the Japanese Empire. (p. 135) Chapter 6, “Knowledge Is Strength: Social Darwinism in Pre-Colonial Edu- cation,” initially examines the prevalence of Social Darwinist attitudes in the development of modern education in Meiji Japan and then explores how these ideas were promulgated inside Korea by means of newspapers such as the Hwansŏng sinmun and The Independent as well as the new school textbooks that began to appear at the beginning of the 20th century. A section on Korean his- toriography at this time demonstrates how “’national history education’ became a vehicle for spreading a nationalist awareness strongly embedded in a Social Dar- winist vision of the world.” (p. 150) After examining the writings of Pak Ŭnsik, which the author describes as comprising a “Social Darwinist educational ‘gospel’” (p. 158), this chapter then examines the work of Sin Ch’aeho, whose worldview and views on education are described as exhibiting “an interesting combination of a general Social Darwinist explanatory framework and a quint- essentially Confucian ethos.” (p. 162) As the author points out, although the emphasis in writing on education at this time was continually placed on the development of the nation so that it could compete effectively with other nations in the world, in reality the effects of education were to enable one sector of society to rise above another with the added consequence in colonial Korea being that those who entered the upper echelons of society by means of education tended to become tainted by collaboration with the Japanese. Chapter 7, “Muscular Nationalism at the Dawn of the New Century: Social Darwinism as an Ideology” introduces the contributions of other prominent Korean nationalists such as Ch’oe Namson, Kim Ku, Pak Yongman and An Ch’angho to Korean modernization efforts and their attempts to encourage Koreans to regain what they perceived as being the lost “manliness” of the Korean nation by importing the Western ideal of “mens sana in corpora sano,” which was at the heart of the ethos of the British public schools and German Bünde (sporting associations), together with the military drills that characterized the training of the armies of Japan and the West. This largely theoretical rather than practical emphasis on physical training was augmented by the revival of interest in national heroes such as Ŭlji Mundŏk and Yi Sunsin as well as more unlikely figures such as the regicidal Yŏn Kaesomun, who was portrayed in the same light as Oliver Cromwell was portrayed in the English historical narrative at that time. As the author points out, it was not until the outbreak of the Pacific War, when Koreans were co-opted into the Japanese war effort and primary school enroll-

Book Reviews 325 ment rose to 66.1% for boys, that paramilitary drills became a daily feature of young Koreans’ lives. In the final chapter “Conclusion: The Influences of Social Darwinism in Korea (1900s and After)” the author reviews the roles played by the major figures previously dealt with in the book such as Yun Ch’iho, Sin Ch’aeho Chang Chiyŏn, Pak Ŭnsik and Yi Kwangsu as well as introducing the feminist Na Hyesŏk for the first time. The problem of the role played by Social Darwinist ‘realism’ in the decisions of Yi Kwangsu and Yun Ch’iho to collaborate with the Japanese col- onial authorities during the Pacific War is given considerable attention, but the author concludes his work with the following balanced assessment of Yun Ch’iho and to some extent the idea of Social Darwinism itself: “Yun Ch’iho may be accused of having lacked ideals and enthusiasm—but he is simultaneously to be praised for having harboured few illusions about the world he lived in. Social Darwinism, to be sure, was helpful in legitimizing colonial collaboration. But at the same time it was also a prism through which the likes of Yun Ch’iho could discern the real interests behind the smoke screen of rhetoric, ‘democratic’ or otherwise.” (p. 221) Despite the limitation of the scope of this work to the exclusive study of Korean intellectuals, a limitation which the author freely admits in his intro- duction, this new study provides us with a multi-faceted view of Korea’s modern- ization project and a clear insight into the major role that Social Darwinism played in it. The author is to be congratulated on a thoroughly researched and engagingly written work that manages to deftly combine historical narrative and theory into a satisfying account that should become required reading for anyone interested in the recent history of Korea.

MICHAEL FINCH Keimyung University

Crisis in North Korea, the Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956. By Andrei N. Lankov. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 274 pages. (ISBN 978-0-8248- 3207-0).

Historical Dictionary of North Korea. By Ilpyong J. Kim. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2003. lxvii, 212 pages. (ISBN 978-0-8108-4331-8).

Accustomed as we are to the idea of North Korea as a politically isolated, extremely authoritarian, and personality-centered monolith, it is sobering to learn —as I did in reading Andrei Lankov’s highly engaging study—that at one point

326 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

the power of Kim Il-sŏng (1912–1994) in North Korea was not only far from absolute but quite tenuous, and far from being a “passive backwater of un- disturbed Stalinism” (74), North Korea was for a time a shifting and unsettled political cauldron and under the sway of Chinese and Soviet politics. Upon reflection this shouldn’t be so surprising. For one, factionalism has always been a determining factor of Korean politics, and prior to 1945 it was certainly a salient aspect of the Korean Communist movement, whose multifarious groups only came under Kim Il-sŏng’s nominal leadership in 1945. For another, there was once upon a time something approaching a unified Communist movement— nothing illustrates this better than the fact that the Korean Communist fighters in Manchuria were ordered by the Soviets to join ranks with the Chinese. Though less evident than it had been, even after Kim’s 1948 installation as the leader of North Korea, factionalism still simmered beneath the surface of North Korean Communist politics. In 1956 it would bubble to the surface. That year would see the first and last known open resistance to Kim’s rule—a single and final showdown between Kim Il-sŏng, whose grip on the government and over the state he had been chosen to lead was tightening by the hour, and the forces still able to challenge him. In his Crisis in North Korea, the Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956, Andrei Lankov, a well-known scholar of North Korea and currently professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, makes a careful study of that eventful year. Over the course of ten chapters and a conclusion, Lankov examines the events leading up to the fateful August 1956 plenary meeting (or plenum) of the Central Committee of the [North] Korean Worker’s Party and the consequences that emerged from it. While on the one hand the plenum marked the failed end to the plans of the loose anti- Kim faction, for the victorious Kim, and for North Korea as well, it marked a new beginning. The eradication and silencing of the opposition allowed Kim in the few years that followed to “change course” and take North Korea down its own singular path. It is not too much to say that North Korea—at least as it existed into the 1990s—was really born a decade later than its nominal date of 1948. Despite the catastrophe of the Korean War, and in many ways because of it, in the early 1950s Kim Il-sŏng was able to greatly strengthen his hold on power. This first act in Kim’s eradication of his rivals opened with the show trials of the “domestic faction” (comprised of those Communists who had resided in Korea during the colonial period) in the early 1950s along with the purge of Hŏ Ka-i, recognized head of the “Soviet faction”, in 1951. In the wake of the Korean War the leader of the Yanan faction, Pak Il-ku (“Mao’s man in Korea”) was likewise purged. Concomitant with all this was a growing personality cult surrounding Kim

Book Reviews 327

Il-sŏng. Though certainly not comparable to the “unprecedented and quite farcical heights” (199) it would attain by the 1970s, this Kim-centered dogma was already pronounced enough in the early 1950s to cause misgivings among Kim’s Communist compatriots. Still, Kim’s consolidation might have rolled along relatively smoothly—thanks in part to the authoritarian example of Stalin and to a lesser part Mao—had not Stalin died in 1953 and Khrushchev then repudiated the personality cult and more oppressive aspects of the Stalinist era. The winds of change summoned up by Khrushchev wreaked havoc in the Communist bloc of Eastern Europe—giving rise to anti-Stalinist, often anti-Soviet, movements there. As Lankov posits, after the 1950s one could argue there was no longer such a thing as a “Communist world” (2). In part influenced by these trends, the rumbl- ings of discontent among North Korean Communist cadre with the thrust of Kim’s economic policy, as well as with his growing personality cult, finally broke the surface. But as with the Korean War, for Kim the challenges of the de-Stalinization movement, and the domestic opposition it encouraged, also brought opportunity. Act two in Kim’s consolidation came in 1955 with a low-key political attack on prominent members of the Soviet faction. Intriguingly, this offensive was never decisively carried through, and in fact Kim ended by nearly repenting of his personality cult in a speech before the Central Committee of the Korean Worker’s Party. Though a lack of hard evidence prevents any firm conclusion as to the reasoning behind Kim’s eleventh hour retreat, Lankov surmises it to be more a case of Kim’s political shrewdness than political regret. That is, perhaps sensing the strength of the opposition or the potential threat of Soviet pressure, Kim backed down to buy himself time and give his would-be adversaries a false sense of security (a tactical retreat quite in the tradition of guerilla tactics). Emboldened by Kim’s apparent contriteness, Kruschev even scolded Kim for his “mistakes” during the latter’s extended trip through the Eastern Bloc in the high summer of 1956. But the ace in Kim’s pocket was the composition of the new Central Committee that had been elected in April 1956 at the Third Party Congress, for it was the membership of this Committee that in August 1956 would largely choose to align behind Kim Il-sŏng and smother the challenge smoldering within its ranks. Much to his credit, Lankov does an admirable job in analyzing the com- position of this Committee considering the little we have at our disposal. Lankov shows that the Committee’s Kim loyalists were in fact not his fellow guerilla fighters of Manchuria days but a new breed, those who had politically matured in the context of Kim’s rise to power after 1948. They were, as Lankov points out, technocrats or Party functionaries who had known only the rule of Kim.

328 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

The final act commenced with Kim’s return to Pyongyang in late July 1956 (after his Soviet scolding). Here again, Lankov must work with “scraps” (a mis- match of unclassified documents, personal interviews, the author’s insights into life in a Communist system, and the memoirs of Enver Hoxha, to name but a few) to reconstitute a complex series of events and cross purposes and compose a meaningful narrative. He provides his own insights and conjectures regarding how events played out leading up to the August plenum, during which Kim would be challenged by a number of high ranking North Korean Communists, pre- dominantly of the Yanan faction but including as well members of the Soviet faction. Lankov also examines to what extent the Soviet diplomatic staff in Pyongyang was cognizant of the challenge and why they not only did nothing to stop it but possibly even betrayed the conspirators to Kim Il-song. As to the “revolt” itself, this may appear to the reader as very anti-climatic. Though it may have been sweeping in its long term potential, in immediate actuality it constituted little more than a doctrinal challenge to dry aspects of socialist policy. But the mere implications of the challenge were reason enough for Kim and his sup- porters in the Central Committee to snuff it out. In the days and weeks that followed the conspirators largely escaped into China or the USSR, leaving Kim’s power unchallenged domestically. But not unchallenged entirely. There was one final and fascinating act before the curtains fell ominously on a North Korea now firmly in the grip of Kim Il- sŏng. In September 1956 a Chinese-Soviet delegation arrived—unannounced, uninvited, and certainly unappreciated—at Kim’s door in Pyongyang. Like much else in this story, there are no available records to consult regarding the mission’s precise objective or activities. The head of the Soviet delegation, Anastas Mikoyan, was apparently so condescending and contemptuous of the Koreans that he earned from them the nickname of mit’kunyŏng (‘asshole’). Based upon the author’s interviews with the few surviving participants, he surmises that the mission’s objective was to stop the purges and perhaps pressure the Koreans to replace Kim. As we know, in all of this they failed. Their cause simply lacked the popular support of the North Korean populace, and Kim’s hold had grown too strong. Kim was free to set off on his own path. In the final chapters—perhaps the book’s most valuable—Lankov examines the political purges and social engineering that followed in the wake of the August 1956 plenum the con- sequences of Kim’s absolute rule for the history of North Korea.

One weakness of the work is the relative absence of background. As the curtains open on North Korea of 1956 one feels a bit as one has entered in medias res—left to infer the existence of a burgeoning personality cult surrounding Kim Il-sŏng.

Book Reviews 329

The reader is not presented with the background or any particulars of this aspect of the infant Kim regime. How did the personality cult develop? How was it promulgated? What was its extent? In the days before the conceptualization of Chuche ideology, in what aspect was Kim Il-song lauded? Answering these ques- tions—or attempting to, for sources are understandably sparse—would likely help to ascertain the nature of the backlash against Kim that was snuffed out in 1955– 1956. In other words, was this reaction to the Kim rule primarily doctrinal or political? Another pitfall, and one the author readily admits, is the relative lack of accessible sources, a reality that forces him to rely almost entirely on the trickle of material that has come out of the former Soviet archives and interviews with participants. Not consulted, and not consultable, are official Chinese and North Korean records nor the bulk of Soviet records. This also leaves much to the author’s conjecture. Again, Lankov fully confesses this and considering the dearth of material he has successfully composed an invaluable study of a critical period, thanks largely to his own contacts and experience and his own native perceptive- ness. In reading Lankov’s work, or other such works on the North Korean state, the reader may find it useful to have handy Ilpyong J. Kim’s Historical Dictionary of North Korea. This has more to do with its uniqueness in the field of English language reference works on North Korea—it nearly stands alone—than with its thoroughness as such. Depending upon one’s subject of interest, readers may find themselves more frustrated than enlightened. Ilpyong Kim, emeritus professor of political science from the University of Connecticut, has made a noble attempt at compiling a reference dictionary of North Korea. It is all the more remarkable that it is the work of a single individual. With such kudos aside, let us just say that when it comes to reference works, too many cooks do not spoil the broth. The dictionary begins with a thorough chronology of events relating to North Korea going back to the formation of the Korean Communist movements in the Soviet Union and China and continuing up through 2001. This is followed by the author’s historical introduction. Here the author oddly presents as fact such things as the Samguk sagi’s dates for the three kingdoms or even that “the history of Korea can be traced back to the Old Choson period when the Kingdom of Choson was found [sic] by Tangun in 2333 B.C.” (xlvii). Despite such questionable statements, mainly confined to the period of ancient history, this is largely a useful introduction to the history and development of North Korea. The dictionary thankfully comes with a map but unfortunately it is challenged in terms of clarity and comprehensiveness. While the dictionary has an entry “Rajin”, the map has “Najin.” The rivers mentioned in the text are either absent

330 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

on the map (Tumen) or very difficult to identify (Yalu, Taedong). Rather than a map of the Korean peninsula it would have been more useful to cut out South Korea, which is just peripheral to the text, and provide a larger and more detailed map of North Korea instead. The dictionary proves a fairly useful resource for North Korean personalities as well as social and political institutions and mobilization campaigns. There are some entries notable by their absence (first, it should be noted that though pub- lished in 2003, the content itself seems to have been last revised around 2000). The dictionary has no entry for “military-first politics” which defines as much as Chuche the current thrust of North Korean ideology. Absent as well is any entry on North Korean refugees, labor camps, the Kaesong Economic Zone, Paek- dusan, Kumgangsan or such prominent individuals as Chang Song-taek or any of the children, siblings, or wives of Kim Jong-il. Another problem is Romanization. A small forward notes that the book uses McCune-Reischauer for the transliteration of Korean, “with some stylistic modifications” (xi), without explaining what those modifications are precisely. One soon surmises that the omission of diacriticals is one such modification. But there also seems to be a substitution of ‘j’ for ‘ch’ in some cases but not others, and likewise with ‘b’ for ‘p’. This may have to do with the author’s statement that the names of North Korean figures will be in North Korean style Romanization. For most readers such confusion could be averted with the inclusion of the han’gŭl for all entries or at least a table explaining the largely unfamiliar North Korean Romanization scheme. But perhaps the greatest shortcoming of the work is the absence of an index. At first thought the inclusion of an index might seem redundant considering the book is organized alphabetically by entry. But without an index how would one know that the “Song of Mt. Kumgang” can be found under “Revolutionary Opera” or that references to Li Jong-ok (the North Korean premier) are to be found under “North-South Korean Relations”? Though in some prominent cases there is cross-referencing, this is the exception rather than the rule. But where the book succeeds it does so very well. As noted, Prof. Kim is an emeritus professor of political science and not surprisingly the strength of the dictionary lies in its coverage of North Korean politics and economics and North- South relations. As admirable as the work is as a labor of love, it would have been more balanced and thorough had it been done as a collaborative project among scholars in many fields dealing with North Korea. It would have benefited as well from a more user-friendly format. Herman Melville once wrote that any human creation supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.

Book Reviews 331

Yet even with its faults, Kim’s dictionary remains a valuable resource for the lack of anything comparable available to the English reader.

DANIEL KANE University of Hawai‘i

Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. By Eleana J. Kim. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010. 344 pages ISBN 978-0-8223-4683-8 (cloth), 978-0-8223-4695-1 (paper)

The full history of South Korea’s adoption program which has been going on since the end of the Korean War in 1953, and which is by far the longest running child migration program in modern history involving as many as up to 200,000 children to close to 20 different Western countries, has not yet been written although several smaller attempts have been made including a chapter in my own book Comforting an Orphaned Nation (2006). Even if the annual numbers have decreased after democratisation and the record high adoption statistics during the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, South Korea is still one of the main sending countries in the world for transnational adoptees to the West. This is even more so as the world of transnational adoption is going through a funda- mental crisis at this very moment in the sense that the numbers are decreasing dramatically on a global level due to intermittent adoption scandals and rampant corruption practices. In my own country Sweden, which like a mirror image of Korea is proportionally the country in the world having adopted the most foreign- born children in modern history, Korean children are therefore nowadays the second biggest adoptee group after Chinese children. The massive migration of Korean adoptees has largely taken place in the shadow of South Korea’s post-war industrialisation and modernisation process, and is today seen as a painful reminder of its darker sides. Even if North Korea has stopped accusing its southern neighbour of selling Korean children to white imperialists, the overseas adoption program and all its consequences and im- plications which are usually summed up as the adoption issue or the adoption problem (ibyang munje) is as ever haunting the country, being the subject of angry editorials and critical documentaries, sensationalized television shows and ro- mantic feature films, and turning up in such diverse genres as television dramas, literature, art, comics and pop music. For many years, the adopted Koreans themselves were conspicuously absent from the public discourse whether in the Western receiving nations or in the

332 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

country of origin. The adopted Koreans of course turned up in the ads and com- mercials of adoption agencies, in the interviews and autobiographies of adoptive parents, in the official speeches of ambassadors and government officials and in the studies and reports of adoption researchers and other experts, but they were seldom speaking for themselves as they were either infantilized as eternal children, Orientalized as perfectly adjusted model adoptees or racialized by a Korean ethnonationalism claiming them as overseas compatriots. However, from the 1990s and even more in the 2000s, adult adopted Koreans have started to find and reach out to each other by organizing themselves in national and regional associations, by creating Internet based networks and by holding international events. This unexpected development has been ac- companied by a sudden explosion of an adopted Korean cultural production including several critically acclaimed novels and poetry collections and art works and films, as well as numerous self-narratives published in anthologies, news- papers and journals in all the various Western languages which the adoptees claim as their mother tongues. It is precisely this emergence of an adopted Korean movement, community and culture with its extremely deterritorialized and heterogeneous character which the American anthropologist Eleana Kim at the University of Rochester has followed and studied within the last decade, and which she has now written a full monograph about. In this first full monograph on what Kim calls the adopted Korean counterpublic, she tells about how she was fortunate to enter her field of study exactly at the same moment when the adopted Korean movement entered its international phase, namely when the first so-called Gathering of Adult Korean Adoptees took place in Washington D.C. in 1999 with 400 participants. Although the first national adopted Korean association was founded in Sweden already in 1986, it was from the 1990s that the community became international by capital- izing on the breakthrough of the Internet, and after the Washington Gathering regular so-called Mini-Gatherings are being hold on the continents of North America and Europe, and three larger international Gatherings have been or- ganised in Seoul of which the last one took place in 2009 with almost 600 participants from 20 or so Western countries. The next pan-European Mini- Gathering will by the way take place in Stockholm in August 2011 when the world’s first adopted Korean association celebrates its 25 years of existence. Kim’s book is both an attempt at historicizing international adoption from South Korea within the context of US empire building, Cold War politics, Christian child rescue fantasies and Western left-liberal discourses of “Third World solidarity” by going back to the foundational years of the 1950s and 1960s, and a highly analytical study of the development of an adopted Korean counter-

Book Reviews 333 public which according to her is based on new and other ways of forming and conceptualizing kinship and citizenship which go beyond blood-based biological essentialism and formal nation-state membership. Although the book sometimes suffers from the usual pitfalls of an academic monograph composed of chapters which partly have been published before as journal and anthology articles, and which therefore contains repetitions here and there and is not always smoothly read as one text, Adopted Territory is a groundbreaking publication which not only contributes to the new fields of Korean adoption studies, adoption cultural studies and critical adoption studies that have emerged lately, but also to the unfortunately still too territorialized fields of Asian studies and Korean studies which still are in the need of getting transnationalized and not just include diasporic Asians and Koreans on the research agenda but also such previously discarded, forgotten and “non-authentic” subjects as adoptees living in Western countries. Kim’s book is also a part of a new research trend in general which consciously breaks away from traditional and mainstream Western adoption research with its normative and modernist approaches and sometimes even essentialist and colonial models, and which herald the birth of what I myself prefer to call adoption cultural studies and critical adoption studies and especially taking place within the humanities, literature, anthropology and history. Within this new field, the subject of Korean adoption and adopted Koreans is of course ever present.

TOBIAS HÜBINETTE Södertörn University

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895-1945, by Mark Driscoll. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. xix + 361 pages. ISBN 978-0-8223-4740-8 (cloth), 978-0-8223-4761-3 (paper).

Mark Driscoll’s Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque offers to date the harshest critique of Japanese imperial history. His quest to analyze “how beastification took place under Japan’s imperialization in Asia” (p. 5) attempts to silence voices that emphasize the contribution that this history allegedly made to the peoples it colonized, both during and following colonial rule. These voices include academic works that, employing United States modernization thinking, have censored “anti- colonial critiques of Japan’s imperialism.” Japanese imperial history, while perhaps harsh, did contribute to the colonized people’s post-liberation development. Additionally, Japan’s neo-conservative voice, which adds that Japan’s advance-

334 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

ment onto the Asian continent was necessary for its economic and national sur- vival, will also find fault with Driscoll’s views. Such Japanese argue that those who deny this positive side of this history are “duped and deluded” (p. 6). Driscoll begs to differ. Imperialism left us nothing pretty. He explains:

Reframing Marx’s language and transcoding it into the mass culture discourse of Tokyo in the 1920s, capitalists depend on the mugging grotesque of the living, erotic labor of subaltern and proletarian others for their very existence. Although some of the secondary and tertiary effects of Japan’s imperialism could arguably be constructed as “mod- ernizing” for those who still accept that idiom, the suffering of colonized subaltern laborers enduring existential states that [Achille] Mbembe (“Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 no. 1, 2003:11–40) defines as “being-in-pain” was its primary cause (pp. 6–7).

Driscoll joins two other recent studies on Japanese imperialism that formulate their theses around neo-Marxist thinking: Hyun Ok Park’s Two Dreams in One Bed (2005) and Ken C. Kawashima’s The Proletarian Gamble (2009), both (like Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque) published by Duke University Press. Driscoll divides his tale of imperialist capitalism’s “vampirizing and grotesquing” of labor into three stages—biopolitics, neuropolitics, and necro- politics—to trace a process that begins with life, and passes through the mind en route to its ultimate destination, death. The initial two decades of Japan’s colonial rule witnessed the colonizers producing a dehumanized labor force. Chinese migrant workers, for example, were listed on ship logs, along with soybeans and other cargo, as freight. During this biopolitical stage (1895–1915) handlers of labor regarded their charges as objects who lived only to work (p. 55). Commodity (e.g. opium) substitution offered workers to barely endure a life dedicated to ensuring capitalist gains. Cheap and exploitable coolie labor, essential for Japan’s operations in Manchuria, serves as Driscoll’s primary exemplar of biopolitics. The Japanese joined other colonizing forces in concocting a racial definition of coolies: they were a simple people, who preferred simple food, and could survive on simple earnings. Their lives “revolve completely around their work” (pp. 47–48). The meager wages that the Japanese used to purchase this labor enabled workers to survive, but just barely. Driscoll contrasts this stage, where labor was “worked into life,” with his final necropolitical stage that “worked (labor) to death” (p. 55). We also see this capitalist-laborer relationship in the pimp-prostitute relationship. Women, subjectified as “hysterics,” were exonerated by such prominent Japanese as Fukuzawa Yukichi for their patriotic efforts: they remitted money back to the

Book Reviews 335 homeland and helped create a foreign market for Japanese goods. The Japanese prostitute in this context played a role similar to that of the European missionary in paving the road for imperialism. The pimp Muraoka Iheji reasoned: “Because of the constant demand for Japanese girls…we’ll be able to set up brothels. This will enable the sundries stores and then the small merchants to come over from Japan right behind us…. All the different parts of society will then be mobilized towards business” (p. 75). Thus, explains Driscoll, business served as a con- tinuation of war by another means. A second—neuropolitical—stage (1920-1932) eased the transition between the two extreme life and death stages, as capitalists fiddled with the laborers’ subaltern mind. As seen in the human mannequin women who graced department store windows in the 1920s, neuropolitical capitalism “melts [laborers] down and transforms them into new forms” (p. 142). Many concepts introduced by Driscoll in Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque are better explained through the author’s own words. Neuropolitics, and its position in this three-stage matrix, is one such concept. In this macro shift where commodification infiltrates all aspects of metro- politan life, it really subsumes not just labor as a formal subsumption, but the whole of society… [I]t operates by capturing human attention and curiosity, thereby “putting the erotic to work.” Through this mobilization of ero and the grotesque—absolutizing in the sense that there are no other paths or solutions available to them in neuropolitics. Although neuropolitical incorporation centered on consuming and being consumed, the biopolitical subjectivites that drove capital to this regime of accumulation are present as dematerialized image commodities themselves. As such, their existence as undead media will help push Japanese capital once again to a new level of accumulation, what I call necropolitics (p. 200). Whereas the biopolitical capitalist stage gave life to the grotesque and erotic, the neuropolitical stage legitimized their existence by legitimizing the perverse, or abnormal. Commodified desires and consumerist dreams produced a second life that fed off of (“vamporized” in Driscoll’s lexicon) Japanese imperialism. He explains: the “rewiring of human nervous systems has stripped metropolitan humans of all ethical and sensual reasoning,” rendering humanity as Pavlovian primitives (pp. 172–3). For this middle stage Driscoll focuses on the role of mind creations, such as erotic literature and grotesque photography (pornography), a departure from the concrete examples he employs in his first and third stages that centered on capitalism’s victims (prostitutes, coolie labor, and military comfort women). Enter necropolitics (1935–1945). In this final stage death trumps life; labor is

336 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

rendered disposable, as even meager efforts to preserve life are deemed un- necessary. Whereas the interest of the initial biopolitical stage was to sustain the health of the sex workers, those of necropolitical capitalists concentrated on engaging labor in preparation for death, either directly as soldiers at the war front or indirectly as overtaxed laborers. The necropolitical stage reverses his earlier equation: now war serves as a continuation of business by another means. The military comfort women, joined by forced laborers and opium addicts, serve as Driscoll’s exemplars at this stage. In China, Japanese wartime actions “from head to tail…cause[d] the debilitation and ruin of the Chinese people” (p. 247), while capitalists turned a profit. We see this in Japan’s monopoly of the opium market, as well as in the forced labor that threatened the health and, often, the very lives, of the male and female laborers. The opium detoxification centers established by the Japanese in 1937 provide an appropriate example. Ostensibly established to breath new life into the opium addict, many of the two million Chinese who en- tered these sham health centers exited out a back door that led to life-threatening work camps. These camps ritualized death as Japanese soldiers summarily massacred the very laborers they had just wined and dined to commemorate their completion of a work project (pp. 303–304). Here Driscoll underlines the inherent contradiction in necropolitics: these laborers, perceived as inferior with a pitiful future, were at the same time both indispensable—the Japanese were dependant on their labor—and, upon completion of their tasks, dispensable. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque is both creative and thought provoking. Driscoll pulls few punches in his condemnation of the erotic and grotesque nature of capitalism, particularly when married with imperialism. Whether his arguments sufficiently counter claims made by the modernists and neo-conservative Japanese who argue the colonial development value of Japan’s imperialist history is a critical concern. That development in the colonies took place cannot be denied, whether one wishes to perceive this change as “modernization,” and in positive or negative terms. The fundamental difference separating Driscoll’s arguments and those of modernists/neo-conservatives appears to be one of focus: whether to direct attention toward colonizer and colonized capitalists who manipulated economic opportunity or the labor that these capitalists manipulated to exploit the opportunities provided by imperialism. Japan’s colonial-era development of Korea and Taiwan inadvertently aided the two states’ post-liberation development in ways similar to Japan’s own modern development from the late nineteenth cen- tury. These examples of development also shared a tendency to grossly victimize labor, a point that modernists and others either gloss over or ignore entirely. A second issue concerns the advancement of Driscoll’s three-stage matrix, particularly the external factors that influenced his progression from the bio-

Book Reviews 337 political to the necropolitical stages. To what extent is their advancement dependent on external factors? Does, for example, society’s (de)evolution to the necropolitical stage require a horrific wartime atmosphere to drive humanity to render life dispensable? Modern development under non-wartime circumstances is hardly devoid of necropolitical examples. Recent energy issues, from coal (miner accidents), to oil (tanker spills), to nuclear (reactor fallouts), while admittedly less dramatic than the imperialist-wartime setting that Driscoll de- scribes, share the characteristic of enriching the lives of some while threatening the lives of others. History has demonstrated that such grotesque exploitation of labor in the name of development hardly requires an imperialist setting. The questions that Driscoll’s work stealthily begs are whether the expansive potential provided by imperialism lifts capitalist-driven labor exploitation to a greater level of grotesqueness and eroticism. And was Japanese “beastification” representative of imperialist behavior in general, or a more polished (and thus more grotesque) version of that practiced by its Euro-American contemporaries?

MARK CAPRIO Rikkyo University

Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918–1170: History, Ideology and Identity in the Koryŏ Dynasty. Brill’s Korean Studies Library, Vol. 1. By Remco E. Breuker, Leiden: Brill, 2010. 484 pp. (ISBN1876-7079 and ISBN 978 90 04 18325 4)

This extensive work is an impressive attempt by Remco Breuker to provide the Anglophone Korean studies community with a nuanced account of the nature of early Koryŏ society. The book is divided into an introduction followed by three main sections, namely, Part 1, “Establishment of a Pluralist Community,” Part 2, “Understanding Koryŏ Pluralist Ideology,” and Part 3, “Koryŏ’s Practical Realities of Engagement.” The first two sections are sub-divided into four chapters each and the final section into three chapters. The book is based on an impressive array of primary source materials in classical Chinese and secondary materials reflecting the current state of scholarship in both Korea and the West. The work is also underpinned by a pluralist theoretical structure based on the works of such scholars as the American psychologist, philosopher and author of A Pluralist Universe, William James, the Austrian-born philosopher of science and author of Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, Paul Feyerabend, the British philosopher, political theorist and author of On History, Michael Oakeshott, the so-called “Dean of Cold War Historians,” John Lewis

338 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

Gaddis, the Belgian political theorist and author of The Democratic Paradox, Chantal Mouffe, and the Russian-British philosopher, historian of ideas and advocate of “objective pluralism,” Isaiah Berlin. It is this attempt to illuminate Korea’s medieval period with the insights of leading Western scholars in the fields of the philosophy of history and politics that is one of the groundbreaking features of this book. The main thrust of Breuker’s thesis stated in his introduction, therefore, is that there has been a pronounced tendency in historical works on Koryŏ to date to attempt to “dichotomize” reality and in so doing prevent a more complex and accurate picture of historical reality from emerging. To counteract this tendency, Breuker advocates a pluralistic approach, arguing that “a pluralist worldview revolves around subtle patterning rather than crude dichotomies that demand all or nothing.” (p. 15) The first chapter of the first section, “Collective Names and Designations” focuses initially on the collective designation of the Korean peninsula and its inhabitants as Samhan (三韓; Three Han), an epithet that was originally coined in China to refer to Mahan, Pyŏnhan and Chinhan, but subsequently came to be used by the inhabitants of the Korean peninsula to refer to their community and territory. Other terms for Korea that were in common usage in Koryŏ times such as Haedong (海東), Tongguk (東國), Tongbang (東方/東邦) and Ch’ŏnggu (靑丘) are also discussed. According to Breuker, Samhan was used for domestic reference, while the other four terms were used in contrast with China. This form of naming, the author argues, “created a clear dividing line between different groups; juxtaposition with China, both geographically and culturally, strengthened their claims of individuality and their equality with China.” (p. 44) In this chapter the origins of the Koryŏ state are traced not to Wang Kŏn but to his predecessor Kungye, the founder of T’aebong, with the convincing argument that Wang Kŏn initially consolidated his power in T’aebong before establishing Koryŏ. As is well known the name Koryŏ is derived from the earlier state of Koguryŏ, but the significance of this derivation is seen by Breuker as being politically pragmatic rather than an intrinsic element in the identity of Koryŏ. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that although the term Koryŏ was used as the official design- nation for the state, the other geonyms mentioned above were in far more common use, with the term ‘Samhan’ serving as “the embodiment of Koryŏ’s past, present and future.” (p. 55) Chapter 2, “A Historic Territory in Koryŏ,” discusses major territorial issues related to Koryŏ and in particular the location and extent of its northern border with Manchuria. It was at this time that geographical features such as the Amnok River and Paektu-san took on their significance as the “natural and symbolic borders of Koryŏ” but only as a consequence of “centuries of protracted warfare

Book Reviews 339 in those areas.” (p. 79) In concluding this chapter, Breuker argues that with the emergence of “a limited home territory,” bounded by three seas and a mountain- ous northern border, there also emerged a “historic community that ought to live there” and this community was more aptly designated by the supradynastical term Samhan than the official state title Koryŏ. (p. 79) Chapter 3, “Shared Ideas of Descent,” examines three different kinds of origin stories relating to Koryŏ, namely, the “royal/imperial myth of descent,” “peninsular genealogy … aimed at domestic consumption” and the “supra- peninsular origin story …” that explains Koryŏ’s origins “with reference to non- peninsular persons and peoples.” (p. 84) By analyzing these origin stories, the author’s intent is to cast light on issues related to Koryŏ’s identity. The first type of origin story is to be found in the “P’yŏnnyŏn t’ongnok (Dynastic genealogy of Koryŏ).” Compiled by Kim Kwanŭi in the thirteenth century 300 years after the founding of the dynasty, this genealogy traces Koryŏ’s dynastic origins back to Koguryŏ and Shilla. Breuker speculates that the absence of any identification with Paekche may have been because the original story was composed in the tenth century when Koryŏ was still at war with Later Paekche. This story of the origin of Koryŏ from a dynastic perspective is further bolstered by the historical genealogies to be found in the Histories of the Three Kingdoms by Kim Pushik and the Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms by Iryŏn, which were both preceded by the no longer extant Old history of the Three Kingdoms (Samguksa). Although Kim Pushik had a well-known bias toward Shilla, Breuker points out that he clearly viewed all three kingdoms, Koguryŏ, Paekche and Shilla, as constituting the heritage of Koryŏ. (p. 91) In concluding this section, the author argues for more recognition of Kim Pushik’s “practical approach to history.” The remaining sections in this chapter deal with the competing founding hero myths of Kija (a culture hero of Chinese origin), Tan’gun (the mythical founder of [Old] Chosŏn, who was notoriously omitted from Kim Pushik’s Histories of the Three Kingdoms) and Tongmyŏng (the founder of Koguryŏ, who was worshipped as a deity in Koguryŏ, Paekche and Koryŏ). Chapter 4, “Tracing Legitimation,” focuses on the historical debate over whether Koryŏ derived its dynastic legitimation primarily from Koguryŏ or from Shilla, a debate that “has been determined by a number of unspoken assumptions, the most important being that Koguryŏ represents nativist independence while Shilla stands for subservient sinocentrism.” (p. 115) The author argues that this dichotomous view is misleading and an interpretation that more closely fits the facts is that Koryŏ based its legitimacy on its “unification of the Three Han” (p. 117), while at the same time flexibly maintaining claims of succession to Koguryŏ (and by extension Paekche) and Shilla as occasion required. The next section dis-

340 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

cusses the imperial status appropriated by Koryŏ monarchs and argues that the simplified, dichotomous interpretation of “naeje oewang ‘emperor at home and king abroad’” simply does not fit the facts. (p. 137) The chapter finishes with an overall conclusion to Part 1, which is summarized as “an attempt to determine what the name ‘Koryŏ’ referred to” (p. 139) and concludes that “Koryŏ identity was more ambiguous, plural, fragmented and multi-faceted than the image it presented to the outer world would suggest.” (p. 142) Part 2 “Understanding Koryŏ Pluralist Ideology” begins with a brief preamble identifying the objects under examination, namely, Koryŏ’s ruler, its literati and its diplomatic activities. In Chapter 5 “The Koryŏ Ruler, Common Focus of Obed- ience and Worship,” the author explores the ambiguities and contradictions of the Koryŏ monarch’s dual role as both the king of the kingdom of Koryŏ and as a Son of Heaven in a realm that was “on an ontologically equal footing with other realms” in the region (e.g. China). (p. 145) In the first section of this chapter, ‘Bureaucracy and royal authority,’ Breuker traces the evolution of royal authority alongside the development of a bureaucracy based on Tang and Song models, concluding that the “authority of the Koryŏ ruler resided in a different locus than his institutional role.” (p. 154) In the following section ‘The ruler in his capital’ the importance of Koryŏ’s three capitals, Kaegyŏng (Kaesŏng, the Supreme Capital), Sŏgyŏng (P’yŏngyang) and Namgyŏng (Namyang, present-day Seoul) and their reputed geomantic virtues is stressed. In the section ‘The ruler in ritual: The Koryŏ Son of Heaven,’ the Koryŏ monarch’s participation in rituals at the royal ancestral shrines, the land and grain altar, heaven-worship at the round altar and earth-worship at the square altar and in Buddhist rituals such as the Lantern Festival and Assembly of the Eight Prohibitions is identified as an important factor in upholding royal authority. Needless to say the memory of the dynastic ruler T’aejo loomed large in state rituals and “became the guideline of all subsequent rulers and . . . of the bureaucracy.” (p. 175) The role of the king in state Buddhist rituals led to him being identified with Buddha and Heaven, while his participation in other court rituals, including Daoist rituals, further enhanced royal authority. But as a consequence of his participation in such a diverse array of rituals, as Breuker concludes at the end of this chapter, “the position of the ruler was the largest contradiction and most conspicuous inconsistency of early and middle Koryŏ, because it unified in one person a host of incommensurable qualities, duties and identities.” (p. 194) Chapter 6 “Koryŏ Diplomacy” opens with a section entitled ‘Concepts of Koryŏ diplomatic history’ that briefly alludes to the numerous Korean studies in this field, which the author argues have generally been quantitative rather than qualitative in nature. Breuker makes clear his own intention to examine the

Book Reviews 341

‘pluralist nature’ of Koryŏ diplomacy and its ‘coping mechanisms’ in dealing with its neighbours. (p. 197) Following an explanation why diplomatic relations with Japan have been omitted from this study—namely, lack of sources and Koryŏ’s unreceptive attitude toward Japanese culture before the Mongol invasions—the section concludes by ‘deflating’ the ‘Chinese-barbarian dichotomy’ and arguing that “Koryŏ considered itself to have the credentials to build a state on the body of cultural resources which it shared with both Song and Liao.” (p. 203) In the following section, ‘Relations with Liao,” the author demonstrates convincingly that despite Koryŏ’s well-known opposition to the Khitan, “Koryŏ’s archetype for the barbarian other, Liao as a state was considered an example to be emulated.” (p. 219) With the eventual replacement of Liao by Jin, Koryŏ perforce adapted to the new situation on its northern border. The final section ‘Contacts with the Song’ provides an in-depth analysis of Koryŏ’s dealings with Song in the context of its relations with the Liao and Jin states and concludes that “Koryŏ foreign relations represented a fluid mixture of reactions to and anticipation of the international situation, identity formation with the foreign other, state building aspirations and consolidation of the Koryŏ state.” (p. 256) Chapter 7 “Pluralist Literati in Koryŏ” demonstrates convincingly the pluralist nature of Koryŏ’s ruling class. An extreme example of this pluralism, cited by the author, was Yi Chahyŏn, “scion of one of the most successful lineages of mid- Koryŏ, licentiate of the state examination, successful capital bureaucrat, revered Sŏn 禪 master and secluded hermit with strong Daoist leanings . . .” (p. 260) Although Breuker readily admits that Yi Chahyŏn could hardly be described as a run-of-the-mill Koryŏ bureaucrat, he strengthens his case by introducing more mainstream figures such as Pak Illyang, Ch’oe Sŏk, Chŏng Mok, Im Ŭi, Im Ch’un et al., who all had both strong Confucian and Buddhist ties and leanings. This reliance on both Buddhism and Confucianism, the author points out, “was also mirrored in the way the state used both ideologies.” (p. 266) Furthermore, such was the plural character of the literati that Daoism, divination, ŭm/yang theory, mathematics and medicine were also pursued enthusiastically by some and without censure by their peers. Even Kim Pushik is shown as being more than simply a staunchly conservative, Confucian scholar, based on textual evidence of his Buddhist faith and involvement in Daoist court rituals. Other scholars in the same intellectual tradition as Kim Pushik, such as Kim Puil, and his political opponents such as Yun Ŏni, who was associated with the Myoch’ŏng faction in the Koryŏ court, are also dealt with in some depth. The chapter concludes with an examination of the Buddhist/Daoist Yi Chungyak, who conforms to the author’s image of a pluralist literatus, and the contrary case of Han Yuch’ung, who did not, and as a consequence of his ideologically inflexible approach, was continuously

342 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

forced out of office throughout his career. The second section of Part 2 concludes with Chapter 8, “The Origins of Koryŏ Pluralism,” which in the author’s words provides “a more general and abstract background to Koryŏ pluralism as well as some possible historical reasons for its development.” (p. 289) It is at this point that Breuker introduces the ideas of Oakeshott, Mouffe, James and Feyerabend to illuminate the con- ception of pluralism that he applies to Koryŏ in order to reveal that its “identity as a whole consisted of this polyphony of different, incommensurable voices, ever- changing and flexible, but within certain parameters.” (p. 290) A historical example is provided by the case of the Shilla Buddhist monk Wŏngwang who famously drew up the Five Lay Commandments for the hwarang. These com- mandments are not only both Buddhist and Confucian in nature but, in the opinion of the author, also Machiavellian, which is to say that they primarily serve the needs of the state. The penultimate section of this chapter, ‘Koryŏ pluralism’s historical origins,’ examines the differences between Koryŏ’s Weltanschauung both before and after it came under the dominion of Yuan, concluding that “Koryŏ came to be positioned within the empire, with unrestricted access to its cultural resources, but to a large extent also outside of its own historical ex- periences.” (p. 310) Finally in his conclusion to Part 2, Breuker helpfully summarizes what he considers to be the major causes of Koryŏ pluralism, namely, its “plural political descent and its codification, the presence of several, fundamentally different thought and belief systems, the family system and the presence of the southern and northern court at its borders.” (p. 311) In this way the reader is prepared for Part 3, which is dedicated to analyzing three concrete examples of the Koryŏ pluralist worldview, namely, Kim Pushik’s Histories of the Three Kingdoms, the Ten Injunctions and Myoch’ŏng’s revolt. After a brief preamble, Part 3 “Koryŏ’s Practical Realities of Engagement” begins with Chapter 9 “The Oldest Extant History and the Perpetuation of a Pluralist Past in Shared Memories and Histories.” After a brief reference to the ideas of Oakeshott on the dialogue between past and present, to those of Frederik Barth on the maintenance of boundaries in measuring the membership of a group, and to those of John Armstrong on the role of mythic structures (mythomoteurs) on the formation and continuation of ethnic groups, this chapter proceeds by discussing the main characteristics of Korean historiography by primarily focusing on Kim Pushik’s Histories of the Three Kingdoms. It is well known in Korean studies circles that Kim Pushik’s work has generally been compared unfavorably with Iryŏn’s later work Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, most notably by the nationalist historians Shin Ch’aeho and Ch’oe Namsŏn, but, as Breuker points out, criticism

Book Reviews 343 of Histories of the Three Kingdoms date at least as far back as Yi Kyubo’s con- demnation of it for omitting the legend of Tongmyŏng. (p. 323) As the author points out, however, Yi Kyubo’s condemnation was not leveled at the whole work, and during the Chosŏn period it was ironically criticized by a wide range of scholars for its inclusion of myths and legends, its lack of deference towards China, for being “unsubstantiated, bizarre and fallacious”, and for its author’s imprecision and carelessness. Where Shin Ch’aeho viewed the work as “being sinophile and essentially anti-Korean” (p. 322), the early Chosŏn scholar Kwŏn Kun criticized it for its disrespectful attitude toward China. Thus Breuker demonstrates that the origins of such varied ideologically driven criticisms of Histories of the Three Kingdoms are primarily rooted in the different historical periods when they were made. The chapter concludes with an examination of Kim Pushik’s treatment of the Shilla hero-warrior Kim Yushin, a larger-than-life figure portrayed as an “amalgam of Confucian, Buddhist and native virtues” and as such constituting “a direct negation of the strict Confucian rationalism Kim Pushik is usually credited with.” (p. 341) Chapter 10 “The Ten Injunctions” examines one of the best-known doc- uments to have survived from the Koryŏ period. In standard text books on Korean history this document is attributed to the founder of the Koryŏ dynasty T’aejo, but Breuker soon disabuses the reader of this notion and categorically states that it was an eleventh-century forgery dating to the reign of Hyŏnjong (1009–1031) and articulating his vision of Koryŏ’s future. The rest of this fascinating chapter is devoted to examining each of the injunctions in detail and the various ways in which they conform to the author’s interpretation of Koryŏ’s essentially pluralist approach to government. The chapter concludes succinctly, “The role the injunctions played in codifying a pluralist view on the world, in sanctioning the explicit presence of contradiction and incommensurability in Koryŏ policy, thought, and general perception of the world can hardly be overestimated. Until the end of the dynasty, the injunctions told their readers different stories; most importantly, though, they conveyed to their readers that the existence of different stories was the norm.” (p. 406) Chapter 11 “Myoch’ŏng’s Challenge: The Bid for the ‘Impossible Good’ brings this extensive study to a fitting conclusion. The author’s close analysis of Myoch’ŏng’s rebellion reveals a more complex and contradictory picture than the standard textbook view, deriving once again largely from Shin Ch’aeho’s view of the nativist, Buddhist idealist Myoch’ŏng pitted against the sinophile, Confucian rationalist Kim Pushik. One of the most significant and convincing reassessments that this chapter puts forward is that Myoch’ŏng was not so much the ringleader of the rebellion as a scapegoat for it. Both Kim Pushik and Myoch’ŏng are shown

344 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

to hold “a Koryŏ-centric view of the world.” (p. 434) The main difference be- tween them, in the author’s view, was the fact that, unlike Kim Pushik, “Myo- ch’ŏng’s Koryŏ-centrism was unmitigated by experience or expedience,” that is to say, unlike Kim Pushik and his supporters, Myoch’ŏng and his followers were relatively ignorant of the world beyond Koryŏ’s borders and as a consequence committed or were caught up in an event that ultimately proved to be the con- sequence of a grave error of judgment. In the words of the author, “Myoch’ŏng’s rebellion is both thematically, historically and chronologically a fitting conclusion to a discussion of Koryŏ pluralism. It showed, with fatal consequences for Myo- ch’ŏng himself, the ideological make-up of the majority of literati. Even more so than Kim Pushik’s confirmation of a pluralist worldview in the aftermath of the rebellion, Myoch’ŏng’s attempt to negate Koryŏ’s pluralism brought it out in full force.” (p. 442) It is an impossible task to summarize the wealth of ideas and information contained in this lengthy work. It is only to be hoped that this review will prompt readers to encounter this challenging text for themselves and in so doing greatly enlarge their horizons within this period of Korean history. As a Korean studies educator, who regularly teaches an overview of Korean history to undergraduate students, I will certainly be using many of the insights to be gleaned from this text in my own lectures on Koryŏ and wholeheartedly recommend this work to any- one wishing to deepen their understanding of this period.

MICHAEL FINCH Keimyung University

Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes, edited by Chris Berry, Nicola Liscutin and Jonathan D. Mackintosh. TransAsia: Screen Culture Series. Hong Kong University Press 2009. 340 pp. HB: ISBN 978-962-209-974-6. PB: ISBN 978-962-209-975-3.

Among the most salient trends globally over the last decade has been the increasing flow of media across national boundaries, not least within Northeast Asia. Propelled in large part by this development, “culture” has assumed a key position in attempts to forge a sense of shared regional identity. The well-touted “Korean Wave”, has, of course, played an important role in this evolving landscape, and South Korea, in its promotion of its popular culture, has become one of the world’s leading proponents of brand nationalism. Striking instances of this newfound enthusiasm for “culture” are occurring at local levels as well: consider, for example, the case of Yŏngwŏl, a town in South Korea’s Kangwŏn

Book Reviews 345

Province. Once reliant upon the coal industry, the town fell on hard times as mines were abandoned and its population dwindled. In 2005, however, Yŏngwŏl assumed the designation “Museum City” in the hope of reviving itself. Since 1999, twenty museums have already been established, and one hundred more are planned for the next decade. The municipality has announced five major biennial conferences to be held over the same period in conjunction with Yonsei University that will celebrate this initiative, research Korean culture and, to be sure, promote Yŏngwŏl specifically and Korea more generally. The case of Yŏngwŏl underscores the increasing entanglement of “culture” with political and economic imperatives: whether one prefers it in “high” or “low” forms or regards distinctions between “elite” and “popular” culture as untenable, “culture” has clearly become a valued commodity. The phenomena sketched above have, unsurprisingly, drawn significant academic attention: intra-Asian Cultural Studies have become a virtual cottage industry, and Korean Studies have exhibited a noteworthy cultural turn in recent years. In the insightful and admirably edited Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes, Chris Berry, Nicola Liscutin and Jonathan D. Mackintosh of the University of London bring together a mix of scholars and practitioners to engage in a critical and reflexive analysis of Cultural Studies and cultural industries in tandem. As the editors tell us in their valuable introduction, the book seeks to challenge an equation deployed by business and government elites that treats the Northeast Asian region as “an equitably balanced triangulation of power between three key actors: the nation, the market and the individual” (p. 2). Berry, Liscutin and Mackintosh profess two main goals: first, to question the nature of the region by examining the points at which this triad of actors intersect and, secondly, to understand how culture is constituted in various complex ways that can undermine as well as enhance regional stability. A strong point of the volume is the attention within this framework that its authors pay to the interplay of the local, national, regional and global; an overarching argument is that the region acts as a prism that enables a viewing of the local and global as “not in dichotomous opposition but as an ongoing cultural negotiation” (p. 8). The book itself is divided into four sections of three chapters each. The first, “Reflections on Cultural Studies in/on Northeast Asia” provides a theoretical context for the rest of the book and attempts “to interrogate how Northeast Asia may be approached from within and without and to put into critical conversation Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries as theory, method, epistemology, ap- proach, and practice” (p. 16). Koichi Iwabuchi, widely regarded as a pioneer in the field for his seminal Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Trans- nationalism, leads off with a piece “Reconsidering East Asian Connectivity and the

346 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

Usefulness of Media and Cultural Studies.” Reading much like the keynote speech that it indeed was (the volume originated in a 2006 conference), Iwabuchi mixes personal reflection with incisive observation to provide an engaging if occasionally disturbing account of the intrusions of corporatist forces into transnational media flows, as states intervene to stamp national cultures and systematize the con- nections of dominant national cultures. Nonetheless, Iwabuchi ends on an optimistic note that makes clear an activist agenda: intellectuals, in his view, can function as “ethical aunts” who go between the state and the civic and promote democratic participation in public dialogues. In this sense, he argues, the work of Cultural Studies perhaps has use in encouraging interaction “beyond national and cultural divides with various aggravated social and cultural issues” (p. 34). The sophisticated, and at times dense, chapters by Michael Dutton (“Asian Cultural Studies: Recapturing the Encounter with the Heterogenous”) and Mark Harrison (“How to Speak about Oneself: Theory and Identity in Taiwan”) are each impressive, but take the reader far afield in their erudite journeys. These include, respectively, Dutton’s fascinating description of a dispute that arose between Theodor Adorno and Paul Lazarsfeld over methodology in a study of US radio habits in the 1930s, and Harrison’s historical overview of politicized discourses of Taiwanese identity. These multi-directional tugs on the reader can make working through the volume in linear fashion disorienting. Moreover, Dutton, though raising germane theoretical considerations, ultimately says little about the actual practice of contemporary Asian Cultural Studies, and although one might imagine why a chapter specifically on Taiwan has been included, its appearance begs important but unanswered questions. Although the volume generally succeeds in its aim of being critical and self-reflexive, there is a curious lack of reflection upon (or even definition of) how the Northeast Asian region is to be understood: is it constituted geographically, culturally or politically? Differ- ent approaches will provide different maps. The volume thus winds up taking as given a key object of its interrogations, and although Dutton’s and Harrison’s chapters are each exemplary pieces of scholarship, they perhaps belong in differ- ent books. After its diffuse opening section, however, the book tightens and proceeds to empirically based studies arranged in three categories: “Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia”; “Discourse, Crossing Borders”; and “Nationalism and Trans- nationalism: The Case of Korea and Japan”. In addition to the chapters of par- ticular relevance to Koreanists that I discuss in more detail below, the collection is rounded out by essays that deal with American-Japanese film co-productions, the distribution of Japanese brands in East Asia, and a particularly rich and enlighten- ing piece by Laikwan Pang on pirated Japanese animation in China.

Book Reviews 347

SooJeong Ahn’s “Placing South Korean Cinema into the Pusan International Film Festival: Programming Strategy in the Global/Local Context” draws on the author’s experience working for what has become the most important film festival in Northeast Asia. As Ahn notes, little empirical research has been done on non- Western festivals and her behind the scenes look at the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) is informative. In focusing on the institutional dynamics that determine how films are chosen and programmed into PIFF, Ahn demonstrates how the festival’s regional approach “displays a distinct agenda and sociocultural context different from that of Euro-American film festivals” (p. 74). Among the nuggets to be mined from this essay is the salutary reminder that Lee Chang- dong’s Peppermint Candy (Pakha sat’ang), was chosen for the coveted opening slot in 1999 not merely because of its incisive analysis of Korean society in the last decades of the twentieth century but because it was the first Japanese-Korean co- production, a fact often forgotten. “In Between the Values of the Global and the National: The Korean Ani- mation Industry” by Ae-Ri Yoon is an interesting if relatively brief ethnographic presentation of animators in South Korea. The chapter asks pertinent questions about how animators negotiate processes of globalization in their work and daily lives, and the animators’ stories themselves are compelling, suggesting the highly contingent, complex and uneven nature of globalization’s effects. Unfortunately, the article’s brevity, much of it devoted to judiciously selected direct quotes, does not permit it to engage with the issues it raises in as thoroughgoing a fashion as other chapters. Yoon notes, however, that this case study is part of a larger project, and one imagines that those interested in Korean animation will be well served by consulting her work. Also drawing nicely upon ethnographic data, Rowan Pease’s “Korean Pop Music in China: Nationalism, Authenticity and Gender” makes a number of counterintuitive but cogent claims about the reception of Korean pop music in China. While it may be easy for outsiders to dismiss Korean idols as the manu- factured products of entertainment conglomerates (and indeed Pease’ s Chinese industry informants emphasize the skilful packaging of Korean groups), devoted K-pop fans in China often construct Korean boy bands (e.g. Super Junior, TVXQ, H.O.T.) as inhabiting a similar modernity as themselves but providing an authen- ticity lacking in their Chinese performing counterparts. Pease’s data thereby re- fines Iwabuchi’s analysis of transnational Asian media consumption of media and its reliance upon perceptions of differing temporal relations to modernity. Furthermore, according to Pease, Chinese fans positively evaluate Korean performers as feminine, sincere and idealistic in contrast to a masculine, com- mercial and pragmatic China, thus offering a twist to quasi-Orientalist views of

348 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

the Other. In fact, as Pease notes, Chinese fans strongly opposed the addition of a Chinese member to TVXQ, which is all the more intriguing in light of Korean current marketing strategies of internationalizing their bands (consider, for example, the recent successful debut of girl group Miss-A, two of whose four members are Chinese). The final three chapters exploring the relationship between nationalism and transnationalism in the flow of cultural products between Japan and Korea highlight ongoing complexity in the fraught relationship between these “close but distant” neighbors. Liscutin’s piece “Surfing the Neo-Nationalist Wave: a Case Study of Manga Kenkanryu” notes the coexistence of the enthusiastic reception of Korean popular culture in Japan and negative feelings towards Korea. At one level, this is to be expected: opposing viewpoints are to be expected in any social aggregation; moreover, any single individual can display ambivalent sentiments. However, while some observers have seen conflicting attitudes on a national scale as reflecting a generation gap and ascribed conciliatory power to popular cultural exchange, Liscutin notes that it is equally plausible to argue that “transnational flows and hybridization effects induce or enhance anxieties of losing the seeming certainties of a clearly demarcated national cultural identity and can, therefore, generate neo-nationalist backlashes” (p. 172). In the succinct formulation of Mark Morris, “it is a striking feature of the contemporary popular culture of East Asia that optimism about the increasing flow and circulation of cultural goods…keeps bumping against political frictions and ghosts of the not so distant past” (p. 196). Liscutin focuses on perhaps the most notorious specimen of this backlash in Northeast Asia, the manga Kenkanryu (“The Anti-Korean Wave”), which became a best seller in Japan and drew international attention. Her analysis comments insightfully on the rhetorical and artistic strategies of a work that itself testifies to a broader socio-political significance for cultural productions. Indeed, as I write in January 2011, the Korean media are anxiously devoting attention to an updated version of Kenkanryu that responds to the recent success of Korean girl groups in Japan. Morris’ piece on “Melodrama, Exorcism, Mimicry, Japan and the Colonial Past in the New Korean Cinema” presents a close reading of depictions of Japan in feature films of the first decade of the 21st century including Rikidozan, Fighter in the Wind, Blue Sparrow, 2009: Lost Memories, The President’s Last Bang, and the execrable Hanbando and considers the strategies Korean filmmakers have deployed to deal with the legacy of Japan’s colonization of Korea, offering numerous perceptive observations along the way. In the final chapter, “Reconsidering Cultural Hybridities: Transnational Exchanges of Popular Music in between Korea and Japan”, Yoshitaka Mori takes a polemic stance, arguing that Cultural Studies in Japan are in crisis and that its political project has essentially failed. A

Book Reviews 349 key problem he observes is that in neither Japan nor Korean has Cultural Studies “overcome existing national boundaries in its encounters with the nation-state, equating culture instead with monolithic nationally circumscribed cultures” (p. 215). His piece argues that in their very origins such genres as enka and shibuya-kei embody a transnational hybridity. I’m aware of irony in addressing this review to a Koreanist audience specifically, especially given Mori’s arguments for ongoing hybridity and the dangers inherent in allowing terms such as the “Korean Wave” to dictate a re- essentialized version of Korea, even if this version creates a more positive vision of the country among its neighbours. While I am in agreement with Mori, it is also apparent that “the national” still retains value as a framework for understanding the chaotic and unstable realities that we inhabit; our task is to constantly infiltrate these determining categories with questions to arrive at a more nuanced under- standing of the world as best we can. In conclusion, while Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia as a whole may not quite be the sum of its very considerable parts (as often with edited volumes that emerge from conferences), there is not a weak chapter in the book. Scholars of contemporary South Korean culture, and indeed contemporary Northeast Asian culture—however we may agree to define these terms—will want to have this lively collection on their shelves and consult it frequently.

STEPHEN EPSTEIN Victoria University of Wellington

A History of Korea: An Episodic Narrative. By Kyung Moon Hwang. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 309 pp. (ISBN 978-0-230-20545-1 hardback; ISBN 978-0-230-20546-8 paperback)

This book is the most recent of several English-language general histories of Korea and is part of the Palgrave Essential Histories series. As such it reflects a growing interest in the West to know more about this country than just its recent division, war and current tribulations. Its author Kyung Moon Hwang, an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Southern California, has attempted to provide a balanced account of historical develop- ments on the Korean Peninsula from the Three Kingdoms Era until the present day. The “episodic narrative” begins neither with the archaeological record of Korea’s pre-history nor with the mythical founding of the Korean race—although

350 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

this myth does receive a mention early on—nor with the legendary founding of the Three Kingdoms themselves, but with the “Great Battle of the Salsu River,” a historically documented victory of the Koguryŏ Kingdom over Sui China in 612. In this way the author emphasizes the importance of the Koguryŏ state to the preservation of the independent development of the early Korean people. Each of the chapters in the book is preceded by a brief chronology, an introductory piece on a major theme of the chapter and most chapters also con- tain a special feature separated from the main text by a text-box. In the first chapter the special feature is an account of the wall paintings to be found in Koguryŏ tombs and what they tell us about Koguryŏ society at that time. I am not familiar with the other works in the Macmillan Palgrave Essential Histories Series, but I presume that this type of chapter organization is common to the other works as well, and it is an effective way of organizing the historical narrative. The only shortcoming in this chapter is the absence of an illustration to accompany the description of the paintings. There are, however, a total of twenty-six helpful black and white illustrations scattered throughout the other chapters in the book. Nevertheless, I was at a loss to understand why they are numbered Image 2, Image 5, Image 8 and so on in an apparently random fashion, rather than Image 1, Image 2, Image 3. The general tone of the work is lively, eminently readable, and at times almost journalistic rather than academic, as the author does not eschew the odd exclamation mark, either with or without parentheses, in order to make his own point of view clear. This somewhat partisan approach to Korean history is readily admitted in the author’s introduction, where he acknowledges his “own biases, however veiled, in interpretation, analysis, and even periodization.” (p. xvi) Approximately one half of the book is devoted to pre-modern Korea, and one half to modern Korea, with one chapter devoted to the events of 1894, namely, the Kabo Reforms and the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War, providing a dividing point between the two eras. This means, of course, that the 150 years or so that constitute the modern era, are given as much coverage as the ap- proximately 2,000 years of documented pre-modern history on the Korean peninsula—not to mention the extensive archaeological record that stretches back much further. This balance, or some might say lack of balance, undoubtedly reflects the classroom situation on university campuses today, in which lecturers will be expected to devote a considerable proportion of their teaching time to the late 19th, 20th- and 21st-century history of Korea, as well as the fact that the author’s own expertise appears to be in the field of modern Korean history. As someone who teaches just such a course at tertiary level, I would say that Hwang has achieved a good balance, and where he is particularly impressive is in his

Book Reviews 351 discussions of the various interpretations of Korean history prevalent in both North and South Korea today, for example, the preference for Koguryŏ over Silla in contemporary historiography, in contrast to the privileged status that the latter was accorded in such traditional histories as the Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa. In general the book covers most of the bases with accounts of the major personalities and events in Korean history being given fairly even coverage. There is also a distinct effort to give more coverage to women’s history than is generally found in this type of work. The chapter on Silla, therefore, begins not with its legendary founder Pak Hyŏkkŏse but with Queen Sŏndŏk, who the author points out is today considered “a great symbol of a time when Korea, unsullied by Chinese and other external influences, stayed true to itself and held (some) women in high esteem.” (p. 23). I could not help noticing that the account of Paekche was given fairly short shrift, however, insofar as it was only allocated a text-box rather than a complete chapter, and Kaya, the “fourth” kingdom, was only granted the most fleeting of mentions. But within the constraints of this type of brief general history, the author’s rationale for allocating a single chapter to Koguryŏ and Silla and an additional chapter for Unified Silla, with the main focus on the activities of Chang Pogo, is understandable. The narrative continues down the years with a clear focus on historical personages, such as Wang Kŏn and the founding of Koryŏ, the Buddhist monk Myoch’ŏng’s failed rebellion, and the influence of Lady Ki, who became the primary imperial consort in the Yuan court and is granted far more attention in this work than in any other general history of Korea that I am aware of. Likewise in the Chosŏn dynasty considerable attention is given to Sin Saimdang, a renowned artist and the mother of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Yi I, including mention of recent Korean feminists opposition to her image being placed on the South Korean 50,000 wŏn note. Admiral Yi Sunsin’s role in the repulse of the Japanese invasions at the end of the 16th century is given adequate mention before the author once again gives voice to women’s role in Korean history in his account of the late 17th- early 18th-century King Sukchong and his consorts Queen Inhyŏn and Lady Chang. This historical story is a great favorite in Korea and provides the author with a useful way into discussing Chosŏn society at this time. This chapter also contains and important text box on the five secondary status groups in Chosŏn. The following two chapters examine Pak Chega and the Sirhak movement and popular culture in the late Chosŏn era respectively. This is followed by accounts of such significant events as the Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion (1811–1812), the Catholic persecutions, and the advent of Imperial Japan and the West. As mentioned previously, Chapter 14, which deals with the events of 1894, provides

352 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011

the dividing line between pre-modern and modern Korea as the subsequent chapters deal with the establishment of the Taehan Empire and various modern- ization projects, including the construction of the first railway line between Seoul and Inch’ŏn, the first vernacular newspaper, the Tongnip sinmun (The Independent), and the opening of Korea’s ports to trade. The takeover of Korea by Japan is dealt with in a single chapter that begins its final paragraph with the provocative question “Did Koreans, then, ‘sell out’ their country?” (p. 160) and concludes that some indeed did do just that, but finally asserts that “the Koreans, whether in accommodation, resistance, or someplace in between, claimed a role in determining their own fate amidst the maelstrom of external forces pushing upon them.” (p. 160) The following chapter dealing with the 1920s is a little surprising in the relative attention it gives to the March First Movement and the woman artist Na Hyesŏk. But once again the focus on Na is easily understood as part of the author’s attempt to redress the balance in the narrative of Korean history that until recently has been dominated by accounts of its male actors. The following two chapters deal with daily life in colonial Korea culminating in the wartime mobilization that began in 1938 and ended with Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in 1945. The division, occupation of Korea by the USSR and USA, and the outbreak of the Korean War during the confusing five-year period from 1945 to 1950 is handled with clarity. The establishment and development of the two Koreas until 2009 provides the material for the final chapters. Once again the author provides us with many helpful insights into the trajectory of the development of the two separate states and the shortcomings of both societies. The final chapter is concerned with the democratization of South Korea, which the author argues still has some way to go to achieve real maturity. This new history of Korea is characterized by its author’s lively style of writing and his willingness to reflect adventurously on the significance of Korea’s past for its present. I will have no hesitation, therefore, in adding it to my list of recom- mended readings in Korean history for my students.

MICHAEL FINCH Keimyung University