Okinawa in South Korean Scholarship

Appendix Okinawa in South Korean Scholarship This supplementary essay is based on a paper I published in 20101 on perceptions of Okinawa among contemporary South Korean historians.2 The original essay analyzed 165 academic studies on Okinawa-related themes, including many that had been in- dexed by the National Research Foundation of Korea and Japan’s National Diet Library. Retracing the history of South Korean scholarship on Okinawa is useful, first of all, to get a general sense of how Okinawa is perceived in South Korea. This exercise may also help to discover what is lacking in current Okinawan studies in both South Korea and Japan, and where my research should be positioned in that context. My analysis of South Korean scholarship brings into view a kind of theoretical framework in which the more eagerly Okinawa is sought after as a “site of solidarity,” the more Okinawa itself recedes from view, consigning the Battle of Okinawa to obscurity. When I began my analysis, the problem, it seemed to me, was that South Korean scholars were studying the lessons from their own historical experience of coloniza- tion not so they could discuss them with their Japanese counterparts, but in order to criticize Japan. Okinawa was just more grist to the mill. In fact, it was South Korean civil-society and human-rights groups who “discovered” Okinawa as a potential site of solidarity in the first place. This genealogical study aims to show how South Korean writing in the field of “Okinawan studies”—initially developed in the fields of ethnog- raphy and historiography—has placed Okinawa in the spectator’s seat. It shows how this trend has been shaped by the environment in which South Korean scholarship developed, reflecting a propensity to differentiate between knowledge derived from social and political engagement and that derived solely from scholarly inquiry. In fact, this critique of South Korean scholarship is also a critique of how basic knowledge about the comfort-women issue itself has been constructed, both in South Korea and Japan. A body of prior research by Japanese and zainichi Korean scholars in 1 Hong, Kankoku ni okeru Okinawa gaku no genzai. This study does not deal with earlier works in the field of literature or those translated from other languages, nor does it include some recent introductory studies of Okinawa-South Korea relations written for general readers. One is Lee Myŏng-wŏn, Tu-gae ŭi sŏm—Chŏhang ŭi yanggŭk, Han’guk kwa Okinawa (South Korea and Okinawa: Two islands, two opposite forms of resistance). Seoul: Samin, 2017. An- other is Oh Sejong, Son Chi-yŏn, trans. Okinawa wa Chosŏn ŭi t’ŭmsae esŏ: Chosŏnin ŭi kasih- wa/pulgasihwa rŭl tullŏssan yŏksa ŭi tamnŏn (Between Okinawa and Korea: On the history and narratives of visualizing/unvisualizing Koreans). Seoul: Somyung, 2019. Full references for works such as those above that are mentioned in passing will be given only in the notes. 2 This essay has been shortened, reorganized, and brought up to date by the author. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, �� | doi:10.1163/9789004419513_013 HONG Yunshin - 9789004419513 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:24:20AM via free access 300845 462 Appendix Japan and civil-rights activists doing the yeoman work of locating primary sources, writing papers, and publishing books began accumulating after 1991, when the issue of military sexual slavery entered the public consciousness. It was not until the early 2000s, however, that this problem was treated seriously by the Historical Society of Ja- pan (Shigakukai) and the Women’s Studies Association of Japan (Nihon Josei Gakkai).3 In Japan, between the late 1990s and early 2000s, the focus of public interest shifted from the victim-survivors of Japanese military sexual servititue to the “comfort-women issue,” which became a kind of political bellwether for the revisionist right and was linked to government censorship of history schoolbook content. In both countries, the public, rather than staying abreast of current research, seemed more interested in using the results of such work to buttress or attack particular points of view. A genealogical analysis of this structural problem, which divorces social activism from “pure scholarship,” is useful for understanding how this polarization has developed in the last 20 years or so. Okinawan studies in South Korea have been dominated by the trope of Okinawa as victim. There seems to be little interest in Okinawans themselves, or, most notably, in their personal experiences of war and long-term military occupation. Survivor narratives—memories of the battlefield—have yet to be tapped as poten- tially rich and powerful sources of new, intimate forms of knowledge about militariza- tion, war, and violence against women 1 Yugu or Ryūkyū: What’s in a Name? Today, South Korea is experiencing an “Okinawa boom.” Of course, Okinawa does not rate high on the list of front-page international news stories. Nonetheless, as Korean interests in Okinawa expand and new narratives involving Okinawa are created by the media and consumed, it is safe to say that Okinawa is trending in South Korea. In my view, however, the Okinawa craze has accelerated two disparate tendencies. It has treated Okinawa as the “other,” while at the same time making Okinawans themselves non-actors at colloquia and other events organized on their behalf by South Korean intellectuals. First, portraying Okinawa as an oriental paradise surrounded by emerald seas, an idyllic honeymoon destination, or the islands of longevity exoticizes it. Secondly, Okinawans are placed on the sidelines when academics try to speak for 3 This was the intellectual environment in which I began writing academic papers in Japanese. In women’s studies, South Korean researchers have focused largely on contemporary history rather than the weighty issues of the colonial era. Searching the National Institute of Infor- matics database of Ph.D. dissertations for the keyword “Chosŏn,” I found 579 dissertations listed, but only seven in the field of women’s history on the Korean peninsula, and all by South Korean authors (including zainichi Korean residents of Japan). My own work is one of the seven. HONG Yunshin - 9789004419513 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:24:20AM via free access 300845 Okinawa in South Korean Scholarship 463 them to the South Korean public. The academic posture of purporting to represent Okinawans also renders them onlookers in the spaces reserved for scholarly discourse, thereby denying them agency. The problem with the Okinawa boom lies in its discursive structure. The closer one looks at Okinawa as a space that has been exoticized and “othered,” the more difficult it is to grasp; the more one attempts to emphathize with Okinawans who have been denied agency, the greater the danger of overidentifying with them. When and how does a researcher with a different perspective intervene in such a discourse? Since the act of written intervention immediately calls into question the author’s own positionality, the ethics of writing itself is brought into play. Rather than criticize another researcher’s “othering” gaze, I would prefer, as an en- gaged writer, to emphasize the possibilities of empathizing with Okinawas while pointing out the dangers of speaking in the name of, and thereby misrepresenting, others based on a misplaced sense of identification. The problem of positionality be- comes paramount when “presenting” Okinawa as a fixed entity to South Koreans who are not knowledgeable about the prefecture and its people. Below, I focus on changes in the names that South Korean scholars have used for Okinawa—Yugu and Ryūkyū— as a means of exploring the issues behind such misidentification. This approach will also allow me to track changes in the narrative positions of some leading academics. Korean scholars have commonly employed the names Okinawa (오키나와 in Kore- an transliteration) and Ryūkyū (류큐), which appear to be standard usages in the Han- gul phonetic syllabary. In the 1960s, however, the completely different “Yugu” (유구, the Hangul pronunciation of the Chinese characters 琉球) was commonly employed by historians and folklorists. What changes in South Korean society prompted the shift from Yugu (유구) to Ryūkyū (류큐) in the late 1990s? This query affords me an opening that allows me to intervene and question the academic penchant to objectify Okinawa. Of course, since the 1980s, Korean glosses for foreign place names have increasingly been brought into accord with indigenous pronunciations. This essay, however, con- cerns itself with the conceptual shifts that supported such alterations. It begins by ana- lyzing the transition in naming practices that occurred in the South Korean discourse on Okinawa from the 1960s to the present. It then charts the changing positions of leading scholars within those narrative confines and concludes by asking what it means to write about Okinawa in South Korea today. Four periods are covered here. The first is the 1960s, when Okinawa first appeared in South Korean academic publications. The second period is from 1970 to 1979, when Okinawa was taken up by folklore specialists and coincides with the era of military dictatorship. The third period is from the early 1980s to 1995, when landmark historical studies on Chosŏn-Ryūkyū relations were conducted, and historians adopted “Yugu” for Okinawa. These years coincide in Okinawa with the personal revelations of former Korean comfort women and military laborers (gunpu), alerting public opinion to those HONG Yunshin - 9789004419513 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:24:20AM via free access 300845 464 Appendix uresolved war-related issues. The fourth period is from 1996, by which time South Ko- reans had become aware of Okinawa’s contemporary history and the ongoing problem of US military bases. At this point, the term “Ryūkyū” came into wide use, eclipsing “Okinawa” and “Yugu.” Ironically, it was during these years that Okinawa’s secondary role on the sidelines of history was strengthened considerably in South Korean narratives.

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