132 This Is a Book About Not One Journey but Two. Separated by A

132 book reviews

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred-Year Journey through China and Korea. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Paperback, 2017.

This is a book about not one journey but two. Separated by a century, they intersect with each other in time and space. Historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki visited the Diamond Mountains (K. Kŭmgangsan) in North Korea in 2008, starting her trip in Harbin in Northeast China and ending it in Busan, South Korea. Accompanying her was a book about a similar tour taken in 1909 by the British writer, artist, and feminist Emily Kemp. As Morris-Suzuki’s book, To the Diamond Mountains, moves back and forth between the two tours, it presents us with a conversation between past and present and across multiple boundaries on the intricate trajectory of Northeast Asia in modern and contemporary history. Located on the eastern coast of the Korean Peninsula, Kŭmgangsan is a famous tourist site on the northern side of the line dividing North and South Korea. For over a millennium, the mountains have occupied a sacred position in the cosmology of Buddhism, attracting pilgrims from both East and Central Asia. In the ancient times, Kŭmgangsan connected Korea with the larger world. Perhaps for this reason, Morris-Suzuki regards her journey as a kind of pilgrimage, too: not a religious one but “a pilgrimage through history.” Her narrative aims to situate Korea in its longue durée interactions with neighboring coun- tries as well as contemporary geopolitical tensions, and to explain the pains and hopes of a land that has endured colonialism, wars, and national separa- tion. The book, with its prologue, twelve chapters, and nineteen hand-drawn il- lustrations, takes on the structure of a Chinese handscroll landscape painting. As readers gradually unfold the scroll, the author deftly leads them through the scenes laid in front of their eyes. Although they seem scattered and inde- pendent of one another, together, these vignettes compose an integrated and grand picture of the history of modern Northeast Asia. Northeast Asia was in turbulence in 1909, much as it was in 2008. When Kemp took her trip, she travelled from Europe to Manchuria by the Trans- Siberian Railway. Russia’s railway colonialism fundamentally changed the mode of exploration in Manchuria, which the Japanese South Manchurian Railway Company took over after the Russo-Japanese War. A few months before Kemp’s visit, Korean nationalist activist An Jung-geun assassinated Japanese statesman Itō Hirobumi in the Harbin railway station, an incident that accelerated the official annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910. The next year Japan built the Yalu River bridge to connect the railway in Manchuria with that in Korea, largely incorporating Korea and Manchuria under Japa- nese colonialism. One of the most important Korean railways extended from

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Sinuiju, on the south side of the Yalu River, through Pyongyang, Kaesong, and Seoul, all the way to the seaport of Busan. In each city the Japanese reshaped the urban landscape by branding colonial and imperialist imprints and explor- ing the propaganda potential of tourism. The turbulence in 2008, as Morris-Suzuki shows, was of a different kind. In China, a country in rapid economic rise, the humiliation of Russia was largely forgotten even by people living in Manchuria. In Dandong, a border town facing Sinuiju in North Korea, on the opposite bank of the Yalu, local people regarded the closed neighboring country as mysterious and exotic place for tourism. What had become the Yalu River Broken Bridge, half destroyed in the Korean War, was turned into a site to gaze at life on the Korean side. One of the amusements for tourists was to smuggle food to the North Korean border guards. Not only had the relationship between China and North Korea soured, but most connections between North and South Korea were also cut off as the North insisted on missile tests. The railway across the Demilitarized Zone, which for a short while connected the Dorasan station in the South and the Kaesong Industrial Zone in the North, was once again suspended. In North and South alike, hostility and fear toward the other side had not faded six decades after the bloody civil war. Each side claimed it wanted unification, yet neither prepared for it. Younger generations in South Korea were less and less interest- ed in holding onto their parents’ dream. In major Korean cities, the Japanese colonial legacy was systematically eliminated. Koreans on both sides of “the world’s last Cold War divide” were still searching for their modern identity in a drastically changing world. Morris-Suzuki is well acquainted with boundaries, and they crisscross her skillful account. Nation-state boundaries, strictly regulated by passports, vi- sas, security inspections, and military guards, presented the greatest inconve- nience for her journey—a nuisance, she reminds us, that Kemp in the early twentieth century did not experience. At Panmunjom, a spot on the dmz where the two Koreas meet face to face, it would take about a ten-minute car ride to travel from one viewing spot in the north to its counterpart in the south. For Morris-Suzuki, the trip took a week: she had to go all the way back to Northeast China, then fly to Seoul and take another tour to the south part of the dmz. The barriers were not just physical but psychological. Numerous times she encountered people who (kindly) warned her about the “danger” of North Korea. The image of the dprk, she shows, is not only made cryptic by the country’s own policies but also demonized by the outside world. Yet no matter how rigorously created and controlled, boundaries connect while they divide. In different parts of the book, Morris-Suzuki talks about border crossings in various forms: from international marriages to smugglings, from china and asia 1 (2019) 127-134