AMERICAN MISSIONARIES, KOREAN CHRISTIANS, AND THE PROBLEM OF SHINTŌ SHRINE WORSHIP DURING THE 1930s Donald N. Clark, Ph.D. Professor of History Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas USA INTRODUCTION It is a great honor for me to be invited to speak to you today at the Eighth Annual Academic Conference of the Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary in Seoul. As you may know, my father, Allen D. Clark (Kwak Anjŏn), was a professor at this Seminary after it reopened in South Korea; and for many years before that, in P’yŏngyang, both my grandfathers, Charles Allen Clark (Kwak Allyŏn) and Stacy L. Roberts (Na Puyŏl), were Seminary professors. Both of my grandfathers served short terms as presidents of the Seminary after the retirement of Dr. Samuel A. Moffett in 1934. Their students included many who became illustrious leaders of the Korean church. My two grandmothers contributed much to the education of girls in P’yŏngyang; my mother Eugenia Clark (Na Chinsaeng) worked in Christian Broadcasting (CBS) and organized foreign aid for orphanages in Seoul as well as serving as a teacher; and my aunt Katherine Clark (Kwak Kajŏn) spent her career in Christian education of young people at the Bible Institute in Taegu. My father and his sister were both born in Seoul. Two of their brothers died in Seoul as children and lie buried in the Foreigners’ Cemetery at Yanghwajin, in Hapchŏng-dong.. My mother was born in Sŏnch’ŏn, in North P’yŏng’an Province; my brother was born in P’yŏngyang; and my two sisters were born Ch’ŏngju, North Ch’unch’ŏng Province. In fact, I am the only member of my family who was not born in Korea. - 11 - I feel humble to be standing here remembering them and thinking about the history of the church of which they all were such a part. Last year (2007) I visited P’yŏngyang for the first time in my life, and I searched without success for traces of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Although I attended Easter Sunday services at the Chilgol Church and was deeply moved by the music and the sermon in the location where Kim Il-sung’s own mother was a Presbyterian deaconess (chibsa), I did not sense anything of the life and vitality that is now part of Christianity in South Korea. When I thought about the fact that P’yŏngyang had been a great center of the faith in the years before World War Two, I could only reflect on the tragic history of modern Korea., the role of my own country in that history, and hope and pray that the Korean people somehow, by God’s grace and in His own time, can find a way to make their broken country whole again. FOREIGN MISSIONARIES AND KOREAN INDEPENDENCE Much has been written about the role of foreign missionaries in the Korean struggle for independence, from Homer Hulbert’s opposing the Ulsa Treaty in 1905 to Frank Schofield’s agitation against Japanese repression in the Samil Movement of 1919 to missionary resistance to Shintō shrine worship by Korean Christians in the 1930s. My own grandfather Stacy Roberts sheltered Sungsil Academy students from the colonial police in his home at the Presbyterian Mission in P’yŏngyang during the Samil uprising of 1919 and even kept a hidden Korean taegukki flag and an illegal pistol, which he never used, possibly as symbols of his own determination to resist, somehow, someday. In fact, however, Dr. Roberts’s main interest was not Korean independence but the training of young Korean in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary to be church pastors. He felt God’s leading to whatever was necessary to maintain a healthy flow of young Christian men into the ministry, even if it meant advising them to stay out of trouble for the sake of the church. The American historian Frank Baldwin once wrote a criticism of Western missionaries in Korea during the Independence Movement under the title “Missionaries and the March First - 12 - Movement: Can Moral Men be Neutral?”1 I once wrote a somewhat less critical article entitled “Surely God Will Work Out Their Salvation: Protestant Missionaries in the March First Movement,”2 in which I answered Baldwin with an argument that the missionaries trusted in God and were inclined to seek God’s intervention in the crisis, rather than to intervene themselves. A difference of emphasis, perhaps, but one that I thought was truer to the missionaries’ own faith than direct political action. To be sure, certain missionaries earned reputations as champions of Korean independence: the names of Eli Mowry, Frank Schofield, and George S. McCune come to mind. But they also serve as example of the price paid by missionary activism: Eli Mowry went to prison, Frank Schofield was deported, robbing Korea of a valuable medical doctor, and George McCune was forced to retire early. Other missionaries, seeing them, would have concluded that they had a choice between continuing their work in Korea and standing up as critics of Japan. Nearly all of them chose to stay quietly and continue the work to which they believed God had called them. While missionaries felt sympathy for Koreans and were offended by the abuses that they witnessed under Japanese colonial rule, there were at least two values that overrode their impulses to defend the Koreans. The first, already mentioned, was their value of their work and their responsibility to maintain it even under difficult political conditions. The second value was a historical orientation, as Westerners, to regard the power realities of colonialism as “normal” in the modern world. Until World War Two, Western missionary societies operated in Africa, India, the Middle East, and many parts of the world under colonial occupation by various Great Powers. Indeed, one criticism of the missionary effort historically has been the way it benefited from colonialism in a kind of symbiosis. For 1Frank Baldwin, “Missionaries and the March First Movement: Can Moral Men Be Neutral?” in Korea under Japanese Colonial Rule, ed. Andrew Nahm (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Center for Korean Studies, Western Michigan University, 1973), pp. 193-219. 2Donald N. Clark, “Surely God Will Work out Their Salvation: Protestant Missionaries in the March First Movement,” Korean Studies (University of Hawaii), XIII (1989), pp. 42-75. - 13 - Americans in the Philippines, for example, colonial rule meant an opportunity to “Christianize and uplift” the Filipino people while teaching them Democracy. In the language of the time, colonialism and Christian missions were also basically racist. Western religious leaders spoke openly of God’s challenge to the white race as his chosen instrument to “civilize” people of other races around the world. Japanese colonial rule in Korea was an unusual case of colonialism because the rulers were non- whites, but in other respects the dynamics of Japanese rule in Korea were familiar to Westerners: the objectives of order, discipline, and purposeful economic reorganization and development, not to mention exploitation and the extraction of wealth. Japan’s aims in Korea were not so different from Britain’s aims in India or Belgium’s aims in the Congo, or France’s aims in Indochina. It was only when they witnessed with their own eyes the arbitrary cruelty of the Japanese in Korea, particularly when it affected Christians of their own acquaintance, that the missionaries’ consciences were truly offended and they understood the position of the Korean people as victims of Japan’s military aggression. Even then, they regarded the continuation of their work as a more important value, even if it meant suppressing their own disgust at Japanese behavior and advising Koreans to be quiet and not resist. THE PROBLEM OF THE SHINTŌ SHRINES3 Article 28 of Japan’s first modern constitution, drafted under the supervision of Itō Hirobumi in 1889, provided for freedom of religion subject to certain restrictions, namely, that “ Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief.” The nature of Japanese colonial rule in Korea raised many questions about the status of Koreans under the Meiji constitution, 3This account is based in large part on research for a chapter in Donald N. Clark, Living Dangerously in Korea: the Western Experience, 1900-1950 (Norwalk, Connecticut: EastBridge Books, 2003), pp. 209-218. - 14 - since the Government-General of Chōsen was essentially a government unto itself. The Japanese Governor-General was the colony’s chief executive, chief legislator, and chief justice, in command of all aspects of administration and law enforcement. Koreans, though “subjects” of the emperor, did not vote in Japanese elections and were not represented in the Diet, so in effect, while they were “subjects,” they were not in any sense real “citizens.” The human rights mentioned in the Meiji constitution therefore did not necessarily apply to Koreans—a problem throughout the Japanese colonial occupation. No issue more directly demonstrated the essential hypocrisy of Japanese rule in Korea than the requirement, enforced beginning in the mid-1930s, that Korean “subjects” of the emperor pay respects to Shintō spirits at the various Shintō shrines that had been built in Korea by that time. These shrines (Korean: shinsa) originally had been installed for Japanese residents, and Koreans had not been required to participate in Shintō rituals. However, by the 1930s, especially with the Manchurian Incident (1931) and the military governorships of Generals Ugaki Kazushige and Minami Jirō, the “duties” of imperial subjects, including Korean subjects, came to include expressions of respect for the spirits of state heroes, including warriors, some of whom had actually participated in the subjugation of Korea in the 1894-1910 period.