Imperial Lessons: Discourses of Domination and Dissent in the 1929 Kwangju Student Protests by Deborah Baxt Solomon A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Leslie B. Pincus, Chair Professor Hitomi Tonomura Assistant Professor Micah L. Auerback Assistant Professor Kiyoteru Tsutsui Associate Professor Henry H. Em, New York University © Deborah Baxt Solomon 2009 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations…………………………………………………………….iii Introduction……………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter One “An Extremely Small Problem of Hurt Feelings”: The Initial Outbreak of Street Protests in 1929 Kwangju……………………..19 Chapter Two Rumors and Manifestoes: The Spread of the 1929 Movement………….63 Chapter Three Intersections of Gender, Nationalism, and Protest……………………..108 Chapter Four 1943 and Its Discontents………………………………………………..150 Epilogue………………………………………………………………………..187 Appendix……………………………………………………………………….196 Selected Bibliography………………………………………………………….197 ii List of Abbreviations KKGJS Chōsen Sōtokufu Keimukyoku. Kōshū kōnichi gakusei jiken shiryō [Kwangju anti-Japanese student incident documents], repr. Nagoya, Japan: 1979.This document collection consists of documents collected by the Government-General in Korea’s Police Bureau and includes documents originally produced by the Academic Affairs Bureau, the department responsible for setting and enforcing curriculum standards and addressing school-related problems that arose on the Korean peninsula. Also included in this collection are reports related to the rise of Communist activity on the Korean peninsula in this period and its relationship to student protest, although the agency responsible for producing these documents is unknown. The documents contained in this volume were produced between 1929 and 1931, and report on activities from 1925-1930. The documents were compiled and printed as a collection in 1979. NKSSS [Chōsen Sōtokufu]. Nihon shokuminchi kyōiku seisaku shiryō shūsei (Chōsen hen) [Japanese colonial educational policy historical document collection, Korean edition], repr., Tokyo: Ryūkei Shosha, 1987-1991. This is a 69-volume set of documents covering a wide range of educational policy documents, policy debates, curriculum directives, etc., throughout Japanese colonization of Korea. It includes reprints of education laws drafted for the Korean peninsula. ZNK Chōsen Sōtokufu Gakumukyoku. Zenra Nandō Kōshū ni okeru naisenjin seito tōsō jiken no shinsō narabi ni kore ga sennai sho gakkō ni oyobashitaru eikyō [The Incident of Japanese and Korean Student Conflict in Kwangju, Southern Chŏlla Province, and its Effects on Various Schools within Korea], Chōsen Sōtokufu Gakumukyoku [Keijo]: 1930. This was a confidential report prepared and circulated within the Government-General of Korea Academic Affairs Bureau Office in January 1930, assessing the state of Korean student unrest on the Korean peninsula. Contains a number of detailed reports of the initial student protests of November 1929. iii KMHU Chosen Sōtokufu. Kankoku minzoku kaihō undō shiryō shoshō, Volume 10. This volume contains police records compiled by the Chōsen Sōtoku- fu Police Bureau, documenting the arrests, interrogations, and later court sentences of activists arrested in the early 1930s for anti-Japanese activity. The majority of the cases contained in this volume are related to other types of anti-Japanese unrest. One detainee, however, was arrested based for Kwangju-student-protest-related activism, and I have used the police transcripts of her interrogation in Chapter Three. KHTU Yi Ki-hong, and An Chong-ch’ŏl. Kwangju haksaeng tongnip undong ŭn chŏn’guk haksaeng tongnip undong iŏtta [The Kwangju Student Independence Movement was a nationwide independence movement] Kwangju, Korea: Hyangjisa, 1997. This book contains both extensive oral interviews with Yi Ki-hong, a 1929 Kwangju student protest participant and also commentary and secondary research by An Chong-ch’ŏl. Therefore, I have treated portions of it as a primary source, and portions of it as a secondary source. SMP Yokoyama Yoshiko, Pyonyan kensō arugamama: ai wa minzoku o koete [Spring memories of Py’ŏngyang: Love transcends ethnicity]. Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 1994. This is a memoir written about a Japanese teacher’s experiences moving to P’yongyang in 1929 and includes first- hand accounts of Kwangju student movement activity. KKSILP Kwangju Kobo/Sǒjung/ Ilgo Palshimnyŏnsa1920-2003 [Kwangju Higher Normal/ Western Middle/ First High School 80-Year History 1920-2003], Kwangju, Korea: Kwangju First High School, 2003. This is a school history that was produced by the school itself whose staff gave me a copy in 2006. It includes charts of school administrators, and a full history of both the school and the commemorative ceremonies held each year to honor participants in the both the 1929-1930 and 1943 Kwangju student movements. iv Introduction The 1929 Kwangju Student Protests On the afternoon of October 30, 1929, on a train carrying students home from school in Kwangju to the nearby town of Naju in southwestern Korea, a fight broke out. According to Korean historian Pak Ch‟an-sŭng‟s account, the fight started when two male Japanese middle school students, Fukuda Shūzō and Matsuyoshi Katsunori, along with some of their friends, began harassing female Korean student Pak Ki-ok inside the train.1 Police records, newspaper articles, and eye-witness accounts concur that over the next several days, fights between Korean and Japanese students broke out every day on the trains to and from schools in the city of Kwangju, and in the train stations. When only Korean students were arrested and prosecuted by police for their involvement in the train and train-station brawls, local student groups organized a Kwangju-wide city protest on November 3, 1929. Korean students marched through the streets of Kwangju, fought with Japanese students and police, distributed anti-Japanese handbills, and, in certain instances, destroyed public property. Despite attempts by the Japanese colonial government to keep the protests from spreading, they were echoed by sympathetic protests in other schools in the region surrounding Kwangju and in other regions and lasted until March of the following year. Historians now estimate that over the course of the next several months, approximately 54,000 students from a total of 194 1 Pak Ch‟an-sŭng, Chŏnnam chibang ŭi sam-il undong kwa Kwangju haksaeng tongnip undong [The Southern Chŏlla region‟s March First Movement and the Kwangju Student Independence Movement], Chŏnam sahak [Southern Chŏlla Sociology], 9:0 (1995): 395- 396. 1 schools across the Korean peninsula participated in anti-Japanese student protests, resulting in prison terms for more than180 students in Kwangju alone.2 The student uprisings that began in Kwangju became the second-largest peninsula-wide anti-Japanese protests of the colonial period, second only to the March First Movement, which began ten years earlier on March 1, 1919. In this dissertation, I combine memoir and oral history with colonial-era documentation, such as Japanese government records and newspaper articles, to explicate the ways in which colonial Korean public protest was undertaken, narrated, and remembered by differently-positioned participants and observers. First of all, I connect tensions on the ground in southwestern Korea to larger trends in the Japanese empire as a whole, such as the emerging popularity of Marxist thought, and increased empire-wide mobility between the colonies and the metropole. The ways in which student groups formed and met in secret, the circumstances in which the initial fights broke out and the mechanisms by which protests triggered by a small scuffle between students on a train expanded into a nationwide movement, for example, all reflected the enormous transformation in public space in Korea created by new Japanese colonial practices. These practices, such as new and modern city planning, road building, school construction, and the laying of train tracks, profoundly influenced the face of public protest on the Korean peninsula. At the same time, the appropriation of public space that was central to the Kwangju student movement forced Japanese settlers and officials alike to confront and renegotiate the limits of their spheres of colonial social control. Second of all, I focus on how the Kwangju students themselves, through their own writings and in oral interviews, conceived of their identities both as Koreans and as 2 Ibid., 405. 2 Japanese colonial subjects. By 1929, the school system had begun to produce a large number of elite, highly-qualified graduates who were unable to find jobs commensurate with their skills and education level, who found themselves caught in the contradictions of a newly emerging colonial modernity. These graduates, especially those who had traveled to and spent significant time in Japan, were thus returning to their hometowns in places like Kwangju alienated and eager to organize students to rebel against what they saw as a fundamentally discriminatory system. The content of student protest manifestoes and other extant documentation reveals that the independent Korea that protesting students were fighting for was at times a fluid entity, a goal that was flexible enough to accommodate within it a range of subjectivities, ideas and objectives. I analyze the discursive metaphors by which student protesters chose