Wartime Mobilization in Late Colonial Korea: Enforcing Everyday Use of the ‘National Language,’ 1937-1945

Korea Colloquium
Co-sponsored by Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies
 

Kyu Hyun Kim
Associate Professor of Japanese and Korean History, Department of History, University of California at Davis

Kyu Hyun Kim is Associate Professor of Japanese and Korean History at University of California, Davis. He holds a PhD degree in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University specializing in modern Japanese history. He was an Edwin O. Reischauer Postdoctoral Fellow, and a recipient of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science Grant and other fellowships from Japan and Korea. He is the author of The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Harvard East Asia Center Publication, 2008). His second book manuscript Treasonous Patriots and Other Supposed Impossibilities: Japanese Colonialism, Wartime Mobilization and the Problem of Korean Identity, 1937-1945, is currently under review at Harvard Asia Center. Kim has authored numerous articles on modern Japanese history, Korean colonial experience, Japanese popular culture and Korean cinema. His forthcoming projects include an innovatively designed study of the cinematic world of Park Chan-wook and a cultural history of the Japanese bodies expressed through the medium of graphic literature in the postwar High Growth Period. He is Academic Adviser and Contributing Editor to www.koreanfilm.org, the oldest English-language online resource devoted to Korean cinema.

Chaired by Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University

Abstract:
This presentation is derived from my second book project exploring the imperial subjectification (hwangminhwa or kōminka) policies in late colonial Korea (1937-1945) and Korean responses to them. The book challenges the conventional view that imperial subjectification policies were radical assimilation processes that sought to eliminate the Korean ethnic identity. Rather than being absorbed into the Japanese identity, the colonized Koreans engaged in a series of complex negotiations and engagements with the demands of wartime mobilization, including what we might call “bargaining strategies,” to reconfigure the meaning of being a “Korean” in the Japanese empire.   It examines various features of the imperial subjectification policies, including enforcement of Shinto shrine worship, implementation of volunteer soldier program and eventually conscription of all eligible Koreans, infiltration of the everyday lives of the colonized Koreans by ideologies and practices of imperial patriotism and the notorious “surname change” program that sought to integrate Korean and Japanese family systems. 

This presentation will focus on one of the wartime mobilization policies, the drive for everyday use of “national language” (kugŏ sangyong or kokugo jōyō) in late 1930s and early 1940s. Unlike the conventional view of this drive, it was never designed to “abolish” Korean language.  Infiltration of the local, everyday and private realms of the lifeworld of the colonized Koreans by the colonizer’s language generated complex and variegated responses from them, some Koreans taking advantage of educational opportunities provided by this initiative in order to obtain social mobility.  Moreover, despite the obvious hegemonic position assigned to the Japanese language, linguistic conditions of colonial Korea remained bilingual or even hybrid.   In the end, the colonial regime could neither make the “national language,” i.e. Japanese, into an everyday language of the lifeworld of the colonized, nor establish it as a shared language of a multiethnic empire, in other words, something other than an “ethnic language” of the Japanese people.  As we can see in the case of the persecution of the Korean Language Association (Chosŏnŏ Hakhoe) in 1942, the Japanese colonial regime’s failure in fact reinforced, rather than weakened, the status of Korean language as a signifier of Korean ethnic identity.

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Generously supported by the Young-Chul Min Memorial Fund at the Korea Institute, Harvard University