Anna Umeda, '27, Sociology, KI Undergraduate Research Assistantship, Summer 2025

This summer, I worked as a research assistant for Professor Si Nae Park on her research project that puts focus on the “Making of Korean Literature” and how the documentation of Korean literature in the late Choseon period influenced and shaped the current Korean classical canon.

Growing up in Japan where little was taught about the horrors of Imperial Japanese history, I felt a responsibiliy and duty to study it. Guided by this duty, I have researched on my own, taken classes that relate to Korean history, and participated in the Harvard Summer School in South Korea last year which had a profound impact on me: I would notice see lingering effects of colonial history in the architecture and cityscape but also a united and hopeful community that looked forward to promote Korean culture that was once suppressed by colonialism. This had made me interested in the pre-colonial history of Korea and the rich culture that flourished during the Choseon period. One of my main goals that I wanted to achieve through this research assistantship was to explore and learn more about colonial Korean history, late-Choseon period Korean culture, as well as the historical and social implications that the Korean language holds at the intersection of hangeul, classical Chinese script, and literature.

Using my fluency in Japanese and experience with sinography, my research consisted of transcribing old Korean and Japanese texts (which included old news paper articles, book collections, research papers, etc.) and compiling bibliographies using database sources such as National Diet Library, Library of Congress, and WorldCat.

While these sound simple enough on the surface, I faced challenges during the process of transcriptions. Depending on the piece of writing, especially those that were handwritten, it was challenging to identify and verify the exact hanja and Chinese character that was used. Furthermore, since a lot of the characters were those of old scriptures, it was difficult to find and align the exact modern equivalent character. There was a lot of trials and errors with searching for these old characters: guided by my knowledge in kanji, I would mix and match the different kanji components to eventually find the exact character. Even with the typed writing, the language styles of both Japanese and Korean texts were from several generations before that used old and traditional grammar and sentence structures that made it difficult to decipher and transcribe accurately.

Something that I found particularly interesting during my research was the different perspectives on Korea that were displayed by the Japanese settlers at the time. During my process of compiling bibliographies and listing out all the titles and authors of Korean books that were published, I started to see certain patterns of how Korea was described even in just the titles and subtitles of these books. For instance, there were a lot of articles and books that were authored by Hosoi Hajime (細井肇) that, while demonstrated deep interest and respect for Korean culture and literature, had an imperialist undertone that focused on the importance of Japan managing Korea. Specifically there were titles he published such as 『朝鮮問題の帰趨』 (“The Future of the Korean Problem”) and 『鮮満の経営 朝鮮問題の根本解決』 (“The Management of Manchuria and Korea: A Fundamental Solution to the Korean Problem”) that saw Korea as a “problem” that needed to be managed by the “solution” of Japanese control.

Experiencing and learning the research process, it was rewarding to see how my role and specialized research fit in like puzzle pieces into the bigger picture of how Korean literature has been (and is still being) constructed by social, political, and historical forces.