Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920-1925

Preface to the 2014 Edition

xi Preface to the 2014 Edition The research for Cultural Nationalism was done largely in the mid1970s , reflecting my training in political science theory based on structuralist understandings of nationalism’s antecedents. The book thus does not utilize the vocabulary that evolved in the late 1980s to describe nationalism as a constructed notion, nor was I aware, when writing it, of the uses for narrative theory. By the 1990s, a better understanding of intellectual and cultural history had come to dominate the field. If it had been written then, this would have been a different book. However, the work still has legs. Indeed, the debate in the 1920s between radical nationalists, who were informed by their enthusiasm for social revolutionary programs, and their older, moderate to liberal capitalist and “culturalist” colleagues, presaged the emerging global struggle between alternate paths to modernity. It is sometimes hard to remember that in the 1970s, leftist intellectuals in North America and Europe, in the absence of a true understanding of the Cultural Revolution , were still interested in Maoism and the great experiment under way in the People’s Republic of China. I wonder how the nationalist debates would be framed today, if we began our study from scratch without the context of the Cold War. Framing the discourse of the 1920s as the emergence of the decisive left-right fissure of the nationalist movement served to highlight and create the historical roots of what became a divided Korea after 1945. While not denying the pivotal role played by the joint occupation of the US and the USSR, historicizing the roots of Korea’s divided nationalist movement added depth to the discussion of how the combined leadership of Korea’s nationalist and socialist movements was effortlessly (or so it seemed) polarized in the crucial 1945–48 interregnum, before the emergence of separate Korean nation-states. Highlighting the early ideological divide between fundamentally different visions of a future Korean nation helped us understand the distortions in each Korean state’s master narrative deployed for legitimation purposes . In the mid-1970s, nationalist historians berated my choice of xii Preface to the 2014 Edition Yi Kwangsu’s essays as representative of a moderate nationalist strategy . Apparently Yi’s later vilification as a collaborator was enough to discredit his earlier writings, yet any serious examination of the debates at the time would find Yi in the middle of nationalist activity and speaking for a broad segment of activists. Moreover, working on this project at the height of Park Chung Hee’s Yusin repression made it difficult to discuss the breadth and quality of socialist discourse evident at the time, as I had picked subjects that did not fit into a highly politicized and narrowly framed nationalist history. Had I been in the North trying to do the same, I probably would not have been able to do this study at all. Happily, historical study in contemporary South Korea is no longer completely tyrannized by the crushing weight of political correctness or censorship. That said, in East Asia’s struggles over the narrative and memory of the Great Pacific War, we still see evidence of how politically controversial historical interpretation can be manipulated. While politicized nationalist historians continue their attempts to police history , they are unable to suppress the burgeoning interest in subjects considered out of bounds in the 1960s and 1970s. Over time I think this study helped stimulate an opening for the serious consideration of the intellectual, social, and even economic history of Korea under Japanese colonial rule. The field of colonial history greatly expanded after the late 1980s, both in South Korea and among non-Korean historians . And serious study of the period allowed us to qualify the 1945 break and see continuities once obscured by the politics of division. This study makes a number of assertions that still inform our understanding of the intellectual debates of the 1920s: • The fragmentation of the Korean nationalist movement was located in this decade and found its expression in the burgeoning publishing world of the early cultural-policy era. • The new Japanese censorship regime that came with Saitō’s reforms was much more porous than originally believed, and it allowed a much broader scope of ideological debate than might have been expected. • The sources of cultural nationalist inspiration lie in the intellectual activity of the Korean Enlightenment in the decades preceding annexation. • The cultural policy ultimately shaped the nationalist debate in favor of a more moderate, accommodationist line by selectively...