Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II

8. The Colonial and National Politics of Gender, Sex, and Family

c h a p t e r e i g h t · The Colonial and National Politics of Gender, Sex, and Family Gender power was not the superficial patina of empire, an ephemeral gloss over the more decisive mechanics of class or race. Rather, gender dynamics were, from the outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise. anne mcclintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995) His thoughts leaped back to all the fuss they had made over Japanese-Korean marriages during the occupation of [Korea by Japan]. Then such things weren’t the makings of slander and humiliation. Rather, they were thought quite natural by many, if not possibly even a mark of distinction. chQn kwangyong, “Kapitan Ri” (1962) In recent years some of the most incisive scholarship on the cultural politics of empire has emphasized that the management of families, gender, and sex was not of secondary concern for colonial and imperial powers, but was central to and implicated in the constitution and maintenance of larger structures of exploitation and domination. Thus, as Ann Stoler has put it, she has been concerned to interrogate “how and why microsites of familial and intimate space figure so prominently in the macropolitics of imperial rule,” a problematic that echoes with other feminist calls for attentiveness to why “gender dynamics were, from the outset, fundamentaltothesecuringandmaintenanceof theimperialenterprise.”1 Withregardtocolonialism in East Asia, while in their pioneering work on gender and Korean nationalismChungmooChoiandElaineH .Kimfocusprimarilyonthepostcolonialeffects 335 andconditionsof Koreannationalism,theyalsooperatefromanunderstandingthat Japanese colonialism and its successor, U.S. neocolonialism, were and are gendered and sexualized formations. Such works and a few earlier studies such as those by Frantz Fanon have helped us see that the construction of masculinity, the cult of domesticity , the regulation of sexual relations, and the production and maintenance of particular types of heterosexual families and the like—all these exceeded the supposed realm of the private, as well as the limited level of metaphor, and worked in a mutually constitutive relationship to race, class, and imperial domination.2 To be sure, they were tropes that helped authorize asymmetrical colonial and imperial power relations, as in the Saidian formulation of the masculine imperial power and the feminized Orient.3 But beyond that, colonial and imperial powers have worked toactuallyfashiongender,sex,andfamiliesinwaysthathavebeenenablingforcolonial and imperial rule. In one respect, such a perspective should sound familiar to historians of Japanese colonialism in Korea, for it is fairly well-known that one of the Japanese colonial government’s core policies for managing the Korean people in the interests of the war effort involved transforming the structure of Korean families. For example ,whiletheso-calledsOshikaimeicampaignisoftentranslatedasthe“name-changingcampaign ”4—thepointbeingthatthiswasamovementtoforceKoreanstoadopt Japanese-style names—it was also something more. Through sOshi kaimei the colonial government sought above all to regulate Korean families along the model of the Japanese-style household, which had one surname (shi) for all household members . In conventional Korean naming practices, women marrying into households had retained their patrilineal descent names (J. sei, K. sQng) and had not adopted their husband’s surnames after marriage. As a result, multiple descent names existed within the same domicile, while women’s patrilineal kinship ties complicated kinship bonds within and beyond the household. In order to execute the strategy of turning unified households into the basic unit of population management above the individual, the colonial government made it legally obligatory to establish one surname for an entire household. This was literally sOshi, “establishing household surnames .”AsKimYQng-dalhasstressed,voluntarismin“establishinghouseholdsurnames ” did not exist, because even if the head of a household neglected to register a new household surname (shi) during the six-month campaign period that began on 11 February 1940, his patrilineal descent name (sei) automatically became his household surname (shi) after 10 August 1940. At the same time, while Koreans experienced enormous pressure to adopt Japanized household surnames and given names, the law did not require them to do so.5 Thus sOshi kaimei entailed the legally 336 · koreans as japanese obligatory adoption of unified household surnames and the formally voluntary, albeit usually coerced, changing of names. Hence, to capture the intent of the policy it would be better to translate sOshi kaimei as “establishing household surnames and changing names,” rather than simply “changing names.” Some historians have also understood that while there was no shortage of those inJapanwhoadvocatedracialeugenics,strictsexualseparation,andendogamy,colonial policy in Korea had from the 1920s...