Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey

Notes

191 NOTES • • • • • • CHAPTER 1 A New Century and the End of an Era 1. The Tonghak movement’s charismatic founder, Ch’oe Cheu, had been executed in 1864. The religion had spread since the 1840s and stressed an eclectic mix of quasi-Christian , Buddhist, and indigenous beliefs. Central to the faith was the concept of innaech’on (God in Man); this included women, who worshiped with the men in Tonghak meetings, a radical departure from the strict segregation of the sexes that was characteristic of NeoConfucian ritual. In the 1890s Tonghak followers tried unsuccessfully to rehabilitate their martyred founder by petitioning Kojong directly. Kojong’s rebuff added to the economic and social discontent that lay at the roots of the rebellion of 1894. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Son Pyŏnghŭi, the religion’s third patriarch, changed the faith’s name to Ch’ŏndogyo (Church of the Heavenly Way) and aligned it with the growing nationalist movement. 2. Russia, France, and Germany jointly demanded cancellation of the lease on the Liaodong peninsula, which had been part of Japan’s spoils following its victory in the Sino-Japanese war. This action has come to be known as the Triple Intervention. 3. Kojong’s father, Yi Haŭng, is known to posterity by his court title, Taewŏn’gun. He controlled the government as an informal regent from 1864 to 1874 and promulgated a number of controversial reform measures intended to restore prestige and power to the throne. For an account of Taewŏn’gun’s rule, see Palais, Politics and Policy, 1975. 4. Han’gŭl is celebrated in modern South Korea with a national holiday. North Korea moved quickly to rename the alphabet as Chosŏn’gŭl to avoid the use of the “han” that appears in “Taehan minguk,” the official name of South Korea. Mixed script—the mixing of Chinese characters and Korean letters—is still used in the South, but Chinese is rapidly disappearing. North Korea eliminated the use of Chinese characters in 1949; see Schmid, 2002, pp. 256–260. 5. The quid pro quo was worked out in July in a secret agreement between Japan and the United States (the Taft-Katsura Agreement) before the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty in September. The English also renegotiated their alliance with Japan to acknowledge Japan’s rights for “guidance and control” in Korea. 6. Itö’s assassin, An Chunggun, has been elevated to the status of national hero in the post-colonial nationalist hagiography of South Korea. 7. The term Righteous Armies is of very old provenance in Korea. It was used to describe the irregulars mustered by local yangban during the Hideyoshi invasions in the 1590s. It could be more recently traced back to the “Protect the Righteous, Expel the Heterodox ” (wijŏng ch’oksa) advocates who opposed the opening of Korea during the debates in 1876; see Schmid, 2002, p. 30. And Chŏn Pongjun, leader of the Tonghak rebellion also styled his armies thus. CHAPTER 2 Colonial State and Society 1. Well over half of the entire GGK bureaucracy, local and central, was made up of Koreans. The proportion was higher for local administrative posts. In the central government in Seoul, Koreans made up 32 percent of the middle-ranking officialdom but only 18 percent of the highest-ranking posts. 2. The overwhelming majority of place names were rendered in Chinese characters. In these cases Japanese could use the Chinese and “read” them in Japanese pronunciation. The Japanese readings remain on many older maps where place names were rendered in roman letters. In Seoul and other cities new Japanese names replaced many traditional street names. 3. The capitol was finally razed in 1995. There had been a protracted debate about what to do with this huge structure. It was used as the first capitol of the ROK after 1948, and later it housed the Korean National Art Museum. Eventually public sentiment called for its removal and after a huge rally and ritual decapitation of the building (the removal of its cupola) on the fiftieth anniversary of Liberation (August 15, 1995), the building was demolished. 4. A poignant example of one such student returning and commenting on the contrasts between the metropole and Korea was written by Yi Kwangsu on a journey home from school in Tokyo. He left an account of such a trip in his essay “From Tokyo to Keijö (Seoul)” (Tokyo esŏ Keijö kkaji), Ch’o...