Text Beyond Context: Power, Discourse, and the Chŏng Kam nok in Colonial Korea

This article explores how the Chŏng Kam nok (Chŏng’s prophecies) persisted as a subversive text that helped Koreans envision the new world order when the Japanese empire sought to regulate belief systems and dominate public discourse about religion in colonial Korea. As a collection of handwritten prognostication texts that contain sources of political disinformation against the Chosŏn dynasty, the Chŏng Kam nok was widely read and transmitted by word of mouth across the country from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. The book foretold the fall of the Yi royal house and the founding of a new regime by a “true man” whose surname was Chŏng. When Chosŏn Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, however, that prognostic claim turned out to be false because it was the Japanese, rather than a man named Chŏng, who overthrew the dynasty. Although the Chŏng Kam nok’s predictions were wildly inaccurate, many Koreans still believed its radical message and reinterpreted it for their own political ends during the colonial period. Both Japanese authorities and Korean reformers vilified the Chŏng Kam nok as a superstitious tradition and suppressed its oral influence through various measures. Despite state persecution, the Chŏng Kam nok survived and provided discontented Koreans under colonial rule with a redemptive vision of the future and an ideological basis for their struggle for national independence. While previous studies have analyzed the textual meanings of the Chŏng Kam nok and examined its impact on peasant uprisings in premodern Korea, this article illuminates the complicated dynamics of colonial power and discourse surrounding the Chŏng Kam nok, a text that remained deeply embedded in the popular beliefs of the Korean people.