Tamna: A Radical New Korean Drama?

With thanks to reader Ezra de Leon for passing the news on, a new Korean drama called Tamna the Island (탐나는도다) appeared over the weekend, and for readers of this blog especially it is noteworthy in many important respects.

The most obvious is for having a foreigner in the lead role, a 24-year-old French model named Pierre Deporte, who has already appeared on Korean screens in the one-off male version of the Misuda (미녀들의 수다; Chatting With Beautiful Women) talk show. Here, he plays a 17th-Century Englishman who washes up on the shores of Jeju Island, and crucially he has some form of love relationship with the local female diver (haenyo/해녀) who finds him, played by teenager Jang Beo-jin (장버진). This is nothing short of revolutionary for Korean screens.

I haven’t found any confirmation of that relationship beyond this Korea Herald article unfortunately, but the first episode did feature an underwater kiss between them, albeit for the sake of giving him oxygen while hiding. But regardless of the ultimate form of their relationship though, Extra Korea! is correct in noting that it will probably be the first non-negative portrayal of a Western male on Korean television in a long time.* In addition, Javabeans, a rare non-tabloidish source on Korean dramas, also appreciates the drama’s reversal of gender roles:

…in Tamna, the women are hard-working and tough, at all ages from moms down to young girls. The men are painted a little more cartoonishly, but I think there’s potential for more than just comic relief in the setup that shows them as the weak ones in terms of the gender balance. They cower and defer to the ladies, who, while not quite Amazonian, have agency over their own lives and families. I hope the drama explores that dynamic a little more — they don’t have to make a big issue of it, but it’s a refreshing change.

Unfortunately I missed the first two episodes, which played on MBC at 7:55 on Saturday and Sunday night. But never fear, for in that above link a description of the first is provided that is so detailed it will surely take as long to read as it would have to have watched the episode itself!

Personally, I’ve been more than convinced to watch the 20-episode series in full, and I plan to download the first two episodes from the MBC website and watch them for myself before this Saturday. Admittedly, the descriptions of the “excruciating English” and “very silly, goofy” style of the drama would normally have put me off, but then I’ve recently learned that it’ s also true that “progressive” Korean directors have a habit of introducing radical social themes through comedy, and I’ve realized that I’ve probably been too dismissive of the genre previously. Certainly that may be reading too much into this particular drama though, so I’ll try to watch it with an open mind.

In the meantime, have any reader seen episodes 1 and 2 already? What did you think?

Update: My wife and I watched Episode 1, and we agreed that it was not without its charm: in particular Jang Beo-jin’s character was very cute, and difficult not to take an instant liking to. And I confess, it was difficult not to keep my eye off her lithe body also, which we got to see rather a lot of. Not to imply that the producers sexed her costume up by any means, but presumably a haenyo’s clothes would indeed have been more functional than modest, and so not without reason have generations of (male) Koreans grown up to images of scantily-clad Jeju divers!

Unfortunately though, the Jeju slang used in the drama was so thick and frequently used that explanations were given for mainland Korean speakers(!), and this rendered the drama very bad for studying Korean, which was my other main aim with watching it. I’ll still follow it via Javabeans then, but personally I’m going to switch to Brilliant Legacy (찬란한 유산) instead, which just finished with record ratings.

Update 2: Invariably a mere ploy to create interest in a drama, I usually never pay attention to rumors of its stars dating, but for what it’s worth Jang Beo-jin was rumored to be dating Im Joo-hwan (임주환) before Tamna aired. He’s the third member of its anticipated love-triangle with Pierre Deporte.

*See here for a positive portrayal of a Southeast Asian man on the big screen recently. Unfortunately those are equally rare, and ironically the movie also features the typical negative stereotypes of Western male English teachers.

(Image sources: Naver; Korea Herald)

Korean Sociological Image #14: How And Why Koreans Became The World’s Greatest Consumers

( Source )

If you’re reading this, then the news that Koreans now spend more and save less than Americans may well come as a bombshell.

I base that on the natural assumption that, as an English speaker interested in Korean sociology, most of your earliest and most-deeply held views on the subject were likely gained from English books. Nothing wrong with that of course, but in a society as rapidly changing as Korea, these can get dated rather quickly.

In turn, if one’s original views are not regularly updated by practical experience of the country and/or Korean-language sources, then they can easily become ossified. Alternatively, they can become hostage to those Koreans with English skills, whom – with no offense intended to the Korean journalists I very much rely on as a blogger – are generally well educated and more affluent than average Koreans, and undoubtedly have class-based agendas to the ways they present Korea to the outside world.

I realize that I’m very much projecting here. But then so fundamental has Korean’s high savings rate been to its postwar economic development, that I’d wager most readers shared my image of Koreans as relatively frugal (as a whole), either by reading that explicitly for themselves or by inferring it from other aspects of Korean sociology. Indeed, this ostensibly dry economic factoid had a profoundly gendered impact in the Korean context.

With apologies for the following necessarily simplistic account, a high savings rate was the natural consequence of the fact that, until the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998, Korea had the most “salarymen” in the world (despite the term being associated more with Japan). As salarymen generally worked at the same company for most of their lives, and made enough of an income and side-benefits to provide for their wives and children, then there was only a minimal welfare state to provide for them should the need arise: hence, these savings provided the safety net that the state didn’t (as well as investment funds for Korean business).

Which brings us to the graph on the right, which shows that the books were not wrong. It would have been very difficult for historiography to have caught up with the massive drop in 1999 however, which the Washington Post article describes as “the steepest savings decline in the developed world.” In hindsight though, somehow Korean society had to pay for its huge transition from having the most salarymen in the world in 1997 to having the most irregular, part-time workers in the OECD less than a decade later. And the money certainly wasn’t obtained by women entering the workforce either, as despite having the lowest rate of women’s participation in the workforce in the OECD in 1997 – so the potential certainly existed – it has resolutely stayed at the same level ever since (see here and #2 here), not unexpected given that women were explicitly targeted for lay-offs as part of the economic recovery.

But this process of “housewifization” is the natural corollary of a male breadwinner system, and has in fact occurred in every developed capitalist economy as women became more valuable as consumers than as factory workers: Korea is merely the most extreme example. Hence prominent 1960s feminist Betty Friedan’s thoughts on the impact on women themselves still have a certain poignancy for Korean women even today:

Why is it never said that the really crucial function…that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house… somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives…it would take a pretty clever economist to figure out what would keep our affluent economy going if the housewife market began to fall off (The Feminine Mystique, 1963, p. 197).

Friedan also pointed out that this consumption was a source of false autonomy, and that marketers in women’s magazines:

“…manipulated housewives into becoming insecure consumers of household products, by giving the housewife a ’sense of achievement’ to compensate her for a task that was ‘endless’ and ‘time-consuming’ (Oh & Frith*, 2006, p. 10).

( See here for a discussion of the above advertisement )

In this vein, one does not have to subscribe to a belief in, say, a vast patriarchal conspiracy or historical-determinism to acknowledge that housewifization – and the accompanying cultural changes – thus has capitalist imperatives. What makes Korea (and other “developmental states“) unique, however, was that from the outset economic growth was explicitly conflated with national-security and anti-communism by the Park Chung-hee (박정희) regime of 1961-1979. Hence upon reaching a consumer-driven stage of development, the Korean government promoted consumerism with a zeal more akin to what one would expect from a communist regime (see this series for an in-depth look at this).

Part of that was the slogan “Consumption is Virtuous” that I originally planned to use in the post title, which comes from a translation of a late-1970s Korean newspaper report I read at university, and indeed the original Korean – “소비가 미덕이다” – rings a very faint bell in my wife’s mind. And given that Korea’s intense economic nationalism and high tariff barriers largely remain, then this is very much a phase that Koreans haven’t really left yet either, as reflected in the common theme to both of the advertisements in this post and the following commercial, which as I put here as being their:

…hyperreal associations of apartments and modern appliances with modernity and civilization, [so intense as to be] a huge qualitative and mental leap beyond any such links in the minds of Westerners. Or rather a leap backward to 1950s and 1960s, because, as with so much about Korean society, perhaps the Western concepts of consumption during and immediately after suburbanization there are a much more appropriate parallel.

And, from this related post, an apt demonstration of the fact that changing social mores are often difficult to disentangle from the capitalist imperative to create false needs for new products:

On that note, I accept (again) that the above is a very simplistic account of the history of the Korea economy, and if you’re after a more detailed economic discussion of this news about the savings rate specifically, then the comments to this post are a good place to start. I also accept that Koreans by no means consume to the extent that they do simply because of government policies, and so by all means read the additional reasons and examples mentioned in the Washington Post article. To which I would add this post and the following article from an old Korea Herald I’ve scanned, which explain why Koreans continue to buy so many large cars despite living in one of the most mountainous, densely-populated, best-served with public transport, and smallest countries in the world:

Consider also this excerpt from p. 103 of Social Change in Korea, published in early 2008:

Back in the 1980s, owning a car – any car – was a status symbol. Now, size matters. Among the sedans sold before 2000, there were more subcompact or compact cars than mid-size or larger models. Since then, mid- and full-sized sedans have come to occupy a greater market share than smaller ones. Only 16.3% of the sedans sold in 2006 (as of July) were smaller models, as compared to Japan’s 61.2%, Italy’s 55.3%, Britain’s 52.1% and Germany’s 23.3%. The United States is the only nation among car-manufacturing countries that sells a smaller proportion of small cars than Korea (emphasis added).

Considering the surge in oil prices at the time that would have been written, and the travails of the US car industry just a little later, then this is probably no longer the case, and an apt symbol of Koreans displacing Americans as the “avatars of consumerism gone mad.”

In hindsight though, this shift is less of a surprise and more the logical culmination of Korea’s particular path of capitalist development. Unfortunately, like the Washington Post noted, is also part and parcel of a society currently under extraordinary stress, as is Korea’s steadily deteriorating economy. But one wonders when Koreans will realize that they can no longer afford to fritter their money away on mere status symbols.

(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)

_____

*Oh, Hyun Sook. and Frith, Katherine (2006) “International Women’s Magazines and Transnational Advertising in South Korea”, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, Jun 16, 2006.

Korean Sociological Image #4: Where do Korean Politicians Come From?

Apologies for the small size, but if you can see the pink and orange blobs for Korean politicians that were originally civil servants or in the military respectively, then you get the idea.

The graph is from this article in the Economist magazine, which asks the question of why professional paths to the top vary so much, but unfortunately only mentions South Korea when it says…

Countries often have marked peculiarities. Egypt likes academics; South Korea, civil servants; Brazil, doctors (see chart 2). Some emerging-market countries are bedevilled by large numbers of criminals, even if this doesn’t usually show up in their ‘Who’s Who’ records.

…yet is no less fascinating for all that. If I reluctantly confine my brief discussion to South Korea here though, then that predominance of civil servants among Korean politicians should be no surprise to anyone familiar with its Twentieth Century history (see here and here), and I’d expect to find much the same in other postwar “developmental states” also, particularly Japan that is their model and the former colonial power of most.

But of course their importance goes back much further than that (see here), as indeed it does in China, which has historically provided Korea with many governmental and political models to emulate. Hence the Economist is quite correct in painting Chinese Communist Party officials with (literally) the same brush also, for despite their modern ideological labels they are in many senses merely performing what are really quite timeless roles.

Other than that, I confess to being surprised at the number of politicians with military backgrounds, even though I’ve written a great deal about the pervasiveness of military culture in Korean daily life. One shouldn’t make too many generalizations from so little information though, and so I’d hesitate to make any links between the low numbers of politicians that were formerly lawyers and Korean legal culture also, although I’m certainly tempted!

(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)

Korean Sociological Image #3: From Asian to Caucasian

If you weren’t aware of it previously, then learning about the pressure Korean women are under to have cosmetic surgery for the sake of getting jobs certainly makes you less judgmental about it. Here are two quick excerpts on the subject from this excellent article from The Independent, which I found via this article about the cosmetic surgery component to Korea’s recent drive to become a hub for medical tourism.

First, from the introduction:

The patients crowding the waiting rooms of plastic surgeons in upmarket neighbourhoods such as Apgujeong want jobs with industrial conglomerates such as Samsung or LG. They are rushing to clinics for chieop seonghyeong or “employment cosmetics,” surgical procedures designed to improve a job seeker’s chance of being hired.

Ahn Yun-Seon is a typical candidate. A 21-year-old economics student, she has a job interview scheduled for early May. Last week she spent 1 million won (£538) for surgery on her gums and ears. She hopes to get a job in a bank. “Female bank employees must wear their hair tied back,” she said. “It’s important to have nice looking ears and a good smile.”

And then the conclusion:

Parents in Korea, especially in Seoul, spend a fortune on their children’s education and often go deep into debt to secure them a place at a top university. Knowing the sacrifices their parents have made, many young Koreans are prepared to go to extremes in search of a good job.

“People doctor their CVs and the photos they send to employers,” said Lee Ho-Jeong, who graduated from Hanyang University. “Doctoring their faces is the logical next step, especially when people are scared that they won’t get hired.”

But much more curious than the demand, is its manifestations in Korean women’s choices of cosmetic surgery operations, for they tend to plump for (no pun intended) – double-eyelid surgery, the shaving down of high cheekbones, Romanizing of noses, and so forth – all of which have the effect of making one’s face look much more Caucasian than Mongoloid (East Asian). And place those choices in the context of an East Asian mania for light skin also, then when one sees the image above (source: Scoubi), an advertisement for this cosmetic surgery clinic in Busan, then it’s difficult not to conclude that Korean women have Caucasian ideals of beauty, as I argued in this post in April last year.

Naturally that post aroused quite a *cough* heated debate in the comments section, not least from Korean women themselves, and to be fair I now acknowledge the historical role that, for one, light skins have played as a sign of the non-farming, indoor elite (albeit not just in Asia). And also the fact that I was strongly influenced in my original opinions by seeing such things as an abundance of Caucasian models in Korean advertisements, and that so many Korean cartoon characters tended to look Caucasian also, whereas in reality “Caucasian ideals of beauty” are only one of a host of factors responsible for each (see here – scroll down a little – and here respectively).

But as Michael Hurt wrote in 2005, arguments that modern ideals of appearance are merely extensions of historical associations of light skin and so forth, must confront the:

…big, fat, white elephant in the room that is America and the West. You have to consider how having white skin here in Korea is not simply a matter of lightness anymore, of being a sign that one doesn’t have to work outside in a field. The relative pallor of one’s skin is now inevitably linked to notions of civility and class that are also reflected against the very real presence of white people, who are not surprisingly, positively associated with notions of civility and class.

But which has been notably absent from counter-arguments that I’ve heard so far. So although I’m always open to changing my mind, and think I have a pretty good record on this blog for admitting when I’ve been mistaken and/or changing my mind upon hearing new evidence, until someone actually addresses that point at all then I’ll continue to believe that “Caucasianness” is a very strong, albeit usually subconscious and/or indirect, influence on modern Korean women’s cosmetic surgery choices. But by all means, if you disagree then please try and prove me wrong!

Update: Turns out, this post led to some lively discussion on this K-pop blog, even though the first image wasn’t loading properly at the time!

(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)

Where do Ajosshis Come From? Part 3: Manchukuo and The Militarization of Daily Life in South Korea

 

( Movie poster for “The Longest 24 Hours,” (기다리다미쳐, 2007), a lighthearted look at military service from the perspective of conscripts’ girlfriends; also known as “Crazy4wait.”  Source )

It’s been quite a while, so to remind readers, in Part One of this series I argued that a virtual gender apartheid existed in modern Korea, with women excluded from economic and political life here to an extent much more reminiscent of Middle Eastern countries than what one would expect in a modern liberal democracy. If that sounds like mere hyperbole to new readers, then sure, it probably would to me too(!), but by all means examine the evidence given there, to which I would now add that Korea has the lowest number of working women of all developed countries also, and that spousal rape isn’t even a crime here (see #2 here).

How to explain this? Well, naturally many specific elements of Korean women’s disadvantaged position in Korean society are no great mysteries: decades of salaryman male-breadwinner forms of employment for instance, explain a great deal about the lack of women in senior positions in companies (a parallel is how the Cultural Revolution four decades ago resulted in an “intellectual skills gap” that still affects the Chinese economy), and deeply hierarchical and sexist Neo-Confucianism has had a profound influence on Koreans’ worldviews, even extending to how men’s and women’s bodies are perceived and valued differently, and from which it is no great leap of the imagination to see echoes of in – amongst other things -  the widespread use of doumi (도우미) or female “assistants” and scantily-clad “narrator models” (나레이터 머델) here to sell mundane household items or open even the humblest of new stores and restaurants respectively.

( With apologies to Michael Hurt for the use of the top image, but like he says, despite their ubiquity most doumi are embarrassed by their jobs and very reluctant to have their photos taken; after half an hour of looking (in Korean!), this is the only similar one I could find. Bottom image taken from here)

But both those and many other factors commonly cited are by no means confined to Korea, and while going into greater detail would undoubtedly tease out plausible reasons why Korean women are worse off than, say, their counterparts in Japan or even China (hardly well-known for gender equality in themselves), here I am more concerned with the systematic nature of women’s exclusion in Korea. Ergo, however cliched it sounds, this series is all about seeing the forest rather than the trees.

With that in mind, based on my readings of especially Kwon (2001) and Moon (2005) and on my own nine years’ experience of the militarism that is still inherent to many Korean institutions (especially schools) in particular, then I laid the blame for that exclusion squarely on the continuation of and widespread public acceptance of the universal male conscription system, and all that that entails: nothing else seems adequate to explain so widespread and pervasive a phenomenon.

Again, that may well sound somewhat exaggerated at first: after all, South Korea is by no means the only country in the world to have conscription, and while I’d venture that a cross-country comparison would undoubtedly demonstrate at least a tendency towards lower levels of women’s empowerment in those countries that had it, that the “feminist paradises” of Sweden and Norway also have it, for instance, shows that any link would by no means be clear-cut. But then for most of the brief history of South Korea the military has had a uniquely pervasive role in society, one not revealed by any casual comparisons with other military regimes, and this really needs to be fully appreciated and understood before some of my more outlandish sounding claims about the effects of conscription on gender roles here can be assessed objectively. Hence, while it will take us far in time and space from what would normally come under the rubric of “Korean gender issues” – and which explains the 9 month hiatus, for unfortunately my beginning to write the series coincided with my wanting to examine more “traditional” aspects of that subject – I realized that the Korean military itself needed to be studied first, and so Part Two was about its origins in the Japanese colonial state, again much greater in size, scope and ambitions than a simple conflation with its European and US counterparts would suggest.

This post continues where that left off, focusing on the short-lived Japanese colonial state of Manchukuo (Manchuria region, 1932-1945), which eventual nreturnees to Korea among the  720,000 Korean immigrants there (from 1932-1940) and a sizable proportion of the South Korean bureaucracy, armed forces, and police of the 1950s and 1960s had some first-hand experience of living in and working for. In particular, Manchukuo was where president Park Chung-hee (1963-1979) above (source) spent most of his formative years as an officer in the army (even going so far as to sign an oath of loyalty to it in his own blood), and, as we shall see, is what he would effectively recreate in South Korea in the 1960s and 70s.

Korea’s Wild Wild West?

( Source )

Okay, first the big picture:  what were Japanese motives in occupying what was to become Manchukuo? Well, primarily because it greatly expanded the Japanese imperial empire, still much smaller, weaker, and younger than its European and American counterparts as explained in Part Two. But more practically speaking, it also provided:

• A bridgehead for the invasion of China, well connected by rail and road links to Korea even before the 1930s
• A buffer-zone between the USSR and both the more developed and crucial colony of Korea, and indeed there would be several clashes between the two on the Machukuo border in the late 1930s
• An important source of particularly mineral resources in its own right, without which the later invasion of Southeast Asia wouldn’t have been possible
• And finally, an escape valve to ease Japanese (and Korean) domestic agrarian population pressures and poverty, exacerbated by the depression.

( The Prewar Expansion of the Japanese Empire. Source )

The 2008 movie The Good, The Bad, The Weird (좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈) in the poster above happens to be set there, and by all accounts it is fun to watch, but unfortunately its depiction of life there in the 1930s as Korea’s version of the Wild West is probably exaggerated at best. While it’s true that the Chinese Warlord Era as a whole is not exactly well known for the stability or internal coherence of its various regimes, and that things would have been quite chaotic around the period when warlord Zhang Xueliang withdrew his forces from the region and ceded it to the elite Kwangtung Japanese Imperial Army after the Mukden Incident of September 18 1931, that strategic retreat was largely dictated by forces beyond his control, such as Chiang Kai-Shek being unable to provide assistance. In fact, his regime was far more coherent than most of that era, being able to effectively wipe out opium-trafficking and internal corruption in the previous decade for instance. Moreover, much of the state bureaucracy was bequeathed to the new Japanese colonial state, and as soon as April of 1932, it was one of the most controlled, regimented regimes in Northeast Asian history.

Don’t worry if that was all above your head: suffice to say that Manchukuo state organs were in many senses grafted onto the preexisting ones of Zhang Xueliang’s regime, but with the crucial difference that recent events meant that there were no longer any substantial non-state actors like a business or landed class to impede them in instilling notions of loyalty and nationalism in their new pool of workers and soldiers.

And whom were by no means unwilling victims of the process either. For example, writing about the Korean “Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under the Japanese Imperialism (sic)” in 2006, Michael Breen said:

The Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under the Japanese Imperialism (sic) announced on Monday that 83 of the 148 Koreans convicted of war crimes were victims of Japan and should not be blamed….

[But they] were not tried as soldiers or POW camp guards who had done their jobs. They were tried for over-zealousness, for decisions and actions over and above the call of duty. They were the thugs, the brutes, the monsters, the most horrible of the ”horrible people”….By what authority does the Truth Commission have to remove their individual responsibility with its class act defense of nationality? Such skewed morality led to the crimes against the lowest class– ”prisoners” — in the first place. People who committed crimes against humanity are not innocent by virtue of being Korean any more than Japanese who brutalized Koreans are innocent by virtue of being Japanese.

….[the Truth Commission] should recognize that the idea that Koreans were all unhappy citizens of imperialism bar a few collaborators is a myth. Koreans were Japanese citizens, and it did not occur to many to support the allies against their own country. Ask anyone who lived in that period, and they will tell you that the political correctness of the post-colonial generation is distorted.

They will also tell you that from 1937-42, Koreans in the Japanese army were volunteers — who included King Kojong’s son, an army general — and that large-scale forced conscription only started in 1944. The Commission should know that those rounding up comfort women were Koreans and those torturing people in police stations were mostly Koreans. Koreans, in other words, were more ”horrible” to Koreans in many cases than the Japanese were. The solution to this dilemma is to accept the notion of individual responsibility.

And according to Suk-Jung Han in his July 2005 Japan Focus article “Imitating the Colonizers: The Legacy of the Disciplining State from Manchukuo to South Korea,”  similar senses of citizenship were instilled in new Manchukuo citizens by means of:

• State-Sponsored Confucianism
• Mourning Rituals and Ancestor Worship
• State-foundation Gymnastics
• Anti-Communist Rallies

A combination which will probably sound very familiar to those of you even with just the most basic of knowledge of South Korea’s history. Indeed, as Han’s article is only 14 pages long and very readable in its own right, rather than provide a detailed discussion of what you many of you will go on to read there regardless, it’s probably wiser if I just provide some excerpts here, starting with:

The legacy of Manchukuo can be seen in numerous “naturalized” events in South and North Korea. So-called “national ceremonies,” such as paying a one minute silent tribute to the war dead in front of monuments, marching, lectures on the “current emergency situation”, movie-showing, poster making, student speech contests, rallies, big athletic meetings, and so on- largely related to anti-communism, and all too familiar to South Koreans for several decades from the 1950s- were originally national events of Manchukuo in the 1930s.

For state-sponsored Confucianism, some crucial clues as for how South Korea has come to be known as “More Confucian than China”:

South Koreans grew accustomed to the Confucian ideology of loyalty and filiality (choong-hyo) stressed by Syngman Rhee’s regime (1948-1960) as well as Park Chung Hee’s (1961-1979). The post-liberation ideology was different from the Confucianism of the Chosun dynasty, which had been not only the official ideology but also the basis of ethics and cosmic philosophy. The former was less intense than the latter. But Confucianism was still influential in the post-liberation era. Important Confucian concepts, like loyalty to the nation, were instilled in students. It was Manchukuo that energetically patronized Confucianism. Manchukuo differed from mainland China where Confucianism was severely attacked by the May 4th intellectuals and their heirs. Also, Manchukuo differed from Japan in the 1930s when Shinto was deployed as the state religion.

About the importance of mourning rituals and ancestor worship, which might sound outlandish to many outside of Korea, but intimately familiar to anyone who’s ever experienced either of the two biggest occasions of the year Seollal or Chuseok in an actual Korean home, and learned first-hand just how morbid they can be, at least symbolically:

Although monuments for the war dead began to supplement Confucian shrines as the site of important ceremonies, the mourning ceremony, either for ancestors or soldiers, was long essential to Confucian practice inside and outside the home. In April, 1935, officials and army officers attended a great mourning ceremony (zhaohunji, shokonsai), held at the newly built monument in the capital. The assembly, opening ceremony, invocation of the spirits, enshrining of the dead, offering of food, and tributary speech solemnly proceeded. This was simply one example of numerous mourning ceremonies of subsequent years, particularly after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war.

The mourning ceremony for dead officials, policemen and soldiers was an important an event, next only to one worshipping Confucius. Although prewar Japanese society also had ceremonies for the war dead at Yasukuni shrine, they were not equal to those in Manchukuo. In Japan, all the war dead (except those who died in hospitals, rather than at the front) were enshrined at Yasukuni. Ceremonies for all were held there at fixed dates. In Manchukuo, by contrast, ceremonies were held at numerous places and at various times. Each ministry of the central government, central police board, army district, province, and county office organized a committee for constructing monuments. Monuments and plazas for the war dead were built across the nation.

(Offerings of food and drink at a temporary mini-shrine devoted to the spirits of dead ancestors, to whom I and all other male members of the family must bow dozens of times in ceremonies on Seollal and Chuseok at my parents-in-laws’ house. Jolly occasions they ain’t, and quite frankly I’d much rather (literally) enjoy the former especially with dragon dances, fireworks and street festivals in Taiwan or China instead. Source)

For state-foundation gymnastics:

Most middle-aged and older South Koreans remember Jaegun gymnastics from the 1960s. “Jaegun chejo shiijak (let’s start Jaegun gymnastics), one, two, three, four!” The song was broadcast in the early morning across the country in the 1960s following Park’s military coup. [9] Most family members woke up to this song-like command and practiced Jaegun gymnastics, still practically asleep. Jaegun, meaning reconstruction (of the state or nation), was the catch phrase of Park’s regime. Several other songs about Jaegun were written and propagated for citizens and students to memorize. The model for Jaegun gymnastics was the Jianguo (state foundation or construction of the nation) gymnastics of Manchukuo. Jianguo and Jaegun had the common Chinese character of foundation or construction (“jian” in Chinese, “gun” in Korean). Jianguo was the essential word in Manchukuo, from “Jianguo spirit”, “Jianguo celebration day” to “Jianguo University” and “Jianguo exercise.” Hence, construction and reconstruction were the key words for Manchukuo and South Korea.

And still as big a part of the collective Korean psyche that there are still many references to it in popular culture, even that explicitly catering to young people that would barely remember it, if at all. One recent example of which was in a commercial for an eyeliner, as I discuss here:

Also of note:

In Manchukuo, exercise and sanitation were important fields in which the regime invested. There were special weeks of exercise and street cleaning. During this time, the human body came under the jurisdiction of the state. One month after its foundation, the regime prepared an athletic meeting….Imitating the German fascists, the rulers of Manchukuo were interested in the physical training of citizens….Through sports, Manchukuo sought international approval, for which the regime was so thirsty.

This importance of this will become apparent in later posts when I discuss Korea’s population control policies of the 1960s and 1970s, only marginally less rigorously pursued and personally invasive than their Chinese counterparts, and a good illustration of which is the withdrawal troops from the DMZ at the height of tensions with North Korea in order to implant IUDs and perform (voluntary, but rather highly encouraged) sterilizations on citizens in remote rural areas and islands. No, really.

( “Crimson Dawn” by Spargett. Source )

And finally, for anti-Communist rallies:

South Koreans became sick and tired of anti-communist rallies (bangongdaehue) or “Great gathering for destroying communists” (myulgongdaehue) under Syngman Rhee’s and Park Chung Hee’s regimes. Old folks and housewives were led by officials of city districts and neighborhood districts, and students led by teachers gathered in great stadiums and shouted anti-communist phrases. Again, the model was Manchukuo. In prewar Japan, of course, there was mass mobilization (through such organizations as the Military reservist association and National youth association). After the Manchurian Incident, in particular, jingoism spread among news media, magazines, movies, and literature. According to Louise Young, however, neither government repression nor market pressures can entirely explain the enthusiasm in the 1930s. It was voluntary. Journalists of Asahi or Mainichi supported the army, because they had conviction (Young 1998: 79). Also, the main enemy in Japanese society was not necessarily communist Russia (although it may have been for the Japanese army). Hence, there were no anti-communist rallies in Japan. By contrast, there were myriad anti-communist rallies in Manchukuo. Also, Manchukuo had many more occasions for rallies. Manchukuo was a pioneering place of maximum mobilization, summoning people day and night. The fascist gatherings of Germany and Italy flowed to both North Korea and South Korea through Manchukuo.

Hell, for all its anti-Japanese rhetoric, even at least one of South Korea’s national holidays (until 2005) ultimately comes from Manchukuo too:

In 1936, “tree-planting day” was added. There were other celebrations such as, those for Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, the entry of Japanese soldiers to Manchuria, the visit of Japanese royal family members, and the abolition of Japanese privilege, even one for the founding of the post office.

For a little more on the national-security mania of South Korean military regimes, see here, but that will be the main topic of *cough* a much bigger Part Four.

But let me stop this post here, for Han’s section on “Inheritors in the 1970s,” in which South Korea sounds like a carbon copy of all the above, really needs to be read in its entirety, and my amount of copying and pasting has already become a little excessive. Apologies for that, and I don’t like looking lazy either, but I confess that the question of how to summarize an article that most readers would go on to read regardless proved such a stumbling block for me that it’s taken me nine months to return to it. And that was despite the fact that the next post in the series will be about something I read in 1997 which – in no uncertain terms – was such a revelation to me that without having done so I literally wouldn’t be in Korea or even East Asia today too, let alone have started this blog (but hence its title). Better then, to be a little lazy in this one post then to procrastinate any longer!

( Image by yewenyi (文意). This monument is in Democracy Park, Busan, which I talk more about here )

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