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Contested Embrace
Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea
By Jaeeun Kim STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9961-4
CHAPTER 1
Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move
Colonial State, Migration, and Diasporic Nationhood
From the mid-nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century, northeast Asia experienced the dissolution of the historic Sinocentric regional order, the rapid rise and expansion of the Japanese Empire, and an unprecedented level of intraregional population movement and ethnic mixing. Over 3 million people migrated from the Japanese archipelago to Korea and Manchuria as colonial settlers (Watt 2009, 19–39), whereas at least 30 million moved from the Chinese mainland (south of the Great Wall) to Manchuria, sinicizing this historic frontier (Gottschang and Lary 2000). The competing state- and nation-building processes in the region profoundly shaped the regulation of these migration flows. These processes were further complicated by the migration of more than 4 million colonial subjects from the Korean peninsula to the Japanese archipelago and Manchuria (the disputed borderland between China and the Japanese Empire). By the end of the Pacific War, the more than 2 million "Koreans" in each of these two destinations together comprised approximately 15 percent of the entire "Korean" population.
Although the importance of colonial occupation for the rise of Korean nationalism has been well documented, the existing literature has long failed to grapple with the fact that the emergence of national categories and nationalism was coeval with the unprecedented level of population movement within the ambit of the expanding empire. A few recent pioneering studies have begun to recognize the critical importance of migration, diaspora networks, and the experience of exile to the construction of nationhood in Korea. Dispersal, collective suffering, homeland orientation, troubled relations with the host society, and identification with coethnic communities elsewhere — the five criteria for diaspora identified by Robin Cohen (1997) — have all been central to the imagination of the Korean nation. However, these recent studies have not paid systematic, sustained attention to the concrete practices of the colonial state, which enabled, channeled, and challenged emerging cross-border networks, national categories, and diasporic imaginations.
In this chapter I examine the role played by the colonial state in the formation of Korean "diasporic nationhood," defined broadly as the institutionalization and the imagination of the Korean nation as a community of common descent, history, and destiny, whose primordial identity is ruptured neither by the extinction of "its own" state nor by its separation from an ancestral homeland. Instead of analyzing Korean diasporic nationhood as an oppositional formation to colonial occupation, I begin by noting the striking "isomorphism" (Anderson 1991, 114) between the Japanese colonial state and Korean anticolonial nationalism in terms of their definitions of national collectivity. Studies of European overseas empires have employed a fruitful line of inquiry focusing on this isomorphism and analyzing the dialectic role that colonial states played in the formation of the national "geo-body" (Winichakul 1994) and anticolonial territorial nationalism (Breuilly 1993). The Korean case is different, however, in that both the colonial state and anticolonial nationalism defined the Korean nation in transterritorial terms. From various possible sources of this distinctive phenomenon, I focus on the development of the Japanese colonial state's official classification practices concerning its Korean subjects who were on the move.
The population classification practices of colonial states have attracted much attention in studies of European colonialism. Scholars have examined how these states, as "taxonomic states" par excellence (Stoler 2002), contributed to the making, unmaking, and remaking of various "peoplehood" identities (Lie 2004) of their heterogeneous populations. The institutionalization of customary courts run by indigenous power holders, for instance, involved transforming multiple, overlapping, and fluid local identities into mutually exclusive, exhaustive, and hereditary legal identities. The institutionalization of settler privileges constructed a sharp boundary between European settlers and native populations and obliged colonial states to deal with various categorical "abnormalities," such as the offspring of the sexual unions between settlers and natives, which blurred this boundary. The development of and debates over these classification practices were therefore deeply intertwined with the vicissitudes of the plural legal orders that characterized European colonial rule. These practices also left a deep and lasting imprint on postcolonial nation-building processes. The central question that informed these studies was how heterogeneous colonial populations, once "encaged" (Mann 1986) within a single imperial administrative unit, could gradually be molded into a nation in some contexts, yet not in others. The literature has limited its analytic scope mostly to the encounters and ethnic mixings that took place within the territorial boundaries of the colonies.
Such an analytic framework cannot adequately explain the legacy of colonialism in Korea, the largest and most important colony of Japan from 1910 until 1945. Unlike most European colonizers who encountered a patch of overlapping rules and a dizzying array of diverse human groupings in their conquered territories, the annexation of Korea brought Japan a relatively well-bounded territory that had been governed by a centralized monarchy (if one with limited bureaucratic power [Palais 1996]). The population was relatively homogeneous in terms of phenotype, language, religion, and cultural practices, despite the rigid status system in place. Further, the question of "mixed-blood" people posed few legal, administrative, or political quandaries comparable to those that arose in European empires for several reasons: the relatively short duration of imperial expansion limited the number of interethnic unions; the phenotypical similarity between colonizers and colonized and the dominant (albeit contested) racial ideology that underscored their affinity made the presence of these unions and their offspring relatively invisible and less disturbing; the broadly shared belief in patrilineality helped minimize ambiguity in sorting out the offspring of such unions. Therefore, the sites for population classification struggles that were so crucial in European overseas colonies were relatively unimportant in Korea.
But another vexing question did arise: how to deal with those who left the colony. As already mentioned, more than 4 million colonial subjects migrated from the Korean peninsula to the Japanese archipelago and Manchuria throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They became the focus of disagreements over who should be allowed to cross the internal and external borders of the empire, how they should be identified, with what rights and obligations they should be invested, and how such decisions should affect their ethnonational membership. These conflicts helped to construct, police, solidify, naturalize, and challenge the meaning and the boundary of "Korea" and the "Korean" people. Therefore, to understand population classification struggles in the Japanese Empire, as well as the long-term consequences of these for ethnic and national boundary making, we must look beyond the territorial unit of the colony.
I focus on the membership politics of migrants of peninsular origin in the first half of the twentieth century in three contexts: (1) Korean migrants to the Japanese archipelago; (2) Korean migrants in Manchuria before the Japanese occupation of the region in 1931; and (3) Korean migrants in Manchuria after the establishment of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state, in 1932. Although the well-established tripartite periodization of Japanese colonial policies in Korea (that is, military rule, cultural rule, and imperialization) informs my empirical analysis, my choice of these three cases is guided largely by my analytic and comparative interest. These three cases serve to highlight several important comparative axes that explain how and why the classification struggles over Korean migrants unfolded differently in these three cases and what the long-term consequences of these struggles were for ethnic and national boundary making. The differences in the place of settlement (the metropolitan mainland, the contested borderland, or the Japanese puppet state) and in the main ethnonational group with whom Korean migrants competed for scarce resources (Japanese or Chinese) determined, among other things, which ethnonational boundary (the internal or external boundary of Japanese nationals) became the focus of contestation; what types of challenges the colonial state faced from colonial subjects, indigenous populations, and other states involved; and to what extent and on what grounds migrants could negotiate their identity vis-à-vis the states involved. The different trajectories of transborder membership politics in these three cases highlight the primacy of geopolitics and the profoundly relational nature of the colonial state's engagement with its migrant populations.
But identifying the common patterns cutting across these three cases is as important as explaining their divergence. I argue that the state's efforts to control colonized populations moving beyond its territorial reach — often against the preference of migrants or the claims of rival states — provided an impetus for the growth of its infrastructural power. The ensuing development of various legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures, in turn, further helped the colonial state to enumerate, identify, and penetrate its increasingly mobile population, if with varying degrees of success. Moreover, such state efforts contributed to the construction, solidification, and naturalization of the category of "Koreans" by contributing to the development and circulation of various idioms of identification to designate people of peninsular origin. As migrants engaged with various state practices that regularly sorted, re-sorted, and treated them as "Koreans," they also came to experience their Korean identity as tangible and consequential. Their chances for migration, education, or employment; their rights to property, subsidies, or protection; and their subjection to the state's extraction or violence all came increasingly to depend on how state agencies defined and identified them, not only inside but also outside the colony. I argue, in summary, that the colonial state's engagement with migrants outside the peninsula provided, albeit unwittingly, a critical institutional scaffolding for the imagined community of the Korean nation, eventually conceived as transcending the colony's geographical boundary. Without considering this transborder dimension of Japanese colonial state building that occurred in the context of imperial expansion, massive migration, and competing nationalist projects, we cannot explain the genesis of Korean diasporic nationhood, not only as a core of the subjective self-understanding of exiled intellectuals but as an objectified legal and administrative identity imposed categorically on migrants from all walks of life.
The Emergence of the Legal, Bureaucratic, and Semantic Infrastructures of Nation Building
THE QUEST FOR THE KOREAN NATION
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, northeast Asia was rapidly and forcibly incorporated into the expanding Western interstate system. Japan arose as a new regional hegemon after defeating China and Russia in two wars. It launched its own imperial project vis-à-vis its neighbors, effectively transforming itself into one of the few non-Western empires. This dramatic macropolitical transformation in the region was accompanied by an equally dramatic epistemological shift. To survive in a world in which only "civilized nations" were allowed self-rule, state elites had to quickly learn and skillfully command the grammar of the modern nation-state system. Japan took the lead in translating a myriad of new concepts imported from the West (state, sovereignty, nation, race, society, population, and statistics, to name a few) and claimed to be the possessor of the new lingua franca of the region, legitimizing its imperial expansion with the lexicon of international law (Dudden 1998; L. Liu 1999). Nation was one of these new terms and indeed one of the most important terms. Japanese intellectuals coined two new words to translate nation, which were later imported to China and Korea. [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], read as kokumin in Japanese, contained two characters meaning state and people. [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], read as minzoku in Japanese, consisted of two characters meaning people and clan. The former emphasized state membership, whereas the latter an ethnic understanding of the nation (Doak 2007).
Each term gained popularity at different times in Japan, China, and Korea, depending on the success of modern state building and the specific conditions of nationalist mobilization in each country. The radical yet successful modern state building in Meiji Japan made the concept of kokumin tangible and resonant by the 1870s and 1880s: the Constitution, nationality law, military service law, national education, and civil registration system, among other state institutions, came to embody this new term (Doak 2007; Kyu H. Kim 2007). Minzoku, on the other hand, became a widely used and resonant term only after Japan began to build its multiethnic empire in the twentieth century (Weiner 1997; Oguma 2002). By contrast, Chinese revolutionary nationalists initially rallied around the concept of minzu (a term equivalent to minzoku) to rise against the Qing court, which came to be newly defined as an alien regime that had doomed the fate of the Han nation (minzu) (Chow 2001). However, once these revolutionaries overthrew the Qing court in 1911, the republican government tried to portray China not as a state of the Han minzu but as a state comprising five minzu, with the intention of discouraging the nationalist ambitions of other non-Han groups and molding them into loyal "state subjects," that is, guomin (a term equivalent to kokumin) of new multinational China. The subsequent Nationalist regime abandoned even this multinational vision and began to claim that, Han or non-Han, all residents belonged to the one unified Chinese nation, called Zhonghua minzu ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) (Dikötter 1992; Mullaney 2011, 21–25).
In Korea, neither kungmin (the Korean version of kokumin) nor minjok (the Korean version of minzoku) was widely used until 1905. Although political discussions about the future of the historic Korean polity proliferated in the emerging public sphere (Schmid 2002), participants primarily used old terms, such as people (inmin), commoners (paeksong), or brethren (tongp'o), to make sense of or performatively call into being a collectivity in which the ultimate sovereignty was to reside (P. Kwon 2007, 198). This lag in the epistemological shift reflects the tortuous modern state-building process in Korea. In the absence of the legal and administrative apparatuses of the modern state, the novelty of the new concept, nation, could be easily obscured.
The limitations of the New Household Registration System (Sinsik Hojok), enacted in 1896 by Royal Decree No. 61, illustrate this point well. The new registration system replaced the centuries-old triennial survey, conducted by the precolonial Choson court since the late fifteenth century (or possibly even earlier) (Hwang 2004). This triennial survey differed from a modern census in three key respects. First, the primary interest of the central state did not lie in acquiring precise knowledge about its populace but rather in securing revenues and personnel for military and corvée service. Actual taxation was thus managed through a quota system divided across counties, which left much room for negotiation, maneuvering, and abuse at the local level (Kyong-n. Kim 2003; Kunt'. Kim 2004). Second, the notion of equality among individuals vis-à-vis the state — a fundamental epistemological principle underlying the modern census — did not yet exist. Rather, the survey served to reinforce social distinctions, which were manifested, among other ways, in the (intentional) lack of a standard format. For instance, the most basic marker of identity, the name, was documented in varying forms according to the person's social status and gender. Finally, the horizontal boundary of state subjects remained unspecified. The territorial scope of this triennial survey implied that those living in the Korean peninsula, which was administered by centrally dispatched officials and mapped relatively thoroughly (Ledyard 1987; Schmid 2002, 200–204), were the subjects of the Choson court. However, the conditions under which an individual became or stopped being a Choson subject had not been specified in legal and administrative terms. The absence of substantial cross-border movement of commoners helped the state maintain this vague understanding of membership for centuries.
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Excerpted from Contested Embrace by Jaeeun Kim. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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