A History of Korea (76 page)

Realist depictions of the underbelly of modern life and of the sad, sometimes brutal struggles of common people had appeared in the early 1920s, most notably in the works of Hy
n Chin’g
n. But the late colonial period witnessed an intensified politicization of literature through an explicit engagement with pressing sociopolitical issues. This trend was exemplified by KAPF, the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation, an organization founded in 1925 to rally authors toward the theme of class consciousness and the finer points of Marxism and historical materialism. KAPF also reflected larger social trends toward leftist activism, as seen in the founding of the Korean Communist Party in 1925, in the attempt to unify nationalist movements under the leadership of socialist activists in the late 1920s, and in the increasingly hostile agitation of factory labor movements and peasant unions well into the 1930s. Revolutionary leftist influence extended to the realms of social criticism, theater, cinema, music, and the fine arts, but
had perhaps the most palpable impact on literature. The representative writer of KAPF was Yi Kiy
ng. After publishing several harrowing chronicles of struggling peasants in his short stories, Yi unveiled his great novel,
Hometown
, through serialization in the
Chos
n ilbo
newspaper from 1933 to 1934.
Hometown
chronicles the attempts by a colorful cast of villagers—in effect, Korea’s proletariat, given the relatively underdeveloped factory labor force—to adjust to the exploitative forces of early capitalism. It employs the ready tropes of proletarian literature, such as the heroic socialist intellectual in the role of the vanguard, but the success of this novel owed much to the compellingly lifelike characters and a grippingly melodramatic story that transcended conventions. Indeed, the work of KAPF writers moved even Korean authors who were not members, or even leftist in inclination, to infuse their works with a greater social consciousness and attention to the people’s daily travails.

Whether through such literary works or via the new media of radio, phonographs, or cinema, culture in the late colonial period revealed to Koreans the countlessly variegated manifestations of each others’ lives. Cultural production gave meaning, then, to the dizzying onset of industrial capitalism—the exploding proliferation of occupations and activities; the appearance of big machines, vehicles, buildings, and cities; and advances in transportation and communications, including especially the newspaper—that rendered contact with a greater world a recurring reality. By instilling a sense of collective plight and subjectivity, both as Koreans and as modern people, the revelation of larger society and the experience of daily life aroused a sense of transformation, modernity, and nationhood much more solidly than could calls to action and political movements. Even the occasional bursts of nationalist ardor served more as exceptions that reinforced the more powerful effects of the churning quotidian. The true historical significance of the Son Kij
ng photo incident, then, lies in its illumination of the centrality of newspapers in the unfolding process of modernity in the late colonial period. To be sure, debates about the propriety of colonial rule, ardent calls for independence, and enticing visions of a better, autonomous future continued to spark passions well into
the 1930s. To the large majority of Koreans, however, life in the late colonial period remained firmly wedded to the here and now. Even to those who could afford to dwell on the grander issues, it was an open-ended time, and anything seemed possible. That soothing ambiguity would come to a screeching halt, however, once the colony became mobilized for war.

19

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Wartime Mobilization, 1938–45

CHRONOLOGY

THE VISIT BY AUTHORS YI KWANGSU AND CH’OE NAMS
N TO JAPAN, 1943

Two of the foremost and best known Korean intellectuals of the colonial period, Ch’oe Nams
n and Yi Kwangsu, made a discreet visit to Meiji University in Tokyo on November 24, 1943. This took place at the peak of the “Greater East Asia Holy War,” so named by the increasingly strident propaganda effort that appealed for sacrifice from imperial subjects. Yi and Ch’oe traveled to Japan to assist this mobilization of manpower by urging a group of young Koreans studying in Japan to join the war effort as student soldiers. Afterward, the two writers gathered in a roundtable discussion with the event’s host, another Korean author, to assess the reception and meaning of their message, and to expound on their motivations for their appearance. They also recounted their own experiences as young Korean students in Japan forty years earlier. Their lives thereafter had traversed the entirety of the period under
Japanese domination, during which they won recognition as two of the most pioneering and influential figures in Korean letters. That they found themselves in old age promoting the dissolution of Korean identity itself constitutes a profound if not tragic irony, as well as a microcosm of the final years of colonial rule as the country became swept up by war.

The experience of wartime mobilization left a pronounced imprint on Korea. It exposed Koreans to the horrific technologies of the most devastating war in human history, brutalized them through sexual slavery and forced labor, and stripped them of basic features of their ethnic identity, including even their names and language. Perhaps most significantly, these concluding years of Japanese rule came to dominate the prevailing perception of the colonial period as a whole, spawning a resentment, bitterness, and distrust among Koreans that would haunt their subsequent history. For despite the difficulties and extreme tensions of the wartime years, there remained a substantial minority of Koreans who took up the Japanese cause. Their numbers, in fact, likely were far larger than those of the celebrated independence activists, working mostly from outside the peninsula, whose impact proved greater in shaping Korea
after
liberation than in bringing it about. As with Yi Kwangsu and Ch’oe Nams
n, the actions of these “collaborators” during the wartime mobilization period have ceaselessly challenged ongoing attempts to arrive at a reckoning of Korea’s colonial experience.