Korean Studies, vol. 20 (1996)

Contents

ARTICLES

Ancient Japan's Korean Connection by William Wayne Farris

The Tsushima Governor and Regulation of Japanese Access to Choson in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries by Kenneth R. Robinson

German Diplomatic Documents on the 1905 Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty by Michael Finch

The Price of Identity: The 1923 Kanto Earthquake and Its Aftermath by J. Michael Allen

The 1932 Aso Coal Strike: Korean-Japanese Solidarity and Conflict by W. Donald Smith

Bridging the Gap: The Strategic Context of the 1965 Korea-Japan Normalization Treaty by Victor D. Cha

The Transformation of Historical Perspectives on Postliberation Capitalism by Suh Yong-Sug
translated by Chae Eun-Hee and William A. Hayes

The American Response to the Korean Independence Movement, 1910-1945 by Timothy L. Savage

BOOK REVIEWS, pp. 232-278

INDEX, VOLUMES 1-20 (1977-1996), pp. 281-310

This article analyzes relations among the peoples of the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago between A.D. 350 and 700 from an archaeological perspective. Until recently, the international academic community was divided between those who advocated the "horserider theory" and those who argued that the Japanese court (located in the Kinai) controlled the three southern Korean states of Kaya, Paekche, and Shilla between 350 and 562. This work seeks a middle position consistent with all the evidence. Scholars from Japan, South Korea, China, Western Europe, and the United States have shown that the peninsular peoples transmitted a huge volume of materials, technologies, ideas, and institutions to the archipelago. These items included: iron and iron-working techniques, iron weapons and armor, horse trappings, new agricultural tools and practices, stoneware, the household oven, gold and silver metallurgy, stone-fitting methods, silk-weaving, writing, plans for mountain fortifications, the crossbow, Buddhism and its architecture, and methods of statecraft such as the be, kabane, law codes, and ranking. Peoples of the Korean peninsula acted as middlemen, often altering or refining ideas that originated elsewhere. Four mechanisms encouraged the influx: minimal trade, large-scale immigration, some plundering by Japanese troops fighting in Korea, and the foreign policies of states such as Paekche and Koguryo. Japanese chieftains anxious to receive technology transfers from the Korean states were obliged to send troops to intervene in the peninsular wars on behalf of the donor government. While this work does not support either extreme interpretation, it underlines the Japanese debt to the peninsular peoples, and points out that the rise of complex states in Japan and Korea was intimately interrelated.

This article suggests that Choson government officials did not strictly adhere to the tributary system model of international relations in their dealings with Japanese. Officials borrowed from Chinese example and from domestic policy in designing Japanese access control policies that responded flexibly to political conditions in Japan. The munin access permits issued by the Tsushima shugo were perhaps the most important feature of these policies. But treatment of Tsushima and the Tsushima shugo by Korean officials made ambiguous the identities not only of Tsushima and the Tsushima shugo, but also the state boundaries of Choson and Japan. These negotiable ambiguities raise questions of how to conceptualize relations between Koreans and Japanese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

This first English translation of recently discovered German diplomatic documents relating to the Japan-Korea protectorate treaty of 17 November 1905 provides not only objective corroboration of the fundamental illegality of the treaty, but also a fresh and vivid perspective on the events and participants at the time.

In the immediate aftermath of the devastating 1923 Kanto earthquake, hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Korean residents in Japan were massacred. Animosity toward Koreans was fueled by rumors of Korean wrongdoing after the quake. Some non-Koreans were murdered as well, but the details of the incident show that Koreans were the specific targets because of their distinct Korean identity, rather than simply because they were not Japanese. The Japanese colonial occupation of Korea provided the backdrop to this extreme example of the explosion of racial prejudice into violence, based on a history of antagonism. To be a Korean in 1923 Japan was to be not only despised, but also threatened and potentially killed.

The 20-day-long Korean strike against the Aso coal mines in 1932 was the only sustained strike by a large number of Korean miners in prewar Japan and the largest strike of the year in Chikuho, Japan's most important coal field. The 400 strikers demonstrated courage and cohesion but won at best a partial victory that left most of them without jobs. This article draws on union documents and a contemporary report by the Kyochokai, a semiprivate organization devoted to labor-capital harmony, to explore the background of the strike, the tactics employed by the male strikers and their wives, and the many obstacles they faced in their fight for better wages and working conditions. The author argues that there was little the workers could do to overcome the harsh antiunion environment of prewar Japan or the surpluses in both coal and labor brought on by the Great Depression, but that the strike might have been more successful if rank-and-file Japanese miners had shown even a hint of solidarity. While a Japanese mining union provided organizational support, the failure of even one Japanese miner to join the strike suggests that Japanese working-class racism severely limited the potential for joint Korean-Japanese action.

Straightforward realist calculations of political and economic interests would suggest much higher levels of cooperation than have been evidenced between the Republic of Korea (ROK) and Japan. An often-cited example of their puzzling interaction is the June 1965 normalization treaty. While highly beneficial to both countries, this settlement came about only after 14 years of acerbic and seemingly unnecessarily protracted negotiations. Conventional wisdom highlights the historical enmity and psychological barriers that separate Koreans and Japanese as a key explanatory variable for the tortured treaty process as well as the primary impediment to generally greater cooperation in the relationship. However, recently declassified U.S. government documents and new primary source materials shed new light on the importance of broader geostrategic variables in the 1965 settlement. This article contends that the heightened Cold War security environment in East Asia compelled a normalization settlement between Korea and Japan. The primary causal factor in this regard was the United States. Rising threats from China, coupled with burdensome entanglements in Vietnam, prompted the U.S. to place the highest priority on reconciliation between its two key allies in the region. While U.S. pressure for an ROK-Japan settlement had existed since the start of negotiations in 1951, these efforts became particularly pronounced from 1964 and were critical to the treaty's conclusion in 1965. These findings have implications for the study of Korea-Japan relations generally as well as for the application of international relations theory to East Asia.

Suh Yong-Sug provides a historical review of the discourse on colonial social formations in Korea, including the "colonialist," "nationalist," and dependency perspectives, as well as current extensions arising from postcolonial economic transformations. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of these models, Suh outlines an alternative model based on the structural capacity of the colonial state to mobilize resources.

Between 1910 and 1945, the perception of Korea in American eyes shifted from that of a remote nation of little concern, to a perplexing problem of policy, and finally to the earliest testing ground of the Cold War. The one constant was the tendency of the U.S. to subordinate its Korean policy to other foreign policy concerns. Wilson's decision to compromise on Korean self-determination to keep Japan in the League of Nations failed when his own Congress decided not to join. Roosevelt's later attempt to set up a postwar order policed by a coalition of the U.S., Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union led him to defer to the increasingly ineffective Guomindang on Korean policy, thereby gaining nothing and hampering American efforts to unify the competing Korean factions in the U.S. Truman's decision to discard a key member of the coalition and keep the Soviet Union from dominating Korea backfired, leading to the establishment of a communist government on one half of the peninsula. The desire to contain communism in Korea then led the U.S. to support the dictatorial regime of the one Korean nationalist who was probably the least popular among American policymakers. In each case, the failure to treat Korea as an end in itself led to results quite the opposite of those intended.