User:Madalibi/Korea (blood, ethnicity, etc.)

Relevant links: Pan-Asianism, Okakura Kakuzō, Iljinhoe (also "Ilchinhoe"), yellow race; Shin Chaeho

Issues: minjok, national consciousness, ethnic identity; ethnic pride today; perception of ethnic homogeneity; modern social problems.

First emerged at the end of the Choson period and during the Japanese colonial period.

Concept of minjok imported from Japan (where it was pronounced minzoku). First appeared in Japan and then China in the late 19th century, and rose to prominence in Korea in the early 20th century. (Schmid 2002: 173). In editorials of the newspaper Hwangseong sinmun, the term minjok was used to refer to "a supranational racial unit" (Schmid 2002: 174). Yu Kil-chun's travel account spoke of countries and their peoples without using the term minjok, but by 1909 he wrote a grammar that claimed its aim was to rectify grammar, one of the unique features of the Korean minjok (Schmid 2002: 174).

"In Korea it was largely after the imposition of the Protectorate that minjok became more widely deployed." (Schmid 2002: 174)

QUOTE: "One of the first modern Korea historians to link issues of martial manhood with nationhood in Korea was Sin Ch'ae-ho (1880-1936). In his attempts to come to terms with the colonial reality, Sin linked the crisis of nationhood with the crisis of (Confucian) manhood." (Jager: 4)

QUOTE: "The issue of national decline that became intimately tied to the loss of national territory was also linked to the problem of race. The / extensive use of the term minjok (race-nation) first appeared in Sin's Toksa sillon, but it is clear that Sin's view of the original minjok––which he traces back to the original Puyeo race––shared many of the same masculine features that were attributed to the heroes of Sin's biographies. If the ups and downs of Korean history were described in stark Darwinian terms ("history is the record of struggle between the I [a] and the non-I [pi-a]" [Sin 1995: 61]), the new subject of national struggle was no longer the individual warrior-hero, but the original war-like minjok. Recounting the course of the Puyeo minjok's struggle with the Xianbi, Chinese, Malgal, Jurchen, and other local tribes, Sin records the trumphs (as well as setbacks) of the minjok in its battle for existence (Sin 1995)." (Jager: 15-16)

QUOTE: "The picture that emerges from Toksa sillon is one of an aggressive, war-like race becoming progressively weaker over time. Whereas once the Puyeo minjok had been renowned for its fierce and combative spirit, this spirit had become progressively "corrupted" by a literary and dilettantish elite that began to look to China for military support." (Jager: 16)

QUOTE: "It was imperative, therefore, that the new historian not only recover the memory of Korea's lost Manchuria, but rediscover this lost martial spirit (which Sin later connected to the revolutionary minjung that signaled his embrace of anarchism). In order to rid the minjok of its "slave mentality," this authentic national spirit had to be revived. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the re-evaluation of the military (and later, the militarized minjung) as the principle agents of Korean history deeply influenced the nationalist ideology of postwar leader Park Chung-hee, who structured his own views and the "strong" and "self-reliant" nation from Sin's version of Korea's "emasculated" past." (Jager: 16)

Shin Chaeho's (1880-1936) Doksa sillon

Translated as "nation/race" by Sheila Miyoshi Jager.

QUOTE: "The term minjok was part of the new lexicon that accompanied the rise of nationalism in East Asia. Pronounced minjok in Korean, minzu in Chinese, and minzoku in Japanese, the two characters of this neologism had strong resonances with ancient terms for ethnic or racial groupings. The first character, min, appeared in the most ancient texts as a term for 'people,' whereas the second character, also present in classical texts, denoted the 'clan,' 'tribe.' or 'family.' Both terms were separately combined with other characters to designate a variety of social groupings, variously translated in English as 'ethnicity' or 'race.' However, it seems that in none of the pre-modern wrtings of Korea, China, or Japan were these two characters regularly linked as a single compound to designate large collectivities. This very combination – two venerable characters traditionally used to denote various / types of social groups – served to blur the term's recent origins, suggesting an etymology that, like the claims being made for the nation, stretched into the distant past. Moreover, with its individual components giving the term a somewhat organic touch through its intimation of a popular (min) and familial (jok) derivation, it proved most useful for intellectuals writing about the nation as a natural entity."(Schmid 2002: 172-73.)

QUOTE: "The term quickly became current among nationalist writers throughout East Asia. While its precise origins remain obscure – a testament to the term's ability to conceal its newness – the consistent use of minjok, like so many other terms relating to modernity and the nation, first appeared in Japan, although it quickly became popular in China as well. The appearance and usage of the word minjok in Korea have been subjected to relatively little scrutiny, with some historians deeming the novelty of the term to be irrelevant. The term rarely appears in the canonical texts of various streams of the Korean nationalist movement in the ten years before the Protectorate Treaty of 1905. Works as diverse as Yu Kilchun Observations of a Journey to the West (1895), Chu Sigyeong's essay "On National Language" (Kungmunnon, 1897), Min Yeonghwan's testimony before committing suicide in protest against the Protectorate Treaty (1905), them ore than two years of daily editions of the Tongnip sinmun (1896-98), and the prison interrogation records of Cheon Pongjun, leader of the Tonghak peasant armies (1895) all were completed without the use of minjok, even though each of them dealt extensively with national concepts. As in the cases of Japanese and Chinese intellectuals, most Korean intellectuals did not employ the word minjok in the early stages of the nationalist movement because it had not yet found a conspicuous place in their conceptin and definition of the nation." (Schmid 2002: 173)

Minjok

Conception of the nation

On the meaning and rising popularity of minjok in the early 20th century.^[1]

Ties to fascism/Nazism/ultranationalism

Minzoku now unacceptable for many in Japan because it was given ultranationalist meaning during WWII. QUOTE: "In Korea, however, the use of minjok has not been burdened by such politically loaded meanings. During the colonial period, minjok proved a useful conception for locating the nation in a time of alien rule. Today, when the Korean peninsula has been divided for more than half a century, the same reasons that minjok proved so useful during the Japanese occupation have ensured its continued utility in calls for reunification."^[2]
"Still, Korea differs from Germany where a similary strong ethnic nationalism was discredited after 1945 due to its prewar linkage with Nazism."^[3]
"In sharp contrast with Germany where a similarly strong ethnic and organic nationalism was discredited due to Nazi connections, nationalism became..."^[4]
"Shin (2006), p. 117" makes useful distinctions between Korean conceptions of minjok and race-based ideas in Germany and Japan.
"Its fascist tendency was conflated with (or even masked by) its anticolonialism, and nationalism became a key ideological resource in both Koreas."^[5]
"Korean nationalism was influenced by Japanese nationalist/fascist thought."^[6]

Notes

^ Schmid 2002, p. 172.
^ Schmid 2002, p. 277.
^ Shin 2006, p. 19.
^ Shin 2006, p. 99.
^ Shin 2006, p. 78.
^ Shin 2006, p. 78 (check).

Minjok

Conception of the nation

Ties to fascism/Nazism/ultranationalism

Notes

Further readings

Korea

Japan