Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan [1 ed.] 9789004401167, 9789004401150

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Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan

East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture Series Editors Zhang Longxi (City University of Hong Kong) Wiebke Denecke (Boston University) Editorial Board Alexander Beecroft (University of South Carolina, USA) Ronald Egan (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) Joshua Fogel (York University, Canada) Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University, USA) Peter Kornicki (Cambridge University, UK) Karen Thornber (Harvard University, USA) Rudolf Wagner (Heidelberg University, Germany)

volume 12

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/eacl

Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan By

Jina E. Kim

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover Illustration: Honmachi in Seoul, Korea, in the 1930s. Image courtesy of Minsokwon. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kim, Jina, author. Title: Urban modernities in colonial Korea and Taiwan / by Jina E. Kim. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: East Asian comparative literature and culture, ISSN 2212–4772 ; volume 12 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019012090 (print) | LCCN 2019018906 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004401167 (Ebook) | ISBN 9789004401150­(hardback :­alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Korean literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Chinese literature—Taiwan—20th century—History and criticism. | Cities and towns in literature. | Colonies in literature. | Imperialism in literature. | Japan—Colonies—History. | Comparative literature—Chinese and Korean. Classification: LCC PL957.5.C53 (ebook) | LCC PL957.5.C53 K56 2019 (print) | DDC 895.7/09004—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012090

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2212-4772 ISBN 978-90-04-40115-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-40116-7 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Figures x Introduction: Text and the City 1 1 Discovering Modernity Sketching Urban Landscapes of Home and Abroad 31 2 Linguistic Modernity New Words on the Streets and Modernist Poetry 58 3 Consuming Modernity Department Stores and Modernist Fiction 96 4 Visual Modernity Screening Women in Colonial Media 132 Postscript Contemporary Urban Life in Seoul and Taipei 165 Appendix: New Words 179 Bibliography 182 Index 203

Acknowledgments During the many years it has taken for this book to be published, countless individuals and institutions have provided support and encouragement. It is only now that I am able to express in writing the deep gratitude for all that they have done. I am first of all grateful to my teachers and mentors who have nurtured me with their intellectual generosity and challenged me with their intellectual acumen. I am especially indebted to the late James Palais who unfortunately only had a chance to read the messy first draft of my dissertation leaving his iconic ample marginalia; the late Scott Swaner who, despite his weakened health, guided me through my defense—I am honored to have been his first Ph.D. student; and Tani Barlow and Chris Hamm who held me together emotionally and intellectually throughout graduate school at the University of Washington and in the postgraduate years as I have navigated through academia. I am grateful to Ann Sung-hi Lee who sparked my interest in colonial-period literature; as well as David Knechtges, Clark Sorensen, and Chandan Reddy who enabled me to explore different methods, fields, and theories. At Cornell University, Timothy Murray, Brett de Bary, and Amy Villarejo instilled confidence in me through their enthusiasm and constant encouragement even as I became missing in action. Torn between literature and medicine while an undergraduate student, Norma Field introduced me to East Asian literature while Elizabeth Alexander taught me about African American literature. They both showed me how powerful literature and language can be in healing ugly histories and pained human hearts. Without these teachers and mentors, I would not have known the value of literature and history nor would I have witnessed the impact a scholar-teacher can make on a student’s life. I have been very fortunate to have worked with wonderful colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Smith College, and Dickinson College. The late Cappy Hurst, Frank Chance, Linda Chance, Frederick Dickinson, and Ayako Kano welcomed a newly minted doctoral student and gave me time to develop various new courses on Korea. At Smith College and Five Colleges, Inc., I thank Lisa Armstrong, Floyd Cheung, Richard Chu, Miliann Kang, Jennifer Guglielmo, Michelle Joffroy, Jamie Hubbard, Maki Hubbard, Kim Kono, Jonathan Lipman, Stephen Miller, Tom Rohlich, and Marilyn Schuster for their collegiality, camaraderie, and confidence in me. My time at Dickinson College was like an incubator where I was able to work safely and productively with Alex Bates, Shawn Bender, Neil Diamant, Nan Ma, Rae Yang, and Evan Young. My current colleagues at the University of Oregon have been nothing but welcoming and they have offered me supportive guidance. I feel extremely

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fortunate to have joined Rachel DiNitto, Roy Chan, Maram Epstein, Alison Groppe, Luke Habberstad, Kaori Idemaru, Dong Hoon Kim, Woojoo Kim, Eun Young Lee, and Glynne Walley in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Many colleagues in Korean studies as well as in other fields have inspired me with their distinguished research, tireless service to the field, and abundant support and friendship. I am indebted to the late Nancy Abelmann, and to Jinsoo An, Paul Barclay, Lung-chih Chang, Heekyoung Cho, Ellie Choi, Hyaeweol Choi, Kyeong-hee Choi, Evan Dawley, Henry Em, Bruce Fulton, William Gardner, Chris Hanscom, Todd Henry, Theodore Hughes, Kelly Jeong, Immanuel Kim, Yung Hee Kim, Ross King, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Ji-Eun Lee, Jin-Kyung Lee, Namhee Lee, John Lie, Hyung-Gu Lynn, Sonia Ryang, Youngju Ryu, Sunyoung Park, Sam Perry, Janet Poole, Bert Scruggs, Serk-bae Suh, and John Treat. A brief mention of their names will not do justice for all the various ways they have contributed to the writing of this book. I am equally grateful to friends and colleagues whom I have met along this journey. Jun Hong, Larry Hunt, Benita Jackson, Stephen Halsey, Caroline Kim, Yoo Jung Kong, Janelle Olsen, Jin Peh, Sachi Schmidt-Hori, Trang Ta, Newell Ann Van Auken, Caroline Yang, and Byron Zamboanga for many stimulating conversations ranging from abstruse academic subjects to ordinary everyday affects. Ruth Chon, Chris and Vanessa Hanshaw, Han Lee, and Cynthia Kwee for affirming to me the endurance of human relationships and unconditional friendships that can collapse time and space whenever we meet. The research for this book could not have been accomplished without the generous financial support from institutions, fellowships, and grants. The Korea Foundation Fellowships, Fulbright Fellowships, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, Korean Literature Translation Institute grant, Smith College Pickering Fellowship and Faculty Summer Research Grants, and Dickinson College Research and Development Grants enabled me to study languages, conduct archival research, and granted me time to write. Research in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan were greatly facilitated by my affiliations with Seoul National University, Academia Sinica, and Waseda University. I thank each one of these institutions and the many teachers and colleagues who have sharpened my understanding of early twentieth-century Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. My heartfelt thanks especially to Chon Woohyung, Cheon Jung-hwan, Kim Yang-Su, Kwon Youngmin, Seo Young-Chae, Shin Bum-Soon, Chen Fangmin, Michelle Hsieh, Peng Hsiao-yen, Yu Chien-ming, Ito Ruri, and Tarumi Chie for sharing their time, knowledge, and passion for their work with me. I extend my gratitude to Sharon Domier and Mikyung Kang, two librarians extraordinaire, who provided help with identifying and obtaining numerous sources.

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Parts of Chapter 1 were previously published as “A Traveler’s Modernity: The Ordinariness of Everyday Space in Yi Sang’s Essays from Tokyo,” in Yi Sang Review 4 (2005), and excerpts have been taken from “Language, Commodity, and the City: Early Modern Korean Urban Literature,” in Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 16 (2003) for Chapter 2. I would like to acknowledge and thank these journals for permitting me to reprint these materials. I am very grateful to the editors of the East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture series Zhang Longxi and Wiebke Denecke as well as Qin Higley and Lauren Bissonette at Brill for their patience and understanding as they guided the book to its completion. The meticulous copyediting of Mary Tong and Jon Wilcox at different stages of the manuscript has improved and clarified my writing immensely. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their extremely helpful suggestions and constructive remarks. Last but not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my immediate and extended family in the U.S., Canada, Korea, and Japan for their unfailing patience, encouragement, and love. I am fortunate and blessed to be part of the large Kim, Lee, Koo, Yoon, and Sim families that include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and sibling from whom I receive tremendous amount of love. They have unwaveringly cheered me on throughout my life from near and far. Words of thanks so utterly lack the depth of gratitude I would like to express to them for sustaining me emotionally and materially. I am especially grateful to my late paternal grandmother Yoon Y.H. who exemplified being modern in her thinking, living, and style. She was the first one to reassure me it was really okay for me to choose literature over medicine. I thank my parents as well as my aunts and uncles from whom I inherited the love of books, telling stories, and an appreciation for the visual arts. It is from eavesdropping on their life stories told in a language other than English which first piqued my curiosity about Korea and Japan. Finally, I reserve the most profound gratitude for my daughter Ella and husband Changhoon, and to them I lovingly dedicate this book. Their wonderful sense of humor and contagious optimism nourishes me and brings me infinite amount of joy every day. Ella’s exclamation that this book is “as old as I am” and her command “it’s time, mommy, for your book to be sold on Amazon!” served as a stark motivator that this book needed to move on to the next phase. With that, I thank in advance my readers.

Figures 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Sakaemachi in Taipei, Taiwan, in the 1930s. Image courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection 59 Honmachi in Seoul, Korea, in the 1930s. Image courtesy of Minsokwon 59 Mitsukoshi department store, Seoul, 1930s. Photo courtesy of Minsokwon 107 Hwashin department store advertisement, Tonga ilbo, January 1, 1938 112 Kikumoto department store, Taipei, 1930s. Photo courtesy of the Archives of Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica 114 Yǒsǒng (April 1936 inaugural issue). Courtesy of Somyong Publishing 143 Yǒsǒng (January 1938). Courtesy of Adan Mun’go 144 Yǒsǒng (August 1938). Courtesy of Somyong Publishing 145 Taiwan Woman’s World (August 1935). Photograph by the author and courtesy of the National Taiwan Library 151 Taiwan Woman’s World (June 1934). Photograph by the author and courtesy of the National Taiwan Library 153 “Seoul Education 1” 158 “Seoul Education 2” 158 “Seoul Education 3” 159 “Anecdotes from Seoul” 159 “The Love of Kankan Hat” (Panel 1) 161 “The Love of Kankan Hat” (Panel 8) 162

introduction

Text and the City In Pak T’aewŏn’s 1934 representative modernist novella A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist,1 the protagonist Kubo aimlessly wanders around downtown Kyŏngsŏng, Korea, leaving home around noon and not returning until 2:00 a.m.2 During his long outing, Kubo walks from his home in Ta’okjŏng to Chongno intersection, gets on the streetcar heading toward Tongdaemun, and transfers to another streetcar, getting off at Bank of Chosǒn. He visits the Nangrang Café and an antique shop located on Changgokch’onjŏng (Hasegawamachi) and then walks to Kyŏngsŏng Train Station. After some time, he returns to the Nangrang Café, where he chats with a friend, then walks back to the Chongno intersection, stopping at the Sparrow Café located next to the Chongno Police Station. Kubo meets up with another friend there, and for the rest of the evening, the two of them wander around Hwanggŭmjŏng (Koganemachi) and Chongno, eventually stopping for drinks at Nakwŏnjŏng Restaurant. Kubo ends his day standing alone at the Chongno intersection around 2:00 a.m. Most of the scholarship to date on A Day in the Life and on Pak T’aewŏn’s other notable novel, Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng (Streamside Sketches, 1936), focuses almost exclusively on Pak’s use of kohyŏnhak (J. kōgengaku,3 or “modernology”),4 a discipline invented by Kon Wajirō in the 1920s to study 1  This text was published serially in Choson chungang ilbo from August 1 to September 19, 1934. Its author, Pak T’aewŏn, was born in 1909 and attended the Kyŏngsŏng cheil kodŭnghakgyo, which later became Kyŏnggi High School. He attended Hōsei University in Tokyo from 1930– 31 where he studied English literature. At the onset of the Korean War in 1950, Pak voluntarily decided to migrate to North Korea (wŏlbuk) where he continued to write. Due to his status as a wŏlbuk chakka, Pak’s writings were banned until the late 1980s in South Korea. “Sosŏlga Kubo” was first reprinteded by Sǔlgi Publishing in 1987 in Seoul when new cultural and political policy lifted the ban. It was translated into English by Sunyoung Park as A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist in On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea, eds. Park and Jefferson J. A. Gatral (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Series, 2010), 141–94. 2  Throughout this book I will use Kyŏngsŏng and Seoul interchangeably. The capital city of colonial Korea was referred to as Keijō in Japanese. 3  To distinguish multiple languages, I adopt the abbreviations: K. = Korean. C. = Chinese. J. = Japanese. 4  Kim Yunsik, “Kohyŏnhak ŭi pangbŏpron,” in Han’guk munhak ŭi riŏlisŭmkwa modŏnisŭm (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1989), 123–48. Kim’s text paved the way for reading Pak T’aewŏn’s novels through the modernology framework. However, Ch’oe Chaesŏ, writing about Pak in the 1930s, was already making a similar argument. See Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes by a Stream and “Wings,” trans. Christopher Hanscom, in Imperatives of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401167_002

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public behavior through observing, detailing, sketching, and photographing everyday urban streetscapes.5 Indeed, Pak’s A Day in the Life reads like an ethnographic account of a man bearing witness to the minutiae of the modernizing Kyŏngsŏng. For contemporary readers, the text could read like a map or even a tourist brochure that allows them to trace the steps of the protagonist and gain a vivid sense of what the cityscape was like in the mid-1930s. The images that emerge show Kyŏngsŏng to be a place with plenty of leisure spaces such as cafés and restaurants, a consumer city with department stores and bookshops, and an urban center equipped with modern roads and transportation system. Kyŏngsŏng thus appears to be a modern, urban city, similar to many other cities around the world at the time. Although A Day in the Life certainly serves as an important ethnographic record of 1930s Kyŏngsŏng, it is more than just a composite of jottings and sketches, supposedly taken from the fictional Kubo’s college-ruled notebook which he, as a writer and a modernologist, carries with him everywhere he goes. No doubt Pak also maps onto the cityscape the nervousness combined with exhaustion that the colonized male Kubo is suffering as he circles the confines of the city, as demonstrated by Christopher Hanscom’s analysis of this story.6 Rather, I contend that the novella is as much an account of Kubo as a “circular nomad” who establishes himself in transnational relationality with each step and pause along the city route.7 The narrative ingeniously details Kubo’s circular motions within the city and interactions with the city, making it clear that Kyŏngsŏng is not merely a backdrop against which his story unfolds. Kubo’s circular, nomadic walk also contains his desires to unleash articulations of commensurability and incommensurability between colonial Culture, eds. Hanscom, Walter Lew, and Youngju Ryu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 165–80. 5  Miriam Silverberg explains that Kon Wajirō defined modernology as: “an indigenous, unprecedented Japanese study of modern customs and mores. Unlike the Edo period study of customs, but like archaeology, modernology was to be premised on a scientific method, yet the order of things to be examined was in the present.” Kon Wajirō also acknowledged his project as being ethnographic but different from anthropology or folklore studies because the object of his study was the “everyday practice (seikatsu) of the cultured people of the present.” See Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” Journal of Asian Studies, 51:1 (1992): 36. 6  In his treatment of Pak’s novella, Christopher Hanscom links hysteria and modernism to an understanding of the unreliability of expression and the failure of interpretation prompted by the double bind of colonial modernity. See Hanscom, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center), 59–77 (chap. 3). 7  Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 29.

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Kyŏngsŏng and elsewhere. Even Kubo’s most vivid daydreams evolve around his travels to Tokyo and return to Kyŏngsŏng. As he does so, he laments how “small” Kyŏngsŏng is compared to Tokyo and becomes quite irritated and depressed by Kyŏngsŏng’s “stuffiness.” At every juncture of his walk, he is reminded of Kyŏngsŏng’s colonial condition: the poor, sickly-looking elderly man at the Kyŏngsŏng Train Station; “the poor or so poor Choson Palace”; and “the impoverished novelist, the impoverished poet.”8 Through these encounters, Kubo is overwhelmed with a desire to escape Kyŏngsŏng for Tokyo, which he describes as a space that can offer “romance and love,” especially as he reminisces about his failed romance with a Japanese woman during his time in Tokyo. He also becomes painfully aware of how utterly Japanized (colonized) and bourgeois Kyŏngsŏng people have become: the Korean café waitresses have taken Japanese names ending in –ko; a Korean family dressed in Western clothes is going to Hwashin department store to dine; one of his middle-school Korean classmates is taking an attractive girl to Wŏlmi Island for an outing. Kubo’s frustration at feeling caged in as he circles the city center is palpable, but what disturbs him more is how the entire city has surrendered to Japanese colonization. Thus, throughout the text, Kubo endlessly compares Kyŏngsŏng to Tokyo as well as himself to others during his outing. At the same time, what I find more significant is the ways in which we can follow our protagonist Kubo through three trajectories of movements— from center toward the peripheries; from peripheries toward the center; and from periphery to periphery—as outlined by the Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant. In other words, I read Kubo’s physical circulation around the city and mental mapping of his various encounters and experiences as a form of the poetic of relations. Kubo’s level of detailed descriptions and his frustrations, in fact, vividly shows the way the narrative form also works to ultimately reproduce the “track of circular nomadism; that is, it makes every periphery into a center; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of center and periphery.”9 If Pak’s A Day in the Life ultimately abolishes the notion of center (Tokyo) and periphery (Kyŏngsŏng) by meticulously mapping out the details of Kyŏngsŏng as an “aesthetic constituent,” then Wu Zhuoliu’s epic novel Orphan of Asia (Yaxiya de guer) presents a much more sweeping narrative of circular nomadism that brings together multiple cities from three different East

8  Pak T’aewŏn, Day in the Life. 9  Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 29.

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Asian countries in the space of one novel.10 In Orphan of Asia,11 Hu Taiming, the protagonist, arrives in Tokyo via Kyoto to study physics. His observations and reactions to Tokyo, Kyoto, and other landscapes in Japan are generally positive. Taiming “loved” Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, and is impressed that the city has preserved its “fragrant culture” while people “down to the bus attendants, boarding-house girls, waiters at cafeterias, and department store salesclerks” were all “too kind” and “behaved as though they were well educated.”12 Tokyo, the modern capital of Japan, also impresses Taiming, and his reactions highlight the new, modern aspects of the city: “The traffic was frightening—masses of people and the busy machines, streetcars, and automobiles—moving aggressively in an endless stream. Unwary pedestrians 10  Wu Zhuoliu was born Wu Jiantian in Xinpu, located in the northern part of Taiwan, in 1900. He moved to Taipei and studied at what is now Taihoku Teachers’ College. Following his graduation in 1920, Wu became a teacher and taught at various schools. But after teaching for twenty years, he resigned from his post to protest against discriminatory practices upheld by colonial administrators toward Taiwanese educators. After his resignation, Wu went to Nanjing as a journalist from 1941 to 1942 to work at Tairiku shinpō (C. Dalu xinbao) [Mainland News], a Japanese-language newspaper published in China. When he returned to Taiwan, Wu continued to work as a journalist for various newspapers, including the Taiwan riri xinbao (J. Taiwan nichi shinpo) [Taiwan Daily News]. Most of the biographical information is from Hong Mizhen, “Wu Zhuoliu shengping yu zuo nianpiao” [A Chronology of Wu Zhuoliu’s Life and Works), in Wu Zhuoliu, eds. Feng Deping and Zhang Henghao (Tainan: Guo li Taiwan wenxue guan, 2011), 289–96. See also Wu Zhuoliu, Orphan of Asia, trans. Ioannis Mentzas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 11  In 1942 Wu began serializing his Random Thoughts of Nanjing, which became the basis for his most famous work Orphan of Asia (Yaxiya de guer), which was originally entitled Hu Taiming, named after the main protagonist of the novel. Wu’s novel was drafted in secrecy between 1943 and 1945 during the war period when writing and publishing was under the strict scrutiny and control of the Japanese censors. It was dangerous to write anything that could be even perceived as anti-colonial. In his memoir Wu writes that during this time he would hide his manuscript, transporting it back to his home in the countryside to avoid being detected by the authorities. Writings produced during the late colonial era in both Korea and Taiwan not only had to adhere closely to imperialist (kominka) policies and to promulgate war propaganda, but they also had to be written in the Japanese language. Like much of the published writings from this period, Orphan of Asia was written and published in 1956 in Japanese (as Ajia no koji) rather than Chinese. It was not until 1962 that the novel was translated into Chinese and not until 2006 into English. Leo Ching, Becoming Japanese (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 179. See also Bert Scruggs’ chapter 2, “One Culture, Two Nations” in Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015), 12–33 for a critical discussion on the translation of Taiwanese literature written in Japanese into Chinese. 12  Wu, Orphan of Asia, 54.

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were bumped into, even on the sidewalk, by other people.”13 Later, when Taiming travels to Shanghai, he similarly describes it as a city filled with modern landscapes, young women dressed in the latest trends and traffic flooded with automobiles, but the tone is contemptuous and certainly different from his admiration of Tokyo. Pointing to Shanghai’s decadence, Taiming is more than ready to “escape the monstrous city” for Nanjing.14 These observations are twice qualified with the statement that he feels like a “country bumpkin,” which strongly suggests the differences between Tokyo/Shanghai and Taipei. What ultimately defines the differences between these cities for Taiming, even more than the cityscapes, is his interactions with people and especially his fellow compatriots, including Chinese mainlanders. Despite the shock of the differences between Tokyo and Taipei, Taiming sees the Tokyoites as generous and polite “without the contemptuous tone that he would have heard in Taiwan” from the Japanese settlers and colonial authorities.15 Both the ancient and contemporary capitals are experienced as modern cities with people, especially young women, who are “poised,” doing modern activities that befit the city. Taiming’s interactions with Japanese people, although generally rendered as positive, are still based on polite distance. Taiming is recognized as an outsider or as a tourist needing minor assistance with directions, boardinghouse chores, and such. His identity as a colonized other is, however, more clearly prominent when he is among other Taiwanese and Chinese students studying in Japan. From the beginning, Lan, his classmate from Taiwan, advises Taiming to tell others (both Japanese and Chinese mainlanders) that he is from Fukuoka or Kumamoto and not Taiwan, a suggestion which greatly disturbs him. On another occasion, when Taiming admits that he is Taiwanese during a lecture sponsored by the Academic Association of China, a student from Guangdong becomes enraged and spits out, “‘Huh? Taiwan?’ He sneered in disgust and, with obvious contempt, quickly strode away.”16 Even in Nanjing, Zeng, his host, practically keeps Taiming under house arrest until he masters Mandarin, for he is strongly advised not to speak Taiwanese Chinese. What I find extremely fascinating in the above scenes is the role of language in its relationship to the city during the colonial era and the ways that the narrator continuously engages in comparative work. Some of the most frustrating moments Taiming experiences are when he is told to hide his Taiwanese identity, specifically by changing the way he accents his speech. In fact, oral speech 13  Ibid. 14  Ibid., 98–100. 15  Ibid., 55. 16  Ibid., 62.

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becomes a site of identification and disidentification for the colonized in the Japanese empire. For instance, Lan remarks that the Japanese of Taiwanese speakers sounds like Japanese from Fukuoka, and Zeng insists that Taiming master the Mandarin dialect so as to hide his Taiwanese-sounding Chinese. Both demonstrate how Taiming has to disavow his language, which in turn forces him to further become aware of his “triple consciousness.”17 The space of oral speech, then, becomes a site for authentification and inauthentification. Yet, as I will discuss more fully in this book, what also emerges from these scenes is the vast variety in speech sounds that are already present and is part of the soundscape in the cities. That is, in Tokyo, Japanese-speaking Taiwanese such as Taiming can pass as speakers from Fukuoka precisely because there are other Japanese who speak in the Fukuokan dialect living in Tokyo and because Tokyoites recognize that the Fukuokan dialect is nonstandard and different from the standard Tokyo Japanese. Tokyo is already a multiphonological space characteristic of a cosmopolitan capital city and imperial metropole. Nanjing and Shanghai, too, are cities where one can hear multiple accents, dialects, and languages, yet in these cities, Taiming is forced to silence vocalization of Taiwanese in order to hide his Taiwanese identity. This suppression is felt especially acutely because the Taiwanese language is, even today, an unwritable language that can only be spoken. Ironically, it is in Nanjing and Shanghai that Taiming actually uses his Fukuokan-sounding Japanese to teach other Chinese the Japanese language as a part-time instructor where his Japanese is legitimized. It is through these moments and movements that Taiming becomes aware of his triple consciousness more acutely. It is thus during his sojourn in Nanjing and Shanghai that Taiming realizes that Taipei is no longer a “Chinese” city, in part through the realization of the ways he vocalizes the language— how he sounds when speaking either Chinese or Japanese. I evoke Glissant’s idea of errantry to think through Taiming’s and colonial Taiwan’s dilemma with language, which is central to the colonial experience in which one’s native language becomes unrooted and the colonized must speak, think, and live in multiple languages. This is surely the case for Taiming who is an exiled figure engaged in errantry. For Glissant, “the tale of errantry is the tale of Relation” where travel and wandering are closely linked to polyvocalism 17  Leo Ching describes the ways in which the colonized Taiwanese comes to understand his position or identity through a “triple consciousness,” which is inevitably formed through “‘residual’ Chinese culturalism and the ‘dominant’ Japanese colonialism.” What Ching means by “triple consciousness” is that Taiming’s formation of his consciousness is contingent upon the “irreducible colonial-national-local triangulation between Japan, China, and Taiwan throughout the Japanese colonial period.” See Ching, Becoming Japanese, 176–77.

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or polylingualism because the errant or the exile “admits that he suffers most from the impossibility of communicating in his language.”18 Taiming cannot speak Taiwanese freely but neither can he speak the standard Japanese of a Tokyoite. Moreover, while in China he is discouraged from speaking Mandarin because he would surely sound un-Chinese. The exile and his acts of errantry, then, oppose the “idea of the root” or “the totalitarian drive of a single, unique root.”19 Instead, errantry forces him to communicate “relationally and dialectically” so as to see exile as beneficial because it leads to the search for the Other.20 Interestingly, it is Taiming’s multiple-accented Japanese that allows him to move through and in various communities whether in Japan, Taiwan, or China. Glissant emphasizes Relation as being “spoken multilingually” in opposition to the “totalitarianism of any monolingual intent,” which is the language of the conqueror that functions as a “vehicular language.”21 Seen this way, Wu Zhuoliu’s novel impressively critiques the notion of national language under colonial conditions. I open with this brief introduction and analysis of Pak’s and Wu’s texts and situate them in relation to one another because together they bring out the central issues this book addresses. This book is interested in exploring how the intracolonial or inter-Asia relationship, that is between the colonies, can tell us about Japanese colonial experiences from a perspective that has been overlooked in previous scholarship on the Japanese empire. Intra- and transregional circulations of people, ideas, and texts within the Japanese colonial empire during the latter half of the colonial period allow us to revisit the dominant scholarly narrative in historical, literary, and postcolonial studies that presents Korea and Taiwan as having vastly different responses to Japanese colonialism. By shifting the objects of analysis from top-down Japanese colonial policies and institutions to lived experiences, the quotidian, poetics, and representations of colonized subjects in Seoul and Taipei through literary and visual texts, this book explores how the culture of modernity in these cities enlivened the networks of connections, convergences, and concurrences thus creating shared experiences which form the backbone of global modernism.

18  Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18–19. 19  Ibid., 14. 20  Ibid., 18. 21  Ibid., 19.

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Ungrounding the Grounds for Comparison: toward a Relationality of Colonial Korea and Taiwan

A methodology of comparison creates problems that are not insignificant and are, arguably, even dangerous. Comparisons are overdetermined, especially when it comes to thinking about colonialism where in which the binaries the colonizer construct are inherently structured so that the colonizer’s culture becomes the normative lens through which to construct the other. In effect, comparisons could work to normalize or even flatten differences. Especially in the colonial context, comparisons usually work to assimilate differences. This was certainly the general policy that undergirded the Japanese colonial government in both Korea and Taiwan, much like how Western imperialism produced itself vis-à-vis its non-Western other. On the other hand, comparisons also maintain and erect differences that forestall the possibilities of generating any sense of commonality across differences. When one considers the largely Eurocentric and imperialistic histories of the discipline of comparative literature itself, the problems of comparison become even more obvious. Emily Apter, in discussing the history of comparative literature in the United States and its methodological impasse, expresses concern that even in the contemporary moment, comparative studies continue, however inadvertently, to uphold and practice “neocolonial geopolitics in carrying over the imperial carve-up of linguistics fields.”22 I find Apter’s efforts germane to this project because she brings a more critical attention to philology and comparison as a way to rethink how our use of language can change, shape, and reify the way we imagine new cartographic connections. At the core, Apter proposes to make translation studies and comparative literature studies commensurable by “using translation as a fulcrum” because, as she argues, translation can work to denationalize literature and can help to move analysis away from the centerperiphery model that has dominated the study of colonial and postcolonial literary studies.23 But translation as well as comparison, as Apter well knows, is not free of national politics and power-inflected relations. What appeals to me about Apter’s work especially is her insistence that linguistic and cultural translation can be a form of dialog where differences are made to meet.

22  Emily Apter, The Translation Zone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 87. Apter is writing specifically in the aftermath of and in response to 9/11 in the U.S., and is highly cognizant of the ways language and wars work together to construct neoimperialist ideologies. 23  Ibid., 243.

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But even when comparison is not epistemologically justified, it can and does take place. In this way, following Natalie Melas’s theorization of the figure of comparison, my project is not so much about excavating exact points of commensurability, nor is it about pursuing equivalences. Rather, similar to Melas, this book is a “ground-clearing” project that brings together forms, texts, and authors in “Relation” in an effort to better understand their similarities and differences, without necessarily deeming them commensurable.24 As in the case of Melas’s work, the idea of Relation as developed by Glissant informs my approach to comparing Korea’s and Taiwan’s colonial histories and modernist literary texts from the latter half of the Japanese colonial period. Glissant’s concept of the “Poetics of Relation” is derived from his attempts to understand the complexity of the colonial and postcolonial conditions of the once French colony of Martinique as it had interacted and continues to interact with the larger world in multiple ways. What he proposes and enacts in his own literary works is a comparison of similarities and differences that are collectively attuned to both the whole and the part, a web of relations wherein “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”25 Glissant demonstrates the epistemological and methodological possibilities of comparison grounded in an understanding of intertwined world systems (languages, economies, histories, and politics). Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “rhizomatic,”26 Glissant writes that “In the world of Relations, which relays the unifying system of Being, to consent to opacity, that is, to the irreducible density of the other, is truly to accomplish, by way of diversity, the human.”27 In short, what Glissant advocates is a recognition of difference where difference should not foreclose us from being human and being treated as human. In other words, ultimately, the recognition of difference and being different should not matter as far as we are humans with dignity. Shu-mei Shih extends Glissant’s idea of Relation even further, and in particular adopts as a model Glissant’s tracing of the plantation system through the reading of literary works from multiple places (the American South, the Caribbean, and Indian Ocean region, for example) and multiple languages,28 to formulate what she calls a “relational comparison” in an effort to theorize new ways of doing comparative literary studies. Shih brings together the methodologies of integrative world history to propose a model of world literature that 24  Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 37. 25  Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11. 26  Ibid. 27  Quoted in Melas, All the Difference in the World, 107. 28  Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 63–76.

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“sees, instead of discreet national literatures, all literatures as participating in a network of power-inflected relations.”29 Importantly, Shih’s model requires us to engage in close reading of texts where “form and formation are intimately connected, as are the content and history.”30 My work appropriates and builds on these scholars’ works that attempt to understand differences through creating Relationality. It is highly unlikely that the authors who appear in my study of colonial Korean and Taiwanese modernist writers read each other’s works in the others’ language—namely, Korean or Chinese. Since these authors were marginalized and colonized, it is more likely that, if they read each other’s works at all, they read them in Japanese. They would also read texts in European languages translated into Japanese, or increasingly in the original English, French, German, or Russian. Whichever the case, Japanese, the language of the colonizer, undoubtedly functioned as the fulcrum upon which Korean and Taiwanese writers encountered each other’s works, if at all.31 In fact, Karen Thornber’s work on the transculturation of Japanese literature in semicolonial China, Chinese-occupied Manchuria, and colonial Korea and Taiwan has amply demonstrated the creation of “literary contact nebulae” where Japanese literary works were circulated, intertextualized, and debated.32 It does appear that there were a number of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers who crossed paths at nameable contact zones, such as the famous Uchiyama Kanzō shoten (Uchiyama Kanzō’s bookstore), a bookstore in Shanghai where many literary luminaries from Japan visited and met Chinese writers.33 Much 29  Shu-mei Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, and Uses, eds. Rita Felski and Susan Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 84. 30  Ibid. 31  See Kim Yunsik, Ilche malgi Han’guk chakga ŭi kŭlssŭgiron [A study of late colonial period Korean authors’ writings (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2003) for a study of bilingual Korean intellectuals who wrote in both Korean and Japanese. For a similar study of Taiwanese writers, see Scruggs, Translingual Narration. Likewise, Serk-Bae Suh’s Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) and Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) studies of literary translation and cultural exchanges between Japan and Korea document the important, yet very often ambivalent, relationship between the colonizer and colonized. 32  Karen Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). 33  Christopher Keaveney, “Uchiyama Kanzō’s Shanghai Bookstore and Its Impact on May Fourth Writers,” E-ASPAC Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast Journal (2002): 8. See also Joshua Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

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of the contact that both Thornber and Keaveney point out, however, occurs between the (Japanese) colonizer and the (semi)colonized. Therefore, it is still difficult to document the extent to which Korean and Taiwanese writers— doubly colonized—actually physically met each other to discuss their literary works or their colonized positions during their lifetimes. And yet, it is certainly not impossible that such contact took place, especially given the many parallels we see in their interests, ideas, lives, travels, studies, and textual outputs. The actual physical and literary contacts notwithstanding, we could still venture that through multiple levels of discursive formations, especially through print media such as newspapers and literary journals, colonized Korean and Taiwanese writers were, indeed, well aware of each other’s colonial situation, regional politics, and aesthetic movements.34 2

Creating Literary Worlds: Global Modernisms

This book applies the model of Relation as both methodology and ethical framework for comparing colonial Korea and Taiwan. The narratives of Korea and Taiwan under Japanese colonialism most commonly recited, heard, and read are those of accommodating Taiwan versus antagonistic Korea, or a benevolent colonial rule in Taiwan compared to a callous colonial rule in Korea. Even in a postcolonial setting, stories of Koreans’ anti-Japanese sentiments and protests are commonly circulated, further fueling the notion that Korea is extremely nationalistic relative to the more passive Taiwan that is “nostalgic” for the colonial era. Much of the existing scholarship and public discourse present colonial Korea and colonial Taiwan as having utterly different experiences under, responses to, and reflections on Japanese colonialism. To be sure, there are obvious and extremely important differences in these two countries’ local histories, needs, and circumstances, and these differences are frequently pointed out by scholars, policymakers, and the general populous. Yet these sweeping differences, which I am calling the “postcolonial myth” of colonial Korea and Taiwan, miss important aspects of the colonial histories and postcolonial historical developments which have informed the discursive formation 34  See Son Chunsik, “Tonga ilbo (1920–40) kisarŭl t’onghae pon singminji Chosŏn ŭi Taeman ŭisik” [The knowledge creation of Taiwan seen through Tonga Daily News (1920–40) colonial Korea], Chungguk hakpo 61 (2010): 319–42. One of the most important instances of colonized writers being brought together in one recognizable space is the example of Korean writer Chang Hyŏkchu and Taiwanese writer Yang Kui, who each received literary awards from the Japanese literary journals Bungaku hyorōn (1934) and Kaizōsha (1932) respectively.

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of Korea and Taiwan. By studying the lived city of the everyday, and the literary works derived from these experiences, I will attempt to show that the idea that Korea’s and Taiwan’s relationship to Japanese colonialism was simply different is overschematized. Looking instead at the two countries’ cultural and literary histories in parallel can bring about a more complicated and compassionate understanding of their differences. More precisely, this study will examine urban spaces and textual productions that have been overlooked by scholars who have in the past identified differences as marking the colonial experiences of Korea and Taiwan. I will do so by building relations between the texts and between the authors and the historical era which they occupied by bringing them together into one cospatial text so as to move toward gaining new understanding and knowledge about each and both Korea’s and Taiwan’s colonial experiences. Comparative studies on colonial institutional structures and colonial policymaking, as well as studies on industrialization and democratization during the postcolonial eras, have already greatly enriched our understanding of the similarities and differences between colonial Korea and Taiwan.35 While all of these previous studies on education, industrialization, and democratization are implicitly informed by urbanization, none of them explicitly address the city and the production of urban culture and urban spaces, despite these being the primary places on and from which conflicts and transformations took place. This study turns to the city and urban culture, literary and visual productions and representations of the city in particular, as a site for understanding the vagaries of modernity and experiences of colonialism in Kyŏngsŏng and Taipei. I do not contend that these two colonial cities are equivalent. That is, I 35  For comparative studies on education and the kominka movement, see E. Patricia Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977) and Wan-yao Chou, “The Kominka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interpretations,” in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, eds. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 40–68. Edward I-te Chen’s pioneering work on systems of political control in colonial Korea and Taiwan argues that Japanese political control worked rather effectively to produce tranquility after 1919, which facilitated in turn the policy of assimilation. See Chen, “Japanese Colonialism in Korea and Formosa: A Comparisons of Systems of Political Control,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 30 (1970): 126–58. In contrast, in Korea the need for Japanese colonial government to continue to appease the native population deterred assimilation. On postcolonial industrialization, see Ezra Vogel, Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). For a comparative study of labor movements and democratization, see Yoonkyung Lee, Militants and Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

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do not claim that they developed at the same pace or produced the same city space and corresponding urban culture. What this study is interested in exploring is the ways in which Kyŏngsŏng and Taipei, existing in a coeval spatial and temporal framework of Japanese colonialism, for the most part, experienced and responded to modernity produced by the growing urbanization and urban culture under restraints of colonialism in their own ways, yet were similar in that they were implicated and intertwined within the larger matrix of colonial power and global modernity. While undoubtedly it would be a large enough project sufficient to devote a study to either Korea or Taiwan and each of their relationships to the Japanese empire,36 this approach does not and cannot explore critically important questions of how colonialism produced differences from the already similar or vice versa. As far as I know, there has yet to be a monograph-length study that compares Korean and Taiwanese literature under Japanese colonial rule. I contend that comparative colonial literary studies—in this case, a study of Korean and Taiwanese modernist literature and urban culture—can open up spaces in which new regionalisms, associations, and identifications could be revealed, imagined, made, or fractured. By relating the urban histories of colonial Kyŏngsŏng and Taipei and the literary and visual works produced during the colonial era which engage with urban life and experiences, I hope to bring out what Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson call the intricate “processes of production of difference in a world of culturally, socially and economically interconnected and interdependent spaces.”37 In other words, by looking horizontally across and between Japan’s colonies we will uncover the ways Japan acted simultaneously, but not identically, to govern its multiple colonies as well as the multifarious ways in which the colonized subjects responded to the entanglements of colonial forces. Rather than focusing on a single national 36  There are many examples of single-country studies in this area. For Taiwanese literature under Japanese colonialism, see Ching, Becoming Japanese (a study of colonial Taiwan); Faye Kleeman’s study of Japanese and Taiwanese writers, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003); Scruggs, Translingual Narration. For Korean literature under Japanese rule, see Hanscom, Real Modern; Kwon, Intimate Empire; Suh, Treacherous Translation. See also Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) and Janet Poole, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Excellent as these studies are in moving away from the national literature model, they do not—and are not meant to—address the relational aspects between the colonies. 37  These authors advocate reconceptualizing the relationship between societies and cultural differences. See Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 14.

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literature and culture, which would create the illusion that each colony was unrelated to another, the present study juxtaposes texts from colonial Korea and Taiwan and places them within an interconnected history of Japanese colonialism and global modernisms. While Korea and Taiwan share the experience of having been a Japanese colony, each has a long and unique precolonial and postcolonial history that cannot be detached from its colonial history. The Korean peninsula’s geographical proximity to Japan has continuously rendered Japan as a force to be reckoned with in Korea’s long history. On more than one occasion, Koreans have had to defend themselves against Japanese invasions, each of which would inflame bitter memories of destruction and death. If the successive Korean dynasties of the past viewed Japan as its neighbor in equal status, China was viewed and served as the “older brother,” and the Middle Kingdom forged a nearly continuous tributary relationship with Korea throughout its long Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910). During the twentieth century, the People’s Republic of China (prc) intervened in the Korean War by sending troops to aid North Korea, and since then the two countries have maintained the longestlasting communist regimes in Asia. Korea is still divided into North and South Korea, and both states maintain close, but precarious, ties with Japan, their former colonizer, and with China. As for Taiwan, centuries before Japan’s interest in it, other European powers, namely the Portuguese and the Dutch, had shown interest in colonizing the island. Not only did the Portuguese find Taiwan to be a “beautiful island” and named it “Formosa” in Portuguese, but the Dutch also found Taiwan’s location ideal for taking part in the thriving China-Japan trade in the seventeenth century and so colonized the island. The Dutch colonization was, however, short-lived, for they were subsequently driven out by one of the last Ming loyalists, Zheng Chenggong, who fled to Taiwan to take refuge in the midst of the Manchu takeover. The Qing, after much debate, decided to designate Taiwan as a prefecture of Fujian Province, thus officially incorporating Taiwan into Qing “Chinese” history and territory. Later, in 1887, the Qing established Taiwan as a province, calling it Taiwansheng. Ironically, Taiwan’s post-Japanese colonial history followed a similar pattern. After Japan’s defeat, the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang, hereafter kmt) led by Chiang Kai-shek fled the mainland, leaving it to Mao Zedong’s Communist Party, and set up an exiled government on Taiwan.38 The sub­ sequent establishment of the state of Republic of China (roc) in Taiwan 38  Before Japan’s surrender in 1943, the Allied Powers, who supported the Nationalist Party, agreed that Taiwan would be placed under Chiang Kai-shek’s authority.

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has created a number of complications around the question of political and cultural identity not only internally within the island among both the older residents of Taiwan and the new, postwar “immigrants” from China but also around the question of Taiwan’s independent nationhood vis-à-vis the prc. This book, then, questions not only the apparent disconnectedness but also the postcolonial myth that has been constructed in narrating the experiences of colonial Korea and Taiwan. By placing colonial Korea and colonial Taiwan in a Relational mode, I hope to demonstrate the parallels between them and their histories. Additionally, I hope to decenter the metropole-colony relationship and instead foreground the intraregional relationships. Ultimately, I will reconsider the shared legacy of colonialism through cultural productions in Korea and Taiwan by overlaying three comparative frames: the city, colonialism, and modernism. 3

The City

Cities, both indicative of and nearly synonymous with human civilization, have been and still are key sites for cultural production and the formation of political subjects. This book foregrounds the city, and specifically the onceJapanese colonial cities of Kyŏngsŏng (current-day Seoul) and Taipei, in order to examine the new spaces, new subjectivities, and new literary modes that have emerged along with the growing urbanization. Needless to say, Seoul and Taipei, the capitals of current-day South Korea (Republic of Korea) and Taiwan (roc), underwent dramatic changes on multiple levels. These cities—the respective seats of both the local city government and the Japanese colonial Government-General—undertook expansive reconstruction projects and pursued new policies in urban design. At the broadest level of urban morphology, in both cities, the layout of the major north-south and east-west thoroughfares were widened, straightened, and quadrated in order to form more grid-like arrangements. Monumental structures such as the two Japanese colonial Government-General buildings—the Government-General Korea (J. Chōsen Sōtokufu, hereafter ggk) in Seoul and Government-General Taiwan (J. Taiwan Sōtokufu, hereafter ggt) in Taipei—and residences and train stations were constructed in European architectural styles, while the Japanese residential section of the cities displayed styles that were discernably Japanese. New shrines and parks were erected to imprint the cityscape with symbols of Japanese cultural hegemony. Furthermore, the sounds and sights of the Japanese language increasingly punctuated the linguistic landscape, ultimately muffling but

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without completely muting the native languages and scripts by the time of the outbreak of the Pacific War.39 Malcolm Bradbury opens his chapter on “The Cities of Modernism” with the statement that cities are “generative environments.”40 By “generative,” he means that the city is and functions as the locus of literary and cultural activities; one finds in them the newspapers, the publishing houses, libraries, museums, magazines, cafés, cabarets, dance halls, and other institutions from which other literary and cultural activities spring. As Bradbury writes, the city has not remained one thing: and the forms have not either. And if Modernism is a particularly urban art, that is partly because the modern artist, like his fellow-men, has been caught up in the spirit of the modern city, which is itself the spirit of a modern technological society. The modern city has appropriated most of the functions and communication of society, most of its populations, and the furthest extremities of its technological, commercial, industrial and intellectual experience. The city has become culture, or perhaps the chaos that succeeds it. Itself modernity as social action, it is both the centre of the prevalent social order and the generative frontier of its growth and change.41 Although Bradbury is characterizing European cities, his description aptly applies to the Asian cities of the early twentieth century, where (colonial) modern, urban culture emerged. Raymond Williams also points out that even among much internal diversity within the modernist movement in Europe, the key shift in modernist cultures was seen in the changed characteristics of metropolises. He writes of, in particular, the ways imperialism and new immigrants to the city have produced new forms and themes.42 Furthermore, in The Country and the City, he keenly shows that the city is neither autonomous nor static but always in motion and constantly changing.43 Williams emphasizes that our experiences of both the country and the city are not singular but dialectical, a point which further validates the writer’s paradoxical relationship to 39  On the different ways that the Japanese Government-General instituted the kominka (imperialization) policies, especially relative to Shinto shrine worship and language, see Chou, “Kominka Movement in Taiwan and Korea.” 40  Malcolm Bradbury, “The Cities of Modernism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, eds. Bradbury and James McFarlane (1976; repr., New York: Penguin, 1991), 96–104. 41  Ibid., 97. 42  Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 44–46. 43  Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 289–90.

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the city.44 That is, writers both abhor and adore the city. The writer desires to belong to the city that offers the conveniences and luxuries of modern, urban life but also wants to be separated from its disorienting and uneven effects. This book, too, locates modern figures, spaces, and objects in the city. The urban landscape frames and paves the study. The literary and visual texts that I examine are generative of and generated in urban environments, and the writers who participate in the modernist movement are, as poet-critic Kim Kirim, the iconoclastic leader of Korea’s modernist movement, has said, “the children of modern civilization born of the city.”45 In this book, urban space and literary and visual texts are analyzed together with the material conditions of the city rather than separately or discretely. In other words, the built environment and the texts will simultaneously occupy the foreground. I borrow from Henri Lefebvre’s innovative theoretical work for understanding space. In The Production of Space, the core argument he puts forth is that space is produced socially and is a “social reality.” He insists that any analysis of space must take into account “spatial practices,” “representations of space,” and the “representational space,” terms which correspond to the lived space, the conceived space, and the perceived space, respectively.46 According to Lefebvre’s schema, the category “spatial practice” refers to spaces such as the street and its associated practices and how competently this space is being used; the second category, “representations of space,” refers to the “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanist, technocratic subdividers and social engineers”;47 the last category, “representational space,” is the “lived” or “imagined” spaces associated with symbols—the space of writers, artists, and philosophers. Lefebvre insists that these three categories must be linked together in order to produce a social space. In essence, the realities of the social space must contain the imaginative (literary representations) as well as the material (built forms), practical, and historical. Lefebvre is resolute in stating that texts (literary, visual, architectural) do not merely consist of representations but operate squarely in the production of space through social relations.

44  Ibid., 234, 295. 45  Kim Kirim, Kim Kirim chǒnjip [Complete collected works of Kim Kirim], vol. 2, 56; see chapter entitled “Modŏnisŭm ŭi yŏksajŏk wich’i” [The historical position of modernism]. 46  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 33. 47  Ibid., 38–39.

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Colonialism: Beyond Colonial Modernity

To be sure, the formation of colonial capitals did not occur overnight nor without difficulties, but by the 1930s, Japan had become a commanding imperial power overseeing various aspects of urban growth. Japan, having secured Taiwan (in 1895) and Korea (in 1910) through its unequivocal victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, by 1937 was beginning to map out its plans for creating the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, by which it would eventually extend its reach as far south as the islands of the South Pacific and even up to the northeastern corners of Russia. Korea and Taiwan subsequently became perhaps two of the most important colonies for Japan until its defeat at the end of World War II in 1945. The circumstances and details under which these two states came to be colonized were very different, as were the ways in which Japan ruled Korea and Taiwan. Yet the rise of Japan, with its ambitious, future-focused slogans such as “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) and “rich country, strong military” ( fukoku kyōhei), placed Korea and Taiwan squarely within Japan’s empire-building projects. Although these two countries shared many cultural ties even before they became Japanese colonies, most markedly through their “Chinese cultural heritage,”48 once part of the Japanese empire they became even more closely linked through the transnational flow of people, goods, and ideas from and to the Japanese metropole and the greater East Asian region.49 Pioneering scholarship, including that of Tani Barlow and the contributors to the inaugural issue of positions: east asia cultures critique, have argued that “East Asian representations are neither disfigured nor unsuccessful replications of any prior stable object, artifact, or concept from another place or time.”50 These essays show the multiplicity of modernity in East Asia. At the same time, Barlow specifically warns of the dangers of “crossing out” or deleting colonialism from inquiries of East Asian modernity, where “modernity” 48  I am using the phrase “Chinese cultural heritage” broadly to include, for example, the fact that both Korea and Taiwan at points in their histories sent tribute missions to China, as well as the usage of Chinese script for writing in both countries and the adoption of Confucianism as a form of social and political organization. 49  Recent scholarship on the Japanese empire has innovatively explored the multidirectional flows between the metropole and the periphery. See, for example, Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010); Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion. 50  Tani Barlow, “Introduction,” positions: east asia cultures critique 1.1 (1993): vi.

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could become a mere cliché.51 Barlow’s essay, which addresses the problem of crossing out colonialism in reference to Cold War China studies in the U.S. academy, is even more applicable now to the study of colonialism and modernity in South Korea and Taiwan. A recent shift toward p’ungsok/ fengsu (風俗) (cultural) studies often hovers dangerously close to crossing out critiques of colonialism in favor of a framework of modernity that appears to celebrate material progress, intellectual and artistic breakthroughs, and experiences of everyday life.52 In Korean studies, Gi-wook Shin and Michael Robinson, the editors of the now classic Colonial Modernity in Korea, have alerted us to the dangers of imposing binaries. They set out to shift scholarship away from the dominant nationalist paradigm of interpreting colonialism as repressive Japanese colonizers set against the resistant Korean nationalists while leaving open the possibility of what a triangulated relationship between nationalism, colonialism, and modernity, and their different permutations, might reveal. Likewise, Liao Ping-hui and David Der-wei Wang, in their edited volume Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945 provide multiple case studies that examine the complex negotiations taking place in the formation of colonial Taiwan under Japanese rule. Cognizant of the ways that Taiwan has been often overlooked in the discussion of colonialism and modernity, the contributors to the volume implicitly and explicitly underscore the uniqueness or differences of Taiwan’s colonial experiences compared to those of Japan’s other colonies. Alternatively, this book proposes urban modernity as a framework through which to explore the powerful forces at work in urban development, colonialism, and in making modernist culture. It proposes to read the changes and transformations of urban life by identifying new urban sites and new creative outputs in literature, art, media, and architecture. This is not to say that the rural countryside cannot be a site of modernity, but the city, I believe, is better suited to show the intersections and interactions of colonial modernity— the multiple levels of cultural conditions emerging from the processes of 51  Tani Barlow, “Introduction,” Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 3. 52  The 2003 documentary Taiwanese film Vival Tonal: Tiaowu shidai [Viva Tonal: The Dance Age] (dirs. Chien Wei-ssu and Kuo Chen-ti), the premier screening of which I attended in Taipei, could be considered a primary example in Taiwan. This documentary, on one level, presents the material agency of colonized Taiwanese by recovering evidence of urban consumer culture and history. On the other hand, many critiqued the film for the ways that it appeared to portray the colonial period too positively. Kim Chinsong’s Seoule ttansŭ holŭl hŏhara [Permit the opening of dance halls in Seoul] (Seoul: Hyŏnsil munhwa yŏn’gu, 2002) has generated a similar response in South Korea.

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modernization. The framework of urban modernity also underscores the urban basis of the ongoing transformation of society and culture and the consequences of these urban-centered transformations on everyday practices. This framework also reveals the unevenness of the ways in which modernity and colonialism were experienced by different groups of people at different urban sites. These urban sites, whether located at the center of the city or in the dark, back alleys, have the potential to reveal colonial contradictions and individual struggles. Lastly, urban modernity brings the colonial—which is to say, Japanese cultural hegemony and the Japanese empire—into question by exploring the sites and practices within the colonial city that compete with global modernity. Urban modernity reveals the interplay in which “Japan” and “the West” not only competed but also become obfuscated by one another or mistaken for the other in the colonial setting and more specifically the colonial urban topography. 5

Modernism in Colonial Korean and Taiwanese Cultural Productions

My third overlaying frame is modernism. Susan Stanford Friedman’s “definitional excursions” of “modern/modernity/modernism” show that the flexibility and variability of these words and concepts depend on various locations and times, which squarely point to how difficult it is to define them. At the most general level, Friedman notes that grammatically “the –ism of modernism turns the noun modern into an advocacy, a promotion, a movement presumably centered around a systematic philosophy, politics, ideology, or aesthetics. The –ization of modernization signifies a process, an evolution or revolution from one condition to another, with modernity as the condition achieved by modernization.”53 Yet, as Friedman concludes, the grammatical/philosophical or the political/cultural definitions of modern/modernity/modernism cannot be fixed and in fact are full of “contradictory dialogic.”54 Whereas the definitions and studies of modernism had largely resided in the West and were bound by a particular historical period and experimental impulses of literary giants, the global turn (or spatial turn) in new modernist studies aspires to unlock various boundaries by expanding not only the geographical expanse but to rethink the methodology for comparing literary worlds. Mark Wollaeger 53  Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/ Modernism,” Modernism-Modernity (MoMo) 8.3 (2001): 498. 54  Ibid., 510.

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points out in his introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, this global turn inevitably opens up a more comparative space to include literary and aesthetic productions from outside the West.55 As I mentioned earlier in this introduction, the work of “inclusion” and comparison poses various ethical and methodological quandaries. New modernist studies, led by journals such as modernity/modernism, have offered new models toward understanding literary productions from neglected areas. Nevertheless, East Asian literatures and especially Korean and Taiwanese literary traditions, either independently or in combination, have received woefully little inclusion in world literature anthologies or critical studies on global modernisms that attempt to explore broader categories and cross-theoretical boundaries. Korea and Taiwan, like numerous other sites across the globe, brought forth “cultural production where some form of modernity has ruptured the social factor and its cultural practices with highly accelerated and intensified change across a wide spectrum of social indicators.”56 Decades of Japanese colonial rule were extremely trying times in Korean and Taiwanese histories when the need to respond to modernity found wanting a form of expression that at times was so utterly insufficient that something new had to be created, borrowed from elsewhere, or recycled from the past. There is no doubt that Korean and Taiwanese writers were, in one way or another, deeply affected by the realities of their past, present, and future where colonial subjugation and modern transformations took full force. In these circumstances, how did Korean and Taiwanese writers respond to different forms of modernity and what kinds of cultural expressions were produced by these writers in colonial Korea and Taiwan? In other words, what constituted Korean and Taiwanese modernisms in the early twentieth century? As this book will demonstrate, Korean and Taiwanese modernisms were neither singular nor provincial nor alternative. In evoking these three descriptions, I build on and critique Fredric Jameson’s idea of singular modernity, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provincialization of Europe, and Dilip Gaonkar’s concept of alternative modernity. Whereas there were intense debates that took place among writers as to which mode of representation and technique is the best organizing aesthetic and ideological principle—that is, either realism or modernism—what we find in both colonial Korea and Taiwan is that these 55  Interestingly and unfortunately, among the twenty-eight chapters, there is not one chapter on Korean or Taiwanese literature. 56  Susan Stanford Friedman, “World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity,” in Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 509.

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cultural producers themselves were far from being unified by one style, form, or ideological position.57 Despite the dominant literary history that pits realism (political) against modernism (apolitical) and sets up a binary between the modern West (real) versus the nonmodern East (derivative), the colonial situations in Korea and Taiwan in the early twentieth century render these neat dichotomies an anomaly. Even within the group of writers who have often been labeled as modernist, there are wide-ranging differences. In fact, it is my contention that the combination of realism, modernism, and nativism is what undergirds the thrust of modernist productions in Korea and Taiwan. As Theodore Hughes writes in his study of South Korean literature of the Cold War, the proletarian cultural movement is intricately intertwined with nativism and modernism by the colonial and the modern in the early twentieth century.58 In other words, various cultural movements of the early twentieth century inform one another and coexist rather than simply being antagonistic or being replaceable in temporal succession. Thus, instead of following a narrow definition of modernity and modernism which conflates modernity with Western technological, economic, social, and cultural progress and belated transference of these to the lesser modern East, or modernism as essentially apolitical “art for art’s sake” creative productions that responded in opposition to the coherent narrative of modernization, I broaden and redefine creative modernism both geographically and stylistically. The need for redefinition arises from the complex relationship between the categories of modernity and modernism in colonial Korea and Taiwan. Very often these categories were blurred and conflated by the colonized writers. For many colonized writers, aesthetic modernism itself was, after all, a product of historical modernity wrought by imperialism and colonialism, which did not necessarily indicate successful modernization. Thus, characteristics and 57  In Korea, an exchange between Im Hwa and Kim Kirim in 1935 set up the critique of engaged poetry versus modernist poetry, whereas in Taiwan a similar debate took place in 1934 between Liu Na’ou and Tang Na surrounding the function of film as entertainment versus having didactic value. Although these debates become centerpieces during these lifetimes of these authors, as well as for literary historians and critics in the postcolonial period, what I hope to show is that their actual aesthetic productions are far more flexible than these strict categories allow. For a longer description and analysis of the debates, see Sŏ Chunsŏp, Han’guk modŏnisŭm munhak yŏn’gu [A study on Korean modernism] (Seoul: Ilchisa, 1988) and Peng Hsiao-yen, “Colonialism and the Predicament of Identity: Liu Na’ou and Yang Kui as Men of the World,” in Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895– 1945: History, Culture, Memory, eds. Liao Ping-hui and David Der-wei Wang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 210–47. 58  Theodore Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 20.

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forms of modernism, which was supposed to stand in opposition to modernity, posed ambivalence and contradictions for colonized subjects who not only used its form as a critique of modernity, colonialism, and imperialism but also as an index of and reference for modernization, leading to a conclusion that is closer to semimodernization. Urban modernity or modernization—that is, the material conditions of the city—was also not fully attainable under colonial conditions for the majority of colonized subjects, including intellectuals and cultural elites, simply because Koreans and Taiwanese were not sovereign subjects living with political freedom. Yet, on the other hand, urban modernity certainly afforded new opportunities for some. For instance, intellectuals and cultural elites such as writers had access to and could experience aspects of urban modernity such as reading foreign literature, traveling abroad, and partaking in consumer culture, to name just a few. In fact, they were the class that aspired to a sense of cosmopolitanism beyond the urban modernity of their own country and metropolitan Japan to construct a sense of belonging to global cultural modernity. Although their aspirations for independent modernization largely failed, it is more difficult to evaluate modernism when we examine these writers’ literary and cultural productions. It is in this space of urban modernity—a space between failure and achievement—that I see colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers situated. To best understand the modernist cultural productions of colonial Korea and Taiwan, it is necessary that we take this broader and overlapping approach to modernity and modernism because, as we will see, the writers themselves sensed and lived in a relational mode and their works were not compartmentalized but rather crossed genres, literary forms, and ideological positions.59 Defining and understanding modernity and modernism in colonial Korea and Taiwan cannot help but be complex and confusing, especially because of their trans-Asian/regional histories and relationships before, during and after colonialism and their place in the network of global modernity in the age of imperialism. In this way, Peter Osborne’s definition of modernism as a philosophical concept and modernism’s fundamental character as a “temporal dynamic of cultural form” that moves away from conceptualizing modernism as a “particular, chronologically-defined, period style” is apt.60 Therefore, my reading of the various texts in this book will combine both a formalist reading 59  Both in South Korea and Taiwan, the 1980s and the post-1987 political liberalization opened up new discussions on the literary realism and modernism of the colonial period. Interestingly, and quite often, scholarly works privileged realism over modernism for the reason that the critique of modernism centered around the idea of assimilation of Western culture and cultural practices. 60  Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2001), 59.

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and one that understands modernism as emerging from a culture of modernity specific to the conditions of colonial Korea and Taiwan. This is another reason why it is imperative that we withhold the rivaling descriptions of Korea’s anticolonialism versus Taiwan’s accommodation or the larger critique of East Asia’s modernity as derivative and to place colonial cultural productions from Korea and Taiwan in relation to one another in order to question the ideologies and circulations of modernity and modernism. One of the predicaments to understanding modernism and modernity in colonial Korea and Taiwan is that during the early twentieth century, both Western and Japanese forms of modernity loomed large in both countries, in addition to their native internalization processes, which adds to the complexity of identifying and describing the culture of modernity. As the first East Asian country to undertake modernization based on various Western institutions and technologies during the process of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, and the first East Asian power to defeat Russia (which was considered to be a dominant “Western” power), Japan’s role in modernizing and relaying aspects of Western modern culture to its colonies is undeniable. At the same time, it has been well studied by now that the idea of modernity, and in particular literary modernity, was also being rigorously worked out and debated as part and parcel of Japan’s colonizing project. That is, while its war victories, institutional and technological achievements, and acquisition of colonies during the Meiji era all signaled Japan’s arrival at modernity, Japanese intellectuals and writers, both at the time and in the subsequent Taishō and early Shōwa years, were grappling with the double bind of assimilating and critiquing Western modernity while simultaneously putting forth discourses and practices of modernity in the colonies.61 Ideas about and concrete signs of Western modernity began appearing in Korea and Taiwan around the same time, but Western modernity also coexisted, flourished, and competed with Japanese colonialism and Japanese-mediated modernity to different degrees.62 I would contend that, for Korea and Taiwan, the combination of Western modernity and Japanese colonial modernity initially came as a bundled experience as a result of the nearly simultaneous experience of informal Western imperialism and formal Japanese colonialism and global capitalism that linked all of these together in a web of intricate circulation. Likewise, both informal and formal imperialisms 61  See Seiji Lippit’s “Introduction: Fissures of Japanese Modernity,” in his Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1–36. 62  Heekyoung Cho has studied the ways Russian literature was mediated through Japanese literature in Korea during the colonial period. See Heekyoung Cho, “Literary Translation and Appropriations: Korean Intellectuals’ Reception of Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose via Japan in 1909–1927” (PhD diss. University of Chicago, 2009).

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also came to play a critical role in the production of and discourses on literary and artistic modernity of the two countries. 6

Introduction to Chapters

While this book focuses on colonial Korea and colonial Taiwan, in particular on the exploration of urban experiences in the respective countries’ capitals, I do not aim to provide comprehensive and exhaustive urban histories of these cities. Indeed, the spaces within the cities that I examine in this book—the street, the department store, and the space of media—are not a comprehensive catalogue of urban spaces. Rather, these are integral, although selective, places that participate in the production of the city. I also bring together various kinds of texts and textual forms—both literary and visual, including cover art and cartoons, architecture, novels, essays, and poetry—in order to sketch not only the broad contours of urban experiences but also the fine lines of the different modes of expression. Franco Moretti suggests that modern urban experiences and narrative form are important partners, and that form, the rise of the modern novel and the plot of the novel with its “intensification of mobility” in particular, can inform urban experiences just as much, if not more than, mere descriptions of the city.63 In other words, the temporal is as important as the spatial. While I agree with Moretti’s attention to the narrative form, I do not necessarily agree that the novel is the best form to document and express the urban experience. Instead, I have chosen to pair various genres with urban spaces in the hope of showing how different narrative forms participate in constructing the urban experience. The book’s chapters move from broad to specific or, to use cinematic terms, from an “aerial” view with long shots to a “zoomed-in” view with close-ups; it moves from a look at the broad construction of the city to the specific places within the city: from the city to the street, then to the department store, and finally to media spaces. Each chapter focuses on a particular narrative form or genre in order to provide a broad scope of the artistic production taking place. While each chapter addresses a specific genre and set of authors, it does not necessarily make claims about the value of one genre or author’s suitability to a particular urban space. For example, I do not contend that poetry is best suited to the discussion of the role of streets and street culture or that Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang are the most suitable figures for understanding modernist poetry, even if they are both often cited as the most representative 63  Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, (London: Verso, 1988), 111.

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modernist poets.64 Rather, my choices and pairings reflect my attempt to discover how “texts form a network of relations wherever the texts are written, read, and circulated.”65 In other words, it is an attempt, as the editors of Geomodernisms have encouraged, “to read astray” by bringing together various modernist texts to be read across temporal, geographical, and cultural lines in an effort to “‘un-discipline’ modernist studies.”66 Chapter 1 places the cities of Kyŏngsŏng, Taipei, and Tokyo in relation to each other in order to map out the multiple directions and chronotopes of modernity. It also investigates the operation of writing “formless in form” through an analysis of Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s essays on Tokyo, which were written while both were living in the imperial capital. To be sure, for each colonized subject, traveling and living in the Japanese colonial metropole would lead to very different experiences from those of other colonized subjects as well as from those of Japanese colonizers who traveled and resided in the colonies. Furthermore, for the colonized, travel to the metropole both obviates and intensifies the polarization of the imagined gap—the colonizer’s cosmopolitan metropole versus the colonized subject’s backward periphery—while simultaneously cultivating a newly discovered sense of connection forged through ambivalence and disappointment with imperialist modernity. But how might we understand these differences without universalizing them? Using Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s texts, I hope to demonstrate how, in the process of traveling and writing about the colonial metropole, authors not only traverse through and between physical spaces and time but also perform cognitive movements through their textual geography. In effect, I argue that the texts I examine in this chapter place ordinary experiences and experiences of estrangement in dialectic movement through which the rediscovery of the self and the other not only becomes more complicated but is at risk. The chapter explores the extent to which the colonized authors and their modernist texts take risks to understand the differences between the colonizer and the 64  The Korean and Taiwanese writers I present in this book received various levels of attention throughout the postwar period within their own national canon due to sociopolitical circumstances and reception, namely related to anticommunist discourses set up by the South Korean and Taiwanese governments as well as affixing Japanese language usage in literature as an act of collaboration. In the late twentieth century, they have become canonical within their national literary studies as a result of the remaking of national literatures in both countries. The recent boom in modernist studies and the Japanese empire in South Korea and Taiwan have brought the authors I study in this book to the center of modernist studies. 65  Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” 96. 66  Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, and Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 7.

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colonized beyond mere discourses of differences. Rather, what I aim to show through this first chapter is what was at stake in the discourses of similarities. From the “aerial” view of cities through cross-straits travels, we move into one of the most important features of cities—their streets, where various interactions between people and modern life take place. The streets of Kyŏngsŏng and Taipei underwent significant transformations not only in their physical layouts but also at the level of textual geography, when street signs, storefront displays, and language heard on the streets exhibited multilingualism, thereby forming a new kind of urban landscape and soundscape. Using the metaphor of “street language,” Chapter 2 examines the modernist poetry of Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang and what I am calling their “modernist street language.” During the colonial period, although the official national language (kokuko) was Japanese, the most frequently spoken languages in Korea and Taiwan were still Korean and Taiwanyu or Southern Min.67 Writing was, as I will elaborate in this chapter, not easily classifiable precisely because of the already heteroglossic nature of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. But the very notion of a national language under colonial circumstances reveals the processes by which language is constantly being contested and undergoing construction and therefore cannot be innately “national.” The Japanese colonial government made concerted efforts to institutionalize and promote Japanese language learning and usage in the colonies through education, broadcasting, and publications, even going as far as prohibiting the use of Korean and Chinese in the latter years of the colonial period. This chapter explores what happens when the colonizing project is thwarted or ruptured by global modernity, which leads not only to the colonizer’s language being imposed on the colonized but to a situation where multilingualism prevails. By drawing attention to the coexistence of multiple languages operating in the literary worlds of colonial Kyŏngsŏng and colonial Taipei as well as on the streets, I show how the Japanese colonial government’s national language movements clashed and competed not only with the native languages but also with various Western languages, including English, French, and German, and of course, Chinese. The result is a kind of creolization that Glissant describes as the “dialectics between the oral and the written, the thought of multilingualism, the balance between the present moment and duration, the questioning of literary genres, and power of the baroque, the nonprojectile imaginary construct.”68

67  I noticed during my research in Taipei (2003–4) the preference for the terms Taiwanyu (臺灣語) or Taiyu (臺語) over Minnanyu in both conversation and in written form. 68  Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 35.

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Streets were important spaces of human interactions because they were most often lined with spaces of consumption, pleasure, and leisure. Chapter 3 turns to the spaces of mass consumerism—department stores—and explores their relationship with modernist fiction. In the early twentieth century, the department store represented the quintessential means of encasing the public in a private space, while also being a private space that was open to the public. In many ways, the department store collapsed the public and the private with its show windows, mannequins, elevators, grand winding staircases, sales girls and display cases, restaurants, art galleries, miniature golf, and rooftop cafés. The colonial-period department stores in Korea and Taiwan were probably not much different from those still there today—a “phantasmagoria,” as Walter Benjamin described the French arcades. Department stores were not simply about conspicuous consumption, but also about the Marxist commodification process, which changed not only the scale and form of consumption but essentially transformed human interactions. This chapter addresses the ways Korean and Taiwanese modernist writers’ depiction of the department store in their fictional narratives parallels the duality of the modernist movement itself and the debate between modernist and leftist (socialist-inspired) literatures. On the one hand, the department store offered a new space of self-fashioning where the individual could “buy” a modern identity in order to fashion an elite or bourgeois subjectivity. On the other hand, this ability to buy and fashion produced a space that exhibited the alarming contradictions of urban modernity because it verged on erasing national and ethnic identities at a historical moment when ethnicity and the nation needed to matter for the colonized who sought liberation for the future. In short, I show that the department store was a space where class and national identities clashed and merged in fantastic ways in the modernist-leftist novels of Yi Hyosŏk and Wang Shilang. In Chapter 4, I examine two different types of visual representations of women in colonial Korea and Taiwan: cover art of popular women’s magazines and narrative comics. Two of the primary archetypes of the city as well as of the urban narrative were the New Woman and the Modern Girl, whom in recent scholarship have received much attention.69 These iconic female figures materialized, both locally and globally, to enliven the formation of 69  Among many others, see Alys Weinbaum et al., eds., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Yung-hee Kim, “Creating New Paradigms for Womanhood in Modern Korean Literature: Na Hye-sǒk’s ‘Kyǒnghǔi,’” Korean Studies 26.1 (2002): 1–60; Kim Sujin, Sin yŏsŏng kŭndae ŭi kwaing [New woman and the excess of modernity] (Seoul: Somyǒng, 2009).

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colonial urban modernity. At the same time, various discourses on modernization gave rise to new ways of positing the role of women in both public and private spaces. In debating the new role and place for women, women became omnipresent and hypervisible. This new hypervisibility of women was closely linked to the growth of urban culture, where physical, social, cultural, moral, and material transformations altered everyday life, bringing forth new styles, sensibilities, and attitudes. Therefore, media representations very frequently showed women adorned in the latest new fashion, engaged in the kinds of activities that were commonly not associated with women, and employed in new work that brought them out to public spaces. In this chapter, I show that the construction of Korean and Taiwanese New Woman and the Modern Girl representations and discourses were complicated by multiple competiting ideologies. This is because the Korean and Taiwanese New Woman and the Modern Girl did not emerge from the simple transplanting of Western or Japanese gender ideologies but one in which these two colonial countries’ own historical conditions under a non-Western imperialist power and growing global, capitalist modernity shaped each of the country’s gender politics. The fourth chapter foregrounds not only the critical role of new visual media in visualizing women but also the implications of that new media on discourses on gender formation. I conclude with a Postscript presenting my reading of Park Wan-suh’s (Pak Wansŏ) Mother’s Stake (Ŏmma ŭi malttuk, 1980) and Chu T’ien-hsin’s (Zhu Tianxin) The Old Capital (Gudu, 1997). These are two contemporary novellas by Korean and Taiwanese female writers which probe the urban histories of colonial Seoul and Taipei and critique the contemporary conditions of the city and the nationalist histories that have left people more isolated from their pasts and displaced from a sense of belonging in the present. In both novellas, the narrators arrive at this critique through remembering and tracing the histories of their own individual experiences of living under Japanese colonial rule. Interestingly, these two novellas transport both the female narrators and the female protagonists back in time and space to show the contradicting experiences of urban modernity. While at the surface both narratives appear to nostalgically recall the past in an uncritical manner, they both embed a poignant as well as pointed critique of the standard historical narratives of resistance versus submission espoused in characterizing colonial Korea and Taiwan in the majority of postcolonial scholarship. More importantly, both narratives look back as a means to critique the present conditions that do not allow for heterogeneous spaces, histories, and voices to coexist. In fact, they present a subtle yet powerful critique of a post-martial law society that purports itself to be a democracy but has not yet arrived there fully.

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Together these chapters aim to provide both a macro and micro exploration of urban history and culture in colonial Korea and Taiwan. In tandem, I enliven these histories using literary and visual texts from the latter half of the colonial period to demonstrate the global modernist impulses connecting the two colonies to each other but also to the wider world.

chapter 1

Discovering Modernity

Sketching Urban Landscapes of Home and Abroad Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different. What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, “an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,” the return to the nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the “discovery” of relics and legends? michel de certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

⸪ During the early decades of the twentieth century, Kyŏngsŏng and Taipei went from being a royal capital and provincial capital respectively to being urban centers of the Japanese empire, increasingly connected not only to Japan but also to the world. Many Koreans and Taiwanese traveled to Japan—but also to Europe, the United States, and China—to pursue education. Others migrated to seek employment or to escape political persecution. Whatever the reason, both domestic and international travel became more accessible (and necessary) to a greater number of colonized subjects, facilitated by new technologies of travel such as the railway system and steamships. Travel, however, was often a complicated matter. It was not simply a matter of physical movement from one place to another but involved cognitive and affective transformations, at times strengthening the separation of the other and the self which was reinforced further by the disjuncture experienced by the traveler’s preconceptions of the place. This realization was often accompanied by traumatic and depressing admissions of displaced expectations. To understand how colonized subjects’ travels abroad informed the ways they experienced the city and modernity as well as the self and other, I examine travel narratives written by Yi Sang (1910–37) and Weng Nao (1908–1939 or 1940?) in this chapter. My definition of travel narratives is quite broad, in that I examine prose pieces that Yi Sang and Weng Nao wrote while in Tokyo, whether about the imperial capital or their hometowns back in Korea and Taiwan, respectively. I read these narratives as neither fiction nor nonfiction,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401167_003

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for they defy genre categorization. Instead, I identify them as modernist prose that can be read in multiple registers, bounded neither by their formality nor by their informality. These essays are self-consciously reflexive, yet they cannot be classified as memoirs; autobiographies; I-novels (J. watakushi shosetsu), an epitome of modern Japanese literature in which the author in his/her authorial voice narrates a very personal story; or even as critical essays (K. p’yŏngron; C. pinglun). Rather, I characterize them as modernist essays and as a writing form and practice similar to how Theodor Adorno conceptualized the essay as an “empty form” of sorts because it has the potential to collapse binaries be it art and science, the personal and the public, formal and informal, fiction and nonfiction. I argue that the essay provided colonized writers with textual spaces in which they could deliberately experiment, both aesthetically and technically and in form and content. Most prominently, the two writers’ essays show the complex relationship they had with modernity and modernism. On the one hand, their modes of discovery were through travel and writing about their travels. Travel writing, however, participates in, for much of its intent and purpose, charting historical modernity which stands in opposition to modernism which bewails teleology—that is linearity, discovery, and solution in narrative. On the other hand, Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s travel writings defied the standard form of travel writing. We might liken this to Adorno’s description of the essay as possessing a “fragmentary character” which he sees as the essay’s nucleus and its potential: “It is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character.”1 In short, their essays are formless in form. In discussing essays written by one of the most elegant essayists of modern Korea, Yi T’aejun, Janet Poole translates his sup’il as “anecdotal essay” following the form of writing widely enjoyed and practiced by Confucian literati during the Chosŏn dynasty.2 In fact Yi, who masterfully adapted the premodern essay form for the modern times, ingeniously titles his essay collection Musorok—literally translated as “random notes”—as if to evoke the modernist sensibilities of breaking down forms and articulating the aesthetic sensibilities of modernity. Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s essays are certainly not continuations of the premodern essay nor do they resemble Yi T’aejun’s style. Yet, what Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s essays have in common with the premodern essay form, as well as with Yi T’aejun’s modern adaptations, is the care they demonstrate in filling the empty form with potential for new thinking and expression. 1  Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 9. 2  Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, trans. Janet Poole (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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Their travel essays, which this chapter will discuss, are dotted with fragmented thoughts, blurry impressions, and fleeting observations all the while being permeated with minute details and vivid descriptions. The space and form of the modernist essay, therefore, provided the crucial flexibility—especially in the 1930s with the intensification of colonial censorship, restriction in political activities, and deepening policies of cultural assimilation—that colonized writers needed in order to map out their experiences of urban modernity. 1

Tokyo, Taipei, and Kyŏngsŏng: Sketching the Colonial Metropoles

Tokyo, a city of 6.3 million inhabitants in 1935, ranked equal in population to New York and London.3 The capital of the expanding Japanese empire loomed large in the imaginations of those living in the colonies, at once enchanted and intimidated by the towering height of the Marunouchi Building, the glittering neon lights of Ginza, and the phantasmagoric department stores of the city. Moreover, to those living outside the metropole, Tokyo seen through films, advertisements, photographs, novels, and, most of all, recalled by those who had been there, seemed to pulsate with the syncopated beats of jazu (jazz) and the stir and the excess of Moga (Modern Girl) and Mobo (Modern Boy) garbed in “Taishō chic” strolling through the streets.4 When the Taishō period (1912–26) ended with the death of Emperor Taishō in December 1926, the early years of the Shōwa era (1926–89) continued to exhibit the sentiments and ambience of Taishō chic in fashion, attitudes, and art. For many Tokyoites, the radical urban transformation undertaken after the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 left Tokyo so changed that it was almost unrecognizable even for native Tokyoites like the famed literary Kobayashi Hideo.5 Although the 1930s and 1940s marked a drastic turn toward militarism and Japan’s aggressive war efforts, Tokyo continued to be the site of cultural production, and the city continued to be an object of lure and interest for colonized Koreans and Taiwanese, 3  Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office statistics. Japan’s total population was approximately 69 million, around 9% of whom resided in Tokyo. 4  See Kendall Brown and Sharon Minichiello, eds., Taishō Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia, and Deco (Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2001). See also Miriam Silverberg, Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and Ian Buruma’s chapter “Ero, Guro, Nansensu,” in Inventing Japan: 1853–1964 (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 63–84. 5  Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home,” in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, 1924–1939, ed. and trans. Paul Anderer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 46–54.

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not to mention numerous notable Chinese and Westerners. Japan—in particular, Tokyo—continued to present itself as a place of desire and destination for travel in the 1930s since it provided Koreans and Taiwanese with opportunities to receive a modern education, experiment with modern technology and intellectual thoughts, and participate in consumer culture. Perhaps most ironically, Koreans and Taiwanese were drawn to Tokyo because it offered them a kind of freedom and opportunity that was lacking in their own colonized country.6 This applied to both upper- and lower-class Koreans and Taiwanese, for some sought jobs in Japan as factory workers and coal miners in the hopes of gaining greater economic freedom, while others sought a modern education that was not available in the colonies.7 However, as in any growing city in the early twentieth century, the glitz and glamour of cosmopolitan urban life were offset by filth, poverty, and discrimination, especially experienced by the city’s marginalized people. If the uneven historical development within Tokyo was glaringly visible,8 then one can easily assume that the uneven development present between the colonies’ urban centers—Kyŏngsŏng and Taipei—and the metropole was likely even more palpable. Although some went abroad to the United States, Europe, and China, the majority of Korean and Taiwanese went to Japan. According to the 1945 Keihkyokuō Report of the Naimushō (Ministry of Home Affairs), the number of Koreans in Japan was as follows: 40,755 in 1920; 419,009 in 1930; 690,501 in 1936; 735,689 in 1937; and 1,241,315 in 1940. According to 1923 population statistics, of the 88,262 Koreans in Japan, only 1,101 were students, and around two-thirds of these students (689) resided in Tokyo. Given the smaller population of Taiwan, the number of Taiwanese going to Japan was also much smaller, compared with Koreans. The number of Taiwanese in Japan was as follows: 1,703 in 1920; 4,611 in 1930; and 22,499 in 1940.9 Interestingly, the proportion of Taiwanese students in Japan was much higher, compared with Korean 6  Cited in Changsoo Lee and George De Vos, eds., Koreans in Japan: Ethnic Conflict and Accommodation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 37. 7  Osaki-shi Shakai-bu Chosa-ka, Chōsenjin Rōdōsha Mondai [The problem of Korean workers] (1924), 21–23, cited in Michael Weiner, The Origins of the Korean Community in Japan: 1910– 1923 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 64. See also William Donald Smith, “Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in the Mines: Korean Workers in Japan’s Chikuhō Coal Field, 1917–1945” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1999). 8  See Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (Rutland, VT: Charles Tuttle, 1984) and Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990) for details of urban Tokyo landscape and culture. 9  Cited in Eiko Tai, “Taiwanese in Japan: A Legacy of Japanese Rule in Taiwan” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1993), 40.

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students. In 1922, there were 1,400 Taiwanese students in Japan; in 1938, there were 4,132.10 By 1936, when Yi Sang left Kyŏngsŏng for Tokyo, the population of the greater Kyŏngsŏng (tae Kyŏngsŏng) metropolitan area had reached approximately 650,000, which ranked seventh in population in the Japanese empire after Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, Yokohama, and Kyoto.11 Greater Kyŏngsŏng expanded its area to include Yŏngdŭngp’o to the west and Ch’ŏngryangni to the east. As for Taiwan, although the Qing government moved the provincial capital from Tainan to Taipei in 1875, it became the official capital of the island only a year before Japanese annexation in 1894. But by the 1930s, Taipei occupied a permanent and important place in the Japanese empire with its population growing to 266,066 (1932), a figure much higher than what was projected by the colonial urban planners in 1905.12 Urban historians like Hashiya Hiroshi characterize both Kyŏngsŏng and Taipei as possessing a “dual structure” by the 1930s.13 Hashiya classifies these two colonial cities as such since the Japanese colonial authorities had to build on top of the existing capital cities, unlike some colonial cities that were completely built anew during the Japanese occupation. New land areas were cleared for grandiose Western architecture. Unmistakably, the most symbolic of these were two palatial government buildings which towered over Kyŏngsŏng and Taipei. In Kyŏngsŏng, a neo-renaissance structure with an impressive dome was erected directly in front of Kyŏngbok Palace, the seat of the Chosŏn dynasty monarchy, while in Taipei, the most central site within the walls of the city was selected as the site in which to erect an ornate baroque-style structure with a tower, which at the time was the tallest structure in the city. The dual structure was observable in the ways the Japanese settlers carved out a neighborhood of their own that competed with and developed alongside the native neighborhoods. In the case of Kyŏngsŏng, an area south of the Ch’ŏnggye stream closer to the first Japanese resident general’s building became the central area for Japanese commercial interests. In Taipei, the area furthest east of the Danshui (Tamsui) River, which occupied a more central space in relation to the older Chinese areas such as Banka and Dadaocheng, was developed for 10  Ibid., 43. 11  Kim Paek-yŏng, Chibaewa konggan [Power and space] (Seoul: Munhak kwa chisŏngsa, 2009), 427. The total population of Korea was approximately 22.9 million in 1935. 12  Huang Wuda, Rizhi shidai Taibeishi zhi jindai dushi jihua zhi yanjiu [A study of Japanese colonial period Taipei urban planning] (Taipei: Chu ban, 1996), 96. The total population of Taiwan was approximately 5.2 million in 1935. 13  Hashiya Hiroshi, Teikoku Nihon to Shokuminchi Toshi [Colonial cities of the Japanese empire] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 2004).

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the construction of the Governor-General’s building as well as residences for Japanese migrants. Furthermore, although the installation of modern infrastructures, such as railways, train stations, electricity plants, and sewage systems, began during the precolonial period in both cities, Japanese colonial authorities accelerated the implementation process often by providing the financial backing that was necessary to complete the projects. The railway system in particular, along with other public transportation, while facilitating the modernization of travel, undeniably served as one of the most potent symbols and acts of territorial claim on the part of the colonial authority. All of these urban implementations demonstrate the ways in which colonial power was exercised and inscribed directly onto the urban landscape. What is evident from looking at Tokyo, Taipei, and Kyŏngsŏng in the 1930s is that all three cities were undergoing major urban transformations almost simultaneously. The modernization process began by the Meiji reformers and elites in the late nineteenth century continued and was transplanted to the colonies. More significantly, these new building projects, street pavements, and infrastructures not only reconstructed the physical urban landscape but also radically altered the way people living in the cities interacted with and experienced their built environment. Modernist writers, most of whom were living in Tokyo, Taipei, and Kyŏngsŏng, could not escape the changes enveloping them. What’s more, writers from the colonies, such as Yi Sang and Weng Nao, who were archetypical urbanites, were keen to capture the details and nuances of their environment in order to make sense of the space and their presence in it. Yi’s and Weng’s travels to Tokyo, further, opened up the opportunity to relate their experiences of perceived and lived environments. In other words, through their travels to the colonial metropole, what came into relief was the greater sense of the simultaneity of encompassing global modernity rather than a space-time gap between the colonies and the metropole. 2

Yi Sang and Weng Nao: Enigmatic or Ordinary?

In literary circles, the mention of Yi Sang and Weng Nao conjures up images of brilliant young men who were clouded in mystery and met tragic early deaths. Both were born as Japanese colonial subjects around the same time. Both received elite colonial educations and excelled in their studies but chose to forego their professions for writing careers and carefree lifestyles. Both were archetypical Modern Boys who had scandalous love affairs with Modern Girls. Both left for Japan in the mid-1930s but were met by unfortunate deaths, never to return to their home countries. Their literary works offer some of the most

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innovative forms, provocative themes, and stirring depictions of human psychology and urban landscapes and senses ever committed to paper. Yi Sang has become synonymous with Korean literary modernism and the influential literary coterie, the Circle of Nine (Kuinhoe).14 Although often labeled as the group that best represented modernist sensibilities, the Circle of Nine was not conceived according to a singular dictum, nor did it claim a cohesive aesthetics. Rather, each member brought his unique literary faculty to the group and its journal Siwa sosǒl (Poetry and Fiction), of which only one issue was ever published. Nevertheless, the fact literary historians make sweeping, albeit mistaken, associations between Yi Sang and the Circle of Nine and attribute its supposed group characteristics to Yi Sang’s ingenious flair attests to both the myth and verity of Yi Sang’s enduring legend. Yi Sang graduated with a degree in architecture from the prestigious Kyǒngsǒng Polytechnic High School at the age of nineteen and worked as an architectural engineer in the colonial government’s Department of Public Works.15 While employed there, he published his poetry in such magazines as Chosŏn (Chōsen) and contributed his cover art to Chōsen to kenchiku (Korea and Architecture), a Japaneselanguage architectural journal. Indeed, his enigmatic poetry and ambiguous prose challenged the “architectural” boundaries of traditional genre forms while offering an equally riddle-filled criticism of urban modernity and Korea’s colonial conditions. Weng Nao is best known for his neo-sensualist or perceptionist (Shin kankakuha) style of writing. He was associated with many literary organizations both in Taiwan and Japan and contributed his writings to the Taiwan Culture Circle (Taiwan wenyi lianmeng), the publisher of the journal Taiwan bungei (Taiwan Literary Arts), which was in print from November 1934 to August 1936. This journal was initially intended to be a bilingual publication (vernacular Chinese and Japanese), although the majority of the texts published were actually in Japanese. Weng had some connections to several other organizations, 14  Yi Sang joined the Circle of Nine in 1934 through the recommendation of the prominent poet and editor Chǒng Chiyong. Two reasons for Yi Sang being a central figure of the Circle of Nine might be that he was the editor of its coterie journal Siwa sosǒl, and the group held their meetings at a café he operated called Chaebi (The Swallow). 15  For a timeline of Yi Sang’s life and works, see Kim Yunsik, Yi Sang yǒn’gu [A study of Yi Sang] (Seoul: Munhak sasang sa, 1987), 390–433. There is a prodigious amount of South Korean scholarship on Yi Sang. For a list of the major studies organized by year, see part four of Kim Chuhyǒn, Yi Sang sosǒl yǒn’gu [A study of Yi Sang’s fiction] (Seoul: Somyǒng Publishing, 1999). For an introduction to Yi Sang’s life and works in English, see Walter K. Lew, “Yi Sang,” in The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, ed. Joshua Mostow (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 657–63; and Lew, “Yi Sang,” Muae 1 (1995): 71–73.

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such as the Taiwan Literature and Arts Research Association (Taiwan wenyi yishu yanjiuhui), the publisher of the important magazine Formosa (July 1933– June 1934), and the Taiwan Scholarly Arts Research Association. Both of these associations played seminal roles in the advancement of literature of Taiwan in the 1930s.16 Yi Sang (pen name: Kim Haegyǒng) was born September 17, 1910, and raised in Kyŏngsŏng and had rarely traveled outside the Korean capital before embarking on his trip to Tokyo. Perhaps it was because he had spent almost his entire life in colonial Kyŏngsŏng, unlike some of his peers and fellow writers who had sojourned to Japan for their education, that Tokyo remained a uniquely alluring destination. Whether sardonically or in earnest, Yi Sang frequently wrote of his wish to go to Tokyo: I penned a few short stories and a few lines of verse, doubling the humiliation of my decomposing mind and body. On top of this, it had gotten to the point where it was too hard for me to survive in this land. Anyway, to put it nicely, I had to go into exile. Where shall I go? I bragged to everyone I met that I was going to Tokyo.17 In my stupor I thought of leaving the country: I’m going far, far away to Tokyo, I’m going, I’m going—going for good, off to Tokyo.18 What enticements did Tokyo hold for a person—ill from tuberculosis as he was—to journey to a crowded, humid, and alienating city hardly conducive to his health? What were Yi Sang’s expectations of the metropole? Why did he feel the almost suicidal urge to personally experience being in Tokyo? How did his encounter with the imperial other inform and revise the way he understood himself and colonial Kyŏngsŏng? Despite his dangerously weakened physical state, in October 1936 he boarded a ship bound for Tokyo, a place he had only heard and read about. Unfortunately, Yi Sang died in Tokyo in 1937 16  Yang Xingting, “Yi yaozhe de juncai Weng Nao,” in Weng Nao, Wu Yongfu, Wang Changxiong heji [Collected works of Weng Nao, Wu Yongfu, and Wang Changxiong], ed. Zhang Henghao (Taipei: Qianwei, 1991), 139–42; Kuo-ch’ing Tu, “Foreword to the Special Issue on Weng Nao and Wu Yung-fu,” Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 27 (2011): vii–xv. 17  Yi Sang, “Pongbyŏlgi” [Record of a consummation], trans. Heinz Insu Fenkl and Walter Lew, Muae 1 (1995), 91–95. “Pongbyŏlgi” was originally published in the colonial women’s magazine Yŏsŏng, December 1936. 18  Yi Sang, “Hwanshigi” [Phantom illusions], in A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction, trans. Kim Chong-un and Bruce Fulton (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 172–78. “Hwanshigi” was published posthumously in the 1938 issue of Ch’ŏngsaekchi.

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from his preexisting illness which had compounded when he was arrested and identified as one of the futei seijin (insubordinate), a label that Koreans often bore from their colonizers. As for Weng Nao, he was born in a rural village in Zhanghua County (Chūka) in 1908. He graduated from the Taichū (Taichung) Teacher’s School in 1929 and worked as a teacher, but similar to other Taiwanese youths who imagined a better life and opportunities at the metropole, he set out for Japan in 1934. In Tokyo, Weng is said to have led a decadent life filled with romantic relationships with Japanese women where he frequented cafés and associated with other Japanese writers of neo-sensualist leanings.19 As far as we know, only eight prose works and a handful of poems by Weng Nao exist, but despite the relatively small oeuvre, his work occupies an integral part of literary modernism in Taiwan. Biographers and literary historians writing about Weng Nao have pieced together fragments about his time in Tokyo, although much about his life remains an enigma. In some regards, Weng appears to have assimilated quite unassumingly into Japanese society. How did he do this? How did he experience Tokyo and its suburbs, Kōenji in particular, where he had lived? How did he look back on the country and the city he had left behind? Yi’s and Weng’s life stories provide material conditions and context from which literary modernism was born. Though these writers and the other writers I study in this book were marginalized figures in relation to the Japanese empire, they were nevertheless the primary cultural producers who were at the center of constructing, imagining, and representing the conditions and realities of their historical moment. The growing scholarship on colonial travel writing has shown that the act of travel can open up new social spaces from which new social constructions and relations can be engendered.20 This is particularly applicable to subaltern travelers to the colony, especially women and/or members of the lower class. On the other hand, a colonized subject’s travels to the metropole often produce a different kind of relationship where the realization of his or her otherness becomes doubly heightened, leading to a rediscovery or awareness of his native home. Thus, travel and travel writings are deeply implicated in the discourses of colonialism and power, whether it is the colonizer traveling to the colony or the colonized traveling to the metropole. Homi Bhabha, however, 19  Kuo-ch’ing Tu, “Foreword,” xi–xiii. 20  See Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991). Both Pratt and Mills focus on women travelers to show their altered gender and social relationships as a colonizer in the colonies.

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warns of the dangers of speaking in terms of a singular discourse of colonialism which hinges on Othering through difference. Bhabha’s now classic claim that colonialism and the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer is an ambivalent matter has reached the status of a truism.21 Furthermore, the ethnographic study of travelers conducted by Katherine George suggests that travelers base their opinions and form biases not so much on what they have actually seen during their travels but on what they expect to see, drawing on what they have heard in their own country.22 Allison Lockwood’s study of an American traveler to Great Britain also concludes that a process of invention about the destination occurs even before the traveler actually departs on his trip.23 Because of these ideas formulated at home, the shock travelers experience once they encounter something contrary to their expectations is substantial. Although George and Lockwood do not explicitly discuss the ramifications of this shock, I surmise that it is because of these shock experiences, as well as a privileging of their own travels, that stories of foreign places become replicated and conveyed to others. Through storytelling and gossip, others who have yet to travel become recipients of these tales. I examine three texts written during Yi Sang’s fateful, lone sojourn in Tokyo: “Tong’gyǒng” (Tokyo); “Kwǒnt’ae” (Ennui); and “Silhwa” (Lost Flowers), as well as Weng Nao’s “Tokyo kōgai rōningai: Kōenji kaiwai” (The Flâneur of Tokyo Streets: The Neighborhood of Kōenji), “Zansetsu” (Remaining Snow), and “Aware na Rui Baasan” (Poor Old Rui).24 My analysis shows how travel for Yi Sang and Weng Nao functioned to articulate an integral part of their discovery of urban modernity—a discovery that revealed a vacuous Tokyo and an absence of real modernity, thus ultimately decentering the metropole. More specifically, by placing Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s texts in relation to one another, I intend to show the ways these two colonized writers represented experiences of Tokyo urban modernity in cotemporal and cospatial ways in relation to their respective Seoul and Taipei modernities.

21  Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86. 22  Katherine George, “The Civilized West Looks at Primitive Africa, 1400–1800,” Isis 46 (1958): 62–63. 23  Allison Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims: An American Traveler in Great Britain (New York: Cornwall Books, 1980). 24  “Lost Flowers” is categorized as fiction (sosǒl) and “Ennui” and “Tokyo” as essays (sup’il) in the two different editions of Yi Sang’s collected works: Yi Sang chǒnjip (ed. Im Chongguk; 1966), and Yi Sang munhak chǒnjip, vols. 2–5 (ed. Kim Yunsik, 1992–2001). However, I will be reading the three texts together to highlight the ambiguities of genre in Yi Sang’s oeuvre.

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Yi Sang: from Kyŏngsŏng to Tokyo

If colonial Kyŏngsŏng had yielded only a copy or reflection of modernity to Yi Sang, then Tokyo was supposed to offer “authentic” modernity. Just a month after the publication of his short story “Nalgae” (Wings) in September 1936, Yi Sang left for the imperial metropole in the hopes of fulfilling his oft-uttered declarations of going to Tokyo. Where he had expected to find a city matching the allures of fiction, he was met with a reality that fundamentally reversed his notions of the city and its periphery. The three texts that I will discuss take us to Tokyo (“Tokyo”), back to Korea (“Ennui”), and finally to the overlapping of Tokyo and Korea in “Lost Flowers,” where the text becomes the interstitial and intercultural space between the two. Published after Yi Sang’s early, unfortunate death in Tokyo, these three interlinked travel essays form what Raymond Williams describes as the falsity of the distinction between the country and the city. In these highly rhythm-sensitive essays, Yi Sang meditates upon and draws out the ordinariness of everyday space in both the colony and the colonial metropolis. I argue that through these essays, Yi systematically de-idealizes the pristineness of the colonized’s pastoral as being the symbol of the nation/tradition or as representing the backwardness of the colonized, simultaneously rendering Tokyo modern as not only inauthentic but just as boring as a countryside. For Yi Sang, the Tokyo he had heard of and imagined differed drastically from the city he encountered upon his arrival in October 1936. His terrible disappointment is evident from the very first lines of “Tokyo”:25 I had imagined that the Marunouchi Building—better known as Marubiru—would be at least four times bigger than this “Marubiru,” something impressive. If I went to Broadway in New York, I might feel the same disappointment—anyway, my first impression of Tokyo was: “This city reeks of gasoline!”26 These opening sentences reveal the chasm between what Yi Sang had invented while in Korea and what he actually witnesses in Tokyo. He appears to be looking for sites, structures, and experiences that would corroborate his 25  “Tokyo” was published two years after Yi Sang’s death in the May 1939 issue of Munjang [Composition], a monthly magazine active between February 1939 and April 1941. It appears that “Lost Flowers” was written later than “Tokyo,” even though it was published before it. 26  Yi Sang, “Tong’gyǒng” [Tokyo], trans. Michael D. Shin, Muae 1 (1995), 96.

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preconceived images of metropolitan Tokyo. Upon arriving in Tokyo, however, he finds that the buildings look undersized, Mount Fuji is “pitiful like a toy cookie,” and Ginza is “more than a little ugly.”27 He recalls, while in the public bathroom making a “simple bowel movement,” the “names of various friends who had bragged so much about going to Tokyo.”28 This gesture and thought underscore not only his disappointment but also the boredom he feels in a city that seems superficial and indifferent. Yi Sang’s reactions to Tokyo’s architecture are particularly marked by disappointment. Not only is the Marunouchi Building unimpressive in size and the Tsukiji Theater “like a clumsily designed tea house,” but most of all, the department stores, the quintessential symbol of capitalism, democracy, and desire, are nothing but a facade.29 Mitsukoshi, Matsuzakaya, Itoya, Shirokiya, Matsuya. These seven-story houses don’t sleep at night these days. However, we must not go inside. Why? The interiors are only one-story, not seven-stories high, and also it is easy to get lost because of all the piled-up goods and teeming shop girls.30 Although the exteriors boast a towering seven-story facade, the interiors of the buildings are revealed as mere one-story hollows piled up with goods. By taking aim at the superficiality of department stores, Yi Sang dealt the most pointed criticism against the mimetic grandiosity of the imperial metropole and his own previous naïveté about modernity. The author’s reaction to buildings in Tokyo became an important extension of his reaction to the illusory social constructions existing between the colony and the metropole. The essay “Tokyo” serves as a central text from which we can gather Yi Sang’s impressions of the colonial metropole; it also, importantly, provides a context for reading other works he wrote while in Japan. Yi wrote “Ennui” in the earlymorning hours of December 19, 1936,31 in his boarding room in Tokyo and it was published posthumously in the Chosǒn Daily News between May 4 and 11, 1937. It was one of the last pieces of writing he completed before his death on April 17, 1937. Yet this fact alone does not constitute its importance in Yi Sang’s oeuvre. I contend that “Ennui” should be read as a part of his travel narratives from Tokyo, although most scholars group “Ennui” together with “Sanch’on 27  Ibid., 98. 28  Ibid., 99. 29  Ibid., 97. 30  Ibid., 99. 31  The last page of “Ennui” notes the time, date, and location of its composition.

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yǒjǒng” (Travels to Sanch’on), “Ŏri sǒgǔn sǒkban” (Premature Dinner), and “Yi ahaedǔl egae changnangam ǔl chura!” (Give Some Toys to These Children!) based on the shared setting of these essays of Sǒngch’ ǒn.32 Although this grouping should not be dismissed, it is important to note that “Ennui,” along with “Chongsaeng-gi” (Record of Death), “Lost Flowers,” “Tokyo,” and his ten letters/postcards (sasin), was written while Yi Sang was in Tokyo.33 As such, I believe that “Tokyo” can be read together with “Ennui” and “Lost Flowers” as a series of Tokyo travel essays to render multiple perspectives on the Japanese empire as seen by a colonized observer in the metropole reconstructing the colonial margins. Curiously, Yi Sang turned his writing to Sǒngch’ǒn, a small farming village in the southern P’yǒngan Province, rather than Kyŏngsŏng, the urban center and capital, which was the setting of his short story “Wings.” Kim Yunsik tells us that Yi Sang had gone to Sǒngch’ǒn in August 1935 and stayed there for about a month. This village is the setting for several of Yi Sang’s other travel essays, most prominently, his “Travels to Sanch’on.”34 He left for this village around the time his café in Kyŏngsŏng, The Swallow, had gone bankrupt and his health had begun to steadily deteriorate. Examining the circumstances surrounding the period in which he made this trip, it is most likely that he sought some form of refuge or escape from his harried city life. If so, then it might make sense that he chose to write about Sǒngch’ǒn during the days in Tokyo when he was feeling desperately weak, both physically and emotionally.35 But Sǒngch’ǒn should absolutely not be mistaken for a place of refuge and recovery. Departing drastically from “Tokyo,” wherein buildings compose the urban landscape and provide the skeletal structure of the empty city, “Ennui” sketches green fields that stretch endlessly in every direction. Whereas fragmented sentences in “Tokyo” convey the accelerated speed of the city, in “Ennui” a 32  Kim Yunsik groups “Ennui” together with other essays related to Sǒngch’ǒn as the second, separate part of volume 3 of Yi Sang munhak chǒnjip, which is entitled sup’il (103–55). 33  Kim Yunsik points out that Yi Sang began writing “Record of Death,” “Lost Flowers,” and “Ennui” in Kyŏngsŏng and later completed them in Tokyo. See Kim Yunsik, Yi Sang yǒn’gu, 176. Yi Sang gives dates for both “Ennui” and “Lost Flowers” in the texts: even if they were partially written while the author was in Korea and completed in Tokyo, we cannot discount the possibility that they were revised in Tokyo to reflect his new experiences. 34  For an illustrated analysis of this particular essay, see Walter K. Lew, “Yi Sangǔi ‘Sanch’on yǒjǒng—Sǒngch’ǒn kihaeng chungǔi myǒt chǒl’e nat’ananǔn hwaltong sajinkwa kongdongch’ejǒk in tongilsi,” in Yi Sang chŏnjip, vol. 5, 189–228. 35  Yi Sang confessed in a letter to Kim Kirim that he had not only physically weakened, but that he felt lonely in Tokyo and reiterated his acute disappointment with the city. See letter no. 7 in Yi Sang chŏnjip, vol. 3, 234–36 and other letters to Kim Kirim that provide additional paratextual information regarding Yi Sang’s opinions on Tokyo.

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series of short but complete sentences slow and lengthen time, thus producing the effect of ennui even at the syntactic level. If Tokyo was ch’isasǔrǒpda (ignominious),36 then Sǒngch’ǒn was sin’gǒpda (bland).37 In “Ennui,” Yi Sang details a day in the life of a remote Korean farming village. Each of the seven sections dwells on the repetitiveness of the everyday, which is the source of considerable monotony, but also moments of considerable self-awareness. For example, in section 1, the narrator goes to play Korean chess (changgi) with Mr. Ch’oe’s nephew, knowing full well what the outcome of the game will be. Ten out of ten I win against Mr. Ch’oe’s nephew. For Mr. Ch’oe’s nephew, playing chess with me itself is the reason for boredom. It might be worth it not to play, since every single game will produce the same result—but what would I do if I did not play? I have to play. Losing certainly is boring, so what is to say that winning is not so? Winning the game ten times out of ten is just as boring as losing ten times out of ten. I really cannot stand this boredom.38 The narrator cannot contain his excess “leisure.” He “has to do something,” even if it means experiencing the already known. And it is this recognition of redundant knowing that amplifies his ennui. Intentionally losing on my part is hard in itself. Why can’t I become utterly absentminded like Mr. Ch’oe’s nephew? Am I being restrained by these trivial victories even while immersed in this suffocating ennui? Is there no way for me to become a total imbecile? … I need to relinquish even the single nerve that recognizes this ennui and become completely prostrate before it.39

36  Yi Sang uses the word ch’isasǔrǒpda to describe Tokyo in his letters to Kim Kirim, dated November 14, 1936 (letter no. 6), and the “29th” without specifying the month (letter no. 7). The next letter to Kim Kirim, letter no. 8, is dated “eve of the lunar new year” (Yi Sang chŏnjp, vol. 3, 239). The word ch’isasǔrǒpda is difficult to translate into English. The Chinese character ch’i means to be “embarrassed, shamed, and disgraceful.” It can also mean “dirty” or “mean.” 37  Yi Sang uses the word sin’gǒpda (bland/boring/uninteresting) repeatedly in “Ennui” (“Kwǒnt’ae,” Yi Sang chŏnjip, vol. 3, 142, 150, 152). 38  Ibid., 142. 39  Ibid.

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These two men are placed in the same textual and physical space as dogs that have given up barking, cows that repeatedly regurgitate their cud, and children who force a bowel movement—all because of the boredom that pervades every crevice of this village. Yi Sang meditated upon the humdrum and mundaneness of the everyday to such a degree that it lost the Rousseauian “romantic primitivism” of country life.40 In fact, contrary to what we might expect from a writer who was feeling sick and lonely in a foreign country, there is a peculiar absence of idealization or even nostalgia toward his home country. Rather, I would argue that his view of Sǒngch’ǒn differs very little from Tokyo. Raymond Williams, in analyzing Charles Dickens’s novels of London, describes the most apparent characteristics of the city as “its miscellaneity, its crowded variety, its randomness of movement” embodying a “negative system of indifference.”41 Similarly, the randomness and indifference Yi Sang had experienced in Tokyo pervade in his writings about his impression of Sǒngch’ǒn. The accounts of strange animal behavior and children’s play best illustrate the negative system of indifference. In section 3 of “Ennui,” roosters crow like clockwork, but dogs do not bark. There is not much meaning in roosters crowing once in the morning and once in the afternoon. In fact, no one recognizes the crowing unless one “just happens to hear it by chance,” because there really is no significance aside from their having crowed yesterday and crowing again today.42 In contrast to the seemingly normal behaviors of the roosters that no one pays attention to, dogs in Sǒngch’ǒn appear to be quite out of the ordinary. Although they are supposed to guard the village, they remain silent even in the presence of a stranger, the narrator. Actually, “they have no reason to bark. Passersby do not come to this place. Not only do they not come to this place, but they also have no purpose in passing through this village, for it isn’t even located near a major road.”43 These same mute dogs, which are of no interest to the village children or women, are also of such little significance to the narrator that they do not stir extreme emotions of either excitement or disgust but only a certain strange curiosity. Even though the narrator encounters a pair of dogs mating in the middle of the street, he describes the scene as 40  By “romantic primitivism” I am referring to Rousseau’s concept where “ordinary” country people, things, and nature are preferred over the “sophisticated” artifice of the urban. Romantic primitivism was also characteristic of nineteenth-century European travel writings. 41  Williams, Country and City, 154. 42  See “Kwǒnt’ae” in Yi Sang chǒnjip, vol. 3, 144. 43  Ibid., 145. The word that Yi Sang uses to describe the road is kuk to, (literally, “national road”) which could refer to a major highway paved by the Japanese colonial government.

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“like boredom itself, it is that boring.”44 Furthermore, in section 6, the narrator focuses on the neighborhood children, who try to entertain themselves but become easily bored playing with rocks, pulling up grass, or jumping up and down while screaming. When the narrator, therefore, spots the children squatting down to force a bowel movement as a form of entertainment, he describes it as “the ultimate creative work of helplessness.”45 Roosters, dogs, and children merely fill the space of Sǒngch’ǒn, since the villagers completely ignore their activities. Whether they function as expected by crowing or mating or exhibit unusual behaviors, such as being unable to bark or force a bowel movement for fun, all actions reflect back to the apathetic attitude of the villagers who take absolutely no notice of them. Therefore, the villagers, too, exhibit unusual behavior and the narrator seems to consider their indifference odder than the animals and children. Hence, the narrator’s focused observation turns not only the animals and children into objects of a modern spectacle but also the adult villagers. Like a spectator who has become bored with a three-ring circus where he watches animals and people perform bizarre acts contrary to their innate, “natural” behavior, the narrator’s sequence of gazes ultimately converges on a scene where everyday happenings in a village become empty of strangeness. This dialectic of the “strangeness of the ordinary” also encapsulates what I mean by this essay’s simultaneously primitivizing and modernizing effects. Like Michel Leiris, who meditates upon the meaning of modernity through “autobiographical” writing that places the self in the primitive past, Yi Sang looked back in time and space and to the primitive.46 There is hardly anything banal about the poetics of the everyday. In Leiris’s chapter “Alphabet,” he meditates upon the Roman alphabet and points to a string of associations. First, the word “alphabet” rhymes with the brand name Olibet. Then, like a child reading a spelling book that teaches him to read and write the alphabet, Leiris explains each letter as things to be touched, seen, and uttered. Through this tactic, he engages in a museumization of language and experience where the banal becomes extraordinary. Similarly, although Yi Sang’s essay is punctuated 44  Ibid., 147. 45  Ibid., 151. 46  This kind of writing, I believe, is exemplified in Michel Leiris’s multivolume “autobiography” Rules of the Game. In volume 1, Scratches, Leiris turns the technology of confession against himself and in an act of self-flagellation exposes himself but really to disappear and “scratch” himself out of existence. I read Michel Leiris’s text as a modernist essay where fragmentations are juxtaposed together through analogies, metaphors, associations, and translations to form a seemingly whole narrative. Leiris’s texts offer a glimpse of the operation of writing.

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with words that name “dullness,” “plainness,” “boredom,” and “ennui,” the narrator never once stops moving. The entire day—from the morning, when he eats his breakfast, until night, when he goes to sleep—the narrator details his activities, thoughts, emotions, and observations in such an ethnographic way that we become hyperconscious of the crisis of human civilization. As noted above, Tokyo becomes a vantage point from which to assess Korea, and it is in Tokyo that Yi Sang recollected observations of his homeland. While at first glance an essay about a farm village might offer a reverse landscape of a city like Tokyo, both “Tokyo” and “Ennui” draw attention to the marginality of man in his relationship to his material environs, as Yi Sang brilliantly depicted in “Wings,” his often-cited urban narrative of Kyŏngsŏng. As Kim Yunsik rightly points out, “Tokyo was the mirror from which Yi Sang could see Kyŏngsŏng.”47 Once Yi Sang was away from the safety of “home” and looking in from the outside (Tong’gyǒng), he could more clearly see details of Kyŏngsŏng appearing in the reflection of that mirror. Unlike “Tokyo” and “Ennui,” each of which focuses on one geographical space, in “Lost Flowers,”48 scenes and thoughts of Tokyo and Kyŏngsŏng interweave back and forth, creating an amalgamation that leaves the metropole indistinguishable from the colony. If “Ennui” is a variation of the urban psych­ologism reflected in “Tokyo” then I would like to extend this metaphor by arguing that “Lost Flowers” is the coda that brings the variations to a climactic finale. “Lost Flowers,” more than any other essay by Yi Sang, exemplifies his experimental forte. In addition to the narrative organization, which takes the reader back and forth between Kyŏngsŏng and Tokyo (although Yi Sang and the narrator are both physically situated in Tokyo), the form is blurred to the extent that many find it difficult to label “Lost Flowers” as either a work of fiction or an essay,49 especially since references to Yi Sang’s other texts and life, as well as other writers’ works, are dispersed throughout.50 Hence, intertextuality 47  Kim Yunsik, Yi Sang yǒn’gu, 150. 48  “Lost Flowers” was published posthumously in the March 1939 issue of Munjang and is believed to be the last literary work written by Yi Sang before he died in Tokyo. In section 2, the narrator (na) tells us, “I am sitting and listening (23 December),” and in section 9 he says he received two letters on December 23. See Yi Sang munhak chǒnjip, vol. 2, 357, 369. If we read “Lost Flowers” as a travel narrative, then the date “23 December 1936” could be understood as the date of composition, which means that it was written after “Ennui.” 49  In his edition of Yi Sang’s collected works, Kim Yunsik includes “Lost Flowers” in the fiction volume. 50  It is imperative in Yi Sang studies that we examine the complex intertextuality of his oeuvre since his texts are intimately connected to one another. It is thus quite difficult to do a thorough reading of a text without examining the various associations. Unfortunately, I will not be discussing “Chongsaeng-gi” [Record of death], even though this piece was also

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functions as an important node in reflecting back in time and space while moving the text forward into a transcultural space between Korea and Japan. “Lost Flowers” centers around the narrator’s conversation with Miss C, a Korean female student, in her room located in Jinpō-cho, Kanda-ku, Tokyo.51 This conversation induces the narrator to lose himself in his own thoughts. Thus, a conversation with Miss C naturally slides into a conversation with Yǒn, the narrator’s girlfriend in Korea, or thoughts of his late friend and writer Kim Yujǒng (1908–37), who had recently died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-nine. These multiple conversations sound as though they are taking place simultaneously, as in section 2, where the narrator admits that, while listening to Miss C’s voice for the past hour, he is really absorbed in thinking back upon his own love affair and his plans for a double suicide with Yǒn, an idea that is ultimately abandoned after Yǒn leaves him for S. “Mr. Yi—What?—Do you think that way?—Yes—Your cigarette has completely burned out—Oh no—What happens if the pipe is set on fire—Please—open—your eyes. My story—is over. Hello—What were you thinking of?” (Ah—That’s a really gentle voice. It’s a voice—that can be heard— from ten li away—like the sound of an expensive watch, it’s gentle and has a precise sheen—pianissimo—Is it a dream. For an hour, I listened to the voice—rather than the story. One hour—it felt like an hour long but for ten minutes—did I doze off? No, I memorized—the story. I didn’t sleep. That spring-like flowing, beautiful voice wrapped around my senses and the voice slept.) Dream—I wish it to be a dream. But I neither slept nor even reclined to sleep.52 Yi used parentheses to indicate his thoughts of Korea, brackets to indicate his conversation with Miss C, or rather Miss C’s storytelling, and unmarked sentences to notate present thought.53 These notations additionally accentuate the simultaneity of shifting thought in one narrative space and bring to bear Yi Sang’s multiple placements. In particular, it stresses the audible written during Yi Sang’s travels in Tokyo and is usually read as the writer’s record of his own demise. 51  See Ch’oe Wǒnsik for the plot summary of this work. Sections 3, 5, and 7 are set in Kyŏngsŏng, while sections 2, 4, 6, 8, and 9 take place in various parts of Tokyo. 52   Yi Sang chǒnjip, vol. 2, 359. 53  This applies only to section 2.

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psychological movement between Kyŏngsŏng and Tokyo as one that is blurring and indistinguishable. Yi Sang was a traveler and a flâneur in Tokyo. Unlike his close friend, the poet and critic Kim Kirim (who was in Japan as a student at the same time), Yi Sang’s experiences in Tokyo were informed by the Kyŏngsŏng traveler’s gaze and proved quite difficult for him to accept since his dream of metropolitan modernity could not be realized in actuality. Not only did the Japanese police, who mistakenly took him for a subversive rogue, arrest him, but his status as a colonized traveler did not afford him a specific identity. Yi’s pronounced disappointment with Tokyo moved him to reflect back upon Korea but not its urban center Kyŏngsŏng. Instead, in “Ennui,” he took the farm village of Sǒngch’ǒn as the subject of his reflection. Interestingly, however, he did not idealize it as the pristine countryside untainted by colonialism or modernity; rather, he superimposed his encounter with the metropolitan modernity of Tokyo onto the rural village, where indifference and apathy structure all social and human interactions as it does in the city. Finally, with “Lost Flowers,” Yi created a narrative which shifts temporally and spatially between Kyŏngsŏng and Tokyo in order to bring to the foreground the simultaneity of the colonial urban space of the two cities. 4

Weng Nao: from Village to Suburb to City

Although Weng Nao’s oeuvre is not large, his prose works are remarkable examples of modernist literature that foreground one’s intimate relationship with one’s environment.54 While we do not have documented evidence that Yi Sang and Weng Nao ever came across each other during their sojourns in Tokyo, their literary works present strikingly similar representations of urban modernity permeated simultaneously with overstimulation and utter despair engendered by encounters with new spaces, technologies, and attitudes. If Yi Sang presented Tokyo modern as a vacuous copy and filled with ennui, then Weng Nao’s Tokyo was also positioned as a city that was prime for impersonators and vagabonds. In this section, I will map out the ways Weng’s narratives—“The Flâneur of Tokyo Streets: The Neighborhood of Kōenji,” “Remaining Snow,” and “Poor Old Rui”—travels between Taiwan and Japan and from inside to outside the city to show how he forged the relationship between the imperial

54  All of Weng’s works were written and published while he was indefinitely residing in Japan, in particular the city of Tokyo and its suburbs, from 1934 to 1940.

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metropole and the colonial periphery as one that was distant yet adjacent and the ways that the familiar is rendered strange and vice versa. If the majority of the available biographical information on Weng Nao focuses on his decadent lifestyle, then the scholarly treatment of his literary works tends to deal with him as a writer who pushed the boundaries of modern Taiwanese literature beyond realism and nationalism by privileging urban form and aestheticism.55 In his survey of Taiwanese new literature, Chen Fangming places Weng’s writings in the category of city literature (dushi wenxue) because many of Weng’s texts animate urban life set in Tokyo, the imperial capital.56 Although equally as many are set in rural Taiwan, as Bert Scruggs points out, these texts too are peppered with interior monologues and affective tension, which are iconic qualities of literary modernism that earlier scholars have largely overlooked.57 Taken together, Kuo-ch’ing Tu writes that Weng’s prose works can be divided into two opposing trends: “a proletarian inclination of reflecting social reality” and “a psychological delineation of individual feelings.”58 Whether it is the rural countryside of Taiwan or a city in either Taiwan or Japan, what is apparent is Weng’s sharp perception of how space was affected by modern transformations and encroaching urbanization, and in turn, how these altered spaces impressed upon the human interiority. All three prose narratives I will examine in this section were written in Japanese during the mid to late 1930s while Weng was living in Tokyo and its vicinity. While “Remaining Snow” and “The Flâneur of Tokyo Streets” are set in Japan and “Poor Old Rui” takes place in Taiwan, all three texts share an interest in space and movement, so much so that the spaces that the narrative exposes have the striking effect of producing one continuous space that overlaps. These overlapping or polymorphous spaces, then, I argue, are where we witness the process and outcomes of colonization and urbanization just as Yi Sang had done with his essays, decentering what we might perceive as the grandness of the metropole. Published in the 1936 issue of Taiwan bungei, “Poor Old Rui” compellingly depicts an old lady’s physical and psychological deterioration, mapped out 55  Pei-yin Lin, “Beyond Realism: The Avant-Garde Writing of Yang Chichang and Weng Nao,” paper presented at the 2005 Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Chicago, 7–8. 56  Chen Fangming, Taiwan xin wenxueshi [History of Taiwanese new literature] (Taipei: Lianjing, 2011), 138. Chen elaborates that city literature in Taiwanese literature also includes works by Taiwanese authors who depict the colonial modernity of Taipei. Authors such as Wang Shilang, who will be discussed in a later chapter, belong in this category. 57  Scruggs, Translingual Narration, 38. 58  Kuo-ch’ing Tu, “Foreword,” x.

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along the simultaneously transforming city and countryside of Taiwan.59 Ultimately, the decay makes a strong comment on the far reaches of urban modernization. Widow Rui lives alone in a mid-province city (most likely Taichung), all four of her grown sons having left home. Her small, dilapidated house is tucked away in a dark, narrow alley that appears to be far removed from the hustle and bustle of the modern city with its “larger roads where buses traveled back and forth, continuously honking their horns.”60 When Old Rui becomes too sick, she goes to live with her son Haiton in a rural village in the southern part of the island. This village, however, is also undergoing major changes. In fact, Haiton’s small general store in the middle of the village is about to be bulldozed because a new road will be paved through the village. In the end, “a police officer was dispatched to inform [Haiton] that he had no choice but to leave, since the aim of the project was the cultural development of the region.”61 After Haiton loses his business and a typhoon destroys much of their land, the family, including Old Rui, returns to the city to find that much has changed during her absence. The narrative points specifically to the ways in which colonization has altered the city. For example, “the streets were wider, and livelier streets were lined with one naichi-style building after another …, and even the language people spoke was different.”62 Shifting back and forth between the city and the countryside, Weng’s narrative reveals how Old Rui becomes a witness to similar urban displacements that leave neither the city nor the countryside unscathed. If Weng was writing about the altered but ultimately cospatial landscapes of the city and the countryside in Taiwan in “Poor Old Rui,” then he extends a similar critique in the essay “The Flâneur of Tokyo Streets” (1935), which describes the relationship between Tokyo’s city center and its suburbs, in particular Kōenji, a neighborhood west of Shinjuku that was developed as part of the Greater Tokyo metropolitan area in the aftermath of the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. More specifically, the ways in which Weng describes the streets of the newly settled Kōenji parallels the organization of the city of Tokyo which was divided into two culturally ascribed areas: “Yamanote” (west of the Imperial Palace and a more affluent, suburb-like part of the city) and “Shitamachi” (the eastern section and considered to be more working and lower class). Weng writes that the streets in Kōenji are completely different from 59  Originally published in Taiwan bungei 3.2 (1936): 2–10. An English translation by Lili Selden is available in Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 27 (2011): 55–76. 60  Weng Nao, “Poor Old Rui,” trans. Lili Selden, 55. 61  Ibid., 69. 62  Ibid., 73.

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those in Tokyo’s center or even those of the more authentic suburban residential areas where the new “culture houses” or culture style (bunkashiki) homes were being built.63 “The streets are narrow and there are no paved sidewalks, so pedestrians and cars fight for space. This continues as one walks west all the way to Asagaya, Ogikubo, and Kichijōji.”64 Although Weng continued to note Kōenji as noisy, lousy, and working class, he rather enjoyed and gained great pleasure from strolling through this new space, which in fact differed little from the noisy, loud streets of central Tokyo.65 In fact, Weng, using the firstperson, epitomizes the nomadic poet who strolls, loiters, and meticulously observes his environment and then relates his experiences. In relating these two strolling experiences, the two different places—Tokyo and Kōenji—begin to overlap and take on a more polymorphous character, which resembles the formlessness of his essay. Similar to the Taiwanese city and countryside in which Widow Rui lives and travels, the city and suburbs of Tokyo also appear to be a kind of “an-other” space or a “thirdspace” as Edward Soja has described it. Similar to Soja’s analysis of Los Angeles, where the center and periphery overlay each other, thus disrupting the binary, we can see through Weng’s essays the transformation being mapped out in the colony as well as the metropole. While Soja largely draws on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of space as being made up of the perceived, conceived, and lived spaces, I see Soja’s construction of the thirdspace as being more formless and flexible. As he writes, the thirdspace is “a product of a ‘thirding’ of the spatial imagination, the creation of another mode of thinking about space that draws upon material and mental spaces of the traditional dualism but extends well beyond them in scope, substance and meaning.”66 I read Edward Soja’s text as I read Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s works. Soja’s book is written like a travel essay, and his writings about his wanderings in Los Angeles and its suburbs resonate in form and content with Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s. Only by collapsing the binary and placing the marginal spaces (the periphery) next to or on top of the center can both come into sharp relief.67 What the narrative 63  See Jordan Sand’s House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004) on the construction of “culture houses,” modern prefabricated, Western-style homes built especially in the suburbs. 64  Weng Nao’s “Tokyo kōgai rōningai: Kōenji kaiwai,” can be found in Hoshina Hironobu et al. eds., Taiwan junbungakushū, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Ryokuyo Shobo, 2002), 101. It was originally published in Taiwan bungei 4.2 (August 1935): 13–17. 65  Ibid. 66  Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 11. 67  Soja, Thirdspace (see, especially, “Part II: Inside and Outside Los Angeles”).

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reveals is that both the city and the country in Taiwan and the city and the suburb in Japan were undergoing changes that radically shifted the way people needed to adjust, adapt, and practice their everyday lives. Interestingly enough, however, Weng also created a space that was untouched by modernization and urbanization. For instance, the back alley in which Widow Rui lives and the outskirts of Kōenji in “The Flâneur of Tokyo Streets” are presented as spaces that have been left untouched in spite of all the changes. They are rather like islands within. The decrepit, dark, back alley stands as a rural space within the growing city where old buildings and social relations are still preserved—just as the marginal spaces of Kōenji provide a safe and affordable place for the working class, immigrants and migrants, and writers and artists to carve out. Reading “Poor Old Rui” and “The Flâneur of Tokyo Streets” together reveals that both the colony and the metropole underwent similar processes of urbanization and modernization. In particular, in this process, a thirdspace—the rural within the city and the city within the rural—emerges. Spatial practice comes into sharp view in Weng Nao’s other writing. “Remaining Snow” is perhaps Weng’s best-known text for its exuberant documentation of Tokyo in the mid-1930s, as well as the ways the narrative unfolds the protagonist’s efforts to reconcile his divided self. Hayashi Haruo (pronounced “Lin Chunsheng” in Chinese), like the author, is a Taiwanese living in Tokyo. Hayashi is a fledgling actor working at the Tokyo Repertory, which stages Western plays such as “The Bandits” and “Crime and Punishment.” One day while at his usual café, Eden, he meets a Japanese waitress named Utsumi Kimiko and falls in love with her. But a letter from his former girlfriend Chinshi Tamae (pronounced “Chen Yuzhi” in Chinese), whom he left behind in Taiwan, arrives to distract Hayashi. It turns out that both of these women ran away from home to escape their parents’ demands to be married off, most likely due to their family’s financial hardships. Chinshi Tamae left Tainan for Taipei, where she was working at a café, while Utsumi Kimiko fled Hokkaido for Tokyo, where she too worked at one café after another to support herself. The narrative later tells us that both Kimiko and Tamae are forced to return home. Hayashi feels torn between the two women. On the one hand he feels the desire to go to Hokkaido to confess his love to Kimiko, but on the other hand, he ponders how “Tamae might very well be weeping under the eaves of an oppressive country home.”68 However, Hayashi ultimately chooses to pursue neither Kimiko nor Tamae. The narrative ends with Hayashi noting,

68  Weng Nao, “Remaining Snow,” trans. Lili Selden, Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, Number 27 (2011), 110.

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[that] in his heart both places [Hokkaido and Taiwan] were equally distant. With that, he began to feel that both Tamae and Kimiko, in their respective locations, existed at enormous removes from him. If that was the case, he wouldn’t return to Taiwan, and he wouldn’t head for Hokkaido.69 Hayashi remains in Tokyo and gazes out the window of his room at the snow from last night’s snowfall. Hayashi’s decision to remain in Tokyo, Bert Scruggs argues, shows that he has chosen “to assume a metropolitan, locative identity” over ethnic identity.70 I agree with Scruggs’s assessment that this text constructs, at every turn, an urban identity for the protagonist. More specifically, Hayashi is a Tokyoite who is very familiar with the city and navigating it. For example, he is able to slip through “narrow alleys between buildings, one after another,” and arrive at the main thoroughfares like Ginza.71 Hayashi goes about the city ably using trains and finding various cafés to seek temporary respite in. At one point, Hayashi’s friend from Taiwan, Kyo Hokuzan (Jing Beishan), even says to him, “Hayashi, you’re talking like a Tokyoite” in response to Hayashi’s all too liberal rhetorical question that Tamae’s return to her parents in rural Tainan “doesn’t mean they’ll force her into marriage, does it?”72 Other scenes of Tokyo crowds during a street festival and train stations as well as architectural landmarks such as the Kitten, Prince, and Eden cafés, enormous Coliseum-like theaters, and the Takarazuka Revue fill the text, creating a marvelous, modernist tableau of the city punctuated by proper names to reify its space in a certain historical moment. Diverging from Scruggs’s assessment that Hayashi chooses a locative, urban identity over an ethnic identity, I would add that the text unveils the protagonist’s difficulty with fully reconciling his ethnic identity which is inexplicably linked to his experiences with urban modernity and space. Despite Hayashi’s ultimate decision to stay in Tokyo rather than leaving for Hokkaido or Taiwan and his familiarity with the imperial capital, what Weng brings out is Hayashi’s struggle with his ethnic consciousness yoked to the material space which becomes ever more difficult to delink especially while situated in that material space. Weng creates the space of colonial capital in a multidimensional way. Instead of the colonial metropole being the center, the idealized space of 69  Ibid. 70  Scruggs, Translingual Narration, 39. 71  Weng Nao, “Remaining Snow,” trans. Lili Selden, 104. 72  Ibid., 105.

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modernity, it, in fact, is coterminous with the colonies, much as it is in Yi Sang’s texts. What’s more, ultimately, Tokyo is a city that is isolating. The protagonist is stranded, stuck, unable to move. This is evident in two ways: at the levels of form and content. First, the story is told from the third-person perspective but interrupted by epistolary passages. These letters, while well-integrated into the narrative, are nevertheless set apart from the main text. This produces a jarring effect where the first-person “I” is inserted into the otherwise thirdperson, omniscient narrative. This combination produces both the documentary impulse and affective momentum which lend the narrative its innovative modernist texture, and which further blurs the line between fiction and essay. The letters also forcibly awaken Hayashi’s consciousness into traveling back and forth between the Japanese colonies and the metropole. The three short epistolary passages are particularly striking. The three letters—one from Tamae in Taipei, Hayashi’s reply, and a third from Kimiko in Hokkaido—certainly close and widen the spatial and temporal gap between the writer and the reader. Not only must the letters physically travel, but they force Hayashi, who is reading them, to mentally and emotionally travel to these places, at the very least, momentarily. More importantly, I see the letters as making him seriously consider leaving Tokyo. Indeed, he goes as far as to request a month of leave from his theater director and ponders which ship to take to Taiwan. These actions, however, are quickly abandoned when he receives a letter from Kimiko informing him that she has returned to Hokkaido. At this moment, “Hayashi felt an urge to go to Hokkaido” to confess his desires for Kimiko.73 In other words, these letters give Hayashi genuine reasons for pause. These temporal and spatial gaps in his consciousness create a more intense tension within himself where he must confront his ethnic and colonial identities. Weng Nao, in effect, sets up the two women as metonyms for Taiwan and Japan. For Hayashi, Tamae is the pitiable, traditional, bound colonized figure of his youth back in Taiwan, while Kimiko, though she is also from the “colony”—the northern backcountry— nevertheless represents the exotic, new Japanese woman. Here Hayashi sees the two women from the position of an elite, colonized male’s gaze who stands squarely from the privileged space of the imperial capital of Tokyo. This positionality renders him motionless. His desire for either woman is impossible to bring to fruition. He cannot claim either woman, just as he can no longer reclaim his Taiwanese identity or claim to be Japanese. As discussed above, Weng’s text maps out Hayashi’s whereabouts in relation to specific landmarks inscribed with social meaning and takes him to various locations in the city. Yet these movements around the city are not 73  Ibid., 110.

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simply described but punctuated by symbolic stop signs at each juncture as if to suggest that Hayashi is still an outsider inside the imperial capital. Hayashi’s relationship with the Tokyo trains is particularly poignant. In multiple instances, he misses the opportunity to either get on or get off the train. Moreover, his mistiming is inevitably linked to his encounters with Kimiko. The first instance occurs after Hayashi meets Kimiko for the first time in a café. After he leaves, he stands at the train station, deep in thought, just watching the trains glide by one after another. On another occasion, as Hayashi and Kimiko walk on Sukiyabashi, they come across two trains simultaneously “hurtling from opposite directions along the raised railway track, looking as if they might collide above the guard rails.”74 Immediately after, the “two left on separate trains.”75 What turns out to be Hayashi’s and Kimiko’s final meeting is also mediated by the train. As they are talking and waiting for a train, Hayashi “unreflectively hopped on” and although he senses that Kimiko has something further to say, by the time he thinks about getting off, the “automatic doors had slid shut, as if to thwart his will, and the train started grinding forward.”76 Soon after, Hayashi receives a letter from Kimiko informing him of her return to Hokkaido. Ironically, the train, the iconic symbol of modern progress and forward movement, not only forestalls Hayashi from realizing his relationship with Kimiko but also literally forecloses him from physical movement. The dilemma that results for Hayashi is that he is stranded in Tokyo. There is nowhere else for him to go. His longing to return to Taiwan or go to Hokkaido are merely impulses that cannot be realized. This isolation further underscores his identity as an outsider in the colonial metropolis. Tokyo is a thirdspace for Hayashi. The reason he chooses to stay there is not so much that Tokyo is superior to the other two places or because it offers him greater opportunities, but because he sees a kind of continuum among the three places where Tokyo, the imperial capital, does not particularly strike as a better or different option from Taipei or Hokkaido. The artistic form of the essay was made more fluid by Yi Sang and Weng Nao in early twentieth-century colonial Korea and Taiwan. Their sensitivity to its nuances and implications highlights the practice of writing as an important artistic endeavor as well as a form of labor, which, as professional writers, they both strived for. Many early twentieth-century intellectuals were greatly interested in formalizing art, and literature in particular, as a means of ordering the 74  Ibid., 106. 75  Ibid. 76  Ibid., 107.

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chaos that is often associated with urbanization, colonialism, and modernity. Included in this ordering project was the attempt to define what modern literature should be and do. For example, the influential literary association Korean Artista Proletariat Federation (kapf) and other leftist literary organizations drafted a detailed treatise for writers to adhere to because they believed that art had revolutionary potential. Yi Sang and Weng Nao, as attested by their essays, also believed in the potential of art and the vision for a better world. But unlike the socialist realist writers, modernists envisioned literature as autonomously engaged in society and the creative power of literature as giving rise to a tradition of the new. While both authors also wrote poetry and fiction, the essay form allowed Yi and Weng to place themselves in the text while still being outside of it. That is, they could become translators of their own writing voices at a time when colonial policies and conditions were becoming more restrictive as Japan set out on their imperialization (kominka) movement. Yi Sang and Weng Nao spent most of their lives in Korea and Taiwan respectively until they made their trips to Tokyo where they wrote several of their seminal texts. These two authors’ experiences and notions of the city and modernity either at home or abroad were informed by their fantasies of the imperial metropole, their eventual residence in Tokyo, and the travel narratives they’ve penned as they encountered the self and the other. Yi Sang’s travel essays undermine the legitimacy of Tokyo modern by equating it to a village in Korea, while Weng’s texts brought to the fore the process of modernization taking place in the village, the suburbs, and the city as creating a city within a village and a village within a city. In doing so, the texts analyzed in this chapter undermine the often-cited idea that Tokyo is the center of modernity. The authors physically became transnational figures in moving to Japan, errants in Glissantean terms. Their autobiographical selves encounter Tokyo, the colonial metropole, where the realities of the imperial city are far from the fantastic stories and modern reveries they had imagined while living in the colonies. This shock leads them to pen a kind of at once transnational and comparative literary text where errantry, the coming together of movement and memory in relation, is magnified in the literary space and in representations of the world. To reiterate, both authors decenter Tokyo, placing a veil over the putative transparency of this city as the metropole of the colonies. Their travels and travel essays significantly collapse the center-periphery model favored by many in contemporary colonial and postcolonial discourse. Furthermore, in this way, Yi Sang’s and Weng Nao’s texts question the poetics of location and affirm the difficulties of absolute belonging and the notion of borders and nations in colonial and urban contexts.

chapter 2

Linguistic Modernity

New Words on the Streets and Modernist Poetry Street lights, trees, and the asphalt road. The scene at night was cold and quiet like a copperplate etching.1 yang Chichang, “Rouge and Lips”

⸪ Photographs from the 1930s of Sakechō or Sakaemachi (now Hengyang Road in Taipei) (Figure 1) and Honmachi (Ponjŏng, now Myŏndong in Seoul) (Figure 2) show these streets lined with impressive Western architecture and crowds of fashionable people strolling about. The photographs also indicate that these streets were a booming commercial area dotted with storefront signs. What is remarkable about these store signs is their polylingual aspect. We can see not only the language of the colonial authority, Japanese, which is already polyglossic in its script, consisting as it does of hiragana, katakana, and kanji, but also other foreign words and scripts, especially Chinese characters and Roman scripts used in English. Moreover, on the pages of Taiwanese and Korean newspapers and popular magazines, we notice polylingualism even more sharply on display. Native scripts (Chinese and han’gŭl) are printed alongside numerous words and phrases in Japanese and in Roman alphabet scripts, especially in the print advertisements that had become an essential part of mass print media and signage in the city. Of course, this kind of sighting is omnipresent now in the twenty-first century to the point where it is hardly surprising to see foreign scripts and languages, especially English, across the cityscape, mediascape, and soundscape of Seoul and Taipei creating at once an effect that is both cosmopolitan and avant-garde and yet alien and abstract. I surmise that in the early twentieth century the linguistic landscape created by foreign-language signs on the streets, in the print mass media, in visual and audio media, and in literary works would have stirred a similar kind of response today from the masses 1  Yang Chichang, “Rouge and Lips,” Taiwan Literature English Translation Series 26 (January 2010): 13.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401167_004

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figure 1

Sakaemachi in Taipei, Taiwan, in the 1930s Image courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection

figure 2

Honmachi in Seoul, Korea, in the 1930s Image courtesy of Minsokwon

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on the streets of cities and readers of modernists texts. Literary critic Shi Shu describes a typical scene that writers in Taipei in the 1930s were inhabiting: [W]hat directly provided them with a new spatial imaginary were street scenes with a distinctively modern flavor, made of neon lights, automobiles, display windows of stores, as well as fancy places to loiter, like the asphalt-paved avenues, the open spaces of the traffic circles, the bazaars, the cafes, the movie theaters.2 The main streets of Taipei, and similarly Seoul, thus vividly reflected the materially-inflected urban modernity. Two places this was most visible was on commercial and public street signage and in modernist poetry. Lydia Liu, in her Translingual Practice, provocatively argues that the meanings of words are “invented within the local environment” rather than transferred from one locale to another.3 She emphasizes the multidirectional process of translation, which does not rest upon a hierarchal relationship between the original and the translation. Translation, as Liu conceives it, is not so different from the cultural and literary “polysystem” that Itamar Even-Zohar also discusses.4 Although Even-Zohar’s model of the polysystem is conceptualized around the older model of the center-periphery dyad, he also makes a valuable point by identifying the important ways in which minor cultures and languages within the translation system can also change the literary system of a national culture.5 Language and translation are in fact systems of semiotic relations through which we come into contact with and learn about other literatures and cultures. The Marxist linguist V. N. Voloshinov, who viewed language as a fundamentally social phenomenon, echoed earlier thinkers such as Condillac, Rousseau, and Herder, in his view of the interactive mode. Voloshinov wrote:

2  Shi Shu, “Shou yu ti,” in Lü Heruo zuopin yanjiu, ed. Yingzhen Chen (Taipei: Lianhe wenxue chuban she, 1997), 208–9, quoted in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 58. 3  Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 26. 4  Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2004), 200. 5  In his study of colonial Egypt, Timothy Mitchell also stresses that modernity is not simply of the West but a product of the West’s interactions with the non-West. See Timothy Mitchell, The Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1–34 (chap. 1: “The Stage of Modernity”).

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The word is implicated in literally each and every act or contact between people…. Countless ideological threads running through all areas of social intercourse register effect in the word. It stands to reason, then, that the word is the most sensitive index of social changes.6 What this also means is that language is not just a social phenomenon but also a materialized tool that is used to legitimatize one’s socioeconomic class, political status, racial and ethnic identities, and gender. As the medium of literary texts, language is an inseparable tool from the literature it creates, yet language is not a transparent or neutral tool. This relationship between language and literature is extremely complicated since language not only communicates information but also represents, constructs, and hides social realities through its semiotic complexities. The institutionalization of a new written script and the introduction of new words and concepts further confound the relationship between language and literature. In essence, language cannot be studied without thinking about its relationship to another language as well as its operations in writing, reading, and speaking. Any language a writer uses to construct their narratives about the world as they see it involves some act of “linguistic relation … creations springing from the friction between languages, by the give-and-take of sudden innovation (for example, initiatory street languages in southern countries), and by masses of generally accepted notions as well as passive prejudiced.”7 What’s more, a writer’s urgency to articulate the new with their own system of knowledge becomes even more intensified when they encounter something new—new objects, experiences, or languages. What was it like to encounter a foreign language or languages for professional writers as well as for the readers and the masses? What was the experience of hearing, seeing, and reading foreign scripts? While for Yi Sang and Weng Nao, inhabiting the physical space of the city leads to representations of the city as a fold, the language that they used to write, read, and speak, as colonized subjects, adds another layer of dilemma. After all, for colonized writers whose lives were spent under colonial rule and education and whose livelihood depended on language as their medium for creative output and cultural production, the choice of which language to use could inflict agony. Both Yi and Weng were highly proficient in the language of 6  V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejk and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 19. See also part I, chap. 2 “Concerning the Relationship of the Basis and Superstructures” and part II, chap. 3 “Verbal Interactions” for further discussion of the interactive mode. 7  Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 104.

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the colonizer and could write fluently in it, and did so frequently. Like Yi and Weng, the two writers explored in this chapter, Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang, were also active during the colonial period when calculated language reform movements in both Korea and Taiwan were taking place. At the time multiple and various attempts to standardize language, especially orthography in Korea and phonology in Taiwan, were in full swing despite and against (and because of) the pressures of the Japanese colonial government to make Japanese the national language of the colonies. Throughout the Japanese colonial period, but more intensely so in the post-1932 era, language became a site of acute ideological tension. John Treat, writing on Yi Kwangsu’s collaboration, argues that in colonial Korea the discourses on collaboration were very much about language and thus Yi Kwangsu’s name conversion to Kayama Mitsuro and his support, if not outright championing, of Japanese language usage during the kominka period was seen as the ultimate sign of collaboration. Even against this backdrop, many modernist writers in colonial Korea and Taiwan did not simply fall into two polemic camps—nationalist/nativist versus collaborators—according to their language usage. Rather, their willful usage of language demonstrated a breakdown of this vexing ideological divide by creating a polylingual system which resembled the varied signage displayed in busy urban streets. The term “national language” (國語; K. kugŏ; C. guoyu) becomes not only an oxymoron but also an intense site of contention in the colonial context where knowing and using the colonizer’s language operates within Glissant’s schema of the relationship of domination and the relationship of fascination. In other words, the colonizer’s language becomes a sign of oppression and legitimacy as well as where competing national projects surface through language.8 Literature, which is built on language, must also be situated in its context and examined in its relational mode—where and how new words enter and how they displace older words, what meanings are retained or discarded during the process in which words travel from one geographical place to another, from one mouth to another, from written to the spoken and vice versa. I conceive this interaction as one mode of translation. When language and literature are placed in the polysystem of the global and colonial, the notion of what we would call a national language is problematized. In the case of colonial Korea and Taiwan, although the most often spoken languages were still Korean and Minnanyu, what was made to be the official “national” language in both cases was Japanese. But the notion of a national language under colonial 8  For a discussion of national language during the enlightenment period, see Andrew Schmid, Korea between Empires, 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 64–72.

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circumstances, in any context of the word “national” points precisely to the process in which language is not innately “national” but made national. Or as Serk-bae Suh argues, the idea of national literature emerges at the moment where one language undergoes a process of being translated to further not just ethnonationalist ideas about language and literature but the reification of colonial structures and the violence engendered by colonial domination.9 One path through which the concept of a national language became paved was by “naturalizing the link between the written word and nation.”108 For example, in Chosŏn Korea, the term kungmun (國文/ national script) was not used significantly until the late 1890s. Although in 1442 a new system of writing using a phonetic Korean alphabet, called Hunmin chŏngŭm (teaching the people the correct sound), was promulgated by King Sejong, at that time and throughout most of the Chosŏn dynasty, Hunmin chŏngŭm was relegated to the status of ŏnmun (crude language) or amkŭl (women’s writing), especially by the Korean scholar-official class—that is, the cultural elite. Rather than marking a national identity, during most of the Chosŏn dynasty, the use of Chinese characters and Hunmin chŏngŭm marked differences in social status, which at the time were largely hereditary. However, during the late nineteenth century enlightenment period, reformers such as the linguist Chu Sigyŏng were interested in Korea’s potential to be independent of China (and Japan) and began promoting the Korean phonetic alphabet as one of the “building blocks” of their enlightenment-civilization-building projects. Thus they not only introduced a sharp distinction between China and Korea, but also between Chinese characters (hancha) and Korean writing (han’gŭl), which subsequently came to be called “national language” or kugŏ in the waning years of the nineteenth century just as Chinese intervention in domestic and foreign affairs became more frequent. Chinese characters, therefore, were positioned as belonging to just another writing system belonging to a “foreign” nation. In China, Hu Shi (1891–1962) initiated the baihua (白話) movement in 1917 in which he advocated the vernacularization or adoption of spoken Chinese in writing in place of using classical Chinese (wenyan/ 文言).11 One of the central calls for reform during China’s early Republican period (1912–49) included the ascendancy of baihua and inventing the Beijing dialect as a standard 9  Suh, Treacherous Translation. See, in particular, his introduction. 10  Schmid, Korea between Empires, 69. 11  Korea’s han’gŭlization and China’s baihua movements were similar to the Japanese genbun itchi (言文一致; unification of writing and speech) movement, which was a product of debates regarding language (script) reform and ultimately also about constructing a national language (kokugo). However, for Japan and Korea, it also involved using entirely different native scripts rather than using Chinese characters.

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dialect thus representing it as the “national” language. In Taiwan, although Mandarin (a Beijing dialect) Chinese was adopted as the national language in the post-liberation period by the kmt government, in the early twentieth century Taiwanese intellectuals and writers such as Chen Xin (1893–1947), Gan Wenfang (1901–86), and Huang Chengcong (1886–1963) also seriously considered the relationship between the written and spoken language of the Taiwanese people and its application in Taiwanese literature. Both in China and in Taiwan, these intellectuals criticized classical Chinese as backward or as remnants of tradition that stalled progress. Yet in colonial Taiwan, the process of vernacularization was not simply a matter of adopting baihua. It also required consideration of how to adopt a writing system for the already existing native spoken Taiwanese, which did not have its own script. This chapter is concerned with what happens when language is ruptured by factors such as colonialism, modernity, and urbanization, by which a colonizer’s language is imposed on the colonized or when polylingualism takes a prominent position in written and spoken forms. What happens to the space of literature—writing and speaking—when the fields of vision and sound are altered within the cityscape and vice versa? In particular, I explore these questions through modernist poetry in colonial Korea and Taiwan. Poetry, like other forms of literature, uses language to tell various kinds of stories, but unlike prose, poetry, which can be written in verse and vary in length, rhythm, and rhyme, relies more heavily on the form, design, and operation of language. How did poets respond to and construct their literary world polylingually? I will explore the interaction of languages with the material and social environment in colonial Korea and Taiwan. By examining the various ways that new words entered the lexicon and were introduced for popular and literary use, I attempt to understand the polylingual practice of the colonized cultures in question. I am particularly interested in how Korean and Taiwanese writers constructed new schemas of their own “national” language and literature through their interactions with other systems within the polysystem of language and translation. Although the concept of translingual practice is helpful, I prefer to use the term polylingual to emphasize that the linguistic interaction that took place in colonial Korea and Taiwan did not take place exclusively between the languages of the colonizer and the colonized—that is, between Japanese and Korean, or Japanese and Minnan or Chinese. Rather, in preferring the term polylingual I want to suggest that during the colonial period there was a discernible move away from or even resistance to linguistic nationalism (the vernacularization and usage of a nation’s own writing script) toward what I call linguistic modernity. Such a shift is evident in the modernist literature where the mixing of languages and their interaction through Relations,

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the creolization engendered by the direct borrowing of loanwords and neologisms, and strategies of adaptation and erasure all undermined the notion of language as a site of national identity and, at the same time, created a new kind of language community. My emphasis is that there arises a distinction between, on the one hand, enlightenment and nationalist forms of cultural and literary modernity, and on the other, more hybrid and materially-inflected forms of modernism in the 1930s urban modernist literature. Although to a certain extent there is a progression from one to the other, I argue that they coexist as alternate forms of modernity in Korea and Taiwan because of the colonial contexts in these countries, which brought forth an intense awareness of one’s own language in the midst of other languages—including not only Japanese and Chinese but English, French, German, Russian, and others. This realization, in turn, revealed the utter limitations and boundaries of language that were constantly being experimented with and challenged by writers of the period. Rather than seeing colonization as forestalling language development or limiting expression, I see the poet’s struggle for expression through linguistic fragments. As Glissant has noted, creolization, which I am also calling polylingualism, opens up and reveals the process of language’s making and the writing of modernist poetry. In conceptualizing the network of polylingual activities, I find the space of the street, and the culture and language of the street which emerged with greater intensity with the urbanization taking place during the colonial period, especially well-suited. Streets of any size, in general, serve as the arteries and veins of the city along which movement takes place. The paving and widening of city streets radically transformed the morphology of the city landscape and the lived space, which in turn offered the sense that Seoul and Taipei had entered a new phase of urban modernity. As part of the modernization process, the Japanese colonial governments in both Seoul and Taipei set out on implementing ambitious new city planning and architectural construction projects. New thoroughfares were connected to arterials, which led to a gridlike organization of the urban centers and extended and expanded the city. In Taipei, under Gotō Shimpei’s vision, the city wall was demolished and a new boulevard encircling the city center was built. From this core, streets were built to extend out in all four directions.12 In particular, the new streets that, by 1905, extended out to the eastern suburbs signaled the development of what would become a lively Japanese residential area.13 In Seoul, urban planning 12  Joseph R. Allen, Taipei: City of Displacements (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 31. 13  Ibid.

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appeared to be even more ambitious. The initial plans were to construct radial and grid systems of roads by creating a north-south and east-west grid and diagonal roads for rotaries.14 Although this plan did not come to fruition, a wide boulevard starting from the ggk building extending southward all the way to Yongsan military headquarters area was eventually built.15 This boulevard would go through the major commercial and transportation areas of Seoul. To the east and southeast, major road and land readjustment projects would create new street arteries that would lead to a grid-like layout of the city. Although as both Joseph Allen and Todd Henry point out in their respective studies of Taipei and Seoul, much of the plans for urban renewal and reform were not always successful or even completed, it is nevertheless apparent that there was keen interest in constructing new streets as a core site of communication, commerce, and control on the part of the colonial government. While the construction of new streets served the colonial authorities, they also facilitated new cultural activities and ways of socialization. New architecture lined the streets, new modes of transportation used them, and pedestrians strolled on them. In addition to the material signs of modernity along the actual streets, “the street” can also be a metaphor for linguistic modernity. It is a space where languages (both spoken and written) emerge, clash, get exaggerated, widened, twisted, trampled on, straightened, and even disappear. Taking my inspiration from Michel de Certeau’s piece on “pedestrian speech acts,” which makes the analogy that “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered,” I contend that the street’s polylingual network of languages and translations participates in pedestrian speech acts.16 Language connects, emerges, and disappears, just as new streets lead to and connect already existing places to emerging places, and streets disappear during the process of new constructions. At the same time, by stressing the circulatory aspect of language, I want to underscore the way language becomes a commodified part of the material culture of literary production, and especially for modernist poets. In this chapter, I focus specifically on the polylingual network of language in the poetry of the Korean poet Kim Kirim and the Taiwanese poet Yang Chichang to show how their poetic spaces become the streets upon which we see polylingual acts taking place.

14  Todd Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 32. 15  Ibid. 16  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97.

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The Setting

A series of intraregional events at the end of the nineteenth century led to three interrelated paradigm shifts: the dissolution of the centuries-old Sinocentric worldview, the realization of the existence of the West, and the recognition of Japan as a force in East Asia. The Kanghwa Treaty of 1876,17 an unequal treaty imposed by Japan on Chosŏn Korea, recognized Korea as “independent” of China, thereby releasing Korea from its tributary or sadae (“serving the greater”) relationship with China. This unequal treaty, similar to the one that China and Japan had both been forced to sign earlier in their histories, forced open multiple Korean ports to formal commercial trade with Japan, thus hurling Korea into the world capitalist system. Subsequently, this led to more extensive contact, both formal and informal, with China and the West—their cultures, ideas, and material objects. Political and economic instability inside the Korean peninsula also contributed to the problems escalating into an international crisis. At the close of the century numerous small peasant revolts broke out throughout the Korean peninsula, especially in the southwestern region, and by 1894 had worsened into a major rebellion. This domestic rebellion accelerated into an international conflict involving China and Japan. The situation escalated and became the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) in which Japan achieved complete victory over China. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki on April 17, 1895. The first article of the Treaty declared the “complete independence and autonomy of Korea” from China: China recognizes definitively the full and complete independence and autonomy of Korea, and, in consequence, the payment of tribute and the performance of ceremonies and formalities by Korea to China, in derogation of such independence and autonomy, shall wholly cease for the future.18 Additionally, China was forced to cede to Japan in perpetuity the full sovereignty over the Island of Formosa (Taiwan) and all islands belonging to it, the 17  For more on the Kanghwa Treaty and the opening of Korea to foreign trade, see James Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 252–86 and Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868–1910: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974). Both are studies on late nineteenth-century Korea and its interaction with Japan and other outsiders. 18  Taiwan Document Project .

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Pescadores Group of Islands, and the Liaodong Peninsula. The Sino-Japanese War, thus, marked a key moment in the Japanese imperial domination that would have such a profound effect on both Korea and Taiwan.19 Ten years after the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) followed in which Japan again emerged victorious. With this victory, Japan became Korea’s protectorate, and Taiwan reached its tenth year under Japanese colonial rule. While Korea and Taiwan were being tossed about in these domestic and international events, Korean and Taiwanese intellectuals were forced to reevaluate their weakened political positions. And while many blamed military weakness, just as many argued that political and military weaknesses derived from antiquated traditions that maintained the status quo. At the center of the self-strengthening reform movements—evident in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan—was the inauguration of what scholars like Benedict Anderson have called “linguistic nationalism.” Linguistic nationalism20 was introduced largely under the slogan of civilization and enlightenment, an important idea advanced by Meiji thinkers like Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901). Throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the various events that connected Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan—Kanghwa Treaty (1876), U.S.–Korean Treaty (1882), Tonghak Rebellion (1894), Sino-Japanese War and Treaty of Shimonoseki (1894–95), Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), March First Independence Movement (1919), May Fourth Movement (1919)—were all closely followed by the general recognition of the need for a systemization of language, specifically one that would bring together the spoken language with a writing system that could be widely and equally accessible to all people. Newspapers, journals, and magazines not only increased in number during this time but also came to play an integral role in the movement toward developing a vernacular. In Korea in 1896, the publication of Tongnip sinmun (The Independent) using exclusively the native Korean alphabetic script was a principal example of linguistic nationalism. The founders and editors of

19  Faye Kleeman’s study of Japanese empire is very helpful especially in extending the geographical boundaries of Japanese colonialism. Kleeman outlines how Taiwan figured in Japan’s imperialist strategy of southward expansion. She reminds us that Taiwan was not Japan’s first colony. In fact, Japan’s colonial expansion began with the establishment of the Hokkaido Administration in 1886, and its complete incorporation into the Japan nation-state as a prefecture in 1900. Okinawa became a formal prefecture of Japan in 1879. Sakhalin also figured in the early colonial expansion of Japan. 20  I am borrowing this term from Benedict Anderson’s work on print nationalism which insists upon the contingency of linguistic nationalism. His core argument employs a linguistic turn to understanding nationalism. See Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 41–49.

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Tongnip sinmun,21 while trumpeting the rhetoric of American progressivism and promoting Westernization, still decided to use only han’gǔl, thereby enormously transforming the literary and cultural history of the Korean language. An English-language edition of the Tongnip sinmun was published along with the Korean edition; hence, the first modern Korean newspaper was already imbricated within a polylingual writing and reading practice. The ramifications of using only han’gŭl were colossal. First, it represented an extraordinary shift from writing that was once dominated by Chinese characters and Chinese syntax. It also represented a symbolic shift away from the Sinocentric worldview.22 Additionally, publishing a newspaper in Korean promoted the idea of reading as an activity universally available to people of any status. In fact, the newspaper became a medium through which information that was once unavailable to those who could not read Chinese characters could be made accessible. Reading could, therefore, become a “popular” activity. As mentioned earlier, although Tongnip sinmun was published using only han’gǔl, it also simultaneously introduced to the reading public English and other European languages through its English edition. Thus, at least until the publication of a separate English-language edition (which began January 1, 1897), Korean readers were exposed to a Korean-English bilingual newspaper and to seeing, in particular, the Roman alphabet. We can safely assume, however, that the number of Koreans actually reading and comprehending the English pages was still very small at this time.23 Nevertheless, it is evident that 21   Tongnip sinmun is generally viewed as the first modern Korean newspaper, although the practice of modern journalism began earlier. Other newspapers published during the enlightenment period include Maeil sinmun [Daily Newspaper], Tyǒeguk sinmun [Imperial Newspaper] (1898–1910) 뎌ㅣ국신문—notice contemporary Korean ortho­ graphy does not allow for the spelling of Tyǒe. This is the orthographic representation of the contemporary “Che” 제 thus “Cheguk sinmun”)—and Hwangsǒng sinmun [Capital Newspaper] (1898–1910). Cheguk sinmun, like the Tongnip sinmun, was published in vernacular Korean, whereas the Hwangsŏng sinmun used mixed script. For more on enlightenment period newspapers, see Chǒng Sǒnt’ae, Kaehwagi sinmun nonsŏl ŭi sŏsa suyong yangsang [A study on aspects of narrative reception of editorial essays in newspapers of the enlightenment era] (Seoul: Somyǒng, 1999). See also Andre Schmid who deals with all of these newspapers in Korea between Empires. 22  See, for example, Ryǒ Chǔngdong, “19 segi ttae ssǔyǒttǒn ‘tongnip’ iranǔn malae taehan yǒn’gu” [A study on the semantics of the word “independence” during the 19th century], Paedalmal 3 (1978): 1–73. Ryǒ divides the usage of the word “independence” in the newspaper into four categories: Rejection of Qing, China; Admiration for Japan; Criticism of anti-Japanese troops; and Recognition of Japan’s role in Chosǒn’s independence from the Qing (165–71). 23   Hansǒng sinbo (February 1895–1906) was Korea’s first bilingual newspaper. The first two pages were in Korean and the third and fourth pages were written in Japanese. Taehan maeil sinbo (April 1904–August 1910) was another Korean-English bilingual newspaper.

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mass print culture played a critical role in making visible and circulating foreign languages, scripts, and ideas. In his study of Korean in the enlightenment period, Lee Ki-Moon (Yi Kimun) suggests that the study of the Korean language and Korean literature (kugǒ kungmun) was one of the most important subjects of scholarly research during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.24 Furthermore, Lee shows that research on Korean literature, linked closely to the problems of writing (script), was considered not only a scholarly project but also as a type of cultural movement that occupied an important space at the time. Kwǒn Young-min, therefore, has termed this particular cultural movement the “Korean language movement” (kugǒ kungmun undong).25 Kwǒn argues that the Korean language movement of the enlightenment period was the pivotal beginning of Korean modern literature, in that newspapers, textbooks, official documents, and other literary works began to be written in vernacular Korean—using Korean han’gǔl and Korean syntax. Because these print media were in Korean they were disseminated to a broader spectrum of readers, spawning a phenomenon that could be called cultural democracy.26 Many thinkers and writers of the time believed that literature, especially fiction (小說/ sosǒl/ xiaoshuo), could and should be utilized as a vehicle through which reform could be carried out on a mass level. The question of language became urgent as writers began to debate about the language reform that would be directly related to the ways that authors constructed their literature. By the time Sǒ Chaep’il began publishing Tongnip sinmun in Korea, Taiwan had already become a Japanese colony. Furthermore, after Japan’s success in the Russo-Japanese War and the seizure of Korea, the colonial rulers attempted to secure their governance over both Korea and Taiwan with a strict military rule (J. bunmei seiji). In Taiwan, numerous anti-Japanese uprisings

24  Lee Ki-moon, Kaehawgi ǔi kungmun yǒn’gu [Study of Korean in the enlightenment period] (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1970), 3. 25  Kwǒn Young-min, Sǒsa yangsik kwa tamron ǔi kǔndaesǒng [Narrative mode and discourse of modernity] (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 1999). Kwǒn extrapolates from Benedict Anderson’s concept of print capitalism in putting forth the Korean language movement as a movement that facilitated cultural democracy. See, in particular, Chapter 2: “Kugǒ kungmun undong kwa tamron ǔi kǔndaesǒng” [The Korean language movement and the discourse of modernization]. 26  See chapter one of Kwǒn Young-min, Han’guk hyǒndae munhaksa [Literary history of modern Korean literature], vol. 2 (Seoul: Minumsa, 2002). Although Tongnip sinmun was a pioneer in using vernacular Korean, other newspapers also used han’gǔl, including the Cheguk sinmun (1898), the Taehan hwangsǒng sinmun [Korean Capital Newspaper] (1898), and various other newspapers, particularly papers published by Christian missionaries.

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and rebellions exploded.27 The Japanese suppression of these uprisings politicized many young Taiwanese who would later actively participate in social and cultural movements. Taiwan’s contact with China, despite Taiwan being a Japanese colony, was not at all surprising due to the geographical proximity and cultural-historic relations between the two.28 In fact, I would contend that the driving force behind language and literary reform in Taiwan was the combination of Taiwan’s colonial status and the ambivalent relationship it had with China, as discussed in the section of the previous chapter on Weng Nao and Wu Zhuoliu. Unlike in colonial Korea, the absence of a systematic script in which to write native Taiwanese meant that Taiwanese writers were dealing with the dilemma of trying to decide which script and method would be the best tool for expressing their language precisely. Meanwhile, in China, leaders of the May Fourth Movement such as Lu Xun and Hu Shi (1891–1962) were proposing and putting into practice the baihua movement. In “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (Some modest proposals for the reform of literature), Hu Shi outlined eight guidelines for the improvement of literature: 1) Writing should be substance; 2) Do not imitate the ancients; 3) Emphasize the technique of writing; 4) Do not moan without an illness; 5) Eliminate hackneyed and formal language; 6) Do not use allusions; 7) Do not use parallelism; 8) Do not avoid vulgar diction.29 Along with Hu Shi’s proposed reforms, tremors from March First Movement in Korea and the May Fourth Movement in China were felt in Taiwan through personal contacts, publications such as newspapers and journals, and students on exchange (Taiwanese students studying abroad in China and Japan and Korean students studying in Japan and China).30 It was, in fact, between 1919 and 1920 that 27  According to Jane Parish Yang, there were eleven major rebellions between 1907 and 1915 in Taiwan. Jane Parish Yang, “The Evolution of the Taiwanese New Literature Movement from 1920–1937,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1981). 28  For more on the contact between Taiwan and China before the Japanese occupation, see Emma J. Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Teng’s study shows how China tried to construct Taiwan as both the Other and as part of China. 29  Originally published in the January 1917 issue of Xin qingnian [New Youth]. For an English translation, see Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 123–39. 30  The March First Independence Movement of 1919 in Korea and the May Fourth Movement of the same year in China were not isolated incidents and news related to these historic events disseminated quickly throughout East Asia. These two movements were important intraregional events connecting Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan. In essence both were responses to direct and indirect anti-Japanese imperial rule but both can also be considered one of the first modern political movements for democracy and nationalism. It should also be noted that after the failure of the March First Movement, Korean leaders

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Taiwanese students studying in Tokyo initiated a movement demanding the abolishment of Article 63, which granted the Japanese Governor-General of Taiwan the executive, legislative, and judicial power to rule the island.31 Taiwan qing­nian (Taiwan Youth) published in Tokyo by Taiwanese students studying abroad, thus became an instrument for expressing their protests and hopes for the future. It is not surprising, then, that the first two issues of Taiwan qingnian focused on the need for language reform. Taiwan qingnian’s predecessor, Taiwan (1922–24), was published as a bilingual volume. Taiwan was comprised of a Japanese section and a Chinese section. Although the essays in both Taiwan qingnian and Taiwan advocated language and literary reform through greater vernacularization, much of the fiction and poetry was still either written in classical Chinese style or retained various characteristics of classical Chinese, while expressing the progressive concerns of the time. These articles, in addition to Zhang Wojun’s (1902–1956) attack on traditional poets in 1924, officially launched the new literature movement.32 Lai He (1894–1943), often cited as the father of modern Taiwanese literature, was a proponent of adopting the vernacular Chinese (and Taiwanese) and encouraged others to write in the vernacular rather than in classical Chinese. He believed, like his predecessors, that writing in vernacular Chinese would facilitate the creation of literature for the common people. Nevertheless, writing in vernacular Chinese proved to be difficult and cumbersome for many writers because Mandarin differed from Taiwanese and classical Chinese in various grammatical features including syntax and lexicon. Therefore, it has been said that even those Taiwanese writers who had advocated vernacularization would first write in classical left for Shanghai to establish a provisional government. News of Korea’s independence movement and of Korean exiles in China reverberated throughout China, especially in Shanghai and Beijing. See Rhee Seung-keun, “March 1st Movement and its Impact on Chinese May 4th Revolution,” Korea Journal 11.1 (1971): 15–19, 48 for the ways Korea’s colonial status became a frame of reference for the Chinese media’s anti-Japanese patriotic movements that reported on the Japanese mistreatment of Koreans. 31  In 1896, with the enactment of Article 63, the Japanese Governor-General in Taiwan virtually became the sole legislating ruler, significantly reducing the legislative procedures within the bureaucracy. This power eventually expanded to different branches of the colonial government in Taiwan whereupon the Governor-General exercised an enormous amount of autonomy rather than being subservient to the Japanese Government in Japan. See Yang, “Taiwanese New Literature Movement,” 8; on Article 63, see Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education, 178–96. 32  Zhang was one of the most vocal critics of classical poetry and classical style in general. An active Taiwanese thinker, translator, and writer, Zhang also was a strong proponent of reforming the Taiwanese language.

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Chinese, then translate their texts into vernacular Chinese and eventually into Taiwanese.33 In the 1930s, the “written Taiwanese movement” (Taiwan huawen yundong) was another attempt to change writing based on the spoken Taiwanyu or Taiwanhua. Led by Huang Shihui, the proponents of the Taiwanese language movement set up an impressive platform for supporting Taiwanese native literature. Among their many projects were writing literature in the Taiwanese language, forming a tradition of Taiwanese-language literature, and popularizing Taiwanese-language literature.34 This movement was important in setting up the debate to come on the merits of native literature, but their plea to adopt some form of written Taiwanese language was short-lived and unfruitful. As Western missionaries in southern China found in the late nineteenth century, developing ways to represent the spoken dialect in a written form proved difficult. Thomas Barclay of the English Presbyterian Mission even published his newsletter in Roman script and attempted to teach the English alphabet to the natives.35 Unfortunately, both Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet were difficult to master in a short period of time. Added to this, the difficulty of representing spoken Taiwanese in written script compelled intellectuals to seek out other tools for producing literature. With Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan and the establishment of Japanese educational institutions, learning the Japanese syllabary hiragana and katakana proved to be an easier and more efficient system of writing for a segment of the Taiwanese population. Just as Korean reformers proposed the propagation of han’gǔl for its potential to democratize literacy and literature, I would argue that Japanese, with 33  Lai He was a medical doctor by training but also a very important writer in the history of modern Taiwanese literature. He admitted that sometimes he would write first in classical Chinese and then translate it into vernacular Chinese; see Lai He quanji [Complete collected works of Lai He], ed. Lin Ruiming (Taipei: Qianwei, 2000), 399–406. This statement demonstrates the extent to which the classical writing tradition remained in Taiwan as well as the difficulty of learning vernacular Mandarin Chinese for the Taiwanese literate elite. 34  See Douglas Fix, “Taiwanese Nationalism and its Late Colonial Context,” (PhD diss., University of California, 1993), 136–37; Yang, “Taiwanese New Literature Movement”; Rosemary Haddon, “Nativist Fiction in China and Taiwan,” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 1992). These dissertations, in one way or another, address the Taiwanese new literature movement and Taiwanese literature during the Japanese colonial period, with a focus on nationalist, leftist, and realist writers. 35  Thomas Barclay (1849–1935) published the June 1885 issue of his Qiaohui Bao using a Romanized representation of the Amoy dialect. Barclay had been appointed in 1874 after the Opium War and dispatched to southern China. In 1875 he became the first missionary from the English Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and later founded the Tainan Theological Seminary.

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its simpler syllabary alphabet, functioned similarly in Taiwan.36 In fact, many Taiwanese began writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Japanese rather than using classical Chinese. Although the acquisition and use of the colonizer’s language are highly contentious subjects, the case of modern Taiwanese writers reveals how their use of the Japanese language in writing their literature was not simply a matter of “becoming Japanese” or supporting the assimilationist (doka) or imperialist (kominka) ideologies. It is undeniable that by the start of the Pacific War, official colonial policy forbade Chinese script and instead enforced Japanese as the language of publication in both Korea and Taiwan. I, therefore, hesitate to interpret the level of Japanese language acquisition and quantity of Japanese-language publications as a simple measurement of accommodation to Japanese colonialism in Taiwan. My purpose in delineating these historical events is to underscore that no singular event in modern Korean or Taiwanese histories or literary histories can or should be constitutive of the meaning of modernity in general or linguistic modernity in particular. Likewise, the experiences of Japanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan cannot be reduced to singular descriptions of resistance or collaboration. Rather, the new cultural movements in Korea and Taiwan speak to their local histories and needs while at the same time show their interconnectedness to larger intraregional developments. The urgency of language and literary reform resounded in both colonies, as it had in Japan during the Meiji Reformation. These reforms attempted to situate the importance and primacy of “national” language in the midst of being stripped of the right to self-rule. In the 1930s, debates on language and literary reform continued. If during the enlightenment period, reformers, intellectuals, and writers saw vernacular Korean and Chinese or Taiwanese as one of the best means of expressing their goals for progress and sovereignty, then in the 1930s the discussion of language was yoked to material inflections of urban modernist literature reflecting the writers’ polylingual abilities and Japanese-language-mediated environments. 36  This is especially true of girls and women’s education in Taiwan. The educational opportunities available to Taiwanese girls increased, and Japanese language education in many ways functioned to reduce the disparity that existed between girls and boys before Japanese colonialism. This is not to say, however, that girls’ education in any way surpassed that of their male peers. The disparity was still conspicuous. See Yu Chien-ming, Women’s Education in Taiwan under Japanese Rule, 1895–1945 (Taipei: National Taiwan Normal University, 1988) [in Chinese]. I am also indebted to Professor Yu for personal conversations on the subject of women’s education in Taiwan. See also Patricia E. Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, edited by Ramon H. Meyers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 275–311.

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In the next section, I will catalogue some of the new words that started appearing in popular publications and analyze how these new words participated in the production of modernist poetry. 2

New Words on the Streets

New words materialized and became more visible in the 1930s especially in the urban environment. The street, both literally and metaphorically, became a space where new things and new words could be found and heard. On street storefronts, from the lips of Modern Girls and Modern Boys who strolled the streets, and in mass publications as well as in literary texts, polylingualism had become all too visible and audible. The emergence of new material goods, ideas, and technologies expanded the Korean and Taiwanese lexicon. Various magazines and journals carried pictures, advertisements, and explanations of “new things”—from new food items and ways of cooking to new fashion apparel, new technology, and new adjectives to describe new nouns. Fascination with and curiosity about new things heightened not only the already expanding material culture but also created an atmosphere in which the relationship between things and people who consumed them became much more intimately linked—even to the extent that we see the emergence of new social identities. In this part of the chapter, I discuss how mass publications of the 1930s introduced “new” words in order to construct a sense of modernity. The presentation of these words in popular magazines and newspapers did much to sell not only the publications themselves but also to “sell” the cultural meanings and values latent in these new words. The word “modern” itself became an object of intense interest and discussion in various sectors of society. In the late 1920s and early 1930s in Korea and Taiwan, the word “modern” was defined as “new,” but it was not equivalent to (新; K. sin; C. xin), a word meaning new that was the buzzword during the late nineteenth century. Many magazines and newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s frequently used the transliteration modǒn or modeng as a prefix attached to assorted nouns, such as, for example, in Korean modǒnǒ (modern word), modǒn kkǒl (Modern Girl), modǒn ppoi (Modern Boy), and modǒn saenghwal (modern life). It is not always clear, however, what “modern” really meant to Koreans during this time. In the January 1930 issue of the popular variety magazine Pyǒlgǒngon (別乾坤), the writer of the article “Modǒnisǔm” defined modern as hyǒndaejŏk (現代的—which can be literally translated as “of current or contemporary times”), and in the September 1930 issue of Sinmin (New Citizen/ 新民), modern was defined as kǔndaejǒk (近代的—literally, “of

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recent times”).37 Reminiscent of Voloshinov’s understanding of language as social and ideological, the writer of “Modǒnisǔm” explained that hyǒndae and modǒn were not equivalent in that “the word hyǒndae is a general noun, but the word modǒn refers specifically to the 1930s, not even 1920 or 1925. Therefore, ‘Modern’ is a proper noun.”38 He went on to say that every decade or century had what it considered to be “contemporary” (hyǒndaejǒk/ 現代的); thus, there was a “contemporary child” (hyǒndae’a/ 現代兒) or a “contemporary trend” (hyǒndae yang/ 現代樣) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But a modǒn ppoi was ultimately different from a hyǒndae’a or a “new youth” (sin ch’ǒngnyǒn/ 新靑年) because the word that Korea used in the 1930s reflects the ideological stance and material conditions of the society and people at that specific moment in time.39 Thus, Modern Boys and Modern Girls were specifically associated with new things that were described by new words such as radio (라디오/ radio), bar (바/ pa), dance (댄스/ taensǔ), jazz (재스/ chaesǔ), skirt (스커트/ sǔk’ǒt’ǔ), parasol (파라솔/ p’arasol), sports (스포츠/ sǔp’och’ǔ), cinema (키네마/ k’inema), and café (카페/ k’ap’e), all of which were material goods, urban spaces, and part of the cultural consumption practices that were also considered products of the 1930s. As Yanabu Akira has noted, the word “modern” also had other connotations depending on local values and understandings.40 Accordingly, what the writers of the above two accounts of “modern” were grappling with, but did not fully articulate, was the way the popular word “modern” had two components to its meaning. One was certainly the temporal dimension, but the other was laden with value and inflected by material and urban modernity. As a popular mass media form, magazines and newspapers introduced to the public new words, objects, persons, and concepts. New words to describe new conditions were pervasive in Sin tong’a (New East Asia/ 新東亞) and Sin yǒsǒng (New Woman/ 新女性).41 Many words referred to people’s new social 37  Quoted in Kim Chinsong, Seoule ttansŭ holǔl hǒhara, 57–58. 38  Ibid., 58. 39  Notice that a Sino-Korean rendering of modǒn ppoi is difficult since the word is a European loanword, although a phonological equivalence could be derived using Chinese characters, for example 摩登 伯一/ módēngbóyī in Mandarin. However, deriving both sound and meaning using Chinese characters would have been difficult. 40  See Yanabu Akira, Hon’yakugo seiritsu jijo [The conditions of establishment of translated language] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1982), 43–65 for the Japanese translation and usage of the word kindai. Yanabu also makes the point that while 近代 was translated as “modern” in Japanese dictionaries, it is not a simple matter of direct interlingual transaction (50–53). 41  The publication of Sin tong’a in 1931 heralded a new age of magazine publishing. Tong’a ilbo [Tong’a Daily News] published Sin tong’a and served as its parent company. Sin tong’a

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and economic status, occupation, and lifestyle as well as to particular objects closely associated with city life. The introduction of these new words profoundly revealed the disparities between what was old and that which was considered new. Moreover, these neologisms marked the rapid changes in language usage and practices, and in material consumption, which differed from the sin sosǒl writers’ attempt at vernacularization during the earlier enlightenment period. Although the contents of the magazines were filled with ideas about what it was to be “modern,” the title of both publications, oddly enough, was preceded by the word “new” (新) rather than modŏn (모던)—a fact which I read as evidence of the coexistence of enlightenment modernity and modernist modernity. The publication of popular columns on “modern words” reveals an interesting heteroglossic relationship. An explanation of an English word might require a Chinese definition, or a French word might use an American popular cultural icon as an example.42 More importantly, the words featured in these columns were drawn from situations that the urban dwellers consuming these magazines could readily identify with. In fact, these dictionary columns undoubtedly assisted readers in understanding the literary works that were being published in the same publications and elsewhere. I have chosen to highlight some of the entries from the magazines that were particularly important in understanding the modernist literature of the 1930s.43 1.

From “Examination of Modern Words” (모던 語點考/ Modǒnǒ chǒmgo), Sin tong’a (March 1932).

룸펜 /Lumpen (German): Meaning rag, junk or dirty scraps. Frequently

also used to refer to those irresponsible fellas who are insignificant scraps, vagabonds, or beggars. As for lumpen intelligentsia, it refers to

treated a wide array of topics from economy and science to sports and entertainment. It is still in print today. Sin yǒsǒng was founded by the Ch’ǒndogyo group who had established the Kaebyǒk [Creation] publishing company. Before publishing Sin yǒsǒng, the Ch’ǒndogyo group published Puin 婦人 [Lady] from June 1922–August 1923. The first copy of Sin yǒsǒng was issued on September 1923 and ceased publication with the April 1934 issue. To be more exact, it was published from September 1923 to October 1926 and then from January 1931 to August 1934. 42  These columns appeared monthly in Sin tong’a and Sin yŏsŏng in the early 1930s. 43  See the appendix for a longer list of these “modern words.” The purpose of providing this is to show the interesting variance in the kind of foreign words that were being introduced to readers. It is not an exhaustive list; I have chosen words from Sin yosŏng’s “Modern Popular Language Dictionary” (April to November 1931) and a special column on food and recipes in the April 1932 issue of Sin tong’a.

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those vagabonds belonging to the learned class. Lumpenproletariat refers to vagabond laborers. But those who belong to the lumpen category are indeed the lowest of the low, and should not be considered eligible to be part of society. They have no mind of their own and lack the ability to work in the labor movement. 2. From Sin tong’a (September 1932). 맘모니즘/ Mammonism (English): Meaning 拜金主義 or 金萬能主義자.

In other words, money is first the priority. That is, first is money, second is money and third is also money. Knowing nothing but money, and thinking that money is God.44

모던이즘/ Modernism (English): Modern 現代 and ism 主義. Together, meaning 現代主義. Also widely used to mean Western style/method/ way. Can be used in this context: A woman who has not become influenced by modernism is unable to relate to social conditions around her. 허니문/ Honeymoon (English): In China, the word is directly translated as 蜜月. In the West, there is a custom in which after getting married the

newlyweds travel and vacation for a short period of time. This is considered the happiest time in their married lives. Called “honeymoon” it is translated as 新婚旅行. 3.

From “Modern Popular Language Dictionary” (모던流行語辭典/ Modǒn yuhaeng-ǒ sajǒn), Sin yǒsǒng (May 1931, 54–55).

레뷰 /Reviue:45 This word is frequently being thrown around these days.

In Chosǒn, there isn’t a revue that is worth its name. Originally, comes from the French referring to a short skit of current events in an exaggerated performance. In today’s Revue, however, dance has become central, combining solo and chorus singing. Therefore, “revue” has come to mean a spectacle that displays pure eroticism. America’s Ziegfeld is considered to be an international revue performer.

44  I have retained the Chinese characters that were used in the definition to show the heteroglossia at work in defining new words. 45  It appears that the writer of this column was probably referring to revue, a show that combined music and dancing. Although it began in Europe, more precisely in France, the genre became popularized through American Hollywood films and became an essential part of urban nightlife in the cities.

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4. From Sin yǒsǒng (October 1931, 90). 프랍퍼 /Flapper: Represented by women like Clara Bow, Iris White and

Nancy Carol who appear in Western movies. It refers to women who do not assert their social status and those who appear to be chaste but at the same time very modern. The dictionary defines this word as either flapping of wings [퍼뜩퍼뜩/ p’ǒddǔk p’ǒddǔk], flashing or glittering [번득/ pǒndǔk]. Therefore, a flapper refers to an active young lady who flaps her skirt and displays a different kind of beauty.

The definitions provided in these entries were not simple descriptions. Clearly, these words were not only identified as “modern” but also projected various values. In addition to offering the German definition, the writer, who may have harbored leftist or socialist sympathies, also tendered a harsh judgment on the lumpen. There was, in effect, a piling-up effect in that language was being newly constructed through layers of meaning. The columnist writes that the lumpen were “the lowest of the low” and should not be “eligible to be part of society.” Even if these sections only reflected the values of the writer, many of these words could not be defined without other new words and expressions. For example, the definition of lumpen began with a general definition of who the lumpen was, but then went on to specify various subsets of lumpen—the lumpen intelligentsia and the lumpenproletariat, to name a few. The lumpenproletariat, for example, was especially ruthlessly dismissed by the writer of the definition: “They have no mind of their own, and lack the ability to work in the labor movement.” These lumpen fellows, though “quite useless,” remarkably resemble the expert observers who walk through the city, much like Walter Benjamin’s conception of Baudelaire’s Parisian artist.46 It appears, however, that there are multiple variations of the urban nomad—the flâneur. In fact, Susan BuckMorss has traced the various persons and personas of the Benjaminian flâneur as representing the modern intellectual, the reporter, the loiterer, or the bohemian.47 Remarkably, much modernist poetry written during the latter half of the colonial period contained a lumpen or a lumpenesque man as a central speaker whose presence, as judged by some, amounted to “filling up space” in the city. In essence, in many examples of colonial-period literature, the lumpen was a likely flaneur figure. His movement about the city acted as a lens through which we can see the changes in society and the urbanization of city space. 46  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 420–21. 47  Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 304–7.

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If a lumpen referred to a man who only filled up space without purpose, in contrast, it is a woman, the columnist suggests, who fills the space of modernism with meaning. “Modernism,” the columnist claims, “can be used in this context: A woman who has not become influenced by modernism is unable to relate to social conditions around her,” where the conditions refer back to “new styles, ways, and methods.” Although the example was cast in the negative, the definition nevertheless assigned being modern and participating in modernism to a female figure. 3

Constructing Street Language in Modernist Poetry

If the columnists in popular magazines outlined the contours of how their readers could conceptualize these new terms in their everyday life, then poets took them and repackaged them. Even the small sample of new words I have listed above from early twentieth-century popular Korean magazines attests to the extent to which words circulated, and the speed with which they did so. To be sure, the entrance of loanwords into the Korean vocabulary not only enriched the modern Korean vernacular that was once dominated by a SinoKorean vocabulary but transformed the cultural landscape by introducing new styles and new forms of everyday practice. As Lydia Liu has shown, loanwords and neologisms were not simply collectibles for dictionary entries but were important elements in meaning-making and culture-building. As described in the previous section, the polylingual practice that took place in colonial Korea through popular publications revealed this dynamic process. If turn-ofthe-century cultural producers’ concern with the enlightenment project was apparent in their choice of conceptual neologisms such as “individualism” (kaein juǔi/ geren zhuyi/ 個人主義) or “democracy” (minju juǔi/ minzhu zhuyi/ 民主主義), then the experience of modernity in 1930s, closely linked to consumer culture and commodities, was likewise apparent in the use of loanwords in the form of transliterations. In this part of the chapter, I turn to the poetry of Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang, arguably the two most representative modernist poets of the early twentieth century in Korea and Taiwan. Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang were pioneering figures in the history of prewar, modernist poetry in Korea and Taiwan. Kim Kirim (1908–?) was an influential figure in the Korean literary establishment during his lifetime. He still occupies an important position even though between 1950 and 1987 the South Korean government had banned Kim’s poetry and scholarship as well as that of other writers (such as Pak T’aewŏn) who had voluntarily or involuntarily

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gone to North Korea. As a member of the Circle of Nine, writer and editor of the Chosǒn Daily News, professor of English literature at Seoul National University, and poet-critic, Kim played a leading role in the Korean modernist literary movement.48 The modernist Taiwanese poet Yang Chichang (1908–94), who founded the Le Moulin (Windmill) Poetry Society (風車詩社) along with Li Zhangrui, Lin Yongxiu, Zhang Liangdian, and three other Japanese poets in 1933, was the leader of the surrealist poetry movement in Taiwan during the early twentieth century.49 The parallels between Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang are uncanny. Both were born in 1908: Kim Kirim in Haksǒng, North Hamgyǒng Province (located in what is now North Korea) and Yang Chichang in Tainan, the ancient capital of Taiwan.50 Kim studied English literature in Japan at Nihon College (1926– 30) and Hokkaido University (1936–39), while Yang, having failed his college entrance examination in Taiwan, went to Tokyo around 1929 or 1930 to study Japanese literature at Nihon Bunka Academy, returning to Taiwan in 1933 or 1934.51 Both Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang, like many others, worked as journalists in their home countries after returning from their studies in Japan.52 Yang published two volumes of poetry in Japanese in 1931 and 1932.53 Kim’s first 48  See Kim Kirim chŏnjip, vols. 1–6 [Complete collected works of Kim Kirim] for a brief biography and introduction. For a collection of critical writings on Kim, see Chŏng Sunjin, ed., Kim Kirim (Seoul: Saemi, 1999). 49  For a brief introduction on Yang and modern poetry, see Michelle Yeh and N. G. D. Malmqvist, eds., Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 16–17. For a fuller analysis of the surrealist movement in Chinese, see Ye Di, “Riju shidai Taiwan shitan de chaoxianshi zhuyi yundong” [The Taiwanese surrealist poetry movement during the Japanese colonial period], in Taiwan xiandaishi shilun [Studies on the history of modern Taiwanese poetry], ed. Wenxun zazhishe (Taipei: Wenxun zazhishe, 1996), 21–34; in particular, see pages 26–33 on Yang Chichang and his involvement in the Le Moulin coterie and its magazine. 50  Kim Kirim was born Kim Inson (金仁孫). Yang Chichang frequently published poetry under his pen name Shui Yinping (水蔭萍). 51  According to Lin Pei-fen’s chronology, Yang Chichang was in Tokyo in 1929–1934. See “Yang Chichang nianbiao” [Chronology of Yang Chichang’s Life], Wenxun yue kan [Literary News Monthly] 9 (1984), 414. On the other hand, Michelle Yeh notes that Yang “studied in Japan from 1930 to 1933, upon his father’s death” (Frontier Taiwan, 59). Although there are conflicting dates, it is most likely he returned to Taiwan sometime early in 1933 and founded Le Moulin later that year. 52  Kim worked as a writer and the editor of the culture section at the Chosǒn ilbo while Yang was a writer and managing editor of the literature section at Tainan xinbao. 53  Another collection of poems was published in 1979 under the title Burning Cheeks, comprising poems originally written in Japanese from 1933–39. The poems were translated into Chinese by Chen Ch’ien-wu in 1988. See John Balcom’s introduction, “Yang Ch’ih-ch’ang,

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book of poetry, entitled Kisangdo (Weather Chart), was published in 1936, but the poems in his second collection T’aeyang ǔi p’ungsok (The Ways of the Sun) (1939) were actually written between 1930 and 1934 and many were published in newspapers and magazines before appearing in the collection. Kim Kirim was one of the founding members of the Circle of Nine in 1932. The coterie’s journal Siwa sosǒl, edited by Yi Sang (see Chapter 1), published its first and only issue in 1936 in which Kim contributed his poem “Cheya” (New Year’s Eve). As stated earlier, Yang was the founder of Le Moulin in 1933 and of the journal of the same name which folded in 1934.54 In addition to writing poetry, both Kim and Yang published literary criticism and essays, which have come to occupy an important position in understanding the preliberation modernist movement in colonial Korea and Taiwan. Both poets were greatly interested in experiences of modernity and how these experiences could be expressed in poetic language. In effect, poetry provided the fertile soil upon which they could test the limits, boundaries, and possibilities of language—not just their mother tongue but languages of the colonial power as well as European imperialists. Just as modern streets were built with layers of stone, gravel, and eventually asphalt, Kim’s and Yang’s modernist poetry, I argue, was also constructed in layers—layers that frequently required destruction and reconstruction. These layers were created through the polylingualism and polyvocalism that are strongly evident in their poetry; language is constantly at work in building and demolishing. I further argue that fissures were created in these layers when language was interrupted or broken down to be reconstructed or reconfigured. Both Kim and Yang achieved this by creating images of denaturalizing nature or the natural landscape, which in turn, heightened the sense of the massive, engulfing urban modernity in which they were living. Put another way, the frequent use of loanwords, transliterations, and foreign language created images and an ambience of not only the modern and exotic but ultimately distance and strangeness. Yet the poetry serving as the new street upon which readers could tread brought the unfamiliar into the realm of the most quotidian, thereby bridging the high elitist modernist literature with popular, urban culture.

Surrealism and Modern Taiwan Poetry,” Taiwan Literature English Translation Series 26 (January 2010): xxxiv. 54  Michelle Yeh, “From Surrealism to Nature Poetics: A Study of Prose Poetry from Taiwan.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3.2 (January 2000): 123–24.

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Kim Kirim

Kim Kirim left a sizable oeuvre, which has been collected in the six-volume Kim Kirim chǒnjip (Complete collected works of Kim Kirim, 1988).55 Kim published four volumes of poetry before he went to North Korea: the abovementioned The Ways of the Sun and Weather Chart; and Padawa nabi (The Sea and the Butterfly) and Sae norae (New Songs). In addition to the poems included in these four volumes, the collected works include fifty-seven newly discovered poems. The majority of the poems that feature in these four volumes were published previously in newspapers, magazines, and journals before being collated and republished as individual book volumes. While Kim Kirim was a respected member of the Korean literary establishment and a leader of modernist poetry in the early twentieth century, the reception and evaluation of his poetry have been mixed. Although he is often labeled as a modernist—and the poet himself decried earlier romanticists such as Kim Ŏk and Kim Sowŏl for their overly sentimental poetry—his critics are right to point out the pervasive sentimental tone in Kim’s poetry.56 Other critics have argued that despite Kim’s deep influence from Western modernism, his poetry, especially his Weather Chart collection, does not present a sharp criticism of modern civilization. They add that Kim’s poetry fails to find a balance between intellectualism and emotion. Therefore, according to Kim Uch’ang, “it [Weather Chart] is no more than a collection of extremely superficial and fashionable abstractions.”57 Recent scholarship which situates Kim’s poetry in the context of colonial modernity tends to evaluate his works more positively and argues that Kim’s poetry vividly shows the encroaching Western modernity and consumerist culture. The poems that we will explore in this section are Kim’s earlier poems published in the woman’s magazine Sin yǒsǒng which will be taken up in the last chapter. While Kim and other now canonical writers published their works in more literary platforms, they also published widely in popular publications. 55  Although Kim is known as a poet, his oeuvre includes fiction, drama, and essays. Moreover, he might be better understood as a literary critic and theorist since the majority of his published work was of this nature and, as a journalist, his writings appeared most frequently in newspapers and magazines. 56  Kim’s contemporaries Yang Chudong and Im Hwa were especially critical of his poetry. Both supporters of the kapf, they found Kim’s poetry to be overly emotional and nostalgic. See Yu Chongho, Han’guk kŭndae sisa [History of modern Korean poetry] (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2011); see also Hwang Chae’gun, Han’guk kŭndae siga munhaksa [History of modern Korean poetry] (Seoul: Jipmoondang, 1992). 57  Kim Uch’ang, “Han’guk siwa hyŏngisang” [Korean poetry and metaphysics] In Kungp’iphan sidae ŭi si-in [Poets from the era of destitution] (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2015), 36–71.

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In this chapter, I have chosen poems published in popular magazines in order to highlight the ways in which these poems interacted in creating modernist street language and street culture. The first poem that Kim Kirim contributed to a women’s publication was “K’ǒp’ijan ǔl tǔlgo” (Holding a Coffee Cup).58 Holding a Coffee Cup Oh—my love, you are a cream puff.59 You are a cup of coffee. Do you have wings like the vapors of the rainbow that is pulling me to a country unheard of on this earth? From my shoulders You lifted off the weights of raucous responsibilities like the laborers Unloading. Which pier in California did you learn this? 커피盞을 들고 오—나의 戀人이여 너는 한 개의 슈—크림 이다. 너는 한 잔의 커피 다. 너는 어쩌면 地球에서 아지못하는 나라로 나를 끌고가는 무지개와 같은 김의 날개를 가지고 있느냐? 나의 어깨에서 하로 동안의 모—든 시끄러운 義務를 나려주는 짐푸는 人夫의 일을 너는 칼리포—니아 의 어느 埠頭에서 배웠느냐?60

The female figure that the speaker of the poem addresses is, to say the least, difficult to imagine as a concrete figure. In giving shape and personality to the 58  This poem was originally published in Sin yǒsǒng (August 1933) and subsequently included in T’aeyang ǔi p’ungsok. See Kim Kirim chǒnjip, vol. 1, 43. I have marked the transliterated loanwords used in Kim’s poetry with italics. 59  Kim writes 슈-크림 (shu-k’ǔrim) which is choux à la crème in French and what in English we would consider a cream puff pastry. 60  Italicized words are the transliterated loanwords Kim uses. They are shu-kǔrim, k’ǒp’i, and k’alip’onia.

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admired figure, Kim moves through two conflicting metaphors—the speaker calls his addressee a “cream puff” and a “cup of coffee” in the first stanza, and then describes her as pulling him out of this world with “wings like the vapors of the rainbow” and “like the laborers unloading” weight in the second and third stanzas. If the first stanza is a personified declaration to the addressee, then in the second and third stanzas, the addressee is formulated through questions of reiteration. We might speculate that Kim Kirim’s speaker, like many intellectuals and writers of the 1930s who enjoyed frequenting cafés that served coffee and pastries, is sitting at a café relishing the sweetness of a cream puff and the warmth of an aromatic cup of coffee as his thoughts wander to his “loved one” (yŏnin/ 戀人). But who is the beloved? The identity of the beloved is difficult to pin down; she is identified only through disparate associations. For example, she is associated with non-Korean foods, vapors that generate a rainbow, and a laborer from California. The poem, in fact, is constructed upon piling these associations together. That is, at the moment the beloved is about to materialize, she vanishes, only to appear in another form: cream puff→ coffee→ wings like vapor→ laborer from California. If the cream puff and coffee allude to the bourgeois urban café and the Modern Girl, then the utopian image of a rainbow and the leftist symbol of the laborer stand in stark contrast to each other. Furthermore, as seen from the pronoun usage in the poem, the poem is as much about the speaker as it is about the addressee. In the Korean, the poem is constructed by alternating na (I, me, or my) and nŏ (you), which appear at the beginning of each line.61 Again, there is a piling-up effect that is created both visibly and vocally. But if the pronouns “I” and “You” are placed on top of one another and the conflicting metaphors create disparate associations, then the non-han’gŭl words have a fissuring effect, creating a large break or pause. This is most apparent after the words shu k’ŭrim, k’op’i, where a period appears, and k’alip’onia which is not only five syllables long but is stretched out even more with a long dash. In addition, the “k” sound in k’ŭrim, k’op’i, and k’alip’onia is strongly aspirated to enhance the fissuring effect. Though the poem is short and could even be characterized as banal, through its technique of layering and fissuring it evokes the experience of modern, urban life. A similar effect is achieved in Kim’s “Singryo p’umjǒm” (Grocery Store), also published in Sin yǒsǒng.62 Divided into four short subsections, Kim creates a crisp, if not a cryptic image of food items: chocolate; apple; pineapple; and

61  Kim intentionally uses the verb naryŏ chuda (to unload) in line 7 in order to maintain the alliteration. 62   Sin yǒsǒng (January 1934): and Kim Kirim chǒnjip, vol. 1, 96–99.

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chestnut. Yet the subheadings naming the foods and the supposed descriptions of them are once again disassociated. Grocery Store 1. Chocolate Though failed in love, there is an aluminum foil covered miniature chocolate soldier. For love is tender, it also melts like snow in the mouth of a young lady. It also melts like ice in the mouth of a gentleman. 2. Crab Apple63 The hare that had lost its heart where has it gone to take a nap on a pillow of hay? 3. Pineapple64 I beg you, do not put the knife to it…. The blood-stained songs of the natives might pour. 4. Chestnut65 It’s a parade of the disarmed central army. Are they going to Tienjin? Are they going to Nanjing? They’re waiting for the general’s telegram.

63   林檎 (nǔnggǔm) is commonly translated as apple in English or sa’gwa (沙果) in Korean, but the image of nŭnggŭm is associated with the tempting fruit of the biblical story of Adam and Eve. The history of the mass production of apples in Korea began during the colonial period. For our purposes, however, nŭnggŭm is important because of the ways that this species of fruit was hybridized. Apple orchards, planted by the Japanese during the colonial period, became a successful profit-making business. 64  Kim writes mo’gwa and then in parentheses, p’a’in aep’ŭl. 65  The word pam is a homonym and could mean both chestnut and night. I have chosen to translate as “chestnut” since it is an item that one would find at a grocery store, especially one that would stock foreign foods like the other items in the poem.

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食料品店

1. 쵸코레-트

사랑엔 敗했을 망정 銀빛 甲胄 떨처입은 초코레-트 兵丁閣下. 사랑은 여리다고 아가씨의 입에서도 눈처럼 녹습니다. 서방님의 입에서도 얼음처럼 녹습니다.

2. 林檎

心臟을 잃어버린 토끼는 지금은 어디가서 마른풀을 베고 낮잠을 잘가?

3. 모과 (파인애풀) 여보 칼을 대지 말어요 부디…. 피묻은 土人의 노래가 흐를가보오. 4. 밤

武裝解除를 당한 中央軍의 行列입니다. 天津으로 가는겐가? 南京으로 가는겐가? 大將의 通電을 기다립니다.

Like “Holding A Coffee Cup,” “Grocery Store” is constructed through layering and fissuring. Notably, Kim’s verses are brief and visually clear as in imagistic writing, although the association between each subheading (the food items) and the verses that follow becomes markedly disjointed. Thus, by section 4, “Chestnut” and its corresponding verses that conjure up an image of marching soldiers adrift without orders seem unrelated at best. Yet, it is also obvious that the disarmed soldiers in section 4 are indeed related to and link back to the chocolate soldiers from section 1. Just like the chocolate soldiers that are helpless and bound to melt in the consumer’s mouth, the soldiers in section 4 are unarmed and without a commander and disappear into the darkness of the “night.” Where the first set of soldiers materializes and vanishes through the violent act of human consumption, the second set returns at the conclusion as soldiers waiting for their orders for deployment that is intimately linked to foreshadowing acts of violence. Moreover, the middle stanzas on apples and pineapples, though they might seem unrelated at first, are also linked to the other stanzas. For example,

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nŭnggŭm (which can also be read imgŭm, a Japanese neologism) is related to images of soldiers and war through their role in Japanese colonialism. Although nŭnggŭm is indigenous to the Korean peninsula, the fruit we enjoy as an “apple” today was the product of a Japanese orchard-grower who bred hybrid species of apples in the Taegu area, thereby developing the city as an important center for fruit cultivation.66 It is obvious that Kim, then, is making a direct association between Japanese capitalist encroachment in Taegu, where Japanese farmers enjoyed a monopoly on apple cultivation, and in section 4 where the Chinese central army has been left helpless by the Japanese army. Both Korean farmers and the Chinese soldiers are being invaded by Japanese imperialism. Also, the poet links the sound of “pineapple” (a fruit that was not indigenous to Taiwan but was brought to the island for cultivation in the capitalist cycle of production and dissemination) to the previous line where the speaker asks about a hare sleeping on a “pillow of hay” (marŭn p’ulŭl). The choice of pineapple also plays on the recognition of nŭnggŭm into the English translation, “apple.” The relationship between pineapples and apples appear not only in the layering and combining of words; both fruits were objects of the agricultural modernization process during the colonial period. The layering and fissuring technique that Kim Kirim uses in this poem at once commemorates the material abundance in a Korean grocery store and critiques colonial capitalist incursions with images of the physical violence of war. Kim’s insertion of Western loanwords produces an estrangement effect in “Grocery Store” as a whole, although not to the same extent as it does in “Holding a Cup of Coffee.” In his analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater, Walter Benjamin writes that the task of epic theater is “to discover the conditions of life … through the interruptions of happenings.”67 Such an interruption is illustrated with an example from Brecht’s play in which a stranger enters a family gathering. Just as the stranger’s entrance interrupts the rhythm of the family scene, Kim’s transliterated words interrupt what is otherwise a poem written in mixed-script Korean. This interruption intensifies the sense of estrangement and alienation, which, along with the layering and fissuring technique, are hallmarks of Kim Kirim’s modernist poetry.

66  See Yi Hoch’ŏl, Han’guk nŭnggŭm ŭi yŏksa, kŭ kiwŏn kwa palchŏn [History of Korean apples, their origin and development] (Seoul: Munhak kwa chisŏngsa, 2002). 67  Benjamin, Illuminations, 150.

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Yang Chichang

Yang Chichang’s urban poetry attempts to capture a reality beyond itself by moving away from realistic representation to evoking images beyond the real. In an interview with Yang Zuqiao in 1986, Yang stated that he and Le Moulin intentionally used surrealism in their poetry because realism was not only ineffective but was also sure to “invite the anger of the Japanese.”68 While I do not doubt Yang’s reflection—surely the Japanese colonial authorities were very watchful of Taiwanese writers’ work—as Michelle Yeh insists, surrealism should not be “reduced to … a product of colonial experience.”69 Instead, it should be understood as a combination of colonial censorship, Yang’s intellectual influences, and his poetic philosophy. Additionally, Yang’s surrealism was based on the poet’s own lived experiences, especially of the changing physical and emotional landscapes of colonial cities and towns in Taiwan. The years he lived and studied in Japan exposed Yang to Japanese modernist and avant-garde literary coteries, as well as to the works of Western modernists and symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, Jean Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, and James Joyce. In Communicating Vessels, André Breton uses the vessel as an analogy to describe how the dream world, or the mind, and the real world meet as if they are continuous.70 I would argue that Yang Chichang frequently brings dream and reality together into his poetic space, ingeniously creating a kind of thirdspace. This alternative space could indeed be, as the poet claims, a safe space that could elude Japanese censors, but as I will show through my analysis of two of his poems, Yang’s concern was with trying to make sense of the realities of the expanding urban modernity. “Rouge and Lips” (1934) is an example of early twentieth-century modernist poetry written by a Taiwanese poet using the surrealist technique of intermingling dream and reality.

68  Yang Zuqiao, “Chaoxienshi zhuyi de changdaozhe: fangwen Yang Ch’i-ch’ang” [An advocate of surrealism: an interview with Yang Ch’i-ch’ang] in Taiwan wenyi 102 (1986): 113. 69  Michelle Yeh, “Burning and Flying: Yang Ch’ih-ch’ang and the Surrealist Poets of Taiwan in the 1930s,” Taiwan Literature English Translation Series 26 (January 2010): 139. 70  André Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. by Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).

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Rouge and Lips The air in the room is as deep as the bottom of a well Her long gown rolled up to her panties Misato caresses her curvaceous leg with a white hand The pipe’s sound, jazz, the smell of sweaty armpits, and…. Awakening from a dream, I see a note: “Bye-bye” signed “M” Rose-colored rouge, a lipstick in its case Consciousness, defeated, flows somberly by.71 The first four lines sketch a vivid image of a Modern Girl at a dance hall. The sound, sight, and smell are lucid, dramatic, and realistic. Misato, the Modern Girl, makes a sensational appearance in Yang’s poem with her “white hands” caressing her “curvaceous legs,” revealed under her hiked-up gown. But this vivid dream is suddenly interrupted when the speaker wakes up to reality and sees a note written in English, “Bye-bye,” and signed “M” for Misato. Not only does the note serve to interrupt the dream, but the single word “bye-bye” and the initial “M” naturally bring the poem to a halting break. In this short space and time within the poem, dream and reality appear reversed. That is, if the dream feels lifelike, his awakened state is like a dream in which he finds a note written in a foreign language. The inclusion of English script intensifies the strangeness and engenders a dreamlike mood, even though the speaker is awake. The poem concludes with the speaker admitting his defeated consciousness, suggesting that he is slowly falling back into the dream state. Yang’s Modern Girl Misato is made to materialize and then made to vanish. Associated with jazz and with a spirited and energetic dance hall, adorned in the latest fashion, she embodies everything that is new, modern, and provocative at that moment in history. In the speaker’s dream, she appears larger than life, only to vanish leaving behind just the initial “M” written with “rose-colored rouge” when the speaker awakes. The materializing and vanishing Modern Girl in “Rouge and Lips” therefore parallels the surrealistic dream state created by the poet. 71  All of Yang’s poetry was composed in Japanese and later translated into Chinese. The poem “Rouge and Lips” was originally not included in Yang’s Burning Cheeks but later included in Shui Yingping zuopinji [Collected works of Shui Ying-p’ing], which included his extant poetry. English translations can be found in Yeh and Malmqvist, Frontier Taiwan (60) and by Balcom in Taiwan Literature English Translation Series 26 (January 2010), 78.

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Yang’s “Ruined City: Tainan Qui Dort” (1936), also written in Japanese, lays bare the suffocating urban conditions of Tainan, his hometown. Tainan Qui Dort, which means “Tainan that sleeps” or “Tainan that is dead” in French, appropriately disguises the title so that the reader must puzzle over the poem to construct an image of the city that has been ailing and is on a brink of death. The use of foreign words, written in katakana, not only immediately marks the words as new and foreign, but in this poem they also function to disguise the real meaning thereby producing irony—layered meanings. For example, in section four, the word アロマ (aroma) is ill-fitting in the context of the “defeated … earth” where the earth would likely produce the stench of death rather than “aromatic mediation.” Similarly, a prostitute singing the バル カローラ (barukarōra), a style of Venetian folk song made most famous in the late nineteenth century French opera “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (The Tales of Hoffmann), appears as the final image providing further irony to the poem. In Act 3 of Jacque Offenbach’s opera, the beautiful courtesan Giulietta decides to seduce Hoffaman in exchange for a sparkling large diamond from Captain Daperttuo, Hoffman’s nemisis. Giulietta wins the dare and Hoffman’s soul is about to be taken. However, he warns the Captain that his friend Nicklausse will come to save him. The Captain, therefore, prepares a drink laced with poison intended for Nicklausse. In an ironic twist, Giulietta mistakenly drinks from the cup and dies. We can create parallel meanings from the “prostitute singing a barcarolle” and Giulietta’s wry death, which at first is not very obvious. As in the use of the word “aroma,” “barcarolle” disguises the real meaning. First, it produces a foreignizing effect with its katakana script. More importantly, however, while the final image of the poem is of the prostitute’s song that is replete with lament and death which forever forbids her from reaching home, thus pointing to the Tainan city that is dead, what has ultimately survived is poetry. Just as in “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” where Hoffmann renounces love of women for poetry, Yang’s poem attests to the resilence of words and poetry in particular even in the midst of war and violence. Ruined City: Tainan Qui Dort 1. Dawn For white terror Crimson lips emit a blood-curdling scream Early in the morning, the wind grows still, playing dead My feverish body is covered with bloody wounds

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2. An Attitude Toward Life The sun breathes into the branch tips of the trees At night the flying moon indulges itself without sleeping A thought slides from my body and spirit Crosses the Strait, challenging the sky, and on a pale Night wind flies toward The gravestone of youth 3. Ritual Song Ritual instruments The sketch of many stars plus the song of dancing flowers Gray brain matter dreaming of a no-mans land of dementia Soaking wet in a ray of light like a rainbow 4. Ruined City People who sign their names on the defeated surface of the earth Blow whistles, hollow shells Sing of ancient history, land, home, and Trees, they all love aromatic mediations O, dusk when autumn butterflies fly! For a prostitute singing a barcarolle The lament of home is pale.72 壊れた街: Tainan Qui Dort

1. 明夜



蒼い驚愕に 眞紅な口唇は怖しい叫びをあげ 風が假死を装うて靜まるあした 私の肉體に血だらけの負傷が熱をおびてくる

2. 生活の表示



太陽は木木の梢に息をふき 夜翔する月は不眠を楽しむ 肉體と精神をすべり墜ちる思維は 海峡を渡り、空に挑み、眞青な 夜風の中を青春の墓石に向つて 飛んだ

72  Yeh and Malmqvist, Frontier Taiwan, 63–64.

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3. 祭歌



祭の楽器 數數の星の素描にフルールの舞の唄 灰色の脳漿は痴呆のくにの空き地を夢み 虹のような光？に濡れる

4. 壊れた街



敗北の地表に署名する人人は 口笛を吹き、空なる貝殻は 古い歴史を歌い、土も、家も、 樹も、アロマの瞑想を愛し、 秋蝶のあがる夕べよ！ バルカローラを唄う芝姫に 故里の愁嘆は青い

One of the most noticeable details about Yang’s poetry is the usage of vivid and powerful color images in his writing. Yang uses contrasting colors—white with scarlet; light of day with dark of night; floral with gray; and rainbow with defeated earth—throughout this poem to intensify the images of a city that is dying. The “ruined city” does not boast of modern technologies such as the train or other mass public transportation. What is more, images of modern objects and scenes do not even appear in the textual space. But in lamenting the loss of “ritual instruments,” we might surmise that, in fact, modern objects and modernity have invaded Tainan and replaced “ancient history, land, home, and/ Trees” (section 4). Thus, the city has been “ruined,” or is dort (asleep or dead), as a result of modernity. The four sections of this poem are organized in a similar fashion to Kim Kirim’s “Grocery Store”—with a subheading and verses that are not explicitly related to each other. Both poems are constructed as a series of potentially freestanding sections, and the images evoked in each stanza are self-contained. Nevertheless, each stanza in “Tainan qui dort” becomes part of the crucial layering work that reinforces the multiple layers of colonialism Tainan has experienced. The city, in essence, is built on top of the previous Tainan, which was built on Dutch colonialism and other histories. Moreover, although Yang’s poem describes a defeated city, the city is juxtaposed to nature, which in fact sustains the destruction. For Yang, “the country (nature) and the city” stand in a dialectical relationship, especially in an era that was undergoing great change, particularly in urban reform and national language movements.73 73   Country and City, 289. Raymond Williams has argued that country and city are not necessarily opposites but rather there exists a dialectical relationship between the two.

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Constructing boulevards, roads, streets, and alleys are the major building blocks of urban transformation.74 These give structure to the city’s complex shape, forming not only networks of transportation and communication but also the city’s social, political, economic, and cultural identities.75 As Allan Jacobs points out, streets become so closely associated with the city that they often confer the city its name and its distinctiveness. Both Todd Henry and Joseph Allen have shown in their studies of urban planning and development in colonial Seoul and Taipei that although colonial planners vigorously attempted to establish grid street patterns in creating these modern cities, these plans were, while successful on one level, never perfectly realized or completed due to various limitations and restraints.76 What these two scholars strongly suggest is that street planning can go unheeded or altered and new street patterns can be formed by the colonized through their own pedestrian acts. Streets can meander and curve, be blocked, widened, narrowed, occupied, and abandoned by users. In other words, streets are unpredictable, motley, and heterogeneous. This is how I characterize the modernist poetry of Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang. The “road” to modernist poetry in colonial Korea and Taiwan was paved by poets’ keen realization of the limitations of their native languages brought about by what Christopher Hanscom and Peng Hsiao-yen have separately characterized as the crisis of representation in Korean and Taiwan modernist literature respectively.77 Both these scholars astutely point out that for the majority of writers in colonial Korea and Taiwan—whether modernist or realist or leftist or aestheticist—their colonial modern conditions were chillingly felt because the language with which to capture their “real” conditions was unavailable and absent. Their distrust in and suspicion of language lead them to construct new forms and strategies. Although Japanese became the dominant (official) language in the colonies and many intellectuals and creative writers were sufficiently bilingual, Japanese was not the sole language available to them. Rather, poets fully utilized an array of languages to express life observed and experienced, thus creating a new poetic language. The usage 74  Urban planners and scholars make distinctions between boulevards, roads, streets, and alleys. I am using “streets” as a broader category here to capture qualities of all of the above, much as Allan Jacobs does in his work Great Streets. 75  See Allan Jacobs, Great Streets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) and Jane Jacobs’ classic work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library: New York, 2011). Both emphasize the public and community aspects of streets life, which are inevitably linked to urban and cultural formation of cities. 76  Allen, Taipei, 28–33; Henry, Assimilating Seoul, 28–37. 77  Hanscom, Real Modern. Peng, “Colonialism and the Predicament of Identity.”

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of loanwords, neologisms, and transliterations sharpened the way Korean and Chinese or Taiwanese languages were being used in poetry. Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang constructed their poetry with foreign images and loanwords that were quickly becoming part of the expanding urban milieu in colonial cities. Their poems have an urban syntax and resemble the morphological features of street patterns. Kim Kirim’s poems are filled with loanwords and transliterations creating the fissuring effect of interruption. At the same time, these interruptions, when layered together, form a coherent poetic story of Korean urban modernity. Yang’s urban poetry is more topographical, not only in terms of zooming in on the sound and images of the bustling dance hall or a dying city but in the ways that he layers the spaces of reality and dream to intensify the layering effect. Unlike the modernist essays of Yi Sang and Weng Nao that decentered the colonial metropole and gave voice to the discovery of modernity in and beyond Korea and Taiwan, the poetry of Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang and other modernist poets was formulated vis-à-vis the relationship between new urban cartographies, material objects, and languages. Loanwords, neologisms, and transliterations creolized the Korean and Taiwanese lexicon but also functioned to heighten the sense of the conflicting presence of modernity through layering and fissuring effects.

chapter 3

Consuming Modernity

Department Stores and Modernist Fiction Inside a department store’s show window, wanton-looking female celluloid mannequins wrapped in bright red and black swimsuits are being splashed by cardboard-made waves. kim kirim, “Tempting Seas”1

⸪ In The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin makes an uncanny connection between the early factories and the arcade (the department store) when he describes early illustrations of factories showing “production rooms and display rooms,” which were “represented in cross-section like doll houses.”2 Factories “displayed” modern assembling processes where identical items were massproduced; department stores then displayed the identically packaged products. Both were engaged in the work of categorization, and both represented a space wherein the experience of modern production and consumption was set in motion. I would suggest, however, that a connection between the department store and the magazine (mass print media) also might be made. Not only did department stores and print media rely on each other for advertising and revenue; they reinforced each other’s spectacle, mass appeal, and construction of notions of the modern. Just as the mass media (especially newspapers, variety magazines, and women’s magazines) introduced readers to new reading practices and a “new culture of reading” in Korea and Taiwan,3 the modern department store gave rise to new sociocultural practices that could arguably be labeled what I am calling “department store culture”—a new consumer culture driven by desire, spectacle, and competition for modern distinctions 1  Kim Kirim, “Tempting Seas,” Kim Kirim chŏnjip, vol. 5, 322–26. 2  Benjamin, Arcades Project, 163. 3  See Cheon Junghwan (Ch’ǒn Chǒnghwan), Kŭndae ŭi ch’aek ikki [Reading in the modern times] (Seoul: P’urǔn yǒksa, 2003). Cheon argues that in the 1920s and 1930s, colonial Korea began to see the emergence of “popular” readers such as the “new woman,” who read for leisure and self-education, and the burgeoning of what could be described as a culture of reading.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401167_005

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amid the production of sameness. The department store—along with department store culture—thus goes beyond its existence as a mere space for sales and consumption. Similar to the way Pierre Bourdieu analyzed class and taste in French society, department stores sharply bring to the surface an inherent contradiction between desire for “distinction,” individuality, and “authenticity” on the part of the consumer and the capitalist forces with which department stores operate to create multiplicity, conformity, and standardization.4 This contradiction becomes even more glaringly visible when the department store is operating in the context of colonial and national politics. The main focus of this chapter is to explore this kind of contradiction between the allure of modern identity through association with modern commodities amid the political and class ideology that calls one to disassociate or suppress those desires. More specifically, how could the colonized find his or her subjectivity through a colonizer’s commodities or “things” while at the same time condemning the very process that allows these things to be made available and enjoyed? Especially, how did colonized Korean and Taiwanese elites and intellectuals who had access to and part took in bourgeois lifestyle and values engage in critiquing the class and political inequalities that intensified under colonial modernity? And how did urban culture and department store culture accentuate this contradiction? What is it about culturally specific commodities and the values associated with them that allowed people to desire it so much as to disregard the historical and political implications? For example, how could Koreans and Taiwanese living under Japanese colonialism protest Japanese imperialism but still love the things of Japan or the imperial West? Put another way, how could one sympathize with proletarian, leftist values but still cleave to a bourgeois lifestyle under colonialism? What was it about commodities and the process of commodification that have the power to mediate politics? How did literary works deal with this conundrum and attempt to make sense of these contradictions? As Arjun Appadurai has proposed, commodities or “things” have social lives and circulate “in different regimes of value in space and time.”5 What he means by “regimes of value” is that as objects circulate from situation to situation, they vary in their cultural value and do not necessarily share the same cultural assumptions as they circulate.6 Unlike the semiotic view of things, by 4  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Routledge, 1986). 5  Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4. 6  Ibid., 15.

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proposing that commodities are social things Appadurai places the “thingsin-motion” and their “cultural biography” as illuminating “their human and social context,” rather than human actors “encoding things with significance.”7 Furthermore, since commodities are neither static nor motionless, in order to trace and to understand the regimes of value they take on as things circulate, Appadurai proposes the principal of “paths and diversions.” He argues that the “flow of commodities in any given situation is a shifting compromise between socially regulated paths and competitively inspired diversions.”8 In other words, a dynamic tension exists between the approved paths in which things move and those who violate those paths. This tension occurs as the commodity is tied to cultural and political determinations. What is noteworthy here is that the violations are not necessarily negative, because this “diversion of commodities from specified paths is always a sign of creativity and crisis.”9 In this respect, I juxtapose Appadurai’s ideas with Glissant’s poetic of relations, where Relation can be imagined as “evolving cultures” and “creolization” of cultures and identities.10 These creolized cultures and identities are brought into form through encounters and clashes similar to the way Appadurai imagines the “paths and diversions” of the social life of things. Things do not exist in a vacuum but from their origins to their final destinations and as they circulate, they mediate culture and politics. It is through this framework that I read Yi Hyosŏk’s (1907–42) and Wang Shilang’s (1908–84) literary works from the colonial period. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, many writers from colonial Korea and Taiwan, regardless of their political or aesthetic leanings, set their literary works within the urban everyday life that was quickly encroaching upon them. Whether they were critiquing the deplorable conditions of the modern city or writing with a nostalgic longing for the countryside, urban life and all its commodities figured prominently in the day-to-day lives of the authors themselves. At the center of this growing consumer modernity and commodification process was the department store. With shop windows, mannequins, elevators and grand winding staircases, sales girls, display cases, restaurants, art galleries, miniature golf, rooftop cafés, and much more, early twentieth-century department stores in Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei were probably not much different from 7  Ibid., 5. Appadurai draws on Igor Kopytoff’s idea of things having a “cultural biography” as a way of thinking about the process and movement of things in various social and historical contexts which Appadurai calls “path and diversions.” See also Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process” in The Social Life of Things, 64–91. 8  Appadurai, “Commodities and Politics of Value,” 17. 9  Ibid., 26. 10  See Glissant’s sections on “Approaches” and “Paths” in Poetics of Relation.

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department stores in the Western hemisphere. Walter Benjamin uses the term “phantasmagoria” to describe the culture of display of consumerism associated with Parisian arcades of the late nineteenth century. The experience of visiting the mammoth, multistory Mitsukoshi and Hwashin department stores with their neo-renaissance architectural facades in Seoul or the seven-floor, concrete-and-steel Kikumoto in Taipei or, of course, the Mitsukoshi in Tokyo would strike awe in any visitor. Like the streets that served as the veins running through the city and the asphalt pavements on which the Modern Boys and Modern Girls strolled, the department store became an iconic structure and an unavoidable feature of the colonial urban landscape, whether one was there to purchase a new item or just to stroll through the neatly arranged, mazelike halls, ride the elevator up and down, or promenade through the grand stairway. On the one hand the department store was the quintessential modern space to be enjoyed and celebrated, but on the other hand, it was a towering structure that clearly made visible the operation of capitalist circulation, commodification, and oppression. In short, it represented not only a space where material goods could be bought and sold but one where every aspect of its internal and external structure reflected the commodification process and the emerging culture of consumer modernity. In this respect, the department store was also an ideal space for examining the tensions between different modes of representation at the level of form and content just as the space of modern fiction also engaged in this work. Most importantly, I argue, the new department store culture facilitated the forming of new social relationships between people, and people and things, and most importantly, the way it affected how things figured in forming one’s identity. In colonial Seoul and Taipei, the rise of a new consumer culture and significant changes to everyday lifestyles were entangled with the construction of national, class, and gender identities. The construction of these identities was never simple and was always being contested within the contradictions of urban modernity. The literary works I examine in this chapter brought together the modern subject formation as a dialectic between the individual’s desire for self-fashioning through consumption and association of the things and spaces that circulated it and the larger historical and ideological forces that impeded this desire for self-fashioning. As examined in the previous chapters, many literary works written in the 1930s in colonial Korea and colonial Taiwan engaged with the changing attitudes toward being modern. The aftermath of the crackdown on leftist groups in the late 1920s and the early 1930s resulted in the dissolution of almost all left-leaning associations and groups by 1935, most notably, the kapf and the Taiwan Literature and Arts Research Association. Thus, many novels written

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in the 1930s spiritedly engaged with the changing attitudes toward modern life and the best possible way to make sense of the often insensible modern world. Rather than directly challenging and critiquing Japanese colonialism, modernity, and capitalism, Yi Hyosǒk and Wang Shilang created stylish scenes of urban life in their narrative fiction that tapped into fashionable sensibilities. Their modernist styles and tastes, however, were combined with subtle yet strong leftist critiques, the combined effect of which was to make the reader question the conditions of urban life. Works by these two authors revealed at times an irreconcilable tension between leftist and modernist modes of representation in attempting to challenge and critique colonialism, modernity, and capitalism all the while witnessing and participating in an ever-growing consumer modernity. In this respect, as Bert Scruggs argues in his study of Taiwanese proletariat literature, many texts at this time combined modernist styles and sensibilities with a leftist critique of class consciousness.11 Likewise, Sunyoung Park in her study of Korean proletariat literature makes a strong case that there was a “plurality of cultural nationalism and its cultural expressions,” especially as it was illustrated by leftist nationalist writers.12 I find Scruggs’s and Park’s observations particularly apt. Using their premise as a springboard, this chapter focuses on the ability of these modernist writers to bring politics and aesthetics together through their keen interest in the department store in their fictional narratives. This interest, I argue, was due in large part to the ways the department store represented a space in which political and social concerns including matters of nation, class, and gender were not cut off from culture but actually encapsulated within it. This encapsulation placed modern subjectivity in a precarious position where it could materialize and vanish along with modern things and their circulation and use. In short, the department store was a space for understanding the cultural politics as well as the cultural production of the time. The first half of the chapter provides general histories of the department store; the second focuses on the novels of Yi Hyosŏk and Wang Shilang and analyzes their treatment of the department store and the social life of things in relation to the ways modern identities materialize and vanish. For Yi and Wang, Seoul and Taipei were cities that possessed both charms and ills and it was this duality that was reflected in their literary works. Both authors were interested 11  See Scruggs, Translingual Narration, 57–87 (chap. 4: “Class Consciousness, Fictive Space, and the Colonial Proletariat”). Scruggs discusses the Taiwanese proletariat literature of Yang Kui, Wang Shilang, Zhu Dianren, and Yang Shouyu. Comparing Yang Kui to Wang and others, Scruggs interestingly notes that while many Taiwanese writers were well aware of socialism, their “writing reflects rather than engages the movement” (72). 12  Park, Proletarian Wave, 195. See especially chap. 5: “Confessing the Colonial Self” on Yŏm Sangsŏp’s literary trajectory (160–96).

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in exposing, through vivid descriptions and hyper-self-conscious protagonists, the underbelly of the bustling glamour of the city in order to reveal growing class inequality and the vapidness of materialism. For writers, no better space existed to represent the tension between the allure of urban life and the frustration mounted by that fascination than the department store, which served as a microcosm of urban modernity itself. 1

Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Department Store

As Karl Marx observed, as things become commodities, their use value matters little and only their exchange value counts.13 The process of commodification changed not only the scale and form of consumption but, more importantly, transformed human interactions with the self, others, and the city. The early department stores in Japan and her colonies solidified the Marxian commodification process. Although the outdoor night markets and traditional rotating markets offered similar experiences—seeing piled-up goods and throngs of crowds searching for things to buy—the department store replaced the core interactive modes experienced through these traditional forms of exchange. First, as Marx described, desire replaced necessity. Second, in the case of the department store, desire did not necessarily involve purchase. Department stores encouraged the activity of “just looking,”14 which underscored the act of shopping as a leisure activity or a form of entertainment also closely associated with class identities. Many goods were enclosed inside glass display cases, as in a museum, and so were literally inaccessible. Hence, the department store encouraged the culture of exhibition and the activity of browsing, which effectively increased desire on the part of the onlooker. Thus, shopping in the department store was just as much about seeing and being seen as it was about buying. Guy Debord, writing about modern society and new consumption practices, argues that spectacle is the “outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production … and epitomizes the prevailing model of social life.”15 Department stores, indeed, promoted spectacle. Everything was designed to encourage looking, from the department store’s grandiose architecture and glass display cases to new commodities, technologies, and people engaged 13  Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 303–8. 14  See Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985) which, through her analysis of the authors mentioned in the subtitle, argues the role of early department stores in the “feminization of the commercial world.” 15  Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 13.

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in new forms of labor. Shoppers, too, were looked at and thus also became objects of spectacle. While both Marx and Debord have rightly pointed out the transformative relationship between commodity forms and human beings conditioned under capitalism, Henri Lefebvre has shown that space is not only a physical context within which human activities take place but also a social product.16 In this way, the newly established department stores in Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei (as well as Tainan) undoubtedly came to function as much more than spaces of consumption where goods were exchanged for money. They became spaces in which new social and cultural practices arose and where patrons, as well as employees, learned to socialize in new ways. Most of all, department stores came to serve as spaces in which not only global things circulated but also where multiple modern identities could be performed and mediated through those things. Steffi Richter, in her analysis of Mitsukoshi in Japan, argues that department stores served as a place where people learned to “perform modern identities” and where new tastes and lifestyles were staged for people to encounter, experiment with, and enjoy.17 Richter closely follows Jordan Sand’s study on the construction of an “aesthetics of domesticity,” where the “house” became a site for defining a “cosmopolitan identity and lifestyle.”18 Both of these studies underscore the centrality of the production of space and its relationship to class. In other words, the rise of these new spaces (department stores and houses) in Japan highlighted the growing differences in socioeconomic status and made visible the new bourgeois culture of the middle and upper-middle classes. Furthermore, both Richter and Sand are acutely aware of the dilemma this new aesthetic posed for Japan’s political position as well as for her national identity vis-à-vis her relationship with Western imperialism. As Sand points out, Meiji Japanese architects and interior decorators were confronted with the quandary of having to strike a balance between adopting “eclectic styles of his European counterparts” and “champion[ing] a native style.” If a designer were to lean one way or the other, he would risk damaging Japan’s position in the international arena when perceptions of civilization versus backwardness

16  Lefebvre, Production of Space, 30–34. 17  Richter provides readings of the department store’s magazine Mitsukoshi as a space in which tastes and lifestyles were staged for readers and shoppers. She concludes that, especially during the early twentieth century, Mitsukoshi contributed to the discursive formation of “Japaneseness.” Steffi Richter, “Staging Good Taste, Staging Japaneseness: Consumer Culture, the Department Store Mitsukoshi and Performance of Modern Identities in Japan,” Asiatische Studien 58 (2004): 726. 18  Sand, House and Home, 19.

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were at stake.19 To be sure, this dilemma would be compounded as Japan became an imperial power of her own in Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Although the colonial conditions of Korea and Taiwan require a different register of analysis, the challenges faced by colonized architects, designers, department store owners, and writers (both artists and intellectuals) as they coped with the loss of political sovereignty and cultural authority were likely not much different. In the case of colonial Korea and Taiwan, the growing urban modernity for which the department stores served as an index brought Seoul and Taipei ever closer in their similarity to Tokyo—so much so that Yi Sang, when visiting Tokyo in 1937, wrote of his utter disenchantment with the metropole in his essay “Tokyo.”20 This similarity, intensified by the conditions of coloniality, has been well theorized by postcolonial critics who have done much to elucidate the multidirectional relationship between the city and the colony as well as the power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized through concepts such as ambivalence, mimicry, and hybridity.21 Yet, in the case of Mitsukoshi and Hwashin in Korea and Kikumoto and Hayashi in Taiwan, it might be too simple to consider these stores and consumer culture as just a matter of forming a hybrid culture through adoption and transplantation. Similarly, it would be too simple to suggest that Hwashin was a Korean enterprise representing colonial resistance or mimicking colonial authority. Rather, I propose to read the department stores as modernist texts that competed to create what I am calling Tokyo modernity (Mitsukoshi), Kyŏngsŏng modernity (Hwashin), and Taipei modernity (Kikumoto and Hayashi). 2

A Brand-New World Inside a Department Store

Although these department stores were spaces where things temporarily resided until they were consumed, they also served as an archive and repository and played the role of cultural ambassadors of sorts by creating spaces for art exhibitions, recreation, lectures, demonstrations, and services and by showcasing the newest and most advanced technologies available, including architectural and civil engineering, utilities, and machinery. Aristide Boucicaut’s Le Bon Marché, founded in 1838 in Paris, can be said to be the first modern department store, although other stores throughout Europe and the 19  Ibid., 112. See also 107–11 for more about Hayashi Kohei and his work as interior decorator of Mitsukoshi. 20  Yi Sang, “Tong’gyǒng,” 96. 21  Three concepts used by Homi Bhabha in Location of Culture.

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United States quickly followed.22 Whiteleys and Harrods were just two of the examples in England, while in the United States, A. T. Stewart started his dry goods store in New York City in 1823 and expanded it to a full-size department store, the Marble Palace, in 1862. Macy’s (1858, New York), Wanamaker’s (1861, Philadelphia), and Marshall Field’s (1866, Chicago) followed shortly there­ after with palatial buildings that became progressively taller, wider, and ever fuller with goods and people.23 Of course, the ultimate goal of these stores was to profit from selling their merchandise, and the means and methods deployed to attract customers into the store were far-reaching and sophisticated. In a sense, department stores created a brand-new world within their walls and became integral players in setting trends, cultivating tastes, and categorizing modernity. The birth of the department store in Japan and in colonial Korea and Taiwan was inextricably linked to the era of late imperialism in which networks of transnational capital, technology, personnel, commodities, and culture crisscrossed continents and oceans. By the turn of the twentieth century, Japanese merchants and businessmen began to consolidate their smaller dry goods stores and open larger ones that would eventually reach department store status, as had been done in Europe and the United States. Mitsukoshi, considered to be one of the first modern department stores in Japan,24 traces its history back to 1673 when the founder Mitsui Takatoshi opened Echigoya as a textile store selling kimonos. Later it became Mitsui Gofukuten and began to expand and reorganize its business.25 In addition to their kimono shops in various locations including Tokyo, the Mitsui family operated a bank and later consolidated its holdings into the Mitsui zaibatsu. Further transformations to this two-hundred-year-old business began when Takahashi Yoshio and Hibi 22  See Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869– 1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981) for a history of the department store and the role it played in creating a department store culture. 23  See Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores (New York: Stein and Day, 1979). 24  Shirokiya (1866) is said to be the first Western-style department store in Tokyo; however, it did not fare well during the postwar period and eventually merged with another department store. 25  The more contemporary, colloquial word used in Japan is depaato, a truncated version of depatomento sutoa. The older word that is now used only in writing is hyakkaten (百貨店). See Hatsuda Toru, Hyakkaten no tanjo [The birth of the department store] (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1993), 60–81. In English, see also Brian Moeran, “The Birth of the Japanese Department Store” (141–76) and Millie Creighton, “Something More: Japanese Department Store’s Marketing of a ‘Meaningful Human Life’” (206–30), both in Kerrie L. MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998).

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Osuke were hired to reorganize the Mitsui kimono shops into a modern business, and by modern, this referred to a kind of department store resembling those in the United States. One of the first changes they made was to use the name Mitsukoshi Depatomento Sutoa. They also instituted a number of new business practices, including erecting displays where customers would be able to roam around rather than having them sit on tatami mats to be presented with merchandise, only hiring sales clerks with at least a high school education, and engaging in active advertising campaigns to create Mitsukoshi as a brand.26 From its newly reconstructed renaissance-style building to its ornately designed interior halls, lounges, dining rooms, rooftop gardens, and sales areas, Mitsukoshi was as much a tourist site, cultural space, and playground as it was a shopping site. All in all, the Mitsukoshi company was as much interested in and succeeded in selling “Mitsukoshi” as a creator of modern culture as in selling merchandise to turn a profit.27 Not to be outdone, other stores from the kimono or drapery shop tradition quickly adapted these newer business practices and transformed their small stores into department stores, which became monumental landmarks of the city. There existed intense levels of competition among Mitsukoshi, Shirokiya, Matsuya, Matsuzakaya, Takashimaya, and others to become the biggest, tallest, and grandest. They constantly upgraded and renovated their facilities in order to maintain an image of being ever modern. When Mitsukoshi rebuilt its store in 1914, it installed both an elevator and an escalator. Most importantly, of course, these department stores competed with each other for the rights to claim the title of being the most modern. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, all of the stores mentioned above were engaged in intense public relations campaigns and advertising wars, vying for the public’s attention. They published their own magazines with illustrations and photographs of the latest kimono patterns, furniture arrangements, and foods, all of which were often accompanied by “how-to” articles. They also hired artists to paint murals, design fabric patterns, and create chic posters.28 26  Takahashi, who studied at the Eastman School of Business, is said to have visited various departments stores in the United States and Europe but was especially inspired by his visit to John Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia in 1887. See Hatsuda, Hyakkaten no tanjo, 62. 27  Mitsukoshi began branding their own line of student shoes and by 1917 had branded other merchandise including cologne, butter, and refrigerators. See Moeran, “Japanese Department Store,” 153. 28  Ibid., 150. See also Julia Sapin, “Department-Store Publicity Magazines in Early-TwentiethCentury Japan: Promoting Products, Producing New Cultural Perspectives,” Transactions of the International Conference on East Asian Studies 56 (2011): 80–89 for a study of the close collaboration forged between Meiji artists and department store catalogues.

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Taking the Competition Abroad: the Global Lives of Things

The modernization of department stores during the late Meiji period (1868– 1912), in the wake of Japan’s victory over Russia, coincided with Japan’s growing imperial interests and its eventual colonial expansion into Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1905. Many Japanese kimono shops, dry good stores, and, eventually, department stores, opened in colonial Korea and Taiwan. In their initial years, these stores most likely supplied goods primarily to the growing population of Japanese settlers, but eventually, they grew to become part of the everyday life of the colonized as well. In Korea, Mitsukoshi, Jojiya, Minakai, and Hirata all began as kimono stores, variety stores, or grocery stores.29 As in Japan, however, the majority of these businesses eventually established themselves as department stores, often by relocating to newly constructed buildings in the Japanese settler district located just south of Namsan near Myǒngch’ijǒng (J. Meijimachi) and Honmachi. While all of these department stores were to a large extent very successful in Seoul, the majority of them closed their doors at the end of the colonial period. Unfortunately, many have disappeared altogether from the historical accounts of department stores in colonial Korea. Minakai, for example, was once a thriving business. After starting in Taegu and then opening its flagship store in Seoul, it had a total of twelve stores throughout Korea and even expanded into China and Manchuria, eventually operating eighteen stores. However, the business collapsed after Japan’s defeat in World War II.30 While all the stores named above were successful, Mitsukoshi quickly came to dominate the retail scene in colonial Seoul by transplanting many of the same practices and features it had instituted in its stores in Japan. After its arrival in Seoul as a clothing outlet in 1906, Mitsukoshi Kyŏngsŏng officially became a branch of the parent company in 1929. A year later, on October 24, 1930, it moved into its new, grand, four-story building with a basement and rooftop garden (the site is the present-day home of the Sinsegye [Sinsegae] department store in the central district of Seoul. Though slightly smaller in size than the Mitsukoshi stores located in Nihonbashi or Ginza, the Kyŏngsŏng 29   For a history of Korean department stores, see Kwak Youngsoo (Kwak Yǒngsu), Paekhwajǒm iyagi [Department store story] (Seoul: Han’guk kyŏngje sinmunsa, 1993), 13–16 and Kim and Chu, Han’guk paekhwajǒm yǒksa [A history of Korean department stores] (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2006). 30  For a more complete account of Minakai, see Hayashi Hiroshige, Minakai paekhwajǒm [Minakai department store], trans. Kim Sǒngho (Seoul: Nohyŏng, 2007). It does not appear that Minakai, Jojiya, or Hirata had a counterpart in Japan, but rather, these were new enterprises initiated by Japanese businessmen in the colony.

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Mitsukoshi department store, Seoul, 1930s Photo courtesy of Minsokwon

branch was just as impressive inside and out. Similar to the department stores in Europe, the United States, and Japan, some of the key attractions were its lavish architectural design, spectacular window displays, and interior decorations that displayed scenes of the new and foreign.31 To be sure, by this time, Seoul’s landscape was punctuated with European-style architecture, such as the Seoul Train Station, the ggk building, and the Bank of Chosǒn, but Mitsukoshi, as the largest retail structure in Seoul, captured the interest of much more of the population (both Koreans and Japanese as well as other foreigners) and came to symbolize beguiling and dizzying modernity at work. Most importantly, in contrast to the ggk building or other buildings like banks and post offices, which for Koreans stood as direct symbols of unwavering colonial authority, Mitsukoshi Kyŏngsŏng embodied the more cosmopolitan qualities of Tokyo. It was filled with all the fantasies not only about modern Japan but the larger world. In addition to its sparkling display cases filled with Japanese and Western commodities and exotic Western decor that astounded the shoppers, Mitsukoshi Kyǒngsǒng applied various business practices that it had successfully 31  Mitsukoshi’s own architecture division supervised the design and engineering of the building.

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appropriated from European and American department stores and used in Japan. For instance, prices on the merchandise were standardized with fixed price tags that prevented haggling and bargaining. Each floor had new cash register machines that would add up purchases, after which written receipts were issued instead of oral transactions. First-time shoppers (or visitors just looking) were confronted with new technologies (calculators, electric lights, chandeliers, and elevators) and merchandise, as well as different ways in which people could interact and spaces and objects could be arranged and displayed. All these encounters converged to shape shoppers’ experiences as scientific, civilized, and modern—and, in effect, also foreign, especially from the perspective of Korean patrons. This modern urban culture, moreover, was largely imagined and constructed as a Tokyo modernity through Mitsukoshi Kyǒngsǒng’s direct connection to the metropole. Located in the center of the Japanese district, Honmachi, Mitsukoshi was adjacent to the major Japanese commercial district where streets were lined with Japanese businesses and flanked either side by signboards and billboards in Japanese and English. With the growing number of Japanese residents and businesses, the area developed into a kind of Japantown, replicating the mood and sense of Tokyo to the extent that the area became known as “mini-Tokyo” by Japanese residents.32 As Jun Uchida points out, Japanese settlers went so far as to “dub the area ‘Keijō’s Ginza.’”33 This naming makes a direct association between the modernity of Honmachi with that of Ginza, an upscale, energized shopping and entertainment area in Tokyo, thus placing Mitsukoshi Kyǒngsǒng at the center of Tokyo modernity for Japanese settlers.34 While most Japanese settlers were not from Tokyo,35 their identification with that city as the cosmopolitan imperial capital would have only grown more with the opening of Mitsukoshi Kyǒngsǒng, further reinforcing their experience of modernity in the colony as coterminous with Tokyo modernity.

32  Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 72. 33  Ibid., 73. 34  Former Japanese settlers recounted how they would rename Korean towns and streets with Japanese words (ibid., 71). 35  See ibid., 64–68, 77, for the demographics of Japanese settlers in Korea. The Japanese settler population in Korea was quite diverse in class, occupation, social status, and regional background. Settlers from the Kansai area outnumbered those from Tokyo. At the time Mitsukoshi completed its building renovations in 1934, there were approximately 109,672 Japanese and 279,003 Koreans residing in Seoul.

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The Department Store as a Site of Competing Modernities

Among the varied and numerous Japanese department stores was a notable Korean-owned department store which came to compete directly with Mitsukoshi. If Mitsukoshi Kyǒngsǒng was constructed as a space that encased and exemplified Tokyo modernity, Hwashin attempted to counter it with its construction of Kyǒngsǒng modernity where the social life of things were localized. Hwashin, owned by Pak Hǔngsik,36 is best remembered as the first large-scale, modern department store that was specifically Korean-owned, although much of the capital came from Japanese banks.37 Pak frequently touted his nationalist credentials and even marketed Hwashin as a minjok (national) department store. Pak, who made his fortune trading rice, was a savvy businessman who began his department store business by purchasing a small variety store, Hwashin sanghoe, in 1931.38 He quickly established Hwashin as a corporation in partnership with the former owner and then opened his “department store” on September 15, 1931. In order to compete with other Korean-owned department stores in the vicinity, Pak reorganized the company by installing a new set of managers and administrators and completely turning over the inventory.39 One of the many strategies Pak utilized in order to remain competitive was to constantly renovate his old store to create the atmosphere and ambience of a modern department store. The original two-story wooden structure was rebuilt and renovated into a three-story concrete structure of approximately 17,791 square feet and reopened on May 10, 1932. He installed a revolving display window on the first floor near the main entrance, which not only attracted 36  Pak was considered one of the richest Korean people in Korea during the colonial period. After liberation, Pak was accused of being a Japanese collaborator for his various business associations with Japanese banks and the colonial government, and he was arrested and tried for his “antinational” activities. For more on Pak Hǔngsik, see Chǒng Unhyǒn, Nanǔn hwangguk sinmin irosoida [I’m a citizen of the empire] (Seoul: Kaema kowŏn, 1999), 105–12. 37  It would be more accurate to say that Hwashin was the last Korean-owned department store competitively operating during the colonial period, since Pak successfully eliminated his Korean competitors. 38  The Tong’a department store was another Korean-owned venture. It was owned by Min Kyusik, a veteran businessperson who had operated the Tong’a Women’s Attire Trading Company in the same area. Tong’a opened across the street from Hwashin, but its shortterm strategy failed and, about a half year later, on July 16, 1932, Pak was able to buy it out. Pak went on to build a bridge connecting Hwashin and Tong’a, which served not only as a clear symbol of the takeover but also as another novelty associated with modern department stores, subsequently drawing in customers and tourists. 39  Kim Pyŏngdo and Chu Yŏnghyŏk, Han’guk paekhwajŏm yŏksa, 61.

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the attention of passersby but more importantly ensured that the new building served as an important symbol of modernity. Pak further enlarged Hwashin when he bought out the bankrupt Tong’a department store nearby.40 With that acquisition, Hwashin occupied the entire corner of the prime site of Chongno intersection. Then, on January 27, 1935, a devastating fire destroyed large parts of the building’s west and east wings, which provided an occasion for Pak to completely rebuild it into a massive six-story structure (plus a basement and rooftop garden) totaling 110,315 square feet, thus surpassing even Mitsukoshi.41 It must be noted that since Mitsukoshi’s grand opening in 1930, it had also undergone several renovation projects, with one of the last taking place in October 1937 when it was expanded to 99,454 square feet. With its reopening in 1937, Hwashin’s new building not only became the largest department store in Seoul; it also incorporated some of the most advanced technology and design that until that time had been unseen in Seoul. Pak hired the Korean architect Pak Kiryong to design the new building.42 Pak Kiryong appears to have been largely influenced by the Chicago School of Design from the late nineteenth century, especially in the way he designed and incorporated bay windows into the facade of the building, which was considered an innovative element in Korea at the time.43 The main door of the neoclassicalstyle building was positioned on the corner in order to facilitate entrance from 40  Shin T’aehwa was the first owner of the small Hwashin variety store, but he was unable to pull the store out of deep debt in 1929. Pak offered to form a partnership with Shin called Hwashin Incorporated. For Hwashin’s company history, see Hwashin p’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe, ed., Hwashin 50 nyǒn [50 years of Hwashin] Seoul: Samhwa Publishing, 1977. 41  Mitsukoshi was at the time the largest department store in Seoul at approximately 2,795 p’yŏng (99,000 square feet). O Chinsŏk, “Ilcheha paekhwajŏm ŏpkyeŭi tonghyanggwa kwan’gye indŭlŭi saenghwal yangsik” [The characteristics of department stores during the Japanese colonial period and the everyday life of related personnel] in Ilche ŭi singmin chipae wa ilsang saenghwal [Everyday life of the Korean people under the Japanese colonial rule], ed. Yonsei University Kukhak Yŏn’guwŏn (Seoul: Hyean, 2004) 135. 42  Pak Kiryong (1898–1943) began his career working as a draftsman for the Japanese Government-General’s Ministry of Public Works and then established his private architecture firm. Pak’s other designs included, among others, the Tong’a department store and the residence of Kim Yŏnsu, the founder of Kyŏngbang textile corporation and brother of Kim Sŏngsu, the founder of Tong’a ilbo. 43  Some architectural historians have pointed out that the architecture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Chicago would be better described as “commercial style” for the ways in which it was applied to numerous commercial buildings constructed during the era. See Carl W. Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture: a history of commercial and public building in the Chicago area, 1875–1924 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1973). In Korean, see An Ch’angmo, “Hanmal ‘kŏch’uke taehan insikgwa kŏnch’uk kaenyŏm” [The understanding of “architecture” and the concept of “architecture” in late nineteenth-century Korea], Han’guk mihak yesul hakhoeji 20 (2004): 75–102.

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either street, as was done in many European and American department stores. Much of the interior layout and decorations followed the patterns used in other Japanese department stores, including tiles, chandeliers, a grand staircase, and large clocks. Although Hwashin and Mitsukoshi Kyŏngsŏng did not employ the exact same architectural styles, they used similar tactics, from the grand facade to the rotating doors and eye-catching window displays. Both department stores installed elevators, escalators, and public phones as well as restaurants, exhibition and lecture halls, rooftop gardens, and many newer and convenient services. The services offered by Hwashin were many and varied. The attendant at the information booth located on the first floor stood by to answer any question about Hwashin’s services, while the entire shopping experience was designed so that the shopper could roam and look around as they pleased without interruptions or feeling obligated to buy anything. They were there not only to buy but to partake of the modern services provided. For example, a family could come to Hwashin for lunch at its restaurant and then browse through the various floors for merchandise, but might also stop by the sixth-floor theater to watch a film or a newsreel for free.44 There were lectures and demonstrations on the newest fashions in clothing, interior decorating, and cooking. And, if the customer by chance did purchase an item, Hwashin, like Mitsukoshi, issued receipts and a guarantee that if the customer was not satisfied with his purchase, they could return the item at any time for an exchange. Delivery and mail-order services also made shopping easier and readily available even to those who lived outside Seoul. Though some of these services did not require the purchase of any merchandise, they nevertheless helped to increase people’s desire to buy material goods and their desire to gain the cultural capital that came from being modern and knowing what was modern. In essence, customers were interested in shopping not just for things but for opportunities to see and experience modernity. Hwashin’s “brand” of modernity was very similar to the Tokyo modernity being sold by Mitsukoshi Kyŏngsŏng. The experience of entering through a massive door into a glittering, spacious room filled with hundreds of things new and foreign was indeed meticulously replicated. While the competition among all the department stores was intense, as the sole Korean-owned department store, Hwashin must have felt a greater urgency to compete with the Japanese stores—and especially with Mitsukoshi. These two, engaged in a battle to be the physically largest, also waged fullscale advertising campaigns and used the media as a forum for competition. 44  O Chinsŏk, “Ilcheha paekhwajŏm ŏpkyeŭi tonghyanggwa kwan’gye indŭlŭi saenghwal yangsik,” 169.

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figure 4 Hwashin department store advertisement, Tonga ilbo, January 1, 1938

Often the ads to announce their openings, expansions, and sales would take up an entire page of a newspaper. Hwashin employed other strategies, such as holding lots to give away an ox and other prizes to a shopper for spending one Korean won at the store. Hwashin also declared that it would open a thousand branch outlets throughout the peninsula and advertised that it was looking for prospective branch operators. These smaller stores functioned as part of Hwashin’s modernizing project because the regional operators would be taught modern business strategies and the new culture of department stores, thereby disseminating Kyŏngsŏng modernity beyond the capital. Indeed, Hwashin set up 350 branches in its initial stage, which both impressed and alarmed the competition. Such rapid expansion prompted the Osaka Daily News to publish an article with the headline, “The Mitsukoshi of Korea, Hwashin’s New Strategies,” which demonstrated the level of esteem Hwashin had gained.45 The label “Mitsukoshi of Korea” indicated that Hwashin’s goal, in large part, had been reached. In the eyes of the mass media and in the realm of public opinion, it was considered an exemplar of modernity. However, what Hwashin accomplished was not just a matter of copying Mitsukoshi, or being considered its equal, but in creating an experience of modernity which could rightly be called Kyŏngsŏng modernity. Kyŏngsŏng modernity centered around the Hwashin department store and along Chongno, the street on which majority of Korean-owned businesses were concentrated. Hwashin’s role in constructing 45  Cited in Kim Pyŏngdo and Chu Yŏnghyŏk, Han’guk paekhwajŏm yŏksa, 68–69.

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Chongno as a “modern” street, or reconstituting it as the nation’s street (minjok ui kil),46 speaks to the ways in which department stores transformed not only the visuality of street culture and urban landscape but also human geography, the ways human beings interacted with and perceived space. In Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, the rise of department stores was somewhat different. Mitsukoshi and other stores did not open branches there. Rather than a permanent store, Mitsukoshi and other merchants such as Takashimaya made their annual trips to Taiwan with their goods for an “open sale.” It was Shigeta Eiji, who had lived and worked in Taiwan since 1905 as a textile merchant, who eventually founded Kikumoto. The grand opening took place on November 28, 1932. Located in a fashionable neighborhood bisected by Hengyang and Bo-ai Roads, Kikumoto fit seamlessly with other stores that catered to Japanese settlers. Similar to the department stores in Japan and colonial Korea, the height and size of the structure made it a conspicuous sight and added a different dimension to the street culture and urban landscape. It had elevators installed in its seven-floor building—making it one of the first buildings with elevators in Taiwan.47 As in Seoul, this technology attracted tourists from within Taipei and throughout Taiwan who would come just to ride the elevators. Unlike the ornate columns and facades used just a decade earlier on other colonial buildings, Kikumoto exhibited a more subtly decorated facade with its modified renaissance style. Despite the less ostentatious architecture, Kikumoto was nonetheless a spectacular sight, both inside and out, thus garnering the moniker “The Seventh Heaven.”48 Kikumoto’s corner presence transformed the visual landscape of the city as well as altering the way individuals became socialized in the space in which they lived. 46  Kwŏn Oman et al., Chongno: sigan, changso, saram [Chongno: time, place, people] (Seoul: Seoulhak yŏn’guso, 2002), 155–156. This is not to say that Chongno was uninteresting or insignificant before Hwashin; to the contrary, Chongno has a long and venerable history of its own which needs to be better studied. It was a bustling street even before Hwashin’s arrival, especially at night where vendors sold a variety of goods including food, clothes, and books. 47  Jingning Xia, et al., Jian zheng, Taiwan Zhong du fu [Witness the Colonial Taiwan] (Taipei: Li Hong Chubanshe, 1996), 140–41, 154. After liberation, Kikumoto was run by the Chinese Nationalist Party until 1955, when it closed its doors after going bankrupt. Many of the Japanese department stores that are now in operation in Taiwan entered the Taiwanese market in the 1980s, including Sogo, Takashimaya, and Mitsukoshi. 48  In 2004 Taipei 101 displaced the Petronas Towers as the tallest building in the world (a record surpassed in 2010 by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai). The lower floors of Taipei 101 are filled with shopping centers and house internationally renowned brands. It has also become a huge tourist attraction; people from outside Taipei are bussed in to marvel at its height and luxury.

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Kikumoto department store, Taipei, 1930s Photo courtesy of the Archives of Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica

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Kikumoto was not the only department store in operation in colonial Taiwan. Only a week after Kikumoto opened its doors in Taipei, Hayashi Houichi, another long-time Japanese settler, opened his department store on December 5, 1932, in Tainan, which had served as the capital of Taiwan until the late nineteenth century. The newly built department store was the tallest structure in Tainan at the time, with five floors plus a rooftop garden. It was also the first Tainan business to stock and sell numerous items, many of which were imported luxury goods.49 Similar to department stores from Korea and Japan, Hayashi was equipped with some of the most modern technologies, such as an elevator and a revolving door. To be sure, the newly built and opened Mitsukoshi, Hwashin, Kikumoto, and Hayashi department stores operated as symbols of urban modernity. From their Western architecture and foreign merchandise to the new ways people participated in consumption practices, they signified luxury and exoticism but also the possibilities to imagine and “fashion” the self as another. Yet department stores were more than a glossy symbol. Underneath the newness of goods and practices producing an aura of otherworldliness lay global capitalism at work in full force, spurring competition at all levels of production, circulation, and consumption. Department stores engaged in intense levels of competition with one another with advertisements and sales to lure customers in. If they aspired to satisfy the desires and fantasies of the modern subject by creating the model of a cosmopolitan, chic city through their external and internal structures, then many novelists critiqued department stores for what they perceived as an unfurling of extravagance, vacuity, and disparity. It is no accident, then, that the department store also became an iconic space in the Korean and Taiwanese urban literature of the 1930s–exactly at a time when actual department stores were giving rise to new cityscapes and everyday practices. There, of course, existed earlier writings on the city and literary works that used the city as a setting. But the third decade of the twentieth century provided unprecedented and unique opportunities for writers to rethink the ways they could convey these new experiences—and the shock of urban modernity—and these

49  The onetime Hayashi department store, also known as Lin department store, was renovated and refurbished to recapture the glory of its early years. It reopened in 2010. The renovation of Hayashi department store is part of Taiwan’s Cultural Heritage Preservation Act promulgated in 1982 to preserve and restore historic building across the nation. “The Department Store that Inaugurated an Age of Fashion in the 1930s–Hayashi Department Store,” Hayashi website, posted April 15, 2014, http://www.hayashi.com.tw/page.asp? nsub=A8A000&lang=E.

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were facilitated by new spaces such as the department store. For instance, Yi Chaesǒn characterizes the Korean urban novel of the 1930s in this way: The urban novel not only takes the city as its background, but also draws out the mood of the city’s universal characteristics, such as poverty, crime, pleasure, prostitution, the ecological friction within human interactions, psychological anxiety, alienation, and symptoms of individual fragmentation, as well as representing a microcosm of a colonized society where freedom has been oppressed.50 Yi’s understanding of the urban novel of 1930s colonial Korea is basically in line with the Marxist critique of the modern city—one in which rapid, capitalist growth had a tremendous displacement effect, leaving people alienated and lost. Similarly, Chen Fangming notes that fiction from colonial Taiwan in the 1930s brought together modernism and proletarian writing into one fictional space by depicting the growing urban modernity while exploring the internal struggles of the characters. Chien-chung Chen echoes Chen Fangming and Yi Chaesǒn when he states that many of the modernist writers, while depicting the “mesmerized urban culture” of big cities like Tokyo or Taipei, still underscore their sobering “life’s predicaments” under colonial rule.51 For many Korean and Taiwanese modernist writers and critics, the department store could not but embody the expanding commodity culture which, to their chagrin, influenced people’s decision-making and sense of self. These novelists often critiqued these conditions by depicting characters as having become commodities themselves. In this way, they were not so different from nineteenth-century European and American realist authors, such as Émile Zola in Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise, 1880) and Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie (1900). These realist novels depicted the era and culture of modern department stores in Paris and Chicago respectively and present female characters, in particular, becoming entrapped in the commodification process that seemingly offers both freedom and subjugation.52 50  Yi Chaesŏn, Han’guk sosŏlsa [History of Korean fiction] (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2000), 359. Yi’s model of the urban novel appears to be derived from and resonates with Blanche Housman Gelfant’s study of the American city novel. 51  See Chen Fangming, Taiwan xin wenxueshi. Also cited in Chien-chung Chen, “Taiwan Fiction Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945,” in Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, ed. Shu-mei Shih et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 233. 52  In the West the novel became one of the most popular forms of media for exploring the implications of industrial and consumer capitalism, spectatorship, the growth of urban centers, and changes in gender relations. These two novels portray the department store

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Globally, department stores and the novel, as “novelties,” became sites of competition that attempted to capture the experiences of the new. Department stores competed to stylize an experience of urban modernity for their consumers; novelists competed to represent experiences of the modern. As stated earlier, following the mass arrest of leftist intellectuals in both Korea and Taiwan (as well as in Japan), literature took a very interesting turn in which writers, especially novelists, began to produce works that were not explicitly proletarian but still contained leftist undertones and themes. That is, adherence to the realist, didactic tenets of earlier proletarian writing gave way to the production of modernist and nativist writings. The turn toward historical fiction, family novels, romances, and other popular genre fiction such as urban and detective novels did not necessarily lead to an abandonment of the themes of political struggle or class suffering.53 Instead, fellow traveler writers began to seek alternative ways to express the realities of their colonial situation and were quite successful in developing new modes of literary expression by venturing beyond socialist realism.54 In Taiwan, Chien-chung Chen points out that despite the growing suppression of leftist activities by the colonial authorities, left-wing literature with socialist ideas became even more “explicit” in the 1930s with the founding of new literary journals that focused on proletarian literature and art.55 Proletarian literary works continued to focus on both the fate and the potential of the masses by thematizing class consciousness and critiquing the social inequalities spurred on by the still present colonial status of Taiwan and the quickly engulfing capitalism in everyday life. Yet, as was the case in colonial Korea, Taiwanese writers found different modes of expressing their critiques of colonialism, class, and capitalism as the historical and material conditions surrounding them also underwent changes to the more extravagant but also more restrictive. The bourgeois space of department stores and the display, circulation, and consumption of new commodities within and throughout the colonies posed new contradictions but also became a productive space for bringing out these contradictions in disguised forms. as an icon of modernity and examine the experience of mass urbanization, especially its impact on the lives of young women in Paris and Chicago. 53  See Kim Yunsik, “KAPF Literature in Modern Korean Literary History,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14.2 (2006): 405–25. Kim notes that kafp literature, especially fiction, applied literary realism and “found in realism a way to reconcile the concrete representation of real life in literature with a scientific worldview” (412). See also Kwŏn Yŏng-min, Han’guk kyegŭp munhak undongsa [A history of the proletarian literary movement in Korea] (Seoul: Myunye, 1998). 54  See Sunyoung Park’s “Translating the Proletariat,” chapter 4 in The Proletarian Wave, 126–59. 55  Chien-chung Chen, “Taiwan Fiction under Japanese Colonial Rule,” 231–32.

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The novels of Yi Hyosŏk (Korea) and Wang Shilang (Taiwan) ingeniously combined modernist moods and styles with concerns about political and class inequalities. For this reason, Korean and Taiwanese scholars have had difficulty labeling Yi’s and Wang’s literary oeuvre, especially since the authors’ own political positions, literary outputs, and literary alliances are not easily categorized as either belonging to the proletarian literary camp (advocates of literary realism) or the pure literature camp (literature as autonomous). This difficulty in categorizing authors and their literary works, however, is one of the hallmarks of colonial writing, especially in the 1930s when proletarianism and modernism merged ever closer to critique capitalist modernity. No two authors embodied this more than Yi Hyosŏk and Wang Shilang and their personal politics and lifestyles did not necessarily become mapped out on their literary works or vice versa. For both writers, however, a central concern was the precariousness of individual subjectivity in the midst of urban modernity. Everything, including the things at the department stores and the shoppers who purchased them, became linked in the process of forming the shoppers’ and by extension the larger colonized subjects’ cultural biography, showing the depth of imperialism and capitalism in the colonies. 5

Yi Hyosǒk’s Julia

Although Yi Hyosǒk (1907–42) is best known for his canonical short story “Maemil kkot p’il muryǒp” (The Buckwheat Season) and is thus often labeled a native-soil (K. hyangto; C. xiangtu) writer,56 his literary scope is much wider. Yi’s earlier works are identified as belonging to tendency literature,57 especially 56  Korean and Taiwanese “native-soil” writers typically used the pristine qualities of the countryside and the loss of traditional lifestyle as central motifs in critiquing modernity. Native-soil writers expressed their spirit of resistance not only explicitly but also implicitly through their critique of the loss of the countryside. In Korea, this characteristic can be also be applied to nongch’on (peasant) literature of the colonial period. Although Yi has been labeled as a native-soil writer, among his fifty-nine fictional works, forty-nine are explicitly set in the city, and thus he is also considered by many to be an urban fiction writer. See Yi Sangok, Yi Hyosŏk: Munhakgwa saeng’ae [Yi Hyosŏk: his work and life] (Seoul: Minǔmsa, 1992) and Kwǒn Chŏngho, Yi Hyosŏk munhak yǒn’gu [A study of Yi Hyosŏk’s literature] (Seoul: Wǒrin, 2003). 57  “Tendency literature” (kyŏnghyangp’a munhak) was coined by the first chairperson of kapf, Pak Yŏnghŭi, in his essay “Sinkyŏnghyangp’a munhak kwa kŭ mundanjŏk chiwi” [New tendency literature and its literary position] (1925). See Kwak Kŭn, Yu Chin’o wa Yi Hyosŏk ŭi chŏn’gi sosŏl yŏn’gu: tongbanja chakka nonyirŭl chungsim ŭro [A study on the early novels of Yu Chino and Yi Hyosŏk as fellow traveler writers] (PhD diss.,

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considering that he debuted with the short story “Tosiwa yuryǒng” (The City and its Ghost) in 1928 in Chosǒn chi’gwang, a bulletin published by the Chosŏn Communist Party. A story about the destitute conditions of the poor living in the city, Yi portrays the urban landscape as dirty, greedy, and merciless. Moreover, the rich who rule the city are shown as heartless. The narrative focuses on a woman whose leg has been run over by a black Ford automobile, a symbol of wealth. As a result of this portrayal pitting the poor against the rich, Yi Hyosŏk entered the literary establishment labeled as a tendency writer. While, among Yi’s novels, Chu Li-ya (Julia) has not been the object of many critical studies to date, I believe that this work demonstrates excellently Yi Hyosŏk’s central concerns and interests in exploring modernity’s many faces through a combination of issues that reveal the contradictions within modern Korean society and literary production. In the novel, Yi brings together the themes of sexuality, political ideology, and urban modernity. Chu Li-ya is a country girl who comes to the big city enamored of the ideas of a lumpenproletariat who tries to instill in her the values of socialism, which appeal to her as liberating and modern. Once she is living in the city, Chu Li-ya frequents the department store like it’s her own backyard and rather enjoys the bourgeois urban life. She is even romantically torn between two proletariats who eventually take different routes in their work: Chu Hwa, who remains true to his socialist causes, and Minho, who merely claims to deny pleasure and romanticism in the name of socialism but always indulges them and even sexually exploits her. To a certain extent, Julia follows the plotline of a typical proletariat text, so much so that some scholars have labeled Yi Hyosǒk a fellow traveler writer (tongbanja chakka), one who is left-leaning but not formally affiliated with the kapf group.58 Chu Li-ya is literally a self-made, or more precisely self-named, woman. Upon running away from her childhood home in the countryside, she discards her Korean name, Kim Yǒngae, and names herself Chu Li-ya (朱利耶), a name that sounds very similar to the English name “Julia.” Her self-chosen name comes from Chu—the surname of a political activist (Chu Hwa) whom Chu Li-ya had met earlier and specifically seeks out in the city—and Li-ya, the name of a character in a novel she had read. After changing her name to “Julia,” she indulges in the lifestyle she had always fantasized about as if the name change had released her from a feudal identity she had been trapped in. Sungkyunkwan University, 1986); and Kim Changdong, “Yi Hyosŏk sosŏl ŭi chomyŏng” [Illuminating the novels of Yi Hyosŏk], Han’guk munhak yŏn’gu 5 (December 1982): 137–55. 58  The term “fellow traveler” or poputchik in Russian was first used by Leon Trotsky, referring to non-Bolshevists who sympathized with the 1917 revolution.

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These lifestyle changes include cohabitating with a man before marriage, eating Western food and, of course, shopping at department stores. For example, when she goes grocery shopping, she buys milk, butter, and vegetables for a salad rather than the ingredients for Korean-style side dishes. She insists that they have bread, “café,”59 and salad for dinner since lighting the stove would be too troublesome. Julia, in fact, divides Korean and Western foods into diametrical opposites. Chu Hwa, who has become used to Julia’s habits comments that she divides her foods into pairs: rice and bread, butter and chili pepper paste (koch’ujang), kimch’i and salad, “café” and rice water. Of these pairings, Julia prefers bread, butter, salad, and café. Within the fictional space of the novel, Yi fills the narrative with exotic, Western-style things, creating an ambience of hypermodernity beyond Japanese colonial modernity. This hypermodernity for Julia is a modernity of Western things. For Julia, even the brand of butter she eats matters since it becomes a visible marker of distinction or social taste. Returning from her grocery shopping, she tells Chu Hwa, “Instead I bought some milk and a can of good butter. By ‘good,’ I don’t mean Hakura but Clover brand. I prefer this one to Hokkaido butter and even Meiji butter. Maybe it’s because I’m poor so I haven’t tasted anything better.”60 In this case, a brand of butter carries a web of significations associated with national, gender, social, and class identities. While I doubt that Yi was receiving any commission from dairy companies for product placement in this literary work, butter—and more specifically, the kind of butter—takes on a certain regime of value and participates in producing a new cultural biography of butter in relation to the global circulation of things. Clover butter, a creamy, sweet spread that Julia prefers, is a Western brand, thus expressing not only her palatal preferences but also her ideas about butter’s association with things far from Korean or Japanese. Ironically, considering her statement that she prefers the Clover brand although it is cheaper than Hokkaido or Meiji butter, it is likely that Clover is a butter substitute—margarine, which was first invented as a cheaper, but just as creamy, alternative in 1869. Especially during the interwar period, margarine became widely produced, exported, and circulated throughout the world although, particularly in Britain and the United States, its unfavorability remained associated with cheapness, fakeness, and with the poor working class.61 59  Yi Hyosǒk writes parenthetically, “(she called coffee café, like the French).” Yi Hyosǒk chǒnjip [Complete works of Yi Hyosǒk], edited by Yi Hyosǒk munhak yŏn’guwŏn, vol. 4 (Seoul: Chamisa, 1990), 19. 60  Ibid., 18–19. 61  Meiji Seika, a company founded in 1916, began producing Meiji butter along with cheese in 1932 (“History,” Meiji Holdings, http://www.meiji.com/global/about-us/history/).

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The history of butter and margarine in Europe is far from glamorous, because it too was mired in the debate of class and status. In late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century Britain, bread-and-butter was a staple of the urban working class. The “smear” on bread or potato not only added a sweet, creamy flavor to the rather plain, dry starch but, especially for children, it provided a sorely needed source of nutrition.62 Later, with the invention of butterine, as it was first called, margarine became an inexpensive substitute for butter in Britain, where the shortage of butter and its increasing prices made it difficult to afford during the war. Interestingly, even the urban poor preferred to buy and consume butter, even if in smaller quantities, because of margarine’s strong association with poverty and its perceived connection to poor housekeeping and a disrespectful show of hospitality.63 Despite various taste tests that proved that the difference between butter and margarine was marginal, if not without evidence, and legislation to protect the sale of it, the stigma attached to margarine stuck, largely due to its association with class identity, social status, and outward appearance of respectability.64 Butter is strongly invoked in Yi Hyosŏk’s novel. Not only is Julia fond of eating bread and butter, but Yi describes Julia as “emanating a rich buttery scent,” so much so that it is as if Julia’s tastes and hobbies were smeared together with the West’s.65 Fearing this, Chu Hwa rebukes Julia when she arrogantly mutters that “there is no one as pathetic as someone who can’t eat butter.” He scolds her by saying “There is not a single person who doesn’t know how to eat butter. The only reason why they can’t eat butter is that they can’t afford to buy it.”66 This exchange clearly shows that Yi uses butter for dual purposes. The first is to enliven the ambience of the modern and exotic by putting butter at the center of Julia’s diet. Butter (or margarine), to be sure, was neither common nor cheap in Korea at the time. It was a luxury commodity sold in department stores such as Mitsukoshi and Hwashin. Not only does Julia’s preference for butter, bread, and coffee strongly color the entire novel with bourgeois, modernist hues, it sets up a space to critique the yearning for the everyday bourgeois lifestyle. Shin Pŏmsun, in pointing out the repeated images of bread in modern Korean literature, argues that in Yi Hyosǒk’s works the presence of bread symbolizes Hokkaido Cooperative Creamery Association began producing butter in 1925 (“History,” Megmilk Snow Brand Group, http://www.meg-snow.com/english/corporate/history/). 62  Alysa Levene, “The Meaning of Margarine in England: Class, Consumption and Material Culture from 1918–1953,” Contemporary British History 28.2 (June 2014): 147. 63  Ibid., 152. 64  Ibid., 160. 65   Yi Hyosǒk chŏnjp, vol. 4, 19. 66  Ibid.

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more than simply the desire for the West but is intimately linked to the “leftist characters who experience class conflicts while being tempted by the sensuality of bread” (ppang ŭi kwannŭng).67 Bread, according to Shin, stands for the livelihood that is driven by our appetite for food (sikyok) and our sexual desires (sŏngyok), which also need to be checked if one is to engage in a fight against social and class inequality. I would add butter to Shin’s symbol of bread. While bread symbolizes sustenance and a metonym for rice, butter, on the other hand, becomes pure desire associated with luxury in defining social status and class identity. Chu Hwa, for his part, decides to see Julia as his training ground for socialist work and not as a temptress who “dangles a forbidden fruit [nŭnggŭm] in front of him.”68 That is, he believes that she has been brought under his tutelage so he can mold and train her to become a comrade. But while Julia admires Chu Hwa and wants to become part of his world, she is not initially committed to his cause and thus is ultimately torn between two lifestyles. Julia’s ambivalence also exposes the hypocrisies and the patriarchal nature of the socialist nationalist movement through characters such as Minho, whom themselves are often conflicted. Thus Yi’s novel attempts to bring into the narrative space the variegated qualities of modern life under colonialism, building up the tension between not only capitalist and socialist ideologies but also the not-so-distant modernist and proletariat forms of the novel. The department store in this novel functions as a space of competing contradictions and foreshadows the eventual exposure of the hypocrisies within the leftist movement that Julia had been taught to see as self-sacrificing in its efforts to bring about a classless society and national liberation. While out on an errand for Chu Hwa’s associates, Julia finds herself being trailed by an unknown man whom she assumes to be either a teenage delinquent or a detective. Although she tries to break away from him by going through side alleys, it is not until she arrives in front of the M. department store that she feels she has made a safe getaway. It is likely that among the crowds of shoppers and onlookers, she believes that she has blended in and escaped the watchful eyes of her pursuant. However, this sense of safety is deceiving; even though the crowd camouflages her, the man tailing her is also camouflaged. Thus, Julia, in her own relative safety, cannot see her pursuer and so does not know whether or not she has really outsmarted him. When she comes back 67  Shin Pŏmsun, “Wŏnch’ojŏk shichangkwa resŭt’orang ŭi shihak” [The poetics of the traditional market and a modern restaurant], Han’guk hyŏndae munhak yŏn’gu 12 (December 2002): 10–11. 68   Yi Hyosǒk chŏnjp, vol. 4, 12.

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out onto the streets after delivering the pamphlets to Minho at his apartment, the man, to Julia’s surprise, is waiting for her. At this moment of confrontation, he addresses her as Kim Yǒngae, not Julia, and even asks her for confirmation of her Korean name: “Excuse me, you must be Ms. Kim Yǒngae, no?” Julia is shaken awake and forced to acknowledge her “original” given name and her rural roots.69 When she returns to her room, she finds her older brother and her fiancé, whom she had abandoned, waiting for her. Julia then discovers that the man she had encountered earlier was a private detective hired by her older brother. In this brief scene, Yi Hyosǒk foregrounds the instability and invented nature of modern identity by challenging the highly sophisticated, cosmopolitan Modern Girl of urban Seoul by reconnecting her to her past and her rural roots. That this happens near a department store that serves as a central backdrop for the confrontation of invented identity is significant. It does seem to point to the ways that modern spaces, like the department store that would presumably facilitate in inventing new identities, have limits. In the end, however, Julia evades her brother’s threats and remains “Julia” instead of returning home. What Yi seems to be suggesting is that however invented Julia’s modern identity may be, it is an invention that ultimately grants her a level of her own subjectivity where she can choose to become a conscientious bourgeois, leftist-sympathizing, liberated female subject. Anne Friedberg has written of the importance of the female wanderer, or flaneuse, and of women’s new access to the city through the department store.70 Friedberg, like Rachel Bowlby, identifies various emancipatory sites for women in nineteenth-century Europe and argues that the department store, above all, allowed for the rise of women consumers who could express their desires.71 To be sure, other feminist critics have argued equally strongly against the optimistic notions of emancipation through consumerism and, in particular, through movement in the public sphere where women become objects of spectacle.72 Also, as I will discuss in my analysis of Wang Shilang’s text, consumption and 69  Ibid., 39. Traditionally, a Korean woman’s personal name was erased and supplanted with either “someone’s mother” or “a lady from somewhere,” especially once she had wed. Therefore, Kim Yŏngae’s naming herself Chu Li-ya (Julia) is a bold act in itself. At the same time, Modern Girls like Julia who were naming themselves with English-sounding names were also objects of ridicule and criticism from the media that portrayed it as “typical Modern Girl behavior.” 70  Anne Friedberg, “Les Flaneurs du Mal (I): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,” 419–31. 71  Bowlby, Just Looking, 2–6. 72  See, e.g., Victoria de Grazia, “Introduction,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, eds. de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1–10. She argues that because of their subordinate socioeconomic position, women have historically been objects of exploitation through consumerism.

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shopping were not simply the realm of women; we must also consider men and their consumption culture as part of the larger story of commodification and identity. What needs underscoring is this tension that emerges in urban modernity in forming gender and class identities through commodities. In many aspects, Julia in Yi Hyosǒk’s novel is a flaneuse who seeks emancipation of several kinds. In the department store (or in a department store café) where she can buy milk, butter, and coffee, her desires become fully expressible and she is able to display and act upon her desires. It has become her habit to stop by the department store and browse through each floor’s bedazzlements. She then goes to the department store restaurant and has a drink. After leaving this place, she stops by the trendy café called Arirang, which she often frequents, and orders a dark cup of coffee…. Coffee’s aroma and bitterness precisely pleased her taste.73 In the public sphere—and, in particular, in a space of consumption—women like Julia can observe, purchase, and taste their desires. Yi’s Julia was an “unfinished” novella published in ten serial episodes in Sin yǒsǒng starting in January 1933.74 Because it was unfinished, we are unable to determine the ending; however, the last available episode ends with the arrest of Julia, Chu Hwa, and his comrades for their involvement in underground activities. Julia is released from jail after ten days, and when she returns home and goes to hospital feeling ill, she discovers that she is three months pregnant. The episode ends with Julia reflecting contentedly on that one passionate evening with Chu Hwa three months before. In his novels and, in particular, in his novels of the city, Yi is more interested in creating impressions, ambiences, and sentiments than directly narrating reality following the proletarian dictum. This is one of the central features that distinguishes Yi’s work from earlier proletarian writings. At the same time, it is Yi’s attention to constructing details that gives rise to the type 73   Yi Hyosǒk chǒnjip, vol. 4, 28. 74  It seems that the first episode appeared twice: once in the January 1933 issue and then again in the April 1933 issue of Sin yǒsǒng. The editors of Yi Hyosǒk chǒnjip do not know why this novel is an unfinished work. Sin yǒsǒng might have discontinued the serial or it could be published elsewhere and went missing. In any case, Yi Hyosǒk’s eldest daughter, Ms. Lee Nah-mi, has relayed to me in personal conversation that not even an unpublished manuscript could be located. Lee Nah-mi and Cho Kyung-seo of Yi Hyosǒk munhak yǒn’guwǒn (Yi Hyosǒk Literature Research Center) in discussion with the author, September 22, 2003.

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of charged sensuality in his literary work that separates him from other leftist and modernist writers. For example, Julia’s preferences for Western food, dress, books, and music are precisely deployed with attention given to her subjective sentiment rather than objective judgment, which creates a composite mood of her as a character and the city she inhabits. Furthermore, Yi’s exploration of the city shows not just how the rich are pitted against the poor but evokes too the palpable tension within the socialist movement groups. Class struggle is just one of many concerns. The intersectionality between class, nation, gender, and sexuality—both heterosexuality and homosexuality—form a web of concerns. Leisure, pleasure, merrymaking, and above all, desire become part of Julia’s modern identity rather than being crafted as perversions. Thus, she can readily articulate her lack of desire for her fiancé while expressing her desire for Chu Hwa and Minho. By bringing out the multiple layers of the inventedness of modern identities through texts that teem with Western commodities, practices, and language, Yi Hyosǒk’s oeuvre, more than any other Korean author of the late colonial period, presents examples of how artistically crafted, modernist, sexual, gender, and class identities were formed. If the new spaces and spatial practices associated with the department store are seen as spaces for the invention of modern identities, then the commodities inside the department store can be seen as items that facilitate the “dressing” of modern identity. The increased interest in new subjectivities required a body to encase it, and the body needed to be dressed, covered, and adorned. As such, the notion of “fashion” also emerged as an important discourse in the formation of modern urban identity. This discourse proliferated in the women’s and variety magazines and newspapers of the 1930s. Many of the items required to attire the Modern Girl (and Modern Boy) were found in the department stores of Seoul. Hats, shawls, parasols, and high-heeled shoes, though they might also be purchased in other venues, were distinctively associated with the department store in the printed mass media, which carried images of and articles about them, and in the literary works that used these accoutrements and spaces as motifs and tropes. In this respect, modernist literature was not divorced from the reality that it reflects and problematizes. Modernist works of the 1930s frequently made use of the proper names of real places—the real material culture of everyday life. The narratives of urban Korea regularly included characters meeting for tea or coffee at a café like Nangrang, dining at the Chosǒn Hotel, playing miniature golf on the rooftop garden of Mitsukoshi, or riding the streetcar down Chongno. Colonial Korea and Koreans were concerned not only with national consciousness, class revolution, and anticolonialism, but also with the everyday matters of creating and adopting style, being fashionable, and being associated with

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the modern. In other words, politics and culture were not separated and neither were material culture and politics. Literary fiction, such as Julia, that was serialized in magazines and newspapers helped to make foreign commodities a household name. Through narratives of everyday urban life, like the advertisements that appeared in mass print media, fictional works participated in constructing cultural biographies of these globally circulated commodities and new practices. Juxtaposed with advertisements for Meiji butter and milk as well as recipes for dishes that used butter as an important ingredient, literary fiction not only helped readers become familiar with new things but, in effect, helped assign value to commodities. The value of things, in turn, inevitably contributed to fashioning one’s identity. 6

Material Desires in Wang Shilang’s “Intersection”

Although scholars of Taiwanese literature have categorized Wang Shilang’s narrative prose as largely leftist, it appears that this assessment is based more on his association with leftist journals and political involvement than on his actual literary works.75 Similar to Yi Hyosǒk’s being labeled a fellow traveler writer, Wang Shilang, on the basis of his earlier works, has often been described as a proletarian writer. While Bert Scruggs rightly points out that Wang’s fiction “foregrounds leftist themes but generally does not offer a proletarian thesis,”76 he nevertheless places Wang’s texts alongside Yang Kui’s to explore how colonized subjects produced narratives that went beyond their interest in nationhood to instill a sense of class consciousness. Scruggs is interested in how Wang Shilang’s fictional narratives work as an anticolonial narrative by highlighting national identity formation, the class consciousness of the protagonist, and social despair.77 Certainly, what biographical information there is on Wang reveals that his political and cultural activities leaned left. For instance, he joined the Black Youth League, an anarchist association, for which he was arrested in 1927 and again in 1928. During his lifetime he spent a total of three years in prison for his political activities. Many of his earlier works were published in progressive journals, such as Mingyue (Tomorrow), Hongshui bao (Floodwaters), Wuren bao 75  See Zhang Henghao, “Heise qingniende beiju” [The tragedy of the black youth] in Wang Shilang, Zhu Dianren heji [An anthology of works by Wang Shilang and Zhu Dianren] (Taipei: Qianwei, 1991), 103–35. See also Wang’s collected works, Wang Shilang quanji, vols. 1–5. Volume 5 contains his critical essays, which are helpful in articulating his ideological position and providing a paratextual reading of his texts. 76  Scruggs, Translingual Narration, 79. 77  Ibid., 81.

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(Trooper), and Chidao bao (Equator).78 His later work appeared mostly in the coterie journals Taiwan wenyi and Taiwan xinwenxue (Taiwan New Literature), which Wang helped to edit with Yang Kui, the vocal leftist writer. Wang’s choice of venues for publication may have been due in part to the limited publishing opportunities available to an author writing in vernacular Chinese, but nevertheless, the editorial positions of these journals and magazines could serve as evidence of Wang’s ideological leanings. As with Yi Hyosǒk, material modernity foregrounds and shapes Wang Shi­ lang’s texts. Three of Wang’s well-known short stories (“Night Rain,” “Decline,” and “Intersection”) are set in urban, colonial Taipei and provide a panoramic view of the growing city center. “Intersection”79 in particular offers an insightful look at how modern commodities configure and fashion the subjectivity of colonized people, as well as how such commodities organize social relationships. In “Intersection,” Wang sketches a sweeping look at Taipei’s busy streets filled with shops, machines (mass transportation, telephones, and electricity), and crowds of people. The opening paragraph is especially spectacular in the way the narrator describes the department store and the hat display in the window. There in the Ihara Department Store window display, the squirrel gray tweed cap, even if it is a domestic product of the empire, in terms of its form or color, here in the display window it looks like, it has none of the fade of the imported hats that co-workers so proudly brag about. He stands in front of this crystalline brilliant absurdly large display and stares dumbfoundedly, he has already hesitated for quite some time. Merging with the ambient electric light that hat seems to be a charming beauty calling to him with outstretched arms. Actually if he thinks about the old hat on his head, it really doesn’t complement the new suite or new overcoat he wears. Moreover, he always feels humiliated and unhappy in front of them. It’s truly unbearable. So, thereupon, without caring whether or not the bonus he just received would cover the price, he lifts his face, tilts back his head, shakes loose his shoulders, and thrusting his hands into his newly finished black overcoat, with bold and big steps, strides into the store.80

78  Ibid., 79. 79  Originally published as “Shi zi lu” in Taiwan xinwenxue 1.10 (December 1936). 80  Wang Shilang, “Intersection,” cited and translated in Scruggs, Translingual Narration, 82. A modern Chinese edition of Wang’s “Shi zi lu” is available in Zhang’s anthology Wang Shilang, Zhu Dianren Heji, 69–85.

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This opening scene vividly describes the protagonist Rongda staring at and desiring the hat displayed in the department store’s brightly lit display window. A distinction is made between what is domestic and what is imported. “Domestic” refers to Japanese hats, whereas the imported hats that Rongda’s colleagues wear are from the West. Although the type of hat is specified as a tweed cap, other Western-style hats, such as panamas, homburgs, fedoras, and walkers (all of which were fashionable for men throughout the 1920–1940s), were readily available in colonial Taiwan and worn by Taiwanese men. Through focusing on the hat and the department store’s display window, the narrative immediately establishes Taiwan’s place in the network of imperial and global political economy. Once inside the department store, Rongda is surrounded by “other stylish hats, makeup, and clocks of all sizes, all sorts of decorative ornaments, and ornate new articles of every kind.”81 Rongda, who is feeling ashamed of his old hat, splurges on purchasing a new one with the bonus he has just received from his work as a petty clerk at a bank. He rationalizes that the hat will match his new overcoat. As such, it is no longer just about a Western hat that he desires to possess but all the other accoutrements and cultural practices associated with the Western hat, such as the Western overcoat, a tie perhaps, as well as ways of walking when wearing Western clothing, going to spaces that would find Western attire appropriate, and engaging in certain “Western” activities. It is about the entire fashioning of the body with the associated commodities and attitudes that are signs of modernity. Although Wang’s narrative does not explicitly outline a Marxist analysis, the Marxist model may be appropriated to a certain extent in understanding this important scene in the department store. While desire, as delineated by Marx in his theory of commodity fetishization, drives Rongda to purchase the hat despite his circumstances, which would ordinarily prevent him from indulging in such luxury items, the way that desire is cultivated and subsequently takes on local cultural values is just as significant. At the same time, it is also apparent that the global life of men’s hats has taken on local roots and as a status and ethnic marker distinguishing Rongda from other lower-class Taiwanese non-office workers. Unlike Yi Hyosŏk, who constructed Julia as the consumer of modern commodities, Wang interestingly tags male consumption to the construction of masculinity and ethnic and class identity in the context of colonialist capitalism thereby reencoding shopping, consumption, and the sartorial as male-gendered. In a reversal of many modernist writings and media representations of the extravagant female consumer who frequents department 81  Wang Shilang, “Shi zi lu,” in Zhang, Wang Shilang, Zhu Dianren Heji, 69–70.

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stores and adorns herself in Western clothing and accessories, in Wang’s text it is Rongda who concerns himself more with his external appearance and the latest fashion. In many ways, the focus on him harkens back to earlier debates surrounding men’s hairstyles, more specifically, the cutting of the queue, which directs attention toward the significance of everyday matters such as fashion and hairstyles as a crucial site for the cultural politics of modernization. In fact, when the queue-cutting campaign intensified in Taiwan in the 1910s, it is said to have created an unusual demand for hats, so much so that in the town of Yilan up to three hundred hats were being sold a day during the first week of 1915.82 In “Intersection,” Ihara/Kikumoto department store is situated as a space of consumption and desire. This space spills out onto the streets of Taipei, and the streets themselves become a metaphor for the department store. Ford automobiles, buses, and kafei (coffee) shops, all of which are iconic symbols of modernity, fill the narrative space, and Rongda continues to admire his new hat at every juncture during his walk down the street. Although he is a flâneur, his position is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, he is not like the lumpenproletariats in Yi Hyosǒk’s Julia, part of the underground resistance; yet, like them, he is conflicted about his desires and admits the discrepancies between his beliefs in political ideals (i.e., critique of colonialism and modernity) and practice of everyday life in which material modernity is pervasive. In fact, Rongda is more similar to Julia. On the other hand, he is certainly not a full-fledged dandy or a Modern Boy, but neither is he a committed political activist. Although he aspires to dress fashionably and in the latest style, he does not arrive at a real proletarian position to decide to devote himself to sociopolitical activism, even by the end of the narrative. He is a nonessential office worker at a bank who cannot advance beyond his station in spite of his hard work and sacrifice, which underscores the predicament of the colonized male worker. Nevertheless, Wang Shilang situates the protagonist out on the street and the department store, among the crowds, and among an endless number of global commodities, as if to arouse the character’s desires and to underscore the near-impossible restraint from fulfilling those desires which only heightens the prospect of Rongda’s potential for class and political awareness. Material things are constantly spread out before one’s gaze, and, in fact, both Yi Hyosŏk and Wang Shilang depict a certain level of material fecundity in colonial Korea and Taiwan through the setting of the narrative and the commodities that dangle just beyond the reach of the characters. But commodities 82  Hui-yu Caroline Tsai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire-Building (New York: Routledge, 2009) 130.

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interrupt the characters’ social relationships with other characters, which precisely underscores both the modernist and leftist critiques. In “Intersection,” Rongda’s purchase instigates a conflict with his wife, while the telephone, a modern communication device, brings him the news that his former colleague has been released from prison. Both of these events, which are mediated by modern commodities and technologies, awaken Rongda from his reveries to the impossibility of fulfillment under colonial modernity. Perhaps the reason “Intersection” has been often labeled as a proletarian story is Rongda’s eventual reflection upon his errors. He comes to the realization that desiring a bourgeois life and abandoning the social activism of his school days was foolish. But, as in Yi Hyosŏk’s novel, a full conversion never takes place, since the narrative does not conclude with Rongda fully taking up the proletarian cause. Rather, his reflective moment occurs quite casually while he relaxes at a hot spring. Like Yi Hyosǒk, Wang Shilang sketches the limitations of sociopolitical activism under late colonialism through people’s changed relationships with each other and their relationships with the social life of things rather than offering a direct challenge to the colonial conditions. In this respect, Wang’s short story shows concern for the various ways that modern urban life affects individual characters from multiple positions. Wanting to be modern and being modern “again” mattered. But the kind of modernity one desired and practiced mattered even more. More importantly, Wang’s narrative reveals the extent to which being modern is closely linked to the social life of things, such as hats and coats, and their association with being fashionable and fashioning the self. Having the right kind of hat marked one’s identity as modern and of a certain social status, just as Julia’s preference for butter and coffee identifies her as a certain kind of modern woman who has a certain financial wherewithal to afford luxuries. However, in both cases, we see that preferring modern commodities does not necessarily mean that the protagonists are able to complete their transformations into modern individuals. A preference for modernity is just one component, albeit a crucial one, of modern identity formation because, for Rongda and Julia, the colonial context in which they experience modernity also makes them cognizant of their roles as consumers of colonial capitalism. It is, in fact, this double recognition that completes their colonized subjectivity and modern identity. From city streets to new spaces of consumption like the department store that housed numerous global commodities, individuals encountered different sensory, mental, and visceral experiences of the city. Furthermore, modern urban life fostered new modern subjectivities. In the modernist fiction of Yi Hyosŏk and Wang Shilang, we see the way the city—and especially the space of the department store—helped to compose and express the aspirations and

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disappointments of the characters. For Julia, the department store became the space where her body was camouflaged yet exposed among the crowds, but also where Kim Yŏngae vanished and her identity as Chu Li-ya (Julia) materialized. The department store served as a kind of boundary marker between Julia’s two worlds, simultaneously liberating the female protagonist and entrapping her. Likewise, Rongda’s acute recognition of the boundaries existing between himself and others is mediated by the space of the department store, where his desire for material luxuries and compulsions are played out against his deepseated knowledge about class inequalities and sociopolitical activism. The “novelty” of the department store and the new genre of literature (the novel) came to encapsulate the new. As Terry Eagleton comments on the wri­ tings of Walter Benjamin, “Novelty is independent of the use-value of the commodity, and so causes it to appear at its most fetishistic … projecting its illusion of infinite renewal in the mirror of infinite sameness.”83 It is with the emergence of the department store that we see for the first time in full force the identicalness of “ready-made” wares as well as mannequins modeling them which, in turn, the consumers were supposed to mimic. To a great extent, then, the department store embodied the expanding commodity culture and became more profoundly engaged in guiding the decisions people were making in the early twentieth century. As we saw in the previous chapter, the poets Kim Kirim and Yang Chichang also critiqued this state of commodified culture that leads to the gain of what might appear to be material wealth and modern identities but also, more profoundly, the ways these new things directed and shaped the choices of words and phrases in literary production. The modernist prose fiction of Yi Hyosŏk and Wang Shilang also engaged in this conversation, showing how the department store provided a mesmerizing target for the critique of urban modernity and global capitalism while recognizing the complex contradictions of these spaces that also created new social relationships with things. 83  Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: NLB, 1981) 28.

chapter 4

Visual Modernity

Screening Women in Colonial Media During her travels throughout Korea during the late nineteenth century, the British traveler Isabella Bird Bishop noticed a “curious arrangement” in the streets of the capital. She wrote that when the bell rang signaling eight o’clock, men would clear the streets of Seoul thereby allowing “bodies of women with servants carrying lanterns” to occupy the dark streets.1 But when midnight arrived, the bell would toll again at which point women would retire and men would return to the streets to go about as they pleased. According to Bishop’s accounts, an upper-class Korean woman confirmed this curious arrangement by stating that “she had never seen the streets of Seoul by daylight.”2 Bishop went on to sketch upper-class Korean women as either being cloistered in the women’s quarters or heavily veiled and covered on occasions when it was necessary for them to leave their quarters. Women had “to go out suitably concealed at night, or … in rigidly enclosed chairs.”3 Bishop’s attitude toward upper-class Korean women was not simply one of curiosity but was strongly tinged with bewildered condescension. But if Bishop expressed condescension toward the upper-class Korean women who were permitted to take to the streets only after sunset, she was equally vocal in expressing her disdain for the lower-class Korean women who were able to be seen outside their homes and on the streets during all hours of the day for work, especially laundering. Bishop describes these women as “ill-bred and unmannerly” and “far removed from gracefulness,” especially compared to Japanese women of the same social status.4 To be sure, post-Orientalism readers can readily recognize Bishop’s bias in her incredulity at the status of Korean women. After all, she is making her observations from the position of a privileged, worldly, British traveler who has not only toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Hawaii, Japan, Australia, and China (among many other countries) but also strolled 1  Isabella Bird Bishop traveled through Korea between 1894 and in 1897. She spent a total of eleven months in Korea during which time she had also traveled through northern China. Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors (London: Revelle, 1898), 47. 2  Ibid. 3  Ibid., 341. 4  Ibid., 339. Bishop had previously traveled through Japan before arriving at the port city Pusan, Korea.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401167_006

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through the streets of Seoul in broad daylight to see and to be seen. Despite the orientalist overtones of her description, I am interested in Bishop’s role as a social historian (an ethnographer), not unlike the modernologists of the early twentieth century, who attempts to record the urban milieu of the late nineteenth-century Chosŏn dynasty and explore the questions of who was on the streets of Seoul at what times, where were they seen and what were they doing. Through her brief commentaries on the social position of Korean women, Bishop also describes Seoul’s streets—the public space—as both a place of danger (for well-bred women) and endangerment (when occupied by “ill-bred” women). Although in the eyes of Bishop, Seoul streets did represent a site of hostility, both upper- and lower-class Korean women appear to have been part of street life and urban culture at the fin de siècle, although their role was limited. If Korean women were becoming more visible in public in late nineteenthcentury Chosŏn, then in the first few decades of the twentieth century they became hypervisible. They seemed to be everywhere and everywhere visible— going abroad to study, traveling outside Korea, strolling in the streets of Seoul, shopping in department stores like Mitsukoshi or Hwashin, sipping coffee in cafés, laundering along Ch’ǒnggyech’on, appearing on stage and in films, collecting tickets on the streetcars, writing under their own names, and being written about in novels, newspapers, and magazines. This new hypervisibility of Korean women was closely linked to the growth of colonial Kyŏngsŏng where physical, social, cultural, moral, and material transformations altered the everyday life and brought forth new styles, sensibilities, and attitudes. Two of the primary inhabitants of the city—key players in this urban narrative— were the New Woman and the Modern Girl, who materialized, both locally and globally, as important figures to enliven the formation of urban modernity. This excitement about newness and modernity, however, was coupled with an equal level of anxiety concerning the new and the modern associated with Japanese colonialism, capitalist modernity, and bourgeois middle-class ideology. The increasing visibility of women in the new urban landscape further stirred the disquiet. In this final chapter, I am interested in exploring how Korean and Taiwanese women become visible and visualized in various media forms. I want to examine how being a female participant, observer of, or a social actor in urban life contributed to or agitated the visual modernity of the city. If, as Lewis Mumford has argued, the city is a “theater” where “social action” is performed, then Korean and Taiwanese women who had had only a limited access to the city until the early 1900s were not only participating in an “urban drama” but

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also a public drama.5 They were stepping outside their domiciliary space, be it their home country or their domestic space, and becoming part of the public urban culture. At the same time, women were also becoming more closely defined as a result of the mass media that confined them to the printed page. As mentioned above, two of the most prominent female figures to emerge in this theater of social urban drama were the New Woman and the Modern Girl. These archetypes lived in the social culture, but they were also born out of texts—created and circulated within textual spaces and discourses. That is, their multiple variations also resided and circulated in the realm of representation. Moreover, although the New Woman and the Modern Girl are not one and the same, they are closely intertwined and often conflated, especially in the colonial Korean and Taiwanese contexts, in part because the appearance and disappearance of the New Woman and the Modern Girl overlap at close junctures. To discuss one without the other would render my analysis incomplete. In order to show the likeness and divergence of these two figures while maintaining their categorical and historical integrity, I have chosen to examine the cover art of women’s magazines and political comics—the visual texts that participated most actively and widely in naming women either a Modern Girl or a New Woman. 1

Styling Gender in Women’s Magazines

The internal dynamics of the Japanese colonial-era magazines Woman (Yǒsǒng/ 女性), New Woman (Sin Yǒsǒng/ 新女性), Taiwan Woman’s World (Taiwan fujin kai/ Taiwan Furen jie/ 臺灣 婦人界), and Woman and Home (Fujin to katei/ Furen to jiating/ 婦人と家庭)6 reveal a new understanding of the highly selfconsciously crafted categories of womanhood which nevertheless resisted monolithic ideological definitions. Although, as we have seen, the Modern Girl appears in many kinds of literary texts, often as the female protagonist or antagonist, her existence and identity are constructed primarily around visible descriptors or signs. As I examine both the New Woman and the Modern Girl and their complex relationship to each other, I am concerned with how the modern female subject is engendered and taught to be an active consumer of 5  Lewis Mumford, “What is a City?” in The City Reader, eds. Richard T. Legates and Frederic Stout (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8. 6  In this chapter, I shall adopt the English titles of magazines with two exceptions. Because the words yǒja (女子) and Yǒsǒng (女性) can only be translated as “woman” in English, in order to keep the distinction, I will use the Romanization of the Korean when referring to Yǒsǒng and Sin Yǒsǒng.

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her own image and whether this consumer identity does anything to impede or augment her materializing and vanishing. Martin Jay has argued that in the modern era the visual has been privileged more than the other senses. Jay also points out that the “‘scopic regime of modernity’ is not harmoniously integrated, but should be understood as a ‘contested terrain’ characterized by differentiation of visual subcultures.”7 In this chapter, I will examine two different modes of visual representation— covers and comics—that appear in the abovementioned women’s magazines to show the implications of the materializing and vanishing Modern Girl. I argue that these images bring attention to the contradictory and reciprocal relationship that arises between modern female subjectivity (the Modern Girl and the New Woman) and capitalist material modernity.8 The tireless efforts by writers, artists, and filmmakers in the early twentieth century to define the Modern Girl have spurred more representations than imaginable. Barbara Sato has shown that the Modern Girl bespoke both “fancy and imagination,” yet because the idea of the Modern Girl was still being debated among intellectuals and academics at the time, she existed more as an object than a subject.9 Even so, the multiple discourses surrounding her, and especially the negative critique, actually did much to solidify the attributes that would become the celebrated features of the Modern Girl in Japan and its colonies. Sato cites Kon Wajirō’s 1925 survey, which revealed that on the streets of Ginza, 99 percent of women still wore traditional Japanese dress, even though media representations at the time made it appear that the city was teeming with Modern Girls wearing Western-style clothes. Thus, Kon concluded that the “Modern Girl’s strength … lay not in statistics that might have determined her presence numerically, but in the possibilities that her radical break with convention offered a growing spectrum of women.”10 This radical break, then, was represented by a Western one-piece dress reaching only to 7  Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 3. 8  This chapter has greatly benefited from my participation in the International Workshop on “Modern Girl, Asia and Beyond: Global Capital, Colonial Modernity and Media Representations” at the Institute of Gender Studies, Ochanomizu University (September, 22–25, 2004). I would like to thank the organizers and Tani Barlow for allowing me to attend and present part of this chapter at the workshop. Many of my thoughts on the topics of visuality and capitalist modernity were inspired from other presenters, and I have attempted to engage with their arguments in this chapter. Since the conference, there has also been ample work published on the topic of the New Woman and the Modern Girl in China, Japan, and Korea in both English-language and East Asian scholarship. 9  Sato, New Japanese Woman, 47–48. 10  Quoted in Sato, New Japanese Women, 51.

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the knee, high-heeled shoes and sheer stockings, a wide-brimmed floppy hat or cloche partially concealing her short bobbed hair or danpatsu, and a handbag. In fact, in the age of mechanical reproduction, in which both Korea and Taiwan were immersed, the image of the Modern Girl became increasingly and readily reproducible. In the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin speaks of traditional art that has lost its “aura” due to mass production.11 This notion of an aura presumes that there was an “original” to reproduce and that the aura disappears when the original and the reproduced are indistinguishable. This process of reproduction, thus, ends in the loss of the original, according to Benjamin. In the case of the Modern Girl, she is at once an original and a copy; she is new but her newness instigates the rapid multiplication of her likeness. In this respect, Benjamin’s theory of translation in the essay “The Task of the Translator” proves helpful in understanding and situating the Modern Girl and her image(s).12 Benjamin’s concept of translation posits that both the original and the translation are fragmentary and that the translation process is really the work of putting the fragments back together into a whole. But he notes that, even in the assembled vessel, the fault lines still show. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.13 Benjamin is obviously referring to the medium of language in the case of translation, but if we read this together with his essay on mechanical reproduction, I believe we can extend the metaphor of the vessel to the mechanical reproduction of images of the Modern Girl. Rather than attempting to determine her “trueness” or originality, I am interested in the debates that continued to circulate and reproduce her identity and image as particularly modern and if this modern revealed itself in similar or different ways in colonial Seoul and Taipei. The magazine, I believe, is an ideal format for exploring the circulation of urban modernity, visual modernism, and the Modern Girl, for it really is a repository that encompasses in one textual space all genres of representation, such as serialized fiction, poetry, essays, news, feature articles, photographs, 11  In Benjamin, Illuminations, 217–55. 12  Ibid., 69–82. 13  Ibid., 78.

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illustrations, advertisements, “how-to” instructions, and more. Furthermore, both the internal and external organization of the magazine participates in the ongoing dialogue about being modern. By internal organization, I am referring to the ideas embedded within each piece of fiction, essay, or visual text; by external organization, I refer to the way in which the magazine was assembled using modern print technology, the way it functioned in society, and the way it imagined and brought together readers and audiences into a community. 2

History of Women’s Magazines in Colonial Korea and Taiwan

A number of women’s magazines were published in colonial Korea and Taiwan. In Korea, Kadyǒng chapji (Home Magazine) inaugurated the genre of women’s magazines. The first issue was published on June 25, 1906, and the last issue on January 5, 1908. This monthly, which was sold for 10 jǒn, used only han’gǔl in order to attract more women readers and to make reading a more accessible activity for women. In addition to articles on the roles of the wife in a family, contributors such as Chu Sigyǒng, who was considered the father of modern Korean linguistics and a vocal proponent of han’gǔl, wrote articles on the use of the Korean language. Following the termination of Home Magazine in 1908, a string of other women’s magazines were founded and disbanded. From 1906 to 1945, there were a total of thirty-seven different women’s magazines in circulation which included titles such as Yǒjagye (Woman’s World), Yǒja siron (Contemporary Woman), Sin yǒja (New Woman), Sin kajǒng (New Home), Puin (Lady), Sin yǒsǒng (New Woman) and Yǒsǒng (Woman).14 While all of these magazines shared a goal of providing reading materials for Korean women and school-aged girls,15 they each had their own agendas, visions, and audiences and employed different means to achieve them.16 14  Song Yujae, Yǒsǒng chapjiae nat’anan han’guk yǒsǒngsang p’unsǒk yǒn’gu [An analysis of representations of woman in Korean women’s magazines] (Seoul: Ewha Woman’s University Han’guk munhwa yǒn’guwǒn, 1983), 7–8. 15  We know that Korean women also read Japanese women’s magazines which were being sold in Korea. For example, in her essay “Farewell Kando, As I Depart Kando,” Kang Kyǒngae writes about a Korean female student reading a copy of Shufu no tomo (719). See Jina Kim, “Subaltern Narratives of Travel through Diasporic Colonial Space: Kang Kyŏngae’s Travel Writings on Kando” (MA thesis, University of Washington, 2002) for an English translation of the abovementioned essay. 16  See Lee Kyŏngja, “Han’guk Yǒsǒng chapji ǔi yǒksajǒk kochal: 1945 nyǒnjonae palkwandoin yǒsǒng chapji rǔl chungsim ǔro” [A historical examination of Korean women’s magazines: With a focus on magazines published before 1945] (MA thesis, Seoul National University, 1972). Lee provides a brief synopsis of the characteristics of the major colonial-period

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Yǒsǒng was the women’s magazine with the longest uninterrupted period of publication during the Japanese colonial period in Korea.17 Published by the Chosǒn Daily Press, its first issue appeared in April 1936 and its last in December 1940, encompassing a total of fifty-seven issues. Yǒsǒng was part of a remarkable lineage of women’s magazines and played a key role in the history of print in Korea. After the 1919 March First Independence Movement, Japan’s cultural policy permitted the relaxation of restrictions on publications and the expansion of various organizations, which resulted in the publication of such magazines as Creation (Kaebyǒk) and the women’s magazines Contemporary Women and Sin yǒja.18 The Ch’ǒndogyo group, which had established the Creation publishing company, founded Sin yǒsǒng and its predecessor Lady, which was published between June 1922 and August 1923. Sin yǒsǒng was published from September 1923 to October 1926 and then from January 1931 to August 1934, making it the longest-running women’s publication during the Japanese colonial period. The Chosǒn Daily Press then began to publish Korean Light (sometimes translated as Morning Light) (Chogwang, 1935–44). Korean Light was one of the most popular variety magazines of its time and successfully competed with Sin tong’a and outsold many of the other magazines published during the same period, including Metropolis (Chungang) published by the Chosǒn Central Daily Press (Chosǒn Chungang ilbo sa). Furthermore, although it ceased publication with its 110th issue in 1944, during its lifespan Korean Light published important literary works such as Chu Yosǒp’s “The Guest and My Mother” (Sarangbang sonnimkwa ǒmǒni, 1935), Kim Yujǒng’s “Spring, Spring” (Pom, pom, 1935), Yi Sang’s “Wings” (1936), and Pak T’aewǒn’s serialized novel, Streamside Sketches (1936), all of which together have come to women’s magazines. She also provides the table of contents from the first issue of these magazines (in most cases) and attempts to deduce what kind of position the magazine was taking and whom the magazine was targeting. See also Lee Okjin, “Yǒsǒng chapji rŭl t’onghaebon yǒkwǒn sinjang: 1906 putǒ 1929 kkaji-rŭl chungsim ǔro” [The growth of women’s rights seen through women’s magazines: From 1906–1929] (MA thesis, Ewha Woman’s University, 1979). Lee Okjin’s study provides a closer reading of some of the texts in the magazines, but it’s still very cursory in that she covers only sixteen magazines in her study. Lee Okjin, on the other hand, also includes examples of covers of the magazines when available. 17  I note that Yǒsǒng was the longest “uninterrupted” woman’s magazine in order to distinguish it from Sin yǒsǒng, which had a longer period of publication from first to last issue (October 1923–April 1934) but only published thirty-eight issues due to periodic interruptions in publication compared to Yǒsǒng’s fifty-seven issues between 1936 and 1940. 18   Yǒja siron was published in Japan by students studying abroad, while Sin yǒja was published in Korea by Kim Wǒnju (Iryǒp), a female writer who later became a Buddhist nun.

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represent the core corpus of modern Korean fiction today.19 Yǒsǒng (1936–40) was then published as the sister magazine of Korean Light. The first issue of Yǒsǒng was published on 1 April 1936 with strong financial backing from the Chosǒn Daily Press and under the tutelage of the publisher of Korean Light, Pang Ŭngmo, along with his high-profile editors, Sǒk Hun, Yun Sǒkchung, Paek Ch’ǒl, and two women editors, No Ch’ǒnmyǒng and Cho Kyǒnghǔi. Yǒsǒng, like its brother magazine Korean Light, boasted a number of notable contributors; Yi Hyosǒk, Yi Kwangsu, Kim Kirim, Chǒng Chiyong, Pak T’aewǒn, and Ch’ae Mansik are just a few of the writers whose names are synonymous with modern Korean literature who frequently contributed to the magazine. Moreover, prominent female writers such as Park Hwasǒng, Paek Sinae, Ch’oe Sǒnhǔi, and Kang Kyǒngae published their fiction and essays in Yǒsǒng and were frequently featured in the magazine. The lineage of Taiwan Woman’s World is somewhat shorter and its relationship to other women’s magazine harder to establish. The monthly Woman and Home ran from December 1933 until December 1934, and at its heels was Taiwan Woman’s World, which began print in May 1934 and continued until June 1939. Woman and Home included a small Chinese-language supplemental section, which indicates that its target readership also included a population of literate Chinese male and female readers who were most likely considered part of the “model families.” Taiwan Woman’s World, on the other hand, was exclusively published in the Japanese language. These two magazines, together with Patriotic Woman (Aikoku fujin/ Aiguo furen), a short-lived Japaneselanguage magazine with uncertain publication dates, comprise the Taiwanese women’s magazine archive. Taiwan Literature (Taiwan wenyi, November 1934–August 1936) and Taiwan New Literature (Taiwan xin wenxue, December 1935–June 1937), the two leading “serious” literary journals, were published around the same time as the two major women’s magazines described above. Although these literary magazines helped to establish writers like Yang Kui and Wu Zhouliu as the leading voices of Taiwanese literature, the popular mass magazines 369 Tabloid (San liu jiu xiaobao/ 三六九 小報, 1930–35) and Current News (Fengyue bao/ 風月報, 1937–41) provided the Chinese-language readership with more fiction, poetry, and anecdotes, as well as social and cultural commentaries. These two “popular” publications entertained and informed both male and female readers who were literate in either Chinese or Japanese, and we can safely conjecture that they were read side-by-side with women’s magazines in Taiwan. Although the number of women’s magazines in Taiwan 19  For English translations of these works, see Bruce Fulton and Yŏngmin Kwŏn, eds. Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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was few compared to the number published in Korea, magazines like 369 Tabloid and Current News enjoyed a large female readership. In addition, a number of popular women’s magazines from Japan were made widely available and were widely read in Taiwan: Housewife’s Companion (Shufu no tomo/ 主婦之友) and Lady’s Forum (Fujin koron/ 婦人公論) are two such examples. In fact, both Chinese- and Japanese-language newspapers carried large advertisements, sometimes an entire page, announcing the arrival of the next issue of these magazines. 3

Uncovering Women in Magazine Cover Art

The very fact that mass media companies dedicated resources to publishing and promoting women’s magazines indicates that gender had become an important component of the modern publishing business. Additionally, both male and female writers, publishers, and editors were using the space of the women’s magazine to encourage a public discourse on modern life, modern gender identity, and modern style. More importantly, women’s magazines created a social space in which women readers could participate in consuming urban modernity and images of modern womanhood. The process of consumption inevitably involved (re)production and circulation, since it upheld what was inside and on the magazine as a real possibility. Magazines urged readers to follow the examples of other women in creating the perfect “sweet home,” confessing one’s own problems and sharing them with a community of other readers through letters to the editors and looking at the latest fashion and advertisements to emulate their styles. Reading also required intense looking and desiring on the part of the reader, just as in the department store. Therefore, the visual aspects of the magazine participated in the intensification of seeing modernity—a visual modernity. For the publishers of women’s magazines, one of their goals was to introduce spectacular “newness” to their readers in the form of new material goods, ideas, technologies, and personalities. At the same time, readers’ fascination with and curiosity about the new heightened their interest in the already expanding material culture. In this atmosphere, the relationship between things and the people who consumed them came to represent what was “modern.” One of the first places for encountering this sense of “modern” was the cover and masthead of a magazine. Margaret Beetham’s work on Victorian women’s magazines and Ellen McCracken’s study on contemporary Western women’s magazines have pointed out that the cover, in addition to being the most important advertisement for the magazine itself, serves as a

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marker of genre distinction, which is crucial to a magazine’s sales as well as to the identification of its readership. The covers of all four magazines discussed in this chapter usually featured a richly colored illustration of a stylish woman.20 In fact, unlike the coterie journals and some variety magazines, women’s magazine covers were probably the most colorful and advanced form of print, in that they were published with bright color inks and with the most up-to-date technology. These covers, thus, helped to advance printing technology and spurred other magazines to follow with their own colorful prints. The two Korean magazines usually featured a large color portrait of a woman’s torso and head, although there were a few covers that showcased a woman’s entire body against the backdrop of a natural scene. The background, when there was one, usually featured willows, trees, and flowers rather than streets or buildings. When a cover did feature an urban scene, it was usually of minuscule proportions compared to the woman’s face, which occupied the central foreground. In contrast, the content of the magazines included hardly any stories of rural life. Most of the cover illustrations of Yŏsŏng and Sin yŏsŏng, as well as the illustrations accompanying their fiction, were created by Ahn Sǒkju (1901–49), whose pen name was Ahn Sǒggyǒng. Ahn was considered to be a kind of a renaissance man because he was not only an illustrious painting artist but was also the first to publish narrative comics in Korean newspapers.21 Additionally, he was an actor, stage set designer, art critic, screenwriter, film director, and playwright, among many other things. Just as writers who contributed their work to the magazines became respected authors of the early twentieth century, Ahn’s illustrations, comics, and graphics earned him a similar standing in the history of Korean visual arts and culture. Appropriately, Ahn’s cover art and illustrations for the modern women’s magazines were created with the Western-style technique of oil painting that was increasingly practiced by artists in colonial Korea. It was indeed rare to see an entire cover or illustrations inside a magazine done in the traditional Korean style of ink paintings. 20  Some of the covers of the Taiwanese magazines use a photograph instead. The history of photography in colonial Korea and Taiwan, though interesting and not comprehensively studied, is beyond the scope of my analysis here. 21  For a study of Ahn Sǒkju and his comics, see Shin Myǒngjik, Modǒn ppoi, Kyǒngsǒng ǔl kǒnǔlda: manmun manhwaro ponǔn kǔndae ǔi ǒlgul [Modern boy, wandering the streets of Seoul: the face of modernity through cartoons] (Seoul: Hyǒnsil munhwa yǒn’gu, 2003). Born in Seoul, Ahn taught art at Huimun High School. He began his career as an illustrator when he supplied the illustrations for the author Na Tohyang’s fiction Hwanhǔi (幻戱) [Phantom], which was serialized in the Tong’a Daily News. I have translated the Korean word manmun manhwa as narrative comics.

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And, although the Japanese-influenced modern painting style (Nihonga) was popular and practiced by many Korean artists, Ahn refrained from using it in his cover art.22 Seen close-up, the young cover models typically had shoulder-length, permanently waved hair, large, round eyes, and long eyelashes. They often wore Western clothing—blouse, scarf, and a hat—and posed with their head tilted or in profile. These women’s features betrayed little of their racial and ethnic identity and it was very difficult to distinguish whether they were Asian or non-Asian let alone specifically Korean or non-Korean. Most likely, though, they were Korean women (see Figures 6 and 7). On the other hand, some covers displayed a model wearing traditional Korean clothing (hanbok) with more “Asian” features—her hair would be tightly pulled back in a bun with a straight central part, her eyes narrower and smaller. Still, in order to distinguish her from “traditional” women, she might exhibit a provocative pose. Then, too, there were some covers that showed a woman wearing hanbok, but with short or permanently waved hair, accentuated by other non-Korean accessories, such as parasols and hairpins lounging on a hammock.23 The August 1938 cover of Yŏsŏng was one of the most unique (Figure 8). The female model is wearing a hanbok but has a very chic, boyish haircut that would be considered daring even in today’s terms. If the bobbed hairstyle had caused such furious debates in Korea in 1922 when Kang Hyangnan bobbed her hair, then it is not too difficult to imagine the reactions that this cover stirred up.24 Yet, the content in the August issue did not address the cover image at all, and simply presented to the public the futuristic image, perhaps even suggesting that the image represented might be expected in the near future. Despite the similarities in the models, the Taiwanese women’s magazine covers also displayed considerable diversity, but diversity in terms of specifically marked ethnic identities. In addition to including illustrations of women in Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese clothing, a few covers even featured a .

22  Other notable visual artists at the time were Yi Insǒng (1912–50), Kim Hwangi (1913–74), and Na Hyesǒk. Many of these artists studied modern Western art in Japan and won contests sponsored by the Japanese Governor-General’s office. As it was in Taiwan, some artists purposely drew in the Nihonga style in order to qualify for various contests, while others appealed to the judges by depicting the country life of Korea (making use of local color, or hyangt’o) using Western painting techniques. 23  While I have been unable to identify who all the cover models were, some are likely to have been notable or popular figures of the day. See Adan Mun’go web archive for images of other women’s magazine covers. http://adanmungo.org/result.php?mode=cate&kind= %EC%9E%A1%EC%A7%80&cate=%EC%97%AC%EC%84%B1. 24  News of Kang’s bobbed hairstyle even appeared in the Tong’a Daily News, June 24, 1922.

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Yǒsǒng (April 1936 inaugural issue) Courtesy of Somyong Publishing

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Yǒsǒng (January 1938) Courtesy of Adan Mun’go

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figure 8 Yǒsǒng (August 1938) Courtesy of Somyong Publishing

blonde-haired, slim-bodied “Western” woman. Unlike her Asian counterparts, it was the elongated body of the Western woman that was accentuated and not her facial features. The elongation of women’s bodies was a tactic used in Western and Japanese representations of women during the same period. In her books Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler profoundly challenges traditional notions of human identity by developing a theory of performative identity, with specific attention to the performativity of gender. By claiming that gender is not a biological characteristic but instead a performance, a repetitive or continuous acting out of gender behaviors, Butler not only attacks the idea that gender identity is foundational and fixed but also elaborates upon the processes by which the subject is constituted through the repetition of hegemonic discourses. Butler’s theory of performativity strikes me as powerful because she develops the concept of ambivalence in tandem with performativity. Butler’s concept of ambivalence builds on Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation, which claims that individuals become concrete subjects when ideology interpolates or “hails” the individual, and the individual recognizes him or herself as the one being hailed. While Butler does not refuse the notion of interpellation, she rightly points out that the hailed individual could misunderstand the hail, which could once again expose the weakness of hegemonic discourses of identity. Thus, for Butler, the moment of ambivalence is also a potential site for subversion and contestation. I would like to add to Butler’s concept of performativity the act of masquerading, more specifically, ethnic masquerading, as a way to examine the various ambiguities present in these magazine covers. By employing the notion of “masquerade,” I intend to underscore the element of disguise and intention. A woman (or man) can intentionally dress to “pass” for someone else

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or, alternatively, can choose not to disclose her (or his) ethnic identity while disguising or obscuring the physical traits of that identity.25 Alys Weinbaum argues that it was the “modern girl’s ability to put on and to take off the mask of femininity, in addition to what sociologists dubbed the ‘racial marks’ … that secured the modern’s girl’s designation as ‘modern’.”26 Weinbaum’s trope of masquerade can be usefully extended to the Japanese colonial case in Korea and Taiwan. In following Weinbaum’s notion of masquerade, I contend that we can also locate instances of ethnic masquerading in Asia. The most notorious case in Asia during the early twentieth century was Ri Koran (Li Xianglan), a Japanese actress who masqueraded as a Chinese woman both on and off screen.27 Ethnic masquerading was more acutely noticeable in the case where the designation of “model family” status was put into practice during the kominka movement. Families honored with this designation during the kominka period not only changed their Taiwanese or Korean names into Japanese but would speak Japanese, wear the Japanese kimono, live in a Japanese house equipped with tatami floors, and so forth—all of which was supposed to demonstrate the level of assimilation and acculturation but in reality merely served as an external demonstration of the material representations of being Japanese. 25  The concept of “racial masquerade” is widely discussed in African-American literature. Generations of interracial marriage (as well as rape) have made the physical markers of racialized bodies ambiguous enough that some Black people can “pass” for non-Black. Alys Weinbaum discusses racial masquerading in her reading of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929), which poignantly deals with the racial masquerading of the main female character in 1920s Harlem. See Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986) and Alys Eve Weinbaum, “The Modern Girl and Racial Masquerade,” in Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modern Girl, Asia and Beyond, March 2005: Institute of Gender Studies, Ochanomizu University. 26  Weinbaum, “Modern Girl and Racial Masquerade,” 25. 27  Born in Manchuria in 1920 as Yamaguchi Yoshiko to a father who was employed by the Southern Manchurian Railroad, she joined the Manchurian Film Association and starred in films as a Chinese actress under the name of Li Xianglan. She was a well-traveled actress who toured Japan, Taiwan, and Shanghai, the movie capital of China, to promote her films as a Chinese actress. Following Japan’s surrender, she worked as an actress in Japan. For more on Li Xianglan, see Shelley Stephenson, “Her Traces are Found Everywhere: Shanghai, Li Xianglan, and the ‘Greater Asia Film Sphere,’” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 222–45 and, by the same author, “A Star by Any Other Name: The (After) Lives of Li Xianglan,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 19.1 (2002): 1–13. Stephenson’s articles not only analyze the colonizer-colonized relationship but look at various levels of masquerading within ethnic, racial, and gender matrixes. See also Tanaka Hiroshi, Utsumi Aiko, and Onuma Yasuaki, “Looking Back on My Days as Ri Koran (Li Xianglan): Memories of Manchukuo,” Japan Focus 2.10 (October 2004). Available at .

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In Taiwanese literature, Bert Scruggs’s analysis of “The Doctor’s Mother” (1945) by Wu Zhuoliu shows how the protagonist Qian, or Kanai in Japanese, fails to obtain the “colonizer’s ethos” despite his efforts to acquire it through various cultural accoutrements. His ethnic disguise or masquerading ultimately fails when a low-level Japanese official addresses him by his Taiwanese last name, Qian, rather than as Kanai, thereby demonstrating that despite all the effort in the world that Qian puts into becoming Kanai with his Japanese “things,” he will always be Taiwanese in the eyes of the colonizer.28 In supplementing Butler’s theory of gender performativity with Weinbaum’s racial masquerade, I want to explore to what extent women in the colonies, whether Korean or Taiwanese, were able to choose to discard or put on the masks of modernity, femininity, and ethnicity. In negotiating these choices, women readers may have used mass women’s magazines as a conduit for understanding and making choices regarding their intersectional identities. Although Butler emphasizes that the concept of performativity is not just a matter of going to the closet and choosing what clothes to put on and take off, the symbolic power of clothing should not be underestimated, especially in thinking about Korean and Taiwanese colonial identity construction. In many ways, the clothing that women literally put on and took off had the potential to problematize stereotypes of gender, ethnicity, and modernity.29 Clothing and fashion, I argue, were tools utilized in the materializing and vanishing of identities and subjectivities. The models on the cover of Yǒsǒng and Sin yǒsǒng exhibited a number of ambiguities with regard to their degree of “Westernization,” or as Indra Levy put it, their “Westernesque” qualities.30 Although some of them displayed 28  Scruggs, Translingual Narration, 44–49. Translation of Wu’s “The Doctor’s Mother” in Joseph S. M. Lau, ed. The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction Since 1926 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 12–23. 29  Kohiyama Rui charts the way in which Tokyo Woman’s Christian College students began wearing Western clothing. Kohiyama argues that while Western clothes and short hairstyles became an important marker of the Modern Girl in Japan, the Modern Girl’s decision to wear Western clothes had more to do with “convenience and economy of the new style of Western clothes” and less with imitating Western-ness (11). See Kohiyama Rui, “Not Imitation but Practicality: Missionary Higher Education for Women and the Modern Girl,” Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modern Girl, Asia and Beyond, March 2005, Institute of Gender Studies, Ochanomizu University. 30  Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). The most famous Japanese Westernesque character is Tanizaki Junichiro’s Naomi in his novel Chijin no Ai [A Fool’s Love], translated as Naomi by Anthony Chambers for the English language publication. The main character, who resembles Mary Pickford in appearance and leads a hedonistic lifestyle, became the archetype of the Modern Girl.

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“Westernesque” features, it was most likely that in these two magazines, the images of women on the covers were Korean in their various performative styles. The conspicuous absence of covers in which a model is wearing a Japanese kimono suggests, at least at the simplest visual level, that the readership of Yǒsǒng and Sin yǒsǒng was limited to those Korean women who were interpellated through the cover image. This, however, does not suggest that Korean women did not wear the kimono. In fact, those who attended government schools as students or teachers, as well as those Korean women who were studying abroad in Japan, wore the kimono.31 Yu Hǔikyǒng writes that in the colonial environment fraught with nationalist sentiment, it was unlikely that many Koreans wore Japanese clothing in Korea, and Japanese clothes did little to influence the fashion trend in Korea, just as the Manchu clothing of the Qing did not influence Korean women’s fashion.32 I would contend that Yu’s account is somewhat misleading and does not consider the discursive power of fashion. Literary texts show that Korean women did wear the kimono, even if the attire appears to have been reserved only for indoor activities. For example, women who worked in the pleasure quarters entertaining Japanese and Korean men wore the kimono. In Yǒm Sangsǒp’s novel Three Generations (Samdae), the main female character, Hong Kyǒngae, wears a kimono when she is working in a café and speaks such fluent Japanese that both Japanese and Korean male customers mistake her for a Japanese woman. At home and in other public places, however, Kyǒngae also wears stylish Western clothes that identify her as a Modern Girl to others.33 Moreover, in a scene from the 1946 film Hurrah for Freedom (Chayu manse), the female nurses change from their white uniforms into their kimonos after work when leaving the hospital, even though the film implies that they were Korean. The conspicuous absence of kimono-clad women on the covers of Yǒsǒng and Sin yǒsǒng, therefore, does not imply that Japanese female settlers in Korea, Koreans masquerading as Japanese, or the Korean “model family” readers were not reading these magazines. More importantly, I contend that the absence of 31  Yu Hǔikyǒng, Han’guk poksiksa yǒn’gu [A study on the history of Korean clothing] (Seoul: Ewha Woman’s University Press, 1975), 641. Yu mentions Pae Chǒngja as the first Korean woman to wear the Japanese kimono in Korea. She was the adopted daughter of Ito Hirobumi and was trained as a spy in Japan. On her return from Japan after her training in 1894 she was wearing a kimono. 32  Of course, the Manchu qipao would come to dominate the fashion scene in urban cities in China as well as in Taiwan in the early twentieth century. 33  Yǒm Sangsǒp, Samdae, ed. O Seyǒng (Seoul: T’aim kihoik, 1999). This novel was originally serialized in Chosǒn Daily News from 1 January to 17 September 1932 in 215 episodes. For a recently published English translation, see Yŏm Sangsŏp, Three Generations, trans. Yu Youngnan (New York: Archipelago Books, 2005).

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the kimono cannot be simply interpreted as a nationalist stance. That is, we cannot simply equate the absence of the kimono with Koreans’ greater antiJapanese sentiments compared to the more accommodating Taiwan. In the case of women’s magazines and popular variety magazines, the point (and the selling point) was being modern rather than being colonialist.34 In the public’s idea of “modern,” the West trumped Japan even though Japan was the formal colonial power. Similar to the way that Yi Sang bemoaned the super­ ficial modernity of Tokyo and brought into question the legitimacy of Tokyo’s version of “modern,” the magazines (and newspapers) more often than not elided Tokyo’s version of “modern” in favor of Western “modern.” As I have already discussed in Chapter 2, although I follow Voloshinov’s concept of social linguistic expression, which portrays language as a site of conflict, I also argue that language functions as a site of mediation and commodification. Moreover, many magazine scholars have already pointed out that the image on the front cover of contemporary women’s magazines is not a projected image of the ideal reader but the ideal that the reader strives for or fantasizes about.35 Read this way, as Kohiyama Rui pointed out, the prevalent images of women in Western clothes and not the Japanese kimono, an important marker of modernity, seem to represent not so much anti-Japanese or sentiments of kimono as backwardness but rather a desire to be modern and fashionable while also practical for city living. Women shed their cumbersome, long hanbok skirts for shorter Western skirts both for fashion and freer movement as well as for economic advantage when more ready-to-wear Western clothing entered the colony. Furthermore, for female factory workers, café waitresses, and elevator operators, whose work required more movement, shorter skirts, and less billowy sleeves posed less hindrance. Thus, even at the very practical level, the kimono, which was styled in a more restrictive fashion than the hanbok, would require even greater care and be even more burdensome to wear. I speculate that while some Korean women did wear the kimono, not wearing the kimono was not so much an act of anti-Japanese protest as much as it was the case

34  Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996). 35  Scholars such as Margaret Beetham, Jennifer Scanlon, and Janice Winship point out the importance of cover art in articulating the ideals to which the readers aspire. See Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800– 1914 (London: Routledge, 1996); Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora Press, 1987).

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that wearing Western clothes was an act of defiance of tradition and a sign of fashionable modernity. The absence of covers explicitly displaying Japanese women’s likeness in Yǒsǒng and Sin yǒsǒng provides an interesting departure from the cover models in the Taiwanese women’s magazines. In these, the women on the cover were quite often racially and ethnically marked either by clothing or hair color. Thus, at a glance, a woman wearing Taiwanese aboriginal clothing and standing in front of a lush banana tree would be identified as Taiwanese, whereas a woman in a kimono or a qipao would presumably be Japanese or Chinese (Figure 9). But, as I suggested earlier in my discussion of the Korean magazine covers, we cannot dismiss the possibility of either an ethnic masquerade or an interpolative act that hails the projected idea of the hailed rather than the true identity of the hailed. If we take clothing as one of the primary devices or “masks” in the performative masquerading act, again we must question the choices women made of the clothing they wore by taking into account fashion and practicality. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Western clothing slowly made its way into Korea and Taiwan, but it did not by any means replace traditional clothing.36 Women were exposed to Western clothing through encounters with missionaries and people who had traveled to Japan, the United States, or elsewhere. In Taiwan, the qipao (or, in Cantonese, chongsam), a traditional Manchu dress worn by Manchu women, was also very popular at the time. In fact, the qipao, with its slim-fitting bodice, high neck, and high-cut skirt, caused quite a fashion stir and still remains the prototypical Chinese fashion for women in the global public’s imaginary.37 In addition to Western clothes and the qipao, one of the most common forms of attire for Taiwanese women was the bendaofu (本島服/ hontō fuku in Japanese and bundosa in Taiwanese). This was a type of two-piece (shirt and pants) clothing worn by the Han Chinese, which came to be known as Taiwanese clothing.38 As in colonial Korea, we cannot rule out the possibility that Taiwanese women also wore Japanese clothes. In a colonial setting like 36  It is difficult to quote how many people were exclusively wearing Western clothing in the 1930s and 1940s. It was more likely that people living in urban areas alternated between wearing Western clothes in public and traditional Korean hanbok at home. 37  In the 1930s, the qipao quickly became popular among female students and the nonworking class, especially in large cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. This popularity quickly spread to other parts of the world, including Japan where Japanese women were seen to be wearing the qipao as well. 38  Hua Me, Zhongguo fuzhuang shi [History of Chinese clothing] (Tianjin: Renmin Mieshu Chubanshe, 1989).

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Taiwan Woman’s World (August 1935) Photograph by the author and courtesy of the National Taiwan Library

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Taiwan, where a multiethnic and multicultural population resided, “crossdressing” cannot be overlooked. Although there has been much speculation about why the colonized native might or might not wear a Japanese kimono in a colonial setting—a debate that all too often reads clothes as a symbol of either anti-Japanese protest or pro-Japanese collaboration—this debate has generally overlooked the ways in which the colonized understood modernity and practiced being modern.39 Returning to the cover illustrations of the Taiwanese magazines, some illustrated covers, like those of the Korean magazines, blurred ethnic and racial markers, making the cover model unidentifiable as Taiwanese, Japanese, or Chinese. In so doing, they featured the ambiguities resulting from the “Westernization” of facial traits and styles. Added to this ambiguity was the uncertainty of the readership. In fact, although Taiwan Woman’s World and Woman and Home were Japanese-language periodicals published in Taipei by the Taiwan Woman’s World Society and Taiwan Children’s World Society respectively, with most of the contributors also being Japanese, the readership consisted of both Japanese and Taiwanese women.40 In many of the issues, the first few pages featured passport-size graduation photographs of female students. Both Japanese and Taiwanese female students were shown wearing either a kimono or their school uniform, which was in the style of a sailor dress or a plain, roundneck jersey dress, inspired by missionary school uniforms. The Taiwanese magazine cover illustrations tended to be more sur-realistic than the Korean cover illustrations. The Korean covers, especially Yǒsǒng, relied on realistic depictions, while some of the Taiwanese cover illustrations verged on caricature. In the exaggerated style, the notion of common beauty and ethnic representations broke down.41 For example, the woman on the

39  See Ko Ikujo (Hung Yuru), “Fashion and Power in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule.” In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modern Girl, Asia and Beyond, March 2005. Institute of Gender Studies, Ochanomizu University. Ko discusses both the popularization of Western clothing and the qipao for women during the latter years of the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan. What is interesting about Ko’s findings is that the qipao, which is originally a form of Manchu dress, was initially known as Chinese clothing but subsequently came to be understood as Taiwanese clothing (84). 40  Although most of the contributors and writers were Japanese, there were quite a few Taiwanese contributors. In addition, some of the essays and articles do not name the author but use the nomenclature “writer of this magazine” or initials (in the English alphabet) of their name or school, which renders the ethnic identity of the writer unclear. 41  Covers from the earlier issues of Sin yǒsǒng, unlike Yǒsǒng, feature abstract cover art that could almost be described as Picasso-esque.

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figure 10 Taiwan Woman’s World (June 1934) Photograph by the author and courtesy of the National Taiwan Library

cover of the December 1934 issue of Taiwan Woman’s World cover (Figure 10) certainly possesses characteristics of the Modern Girl. Her permanently waved, short hair and stylish overcoat with fur collar exemplify the Modern Girl archetype, yet the simplistic, verging on caricature, depiction of the model’s face renders her ethnic identity unrecognizable. At the other extreme, some of the covers are photographs of young women. Still, whether a caricatured image, an illustration, or a photograph, all of the images represented some attempt to show what being modern looked like. For the most part, the covers we have looked at present some elements of either the New Woman or the Modern Girl. Thus, these covers obscured the mythologies of the New Woman and Modern Girl while at the same time constructed a new image. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes’ meditation on the mundane tries to separate secondary meanings from the obvious.42 Mythology, 42  Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).

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according to Barthes, is a “type of speech” and a “mode of signification” whereby images (photographs, magazine covers, comics, ads) become signs and what is perceived as natural is revealed as mere artifice. I read the hybridity and ambiguity that pervade the covers of the Korean and Taiwanese women’s magazines as a mythology with ideological implications. These colonial-period magazine covers, by depicting various images of women, appeared to make an attempt to integrate women from diverse ethnic, social, education, and class groups. The illustrated covers are rich with signs and meanings, for they identify and imagine the ideal reader. Therefore, while it was common for the cover model to be a young, stylish woman, the fact that those women represented multiple ethnic categories suggested that the readership of magazines of both Korea and Taiwan was quite broad. In fact, rather than identifying the readership narrowly by targeting only one group of women, as did some Korean magazines like Lady and the Taiwanese magazine Patriotic Women, the variety of modern women on the covers of Yǒsǒng, Sin Yǒsǒng, and Taiwan Women’s World permitted them to extend the scope of their audience with respect to ethnicity and citizenship. We can also assume the readership ranged in age from the teens to middle age—that is, from female student to wife. In the public’s mind, the New Woman signified a new generation of bourgeois, female intellectuals who defied tradition for the sake of their own selfish desires. The Modern Girl, on the other hand, appeared apolitical, without a family, and hypersexual. The extreme characteristics of these two figures, therefore, had to be avoided on the covers. Thus, the magazines appeared to have constructed an amalgamation of the two. The hybridity of cover models, what’s more, suggests that women were in various moments of transition. Visual markers of change in women’s clothing, hair, makeup, and body language tell us that such shifts were closely related to the changes in the notions of gender, the growing consumer culture, and the rise of a medium that would facilitate gender construction. If the cover images took aspects of both the Modern Girl and the New Woman and hybridized them, then the titles of the magazines privileged the New Woman and virtually erased the Modern Girl altogether. Nowhere was there a magazine named “Modern Girl” in the history of Korean women’s magazines: if the title is supposed to reflect the meaning of the cover art and the content inside the magazine, then this absence suggests a huge contradiction. Although no magazine took Modern Girl as its title, she appears everywhere inside them. As I will discuss in more detail in the next section on comics, despite the fact that the Modern Girl was deployed as the spokesperson for selling numerous modern material goods through the colonial-era women’s magazine, she is, nevertheless, not named.

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Drawing Humor and Critique through Narrative Comics

Although some of the advertisements in the Korean and Taiwanese magazines employed “capitalist realism”43—an effort to offer a realist representation of the product—more frequently, products were represented with illustrations and line drawings. As in the examples of Ajinomoto advertisements, cartoonlike figures were preferred over celebrities like Ch’oe Sǔnghǔi as themselves. Since the same Japanese products were advertised in various Korean and Taiwanese magazines and newspapers, it is not surprising that the ads closely resembled one another. Even when changes were made in order to suit the local market, the principal design, layout, and premise were quite similar to one another.44 The preference for comic-like figures in Japanese advertisements was apparent. In Miriam Silverberg’s study of Japanese advertisements during the first half of the twentieth century, she shows how three different cultural practitioners imagined and visually represented bodies in modern Japan.45 Comparing the archivist, the capitalist, and the cartoonist, Silverberg argues that it is the cartoonist who is the “choreographer of the affective body in history.”46 Furthermore, she notes that in modern Japan, European constructivist graphics are preferred over the mimetic, photographic realism of American ads. Silverberg suggests that Oya Soichi’s comment on Japanese modernity being without “emotions, morals, or ideals—all contours and not content,” could provide a possible answer.47 Another factor that distinguishes the cartoonist from the archivist and the capitalist is that the cartoonist is concerned with capturing the now—the present—while the archivist is interested in the past and the capitalist vested in the future. Silverberg’s descriptions were written about cartoons in advertisements, but they certainly also apply to the comics appearing as graphic narratives in magazines and newspapers in the early twentieth century. Comics, though generally considered to be humorous, is actually quite a serious genre. Like the literary technique of satire that ridicules and provokes its target, comics and especially caricatures mock and deride their subjects in 43  Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 210–18. 44  See Shin Insŏp, Han’guk kwang’go sa [History of Korean advertising] (Seoul: Nanam, 1986). 45  Miriam Silverberg, “Advertising Every Body: Images from the Japanese Modern Years,” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 129–48. 46  Ibid., 131. 47  Ibid., 137.

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order to make a larger comment about society. In most cases, satires and comics use exaggeration to bring a certain issue to light. As a result, most satires and comics have a caustic tone to them. At the same time, the exaggerated way in which they present their commentary resonates with their readers, which in turn engenders humor. In fact, comics are—and were in colonial Korea and Taiwan—one of the most effective means of criticizing and confronting society. The comics I will examine in this section are one-panel graphic narratives of the New Woman and the Modern Girl, usually supplemented by short texts. Some of the comics stand alone, since even without the narrative, they are able to make a clear point, and even the culturally or linguistically illiterate reader can grasp the obvious message. Narrative comics are distinguished from comic strips in which more than one panel is used to tell a story.48 Comic strips are further differentiated by their use of dialogue balloons to show the character’s direct thoughts or speech, whereas in narrative comics there are no dialogue balloons. The name given to this genre of comics in Korea is manmun manhwa (漫文漫畵) which means “scattered words and scattered pictures.”49 In Korea, the first artist to draw narrative comics was Ahn Sǒkkyǒng, introduced earlier in this chapter as the illustrator of many magazine cover illustrations. Ahn’s series “Seoul Seen through Comics” (Manhwaro pon Kyǒngsǒng) was the first set of narrative comics in Korea and appeared in 1927. Other comic artists quickly followed suit, including Ch’oe Yǒngsu, Kim Kyut’aek, and Im Hongǔn.50 Korean narrative comics were likely influenced by the Japanese 漫畵漫文, which debuted in 1913. Okamoto Ippei was one of the pioneers of this genre.51 Japan, in turn, can trace the introduction of comics to the Brit Charles Wirgman, who settled in Yokohama and began publishing Japan Punch during the early Meiji era.52 The Marumaru chinbun, the first comic magazine, and Tōkyō Puck were relentless in mocking everything except the Japanese emperor. According to Peter Duus, Meiji-period comics also mocked Koreans, 48  Some narrative comics, however, were serialized. 49  I am translating manmun manhwa as “narrative comics.” 50  Shin, Modŏn ppoi, 8–9. 51  For more on Okamoto Ippei, see Silverberg “Advertising Every Body.” What I am calling narrative comics was called in Japanese storii manga (comic story). 52  Peter Duus, “Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong—the Development of the Japanese Political Cartoons,” Journal of Asian Studies 60.4 (November 2001), 968. Duus traces the history of political comics in Japan and explores the interesting relationship between the comic artists who created satirical political comics, their object of ridicule (usually a high-profile government official), and the readers. In essence, Duus shows that all three groups belonged to the same political community and were vested in the nationbuilding project.

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especially in the first years after the annexation of Korea. The depictions “ridiculed, demonized, or feminized the Koreans” and often showed them in their traditional garb.53 This is telling, since most Korean men—at least, those who were visiting Japan for official purposes—were already wearing Western suits by the time of the annexation. Yet, Meiji comic artists specifically dressed Koreans in their traditional Korean attire in order to show Korea’s primitiveness versus Japan’s civilized and enlightened state. Clothing cannot be ignored as a component of the visually discursive formation of identity. In colonial Korea and Taiwan, the new images of women and their changing roles and positions in society were the topic of everyone’s curiosity and scrutiny and comics, as a genre that specialized in “current affairs,” did much to help readers keep abreast of women’s whereabouts, appearances, and behaviors. Questions about the New Woman and the Modern Girl and what their key features might be, as well as debates about women’s hairstyle, attire, and education, occupied many column inches in newspapers and magazines. To be sure, face-to-face discussions about issues related to women also occupied a great deal of people’s leisure time. Narrative comics did much to produce and circulate new images of and ideas about women. As I will now illustrate with some choice examples, as with magazine covers, the images of New Woman and Modern Girl in narrative comics were multiple and resist simple definition. What often marked the difference between a “traditional” woman and a “new” woman was what could be seen at the surface level. Thus, women’s hairstyles and clothing became the central points of discussion. As discussed earlier, women’s short hairstyle even merited a roundtable discussion, the transcript of which was published in an issue of Sin yǒsǒng.54 Figure 11 presents a narrative comic drawn by An Sokkyŏng in Sin yŏsŏng depicting a woman sitting in front of a vanity table cutting her hair with a large pair of shears. She is wearing a shortened hanbok skirt and exposing her legs, covered only by what are probably nylon stockings. Outside her window, even the sun looks on with an expression of incredulity. The accompanying narrative, titled “Seoul Education,” reads: “When a female student from the countryside comes to Seoul, the first things she learns to do, even before she begins her education, are shortening the hemline of her skirt, cutting her hair 53  See Duus, “Weapons of the Weak,” 984 and 987 for the cover of Tōkyō Puck. See also Todd Henry, “Sanitizing Empire: Japanese Articulations of Korean Otherness and the Construction of Early Colonal Seoul, 1905–1919,” Journal of Asian Studies 64.3 (2005): 639– 75 on how comics and images formed the discourse on both dirtiness and cleanliness in colonial Seoul. 54  “Ch’onggak chwadamhŭi” [Bachelor’s roundtable], Sin yŏsŏng (February 1933): 50. Names of the participants listed were Yi Muyŏng, Ch’oe Pyŏnghwa, An Hŭinam, and Pak Sanghwa.

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figure 11 “Seoul Education 1”

figure 12 “Seoul Education 2”

to make bangs, walking with high heels, and writing letters” (June 1925: 33). The second in the series (Figure 12) shows the woman outside trying to gracefully walk through the streets, but her awkwardness is glaringly apparent. Her legs appear wobbly in her high-heeled shoes, and the way she is holding her parasol far away from her head in order to show off her newly styled haircut is laughable (June 1925: 36). The other, more seasoned women snicker at her, and a man chuckles while staring down at her unstable bare legs. The third comic in the series (Figure 13) satirizes one of the favorite activities of the female student: writing love letters, where love and romance are considered to be activities for the frivoulous New Woman (June 1925: 67). Figure 14 presents a comic published in Yǒsǒng in which four women with short permanently waved and bobbed hairstyles, all wearing Western shoes and wearing Western clothing or reformed Korean hanbok, sit on a couch (September 1938: 75). Each woman holds in front of her a nametag: Shyali (샤 리/ Shari); Ahna (안나/ Anna); Maeli (메리/ Mary); and Ahila (아이라/ Anna). The accompanying short narrative reads:

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figure 13 “Seoul Education 3”

figure 14 “Anecdotes from Seoul”

These days one frequently hears working women with names like Ahna or Aila. I was thinking about the name Ahila for a while and have come to the conclusion that Ahila is a version of Ahna. For example, when one writes Ahna in English it is Anna. English pronunciation of this name is Aena (애나). When this name is written in Chinese characters, it is rendered as 愛羅. Now, reading these characters in Korean would produce Ahila. Therefore, Ahna = Ahila. That is, from Europe, Ahna went to the United States and from there she came to the vicinity of P’yǒngyang, Chosǒn. She then crossed the sea and returned here and ended up being Ahila. If the cover art presents idealized images of women, then the narrative comics highlight women’s unflattering qualities. In the panels shown above, the onlookers turn to the New Woman and Modern Girl with a critical eye—more precisely, one of disapproving mockery. Although on the surface, the comics seem to critique a young woman’s concern for her outer appearance and her

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desires to mimic the latest fashion, they are also a critique of the bourgeois, female intelligentsia who advocate these appearances and activities as a form of modernity. The first two comics seem to imply that “cutting” one’s hair and “shortening” one’s skirt are acts of “short-sightedness” and that a woman who does these things is unintelligent. Since female students (either coming from the countryside or having studied abroad) were among the first in society to do these things, the comic panel implies that, along with their shortened hair and short skirts, they are also cutting short their intelligence. While these comics are discursive formations, they were most likely referring to real women like Kim Hwallan. Kim Hwallan (1899–1970) became notorious in 1922 as one of the first Korean women to bob her hair,55 for which she was widely mocked.56 In addition, like Yi Hyosŏk’s female protagonist Julia in Chu Li-ya, Kim was born as Kim Kidǔk but changed her name to Hwallan, which is a Koreanized version of Helen, a Christian name she had adopted. The comic narrative in the 1938 Yǒsǒng issue entitled “Anecdotes from Seoul” (Kyǒngsǒng yahwa/ 京城夜話) is a little more ambiguous. By the late 1930s, the distinction between the New Woman and the Modern Girl had virtually evaporated. The New Woman, originally associated with those first-generation Korean women who had completed higher education and came from the bourgeois class, was now hard to distinguish in the popular imagination from the Modern Girl.57 In Figure 14 none of the four women are readily identifiable as either a New Woman or a Modern Girl. We are unsure whether these women 55  The first woman to bob her hair in Korea was actually Kang Hyangnan in June 1922. A sensational story about how she bobbed her hair appeared in Tong’a Daily News, June 24, 1922. For more on Kang Hyangnan, see “Yǒsǒngsa yǒn’gu moim kilpak saesang” [Women’s history research group, Kilpak saesang] and “Nado namja ch’ǒrǒm salgo sipda” [I want to live like a man], both in Yǒsǒngsa Yǒn’guhoe, 20 segi Yǒsǒng sakǒnsa [Twentieth-century events in women’s history] (Seoul: Yǒsǒng sinmunsa, 2001), 39–49. 56  Kim Hwallan studied at Ohio Wesleyan College, Boston University, and Columbia University, where she had obtained a PhD. She was later to become the president of Ewha Woman’s University. 57  The distinction between female students and kisaeng in the early twentieth century was already collapsing as both kinds of women imitated each other. One of the earliest literary examples can be seen in Yi Kwangsu’s The Heartless where the landlady tells Hyǒngsik, the protagonist, that a woman who looks like a female student but seems to be a kisaeng, referring to Yǒngch’ae, had visited. In a later short story by Kim Yujǒng, a bus girl wraps a pojagi full of heavy magazines and carries it with her to work every day in order to look like a female student. Ironically, it is her elderly father who helps her in this ritual every morning. For more on the relationship between female students and kisaeng, see Kwǒn Podǔrae, “Kisaeng kwa yǒhaksaeng” [Kisaeng and female students] in Yŏnae ŭi sidae: 1920-yŏndae ch’oban ŭi munhwa wa yuhaeng [The age of love: early 1920s cultural trends] (Seoul: Hyŏnsil munhwa yŏngu, 2003).

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are students, mothers, café girls, or educators. Even their personal names are exteriorized and Westernized in the accompanying text.58 The comic panel implies that women had become indistinguishable so much so that Ahna = Ahila, and everyone is a generic copy of another. But read another way, it demonstrates the palpable level of male anxieties engendered by women who are now able to name and express themselves and define their identities through their flair for modern fashion and Western names. It also points to the extent to which “Western-ness,” surpassing or bypassing “Japanese-ness,” had become infused as part of Korea’s popular culture and gender identity formation. 5

Modern Girls Meet Modern Boys

The serialized comic “The Love of Kankan Hat” (Kankan mo no ai) by Enomoto Masao appeared in the first issue of Taiwan Woman’s World, and perhaps most humorously captures the irony embedded in modern identity formation. A Modern Girl wearing a kankan hat and an unemployed lumpen intelligentsia named Ken meet by chance while strolling about the city when his laundry claim ticket blows out of his hand and lands in front of the Modern Girl, who accidentally steps on it with her high-heels.

figure 15 “The Love of Kankan Hat” (Panel 1)

58  Recall Chu Li-ya (Julia) from Yi Hyosǒk’s Julia who had named herself after a character from a film in order to shed her national identity and in the hopes of developing a more sophisticated urbane and emancipated identity. There were many other Korean women who upon returning from their studies in the U.S. would solely go by their “American” names. Some examples include Kim Melissa and Hwang Esther, who were also members of the Kǔnuhoi, the first Korean women’s movement association.

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figure 16 “The Love of Kankan Hat” (Panel 8)

As the narrative progresses, they go to a café to enjoy a drink of Carupis and then to the dance hall where they sit close under neon lights and whisper sweet nothings to each other. They continue to enjoy frivolous days of doing things that are considered highly fashionable until their dating days come to an end when each of their parents decides that it is now time for them to meet prospective marriage partners from respectable families. Each is presented with a seriously marriageable candidate whom the parents introduce as nothing resembling a Modern Girl or a lumpen. The girl is “beautiful and soft-spoken. Her father operates a trading company” while the young man is described as “a son of a shipping mogul and an intellectual who graduated from Keio University.”59 Both the Modern Girl and the lumpen decide that they will meet their respective blind dates because they recognize that, after all, a Modern Girl and a lumpen are not ideal marriage partners, and “in this world money is everything!”60 But in the last panel we find out that when the two arrive to meet their blind date, their partners are none other than each other!61

59  Enomoto Masao, “Love of Kankan Hat,” Taiwan Woman’s World 1 (1934), 100. 60  Ibid. 61  Ibid., 102.

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If the comic panels in Yŏsŏng magazine highlighted the ambiguities in naming the New Woman and the Modern Girl, “The Love of Kankan Hat” reveals the process by which these ambiguities become resolved through the contradictions it presents. In fact, the ideal New Woman and the ideal intellectual man that the parents had regarded as a perfect match for their children turn out to be the Modern Girl and the unemployed lumpen Modern Boy. What’s more, both the kankan hat girl and Ken had rejected each other in favor of what seemed to be a better prospect. When these better prospects are revealed, however, the New Woman was just another persona of the Modern Girl and the intellectual man another persona of the lumpen Modern Boy. This tidy narrative climax is humorous, to be sure, but it also illustrates the contradictions still embedded within the way people of that era perceived these figures. Yet slightly different from the previous comics in Korean women’s magazines, where self-naming can be read as an exercise of individual subjectivity, in “The Love of Kankan Hat” the emergence of individual subjectivity occurs when Ken and the kankan hat girl learn each other’s true names. That is, the physical encounter between the two figures achieves the aggregate of all and their realization that “really, this world is at once too big and too small.”62 In the context of early twentieth-century Korea and Taiwan, the idea of the New Woman was both a category of actual historical figures and a stylized construct of newspapers and magazines. Biographical studies of New Women such as Na Hyesǒk or Yang Qianhe came to stand for all women’s history. And, as Sally Ledger suggests in her study of the New Woman in Britain, the New Woman “was constructed as a product of discourse” and that this discourse is just as “‘real’ and historically significant as what she actually was.”63 In previous studies of New Woman in Korea and Taiwan, critics took the New Woman to be either a descriptor of real historical figures or as a character type produced through literary texts, but I would argue that each of these theoretical approaches is too limited. Understanding the New Woman as a purely discursive construct reduces her to a sensationalized textual figure; on the other hand, understanding the New Woman as a category that only describes actual historical figures also forestalls our understanding. Although the Modern Girl is usually set up as the antithesis of the New Woman, these comics show that the New Woman and the Modern Girl had 62  Ibid. 63  Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1. See also chapter 4, “The New Woman,” in Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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more in common than not. Both had become highly commodified figures that appeared everywhere. Magazine covers displayed images of contemporary women but avoided extreme traits or styles, thereby hybridizing the two archetypes. Furthermore, even though advertisers and publishers exploited the potential of using images of the New Woman and the Modern Girl as spokespersons for their sales, they were nevertheless still reluctant to defend her when she appeared in other guises. Satirical comics exposed the fears and anxieties about changing gender relations and helped the hybridized New Woman/Modern Girl to remain a celebrity. These comics thus show the real translatability of the configuration of the New Woman/Modern Girl and her circulation in colonial East Asia. They illustrate that the New Woman and the Modern Girl have one important thing in common: each is an active consumer of material goods and of each other’s images. Although they were mocked and satirized for it, it was through consumption of these images that real women moved toward naming themselves and thus forging their own subjectivity.

Postscript

Contemporary Urban Life in Seoul and Taipei Pak Wansŏ’s Mother’s Stake and Zhu Tianxin’s The Old Capital are two contemp­ orary novellas by female authors which probe and trace the urban histories of colonial Seoul and Taipei respectively from postcolonial temporalities and spaces. These two works critique the contemporary conditions of the city and the nationalist versus antinationalist histories that have left people more isolated from their pasts and displaced from a sense of belonging in the present. In both novellas, the female narrators come to this critique through remembering and tracing the urban spatial histories of the city under Japanese colonial rule. Interestingly, these two novellas transport both female narrators/ protagonists back in time and space to show the contradicting experiences of colonialism and modernity by inscribing their experiences onto the city. While on the surface both narratives appear to recall the past uncritically and even nostalgically, they both embed a pointed critique of the standard binary historical narratives of resistance versus submission and nationalist versus antinationalist espoused in characterizing colonial and postcolonial Korea and Taiwan. More importantly, both narratives look back to the past as a means to critique conditions in the present that do not allow for heterogeneous spaces, histories, and voices to coexist. In fact, they present a subtle yet powerful cri­ tique of post-martial law and postcolonial societies that purport themselves to have progressed, overcome colonialism, and to have become democracies but, in reality, have not yet arrived there. In many ways, Pak’s and Zhu’s postcolonial novellas pointedly question how to make sense of the Japanese colonial presence in the putatively postcolonial while also challenging the applicability of the very idea of the postcolonial in contemporary Seoul and Taipei. In this way, Ann Stoler’s reconceptualization of empire as imperial formations is more befitting here because it underscores the “ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclama­ tion” and because “imperial formations are relations of force.”1 Similarly, Stuart Hall calls attention to the complexities of the “post-” not simply as the passage of time or “two successive regimes but the simultaneous presence of a regime and its after-effects.”2 In this way, the two novellas that I will analyze in this postscript engage with the effects, mutations, and, evolutions of the colonial 1  Ann Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23.2 (2008): 193. 2  Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 22.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401167_007

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past as it still powerfully lives on in the urban landscapes, institutions, dis­ courses, and cultural productions. 1

Remembering and Tracing Urban Histories

In Pak’s Mother’s Stake,3 the first-person narrator (“I”) looks back at her child­ hood when her widowed mother moved the family from a rural village outside of Songdo (otherwise known as Kaesŏng), a city in current day North Korea, to Seoul to help her only son become successful. The mother had recognized that for her son to become successful, they needed to leave behind the feu­ dalistic countryside for a modern city, thus seeing the city, especially Seoul, as a space of modernity and possibility. When the story begins, the narrator’s mother returns to the village home of her in-laws in order to take the daughter, who had been staying with her elderly grandparents, to Seoul. The mother also desires to transform her into a New Woman, and as so she tells the daughter: Just because you live in Seoul, you don’t automatically become a modern woman. Only after you learn a lot do you become one. Once you become a modern woman, you have a modern hairstyle, a bob, not chignon like mine. You wear a straight black skirt which shows your calves, and highheeled shoes, and you carry a purse.4 The mother, however, also realizes that the only way for her daughter to become a modern woman is for her to live in the city. The mother here, therefore, is an instrumental figure who situates modernity’s future possibilities within the city. Non-diegetically, the readers realize that by the time the mother returns to fetch the narrator, the mother would have already experienced the hard­ ships of living in Seoul. Despite it all, the mother takes her daughter to Seoul.

3  Mother’s Stake is Pak’s (1931–2011) semiautobiographical novel published separately in three parts in 1980, 1981 (both in Munhak sasang), and 1991 (in Chakka segye), and brought together in volume 7 of her collected works published a decade later: Ŏmma ŭi malttuk (Seoul: Segyesa, 2002) The first part of the trilogy is set during the colonial period around 1937–1938 when the narrator, the daughter in the text, is entering primary school. All three parts are translated in English and published as “Momma’s Stake” (1, 2, 3) in Pak Wansŏ, A Sketch of the Fading Sun, trans. Hyun-Jae Yee Sallee (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 1999). Pak debuted as a novelist with her first novel The Naked Tree (Namok, 1970), which is also semiautobiographical, and since then has published numerous award-winning novels and short stories. 4  Pak, Sketch of the Fading Sun, 105.

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Kyeong-hee Choi’s reading of Pak’s novella has shown that the modernizing project undertaken by Korean women and their experiences as mothers and daughters in colonial Korea were less driven by an “ideological stance such as nationalism.”5 In fact, Choi persuasively shows both the absence and pres­ ence of the colonial experience in the narrative and specifically notes that “the maternal protagonist’s mind is characterized as neither colonial nor national.”6 Choi argues, however, that while the narrative appears to be nostalgically look­ ing back on the past, the struggle the narrator daughter experiences with her mother’s modernizing efforts indeed reveal the contradictions of colonial modernization. While Choi focuses on the question of Korean women’s iden­ tity formation and the issue of gender, I add that another prominent example of the inherent contradictions of colonial modernity in Mother’s Stake is the way the narrative sketches Seoul and the role of the city and space in unveiling the complexities of gender and history. As the daughter arrives in Seoul from her grandparent’s rural home, she ini­ tially becomes fascinated by the novelties of the streetcar and street snacks. But as the narrator and her mother slowly trudge toward their rented room in a thatched-roof house through the windy, narrow, and uphill alley, she begins to have doubts about the modern Seoul that her mother has been boasting to her about on the train. The Seoul she sees and the alley up to her new home are “like the inner lining of [a] cow stomach that is shabby, unruly, and endlessly foul.”7 She cynically asks, “Is this Seoul?” to which her mother immediately responds “Nope…. We’re not really in Seoul. This is outside the gate.”8 The mother then firmly tells her that this is where they will be living until her older brother becomes successful. With this disappointing initiation, the narrator begins her everyday life in Hyŏnjŏ-dong, a neighborhood just outside Seoul proper located outside the West Gate (Sŏdaemun), a slum area developed dur­ ing the colonial period where poor Korean migrants had settled to eke out a living.9 The once scenic mountainside became an appalling sight dotted with 5  Kyeong-hee Choi, “Neither Colonial nor National: The Making of the ‘New Woman’ in Pak Wansŏ’s ‘Mother’s Stake 1’,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, eds. Shin Gi-wook and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 224. 6  Ibid. 7  Hyun-Jae Yee Sallee translates this passage as: “The alley was winding, dirty, and complicated as intestine. It was endlessly long and rough.” “Momma’s Stake 1” in A Sketch of the Fading Sun, 108. 8  Pak, Ŏmma ŭi malttuk (2002) in Korean, and in English translation A Sketch of the Fading Sun, 109. 9  A 1935 commentary identifies Hyŏnjŏ-dong as both a common and exceptional case of the new urban landscape of Seoul: “As part of competition for survival, the poor were pushed out of Seoul proper to outside the Gates and to places like Hyŏnjŏ-dong forming a ladder up a

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“shabby boxes thrown on top of one another” as nominal houses and a pathetic passage—“the so-called road” that had been built slapdash after the houses for “trifling survival.”10 The story ends with the adult narrator, now over forty years old, climbing up the hill of her old neighborhood and desiring to walk the same route that she used to take to school. She notices how this “untidy and disorderly place hadn’t changed at all,” becoming a “monument,” but she also notices the changes in the area around the house in which she had lived. In fact, her house was now nowhere to be seen, as with many others’ houses, since they had been wiped out as part of new urban development projects in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, the area was now lined with “rows of tene­ ment houses, like a folding screen, stood tall, blocking the view of In Wang Mountain.”11 There, during her climb, she sees for the first time the wall—“the object that Momma imagined, distinguishing between the inside and out­ side of the gate.”12 A real physical barrier—a barbed wire fence—now blocks her way. This barbed wire fence conjures up an image of not only the demarcation of Seoul but more vividly for the narrator, an image of the demilitarized zone that she has “never had an opportunity to visit” but had experienced during the Korean War and in living in a divided Korea. As the narrative draws to an end, the narrator ponders about the phrase “new woman” (sin yŏsŏng) which her mother pleaded with her to become but which she does not seem to have become. Pak ends the story with the narrator concluding, “Both the wall and the phrase are capable of either old or new, but I’m not going to attempt to restore the phrase and its meaning. Still, I feel as well that bygone days ought not to be denied.”13 The narrator is certainly nostalgic and even resigned as she looks at her old neighborhood from a temporal distance. These emotions, however, are not ones in which she indulges in the colonial past but ones that analytically scru­ tinize how the present deals with the past. In her childhood, the circumstances that forced her and her family to live just outside the gates of Seoul had to   mountain side. There they had built thousands of old-fashioned three or four kan houses[;] whereas in the past no one had even looked at a mountain side as a residen­ tial area, now thousands of houses are being built.” Yu Kwangyŏl, “Landscape of Greater Seoul,” Sahae kongron (October 1935), full text included in Kim Chinsong, Seoulae ttansǔ holǔl hǒhara, 285. 10  Pak, A Sketch of the Fading Sun, 108–9. 11  Ibid., 136. 12  Ibid., 137. 13  Ibid., 137.

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do with their class and ethnicity. The poor Koreans, especially migrants from the countryside, were pushed to the outskirts of the city whereas the Korean elites and Japanese settlers occupied much of central Seoul, the seat of politi­ cal and economic power. Forty or so years later, as the narrator returns to her childhood home, much has remained the same but much too has changed. Not only has her family subsequently moved inside the gates, but her child­ hood home in Hyŏnjŏ-dong is now considered to be part of Seoul proper—the gates no longer physically mark the city borders. Yet the class boundaries that she had known still existed, if not amplified. Seoul was now expanding south of the Han River (Kangnam) and constructing new affluent neighborhoods where the new rich were living in Western-style apartment buildings, whereas Hyŏngjo-dong was still sadly underdeveloped and fitted even more tightly with “tenement houses.” But more starkly and even worse, the barbed wire fence she sees with the sign “No Trespass” stands erect not only marking Seoul but as a symbol dividing the entire nation, reminding her of the historical realities of the conditions of Seoul as a capital of a divided Korea. In the subsequent series of Mother’s Stake, Hyŏnjo-dong and the first house that the mother purchases at the edge of the alley serve as stirring symbols of Korea’s ongoing division stemming from colonialism and war. The Korean War and the realities of division become even more evident as the narrator’s aging and physically debilitated mother expresses her wishes to have her ashes dispersed over the ocean on Kanghwa Island, which is as far as any South Korean can go to being at the closest point to Kaep’ung, North Korea, her native home­ town and their ancestral burial site which is no longer accessible. Despite the mother’s wishes to be close to her North Korea hometown, the grandson—her deceased son’s eldest son—decides on a burial site in South Korea. Ironically, this burial site ends up resembling the very first house that the mother had bought in Hyŏnjo-dong. The land had become a precious asset once again with new land developments and constructions. While burial sites are usually located on a hilltop, the cemetery that the grandson chooses is located on a hill that is so steep that it is difficult to even drive up with a car, especially during snowy winters. Moreover, the burial plot is on the edge of the hill thus instead of a standard rectangular plot of land only a triangle-shaped plot can be purchased. As the narrator points out, the plot resembles their Hyŏnjo-dong house’s “ornamental yard,” as mother had called it. This repetition of space cre­ ates the effect that the narrator and the mother have not really left the colonial period behind although by the time (grand)mother passes away, South Korea has elected a democratic government and had indeed become the thirteenth largest economy in the world between 1985 and 1990.

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Zhu Tianxin’s The Old Capital is also a trilogy of sorts in that the novella is divided into three parts.14 In the first part, the protagonist/narrator (desig­ nated in the second-person pronoun “you”), a well-educated, modern woman, endlessly strolls around Taipei feeling increasingly isolated despite the fact this city is supposed to be familiar to her as her “home.” The second part sketches her trip to Kyoto to meet her old friend A, where the protagonist recalls the Taipei of her young adulthood. The last part tells of her return from Kyoto and retracing of Taipei as if she were a Japanese tourist with an old colonial-period Japanese guidebook and map. The narrative spans about twenty years from the protagonist’s days at high school to 1996 when she is in her late thirties and has become a mother. The protagonist’s memory weaves back and forth between the past and the present as she travels between the two cities and a text folds in other literary texts. In this way, the narrative unveils the complex intertwined and multilayered histories of Taipei’s past and present. Jen-yi Hsu examines Zhu’s novella as a narrative that contests globaliza­ tion as emancipatory and thus frames her analysis through melancholia and ghostly specter.15 Hsu argues that Zhu puts forth a salient critique of Taipei as both global and ghostly where in which Taipei has become subsumed under the logic of global capitalism and accelerated urbanization (i.e., progress and modernity) but has lost something much more integral to humanity along the way. And that which is lost is history and remembrance. Peng Hsiao-yen also adds that writing in the post-martial law era, authors such as Zhu Tianxin and other second-generation Chinese-Taiwanese writers, began to develop a deep “mistrust of official histories” and produced works that could be characterized by “representation crisis.”16 Although Peng’s main interest in this essay is an examination of Zhu Tianxin’s fiction through the prism of the waishengren’s (Taiwanese mainlander) process of resolving their identity crisis and ideas about home and homeland, Peng ties the unstable identity of the waishengren to the question of historical memory and the legitimacy of memory in Taiwan. All in all, both Hsu and Peng are interested in Zhu’s notions of home, history, 14  See Howard Goldblatt’s translation of The Old Capital: A Novel of Taipei (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Zhu Tianxin (b. 1958), along with her older sister Zhu Tianwen, is considered as one of the most prominent fiction writers in contemporary Taiwan. Their father was the renowned writer Zhu Xining (1927–98) who had emigrated to Taiwan with the kmt withdrawal to the island. The Zhu sisters were thus born in Taiwan as second-generation Chinese-Taiwanese. 15  Jen-yi Hsu, “Ghosts in the City: Mourning and Melancholia in Zhu Tianxin’s The Old Capital,” Comparative Literature Studies 41.4 (2004): 547. 16  Hsaio-yen Peng, “Representation Crisis: History, Fiction, and Post-Martial Law Writers from the ‘Soldiers’ Villages,’” positions: east asia cultures critique 17.2 (2009): 377.

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and identity in post-martial era Taiwan where these have become increasingly unstable and contentious. While these issues point to the important ways that they are inextricable from the larger politics of Taiwan, I would also underscore the ways Zhu con­ structs the city of Taipei to serve as an index for the multiple inscriptions brought on by historical, political, and cultural changes. Furthermore, Zhu’s novella both inscribes and extirpates history onto/from the city to note what it means to be not only Chinese or Taiwanese but otherwise as people of global modernity. As other critics have also pointed out, these acts of writing and reading the city create a sense of nostalgia, but I would also add that it goes beyond nostalgia to create a sense of acute sadness verging on violent sorrow. Zhu bookends her novella with powerful, succinct questions. The opening line poses the question, “Is it possible that none of your memories count?” The nar­ rator’s attempt to answer the question begins with the repeated phrase “Back then” in the subsequent six paragraphs.17 These “back then” phrases ask “you” to recall the times before the contemporary global conditions when “the sky was much bluer,” “people were more willing to let them [tears] fall …,” “people were often willing to sacrifice themselves …,” “trees could survive and grow tall and green …,” “young people had only the streets to roam …,” “on summer nights you could see the Milky Way and shooting stars …,” “your background music … would likely be the Beatles …”18 These instances of “back then” bring forward the memories of the past’s unadulterated landscapes but they also ask more pointedly whether or not the details of individual memories of the past are less important than the competing political histories that are transmit­ ted as official histories. The novella ends with another gripping question and response: “What is this place? … You began to wail.”19 Instead of an answer that is articulated in words, the wail is a physical, emotional response but one that is just as resolutely vocalized through sound. It’s a cumulative sound and response, and one that defies precise definition. It is with this violent sor­ row that the novella concludes. In between the bookended questions, the narrator further probes the com­ plicated layering of Taiwan’s multiple colonial histories and spatial practices which are in the midst of being erased for the sake of another kind of nation­ alist history and globalist modernity. Throughout the novella, the Japanese language punctuates the text. In particular, the narrator recalls street names and train stations in Japanese such as Izumi-machi, Shijo-to, Hon-machi, 17  Zhu, The Old Capital, 111. 18  Ibid., 112. 19  Ibid., 217.

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Miyanoshita, and so forth: “feeling like one of your ancestors heading out of town a century before.”20 These Japanese-named streets are situated in tension not only with the changes made by the kmt government in the postwar period that attempted to purge remnants of the Japanese colonial era but also the contemporary moment in which the narrator resides. The ongoing demolitions and constructions throughout the 1970s and 1980s further intensified in the 1990s with the global turn but also regime change that brought the Democratic Progressive Party (ddp) to power in place of the kmt. As the narrator strolls through Taipei, she recalls not only her high school and college years when old Japanese architecture was demolished and traces of Japanese colonialism was erased; she also observes the demolition wrought by the urban constructions enacted during the regimes of Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, especially the bulldozing of juancun (soldiers’ village), as newer skyscrapers housing multinational companies and department stores sprouted up. I would, therefore, argue that the narrative does not privilege the history of Japanese colonialism although at a glance, with its nostalgic tone, this might appear to be the case. Instead by peeling and piling layers of colonial histories, Zhu reminds us that Taiwan’s and Taipei’s history is not only about the Japanese colonial period but also the neocolonial terms of the kmt regime and the nativist nationalism of the ddp, both of which hinged on ethnic nationalism. One particular scene stands out to illustrate the layers of Taipei’s urban colonial histories. The narrator evokes Taipei’s flora and fauna to implore the integral aspect of maintaining heterogeneous narratives of colonial histories experienced by an infinite number of individuals. In the ninth month of the lunar calendar, the chrysanthemums bloom, the hibiscuses wither, the campions grow fuzz, leaves of the calthrops and lilies dry out on the river, the organs appear, and the yams turn milky…. No, no, it’s definitely not because there were chrysanthemums and osman­ thus (if your father had come from another province), or hibiscuses and tree orchids (if your father was local Taiwanese), or wisterias and arhat pines (if your ancestors had spoken Japanese) or eucalyptuses and breadfruit trees (if your ancestors had fought in the South Pacific, even Australia, as imperial soldiers).21 What is native to Taipei becomes complicated in the documentation of trans­ planted flora and fauna to Taipei from other provinces and farther away from 20  Ibid., 113. 21  Ibid., 128.

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places such as the South Pacific. On the one hand, these transplantations point to the violent penetration of Taipei from outsiders. But they equally allude to the multiple layers and directions from which Taipei’s history constitute. The first-person narrator in Pak’s Mother’s Stake, “I,” and the second-person narrator in Zhu’s The Old Capital, “You,” both invite the readers intimately into the narrative and thus implore us to rethink the vanishing urban histories of colonial cities and the politics of identity in divided lands of which both Taiwan and South Korea are. Both the “I” and the “You” produce an uncanny effect of confessionalism that allows us to hear the inner thoughts and mono­ logues of the protagonists. At the same time, this intimate confessional mode is made public through their narratives of travels and walks inscribing their thoughts onto the city. Both the first-person and second-person point of view of narration ultimately implicates the readers as partners in seeing, hearing, and experiencing the city as the narrators do. In this regard, the two stories also question not only the allure and power of modern cities to pull people in but also the social meaning of preserving of urban heritage—a topic that has become more urgent as both Seoul and Taipei have experienced onslaughts of demolition and construction throughout their industrialization periods under military dictatorship and even more now in the era of globalization. During the postwar (Korean War and Chinese Civil War) periods, the population of Seoul grew from approximately 1 million in 1950 to 5.3 million in 1970; Taipei’s population more than tripled between 1950 and 1970: 503,000 to 1,720,000.22 The growth in population was due to a large number of refugees from North Korea fleeing to Seoul during the Korean War and by defeated Chinese migrants, mostly government and military officials of the kmt, fleeing to Taipei after Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government’s defeat. Furthermore, many from the rural population of both South Korea and Taiwan streamed into Seoul and Taipei and other industrializing cities seek­ ing employment. In order to accommodate this growing population but more importantly to gain legitimacy, the respective governments of South Korea and Taiwan set out on a course of rapid industrialization and modernization. They bulldozed squatter settlements to make room for new housing and commer­ cial constructions while also expanding the cities’ land acreage to the south of Seoul and to the east in Taipei. In particular, by the early 1980s, the older resi­ dential houses such as those at juancun in Zhu’s novel or at p’anjach’on (shanty town) in Pak’s novel where a large population had once lived and called home were bulldozed, demolished, and cleared, leaving little trace of what was once there. Instead, newer high-rise apartment buildings, reminiscent of stacked 22  Statistics available at www.worldpopulationreview.com.

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cement blocks, all of which looked identical to one another, arose providing new residences and creating new urban landscapes. To be sure, the excavation of tunnels for new highways and underground networks for the subway system did much to lay the groundwork for modern infrastructure from which both Seoul and Taipei are today benefitting. At the same time, however, as the two novels bemoan and underscore, much of what is now Seoul and Taipei came as a result of destruction, erasure, and forgetting. In essence, they both question the logic of the urban modernization undertaken by Japanese colonial gov­ ernments as well as the successive military regimes in both South Korea and Taiwan. If we are to be more precise, the novellas do not make a distinction between the Japanese colonial power and the postcolonial military regimes of South Korea and Taiwan. Ruptures and continuations coexist; the violence wrought by colonial and postcolonial regimes is part and parcel of a larger imperial formation. For both authors, the novels are not just about the transforming the spaces of Seoul and Taipei but also about the places where their own identities were built but which are now at the brink of being erased, thus forcing the ungrounding of their identities even after Japanese colonialism has ended. In fact, both narrators return to their homes having to take on different iden­ tities in order to make themselves feel at home. For “You” in Zhu’s The Old Capital, she masquerades as a Japanese tourist to trace the history of the once colonial city; while “I” in Pak’s Mother’s Stake cannot but add the geographical marker “South” in front of her Korean identity or “Republic of Korea” as her citizenship. Although we should not conflate the narrators with the authors’ themselves, it should be pointed out that the narrators’ dilemmas could be read as symbolically resonating with the authors’ own struggles with the pre­ vailing politics of ethnic identity at the time these novels were written. Both Zhu and Pak are considered “outsiders” to the country and the city that they had called and continued to call home. Zhu is a second-generation ChineseTaiwanese born in Taipei to a parent who migrated from Mainland China in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War. Pak, on the other hand, was born in what is now North Korea in a town outside of Kaesŏng, a city that became part of North Korea during the armistice negotiations that stopped armed fighting. These movements to another geographical space that is related to your home but not quite, and having a hyphenated identity that nevertheless could be easily passed over or elided, pose a dilemma just short of the once Japanese policy of assimilation. Both South Korea and Taiwan while undergoing postwar rehabilitation engaged in intense nationalist movements that created deep fissures between

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coethnic nationals. The anticommunist movement in South Korea made any­ one with North Korean roots, associations, or sympathies not only secondary citizens but deemed as threats to national security while in Taiwan the kmt, the new arrivals who followed Chiang Kai-shek, relegated the local Taiwanese to the status of secondary citizens. In part 2 of Mother’s Stake, the family’s fate ebbs and flows depending on which Korea has taken control of Seoul at any given moment during the war. The narrator’s older brother joins the communists after the liberation from Japan but shortly after recants his com­ munist allegiances. This becomes a sore point during the first three months of the Korean War when the North Korean Red Army takes the city of Seoul. The older brother is taken and forced to “volunteer” for the Red Army only to see his fate change hands once again when U.N. troops retake Seoul in the autumn of 1950. Because he is identified as a “suspect,” it is difficult for him to receive a citizen’s identification card, which was needed for travel, especially as they needed to flee Seoul during wartime. In Taiwan too, the deluge of new Chinese migrants to Taipei upset the possibility of native Taiwanese rule after libera­ tion and essentially created a kind of internal colonialism in which Taiwanese living in Taiwan prior to 1945 became secondary citizens. The kmt violently suppressed antigovernment activities, and on February 28 (the 228 Massacre) thousands of civilians and antigovernment protestors were killed or impris­ oned, signaling the start of the long forty years of what the Taiwanese call the White Terror period (1947–87). In addition to suppressing any form of pro­ communist activities, whether real or perceived, the kmt rule privileged early Chinese migrants in positions of political and cultural leadership and insti­ tuted a process of resinification of Taiwanese people, including making spoken Mandarin Chinese the official language. But three decades later with the end of martial law and kmt’s loss of power, a wave of new nationalism centering on Taiwan’s independence movement brought the question of Taiwanese identity once again to the forefront. Zhu, in short, probes and questions these waves of changes through her observations and documentation of Taipei. 2

Seoul and Taipei as (Post)Colonial Megacities

This book has addressed the ways the colonial cities of Seoul and Taipei were spaces of new cultural productions. Growing urbanization transformed not only the physical space but also the lived and experienced space. In other words, there was a very close relationship forged between the emergence of modern cities through various aspects of urbanization and the ways cultural

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producers imagined, represented, and interacted with the city. These cultural producers, namely writers, artists, and intellectuals were “born” of the city which became a crucial source of inspiration for their creative outputs. Living in the city further afforded them opportunities to vigorously critique the urban culture that they were so intimately part of. During the first few decades of the twentieth century when Japanese imperialism and global capitalism continued to make inroads into the two colonies, the urbanization of Seoul and Taipei became more and more visible. Urbanization often went hand in hand with various kinds of modernization processes and the production of a culture of modernity. New spaces arose, new subjectivities were tested, and new literary modes emerged to form what I have termed urban modernity in this book. In the 1930s Seoul and Taipei, like so many other cities around the world, became ever more connected to the outside world through new communication methods, faster transporta­ tion, transnational flows of consumer goods, and translations of literary texts and ideas which all did much to produce and enliven the urban culture. For instance, the street became a space in which to spend one’s time, to loiter, and not merely to use as a route to go from one destination to another; the department store became an all-inclusive cultural tower enabling people to experience shopping, dining out, watching films, and watching people. I have shown that Korean and Taiwanese writers and artists actively took part in this new urban culture by contributing to it in multiple ways. Since they were susceptible to the changing material and mental environments of the city, they frequently expressed their anxieties, concerns, and criticisms, as well as carefully noting material progress, through different narrative forms that often pointedly corresponded to the urban environment. A number of mass media platforms, especially popular magazines, journals, and newspapers, became available as a space on to which writers and artists could offer their commen­ taries on modern urban conditions and interact with the imagining of the city. As exciting as the many changes ushered in by urbanization and its ensu­ ing modernity might have been, it created both opportunities and obstacles, for modernity did not necessarily have positive or successful connotations or outcomes. At times, urban modernity was experienced in shocking and violent ways, further leading to the displacement of the subject and highlighting the contradictions of modernization. This study has highlighted the ways literary and visual works brought into the popular urban culture in Korea and Taiwan the concerns around Japanese colonialism, language, national identity, and gender when other institutional forms, namely direct political participation, were hindered if not altogether blocked by colonial governments.

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177

My choice of two cities, Seoul and Taipei, and by extension Korea and Taiwan, is not without purpose. Korea and Taiwan being major Japanese colo­ nies, some studies have compared the two but often argue lop-sided visions of Korea’s radical, anti-Japanese characteristics in contrast to Taiwan’s more pliant attitude toward the former colonizer. I have shown in this book that the new urban cultures and spaces complicate this dichotomy. By shifting the focus of analysis to Seoul and Taipei and insisting on studying the transregional connections between the two, rather than placing them within the colonycolonizer relationship or examining them through top-down histories, I hope to have deactivated, to some degree, what I had termed in Chapter 1 the post­ colonial myth of Korea’s strong anticolonialism nationalism versus Taiwan’s weak anticolonial nationalism. The imprints of Japanese colonialism on the cityscape of Seoul and Taipei are still noticeably visible despite post-liberation urban transformations that have also undeniably made their mark in erasing colonial-period urban planning and, most noticeably, in demolishing colonial architecture. Politicohistorical circumstances certainly factored into the development of Seoul and Taipei in the post-liberation decades. For instance, the Korean War ravaged Seoul and most of the peninsula and ultimately divided the peninsula into two states (North and South Korea) squarely placing Seoul on the southern side of the demilitarized zone. This national division would undoubtedly produce a different Seoul vacated by Japanese colonizers but newly occupied by the U.S. military as the peninsula became a strategic geopolitical site in the ensu­ ing Cold War. In China, Mao Zedong’s Communist Party’s defeat of the kmt forced followers of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist party into a mass exodus to Taiwan, thereafter forever altering its political and historical landscape. The standard histories of Korea and Taiwan would posit that subsequent military dictatorships under martial law in both countries did effectively transform their nations into newly industrializing countries of East Asia through new urban infrastructure and agricultural reforms and thus set the path toward becoming the “success” stories of late modernization. Yet as writers and works I have examined in this book show, the demolition of material realities and dis­ placement of memories did not ease the chaos and violence of colonization, modernization, and urbanization. To be sure, in the post-liberation era, Seoul and Taipei have become highly modern cities with skyscrapers, luxurious shopping centers, congested streets filled with automobiles, and cafés, restaurants, theaters, and so forth, which make them indistinguishable from most other modern megacities in the West or even Tokyo, the capital of their former colonizer. In the case of Seoul, with

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its population of 21 million in the greater metropolitan area, it is now con­ sidered a megacity with some of the most advanced technology in the world connecting people and things almost instantaneously (except, of course, with its closest neighbor, North Korea). Taipei, with its nearly 7 million inhabitants in the greater Taipei-Keelung metropolitan area, also boasts various successes of modernization—such as having one of the tallest buildings in the world, the Taipei 101. In touting Seoul and Taipei as global cities in the twenty-first century, they are also often cited for their reconstruction or recovery from their colonial pasts. But the colonial legacies are still prominently imprinted in the urban spaces of these two cities despite the various efforts to rectify and eradi­ cate them from both the physical landscape and from the space of memory. In part, the two national governments have dealt with the materiality of their respective colonial legacies in different ways. For example, one of the most often cited examples of the two government’s differing responses to Japanese colonialism is the case of the 1995 demolition of the ggk building in Seoul and the continuing usage of the ggt building in Taipei as the Office of the President in Taiwan. Of course, there is a much longer and complicated debate behind Seoul’s demolition of the ggk building that cannot be simply ascribed to South Korea’s still surging anti-Japanese attitudes. Just as the still standing ggt building cannot merely symbolize Taiwan’s nostalgic longing for Japanese colonial rule. Despite what appears to be a disappearing past amid new high-rise apartment buildings, technological advancements, global capi­ tal, and growing consumerism, the past, in fact, maintains a stubborn presence in both cities. On the one hand, political democratization and market liberal­ ization have opened up even greater intraregional flows of travel, labor, and culture. This includes, especially, the importation of Japanese manufactured and consumer goods, cultural and media products, and widespread usage of the Japanese language at various levels, from official language instructions to the business signs lit up in neon lights that suggest that the former colo­ nizer’s culture has become openly and uncritically consumable. On the other hand, cultural producers, including writers, filmmakers, broadcasters, and scholars, continue to revisit the colonial past. This insistence on the continu­ ous presence of the past in Seoul and Taipei has taken on different modes, registers, and pitches but ultimately what is desired is the production of multi­ layered topographies of the city—with all of its messy heterogeneity.

appendix

New Words 1.

Selected words from Sin yǒsǒng’s “Modern Popular Language Dictionary” (April to November 1931).

애드벤튜어 납프 네온싸인 테쎄 후리란써 그류 깽 콘트 왐파스껄 싸루-ㄴ 스포트라이트 제네스트 코큐 아라모데 오버월크 쩨사 에네르깃쉬 드라이 웨트 따메 듸볼스 빠겐쎄일 오버랍 마티네 뽀드뷜 쇼 싸이드푸레이 악팅 오욱숀 윙크 스테-트멘트

(aedǔbent’yuǒ: adventure) (Napp’ǔ: NAPF [Nippona Proletariat Artista Federation]) (neon ssain: neon sign) (t’esse: these) (huri lanssǒ: freelancer) (gǔryu: guru) (kkaeng: gang) (k’ont’ǔ: Conte) (Wamp’asǔ kkǒl: WAMPAS [Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers] Girl (ssalun: saloon) (sǔp’ot’ǔ lait’ǔ: spotlight) (gene sǔt’ǔ: general strike) (k’ok’yu: cocueur) (a-la-mo-te: à la mode) (obǒ wǒlk’ǔ: overwork) (jjesa: Cestea) (enerǔgitshwi: energisch) (tǔrai: dry) (wet’ǔ: wet) (ttame: dame) (tǔibolsǔ: divorce) (ppagen sseil: bargain sale) (obǒlap: overlap) (mat’ine: matinee) (ppodǔbuil: vaudeville) (syo: show) (ssaidǔ p’urei: side play) (akt’ing: acting) (ougsyon: auction) (wingk’ǔ: wink) (sǔt’et’ǔment’ǔ: statement)

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401167_008

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오피스와이프 온파레이드 헤게모니 패트러나쥬 푸레이밍업 쎄커핸

2.

(op’isǔ waip’ǔ: office wife) (on p’areidǔ: on parade) (hegemoni: hegemony) (p’aet’ǔrǒnajyu: patronage) (p’ureiming ǒp: framing up) (sse k’ǒhaen: secondhand)

Selected recipes from special column on food in August 1932 issue of Sin tong’a (original recipes were accompanied by photographs of the dishes).

Remonp’urosǔ (레몬푸로스 Lemon Frost)1 Ingredients: Lemon, one egg white, ice. Cooking Method: Make lemonade by mixing together lemon juice, sugar, water and ice. Next, whip egg whites to make foam and sprinkle an appropriate amount of sugar. Pour lemonade in a cup and spoon the foam on top of the lemonade. Drink up! Ttalgiaisǔk’ǔrim (딸기아이스크림 Strawberry Ice cream) Ingredients: 2 cups of strawberry, 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of milk, 3/4 cup of cream.2 Cooking Method: Wash strawberries and place in a bowl. Sprinkle sugar and blend. Let them sit for about an hour, then strain. Mix in milk and cream with a little salt and pour into the ice cream machine. Let freeze. P’urǔtk’akt’el (푸릇칵텔 Fruit cocktail) Ingredients: Banana, apple, strawberry, watermelon, etc.3 Cooking Method: In addition to the abovementioned fruit, feel free to add other fruit of your choice. Slice bananas into two, apple and watermelon into two or three, and large strawberries into two. Place all ingredients in a cup. Enjoy with some sprinkled sugar. If you want to add pineapple, add pineapple juice, which will make it tastier. Even better, add lemon or tangerine juice. 1  Refer to Jiyoung Nam and Bruce Southard, “Orthographic Representation and Resyllabification of English Loan Words in Korean,” Language and Speech 37:3 (1994). Their study examines the orthographic representation of words that appeared in the Tong’a ilbo in 1987. The resyllabification of loanwords that appeared in the 1930s differs from Nam and Southard’s study, but in general follows the CV (consonant vowel) or CVC (consonant vowel consonant) rule. 2  “Cup” is the measurement that was actually used in the recipe. 3  Banana is not native to Korea. Apples were also called neung’geum, from the Japanese ringo and the Chinese pingguo. Nǔng’gǔm was an object of interest for many writers in the early twentieth century. For example, Yi Hyosǒk wrote a short essay titled 十月에피는林檎꼿 (Apple blossoms that bloom in October, 1933) and Kim Kirim wrote 林檎의輓歌 (Nǔng’gǔm elegy, 1936) and a poem entitled 林檎밭 (Nǔng’gǔm field, 1932).

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Hatppisǔk’et (핫삐스켓 Hot Biscuit) Ingredients: 1 hap flour, 2 large spoons of butter, 2 small spoon of baking powder, salt, 4 large spoons of milk or water. Cooking Method: Mix flour, baking powder and salt and sieve it through a sifter. Add butter. With two knives, cut butter into the flour. To this, pour milk or water and knead. Evenly spread the dough on a cutting board and let it sit for about 3–4 minutes. Using a biscuit cutter or a small bowl or cup, cut out round patterns. You do not have to only make round patterns, you can make the biscuit into any shape you like. Place these in a stove and bake thoroughly. Keep warm and enjoy for breakfast instead of rice. K’ǒ-reraisǔ (커-레라이스 Curry Rice) Ingredients: carrots, pork, curry powder, salt, soy sauce, starch, rice, and water. Cooking Method: Thinly slice the meat and coat with butter. Sauté it with curry powder (one large spoon of curry powder for one doi4 of rice). Add water and boil. Retain the water as if you are making traditional rice. Pour curry over the rice. Chop up vegetables, meat, and carrots into small pieces and boil them. Delicately place items on plate. Kamja chijin’gǒt (감자 지진것 Fried Potatoes)5 Ingredients: Potato, peas, eggs, butter, and salt. Cooking Method: Although potato is the most important ingredient, adding egg, if you have it, will be even tastier. This is a sufficient replacement of either bread or rice. Peel off potato skin and slice potato vertically. Fry strips in butter or oil. When cooked, sprinkle some salt and place on a plate. Slightly cook the beans and fry the egg about half way and eat it together with the potatoes. P’uraench’wit’osǔt’ǔ (푸랜취토스트 French Toast) Ingredients: Hard bread, egg, and salt. Cooking Method: Trim the crust off the hard bread to make it look nice. Dip it into egg batter and fry it on a frying pan.

4  Both hap and doi are units of measurement for dry items. 5  For “fried potatoes,” rather than using the transliteration, the author translates it into Korean. It might be the case that there was a similar Korean dish made with fried potatoes.

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Index Adorno, Theodor 32 Ahn, Sŏkju (Ahn Sŏggyŏng) 141, 156–157 Allen, Joseph 66, 94 Alley 20, 51, 53–54, 94, 94n74, 122, 167, 169 Althusser, Louis 145 Anderson, Benedict 68, 70n25 Architecture descriptions of Department store 111, 107, 113 and Meiji period 102 and Tokyo 42, 54 and Seoul 65, 107, 107 and Taipei 65, 113, 115, 172 Western style 35, 57 during Colonial period 177 Appadurai, Arjun 97–98, 98n7 Apter, Emily 8 Baihua 63–64, 63n11, 71–72 Banka 35 Barclay, Thomas 73, 73n35 Barlow, Tani 18–19 Barthes, Roland 153–154 Benjamin, Walter 28, 79, 88, 96, 99, 136 Bhabha, Homi 39–40 Ambivalence 40 Bilingualism Colonial writers 94 Korean newspapers 69n23 Taiwanese publications 34, 72 Bishop, Isabella Bird 132–133 Bourdieu, Pierre 97 Bradbury, Malcolm 16 Brecht, Bertolt 88 Epic theater 88 Breton, André 89 Bunmei kaika (Civilization and Enlightenment) 18 Bunmei seiji (Military rule) 70 Butler, Judith 145, 147 Butter 120–121, 124 butterine (margarine) 121–122 “buttery scent” 121 and new 126 as symbol of luxury 122, 126

Chen, Chien-chung 116, 117 Chen, Fangming 50, 116 Chiang, Ching-kuo 172 Chiang, Kai-shek 172, 175 Chidao bao (Equator) 127 Chinese cultural heritage 18n48 Ching, Leo 6n17 Chogwang (Korea Light) 138 Choi, Kyeong-hee 167 Ch’ŏndogyo 77n41, 138 Chŏnggye stream 35, 133 Chongno intersection 1, 110 street 112–113, 113n46, 125 Chosŏn dynasty 14, 32, 35, 63, 67, 133 Chu, Sigyŏng 63, 137 Circle of Nine (Kuinhoe) 37, 37n14, 81, 82 Circulation around the city 3 capitalist 24, 99 of global commodities, things 97, 100, 120, 126 of language 66, 80 of modernity 24 of subjectivities 100 in magazine 136–137, 140 in department store 115, 117 images of Modern Girl 164 transregional 7 City 15–17 as generative 16 as theater 133 contemporary conditions of Seoul and Taipei 27, 165, 171 planning or urban planning 65, 66, 94, 177 literature (dushi wenxue) 50, 50n56, 124 Colonialism and collaborator 26, 62, 74, 109n36, 154 and modernity 18–20, 120, 130, 167 Comics 135 Japanese 155–157 narrative comics (manmun manhwa) 28, 141, 141n21, 156–161 political 134

204 Comics (cont.) of Modern Girl and New Woman 156–164 or lumpen 161–164 Commodification 97, 98 Marxist process 28, 99, 101–102, 116 Marxist fetishization 128 language 66, 121, 149 gender 124, 164 Commodity as novelty 97, 131 luxury 115, 121 culture 98, 116, 131 Western 126 Comparison as methodology 8–12, 21 Consumerism 123 male consumer 128 female consumer 154 Contact zone 10 Cosmopolitanism 23, 102, 107, 115 Creolization 27, 65, 95, 98 Crisis of representation 94 Cultural biography 120, 126 Cultural politics 100, 129 Cultural production 15, 20–24, 33, 61, 100, 166, 175 Dadaocheng 35 Danshui (Tamsui) River 35 Debord, Guy 101 De Certeau, Michel 31 pedestrian speech acts 66, 94 Demilitarized Zone 168 Democratic Progressive Party (DDP) of Taiwan 172 Deleuze, Gilles 9 Department stores 28, 96–101, 117, 122, 130–131 and class 102, 117 and modern practices 108, 111, 115 as index of modernity 99, 102–103 as phantasmagoria 99 “department store culture” 96–97, 101 history of 103–104 in the West 99, 104 in Tokyo 33, 102–103 in Taipei and Taian 113–115, 127, 129, 172 See Kikumoto

Index in Seoul 106–107, 109, 111–113, 125, 133 See Hwashin and Mitsukoshi representations in literature 42, 116, 120–121 Doka (assimilation) 23n59, 74 Dual structure urban planning 35 Eagleton, Terry 131 Enomoto, Masao 161 -Works “Love of Kankan Hat” 161–163 Errantry 6–7, 57 Essay as genre 26, 32–33 and Yi Sang 41–47, 56–57 and Weng Nao 49–57 see travel narrative Ethnic consciousness 54 Even-Zohar Itamar 60 Fashion idea of self-fashioning 28, 99, 115, 125–126, 128, 147 Western 128, 135, 147, 147n29, 148, 150 wearing han’bok 142, 149 wearing kimono 146, 148, 149 wearing qipao 150 wearing bendaofu 150 and discourses of modernity 75, 90, 111, 130, 148–150, 158, 161 February 28 (228 Massacre) 175 Fellow Traveler 117, 119, 119n58, 126 Fengsu (cultural studies) 19 Fengyue bao (Current News) 139 Ferguson, James 13 Friedman, Susan Stanford 20 Furen to jiating/ Fujin to katei (Woman and Home) 134, 139 Futei senjin (insubordinate) 39 Fukoku kyōhei (rich country, strong military) 18 Fukuzawa, Yukichi 68 Genbun itchi (unification of writing and speech) 63n11 Geomodernisms 26 Ginza 33, 42, 54,106, 108, 135 Glissant, Éduard 2n7, 3, 6–7, 9, 27, 57, 65, 98

205

Index Government General of Korea (GGK) Building 66, 107, 178 Government General of Taiwan (GGT) 15, 72, 72n31 Building 178 Great Kantō Earthquake 33, 51 Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere 18 Global modernism 7 Global modernity 20 Gupta, Akhil 13 Hall, Stuart 165 Hairstyle bobbed hair 136, 142, 153, 157–158, 160n55, 166 Taiwanese male 129 critique through comics 157–158, 158fig. 11, 160 Han River 169 Han’gŭl 63 and han’gŭlization 63n11, 68–70 and literacy 73 in newspapers 70n26 in women’s magazines 137 Hanscom, Christopher 2, 2n6, 94 Hashiya, Hiroshi 3 Hayashi, Houichi 115 Hayashi Department Store 115, 115n49 Henry, Todd 66, 94 Hokkaido 54–55 Hongshui bao (Floodwaters) 126 Honmachi (Ponjŏng) 58, 59fig. 2, 106, 108 Hsu, Jen-yi 170 Hu, Shi 63, 71 Huang, Shihui 73 Hunmin chŏngŭm 63 Hwashin Department Store 3, 99, 109n38 as modernist text 103, 109, 112 and nationalism 109 architecture 109–111 advertisement 112fig. 4 and urban modernity 115 services 111 Hyŏnjo-dong 167, 167n9, 169 Identity association with “things” 97, 102, 130 colonial 5–7, 49, 55, 126, 147

ethnic 142, 146, 150, 153, 170, 17–175 gender 129, 134, 136, 140, 145, 160, 167 performative 145, 147, 150, 157 politics in divided nation 173–174 relational 9, 15 unstable 123, 171, 174 urban 28, 54, 102, 123–125, 130, 161n58 Im, Hwa 22n57 Imagism 87 Immigration Koreans in Japan 34 Taiwanese in Japan 34 Imperial formation 165 Intracolonial 7 Intraregional 7, 15, 67, 74, 177–178 Jacobs, Allan 94 Jacobs, Jane 94n75 Japanese settlers in the colonies 35, 106, 108n35, 113 Juancun (soliders’ village) 172, 173 Jay, Martin 135 Kaesŏng 166 Kanghwa Treaty 67 Keijō (see Kyŏngsong and Seoul) Kikumoto Department Store 99, 103 architecture 113, 114fig. 5 history of 113, 113n47 representations in literature 129 Kim, Kirim 17, 22n57, 27, 62, 80–88, 139 criticism of 83 loanwords in poetry 85–88, 95 -Works: “Holding a Coffee Cup” 84–85; “Grocery Store” 85–88 Kim, Hwallan 160 Kim, Paekyŏng Kim, Yujŏng 48, 138, 8 Kim, Yunsik 1, 1n4, 10n13, 43, 47, 117n53 Kisaeng 160n57 Kobayashi, Hideo 33 Kōenji 51–53 Kohyŏnhak (Modernology) 1, 133 Kokugo (national language) 27, 62, 63 Kominka movement 12n35, 16n39, 57, 74, 146 Kon, Wajirō 135 Kopytoff, Igor 98n7

206 Korean Artista Proletariat Federation (KAPF) 57, 99, 117n53, 118n57 Korean War 14, 169 Kuomintang KMT 14, 64, 170n14, 172 Kyŏngbok Palace 35 Kyoto 4, 35, 170 Lai, He 72 Language and identity 65 and community 65 assimilation 74 disavowing 6 interactive and social 60–61, 66 Japan language 15, 26n64, 27, 58, 62, 73, 74, 94, 171 Korean language history and reform 62–63, 68–70, 74 making of 65 Mandarin 64, 72, 175 materially inflected 77–79 museumization of 46 notions of national language 62–64, 175 standardization of 62 Taiwanese language history, reform, vernacularization 6, 27, 64, 68, 70–73 relationship to the city 5, 61, 95 see also polylingualism Leftist literature 28, 57, 85, 94, 122 contradictions within 122 in Taiwanese literature 126, 130 modes of criticism 100 suppression of 99, 117 see also KAPF Le Moulin 82, 89 Leiris, Michel 46 Lefebvre, Henri 17, 52, 102 Linguistics 58 relations 61 and modernity 64, 74 and fragments 65 and nationalism 68 Lippit, Seiji 24n61 Liu, Lydia 60, 80 Liu, Na’ou 22n57 Lumpenproletariat 77, 79, 129, 161–162 Lu, Xun 71

Index March 1, 1919 Independence Movement 68, 71n30, 138 Martial law under 177 post-martial law era 29, 165, 170 Marx, Karl 28, 101 Marxist criticism 116 Masquerade 145–146 ethnic masquerade in Taiwan 147, 174 Mass media 11, 96, 134, 147, 154 May Fourth Movement 68, 71, 71n3 Megacity 177–178 Meiji Restoration 24, 36 Melas, Natalie 9 Military dictatorship 173 Mingyue (Tomorrow) 126 Mitsui, Takatoshi 103 Mituskoshi Department Store 99, 102 architecture 107, 111 history of 103–5 magazine 102n17, 105n28 in colonial Kyŏngsŏng 106–108, 110, 112 Modern Boy (Mobo) 36, 75, 76, 99, 129 Modern Girl (Moga) 28–29, 36, 75, 76, 85, 89, 99, 123, 125, 133, 135, 136, 146, 148, 153–154 in narrative comics 157–160, 161–162 Modernism 116 characteristic of 2n6, 16, 23 definitions of 20–23 Kim Kirim as representative author of 83 Korean and Taiwan modernism 21–22, 57, 125 popular definition 78, 80 relation to modernity 23–24, 32 relationship to realism and leftism 116–118 translation 75–76 visual 136 Weng Nao as representative author of 39, 50 Yi Sang as representative author of 37–38 Modernity 12 capitalist 29, 118 colonial 18–19, 24, 83, 130, 167 consumer 99–100

207

Index critique of 23, 32, 118n56, 131 culture of 7, 176 definitions of 20–22 global 13, 36, 171 hypermodernity 120 Japanese mediated 24, 149 literary 24 material signs of 66, 76, 80, 127 130, 135 words 75 urban 16, 19–20, 23, 31, 40, 60, 65, 95, 103, 108, 116, 124, 133, 176 visual 133, 135, 140 Western 149 see also department store as index of modernity see also gender Moretti, Franco 25 Mumford, Lewis 133 Naming practices 160–161, 161n58 Native Soil (K. hyangt’o; C. xiangtu) writer 118, 118n56 Neo-sensationalist (Shin kankakuha) 37, 39 New Literature Movement Taiwan 72 New Modernist Studies 21 New woman 28–29, 133, 153–154, 166 narrative comics 157 critiques of 158–159 historical figures 163, 168 Nomadism 1, 52, 79 Nostalgia 45, 171 Novel modern 25, 117, 131 Orphan of Asia 3–5 Osborne, Peter 23 Pak, Hŭngsik 109, 109n36 Pak, Kiryong 110, 110n42 Pak, T’aewŏn 1, 80, 138, 139 -Works: Day in a Life of Kubo the Novelist 1–3 Pak, Wansŏ 29, 165 -Works: Mother’s Stake 166–169 P’anjach’on (Shanty town) 173 Park, Sunyoung 100 Peasant (nongch’on) literature 118n56 Peng, Hsiao-yen 22n57, 170

Phantasmagoria 99 Poetic of relations 3, 9 Polylingualism 58, 64, 69, 74, 80, 82 Polysystem 60 Polyvocalism 6–7, 82 Population of Koreans in Japan 34 of Taiwanese in Japan 34 of Seoul 35, 35n11 of Taipei 35, 35n12 of Japanese settlers in Korea 106, 108n35 growth of Seoul and Taipei 173, 178 Tokyo 33 Postcolonial 7, 29, 165 Postcolonial myth 11, 15 Primitivism 45–46 Proletarian cultural and literary movement 22, 117–118 literature in Taiwan 116, 124, 126, 129, 130 See also leftist literature and KAPF Pungsok (cultural studies) 19 Qing dynasty 14 Readership female readers 140, 149n35, 152 ideal 154 as witness 173 Realism 21–22, 50, 116 capitalist realism 155 photographic realism 155 realist literature and writers 94, 117 Relational 26, 98 comparison 9 Ri, Koran (Li Xianglan/ Yamaguchi Yoshiko) 146, 146n27 Russo-Japanese War 18, 68 San liu jiu xiaobao (369 Tabloid) 139 Sakechō (Sakaemachi) 58–59 Scruggs, Bert 54, 100 Shi, Shu 60 Shigeta, Eiji 113 Shih, Shu-mei 9 Shitamachi 51 Shōwa era 33 Silverberg, Miriam 155 Sino-Japanese War 18, 67

208 Sin yŏsŏng 76, 83, 124, 134, 138, 141, 148 Socialism socialist movement 125 socialist Realism 117, 122 Soja, Edward 52 Sotofuku buildings 35 Space polymorphous 50, 53 social space 17, 39, 140 spatial practice 17, 53, 102, 125, 171 of consumption 124, 129 Stoler, Ann 165 Storii manga (comic story) 156n51 Street 15, 27, 94 and women 132 and names colonial period names 171 as pedestrian acts 94 Tokyo 52 street signs in colonies 60, 65 grid system in Seoul and Taipei 66, 94 Subjectivity 100 colonized 130 fashion 147 female 123, 135, 164 Surrealism 89 Tainan 35, 53–54, 81, 115 representation in poetry 91–93 Taishō chic 33 Taiwan huawen yundong (written Taiwanese movement) 73 Taiwan bungei (Taiwan Literary Arts) 37 Taiwan Furen Jie (Taiwan Woman’s World) 134, 139, 151–153 Taiwan Qingnian (Taiwan Youth) 72 Taiwan wenyi lianmeng (Taiwan Culture Circle or Taiwan Literature and Arts Research Association) 37, 99 Tang, Na 22n57 Tendency literature (kyŏnghyangp’a munhak) 118n57 Things in motion 98 social life of 98, 129, 130 Western 120 see also commodities Thirdspace 51, 89 Thornber, Karen 10

Index Tongnip sinmun (The Independent) 68–70 Bilingual edition 69 Transculturation 10 Translation 8, 60, 62, 64, 66, 76n40 theory of Walter Benjamin 136 Translingual 60, 64 Transnationalism 000 Travel narrative 26, 31, 39–40, 55–57, 132, 173 See also essays Treat, John 62 Treaty of Shimonoseki 67 Tributary state 67 Triple consciousness 6, 6n17 Tu, Kuo-ch’ing 38n16, 50 Urban development acceleration 170, 174, 176 demolition 168, 172, 173 morphology 15, 65 topography 20 Voloshinov, V.N. 60–61, 76, 149 Waishengren 170 Walking 66, 173 Wang, Shilang 98, 100, 118, 126–130 -Works: “Intersection” 127–130 Weinbaum, Alys 146 Wenyan 63, 72 Weng, Nao 26,31, 37, 39, 40 49–57 language 61 -Works: “The Flâneur of Tokyo Streets” 51–53; “Remaining Snow” 53–56; “Poor Old Rui” 50–51 White Terror Period 175 Williams, Raymond 16, 41, 45 -Work: The Country and the City 16 Wŏlbuk 1n1 Women’s magazine 28, 134, 136 history of Korean women’s magazine 137–139 history of Taiwanese women’s magazines 139–140 cover art 140–142, 143–144, 147–148, 152–154 Wu, Zhuoliu 3–4, 4n10, 147 -Work: “The Doctor’s Mother” 147 Wuren bao (Trooper) 126

209

Index Yamanote 51 Yanabu, Akira 76, 76n40 Yang, Chichang 27, 62, 80–82, 89–95 foreign words 90–91 surrealism 89 -Works: “Rouge and Lips” 89–90; “Ruined City” 91–93 Yang, Kui 126–127 Yi, Chaesŏn 116 Yi, Hyosŏk 98, 100, 118–126, 139 -Works Julia 118–126, 131, 160; “The City and its Ghost” 119

Yi, Kwangsu 62, 139, 160n57 Yi, Sang 26, 31, 36–38, 41–49, 103 Architecture degree 37 language 61 arrest and death 49 -Works “Tokyo” 38, 41; “Wings” 41, 138; “Ennui” 42–45, 49; “Lost Flowers” 47–49 Yi, T’aejun 32 Yŏsŏng 134, 141, 143–144, 148 Zhang, Wojun 72 Zhu, Tienxin 29, 165 -Work: The Old Capital 170–173