While the Korean populace generally agrees on Yi Kwang-su's (이광수) literary prowess, his political identity is controversial. Historical scholarship surrounding his life is often overlayed with the binaries of traitor and patriot or collaborator and nationalist; however, his identity throughout colonial Korea was not split merely between these dichotomies. Rather, Yi Kwang-su's writings display an identity that was at once dynamic, contested, and evolving during the colonial period, an identity which was influenced by the global trend of development, shaping him as simultaneously a collaborator and a nationalist.
Yi Kwang-su was perhaps the most influential colonial Korean writer. He received his education from the prominent Waseda University with a Ch'ondogyo scholarship, despite his impecunious background as the son of a fallen yangban family (Robinson, pg. 53). Inspired by disenfranchisement with Japan's military rule of Korea, he authored the Tokyo Student Declaration of Independence, which led to the anti-colonial March 1st Movements in 1919; however, he was forced to retreat after this to the safety of the Shanghai Korean provisional government. By the 1920s, Yi returned to Korea and redoubled his efforts on the Alliance for Self-Improvement, which was based on teachings from his sunbae (upperclassman) An Chang' ho and oriented to foster education and gradual reform in Korea rather than a revolution. This push for a vanguard-led nation of literati, apolitical education, and cultural reform, as laid out by Yi's "The Treatise on National Reconstruction," became known as a form of cultural nationalism, linking patriotism with economic development (Robinson, pg. 62-63). As a lauded literati and with Japan's shift towards “Cultural Rule,” Yi also gained influential editorial positions at colonial-approved newspapers from which he was able to trumpet his views on the state of colonialism in Korea: two of these newspapers still exist today, the Dong-a Ilbo and the Chosun Ilbo.
Despite his early support of independence, Yi had controversial stances. For example, he emphasized pragmatism and practicality in place of revolution, believing the "French Revolution was carried away by emotion and fancy" (Choi, pg. 46). Motivated by Gustave Le Bon, Yi wrote in "Is the Reconstruction of National Character Possible?" that there was a core group of Koreans capable of altering their traits to become more "modern" and that these educated peoples should lead social change, rather than the angry proletariat. He very much had a top-down approach to Korean development: that the people with the social, monetary, and educational capital should be the custodians of modernity in Korea. In addition, Yi spoke about coming into a realistic self-consciousness of the Korean people's state of barbarism contrasted with the modern world (chagak), underscoring "progress and self-awareness as distinguishing marks of the civilized" (Choi, pg. 42). Notwithstanding global events, like the Bolshevik Revolution, and omnipresent Marxist scholarship, Yi believed that class conflict was not the cure for colonialism nor was it the path to modernization in Korea — it was a belief that would garner significant criticism.
Critics of Yi's most famous writing "On National Reconstruction" were offended by Yi's borderline internalized racist remarks: Sin Sangu, a leftist scholar, claimed that Yi was betraying his nation by disregarding the rich history, enduring character, and achievements of the great dynasties of Korea by suggesting there was drastic character reformation needed in the Korean psyche to fix the "decayed" Korean spirit. In addition, Yi claimed that the Korean people were simply not ready for independence as they lacked the education, sophistication, and correct national character to lead the nation towards modernity without colonialism successfully. This view was in stark contrast to the Fourteen Points laid out by President Wilson, particularly self-determination, that initially played a role in inspiring the March 1st movement that Yi so buttressed.
Recent scholarship, however, illuminates a more nuanced way of perceiving Yi's "On National Reconstruction." Rather than merely a precursor for bolstering colonialism in Korea, Yi's writing can be viewed as a plea to the Korean interior. By invoking historical memories with references to Sanhai jing, Hou Hanshu, and Sanguo zhi, Yi was attempting to produce a collective minjok identity that was simultaneously in line with the global trend of modernization and capitalism and the 5,000 years of Korean history (Choi, pg. 42), vouching for the creation of a highly organized society, stratified by occupation and purpose. In this light, Yi's take on cultural nationalism was about cultivating a collective nation that moved beyond what he viewed as the Confucian "stagnancy" prevalent in the Choson dynasty while drawing upon the strength of the Korean ethnic lineage — a minjok identity, albeit controversial and dangerous, still pervasive in modern, capitalistic Korea today. As Shin notes, Yi concluded that "Koreans have been without a doubt a unitary ethnic nation [tanil han minjok] in blood and culture," and this ethnic nation replaced "failed" Confucian culture, fueling Korean nationalism at the time and shaping the "post-1945 notion of nation in both parts of the peninsula" (Shin, pg. 49).
Whether Yi was a patriot or a traitor is a highly contested topic. One view that is still cited today as justification to label Yi as a problematic collaborator and traitor is his support of sending Korean men to fight in Japanese wars in the later years of his life, "extoll[ing] Korean youth to volunteer for the Japanese Imperial Army, and eulogiz[ing] the greatness of the Japanese Empire" (Lankov). Another charged fact is he was considered one of the first Koreans to replace his Korean name with a Japanese one. On the other hand, it would be a disservice not to recognize the paradox represented by Yi's multiple imprisonments by the regimes that dominated his life in both colonial Korea and post-liberation Korea (Lankov). Undoubtedly, Yi saw the world in social Darwinian terms, admiring the trial and error nature of the British constitution and successes of Meiji Japan, writing that "the British…love freedom and, unlike the French and Germans, have a proclivity for civil society and are realistic and liberalist" (Choi, pg. 45). His praise of the trial and error system adopted by the British constitution speaks to Yi's privileged positionality within colonial Korea as he possessed the luxury to take a gradual approach to land reform and poverty alleviation, whereas the agrarian peasants merely desired sustenance.
Looking at Yi’s actions in context, however, it is clear Yi had to navigate his own identity through his travels to the “future” (modern, capitalistic Japan) and to the past ("backward," poverty-stricken Korea). His contradictory nature as a pioneer cosmopolitan citizen, as an "Other" in both the gaze of the Imperialist regime and local, everyday Koreans, was a result of his greater interactions with the global capitalist order and his background as a Korean patriot. Within the confines of his in-betweenness and alterity, being neither wholly an evil collaborator nor a champion for independence, neither a Japanese citizen nor a local Korean with no experiences abroad, Yi Kwang-su inevitably played the role of messenger between both colonial oppression and an uprising Korean nation, code-switching between his global and local ("glocal") identities (Choi, pg. 685). In this vein, Yi's urgency to modernize Korea, with his strong support for education reform and conservative nationalism — the minjok identity —, reflects his desire to bridge the gap between his own identities and, by extension, the "backward" locale and the modern global. It can also be argued that his strong push for education reform and minjok patriotism laid the foundations for Korea's "Miracle on the Han," where President Park Chung-hee's focus on exploiting a highly educated and patriotic labor force led to the inception of an export powerhouse.
Ultimately, the relevance of Yi Kwang-su studies today is understanding the national division and subsequent ultranationalism that persists in the two Koreas. In many ways, Yi's "On National Reconstruction" was the first political document that drew a hard line between the left-wing and right-wing reformers in Korea. Despite recent interest in Yi Kwang-su, dealing with the issue of collaborators in Korea is still nontrivial. With the advent of a continuously democratized state in Korea, from President Kim Dae-jung onwards, however, the urgency of expunging collaborators from Korea's historiography has diminished. At the same time, the freedom to explore the question of collaborators is not curtailed for the sake of authoritarian regimes and national reconstruction. Thus, scholarship now can approach the issue of collaboration from all angles that do not strictly depict characters as "absolute evils," approaching collaboration, not as an isolated individual's wrongdoings, but a system "embedded in Korea's modern history" that is inescapable and inevitable (Koen, pg. 228). With this line of thought, Yi Kwang-su can be understood concomitantly as a patriot and collaborator who cared deeply about Korea's future. While he was problematic in his dismissal of agrarian Koreans, he worked within the constraints bestowed upon him in colonial Korea while navigating his conflicting identities to produce a visionary ideal of a vanguard-led Korean minjok, both modern and thriving.
by Thomas Sze (East Asian Studies, Brown '22)
REFERENCES
Choi, Ellie. “Memories of Korean Modernity: Yi Kwangsu's The Heartless and New Perspectives in Colonial Alterity.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 77, no. 3, 2018, pp. 659–691.
Choi, Ellie. “Yi Kwangsu and the Post-World War I Reconstruction Debate in Korea.” The Journal of Korean Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press (Spring 2015).
De Ceuster, Koen. “The Nation Exorcised: The Historiography of Collaboration in South Korea.” Korean Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2001), 207-242.
Lankov, Andrei. “Life of Writer Yi Kwang-su: From Nationalist to Collaborator.” Korea Times, April 25th, 2010). Accessed on October 25th, 2020. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/04/113_64837.html
Michael E. Robinson. Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.
Shin, Gi-Wook. Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy. Stanford University Press, 2006.
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