It's Independence Day in Korea, or, more accurately, Failed Revolt Followed By 25 Years of Further Occupation Day. It's raining, and has the effect of curtailing the citywide holiday weekend-long drunken bacchanal. It's a good, cold, cleansing rain. It's the only appreciable rain, in fact, since we got here.
Fittingly, the weekend before we went to Korea's Independence Hall. Not like our Independence Hall, where stuff was signed, but more of a museum. Let me say "museum," because (and I'm speaking as an historian here) it was more propaganda than factual, balanced history.
Just outside Cheonan, it's a sprawling site. At first you see a pair of monumental spires, reminiscent of some late Soviet public art. Off to the side and up the hill is something similarly modernist in a totalitarian way, housing a bell dedicated to the reunification of the peninsula. As you approach, there is a massive pavilion, an ominous pile of concrete that is stylistically a cross between classic Asian architecture and brutalism. Under the roof is a heroic sculptural tableau in the style of Socialist Realism that feels a lot like Laborer and Kolkhoz Woman, and does nothing to dispel the totalitarian vibe.
Moving beyond the pavilion is a collection of exhibition halls. The first one is quite nice, and displays the origins of the Korean people and their history up to the end of feudalism in the 19th century, including stuff about how they repelled Yuan-dynasty invaders from China and Shogunate-period Japan, including the feats of Yi Sun-shin and the mighty turtle ships. The remaining halls, however, are fairly disappointing; a tedious repetition of historical half-truths offered up not for visitors' edification but to cement an official government narrative.
The history, elevator-style, is this: Korea, in its first thousand years, traded extensively and took in a tremendous amount of Chinese culture, either directly or as mediated by Japan, including architecture, writing, Confucianism and Buddhism, and so forth. (These contributions go unacknowledged.) In its second millennium, Korea turned inward and became a "hermit kingdom" with no interest in its neighbors, China and Japan, who, to be fair, occasionally lusted after their land. In the 19th century, after the Americans forced Japan to open itself up to the world, they went on to demand the same of the Koreans. The Japanese decided to meet the domineering West by aggressively westernizing, while the Koreans were much less enthusiastic. After a few years, Japan started throwing its new weight around the region and forced Korea into a series of unfair treaties that culminated in outright annexation in 1910.
On March 1st, 1920, some activists and intellectuals had had enough, and made a declaration of independence. The Japanese did not find it very reasonable or humorous, and they brutally cracked down on the Koreans. There was some insurrectionist guerilla armies hiding out in China and Russia, but the Japanese remained firmly in control until 1945, at the end of World War II. I don't want to sugar-coat what the Japanese occupation was like: they forced Koreans to adopt Japanese language and Japanese names, and made terrible reprisals for insurrectionary acts. As pig-headed as Koreans can be (and no, that's not a crack at the kosa ceremony), the Japanese rose to the occasion and met obstinance with iron-hearted repression. (The presentation of the history of the occupation doesn't mention those Koreans who prospered under Japanese rule, except to obliquely accuse them of collaboration, or the millions of ordinary people who went about their daily lives with no great preference for one repressive regime over another. Quite a few of them, if Europe's history in WWII is any model, probably wanted to be on the winning team.)
This is more or less where the museum's narrative ends. In it, little attempt is made to distinguish between imperial era Japanese and contemporary Japanese (what do the Japanese translations on the placards say, I wonder?), and the same terrible stories are told over and over. Not just in general, but the same individual incidents, the exact same burnt churches and razed villages. Meanwhile, as they beat the drum of Japanese awfulness, they inflate the insurrectionaries into demi-gods and glorify the pure, untainted, unflinching, heroic Korean race, who are eternal victims of their rapacious neighbors. Americans don't get let off the hook either, for their role in opening up Korea or their abandoning Korea to Japanese rule after World War I. It's a level of national self-indulgence and wallowing and indignation that wouldn't be tolerated by museum-goers in the West.
Conspicuously absent is the story of Americans defeating the Japanese, or the continued role of 30,000 American troops spread over 15 bases, still here after 70 years as guarantors of South Korean liberty. (I do wonder what sort of "independence" it is when you're garrisoned by a foreign power, incapable of confidently defending your own territory from an aggressive neighboring country.) The entire Korean War is glossed over, almost ignored (except a vague, usual, half-hearted pining for unification), and no mention is made of 37,000 Americans dead from that conflict (though, to be sure, they do blame us for allowing the partition of the peninsula between the Soviet and Western spheres, regardless of whether we were in a position to resist Soviet demands). The fact that the Chinese overwhelmingly fought the war on the side of North Korea (with 920,000 war dead), as well as their continued support for the DPRK, is nowhere mentioned. (I suspect because the Japanese will take the abuse quietly and the Chinese won't, and will meet outrage with outrage. Meanwhile, the Japanese inscrutable placidity over Korean indignation, and their failure to engage on Korean terms, just serves to enrage Koreans. One of the Korean Google reviewers actually said that he thought the new displays excused the Japanese and weren't explicit or strident enough, and he preferred the old ones. I wonder what they said, but not really.)
Another simply galling narrative is the idea that things were quite hunky-dory under the grinding feudalism of the Joseon dynasty (and probably all the dynasties preceding it). If left to its own, we are asked to assume, Korea would still be undivided, full of happy peasants and sagely mandarins. (No one imagines they would find themselves in the former class in this alternate history.) This scenario ignores the probable fact that, had the Americans and Japanese never showed up, their Communist neighbors would probably have invaded this peaceable kingdom anyway and the whole peninsula would now be the DPRK, grinding along under a new form of feudalism. Eventually, every country is invaded, and Korea is no exception—just consider that a third of English words are French.
I don't want to be offensive or dismissive, and I don't want to be an apologist for imperialism, whether Japanese or Communist or American. If I'm wrong, challenge me in the comments below and we'll talk. But it seems to this casual observer that Koreans being forever the aggrieved targets of foreign aggression, while protesting their divine singularity among the nations of the earth and the indomitability of their heroic national spirit, makes them look insecure and petty, when there isn't any reason for them to feel that way. They're a major economy, prosperous, and well-regarded in the world. They've got COVID on the ropes! They don't need to prove themselves. However, this narrative is a tool of the government here to hold together a society that might otherwise be fractious, and so in itself is a kind of repression, a flattening of the discourse. It's the same impulse to a curated, selective history in the service of ideology that I find intolerable among Americans, particularly the "America First" crowd. Koreans, please: the red hat doesn't look good on you, either.
Another tut-tuttable curiosity on the museum grounds is the partial remains of the former seat of the Japanese imperial government. When they built it in Seoul, it was sited to loom over the former imperial palace, by which Koreans were predictably offended (even without any impulse to restore the monarchy). (It's hard to understand the Japanese motivation. If they thought to cow Koreans in awe and despair, they don't understand Korean backbone.) After the war, it was the site of the first independent Korean parliaments and presidential inaugurations. This alone should have saved it from demolition. It served as government offices into the 1990s, when it was unilaterally decided by the administration in power to be razed to end the historic insult and free up land for development—despite the ongoing national conversation on what to do with it. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, and the government wanted a nationalistic statement of, again, the indomitability/victimhood of the Korean people. It was historical vandalism as pure domestic propaganda. They could have relocated the building, or left it standing where it was as a reminder, and maybe turned it into the museum that now stands in Cheonan. Instead, it was pulled down and some of the more recognizable architectural remains were relocated to the Cheonan museum, arranged (not very artfully) into pseudo-ruins, to get a little more mileage out of the propaganda stunt. The world recently clutched their collective pearls when the Kim sister had the joint North-South liaison building in Kaesong, but it wasn't the first time Koreans have destroyed a building to make a point.
Look, I feel bad for having outspoken opinions on a history and society not my own, and I can almost hear the chorus of "How dare you?!" in Korean. But with familiarity comes a degree of contempt, and I have been here long enough, and read enough, to turn a jaundiced eye to the politics and political theatre of it. Don't give me a sanitized, dressed-up, Disney-fied story of absolute good against absolute evil, and expect me to swallow it uncritically. I'm an academic, objections are my thing. But I'm not the target audience for this national myth-making, am I? The audience is a domestic one, for domestic political purposes, and I think Koreans in this century should want and demand better from their leaders than to have their brains scrubbed clean of independent or contrary thought.
Coda: This weekend, we went to see the Gakwonsa Buddhist monastery, also just outside Cheonan, which is beautiful if not terribly historic (it was government-built in 1977 on the wearisome theme of Unification). It was surprisingly crawling with Westerners, who unsurprisingly did not acquit themselves of the reputation Americans (accurately) have for being obnoxiously loud and boisterous. (See, I don't even spare my own people.) Ignoring them, I looked around, and saw the wonderful Buddhist architecture I've seen also seen in Japan, Taiwan, and even as far away as Sikkim, in Himalayan east India. The same architecture. The same (excepting Sikkim) Chinese calligraphy. All these nations share a common cultural heritage that makes them at least as alike as they are different. If only they could get past their smoldering grudges and jealousies to realize a constructive oneness between them. If France and Germany could do it, and all of quarrelsome Europe (excepting Britain) can do it, then I have hope for East Asia, too.
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