Please post one paragraph of critical questions and/or analysis on Dower's "Patters of a Race War," Kim's "How Do Abject Bodies Respond?" and/or Kim's "When You Can't Tell Your Friends from 'the Japs.'"

Kim_HowDoAbjectBodiesRespond.pdf

Home >History homework help >Please post one paragraph of critical questions and/or analysis on Dower's "Patters of a Race War," Kim's "How Do Abject Bodies Respond?" and/or Kim's "When You Can't Tell Your Friends from 'the Japs.'"

5 d chul kim

How Do Abject Bodies Respond? Ethnographies of a Dispersed Empire

A fter receiving an appointment in 1915 as professor of human anat-omy in the Keijō Medical College, Kubo Takeshi, a scholar with a doctorate in the same field, devoted his research efforts to the study of “racial anatomy” through analyzing the corpses of Koreans. His findings were published between 1915 and 1922 in twenty- three installments in the Journal of the Chōsen Medical Association under the title “Research Concern- ing the Racial Anatomy of Koreans.” Kubo Takeshi’s voluminous writings repre- sent the earliest extant research into the physical anthropology of Koreans.1

This research, which seems to boast a strong scholarly tone, concluded:

The weight of the skeletons of Koreans is heavier than that of Japa nese. The muscular system of the Japa nese is superior to that of Koreans. The skin and the subcutaneous fat of Koreans are comparatively larger. The digestive and respiratory organs of Koreans are considerably larger, but especially so in the case of the digestive organs. The circulatory organs and central ner vous system of the Japa nese are superior. This result is sensible when one consid- ers the general living conditions and lifestyles of Koreans. The fact that Kore- ans are inactive owes to the weak growth of their muscular systems and the excess of subcutaneous fat. Furthermore, the fact that Koreans consume lots of food that is both coarse and difficult to digest causes me to think that their digestive organs are extremely well developed. The relative smallness of their central ner vous systems and circulatory systems demonstrates that great de- fects exist in their intellectual faculties.2

I first aim to investigate how, following its adoption by the Japa nese Empire, physical anthropology— which through cutting- edge science secured the ani- malistic image of Koreans as “sluggish in their actions, willing to eat any food whatsoever, and as having major intellectual deficiencies”— ultimately influenced colonial and imperial subjects’ perception and understanding of Self and Other. In par tic u lar, with re spect to the issue of race, I intend to discuss the perpetual fear and unease that existed between the Japa nese colonists and the colonized people of Korea. Mechanisms of division, hierarchization, subsumption, and exclusion all served as fundamental conceptual tools in racial studies, an aca- demic arena that sought to demonstrate the homogeneity of each race. Though it was the colonists who deployed these mechanisms, both the colonists and the

<i>The Affect of Difference : Representations of Race in East Asian Empire</i>, edited by Christopher P. Hanscom, and Dennis Washburn, University of Hawaii Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=4537073. Created from ucsc on 2019-05-25 01:58:58.

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Ethnographies of a Dispersed Empire | 109

colonized shared the tensions, unease, and fear thereby generated. I want to stress that this unease and fear presented a “hole” that destroyed the efforts of the ruling powers to establish a “safe society.”3

The development of physical anthropology in Japan was used to objectify co- lonial Korean subjects. This racial outlook, broadly shared by both colonizers and colonized, did not so much strengthen and clarify the bound aries between Japa nese and Koreans as intended as become instead a source of tension and unease that threatened to blur and efface those bound aries. In the analy sis that follows I will examine the anxiety and friction produced by racist sensibilities as depicted in Yŏm Sangsŏp’s novel On the Eve of the Uprising and Kim Sary- ang’s novella Pegasus. These works of fiction not only elaborately portray the stripped- bare bodies of the colonized, continuously abjected under colonial power, but also capture the “hole” of insecurity and fear experienced by the very colonial power that observed and scrutinized those colonized.

Japa nese Physical Anthropology and Koreans Physical anthropology, which sought to determine the relative superiority of the races on the basis of physical traits such as height, skin, eye shape and color, nose and ear shape, skull size, the length and weight of bones, blood type, the size of internal organs, or the appearance of hair and pubic hair dominated Japa nese anthropology after the Taishō period. Kubo Takeshi, who believed in a correla- tion between the size of the central ner vous system or the circulatory organs and intellectual ability, pres ents one example of this trend. Kyoto Imperial Uni- versity’s Kiyono Kenji, one of prewar Japan’s representative anthropologists, headed the Kiyono Anthropology Research Center, which in introducing a new statistical methodology made itself the center of Japa nese anthropological re- search. At the same time, it was extremely influential in laying the scientific groundwork and setting the standard for anthropological research carried out by amateur natu ral historians such as Tsuboi Shōgorō, dubbed Japan’s first an- thropologist.4

It was not until the 1930s that Japa nese research into the physical anthropol- ogy of colonized Koreans began in earnest. The efforts of Imamura Yutaka and Ueda Tsunekichi, who were both professors of anatomy at Keijō Imperial Uni- versity and spearheaded research into the physical anthropology of Koreans (with help from their students), contributed greatly to the development of the discourse concerning the “specific characteristics” of Koreans and to the proj- ect of identifying how they differ from the Japa nese. However, any science claim- ing that the differences between Koreans, Japa nese, and Chinese were intrinsic and biological could not but encounter difficulties.5 A ninety- four- page article titled “Research into the Physical Anthropology of the People of Chosŏn” was published in the Journal of the Chōsen Medical Association in 1934. It presented the results of a nationwide survey of body mea sure ments of Koreans conducted between 1930 and 1932 by the anatomy research group led by Imamura and Ueda at Keijō Imperial University. The authors began the article by mentioning several

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problematic aspects of Kubo Takeshi’s research: they noted that the Koreans Kubo mea sured were drawn from only a select few occupations, especially ki- saeng (female entertainers) and soldiers, and that Kubo’s survey was restricted to a few locales. They also commented that he failed to take “modern mea sure- ments” of living bodies.6 The foregoing points demonstrate that Ueda and Imam- ura operated under the princi ple that it was better to have “more elaborate mea sure ment and quantification of more people in more regions.” This notion had not once been called into question in the whole history of physical anthro- pology. As a result, this extensive article was filled with innumerable data, elab- orate and complex formulae, and “modern calculations” that the average person could not penetrate, all clearly meant to lend the article some sort of scientific gravitas and reliability.

In spite of this vast collection of data, the research team either failed to draw any conclusions or simply drew exceedingly bland ones, such as reiterating the fact that there were indeed “differences” in the mea sure ments of the races. Weak results of this sort filled published articles at the time. For example, when Ueda argued in a 1935 article on the comparative mea sure ments of Koreans and Japa- nese that “Kyoto skulls are very similar to those of Yongsan,” “as a race, Koreans are very close to the Japa nese,” or “ peoples with large bodies came from the Korean peninsula, crossed through Chūgoku, and established themselves in Kinki,”7 one sees the end product of the extensive research efforts of Japa nese anthropologists and anatomists since the Meiji era. For examples of such re- search, we can point to Kubo’s work, to a survey on 2,980 Koreans conducted between 1912 and 1916 by Torii Ryūzō as part of the Chosŏn governor- general’s “source material survey,” 8 or to mea sure ments of Koreans and Manchurians taken by Ueda and the anatomy research group at Keijō Imperial University. However, the general conclusion that “no significant racial difference between the Japa nese and the Koreans exists” seems to render their previous research efforts somewhat meaningless.

We should pay attention to the fact that Ueda always takes “the Japa nese” as the basis of comparison when he claims that “as a race, Koreans are close to the Japa nese.” As is well known, the countless theories about “the native Japa- nese,” as well as the dense research on and debates over the origins of modern Japa nese people, all have the dual goal of creating a homogeneous grouping of “Japa nese people” (or “the Japa nese race”) and proving the particularity (or even superiority) of that same group. Here, the impor tant point is not to demon- strate whether racial difference exists between the Japa nese and Korean or Chi- nese peoples; the point is rather this development itself— the operation of epistemological- political power in positioning someone as Other within a system of knowledge and discourse that constructed the homogeneity of the “Japa nese.” In other words, racism is a system of knowledge and discourse that establishes one group as the object of comparison and observation in order to construct the self- identity of another group. Through the effects of the forms of recognition and practice that arise from within this system, we have the inven- tion of the other race. Accordingly, we should focus less on questions pertain-

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ing to the scientific validity of racial theory and more on the epistemological- political authority that forms its foundation, on the effects of such power, and on the very people who found themselves in the position of the racial Other.

Abject Bodies One can easily see the affinities between physical anthropology and modern bio- politics, given the former’s goal of observing and mea sur ing as many human corpses as pos si ble. Furthermore, physical anthropology functions as a modern ideology of oversight and discipline, considering its foundational belief in the ex- istence of a reciprocal relationship between bodily traits and mental abilities and, consequently, its adoption of the body and mind as an object of control, re- newal, transformation, and modification.

In a world characterized by racism with a scientific basis in physical anthro- pology, all social relationships are reduced to that between the viewer and the viewed. Power and authority emerge from the gaze. Camera lenses, devices for mea sur ing human bodies, and anatomical tools take naked life and stare at it, mea sure it, penetrate it, probe it, and amputate it. The person who stands behind the lens remains unseen. The anatomist who stands above the dissecting table with scalpel in hand is also hidden behind a mask. Only those unsightly, dis- gusting, gruesome, and dangerous “abject bodies” are overtly vis i ble. Bodies placed before a mea sur ing device cannot speak. This goes without saying for corpses. However, even those abject bodies lined up for live mea sure ments (usu- ally under the auspices of the military or the police) are thought of as silent Others. Their bodies are collected, disassembled, mea sured, categorized, and in the end represented by the surveyors. How? And for that matter, why?

As discussed previously, anthropology, as a proj ect that both classifies and hierarchically positions the races, generates the notion of group homogene- ity within a nation- state and offers a narrative about the birth of an “us,” of a “nation.” 9 In order to establish such a narrative, a “them”— that is, the “barbar- ian” or the “uncivilized”— who stands in contrast to “us” must be discovered or in ven ted. Tomiyama Ichirō eloquently explains how and by what necessity the Ainu— the “barbarians” of Hokkaidō— were constructed. According to him, the notion of the barbarian Ainu originated with a theory of Japa nese cannibalism. In 1877 E. S. Morse, an American who strongly influenced Japa nese anthropol- ogy, argued on the basis of results obtained from the excavation of a shell mound that cannibalistic practices existed in ancient Japan. In order to escape this awk- ward predicament, Japa nese anthropology “discovered in the Ainu a stone- age people, presented ‘cannibalistic races’ as the ‘uncivilized’ other, and thereby began to construct the homogeneity of ‘the Japa nese.’ ” In other words, “ ‘the un- civilized’ of the Stone Age became objectified in the Ainu, who were thereafter branded with alterity and presented as ‘uncivilized.’ The Ainu, much like Stone Age remains, were seen as eternally uncivilized persons who had lost any of their own history,” while “ ‘the Japa nese’ were seen as the inheritors of the history of enlightenment.”10

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While the pro cess of entrenching the Ainu in a Stone Age framework and thereby distinguishing between the Japa nese race and other races followed geo- graph i cal bound aries, other methodologies existed as well. For example, the burakumin, outcaste villa gers who have endured discrimination since the Middle Ages, pres ent a similar case. These people did not live in areas far removed from the Japa nese mainland like Hokkaidō or Okinawa. Nevertheless, early Japa nese anthropology categorized them as an alien race or as foreigners, thus pushing the burakumin outside the bound aries of “the Japa nese.” Sakano Tōru explains that “this categorization resulted from the pro cess of re- organ izing people under the category of ‘national subject’ [kokumin] after the end of the feudal order and the concomitant equalization of society.” In other words, the real reason for dif- ferentiating outcastes was the “objection to having the people branded as ‘Eta’ under the previous status system included in the emerging category of ‘us.’ ”11

The above examples demonstrate that the inclusions and exclusions the an- thropological gaze generates do not necessarily follow geo graph i cal lines of division or colonial or imperial bound aries. To be sure, Japa nese anthropology discovered many barbarian and distinct races in the colonized areas and regions subsumed into the expanding territory of the empire; however, social relationships inside the nation- state formed yet another racial boundary. Of course, this is in no way unique to Japa nese anthropology. The birth of the new national people and the genesis of the displaced (nanmin) excluded from that group— those people who, according to Kim Hang, “assumed the role of disclosing the primitive accumulation of colonial rule, who at the root of colo- nial control formed the transcendental basis that made the existence of colonial domination pos si ble”12— was a global phenomenon. The racial categorizations that anthropology creates are thus reflected in the emergence of the categories of the national subject and the refugee.

Who are these “displaced” that anthropology discovered or created? The most marginalized groups of society, including kisaeng (female entertainers or cour- tesans), vagrants, criminals, disfigured persons, persons of mixed blood, those with psychological maladies, and other similar groups, were all placed before the anthropologist’s camera and mea sur ing devices and under the anatomist’s scal- pel. To this, we can add the native and Aboriginal peoples of colonized territo- ries. These people had been rejected, uprooted, and vomited out. I prefer to call them “the abject,” following Julia Kristeva. However, these people were not sim- ply excluded or thrown aside. These people were absolutely necessary for the “viewers” of society to establish their own homogeneity, and in fact their ex- istence was an existence vomited out from the viewers themselves. However, in the same way that the repressed returns, so too do these abject appear before the viewer. How so?

As is commonly known, modern naturalist and realist art fully bloomed in the fertile soils of the imaginative power of modern natu ral science, especially anthropology. The theory of evolution forms the backdrop for this development. Humanity’s new self- understanding— which is to say, anthropology’s rise to

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prominence as a branch of study— would have been impossible without the the- ory of evolution.13 In this world, the author served as the “anatomist of the soul and body” and “vividly described the animalistic nature, the physical strength, and the violent tendencies” of the “ human- beast”—in short, he became a student of anthropology.14

The human- beast, to rephrase in Kristeva’s terms, is an abject; someone who exists as an “in- between,” someone with traits that are “ambiguous,” and some- one who represents a “composite” of vari ous qualities.15 Dirty, disgusting, creepy, and ghastly, the abject is neither a subject nor an “object” that, by standing opposite from me, ultimately guides me toward a world of homogeneity and meaning. As dirty and revolting as fecal matter, urine, pus, blood, or vomit, the abject forms the “border” of my existence. My body, as a living entity, can sur- vive only up to the point at which such toxic substances are released. Only corpses exist on the other side of that border. I live only to the point that I re- lease such filth; thereafter, in the moment at which nothing else remains, my body will have crossed that border. Therefore, “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”16 Corpses are truly the outer limits of the abject.

As mentioned previously, the abject are not objects that lead me toward some sense of homogeneity. Rather, they “disturb identity, system, order.”17 Just as corpses reveal the limits of existence, the abject mark the furthest bound aries of the system. People with ambiguously defined identities must be put forward as beings that manifest the limits of identity. This is the case with criminals who, as their tricks become increasingly vulgar and cruel, assume the qualities of the human- beast and reveal the last and furthest frontier that the system must de- fend. As long as they exist, law and order will not only ceaselessly devolve into disorder, but the system’s weakness will also ever be exposed. For order to exist, then, these nasty by- products must be continuously discharged.

Given the threat posed by the abject, it was imperative that they be located, defined, and ejected— those who stood on the border as the in- betweens, those who presented composites of characteristics from the inside and the outside, and those who shook the foundations of the imperial system and order and its sense of homogeneity. As a result, the indigenous inhabitants of colonies consistently found themselves branded as criminals (or at least, latent criminals) and subse- quently were surveyed, observed, quarantined, and ultimately pushed past the bound aries of society and treated as if they were refuse. The fate of empires hangs on how these individuals are categorized and treated. The colonists focus their gaze relentlessly onto the colonized. The net of this gaze, stitched together from countless categorizations and borders, is constantly thrown over the bodies of the colonized. There is nowhere to flee. Even if one becomes a corpse, the gaze of the colonist still looks on. This is to say nothing of the experiences of the liv- ing. What is one to do? Yŏm Sangsŏp’s On the Eve of the Uprising pres ents one example of a topography or natu ral history that carefully rec ords the conditions of those caught under the net of the gaze.

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On the Eve of the Uprising— from Abject Bodies to Abject Bodies The question of where to find the origin of the gaze that structures this par tic- u lar work continues to pres ent difficulties. Some read it as the introspective gaze of a colonial intellectual who, upon his homecoming, is awakened to the bitterly painful state of the nation. Others point out that the “naturalist” gaze itself—as the protagonist observes his “kind”—is an effect of the internalization of the dis- torted views of the colonizer and reveals the class limitations of the author. However, I do not think these two viewpoints necessarily conflict. At least as far as the gaze is concerned, the narrator cannot be classified as either colonized or colonizer but as both. Literally, he is an in- between, a gray figure with a murky identity. This, of course, has no bearing on the oft- mentioned objectivity of the gaze that emerges in discussions of Yŏm’s fiction. Rather, he radically persists in his own subjectivity as a “gray person”; in his own subjectivity as an abject, ever in danger of being expelled beyond the border. Let us examine how On the Eve of the Uprising unfolds in accordance with this subjective gaze. The following passage merits par tic u lar attention:

As I was traveling from Tokyo to Shimonoseki, I was neither attempting to behave like a Japa nese person, nor, for that matter, was there any need to behave like a Korean—as such, I simply was at ease, going about my busi- ness.18

Of course, the protagonist Yi Inhwa could let go and go about his business with- out having to act like either a Japa nese person or a Korean because his face is indistinguishable from that of a Japa nese person. While “traveling from Tokyo to Shimonoseki”— that is to say, while he was in “Japan proper”— not only was he free from the gaze of others, but he also became a subject gazing at and ob- serving others. In the first scene of the novel, after he receives a tele gram from his hometown and prepares to return, he sits on the Tokyo city tram staring at the surrounding passengers, who have “contorted faces with skin shriveled up from hard work, starvation, and the cold.” He even provides a lengthy exposi- tion of the “practice of surveying those around them,” which is a habit that “all humans have.” (22)19

However, his ability to unilaterally scrutinize others extends only so far. The moment he leaves Japan proper— that is, the moment he enters the waiting room for the connecting boat in Shimonoseki—he is caught in the gaze of a detective who “spontaneously became aware of his presence.” (34) However, Yi Inhwa had no way of knowing that the gaze of this par tic u lar imperial policeman— a gaze focused intently on his outward appearance, which was supposedly indistin- guishable from that of a Japanese— was no ordinary gaze but rather a system- atized gaze attuned to racial differences, developed out of the lengthy and intense examination of the bodies of colonized natives. The imperial police had already, for instance, developed secret guidelines, such as the following, to bet- ter manage abject persons with ambiguous external features:

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1. Their height is no diff er ent from people of Japan. Because of their straight postures, there are few with bent or curvy backs.

2. Their faces are no diff er ent from those of the Japa nese, their hair is smooth and lacks density, there is little hair on their faces, so- called “flat faces” are numerous, and their beards generally appear thin.

3. Tooth decay is infrequent because, from early childhood, they use salt when brushing.20

In 1913 the Department of Security of the Home Ministry, in order to better regulate Koreans (who were often “difficult to distinguish from people of Japan proper”), released a secret document containing forty- six diff er ent guidelines to help determine whether or not someone was Korean. We need not dwell on the question of whether the guidelines worked effectively; rather, we must focus on the fact that this document worked in concert with an anthropological gaze to systematically dig into, cut apart, mea sure, and classify the bodies of colonial subjects. And as long as this was the case, it would seem that Yi Inhwa’s asser- tion that he need not “attempt to behave like a Korean or a Japa nese person” amounted to nothing more than a misapprehension. Indeed, in all of his sub- sequent journeys he finds himself consistently under the vigilant gaze of the police.

Of course, forces other than the police subject Yi Inhwa to their gaze. From the moment he leaves Japan and sets foot on Korean ground, he discovers that both Japa nese and Korean people cast suspicious stares his way. However, Yi too constantly scrutinizes and classifies others. In this sense, On the Eve of the Uprising seems to use the protagonist Yi Inhwa’s paranoid sensitivities to these intersecting gazes to drive the narrative. Here, I want to focus on how that sen- sitivity develops into racial and phrenological descriptions of others.

In a famous scene in the bathing area on the passenger boat, our protagonist sits beside Japa nese passengers and describes their appearances as they converse. He observes the shifting of “large innocent eyes back and forth” in a “dark, rug- ged face” and “large and copper- colored bodies” that call to mind “peasants fresh from the countryside.” Similarly, he classifies people with “predatory eyes” who have a “condescending, imposing manner of speaking, coupled with thin lips” like “a pawnbroker’s middleman or something along those lines.” (35)21 Having been subjected to the gaze of the Japa nese detective shortly beforehand, Yi In- hwa experiences an “undisguised burst of superiority, mingled with inferiority” (47) as he vengefully classifies Japa nese people according to their appearances and the occupations he associates with them. His subsequent travels also clearly demonstrate how these feelings of superiority and inferiority are cast in accor- dance with a phrenological gaze.

Finishing his bath and entering the changing room, Yi Inhwa’s identity as a Ko- rean is revealed by a Korean detective who states that “in my estimation, though he does speak Japa nese fluently, I needn’t inquire into his way of speaking—it is clear that he is a Korean.” Yi subsequently becomes “the recipient of hateful

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stares from many people” and feels his “energy diminish and his shoulders hunch.” (41-42) In sum, as soon as he leaves the Japa nese mainland, where he has “no need to act either as a Japa nese person or a Korean person,” he begins to react with great sensitivity to gazes that distinguish between Koreans and Japa- nese. Arriving at Pusan, the gateway to the colony, he once again encounters the “eyes of an assistant policeman and an assistant gendarme, neither of whom carried their own revolvers.” He stands “hoping and praying that they would take me for Japa nese.” (50)

Naturally, his wishes do not come to fruition. It is not in Tokyo but rather in his own hometown that he is exposed as a “person of Chosŏn.” “Cold sweat trick- led down [his] back,” and he “was at a loss for words, overcome by anxiety and fear.” (51)22 It is only on the train that his hopes materialize ever so briefly. Inside the train, he carefully observes the other passengers in his vicinity and describes their be hav ior. The scene in which he engages a merchant peddling Korean- style hats is of par tic u lar interest here. Yi, who had attracted the suspicion of “inspec- tors and relief officers every time he arrived in the train station,” focuses on the “protruding cheekbones and thick lips that extended outward from the dark face” of this “rural villa ger of approximately 30 years, who wore a protective cov- ering on his hat and tied a towel to his umbrella.” The man carefully inspects Yi’s face as well, out of a “concern whether he was Japa nese or not.” (76) Ulti- mately, it is not the imperial power that mistakes Yi for a Japa nese but a colonial abject who is positioned outside imperial law.

This very hat merchant is an archetypal abject who threatens the system and throws the established order into confusion. In response to Yi’s questioning about why he does not cut his hair, the man answers:

If you want to cut your hair, you must first know how to speak Japa nese and have some knowledge of current affairs. If a person has short hair but can’t speak Japa nese, he’s likely to be harassed even worse by officials and police- man. But if his hair is worn up in a traditional topknot, they let minor offenses pass, because he’s just a yobo. So doesn’t it make more sense not to get a hair- cut? (77)23

In 1902, Mochiji Rokusaburō, who oversaw policy toward indigenous peoples in the Civil Affairs Bureau of the governor- general of Taiwan, stated that “ under the laws of the Japa nese Empire, there is no relationship between the empire and native persons.” They existed entirely outside the law. Mochiji also stated: “While in so cio log i cal terms, the raw savages [seiban] who have not surrendered are human beings, they are analogous to animals from the perspective of interna- tional law.”24 In other words, the hat merchant that Yi Inhwa meets on the train is the seiban of Chosŏn. He is not a seiban who “wore a hat,” “walked with a Western cane,” “cut his hair,” “learned the language of Japan,” and “surrendered” but rather is an “undomesticated” seiban who continues to wear Korean- style hats and manggŏn and never cuts his hair—he is, in fact, a yobo. The laws of the empire do not apply to him. He has been pushed outside the confines of the law and rendered the equivalent of an animal.

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Yi Inhwa witnesses these base and haggard human- beasts on the train ride to Seoul. When the train briefly stops at Taejŏn station, Yi sees four or five crim- inals, bound and tied, under police guard. Though we have no way of knowing what crimes these people have committed, when we consider Yi Inhwa’s tone when observing them it becomes clear that these are not criminals of conscience or po liti cal offenders. “A young married woman, whose general appearance was rather unseemly, what with her hair let out and her jacket stained with blood,” “stared blankly at Yi Inhwa and nodded her head,” as if to say that “she was not ashamed.” Yi says that after seeing these people, “his heart fluttered and his legs shook, as this entire spectacle seemed a recreation of something taken from a book.” (83) As we can see, for him fear and hatred overwhelm feelings of com- passion and pity. When Yi looks upon these rope- bound abject bodies and says he feels as if the scene was like something in a book, he is expressing his sense of shock after witnessing concrete manifestations of the border between the legal and the illegal, as well as forms beyond that border, which the imperial order constantly reinforced and inculcated in the colonized people (and therefore made extremely familiar to them) through vari ous methods, including books. Returning once more to Kristeva, revolutions, liberation movements, or crimes that carry some degree of solemnity, like suicide terrorism, are not reflections of the abject. Cunning, merciless, and shameful crimes are the true abject, for these show the fragility of the law.25 The abject do not, then, emerge as the objects of indoctrination or correction but rather as entities to be thrown outside soci- ety’s bound aries; entities who, though captured by the law, are to be thoroughly excluded; entities who, in the eyes of the law, are the equivalent of animals. It is from this that Yi Inhwa’s fears originate.

Yi Inhwa’s pessimism and despair reach a climax here. Amid a swarm of ab- jects, Yi spits out that famous exclamation: “This is a grave! A grave full of mag- gots!” (83) This exclamation, a condensation of the gruesome real ity of colonial life, points toward the ends of the abject, namely corpses and the filth stream- ing forth from them. Nevertheless, he seeks out both the conditions that give rise to the abject and also a new world where such conditions no longer obtain from the perspective of the theory of evolution. In this sense, his despair never reaches the level of a total denial of the system but targets the interior of the system, which can be maintained only by constantly reproducing and expelling abject bodies:

Every one is a maggot. You and I are maggots. Even inside the grave, the evo- lutionary pro cess continues, not ceasing for even a minute! There will be natu- ral se lection and the strug gle for survival . . . Each of these maggots will soon disintegrate into ele ments, turn into earth . . . Be ruined, utterly! If we could only be over and done with, maybe something better might grow.(83)26

In the last line of the novel, Yi— who has finished his work in Seoul and is pre- paring to return to Tokyo— says of himself: “I am barely escaping from this grave.” (107) Though we cannot know what happens to Yi Inhwa after his return to Tokyo, based on the discussions we have had to this point we cannot help but

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question whether he is able to be at ease without having to worry about whether he should behave like a Japa nese person or a Korean person.

Regarding the many Yi Inhwas of the world, in 1940 Yi Kwangsu wrote the following:

Now, thinking back on things, I am certain that the faces of peninsular Kore- ans have changed over the past thirty years. But it is not only their faces that have changed. The way they dress, the way they walk, their manners, and their thoughts all have changed. Taken together, these things have resulted in their faces changing. It is especially so with young people. Women are even more difficult to recognize.27

In thrusting the figure of the colonized whose faces have changed before the colonizer who demands “assimilation,” Yi Kwangsu shows us the strategy of “mimicry,” what Homi Bhabha describes as “one of the most elusive and effec- tive strategies,” which allows the colonized to look “almost the same, but not quite” to “at once resemble and menace.”28 Be that as it may, we must attend to the fact that the gaze that observes the changed faces of “peninsular Koreans” looks out through the ethnological frame of empire. Rather than subverting the police’s keys to identifying Koreans, his assertion, or perhaps hope, that “one cannot distinguish the faces of Koreans and Japa nese” in actuality mimics them with great accuracy, though in the opposite direction. Moreover, this approach serves to position all those other Yi Inhwas who left the grave- like confines of a colony that overflowed with abject bodies squarely within the ethnological and phrenological imperial frame. Regardless of whether one’s face or outfit changed, as long as one remained within this racial framework one could never escape this net of classifications and bound aries nor could one’s fate as an abject be changed.

This indeed came to pass. Twenty years after Yi Inhwa returned to Tokyo— the same period in which Yi Kwangsu wrote the above words— his exclamation became real ity. The implementation of the Korean Volunteer Soldier System in 1938 and the Conscription System in 1944 pushed countless Yi Inhwas into graves full of maggots. Caught in the finely knit web of countless classifications and bound aries that constituted the racial distribution of the empire, these other Yi Inhwas were disposed of as corpses, the utmost limit of the abject, and thereby sustained the system. And, as is well known, the cost of this was a promise about the lives of those within the bound aries, within the system. The abject bodies of the colony “could live only in death.”29

The Response of the Abject As mentioned above, as faithful companions of modern biopolitics, modern nat- uralist and realist art were born with the discovery of abject bodies. Rey Chow, in an attempt to problematize primitivism through an analy sis of con temporary Chinese cinema, finds in Western “high modernist” art— represented by paint- ers such as Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse, and Modigliani and authors such as James

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Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller— a pro cess in which “Western signifi- cation systems become modernized and high- tech’d by primitivizing others” through the “continual primitivization of non- Western lands and peoples.”30 Chow also points out that none other than anthropology was implicated in these “artistic aspirations.” Furthermore, she not only stresses the West’s exploitation of non- Western peoples but focuses on the “primitivization of the other” that emerged in repre sen ta tions of female sexuality and the fact that such repre sen- ta tions are found not only in the West but also in the writings of authors from the Third World:

In the “third world,” there is a similar movement to primitivize: the primitive materials that are seized upon here are the socially oppressed classes— women, in particular— who then become the predominant components of a new lit- er a ture. It would not be far- fetched to say that modern Chinese lit er a ture turns “modern” precisely by seizing upon the primitive that is the subaltern, the woman, and the child. We would therefore need, once again, to reverse the conventional way literary history is written: not that modern Chinese intel- lectuals become “enlightened” and choose to revolutionize their writing by turning their attention to the oppressed classes; rather, like elite, cultured intellectuals everywhere in the world, they find in the underprivileged a source of fascination that helps to renew, rejuvenate, and “modernize” their own cul- tural production in terms both of subject matter and form.31

The foregoing passage argues that a new modern lit er a ture appeared through the discovery of a source of fascination with and the primitivization of “the un- derprivileged” or, in the terminology of this article, abject bodies, by Western and Third World authors alike. This can be applied to modern Korean lit er a ture as well. In fact, the modern lit er a ture of colonial Korea overflows with repre sen- ta tions of the abject body. Equipped with the imperial anthropological gaze, elite colonial male authors figured all manner of abject bodies— persons of lower social classes, criminals (especially female criminals), deformed persons, the insane, and so on. What has continuously emerged in postcolonial Korean lit- erary history, in its linking of the figuration of such bodies with nationalist discourse, is precisely “the conventional way literary history is written.”

Yi Hyeryŏng, in an article that carefully analyzes how elite males monopo- lized the figuration of female sexuality in colonial fiction, thoroughly overturns the “conventional way literary history is written.” Like Chow, Yi points to the tendency of modern Korean novels to “portray a primitive world, where instinct dominates and the cunning of reason holds no currency, through the lives of those in the lower strata of society.”32 Moreover, Yi brings to light how the trans- formation of these abject bodies into a spectacle occurred primarily through male authors’ repre sen ta tion of female sexuality. Analyzing the appearance of the lower- class femme fatale in works such as Na Tohyang’s “Mulberry” and “Waterwheel,” Kim Tongin’s “Potato,” Hyŏn Chingŏn’s “Fire” and “Chastity and the Price of Medicine”; the presence of the New Woman in Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Love and Crime and Two Minds; and the appearance of the lower- class prostitute in

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works such as Kim Yujŏng’s “Wanderer among the Hills,” “The Kettle,” “Wife,” and “A Sudden Shower,” Yi points out how repeated depictions of the bodies of abject women in Korean fiction from the 1920s and the 1930s are “always pre- sented as entities inextricably bound up with nature and instinct” and how the sexuality of these women is in fact a “mere projection of the repressed desires of male elites.”33

The impor tant point here is that masculinity’s mono poly, through the repre- sen ta tion of female sexuality or the bodies of the lower class, comes into con- tact with the ethnological gaze of imperialism. Yi explains the pro cess by which the abject become naturalized by noting that male elites, who created the lower- class femme fatale in the first place, never appear in the novel itself. The male elites, by standing outside the work and so concealing their gazes, “carry out the function of invisible steel bars, bars that allow the semblance of a state of na- ture at a zoo.” That is, they function much like the anthropologist’s camera or the anatomist’s scalpel. This unseen gaze functions as “the perspective of civili- zation” through which abject bodies accordingly find themselves “fixed as enti- ties more natu ral than nature.”34 Needless to say, this whole pro cess serves as a method of colonial rule—on the one hand, by primitivizing and naturalizing the inhabitants of a colony it alienates and suppresses impulses lodged within itself, and on the other, it imitates an imperialist racism that affirms the position of the “civilized” by fixing its gaze upon “savages” caught in a state of nature. Accord- ingly, “if we recall that the abject became incarnate in women and the cast- offs of society, then we must expose the complicity not only of the colonial rulers, but also of the colonized male elite.”35

I completely agree with the foregoing analyses provided by Rey Chow and Yi Hyeryŏng. At the same time, I want to propose one further question: Are abject bodies entities that are always only made vis i ble? If not, how might these bod- ies, ever on the opposite side of the camera lens or maintaining silence under the scalpel of the anatomist, respond to the gaze of the observer? That is, how might they reverse the camera lenses and scalpels that observe, mea sure, cut open, and dissect? How can they expose the gaze of their observers? Further- more, how can they disturb a system that reinforces the borderline of its own internal identity by constantly pushing the abject outside that boundary? How can the gaze upon abject bodies be scattered?

My goal here is not to discover an opportunity for positive, active subject for- mation in the appearance of abject bodies and thereby to group them under some alternate category of self- identity. There is nothing the abject bodies can do when placed before the gaze of authority. However, as we see in Torii Ryūzō’s photo graph from Manchuria, the abject pictured therein reveals, in a completely unexpected and unintended manner, the existence of the unseen gaze that frames this racial exhibition. It momentarily evokes for the spectator the “in- visible steel bars” of the zoo. If the violent gaze targeting the abject ever were to display a crack, even if only microscopically, it likely begins with this moment of realization (fig. 5.1).

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I want to focus on this moment. The abject, which elicit nausea and disgust, are things that I have pushed and spat out, that I have eliminated from myself in order to establish my own identity. Nevertheless—or rather, precisely for this reason— they stand constantly between two borders, and I am constantly ex- posed to the risk of contamination. Though pushed outside the border through stigmatization and classification, their very existence has the capacity to mark that boundary, a capacity without which the system would be absolutely unable to subsist. Yet at the same time they are contagions— germ carriers that can or will perforate that system (or that system’s self- identity). In short, they are sub- sumed in their exclusion and excluded in their subsumption. By being excluded, they uphold the system, but the very moment (point) they begin to both threaten the system and uphold it is the moment (point) when an equivalence between

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Figure 5.1. In this photo graph taken by Torii Ryūzō, an el derly person shields his face as he clasps his hands together. According to an explanation provided by the Tokyo University Museum, “At the time, one of the most difficult aspects of anthropological surveys was the fact that people would often run away out of fear of having their picture taken. This el derly person, as well, likely raised his hand due to fear of being photographed.” The subconscious reaction of the abject before the camera lens reveals the existence of the people on the opposite side of the lens and thereby momentarily unsettles the boundary between the viewer and the viewed. We must turn our attention to the moment when vio lence begins— which is to say, the moment when these disturbances begin. In my view, this image seems to symbolize this moment. Source: Tokyo University Museum Database.

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exclusion and inclusion emerges— the moment (point) the abject is born. More- over, this moment (point) heralds the birth of the apprehension and fear shared by the system and the abject. Ultimately, the abject both stands beyond the boundary line and marks that boundary, existing within the moment of appre- hension and fear. Without it, there would be no boundary. Because of its exis- tence, the system is stabilized, but at the same time it is also always exposed to instability.

The response of the abject also emerges at this moment (point). Small ges- tures that may be seen or may go unseen, covert glances, an undomesticated roughness, an interior craftiness that others cannot discern, a silence and ex- pressionlessness that incites unease, strange signs of disquiet— these sorts of things represent what the abject, trapped by invisible steel bars, can do or show. However, that sort of ambiguity and lack of transparency can perplex and dis- quiet onlookers. Yi Yŏngjae, in an analy sis of The Volunteer (1941), a propaganda film shot during the Pacific War, discusses how the “scowling expressionless- ness” of colonized peoples confuses and perplexes the colonizers.36 According to Yi, the “uniform expressionlessness seen in the scowling faces of the actors straddled the line between laughing and crying” and in its indecipherability presented Japa nese movie critics with difficulty. In my view, this expressionless- ness, which dominates the whole of the symbolic space of the colony, pres ents one mode of response from abject bodies.

Figure 5.2. The black hole of expressionless that completely devours the gaze of the viewer. Anxiety is induced when the gaze of the colonizer is distorted in reflection when coming up against the (image of) the bodies of “ human- beasts.” Source: Tokyo University Museum Database.

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This sort of reaction completely swallows the gaze of the viewer, much in the same way that a black hole devours light. Before that black hole of expression- lessness, the gaze of the viewer is thrown into confusion while the appearance of the photographed subject is scattered. For example, what of the following case?

On the exterior, these people may seem indifferent— yet, whence their menacing stares, deeply suspicious glances, lips struggling to conceal mock- ing smiles, sluggish deportment, traces of dark shadows of doubt, and distrust of the Karak people? This is hardly a sign of powerlessness, but rather a method of resistance— and one need not be a statesman of Silla to know this.37

This passage from Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s Marriage of the Peoples (1945)— a piece of national- policy fiction (kukch’aek sosŏl) written in Japa nese that obliquely advo- cates for the ideal of the Greater East Asian Co- Prosperity Sphere through its repre sen ta tion of Silla’s unification of the Three Kingdoms— depicts the distur- bance of the colonizer’s gaze upon the colonized, as seen earlier. When confronted with the “menacing stares, deeply suspicious glances, lips struggling to conceal mocking smiles, sluggish deportment” and the undomesticated bodies of the human- beasts, the gaze of the colonizer becomes both scattered and confused.

Pegasus— “Blurry Figures, Malicious Laughter” A pioneering description of this scattered gaze may be found in Kim Saryang’s Pegasus. Before touching on the novel’s content, I want to call attention to the fact that the social status and developmental history of both the author and the novel reflect those of the archetypal abject. Kim Saryang’s name repeat- edly appears in debates over the identity of Korean lit er a ture, much like Chang Hyŏkchu, the first Korean author to debut in Japa nese writing. During the colo- nial period, Chang Hyŏkchu, Kim Saryang, and both authors’ Japanese- language novels were considered ambiguous entities existing in an ambiguous space be- tween Korean and Japa nese lit er a ture and therefore, were ostracized.38 In these novels, imperial authors not only gained a taste of the odd exoticism generated by a distant colonial Aboriginality but also expressed their sense of superiority (with a mix of scorn and praise)39 over the colonial natives’ fumbling attempts to mimic the imperial language. In effect, this shows how Kim’s and Chang’s novels were seen as heterogeneous, positioned on the fringes of Japa nese lit er a- ture. At the same time, their novels were pushed outside the bounds of Korean lit er a ture.40 Moreover, in postcolonial South and North Korea, they have either been forgotten or branded sell- outs, criminals, traitors, or collaborationists. These two were abjects who stood on the borders of existence and threw identi- ties into confusion and who assumed the function (or, who had to assume the function) of strengthening internal homogeneity by being pushed outside pre- dominant social bound aries.

Let us consider one further example. In 1987, North Korea’s Munye Publish- ing Com pany assembled the works of Kim Saryang as part of an effort to reframe

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him as a patriotic revolutionary author. In the introduction to the collection, a North Korean critic provides the following commentary on Into the Light, one of Kim Saryang’s representative works: “Although one cannot deny that the [book] pres ents the plight of the Korean people,” the shortcoming of the novel actually consists in its treatment of “the prob lems of children of mixed blood.”

This par tic u lar work’s limitations are seen in the fact that the mixed- blooded adolescent Haruo is established as the central matter of concern. It is not pos- si ble to develop a portrait of the destiny of the ill- fated Korean nation through such a prob lem set. Why? The fate of the Korean nation is a matter pertain- ing to Koreans, who have endured great oppression and exploitation at the hands of Imperial Japan— not to a mixed- blood child like Haruo.41

In the context of a discourse that attempts to rehabilitate Kim Saryang as a revo- lutionary patriot, there is no place for a child of mixed blood. A child of mixed blood pres ents an archetypal abject that muddies the purity of blood and the identity of the nation. Therefore, in treating the issue of the “fate of the Korean nation” through the lens of a child of mixed blood, Kim Saryang himself assumes the position of an abject.

In this regard, the name of the protagonist in Pegasus, Genryu (K. Hyŏllyong), merits par tic u lar attention. As opposed to the names of the Japa nese and the Koreans who appear in this book— those names with “clear identities” such as Tanaka, Omura, Yi Myŏngsik, and Mun So’ok— the name “Genryu” is extremely ambiguous and confusing. One finds it difficult to determine whether the per- son is a Korean or a Japa nese person by his name alone. Genryu could be either; however, what ever the answer, the name still carries an odd feeling. The very name Hyŏllyong— which feels as though it lacks a clear definition, in that it could be one thing or the other, or perhaps neither— exemplifies aspects of abject ex- istence, of an entity with a “mixed- blood” background.

The novel begins with a description of the novelist Hyŏllyong walking dizzily toward “the street most bustling with Japa nese people in all of the capital city” after spending the night in the red- light district.42 Words like “tick,” “bedbug,” “young rat,” “trash,” and “stray dog” describe this intellectual male writer (who carries a sexually transmitted disease and walks pigeon- toed through the streets). All such words are used repeatedly when calling attention to this char- acter with a sinister personality disorder. When one considers the prevalent use of women and the lower class in colonial novels to describe abject bodies, the debased repre sen ta tion of this elite intellectual male seems without pre ce dent.

Therefore, Hyŏllyong seems rather diff er ent from all of the abject seen to this point. He is not a native who devours the gaze of the rulers with a cold and stark expressionlessness. He bears no resemblance to downtrodden lower- class folk who “manifest themselves not through language, but through their bodies.” Rather, he bears greater resemblance to a Frankenstein- made monster who, in his ability to speak the language of the rulers, becomes difficult to treat.43 This “monster” that “cuts his hair, speaks Japa nese, and has knowledge of current af-

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fairs,” which the hat merchant spoke of in On the Eve of the Uprising, has no concern for the gazes cast upon him and first speaks of himself as a heap of gar- bage or a bedbug. However, the hateful and scornful looks cast on his strange be hav ior are often scattered or refracted in unexpected directions.

The reason why Korean literati “hate and exclude him as if he were some hor- rible thing like a bedbug” has not only to do with the fact that he exhibits major personality flaws, such as lying, boasting, and other strange be hav iors, but even more with the fact that he continuously speaks without care or caution, saying things like: “Writing in the Korean language disgusts me. The Korean language should go eat shit. It is simply a talisman of destruction.” (253) For this reason, “Korean literati banded together and forced him outside the cultured world.” (238) Once he is pushed outside this boundary, those on the inside find “soli- darity.” The interior is, of course, “Korean culture.” The critic Yi Myŏngsik, in a gathering dedicated to criticizing the “Hyŏllyong faction,” fulminates against Hyŏllyong as he strongly decries the deplorable state of literary production in the Korean language.44 Hyŏllyong sneers at Yi Myŏngsik, who in response grabs a plate and throws it at him. Even though Hyŏllyong is hit on the head and falls backward, he continues giggling, and Yi Myŏngsik is subsequently imprisoned for assault.

Nonetheless, we must ask: Who was chastising whom? Who cast whom out? Are Yi Myŏngsik and Hyŏllyong truly diff er ent types of figures? Can we not read Yi Myŏngsik as some sort of superego while reading Hyŏllyong as some sort of id? Unlike Hyŏllyong, who is consistently described with generous amounts of sarcasm, humor, and irony, Yi Myŏngsik is described with a rigid, formulaic, and argumentative style of writing. After Yi briefly appears in and dis appears from the novel, Hyŏllyong’s self- despairing wildness, much like a horse without its reins, fills the absence Yi has left. We can read this abject figure much like an id that has escaped the control of the superego. However, if so, whose “id” is this?

This abject, who “has been abandoned by the Koreans” and would “have no choice but to die in the streets” (259) if also abandoned by the Japa nese, alter- nately behaves in a clingy manner, begs, displays anger, jeers, threatens, flees, or squirms when confronting his observers. As a result of this struggling, the gaze upon the subject wavers and generates unintended reflections. Consider the fol- lowing example. Hyŏllyong becomes the object of hatred from Yi Myŏngsik and his colleagues, who strongly support the notion that “Korean lit er a ture has a dis- tinct identity.” However, when one realizes Kim Saryang’s personal history of activity in the world of Tokyo letters and considers that many of the statements made by Yi Myŏngsik in the novel directly reference statements appearing in other Kim Saryang works, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine the meaning of the dispute between Hyŏllyong and Yi Myŏngsik. In this regard, how might one best classify the “Korean literati,” who branded Hyŏllyong a “tick on Korean culture” and deci ded to exclude him from their world? These literati, ever involved in a flattery competition to “pres ent themselves as the representatives of Korean lit er a ture on the occasion of a visit from some reasonably well- known

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figure from the Japa nese art scene,” are no diff er ent from Hyŏllyong, who spends his day gasping and panting, wandering in search of authors from the Japa nese mainland. They are simply lodged in a competition over patriotic fervor. In the end, as the scornful gazes cast on Hyŏllyong grow ever stronger, the Korean li- terati ultimately come to cast similar gazes on themselves.

Hyŏllyong’s relationships with Japa nese intellectuals pres ent one further case worthy of examination. Due to a series of incidents, Hyŏllyong finds himself trembling with fear as Omura, “the head man of a proj ect to publish a magazine on current affairs that aims to strengthen the patriotic solidarity of the Korean people,” demands that he temporarily enter a temple and improve his be hav ior. Hyŏllyong, who thinks that he will “certainly die in the streets if Omura aban- dons him,” spends the entire day in Chongno and Honmachi searching out Tanaka, a Japa nese author from Japan, who he believes will help rescue him. While observing the harried wanderings of this pitiable abject, we find that he eventually meets the power ful people from Japan whom he so desperately sought. It goes without saying that these Japa nese people view Hyŏllyong as if he were an insect. At the same time, one sees their ignorance, arrogance, phoniness, and vanity in their treatment of Hyŏllyong. For example, Professor Tsunoi, who held a chair at a “State Professional School,” claimed that “to be a Korean youth is to belong to a clan [choksok] that, without exception, has a cowardly mettle, a highly skewed temper, a shameless disposition, and a strong proclivity for factionalism.” (270) Yet according to the speaker, he “is just one of many scholars who came to Chosŏn for the purpose of earning money” and therefore “can be considered a Japa nese Hyŏllyong.” (268) Then there is Tanaka, who landed in Chosŏn “follow- ing an excursion in Manchuria, where he concluded that he might be able to re- brand himself and start a new line of work in Korea.” (269) After listening to Hyŏllyong’s lengthy exposition concerning “how he, when encountering Japa- nese, out of a sense of mean- spiritedness, could not suffer the meeting without shooting off a long string of Korean- style insults,” (270) Tanaka finds himself very moved. He then experiences a profound internal happiness as he says to himself: “It is indeed true that one can only write imperial lit er a ture if one is completely confined to Japan. But here, one sees the sufferings of continental people . . . So it is deci ded. Japan must be made to know the self- reflections of Korean intellectuals . . . Those who say that the Chinese cannot be known are incomparably foolish. I came to know Koreans in just two days—at such a pace, the Chinese can then be known in four.” (271) Fi nally, we find that Omura, after instructing Hyŏllyong that he should “carefully study the signs of the times,” is truly the type of person who “struts about excitedly, moved by the eloquence of his own speech.” (273)

These are impor tant moments, when the hateful and scornful gazes cast upon the abject Hyŏllyong suddenly reflect back onto the appearances of the gazers, causing them to realize that they are little diff er ent from the people they observe. The author captures this with great descriptive precision. Consequently, many figures emerge as targets of derision and exclusion. In addition to Hyŏllyong, we can include the literati, as well Korean culture and Korean cultural identity,

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all of which cast gazes onto Hyŏllyong. We can also include patriotism, impe- rial lit er a ture, and the Japan and Korea as One policy, not to mention the Japa- nese literati and the Japa nese themselves. The following scene depicts the sud- denly flustered appearance of Tanaka— who had previously observed Hyŏllyong with the demeanor of one “conducting a survey of the Korean people”— and the origins of his reaction:

Hyŏllyong, wondering if the time was right, ran to the side of Tanaka, pant- ing.

“Mr. Tanaka.”

Hyŏllyong spoke in a grave tone with Tanaka, his voice caught in his throat.

“Please ask a favor of Mr. Omura for me. Please convince him not to send me to the temple. Please!”

Listening to his voice tremble with such passionate sadness, Tanaka found himself caught off guard, staring Hyŏllyong straight in the face. Suddenly, Hyŏllyong’s figure, which was so hardened that it gave one goose bumps, be- came scattered, and he began to laugh wryly. (275–276)

This colonist, who had “surveyed and observed the Korean people,” feels both confusion and surprise the moment he is confronted with the sudden disarray and malicious laughter of the object of his observations. The monster who can speak the language of the colonial rulers is no longer a noble savage but a source of gloom, discomfort, and embarrassment. Caught in the act of looking, the ob- server’s gaze becomes jarred, and the form of his object becomes distorted when the monster (who is “fixed as an entity more natu ral than nature”) begins to laugh and look back at him. Tanaka may even fi nally recognize the presence of the “unseen steel bars” between himself and his target. In other words, he likely feels confused after realizing that a long- suppressed part of himself has appeared on the other side of those unseen steel bars.

What ever becomes of this abject and his “malicious laughter”? After all his efforts yield no results, he begins to shout, “I must die! Wedge me between a car and a train and kill me as with a bomb!”— and, just as in the first scene of the novel, he is left wandering the alleys of the red- light district of Shinmachi. He feels suffocated and surrounded by the people proceeding to Shinto worship, who are comprised of “an endless line of gaiter- wearing middle school students and professional students, followed by teachers wearing khaki- colored clothing, not to mention people from newspapers or magazine offices, or even literati with acquaintances.” Hyŏllyong wanders through the labyrinthine alleyways as he hallucinates tens of thousands of people shouting “Senjin! Senjin!” at him, forc- ing him to shout in response, “I am not a Senjin! I am not a Senjin!”

“Please rescue me, a man of Japan— rescue me!”

He cried out as he panted for breath. Then, he ran to a diff er ent house and knocked on the door.

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“Please open up! Please allow me, a Japa nese man, to come inside!”

Again he began to run. He knocked on the door.

“I am not a Senjin! I am Kennogami Ryūnosuke, Ryūnosuke! Please allow me inside!” (281)

Having been thrown outside the bound aries, this abject man boldly invokes a sacred symbol of self- identity (Ryūnosuke) from the world within those bound- aries and demands to be let inside. He knows that Pegasus can only be born if Medusa is killed. Therefore, he passionately wails that the “Senjin” has died and that he can become a “Japa nese man.” As we saw with many of the other colo- nial abjects above, he too can “live only in death.”

Conclusion Where does vio lence begin? Vio lence is a basic condition of all living things. If life is a product of vio lence, we must focus our attention not on eliminating it but on the conditions under which it materializes, on “ those moments where actors experience a looming presentiment of vio lence.” 45 When we speculate on the sort of vio lence that emerges and is actualized in everyday life— rather than the vio lence of states of exception and emergency—we begin to under- stand how the vio lence of colonialism continues well after colonialism’s po liti- cal end and how re sis tance to colonialist vio lence easily transforms into the same sort of vio lence.

If we capture the very first moment that vio lence materializes, we can also discern the moment when re sis tance to vio lence begins (or perhaps, must begin). In the first moment of contact with the other, signs of vio lence begin to flicker. We must direct our attention, then, not to the scenes of massacre or slaughter— the result of the colossal bursting forth of these signs of vio lence— but rather to the place where these signs originate. Only by standing in that place can we stop “speaking on behalf of the dead” and start “letting the dead speak for themselves.” 46 How is the speech of the dead to be understood?

Can we even begin to understand the meanings conveyed by the menacing stares, deeply suspicious glances, lips struggling to conceal mocking smiles, and sluggish deportment47 of these human- beasts? Can we read in that expressionlessness— the black hole that devours the gaze of the master— the po- tential to produce small fissures in a system of vio lence? Can we detect traces of microscopic contagions spread by those “monsters,” ventriloquists who “speak two languages with one mouth?” 48 To put it differently, the purpose here is not to focus on a “field of active potential, as with acts of revolutionary overthrow or disobedience” but rather on the po liti cal significance of minor or even unin- tended “transgressions.” 49 If the modern nation- state’s systems of oversight and discipline newly mold the bodies and senses of its citizens, the possibility of “vio- lations” of discipline remains “ever- pres ent in their lives and self- formation.”50 If we turn our eyes, then, toward these minor transgressions as a “sort of criti-

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cal point” that “perforates the unjust mono poly system of the state”— and upon the slight fever or perhaps a certain “sorrow” arising from the anxiety the trans- gressor feels at that moment—we can perhaps find some point at which the system of vio lence is thrown into disorder. In other words, “in order to observe these critical points— indistinct and difficult to properly grasp—we must care- fully examine the significance of these tepid or sporadic transgressions, and perhaps that fever spread through the body of a transgressor of humble appear- ance.”51 To reflect on vio lence, to search for the point at which these cracks emerge, is to turn our ears to things that are difficult to hear and our eyes to things that are difficult to see. In this regard, we may simply be anthropologists of another sort.

Notes This chapter was translated from the Korean by Matthew Lauer. 1. The mea sure ments of the bodies of Koreans completed in 1887 by Koike Masanao (a

Japa nese army surgeon stationed in Pusan who examined the bodies of seventy- five Kore- ans between the ages of twenty and fifty) is thought to be the first example of such research. However, the rec ords of this research are not extant. See Kohama Mototsugu, “Chōsenjin no seitei keisoku” (Bodily mea sure ments of Koreans), in Lectures on Anthropology and Archae- ology, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Yuzankaku: 1938). The following year, in 1888, Koganei Yoshikiyo pre- sented results from his mea sure ments of the skulls of four Koreans. See Yutaka Imamura, “Chōsenjin no taishitsu jinruigaku ni kansuru bunken mokuroku” (Cata log of documents pertaining to the physical anthropology of Koreans), in Lectures on Anthropology and Ar- chaeology, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Yuzankaku: 1938). When one considers that the first Japa nese an- thropological society was formed in 1884 and that the first anthropological journal (Journal of the Tokyo Anthropological Association) was printed in 1886, one realizes that research into the physical anthropology of Koreans began at a rather early point in time. For recent re- search into Kubo Takeshi, see Hoeŭn Kim, “Anatomically Speaking: The Kubo Incident and the Paradox of Race in Colonial Korea,” in Race and Racism in Modern East Asia (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013).

2. Ibid., 85. 3. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 4. For a thorough explanation of the development of prewar Japa nese anthropology, see

Sakano Tōru, Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha, 1884–1952 nen (Anthropologists and imperial Japan, 1884–1952) (Tōkyō: Keisō Shobō, 2005); and “Kiyono Kenji no nihon jinshuron” (Kiyono Kenji’s theory of Japa nese race), History of Science— Philosophy of Science 11 (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1993). In addition, for in- depth analy sis of the relationship between the his- tory of anthropology and colonialism, see Tomiyama Ichirō, “The Birth of the Citizen and ‘The Japa nese Race,’ ” in Thought 845; Takezawa Yasuko, Jinshu gainen no fuhensei o tou (An inquiry into the universality of the concept of race) (Kyoto: Jimbun Shoin: 2005); Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Shisō kadai toshite no ajia (Asia as a conceptual prob lem) (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 2001); Tessa Morris- Suzuki, “Ethnic Engineering, Scientific Racism and Public Opinions Surveys in Mid- century Japan,” positions 8 (2000): 499–529.

5. The methodological inversion of an ethnology that first establishes the conceptual catego- ries of “Koreans” and “Japa nese” and then defines them as “races” with basic biological traits on the grounds of body mea sure ments derived from those initial categories calls the scientific value of this scholarship into question. The 272 research articles written on the physical

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anthropology of Koreans since 1938 plainly display the futility of such an approach. See Imam- ura Yutaka, “Chōsenjin no taishitsu jinruigaku ni kansuru bunken mokuroku.”

6. Arase Susumu, “Chōsenjin no taishitsu jinruigaku teki kenkyū” (Research into the phys- ical anthropology of the people of Chōsen), in Journal of the Chōsen Medical Association 24, no. 1 (1934): 60.

7. Ueda Tsunekichi, “Chōsenjin to nihonjin to no taishitsu hikaku” (A comparison of the bodies of Koreans and Japa nese), in Nihon minzoku (The Japa nese race) (Tokyo: Iwanami Sho- ten: 1935).

8. For a treatment of Torii Ryūzō’s “source material survey” and the body mea sure ments of Koreans taken by Japa nese anthropologists, see Sŏgyŏng Ch’oe, “Ilche ŭi ‘Chosŏn in sinch’e e taehan singminji chŏk sisŏn” (The Japa nese Empire’s colonial gaze onto the bodies of the ‘ People of Chosŏn’) (Chuncheon, South Korea: Institute of Japa nese Studies, Hallym Univer- sity, 2004). As part of this research, Torii collected around thirty- eight thousand photos of the customs and bodies of Koreans. These photos are now stored in the National Museum of Korea.

9. Sakano, Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha. 10. Tomiyama, Birth of the Citizen, 43. 11. Sakano, Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha, 37. 12. Hang Kim, “The Sovereignty of Citizens and Partisan Publicness— A Reinterpretation of

Before the March First Movement” (K. Inmin chugwŏn kwa p’arŭt’ijan konggongsŏng— ‘Mansejŏn’ chaedokhae), The Shape of Thought, the Alleyway Entrance Author: In Search of the New Lit er a ture of Yŏm Sangsŏp (K. Sasang ŭi hyŏnsang, pyŏngmun ŭi chakka: Saeroun yŏm sangsŏp ŭi munhak ŭl ch’ajasŏ) (academic conference, Acad emy of East Asian Studies, Sŏnggyun’gwan University, January 17, 2013– January 18, 2013).

13. However, here we must draw a strong distinction between Darwin’s theory of evolution and Spencer’s theory of social evolution (social Darwinism). Darwin denied any and all at- tempts to find a force of “internal necessity” in the timeline of evolution. Conversely, social Darwinism grafted the concept of “time as a phase in the march toward civilization” or “time as initiating and ‘completing’ the pro cess of evolution” onto the theory of evolution. In this way, social Darwinism transformed Darwin’s theory into a tool and thereby discovered a scientific framework that placed the development of society and the ideology of pro gress within time. It goes without saying that anthropology, as a discipline, was established with the help of this framework. For a more thorough explanation of this point, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

14. Chongyŏn Hwang, “Naturalism and Beyond,” in Shape of Thought, the Alleyway En- trance Author.

15. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1984), 4.

16. Ibid., 3. 17. Ibid., 4. 18. Yŏm Sangsŏp, On the Eve of the Uprising, in Yŏm sangsŏp chŏnjip (The complete works

of Yŏm Sangsŏp), vol. 1 (Seoul: Minŭmsa: 1987), 47. Quotations are taken from this original text and from this point on will be cited in- text with page numbers in parentheses. The En glish translations here are generally based on the version found in Sunyoung Park’s “On the Eve of the Uprising,” in On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Studies from Colonial Korea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2010), 5–114. I have made changes where appropriate, including the addition of passages from the original omitted in the translation. When I have relied on Park’s translation I cite the page number in endnotes.

19. Park, “Eve of the Uprising,” 16.

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20. Kyŏngsik Pak, ed., Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei (Collected documents con- cerning Koreans residing in Japan), vol. 1 (Tokyo: San- ichi Shobō 1975), 28.

21. Park, “Eve of the Uprising,” 30. 22. Ibid., 47–48. 23. Ibid., 78–79. 24. Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010),

45–46. 25. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 26. Park, “Eve of the Uprising,” 85–86. 27. Yi Kwangsu, “Kao ga kawaru” ( Faces have changed), in Spring and Autumn Arts, 1940, 11;

Yi Kyŏnghun, The Complete Pro- Japanese Works of Ch’unwŏn Yi Kwangsu (K. Ch’unwŏn Yi Kwangsu ch’inilmunhak chŏnjip), vol. 21 (Seoul: P’yŏngminsa, 1995), 140–141.

28. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, trans. Na Pyŏngch’ŏl (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2002). Translation taken from The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 122–123.

29. Hang Kim, The Threshold of Imperial Japan (J. Teikoku nihon no iki) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2010).

30. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Con temporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 20.

31. Ibid., 21. 32. Hyeryŏng Yi, “Tongmulwŏn ŭi mihak” (The aesthetics of the zoo), in Han’guk sosŏl kwa

kolsanghak chŏk t’aja tŭl (Korean fiction and the phrenological other) (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2007), 38.

33. Ibid., 31. 34. Ibid., 38. 35. Ibid., 41. 36. Yŏngjae Yi, “Cheguk ilbon ŭi chosŏn yŏnghwa” (Korean films under imperial Japan), in

Hyŏnsil munhwa (Realist culture) (Seoul: Yŏngu, 2008), 61. 37. Chaesŏ Ch’oe, Minjok ŭi kyŏrhon (The marriage of the peoples), in Ch’oe chaesŏ ilbonŏ

sosŏl chip (The collected Japanese- language fiction of Ch’oe Chaesŏ), trans. Yi Hyejin (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2012), 235.

38. For an analy sis of how Chang Hyŏkchu and Kim Saryang have been represented in the history of modern Korean lit er a ture, see Chul Kim, “Tu gae ŭi kŏul— minjok tamnon ŭi chah- wasang kŭrigi” (Two mirrors: Drawing a self- portrait of nationalist discourse), in Singminji rŭl angosŏ (Embracing colonialism) (Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2009). Kwŏn Nayŏng has also used the con- cept of the abject to analyze the “disquiet” experienced by imperial critics because of Kim Saryang’s use of two languages. According to Kwŏn, the imperial critics who nominated Kim Saryang for the Akutagawa Prize attempted to expand the formal bound aries of Japa nese lit er- a ture by assimilating colonial lit er a ture, even though they sensed the possibility that colonial lit er a ture could contaminate the “purity” of Japa nese lit er a ture. My own analy sis in this article is highly indebted to Kwŏn’s analy sis of this “two- faced gesture, that both includes and ex- cludes colonial authors” and the sense of disquiet that it generated. See Nayŏng Kwŏn, “Cheguk, minjok, kŭrigo sosuja chakka” (Empire, nation, and minority authors), in Han’guk munhak yŏn’gu (Korean lit er a ture) 37 (2009).

39. Frantz Fanon has analyzed the scorn shown to a black man who asks for a banana in broken French and the hypocritical racist praise that “turns a black man who quotes Montes- quieu into an exceptional case.” See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Sŏkho Yi (Seoul: In’gan sarang, 1998).

40. In a special report from August 1936 in the magazine Samch’ŏlli, in which Korean lit er a- ture is defined as “writing in the Korean language, by Koreans, for Koreans,” it is concluded

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that “the work that Chang Hyŏkchu presented in Tokyo literary circles is not Korean lit er a- ture.” For a more detailed explanation, see Chul Kim, “Tu gae ŭi kŏul.”

41. Hyŏngjun Chang, “Chakka kim saryang kwa kŭ ŭi munhak” (The author Kim Saryang and his work), in Kim saryang chakp’um chip (The collected works of Kim Saryang) (P’yŏngyang: Munye, 1987), 10. This par tic u lar review’s commentary that “[the book] cannot appropriately treat the fate of the Korean nation” is in fact a retort to the review of Sato Haruo made for the Akutagawa Prize, which claimed that the book “fully treated the pitiable fate of the Korean nation.” According to Kwŏn Nayŏng, Sato Haruo’s review clearly displays both the arrogance of the imperial literati— who continuously demanded that colonial authors write “work that represents the colony and pres ents a foreign flavor”— and also something of the co- lonial consciousness. See Kwŏn, “Cheguk, minjok.” However, when the North Korean critic responded to Sato Haruo by saying that “the fate of the nation cannot be depicted through a ‘child of mixed blood,’ ” he also fully adopted the racism of the old empire.

42. Saryang Kim, Tenma (Pegasus), in Kim Saryang zenshū (The collected works of Kim Sary- ang), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsa, 1973). For an En glish translation of this novel, see Christina Yi, Tenma, in Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japa nese Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2013). The pages numbers used for quotations from this book are from the version in the Korean translation and from this point on are cited in- text in parentheses.

43. Yi, “Tongmulwŏn ŭi mihak,” 18. 44. On this occasion, Yi Myŏngsik said, “For the benefit of the work of people who either do

not enjoy writing in Japa nese or simply cannot, we must or ga nize a translation ser vice with the support and funding of Japa nese who sympathize with this situation. The notion that one must either write in Japa nese, or not at all, dumbfounds me.” These words appear to reflect other statements by Kim Saryang in September 1940 in Chōsen Bunka Tsushin (Korean culture news).

45. Tomiyama Ichirō, Bōryoku no yokan (Premonitions of vio lence), trans. Sŏgwŏn Song (Seoul: Greenbee, 2009).

46. See Tomiyama Ichirō, Memories of the Battlefield (J. Senjō no kioku, K. Chŏnjang ŭi kiŏk), trans. Im Sŏngmo (Seoul: Isan, 2002).

47. See note 41. 48. Chul Kim, Pokhwasulsa tŭl (The ventriloquists) (Seoul: Moonji, 2008). 49. Yerim Kim, “Kukka wa simin ŭi pam— kyŏngch’al kukka ŭi yagyŏng, simin ŭi yŏhaeng”

(Night of citizens and the state— the night watch of the police state, and the nighttime travels of citizens), in Hyŏndae munhak ŭi yŏn’gu (Con temporary lit er a ture), (Han’guk munhak yŏn’gu hakhoe [The association for research on Korean lit er a ture]) 49 (2013): 398.

50. Ibid., 380. 51. Ibid., 409.

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