Home Uncategorized 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.'"

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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.'”

UC Santa Barbara
Journal of Transnational American Studies

Title
When You Can’t Tell Your Friends from “the Japs”: Reading the Body in the Korematsu Case

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Journal
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4(1)

Author
Kim, Heidi Kathleen

Publication Date
2012

Peer reviewed

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When You Can’t Tell

Your Friends from “the Japs”:

Reading the Body in the

Korematsu Case

HEIDI KATHLEEN KIM

“Parks. Brown. Plessy. To that distinguished list, we add today the name of Fred

Korematsu,” said President Bill Clinton gravely, as he awarded Korematsu the

Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. As the plaintiff of Korematsu v. United States

of America, one of the Supreme Court test cases of the legality of Japanese American

incarceration, Korematsu’s personal legacy has been chiefly one of civil rights

activism based on his role in this case, the 1980s appeals, and his amicus briefs in

Rumsfeld v. Padilla and other Guantánamo Bay detention cases in the 2000s.

The strange case of Fred Korematsu is most famous for the legal precedent it

set for the incarceration of citizens without trial in time of war, a precedent that has

been heavily discussed in recent years in the specter of post-9/11 racial profiling and

the citizens and enemy aliens held at Guantánamo Bay prison. In this article, I look

more broadly at the logic behind this decision, showing that the Korematsu case is a

keystone both of legal decisions that sought to define Asia and America in terms of

continually shifting readings of race on the American subject’s body. Even more

crucially, Korematsu’s brief, a legally irrelevant attempt to pass as non-Japanese, is

part of a larger social dilemma about the racialized Asian body in America during and

after WWII, which formed an integral part of the logic that allowed the Supreme

Court to claim that military necessity was the reason for mass incarceration.

Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in Oakland, California to Issei parents

and grew up in the area. On December 7, 1941, he was driving in his car with his white

girlfriend when he heard the news on the car radio. On Monday, he reported to the

shipyard where he worked as a welder and was fired. He tried to enlist in the Coast

Guard or army (reports vary) but was turned down for stomach ulcers—this was

before the general change to 4-C (alien) Selective Service status for Japanese

Americans. He was planning to go to Nevada or the Midwest with his girlfriend when

his family was forcibly taken to the Tanforan Assembly Center. Soon afterwards, he

had plastic surgery to look, in his own words, more “Caucasian,” and changed his

name on his draft card to Clyde Sarah. Nevertheless, he was arrested on a street

corner on May 30, 1942. When approached by Northern California American Civil

Liberties Union (ACLU) official Ernest Besig, he accepted the offer of legal

representation and eventually became the plaintiff of the landmark case Korematsu

v. United States of America, in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality

of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into incarceration

camps during World War II, with a vote of six to three. Korematsu’s criminal

conviction (though not the ruling on constitutionality) was overturned in 1983 in the

Federal District Court that had originally convicted him on the grounds that the

government had knowingly suppressed information about the “innocence” of

Japanese Americans.
1

Korematsu’s attempt to elude incarceration, though brief and unsuccessful,

raised the question of racial visibility at a time when the bodily identification of

Japanese Americans and the potential spies among them was directly linked to the

actual state-mandated incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the

west coast of the United States. Time magazine, less than two weeks after the attack

on Pearl Harbor, famously offered a few “rules of thumb” on “How to Tell Your

Friends From the Japs,” a subject of real concern during wartime paranoia about

spies. Life offered a similar spread, “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” both

complete with photographs.
2
These popular examples are extremely well known, but

less well known is the role of racial recognition on the legal side of the incarceration.

While attempting to avoid charges of racism, government officials seriously cited the

inability to tell Japanese apart from each other and from other Asians as a reason to

incarcerate them. Korematsu’s experience offers a hard look at the ongoing difficulty

of disentangling the social and physical constructs of race, particularly when used as

grounds for discrimination and incarceration.

Peter Irons, one of Korematsu’s lawyers in 1983, notes that “[f]rom the time

of his arrest to the present, accounts of his case have uniformly portrayed Korematsu

as a young man impelled by romance alone, and whose effort to change his features

was a bizarre response to DeWitt’s exclusion order.”
3
Such accounts are, for the

most part, perfunctory; even Korematsu’s obituaries mention the facial surgery and

his girlfriend without much discussion of their context or impact. Historians of the

Japanese American and Asian American experience have often referred to his

“plastic surgery,” but do not trace the trajectory of how these facts were narrated,

mostly focusing instead on the case.
4
This study will focus on how Korematsu’s

surgery was portrayed, providing a foundation for the intersection between the

cultural studies that have been done on cosmetic surgery, particularly ethnic or

racialized surgery, and the legal and historical studies of the importance of racialized

appearance in court cases about citizenship and civil rights.

Racialized cosmetic surgery is usually described as the alteration of specific

features that have come to be classified with the negative characteristics of a race—

most commonly, for an east Asian, the lack of an epicanthic fold around the eyes and

the shape of the nose. Korematsu’s plastic surgery can be mentioned without the

typically mixed reaction from the Asian American community or the macabre

fascination of the mainstream media with Asian and Asian American plastic surgery in

the late twentieth century because audiences interpret Korematsu as acting under

what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong so aptly dubbed “necessity” while impelled by

“extravagance.” While her exploration of these terms focuses on literature, her

historical foundation allows me to expand her framework—in particular her

consideration of Asian American mobility as necessity—“subjugation, coercion” or

duress—rather than adventure or exploration. The incarceration of Japanese

Americans living on the west coast certainly was coercion, and allows for the

consideration of Korematsu’s actions without the judgment of political resistance.
5

Perhaps there has also been an unwillingness to besmirch Korematsu’s

reputation as “civil rights hero” with too much talk about his surgery, which is

predicated on its negative implications. The scholarship on cosmetic surgery,

particularly racialized surgery, has sought at different moments to map subjects’

motivations and desires in condemnatory or redemptive fashion. Such studies have

typically omitted Korematsu in tracing their historical trajectory, and often their focus

on aesthetics and economics fails to consider the legalized discrimination that drives

surgery, particularly in earlier periods (i.e., the first half of the twentieth century).

This article may serve to break boundaries in both directions, contributing to the

depolarization of “good and bad” and “resistant and accommodating” Asian

subjects as Viet Nguyen suggests is necessary. Looking at perhaps the earliest

passing of an ambiguous Asian subject, the half-Chinese half-white British author

Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, Nguyen speculates that her passing for Japanese in

the early twentieth century demonstrates neither rebellion nor accommodation, but

constitutes a “viable and important political gesture.” This critical scrutiny of passing

as strategy marks other recent Asian American studies of bodily presentation, such as

Leslie Bow’s examination of supposed feminine betrayals as “acts of subversion.”

Korematsu’s reputation as a heroic subject, brought to bear on this debate, furthers

the revision of passing and plastic surgery as something other than accommodation.
6

Korematsu’s spoken motivation was to be allowed to stay at home and marry

his girlfriend. Sander Gilman places the stakes of plastic surgery very high, saying that

the goal is nothing less than happiness, but that the location of happiness had at the

end of the nineteenth century been transformed from the “political ‘unhappiness’ of

class and poverty” to the “‘unhappiness’ found within the body.”
7
Early plastic

surgeons and their patients specifically disclaimed the alteration of racialized

features as an attempt to “pass.” The most discussed early example was Jewish

American actress Fanny Brice, who said after altering her nose in 1923, “I wanted to

look prettier and my nose was a sight in any language, but I wasn’t trying to hide my

origin.” The racialized or ethnicized body could be a construct separate from race

and ethnicity, Brice and other patients claimed, yet simultaneously, the Supreme

Court sought to define citizenship rights based on racial origin and racialized

appearance.
8

Studies of Asian American plastic surgery typically focus on the large numbers

of facial surgeries in the last two to three decades, some reaching back to the

postwar era. Gilman’s rhetoric echoes the inalienable American right to the “pursuit

of happiness,” and the right to plastic surgery has been portrayed by Asian

Americans as an exercise of their purchasing power and as an example of American

freedom. David Palumbo-Liu complicates this with patients’ strategems—a desire for

economic improvement being chief among them—and further points out that Asian

American plastic surgery has its roots in the state’s post-WWII Americanization

projects in Asia that strove to make the Asian subject easier to assimilate. Eugenia

Kaw’s oft-cited anthropological study attributes these surgeries to a stated desire to

escape the socioeconomic inferiority associated with Asian racialized features—

“passivity, dullness, and a lack of sociability”—rather than an overt desire to look

prettier or whiter.
9

A central debate of these surgery studies has been whether the choices of the

patients capitulate to a centralized, white standard of beauty. Some modern scholars

attribute a more resistant or diverse attitude toward appearance. Traise Yamamoto

interprets modern cosmetic eye surgery on both Asians and Asian Americans as both

“reappropriation” and “reinscription,” noting that the patients themselves often

disclaim a desire to look ‘white’ (as did Fanny Brice), even sometimes specifically

warning the surgeon against such a result. She points out that the identification of

the epicanthic fold with whiteness (as opposed to, say, blackness or those Asians

who have the fold) essentializes these features.
10

As an Asian American figure who

had cosmetic surgery, whatever his motivations, Korematsu links the uneasy

consideration of modern surgery and the other trappings of racial passing with the

legal history of civil rights and citizenship rights, forcing us to consider the role of the

body’s possible malleability in legal history. As Bow writes, “[T]heorists of racial

passing . . . reveal [that] racial ambiguity can represent a site for exposing the stakes

underlying the terms of social division.”
11

Racial ambiguity, whether natural or

surgically induced, enables passing and undermines the attempt to clearly delineate

race.

Prominent African American magazines repudiated passing as unsavory and

unnecessary while claiming participation in the postwar economic abundance of the

1950s. At the same time, many Japanese Americans were trying, if not to “pass,”

then to demonstrate Americanness through conformity to white middle-class

standards. This was also the decade when ethnic Asians on both sides of the Pacific

started to seek cosmetic surgery in substantial numbers. Kimono-clad beauty queens

of the prewar era gave way in the 1950s to bouffant-haired pageant contestants clad

in western-style dresses. Others on the fringe of the community opted for a different

disguise, as many “resettled” Nisei attempted to pass as other Asian ethnicities in

order to escape prejudice. One such Nisei, Bill Katayama, did this during the war as

well as afterward, at one point claiming a fictional half-Japanese, half-Korean

identity.
12

What many of these Asian Americans sought was not to pass into a

complete and total whiteness that could hide their otherness, but to escape into the

realm of racial ambiguity.

This bodily and social ambiguity existed alongside the complex historical

negotiation of the citizenship rights of ethnic minorities in the United States. Judge

William Denman of the Court of Appeals even incorporates the social and legal

“passing” parallelism in his lengthy opinion about the Korematsu case: “[Korematsu]

made an unsuccessful attempt to have his features altered by plastic surgery, hoping

thereby to escape the discrimination against his minority group of citizens.

This

attempt is as pathetic as that of another of our minority groups—of those of one-

sixteenth negro blood hoping to conceal the fact that they have not ‘passed over’

into general Caucasian social intercourse.” Denman sees pathos predicated on

certain failure, though his awkward wording betrays some uncertainty. It seems

patently obvious that some Americans of “one-sixteenth negro blood” have passed.

Yet, Denman misstates the concept of passing as involving the eradication of that

last one-sixteenth of racialized blood as necessary for true passing. His insistence

reveals the fear that race is, essentially, “social intercourse,” so that someone like

Korematsu could actually pass over and change his race by associating with all white

Americans if only he could eradicate his features.
13

Using a new vocabulary about the

racialized Asian appearance, Korematsu and his legal counsel sought in vain to find

the grounds of racial definition, combating every possible “proof” of race and

national loyalty they could think of from complexion to career choice. The issue of

appearance, however, never lost its primacy in Korematsu’s mind. In 1983, he bluntly

told the court, “According to the Supreme Court decision regarding my case, being

an American citizen was not enough. They say you have to look like one, otherwise

they say you can’t tell a difference between a loyal and a disloyal American.”

Other Asian Americans had historically identified and manipulated the public

presentation of the body, as well as the body itself, in order to legally claim status as

Americans. When Wong Kim Ark, plaintiff in the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case

about native-born Chinese American citizenship, claimed that he was a citizen by

birth, US district attorney Henry S. Foote contended that Wong had “been at all

times, by reason of his race, language, color, and dress, a Chinese person.”
14

This

bizarre list of qualities mixes the changeable with the supposedly unchangeable in a

way that throws doubt on the definition of race (and color), which was certainly

mutable at the time. Erika Lee’s examination of illegal Chinese immigration via

Mexico and Canada includes anecdotes of Chinese disguising themselves as Native

Americans, Mexicans, and even African Americans. This usually involved costume,

color, and a bit of language. The Buffalo Times claimed that smugglers would put

Chinese in “Indian garb,” give them a basket of sassafras, and row them across the

lakes from Canada into the US. Those who came from Mexico would put on “the

most picturesque Mexican dress.” Those coming from Cuba, a US government report

claimed, were painted black and blithely walked ashore. As Lee phrases it, the

Chinese immigrants put on new “racial uniforms” to pass as the dominant “others”

of particular regions, benefiting from racial stereotypes by avoiding new scrutiny.
15

With little history of long-term social passing, passing by Asians was thus

documented in this era as a specifically illegal, border-crossing strategy.

Previous legal cases, particularly those about citizenship, insisted upon both

the illegibility and legibility of racial appearance. Placed in this genealogy, the

ambiguity suggested by the plastic surgery in Korematsu can be seen as a long-

standing vexation that parallels the social history of racialized surgeries. The often

paired landmark cases Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v.

Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) have been studied by innumerable scholars. However, it is

particularly important to note that neither of these much-studied cases challenged

the constitutionality of racial bias in citizenship requirements. Instead, the court was

asked to rule on racial definitions based on history, culture, geography, and

appearance. Ozawa had attempted to classify the Japanese as white on several

grounds, including that of skin color. The court replied that skin color was a specious

test to apply, since, as they asserted, the skin color test was “impracticable, [skin

color] differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons,

ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette, the

latter being darker than many of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow

races.” They therefore restricted the white race to “what is popularly known as the

Caucasian race,” eschewing racialized appearance in favor of a “popular” definition

of race.
16

In 1923, the same year as Brice’s surgery, Thind attempted to have himself, as

a “high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar, Punjab, India” declared

Caucasian, rather than white. Once again the court declined to consider ethnology

and took refuge in “popular” understanding of whiteness, but the footnotes to the

argument are revealing. Quoting anthropologist Keane’s Man: Past and Present, the

court referred to a passage on the Caucasian race: “[W]e recognize a common racial

stamp in the facial expression, the structure of the hair, partly also the bodily

proportions. . . . Even in the case of certain black or very dark races . . . we are

reminded instinctively more of Europeans or Berbers . . . thanks to their more regular

features and brighter expression.” Skin color, according to the court’s own ruling in

Ozawa, was not legible as a test of whiteness. Here, they suggest via the footnote

that “features” and “expression” were likewise illegible. Yet, the court also suggests

that bodily racial difference is easily recognizable or distinguishable: “[T]he physical

group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the

various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white.” (my

emphases) Although the children of Hindu parents might well have a “common racial

stamp” in features, and Ozawa had recognized the illegibility of skin color, the court

insisted on some “readily distinguishable” physical characteristics that they declined

to specify. The argument about European Americans was also specious, considering

the popular debate that raged at this time about inferior European races and their

predetermined physical and intellectual characteristics. Whiteness became, as Ian

Haney-López states, “a social product measurable” not by the anthropologist’s

calipers but “only in terms of what people believe,” something “self-evident.”
17

With racial appearance accepted as a universal metric, it was inevitable that

individuals would try to elude the spirit of the law. In 1926, only three years after the

Thind case and Brice’s surgery, the New York Times reported that a Japanese

American man from Boston had plastic surgery to render himself acceptable to his

white Iowan girlfriend’s parents. Shima Kito “put himself in the hands of a surgeon.

The latter cut the eye corners so that the slant-eye so characteristic of the Japanese

race was gone. He lowered the skin and flesh of the nose so that the upturned trait

disappeared, and he tightened the pendulous lower lip.” This was deemed an

“example of the use of plastic surgery to obliterate racial characteristics” (my

emphasis), which was finished by changing his name to William White.
18

Kito did not

bother with Brice’s disclaimers that she was not trying to erase her Jewishness; it

seemed his concern to obliterate his Japaneseness as thoroughly as possible, if only

to satisfy his prospective in-laws.
19

Nevertheless, the timing of Kito’s surgery

suggests that he may have been an earlier version of Korematsu in terms of

attempting to escape the legalization of discrimination against Japanese Americans,

thus making his choice imperative. The Cable Act of 1922 specified that female US

citizens who married aliens eligible for citizenship would retain their US citizenship,

implicitly barring (at the risk of losing one’s citizenship) marriage to Asian aliens, who

were ineligible. Kito’s marriage would certainly have fallen into the latter category, so

his surgery functioned as both a means to obtain parental approval as well as the

ability to pass as a “white” American citizen (which also allowed his wife to retain her

citizenship). At the time, the idea of using surgery to undergird passing for Asians

raised few legal fears. Instead, it was presented as a human interest story, with a man

willing to change his race for love. However, no such presentation was possible for

Korematsu after Pearl Harbor.

Newspapers of the era mention Korematsu’s attempt to pass as a “Spaniard”

or “Spanish-Hawaiian,” some even calling him a “Jap spy.” Looking at photographs

of Korematsu before and after his surgery, it is hard to imagine him being identified

as of anything but (at the very least) East Asian descent, but he did succeed in

“passing” as a safe ethnicity for long enough to make the media and the FBI

nervous.
20

FBI agents found the doctor and interrogated him about Korematsu’s

surgery, which had cost $125. Masten, who had not done anything actionable,

claimed that he had told Korematsu “that he could build up his nose and remove the

folds from the inner corner of his upper eyelids but that he could not make the

subject look like an American” (i.e., white).
21

The phrasing may have been the

agents,’ or it may have been Masten’s own, but the government was reassured here

that no Japanese could be made to look “American”—or for that matter that any

Japanese American could look authentically American to begin with, a feeling that

Korematsu still echoed in 1983.

Instead, Korematsu was left with the tell-tale scars that first raised questions

of plastic surgery. The FBI’s initial report included under “scars or marks”: “Cut scar

on the forehead, lump between eyebrows on nose.” The mutilated flesh betrayed

Korematsu’s attempt. Korematsu’s 1990 account of his original motivation for

getting the surgery conflicts with his girlfriend’s statements to the FBI. She claimed

that she had tried to talk him out of it, worried that he would get in trouble.

According to Korematsu, it was originally her idea. He told the doctor that he feared

racism if he married his Caucasian girlfriend. Masten took some skin from around his

eyes, and “that was it,” Korematsu said. As Korematsu himself observed in federal

court, evoking laughter, “I don’t think he made any change in my appearance for

when I went to the Tanforan Assembly Center everyone knew me and my folks didn’t

know the difference.”
22

Thus, Korematsu’s attempt at passing through racial

performance was not effective. Moreover, his failed attempt also raises the specter

of medical ethics—in this case, the possibility that white doctors may have exploited

the fears (and wallets) of Asians by surgically promising at least another type of

Asianness.

Korematsu, like the individuals involved in many other civil rights test cases,

was chosen by the ACLU because he was a “safe” option: he did not perform the

usual elements of “Japaneseness” (or Japanese immigrant identity) that might

trouble a jury—he never lived in Japan, did not speak Japanese, did not work in a

Japanese-owned business, and was an American patriot. It was Korematsu’s last step

of altering the Japanese body that exploded the concept of, as the ACLU’s

Commonweal magazine phrased it, “racial visibility.”
23

After all, successful passing

created paranoia in 1940s America, as coverage of Korematsu in the days after his

arrest convey. As it happens, he was not a “Jap spy,” but his motivation was indeed

to pass as white for social reasons. Becoming American, his plastic surgeon

confidently said, was impossible. If his goal was to pass merely as non-Japanese,

clearly it would have been more easily achieved by passing as say, Chinese. However,

even this was potentially risky. In 1942, The New York Times reported incidents of

racial confusion, in which ethnic Chinese (their ethnic group/s were not specified)

fishermen were arrested but “released on submitting proof that they were Chinese.”

However, a forty-two-year old Javanese sailor was shot and killed when he failed to

respond to a sentry; his captain said afterward that the sailor and his companions,

who were released after questioning, did not understand English. Consequently Time

magazine, in an article on identification, praised a Chinese American reporter who

wore a self-identifying label.
24

Beyond these hazards, other Asian ethnicities were also circumscribed by the

laws against miscegenation, which were part of Korematsu’s concerns. Korematsu

had to claim at least as much whiteness as his Italian American girlfriend. With the

odd choice of “Spanish-Hawaiian,” which he opted for on his draft card, Korematsu

showed a keen understanding of racial status and hierarchy, picking a label claiming a

dark-skinned whiteness (Spanish) and a definite American origin (Hawai’i). Moreover,

by tacking on a hyphen and Hawai’i, he added an element of outsiderness which

would account for his phenotype yet render him, believably, an “exotic American.” It

added a touch of racial ambiguity just in case he did not look “Spanish,” and provided

him access to a land (Hawai’i) with different racial rules, where most Japanese

Americans were not incarcerated and native Hawai’ians were entirely

unimpeachable. “Spanish-Hawaiian,” an unusual combination, covered all the bodily

differences and the social needs that Korematsu exhibited in wartime, appealing to a

very modern ideal of racial diversity and hybridity.

What becomes strikingly apparent when examining Korematsu’s court

documents, however, is both how essential and how difficult it is for a court of law to

deal with the appearance of the racialized body. Both the popular and the

investigative coverage of Korematsu’s plastic surgery remained a technically

irrelevant but enduringly fascinating detail in his legal battles, from his initial court

case through to the Supreme Court documents. He was at perfect liberty to do

whatever he liked to his face while Japanese Americans were still allowed on the

coast. The ACLU was well aware of his plastic surgery, but in their focus on

downplaying connections to Japan, perhaps failed to consider the deeper meaning of

bodily inscriptions of race. Following the usual practice of trying to find the most

acceptable test subjects for civil rights cases, famed ACLU director Roger Baldwin

asked investigator Besig to emphasize Korematsu’s “attitude, background,

connections and patriotism.” Besig, who had been aggressively recruiting test case

subjects, replied carefully that there was “nothing in the facts to jeopardize our

chances of success.” In the interpretation of the facts, however, there was abundant

opportunity for speculation.
25

The official wartime newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League,

the Pacific Citizen, usually referred to Korematsu as a shipyard worker and

prominently mentioned that “he was discharged from Moore’s shipyard in Oakland in

January [1942] because of his race.” An article on his federal court case also reported

that “Korematsu, when asked, replied that he was ready and willing to bear arms for

the United States. He said that he tried to enlist in the US army [other reports said

the Coast Guard] but was turned down because of physical disability.” As a

counterpoint to this narrative of unimpeachable patriotism, the article concludes,

“The government had charged that Korematsu had undergone plastic surgery in an

attempt to alter his features.”
26

Mentioning the most lurid feature of the case does

not treat the plastic surgery as a proven but irrelevant fact, but instead adds it to the

list of Korematsu’s supposed crimes. Given the generally supportive tone of the

Pacific Citizen articles about the test cases, this line stands out as an implicit denial of

the “charge;” the plastic surgery was mentioned in several of the local newspapers’

coverage of the case, though as a notable fact rather than a charge. Official channels

were well aware that the questions of appearance and plastic surgery were central to

the apparent guilt of the Japanese, regardless of any government claims to the

contrary.

The debate over Korematsu’s plastic surgery stemmed from the government’s

confused rhetoric about the forcible removal of the Japanese Americans, namely that

it was not a racially motivated decision, yet predicated on appearance. Initial fears

ostensibly rested on affiliation with an enemy country and culture. The Kibei,

Japanese Americans born in the US but educated in Japan, were particularly suspect.

Shintoism came under attack, as well as Japanese language schools, judo, and other

vestiges of Japaneseness. General DeWitt famously said, “A Jap’s a Jap,” as Justice

Robert H. Jackson quoted in his Korematsu dissent, but this certainty was refuted by

the intense scrutiny of community and organization leaders who might be more

guilty than others. Many members of the public, and certainly the courts, eventually

adopted the more moderate view that many, if not all, Japanese Americans were

unimpeachably loyal. Nevertheless, they all had to be incarcerated.

Inability to distinguish among Japanese led to fears that spies could easily

hide among them if the “good” citizens were free to stay. The US Attorney General

office’s memorandum “The Japanese Situation on the West Coast,” prepared by

three lawyers, stated, “Since the Occidental eye cannot readily distinguish one

Japanese resident from another, effective surveillance of the movements of

particular Japanese residents suspected of disloyalty is extremely difficult if not

practically impossible,” whereas “the normal Caucasian countenances of [persons of

German or Italian stock] enable the average American to recognize particular

individuals by distinguishing minor facial characteristics.” In other words, they were

being incarcerated because the way they looked was deemed illegible (i.e., “they all

looked the same”).
27

Denman’s focus on appearance in his appellate opinion takes this racist turn.

He cites appearance as justification for the military necessity of “discriminating

cruelty” (his own term in the Hirabayashi case) against the Japanese: “Because of . . .

limitations of social intercourse, people do not become familiar with the Mongolian

physiognomy. The uniform yellow skin and, on first impression, a uniformity of facial

structure, makes ‘all Chinks and Japs look alike to me,’ a common colloquialism.

Hence arises a difficulty for General DeWitt’s soldiers or the federal civil officers in

picking out . . . suspected saboteurs or spies. . . . Also the difficulty of identification of

Japanese of known or suspected enemy aid, by descriptions telegraphed or written

to white enforcement offices.” Denman admits the social construction of the

concept that “all Chinks and Japs look alike,” but treats it as a reality that must be

dealt with. His logic implies that all Chinese Americans might as well have been

incarcerated too, along with perhaps other Asian Americans and similar-looking

ethnic minorities. All were equally visible and yet illegible, making it too difficult to

“pick out” spies. This casts a different light on Denman’s analysis of Korematsu’s

surgery, which he calls “pathetic,” positioning the facial alteration as a strategy that

impedes the identification of “saboteurs or spies.” In this sense, Korematsu’s surgery

may have had a very real effect on the legal decisions and their grounds. However,

the constitutionality of the law was difficult for some of the judges to divorce from

“wartime necessity,” and Korematsu’s unfortunate attempt at “passing” highlighted

the possibility of “spies among us” and exacerbated the necessity for incarceration.
28

In the end, none of the Supreme Court justices referred to Korematsu’s

surgery or girlfriend in their opinions, mentioning only that he, “according to the

uncontradicted evidence, is a loyal citizen of the nation.” Frank Murphy’s dissent

does not even mention Korematsu by name or situation, addressing the racism of the

incarceration as a whole. Nevertheless, the justices were demonstrably aware of the

language around Japanese appearance as well as Korematsu’s attempt to pass. The

petition for certiorari (to be heard by a higher court) read, “The violation was

intentional. Petitioner had changed his name, undergone an operation to conceal his

facial characteristics, and wanted to remain in Calif. long enough to earn sufficient

money to take his girl to the Middle West.” A similar certoriari document in Justice

Robert H. Jackson’s papers bears his hand underscoring: “The violation was

committed knowingly, and P. had changed his name and undergone a facial operation

in an effort to conceal his racial characteristics.” This document also bears Jackson’s

notes about the justices’ initial conference votes on the case, which confirms that

they all were well aware of the surgery—and perhaps as intrigued as Jackson was,

judging from his underscoring.
29

The Stone Court, which decided all three incarceration cases and practically

coincided with the American participation in WWII, is remembered as a liberal yet

bitterly divided court—divided in spite of the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt had

nominated seven of the nine justices on the bench at the time of Korematsu. Hugo L.

Black, the Korematsu opinion author, is remembered otherwise as a defender of

legislative authority, racial equality, and individual rights who had to overcome a

storm of publicity about his brief membership in the Ku Klux Klan to be confirmed.

Black often voted with William O. Douglas, Wiley Rutledge, and the Court’s most

famous liberal, Frank Murphy. However, Murphy had foreseen that the

disagreements in the court would come to a head over the three test cases, writing

to his clerk, “Read this and perish! The Court has blown up on the Jap case—just [as]

I expected it would.”
30

Korematsu indeed blew up the court, which had voted unanimously but with

some separate opinions on the constitutionality of targeted curfews in the earlier

Hirabayashi and Yasui test cases. In successive drafts, Black’s opinion for the court

moves progressively further away from addressing the charge of racism so incisively

laid out in Murphy’s and Jackson’s dissents. In an early draft, Black wrote:

It would be idle to deny that the course of American life

and thought has been increasingly polluted by the warped

psychology of race hatred. This has been but a reflection of

the witch’s brew that has lately been served up abroad. But

the instant case poses no problem of “concentration

camps.” Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and

relocation centers—and we deem it unjustifiable to call

them “concentration camps” with all the ugly

connotations that term implies. . . . In any event, it helps

but little to clarify matters to succumb to the luxury of the

imagery of words like “concentration camps.” It helps even

less to invoke the term “racial prejudice.” It would be a

superfluous gloss on the history of this Court to condemn

the bigotry that springs from an exalted sense of race. To

cast this case into the outlines of racial prejudice merely

confuses the issue.31

Here, Black charged into the issue of racism head-on, being most exercised about the

term “concentration camp.” His anxiety about its “ugly connotations” reveals that

he has a sense of its reality, yet he admits to ignoring the “true nature” of the camps.

Nevertheless, he found little satisfaction, apparently, in his admission that racism

existed, since his only move was to deny its applicability. The final version of his

opinion omitted his discussion of the “witch’s brew” of racism and much of the

discussion of “racial prejudice,” pausing chiefly to disparage the term “concentration

camp.”

Though Jackson’s dissent carefully addresses his respect for military necessity,

he refuses to uphold an order he finds unconstitutional: “A citizen’s presence in the

locality, however, was made a crime only if his parents were of Japanese birth. Had

Korematsu been one of four—the others being, say, a German alien enemy, an Italian

alien enemy, and a citizen of American-born ancestors, convicted of treason but out

on parole—only Korematsu’s presence would have violated the order. The difference

. . . only in that he was born of different racial stock.” Jackson emphasized that

Japanese Americans were indeed singled out by race. Moreover, a possible reference

to Korematsu’s surgery appears when Jackson notes that “this prisoner is the son of

parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no

way to resign.” Indeed, Korematsu would seem to have exhausted the logical

options for such a resignation.

In drafts, Black had written that Korematsu had “moved from his home to

another place in Oakland” and had had “an operation on his face to change his facial

expression”—later revised to “change his facial appearance”—“[to] conceal his

identity as a person of Japanese ancestry.”
32

This language disappeared, along with

his references to Korematsu’s Italian girlfriend and desire to move to the “Middle

West.” However, the opinion still quietly makes reference to the problems of

illegibility: “There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military

authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short.” A

shortness of time implies an inability to sort out the disloyal from the loyal, and

according to the military’s own logic, much of this was due to appearance.
33

Owen Roberts’ and Frank Murphy’s dissents maintain that the sorting had to

happen, regardless of time: “No adequate reason [my emphasis] is given for the

failure to treat these Japanese Americans on an individual basis. . . . It is asserted

merely that the loyalties of this group ‘were unknown and time was of the essence.’”

Once again, we see a reference to the difficulty of sorting out the innocent from the

guilty, when it was so much faster and easier to assume, as General DeWitt’s report

does, that they all belonged to an “enemy race.” When Roberts refers to the lack of

an “adequate” reason, he refers to this assumption, inclusive of the logic that sorting

them out would take too long, which in itself was at least partly predicated on the

illegibility of appearance. A 1967 interview with Black reveals how important this

issue remained in his memory. “They all look alike to a person not a Jap,” he said,

adding, “A lot of innocent Japanese Americans would have been shot” if Japan had

attacked. These debates show the primacy of racialized appearance, though its

acknowledgment at the federal level would inevitably have, in Black’s words, cast the

case into the outlines of racial prejudice. Despite its excision from the opinion,

neither the justices’ nor Korematsu’s experiences were free of the frenzy concerning

appearance.
34

Korematsu’s transformation into hero has hidden not only the turbulent

history of his surgery but the enduring legacy of his Supreme Court loss. Black wrote

in his opinion that “all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial

group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are

unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid

scrutiny.” More recently, in his memoirs former Chief Justice William Rehnquist

controversially upheld the Korematsu case as an illustration of deferring to military

authority in time of war. Thus, regardless of the success of the 1983 appeal and

Korematsu’s Presidential Medal, the Korematsu decision still stands, technically

available to be used as legal precedent for racism in times of “necessity. What cannot

be overlooked, however, is that Korematsu’s attempt at passing cut to one of the

central legal and racial issues of the incarceration. Trying to pass as not-Japanese and

perhaps as white, he exposed the tenuous definition of racialized appearance that

the military insisted was part of the necessity for incarceration. Theoretically, his

plastic surgery was the ultimate attempt to pass, but it provoked controversy

because of the fear that it could succeed. Korematsu had gone too far.

The binary framing of race and nationality on the body was a gross

oversimplification of identity formation for Japanese American individuals and the

international framework within which incarceration functioned, then and now,

making Korematsu rightly a figurehead not just for civil rights, but also for

international affairs. Wong’s work pushes us, among other things, to understand

Asian American studies in its global circulation,
35

and the study of incarceration has

increasingly moved in this direction—with the diversity and international scope of

the Japanese American incarceration, and its comparison to other incarcerations

such as Guantánamo, and the post-9/11 US discussion of illegal immigration,

citizenship, and airport security.
36

It is likewise important for modern considerations

of cosmetic surgery and other contested sites of identity construction to include the

geopolitical events and legalized discrimination that pushes individuals toward their

supposedly “aesthetic” or “strategic” economic choices. Across all these complex

issues is the constant of the “questionably identifiable racial other.” The racialized

body’s appearance in the courts and the media, gradually filtered out as the stakes of

constitutional review and racial profiling grew more intense, remains an important

part of the logic of the Korematsu decision as well as the legal history behind it. The

intervening time has done little to further develop this logic. For all the modern

discussion of how race is a difference scarcely worth mentioning in our genetics, the

body of the other is still a point of contention within the American legal system.

Notes

1 The mention of Korematsu’s specific disability is found in Ernest Besig, Letter from

Ernest Besig to Roger Baldwin, American Civil Liberties Union Archives, Princeton, NJ.

Most of the other biographical information is available in a variety of sources, including

Of Civil Wrongs & Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story, dir. Eric Paul Fournier, National Asian

American Telecommunications Association, 2000.

2 “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” Time, December 22, 1941. “How to Tell Japs

from the Chinese,” Life, December 22, 1944.

3 On May 3, 1942, General DeWitt issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, ordering all

people of Japanese ancestry (whether citizens or non-citizens) still living in California’s

Military Area No. 1, to report to assembly centers where they would live until moved to

“Relocation Centers” (i.e., incarceration camps).

4 Peter Irons, Justice at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 97. For more

information on Korematsu, see, for example, Franklin Odo, ed., The Columbia

Documentary History of the Asian American Experience (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2002) 306; Howard Ball, “Judicial Parsimony and Military Necessity,” in Japanese

Americans, from Relocation to Redress, eds. Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor and Harry H.L.

Kitano (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1986), 179; “Korematsu v. United

States,” Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present, ed.

Brian Niiya (New York: Facts on File, 1993) 209; Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An

Interpretive History (New York: Twayne, 1991), 136.

5 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to

Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 13, 121.

6 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race & Resistance: Literature & Politics in Asian America (Oxford, UK:

Oxford University Press, 2002), 35. Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion:

Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2001).

7 Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 136.

8 Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore, MD: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1997), 186, 82, 77.

9 See Chapter Three, “Written on the Face,” in David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American:

Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) and

Eugenia Kaw, “Medicalization of Racial Features: Asian American Women and Cosmetic

Surgery.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7.1 (1993): 75.

10 Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity,

and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999) 95-99.

11 Leslie Bow, Partly Colored: Asian American and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South

(New York: New York University Press, 2010), 207.

12 Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century US Literature and

Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 118; Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain,

Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 2006); David Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and

Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-1949 (Urbana, IL: University of

Illinois Press, 2000), 164-166.

13 Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States. 140 F.2d 289. United States Court of Appeals

for the Ninth Circuit, 1943.

14 Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: The Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill, NC: The

University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 105.

15 Ibid., 161.

16 Takao Ozawa v. United States. 260 U.S. 178. Supreme Court of the United States, 1922.

17 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. 261 U.S. 204. Supreme Court of the United States,

1923. Ian Haney-López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New

York University Press, 2006), 79-80.

18 “Changes Racial Features: Young Japanese Wins American Bride by Resort to Plastic

Surgery,” The New York Times, March 8, 1926.

19 Haiken, Venus Envy, 130, 201.

20 “Internment Upheld,” News, September 2, 1942. “Jap Shifted to Jail Here,” Examiner,

June 23, 1942. Other newspaper clippings are shown briefly in Of Civil Wrongs & Rights,

dir. Fournier. Besig, Letter from Ernest Besig to Roger Baldwin.

21 Irons, Justice at War, 96.

22 Ibid., 153. Of Civil Wrongs & Rights, dir. Fournier.

23 “In the Supreme Court,” The Commonweal, March 10, 1944.

24 Lawrence E. Davies, “California to Keep Japanese Farming,” The New York Times,

January 9,

1942.

25 Irons, Justice at War, 118. Besig, Letter from Ernest Besig to Roger Baldwin, June 10,

1942.

26 “Evacuation Legality Will Be Tested in San Francisco Case,” Pacific Citizen, June 11, 1942.

“Federal Court Convicts Nisei in Test Case,” Pacific Citizen, September 17, 1942.

27 Irons, Justice at War, 54.

28 Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States.

29 O.T., 1932 No. 22, Korematsu v. US, William O. Douglas Papers, Library of Congress,

Washington, DC. No. 679 Korematsu v. United States Cert. To Cca 9, Robert Houghwout

Jackson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

30 The Korematsu justices were, in order of appointment: Chief Justice Harlan Stone,

Owen Roberts, Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William Douglas, Frank

Murphy, Robert Jackson, and Wiley Rutledge. Many books have been written about the

court, the most recent of which is Noah Feldman’s Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of

FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (New York: Twelve, 2010). Other useful references

include William Domnarski, The Great Justices, 1941-1954: Black, Douglas, Frankfurter &

Jackson in Chambers (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Howard

Ball, Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Murphy’s note is in his papers (Frank Murphy, “Gene–Read This…,” Frank Murphy

Papers, Ann Arbor, MI.)

31 Hugo LaFayette Black, “It Would Be Idle to Deny…,” Hugo LaFayette Black Papers,

Library of Congress, Washington, DC. For ease of reading, I have reproduced this

incorporating his handwritten corrections on a typed draft fragment.

32 Black, “The Petitioner, Born June 30, 1919…,” 2. Black, Untitled Draft of Korematsu

Opinion, 5. Both in Hugo LaFayette Black Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

33 Korematsu v. United States. 323 U.S. 214. Supreme Court of the United States, 1944.

34 Korematsu v. United States. Feldman points out in Scorpions that the Court may have

expected Korematsu and Endo to form a dual legacy, but the violation of rights in

Korematsu has been the lasting impression. For Black’s comments, see “Justice Black,

Champion of Civil Liberties for 34 Years on Court, Dies at 85,” The New York Times,

September 26, 1971.

35 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Keynote Lecture: Maxine Hong Kingston in a Global Frame:

Reception, Institutional Mediation, and ‘World Literature.’” AALA Journal 11 (2005).

36 Elbert Lin, “Korematsu Continued…” Yale Law Journal 112.7 (2003) and Roger Daniels,

“The Japanese American Cases, 1942-2004: A Social History.” Law and Contemporary

Problems 68.2 (2005).

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

The Affect of Difference : Representations of Race in East Asian Empire, 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

110 | chul kim

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-

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

Ethnographies of a Dispersed Empire | 111

112 | chul kim

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

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:

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.

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

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).

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

Ethnographies of a Dispersed Empire | 121

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.

122 | chul kim

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.

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-

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,

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-

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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130 | chul kim

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.

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

Ethnographies of a Dispersed Empire | 131

132 | chul kim

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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