The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [5]
Although nationalists took advantage of new Korean-language newspapers to canvas support, they were no match for the colonial propaganda machine, which now sought to co-opt Korean pride instead of stamping it out. It asserted that Koreans shared the same ancient progenitor, bloodline and benevolent ruler as the Japanese themselves; both peoples thus belonged to one “imperial” race morally (if not physically and intellectually) superior to all others.3 The dominant slogan of the day was naisen ittai or “Interior [i.e. Japan] and Korea as one body.” While intent on undermining their subjects’ sense of a distinct nationhood, the authorities emphasized that naisen ittai did not mean the end of Koreanness, and even posed as champions of a culture that had languished too long in China’s shadow. Koreans were encouraged to cherish their “region” and its “dialect,” even its yin-yang flag (which was printed in school maps and atlases right up to liberation), as long as they remembered that the peninsula was but one part of a greater Japanese whole.4
A postcard from the “Japan and Korea as one body” campaign of the 1930s shows Japan (r) and its colony as schoolboy partners, running a three-legged race over the globe.
Nationalist intellectuals attempted to counter this propaganda by reviving interest in the legend of Tan’gun. Set down in an anthology of folk-tales in 1284, then largely ignored for centuries, it told how this half-divine figure had inaugurated the first Korean kingdom with his seed in 2333 BC. As the nationalists saw it, the tale gave the Koreans their own pure bloodline, a civilization grounded in a unique culture, and over four millennia of history to their colonizers’ three. One writer even tried to establish Mount Paektu, a volcanic mountain on the border with China, as Tan’gun’s birthplace and a counterpart to Japan’s sacred Mount Fuji.5 The South Korean historian Yi Yǒng-hun puts it best: “The myths and symbols needed to form a nation were coined new in the awareness of Japan’s myths and symbols—in opposition to and in emulation of them.”6 The public proved indifferent to this derivative mythmaking, however, and by the end of the 1930s most prominent nationalists had themselves become enthusiastic advocates of the new order.
Korea’s left-wing writers executed a similar volte face. Rounded up and imprisoned in the early 1930s, then released after promising to behave themselves, they soon began lending their voices to the great militarist chorus. As the Korean-language Maeil sinbo newspaper remarked with satisfaction in 1944, writers of all ideological stripes—communist, nationalist, libertarian—had united in support for the system.7
But even while these writers glorified the emperor, they urged their countrymen to cherish their Koreanness.8 In romance novels frail Japanese women fell in love with strong Korean men, much as they still do in South Korean films and dramas.9 Illustrations in newspapers and magazines showed girls in traditional hanbok costume waving the Japanese flag, and Confucian gentlemen in horsehair hats standing proudly by their newly recruited sons.10 The regime stimulated pride in “peninsular” history for imperial ends, encouraging Koreans to reclaim their ancient territory by settling in Manchuria.11 One writer invoked the elite hwarang soldiers of the Silla dynasty to whip up fighting spirit.12 Another called on young men to “demonstrate the loyalty of a Japanese citizen and the spirit of a son of Korea” by volunteering to fight in the “holy war” against the Yankees.13 As the historian Cho Kwan-ja has remarked, these collaborators regarded