6 World History as a Nationalist Rationale

6

World History as a Nationalist Rationale

How the National Appropriated the Transnational in East Asian Historiography

举例 日鲜同祖论

These scholars（反同祖论） failed to dominate the historical discourse, however, because the Japanese Empire had to deploy the kōminka (皇民化, nationalization of colonial subjects) policy in order to mobilize colonial subjects to sustain the “total war” system. The kōminka movement was an extreme form of assimilation designed to transform colonial subjects into the “true Japa- nese,” not only in action but also in spirit.26 Ilseontongjoron provided the historical alibi for the forced nationalization of colonial masses by the Japanese Empire.

The historical discourse of the common origin of Koreans and the Japanese experienced a nationalist turn in postliberation Korean historiog- raphy. Korean nationalist historians rejected the Japanese Imna command- ery, a historiographical byproduct of Ilseontongjoron, as an invention of Japanese colonialism. At the same time, they highlighted the entangled his- tory of ancient Korea and Japan in their stress on a unidirectional cul- tural transfer from ancient Korea to Japan. They argued that the Korean writing system of idu and hyangch’al influenced Japanese Man’yō-kana as a system of transcribing Chinese characters. They also alleged that the highly developed fine arts in ancient Korea contributed to Japanese art, as proven by the superiority of Korean immigrant-made works such as the murals at the Hōryūji Temple and the portrait of Shōtoku Taishi.27 The thesis of the

188 IMAGINING

high-culture diffusion from Korea to Japan in ancient history fit nicely with their nationalist argument. Kim Seok-hyung, a leading North Korean party historian, published the most extreme account of this one-way cultural transfer from Korea to Japan, arguing that emigrants from the three Korean kingdoms (Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla) had settled in western Japan and were cultural pioneers who contributed to the progress of Japanese history.28 What one finds in his writings is not Marxism but “national communism.”29 Kim’s argument upset a group of Japanese historians and provoked angry counterarguments. Inoue Mitsusada described in highly emotive terms of “attack and defense” a quasi-physical battle between himself and Kim. Indeed, Inoue attributed the heart attack he experienced to the tension caused by this controversy.

The controversy took material form in arguments about how to inter- pret the inscription on King Gwanggaeto’s monument. Although the two sides differed sharply in their reading of the texts, they shared the same platform of Ilseontongjoron. For both, the cultural and anthropological homogeneity of Koreans and Japanese was a given; the only issue was which ethnicity was dominant. The transnational history of Korea and Japan, ini- tiated by the Japanese colonial discourse of the common origins of the Japanese and Koreans, became a battleground for hegemony over a shared heritage. World history tended to be supplanted by pan-Asianist regional history in colonial Korea and to a lesser extent in imperial Japan, but the grand narrative of pan-Asianist regional history was oversimplified and one-directional. Ordinary people, everyday practices, minor events, and historical ambiguities were all at odds with this grand narrative. The recip- rocal relations between colonizers and colonized and between the colo- nies and the Japanese metropole were disregarded in place of an abstract pan-Asianism. Pan-Asianist regional history could not articulate that the empire (Japan) was made by its imperial projects.31

The structure of the history department at Keizo (Seoul) Imperial Uni- versity, the only university in colonial Korea (opened on May 1, 1926), is a good indication of this problem. In his speech inaugurating the university, its president, Hattori Unokichi, emphasized the academy’s duty to serve the state and announced a blueprint for making Keizo Imperial University a center for Oriental studies. Due to this Orient-centered research strat- egy, the history department offered three majors: national (Japanese) his- tory, Chosǒn (Korean) history, and Oriental history. What distinguished

WORLD HISTORY AS A NATIONALIST RATIONALE 189

Keizo Imperial University’s history department from those of other impe- rial universities in the Japanese archipelago was that Western history was replaced by Korean history. Kaneko Kosuke had taught Western history at the university since 1928, but there was no official Western history major.32 Of the eighty graduates from the history department between 1929 and 1941, eighteen students majored in Japanese history, thirty-four in Oriental history, and twenty-eight in Korean history.33 Seoul National University (the postliberation successor to Keizo Imperial University) had no profes- sor lecturing on European history until 1962, long after liberation.

战中的“世界史”

战后美军和“世界史”

World history thus came back to postwar East Asia as an educational project, at the implicit behest of American military authorities. It became a required subject at the middle and high school levels in Japan, and part of the required high school curriculum in Korea, during the educational reforms that took place immediately after World War II. Although world history’s status did shift periodically in Korea (as later curricular reforms meant it was sometimes optional and sometimes required), it consistently remained a required subject in Japan. In some world history textbooks from

WORLD HISTORY AS A NATIONALIST RATIONALE 191

the late 1940s and early 1950s, Western history overwhelms Eastern his- tory by a ratio of about three to one. Course periodizations were also based on European historiography: the progression of stages from ancient to medieval to modern to contemporary. Liberalism, democracy, bourgeois revolution, the industrial revolution, and nationalism were the most pop- ular problematics in world history textbooks, which in turn reinforced the Eurocentric understanding of world history.

Research subjects echoed world history education. The rise of capital- ism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the German Peasants’ War, the English Revolution and gentry debates, the American Revolution and slav- ery, Enlightenment and the French Revolution, agrarian reforms in Prussia, and the Industrial Revolution were among the most popular topics for world historians. All those topics address the transition from feudalism to capitalism; in other words, the history of modernization in Europe. Euro- centric world history was promoted to accelerate the historical process of industrialization, political democracy, and modern nation-building.37 Japanese historians relatively free from Cold War imposition could expand their research frontiers to Eastern Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa in the 1970s, and leftist critical historiography has been rela- tively dominant in Japan. An amalgam of Marxism and modernization theory, represented by Ōtsuka Hisao’s economic history, has been the main explanatory framework for the Japanese transition from the feudal to the modern on a world-historical scale.

Conversely, Korean historians, deprived of academic freedom under the anti-Communist dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, struggled to pursue “history from below.” The postcolonial generation, born in the 1950s and attending university in the 1970s, were eyewitnesses of a typical process of primitive accumulation of capital under the South Korean developmen- tal dictatorship. A sort of enclosure movement, not by force but by a mar- ket manipulation of keeping low prices for agrarian products, a massive migration of peasants to the city as a reserve army of labor, the misery of the working masses, the mobilization of worker-peasants to the project of modernizing the fatherland and social patriotism—all these phenomena of nineteenth-century European social history seemed to recur in twentieth-century South Korea. In these circumstances, it is not surpris- ing to see the emergence of Korean narodniks and their concern for “his- tory from below.”

Marxist historiography in colonial Korea was also marked by the Euro- centric vision of world capitalist development. The Eurocentric unilinear development model ended up defending the autogenous capitalist devel- opment of colonized Korea against the colonizer Japan’s stagnancy theory. Marxist universal history and its consequential Eurocentrism was able to accommodate the nationalist rationale with its stress on the autogenous development of capitalism. The peculiar fusion of Marxist historicism and the Rostovian take-off model of economic growth was influential in post- war Korean historiography, too. Sometimes one person, such as Min Seok- Hong, first professor of Western history at Seoul National University, could endorse the stubborn Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution of 1798 and advocate Rostow’s modernization theory at the same time.46 The desire for modernity—in both of these ways—was a locomotive to drive the study and education of world/Western history. In this context, world his- tory meant exclusively Western history, because the failed modernization in Asia could not be used as a model. World history was an exercise in iden- tifying a reasonable model to spur postwar Korean development.

In less developed countries, socialism under the slogan of “the creative application of Marxism-Leninism” became a development strategy of rapid industrialization intended to catch up with and overtake advanced capi- talism at the cost of the working masses. To many East Asian intellectuals suffering from the identity crisis between Westernization and national identity, socialism came as a two-birds-with-one-stone solution. Socialism was expected to solve the historical dilemma of anti-Western modern- ization because of its vision of anti-imperialist national liberation and rapid industrialization from above. The popularity of the dependency theory among Korean-left historians and social scientists in the late 1970s can be understood in the same vein. Dependency theorists based colonial history on the premise that at the heart of colonialism lay the one-way transfer of capital from the colony to the metropole and the additional

194 IMAGINING

transfer of surplus through the unequal exchange between the center and periphery. The hated Japanese colonial rule was seen as the prime cause of contemporary Korean economic backwardness, military dictatorship, an immature civil society, the division of two Koreas, and all sorts of pre- modern residues.

Dependency theory and its aftermath in historical research did not shatter the dichotomy of the normative West and the deviated East, nor of model modernization and deviated modernization. With its sharp criticism of the unequal exchange and unilateral surplus transfer between center and periphery, dependency theory and its historical arguments were more often than not based on an oversimplified opposition between East and West as well as essentialized regional differences represented by the concept of the “Third World.” Thus it fails to pick up historical tensions inherent in any specific unit of either peripheries or centers. It tends to essentialize the homogeneity and heterogeneity of both nation-states and the region. In the final instance, dependency theory and its worldview came to serve world history as a nationalist rationale by justifying the accumulation of capital by the nation-state for rapid industrialization. Once again, both modernist and Marxist world history in postwar East Asia was overcome by Western history.

Beyond National History?

In 2005 the joint East Asian history textbook A History to Open the Future (HOF) was published simultaneously in Korea, Japan, and China.47 A watershed in textbook cooperation, it was designed to counteract the nationalist polemics over history in East Asia. In the midst of the turbulent historical controversy ignited by the Japanese New History Textbook, HOF achieved a remarkable marketing success. In 2005 alone, roughly 120,000 copies of Chinese versions, about 70,000 Japanese copies and nearly 30,000 copies of the Korean version were sold. More than fifty his- torians, history teachers, and citizens of the three countries participated in this project, and thirteen conferences have been held consecutively in China, Japan, and Korea since 2002. HOF encouraged hope about the future topography of East Asian historiography, and it has led historical discourse in East Asia toward regional peace and historical reconciliation. The broad

WORLD HISTORY AS A NATIONALIST RATIONALE 195

press coverage of that book, in Korea at least, disseminated this optimistic vision, and indeed HOF may deserve credit as the first transnational his- tory book in postwar East Asia. Given the current East Asian “History War,” this book is an impressive achievement.

Yet a scrupulous reading of HOF raises questions about its transnational character. In short, it is a transnational history based on the national his- tory paradigm. First of all, many nationalist historians from the three countries took part in the project. On the Korean committee, nationalist (left) historians constituted the majority. The Japanese committee com- prised mainly “postwar historiography” historians who expressed remorse for Japan’s wartime past. In China, the main contributor was the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Whether nationalists, left-leaning democrats, or Marxists, a common positivist thread connects the contributors’ different political approaches. They all claim to have sought “historical truth and lessons” through the textbook project. Perhaps the positivist stance narrowed the scope of the book, because trilateral agreement on the facts was a prerequisite, which explains why the book is rather simplistically focused on Japan’s wartime aggression and invasion.

Second, as Narita Ryūichi has rightly pointed out, the book never ques- tions that the nation-state is a collective subject. The editorial committee’s proud declaration that HOF incorporates the viewpoints of women, minor- ities, and the oppressed is somewhat true. The goal of HOF to be “free from narrow-minded chauvinism” seems partially accomplished. One should pay attention to the intentional usage of “chauvinism” instead of “nation- alism”: the target of HOF was not “nationalism” per se, but perceived “bad nationalism,” that is, narrow-minded chauvinism. The (Korean) editorial committee did not recognize that even “good nationalism” betrays the principle of standing for minorities. Insofar as the nation-state continues to be the subject of history, a transnational East Asia has no place for national minorities lacking their own nation-states. It should be noted, too, that HOF represents East Asia exclusively as the three countries of South Korea, Japan, and China. Taiwan, Vietnam, Mongolia, and even North Korea are excluded from scope of the HOF project.48

Third, HOF sacrificed issues of transnationality and translocality for its own national history paradigm. The global context of modernity is miss- ing in the first chapter on the “opening of ports and modernization.”

共同编写战后历史无法被公开

Unfortunately, these two bilateral historical dialogues in East Asia are dotted with arguments more antagonistic than symbiotic. The ways that China, Japan, and Korea distinguish true and false in historical epistemol- ogy reflect their different ways of governing themselves and others. In this game of veracity, the problem of truth becomes the political problems of national history. As long as the national history paradigm is allowed to structure the conditions of possibility for historical truth, no stress on “objective understanding,” “facing history squarely,” “fact-based research,” and a general positivistic stance can resolve the antagonistic disagreement implicit in national histories. What is required as “a stepping-stone to make a scholars’ community for common prosperity in the future with mutual trust” is the change of episteme in historical thinking and reasoning. The goodwill to improve ties through historical reconciliation cannot be realized unless historical disputes, historiographical disagreements, and different opinions can be symbiotic and free from the egocentric national history paradigm. Historical dialogues in East Asia, represented by two joint national history research committees, should shift from interna- tional dialogues between national histories to transnational dialogues beyond national history.