Colonial Hero: Son Kijŏng in Narratives of Popular and National Korean History

ABSTRACT

Son Kijŏng’s monumental victory in the 1936 Berlin Olympic marathon propelled him to the status of hero in both colonial Korea and Imperial Japan. His triumph symbolised the successful fulfilment of Japan’s colonial policy of assimilation (dōka). Yet, this very event – the moment when assimilation was ostensibly realised – created the opening for a legendary act of resistance to Japanese colonial authority: the publication, in the Tonga ilbo, of a photograph with the Japanese flag on Son’s chest blotted out. This article explores colonial-era representations of Son’s achievement as well as the formation and solidification of a historical narrative that portrays Son as a champion of Korean nationalism. Rather than any act performed by Son, it is the malleability of representation established during the colonial era that has allowed for the valorisation of Son as a symbol of resistance to Japanese colonial authority. More recently, colonial-period images of Son, building on the established dominant historical narrative of resistance, have been refashioned as blank canvases from which imagined historical outcomes can be created and formed into narratives that speak to current ideological demands for portrayals of active resistance to Japanese colonial rule.

Korean abstract

1936년 베를린 올림픽 마라톤에서 금메달을 회득함으로써 손기정은 식민지 조선과 일본제국에서 영웅이 되었다. 그의 우승은 일본제국에 있어 식민지 정책인 ‘동화’의 성공을 상징했다. 그러나 표면적으로 동화가 성취된 이 때에 일본제국을 저항한 매우 유명한 일장기 말소 사건이 발생했다. 이 논문은 일제시대의 그 당시 손의 우승에 관한 묘사 및 한국 민족주의의 투사로 표상하는 역사서사의 형성과 고착을 살펴보고자 한다. 손기정의 행동보다 식민지 시대에 형성된 표상의 유연성으로 인해, 손기정이 일본의 식민지 권한에 대한 저항의 상징으로 추앙된 것이다. 최근 들어 지배적인 저항의 역사서사를 기반으로 하는 식민지 시대의 손기정의 이미지가, 일제 강점에 적극적으로 항거하는 표상에 관한 현재의 이념적 요구에 응하는 허구의 역사적 사건을 창작할 수 있는 백지가 되었다.

KEYWORDS:

• Narration of history
• colonial Korea
• Japanese Empire
• Son Kijŏng
• collaboration
• resistance
• assimilation (dōka)
• Olympics
• popular history
• memory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Several different romanisations have been used for Son’s name. For the sake of consistency, I have chosen to use Son Kijŏng – the most commonly used romanisation in academic writing. His preferred spelling was Sohn Kee-chung, which has also been used quite frequently in English-language media coverage of Son.

^2. Although the details are not clear, available sources and information suggest that Ch’oe was purged and forced to leave P’yŏngyang in 1967, dying shortly thereafter in 1969 (J. Kim, 2003).

^3. A search of online Korean research database Dbpia finds more than 60 academic articles on Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi. By contrast, a search for Son Kijŏng only finds five such articles.

^4. After ‘voluntarily suspending publication’ (chajin hyugan) on 4 September 1936, Yo Un-hyŏng, the President of Chosŏn chungang ilbo, made the decision to permanently cease publication of the newspaper in November 1937 due to an increasingly difficult publication environment (Chŏng, 2008, 143–144).

^5. Terashima’s (2020) biography of Son has been translated into Korean and received some coverage in the South Korean press (e.g., Yonhap nyusŭ, 2020). The book notes that Son was involved in the promotion of volunteering for the Imperial Japanese Military but that it was his biggest ‘regret’ (huhoe) in life (Terashima, 2019, 80).

^6. This trend has been discussed in studies on Korean film (H. Lee, 2020; Shin, 2019) that identify a shift from the lacklustre performance of films with a more nuanced depiction of the colonial era during the first decade of the 2000s such as YMCA Baseball Team (Yagudan, 2002), Blue Swallow (Ch’ŏngyŏn, 2005), and Modern Boy (Modŏn poi, 2008), to the more successful – in terms of both box office and critical acclaim – recent films that focus on colonial-period resistance, such as Assassination (Amsal, 2015), The Age of Shadows (Miljŏng, 2016), and The Battle: Roar to Victory (Pongodong chŏnt’u, 2019).

^7. Since the 1980s, the Korean Olympic Committee has called on the IOC to change Son’s nationality and name. Before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the IOC made changes to reflect Son’s accomplishments and explain the historical background but refused to change his nationality and registered name because it would distort history (Chosun ilbo, 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Seed Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2019-INC-223000X).