Speaking with the Colonial Ghosts and Pungsu Rumour in Contemporary South Korea (1990–2006): The Pungsu (Feng Shui) Invasion Story Surrounding the Demolition of the Former Japanese Colonial-General Building and Iron Spikes

Abstract

This essay explores how the legacy of Japanese colonisation (1910–1945) continues to have a lingering impact on Korean life decades after territorial decolonisation. That is, the idea of demolishing the former Japanese Colonial-General building from the civil government of Kim Young-sam and the mysterious large iron spikes found at “auspicious sites” in mountains across the country caused a huge public debate throughout the 1990s until the demolition of the building in 1996. The building in question, on the doorstep of the Chosun royal palace, was regarded as a case of a pungsu (a form of East Asian geomancy better known as feng shui) “invasion” by the Japanese during the colonial era, allegedly to cut the qi (vital forces) of Korean national sovereignty. The iron spikes were also understood by many in the context of a “pungsu invasion”. Unfortunately, there is a general lack of documentary and scientific evidence to confirm the claims made about them, and so the controversy about whether this is a fact or a trauma-stricken myth continues. Beyond the debate over documentary and scientific evidence, this article aims to articulate how these stories or rumours suggest “a collective problem solving and collective psychosis” of a community reimagining itself at an important juncture of history. These rumours reflect the ways in which the nation and the public deal with the interrupted and incomplete social process, especially with regard to the long-unresolved collective wounds and grievances from the Japanese colonial era and a continuing fear of Japan, the nation’s “other”. This article also aims to explore how this controversy echoes post-authoritarian Korean society’s fever of “spiritual decolonisation” and “rectification of history”, which have become consistent public preoccupations and policy statements of successive Korean governments.

Notes

1. The brutality of this colonial experience derived from, but is not limited to, the following: the forced ‘annexation’ (colonisation); the brutal suppression of Korean resistance to Japanese rule; the coercion of young Korean women into sexual slavery for the Japanese military; the forcible change of Korean names to Japanese ones; the forced worship of the Japanese emperor; the suppression of the Korean language; the conscription of young Korean boys to the war; the exploitation of the Korean labour force; and the treatment of Koreans as secondary citizens.

2. The structures destroyed included the Gwanghwa-mun (entry gate of the palace), the Heungrae-mun (gate of the second house within the palace) and others. In building an exhibition house for the Chosun Expo in 1915, Japan had already destroyed 90% of the palace buildings and later built the Colonial-General building (Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea 2008).

3. From the early 1990s, various civil society groups took the initiative to identify examples of the Japanese colonial administration’s renaming of places, sites and streets, and also a case of the renaming of a sacred Korean mountain with the symbolic character of the Japanese emperor (see Bae 1994; G. Kim 2005). These initiatives perceived that the renaming of the land by the Japanese had had a spiritually detrimental and demarcating effect on Koreans, and saw reverting to the original Korean names as a significant decolonising action.

4. As Yoon Hong-key (2006, pp. 1–6) points out in his book The Culture of Fengshui in Korea, pungsu is a traditional folk belief that has never ceased to influence the local perception of the everyday, as shown in cases in recent decades where some famous politicians have moved their parents’ graves to ‘auspicious sites’ with a wish to be successful in the elections. The geographer and pungsu scholar Choi Chang-jo (1997, pp. pp. 495–508) notes that Korean pungsu developed from an indigenous form of geomantic theory in ancient Korea and was later combined with a theoretical feng shui school imported from China during the Three Kingdoms era (fourth–seventh centuries). With the Chinese influence, Korean pungsu developed particular local features so that it differed from its Chinese counterpart as much as the landscapes of the two countries consist of radically different features. Belief in feng shui is very popular in China and Hong Kong. It is known that most of the important public and commercial buildings in Hong Kong are built with feng shui in mind, including the famous British-designed HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) main building. In Japan, feng shui exists under the name of fusui; it is popular and has also influenced people in making decisions about the location of their houses.

5. The USA, South Korea and Japan were also security partners against communists from the Soviet Union, China and North Korea, as well as being linked by the same economic development plans implemented by the USA, and so many matters concerning Koreans (for example, justice and war reparations) were superseded and suppressed under these circumstances, as seen in the case of the Tokyo trial.

6. In this period, various social groups, such as students, intellectuals, urban workers, the urban poor, peasants and members of the critical middle class, created a grand coalition for the reform of society and the end of dictatorship. This social movement was referred to as the minjung movement (while minjung literally means ‘mass’ or ‘people’, minjung was used here as a generic term for this coalition beyond economic categories). Many forms of dissident cultural and artistic expression, such as minjung art and literature, had political aspirations and focused on representing the under-represented issues of grievance in history and society, and elucidating the human, cultural and political contexts and causes of this popular uprising.

7. There are various accounts of this (see Hur 1998).

8. For example, during the Kim Young-sam era (1993–1997), in an effort to rectify the past, Kim also prosecuted two former presidents, Chun Doo-hwan and Rho Tae-woo, on multiple charges that included the Kwangju killing.

9. Kim Young-sam did not deal with the issue of collaboration and the property accumulation of the collaborators’ descendants.

10. The anarchist and historian Shin Chae-ho was the first to describe the history of Korea as the history of a minjok — that is, the Korean people as an independent entity as opposed to the self-aggrandising Confucian historiography of China and the colonial historiography of Japan, both of which tried to locate themselves as the centre and so place Korea and other Asian countries as subsidiary entities. Doksa Sillon (A New Reading of History), written in 1908, and Chosun Sanggosa (The Early History of Chosun), written in 1924–1925, laid out the first minjok-based linear national history of Korea.

11. For the first three months after an official letter was sent to the Japanese prime minister from a working group to resolve this issue, the Japanese authorities dubbed the victim women ‘prostitutes’, but then had to admit its systematic involvement in the repeated rape and enslavement of civilian women when evidence was found.

12. Hur (1998, pp. 7–8) claims that it is due to the fact that many Koreans think Japan has never repented for its past and continues to deny its past, which is seen as a symptom of its intention to undermine Korea’s sovereignty and self-esteem in the present in order to justify what it has done.

13. Caruth (1996, pp. 2–7) defines trauma as a psychological condition created by desires, wishes and representations in a subject suffering from a violent event which resists simple comprehension.

14. Laplanche notes: ‘No complete view of traumatic events is possible without taking into account the subject’s particular “predisposition”. For there to be a trauma in the strict sense of the word — that is, non-abreaction of the experience, which remains in the psyche as a “foreign body”’. He continues: ‘certain objective conditions have to be met’. The ‘objective condition’ refers to a condition in which the subject can reaccess the original condition and context of the trauma (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973, p. 466).

15. The reporter Kang Insun (1993, p. 336) points out that these varied responses point to the singular result that when this building was referred to as the ‘former Colonial-General building’ in the survey, more than 80% agreed with its demolition or relocation. When referring to it as a museum, the survey result shows slightly fewer demands for its demolition.

16. The Committee to Oppose the Demolition of the Former Colonial-General Building (chaired by Kang Won-yong, the chief director of the Christian Academy and a reformist figure) was the group responsible for this. Its 58 members included the lawyer who applied for the injunction against the government’s decision in 1995. They advocated opposition to the ‘relentless government policy to purge history’. The court finally ruled that the Korean government had a right to demolish the building.

17. However, the management and curators of the National Museum pointed out that recycling should not be an issue since the building was basically made of cement with only the surface decorated with 10 cm-thick granite slabs, and it had structural faults that belied its solid appearance. Even if Koreans were to continue to use it, it was a building that required many repairs (T. Kim 1995).

18. The aforementioned 1992 survey included questions on the method and timing of the demolition, which resulted in 35% of citizens and 40% of experts wanting to build a new museum first and demolish the Colonial-General building later, for the safety of the national treasures (I. Kang 1993, p. 336).

19. Evidence of the popularity of pungsu as a theory of architecture and landscape can be found in numerous Asian and Korean classic texts, as well as their contemporary architectural practices. A Chinese classic, Iching (The Book of Changes), conveys feng shui-associated geomantic ideas. Many Korean classics of the Chosun period, such as Jeongkamrok (a prophetic book based on pungsu), Taekliji (a book of Korean geography and customs) and the Annals of the Chosun Dynasty (a book on royal history), also introduce pungsu-related ideas and cultural discourse.

20. Such thoughts concerning the inseparable relationship between humans and place, the natural landscape and the sacred order that pungsu stands for are not unique to either Korean culture or other Asian cultures. The view that reads nature as a theological text has always existed across the world. As Yoon (2006, p. 278) points out, Genesis in the Bible explains the six-day creation and makes it comprehensible in the form of the early hexaemera. The parallel conception of the land and body as one is seen in various forms of religion across time and cultures.

21. I have adapted the description used by Hong Kal (2005) of the 1915 Japanese exposition building in colonial Korea, which was also in the same style.

22. According to Lee Y-hwa (2000, p. 26), the books note that Korea tried to develop grave sites that are supposedly auspicious, and this greatly damaged the mountains and forests, and provided a source of frequent disputes among families anxious to secure those sites for their ancestors.

23. Its written characters indicate the same meaning as feng shui and pungsu, which all translate as a philosophy of wind and water. As in Korean pungsu, fusui has its own way and its own local characteristics under the influence of feng shui.

24. One could safely argue that a colonial authority would not have willingly written down such deeds since it contradicts its official image as the Asian heir to Western, modern, scientific, Enlightenment thinking.

25. A Gathering of People with a Thought for the Community (Urirlsaenggakhaneunmoim) was later turned into A Committee for the Revitalisation of Korean People’s Spirit (Minjokjungkisunyangwuiwonhoi) by So Yun-ha. Their most important practice is paying for a purification ceremony called junganje to heal the supposed wounds and pain of the mountains.

26. The most recent case reported was on 17 August 2010 in Yonhap News (Park 2010).

27. Kim also notes in his book that out of 61 reported cases, four were confirmed as pungsu spikes and another four were sites where spikes has been previously removed after having been confirmed by other groups as pungsu spikes; two were difficult to determine; two were determined to be land survey tools; and in 49 cases no spikes were found (G. Kim 2005, p. 26).

28. So and his organisation pulled iron spikes out following the description of the precise location given in this testimony. The transcribed testimony is said to have been given to a barber of the late Park Chung-hee, who subsequently forgot where he left it (An 2005).

29. For instance, the fact that the locations of the iron stakes are concentrated in the area to the east of the Taebak mountain is also seen as strong evidence of a “pungsu invasion”. This area is known for being the birthplace of famous generals and leaders in Korean history. As folklore indicates, the Japanese identified those places and drove the iron spikes in ‘the auspicious sites of the mountains of such areas’ (G. Kim 2005, pp. 36, 47).

30. The shaman who did this believed that the vital energy of the family would be transmitted to her clients through the iron spikes (see S. Kim 2000).

31. She continues by saying that the demolition was perceived as pulling out the iron spike in order for Korean minds to overcome their historical wounds (see S. Kim 2000).

32. The Japanese original was published in the Sundai History Studies Journal in 1997. Unno discusses that Japan set up a survey department in October 1894 directly under the emperor’s office to measure the land of Korea for military purposes immediately after it finished its war with China. Korea was used as a battlefield during the war. Since it was an illegal act not permitted by Korean law, Japan had to conduct this survey secretly. This survey covered most of Korea from the south to the north, as well as Manchuria. In 1904, the number of people working in the survey teams reached 406, and they were recruited and trained specifically for this temporary and secret survey department. The point of this article is to discuss how this Japanese project was challenged and slowed down by Korean popular resistance (see Unno 2006, pp. 65, 67–72).

33. Email interview with Lee Jin-ho, 24 December 2009.

34. Stewart (2003) uses this expression in taking account of the existential function of rumour.

35. The demolition began on 15 August 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of Korean independence, with the authorities removing the dome of the building, which was a gesture of the intent to dismantle it eventually. The following year, on Independence Day in 1996, with court approval, dynamite was set inside the building and the building disappeared into the ashes of history with a huge explosion.

36. The square was opened to the public in August 2009.

37. Despite the collaborative effort of the female victims and working groups over two decades, Japanese politicians’ erratic reversal of their conviction of Japan’s war responsibility has continued, as has the dismissal of victims of these and other atrocities like the Nanjing massacre.

38. The new historiography often legitimises the right-wing claim of Japanese politicians that dismisses events like the 1937 Nanking massacre as minor incidents. The revisionists often view themselves as the victims of the war rather than the aggressors. All this makes some of Japan’s Asian neighbours doubt the Japanese authorities’ vision of history and treat it as an unaccountable other. This is especially true when compared to the process by which Germany expressed its guilt of Nazi atrocities and made commitments to rectify the past to other European nations (see Tanaka 1994).

39. This has been already witnessed in China in recent years.