Racializing Chōsenjin: Science and Biological Speculations in Colonial Korea

Abstract

Recent literature on the history of medicine in colonial Korea has revealed that Japanese medical scientists studied Korean bodies to expose racial differences between the Japanese and Koreans and justify Japanese colonial rule. Previous scholars, however, have focused mainly on finding a connection between colonial medical research and eugenics. This article attempts to consider things as yet underinvestigated, in particular, the way in which medical research on Koreans emerged and was intertwined with Japanese colonialism in other ways, separate from contemporary eugenics projects. The article examines the emergence and development of what we now considered as “racial sciences”—physical anthropology, serological anthropology, and human genetics—with regard to the biological characteristics of Koreans. In doing so, it argues that biological speculations on Koreans originated as a subdiscipline of Japanese origin studies and resonated with a newly emerging type of colonial racism in colonial Korea—inclusionary racism. The article also presents the colonial scientific enterprise’s conclusion that Koreans were biologically heterogeneous, contradicting colonial Korean intellectuals’ assertion about Korean ethnic homogeneity. The use of Korean ethnic homogeneity as an ideological basis for nation building by two Korean governments meant that postcolonial Korean scientists had to seek a way to reconcile the colonial era’s “scientific conclusion” (biological heterogeneity) with the postcolonial era’s “politically approved” conceptualization (biological homogeneity). Therefore, regardless of whether it was trying to refute, appropriate, or revitalize the colonial legacy, biological research on Koreans in the postcolonial period was carried out under the framework that had been constructed by colonial racial sciences.

• racial science
• physical anthropology
• serological anthropology
• human genetics
• colonial Korea
• Japanese colonialism

Acknowledgments

Takuya Miyagawa led me to look at the colonial origin of racial sciences in South Korea when I initiated my dissertation research. I thank members of the Medical History Group (Ŭihaksa Moim) at the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Seoul National University, for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. I have to acknowledge the numerous colleagues and peers who have helped me develop this article, especially Chang-Geon Shin, Chuyoung Won, Hyun Gyung Kim, Tae-Ho Kim, and Young Su Park. I am also grateful to editor Wen-Hua Kuo and the two anonymous referees for helping me articulate the ideas presented here. This research was generously supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Japan-Korea Cultural Foundation.

Notes

¹ I adopt the McCune-Reischauer Romanization and the Revised Hepburn systems as the Romanization of Korean and Japanese, respectively; all Korean and Japanese names in this article are listed in the order of surname first, followed by the given name. I transliterate names following the persons’ preferences as stated in their English written publications.

² Henry (2013) diagnoses that when claiming the racial superiority of the Japanese colonizer, Japanese officials and settlers in colonial Korea relied less on biomedical research than their Western counterparts in India and other Asian colonies. For him, Japanese colonial racism was “affective racism,” making boundaries based on the different cultural practices and coercing the colonized to embody a cultural sensibility deemed adequately Japanese.

³ Another part of their work was intervening in the reproduction of colonial Korean women in regard to jinko mōndai 人口問題 (the population problem). See S. Kim 2008, Park 2017, and Yoo 2008.

⁴ Here I translate tanil minjok 單一民族 and honhap minjok 混合民族 as “ethnically homogeneous nation” and “ethnically heterogeneous nation,” respectively, according to Shin (2006). Claiming the ethnic nationalist nature of Korean nationalism, he defines “being ethnic” as an entity having common biological properties as well as cultural ones. Oguma Eiji’s criticism of the myth of Japanese ethnic homogeneity (Oguma 1995) has inspired Korean historians and sociologists to develop a critical approach to Korean nationalism grounded on the belief of Korean ethnic homogeneity.

⁵ For a detailed history of Koya’s activity as a leading mainstream eugenicist in the Japanese Empire, see Oguma 1995 and Chung 2002.

⁶ For a detailed explanation on the history of physical anthropology at Keijō Imperial University and its postcolonial transformation, see Hyun 2015 and Kim 2016.

⁷ Jung (2012) offers a detailed explanation of Satō’s activity inside and outside colonial Korea. For the history of blood science and race in colonial and postcolonial Korea, see Hyun, forthcoming.

⁸ It is worth noting that Komai’s discussion about national environment and minzoku had some commonalities with a philosophical argument on the relation between climate fudō (風土) and minzoku developed by Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎, 1889–1960). The Japanese philosopher was also a professor at Kyōto Imperial University and thus might have interacted intellectually with Komai, although I have not found any historical materials indicating this.

⁹ Mizushima claimed that cold and typhoon-prone regions of temperate climate zones were the best place to develop civilization. According to his argument, the climate of the Korean peninsula was superior to the Japanese archipelago concerning bunka no shinten 文化の進展 (the progress of culture). See Mizushima 1935: 17–18. I thank Shin Chang-Geon at Tokyo University of Science for helping me find the bibliographic information about Mizushima’s article.

¹⁰ Another pathway to convert colonial racial research’s conclusion to support the Korean biological homogeneity argument was cherry-picking colonial racial theories. For such a case concerning serological anthropology, see Hyun, forthcoming.

¹¹ Honhap minjok is the Korean expression of the Japanese term konwa minzoku.

¹² I borrowed the term from Kim Hoi-eun’s (2016: 459–69) observation on “the recycling of colonial physical anthropology in postcolonial Korea.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaehwan Hyun

Jaehwan Hyun is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science). He received a PhD in 2018 at Seoul National University, with a dissertation examining the role of geopolitics and transnational collaboration in the mutual constitution of human genetics and national identity in Korea from 1926 to 2009. Now Jaehwan focuses on how the International Biological Program (1964–74) and related cooperative projects were entangled with the postcolonial nation building of Japan and South Korea and with the US military interventions across the Pacific. In particular, he looks at how anthropologists and ecologists “naturalize” borderlands and border peoples in Japan and South Korea.