Hybrid spaces: Japanese teachers in Korean rural schools during the wartime mobilisation (1931–1945)

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the memories of Japanese teachers who worked in Korea during the colonial period. By focusing on the autobiographical narratives of three Japanese primary school teachers who worked in rural Korea between 1931 and 1945, this study aims to unpack the relatively under-studied aspects of colonialism. Their narratives carried personal histories regarding their choice to study and work in Korea, the nature of their relationship with Korean children, and the memories of the political and cultural atmosphere at schools in pre-war Korea. These memoirs were accounts of Japanese colonialism through the “Japanese eyes”. As they intimately interacted with the local community and students, their memories were multifaceted and complicated; these were not simply apologetic or nostalgic but involved particular social relations that they had experienced in Korea. In this paper, I attempted to shed light on the reconstruction of the grander narrative of pre- and post-war educational history in the region by looking at the complexity of their “reflected” memories.

KEYWORDS:

• Japanese teachers
• colonial education
• Korean rural schools
• wartime education
• memoirs
• autobiographies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

All the translations of Japanese and Korean sources are the author’s. Based on East Asian ordering of names, the Japanese and Korean individuals are indicated with their surnames first followed by their given names. The Romanisation for Korean language follows the “Revised Romanisation of Korean” (officially approved since 2000 by the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism).

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Post-War Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11.

² Bruce Cumings, an American historian specialising in Korean history, has defined this phenomenon as a “collective revulsion”, in which “one Korea indulges in a myth that everyone resisted and the other in a myth that no one collaborated”. Bruce Cumings, “The Legacy of Japanese Colonialism in Korea,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984), 481–2.

³ This approach has been initiated and developed by scholars on Korean studies in Western academia, who have suggested rejecting the “binary constructions” of historical narrative based on the typical schemes that focus on exploitation versus resistance. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

⁴ The rightist scholars (or extreme modernists) on colonial history have often tended to overestimate the value of modernity in its economic sense at the expense of other qualities such as human dignity, political freedom, equal rights and communicative rationality, thereby eventually distorting the suppressive “reality” of colonialism. Yoshiko Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Post-War Japan: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo’s Court Challenges (New York: Routledge, 2009).

⁵ Sōji Takasaki, Shokuminchi Chōsen no nihonjin [The Japanese in Colonial Korea] (Tōkyō: Iwanami, 2013).

⁶ Tsugio Inaba, Kyu Kankoku ~ Chōsen no Nihonjin kyōin [Japanese Teachers from the Old Korea to Colonial Chōsen] (Fukuoka: Kyūshū Daigaku, 2001); and Tatsuya Yamashita, Shokuminchi Chōsen no gakkō kyōin [The Teachers in Colonial Korea] (Fukuoka: Kyūshū Daigaku, 2011).

⁷ Shigeaki Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore – Abrokgang no kodomo-tachi [Various Sides of Colonial Education: The Children on the Abrok River] (Yonago: Yonago Purinto, 1997); Isamu Itō, Kyōiku sanpo, watashi no naka no Chōsen [Taking a Walk with Education: Korea Inside Me] (Tōkyō: Kōseisha, 1982); and Junji Tabei, Genkai o watatte – moto Chōsen kokumingakkō kyōin no kaiko [Crossing the Genkai: A Recollection of a Former Primary School Teacher in Korea] (Kōbe: Kon-ki insatsu kōgyō-sha, 1993); Yoonmi Lee, “Iljaeha Ilbonin gyowondeul [The Japanese Teachers in the Colonial Period],” Hanguk Gyoyukshinmun [Korean Educational News (weekly)], December 23, 2019. www.hangyo.com/news/article.html?no=90487 (accessed April 19, 2021).

⁸ The post-war politics in Japan went through several phases. Public discussions were limited until the early 1970s, while the progressives and conservatives had intense debates over the issue of war responsibility. Since the late 1980s, coupled with the end of the Cold War, the issue of remembering the past became more of an open issue in Japan. Nadeschda L. Bachem, “Ambivalent Encounters: Colonial Memory in the Literature of Two Japanese Returnees from Korea,” Japan Forum (2020), DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2020.1747519; and Franziska Seraphim, “Negotiating War Legacies and Postwar Democracy in Japan,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no. 2–3 (2008): 206.

⁹ This call back or repatriation, called “hikiage”, meant giving up everything they had in Korea. Those who returned to Japan after the defeat were grouped under the category of hikiagesha (returnee). Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Post-War Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

¹⁰ The status of these returnees has been a point of controversy in post-war Japan. The returnees were often treated as “poor persons in need of welfare”, while others were branded as “the running dogs of imperialism”. Watt, When Empire Comes Home, 14, 87.

¹¹ Takasaki, Shokuminchi Chōsen no, 201–7.

¹² Post-war literature by repatriates, including that by teachers, is abundant. The narratives of the three teachers under study here have been selected among the published memoirs based on their commonalities, particularly their experiences as young ordinary teachers in rural areas who worked mostly with Korean children. The narrated experience of the Japanese teachers varied, depending on their localities (urban or rural), school levels (primary, secondary, or tertiary), and school types (all Korean, all Japanese, or co-educational). The narrated memories of the three teachers are in contrast to other cases, such as Takeda Seizo, for instance, a secondary-school teacher, later an administrator, who served in Korea between 1924 and 1945. Takeda, who was trained in the prestigious Hiroshima Higher Normal School in Japan and worked mostly in urban co-educational settings while he served in Korea for 21 years, wrote a detailed memoir in 1973 documenting his work in Korea, filled with clear apologetic and nostalgic overtones. Seizo Takeda, Nitchō kyōiku angya no tabi [Japan-Korean Educational Pilgrimage Trip] (Tōkyō: Tōkyō Eigakuin, 1981).

¹³ Such orientalist terms were used to describe the isolationist policy of Korea up to the mid-nineteenth century. William Elliot Griffis, Corea: The Hermit Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894; first published in 1882).

¹⁴ Mark E. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

¹⁵ Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 5–6.

¹⁶ Ibid., 11–2.

¹⁷ Man-Gyu Yi, Joseon gyoyuksa [The Educational History of Korea] (Seoul: Sallimteo, 2010), 665; Yi’s work was originally published in two volumes, in 1947 and 1949.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 94.

²⁰ Yi, Joseon Gyoyuksa, 660.

²¹ Takasaki, Shokuminchi Chōsen no; The Japanese government promoted Japanese nationals to serve as teachers in the occupied territories. Japanese teachers in Korea were paid better than in Japan and were required to undergo a shorter period for training compared to the Koreans. Many Japanese teachers only attended secondary vocational institutes in Japan, and entered a short-term teacher certificate programme in Korea (usually one year for the Japanese holding a secondary school diploma) and eventually began to work in Korean primary rural schools.

²² Ibid., 154–5.

²³ Jōkō Yonetarō grew up in a liberal and Christian family in Japan but later became a socialist; Shindō Toyō, Zaichō Nihonjin kyōshi: hanshokuminchi undō no kiroku [The Japanese Teachers in Korea: The Record of Anti-Colonisation Movement] (Tōkyō: Shiraishi shoten, 1981); and Jōkō Machiko et al., Shokuminchi Chōsen no kodomo-tachito ikita kyōshi Jōkō Yonetarō [A Teacher Who Lived with Children in Colonial Korea Jōkō Yonetarō] (Tōkyō: Ōtsuki shoten, 2010).

²⁴ This was a nationwide, anti-Japanese protest caused by a misconducted dispute resolution over a fight between the Japanese and Korean high-school students in Gwangju, a southern city in Korea.

²⁵ Inaba, Kyu Kankoku ~ Chōsen no Nihonjin kyōin; and Yamashita, Shokuminchi Chōsen no gakkō kyōin.

²⁶ Tabei, Genkai o watatte, 4.

²⁷ Both teachers started their teaching career from 1936 until 1945 in Korea. Itō went to a normal school in Daegu and Kosugō went to a normal school in Jeonju; Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore; and Itō, Kyōiku sanpo.

²⁸ Cumings, “Legacy of Japanese Colonialism,” 478.

²⁹ The idea of the sphere, which had existed in other forms, was formally announced in August 1940 by Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke. W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 227; and Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 176–84.

³⁰ Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore, 11, 51.

³¹ Ibid., 11–2.

³² Ibid.

³³ In his 1997 memoir, Kosugō commented that he later regretted the forced assimilation while he was teaching in Korea. However, during his time in Korea in the 1930s he did not recognise the meaning of assimilating a nation with over “four thousand years of history” that had passed on “the ironware culture, Buddhism, and even letters or scripts in the earlier stages of civilisation” to Japan. Ibid., 11.

³⁴ A Korean name – both South Korean and North Korean – comprises a family name, typically only one syllable as in Chinese names, followed by a given name. The ancient Korean family names varied but with the growing adoption of the Chinese writing system since the seventh century, they changed to this pattern. In 1751, Yi Jung-hwan, a Korean scholar, noted in Tekriji, a well-known book on Korean ethnology/anthropogeology, that this system began to spread around the beginning of Goryeo [Korea] Dynasty (918–1392), when political measures were adopted by its founder, Wang Geon (877–943), to integrate the formerly divided territories into a unified state (Hanguk minjok munhwa baekgwa daesajeon [Encyclopaedia of Korean Culture] http://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Contents/Index?contents_id=E0029415 (accessed 12 April 2021).

³⁵ Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore, 29–32.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Taira Shidehara, Chōsen kyōiku-ron [On the Education in Korea] (Tōkyō: Rokumeikan, 1919), 169–78.

³⁸ Ibid., 50–1.

³⁹ The term “education fever” began to be used in the early twentieth-century Korea, especially to describe the zeal for education to improve the nation in the time of crisis after the Protectorate Treaty followed by the Russo–Japanese War (see, Yoonmi Lee, Modern Education, Textbooks and the Image of the Nation: Politics of Modernization and Nationalism in Korean Education, 1880–1910 (New York: Routledge, 2000)); it is now commonly used to describe South Korean education. Michael Seth, Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002).

⁴⁰ Lee, Modern Education, Textbooks and the Image of the Nation.

⁴¹ The number of students enrolled in public schools began to outnumber the students in traditional seodang only as late as 1923. Seong-Cheol Oh, Shikminji chodeung gyoyukui hyeongseong [The Formation of Colonial Education in Primary Schools] (Seoul: Gyoyukgwahaksa, 2000), 113.

⁴² After the nationwide liberation movement called Sam Il Undong (March First Movement) in 1919, both nationalists and socialists began to call for improved access and compulsory education. Oh, Shikminji chodeung, 36–50; Henry Chung, The Case of Korea: A Collection of Evidence on the Japanese Domination of Korea and on the Development of Korean Independence Movement (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1921); and Hugh H. Cynn, The Rebirth of Korea: The Reawakening of the People, its Causes, and the Outlook (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1920).

⁴³ Itō, Kyōiku sanpo, 26.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Tabei, Genkai o watatte, 35.

⁴⁶ Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore, 38–40.

⁴⁷ Itō, Kyōiku sanpo, 27.

⁴⁸ Tabei, Genkai o watatte, 33.

⁴⁹ Under the assimilation policy, schools in Korea were regulated by the same law, while being divided into two categories: for students who used Japanese for everyday use and for those who did not. The former referred to the schools for Japanese residents and the latter to those for Koreans. Yoshisanro Shibata, “Shin Chōsen kyōiku-rei ni tsuite [On the New Ordinance on Education in Korea],” Chōsen Kyōiku [Education in Korea] 6, no. 6 (1922): 6–11.

⁵⁰ The Japanese settlers usually sent their children to primary schools for Japanese. However, co-education was practised in some rural schools where the number of schools was limited. In the school where Kosugō worked, the children of the Japanese principal attended the Korean school. They spoke both languages fluently as they played with the Korean students after the classes using Korean language. Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore, 18.

⁵¹ Tabei, Genkai o watatte, 38–9.

⁵² Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore, 33–4.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ These teachers also went through processes that other returnees suffered in post-war Japan. Lori Watt described how the “passionate feelings of patriotism” turned into an “experience of profound sense of betrayal of those ideals”: “Some had believed the rhetoric that Japan was working to free Asia from the grip of white colonialism, but when they returned to Japan, its occupation by the United States military exposed the contradictions in the colonial project. They survived the violent end of the empire, but rejected … as insufficiently Japanese, chafed within its borders in a kind of reverse exile”. Watt, When Empire Comes Home, 10.

⁵⁵ Igarashi, Bodies of Memory.

⁵⁶ Todd A. Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California, 2014), 204–18.

⁵⁷ Takasaki, Shokuminchi Chōsen no, 201–7.

⁵⁸ Itō, Kyōiku sanpo, 234.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 223.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 235–41.

⁶¹ Ibid., 9–10.

⁶² Ibid., 234–5.

⁶³ Seraphim, “Negotiating War Legacies,” 206–11.

⁶⁴ Watt, When Empire Comes Home, 5–10.

⁶⁵ Tabei, Genkai o watatte, 300–17.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 318.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 328–9.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 331.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 339.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Ibid., 356.

⁷² Ibid.

⁷³ Ibid. 356–7.

⁷⁴ The Soviet entry to the north created a stream of Japanese civilians as refugees towards the southern part of Korea; Eunjin Byun, “38 doseon ibug ilbon-in-ui sikminji gwihwan gyeongheomgwa gieog-ui pyosang- Isogaya Seuejiui jeosul-eul jungsim-euro [Memories on Colonial Korea and repatriation of the Japanese in the North of the 38^th Parallel- centring around Isogaya-Sueji’s writings],” InmunsahoegwahagYeongu [Humanities and Social Science Research] 22 no. 1 (2021): 1–17.

⁷⁵ Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore, 66.

⁷⁶ Kosugō nostalgically reflected upon the episodes with the Korean children and felt melancholic as he could never be in contact with those children who were in North Korea. In his narrative on an episode with a 10-year-old student named Yi Seung-Cheol, who helped him out in a troubled situation when he was a newly recruited teacher, Kosugō expressed his feeling of regret that he could not find an opportunity to tell him about his appreciation. Ibid., 34–8.

⁷⁷ This school, which is in North Jeolla Province in South Korea, was renamed and changed into a four-year university called Jeonju National University of Education.

⁷⁸ Kosugō had his teacher training at a normal school in Jeonju, a city in the southern part of Korea, but worked mostly in the northern provinces.

⁷⁹ Kosugō, Shokuminchi kyōiku arekore, 72.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 71.

⁸¹ Takasaki, Shokuminchi Chōsen no, 207.

⁸² This reminds us of “Asia as method”, popular in Asian studies, which problematises the one-way flow of knowledge production from the West to the non-West and calls for challenging the alleged universalism of the West and making more references to local sources and discourses. Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2010).

⁸³ Yoonmi Lee, “A Critical Dialogue with ‘Asia as Method’: A Response from Korean Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 51, no. 9 (2019): 958–69.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hongik University [Research grant].

Notes on contributors

Yoonmi Lee

Yoonmi Lee is Professor of Education at Hongik University, Seoul, Korea. She received her PhD at the Department of Educational Policy Studies (majoring in comparative history of education), University of Wisconsin-Madison. She served as President of the Korean Association for History of Education from 2011 to 2012. Her research interests include comparative and transnational history of modern education, education and state formation and cultural politics of education, particularly in the East Asian context. She was a visiting professor at Stockholm University, Sweden (2009/2010); Kyoto University, Japan (2017/18); and Teachers College, Columbia University, USA (2018).

She has published in international journals such as Paedagogica Historica, Oxford Review of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory and Curriculum Inquiry. Her publications include Yoonmi Lee, Modern Education, Textbooks, and the Image of the Nation: Politics of Modernization and Nationalism in Korean education 1880-1910 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Leonel Lim and Michael Apple (eds.), Critical Studies of Education in Asia: Knowledge, Power and the Politics of Curriculum Reforms (New York: Routledge, 2019; book chapter); Florian Waldow and Gita Steiner Khamsi (eds.), Understanding PISA’s Attractiveness (London: Bloomsbury, 2019; book chapter).