With the possible exception of Palestinian society under Israeli control, nowhere is the collaboration of an occupied people with its rulers an issue of greater moment today than in the Republic of Korea. Although more than half a century has passed since Japan was forced to abandon its designs for the peninsula, charges of past collaboration with the Empire (tae-il hyŏmnyŏk) continue to be aired in both the Korean press and the National Assembly. “No matter what problem arises in Korean society,” wrote one historian in 1997, “it is never unrelated to the question of collaboration” (Kim Pongu, quoted in De Ceuster Reference De Ceuster2002, 207). Koreans note that a thorough accounting of pro-Japanese collaboration (ch'inil ch'ŏngsan) with the Japanese regime was made neither at the time of Liberation in 1945 nor afterwards, and that this remains the most important part of the movement dedicated to “cleansing the past” (kwagŏ ch'ŏngsan) in general. While the reason for this lacuna is usually said to be political, alternatives would have to include the insufficiently nuanced historiography we possess of twentieth-century collaboration not only in Korea but worldwide. The journey of our current discourse of “colonial modernity” from South Asia (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty1993) through East Asia in general (Barlow Reference Barlow and Barlow1997) to Korea in particular (Shin 1999) means that students of Japan's history in the peninsula no longer easily speak of collaboration as a personal moral failure, but instead as a structural feature of modernity in that colonial world (K. H. Kim Reference Kim2004). But this advance in our understanding does foreclose an analysis of just that feature with the tools of ethical theories that have evolved cognizant of an incomplete “accounting” of Europe's own history of wartime collaboration.

This essay will be an attempt to suggest certain lines along which a posterior ethical review of those histories of collaboration might proceed. It may strike some as gratuitous to append an ethical test of the actors to an historical narrative, but in fact sketching a historical narrative is simply my means of reaching that test. “Historians must legitimately ask how the moral subject that collaboration presupposes was fashioned,” writes Timothy Brook in his book on that topic in wartime China; but he is naive to warn we mustn't “retrospectively judge that subject's acts.” Brook is in good company, since we have largely discarded the moral binarism of “collaboration” versus “resistance” and replaced it with, in Primo Levi's famous phrase that has traveled far, the “gray zone” of lived circumstances we cannot empathetically inhabit, and therefore must hesitate to judge. “[M]oral judgment,” Levi awarded, “ . . . is a judgment that we would like to entrust only to those who found themselves in similar circumstances and had the opportunity to test for themselves what it means to act in a state of coercion” (Reference Levi1989, 44). But inevitably we do judge, because we instinctively put ourselves in the place of those we study, and ought to do so. “The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if that were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible” (Reference Arendt1963, 295–96).

Brook himself observes “every culture tags collaboration as moral failure” (Reference Brook2005, 4–5). That this is a “moral universal” may flow from the fact that it is tautological: where “collaboration” in history produced happy results—Indian independence, for example, or liberal democracy in Japan—we use other language (“Gandhi co-operated with the British,” or “The Japanese bureaucracy assisted GHQ policymakers”). Brook is certainly right to rethink our reflexive moral reaction to collaboration, but there is no way to do that and not, finally, retrospectively judge the dramatis personae in history both felicitous and otherwise.

Brook asks us to consider the important question of why collaboration made sense to so many people (2005, 245). My version of the same query is: What was the moral calculus with which the Korean intelligentsia calculated the potential good that might remain after subtracting the near-certain harm generated by serving as the agents—the collaborators—of a foreign power? It might be natural to look for these answers among the business, political, police and bureaucratic elites of colonial Korea, and others have done so. But here I look for the answer in the writings of Korea's most prominent modern novelist, Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950?), who not only wrote copiously during the Japanese interregnum but also left us, after Liberation, with a defense of his infamous collaboration that invites a rereading today in light of new approaches to colonial collusion. I will begin, however, with two other novelists, one French and the other American.

Jean-Paul Sartre published “What is a Collaborator” (Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?) just as hostilities were ending in northeast Asia in August 1945. Occasioned by the restored Third Republic's trial of a number of actively pro-German French intellectuals, including the writer Robert Brasillach (1909–45), Sartre's essay speculates on why some of us will choose to work, and with zeal, for an occupying authority.

Sartre declares collaborators to be a small minority of people, but a minority nonetheless found everywhere, just as crime and suicide (phenomena he likens to collaboration) are also everywhere. In ordinary times collaborators remain “latent,” perhaps unknown even to themselves. But in wartime their treason emerges “like a disease.” This is never accidental: collaboration operates logically and predictably, and according to “certain social and psychological laws” (Reference Sartre1949, 44).

In the first part of his essay Sartre turns to the “social laws” that produce the collaborator. It is important to note that there is nothing inherently ideological in collaboration for Sartre. Indeed, there is no such thing as “collaboration” for Sartre, only “collaborators,” who are an existential-psychological “type.” He does not conflate, as have others, the category of “fascist” with that of “collaborator.” Rather, Sartre broadly equates his collaborateur with the “outsider,” be he from the marginal fringe of a mainstream political party; a bourgeoisie who detests the class he comes from but is too cowardly to join with the proletariat; a failed journalist, artist or educator; an “anarchist of the right” who never reconciled with the reality of a republican France; or those, like some higher Catholic clergy, who were already accustomed to obeying a foreign authority (for example, the Vatican).

But this is merely a prelude to what truly interests Sartre, namely the psychology and not the social milieu of the collaborator. His essay is best known for its association of collaboration with homosexuality and masochism. The French collaborator, always gendered male in Sartre's scenario, effeminately seeks to seduce the masculinized German invader; and the collaborator not only needs but finds pleasure in the hatred borne him by patriotic countrymen. This pathologization of collaboration is the lasting legacy of Sartre's “What is a Collaborator?” and its arguments stubbornly remain in circulation.Footnote ¹

Less well known in Sartre's essay, but more useful to us in speaking of colonial Korea (if still related to the pathologization of treason), is what he refers to as the “realism” (réalisme) of the collaborator. No collaborator, Sartre claims, ever doubted the longevity of Nazi rule. If they had thought imprisonment or execution by 1945 were likely or even remotely possible, who among them would have chosen to collaborate? In the mind of the collaborator German hegemony was inevitable, even desirable, simply because it had happened. An odd kind of historicism, what Sartre terms a “false Hegelianism” (hégélianisme mal), dictated that the fait accompli of June 1940 had to be regarded as “progress,” however unsavory. They believed, according to Sartre, that “The most recent historical event is the best simply because it is the most recent” (1949, 53). That this is not an intellectual conviction, but rather the expression of a psychological propensity, effectively removes the history of collaboration from history and renders it inconsequentially clinical. One goal of my larger project is to argue that collaboration around the world needs to be detached from idiosyncrasy and restored to our account of how modern citizenship was fashioned.

This “passivity” (sexual, intellectual) that Sartre made the hallmark of his diagnosis of the collaborator, this surrender to a Hegelian inevitability, is also one part of the story told of Korean collaboration with the Japanese from the peninsula's formal annexation in 1910 to the liberation in 1945 that came with the American defeat of Japan in the Pacific. But it is a small part. While echoes of the Sartrean disease-model of the collaborator can be heard in Korea (Yi Kwang-su's pro-Japanese behavior, for example, has been blamed on a nervous breakdown, or on his need for a father figure to replace the real one he lost at age eleven [Kawamura Reference Kawamura Minato1989]), far more frequent is the charge that Korean writers who collaborated did so not out of self-interest or ambition—never the case, says Sartre, of collaborators in general—but out of a conviction that absorption into the Japanese empire was both historically necessary and beneficial for the Korean people. That position now seems absurd to us, but it might not have at the time. Collaboration was not quite the shibboleth it has since become, and our first task is to recreate not just the political stakes but the cultural ideals of that era.

Almost half a century before Marshal Pétain stood beside Hitler in 1940 and, in subsequently announcing a grand “collaboration” between their two countries, forever altered the meaning of that word, Henry James published a short story with the same title. James chooses for his narrator in “Collaboration” (1892) an American painter with little talent but who hosts a popular Sunday salon in his Paris studio. These soirees are “as international as only Parisian air can be.” They are attended by guests American, French and German in nationality but united by a devotion to the international cosmopolis of art and its appreciation. One evening an argument breaks out over the merits of literature in England, to which one of the painter's young French friends, a poet and playwright named Félix Vendemer, reacts vehemently. “I don't know what is meant by French art and English art and American art,” he says. “Art is in every country,” and the novel “is the novel” everywhere. There is only one country worth living in, he tells his American host, and that is “the land of dreams—the country of art” (Reference James1996, 242).

Vendemer has an opportunity to make his point when he hears that evening a young German composer play several of his compositions on the piano. This same composer, Herman Heidenmauer, is equally impressed by Vendemer after reading a book of his poems lent him by our painter-narrator. In the next few days the two men warily approach each other via the offices of their mutual American friend. Finally, all three together one night in the studio, the German makes a bold proposal to the Frenchman: let us collaborate on an opera. Your words are a perfect match for my music.

There is, however, a personal cost for both men in undertaking this project. Vendemer is engaged to a French girl whose father, grandfather and uncle were all killed by Germans at Sedan in 1870. Collaborating with one of the detested enemy will mean having to give up his fiancée, whose mother would never allow such a thing. For Heidenmauer's part, working with a Frenchman—“an unnatural alliance,” “an unholy union” in the view of so many of his countrymen—will cost him at the very least the stipend his proud German family provides him. But these two men are in love with something greater than either a woman or a nation: “les femmes,” they conclude, have a “mortal hatred of art,” while “the hideous invention of patriotism,” though “a clever invention in its time,” is now nothing more “but a fifth-rate impertinence” standing in the way of two like-minded artists.

Vendemer explains: “In art there are no countries—no idiotic nationalities, no frontiers, nor douanes, nor still more idiotic fortresses and bayonets. It has the unspeakable beauty of being the region in which those abominations cease, the medium in which such vulgarities simply can't live” (1996, 250). So convinced, the poet and the composer leave Paris and move to the Italian Riviera, “where sunshine is cheap and tobacco bad, and they live (the two together) for five francs day, which is all they can muster between them” (1996, 253). James' story ends with their joint labors on the opera in progress and with the painter-narrator, pleased with what he has brokered, exclaiming how “mighty” art is. There is no irony in Henry James' year of 1892: the long history of wars that divided the nations of Europe is easily, effortlessly, discarded through an act of defiance by denizens of a new, international empire of aesthetics.

We have in this dated story a succinct expression of what “collaboration” progressively came to mean in the West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James himself would participate in the writing of a collaborative novel published in 1908 (Howells et al. Reference Howells1986); T. S. Eliot would make literary collaboration in its broadest sense his major critical project for his lifetime; and in even a much narrower definition, it has been said, for instance, that “Twentieth-century American literature is largely a history of collaboration” (Inge Reference Inge2001, 625). But literature aside, we have a specific political history to attend to. Against the backdrop of a burgeoning nationalism not only in Europe but elsewhere, there emerged the modern ideology of an aesthetic realm (and with it its own notion of “citizenship” and concomitant loyalties) that could, should, and did transcend it. That “art” possessed no country was only one of many modern postulates (capitalism lacked for frontiers as well) promulgated not so much in contradiction as in structural counterpoint to nationalist ideology. Even as different regions of the world developed their respective mechanisms of state-building and national identity, few of those regions could have done so without ideas that crossed borders and retained consistent integrity despite often unique application. When Andre Schmid notes that “Korean nationalists and Japanese colonialists shared much in the way of conceptual vocabulary, themes in cultural representation, and narrative strategies” (Reference Schmid2002, 102), he supplies proof of Prasenjit Duara's argument that “the East Asian modern is a regional mediation of the global circulation of the practices and discourses of the modern” (Reference Duara2003, 2).

This is where “collaboration,” and not just the artistic kind, comes into historical view. When poet, literary historian and future pro-Japanese collaborator Paek Ch'ŏl (1908–85) published his “Kokkyō o koete” (Crossing the border) in Reference Paek Ch'ŏl1931, his poem about a communist smuggling himself across the Yalu back into Korea from Soviet Russia while thinking of his comrades in Moscow, he was also writing a poem about “overcoming” (koeru) borders, a community of committed proletarians with national identities but international allegiances (1931). This is all the more true in the so-called world “periphery,” where modernization occurred in some kind of attenuated, serial order: in East Asia, Japan first and only then its clients. To quote Timothy Brook once more, “Under late (and even post-) colonialism, all nationalisms are collaborative in some measure. . . The surrounding presence of the world system means that no nation can be fully autonomous” (Reference Brook, Brook and Schmid2000, 188). One can say that on the Korean peninsula not only before the 1910 Annexation but well afterwards, collaboration between Korean and Japanese intellectuals, specifically writers, partook of a similar utopian desire for a cross-straits community of artists excused from the inconveniences of national histories. Since the early Meiji period, and continuing to the present day, generations of Koreans in all fields from the sciences to the fine arts, impressed by Japan's preternatural modernization, have traveled to the archipelago to associate—collaborate—with their Japanese counterparts. From the start, Fukuzawa Yukichi had Korean students living in his house. It is key for us to keep in mind that there are two histories of collaboration—the pedagogic and the political. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1802 a collaborator meant a student who assisted less academically prepared peers, and this sense of the word lasted well into the twentieth century and even, in the current practice of “hip hop collabo in Seoul and Tokyo,” today.

Artistic collaboration has many examples in the formation of modernity. I have already mentioned Eliot, whose work with Pound on The Waste Land is well known, but there were also the French Impressionists such as Monet, Bazille, Renior and Sisley working together in the mid-nineteenth century; the Rye Circle at the turn of the twentieth in the United States included Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford; and Sigmund Freud's collaboration with Wilhelm Fleiss around the same time. In twentieth-century Japan there was the once rich tradition of the kyōdō seisaku ‘collaborative work’ among Proletarian and early Modernist writers (Schimmel Reference Schimmel2006, 272–342). It is important to remember that these collaborations were almost never horizontal—there was typically a hierarchy of age or talent that structured the collaboration in terms of benign domination and submission. In the case of Korean and Japanese intellectuals, of course, such subordination could have its baneful consequences, but it was not always so.

When literary historians in Korean say that colonialism is the defining factor in their country's modern fiction and poetry, that is akin to saying that Japanese literature, already recognizably “modern,” was the single most important influence on their own literary experimentation. As Lu Xun said, one might hate Japan, but it is still the point of access to the literature of the West. Anti- and pro-Japanese writers alike in Korea's colonial period owed a profound debt to Japanese literature and criticism, which they could avail themselves of in the peninsula's major cities, and to Japanese writers and scholars, whom they met occasionally in Korea but more often in Japan itself, where so many resided at some point in their lives (Yi Reference Yi Kwang-su1932, 207).

Yi Kwang-su, the oldest and best known of this generation of writers, was only thirteen years old in 1905, just months before Korea became a protectorate of Japan, when he was sent to Japan to study for five years. He ended his first Japanese sojourn as his country was ignominiously annexed in 1910. In Tokyo, beginning in 1907 as a third-year student at middle school, Yi read deeply in Kunikida Doppo, Tokutomi Roka, Natsume Sōseki and many other Japanese and Western writers. He bought I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905–06) with his own money, of which he had very little, and as a student at Waseda was reading more Sōseki while working on what would be proclaimed Korea's first modern novel, his 1917 Heartless (Mujŏng). If Japan's best novelist was Yi's distal literary mentor, the equally important Kobayashi Hideo would be his critical one. Years later, at the height of his pro-Japanese activities, Yi would write a public letter to Kobayashi—accurately described by Kim Sŏk-pŏm after the war as one penned “in the language of a slave” (Reference Kim Sŏk-pŏm [Kin Sekihan]1993, 49)—that even Kobayashi himself found too embarrassingly sycophantic to bother responding to. (“Let us push forward,” Yi wrote as Kayama Mitsurō, the Japanese name he had been using for at least two years before mandated by colonial officialdom. “Let us of our own accord discard all things Korean and become Japanese” [Kayama Reference Kayama Mitsurō [Yi Kwang-su], Masuo and Toshihiro2002, 137]). But my points are that the trajectory of modern Korean literature for better or worse cannot be traced without reference to Japan's own, that Yi was only the first of many writers to find his literary and intellectual home in the Japanese colonial metropole, and that artistic collaboration so often led to political.

Be it in the cause of proletarian internationalism or a Modernist doctrine of “art for art's sake,” Korean and Japanese writers alike were engaged jointly in producing literary modernity. The “collaboration,” in other words, might not have resulted in any works or essays with dual authorship, à la Vendemer and Heidenmauer, but it did produce a body of work, in both places, in the first half of the twentieth century that strove in tandem for cognates Japanese kindai and Korean kŭndae ‘modern’: a goal that became politically and catastrophically collaborationist when that word was metonymically exchanged (this time in the Japanese language alone) for the racialist category of Nihonjin ‘Japanese.’ But as Namiki Masato has pointed out, collaboration with Japan (tai-Nichi kyōroku) was “precisely the site where so many Koreans in the colonial period came into concrete contact with modernity” (Reference Namiki Masato1999, 113–14).

It has been argued that collaboration is a fundamental condition of the modern, and for both better and worse. Milan Kundera deigned the word important enough to include in his list of sixty-three terms that all of his translators must understand:

Kundera's deserved sarcasm aside, the collaboration he bemoans is of course so omnipresent because it is part of the architecture with which we built the modern world. In an essay that contends the public sphere in colonial Korea was created precisely where “everyday resistance and collaboration met,” historian Yun Hae-dong notes that “As Japan pursued imperial policies of assimilation, the Empire variously attempted to construct a Korean collaborationist system and were able to make collaboration by Koreans both structural and normative” (Reference Yun Hae-dong and Takeshi2002, 137). This is part of why men such as Yi could have been nationalists before—and at the same time—they were collaborators. (One might have concluded, after all, that the best deal for a future Korea lay in allying with the Japanese.) Nonetheless, Yi is rebuked today for campaigning for two particularly onerous Japanese colonial policies: the effective abolition of the Korean language, and the induction of Korean youth (first as volunteers beginning in 1942 and then conscripts in 1944) into the Imperial Army. Yi made the adoption of Japanese the foundation of Korea's future; in his “Naisen ittai tsuisōroku” (Reflections on the unity of Japan and Korea, 1941), he declares “The number one prerequisite for our imperial subjectification [kōminka] is learning Japanese [kokugo]” (Kayama Reference Kayama Mitsurō [Yi Kwang-su], Masuo and Toshihiro2002, 127). In Reference Kayama Mitsurō [Yi Kwang-su]1940 he wrote the following:

Yi, like other collaborators, believed in the eradication of the Korean language. (He was among the very first Koreans to officially take a Japanese name, declaring in the Maeil sinbo (Daily News) in 1940 his reason to be that “I am a subject of the Emperor. My descendents, too, will live their lives as subjects of the Emperor” [Kayama 1940]). His argument, worthy of the most extreme ideologue, was that Koreans must use the Japanese language because the Japanese emperor does so. If collaboration with the Nazis finally turned on what one said about, or did to, the Jews in Europe, then in Korea the decisive issue dividing those who collaborated and those who did not may have been the question not of the survival of a people themselves, but rather their language. Yi, like other intellectuals of his day, “universalized” the Japanese language, saw it as a “world language” (sekaigo) whereas Korean was merely Korea's alone, and therefore a hindrance to the international advancement of Korea's culture. More importantly, he identified the Japanese language with the Japanese “spirit” (seishin), just as he collapsed Korean and Japanese ethnicities by parroting the colonial claim of a common descent from a mythical Ur-race of Northeast Asian peoples (dōsōron).

Yi Kwang-su also made prominent statements in favor of Korean participation in the armed forces. On November 14, 1943, over three thousand Koreans gathered at Meiji Gakuin in Tokyo to hear Yi urge them to volunteer; and in an issue of Samch'ŏlli in July, 1940, he pleaded in Korean: “Mothers, do you have sons? If so, let them enlist. Are your sons important to you? Then that is precisely why you must make them go. Is he your only son? Even so, make him go” (Reference Yi Kwang-su, Pyŏng-gŏl and Kyu-dong1986, 88).

Yi Kwang-su would be damned by postwar history for making such outrageous statements, and there were consequences. Taken (nappuk) to Pyongyang during the first, three-month North Korean occupation of Seoul in the summer of 1950, the details of his suspected death soon thereafter are not known for certain. If he died of other than natural causes, it was no doubt due to extremely pro-Japanese writings and behavior all the more humiliating to Koreans because of his earlier, unassailable reputation as the creator of Korea's first modern novel.

Yi's collaboration was so extreme—he bowed each morning in the direction of the imperial palace in Tokyo, and displayed the Japanese flag over his desk—that he is quite nearly a caricature of the enthused convert to “Nihonism.” But I would like to suggest another way to regard Yi's collaboration, one that brings us back to the relationship between it and modernity. It is plausible to believe Yi's sympathies for and with the Japanese were genuine and not insincere or expedient. Yi, like many others, had trouble reconciling Korean nationalism with modernity. The former was regarded widely as native; the other, imported. But Yi thought he had a solution. At some point in his thinking, his life-long dedication to the enlightenment of the Korean people via their modernization, a project to be accomplished via collaboration with the Japanese in their mutual pursuit of the “modern,” shifted rhetorically from being like the Japanese to literally being Japanese. Collaboration with Japan, specifically collaboration with its culturally genocidal “Naisen ittai” policies, was effectively collaboration with an instrumentality and not an end. The March First Movement defeated, and the prospect of Korean independence receding into the realm of science fiction, “being Japanese” in Korea became the only means to be “modern.”

I am not offering an apology for collaboration, nor do I mean to decisively differentiate European from East Asian collaboration. In fact, I am tempted to attribute to the ideology of the twentieth-century Japanese empire a lesson learned earlier: in the history of Jews in eighteenth-century France. With the French Enlightenment came the assumption that citizens of a state must be the same in order to be treated the same. After the French Revolution, the late historian Arthur Hertzberg writes, Jewish leaders “believed almost unanimously that the complete regeneration of the mass of Jews required the end of their autonomy and their complete assimilation into French society” (Reference Hertzberg1968, 8). Hertzberg goes on to note how in time “all parts of the Jewish community became, to varying degrees, at home in the French language,” and that all this was in accordance with the principles of the Revolution, namely that all special status and exemption be abolished. The social contract could be extended only as far as the isomorphism of its “signatories”—and therein, of course, lies the rub.

A related assumption certainly seems to have been at work in the modern Japanese empire. In his 1938 best-selling polemic (one of Korea's infamous “three great pro-Japanese tracts”), Chōsenjin no susumu beki michi (The road before the Koreans), Hyŏn Yŏng-sŏp (1907-??) insisted repeatedly that that road was simply “Nihonjin to naru michi”—the road of becoming Japanese. This passion for conversion approaches what Henry James' brother William described in terms of religious epiphany, defining conversion as “the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy. . .” (Reference James2002, 150). And of course, once a Korean becomes a Japanese, collaboration and its associated moral morass recede as an issue—how does one collaborate with oneself?

What this proposes to me is that our analysis of collaboration must call on the scrutiny of moral reasoning. There is, of course, a moral postulate driving Yi's desire to see Koreans treated without prejudice by the Japanese, and in the position that equality presupposes identity. There is also a line of calculatedly pseudo-Darwinian ethics in Yi's writings. But there is also another line of moral thinking which some have applied since 1945 in judging the actions of collaborators, and it will be inflected by the knowledge we now have of the results—ethical and otherwise—of decisions made a priori.

The origins of Yi's predisposition towards the Japanese and collaboration with them has a number of supposed starting points: from, at the latest, his involvement in the Tong'uhoe Incident of June 1937 (when he is alleged to have agreed to collaborate in the hope of securing the release of dozens of arrested nationalists); to the 1922 publication of his controversial critique of Korean national character, “Minjok kaejoron” (On the reconstruction of the nation); to even his experience in 1903, at age twelve, of seeing Japanese troops push back even more brutal Russian ones in the Russo-Japanese War (Hatano Reference Hatano Setsuko1990, 64–5). What is clear, whatever the chronology, is that among the many ideas that influenced Yi—Confucianism, Tonghak ideology, Christian humanism, pacifism, Buddhism, “Nihonism,” Nietzschean political philosophy—social Darwinism was powerful among them. His intellectual trajectory saw a trust in science replace a belief in Western monotheism, and a passion for the Nietzchean worship of the strong displace a disillusionment with the weaker pacifism of Tolstoyean Christian humanism. By 1922 and his polemic “Minjok kaejoron,” Yi's thinking was primed for an accommodation with Japan and its imperial ambitions.

Yi was not alone in this, of course. Social Darwinism has a long history throughout East Asia, more complicated than in Europe if only because the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese typically interpreted social Darwinism from the point of view of societies—races—rather than individuals. Gi-Wook Shin has pointed out that in East Asia, it was always “the German version of [Darwinism], which focused on the collective struggle for existence among nations and races, rather than the Anglo-American focus on individual capitalist competition” that influenced Korea (2006, 29). Nonetheless, there is a straight line from Darwin to Spencer to Edward Sylvester Morse in Japan to his student Yu Kil-chun (1856–1914) in Korea, where “natural selection” was nativized under the neologism kyŏngjaengnon ‘competition-ism.’

While studying at Meiji Gakuin and later Waseda (where Ukita Kazutami [1859–1946], author of the Darwinian Shakaigaku kōgi ‘Lectures on Society,’ taught), Yi picked up the same ideas linking social Darwinism with imperialism as did his classmates, many of whom were reading Taiyō, Chūō kōron, and Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, magazines that popularized those ideas. It was at this time that the theme of Korean weakness and deficiency surfaces more frequently in Yi's writings. In his last years, Yi would recall his shame at seeing disheveled, bad-smelling (sillo naemsae nŭn koyak hayŏtta) Koreans spitting on the floor of the train he was taking back home after studying in Japan (Reference Yi Kwang-su1964, 194–95). Eventually, his sense of revulsion would extend to Korea's historical lack of a literature or art worthy of the name, indeed of a “civilization” (munmyŏng) at all (Nan Reference Nan Bujin2001, 14).

In his study Sŏul e ttansŭhol ŭl hŏhara (Let There Be Dance Halls in Seoul), Kim Chin-song places Yi's pessimism, and his later embrace of Japanese imperialism, in the following context:

Yi was probably, to put the best possible spin on it, a “pro-Japanese nationalist,” but we need to return to the moral underpinnings of that position. In 1917 he published an essay entitled “Usŏn su ga toeko yŏnhŭ e in i toera” (First be a beast, only then a man), in which he took the Nietzschean position that “Morality is the obligation of the weak to submit to the strong” (Todŏk ŭn kangja ege pokjong hanŭn yakja ŭi ŭimura) (Reference Yi Kwang-su1962a, 151): “‘Live!’ Insofar as life is the sole objective of all creatures, there are no moral strictures [todŏk] against achieving that goal. There is nothing wrong in a dying man's stealing the food of another. It is right [chŏngdang] that, rather than die oneself, one should let another die in one's place” (1962a, 152).

What this means of course is that the Darwinian assertion that the fittest survive translates into the dictum that the strong should survive; and so by the time Yi declares in the Dong-A Ilbo (East Asia Daily) in 1924 that Japan's occupation of Korea cannot be reversed by military means (Reference Yi Kwang-su1962b), accommodation with—and eventually assimilation into—Japan becomes one inevitable conclusion.Footnote ²

After the war Yi Kwang-su was the most prominent collaborator to write an autobiography. Yi divorced his wife in the spring of 1946 in order to protect her property were his own seized, and he embarked upon the life of an ascetic. But he continued to write, and his 1948 Na ŭi kobaek (My Confession) was an account of his career starting with his early nationalist devotion to Korea and ending with an appendix entitled “A Defense of the Collaborationists” (Ch'inilp'a ŭi pyŏn [Yi 1964, 280–87]), a combative defense of his pro-Japanese activities as both necessary and right.

Under a new law promulgated by South Korea's National Assembly, he was arrested on February 7, 1949 for “anti-nationalist activities” and confined to Mapo Prison. Less than a month later Yi was released ostensibly for health reasons. The charges against him were dropped in August, not because there was insufficient evidence to convict, but because the Syngman Rhee regime was discovering the law under which he was charged inconvenient for many of its friends. But Yi did not remain at liberty for long. In July 1950, he was seized by the North Korean People's Army when it occupied Seoul and was taken across the parallel.

Despite Yi's fate, there has been little sympathy expressed in Korea for him as a collaborator, and the hubris of My Confession is certainly one reason why. At best its arguments have been called self-serving and hypocritical; at worst, a “filthy” work the product of a diseased and decadent mind. It is certainly a provocative rationalization of pro-Japanese conduct that many contemporary Korean readers surely found appalling. But what matters to us here is that its justifications, feigned or not, were ones that Yi presumably thought would exculpate him. My Confession may indeed be “fiction,” but therein we find Yi free to imagine his ethical dilemma in its purest terms. Then too, looking into the moral implications of an event in the past is surely different than calculating the ethical prospects of actions for a future in which consequences can be reasoned but not known, and that is what makes My Confession useful when inquiring into the moral calculus, and subsequent sums, of collaboration with the Japanese empire.

Philosopher Shelly Kagan has put generally what I specifically consider Yi Kwang-su's postwar dilemma this way: “But what, then, should we say, if someone does an act that looks like it will lead to the best results overall—all the best available evidence supports this belief—but in fact it leads to bad results overall? Did they do the right act, or didn't they?” (Reference Kagan1998, 64). Kagan's answer is that we can be either objective or subjective: that “rightness” is a matter of the facts as they are, or that whether an act is right or not is a matter of what the agent (read collaborator) believed them to be: “Those who conceive of morality as fundamentally a guide to decision making will be drawn to subjective accounts; those who conceive of morality as offering instead a standard for evaluating acts, which we may simply fail to get right, will be drawn to objective accounts” (1998, 65). This is why, I suggest, Yi incensed his readers: unwilling to read “subjectively,” Yi's conclusions were so clearly at odds with what, after 1945, were the “objective” facts of colonial collaboration.

What was Yi's defense? My Confession notes that, as a very young man finishing middle school in Japan, he turned down admission to one of Japan's elite higher schools to return to Korea's Osan School to teach what he had learned abroad. Like other nationalist yuhaksaeng ‘foreign students’ of his generation, Yi writes that he “sacrificed himself for the sake of the nation” (1964, 194). Decades later, faced with Japanese demands for Korean assistance in the total war with China, Yi writes that he was forced to sacrifice himself again. By collaborating he relieved his countrymen of the obligation: “I, by offering myself as a sacrifice, would be able to preserve freedom [for others]” (Na nŭn, na, hana rŭl hŭisaeng ŭrossŏ i chayu rŭl kŏnjil su itta) (1964, 263). Indeed, not many others could have collaborated to effect—with characteristic hubris, Yi argues Japan needed a Korean as distinguished as himself to be a prominent defender of the imperial cause (Reference Yi Kwang-su1963, 332–34).

This is analogous, in fact, to what Marshal Pétain claimed as his defense in his postwar trial in France. Pétain, one of his nation's greatest WWI heroes, pled that he needed to step forward, sacrifice himself, and serve as head of a collaborationist state in order to save other Frenchmen and, indeed, France itself. This “shield theory” has been reiterated in the defense of suspect behavior everywhere in the theater of the World War II, from Albert Speer in Germany to Sukarno in Indonesia—variations of the alibi Arendt notes was “what all the defendants in the post-war trials said to excuse themselves”: “[I]f I had not done it, someone else could and would” (Reference Arendt1964, 185).

This argument did not work for Pétain, and it did not work for Yi. Writing in prison, Yi argued in My Confession that he would happily be convicted of treason, if that would spare the nation the trauma of massive reprisals for collaboration committed by “hundreds” (1964, 178) and indeed, in another commonly heard argument,Footnote ³ by every Korean who had not gone into exile:

This argument, however reasonable it may now seem, did not save anyone. The debate in the immediate aftermath of the war was not over who collaborated—there was a consensus on that count—but just what to do with them. Speaking of the French novelist Robert Brasillach, sentenced to death for collaboration with the Nazis but on whose behalf intellectuals worldwide sought to intercede, de Gaulle ruled that he had gambled and lost. The modern Korea historian Bruce Cumings has said something similar of Korea: Korean elites in the 1930s and 1940s flipped their coin in the air, thinking it would land one way, but in 1945 it landed the other (Reference Cumings1981, 31).

Yi, however, did not think he was placing a bet. Or rather, he thought he had them all covered. In the final pages of My Confession, Yi makes the following case: The reality then was that Japan is strong. Independence for Korea at present is impossible. The Japanese will steal from us whatever they desire. But if I agree to collaborate, we will be rewarded with a say in the future of Japan if it wins its war. Korea will be able to make demands. Those of us who volunteer as laborers will be treated the better for it. In any case, we can learn much that is practical by soldiering or working in factories. If we send troops into their battles, the Japanese will no longer be able to treat us as cruelly as they do. Discrimination against us will disappear. If Japan wins, we'll have equal rights with the Japanese. Having collaborated will not incur any harm that wouldn't have occurred anyway. And we'll be one step closer to eventual independence.

But if Japan loses the war, Yi reasoned, we'll also have our chance for freedom, and no harm will have been done. Why? Because under the Japanese we had no right to free political speech. None of the victors will blame us, they'll know we had no other choice. If we don't collaborate, on the other hand, and Japan wins, those who refused to assist will pay a price. If Japan loses, they will commit great atrocities in revenge as they retreat from the peninsula (1964, 267–69).

Needless to say, Yi's imagination of how history would play itself out was not what actually happened. But then, we have the benefit of “objective” facts, whereas he only had subjective reasoning. It was reasoning, and it hypothetically obtains whether it was really what he was thinking in the late 1930s, or simply concocted while facing trial. Yi's logic was that of the “act-consequentialist,” the kind of utilitarian for whom any action must be chosen on the basis of the total welfare of the likely outcome. Yi concluded, as a reasonable person might, that collaboration regardless of the course of the war would yield a superior quantity of “good” for Korea than non-collaboration.

Hindsight is everything, of course. Some Koreans say that, even at the time of colonization, it was clear that no amount of collaboration actually minimized or ameliorated Japanese oppression, and therefore Yi's reasoning was in fact not coherent. Indeed, other rationales proffered by Yi stretch what a “reasonable person or persons” might have concluded. In My Confession he writes: “What kind of harm [ŏttŏhan sonhae] can come even if we show an attitude of collaboration with Japan? It was thought none at all. Whether we showed an attitude of cooperation or refused to do so, it was clear that Japan was going to take from us just what it wanted, be it our labor or our service in the military” (1964, 269). Actual incidences of such refusal during the war, however, such as Denmark's stand against the deportation of its Jews, proved otherwise. But again that is our “objective” fact then not available to Yi Kwang-su. What was available to him, but absent in his argument, is that this “attitude” of collaboration, the Korean equivalent of the “fake tenkō” (ideological apostasy) so many Japanese intellectuals after the war claimed had been their real intent, was in fact of as useful to Japanese domination as sincere collaboration or a sincere tenkō, and thus, not logical.

Yi's juggling of the means versus the ends is still the central issue in political ethics, as the American debate after 9/11 on the morality of pre-emptive invasions of other countries disclosed. Most people in their everyday lives are amended consequentialists, but “deontological,” which means we do not believe in doing harm even if the ends would justify it. (We don't kill, for example, a healthy man to award his organs to five sickly people in need of them.) Yi was deontological, as his musings on “harm” in My Confession attest. He is, in other words, quite like us today. We often find ourselves “working in the system” we deplore. World War II, including the occupation of Korea, provides us with ample evidence that act-consequentialism is certainly preferable to rule-consequentialism, since we learned that under the Nazi regime putting our faith in simple rules that might theoretically produce the better results, in fact, yielded unimaginably disastrous consequences.

We can say this, however, only because the history of the twentieth century is behind us: we know the consequences of abetting Hitler and Governor-General Minami Jirō. But we do not know what lies ahead of us, including the future's judgment of the choices we make today, and so the debate on consequentialism, and collaboration, continues, if primarily in the area of bio-ethics (abortion, euthanasia, organ transplants). Yet WWII remains the elephant in the room for what moral philosophers have said in recent decades about collaboration. In 1973 Bernard Williams hypothesized the scenario now known widely as “Jim and the Indians”:

This is a fanciful cartoon which nonetheless recalls the real world, namely the Nazi policy of “collective responsibility,” both brilliant and horrific, which put occupied Europe's resistance fighters in a similar conundrum, and it is our sensitivity to that still-recent history that has made the now nearly forty-year debate on just what Jim should do so controversial.

Williams initially deployed his “Jim and the Indians” to attack utilitarianism's act-consequentialist position that, yes, certainly, Jim should shoot an innocent person—it will save the lives of nineteen others. Most of us react reflexively about shooting an Indian, since we are deontological: no act producing good is warranted if we do harm. But deontology has its thoughtful antagonists. Williams argues that act-consequentialists may conclude we are as responsible for what we allow to happen as for what we do ourselves, and that this concept of “negative responsibility” is dangerously flawed. Now, a non-consequentialist might also argue for Jim's killing of an Indian, if Jim thinks to himself: well, he or she will die anyway, and so is no worse off by being killed by me. But a non-consequentialist might alternatively argue that in killing, Jim would be collaborating with evil, given that the Captain has arranged for the killings and by mutually assented coordination will use Jim to carry out his aims.

Williams' nuanced response is that, pace consequentialism, there is a crucial moral distinction between a person being killed by me (i.e., Jim), and being killed by someone else (the Captain) because of what I do. The utilitarians among us obviate that distinction, Williams says, thereby stripping us of our humanity and of everything that makes human life worthwhile, rather than preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers with the integrity that moral decisions must preserve—all thoughts that a modern anti-Kantian (or a Kantian with “issues”) might well have.

The moral philosopher today who has pondered this problem with the most relevance to collaboration in colonial Korea is Frances Kamm. In a Reference Kamm2000 article entitled “Responsibility and Collaboration,” Kamm counters Williams with the following argument: “in at least some special circumstances, there is something to be said for collaboration with evil” (2000, 173). Why? In brief, Kamm believes that under “illegitimate authority,” for Jim to act and kill an Indian does not incur positive moral responsibility for Jim, but instead for the Captain: “When someone chooses to become an Agent [i.e., a substitute actor], she is morally responsible for that choice; but that is not the same as moral responsibility for the consequences of the act. Choosing to be an Agent will involve evaluating how bad what one is asked to do will be and what good will be achieved by being an Agent” (2000, 179).

In other words, Kamm would rule that a Korean collaborator such as Yi is responsible for choosing to be a collaborator, but not responsible for what Japan did. For Kamm, the fact that the Captain—or the Government-General of Chosen—is an illegitimate authority makes all the difference to the moral value of any Agent's act.

Kamm's logic is appealing, not least because it delivers us from a gnawing “objective” fact of World War II: that collaboration by Jews with the Nazis resulted in the murder of Jews, a fact to which Kamm bravely turns to near the end of her article (2000, 197–98). Nonetheless, this is a potentially troubling splitting of hairs that, while it permits us to criticize collaborators for choosing to collaborate while freeing us from holding them responsible for what their actions ultimately enabled, risks the charge of moral cowardice.

The impulse to spare collaborators from the consequences of collaboration, I believe, springs from our perennial reaction to what Hannah Arendt wrote about Adolf Eichmann's trial in the early 1960s. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt—probably as resolute a Kantian as we can find in the second half of the twentieth century—refused to excuse any Jewish leaders for assisting the Germans in selecting victims for extermination. She would not countenance the idea of a “lesser evil,” because that leads us to acquiesce with a criminal regime that counts on us compromising just that way. So what would Arendt have had Jewish elders in Budapest or Berlin do? Not let their rote precepts guide them, because as she notes, nowhere in Europe did our catechisms prevent anyone—Jew, Christian, communist, whomever—from doing the worst. Those who did resist fascism, sometimes at cost of their lives, did so because they declined to surrender their faculty of judgment, the Categorical Imperative (“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” [Kant Reference Kant and Ellington1993, 30]). They refused, in other words, to live in a world in which they had committed acts they, as individual reasoning moral subjects, could not live with anyone committing.

Few people agreed with Arendt at the time, and few do today. I am sympathetic to her argument, but I also recognize that rational agency suffers from a bad reputation these days: against philosophy, twentieth-century history would have us concede that, yes, one can “rationally” commit an immoral act, just as moral acts can be irrational. It is no coincidence that one eloquent spokesman for replacing Kantian reason with a late-twentieth century version of natural law is an historian of the Holocaust as well as a philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman:

I return to my initial objection to our popular hesitation to judge “moral subjects” under Japanese imperialism, be they Timothy Brook's local elites in China or Korea's greatest modern writer. There may be no positions further at odds than those of Arendt and Bauman, but note that both do “judge.” Judgment here is not reducible to “excusing” or “not excusing,” it is not that casual: it has to do with what we fundamentally are, either individuals with powers bestowed by the intellect (Arendt), or human beings with no significance outside of all other human beings (Bauman). The debate in South Korea over what to do with its legacy of collaboration must grapple with this question, which persists throughout history precisely because it not historical, by which I mean contingent. It is an existential question whose various answers have governed in part what history we have wrought, and not the other way around.