During the Cold War, when South Korea was under a military dictatorship, the term “collaborator” (ch'inilp'a) often functioned as a kind of prohibition, indicating that a person or certain texts were not worthy of serious scholarly attention. Collaboration was also a politically taboo topic since many of the South Korean political and military elites, including President Park Chung Hee, were former collaborators. Criticism of collaborators could be seen as questioning the legitimacy of the regime. Though some important studies were published during this period, such as Im Chongguk's courageous Ch'inil munhaknon [On literature by collaborator writers] in 1966, it was not until after the victory of the democracy movement and the end of the Cold War that research on collaboration became active. During the past two decades, a variety of approaches to the issue have emerged. There have been, as one would expect, nationalist denunciations, but also attempts, influenced by cultural studies, to reconceptualize collaboration in ways that can produce new readings of their times. John Treat's article is an effort to contribute to this growing literature, and it offers an approach that has some similarities and important differences with recent studies on the topic. Similar to some of the work of younger South Korean scholars, he conceives of collaboration as “a structural feature of modernity” and situates the issue in a broader, more international context through his examination of texts by Jean-Paul Sartre and Henry James. Significantly, he also focuses on understanding the basic morality of collaboration. It is an attempt to return scholarly discussion to the basic question, one that has proven to be difficult and painful to face—why did Korean intellectuals collaborate with the Japanese empire?

Among the Korean writers who collaborated, Treat focuses on Yi Kwang-su but explains his choice only by saying that he is “Korea's most prominent modern novelist.” Though the reasons should be apparent to anyone familiar with the period, it is important to clarify Yi's historical significance. Yi is indeed one of the prototypical traitors/collaborators of the modern period, along with Yi Wan-yong, the signer of the 1910 annexation treaty. Many other writers collaborated with the Japanese, but none of them are as reviled as Yi Kwang-su. One example of the feelings that he invokes is Sŏnu Hwi's short story “Implication” [Muksi], in which the narrator mentions right at the beginning that he once wanted to commit an act of terror against Yi (Sŏnu Reference Sŏnu Hwi1987, 183). What distinguishes Yi from the others is his unique relationship to his readership. He was not the most respected novelist nor considered to be the most technically sophisticated writer (“Yŏngŏ…” 1936), but he was undoubtedly the most popular. Moreover, like a modern celebrity, readers were so familiar with many details of his personal life that they identified with him in a way that they did not with other writers.Footnote ¹ As the literary critic Kim Yun-sik has noted, it was this identification with Yi Kwang-su that made people so angry about his collaboration: “When he betrayed the nation, what made readers so unbearably pained and angered was their identification with Yi Kwang-su. Rather than criticizing Yi, they were critical of, sad for, and pained at their own selves” (Kim Reference Kim Yunsik1992, 71). His collaboration was traumatic, and the pain of this trauma is still so immediate because it has been difficult to create a narrative that explains how someone so seemingly nationalist could one day turn into such a faithful subject of the Japanese emperor. As Kim Hyŏn has noted, “Yi Kwang-su is like a wound that grows more painful the more one touches it” (Kim Reference Kim Hyŏn and Kim Hyŏn1977, 11).

As in other recent scholarship, Treat seeks to understand collaboration as a “structural feature of modernity.” For Treat, Japanese colonialism created a system in which “‘being Japanese’ in Korea became the only means to be ‘modern.’” Quoting Yun Hae-dong, he notes that Japan was “able to make collaboration by Koreans both structural and normative.” Though such claims undoubtedly have much truth to them, they also contain the danger of confusing the claims of imperial ideology with the “reality.” Japan celebrated the fact that it was the only modernized country in East Asia, but its status as an imperial power was complicated by its relationship to the West. Most Korean colonial intellectuals were fully aware of this; for them, Japan was not so much a source of modernity as the place where they could gain access to Western thought and knowledge. When Yi Kwang-su later wrote about his formative literary experiences, he downplayed Japanese influences and noted how he felt divided between Tolstoy and Byron, both of whom he first read as a middle school student in Japan (Yi Reference Yi Kwang-su1963, 304–305; Reference Yi Kwang-su1915). During the first two decades of colonial rule, collaboration did not necessarily entail assimilation.

It was not until the 1930s that collaborators increasingly saw Japanese modernity as superior to that of the West. Treat argues that one of the main factors in this shift was the influence of Social Darwinism; having studied its ideas in Japan, “by 1922. . . Yi's thinking was perhaps primed for an accommodation with Japan.” Social Darwinism was certainly a contributing factor, but not necessarily a decisive one. All Korean and Japanese students learned its basic principles, but some went on to follow anti-imperial ideologies such as Leninism. The influence of Social Darwinism also does not explain the timing of Korean intellectuals' collaboration, since its ideas had been introduced to East Asia in the late nineteenth century.

Another important factor was culturalism—more specifically, Neo-Kantian culturalism. It emerged in the mid 1910s when Yi Kwang-su was a student in the philosophy department at Waseda University; in his 1936 novel, His Autobiography, he recalled:

“Professor K” was Kuwaki Gen'yoku (1874–1946), one of the leading proponents of Neo-Kantianism. The discourse on culture was a reaction to World War I, which disillusioned many East Asian intellectuals by revealing the destructive nature of Western modernity. Culture was conceived as a refuge from the instability of a social world dominated by the circulation of commodities; it promised to restore meaning to a world governed by the cold logic of a competitive, profit-driven market economy. Yi had a more explicitly nationalist conception of culture compared to the first Japanese Neo-Kantians; for him, the nation could overcome the debilitating effects of modernity by transcending class divisions (Yi Reference Yi Kwang-su1925, 55). To focus on Yi's adherence to Social Darwinism simplifies his position toward modernity; he was, to tweak Raymond Williams' phrase, a “modernist against modernity.” This reaction against modernity was another important factor behind Yi's collaboration, but it is still insufficient as a full explanation.

Treat's analysis of the logic of Yi's motivations focuses on a reading of his work My Confessions [Na ŭi kobaek], a combination of an autobiography and a defense of his actions. As Treat mentions, there has been resistance to accepting Yi's contention that his collaboration was motivated by a desire to sacrifice himself in order to protect the Korean people from greater suffering. Treat argues that Yi's decision was not a “moral failure” but a morally plausible choice at the time, calling him a “pro-Japanese nationalist.” Though he refutes Yi's justifications for his collaboration, he notes that such judgment is only possible in retrospect, after Japanese rule ended in August 1945. Some South Korean writers and scholars have put forth similar analyses, such as the novelist Pok Kŏil (Reference Pok Kŏil2003, 105) and Kim Yun-sik (Reference Kim Yunsik1999, 344–45), and the scholar Cho Kwan-ja has also called Yi a pro-Japanese nationalist (Cho Reference Cho Kwanja and Kim Ilyŏng2006). Such work has been part of an effort to reconceptualize Korean nationalism as well as a sign that South Korea may be ready to move toward closure on the issue.

Unlike the work of many South Korean scholars, Treat's analysis is restricted to the pre-1945 period, but this move has the effect of avoiding other complex aspects of the issue. It is not only collaborators' actions during the colonial period but their actions after liberation in August 1945 that has complicated the resolution of the issue. After the end of Japanese rule, people expected that there would be a reckoning between former collaborators and those who engaged in direct resistance against the Japanese. However, the former were more interested in covering up their past than confronting it. As Treat notes, this was a particularly awkward issue for the Syngman Rhee administration since many of its members, ranging from high-ranking officials to police officers, were former collaborators. These individuals played a key role in suppressing the Korean People's Republic and enabling a right-wing, anti-communist dictatorship to be established in the south (Cumings Reference Cumings1981). Only a few writers, such as Yi Kwang-su and Ch'oe Nam-sŏn, wrote accounts of their collaboration, but they did little to satisfy former resisters.Footnote ² Most of all, they failed to apologize for their collaboration. In an article that appeared a few months before the publication of My Confessions, the novelist Kim Dong-in, a close colleague of Yi's, wrote about his disappointment at Yi's reluctance to apologize. Kim noted that the people's mood toward Yi was hardly punitive: “We thirty million Koreans love Yi Kwang-su. We love and cherish him. . . People ardently wish for the day when our nation and our Yi Kwang-su can meet again.” Kim believed that people were willing to forgive him as long as he was contrite, even calling Yi's collaboration a mistake (silsu) rather than a betrayal. But he was firm in asserting that it was necessary for him to give an “unconditional apology” (Kim Reference Kim Dong-in1988, 437–38). Even if Yi felt that he had done nothing wrong, he could have sacrificed himself once again and apologized on behalf of all collaborators. His conspicuous failure to do so made it difficult for others to accept his defense of his actions—that he was motivated by a genuine concern for the welfare of the Korean people.

Treat has used Yi Kwang-su as a “test case” for judging the morality of support for Japanese rule and imperialism, and this approach suggests new avenues for future research. Treat's conclusions could even be further tested by extending his analysis to Yi's literary works. Though Yi did not consider himself to be a professional novelist, the majority of his output was literary texts, and the interplay between his fiction and nonfiction has been a productive topic for scholarly work. In the past decade or so, research on pro-Japanese literature has begun to grow, and one major issue in this field is the portrayal of “Korean” identity. Since Treat focuses on Yi's post-liberation defense of his collaboration, it would have been interesting to read My Confessions together with his 1947 novella “A Dream” [Kkum]. As Kim Dong-in noted, it was a tremendous success, with sales exceeding those of his previous works, and significantly, readers expected it to be an expression of contrition (Kim 438). Based on a story in the Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms (Samguk yusa), the novella tells the story of a Buddhist monk named Chosin, who, succumbing to temptation, seduces and elopes with a young aristocratic woman. He later falls even further into immorality and kills a man, but just as he is about to be caught, he wakes up in his temple, relieved to find that he had been dreaming. In a sense, Chosin is the opposite of Yi Kwang-su; the monk had impure thoughts but did not, in reality, act upon them while Yi argued that his thoughts had been pure even if his actions had not. But it would also be possible to interpret the story as expressing a wish that Japanese rule had also been nothing more than a bad dream and that there was thus no need to apologize for collaboration. It is not surprising that Kim Dong-in felt that readers had been deceived by Yi Kwang-su.

In sum, research on collaboration has been stimulated by the critique of nationalism that emerged after the end of the Cold War in the West as well as by the reexamination of Japanese fascism in South Korea and Japan during the past fifteen years. This work has enabled new kinds of dialogue to emerge between South Korean and Japanese scholars, and Treat's work has demonstrated the potential for scholars in other countries to make important contributions to this growing body of research. Their reconceptualization of collaboration suggests the potential for writing new histories of Korea's experience of Japanese rule and for tracing a new genealogy of South Korean state nationalism.