In her newest ambitious book, Heritage Management in Korea and Japan, Hyung Il Pai examines how certain Korean and Japanese architectural sites and objects such as statues therein—from guard houses to temples—gained iconic status. In a word, how they became national treasures.
As Pai herself best explains, her book aims to bring into relief how “in the past century the evolution of the concepts and categories ‘local,’ ‘national,’ and ‘global heritage’ have paralleled the search for antiquity, authenticity, and identity by Japanese empire-building politicians, exposition organizers, collectors, scholars, businessmen, and leisure tourists” (p. 164).
The scope of Pai's undertaking is by definition vast and also highlights different dimensions of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity—including “post” such existences of each in an increasingly globalized age. Her source materials are rich and varied, from detailed diary entries and procedures of formal professional meetings to tourist pamphlets and advertisements. On top of this, Pai has engaged in deeply ethnographic work of her own as well, relying on her vast array of personal connections in addition to academic ones to interview participants and witnesses to the process of making certain sites “matter.”
How does Pai propose to do this and cover such a broad period? First, she explains, she analyzes the evolution of the concept of a museum treasure. Then, she interrogates how certain targeted efforts that began during Japan's age of empire—specifically its colonization of Korea during the first half of the twentieth century—endured rather smoothly through the end of the colonial era to integrate with post-1945 endeavors at national creation. Finally, Pai confronts one of the most pressing issues today: “Who is to blame for the plunder of Korean treasures?”
Pai's initial interrogation considers how Japanese scholars, collectors, and government officials came to recognize in the 1870s that critically important objects were “leaving the country” (p. 57). Analyzing the efforts particularly of Machida Hisanari to make Meiji officials aware that the country was in essence being emptied of its “material culture” (p. 58) at an alarming rate by overseas collectors such as Ernest Fenollosa, William Sturgis Bigelow, and Sylvester Morse, Pai establishes her overall parameters and vantage point: not to blame but to be historical.
She probes further to see how Japanese scholars would themselves then take up such cataloguing of Japanese objects just as Social Darwinist theories and timelines arrived in Japan, cementing as knowledge of self and other “prehistory,” “evolutionary theories,” and “the typology of races” (p. 95). Moreover, this would all be happening at the same time that Japanese officials, soldiers, and entrepreneurs were establishing the foundations of the Japanese empire, most especially in Korea. In these chapters and pages, the book reads well together with a variety of books, perhaps most especially with Stefan Tanaka and Oguma Eiji.Footnote 6
The Ainu indigenous people in Hokkaido at stake in Japan's first colonial undertaking together with aboriginal groups in Taiwan (its second) established a newly conceived sense of Japanese racial superiority among the Japanese empire's framers. Yet, as Pai and others whom she cites in her extensive bibliography have argued, it was through Japan's conquest and annexation of Korea during the first decade of the twentieth century that Japanese theorists discovered what she pithily calls “the missing link.” In Korea, Japanese who were caught up in and in charge of the self-referential, international process of plotting their nation's place on the scale of humanity found their perceived origins, and, thus, themselves. And this, of course, is where the trouble really began for Koreans and their historical treasures—not to mention their lived reality, which Pai deftly draws out as well in this context while not repeating overly familiar territory.
Pai continues this narrative right up to the present, ending her concluding section by examining the antiques “smuggling” industry that went on well through the end of Japan's colonial era—even as Koreans were relying on treasured sites and objects that Japanese had designated as significant to define their national origins. In part she does so to analyze the broader United Nations–sponsored, globalized tourist heritage industry. Also, this remains one of the most contentious issues today, although efforts such as Pai's to give specificity to what it involved affords those concerned with its resolution much-needed evidence on which to base claims and do their work.
Heritage Management in Korea and Japan is detailed and highly informative, with the one important area that Pai might consider developing in future work being the question of objects in today's North Korea as well as how the Korean War figures into many of her concerns—and, unfortunately, continues to do so.
