As Koreans grappled with the promises and perils of modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they naturally regarded their immediate neighbors in Russia, China, and Japan as alternatively inspiration, model, potential ally, and dangerous threat. Vladimir Tikhonov's Modern Korea and Its Others takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the myriad ways in which Koreans viewed their most proximate “others.”
Tikhonov's approach is fairly straightforward. He utilizes a wide array of newspapers, writings of noted thinkers and activists, and literature to chart the multifaceted ways Koreans regarded and depicted first Russia, then China, and finally Japan. In all three cases, he explicates how Koreans viewed not only the imagined nations of Russia, China, and Japan but also the flesh-and-blood inhabitants of those lands who interacted most intensively with Koreans—Russians in the multi-ethnic metropolis of Harbin, Chinese migrants in Korea (and Chinese who lived in Manchuria in close proximity with Korean migrants there), and, most interestingly, Korean-Japanese marriages.
Tikhonov's coverage is impressive, if not intimidating, in terms of the languages of the sources utilized—Korean, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, English, and more—as well as their number and diversity. A range of theories and approaches—some that animated his subjects at the time while others have been retrospectively applied to them: Orientalism, the notion of the subaltern, pan-Asianism, socialist internationalism, nationalism, gender, and many, many more—are skillfully and illuminatingly applied to these sources and their authors.
What emerges is a picture of almost incomprehensible variety. Tikhonov's chapter titles attempt to delineate some overarching themes—“Russia as a Threat and a Hope”; “Japan—Model and Conqueror, Eternally Alien”—but these do not do justice to the sheer diversity of viewpoints, opinions, and ideas described. The neophyte (or undergraduate student) is likely to find this book hard going. Tikhonov's writing style is dense (paragraphs easily turn into pages) and relentless in its explication of author after author, and work after work. But the area expert (or even graduate student) will likely find Modern Korea and Its Others fascinating and enlightening. Familiar figures—Yi Kwang-su, Sin Ch'ae-ho, Pak Ŭn-sik, Yun Ch'i-ho, Kim Tong-in, Ch'oe Sŏ-hae, and a host of others—will often be viewed in a different and sometimes surprising light. And rare indeed will be the reader who will not be introduced to at least a few heretofore unknown figures, writers, or events. Whether it is the significantly diverging views of Tolstoy held by different Koreans or the image of a poor Russian girl trying to make ends meet by singing Arirang (in Korean) at a Harbin variety show; whether it is the desperation of some Koreans seeking hope in the reformist efforts of Liang Qichao and the revolutionary activities of Sun Yat-sen or the tragic plight of Korea's Chinese community who lost their lives and livelihoods in the aftermath of the 1931 Wanbaoshan (Manbosan) Incident; or whether it is the difficulties and inherent inequalities that characterized many Korean-Japanese marriages (in telling contrast to the well-known case of Pak Yŏl and Fumiko Kaneko), Modern Korea and Its Others has much with which to engage the reader.
But it is also this same variety and diversity that sometimes gets in the way of reaching broader conclusions. Tikhonov points to the “possibilities for individuation inherent in both Chinese and Korean modernity discourses” (p. 141), and perhaps this is the primary conclusion to be derived from his book. In contrast to the post-liberation period (covered briefly in the book's conclusion) in which both Koreas propagated totalizing nationalist discourses that left very little room for divergence or alternatives, the pre-1945 period was one in which there clearly was no single “Korea” but rather a myriad of individuals who longed and worked for an array of different possible identities and futures—modernity and Korean state- and nation-hood to be sure, but also pan-Asian ethnic consciousness, international class solidarity, alliance with one or more of Korea's neighbors (usually in the name of resisting the third), the embracing of some aspects of modernity while rejecting others, etc.
It is curious that Tikhonov appears largely uninterested in explicitly pointing to direct legacies of the period he so skillfully surveys. The architects of the post-liberation Korean states (Yi Sŭng-man, Pak Chŏng-hŭi, and Kim Il-sŏng) were clearly shaped by their colonial experiences, but they are hardly mentioned and never quoted in the book. It is as if Tikhonov wishes to highlight the stark contrast between the heady diversity of the pre-1945 period and the monolithic nationalism that followed. But, still, the closing of alternative paths and the diminishing possibility of close alliances are evident in Tikhonov's narratives. Stalin's forced relocation of the Soviet Union's Korean population to Kazakhstan and his purge of Korean communists; the Minsaengdan and Wanbaoshan Incidents; and, the inescapable contrast between Japanese assimilationist rhetoric (even its promotion of Japanese-Korean marriages) and the reality of Korea's unchanging second-class status all point to the increasingly inescapable conclusion that the national boundary was insuperable and that alternative trajectories were unwise or impossible. To the extent that they all became unitary nation-states, both Korea and its “others” ended up mirroring each other quite closely.
