In recent years, scholars of modern Korean history have begun to extend their reach beyond the Japanese colonial era and attendant issues of “colonial modernity” and to examine the continuities and ruptures of the post-1945 period. Bruce Cumings actually pointed the way here decades ago with his monumental study of the Korean War and the formation of two adversarial Korean states, followed more recently by seminal studies of the North Korean revolution by Charles Armstrong and Suzy Kim, and of South Korean nation-building, politics, and society by Gregg Brazinsky, Hyung-A Kim, Namhee Lee, and Hwasook Nam, among others. And few if any scholars have done more to open up “contemporary history” (hyŏndaesa) in both Korean and English than Tae Gyun Park (Pak T'aegyun) of Seoul National University, whose many books and articles have illuminated various aspects of the post-1945 period, including the Korean War, US-ROK relations, economic development, and most recently South Korea's participation in the Vietnam War. All this notwithstanding, contemporary Korean history is still very much a nascent field, especially in English. In the case of South Korea, the 1950s have suffered particular neglect, as historical narratives have tended to leapfrog from the end of the Korean War in 1953 to the great political upheavals of the April Student Revolution and May 16 Military Coup in 1960–61 with little appreciation or understanding of the culture and everyday life that emerged south of the DMZ in the immediate postwar period, or of the relationship between that culture and lived experience and the major political events that followed. Thanks to Charles Kim's superb new study of this period, such elision will no longer be possible, and the 1950s have now been revealed as a rich lode of historical meanings and connections that other scholars will also want to explore.
Kim's avowed aim is to provide “a thick description of culture and protest” (p. 6) in South Korea after the Korean War, and to do so he burrows deeply into some of the major newspapers, magazines, textbooks, films, and other educational materials of the period. These include most notably Sasanggye, the country's premier intellectual journal that ran from 1953 until 1970, when it was shut down by the Park Chung Hee regime; the popular women's magazine Yŏwŏn; and both iconic and lesser-known movies like Chayu Puin (Madame Freedom) and Chayu Kyŏrhon (The Love Marriage).
Borrowing a term from the historian William Sewell, Jr., Kim argues that the dominant discursive landscape of the decade after 1953 can be expressed in terms of two “schemas,” one centered on a complex of ideas Kim calls “wholesome modernization,” and another he calls the “student vanguard.” Wholesome modernization was fundamentally conservative, a set of aspirational guidelines, aimed particularly at young women, to navigate a socially subversive new ap’ŭre (après-guerre, post–Korean War) world of greater professional and sexual freedoms unleashed by the war and the influx of Western cultural influences. It reasserted the traditional virtues of male privilege and dominance at a time when increasing numbers of young women were entering the workforce and eschewing arranged relationships and marriages with men for romantic free-style dating and love matches. At the same time, in contrast to a perceived indulgent and decadent ap’ŭre lifestyle, it also promoted the idea of “developmental happiness,” which portrayed ideal married life as a rational, efficient, hygienic, and mutually pleasurable long-term strategy that incorporated healthy and enjoyable consumption and leisure as part of the living arrangement. The student vanguard schema, on the other hand, was a call to action to educated youth, especially males, to act as the patriotic voice, conscience, and leadership of the new Korean ethnic nation.
The two schemas shared some significant commonalities. The concentrated focus on youth, Kim notes, was a defining hallmark of the period, and while both schemas were directed at youthful self-improvement at an individual level, the idea of personal development in each case was also linked to the development and well-being of the nation as a whole, more explicitly so in the case of the student vanguard perspective. Both schemas also operated within a permissible range of public discourse, which despite Cold War and post–Korean War ideological constraints and the political strictures and manipulations of the Syngman Rhee government, left considerably more room for critiques of state and society than would later be the case under the Park Chung Hee regime, particularly in its Yusin incarnation after 1972. Indeed, especially in the case of the student vanguard idea, the Rhee state had sought to enhance its nationalist status and legitimacy by highlighting, praising, and identifying with anti-colonial student movements during the Japanese occupation and encouraging students to model themselves on their patriotic seniors. Therein lay a great irony, however. Such emulation was a double-edged sword, and Kim describes in rich detail how, with criticism of Rhee's corruption and election fraud intensifying in the late 1950s, the students came to embrace their patriotic legacy with fervor and to use it to bring down the government in the April 19 Student Revolution of 1960.
Finally, in one of the most interesting aspects of his analysis, Kim argues that both schemas in the 1950s constituted clusters of ideas with complicated genealogies reaching both backward and forward in time, to the colonial period and to the early Park Chung Hee period, respectively. He notes, for example, that the empowering student vanguard scheme that toppled Rhee was in fact an “invented tradition of youth protest” (p. 10), a hagiographic reworking of various colonial-era memories and discourses, including those surrounding the March First Movement of 1919 and the Kwangju Students’ Movement of 1929, as well as a reconfiguring of Japanese wartime state-centered ideology designed to produce patriotic imperial subjects. In an epilogue, moreover, he describes how the Park Chung Hee military junta, after seizing power in 1961, not only appropriated various aspects of the conservative wholesome modernization schema into its development plans, but also wrapped itself in the mantle of the student vanguard schema to claim authority and legitimacy as heir to the April Revolution.
One might question whether Kim's schematic classification of 1950s discourse into only two lines runs the risk of reductionism, especially, as the author himself points out, post–Korean War periodicals nearly doubled in number from 301 to 536 between 1954 and 1960. I would argue, for example, that it is difficult to comprehend the full ideological contours of the Park Chung Hee regime solely on the basis of the wholesome modernization and student vanguard paradigms, without also taking into consideration specifically militarist orientations also rooted in the 1950s and earlier. Moreover, while Kim rightly emphasizes pre-1945 and especially colonial influences in his analysis, apart from a brief mention of US “modernization theory” and its resonance with his idea of wholesome modernization, he pays scant attention to the multiple ways in which American cultural hegemony and patronage in these years of extraordinary South Korean dependency on the United States made an impact, both on his two schemas and in other ways as well.
Such questions, however, in no way diminish the significance and thoughtfulness of this outstanding book. Kim's groundbreaking foray into the 1950s has allowed us to see this crucial decade with a new historical eye, and, indeed, his first chapter, “Narrating the Postwar Crisis,” is in itself an evocative overview of the period that gives one a sense of some of its many fascinating features: media scandals and sensations; a changing popular vocabulary; juvenile gangs on the city streets; postwar desperation, greed, anxiety, and suicide; and pervasive rural poverty. That chapter, and the five that follow, which lay out the two schemas and discuss how they were manifested in the tumultuous political events of 1960–61, make Youth for Nation an exemplary work, and an enticing invitation to other historians to follow Kim's lead.
