In Acceptance of the Japanese Civilizing Mission: Chung's and Ishidoya's Beginnings in Colonial and Imperial Botany

Chung Tyaihyon seemed to take pride in being a descendant of the elite yangban class.Footnote ⁷ It was the class whose members had the exclusive privilege of becoming government officials if they passed the civil service exams, which were based mostly on Confucian texts written in classical Chinese. This privilege, however, disappeared in 1895 when the reformist Korean government abolished the exam system and introduced the modern education system. Carried out under the sense of crisis brought about by Western expansion towards East Asia, it was one of the modernizing measures largely inspired by the Japanese model (Schmid Reference Schmid2002). Aimless, Chung stopped his study of Confucian classics.

He went to Seoul in 1905, when Korea became a protectorate of Japan, to begin his study of Japanese at the age of 23. He said that he became “weary of the pre-modern farm management” and decided to learn some “practical knowledge” (Yi Reference Yi1994, 60). This move was prescient, as it became the basis for his one-year government scholarship to study at the Agricultural and Forestry School in 1907.Footnote ⁸ Taught by Japanese teachers, the course was designed to train staff for the Japanese “development” project for Korean forestry resources, launched in 1905.Footnote ⁹

Like many Koreans who witnessed the consecutive victories of Japan against the great empire of China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, he appeared to believe that Japan succeeded in acquiring Western modernity. The “humiliation and fury” that he felt over these wars, fought over Korea largely on Korean soil, only deepened his awe at the transformation of the neighbor that had always been unwelcome and slighted in the past (Ha Reference Ha2006; Toby Reference Toby1991). Fully overwhelmed by this display of force, Chung embraced in particular the notion that the modern science and technology that Japan had put forward was indeed a universal tool that could empower his “poor and powerless” country (Yi Reference Yi1994, 65).Footnote ¹⁰

However, this acceptance of the Japanese civilizing mission did not simply acknowledge the alacrity of Japan's earlier acquisition of the universally empowering tool of science. To most non-Europeans, it accompanied the acceptance of science as the new “measure of men” and culture (Adas Reference Adas1989). That is, almost exactly as Western and Japanese imperialists intended, Chung accepted the inferiority of his own people and culture. He came to believe that Korean knowledge, in comparison with that powerful knowledge that Japan now claimed, was simply the “leisurely appreciation and lyricizing of things” of no practical use (Chung, To, Lee D., and Lee F. Reference Chung, Pong-Sup, Deok-Bong and Fui-Jai1937, 1). And by accepting Japanese tutelage, his sense of inferiority or helplessness only deepened. The intellectual gap between him and the Japanese teachers was too wide. Chung reflected that “Koreans did not perform well in natural science like physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics – subjects based on rationality” (Yi Reference Yi1994, 63). It was true that it was a struggle for most students to pass the one-year intensive course, although this was hardly surprising given that they had little elementary education and inadequate Japanese. Nonetheless, Chung internalized this as Koreans’ lack of rationality.

Chung passed the challenging course with six other classmates, becoming a forester in 1908 at the Suwŏn forestry office, the principal one of the five that Japan had established in major cities the year before. There he participated in forestation projects specifically designed to “demonstrate the effect of the new [Japan-guided] administration” (Anon. 1912, 1). As a serious believer in the Japanese civilizing mission, Chung seemed not to mind the effective demolition of rich forests in the North.Footnote ¹¹ To him, it was the scientific approach that Koreans had never witnessed, “the beginning of forestry in Korea” (Chung Reference Chung2002, 52). He apparently made learning and practicing this foreign knowledge his vocation; he did not leave the forestry department after the Japanese Government-General of Korea took control of Korea in 1910. It was a difficult decision as the colonial government demoted him to a manual worker and decreased his salary. Chung's acceptance of the Japanese civilizing mission, not questioning the Japanese assessment of Korean inferiority and its unfair condition, appeared complete.

Fortunately, Chung was able to resume his learning of modern science by meeting Ishidoya Tsutomu (石戸谷勉, 1891–1958), who became his boss in 1911, and whom he came to remember as “a great teacher that I would never forget until I die” (Chung Reference Chung1943, Preface). Ishidoya was one of the enthusiastic Meiji youths who wanted to learn modern science. For his education, he chose the first scientific agricultural school in Japan, the Sapporo Agricultural College, established by the Japanese government with American teachers at its head in 1876 (HSSJ 1965, v.15, 14–57). Then Ishidoya chose Korea for his scientific career, evidently answering the call to abandon Japanese insularity and to take on the imperial responsibility; there was a scientific career to be made in Korea while enlightening backward Korea with Japan's advanced modern science.Footnote ¹² Ishidoya, enamoured by “Western” science and invigorated by Japanese expansion, accepted this civilizing mission by launching his scientific career in Korea.

The civilizing mission thus brought together Ishidoya and Chung. Chung was eager to discard his own tradition and learn science from Japan, while Ishidoya was determined to transform the unenlightened land and people with his science. As we shall see, the most striking result of their collaboration was to be the tumultuous changes in Ishidoya's mission. The unenlightened land and its people had their say.

Ishidoya's Discontent: The Problem of Transplanted Trees and Knowledge Practices

Ishidoya's civilizing mission based on scientific forestry encountered challenges from the beginning. The colonial situation was hardly ideal for his scientific career. Upon securing dominance, the colonial government became less interested in displaying Japan's advanced science.Footnote ¹³ All model tree nurseries except for the one in Seoul were closed. The role that the colonial government expected from the inexperienced Ishidoya was to “directly apply the experience and research results from the [Japanese] mainland.” It believed that separate research was not necessary as trees and climates were quite similar in Japan and Korea (Oka Reference Oka and Kyeong-Bin2000, v.1, 313, 307–333). However, through his growing engagement with the colonial land and its people, Ishidoya came to question all these expectations and underlying assumptions about the Japanese civilizing mission.

Applying imperial science to Korea turned out to be disastrous due to the inexperience of Japanese forestry. Concerns about deforestation had been raised since the 1880s in Japan, with rapid industrialization and urbanization. However, reforestation was not a pressing issue as Japan was gaining access to rich forests in Hokkaido, Karafuto, and soon Taiwan, and Korea. Serious reforestation in Japan only began in 1919.Footnote ¹⁴ In the meantime, the untested creed of Japanese foresters was that the West had the ready universal solution. Japan's forests would be quickly restored if they faithfully copied what had succeeded in the West by importing superior Western trees.Footnote ¹⁵

However, when the only forester in Korea, Ishidoya, transplanted these superior foreign trees to Korea, including some Japanese trees supposedly stronger than Korean ones, they did not grow well.Footnote ¹⁶ Ishidoya seized this failure in transplantation as a chance to secure an independent research function in Korea, establishing a small forestry research laboratory in 1913. The support for his independent research was hardly significant. Chung was the only assistant that he could obtain, along with a guest researcher from Tokyo Imperial University, Nakai Takenoshin (中井猛之進, 1882–1952), who had successfully secured the colonial government's backing for his botanizing of Korean plants as a government-botanist (Lee Reference Lee2015). Luckily, the following year Asakawa Takumi (浅川巧, 1891–1931), a graduate of a three-year agricultural school in Yamanashi, joined their small workforce.Footnote ¹⁷

Ishidoya's first task was to explain the failure of the transplanted trees. He and his team conducted various comparative studies on these trees for several years. By 1917, his lab in Korea had accumulated enough data to present its result to Japan. In their first report sent to Japan, signed by him and Asakawa, the researchers singled out one famous example, American catalpa, to criticize Tokyo's blind reliance on foreign trees. Having obtained such grandiose names like “Golden Tree (黃金樹)” and “Spiritual Tree (靈木),” American catalpa was promoted as the magic bullet needed to rapidly reforest denuded Japanese forests. However, Ishidoya and Asakawa found that its impressive growth was limited to well-maintained nurseries. In the field, American catalpa did not come close to attaining the promised results. The researchers contended that foresters ought to reconsider the hasty introduction of foreign trees based on nursery data (Ishidoya and Asakawa Reference Ishidoya and Takumi1917a).

Furthermore, the data were building up to show that superior Japanese species performed poorly in comparison to similar Korean species when transplanted into Korea. In the colonial soil the robust Japanese larch, ambitiously imported from Nagano and Karafuto, fared ill in every aspect – growth, survival rates, and seed and fruit production. The Korean larch that Ishidoya and Asakawa succeeded in cultivating gave decisively better results. This comparative failure of Japanese species was hardly limited to larch; for many trees common to these adjacent lands – chestnut, pine, mountain hazel, and cedars of Lebanon – Japanese ones performed substantially less well than Korean ones in Korea (Ishidoya and Asakawa Reference Ishidoya and Takumi1917b).

The devastating failure of two representative Japanese trees in Korea, Japanese cedar and Japanese cypress, gave Ishidoya some clues. Both trees failed to endure Korean winters in spite of the fact that they had grown well in the Northern temperate zone in Japan, which had similarly cold winters. Ishidoya realized that “the standardized weather table” that had initially suggested the similarities in climate was inadequate. When conditions other than temperature (the daily minimum and maximum, the duration of the cold snap, changes of temperature after the cold snap, the strength of wind, rainfall, and the number of clear days during the winter, etc.) were factored in, Korean winters were quite distinct from Japanese winters. They were much drier with a much lower minimum temperature. He conjectured that Japanese cedar and cypress, accustomed to humid and less severely cold winters, could not have developed the mechanism for preserving moisture, which Korean ones seemed to have developed. Consequently, they just withered away by the end of winter, while trees of the Korean species renewed themselves. This invisible physiological difference of Japanese and Korean trees and the subtle differences in climate could not be ignored (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1918).

Ishidoya's consideration for local conditions did not stop at climate. In the early 1920s, he came to contemplate the emerging concept of “forest ecology.”Footnote ¹⁸ He observed that “the importance of ecological interrelationships” among trees, other living organisms, and the soil sustaining them was insufficiently appreciated by Japanese foresters. To Ishidoya, Japanese foresters seemed to “merely repeat from the Western textbook” when they wrote that the forest was more than an aggregation of trees. Their assertion was devoid of a serious appreciation of the complex interrelationships among forest components. He asserted that forests were “above all, living creatures,” with all the autonomy that entailed. Foresters should thus be aware of this ecological complexity before trying to make forests yield what people needed. It was another reason why indigenous trees, which had been part of the “collective life” of Korean forests, would fare better in Korea (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1921a; Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1922).

To Ishidoya, the problem of tree transplantation was not an isolated failure; it strongly reflected what went awry in Japan's transplantation of Western science. If mainland Japanese forestry relying on an easy “universal” solution transported from the West was not enough to push him to this conclusion, there was another case that solidified his mistrust about Japanese scientific practice. The plant systematics of Nakai Takenoshin, the guest botanist to the colonial government who became professor at Tokyo Imperial University in 1922, provided further evidence of this problem.

Nakai's case, however, was a great success story in the modernization of Japanese botany, and a significantly typical one in that it was based on Japanese imperial expansion (Lee Reference Lee2015). In 1909, Nakai finished his dissertation on Korean flora without ever setting foot in Korea. Fully written in Latin, this international achievement owed much to his predecessor's prescient strategy of accumulating dried plant specimens from Japanese peripheries. Matsumura Jinzo (松村任三, 1856–1928), professor in plant systematics at Tokyo Imperial University, had deemed Korea, the seriously understudied “hermit” country, especially important for Japanese botany. He sent his botanical collector twice to Korea in 1900 and 1902, much in advance of Japan's actual annexation of Korea. Due to this prescient strategy, Nakai's thesis could include almost three times as many Korean plants as had ever been included in any works by Western botanists. Based on this impressive coup, Nakai appealed to the colonial government, which readily agreed in 1913 to sponsor his further academic work. Nakai was asked to “demonstrate that Japan makes advances in the scholarly fields as well as in the colonial governance” in Korea (Nakai Reference Nakai1927, 562). Through this support, which went on for 30 years, Nakai produced a series of works on Korean flora, Flora Sylvatica Koreana (朝鮮森林植物編, 1915–1940), in a mixture of Latin, English and Japanese, which in turn made him a representative Japanese systematist and world-renowned expert on Korean flora.Footnote ¹⁹

Nakai's success was based on Japanese botanists’ fastidious imitation of Western botany. Just as the European botanist Linnaeus based his universal classification system on dried specimens collected from non-European peripheries including Japan, Japanese botanists searched for less explored territories to build up the Japanese center of botany. Although these “armchair botanists” did not often leave their comfortable centers, the specimens that they studied had of course been collected in the field.Footnote ²⁰ Nakai made 18 trips to Korea during his 30-year service, but they were all short trips during his summer breaks from the university. Naturally, Nakai's success owed a great deal to information and specimens sent from Korea, many of which Ishidoya and Chung, whom Ishidoya assigned as Nakai's assistant, had collected throughout the years (Lee Reference Lee2015).

Nevertheless, Nakai was not so generous in acknowledging the important knowledge transfer from the colonial field. Nakai's “discovery” of the new Korean willow, Chosenia, was an illustrative case. Chosenia was a kind of willow tree in northern Korea and Nakai first thought that it was a known species common in Manchuria, Salix rorida. Yet the foresters who saw the trees in early spring when it blossomed found its small catkins quite distinctive. And as it was very difficult to collect and to make dried specimens with those delicate catkins intact, it took two years for them to obtain satisfactory specimens. They sent them to Nakai in 1918, which persuaded him to register it as a new species in the genus of Salix, as Salix splendida Nakai. Yet his collectors suspected that there was something more to this splendid looking willow and realized that these flowers had no scent, unlike those of other willows. This suggested that it could not be pollinated by insects but only by wind. Nakai, only after learning this from his collectors, decided that it should be a new genus in the Salix family, Chosenia. However, Nakai did not fully acknowledge the expertise and active input that had been provided by his collectors. He mentioned their names only in his second report where he treated them as passive collectors at his command.Footnote ²¹

Furthermore, Nakai's repeatedly mistaken identifications about the willow made Ishidoya reflect on the arbitrariness of plant systematics.Footnote ²² It seemed that “armchair botanists” at the various botanical centers could not agree on whether the characteristics that they identified on their dried specimens meant a new genus, species, variety, form, or nothing. These armchair botanists seemed not to know the possibility of rich variation occurring in the field. Ishidoya argued that the characteristics distinctive of dried specimens were often simple variations reflecting soil or environmental differences or passing traits in plants’ constant growth and life cycles. Furthermore, botanists made obvious human mistakes, such as misrecognizing traits and mixing up specimens, as he witnessed first-hand from Nakai.Footnote ²³

Ishidoya thought Nakai's unreliable practice symbolized a “Japanese attitude that usually over-evaluated anything from outside.” Japanese botanists not only accepted all these new designations of “scientific names” but also tried hard to compete with Western botanists by creating more names on the basis of minute details. Ishidoya even made the accusation that this uncritical conversion to Western systematics was the repetition of Tokugawa naturalists’ blind following of the Chinese authority (Li Shizhen's (李時珍, 1518–1593) Bencao gangmu (本草綱目); Systematic Materia Medica, 1596). Ishidoya, by revealing this problem of Western and Japanese practice induced by their disregard of local conditions, appealed to his colleagues in the field to stop relying on “those taxonomists who recklessly claim new species based on the shades of the bark or the shapes of the fruit” and to work for “the public good” by delving into local soil (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1928a, 81, 86).

Ishidoya's discontent had the familiar ring of a field worker's discontent against a practice imposed from the center. In this case of the Japanese empire, where the gap between the metropolitan scientific establishment and the colonial outpost was often narrower than that in the Western empires, he seemed freer in articulating his critique on imperial scientific practice. Notably, what made the imperial science of Japan most vulnerable to this colonial expert's criticism was the claim that modern science was universal. “Universally” superior trees from the West and Japan simply did not stand up well in the colonial land and those “objective” facts of the dried specimens turned out to be rather ephemeral in the field. As much as the concept of universality powerfully brought modern science into this non-European contact zone, its weakness in the field seems to have had the potential to upend the imperial enterprise itself.

Chung's and Ishidoya's Different Perspectives on Japanese Science and Korean Traditions

As described thus far, Ishidoya's concern about the colonial land as the site of knowledge production was focused on its natural conditions. The singularities of Korea's soil, climate, and ecology made the colonial land not just a place to transmit Japanese knowledge but a place from which its own localized knowledge ought to be generated. However, Ishidoya's deepening contact with Korea was not limited to its natural environment. In particular, his contact with Korean knowledge traditions through his interaction with his Korean subordinate Chung provided an important impetus for his transformation from a scientific forester into a herbalist specializing in traditional medicine. Notably, the “discovery” of Korean knowledge traditions for both Chung and Ishidoya was very gradual – much more so for Chung.

At first, Ishidoya and Chung shared the same enthusiasm for “Western” science, now also possessed by Japan, and seemingly agreed on quite an asymmetrical or one-sided relationship under this hegemony of modern science. That is, Chung received what Ishidoya gave him. Ishidoya's urge to be a missionary of Japanese science was at work. Ishidoya treated his two subordinates, Chung and Asakawa, with unusual equality in terms of promotion and salary.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, Ishidoya took Chung's desire to learn seriously and taught him everything from collecting plants and making specimens to cultivating and foresting trees. He gave the studious Chung the chance to work with Nakai, a scholar from the center.Footnote ²⁵ However, Ishidoya listed only Asakawa as his co-author for those important papers that he presented to Japanese experts, in spite of Chung's active participation in the transplantation experiments. While Asakawa could become a colleague with whom Ishidoya challenged the key assumptions of Japanese forestry, Chung remained a passive beneficiary of his civilizing mission. Even though Ishidoya was not prejudiced against Koreans, the difference between Chung's and Asakawa's contributions, attributable to Chung's belated initiation to modern science, seems to have justified this inequality.Footnote ²⁶

Although being on the receiving end of the civilizing mission was the realization of Chung's dream, the extreme one-sidedness of their knowledge interaction must have been burdensome for him. Chung found his first chance to reciprocate Ishidoya's teaching when the colonial government launched an investigation of traditional medicinal plants in 1916. Absorbed with transplantation problems and as of yet unfamiliar with any traditional knowledge, Ishidoya mobilized Chung (Shin Reference Shin2007). Chung, in spite of his lack of interest in traditional medicine, seemed determined to be a good native informant, just as Ishidoya had been a good teacher to him. He searched hard in order to offer some useful Korean texts. He not only brought out rather widely-circulated medical books including Treasured Mirror of Eastern Medicine (東醫寶鑑, 1613) but also presented the then-unknown text Farm Management (山林經濟, ca. 1700), based on which the 1916 report on 169 commonly traded herbs in Korea was produced.Footnote ²⁷

Although Chung's role in this was known through a later report on medicinal plants by the colonial government (Forestry Research Institute 1936), Ishidoya did not acknowledge Chung's contribution to this report. While many reasons for Ishidoya's unusual omission of Chung's name may be assumed, one clear factor appeared to be Ishidoya's lack of appreciation for tradition in general. Hitherto, traditions had been, for Ishidoya, something replaced by superior modern science. He was horrified that Korean people were still “searching for roots of grass and bark of trees,” which were even traded in specialized markets, for their medical needs. Whereas such a custom was safely relegated to the pre-modern past in Japan, Ishidoya deplored that “in Korea, the benefits of advanced medicine provided by the colonial government were not yet widespread enough for average people to enjoy.” The aim of the modern Ishidoya was to help develop new medicines from these sources through “the advancement of chemistry” (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1916, 75).

Yet even as he deplored the conditions of Korean herbalism, he found something quite significant through Chung in his first encounter with Korean traditional texts. The alleged academic lingua franca of Korea, Japan, and China – classical Chinese – had strikingly different usages regarding plant names depending on which country the text originated from. In each, they used different Chinese characters for the same plants. As it could be a serious issue for his forestry work, he conducted a systematic investigation in 1917 by comparing Chinese characters for common trees in three countries. For common trees such as Japanese cypress, silver magnolia, fir, cinnamon tree, and camphor tree, the Chinese characters used in the three countries were all different. Furthermore, in Korean texts, matters were further complicated by the transliteration of vernacular names into Chinese characters. Ishidoya warned other Japanese experts that they could not obtain exact information from Korean texts without the mediation of Koreans like Chung, who knew the traditional usages of those Chinese characters in their culture (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1917).

In 1918, when Ishidoya made a follow-up report on herbal medicine, he relied on Chung's assistance again but not for a further investigation of old books. Ishidoya, with Chung as an interpreter, decided to interview contemporary doctors and medicine dealers. Curiously, these Korean doctors, almost regardless of region or social standing, said more or less the same thing about any given medicine. The information turned out to be derived from one text produced in the early seventeenth century that Chung had brought forward in 1916, Treasured Mirror. Ishidoya dwelled upon this intriguing fact but at this stage he simply assessed it as “Korean doctors’ lack of empiricism and slavish reliance on the old authority,” apparently unswerving in his scepticism about traditional knowledge. Chung's help was yet again unacknowledged in the report (GGK 1918).

We cannot trace exactly how and why Ishidoya came to shed this scepticism about traditional knowledge. The first sign was shown in a report produced by a collaboration with Asakawa: their three-year investigation of old and large Korean trees for the designation of natural monuments.Footnote ²⁸ Begun in 1916 and published in 1919, their report listed 5,300 trees by province and by reason of their long survival or fame. They found that these deeply-rooted trees survived not simply due to their adaptation to Korean soil but also by becoming part of Korean people's lives. These trees had received communal protection because they offered shade, gathering places, spiritual guidance, as well as aesthetic enjoyment and collective memories to Korean people (GGK 1919). Ishidoya did not dismiss these reasons as superstition or irrationality but appreciated them as part of Korean culture that had ensured the longevity of so many trees.

Ishidoya's increasingly positive outlook about Korean culture was not a passing fancy, as confirmed by his last work as a forester in 1923, The Identification Keys of Korean Forest Trees (朝鮮森林樹木鑑要). This work, co-authored with Chung for the first time, further manifested how his changing perspectives on Korean culture were creating a different dynamic in his relationship with Chung.

Their preface specified that their work was a guide for fieldworkers like themselves. They had to “complement what was missing for field workers and collectors” from Nakai's Flora Sylvatica Koreana. In “foreign languages,” Nakai's Flora was quite inaccessible to them, and, burdened with sumptuous illustrations, it was too expensive. Moreover, Ishidoya and Chung found it an inadequate guide to identify plants in the field. They needed plant identification keys based not on dried specimens but on living plants. In their guide, they made the distinction between shrub and tree, and used a tree-specific common category (consisting of needle-leaved, broad-leaved, and bamboos) to indicate overall shapes of trees. While the morphological characteristics of leaves, flowers, and fruits constituted an important part of their system, as it did for Nakai, they did not care about the details except those “permanent characteristics discernible to naked eyes in the field.” They provided a tree's usual habitat, soil type, and other plants often observed together as more tips for field identification (Ishidoya and Chung 1923, guidelines).

What made this field guide even more distinctive from Nakai's work was its strong grounding in Korean culture. Though it was not uncommon to use “Hangŭl,” i.e. the Korean alphabet, in colonial government publications, especially to promote policies, Ishidoya and Chung's persistent attention to vernacular names was a good indication of their growing interest in Korean culture. For any given plant, their Identification Keys reported as many vernacular names as possible, amassing a wide variety of names used in different regions and texts. These Korean names then in turn became essential tools in their investigation for plant usages in Korea. As if to compensate for Nakai's academic work's slight in that regard, Ishidoya and Chung put the uses of plants at the center. Moreover, these uses were not general ones but cultural ones highly specific to Korea. Unlike Nakai who briefly mentioned the rather well-known uses of most widely-utilized trees, like paulownia for furniture making, they recorded only special uses while omitting such common knowledge. They discussed how Korean people made cookies out of pine pollen and valued nut pine trees for coffin-making, etc. For herbal plants, they reported how Korean doctors used acanthopanax plants for tuberculosis and stroke, and hawthorn fruits for indigestion (Ishidoya and Chung 1923, 3, 6).

The Identification Keys, which thus testified to Ishidoya's deepening interest in Korean culture and its relationship with plants, specifically credited Chung for collecting vernacular names (Ishidoya and Chung 1923, guidelines). In addition to the simple acknowledgment of Chung's years of labor in collecting those names via his field trips and his textual investigations, it signified how Ishidoya's changing perspective on Korean culture influenced his appreciation for Chung. Although their long collaboration and Chung's intellectual growth would be as significant, Chung's expertise on what Ishidoya cared about seemed crucial in Ishidoya's new appreciation for Chung. He was not a mere recipient of Ishidoya's civilizing mission any more. He was a crucial ally for Ishidoya's new knowledge practice, which was notably set against Nakai's academic work.

In 1925, Ishidoya left the recently expanded Forestry Research Institute, where he had carved out his career as a forester for 15 years.Footnote ²⁹ What he decided to do next was made clear in his first appearance at the meeting of the Natural History Association of Korea (朝鮮博物學會) that year. He began to study Korean medicinal plants through Treasured Mirror, the book that he had earlier thought hindered the empirical spirit in Korean traditional medicine by exercising too much authority on it. Now, Ishidoya revealed a different expectation. He seems to have imagined that this 25-volume book must contain some tried and true knowledge to have persisted so long in use.Footnote ³⁰ He was especially keen on its “Koreanized” knowledge, i.e., that which was not shared with other cultures. He selected 45 medicinal plants that he could not find in Chinese or Japanese texts for his investigation (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1925). He was pursuing the most localized knowledge exclusively through Korean traditions, an effort that would seem to be as far as possible from offering another blind copy of uprooted universal knowledge from the West.

Fortunately, perhaps, he seemed to find a good sponsor for his serious search for localized knowledge. Sugihara Noriyuki (杉原德行, 1892–1976), a pharmacology professor in a colonial medical school, came to think that Ishidoya's research on traditional medicine would be crucial in establishing a “characteristic” pharmacological section in the newly opened imperial university in Seoul. He invited Ishidoya in 1926 to join the section as a lecturer and gave him a budget to purchase old texts. Ishidoya's role was to study traditional texts to identify original plants of traditional medicines for his pharmacologist colleagues’ further analyses (Sugihara Reference Sugihara1974).

The first of their 16-part article, “Korean Traditional Medicine (朝鮮の漢藥)” in 1926, clearly displayed Ishidoya's enthusiasm for the new subject.Footnote ³¹ In particular, it presented Korean traditions as something original that had incorporated traditional Chinese medicine in its own way. It described the fifteenth-century efforts to compile local medicines (鄕藥) and offered a very favorable reappraisal of Hŏ Chun's (許浚, 1546–1615) Treasured Mirror, namely as an achievement comparable to Li Shizhen's Bencao gangmu. He thought that Hŏ's work, finished “only 33 years” after Li's work, was an original Korean contribution much ahead of similar Japanese works. He wrote: “Such a great work was rare even in the West” at the time. He continued his praise by noting that whereas the number of herbal medicines recorded in China had rarely reached 1,000 until Li Shizhen's time, Hŏ contemporaneously described 1,350 medicines, including many local ones (Ishidoya and Sugihara 1926).Footnote ³² Ishidoya indicated that its value, comparable to that of the great Chinese and Western traditions, was the result of its own search for what was good in its own land. By portraying it as the wholesome opposite of Japanese imperial science, Ishidoya appears to display a thorough appreciation of traditional Korean knowledge.

On the other hand, Chung could neither break away from Japanese practice nor embrace Korean traditions as easily. The views that justified the Japanese civilizing mission seemed internalized in him. Chung's first independent report in 1925, Distribution and the Right Land for Important Korean Trees (朝鮮産主要樹種ノ分布及適地), illustrated his position. It was an interim report for the most ambitious project that Ishidoya had launched with Asakawa and Chung at the expanded institute in 1922. This “Right Land for Right Tree (適地適樹)” investigation aimed to find the most suitable trees for each region by considering the climate, soil, and ecological condition of the land together with physiological characteristics of trees, neatly addressing Ishidoya's concerns. When Ishidoya left the department, Chung was left in charge of the report (Chung Reference Chung1925).

The defining characteristic of Chung's report was its complete dependence on Japanese sources, including data accumulated at the Institute. The report provided suitable soil characteristics and geographical distribution of each tree, accompanied by a map that showed the vertical as well as horizontal limits of a tree's habitat. Notably, for the use of trees, he also utilized Japanese references to enumerate the specific Japanese uses of 77 representative Korean trees – a decision that stood in marked contrast with the approach taken in Identification Keys. Even for well-known trees like paulownia, he listed Japanese furniture and tools often made out of it, as if to show that these Korean trees had a promising market in Japan. In fact, the audience of the text was the Japanese foresters visiting Korea for the annual meeting of the Forestry Association of Greater Japan, being held for the first time in Korea. Chung, by corroborating the various Japanese uses with the “objective” data of the wood's strength, elasticity, and so on, clearly displayed his ability to use the data obtained through “modern” tests and measurement (Chung Reference Chung1925). With no tinge of Korean-ness, Chung presented himself as a reliable practitioner of Japanese science.

Unfortunately, this comprehensive and clear 50-page report signalled not the beginning of Chung's successful career as an independent researcher but instead the end of it. The rather exceptional fairness that Chung had enjoyed rapidly evaporated after Asakawa died suddenly and the leadership of the department changed. In 1933, though Chung had chosen to stay as a contract worker at a much-lower salary, he lost his position in the department.Footnote ³³

It was at this moment of crisis that Chung resumed his engagement with the Korean tradition that he thought inferior and useless. The colonial government seriously re-launched the investigation and cultivation of Korean medicinal plants in 1933, just as Chung desperately needed a job assignment. Chung, assuring his new boss about his expertise in Korean medicine through a rehashed article from Ishidoya's 1916 and 1918 reports on the topic, secured the job (Chung Reference Chung1933).Footnote ³⁴ One could hardly say that Chung wanted this transition to his own traditions, which he assessed as a “leisurely appreciation and lyricizing of things” until 1937.

Ishidoya could put himself at odds with the Japanese imperial center. Although it was with rare courage that he challenged the authority of the imperial center so vocally through his scientific practice, in the Japanese empire where the concurrent making of the center was more obvious than in the Western empires, his critique seems a sound strategy to strengthen his position as a colonial expert. By having a dutiful Korean subordinate at his side, he also had no barrier in exploring and moving into the new area of traditional knowledge that he had thought inferior in the beginning. He could thus fully utilize colonial traditions in shaping his new career; his high praise for colonial traditions worked well in strengthening his value as a colonial expert. It was knowledge practice unbridled with any limitation, it seems.

On the other hand, Chung seemed unable to see beyond what the forceful colonization imposed on him: his and his culture's inferiority and the power of modern and Japanese science. However, his wish to become a modern scientific practitioner could not be sanctioned under the colonial structure. In keeping with the colonial asymmetry in power, he had to be either an assistant to Japanese research or a reliable native informant for the further investigation of colonial resources. It seems natural that he was not so enthusiastic about the Korean traditions that he had to study to live on. While both of their paths were the results of their constant negotiations for the “better,” Chung's agency was a disabled one under the insurmountable power of imperial Japan that limited his choices at every step.

Ishidoya's and Chung's Anti-Imperial Projects?

Nonetheless, as undeniable as this asymmetry was, neither the imperial citizen nor the colonial subject was free from the “political” constraints imposed by the imperial power structure. Knowledge practice in the colonial context seems never to escape the political tension caused by the imperial need to constantly assert its dominance and superiority over the colonized, against the resistance of them. Ishidoya would illustrate his operation within this political tension by moving away from Korean traditional medicines to study Chinese medicines as they were then circulated in the international herbal market. In this charged atmosphere of colonial knowledge practices, Chung, who collaborated with the Japanese at the colonial government with the assumption that science was neutral from politics of imperial dominance, also came to politicize his science in leading Korean-only botanizing.

In particular, Ishidoya's move towards the study of the Chinese medicinal market reveals the politics of East Asian traditions in Japanese imperialism in East Asia. Ishidoya's study of Korean traditional medicine, notwithstanding its enthusiastic beginning, did not last long. At first, he and his superior at the colonial university, Sugihara Noriyuki, seemed in agreement in extolling the superiority of Korean knowledge regarding medicinal plants. However, their reasons differed. Whereas Ishidoya had searched for something to replace or challenge Japanese imperial science, Sugihara wanted to strengthen it by making Korea, as opposed to other colonies or the Japanese mainland, the “ideological base” as well as the “material base” for Japan's expansion to China (Sugihara Reference Sugihara1939a, 43; Sugihara Reference Sugihara1939b). Right from the start, Sugihara transformed Ishidoya's study of localized Korean medicines into that of “East Asian” medicines; their first article, “Korean Traditional Medicine,” dealt with medicines common in China, Korea, and Japan instead of uniquely Korean medicines as in Ishidoya's 1925 work (Ishidoya and Sugihara 1926).

This emphasis on the commonality within “East Asia” was in line with the clear shift in Japanese imperial ideology, which had been vacillating between brandishing its successfully acquired “Western modernity” and courting its Asiatic brothers. As Japan came to be in more direct competition with the West over China in the 1930s, the notion of distinguishing itself from its adjacent colonies with borrowed “Western modernity” became more vulnerable to criticism.Footnote ³⁵ And as Sugihara was keenly aware, the idea of a shared tradition could serve another important purpose, i.e., to evade a derogatory view of Japan's successful “Westernization.” He noted that the compliment that the “Japanese were exceptional at mimicking” implied that the Japanese “lacked originality.” He argued that Japan could undermine that criticism by presenting a new civilization that combined in an original way what Japan had successfully copied from “the West” with what Japan shared with its Asian brothers, the “Eastern” tradition. His pharmacological section was the place to fuse “Eastern” and “Western” medicine for that purpose (Sugihara Reference Sugihara1939a, 42).

However, Japan's claim for the “Eastern” tradition was quite tricky. For it seemed taken for granted that the center of that Japan's “Eastern” tradition was China, or “the Middle Kingdom (中國, 中華).” If a demonstration of the superiority of the empire was needed to legitimize its forceful domination over the colonized, relying on a borrowed tradition was not an ideal strategy. Therefore, in this “East-West Fused (東西 融合)” civilizing mission, rewriting the history of East Asian knowledge traditions to render Japan's place within these more significant traditions became an important task in every discipline.Footnote ³⁶

Sugihara's pharmacological section for “East-West Fused” medicine seemed to assume that role in medicine. Ishidoya, who once slighted the Japanese tradition as subservient to Bencao gangmu's authority, took part in this by rediscovering the Japanese tradition in 1930. Ishidoya now re-presented the Japanese tradition as a virtual equivalent to the great tradition of China. The Japanese search for medicinal plants seemed to have a history as long as that of the Chinese search famously begun by the mythical figure Shennong (神農). Japan had its own ancient hero, “the Ancestor of Herbs (藥草の祖),” who similarly introduced this practice of securing herbs for people, an example which many Japanese emperors and scholars had followed, to produce a solid scholarly tradition. Although it was true that Bencao gangmu played an important role in shaping Japanese research on medicinal plants, Japan could boast many original contributions even recognized by the Chinese themselves, he reported (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1930a; Reference Ishidoya1930b).

Ishidoya's re-examination of the Japanese medical tradition conducted in the pharmacological section accompanied a dramatic reappraisal of the Korean tradition as well. His re-evaluation of Treasured Mirror was illuminating. This time, he wondered why Treasured Mirror had not utilized the great achievement of Bencao gangmu. Obviously, his earlier evaluation of Hŏ Chun's work as an original achievement comparable to Li Shizhen's work was reversed. His new position reflected the trope of Japanese medical history, of beginning with Hayashi Razan's (林羅山, 1583–1657) offering of Bencao gangmu to the shogun in 1607 and enumerating subsequent works in Japanese medicine in terms of their relationship to this classic. Ishidoya seemed to believe that if the book had come to Japan in 1607, Koreans must have had it earlier and Hŏ must have taken advantage of it. He specifically criticized Hŏ for creating his own classification system that more resembled an aged system of the Tang and Song periods, than following the superb natural classification system of Li Shizhen. Hŏ's was thus a poor and reactionary copy from Chinese tradition.Footnote ³⁷

After this sweeping historical re-assessment, Ishidoya seemed no more interested in dwelling on Japanese traditions than he did on Korean ones. An immense body of Chinese works and herbal medicines was waiting for his investigation. In a single visit to China in 1929 following the Japanese Manchurian railroad, he encountered an overwhelming amount of material for his research. He reported with awe that one huozhan (貨棧), or medicine shop was as big as one Korean market, consisting of a huge storehouse, lodging facilities for international dealers, and a trading space. In spite of the turmoil in China, the huge Chinese market was connected to the international market by the dealers’ union in this well-established industry. So gigantic were these international medicine dealers that to them “Japan, Korea, or the South Sea Islands were not foreign nations but simply a region comparable to Yunnan or Sichuan,” he noted (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1930b, 7). Tons of herbal medicines from all around the world, including French and Canadian Ginseng, poured in and were classified by origin and quality, and traded constantly by merchants from everywhere according to their market value (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1931).

Ishidoya's enthusiasm for the international Chinese market and his specific emphases would be revealing of two noteworthy factors shaping his research on Chinese herbal medicines: his continuing concerns about proper Japanese imperial science and the market's interesting role in inspiring a new model. By becoming a big player within the imperial scientific network, he could not set his practice apart from the imperial project anymore. However, he was not a comfortable participant. His failure to mention the sponsor of his trip Dojinkai (同仁会, 1902–1945), an association for Japanese medical mission in Asia funded by the Japanese Congress, seems significant.Footnote ³⁸ Also, while all of his subsequent trips to China in 1934, 1936, and 1938 were part of the scientific investigations organized by Keijo Imperial University and protected by the Manchurian military, Ishidoya's due acknowledgment of this fact was visibly perfunctory. In contrast with other works that showed a certain enthusiasm about their role in the projects, he described his work even as something just “commanded” by the university (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1934; idem 1935; idem 1937).

The essays that he published during this period left more concrete traces of his continuing concerns about Japanese imperial science. The most explicit concerns were shown in the following 1934 discussion on the street trees of Manchu and Korea. He wrote:

Ishidoya was criticizing Japanese imperial policies for ruining “regional colors” in contrast with those of Russia, Japan's competitor for Manchuria.

Ishidoya seems not to be demanding Japan's withdrawal from its colonies, as he showed no fundamental criticism about the Russian occupation of Manchuria. His goal seems to be civilizing the Japanese civilizing mission.Footnote ³⁹ As shown above, his primary condition for a better imperialism was the proper appreciation of the regional culture. So in another piece of writing, in 1936, a preface for a book on medicinal plant gardening by some Japanese foresters in Korea, he chose to praise Korean traditions again, this time in the form of the eighteenth-century Korean text, Farm Management, which Chung had introduced to him in 1916. This book was “a perfect manual for the ideal country life of peace and plenty” that he had kept by his pillow all the time to plan his life in retirement. It was a life which had “no coercion nor command” (FAKP 1936, preface).

Ishidoya's fascination with the market had various factors that helped him address these continuing concerns. Above all, the market could provide independent means to realize his special research concerns, thus allowing him to carry out his research partially outside the imperial research projects, “commanded” by the imperial authority. Medicinal dealers, not just Japanese but also Korean, came to sponsor his research and its publication, overcoming the racial boundary. Through this funding, Ishidoya even managed to establish a research laboratory on herbal medicines in Kaesŏng, a city near Seoul that had long been famous for its international medicinal trade based on ginseng.Footnote ⁴⁰

Chinesische Drogen (1934–1941), the four-volume work in German that became his doctoral dissertation showed what he aimed at and what he could achieve by securing this sponsorship from the market.Footnote ⁴¹ First, his choice of German echoes several characteristics that he had noted from the market. Notably, German was not a language that he could have chosen in writing his official reports. For example, Nakai's Flora Sylvatica had all its sections on the use of plants only in Japanese.Footnote ⁴² More explicitly, Nakai complained in his report for the first scientific expedition to Manchukuo that he could not discuss the uses of plants in his report because the “military authority prohibited their inclusion” (Nakai and Honda 1936). Obviously, the Japanese imperial establishment believed that such profitable information should be owned and kept secret by the state. Choosing German (a language that clearly had a wider audience than Japanese at the time, especially in scientific communities) for his thoroughly useful investigation of Chinese medicines, Ishidoya begged to differ. As a one-time Esperantist, Ishidoya's concern was not serving “East Asia,” a term that he never used, or the Japanese empire, but “human beings.” He wanted to present his research as discovering “unique botanical resources for our human benefit” (Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1940, 457; Ishidoya Reference Ishidoya1928d).

The internationalism that he tried to project with his choice of a Western language was not just idealism.Footnote ⁴³ It became a way to give his research competitive value equal to or better than those of established imperial scientists by appealing to international audiences. Like the Chinese market that he depicted, his knowledge practice looked like a knowledge practice of fair exchange regardless of national, political, or religious boundaries, notable in the updated reference list of Chinesische Drogen. He actively utilized contemporary works by Western scholars. He acknowledged a German scholar, a French priest, an American missionary, and even a Russian general as colleagues who collectively inherited “the most precious intangible assets that our ancestors had bestowed on us.”Footnote ⁴⁴ To participate in this “global” exchange network of knowledge dominated by Western scholars, German was a more marketable choice for his knowledge product.

The power of the market in shaping his work was not limited to his choice of German. Chinesische Drogen showed its influence by its exclusive focus on medicinal products from the market. He started from the medicines that he bought from the market and discussed the characteristics of them as dried and processed for sale. He essentially provided the visual information such as shapes and colors of those medicines while adding tactile and olfactory information when necessary. He carefully included characteristics obtained through commodification, when the plants were changed due to various means of preparing them for the market. Leaves, an easy identifier for live plants, were often absent in plants at the markets, and sometimes roots had to be tied up or trimmed. Other plants developed corneous tissues or spots during their preparation. He also noted which parts of stems or roots were taken. Based on this information, he produced a unique classification system that might be called “the classification for the market”: a system that helped identify good medicine in the market and helped growers or collectors process their medicines for the market.Footnote ⁴⁵

Thus, he made his work on Chinese medicines a hands-on empirical investigation on commercially recognized products. His own experience, other similar contemporary endeavors, and chemical analyses helped him identify original plants and illuminate medicinal effects and uses. By shaping his research in such a way, he did not have to rely on plants that he collected under the protection of the Japanese military, and the “East Asian” traditional texts became sources that he relied on only as a last resort.Footnote ⁴⁶ These seem to be choices that Ishidoya made by cultivating the market as a source and a model for his research. The medicinal market, as cultivated and presented by him, became an alternative source and inspiration in order to avoid the undesirable association with “vulgar” imperialism. Yet, by doing that, he had stripped off almost all local and cultural elements that he had once cherished. In spite of these limitations, it is important to note that Ishidoya's choices were hardly forced. And these choices that allowed multiple transformations of his knowledge practice were undeniably the product of Japanese imperial expansion, which Ishidoya knew how to take advantage of.

Chung, who had become a conduit of traditional knowledge, was presented with the unexpected opportunity to continue his dream, although in a lesser context than within the expanding imperial power. Chung seemed rather reluctant at first when some young Korean naturalists offered him a timely opportunity to continue his modern botanical practice. These naturalists, like Chung, accepted the Japanese civilizing mission in order to throw themselves into the very foreign practice of collecting and making an inventory of all natural objects in their land. They seized almost the only scientific practice allowed for them in the colony, as if to show that Koreans could be rational.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1933, at the most trying moment for Chung's career in the colonial government, some Korean amateur naturalists including some of his agricultural school juniors visited him to ask his help for their botanizing project. While the Natural History Association of Korea, which was organized by the Japanese, showed an unusually open attitude towards Koreans, these Koreans, mostly middle school teachers, wanted to organize a Korean-only research group.Footnote ⁴⁸ Finding vernacular names for the scientifically studied animals and plants, a task neglected by most Japanese naturalists, seemed to constitute a legitimate task for Koreans. However, when the plant section in the Korean Natural History Research Group (朝鮮博物硏究會) sought Chung's expertise, he showed serious reservations. Only after dozens of visits did he agree to join (Yi Reference Yi1994, 81).

The apparently simple project of making a catalogue of Korean plant names was in fact very political, as Chung seems to have noticed from the beginning. The Japanese authority questioned why Korean names would be necessary when there were already Japanese names. Furthermore, the political meaning was not simply limited to having a Korean translation of Japan's much vaunted scientific achievement. Theirs was a much more serious project that aimed to annul the political meaning of Nakai's botanizing of Korea. They sensed that Nakai's botanizing was not a simple “scientific” investigation but a tool justifying Japanese imperial rule by displaying its civilizing effects over unenlightened Korea. If Koreans could do the same by themselves, it would be a good way to question the necessity of Japan's intervention in civilizing Korea.Footnote ⁴⁹

Korean naturalists began to convene at a small lab for their autonomous study of Korean flora in 1933. As they thought that it should be an independent project carried out by Koreans, they set out to redo the whole process that Nakai had gone through to produce his knowledge. They obviously refused to simply absorb and compile what “Nakai” had previously done. With about ten regular participants, they met almost every week for three years at the lab to examine and discuss Korean plants that they themselves collected, including the duplicate standard specimens that Chung had accumulated in the forestry department when he was making specimens to send to Nakai. They also took on the arduous and time-consuming task of matching the new scientific names with old Korean names by rummaging through traditional Korean texts related to plants. Only when they could not find the old names did they take it upon themselves to name the plants, using names based on local information such as folk names or usages and tales about plants that they had garnered during their collecting trips. They published the Vernacular Name Catalogue of Korean Plants (朝鮮植物鄕名集) in 1937; at the time it was only half completed, because they excluded all plants that they themselves could not confirm.Footnote ⁵⁰

This final product, their toil condensed into one representative Korean name for each plant, seems modest and simple indeed. Significantly, it opened the way to connect Nakai's modern knowledge to traditional Korean knowledge by recovering names from old texts. Nonetheless, in the Korean preface of this book, Chung wrote:

Their autonomous investigation was proof that Koreans were equally capable of that scientific approach. Their work thus undermined the justification of the civilizing mission, as if such justification based on the spurious rationale of racial inequality needed any refutation. Their project, on the other hand, could also be seen as displaying the effect and power of the civilizing mission with their affirmative reproduction of Japanese science and with their denigration of their own tradition. In the strongly colonial desire to have Western science for power, the hierarchy of cultures imposed by imperial rationale seemed never to have been shaken.