Ch'oe Chaesŏ's enthusiastic embrace of Japanese colonial domination in the 1940s has bewildered scholars of colonial-period Korean literature. Ch'oe is credited with introducing the modern English literary criticism of T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Herbert Read to Korea in the 1930s. He emphasized the importance of intellect in literary criticism and argued that it unified the theories of those English literary critics despite discrepancies among their ideas. By applying Western literary theories to his analysis of Korean literature, Ch'oe attempted to bring modernity to Korean literature. He believed that the future of Korean culture depended on the successful adoption of European cultural traditions, even though he considered the development of Korean society to be lagging, and thus impeding the growth of literary modernity.

Around 1940, Ch'oe began writing literary criticism that justified the Japanese colonial policy of assimilation, which was epitomized by the government slogan “Japan and Korean as one body” (naisenittai). His criticism positioned Korean literature as a subset of Japanese literature, and he encouraged Korean writers and poets to contribute to a Japanese national literature or kokumin bungaku. Ch'oe sprinkled his essays with ideology, renouncing the modernity that was being “overcome” by Japan and declaring his loyalty to the Japanese state, even unto death. Thus, in the eyes of Korean literary historians, Ch'oe's collaboration with the Japanese colonial authorities was not only a betrayal of his people but also a traitorous departure from his former advocacy of modernity and intellect in literary criticism.

Ch'oe's drastic transformation from faith in the intellectual rooted in the Western literary tradition to an embrace of the cultural policy of Japanese colonialism makes him a valuable window into the ideological topography of intellectuals in the late stage of Japanese colonialism's policy of assimilation in Korea. Not only did Ch'oe offer one of the most systematic theoretical justifications of “Japan and Korea as one body” in the realm of culture and literature in colonial Korea, but also he was able to proselytize his position in the Japanese-language publication Kokumin Bungaku (National Literature), the only literary journal allowed to remain in print by the early 1940s.

In this essay, I will closely read Ch'oe's 1943 Japanese-language book Tenkanki no Chōsen Bungaku (Korean Literature in a Time of Transition, 轉, 學 (轉換期の朝鮮文學), in which he set out to subsume Korean culture within Japanese culture and to call on Korean writers and poets to produce a national literature that would raise the national consciousness of the Japanese empire among Koreans. I will attempt to work through Ch'oe's defense of the assimilation policy of Japanese colonialism in Korea. The central chapters of the book pivot on his intellectual justification for positioning Korean literature within Japanese literature. Under the crust of his unabashed enthusiasm for Japanese colonial dominance in Korea lie more nuanced arguments for securing an autonomous space for Korean culture in the face of the assimilation policy of Japanese colonialism. However, I do not intend to rescue the ambivalence of his writings from the sweeping denunciation of Korean nationalists. Instead, my aim is to analyze how his sincere intellectualism and experiences as a denizen of everyday life in colonial society led him to collaborate with colonial domination. In doing so, I want to expose how banal quotidian life was turned into a space of production and reproduction of colonial domination. I will also pay attention to how his concept of history contributed to developing his argument.

Finally, by comparing Ch'oe's critical essays on literature, culture, and politics with his own Japanese translations, I examine the way in which the originals and the translations address a slightly different readership. Such a slight difference between the Korean originals and the Japanese translations, however, interrupts the transparent signification of such concepts as tradition, culture, Japan, and Korea on which Ch'oe based his arguments in the essays. The difference reveals that the meanings of such concepts are undecidable in Derrida's sense. The undecidability embedded in the significations of the concepts ultimately disrupts Ch'oe's discursive strategy, which aimed simultaneously to include Koreans in the category of the Japanese nation and to establish an autonomous space for Korean culture within the empire of Japan.

Before venturing into an analysis of Korean Literature in a Time of Transition, however, I will trace Ch'oe's early life before the publication of the book in order to situate him and his thoughts in the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea.

A Portrait of the Colonial Intellectual as a Young Man

Ch'oe was born in 1908 in Haeju, Hwanghaedo, in the northwestern part of Korea. His father was a wealthy businessman turned farmer, and his family seems to have been more than affluent (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1977, 52–54). In 1926, he matriculated at the top of his class, bound for the Faculty of Letters at Keijō Imperial University. Finishing there, he entered the Department of English Literature at the university in 1928. Academically active and ambitious, he regularly wrote articles for the English Department bulletin. Its editor in chief was Satō Kiyoshi, a Japanese professor in the English Department.

While at college, Ch'oe lived in a Japanese boardinghouse, made friends with Japanese classmates, and spoke in Japanese. He rarely spoke Korean on campus (Yi Reference Yi1980, 122). Ch'oe was well known for his fluent English, but he was extremely unpopular among Korean students because he socialized only with Japanese students, and not with them. Once, some Korean students ganged up on him because of his “pro-Japanese” attitude, but it is not clear whether those tendencies extended to a political allegiance.

An excerpt from the memoirs of one of Ch'oe's teachers at college, Takagi Ichinosuke, attests to the complicated attitude of the colonized intellectual toward Japan. Takagi was a prominent Japanese scholar of Japanese literature who taught at Keijō Imperial University for 14 years, from 1926 to 1940. Takagi met Satō when they studied in England on Japanese government fellowships, and the two remained friends. Ch'oe was one of Satō's most beloved disciples. Knowing them both, Takagi was close enough to Ch'oe to witness this comic-tragic scene of the colonized man:

An essay that Ch'oe wrote on James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man offers some clues about what lay behind his affection for Japan and his aloofness from Korea. Ch'oe called attention to the protagonist Stephen Dedalus's alienation from his fellow students, who do not understand his cynicism about Irish nationalism and his ambivalent attitude toward English culture (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1940, 120–34). The resentment of the students is succinctly summed up by the question that Stephen is asked by a classmate named Davin, which Ch'oe quoted in his review: “Are you Irish at all?” This scene in the novel is superimposed on an autobiographical anecdote of Ch'oe being harassed by other Korean students in college for his lack of nationalistic zeal and for his affection for the Japanese culture and language. Ch'oe reasoned in his review that Stephen has to escape from parochial Irish culture and tradition in order to liberate the artist within. He saw himself as speaking for himself as well as Stephen. In other words, Korean tradition was an impediment to the cultivation of his artistic taste, while Japanese language and culture were vehicles for it.

Ch'oe's attitude toward Japan was too complicated to identify him as pro-Japanese, if “pro-Japanese” carries a political implication. My main concern, however, is not to defend Ch'oe from accusations that he had been politically pro-Japanese since his college years. Ch'oe must have noticed that his personal taste for the colonizer's culture could not be easily dissociated from its political implications by his fellow colonized. Furthermore, if Ch'oe identified with Stephen, whom Joyce is believed to have modeled on himself, Ch'oe's later actions were quite the opposite of those of Joyce. Although Joyce wrote in English, as Ch'oe wrote in Japanese, Joyce did not choose English literature over Irish literature or English over Gaelic, nor did he subsume Irish literature within English literature. Instead, he dismantled the putative unity of English, the colonizer's language, by hybridizing it with a variety of languages, as he did in Finnegans Wake. In other words, Joyce aimed to uproot English culture (Kim Reference Kim2003, 95).Footnote ¹ Ch'oe would harshly criticize such uprooting as a negative characteristic of cosmopolitanism when defending Japanese colonial domination.

In the mid-1930s, Ch'oe started writing reviews of Korean literary works. As he seldom spoke Korean at college and his literary theories were influenced by English critics, his writing of reviews of Korean works marked a significant shift. In the late 1930s, Ch'oe came to emphasize the importance of morality in literary criticism. Drawing on Herbert Read, he argued that morality was the intuitive understanding of values through the intellect (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1961, 17).Footnote ² By stressing the importance of these two elements, he attempted to “restore judgment” to the field of literary criticism, to advocate a literary criticism that, he argued, would encourage literature capable of providing order for man in a chaotic world. He posited that intellect should hinge on (Western) cultural tradition, and he stressed that literature should be anchored in the living and historical experience of the people (minjung) and that the writer should recognize that he was a member of the community of the people, not an isolated individual. As discussed later, his emphasis on the living and historical experience of the people would later turn into a depoliticization of everyday life and mythification of history when he argued for the integration of Korean culture and literature into those of Japan. In any case, it should be pointed out that what Ch'oe meant by cultural tradition in this context was the European culture that had produced the Western men of letters he addressed in his critical writing.

Thus, Ch'oe was skeptical about Korean intellectuals' own surge of interest in Korean cultural tradition during the 1930s. Korean literary criticism had fallen into stagnation after the decline of the proletarian literature movement, the wellspring of Korean literary criticism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Two major Korean-language newspapers, Chosŏn Ilbo (Korea Daily) and Tong-A Ilbo (East Asian Daily), initiated a call to reevaluate Korean cultural tradition (Hwang Reference Hwang1988). That call was welcomed by intellectuals well beyond the ranks of conservative nationalists, but Ch'oe warned that such a revival would degenerate into an obsession with regressive tastes and irrational reactionary implications. In particular, he pointed out that ancient treasures and literature alone could not constitute culture. To him, the issue was how Korean tradition could be made to contribute to the development of modern culture in contemporary Korea and eventually to world culture (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1937). He believed that contemporary Korean culture should be anchored in Western cultural traditions, whether Korean traditionalists liked it or not (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1938; Reference Ch'oe1961, 304–11).

In 1939, Ch'oe founded a Korean-language literary journal called Inmun P'yŏngnon (Humanities Criticism), which soon became one of the most influential journals for intellectuals in Korea. In 1940, he started advocating Japanese colonialism in his journal. In those writings, Ch'oe turned sharply away from his previous position stressing the significance of the intellect in literary criticism and the importance of European cultural tradition as the foundation of Korean cultural development. In 1943, Ch'oe came out with a book that has been read in postliberation Korea as undisputable evidence of his traitorous collaboration with Japanese colonialism. A collection of literary criticisms written in Japanese, Tenkanki no Chōsen Bungaku (Korean Literature in a Time of Transition) offered a justification for the assimilation of Korean literature into Japanese literature. This treatise would serve to condemn him to self-imposed silence for ten years after the liberation of Korea and to the lifelong stigma of being a pro-Japanese traitor (Cho Reference Cho1960, 18–19).Footnote ³

Constrained by History, Tamed by Everyday Life: Korean Literature in a Time of Transition

In his 1943 book, Ch'oe called for the establishment of a national literature, which would inculcate Koreans into the Japanese national consciousness. What is most conspicuous about Ch'oe's discussion is that his conceptualization of a national consciousness did not rest on a primordial community of common blood. He emphasized that an awareness of common blood or of a community of everyday life alone cannot help produce literature because it transmits no value system that can instill the creative spirit of the writer with concrete meanings and content (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 56). He implied that national consciousness is not a feeling of belonging that stems from a folkish primordial community, but rather a sense of belonging to the people of a nation (kokumin) that is consciously mediated by the state (kokka). It goes without saying that in order to include Koreans in the category of the Japanese nation, Ch'oe, along with other ideologues of “Japan and Korea as one body,” had no choice but to emphasize that the notion of nation (kokumin) should not be based on folk or ethnicity.

To understand his argument, we need to clarify how Ch'oe defined national literature. Under total mobilization (kōdo kokubō taisei, literally meaning the advanced defense state system), the task of literature was to unify the nation and raise national morale. Japanese writers naturally subscribed to this theory when war broke out, but this was not the case in Korea, which, Ch'oe argued, was handicapped by the mentality that national literature served only to instill a feeling of primordial community based on ethnicity or the folk (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 120). Thus, the task at hand, according to Ch'oe, was to awaken Koreans from that folkish feeling of Korean nationalism to the reality that they were now subjects of the Japanese state. National literature should serve that purpose (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 125).

More than simply parroting the slogan “Japan and Korea as one body,” Ch'oe was locating a historical necessity arising not only in Japan but also in Europe for subsuming Korean culture within Japanese culture. The rise of totalitarian movements such as fascism and Nazism had sent the world into a seismic transition (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 14–16). The old values of individualism, rationalism, and liberalism rapidly had become impotent in the face of the ontological conditions of human beings bound by nationality and ethnicity. Korean intellectuals were forced by worldwide historical change to realize that in order to survive the violent struggles among nation-states, they did not have any other choice but to embrace Japan as the state to which they belonged and to position themselves as a part of the Japanese nation. Thus, it was Ch'oe's analysis of historical developments and not ambition or cowering capitulation that led him to embrace Japanese dominance in Asia. In that regard, it is noteworthy that he believed one should sincerely embrace the realities of daily life rather than subsisting on the abstract ideals of socialism and liberalism, which he saw as the two aspects of cosmopolitanism that denied the essential importance of an individual's identity as part of nation and state (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 107–11).

Ch'oe regarded the rise of fascism and Nazism and the ensuing war in Europe and Asia as historical developments that made liberalism and individualism untenable (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 36–42). Thus, he believed the world demanded a new intellectual framework to grapple with the turmoil of the twentieth century. He assailed rationalism, liberalism, and individualism as the worldview of modernity, which offered no intellectual guidance for coping with the raging war that was ruthlessly consuming lives and the cultural achievements of humanity.

However, Ch'oe was not the only thinker who was critical of modernity in Korea during the late 1930s and the early 1940s. The philosophy of history critics, including Sŏ Insik, Sin Namchŏl, Kim Osŏng, and Pak Ch'iu, drew on the ideas of such younger philosophers of the Kyōto School as Miki Kiyoshi, Kōsaka Masaaki, and Kōyama Iwao to attempt to dethrone Europe from its position at the center of world historical development.Footnote ⁴ It was Ch'oe who opened the pages of his journal Inmun P'yŏngnon to the Korean philosophy of history critics and thus provided them with a venue for publishing their ideas in the late 1930s. Like the Kyōto School philosophers, they criticized liberalism, rationalism, and capitalism and argued that the world crisis had been brought about by the rise of fascism, the emergence of the philosophy of life (lebensphilosophie), and the worldwide economic depression, which had shown these European-derived dogmas to be bankrupt.Footnote ⁵ They attempted to come up with a new worldview to replace old intellectual systems. Ch'oe's critical writings in defense of Japanese colonialism drew on many of their concerns and problematics.

In an age of total war in which nations enlisted their entire military, economic, and technological capacity to mobilize for survival, Ch'oe thought it futile to preach human reason shared equally among all individuals regardless of nationality (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 54–57). He saw history as unfolding according to its own law. Human beings were not active agents who created history but rather passive participants responding to historical changes that proceeded according to their own laws. Thus, he posited history not as collective events actively made by human beings but as an irrevocable force. In short, to Ch'oe, human beings could not actively change history for their own good but rather were relegated to passively responding to its vicissitudes. Individual human beings could not contest history but only had to accommodate it. As the early twentieth century was the period in which only strong states would survive, Koreans should cast their lot with a strong state rather than struggle to become independent. As a matter of fact, Koreans already belonged to a strong state, Japan, whether they liked it or not. Facing up to the fate already determined by history, the individual's task was to live sincerely (seijitsu) under the conditions given. Living sincerely thus involved adaptation to the changing currents of history.

The analysis of history at the root of Ch'oe's argument was that writers should delve into the everyday life of the nation (kokumin) and ground literature in the concreteness of everyday life (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 24). To some extent, this emphasis was a generic trait of the literature of ideological conversion produced by former leftists in Japan (tenkō bungaku). Such goals of socialism as class equality and liberation from oppression were deemed too abstract to help ordinary people improve their everyday lives. Socialist activists were depicted as incompetents who could not even feed their own families, let alone save society from capitalist tyranny. For example, in his 1937 novel Seikatsu no Tankyū (Quest for Life), Shimaki Kensaku describes a protagonist who is weary of the abstract ideals his colleagues spouted at college and sick with a disease that he contracted in Tokyo.Footnote ⁶ As he commits himself to working on his father's farm in his hometown, he not only cures his disease but also discovers the true meaning of life. Shimaki's novel was very popular among readers. This tends to validate the thinking of the postwar critic Yoshimoto Takaaki, who argued that the mass recantations of leftist intellectuals in the 1930s had more to do with their dawning awareness of their alienation from the masses than with state coercion. Yoshimoto contended that the mass conversion was inevitable because the leftists' dogmatic ideology was inapplicable to the everyday life of the people (Yoshimoto Reference Yoshimoto1968, 5–27). In other words, from Yoshimoto's perspective, the separation of socialist ideas from the life of the people mirrored the gulf between leftist intellectuals and the masses.

Japanese conversion literature was not the only intellectual strain of the day that prioritized the concrete reality of everyday life. The contrast between the abstract ideals of leftist intellectuals and the concreteness of everyday life also constituted an important motif in the writer Kim Namch'ŏn's literary works in colonial Korea. Kim wrote stories describing leftist intellectuals' ineptitude at everyday life and their often frustrated endeavors to adapt to the real world (Sin Reference Sin1991). Ch'oe praised one of Kim's short stories, “Tŭngbul” (Lantern, Reference Kim1942), for its prioritization of the concreteness of everyday life.Footnote ⁷ Ch'oe paid special attention to the main character's dedication to his family. The main character once demanded sacrifice from his family for his selfish literary pursuits. But now he realizes that he should give up his nebulous idea of literature for his family. Ch'oe stressed that the short story describes the journey of the main character from abstract to concrete and argues that beauty is to be found in the life of a practical man (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 237). Introducing a scene in which the main character concludes a bedtime story for his children by saying, “I want to live,” Ch'oe defined the main character as a man who exhausted his youth with abstractness, ideology, and rationalism but has now awakened to the importance of everyday life in his business, home, and family life (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 237–38).

Ch'oe argued that the arena of the quotidian should be depoliticized. He urged other colonial intellectuals, who did little while talking much about Korean independence or socialist ideals, to find and work on their everyday lives. Thus Ch'oe posited everyday life as an apolitical space that the politics of resistance could not infiltrate. Posing everyday life as an apolitical space was itself reactionary politics, however, because it neutralized any attempt to act out opposition to colonialism in everyday life. What the colonial intellectual was allowed to do instead was to carve out an autonomous space for Korean culture and literature within the Japanese empire in return for collaborating with the Japanese colonial authorities.

The space of everyday life in Ch'oe's thinking is rigidly territorialized as a national space in which individuals live mundane lives as members of their nation. Advising writers on how to write national literature that expresses the feelings of the nation, Ch'oe insisted that by breaking away from interiority, they enter “the everyday life of the nation” (kokumin seikatsu). Only in the everyday life of the nation can writers empathize with their nation and learn what national sentiment is. Only by so doing can they write national literature (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 60–61).

Ch'oe's project can be simply put as locating Korean culture as a subset of the culture of Japan. The end result that he aimed at was the demarcation of Korean culture as an autonomous space within the culture of the Japanese empire. In a way, Ch'oe inverted the strategy of colonial discourse, which simultaneously excludes and includes the colonized. It is the colonized who differentiate their culture from the colonizers' while locating it within a new concept of culture of the empire, inclusive of both cultures of the colonized and the colonizers. In this context, it is important to remember that for Ch'oe, Japanese culture is not the culture of Japanese folk (nihon minzoku) but rather that of “Japan as a state” (kokka to shite no nihon). If a literary work is identified as a part of Korean literature, then it is both Korean and Japanese because Korean culture is the subset of Japanese culture. However the converse is not necessarily true. Even if a literary work is recognized as Japanese literature, it is not necessarily regarded as Korean literature because Japanese literature includes all of the different literatures produced within the Japanese empire.

In sum, Ch'oe deprived Japan, the ethnic community interpellated as Nihon (or Yamato) minzoku, of its centrality, and set out to position it as a part of the totality called the Japanese nation (Nihon Kokumin), a newly configured political community that was open not only to Koreans and Japanese but also to Taiwanese and any other people within the Japanese empire. Upon such reasoning, he rejected Korean imitations of Tokyo culture, if Tokyo designated no more than a specific locality within the Japanese empire. Its putative centrality as the capital of the Japanese empire did not override the particularity of Korea. Furthermore, by arguing that Korean literature was more than just one kind of local literature of Japan, like that from Hokkaidō or Kyūshū, Ch'oe insisted that it should be granted the special autonomy proper to its long literary tradition independent from Japan (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 97).

Ch'oe contended that not only was Korea different from Japan in terms of climate, character, and way of thinking, but also it had a long literary tradition of its own. Moreover, it had different problems and demands, he argued. He contended that because Korean literature dealt with the reality and sentiment of everyday life in Korea, it would continue to be quite different from Japanese literature. He suggested it should occupy a position like that of Scottish literature in relation to English literature. Scottish literature is a part of English literature, but it has its own character and has made many contributions to the latter. In contrast, Irish literature, though it is largely written in English, has an anti-British cast. Ch'oe insisted that Korean literature should not follow the Irish lead in relation to Japan (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 88).

Never allowing himself to cry in despair that Korean literature was doomed to extinction or complete absorption into Japanese literature, Ch'oe proposed another vision: Koreans should contribute to the construction of new Japanese culture by retaining the originality of their own literature (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 88).

The title of his book, however, poignantly betrays the aporia that haunts Ch'oe's view of the new Japanese national culture and literature as inclusive of local cultures and literatures within the empire. Ch'oe did not title his book Tenkanki no Kokumin Bungaku but Tenkanki no Chōsen Bungaku. It goes without saying that bungaku (literature), unless being specified as Chōsen (Korean) bungaku, would be interpreted as nihon bungaku (Japanese literature). To see the point, it suffices to remember that the Japanese critic Aono Suekichi had published a book of literary criticism titled Tenkanki no Bungaku (Literature in a Time of Transition) in Reference Aono1927. Certainly, the leftist politics that inspired Aono's literary criticism was in direct opposition to what Ch'oe expressed in Tenkanki no Chōsen Bungaku, which stressed unwavering loyalty to the Japanese state.

However, I call attention to the fact that Aono did not need to modify the title of his book with the adjective “Japanese.” In contrast, Ch'oe did need to specify which literature he was discussing. Otherwise, readers could not gauge from the title that the book (which was, after all, written in Japanese) was about Korean literature. One might rightly say that the Japaneseness of literature in Aono's book did not have to be specified because the book was delivered in Japanese. This instant correlation between the Japanese language and Japanese literature already points to the insurmountable difficulty that Ch'oe had to face in placing Korean literature within Japanese literature. Korean literature could hardly be dissociated from the Korean language. As long as the Korean language was perceived to be distinct from, but on a par with, the Japanese language, the integration of Korean literature into Japanese literature could hardly be accomplished. Conversely, even though “Japanese literature” in this context referred to the literature of the Japanese nation (kokumin) rather the literature of the Japanese folk (minzoku), it still retained the connotation of the literature of the Japanese folk.

Thus, language was central to establishing a relationship between Korean and Japanese literature in the framework of national literature. Although Ch'oe advocated the unique local color of Korean culture and literature within the culture of the Japanese empire, as discussed earlier, he expressed an unequivocal view that Japanese should replace Korean gradually as the medium of literary expression in colonial Korea.Footnote ⁸ If Japanese took the place of Korean as the literary language for Korean writers and poets, what would make Korean literature distinct from general literature—that is, Japanese literature—which was generalized enough not to carry any modifier, as in Aono's book title? While arguing that Korean literature as national literature should be part of Japanese literature, Ch'oe did not present any concrete ideas about how to put the principle into practice in creative writing other than emphasizing the importance of everyday life in which writers could learn the sentiment of the nation.

Regardless of Ch'oe's view on what would become of Korean literature, Korean-language literature would linger until the Korean language was completely replaced by Japanese, as called for by colonial policy. Even though the number of literary works in Korean was steadily dwindling as more and more writers and poets wrote in Japanese under the pressure of the colonial authorities, the majority of writers and poets either continued to write in Korean or stopped publishing at once for various reasons. Their silence cannot be explained only by a nationalistic allegiance to the Korean language. First of all, there existed discrepancies among Korean writers in their levels of Japanese fluency. While most intellectuals in Korea were bilingual, only a small number of them were actually capable of producing literary works in Japanese (Kim Reference Kim2003, 77–78). For those Korean writers who were handicapped by their limited Japanese fluency, the replacement of Korean by Japanese as the dominant literary language meant the end of their literary careers.

The Japanese colonial authorities, as well as their propagandists such as Ch'oe, recognized that the complete replacement of Korean by Japanese was a long-term project and would not be accomplished soon.Footnote ⁹ Accordingly, the journal Kokumin Bungaku that Ch'oe founded and managed still publicized as late as 1942 that it planned to regularly issue Korean-language literary collections even after it had decided to publish the monthly exclusively in Japanese and abandon its initial schedule of four issues per year in Korean and the rest in Japanese (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1942, 44–45). In the announcement of the end of the Korean-language issues, Ch'oe argued that national literature in the genuine sense should be written in Japanese, but at the same time, he insisted that the journal's decision aimed not to put an end to Korean language literature at all but instead to encourage intellectuals to take the initiative in the everyday use of Japanese (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1942, 44–45).

Thus, “Korean literature in a time of transition” belonged to a liminal state in which Korean-language literature was gradually being replaced by a literature that was firmly integrated into Japanese literature through the exclusive use of Japanese as the medium of literary expression. It was only through translation that the difference between Korean literature in the present, which was primarily written in Korean, and a national literature to come in the future, which should be exclusively written in Japanese, could be instantly transcended. Consequently, one form of transitional Korean literature advocated by Ch'oe was translation literature from Korean into Japanese. As a matter of fact, he translated Korean stories into Japanese as early as in 1936.Footnote ¹⁰

Two chapters of Korean Literature in a Time of Transition were Ch'oe's own Japanese translations of two earlier essays he had originally written in Korean. In a sense, the translations can be seen as another example of his attempts to put his idea of national literature into practice. Ironically, however, a minuscule difference between the original articles and the translations foreshadows the inevitable failure of his attempts. When reading the original articles and the translated chapters side by side, the reader can detect a subtle difference in the assumed readership between the originals and the translations. In lieu of conclusion, I will show the ways in which such a difference destabilized Ch'oe's framing of Korean culture and literature under the category of the Japanese national culture and literature and interrupted his ultimate endeavor to establish an autonomous space for Korean culture within the Japanese empire.

Translating Difference

Most of the essays included in Korean Literature in a Time of Transition were originally written in Japanese, but the first two chapters were Ch'oe's own Japanese translations of articles he had initially published in his Korean-language literary journal Inmun Pyŏngnon. The first chapter, “Tenkanki no Bunka Riron” (Cultural Theory in a Time of Transition), was a Japanese translation of an essay that Ch'oe previously had published in Korean under a slightly different title, “Chŏnhyŏnggi ŭi Munhwa Iron” (Cultural Theory in a Time of Change) (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1941a). In the essay, Ch'oe criticized both the popular understanding of culture as the pursuit of the Western lifestyle and intellectuals' privileging of culture as an absolutely autonomous realm insulated from secular life and politics—the two tendencies he perceived to be dominant in Japan and Korea during the 1920s and 1930s. Ch'oe went on to call for a new culture firmly rooted in the nation-state to replace modern culture, which in his view was based on rationalism, individualism, and cosmopolitanism.

The second chapter, “Bungaku Seishin no Tenkan” (Shift in Literary Spirit), was a critical essay in which Ch'oe traced the cause of the ongoing cultural crisis to the world historical transition that resulted from conflicts among nations and states in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Ch'oe argued that such a seismic change in history invalidated modern literature and its ideological pinning—individualism—and demanded a new literary spirit connected to the nation state. Its Japanese title was the literal translation of “Munhak Chŏngsin ŭi Chŏnhwan” (Shift in Literary Spirit), the title of the original Korean-language essay (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1941b). Both of the original essays were published in 1941, about two years before the publication of the book.

Ch'oe's criticism of modernity and cosmopolitanism in both essays was in tune with dominant Japanese discourse in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which denounced the cosmopolitan tendencies in Japanese society of the earlier decades. The ascendancy of cosmopolitanism and its association with commercialism in interwar Japanese popular culture provoked anxiety among intellectuals over Japanese national identity.Footnote ¹¹ Because cosmopolitanism was based on a belief in universal culture, a growing number of intellectuals felt anxious about the potential threat that such universalism posed to the national subjectivity. Many Japanese intellectuals began to critically reflect on the universalist implications of cosmopolitanism for the Japanese national identity in reaction to the ascendancy of cosmopolitanism during the 1920s (Lippit Reference Lippit2002).

In the early 1930s, the Japanese state stepped up persecution of the proletarian literature movement that had dominated Japanese literary circles since the 1920s. Under pressure from the state, the majority of leftist intellectuals recanted their political beliefs.

Following the ideological “conversion” (tenkō) of leftist intellectuals, those associated with the Japan Romantic School expressed their concern about the rapid ascendancy of mass culture accompanying the economic boom after World War I and its degenerative effect on society. The commodification of culture was regarded as a result of modernization, which was equated in Japan with Westernization. Therefore, anti-Western sentiments in Japan were embedded in criticism of the commodification of culture. More and more Japanese intellectuals, ranging from the communist Takakura Teru to the cultural conservative Yasuda Yojūrō, deemed Western modernity to be a threat to the indigenous tradition of Japan.

The anxieties of intellectuals of different stripes intersected at the point of trying to figure out how to cope with the loss of tradition and how to overcome the threat of modernity posed by the alien civilization of the West. The remedy they proposed was to anchor literature in a fixed foundation that could not be undermined by the incessant churning of modernity. Despite disparities in their arguments, Japanese intellectuals agreed that Japanese literature should be based on kokumin (the nation or the people of the nation). They saw Japanese culture being colonized by modern culture, which they conflated with Western culture and commodification. They came to regard the creation of literary works that confirmed the Japanese national identity as the only cure for the malaise of modern culture. They called it kokumin bungaku (national literature).

The concept of a national literature is dependent on the ability to define the nation. The English word “nation” can be translated into Japanese as either minzoku or kokumin. While kokumin emphasizes the people's relationship with the state, minzoku gives more weight to the ethnic aspect of nation. The two terms, however, were used interchangeably throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, such Japanese scholars as the sociologist Usui Jishō endeavored to establish a more rigorous distinction between minzoku and kokumin. In April 1937, the prominent intellectual journal Shisō published a special issue on nation. In the issue, Usui characterized minzoku as a community based on culture, while defining kokumin as the subjects of the state. On the other hand, in his book Minzokuron (The Theory on Nation), Takata Yasuma stated that kokumin was a modern form of minzoku. He argued that whereas minzoku was a passively formed community based on tradition, kokumin was an actively formed community based on the conscious goals and ideals held by its members (Usui Reference Usui1937, 13–36; Takata Reference Takata1942).

All of these efforts to distinguish minzoku from kokumin reflected the political reality of an empire within which not only the Japanese but also other peoples (minzoku) were subjects of the state. At any rate, there was a loosely shared assumption among Japanese intellectuals that minzoku was a cultural community based on tradition, while kokumin was a political community associated with the state.

Such categorization of nation as a political community raises questions about the Japanese national literature debate of the 1930s and 1940s. The Japanese discourse on national literature and culture lacked any substantial deliberation on the colonized, who were not ethnically Japanese but nonetheless were politically subject to the Japanese empire. Whereas interwar Japanese cosmopolitanism aligned Japanese civilization with that of the West on the basis of universalism, the growing anxiety over such cosmopolitanism led many intellectuals to perceive Japan as becoming culturally colonized by the West. On the other hand, both Japanese cosmopolitanism and anxiety over it did not take serious account of Japan's relationship with its colonies in their schemas of Japanese cultural identity vis-à-vis the West. It would not be an unjustified exaggeration to say that Japanese intellectual discourse on cultural identity remained oblivious of Japan's colonies till the early 1940s, when the Japanese government needed support for war efforts from its colonies and pressed intellectuals to embrace the idea of the unity between Japan and its colonies.

Ch'oe's essays eerily repeated the Japanese criticism of modernity and cosmopolitanism, silencing significant differences between Japan and its colony Korea in their relationships with the West, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. First of all, modernity and cosmopolitanism were introduced to Korea primarily through Japan during the colonial period. In that sense, Korea's relationship with the West, from which both modernity and cosmopolitanism originated, was even more complicated than that of Japan. In the minds of Korean intellectuals, modernity was associated not only with the West but also with Japan. For example, to such Korean intellectuals as the modernist poet Yi Sang, Japan was another source of cosmopolitan modernism, not a mere copy of a Western cosmopolitan metropolis.Footnote ¹² Consequently, when Korean intellectuals denounced modernity and cosmopolitanism and advocated a return to tradition, the target of such criticism could be extended beyond the West to Japan.

The way in which the term “national literature” gained currency for the first time in Korea clearly suggests the difference between Japan and Korea. In reaction to the rise of proletarian literature in the 1920s, a group of nonsocialist, nationalist intellectuals emphasized the importance of Korean cultural tradition in literary creation and called for a national literature (kungmin munhak) (Paek Reference Paek1982, 359–64). The advocates of national literature saw that the rise of proletarian literature and its emphasis on class conflict undermined the unity of Korean society. The intellectuals also felt that a national literature would help raise Korean consciousness to withstand pressures to imitate Japan's mimicry of Western culture. Preserving Korean cultural tradition lay at the center of their argument (Kwŏn Reference Kwŏn1988, 129–43). Needless to say, in this case, “nation” referred to the Korean ethnic nation.

However, Ch'oe kept silent on such difference. He cursorily mentioned that the entirety of Japanese culture was in crisis, and so was Korean culture. He did not even attempt to deliberate similarities between Japan and Korea as non-Western societies whose traditions were being encroached on by menacing Western cultural influence disguised as universal culture, as if he felt that such an emphasis on similarities between Japan and Korea would be redundant. Ch'oe seems to have believed the fact that Korea was politically part of the Japanese empire obviated any justification for his conflation between the colonizer and the colonized.

When he called for a return to tradition in opposition to cosmopolitanism by following the dominant view of Japanese discourse on national identity, however, his emphasis on the importance of tradition suddenly destabilized his conflation of Japan and Korea. Although the interruption was momentary and compromised in the original text, its destabilizing effect on Ch'oe's overall conflation of Japan and Korea was much more pronounced in the Japanese translation of the essay. In the original Korean-language essay, Ch'oe wrote,

Echoing Japanese intellectuals' poignant nostalgia for lost tradition as exemplarily expressed by Hagiwara Sakutrō in “Return to Japan” (Nihon e no Kaiki), Ch'oe called on his readers to embrace tradition in establishing a new culture rooted in the nation-state.Footnote ¹³ However, he did not specify what or even which tradition his readers should return to, although readers can conjecture that the tradition Ch'oe was talking about was Korean tradition, as it is fairly clear that he assumed all of his readers to be Korean.

Ch'oe often used the first-person plural pronoun “we” (uri) throughout the essays. “We” is ostensibly employed to invoke an emotive as well as an intellectual community imaginarily formed between the author and his readers. As mentioned earlier, it is quite clear that Ch'oe considered his readers to be Korean in the original Korean-language essay. For example, when criticizing the popular understanding of culture as the superficial imitation of the Western lifestyle, Ch'oe took munhwa chut'aek (bunka jūtaku, “culture housing”), Japanese and Western mixed-style housing, as an example of such a misconception of culture:

As seen in his cynical caricature of culture life, Ch'oe addressed Koreans as “we.” In short, Ch'oe seemed to take it for granted that the community formed between himself and his readers through the interpellation of “we,” the first-person plural pronoun, was exclusive to Koreans, as the “Korean style” added to culture housing was inseparably connected to the “we” in the phrase in question.

Ch'oe faithfully rendered this part of the essay in his Japanese translation, with one significant exception. “Since it is basically Japanese-West mixed-style housing, the Korean style must be added to it when we build it” (uri ŭi sonŭro chiŭlt'aeen) in the original was altered in translation as, “Since it is basically Japanese-West mixed style housing, the Korean style is naturally added to it in the peninsula” (hantō no baai) (emphasis added).

The “we” in the original text is erased in the translated passage, and instead it is replaced with “the peninsula.” Human subjectivity inscribed in the “we” is suppressed in the replacement, the name of a geographic object as seen from the Japanese archipelago, “the peninsula.” In that sense, through translation, Koreans are doubly objectified: first, they are deprived of the first-person plural, “we”; and second, they are metonymically replaced with an object, the peninsula in the pejorative hantōjin, the peninsular people whose meaning can be made out only in opposition to naichijin, the people of the Japan proper, the real Japanese. In short, at this specific moment in the Japanese translation, Ch'oe did not take it for granted that all of his readers were Korean, as he had in the original Korean-language text.

The community established between the author and his readers through the interpellation of “we” in the Japanese translation includes anyone who can read the Japanese text. The assumed readership includes “the Japanese,” only against which the signification of the peninsula as Korea, and Koreans by metonymic association, makes any sense. When readers juxtapose this replacement and displacement of Koreans and Ch'oe's call for a return to tradition, they will feel that the meaning of “our tradition” to which Ch'oe urges his readers to return is undecidable in Derrida's sense. To which tradition is he urging his readers to return? Because his readers were not limited to Koreans, it was undecidable whether the tradition was Korean or Japanese, or even that of East Asia, which would subsume both. Strictly speaking, there would be no logical inconsistency even if Ch'oe had Japanese tradition in mind when he was calling on his Korean readers to return to tradition, as in his framing, Korean tradition could be considered a subset of Japanese tradition because Korean culture was deemed to be a part of Japanese culture.

As seen in the book title Korean Literature in a Time of Transition, however, there remained ambivalence in the relationship between Japan and Korea in Ch'oe's thought. “Japan” retained residues of the primordial community of Japanese folk rather than the community of the higher order, the Japanese state. It is not always clear whether the sign “Japan” signified the primordial ethnic community or the political community mediated by the state. In other words, “Japan” is an oscillating signifier whose meaning is undecidable. The undecidability interrupted Ch'oe's discursive project of subsuming the Korean people under “Japan,” the meaning of which should be fixed onto “the Japanese state.” In order to ward off the undecidability, Ch'oe deployed “nation” (Kokumin), inclusive of both Koreans and Japanese, in order to unravel the tenacious conflation of the folkish Japan and the Japanese state.

The slippage between Japan as the ethnic group and another Japan as the political collectivity parallels the incongruence of the first-person plural “we” between the original Korean text and Ch'oe's own Japanese translation, which constitutes the first chapter of the book Korean Literature in a Time of Transition.

“Korean” (Chōsen) in the book title is itself haunted by undecidability. It is undecidable whether the adjective is related to Korea as a primordial community irrespective of the Japanese state, or as an ethnic group firmly subsumed into the Japanese nation. The signification of “Korea” exceeds the meaning that Ch'oe deemed desirable. For instance, in urging writers to moderate the use of Korean local color in their creative writing, Ch'oe warned that writers' emphasis on Koreanness might mislead readers into interpreting their works as signaling a political message of support for Korean independence (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 131–32). The warning marked his anxiety over the undecidability of “Korean,” which destabilized his framing of Korea as part of the Japanese empire politically as well as culturally and thus allowed his own advocacy of the particularity of Korean culture to register as a subversive message. In that sense, the book Korean Literature in a Time of Transition was all about the attempt to exorcise the undecidability of “Korea” by redefining Korean literature as an integral part of Japanese literature. Needless to say, the attempt was anything but successful, as seen in the undecidability of the meaning of tradition.

“Korean” in the title resonates with the undecidability of “Japan,” whose meaning oscillates between “Japan” as the community of higher order inclusive of Koreans and other colonized peoples within the Japanese empire and as the primordial ethnic community exclusive to the Japanese people. “Korean” in the title simultaneously masks and traces the lack of transparent significance of “Japanese” as distinct from “Korean.” In that sense, “Korean literature” (Chōsen Bungaku) in the title, Korean Literature in a Time of Transition, is a Derridean supplement to “Japanese literature” (Derrida Reference Derrida and David1973, Reference Derrida and Spivak1976).

In his reading of Rousseau's works, Derrida observed that Rousseau describes writing as a subordinate but necessary supplement to speech, as writing partially restores what speech promises yet eventually fails. According to Derrida, the term “supplement” is presented in Rousseau's writings in such a way that its meaning is undecidable between plentitude and deficiency because a supplement simultaneously adds to and substitutes for what it supplements. It adds to something that is deficient in order to make it complete, yet it also fills in as a subaltern substitute for something that is already complete. Put differently, a supplement portends the full presence of what it supplements, yet ironically, it also marks the lack of presence because presence depends on it in order to be complete. Thus, presence can be present only by proxy. The concept of supplementarity pertains to Derrida's critique of Western metaphysical thought, which, in his view, privileges presence. Hierarchy is embedded in the relationship between presence and its supplement. Presence is deemed original, pure, natural, and essential, whereas a supplement is considered derivative, corrupt, artificial, and extraneous. Nevertheless, as discussed earlier, presence is present only as the aftereffects of its supplement. The original, pure presence is always deferred.

Through deliberation on supplementarity, Derrida demonstrated his reading strategy, which has been branded deconstruction. It lays bare the ideology of what he termed “transcendental reading.” Transcendental reading is premised on the assumption that meaning can be exhaustively reduced to the transcendental signified outside the text, whether it is the authorial intent, the author's subconscious, or the extratextual context in which the author is located. The transcendental signified is indefinitely deferred, however, because in signification, one signifier is replaced with another rather than fixed onto the ultimate signified.

The notion of supplementarity manifests an occasion of undecidability, the kernel of Derrida's ethics and politics. As shown in the case of a supplement, undecidables pivot on the dynamics of certain oppositions that are inherent in a text, yet they simultaneously subvert the oppositional dynamics because of their double meaning. Undecidability does not merely postulate the indefinite deferral of the transcendental signified. It also demands that when reading a text, the reader must choose with great care a possible meaning over another. Thus, instead of resulting in indecision, undecidability constitutes the very condition of the possibility of making a decision. Unless the decision undergoes the ordeal of undecidability, it cannot be a genuine decision (Derrida Reference Derrida1989–90, 965). In other words, undecidability does not merely indicate the impossibility of meaning. On the contrary, it presupposes that there must be plausible meanings among which the reader debates in order to make a genuine decision. Nevertheless, no matter how legitimized the reader's decision is, the other possible meaning—the decision left out—still haunts and disrupts the univocal signification of the text.

Needless to say, by engaging in a deconstructive reading of Ch'oe's texts, I do not deny the relevance of the authorial intent and extratextual context. Undecidability would not work unless legitimate meanings were available through reading. Reading, in turn, cannot proceed without recourse to the authorial intent and extratextual context. Invoking Derrida's concept of supplementarity, I call attention to the undecidability inherent in Ch'oe's texts that is highlighted by the differences between the texts and his own translations. The undecidability merits our attention because it destabilizes the univocal signification of such concepts as culture, tradition, Japan, and Korea despite Ch'oe's authorial intent to fix them onto stable meanings.

As a Derridean supplement, Korean literature is distinct from but simultaneously subordinate to Japanese literature, the literature of the ethnic Japanese, which does not need to be particularized, as seen in Aono's book title. On the other hand, Korean literature registers as something necessary to make Japanese literature complete so that the latter will be the literature of the Japanese empire, which should be inclusive of Korean literature and Taiwanese literature along with Japanese literature of the Japanese folk. Thus, Korean literature simultaneously portends the presence of Japanese literature (the literature of the Japanese folk) and traces the lack of it (the literature of the Japanese empire). In other words, “Japanese” literature emerges at the moment when “Korean” literature registers in juxtaposition to it. This dynamic inevitably establishes the hierarchical relationship between Korean literature and Japanese literature. Japanese literature is thus assumed to be the standard against which the value of Korean literature is judged. Moreover, the hierarchy in discourse mirrors the hierarchical relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in colonial society.

Ch'oe's attempt to frame the particularity of Korean culture as the fence to protect its autonomous space was parasitically dependent on the hierarchical structure of colonial society. The parasitic dependence was clearly revealed at the moment Ch'oe argued that Korean literature advanced the theory of national literature further than its Japanese counterpart because Japanese loyalty to the Japanese state was a given (Ch'oe Reference Ch'oe1943, 119). Japanese ethnicity automatically ensured the allegiance of those identified as the Japanese folk (minzoku) to the Japanese state. Needless to say, the end goal for Koreans was only to become the Japanese nation (kokumin) temporally placed in a future when Koreans' allegiance to the Japanese state would not be questioned. The model of the Japanese nation for Koreans was also spatially assigned to the Japanese folk (minzoku), whose loyalty did not need to be interrogated as rigorously as that of Koreans. Ch'oe's deployment of “nation” was thus destined to preserve the colonial order that prioritized the Japanese folk over Koreans, despite his intention to neutralize the centrality of Japanese folk by employing the term “nation,” exactly because he never intended to challenge the legitimacy of colonial domination. Instead, he intended to beg for as much autonomy for Korean culture as the Japanese colonial authorities would allow.