Sungyun Lim's Rules of the House is a groundbreaking work on Korea's colonial history (1910–45), legal history, history of gender and family, and modern history as a whole. Broadly, the book analyzes the reshaping of the Korean family system over the first half of the twentieth century through legal proceedings; the gradual introduction of the Japanese household registration system; and Koreans’ efforts to reframe, negotiate, and resist this process. Such developments affected the modern formations of gender relations, inheritance practices, customs and customary law, and cultural norms involving sexuality and conjugal ideals—indeed well past the colonial period into even more recent times.
The book furthermore highlights the agency of the colonized Koreans in general and Korean women in particular, who pursued grievances and lawsuits over inheritance, divorce, adoption, and household authority. Lim's core argument is that the colonial setting brought about a gradual nuclearization of the legally constituted family system, or what Lim calls a transition to a “small patriarchal family,” through state measures that drew a tighter “boundary” around the official household. This claim is firmly supported by the legal developments, to be sure, but also their connections to inheritance disputes, administrative practices, and cultural changes as they affected and reflected primarily females. Mothers, daughters, daughters-in-law, modern girls, concubines, and especially widows take center stage in this study.
Each group is featured in turn. The first chapter emphasizes the primacy of widows, who traditionally were expected to remain “chaste” while holding a precarious household position as embodiments of a range of issues and conflicts involving family structure and authority (“rights”) from the late Chosŏn era to the early twentieth century. Widows remain the focus in chapter 2, which tracks legal and administrative shifts and investigations undertaken by the colonial regime, mostly by altering the household registration system and the construction of customary law, in order to implant gradually the Japanese family model. The impact extended beyond widows to a range of family members within and beyond the nuclear household, as questions and quarrels over adoption and inheritance befuddled officials, judges, and civilians alike.
These legal confrontations sometimes brought forth strange bedfellows, with combatants coming from the powerfully entrenched practices and networks of patrilineal descent groups as well as from the colonial state and various groups of women. Perhaps the most interesting way the book integrates these actors appears in the opening of chapter 3, which details how a court case pitting two widows from the same household—a second wife and her (step-) daughter-in-law—actually revealed the increasing prominence of daughters as alternative household heads and as repositories of opposing views and interests in the struggle to define the modern family. Son-in-law adoption, a more common practice in the metropole, thus became more appealing to both colonial officials and progressive Koreans, which pitted them against lineage interests as well as Korean nationalists. This legal move was finally adopted in 1940, in the same series of reforms as the infamous “name change policy” that coerced the adoption of Japanese-style surnames for registration purposes.
The fourth and fifth chapters take the study in slightly different directions. The former draws on novels and other expressions of popular culture that stressed romantic love in conjugal relationships, which accompanied growing efforts to use concubinage as viable grounds for divorce as well as to allow for common law marriage. Chapter 5, meanwhile, follows such legal and discursive developments over the threshold of the 1945 liberation, highlighting the contradictions and dilemmas facing officials and intellectuals in early South Korea as they attempted to reconcile decolonization demands with the acknowledged benefits of some colonial measures in family law. This opened up a host of thorny problems in attempting to build a society that was inherently both (South) Korean and modern in the most intimate realm of social relations, the family.
No other English-language monograph has achieved an integration of all these considerations so thoroughly. The scholarly impact of Rules of the House, then, should go beyond modern Korean history to the realms of gender studies, comparative colonialism, modern legal history, and anthropology, indeed to the ongoing South Korean reckoning with the colonial legacy, as discussed in the book's conclusion. For the colonial period itself, Lim expands considerably the range of actors warranting historical scrutiny and the various means by which Koreans participated in the construction of both modern society and tradition.
The book is not without flaws, including its frequent Romanization errors and its very small typefont in the print version, which does a disservice to the reader and makes the physical book seem slight. More substantively, the book also probably overstates the degree to which females actually exercised greater agency through their becoming the focus of various legal and administrative proceedings, a process that was likely driven by male relatives, clerks, lawyers, bureaucrats, and judges. The book also holds some outdated understandings of the historiography. For example, it targets for criticism the “domination and resistance” narrative of the colonial period, a paradigm abandoned long ago, and fails to engage with recent scholarship that is more directly related, the most prominent of which is The Emotions of Justice by Jisoo Kim, who tackles many of the same issues, themes, and sources for the historical period immediately preceding that covered by Rules of the House.Footnote 1
Along these lines, Lim also disregards the sweeping 1896 revision of the Korean household system, which was not determined by Japanese domination and constituted a precolonial, autonomous reform. Her one allusion to this measure, in a footnote, says merely that it was not as systematic or successful in surveying all the households, but the 1909 measure left out a lot of people too and was not as much of a departure as she suggests. More importantly, the 1896 household registration reform—of which there remains vast documentation still being analyzed and actual published studies, including by this reviewer—modernized the long-established Korean parameters of legal households and thereby prompted new administrative demands. These included gathering information, including ancestry and household possessions affecting inheritance matters, that the colonial system did not account for and furthermore proved essential to reconsidering and changing the colonial system after liberation, a theme covered by Lim's final chapter.
Nevertheless, Lim's clear and persuasive presentation of her findings and of its scholarly significance, supported by an impressive range of primary sources such as court cases, administrative manuals, newspaper and journal articles, and novels, makes this book a valuable contribution to the historiography of Korea. Its straightforward, accessible, and often compelling narrative also renders it attractive for adoption in both undergraduate and graduate courses.
