East Asian Transwar Popular Culture

Literature and Film from Taiwan and Korea

Pei-yin Lin, Su Yun Kim, Pei-yin Lin, Su Yun Kim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811331992
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811332005
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Asiatische Geschichte

This collection examines literature and film studies from the late colonial and early postcolonial periods in Taiwan and Korea, and highlights the similarities and differences of Taiwanese and Korean popular culture by focusing on the representation of gender, genre, state regulation, and spectatorship. Calling for the "de-colonializing" and "de–Cold Warring" of the two ex-colonies and anticommunist allies, the book places Taiwan and Korea side by side in a "trans-war" frame. Considering Taiwan–Korea relations along a new trans-war axis, the book focuses on the continuities between the late colonial period's Asia-Pacific War and the consequent Korean War and the ongoing conflict between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, facilitated by Cold War power struggles. The collection also invites a meaningful transcolonial reconsideration of East Asian cultural and literary flows, beyond the conventional colonizer/colonized dichotomy and ideological antagonism.

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© The Author(s) 2019

Pei-yin Lin and Su Yun Kim (eds.)East Asian Transwar Popular Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3200-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Pei-yin Lin¹ and Su Yun Kim¹

(1)

University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China

Pei-yin Lin (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Su Yun Kim

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

East AsiaTranswarPopular cultureTaiwanKorea

End Abstract

East Asian Transwar Popular Culture: Taiwan and Korea in Tandem

The year 2017 was very special for many South Koreans. Park Geun-hye (1952–), the eldest daughter of long-time dictator Park Chung Hee (r. 1961–1979) and first female president of South Korea, was officially impeached in March after the revelation of multiple corruption and bribery scandals.¹ On May 9, Moon Jae-in, a former human rights lawyer, won the presidency in a landslide election victory (Tharoor 2017). Soon after Moon’s win, Tsai Ing-wen (1956–), Taiwan’s first female president, elected in May 2016, extended her congratulations to President Moon and the people of South Korea. In her statement, Tsai also expressed her wish that “the two allies [South Korea and Taiwan] which share the same values in terms of democracy and freedom in East Asia can work together and develop a more dynamic, richer, and closer substantial relationship” (Zeng 2017).

The rise of female leaders in the politics of these two countries, and the shared democratic governmental system, is highly indicative of the similar sociopolitical trajectory that Taiwan and South Korea have followed and are currently following. Both were Japanese colonies in the first half of the twentieth century; neither went through a proper decolonization process after 1945, as many former colonies did. The new US-backed governments of Chiang Kai-shek (of Taiwan) and Rhee Syngman (of South Korea) enforced strong anticommunist ideologies. Both countries were under authoritarian and military dictatorships for decades. It was not until the 1990s that South Korea elected non-military presidents, while Taiwan held its first direct presidential election and elected its first president from the opposition party in 2000. Another similarity between Taiwan and South Korea is the ongoing tension with their non-democratic counterparts—China and North Korea.

Putting aside “hardcore” politics, Taiwan and South Korea interact dynamically in the realm of popular culture. K-drama and K-pop have been warmly received in Taiwan; notably, quite a few young Taiwanese men and women have been spotted by Korean talent scouts and become successful in Korea and the Asian market. This Taiwanese-Korean cultural exchange can be dated to an earlier time, during the Japanese Empire. Between 1919 and 1921, the Korean intellectual Pak Yunwŏn sojourned in Taiwan and published his impressions of Taiwan upon returning to Korea (Pak 1921a, b). In the 1930s, writer Kim Saryang exchanged letters with his Taiwanese counterpart Long Yingzong . Yang Kui, after reading an essay by Chang Hyŏkchu, concluded that Taiwanese writers should publish more in bourgeois newspapers to attract wider attention to proletarian literature (Yang 1935). The 1930s also witnessed the emergence of modernist literature in the two Japanese colonies. Wings, by Yi Sang (1910–1937) of Korea , and Love Story before Dawn, by Weng Nao (1910–1940?) of Taiwan, both utilize the stream-of-consciousness technique. The former tackles the sense of alienation brought about by modernity, whereas the latter details a precocious man’s sexual awakening and yearning for love.

The link between Taiwan and Korea continued after the end of Japanese colonialism, both politically and culturally. On January 23, 1954, 14,000 soldiers under the name of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army that had been captured by American forces during the Korean War arrived in Keelung, northern Taiwan. Taiwan’s Nationalist government considered the soldiers “anticommunist martyrs,” marking the date as “World Freedom Day.” The outbreak of the Korean War had made “the Taiwan issue” less of a priority for the newly established People’s Republic of China, as concern about a possible US invasion of Chinese territory was thornier. This explains why scholars, such as Zhang Shuya in her provocatively entitled book Did the Korean War Save Taiwan?, raise questions about whether Taiwan’s current political status should be attributed to the Korean War (Zhang 2011).

In the early postwar decades, South Korea was the only country among those that had diplomatic ties with the Nationalist government to appoint a resident ambassador to Taipei. Kim Shin , son of the Korean independence movement leader Kim Ku , was an ambassador to the Republic of China. As for literary interactions, Taiwan’s prolific modernist poet Ji Xian was a close friend of the Korean sinologist Hŏ Seuk (C: Xu Shixu), who helped translate several Chinese works into Korean. Unfortunately, a common issue faced by writers and film directors of modern Taiwan and South Korea is the censorship that was exercised over decades. It is coincidental that 1987 was a decisive year in the modern history of both Korea and Taiwan, marking South Korea’s democratic transition and the beginning of Taiwan’s post-martial law era.²

Despite the rich Taiwan–Korea exchange, and their similar historical transformation from Japanese colonies to fragile, split, and war-ridden embryonic “nations,” Taiwan and Korea are seldom placed abreast. Calling for the “de-colonializing” and “de–Cold Warring” of the two ex-colonies and anticommunist allies, we place Taiwan and Korea side by side in a “transwar” frame. We believe that considering Taiwan–Korea relations along a new transwar axis evokes a poetics of hospitality, for comparing Japan’s fascist empire-making and the succeeding regimes’ nascent yet militant nation-building projects under the Cold War order. The transwar concept brings our attention to the continuities between the late colonial period’s Asia-Pacific War and the consequent Korean War and the ongoing conflict between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, which were facilitated by Cold War power struggles.³ It also invites a meaningful transcolonial reconsideration of East Asian cultural and literary flows, beyond the conventional colonizer/colonized dichotomy and ideological antagonism.

The East Asian region in the twentieth century has too often been marred by the politics of antagonism. Japan was the common enemy of China, Korea, and Taiwan throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century. Communist China had too little in common with postwar Taiwan and Korea to make any sensible comparison; needless to say, the China-Taiwan pairing also triggers the thorny issue of reunification. While the compare-and-contrast approach to Taiwan and Korea appears the most viable and thought-provoking, we are fully aware of the danger of comparison studies: differences might be flattened and “neocolonial geopolitics” generated continuously.⁴ Hence, akin to Natalie Melas’s focus on forms of “incommensurability” (Melas 2006), we do not seek for equivalence but aim to provide a methodological possibility for better understanding how these intertwined and analogous historical trajectories have generated distinct local reactions and characteristics in Taiwan and Korea. More precisely, this book does not adopt a “relational comparative” approach, but pursues a side-by-side mode of comparative study of Taiwan and Korea’s popular cultures during the years specified.

This book explores late colonial and early postcolonial Taiwanese and Korean literature and films, focusing on issues such as gender, genre, state regulations, and spectatorship. To emphasize the transwar continuity of imperialist powers—Japan and the USA—and their impact on the production of post-1945 Taiwanese and Korean popular culture, we present the eight chapters in the colonial and then postcolonial order, in both parts. This book applies a broad definition for “popular culture.” Rather than considering it opposite to “high culture,” we refer to the various forms of cultural production, such as literature and film, which aim to reach a wider readership and audience. For the literature part, this book covers works published in “non-national” languages (Chinese and Korean) during the Japanese colonial rule, and popular media prints from the postcolonial period. For the chapters on film, authors investigate movies produced for mass audience for both entertainment and educational purposes. For each part, we showcase the similarities and differences of popular literature and films from Taiwan and Korea during the decades in point.

This “side-by-side” tactic has several vantage points. As the chapters will demonstrate, Korea enjoyed a more sanguine film industry than Taiwan under Japanese rule. Korea’s postwar “Golden Age” of filmmaking, from the late 1950s throughout the 1960s, coincided with the two waves of Taiwanese-language cinema in Taiwan (roughly the late 1950s and 1962–1968), illustrating the intricate relationship between government policies and general audiences’ appetite for melodramatic films. American films were dominant in both South Korea and Taiwan. While the United States Information Service (USIS) in Korea was busy producing propagandistic cultural films to teach Korean spectators how to lead a cosmopolitan (American) lifestyle (Kim 2013), in Taiwan, American movies made up 78.6% (349 out of 444 films) of imported films allowed in 1954, according to the Kuomintang (KMT)’s “Foreign Film Import Regulation,” put into effect the same year (Liu 2007). In addition, US-driven Cold War politics helped give rise to the Asian Film Festival , a regional alliance articulating the anticommunist sensibilities of “free Asia.”⁵

However, as the majority of Taiwanese spoke the Hokkien dialect (taiyu, or “Taiwanese language”) at that time, Taiwanese-language films were in high demand in the 1950s and 1960s and were tolerated by the government as long as they were not politically sensitive. This “dialect” aspect was exclusively a Taiwan-only phenomenon in the history of film in both countries. Another Taiwan-specific characteristic was the screening of national anthem films (actually the Nationalist Party song) before each feature, a policy implemented intensely in the 1950s. Even though melodramatic films were popular in Taiwan in the 1960s, just as in South Korea, many of them were in the style of “healthy realism,” a KMT-led, Mandarin-language film campaign.⁶ It indicates a critical difference between Taiwan and Korea in the early postwar decades—unlike Korea, which underwent a decolonization process, Taiwan entered another period of quasi-colonial rule with the KMT’s various, top-down “re-Sinicizing” cultural policies. Chapter 7 by Misawa well demonstrates the politicized aesthetics at work in early postwar Taiwanese cinema .

The language issue played an even more important role in post-1945 Taiwanese literary production. Popular genres in both colonial Taiwan and Korea had survived a string of Japanese policies promoting the total war effort, including bans on publishing in Chinese and in Korean. These genres, with a popularity boost from the mass media, continued to develop in the postwar years, albeit with thematic and stylistic modifications. America’s influence was traceable, with the emergence of Taiwan’s modernist literature, partially sponsored by the USIS, being a salient example. Yet again, Taiwan’s case is less straightforward due to the fact that the majority of active native Taiwanese authors had to pick up Chines...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Colonial Romance and Its Postwar Metamorphosis
• Part II. Cinematic Nationalism and Melodrama in the Colonial and Postwar Eras
• Back Matter