Offspring of Empire: Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945

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OFFSPRING OF EMPIRETe Kochang Kims and

the Colonial Origins o

Korean Capitalism,

. With a new preace by the author


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Korean Studies o the Henry M. Jackson

School o International Studies

Clark W. Sorensen, Editor


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.

Over the Mountains Are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households andTeir Adaptations to Rapid Industrialization,by Clark W. Sorensen

Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 19201925,by Michael Edson Robinson,

with a new preace by the author

Offspring o Empire: Te Kochang Kims and the Colonial Origins o Korean

Capitalism, 18761945,by Carter J. Eckert, with a new preace by the author

Conucian Statecraf and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyngwn

and the Late Chosn Dynasty,by James B. Palais

Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea,by Gi-Wook Shin

Te Origins o the Chosn Dynasty,by John B. Duncan

Protestantism and Politics in Korea,by Chung-shin Park

Marginality and Subversion in Korea: Te Hong Kyngnae Rebellion o 1812,

by Sun Joo Kim

Building Ships, Building a Nation: Koreas Democratic Unionism under

Park Chung Hee, by Hwasook Nam

Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910 1945by Mark E. Caprio

Fighting or the Enemy: Koreans in Japans War, 19371945,by Brandon Palmer

Heritage Management in Korea and Japan: Te Politics o Antiquity and Identity,by Hyung Il Pai

Wrongul Deaths: Selected Inquest Records rom Nineteenth-Century Korea,

compiled and translated by Sun Joo Kim and Jungwon Kim


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Te Kochang Kims and the ColonialOrigins of Korean Capitalism, 18761945

Carter J. EckertWith a new preface by the author

University of Washington Press

Seattle and London


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Tis publication was supported in part by the Korea Studies Programof the University of Washington in cooperation with the

Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

1991 by the University of Washington Press

Preface to the 2014 edition 2014 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America

17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any

information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Press

PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145, USA

www.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eckert, Carter J.

Offspring of empire : the Kochang Kims and the colonial origins of Korean capitalism,

18761945 / Carter J. Eckert ; with a new preface by the author.

pages cm. (Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International

Studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-295-99388-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. BusinesspeopleKoreaHistory. 2. Kim family. 3. Industrial

policyKoreaHistory. 4. KoreaDependency on Japan

History. 5. CapitalismKoreaHistory. I. itle.

HC466.5.A2E25 2014

338.9519009'041dc23

2013046770

Te paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed

Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.


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For Emeline J. Eckert


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List o Illustrations ix

Preace to the First Edition xiPreace to the 2014 Edition xvii


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Following page 190

Following page 126


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xvii

Preace to the 2014 Edition

I requently tell my bright and ambitious students, who are ar too preoc-cupied with trying to plan and control their distant utures, that they shouldremain open to the possibilities and opportunities that chance may affordthem in their lives. As an undergraduate at Lawrence College and later as agraduate student at Harvard in the 1960s, my historical interests had beenwholly and passionately centered on ancient and medieval European history.But in 1969 I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to South Korea or a two-year program, and my lie completely changed. I ended up living, working,and studying in Seoul until 1977. Tose eight years I spent in South Koreawere the zenith of the countrys drive for modernization under Park ChungHee, and I gradually became ascinated with the larger historical context othe phenomenon that was unolding beore my eyes. Eventually I shifed myhistorical interest to East Asia and Korea and completed my doctoral workon Korean and Japanese history at the University o Washington.

Although it now seems somewhat naive and overly ambitious, when Ibegan writing this book my intent was simply and objectively to explore thehistorical rise of the Park Chung Hee periods particular brand of capitalism,which was characterized by, among other things, a strong developmentaliststate; a small number o large business conglomerates (chaebl) that werestructurally linked to the state, not least in their financing; and an authori-tarian state-business control o the labor orce. Te Kyngsng Spinningand Weaving Company (Kyngbang) was a natural point on which to ocusmy study, not only because the textile industry had been in the oreront oSouth Koreas economic development, but also because Kyngbang was Ko-reas first major capitalist enterprise with a history dating to the early part othe twentieth century. Tanks to the kindness and generosity of Kyngbangschairman, Dr. Kim Kakchung, I was fortunate to gain access to the companysrecords reaching back to its ounding in 1919, which allowed me to docu-ment the rise of the company in considerable detail. What I discovered, to mysurprise, was that the company had experienced its first great spurt of growthnot afer1945, as I had initially assumed rom the existing historiography,


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but rather during the Japanese colonial occupation. My original researchthen expanded into an exploration o how such an apparent anomaly could

have occurred. Tat led me not only to consider the possibility o capitalistlinkages between the colonial and postcolonial eras, but also to posit a morecomplicated and nuanced understanding o the nature o interaction be-tween Koreans and Japanese during the colonial period. Tus was Offspringo Empireconceived and born.

Books are sometimes said have a life and history of their own, quite apartrom an authors intentions or desires. Tat has certainly been the case withOffspring. In North America and Europe the book has been regarded, as Ihad intended and hoped, as a contribution to the historical study o Korean

economic development and o Korean-Japanese interaction under colonialrule. In Korea the reception has been mixed. o be sure, response to the bookhas not been uniormly negative, and I continue to receive letters, emails,and visits rom South Korean scholars, especially younger scholars, who tellme they have been inspired by the book to think outside conventional na-tionalist historical paradigms. On the other hand, Offspringhas also beencriticized in Korea for its alleged justification or beautification of Japanesecolonial rule. One historian was so outraged by what he perceived as thebooks apologist theme that he publicly attacked my personal character and

motivations. In Japan, meanwhile, much to my exasperation and embarrass-ment, the book, whose title was egregiously mistranslated as Nihon teikokuno moshiko(roughly, Te Japanese Empires Gif o the Gods), was seized uponby right-wing Japanese writers and groups as conclusive proof of the benevo-lence and benefits o Japanese colonial rule in Korea.

At times, such reactions to the book have made me eel as i I had ex-perienced, in Roland Barthess amous ormulation, a classic postmoderndeath o the author, in which the original purpose and understanding othe writer are superseded or even obliterated by meanings ascribed to the

book by its readers. I also have ound mysel wondering how many o thosereaders had actually read the book. Te sting o authorial death has been allthe more rustrating because Offspringwas only relatively recently (2008)translated and published in South Korea in the Korean language. Many ear-lier critics had relied on excerpts divorced rom the context o the ull book,or on makeshif summaries in which both the exactitude and the subtletyo the original had been lost, orworseon mere rumors o what the bookwas purportedly said. Critical reviews and debate are an integral and neces-sary part o the scholarly proession, and there are many things one might

legitimately criticize about the book. But the scholarly enterprise also re-quires that criticism be based on what was actually said or written, not onmere assumptions and imputations. I thereore welcome this new edition o


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Offspring,and I welcome the opportunity this occasion affords to rise brieflyfrom the authorial dead and try to set the record straight with respect to what

the book is actually about, and what, with the hindsight o twenty-two years,I regard as some o its strengths and weaknesses.

Let me begin by being unequivocal: Offspring o Empireis not an apol-ogy or Japanese colonialism; it is a study o the rise o Korean capitalism. Ihad no intent to deny or minimize the oppressive aspects o the occupation,which were legion, especially for the vast majority of the population excludedfrom the Korean elite, whom the colonial authorities consciously endeavoredto placate and co-opt. I also intended to leave no doubt that the colonialauthorities shif to a more cooperative capitalist policy with the Korean elite

afer 1919 was designed primarily to urther Japanese imperial interests, notto promote the development o Korean capitalism per se.

I didnt even rule out a counteractual argument that Koreans could orwould have developed capitalism on their own, in the absence o Japaneseimperialism. What might or should have happened, however, is not empiri-cally demonstrable, and the focus of this book is on what actually did happen,how capitalism did in act develop. Here, o course, the book does make anargument that colonialism had a significant impact. But it certainly does notdeny the role o other actors in shaping the economy, both beore 1910 and

especially afer 1945: a variety o postwar American influences, the effectso the Korean War, the rapprochement between South Korea and Japan, andthe economic benefits o South Koreas participation in the Vietnam War,to name a ew. Again, such actors, however important, were not the ocuso this book. Instead, Offspring tried to fill a gap in the literature at the timeby looking at the colonial period in the longue dureo Koreas modern eco-nomic history.

At the core of the book, then, is a story of capitalist transformation duringthe Japanese occupation. Tat, in turn, is part o an implicit larger narrative

o the history o Korean capitalism beore and especially afer the occupa-tion. Embedded within this story are many other related stories, includingthe beginning o a major shif rom landed to industrial wealth, the rise o apowerful developmentalist state, the emergence of a nascent bourgeoisie andworking class, and the socioeconomic changes wrought by war and wartimemobilization in the 1930s and 1940s.

As in every society it has touched, capitalism has been a dynamic process,breaking down existing structures and social arrangements and giving birthto new ones. Colonial Korea was no exception. But to point to the transor-

mative power o capitalism is not to praise or celebrate it. No less a critic ocapitalism than Marx himsel acknowledged its revolutionary potential, andOffspring,while offering a window on that revolutionary process, also takes


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a critical stance on the orm o capitalism that did develop in Korea undercolonial auspices. Only readers who consider massive state intrusion into the

economy and society, a chaebl-dominated private sector, and suppressiono the labor orce to be unproblematic could possibly conclude rom thisbook that colonial influence on the development o Korean capitalism wasan unimpeachable good. Indeed, whether in Europe, the United States, Japan,Korea, or anywhere else, historical capitalism has never been unproblematic.I believe that one reason some critics o Offspringhave read the book as anapology or Japanese colonialism is, they have tended to view capitalism aspart o a linear, progressive process o historical development and to idealizeEuropean orms o capitalism as models. But o course it was precisely the

darker aspects o European capitalism that provoked Marx to produce hismonumental critique. Capitalism in colonial Korea, like its European coun-terpart, was simultaneously oppressive and transormative.

In addition to trying to shed some light on what was, at the time, stilla relatively neglected period in the history o Korean capitalism, anothero my goals in Offspringwas to try to break through the nationalist ana-lytical binaries of Japanese/Korean, oppression/victimization, or oppression/resistance that still dominated and constricted historiography on the colo-nial period. Again, my purpose was not to deny the historical realities o

Japanese colonial discrimination and oppression. But such binaries greatlycircumscribed Koreans agency in their own history. Moreover, my researchon Korean capitalism suggested a ar more complex and nuanced history oKorean-Japanese interaction in this period than these simple binaries couldaccommodate. Both Koreans and Japanese were in act diverse popula-tions, and their relationships with one another varied over time and by class,and even between individuals. Tinking beyond these binaries, so deeplyinscribed even in my own mind at the time, was a major intellectual chal-lenge, but doing so was the only possible way that I could make sense o the

documents stretched out beore me. And doing so held out the possibility oa greatly expanded and more compelling history o the period.

As I look back on the book rom the perspective o 2013, the flaws oOffspringare only too apparent. Although I continue to believe that colo-nialism exerted a proound impact on postcolonial South Korea, includingon its economy, this linkage is not clearly or convincingly demonstrated inthe book so much as it is asserted. Recent work by younger South Koreanscholars examining the 1950s and 1960s make clear that the colonial legacycan be properly assessed only in the context o many other actors that in-

fluenced and shaped South Koreas postcolonial economic trajectory, someo which I noted above.


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I also eel, in retrospect, that my treatment o the Korean capitalist elitesaccommodation to Japanese colonial policies, especially during the wartime

period o 193745, though empirically accurate, was too heavy-handed andone-dimensional. o a large extent it represented a negative reaction on mypart to mainstream scholarship at the time, as well as to official companyhistories and biographies, all o which sought to minimize or even to denythe connections and interactions between Korean and Japanese capital thatwere so evident in the documentation I had collected. But the result was thateven as I was consciously trying to eschew analytical binaries, I wound upcreating one o my own in the orm o class/nation.

Tere is o course no question that economic considerations played an

important role in Korean capitalist accommodation to colonial policies. Butagain, recent scholarship by younger scholars, both Korean and non-Korean,as well as my own subsequent research, has suggested that a simple binaryo class/nation or o collaborator/nationalist ails to capture either the rangeor the psychological depth o the actual experience o Koreans during thecolonial era, most o whom lived in an existential gray zone o everyday lie,where motives, emotions, and even identities were more fluid and mixedthan these binaries imply. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, or example,Kyngbangs president, Kim Ynsu, was working closely with Japanese o-

ficials in Korea, Manchuria, and Japan to expand the spinning industry inaccord with colonial policies, and by 1942 he had successully established ahuge new spinning mill in Manchuria. As I noted in Offspring,such endeav-ors were clearly profitable or Kim and his company. However, in a privateletter o January 1943 to one o his Japanese supporters, Sekiya eizabur(preserved in the National Diet Library in okyo), Kim, who had just comeout o the hospital, wrote o his renewed determination to continue workingor the sake o Korea [Chsen]. Tat he explicitly spoke o Korea and noto Kyngbang, or even o the Japanese Empire, which one might have

expected given the common rhetoric of the time, is interesting. In Kims ownmind at least, the sharp distinction I drew between class and nation in chap-ter 8 o Offspringmay not have been so clear. Such gray zone complexitieso the era certainly deserve urther study.

Readers will of course make their own judgments on Offspring o Empire,and it is certainly not my expectation or even desire that this new preacewill silence all critics. Since Offspringwas originally published, the world andKorea have undergone tremendous changes, and a new generation o inter-national scholars, much reer o the ideological and political constraints o

the past and in closer touch with one another than ever beore, is producingexciting new work on modern Korean history, including the history o the


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colonial period. It is my hope that Offspring,despite its imperections, willcontinue make some small contribution to the efforts o this new generation

o young scholars.Carter J. EckertYoon Se Young Proessor o Korean HistoryHarvard University


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Offspring of Empire: Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945

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