Korean Studies Graduate Student Conference 1999 - Abstracts

---

Panel One: INTERNATIONAL HISTORY

---

Moderator:
Carter J. Eckert
Professor of Modern Korean History, Harvard University
Director, Korea Institute

---

Tae Yang Kwak
"The Nixon Doctrine and the Yusin Reforms"
Harvard University


Richard Nixon assumed the American presidency promising to bring an "honorable" conclusion to the Vietnam War. The strategy he employed was the Nixon Doctrine. The Nixon Doctrine broadly outlined a decreased American presence in the Asian theatre and rapprochement with the Soviet Union and Communist China. Through the Doctrine, Nixon implored Asian nations to assume the primary responsibility for their own defense. It was important to apply the Doctrine throughout Asia in order to make America's withdrawal from Vietnam not seem like a local retreat. The Nixon administration looked to Korea to be the model for the Doctrine. They saw Korea as the nation in Asia, confronted with a communist threat, having been significantly bolstered, both economically and militarily, through its own participation in the Vietnam War, that could assume the primary responsibility for its own defense. Park Chung Hee, on the other hand, precisely because of Korean commitment and sacrifices in Vietnam, and Korea support of American policy in Southeast Asia despite worldwide criticism, believed that Korea should be the exception to the Nixon Doctrine.

Overturning a militant containment approach that started with the Korean War and characterized Kennedy and Johnson's approach to the Vietnam War, Nixon sought to achieve global security through détente between the great powers. However, Park Chung Hee had a firm conviction that détente alone would never mean security for Korea. The first few years of Korean participation in the Vietnam War represented a high point in Korean-American relations, and the personal relationship between Park Chung Hee and Lyndon Johnson. But by January 1968, significant rifts had developed. In 1970, Nixon withdrew 20,000 American soldiers from Korea despite adamant protest from Park, reducing American forces in Korea to 42,000 while Korean forces in Vietnam were still 50,000. In late November and early December 1971 Park Chung Hee all but begged Nixon multiple times for a meeting with Nixon before his trip to Beijing. Nixon denied Park a meeting. Park was furious and within days declared a state of emergency in Korea citing "recent international situations." Rapprochement between the United States and Communist China, American retreat from Vietnam, its failure to protect the Republic of China's seat in the UN were all cited in the original final version of Park Chung Hee's October 17, 1972 Declaration of Martial Law. These and other sections which were directly critical of American Asian policy and which threatened to undermine the Nixon Doctrine were omitted from the actual pronouncement due to heavy pressure from the Nixon administration. There is a strong connection between the Nixon Doctrine and Park Chung Hee's turn toward authoritarianism that has been kept hidden and largely unexamined.

Sources: Materials from the National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, MD.

---

John S. Park
"An Examnination of IAEA Inspections in North Korea 1993-1994"
Cambridge University


One of the main functions of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is to facilitate the creation of nuclear transparency, and in so doing, build trust and confidence among countries. In 1994, on the Korean Peninsula, it sought to achieve the former, but ended up building, not trust, but greater suspicion which nearly brought about the outbreak of conflict in the region. How did IAEA nuclear inspections exacerbate tensions on the Korean peninsula in 1994?

In addressing this question, an overview of the purposes of IAEA inspections - the main constituent part of IAEA safeguards - will be first presented. Against this background, the Agency's role as the backbone of the nuclear nonproliferation regime will be examined. Specifically, the conduct of the IAEA will be analyzed in the North Korean nuclear case in light of the Agency's application of its inspections repertoire.

The technical objective of safeguards as stated in the NPT Model Safeguards Agreement is "the timely detection of diversion of significant quantities of nuclear material from peaceful nuclear activities to the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or for purposes unknown, and deterrence of such diversion by the risk of early detection." (NPT Model Safeguards Agreement (note 6), para. 28.)

The deterrent function of safeguards in general is, however, secondary to their main function, which is the building of confidence among nations. Thus the IAEA describes the two main political objectives of nuclear safeguards as:

To assure the international community that States are complying with their nonproliferation and other 'peaceful use' undertakings.
To deter (a) the diversion of safeguarded nuclear materials to the production of nuclear explosives or for other military purposes and (b) the misuse of safeguarded facilities with the aim of producing unsafeguarded nuclear material. (IAEA, IAEA Safeguards: An Introduction, (Vienna: IAEA, 1981), p. 12.)

The IAEA employs three safeguards methods or measures - material accountancy, containment, and surveillance - by making use of four procedures - design review, maintenance of plant-operating records, reports on plant operation and on-site inspection. (Richard Kokoski, Technology and Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 149-150.)

On the micro-level, the NPT Model Safeguards Agreement allows for three types of inspection:

ad hoc inspections for verifying initial inventories of nuclear materials subject to safeguards, and changes thereto, as well as transfers into or out of the state;
routine inspections to verify the consistency of reports filed by the state with records, the location, identity, quantity and composition of nuclear material subject to safeguards, and information on possible causes of any uncertainties which may exist; and
special inspections, which the Agency may make to verify information in special reports or "if the Agency considers that information made available by the State, including explanations from the State and information obtained from routine inspections, is not adequate for the Agency to fulfill its responsibilities."
(NPT Model Safeguards Agreement (note 6), paras 73 and 77.)

In applying the first two and insisting on the third type of inspection in the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, the IAEA's difficulties in bolstering the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime in the evolving multipolar global and regional arena were revealed. It is the contention of this paper that the IAEA, in conjunction with a regional nuclear watchdog organization - much like ABACC (an Argentine-Brazilian bilateral body whose efforts benefit regional parties) - would be more effective in dealing with the nuclear proliferation issues in the area. The IAEA, an international body, is much too blunt an instrument to function effectively in situations like those that are arising in Korea with greater frequency.

Indeed, as evidenced by the IAEA's almost blind adherence to the "continuity of safeguards," the nuances of a particular region's security environment and experience is oft neglected. While the technical expertise of the IAEA is unparalleled and fiscally unfeasible to duplicate in regions and sub-regions around the world, cooperation between an Asia-Pacific ABACC and the IAEA would achieve much towards realizing regional nuclear transparency among countries in the region. In the process, such a partnership would make Northeast Asia, in general, and the Korean Peninsula, in specific, a significantly more secure region.

---

Kevin Orfall
"Building Peace on the Korean Peninsula: the Problems and Promise of CBMs"
Monterey Institute of International Studies


The division of the Korean peninsula along ideological lines exists as one of the last tangible vestiges of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and former Soviet Union. While North Korea remains dedicated to the Juche philosophy of national independence created by Kim Il Sung, South Korea has seen remarkable progress take place since adopting an internationalist economic strategy. Economic conditions in the the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are worsening creating severe social, political and security imbalances. These growing disparities, in combination with its powerful military and growing isolation from the world community, are increasingly causes for concern in Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing and Washington.

American-led efforts to ease North Korea out of its self-imposed state of isolation and into the community of nations is progressing, albeit slowly. However, the ultimate test of improved relations lies not in improved DPRK-US relations but in those between the two Koreas. It is important that the governments of Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il develop confidence in one another in order to engineer improved relations building up to a mutually acceptable scheme to reunify the two countries.

As confidence building does not normally address the more contentious force reduction and redeployment issues, it appears to be a natural candidate for initial efforts to improve inter-Korean security relations. This paper will briefly discuss confidence building measures from a theoretical and then practical perspective. With the theoretical understanding established, I will outline and explain the various CBM measures that are available to policymakers and compare/contrast those options with the efforts being undertaken under Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine policy". Lastly, I will offer some policy prescriptions that will serve the building of confidence on the Korean peninsula.

---

Panel Two: LITERATURE

---

Moderator:
Nak-Chung Paik
Professor of English Literature, Seoul National University
Visiting Scholar, Harvard-Yenching Institute

---

Jiwon Shin
"Rethinking the Songs of Ch'oyong"
Harvard University


This paper attempts to reconsider the texts and the tradition of oral performances commonly known as the songs of Ch'oyong.. Instead of taking Ch'oyong as an historical figure, as some previous studies have suggested, I shall explore the ways in which the character Ch'oyong has been legitimated as ritualistically given. I consider three texts in which Ch'oyongga and its appropriated form appear: Silla Ch'oyongga as it appears in Samguk Yusa; Koryo Ch'oyongga transcribed in Akhak Kwebom and Akchang Kasa; and arguably a modern appropriation of Ch'oyongga in a short story "The Great Battle of Dragon vs. Dragon" (Yong kwa yong ui tae kyokjon) written by Sin Ch'ae-ho and published in 1928. I suggest re-reading the final four lines of Silla Ch'oyongga by paying particular attention to the shifter in the possessive pronoun which destabilizes its referent. To elucidate my reading of these lines, I examine the different textual manifestations of Ch'oyongga diachronically. I argue that an interpretation of Ch'oyongga from any given text must be considered intertextually.

---

Jim Maguire
"Korean Literature in English Translation: Why It Doesn't Sell"
University of Dublin


This paper examines the reasons for the shortage of Korean fiction published in the West. An assessment of the inherent qualities of Korean fiction and poetry in the context of cultural expectations of western readers alongside an examination of the deep-rooted attitudes toward the value attached to scholarly translation (in Korea) and to literature in translation in western countries, especially those with a high ratio of new native fiction, will highlight the difficulties faced by translators and publishers of Korean fiction and poetry abroad.

The first section of the paper asks if the shortage of Korean fiction in the west arises from the inferiority of Korean fiction, from the already established appeal of Japanese fiction in the west, from the west's indifference to Asia, or from Korea's lack of receptivity to western fiction. The second part examines how adequately Korean fiction is being served by translation and the priorities of the Korean literary establishment in determining which works should be translated, who should be doing the translation and who the books are being translated for (with outspoken contributions from Brother Anthony, Kevin O'Rourke, Bruce Fulton and others). The final section observes how international publishers such as Harvill Press have set about marketing Korean fiction and developing a Korean list and examines the reluctance of readers in western countries to read literature in translation.

---

Christy Choi
"Approaching the Translation of Yun Tong-Ju's Poetry"
Harvard University


In order to arrive at a good translation of a literary work, especially poetry, one needs more than a good command of the languages involved. Since a form of interpretation of the original text is already imbedded in the translation of poetry, it is crucial that one needs to try to understand the original poems as well as possible.

Non-Korean readers will not embrace Yun unless his intrinsically poetic stature is evident in nuanced translation that respect the prosodic naturalness, the profound tonalities, and the intricacies of the originals. Korean readers, on the other hand, tend to be so enamored with the dignified pathos of his life that they grant a cultural and sentimental value to poems without searching out the poetic subtleties of his work. Even the small proportion of commentaries that extol themes in his work tend to merely paraphrase the themes and praise his abilities to explore them in his historical setting, rather than uncover the way his poetry is not reducible to declarative and philosophical assertions.

Some of the poetic attributes that give Yun's work the inexhaustibility of significant poetry are seemingly conflicting tendencies that become complementary through the power of his art: natural syntax and rhythms that are nonetheless carefully devised; an authoritative passivity; humility achieved through audacity; and capacity at once to give multiple meanings to words and to see the limitations of words.

---

Panel Three: PREMODERN HISTORY

---

Moderator:
Milan Hejtmanek
Assistant Professor of Premodern Korean History, Harvard University

---

Ah-Rim Park
"Representations of Heavenly Beings in Koguryo Wall Paintings"
University of Pennsylvania


A study of major motifs in wall paintings of Koguryo (37 BC-668 AD) would be one way to see how Koguryo murals have developed their own characteristics as well as how they have interacted with foreign cultures and arts such as Chinese funerary arts and Buddhist arts from the Han dynasty (BC 202-221 AD) to the Northern and Southern dynasties (265-581 AD). Celestial motifs depicted on ceilings of Koguryo murals including a heavenly being, chonin, reveal a perspective of a tomb occupant for the afterworld. The present paper aims to examine features of a heavenly being on murals of several Koguryo tombs and then to try to find a comparable example from China or Central Asia in order to find out whether the Koguryo heavenly being has its own unique features, whether there is any development according to each period, and whether the development of the Koguryo heavenly being corresponds to that of the Chinese or Central Asian heavenly being. Originally coming from India, a Buddhist celestial being usually called pichon was introduced into Central Asia and China in conjunction with the transmission of Buddhism. It was during the Northern and Southern dynasties period in China that lots of the Buddhist cave temples such as Yungang, Longmen, and Gongxian had been built, and the Buddhist celestial being was prevalent in these caves. In the long process of its transmission, the Buddhist heavenly being has undergone gradual changes displaying regional and temporal evolutions. It is noteworthy that when the Buddhist heavenly being entered China, its encounter with a traditional Chinese heavenly being (or Daoist immortal), sonin, generated a sinification of Buddhist pichôn. Before an entry of the foreign heavenly being, the traditional Chinese heavenly being whose inspiration is probably found in Chinese Classical records such as Huai Nan Zi and Shan Hai Jing was widely depicted on bronze mirrors, decorated tomb bricks, and stone reliefs from the Han dynasty to the Northern and Southern Dynasties.

Examination of representations of Koguryo heavenly beings in light of East Asian funerary and Buddhist arts tradition reveals broad-ranged interactions of Koguryo arts either in temporal or regional aspects. Along with depictions of foreigners in Koguryo tombs such as entertainers and wrestlers, Korean envoys with a typical feathered hat found not only in a mural at the tomb of the Princess Zhanghuai, Xian, Tang, China (706 AD), and in the Vimalakirti scene at Mogao cave 335, Tang (686 AD), but also in a mural from a Sogdian palace in Afrasiab, Uzbekistan (6th-7th centuries) would be other examples suggesting such characteristics of ancient Korea. Therefore, the present study to attempt to trace the development and features of Koguryo heavenly beings in context of East Asian funerary and Buddhist arts tradition would be just one clue in understanding Koguryo arts and cultures in a broad and in-depth perspective.

---

Bonnie Kim
"Societal Organization in Unified Sillan Villages Through the Translation and Analysis of an 8th Century Shosoin Census"
Oxford University


In my paper attempt will be made to present a comprehensive overview of the general societal organization in four hamlets during unified Silla, based on an examination of the multi-tiered classification system used to categorize people, livestock, and agricultural fields in an 8th century census. In particular, I intend to shed light on the duties and roles of the local peasant populace in relation to those of the governing village officials. Finally, I shall interpret the factual data presented in the document to suggest what daily life might have been like within the Sillan village unit.

In writing my paper I shall utilize a Sillan census register, discovered in the Imperial Shõsõin Repository in Nara, Japan, as my primary source. This particular document, one of eight from the unified Silla period, is taken from the Hangkuk Sangtae Komunso Charyo ("A Compilation of Korean Documents from Antiquity"), compiled by Yi Ki-baek.

In my paper I will present a complete translation and analysis of the census register to shed light on the socio-economic life of unified Silla.

In order to supplement the translation and analysis, secondary Korean language sources will be used.

---

Richard Hoge
"Love Among Princes: Royalty, Filial Piety, and Politics in the Early Choson Period"
University of Washington

---

Panel Four: CULTURAL STUDIES

---

Moderator:
David R. McCann
Professor of Korean Literature, Harvard University

---

Chang-Hee Shin
"Gender Negotiation in the Era of Democratization"
Wayne State University


The South Korean cinema of 1980s supports the contention that demands for a national cinema and the negotiations of state polity to subside them show the male dominant enterprise in nationalist discourse. With the changes in film policies and the emergence of popularity of soft-pornographic films in the 1980s, a figure of women was at issue but the film narrative addressed mostly male interests. This study demonstrates an account of how the narrative had been negotiated with and sustained the male dominant culture in the 1980s through analyzing gender construction in soft-pornographic films.

Representations of women which the 1980s proliferated in many ways lead one to the illusion of a "changing" role of woman in the era of transformation, from traditional to modern, liberal woman. However, the much of soft-pornographic films (and women's film) in the 1980s had excluded and denied a female subjectivity by focusing on masculine employment of the image of woman, body of women, desire of woman, and thus woman being. In this discourse of sexuality, furthermore, the role of woman was instrumental to articulate the male projection of the conflicts confronted with rapid social changes in the 1980s Korea and thus women became the mediation of cultural struggles over ideology of gender, marriage and family. As such, the gender construction in the film narrative assured masculinity that supposedly wounded by the (neo)colonial consciousness and troubled by the conflicts in formation of national discourse in Korea. This mechanism is central in keeping the male dominant in nationalist discourse in order to sustain the continuing phallocentric tradition.

However, the changing figure of women raises the question of woman, and provides a useful instruction to see the problematics within nationalist discourse in Korea. On the one hand, it discloses the privilege of nationalism that continues to prioritize itself and thus generates a new form of female bondage. On the other hand, it also reveals the contradiction of nationalism that nationalist discourse obscures collectivity of national identity by failing to establish the marginal and heterogeneous group. Corresponding to the question of women, this study in the end suggests that the possibility of national collectivity is persistently foreclosed through the manipulation of female agency.

---

Jung-ho Yoon
"Controlled Bodies and Uncontrollable History: A Study of Yang'gongju Stories of the 1950s"
University of Texas, Austin


The Korean yang'gongju stories, or stories of prostitutes for foreigners, are products of the ever complicated relationship between Korea and the U.S. in the latter half of the twentieth century. In yang'gongju stories, a central motif is the prostitute's body. Who possesses her body, who has access to it, and how the woman herself uses her own body have a great social and historical implication.

In Sang-won O's 1956 short story "Nanyeong" [A Disturbed Shadow], the male protagonist identifies the prostitute's body wearing "strong perfume" and "offensively heavy makeup" as an emblem of American dominance. Defining American culture as overdeveloped in materiality and underdeveloped in spirituality, the protagonist tries to prove his ethical superiority by suppressing his own bodily needs and simultaneously imposing the same constraint upon the woman's body.

Different from the protagonist's understanding, however, the woman is not simply an agency of American imperialism. She has her own subjectivity. What the woman legally and illegally brings home from her work is crucial for her husband and children's survival. While the GI sergeant makes her a prostitute, she snitches out various necessities from the U.S. military camp under the sergeant's tacit approval, thus taking advantage of his sexual desire.

Body matters in Yu Ju-hyeon's 1957 story "Taeyang-eui Yusan" [A Heritage of the Sun] too. All the hopes and expectations Mr. Bae has projected onto his daughter Samsun for the past several years and especially for the day of her homecoming are destroyed as he finds his daughter's body dirtied by a foreign man. In a subplot, the female shaman leaves Mr. Bae for a newly arrived monk who is younger and richer. It is suggested that Samsun's relationship with an American is the same kind of survival tactic.

The two stories represent women as better players than men. A dire living condition makes women aware of commercial values of their bodies. In each story, the woman takes advantage of men's bodily desire in pursuit of things she needs for survival. Men's possession of her body is only temporary. They have to pay her repeatedly to maintain their privilege. But then there is a negative side of it for the woman. Since her attainment of economic resources is based on her sexualized body, she is subordinated to the system that objectifies her.

In each story, the prostituting woman's body becomes a point of contention. Male protagonist's strong moralistic accusation of the woman is a defensive strategy devised to avoid confronting the uncontrollable reality lying beyond the woman's body. There is nobody who has a full control over the woman's body. Even the woman herself does not fully possess her own body. The conflictual tripartite relationship between Korean women, Korean men, and American men mediated by Korean women's bodies thus reflects a radical social change and the contradiction brought about by their historical encounter. The perception of the prostituting woman's body manifested in these earlier texts continues to appear in later yang'gongju stories with some variations.

---

Michael Kim
"Culture Wars and Contested Meaning: Language Politics in the First Republic of Korea"
Harvard University


An undeclared war erupted among the elite guardians of Korean culture when liberation in 1945 allowed Koreans to reclaim the right to establish the linguistic, cultural, and ideological basis of their nation. The conflict flared along multiple fronts, and the urgent task at hand was to forge a common understanding of Korea's national identity and culture. Yet achieving agreement on which existing cultural models in 1948 were worthy of canonization proved to be a contentious proposition. The ensuing public debate over how best to construct the modern Korean nation formed the backdrop of the Culture Wars of the First Republic.

The battleground for this conflict was Korea's emerging public sphere. A profusion of newspapers, journals and books provided an opportunity for competing elites to advocate their own views about the essential characteristics of modern Korea. The contestants had privileged access to the new communications technologies that had transformed Korea since the late 19th century. Eventually, the contents of this public debate began to undermine the State's own hegemonic definition of Korean culture.

My presentation will examine the dynamics behind the Culture Wars by focusing on the proposed han'gul simplification plans of the 1950s and contextualize this issue within the larger struggle between State and Society over the establishment of their own version of Korean culture. While the han'gul crises may have been fought over the mundane matter of proper spelling, it is my contention that the issues raised provide valuable insights the subtleties involved in constructing a unified national culture.