Yellow over Black: History of Race in Korea and the New Study of Race and Empire

Introduction

Among all the races, since whites are the most brilliant, diligent and courageous, they have gradually defeated other inferior races all around the world and acquired lands and trees. Therefore, some races among the inferior, which cannot learn whites’ knowledge and customs, should become gradually extinct. (Dongnipsinmun, 24 June 1897)

In the study of race and empire, two implicit assumptions are generally held: first, racism presupposes collective racial contacts; second, the imaginary creation of racial boundaries was only made meaningful and possible by the Western colonizer in the Age of Empire. Though the study of race and empire has become more productive with the emergence of a cultural turn, these two closely related fields have been predominantly dictated by the assumptions above. While those two assumptions will be examined in much detail, it seems that any studies outside those assumptions tend to be considered as regional or local – in other words, less theoretically valuable at best. In this paper, through brief historical examples of Korea’s racial construction in the Age of Empire – cases that are seemingly local and hardly imaginable if seen from the existing perspective – it will become clear how those assumptions have limited the theoretical scope of the related studies and how those seemingly peripheral stories can greatly contribute to the study of race and empire.

No race problem or racial discourse has been regarded as occurring in Korea except for the discourse of hanminjok (uni-ethnicity). Whether it has been viewed as self-evident or peripheral, the study of race and empire has rarely paid attention to race in Korea; instead, it has been considered that it is a topic for regional study, while the latter also has been overlooked with its historical construction. It has not been much different within the national boundaries of Korea. Imaginary racial absence has been embedded in many aspects of Korean culture; therefore, most Koreans seem to believe it to be true. Congruent with the popular regime of ‘no race problem’ in Korea, some contend that race has recently become important, with the influx of foreign workers into Korea in the contemporary ‘multi-cultural’ society. Lack of knowledge and discussion on race in Korea has predominated not only among the general Korean population but also recently among Korean national sociologists. In 2008, half a volume of the Korean Journal of Sociology (42(2)) was dedicated to empirical articles discussing racial issues. However, with few exceptions, Korean scholars have exclusively focused their discourse on cultural diversity while neglecting how racial ideology has been historically constructed in Korea. Because they view race as unprecedented and therefore a new social phenomenon, they believe that the colorblind contact hypothesis would come true, as ‘racially innocent’ Koreans might ultimately become less prejudiced through contacts with and ‘proper’ education about different cultures without much theoretical guidance from the study of race and empire.

Recently, the study of race in the US has paid attention to racial issues outside the US. While globalization has accounted for this, the sociology of race has also received significant help from the study of empire. With the emergence of a cultural turn, the study of empire and related regional studies have come to examine cultural aspects of empire; particularly, a recent focus has been on how the empire invented the difference between the colonized and the colonizer. Evidence reveals that the invention of colonial differences would not have been possible without the invention of race. However, those studies have often limited their perspectives to those of Western colonizers or the Western empire. Yet how the colonized – rather than the colonizer – actively made sense of this difference, and even invented differences in their own terms, has not garnered much attention. In other words, without much hesitation, most scholars have assumed that the agency of the colonized was only reactive to the Western colonial regime. Thus, to juxtapose the Korean case with this, the existing study of race and empire can only assume that Korean racial ideology – if it existed – was a passive response to the cultural–racial schema of the Japanese Empire, a mere imitator of the Western Empire in the study of empire.

Given these contexts, it is not surprising that the history of race in Korea has been predominantly ignored, as the study of race has overlooked the historical contingencies of the racialized; the study of empire has not paid much attention to the colonized, the Japanese Empire, or the colonized of the Japanese Empire. The existing theoretical framework does not yield much room for the colonized (or the yet-to-be colonized) to voluntarily construct racial boundaries between themselves and others prior to the colonial regime; thus, it does not recognize how this could affect the further stages of complex racialization.

However, lessons from regional studies teach us that racial ideology indeed contributed to the myths of hanminjok ideology and nationalism in precolonial and colonial Korea (Em, 1999; Pai, 2000; Schmid, 2002; Shin, 2006; Tikhonov, 2010). The primary focus of these studies is not the construction of race and racial others itself; thus, they do not call for much theoretical attention from the study of race and empire. However, these studies at least tell us that race indeed mattered in Korea long before the current global labor migration and the era of ‘multi-culture’ independent from the official colonial regime.

The mere fact that those regional studies have discovered race in an unexpected region might be indeed meaningful. As seen above, related academic fields have appreciated those regional studies in this way. However, as we will see, race – especially blackness – in Korea during the Age of Empire was quite pivotal, as Koreans actively made sense of the ‘new’ world. Therefore, against existing assumptions, I propose in this paper that the study of race and empire would benefit from a case in which historical racism and blackness were possible in a nation-state that consists of racially homogeneous members of non-white and non-former colonizer during the precolonial period and under the colonial regime.

Study of Race

Classical social thinkers did not pay much attention to race. Though race has been occasionally mentioned, it was not treated as part of the fundamental structure of society. Contrary to the contact hypothesis, which assumed natural racial melting, persistent racism and racial differences in the US eventually drew attention from scholars and became indispensable topics in today’s American sociology. Rather than treating race as a superstructure of economy (e.g. Bonacich, 1972), Omi and Winant (1994) demonstrate that race is not a mere byproduct of economic structure and elevate race to a status as one of the major social structures. King and Smith (2005) similarly argue that analysis of almost all American politics has to be viewed through a racial lens with two evolving and competing racial orders: a white supremacist order and an egalitarian transformative order. Rather than being a temporary and non-fundamental social phenomenon, they argue that race cannot be reduced to elements of social structure, such as class, and should instead be treated as a fundamental type of structure in American society. Omi and Winant term this socio-historical process ‘racial formation’ and define it as ‘the process by which social, economic, and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings’ (Omi and Winant, 1994: 61–62). Thus, in the study of race it can cogently be assumed that the relationships between race and economy or other major social structures are multidirectional.

Though researchers on race have been quite successful in revealing the ‘hidden’ structure of racism in the US by showing how significant race is in contemporary society (e.g. Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Feagin, 2006), they have often overly emphasized the binary between whites and non-whites and how white supremacy has oppressed non-whites. Thus, in this model, non-whites are lumped together into one entity that has suffered equally from white supremacy. Because this binary model has clear limits, Kim (2000) has introduced ‘racial triangulation’, which can be explained as two axes – ‘relative valorization’ and processes of ‘civic ostracism’. According to her concept of racial triangulation, Asian Americans are relatively more valorized than blacks, but they are still treated as foreign outsiders. Moreover, she emphasizes how people of color – Korean Americans, in this case – participate in racial triangulation rather than being passively oppressed. Interestingly, while she raises another question (i.e. under what conditions they reacted in a certain way), she does not provide much analysis on the historical background from which it emerged.

The reason that Kim has failed to delve into this question is that those who study race have conceived of people of color as ‘empty vessels’ or ‘passive receptacles’. In this framework, immigrants who come to the US eventually become racialized due to the racial specificity of the US. The reason could be accounted for by the first assumption mentioned above. Since immigrants (especially East Asians) are considered as people without collective racial contacts before they entered the US, scholars have often implicitly assumed that those people can be lumped together as racial others who equally and passively suffer from racism in the US, regardless of their diverse backgrounds. Thus, while her work is informative in the important regard that Korean Americans have often actively participated in the construction of racial triangulation and maintenance of the status quo, what answers can be given on why they have reacted in a certain racial way if we adhere to the first assumption?

Some scholars have claimed the necessity of a wider approach. In a migration study, Chan (1990) indicated the importance of the historical, political and economic contexts of the sending countries and the international political context rather than the contexts of the receiving countries. She argued that colonization and nationalization affected immigrants’ negotiation with white supremacy and racialization. Moreover, she showed how US international policy affected peoples of color differentially according to home country. While her analysis is not directly related to race or racism in the sending countries, it provides an important lesson that many scholars have overlooked. Azuma’s (2005) more detailed approach, termed ‘an inter-national perspective’, demonstrates how international racial contexts matter. In order to show more in-depth analysis of the second generation’s transnational past, he claims a perspective that ‘stresses the interstitial (not transcendental) nature of their lives between the two nation states’ (Azuma, 2005: 5). His analysis on how both nations’ governmental policy and history affected Japanese descendants in America shows the propensity of analysis bounded within national boundaries to overlook important aspects of race and racism. According to him, the colonial intentions of the Japanese government with respect to Japanese immigrants’ intentions to maintain their Japanese culture indicate that Japanese immigrants never simply accepted racialization from the US government or succumbed to white supremacy. In other words, their already-constructed racial hierarchy and its ongoing influence were crucial in understanding how Japanese people made sense of their racial surroundings in the US.

However, only a few studies have delved into the history of racial ideology in East Asia. For example, Dikötter (1994) articulates how the concept of race had changed throughout the nineteenth century in China. Further, Weiner (1997a, 1997b) shows how the concept of Japanese race had been constructed from the Meiji era through the period of imperialism in Japan. On the other hand, as Park (1997) acknowledges, systematic analysis on the history of racial ideology in Korea has not yet been done. Koreans have racial preferences before they enter the US; for example, Ablemann and Lie (1995) show that Koreans who immigrated or determined to immigrate to the US preferred whites to blacks. Further, Kim (2008) reveals that the construction of racial image through the presence of American soldiers after the Korean War might have contributed to Koreans’ view on blacks. While those studies remind us that Koreans are not racially innocent or ignorant, it is not surprising that historical analysis on the issue is still lacking, since collective racial contacts in Korea had no precedent.

Though other brief examples will be presented later, let me revisit the quotation from the first page. Who were considered to be inferior by Koreans in the age of empire? Who should be extinct? In other words, the quotation from Dongnipsinmun – the first private-led Korean newspaper – implies more than aspirations for Western civilization. As we will see later, those racial others are mostly blacks and ‘natives’. This raises an important question for the study of race. As racial construction of whiteness would be impossible without racial otherness, if we can reveal that the Korean racial identity fundamentally requires either racial otherness or blackness, this goes beyond the isolated regional history and requires theoretical adjustment of the concept of ‘global white supremacy’ (Mills, 1998).

Global white supremacy – a ‘system, a particular kind of polity, so structured as to advantage whites’ (Mills, 1998: 100) – is an alternative theoretical framework that aims to supplement previous theories that overlooked race as a fundamental political philosophy. In order to criticize and deconstruct global white supremacy, Mills suggests that blackness, which has been overlooked by mainstream Western political philosophy, must be visible. Since global white supremacy has taken different forms around the world throughout history, he argues that various approaches are required. From the empirical to theoretical levels, many scholars have successfully revealed those ‘hidden’ structures. For example, Bashi (2004) shows how anti-blackness has been prevalent in transnational immigration law, policy and practice not only in the US but also in the UK and Canada. Also, Wilderson (2003) articulates that Gramsci’s concept of civil society does not yield any space to overcome white supremacy because it only concerns a subaltern structured by capital while capitalism required violence toward black or blacked bodies.

Without any collective physical racial contacts, the construction of Korean identity still required racial otherness – not only whiteness but also blackness, which signified inferiority. In other words, Korean racial identity did require symbolic violence toward blackness prior to the era of globalization. Yet it has been hardly visible in existing race studies. If we remember the goal of the theories on global white supremacy, this ‘hidden’ blackness should not be overlooked. What can this racial history in locations where blackness is least expected contribute to theories of global white supremacy? Rather than clinging to the contact hypothesis – the idea that contact between races would eventually lead to deracialized, harmonious relations – an answer to the question would expand the horizon of the existing theories on global white supremacy.

Study of Empire

As the study of race has given special meaning to race in the US, some scholars have ignored deeply rooted historical and transnational aspects of racism in both the US and the world at large. In this manner, the study of empire has taught us important lessons on how this imaginary creation was constructed throughout the Age of Empire. Rather than emphasizing how global capitalism or globalization can be traced back to imperial origins, this ‘new’ study of empire focuses on cultural aspects of empire and how these enabled and maintained the empire.

In an article titled ‘The “New” Sociology of Empire and Colonialism’, Go (2009) explains what the recent sociology of empire has examined. According to him, it has examined ‘social forms, processes and relations associated with imperialism and colonialism’ (Go, 2009: 775). By doing so, the new study critically reconstructs the limitations of traditional sociology. Termed as ‘imperial-colonial’ studies, he newly articulates four of their important characteristics. First, rather than reducing imperialism to economics, it emphasizes its cultural role. As claimed by Dirks (1992), modern colonialism was essentially a cultural project of control. Second, it rejected a monolithic understanding of history. Contextualized within a larger ‘imperial turn’ or ‘postcolonial turn’, it admits that a general theory in history is impossible and turns its emphasis to multiple histories. In other words, if historicism puts the history of non-European countries in a ‘waiting room’ (Charkrabarty, 2000), these ‘imperial-colonial’ studies reject the idea that every nation is destined toward the path of one modernism. This notion of multiple histories is directly related to the third characteristic. If we reject the idea of the historical ‘waiting room’, we ought to see how those histories are mutually constituted. Thus, the new study emphasizes how the East and West are mutually constituted. Finally, based on pseudoscientific notions, it sees some of the scientific categories as imagined and created through imperial and colonial relations. Through these lenses, the sociology of empire has cogently demonstrated that the monolithic view on empire has overlooked complicated interests among multiple actors and that colonial legacies and racialized images of colonialism are still valid (Go, 2009).

Unlike ‘nation-states’, ‘empire-states’ consist of hierarchically differentiated subjects (Cooper, 2005; Jung, 2011). Each member of the empire is hierarchized according to the ‘rule of difference’ (Chatterjee, 1993); therefore, how they were differentiated – and under what criteria – became important. Rather than simple geographical differences, scholars have emphasized that the differences required the notion of the biological (or racial) inferiority of the colonized. For example, Todorov articulated that its main characteristic is ‘the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other people on account of physical differences’ (Todorov, 1986: 370). Bhabha also argues that the very purpose of colonial-cultural discourse was ‘to construct the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin in order to justify conquest’ (Bhabha, 1994: 70).

While understanding the crucial roles of these imagined racial lines of colonial regimes in empire-states, Steinmetz (2007) raises an interesting argument that these imagined cultural-racial differences were not only invented during colonization. Indicating the differences in colonial policies among German colonies, he claims that those imagined differences were invented before official colonization and that such ‘precolonial cultural familiarization’ almost dictated how the colonizer would rule the colonized. According to him, this creation of fixed meaning by the proto-colonizer indeed enabled colonization; this explains why colonial policies varied according to colony from the outset. His work thus reveals that those cultural aspects are not just important but always historically contingent.

Though the ways in which the colonizer would rule the colonized were almost determined by precolonial cultural familiarization, this does not simultaneously mean that those rules were omnipotent. Those rules of difference were always challenged and negotiated. This very aspect has become one of the major themes of the current historical scholarship on empire (Calhoun et al., 2006). Whether we call it colonial resistance or colonial ambiguity, though those two are conceptually different, we have to delve into how the colonized people made sense of precolonial cultural familiarization or imaginary cultural creation not only under the colonial regime but also prior to official colonization. However, the precolonial cultural familiarization of the colonized has not been investigated in the study of empire.

Scholars’ efforts to emphasize those limits of power have explained why most studies on empire still only investigate what the West did in the East or to the Other. In other words, their interests still lie in how Western colonial power was limited, though those studies also investigate the causal factors of limitations. Rather than treating the colonized and the East (or the Other) as autonomous agents, scholars have merely taken a detour and thus ironically re-centered the Western concept of self (Frankenberg and Mani, 1996). On the one hand, this trend is congruent with the lopsided emphasis on the colonizer. On the other hand, this tendency might be one of the reasons why the study of empire has only reflected interest in the Western Empire. The Japanese Empire has been treated as no more than a historical anomaly or a mere imitation of the Western Empire; thus, it is seen as less important in the larger academic field. Perhaps, as Schmid (2000) notes, for most scholars of empire, the West still remains the sole locus of external change, progress and influence. Well-known scholars in the study of empire have hardly even mentioned the Japanese Empire. If the study of empire has paid little interest to the colonized of the Western Empire, it is easy to imagine how the colonized (or yet-to-be colonized) of the Japanese Empire have been conceived.

Since imagined racial lines formed the crucial rules of the difference, the notion of a racially similar empire might be one of the reasons that the Japanese Empire has been overlooked. For example, Peattie (1984) indicates that the Japanese Empire was unique in that its subjects were racially akin to the colonizer. Ching (1998) also notes that the major difference between the Japanese Empire and the Western Empire was the former’s absence of a clear duality – such as white vs. non-white – due to its cultural and racial alikeness. Similarly, Ferro (1997) shares the idea that the difference within the Japanese Empire was a difference of minzoku (民族) rather than jinshu (race, 人種). ¹ He states that minzoku ‘referred to something broader, that is, a culture represented by a people, with Japan being placed at the summit of this cultural ladder and being accordingly destined to lead the others, as a result of the synthesis it had achieved between the East and the West’ (Ferro, 1997: 101).

However, minzoku cannot be interpreted without the notion of blood. Minzokusei (characteristic of minzoku, 民族性), which is still a frequently used term in Japan today, was largely defined by blood during the 1920s and 1930s. As Park (2009) notes, Asian-led governance of racial proximate Asian populations also required the racialization of its subjects. For example, Siddle (1997) reveals rampant ‘scientific racism’ during the colonial period in Japan. For instance, colonial anthropologists Furuhata Tanemoto and Furukawa Takeji researched the proportions of the four principal blood types (A, B, O and AB) among the Taiwanese and Ainu people. After identifying two broad types – active (O and B) and passive (A and AB) – they concluded that high proportions of blood types O and B exist among Taiwanese aborigines and Ainu people, respectively. They wrote that Taiwanese aborigines’ stubborn and energetic natures were caused by a high proportion of blood type O; thus, the aborigines require much energy for civilization. On the other hand, they wrote that the Ainu people – who were on the verge of extinction – were mostly blood type B and were thus satisfied with the present without worry for the past or future (Siddle, 1997). Further, as shown by Mizuno (2009), the method by which to define minzoku was a hot issue in ‘science’. While the Marxists rejected the racialized notion of minzoku, which was based on the current notions of blood or biology circa the 1930s, the existence of this debate signifies that at least race matters in the Japanese Empire existed alongside minzoku. ²

Like social Darwinism in the Japanese Empire, racial ideas were also appropriated as their own cultural category. In order to understand the relations between Japan and others, the empire only selectively assimilated European ideas. Through their experience of colonialism, they later developed their own ideas (Young, 1997). As used in the Western Empire, racial ideology in the Japanese Empire was also arbitrary. Sato (1994), for example, demonstrates how dobundoshu (same language same race, 同文同種) ideology was used and contested at the same time to show arbitrarily either the racial similarity of ‘yellows’ or the racial superiority of Japanese.

Imagining the difference between the colonized and the colonizer was also important in the Japanese Empire, as opposed to the idea of similarity. In the study of race and empire, rather than re-centering the focus on the colonizer, it is important to examine the ways in which the colonized of the Japanese Empire made sense of those racial schemes before and during the period of empire.

Race and Blackness in Precolonial Korea

Hilary Conroy’s work was the first to emphasize how a precolonial cultural aspect played a role in the colonizing of Korea (Conroy, 1960). For more than 30 years, his work had been the only opus on how the cultural schema of Seikanron (an argument on conquering Korea) in Meiji Japan played a pivotal role in colonizing Korea. Though the Meiji Japan had a far superior army to and a bigger economy than Korea, scholars have shown that these were not sufficient to regard the Empire as a given. In order to prove that Japan was the equivalent of the civilized West, Japanese people assumed that they would be treated the same if they were successful in colonizing Korea (Duus, 1995). Duus (1995) also shows that defining Koreans was a pivotal task to Japan. In rationalizing Koreans’ ‘backwardness’ and legitimizing their own colonization of the Koreans, they ‘defined’ Koreans as racially and culturally inferior. These two brief but pertinent examples demonstrate the importance of precolonial cultural familiarization in the Japanese Empire, often conceived as an empire of similarity.

Accordingly, as mentioned above, the question that followed was the precolonial cultural familiarization of the yet-to-be colonized. How did Koreans negotiate this imaginary creation and create racial others based on their own racial understanding? If the colonized are not simply reactive to colonial oppression, then they actively made sense of history independently of official colonization. Though Steinmetz (2007) emphasizes the importance of precolonial cultural familiarization by the colonizer, the bottom-up perspective would be equally important in understanding the dynamics of empire. Therefore, how Koreans made sense of the cultural gaze – not only during the Japanese Empire but also before the actual colonization in the Age of Empire – should be the starting point of analysis. In this way, they will be treated as active and autonomous participants in history-making.

Numerous studies on Korea do exist. However, studies on the history of race in Korea are far from flourishing, presumably because the notion of hanminjok is believed to be natural. However, scholars have revealed how Korean nationalism and hanminjok ideology are related to Japanese colonialism and ‘modern’ projects (Robinson, 1989; Em, 1999; Pai, 2000; Shin, 2006). Especially, Schmid (2002) and Tikhonov (2010) see Koreans in the Korean context rather than putting them into the context of the Japanese Empire. Focusing on the munmyeonggaehwa (enlightenment, 文明開化) idea of gaehawpa (reformists, 開化派) thinkers from 1895, Schmid (2002) examines how the idea became pivotal before and after colonization. While Schmid assumes that this munmyeonggaehwa idea was somehow monolithic, Tikhonov (2010) further analyzes its complicated meanings. Rather than highlighting munmyeonggaehwa itself, he saw how social Darwinism was pivotal and how it shaped the racial identities of Koreans initially (independently of formal colonization).

Though Schmid (2002) and Tikhonov (2010) hint that construction of Korean identity was impossible without reference to race in general, how Koreans made sense of racial others throughout the Age of Empire has never been thoroughly studied. In addition to aspirations for whiteness or Western civilization, Koreans had to legitimize their racial standing in their imagined racial hierarchy. As we will see, without the notion of blackness – which signified hopeless ‘backwardness’ – their dismal but hopeful racial standing could not be justified.

While blackness was not familiar to Koreans, as expected from the absence of collective racial encounters, such absence does not simultaneously mean backwardness at the outset. The oldest historical record on ‘black’ in Korea comes from the Goryeo dynasty. While those black people were from Thailand, they were described as black by the first King of Goryeo. As far as the written record reveals, the first African black person in Korea was Haegwi (sea ghost) in 1598. ³ According to Joseonwangjosillok (the annals of the Joseon Dynasty), a general from the Ming dynasty brought one black mercenary from Portugal. He was probably an African slave taken by the Portuguese. Regardless of his origin, the king of Joseon (Seonjo) was very pleased with his bravery. ⁴

Yet, a few hundred years later, blackness was completely reinvented. As social Darwinism became the overarching theme of the Age of Empire, failure to modernize – even if arbitrarily represented in terms of numerous but often conflicting aspects – was juxtaposed with failure of race. As seen above, this well-known theme prevailed in Korea during its precolonial and colonial periods. Yoo Gil-Jun wrote in 1895 that lazy Native Americans (the Reds, in his words) do not appreciate white civilization, and the blacks do not know how to use their natural resources and would be extinct soon; these racial others were imagined as losing races and used as warning signs to Koreans (Yoo, 1895). In the same vein, it was written in Dongnipsinmun that ‘the blacks are stupider than the Eastern race and very inferior to the whites’ (Dongnipsinmun, 24 June 1897). With their imagined racial others, Koreans were able to justify their status in the world, as found in Dongnipsinmun, that ‘Korea and China … have become semi-enlightened, but Africa and the rest still cannot escape from savagery’ (Dongnipsinmun, 19 February 1898). An article from 11 September 1899 summarizes the racial tone of the newspaper well:

Human beings have five races. … First is Mongolian, second is Caucasian, third is African, fourth is Malay, and fifth is American. … If we see those five races, they are the same human beings in this world in spite of their complexions and appearances. All have joy, love, and hatred. However, some races are with much knowledge and asset and are thus treated with respect everywhere, while some races have no knowledge and talent and are thus treated with contempt. … There are also many nations, such as a savage nation, a pre-enlightened nation, a half-enlightened nation, and a fully enlightened nation. A savage nation, so-called the worst, has no knowledge and thus cannot live like humans. … Koreans fall into yellows. … Although we have roughly explained, blacks and reds are no less than human beings. However, there is no good to talk about them. Also, savage and pre-enlightened nations are no less than nations but it is no good to talk about them either. However, since Koreans are yellows in the East, thus not a bad race at all, let’s become an upper nation among the East and West. (Dongnipsinmun, 11 September 1899)

Constructing identity might be impossible without the sense of otherness. However, establishing racial hierarchy was unprecedented in Korea. While they often racially compared Koreans to Japanese and Chinese as types of yellows, the construction of imaginary blackness provided racial identity with semi-enlightened status. As much as they strove to emulate the West, however selectively, their image of racial others was crucial to how they understood the world. Thus, falling into the same status as the blacks and reds was the thing they would least like to see in the future. As it became inevitable that Korea would fall into the hands of the Japanese Empire, in an article titled ‘Look Back at Your Home Country’, appearing in a Korean newspaper in Russia, it was written: ‘how mortifying it is that we could gradually become extinct, like American reds and African blacks’ (Haejosinmun, 17 March 1908). While they were surrounded by strong colonial powers, they had a voluntary understanding of the world rather than a passive response to the colonial rules of difference.

Therefore, it is necessary to take this precolonial cultural familiarization of the yet-to-be-colonized into consideration when studying Koreans under the Japanese colonial regime. Regarding that period, studies have revealed that ‘almost the same, but not white’ (Bhabha, 1994: 127) was also the foundational colonial discourse of the Japanese Empire. However, one subtle difference was that they had to invent differences within race, since appealing to yellowness was also pivotal in their assimilation policy. The regime thus invented subtle racial differences and justified their legitimacy – almost the same yellow, but not pure yellow. Mizokubyo (ethnic-racial disease, 民族病) on Korean women’s fertility (Park, 2009) and the discourse on hygiene and sanitization (Henry, 2005) reflect how differentiating colonial discourses prevailed in various aspects of life in colonial Korea. While these studies explain the capricious but ironically systemic characteristics of the discourse on modernity, mimicry and ambiguity in the Japanese Empire, analysis of the racial dyad between Japanese and Koreans is limited.

Falling into the hands of the Japanese Empire meant assuming the same low status as the colonized blacks (and reds), which could stigmatize Koreans as a race that should become extinct. Therefore, they might have embraced blackness, as they realized the absurdity of their own racial hierarchy. Though this is a much-limited aspect, anti-blackness does not seem to disappear completely. Describing racial violence in the US, it was written in Maeilsinbo that ‘Even whites in the US who advocate philanthropy and benevolence are annoyed by a black face’ (Maeilsinbo, 19 August 1931); racial inferiority was thusly justified. In other words, while most Koreans had not seen blacks, they would have probably been annoyed by a black face. Further, asking why a face turns red when one feels ashamed, it was also written that ‘blacks have no sense of shame’ (Maeilsinbo, 30 October 1932).

Beyond admitting the existence of racial bashing, it is necessary to investigate how a lingering (or reconstructed) image of blackness under colonialism still gave them hope of independence from the Japanese Empire. As opposed to blacks or racial others who had been hopeless without any glorious history, they could claim the possibility to become independent and regain their glory. In 1914, a few years after colonization, An Yeongchan (a colleague of the first Korean President, Rhee Syngman) wrote in Gungminbo (a Korean newspaper in Hawaii):

Oh, my people! Oh, my brothers and sisters! Stop your duty if you want to follow the trace of the American reds. Stop your duty if you want to follow the footsteps of the African blacks. Stop your duty if you want to be a slave of Japs (Waenom) for good. Fulfill your duty if you want to recover samhan. ⁵ Fulfill your duty if you want to rebuild Joseon. Fulfill your duty if you want to become a robust race of a prosperous nation. (Ahn, 1914)

Despite their colonized status, Korea was seen as a sacred country with a history of 5000 years of speaking the same language, different from barbaric and ignorant African or American blacks (Bungmisibo, 15 August 1944).

Certainly, the racial ideology of yellow over black was not monolithic, as can be seen from other cultural aspects of the Age of Empire. It was arbitrary and thus challenged and negotiated as well. Though detailed studies are required, we assume that the agency of Koreans under the Japanese colonial regime would have been different without their justification of racial hierarchy. Subsequently, we conjecture that Koreans’ precolonial and colonial cultural familiarization partially shaped the dynamics of the Japanese Empire. If racial hierarchy and blackness was pivotal in establishing Korean nationalism and the idea of haminjok, then we should no longer treat Koreans as racially empty.

Though it might be redundant, I now revisit the two implicit assumptions of the study of race and empire. As the stories above reveal, anti-blackness (or racism) is still possible without a collective racial encounter. Further, as the colonizer created imagined racial lines before and during both Western and Eastern colonialism, the precolonial cultural familiarization of the yet-to-be colonized could also be quite meaningful. Integrating these aspects would be complicated but necessary if the goal of the study of race and empire is to escape from a narrow theoretical framework and adopt a ‘global’ perspective.

Conclusion

This is certainly not a complete picture of the history of race in Korea; I have not attempted to create one. While further studies would reveal more racial or anti-racial ideas held during that period, I have demonstrated how the existing theoretical framework of the study of race and empire has limited its perspective by sketchy historical examples from Korea in the Age of Empire.

Regardless of the term by which we call the present world, it has certainly brought into being a new politics of race. Some parts of the world have become racialized, and this newly racialized world has led to global-scale racism. Thus, with the emergence of unprecedented, collective racial contacts and globalized racial media (which can sometimes be as powerful as physical contacts), it is assumed in the study of race that racial rupture exists among those people. The Korean racial context differs from that of the obvious racial world, like the US, where it feeds on ‘black death’. However, the racial uniqueness of the US cannot justify the assumption that racism presupposes collective racial contacts. I have demonstrated how Koreans constructed blackness in the Age of Empire without collective racial contacts and how race became pivotal in their identity and colonial agency. How the new politics of race has been appropriated by those ‘newly racialized people’ is certainly contingent on their history of race.

As is aptly argued in the study of empire, how universal claims and principles were bound by particularistic assertions is directly related to how the European empire created boundaries that were challenged and negotiated (and thus fluid). While its lingering cultural–philosophical scheme has been significantly challenged through the study of empire and postcolonial arguments, the implicit assumption that the imaginary creation of difference was significant only if performed by Western colonizer hinders scholars from delving into how the non-Western colonizer constructed imaginary lines. As the study of empire ironically re-centers the West, the agency of the colonized has been treated as only reactive in nature. In this context, the colonized people of the Japanese Empire have had no place in the study of empire. Unlike the colonial subjects of the European Empire, they were double jeopardized through the universalization of European colonial cultural–philosophical legacies and specifically invented and reinterpreted Japanese colonial legacies. If they are not treated as only responsive, an understanding of how those legacies have been contingent on the precolonial cultural familiarization of the colonized of the Japanese Empire would lead to a new theoretical aspect of the study of empire.