KJ
Reviews
Korea
Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning
Calm
Edited by Donald Kirk and Choe Sang Hun, EunHaeng NaMu (Seoul, South
Korea) 2006, 455pp
Reviewed
by Eric Johnston, in KJ#67
Western writers of the Late Victorian period who passed through Asia
tended to see Japan as, to quote Edward Said, the Exotic Other, a lost
Shangri-La that still held fast to ancient customs and rituals that
had all but disappeared in the rapidly industrializing Western world
yet was, paradoxically, embracing the West. The clearest expressions
of such views were in the works of vagabond traveler and writer Lafcardio
Hearn. Others, especially journalists, provided readers in the parlors
of London, Boston, and New York with tales of an ancient, mysterious
land of highly civilized people who nevertheless were bent on becoming
even more “civilized” by attempting to join the modern (i.e.
Western) world.
Korea was even more mysterious than Japan. Yet unlike the nation of
Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, the culture whose artistic
genius inspired Monet, the Land of the Morning Calm was, by the few
Western writers who passed through, considered to be a malaria and typhoid-infested
backwater that geopolitics had not favored. With China and Tsarist Russia
to the North, Imperial Japan to the West, the world's newest imperial
power in the Pacific, the United States (which had just annexed, and
very bloodily, the Philippines) was knocking on her door. Korea, at
the turn of the 20th century, was seen not as an emerging great power
with an ancient and illustrious past but as a troubled land that was
the flashpoint for regional conflict
On hand to chronicle Korea's struggles with imperialism in its many
forms over the next century would be a wide array of Western, Korean,
and Japanese correspondents. Some, like famed author Jack London, came
in search of adventure and a taste of military glory. Unfortunately
for him, London arrived too late to cover the main battles of the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904-05. Wandering around Seoul with little to do, he ended up
entertaining the city's foreign residents with a reading of his most
famous work, The Call of the Wild.
After Japan colonized Korea in 1910, the journalistic record would,
over the next few decades, be tightly controlled by Japanese censors,
further contributing to Korea's sense of isolation from the outside
world. That would begin to change after the Second World War, especially
by the correspondents who covered the Korean War (1950-1953). Men like
Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News and Bill Shinn of Associated
Press, and a very few women like Maggie Higgins of the New York
Herald Tribune, put their lives on the line to report a conflict
few in the West were interested in, while Max Desfor of Associated Press
would win a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for his haunting photograph of panicked
refugees in Pyongyang.
The bulk of Korea Witness deals with the Korean War and the
U.S.-backed military dictatorship in South Korea that followed it. Korean
correspondents like K.C. Hwang, Shim Jae Hoon, and Paul Shin, all who
worked for the foreign media, incurred the wrath of a succession of
military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, often reporting at great
personal risk. It was they, and a few Western correspondents, who managed
to tell the outside world about the uprising in Gwangju in May, 1980,
which was brutally suppressed by the South Korean army a week later
after over 200 had been killed and 2,400 had been injured.
The majority of the reports focus on the tragedy and violence that marked
so much of 20th century Korea, both North and South.
But admiration for the courage and resilience of ordinary Koreans also
comes through. By the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Koreans were starting
to shake off their troubled past.
Ex-New York Times Tokyo bureau chief Henry Scott-Stokes marvels
at how much Seoul has changed since the 1980s, and how strong the people
are, with woman in growing positions of political power and an economy
that was vibrant enough to recover from the Asian financial crisis of
1997.
Yet if South Korea is no longer the mystery it was in Jack London's
day, North Korea remains the Hermit Kingdom. Western correspondents
rarely manage to gain much access to North Korea, but the late president
Kim Il Sung did grant a three and a half hour interview to 20 foreign
journalists just three months before he died in 1994. Other reports
from North Korea in Korea Witness filed at this time offer glimpses
into life just after the Cold War. That such reports still, more than
13 years later, are among the relatively few detailed, independent accounts
the world has about North Korea is a tragedy.
The correspondents who contributed and those whose dispatches are reprinted,
include 20th century's most famous Asian foreign correspondents. Many
of the witnesses to Korea's postwar history are still living in South
Korea, Japan, or the United States. Those with an interest in both modern
Asian history and journalism will be enthralled by their stories.
However, in their desire to let the writers tell their stories, the
editors admit to editing with a light hand. This arrangement surely
pleased the writers and convinced them to share their stories and memories.
Thus, while readers with a good grasp of 20th century East Asian history
may not mind the more detailed insider type stories, more in the way
of background and overview would have given the book the wider audience,
one beyond Asia hands and experts, which it very much deserves.
Copyright
held by the author
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