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Choosing to Collaborate: Yi Kwang-su and the Moral
Subject in Colonial Korea
John Whittier Treat
The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 71 / Issue 01 / February 2012, pp 81 – 102
DOI: 10.1017/S0021911811002956, Published online: 16 February 2012
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021911811002956
How to cite this article:
John Whittier Treat (2012). Choosing to Collaborate: Yi Kwang-su and the Moral Subject in
Colonial Korea. The Journal of Asian Studies, 71, pp 81-102 doi:10.1017/S0021911811002956
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Choosing to Collaborate: Yi Kwang-su and the Moral
Subject in Colonial Korea
JOHN WHITTIER TREAT
Today historians hesitate to judge collaborators with the Axis powers in World
War II, citing the impossibility of putting oneself in the often untenable position
collaborators found themselves. Nonetheless, contemporary moral philosophy
continues to ponder the ethical choice of complicity versus resistance. Yi
Kwang-su (1892–1950?), Korea’s most distinguished modern novelist as well
as one of its more notorious pro-Japanese partisans during the colonial period,
offers a compelling test case for how we might attempt to not only understand,
but also morally adjudicate, his support of Japan’s occupation of his country.
With the ongoing debate over collaboration with the German Reich in mind, I
contend that the case of colonial Korea presents us with important first-order
ethical issues to resolve.
WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION of Palestinian society under Israeli control,
nowhere is the collaboration of an occupied people with its rulers an
issue of greater moment today than in the Republic of Korea. Although more
than half a century has passed since Japan was forced to abandon its designs
for the peninsula, charges of past collaboration with the Empire (tae-il hyo˘mnyo
˘k) continue to be aired in both the Korean press and the National Assembly.
“No matter what problem arises in Korean society,” wrote one historian in 1997,
“it is never unrelated to the question of collaboration” (Kim Pongu, quoted in De
Ceuster 2002, 207). Koreans note that a thorough accounting of pro-Japanese
collaboration (ch’inil ch’o˘ngsan) with the Japanese regime was made neither at
the time of Liberation in 1945 nor afterwards, and that this remains the most
important part of the movement dedicated to “cleansing the past” (kwago˘ ch’o˘ngsan)
in general. While the reason for this lacuna is usually said to be political,
alternatives would have to include the insufficiently nuanced historiography we
possess of twentieth-century collaboration not only in Korea but worldwide.
The journey of our current discourse of “colonial modernity” from South Asia
(Chakrabarty 1993) through East Asia in general (Barlow 1997) to Korea in particular
(Shin 1999) means that students of Japan’s history in the peninsula no
longer easily speak of collaboration as a personal moral failure, but instead as a
John Whittier Treat (john.treat@yale.edu) is Professor in East Asian Languages and Literatures and Chair of
LGBT Studies at Yale University
The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 71, No. 1 (February) 2012: 81–102.
© The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2012 doi:10.1017/S0021911811002956
structural feature of modernity in that colonial world (K. H. Kim 2004). But this
advance in our understanding does foreclose an analysis of just that feature with
the tools of ethical theories that have evolved cognizant of an incomplete
“accounting” of Europe’s own history of wartime collaboration.
This essay will be an attempt to suggest certain lines along which a posterior
ethical review of those histories of collaboration might proceed. It may strike
some as gratuitous to append an ethical test of the actors to an historical narrative,
but in fact sketching a historical narrative is simply my means of reaching that
test. “Historians must legitimately ask how the moral subject that collaboration
presupposes was fashioned,” writes Timothy Brook in his book on that topic in
wartime China; but he is naive to warn we mustn’t “retrospectively judge that
subject’s acts.” Brook is in good company, since we have largely discarded the
moral binarism of “collaboration” versus “resistance” and replaced it with, in
Primo Levi’s famous phrase that has traveled far, the “gray zone” of lived circumstances
we cannot empathetically inhabit, and therefore must hesitate to judge.
“[M]oral judgment,” Levi awarded, “ . . . is a judgment that we would like to
entrust only to those who found themselves in similar circumstances and had
the opportunity to test for themselves what it means to act in a state of coercion”
(1989, 44). But inevitably we do judge, because we instinctively put ourselves in
the place of those we study, and ought to do so. “The argument that we cannot
judge if we were not present and involved ourselves,” wrote Hannah Arendt,
“seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if
that were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history
would ever be possible” (1963, 295–96).
Brook himself observes “every culture tags collaboration as moral failure”
(2005, 4–5). That this is a “moral universal” may flow from the fact that it is tautological:
where “collaboration” in history produced happy results—Indian independence,
for example, or liberal democracy in Japan—we use other language
(“Gandhi co-operated with the British,” or “The Japanese bureaucracy assisted
GHQ policymakers”). Brook is certainly right to rethink our reflexive moral reaction
to collaboration, but there is no way to do that and not, finally, retrospectively
judge the dramatis personae in history both felicitous and otherwise.
Brook asks us to consider the important question of why collaboration made
sense to so many people (2005, 245). My version of the same query is: What was
the moral calculus with which the Korean intelligentsia calculated the potential
good that might remain after subtracting the near-certain harm generated by
serving as the agents—the collaborators—of a foreign power? It might be
natural to look for these answers among the business, political, police and
bureaucratic elites of colonial Korea, and others have done so. But here I look
for the answer in the writings of Korea’s most prominent modern novelist, Yi
Kwang-su (1892–1950?), who not only wrote copiously during the Japanese interregnum
but also left us, after Liberation, with a defense of his infamous collaboration
that invites a rereading today in light of new approaches to colonial
82 John Whittier Treat
collusion. I will begin, however, with two other novelists, one French and the
other American.
Jean-Paul Sartre published “What is a Collaborator” (Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?)
just as hostilities were ending in northeast Asia in August 1945. Occasioned
by the restored Third Republic’s trial of a number of actively pro-German
French intellectuals, including the writer Robert Brasillach (1909–45), Sartre’s
essay speculates on why some of us will choose to work, and with zeal, for an
occupying authority.
Sartre declares collaborators to be a small minority of people, but a minority
nonetheless found everywhere, just as crime and suicide (phenomena he likens to
collaboration) are also everywhere. In ordinary times collaborators remain
“latent,” perhaps unknown even to themselves. But in wartime their treason
emerges “like a disease.” This is never accidental: collaboration operates logically
and predictably, and according to “certain social and psychological laws” (1949,
44).
In the first part of his essay Sartre turns to the “social laws” that produce the
collaborator. It is important to note that there is nothing inherently ideological in
collaboration for Sartre. Indeed, there is no such thing as “collaboration” for
Sartre, only “collaborators,” who are an existential-psychological “type.” He
does not conflate, as have others, the category of “fascist” with that of “collaborator.”
Rather, Sartre broadly equates his collaborateur with the “outsider,” be he
from the marginal fringe of a mainstream political party; a bourgeoisie who
detests the class he comes from but is too cowardly to join with the proletariat;
a failed journalist, artist or educator; an “anarchist of the right” who never reconciled
with the reality of a republican France; or those, like some higher Catholic
clergy, who were already accustomed to obeying a foreign authority (for example,
the Vatican).
But this is merely a prelude to what truly interests Sartre, namely the psychology
and not the social milieu of the collaborator. His essay is best known
for its association of collaboration with homosexuality and masochism. The
French collaborator, always gendered male in Sartre’s scenario, effeminately
seeks to seduce the masculinized German invader; and the collaborator not
only needs but finds pleasure in the hatred borne him by patriotic countrymen.
This pathologization of collaboration is the lasting legacy of Sartre’s “What is a
Collaborator?” and its arguments stubbornly remain in circulation.1
Less well known in Sartre’s essay, but more useful to us in speaking of colonial
Korea (if still related to the pathologization of treason), is what he refers to as the
“realism” (réalisme) of the collaborator. No collaborator, Sartre claims, ever
doubted the longevity of Nazi rule. If they had thought imprisonment or
execution by 1945 were likely or even remotely possible, who among them
1See, for example, Alice Kaplan’s reference to novelist Jean-Louis Bory’s 1976 comments on the
supposed “homosexual collaborationist milieu in occupied Paris” (2000, 7–8).
Choosing to Collaborate 83
would have chosen to collaborate? In the mind of the collaborator German
hegemony was inevitable, even desirable, simply because it had happened.
An odd kind of historicism, what Sartre terms a “false Hegelianism” (hégélianisme
mal), dictated that the fait accompli of June 1940 had to be regarded as
“progress,” however unsavory. They believed, according to Sartre, that “The
most recent historical event is the best simply because it is the most recent”
(1949, 53). That this is not an intellectual conviction, but rather the expression
of a psychological propensity, effectively removes the history of collaboration
from history and renders it inconsequentially clinical. One goal of my larger
project is to argue that collaboration around the world needs to be detached
from idiosyncrasy and restored to our account of how modern citizenship was
fashioned.
This “passivity” (sexual, intellectual) that Sartre made the hallmark of his
diagnosis of the collaborator, this surrender to a Hegelian inevitability, is also
one part of the story told of Korean collaboration with the Japanese from the
peninsula’s formal annexation in 1910 to the liberation in 1945 that came with
the American defeat of Japan in the Pacific. But it is a small part. While
echoes of the Sartrean disease-model of the collaborator can be heard in
Korea (Yi Kwang-su’s pro-Japanese behavior, for example, has been blamed on
a nervous breakdown, or on his need for a father figure to replace the real one
he lost at age eleven [Kawamura 1989]), far more frequent is the charge that
Korean writers who collaborated did so not out of self-interest or ambition—
never the case, says Sartre, of collaborators in general—but out of a conviction
that absorption into the Japanese empire was both historically necessary and beneficial
for the Korean people. That position now seems absurd to us, but it might
not have at the time. Collaboration was not quite the shibboleth it has since
become, and our first task is to recreate not just the political stakes but the cultural
ideals of that era.
Almost half a century before Marshal Pétain stood beside Hitler in 1940 and,
in subsequently announcing a grand “collaboration” between their two countries,
forever altered the meaning of that word, Henry James published a short story
with the same title. James chooses for his narrator in “Collaboration” (1892) an
American painter with little talent but who hosts a popular Sunday salon in his
Paris studio. These soirees are “as international as only Parisian air can be.”
They are attended by guests American, French and German in nationality but
united by a devotion to the international cosmopolis of art and its appreciation.
One evening an argument breaks out over the merits of literature in England,
to which one of the painter’s young French friends, a poet and playwright
named Félix Vendemer, reacts vehemently. “I don’t know what is meant by
French art and English art and American art,” he says. “Art is in every
country,” and the novel “is the novel” everywhere. There is only one country
worth living in, he tells his American host, and that is “the land of dreams—
the country of art” (1996, 242).
84 John Whittier Treat
Vendemer has an opportunity to make his point when he hears that evening a
young German composer play several of his compositions on the piano. This
same composer, Herman Heidenmauer, is equally impressed by Vendemer
after reading a book of his poems lent him by our painter-narrator. In the next
few days the two men warily approach each other via the offices of their
mutual American friend. Finally, all three together one night in the studio, the
German makes a bold proposal to the Frenchman: let us collaborate on an
opera. Your words are a perfect match for my music.
There is, however, a personal cost for both men in undertaking this project.
Vendemer is engaged to a French girl whose father, grandfather and uncle
were all killed by Germans at Sedan in 1870. Collaborating with one of the
detested enemy will mean having to give up his fiancée, whose mother
would never allow such a thing. For Heidenmauer’s part, working with a
Frenchman—“an unnatural alliance,” “an unholy union” in the view of so
many of his countrymen—will cost him at the very least the stipend his proud
German family provides him. But these two men are in love with something
greater than either a woman or a nation: “les femmes,” they conclude, have a
“mortal hatred of art,” while “the hideous invention of patriotism,” though
“a clever invention in its time,” is now nothing more “but a fifth-rate impertinence”
standing in the way of two like-minded artists.
Vendemer explains: “In art there are no countries—no idiotic nationalities,
no frontiers, nor douanes, nor still more idiotic fortresses and bayonets. It has
the unspeakable beauty of being the region in which those abominations cease,
the medium in which such vulgarities simply can’t live” (1996, 250). So convinced,
the poet and the composer leave Paris and move to the Italian Riviera,
“where sunshine is cheap and tobacco bad, and they live (the two together) for
five francs day, which is all they can muster between them” (1996, 253).
James’ story ends with their joint labors on the opera in progress and with the
painter-narrator, pleased with what he has brokered, exclaiming how “mighty”
art is. There is no irony in Henry James’ year of 1892: the long history of wars
that divided the nations of Europe is easily, effortlessly, discarded through an
act of defiance by denizens of a new, international empire of aesthetics.
We have in this dated story a succinct expression of what “collaboration” progressively
came to mean in the West during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. James himself would participate in the writing of a collaborative
novel published in 1908 (Howells et al. 1986); T. S. Eliot would make literary collaboration
in its broadest sense his major critical project for his lifetime; and in
even a much narrower definition, it has been said, for instance, that “Twentiethcentury
American literature is largely a history of collaboration” (Inge 2001, 625).
But literature aside, we have a specific political history to attend to. Against the
backdrop of a burgeoning nationalism not only in Europe but elsewhere, there
emerged the modern ideology of an aesthetic realm (and with it its own notion
of “citizenship” and concomitant loyalties) that could, should, and did transcend
Choosing to Collaborate 85
it. That “art” possessed no country was only one of many modern postulates
(capitalism lacked for frontiers as well) promulgated not so much in contradiction
as in structural counterpoint to nationalist ideology. Even as different regions of
the world developed their respective mechanisms of state-building and national
identity, few of those regions could have done so without ideas that crossed
borders and retained consistent integrity despite often unique application.
When Andre Schmid notes that “Korean nationalists and Japanese colonialists
shared much in the way of conceptual vocabulary, themes in cultural representation,
and narrative strategies” (2002, 102), he supplies proof of Prasenjit
Duara’s argument that “the East Asian modern is a regional mediation of the
global circulation of the practices and discourses of the modern” (2003, 2).
This is where “collaboration,” and not just the artistic kind, comes into historical
view. When poet, literary historian and future pro-Japanese collaborator
Paek Ch’o˘ l (1908–85) published his “Kokkyo¯ o koete” (Crossing the border) in
1931, his poem about a communist smuggling himself across the Yalu back
into Korea from Soviet Russia while thinking of his comrades in Moscow, he
was also writing a poem about “overcoming” (koeru) borders, a community of
committed proletarians with national identities but international allegiances
(1931). This is all the more true in the so-called world “periphery,” where modernization
occurred in some kind of attenuated, serial order: in East Asia, Japan
first and only then its clients. To quote Timothy Brook once more, “Under late
(and even post-) colonialism, all nationalisms are collaborative in some
measure. . . The surrounding presence of the world system means that no
nation can be fully autonomous” (2000, 188). One can say that on the Korean
peninsula not only before the 1910 Annexation but well afterwards, collaboration
between Korean and Japanese intellectuals, specifically writers, partook of a
similar utopian desire for a cross-straits community of artists excused from the
inconveniences of national histories. Since the early Meiji period, and continuing
to the present day, generations of Koreans in all fields from the sciences to the
fine arts, impressed by Japan’s preternatural modernization, have traveled to
the archipelago to associate—collaborate—with their Japanese counterparts.
From the start, Fukuzawa Yukichi had Korean students living in his house. It
is key for us to keep in mind that there are two histories of collaboration—the
pedagogic and the political. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in
1802 a collaborator meant a student who assisted less academically prepared
peers, and this sense of the word lasted well into the twentieth century and
even, in the current practice of “hip hop collabo in Seoul and Tokyo,” today.
Artistic collaboration has many examples in the formation of modernity. I
have already mentioned Eliot, whose work with Pound on The Waste Land is
well known, but there were also the French Impressionists such as Monet,
Bazille, Renior and Sisley working together in the mid-nineteenth century; the
Rye Circle at the turn of the twentieth in the United States included Joseph
Conrad and Ford Madox Ford; and Sigmund Freud’s collaboration with
86 John Whittier Treat
Wilhelm Fleiss around the same time. In twentieth-century Japan there was the
once rich tradition of the kyo¯do¯ seisaku ‘collaborative work’ among Proletarian
and early Modernist writers (Schimmel 2006, 272–342). It is important to
remember that these collaborations were almost never horizontal—there was
typically a hierarchy of age or talent that structured the collaboration in terms
of benign domination and submission. In the case of Korean and Japanese intellectuals,
of course, such subordination could have its baneful consequences, but
it was not always so.
When literary historians in Korean say that colonialism is the defining factor
in their country’s modern fiction and poetry, that is akin to saying that Japanese
literature, already recognizably “modern,” was the single most important influence
on their own literary experimentation. As Lu Xun said, one might hate
Japan, but it is still the point of access to the literature of theWest. Anti- and pro-
Japanese writers alike in Korea’s colonial period owed a profound debt to Japanese
literature and criticism, which they could avail themselves of in the peninsula’s
major cities, and to Japanese writers and scholars, whom they met
occasionally in Korea but more often in Japan itself, where so many resided at
some point in their lives (Yi 1932, 207).
Yi Kwang-su, the oldest and best known of this generation of writers, was only
thirteen years old in 1905, just months before Korea became a protectorate of
Japan, when he was sent to Japan to study for five years. He ended his first Japanese
sojourn as his country was ignominiously annexed in 1910. In Tokyo, beginning
in 1907 as a third-year student at middle school, Yi read deeply in Kunikida
Doppo, Tokutomi Roka, Natsume So¯ seki and many other Japanese and Western
writers. He bought I Ama Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905–06) with his own
money, of which he had very little, and as a student at Waseda was reading more
So¯ seki while working on what would be proclaimed Korea’s first modern novel,
his 1917 Heartless (Mujo˘ng). If Japan’s best novelist was Yi’s distal literary
mentor, the equally important Kobayashi Hideo would be his critical one.
Years later, at the height of his pro-Japanese activities, Yi would write a public
letter to Kobayashi—accurately described by Kim So˘k-po˘m after the war as
one penned “in the language of a slave” (1993, 49)—that even Kobayashi
himself found too embarrassingly sycophantic to bother responding to. (“Let
us push forward,” Yi wrote as Kayama Mitsuro¯ , the Japanese name he had
been using for at least two years before mandated by colonial officialdom. “Let
us of our own accord discard all things Korean and become Japanese”
[Kayama 2002, 137]). But my points are that the trajectory of modern Korean
literature for better or worse cannot be traced without reference to Japan’s
own, that Yi was only the first of many writers to find his literary and intellectual
home in the Japanese colonial metropole, and that artistic collaboration so often
led to political.
Be it in the cause of proletarian internationalism or a Modernist doctrine of
“art for art’s sake,” Korean and Japanese writers alike were engaged jointly in
Choosing to Collaborate 87
producing literary modernity. The “collaboration,” in other words, might not have
resulted in any works or essays with dual authorship, à la Vendemer and Heidenmauer,
but it did produce a body of work, in both places, in the first half of the
twentieth century that strove in tandem for cognates Japanese kindai and Korean
ku˘ ndae ‘modern’: a goal that became politically and catastrophically collaborationist
when that word was metonymically exchanged (this time in the Japanese
language alone) for the racialist category of Nihonjin ‘Japanese.’ But as Namiki
Masato has pointed out, collaboration with Japan (tai-Nichi kyo¯roku) was “precisely
the site where so many Koreans in the colonial period came into concrete
contact with modernity” (1999, 113–14).
It has been argued that collaboration is a fundamental condition of the
modern, and for both better and worse. Milan Kundera deigned the word important
enough to include in his list of sixty-three terms that all of his translators
must understand:
[I]n the course of the war against Nazism, the word “collaboration” took
on a new meaning: putting oneself voluntarily at the service of a vile
power. What a fundamental notion! However did humanity do without
it until 1944? Now that the word has been found, we realize more and
more that man’s activity is by nature a collaboration. All those who
extol the mass media din, advertising’s imbecilic smile, the neglect of
the natural world, indiscretion raised to the status of a virtue—they
deserve to be called “collaborators with modernity.” (1987, 125–26)
Kundera’s deserved sarcasm aside, the collaboration he bemoans is of
course so omnipresent because it is part of the architecture with which we
built the modern world. In an essay that contends the public sphere in colonial
Korea was created precisely where “everyday resistance and collaboration
met,” historian Yun Hae-dong notes that “As Japan pursued imperial policies
of assimilation, the Empire variously attempted to construct a Korean
collaborationist system and were able to make collaboration by Koreans
both structural and normative” (2002, 137). This is part of why men such as
Yi could have been nationalists before—and at the same time—they were collaborators.
(One might have concluded, after all, that the best deal for a future
Korea lay in allying with the Japanese.) Nonetheless, Yi is rebuked today for
campaigning for two particularly onerous Japanese colonial policies: the effective
abolition of the Korean language, and the induction of Korean youth (first
as volunteers beginning in 1942 and then conscripts in 1944) into the Imperial
Army. Yi made the adoption of Japanese the foundation of Korea’s future; in
his “Naisen ittai tsuiso¯ roku” (Reflections on the unity of Japan and Korea,
1941), he declares “The number one prerequisite for our imperial subjectification
[ko¯minka] is learning Japanese [kokugo]” (Kayama 2002, 127). In 1940 he
wrote the following:
88 John Whittier Treat
. . . To put it plainly enough that Koreans will understand, they must
forget the fact that they are Koreans. There is no need ever to recall
it. I used to think that for Koreans to assimilate [do¯ka] it would be
enough for us to be Japanese subjects [shinmin]. But now I’ve come to
believe Koreans need to completely forget that that is what they are.
Now Koreans need their very flesh and blood and bones to become
Japanese. This is the only way for Koreans to preserve their existence.
(Yi, quoted in S. Kim 1993, 48)
Yi, like other collaborators, believed in the eradication of the Korean
language. (He was among the very first Koreans to officially take a Japanese
name, declaring in the Maeil sinbo (Daily News) in 1940 his reason to be that
“I am a subject of the Emperor. My descendents, too, will live their lives as subjects
of the Emperor” [Kayama 1940]). His argument, worthy of the most
extreme ideologue, was that Koreans must use the Japanese language because
the Japanese emperor does so. If collaboration with the Nazis finally turned on
what one said about, or did to, the Jews in Europe, then in Korea the decisive
issue dividing those who collaborated and those who did not may have been
the question not of the survival of a people themselves, but rather their language.
Yi, like other intellectuals of his day, “universalized” the Japanese language, saw it
as a “world language” (sekaigo) whereas Korean was merely Korea’s alone, and
therefore a hindrance to the international advancement of Korea’s culture.
More importantly, he identified the Japanese language with the Japanese
“spirit” (seishin), just as he collapsed Korean and Japanese ethnicities by parroting
the colonial claim of a common descent from a mythical Ur-race of Northeast
Asian peoples (do¯ so¯ron).
Yi Kwang-su also made prominent statements in favor of Korean participation
in the armed forces. On November 14, 1943, over three thousand
Koreans gathered at Meiji Gakuin in Tokyo to hear Yi urge them to volunteer;
and in an issue of Samch’o˘ lli in July, 1940, he pleaded in Korean: “Mothers, do
you have sons? If so, let them enlist. Are your sons important to you? Then
that is precisely why you must make them go. Is he your only son? Even so,
make him go” (1986, 88).
Yi Kwang-su would be damned by postwar history for making such outrageous
statements, and there were consequences. Taken (nappuk) to Pyongyang
during the first, three-month North Korean occupation of Seoul in the summer
of 1950, the details of his suspected death soon thereafter are not known for
certain. If he died of other than natural causes, it was no doubt due to extremely
pro-Japanese writings and behavior all the more humiliating to Koreans because
of his earlier, unassailable reputation as the creator of Korea’s first modern novel.
Yi’s collaboration was so extreme—he bowed each morning in the direction
of the imperial palace in Tokyo, and displayed the Japanese flag over his desk—
that he is quite nearly a caricature of the enthused convert to “Nihonism.” But I
Choosing to Collaborate 89
would like to suggest another way to regard Yi’s collaboration, one that brings us
back to the relationship between it and modernity. It is plausible to believe Yi’s
sympathies for and with the Japanese were genuine and not insincere or expedient.
Yi, like many others, had trouble reconciling Korean nationalism with modernity.
The former was regarded widely as native; the other, imported. But Yi
thought he had a solution. At some point in his thinking, his life-long dedication
to the enlightenment of the Korean people via their modernization, a project to
be accomplished via collaboration with the Japanese in their mutual pursuit of
the “modern,” shifted rhetorically from being like the Japanese to literally
being Japanese. Collaboration with Japan, specifically collaboration with its culturally
genocidal “Naisen ittai” policies, was effectively collaboration with an instrumentality
and not an end. The March First Movement defeated, and the prospect
of Korean independence receding into the realm of science fiction, “being
Japanese” in Korea became the only means to be “modern.”
I am not offering an apology for collaboration, nor do I mean to decisively
differentiate European from East Asian collaboration. In fact, I am tempted to
attribute to the ideology of the twentieth-century Japanese empire a lesson
learned earlier: in the history of Jews in eighteenth-century France. With the
French Enlightenment came the assumption that citizens of a state must be
the same in order to be treated the same. After the French Revolution, the
late historian Arthur Hertzberg writes, Jewish leaders “believed almost unanimously
that the complete regeneration of the mass of Jews required the end of
their autonomy and their complete assimilation into French society” (1968, 8).
Hertzberg goes on to note how in time “all parts of the Jewish community
became, to varying degrees, at home in the French language,” and that all
this was in accordance with the principles of the Revolution, namely that all
special status and exemption be abolished. The social contract could be
extended only as far as the isomorphism of its “signatories”—and therein, of
course, lies the rub.
But, having accepted, and even having helped create, the new premise
that the Jews ought to be admitted into society, theologians and economists
had agreed without any doubt that they were accepting not of the
concretely existing one, but of some new Jew that they would remake,
or who would remake himself, in the image of what they thought he
ought to be. There was a price on the Jew’s ticket of admission into
society. (1968, 138, 192, 266)
A related assumption certainly seems to have been at work in the modern
Japanese empire. In his 1938 best-selling polemic (one of Korea’s infamous
“three great pro-Japanese tracts”), Cho¯ senjin no susumu beki michi (The road
before the Koreans), Hyo˘n Yo˘ng-so˘p (1907-??) insisted repeatedly that that
road was simply “Nihonjin to naru michi”—the road of becoming Japanese.
90 John Whittier Treat
This passion for conversion approaches what Henry James’ brother William
described in terms of religious epiphany, defining conversion as “the process,
gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong,
inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior and
happy. . .” (2002, 150). And of course, once a Korean becomes a Japanese, collaboration
and its associated moral morass recede as an issue—how does one collaborate
with oneself?
What this proposes to me is that our analysis of collaboration must call on the
scrutiny of moral reasoning. There is, of course, a moral postulate driving Yi’s
desire to see Koreans treated without prejudice by the Japanese, and in the position
that equality presupposes identity. There is also a line of calculatedly
pseudo-Darwinian ethics in Yi’s writings. But there is also another line of
moral thinking which some have applied since 1945 in judging the actions of collaborators,
and it will be inflected by the knowledge we now have of the results—
ethical and otherwise—of decisions made a priori.
The origins of Yi’s predisposition towards the Japanese and collaboration with
them has a number of supposed starting points: from, at the latest, his involvement
in the Tong’uhoe Incident of June 1937 (when he is alleged to have
agreed to collaborate in the hope of securing the release of dozens of arrested
nationalists); to the 1922 publication of his controversial critique of Korean
national character, “Minjok kaejoron” (On the reconstruction of the nation); to
even his experience in 1903, at age twelve, of seeing Japanese troops push
back even more brutal Russian ones in the Russo-Japanese War (Hatano 1990,
64–5). What is clear, whatever the chronology, is that among the many ideas
that influenced Yi—Confucianism, Tonghak ideology, Christian humanism, pacifism,
Buddhism, “Nihonism,” Nietzschean political philosophy—social Darwinism
was powerful among them. His intellectual trajectory saw a trust in science
replace a belief in Western monotheism, and a passion for the Nietzchean
worship of the strong displace a disillusionment with the weaker pacifism of
Tolstoyean Christian humanism. By 1922 and his polemic “Minjok kaejoron,”
Yi’s thinking was primed for an accommodation with Japan and its imperial
ambitions.
Yi was not alone in this, of course. Social Darwinism has a long history
throughout East Asia, more complicated than in Europe if only because the
Chinese, Koreans and Japanese typically interpreted social Darwinism from
the point of view of societies—races—rather than individuals. Gi-Wook Shin
has pointed out that in East Asia, it was always “the German version of [Darwinism],
which focused on the collective struggle for existence among nations and
races, rather than the Anglo-American focus on individual capitalist competition”
that influenced Korea (2006, 29). Nonetheless, there is a straight line from
Darwin to Spencer to Edward Sylvester Morse in Japan to his student Yu
Kil-chun (1856–1914) in Korea, where “natural selection” was nativized under
the neologism kyo˘ngjaengnon ‘competition-ism.’
Choosing to Collaborate 91
While studying at Meiji Gakuin and later Waseda (where Ukita Kazutami
[1859–1946], author of the Darwinian Shakaigaku ko¯gi ‘Lectures on Society,’
taught), Yi picked up the same ideas linking social Darwinism with imperialism as
did his classmates, many of whom were reading Taiyo¯, Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, and Nihon
oyobi Nihonjin, magazines that popularized those ideas. It was at this time that
the theme of Korean weakness and deficiency surfacesmore frequently in Yi’s writings.
In his last years, Yi would recall his shame at seeing disheveled, bad-smelling
(sillo naemsae nu˘n koyak hayo˘ tta) Koreans spitting on the floor of the train he was
taking back home after studying in Japan (1964, 194–95). Eventually, his sense of
revulsion would extend to Korea’s historical lack of a literature or art worthy of
the name, indeed of a “civilization” (munmyo˘ng) at all (Nan 2001, 14).
In his study So˘ ul e ttansu˘ hol u˘l ho˘hara (Let There Be Dance Halls in Seoul),
Kim Chin-song places Yi’s pessimism, and his later embrace of Japanese imperialism,
in the following context:
Within the logic of modernization, there typically exist two antonymic
aspects. For intellectuals in pursuit of modernity, whether it was a nationalist
call for the cultivation of ability [sillyo˘k yangso˘ng], or a pro-Japanese
call for that same cultivation of ability, there was the self-conceit of nationalists
who would promote the power of the nation through education and
enlightenment, on the one hand, and on the other an acceptance of
imperialism based on social Darwinism and an internalized national
sense of inferiority that had to accept Western culture. (1999, 116)
Yi was probably, to put the best possible spin on it, a “pro-Japanese nationalist,”
but we need to return to the moral underpinnings of that position. In 1917 he
published an essay entitled “Uso˘n su ga toeko yo˘nhu˘ e in i toera” (First be a
beast, only then a man), in which he took the Nietzschean position that “Morality
is the obligation of the weak to submit to the strong” (Todo˘k u˘n kangja ege
pokjong hanu˘n yakja u˘i u˘ imura) (1962a, 151): “‘Live!’ Insofar as life is the sole
objective of all creatures, there are no moral strictures [todo˘k] against achieving
that goal. There is nothing wrong in a dying man’s stealing the food of another. It
is right [cho˘ngdang] that, rather than die oneself, one should let another die in
one’s place” (1962a, 152).
What this means of course is that the Darwinian assertion that the fittest
survive translates into the dictum that the strong should survive; and so by the
time Yi declares in the Dong-A Ilbo (East Asia Daily) in 1924 that Japan’s occupation
of Korea cannot be reversed by military means (1962b), accommodation
with—and eventually assimilation into—Japan becomes one inevitable
conclusion.2
2Collaborationist rhetoric around the world was informed by the bastardized axioms of evolutionary
biology. A WWII French collaborator, Charles Laville, wrote an article during the war entitled
92 John Whittier Treat
After the war Yi Kwang-su was the most prominent collaborator to write an
autobiography. Yi divorced his wife in the spring of 1946 in order to protect her
property were his own seized, and he embarked upon the life of an ascetic. But
he continued to write, and his 1948 Na u˘ i kobaek (My Confession) was an account
of his career starting with his early nationalist devotion to Korea and ending with
an appendix entitled “A Defense of the Collaborationists” (Ch’inilp’a u˘ i pyo˘n [Yi
1964, 280–87]), a combative defense of his pro-Japanese activities as both necessary
and right.
Under a new law promulgated by South Korea’s National Assembly, he was
arrested on February 7, 1949 for “anti-nationalist activities” and confined to
Mapo Prison. Less than a month later Yi was released ostensibly for health
reasons. The charges against him were dropped in August, not because there
was insufficient evidence to convict, but because the Syngman Rhee regime
was discovering the law under which he was charged inconvenient for many of
its friends. But Yi did not remain at liberty for long. In July 1950, he was
seized by the North Korean People’s Army when it occupied Seoul and was
taken across the parallel.
Despite Yi’s fate, there has been little sympathy expressed in Korea for him as
a collaborator, and the hubris of My Confession is certainly one reason why. At
best its arguments have been called self-serving and hypocritical; at worst, a
“filthy” work the product of a diseased and decadent mind. It is certainly a provocative
rationalization of pro-Japanese conduct that many contemporary Korean
readers surely found appalling. But what matters to us here is that its justifications,
feigned or not, were ones that Yi presumably thought would exculpate
him. My Confession may indeed be “fiction,” but therein we find Yi free to
imagine his ethical dilemma in its purest terms. Then too, looking into the
moral implications of an event in the past is surely different than calculating
the ethical prospects of actions for a future in which consequences can be
reasoned but not known, and that is what makes My Confession useful when
inquiring into the moral calculus, and subsequent sums, of collaboration with
the Japanese empire.
Philosopher Shelly Kagan has put generally what I specifically consider Yi
Kwang-su’s postwar dilemma this way: “But what, then, should we say, if
someone does an act that looks like it will lead to the best results overall—all
the best available evidence supports this belief—but in fact it leads to bad
results overall? Did they do the right act, or didn’t they?” (1998, 64). Kagan’s
answer is that we can be either objective or subjective: that “rightness” is a
matter of the facts as they are, or that whether an act is right or not is a
matter of what the agent (read collaborator) believed them to be: “Those who
“Biology and Collaboration” (Biologie et collaboration) in which he argued that collaborators represented
an advance in human evolution. (Ory 1976, 223)
Choosing to Collaborate 93
conceive of morality as fundamentally a guide to decision making will be drawn to
subjective accounts; those who conceive of morality as offering instead a standard
for evaluating acts, which we may simply fail to get right, will be drawn to objective
accounts” (1998, 65). This is why, I suggest, Yi incensed his readers: unwilling
to read “subjectively,” Yi’s conclusions were so clearly at odds with what, after
1945, were the “objective” facts of colonial collaboration.
What was Yi’s defense? My Confession notes that, as a very young man finishing
middle school in Japan, he turned down admission to one of Japan’s elite
higher schools to return to Korea’s Osan School to teach what he had learned
abroad. Like other nationalist yuhaksaeng ‘foreign students’ of his generation,
Yi writes that he “sacrificed himself for the sake of the nation” (1964, 194).
Decades later, faced with Japanese demands for Korean assistance in the total
war with China, Yi writes that he was forced to sacrifice himself again. By collaborating
he relieved his countrymen of the obligation: “I, by offering myself as a
sacrifice, would be able to preserve freedom [for others]” (Na nu˘ n, na, hana ru˘ l
hu˘ isaeng u˘ rosso˘ i chayu ru˘l ko˘ njil su itta) (1964, 263). Indeed, not many others
could have collaborated to effect—with characteristic hubris, Yi argues Japan
needed a Korean as distinguished as himself to be a prominent defender of
the imperial cause (1963, 332–34).
This is analogous, in fact, to what Marshal Pétain claimed as his defense in his
postwar trial in France. Pétain, one of his nation’s greatest WWI heroes, pled that
he needed to step forward, sacrifice himself, and serve as head of a collaborationist
state in order to save other Frenchmen and, indeed, France itself. This “shield
theory” has been reiterated in the defense of suspect behavior everywhere in the
theater of the World War II, from Albert Speer in Germany to Sukarno in
Indonesia—variations of the alibi Arendt notes was “what all the defendants in
the post-war trials said to excuse themselves”: “[I]f I had not done it, someone
else could and would” (1964, 185).
This argument did not work for Pétain, and it did not work for Yi. Writing in
prison, Yi argued in My Confession that he would happily be convicted of treason,
if that would spare the nation the trauma of massive reprisals for collaboration
committed by “hundreds” (1964, 178) and indeed, in another commonly heard
argument,3 by every Korean who had not gone into exile:
Paying taxes to the Japanese government, registering one’s household,
following the law, flying the rising-sun flag, taking an oath to the
Empire, worshipping at a [Shinto] shrine. . . all this was collaborating
with Japan. Put in the bluntest terms, just staying alive [chukji anko
3Again, Sartre provides us with a French example:
We could not stir an inch, eat or even breath without becoming the accomplices of our
enemy . . . Everything we did was equivocal; we never quite knew whether we were
doing right or doing wrong; a subtle poison corrupted even our best actions. (Quoted
in Bennett 1999, ix)
94 John Whittier Treat
sara innu˘n ko˘t to] was collaboration. Why? If one didn’t collaborate, one
would be dead or imprisoned. (1964, 280)
This argument, however reasonable it may now seem, did not save anyone. The
debate in the immediate aftermath of the war was not over who collaborated—
there was a consensus on that count—but just what to do with them. Speaking of
the French novelist Robert Brasillach, sentenced to death for collaboration with
the Nazis but on whose behalf intellectuals worldwide sought to intercede, de
Gaulle ruled that he had gambled and lost. The modern Korea historian Bruce
Cumings has said something similar of Korea: Korean elites in the 1930s and
1940s flipped their coin in the air, thinking it would land one way, but in 1945
it landed the other (1981, 31).
Yi, however, did not think he was placing a bet. Or rather, he thought he had
them all covered. In the final pages of My Confession, Yi makes the following
case: The reality then was that Japan is strong. Independence for Korea at
present is impossible. The Japanese will steal from us whatever they desire.
But if I agree to collaborate, we will be rewarded with a say in the future of
Japan if it wins its war. Korea will be able to make demands. Those of us who
volunteer as laborers will be treated the better for it. In any case, we can learn
much that is practical by soldiering or working in factories. If we send troops
into their battles, the Japanese will no longer be able to treat us as cruelly as
they do. Discrimination against us will disappear. If Japan wins, we’ll have
equal rights with the Japanese. Having collaborated will not incur any harm
that wouldn’t have occurred anyway. And we’ll be one step closer to eventual
independence.
But if Japan loses the war, Yi reasoned, we’ll also have our chance for
freedom, and no harm will have been done. Why? Because under the Japanese
we had no right to free political speech. None of the victors will blame us, they’ll
know we had no other choice. If we don’t collaborate, on the other hand, and
Japan wins, those who refused to assist will pay a price. If Japan loses, they will
commit great atrocities in revenge as they retreat from the peninsula (1964,
267–69).
Needless to say, Yi’s imagination of how history would play itself out was not
what actually happened. But then, we have the benefit of “objective” facts,
whereas he only had subjective reasoning. It was reasoning, and it hypothetically
obtains whether it was really what he was thinking in the late 1930s, or simply
concocted while facing trial. Yi’s logic was that of the “act-consequentialist,”
the kind of utilitarian for whom any action must be chosen on the basis of the
total welfare of the likely outcome. Yi concluded, as a reasonable person
might, that collaboration regardless of the course of the war would yield a
superior quantity of “good” for Korea than non-collaboration.
Hindsight is everything, of course. Some Koreans say that, even at the time of
colonization, it was clear that no amount of collaboration actually minimized or
Choosing to Collaborate 95
ameliorated Japanese oppression, and therefore Yi’s reasoning was in fact not
coherent. Indeed, other rationales proffered by Yi stretch what a “reasonable
person or persons” might have concluded. In My Confession he writes: “What
kind of harm [o˘ tto˘han sonhae] can come even if we show an attitude of collaboration
with Japan? It was thought none at all. Whether we showed an attitude of
cooperation or refused to do so, it was clear that Japan was going to take from us
just what it wanted, be it our labor or our service in the military” (1964, 269).
Actual incidences of such refusal during the war, however, such as Denmark’s
stand against the deportation of its Jews, proved otherwise. But again that is
our “objective” fact then not available to Yi Kwang-su. What was available to
him, but absent in his argument, is that this “attitude” of collaboration, the
Korean equivalent of the “fake tenko¯ ” (ideological apostasy) so many Japanese
intellectuals after the war claimed had been their real intent, was in fact of as
useful to Japanese domination as sincere collaboration or a sincere tenko¯ , and
thus, not logical.
Yi’s juggling of the means versus the ends is still the central issue in political
ethics, as the American debate after 9/11 on the morality of pre-emptive invasions
of other countries disclosed. Most people in their everyday lives are
amended consequentialists, but “deontological,” which means we do not
believe in doing harm even if the ends would justify it. (We don’t kill, for
example, a healthy man to award his organs to five sickly people in need of
them.) Yi was deontological, as his musings on “harm” in My Confession attest.
He is, in other words, quite like us today. We often find ourselves “working in
the system” we deplore. World War II, including the occupation of Korea, provides
us with ample evidence that act-consequentialism is certainly preferable
to rule-consequentialism, since we learned that under the Nazi regime putting
our faith in simple rules that might theoretically produce the better results, in
fact, yielded unimaginably disastrous consequences.
We can say this, however, only because the history of the twentieth century is
behind us: we know the consequences of abetting Hitler and Governor-General
Minami Jiro¯ . But we do not know what lies ahead of us, including the future’s
judgment of the choices we make today, and so the debate on consequentialism,
and collaboration, continues, if primarily in the area of bio-ethics (abortion,
euthanasia, organ transplants). Yet WWII remains the elephant in the room for
what moral philosophers have said in recent decades about collaboration. In
1973 Bernard Williams hypothesized the scenario now known widely as “Jim
and the Indians”:
Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town.
Tied up against the wall is a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few
defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a
sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after a
good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by
96 John Whittier Treat
accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a
random group of inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against the
government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible protestors
of the advantages of not protesting. However, since Jim is an
honored guest from another land, the Captain is happy to offer him a
guest’s privilege of killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts,
then as a special mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off.
Of course, if Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro
here will do what he was about to do when Jim arrived and kill them
all. Jim, with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders
whether if he got ahold of a gun, he could hold the Captain, Pedro,
and the rest of the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the
set-up that nothing of the kind is going to work: any attempt at that
sort of thing will mean that all the Indians will be killed, and himself.
The men against the wall, and the other villagers, understand the situation
and are obviously begging him to accept. What should he do?
(1973, 98)
This is a fanciful cartoon which nonetheless recalls the real world, namely the
Nazi policy of “collective responsibility,” both brilliant and horrific, which put
occupied Europe’s resistance fighters in a similar conundrum, and it is our sensitivity
to that still-recent history that has made the now nearly forty-year debate
on just what Jim should do so controversial.
Williams initially deployed his “Jim and the Indians” to attack utilitarianism’s
act-consequentialist position that, yes, certainly, Jim should shoot an innocent
person—it will save the lives of nineteen others. Most of us react reflexively
about shooting an Indian, since we are deontological: no act producing good is
warranted if we do harm. But deontology has its thoughtful antagonists. Williams
argues that act-consequentialists may conclude we are as responsible for what we
allow to happen as for what we do ourselves, and that this concept of “negative
responsibility” is dangerously flawed. Now, a non-consequentialist might also
argue for Jim’s killing of an Indian, if Jim thinks to himself: well, he or she will
die anyway, and so is no worse off by being killed by me. But a nonconsequentialist
might alternatively argue that in killing, Jim would be collaborating
with evil, given that the Captain has arranged for the killings and by
mutually assented coordination will use Jim to carry out his aims.
Williams’ nuanced response is that, pace consequentialism, there is a crucial
moral distinction between a person being killed by me (i.e., Jim), and being killed
by someone else (the Captain) because of what I do. The utilitarians among us
obviate that distinction, Williams says, thereby stripping us of our humanity
and of everything that makes human life worthwhile, rather than preserving
our status as moral actors and decision-makers with the integrity that moral
decisions must preserve—all thoughts that a modern anti-Kantian (or a
Kantian with “issues”) might well have.
Choosing to Collaborate 97
The moral philosopher today who has pondered this problem with the most
relevance to collaboration in colonial Korea is Frances Kamm. In a 2000 article
entitled “Responsibility and Collaboration,” Kamm counters Williams with the
following argument: “in at least some special circumstances, there is something
to be said for collaboration with evil” (2000, 173). Why? In brief, Kamm believes
that under “illegitimate authority,” for Jim to act and kill an Indian does not incur
positive moral responsibility for Jim, but instead for the Captain: “When someone
chooses to become an Agent [i.e., a substitute actor], she is morally responsible
for that choice; but that is not the same as moral responsibility for the consequences
of the act. Choosing to be an Agent will involve evaluating how bad
what one is asked to do will be and what good will be achieved by being an
Agent” (2000, 179).
In other words, Kamm would rule that a Korean collaborator such as Yi is
responsible for choosing to be a collaborator, but not responsible for what
Japan did. For Kamm, the fact that the Captain—or the Government-General
of Chosen—is an illegitimate authority makes all the difference to the moral
value of any Agent’s act.
[W]hen harming others is in question, an agent’s . . . responsiveness is
morally favored because, when dealing with an illegitimate authority
who has not yet done what will insure a harm, it permits the location
of complete positive moral responsibility and accountability in the
villain, and this is favored because it preserves the villain’s sole moral
responsibility for unjustified harm. . . . So it is background acts of the
Captain’s, rather than a subsequent intervening act, that are most important
for determining moral responsibility. (2000, 192, 195)
Kamm’s logic is appealing, not least because it delivers us from a gnawing “objective”
fact of World War II: that collaboration by Jews with the Nazis resulted in
the murder of Jews, a fact to which Kamm bravely turns to near the end of her
article (2000, 197–98). Nonetheless, this is a potentially troubling splitting of
hairs that, while it permits us to criticize collaborators for choosing to collaborate
while freeing us from holding them responsible for what their actions ultimately
enabled, risks the charge of moral cowardice.
The impulse to spare collaborators from the consequences of collaboration,
I believe, springs from our perennial reaction to what Hannah Arendt wrote
about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in the early 1960s. In Eichmann in Jerusalem,
Arendt—probably as resolute a Kantian as we can find in the second half of
the twentieth century—refused to excuse any Jewish leaders for assisting the
Germans in selecting victims for extermination. She would not countenance
the idea of a “lesser evil,” because that leads us to acquiesce with a criminal
regime that counts on us compromising just that way. So what would Arendt
have had Jewish elders in Budapest or Berlin do? Not let their rote precepts
98 John Whittier Treat
guide them, because as she notes, nowhere in Europe did our catechisms prevent
anyone—Jew, Christian, communist, whomever—from doing the worst. Those
who did resist fascism, sometimes at cost of their lives, did so because they
declined to surrender their faculty of judgment, the Categorical Imperative
(“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that
it should become a universal law” [Kant 1993, 30]). They refused, in other
words, to live in a world in which they had committed acts they, as individual
reasoning moral subjects, could not live with anyone committing.
Few people agreed with Arendt at the time, and few do today. I am sympathetic
to her argument, but I also recognize that rational agency suffers
from a bad reputation these days: against philosophy, twentieth-century
history would have us concede that, yes, one can “rationally” commit an
immoral act, just as moral acts can be irrational. It is no coincidence that one
eloquent spokesman for replacing Kantian reason with a late-twentieth
century version of natural law is an historian of the Holocaust as well as a
philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman:
[M]oral issues cannot be “resolved,” nor the moral life of humanity guaranteed,
by the calculating and legislative efforts of reason. Morality is not
safe in the hands of reason, . . . Reason cannot help the moral self without
depriving the self of what makes the self moral: that un-founded, nonrational,
un-arguable, no-excuses-given and non-calculable urge to
stretch towards the other, to caress, to be for, to live for, happen what
may. (1993, 247)
I return to my initial objection to our popular hesitation to judge “moral
subjects” under Japanese imperialism, be they Timothy Brook’s local elites
in China or Korea’s greatest modern writer. There may be no positions
further at odds than those of Arendt and Bauman, but note that both do
“judge.” Judgment here is not reducible to “excusing” or “not excusing,” it
is not that casual: it has to do with what we fundamentally are, either individuals
with powers bestowed by the intellect (Arendt), or human beings with no
significance outside of all other human beings (Bauman). The debate in South
Korea over what to do with its legacy of collaboration must grapple with this
question, which persists throughout history precisely because it not historical,
by which I mean contingent. It is an existential question whose various
answers have governed in part what history we have wrought, and not the
other way around.
Acknowledgments
I thank my colleague Shelly Kagan for his advice early in the research for this essay, as
well as my friend Sun Joo Kim for catching an error when I spoke on this topic at Harvard
in 2006. The late Yale historian Paula Hyman referred me to Hertzberg’s work, for which
I am grateful.
Choosing to Collaborate 99
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