I’m spending a quiet Friday night here in Seoul, Korea after my first week of summer Korean language classes at Yonsei (I was at Seoul National University’s program the last two summers). I have gotten into the habit of watching the 9pm news on Korea’s MBC channel and was especially amused by one of the stories for tonight:
Could it be that the familiar image of a 도깨비 (a kind of goblin or monster that appears in various Korean folk tales) is not the real Korean goblin but in fact a foreign goblin?
The MBC investigative reporter visits an elementary school and opens up the students’ textbook to an image showing a bunch of horned monsters. She asks the students, “Which country do these goblins come from?”
The students all happily shout, “우리 나라!” (Our country!)
But, are the children being deceived? Are they being spoon-fed images of the foreign demons of their former colonial overlord and being told that they are really Korean goblins?
The screen cuts to a book filled office where a professor of folklore compares the various familiar images in contemporary Korea of the goblin, shown with one or two horns and a spiked club, with…very similar looking images of Japanese demons or Oni (鬼). We are then shown authentic Korean representations of the 도깨비 figure, shown without any horns, but with a distinctly Dragonball-like haircut.
How can it be that these Japanese 오니 (Oni) images have come to replace the images of the true Korean goblin? Something must be done to prevent the corruption of our children! Can we not recover the subaltern Korean goblin from the grasp of Japanese imperialism?
Read related articles on this shocking discovery (Doesn’t have all the picture comparisons shown in the MBC version, however):
Yeonhap Article
Hankooki.com
I’m going to start a series of postings while I’m here in Korea aimed at highlighting websites in this wonderfully internet-wired country which are poorly designed, filled with coding errors, and essentially unusable for anyone who does not use Internet Explorer and Windows. I can only hope that web designers in Korea will increasingly work towards creating standards compliant web sites that work regardless of browser and platform.
Disaster Site: Korean Studies NET
Link: http://ksnet.aks.ac.kr/
Problem as of June 29, 2007: 1) Membership page located here is a very simple web form. Can be created with a few lines of code and any server based scripting language. There is no excuse for a simple form like this not to work. However, when filling the form out in Firefox or Safari browsers on a Mac, you will get error messages. Furthermore, if you load this page with the Firefox “Error Console” showing, no less than 7 errors appear in the CSS and other loaded code for the page. 2) Pressing on “advanced search” produces a cute little timer which never ends, you are never redirected to the advance search page.
After my week-long adventure with my father in Alabama, I am visiting my parents and sister in Oklahoma, in a place called Bartlesville. I have never lived there (I refused to move to America when my family moved there from Norway when I was about to begin my senior year at the International School in Stavanger) and I don’t think I surprise my friends or family when I say that I really don’t care much for the place. When I pass through to visit, I spend most of my time indoors with family or in the library, where these days I continue to work on a translation project and, during my breaks, annoy my sister, who works behind the reference desk. This weekend I leave for my two years of dissertation research in Korea, Taiwan, China, and Japan.
But in the meantime, what sort of place is this town of Bartlesville?
It is the kind of town where it is apparently necessary to place signs on many of the doors of office buildings and other businesses to indicate you don’t want people wandering in bearing firearms.
It is the kind of town where a novel in the local Mid-High school library may get banned for containing two lesbian characters, who, shock and horror, kiss. At least a few local librarians and other concerned community members are showing their opposition to the ban (including my sister) but we’ll see how things turn out. As one editorial by a concerned mother puts it in the local Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise,
“How sad it is to me that people are outraged for a parent to try to protect her child from the message that ‘being homosexual is ok and acceptable.’ God’s word teaches us otherwise. What has happened to our nation in 400 years? We have gone from fearing God’s word to ridiculing it.”
Oh, what a travesty that a junior high school child might haplessly stumble upon a novel in their own Mid-High school library with two lesbian (though one was apparently “experimenting”—even more frightening!) characters. Who is responsible for installing that sort of smut? If only this book was removed then surely the children would be safe to walk the library aisles and bask in the grace of God’s law.
It is the kind of town where, as happened to me only a few hours ago, should your lunch at the Subway sandwich store amount to $6.66, you will be invited to buy a cookie, or at least accept a trivial $.01 “miscellaneous” charge so that the number of the Beast will not mark your purchase.
It is, as you can see, almost like another country.
Although I lived in New York for two years, I never got around to visiting many of its museums. A few weeks ago I finally paid the Museum of Natural History a visit along with a good friend of mine.
As some of my previous postings indicate, I have become more and more interested in the geographies and narration of museum exhibits. As a student of East Asian history, I was especially interested in how the museum portrayed the cultures of that region.
The museum of natural history is not just home to dinosaur bones and stuffed animals. Between the hall containing the stuffed lions and the one containing the stuffed birds, one can find the “Hall of Asian Peoples.”
In the hall of Asian peoples, with “Asia” defined in the broadest old use of the word, we can find all sorts of exhibits. The hall provides a lot of interesting material for comment, from its exhibit on “the Lure of Asia” to its portrayal of Islamic cultures and China, but I’ll just make a few comments on its portrayal of Korea and Japan. Take a look at this hall plan (click for a larger version):
I was struck by the central location of Japan in the large square room to the right. Surrounding Japan were a number of exhibits, including the “Introduction to Primitive Asia” and others. Among the exhibits on the outside of the Japanese center was one portraying the Ainu peoples.
The Ainu, of course, where almost eradicated by the Japanese. Next to this, also on the outside of the Japanese center, we find the Koreans. The entire mapping of these cultures in the museum closely mirrored the Japanese imperial order of old.
The Korean government, however, has done what it can to spruce up the exhibit a bit, which portrays a Yangban scholar at his studies, with his hanbok-clad wife working nearby. The title of the exhibit is, “KOREA: The Uniqueness.” Ah yes, that familiar claim brought back so many memories. A sign reports that, “This exhibit was made possible through the generous assistance of the Korean Cultural Service.” It saddens me that, far outside of the host countries, the arm of nationalists can reach into the heart of museums. When I was there, a crowd of delighted Korean tourists were snapping pictures. The Ainu next door were less popular with the cameras.
The heart of the square room, with its Japan exhibits, was hardly any better. I could smell the hand of Japanese government influence upon the contents of the exhibit, even if some of the contents showed unmistakable evidence of a non-Japanese hand. See, for example, the kanji characters in this numbered list of photo identifications:
Besides the general sloppiness of the handwriting, you may notice the number four (四) shows a little excess creativity. These problems, however, are found in most museums. The element of the Japan exhibit that most showed potential Japanese government or other suspect dabbling was the description of the Japanese emperor system (click for readable version):
This description of the Japanese emperor would not pass muster in a student essay in the most introductory course on Japan. The over-attribution of agency to the emperor in the Meiji period, the description of the “restoration” of Shintô which was more accurately the birth of state Shintô, is bad enough. The most interesting problem with this little snippet is what it leaves out. Notice how the paragraph jumps from the triumphs of the Meiji period, over the decades of Japanese imperialism, directly to Hirohito’s denial of divinity after World War II. How clean this picture looks: no imperial responsibility for the war, no outside pressure of Hirohito to deny his divinity hinted at.
In case the rosy picture of the text failed to persuade, no “Hall of Asian Peoples” could be without a photo of the Japanese imperial couple:
