I have recently switched to almost full-time reading of early postwar Korean newspapers. I’m avoiding those newspapers (조선일보, 동아일보, 서울신문) from this period that I have easy access to back in my library in the US or through online databases. There are two bound and published collections with copies of early postwar newspapers easily available to me in Yonsei’s central library and in the 국학연구원 that I am affiliated with. I’m sure microfilm or other versions of these newspapers exist in other libraries, including the national library, but these bound volumes serve well for now.
I launched right in without much thought, as I usually do with an exciting new source, beginning somewhat arbitrarily with one of the newspapers I have often seen cited in secondary works from the period which was only around for a few years, 自由新聞. The series with this collections of newspapers is a “mere” two dozen volumes or so with about 550 pages of newspapers (usually 2 pages per issue) in each volume stretching from 1945-1950.
I’ll just cruise through them all, I must have been thinking—you know—get a feel for the lay of the “media” land and the period. I scan through each issue of the newspaper, take pictures of articles directly relevant to my topic for later use noting down their titles, dates and topics, and read some of the more important articles immediately, all while taking a notes on what issues dominate in the newspaper at the time. After just a few days of this I forced myself to make a reality check. At the pace I was going, I calculated, it would take me 23 weeks to go through just the single collection of newspapers I am looking at and this is only one of many kinds of sources I want to look at while I’m Korea. Doubling my daily pace would still take about 11 weeks, which is still too long. While it is very likely my pace will increase naturally as I become more familiar with the materials and improve my reading/scanning skills this will just not do. Clearly I have to change strategies.
This is really a classic research problem, one that all of us face in doing research for even high school or undergraduate history papers (and in many related fields) and as a teaching assistant I have had to advise my own students on this problem in the past. Somehow though, the much larger scale of the project and time available to complete it has a way of making us forget the scarcity of time available.
More experienced historians surely know better than I, but it seems to me that there are a number of approaches one can take to surveying a large quantity of potentially useful primary materials such as this collection of Korean newspapers from 1945-50.
I have an issue, a problem, and certain historical questions I want to answer. I believe that, if approached with care, this particular collection of sources can help me get answers to some of those questions, or at the very least, help point me towards specific places, people, or events that I can explore in other sources that will help me answer some of those questions. Here are a few approaches that come to mind that might be used for a newspaper collection like this:
The lazy scholar approach: Read all the academic work related to your problem, note down all citations from the primary source you are interested in, look up those citations, read the originals, and use them in your own work.
Seal off a perimeter approach: Make a list of events or key periods of time when things happened or when you think things might have happened which are relevant to your issue. Then, depending on the quantity of primary materials and your time available, read or scan through issues within a fixed range around that period of time.
Headline lightning scan: Make a very small list of keywords, and blaze through the entire collection in the time period you are working for, stopping only to photo articles with your keywords in the headlines.
Section focus approach: Look through a few issues of each newspaper from across the span of your period of interest in order to get a good understanding of the way the newspaper is organized, what articles appear where, where articles which may be of interest to you are likely to appear in the paper, and take note of specific regular columns or editorial sections which may be relevant to your research. Then look only at only these sections or columns for the whole span of time.
Locked in the tower approach: Go through it all, starting with the most important works and then just keep going until you suddenly run out of time.
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I confess that I’m one of those Orientalists who really loves the characters used in the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. There have been many voices (e.g.) over the last century or so who have argued for the complete romanization of East Asia’s languages and Korean nationalists (as well as those who claim they only oppose use of Hanja for purely rational or anti-elitist educational goals) have come a long way in championing the widespread use of Hangul (한글) at the expense of Hanja (漢字).
I am really not interested in getting sucked into the debates about efficiency, literacy, etc. that reduce the question of whether to continue to use these characters to a raw utilitarian cost/benefit analysis. I will say that my fascination with these characters is not because, as a non-Asian, I somehow feel like my years of studying the languages of this region have either a) granted me privileged access to some kind of a secret magical code or b) would be completely wasted if the entire region abandoned the characters tomorrow.
I honestly believe there is an amazing beauty to the writing system, and I marvel at way that very different languages (all the dialects of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and once upon a time Vietnamese) have incorporated their use and comprise, or at least potentially comprise, a written language bloc (a 漢字圈). My attraction to this idea is perhaps ironic because I am also an opponent to the formation of an “East Asian community” on any significant institutional level (but that is another story).
So here I am in Korea this year and, as a lover of Hanja, I silently curse the reformers as I try to make my way through academic history books or newspaper articles trying to guess the character compounds “hidden” behind many of the unfamiliar 한글 words. I thus far more enjoy reading books and newspapers published a few decades ago than those published recently, before the gradual Hanja attrition set in, or reading North Korean archival documents written before around 1948, when Hanja quickly drops out of use. And it must be at least one reason why I get an occasional kick out of the very conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo (朝鮮日報) even though my politics are often much closer to the Hangul-only newspaper 한겨레.
Chosun Ilbo is also almost all Hangul these days, but one gets the distinct impression that they really think Hanja is cool, or at least, kinda neat. I feel like their writers are begging to tell everybody, “Hey look, look at how the character for Japan is a sun, and the character for the United States is the character for beauty,” or “Look how I can put the character for ‘war’ in all kinds of political contexts!” The characters stand out in a headline, even if it takes just the same amount of space to use the Hangul equivalent. Though the context would usually make it clear what was meant without Hanja, the use of the Hanja make certain words stand out and avoids the need to look twice or pause to guess the meaning, almost as if those words were in bold.
Sometimes Chosun Ilbo likes to go wild and use four character compounds for their leading headlines. Yesterday’s issue of the newspaper had the headline “與多野多” (Many from the ruling party and many from the opposition) for an article discussing the fact that there are multiple contenders still in the ring for the upcoming December presidential election from both the conservative and ruling progressive political camps. However, that four character compound doesn’t really have a deep historical ring for me (does it for anyone else?).
One of my favorites, however, was in a headline a few weeks ago: 以朴制昌 which means “To use Park [Geun-hye] to control [Lee Hoi-]Chang” (They probably used the character for Chang 昌 since both leading conservatives running have the last name Lee/Yi 李) Below the headline was a short explanation for some of readers who may not have gotten the meaning: “박근혜와 연대해 이회창 제압” and unlike the paper version of the newspaper, the online versions of the article and other articles which used the compound sometimes put the Hangul before the Hanja or ditch the Hanja altogether (less faith in the Hanja-reading skills of the internet generation perhaps?).
Park, is the daughter of Korea’s military dictator Park Chung-hee (reigned from 1961-1979) famous for a regime of political oppression, torture, and, no one forgets to mention, economic growth. She fought and lost in the primaries against the current front runner Lee Myung-bak to represent the conservatives in the election. Now Lee Hoi-Chang, another staunch conservative who had once vowed to stay out of this election, has split the conservative vote and Chosun Ilbo was hoping in early November that Park would quickly defuse this challenge from the right with her considerable political weight. While she did eventually weigh in with a statement, Lee Hoi-Chang is still in the race.
What makes 以朴制昌 cute and gives away the newspaper’s love for an old-fashioned classical education is that it is a play on the old Chinese idiom “using barbarians to control other barbarians” (以夷制夷). This kind of playing with character compounds that echoes an idiom, slogan, or historical event is really common in Chinese, Taiwanese, and to a lesser extent Japanese newspapers, not to mention writing I have come across in all East Asian works aimed at an educated audience, but I admit that I enjoy it when Korean newspapers also join in the game. This may be on the decline, however, as classical references and Hanja compounds increasingly generate either the Korean equivalent of a, “Huh?” or scare away the youth who hate to read a newspaper that plays geeky language games that their grandfather thinks are funny. Ah, kids today.
With a quick dictionary search, here are a few compounds in Chinese that use this pattern:
以暴制暴 yǐbàozhìbào f.e. Violence must be met by violence.
以華制華[-华-华] yǐhuázhìhuá f.e. play off one group of Chinese against the other
以快制高 yǐkuàizhìgāo f.e. 〈sport〉 play fast against tall players
以禮制軍[-礼-军] yǐlǐzhìjūn f.e. discipline the army according to propriety
以夷制夷 yǐyízhìyí f.e. play off one foreign power against another
A few more that appear with a google wildcard search: 以静制动, 以”动”制冻, 以柔制快 , 以毒制毒
The song name, artist, and album tags in many music files (whether they are acquired legally or otherwise) from Chinese and Korean sources are completely garbled in iTunes on a Macintosh. I assume this is because iTunes assumes that the text is one encoding (Unicode or MacRoman?) and they were in fact encoded in another (often EUC_KR for Korean, Big5 for Taiwanese files, GB for files with simplified Chinese characters). I used to frequently get this problem with Japanese music files but for some reason (perhaps because Unicode is more popular in Japan?) this has gradually become less of a problem.
Fixing these tags can be a pain and some of the older tools such as once awesome “MP3 Rage” and “ID3 Editor” often make things worse due to their inconsistent handling of 2-byte non-Roman languages.
An Apple Support page, however, recently pointed me to a great shareware application ($12) called ID3Mod2 which looks like it is made by the same people that made the incredible Chinese input method QIM that I talked about in an earlier posting (I don’t know this developer personally so it is not as if I’m trying to find good things to say about their work). You can freely use the software for a number of days, during which I was able to go through and fix all of the garbled tags in music files I have collected in China, Korea, and Japan over the last decade. Amazing - I might now actually learn the names of some of the songs I have been listening to for so long and someday even gather the courage to request them on a future karaoke adventure.
