Abstract
Two figures loom over the history of twentieth century Korea, born only five years apart: Kim Il Sung (1912) and Park Chung Hee (1917). Both were shaped by the complex and tumultuous context of Northeast Asia in the first half of the century and went on to decisively shape their respective half of the Korean peninsula in the latter part of the century. In this book, the first of two volumes, Eckert sets out to provide the context that created Park Chung Hee, and by extension, the South Korea of breakneck development and rigid discipline that was forged under his rule (1961–1979). Following in the footsteps of his previous book on the emergence of capitalism in Korea under Japanese colonial rule (Offspring of Empire, 1993), Eckert again seeks the origins of today’s South Korea in the colonial period, although much of this book is focused on events and institutions located in Manchuria. While Park Chung Hee is the figure that ties the narrative together, the book delves deep into the theme of militarism in East Asia, focusing particularly on the two officer academies of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) that trained Park.
The book is divided into two parts and the first of these deals with the context of militarization in Korea and Japan from the late nineteenth century onward. Eckert suggests a framework of three ‘waves of militarization’ on the Korean peninsula. The first of these began towards the end of the nineteenth century when the waning Chosǒn state sought to create a modern Korean military force while imperial powers encroached on every side; the second came under Japanese colonial rule between 1910 and 1945; and the third under Park Chung Hee’s rule in the Republic of Korea from the 1960s onward. The first part of the book also introduces the institutions that are the focus of the second part: the Manchurian Military Academy located near the Manchukuo capital of Xinjing and the Japanese Military Academy at Zama in Japan itself. The former had been established by the Japanese Kwantung Army as part of its efforts to mould the puppet state of Manchukuo as a model polity, intimately tied to the Japanese Empire, while the latter had a history stretching back to the establishment of the Meiji government in 1868.
The second part of the book is filled with a great wealth of detail on every aspect of the military academies and how they shaped Park and his Korean, Chinese, and Japanese comrades, from politics, ideology, and tactics to the minutiae of daily routines and military discipline. This level of detail can occasionally feel overwhelming but it also makes this work richly rewarding for the reader. Among the passages that stand out are the dense descriptions of the regime within the military academies, where ‘the cadets had undergone one of the most sustained, intense, and arguably effective experiences in will training that any twentieth-century institution had to offer’ (p. 272). The punishing daily routine, harsh training exercises and constant admonitions to be ready to die for certain victory all seemed intent on creating dehumanized, machine-like warriors. And within this rarefied world of extreme discipline and devotion to the cause of the empire, it was Park who stood out as one of the most zealous of the zealous, or ‘baka-majime’ (p. 103) in the parlance of the cadets. It is, of course, well known that Park joined the Imperial Japanese Army and retained his admiration for Japan after Korea’s liberation. However, this work drives home just how steeped he was in Japan’s militaristic culture and how dedicated to the Japanese Empire; knowledge that has the power to alter the way we perceive all he did subsequently.
Beyond demonstrating how the academies moulded the characters of Park and the other cadets, the weightiest part of this book is dedicated to understanding the political and economic worldview of the Japanese military academies and their cadets. There was both an ideology imposed from above and a somewhat more rebellious one that was nurtured among the ranks and linked to the Shōwa Restorationism of 1930s Japan. One of its most significant aspects was the belief that the army not only had a right to intervene in civilian politics but a sacred duty to do so when necessary. Another was the disdain for free market capitalism and the pursuit of profit, and belief that these tendencies had to be tamed. What Eckert calls the ‘anticapitalist’ tendencies of the IJA were brought to fruition most visibly in Manchuria where, under the auspices of the Kwantung Army, the Japanese set about creating a state capitalist, planned, industrial economy (pp. 213–217). This, Eckert argues, was a key model for Park’s project of industrializing South Korea from the 1960s onward, and also helps us to understand his own disdain for the Korean capitalist class.
This is one area where the book can feel somewhat narrow in its purview and rigid in its narrative, setting out a rather straightforward line of descent from the final years of imperial Japan to the South Korean ‘miracle’. There is a danger here of seeing everything through the Cold War historical lens in which North Korea must be forever a separate world and South Korea represents the only true heir to Korea’s past. The seeds sown by Japanese militarism and statism in the decades before 1945 have given numerous fruits in the postcolonial era. Reading this book, one is continually struck by the extent to which the Japanese colonial legacy influenced North Korea as well as South, how much its fast-paced industrialization in the 1950s and 60s was built upon a late colonial physical and ideological substrate, and how much the thorough-going militarization of North Korean society might have derived from Japanese militarism. Perhaps in the following volume, which will presumably pick up the story at the time of division in 1945, this will be addressed and the story will be broadened somewhat to encompass the rivalry between Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung as partly a product of Japanese militarism and imperialism.
The aim of this book and the one to follow, as Eckert posits in his introduction, is to ‘see Park historically, as a product of his times’ (p. 7), and it has certainly succeeded in this enterprise. This work is an immense achievement of historical scholarship, representing decades of work, including numerous interviews with those close to Park and those who experienced life at the academies. At the end of the book one feels almost as though one has spent a brief time at one of the institutions Eckert describes. The coming volume on Park Chung Hee’s later years is likely be just as significant and will be widely anticipated among scholars of modern East Asia.