The white-clad people: The white hanbok and Korean nationalism

Westernisation of Korean clothing culture

Western clothing was introduced in Korea after the opening of ports to Japan in 1876 (The Treaty of Ganghwa Island). Meiji Japan, having implemented sartorial reform that mimicked Euro-American customs, pressured Korea to accept similar changes via several dress reform acts. The most radical of these, the Eulmi dress reform (1895), included an ordinance prohibiting topknots, further simplification – narrower hanbok in black – of official uniforms after the Gapsin dress reform (1884), and permission to wear Western clothing. (Kong, 2005: 43, Lee, 2015a: 108–109). The fact that this reform was imposed shortly after the Japanese government’s brutal murder of the Korean queen significantly influenced public perception and resistance. ¹⁰

Across the social classes, the most unsettling aspect of the reform was the ordinance about cutting men’s topknots. Koreans customarily kept their hair long, as prevailing ethics regarded the hair as having been gifted by people’s parents (Kong, 2005: 65). Cutting the topknot was, therefore, deeply unfilial behaviour; a grave punishment imposed on convicts. People thus perceived the ordinance as a ‘barbarian’ and ‘inhuman’ persecution, a sentiment effectively reflected by the Confucianist scholar Choi Ick-hyun’s declaration that he would rather be beheaded than have his topknot cut (ibid: 44). Further, as the neo-Confucian political ideology and educational principles regarded individual ethics and filial piety as the bases of social and monarchical order, many equated the loss of hair with the loss of the established social order (Kim, 1995). The widespread public refusal to cut topknots was met by enforcement of the ordinance on the streets and house searches being carried out by the authorities. This led to an explosion of anti-Japan sentiment, resulting in uprising of the nationwide militia (the Righteous Army of Eulmi) in October 1895 (Yoon, 1995). The uprising ended in August 1896, when a new administration suspended many acts of the dress reform, including those regarding topknots.

The reforms were part of a forced modernisation process that continued through the Korean Empire (1897–1910) (Lee, 2018: 47). At the turn of the century, because the reform was led by the pro-Japan government and organisations, Western clothing was interpreted as corresponding with Japanese interference in Korean sovereignty (Lynn, 2004: 78–79), and with the idea of Japan and the West as unity (왜양일체). In the same way that the Japanese General Government Building in Seoul—the symbol of colonial power—was a Western-style structure, the Western clothing that Japan introduced to Korea mirrored the identity of Meiji Japan that had been constructed between the Occident and the Orient. Western clothing and architecture projected the power relations between Japan and the West onto the relationship between Japan and Korea by introducing a Japanese version of Western modernity (Kim, 2013: 148). Therefore, Westernisation of Korean clothing culture was a process of refraction, and the prohibition of the white hanbok as part of the assimilation policy effectively reveals this refracted modernity, inseparably merging Westernisation with colonisation.

Prohibition of the white hanbok

The prohibition of the white hanbok was initially limited to official uniforms, but from the beginning of the 1920s, the authorities began to suppress it across class, gender, and on non-official occasions. (Kong, 2005: 48–51; Cho, 2010: 686–688; Park, 2014: 56; Lee, 2015a: 236) Figure 6 The tense political climate at the end of the 1910s may provide the context behind this change. After a decade under the brutal military rule of Japan, a series of independence movements broke out in 1919. In February, Korean resistance leaders in Manchuria and Korean students in Tokyo respectively issued independence declarations. These were followed by the explosion of the March 1st Movement throughout the peninsula (see The New York Times, 1919a, The New York Times, 1919b, The New York Times, 1919c). As a result, the Japanese government replaced the military rule with the so-called cultural policy. Although it appeared to be relatively lenient, the underlying aim of the new policy lay in depreciating and eliminating Korean culture, and the suppression of the white hanbok was an important step towards fulfilling this aim. Many remaining photos of the March 1st Movement are filled with white-clad crowds clearly linking the white hanbok with collective resistance. As anthropologist Dorinne Kondo ([1997] 2014: 16) suggests, ‘at times the surfaces of the body are the most readily available sites for inscribing resistance’ and the white hanbok, as the interface between Korean bodies and their wretched world, was being transformed into the site of anti-colonial struggle.OPEN IN VIEWER

The ostensible rationale behind the prohibition of the white hanbok was based on modern values: to improve standards of hygiene and to liberate women from the labour of maintaining the white hanbok (Kong, 2005: 48–51; Park, 2014: 56; Cho, 2010: 687). The actual purpose, however, was to control the labour force and divert it to the effective running of the colonial economy (Cho, 2010: 682, 693). ¹¹ By the 1930s, the prohibition became a concrete policy of the imperial administration through strict enforcement and systematic coercion. Police and local government officials would stop people on the streets and carry out house searches, spraying ink or stamping slogans on the white hanbok. Those who wore a white hanbok were ineligible for food rations, education and other basic social needs, and were denied access to public spaces and buildings. (Kong, 2005: 51, 54; Cho, 2010: 709; Park, 2014: 64).

Another, even more critical, purpose of the prohibition was to overturn established Korean ways of life (Henry 2014: 5, 52). The assimilation policy aimed to obliterate the Korean language, culture, and history, turning the people into second-class subjects who could be exploited for imperial expansion. Koreans were forced to adopt a Japanese name (1940–1941) and speaking or writing Korean was prohibited in all educational and official settings, in which everyone had to routinely recite ‘the oath of imperial subjects’. The traditional religion, musok (Korean shamanism), was condemned and banned as mere superstition, and visits to Shinto shrines became compulsory instead (ibid: 4). The branding and smearing of the white hanbok was thus part of the mechanism of colonial control aimed at erasing Korean-ness from the most fundamental layer of life.

The assimilation policy stained the white hanbok both materially and metaphorically: it negated Korean history as well as denigrating the people and material culture as inferior to those of Japan, closely following the methods of Western colonisers posing as ‘civilisers’ who ‘enlighten’ the colonised. Claiming that Koreans and Japanese people had a common origin but that the former were intrinsically subordinate to the latter, the assimilation project was promoted as a process of ‘development’. From the end of the 19th century, Japanese historians, anthropologists, commentators, and travel writers propagated views that contrasted ‘stagnant’ Korea with ‘progressive’ Japan and ‘lazy’ Koreans with ‘dynamic’ Japanese people (Cho, 2010: 693; Lee, 2015b: 303; Maldonado, 2020: 189). Their views linked similar negative stereotypes to aspects of Korean material culture. For example, they suggested that the ondol—the underfloor heating system essential in harsh Korean winters—made Koreans lazy. The long white robes of Korean men supposedly proved their decadent, lazy, and arrogant attitude (Maldonado, 2020: 189–190). Popular Japanese narratives regarded the Korean taste for white clothes as a ‘backward’ habit, originating in a collective lack of colour sense, perpetual poverty, and prolonged national mourning. ¹² For instance, when attempts to suppress the white hanbok did not yield a noticeable result during the 1920s, the Japanese authorities blamed this failure on a lack of dye material and related skills (Cho, 2010: 697). Koreans, by contrast, enthusiastically embraced newly introduced chemical bleaching methods for keeping their hanboks whiter (Lee, 2015a: 302). Closely following the methods and practices of Western history and anthropology, Japanese scholarly and journalistic texts served to reinforce colonial power, to bring about the systematic destruction of Korean cultures. The aim of their assimilation policy was to mark Koreans with inescapable difference.

Refracted modernity and orientalism

Although racial prejudice is a typical feature of unbalanced power relations, the stereotyping of Korea under the Japanese assimilation policy was distinct in that it reflected the West’s influence on Japanese selfhood during its modernisation process. Reflected in the stereotyping, in other words, was a Japanese self-image constructed between the West and the East in the mould of Western Orientalism (Kikuchi, 2004: 91). After opening its ports to the United States in 1853, Japan radically Westernised itself. The Westernisation of Japanese clothing—a voluntary, systematic, and top-down process—exemplifies this transition. Its rapid process was greatly motivated by the fact that Meiji Japan considered Euro-American cultures to be superior, and by a strong desire to demonstrate its new alignment with Western, rather than Chinese, power (Slade, 2009: 54–55). By aligning with the West, Japan also absorbed images of the Orient constructed by Western Orientalists such as Lafcadio Hearn and Bernard Leach, who stereotyped images of the Orient as either ‘primitive’ and ‘child-like’, or ‘mystical’ and ‘spiritual’ (Kikuchi, 2004: 14). Japanese intellectuals responded to such portrayals by intensifying an image of the ‘mystical Orient’: they highlighted Eastern religion, philosophy, and aesthetics, classifying related cultural outputs according to the Western mould. The result was that Japan’s modern identity became constructed in the mould of ‘Japan as other’, as cast by Western Orientalism. In time, the admiration of Western culture was met with growing cultural nationalism in Japan (ibid.: 77–79). However, Japanese intellectuals still sought to refute Western authority by adapting Western systems of knowledge about the non-West (Brandt, 2000: 714).

Simultaneously Westernised and Orientalised, Imperial Japan projected Orientalist images onto other Asian nations while dissociating itself from them (Yoon, 2010: 133; Kikuchi, 2004: 123; see also Tanaka, 1993). Exoticising the East was part of the Western imperialist agenda, and Imperial Japan even furthered this agenda. The Japanese variant of Orientalism was a product of the ambivalence—between the inferiority that Japanese people felt in relation to Western powers and cultural nationalism (Brandt, 2000: 731; Kikuchi, 2004: 139)—and the transplantation of this ambivalence into colonial narratives with similar racial undertones. These contradictions of Japanese identity persist, as Kondo ([1997] 2014: 57) writes: ‘Western Orientalizing, counter-Orientalisms, self-Orientalizing, Orientalisms directed at other Asian countries […] the interweavings of such constitutive contradictions produce “Japan”.'

The politics of Western and Japanese views of the Orient is exemplified by views on the Korean aesthetic popularised by Yanagi Sōetsu, the Japanese founder of the mingei theory. The mingei theory itself was based on the logic of cultural improvement: the enlightened Japanese ‘seeing eye’ (chokkan) discovers ‘wild’ forms of Korea, ‘elevating’ them to the realm of taste, connoisseurs, and philosophy. It was not just about being inspired by Korean ceramics, but rather ‘civilising’ an ‘unrefined’ form as raw materials free for the taking. Along the same vein, Yanagi set out his view on the Korean aesthetic—the so-called beauty of sadness—in his 1922 work entitled ‘Korean Art’, alleging that the white glazes emblematic of Joseon ceramics signified the ‘sad and lonely’ demeanour of Korean people, who lived in perpetual mourning and experienced repeated foreign invasion (Bailey, 2013). Yanagi claimed the wounds Imperial Japan inflicted on Korea as being intrinsic, deserved, and the nation’s inevitable fate, promoting, as a result, the legitimacy of Japanese rule in Korea (Brandt, 2000: 723–724, 2007: 3). Yanagi then applies the same idea to the white hanbok: ‘[t]he people, by wearing white clothing, are mourning for eternity. … Is not the paucity of color true proof of the absence of pleasure in life?’ (Yanagi cited in Brandt, 2000: 735; see also Kikuchi, 2004: 133). Such views clearly show that clothes can function in similar way to how the skin becomes a condensation of racial discourses. (Metzger, 2014: 12) In Yanagi’s logic, this characterisation of Korean art and material culture meant the tragic impossibility of an independent Korea.

Yanagi’s aesthetics of colonialism are strongly influenced by Western Orientalist views on Japanese culture—denigrating the people and culture while appearing sympathetic—and this disavowed Korean agency (Ko, [1931] 1966; Naoki cited in Kikuchi, 2004: 138). The rhetoric significantly influenced Japanese views of Korean culture during the colonial period and beyond, contributing to a broader discourse that naturalised Japanese colonialism (Brandt, 2000: 736).

Double consciousness

Colonial narratives regarding the white hanbok therefore exemplify how Korean people and culture were falsified through the prism of both Western and Japanese Orientalisms (Yoon, 2010: 127). More broadly, they show how colonisers hegemonise and structure knowledge production, delineating what can be known and what remains hidden, whose views matter, and whose narratives count as history. Japan’s Orientalist views on Korea dominated textbooks, museums, public discourse, popular media, art, and academia, and produced hegemonic representations, significantly influencing the way Koreans perceived themselves and their own culture. In other words, once instilled in Korean minds, these falsifying views gradually created a veil that filtered Koreans’ views about themselves. ¹³ Sociologist and psychoanalyst W.E.B. Du Bois (1897) uses the metaphor of a veil to portray the African American double consciousness; that is, the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of denigrating others. As a fundamental figure in Du Bois’s sociological theory of race relations in post-civil war America, the veil alludes to racial stereotypes or ‘the occluded vision of those on the dominant side’, as well as the impact this blindness has on the marginalised. (Lemert, 1994: 386; Blau and Brown, 2001: 221, 230) Not unlike the African American experience that Du Bois conveys, Koreans under Japanese rule were born with a veil in a world saturated with denigration and discrimination that defined their selfhood. Exiled within their own home, ‘straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil’ (Du Bois, [1903] 2015: 69), the Korean individual and collective self was acutely marked by the hegemony—and perhaps it still is: the imaginary stain on the white hanbok has proved to be more difficult to erase than any material stain.

For some, however, the veil offered ‘the gift of second-sight’ (Lemert, 1994: 388). Just as it allowed Du Bois (1897) to see in himself ‘some faint revelation of his power, of his mission’, the double consciousness strengthened a sense of collective belonging and resistance, leading to what may be regarded as the birth of Korean modern nationalism. In these contrasting ways, the smearing of the white hanbok brought the unconscious skin into the view of the collective consciousness. As suggested above, the March 1st Independent Movement (1919) may have led the Japanese authorities to perceive the white hanbok as a distributed site of resistance. In the following two decades, the widespread refusal to assimilate reinforced such perception (Park, 2014: 53). Anthropologist James Scott (1989: 33–37) contends that anonymous everyday practices, although not openly declared or consciously organised, can amount to political actions of resistance. Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create a coral reef, thousands of acts of implicit insubordination and evasion can create a political barrier reef, exerting relentless pressure on the relevant authority (ibid: 49, 54). The initially passive refusal to change an established lifestyle grew into a wilful act of resistance, and everyday clothes become established as a political site on which national identity could be shaped.

As the assimilation policy intensified to control every aspect of Korean lives in the years approaching and during the Pacific War (1937–1945), people appropriated the policy according to their own needs. For example, during compulsory visits to the Shinto shrine on Namsan (a mountain in central Seoul) (1937–1945), most Koreans, although appearing compliant, did not pray before the deities. Some would turn up in unseemly clothes and use their appearance as an excuse for not praying, actively exploiting the rhetoric of colonial racism and modernisation (Henry, 2014: 1–4, 191). As Imperial Japan hurtled towards the Pacific War, its intention to plunder Korean labour and resources became even more conspicuous, for instance, by directly comparing the cost of maintaining white clothes with the cost of war supplies and munitions (Cho, 2010: 690–691, 693). During the war, Japan imposed a total mobilisation of Koreans in the forms of military conscription, forced labour, and sexual slavery. ¹⁴ By this stage, Koreans directly equated the suppression of the white hanbok with the general suppression of Korean people (Song, 2007: 108; Seo, 2014: 158).

Dong-po: The membrane of the homogeneous nation

The emerging Korean modern nationalism in the absence of sovereignty is effectively captured in the phrase baegui-dongpo or baegui-minjok (‘white-clad people’). The phrase conveys the idea of the white hanbok as a skin that binds the people together, perhaps reflecting how external threats can reinforce the phantasy ¹⁵ of an intact national skin. While functioning as a drive for resistance, the idea also contains an acute sense of loss: the smeared white hanbok became a synecdoche of the dispossessed nation, on which exploited bodies, torn-down ancient buildings, and plundered land and resources were superimposed. Amid continuing crises in the latter half of the 20th century, this skin would stiffen into an exclusionist nationalism—the myth of the ‘homogeneous nation’.

To explain the phantasy of an intact national skin, the word dongpo (the latter half of the phrase baegui-dongpo, ‘the white-clad people’) is a good place to start. The typical Korean sense of nation conflates ethnicity and race with the belief in a common prehistoric origin and an uninterrupted ‘bloodline’. ¹⁶ In constitutional law, the principle of bloodline or jus sanguinis defines the notion of nationhood (Shin, 2006). The contemporary meaning of the word dongpo clearly reflects this principle. The syllable dong means ‘same’, and the syllable po is associated with the placenta or a womb-like space. ¹⁷ The literal meaning of dongpo can thus be ‘born out of the same womb’. However, it is never used to denote siblings, instead referring exclusively to large communities instead. Compared with the subtler evocation of familial ties in words such as ‘fatherland’ and ‘compatriot’, dongpo is a strikingly material and visceral expression linking diasporic Korean communities around the world by their bloodline. According to the Overseas Koreans Foundation Act (2020)—‘Koreans’ in its title is the official translation of dongpo—anyone with a ‘Korean bloodline’, regardless of their nationality or country of residence, is considered dongpo (KOSTAT, 2020).

The inclusivity and exclusivity simultaneously implied in dongpo reflect the complex Korean history between the late 19th century and the 1940s. Before the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), its meaning used to be much more comprehensive (See Kwon, 2005), as political thinkers referred to like-minded thinkers from China, Europe, the US, and Japan as dongpo; at the turn of the century the word also carried a racial nuance, tying Korea, China, and Japan together under a single East Asian identity against the encroaching Euro-American power (Huh, 2009: 17–18). After the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, however, when Japan’s imperialist intentions became clear, the meaning of dongpo quickly turned ultra-nationalistic, becoming almost identical to its current use. Faced with the impending loss of the nation, Dangun—the mythical founding father of ancient Korea (Gojoseon)—was rediscovered as the all-encompassing parent of dongpo (Kwon, 2005: 278, 283), and the print media celebrated the ancient history rather than that of waning Joseon (ibid.: 282).

The need to believe in a distinct identity grew even more important under colonial rule, as many moved abroad either as independence activists or as forced labourers, military conscripts, or sexual slaves in Japanese occupied territories. ¹⁸ The loss of their nation left Koreans with only the phantasmic membrane, dongpo, to cling to, and the white hanbok eventually emerged as the membrane of the ‘homogeneous’ yet dispersed community. In this sense, the word dongpo embodied the changing meaning of the nation and its membership as Korea experienced the demise of the monarchy, loss of the nation, and the emerging sense of an imagined community in which its people were sovereign (ibid: 283, 285).

It was precisely this democratic potential that was emphasised in the new word minjok (meaning ‘people’, the latter half of the word baegui-minjok, ‘the white-clad people’). The word jok translates as ‘clan’ or ‘race’, and the meaning of the word min evolved from meaning commoners within a monarchical class system to meaning the members of a democratic state. The word has its roots in the Japanese idea of minzoku (Huh, 2009: 17) which emerged during the 1880s to claim a distinct and homogeneous Japanese identity. From the end of the 19th century, however, this initial claim was replaced by the ‘mixed nation theory’ to legitimise expansion of the Japanese empire (Oguma, 2002: 81, 285). Against this imperial notion of a pan-Asian identity, Korean intellectuals widely promoted the word minjok to communicate the sense of an exclusive community with a shared ancestry, history, culture, and language (Kwon, 2005: 283–284; Park, 2021; Huh, 2009: 17). Within the Japanese system of constitutional monarchy, minzoku are subordinate to the sovereign emperor (Oguma, 2014: 10–11), whereas Korean minjok, having emerged in the absence of a monarch, considered the people as the objects of allegiance (Park, 2021; Huh, 2009: 18–20). It thus marks the beginning of Korean modern nationalism (Kim et al., 2019: 180), carrying a strong implication of resistance against external threats and internal political oppression (Kwon, 2005: 284).

Involuntarily dispersed all over Northeast and Southeast Asia, Korean people felt a sense of collective belonging through the ideas of dongpo and minjok, of which the mythical yet material substrate was found in the white hanbok. The white hanbok served both as a protective layer and as connective tissue helping the people to make sense of traumatic experiences, and the myth was especially potent when the collective identity was at risk. Since the 1920s, the phrase ‘the white-clad people’ has frequently been used as a byword for Korean people in a nationalistic mood ¹⁹ (Park, 2014: 51).