Transcolonial Racial Formation

Abstract

The author examines the process of racial knowledge creation within the context of U.S. empire and its military occupation of southern Korea from 1945 to 1948. The author uses a postcolonial sociohistorical approach to analyze archival sources authored by U.S. military occupation administrators, advisers, and journalists. The author argues that the U.S. military occupation was in practice colonialism, and that the United States pulled racial knowledge gained through previous colonial experiences and from British and Japanese empires to construct the racial script of the “Irish of the Orient.” Through this script, the United States justified the need for a military occupation by reading Koreans through colonial constructions of Irish drunkenness and joviality as well as Filipino immaturity. Conversely, the script signaled the potential of Koreans to eventually become democratic subjects. Through the metaphor of the “Irish of the Orient,” the author finds that the racial formation of Koreans during the U.S. military occupation exemplified the relational, nonlinear, and transcolonial process of racial formation.

Keywords

racial formation colonialism racial script Korea military occupation

On January 3, 1946, the U.S. Armed Forces newspaper, Stars and Stripes, printed an article about Korea and Koreans. It explained, “They call this ‘the land of the morning calm,’ but for 4,300 years Korea has been turbulent with wars, rebellions and intrigues which may account for the nickname given to its people: ‘the Irish of the Orient.’”¹ The article was published a few months after the United States took over all of Japan’s former military bases and established the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea below the 38th parallel between 1945 and 1948. The military occupation was based on the Cairo Declaration of 1943, in which the United States, the United Kingdom, and China agreed that Korea would “in due course” become free and independent. However, the language “in due course” was interpreted in differing ways, and as one U.S. occupation administrator wrote,

One of the greatest difficulties here in maintenance of order is the idea planted firmly in the mind of all Koreans that Korea is now [repeat] now a free and independent nation. . . . In talking to educated Koreans I discovered that translation of the Cairo statement have been “in a few days” or “very soon” rather than “in due course” in reference to the time of Korean independence.²

Looking back, scholars and former military advisers have commented on how unprepared military and civilian officers were in dealing with what was often referred to as the “Korean problem.” The “Korean problem” was frequently attributed to perceived character flaws of an overly eager and newly liberated Korean population, although it was more indicative of the lack of Korean-specific knowledge by U.S. administrators and soldiers.

The explanation of Koreans as the “Irish of the Orient” is an example of how orientalism, as a form of power and unidirectional knowledge construction, works to construct racialized knowledge about the “other” (Said 1978). In this case, Korea as part of the public’s imagining of the “orient” allowed the United States to make the unknown more familiar through a less foreign point of reference, the Irish. Conjuring the “orient” reified the East-West binary while relying on “common-sense” understandings of the “orient” as a one-dimensional, backward, irrational, exotic, and stagnant place (Lee 2014:8). The imagining of the “orient” and “orientals” directly contrasted with imaginings of Americans as leaders of the modern civilized world and as champions of progress. The ideological tone set through the phrase “Irish of the Orient” foreshadowed and justified the “liberatory” mission of state-crafting as well as the moral obligation (i.e., white man’s burden) to teach Koreans to be modern and civilized.

Studies of the U.S. military occupation period in Korea have been limited in scope and lack systematic analysis of how racial formations operate within a military occupation context. Although historical and sociological scholarship on the military occupation has approached the period by examining the history of U.S. involvement in Korea, especially in the context of increasingly hostile Cold War politics (Chay 2002; Cho 1991; Pak 1980), few studies have approached this period within the scope of U.S. empire, and even fewer have examined the military occupation in relation to race and gender formations, an exception being Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon’s (201) edited volume, Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present. Another exception is Nadia Kim’s (2008) work on the racialization of Koreans. Kim demonstrated that since 1945, American perceptions of Koreans have followed three narratives—(1) Koreans as subjects of an inferior third world, (2) Koreans as the “inscrutable foreigner, yellow peril,” and (3) Koreans as coolies or as the same as all Asians—all while the U.S. military defined itself as the liberator and, later on, ally (p. 55). While Kim rightly notes that the racialization of Koreans was constructed relationally with other Asians, particularly the Japanese and Chinese, the racialization of Koreans as the “Irish of the Orient” adds another dimension.

This article was shaped by three primary questions. First, what was the relationship between U.S. empire, military occupations, and race in the post–World War II period? Second, what was the function of the Irish metaphor for the military occupation? And finally, what does the metaphor reveal about relationality and the racial formation process? The first section of the article lays out the methodological approach and provides a critical theoretical overview of the connections between the sociologies of race, empire, and military occupations. I argue that the military occupation of Korea was in practice and form, colonialism. Reading the military occupation as colonial rule allows us to examine race as a central organizing structure in establishing colonial and occupational knowledge. The second section assembles the historical landscape or the transcolonial building blocks of the “Irish of the Orient.” This section examines the intracolonial scripts of U.S., British, and Japanese empires prior to the U.S. military occupation of Korea. In doing so, I reveal how racial scripts and counterscripts produced in each colonial context later became the building blocks of racial knowledge during U.S. military occupation. The final section analyzes the racial logics used to justify the military occupation of Korea by analyzing a statement made by Lieutenant General Hodge. This passage highlights the transcolonial racial formation of Koreans and the histories signaled through the metaphor “Irish of the Orient.”

Methods

Archival Methods

To establish the discursive linkage of Ireland and Korea, the primary sources used in this article come from a combination of newspaper articles, personal papers of military occupation advisers and administrators, and documents from the U.S. military government in Korea. They were collected from the National Archives and Records Administration (Washington, D.C., and College Park, Maryland) and the Hoover Institute Archive. I also used secondary sources to connect the wide range of histories needed to make the Irish-Korean link legible. The primary and secondary documents were analyzed for evidence of transcolonial referencing through the use of two analytical tools. First, I looked for relational constructions of Koreans with other former colonial populations. Then, I used racial scripts and counterscripts as an analytic to see how racial knowledge was constructed (Molina 2014).

Postcolonial Relational Approach

Although a comparative approach is often used to expose commonalities and differences between two or more contexts, this article is informed by a postcolonial sociological approach as it highlights the transcolonial circuits of racial formation. In Julian Go’s (2012) call “For a Postcolonial Sociology,” he noted that a postcolonial sociology should be a relational historical methodology that examines the “interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space” (pp. 25–55, 28). Building on Edward Said’s postcolonial methodology that finds power in the spaces that connect seemingly disparate histories, spaces, and peoples, Go called for a postcolonial sociology that examines the relations and connections of bifurcated practices, peoples, and processes across geographies and time (p. 42). Thus, a postcolonial approach destabilizes categorical bifurcations of East versus West, colony versus metropole, colonizer versus colonized, where structured knowledge inherent in the use of the categories themselves reproduces structures of power and orientalist means of knowledge. While the purpose of comparison is to see what the differences or similarities of two or more groups are, the purpose of relational studies is to see not only what but, more important, why and how these differences and similarities are constructed, sustained, challenged, and rebuilt. A relational approach uses comparison as a means to understand the relationship between groups and how they are actively constructed in relation to one another. In addition, while binaries in comparative analyses can reify categories and leave contradictions unexplained, they can be useful in relational analyses because binaries are no longer strictly a means of comparing two different things but are unstable constructs that are the outcomes of interactions between binaries or bifurcated categories. A postcolonial relational analytic allows us to critically use the seemingly stagnant binaries and essentialized categories used by the United States during the military occupation to show how knowledge was constructed, sustained, and challenged.

Bridging Military Occupation, Race, and Empire

Military Occupation as Colonialism

This article situates the “Irish of the Orient” metaphor within the “global field of empires.” I position Korea within a geographically and temporally expansive history of inter- and intraimperial circuits similar to that of the Philippines (Go 2003:1–42). Go (2003) described how U.S. “colonial policymakers and administrators drew from frameworks offered by colonial neighbors and imperial competitors” to create interimperial circuits of knowledge for colonial rule. This was not simply a casual referencing or borrowing; it meant explicit exchanges of best practices and global standards of conduct in the form of interimperial conferences of colonial powers such as the 1919 League of Nations meeting (p. 21). Although the global field of empires looked quite different by 1945, practices of “formal” empires did not simply cease to exist after World War II, and the Korean example demonstrates that 1945 did not mark the end of U.S. empire.

After World War II, the U.S. empire’s priorities shifted from the acquisition of territories and formal colonies to small launch pads and strategically placed military bases (Gillem 2007:17). In other words, overseas, the U.S. empire became more flexible, with pockets of permanent and temporary sovereign power through military occupations and bases. This shift resulted in conclusions that the United States was an informal empire or an empire with imperial, not colonial, characteristics. For example, Steinmetz (2005) categorized the United States as an imperial rather than a colonial state in the post-1945 period. This classification was based on his differentiation of empire into two modes: colonial empires as territory-based and imperial empires as nonterritorial (pp. 339–67). However, the territorial sovereignty distinction between colonial and imperial empires has its limitations in the context of military occupations in the post-1945 period. Steinmetz’s distinction between colonialism and imperialism becomes blurred as the link between U.S. sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territoriality became more flexible through the spread of military installations. The Korean example shows that colonialism and imperialism have operated in tandem, not in succession, as the United States had full jurisdiction and power over the policies, land, and people of southern Korea during the military occupation.

Similarly, distinctions between informal and formal imperialism do not fit with the military occupation model of expansion. Go (2003) defined “informal imperialism” as the “exercise of control by one sovereign state over other nominally sovereign states through various diplomatic, economic, or blatantly coercive strategies” and equated “formal” imperialism to colonialism or the “explicit and often legally codified establishment of direct political domination over a foreign territory and peoples” (pp. 4–5). Go further broke down the category of “colonialism” into two modes, settler and administrative colonialism, using the United States in the Philippines as an example of administrative colonialism because of its lack of permanent settlement (p. 6).

In the Korean case, Steinmetz’s (2005) distinction of imperial versus colonial on the basis of territory would classify the military occupation as a colonial mode of empire. With Go’s (2003) distinction between informal imperialism versus colonialism and administrative versus settler colonialism, the U.S. military occupation of Korea falls under colonialism because U.S. power was based on direct control, not informal or soft power from afar. But it falls between administrative and settler colonialism, leaning more toward settler colonialism if we look beyond the formal military occupation period of direct rule (1945–1948) to the post–Korean War period of occupation on the basis of rhetorics of mutual defense and alliance. Today, the military bases in South Korea look increasingly like small U.S. settlements or, as Gillem (2007) called them, “America Towns,” with elementary schools, fast food restaurants, and golf courses.³

Redefining Colonialism and the Temporary

A distinction between military occupation and colonialism is that a military occupation is assumed to be a temporary situation with no claims to permanent territorial sovereignty by the occupying power (Edelstein 2004). Yet military occupations before 1945 were not necessarily distinct from colonialism because occupations were a part of the colonial process. As Gumz (2014) outlined, there was an international push in the late nineteenth century for military occupations to become an international norm to contain war and to restrict resistance. The narrative of military occupations shifted from occupiers as conquerors to military occupations as a system of nontransformative administration. This meant that local governments would remain operational, while day-to-day living for occupiers and occupied would operate side by side in a pluralist environment. In the pre-1945 era, Korea might have automatically become a territory of the United States, like the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the post-1945 era centered discourses of states’ rights to self-determination. As Nkrumah (1965) observed, a former colonial power “without a qualm . . . dispenses with its flags” and “devises innumerable ways to accomplish objectives formerly achieved by naked colonialism . . . while at the same time talking about ‘freedom’” (p. 239). Within this new framework, military occupations from bounties of war could not legitimately lead to colonial territories if the United States were to build its legacy as the world’s paragon of democracy. Thus, as determined during the Potsdam conference, Korea was a bounty of war that would in “due course” become independent under U.S. military government rule.

Although the United States did not turn Koreans into U.S. passport–carrying colonial subjects or make formal claims of territorial sovereignty, military occupation and colonial acquisition are synonymous in that both deny claims of indigenous sovereignty, rule with force, and establish tiered systems of governance and law for occupiers and the occupied. They differ in temporality and resource extraction. Traditional notions of colonialism assume a territory’s indefinite status as a colony until independence is won. Under military occupation, status as an occupied territory is assumed to be temporary until the occupiers are kicked out or independence is “gifted.” Military occupations often fall under the paradigm of the “white knight” (Gumz 2014) of international law, whereby executors of occupation are there to establish or maintain peace: it is the contemporary iteration of the “white man’s burden.” In southern Korea’s case, formal military occupation ended with the inauguration of President Syngman Rhee but lived on beyond the conclusion of the formal military government through militarized aid in the form of U.S.-occupied military bases and the gendered racial formations that shaped the experiences of Koreans and U.S. troops. As Kwame Nkrumah (1965) outlined, one of the mechanisms of neocolonialism is “breaking up former large united colonial territories into a number of small non-viable States which are incapable of independent development and must rely upon the former imperial power for defense and even internal security” (p. xiii). The division of the Korean peninsula created a similar postcolonial situation that Nkrumah observed in postcolonial Africa, where neocolonial methods of rule included the establishment of military bases, stationing of troops, and planting advisers in exchange for the right to land concessions, use of natural resources, and the right to provide “aid” (p. 246). Nkrumah’s critiques resonate with the Korean situation to this day, in which the United States continues to occupy land and resources through military bases and the stationing of troops in South Korea.

We need to reexamine how “temporary” is being defined, and the relationship between formal markers of time vis-a-vis time as an ideological developmental concept with no clear conclusion. If we challenge the segregation of economic versus political versus legal versus social dimensions of a military occupation, we begin to see how the end of a military occupation in one realm (i.e., handing over administrative rule to indigenous population) does not necessarily mean that the occupation ends in the social, territorial, or economic realms. In this way, the temporary nature of military occupations exists as a temporal marker in a specific realm but does not indicate the end of the occupation as a whole. The military occupation continues on, whether it is through social or economic spheres or through bilateral treaties that maintain military bases in formerly legally occupied states. Removing the “temporary” qualification renders military occupation as the post–World War II variant of prewar colonialism, one that operates within discourses of self-determination and anticolonialism.

Military Occupations and Social Formations

Given the ubiquity of social formations and their impact on military life, there is surprisingly little research on military occupations within the larger discipline of sociology. As noted by Höhn and Moon (2010), relevant work comes from feminists who document the gendered impacts of occupations on local populations. Feminist scholars De Matos and Ward (2012) defined military occupation as a “broad umbrella to include intervention, peacekeeping, annexation, the long-term establishment of military bases . . . all linked into the legacies of colonialism in the postcolonial era” (p. 3). Arguing that a military occupation is an inherently asymmetrical power relationship, they defined military occupations as an inherently coercive presence that has gendered impacts on the occupied and occupier. De Matos and Ward focused on the similarities between colonial versus occupation models of power but stopped short of defining occupation as a form of colonialism, considering the two as distinct despite noting their similar models of power and overall asymmetrical power relations (p. 7).

Nonetheless, the racial gendered impact of the military occupation on local women is clear. From the onset of the military occupation in Korea, military government officials made note of the foreseeable problems with Korean women due to their “very chaste” nature.⁴ However, within a month of the U.S. landing, there were printed messages in newspapers warning U.S. soldiers that Korean women were “Not 99.44% Pure!” Newspapers also asked if soldiers had “heard of the “95% club?” informing them that the “surgeon’s office says that 95 per cent of prostitutes examined so far have a venereal disease.”⁵ Korean women were quickly racialized as conquerable exotic whores who eventually became a venereal disease problem for the U.S. military government to control.⁶ The hypersexualization of Korean women had lasting effects and extended beyond the military occupation into the post–Korean War period. For example, in 1977, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes highlighted the real reason why the soldiers were in South Korea:

Picture having three or four of the loveliest creatures God ever created hovering around you, singing, dancing, feeding you, washing what they feed you down with rice or beer, all saying at once, “You are the greatest.” This is the Orient you heard about and came to find. (Moon 1997:33)

As the passage demonstrates, the gendered racial formation of Korean women began even before soldiers left the United States. When the soldiers arrived in South Korea, their expectations for what Korean women “should” be were redefined or reaffirmed through their interactions and experiences. After their tours, soldiers not only brought home stories of their sexual conquests and reinforced the objectification of Korean women’s bodies, but in some cases, they also literally brought back Korean women, who were then sold to sex trafficking and prostitution rings in the United States (Raymond and Hughes 2001:46). The dehumanization and hypersexualization of women have become lasting problems long past the “formal” military occupation period from 1945 to 1948.

The U.S. State and Transcolonial Racial Formation

The military occupation of southern Korea in practice was an exercise of U.S. colonialism and an extension of the U.S. empire-state. Within this context, the Korean case offers a contemporary example of how military occupations cannot be separated from the racial logics required to occupy.⁷ In addition, Korea exemplifies how military occupations can be analyzed with methodologies and analytics developed from postcolonial studies by deploying a relational lens to study occupation in relation to U.S. race and state formations. However, there is relatively little theorization of the relationship between race and the state (Goldberg 2002:2; Jung 2011:2; Jung and Kwon 2013). As some scholars have recently noted (Goldberg 2002; Jung 2011; Jung and Kwon 2013; King and Smith 2005), Omi and Winant’s (1994) theorization of the “racial state” in their foundational text Racial Formations in the United States is an exception that directly links racial formation and state formation in the United States.

Omi and Winant (1994) defined the U.S. state as an inherently racial state that is continuously shaped and reshaped through a process of racial formation. Instead of seeing race as a fixed category, Omi and Winant laid out a theory of racial formation as a “sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 55). At the core of racial formation theory are racial projects that serve as an “interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics” in the struggle over racial meanings (p. 56). Racial projects are the building blocks of a racial state, and through racial projects, racial categories and meanings are challenged, protected, and rearticulated. Although Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory has become the dominant paradigm in theorizing race, their theory has no discussion of how U.S. territories, military occupations, or U.S. state actions abroad affect race and racism.

Building on Omi and Winant’s (1994) theorization of racial formation and the racial state, scholars have further theorized the process of racialization as a transnational process. The framework of imperial racial formation posits that racial formation in the United States is determined by domestic racial projects in conjunction with imperial, transnational processes initiated by U.S. imperial interests overseas (Espiritu 2003; Kim 2008; Kim 2010). Recently, Cindy I-Fen Cheng (2013) further contributed to our understanding of racial formation by accounting for how U.S. foreign policy and geopolitics affect the racial formation of Asian Americans. In the historiography of critical temporal markers that affected the racial formation of Asian Americans, Cheng goes from World War II to the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the Korean War. The military occupation in southern Korea, although briefly noted, is not part of her analysis, but as I will later argue, the military occupation was a workshop for figuring out how to discursively construct nonwhite bodies as compatible subjects of U.S. democracy. Indeed, we need to remember that the racial formation of Asian Americans was constructed in relation to communism, foreign policy, and the racial state as well as in conjunction with the process of U.S. empire-state building.

The U.S. military occupation in southern Korea is a concrete but often overlooked example of U.S. empire. The omission of the U.S. military occupation in Korea as a site of empire is due to several factors, including the assumption discussed earlier that military occupations are distinct from colonialism and the assumption that the U.S. is and has always been a “colonial nation-state” (Omi and Winant 2015:7). Instead, Jung and Kwon (2013) rejected the idea that the U.S. racial state is a nation-state with colonial or imperial tendencies and analyzed the United States as an empire-state that has always been simultaneously imperial and colonial. Similarly, Jung (2015) asserted that “the US empire-state has always produced overlapping and competing temporalities and geographies, and we would be well advised not to accept the official ones, such as the notion that contemporary United States is a postcolonial nation-state” (p. 81). Given sociology’s emphasis on the United States as a nation-state, it is not surprising that theorizations of race have been limited to domestic and bilateral transnational formations rather than transcolonial formations. In this light, the lack of sociological studies that examine the racial formation of Koreans in relation to the Irish is understandable. However, unraveling the “Irish of the Orient” through the lens of U.S. empire allows us to rethink the process of racialization within the larger global context of empire. If the U.S. empire-state produces overlapping and competing temporalities and geographies, we need to also expand the boundaries of our analyses. By shifting and widening the scope of how race is constructed from a dualistic formation to a formation that is shaped by a multitude of histories of empire, we can see how racial scripts are built and how histories of empire live on through transcolonial racial formations.

Building Blocks of a Racial Script

I analyze the discourse of the “Irish of the Orient” through what Natalia Molina called a “racial script.” In Molina’s (2014) work on the constructions of Mexicans via U.S. immigration and citizenship discourses, she used racial scripts to expose the hidden linkages at the level of social structure and cultural representation that construct racialized groups in relational, not comparative, ways. Racial scripts show that “racialized groups are linked across time and space: once attitudes, practices, customs, policies, and laws are directed at one group, they are more readily available and hence easily applied to other groups” (p. 7). The recycling of racial scripts to assign racial meaning to different groups is an effective and efficient way to maintain racial hierarchies and power structures because they rely on already existing structural and cultural infrastructures (p. 8). Alternatively, Molina used the notion of “counterscripts” to show how racialized groups put forth their own scripts to resist power structures. This enables racialized groups to form unexpected alliances on the basis of the recognition of similar experiences that transcend time and space (p. 10).

Although the “Irish of the Orient” as a racial script initially feels novel, particularly because of the racial dissymmetry, the script did not appear out of nowhere. The Irish-Korean or Irish-“oriental” connection began much earlier than the U.S. military occupation of Korea. To trace the fragmented history of the connection, this section explores the intracolonial racial scripts within British, Japanese, and U.S. colonialisms. Long before Koreans were classified as the “Irish of the Orient,” the connection between Ireland and the “orient” spans back to native Irish origins legends. The genealogy of linking Irish civilization to the “orient” dates back to the ninth century, when native Irish representations claimed the “orient” as the ancestral origin of Irish civilization.⁸ The “orient” has throughout the years been embedded in understandings of Ireland’s racial, linguistic, and cultural origins through Irish-“oriental” origins folklore. However, as conflict between Ireland and British empire increased, the relationship between the “orient” and Ireland shifted as the British used comparisons of the barbaric “oriental” with the barbarity of Ireland as justifications for the need to colonize the racialized “other.” In response, the Irish looked to the “orient” to understand their place in the world within the context of empire (Lennon 2004:xvii–xix). Joseph Lennon (2004) noted that although Irish literature on the “orient” is diverse, there are some common discourses, and the discourses are unique from European and American orientalisms (p. xxii). The affinity of Irish writers with the “orient” was a means to self-representation, a way to disrupt the East-West binary, and to challenge colonial representations of Irish barbarity.

Using the notion of the counterscript, Irish orientalism can be read as a counterscript that appropriated European orientalism by claiming and referencing a long history of Irish-“oriental” origins legends. Ireland was at once a part of and not a part of Europe, facilitating identification with other colonized groups and the identification of colonized groups with the Irish. This was a type of cross-colony identification that disrupted Euro-American orientalism that defined the “orient” as antithetical to occidental civilization (Lennon 2004:xxvi). For example, at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish writers aligned themselves with orientalist depictions of a mystical and exotic “orient” to separate themselves from Europe. In W. B. Yeats’s preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924), he credited his verses to Indian poets and noted that there is “something in Irish life so old that one can no longer say this is Europe, that is Asia” (cited in Lennon 2004:249). The claiming of Irish life as not European or Asian but rather European and Asian was an example of how cross-colony identification attempted to disrupt the “othering” of European and American orientalisms as a technology of colonialism (Lennon 2004:250). Similarly, James Joyce’s assertions that Gaelic is “oriental in origin” can be read within the context of a desire to distance Ireland from the geographical proximity to Britain and instead link the island to much older civilizations and cultures (Cullingford 2000:225).

As the Irish in British-occupied Ireland were fighting for independence (1919–1921), Japan was busy studying the colonial strategies of the French, British, and the United States. When considering different approaches to colonial governance for Korea (1910–1945), Japanese imperialists assumed they would have an easier time than the British had with the Irish because of perceived racial and cultural similarities between Koreans and Japanese (Caprio 2009:82). However, under a very different form of colonial governance than the Irish, Koreans proved to be an “Irish nightmare,” with the March 1 movement of 1919, which has been compared to the Irish “Easter Rising” of 1916 (Caprio 2009:111; Koehler 2011).

Although Japan was looking to other empires for strategies, Koreans looked to Ireland and the West to structure their own notions of modernity and resistance that did not rely on Japanese colonial modernity. Challenging the Japanese colonial script of racial and cultural similarities, Koreans during the Japanese colonial era looked to the Irish struggle for independence under British rule and actively engaged with Ireland.⁹ The identification with the Irish and not with other colonized peoples also speaks to the racial hierarchy that had already been established. Kim (2015:212) noted that as social Darwinism became the dominant paradigm, Koreans reinvented blackness and Africa to signal inferiority and savagery. With the Irish being part of the racially superior white race, Korean intellectuals and poets looked to Irish knowledge, specifically literature, to learn about coping with Japanese colonialism. With that knowledge, Koreans educated in Japan translated and wrote their own plays and novels for a Korean audience. As Korean intellectuals watched Ireland become a free state in 1922, they became encouraged with the possibility of a free Korean state. Building on the similarities between the two colonial situations, Korean intellectuals developed a new style of modern Korean drama and theatre that borrowed thematically and stylistically from Irish playwrights and novelists (Hwang 2012; Kim 2013; Lee 2004). In addition to Ireland as a model of possible independence, Korean intellectuals looked to Ireland to raise a liberatory consciousness through realistic depictions of poverty, labor, illness, and the disorientation that came with the loss of sovereignty as reflections of the Korean condition under Japanese rule. For example, after being exposed to James Joyce’s Ulysses, Japanese-educated Park Taewon published his novel A Day of Mr. Goobo the Novelist in 1936. Literary scholars note the similarities in the protagonists’ days, depictions of Joyce’s Dublin and Park’s Kyungsung (old Seoul), and stream-of-consciousness and interior-monologue methods of narration (Min 2004).

Although Korean mimicry of Irish literature was one medium to build anti-imperialist public consciousness, Korean independence leader Heo Heon (허헌) actually visited Ireland. Heo Heon was born in 1885 and earned his law degree from Meiji College in imperial Japan. He became a lawyer and an independence activist, later becoming a leader of the nationalist independence party Shinganhoe (신산회). In 1926, Heo visited Queenstown (now Cobh) and Dublin, Ireland. In his travel essay (Heo 1929), he described Queenstown as a vibrant port city devastated by the war for independence. Describing his tour around Queenstown with the Canadian party leader of Sinn Fein, Heo wrote,

scorched farmlands, destroyed roads and bridges. No words can describe how horrible it is. But after the establishment of the Irish Free State, it seems like that the new Irish government is making an effort to reconstruct their country. I could find smiles of hope from the faces of the Irish people and I could recall the phoenix from them.¹⁰

Envisioning happiness rising from the ashes in the wake of an independence movement that resulted in the Irish Free State was a transcolonial glimpse into the possible future devastation and resurrection of an independent Korea. The imagery is hauntingly hopeful—the idea that you may need to destroy what you love, with the faith that colonized people have the capacity to come back from the ashes and rebuild with a smile.

In addition to the intracolonial scripts within British and Japanese empires that connected the Irish to the “orient” and Koreans to the Irish, an important aspect of understanding the significance of the Irish metaphor is to put it into the context of the racial-political narrative of the Irish “becoming” white in the United States. This historical narrative is important because it connects Koreans with discourses of democratic potential and racial uplift trajectories that justified the U.S. military occupation of Korea. In British-occupied Ireland, eighteenth-century Irish Catholics were frequently compared with the status of indigenous American Indians and enslaved Africans in the United States. But a major difference in Britain’s approach to its Irish colony was to primarily assimilate the Irish politically, whereas American Indians and enslaved Africans were not (Caprio 2009; Ignatiev 1995). Historians have argued that when Irish Catholics migrated to the United States, they were not immediately accepted as “white” (Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 2007). The Irish were often compared with blacks, and Roediger (2007:144) argued that it was only in the 1840s and 1850s that the qualifications for “white” became more inclusive because of anti-immigrant sentiment resulting from conflict with Mexico and Chinese immigration.¹¹ The narrative of the less-than-desirable, “black-like” Irish becoming white democratic citizens was an important discourse that allowed the United States to link nonwhite subjects with the capacity to become democratic subjects.

The colonial racial scripts and counterscripts linking Ireland to Asia the “orient” and Koreans to the Irish established the historical transcolonial building blocks that culminated in the racial script of the “Irish of the Orient” during the U.S. military occupation. Through the embedded histories situated in the metaphor, the U.S. managed a way to make Korea and its people legible.

Transcolonial Racial Formation during the U.S. Military Occupation

From the beginning of the U.S. military occupation of Korea, Korean political leaders’ immediate desire for self-governance and self-determination collided with the U.S. desire to manage the process of setting up a noncommunist democratic state. Glossing over internal heterogeneity among Koreans, Korean leaders were deemed too individualistic, uncooperative, and unable to get along with one another. In the eyes of the United States, their perceived “immaturity” was a characteristic that held them back from taking responsibility for the needs of their newly “liberated” country.¹² For example, in a civilian administrator’s analysis of the first year of the military occupation, he described Koreans as having “extreme individuality” and an emotional state that made them “more apt to resort to violence in order to win a point” (Meade 1951:16–17). This logic of extreme individuality and tendency toward violence was used throughout the military occupation to explain Korean dissent and lack of “progress” on part of the military government. As Lieutenant General Hodge explained in an orientation for the newly arrived undersecretary of the army, Koreans were “very individualistic; they are hard to deal with, uncooperative. They can’t get along among themselves. You put ten of them in a room to solve a problem, and you will have a four to five-way fight going on within a half hour.”¹³

Thus, conclusions of Koreans as individualistic, uncooperative, and immature did not align neatly with other “oriental” racial temperaments such as that of the Japanese or Chinese. Instead of aligning Koreans with the most obvious nonwhite group in the U.S. racial hierarchy (African Americans) or with the racially aligned former colonial power (Japanese), Koreans were defined in relation to U.S. understandings of Irish history and “Irishness.” U.S. military government administrators used the Irish-Korean metaphor to inform and give insight into the souls of an unknown population which the U.S. was supposed to prepare for a new democracy. Journalists also used the metaphor to describe Korean personality traits to the larger American public. One journalist explained that the Koreans were “like the Poles—or the Irish—a stubborn, emotional, strongly individualistic race” (Gunther 1951:174). Another wrote that the nickname was due to similarities between Ireland and Korea, both having gone through thousands of years of war and rebellion (see note 1). Hodge used this explanation especially when it came to teaching Americans what Koreans were like. In a meeting during a fact-finding mission in Korea, Hodge outlined how Koreans were like the Irish:

The Korean people claim their own civilization and independence through 42 hundred years. It is true that they have developed an almost separate oriental race. However, in the early days the tribes and provinces were loosely combined and not a real nation. . . . I call them the Irish of the Orient, and I think that is about the shortest description I can give. They are natively intelligent with high potentialities. They love to fight, drink, and have a good sense of humor. They love parties; they don’t like to work unless they have to; they are an attractive and a very happy people under good conditions. They are not as regimented as the Japanese. They are, in some ways, more volatile, but not quite as imaginative as the Japanese and they are not as changeless as the Chinese. . . . The youngsters here up to 14 or 15 years old are the most attractive I ever saw until they begin to realize what their conditions are then become frustrated. Those kids are almost like American kids; they play the same type [of] games and have in many ways the same manner of thought. They are a people that I don’t believe are naturally suitable to the rigidity of Communism.¹⁴

In his articulation of the racial script, Hodge rejected the Korean claim of independence as a sovereign state. With the conflation of race and nation, he noted that although “they have developed an almost separate race,” the fact that the peninsula was organized by a system of tribes and provinces demonstrated that there was no real unified or horizontal system of governance. On the basis of U.S. democratic models of governance, the historical lack of a strong centralized mode of government delegitimized the Korean claim of being an independent civilization. Here, we see the ideology of U.S. exceptionalism that was pervasive during U.S. colonization of the Philippines. As Daniel Williams, secretary of the Philippine Commission, stated on October 1, 1901 (cited in Go 2003),

It is an interesting phenomenon, this thing of building a modern commonwealth on a foundation of medievalism—the giving to this country at one fell swoop all the innovations and discoveries which have marked centuries of Anglo-Saxon push and energy. (p. 1)

This exceptionalist logic—that the U.S. was uniquely enlightened and suited to spread democracy—was used in the Philippines to justify the “need” for colonization and trusteeship. Similarly, nearly half a century later, the depiction of Korea as not a “real nation” justified the U.S. military occupation as a state-building mission and the necessity for tutelage. Similar to Filipinos, the United States perceived Koreans to have character weaknesses that required U.S. assistance in becoming mature and capable democratic citizens.

Although Hodge distinguished Koreans within the “oriental race” by stating that they were not as “regimented,” more “volatile,” and not as “imaginative” as the Japanese nor as “changeless” as the Chinese, Koreans were made legible through the racial script of the Irish. The Irish were racially separate yet their racial script translated well onto Koreans, mapping on two scripts. The first script is the well-known stereotype of the Irish figure as the jovial, drunk, fighting Irish man. The second, less obvious script refers to Irish American history, which provided the possibility and the potential of Koreans as a nonwhite race becoming democratic citizens. Like the Irish in the United States and former Filipino colonial subjects, Koreans were considered immature, with their partying and conditional work ethic.

Yet Hodge hammered home the potential of a Korean democratic subject by connecting Korean kids with American kids. Although Korean kids exhibited similar behavior as Korean adults in terms of only being “happy under good conditions,” Hodge’s claim that Korean kids were “almost like American kids” because they had the “same manner of thought” signaled the idea that the next generation could be like Americans. Americans, America, and democracy were ideologically interchangeable; and ultimately, Hodge diagnosed the Koreans as not “naturally suitable” to communism, further justifying the military occupation as inherently necessary for the best interests of Koreans. Although communism might have been alluring, because they “don’t like to work unless they have to,” their other character flaw, “extreme individuality,” was a counter indicator of their inherent compatibility and potential as democratic capitalist subjects. Thus, with the right guidance from the United States, Koreans, like Filipinos, could be taught how to become a “real nation”: a capitalist democracy.

Centering behavior issues justified the U.S. presence but it also pointed to the U.S. desire to assimilate Korea into its portfolio of colonial projects conducted in the name of democracy. As political adviser Millard Preston Goodfellow noted,

I have been suspecting that there is still an imperialistic design among some of those in the State Department regarding Korea. . . . If they try to make Korea another white man’s burden, they will find it much harder and costlier burden to carry. The Koreans who managed to maintain their independent existence over 4000 years against heavy odds and made the situation difficult for the Japanese rulers during the 40 years of their regime will not submit to any foreign yoke.¹⁵

Here, Goodfellow signaled to both Korea’s history of resistance to Japanese assimilation efforts and the potential difficulties the United States would have in treating Korea as “another white man’s burden” (see Caprio 2009). On the basis of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, there was initially a 40- or 50-year trusteeship plan, which was later reduced to a 5-year plan (Cumings 2005:190). However, once the word of a trusteeship reached Korea, it intensified tensions. On January 1, 1946, a Stars and Stripes article highlighted the resistance with the title “Korean Hotheads Attack GIs in Trusteeship Plan Protest.” Protesting the announcement of a 5-year trusteeship, the article wrote, “Hundreds of Koreans employed by the American Military Government walked off their jobs. . . . Banks were closed and policemen left their posts.” According to the article, Hodge stated that the plan was for “Korea’s own protection.”¹⁶ Hodge eventually changed his stance on the trusteeship because of its contribution to the growing resentment toward U.S. soldiers and the U.S. military government, and ultimately, a trusteeship was never implemented (Cumings 2005:199).

The Irish and Filipinos became a fulcrum for the knowledge construction process about an unknown population. Ireland’s colonial relationship with the United Kingdom and Korea’s colonial relationship first with Japan and then the United States are connected by more than racializations based on orientalist constructions of uncivilized, immature, and indulgent people who are not equipped to self-govern. These racializations are a result of transcolonial learning and borrowing, from both the colonized and the colonizers. Furthermore, the “Irish of the Orient” as a racial script was quite informative during the U.S. military occupation as a way to understand the psychology of a newly “liberated” colonial subject. Laced with multiple and overlapping histories of empire and race, racial scripts provided knowledge about an unknown population as a means to not only know the “other” but to produce knowledge as a means to secure and maintain power. In this case, the racial knowledge that accompanied the racial script, “Irish of the Orient,” came with the historical narrative of Irish Americans being near the bottom of the racial hierarchy to “becoming” white in the United States. Through civic participation and specifically voting power, this script signaled the potential of Koreans to become civilized democratic citizens. The “Irish of the Orient” then served as a racial script through which Americans could interpret Koreans and the Korean problem.

Conclusion

The Irish metaphor was salient primarily during the pre–Korean War period as the relationship between the United States and Korea/South Korea shifted significantly after the onset of the Korean War and armistice of 1953. In the pre–Korean War period, the status of Korea and its relationship to the United States was in concert with the U.S.-Philippine colonial logics of the “white man’s burden.” Similar to post-Spanish colonial Filipinos, Koreans were seen as postcolonial subjects of Japanese empire who needed to be taught how to become mature, self-governing democratic subjects. In addition, the Irish metaphor could be used freely without actually suggesting that Koreans were literally capable of becoming white American democratic citizens. This was outside the scope of possibility because of immigration laws at the time. Korea fell under the “Asiatic Barred Zone” of the Immigration Act of 1917, so the United States did not need to worry about Koreans migrating en masse to the United States.

However, after the establishment of a South Korean government in 1948, the Korean War became a new temporal marker and a new opportunity for the United States to become the benevolent liberator it had failed to be during the occupation. In the one-year period between the removal of most U.S. forces in 1949 and the “outbreak” of the Korean War in 1950, the image shift from failed occupier to benevolent ally was an opportunity for the United States to redeem itself in the craft of statehood. The Irish metaphor was no longer as illuminating, and instead, South Korea’s development trajectory from the aftermath of the Korean War became a symbol of the success of U.S. benevolence, and South Korea became the model minority of postcolonial states.¹⁷

Returning to the initial question of how U.S. military occupation administrators interpreted Koreans, I want to end by revisiting the attempt Hodge and others were making to understand “Koreanness” through “Irishness.” Cheng (2000) found that throughout Irish literature, analyses of Irish writers, and even contemporary popular culture, depictions of “Irishness” were rooted in the historical racialized “othering” of the Irish by the British. Among others, stereotypes of Irishness and the Irish “spirit” have centered folk traditions, pub culture (drunken joviality), and being sentimental, emotional, and temperamental (Cheng 2000:241–42).¹⁸ Similarly, the “Irish spirit” is analogous to constructions of Korean “han,” or a Korean “essence” rooted in the history of survival embedded in a history of conquest. After the official annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, Schmidt (2002) noted a shift in the conceptualization of the nation from one based on territorial sovereignty to an understanding of the nation as a spirit, or essence of an ethnic population.

The separation between the national territory and the national soul enabled Koreans to differentiate between their identities as colonial subjects/colonial citizens and as Koreans. Similarly, Ji-Yeon Yuh’s (2005) conceptualization of “refuge migration” of Koreans found that the conditions created by colonialism and war created desires to seek refuge from economic, political, and social instabilities through migration. This, in return, resulted in community and identity formations that depended on shared memories and experiences rather than nation-state-centered notions of belonging (Yuh 2005:3).

A postcolonial sociohistorical approach reveals that notions of Koreanness or Irishness stem from their histories as colonized subjects whose essences cannot be captured within the parameters of a territorially bound nation. By focusing on the intracolonial racial scripts, counterscripts, and transcolonial histories of empire, we see that Korean racial formation was a continuation of the colonial desires and strategies of the U.S. empire-state. Reading the U.S. construction of Koreans as the “Irish of the Orient” also shows the use and construction of race from a larger field of colonialisms that worked in relational, nonlinear, and transcolonial ways. Thus, Koreans became the “Irish of the Orient” through the accumulation of colonial racial scripts and exemplified the transcolonial process of racial formation in U.S.-occupied Korea and post–World War II practices of U.S. empire.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship Program, which allowed me to conduct much of the research reflected in this article. I would also like to thank Moon-Kie Jung, Anna-Maria Marshall, Fiona Ngo, Erin L. Murphy, and Vincent N. Pham for their encouragement and comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

Author Biography

Yaejoon Kwon is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is completing a dissertation titled, “U.S. Empire in Korea: Race, Gender, and the Military Occupation, 1945-1948.” She will be teaching in the American Ethnic Studies program at Willamette University as a visiting instructor in the fall.

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