Imagined Romance: Intimate Relationships between Koreans and Japanese in the Total War Period

Abstract

Can colonized subjects imagine romance with their colonizers? Familial and marital relationships between colonizers and their colonized subjects were generally regulated by the colonial powers. In colonial Korea, intermarriage between Koreans and Japanese was also regulated and simultaneously, promoted by the colonial government in various forms. The way Korean intellectuals imagined intermarriage, however, differed from official guidelines. Korean intellectuals and writers manifested their ideas about intermarriage in various print media, either as opinion pieces or in literary works. In this presentation, I draw attention to a shift of focus in these publications: from the early colonial era’s metaphors of family and home to the imagination of romance in the late colonial era. I discuss the writings of influential thinkers and writers including Ch’ae Manshik, Yi Hyosŏk, and Yi Kwangsu. Particularly, I engage with the question of “romance” and the idealization of the relationship between Korean males and Japanese females at the time of the Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere (officially from 1940 but in the making from the late 1930s). This was a time of intense war mobilization in the colony, when various imperial subjectification projects were implemented. Thinking beyond the often discussed framework of Total War ideology, I trace the Korean intellectuals’ perception of gender, patriarchy, and desire through their literary writings that focus on the depiction of intricate emotions. Rather than presenting the success or failure of romance as a metaphor for the colonialization project, these publications allow us to see romance and intimacy as an integral part of subject formation in colonial Korea.