The Koreans in Hawai'i


Book Description

"The photographs, in illuminating and complementing writings and oral histories found elsewhere, provide insight into Hawai'i's Korean immigrant community, politics, and everyday life. They reveal the struggles and successes of the first and subsequent generations, allowing the viewers to connect with the past.




The Ilse


Book Description

On January 13, 1903, the first Korean immigrants arrived in Hawai'i. Numbering a little more than a hundred individuals, this group represented the initial wave of organized Korean immigration to Hawai'i. Over the next two and a half years, nearly 7,500 Koreans would make the long journey eastward across the Pacific. Most were single men contracted to augment (and, in many cases, to offset) the large numbers of existing Chinese and Japanese plantation workers. Although much has been written about early Chinese and Japanese laborers in Hawai'i, until now no comprehensive work had been published on first-generation Korean immigrants, the ilse. Making extensive use of primary source material from Korea, Japan, the continental U.S., and Hawai'i, Wayne Patterson weaves a compelling social history of the Korean experience in Hawai'i from 1903 to 1973 as seen primarily through the eyes of the ilse. Japanese surveillance records, student journals, and U.S. intelligence reports--many of which were uncovered by the author--provide an "inner history" of the Korean community. Chapter topics include plantation labor, Christian mission work, the move from the plantation to the city, picture prides, relations with the Japanese government, interaction with other ethnic groups, intergenerational conflict, the World War II experience, and the postwar years. The Ilse is an impressive and much-needed contribution to Korean American and Hawai'i history and significantly advances our knowledge of the East Asian immigrant experience in the United States.




The Koreans in Hawaii


Book Description

The Koreans in Hawaii: A Pictorial History, 1903-2003, brings together hundreds of photographs to tell the powerful story of the people who have shaped the Korean immigrant experience in America over the past one hundred years. Although Koreans faced the same hardships and barriers as other East Asian immigrants in the New World, the story of their migration, settlement, and assimilation into American society has received relatively little attention. This volume not only commemorates the centennial of Koreans in Hawaii, but also offers readers an unprecedented look at the rich history of a community that continues to develop and change to this day. The photographs, which illuminate and complement writings and oral histories found elsewhere, provide insight into Hawaii's Korean immigrant community, politics, and everyday life. They reveal the struggles and successes of the first and subsequent generations, allowing viewers to connect with the past. Together with chapter introductions, the wide range of photographs (many only recently discovered in archives and family albums) represents an engaging record that uncovers the deep roots of Korean Americans in Hawaii.




The Korean Frontier in America


Book Description

Korean immigration to Hawaii provides a striking glimpse of the inner workings of Yi-dynasty Korea in its final decade. It is a picture of confusion, functionalism, corruption, oppression, and failure of leadership at all levels of government. Patterson suggests that the weakness of the Korean government on the issue of emigration made it easier for Japanese imperialism to succeed in Korea. He also revises the standard interpretation of Japanese foreign policy by suggestion that prestige—the need to prevent the United States from passing a Japanese exclusion act—as well as security was a motivating factor in the establishment of a protectorate over Korea in 1905. In the process he uncovers a heretofore hidden link between Japanese imperialism in Korea and Japanese-American relations at the turn of the century. The author has made extensive use of archival materials in Korea, Japan, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C. in researching a subject that has been neglected both in the United States and Korea. The study presents new information on the subject along with a keen analysis and innovative interpretation in a readable and accessible style. The work will be of significant value to specialists in Korean history, Korean-American relations, Japanese history, Japanese-Korean relations, U.S.-Japanese relations, Hawaiian history, and U.S. diplomatic history.




Homing


Book Description

Millions of ethnic Koreans have been driven from the Korean Peninsula over the course of the region’s modern history. Emigration was often the personal choice of migrants hoping to escape economic and political hardship, but it was also enforced or encouraged by governmental relocation and migration projects in both colonial and postcolonial times. The turning point in South Korea’s overall migration trajectory occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the nation’s increased economic prosperity and global visibility, along with shifting geopolitical relationships between the First World and Second World, precipitated a migration flow to South Korea. Since the early 1990s, South Korea’s foreign-resident population has soared more than 3,000 percent. Homing investigates the experiences of legacy migrants—later-generation diaspora Koreans who “return” to South Korea—from China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the United States. Unlike their parents or grandparents, they have no firsthand experience of their ancestral homeland. They inherited an imagined homeland through memories, stories, pictures, and traditions passed down by family and community, or through images disseminated by the media. When diaspora Koreans migrate to South Korea, they confront far more than a new living situation: they must navigate their own shifting emotions as their expectations for their new homeland—and its expectations of them—confront reality. Everyday experiences and social encounters—whether welcoming or humiliating—all contribute to their sense of belonging in the South. Homing addresses some of the most vexing and pressing issues of contemporary transnational migration—citizenship, cultural belonging, language, and family relationships—and highlights their affective dimensions. Using accounts gleaned through interviews, author Ji-Yeon Jo situates migrant experiences within the historical context of each diaspora. Her book is the first to analyze comparatively the migration experiences of ethnic Koreans from three diverse diaspora, whose presence in South Korea and ongoing relationships with diaspora homelands have challenged and destabilized existing understandings of Korean peoplehood.




Burnt by the Sun


Book Description

Burnt by the Sun examines the history of the first Korean diaspora in a Western society during the highly tense geopolitical atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. Author Jon K. Chang demonstrates that the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic and maligned nationality (ethnic community) during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. He argues that Tsarist influences and the various forms of Russian nationalism(s) and worldviews blinded the Stalinist regime from seeing the Koreans as loyal Soviet citizens. Instead, these influences portrayed them as a colonizing element (labor force) with unknown and unknowable political loyalties. One of the major findings of Chang’s research was the depth that the Soviet state was able to influence, penetrate, and control the Koreans through not only state propaganda and media, but also their selection and placement of Soviet Korean leaders, informants, and secret police within the populace. From his interviews with relatives of former Korean OGPU/NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) officers, he learned of Korean NKVD who helped deport their own community. Given these facts, one would think the Koreans should have been considered a loyal Soviet people. But this was not the case, mainly due to how the Russian empire and, later, the Soviet state linked political loyalty with race or ethnic community. During his six years of fieldwork in Central Asia and Russia, Chang interviewed approximately sixty elderly Koreans who lived in the Russian Far East prior to their deportation in 1937. This oral history along with digital technology allowed him to piece together Soviet Korean life as well as their experiences working with and living beside Siberian natives, Chinese, Russians, and the Central Asian peoples. Chang also discovered that some two thousand Soviet Koreans remained on North Sakhalin island after the Korean deportation was carried out, working on Japanese-Soviet joint ventures extracting coal, gas, petroleum, timber, and other resources. This showed that Soviet socialism was not ideologically pure and was certainly swayed by Japanese capitalism and the monetary benefits of projects that paid the Stalinist regime hard currency for its resources.




Koreans in Central California (1903-1957)


Book Description

The Korean Kingdom and the United States signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1882. This treaty opened Korea to American missionaries who proselytized Christianity to the Koreans. When Hawaii sugar planters recruited Koreans to come to Hawaii to work in the Hawaii sugar plantations, they picked most of the Korean Hawaii emigrants from the Korean Christian converts. Between 1902 and 1905, some 7,000 of them immigrated to Hawaii. Of those 7,000, about 2,000 transmigrated to the mainland. Most of these Hawaii Korean trans-migrants settled on the West Coast, primarily in California. This book tells the Korean immigrants' life stories in California's eight San Joaquin Valley farm communities: Fresno, Hanford, Visalia, Dinuba, Reedley, Delano, Willows, and Maxwell. It describes how they survived through discrimination and injustices in early twentieth-century America, and also details the Korean immigrants' efforts to regain their lost motherland from Japanese colonialism (1910-1945).




Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey


Book Description

For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century. Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910. Robinson breaks new ground with his analysis of the colonial period, tracing the ideological division of contemporary Korea to the struggle of different actors to mobilize a national independence movement at the time. More importantly, he locates the reason for successful Japanese hegemony in policies that included—and thus implicated—Koreans within the colonial system. He concludes with a discussion of the political and economic evolution of South and North Korea after 1948 that accounts for the valid legitimacy claims of both nation-states on the peninsula.




Korean Spirituality


Book Description

Korea has one of the most dynamic and diverse religious cultures of any nation on earth. Koreans are highly religious, yet no single religious community enjoys dominance. Buddhists share the Korean religious landscape with both Protestant and Catholic Christians as well as with shamans, Confucians, and practitioners of numerous new religions. As a result, Korea is a fruitful site for the exploration of the various manifestations of spirituality in the modern world. At the same time, however, the complexity of the country’s religious topography can overwhelm the novice explorer. Emphasizing the attitudes and aspirations of the Korean people rather than ideology, Don Baker has written an accessible aid to navigating the highways and byways of Korean spirituality. He adopts a broad approach that distinguishes the different roles that folk religion, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and indigenous new religions have played in Korea in the past and continue to play in the present while identifying commonalities behind that diversity to illuminate the distinctive nature of spirituality on the Korean peninsula.




Broken Voices


Book Description

Broken Voices is the first English-language book on Korea’s rich folksong heritage, and the first major study of the effects of Japanese colonialism on the intangible heritage of its former colony. Folksongs and other music traditions continue to be prominent in South Korea, which today is better known for its technological prowess and the Korean Wave of popular entertainment. In 2009, many Koreans reacted with dismay when China officially recognized the folksong Arirang, commonly regarded as the national folksong in North and South Korea, as part of its national intangible cultural heritage. They were vindicated when versions from both sides of the DMZ were included in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity a few years later. At least on a national level, folksongs thus carry significant political importance. But what are these Korean folksongs about, and who has passed them on over the years, and how? Broken Voices describes how the major repertoires were transmitted and performed in and around Seoul. It sheds light on the training and performance of professional entertainment groups and singers, including kisaeng, the entertainment girls often described as Korean geisha. Personal stories of noted singers describe how the colonial period, the media, the Korean War, and personal networks have affected work opportunities and the standardization of genres. As the object of resentment (and competition) and a source of creative inspiration, the image of Japan has long affected the way in which Koreans interpret their own culture. Roald Maliangkay describes how an elaborate system of heritage management was first established in modern Korea and for what purposes. His analysis uncovers that folksong traditions have changed significantly since their official designation; one major change being gender representation and its effect on sound and performance. Ultimately, Broken Voices raises an important issue of cultural preservation—traditions that fail to attract practitioners and audiences are unsustainable, so compromises may be unwelcome, but imperative.