Scribblings of the Metropolitician

A Sad Day Has Come

This is the last time I will post here. My time as the "Metropolitician" is up.

I've realized a lot of things over the last week or so, since falling for a certain young lady of a more conservative persuasion, who has quite literally rocked my world. I realize that a lot of the liberal ideas I had formerly and formally adhered to were largely misconstrued notions I had held, distortions of ideological ramifications that simply had no precedence in either established fact, dilapidated fiction, or even (and not either) the demonstrated dialectics of most people's dystopic desires.

In short, a new kind of love has made me into a harder, more turgid man.

No longer will I carry the torch for a a deluded liberalism, nor be the voice for lefty illiberality. What I truly hanker for is a haughty helping of a hunk of cheese that isn't defined in terms of a mere neo-Freudian kitsch, but the kind of cheese one can count on, like money in the bank; indeed, one needs sustenance so solid and reliable one can literally stick it in a pipe and smoke it.

So I can no longer continue to write here, after having fallen for someone like the one who has learned to call me "oppa." Such is an experience I never thought I could have had, either as a black man, or a Star Trek fan, and her highly-developed sense of what I have previously called here mere "fetishized femininity" has caused in me an emotional rise that is quite epic in its tense and torpedo-like tautology. Indeed, they didn't call Moby a "Dick" for nothing, as they say. Unlike the proverbial Ahab, my little lady has actually caught her whale.

When wondering why I have decided to forgo any further forays into formalism and endorse not Barack "Aladdin" Obama, but rather John McCain, the answer becomes perfectly obvious, does it not?

When you ask yourselves these questions, as you struggle for the answers, yet still can't bring yourself to face the truth, realize that Tom Cruise once said, quite poignantly, that the "truth could not be handled" and that in a similar situation, Al Pacino pointed a finger and said that the entire Supreme Court was indeed, very much "out of order."

In the same way, I was once out of love, and was so lost without her, but believe you me -- I now realize that it's hip to be square. Or did not Huey Lewis not give you that news?

So, it is with heavy hands that I make my last entry here, since the Metropolitician that was me has completely and totally ceased to be he.

For Pak Geun-hye's youngest daughter knows how to hit me where it counts, and to not just do that to me once, but likes to hit me, baby one more time, all the time, if you catch my meaning, number one Negaroni! See, I don't shrink away from saying, loudly and proudly, what needs to be said. And if you didn't get it from the passage above, you need a double dose of dis doubletalk. April mothafuckin' fool's, bitches!

Word to your mother, yo!

"Spot the Terrorist"

Wow - someone's finally doing good work on this, while I was too lazy. An undergraduate had once taken the bait of my suggestion for someone to do a final seminar paper on Stephens (whose name had slipped my mind in my slew of recent posting), since the "terrorist" acts of Korean nationalists during more radical times seem to have received real little treatment. But, alas, he chose to go for an easier topic; so I still think it worthy of a good seminar paper.

I'm glad Gusts of Popular Feeling has picked up the ball and done some thorough Internet sleuthing, as well as connecting of some cool historical dots.

Still, I think the visual connection implied by the picture of Cho-you-know at the end of their post is akin to lobbing a Molotov cocktail with a nitro twist into the dragon's lair of extreme Korean netizenry.

So, as they said on that old In Living Color skit, "I ain't goin' touch it."

But I'll link to it.

Hehe.

They, Them, They, Them, Them, Them

Well, that's about the level of complexity of thinking that goes with this inanely ahistorical diatribe printed in The Korea Times. The author starts off by asking some good questions, which require historical answers argued in terms of structure, processes, and other specifics:

Why is it that the Japanese are incapable of expressing the same remorse as the Germans about the atrocities they committed? Japan was defeated just like Germany in WWII. One reason is that WWII’s victors imposed a rigorous “denazification” program on the Germans, through aggressive social and political reform, as well as outright propaganda.

No such “deimperialization” program was imposed on the Japanese. The Japanese did not in fact ever “endure the unendurable.” In the light of Koizumi and Abe’s offenses, perhaps the Allied Forces should consider implementing the deimperialization program, belatedly, today.

But the article ends, even as it talks about some of the factors and actors that went into the process of creating a certain kind of "Japanese people", all arguments that he dismisses altogether:

In the decades prior to WWII, the Japanese people watched as their Emperor and military began a campaign of mass killing and conquest across Asia. The Japanese people could have overthrown their government and halted this barbarism, but they chose not to. The Japanese people made a choice to support a government, which raped, tortured, and murdered thirty million other human beings.

The Japanese people today are not unlike the Japanese people in the decades prior to WWII. Due to the absence of any postwar deimperialization program, they grew up in an amoral environment free of guilt or remorse.

Their view of Japan’s WWII war criminals is not shame and revulsion; instead, they think they should be honored. Their view of Japan’s WWII sex slaves is that they deserve no apology, because they were just a bunch of whores. If they did not hold these views, they would certainly not have voted for atrocity-denying Ahmadinejads like Koizumi and Abe.

Talk about some ahistorical history. And "ahistorical" doesn't refer to a lack of names, dates, or events in history, but rather a complete ignorance of the complex process that goes into creating the Japanese, Korean, or just about any "people" in the first place – whether you call that das Volk, the minjok, or minzoku.

Good history isn't just listing facts; it's also historicizing concepts, categories, identities, into the processes that created them. The concept I always use is that of the "minjok" ("race" or "people" in Korean) – it's a concept that's just over 100 years old, yet people employ it as though it spanned over the supposed 5,000 years of Korean history. It didn't, and I have yet to have anyone meet the challenge of finding a reference to minjok (民族) as a referent to a singular people or national identity before the turn of the 20th century. No one has because no such reference exists. But the power of such concepts lie in the ahistorical way people use them, even as they falsely believe the concepts themselves to be historically ancient. It's like the Matrix – the illusion relies on you not even questioning the reality before your eyes, or the logic of the "obvious." This even goes back to Plato's cave, man.

Looking at the Japanese people as some singular historical agent, irrespective of then or now, who should be blamed for the crimes of "their" government is as historiographically irresponsible as saying that "the American people" are "responsible" for the "crimes" of everything from the present Iraq wars back to invading Vietnam, to bombing Hiroshima, to committing clear acts of genocide against Indians, and building the institution of slavery.

I didn't vote for Bush, nor do I approve of the war, nor do I want to have any truck of racist, sexist, or any other-ist policies in my society. Yet, these things do happen, even when many historical agents within a society do exist.

But there is an "America" that is responsible for those things, because governments represent the people and exist as a singular, responsible entity for the sake of their "people." So governments can owe apologies. They can and should owe compensation.

As examples, I think the former "comfort women" deserve(d) apology and compensation. The question of whether or not they received legal compensation is the one that sticks with me; the question of "if" isn't even one.

As an American example, I think American blacks who can trace their roots to slaves brought to the United States, or as late as GI's denied the benefits of the GI Bill after WWII because most colleges wouldn't accept blacks and the Feds generally wouldn't pay for tutions at historically black colleges, or the then legal practice of denying blacks the low-interest loans that was responsible for creating a white middle class and suburban America – blacks were legally, fiscally, and socially discriminated against in concrete and calculable ways; only the historically misinformed (and that's a lot of people, unfortunatley) think that "reparations" is just a general handout for "slavery."

Naw, brah. It's the fact that my father's father's generation was subject to the legal discrimination of the Federal Housing Administration's official policies of not offering loans to blacks that resulted in specific and traceable financial harm to blacks as a group, the effects of which are visible to this day, especially in the form of the black ghettoes that formed as white took flight, and blacks were legally and financially crippled from leaving.

And that's just one reason. You don't even have to get to slavery to talk about the possibility of "reparations." Just take me back to the 1950's and it's easy to demonstrate clear and specific harms committed categorically against blacks as a people in the US. Yeah, most white people didn't own slaves; but a whole lot of white folks lived in houses that blacks weren't allowed to buy with loans forbidden to them and the option of receiving higher educations blocked because the GI Bill didn't apply. The routes of access to middle-class upward mobility were legally and socially blocked. There were laws in place. On the books.

So all the middle-class homes, against which many whites borrowed to fund open their own businesses, make investments, and send kids to college – a lot of white folks materially benefitted from things that blacks weren't allowed to. Are individual white people responsible? Well, no, technically. Is that a part of "white privilege," as argued in group terms, in the US? Sure, but that's a different conversation. Is the US government responsible for its past actions against black people? Damn skippy. So where's my check?

But when you get down to talking about how the "people" are formed, and past whole "peoples" being responsible for things and not specific entities and as the result of real and specific policies, you get into complexity. There is ideology, education, indoctrination, and force. There is collusion, collaboration, and willful giving over of one's loyalties. When you start saying "all Japanese are responsible" or "white people are responsible" – what use is that, on top of being a historically specious argument?

In other words, if you want to historicize "them," then do so. Back to the "Land of the Rising Sun," look at the fact that "Japan" went from being a feudal society under lords and military chieftains – and with no singular national or racial identity in the modern sense of the concepts – into a revolutionized nation-state from 1868 in which most of the population did not even know the Emperor's name, nor did they care, to a state asserting its power and authority in the 1870's and 1880's and which often had to put down peasant rebellions in order to do so, to a state that had begun to form a real identity after the "success" of the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education turning the school system into an ideology factory teaching that killing Chinese was actually morally preferable to killing a useful cow or pig.

By the time we get to the kids in the early 20th century becoming soldiers and adults in their 20's and 30's who would commit the "Rape of Nanking" and myriad other atrocities, the question of "why" isn't really one, is it?

And given the fact that Koreas under colonial rule in the 1910's, 20's, and 30's were being subjected to the exact same processes that had turning a nation of mostly civilian farmers, peasants, merchants, and artisans with no particular common interests into a "Japanese people" in the 1870's, 80's, and 90's – one should be so careful about so glibly labelling an entire people a singular, Otherized "Them."

Because looked at another way, the Japanese "people" were as much ideologically victimized as the Korean people had been. Thank God someone stopped the Japanese war machine and ended that process, though, right? Imagine the state of Korean national identity if the Japanese had held the peninsula until the present day.

Given as much time as the Japanese had to turn peasants into "Japanese", one wonders if the Japanese programs to erase Korean culture (which actually began in earnest very late in the game, in the late 1930's) had been held for three or four generations. The most die-hard nationalists would decry the idea that Korean identity would be erased, but a true scholar of history – not a ideology-blinded patriot – would recognize the power of education systems and total social control.

Hey, the very same system was successful in creating a strong Korean nationalism under Park Chung Hee, wasn't it?

The point is that the Japanese "people" were subjected to the exact same processes as the Korean "people" were and are, as most "peoples" on God's not-so-green Earth are.

The "facts" of most of this history isn't in dispute; all the bluster over who invaded whom, who owns which rocks in the sea, who apologized or didn't when and why – that's all child's play and pretty un-fucking-important against the context of the history that made all this possible in the first place: the problematic construction of national identity itself and the suspect interests such identity engenders on the individual and collective levels.

Yeah, that may sound complex, but it's a complex issue, and should be treated as such. That's one of the problems with such matters; no one doubts that the economy, the political system, or breaking down the nuanced meanings of a culture's classic works of literature requires theory, a deft hand, and an elevated level of thinking.

Yet, when it comes to clashing nationalisms, lay idiots who should even know better as lay idiots, write inflammatory pieces with absolutely no thought being given to the argument than "they" did this or "they" are responsible.

If you want to look at "who" or "what" is responsible, then it might yield the answer that kneejerk nationalist governments who utilize processes of extreme ideological control are at base, the culprit.

Problem is that once you look at things that way, you realize that the Korean "us" under Park in the 1960's was not too different from the Japanese "them" under the Meiji regime in the 1870's, when Japanese peasants had to be taught how to bow when the Emperor's procession passed.

In that sense, to talk about the Japanese as a singular historical agent, with a common set of interests and identifications over decades or even centuries at a time, is about as stupid as it is wildly historiographically irresponsible.

And that's the triple truth, Ruth.

The Dangers of Politically Correct History

It's unfortunate that something so obviously a valid argument (English and Korean) – that there were Koreans who collaborated, especially in the recruiting of the so-called "comfort women" – are still beyond the bounds of scholarly debate.

Given the fact that there is a good bit of evidence to show that there were Koreans who collaborated in this horrible, ongoing act, making the assertion is a reasonable thing for a scholar to do.

What makes me suspicious about any "correct" vs. "distorted" history is the political context in which certain issues are raised, and the fact that there is a "right" answer before the question is even fully articulated. The Korean government and media seem to want to construct a history of black-and-white absolutes, in which Korea was a hapless victim; and even beyond the issue of the colonial period itself, if we're assigning national "blame" and talking about collective guilt, then isn't the Korean government, by having fostered, protected, and developed a sex industry (based in no small part on Japanese roots) around the US military for the gathering if capital for the nation – if we're talking about guilt on national and government levels, how is the Korean government also not morally culpable for having perpetrated a continuation of nearly the same kind of oppressive system of sexual labor?

Put another way, from the perspective of the so-called "comfort women," was being forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers much different from returning to Korea and having no other social option than to do the same for American soldiers, especially at the behest of the Korean government?

On a related note, it is also scary to me is how convicted Korean war criminals can be absolved of responsibility after having been convicted of war crimes from eyewitnesses who identified them as having been infamous to their cruelty in the prison camps where they had served as guards over captured American servicemen. There's even a site demanding that compensation be given to the Korean war criminals, with no additional evidence other than they were Korean, and couldn't have really been morally culpable.

The rationale, in a nutshell? They were Korean, and just doing what they had been told. Well, the Americans tortured under certain of these individuals apparently couldn't make that distinction as their guards went above and beyond the call of duty to psychologically and physically torture them.

Huh? Even the Jews had the kapos in the death camps. But Koreans are somehow, by virtue of being Korean in the colonial period, with no additional evidence presented, impervious to guilt, because a court in 2006 assumes so?

So basically, being Korean during the colonial period absolved individuals of any responsibilities for their actions, and by retroactive extension, the then non-existent Korean nation under colonial rule.

And then for the Korean government to sell away future moral culpability for past wrongs – without informing the victims nor ever having compensated them since (which declassified documents talked about here and here and here and here and here revealed to be true in 2005) – isn't that enormously problematic?

And then there's also the fact that the government actively suppressed any talk of this stuff for decades, since it seriously contradicted with the state's interests in keeping this quiet?

How is that not sharing in a great deal of moral culpability for the lifelong pain and plight of the "comfort women" who lived on for far, far longer than 1945? Does anyone really think their suffering was due solely to the Japanese before 1945, or that that suffering ended immediately upon liberation and thereafter?

In other words, when did I step into an alternate universe in which Korean society has valued women's bodies at all throughout most of Korean modern history?

Was that when the Korean government was sending representatives to encourage prostitutes in the "camp towns" around the US military bases to gather capital for the nation? Or perhaps that was when the Park government was exploiting feminized labor throughout the 1960's and 70's? Is that why there are estimated from 300,000 to a staggering one million prostitutes working in the Korean sex industry in South Korea today (4.1% of the GDP by the government's own 2002 estimates)?

Why is this news, from a hardcore feminist perspective, at all surprising? There were Koreans who colluded in the kidnapping of the comfort women. Wow – not surprising, since most of the Koreans involved in the ongoing sex industry employing Korean women, as well as the importation of Filipino and Russian women under the same conditions that Korean women were kidnapped in the colonial period, as well as in the recent upsurge in the human trafficking of Korean women now all over the world since the 2004 Anti-Prostiition Law crackdown...

Seriously – are people around the nation holding their hands over their mouths and fainting in disbelief? In a country in which there are "masturbation rooms" and brothels next to elementary schools?

Come on.

And all the accounts you see present serious problems for the serious historian (as opposed to the kneejerk nationalist kind). As I tell my students of history all the time, refrain from using the passive tense as much as possible. This is not just for stylistic reasons, but also because it's an easy way to elide concrete historical references and credible evidence, which is what good history is based upon.

Most accounts read "were abducted" and "were taken" or "were misled into thinking they were applying for domestic labor" – something like this. If we have the facts evenly laid out and they are apparently distributed such that they offer a similar level of credible density across the entire argument, then why don't the histories tend to read, "After having been kidnapped by a roving band of Japanese soldiers searching for young candidates to be recruited into the ranks of the so-called "comfort women," Yumi found herself placed on a train and bound for..."

Too many of the accounts tend to skip right over recruitment and procurement and emphasize only the horrors of being a sexual slave itself. I'm not pooh-poohing that description, but merely pointing out that I know; I get it. I fully acknowledge the horror of that experience as well as the Japanese military and government's well-documented and historically compelling participation in the entire process.

But the question no one on this side of the East-Sea-of-Japan/Tokdo-Takeshima divide wants to look squarely in the face is the extent to which the overall low value of women's bodies in both societies at the time (which is still partially reflected now) contributed to not only the easy operation, but the relatively easy procurement of soon-to-be "comfort women."

Given the fact that the Japanese state and Korean/Japanese-run industry were in collusion at the time (which brings up the thorny issue of Korean collaboration), and that industry and organized crime were also closely linked (and were well into the development period as well), and that we know that many of the Korean women were brought into the industry by paid domestic recruiters, why is it akin to career suicide to pose the same question of collaboration, especially since the same historical actors – the state, industry, and organized thugs, for example – were on the scene.

Because that's a messy question.

But we forget that historical narratives are constructed around political purposed. The "Holocaust" didn't gain that moniker until the mid-1960's. It didn't become the historical lesson for the world that it is until a significant amount of time after the fact.

This doesn't change what happened. It changed how it is represented. "The Holocaust" happened like a motherfucker, but it took some time for the West to make sense of it, for the considerable political power of both Israel and those who support her to makes its presence felt (and not as a worldwide conspiracy, but as a political force like any other that exist in the world of politics, especially one enabled by a mixture of nationalism and a recent historical "quickening"), as well as for the rest of the world to begin to mold a coherent historical narrative out of such an overwhelmingly horrible act.

The situation with South Korean politics and constructions of "correct" versus "distorted" history makes for any true, deeper exploration into the painful, complex, and stomach-turning morass of the Japanese colonial period nearly impossible, quite ironically, in South Korea.

Think this isn't true? Look at the reactions to professors who even hint that Korea might have benefitted materially from the colonial period – they are summarily fired and their names turned into mud. And to the crazies who don't tend to read very closely before hitting the comment area, I'm not concerned with whether Korea benefitted or not at the present moment; I am only concerned with the fact that, given such a complex period with so complex and dependent factors, this isn't even considered a legitimate historical question.

"Did the Holocaust happen at all" is not something I consider a legitimate question, given the staggering, mind-boggling amount of evidence that anyone who has taken even a passing interest in the subject is faced with. Holocaust denial is political extremism because it is so very historically untenable a line of reasonable inquiry. You would have an easier time convincing me that Neil Armstrong never went to the moon (and yes, I've seen all the conspiracy theory videos and been to the web sites). And it is even more suspicious because it is usually only political extremists who are ever behind it.

However, "To what extent did Korea materially benefit from colonial occupation" is a legitimate historical question. "To what extent was there Jewish collaboration in the camps?" is also a legitimate historical question. And outside of a very narrow zone of unreasonable, undocumentable, and untenable extremes, most historical questions are at least worth asking, even if they may not be fun to hear answered.

And what is frightening about the Red Guard, knee-jerk reactions to Koreans in difficult moments in history, the logic behind people wanting certain professors' heads for even broaching certain historical topics seems to essentially stem from the idea that "they were Korean; that couldn't have happened."

It such professors were met with overwhelming, damning evidence of just how daft and dumb their arguments were, I wouldn't have a problem with this; but most of the reaction, as in the past with similar incidents, is simply knee-jerk nationalism guiding historical and popular discourse, even in the face of someone who might have something worthy of hearing. I'm not saying she's right about her historical assertion; I'm just saying that anyone covering their ears while calling for her head on a silver platter is most unequivocally wrong.

And given all the other sacred cows of Korean national ideology that poses as history from the colonial period, I think I'd like to hear what she has to say. And I'd like to hear more about who did the recruiting, how it was done, and what role the Korean government played in covering up this entire period after the war.

Announcing the Korea Journal Blog!

It's been a long time coming, but finally here – the Korea Journal announces its blog to the Korean Studies community and those interested in a more academic take on Korean society, culture, literature, and history.

Although I am the administrator of this blog, I do have a real job, and right now, I'm writing to you in my capacity as a consulting editor for the UNESCO-published Korea Journal, the oldest English-language academic journal there is, having been in print since 1962. The Journal publishes quarterly issues organized around a specific theme.

We have covered everything from Korean Buddhism to Korean cyberspace in our issues, and deal with current events, traditional fare, as well as assorted esoterica. If you don't know about us, you should check out some of the issues.

We are a new blog, and really look forward to developing an active community of people with Korean concerns. Since we have the academic background, resources, and institutional history, we thought it the perfect time to finally join the blogging community and offer ourselves as a resource for your debates, discussions, and deliberation about things Korean.

So come on over to the blog, register to leave comments, and join our growing community of Korean Studies scholars!

Why Be Critical?

I've noticed a few patterns of argument in many of the comments over the last several weeks, as well as in the occasional posts that actually got some people riled up enough to start some controversy. It seems that certain people seem to have the idea that being critical of Korea is in some way inherently negative and/or out of bounds. Let me dismiss the following typical arguments I've been getting, which are not just limited to this blog:

"We're just a poor, little country."
Well, as the wise old saying goes, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Most Koreans point with pride to having risen out of the ashes of the 1950's to becoming the 11th largest economy in the world, the national coming-out party that was the 1988 Seoul Olympics, being the most wired society in the world, being a leader in the production of semi-conductor chips, and myriad other minor miracles, such as apparently having started a "Korean Wave," or being the "hub of Asia" or the new "hub of stem cell research." Umm, well, scratch the last one. Point is – Korea's got a strong economy, high overall standard of living, and foreign workers who immigrate here to send money back home to countries over there. Sorry, Charlie – you've joined the club – you're an "advanced nation" now, you've reached the ever-so-coveted status of 선진국. Whether by dint of concrete economic markers, public perception, or the inflow of foreign workers come here to get ahead, Korea's officially made it to the status of "developed." Now, it's time to step up to the plate, take responsibility for one's own collective actions, and become open to international criticism because you now constantly demand to be considered (and rightfully so) an international player. Don't go crying "foul" when you get treated as a big playa should, for better or worse. Nobody's buying it anymore.

"Look in your own backyard."
Related to the above argument, critique of Korea is not only bad, but it's ethnocentric and even – let me sit down here – "racist." Or it's tantamount to "Korea-bashing." Sorry, I don't accept that as legitimate, either. I look in my own backyard all the time, and use the same analytical/critical eye to identify problems inherent and endemic to my own society. I am a trained academic, have a complex understanding of American history and society, and have the rhetorical and pedagogical skills to put this all to good use. Yes, I point out a lot of things in Korean society that may be uncomfortable, but given my academic training, my complex understanding of Korean history and society, and those same rhetorical and pedagogical skills, I think I am capable of doing so in a constructive way. Sure, I am still an "outsider" and have to rely on some crutches, but this still doesn't mean I am not able to point out useful things, especially as they have to do with things outsiders are especially good at seeing. So when I bring critical social theory and ethnic studies attitude to the Korean context, it usually adds up to something interesting and productive. To the people who would say that what I'm doing is harmful – I check myself all the time with younger Korean students, undergraduates, and fellow intellectuals. It's also part of the reason I blog. I'll listen to and engage with intelligent debate; poorly articulated comments by identity politics nationalists with a grade-school knowledge of history don't do much for me; and I often wonder to myself just what productive discourse do such people actually believe they're producing, anyway? OK – for example, so there's racism in America. And sexism. And homophobia. Who said there wasn't? I'm not talking about that right now. I'm talking about Korea, in a Korean context, dealing with the issue in terms of the particulars of the Korean situation. If I had been constantly referring to America as the source of my critique, wouldn't I be guilty of true ethnocentricism anyway? Think about what you're saying, people.

"You shouldn't air our dirty laundry."
Sure I should. This is an argument as old as the hills and is not specific to Korea. And it sometimes has a point. There's a time and place for everything. Focusing one the internal political strife within the Black Panthers during the late 1960's probably would not have been a good time to do that. Breaking ranks and criticizing one's political party probably isn't something you want to do right before an election you'd like to see it win. But sometimes – most of the time – this argument is just a bullshit cover for being uncomfortable with challenging the status quo, or just being plain uncomfortable. But embarrassment has its benefits, if you are familiar with history. The treatment of Blacks during the 1960's was embarrassing to the US's image abroad, especially in our Cold War fight with the Soviet Union for the right to look right. Pictures of dogs being sicced on peaceful demonstrators while being picked up off their feet by firehoses were placed on the front pages of Pravda and used to ridiculed America's boast of fighting for "freedom" in the world. That embarrassment led the federal government to want to solve the problem quickly, the sending of federal troops to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and was generally responsible for the institutional support of the Civil Rights Movement. I am pretty Hegelian in my belief that progress comes from the inherent clash between thesis and antithesis, one that leads to a better, higher balance between opposing forces. For Korea, now is the time. In a country that has developed and now needs and wants to live up to its own stated principles of "liberal democracy" and "freedom", it's time to put up or get come-upped. Photographers and writers, performers and artists, intellectuals and academicians, politicians and pundits – it's time to air out them dirty secrets and try to get 'em cleaner. And by the way, in an increasingly globalizing economy and world, there's no such thing as any "dirty laundry" that outsiders can't see, anyway. Maybe that was true for a Korea nobody cared about, in which there were no significant numbers of Korean-speaking non-Koreans, in which no one really had any real stakes in this place. But now – we read ya'lls books, newspapers, and watch your television and movies. Isn't that what you wanted? Which brings me back to that cake saying...

"You can't know Korea."
Ah, the argument of cultural essentialism. Resting upon faulty assumptions that "culture" is some magical commodity passed down through the blood, or that a real understanding of Korean history is only available to those possessing Korean surnames, is the idea that foreigners have nothing really useful to say about Korea because foreigners are incapable of really knowing anything about Korea. The seemingly innocuous version of this manifests itself after, for example, having given a complex, highly theoretical conference presentation on changes in the nature of Korean national identity in relation to the growth of the economy in the late 1980's and early 1990's, in which I talked about all sorts of esoteric things that rely on obscure primary sources in Korean – afterwards the Koreans sitting around my table at dinner marveled at the fact that I could order food in Korean. How the hell did you think I did all that research if I couldn't speak Korean? I scream to myself in my mind. The truly irritating flip side of this is when I make assertions about Korean history or offer my informed opinion about some aspect of Korean society and am dismissed by some university undergraduate who has never cracked a textbook that wasn't approved by the Ministry of Education, and wants to point out my American "bias" and how there are some things that "only Koreans can know." Oooook. Just being "Korean" doesn't guarantee a knowledge of Korean history, nor does it mean that person has the right – and certainly not the qualifications – to speak for all Koreans. Too many times, I've heard in heated conversations that "No Korean would ever..." or "You just don't understand how Koreans think" deployed in order to prove a point. In all such cases, I know or know of lots of Koreans who have done just that thing, and I think I do have some sense of how Koreans think, but I just happen to disagree with the speaker's point. Equating me disagreeing with a Korean on a specific issue with "Not understanding Korea" is a rhetorical cheap shot and just plain arrogant. And most of the time, the "No Korean would ever..." argument is easily refuted by simply reading the newspaper. Korea's a big society, with lots of people doing all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. It's telling that most of the people I've ever heard utter this argument come from sheltered families, probably do not read the newspaper, nor think critically about what it does and doesn't say, and accept state propaganda as fact. Like the female grad student who butted in on a conversation to offer her "expert" opinion that sex work (the topic of much conversation when the government released new statistics at the end of 2002) wasn't like we were anecdotally describing and that we were just weird foreign guys looking at Korea the wrong way. When I irritatingly asked her, "Then do you think they actually give haircuts at barber shops?" she snapped back, "What else would they do there?!" When we told her about the almost universal experience of most foreign guys who walk into these places with the barber sign and quickly learn that there ain't no hair being dealt with in the damp, dark depths of these mostly underground establishments, she was near tears. We decided to change the topic because it's hard to be unplugged from the Matrix against one's will; it's a shock to the system. But for foreigners – especially foreign people who actually know a thing or two (and who were actually relying on the government's own stated conservative statistics in this case) – encountering this kind of argument is really irritiating: "I'm Korean. Don't you think I would know?!" No, actually, I'm saying that being Korean doesn't mean one is automatic "expert."

"Only Koreans can understand certain things."
Well, if there are only certain things that people can know – if there is nothing universal in the pursuit of higher knowledge – I guess we all better stop studying each other's histories, translating great works of literature into other languages, and stop trying to understand different people's views of the world based on their individual experiences and identities. What's the point, eh? Knowledge is too particular for the Other to want to gain it, anyway. Let's leave things to the red-faced, self-assured undergraduates and angry nationalist bloggers to educate the rest of us. After all, "It's an X thang; ya'll wouldn't understand." All irritated complaining aside, I do believe that our experiences and identities allow insiders a point-of-view that is somewhat unique; but I refuse to believe that the nature of human experience itself is so specific that one cannot empathize by affective analogy and sympathetic imagination. Can a man understand being raped? Can a white person understand a black person being called "nigger?" Can a Japanese person understand many Koreans' anger towards them? My answer is a resounding "yes." One might not understand actually having the experience, but every human being is wired to have the same emotions, even if we all don't have the same exact experiences. But the human ability to imagine by analogy, to generalize from the specific, is endemic to the way our brains work, to the way we organize the world, to being what we define as intelligent creatures. And regardless, ghettoization of both identity and the intellect leads us nowhere. At least striving in the other direction – that of empathizing with analogous experience – leads in a positive direction. So when Koreans say that the emotions of "jeong" or "han" are things that foreigners can't know, or that only Koreans could really possess the "soul" to make a traditional instrument sing, I beg to differ.