Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea by Jager Sheila Miyoshi;

Author:Jager, Sheila Miyoshi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4586866
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

7

Monumental Histories

Our ancestors were manly men until the middle ages, but this masculine character disappeared by the time of the establishment of the Chosŏn dynasty.… Sorrow is the only reward we can get from surveying our past history.

—President Park Chung-hee1

How does one commemorate a war that technically is still not over? While the Korean War, at least for Americans, “ended” in 1953, the discourses of commemoration about the war have not been brought to closure in Korean society.2 How does one bring closure to a war for which the central narrative is one of division and dissent, a war whose history is still in the process of being made?

In South Korea, the official commemoration of the Korean War has always taken on an anti-North Korean stance. But this official view was suddenly questioned in the wake of Kim Dae-jung’s historic meeting in Pyŏngyang with North Korean leader Kim Chŏng-il in June 2000. Indeed, to the surprise (and dismay) of the hundreds of veterans who had gathered in Seoul to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Korean War in June 2000, it was announced that most of the planned commemorative events, including a large city parade and an historical reenactment of the 1950 Inchŏn landing, were to be canceled.

Of course, the singular and official historical narrative of the Korean War, including the anti-North Korean rhetoric that was embedded within it, has always been open to question in South Korea, although it was not until very recently that these new views and, especially, new perceptions of North Korea, could be freely aired. While any commemorative act, particularly about wars, is a form of history-making that aims to promote and secure a particular interpretation of events while at the same time blocking or erasing potentially contestatory readings, in South Korea, official memory about the war has always been constituted within a discourse of national self-definition aimed to promote the legitimacy of the State. In the Korean official culture of commemoration, the Korean War has played a fundamental role in defining the masculinist language of national self-definition and State legitimacy in South Korea. Not only has this official commemorative culture perpetuated and generated a view of the past in terms of a particular masculine ideal, memories of the war have affirmed the identification of the national subject with the authority of these masculine images aimed to perpetuate the State’s vision of a future reunified Korea.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the masculinist logic of this official commemorative culture through a detailed examination of the War Memorial, a huge architectural complex located in Yongsan-gu, Seoul. Conceived under the Roh Tae-woo regime in 1988, the Memorial was opened to the public in 1994, soon after the election of Korea’s first civilian president Kim Yong-sam, in over thirty years of military rule (Figure 7.1). While the War Memorial glorifies the ancient or eternal character of the nation, which it links to the lost “manly” past of a forgotten martial tradition, it simultaneously seeks to emphasize

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