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July 11th, 2023 
Awake Goy 
Review of the book The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided by Theodore Jun Yoo
In 2023, the book The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided by South Korean Professor Theodore Jun Yoo was published in Russian. It was praised in the West as “a rare multidisciplinary study of the two Koreas from the division of the peninsula in 1945 to the present time.”
There are very few popular science books on Korea, and the application of content analysis to the book already suggests that the author considers the inhabitants of the DPRK and the ROK as belonging to different nations. This is, to put it mildly, a bold assertion, especially if one recalls the definition of a nation in both Soviet and Russian scholarship.
Who is Theodore Jun Yoo? He is an associate professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University, and this is not his first book. In 2008, he wrote about gender politics in Korea during Japan’s colonial rule, and in 2016 about what mental health politics looked like in the same period. All three books were published by the University of California Press, not to mention a large number of articles dealing with various aspects of what is now commonly referred to as everyday history.
Born in Seoul in 1972, Theodore Jun Yoo comes from a family that moved to the South during the war. His father was a doctor who worked in Ethiopia during the reign of Mengistu Haile Mariam. In 1987, Theodore went to the USA and completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago. He taught in Hawaii for ten years, then returned to Seoul – in theory, anyone with such experience can write a book.
Theodore Jun Yoo’s book, like his earlier works, attempts to look at Korean history from the perspective of everyday history or “microhistory, which narrows the scope and scale of observation.” In other words, history is not depicted through macro processes, but through personal stories or plots drawn from the popular culture of the time and reflecting the key issues of the day. This is why references to books and films are found in Yoo’s book as often as references to other sources, but when dealing with books of this kind, the careful reader always asks the question: to what extent does the personal story depicted really reflect the mainstream, being a typical rather than anecdotal evidence? All the more so since the author himself acknowledges the dearth of information on North Korea, with the result that the discourse is also based on “fragmentary, selective, and sometimes unreliable narratives culled from defectors or NGO groups.”
What it really means, however, is uncritical replication of rumors and the fact that in any story with the number of victims the author chooses the maximum figure regardless of whether the North (three million victims of famine on p. 13) or the South (80,000 victims of the Jeju uprising on p. 37) is concerned.
While this is still acceptable where estimates are disputed or there are different methodologies of calculation, saying that three million people died of famine during the “Arduous March” is to go along with propaganda. Such estimates were popular in the noughties, but after a UN-backed census of the DPRK’s population failed to show a demographic gap (p. 13), the current scientific consensus on the number of victims ranges from 200,000 to 600,000.
The reason for this seems to be that when one deals with everyday history or researches narratives, there is no difference between fact and interpretation, as one is interested not in what happened, but in how the memory of an event is imprinted on the mass consciousness (in which there are always plenty of victims). However, from the reviewer’s point of view, when writing a book “about history in general”, this approach is rather flawed, since it is still important for the reader to understand what actually happened.
Although the book is formally structured along chronological lines, in each of these periods the author selects some characteristic and important stories that are intended to give a general impression of the era. One story flows into another and the reader gets a sense of Korean history because an interesting narrative lingers in the mind better than numbers and facts. However, such a mosaic pattern does not always allow one to relate this or that phenomenon to the activities of a particular political leader.
There are indeed a lot of interesting things in Theodore Jun Yoo’s book. These are mainly the results of his past research in the genre of everyday history, diaspora history or the history of everyday life, which will greatly expand the outlook of someone interested in ethnography, cultural anthropology or contemporary issues of the two countries.
In particular, the following topics attracted the reviewer’s attention:
- The proliferation of US food aid to the ROK and the resulting change in traditional food culture.
- US adoption programs and disparate stories of prominent members of the diaspora in Japan and the US, especially the story of wrestler Rikidozan.
- State promotion of prostitution during and after the Korean War, including during the Park Chung Hee administration. The author also writes frankly about the so-called “Gisaeng Tours” for Japanese tourists, noting that the state directly promoted the sexual exploitation of women in order to obtain foreign currency.
- Park Chung Hee’s policies to reduce birth rates, including the introduction of IUDs, and the provision of mobile clinics by the US, where free abortions were carried out.
- The government’s health policy, like the nationally, rolled out worm control under Park. This also includes the problem of mental ailments and their social causes.
- DPRK’s activities to draw African Americans to its side, including Pyongyang’s interactions with the Black Panthers.
- The story of South Korean migrant workers in West Germany, where US miners and nurses had been going since 1963, and the remittances they made accounted for about 2% of the country’s GDP at the time.
- Persecution of the “counterculture” under the military and attempts to “purify” pop music.
- This also includes attempts by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) to hunt down dissidents in West Germany, which (p. 109) almost led to the break-up of diplomatic relations, according to the author.
- The story of the campaign to clear the slums on which the Olympic venues for the 1988 Games were being built.
- The story of the North Korean spy Muhammad Kkansu, who posed as an Arab and was actually a prominent scholar, arrested in 1996 and pardoned by Kim Dae-jung in 2003.
- Reflection of the North Korean regime in popular culture, including films and video games.
- The story of the 2008 protests against US beef – although the author does not say so directly, it appears that the protests were prompted by bogus investigative journalism and “mistaken claims” by some scholars. So this turns out to be the first attempt by the Democrats to provoke a crisis with fake news.
- Lee Myung-bak’s attempts to promote makgeolli (one of the author’s scholarly articles is devoted to this), and generally to globalize traditional Korean cuisine.
- National scandals involving Shin Jeong-ah and Hwang Woo-suk, when the merits of scholars whom the Roh Moo-hyun government had trumpeted as national geniuses turned out to be bogus. However, thanks to the mosaic style of narration, these scandals do not cast a shadow on Roh Moo-hyun’s reign, as he is not mentioned there.
- The story of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up under the Democrats on the model of a similar institution in South Africa.
- Development of multiculturalism and state policies in this area, including specific treatment of Joseonjok (Korean Chinese).
- The struggle around “patriarchal attitudes towards women”, including the cyberwar between feminists and the users of the Ilbe website.
However, when Theodore Jun Yoo enters the field of actual history or politics, it leaves a strange impression. First, some very important events are missing from the context. For example, the formation of North Korea’s “self-reliance” policy and Pyongyang’s uneasy relationship with Beijing and Moscow cannot be understood without reference to the events of August 1956, when pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions of the WPK tried to oust Kim Il Sung. Andrei Lankov wrote a lot about it in English, and his books are even listed in the bibliography. It is therefore not clear why such a significant event is missing from the author’s attention and why Kim Il-Sung’s 1955 speech, where the term Juche was first mentioned, suddenly turns out to be a criticism of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization (p. 62). As a result, the author mentions on p. 60 the purges of the pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions, but he does not explain what caused them.
“Koreagate” was also left out. Although the author writes about the Unification Church as a dangerous cult, he leaves out the most serious lobbying scandal in the US, in which the Moonists were actively involved.
Second, there are many confusing passages in the text, which can give the wrong impression of the history course. For example, on page 15 in the chronological table there is the phrase “On October 26, 1979, Park Chung-hee is assassinated by his own intelligence chief. Chun Doo-hwan seizes power.” As a result, it is easy for the uninformed reader to get the impression that the coup took place immediately after Park’s assassination.
It seems odd that the author sees Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam as friends, although it was their wide-ranging differences of opinion that prevented them from teaming up against Roh Tae-woo.
Third, the closer he gets to modernity, the clearer the author’s political views become. He condemns Syngman Rhee’s rule or military dictatorships quite objectively, acknowledging that before and during the Korean War (p. 42) “both sides committed horrific atrocities against the civilian population.” References are made to the crimes of South Korean troops in Vietnam (p. 93) and that more people were killed in Gwangju than in Tiananmen (p. 145). Moreover, he raises a highly sensitive subject today, pointing out honestly that “the Japanese government had proposed to compensate individual victims directly, but the South Korean government insisted on receiving the whole amount of grants on behalf of the victims, which it never distributed as promised” (p. 91). However, he did not conclude that it was Seoul, not Tokyo, that was responsible for compensating the forcibly mobilized or “comfort women” consequently.
This is because the author is not just sympathetic to the Democratic Party, but is willing to put the right emphasis, even if the facts get in the way. As a result, in describing Lee Myung-bak’s rule, the author rightly points out his corrupt schemes, but his infrastructural achievements prove to be “controversial” (p. 215). The corruption charges against Roh Moo-hyun turn out to be “unsubstantiated” (p. 212-214), although both the ex-president and his entourage admitted to abuse of power and bribery. The story of Park Geun-hye’s rise and fall is all the more told in strictly democratic terms, including the passage about the Sewol ferry tragedy on p. 286: “Investigations revealed that the coast guard had been more concerned about legal accountability and following a chain of command than about the lives of the passengers. They only picked up the fleeing crew.” This is a blatant lie because attempts to rescue passengers can be seen on video from the tragedy.
As for the North, while on p. 65 the author admits that “by 1960, North Korea was the second-most industrialized country in Asia next to Japan; heavy industry accounted for more than 70 percent of the North’s economy, with a 2 percent annual growth rate during this period”, on p. 183 it appears that during the “Arduous March”, “the state banned direct use of words like famine, hunger, and death.”
As a result, some sections of the book resemble, in terms of “juggling the facts”, the well-known joke that “Stalin’s regime drove to suicide the legally elected Chancellor of Germany, a talented artist and vegetarian.”
So despite the beautiful stories from the everyday life, the outcome boils down to this: they split a single country, and its one half is a rogue state, while the other is a thriving democracy, albeit not without its past and present problems.
The situation is aggravated by the absence of a scientific proofreader, whose notes could have filled in the lagoons accidentally or deliberately left by the author. In this case, we are in particularly talking about gross transcription errors in the Russian version of the book, including the misspelled name of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Whether it was the author’s, the translators’ or the proofreaders’ mistake, it remains strange, but in any case it takes less than a minute to check the accepted way of rendering the name of the DPRK leader in Russian, and this, alas, does not add credibility to the material.
If, against the backdrop of the book’s popularity, the publishers decide on a second edition with scientific editing, it will be an important and significant step forward, as Theodore Jun Yoo’s book ended up leaving a dual impression. On the one hand, for an expert on Korea already immersed in the context and skilled in textual criticism, this is a really interesting book with a lot of useful information, including sections on topics about which very little or nothing has been written in Russian.
On the other hand, this is NOT the first book a person interested in the history, culture and politics of the Korean peninsula states should read. This is because, as a popular science publication, Theodore Jun Yoo’s work debunks some misconceptions about the DPRK and the ROK, but also lays just as many others in the memory. In taking on an important work of interpreting Korean history, the author has perhaps exceeded his professional competence, while his other books may have been worth translating despite the narrowness of their audience.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of China and Modern Asia at the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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