God, Empire & Education:Comparing Japan's Policies on Mission Schools in Korea & US Policies on Language Schools in Hawaii in the1910s

• In Event: Difference and the Politics of Representation

Proposal

On February 7, 1917, Korean nationalist leader Syngman Rhee (1875–1965), residing in Hawaii while exiled from the Japanese protectorate of Korea, sent a letter to Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, Arthur Judson Brown (1856–1963) of New York. Rhee was the founder-cum-principal of the Korean Girls’ Seminary (formerly the Korean Christian Institute) in Honolulu and was interested in all things pertaining to Korean education in Korea and Hawaii. He requested a copy of Brown’s “Japanese Nationalism and Mission Schools in Chosen,” published the previous month in the International Review of Mission, as it “concern[ed] the recent School Regulations in Korea,” an issue he “very much wanted to read” about. Brown was an outstanding Church leader who had spent decades specializing in “Far East” missions, producing noteworthy publications exploring the history and sociopolitical landscapes of East Asian nations. He was also a highly esteemed administrative officer who not only took an active role in developing mission strategies in response to the region’s volatile geopolitics but also demonstrated a keen interest in the missions’ role therein.

In this article, Brown analyzed the Japanese- colonial project in Korea and its significance for missionary education. He focused on the Japanese colonial government’s private school regulations of 1915, which prohibited religious education in all Korean schools. This controversial policy had sparked intense opposition from the missionary leadership and locked it and the Japanese authorities in ongoing, heated debates. The 25-page article, written by an important American Church official about Japan’s imperializing educational policies in Korea, provides a glimpse of how the “transnational spirit of Christ” met with—by turns grappled with and became resigned to—imperial Japan’s national drive for expansion and colonized Koreans’ quest for national sovereignty in the early twentieth century. The interplay between these divergent imperatives was complex and dynamic as it unfolded across the Pacific, from Korea and Japan to Hawaii and the continental United States. It was well-illustrated by the fact that a Korean nationalist exile, Rhee, who had established a Christian mission school for Korean girls in Hawaii had contacted an American Christian leader in New York, Arthur Brown, to learn about Japanese colonial officials’ communication with American missionaries regarding Korean education, a dialogue from which Koreans were almost completely excluded.

Brown’s article is an indication of the intercontinental conversation between Japanese officials and American agents in the mid-1910s about the role of education in empire-building and the creation of imperial subjecthood. Intriguingly, their visions had many similarities, even if the two imperializing nations had conflicting views concerning specific places and populations. Dissecting Brown’s account, my study examines these two groups’ shared ideas on subjectification through schooling and juxtaposes Brown’s discussion of the rationale for the Japanese colonial government’s regulatory stance toward private schools in Korea (especially those run by American missionaries) with the logic and discourse used by American exclusionists to attack Japanese-language schools (particularly those administered by Buddhist priests) in Hawaii and on the Pacific Coast in the 1910s. It then considers the role of religion and religious education in this subjectification process as illustrated by controversies in both Korea and Hawaii in the 1910s and 1920s.

By drawing parallels between these imperial powers’ conceptions of the role of education in their subject-making practices and assimilation policies, I demonstrate how American and Japanese nationalisms or “imperialisms” both informed and conflicted with one another vis-à-vis the subjugation of alien elements in their expanded national territories. In doing so, I also show how Korean educators and students in Korea under Japanese rule, as well as Korean expatriates and migrant educators in the United States, navigated inter-imperial complexity and connectivity for greater educational autonomy. Investigation into the trans-local/transnational entanglements and transpacific imperial connections forged in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the human agency within, sheds light on the historical context and provenance that paved the way for new forms of subjectivity, sociality, and identification defying any simple categorization and that cannot be explained within the usual single-nation analytical frameworks.

In recent years, myriad studies have underlined the value of situating the United States as an empire—as a means of understanding the global reach of American culture and ideology as well as the formation of American national identity and racial relations. Consequently, greater attention has been paid to education’s role in empire. Building upon U.S. imperialism and imperial education scholarship, this study takes a further step by treating the competing U.S. and Japanese Pacific imperialisms of the first half of the twentieth century as an integral context that deepens our understanding of education’s place within the modern global circuits of race and empire. With an eye to the complex grids of knowledge and power laid out by imperial designs, human agencies, and historical contingencies, this study examines how the two empires strove both to make use of the public education system and to take control of private schooling for their respective imperial agendas. How schools were considered as a locus of power by rulers and ruled alike is considered as well.

Author

• jisoo hyun