Choosing to Collaborate: Yi Kwang-su and the Moral Subject in Colonial Korea

Today it is common to demur from censuring collaborators with the Axis powers in World War II, citing the impossibility of putting oneself in the untenable position such collaborators then found themselves. Nonetheless contemporary moral philosophy has much to say about the choices men and women face when confronted by complicity with evil. Yi Kwang-su (1892-1950?), Korea's most distinguished modern novelist as well as one of its more notorious pro-Japanese partisans during the colonial period, offers an compelling test case for ways in which we might attempt to not only understand, but judge, his words and deeds in support of Japan's occupation of his country. Heeding the ongoing debate over collaboration with the German Reich, this presentation contends that the case of colonial Korea illustrates important first-order ethical issues.

John Whittier Treat is chairman of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University, from which he earned his PhD in 1982. He is the author of POOLS OF WATER, PILLARS OF FIRE: THE LITERATURE OF IBUSE MASUJI (Washington, 1988); WRITING GROUND ZERO: JAPANESE LITERATURE AND THE ATOMIC BOMB (Chicago, 1995; and GREAT MIRRORS SHATTERED: JAPAN, ORIENTALISM AND HOMOSEXUALITY (Oxford, 1999). He has taught at the University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Texas and Seoul National University. His current projects include a volume of edited essays on collaboration in East Asia, 1895-1953.

Location