Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 by Andre Schmid

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Reports back from diasporic communities, especially San Francisco, forced domestic writers to conceptualize the relationship of these deterritorialized immigrants to the peninsula. ” I argue in chapter 7 that the dichotomy of inside/outside developed in these reports on the diaspora enabled new strategies for exploring questions of national character and, ultimately, enabled the dominant spatial logic of national discourse to be turned inside out. This logic—namely, that national territory and culture are isomorphic—was challenged by both domestic and overseas writers as the colonial presence of Japan deepened while the patriotic activities of Koreans in San Francisco increased.

Yet the location of the Kwanggaet’o stele on the other side of the border—outside the peninsula, so to speak—led many writers to ponder the relationship between the peninsula and the vast lands of Manchuria. As I show in chapter 7, this tendency developed into a romantic vision as writers cast their historical gaze back to an earlier age when the nation extended beyond the peninsula into the lands of Manchuria. During the Choso˘n dynasty, some Koreans had felt nostalgic about the north. But now with a new national subject, the minjok, linked to its mythical progenitor, Tan’gun, a novel way of claiming Manchuria as central to the nation arose.

From the earliest years of the Meiji period, Korea had been an important foreign policy issue for Japanese leaders. 14 In a demonstration of how quickly Japan had learned the style of gunboat diplomacy, which only a short time before had been used against it, a ship was sent off the shores of Korea to provoke an incident. The following year, beating the Western powers at their own game, Japan signed the Treaty of Kanghwa with the Korean government, opening the peninsula to an ever widening array of international commercial activities.