Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes Im Chongkuk’s Ch’inil Munhangnon, published in 1966, as a key study of pro-Japanese collaboration. Written under Park Chunghee, it links literary collaboration to colonial systems, weighs its insight and moral limits, and shows its influence on later debates and activism.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Im Chongkuk’s Ch’inil Munhangnon (Pro-Japanese Literature) as a foundational work in the post-liberation study of pro-Japanese collaboration in South Korea. Im first emerged as a literary critic and gradually became known for exposing the collaborative activities of major colonial-period writers. The publication of Ch’inil Munhangnon in the 1960s is historically significant, as it appeared under the authoritarian regime of Park Chunghee—a leader widely criticized for his own pro-Japanese background—when open discussion of collaboration was politically constrained. Rather than merely compiling lists of collaborators, Im situates collaboration within broader political and institutional frameworks by analyzing colonial policies, legal structures, and pro-Japanese organizations that developed alongside Japan’s assimilationist agenda in Korea.

This paper evaluates the scholarly significance and limitations of Im’s work through comparison with earlier studies from the 1940s, focusing on what changed, what remained consistent, and what continues to pose theoretical problems in the discourse on collaboration. While Im’s research was innovative in its scope and documentation, it also adopts a strongly moralistic framework. He sharply condemns collaborators as betrayers of the nation and assumes that Koreans could and should have maintained a fixed national identity under colonial rule. Such moral absolutism risks obscuring the fluid, coercive, and complex conditions under which colonial subjects negotiated identity and survival. Although Im’s approach presents clear limitations, his work offers crucial insight into grassroots intellectual movements surrounding pro-Japanese collaboration and helps trace how these early debates shaped the resurgence of public activism and historical reckoning in the 1990s and early 2000s.