Chapter Five. Crafting Independence: Gender, Class, and Reorientation under Colonial Rule, 1896–1945

Abstract

The plot device of separated twins in the action film “Assassination” (2015) illustrates the balance between nature and nurture in directing history over the 35-year period of Japanese colonial occupation, from 1910 to 1945. Re-imaginings of South Korean films usually reinforce national moral imperatives that lie close to the heart of contemporary Korean identity—but also to question this received wisdom. The struggle for independence against Japanese rule remains the dominant motif, but the undeniably modern transformations occasioned by colonialism help expand the notions of autonomy that arose in response. And most striking in this regard has been the unmistakable primacy of female characters—contrasting, mirroring, interchangeable, or dual (and duelling) women’s roles—in complicating the meaning of resistance, independence, and freedom. These works, including Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden” (2016), thus contrast with the traditional glorification of the vigorous fight against Japan. They feature very modern female protagonists who struggle against not only the foreign occupiers but also the traditional Korean customs, behaviours, and institutions that the invaders brought into relief. Female identity and gender relations thus stand for or even supersede the structural forces of social class and patriarchy that must be fractured or reconfigured under foreign occupation.

FormalPara Playbill

“Assassination” (Amsal); Choe Dong-hun, 2015

“Gabi” (“Coffee”); Jang Yun-hyeon, 2012

“YMCA Baseball Team” (YMCA yagu-dan); Kim Hyeon-seok, 2002

“Private Eye” (Geurimja sarin [“Shadow murders”]); Bak Dae-min, 2009

“A Resistance” (Hanggeo: Yu Gwan-sun iyagi [“Resistance: the story of Yu Gwan-sun”]); Jo Min-ho, 2019

“Blue Swallow” (Cheongyeon); Yun Jong-chan, 2005

“My Heart” (Jeong [“Affection”]); Bae Chang-ho, 2000

“Radio Dayz”; Ha Gi-ho, 2008

“Modern Boy”; Jeong Ji-u, 2008

“The Handmaiden” (Agassi [The Countess]); Park Chan-wook, 2016

“Love, Lies” (Hae-eohwa [“Flowers that understand words”]); Bak Heung-sik, 2016

“Spirits’ Homecoming” (Gwihyang [“Homecoming”]); Jo Jeong-nae, 2016

“Malmoe: The Secret Mission” (Malmoi [“Collecting words”]); Eom Yu-na, 2019

“2009: Lost Memories”; Yi Si-myeong, 2002

“The Tiger” (Daeho [“Great tiger”]); Bak Hun-jeong, 2015

“Age of Shadows” (Miljeong [“Moles”]); Kim Ji-un, 2016

“Anarchist from the Colony” (Bak Yeol); Yi Jun-ik, 2017

“Battleship Island” (Gunhamdo [“Hashima Island”]); Ryu Seung-wan, 2017

“The Good, the Bad, and the Weird” (Joheun nom, nappeun nom, isang-han nom); Kim Ji-un, 2008

In her new posh home in Seoul in 1933, with Korea now approaching a quarter-century of Japanese colonial rule, the lead character of “Assassination”, An Og-yun (played by Gianna Jun), stares at hanging family pictures, then turns and spots the wedding gown prepared for her. This causes her to weep uncontrollably—not out of sentimentality but rather in shock and horror at the realisation of what her life had become, at least potentially. For the dress marks an upcoming marriage to a high-ranking Japanese military officer, and on the walls are images not of herself but of her long-separated identical twin whose identity An has appropriated in order to kill the most notorious Korean collaborator under Japanese occupation, her biological father. While Og-yun was growing up under severe conditions in Manchuria into a fighter for the armed independence struggle, this man had raised her unsuspecting sister in privileged surroundings in Korea while betraying his nation. The plot device of separated twins thus highlights the interaction of nature and nurture in shaping people and perspectives under foreign domination. Indeed, the film, while featuring a range of mostly male “assassins”, shares with the best cinematic treatments set in colonial Korea the centring of a female character—and often the pairing of female characters, as is the case with “Assassination”—to signal both the fixity and fluidity of identity, as well as the deeper stakes of resistance and adaptation under Japanese rule.

Unsurprisingly Korea’s 35-year experience of colonisation—starting in 1910 with forced annexation into the Japanese empire and ending with Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in 1945—has inspired a rich spectrum of imaginings by South Korean cinema ever since liberation.⁴⁰ This enterprise has served steadily to reinforce imperatives, backed by the prevailing ethos of state and society, that lie close to the heart of contemporary Korean identity but also to question received wisdom by adding more interpretive layers in depicting this period. Granted, the righteous struggle for independence against Japan remains the overarching premise, but the undeniably massive and modern transformations occasioned by colonial rule continue to help expand the notion of independence that arose in response. The hallyu films set in the colonial era, indeed even before—during the 15-year period directly preceding annexation in 1910—have thereby applied a full range of cinematic artistry to portraying this crucial part of the nation’s recent past.

The result has been remarkable on many levels, starting with the very act, following South Korea’s 1987 democratisation, of approaching this period with greater circumspection and sophistication.⁴¹ But the most striking characteristic of films set in the colonial period has been the unmistakable primacy of female characters: contrasting, mirroring, interchangeable, or dual (or duelling) women who elaborate on the meanings of resistance, independence, and freedom in the face of (gendered) fate. These works thus deliberately stand in contrast to the traditional glorification of the vigorous fight against Japan, which nonetheless remains an abundantly recurring element, by focusing on aspirational female protagonists. Such characters struggle against not only foreign occupiers but also the traditional Korean structures and behaviours that the invaders brought into relief. In likely reflecting early twenty-first-century developments in South Korea as much as a pursuit of historical veracity, female agency thus stands against or overcomes the power of social class, patriarchal conventions, and familial expectations that must be fractured or reconfigured amid the dislocations of foreign occupation.

Prelude to the Takeover, 1896–1910

Three films set in the 15-year period leading up to the Japanese annexation of 1910 establish the thematic parameters of the films examined in this chapter as a whole. In “Gabi” (Jang Yoon-hyeon, 2012), a main female character’s conflicts of identity result in the reinforcement of national loyalty amid the disruptive onset of imperialistic forces in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century. “Gabi”, the circulating Korean rendering of “coffee” at the time, stands for a wide range of demands and choices in a precarious historical moment. In hindsight, this was the last major chance for Koreans to maintain political autonomy, although the film’s story ends in 1897 with the optimistic establishment of the Great Korean Empire, the new polity meant to extend the life of the Joseon dynasty but which fell to Japan in a process finalised in 1910.

Most of the film actually takes place in 1896, after the Korean monarch had fled to the Russian legation in Seoul at the start of the year while under perceived threat from Japanese soldiers and Korean reformists.⁴² In 1894, the reformists had inaugurated the comprehensive and systematic Gabo Reforms under the protection of Japanese soldiers, who occupied Seoul that summer in order to confront the Chinese military’s own entrance into the country at the behest of a Korean court trying to quell a massive peasant revolt. The rapid progression of these three interlocking events of 1894—the Donghak Uprising of the spring and the Gabo Reforms and outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War that summer—accelerated the dialectics of Korean modernisation under imperialism: the internally driven quest for a more just socio-political order while resisting foreign threats; the adoption of modern Japanese, Chinese, and western models while pursuing systemic reform; and the attempt to preserve Korean autonomy within the East Asian regional order while manoeuvring between threatening external powers. The intensifying interaction with the wider world occasioned by imperialism constituted a double-edged sword that sharpened the impulse for significant internal reform but also threatened the country’s independence.

Such is the basic conflict that drives “Gabi” and the development of the film’s main character, Danya, the Russianised name of a Korean girl who, two decades before the events of 1896, had been orphaned when her father, a government interpreter, was killed by Japanese assassins while working secretly for a Korean king pursuing ties with the West. As the narrative shifts forward to 1896, this basic configuration of competing foreign interests—Japan versus the West, as represented by Russia—still gnaws at that monarch, Gojong, as he tries to negotiate the survival of both himself and his country while in internal exile within the Russian legation. This predicament symbolises the position of Korea itself as the country attempts to remain intact while menaced by imperialist powers. Meanwhile, the adult Danya and her lover “Illyich”, a Korean who had been tasked as a child by Danya’s father to protect her, have been living in the wilds of Siberia as swashbuckling bandits without any greater loyalties. But they are captured and separated by the Japanese who are trying to subvert the Russian empire’s increasing reach into East Asia. The pair return to Korea, after Illyich has turned into a Japanese agent, while Danya, unaware of his deal with Japan in exchange for her survival, is recruited to work as a Russian language interpreter. The pair reunite, but it is Danya’s increasing interaction with the Korean king that ignites her shift in loyalty away from Illyich—and all that he pursued and represented, including now the ruthless interests of Japan—to the Korean monarch, whom she is later tasked by Illyich to poison (through coffee). Danya’s change in outlook is symbolised visually by, among other things, one of the main themes in the film: the stark change in her clothing after she chooses to become a Korean court lady, for a court that was now housed in a Russian building. The Korean king himself changes garb back and forth between the traditional gown and a faux-Kaiser uniform, signalling a modern-day emperor, which appears in a well-known image of him from the time. These opposing directions of transformation reflect the flood of foreign influences in the age of high imperialism, which is represented in the film also by guns and trains, as well as by the enveloping presence and utility of coffee, beloved by the Korean king and expertly brewed by the two lovers. Coffee actually tastes better if left a bit bitter, without much sugar, Danya advises.

The predicaments of national loyalty and identity are embodied also in the other main female character, Sadako, who has forced Illyich into service as a Japanese henchman. The adopted daughter of a Japanese official in Korea, as a Korean girl she had been sold off to a Japanese family and now insists to Illyich, while speaking in Korean, that she is “Japanese to the bone”. Sadako thus occupies one end of the spectrum of Korean collaborators, staple characters in the films set in this era, but she is at heart not very different from Danya herself. For both, despite the circumstances of their birth and initial upbringing, events in childhood beyond their control set their life directions. And as adults, their identifications take different turns in reflecting freedom or fate, with Danya choosing to return to the course followed by her father while Sadako further traverses the path from her childhood. That they are female characters increases the stakes and depth of their chosen destinies, as if to further burden their search for agency and perspective with the weight of customary expectations, demands, and constraints. But these limitations demonstrate well the restricted options faced by the country and its government at this time. That the film ends optimistically with the founding of the Great Korean Empire in 1897 reflects the ongoing positive reassessment of that polity, now viewed increasingly in South Korea as the nation’s final desperate attempt at autonomous modernisation in defiance of Japanese designs.

Anti-Japanese resistance stands even more squarely at the centre of “YMCA Baseball Team” (Kim Hyeon-seok, 2002). This comedic tale is set in 1905, when the Japanese military, which had arrived in Korea the previous year to prosecute its war against Russia, coerced and bribed Korean high officials into signing a protectorate treaty that transferred control of government finances and foreign affairs to the Japanese. These are the circumstances in which Korea’s first organised baseball team forms and fights—on the playing field, not the battlefield—against a Japanese army team that encroaches upon the Koreans’ home turf (Image 1). The allegory thus emerges in many forms, with baseball signalling heaps of bigger things: autonomy and independence, modernity, westernisation, resistance, social reform, and national identity and consciousness. That is a lot to carry for a simple game, but it attests to the skill with which the film manages to endow an ostensibly lighthearted, indeed farcical story—replete with gags such as play-by-play announcing, picture-in-picture shots of the game in progress, and even a musical number—with historical weight. Indeed, in hindsight, all those historical issues were in play at this major turning point at the start of Korea’s twentieth century, as the country teetered on the brink of subjugation, and were even heightened once into the period of colonial rule.

Image 1

The Korean baseball team being confronted by Japanese soldiers in “YMCA Baseball Team”

Just as symbolically significant is the main character of Ho-chang, a somewhat thick-headed but endearing young man trying to both escape and meet the expectations of his traditionalist Confucian father. He stumbles upon an American missionary compound and meets there a young woman named Jeong-nim, the daughter of real official Min Yeong-hwan—a character appearing also in “Gabi”—who committed ritual suicide in protest against the protectorate treaty of November 1905. (In the film, his funeral is actually the setting for the funniest scene.) Jeong-nim, having been educated abroad, introduces Ho-chang to baseball. Ho-chang is smitten by the game and, less overtly, by the young woman, and both sources of interest serve as windows to the wonders of (westernising) modern change. After some feigned disinterest, he agrees to join the new baseball team organised by the YMCA, which draws young Koreans from a full range of social identities, from a dishevelled man of slave background to his polar opposite, a haughty aristocratic type. They include also the son of one of the high-ranking cabinet ministers condemned for giving away the country in 1905. This young man’s own opposite is an independence activist who had studied in Japan and, on a fateful day while practising with the team, encounters a buddy from school days in Tokyo now serving as a Japanese military officer. The friend, who proposes to play a friendly game of baseball, also happens to be the son of the Japanese military overlord, newly arrived to impose Japanese power and quash Koreans’ hopes of keeping their autonomy.

This array of forces raises the historical stakes until the predictable final matchup between the Japanese army team and the YMCA team, but the ending is deliberately stripped of any gravitas beyond the token rallying cry of Korean resistance. Instead, the real appeal of “YMCA Baseball Team” comes from its visual and narrative signals that, among other things, foretell—both historically and in films—a dominant motif of the succeeding period of colonial rule as well: the popular formation of modern national identity. One component of this effort is a solidifying sense of common cause against an urgent threat, while another is taking this moment as an opportunity not only to drive out the invaders but to undertake fundamental internal social reform. The challenge is to discern the beneficial elements of modern change—represented by the streetcars, street lights, and bicycles, all impressively recreated for the background sets of Seoul—and integrating them into a renewed Korean existence that is nonetheless established on a traditional basis. This heritage is denoted by items as wide-ranging as Buddhist stupas, the medallion carried by former secret royal inspectors (amhaeng eosa), and the graceful crane, the pose of which Ho-chang adopts in order to improve his batting stance. Learning how to swing a bat is the metaphor for the great challenge facing Ho-chang and indeed all Koreans, for the flying baseball, like adaptation to the modern world, is a fast, curving, elusive target. For this, the brief appearance of western missionaries and the prominence of their game in the story serve as a counterweight to the imposing source of much of the foreign influence at the time, Japan. As one of the team members notes, the Japanese began playing the imported game three decades before the Koreans. Like modernity, however, the Koreans can not only catch up but surpass their rivals. In reality, of course, this was a more complicated matter.

In “Private Eye” (Geurimja sarin [“Shadow murders”]; Bak Dae-min, 2009), the messiness of a Korea undergoing conquest—as well as the potential of the modern world, in the form of science and deduction, to attenuate such an unsettling process—provides the setting for another theme of the succeeding colonial era: the decaying, indeed already rotten Korean elite. The setting of 1909 (exactly a century before the film’s release year) is meticulously recreated, though not always faithfully.⁴³ Two years earlier in 1907, the Japanese effectively had taken control over the Korean government through the forced abdication of the monarch and the establishment of Japanese veto powers over Korean government decisions and appointments. And one year later came the formal annexation of 1910. In the year 1909 the Korean independence fighter, An Jung-geun, gunned down the first Japanese overlord of the protectorate, Ito Hirobumi, an assassination that likely accelerated the process towards outright annexation less than a year later. This formal takeover merged the Japanese protectorate administration with the preceding Korean government, which since 1907 had already been dominated by reliably pro-Japanese officials anyway. Such a political context allows the film to highlight one of the seediest features of a Korean polity heading towards the cliff: the exploitation and abuse practised by those pursuing the ugly collusion of the Korean elite with the conquering Japanese. Those now wielding power among both the Japanese rulers and their Korean collaborators come together to jointly engage in heinously decadent practices as a means of exploiting and promoting this degenerate decline.

On the surface, however, “Private Eye” is an un-agitating neo-noir murder mystery, with the eponymous detective teaming up with both a young medical student and a budding female scientist to solve the “shadow killings” of two high-placed men. What this trio uncovers are Korea’s messy entanglements with rapid material change and abuses of privilege that serve as allegories for the country’s (formally the “Korean Empire’s”) deterioration and attendant loss of autonomy. The Independence Gate, originally established in 1897, the year of the Great Korean Empire’s birth, in order to rally Koreans’ determination to forge an autonomous modernity, makes an appearance for all the wrong reasons, now standing in an empty field devoid of any signs of activity, a marker of the fading cause (Image 2). Elsewhere, what replaces the gate and all that it represents are the distracting lures of opium and a traveling circus, the troupe for which brings together, as with the YMCA baseball team, a motley collection of people of lower social standing. Here, though, they are abused by, in order to divert attention away from, the connivance of corrupt Korean power holders selling out the country. Also appearing, as it does in “Assassination”, is the plot device of twins and the accompanying issue of separate but parallel historical paths, but this is one of several underdeveloped and unclear subplots, as is the connection to the annexation that would immediately come the next year in 1910. Indeed, the film stays relatively silent about these realities, eliding the issues of national recovery or even overt resistance, and instead shining a spotlight on the underbelly of Korean society while only hinting at avenues for hope.

Image 2

The detective and his assistant looking at the neglected Independence Gate in a weedy field, from “Private Eye”

Countering Women for Independence

The choice between Japan and the West, dependency and autonomy, and tradition and modernity was anything but a duality, as the lead-up to the annexation of 1910 demonstrated and as the subsequent colonial experience further proved. In portraying these complications, however, the films set in the colonial period often revert to dichotomies, albeit in a crafty way—by presenting the precarious existence of Koreans beholden to and resisting fate through the dualities of female leads. Whether in featuring or implying a contrasting opposite or in pairing individual females, the partnering of women characters stands as an unmistakable thematic core, as if to underscore the greater fluidity, impact, and stakes of the fate-freedom balance in the experience of modern change under colonialism. And at times such a countering juxtaposition is expressed, as in “Gabi” (above) or “Modern Boy” and “The Handmaiden” (below), as an act of disguising and hence of interchangeability, a means to subvert and flatten patriarchal and other hierarchies.

This general rule for the most accomplished hallyu films set in the colonial period is actually reinforced by perhaps the most notable exception, “A Resistance” (Hanggeo: Yu Gwan-sun iyagi [“Resistance: The story of Yu Gwan-sun”]; Jo Min-ho, 2019), a biopic of the celebrated independence activist and martyred teenaged student Yu Gwan-sun. Here, the only duality is an implied transformation from a curious and increasingly assertive school girl (the brief scenes of which are shown in colour) to Yu’s life in captivity for organising locals in her hometown during the March First 1919 mass uprisings against colonial rule. She was jailed for a year thereafter before dying, and most of the film takes place in that time of incarceration, which is presented in black and white in order to convey the stark realities of that experience for her and her female cellmates. Inspired by Yu’s brave defiance, they are shown determined to act collectively, including by mimicking the mass public demonstrations as they trundle in sync in their cramped cell to keep their minds and bodies from rotting. However, despite the insights provided by cellmates from various corners of the country, including a gisaeng courtesan and even an expectant mother, the focus is firmly on reinforcing the heroic image of Yu in the face of terrible trials.

In unmistakable opposition to such a conventionally hagiographical portrait stands another biopic, “Blue Swallow” (Cheongyeon; Yun Jong-chan, 2005), in which the heroine, Bak Gyeong-won (Jpn. “Boku Keigen”), is anything but an independence activist and indeed almost the reverse: in the 1920s and 1930s, as the first Korean female pilot, she resists all forms of attachment, including national identity, and hence pursues her life goals in the colonial metropole of Japan, where almost the entire story is set. In hindsight, then, controversy surrounding this film was almost inevitable and indeed arose even before its release, which probably explains its box office failure.⁴⁴ But “Blue Swallow”—the name of Bak’s plane—presents an intriguing anti-hero, most of all through an insistently individualistic character who rejects all customary expectations and predetermined outcomes in order to actualise her agency, even if this leads to self-destruction. In the scope of audience expectations, she comes across as a feminist role model but also as a pro-Japanese collaborator, depending on the relative weight of various indicators from the story and on the semiotics, which is powerful in its visual punch.

The two primary symbols are the airplane—or flying in general—and the sun. Many of the thrilling aerial scenes juxtapose the two objects, showing Bak’s biplane in the air against a backdrop that includes the blazing sun. At times it appears she is flying too close, evoking Icarus (Image 3), and at other times she encounters cloudy visibility as an overcasting omen. But mostly the open air, along with the sun that illuminates it, is her comfort zone, where she can enjoy pure freedom and take flight from the restrictions imposed by her impoverished upbringing in Korea, by her Korean ethnicity in Japan, and most of all, by her gender. While a talented student at a Tokyo-area flight school, a love interest appears in the form of a Korean officer in the Japanese military who is also the son of a collaborator, but this character, Ji-hyeok, who rejects everything his father represents, does the most to distract or question Bak’s resolute quest. Such a shift is signalled by the appearance of the sun into scenes of the pair together, and Bak herself is shown looking at the fireball in the sky with a creeping sense of doubt even while resisting the urge to settle down (Image 4). The unresolved question is whether the sun should be associated more with the sky and airplanes, and hence of Bak’s quest for self-fulfilment, or with Japan, the self-labelled “land of the rising sun”, and in turn whether Japan also represents true freedom. Certainly, in both historical terms and the film’s presentation, the Korea of her time could not have offered Bak such opportunities.

Image 3

Bak Gyeong-won’s plane in “Blue Swallow”

Image 4

Korean aviator Bak Gyeong-won peering at the horizon in “Blue Swallow”

An extension of this ambiguity comes from whether the viewer or the Bak character finds that the political circumstances of the time inhibit her pursuits or accommodate them. The character herself appears apolitical to a fault, as if purposefully disregarding the impact of colonial hegemony even while being surrounded and constantly prodded by it. As the opening sequences illustrate, the Japanese takeover had instilled a passion for flying and provided her the chance to pursue it, but it also complicated and eventually grounded her ultimate ambitions, clouding her vision with the lure of something more ominous than what she could discern. Such forces pulling her in opposing directions are embodied in two countering female characters. One is a young woman from Korea who aspires, like Gyeong-won, to overcome hardship by learning to fly and thereby unwittingly becoming a romantic rival. The other is a Japanese pilot who becomes a rival in the air but turns into a sympathetic partner who helps Gyeong-won navigate the emerging political obstacles. Indeed, the sudden and violent intrusion of real-world conflicts into Gyeong-won’s detached life as a budding aviator shakes her into a realisation that she cannot escape the larger forces around her. In the end, after discovering that any attempt to return to an embrace of her Korean identity would prove fruitless, she accepts an attachment to Japanese power as an inescapable element of her (now tempered) search for freedom. By the end of the film, as a fantasy sequence suggests, her dreams of reaching for the open skies had always included a darkening foreboding. Indeed the beginning of the film shows her as a girl running in an open field, enthralled by a plane flying overhead and chasing it towards the sun (Image 5). But the machine is also spewing dark smoke. Her independence would always come at a price, although it is not clear how aware Bak is of this trade-off and, if so, whether she accepts it. As an allegory for Koreans’ colonial condition, this would prove as instructive as any other.

Image 5

Bak Gyeong-won, as a child, chasing a plane heading towards the sun, from “Blue Swallow”

If “Blue Swallow” presents a lead female character who actively rejects the burden of human attachments, and more so that of the family, one of the most distinctive and moving films of Korean cinema, “My Heart” (Jeong [“Affection”]; Bae Chang-ho, 2000), engages with the theme of female independence during the colonial period in a decidedly different way. Indeed, on the surface, everything about the film contrasts with “Blue Swallow”: “My Heart” remains mostly set in the Korean hinterlands, about as far away from Tokyo as possible, and offers only hints at the political circumstances; modern technology makes almost no appearance in the main story, except for important glimpses of a camera and phonograph, and a reference to a movie showing; its main character, Suni, while literate and trained in traditional medicine—a key point—is anything but urbane; and while the pilot Gyeong-won of “Blue Swallow” regards her personal relationships with wariness, Suni embraces human attachment in all its forms, as suggested by the film’s title. But at its heart the film also celebrates individual female agency over structured destiny, and while it doesn’t reject norms, as the aviator Bak character does, “My Heart” is a feminist take on the debilitating duo of patriarchy and social convention, particularly as they pertain to marriage and family. For this, the film employs that most striking motif in the historical films set in the colonial era, the pairing and mirroring of female characters to forward both the storyline and symbolism of true independence.

The achievement of autonomy comes through three episodes of Suni’s life, which map a journey of self-discovery and unfolding of personhood. The two transition scenes between the main episodes, enveloped in remarkably evocative background music, feature her walking on a path out of darkness and into a bright, lush scene of the Korean countryside, foretelling enlightenment and growth. But the process through which Suni achieves this growth is also fraught with challenges and tragedy, situations that she adjusts to with ever-greater awareness of her familial affections, though reconfigured, and through the crafting of more fulfilling partnerships as a means of breaking the bonds of her bestowed circumstances. To highlight this point, the main storyline begins with her arranged marriage as a mid-teen to a bratty boy who is even younger, and Suni’s early realisation of what this ultimately means establishes her character as one who seeks firm but practical solutions to unfair life through tools of individual agency. These include her passion for reading, which provides her comforting escape and even hope, and her “affection” or “heart”, which is consistent but flexible enough to fit changing needs.

The first test of her capacity for compassion comes a few years later—though still in the film’s first episode—when her husband returns home from boarding school. Now a dashing young man, he comes armed with cosmopolitan tastes and a “modern girl” as his openly attached mistress. In an extraordinary scene that reverses the perspective of the colonial-period literary trope of the modern man having to choose between a traditional wife and his educated “new woman” lover, Suni reacts with predictable resentment, even anger, upon being confronted with this stunning revelation. But in a sign that she is not interested in accepting her lot or even in fighting it, she soon sympathises with her husband and especially her counterpart and presumed rival, the young lady who, unlike Suni, received schooling and got to choose her partner. But just like Suni, she remains trapped by patriarchal convention, unable to fully exercise her choice. So Suni chooses to retreat, not as capitulation but rather as an act of emancipation for both women. Suni’s other female counterpart in the first episode comes in the form of her tyrannical mother-in-law, who treats Suni mercilessly in full embodiment of the fatalistic cycles of familial abuse. This stern figure, to whom Suni had slavishly devoted herself, actually softens her stance after learning of her son’s plans with his concubine, but Suni does not fall for this ruse and beats a further retreat, this time out of her conjugal compound.

A second spouse, of sorts, is featured in the second episode, but this man, a lovably clumsy romantic but a skilled potter, is not just a replacement husband in Suni’s next life stage. After she accepts his preposterously traditional expression of his fondness for her, she takes an equal position, if not command, in this pairing. Just as importantly, she develops a genuine affection for him as a partner of choice, free of domination and exploitation, an idyllic scenario reinforced by expansive shots of the beautiful landscape backed by an equally lustrous soundtrack. This is why his death in an accident while securing a gift for her—a makeup canister, a potent symbol that crosses the film’s second and third episodes—is so poignant and heartbreaking. But in the larger scheme of things this turn constitutes also the next challenge to Suni’s quest for family in a nontraditional sense, one based on freedom and compassion amid hardship.

The hardship envelopes her in the opening of the third episode, as Suni, like many other Koreans, scrounges for food and other life necessities during presumably the wartime mobilisation of the early 1940s. Into this situation comes a young woman, Bong-nyeo, who together with her infant boy stumbles onto Suni’s homestead while fleeing her enslaving husband. Suni takes her in, and this pairing furthers the trajectory of Suni’s preceding partnership in that she now takes the clearly senior role, this time as the main provider and caretaker. But Bong-nyeo plays her cooperative part as well, and when she uses the makeup canister to engage in a desperate act to secure material sustenance for this new family, neither Suni nor the viewer is struck by revulsion but rather a realisation that, once again, Suni adjusts to her circumstances. She responds out of not loathing or judgement but rather a maternal, sisterly, indeed spousal affection for both the young woman and her baby. Suni’s next role as the boy’s doting second mother then finalises her lifelong journey for an existence and family of genuine liberation. That this life course takes place during the colonial period is never a major element of the narrative, but as with the brief hints of the temporal context, the physical setting of Korea’s countryside facilitates a feeling that, more than the political situation, the impulses of the modern, even in the hinterlands, fuel emancipation.

As for the urban areas of colonial Korea, the transformations were more apparent, particularly during the so-called Cultural Rule period beginning in the early 1920s, resulting in a freer atmosphere of association and bountiful expressions of cultural and national identity. The cities, especially the capital but also the growing population centres of Busan and Pyongyang as well as other new metropolitan and harbour areas, provided cauldrons for the growing mix of modernity and ethnicity, fuelled by the technologies of the mass media such as newspapers. The airways are the main medium for the film “Radio Dayz” (Ha Gi-ho, 2008), which dramatises through comedy the birth of Korean-language radio programming and its accompanying social, economic, and cultural developments of the 1930s. What is also taken less than seriously, though definitively portrayed, are the political facets of this setting, including resistance to Japanese colonial rule, a glorified effort that is nonetheless somewhat ridiculed and, at best, receives a token nod through tickling depictions of bumbling independence fighters. Led by someone who looks like the patriotic martyr An Jung-geun, they start by trying to infiltrate the radio programming but end up being absorbed into the consumerist culture that the radio exploits and further unleashes.

Such a backdrop also engenders the film’s equally witty exploration of modern human agency, and in this regard the notion of “ad-libbing” takes centre stage as a concept and plot device. The radio station’s serialised live soap opera—like the story episodes appearing in the newspapers of the period—becomes a popular hit but is soon beset by unruliness among the actors in the play. This colourful cast of characters from a variety of backgrounds takes turns to eventually pile on uproariously in digressing from the script. In keeping with the film’s parodying tone, the frustrated scriptwriter is a replica of a famous real author at the time, Bak Taewon,⁴⁵ although he is depicted as a somewhat ridiculous figure. More ominously, the direction of the radio play is appropriated by the devious designs of the colonial regime, which wants to use the programme to promote the upcoming Japanese war in the Asian mainland. The ethno-national interests represented by these two script sources can hardly control what eventually happens, however. Neither can the spirit of resistance espoused by the leader of the “revolutionary” independence fighters, who offers some of the funniest moments as the resourceful sound effects guy for the programme. Rather, the storyline of the radio drama, along with that of the film, follows a course directed by popular response and other commercial imperatives such as advertising, which crescendo into a morass of uncontrollable modern growth in urban colonial Korea until the ending becomes rather devoid of meaning.

Actually, within the radio play’s diegesis the ending could be forwarding a message, although the viewer would have difficulty taking this seriously, much less deciphering its substance. In this scenario the main male character who—in mimicking the heroic position, as noted above, from a well-known trope of Korean novels at the time—has been stuck in a love triangle between a suave, cosmopolitan modern girl, and a more traditional, down-to-earth female. The purpose of juxtaposing these two countering women, who reflect their respective characters in the film, seems to be an effort to align more closely with Korean collectivity under colonial rule, but the viewer probably cannot be sure. Indeed, nearly everything about the film instils a wariness of taking anything seriously, which might have been the point after all. But in showcasing the capacity of digital animation for painting the Seoul surroundings of the day, “Radio Dayz” seems wanting to insert playful ridiculing of both the received impressions of modernising Koreans’ resistance and the role of cultural formations in that process.

Though with fewer literary allusions, “Modern Boy” (Jeong Ji-u, 2008), which was released the same year as “Radio Dayz”, improves the computerised recreation of 1930s Seoul while dramatically increasing the layering of gendered meanings of the urban setting. A richly creative, dazzling adaptation of an impressive debut novel by author Yi Ji-min, “Modern Boy” is somewhat misnamed, though understandably, since the narrative perspective is mostly that of the male protagonist, not of the main character as a whole, “Laura”.⁴⁶ She actually goes by several different names, as she functions as a slippery object of love, lust, identity, and meaning for the leading man. And he ironically is named “Hae-myeong” (“clarity” or “understanding”) even though, despite constantly being on the chase, he never seems to grasp her, at least in the figurative sense. Indeed, Laura is a mistress of disguise—it helps that one of her day jobs is a seamstress—always changing her appearance and identity to suit her role as a likely nationalist heroine, but the viewer can be forgiven for feeling confused. Her grand destiny seems at once sturdy and carefully planned but also vulnerable to intrusions, especially from her pursuing paramour Hae-myeong. Regardless, despite the appearance of a minor but symbolically crucial countering woman character, a Japanese lip-syncer, mostly it is Laura’s many disguises and attendant personalities that forward her multiple female potentialities, all working towards a common end as a “modern girl” in colonised Seoul.⁴⁷

Hae-myeong, the titular “modern boy”, is shown at the start of the film attending to his grooming and general self-satisfaction as a hedonistic, middling bureaucrat in the colonial government. At a jazz club, however, he becomes bewitched and immediately falls for a sexy singer and dancer, who turns out to be Laura. Maybe he is being set up by his friend, Shinsuke, a prosecutor for the Japanese empire and old buddy from Japan, but Hae-myeong immediately launches his great quest for the girl, who appears to give in to his overtures. But she also runs away on more than one occasion. Hae-myeong’s repeated search for Laura can be taken as the general framing of the film’s storyline, but the ones pulling the strings are Japanese colonial power, as represented by Shinsuke as well as the impending war, and Laura, who counters such colonial domination in all her guises. For the rotating lives she leads in public—as a dancer, singer, tailor—are all masquerades for her quest for true liberation. It turns out that she is also a secret freedom fighter against Japanese rule, and her skills in imitation, as well as physical resemblance (she is tall) to Hae-myeong, facilitate the interchangeability of not only her female identities but also her gender as well. To forward this point, Laura appears at several times androgynously, including in donning a potent jacket at the end. Meanwhile, Hae-myeong, who even takes her place on the dance stage at one point, is feminised if not emasculated, wearing a pink suit with the coiffed hair of a classic Korean beauty while smeared in cow dung in one of his early ventures to find her. When he does, he fights with her by grabbing her hair and biting her, as Laura accuses him of being nothing more than a traitorous dirtbag.

The integration of gender with nationalism is both disquieting and multifaceted, with the male standing for the selfish pursuit of material interests at the expense of the collective. Laura, meanwhile, seems to represent the genuine Korean nation itself or a vision of the nation currently lost but seeking restoration. Hae-myeong’s confused yearning and search for her thus replicates the colonial condition of privileged or educated Koreans, indeed all Koreans under colonial rule, who seek a substantive life true to their core identity but finding the process, and the ultimate target itself, bewildering and elusive. Laura is seeking something as well—to be sure, a means to strengthen the independence movement, but beyond that, also something that reflects her female subjectivity in negotiation or contestation with the tandem of patriarchal and colonial demands. For this, she deploys surprisingly powerful tools at her disposal, including her beauty, her talents in dancing and especially singing, her tailoring skills, and her alluring object-hood for Hae-myeong, which she exploits but in so doing also reels from inner conflict. To successfully negotiate these tugging forces hence seems impossible, as suggested in the original novel’s rhetorical title, “How can one, even though destroyed, not die but rather live?” (Mang hageona jukji anko sal su itkenni).

It appears an alternative solution to this quandary is offered by the extraordinary film by Park Chan-wook (Bak Chan-uk), “The Handmaiden” (Agassi [“The Countess”]; 2016), which constitutes a definitive centring of female subjectivity, through partnering and pairing, in dramatising the response to colonisation. This starts with the film’s title itself, which in Korean (“Agassi”) points to not the handmaiden but rather her female counterpart, the countess. Such mirroring also reflects this film’s glaring self-referencing, which actually produces such a visual and semiotic fluency that it might seem excessive: a celebration of feminine agency as a counter to the perverted mix of patriarchal and political domination, “The Handmaiden” is fixated on giving the viewer a sense of peeping into intimate realms while showing the characters busy doing the same; more about sex than class or nation, it can appear that the film, under an accomplished male director’s meticulous gaze, veers into self-indulgence; and, while all the four main characters are imposters—three of the four are born Korean but straining to become more Japanese, while the fourth wants the reverse—they are all played by Korean actors trying to pass as flawlessly bilingual. The story is actually based on a novel set in Victorian England, “Fingersmith” by Sara Waters,⁴⁸ with the book’s title referencing, at an opening level, a pickpocket.

An unmistakable sense of thievery indeed pervades the story and backdrop, and the film is a character study of posers, engaged in everything from petty theft to the grand larceny of colonialism, though mostly in between. All four characters want to escape fates drawn by the circumstances of their birth and especially their upbringing. The countess, named Hideko, is the lone “Japanese” figure. She has been raised as an orphan in her uncle’s enormous compound in colonial Korea, a house of horrors that literally encages and serves as the unsettling setting for much of the film. Into her adult life comes Suk-hui, a Korean raised in an orphanage that trains in the arts of snatching and swindling, who is drawn by the promise of a major windfall from easy pickings. She is recruited to this con job by “Count Fujiwara”, by birth the son of a servant from Jeju Island and a shaman but who—also through an orphaned upbringing—has learned to pass himself into supposed standing as a (materially deprived) Japanese nobleman. An irresistibly dashing and handsome fellow, he now wants to finagle his way into marriage with the countess through an intricate scheme, which includes bringing Suk-hui into the countess’s compound as her new handmaiden. The only main character not brought up as an orphan, apparently, is Hideko’s uncle, Kozuki, a bibliophilic forger originally from a Korean interpreters’ family who manoeuvred into position, during the process of the Japanese takeover, to gain control over a literal gold mine in the peninsula’s northeast.⁴⁹ Kozuki, a collaborator, is naturally repulsive in other ways as well, including through his designs on marrying his niece by marriage, Hideko, for her inherited wealth. He had strictly raised her in the compound to act as a dramatiser of (heterosexual) erotica in order to sell his books to well-attired men leering at her while she performed staged readings. As he continues to confine and pimp the countess into her adulthood, she is driven by desperation to escape.

Japan as a whole, or at least Japan’s imperialist presence in Korea, thus acts as a fraudulent, perverse, but also versatile regulator of individual destinies, a decadent source of aliens in the Koreans’ homeland and the generator of tricksters who attach themselves to colonial rule as a means of forging social ascendance. The many motifs that forward this impression are insistent, including drawing as a useful skill for deceiving through reproduction, Kozuki’s profession as a reproducer and forger of pornographic books, shots of shoes and ships as tools for freedom—as opposed to the train as a vehicle for destiny—and most of all, the countless scenes of characters appearing through mirrors. In addition to accentuating the power of hidden surveillance, as shown in the sliding doors of Japanese-style buildings, these reflected images offer glimpses of introspection, fantasy, and hope for venturing off the predestined path. As for the overbearing presence of fate itself, it surrounds and literally hangs over the scene in numerous shots of corridors—as in “The Throne” (Chap. 3)—whether indoors in long enclosed hallways or outdoors in canopies or impossibly steep stairs. Most menacing is a giant cherry tree in the compound just outside the house, a looming presence that beckons Hideko, who expresses a “wish never to have been born”, towards the ultimate escape.

What allows Hideko to consider other means of liberation is her newly aroused sexuality, maturing as an instrument of defiance in the face of fate, especially those ends determined by the marriage of patriarchy and sex. Marriage itself, along with heterosexual sex, is shown as little more than the institutionalised expression of male domination and hence also in league with, if not the origin of, other structures of abuse, such as the family and colonialism. More than national loyalty or even social hierarchy, however, the film’s thematic concern is with freedom from gendered conventions through the exploration and actualisation of female same-sex intimacy. As a form of resistance, then, this emancipatory act can allegorise the opposition to Japanese hegemony in all its forms—although, again, the main target is patriarchy in all its forms. The pervasive act of grifting, therefore, also drives the main transition episodes between the three parts of the story, shown through different narrative angles, wherein double-crossing then turns into triple-crossing. This latter switcheroo scene also helps carry the film’s underlying theme of the interchangeability and mirroring of the two female characters, which produces role reversals that drive the plot all the way to the end but also a sense of doubling, of two halves aligned to forge a more powerful unity. In the most generously nationalist reading, this can suggest an allied response to Japanese imperialism. More likely it forwards the subversive possibility of the grand emancipation of the individual against traditional collectives and their shackles, a passage to the “distant harbour” that Suk-hui dreams of (and eventually reaches). This quest for true liberation is smoothened by the stuff of female sexuality, as illustrated by animated performances of homoerotic intimacy meticulously composed to show the interchangeability of two bodies through a dissipation of distinction.

What results is an image of mirrored halves of a single entity, which add to the endless visual cues of sexualised identity. The theme of partnering through interchange appears consistently in the colour scheme, for example, especially in the outfits of the two women when shown together, with Hideko usually wearing white in contrast to Suk-hui’s darker garb—except, importantly, in the most private settings. In such scenes, the acts of nourishing and gratifying, as well as repulsing and poisoning, through the breast further complicate the film’s commentary on the balance between nature and nurture, as noted above. Spoons and chopsticks, cords and ropes, balls and chains, fruit and wine, and bells and whips also add to the litany of sexual signals. And most persistent of all is the focus on fingers, instruments not just for pickpocketing but also for buttoning and unbuttoning suffocating bodices, for interlocking in love and passion, and for pleasuring, including through relief from pain. By contrast, fingers and hands appear also as wicked tools, gloved to hurt and deceive but also ringed to denote the trappings of patriarchal marriage and family. Like knives, fingers on the hands of rakish males do not fulfil but rather thrust and stab, and hence, such digits might as well be discarded. The struggle against colonial rule would be pointless, the film seems to say, without the holistic rejection of an even sturdier and scarier mode of domination.

War and Armed Resistance

Understandably such considerations of patriarchy or much of anything else take a back seat in the films set in the final, most difficult period of colonial rule, that of the wartime mobilisation, which began after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and escalated considerably after Japan’s invasion of China in 1937. In Korea, the mostly traumatic memories from this experience, from the early 1940s, eventually stood as the default impression of the colonial era as a whole, a representation of stifling, terrible fate. Understandably, then, the spirit and workings of national consciousness and active resistance, especially through the armed independence movement, are emphasised as the modernist pursuit of liberation. Still, these works utilise some of the same motivic devices that characterise other films set in the colonial period examined above, including the conspicuous centrality of female subjectivity and paired female characters.

This is the case, for example, in a story that actually ends with the 1945 liberation, “Love, Lies” (Hae-eohwa [“Flowers that understand words”]; Bak Heung-sik, 2016). Though on one level this lavishly colourful film is a melodrama of a romantic triangle riven by jealousy, ambition, rivalry, and treachery, it also explores the painful complications, bound by shared destinies as well as individual choices, of the war period, of the colonial experience as a whole, and of their aftermath. The main narrative is an extended flashback bookended by the latter-day (1990s) South Korea a half-century later, and it begins with a brief moment in the 1930s that provides the background of the two main characters as girls. They meet in the Gwonbeon, a training academy and talent agency for the modernised gisaeng courtesans in late-colonial Seoul, who are still bound by expectations of sexual service as well as artistic performances. Soyul is already the star pupil as an adolescent, having received her talents from her mother, who herself had gained fame as a courtesan singer—in other words, Soyul was headed into this profession in a way similar to the hereditary paths of premodern times. At the Gwonbeon she eventually meets and befriends Yeon-hui, who is sold to the academy by her abusive father to cover a debt.

As the film shifts to the pair as young adults, they are inseparable best friends in 1940s wartime Seoul, but about to be torn apart by love interests intermixed with the terrible demands of war mobilisation. Like twins, they are also nearly interchangeable, so close are they personally and in appearance as well as in their common underprivileged background. But they diverge through fateful catalysts that turn them into rivals. Yeon-hui, it turns out—the one not bound by her ancestry into this role—becomes the more talented singer, at least for the modernised “trot” style of songs coming into form. Hence, Yeon-hui experiences far greater success in the emerging commercial market of sound recordings, while Soyul, more suited for the high-minded singing style of traditional songs, represents the Korea unable to adapt to modern demands. The shifting of the sentiments of Soyul’s fiancée, a songwriter with designs of using his music for a patriotic cause, turns into a tragedy through the intrusion of collusion with Japanese power, producing a parable regarding the untidy, durably painful colonial remnants in South Korea’s history thereafter. Such temporal and historical connections, as with fate in films such as “Gabi” and many others examined in upcoming chapters, are symbolised by the train and railroad tracks, which also seem to signal a distinction between love and sex, and between love (and lies) as determined by luck and by choice. Flowers serve this purpose as well; they refer to the euphemism of the times for courtesans—hence the film’s Korean title, “Flowers that understand words”—and are shown being plucked by the hand of fate upon coming into full bloom.

The most searing exploration of the connection between females and (national) fate under war mobilisation understandably appears in the cinematic treatments of the most publicised and controversial wartime atrocity, the so-called “comfort women” sexual trafficking system. The available evidence shows that the scale of the network of military brothels reached enormous proportions in following the Japanese army’s invasions of various parts of northeast and southeast Asia during the Pacific War of 1937–1945. Likewise, multiple forms of the operation of the brothels corresponded to different ways the women and girls found themselves in these wretched circumstances. Still, most of the victims, likely numbering in the thousands if not tens of thousands, appear to have been Korean. Two films released around the same time approached this very difficult subject in similar ways, starting with the pairings of female characters both in the historical context of the war and across historical time.

The present chapter will analyse one of these two works, “Spirits’ Homecoming” (Gwihyang [“Homecoming”]; Jo Jeong-nae, 2016). As in the other film, “Snowy Road”, there are two countering relationships for the main character, Jeong-min: the first being her friendship with another teenaged girl, Yeong-hui, in 1943, the setting of the flashback story; and the second the pairing with Jeong-min’s spiritual reincarnation through a young shaman girl in 1990s South Korea, when the comfort women’s accounts first gained mass public attention. Jeong-min and Yeong-hui had met, following abduction from their respective families, in a rail car to Manchuria, where they suffered the horrors of a “comfort station”, forced to serve imperial soldiers while also trying to escape death. The latter backdrop of the 1990s begins with an elderly Yeong-hui, now living a subdued life alone after having hidden the details of her wartime experience. One day she is aroused by disturbing stirrings and visits her friend, an elderly shaman, who introduces Yeong-hui to a girl, Eun-gyeong. Eun-gyeong is recovering from her own trauma, and as a young shaman, she serves as the medium between the two settings and hence between the original two friends from a half-century earlier. Through its capacity to conjure the spiritual journeys of individuals, shamanism becomes the channel for the reinforcement of Koreans’ cultural identity as well as of the notion of a homeland (hence the film’s title) in opposition to the scarring foreignness of Japanese rule or of the distant Manchurian setting. A spiritual return, not just that of a physical body, serves as a metaphor for personal healing but also for historical and national healing in order to overcome the trauma of the wartime and colonial experiences. As Eun-gyeong remarks when touching an amulet—a potent symbol of protection and healing in the narrative—she sees “butterflies and soldiers”. This utterance refers to the spirits of both the girls from the 1940s and of the Japanese soldiers who are visualised as chilling, lingering ghosts, menacing reminders of the unfinished business of overcoming colonisation and war.

The soldiers appearing in Eun-gyeong’s vision also could refer to the Manchurian-based independence fighters who intervene in a critical scene. The utility of the Manchurian setting for establishing the contrast between home and away, as was seen in films set in earlier eras such “War of the Arrows” (Chap. 2), becomes prevalent in the films set in the colonial period and especially in the final, wartime mobilisation years. As with “Spirits’ Homecoming”, the coverage of armed, violent resistance, whether organised or not, against Japanese rule is de riguer in many of these films, even when, as in “Radio Dayz”, the heroism of the independence movement is playfully de-fanged. These are Korean films, after all, and as such they must give at least a nod to this lofty narrative at the heart of Korean historical consciousness. One of the few exceptions to this rule is “My Heart”, analysed above, which is indeed exceptional in many ways. Another is “Malmoe: The Secret Mission” (Malmoi [“Collecting words”]; Eom Yu-na, 2019), which dramatises the persecution and arrest, in 1942, of leaders of the Korean Language Society who attempted to compile and publish an authoritative, standardised dictionary. Along with the customary scenes of suppression and (sneaky) resistance, the plot revolves around the surveying of local dialects, with scholars and lay persons from around Korea contributing their particular versions of common words. This process thus serves up an allegory for the coalescing of national identity and the sense of common cause amid the wartime government suppression of Korean identity through, among other measures, restricting the use of the Korean language in public settings. Even here, however, the short flashes of violence remind the viewer of the inherent dangers in such a setting and hence glorify the sacrifices of the anti-colonial struggle.

Almost all other films that portray Korean resistance are far more explicit about the heroic opposition amid oppression. We can begin by noting that even into the hallyu era of the turn of the twenty-first century, multiple cinematic depictions of An Jung-geun and his assassination of the Japanese overlord Ito Hirobumi a century earlier, in 1909, have been produced. Perhaps the most distinctive is “2009: Lost Memories” (Yi Si-myeong, 2002), based on an alternative history novel by Bok Geo-il, “Epitaph”, which uses a time-machine plot device to dramatise how An’s act awakened and sustained the Koreans’ spirit of struggle. While the notion of parallel or counterfactual history is interestingly shown, however, the logic is a bit convoluted, given that, in the main story, Korea not only became colonised by Japan in the year following the 1909 assassination but indeed remains colonised at the turn of the twenty-first century. More believable is a film that grounds Korean nationhood in its most prominent folkloric symbol from the animal world, the Korean tiger, which was hunted into extinction in the early twentieth century. In “The Tiger” (Daeho [“Great tiger”]; Bak Hun-jeong, 2015), set mostly in the 1920s, a legendarily ferocious one-eyed beast and a famed Korean hunter tasked to kill it seem to stand for the common fight against foreign rule, as represented by swarming colonial soldiers joining the hunt. But their existence perhaps stands also for the lost cause of independence or the impossible position of Koreans under Japanese domination. Although difficult to discern, the computer-rendered tiger (revered as the “mountain lord” [san’gun-nim] by the locals) exhibits human qualities of judgement and wrath and thereby seems to function as the fierce guardian of Korean cultural identity, with its lair atop Mt. Jiri even drawing from the Korean origins myth.

Also set in the 1920s is “Age of Shadows” (Miljeong [“Moles”]; Kim Ji-un, 2016), a spy thriller backgrounded mostly in Seoul and a bit in Shanghai, with the two locales connected by a story of independence fighters trying to smuggle explosives into the peninsula from their base in China. Not surprisingly, Shanghai, given its loose political jurisdictions and its hosting of the leading Korean provisional government at the time, presents an inviting countering locale to occupied Korea, as shown in “Assassination” and “The Handmaiden” as well. In “Age of Shadows”, the sense of movement is constant, through the many appearances of vehicles in motion—bicycles, rickshaws, automobiles, trucks, and especially trains—as well as the frequent close-ups of feet: dead, alive, dismembered, and often under severe duress. The idea, apparently, is that one’s loyalties and perspectives, especially those of the main character, a Korean police official in the colonial government dispatched to Shanghai to nab independence activists, can be turned through appeals to underlying ethnic bonds. He seems, however, moved mostly by his weakness to alcohol. The backdrops in sight and sound are colourfully elaborate, as is the violence, including excruciating torture scenes, which seem to reinforce the main objective in this highly publicised and touted film: to pound into viewers’ heads reminders of Japanese brutality and the patriotic struggle against it, a fetishisation of bloody suffering as if it were a passion tale. With little to no depth to the characters or even the story, everything about the film’s outer form, from the Shanghai exile for the Korean independence movement to the malleability and mobility of Korean sentiments, comes straight from the cinematic playbook.

The Shanghai connection plays a role even in a film set wholly in Japan, “Anarchist from the Colony” (Bak Yeol; Yi Jun-ik, 2017). Neither this English title nor the original Korean one, “Bak Yeol”, accurately reflects the storyline and thematic focus, however, as the biopic is of both the eponymous Korean and his Japanese lover, Kaneko Fumiko, indeed of their small group of mostly Korean anarchist/socialist revolutionaries in Tokyo in the 1920s. Somewhat like “The Fortress” (Chap. 2), set in the Manchu siege of the seventeenth century, “Anarchist from the Colony”, while surrounded by threats of violence, is more about vocalising ideas. It features extended close-ups of dialogue—between the two primary characters, between them and their comrades and representatives, and among the political forces in Japan persecuting them. In the narrative, the couple, soon after having met, are caught in the terrible vigilante massacres of Koreans after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which provides the Japanese government reason for prosecuting them for high treason. Bak and Kaneko are shown engaged in resistance not through arms but rather through their public calls for tearing down the Japanese emperor system—indeed, by force if necessary—in pursuit of absolute equality. The courtroom scenes showcase the two characters’ systematic analysis of the link between Japan’s imperial house and its imperialism in the conquest of Korea and in the dehumanisation of the Korean people, both within the colony and in Japan. Thus, even as practitioners of a radical individualism of equality, including gender equality, their defiance in the face of a near-certain death sentence finds resolution in an embrace of Korean traditional values and identity. Given that the film was made by an accomplished Korean director for a Korean audience, such an outcome is understandable.

This is the case also for another story set in Japan, the much-anticipated “Battleship Island” (Gunhamdo [“Hashima Island”]; Ryu Seung-wan, 2017), directed by a well-established hit maker and, at the time of release, starring probably South Korea’s most high-profile movie star, Hwang Jeong-min (of “Ode to My Father”, covered in Chap. 7). Set in the closing months of the war in 1945 on an insular coal mining complex in the waters off Nagasaki, “Battleship Island” features Korean forced labourers, as well as enslaved females (including an adolescent) working as “comfort women”, trapped in horrific conditions, the grit and grime of which form the overarching backdrop. This hellacious framework later takes a somewhat preposterous turn towards a savagely frenzied but slickly staged war flick, when a desperate escape attempt by the Koreans, led by a secret independence fighter, itself becomes an all-out gun battle between the Koreans and the Japanese (as well as their Korean collaborators). The closing scene—among the many impressively staged, stunning visuals in the film—shows survivors witnessing the mushroom cloud of the Nagasaki atomic bomb billowing on the horizon. Here, then, instead of the metropolitan Tokyo of “Anarchist from the Colony”, a cramped, inescapably harsh island serves as a stand-in for Koreans’ colonised condition, if not for Korea itself, within the Japanese imperium. Such films set in Japan take the fight to the metropole, as it were, in depicting the expansive reach of Koreans’ victimisation from and resistance to colonial rule.

More than Japan or China, however, Manchuria—as already suggested in the films discussed above—has been the most alluring foreign setting for films set in the colonial period. The region, which was over twice the size of the Korean peninsula and controlled by Japan partially before 1931 and more thoroughly, though not completely, afterwards, became somewhat of a wild frontier for Koreans seeking work, migration, or armed struggle. Koreans who used Manchuria as a base for fighting Japan have been bestowed with hyper-heroic credentials, drawn from and further reinforcing the romanticised image of Manchuria as a place of adventure and glory, even wealth, in a way that the Korean homeland at the time could not have been. As Jinsoo An has shown, these “Manchurian action films” have a long pedigree in post-liberation South Korea and, particularly in the works from the 1960s, borrowed elements from Hollywood westerns to shift agency to the individual pursuit of riches, often in disregarding and even flouting the broader nationalist imperatives.⁵⁰

Perhaps the most interesting, indeed wild presentation of Manchuria in the colonial period has been “The Good, the Bad, and the Weird” (Joheun nom, nappeun nom, isanghan nom; Kim Ji-un, 2008). This updated Korean sendup on the spaghetti western, by the same director who later made “Age of Shadows”, goes beyond its cheeky name to picture Manchuria as an untamed northern border land of bandits, outcasts, and their pursuers, and hence as a displacement for Korea, although the three title characters cannot escape the homeland’s pull entirely. Traces of the customary treatment of the fight against Japan feel more like token obligations in this action-parody, for the characters also seem to take turns dismissing the independence struggle. And as with classic Hollywood westerns, the vast empty space—vividly shot and painted—is itself an intervening character, on par with the colourful humans. So is the railroad, that symbol of fate, heading towards the endless horizon that often holds the setting sun, and targeted by competing sides looking to either destroy or seize it. They are all seeking riches and power, as revealed by a supposed treasure map meant perhaps to serve as the inscrutable blueprint for national recovery and meaning, or just simply as the source of funds for various thieves, including the Japanese military.

A final work linking Manchuria and armed resistance, along with collaboration, social reform, and female agency—the primary themes and motifs of films set in the Japanese occupation period thus far analysed in this chapter—is the very impressive and entertaining “Assassination” (Amsal; Choe Dong-hun, 2015). While cloaked in a blockbusting nationalist action flick, the film throws into relief the workings of structure and agency in national identity and hence also in national history. In this sense, the ostensible subject matter of the armed independence movement serves as more of a convenient backdrop, although importantly real historical figures play key roles, headed by Kim Gu and Kim Won-bong, leaders of independence organisations based in China starting in the 1920s. Most of the story takes place in 1933, in alignment with the real events in 1932 of Korean operatives carrying out strikes against Japanese leaders in Shanghai and Tokyo, respectively.⁵¹ But the story also extends to 1949, the post-liberation period in South Korea, and begins with a long prelude set in 1911, with the attempted assassination of the first Japanese Governor-General of colonial Korea, Terauchi Masatake. The dramatisation of this event introduces the primary plot device and some main characters, including the central figure of An Og-yun, whose surname probably alludes to the independence fighter An Jung-geun, as discussed above. In 1911, An is an infant—born, tellingly, in 1910, the year of annexation—who becomes separated from her twin sister through the killing of their mother by their father, a sniggering quisling named Gang In-guk who is seeking Japanese favours.

When the story jumps to 1933, An, having grown up in Manchuria surrounded by Korean freedom fighters, is a sharpshooter tasked with traveling to Shanghai to join a mission that will then head to Korea to kill both a ruthless Japanese military commander and Gang In-guk, now a very wealthy industrialist supplying the Japanese war machine. An is actually being set up by Yeom Seok-jin, who had been captured in 1911 while trying to kill the Japanese overlord—as well as to protect the baby An, interestingly—and has now turned into a spy and hired gun for the Japanese. In Shanghai An encounters another Korean assassin, the famed “Hawaii Pistol”. Yeom pays him handsomely to kill An’s team of three, which includes a military man named “Machine Gun”. All these figures make their way, via train, to Seoul, where An discovers, after having tried to assassinate him, that Gang In-guk is her long-lost biological father. It also turns out that the Hawaii Pistol—the epitome of the killer for money and hence the opposing character model to An, a killer for the cause of her nation’s freedom—had himself been orphaned in a way. This common background and a small debt to her from Shanghai lead to his hesitation in carrying out the lucrative job of eliminating An, whom the Hawaii Pistol’s humorous sidekick calls “Three Thousand Dollars” in reference to her bounty. The most interesting and important counterpart to An is her long-lost identical twin, Mitsuko, a Japanese name alluding to the opulent department store, Mitsukoshi, which is lavishly presented amid the bustling urban backdrop of Seoul at the time. Having grown up as Gang In-guk’s very pampered daughter, Mitsuko’s next step is to enter a “marriage of many gains” to the cruel son of the Japanese military commander, Kawabuchi.

The pivotal scene then—in which An breaks down in horror upon seeing Mitsuko’s family pictures on the wall and, to top it off, Mitsuko’s chilling wedding dress—distils the film’s main takeaway: this easily could have been An’s own life, if not for the randomness of her being taken in one carriage at that pivotal moment in 1911 while her sister was taken in another carriage, that of their murdered mother. (In 1933 Seoul as well, when Mitsuko first spots An, An is boarding a streetcar carriage.) An had thus escaped the destiny of her sister, one of material privilege and psychological ease but also moral obliviousness and fatal subservience to the depraved strivings of the distasteful Gang, their common biological father. By contrast, An had grown up in sparse and perilous surroundings with friends and family of no blood connection, but of course, the audience is directed to immediately identify with An’s loathing and disgust at that emotional moment of discovery. This question of what constitutes a dignified, secure source of identity, including especially the difference between biological and societal upbringing, thus parallels the question of what lies at the heart of one’s identification: the individual, the family, or the larger collectivities of community or nation. This in turn triggers thinking about how much one’s ordering of these components is by choice and how much by fate.

Naturally, due to this film’s setting, such personal issues are transposed to the level of national history under foreign occupation. To characters like An and her genetic father, it seems heredity, including their mutual biological bond, has no bearing on their notions of family: Nurture wins handily over nature. Indeed, the film appears to hail the freedom to resist, in An’s character, the demands of inherited destiny and familial loyalty, or to completely disregard them in favour of worldly gain, as shown by the freelancer Hawaii Pistol, the traitor Gang, and the turncoat Yeom. As suggested by Hee-seung Lee in her analysis of colonial-setting films appearing in the 2010s, these works seem to reflect an early twenty-first century’s heightened awareness of the agency, across a widening spectrum, held by Korean historical actors living under colonial rule.⁵² Such logic can easily be extended to doubt the basis of their national consciousness as well: Why should these characters and, indeed, the audience assume moral imperatives of national identification as endowed with deeper value, a more bedrock basis of one’s existence, just because of the geographical and political contexts of one’s birth? If this too can be questioned, then so can conventional grounds for both patriotic and treasonous behaviour, and in turn also the implications for one’s view of Korea’s colonial experience and the independence movement.

Such considerations are further extended in “Assassination’s” long epilogue, when the setting shifts forward to 1949, four years after liberation. Yeom, now a police commander in the nascent South Korean government, is being investigated and tried for “anti-national” behaviour from the colonial period that had killed so many patriotic resistors. In reflecting the actual outcome of these trials of the most notoriously pro-Japanese figures, which the new regime of Syngman Rhee violently disbanded, Yeom is set free due to the sudden murder of the key witness, but not before passionately presenting in court the common refrains of such men in these aborted trials: that he actually acted out of concern for the Korean people; that he made great sacrifices for their genuine liberation; that he had no choice. Later, he also insists that he did not believe Korea would be liberated, that in effect its fate was set. Of course, this reasonably accurate utterance does not amount to legitimate justification in the film’s moral framing, for Yeom should have chosen correctly anyway, just as An and the overlooked independence fighters did. While she occupies the steady moral centre, however, the various other assassins all present realistically alternative choices and accompanying destinies. And in reflecting the most intriguingly common thematic device of the films set in the colonial period, the most compelling contrast comes from Mitsuko, like her twin a quintessentially female representation of fateful turns in Korea’s colonial past as well as that past’s unshakable presence thereafter.