Category: GWIKS Special Talk Series

On November 5, 2019, John Burton, Washington Columnist at Korea Times gave a talk as a part of GWIKS Special Talk Series on “Ernest Bethell and the Great Game in Korea.” Moderated by Yonho Kim, Associate Director of the Institute for Korean Studies at GW, Burton began the lecture with how he got interested in Ernest Bethell, and explained that he became interested in Korean history at the turn of the 20th century when the country was undergoing a profound transition from an isolated Confucian feudal society to one of modernity and at the same time Korea was becoming a target of great power competition when he first visited Korea in 1992.  

He pointed out that there has been a growing interest in Ernest Bethell recently along with its 100th anniversary of the March 1st movement and an increased recognition of Bethell’s role in Korea’s fight for freedom. He provided the geopolitical and historical background that by the end of the 19th century, the great power rivalry had extended eastwards and to the Korean peninsula. Japan’s interest in the world was expanding after the Meiji Restoration, starting with Korea, because of its strategic geopolitical position while China was losing its regional influence. Meanwhile, Korean core had been in a state of near perpetual disarray due to a struggle for power among several leading aristocratic families. 

Bethell’s family was a middle-class merchant family and moved to Kobe, Japan when Ernest Bethell was 15 years old. Burton pointed out the fact that there were a lot of opportunities for entrepreneur after the Meiji Restoration and that Kobe was open for traders with extraterritoriality and foreign trade dominating its export. He explained that Bethell enjoyed comfortable and financially secure life in Kobe where his uncle established the trading company. However, followed by the implementation of new anglo-commerce treaty that scrapped the foreign trade concessions and caused the local competition, foreign businesses were challenged by Japanese competition. 

Burton demonstrated that Bethell had needed the new career path at the age of 31. Bethell worked for the British newspaper, Daily Chronical, during the Russo-Japanese War, and was a frequent contributor to the readers’ column. Burton introduced one of Bethell’s coverage on stone fight. While the British press released the favorable coverage of Japan, Bethell covered what he thought was right which was why he was fired by the Chronicle. He established the early Korean newspaper, The Korea Daily News (Daehan Maeil Sinbo in Korean) with Yang Ki-Tak. Topics covered in The Korea Daily News included righteous army, brutality of Japan in Korea, and Japan-Korea Treaty in 1905 where Emperor Gojong was forced to sign the treaty. Although he enjoyed the extraterritoriality as a British, upon Japanese Resdiency-Gerenal’s request, Bethell was prosecuted in the British Supreme Court for China and Corea. Burton demonstrated that Bethell took up the cause of Korean independence against Japanese annexation by founding a newspaper, and ultimately paid the price by being betrayed by his own government in the name of great power politics, which led to his early death. 

Burton also introduced some of the other journalists who were sympathetic to Korean after witnessing brutality of Korea, including Soh Jaipil, and early Korean newspapers, including Chosun Shinbo, and Hwangseong Sinmun.  

On December 14th, 2020, GWIKS hosted a special book talk with translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton about their latest work, One Left, originally written by Kim Soom, which discusses the topic of Korean comfort women in World War II captured for the first time through a Korean narrative.

To start with some background on how the couple came upon the book and why it had taken so long — 75 years — for a novel like this to be written. During his time as a professor teaching modern Korean literature, Bruce Fulton found dedicate a day to teach about the Korean War. What was curious to him during that time was that he could not find much literature that talked about the experience of the war during the time of the war; a majority of the works that had been published highlighted the circumstances of the war only after the fact. This led to him questioning why this was the case, and ultimately he was led to the answer being that it was just too painful to document and revisit. This would lead him and his wife Ju-chan to focus their attention on translating works of fiction in English about the war that involved trauma, in hopes of helping readers both in Korea and outside of Korea to understand the stereotype of why Korean fiction is considered somber with a new lens of empathy.

This eventually led the couple to translate One Left by Kim Soom. Ju-Chan described Kim Soom as a workhorse, having written 19 novels within the past decade and having a unique writing style that is very fast but also very detailed in its research and narrative. One Left would be her first novel published in English, sprouted after three other books written in Korean regarding comfort women, as Kim Soom took directly to answering the question, “Who is going to tell the stories of these women once they have passed away?” The writing process of the novel was stressful on Kim Soom in its own right, but the goal of continuing to tell their stories to new audiences and new generations was undoubtedly worth it.

What the Fultons found to be the brilliance of this novel was the fact that author Kim Soom worked diligently to research the testimonies of the surviving women affected by this tragedy and was able to create a narrative based solely on the voices of these women. This is not only a novel that captures the story of Korean Comfort women through the eyes of its victims but was also published by a Korean woman who showed dedication to telling the story of their legacies in a detailed, engaging manner. The novel follows the story of our unnamed protagonist through reflections of her past traumas and her present-day experience as the “One Left”, the last of the comfort women. Through this emotional journey of losing herself and reclaiming her name, her identity, the reader begins to understand in reading this experience that this is not the story of just the “One Left”, but rather, the story of hundreds of girls who had to endure this atrocity after being taken from their ancestry homes during the war period.

The message that Kim Soom left with this book is when reading One Left and other stories are to think of these individuals as if they were your mother, your sister, or your neighbor. Try your best to remove the shame from this experience and allow them to tell their stories that need to be heard.