초록
The purpose of the present article is to demonstrate that Sŏkkuram attained its status as a work of art through Japanese and Korean intellectuals’ efforts to invent or elevate the East and that the eulogy of its art was involved in the self-legitimizing and self-aggrandizing culture of imperial Japan. The sculptures of the grotto were not dis-connected from the context of Buddhist ceremonies and practices and discussed in terms of art until they became the object of Japanese critical discourse accommodating western notions of art. Yanagi Muneyoshi, the author of the first critical essay ever written on Sŏkkuram as a work of art, tried to explain its formal features and their significance from a viewpoint of romantic and Blakean art and assumed as its character-izing and inclusive category an Eastern art which had held its unifying ground in Buddhism. His analysis of Sŏkkuram was in line with attempts to invent Buddhist art in correspondence to Christian art and, ultimately, the East to the West. In his “Sunset,” a short-story set against Kyŏngju, Yi T’ae-jun was interested in capturing what he himself had called “Eastern sentiment” evoked by the historic remains in the old capital city of Silla and located its consummation in the sublimity of Sŏkkuram. Compared to the eleven-faced-Kwanŭm bodhisattva in the text, the heroine T’aok is not just an em-bodiment of compassion toward all mortal beings, but also a symbol of a new East that was the dominant theme of Japanese wartime ideology. As Japan’s war intensified, and as the culture of imperial Japan took a fascist turn, the aesthetic of Sŏkkuram became ir-revocably politicized. Buddhism, the source of elevating representations of the grotto, served in the war effort in the form of Imperial-Way Buddhism. The aesthetic of Oriental sublime was thus inseparably entangled with Japanese imperialist fantasies.
키워드
Sŏkkuram, Kyŏngju, Silla, Chosŏn Art Exhibition, the sublime, Asianism, Orientalism, imperialism, colonialism, Buddhism, bodhisattva
I. LANDSCAPE WITH A STONE TEMPLE
Korea provided the Japanese during their age of empire with not just a territory for their political, economic and military activities, but also resources for their aesthetic pleasure. For Japanese settlers, travelers, and administrators, the land of Korea often became separated from the idea of a place for residence and labor and was transformed into nature as an object of appreciation, in other words, into landscape. The Japanese could not but have been foreigners to Korea as a historical land, but their otherness positioned them advantageously to find Korea’s unique landscapes. In particular, when aesthetically trained Japanese looked at Korea’s natural world they projected their familiar notions or experience of landscape and represented or reshaped the world so that it came close to what they understood forms of landscape to be. For example, Kawai Gyokudo, a major figure in Japanese painting who was on the selection committee for the first Chosŏn Art Exhibition hosted by the government general in 1922, gave a lecture afterwards in which he confessed he had been moved by the things and scenes in Korea and expressed his high expectations for the paintings that could be produced thanks to the exhibition system being set up in the beautiful site of local custom.
According to Kawai, Korean paintings would differ from their historical precedents because they would be created under the influence of Western and Japanese culture, and they would differ from their Japanese counterparts because the exhibitions would take place in the civilization of traditional Korea. Kawai found Korean paintings to have been destined to produce their own “local color” and called upon Korean painters to produce “works corresponding to their land.” He entrusted Korean painters with the task of transforming their land into landscape. Oriental-style painting (
The dreamwork of imperialism is aimed at creating “a utopian fantasy of an empire’s perfect landscape” by incorporating foreign lands on its periphery into the styles, techniques and conventions of artistic representation cherished and circulated in its center. If it can be said that nineteenth-century European art realized a landscape aesthetics controlling colonial differences in its trends of orientalism, primitivism, and exoticism, a similar development occurred in the Korean local art movement led by Japanese. As a matter of fact, Korean things and scenes provided materials useful in demonstrating pictorial techniques from the early stage of modern Japanese art.
Painters who sent their works to the Chosŏn Art Exhibition were acquainted with the representational conventions of both the Western and Oriental painting styles developed by the Japanese, and employed them to serve the utopian fantasy of Japanese imperialism. Objects for painting tended to be confined to what were generally believed to be Korea’s local particularities, such as tile-roofed or thatched houses, pastoral peasant villages, and old folks, women and children in their traditional costumes, and they were often fixed as images of the Other in relation to a civilized, urbanized, mature and masculine Japan.
Around the time Yi In-sŏng presented his oil painting saturated by a local aesthetic sense, Kyŏngju was among the tourist attractions on the Korean peninsula. Kyŏngju’s colonial development concentrated on the excavation and management of its historical remains, transforming it from a Confucian Korean town into the old capital of Silla representative of a glorious antiquity in Korea. The mountain valley depicted by Yi shows a combination of images that Japanese and Koreans both thought of as being unique to Korea.
What distinguishes Yi’s Kyŏngju is its invocation of a Korean antiquity. The boy on the left of the picture turns his face toward Ch’ŏmsŏngdae, an astronomical observatory that towers in the background. The boy on the right side casts his eyes upon some fragments of roofing tiles lying scattered in the foreground. These objects call to mind the ups and downs of the ancient kingdom that built its capital city there. In looking at the face of the boy, who holds something like a flute in his left hand, and who seems as if he were sunk in meditation with his long slanted eyes, one might think of the face of a stone Buddha image abandoned in the wilderness of a mountain, or that of the principal Buddha figure within Sŏkkuram on Mt. T’oham.
It was primarily Japanese interest in Silla that turned Kyŏngju into an ancient landscape. According to Japanese historical records such as the section on Empress Jingū in
In his poem-like essay on a visit he paid in 1921, Asakawa Noritaka, known for his research on and collection of Korean porcelain, wrote that the grotto awakened a strong sense of Tōyō (the Orient or the East). In the minds of the Silla people who had built Sŏkkuram on the top of Mt. T’oham Asakawa detected an invocation of the Buddha’s protection for travel by sea between Silla and Nara Japan and saw traces of the “unilinear flow of beauty” created by Tang China, Silla, Paekche and Nara Japan. The existence of Sŏkkuram called for the revival of a great Orient, as Asakawa wrote, “Eternal Sŏkkuram, you who speak the words of God/ May the people of the Orient return to their homeland deep in your heart.”
II. A BLAKEAN ARTIST’S MIND: YANAGI MUNEYOSHI ON SŎKKURAM
After it was brought to public attention by the colonial government, Sŏkkuram gained as much significance for Koreans as it had for Japanese, in fact, probably far more for Koreans than Japanese. Beginning with Tokyo Imperial University Professor Sekino Tadashi and other authorities on historic remains on the peninsula, the ruling class of colonial society recognized the artistic values of the grotto and the high level of Silla civilization, and this meant to contemporary Koreans that they were authenticated as the descendants of a great people. On September 20, 1923, about a month after repair work on Sŏkkuram had been completed, the
More important is the process whereby figurative items such as Buddha images that had traditionally been made for the purpose of Buddhist rituals came to be recognized as artworks. According to a Japanese art historian, after Japanese came across sculptures in museums and official residences on their visits to the capital cities of Western countries, they began to think of Buddha figures as their traditional equivalent of Western sculptural works. Shortly after Western-style institutions such as exhibitions and art schools were introduced, preeminent artisans of Buddhist icons were hired as college professors, and when a hall for Japan was arranged at the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873 a large Buddha image from Kamakura was put on display.
As is widely known, it was Yanagi Muneyoshi who made the first attempt to identify Sŏkkuram as a work of art. His “On the sculptures of Sŏkkuram,” published in the June 1919 issue of
Despite his moderate tone, in his elucidation of the artistic qualities of the grotto and their significance, Yanagi fails to hide the attitude of an elite aesthete who claims to speak for the history and culture of the imperial periphery. This attitude is revealed by his indifference to how Sŏkkuram had been hitherto understood and experienced by Koreans and by his description of his appreciation of the Buddhist artwork as being an effort to recover Koreans’ lost “honor,” made out of his own compassion for them. In her book on the Japanese folk art movement Kim Brandt demonstrates that Yanagi was among those Japanese intellectuals who self-consciously arranged themselves alongside their Western counterparts as imperial authorities by “claiming the power to discern Oriental objects, and even to create their proper meanings and uses.”
It was on September 1, 1916 when Yanagi visited Kyŏngju for the first time in his life. His interest in Korea is said to have begun about two years before when Asakawa Noritaka, then a school-teacher in Seoul, stimulated his interest in Korean arts and crafts while staying at his house in Abiko, Japan.
Yanagi’s individualism has something in common with the notion of man and nature essential to European romanticism—what Charles Taylor calls expressivism. The latter assumes that each individual has his or her inner nature as a source of being human in his or her own way, the “inner élan” which also connects with a larger natural life or order. The expressivist view of human life makes art crucially important to modern culture because art exemplifies an individuated human activity whose aim is to realize individual nature through its expression, that is, making it manifest and definitive.
Some of Yanagi’s romantic and Blakean notions of art are projected into his essay on Sŏkkuram. Though he knew that it had been made in the style of stone temples whose precedents were found in India and China, he did not pay attention to the history of temple architecture or Buddhism. For him, Kim Tae-sŏng, the Silla architect to whom Sŏkkuram was attributed, was far more important as a point of reference for understanding its art. Prior to mentioning the artistic features of the grotto Yanagi concentrates on the architect who is described in
Yanagi does not identify Kim’s religious mind, but it is obvious that it is related to a certain spiritual experience reiterated by Yanagi. It might be maintained that Kim’s religious mind is characterized by his own unique “inner depth and mystery” as he attained purity by immersing himself in a “history of spirit.” Needless to say, in Kim’s case, the history of spirit is alive in Buddhist teachings. Yanagi detects a “symbol of Buddhist wisdom which is at once dual and non-dual” in visual representations in the front room of the Deva kings known as Ahom. “A”is the first sound made when a mouth is open and “hom” the last sound when a mouth is shut, thus the two images, by extension, refer to the beginning and end of the universe. Yanagi further thinks of a “state of non-being embracing all beings” at the moment when he is moved by the Buddha image in the center of the grotto.
Yanagi’s essay on Sŏkkuram was influential among Koreans as well as among Japanese interested in Buddhist art. Ko Yu-sŏp’s and Pak Chong-hong’s articles on Korean art reveal that it was an important source of inspiration for their study. It is difficult to say, however, that it is still exemplary as a way of understanding the stone temple. Though Yanagi noticed that it had been a space for Buddhist ceremonies and practices, he was not interested in what significance the ceremonies and practices held in the history of Korean people. There are paragraphs in Iryŏn’s chronicle revealing that it was built in connection with dynastic rule in Silla, but the political dimensions of the grotto did not attract Yanagi’s attention.
In this regard, we need to note that the concept of religion he used is Western. Just like
After accepting Western concepts of religion, Japanese intellectuals like Yanagi were faced with the task of re-describing their traditional system of religious teachings and beliefs and thereby of inventing Japanese or Asian forms of religion that corresponded to Western forms. Due to its traditional ways of teaching and worshiping gods and Buddhas, they found in Buddhism a counterpart of Christianity. For instance, Inoue Tetsujirō, an eminent first-generation scholar of Japanese religious studies and a pioneer of comparative religion in Japan, was quick to focus on what he thought had made Buddhism in India, China and Japan as great and universal a religion as Christianity. In particular, he believed that Buddhism was not only equal, but even superior to Christianity in its Mahayana tradition.
The Buddhist idea of non-being that he used in his discussion on Sŏkkuram was, in fact, one of the major issues explored in his first book on religion, in which he put Buddhism on a par with Christianity and emphasized its spiritual significance. Before arguing that the concept of non-being is the same as Western concepts that designate God or reality in a negative way, he states that Buddhism is one religion which offers a spiritual home for Oriental peoples, and that “the very truth of ‘non-being’ has a distinctly Oriental color to it.”
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14 Together with Sekino Tadashi, Yanagi is one of those who first recognized the temple-like nature of the grotto.
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20 Yanagi disclosed that he transcribed a copy of Iryŏn’s chronicle in the possession of a friend of his during his stay in Kyŏngju. The friend may have been Okuda Yasushi (1867–1933), a colonial from Chikuse, Japan. He was well-educated to the extent that he had studied Chinese poetry with Natsume Soseki in his youth, and somehow held the position of Manager of Royal Mausolea in Kyŏngju from 1914, one year after he had failed to take his seat in the Imperial Assembly
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22 lbid., pp. 130–131, 135.
23 “And then [Kim Tae-sŏng] brought demons under his control by asking two saints, Sillim and P’yohun, to head the two temples [Pulguksa and Sŏkkuram], heightened Silla’s kingship by bringing peace to the country, and did his best engaged in missionary work.
24 Ōsaka Kintarō wrote that the Korean people in the Kyŏngju community had a custom of going into the grotto through a crevice in its dome, believing that there was a Buddha inside who had a divine power to transform female to male children. See Ōsaka Rokuson,
25 According to Isomae Junichi, a leading scholar of Japanese religion, there were primarily two kinds of Japanese translations of the word religion, one being centered on its sense of conventional and practical activities,
26 lbd., pp. 67–96.
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III. AN EPIPHANY OF NIHILISM—YI T’AE-JUN ON SŎKKURAM
Along with the rearrangement of the streets of Kyŏngju begun around 1910 when Japan annexed Korea, the government-general’s repair work on Sŏkkuram may have initiated the modern age in the history of the city. As demonstrated by a newspaper article that applauded the stone temple as one of the city’s historic remains, its existence was one of the main reasons why popular journalism paid information on the historic remains in Kyŏngju because some literature on the city was available, such as handed-down local histories written in classical Chinese and Sekino’s report on his survey of its old architecture and craftwork, but the idea of the town as the ancient capital city of Silla became popular with Koreans as the preservation of Sŏkkuram began to be reported by newly emerging Korean-language print media as an administrative achievement of the government-general. The Kyŏngju Kojŏk Pojonhoe (Society for the Preservation of Historic Remains in Kyŏngju), founded by local officials in 1911, reorganized itself and launched a series of projects, giving support to the government-general’s repair work on the grotto temple.
After the discovery of Sŏkkuram as a work of art, Kyŏngju took top position alongside the Kŭmgang Mountains as a tourist attraction, adjusting to a new environment where the railway made sightseeing in Manchuria and Korea popular in Japanese society. It is, thus, not strange at all that the experiences of Kyŏngju narrated in the works of Korean and Japanese writers are mostly touristic in nature. In the case of Yi T’ae-jun’s short-story “Sŏgyang” (Sunset), the male character Maehŏn relies on the transportation system and excursion routes developed for the purposes of the tourist industry as well as the colonial administration. As if acknowledging inadvertently that he was joining in the Japanese-led commodified pilgrimage through the historic and the beautiful, Maehŏn makes his first stop on his excursion the “Museum,” the center of an aestheticized Kyŏngju. He then stops at an antique shop, which is a miniature of the city, as an age-old place turned into a tourist attraction, and there he meets a young woman named T’aok, who will later strike him as “an eternal woman.”
In his profession, aesthetic taste, and other respects, Maehŏn brings to mind the author Yi T’ae-jun, as a middle-aged man with a successful writing career who has begun to feel old. T’aok, a young woman of urbanized beauty, makes him more sadly aware of his age while inciting a passion for love in him. He becomes acquainted with her in Orŭng. It would seem absurd to Korean readers today for a romantic affair to be set against the background of Orŭng, which is a group of five tombs of the founder of Silla and other royal family members. But aesthetic pilgrims of Yi’s time used to consider the tombs as impressive as any other scenic spot. For example, Katō Shōrinjin, a major figure of Oriental painting in colonial Korea who served as a selection committee member for the Chosŏn Art Exhibition, had a brilliant prize-winning career, and even worked once as a painting instructor for Korea’s imperial household, wrote of Orŭng that “with the dreams of Silla it evokes, it is a scene to paint that could be found nowhere but in Kyŏngju.”
The unique scenic beauty of the tombs facilitates communication between Maehŏn and T’aok. When he is fascinated by the “surreal, strange spectacle,” in which five mammoth mounds sit near each other in harmony, she moves him by referring to it as “
In Maehŏn’s view, the impression of Orŭng and Yŏngji which is “
As is widely known, Yanagi Muneyoshi was the first to formulate the idea that Korean art was an art of lines. In a famous essay of 1922 he asserts that the beauty of lines is a defining trait of Korean art, observing that curvilinear forms stand out in Korean arts and crafts ranging from the roofs of houses to patterns inlaid in porcelain.
Kyŏngju in “Sunset” exists within the zone of Korea in both a geographical and cultural sense. Yet it is not the place of a pure Korean identity as in the Korean nationalist imagination. It is quite suggestive that for Maehŏn the heart of Kyŏngju is Orŭng or Yŏngji, for these historic places could have provided evidence that Silla was ethnically and culturally complex, and no prototype of a homogeneous national community. As the tombs of the founder of Silla, his wife and the following three kings, Orŭng not only indicates an origin for Silla, but also recalls the controversial relationship between Silla and Japan. The identity of the Silla founder Pak Hyŏkkŏse was a matter of dispute for several reasons, including that the character of his last name could be the same as the Ho in Hogong, Pak Hyŏkkŏse’s chief Japanese vassal. The surmise that his clan might have been Japanese like that of Hogong, or derived from a southern overseas tribe and not from natives on the Korean peninsula was held by a certain section of colonial Korean society.
T’aok, who captivates Maehŏn’s mind on his first day in Kyŏngju, has a symbolically close relationship with the old Eastern city. While she is a student of English literature, a fact which makes it not surprising that she uses words like “
T’aok attracts Maehŏn’s attention because of her appearance as a beautiful, educated and urbanized woman, but once it is established that they feel the same way about the tombs, she looks increasingly like an embodiment of an animated Orient to him. When she is unable to bear the scorching heat near a riverside and takes off her clothes without reserve to swim, he sees “a fairy jumping out of Orŭng” in her naked body. After realizing that Kyŏngju’s charm is alive and well in her spirit and body, he begins to feel attachment for her, but like his “Oriental sentiment” her Eastern beauty does not allow him to be seized by vulgar desire. In the fall, more than a year after he first met her, he visits the city again and sees Sŏkkuram in her company. The temple gives him a pregnant metaphor for her mysterious character as well as a route to the “ecstasy of art.” When he looks at a carved image of “
As might be expected of someone who confesses fondness for the nihilistic atmosphere of Orŭng, T’aok sometimes reveals to Maehŏn that she has been obsessed with thoughts of death. While gazing at the landscape of Yŏngji through the window of a nearby hotel, she thinks of the story of Asanyŏ who had drowned herself there, and after waking from her dreamless sleep in her hotel room, she expresses the feeling that death may be just like that. According to the story, she has lately been faced with circumstances in which it would be rather strange if she did not become absorbed in thoughts of death, for she had lost her mother two years before she met Maehŏn. She had studied in Kyoto until the death of her mother brought her back to Kyŏngju, her parents’ place of residence which she had usually preferred to the old city in Japan. Though this is a guess with not much evidence in the text, her attachment to Kyŏngju might be related to her aesthetic and ethical self-consciousness being heightened and articulated by her confrontation with the transience and mortality of human beings. It is difficult not to feel an element of the secularized form of
In this context, it is noticeable that she lets Maehŏn sleep in a bed that has been warmed by her body before she parts from him, leaving a farewell note in which she tells him about her engagement. The sleep that he is unable to resist even when with her represents the physical weakening he has begun to endure as he approaches the age of fifty and, on a deeper level, his being destined to die, as suggested by T’aok’s remark on the analogy of sleep and death. Thus it does not seem to be a mere trick to attempt a secret leave-taking when she asks him in the middle of the night to go to the room where she had been sleeping alone and lie down in the bed steeped with her body warmth and scent. It can also be understood as an expression of her compassion for him. It is probably because he has intuited she has a compassionate attitude grown out of a nihilistic view of human existence that he compares her with an eleven-faced-Kwanŭm (Avalokiteśvara) and praises her womanhood as being “sublime.”
As is generally known, an Eleven-Faced-Kwanŭm is a form of Kwanŭm Bodhisattva, one of the Buddhist forms of an ideal human being primarily characterized by compassion for all the creatures of the world. The saint of mercy presents herself in different figures in response to the differences in
It is appropriate, indeed, that Maehŏn uses the term “
28 For a more detailed account of Kyŏngju Kojŏk Pojonhoe, see Kim Hyŏn-suk’s previously cited article. It is reported by Okuda Yasushi in his
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34 One of the grounds on which Japanese during their imperial period put forward a theory that Pak Hyŏkkŏse was from Japan is a passage in the first section of “Silla pon’gi [A record of Silla]” in
35 For a discussion of Hyŏn Chin-gŏn’s alteration of the Yŏngji tale, see my “Silla ŭi palgyŏn: kŭndae Hang’uk ŭi minjok jŏk sangsang mul ŭi singminji jŏk kiwŏn,” in
IV. A BODHISATTVA WAY OF LIFE
After Sŏkkuram was discovered as an artwork the eleven-faced Bodhisattva image came to be as much admired as the primary Buddha. It had a prominent position in Japanese-language books published for the purpose of advertising the historic remains in Kyŏngju. There are three pictures of Sŏkkuram in
Yet it is a dance by Ch’oe Sŭng-hui that probably became the most famous Korean artwork emulating the Bodhisattva statue. Ch’oe included a dance entitled Bodhisattva in the program she offered in Paris in 1939, a performance that launched her career as a world-famous dancer. As indicated by a poem composed by her husband, the poet An Mak, the dance was an adaptation of some visual features of the image in Sŏkkuram.
It was no accident that Ch’oe made important use of this Buddhist motif in initiating Oriental-styled dance because, as indicated in my earlier discussion of Yanagi Muneyoshi, modern Japanese intellectuals intent on culturally constructing the East on an equal footing with the West often found an equivalent to Christianity in Buddhism. It can be said that an East in opposition to the West, originating from a European way of seeing the world geographically took on its cultural form through its encounter with Buddhism in Japanese scholarship. As the cultural substantialization of the East emerged as an important stage in the process of Japanese self-definition, and as Asianism rose to prominence with a view to strengthening the hegemony of imperial Japan, the idea of an essentially Buddhist East held a powerful appeal. Japanese Buddhist priests who were aware of the strong presence of the Christian West did not hesitate to exalt their religion as a cultural commonality of all Eastern countries that would enable them to build a coalition. A great modernizer of Buddhist thought, D. T. Suzuki, famously said: “If the East is one and there is something that differentiates it from the West, the differentia must be sought in the thought that is embodied in Buddhism. For it is in Buddhist thought and in no other that India, China and Japan representing the East, could be united as one. Each nationality has its own modes of adapting the thought to its environmental needs, but when the East as unity is made to confront the West, Buddhism supplies the bond.”
The unification of the East had been, in practice, an important agenda in Japanese politics and culture since the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Koreans as well as Japanese were drawn to a vision of the East Asian community that would replace what they perceived to be a defunct European individualism and liberalism. Combined with imperial Japan’s interest in hegemony over the Asian region, Asianist propaganda envisioned an East that would overcome Western modernity and initiate a new beginning in world history. An image of this new East can be glimpsed in Yi T’ae-jun’s character T’aok. When she parts from Maehŏn a year after first meeting him—significantly in Haeundae this time and not in Kyŏngju—she reveals that the Bodhisattva type is not all that defines her.
It was from the sixth to eighth century, during the time of the Sui and Tang dynasties in China, when Suiko and Shomu were on the throne in Japan, and when Silla unified what is now Korea that Buddhism had flourished in East Asia, creating a single cultural sphere. For Yanagi Muneyoshi, Sŏkkuram offers a superior illustration of the religious spirituality of East Asian peoples that found its expression in Buddhist doctrines and practices of the time. In his view, religion was in decline and Buddhism on the verge of disappearance in Korea, but in the grotto the country was “alive as an eternal land of religion.” He chose to describe his own visit not in terms of historiography or archaeology, but as a religious experience. The inner room of Sŏkkuram was a spiritual world to him, and the climax of his aesthetic pleasure coincided with “a strange spiritual moment of shivering.”
In this regard, it is noteworthy that Japanese and Korean critics hesitated to resort to secular ways of aesthetic thinking in speaking about Oriental art, and Sŏkkuram in particular. In an essay describing his visit in 1938 to Kyŏngju Kobayashi Hideo mentions that while the Sŏkkuram carvings were beautiful, he could not but be tired of them. The reason he adduces for this rather curious reaction is that he does not have a “Buddha” in him such as those carving artists from the far past undoubtedly had. He could not allow himself to be pleasantly absorbed in the beauty of the sculptures because he had no religious belief. He wrote that on his way back from the grotto that the word “aesthetic” came into his mind all of a sudden, as if he had been groping for a way in the darkness, and this in turn had left him with even more unpleasant thoughts.
But if we think of the Oriental sublime only in terms of aesthetics, then we cannot understand it correctly. Around the year 1942 when Yi T’ae-jun’s short-story was published, Buddhist artworks were not the only examples of the sublime, which also included the war Japan had just started against the United States of America. As mobilization for total war took a stronger hold on everyday life in Korean society after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the self-awareness and self-discipline of individuals as subjects of the Japanese empire became considered right not only in an ethical but also an aesthetic sense. Conduct dedicated to the ideal of so-called
Even more illuminating is the fact that Buddhism was frequently reformulated as a body of doctrines conducive to the legitimization of the total war system. Traditionally prone to coordinate their practices with the interests of the state in the name of “
Needless to say, Korean Buddhist preachers and scholars were great admirers of Sŏkkuram and, by extension, the culture of Silla in general. But out of them came advocates of Japanese fascism as well as champions of Buddhist art and culture. Kwŏn Sang-no is a case in point. One of a few learned historians of Korean Buddhism, Kwŏn wrote a Korean-language pamphlet on Imperial-Way Buddhism, in which he attempted to charge the Korean Buddhist orders with patriotism modelled on the Nichiren sect, a paragon of Japanese
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37 The picture of Yi To-yŏng’s
38 The first half of An Mak’s poem is: “In the middle of Europe/Korea is in motion./An image carved on the wall of Sŏkkuram/Shines through the barrier of the human mind./As if it were a human being alive/It silently steps out into the light.” The translation is mine and based on the text cited in
39 See the titles of her dances and the summaries of their themes cited by
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41 Haeundae was developed as a resort place when hot springs were discovered by Japanese who moved there after the harbor of Pusan was opened to them in 1876. The development of the hot springs is said to have been started by a Japanese doctor Wada Nomo. Though it was known for its beautiful scenery prior to its colonization, Haeundae became as it is today, initially as a new commercial area created by Japanese colonials, and in that sense is quite different from such historic places as Kyŏngju.
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47 For more information on the Imperial-Way Buddhism, see
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1Kawai Gyokudō (1922), p. 8, 12, 13 .
2W. J. T. Mitchell (2002), pp. 10–13 .
3Fujishima Takeji (1982), p. 248 .
4 Much examination has been made of the localism as expressed in the works presented to the Chosŏn Art Exhibition.Pak Kye-ri (1996) and Kimu He-shin (2005) are still useful among others.
5 Among those who are said to have led Yi In-sŏng’s interest to Kyŏngju was Shiraga Jukichi, the principal of Kyŏngbuk Women’s High School, whose passion included collecting and studying old Korean artworks. It was also he who opened the way for Yi to study abroad in Japan after Yi was awarded the special recommendation prize at the 1931 Chosŏn Art Exhibition with his oil painting “Seibo gairo [A street scene at a year’s end],” a portrayal of the main street of his hometown Taegu.(Sin Su-gyŏng, 2006, p. 50, 95.) Some results have recently come out of research on Japanese colonials who had an influence on the understanding of Kyŏngju. Kim Hyŏn-suk (2007) deals with the Society for the Preservation of Historic Remains in Kyŏngju, Chŏng In-sŏng (2009) with the same association and Moroga Hideo, one of the Japanese directors of Kyŏngju Museum, and Hwang Jongyon (2010) with Kimura Shizuo, the first Japanese administrator of Kyŏngju, and Ōsaka Kintarō, a principal of Kyŏngju Elementary School and a director of Kyŏngju Museum.
6 It was argued during the colonial period that the primary Buddha image reminded its viewers of a child’s face. SeeChosŏn ch’ongdokbu (2004), p. 42 .
7Tayama Rokui [Katai] (1924), p. 456 .
8 One of the good examples of poems byyangban literati concerning Sŏkkuram is “Sŏkkul [A stone cave]” which Ōsaka Kintarō selected for his anthology from Yi Kwan-o’s (1740–1815) collected works. See Kogo misul tong’in (1962) . The habit of worshipping the Buddha statue in Sŏkkuram among the Korean community of Kyŏngju was briefly mentioned by Nakamura Ryōhei in his book on the grotto. (Nakamura Ryōhei, 1929, p. 31) It is a far-fetched, Japan-centric idea found in books like Chōsen bijutsu taikan (A comprehensive view of Korean art, 1910) that the temple was discovered by the Japanese and, in particular, by Sōne Arasuke, then Vice-Resident-General who made a tour of Kyŏngju. Some historical records and drawings that belie the claim made by the Japanese colonials are discussed by South Korean scholars. See Kim Sang-hyŏn (1991) and Kang Hŭi-chŏng (2012), pp. 136–151 .
9Asakawa Noritaka (1923), p. 134 .
10 SeeYonetani Masafumi (2006) , especially the first part (pp. 1–73).