New Chef, Park
: “Koreanness” with Full of Non-Koreanness

By Ye-mok Jeon[1]

This propaganda poster portrays an imaginary situation when former Korean President Park Chung-hee become a chef at a Canteen[2]โ€™s Korean Cuisine vendor of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. Although the vendorโ€™s menu provides โ€œauthenticโ€ Korean dishes for customers, the stall also sells field rations, Manchurian dishes, Japanese dishes as well as Korean dishes. Those dishes are far from authentic Korean dishes. Bibimbap is a Korean food but Guobaorou (้”…ๅŒ…่‚‰, Northeast Chinese cuisine) and sushi (ใ™ใ—, Japanese cuisine) are not Korean food. Furthermore, Park said, through a speech bubble, โ€œDo not ask me why I can cook exotic food,โ€ implying that he wants to hide his background regarding his ability to cook exotic dishes.

The main message of the poster is to indicate the irony of President Parkโ€™s regime through metaphors in the poster. Park was eager to spread nationalist sentiments to achieve economic success and purge communists. Paradoxically, his background was, to some degree, far from a true โ€œKoreanness.โ€ This irony can be explained by several studies.

First, President Park received the legacy of Manchukuo. He was once a soldier of the Kwantung Army, a segment of the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuria. Michael Robinson points out that Parkโ€™s experiences in the Japanese military affected โ€œParkโ€™s nationalist visionโ€ and โ€œmassive mobilization campaigns,โ€[3] which are especially true in the case where Park urged the Korean labor force to work hard.[4] In addition, Suk-Jung Han argues that Parkโ€™s experiences in Manchuria as a cadet deeply affected his way of governance in South Korea.[5] For example, Han reveals similarities between Manchukuo and South Korea: How the two regimes used Confucianism as a fundamental rule for governance; how gymnastics played a political as jaegun in South Korea and as jianguo in Manchukuo.[6] Second, while modernizing and industrializing South Korea, Park also demonstrated Japanese ideologies. Park and his technocrats assumed nationalist qualities under the banner of โ€œthe โ€˜Korean Way (Hanโ€™guksik)โ€™ development,[7]โ€ which is related to Japanese ideas and methods of industrialization in 1930s.[8]

Moreover, many symbols are carefully arranged in the poster to represent the above-mentioned irony. First, Parkโ€™s military experiences in Manchu and Japan were depicted as Parkโ€™s ability to cook a Manchurian dish (Guobaorou), a Japanese dish (sushi), and field rations. This menu demonstrates the irony of the โ€œKorean Way,โ€ which was proclaimed by Parkโ€™s regime. The reason for this is that Parkโ€™s โ€œKorean Wayโ€ consists of non-Korean parts. In other words, his โ€œKoreannessโ€ was inundated with non-Koreanness. Other figurative images continue to support the irony. The image of Parkโ€™s job as a chef implies that he is the leader of South Korea and the list of his menu means his style of governance in South Korea.

Next, Parkโ€™s remark in the poster also reflects his other ironic situation. As Park was not able to be proud of what he did in the past, he did not want to reply to the question: Why can he cook foreign dishes? His message in the speech bubble means that Park continuously endeavored to conceal his record on joining Japanese troops and participating in communist activities which contradicted his โ€œKorean Wayโ€ and nationalism.

Lastly, the color combination of the poster is also relevant to the irony, inspired by the national flag of Manchukuo whose colors are matched with five races in the nation and are related to Manchukuoโ€™s slogan, Five Races Under One Union (ไบ”ๆ—ๅ”ๅ’Œ). The background color is yellow which is the same as that of Manchukuoโ€™s flag and the color of the posterโ€™s headline is also red and blue which is the same as the first two stripes of Manchukuoโ€™s flag. Also, yellow, red, and black colors correspond to peoples of Japanese, Manchurian, and Korean respectively in the poster as does Manchukuoโ€™s national flag. The color of Park was depicted as a black and white picture because the black color represents Korea in Manchukuoโ€™s national flag. The same color combination between the poster and Manchukuoโ€™s national flag connotes the fact that unrealized Manchukuoโ€™s ideal was, to some extent, realized in South Korea, considering the legacy of Manchukuo in South Korea despite seemingly two countriesโ€™ irrelevance.


[1] This exegesis was submitted as a final term project of the class HH3020, Introduction to Korean History, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2019. Also, this project was selected as one of the best three essays in the class and displayed at the library of NTU for one month.

[2] Canteen is a name for a food court in Singapore and other Chenese-speaking places.

[3] Michael Edson Robinson, Koreaโ€™s Twentieth-Century Odyssey (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 128.

[4] Robinson, Koreaโ€™s Twentieth-Century Odyssey, 134.

[5] Suk-Jung Han, โ€œThose Who Imitated the Colonizers: The Legacy of the Disciplining State from Manchukuo to South Korea,โ€ in Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, ed. Mariko Asano Tamanoi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiโ€™i Press, 2005), 168.

[6] Tamanoi, Crossed Histories, 171.

[7] Hyung-A Kim, Koreaโ€™s Development under Park Chung-Hee: Rapid Industrialization, 1961-1979 (London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 8.

[8] Kim, Korea’s Development under Park Chung-Hee, 178.

๋“œ๋””์–ด ์ด๋ฃจ์–ด์ง„ ์šฐ์ƒํ•™์˜ ๊ฟˆ
(The Dream of Eugenics Finally Comes True)

2013 ํ•œ์–‘์ธ ์—์„ธ์ด ์ตœ์šฐ์ˆ˜์ƒ(1๋“ฑ)
(The First Prize at Hanyang Best Essay in 2013)
์ „์˜ˆ๋ชฉ(Ye-mok Jeon)

Abstract:
The essay title was “The Dream of Eugenics Finally Comes True.” I satirically describe how “eugenics” materialize in the present because those who are poor do not reproduce for socio-economic reasons. However, the case of the rich is the other way around, and finally the eugenics’ dream comes true.

๊ทธ๋Š” ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„์ด๋‹ค. ๋ชจ๋‘๊ฐ€ ๊ทธ์— ๋Œ€ํ•ด ๋งํ•˜๊ณ  ๊ด€์‹ฌ๊ณผ ์ด๋ชฉ์ด ๊ทธ์—๊ฒŒ ์ง‘์ค‘๋˜์–ด ์žˆ๋‹ค. ๋จผ์ € ๊ทธ๋Š” ๋˜‘๋˜‘ํ•˜๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋Š” ์šฐ๋ฆฌ ์‚ฌํšŒ๊ฐ€ ์กด๊ฒฝํ•˜๋Š” ๋ช…๋ฌธ๋Œ€๋ฅผ ๋‚˜์™”๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์ด๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๊ฐ€ ์˜์›…๋‹ด์ฒ˜๋Ÿผ ํšŒ๊ณ ํ•˜๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ์•„์ฃผ ์–ด๋ ธ์„ ๋•Œ ๋ช‡ ์–ต ๋Œ€์˜ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ๋ฅ ์„ ๋šซ๊ณ  ๋‚œ์ž์— ๋“ค์–ด๊ฐ„ ๊ฒฝํ—˜์ด ๊ทธ๊ฐ€ ๋ช…๋ฌธ๋Œ€์— ๋“ค์–ด๊ฐˆ ๋•Œ ํฐ ๋„์›€์ด ๋˜์—ˆ๋‹ค๊ณ  ํ•œ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋•Œ์˜ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ๊ณผ ๋ณ„๋ฐ˜ ๋‹ค๋ฅด์ง€ ์•Š์•˜๋‹ค๋‚˜ ๋ญ๋ผ๋‚˜. ์‚ฌ์‹ค ๊ทธ๊ฐ€ ๊ณต๋ถ€๋งŒ ์ž˜ํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด ์•„๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ณต๋ถ€๋ฟ๋งŒ ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ผ ์ง‘์•ˆ์ด๋ฉด ์ง‘์•ˆ, ์šด๋™์ด๋ฉด ์šด๋™, ์™ธ๋ชจ๋ฉด ์™ธ๋ชจ, ์œ ๋จธ๋ฉด ์œ ๋จธ ๋ฌด์—‡ ํ•˜๋‚˜๋ผ๋„ ๋’ค์ฒ˜์ง€์ง€ ์•Š๋Š”๋‹ค. ๊ทธ์˜ ์˜†์—๋Š” ์นœ๊ตฌ๋“ค์ด ๋„˜์ณ๋‚˜๊ณ  ์ฃผ์œ„์˜ ์–ด๋ฅธ, ๋ถ€๋ชจ๋‹˜, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์ง์žฅ ์ƒ์‚ฌ์—๊ฒŒ ํ•ญ์ƒ ์นญ์ฐฌ์„ ๋ฐ›๋Š”๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋ž˜์„œ ๊ทธ๋Š” ์‹ ์ž์œ ์ฃผ์˜ ์‹œ๋Œ€์˜ ์ ์ž(้ฉ่€…). ๊ทธ๋ž˜์„œ ๊ทธ๋Š” ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„. ํ•˜๋ฃจํ•˜๋ฃจ ์ง‘์„ธ ๋‚ด๊ณ  ํ•™์ž๊ธˆ ๋Œ€์ถœ์— ์น˜์–ด ์‚ฌ๋Š” ํ”ผ์ณํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„๊ณผ ๋‹ฌ๋ฆฌ ๊ทธ๋Š” ์—ฐ์• ๋Š” ๋ฌผ๋ก  ๊ฒฐํ˜ผ๋„ ํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์„ ๊ฒƒ์ด๋‹ค. ๋”ฐ๋ผ์„œ ๊ทธ๋Š” ์ž์‹ ์˜ ์œ ์ „์ž๋ฅผ ํ›„์„ธ์—๊ฒŒ ์ „๋‹ฌํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋‹ค. ์ด๊ฒƒ์€ ์ƒ๋‹นํžˆ ๋ฐ”๋žŒ์งํ•œ ์ผ์ด๋‹ค. ์žฌ์ฃผ ๋งŽ๊ณ  ๋Šฅ๋ ฅ ๋งŽ์€ ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„๋งŒ ๊ฒฐํ˜ผํ•˜์—ฌ ์ž์‹์„ ๋‚ณ๊ฒŒ ๋˜๋ฉด ์šฐ๋ฆฌ ์ธ๊ฐ„์€ ๋” ๋‚˜์€ ์ข…์กฑ์œผ๋กœ ์ง„ํ™”ํ•  ๊ฒƒ์ด๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์ด๋‹ค. ๋” ๋ฐ˜๊ฐ€์šด ์‚ฌ์‹ค์€ ์ด๋Ÿฐ ํ˜„์ƒ์ด ์šฐ๋ฆฌ๋‚˜๋ผ์— ๊ตญํ•œ๋˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ผ ์ „ ์„ธ๊ณ„์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋‚˜ํƒ€๋‚˜๊ณ  ์žˆ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด๋‹ค. ์•„์‹œ์•„, ์œ ๋Ÿฝ, ๋ฏธ๊ตญ ๊ฐ€๋ฆด ๊ฒƒ ์—†๋‹ค. ์„ธ๊ณ„ ๊ฐ๊ตญ์˜ ํ”ผ์ณํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„๋“ค์€ ๋‚ฎ์€ ์ŠคํŽ™ ํƒ“์— ์ทจ์ง์„ ํ•˜์ง€ ๋ชปํ•œ๋‹ค. ์ทจ์ง์„ ํ•˜๊ธด ํ•˜๋”๋ผ๋„ ๊ทธ๋“ค์€ ๋น„์ •๊ทœ์ง์ด๋‹ค. ๊ณ ์šฉ์˜ ์œ ์—ฐ์„ฑ์„ ์ค‘์š”์‹œํ•˜๋Š” ์‹œ๋Œ€์  ์š”์ฒญ์— ๋ถ€์‘ํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด ๊ทธ๋“ค์€ ์ผํšŒ์šฉํ’ˆ์œผ๋กœ ์ „๋ฝํ•˜๊ณ  ๋งˆ๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด๋‹ค. ํ”ผ์ณํฐ๋“ค์€ ๊ทธ๋ ‡๊ฒŒ ์‚ฌ๋ผ์ง€๊ณ  ์žˆ๋‹ค.

๋ฌผ๋ก  ์ด์ „์—๋„ ์šฐ์ƒํ•™์˜ ๋…ธ๋ ฅ์ด ์—†์—ˆ๋˜ ๊ฒƒ์€ ์•„๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‚˜์น˜ ์ •๋ถ€๋‚˜ ๋ฏธ๊ตญ ์ •๋ถ€์—์„œ๋Š” ์šฐ์ƒํ•™์„ ๊ทผ๊ฑฐ๋กœ ํ•œ ์ •์ฑ…์„ ์‹คํ–‰ํ–ˆ์—ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‹น์‹œ ์ •๋ถ€๋Š” ์žฅ์• ๋‚˜ ์œ ์ „ํ•™์  ์งˆ๋ณ‘์ด ์žˆ๋Š” ํ”ผ์ณํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„์—๊ฒŒ ๋‹จ์ข… ๋ช…๋ น์„ ๋‚ด๋ ธ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋“ค์˜ ์œ ์ „์ž๊ฐ€ ํ›„์„ธ์— ์ „๋‹ฌ๋˜์ง€ ์•Š๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด ์ธ๋ฅ˜ ์ง„ํ™”์— ๋„์›€๋˜๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์ด๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋ ‡์ง€๋งŒ ์ด๋•Œ์˜ ์šฐ์ƒํ•™์€ ์˜จ๊ฐ– ์žก๋‹คํ•œ ์ธ๊ฐ„ ์œค๋ฆฌ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์— ๋น„ํŒ์„ ๋ฐ›๊ณ  ์ž์ฒด์ ์œผ๋กœ ์†Œ๋ฉธํ–ˆ๋‹ค. ํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ ์ด๋ฒˆ์—๋Š” ๋‹ค๋ฅด๋‹ค. ์ง€๊ธˆ์€ ์–ด๋Š ๊ตญ๊ฐ€๋„ ์œ ์ „์ ์œผ๋กœ ์—ด๋“ฑํ•œ ์ธ๊ฐ„์—๊ฒŒ ๊ฒฐํ˜ผํ•˜์—ฌ ์ž์‹์„ ๋‚ณ์ง€ ๋ง๋ผ๊ณ  ์ง€์‹œํ•˜์ง€ ์•Š๋Š”๋‹ค. ์˜คํžˆ๋ ค ํ”ผ์ณํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„์ด ๋‹จ์ข…์„ ์ž์ฒ˜ํ•œ๋‹ค. ์‚ฌํšŒ์  ํ˜„์‹ค์ด ๊ทธ๋“ค์—๊ฒŒ ๋‹จ์ข…์ด๋ผ๋Š” ๊ฐ€์œ„๋ฅผ ์†์— ์ฅ์–ด ์ฃผ๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์ด๋‹ค. ์ด๋•Œ ์ •๋ถ€๊ฐ€ ์ง์ ‘ ๋‹จ์ข…์„ ์‹œํ–‰ํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์€ ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ฏ€๋กœ ์ •๋ถ€์˜ ์ž˜๋ชป์€ ์—†๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋“ค์€ ๊ฐ€์œ„๋ฅผ ์ฃผ์—ˆ์„ ๋ฟ์ด๊ณ  ์„ ํƒ์€ ํ”ผ์ณํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„๋“ค์ด ํ•œ ๊ฒƒ์ด๋‹ค. ๋”ฐ๋ผ์„œ ์ด์ „ ์šฐ์ƒํ•™์˜ ๊ฐ€์žฅ ํฐ ์ ์ด์—ˆ๋˜ ์œค๋ฆฌ์  ๋ฌธ์ œ๋„ ์ „ํ˜€ ๊ฑฐ๋ก ๋˜์ง€ ์•Š๋Š”๋‹ค.

ํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ ์‹ ๊ธฐํ•˜๊ฒŒ๋„ ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„ ์‚ฌํšŒ ๋‚ด์—๋„ ์„œ์—ด์ด ์žˆ๋‹ค. ์ฆ‰, ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„์ด๋ผ๊ณ  ํ•ด์„œ ๋ชจ๋‘ ๋‹ค ๊ฐ™์€ ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„์€ ๋˜ ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ผ๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด๋‹ค. ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ์‚ฌํšŒ ๋‚ด์—๋„ ๋ช…๋ฌธ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ์ด ์žˆ๋Š”๋ฐ ๊ทธ์ค‘ ๋Œ€ํ‘œ์ ์ธ ๊ฒƒ์ด ๊ฐค๋Ÿญ์‹œ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ๊ณผ ์•„์ดํฐ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ์ด๋‹ค. ๊ทธ์ชฝ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ ์ถœ์‹ ๋“ค์€ ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ๊ณ„๊ธ‰์ด ๋Œ€๊ฐœ ์™•/์„ธ์ž์ด๊ฑฐ๋‚˜ ์–‘๋ฐ˜ ๊ณ„๊ธ‰์ด๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋“ค ์‚ฌ์ด์—๋„ ๋‹ค์†Œ ์—ด๋“ฑํ•œ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ์ด ์žˆ๋Š”๋ฐ ๊ทธ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ์€ ๋ฒ ๊ฐ€ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ์ด๋‹ค. ๊ทธ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ์€ ๋‹ค๋ฅธ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ์œผ๋กœ๋ถ€ํ„ฐ ‘๋ฒ ๋ ˆ๊ธฐ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ’์ด๋ผ๊ณ  ๋ถˆ๋ ค์ง€๋Š”๋ฐ, ๋ฒ ๊ฐ€์™€ ์“ฐ๋ ˆ๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ํ•ฉ์„ฑํ•œ ๋ง๋กœ ๋งค์šฐ ๋ชจ๋…์ ์ธ ๋‹จ์–ด์ด๋‹ค. ์ด๋Ÿฐ ๊ฒฝํ–ฅ์„ ๋ณผ ๋•Œ ๋ฒ ๋ ˆ๊ธฐ ๊ฐ€๋ฌธ์€ ํ”ผ์ณํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„์œผ๋กœ ์ „๋ฝํ•  ๊ฐ€๋Šฅ์„ฑ์ด ๋†ํ›„ํ•˜๋‹ค. ์ด๋Ÿฐ ์Šค๋งˆํŠธํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„์˜ ํ”ผ์ณํฐ ์ธ๊ฐ„ํ™” ์‚ฌ์ดํด์ด ๊ณ„์† ๋ฐ˜๋ณต๋œ๋‹ค๋ฉด ์šฐ๋ฆฌ ์ธ๊ฐ„์€ ๋” ๋น ๋ฅธ ์†๋„๋กœ ์ง„ํ™”๊ฐ€ ๊ฐ€๋Šฅํ•  ๊ฒƒ์ด๋‹ค. ๋“œ๋””์–ด ์šฐ์ƒํ•™์˜ ๊ฟˆ์ด ์ด๋ฃจ์–ด ์ง„ ๊ฒƒ์ด๋‹ค.