The Questions Concerning the Colonial Girl

On February 1, 1935, one of the news articles in The Chosŏn Ilbo was a “grotesque” story about a seventeen-year-old girl named Kim Pogŏm, who ran away from a school for training traditional courtesans (kwŏnbŏn). Pogŏm had graduated with excellent scores from a common school in Wŏnsan area, the northern part of the Korean peninsula, four years before, but could not continue to study due to the severe poverty of her family. She was still determined to learn and entered Sŏnggyŏng School the following year.Footnote ¹ However, her shaman-grandmother forced her to enter the courtesan school and support the family. While training to become a courtesan there, Pogŏm disappeared, leaving behind seven won Footnote ² and a letter to her grandmother:

Nobody knows what happened afterwards to this girl who tried to seek her own destiny rather than settle with the one imposed on her.

One can only guess the reason for the anonymous reporter's use of the word, “grotesque” in describing this case of a missing girl.Footnote ⁴ The word “grotesque” reminds the twenty-first-century reader of the characteristics of modern Japanese culture, which Miriam Silverberg associated with “the social inequities and ensuing social practices of those living within a consumer culture defined by the economic hardships of the depression.”Footnote ⁵ Although Korean newspapers of the period reported numerous cases of missing girls, this case was remarkable enough to be covered in a moderately lengthy report perhaps because the girl disappeared, leaving behind a letter to her grandmother that declared that her life course should be determined by her own will and that her grandmother should give up trafficking in her and her sisters. To the twenty-first-century reader, it may be somewhat bizarre that the girl in question was forced into a traditional female-entertainment service by her own grandmother; to the contemporary newspaper reader, the report might stimulate the grotesquely erotic fantasy of those who were seeped into the exchanges between courtesans and their clients – the culture of girl-trafficking, which was further worsened by economic adversity. She even audaciously advised her grandmother not to exploit her younger sisters. The news showcases a girl who was caught in traditional family hierarchy, burdened by poverty, sold to a female entertainment service, and (yet) strongly motivated to follow her desire to learn and improve herself. Whether or not the reporter recognized it, she was an embodiment and articulation of complexly charged conditions of life of many a young girl living the period. The girl's protestation, which subtly hides her accusation about her grandmother, exemplifies her effort to escape poverty and servitude, to claim her agency in life, and above all else, to dismantle the view on the girls as the exploitable body.

This essay explores how the term ‘girl,’ or 少女 (sonyŏ), in 1930s colonial Korean society simultaneously created and resisted homogeneity. We analyze the different contexts and cultural forces that shaped the girl in colonial Korea in order to illustrate some phases of the relationships that historical girls of colonial Korea had with their nation and state, the nation, that is, to which they thought they belonged at births and the state for which they were mobilized while they were systematically otherized. Our questions are twofold: how did the colonial state ideology produce a gendered youth subject through institutional inculcation of the idea of the girl at the historical juncture of colonial modernization? And how did the colonial society of Korea identify, classify, and address the girl in a way that contributed to the formation of a gendered modern subject trapped in complicated colonial conditions? In answering these questions, we scrutinize the ways in which the subjectivities of colonial girls were ideologically forged through educational and institutional interventions and cultural interpellation. In what follows, we will show why it is significant first to discuss the concept of the girl as an absent signifier whose central property was porous in colonial Korea; second, to delineate the ideological functions that the school textbooks played through their gender-specific inculcation of the colonial state ideals; and third, to interpret the ways notable newspapers of colonial Korea addressed the girls. For our purposes we focus on the 1930s, as this was the period when the conceptual distinction between children and adults was further solidified and gendered children came to be understood as subjects instead of being simply the objects of national enlightenment. It was also a period when the gender-based readership of print media was made visible as the foundation and circulation of a children's literature magazine like Sonyŏn (The Boy, 1937)Footnote ⁶ exemplify. By doing so, we elucidate colonial processes of which girls of colonial Korea became part, albeit unknowingly.

The Concept of the Girl (Sonyǒ) in Colonial Korea

The appearance of the girl in cultural sphere was one of many modern phenomena. In colonized non-European regions such as Asia, the girl remained a neglected figure until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Western-style modernization took place and schooling was extended to accommodate female children of varying ages who had very limited access to traditional education. Defining girlhood was even more problematic in colonial Korea due to the prevalent practice of what we now call child marriage.Footnote ⁷ The Government-General of Korea (GGK) defined an early marriage as those married before age fifteen in the case of females, and seventeen for males. If we remember that the average life expectancy of females in Korea during the 1930s was 38.5 years, whereas in England it was 62.9, we may legitimately question the idea of a protracted girlhood in early twentieth-century colonial Korea.Footnote ⁸ Should we call a female who was, say, fifteen years old in 1938 a ‘girl’ or a ‘woman’? If girlhood needed to be understood as a separate period of life from that of a grown woman, where it fell was by no means clear. Such a conundrum suggests that the ‘girl’ did not so much physically refer to a child/woman of a certain age as to the modern cultural identity that society began to assign to and associate with her.

Distinguished from both adulthood and boyhood, girlhood is still associated simultaneously with self-evidently conflicting characteristics. It is associated with a lack of sexuality and with sexuality of a sort – immature yet alluring – as the girl is frequently infantilized and feminized at the same time. Girlhood in colonial Korea was fraught with many contradictions – presence and absence, tradition and modernity, asexuality and premature sexualization, a consuming subject of the modern Western culture and a helpless victim of male aggression, adult violence, and human trafficking, to name but a few. Because many of these contradictions have to do with coloniality, where gender, ethnic hierarchy, social class, radical disparity in socioeconomic resources, power, and other forms of capital are intricately connected, examining the colonial girl is to shift her from the margins of colonial studies to the center, to provide us with a specific site from which to rethink the multiple relationships between gendered colonial subjects and the conditions of colonial modernity, and thus to rewrite the history of coloniality and modernity in Korea.

The concept of ‘the girl’ in colonial Korea was constantly in the making; partly as a “promise of modernity” and largely in accordance with, and in response to, the imperialization of Japan and colonization of Korea.Footnote ⁹ Her relation to traditional hierarchy, her position within the changing social structure, her access to and privilege of material resources and educational opportunity, and the conscious exercise of her own agency (or lack thereof) under the colonial regime all determined the ways she perceived and imagined herself within the world around her. Apart from the girl as an ideological entity and the normativity of girlhood, girls who lived their day-to-day realities conditioned by the colonial modernity had experiences widely different from one another, and their daily experiences were often “enveloped in the global history of modernization.”Footnote ¹⁰ Especially within colonial Korea, the confusion and fluidity of territorial borders, the mobility and migration induced by colonization and Japanese imperial expansion, along with far-reaching changes in the economic and cultural spheres, combined to pose disturbing cognitive challenges to the everyday lives of ordinary people. These challenges were often deeply gendered and age-specific, pivoting around and demanding a way to conceptualize and define the girl's body in a new cultural environment. Colonial modernity thus inevitably rendered the concept of the girl in colonial Korea unstable, expansive, and complicated.

Compared with the ‘New Woman’ or ‘the boy’ as a new modern subject, not much has been written about girls in colonial Korea.Footnote ¹¹ Ever since Ch'oe Nam-Sŏn began in 1908 to publish The Boy (Sonyŏn), the first general magazine in colonial Korea, for instance, youth in Korea were represented as young men or boys. If young women captured the attention of the public then (and now) under the name of the ‘New Woman’ or the ‘Modern Girl,’ unspecified girls were scarcely considered then as significant colonial subjects unless they were grouped as ‘school girls’ (yŏhaksaeng). The popular imagination of ‘girls’ from the colonial period tends to be colored by the descriptions about ‘Modern Girls,’ or weighed by the images of and discussion about girls who were forced into military sex slavery during World War II. Whether it was that of a flirtatious self-asserting Modern Girl, or an exploited girl in a military brothel, images of the colonial girl were circulated either as capricious modern subjects or helpless war victims of sexual and imperial violence. These two highly gendered and overly sexualized groups characterize modernity and coloniality in Korea, and yet they do not adequately represent girls of various classes whose subjectivities had yet to be formed through their responses to, and participation in, structural changes that the colonized nation underwent.

Analyzing the figures of the ‘New Woman’ and the ‘Modern Girl’ in China, Sarah E. Stevens argues that the two figurations reveal the self-contradictory understanding of modernity exhibited by the Chinese in the early twentieth century. Whereas the figure of the ‘New Woman’ expressed the quest for modernization and the desire to build a modern nation, the figure of the ‘Modern Girl’ reveals the anxiety and fear of modernity – particularly its drawbacks and “male disillusionment of modernity.”Footnote ¹² If the term ‘Modern Girl’ embodies cultural fear of the newly emerging subjectivities of girls, what does the figure of a ‘girl’ within this term stand for? The semantic property of the word ‘girl’ apparently democratized girls of colonial Korea, not only across different classes but also across the national borders of Korea and Japan, while the semiotic values of the word underwent constant construction. When a new term comes into people's vocabulary, or a term is used “in a new way,” by “enough people,” not only is its semantic property defined by the way it is used, but it also transforms the object it is meant to designate.Footnote ¹³ When a boy is called for in a particular way, the particularly desired subject is created. As Jennifer Higginbotham argues in her essay on the birth of the early modern girl, “the cumulative speech acts” of people contributed to shaping “the imaginative possibilities” for what it meant to be a girl.Footnote ¹⁴

The fact that the ‘Modern Girl’ and the ‘Military Sex Slave’ dominated the popular imagination about colonial girls suggests the extent to which Korean public imagination was fixated on the sexualized body of the colonial girl. This also suggests that our historical imagination of the ‘girl’ is predicated upon the presence of her body. Indeed, cultural understanding, social appropriation, and national exploitation of her body was at the core of the colonial interpellation of the girl, and educational books and print media supplemented such state and national interpellation by addressing girls of varying social classes. The study of the colonial girl is significant because both the colonizing state and the colonized nation struggled to claim her body, and for that reason her body becomes an important figure of coloniality, modernity, and nationality.

The ‘girl’ was born as an absent signifier from its inception. When the first general magazine for young generation, The Boy (Sonyŏn) was first published by Ch'oe Nam-Sŏn in 1908, one of the leading intellectuals of early twentieth-century Korea, it called for ‘boys’ and made them visible through its very title, The Boy. The title of the magazine was itself an interpellation of the ‘boys’ as the future citizens of Korea, and thus, the male children of certain ages were instantaneously grouped together into one universal category of the ‘boy,’ regardless of their classes in traditional society. Calling for a future citizen was thus an act of gendering him. Although it did not sell very well initially, The Boy certainly helped the Koreans to imagine the young generation as the subject of social and cultural reformation, as it was one of the earliest efforts to cultivate the young generation in accordance with the then changing political and cultural needs of Korea. The fact that most of the writers who actively engaged in publishing literary journals in the 1920s, and thus modernizing Korean literature, grew up reading magazines like The Boy or The Youth (Ch’ŏngch'un) reveals the extent to which young people seriously accepted the roles assigned to them by enlightened intellectuals. Now in the wake of colonial modernization, boys were asked to be responsible for revitalizing society and to prepare themselves for a new modern nation. If boys were called upon and requested to become aware of their new responsibilities, where were the girls?

Forgotten or dismissed, the girl was paradoxically present through her absence. By gendering future Korean citizens as exclusively boys, the title of the magazine The Boy contributed to forming the concept of the girl as well.Footnote ¹⁵ The modern binary of the boy and the girl became more prominent than ever from the late nineteenth century throughout the twentieth century. Ch'oe's omission of the girl in his title was a weighty, if inadvertent, decision of gendering the citizens of a future Korea: boys should shoulder responsibility for national rebuilding, while girls were to remain invisible.

The asymmetrical interpellations of boys and girls ironically make us question the whereabouts of the girl within the discourse about youth, because in this discourse she is simply absent. Considering that Ch'oe, the publisher and editor of the magazine, studied intermittently in Japan between 1904 and 1907, we find that his title is by no means fortuitous. The first decade of the twentieth century in Japan saw a mushrooming of girls’ magazines (shōjo zasshi) including Girls' Sphere (Shōjo kai, 少女界) (1903), Girls' World, (Shōjo Sekai, 少女世界) (1906), and Girls' Friend (Shōjo no tomo, 少女の友) (1908). The appearance of ‘the girl’ (shōjo) in the cultural sphere was one of many modern phenomena, as the word did not so much physically refer to a girl of a certain age as the modern cultural identity that society began to assign to and associate with her.Footnote ¹⁶ It was likely that Ch'oe was well aware of the modern gender-specific reference to young people, and he was certainly addressing the boy, not the girl, through the title of his magazine.

What then was it like to perceive certain groups of females as ‘girls’ during the colonial period? Did they recognize their conspicuousness-as-absence forged by, say, such cultural interpellation as The Boy? About two decades later, the word ‘girls’ was used and gained currency in official, social, and cultural media, for instance, through the appearance of such magazine titles as The Girl's Generation (Sonyŏ sidae, 1928), The Girl's World (Sonyŏgye, 1927–1928), The Rose (Changmi, 1927), and The Forget-Me-Nots (Pongsŏnhwa, 1930),Footnote ¹⁷ perhaps with certain ideological functions. When these females were able to get easier access to primary education and thus attended schools and learned various subjects there, the institution also turned them into gendered subjects of the colonized nation through their various ways of teaching. Then, what were their self-perceptions in their school environment and their day-to-day lives? What did they have to do to be recognized as a visible (colonial) subject? In answering these questions, the following section will explore how the state makes a call on the ‘girl’ by visually incorporating her into the school textbooks and curriculum and how the girl students negotiated with institutional teaching.

The Imperial Call on Sonyŏ: Shūshin (修身) Textbooks and Kokugo (国語) Essays

While the girl's position as a discernible social category in the Korean-language print media ascended, the GGK also became increasingly interested in wooing her into the classroom, determined to bring her on board with the imperial agenda. One of the most organized and effective means of deploying this state interest was through the shūshin (修身), the moral education curriculum which aimed to inculcate in children the state's sanctioned virtues, ideals, norms, and desires. It was a pedagogic vehicle to mold and align children's conduct, behavior, actions, and even thought with state goals. The colonial girl, previously absent, was now “brought out” into public view; she suddenly stood at the center of intersecting and sometimes conflicting calls, shaped by gendered ideals, modern virtues, nationalistic impetus and imperial ambitions. She was at once cast as an equal partner with the boy, a beneficiary of modern education; her actual potential, however, was confined to “home and family,” in the most repressive patriarchal sense of the term. The colonized nation called upon her to share the vision of the new modern woman, but the empire used the same rhetoric to subordinate her by demanding loyalty to the imperial causes. The fate of the colonial girl by gender and ethnicity was wedded to the need for an extra hoop to pass through in order to gain recognition, and she was to remain in the perennial status of a compensatory existence in which she could never fully become master of her own fate. While the imperial (or national) call upon boys opened new possibilities for them by shouldering the future and seeking self-validation within the empire, albeit in a colonized status, the same call upon girls ended up exposing the impossibility of ever realizing full membership, either within their colonial heritage or in the imperial state. When the girl was riding the crest of the wave of public interest and pedagogic attention in the 1930s, the more “visible” she became in the textbooks and print media, the more invisible her subjectivity and personhood became.

Japan's late nineteenth-century modern schools, as elsewhere, were designed to cater to the boys. The girl was a late addition to the classroom, and the gender imbalance in compulsory education remained a common feature across rural and urban schools in colonial Korea, with a more aggravated gap in the former.Footnote ¹⁸ From 1910 to the early 1930s, Korean enrollment numbers in the Common School (普通学校) stalled;Footnote ¹⁹ however, the 1930s gave rise to an overall increase in the number of boys and girls, with greater numbers of colonial girls being ushered into the shūshin classroom. According to statistics, the sheer number of girls matriculating jumped from 2,091 in 1917 to 31,268 in 1932; perhaps more important was the improved girls’ graduation rate that went from 21.8 percent in 1917 to 63.3 percent in 1932, and up to 73.7 percent in 1937, a rate higher than the graduation rate for boys, 72.7 percent, in the same year.Footnote ²⁰ As the 1930s saw a rise in the enrollment rate of the colonial girl in common schools, it meant that she had to negotiate the two contending realms marked not only by language and audience, but more importantly by ideological calling. Meanwhile, in the colonial classroom, her cognitive world would be anchored to the Japanese language and moral education. In the shūshin curriculum, the colonial girl's existence was defined by an auxiliary function she was to fulfill. From the first grade, shūshin textbooks taught her the virtues of living for others and not for herself, in accordance with the well-known aphorism of Meiji Japan (1868–1912), the “Good Wife, Wise Mother” discourse. The socially sanctioned roles designated for her were wife, daughter-in-law, and mother – caretaker and home maker. Where colonial boys dreamed of rising in the world, she dreamed of aiding in her male counterpart's pursuit of his ambitions, his fighting for the empire, or producing a son to continue his family line. The history of shūshin parallels the history of modern Japan. Meiji Japan had invested in the moral education of its youth from the very beginning; an earlier form of shūshin instruction dates back to 1872, when it was called Gyogi no satoshi (修身口授), a storytelling pedagogy targeting first- and second-year primary school students.Footnote ²¹ The prominence of shūshin in primary education continued in the early decades of the Meiji era, instituting such Confucian values as order, respect, filial piety and courtesy. With the promulgation of the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, the shūshin curriculum came directly under government supervision, its core values centering on national Shintoism and emperor-worship.Footnote ²² That is to say, the Imperial Rescript on Education anchored children within the emperor's realm and defined the relations between the emperor and his subjects in terms of loyalty, intimacy, and bloodline. The shūshin maintained the status quo at the turn of the century, along with the core curriculum of history, geography, and Japanese, continuously heightening public attention and debate. The first government-authorized shūshin textbook (国定教科書) was published in 1903. The following year, Meiji Japan implemented a national curriculum of shūshin in primary schools, fostering basic moral education and the values of good citizenship. Under this nationalized universal curriculum, textbook content, including the use of figures and illustrations, were subject to scrutiny and revision. This task intensified as modern Japan was simultaneously on guard against Western hegemony whilst in the process of dominating its Asian neighbors. In comparison to the first edition which readily used foreign figures such as Nightingale, Lincoln, Washington and Columbus, the 1910 second edition featured fewer Western figures and even fewer females.Footnote ²³ When transplanted into colonial Korea, the shūshin textbook was tasked with the additional strategic maneuvering of co-opting the colonized subjects and putting them in “their place” within the expanding empire. That is, it was not so much the blatant erasure of Korean identity that the colonial state aimed for, but more importantly, the shūshin was to produce a “distinctive subaltern ethnic identity” of Koreans within a multi-ethnic empire.Footnote ²⁴ What was the colonial girl's place in this praxis of ideological forces? One of the marked changes in shūshin textbooks from the third edition (1928–1937) to the fourth edition (1938–1941) is the inclusion of the colonial girl in full-page illustrations as equal to the boys. Didactic illustrations were especially effective on noticeably younger students who presumably had little competency in the Japanese language. Previously, in the third edition textbooks, the colonial girl had been attired in Korean traditional attire and long, braided hair, while the boy had a short haircut and was dressed in either a Western-style jacket with shorts or an outer coat. This suggests not only a temporal gap – marked by her pre-modern attire and hairstyle – between the two genders, it also reveals the colonial girl as a secondary member, as she is not acknowledged visually as a contemporaneous participant in society.Footnote ²⁵ In the fourth edition, the colonial girl undergoes a drastic sartorial and tonsorial revision in which she sports bobbed hair and Western dress, a type of ‘Modern Girl.’ Previously placed in domestic settings engaged in chores ranging from doing laundry to sewing, in the fourth edition she makes her debut in the official realm of the empire, standing shoulder to shoulder with boys on her way to school, in the classroom, and during playtime.Footnote ²⁶ In an illustration depicting worship at a shrine, she is shown alongside the boys while bowing.Footnote ²⁷ Beyond the full-page illustrations used mostly for younger primary school students, for the upperclassmen, the shūshin textbooks are organized in vignettes that include smaller illustrations, with each short entry intended to convey an exemplary virtue in tune with emperor-centered and Confucian ideals. Throughout all levels of the textbooks females appear in but a scant few entries, narrowly typecast as caretakers of the home and family – essentially reduced to the trope of ‘mother.’Footnote ²⁸ Males were depicted as sons, husbands, and fathers, whereas females, in the limited entries in which they do appear, were rewarded for fulfilling their virtuous motherly roles, ranging from nursing and rearing children to maintaining the home.

“Girls” in Newspapers in 1930s Korea

If the girls within schools negotiated with the imperial dictates, many of the girls outside schools had to negotiate with, or directly face “precarity” (to borrow Judith Butler's term) of life,Footnote ⁵¹ or to be more precise, of “probable death.”Footnote ⁵² Unlike the home islands of Japan, “girl culture” never became prevalent throughout the colonial period in Korea. The reasons for the absence of girl culture require further research beyond this essay; but in spite of, or perhaps because of, such an absence, it is important to examine the ways in which the print media of colonial Korea addressed girls, and to find out what kind of space – imaginary or actual – colonial girls forged in the reading public during the time.

As Adrian Bingham points out, newspapers, with their wider circulation than that of books, were “perhaps the most important channel of information about contemporary life.”Footnote ⁵³ We argue that the representational category of ‘the girl’ (sonyǒ), was more widely addressed at the time when newspapers and magazines were mushrooming. The purpose of our investigation is to illustrate the ways in which the term, the ‘girl,’ was used in the newspapers, and how its use informed the reader of the public presence of ‘girls.’ Although the space of this essay may circumscribe in-depth analyses of the various types of lives of the girls, the restriction does not obviate the need for such illustrations. The Chosŏn Ilbo, a Korean-language newspaper founded on March 5, 1920, exemplifies how the naming of a particular demographic group was done in mass print media. Headlines often contained the word 少女 (‘the girl’ or ‘girls’). During the decade of the 1930s, a total of 904 news headlines ran containing the term.Footnote ⁵⁴ Compared with 648 entries during the 1920s, the increased number suggests that girls and their lives came more fully in the purview of the public and were considered to be newsworthy. The entries for ‘girls’ outnumbered those for ‘schoolgirl’ (女学生), which appeared 172 times.Footnote ⁵⁵ During the same decade, there were 2,681 entries which contained ‘boys’ or ‘boy’ and 563 entries which contained ‘married women’ (punyŏ). In the previous decade, there were 3,917 entries for ‘boys,’ while entries for ‘married women’ appeared only 633 times. Entries for ‘schoolgirls’ appeared 306 times in the 1920s. The term ‘sonyŏ’ was alternately used along with such other words as kyejibae (or kyejib aie, meaning ‘girl child’) and ch’ŏnyŏ (an unmarried young woman, literally meaning a virgin) in the newspapers. The term sonyŏ (‘the girl’) broadly applied to girls of a wide range of ages, from three to eighteen or nineteen. Most of these entries reveal that girls fell prey to different kinds of accident and exploitation in the rapidly changing society, but they also help us read them as social subjects with their own sense of agency – the ones who could shape their lives in accordance with their encounters with the conditions of their lives during the decade.

As expected, most of the news was about various misfortunes that befell Korean girls. As shown in the anecdote with which we began this essay, many girls were being trafficked in and out of their homes and hometowns for a meager amount of money (ranging from three to twenty won).Footnote ⁵⁶ Apparently girls were sold at very young ages, as revealed by the notorious murder case of a five-year-old girl, Lee Oksun, in the backyard of a Chinese restaurant, Yŏlbinnu (in Tonŭi-dong), Seoul. A thirty-three-year-old Chinese man named Wu Binhae (also known as Wu Binji) murdered his alleged foster daughter, whom he said he had “bought” for three won from a poor family in order to profit from prostituting her in the future. He and his wife, Ma Sinae, who traded opium, “bought” young Korean girls, according to the newspaper. They had been living with four other girls who were suspected to be Korean, although these girls would not speak Korean in the police station. Apparently, Wu was the “evil” guardian of the murdered girl, and his crimes of kidnapping, girl trafficking, and murder turned out to have had a longer history and with more victims than the murder of the five-year-old girl revealed. He and his wife, along with other Korean accomplices, had been kidnapping children and seducing young women under the pretext of connecting them to rich families, in order to sell them to local dining places or brothels in China. One of the accomplices, Park Chunch’ŏl, even sold his own five-year-old niece, who was later murdered by Wu.Footnote ⁵⁷ The news shocked the public, and newspapers intensely and intently reported the trial results of these cases.Footnote ⁵⁸

The kidnapping of girls was frequently reported in the newspapers, and often involved residents in the Chinatowns of Sŏsomun and T'aep’yŏng-dong. According to the newspaper articles, girls were kidnapped and forced into prostitution in Chinatown, or sold and sent off to Shandong or Shanghai, China. Newspapers often stated that the police were going to raid the Chinatowns to search for the girls who had been rumored to work there as prostitutes and opium addicts. It is also evident that people were aware of rumors about Chinatowns, and obliquely associated cases of missing girls with the hitherto unidentified organized human traffickers involving the ethnic Chinese in Korea and their Korean accomplices. Inhabited by a different ethnic group, Chinatown was at the center of both well-grounded and unfounded rumors about poverty, atrocity, and lawlessness.Footnote ⁵⁹ Eventually, The Chosŏn Ilbo one day concluded that uncovering the crimes of the Chinatown-based girl- (child-) trafficking would be difficult because most of those girls had been kidnapped at a very young age and would not remember their parents nor speak the Korean language.

Aside from the girls kidnapped by the Chinese and sold to buyers in both Korean Chinatowns and mainland China, there were girls who were abused by “bad” foster parents; girls who were living in domestic servitude were often physically and sexually abused. Many of the girls reported about in the newspapers fell out of familial or parental protection due to poverty, to their parent's ignorance, or to the presence of organized human traffickers (inyuksijang, meaning the market for human ‘flesh,’ the term actually used in the newspaper).

Girls were not always victims, however. We do not mean to suggest that all colonial Korean girls were victims of patriarchy, of industrialization and modernization, of male aggression and human trafficking, or of colonial violence. Although newspapers ran a greater number of articles about unfortunate girls who were victimized, girls also sometimes rebelled and sought ways to shape their own lives. Girls in the factories, for instance, organized workers’ strikes and sabotage. On August 21, 1929, thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girl factory workers at a silk mill in Ch’ŏngju, Ch'ungch’ŏng-do, organized a strike. The following year about thirty young girls also organized a strike at a mill in Ch'unch’ŏn, Kangwŏn-do, on February 13, 1930, protesting against low wages – wages that wouldn't even cover half the cost of their meals, according to the newspaper.Footnote ⁶⁰ There were also girls who registered themselves in special classes for the illiterate. Among the three classes for literacy provision (munja pokŭp) that The Chosŏn Ilbo offered to girls, boys, and women respectively,Footnote ⁶¹ the class for girls showed the highest enrollment, with ninety-one students, the boys with fifty-five, while the married women's class had only twenty-five. The lower enrollment rate for boys and women may be explained by the fact that boys had better access to official schools and that married women had less free time than girls. The higher enrollment rate for the girls, however, attests to the enthusiasm with which girls acquired Hangŭl literacy. Literacy provision classes were offered with memorable slogans such as “Knowledge Is Power” (anŭn kŏsi him ida) or “we can't survive without learning” (paewŏ ya sanda). The slogans underscored limited literacy, not only as an essential survival skill in a modernizing society, but also as an important element of citizenship even in a colonized nation.Footnote ⁶² The presence of girls enrolled in “literacy education” that took place outside formal schools indicates their desire to participate in knowing the world around them through their own ways of reading it.

While the above-mentioned cases suggest that some girls resisted their confined agencies as epistemic and political subjects, or as individuals, newspapers of the 1930s expressed concerns about the increasing number of crimes committed by girls and women. Some notable examples include: girl swindlers, arsonists who set fire to their husbands’ or in-laws’ houses in order to escape the marital shackles, girls fleeing from their family who forced them into unwanted wedlock, or the girls identified as “juvenile delinquents.”Footnote ⁶³ Especially in response to the “juvenile delinquents,” the GGK was, according to the newspaper, intending to survey the rate of juvenile delinquency throughout the Korean peninsula.Footnote ⁶⁴ Perhaps in order to figuratively sanitize the streets of Seoul of potentially delinquent girls, the GGK interrogated girl hawkers selling caramel candies and chewing gum. These girls of “twelve or thirteen years old wore heavy makeup like waitresses of cafes and bars.” The newspaper called them “secret night flowers” who were manipulated by evil young men or women behind them.Footnote ⁶⁵

A story about a girl communist leader once appeared in the newspaper. Kwak Sŏngsu, a sixteen-year-old Chosŏn Communist Party member, was arrested by the Japanese for anti-colonist resistance activities in Manchuria.Footnote ⁶⁶ The news article calls her a “Red Jeanne d'Arc” (Joan of Arc), and this analogy with the royalist symbol of “integral nationalism” is intriguing.Footnote ⁶⁷ The writer of the essay might not have been all that familiar with the context within which the detailed political semiotics of Joan of Arc had been employed, and yet the figure of a patriotic heroine would itself have been quite well known in colonial Korea.Footnote ⁶⁸

The news articles about girls evidently increased the visibility of girls. The consequences of increased visibility, however, seemed rather ironic. At the very moment that these girls came within the cognition of the reading public, many of their lives were defined as lying outside ‘normative girlhood’; threats, dangers, and severely unhealthy conditions were the rules rather than exceptions of their way of living during the period. At the very least, the girls who were reported, delineated, or represented through the news media seemed to be denied the status of ‘girls’ even though, in fact, they were officially addressed as such. Girls without girlhood found that to exist outside ‘normative girlhood’ meant being perceived as the ones who had to sacrifice their ‘flesh,’ that is, their bodies. The news media bore witness to the fact that the bodies of these girls – the group of female youth that they named as ‘girls’ – were easily accessed by adults, often exploited for economic gain, or sacrificed for perverted adult pleasures and commerce parasitizing on such deviant pursuits. Theirs were the bodies held hostage to precarity of life.

Remembering again that the average life expectancy of Korean women in the 1930s was approximately half that of their British counterparts, a twenty-first-century reader of the ‘girls’ of the period may face conceptual challenges. One of these challenges takes us back to the questions with which we began this essay, and which may be succinctly summarized by one ultimate question: was there girlhood in colonial Korea? The ‘girl,’ or sonyǒ, was a term appropriate for filling the lacuna between the appellation of kyejibae (‘female children’) and punyŏ (‘married women’). The lacuna that should be filled both conceptually and practically as a transition in modernizing society from a young female child to a married woman required sufficient time. The state- and social interpellations of the girls through educational apparatuses and print media unwittingly made visible the conceptual hiatus between the two simple stages of the female life cycle – childhood and womanhood, while filling it with the modern term of sonyǒ (the ‘girl’). In colonial Korea, the concept of the ‘girl’ emerged paradoxically through its absence and through a new representational category imported from the modernized West. Born as an absent signifier, the ‘girl’ became porous and capacious, and yet, it failed to suture the ruptures of the meaning of the ‘girl’ in the public imagination of the period.