XXX Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 19–21 июня 2019 г. Т. 2

Источниковедение и историография Кореи к 150-летию академика В. В. Бартольда (1869–1930). Ч. 2 197 [ 深化組事件 ] The purge basically eliminated the colonial-era educated generation of officials from the North Korean system. Hwang Jang-yop fled to South Korea, where he died in suspicious circumstances in 2010. 1 4. Conclusions “The East Asian perspective is stranded at the level of the question being posed; it has yet to become systematic content. […] Asia has not been able to grasp itself either as a regional hierarchy or as a concept of civilization, and to continue extending its discursive efforts systematically in such a direction” 2 . This is what Korean scholar Paek Young-seo [ 白永瑞 ] complained in ‘Thinking East Asia’, [ 思想東 亞 ] a historical critique of the Korea’s place in the East Asian political community. This paper has been an attempt to offer some possibilities of systematizing that East Asian perspective. The work of the Reform Bureaucrats during the 1930s, which attacked the material question of poverty and class disparity at the base, left a rich institutional legacy, but stopped short of providing the Korean people the means of political emancipation. Kuriki Yasunobu was therefore correct in saying that freedom attained in political revolution is prerequisite to (further) advancement in material liberty. Yet North Korea’s post-1945 relations with Japan was often sabotaged by South Korea and by rightwing political elements in Japan, and indeed Japan’s post- war economic boom had much to do with the Korean War, when Japanese industry mobilized against North Korea. Moreover, Japan’s withdrawal of technical assistance after 1976 contributed to the failure of North Korea’s “Technical Revolution” and the start of the country’s decline.All of this demonstrates how Japan— the “other” in the eyes of the North Koreans—being in the wrong camp or simply being uncooperative, could spell doom for North Korea. On the other hand, had Juche stayed as a strand of humanist Marxism as it was in the early 1970s, and Japan-North Korean relations not been soured by the 1976 default, there is a good chance that the North Koreans could have enjoyed a much greater degree of material, and indeed, political liberty, compared to what they were eventually left with. The burning question now is how the Cold War divide — the basis of political modernity for contemporary East Asia — could be overcome, not just on the Korean peninsula, but also with Japan. Mental resources for this can be found in the history of mutual-composition of Japanese and (North) Korean modernity. Until 1998, North Korea was run by people with direct experience of colonial rule, and it could be argued that even after 1998, the country remained more-or-less under the influence of a Japanese legacy in colonial and militaristic institutions and mentalities; thus the “other” was made up in fact of elements of “us”, as we existed in the past. During the 1 Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law Jang Song-thaek [ 張成沢 ] masterminded the purges and emerged as its greatest winner; yet he too would be executed in 2013 on Kim Jong-un’s orders. 2 Paek, Thinking East Asia. 203.