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Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945
For South Koreans, the early 1960s to late 1970s were the best and worst of times—a period of unprecedented economic growth and deepening political oppression. Carter J. Eckert finds the roots of this dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the country’s long history of militarization, personified in South Korea’s paramount leader, Park Chung Hee.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
700 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 7, 2016
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231 people want to read
About the author
Carter J. Eckert
7 books5 followersCarter J. Eckert was an American historian who specialized in Korean history. He was the Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History at Harvard University.
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August 9, 2024
The problem with this book is that there isn’t enough Park Chung Hee in it. Rather, what Eckert does is take a Foucault-like approach to analyze how knowledge and power were reproduced within the educational institutions that Park attended. Therefore, you get an analysis of the curriculum and conditions within the institutions, but actual Park Chung Hee did this and that stories are hard to find. The author even goes to the length that, after Park graduated from the Japanese military academy in 1944, he does not describe Park’s adventures as a young lieutenant in the Manchukuo Army in the waning days of World War Two, but rather the conditions at the military academies that Park had attended during that time.
That being said, this is a good book. Park Chung Hee was the central figure in South Korea’s modernization, and he, and South Korean society generally, was shaped by a military ethos as cultivated in Japan’s military academies. As well as Park, most of the figures who surrounded him in the 1961 coup had also been educated in those places and this ethos, and so an investigation of what was going on there helps to tell us how they saw the world and their place in it. The author finds that four general principles guided life in the Japanese army before and during World War Two. First, in a time of crisis, the military had a duty to intervene. Second, the capitalist economy had to be subordinated to the needs of the state and society. Third was a commitment to bold, risky action with confidence and willpower, and lastly, discipline was enforced by the military, by violence if necessary.
The author wants to go beyond contemporary historical debates about whether Park was an economic hero or a political villain in order to put him into his historical context. An uncomfortable fact for many contemporary Koreans is that, at the time, many Koreans were loyal to the Japanese colonial regime. It was modernizing and strong and in that sense seemed to be worthy of support and emulation. Traditional Chosen Dynasty Korea had been a heavily unmilitarized society, but it became more militaristic in the closing days of the 19th century, largely as a response to Western and Japanese imperialism. After the Japanese took over formally in 1910, they originally demilitarized Korea, but as Japan itself became more militaristic, so Korea followed, largely because of the needs of the empire. In 1931, Japan took over Manchuria and in 1937, it invaded China proper. Finally, it went to war against the U.S in 1941. Because of these developments, educational institutions became much more militaristic in their practices and Koreans were recruited to fight for the empire.
Books like this are hard to write. First, you need the language skills to do the research (Korean, Japanese) and then you need the background to make sense of what was going on. The author, Carter Eckert, a professor of Korean history at Harvard University, fortunately has the skills to do it. He has an academic writing style. His writing is not lively, but sometimes the fascinating details he reveals in his sort of mundane, dry style make them almost pop more.
To summarize what the book says about Park Chung Hee. He was born in a small village about 50 km north of Taegu in 1917, the youngest son of a poor farmer. He graduated from Taegu Normal School, a teacher’s college, in 1937. These schools were heavily militarized, with students living in military style barracks and undergoing military drills. Park took the drills very seriously, he was a bugler and heavily into kendo. After he graduated he became an elementary school teacher and married. He was too old to get entry into the Japanese military academy, so he tried to get into the Manchurian military academy. To gain admission, he wrote them a letter written in his own blood. No reply, so he sent another one. That got him into the newspaper and he was given a spot despite his age. He excelled at the academy and was chosen to study in Japan at the Japanese military academy. At the military academy, he had large pictures of Mussolini and Hitler that he bowed to every morning. He graduated in 1944. As the war situation became worse for Japan, “will” training intensified, in which Japanese officers were being steeped in the will to die, to overcome the fear of death, to face any obstacle, to make fanatical banzai charges in the face of certain death. When the author asked Park Chung Hee’s Korean classmates why they backed Park in the coup, they all mentioned his indomitable will and ambition to carry it off.
So what was it like to be cadet at the Manchukuo military academy or the Japanese military academy during World War Two? Now that is a question with very deeply interesting answers, divorced as we are by time and distance from such a thing. The author goes into great detail about many things, but a few stood out to me. He writes about the personnel in charge of the Manchukuo Army and the military academy to show that they were generally Japanese officers whose views were so radical that they had often been expelled from the Japanese army. On the other hand, many of the Chinese cadets and Chinese officers clandestinely studied Communism and were actually committed to independence from Japan. This all came to a head when the Russians invaded in 1945.
Conditions at the academy were Spartan, to say the least. When it was -35 in the Manchurian winter, cadets were forced to march in their summer uniforms to toughen them up. On one occasion, they were forced to jump headfirst into a frozen river. The poop froze in the outhouses to form mountains under the butts of the recruits that they had to dodge. In the summer, the food was full of bugs. One cadet showed up, promptly got malaria and when he got out of the infirmary, his commanding officer cursed that he “would die in a ditch.”
The academy placed great importance upon the study of kendo for warrior training. The cadets practiced every day, and there were vicious pitched battles and individual combat. There was less concentration on skill and more on strength and success and the cadets would find themselves beat over the heads repeatedly with a bamboo sword for various infractions, including performing poorly in a kendo match.
Absolute obedience to orders was enforced ruthlessly. Corporal punishment was usual. The upper classmen beat the lower classmen. A common form of punishment was to order cadets to line up opposite each other and slap each other in the face repeatedly. Failure to slap hard enough led to your senior demonstrating the proper method on your face. And the cadets were to accept all this cheerfully and with enthusiasm. A lack of either could lead to more face-slapping or bamboo caning or punches or kicks.
The cadets were required to write in a diary every night, reflecting upon their performance and shortcomings and what they had been taught. These were then reviewed by their section commanders, who commented upon them. The cadets were exhorted to develop their “will” and tenacity and belief in certain victory, the offensive rather than defensive even in the face of overwhelming odds. Contrast this with the fact that when the Russian tanks started rolling into Manchuria, most of the Chinese officers immediately turned and shot their Japanese counterparts. Even while heavily supervised for “wrong think”, people think their thoughts.
There is an academic theory that says that colonies often preserve older customs that have changed in the mother country. This can be as innocuous as colonists preserving older figures of speech or accents in their mother tongue, but it also contributed to Korea’s militarization under Park Chung Hee. After World War Two, Japan was demilitarized both physically and ideologically by the American occupiers. However, the same had not happened in Korea, both because of the Korean War and because the officers trained by the Japanese also happened to be among the most competent people in the country and the Americans were inclined to overlook their previous loyalties. However, Park Chung Hee’s coup in 1961, supported as it was by many of the other graduates of the Japanese and Manchukuo military academies, shows how Japanese militarism continued to shape Korea into the 1970s. After the 1961 coup, Park took a trip to Japan and had lunch with a former prime minister. He said “We are young, and from the viewpoint of Japan, what we are doing must seem naïve, but in fact we are acting in the spirit of the men of high purpose of the Meiji Restoration.” This statement shocked the Japanese politicians to whom it was made.
This book is worth reading if you are interested in the development of South Korea or the Japanese Empire. It takes us into a world whose values were almost completely opposite to most of what we hold dear today. “Liberalism” and “Democracy” were dirty words. “Strength” and “Will” were held dear. It is easy to denounce them. Yet I think we need to keep in mind the historian of war Azar Gat’s claim that the reason that those ideas lost was because the United States was stronger than Japan and Germany, not that the ideas in themselves created societies weaker than democratic, liberal ones. Now that those forces seem to again be on the rise, both within our liberal democracies and outside them, we need to understand the strengths of those societies, what they offered people both emotionally and materially, if we wish to combat them and their ideas. Eckert’s book is a window into that world.
That being said, this is a good book. Park Chung Hee was the central figure in South Korea’s modernization, and he, and South Korean society generally, was shaped by a military ethos as cultivated in Japan’s military academies. As well as Park, most of the figures who surrounded him in the 1961 coup had also been educated in those places and this ethos, and so an investigation of what was going on there helps to tell us how they saw the world and their place in it. The author finds that four general principles guided life in the Japanese army before and during World War Two. First, in a time of crisis, the military had a duty to intervene. Second, the capitalist economy had to be subordinated to the needs of the state and society. Third was a commitment to bold, risky action with confidence and willpower, and lastly, discipline was enforced by the military, by violence if necessary.
The author wants to go beyond contemporary historical debates about whether Park was an economic hero or a political villain in order to put him into his historical context. An uncomfortable fact for many contemporary Koreans is that, at the time, many Koreans were loyal to the Japanese colonial regime. It was modernizing and strong and in that sense seemed to be worthy of support and emulation. Traditional Chosen Dynasty Korea had been a heavily unmilitarized society, but it became more militaristic in the closing days of the 19th century, largely as a response to Western and Japanese imperialism. After the Japanese took over formally in 1910, they originally demilitarized Korea, but as Japan itself became more militaristic, so Korea followed, largely because of the needs of the empire. In 1931, Japan took over Manchuria and in 1937, it invaded China proper. Finally, it went to war against the U.S in 1941. Because of these developments, educational institutions became much more militaristic in their practices and Koreans were recruited to fight for the empire.
Books like this are hard to write. First, you need the language skills to do the research (Korean, Japanese) and then you need the background to make sense of what was going on. The author, Carter Eckert, a professor of Korean history at Harvard University, fortunately has the skills to do it. He has an academic writing style. His writing is not lively, but sometimes the fascinating details he reveals in his sort of mundane, dry style make them almost pop more.
To summarize what the book says about Park Chung Hee. He was born in a small village about 50 km north of Taegu in 1917, the youngest son of a poor farmer. He graduated from Taegu Normal School, a teacher’s college, in 1937. These schools were heavily militarized, with students living in military style barracks and undergoing military drills. Park took the drills very seriously, he was a bugler and heavily into kendo. After he graduated he became an elementary school teacher and married. He was too old to get entry into the Japanese military academy, so he tried to get into the Manchurian military academy. To gain admission, he wrote them a letter written in his own blood. No reply, so he sent another one. That got him into the newspaper and he was given a spot despite his age. He excelled at the academy and was chosen to study in Japan at the Japanese military academy. At the military academy, he had large pictures of Mussolini and Hitler that he bowed to every morning. He graduated in 1944. As the war situation became worse for Japan, “will” training intensified, in which Japanese officers were being steeped in the will to die, to overcome the fear of death, to face any obstacle, to make fanatical banzai charges in the face of certain death. When the author asked Park Chung Hee’s Korean classmates why they backed Park in the coup, they all mentioned his indomitable will and ambition to carry it off.
So what was it like to be cadet at the Manchukuo military academy or the Japanese military academy during World War Two? Now that is a question with very deeply interesting answers, divorced as we are by time and distance from such a thing. The author goes into great detail about many things, but a few stood out to me. He writes about the personnel in charge of the Manchukuo Army and the military academy to show that they were generally Japanese officers whose views were so radical that they had often been expelled from the Japanese army. On the other hand, many of the Chinese cadets and Chinese officers clandestinely studied Communism and were actually committed to independence from Japan. This all came to a head when the Russians invaded in 1945.
Conditions at the academy were Spartan, to say the least. When it was -35 in the Manchurian winter, cadets were forced to march in their summer uniforms to toughen them up. On one occasion, they were forced to jump headfirst into a frozen river. The poop froze in the outhouses to form mountains under the butts of the recruits that they had to dodge. In the summer, the food was full of bugs. One cadet showed up, promptly got malaria and when he got out of the infirmary, his commanding officer cursed that he “would die in a ditch.”
The academy placed great importance upon the study of kendo for warrior training. The cadets practiced every day, and there were vicious pitched battles and individual combat. There was less concentration on skill and more on strength and success and the cadets would find themselves beat over the heads repeatedly with a bamboo sword for various infractions, including performing poorly in a kendo match.
Absolute obedience to orders was enforced ruthlessly. Corporal punishment was usual. The upper classmen beat the lower classmen. A common form of punishment was to order cadets to line up opposite each other and slap each other in the face repeatedly. Failure to slap hard enough led to your senior demonstrating the proper method on your face. And the cadets were to accept all this cheerfully and with enthusiasm. A lack of either could lead to more face-slapping or bamboo caning or punches or kicks.
The cadets were required to write in a diary every night, reflecting upon their performance and shortcomings and what they had been taught. These were then reviewed by their section commanders, who commented upon them. The cadets were exhorted to develop their “will” and tenacity and belief in certain victory, the offensive rather than defensive even in the face of overwhelming odds. Contrast this with the fact that when the Russian tanks started rolling into Manchuria, most of the Chinese officers immediately turned and shot their Japanese counterparts. Even while heavily supervised for “wrong think”, people think their thoughts.
There is an academic theory that says that colonies often preserve older customs that have changed in the mother country. This can be as innocuous as colonists preserving older figures of speech or accents in their mother tongue, but it also contributed to Korea’s militarization under Park Chung Hee. After World War Two, Japan was demilitarized both physically and ideologically by the American occupiers. However, the same had not happened in Korea, both because of the Korean War and because the officers trained by the Japanese also happened to be among the most competent people in the country and the Americans were inclined to overlook their previous loyalties. However, Park Chung Hee’s coup in 1961, supported as it was by many of the other graduates of the Japanese and Manchukuo military academies, shows how Japanese militarism continued to shape Korea into the 1970s. After the 1961 coup, Park took a trip to Japan and had lunch with a former prime minister. He said “We are young, and from the viewpoint of Japan, what we are doing must seem naïve, but in fact we are acting in the spirit of the men of high purpose of the Meiji Restoration.” This statement shocked the Japanese politicians to whom it was made.
This book is worth reading if you are interested in the development of South Korea or the Japanese Empire. It takes us into a world whose values were almost completely opposite to most of what we hold dear today. “Liberalism” and “Democracy” were dirty words. “Strength” and “Will” were held dear. It is easy to denounce them. Yet I think we need to keep in mind the historian of war Azar Gat’s claim that the reason that those ideas lost was because the United States was stronger than Japan and Germany, not that the ideas in themselves created societies weaker than democratic, liberal ones. Now that those forces seem to again be on the rise, both within our liberal democracies and outside them, we need to understand the strengths of those societies, what they offered people both emotionally and materially, if we wish to combat them and their ideas. Eckert’s book is a window into that world.
September 12, 2020
Have you ever read a book that drew you in even though you didn’t actually like it?
This is such a book for me. I kept reading on in the hope of finding more nuggets of interesting information but only found the occasional crumb.
This book was quite a disappointment in that I obtained it to learn more about Park Chun Hee’s formative years. What I actually got was a detailed examination of the culture and curriculum of the Japanese Military and the Manchurian Military Academies that Park attended. The problem is not so much the information as the deceptive title.
If you are actually hoping to learn more about Park Chun Hee, get a different book. The author here has a different agenda.
This is such a book for me. I kept reading on in the hope of finding more nuggets of interesting information but only found the occasional crumb.
This book was quite a disappointment in that I obtained it to learn more about Park Chun Hee’s formative years. What I actually got was a detailed examination of the culture and curriculum of the Japanese Military and the Manchurian Military Academies that Park attended. The problem is not so much the information as the deceptive title.
If you are actually hoping to learn more about Park Chun Hee, get a different book. The author here has a different agenda.
May 20, 2018
Little Disappointing as I wished there was more insight information about Park Chung Hee's life.
April 15, 2024
As others have noted, this is not really a conventional biography of Park. What one has is a history of the milieu that the man was raised and educated in; that of the Japanese empire in mainland Asia and the institutions of the Imperial Japanese Army. This provides the deep background on the choices that Park made once he took power in South Korea. I enjoyed it, but it probably is not the first book that someone should read on 20th-century Korea or Japan.
Originally written: June 15, 2018.
Originally written: June 15, 2018.
January 7, 2022
Here is the how you should look at this book. It is a book about the Japanese Military Academy(JMA) and Manchukuo Military Academy(MMA) with a little bit about Park Chung Hee thrown in. The author tries to how what life events and environments influenced Park to take power in 1961 and how he lead during his presidency. To do this the book spends a lot of time on the two previously mentioned military schools. Park Chung Hee appears every once in a while and is not the focus here.
If you want to learn about the education of cadets/junior officers in Imperial Japan, there is no other book out there that covers this field as well as this book. Not even Edward Drea, the subject matter expert on the Imperial Japanese Army, has a text that covers this subject so much. If you want to learn about militarism in late Joseon Era/ Korea's Colonial Period, this is not a bad book either. If you want a biography on Park Chung Hee, you could probably do better. This is just the first of a two part series by the author so I believe the next book will focus on Park putting what he learned and experienced during his training as a teacher and at the military academies to the test during his leading of Korea but that is only my guess.
If you want to learn about the education of cadets/junior officers in Imperial Japan, there is no other book out there that covers this field as well as this book. Not even Edward Drea, the subject matter expert on the Imperial Japanese Army, has a text that covers this subject so much. If you want to learn about militarism in late Joseon Era/ Korea's Colonial Period, this is not a bad book either. If you want a biography on Park Chung Hee, you could probably do better. This is just the first of a two part series by the author so I believe the next book will focus on Park putting what he learned and experienced during his training as a teacher and at the military academies to the test during his leading of Korea but that is only my guess.
April 7, 2025
Eckert老师提出的问题极好：军队是研究韩国现代性非常重要的一个维度，但军队仿佛是头看不见的大象，被人们所忽略。就像Weber所提出的"military discipline gives birth to all discipline"，军队同样是现代社会组织要模仿的重要对象，也因此，以朴正熙为首的深受旧日本帝国军事教育体系的韩人，对战后韩国社会的纪律化改造影响相当深远。
而这些韩人，之所以如此近乎全盘接受帝国的规训教育，首先有对朝鲜王朝的“文强武弱”的极度反感，在那个时代，只有尊重军队并建设国防，才能在社会达尔文主义观念盛行的世界中生存；但讽刺的是，几乎只能通过加入帝国的军队才能实现未满的民族国防自强的愿望，还有出自对帝国种族支配的反抗，这些韩人只有参军并当上军官才尽可能和日本人平起平坐，甚至用军衔来压制对普通韩人平民极为粗鲁的日本宪兵，尽管殖民早期旧日本帝国并不赞同对韩人征兵，其惧怕后者武装组织化后对抗殖民统治。而之后，日本和伪满政权的陆军士官学校的教育体系，无论是内务、唱军歌、历史教育、军事训练，均对这些被支配民族的学生产生重要影响。特别是伪满学校从上到下的反资本主义倾向（从早先的226事件影响到马克思主义社团对学生的渗透），也就是反对个人利益最大化和财阀体制，亦深深塑造这些韩人的经济观。说穿了，就不管是组织形式还是日常的社会的文化，都要以军队作为模板。
遗憾的是，这本书谈了太多伪满陆军军官学校和日本陆军士官学校本身了（虽然作者有很多当时的学生的访谈材料，挺丰富的），这到底是Japanese studies还是Korean Studies？但貌似我也发现了，很多近现代Korea研究到最后都变相成为Japanese studies...而且根据提出的问题，只说1945年前的军事主义起源确实不够，重要的是1961年后的。书名挺有误导性的。可能Eckert老师有过下半部研究的计划？但人已作古，我们也就不得而知了。
而这些韩人，之所以如此近乎全盘接受帝国的规训教育，首先有对朝鲜王朝的“文强武弱”的极度反感，在那个时代，只有尊重军队并建设国防，才能在社会达尔文主义观念盛行的世界中生存；但讽刺的是，几乎只能通过加入帝国的军队才能实现未满的民族国防自强的愿望，还有出自对帝国种族支配的反抗，这些韩人只有参军并当上军官才尽可能和日本人平起平坐，甚至用军衔来压制对普通韩人平民极为粗鲁的日本宪兵，尽管殖民早期旧日本帝国并不赞同对韩人征兵，其惧怕后者武装组织化后对抗殖民统治。而之后，日本和伪满政权的陆军士官学校的教育体系，无论是内务、唱军歌、历史教育、军事训练，均对这些被支配民族的学生产生重要影响。特别是伪满学校从上到下的反资本主义倾向（从早先的226事件影响到马克思主义社团对学生的渗透），也就是反对个人利益最大化和财阀体制，亦深深塑造这些韩人的经济观。说穿了，就不管是组织形式还是日常的社会的文化，都要以军队作为模板。
遗憾的是，这本书谈了太多伪满陆军军官学校和日本陆军士官学校本身了（虽然作者有很多当时的学生的访谈材料，挺丰富的），这到底是Japanese studies还是Korean Studies？但貌似我也发现了，很多近现代Korea研究到最后都变相成为Japanese studies...而且根据提出的问题，只说1945年前的军事主义起源确实不够，重要的是1961年后的。书名挺有误导性的。可能Eckert老师有过下半部研究的计划？但人已作古，我们也就不得而知了。
November 17, 2017
Probably more of a 4.75 than a 5, because I don't think the early parts of the book are totally cohesive with what comes after that, but still very informative. Apparently cadets in the Japanese military academy, while not communists by any means, had far more respect for communism than for laissez-faire capitalism, which they saw as a foreign and unmitigated evil. This explains more than just Park's economic ideas, but also why he considered Kim Il-sung a threat only he, thanks to his military training, was capable of overcoming.
September 30, 2023
An excellent overview of the Japanese officer training system - showing how it built Park Chung Hee's personality, ideology, and leadership style.
Can also be used as a microcosm of the Manchukuo system/ideology/aspiration writ large, or perhaps even as a way to interpret Kodoha thought.
Of surprise to me was the political pluralism within the academies - nationalists and Marxism bubbled just beneath the surface!
Can also be used as a microcosm of the Manchukuo system/ideology/aspiration writ large, or perhaps even as a way to interpret Kodoha thought.
Of surprise to me was the political pluralism within the academies - nationalists and Marxism bubbled just beneath the surface!
January 30, 2018
Excellent book.
June 26, 2023
The best and most entertaining work of history I have ever read. If only it were easier to find diamonds in the rough such as this - ah well.
August 23, 2024
the consensus on this book seems to be that there was not enough actual descriptions of park chung hee himself given the title which i agree with. but for what it is, a book that dives into the military traditions and structures in the japanese empire that influenced post-korean war south korean leadership, it’s incredibly stellar and is really detailed! when this book did draw connections to park’s regime from these japanese military structures it was so fascinating, i just wish it had more of that
October 9, 2021
Good book covering the pre- and WWII period of Japanese military academy instruction and environment more than the specific focus on Park Chung Hee I had expected. A LOT of detail if you're interested in how Imperial Japanese Army officers were trained--explains quite a bit as to how WWII in Asia and the Pacific was prosecuted.
February 7, 2017
Interesting military history. Can be tedious if not your thing but well worth the read.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews