Education at the Crossroads of Transpacific U.S. and Japanese Imperialisms: Korean Private Schooling in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1906–1940

Abstract

In territorial Hawai‘i (1900–1959), transpacific migrant Koreans engaged with a highly stratified, tripartite social system consisting of propertied white colonials, culturally and materially dispossessed indigenous populations, and their own, largely non-white, non-propertied migrant laborer class. There, they encountered not only White Euro-Americans’ colonialist impulse toward Americanization and the racial and economic subjugation of Asian migrant workers, but also the strong nationalistic desire of Korean expatriates to liberate Korea from Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945). In this context of transpacific imperial entanglement, Korean migrants and expatriates defied the status quo to develop and practice their own concept of a “proper” education for their Hawai‘i-raised and Hawai‘i-born children. This dissertation examines the private schooling initiatives of the early Korean community in US territorial Hawai‘i and poses new questions about their substance and significance, not only in relation to the American imperial project but also within the larger context of the competing—yet at times complementary and mutually reinforcing—imperialisms of the United States and Japan during the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on the cases of the first two Korean private schools in territorial Hawai‘i —the Korean Central School (Hanin Chungang Hagwŏn, 1906–1919), founded by the Hawai‘i Methodist Episcopal Mission, and the Korean Christian Institute (Hanin Kiddok Hagwŏn, 1915–1940), founded by Korean community leaders, notably Syngman Rhee (who went on to become the first President of the Republic of Korea in 1948), this study contextualizes the ways in which such educational institutions functioned as sites of negotiation for the meanings and methods of agency, nationalism, and citizenship. It explores how their marginality—as Japanese-colonial subjects at home and as a stateless, racialized Asian laboring caste in territorial Hawai‘i—shaped the Korean academies, from their pedagogical strategies to their opposition to systems of subjugation. This dissertation argues that the Koreans who organized the two Korean schools employed strategic tactics, capitalizing on the discourses of Americanization, prevailing anti-Japanese sentiments in the US, and their commitment to Christianity, to position themselves as Christian individuals deserving of national independence and modern citizenship. In the process, they offered a distinctive brand of Americanization and civic education—one that emerged out of a desire to establish Korean national sovereignty, promote ethnic nationalism, and create cultural differentiation, all while trying to emulate and assimilate into Protestant America. In doing so, they exhibited complex subjectivities that simultaneously challenged and conformed to imperial formations across the Pacific. The Korean private schools and their politics of education offer a glimpse into a complex early-twentieth-century transpacific immigrant world that developed in relation to multiple hegemonic forces of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, religion, race, and ethnicity, while ultimately revealing a novel form of modern subjectivity that transnational education called into existence within a specific historical and regional setting. Their stories also help illuminate the tensions and contradictions inherent in seeking recognition from the US imperial state by leveraging its hegemonic frameworks.