It's Madness: The Politics of Mental Health in Colonial Korea

by Theodore Jun Yoo

Overview

It’s Madness examines Korea’s years under Japanese colonialism, when mental health first became defined as a medical and social problem. As in most Asian countries, severe social ostracism, shame, and fear of jeopardizing marriage prospects compelled most Korean families to conceal the mentally ill behind closed doors. This book explores the impact of Chinese traditional medicine and its holistic approach to treating mental disorders, the resilience of folk illnesses as explanations for inappropriate and dangerous behaviors, the emergence of clinical psychiatry as a discipline, and the competing models of care under the Japanese colonial authorities and Western missionary doctors. Drawing upon unpublished archival as well as printed sources, this is the first study to examine the ways in which “madness” was understood, classified, and treated in traditional Korea and the role of science in pathologizing and redefining mental illness under Japanese colonial rule.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520964044
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/16/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Theodore Jun Yoo is Associate Professor of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University. He is the author of The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945.
 

Read an Excerpt

It's Madness

The Politics of Mental Health in Colonial Korea

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By Theodore Jun Yoo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96404-4

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CHAPTER 1

Forms of Madness

[Huang] Di: Someone suffers from anger and craziness; how does this disease emerge?

Qi Bo: It emerges from the yang.

[Huang] Di: The yang? How can it let a person become crazy?

Qi Bo: As for the yang qi, because [its flow] was suddenly cut off and because [this blockage] is difficult to open, one tends to become angry. The disease is called "yang recession."

Huangdi Neijing Suwen (Inner canon of the Yellow Emperor, basic questions)

Treating mental illness: Hire a blind person ... [to] strike the patient with a peach tree branch.

MURAYAMA CHIJUN, Chosen no kishin (Ghosts of Korea)

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER of the Dong-ui bogam (A treasury of Eastern medicine), one of the first encyclopedias on Korean traditional medicine, printed during the Joseon period (1392–1910), the author, Heo Jun (1539–1615), describes a case diagnosed by the famous Chinese physician Master Zhang Congzheng (1156–1228), the founder of the Gong Xie Pai (Attack and Drain School). The patient, who was the wife of a certain Xiang Guanling, reportedly experienced two serious problems: she refused to eat anything despite feeling hungry, and she expressed uncontrollable rage (bunno). The wife cursed furiously at the people around her and even threatened to kill them. Her erratic behavior persisted despite the remedies offered by various doctors. After examining her symptoms, Master Zhang decided to eschew the ineffective herbal treatment and recommend a novel approach. On his order, the family hired two courtesans with "rouged faces" to perform an opera, "which made Xiang's wife laugh a lot." The next day, the wife viewed a wrestling match, which inspired more laughter. Master Zhang then suggested that the family invite several women with healthy appetites to eat with gusto by her side during the meals and rave about the delectable cuisine "until she begged for a taste." After a few days, the patient's anger started to diminish, her appetite returned, and she was cured without any medication. Sometime later, the family joyfully reported that she had given birth to a son. In his commentary on Zhang's treatment of his patient, Heo explained how an excess of any of the seven emotions (e.g., joy, anger, anxiety, worry, grief, fear, and fright [shock]) could cause acute damage to the internal organs, namely the liver, heart, and spleen. He observed that Zhang, in order to cure the uncontrollable rage of Xiang's wife, employed laughter to unclog the qi (vital energy) trapped in her meridians; this in turn rebalanced her yin and yang, allowing the blood to circulate equally to all parts of her vital organs and returned her body to its normal state.

Popular remedies such as Heo's based on traditional Chinese medicine began to make inroads into Korea starting in the seventeenth century but confronted resistance from a society steeped in traditional folk beliefs and practices. Koreans continued to resort to influential shamans, seeking their advice, rituals, and healing. As this chapter will show, the resilience of shamanism lay in its intimate, emotional connection to the personal, everyday experience of clients: it was a social practice that offered empathy for the suffering and performed rituals to expel pent-up feelings of han (resentment and regret), which, if left unresolved, could lead to violent manifestations such as hwabyeong (fire illness). One scholar has observed that shamanistic "prayers to obtain personal and private advantage were anathema" to the rigid cosmic world order of Confucianism, the official ideology of the Joseon dynasty. Supplications for individuals were antithetical to the Confucian goal of accepting "unquestioningly whatever fate Heaven ... had in store for them" — namely a fate "directed toward public benefit rather than personal interests." Shamanism's association of erratic behaviors with spiritual and moral failings and with disturbances in relationships with the spirit world also came under harsh criticism and ridicule from the modernizing medical world and Western missionaries, who viewed it as backward and irrational. The missionaries, however, would find a place for shamanism's view of madness as possession in their own "discourse on demonology."

In contrast to shamanism, traditional Chinese medicine and the Korean traditional medicine that sprang from it tended to somatize symptoms as manifestations of an organic physical disorder. This holistic approach did not differentiate the mind from the body; as one scholar observed, it claimed to be a "rational, empirical, and systematically synthesized healing tradition largely devoid of supernatural components." Recent studies have shown that Koreans, even from the lower classes, turned into more avid consumers of naturalistic medicine as both physicians and medical supplies became more accessible to the public. Clearly, the Neo-Confucian government contributed to this trend when it occasionally expelled shamans from the capital and tried to ban shamanistic healing, efforts lauded by the burgeoning medical mutual aid associations. While there was a gradual "popularization of medicine" starting in the early modern period, Koreans did not completely abandon shamanism for relief from problems of the spirit. This was especially true for marginalized groups like women in an increasingly rigid Confucian society. For instance, the diary of Yu Hui-chun (Miam ilgi), a high-ranking Confucian scholar and official at the end of the sixteenth century, reveals that out of the 570 entries on medicine there were two entries about a shaman's ritual initiated by "the female members of the family." Shamanistic interpretations of "spirit possession" bled through the naturalistic medical layer of the palimpsest as people sought to cope with their suffering through familiar rituals, music, and dance and to escape the constrictions of Confucian life that left little space for the unconventional. To understand these different layers of understanding, this chapter will explore traditional beliefs of shamanism, the impact of Chinese medicine, and finally the emergence of Korean natural medicine, which drew on understandings of folk illnesses and Chinese medicine to formulate its own syncretistic view of "madness."

TRADITIONAL BELIEFS OF SHAMANISM

According to the late Roy Porter, the discovery of unearthed trepanned skulls by archaeologists in Spain indicates that early humans may have believed in spirit possession and that they bored holes in the skulls of the afflicted with flint tools to allow the demons to escape. In Korea, the oldest belief system and healing tradition, which antedates all historical records, was musok (shamanism), which also involved a belief in the supernatural. This "lived religion" was an integral part of everyday life and culture. In the words of one missionary, shamanism was "a religion of the Korean home." Sung-Deuk Oak observes that while official ceremonies and domestic ancestral veneration lay "under Confucian liturgical hegemony," gut rituals to appease household spirits remained under the control of the mudang (shaman, usually female) and occasionally a baksu (male shaman). As healers, shamans offered an outlet (if only temporarily) for the pent-up anger, regret, frustration, and other emotions that pervaded daily existence. In shamanism, inexplicable "illnesses" (perhaps what some would have described as "madness" in the West) were considered a natural consequence of humans' interactions with the spirit world. In fact, shamans themselves had to suffer and overcome an "initiation sickness" (sinbyeong) accompanied by hallucinations, dreams, hearing voices, and more to be able to heal others. Only then could they identify and heal the ruptures "in the relationship between the living and the dead." The intimate connection of shamanism to the everyday lives of Koreans made it difficult for the Neo-Confucian order to root it out completely, even as shamanistic practices confronted greater prohibitions and stigma.

Sources on Shamanism

In the absence of sources written by shamans themselves, one must rely on accounts by contemporary observers, being mindful of their specific political agendas. One source is the writings of the Neo-Confucian patriarchal state, which sought not only to repress shaman practitioners, who posed a threat to its core ideologies and authority, but also to decry shamanistic practices as corrupt and superstitious and to contrast them to the Neo-Confucian social and political reforms and virtues that they wished to promote. As Merose Hwang has shown, this critical "mudang (shaman) discourse" represented a form of elitist control. American missionaries in the late nineteenth century also provided critical assessments, routinely describing shamans as depraved charlatans and devil worshippers who represented the ills of backward Korea as opposed to the rational and superior belief system of Christianity. According to J. Robert Moose, for example, Korean shamans were "in a league with evil spirits" and had the ability to attract "even the highest and best educated classes." Homer Hulbert likewise dismissed shamanistic practices as "idiotic" performances. Yet as the historian Andrew Scull has pointed out, similar practices are part of the Christian tradition as well: from Christianity's earliest years, missionaries used the casting of demons and healing of the possessed "as proof of the world of Christ over the invisible enemies faced by humans," and in the Byzantine Empire "the existence of demons and the power of religious healing" were beliefs widely held not only among "ordinary folk" but even among "the powerful and the relatively well-educated."

Unlike the missionaries, who relegated shamanism to the category of useless, primitive superstitions, the Japanese Government-General's Office expressed a keen interest in Korean customs and beliefs and commissioned ethnographers such as Akamatsu Chijo (1886–1969), Murayama Chijun (1891–1968), and Akiba Takashi (1888–1954) to direct large-scale studies on these subjects. Their ethnographic surveys both elucidated the similarities between Korean and Japanese culture to facilitate Koreans' assimilation and provided useful information on local laws, land records and transactions, and general customary practices to prepare the population for large-scale social and political engineering. A pervasive Korean police force assisted Japanese investigators of Korean life and customs by rounding up subjects for studies. As E. Taylor Atkins suggests, however, these surveys "did not always need to be immediately applicable to practical administration," so social investigators could "follow their interests to a certain extent" and develop a "special interest in Koreana that exceeded their mandated ethnographic agenda." Indeed, Japanese researchers often prefaced their works "with remarks on the importance of cultural understanding to good inter-cultural relations and enlightened governance."

The sociologist Akiba Takashi and the religious studies scholar Akamatsu Chijo both pioneered the investigation of Korean musok. The former had studied functionalism with prominent scholars in Europe such as Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and the latter had also spent several years abroad. As professors of Gyeongseong (Keijo) Imperial University, both devoted their time to extensive field research on Korean shamanism, and in 1937 they would coauthor Chosen fuzoku no kenkyu (A study of Korean shamanism), one of the most comprehensive studies to date on shamanism in ninety locations nationwide. While their methodologies differed, both averred that shamanism was perhaps the most "representative cultural aspect" of colonial Korea; its primitive or primordial elements were indicative of Korea's backwardness but offered a clue to understanding Japan's own past and constructing in contrast an identity for Japan that was both "modern" and "Asian."

Another Japanese scholar who became interested in the study of traditional culture and was employed by the Government-General's Central Council (Chusuin) for several decades was the sociologist Murayama Chijun, a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University and a contemporary of Akiba and Akamatsu. In 1928 he published Chosen no kishin (Ghosts of Korea), a pioneering work on Korean ghosts and spirits. This would be one of several important books he authored on Korean folk culture and religion. Murayama coordinated extensive field surveys and pored over local surveys and reports that Korean police and provincial administrators made available to him. While his works undoubtedly contributed to colonial policies to eliminate shamanistic practices and promote cultural assimilation, they represent an invaluable resource. Murayama was the first to systematically classify local ghosts as well as to document specific folk remedies used to expel diabolic spirits that were known to cause mental disorders. Further, as E. Taylor Atkins observes, Murayama's reports represented much more than just "rich data, classification schemes, and surface description": they also sought to analyze "the indigenous meanings of folk beliefs and practices." In 1932, Murayama authored Chosen no fugeki (Shamans of Korea), an extensive survey of shamans in South Jeolla Province, which had the highest population density of shamans in Korea. In this particular study, he highlighted the importance of a gut or sacrificial ritual offered to the spirits by the shaman through ritualized song and dance, entreating the gods for peace and a bountiful harvest (byeolsin gut) or for recovery of an ill person afflicted by misfortune (byeong gut).

By the mid-1920s, a number of Korean intellectuals like Choe Nam-seon, Seon Jin-tae, and Yi Neung-hwa were aware of these comprehensive ethnographic studies commissioned by the Government-General Office and were beginning to pay serious attention to shamanism and folk beliefs and practices. Nationalistic in their aims and empirical in their methods, these studies sought to differentiate Korean culture from Japanese culture by focusing on what made it unique, contradicting the negative views held by the yangban (literati class) and the colonial government. For example, Choe Nam-seon described Dangun, the legendary progenitor of the Korean people and founder of Gojoseon (Old Joseon), as a shaman ruler, mirroring other nationalist writings that presented shamanism and other folk practices and folklore as uniquely Korean spiritual resources. Contrary to these approaches to shamanism, which upheld it as part of a "usable past" in constructing national culture, Korean print media criticized female reliance on shamanistic rites as old-fashioned and promoted in contrast a new vision of modern womanhood that would rely on scientifically approved hygienic practices and consumption choices to maintain the health of the family.

Missionaries such as George Heber Jones (1867–1919), Eli Bar Landis (1865–98), Homer B. Hulbert (1863–1949), and Horace G. Underwood (1859–1916) began to write their own descriptions of shamanism starting in the late nineteenth century. Filtered through their Christian lens, their narratives cast shamanism as a folk religion steeped in supernatural entities, demonic possession, and witchcraft. Sung Deuk Oak posits that shamanism served as the "significant other" of Christianity in missionary discourse. It routinely cast the former as a primitive form of "demonism" that could be vanquished if Koreans could only replace their fraudulent healers (especially mudang) with Jesus, and their "household fetishes" of "devil worship" with images of the "the Lord's Prayer, Apostles' Creed, and Ten Commandments." Though missionaries' accounts were fueled by an iconoclastic zeal to destroy what they considered devilish, they recorded detailed descriptions of spirit possessions, gut and exorcism rituals, and other aspects of shamanism that can shed light on indigenous understandings of these phenomena.

Despite such differing and competing images of Korean shamanism, one can tease out common descriptions about general shamanistic beliefs and practice (with local variations) from the sources described above and from comparative studies. But seductive as it is to imagine shamanism as pristinely and primordial, it was infused with other traditions, especially Buddhist influences, and as scholars such as Boudewijn Walraven have pointed out, it borrowed from vernacular Korean literature, musical traditions, and even rhetorical devices, infusing popular religious culture with elements of elite genres.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from It's Madness by Theodore Jun Yoo. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Photographs,
Introduction,
1 Forms of Madness,
2 Madness Is ...,
3 A Touch of Madness: The Cultural Politics of Emotion,
4 Madness as a Social Epidemic,
Conclusion: A Method to the Madness,
Notes,
Glossary,
Bibliography,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

"[Breaks] new ground... [Yoo has] offered readers an ambitious challenge: one directed to Korean studies, but also one also carrying its implications far beyond."

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