#ally minju

[withthewindinherfootsteps]

Parallels in the Yi City arc: Yi City Quartet & 3Zun

(Long post ahead!)

I think one overlooked detail about the Yi City arc is how closely its characters parallel the story of 3Zun – with Xiao Xingchen as Lan Xichen, Xue Yang as Jin Guangyao, and Song Lan and A-Qing as aspects of Nie Mingjue! Though we can't know if its intentional, the sheer number of similarities does suggest to me that it shouldn't be overlooked – so, let's investigate.

Both Xiao Xingchen and Lan Xichen play the role of the 'betrayed' — significantly, because of some sort of blindness.

While for Xiao Xingchen this is physical, Lan Xichen is also blind to Jin Guangyao's true nature. This blindness has been shaped by their betrayer: Xue Yan blinded Song Lan, leading to Xiao Xingchen sacrificing his own eyes for him, while Jin Guangyao deliberately acts to make himself appear honourable and innocent to the people he encounters. This means Lan Xichen cannot 'see' anything contradictory to this about him. This theme of blindness becomes important to the thematic implications of this arc, which we'll talk about later.

In both cases, the 'betrayer' has some role in shaping this blindness, and uses it to their advantage.

Xue Yang blinded Song Lan, causing Xiao Xingchen to give up his eyes for him. Jin Guangyao's crafted persona is the reason Lan Xichen doesn't suspect anything about him. Xue Yang uses Xiao Xingchen's blindness to conceal his identity/nature and thus get close to an unsuspecting him; Jin Guangyao is likewise able to be unsuspected, while using Lan Xichen's generosity to murder Nie Mingjue and gaining a strong ally/defender. Regardless of intent towards Lan Xichen himself, this is still true.

This leads to an identity reveal and betrayal, in which the former party is blindsided (...pun not intended, I couldn't find a better word).

Xiao Xingchen is shocked that Xue Yang is Xue Yang when A-Qing tells him; Lan Xichen likewise does not want to believe Jin Guangyao isn't the person he thought he knew (though, he does promise to evaluate his beliefs!), and when Jin Guangyao ends up sealing his spiritual powers and betraying him, he doesn't see it coming.

Additionally, Lan Xichen and Xiao Xingchen are both tricked into stabbing a member of their group, as a part of someone else's revenge.

For Lan Xichen, it's an outside party (Nie Huaisang); for Xiao Xingchen, it's another member of this group (Xue Yang). Nie Huaisang wanted to take revenge on Jin Guangyao, and Xue Yang wanted to take revenge on Xiao Xingchen himself.

Also, Lan Xichen was tricked by his Xue Yang counterpart into being an instrument for a group member's murder, which could also parallel these events on Xiao Xingchen's side!

So, why is this important?

A common theme in MDZS is being critical of information/rumours. Don't accept something at first glance – question the validity, the evidence, the reason it's being brought up. We see this in the way Lan Wangji acts (eg when discussingg the case of the Chang clan) and in how he teaches the Juniors; we see this in how Wei Wuxian questions the words and intentions of Sisi and Bicao, even when having people suspect Jin Guangyao would be beneficial to him; we see this in the very premise of the novel, as something we were led to believe was true at first glance (by the title and prologue) is proven to be entirely false.

And, in Lan Xichen and Xiao Xingchen's case, we see the dangers of the opposite. That's not blaming them – Jin Guangyao is a very good manipulator and I’d argue Lan Xichen handled the situation very well when it was raised, and Xiao Xingchen was physically blind and couldn’t have guessed the body on the roadside would be Xue Yang of all people – but factually, both characters believed something without having seen the full picture, and were stabbed in the back for it. Lan Xichen could have considered Nie Minjue's words to provide another perspective, and Xiao Xingchen could have inquired into this mysterious person's background and questioned whether they were exploitative (even if it may have been unreasonable, and wouldn't have changed much since Xue Yang is a very good liar), yet both didn't. They both do accept or try to accept what we know is the truth when it's raised to them, but unfortunately it's too late and both pay a steep price. It's also worth noting that both are considered righteous figures (you can debate about Lan Xichen, but that's his in-universe perception), and neither had malicious intent towards any group member. But it doesn't matter how good your intentions are, or how good of a person you are – if you believe things unquestioningly, it'll still lead to harm. Both to you, and unintentionally by you, too. After all, this unquestioning acceptance of one-sided hearsay is a major driver of the mob mentality so heavily critiqued in the book.

And yes, this could've worked had their stories not so closely paralleled each others' – but I'd argue Xiao Xingchen's physical blindness serves to lampshade the metaphorical blindness of Lan Xichen, accentuating this theme. And also having two similar stories helps draw attention to what both of them are saying much more easily than if the stories had been very different.

At the end, however, Lan Xichen is left alive and able to reflect on what led him to this scenario – unlike his spiritual predecessor. Perhaps this is a glimmer of hope, a sign that there is more room for the questioning of rumours and for critical thinking skills in the world now, especially as the younger generation who embodies this begins to grow up; or perhaps it's just another detail of just how doomed Xiao Xingchen was, because despite embodying this theme, was there anything to reflect on and do differently, that would've changed the outcome of his story? As we said before, Xue Yang is a very good liar, and there really wasn't a reason to constantly suspect him from the information Xiao Xingchen had and (more importantly) could feasibly gather. Regardless, the difference in where they end up is important when analysing similarities, and I'm inclined to believe it is a small sign the world can change for the better.

(Similarities on other members under the cut – because there are a lot for everyone else, too, and this post isn't just about the two mentioned above. Once more, we'll be analysing both the 'what' and the 'why'.)

Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao play the role of the 'betrayer' or 'villain', hiding the fact that they're causing and wanting to cause harm – successfully from one member, unsuccessfully from the other(s).

The 'What'

Both kill the suspecting, the main difference being who they're targeting with this action (for Xue Yang, this taints Xiao Xingchen further, whereas Jin Guangyao was simply targeting Nie Mingjue and not Lan Xichen at all). Additionally, both are from a lower-class*, non-cultivator background, who were taken in by the Jin sect and rose to power through this and through doing… morally dubious things. Both share revenge as a motivator – specifically, revenge against an older, male Sect Leader who used them, rejected them and physically harmed them in some way too (Chang Ci'An due to Xue Yang being a street child; Jin Guangshan due to Jin Guangyao being the ‘son of a prostitute’). However, they have both accomplished this revenge goal at the time of their main story. They also have worked together and helped each other in their actions in the past (Villainous Friends extra). Also, both end up losing a hand to Lan Wangji, coincidentally enough.

The 'Why'

Though classism is a present theme in both their stories, I wouldn’t say this is what the parallels are drawing attention to — it’s drawn attention to much more when dealing with Jin Guangyao, and the idea that being treated badly isn’t an excuse for your actions is more prevalent in contrast (with characters like WWX and A-Qing) than similarities. Thematically, they instead serve to show just how easily information can be twisted and distributed – and again, why it's so important we don't accept everything at first glance. Outside of themes, their parallels do contrast them slightly, too — after all, Jin Guangyao’s treatment of Lan Xichen** is much more positive than Xue Xang’s of Xiao Xingchen, despite the ‘betrayed’ treating both of the similarly. But, one could argue, how much does this actually matter? Considering the eventual harm brought to this figure by them regardless, and everything else each of them did? Whatever the answer, the questions are raised by these similarities between them.

Finally, Nie Mingjue is paralleled by both Song Lan and A-Qing in different ways, though the Song Lan parallels are more prominent.

The 'What': Song Lan

All three were killed by the ‘betrayer’ — however, both Nie Mingjue’s and Song Lan’s murders occured before the betrayal, and their deaths and post-mortem identity reveals play an important role in it. A-Qing witnessing Song Lan’s death (as well as just discovering Xue Yang’s identity from Song Lan) is what makes her tell Xiao Xingchen who Xue Yang is, catalysing that betrayal, and Xiao Xingchen discovering Song Lan’s identity makes the betrayal have… let’s say even more of an impact :’). Meanwhile, the identity reveal of the mysterious corpse triggers the investigation of Jin Guangyao, and also starts to catalyse his downfall, leading to the events of the Guanyin temple. Additionally, both turn into fierce corpses encountered by the cast of the main story (both fighting Wen Ning and starting more antagonistic than they end up), with these corpses having been modified in some way by the ‘betrayer’: Nie Mingjue’s corpse is cut up, and Song Lan’s has the needles inserted and is under Xue Yang’s control. I wouldn’t especially say there are themes or questions raised here, it’s more similarities in the group dynamic, but it’s still very interesting to see.

There isn't as much to say here on the 'why' side of things, though there may be something I'm missing. The role of these characters here is mainly in service of the themes in the other characters' arcs – but it's still useful to analyse just how many factual similarities there are, again to give us hints as to whether these parallels between the groups were intentional or not.

The 'What': A-Qing

A-Qing and Nie Mingjue have less parallels, but they definitely exist. Their role here is their constant suspicion — they both suspect and keep suspecting the ‘betrayer’’s actions, despite the trust of the ‘betrayed’ in them (though Nie Mingjue is certainly more violent in this regard). Additionally, both play an important role in the death of the ‘betrayer’ as undead beings: the ghost of A-Qing by constantly tapping her bamboo pole to reveal Xue Yang’s position, and Nie Mingjue’s fierce corpse by directly killing Jin Guangyao. Both are souls through which Wei Wuxian experiences the events of their stories, and both also end the story in some sort of container — Nie Mingjue in the coffin and A-Qing’s broken soul in a spirit-trapping pouch — but admittedly that’s much more flimsy than the rest of my points.

The 'Why': A-Qing

Though at first glance it seems like this suspicion didn't do anything positive for the characters – both ended up dead at the hands of the one spreading/taking advantage of misinformation – it's important to note that these characters are the characters the truth is revealed through. Though I'd argue Nie Mingjue was probably blinded by his own assumptions as much as Lan Xichen was blinded by his own, even if it did end up lining up more closely with the truth, he still plays the same role as A-Qing in questioning and suspecting somebody despite it appearing – on the surface – that there's nothing wrong. And I don't think it's coincidence that in both these cases, the truth is revealed through somebody who did play this role.

Final Thoughts

Though it is possible these parallels were still coincidences, there really are a lot of similarities between the groups' storylines – and they do serve the purpose of important themes within the book. Therefore, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume they were intentional on some level! And even if I'm reading too far into things and they weren't? It doesn't mean they hold no value.

Finally, these parallels are really interesting on their own, but it’s also really interesting to compare where each group ended up. Both groups ended up destroyed due to murder done by the ‘betrayer’, with only one person left standing. However, while Xue Yang was the survivor of the Yi city group (and was later killed by LWJ), the survivor of the Venerated Triad was Lan Xichen — someone who, as mentioned, though heavily affected, now has the chance to grow as a person and fully take things with all their context because of it. So despite the prevalence in the Jianghu of the attitude MXTX is critiquing, despite Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji and Mianmian only really being able to find peace by stepping away rather than changing it, despite the tragedy of the stories of both the Yi City quartet and of 3zun... ultimately, these parallels could indicate hope.

—

*Although there is a big difference in how much lower this class is, of course.

**There is also the aspect of Xue Yang having a negative past with Xiao Xingchen before, with the opposite being true for Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen. Jin Guangyao is known to have a good memory and hold grudges — so, if the pairs’ roles were reversed, would anything fundamentally change?

[distopea]

I felt in a mood to explore Minju and Oliver relationship, mostly the day they understood they were basically the same story but told in a different timeline... 🙏

It wasn’t the first time she had seen him. He was the type of man to be visible. Electric blue hair, muscles, a cut jawline ready to slice anyone and smooth olive skin. He was a catch for the eyes, a butterfly in the middle of the night - yet, he was always ending in the same emergency room at 5am, a bag of ice pressed on his swollen lips or cheeks, and his irises gazing at nothing but the air. 

Minju stopped in front of the room, having this sensation of facing herself a few years before. Anyone could believe that he was simply an unlucky man who had partied too hard, but alas, she had also seen him in different places. Dark ones. She shuddered, not only because she was tired after spending another night watching her brother, but because the memories were sometimes too vivid. She shouldn’t step in, he wasn’t his problem - she had already too much to deal with, with her own family, but his misery was a call in the middle of the dark. She knew he had no ally in this world. 

“Hey” 

Her voice was nothing but a soft whisper, a gentle way to approach him and notify her presence. She seemed tough and mostly unapproachable most of the time, heartless in her own way, yet she was truly warm in her soul. She caught a glimpse of his eyes and she stood motionless. In the depth of his chestnut irises she knew he was also aware of who she was. She watched him stiffen on his chair, looking away once more. 

“The work is done,” Oliver said, before he cleared his throat. Minju stepped in, grabbing that ridiculously small plastic glass to give him some water, her other hand keeping her jacket clutched against her torso. 

“Yes, I know. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.” She answered, unsure now if she was truly welcomed. He was wary, but it felt oddly reassuring and familiar. Being wary in his line of work was his only tool for survival. “Ice is only good for the swell but… Coconut oil is the best for cuts.” 

She caught his attention, while she casually pressed her back against the cold wall of the hospital. Oliver sighed, lengthily, pressing the dripping bag against his cheek. He had been there long enough for the ice to melt ; he was probably not so eager to go home. In his little cocoon, Minju knew he would crumble. Silence was his only answer, and she understood that she had potentially busted him at the worst moment possible. After. After the cuts, the punches, and well… the raping. After he had given himself to someone who just wanted to use him and hurt him. She knew exactly how he felt. 

“I’m alright,” Oliver stated again, noticing that Minju was still that lingering shadow behind his back, unmoving. “I don’t feel any sort of pain, it’s a condition. I don’t feel any of them right now. The client was happy, he even left some extra cash. Tell Kaizen, or Gambit, I don’t know.” 

His voice was betraying his lack of trust in her, a certain harshness hidden in the back of his throat, and not only because it was sore. He resented her, probably because he wasn’t aware of who she was before the woman she had become today. No pain, ugh? Minju had once heard about this condition. Pain insensitiveness. The perfect tool for a sadist to have fun, and for the cleaners to earn power. 

“Ah, that’s why they picked you.” Minju felt a cynical smirk curling her upper lip. “They always have a reason.” 

Their eyes met again. Hers were endlessly glacial. She eventually grabbed the backrest of the free chair and dragged it into the room until she placed it near Oliver and sat down. 

“Coconut oil is not for the pain, it’s for the scars. It prevents them from staying.” 

She knew he would be puzzled, so she decided to handle the answer without being asked. She slowly lifted her shirt up, only to reveal the bad shape of a messy “A” carved into the pale skin of her hip. Anyone who had whored themselves out would know it was branding - a mark from someone who wanted to own them. Oliver couldn’t look away, and pinched his lips together. Minju finally covered it back. 

“If only I had known about it before this one,” Minju voiced, shrugging. Detaching herself from the emotions she had experienced back then was the safest way possible to cope with her past. Yet, she couldn’t lie to herself ; it was still a part of her present too. 

“I didn’t know…” Oliver eventually said, removing the bag of ice and putting it aside on the night table, water miserably dripping on the ground. “About…” 

“About me?” Minju cut him, perceiving that he wasn’t comfortable enough to say those words because they were unfortunately his own reality. “Yeah, I was one of them. Way before the Amazon Club was made, actually.” 

Oliver remained silent for a while, playing with his blue hair. 

“A… Like?” 

Minju gently smiled, pressing her elbow on the top of the chair, crossing her legs. She eyed him like the big sister she was ; desiring to protect the last few parts of his innocence. He was perhaps terrified of encountering that man one day. 

“Alessandro Lenio, Zodiac’s big brother.” She answered. “He wasn’t just a client, to me. I was his pet and property, and he made sure everyone would be aware of it. He gave me a little souvenir one day…” She still sounded bitter, even today. She waved her hand. “But you won’t meet him. He’s a man of the past.” 

“But… you’re not an escort anymore, right?” Oliver eventually dared to ask. His eyes darkened. “I don’t know exactly who you are, just that you’re involved with the club affairs and Kaizen. All of them.” 

All of them. A little display of bravery from Oliver, the undermeaning of his words quite clear. He wanted to bite, but he was lacking the teeth. Of course, he would associate her with the rest of them ; he was standing alone on the other side of the road, and he didn’t know if there were any friendly faces among those monsters. 

“You’re not stupid. You’re different to them, just like I was. I bargained for my freedom when my time came, and one day I suggest you do the same.” 

“Yeah, I don’t really believe in that…” 

She didn’t either. 

“Male clients only?” Minju asked, while she retrieved the plastic glass of water from his hand and took a gulp herself until it was empty, and she threw it in the can at the corner of the room. 

“Only males.” Oliver answered darkly. 

“The worst kind,” Minju said, before she eventually stood back up. “Did Zodiac ever come to see you?” 

Oliver frowned, unsure about her question. Zodiac was always barking at him, but he would stand far away as much as possible. It was as if he was carrying the plague and Zodiac could catch it from sharing the same oxygen. Oliver preferred it that way. 

“Came to me how? Why do you ask?” 

Minju smiled, almost nostalgically. Zodiac’s secret was still safe, even after all these years. 

“Nothing. Are you hungry, perhaps? Pancakes are on me.” 

Oliver snorted, shaking his head. He wanted to leave this room as well, hoping that the few rays of sun would ease his damaged soul. 

“So you’re not here to kill me?” 

Minju shook her head, sliding her jacket back onto her shoulders. Their eyes met again. Cold against cold. Victim against victim. Freedom against slavery. 

“No. But please… Make sure that your name will never be on my list, Oliver.” 

[solomonomenon]

i think skz know how they can use their star charm to woo people anyone they want but heres my personal thoughts on each membernot that it matters at all i just dont get if there is a real ship why their hard core fans force them to kinda become gay without considering the idol themselves? not saying they cant be gay at all but there is a difference between what the fans delusions want and what the members personally want

but heres my thoughts anyway

felix, bisexual. i think felix tends to lean towards a more genderless type image and i think he would not care who he loved as long as they are a decent person towards him he can sway anyone into loving him be it man or woman so i will say bisexual for him he just has that aura about him that make anyone love felix even if they arent a fan of the group as a whole

lee know again bisexual i think bro just doesnt gaf either way he will date whom he loves and if its han then great but i dont think he would willingly choose him right off the bat despite what some of their fans think but he does seem to lean more towards being comfortable around men than women? i could be wrong ofc but im saying both mainly due to his very dont give a fuck attitude, if he likes someone i think it wouod take him by surprise tbh bro doesnt seem as romantic as the other members

seungmin straighter than a ruler. need i say more?

changbin also straight. bro is a walking bank account too so i would not be surprised if he is very generous maybe too generous with his love for women and helping others out

bangchan no doubt about him dude is straight, he acts so awkward especially around some twice members i think he may have a crush on them very very easily / anyone whos foreign enough for chans liking will get chans approval immediately

IN i'd say hes straight maybe bisexual? but same with lee know i dont get romantic vibes from him right away i just dont think he would care to date right this minute but he definitely loves the attention he gets from female fans very much

han? either very gay or bisexual tbh, hes another oddball of the group tbh i dont really know much about him and i think hes very self fulfilling so not really romantic material at the moment thats why i said hes either very gay or bisexual at the very least or just not interested in dating, he plays into the parasocial relationship way too much from what i have seen of him so could be either. if i had to compare he is the harry or louis of the group someone whos just weird asf lol

hyunjin straight but also could be bisexual again i think hes a bit of a toxic mess especially in the readings ive read about him he seems all over the place hot and cold so could be straight or bi but i wouldnt pin him as good dating material

oh wow thank you for sharing your thoughts I appreciate it and yeah I could see what you're saying so let's discuss it a little

for felix, I agree that he's giving bi or even pan but I think what he wants to present himself might be different from what he wants romantically or sexually. he's definitely aiming for that unisex, androgynous look but for his interests I can see women but I'm not sure about men. one thing for sure is if he's not a part of community he's fully an ally

for leeknow, we know he does have female friends and he seems comfortable when he was working with minju sullyoon and nolto's casts. I think main reasons are the industry itself and all the crazy fans, he's a pro idol (his word lol) he wouldn't share with us much about female friends oh and also isn't it better to be close with women than only men? a group that consists only of men isn't really a nice thing to be around lol

seungmin? no notes 🤣 I think he's also a walking bank account like changbin and maybe chan as well

for jeongin, hard agree with the female fans part, he's evidently enjoying it

I think han was super straight back when they just debuted like the first few years. rn? not so much but still gives off straight vibe with a hint of something else. maybe he's gone through some self-discovery, he does seem like he's more comfortable in his own skin

I agree with you on hyunjin but I don't think I'd use the word toxic, he's just hopeless romantic which yeah, not really a good dating material

again all of this are only my opinions nothing absolute I could totally be wrong and if that's the case I'll change my opinions lol

[looosey]

Amari's Rap Journey #2: Class Listening Party

Imagine this. It's the day after classes ended, and you wake up at 12 again, and look up around you at the messy-ass room that's been left after a 48 hour work grind. You do two loads of laundry, take a shower, and cook yourself a breakfast, all while watching the time because at 3 p.m... At 3 p.m. is the class listening party.

MIT Building 4 Room 237. You enter the lecture hall at 3:15 and most of the other kids are sitting sporadically in the first five rows. Scoot up! You think, and you sit next to your friend Z in row 2. Scoot up someone says, and I sit in the first row next to Tagoe, a DJ whose energy I'm a fan of [1]. Everyone is in the first two rows now, including Dee-1 from Harvard and two HASS professors that are close to Lupe, and we're waiting for Lupe to walk in and the listening party to start.

Yo... You needed to be there, it was soooo crazy. We started listening to EP after EP, and these people are actually sooo talented. Some industry level sounds, some quirky conceit albums about physics and history, some conceptual ones about being on one long drive or one continuous loop, and one fun Rico Nasty sounding track that was so fye we had to play it three times and mosh.

When we played mine, I was a lot more confident because I'd already played it in front of iHouse before. I hope to never forget the responses of my fellow rappers in the room though.

They were caught by surprise by the trap record for Show Me The Money, Dee-1 looked at me and asked: that's you? They found G-DRAGON funny, and Ally even recognized it was about G-DRAGON before the chorus hit (that's more than I could ask for). Suffolk county water dropped, and Lupe shouted me out after that some of those bars were written behind bars and Ally said she had been hoping to listen to them again. So both of them responded positively, and I'd shouted them out in the beginning of the track. Nomadic Seoul of course was a little quieter until the beginning of verse 2, which I knew was going to get a stronger response. They really liked the bar:

"Now I know better there's more to life than work, in fact life don't work less there's more to life than work."

And the bars before and after. Lupe said the bars were hard. In general I'd been a little scared about being TOO personal in a freakin, class project, but I'm glad I did what I wanted to. Monk said she liked it too, when I saw her in the hallway.

All in all, I really appreciated them all for hyping the EP up, I think I was dapped up more in those 8 minutes than I been in like 8 years. And Dee-1 even bowed at me after, bruh, like I'm such a fan of his Jay, 50, and Weezy track [2]. I can't. He did leave right after, but still??? I'm complete.

Some of the kids didn't want to show their EP's off, but I know know know that showing up was so important to me. That's a value that was always important but really instilled in me by Lupe and this class.

After my UROP meeting I ran into Ally and we went to his office to get feedback right after. I love Ally, I'm a fan [3]. For advice, I asked him to teach us how we should improve in the next three months. The advice I'll record in another post, but it was detailed and I'm so grateful for it. I appreciate Lupe as a teacher so much and after our dinner tomorrow, the class is really ending. It's been amazing!! Now, to take his class next year or not...

Footnotes (inspired by @tumblasha):

[1] Tagoe's Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/jonathan-tagoe-548571918

[2] the track is so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IGfv8zSgw

[3] Ally Minju's spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3jZQxUxjnQ753paNQHHuUk?si=EK-A6vkPSKOmB9s6wOqZ7g

[scented-morker]

Forgotten : the mice are back

a/n: minju should be a hallmark main character

taglist: @grassbutneo @daegalfangirl @allie-mcginn @rynshyuckies

masterlist | next

[iznsfw]

Axis and Allies?

Looked it up and found out it's a board or video game! Sounds fun, but I don't play it :(

Have a Minju though!

[djinmer4]

Matchmaking for the Greater Evil (1/4)

Inspired by: https://mdzskinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/841.html?thread=120649#cmt120649

~~~~~~~

It starts during the Sunshot Campaign.

Jiang Wanyin is, barring Chifeng-zun himself, the most powerful and enthusiastic supporter of taking down the Wen Sect.  His drive attracts rogues and new cultivators like flies to honey, then he trains Jiang Sect’s new recruits to standards that impress even Nie Minjue.  He’s a hurricane on the battlefield, aggressively clearing out the enemy with floods of purple-clad soldiers, swift passes of Sandu, and burning strikes of Zidian.

Unfortunately, he’s a hurricane off the battlefield too.  He’s far, far too aggressive, plunging deep into Wen territory, forcing their other allies to race to catch up to him, driving his men into exhaustion, never retreating no matter the tactical situation.  Only Sect Leader Nie is spared his acid tongue, probably because Nie Mingjue’s the only person on their side that Jiang Wanyin actually respects.  Being the most frequent relayer of other’s orders to slow down, halt or even retreat, Meng Yao experiences the brunt of Sect Leader Jiang’s displeasure and the man is rapidly becoming a massive headache for him.

He hopes that when Wei Wuxian is finally found again, that it will calm some of the younger man’s temper, but unfortunately the recovery of Jiang Sect’s First Disciple seems to spur Jiang Wanyin to even greater heights of aggression.  The only silver lining, in this case, is that with the corpses doing a great deal of the heavy lifting, the Jiang Sect soldiers are finally getting from the constant battle and are no longer in so much danger of burn-out.

Reprieve comes from an unlikely source.  Nie Huiasang, like many other Qinghe non-combatants, has been sent to the Cloud Recesses, but he’s not letting that stop him from assisting.  He’s taken over most of Meng Yao’s former quartermaster duties and compiling reports from the territories they conquer.  Nothing that directly impacts the front, that’s still going to Meng Yao’s desk, but stuff about destroyed infrastructure and population, things they are going to need to know after the war is over and rebuilding has begun.  It mostly keeps the younger Nie away from the frontlines, but he occasionally accompanies dispatch and supply caravans in order to get a bet picture of the front and carry sensitive messages.

One such trip brings him to a Jiang war camp . . . with orders for Jiang Wanyin to retreat back up the valley and help Lan Wangji secure another Supervisory Office.  The orders come from Lan Quiren.

Meng Yao suppresses a wince, then steps up to shield the Young Master from Jiang Wanyin’s temper.  But to his surprise, Jiang Wanyin grumbles and shouts but does in fact order his men to pack up and prepare to retreat.  And without any prompting or coaxing from anyone else!  It’s such a surprise, he barely registers when A-Sang latches onto him and complains about being dragged to this horrid place and not being able to see Da-Ge before having to go back to the Cloud Recesses again.

Huiasang doesn’t come with orders for Sect Leader Jiang very often and Meng Yao ends up defecting to the Wens halfway through the war, but each and every time he does, Meng Yao observes the same pattern.  Jiang Wanyin will complain and shout and yell about losing ground, but he’ll automatically comply without needing Meng Yao or Lan Wangji breathing down his neck.  Even the quality of his shouting is different, still as loud as ever but without the bitter edge that indicates he’s about to attack the messenger for not giving him the orders to push, push and keep pushing ahead.  Huaisang complains too, but given that Jiang Wanyin never lays a hand on him, Meng Yao considers it a pretty big statement of how tolerant the Jiang Sect Leader is with his former classmate.  Meng Yao hasn’t been attacked either, but Meng Yao has had a lifetime of experience calming angry people and he knows it’s happened to other messengers.

It continues after the Seige at the Burial Mounds.  The Jin Sect is at its wit’s end, trying to dislodge Sect Leader Jiang from haunting (Lady Jin’s words, not Guanyao’s) Carp Tower.  Despite being concerned with rebuilding his own Sect, the man shows up religiously every month to check in on his nephew.  Finally, after that first year, Nie Huiasang makes the suggestion that they send little Jing Ling to Lotus Pier, to be raised by his uncle.  Jin Guanyao happily seizes upon the idea.  With his own marriage to Quin Su coming up and her pregnancy, having Jin Ling potentially be Lotus Pier’s heir rather than Carp Tower got him out of the way neatly.

He half expects Nie Huiasang to be back within the week, complaining about Jiang’s harsh behavior, but the boy sticks it out for six whole months, before being called back to Qinghe by his brother.  It’s the start of Huiasang’s busy traveling schedule for the next few years, shuffling back and forth between Qinghe, Lanling, and Yunmeng, carrying messages and observations to each of them.  Xingchen even jokes that Huiasang should add Gusu to his travel route, otherwise the only time he ever sees the younger is when the Lan Sect Leader visits Lanling.

It doesn’t last.  When Jin Rulan is five and Jin Rusong is four, Jin Guanyao brings up the ideas of the watchtowers, and certain elements take revenge by targeting Rusong.  Someone needs to tell Sect Leader Jiang that he will no longer have exclusive custody of Jin Ling, but there are no more couriers in Carp Tower willing to go to Yunmeng and this is not the type of thing that can be sent via spiritual messenger or one of Huiasang’s birds.  Out of options, he sends Huiasang himself and prays that he’s not sending his little brother to his death.

To his surprise, A-Sang comes back intact with Jin Ling, dressed in Yunmeng purple, a small army of Jiang Sect cultivators, and Jiang Wanyin himself.  The walking headache is as vicious as ever, not willing to let his only remaining relative out of his control.  It’s a strenuous week of negotiation that makes him contemplate the murder of all the involved parties more than once, but a compromise is finally hashed out, with Jin Ling to spend half of each year at Carp Tower and the other half at Lotus Pier, at least until either Jin Guanshan, Jin Guanyao or Jiang Wanyin produces another viable heir.  Jin Guanyao celebrates by getting blackout drunk with Huiasang.

That solidifies Nie Huiasang’s position in his schemes.  No matter what skills the boy does or does not demonstrate, the one consistency is that he has become Lanling’s unofficial messenger to Yunmeng.  Need to impose new tariffs on weapons?  Huiasang gets sent.  Jing Ling fought with his classmates again?  A-Sang, Lotus Pier is lovely at this time, please paint a picture of it for Quin Su.  Jin Guanshan just died, and Jin Ling’s going to have another stay another month at Lanling for the funeral?  Take this gift with my compliments to Sect Leader Jiang, and feel free to say for the entire month.  Just make sure you’re back in time to escort Jin Ling to his uncle.

The only time he doesn’t send A-Sang anywhere is just after Da-Ge was put to rest.  There are few things that could possibly be more upsetting during the mourning period than dealing with Sect Leader Jiang and Jin Guanyao isn’t cruel if he doesn’t have to be.  Huiasang begs off attending the next two Cultivator Conferences and Jin Guanyao gladly takes up the responsibility of inter-sect relations for the Unclean Realm, it’s the least he could do for his little brother.  And when he finds out Jiang Wanyin had barged into Huiasang’s seclusion, he takes the journey to Lotus Pier himself to chew out the other Sect Leader.  After all, if Jiang Wanyin is actually interested in Huiasang, he should have the decency to go through Huiasang’s protectors.

(Really, the only thing that could be worse is if Huiasang found out what really happened.) 

[fumikomiyasaki]

Leroy and other dorm Members Relationships:

Henry Lakeside:

Since the first day Leroy thinks Henry is too stuck Up and boring, but not only that, He Sees him as the person who Took His Spot as a Leader of Monsville away. Their Relationship is kinda complicated. When it comes to it they are allies, Leroy also tried to help him with His Quest to Look more normal. He is at fault that Henry's dorm Uniform is Like that because He thinks Henry Looks more unique with His Belly exposed Like that and Henry did it so that Leroy would wear his dorm Uniform more normally. Also Leroy showed Henry Takoyaki which became His favourite food. Sadly their usual Relationship is bickering about what to Work on next, Casual insults, and discussions over different Viewpoints. It became that bad that Sometimes Monsville was Split in Team Leroy and Team Henry. Henry did make Leroy His Vice dorm Leader and Head of the workers though because Leroy Had Talent in His Work and because of the Origin of Their dorm. Although Sometimes He thinks about giving that post to Subby instead.

Mellow Mildew:

Leroy owes Mellow a lot so He would protect him from everyone who tries to hurt him. Together They are a strong Team and made some of the most sucessfull Machines in Monsville. Mellow looks Up to Leroy like an older brother. He wants to be as strong and change himself as well but it's much harder for him… Still He follows Leroy in hopes to still get stronger.

Alyn by @in-that-deep-blue-sea :

Leroy lowkey kinda flirts with her every time he passes the Office. However Roslyn mostly Intimidates him away from her. It's not known If this interest is genuine or not mostly he tries to tease her but also wouldn't Go far to make her angry, because he is scared when she is angry.

Mitchell Iris by @oiseaunoir11 :

Sees him as a Rival and also gets annoyed by Mitchell a Lot. In the end He can't bring himself to hate him though because in a way both are kinda mischievious and sometimes Mitchell helps him with pranks but other Times He gets provoked by him. They both try to outsmart each other. Lets say when it comes to it Leroy would defend Mitchell but also in Middles school Mitchell and Subby stood Out more which made Leroy kinda jealous of them.

Subby by @twst-the-royals :

Major confused Feelings. Leroy Sees them as Main Rival, even more than Mitchell. Everytime Subby wins something Leroy gets pissed of and when He wins and Subby tells him He did a good Job He gets even more pissed. He can't help but to still feel Happy working with them together as well as their kindness. It eases Leroy's mind to Talk with Subby about His troubles. Lets say Leroy is for Mitch and Subby Like a Tsundere, He cares for them but He also can't stand them sometimes. Deep down They are Important to him.

Giovanni Corno by @shoujoqueensstuff :

Leroy teases him but also keeps him out of Trouble. He doesn't care much for him but he also doesn't want him to get hurt. Lets say After Work is done He would invite him sometimes for Lunch and Push some more Confidence Into him. Because He feels like He Sees lots of His old self in Giovanni.

Roslyn Slimak by @lawlessofdusk :

Tends to stay away at all costs. He is scared of her, feels like she would lecture him all the time. Her stares give him shivers…

Sophia Adraline by @twstxena :

Leroy actually wants to get closer to her because They share a Hobby of Anime But sometimes has it hard to approach her. Maybe one day He will find a way that He can Talk to her about it.

Tamami Nereis by @selfinsertheaven :

Both are bickering a lot but also hanging together a lot. Doing pranks together going Out to eat sushi and Talk about Fashion.

Song Minju by @eclipsezero :

Sometimes He is stuttery around her. Like she is interested in her and wants to Talk with her about her modeling But her presence is kinda overwhelming to him. So He gets slight embaressed and stutters when He is talking to her. And that comes depite normally Leroy having No shame talking to others.

[draconivn]

MP | Fanfics By Minju

Date Updated: November 16, 2020

Fandoms:

Samurai Love Ballad: PARTY (SLBP) - Date Masamune

Ikemén Sengoku (IkeSen) - Masamune Date

Ayakashi: Romance Reborn (ARR) - Koga Kitamikado

Court of Darkness (CoD) - Guy Avari

Will also occasionally write for:

SLBP Katakura Kojuro

IkeSen Toyotomi Hideyoshi

IkeSen Ishida Mitsunari

Read more under the cut [!]

THE STORIES

Samurai Love Ballad: PARTY (SLBP)

[ ONE-SHOT ]

002. Wife Duties: Masamune x Reader – He’s stressed, and sometimes he has a hard time in expressing himself. Now that you’re his wife, it makes you wonder what you could do to help, since the things that stress him out can’t be put on your shoulders. // FLUFF

003. A Happy Family: Masamune x Reader – It was one milestone of happiness after another. First your wedding, then the announcement that you were pregnant with the Date heir. Everyone’s trying to figure out if it’s a boy or a girl, but your dilemma is trying to keep yourself busy until the big moment. // FAMILY

SLBP. 01. Blue Confidence: Masamune x Reader – His eye may not be as damaged as his confidence after Lady Yoshihime is done with you and him. Part of the One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu birthday series. // ANGST, COMFORT, IMPLICATIONS OF VIOLENCE

SLBP. 02. Merciless Sin: Masamune x Reader – Just because Lord Masamune is merciful on the battlefield, doesn’t always mean he’s merciful after coming home from a campaign. Part of the One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu birthday series. // NSFW, SMUT

SLBP. 03. A Letter of Love: Masamune x Reader – Lord Masamune is a man of few words, only best in expressing himself in writing. Knowing that you’re currently busy with preparations that Lord Kojuro has decided to spearhead for tonight’s birthday festivities, taking a moment to speak to Lord Masamune won’t be easy. Instead, he finds a letter by his cup of tea you left for him when you stopped to check on him. Part of the One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu birthday series. // FLUFF, LETTER

[ SHORT STORY ]

001. Daughter of the Takeda: Saizo x OC – You wanted to do more than just be in the kitchen like any woman would’ve known how to do. You want to explore. You want to become so much more. But when you live in a world of war, what you decide to do in your past ends up following you to your future, even though the battlefield is no place for a woman. Will you find love or will you only find blood? // ADVENTURE, ACTION, ANGST, ROMANCE – 7/?

Ikémen Sengoku:

[ ONE-SHOT ]

004. Aphrodisiac: Hideyoshi x Reader – Hideyoshi’s loyalty to Nobunaga and his love for you is on the line when Nobunaga gifts you chocolate. Chocolate is known to be sugary, but it also has aphrodisiac properties. But of course, Hideyoshi is back to his mother-ing habits, trying to make sure neither of you consume too much of a good thing. // SMUT

008. In His Arms: Masamune x Reader – I wondered what Masamune would be like in comforting me while my mind was not in the best headspace. Feel free to insert your name if this applies to you. // ANGST, FLUFF, LOW SELF-ESTEEM

009. His Little Writer: Masamune x Reader – Forget being a seamstress, you’re a writer! You’re in the middle of your work and there’s that particular scene that frustrates you to no end. Masamune comes to check in on you and review your work, then he has an idea to try and inspire you. // SMUT, NSFW

011. Surrender To Love: Masamune x Reader – Reader request! You’ve had a long day, and Masamune decides to take care of you, but one thing leads to another. // SMUT, NSFW, FLUFF

012. What Love Gave Us: Hideyoshi x OC – Request for thatsmolart! It’s a date! Hatsuko tries to figure out what to give to Hideyoshi who always tries to give her everything. 

IS. 01. Scarred Love: Masamune x Reader – His scars are also a part of him. Will you love a man who pursues your heart to give you love, even if he is covered in scars? Part of the One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu birthday series. // ANGST, COMFORT, SLIGHT NSFW

IS. 02. Purr for Me: Masamune x Reader – Because why stop at one orgasm when you can have more? Part of the One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu birthday series. // NSFW

IS. 03. Honest Words: Masamune x Reader – When Masamune writes letters, he always says what he means, and they’re very heartfelt, even if it’s a letter just to catch up with someone. So you decide to write him a letter of your honest feelings for his birthday. Part of the One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu birthday series. // FLUFF, LETTER

IS. 04. Never Enough: Masamune x Reader – Normally you both manage to sleep through the night after some time between the sheets with Masamune. But somehow you both wake up in the middle of the night after an odd twist of limbs to encourage a little something more. Part of the One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu birthday series. // NSFW, HIS POV

[ SHORT STORY ]

 005 - 006 - 007. The Lonely Kitten Trilogy: Masamune x Reader – Masamune discovers his kitten’s been very lonely when he’s away for work. SMUT, NSFW. – COMPLETED 3/3

010. Imperfectly Perfect: Masamune x OC – Masamune always held to his beliefs to be the ideal leader. His goal in allying with Nobunaga was to learn how to govern his people better, all the sacrifices he would have to obtain just to make sure he could create a world where people wouldn’t go hungry. Then one day, he meets a woman, and she unknowingly turns his world upside down. // ROMANCE, ACTION, ADVENTURE, HISTORICAL – ONGOING 6/?

Ayakashi: Romance Reborn

[ ONE-SHOT ]

014. A Mid-Day Snack: Koga x Reader – Koga’s usually buried in paperwork. Today, he’s training. So... shirtless Koga and... kabedon? //  FLUFF

[ SHORT STORY ]

TBA

Court of Darkness:

[ ONE-SHOT ]

016. Take My Hand: Guy x Reader – You go to lunch with Guy one day, and wondered what it would be like to hold his hand. // FLUFF, GUY’S PG TEASING

[ SHORT STORY ]

015. For My Paramour: Guy x Reader – Guy’s birthday is coming and you’re wondering what to give someone who has everything that he could obtain. So you decide to make him something, and well... your mind starts wondering about your abilities and being able to be by his side. // FLUFF, COMFORT – COMPLETED 4/4

[lgcmanager]

SIDE EVENT 006.

a reminder on side-events; they are non-mandatory occasional events that your muse can choose to participate in or not.

while missing an event might mean missing out on points, be aware that choosing to take part in it could have positive or negative consequences for your muse. there is also no telling which part of the event will have consequences either since they will be tailored to make it difficult to guess what could impact your muse. while the final consequences are decided at the same time as the event is created, we will only reveal them the sunday after the deadline. so choose wisely: are you willing to make a gamble with your muse?

** the admin team would like to add a special thank you to @lgcjude / @lgcjina / @lgcwon for the event idea **

LEGACY FESTIVAL

spring is the season of festivals. since april, senior artists have been busy with the many festivals (universities and musicals) that run throughout the season. with their current roster being larger than ever, legacy is looking to create a whole new experience inspired by the extremely popular festival: ‘COACHELLA’. the THREE DAYS festival will begin on JUNE 12 and end on JUNE 15. a site with tents and three stages will be set up for the occasion. food trucks from various restaurants will also be set up in a resting area. various activities and merchandise will be available during the festival, but the main attraction remains LEGACY ARTISTS.

during the three days of the festival, the senior artists will perform on the main stage. alongside them FUTURE DREAMS will also take on the main stage. with little time to prepare, they will perform the songs they have been rehearsing and performing during the past months. the rest of the trainees will be performing on the two smaller stages. they have been divided between SIX different activities. the first is a FANMEETING, where trainees will sit with a host, answer question from the crowd (pre-screened) and take pictures with lucky winners. the second is a LIVE SHOW with trainees hosting it. the third is a BEAUTY PANEL with a professional makeup artist of innisfree using trainees as models, they will discuss beauty with the trainees too. the fourth is DANCE BATTLE where trainees are divided in teams of two and have to ace the most choreography of songs randomly given to them. the fifth is the same concept but as a SINGING BATTLE. the final stage is a RAP BATTLE, a mock form of show me the money form where each trainee will have to perform a rap stage.

while the festival is for fans to enjoy, trainees will also be given a few hours to attend 2 stages. safe areas for artists will be arranged everywhere so that legacy artists can enjoy activities freely. those areas will be close enough from the vip area so that fans who paid more could interact with legacy artists should they wish to. trainees are forbidden to attend stages of trainees of another gender.

here’s the detail of each day and trainees division (each stage is 1 hour):

DAY 1 (June 12)

Main Stage (6PM): Type Zero, with Hwang Minjun [ performing: simon says, hala hala, stronger, super car, kick it ]

Dance Stage Girls (10 AM): Aikawa Yuuki, Gong Minju, Jin Eunji, Liu Jiao, Song Ahri, Yamashita Ichika VS Cho Yoomin, Kang Dana, Lee Jiae, Li Zimeng, Oh Mina, Park Nickie

Dance Stage Boys (11AM): Bae Nathan, Chung Hanjae, Im Nova, Jung Ahin, Lee Mike, Okamoto Akira VS Choi Jongsuk, Jang Taesung, Kang Jaemin, Lim Sanghyun, Oh Max, Song Shaun

Beauty Panel (1PM): Kim Ara

Fanmeeting (2PM): Choi Daehyung, Choi Max, Han Insoo, Kang Eunho, Lee Jaewoo, Seo Minseok, Tsai Sunisa

Live Show (4PM): Hwang Subin

DAY 2 (June 13)

Main Stage (6PM): Project Origin Girls, without Lee Rachel [ performing: adios, favorite, rollin’ rollin’, hip song ]

Singing Stage Boys (10 AM): Bae JC, Kim Alex, Kim Luccas, Kim Junghwan, Lee Youngmin, Ryu Hyunseok, Tangsrisuk Sao VS Cho Hanjoon, Lee Benji, Lee Minseok, Lee Seungjae, Wu Aaron, Yoo Minwoo, Yun Yebai

Singing Stage Girls (11AM): Han Allie, Hwang Chanmi, Jo Jiwoo, Kim Noeul, Lee Roobi, Ok Miyoung VS, Kim Nami, Min Elly, Pongsak Arinya, Son Seolmi, Tsuchiya Mitsuki

Beauty Panel (1PM): Kwon Sihyun

Fanmeeting (2PM): Im Nari, Jung Jihye, Lee Rachel, Leong Charlotte, Wu Sally

Live Show (4PM): Kim Jinah

DAY 3 (June 14)

Main Stage (6PM): Project Origin Boys with Park Seojin, without Choi Max, Hwang Minjun, Park Iseul (not revealed yet) [ performing: HIT, Energetic (by DBSD), Pretty Girl, Flash ]

Rap Battle (10AM): Ahn Dohyun, Chwe Hunji, Kim Jinseo, Kim Mia, Li Dean, Na Jaehyun, Ok Minhyuk, Pongsak Theerat, Son Alec

Beauty Panel (1PM): Lee Hanbyul

Fanmeeting (2PM): Ahn Jaeyoon, Hwang Jingren, Kang Dongwon, Kang Seyoon, Moon Sungkyu, Park Iseul

Live Show (4PM): Yoon Shinha

REQUIREMENTS

you have until JUNE 27 to complete the requirements for this event. the official tag for this event is lgc:festival2020.

Write a 300+ words solo or a 4 replies (minimum 8 lines) thread with another trainee about the preparation period or the stage performance. REWARD: +8 POINTS TO DISTRIBUTE ANYWHERE +4 NOTORIETY.

Write a 300+ words solo or a 4 replies (minimum 8 lines) thread with another same gender trainee about enjoying any other activity during the festival. interaction with the fans in the VIP section are required. REWARD: +6 POINTS TO DISTRIBUTE ANYWHERE +6 NOTORIETY.

to validate your skill points and collect your notoriety points, please submit the following form ONCE on the points blog before JUNE 28, 11:59EDT.

TITLE: MUSE NAME ∙ FESTIVAL

- STAGE THREAD/SOLO: +8 ( skill points distribution ) +4 NOTORIETY [ LINK ]

- FREE TIME THREAD/SOLO: +6 ( skill points distribution ) + 6 NOTORIETY [ LINK ]

[panoptiphobia]

Dissertation Prospectus: The Development of South Korean Prisons and Penology, 1945-1961

Dissertation Prospectus

[Please DM for file with full citations]

“The Development of South Korean Prisons and Penology, 1945-1961”

I. Project Overview

Stripped of its legitimating discourses, imprisonment is the simple act of putting human beings into cages. By the mid-twentieth century, the practice of incarceration had spread by means of Western colonial expansion to nearly every area of the globe. Many of the formal vestiges of empire fell away after the second World War, but Western-style incarceration remained a worldwide practice. The project to modernize the Korean prison system continued long after its initial development during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). After a chaotic period under the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK; hereafter “MG”) (1945-1948), South Korean penal officials were immediately swept up in bold prison reform efforts.  My dissertation research examines the ways South Korean penal reformers imagined the past, present and future of the prison system during Korea’s tumultuous 1950s. I am working to map the cultural, political and economic influences on Korean penology and its discourses in the early Cold War era. The United States government relied on the internal stability of South Korea as an East Asian bulwark against communism, and directly shaped the development of the penal system within the Cold War system.  This study has larger implications for the general history of 1950s South Korea, Cold War international relations, and the development of power and social control in the Republic of Korea (ROK) state by historicizing a crucial institution used for state control of the incarcerated and free population alike. This dissertation will argue for rereading the history of the South Korean prison as a crucial site for the production of notions of ROK national identity and citizenship.

The historical timeline of this project extends from Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule and subsequent division by the U.S. and Soviet Union in 1945, through the Korean War (1950-1953) and fall of the Syngman Rhee regime in 1960, and ends with the coup d’etat by General Park Chung Hee in 1961. After the establishment of the Republic of Korea in 1948, penal reformers proclaimed the goal of “democratizing” the prison system under the slogan ‘Democratic Penology’ (minju haenghyŏng). Prior to the Korean War, prisons were underfunded, overcrowded, and used for ostentatious performances of anticommunist conversion. However, by the late 1950s penal officials boasted of the prisons’ humane conditions and state-of-the-art rehabilitative and educational function. Exhibitions displaying prisoners’ paintings, calligraphy, craftworks and writings evidenced their “reformation” for the public. How did the state of prisons change so drastically over a single decade, and how much of these claims is simple propaganda? These purportedly liberal reforms were carried out by the notorious authoritarian regime of South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee. Penal practice departed drastically from reformist theory when it came to punishing political opponents of the regime, but the prison system nevertheless did see major changes in the overall treatment of prisoners and training of penal officers. At the same time, this official narrative of reform is conspicuously silent with regard to the state of prisons during the Korean War (1950-1953), a period in which tens of thousands of political prisoners were massacred.

The devastation of the conflict left nearly every South Korean penal facility in ruins. Postwar reconstruction efforts focused not only on the rebuilding of existing prisons, but also the addition of new, state of the art facilities. With the help of material aid from the United Nations and the United States, Korean penal reformers began to transform their system in the image of their Cold War allies. Post-Korean War penal practice took on the guiding ideologies of liberal democracy and ‘penal education’ (kyoyuk hyŏng). The new system emphasized job training and rehabilitation of prisoners for reentering society. Penal reformers also embarked on UN-sponsored trips abroad to study the prison systems of the U.S. and Western European countries. These officials debated responses to the challenges facing their system in the pages of professional journals and books on penology and its history. While the period spanning South Korea’s first republic (1948-1960) stands as a crucial first stage of autonomous penal reform, it remains understudied in the field of Korean history.

Through my analysis of the discourse in professional journals of penal administrators, prisoner educational materials, and the memoirs of former guards and inmates, I will ask the following questions: What rules governed what could be said about the socially deviant and their treatment? What behavior constituted true violation of the social contract and what acts would be punishable by death? How and why was the idea of rehabilitation of convicts sold to the public? How were these rules affected by the Cold War system? What statements were qualified and by whom? When penal reform efforts were obviously failing, what political goals were achieved by state officials and civil society members claiming the contrary? Why was it culturally and socially significant to portray images of the well-ordered prison to the populous? I will trace the changes in these discourses of criminality and reform in the early ROK to explicate the pivotal role of punishing the deviant in the reflexive formation of national identity and solidification of state power.

II. Theoretical Framework: The Prison, the State, and Power

This dissertation, as it deals with the repressive apparatus of the prison, also deals concomitantly with theories of state power and violence. It interrogates the thesis of colonial continuity in the post-liberation state. The Korean history field assumes direct continuity between the colonial and post-liberation states without agreeing on a clear methodology or framework for locating which actors and institutions qualify as the “state.” Max Weber, one of the many scholars expounding on just what constitutes the state, defined it as the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” The parenthetical status of “success” in this translation perfectly reflects the tension at the heart of this project. The prison system was a vital tool for solidifying state power that acutely manifested the evolving relationship between subject and sovereign, but its supporters constantly struggled to defend its legitimacy and exaggerated the effectiveness of reforming inmates in the crisis-ridden institution. The U.S. occupation and Syngman Rhee regime inherited the colonial prison system’s veneer of legitimacy in incarceration as a practice resulting from due process of law, but continually reverted to extrajudicial and exceptional violence to solidify control of their territory. Giorgio Agamben’s work reveals this sovereign exception, the violent act of exclusion of the killable other from qualified political life, to be as old as the polis itself. Agamben amends Michel Foucault’s notion of state racism—the normalizing precondition that allows for killing internal others —to include all states, not just their modern and totalitarian instantiations. However, analyzing cases under the the Cold War system presents novel challenges to these theories of state power and violence: ROK authorities’ indiscriminate massacre of ideological prisoners without regard for loss of legitimacy reveals that their monopoly of violence was legitimated by the external machinations of Cold War containment, rather than an internally derived pact between the state and citizenry. This dissertation examines the shifting status of ROK sovereignty and authority to punish and kill through periods of both occupation and an “autonomous” South Korean government.

The U.S. occupation had to ‘rebuild’ the state in the momentary absence of the Japanese colonial repressive apparatus: this dissertation views prison-building as a part of state-building. Bruce Cumings has shown how Korea’s transition period from colonial to occupation state power was a crucible for popular resistance to underlying social contradictions that often pitted the rural populace against representatives of central power in the capital. Penal systems have a distinct function for suppressing such revolt by controlling bodies and flow of information in prescribed spaces, part of a process that Anthony Giddens calls “internal pacification.” Internal pacification is a generalized phenomenon that establishes “locales” to “promot[e] the discipline of potentially recalcitrant groups at major points of tension, especially in the sphere of production.” Neither the U.S. military occupation nor the fledgling Rhee government could claim total control of the peninsula’s mountainous regions, but improving surveillance networks through an archipelago of carceral institutions made both rebel activity and common criminality ‘legible’ as sets of tables, statistics and programs for social engineering. This project will treat provincial jails and prisons as outposts of pacification, simplification, and the spread of central power to the whole of the Korean peninsula.

Researching postcolonial societies in their immediate post-liberation period also reveals the nebulous nature of the state as a set of institutions, discursive effects, and material realities. Timothy Mitchell has proposed analyzing the state “not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist.” At various points in the analysis of early ROK penal history, the prison system appears as more idealistic rhetoric than fact, but it nonetheless projected the effects of a (re)developing state apparatus. Examining Korea’s ‘Liberation Space’—the period after 1945 when political control of the Korean peninsula was still in flux—and tenuous sovereignty after 1948 is better served by Foucauldian power analysis and his idea of ‘governmentality’: the “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.”

This approach allows for analyzing discourse as both an instrument and effect of power, identifying the “decentered and productive nature of power processes.” Traditional political histories fail to locate, or misattribute state power as a possession of a select few actors in the Syngman Rhee regime without accounting for the persistent local contestations to central power or the ambiguous status of South Korea’s sovereignty in the U.S.-dominated Cold War system. This dissertation asks how power was produced and maintained in early South Korea by diverse sets of actors and discursive effects of state and non-state institutions alike. Foucault’s reframing of modern power as a matrix of relations dispersed throughout the social body allows for thinking social existence beyond the juridical and state horizon: Power is not held, but constantly negotiated. Previous scholarship has looked for the emergence of such Foucauldian phenomena as governmentality, biopower, and panopticism before and after colonial annexation, but there has been little scholarship about what became of these dispersed power relations in the interlude between the colonial and U.S. occupation, how they were reified in the military government, or how they manifested in the ROK state. Korea’s ‘Liberation Space’ has been characterized as a power vacuum, but one can reexamine the period through the prison as a representative institution that facilitated the continued spread of disciplinary power in post-liberation society. Analyzing governmentality in this period problematizes Foucauldian models’ linear progression toward the telos of the Western European nation-state. Was the spread of these technologies of colonial state power truly continuous? Or was their spread halted and then redeveloped? Is modern power a one-way threshold or cyclical phenomenon capable of starts and stops, progression and regression? The broader goal of this research is to examine the rebirth and/or afterlives of governmentality and modern power in post-liberation Korea.

III. Methodology

This dissertation will utilize discourse analysis to track changes in notions of criminality, deviance, and its punishment in post-liberation Korea. The existing penal historical scholarship on the early South Korean prison system, which is minimal, has merely identified the gaps between penal officials’ theory and their practice, limiting analysis to the immediate space and functions of the prison and simply concluding that little had changed between the colonial and ROK penal systems. This narrow approach confines historical analysis to prison spaces without accounting for the myriad social forces that shape penal policy and their (in)efficacies.  

A more thorough Foucauldian discourse analysis will allow for reading between the lines of official discourse to identify subtle changes in framing and rhetoric that signify larger currents in not just the prison system, but in the broader society as well. Shifts in penal discourse reflect changes in modes of production, emergence of new mentalities, and changes in power relations between the citizen and state. This dissertation will ask why significant thematic shifts in penal discourse occurred when they did, identifying the larger social and historical forces that shaped popular assumptions about citizenship and its deviant other. This analysis will answer these questions to account for the porous nature of prisons as spaces productive of a power that comes to permeate all social relations in the modern state. It will identify the dialectical nature of the prison that both affects and is affected by social and historical change.

More specifically, this dissertation will primarily focus on the post-Korean War discourse of “democratic penology” (minju haenghyŏng), a guiding principle of late-1950s penological texts that elevated the rehabilitation of the prisoner to the status of (re)building the nation itself. A more integrated analysis of both official and public discourse on punishment reveals the ways the Cold War system came to colonize the very consciousness and subjectivity of ROK citizens, shaping the way individuals viewed basic categories of the criminal and what constituted the ideal democratic citizen. One of the basic arguments of this dissertation is that early South Korean penal culture was fundamentally shaped by transnational interaction with the penological regimes of the U.S. and United Nations during the Korean War. The Cold War system influenced penology by reframing rehabilitation as the necessary work of reforming unruly bodies susceptible to idleness and communism into industrious, educated participants in the crusade to build a “Free World.” In this way, the Syngman Rhee’s anticommunist authoritarian state regime utilized prisons as both a productive and repressive technology for maintaining control of prisoners and the broader public. Images of ideal ROK citizenship found their other not only externally, with the positioning of South Korea as the anticommunist opposition to their northern counterparts; ROK identity was also formed through the isolation, confinement, and reform of the internal deviant other.

IV. Writing Korea into Global Penal Historiography

This dissertation is an attempt to write Korea into the broader field of penal history to better understand local instantiations of the global spread of incarceration. The current field of U.S. penal history was largely inspired by the historiographical turn of the 1970s that reframed punishment as a technology of social control. While their theoretical approaches differ, penal historians working in the 1970s and 1980s fundamentally refuted the traditional narrative of the prison as a self-evidentiary necessity or universal good. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) has had the most lasting impact on penal historians for fundamentally reframing the role of prisons in the development of novel forms of power, governance, and modern subjectivity. Foucault revealed the prison as a key site for examining the production of docile, normalized bodies in modern states. Additionally, the prison produced discourse of the deviant recidivist and presented itself as the sole answer to this self-generated problem. Foucault viewed this normalizing ‘power/knowledge’ of the deviant as both a repressive and productive force. These Foucauldian concepts help to contextualize the historical developments of post-1945 South Korean penal culture, where authorities repeatedly committed to the “failing” prison system while simultaneously producing knowledge about the criminal and deviant. This dissertation will interrogate the persistence of the prison form and its normalizing discourses across ruptures of the liberation, division, and the Korean War.

The field of Western penal history has been significantly focused on explaining the persistence of the prison despite its continual failure to achieve its proponents’ goals. The group of scholars contributing to The Oxford History of the Prison (1995) demonstrate that modern incarceration has almost always been ineffective in attaining its changing and even conflicting goals. For the purpose of reform, it has historically been impossible to find meaningful correlation between the quality of imprisonment and deterrence of crime. Prison also does not satisfy the public need for retribution: at any given time, the majority of citizens of modern societies perceive punishment as overly lenient. Even when the prisoner is simply considered a source of cheap or free labor, there are varied conclusions regarding the efficacy of productive labor in penal history. The general consensus is that Western imprisonment seldom, if ever, achieved the intended goals of its implementation: it self-perpetuates despite its internal contradictions. Rebecca McLennan has shown how U.S. penal reformers at various points from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century continually portrayed the prison in a state of “crisis” as it expanded and solidified its hold as the dominant form of punishment. Crises in the modern state, both manufactured and real are met with political attention, expenditure of resources, and bureaucracy that takes on an expansionist logic and life of its own. Further research in Korean penal history presents a crucial case study for the persistence of the carceral form in material conditions starkly different from its development in Western Europe and the United States. It must critically examine the highly propagandistic discourse of early ROK reformers with evidence of the material conditions of war and poverty that threatened the very existence of the carceral apparatus throughout the 1950s.

Some penal sociologists claim that Foucauldian explanations for carceral expansion are too instrumentalist. David Garland challenges the Foucauldian view of an agentless, rational power driving the expansion of the carceral state, and revitalizes the Durkheimian view of punishment as the public’s passionate retribution against social deviance. For these scholars, punishment is highly imbued with cultural meaning and public participation. Garland seeks to go beyond Foucault’s perspective on power, demonstrating the ways the prison “satisfies a popular (or a judicial) desire to inflict punishment upon law-breakers and to have them dismissed from normal social life, whatever the long-term costs or consequences.” Philip Smith further questions Foucault’s erasure of the role of irrational concerns and cultural values in punishment. He responds to the Foucauldians, “how does the ideal type of disciplinary power intersect with broader systems of meaning? How does the civil sphere participate in surveillance? Under what circumstances might spectacle still play a role in social control?” This research will hold these approaches in tension with Foucauldian analysis, a framework developed from the specific historical case of Western European nation-states. Examining the sudden reversal to punitive retribution against social and ideological deviance during the Korean War must account for Korean penal development’s post-colonial and Cold War historical specificities.

This dissertation is further informed by Western penal historical scholarship that emphasizes the porous nature of prisons as social and cultural entities. Some have amended the Foucauldian view of one-way discursive production of prisoner identity as it overlooks the ways deviant subgroups were defined and defined themselves. Others have revealed how penal regimes respond to external stimuli, and sometimes even serve as the primary impetus for political formations in free society. Accordingly, historicizing the development of South Korean prisons must account for their reciprocal relationship to political and economic dynamics in the broader society along with the development of an emerging ROK national identity. The prison must be examined in its Korean context, as well as the regional and global context of the Cold War.

Contemporary penal historians have charted the expansion of the Western prison form to the rest of globe outside of Europe and North America. Comparative penal histories further accentuate the importance of differing local conditions that shaped the African, Latin American, and Asian experiences of penal modernization. Contributors to the influential volume, Cultures of Confinement (2007) center the role of cultural practices and social dynamics to develop a more comprehensive approach that “highlight[s] the extent to which common knowledge is appropriated and transformed by very distinct local styles of expression dependent on the political, economic, social and cultural variables of particular institutions and social groups.” Frank Dikotter reminds us that the prison, like all institutions, “was never simply imposed or copied, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its flexibility.” Not every case of colonial prison expansion was “successful” for colonial aims: Peter Zinoman’s Colonial Bastille demonstrates how French colonial prison spaces facilitated intellectual exchange across dispersed geographic locations and helped foment a Vietnamese national identity amongst otherwise disparate linguistic and ethnic groups of Southeast Asia. Clare Anderson presented a case with the opposite effect in British colonial India, where the prison forced cohabitation of traditionally segregated social castes—an offense severe enough to foment popular uprising across the subcontinent. Despite vast differences with the case of Korea, these examples demonstrate how development of the western prison form was not always an unproblematic or effortless technique of social control: the spatial entity of the prison brought together diverse social forces, impacting existing local conditions and drawing dynamic responses to reorganization of the social order. The same attention to local dynamics must be applied to the crisis-ridden early ROK prison system that took more than a decade to clothe, feed, and properly contain its inmates.  

The English-language penal historical field’s shift in focus to colonial prisons revealed challenges to Foucault’s emphasis of the advent of disciplinary power in modern incarceration. While previous scholarship on the global rise of imprisonment framed colonial institutions as “laboratories of modernity” that employed state of the art technologies for effective governance, Zinoman found that “[French] colonial prison officials introduced no such innovations and ignored many of the putatively modern methods of prison administration that had been developed in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century.” Dikötter emphasized that colonial or peripheral iterations of the penitentiary deviate from the Foucauldian narrative of imprisonment’s shift away from corporal punishment:  “a history of the prison shows not so much the ‘disciplinary power’ of the modern state but on the contrary the many limits of the government in controlling its own institutions: prisons were run by a customary order established by guards and prisoners on the ground rather than by a panopticon project on paper.” Florence Bernault cites the persistence of retributive and deterrent violence in African colonial regimes to refute the correlation between modern governance and the decline of “state-inflicted destruction.” Proponents of the Western penitentiary reframed free individuals as subjects, while the colonial prison primarily constructed colonial individuals as objects of power. Black and brown bodies bore the brunt of colonial, retributive violence well into the twentieth century despite changes in metropolitan nations. Historicizing the advent and persistence of the carceral form in Korea must allow for local specificity that challenges common Foucauldian narratives of the development of bloodless, disciplinary power. Widespread corporal punishment, torture, and destruction of the body was maintained in the penal practice of colonial and postcolonial Korea until as late as democratization in 1987.

The rise of the prison in Western European metropoles paralleled the extension of political rights of citizens in the rise of the modern liberal state, and thus held great promise for nascent anti-imperial and nationalist modernization movements. Following this model, East Asian powers enthusiastically adopted the prison as a tool of social control, producing a well-disciplined citizenry as a preemptive measure to resist colonization, or, in the case of Japan, forcing legal modernization on their neighbors as a strategy of colonial aggression. Prisons were quintessentially modern facilities that promised rehabilitation of human beings and the (re)invention of the nation itself. Frank Dikötter’s study shows how late-Qing and early republican reformers were quite successful in developing modern penal facilities and practices, so much so that Western imperial powers demanded a regression to corporal punishment to bolster the deterrent effects protecting their extraterritorial interests in China. This clearly demonstrates the Janus-faced nature of the Western penal form’s entrée into East Asia: modern disciplinary power was reserved for white bodies and the prison otherwise served imperialist, capitalist endeavors. Daniel Botsman further details the advent of East Asian penal modernization in Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan. Botsman analyzes penal institutions in Japan before Western influence, their hasty reform in the Meiji era, and the use of legal reform discourse to justify imperial expansion into the rest of East Asia. Once the carceral form came to dominate Western imperialist discourse of legitimate exercise of state power, Japanese historians raced to locate its origins before Western imposition in the Tokugawa stockade. Japanese reformers quickly developed model prisons and flaunted them as both tools of colonial legitimation and repression in Korea and Taiwan. These works by Dikötter and Botsman are the most prominent English-language works writing East Asia into global penal history, but no such work yet exists for the Korean case. This dissertation will start to write Korea into global penal history, tracing the development of the carceral form on the Korean peninsula through its colonial introduction and extending analysis beyond liberation. Historicizing the postcolonial South Korean penal system will reveal the ways postcolonial penal regimes both reflected and challenged penological trends after World War II, when the world historical system that brought imprisonment to every corner of the globe entered a new phase of global struggle in the form of the Cold War.

V. Korean Penal Historiography

The following section will outline secondary scholarship in Korean penal history, highlighting the ways previous scholarship has been limited by the thesis of a dichotomy between premodern and modern forms of punishment, and between colonial oppression and Korean resistance. Korean penal historiography has primarily focused on the late-nineteenth century introduction of the carceral form and its uses during the Japanese Colonial Period (1910-1945) to suppress resistance to Japanese rule. Chosŏn penal culture was primarily retributive with legal institutions relying heavily on corporal punishment for deterrent effect, and torture to extract confessions. By prioritizing the mere deprivation of liberty over physical harm of the body, the 1890s codification of carceral punishment and conversion of flogging to units of time served represented a monumental shift towards rehabilitationist penal thought during the Taehan Empire (1897-1910) period. While the question of autonomy of the Korean state to carry out penal reforms without colonial manipulation is debated in existing scholarship, it is clear that the continued rationalization of the Korean criminal justice system in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries aided the subsequent colonial state’s penetration of everyday life on the peninsula.

Historicizing Korea’s first modern prisons cannot be separated from their use by the colonial regime to detain, torture, and execute members of resistance movements. Lee Jong-min has shown how colonial penal modernization had political dissent as a primary concern, and more general crime as an afterthought. The explicitly political nature of penal reform continued into the colonial period, and saw a racialized recommitment to bodily punishment and ideological conversion. Previous scholarship focuses almost entirely on colonial penal authorities’ persistent use of bodily torture to refute the notion of colonial prisons’ “modernity.” This view uncritically accepts both incarceration and modernity as positive developments in a linear progression of the humane treatment of the subject by state power. More problematically, it reifies the notion of a more “humane” form of incarceration that hypothetically would have developed had it not been for the colonial intervention.

Scholars inspired by the “colonial modernity” paradigm questioned nationalist historical narratives, and problematized notions of “distorted” modernity. They do not see flogging as a disqualifying factor for a novel type of state power under Japanese rule, and present a nuanced reading of the development of Foucauldian disciplinary power that retained corporal punishment due to local specificities of the Korean colonial context. Flogging Korean bodies in the presence of medical doctors was a sophisticated technology of social control used in lieu of the underdeveloped use of incarceration and monetary fines, punishments that colonial authorities feared had not yet been sufficiently internalized by the local populous as deterrents to crime. By the end of the colonial period, Korea’s premier penal institutions had factories, educational programs, and ideological conversion programs aimed at cultivating ideal imperial subjects. Korea’s penal modernization was indeed colored by the colonial experience, but this fact should not cloud analysis of the global spread of disciplinary power through both colonial regimes and their post-colonial successors.  

The Korean history field still lacks a comprehensive work detailing Korea’s post-1945 penal history in either the Korean or English languages. The most thorough narrative can be found in the Republic of Korea Corrections Bureau’s official history. While useful as a starting point for scholarly research, the work presents a hagiographic account of the triumph of the ROK’s modern penal practice over traditional and colonial practices, and uncritically accepts the development of incarceration as desired progress. The most recent edition of this state-sponsored history retains the Cold War-influenced, anticommunist narratives of the division and Korean War, notably silencing the early ROK penal system’s use in ideological indoctrination, preventive custody of political prisoners, and massacres of political prisoners. Political concerns aside, this institutional history fails to place Korean penal history in its social and political context, taking the prison form for granted and extending its history backward from the present day.

More critical academic scholarship in penal history attempts to contextualize development of the ROK carceral system, but the field has largely overlooked the period between the peninsula’s Liberation in 1945 and the 1961 military coup by General Park Chung Hee. The seminal work of Bruce Cumings and contributors to the first volume of Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi insik (Korean History Before and After Liberation) clearly established the role of the U.S. military occupation government in appointing collaborators and veterans of the colonial system in the early ROK police and legal apparatuses. The specifics of post-liberation continuity in the penal system from the colonial period have yet to be properly fleshed out, but existing scholarship paints a picture of overcrowded, underfunded, escape-prone prisons in the wake of popular resistance to U.S. occupation policy.  Prisons were most crowded following the crackdown of the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946, a series of widespread clashes between central authority and local supporters of the ‘people’s committees’ that had sprung up after liberation. Though his work focuses primarily on prisons during the later Park Chung Hee dictatorship, sociologist Ch’oe Chŏng-gi briefly examines the post-Liberation turnover of prisons to contextualize colonial continuities in the penology and ideological indoctrination of South Korea’s subsequent authoritarian regimes. He attempted to explicate the “real conditions” (silt’ae) of post-liberation penal spaces, revealing that most of the personnel retained their positions from the colonial system, and newly hired officials received minimal training that changed little from the colonial model. Pak Ch’an Sik’s work revealed the strain on the penal system when mainland prison facilities received an influx of detainees after the 1948 Cheju Uprising, a series of revolts on Cheju Island that were met with a protracted campaign by the MG and South Korean authorities to massacre leftists, their collaborators, and ordinary citizens caught in the fray. Further research utilizing U.S. military archival sources will facilitate a more detailed understanding of the MG’s role in penal modernization, its colonial legacies, and the Cold War’s impact on South Korea’s penal history.

There is even less scholarship dedicated to the penal system of the First Republic (1948-1960), but prison spaces served a crucial role in suppressing leftist activity from the founding of the ROK in 1948 to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Historian Kang Sŏng-hyŏn has provided detailed historical accounts of the early Rhee regime’s expanded categorization of “thought criminals” (sasangpŏm) after the 1948 passing of the National Security Law, the act that allows for the exemption of constitutional rights to due process and habeas corpus in cases related to national security. As prisons overflowed, the state attempted reeducation and conversion of ideological offenders through the euphemistically named National Guidance League (Kungmin podo yŏnmaeng). Historians working in the early 2000s exposed the history of forced reeducation and eventual wartime massacre of suspected leftists who were members of the League, but the League’s relationship to the penal apparatus needs to be examined further to better historicize changes in penal thought and practice at the founding of the First Republic.  

Historical analysis of prisons during the Korean War emphasizes their use as sites of liberation or massacre while the peninsula changed hands back and forth between the ROK and DPRK. After the retaking of Seoul in the Fall of 1950, the Rhee regime used penal spaces for detainment and expedited execution of those suspected of collaborating with the Korean People’s Army (KPA) of North Korea. The literature on prisoners of war reveals a geopolitical layer to consider when charting the Cold War influence on Korean penal practice. Further research of the UN’s extensive POW and ROK civilian internee reeducation programs will show changes in ROK penal practice across the wartime rupture and account for the Cold War imposition of the Geneva Convention and United Nations-imposed penal paradigm. Nearly all of South Korea’s prison facilities were destroyed or damaged in the war, and reconstruction  was still only partially complete as late as 1960. Other than a brief mention in the ROK Correctional Service official history, there appears to be no published research detailing the post-war reconstruction of the ROK penal system or its transformation to the “correctional” model in 1961. This dissertation will use diverse and previously underutilized primary sources to explicate the pivotal role of the prison and its discourses undergirding the social upheaval of the early ROK’s history of war and reconstruction.

VI. Primary Sources

Inspired by a Foucauldian model of discourse analysis, this research seeks to historicize changes in ROK penal culture by analyzing both official reform discourse and responses to its implementation on the ground. Primary source materials related to prisons in the immediate post-liberation period are scarce, and researchers must utilize both U.S. and local sources to develop even the most rudimentary account of the turnover of penal authority from colonial to occupation forces. The files of the United States Military Government in Korea contain the occupation government’s penal section records. MG administrators kept haphazard, and often handwritten reports on prison conditions and fluctuations in inmate totals, which also contained evaluations on changes in penal practice relative to their Japanese predecessors. These materials are invaluable for ascertaining the most basic information about the penal system after the transfer of authority from the Japanese colonial government to the U.S. military occupation. They will also help track the evolving MG penal discourse that celebrated perceived advances in reform while facing intensified resistance to the occupation. This dissertation will also analyze Korean print media sources to chart local perceptions and responses to prison overcrowding, organized escape attempts, and deteriorating prison conditions. After events like the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946, depictions of penal spaces and activities appear in more diverse archival sources produced by different sections of the military government tasked with suppressing rebellion, investigating hygienic conditions and prisoner abuse, and responding to reports of massacres.

This dissertation also examines the early development of the field of ROK penology—the study of prisons and penal practice. The liberation period saw a limited number of publications by Korean penologists establishing the state of their field with renewed purpose and the perspective of an autonomous institutional future in an independent Korean nation. These early publications include the first post-liberation issues of Penal Administration (Hyŏngjŏng), a successor to a similar colonial period penal journal that was then discontinued after the outbreak of the Korean War. Novelist Yoon Paek-nam also published a history of Korean penal culture, A History of Chosŏn Penal Administration (Chosŏn Hyŏngjŏngsa), in 1948. The work traces developments in punishment on the Korean peninsula from before the Three Kingdoms Period (57 BCE - 688 CE) through to the colonial period, and repositions the Korean people as the subject of their own penal modernization. Newspapers also served as both cheerleader and watchdog for early advances in South Korean penal administration.

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the body of available primary source material becomes sharply limited and shifts subject focus from typical penal administration to the handling of prisoners of war. The United Nations Command’s Provost Marshall section, the unit responsible for the handling of POWs and Civilian Internees (CI), kept extensive incident reports for cases of abuse, injury, and death of prisoners. The U.S. National Archives and Record Administration facility (NARA II) in College Park, Maryland holds extensive records, course materials, and correspondence related to POW reeducation programs. The same institution also holds vital materials related to wartime atrocities such as the massacres at Taejŏn Prison in the summer of 1950,  and the summary execution of Sŏdaemun Prison inmates at Hongche-ri in the fall of same year.

The key primary source for analyzing post-Korean War penal development discourse is the Ministry of Justice professional journal, Penal Administration (Hyŏngjŏng). The monthly journal ran from 1952 to 1961 and featured a diverse range of articles on penal reform, musings on life as a prison guard, comics, poems, short stories, and reporting from observation tours of the penal facilities of the United States and other Cold War allies.  Active penal administrators contributed to the journal and fleshed out the specifics of what it meant to “democratize” their vocation as public servants in an ostensibly democratic and developing society. This project will consider the subjectivity of prison guards (many of them veterans of the colonial prison system) in developing an autonomous penological ideal and institutional culture infused with nationalist and Cold War anticommunist ideology. Late-1950s newspapers profiled veteran prison guards, remarked on advances in penal practice since liberation, and introduced the public to the “new penology” of rehabilitation through arts, crafts and vocational training. The period also saw further development of the field of penology in international context with publications like Kwon T’ae-gŭn’s Penology (Haenghyŏnghak) in 1956. The prisoner magazine, New Path (Saegil) featured articles and creative works by prisoners for prisoner consumption, and is another vital source for understanding the specific content and messaging of rehabilitation programming. South Korean archives contain more official records and prisoner-targeted materials produced by the Ministry of Justice’s Penal Bureau, such as textbooks and approved recreational reading material, plays, and films. Further field work will also prioritize finding unofficial memoirs and eyewitness accounts of penal spaces to bring propagandistic claims of reformers and prisoner experience into the same frame of analysis. This project will also utilize interviews with former guards and inmates introduced through the network of historians associated with Seodaemun Prison History Hall.

Further archival work is needed to excavate the specific primary sources relevant to changes in prisons after Gen. Park Chung Hee’s 1961 coup d’état, but the period’s much improved administrative and records-keeping capacity make obtaining official documentation much easier than work on the Rhee regime. The largest obstacle, however, to obtaining primary sources for both the 1950s and early 1960s is the stringent nature of South Korean privacy laws that prevent archival access for materials containing the personal information of living private citizens. Thus the project will require alternative methodologies and creative use of unofficial sources to historicize the changes to penal administration in this period.

VII. Chapter Outline

The first chapter of this dissertation will reevaluate the advent of the carceral form and practice on the Korean peninsula by reviewing the scholarship on penal modernization and suggesting a more thorough Foucauldian reading of carceral practices and governmentality during the Taehan Empire (1897-1910) and Japanese colonial period. This chapter identifies the local specificities of Korea’s penal modernization, highlighting autonomous Korean discourses of reform and changes in penal culture, and merge Korean penal history scholarship with debates on the emergence of modern governmentality prior to formal annexation. This chapter will locate trends in colonial period penal discourse to better understand continuities and ruptures in the post-Liberation penal system.

The second chapter analyzes the official discourse that reframed the prison as a necessary tool for public safety divorced from its colonial legacy.  It seeks to answer the question of how southern Korean prisons went from nearly empty in the Fall of 1945, to overflowing by August of 1948. It combines analysis of U.S. military archival sources with local responses to flesh out the narrative of post-Liberation penal reform and its opposition. This chapter will complicate the narrative of a seamless transition from colonial to ROK penal practice by accounting for both U.S. and local officials’ repositioning of the role of punishment under occupation and (ostensibly) autonomous Korean rule. While the infrastructure and personnel were often the same, post-liberation authorities struggled to justify the prison as a necessary institution for public safety while emphasizing qualitative difference with colonial penal practice. Popular resistance to U.S. military rule complicated official narratives about criminality and social deviance by pitting the occupation against the very people it proposed to protect. Koreans’ fight for local autonomy and survival under mismanaged economic policy landed many in jail or prison, revealing the MG criminal justice system as the repressive tool of yet another occupier. The chapter will further examine official and public discourse surrounding the state of USAMGIK prisons in comparison to their Japanese predecessors, and center high-profile cases of abuse and prison breaks following the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946. It will utilize the abundant primary source material (testimonies) produced surrounding the October Taegu Uprising (1946) and Cheju Massacres (1948) to account for the role of the penal apparatus in suppressing rebellion and facilitating massacre.

The third chapter will explore penal reform and ideological indoctrination, analyzing the shifting official and public discourse surrounding criminality and punishment after the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948. The establishment of a separate government in the south further solidified division of the peninsula and raised the status of social control of deviance to that of the Cold War containment of communism. Maintaining an archipelago of well-ordered prisons (and the disciplinary power they projected to the free population) were crucial to solidifying South Korea’s internal stability as a bulwark against the spread of communism in East Asia. This chapter focuses on the penal rhetoric of president Syngman Rhee, a problematic figure with his own history of incarceration and prison activism. As one of the first administrative measures of the new republic, the Rhee regime enacted mass pardons to release a significant portion of nonviolent offenders from prison, a thinly veiled measure to remedy prison overcrowding and reduce operational costs. The problematic pardons prompted a wholesale reevaluation of the parole system and South Korean society’s belief in rehabilitation penology at large. Any relief mass pardons provided for prison overcrowding was immediately erased with the expansion of categories of political crime after the passing of the National Security Law. This chapter traces changes in the discourse surrounding “ordinary” criminality alongside the First Republic’s resurgence of colonial era methods of ideological conversion (K: chŏnhyang; J: tenkō) in penal spaces and activities of the National Guidance League. It interrogates the historiographical division between “normal” and politicized penal practice with a case study where hegemonic anticommunist ideology came to influence every facet of governance and public discourse. Analysis of materials related to the activities of the National Guidance League will emphasize the shift to a Cold War penal paradigm after the passing of the National Security Law in 1948 and flesh out the relationship between early ROK penology and ideological indoctrination.

The fourth chapter will trace developments in ROK penology and penal administration through the rupture of the Korean War. It will examine the phenomenon of massacres of political and ordinary prisoners, exploring the role of ROK penal spaces and practices in the killing.   Where the previous chapter explored the discourse and rationale of pardons, this chapter examines wartime massacre of prisoners as a reversal of disciplinary power, where the status of prisoners as social deviants and the ulterior motive of conversion programs were laid bare. Prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, prisoners undergoing anticommunist conversion were housed, fed, educated and socially assimilated. After North Korean forces invaded Seoul in June of 1950, tens of thousands of ideological offenders were massacred. This chapter explores the breakdown of penal administration and resort to retributive violence towards both political and ordinary prisoners in wartime crisis. Prisons were sites of both liberation and massacre as the KPA occupied portions of South Korea in 1950. This chapter will account for the use of southern prisons by North Korean authorities, isolating the prison as a site and technology of power readymade for use by shifting polities for varied political ends.

This chapter will further explicate the influence of U.S. and United Nations penological schema on the development of rehabilitation-based penology that was infused with wartime ideological indoctrination. The UN Command’s Civilian Information and Education Section oversaw an extensive program for the “reeducation” of North Korean and Chinese POWS as well as ROK CI’s through propaganda film screenings, assigned readings produced by the United States Information Service (USIS), group discussions, and other cultural activities in the POW camps of Kŏje Island. This chapter will weave analysis of materials related to POW and civilian internment to account for changes in pre- and post-war ROK penology across a period that has heretofore only registered as a rupture in the penal historical record.

The fifth chapter will focus on the post-Korean War reconstruction of the prison system and wholesale reframing of penal administration as a tool of “democratization” and development. Nearly all of South Korea’s prison facilities were destroyed in the war. The primary aim of this chapter is to chart the significant shift in the post-war (1953-60) ROK penal imaginary that refigured the prison as a site for rehabilitation and production of the ideal democratic citizen. Spurred by technological aid from the U.S. and U.N., ROK authorities embarked on a campaign to reconstruct existing prisons, build new state-of-the-art penal facilities, and reframed their guiding ideology as a project for “democratizing” penal administration (minju haenghyŏng). Rehabilitation through education and penal labor was reframed as a mission to prepare inmates to not only rejoin society, but contribute as model citizens in an emerging member state of the Cold War’s “Free World.” This chapter will explore how South Korean penality interacted with discourses of development, modernization, poverty, and overcoming “backwardness.” It will demonstrate how discourse on the prison and deviance reflected hegemonic discourses of gender and race in the Cold War 1950s. South Korean discourses of the democratic citizen, their duties, and the human itself were significantly impacted by encounters with U.N. aid organizations and the emerging “human rights” global discourse. This chapter asks how the Cold War environment and U.S. influence racialized notions of deviance and development through the lasting impact of wartime reeducation schema that emphasized a perceived East Asian difference in the capacity for reform and achievement of liberal democratic subjectivity. South Korean penologists responded to these encounters with Western penal regimes with an urgency to overcome the “backwardness” of their system and its material limitations.

The concluding chapter concerns changes in the ROK prison system after the April Revolution of 1960 (the popular uprising that overthrew the Syngman Rhee regime) and subsequent military coup in May of 1961. Prison spaces appear in historical narratives of the initial period of repression following the fraudulent election of March, 1960, but the role of prisons in this period is understudied. The military junta (1961-63) led by Gen. Park Chung Hee fundamentally reframed the mission of penal institutions under the euphemistic schema of “corrections” by renaming penal institutions kyodoso in December of 1961. South Korean penal culture still utilizes the language and guiding ideology of corrections developed in this era.

VIII. Research Plan

My archival work in South Korea, which will start in July 2019, will be supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. While in Korea I will be affiliated with Sungkyunkwan University’s Interuniversity Center for Korean Language Studies which will provide library access and other logistical assistance. I will also work closely with one faculty member at SKKU, Professor Oh Je-yeon who specializes in contemporary Korean history and student movements of the 1950s. With Fulbright funding I will spend eight months in Seoul accessing several state archives, including the National Assembly Library, the National Library System’s central library, and the National Archives of Korea. I will also search for materials held by the Ministry of Justice Correctional Service’s central headquarters, and also explore what is made publicly available by the remaining prison facilities and archival institutions in the provinces outside of Seoul. I have also met with the director of Seodaemun Prison History Hall, Dr. Pak Kyŏng-mok, and his curatorial staff will assist me in accessing their archival materials. They also have a network of former staff and inmates from the Park Chung Hee period who periodically speak about their experience, so I have obtained the necessary credentials from UCLA’s institutional review board of the Office of the Human Research Protection Program to conduct interviews. I will return to Los Angeles in March of 2020 and support the rest of my writing process with funding as a teaching assistant. I plan to make another research trip to NARA in Maryland, as well as other U.S. archives to further flesh out the U.S. influence on Korean penology. I will then apply for the Dissertation Year Fellowship (DYF), planning to use the rest of my departmental funding and finishing my dissertation to graduate in 2022.

Sample Bibliography

Primary Sources

Newspapers and Magazines

Chosŏn ilbo

Chungang ilbo

Hyŏngjŏng

Kyŏnghyang sinmun

Saegil

Tonga ilbo

Archival Sources

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA II)

Record Group 554: Records of General HQ, Far East Command, Supreme Commander of Allied Powers and United Nations Command. USAFIK, XXIV Corps, G-2, Historical Section. “Records Regarding the Okinawa Campaign, U.S. Military Government in Korea, U.S.-U.S.S.R. Relations in Korea, and Korean Political Affairs. 1945-48.

---. Provost Marshall’s Section. Records Relating to Anticommunist Measures, Prisoners of War, and Troop Planning, 1950-51.

---. Provost Marshall’s Section. Prisoner of War Division, Correspondence Relating to Interned Korean Civilians.

RG 59 General Records of the Department of State. Central Decimal File, 1960-63. Box 2178. Country Law study for the Republic of Korea. JAG Section, HQ, Eighth U.S. Army.

“Appendix C: Reports on Korean Prisons,” Country Law study for the Republic of Korea. JAG Section, HQ, Eighth U.S. Army. 4/19/61. p. C1. NARA II, RG 59 General Records of the Department of State. Central Decimal File, 1960-63. Box 2178.

Hoover Institution Archives:

Haydon L. Boatner Papers

George F. Mott Papers

Other

American Advisory Staff, Department of Justice, USAMGIK, “Draft of Study on the Administration of Justice in Korea Under the Japanese and in South Korea Under the United States Army Military Government in Korea to 15 August 1948”

Ch’oe Se-hwang. Yŏngguk ŭi hyŏngjŏng chedo. Seoul: Ch’ihyŏng Hyŏphoe, 1954.

Gayn, Mark. Japan diary. William Sloane Associates, 1948.

Kwon, T’ae-gŭn. Haenghyŏnghak. Seoul: Kyujangsa, 1956.

Yoon, Paek-nam. Chosŏn Hyŏngjŏngsa. Seoul: Munyesŏrim, 1948.

Secondary Sources

Korean Language Sources

Ch’oe Chŏng-gi. Kamgŭm ŭi chŏngch’I. Seoul: Ch’aek Sesang, 2005.

---. Pijŏnhyang changgisu: 0.5 p’yŏng e kach’in hanbando. Seoul: Ch’aek Sesang, 2007.

---. “Haebang ihu Han’guk chŏnjaeng kkaji ŭi hyŏngmuso silt’ae yŏn’gu,” Chenosaidŭ (Genocide) Yon’gu, no. 2 (August 2007), 63-93.

Im, Chong-t’ae. Han’guk esŏ ŭi haksal: han’guk hyŏndaesa, kiŏk kwa ŭi t’ujaeng. Seoul: T’ong’il Nyusŭ, 2017.

Kang Hye-kyŏng, Che 1-konghwaguk ch'ogi kungmin t'ongje ŭi hwangnip. P'aju: Han'guk Haksul chŏngbo, 2005.

Kang Sŏng-hyŏn. “Kungmin podo yŏnmaeng, chŏnhyang esŏ kamsi, tongwŏn, kŭrigo haksal ro,” in Chugŏm ŭrossŏ nara rŭl chik'ija: 1950-nyŏndae, pan'gong, tongwŏn, kamsi ŭi sidae, edited by Kim Tŭkchung, et. al., 119-76. Seoul: Sŏnin, 2007.

---. “Han’guk chŏnchaeng chŏn chŏngch’ibŏm yangsan ‘pŏpgyeyŏl’ ŭi unyŏng kwa chŏngch’ipŏm insik ŭi pyŏnhwa,” in Chŏnchaeng sok ŭi tto tarŭn chŏnchaeng, edited by Sŏ Chung-sŏk et. al., 83-128. Sŏnin, 2011.

Kim Sam-ung, et. al. I Sŭng-man chipkwŏn'gi ŭi sŏdaemun hyŏngmŭso. Sŏdaemun hyŏngmuso yŏksagwan, 2012.

Lee Im-ha, “Han’guk chŏnjaenggi puyŏkcha ch’abyŏl,” in Chŏnjaeng sok ŭi tto tarŭn chŏnjaeng, edited by Sŏ Chung-sŏk et. al, 129-72. Seoul: Sŏnin, 2011.

Lee Jong-min, “1910-nyŏn tae kŭndae kamok ŭi toip yŏngu,” Chŏngsin Munhwa Yŏngu 22, no. 2 (Summer 1999).

---. “Cheguk ilbonŭi ‘mobŏm’ kamok: tok'yo - t'aibei – kyŏngsŏng ŭi kamok sarye rŭl chungshim ŭro,” Tongbang Hakchi 177 (2016): 271-309.

Pak Ch’an-sik, “Cheju 4.3 sakŏn kwanlyŏn haenghyŏng chalyo wa hyŏngmuso chaesoja Sŏdaemun, Map’o, Kwangju hyŏngmuso lŭl chungsim ŭlo,” Tamna Munhwa, Vo. 40, (2012): 251-315.

Pak I-jun “Migunjŏnggi chŏn'guk chuyo hyŏngmuso chiptan t'arok sagŏn yŏn'gu” Tamnon 201 9(4) (2006): 141-69.

Pak Kyŏng-mok, “Taehan cheguk malgi ilche ŭi kyŏngsŏng kamok sŏlch’i wa pon’gam/pun’gam che shihaeng,” Han’guk Kŭnhyŏngdaesa Yŏngu, no. 46 (Fall 2008): 81-104.

---. “1930 nyŏn dae Sŏdaemun Hyŏngmuso ŭi ilsang.” Han’guk Kŭnhyŏndaesa Yŏngu 66 (September 2013): 65-116.

Pŏmmubu Kyojŏng Bonbu, Taehan Min'guk kyojŏngsa, vol. 1. Paju: Pŏmmubu Kyojŏng Bonbu, 2010.

Sim, Chae-u. Chosŏn hugi kukka kwŏllyŏk kwa pŏmjoe t'ongje: ‘shimnirok’ yŏn'gu. T’aehaksa, 2009.

Song Kŏn-ho. Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi insik, vol. 1, revised edition. Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1989.

To Myŏn-hoe, Han’guk Kŭndae Hyŏngsa Chepan Chedo-sa. Seoul: P’ulŭn Yŏksa, 2014.

English Language Sources

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Anderson, Clare. The Indian uprising of 1857-8: prisons, prisoners and rebellion. Anthem Press, 2007.

Botsman, Daniel V. Punishment and power in the making of modern Japan. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Bright, Charles. The Powers that Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the" Big House", 1920-1955. University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Burge, Russel.  “The Prison and the Postcolony: Contested Memory and the Museumification of Sŏdaemun Hyŏngmuso,” Journal of Korean Studies, Volume 22, Number 1 (Spring 2017): 33-67.

Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 1. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Dikotter, Frank, and Frank Dikötter. Crime, punishment and the prison in modern China. Columbia University Press, 2002.

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Dudden, Alexis. Japan's colonization of Korea: discourse and power. University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

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---. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History. Princeton University Press, 2019.

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Zinoman, Peter. The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940. University of California Press, 2001.

[riotshow]

⋆ ˚｡⋆♬˚ thanks for joining us on the show, casey hwang! we’re live in 15 hours, so make sure to send in your account to secure your spot.

kim minju is now taken.

SLOTS: velvet light’s stylist.

⋆ ˚｡⋆♬˚  ( kim minju + she/xe + 20 ) today we have a very special guest on riot! the show. casey hwang from rainbow music group’s very own crew! they’re the stylist for velvet light and are known by their coworkers for their observant and obnoxious personality. today they’re here to talk about why people should stop wearing the color pink since it’s xyr favorite color, and to debunk the rumors that they copy looks from fashion tiktokkers and claim it’s hers. later on they’ll be talking about their favorite song, girl of the year by allie x, and stay tuned til the end for their tips on extreme ironing. ( x + they/them + est )

[theophq-archive]

a lily disse que pensou ter visto park yeeun pelas ruas de the orange province, mas era só minju hwang. esperamos que ele se sinta bem-vindo por aqui e não se esqueça de suas obrigações.

a ally disse que pensou ter visto chris wood pelas ruas de the orange province, mas era só mason bernard montgomery. esperamos que ele se sinta bem-vindo por aqui e não se esqueça de suas obrigações.

[4yue]

whoever puts the glitter on minjus face for the performances is the only true ally