A Note on Romanization and Names
The following post is Part VIII—and the last—in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. I have decided to share the introduction in full not only because it encapsulates my work from the past four years, but it also contains a lot of references to information that I hope to blog about in the future.* New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Below I discuss the conventions used throughout this series, and subsequently, throughout the blog. I also share the table of contents from my dissertation as images at the end for those who are interested in the overall structure and the two case studies.
*Some edits have been made to the original wording of the introduction to better suit the style of a blog post.
In recent years, the study of the Manchukuo period has largely been composed of research by scholars in China (especially ethnic Koreans), South Korea, and Japan. Additionally, there is a growing number of studies in English, but such works usually depend on the author’s affiliation with one of the above countries and its respective language. The divergent backgrounds of Manchukuo scholars have led to contested interpretations over shared histories in the region. English-language research emerges from these various positions and therefore highlights the lack of cohesion in the region’s historiography. Therefore, a note must be made about the naming practices used throughout my thesis and this blog.
Many of the proper nouns have, in various scholarly and contemporary texts, been rendered in (romanized) Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, respectively. Recall from Part III that the word “Manchuria” itself has a convoluted history of translation with accompanying political implications since Manchuria is not the toponym used in Chinese to describe northeast China. As can be expected with Manchuria, words frequently pass across linguistic thresholds when different cultures reside in the same spaces.
In general, the proper nouns in the thesis follow Chinese patterns and practices for places and events. When a primary source was written in Chinese, I use standard pinyin romanization. (One exception is that, when providing the pinyin for the Chinese word for the plural pronoun “we,” I use the hyphenated wo-men so that it does not get confused with the English word “women.”) However, if a text was written in Korean, romanized Korean spelling is used, and the same goes for Japanese publications.
The translation of Korean works into Chinese via Japanese presents some difficulties. My translations are based on the Chinese materials to stress that this thesis discusses the afterlives of the original texts in the specific context of Manchuria. Approximately half of the Mansŏn ilbo editorials, featured in Case Study 1, were in a recent compilation where all the primary sources had been translated into Chinese. I accessed scans of the other half of the original newspapers at the Seoul National University library. Due to this process in my research, half of the Mansŏn ilbo titles shown in Table 3 in section 2.4 are written in hanzi, because of their Chinese translations, and the other half are in their original hanja. I have rendered Korean hanja names from the Mansŏn ilbo editorials in romanized Korean, such as Ko Ch’ae-gi and Yi Tae-u in Chapters 1 and 2.
Manchuria landmarks are rendered in a mix of English and Chinese pinyin (e.g., Changbai Mountain(s), Songhua River, etc.). Changbai Mountain is the tallest mountain outcrop in Manchuria, culminating in five peaks that surround a deep crater lake. The main Korean term for the mountain refers to the highest of those peaks, literally “white-topped mountain” (Paektusan; Ch. Baitoushan). Sometimes, as exemplified by the NAUA songs, Korean sources will use a reading of “Changbai,” Changbaek, to refer to the mountain. It is unclear if such cases mean that the text originally came from Chinese or because the writer had other intentions. Due to these concerns, I use the unitalicized Changbai Mountain because it connotes the entire mountain range as well as its main peaks, and the term is intelligible across Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages.
Another landmark named throughout these chapters is the Songhua (K: Songhwa) River. Apart from a few English translations of Korean songs in Case Study 2 where Songhwa is used, all other appearances are rendered as the deemphasized “Songhua.” Contrastingly, however, the river that serves as a border between China and Korea generally appears in this thesis as the Amnok (Ch: Yalu) River because most sources I cite that use it were written in Korean. Where translated from Chinese sources, Yalu River is used. Chinese and Korean people in the 1930s tended to refer to the Amnok/Yalu River as a shorthand for the border and the turbulent relationship between its peoples. Reflecting the source texts thus emphasizes the similar ways that Chinese and Korean writers conceptualized the world around them while also showing the differences in their thought processes. I do not italicize place names given in Chinese or Korean.
Names for provinces and cities in Manchuria, even though they had Japanese names during the Manchukuo period, are given in Chinese because the primary sources for this thesis are mostly in Chinese. Switching to Japanese would add an extra layer of decoding that is unnecessary when the thesis revolves around Chinese and Korean interactions. One problematic city name, however, is Fengtian. Historically, the Manchu word “Mukden” and its Chinese counterpart “Shenyang” were used interchangeably for the city, but Fengtian was the name of a nearby prefecture. The Manchukuo state-builders used Fengtian, perhaps because it means “mandated by Heaven.” After 1945, the city name reverted back to Shenyang, but I refer to it as Fengtian in this thesis to accurately reflect the period under examination.
Events also present difficulties for naming. In this Introduction, I used the pinyin spelling of Wanbaoshan (K: Manposan) because it has become common in current research on the incident, although older spellings used the Wade-Giles romanization Wanpaoshan. Another significant event was the Manchurian Incident, as it has come to be called in English. I have chosen to use a slightly less popular term, the Mukden Incident. One reason I use “Mukden Incident” is that it highlights the place where the event occurred. But mainly, I avoid categorizing anything as “Manchurian” throughout this thesis. The word “Manchuria” is contested, so to modify an already inconclusive toponym risks further confusion, and future scholars of Manchuria need to pay close attention to when and how the region is described. It is with this purpose in mind that the following chapters highlight the way Chinese and Korean writers in Manchukuo used the words Manzhou/Manju. It is important to retain the ambiguity of the primary materials for the reasons I discussed throughout the Introduction.
One exception to using Chinese for place names is the region in eastern Manchuria bordering the Korean peninsula. It was historically called Kando by Koreans and Jiandao in Chinese. I use the unitalicized Kando to pay homage to the long history of Korean social life that characterizes that area of Manchuria.
Lastly, various ways of referring to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) in English are particularly contested because translations come from groups that fought against each other. To introduce the war and its impact on Manchukuo in Case Study 1, the Second Sino-Japanese War is used. In Case Study 2, however, I make use of the Chinese name for the conflict, Zhongguo kangri zhanzheng, literally “the War of Resistance Against Japan.” The songs of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army use similar rhetoric whether in Chinese or Korean. Therefore, Chapters 3 and 4 retain “War of Resistance” to reflect the army members’ mentality and discursive practices. On another level, using “the War of Resistance” in scholarship on the NAUA songs links cultural products from the army in Manchuria to communist troops elsewhere in China and Korea.