A Korean Colonial Intellectual's View of Western Europe in the Early 1930s

Abstract

Soon-Tak Lee(李順鐸), a Marxist professor of Yonhee Higher College, traveled around the world during his sabbatical year of 1933. After his return to Korea, he published a travel book, Essays on the Recent World Travel(1934), which is considered the first world-travel literature in Korea. He studied at Kyoto Imperial University under the guidance of Hazime Kawakami(河上肇), a famous Marxist scholar. Professor Kawakami had also traveled in Europe in the 1910s, wrote a travel book titled Looking back Fatherland(1915). This is quite a coincidence between these two scholars' careers. Kawakami's book is an important source that provides us with a Marxist intellectual's view of Western Europe. On the other hand, Lee's book represents an East Asian scholar's views of Western Europe, and at the same time, includes a colonial intellectual's attitude towards imperialism in the early twentieth century. The purpose of this paper is to examine some differences inherent in the two scholars' views on Western Europe and modern civilization. While Kawakami tried to reflect the cultural pattern and type of the West and the East comparatively, Lee was interested in understanding European culture itself.