Throughout his eighteen years of rule, Park was the man on the commanding heights. External and internal constraints on his political maneuvering were severe, but Park looked at these as obstacles to be overcome, managed, and eventually incorporated as parameters influencing policy.
They rarely stopped him from pursuing his goal. They did reshape his actions, policies, and strategies, but not his end-point of pukuk kangbyông (“rich nation, strong army”). It is natural that within the context of an imperial presidency, Park’s own personal preferences, ideas, and leadership style came to be reflected in the nature and direction of his modernization strategy. Without taking account of his willingness to take risks and his goal of transforming South Korea into a second Japan in his lifetime, for
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example, it is difficult to explain the lightning speed with which South Korea concentrated scarce resources in a few high-risk heavy and chemical industrialization (HCI) projects. What really mattered in bringing about a sudden economic takeoff in war-devastated South Korea were the ideational dimensions that shaped Park’s cognitive beliefs. As many analysts have argued, ideas embedded in ideologies, information, and images not only guide leaders’ choice of policy measures to deal with pending problems but also provide them with the capacity to indoctrinate and mobilize their domestic populace.3 Indeed, leaders are predisposed to see what they want to see. Their thoughts, policy preferences, and strategic choices are bounded by their own ontological locus. This ideational complex is not a mere summation of the individual’s personality traits. It has rather a complex gestalt with its own structure and organization that must essentially be seen as a system.4
Park’s ideational structure was complex, having a triple layer of ideas and images that were sometimes complementary and at other times contradictory. Although his association with Japan had shaped the foundations of his modernization strategy, Korean nationalism served as his primary driving force. The American factor also became a constant source of opportunities and constraints, critically conditioning the dynamics of his modernization strategy.
A Japanese Identity
Park Chung Hee, who became the “Japanese” Takagi Masao during the colonial period, was deeply influenced by Japanese colonial and military legacies.5 Ambassador Okazaki Hisahiko lamented Park’s death in 1979 as
“the death of the last soldier of Imperial Japan.”6 This was not an exagger-ation. Born under Japanese colonial rule, he received a Japanese education throughout his youth, absorbing imperial educational doctrines that glorified the Japanese emperor and indoctrinated the Koreans of his generation to be loyal imperial subjects.7 Teaching only briefly, he changed careers and spent two years at the Manchurian Xinjing Officers School, which trained officers for the Manchukuo army, largely Chinese in both its officer corps and its ranks. As one of the top students in his class, he spent the last two of his four academy years at the prestigious Japanese Military Academy (JMA) in Zama, as part of a Manchukuo ryugakuseo class (the eleventh) that graduated with the fifty-seventh class of the JMA in 1944.8 Park was proud of being a graduate of the academy and championed its spirit of discipline, leadership, and loyalty.9 His Japanese education shaped his per-
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sonality and his Weltanschauung. He emphasized attention to detail, preci-sion, and decisiveness, and preached the value of self-sacrifice for the nation. Park was thoroughly militaristic in mentality, in the fashion of Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s.10
Park’s Japanese identity influenced his modernization strategy in three critical ways. First is his admiration of the Meiji Restoration (1867/68–
1912) and his incorporation into his modernization program of that era’s nationalist ideological tenets, including fukoku kyohei (“rich nation, strong army”) and shokusan kogyo (“production promotion”).11 The rise of a modernizing elite, the dissolution of old power bases, and bringing military force and industrial production under the guidance of the state, all of which were the central traits of the Meiji Restoration, became the references for Park’s political and economic governance. The slogans of Park’s modernization project echoed those of the Meiji Restoration. The South Korean state called for “production promotion, exports, and construction,” urged “construction on the one hand and national defense on the other,” and preached the virtue of “frugality, hard work, and saving.”12
When Park visited Japan in 1961, he told leaders Kishi Nobusuke, Ishii MitsujirÃ, and Kosaka Zentaro of the impact of the Meiji Restoration on his thinking. “I am pushing for the modernization of my country as the modernizing elite of the Meiji Restoration did,” Park said, and noted that he was “studying the history of the Meiji Restoration in that context . . . I am a graduate of the Japanese Imperial Military Academy, and I still believe that Japanese education is the best way to cultivate a strong army.”13
Park’s obsession with “rich nation” and “strong army” is evident in his selection of heavy and chemical industries as the strategic sectors that would pull South Korea out of economic backwardness and military vulnerability. He once told Kim Chông-ryôm, then minister of commerce and industry, that “the power that enabled Japan to declare the Pacific War came from steel mills. Japan could produce tanks, cannons, and naval vessels because it had steel mills.”14 Believing in the power of steel, Park hurriedly designated the construction of an integrated steel mill as a priority project as early as 1962, in the formulation of the first Five-Year Economic Development Plan (FYEDP), despite U.S. reservations about the financial feasibility and economic viability of such a goal.15 In July 1967, again in the face of criticism by the United States and the World Bank, Park repeated his identification of the steel industry as a strategic sector in the second FYEDP.16
The integrated steel mill project was a precursor to and an essential part of the 1970s’ HCI drive, the mainstay of Park’s economic modernization plans. His desire to pursue HCI thus began in the early 1960s, but was
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postponed until the promulgation of the authoritarian yushin constitution in 1972 because of the lack of foreign capital and technology and the limited state capacity for forced saving. The idea of HCI was strongly influenced by Park’s Japanese ethos as well as by economic theories of unbalanced growth that were then prevalent. U.S. officials, civilian academics, and initially even the South Korean economic bureaucracy opposed HCI as a premature, risky, and abrupt shift of economic strategy, but Park, aware of the Japanese precedent, pursued the “big push” for HCI in the belief that it would enhance national security through its forward and backward linkages with the defense industry. The perceived security benefits outweighed the costs of weakening the comparative advantage of South Korea’s labor-intensive export sectors.17 Moreover, in his view, the heavy and chemical industries constituted the most effective long-term measure to ensure national wealth and military strength simultaneously. The costs were short term and the benefits long term, making Park perceive his role as asking his people to make the necessary sacrifices for the future of South Korea.
When President Richard M. Nixon declared his Guam Doctrine in 1969
to initiate U.S. military disengagement from Asia, Park’s fear of the Americans’ departure pushed him to initiate an aggressive HCI drive to develop a defense industry by 1973. For Park, it was a moment of realizing his lifetime goal of military self-help and strong defense. When Park received Fujino Chujiro, then president of the Mitsubishi General Trading Company, in February 1965, he recollected his experience under Japanese colonial rule: “While I was attending the Japanese Military Academy, I had a chance to visit Mitsubishi Heavy Machinery. I was deeply impressed by the production of naval vessels and submarines.”18 Park knew of the Japanese war economy of the 1940s and emulated its system of total mobilization.19
The strong bureaucracy, primacy of production, strategic state intervention in markets, bureaucratic control over the financial sector
, and zaibatsu corporate governance structures of Japan’s wartime economic system resurfaced during Park’s reign, albeit with innovations to fit the South Korean context.
Second, Japanese militarism left a lasting impact on the formation of Park’s political modernization. His military coup d’état of May 1961 could itself be seen as emulating a series of military coups that shocked Japan during the Showa period of the 1930s. Although Park exalted the Meiji Restoration, the Japan he knew and emulated was that of the Showa period,20 driven by the nationalist right-wing elements of the Japanese armed forces who sought to reestablish the authority of the imperial system and replace allegedly incompetent civilian party politics with military leader-
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ship. He particularly praised the patriotism, nationalism, and militarism of the officers who staged the February 26 Incident, an attempted coup led by ultranationalists in the Japanese imperial army in 1936.21 As Gregory Henderson has argued, Park and his followers defined their military coup, like the ones in Japan, as an effort to save the nation from corrupt and incompetent civilian political factions and to create a new nation of wealth and strength through state power.22
The New Community Movement, part of Park’s agricultural modernization, was also a product of learning from Japan of the 1930s. During the militarist era, the Japanese colonial government implemented a Village Promotion Policy based on the dense network of mass organizations (yokusankai) that it had created for the purposes of political control and mobilization. Much of this colonial experience was revived in Park’s New Community Movement to make people in the countryside join his larger modernization drive.23
Third, Park and his staff also continued to learn from the trajectory of Japan’s economic development in the postwar period. Yi Tong-wôn, who served Park as chief of staff (1962–1964) and foreign minister (1964–
1966), reports in his memoir of Park’s appreciation of the Japanese model: Yi: Your Excellency, please don’t worry! There will be a way out of this.
Look at Great Britain! Like us, its geographic size is small, and its resource endowment is poor. Yet they conquered the world . . .
Park: Why should we learn from a far away country like Great Britain? We have lots to learn from Japan, which is near to us.24
Yi Tong-wôn describes Park as a man “busy studying Japan. He frequently took clippings from Japanese newspapers and read The History of the Japanese Economy until midnight. A great portion of Park’s modernization policy emerged from the emulation of Japan. He compared South Korea’s economic situation to that of Japan all the time, even through the 1970s.”25 The identification of Japan as a valuable source to learn from and imitate also meant that it was the target to catch up with and even surpass. The respect for Japan’s accomplishments coexisted with Park’s distrust of and enmity toward Japan. The two were not contradictory. They were different sides of the same coin.
South Korea’s heavy and chemical industrialization plan exemplifies postwar Japan’s influence on Park’s thinking. The plan traced the origins of Japan’s transformation into an economic superpower to its HCI-centered Long-Term Economic Plan promulgated in 1957. The strategy was judged as having enabled Japan to raise exports to the level of $10 billion within ten years by creating new frontiers of industrial growth.26 The
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Japanese experience was South Korea’s road map for HCI in the 1970s, but even in the previous decade South Korea had experimented with its neighbor’s ideas. The Machinery Industry Promotion Act, drawn up by South Korea’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) and legislated by the National Assembly in 1967, was in large part a replica of Japan’s Temporary Measures to Promote the Machinery Industry introduced in 1956. Differences between the two laws were minor. South Korea’s Electronics Industry Promotion Act (1969) shows an even greater similarity to Japan’s Temporary Measure to Promote the Electronics Industry (1957).
The Park regime also introduced the concept of a general trading company (shogo shosha) borrowed from Japan. In 1972, Prime Minister Kim Chong-p’il invited Sejima Ryuzo, then vice president of Ito Chu Company and former staff officer of the Japanese army in Manchuria, to propose the establishment of a general trading company (GTC). The idea of establishing GTCs to coordinate the export drive and realize economies of scale in trade was circulated within the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) and other ministries for deliberation until MCI minister Yi Nak-sôn, a member of the 1961 coup coalition and a confidant of Park during the junta years, reported to Park in January 1975 that the MCI was ready to propose the enactment of a law to establish GTCs. The idea was to promote export growth by selecting a few chaebol as the center for the country’s exports and concentrating resources behind their conglomeration into export giants. Park’s endorsement quickly followed, making the GTC operational that same year.
Compared with the Japanese GTC system, the South Korean model placed a greater emphasis on export growth and focused more on the exploitation of linkages between manufacturing and trading, but the idea of developing a few national champions to exploit economies of scale in global marketing; bringing small- and medium-sized exporters and importers under the umbrella of giant trading houses to facilitate the logistics of information sharing, quality control, and production coordination; and concentrating the channels of dialogue and cooperation within the state bureaucracy was Japanese.27 At the same time, South Korea did not stop at imitation, but innovated, creating a GTC system that was more dependent on state support for survival, more hierarchical in organization, and more selective in the choice of strategic merchandise under the less favorable economic conditions that South Korea faced.
The anatomy of Park’s modernization strategy demonstrates the depth of Japan’s influence on him. The Japanese ethos, policy models, and institutions were instrumental in crafting the ideational foundations of Park’s economic, political, and social modernization policies and goals. More-
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over, learning occurred throughout his lifetime. The postwar Japanese ideas of industrial policy, administrative guidance, and GTCs shaped his decisions regarding modernization strategy and its institutional vehicles after his seizure of power in 1961. The scope of learning widened and its speed accelerated with the diplomatic normalization of relations with Japan in 1965 and the launching of heavy and chemical industrialization in 1973, but the most fundamental elements of his cognitive map—beliefs, norms, and values—were closely related to Japan of the 1930s, rather than to the pacifist and democratic postwar Japan. Nationalism, statism, and military values constituted his ethos.
Whereas imperial Japan constructed his personality, postwar Japan provided Park with instrumental ideas on how to ensure industrial and managerial efficiency, maximize the effect of state intervention on growth, and mobilize society for modernization. Undergirding this process of learning was the thick network of Japanese advisors that Park built up through his lifetime.
Industrializing Nationalism
Park was a self-proclaimed nationalist.28 In spite of, or because of, this self-identification, his nationalist identity became a subject of intense political debate.29 The conservatives of the post-Park period came to admire him as a true nationalist who had succeeded in establishing a new national pride and identity out of the shackles of defeatism, war, and poverty, whereas the liberal and radical intelligentsia branded him a betrayer of the ideals of democracy, national unification, and sovereignty that made up the progressive version of Korean nationalism.30 Still others have emphasized his transformation over time from a soldier-revolutionary on the nationalist path to modernization during the early part of military rule to a proponent of “dependent development.”31 Sociologist Ko Yông-bok writes:
Was [Park] a nationalist? The fact that he was a son of a poor farmer and that he experienced national discrimination under Japanese colonialism may well suffice to have made him a nationalist. Ill-trea
tment of Park by the American military authorities during his military career and the American government’s overt pressures during the military coup could have bred nationalist sentiments in him. In light of all this, it seems quite natural for him to adopt nationalist democracy as his revolutionary ideology. But having realized the formidable barriers to the nationalist path to industrialization, his nationalism receded, and he eventually pursued a dependent capitalist path to industrialization.32
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Implicit in Ko Yông-bok’s appraisal is that Park was a pragmatist who adapted his nationalist ideals of modernization to the realities of South Korea.33 The substance of Park’s nationalism was not a constant, but a variable changing over time. For him, nationalism was an ideological construct with which to expedite economic modernization, to consolidate his fragile political power, and to mobilize civil society to fulfill his vision of transforming South Korea into an industrial powerhouse. It is this instrumental ideology of industrializing nationalism that persisted from the military coup in 1961 to his unexpected death in 1979.
Park ascribed what he saw as the mediocrity of five thousand years of Korean history to the lack of internal cohesion that continually invited foreign invasion, the loss of national identity, and the rise of flunkeyism as well as the lack of innovation in economic life and the resulting vicious circle of poverty and underdevelopment. Park’s total negation of Korean history was as much a calculated political move as an outburst of nationalist ideological beliefs. The legitimization of his 1961 coup depended on his ability to put South Korea’s past in the most unfavorable light possible and to project the future as one of “rich nation, strong army.” The more effective Park was in projecting the image of a leader who had brought about this radical break in Korean history, the greater his mandate to rule the country.34
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