The comedy film, YMCA Baseball
Team, is one of those “feel-good” movies that makes your day better, especially
better if you do love Korea and her people from the bottom of your heart and
you dream of one unified Korea. I can surely watch the scene of Korean
minjok/minjung victory in the rematch against Japanese colonial officers over
and over. United Koreans, at the end, overcome a foreign influence of
colonialism. Koreans are unified!
In the film, during the critical
moment of Korean history and destiny, when Korea becomes the protectorate of
Japan after the signing of the Eulsa Treaty in 1905, a diverse group of Koreans
from yangban to chonmin backgrounds discovers baseball, a new Western sport, and
joins the first baseball team in Korea called YMCA Baseball Team.
The creation of YMCA Baseball Team, organized by Min
Jong-rim, a female coach educated in the West, parallels the development of
Korean nationalism, minjok, a modern construct (337). According to Carter
Eckert, before the late 19th century, “there was little, if any,
feeling of loyalty toward the abstract concept of “Korea” as a nation state, or
toward fellow inhabitants of the peninsula as “Koreans” and Korean people did
have stronger “attachments to their
village or region, and above all to their clan, lineage, and immediate and
extended family” (338). However because of Japanese colonialism at bay, Korean
political activists and intellectuals from the independence movements desired
and envisioned Korea’s collective identity in terms of a “deep, horizontal
comradeship” regardless of the actual divisions and inequalities that prevailed
in Korean society (339). Furthermore, Korean nationalists started to view
Koreans as a unique ethnic group not as yangban, commoners, and base people
(342).
In the movie, baseball is the source of unity and “One
Korea.” It brings people from different hierarchies of the Choson Dyansty and
transforms them into one Korean Team. Lee Ho-chang , the main character, is a
son of a yangban scholar. Oh Dae-hyeon and Min are from Korean elites educated
outside of Korea; they are nationalists and members of the Anti-Eulsa League,
an organization formed in protest of the Five Eulsa Traitors. Ryu Kwang-tae, is
a son of the Choson official whose father is part of the Five Eulsa Traitors.
Ma Seong-han is a former servant of the chonmin background while Lee-Eun is an
artisan, a commoner. Without the introduction of baseball and the desire to win
the rematch against Japan (Korean nationalism), these characters would not be
part of a cohesive group, but would continue living their own separate
traditional lifestyles. In addition, the
team spirit of baseball (force of nationalism) left me speechless because even
though Oh and Ryu became enemies because Oh tried to assassinate Ryu’s father,
in the rematch, they apologized, forgave each other, and worked as a team in
order to defeat the Japanese.
Just as film characters became
one team through baseball, descendants of yangban, commoners, and chonmin
became today’s Korean ethnic group under the banner of Korean nationalism. But
a series of questions that came to my mind is “Are modern Koreans really a
single, unified, “homogenous” group in the Korean nation state? Isn’t there a
still strong regionalism in South Korea where names of political leaders such
as Park Chung-hee and Kim Dae Jung ignite such political controversies and
different emotional responses for people of different regions? Do Korean
nationalists consider overseas Koreans, mixed people such as children of
American GIs and South Asian wives, and North Korean defectors, part of their “KOREAN
MINJOK/MINJONG”?
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