The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (& Max Ward!)

First, I’m going to start off with Max Ward’s talk “Imperial Sovereignty and Colonial Violence: An Analysis of the Japanese Peace Preservation Law through the Colonial Question.” While I will admit I didn’t follow his entire talk, I will say that I learned about the Japanese Peace Preservation Law, applied simultaneously between 1925 and 1945 throughout the entire Japanese empire; both metropole and colonies.  The Peace Preservation Law was implemented to suppress any communist movement in Japan.  There were 68,000 arrested or detained in Japan, and thousands more in the colonies.  However, problems arose regarding interpretation in the colonies versus the metropole.  There was no wording change in the law, so the was there a difference in how the law was applied in different places? If there was, what was it?  These questions just begin to scratch the surface of Max Ward’s talk; he goes on to analyze all of this and focuses a lot of time on the “kokutai,” or the “location of sovereignty.”

The Good, the Bad, and the Weird was sort of a Korean Western, which was unlike any other movie we’ve watched. I found myself enthralled with the action from the beginning; the opening scene was a blood bath.  It was soon obvious that Chang-yi represented the Bad, Do-won represented the Good, and Tae-goo the Weird. What struck me as most interesting was even though Chang-yi was collaborating with the Japanese, and Do-won was just working as a bounty hunter, that Tae-goo was not working for either Korean nationalists or Korean collaborators.  Tae-goo was purely motivated by the prospect of a treasure at the end of this treasure hunt.  As a thief, Tae-goo feels as though whether he be under the control of the Japanese empire or Korean nobility, his life is the same.  He has no country, he only has his hunt for money.