Joseph A. Seeley's "Border of Water and Ice"

Joseph A. Seeley is Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia. He specializes in the histories of Korea, the Japanese Empire, and East Asian environments and borderlands.

Seeley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria, and reported the following:

“By nature a Korean takes to smuggling like a duck to water.”

These harsh, discriminatory words and their historical context is examined in page 99 of my book, Border of Water and Ice. K-pop is undoubtedly more famous today than K-smuggling, but as my book shows, the fluid Yalu River between China and northern Korea has long seen a thriving underground trade. After Japanese imperialists colonized Korea in 1910, they encouraged Koreans to smuggle goods across the river in order to further expand Japan’s influence into China.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from Roy Maxwell Talbot, an American official working for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Talbot unfairly saw Korean participation in smuggling as a racial flaw. But as page 99 of my book states, “Blaming smuggling on Koreans’ ethnicity was easier than dealing with the systemic factors that fueled Korean participation in this illicit trade.” With few other economic options under Japanese rule, thousands of poor, marginalized Koreans along the border were drawn into the underground economy as a way to survive. Japanese merchants profited from their activities, and Japanese border police were very much complicit. As I note on the very bottom of page 99: “widespread Korean involvement in smuggling would have been unimaginable without the protection offered by Japanese police authorities.”

This page gives a taste of what my book is about: how Japanese colonialists tried to control and exploit border-crossers, like Korean smugglers, to further their goals. One key aspect of the book not covered in this specific page is how the Yalu River itself—with its seasonal floods, freezes, and thaws—shaped these underground economies and other aspects of border life. Smugglers knew that their success or failure depended on an intimate understanding of this protean border of water and ice.

Learn more about Border of Water and Ice at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue