Beyond Japan: Reviving Korea’s Past Toward Its Future Global Ascendance

This paper explores how Korean immigrant leaders in the United States from the 1930s to 1940s reformulated the story of their country’s past toward advancing a vision of a future sovereign Korea. Drawing on petitions and letters written by Korean immigrant organizations to American government agencies as well as news articles, it situates these efforts within a moment when Korean immigrant leaders began to see the growing possibilities of forming kinship with the United States in opposition to the Japanese empire. By doing so, this paper argues that Korean immigrant leaders glorified their country’s history to highlight their racial superiority—or their racial “fit”—and thus position Korea less as a colonized country than as an equal player among other national powers on the global stage.