Video: From SPAM™ to K-Pop: The Korean War and the Rise of Modern South Korea
Sean C. Kim, Professor of History, University of Central Missouri
Ilisa Barbash, Curator of Visual Anthropology, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
South Korea has recently jumped onto the global stage through its economic rise and export of popular culture. Drawing on their new book, The Forgotten Home Front: Roger Marshutz’s Photographs of Pusan, South Korea, 1952–1954 (Peabody Museum Press and KMEC Books, 2026), coauthors Lisa Barbash and Sean Kim visually explore a key moment of transition in the development of South Korea: the Korean War (1950–1953). This conflict ruptured Korea’s traditional and colonial past and ushered in new political, economic, and cultural opportunities—under American influence—that have shaped modern South Korea. By examining this moment of change through photography, the lecture illuminates South Korea’s rise from a war-torn peninsula to an economic powerhouse and global cultural trendsetter.
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture in collaboration with the Harvard Korea Institute.
Recorded April 23, 2026
About the Speakers
Sean C. Kim is Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri where he teaches courses on East Asian, World, and U.S. history. Kim holds a PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research focuses on modern Korean religious history, particularly the emergence of Protestant Christianity. Kim is currently working on an edited volume on Korean religions.
Ilisa Barbash is Curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. Her book, Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (Peabody Museum Press, 2015) received the John Collier, Jr. Award from the Society for Visual Anthropology. Her coedited volume, To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (Aperture/Peabody Museum Press, 2020) won the 2021 Rencontres d’Arles, Best Historical Photographic Book Award.
Transcript
From SPAM™ to K-Pop: The Korean War and the Rise of Modern South Korea
[00:00:06.80] Hello. Good evening, everyone. My name is Caroline Jean Fernald. I'm the Executive Director of Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, a partnership of four public-serving museums, where our mission is to connect collections and research at Harvard with global audiences, fostering community, and deepening appreciation for science, the natural world, human cultures, and our shared experiences.
[00:00:32.60] With this mission in mind, I am delighted to welcome you to tonight's program presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, a partner of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, in collaboration with the Harvard Korea Institute. We are thrilled to welcome Sean C. Kim and Ilisa Barbash, co-authors of The Forgotten Home Front, Roger Marshutz's Photographs of Pusan, South Korea, 1952 to 1954, published this year by the Peabody Museum Press and KMEC Books.
[00:01:02.28] Tonight, they will discuss South Korea's rise from a wartorn peninsula to an economic powerhouse and global cultural trendsetter. I'm very thrilled that I get to stand up here with the backdrop of cans of SPAM. I have been gassing up and promoting this talk for weeks now. And on Tuesday when we gave a talk, I said I was going to be so sad after Thursday that I no longer got to say the word SPAM in my introductory remarks. This is a staple in my household.
[00:01:28.52] And the other thing I want to do, besides talk about SPAM, is to just really show off this book. It's a beautiful book. And we have all been marveling at the beautiful binding, in particular. It lays flat on the desk. So highly recommend you check out the book. After the program, where you can, you'll have an opportunity to purchase a copy of The Forgotten Home Front and have it signed in the museum galleries upstairs. Our staff and volunteers will guide you.
[00:01:53.92] HMSC's partnership of museums crosses many disciplines, and we host a wide array of events throughout the year at our four museums. On April 28, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments will host the panel discussion "Making a nation, technologies of the American Revolution," which will highlight the role of surveying electricity and mathematics in the Revolutionary War and its wider historical moment in the Boston area.
[00:02:18.80] On April 30, we will host Arts Thursdays Botanical Wonders at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. At this event, you can marvel at the Blaschka glass flowers, see behind-the-scenes collections and research, and, most importantly of all, make your very own felt succulent. To learn more about additional upcoming museum events, I invite you to visit our website hmsc.harvard.edu, where you can sign up for our newsletter. Or you can also follow us on social media.
[00:02:46.76] We are grateful to all our members and supporters for making these programs possible. It is now my pleasure to introduce Diana Lauren, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Thank you.
[00:03:02.21] [APPLAUSE]
[00:03:05.93] Good evening, everybody. It's my great pleasure to introduce our speakers for tonight and to talk about their wonderful work. I wanted to start with a little backstory to provide you with information on how this collection came to be at the Peabody Museum. So the Peabody actually learned of Roger Marshutz's photographs when he cold called us around 2002, 2003. He was a professional photographer, and he decided that the Harvard Peabody Museum would be a place to deposit the photographs that he took as an American GI in what is now South Korea at the tail end of the Korean War.
[00:03:43.73] At that time, the museum's director, Ruby Watson, consulted with the late Carter Eckert, head of the Korea Center at Harvard, who felt that they were a wonderful documentation of Korea during 1952 to 1954. When the collection was accessioned into the Peabody Museum, Ilisa Barbash, Peabody Curator of Visual Anthropology, was asked to co-curate an exhibit of the photographs with Sean Kim, Harvard PhD and post grad.
[00:04:13.49] So the exhibition of that work, in which Roger Marshutz was an active participant, was shown at the Peabody in 2006. With Roger's blessing, Sean and Ilisa decided to undertake a book. As happened so often, books take time, but we're so pleased with the beautiful product that you can see when you purchase a copy.
[00:04:39.13] So let me introduce Ilisa and Sean. Ilisa is curator of visual anthropology at the Peabody Museum, where she makes films, writes books, and curates exhibits about photography. Her book, Where All the Worlds End, which was published by Peabody Press in 2015, was about Western representation of the Ju/'hoansi in 1950s Namibia and was awarded the John Collier Junior Award for Visual Excellence in the Use of Still Photography by the Society of Visual Anthropology.
[00:05:11.13] She then co-edited To Make Their Own Way in the World, The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, which was copublished by Aperture and the Peabody Museum in 2020. And that book won the 2020-- and excuse me if I don't pronounce French correctly-- Rencontres d'Arles-- I'm looking at Ilisa-- Best Historical Photographic Book Award. So that's wonderful.
[00:05:35.63] Sean is a Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri, where he teaches courses in East Asian, world, and US history. He received his PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University, studying modern Korean history under the late Professor Carter Eckert.
[00:05:56.45] Sean's research focuses on Korean religious history, in particular the growth and indigenization of Protestant Christianity. So please join me in welcoming Ilisa Barbash and Sean Kim as they talk about their work.
[00:06:11.91] [APPLAUSE]
[00:06:14.13] Thank you all for coming. Thank you, Diana and Caroline. I'll speak first, and then Sean will speak. And we kind of wrote the book taking turns writing chapters, dividing the chapters up, writing captions, editing each other's work. And it took a few years. Sean got tenure. I published other books. But we're really happy to finally have this book emerge.
[00:06:45.51] And I want to give a special shout out to Peter Marshutz and Hilary Casanova, who are Roger Marshutz's adult children, who I hope are watching on Zoom.
[00:07:01.14] When we accepted Roger Marshutz's photographs, we knew they were something about the Korean War, but it really takes looking through a collection to find out exactly what it is. And in fact, it was a little bit more than just about the Korean War, which is an enormous topic on its own, obviously.
[00:07:26.66] We looked through the photographs, and we realized that they were not about combat. They were not about what you really think about when you think about war. Instead, they were about the collateral damage of war. They were based mainly in Pusan, or Busan, and I'll get into that more deeply, and Sean will get way more deeply into that.
[00:07:48.32] But that was the place where after the advances of Chinese and North American forces, that was-- Pusan was the place, a port city where people flocked to escape the war, so South Koreans and maybe North Koreans. And the population of Pusan basically doubled at that time.
[00:08:13.54] The Korean War is known as the forgotten war. And if you are a veteran of the Korean War-- and I spoke with one. He was absolutely perturbed that I would call it a forgotten war. It is called forgotten because it's sandwiched temporally between World War II and the Vietnam War and received a lot less attention, ultimately, in the history books. It also never really got resolved, which Sean will talk about in a bit.
[00:08:48.30] So The Forgotten Home Front seemed like a good title for this book. The forgotten home front is Pusan. It's the home front we don't think about when we think about the Korean War. And I think some might even think about the forgotten home front of the people in the United States and people related to the UN forces who fought the war, what their home lives were like during this three-year conflict.
[00:09:19.50] Roger Marshutz is one of the best photographers you probably have never heard of. Has anyone heard of Roger before seeing this talk or notice of this talk? OK. So Roger was born in 1929, in Los Angeles. And he studied engineering, but his true love was photography. And when he was drafted for the Korean War, most of the fighting was already over. And instead, he worked as a photographer for the Pusan-based public information office at the Pusan military post.
[00:09:58.46] And his primary job was to document American reconstruction efforts and to do PR for the military. But I'll get back to that. So how might you have heard of Roger Marshutz's work, or how might you have seen his work? Well, he took this photograph of Marilyn Monroe. He became a Hollywood photographer after the war and took pictures of celebrities.
[00:10:27.38] He said in a magazine interview, I'd go to someone's house, like Natalie Wood's or Kim Novak's, and spend an afternoon shooting them or taking pictures on a lot. Being short and a little introverted at the time, I just captured people. The camera lets you hide behind it, lets you lean on it, and make it work.
[00:10:51.35] He took this picture of Elvis Presley, which is more famous. Presley was performing at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show in Tupelo. Roger used a Leica brand camera with a rapid wind base that allowed him to take a quick succession of photographs. And he said there were other negatives made, like the one before and the one after, but those weren't the same as this. There's always a decisive moment, as Henri Cartier-Bresson says.
[00:11:27.83] Now, Henri Cartier-Bresson-- I'm trying to pronounce it correctly-- was a French photographer whose French book, Images a la Sauvette, was translated in English to have the title The Decisive Moment. It's a special moment in photography. Many people think of The Decisive Moment as capturing the action that is portrayed, the moment that-- and I'm not going to use the pointer the way I thought I was. So please don't be alarmed by not seeing the light go on.
[00:12:06.75] It's the moment-- he's in action, and you can see it's a wonderful moment. But also, the decisive moment actually belongs more to the camera person. It's the way the action fits into a frame geometrically, with this perfect diagonal reach of Presley and the microphone, Presley going down, the microphone and his body going up, and toward the crowd, the crowd reacting back, Presley's head and shoulders sort of aligned almost at the top of the frame.
[00:12:44.27] And then you see this guitar person right there. And that kind of enlivens the whole composition. And you can imagine the frame before and the frame after. It could not have possibly captured all these elements. It is a decisive moment. So Roger was very fond of diagonals, and it's going to be a theme in my portion of the talk. And then you'll start seeing diagonals wherever you go, especially in Sean's images.
[00:13:16.23] So we have the diagonal of the enormous load of I'm not even sure what on the man's back, going like that, and then a blank space but with interesting squares and lines in front of him. And then the diagonal of the handle of what he's carrying. And what he's carrying is a load using a pack called a jige. And Americans called it an A-frame. So it has a point at the top, and it goes out like an A.
[00:13:57.79] American soldiers really admired that. I found writings by American soldiers who were talking about what amazing construction it was. Somebody liked it so much they named the local newspaper for the military services the A-Frame News. It was a local weekly version of Stars and Stripes, which still does exist, which is the voice of the military for the troops in a newspaper form.
[00:14:31.91] The A-Frame News not only printed many of Roger Marshutz's photos but also articles he wrote about how to take pictures. Roger was, in fact, one of over probably 700 soldiers who photographed the war. And of course, there were professional photographers who photographed the war as well.
[00:14:52.71] One of Marshutz's primary tasks was to photograph Brigadier General William S. Whitcomb, Korean-based Section Commanding General in charge of reconstruction. In other words, Roger was doing his public relations. And you can see a diagonal between the top of Whitcomb's head, going down his neck to the bottom of Syngman Rhee, the President of South Korea's, elbow. And Rhee is giving Whitcomb a medal there.
[00:15:25.19] What I also love about this picture is Roger's use of light. Everybody's got sort of a white outline around them, which is what we call backlighting. And it's natural light that comes from the window. And if you do it wrong, your picture gets blown out. And if you do it right, you have this wonderful sort of white halo around the subjects in your photograph.
[00:15:53.88] Roger followed Whitcomb to many events, including visiting orphanages, which was a large project in reconstruction. This is Whitcomb being presented with a basket of eggs from two little girls.
[00:16:16.52] But when Roger had free time, he would wander the streets of Pusan and record life on the Korean home front in alleyways. And he captured on film a panoramic view of Korean society and culture and revealed a nation in a period of extreme transition. And that's what Sean is going to speak to you more about.
[00:16:42.96] In this picture. I want you to notice the frames within frames. We have the window frames. We also have this moment that I said was this moment of the country in transition. We have apples in a store. And then we have all sorts of American goods in this store.
[00:17:03.88] And some of them use-- some of the older people in the room, including myself, might notice candies like Chuckles that are no longer made. And then it's Bit-O-Honey. It's nice to know that Baby Ruths still exists.
[00:17:24.28] OK, so this also, I think, is something-- it's got diagonals. It's got frames within frames. The frames, rather than being sort of straight lines, they are the piles of tires that are darker. So he's using darkness and light to highlight and bring your eye into the frame to see this woman. I think she's holding a baby.
[00:17:57.28] But it's this really complicated composition that if Roger really wanted to get the woman alone, he could have walked a little closer in and not had all these framing devices. This is what I would call a decisive moment, even though there's not a lot of action in it.
[00:18:18.92] Here, we see Roger's ironic sense of humor and, again, some diagonals. These are firefighters putting out a fire. Above their heads is a poster of a woman who is part of a Lucky Strike advertisement. And Lucky Strike was a cigarette brand popular at that time.
[00:18:40.10] Roger liked to go around Pusan and find signs to photograph he liked there. He did not speak Korean. He used the ones that he did not understand as graphic elements in his photography. And then the ones he did know, he found some irony in them.
[00:19:01.56] In this photograph, we see signs and, as I said, graphic elements. We see darkness. We see this woman is highlighted by the light. And then there's this V of diagonals revealing a hillside behind these busy streets of Pusan that have soldiers in them as well as civilians.
[00:19:26.24] And those hills contain makeshift shelters that were built by some of the many people who fled from the North to the South and had nowhere to live and just made encampments up in the hills.
[00:19:45.33] So that's my introduction to Roger's work. Sean Kim is going to now tell you how, through Roger's work, we find a really interesting history of Korea. And then I'm going to pop in back and show you a little bit more of Roger's photos at the end. Thank you.
[00:20:07.49] Good evening. It's a great pleasure to be here this evening. And thank you all for joining us in person and online. And thank you to the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture for hosting today's presentation. It has been my privilege to work with Ilisa on the extraordinary collection of photos by Roger Marshutz. I learned a lot about diagonals. I knew nothing about photographs. And I don't know that much now, but, yes, diagonals.
[00:20:36.05] I had the honor of meeting Roger Marshutz when he came for the exhibition in 2006. In fact, after the exhibition, I showed him around Cambridge and Boston, and he even came to my apartment to check his email. This is 2006, so you couldn't check your phone for email. So he paid me the honor of a visit to my apartment.
[00:21:00.29] As Diana Loren mentioned in her introduction, it was the late Professor Carter Eckert who introduced me to Roger's photo collection. And I remember the day when Carter gathered up all his graduate students and took us to the Peabody Museum. At first, I thought it was the Peabody Museum in Salem, I mean, just my ignorance of geography. So we went to the Peabody Museum, and he was so excited, just brimming with excitement about this collection, 3,000 photographs.
[00:21:34.09] And he explained to us what an extraordinary, valuable contribution this would be to the Harvard Museums as well as to Korean studies at Harvard. I regret that neither Roger nor Carter are here to see the publication of the book, but I think if they were, they would be very pleased. It is really a beautiful, beautiful book.
[00:21:57.49] My role in both the exhibition and the book has been to provide the historical context for the photos. So that's what I'll be doing this evening, and I'll try to keep my comments brief so we can have plenty of time for discussion. So I'll be skipping over a lot.
[00:22:11.57] Let me begin with some brief comments about the Korean War. For most of the first half of the 20th century, Korea had been a colony of Japan. From 1910 to 1945, it was part of the Japanese colonial empire. With Japan's defeat in World War II, Korea was divided into different occupation zones, the Soviets in the North, the Russians in the North, the Americans in the South. So similar to what happened to Germany after World War II, the Allies came and partitioned the country. You had military occupation.
[00:22:50.81] And then when the Soviets and the Americans left, the Koreans themselves, split by ideology, established separate governments in the North and South. And sadly, the division continues to this day. In 1950, North Korea tried to force reunification of the two halves with an invasion of the self, prompting the United States to send troops to help the South and prevent the spread of communism.
[00:23:21.83] I grew up in Independence, Missouri. And some of you know that's Harry Truman's hometown. This is the era of Truman's containment policy and preventing the spread of communism. The war ended in a stalemate, and the Korean Peninsula remains divided roughly along the same boundary where the war began.
[00:23:42.94] What followed the Korean War was the rebuilding of both Koreas but based on very different models. North Korea turned to the Soviet Communist model and South Korea to American-style capitalism. And for South Korea, the political, military, and economic ties to the United States continued in the decades that followed.
[00:24:05.34] So one of the themes that are in the historical part of this book is the very, very close relationship between the US and South Korea. And it's not just political military ties that began with the Korean War, but it extends well beyond that into society, culture, religion. I mean, really, almost all aspects of South Korean life you can't imagine without the relationship to the United States.
[00:24:34.54] The city of Pusan played no small role in South Korea's remarkable post-war transformation. As Ilisa pointed out, during the Korean War, in the initial invasion, in the initial wave of the North Korean military-- so the North Koreans crossed the border and within a very, very short period of time took the entire peninsula except a 50 by 50 mile area known as the Pusan perimeter. So the Port of Pusan and the area surrounding it, that was all that was left of South Korea when the US decided to intervene.
[00:25:15.54] So during the Korean War, Pusan was South Korea's only opening to the US and the world. And it was through Pusan that American forces and economic relief and aid entered Korea. Since the war, Pusan, as the nation's main port, has served as a gateway for international trade and commerce. Today it's a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis of 3.5 million people.
[00:25:45.22] This is a photo of Pusan in the early 1900s. For centuries, the city had served as the main port for Korea, in particular because of its proximity to Japan. The city served as a center for the trade between Korea and Japan. In fact, during the Chosun Dynasty, which was 1392 to 1910, Korea's last dynasty, very long dynasty, there was actually a part of the city that was a Japanese quarter, where Japanese lived and carried on trade with the Koreans.
[00:26:15.26] When Japan made Korea colony in 1910, it further developed the city as an international port. This is a photo that Roger Marshutz took of the city during his time in Korea. Because Pusan was spared the fighting that took place during the war, Pusan perimeter, most of the city was left intact. And so, many of the buildings structures-- well, most-- from the Japanese colonial period survived in Pusan, whereas the rest of Korea, they were destroyed.
[00:26:50.22] Now, parts of Pusan were destroyed during the fire. You saw the firemen with the hose. There were major fires in Pusan when Roger was stationed there.
[00:27:02.90] This is a street scene of Pusan. And notice the Japanese-style buildings. And the Japanese also built a lot of Western-style buildings as well. And just an interesting bit of trivia, the students here, they look like either middle or high school students. The school uniforms, those are a legacy of Japanese colonialism. And from what I understand, they're based on Prussian military uniforms. The Japanese like Prussians.
[00:27:34.26] You saw Brigadier General Whitcomb in an earlier slide, again, with President Syngman Rhee. He was a president from 1948 to 1960. He was educated in the United States, including a master's degree from Harvard. And during the Japanese colonial period, he spent most of his time in the United States lobbying for Korean independence. And then after the Japanese left, he became the first president of the Republic of Korea.
[00:28:13.46] This is a closer view of one of the many refugee camps that dotted the hills of Pusan. When I first heard about this photo collection, one of my personal agendas-- both my father and mother were born and raised in Pyongyang in North Korea, and they fled when the UN forces retreated. And the Chinese entered the war in the winter of 1950, so UN and US forces retreated. So my parents, both of my parents, they were teenagers. They fled with the American troops.
[00:28:51.07] And my father went all the way down to Pusan. And so I thought dad might be in one of these 3,000 photos. I never found him. There was one that looked like him, but he wasn't in the photos.
[00:29:05.87] The book covers many, many different aspects of the home front. And in the interest of time, I'm going to focus on two, leaving out a lot. And those two are the economy. South Korea went through a remarkable economic transformation in the '60s, '70s, and so on. And then the other area that I'd like to focus on today is religion, since that's my area of expertise. But also, Roger Marshutz had lots of photographs of religion.
[00:29:38.79] So beginning with the economy, Roger's photos depict the South Korean economy at its lowest point, devastated by the war and just beginning to recover. I remember a week or so ago hearing in the news how the war in Iran, just that kind of limited military action, it's going to take 12 years to recover. I think about the devastation-- the total war of the Korean War, how long it took South Korea to recover, although it rebuilt itself rather quickly.
[00:30:17.59] Into the early 1960s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. And the economy was almost entirely dependent on US economic aid. It was really a basket case.
[00:30:35.51] Roger has several photos of the informal extralegal economy that developed so-called black markets. He took numerous shots of open-air markets and stalls, where a variety of imports, mostly US goods, were being sold by vendors. And US military boots-- and I don't know what else is on this table, but I love this photo of him counting the money.
[00:31:07.59] While Koreans on the streets suffered severe shortages of food and goods, Americans, American soldiers sat on a huge surplus in their military installations. The items made their way into the streets through a collusion among US soldiers and Korean participants. More US goods, piles of canned American goods.
[00:31:37.99] One of the most popular items that came from US bases is SPAM. And I'm going to go back to the-- I saw a similar display at H Mart. And I love this SPAM, Classic SPAM, Mild, one slice of spam with a hot bowl of rice.
[00:32:06.91] Introduced by Hormel in 1937, SPAM spread around the world since World War II with US soldiers. And of course, I know a lot of you are probably familiar with Hawaiian cuisine, how they incorporate SPAM. One of the ways in which SPAM was integrated into the Korean diet was a so-called budae jjigae, army base stew, in which small cubes of SPAM are boiled with kimchi, vegetables, and ramen noodles.
[00:32:37.84] While some of the SPAM may have come through the extralegal markets, there are stories of Koreans scavenging through the trash of military bases to find the SPAM and whatever else was edible and putting them all in a stew. So it's also called garbage stew. It's a humble reminder of Korea's sad past.
[00:32:59.56] A few more comments about the economy. The South Korean economy, of course, has come a long way since the 1950s. Beginning in the 1960s, South Korea experienced what is called the Miracle on the Han River. The Han River is the main river that runs through Seoul. The government made economic development a top priority and, through a close partnership with large conglomerates called chaebol, like Samsung and Hyundai, laid down the foundations for rapid industrial growth based largely on exports.
[00:33:31.88] Again, I don't have time to get into the details, but the US played a key role, not only providing the market for the goods but also technology and other resources for the economic development. Let's turn to religion.
[00:33:47.44] This is one of my favorite photos in the book. It's one of 125 color photos in the collection, and I love the background of the roof as well as the posture of the monk. Roger's photos have scenes of all the major religious traditions of Korea-- Buddhism, Confucianism, and what we might broadly call folk religion or vernacular religion, I think is the term that is used now, vernacular, as well as Christianity.
[00:34:23.72] This is an example of the vernacular religion, fortune telling. And the man here is giving advice on everything from prospective spouses to the whereabouts of missing relatives. The predictions are based on a variety of different factors, such as year, month, day, time of your birth.
[00:34:50.72] Part of the vernacular religion is what we call shamanism. And I know that recently Korean shamanism has been introduced more broadly to the world in a big way with the popularity of KPop Demon Hunters. In the 1950s and 1960s, shamanism was actually suppressed by the South Korean government as superstitious and backward. But in the 1970s, it experienced a revival, even being seen as a spiritual foundations of the primal religion, the foundations of Korean identity.
[00:35:24.08] And today, it has gone global. I have a colleague who is a specialist in Korean shamanism. And she looks at shamans in the Korean diaspora in Los Angeles, Hawaii, Europe, and also how shamans today are using social media to reach a newer and younger audience.
[00:35:45.45] Among Roger's photos of religion, the vast majority are connected to Christianity. This comes as no surprise as the majority of the US troops were Christian, although Roger himself was Jewish. But the US military also coordinated its relief efforts in conjunction with Christian organizations. One of them was a Maryknoll medical clinic. And this is a Maryknoll sister.
[00:36:11.40] This medical clinic, which provided free medical care, was established during the Korean War as an emergency medical facility. And today, the clinic has become a full-fledged hospital, the Maryknoll Hospital in Pusan.
[00:36:29.72] The Protestants were even more active than the Catholics in the partnership with the US military, running orphanages as well as distributing relief packages. This is a photo of a Christmas service at one of the orphanages sponsored by the US military. The banner reads evangelistic band, [KOREAN], the Pusan Reconstruction Church. Such bands were sent out regularly on Sundays by churches to preach and distribute tracts.
[00:37:06.29] Pusan became a haven for the mass exodus of Christians who had fled the war, as well as the persecution of the religion by the Communist government in the North. And when the war was over, they spread out from Pusan to other parts of South Korea to plant their churches. Both, the Protestants and the Catholics drew their support from American churches and leaders. During the war, the evangelist Billy Graham had visited Korea to conduct one of his Crusades. And some of you may be familiar with Cardinal Francis Spellman, who was the Archbishop of New York. He also visited. And Roger has several photos of the Spellman visit.
[00:37:45.69] Some of you may know this, but South Korea today is one of the most Christian countries in Asia. And an example of this is the world's five largest churches are in Seoul, including the largest one of all. It's a Pentecostal church. And they claim a membership of 600,000 to 800,000. And so what began as a handful of churches in Pusan has really exploded in terms of success, numerical success.
[00:38:19.13] It was in the context of the Korean War that the foundations for the relationship between South Korea and the US were laid. Roger Marshutz's photos of Pusan document the forging of that relationship, one that in the decades to follow would extend beyond military, political, and economic ties to society, culture, and religion. The US has played an integral role in the rise of modern Korea.
[00:38:44.09] The photos reveal a country that is just beginning to recover from the ravages of war. There are heartbreaking scenes of refugee camps and orphan shelters. But in spite of the bleak circumstances of wartime Pusan, there's a vitality and energy that comes through the photos. From the hustle and bustle of the markets to the children at school and at play, Korean daily life resumed as the war drew to a close.
[00:39:14.89] And Roger Marshutz with his camera captured these images of vitality and hope for the future in a way that no words ever could. Ilisa will now return.
[00:39:31.08] [APPLAUSE]
[00:39:35.33] We wanted to show you a few more of Roger's works after he wound down his Hollywood photography career. In the 1990s, he did volunteer work with the Los Angeles Rescue Mission and Los Angeles Homeless Health Care. He photographed and interviewed people and created two projects.
[00:40:01.67] One was with ex-gang members in stucco frames that were spray painted with graffiti by the portrait subjects. And another was also collaborative. He framed portraits of unhoused people in corrugated cardboard and embedded the frames into speakers, where you could hear their voices talking about their lives.
[00:40:31.69] And Roger followed this really lovely trajectory of photographing about people and of people and then moving into a more collaborative mode. And as he said, my work is segments of our society, a voice that we normally don't have the inclination to talk to or have the desire to listen to. These are people we avoid or even afraid to approach. Each piece has this voice.
[00:41:03.42] And Roger's daughter sent me this picture. And so at some point in Roger's free time, he managed to go and photograph-- I don't know actually where this is, a photograph of a lion-- but I think it shows Roger's humor and intrepid spirit. And then we have some photo credits here. And we'll be very happy to answer any questions you might have.
[00:41:29.14] Thank you. Thank you very much for a very, very interesting presentation. I wanted to ask-- I wanted to say I've benefited greatly from South Korea's relationship with the United States as my wife is Korean. And so I'm very thankful for that. And I wanted to know, based on your knowledge of the photographs and what you've seen, what would you say the photographs have to say about the future of the relationship between South Korea and the United States?
[00:42:05.18] Historians don't like to talk about the future.
[00:42:08.20] [LAUGHTER]
[00:42:12.73] But I think the future-- President Obama made a statement about how the very, very strong relationship with-- I mean, this was a number of years ago-- but how South Korea is one of the closest allies of the US. And I think that will continue because the US continues to maintain a military presence, 20-some-thousand troops stationed in Korea, and the economic ties.
[00:42:50.34] And even an example of Korean actors winning the Academy Award, I mean, that's kind of an American validation of a Korean actor. The relationship is just so intimate that I think-- it's hard to predict the future. Now, there are challenges in that relationship, but my two cents worth is that it will continue pretty strong.
[00:43:22.30] I had a question about the religion. Actually, my in-laws are buried in a Catholic cemetery in Los Angeles. And there's a Korean priest from the 19th century, a big statue of him there. So I know that Catholicism had come much earlier, but it sounds like it grew exponentially after the Korean War. So was that due to the seeds having been planted earlier or due to people looking for something different in a time of distress? Or what led to-- or a lot of proselytizing from the Americans? Or how would you characterize that?
[00:44:04.64] I could spend the rest of the time answering that question. That deals with my research. As you pointed out, the Catholics came in about a century before the Protestants. So 1784 is when Catholicism came. And the Protestants, 1884, exactly 100 years later. And the Catholics didn't grow as quickly. And I think part of it had to do with its hierarchy and the foreign priests.
[00:44:33.74] But the Protestants, one of the factors was really aggressive colonization and evangelism. And then there are other factors as well. During the Japanese colonial period, the Japanese were the imperialist villains. And American missionaries, Protestant missionaries, they had set up schools and hospitals. They were seen as our friends, our supporters. So you don't have the same kind of anti-imperialist view of Christianity complicit in imperialism.
[00:45:06.61] So that helped the Protestants. It's really a number of factors. But I would say the aggressive evangelism, certainly for the Protestants. But then the growth has actually tapered off a little bit recently. There have been a number of major scandals involving large churches, corruption. So the growth of the Protestant church has stalled a little bit or even declined. But the Roman Catholics have really grown a lot in the last couple of decades.
[00:45:37.89] And part of that has to do with the fact that when South Korea was under a series of dictatorships, the Protestants pretty much accommodated, even supported the dictators. And so they lost a lot moral credibility or authority. Whereas the Catholic Church was very much part of the democratization movement. And Cardinal Stephen Kim was an outspoken critic of the dictators. And I think that has really helped the Roman Catholic Church.
[00:46:09.09] So Korea isn't the most Catholic country. I think the Philippines is. But Korea does have a very large Catholic community and I think 103 saints, canonized saints.
[00:46:27.79] Thank you so much for that talk. A couple of things. I'm Korean, and my parents also were from Pyongyang, and they came down. The second thing is they were Catholic. They became Catholic very early. And my father actually wrote the rough draft of the first constitution for the newly formed country of South Korea, Republic of South Korea.
[00:46:55.53] Wow.
[00:46:55.73] Yeah, because he was a Foreign Service diplomat. And back in the day, the up and coming diplomats, everyone was learning Japanese and German because that's what the propaganda said, that they were going to win. And there were only two people in the Foreign Service that decided to study US constitutional law, and my father was one of them.
[00:47:17.31] So when the dust settled and the US came in, they said, does anyone know anything about US government? And my dad raised his hand. And they used to make fun of him because, like, what are you doing? Why are you doing the losing side? And he said-- so he based the South Korean constitution on the US constitution. And so he wrote the rough draft. He was like the Thomas Jefferson.
[00:47:41.71] And then my last thing is my mom was in Pusan between 1949 and 1954 because she was a doctor in the MASH unit. So do you have pictures-- this is the reason why I came. Do you have pictures of MASH units or the US military or US military hospitals in Pusan? Because I would love to look and see if I can find my mom.
[00:48:09.95] There's really nothing outside of Pusan.
[00:48:13.23] But hospitals or anything?
[00:48:16.49] Well, I mean, we have them all online, so you can go through our website and access collections online and put in Marshutz's name. The medical ones we do have are Maryknoll hospitals and clinics. And so if she worked at one of the clinics, she could well be in one of the photos.
[00:48:43.65] She did. She did work in a church-affiliated--
[00:48:44.55] That would be amazing, and I hope you tell us.
[00:48:46.83] Oh, my gosh. All right, I will.
[00:48:54.19] We have a question from the Zoom audience. Could you share any insight to the lives of Korean civilian women and children post-war?
[00:49:08.87] So the question is post-war--
[00:49:12.15] Could you share any insight to the lives of Korean civilian women and children post-war?
[00:49:21.83] That's a really broad question. So I think a lot would depend on your socioeconomic background, what experience you had.
[00:49:42.63] In spite of the general poverty of the Korean War, as well as in the years that followed, there were still class differences, socioeconomic differences. So I would say for the general public, including women and children, there were very challenging times. As I mentioned earlier, the country was very, very poor.
[00:50:14.64] Yeah, it's a little beyond the scope of the book.
[00:50:21.12] Now, the book does talk about adoptions. That's something that we weren't able to cover in today's presentation. But there are many photos of the orphanages. And Holt, some of you may be familiar with the Holt agency, that was the main agency that facilitated adoption of Korean children in the United States. And recently, they've come under criticism for ethical abuses.
[00:50:54.12] So thousands of Korean orphans came to the United States through adoption. And women, there are many Korean women who married American servicemen and came. And so that's another topic that we didn't discuss. But part of the US-South Korea relationship is the flow of people, just orphans and wives of US military but immigrants-- I mean, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans who have come to the United States. So it's a flow of people as well.
[00:51:40.72] Was Marshutz a darkroom-focused photographer? In other words, when you compare his negatives and his photographs, did he dodge, did he crop, did he change the images from the ones taken out on the street?
[00:51:57.44] That's a good question. Was Marshutz a darkroom photographer? To what extent did he change his photographs after he took them? I would say in Korea, he just sent them off to either Japan. Or there was a ship that had a lab, and they would be processed there and printed. And then he would submit them for publication.
[00:52:28.88] When we worked with Roger, he was very conscious of dodging and cropping. And it was a little tricky because at the Peabody, we don't like to have our images altered. But we were working with Roger, and Roger was the photographer, so if he wanted to alter one of his images, we said, sure, this is your photograph. And in one case, he cut somebody out of a photograph to make a stronger dynamic line, diagonal line, but left the hand of that person in the photograph. And I use it when I'm teaching students why we don't mess with photography.
[00:53:16.42] But Roger had this tremendous career and ultimately, I'm sure, was very good at all sorts of darkroom techniques.
[00:53:28.10] You briefly mentioned the rebuilding economically through companies. And I'm wondering, was there a model for that? In other words, why was that decision made? Is that decision also made-- has it also been made in other countries? Anything you could tell me about that would be great.
[00:53:46.31] That's a great question. So in 1961, there was a coup d'état. So after Syngman Rhee had to go into exile because of-- he turned very authoritarian, dictatorial toward the end of his administration, rigging elections and such. So he was forced to go into exile and spent the rest of his life in Hawaii.
[00:54:17.93] And then there was a brief period of democracy. But then the economy continued to be a mess. And there was political, social unrest. So a young general took over in a relatively bloodless coup d'état, President Park Chung Hee. And then I think a year later, he was duly elected as president.
[00:54:40.53] And it really was he who, more than anyone else-- he became a dictator, terrible dictator later as well. But he made the economy the top priority. And the economic development really had kind of twin pillars-- on the one hand, a US-style capitalism. But the more direct model that he drew on was that of Meiji Japan.
[00:55:13.01] The Japanese, when they first modernized their economy, westernized their economy, it wasn't laissez-faire, free market capitalism. But the state took a very proactive role. And it wasn't socialism, but the state would work with the zaibatsu, the large conglomerates, and spearhead the development of the economy.
[00:55:43.49] And it was also export-driven. So the export-driven economy based on close relationship between the central government and large corporations, I mean, that came from Japan. And something I didn't mention in the presentation is-- so the US and Japan, not to take anything away from the South Korean economic development-- I mean, the president and the corporations-- and there were a lot of bureaucrats involved as well. That's another part of the Japanese model.
[00:56:19.13] But during the Vietnam War, South Korea was second only to the US in sending troops to South Vietnam. And that was part of an agreement where if South Koreans sent combat troops, the US would grant-- South Korea got a lot of money, lucrative contracts as well. And then another part is in 1965, diplomatic relations were normalized, resumed with Japan. And Japan gave South Korea a lot of money, in a way as a kind of reparation for the colonial period.
[00:56:56.49] But that's kind of in a nutshell. I'm leaving a lot out. But something that my mentor, the late Professor Eckert, talked about was-- the way that I was trained and a lot of historians are trained is we look at the big picture and big events and major figures.
[00:57:23.85] And part of my training, although it wasn't a big part of my training, was the quotidian, like the daily life. And there's so much that is missed when you just look at the big picture. And so there were a lot of moments when I thought, like, wow, you can't really get this from textbooks.
[00:57:47.76] And well, in particular, I guess, the example that comes to mind is-- I mentioned in response to an earlier question the orphans. And recently, many of these orphans now, they're adults, and there are quite a few good scholars of that history. But that was something that I had not really-- so that was one of the surprises, that part of it. I
[00:58:20.42] We knew there were orphans in the Korean War. We knew there were orphans who were brought to the United States, but just the detail and the names of the orphanages. And I didn't know that the US military was part of the relief efforts. And then when I did the research, a lot of the kind of dark side of that history too-- I mean, on the one hand, such good intentions.
[00:58:51.54] In fact, I think before Holt got involved, some US soldiers would literally pick kids off the streets and send them home. But seeing the experience through the eyes of the children, what that must have been like, to be sent from wartorn Korea to the Midwest America So yes, thank you for the question.
[00:59:21.66] Thank you so much.
[00:59:22.72] Thank you.
[00:59:23.64] Thank you.
[00:59:24.16] [APPLAUSE]