Law and Customs : The Girl at the Confluence of Colonial Law and Family Customsin the 1920s and 30s

An article featured in the May 3rd, 1923 edition of Maeil sinbo (Daily News) reports the story of a 16-year-old girl who had been sold for 180 won in order to pay her father's debt. However, she was miraculously “returned” when the colonial court called the transaction illegal. Newspapers began to flourish in colonial Korea during the 1920s, and such stories of girls inundated the news. As a figure, the girl (or the daughter) was often depicted in print primarily as either a victim of crime, including human trafficking, or as a key culprit in scandals or acts of vandalism, theft, fire, etc. Salacious tales fueled the journalistic drive to increasingly sensationalize the girl as a tabloid subject. Caught between age-old customs such as daughter selling, and an emerging journalism which drove her public profile ever higher, the girl ascended within legal debates—albeit briefly—as the alternative to widows as a potential heir. Proposed by the colonial government as part of the implementation of the Japanese Civil Code (1922-1923), discussions of the daughter's inheritance rights were raised by Japanese authorities, only to encounter vehement resistance by conservative sectors of Korean society that could not fathom the possibility. This paper explores the complex figure of the colonial Korean girl during the 1920s and 30s. I examine her place within the emerging institutions of modern law and journalism, how she was cast as a newly-distinct and recognizable social entity, yet all the while still subject to persistent customs of degradation and violence.