The tumultuous history of the Korean Peninsula can be seen through a myriad of prisms. In some cases that defy conventional wisdom. Well-educated Koreans in the South moved willingly to the communist North before the Korean War and stayed. One exceptional case caught the attention of Ryuta Itagaki, a professor of historical anthropology, and the outcome is an illuminating saga of a prominent linguist.

In 2010, Itagaki, then a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, met Kim Hye-young, a Korean language instructor, in Toronto. She mentioned that her father was a linguist named Kim Su-gyong. She was born in Pyongyang but she and her mother and four siblings parted from him amid the dust of war and ended up in the South.

The family immigrated to Canada in the 1970s with the hope of having a better chance there to look for Kim in the North and be whole again. To that end, Kim Hye-young majored in linguistics, and in 1988, her road map paid off. She reunited with her father at an academic conference in Beijing.

Back at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, Itagaki happened to hear about Kim Su-gyong two years later. Ko Young-jin, a college professor and expert in North Korea’s language policies, described Kim Su-gyong as a “genius linguist and polyglot,” who laid the foundation for North Korean linguistics from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Incidentally, Doshisha University’s Institute for Study of Humanities and Social Sciences was planning to host an international symposium on East Asian studies in 2013. The twosome set out to organize a symposium on Kim Su-gyong, the first ever, inviting scholars from South Korea, China and Japan.

Scouring a paucity of information, Itagaki compiled a timeline of Kim’s life and a list of his works. During his research, he became infatuated with the man and his career and achievements. At the same time, he was struck by the tragic odyssey of Kim and his family through the rough years of national division, war and subsequent separation. He thought he could construct a broad historical narrative of the 20th century based on a microscopic study of an extraordinary individual who struggled to cope with turbulent times. It would span colonial occupation, the Cold War, Marxism, North Korean politics, family dispersion and Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics.

In a sense, the discovery of Kim Su-gyong was a breakthrough in Itagaki’s pursuit of Korean studies. In a follow-up to his doctoral research on the “colonial experience in Sangju, North Gyeongsang Province,” he intended to conduct a similar study on the North Korean region of Hamhung. While research material piled up, he found the subject trickier than expected. Unlike Sangju where he stayed extensively, on-site research on Hamhung was impossible.

For the next eight years, Itagaki wholly devoted himself to tracing the trajectory of Kim’s personal and academic life. His unflagging quest for relevant material resulted in many trips to South Korea, China, Russia, the United States and Canada, as well as public archives and old bookstores in Japan. He interviewed Kim’s relatives and acquaintances, collecting old photographs, letters and memoirs, in Toronto, Los Angeles, Moscow, Beijing and Seoul.

Itagaki’s efforts culminated in Kim’s first book-length biography, “Kim Su-gyong 1918-2000, A Korean Linguist Who Went North,” published in Japanese in Tokyo in 2021. A Korean edition with the same title came out in Seoul earlier this year.

The 550-page Korean edition is a gripping page-turner. It is a touching testimony to a scholar’s academic integrity and dedication to his subject, interwoven with his humanitarian insight. The book has two parts: five chapters depicting the protagonist’s life story and four chapters explaining his academic principles and activities. These chapters are presented in an alternate plot which the author describes as a “contrapuntal biography,” borrowing Edward Said’s concept of “contrapuntal reading.” The last chapter integrates the two parts.

Kim Su-gyong was born in Tongchon, Kangwon Province, just north of the DMZ. He studied philosophy and structural linguistics at Keijo Imperial University, the predecessor of Seoul National University, and undertook graduate studies in Korean linguistics at Tokyo Imperial University. After World War II he taught at Gyeongseong College of Commerce, which would later be incorporated into Seoul National University.

In 1946, amid the postwar chaos, Kim joined the Korean Communist Party and crossed the 38th parallel soon afterward to join Kim Il Sung University as a founding member of its faculty. The ensuing two decades saw him playing a central role in establishing the North’s language policies and standardizing its theories of orthography and linguistics, as the author of the country’s first textbooks on grammar and stylistics.

“Putting together fragmentary information about Kim as if playing jigsaw puzzles, I was completely fascinated by his writings,” Itagaki wrote in his preface. “And the more I learned about his personal history the more I came to see how closely it was interlocked with the impossible history surrounding the Korean Peninsula.” He later remarked in a press interview that he couldn’t be more pleased if his book could make a small contribution to overcoming the prolonged division of the peninsula.

Lee Kyong-hee

Lee Kyong-hee is a former editor-in-chief of The Korea Herald. The views expressed here are the writer's own. -- Ed.