Abuse of Modernity: Japanese Biological Determinism and Identity Management in Colonial Korea

Medical researcher Kubo Takeshi’s contributions to professional publications, such as Chōsen igakkai zasshi (The Korean medical journal), and more popular magazines, such as Chōsen oyobi Manshū (Korea and Manchuria), reflected many of the prejudicial attitudes that Japanese held toward Koreans during the first decade of colonial rule. His scholarship was based on biological determinist thinking, an approach developed by eighteenth-century European medical researchers to establish race, class, and gender hierarchies. For Kubo this approach provided a means for exploiting scientific inquiry to establish and manage Japanese superiority over Korean subjects in a more stable manner than one based on more malleable cultural differences. A people could adjust its customs or mannerisms to amalgamate with a suzerain culture but could not do so with hereditarily determined features, such as blood type or cranium size, shape, or weight. Practitioners, however, often linked the physical with the cultural by arguing that a people’s physical structure was a product of its cultural heritage. The subjectivity injected into this seemingly objective research methodology abused the lay community’s blind trust in modern science in two ways. First, it employed this inquiry to verify biased observations, rather than to uncover new truths; second, it altered the approach, rather than the conclusions, when this inquiry demonstrated the desired truths to be inaccurate. Biological determinism proved useful in substantiating a Japanese-Korean colonial relationship that acknowledged historically similar origins while arguing for the historically different evolutions of the two peoples. Keywords: biological determinism, Chōsen igakkai zasshi, Kubo Takeshi, craniology, racial identity, Keijō Medical College, colonial history, Kubo Inciden

A greedy algorithm for computing eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix

We present a greedy algorithm for computing selected eigenpairs of a large sparse matrix $H$ that can exploit localization features of the eigenvector. When the eigenvector to be computed is localized, meaning only a small number of its components have large magnitudes, the proposed algorithm identifies the location of these components in a greedy manner, and obtains approximations to the desired eigenpairs of $H$ by computing eigenpairs of a submatrix extracted from the corresponding rows and columns of $H$. Even when the eigenvector is not completely localized, the approximate eigenvectors obtained by the greedy algorithm can be used as good starting guesses to accelerate the convergence of an iterative eigensolver applied to $H$. We discuss a few possibilities for selecting important rows and columns of $H$ and techniques for constructing good initial guesses for an iterative eigensolver using the approximate eigenvectors returned from the greedy algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach with examples from nuclear quantum many-body calculations, many-body localization studies of quantum spin chains and road network analysis.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl