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Dear Mr. Park,
Perhaps I can help with some information about McCune and Reischauer.
1. You asked about their names.
Their full names were George McAfee McCune and Edwin Oldfather
Reischauer.
2. You asked about their backgrounds.
George McAfee McCune was born in Sonch'on, North P'yong'an Province, in
1908, the son of Dr. and Mrs. George Shannon McCune. (The photo on Henny's
reply to you is of the senior McCune, not of G.M. "Mac" McCune, who helped
devise the McCune Reischauer system of Romanizing the Korean Language.
George M. "Mac" McCune grew up in Sonch'on and P'yongyang in the teens
and twenties. He attended Pyongyang Foreign School during his early life
and but finished his secondary and college education in the United States
and married Evelyn Becker, a childhood friend from Korea who was the
daughter of Prof. & Mrs. Arthur L. Becker of Chosen Christian College (Yonhi
College, now Yonsei). He was working on his Ph.D. in East Asian History at
the University of California at Berkeley when he returned with Evelyn to
Seoul to stay with her parents on the Yonhi campus and spend his
dissertation research year working on Korean historical documents at what
was at the time pretty much Korea's only center for Korean studies research.
Working with mentors at Yonhi, he had occasion to wish for a standard
romanization system for Korean comparable to the Hepburn and Wade Giles
systems in Japan and China.
Among McCune's Korean mentors at Yonhi College were the linguists Ch'oe
Hyonbae, Kim Son'gi, and Chong Insop, all of whom were likewise interested
in devising a standard romanization system and had their own ideas about
what kinds of linguistic theories and principles should govern the
orthography. Together with them, McCune started working out the system.
Early in the summer of 1937, Edwin O. Reischauer and his wife Adrienne
stopped in Seoul on their way to Peking/Beijing where Ed was to do his own
Harvard dissertation research for what eventually became his work on Ennin's
travels in T'ang China. Because of the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July
1937 and the outbreak of hostilities in north China, the Reischauers were
obliged to spend much longer than intended waiting for travel clearance in
Seoul. They were houseguests of the Beckers and Ed took the opportunity to
join in the romanization project involving Ch'oe, Kim, Chong, and McCune.
As the Japan-born son of the missionary-scholar A.K. Reischauer,
Reischauer had a lot of experience with the Japanese language, and he was
eager to learn some Korean. Imperial Japan had just decreed (fortunately,
not for long), a new Romanization system to replace the Hepburn system (the
story is that the reason was that Hepburn had been a gaijin and couldn't
possibly have known what he was doing), and the Japanese government had done
things like make "ch" into a "t," turning Chosen into Tyosen and the name of
the emperor's brother, which was Prince Chichibu, into "Prince Titibu."
Though this brought worldwide derision, the Japanese insisted that their new
romanization was "scientific" and fully in accord with the unique qualities
of the Japanese language and its immemorial antiquity.
McCune and Reischauer spent the summer and fall taking what had already
been done at Yonhi and supplying the various charts and explanations that
were eventually published in their article "The Romanization of the Korean
Language Based upon its Phonetic Structure," in Transactions of the Korea
Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, XXIX (1939), pp. 1-55. McCune
published an article entitled "The Yi Dynasty Annals of Korea" in the same
volume of TKBRAS as a kind of demonstration of the new system.
McCune and Reischauer both went on to complete their doctoral studies
and were both drawn into the U.S. Government during World War II, as East
Asia specialists. McCune, however, had a heart problem and he died young,
in 1948, at the age of 40. His promise as an early Korea scholar is
suggested by the manuscript he wrote on the early years of the division of
Korea that was finished for him (by Arthur L. Grey) and published under the
title Korea Today, by Harvard University Press in 1950. Evelyn Becker
McCune served for many years in the government and was a researcher at
Berkeley and Hawaii until her last retirement. She published books on
Korean art (e.g., The Arts of Korea, Tuttle, 1962) and is still living, in
central California.
Reischauer of course went on to be the dean of Japanese studies in the
United States, as the link on Henny's response tells you. He served on the
Harvard faculty for nearly forty years and in the 1960s he was the U.S.
Ambassador to Japan under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
In the 1970s, as a scholar at Harvard, Reischauer was known for his
critical views regarding human rights under the regime of Park Chung Hee in
South Korea. Defenders of the regime counterattacked by accusing Reischauer
of anti-Korean prejudice, presumably because he was primarily associated
with Japan. His real importance as a prime mover in planting Korean Studies
at Harvard, helping create the Korean collection at the Harvard Yenching
Library, and bringing Korean scholars to Harvard on Harvard-Yenching (and
other) fellowships was pushed aside. At a time when Korean Studies in the
West were very weak and in dire need of advocates in Chinese and Japanese
studies, Reischauer helped mentor Ed Wagner and several generations of us in
what B.C. Koh once called "the thin second echelon of Korean Studies in the
United States."
Comment: When it comes to the issue of foreigners' devising the
McCune Reischauer system, I think there are several legitimate points to
make. One is that no system is perfect. Even the most ardent advocates of
the M-R system will admit there's room for adaptations. Second, I wish
people in the linguistics profession who know this story would dig into the
role played by the scholars at the Korean Studies institute at Yonhi College
in the 1930s. I don't know for a fact how much of an influence the Korean
scholars had on the system. I only know that McCune was their protege in
his studies of the Korean language and they advised him when it came time to
make up the system. Third, Reischauer apparently contributed insight from
the Japanese experience and the controversies then raging among foreigners
in Japan over the essential problems with the system that had just been
decreed by the Japanese government. He and McCune both had studied
classical Chinese at Harvard and Berkeley and they both knew Japanese
(Reischauer knew it much better than McCune). McCune knew how to speak
Korean from his youth, and he was upgrading his reading and writing skills
to "adult" Korean while studying the language in Seoul.
Footnote: George McAfee "Mac" McCune's younger brother Shannon Boyd
Bailey McCune graduated from PYFS in 1931, went to Wooster and Cornell and
became a geographer. He served in the government during the war and emerged
as the author of numerous pieces on Korean physical and human geography
thereafter, including at least two books that were published by Tuttle in
the 1950s. He was once provost at Colgate, served President Kennedy as U.S.
High Commissioner in the Ryukyus in the 1960s, and spent the latter decades
of his career in Gainesville as a Geography professor at the University of
Florida.
I hope this information is useful,
Yours very truly,
Don Clark
Donald N. Clark
Professor of History and
Director of International Programs
Trinity University
715 Stadium Drive
San Antonio, Texas 78212-7200 USA
Voice (210) 999-7629
Fax (210)999-7305
World Wide Web:
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/int_studies/Faculty/dclark.htm
Program Website: http://www.trinity.edu/departments/int_studies/index.htm