Japanese Colonialism, 1910–45
Korea did not escape the Japanese grip until 1945, when Japan lay prostrate under the US and Soviet onslaught that brought World War II to a close. The colonial experience that shaped postwar Korea was intense and bitter. It brought development and underdevelopment, agrarian growth and an impoverished peasant tenancy, industrialization and extraordinary dislocation, and political mobilization and deactivation. The colonial period also resulted in a new role for the central state, new sets of Korean political leaders, communism and nationalism, and armed resistance and treacherous collaboration. Above all, it left deep fissures and conflicts that have gnawed at the Korean national identity ever since.
Under the peace treaty signed in 1905, brokered by Theodore Roosevelt in a conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Russia recognized Japan’s paramount rights in Korea. Diplomatic notes exchanged between the United States and Japan acknowledged a trade-off between the Philippines and Korea. Japan would not question American rights in its colony, and the United States would not challenge Japan’s new protectorate, which it established in 1905.
Japan thus controlled Korea’s foreign policy, installed a resident general, and, in 1907, deposed King Kojong. Kojong was succeeded by his son Sunjong (r. 1907–10), the second and last emperor of Korea. Significant Korean resistance followed on this deposition, spreading through several provinces as local yangban organized militias for guerrilla warfare against Japan. In 1909 a Korean assassin named An Chung-gun killed Ito Hirobumi, the Japanese statesman who had concluded the protectorate agreement. An expatriate Korean in San Francisco also gunned down Durham Stevens, a foreign affairs adviser to the Japanese who had lauded their efforts in Korea. Such opposition was too little and too late. In 1910 Japan turned Korea into its colony, thus extinguishing Korea’s hard-fought independence, which had first emerged with Silla and Koguryo resistance to Chinese pressures.
Colonialism was often thought to have created new nations where none existed before, to have drawn national boundaries, brought diverse tribes and peoples together, tutored the natives in self-government, and prepared for the day when the imperialist powers decided to grant independence; but all such advantages existed in Korea for centuries before 1910. Furthermore, by virtue of their relative proximity to China, Koreans had always felt superior to Japan and blamed Japan’s devastating sixteenth-century invasions for hindering Korean wealth and power in subsequent centuries.
Thus the Japanese engaged not in creation, but in substitution after 1910: substituting a Japanese ruling elite for the Korean yangban scholar-officials, colonial imperative coordination for the old central state administration, Japanese modern education for Confucian classics, Japanese capital and expertise for the budding Korean versions, Japanese talent for Korean talent, and eventually even the Japanese language for Korean. Koreans never thanked the Japanese for these substitutions, did not credit Japan with creations, and instead saw Japan as snatching away the ancien régime, Korea’s sovereignty and independence, its indigenous if incipient modernization, and above all its national dignity. Unlike some other colonial peoples, therefore, Koreans never saw Japanese rule as anything but illegitimate and humiliating. Furthermore, the very closeness of the two nations—in geography, in common Chinese cultural influences, and in levels of development until the nineteenth century—made Japanese dominance all the more galling to Koreans and gave a peculiar intensity to the relationship, a dynamic that suggested to Koreans that “there but for accidents of history go we.”
The Japanese built bureaucracies in Korea, all of which were centralized and all of them big by colonial standards. Unlike the relatively small British colonial cadre in India, the Japanese came in large numbers (700,000 by the 1940s), and the majority of colonizers worked in government service. For the first time in history, Korea had a national police, responsive to the center and possessing its own communications and transportation facilities.
The huge Oriental Development Company organized and funded industrial and agricultural projects, and came to own more than 20 percent of Korea’s arable land; it employed an army of officials who fanned out through the countryside to supervise agricultural production. The official Bank of Korea performed central banking functions, such as regulating interest rates and providing credit to firms and entrepreneurs—almost all of them, of course, Japanese. Central judicial bodies wrote new laws establishing an extensive, “legalized” system of racial discrimination against Koreans, making them second-class citizens in their own country. Bureaucratic departments proliferated at the Government General Headquarters in Seoul, turning it into the nerve center of the country. Semi-official companies and conglomerates, including the big zaibatsu (business empires) such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui, laid railroads, built ports, installed modern factories, and ultimately remade the face of old Korea.
Japan held Korea tightly, watched it closely, and pursued an organized, architectonic colonialism in which the planner and administrator was the model, not the swashbuckling conqueror. The strong, highly centralized colonial state mimicked the role that the Japanese state had come to play in Japan—intervening in the economy, creating markets, spawning new industries, and suppressing dissent. Politically, Koreans could barely breathe, but economically there was significant — if unevenly distributed — growth. Agricultural output rose substantially in the 1920s, and a hothouse industrialization took place in the 1930s. Growth rates in the Korean economy often outstripped those in Japan itself; one estimate suggested an annual growth rate for Korea of nearly 3.6 percent in the 1911–38 period, compared to a rate of 3.4 percent for Japan itself.
Koreans have always thought that the benefits of this growth went entirely to Japan, and that Korea would have developed rapidly without Japanese help anyway. Nonetheless, the strong colonial state, the multiplicity of bureaucracies, the policy of administrative guidance of the economy, the use of the state to found new industries, and the repression of labor unions and dissidents that went with it provided a surreptitious model for both North and South Korea in the postwar period. Japan showed them an early version of the “bureaucraticauthoritarian” path to industrialization, and it was a lesson that seemed well learned by the 1970s.
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