The Rise of Korean Nationalism
The colonial period brought forth an entirely new set of Korean political leaders encouraged both by the resistance to, and the opportunities of, Japanese colonialism. The emergence of nationalist and communist groups dates back to the 1920s; it was in this period that the left–right splits of postwar Korea began. The transformation of the yangban aristocracy also began at this time. In the 1930s, new groups of armed resisters, bureaucrats, and, for the first time, military leaders emerged. Both North Korea and South Korea have been profoundly influenced by the political elites and the political conflicts generated during colonial rule.
One thing from the Choson Dynasty that the Japanese were not able to destroy was the yangban aristocracy. Although the higher scholar-officials were pensioned off and replaced by Japanese, landlords were allowed to retain their holdings and encouraged to continue disciplining peasants and extracting rice as in-kind tax payments from them. The traditional landholding system was put on a different basis through new legal measures and a full property survey shortly after the Japanese took over, but tenancy continued and was systematically extended throughout the colonial period. By 1945 Korea had an agricultural tenancy system with few parallels in the world. More-traditional landlords were content to sit back and let Japanese officials increase output; by 1945 such people were widely viewed as treacherous collaborators with the Japanese, and strong demands emerged to share out their land to the tenants. During the 1920s, however, another trend began as landlords became entrepreneurs.
In 1919 mass movements swept many colonial and semicolonial countries, including Korea. Drawing on US president Woodrow Wilson’s promises of self-determination, a group of 33 intellectuals on March 1, 1919, petitioned for independence from Japan and touched off nationwide mass protests that continued for months.
The March First Independence Movement of 1919 prompted protests by students and other Koreans against Japanese rule in several Korean cities, including Seoul and Pyongyang. These non-violent demonstrations spread over the ensuing days to numerous cities and towns. Japanese authorities arrested thousands of Koreans, many of whom died as a result of torture and inhumane conditions of detention.
The Japanese fiercely crushed these protests, causing many younger Koreans to become militant opponents of colonial rule. The year 1919 was a watershed for the anti-imperialist movement in Korea. The leaders of the movement were moderate intellectuals and students who sought independence through nonviolent means and support from progressive elements in the West. Their courageous witness and the nationwide demonstrations that they provoked remained a touchstone of Korean nationalism. The movement succeeded in provoking reforms in Japan’s administration, but its failure to realize independence also stimulated radical forms of anticolonial resistance.
Some Korean militants went into exile in China and the Soviet Union and founded early communist and nationalist resistance groups. The Korean Communist Party was established in Seoul in 1925. One of the organizers was Pak Hon-yong, who became the leader of the Korean communist movement in southern Korea after 1945. Various nationalist groups also emerged during this period, including the exiled Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai, which included Syngman Rhee and another famous nationalist, Kim Ku, among its members.
Sharp police repression and internal factionalism made it impossible to sustain radical groups over time. Many nationalist and communist leaders were jailed in the early 1930s, only to reemerge in 1945. When Japan invaded and then annexed Manchuria in 1931, however, a strong guerrilla resistance embracing Chinese and Koreans emerged. There were more than 200,000 guerrillas—all loosely connected, and including bandits and secret societies—fighting the Japanese in the early 1930s. After murderous but effective counterinsurgency campaigns, the numbers declined to a few thousand by the mid-1930s.
It was in this milieu that Kim Il Sung (originally named Kim Song-ju, 1912–94; the name Il Sung means “become the sun”) emerged. He was a significant guerrilla leader by the mid-1930s, considered by the Japanese as one of the most effective and dangerous of guerrillas. The Japanese formed a special counterinsurgent unit to track Kim down and assigned Koreans to it as part of their divide-and-rule tactics.
Both Koreas created myths about this guerrilla resistance: North Korea claimed that Kim single-handedly defeated the Japanese, and South Korea claimed that Kim was an imposter who stole the name of a revered patriot. Nonetheless, this experience was important for understanding postwar Korea: the resistance to the Japanese became the main legitimating doctrine of North Korea; North Koreans traced the origin of the army, the leadership, and their ideology back to this founding moment. For the next five decades, the top North Korean leadership was dominated by a core group that fought the Japanese in Manchuria.
Japan went to war against China in 1937 and the United States in 1941, and as World War II took on global dimensions, Koreans for the first time had military careers opened to them. Although most were conscripted foot soldiers, a small number achieved officer status, and a few even attained high rank. Virtually the entire officer corps of the Republic of Korea army during the Rhee period (1948–61) was drawn from Koreans with experience in the Japanese Imperial Army. At least in part, the Korean War (1950–53) became a matter of Japanese-trained military officers fighting Japanese-spawned resistance leaders.
Japan’s far-flung war effort also caused a labor shortage throughout the empire, including Korea, where it meant that bureaucratic position was more available to Koreans than at any previous time. Thus, a substantial cadre of Koreans obtained administrative experience in government, local administration, police and judicial work, economic planning agencies, banks, and the like. That this development occurred in the last decade of colonialism created a divisive legacy, however, for this also was the harshest period of Japanese rule, the time Koreans remember with greatest bitterness.
Korean culture was squashed, and Koreans were required to speak Japanese and to take Japanese names. The majority suffered badly at the precise time that a minority was doing well. This minority acquired the taint of collaboration and never successfully shucked it off. Korea from 1937 to 1945 was much like Vichy France in the early 1940s. Bitter experiences and memories of the period continue to divide people, even within the same family, and as they have been too painful to confront directly, they have become buried history. Nonetheless, the memory continues to play upon the national identity.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of Korea’s colonial experience was the manner in which it ended: the last decade of a four-decade imperium was a pressure cooker, building up tensions that exploded in the postwar period. The colonial period built to a crescendo, abruptly collapsed, and left the Korean people and two different great powers to deal with the results. There had been some fighting against Japan along the Korea–China border in the late 1930s, including forays into Korea by Kim Il Sung’s force, but no sustained armed resistance within Korea itself.
In the mid-1930s, Japan entered a phase of heavy industrialization that embraced all of Northeast Asia. Unlike most colonial powers, Japan located heavy industry in its colonies and brought the means of production to the labor and raw materials. Manchuria and northern Korea acquired steel mills, automotive plants, petrochemical complexes, and enormous hydroelectric facilities. The region was held exclusively by Japan and tied into the home market to the degree that national boundaries became less important than the new transnational, integrated production.
To facilitate this production Japan also built railroads, highways, cities, ports, and other modern transportation and communication facilities. By 1945 Korea proportionally had more kilometers of railroads than any other Asian country except Japan, leaving only remote parts of the central east coast and the wild Northeast China–Korea border region untouched by modern means of conveyance. These changes were externally induced and served Japanese, not Korean, interests. Thus, they represented a kind of overdevelopment.
The same changes fostered underdevelopment in Korean society as a whole. Because the changes were exogenous, the Korean upper and managerial classes did not blossom; instead, their development was retarded or ballooned suddenly at Japanese behest. Among the majority peasant class, change was considerable. Koreans became the mobile human capital used to work the new factories in northern Korea and Manchuria, mines and other enterprises in Japan, and urban factories in southern Korea.
From 1935 to 1945, Korea began its industrial revolution, with many of the usual characteristics: uprooting of peasants from the land, the emergence of a working class, urbanization, and population mobility. In Korea the process was telescoped, giving rise to remarkable population movements when considered comparatively. By 1945 about 11 percent of the entire Korean population was living abroad (mostly in Japan and Manchuria), and fully 20 percent of all Koreans were either abroad or in a province other than that in which they were born (with most of the interprovincial movement being southern peasants moving into northern industry). This was, by and large, a forced or mobilized movement; by 1942 it often meant drafted and conscripted labor. Peasants lost land or rights to work land only to end up working in unfamiliar factory settings, doing the dirty work for a pittance.
When the colonial system abruptly terminated in August 1945, millions of Koreans sought to return to their native villages from these far-flung mobilization details. But they were no longer the same people: they had grievances against those who remained secure at home, they had suffered material and status losses, they often had come into contact with new ideologies, they all had seen a broader world beyond the villages. It was this intense final decade that loosed upon postwar Korea a mass of changed and disgruntled people who greatly disrupted the early postwar period and the plans of the United States and the Soviet Union.
It is estimated that by 1945, 20 per cent of all Koreans had been displaced from their places of origin, with 11 per cent displaced outside Korea. At the end of World War II, there were approximately 2.4 million Koreans in Japan, 2 million in China and about 200,000 in the Soviet Union. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the colonial administration collapsed. Millions of displaced Koreans sought to return home while others stayed behind in Japan, China and the Soviet Union. The legacy of this forced displacement includes substantial minority populations of Koreans, particularly in Japan and northern China.
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